until SP1.

This is insightful. Not sure why you got modded down but I was just thinking the exact same thing.

Mod parent up.

Admittedly, you SHOULD already know what the Stop Online Piracey Act is, but whoever modded you as flamebait obviously had an axe to grind.

And there is always a chance that the wind turbine in my yard could get struck by lightning and blown into my neighbors dying spruce tree, igniting the side of his house during a wind storm, in turn setting the connecting fence ablaze causing our entire town and the surrounding national forest to erupt in a giant hell-fire of death, moving across Northern Colorado in to the mountains where the fire-fighting capabilities of sparse municipalities are defensless against its firey rage.

Its just not a very good chance.

The only fair comparison is a measurement of deaths-per-Terawatt. And large scale nuclear has proven pretty good even after the contrived linear-no-threshold-model gymnastics that FUD spreaders like to use.

How much?

You sound like one of my PMs here. As long as it works right, the customer won't care right? Wrong.

The fallacy is this. The code WILL NOT WORK RIGHT on the first go. Your customers will often be willing to pay for more features than you planned for in the next version. Your QA testers will find as many bugs as they can, but the scale at which they can test is never close to what it will be in production. You WILL have to support the software, you WILL have to release patches, and someday, someone WILL want to reuse your code.

True, the cost of writing the code is heavily front-loaded and therefore seems larger. But the cost of maintanence is never ever trivial. A good developers will come to understand this, so long as they have to maintain their own code. A good developer will offer resistance to a PM that emphasizes cost of coding over the elegance and extensibility of the code. If theses developers in India are building a career, they will become good developers.

Yeah, terrible thing about what happened at Fukushima. HOW MANY MORE WILL HAVE TO DIE???

I think it's funny that whenever anti-nuclear people talk about nuclear, they bring up a reactor from 25 years ago, but whenever they talk about other alternatives to fossil fuels, its always some cutting-edge solar project or some future break through in energy storage that nobody nowhere has commercially implemented.

Ask them why, and its all, "you know, the Man and stuff, and the Banksters, and the you know, the Nuclear Industry with their corporate... uh... thought police and they have the world governments in their pockets."

Sweet Lord.

They have about 45B in cash. Their market cap is about 220B. Does this mean that if their share price dropped below $5.20 that Microsoft could potentially buy out Microsoft?

a lot of editorial comments, branding WP7 as Windows Mobile, and obvious misleading lines. The headers to the patents involved misled me to believe that the patents covered broad UI concepts with huge areas of scope with 15 years of prior art. Patent 5,889,522 for example was stated as claiming "putting known tab controls into an operating system for use by all applications rather than providing tabs on an application-by-application basis."

That sounds wicked general and its a really old UI concept that seems obvious to anyone who switched to Firefox back in the day for exactly that reason. Until you read the actual patent and discover that in reality they are claiming the implementation of the UI SDK framework that comes as part of the OS. Oh yeah, and the patent was filed back in 1994. I'm not sure how many operating systems offered tab-centric UI support in the SDKs for third party apps back then, but I'm thinking prior art will be a little hard to come by, and tabs sure as hell didn't seem like such a duh-concept back before they were ubiquitous, much less a specific object implementation of a tab control in a common UI SDK for the OS.

After reading a few of the actual claims from some of the patents, I stopped wasting my time and discarded the whole patent table. After the TFA came out and stated that Microsoft was pure evil, which was unfortunately at the very end, I felt dirty for having even clicked. What MS is doing may be wrong, and it certainly hinders innovation, but let us not pretend that one company serving its shareholders' interests is going to be evil while another company doing the same damn thing is going to be the Shining White Knight of our fantasy.

Its a subsidy. The public is assuming risk or cost on behalf of a non-public entity. That's a subsidy. BUT you shouldn't count this as a strike against nuclear and here's why:

This is NOT a typical business risk that the public is assuming. The typical business risks are the increasing market value of inputs and the decreasing market value of outputs. Your plain-old honest market forces being plain-old unpredictable. But that is not the case with nuclear.

Nuclear has big returns, but also has huge investments. It also has a long lead-time. Your typical nuclear construction project has miles of regulatory red-tape, truck-loads of public design review, and a moving-target approval process that must span several political cycles. The public-at-large believes the NRC to be a rubber-stamping revolving door for the industry, but ironically enough, people in the nuclear industry believe the NRC is there to over-regulate, micro-manage and generally crush your hopes and dreams.

You can play the parlor games of calculating how many Chernobyl-scale accidents would have to happen per year before we would say the nuclear industry regulations WEREN'T ridiculous when compared to other base-load energy sources.

