The quake at Fukushima had 6 perhaps with good will 6.5 on the richter scale.
A point-blank earthquake of that magnitude would be a lot of shaking and would explain the problems with industrial controllers without the need to invoke stuxnet.
a. Less than 90% of Americans claim to believe in God (and even less actually do)
b. You're assuming everyone on Slashdot thinks God is a myth. Rather than just claiming, "God is a myth," tell us why he's a myth.
Because one disaster is made better by using the few people that demonstrated that they are some of the worst options for operating a nuclear power plant.
That didn't happen at Fukushima. I find it interesting how people can't wrap their heads around the idea that magnitude 9 earthquakes can cause nuclear accidents.
The Fukushima Event is yet another glaring message for Humanity that until real adults show up, we need to stop messing around with nuclear power.
Or we could just keep people who don't have a clue what a "real adult" is out of the decision loop.
I mean, what sort of industry can withstand the inclusion of a randomly occurring 4-decade cleanup program?
Or one could implement sensible land use instead. Nuclear plants and other heavy industry doesn't require pristine environments, for example. So instead of spending tens of billions and decades to make Fukushima look pretty, they could spend a lot less in time and money and turn the area into a useful industrial park. And the plus is that if down the road, someone spills more chemicals or releases more radioactive material, then it's in an area that is already compromised and for which one doesn't need to do white glove-level clean up.
The first world came out fine thanks to advantages it had when it was developing, advantages that the third world does not have today.
And we see that your "advantages" are:
First, there was no first world before the first world. This meant there was little pressure from above, because there was no "above". There were less/no AGW alarmists and tree huggers getting in the way of industrious businesses from improving the economy necessary to pull a society into the first world.
Normally, people would consider a working example as an advantage.
Second, pollution s not seen as a huge global problem. Your country pollutes? That's your problem. The notion that we're in a global village and your pollution will affect the whole world later was yet to be popularized (one reason being there were less AGW alarmists pushing the narrative)
Ok, where's the disadvantage here? I thought at first you were speaking of pollution holding back the third world. Or that somehow there was a global aspect to pollution which was relevant to your claim.
But that's not what you actually wrote. With this and the previous paragraph, you seem to saying that some people thinking pollution is a big deal and some people don't. While that is what I'd consider a fact, it is a fact which is completely irrelevant.
Third, the world economy was less globalized. Globalization increased the effects of international pressure, but not from AGW alarmists. The pressure comes from owners and shareholders, and they pressure third world factories to keep working and polluting to keep up production.
Such as the pressure to control corruption, upgrade one's society to first world levels, and improve the well-being of one's citizens? A pressure which accompanies a surge of wealth with which to accommodate the pressure? Again, where is the argument here?
And that pressure existed in the first world as well, yet things turned out well anyway.
Furthermore, globalization creates a moral hazard covering up the harms of pollution. After all, Pollution Respects Distance, so the owner of the factory doesn't see the damage he's doing, nor would other first worlders enjoying the products made by that factory. The third world people who are suffering are too far away to be able to seek compensation.
Reading stuff like this, I get the impression that some people out there think it's a law of physics that belching smokestacks must exist somewhere in the universe in order for us to have a nice civilization. It's just not true.
There will always be some degree of pollution and other externalities just because we're human. The developed world has demonstrated that this can be controlled. The rest of world in turn is following that same path.
I believe that of you take an OLD idea and do it on a computer, doing it on a computer doesn't matter, it's still an old idea and not patentable.
That implies that if you create a NEW idea, doing it on a computer still doesn't matter.
I agree. The sorts of things that are being patented "on a computer" shouldn't be patentable without a computer, either. The computer is ultimately just a mechanism for speeding up math. With or without that speedup, the underlying subject of the patent application is pure math—and math, as such, is not supposed to be patentable subject matter. It doesn't matter whether the idea is new or old.
Every customer who had bitcoins or USD on deposit at Mt. Gox entered into a contract with them when they created their account. It was part of the signup process.
The bigger obstacle, I suspect, is that most of their customers were not Japanese citizens (AFAIK). Bringing a suit against a company based in another country, as an individual, is far from trivial; even if you win a judgement in your home country, you may find it difficult to collect.
It isn't legal tender.
Most things aren't. Euros aren't legal tender in the U.S., for example, and vice-versa. If Bitcoin were legal tender it would only mean that if someone owed you $50 they could offer you $50 worth of Bitcoin and you would be compelled to either accept the Bitcoin to pay off the debt or give up on collecting at all. No one is seriously suggesting that Bitcoin should be made legal tender. A number of Bitcoin supporters would probably rather do away with the idea altogether. I can see a use for it, though; an arbiter (public or private) may well decide not to hear your case unless you agree to accept a standard form of reparations, as other party may not have access to the specific goods owed. That would be well within the arbiter's rights—as long as they aren't preventing you from seeing justice elsewhere.
Yes, precedent was surely set when EVE Bank failed. Oh, wait.
EVE is a game. The players are aware of that. There is no expectation that anyone will step in and enforce real-world rules inside the game; that would ruin the game. Bitcoin is different. The protocol is just as virtual, but the contracts relating to it are entirely real, and ought to be just as enforceable as any other contract.
That doesn't mean any particular government is obligated to do the enforcing, of course, but they claim a monopoly in that field; if they're not going to uphold perfectly legitimate contracts themselves they at least ought to step aside and let someone else do it.
Even better: Make the navigation app stop responding to input whenever the phone is moving.
The phone can't distinguish between the driver using the phone while it's moving and a passenger using the phone while it's moving. I, for one, would be very annoyed if my phone stopped working whenever I was riding in someone else's car, or on public transportation. There's also the fact that this misfeature would actively prevent a passenger from assisting the driver with navigation functions.
Bitcoins are just bits on your harddrive. They have no intrinsic value.
Neither does anything else. Intrinsic value is a myth. So what? They have a market value, which is all that's needed to determine liability.
If that makes you feel better, think of it in terms of a contract to provide a service on demand (creating a value transaction, signing it, and uploading it to the blockchain) rather than goods. That service has an associated value, for which Mt. Gox received payment at the time of deposit, and (through its own unbelievable degree of incompetence) Mt. Gox is no longer capable of performing it as previously agreed.
This doesn't have anything to do with whether Bitcoin is a "government-regulated currency". Bottles of soda aren't a government-regulated currency either, but if I gave 100,000 bottles of soda to a company with the understanding that they would store them and return them on demand, and they managed to lose them, I would still have a legal claim against that company for the value of the goods they were supposed to be holding for me. This is squarely in common-law contract territory; no special regulations are required.
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
