Apparently even the Amish lifestyle is changing to have less exercise now. For example they are not allowed to drive, but they can accept lifts in cars driven by non-Amish.

Only if you discount all the damage they do, paid for by private health insurance and by people cleaning up the soot from cars that ends up in their homes.

Germany is reducing the number of coal plants it has: http://energytransition.de/201...

Most of the closures and new builds were announced before Fukushima, and some of the new builds have been either cancelled or mothballed since. The ones that are opening are unlikely to ever make much money, if any.

The difference between a strip mine and Fukushima is that the mine is planned and will be cleaned up and returned to a re-usable state when finished with, and didn't destroy multiple towns and villages or kill hundreds of people. The mine can be managed, Fukushima cannot.

Safety is not a purely engineering problem though, much of it is politics and business. If you want to design a safe nuclear plant you have to figure out how to deal with those as well as the engineering challenges.

How do you ensure your design is free from defects and flaws? How do you make sure your design is followed exactly and no cost-cutting changes are made? How do you ensure that over the plants operational life-time, which is likely out outlast your working and possibly your actual lifetime, no corners are cut and standards maintained? How do you ensure that extra money is spent as soon as new problems are discovered, like new geological fault lines or flaws in your original design? How do you get investors looking to make a profit on-board with all these potentially unknown costs down the road? How do you ensure that waste will be dealt with in a timely fashion, without corner cutting?

Most of the problems are not engineering ones, they are political and business problems.

Not, it is not being ignored. I don't know about the US but in the EU there are very strict regulations governing gas and coal plants, and we are working towards getting rid of them or at least doing full capture of the output.

Incredibly are governments are capable of doing both things at once. I know, hard to imagine.

The numbers for harm done by modern western coal plants and especially the number of deaths attributed to solar and wind have been widely debunked anyway. That lame blog post that claimed solar killed so many people just took the number of construction worker deaths per year and decided half of them were probably people falling off roofs while installing solar panels. This old lie really needs to die.

During the 11th March earthquake in Japan a couple of plants experienced problems with their SCRAM mechanisms. Although the rods can in theory fall due to gravity, it only works if the rods don't get stuck due to the violent lateral forces placed on them and the reactor shell. Fortunately enough rods did come down to control the reactors and allow them to be cooled, but it demonstrated the weakness in this design.

The other issue with earthquakes, which Fukushima and a couple of other Japanese plants experienced, is that the cooling system can be damaged or difficult to operate in the aftermath. The system relies on transporting water through pipes and valves. If the pipes break or the valves somehow get stuck in the wrong position the system can fail. At Fukushima there were slow leaks, but the most critical failure which preventing effective cooling and lead to the hydrogen explosions and full melt-downs was an inability of the plant operators to monitor the position of key valves. That lead to water being syphoned off into storage tanks instead of cooling the reactors.

This is actually a well known technique. The human body is designed for long periods of rest and short bursts of activity, e.g. running away from / after some animal. While sustained exercise does burn a lot of calories and have other benefits, short bursts put muscles into high energy mode constantly so as to be ready.

I used to love running, it's one of the things I miss the most. I'm trying to find ways to do short, concentrated bursts of exercise that don't completely destroy me.

Thanks to Snowden's leaks we know that NSA employees do have concerns about what they are doing, but as ever the chain of command and "everyone else is doing it too" seems to be enough. Well, for everyone except Snowden and maybe a few others.

There is a balance to be struck. Western media tends to heavily sanitize war and it disconnects people from the consequences of the actions taken on their behalf. On the other hand, even in death those who were killed have a right to some dignity.

That's assuming that they have jurisdiction. If Lizard Squad is not in the US... Well, better hope their country is on good terms with you guys and is willing to hand them over.

Says the Anonymous Coward. Without any kind of reference to reliable statistics your anecdote is utterly worthless I'm afraid. Could be completely made up.

I'm not saying you are wrong, merely that an anonymous anecdote with no data to back it up shouldn't be modded "informative".

It's not just people who have serious mental defects, it's people who might otherwise be normal human beings. It's what some people call "rape culture", the fact that a lot of guys don't really see anything particularly wrong with pressuring girls for sex or treating them as disposable sex objects so it isn't that much of a leap to go as far as drugging them. I mean, if plying them with alcohol so they are less inhibited is okay...

Once you become away of it you start to notice how prevalent it is in western culture. A few years ago there was an advert for pain medication where a women told her husband she didn't want sex that night because she had a headache. The guy produces the pills, "problem" solved, and the woman looks... Well, in all honestly the actress looked like she was resigned to being raped that night, by the look on her face. Going back much further if you watch this scene from Goldfinger it's supposed to be... romantic? but Bond basically forces her to have sex with him.

Women are often portrayed as either wanting this behaviour or as deserving it. Female characters tend to be manipulative, using their looks and the promise of sex to get what they want. It gives guys the impression that if they meet a girl, she is attractive and dresses in anything lower cut that a turtleneck, she is trying to manipulate them. If they go along with it and maybe buy her a drink or two they have "paid" and expect something in return. Changing her mind or wanting to go slowly is just a rip-off.

It's really screwed up when you start to look at it.

Buying Waze would not have helped because Waze uses Google data for maps, so presumably would have had to switch to using TomTom/Bing like Apple Maps did. TomTom's data is crap and Bing's search results are average at best, which is why Apple Maps also sucks.

Google's StreetView programme wasn't just about invading everyone's privacy, it was about getting more data on roads than mapping provided at the time. Their systems can read things like street signs, understand road markings, spot where a particular house number's door is, and automatically improve their maps in a way that would require an incredible amount of effort to do manually. Combined with satellite imagery and telemetry from their cars, and of course deep mining the web, their data is simply years ahead of everyone else.

Nokia has started deploying its own cars to assist with mapping, but Apple hasn't even started and neither has anyone else. That puts them nearly a decade behind, desperately trying to catch up.

It would never catch on because it doesn't support what existing Micro USB connectors do, and what other manufacturers already use. For example, there is no way to do uncompressed 1080p video over it, and phones were doing that three or four years ago so are not likely to drop back now. The cost of the Apple video solution is prohibitive as well, when an MHL adapter is â5.

Lightning doesn't seem to support USB peripherals either. Not sure if it is an inherent limitation of the design or just that Apple don't use them, but many Android devices can make use of USB flash drives, card readers, game controllers, keyboards, mice and the like.

How can you say that when you haven't even seen a USB-C connector in the flesh, let alone tried it out for a while?

One important aspect of being prepared that people often seem to forget is to make your house safe in the event of an earthquake. Make sure things like your kitchen cupboards are not going to empty their contents onto your head, or that you can at least hide under a table in every room. Most injuries come from falling objects.

Helmets are not a bad idea either. You can get flat packed foam or inflatable ones. When you go outside there is still a danger that things were dislodged and will fall off buildings, or that there will be aftershocks.