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Comment Re: Talk about creating a demand (Score 1) 334

It seems to me that Fukushima didn't have a design problem as much as it had a bad siting problem.

Fukushima had three problems. One, design. The design is very old and not very good by modern standards. Two, siting. It was put somewhere even ancient Japanese knew was a bad idea. Three, NIMBY. Area residents didn't want to look at generators on pylons.

Comment Re:You can't control the class, so you've failed. (Score 1) 355

All it takes is that the parents of such an asshole student are "important" because they donate money into the school's coffers, basically buying their precious little dud a degree.

And when told that you can't fail those students and kick them out of your class, you do what anyone clever would do, and bring some light to the problem by failing the entire class. Bravo! Goddamned brilliant, if you have integrity and are willing to deal with the consequences that is.

Comment Re:Just for context (Score 1) 314

I couldn't find a better map, but fluoride can always be found in meaningful amounts naturally in groundwater.

I use a RO filter, you insensitive clod! I don't even care what's in my water, unless it's so severe I can't bathe in it. And I use a spin-down filter, a spun filter, and a carbon filter before that happens anyway.

It's sad that you need to filter your municipal drinking water before you can drink it, though, especially when that's in part because they added nasty crap to it.

Comment Re:The grid needs storage - not battery storage (Score 1) 334

As to your used battery idea, it is not a good one. Most used batteries are car batteries.

Aside from the fact that we're talking about used EV batteries, it might interest you to know that high-end vehicles are now replacing their flooded lead-acid starter batteries with Li-Ion packs. Even a really dinky one is capable of starting the vehicle, but the truth is that there's embarrassingly more electrical accessories in the modern car, and they need a battery with more capacity so that you can use them all at once even in a vehicle with a stop-start system. As the price on electrically-operated accessories (like power steering, heat pumps, and so on) comes down due to economies of scale, you can expect this trend to proliferate down to cheaper cars. It's pretty hilarious to look even into older vehicles, say a saturn, and compare the size of the battery to the size of the engine. Which block is bigger, the battery box or the cylinder block? A Li-Ion battery would be half the size, and let you design a foot off the length of the vehicle — or put it someplace else, where it would do you more good.

Anyway, these Li-Ion packs can be broken down and their individual cells tested, matched, and re-used, so the car starter battery of the future will also be useful for these systems... just not the batteries of today. Those are already aggressively recycled, however, like most car parts.

Comment Re:The grid needs storage - not battery storage (Score 1) 334

I've also used a slightly amount of hyperbole, they won't cost $0. Packs will at minimum have to be tested and recertified, and in many cases will need cells replaced — and individual cells will need to be tested and matched into groups of cells with similar characteristics for maximum output. That all costs some money. However, it costs nowhere near as much as putting the packs together in the first place; it costs some charge and discharge cycles, but there's no reason why these cycles can't be performed as part of an actual operating load-smoothing plant. After all, you'll have many modules in parallel, and any which cause you problems will simply be removed from the system. On the other hand, some packs might well be usable without any cell replacement, and they really would cost only the transportation costs and testing logistics and overhead, less the profit from their participation in load balancing during testing.

Comment Re: wait, what? (Score 1) 89

Those who are more paranoid acknowledge that ownership problem and do updates using an alternate method, i.e. login.

I don't think you understand what I said. If you've only got one uid, then both your web user and your shell user are the same user. This is typical of low-cost hosting services. Unless you're colocating, you've typically only got one uid. This ain't the law, some providers will let you crank them out, especially if you're chroot'd.

Comment Re:Useless Bandaid (Score 1) 634

So if being a woman actually counted for them in STEM hiring (not against them), then you'd agree there wasn't a problem?

Don't let me disturb your worldview with facts, but in every IT or other STEM area I've seen (in the US at least), Women would be hired ahead of Men if they were anywhere close to being able to do the job and were interested in it.

Comment Re: Easy fix (Score 1) 247

Google is your friend.

Took all of 5 seconds to find examples like this from Wired.

The first link in the list has this regarding CAFE regulations of the time:

Domestic automakers predicted that fuel economy improvements would require a fleet primarily of subcompacts. In 1974, a Ford executive testified that the standards could “result in a Ford product line consisting . . . of all sub- Pinto-sized vehicles.”

Comment Re: wait, what? (Score 1) 89

The real problem is that almost all installations of Wordpress ensure that their files are editable by the web process user in order to use the auto-update feature.

Sure, but that's a necessary feature of any self-updating CMS. And if you're hosting it, you usually only have one username anyway, so the files can't be owned by another user.

Comment Re:And still we don't learn (Score 1) 89

Add to this that WordPress is by far the easiest of the major CMS platforms to manage, and it gets even worse. I manage a couple of WordPress sites and a Joomla site.

Haven't tried Drupal eh? Damning with faint praise, but it's notably better than WordPress. The only PITA is dealing with database access, but so far I've been able to do that through other modules' code and haven't had to do it directly.

Comment Re:OR (Score 1) 334

These are established technologies.

Yes, and the former is horribly lossy while the latter has significant environmental impact, and as such is only suitable for limited sites. Established doesn't mean good, or shall we slap a slave collar around your neck and send you down a diamond mine?

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