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Comment perhaps, it happens to be in the middle of estimat (Score 1) 230

I can't comment on the applicability of that particular model, but I did note that estimates using various models ranged from a few hundred to around five thousand. To a person wanting to reach useful conclusions, from unbiased information to the extent possible, the 1,000 estimate is therefore a reasonable estimate to reason from. To compare nuclear to coal, hydroelectric, etc. we really only need an "order of magnitude" estimate and a survey of all available models indicates that 1,000 is the right order of magnitude.

If your purpose is advocacy, you can of course choose the highest or lowest estimate, whichever suits your agenda. However, doing that carries significant risk. Cherry-picking your data and models can put you in the same position that environmentalists were in during the 1970s - vigorously advocating for a policy that is detrimental to your goals. In the seventies and eighties, environmentalists chose the numbers they liked to suggest that nuclear is "bad". By doing so, they insured that the US would be powered primarily by burning fossil fuels for the forty years since. Had they tried to be objective in their analysis, they probably would have become supporters of nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels forty years sooner, and we might not have any coal-fired plants today.

Comment try 4,000 and 30 years (Score 1) 230

> but it has impacted the health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

Try 4,00. I gave you references for every single number in my post. Are you SO lazy you'd rather make shit up out of whole cloth rather than spend two seconds to look at the real numbers?

> It will continue to do so, for generations. Nuclear disasters never go away.

The half-life of cesium-137 is 30 years.

  Radioactive substances can be classified by their halflife, which is the amount of time required for half of the radiation to be emitted. A common use
of a material with a long half-life is carbon-14 dating, used by archaeologists to measure the age
of a plant or animal specimen. Archaeologists calculated that Ötzi the Iceman was about 5,000
years old because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years and Ötzi emitted about half as much
radiation as a person alive today (South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology 2013). Plants and
animals are not considered to be a radiation risk because the half-life of C-14 and other
components of our bodies is so long, meaning it takes thousands of years to emit appreciable
amounts of radiation. Other substances such as iodine-131 have a short half-life, meaning they
release radiation quickly. Handling iodine-131 is dangerous because it releases half of its
radiation in just eight days (U.S. Environmental Department Protection Agency, 2013).
Protection is simple, however, as the EPA advised “iodine-131's short half-life of 8 days means
that it will decay away completely” in a few weeks. The difference can be visualized by
comparing a household candle, which releases energy slowly, to gunpowder, which releases
energy quickly. Gunpowder is dangerous because the energy is released quickly. A candle is
safe to have around the house because the energy is released slowly. Radioactive substances can
be viewed in a similar way - waste that takes thousands of years to release its energy is not
particularly dangerous to have around.

Comment Banquiao, baby. 230,000 killed by hydroelectric da (Score 1) 230

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.

Comment bonus points if you do your research and use gramm (Score 3, Informative) 77

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.

Comment everybody pays taxes, and so values govt money (Score 1) 100

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.

 

Comment depends. VBA is very different from systems arch (Score 5, Interesting) 241

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.

Comment yes he did appeal his conviction on the 2nd felony (Score 1) 51

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.

Comment See TFS - it exemplifies the opposite (Score 1) 77

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.

Comment That's very tricky with newer SuExec and not trans (Score 1) 168

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.

Comment PHP suexec, mostly. Thanks Plesk (Score 4, Informative) 168

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.

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