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Comment Re:a perfectly stupid idea. (Score 1) 652

You don't want 2/3 of the people who have the best understanding of the facility to be taken out in the first few minutes of an accident.

Understand who I'm talking about here; the bean counters who play around with the numbers and externalize risks in order to maximize profits at the expense of the safety of thousands of people, the economy and the environment, and who usually escape massive disasters caused by their poor planning with barely a slap on the wrist.

If they fuck it up badly enough that the plant even has the possibility of that kind of catastrophic failure, then yes, I do want them taken out, and I don't anticipate it making the slightest difference to managing the accident response.

Comment Re:Deliberate (Score 1) 652

5. Parts should be manufactured in factories using standard methods and specifications. Parts should be interchangeable from site to site. Minimize customizations as much as possible.

6. Anyone with responsibility for the safety, maintenance and/or operating budgets of a nuclear plant must reside, with their spouse and dependants, on or near the grounds of said nuclear plant for at least 9 months of the year.

Comment Re:He definitely did know and understand the risk. (Score 4, Funny) 151

This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. He is not fighting for you or your right to keep a "backup copy". Trying to get everyone on the net riled up is just yet another PR stunt. Kim always has been and always will be caring for only one person: himself. And he will not hesitate to lie and step on former friends and partners alike. Never just trusting anything he says should be the default.

... and yet, somehow, he still comes across as less sleazy than the people going after him.

Social Networks

Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives 88

reifman writes Upstart social networking startup Ello burst on the scene in September with promises of a utopian, post-Facebook platform that respected user's privacy. I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology. It's just another privately held, VC-funded silo. Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with "an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online." Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward. In part one of "Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives," I revisit/review six open source social networking alternatives in search of a path forward beyond Facebook.

Submission + - How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that.

Submission + - Is Ruby on Rails Losing Steam? (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: In a post last week, Quartz ranked the most valuable programming skills, based on job listing data from Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution. Ruby on Rails came out on top, with an average salary of $109,460. And that may have been true in the first quarter of 2013 when the data was collected, but 'before you run out and buy Ruby on Rails for Dummies, you might want to consider some other data which indicate that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards,' writes ITworld's Phil Johnson. Johnson looked at recent trends in the usage of Ruby (as a proxy for Rails usage) across MS Gooroo, the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, Redmonk's language rankings, and GitHut and found that 'demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills has been on the decline, at least for the last year.'

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Google Fiber Austin Pricing Revealed - PC Magazine (google.com)


Computerworld

Google Fiber Austin Pricing Revealed
PC Magazine
The regular Fiber plan costs $70 per month; add 150-plus high-def TV channels for a total $130. 0shares. Gigabit Internet VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY. Ahead of next month's gigabit Internet rollout in Austin, Texas, Google has offered a sneak peek at its...
The next city to get Google Fiber may have just been revealedBGR
Google Fiber reveals 1 Gig pricing for AustinFierceTelecom
Google Fiber offers free basic internet and $70/mo Gigabit internet in Austin, TexasLoad The Game
Hot Hardware-TechSpot-Tech Times
all 44 news articles

Games

Top Counter-Strike Players Embroiled In Hacking Scandal 224

An anonymous reader writes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the world's fastest growing eSports, but the community has been rocked by scandal in the last week, with several top players being banned by Valve for using various hacking tools to improve their performance. With the huge Dreamhack Winter tournament taking place this weekend, the purge could not have come at a worse time for the game, and fans are now poring over the archives for other signs of foul play in top tier games — be sure to look out for these tell tale signs while playing.
Google

Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change 652

_Sharp'r_ writes Two Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change. After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?

Submission + - UK Pirate Party Slams Theresa May's Plans For Static IPs (theinquirer.net)

Carly Page writes: The UK Pirate Party has unveiled plans proposed by Home Secretary Theresa May that could force ISPs to assign fixed IP addresses to individual users and machines, thus allowing authorities to identify with more certainty those responsible for cyber crimes.

