Fukishima killed 1,000 people, which is really sad. 230,000 were killed by the Banquiao hydroelectric dam disaster. Even if the worst nuclear accident in history happened EVERY YEAR, it would still be safer than hydroelectric.

  Let's look at US safety standards. The one accident at a US nuclear utility which some find concerning occurred in 1979, at Three Mile Island. Fatalities linked to the Three Mile Island incident total zero, as shown by Hatch, Beyea, Nieves, and Susser (1990) and many other studies. The same year, in 1979, 1,800 people were killed in the Morvi hydroelectric plant failure (Noorani 1984). Also the same year, 130 people were killed in coal mining accidents as shown by Mine Safety and Health Administration reports (2010). This shows that even in the worst year for US nuclear power, the alternatives were infinitely more hazardous. Internationally, Fukushima and Chernobyl later grabbed headlines. While the failure of the old Russian reactor at Chernobyl did kill an estimated 4,000 people (Sovacool 2008), this pales in comparison to the 230,000 killed in the Banqiao hydroelectric disaster (Pisaniello 2009). Fukushima caused the loss of 1,000 lives (von Hippel 2011), yet more were killed in Jesse oil pipeline explosion (Sovacool 2008). Sovacool calculates that in total, energy accidents killed 182,156 people from 1907-2007 and all nuclear accidents in history represent just 2% of those fatalities. Nothing is perfectly safe, but energy must come from somewhere and nuclear has proven to be far safer than the alternatives for large-scale power production.

I've gotten involved in a couple of rounds of agency rule-making before and it taught me a few things. I learned that this is where the skills learned writing papers in school can really be useful. The folks at the FAA think they know something about this topic, so they tend to discount comments that sound like the person is spouting off emotionally without having any real knowledge of the subject matter. On the other hand, they don't know everything that everyone is doing in the field, so they'd like to hear comments from people doing different things. For example, my local university has a drone research center and the FAA doesn't know what all the research center is doing, so they can appreciate comments about using drones in a research and educational setting.

IF you really care about this topic, it may be worth putting some time into writing your comments well, or supporting an organization who will, such as the model aircraft association.

The fact that US dollars can be used to pay any debt makes it valuable, yes. Possibly just as important, almost everybody in.the US has to pay taxes even the 46% who get more refunded than they paid. Those taxes have to be paid in USD, so pretty much everybody needs to have some dollars to pay their taxes with. Since everyone needs them, everyone values them. The few people who don't pay taxes can of course trade their dollars with anyone who does pay taxes.

A "programmer" can be someone who spends two days putting together a complex Excel macro (poorly), or someone who designs an information systems architecture for a significant enterprise. These are VERY different activities.

On top of that, I'll say that approximately 85% of people doing programming aren't really competent. Compare how often software crashes vs how often cars fail in such a way that they crash themselves. So you have to specify, are you talking about MOST programming, or competent programming? Most programming isn't done competently.

Well-designed and larger software projects require a thorough understanding of a large set of rules, both knowing what the rules are, and understanding WHY the rules are as they are, and when to apply which rules in order to move forward. In that sense, it's very much like math. Also like math, one wrong decision can lead you down a path of futility, from whence reversing course is time-consuming.

That's true, after being convicted of a second felony, he did appeal and that conviction was vacated. Also, a second court found that he did in fact commit extortion. So yeah, although he was convicted of two felonies, he should be treated as being guilty of the one.

Apparently you didn't watch the fine video.
The bright young entrepreneurs at MIT had human fingers to examine as prior art, and what they came up with was "strap two sticks to your wrist to get in the way". The original design of our bodies is WAY better than what MIT is coming up with.

Have you ever had a nasty cut, where you cut a little chunk out of yourself? I''ve done that a few times. I couldn't locate exactly where, because the missing chunks of flesh have been regenerated automatically. Try taking a chunk out of your iPhone or any human technology. Let us know when it grows back.

There are some people with some silly ideas about the creator, and therefore some strong arguments against those silly ideas. Engineering prowess isn't one of those strong arguments. Everything from the water cycle on the macro level to ion pumps on the microscopic level - genius ideas abound in nature.

It's very, very tricky (impossible?) to set that up right with the newer suckurity checks in recent version of SuExec, especially now that SELinux has removed *_disable_trans. Previously you could do it with httpd_suexec_disable_trans. Now mostly people resort to running Apache as a permissive context - effectively castrating the mandatory access controls in order to run soemthing that castrates the discretionary access controls (standard permissions).

Also, before the new checks were added, SuExec could be used in a smart way, though few people did. Suppose you have a user named "joe". You could create a script user named "joes_scripts". In that way, Joe's scripts would run as their own user. The new checks won't allow the joes_scripts user to run within a the home directory of "joe", so there goes the proper use of suexec.

On a dedicated server, the you CAN create a user that safely isolates scripts, so scripts run as a separate user from everything else. That user is called "httpd" or "nobody", and that's the default you get by NOT using suexec.

Most of what we see in the wild is caused by improperly written PHP scripts which don't validate their input and then use crud like fopen_url. That provides the crackers the METHOD to put files on the server and execute them. SuExec gives web visitors PERMISSION to ad and modify files.

Unfortunately, the folks at Plesk didn't read the first paragraph of the SuExec documentation before deploying it by default, so hundreds of thousands of DIY web servers are running with SuExec. (SuExec means allow visitors to modify files, but don't allow other clients hosted on the same shared server to do so).

What the Plesk and DirectAdmin folks should have read, from the Apache SuExec page:

        -----
        Used properly, this feature can reduce considerably the security risks involved with allowing users to develop and run
        private CGI or SSI programs. However, if suEXEC is improperly configured, it can cause any number of problems and
      possibly create new holes in your computer's security. If you aren't familiar with managing setuid root programs and the
        security issues they present, we highly recommend that you not consider using suEXEC.
        -----

That last sentence bears repeatings. "If you aren't familiar with managing setuid root programs and the security issues they present, we highly recommend that you not consider using suEXEC." Plesk, and DirectAdmin - your customers are not familiar with managing setuid programs and the security issue, so they should not even CONSIDER running suexec, much less have that foisted on them as the default.

Indeed, I meant westfieldwhip.com

Ps, about desktop market share -
Westwhip.com has a significant market share in their target market too. A 90% share of a segment that's becoming a historical era doesn't mean much.

http://www.forbes.com/global20...

Apple is the #15 largest company in the world. Microsoft is #32.

Apple has $160 billion of CASH on hand. Microsoft's total assets, all of their real estate, etc is $150 billion.

While Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, and the longest serving Democrat in any national office, he wrote scathing commentary about Obama ignoring the Constitution and legislating from the oval office. Nobody is more democrat than Byrd. More recently, the distinguished Senator from Ohio wrote that Obama's handling of Obamacare is clearly unconstitutional.

I understand you're probably infatuated with the guy, but peek around the blinders once in a while.

He, like all presidential candidates, WAS profoundly egotistical and had a pathological need for approval, but that he seems to have given up on the approval part, going the way of "nobody understands but me". That sometimes happens when somebody becomes "the most powerful man in the world", of course.

His July, 2013 decision to start blatantly rewriting law, unilaterally, is ample evidence of that. Ev Almost everyone, the people who voted for him, congress members from his own party, his largest donors - all say what he's doing is unconstitutional and wrong, but he doesn't seem to care anymore.

For a rough guesstimate, let's say 25 people read your post. At least one of those people (4%) use XQuartz. Is 4% of people "next to no one"?

I use it. Sometimes to run something like Wireshark, sometimes I do:
ray@mymac$ ssh -X -C me@linux.myhouse