...and someone else will take his place.

Yep, I think we can all agree that it's worth a few punkin' headed babies and/or a couple of deaths so the rest of us can have brighter colors and whiter whites.

That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.

The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.

To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*

* Math for the wind/solar comparison:

• The Fukushima plant had 4696 MWe of nominal generating capacity.
• Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, so in a year it produced on average 90% of that, or 4226.4 MW.
• Average wind turbine generates about 1.5 MWe peak.
• Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.25 on the high end, so in a year that turbine produces an average 375 kW.
• You'd need 11270 1.5MW turbines to equal Fukushima's output.
• PV Solar using high-end 20% efficient panels generates about 150 W/m^2 peak.
• Average rooftop installation is about 20 m^2, but the roof size is about 40 m^2. So 6 kW peak.
• Solar's capacity factor in the U.S. is 0.145. So on average the rooftop would generate 870 Watts.
• You'd need 4.86 million rooftops to equal Fukushima's output.
• Working in high places is dangerous. Roofing is the 5th most dangerous job in the U.S., at 34.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers each year.
• If a solar installation requires 3 roof-top workers and they can do 100 installs per year, you'd expect 51 deaths per year vs. an estimated about 30 deaths from cancer caused by Fukushima's radiation release in a once-per-25-year accident.
• I can't find stats for turbine worker fatality rates, but wind already kills about 5-10 maintenance workers per year while providing less than 1/10th the world's electricity that nuclear does.

It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort

Put another way, if the median income is $45,000, then 1500 regular donors giving 1/1500th of their annual income or $30/yr each will give an author a median income. (In reality, it's less than 1/1500th because the mean income is higher than the median, so the more affluent donors will allow the author to hit the median income with less than 1/1500th of each donor's income.)

I think it's also important to keep in mind that the current book/music/movie pricing model does not scale. A DVD costs $18.95 whether they sell 10,000 copies or 10 million. In every other industry except the IP industries, price drops as sales increase. At first DVD players cost $150 and they only sold a few tens of thousands of them. As their success grew and sales reached into the tens and hundreds of millions, the price dropped to the $25 they're at now. The Patreon model brings this price scaling to the IP industry (much to the chagrin of the established players). If you're supporting an author in a niche market that you really enjoy, you'll be encouraged to donate a lot to him just to keep him writing. But if the author is enjoying J.K. Rowling-level success, you'll be less inclined to donate as much or won't donate at all, knowing that he's already getting plenty of money from other supporters.

It's good to see the EPA finally considering relaxing some of its uptight, business-hostile regulations. No wonder the US is losing ground to the developing world when for a few decades it has pushed this regulatory regime that holds industry back and has really harmed wider adoption of nuclear energy.

You're trying to be sarcastic, but your words are quite literally true. 0.25 mSv is:

• 12x the radiation you get from a chest x-ray
• 6x the radiation you get from a 5 hour airliner flight
• 3.5x the radiation you get from living in a stone, brick, or concrete house for a year
• about half the radiation dose from a mammogram
• an eighth the radiation dose from a head CT scan
• 1/28th the radiation dose from a chest CT scan

If the 0.25 mSv limit were applied consistently to other aspects of our lives, we'd ban mammograms and CT scans, limit people to a dozen chest x-rays in a year, restrict pilots and stewardesses to just 30 hours of flight time per year, and severely curtail brick, stone, and concrete as building materials. If the proposal someone made below to reduce the limit to 0.025 mSv were carried out, we'd have to ban air travel and chest x-rays altogether.

That's actually why I avoid big cities in the Northeast. New York has had a quake of magnitude 5 in the recent past (1884 if I remember). While a 5 is not big, it is serious enough to do damage to unreinforced structures like brick. And the huge number of brick buildings in New York are about as unreinforced as they come. (Brick construction has no lateral strength, and topples over with just slight sideways shaking. One of the few fatalities in the 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake was a man who pulled his car off the road to ride out the quake, and the free-standing brick wall he parked next to fell on top of him.

This map just shows you the likelihood of a big quake, not the potential for damage from a quake. To get the damage potential, you need to come up with a maps of how lenient the local building codes are, then multiply the two. The areas of highest risk are actually those where big or even moderate quakes are infrequent, leading to complacency among the residents and lax building codes.

This is why a 5.7 in Morocco kills 12,000, while a 6.9 just outside San Francisco only kills a few score. Residents of the former city never thought a quake would hit there. Residents of the latter knew a big quake was coming and built appropriately. You couldn't pay me to live in St. Louis, South Carolina, east Tennessee, or New York City. All have the potential for moderate to huge quakes, but they're so rare the building codes don't take them into account.

The issue is that they don't think of a much smaller ISP like Level3 as a peer, and don't want to give them settlement-free peering - they don't peer for free with lots of other ISPs for the same reason.