Loz Kaye, Pirate Party UK leader said: "It's extraordinary that the Home Office did not consult [the] industry about these plans. To me it shows they don't care whether they will work or not. They are just interested in headlines.

"It's clear that the Liberal Democrats have completely lost the plot on mass surveillance. To suggest this is necessarily the end of this issue is fatuous. Just look what happened with DRIP."

Feed Google News Sci Tech: T-Mobile customers on throttled data plans will soon receive accurate speed test (google.com)


Auto World News

T-Mobile customers on throttled data plans will soon receive accurate speed test ...
9 to 5 Google
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission this week reached an agreement with T-Mobile to ensure that customers receive proper information about the speed of their wireless internet connection, even if the user has a capped data plan. The carrier has...
FCC: T-Mobile to give customers more info about their Internet speedsUncover Michigan
T-Mobile (TMUS) Agrees To Reveal Accurate Data Speeds For Throttled ... Bidness ETC
No more lies, T-Mobile US: Download speed caps magically vanished on speed ... Register

all 52 news articles

Crime

Kim Dotcom Regrets Not Taking Copyright Law and MPAA "More Seriously" 151

concertina226 writes Kim Dotcom has spoken out about his long battle over copyright with the U.S. government and his regrets about the events that have led to his arrest ahead of his bail breach hearing on Thursday that could see him return to jail in New Zealand. "Would I have done things differently? Of course. My biggest regret is I didn't take the threat of the copyright law and the MPAA seriously enough," Dotcom said via live video link from his mansion in Auckland, New Zealand at the Unbound Digital conference in London on Tuesday. ... "We never for a minute thought that anyone would bring any criminal actions against us. We had in-house legal counsel, we had three outside firms working for us who reviewed our sites, and not once had any of them mentioned any form of legal risk, so I wish I had known that there was a risk."

Submission + - Let's Encrypt Partnership Promises Open, Better Web Security (thevarguy.com)

Mcusanelli writes: There's a good chance the software that runs your cloud, stores your data and serves your websites is open source. Soon, the SSL/TSL certificate that encrypts it can be, too — or something close to it, at least, if Let's Encrypt, an initiative back by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai and others to build an open certificate authority, succeeds.

Submission + - Kim Dotcom: I Regret Not Taking Threat of Copyright Law and MPAA More Seriously (ibtimes.co.uk)

concertina226 writes: Kim Dotcom has spoken out about his long battle over copyright with the US government and his regrets about the events that have led to his arrest ahead of his bail breach hearing on Thursday that could see him return to jail in New Zealand.

"Would I have done things differently? Of course. My biggest regret is I didn't take the threat of the copyright law and the MPAA seriously enough," Dotcom said via live video link from his mansion in Auckland, New Zealand at the Unbound Digital conference in London on Tuesday.

"I thought that due to court decisions we were monitoring from our competitors like RapidShare who did exactly what we did and were winning in civil court proceedings, and YouTube was winning against Viacom – our sense was that we were protected by the DMCA law.

"We never for a minute thought that anyone would bring any criminal actions against us. We had in-house legal counsel, we had three outside firms working for us who reviewed our sites, and not once had any of them mentioned any form of legal risk, so I wish I had known that there was a risk."

United Kingdom

Cameron Accuses Internet Companies Of Giving Terrorists Safe Haven 183

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from The Guardian: "Internet companies are allowing their networks to be used to plot "murder and mayhem", David Cameron has said in response to the official inquiry into the intelligence agencies' actions ahead of the killing of Lee Rigby. He demanded that internet companies live up to their social responsibilities to report potential terror threats and said there was no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over child abuse but not over combatting terrorism. His comments to the House of Commons came after the parliamentary intelligence and security committee concluded that the brutal murder of Rigby could have been prevented if an internet company had passed on an online exchange in which one of the killers expressed "in the most graphic terms" his intention to carry out an Islamist jihadi attack.

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