Yes, I think that corruption is the real point here. In my view, safety of nuclear power is ultimately determined by the extent of corruption within the country that is operating/regulating the power stations. In countries with a culture of openness, nuclear power will be much safer: those certifying safety will be able to make better judgements and have greter authority. So I don't see that the question of nuclear power is black and white - I endorse nuclear power only in those countries that can be trusted. Whilst the industry has a trust issue, I would hope that people see that individual countries set their own standards.

Since Fukushima, we now see that TEPCO just didn't want to know about safety issues. There was no way that they were going to shut down a working power station. Chernobyl was brought online before a key safety requirement was satisfied and efforts to resolve that ultimately led to the disaster. Three Mile Island is fundamentally different: caused by sloppy training/operation, a faulty component, HCI confusion due to design and, whilst a disaster, ultimately far less serious. (I am from none of the countries that these disasters occurred in.)

In about 92, a couple of friends at school wrote a BASIC program to fake the login screens on the BBCs to grab the login details. I had a copy because I was curious how it all worked. Still got busted. A year later everything went Mac.

I've been reliably informed that Santa Claus is delivering mine.

Is blue really a signal layer? Looks like blue and pink are silks to me and the board is simply double-sided.

Siblings are just a special case of cousin- 0th cousins!

In a restaurant where you pay at the end, you are in debt after eating. I cannot believe such a restaurant needs a licence to offer credit..? Similarly staying in a hotel etc.

The raw in-flight sound really makes this video brilliant. The rocket splutters and then eerie silence.. for a few seconds. Mesmerizing stuff...

Did Absolute actually intercept communications? Is gathering data from a laptop 'intercepting communications' according to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)? The second article says

If you are gathering data from a camera/keyboard on a stolen laptop, does that suddenly become illegal when the camera/keyboard starts to be used for a live chat? What if the user saves a file that is emailed a few days later but downloaded in the intervening period. Is that a communications interception?

I really don't think you (or your representative) should be done/sued for gathering data off your stolen laptop that you have tracked down, even if that data then goes on to be communicated, when the purpose is simply to recover stolen goods. This is surely common sense but, I suppose, that isn't law. I hope some lawyer ends up out of pocket to reduce this nonsense happening in future. In the case of this unfortunate couple, they should just accept that it was bad luck.

We'd all have to wear plastic safety specs too...

...we're creating even more carbon emissions!

There's a culture where safety does not come first on the priority list. One suspects authoritarianism is ultimately to blame: individuals afraid to make decisions themselves perhaps?

The DOD procured Ada which became a standard in 83, much improved in 95. For _critical embedded systems_, it is a very suitable language. Also very suitable if you are thinking of changing the hardware on which it runs.. perhaps a 30+ year military project might involve a change of platform at some point? Civilian contractors didn't like it, presumably because it wasn't fashionable. (Anyone who can write a program in C is clever enough to learn Ada within a month. It's a question of will.) And the customer (supposedly "always right") eventually caved in and no longer mandated it, presumably on short-term cost grounds. Just one example of the government/military not knowing enough to make a stand.

I feel like I'm looking at some sort of weird creature, like something from The Thing. A laptop with two screens? It's like someone with two mouths or three eyes... (Don't think it would be as bad if it was one very wide screen.)

Interestingly, for the Millennium Bridge, it wasn't actually the frequency of people's footsteps that caused the problem. (This can be a problem when people step in time and some other London bridges have signs that troops should break time.) The main issue with the Millennium Bridge was that the resonance was lateral, i.e. side to side, which was not well known about, and there was positive feedback: small lateral movements, within normal limits, became amplified because the way people naturally corrected their balance induced the resonant frequency. I haven't read enough about this topic to know whether there was any positive feedback, i.e. whether the movement of the building was affecting their Tae Bo workout (or other people in the building) which in turn amplified the tremors.

to the sound of the word 'bitcoin'. So I am claiming prior fart.