Exactly out thoughts, gaijin! It's 4 hours - nobody should swim that long, and only 8% anyway - not a big deal. We are waiting for a new tsunami that will wash all this inconvenient radioactive junk into the ocean, we do not need it any more, you see. Ocean currents will do the rest, nature will find the way! Pity about dolphins tho. Tasty, tasty dolphins!

Tepco - committed to bringing nuclear power to every doorstep in the world!

Do not worry gaijin, we upgraded our dosimeters to a newest model that is capable of displaying up to 1.8 sieverts!

I'm saying liquidation was handled much worse in Fukushima accident. Look how Chernobyl was handled - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Immediate_crisis_management. Fire containment, that prevented fire to spread another reactor, volunteers swimming in bubbling radioactive water to open the valve - 3 people prevented one more hydrogen explosion and died shortly afterwards, and later quarter million workers building sarcophagus over reactor 4, sealing it to prevent future contamination. If Chernobyl was handled same way as Fukushima - we would have have of Europe exclusion zone, with all what was inside reactors 3 and 4 blown around and scattered by the wind. Fukushima is not over yet after more that 2 years after disaster - there are still tons of radioactive water pouring into world ocean every day, and in case of an earthquake, that is not really uncommon in Japan, high possibility of massive disaster involving that huge amounts of spend fuel that is still on site.

Better than capitalism in Japan anyway. 2 years since accident - the freaking thing still massively leaks! Read about Chernobyl disaster - basically much larger hydrogen explosion and radioactive contamination was prevented with cost of liquidators lives.

But why would Assad do that? To get punished for using chemical weapons on civilian population? - not logical. Maybe he is just a crazy evil maniac? Not looks like that, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad. If you think about it, it is much more likely that rebels or CIA used chemical weapons on civilian population to get a good pretext to punish Assad for doing that.

Yes, and another possibility is spaghetti monster created us all. We can think of milliards of possibilities, but from inside the box we can not see what is outside the box, there can be nothing at all or something so weird that we can not even imagine it - it can be anything. Everything that we really have is the current moment, we can spend it anyway we like, we can feel love, hate, pain, pleasure, think about the gods, search for something, write posts on slashdot, believe in god in any form - it's all the same, it's all just happening now, in a current moment. Does it really matter is there something out there? Just choose what do you want to experience now, in a current moment. Feeling love is the popular choice :)

Provided all software is working and GUI remains the same? They would not care if you change NT kernel on their Windows desktops to this mystical 'something else', then. Majority of people using any product do not think much about kernel, and rightly so.

Anyway it's just as easy to tap traffic after it exit VPN endpoint in UK, so your UK VPN does not hurt anyone, use it if it makes you content. It will always be slower - all your traffic will be routed trough your UK VDS, so latency to a given website will be sum of latency from your home to UK VDS and from UK VDS to a given website.

But yes, now you can watch BBC online - it will not let you with non UK IP. And to watch hulu you need US IP. And if you live in one of the countries in growing "Wanna Great Firewall like in China" club...
No, internet is not fragmented, no, no. Ok, maybe just a bit. For now.

Always yours, Captain Obvious.

Sorry, telepaths are currently on a vacation. Show us traceroute output from your home to VPS and from VPS to home IP.

Yeah, and not to offend you but just in case - please erase last digits of your home and VPS IP's before posting, or you may end up with no connectivity at all ;)

I see it now - Moscow, Kuncevskaya metro station, winter, early morning, people are hurrying for work, entering metro station like an endless river. Before entering the station stream of people stops. what are they doing? Looks like everyone taking their cellphone out with cold, numb fingers, and wrap it with tinfoil. I see an old woman, she stays there with a cellphone in her hand, looking lost - what happened? Oh noes, she forgot her tinfoil! Will somebody help her, give her a piece of tinfoil to wrap up her phone? I guess we will never know...

This is a very unlikely scenario - in real life nobody will bother to switch a phone off. Passport is required to buy any sim card in Russia, so this will be very effective in tracking movements. Plus there are cameras on the entrance - they can match name on sim card with face, training face recognition software, if it is not ideal yet.

I can try to explain why. So far only known life form is our carbon based, situated exclusively on planet Earth - it includes every living organism on Earth, from amoeba to whale. We do not know it for sure, but it is possible (but unlikely) that it is the only life form existing in the universe. More likely is that life is like a sparkle in time in space - that there were (insert arbitrary large number) of life forms before us, and will be even more after us, but on cosmic time scale life expectancy of average life form is very small, so most of time/space is kinda lifeless and boring, and, most important of all, lacks an observer.

It's easy to think about observer as about god - it's something that everybody have or it lives inside everybody who's alive, it does not include any part of personality, it does not have any properties at all - so everybody have the same observer, or, you can say, it's one for everybody. If you think about it this way - it does not die after your death, so it makes you almost immortal - if you define 'me' such it does not include your personality, which I believe is right - as personality is just a sum of your genes and previous life experience.

So, what can be our purpose in life, and what can be the purpose of a humane race? Based on above I believe it should be protecting and expanding areal of carbon based life form. This runaway greenhouse scenario will end up with earth without liquid water on a surface - it can possible kill all life as we know it, so we should try to prevent it, even if it will happen after our personal deaths. Anyway, on a long enough time line, chances of survival of life on planet Earth drops to zero - so I believe we should do what we can to extend life, not necessary humans - maybe just a seeds from which evolution can begin - to as many planets as we can.

Nope.

Why exactly should we want any censorship?

Oops, sorry - Senkaku Islands are controlled by Japan and disputed by China, so yes, looks like Japanese need US backing or there own strong military force (probably only nukes will count) to deter China.

So basically US backing Japan or not is irrelevant - as all this territorial claims you listed is Japan territorial claims to China and Russia, not the other way around, and Japan is not going to get anything anyway, with or without US backing them.

No it's not works out to the same thing, it's the matter of who need to start aggression to get what they perceive as theirs. I'm saying that de-facto Russia control those islands since WW2, and Russia have no territorial claims to Japan. US backing Japan is irrelevant in this case, as Russia would not start aggression on Japan (as it have no territorial claims), and Japan would not start aggression on Russia in foreseeable future as it could lead to nuclear strikes.