However, the alarm will be turned off when you use the key in the ignition (even if you set the alarm off by using the key in the door). Not sure if that was what the other poster was trying to get at.

You probably shouldn't include Twilight and The Hunger Games in the same comparison. While the writing in both is geared towards their target audience (young adults/teenagers), The Hunger Games doesn't read like it was written with a thesaurus. The Hunger Games has a story that is more intricate than "I am a boring girl who loves a vampire that sparkles."

Not just meaning, but at least in English, two words, spelled the exact same way can have different meaning and pronunciation.

See: Heteronyms

I just wanted to add one more thing...

Most of the job descriptions in Silicon Valley that have 'engineer' in their title wouldn't be considered engineering outside of that small area of the world.

You can write buggy programs/games and drivers/firmaware and it doesn't make you an engineer. In fact, it makes you almost the exact opposite: A hack.

Yeah, companies never try to screw with "skilled labour". They would never dare lock out engineers (P.Eng. or the U.S. version of everyone is an engineer), or mechanics or technicians.

You, my good friend, are a complete twat, with very little appreciation for the position that most workers ("skilled" or "unskilled") operate in regardless of the general state of an economy.

That's not really true. Davis Besse was not very forthcoming, to put it lightly, about the conditions of the pressure vessel. A quick google should provide you with a reasonably good story about this one. I believe some people were actually prosecuted for it.

You know, debating semantics about how much of the core melted is a losing battle. And it should be.

Any severe core damage (define it however you want, but basically, once you start melting fuel, it is generally accepted that things have gone very wrong) is extremely serious. Not necessarily serious to public health (see: TMI and the low releases of radioactivity), but serious to the nuclear industry due to the incredible erosion of trust that results from any incident (even with no consequences, but increased risk, like Davis Besse).

It's like the old saying goes...

Q: How do you know when someone doesn't watch TV?

A: Don't worry, they'll tell you.

and if not a coast, a major river (which faces essentially the same weird random shit happening problem).

Really? You think a river has the same random shit happening? How many tsunamis have wiped out inland rivers? I'm sure you could find *an* example, but it is hardly representative.

Your entire "argument" is that everything the Chinese build is crap. Entirely worthless crap. They couldn't possibly be responsible for constructing and assembling large swaths of infrastructure in the USA, because

the chinese are probably doing a shitty job of actually building the reactors

You really think that patent license fees might be the kicker for building an older generation reactor? You really think that the cost savings come may come from this area?

Generally, the company building the reactor would also own any and all patents associated with it.

The purpose of building an older model is that you know the physics are well understood (it will produce power without modifications to the core), and the parts are mostly available (there is almost always some problems with obsolescence).

I understand that countries have reconsidered some planned construction after Fukushima, but it really is a defense in depth issue. Make sure your emergency generators cannot be incapacitated by an event. If they can, make sure you have spares a couple of hundred miles away that can be airlifted you very quickly.

The problem with Fukushima was the lack of preparedness for a disaster beyond what their design basis. As a result of the accident, all plants have developed methods of dealing with this accidents. They may not be perfect, but will provide much more defense in depth in the event of a beyond design basis accident.

In Canada, at least, my one experience with an ISP that refused to provision my DSL connection to the 5 Mbps advertised. I made it very clear that if the line really could not support it, that I would be okay dropping it back down to 3 Mbps.

They refused, because they don't try to fix anything unless it is below 40% of the advertised "up to" speed. I told them, well, if I gave you 40% of the amount you charged for my services, without even trying to pay for the whole month, you wouldn't find that very acceptable. That got me, unsurprisingly, nowhere.

I wrote a letter (submitted online) to the Better Business Bureau, for false advertising. It took about three business days for someone at the ISP (a supervisor or manager) to call me and say that they put me up to 5 Mbps, and apologized for the inconvenience.

I thanked them, and said that my issue was entirely that they would not attempt it. After all, it can't really cost them that much to make the switch twice. Though it could have cost them a customer to not make it.

The highway chase was one of my least favourite scenes of all time.

I found it to be incredibly long and repetitive. I enjoyed the special effects and the fight scenes from the first movie, but they weren't the only thing the movie had going for it. I found the second and third movies were just glorified Michael Bay movies (which I can enjoy, just wasn't what I wanted from the Matrix trilogy). It really cemented why I did not enjoy the sequels to The Matrix.

In summary, I agree with your assessment. :)

foobar2000 is the only thing I miss from Windows land. There isn't a straight Linux port either, right? You have to run it in wine or a VM?

Say what you will about Lotus 123, but WordPerfect was a damn near perfect word processor. Only about a million times better than Word (not much of an accomplishment, I know).

In fact, I think Word Perfect in the late 90s is still more useful than Word 2007/2010.

If you are thinking about the 'worst possible earthquake,' for any nuclear plant/building, you're going to overspend by orders of magnitude.

In fact, given that the earthquake itself wasn't the biggest issue, but the tsunami... you need to think about all methods of tsunami creation. Landslides, volcanic eruptions, etc. If you look into the largest tsunamis historically, they top out at hundreds of meters in height. Not common, but they happen.

There are lots of lessons to be learned from Fukushima. At a certain point though, you have to decide on your design basis accidents, and analyze them. You naturally build in conservatism into the analysis, but sometimes you just get boned. Imagine if a meteorite fell into the Pacific near Japan? You may end up with a *much* larger wave!

Is it reasonable to design to that situation? Probably not. Should you have some procedures in place to mitigate beyond design basis accidents? Most definitely.

That is probably where the lessons from the clusterfuck that was Fukushima will be applied. Utilities will invest in better contingencies (spare generators, located in a remote location but available via helicopter within a timeframe) and procedures to guide plant staff and public relations staff in dealing with the crisis. Timely release of good information (i.e., information supported by validated data (or high confidence data)) is almost as important as controlling the situation on site.

Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as it could have been given all that happened. The industry *will* (it will be imposed) be in a better position to deal with a similar situation in the future.