What happens if someone discovers a flaw? So far every reactor design ever built has needed some modification afterwards, due to unforeseen issues. Seems like if there is no way to force companies to make those modifications, like a government agency telling them or affected citizens having the right to sue we will just end up with another Fukushima style accident.

That's going to jack the cost up to military levels too then. Probably more, because unlike the military the nuclear plant operators would have to hire people on the commercial market and train them to a high level, and then pay them enough to retain them.

There isn't really enough volume to justify that kind of mass production. Even if there were, many of the parts are specialist and have to last the lifetime of the plant, because once contaminated can't be easily replaced. In other words, it wouldn't bring costs down.

Surely there are lawsuits over all types of new power generation. People hate windmills and coal plants and fracking and everything else near their homes. Nuclear is hardly unique in that regard.

Anyway, in the UK lawsuits are not such a big problem, but nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.

Actually a lot of environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power. It's those investors and their "risk averse" nature that don't want to throw billions of dollars at something that might lose them money, especially when there are better opportunities.

The UK has to pay power companies to build new nuclear plants, and still only one player is interested. They are that bad of an investment. Nuclear is unsuitable for commercial operation, and always requires government funding to get built.

The advantage is their family back home costs 1/10th as much as yours to provide for.

You are assuming that:

a) The prosecutor wants to bring a prosecution if the evidence allows

b) The grand jury process is a fair way to decide if something should go to trial

Laypeople often say things "popped up" on their computer when they really mean it just appeared on their screen. Same way they call their PC a "hard drive".

They heard someone saying it and try to use it themselves, like a child does when first learning a language, and get it wrong.

Chrome is the dominant browser now, so it's more a question of if those plug-ins are important enough to be redeveloped for the majority of users.

The replacement API has been around for ages, and is much more secure. If I used any of those plug-ins I'd be demanding they get upgraded for my own protection, or stop using them.

By "west" you mean the US and UK, neither of which ever really had a good idea of what freedom is. The US was a bit better than the UK because it had a constitution, but that document mainly ensures negative freedoms: freedom from interference, or limits on your actions.

Most of western Europe, particularly Germany, France, the Netherlands and other Nordic countries have a lot of positive freedom too. Privacy, happiness, a real prospect of prosperity. That's why they get so pissed off about spying, and don't engage in it on anything like the scale that UK-US does.

While they did infect some Windows machines, it's worth noting that a lot of the malware does target Unix based operating systems running in telecom equipment. Some of it goes after the BIOS or the firmware in various bits of hardware (e.g. hard drives) too, which is pretty much impossible for any OS to defend against.

Incorrect. There is a grand jury who made a decision on terms and evidence dictated by the prosecutor. I think that's the real problem here. A trial, while imperfect, is adversarial and offers the chance to present more evidence and make counter arguments on any terms. The grand jury was limited to what the prosecutor decided to allow.

Just playing Devil's advocate for a moment, they said that the witnesses were considered unreliable and thus there was no realistic prospect of a conviction at trial. I don't know how true that is, I wasn't there to hear their evidence, but that's the claim being made.

Actually ultra high speed charging is kind of a big deal. Even if you can supply that much energy, the batteries don't like more than about 1.5C. Funnily enough that works out at about 120kW, the current Tesla high speed charging rate. If you go much beyond that it will start to affect the lifetime of the battery pack.

You also have the issue of cooling. The car actively cools the battery pack during charging, but it's cooling capacity is limited and unlikely to support 500kW charging, let alone 1000kW.

Having said that, the Tesla is still awesome because a 40 minute stop every 270 miles is probably as necessary for the human driver as it is for the car.

I thought it was because US made cars were mostly shit; unreliable and liable to explode or fall apart on you. Japanese cars offered reliability at a reasonable cost.

It was the same in the UK. British cars had such a terrible reputation they couldn't compete with Japanese and European ones.

There need to be much, much harsher penalties for injuring someone after violating their rights. Cops need to be made to think twice before tazing people.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of what we did back in the 50s and 60s. You don't need an airtight suit just to go out on your little dinghy, or millions of litres of rocket fuel igniting under you to get there. It's baby steps compared to what will one day be possible, but not exactly showing a lack of effort. That started in the mid 70s.