Yeah, this is not an access issue, it's more the research skills of the parents.

Even without the talk page, the assertion that people are sending their kids to school while unable to afford food and shelter, much less Internet access is a bit... ignorant. Education is not cheap. SIM cards and data are cheap in India, even by local standards, at least for those who have enough to consider sending their kids to school. A quick search on vodaphone.in puts 1G of data for 30 days at around $4USD without a contract. Indian GDP is low, but not *THAT* low.

Footwork and telephone calls are reasonable research tools too. If parents are themselves uneducated, they'll have difficulty making decisions about an institution. Not because uneducated == stupid, but because it means they don't know what to look for when checking out an institution.

It would be nice to hear from someone in India on this, it's not like they're not part of the Slashdot community. 15,000 people dont' screw this up because they're stupid. Something deeper is at play and I don't think the Wikipedia Zero explanation makes sense.

It's handy to have an Indian coworker to vet their degree. Last coworker I had from India had a masters but spelled like he was on a q9 keyboard.

We did the same for applicants citing Chinese degrees or to call about job experience. They should be happy we had somebody who knew the schools, spoke the language and could make the calls, it often worked in their favour, but sometimes it spotted a fraud.

Sadly if somebody can only cite a random foreign school and experience and if nobody can vet them, I'll pass on the applicant. The immigrant experience is not easy.

They go to "great expense" to send their children on courses there, but can't afford a SIM card to do any research?

I'm sure the greater part of the Israeli training program is "active duty"

That's why you use a USB SD Card reader which honours the write protect in its hardware.

You don't use an on-board SD card reader.

Cyanogenmod with F-Droid, Firefox OS, Nokia N900....?

Hey, maybe it means that when a band creates a new sound, they can license it out....

I threw up a little saying that.

.... so far, I do not recommend it.

"A great introductory language"

There *must* be something I'm missing.

I see her struggling with syntax errors and logical mistakes not picked up in syntax highlighters or bolt-on delinters. The debuggers are a myriad of pages of DOM inspectors, performance tools, js files she's not working with, options for things she doesn't know about and a maze of files, with very little ability to actually step through your running code to see how your "if" statement executes.

The cute little sandbox online simulators take shortcuts.... she spent three hours trying to figure out why she couldn't get a selector hook a click event to a button, running the code in online simulators but not being able to translate it to her code. In the end it was because she forgot to start with a jQuery $(document).ready statement, the simulator couldn't identify that mistake. She couldn't spot it herself because it gave no indication of what might be wrong.

Even turning on strict mode on Firefox doesn't give a single error for a missing $(document).ready, but generates 7 errors for jquery.js.

I used to think Javascript was okay for learning.... but she's programming blind on a lot of stuff. I would love for her to see something like "assigning click event to null object, line 28" or similar, but all I can say is "divide and conquer... test your assumptions at each step, and watch for errors, even if they rarely appear...".. She would have been much better off spending her time working with variables, types and if statements rather than trying to squeeze information out of her programming environment.

He's claiming that poor plant maintenance activities caused random civilians to be exposed in the area around the plants that this occurs all the time and was even addressed by the authorities with fines.

I call BS.

"Solar DOES make baseload NOW. And better than nuclear. Unless you redefine baseload to make it fit nuclear's usage."

From Wikipedia, the largest solar plant in the world is at 550MW, opened this year, sits in the desert and takes up 6 sq km

Fukishima generated 4.7GW, opened 43 years ago, sits outside Tokyo and takes up 3.5 sq km.

I'm very pro-solar. I support all R&D in the area and I think it's the future.... however I imagine a future of distributed generation, distributed storage and distributed load, addressing generation, storage and distribution issues. 50sq km of solar farm in Tokyo and surrounds would be impossible, and PV isn't going to become 1000% more efficient any time soon. 50sq km of rooftops + conservation + wind, + etc etc, Very possible... of course it will take a lot more at a more northern latitude.

... but we need energy now.

Baseload power comes from nuclear, coal, geothermal or hydroelectric. Hydroelectric is limited, environmentally difficult and already exploited to the max. geothermal is highly regional.

Solar and wind will be great some day.... but they don't stand a chance at current baseload generation.

That leaves nuclear and coal.

What are the other options?

Any specific cases of radioactive spills in suburban England?

After Sept 11, 2001, in my hometown the visitor center got shut down and a few extra security measures were put in place. Some people thought it was due to cover-ups.

But then, some people also thought the strange plants growing in the waste heat pond from the reactor were radioactive.

The Ukraine mine had 32 this month. 101 died there in November 2007, 57 more the next month.

I grew up near a nuclear plant. We didn't know it was there except that the restricted building zone near the plant was full of baseball diamonds, beaches and nature trails. No, really.

Death per kilowatt, etc.

Many of these nuclear costs are because of irrational fear. If no amount of safety is enough, no amount of spending will be enough.

Nuclear is already far safer than other power generation, including numbers from Fukishima.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/

The impact to your life is far greater earlier in life, so buy all 40 years of tickets when you're in your early 20's.

If you win in your 60's, the real cost is 40 years of unnecessary labour + $2,080.