Cheap talk coming from someone sitting at their desk with a Big Mac.

These guys didn't know what the rad levels really were, and it's well known that there are always random hotspots where fallout gets concentrated. They weren't going to die on the spot from walking around, but they were certainly risking their health in that area. I credit these guys for getting off their duff and trying to produce some kind of data on the ground in the evacuation zone. This is more enlightening than anything that has come out of TEPCO or the Japanese government.

Maybe you should find out what people are using the DB access for first...at my company, we use it as a working drop for communicating external documents with outside vendors, more convenient than shoveling everything around via email.

My old joke about the ideal network for the network admin is a single computer in a bank vault, unplugged. It's unfortunate that the job basically is all downside in terms of incidents, but ultimately the job should still be to *facilitate* employee access to company data, customers, and each other. Otherwise you are actively impeding the profitability of your company.

This is also not a good link, because that ACLU map is completely wrong at least as far as Chicago is concerned. The United States asserts full territorial sovereignty over Lake Michigan and that is considered to be within the United States in its entirety. This inconveniently removes a large population from the ACLU's Dramatic Map but if they wanted to be accurate, they would remove the "border" region around Lake Michigan.

I don't disagree that it still seems like an overly broad interpretation of "border", but it would be more interesting to know if this has been challenged in Federal Court on constitutional grounds.

This generally is construed to mean "all people" i.e. 100%, which is probably within the sphere of "statistically relevant". Just sayin'.

Why not just take the Chromium tree and figure out how to run Firefox extensions on there and just call that Firefox? Would save time and have much better memory use and performance. Firefox is basically converging on a Chrome clone with slightly worse performance and some dumb UI hacks that will end up largely unused/abandoned (like Panorama).

Isn't all this what the extension ecosystem is for? Why would a team that already is overwhelmed by the task of testing its product incorporate MORE features to test? My main issue with Firefox right now is not a lack of Facebook integration (-_-) but the obvious memory leakage in the released FF 4 with AdBlock/NoScript, which was present through the entire last half of the beta cycle.

Mozilla has really wandered off the reservation here. I want a solid, fast browser that supports the great extensions that Mozilla didn't write, and continues to support developments in the core web standards space. If I want Chrome or Flock, I'll just download those, seriously.

I know it's late, and I think this may have been intended as humorous, but really, guys? Has it come to this?

Posted this above as well, but Unit 1 at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another 10 years in February.

The fact of the matter is that a utility will always apply for an extended operating license and will almost certainly get one. The only plant shutdowns I know of in the US, apart from TMI Unit 2, were when something too expensive to repair needed replacement, such as the ComEd Zion plant outside Chicago, which needed a new $460 million steam generator. So since there is so much better in the way of designs available, why aren't utilities rushing to replace these ancient reactors instead of asking for extended licenses, you ask? Economics of course - an existing plant is almost all sunk cost, and the utilities are in business to make money. They will build new reactors only to add capacity, and they will build the cheapest design they are permitted to.

My main objection to nuclear power is that these plants are operated by businesses. Unlike a solar farm or even a coal plant, the worst case failure for a nuclear plant is very, very bad. You have a business trying to maximize profit knowing that the worst case failure costs will be shifted to the taxpayer. This is a recipe for disaster. I have no issues at all with the state of reactor technology, and the US military operates dozens of reactors that *move around* and has for 50 years without a major accident (the Russians haven't had as much success there, though). If these things were being operated by some agency like the military with those levels of discipline, perhaps we could all rest assured. When it's some utility executive who wants a bigger bonus, I am not at all confident.

This misinformation has been bandied about quite a bit, but the fact is that while Reactor 1 had reached the end of its operating license in March, the Japanese government had actually just extended the license for another 10 years in February. The "entire complex" was not by any means scheduled for shutdown, particularly units 5 and 6, which are undamaged and will likely be restarted at some point.

As far as I can see from looking at my usage data it does include the overhead as part of your usage. Kind of like if UPS required you to ship everything in a cast-iron box and then still charged you an overweight shipping fee by total weight.

The meter also lags by 2-3 days and is incorrectly totaled by the cumulative meter, which rounds each day up to the next megabyte, and also is still confused about the billing period, including several lagged days from the previous period.

