They also don't seem to be charging him under it. So they probably agree with you.

This is an inherent problem with systems that have a centralized control. Including GitHub. git is inherently decentralized, so it has different problems, which the designers of GitHub tried to resolve through centralization. If you'll notice, it worked. The problems with decentralization were solved. But now we have the problems of centralization.

I don't know what a real solution would be. Google is a good example in another area. Web pages are decentralized, but Google makes it possible to find what you need...but Google is centralized, so if Google doesn't want you to find somthing, it is even more difficult to find than before.

This is the inherent problems of monopolies, even when they aren't abusing their power. But monopolies always eventually abuse their power. Sometimes not until the first generation of management retires, but eventually.

I was worried about SourceForge from the first time that I heard about it. But it was so useful...

It's not a GPL violation, merely unethical. It probably isn't illegal.

Well, trust isn't a single bit operation. More nearly a float. Actually, trust along a single dimension is reasonably considered a float, but there are multiple dimensions.

Yes, it's safer if you use your own trusted compiler. But it's also safer if you build your own CPU, and the rest of your computer. And I doubt that MS would have bothered to build a custom compiler that would hide back doors when it was compiling the MSWind OS. It clearly *could*, it's just unlikely. Of course, how unlikely you consider it depends on what you are worried about, and I'm not planning on using any of their software, so I can afford to be unworried. I worry more about SOHO router vulnerabilities.

So the question becomes "For what purposes are they considering using MSWind?". This is still probably only security theater, but your proposed objection is likely to be unreasonable. One should never be certain, so one operates on the balance of probabilites of cost and gain.

You're missing the point. The other guy *is* evil/hateful/fascist/$badBadBad, just in a slightly different way than the guy you were convinced to vote for. This is usually true even for the candidates offered by the minority parties, though that may well be because only loons will run after an office (and spend the effort) when there's just about no chance they'll get it.

Every election I witness I become more and more convinced that a lottery would be a much better way to select a representative. Three adults at random from each voting district. And penalties for declining (say, triple your tax bill for the next 20 years). And when you "retire" from office, you get a pension of twice the median income in your district, and are prohibited from accepting "favors" (how to phrase that to eliminate loopholes) from anyone you regulated or passed laws concerning while you were in office.
This would require a bit of internal restructuring of the government to remove the ability of a single person to really screw things up (as occasionally a real winner would get selected) but that needs doing anyway (as occasionally a real winner gets elected).

I understand that you think that Synroc is a solution. Maybe it "sort of" is. I've long considered glassification to be a reasonable approach to develop. But I said "develop". I don't believe that there has been any extensive testing of Synroc, so I don't consider it a proven solution. Perhaps it would work out. (And could you use it for process heat?)

The thing is, this is deciding that we're going to throw away most of the recoverable energy. I think hot breeders are a more desirable approach, with something like Synroc used only on the final result. But it's also quite possible that really counting all the costs would leave the decision as "This costs more than the alternatives in almost all situations."

Clearly the current approach is bad policy, poorly and unsafely implemented. It's not clear to me what good policy would be, particularly when one can pretty much guarantee that over time some people are going to be lazy, stuipd, and selfish. This seems to mean that you need to ensure that it's difficult to profit from unethical behavior. Preferably both difficult and dangerous, but at least difficult. So fast breeders are problematic. It's possible to stop them and extract weapons grade materials. One of the arguments for pebble bed reactors is that it makes this more difficult. But pebble bed reactors have lots of high level waste. What's really needed is a way to make that useful, not just a better way to throw it away.

So you work for their competition, then?

The "$200 hammer" was because the corporation that sold it wasn't willing to go through the paperwork for less.

A few scores and mass intimidation, and that's probably still an underestimate. But that's still minor compared to Beria.

Weelllll.....maybe.

Batteries can have a few problems. Exploding, e.g. (To be honest, I can't think of a form of energy storage that doesn't have a few problems.)

This probably means that there need to be construction standards for how the batteries are installed that will protect the house that they power from being destroyed if there's a battery problem. Not an insurmountable problem, but I haven't heard anyone talking about that yet.

There are worse things you could do, and that's about the highest praise I can give this choice.

Both were design problems, and both were also operator errors. Chernobyl in both cases had worse problems, but remember that in Fukishima the back up power supply was located in a trough where after the water washed over it, it remained flooded. And it was flooded in the first place because it wasn't high enough above sea level. Another design problem. Then the spent fuel rods were kept on site, and not properly disposed of. (Know any other plants that do that? Perhaps on the US coast?)

Not all things that are clearly problems have an obvious solution. The spent fuel rods is one example. But a different solution is now clearly needed, and it should have been obvious that one was needed before the incident. (It probably was, but deciding what the right answer is, and implementing it, is not going to be easy.) So I'm calling the way the fuel rods were handled a clear human error, as it wasn't a part of the design of the plant. They weren't supposed to stay there.

Of course, you can call any design error a human error also, and you'd still be correct, but I'm following what I understand your separation to be.

The problem is, you aren't going to be able to prevent human errors. You can only minimize them. So you need to count them in as a part of the cost of the incident. (And if the same series of mistakes as happened at Chernobyl wouldn't happen again, that doesn't indicate that no equally bad series of mistakes will ever happen again. And Russia isn't the only country were there are often very loose safety regulation/enforcement.)

If you want to understand the nuclear industry, you need to realize that its backer was not so much the corporations as the military. The civilian nuclear industry allowed to move a bunch of their budget into a different government agency, where it wasn't as subject to being cut. (When politics changed, it got moved back into the military budget.)

Think of how Crysler got bailed out by the government because it was an "essential supplier of military equipment", but how the bail out didn't come out of the defense department budget. The same thing happens repeatedly in different areas, but usually wihtout as much public notice.

No. The logical solution is for the government to recompense those damaged by the event, and to then bill the companies for recompense, plus a "handling charge" for their work in recompensing the damaged. Probably the "handling charge" should be a fixed charge plus a low percentage, so the government doesn't have an incentive to minimize the compensation. (They will anyway due to corruption, AKA lobbying, but to minimize the incentive.)

It's still not clear to me what "a lot further along" would be. Waste disposal is still, the last I heard, an unsolved problem. There are some reasonable paths that could be developed, but until there's been a least a pilot, say, fast breeder reactor that actually burns all its fuel to "nearly harmless" one can't show that it will really work. And long term storage looks both dangerous and expensive. And also like it would prevent recovery. Hot waste should at least be useable as a source of process heat. That *might* pay for storing it.

OTOH, it's also quite possible that "further along" would mean that all the extant plants were shutting down after burning their final supply of fuel....except for a few specialty plants, like reactors in nuclear subs. I can see an excellent case for using fission reactors on the moon, but cooling them could be a major problem, so it probably wouldn't pay until there was a permanent base.

The thing is, AFAIKT based on current public information we just don't know what "further along" would mean.