Level 3 is a tier-1 network, about as big as they come. This isn't big Verizon poo-pooing some little ISP as you seem to think. This is like your local gas station Verizon trying to get Exxon to pay them for the "privilege" of shipping them product their customers have already paid for.

Seriously, is that really what matters now? What an arrogant *****. What really matters is who did it and why. What's the risk for other planes.

In the grand scheme of things, yes those are the things that matter. But unless a U.S. citizen was killed, the U.S. really has no business getting involved in this. It's the same reason the U.S. stations troops in South Korea. Their job isn't to help repel a North Korean invasion. Their job is to die so the U.S. has a reason to get involved.

The plane was a Boeing, so Boeing and possibly the NTSB will be involved in the investigation. But unless another country requests it, the U.S. cannot bring in the FBI or CIA to investigate this unless a U.S. citizen was killed. Given that Russia has already removed the black boxes and purportedly the missile truck used in the attack was secreted to Russian soil, those are the kind of intelligence assets you really want investigating this.

So yes the things you say are most important, but answering them reliably very much hinges on whether or not a U.S. citizen was among those killed.

Maybe MSFT was trying to learn from Xerox, Kodak, and other companies that pioneered technologies and then failed to follow through.

While Xerox deserves full blame for missing opportunities (the mouse, GUI, ethernet, and laser printer were all invented there), Kodak does not. They were always on the forefront of digital imaging. They built the first digital camera in the 1970s, and had a line of digital SLRs in the early 1990s. They knew exactly where the industry was heading, and in fact did most of the early R&D to get us there. The only reason they managed to hang around as long as they did was because they owned most of the patents on digital imaging and were collecting massive royalties.

What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors. Kodak was a film company, not a camera company. They weren't in the business of making cameras (aside from some cheap consumer models and disposables). When the industry shifted from film to digital, the companies which ended up on top were companies skilled at making cameras/lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and their arch-rival Fuji which had been busy making decent point and shoots prior to the switch to digital), and companies skilled at making electronics/silicon (Sony, Panasonic, Casio, etc). Kodak thought they could carve a piece of the digital sensor pie for themselves, but rapidly found themselves unable to keep up with companies with decades of expertise manufacturing microprocessors who simply shifted that expertise into manufacturing sensors. In other words, the best business model for making camera sensors turned out not to be knowing how to make camera sensors. It turned out to be knowing how to make microchips.

Remember when the UN complained about Guantanamo Bay? Well, this is similar.

Guantanamo Bay was (and is) a legal black hole. Past U.S. Supreme Court decisions held that not only U.S. Citizens but also foreigners on U.S. soil have Constitutional protection. So housing Taliban prisoners in U.S. prisons would've automatically granted them U.S. Constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy trial, the right to know what they're accused of, and a guarantee of legal counsel. Well guess what? Guantanamo Bay isn't on U.S. soil. It's on land leased from Cuba. Thus it falls outside the jurisdiction of that pesky SCotUS decision, and allowed the U.S. government to detain foreign nationals without following its own Constitution. That's the entire reason Bush chose it for the prison.

Most of the International and UN arguments against Guantanamo rested on International treaties concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. The problem is the preface for almost all those treaties defines combatants as people who don a uniform and wear a distinguishing emblem. The reason they make a big deal about this is to provide an incentive for soldiers to distinguish themselves from non-combatants (civilians), so as to reduce civilian casualties due to misidentification. If your soldiers want all those juicy protections for prisoners of war, they have to wear a uniform and emblems designating them as soldiers thus making it impossible for them to blend in among civilians.

Unfortunately, most if not all the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay never wore a uniform. The people drafting those treaties on the rules of war never really considered what would happen if a fighting force chose not to abide by the uniform requirement. They kinda assumed the protections were a big enough carrot that everyone would do it. This also makes it a bad idea to expand the protection for prisoners in those treaties to cover non-uniformed combatants, like many who are opposed to Guantanamo have naively advocated. If you do that then unless he's got an overdeveloped sense of honor, no soldier in his right mind would ever wear a uniform - it just makes him an easy target. And we'd devolve back to the pre-imperial chaos where wars were fought between two masses of people with no discrimination between combatants and civilians. Thus the Guantanamo prisoners fall through a crack in International law.

This isn't to say the prison at Guantanamo Bay is ok. I've never supported it and have called for it to be shut down since the beginning. I'm just saying both U.S. and International law don't quite cover the situation at Guantanamo (kinda like the guy stuck at an airport for 18 years because of the way International laws regarding entry visas and citizenship work). That makes it completely the opposite of this case, where there are laws protecting privacy in both U.S. (4th Amendment protection against warrantless searches) and UN (Article 12) that would appear to prohibit the NSA blanket surveillence.

So, forward domain_registration@sony.com to former_employee@sony.com. Let us know how that works out for you.

It works a lot better because if domain registration emails are being sent directly to former_employee@sony.com, then only he knows that domain registrations are being sent to him. There is no record at Sony saying that he was the one getting those emails.