With that attitude, no, it's not worth upgrading. Continue to enjoy using MS-DOS and life in the retirement community...

I'm surprised that nobody typically mentions the fact that Chrome is produced by an insanely profitable company that makes its cash from an effective monopoly on online search. They have hundreds of paid engineers working on Chrome, and it would be an embarrassment if they weren't able to make the kind of progress they have. Mozilla has (I believe) some paid developers, but is still primarily an open source project and has a fraction of the resources of Google (or Microsoft). It amazes me that people beat up Mozilla on its progress compared to products that have huge amounts of money behind them. They also have a huge legacy codebase that they have to deal with it. Progress is always swift when you start the clean-sheet efforts...once you start having to deal with things like backwards compatibility, life begins to suck. Google will quickly get there as well, especially since they have extension support now.

Also, just like Apple with Safari and Microsoft with IE, at some point Google management will declare the battle won and move resources to other projects, and some other browser will become the new hotness. This is all the natural course of events, and I believe competition is good in tech, and all kudos to Chrome for revitalizing the browser space, even if I find some of their "innovations" to be design preferences hailed mostly for being different, not necessarily better.

The point would be for the exact level of damage to the spent fuel pools to be revealed, which would confirm the level of concern that should be given contamination fears. If the pools are all full of water or show undamaged assemblies, then the public would be reassured. That they have chosen not to release this footage, by Occam's Razor, indicates that things are worse than has been definitively confirmed, although likely not worse than has been widely speculated.

I really don't understand the strident desire by some to downplay the severity of this incident. In pure economic terms, this has crippled the Tokyo electric grid, probably for years, which is affecting the lives of tens of millions in the Tokyo area. It will also cost billions of dollars to clean up, by "clean-up" meaning entombing these particular facilities forever.

It's kind of hard to do warm and fuzzy stories about four malfunctioning nuclear reactors.

The media is a business, so of course they are going to make their 'product' stand out to sell advertising. The fact is that 'reactionary and sensationalist people' want to watch the dramatic exposition because BBC is boring to them - calm, rational, thoughtful people are not instantly converted into 'reactionaries' because they flip on the tv and suddenly see a Fox News story one day.

It's ridiculous that this is being quibbled over. It's apparently so dangerously radioactive in the area that people cannot approach to even look in the building. There was an explosion and fire of something that apparently generated intense radioactivity in unit 4. If there's still 100 gallons of boiling water left in the pool or not seems kind of irrelevant at this point.

Best comment. The core issue in all of the major accidents that has happened with nuclear plants has been human error. TMA Unit 2 was a brand new reactor in 1979 and its failure bypassed all of the safety systems due to the operators not understanding what was happening. At Chernobyl, the night shift crew that decided to run the ill-fated experiment that destroyed the reactor ignored numerous warnings from the control system that the power level was rising rapidly until it was too late. The Davis-Besse plant in Ohio was 3/8" of stainless steel cladding from a catastrophic coolant breach that would have vented the core into the containment and probably caused a full meltdown, all because company inspectors failed to inspect the reactor head for corrosion and falsified records.

Until we have Skynet designing, building, operating. and maintaining reactors there is no way to prevent the human element from bypassing the most superb design and construction. The issues that nuclear power advocates tend to gloss over is that even if the probability of design failure is very low, some retard can decide to switch off the cooling pumps because he doesn't understand what's going on, or fail to do maintenance on the emergency backup system, etc. And when the worst case failure is contamination of hundreds of square miles of land at a likely cost of at a minimum tens of billions of dollars, this isn't acceptable.

What amazes me is that even after Chernobyl, the precise example of the worst case disaster, people continue to suggest that nuclear power is a safe form of power generation. And most of the arguments are along the lines of "well, those guys were dumb". Guess what, every reactor in operation potentially has the exact same human beings that can make the exact same kinds of mistakes.

On an engineering level, I actually like the concept of nuclear power generation. It's efficient, and non-greenhouse gas producing. Current generation designs should be very safe. But when you have for-profit companies operating them whose primary goal is monetary return, the potential for a major accident will always be present, especially in countries such as the US where corporate entities are considered sacrosanct and where the costs of a disaster will just be transferred to the taxpayer.