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Comment Re:Fukushima Residents and Farmers Disagree (Score 5, Insightful) 201

by slb (#38399078) Attached to: Fukushima Finally Reaches Cold Shutdown

What a relief! I wonder when they'll start moving people back into Fukushima Prefecture.

Fukushima prefecture is 14500 km2 and 2M inhabitants less than 8% of the territory and 3.5% of population have been evacuated.

I can't wait to sink my teeth into some Fukushima vegetables and I know you feel the same way

Most of the japanese would be perfectly OK eating food from Fukushima prefecture without fear-mongering idiots scaring a gullible population with occasional radiations level in food lower than one would find in a simple banana or brazil nut.

When do you suppose that 12 mile radius exclusion zone will be lifted? This decade or next?

Exclusion will be lifted next year for all areas with less than 20mSv/y of radiations level, that's more 80% of the evacuated area. Also half the radiations are due to Cs-134 with a half-life of 2 years. That mean all zones will be available in less than a decade, including municipalities like Namie or Iitate.

Now that we've decided that the maximum radiation dosage for a Japanese child is the same as an American nuclear worker, it's only a matter of time before they play in the shadow of Fukushima again!

There's a big difference between what you are allowed to receive every years during your carreer and a maximum environmental exposure that could hypothetically only happen one year. I'm sure the inhabitants of Ramsar who live with a natural radioactivity level of more than 100mSv/y would be laughing a lot at this.

And let's not forget how much better Tokyo is with 30% less electricity.

Yeah sure I wonder how any other energy production facilities would have fared facing the same earthquake and tsunami. Do you really think the Japanese government will be dumb enough to replace nuclear plants with tenth os thousands of off-shore tsunami-proof windmills ...
Science

Submission + - Russian Scientist Discovers Giant Methane Plumes i (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by thomst
thomst writes: Russian scientist Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks revealed in an interview with The Independent that his team discovered "powerful and impressive seeping structures (of Methane gas) more than 1,000 metres in diameter" during their survey of the Arctic Ocean earlier this year. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and the high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them," Semiletov told The Independent's Steve Connor. This finding is important because methane is estimated to be 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it could indicate that global warming is about to accelerate dramatically.
Android

Apple Loses Tablet Battle In Australia 159

Posted by samzenpus from the learn-to-play-nice dept.
New submitter harmic writes "The Australian Federal High Court has denied Apple's appeal against the earlier decision that overturned the ban on sales of the Galaxy Tab. The Samsung Android based tablets should be in the shops in a matter of days. Apple had attempted to appeal an earlier court ruling overturning the ban."
Censorship

Pakistan Bans 1600 Words and Phrases For Texting 356

Posted by timothy from the when-the-stakeholders-hold-mallets-too dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "In a move reminiscent of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrases it has deemed obscene and told carriers they have seven days to block the words on their networks, or face legal action. 'The filtering is not good for the system and may degrade the quality of network services — plus it would be a great inconvenience to our subscribers if their SMS was not delivered due to the wrong choice of words,' says an official at a one of the telecoms. The list includes such words and phrases as 'idiot,' 'monkey crotch,' 'athlete's foot,' 'damn,' 'deeper,' 'four twenty,' 'fornicate,' 'looser,' and 'go to hell,' among others. There are also various double entendres included in the ban such as 'beat your meat' or 'flogging the dolphin.' Mohammad Younis, a spokesman for the PTA, says the ban is 'the result of numerous meetings and consultations with stakeholders' after consumers complained of receiving offensive text messages. 'Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.'"

Comment Journalism at its best as usual ... (Score 3, Informative) 95

by slb (#38060944) Attached to: Fukushima Soil Contamination Probed
So this is a computation using a statistical model to give estimates of the soil contamination, and it becomes facts and measured quantities in the ground. But worse, look at the original scale provided by the authors of the paper: it clearly shows the areas under 2500Bq/kg, but the journalist conveniently merged it with the upper-bound area and also avoided the use of the green/blue colors usually associated with safe values in any mapping. Maybe the original map had not enough red and orange area for effective scare-mongering ? BBC I am disappointed...
Science

The Weight of an e-Book 243

Posted by samzenpus from the because-he-can dept.
whoever57 writes "According to Prof Kubiatowicz from Berkeley, each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."
Australia

Australian Malls To Track Shoppers By Their Phones 236

Posted by samzenpus from the dial-S-for-shopping dept.
Fluffeh writes "Australian shopping centers will monitor customers' mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. One unnamed Queensland shopping center is next month due to become the first in the nation to install receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two meters."
Science

Researcher Builds Life-Like Cells Made of Metal 259

Posted by samzenpus from the devil-in-the-dark dept.
Sven-Erik writes "Could living things that evolved from metals be clunking about somewhere in the universe? In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible. He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from giant metal-containing molecules and has given them some life-like properties. He now hopes to induce them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities. 'I am 100 per cent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology,' says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow. His building blocks are large 'polyoxometalates' made of a range of metal atoms — most recently tungsten — linked to oxygen and phosphorus. By simply mixing them in solution, he can get them to self-assemble into cell-like spheres."
Books

Authors' Guild Goes After University Book Digitization Projects 170

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-they're-consistent dept.
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Ars Technica: "With the planned settlement between Google and book publishers still on indefinite hold, a legal battle by proxy has started. Google partnered with many libraries at US universities in order to gain access to the works it wants to digitize. Now, several groups that represent book authors have filed suit against those universities, attempting to block both digital lending and an orphaned works project. The suit is being brought by the Authors' Guild, its equivalents in Australia, Quebec, and the UK, and a large group of individual authors. Its target: some major US universities, including Michigan, the University of California system, and Cornell. These libraries partnered with Google to get their book digitization efforts off the ground and, in return, Google has provided them with digital copies of the works. These and many other universities have also become involved with the HathiTrust, an organization set up to help them archive and distribute digital works; the HathiTrust is also named as a defendant."
Earth

The Coming Energy Turnaround In Germany 394

Posted by Soulskill from the bratwurst-is-a-renewable-energy-source dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Germany has decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and embark on an energy turnaround that focuses on large increases in sustainable energy production. What will it take in terms of investments, and will it mean cost hikes for German consumers? Will it really mean more jobs in the 'green energy' sector? Quoting: 'Total investment over the next decade for such an energy turnaround is estimated to be roughly €200 billion (or almost $290 billion). ... At the moment, more than 20 new coal-fired power plants are being planned or already under construction; together, they would achieve a total output of 10 gigawatts and could, in terms of power supply, replace nuclear power plants that are still operational. But coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy turnaround that the government has put forward.'"
Firefox

Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers 683

Posted by Soulskill from the numbers-are-a-distraction dept.
MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things one step further and remove Firefox version numbers entirely — from the user-facing parts of the browser, anyway." You can see the Bugzilla entry for this change, and keep up on Mozilla's reasoning and discussion through a thread on the mozilla.dev.usability newsgroup. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ... The most important thing is confidence that they're on the latest release. That's what the About dialog will give them."
United Kingdom

Ripping CDs Set To Be Legalized In UK 156

Posted by Soulskill from the about-bloody-time dept.
nk497 writes "The UK is finally set to legalize format shifting, making it legal for the first time to rip songs or films from CDs and DVDs. Ripping is technically illegal under copyright protection laws, despite most industry lobbyists agreeing it was time for a change. The rules look set to be modernized as the government endorses a recent intellectual property report, which also called for the government to ditch plans to require ISPs to block illegal file-sharing sites without a court order."

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