If you instead have it sent to domain_registration@sony.com with a forwarder, when former_employee is fired, the sysadmin can look at the entire list of forwarded addresses, grep for every instance of former_employee, and re-forward them to other employees.

See the difference? With your method, only the former employee knows what emails he was getting that need to be redirected. And if he was fired, he certainly isn't going to cooperate at providing a list. With forwarded email addresses, Sony has a list of all important emails which were going to the former employee.

All this is kinda moot though. In this case with a company the size of Sony, they should've just paid the $1000 or so to register the domain for the next 100 years.

First, if this is 80 meters in diameter, or 40 meters in radius

That's one big-ass sandworm. (Look at the pic - it's not a crater, it's just a hole in the ground.)

hoping users will alter their behavior doesn't work. Better technology does.

Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Energy saved from improved efficiency through technology is usually spent on additional uses, rather than reducing your overall energy use.

They do have smaller gallons though: 31 US MPG is actually 37 UK MPG, which is not too bad for a 525

The other problem is that even if the gallons were the same, MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. So going from 31 to 37 MPG is actually less fuel savings than going from 20 to 24 MPG, despite both being about a 20% improvement in efficiency and the former being a 6 MPG improvement vs 4 MPG for the latter. Being an inverse, the bigger the number the less it matters. This is why the push to hybridize econoboxes is a joke - you get very little fuel savings for the added complexity. The vehicles you really want to be hybridizing first to save the most fuel are trucks and SUVs.

You really want to be measuring fuel consumption in gallons or liters per 100 miles or km. That's the best way to answer the question, "I have to drive x miles; how much fuel will I use?" That's how nearly everyone drives. MPG is the best way to answer, "I have x gallons of fuel to use; how far can I go?" Only race car drivers drive that way.

However, having a fleet of heavy cars around is more dangerous for the average person, which is what the EU statistics show, and that study points it out too.

That's not how the physics works. Two heavy cars colliding is the same as two light cars colliding (provided the cars are not so light they have to compromise on length of crumple zones and rigidity of the passenger compartment). All other things being equal and assuming no objects are flying through windows (a weak spot in the protection of the passenger compartment), heavier cars are safer than lighter cars in equal-mass collisions, and collisions against stationary barricades (equivalent to an equal-mass collision).

Another reason the busy American highways are dangerous is all of the trucking used to move things around

This is what's important. Where accidents become bad are when a light car collides with a heavy car or a truck. The mass disparity results in a net energy transfer from the high mass vehicle to the low mass vehicle. In a head on collision with both vehicles traveling at the same speed, the heavier vehicle experiences a velocity change less than 100% its starting velocity (it just slows down). The lighter vehicle experiences a velocity change greater than 100% its starting velocity (it bounces backwards). The occupants of the lighter vehicle thus experience more g's of deceleration. (Put another way, the collision is symmetric in the reference frame of the center of momentum of the two vehicles, which means the reference frame is moving in the same direction as the heavier vehicle.) If you want to minimize accident injuries and deaths, you'd mandate that all cars be of the same mass, and remove trucks onto a different set of parallel roads.

Having driven on the Autobahn, I'd say another factor is the U.S. having less stringent licensing and driving requirements. In Germany, drivers are required to pull over to the slower lanes if a faster car approaches them from behind. In the U.S., people seem to take delight in cutting off faster drivers. The result is that German highway lanes are highly stratified with slower traffic always on the right, faster always on the left, thus minimizing speed differentials between adjacent lanes. While in the U.S. frequently the right or middle lanes are faster than the left lanes, resulting in more opportunity for collisions due to greater speed differentials between adjacent lanes.

If the spy budget is like the Pentagon budget, the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world combined.

U.S. spending on defense is not that far off the world average if you compare against GDP, especially if you include Japan (whom the U.S. is bound to defend under the peace treaties ending WWII). Much ballyhoo is made about how much the U.S. spends on the military in gross dollars. But that is mostly a consequence of the U.S. economy being so huge (nearly 1/4 of the world's total). If you think about it, you'll realize comparing military spending in gross dollars is pretty stupid, kinda like comparing how much food each country eats in tons instead of per capita. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world's military spending, while the U.S. + Japan account for 30% of the world's economy. (I'm deliberately not adding European GDP to account for U.S. bases there as part of NATO, since those really should have been scaled back with the end of the Cold War.)

If you normalize for size of economy by comparing military spending vs GDP, the U.S. military ends up 15th in the world at 3.8%, notably below Russia. If you include Japan's GDP, it drops to 2.9% putting it 27th. (This excludes a few countries with historically higher military spending as percent of GDP since there is no 2013 data available for them yet. Mainly, Syria, UAE, North Korea, and Sudan.)

So getting back to your point, if countries' spending on their spy agencies is anything like their military spending, then NSA funding should actually be pretty close to what other countries' spy agencies get in proportion to their economy. BTW, spy satellites fall under NRO, not NSA.