I agree with the premise, though I'm not certain that is something you can do with any degree of certainty, certainly not in Japan where earthquake activity is more frequent. The driver of placing them is the availability of cooling water, so this generally means they will be located next to large bodies of water.

I'm satisfied with the approach of making sea walls, and the like, however the external risk we are talking about is if the operator actually complies with the rules, as is the case with Tepco.

That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.

I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.

What's so horrible about The Hobbit?

The book? Nothing. It's a decent story. I like it.

But if you're talking about the movie trilogy then there's a problem. It isn't "The Hobbit". It's a movie that wants to be "tolkienesque" and uses names and scenes that Tolkien had used in his stories. The same as the "I, Robot" movie was with Asimov's stories.

Look at the page count in The Lord of the Rings. Then compare it to the page count in The Hobbit.

Now compare the run time of the movies. Either LoTR got butchered or The Hobbit was puffed up with standard Hollywood hero crap.

I'm skipping it because I do not want ANOTHER generic Hollywood cliche driven green-screen-spectacle-fest.

what are you talking about? Visual Basic is totally portable!

I can run it on Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows CE, Windows 7, even Windows 8!

And for the last time: Why don't you look beyond the professed support and the actual reality?

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.

So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?

Yep, at least, our real biology- as opposed to a made up biology from a bunch of "sexual revolutionists". It is important to separate the sane from the insane, after all.

If you like superhero movies.

Oh, Joss, why couldn't you have stuck with Westerns?

Not everyone is 14 years old.

Making a movie from a novel is rather hard. They are different experiences, rely on different cues, have different timings and often play to different audiences.

Yes, Blade Runner isn't Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Aliens is just Giger and Dan O'Bannon and bog knows what Prometheus was about aside from Charleze Theron in a tight fitting flight suit, but it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Beats Transformer movies and the sad fall of Joss Whedon.

And yet again you uncritically take promotional language as true. As someone who actually uses one of the languages supposedly supported by Dragonegg, I would say it would behoove you to look beyond the advertising copy.

Me calling you a dumb fanboi is not angry name calling. It's a statement of fact, which you thankfully keep proving with every post.

No, that's me. Or maybe Railgunner. For about half the Christians out there, Natural Law is a concept that went out of vogue with the Reformation.

Even the enumerated powers are too centralized for me. As has been proven ever since Shay's rebellion, subsidiarity and solidarity with close neighbors, will not be tolerated. The good part of the old pre-Westphalia kingdoms was that assassination was always a solution.

Again, if you fight for an enemy nation in a war expect people are going to be angry at you.

There was no fight for an enemy nation in Odessa. There were anti-Maidan protesters.

Yanokovych employed snipers against massive peaceful protests, they occupied buildings but they also had hundreds of thousands of people. The pro-Russians have never had a tenth as many.

Except that it was not even proven that it was Yanukovich who used the snipers. And he wasn't indiscriminately shelling civilians in western Ukraine either. I have a coworker from Ukraine, his extended family in Donetsk (a young woman with two children) was killed by Ukrainian artillery.

Like I said, Yanukovich was a bloody crook, a common criminal who came to power, but compared to the current Ukrainian government he was almost a saint.

And you can't compare Yanoyovych's actions to a defence from an actual invasion.

What invasion are you talking about? There is a civil war going on. Irregulars on one side, quickly legalized former irregulars on the other side. Ukraine would never stand a chance against an actual invasion from Russia. Compare that to the utterly professional and practically bloodless annexion of Crimea. And this is why Ukrainian army doesn't even try to do anything about that, they know they don't stand a chance. Shelling cities, on the other hand, is easy. Especially these in Eastern Ukraine - Galicians don't consider Eastern Ukrainians to be real Ukrainians, even though they themselves were ousted from Poland when ethnic Poles were thrown out of Western Ukraine after WW2. They don't even speak the same language - a mix of Ukrainian and Polish by the Galicians, Surzhik by Eastern Ukrainian.

There's nothing criminal or fascist about the current rulers.

Svoboda was recognized as a neo-nazi party by basically every European country. And even though this party was in minority in the last elections, they suddenly have received a lot of interesting positions after Maidan because their armed thugs helped the coup. And what followed were banning oppositional parties, censorship of media and other nice things that typically follow after a fascist coup.

Tell me what they should have done in response to an invasion that you wouldn't consider "criminal" or "fascist".

An invasion has to happen first. Then one regular army can fight another regular army.

a) No one knows how the fire started, both sides were throwing molotov cocktails, and the majority of the crowd attempted to help evacuate the building.

You can see in numerous youtube videos that while some of the crowd helped the people out, others happily continued to throw incendiaries into the windows. Majority my arse.

b) Ally yourself with an enemy nation who has just invaded and annexed part of the country, take over buildings by force, then kill some peaceful protesters. You really expect to get a kind response?

Imagine that Yanukovich had done the same to the maidan thugs, what the current national guard does to civilists in Donetsk. For all his faults he was a saint in comparison.

They simply hand over half the country to actual murderous criminals and fascists?

Actual murderous criminals and fascists already own the majority of the country. What difference would it make?