But the general point is that a lot of the risk of nuclear power isn't from melt-downs or contamination leaks. No, most of it is associated with developing and building nuclear plants, and is artificially contrived from public opinion and the political process keeping the plant from ever getting off the ground in the first place. This is of course true for many business ventures, but it is ESPECIALLY true for the nuclear industry. It seems fitting to me that the public should bare at least part of the burden of risk that the public created.

No, you didn't. Your previous post assumes that people standing in a windy field next to a fatally defective wind turbine is equally as likely as reactor being built without a containment vessel, or being ill-prepared before being hit by a tsunami, this leads to an inaccurate calculation of risk. If risk is defined as probability of an event multiplied by its consequences, wind power is still the riskier bet. This is magnified when you consider that the probability of the windy-field scenario would be magnified if we were to scale wind-energy up to nuclear's specs.

The costs of nuclear that are not associated with loss of human life are a valid argument. Land becomes unusable for a period of time. Back to my original comment, I'm willing to bet that this area of land is very, very insignificant when you consider the land made unusable when mining for the input materials. Again, I think nuclear will fair favorably, but we would need more resources than I have at my fingertips at this computer to make a reasonable estimate.

For that unit, for its lifetime. A finite quantity of mined material produces a finite quantity of energy in both cases, so I don't see why that's relevant. Everything can be recycled up to a point, steel silicon, even spent fuel if you care to.

You quote both the TORCH report and the Nesterenko, Nesterenko and Yablokov report, and lets not forget: Greenpeace.

My general response to this is, yeah we know. My nephew's highschool teacher claimed that Japan would have to be evacuated after Fukushima, and advised students to take precautions to avoid eating even American-grown food that may have been contaminated by the fallout. At some point, we need to set the bar for how much a given claim stands up to peer-review. Everything that falls short can be excluded from the depending-on-who-you-ask colloqialisms, and all of these reports fall below that bar IMHO.

Don't get me wrong, unlike my nephew's teacher, these studies have all made unique contributions to scientific knowledge and that is valuable. The conclusions they make, however cannot be touted as reputable estimates. None of them do any robust correlation between various reports of deleterious health effects and dosage. None of them account for increased rates of screening and improved screening technologies when calculating statistics on epidemiological diagnoses. Two of them even cite the IAEA Agreement WHA 12-40 as sources of error in previous WHO studies, apparently without having read the agreement and its conflict-of-interest clauses.

Most of the death toll from nuclear power since the adoption of the containment vessel probably comes from mining, not construction. I'm willing to bet the same for other forms of generation, except for fossil fuels and hydroelectric. Getting the raw materials out of the ground is a labor intensive process requiring heavy machinery and risky setups, and lives are invariably lost or shortened more so than in normal construction. In China alone, between 5,000 and 20,000 people die each year from mining accidents.

It has been 25 years since a nuclear disaster occured that resulted in the loss of human lives, 64 lives directly, according to UNSCEAR but up to 4,000 according to the World Health Organization when shortened lives are also accounted for. That means that since Chernobyl, the death toll from mining supercedes the nuclear death toll by between 30 and 7800 times over depending on who you trust. Keep in mind, this is for CHINA ALONE, and is assuming mining in China was NOT more dangerous 25 years ago.

Now lets take into account that Chernobyl implemented a design created primarily for weapons production, had no containment vessel, and was being run by a communist regime on the brink of collapse. The scale of melt-down that occured there would be near-impossible for a gifted group of well-funded terrorist engineers to cause in a modern reactor with containment. The worst nature has thrown at an ill-prepared plant (read: Fukushima) still resulted in no deaths.

So here would be my question: which energy source requires the most mined materials per TW. Honestly, I don't know. But my suspicions are that nuclear would be near the bottom of that list.

As long as [ this | that ]. If you are going to hold nuclear to these extreme corner cases, please hold all other energy generation techniques to equally high standards.

I disagree whole heartedly with your theory that engineers are exposed to MORE toxins from manufactured products than construction workers, janitors, factory workers, restraunt workers, clerical staff and the whole host of other manual laborers out there. It just seems irrational.

But I do agree that whoever modded you as troll needs to go fuck themselves.

BAD engineers can be a detriment to science, but so can bad scientists.

Engineers do understand data. We collect data, model the data, draw conclusions, make predictions, test those predictions, and use them to generate wealth. So except for that last part, we ARE scientists, just not PURE scientists.

Many of us would love to do pure science, and we leverage pure science as much as possible to advance the state of our specific art, but while we understand the value of data, we also understand the importance of wealth. Or is that what you meant when you said "more conservative?"