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What stopped the nuclear industry? Not TMI.->

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes "The nuclear industry faced big challenges even before TMI: of all reactors canceled, 40% of were abandoned before 1979. The interlinked issues of declining demand growth, high interest rates, nuclear industry structural problems, changing public perceptions, and the rise of alternative means of acquiring utility resources all had powerful effects on the viability of the nuclear enterprise. It is therefore not correct to conclude that the Three Mile Island accident was the sole or even the most important factor leading to the difficulties the US industry has faced. The accident clearly had some effect on reactors then under construction, but we are convinced that the other factors we list above were in the aggregate more important than TMI in their effect on the likelihood of new nuclear orders in the post-TMI period.

–Jonathan Koomey and Nate Hultman"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Offline is a lot worse than off grid (Score 1) 328

by BiDi (#35230048) Attached to: In case of a blackout, batteries etc. will give me ...

The problem with blackout is that the web drops. When web drops, everything else is 95% useless, no matter the batteries.

Even for work in SketchUp you have to be connected, else you can't get models from the web. Emails? Forget it.

On the rare occasion when that nightmare happens I get my fix from mobile browser which has it's own battery, to keep up with Gmail and to tell everyone I am back in stone age with old farts.

If there is a real (and expensive) need for web & pc, I use bluetooth and laptop to use mobile phone as a modem. It is slow but it works. Means a lot if you work in the cloud and program over the console.

The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod 292

Posted by Zonk
from the learning-machines dept.
Robaato writes "Stephen Levy writes in the Guardian about the perception of randomness, or the lack thereof, on an iPod set to shuffle." From the article: "My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short." My first iPod shuffle refused to let me delete (sigh) Weird Al's Polkamon off of the flash memory.

Browser Vulnerability Study Unkind to Firefox 253

Posted by timothy
from the still-beats-IE-on-my-linux-boxes dept.
Browser Buddy writes "A new Symantec study on browser vulnerabilities covering the first half of 2006 has some surprising conclusions. It turns out that Firefox leads the pack with 47 vulnerabilities, compared to 38 for Internet Explorer. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'In addition to leading the pack in sheer number of vulnerabilities, Firefox also showed the greatest increase in number, as the popular open-source browser had only logged 17 during the previous reporting period. IE saw an increase of just over 50 percent, from 25; Safari doubled its previous six; and Opera was the only one of the four browsers monitored that actually saw a decrease in vulnerabilities, from nine to seven.' Firefox still leads the pack when it comes to patching though, with only a one-day window of vulnerability."

Ad-supported Textbooks Are Here 192

Posted by Zonk
from the learn-about-napolean-and-the-delicious-taste-of-coke dept.
prostoalex writes "Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market. Freeload Press, says the New York Times, will distribute ad-supported electronic textbooks to students of 38 universities. However, it seems that neither professors neither New York Times are impressed with the quality of titles so far: 'The reading difficulty is created by Freeload's use of PDF images, which retain the printed page's layout without reformatting. Navigating around a single superwide, supertall page requires lots of clicking and zooming and patience. The company will soon use improved software that can automatically adjust the text so it is more legible, said Tom Duran, a founder of Freeload Press and its chief executive.'"

Comment: Just use more small vehicles (Score 1) 688

by BiDi (#15453985) Attached to: ISPs Offer Faster Speeds, Why Don't We Get Them?
You have an 8 lane crowded highway and you want to transfer a ton of small packets over it. Why use a big convoy of trucks and wait like 98% of idiots out there? Didn't you notice something strange... those motorists that are laughing at your face and passing you by all the time? Why not use them as the means of transport? Maybe because they are expensive in real world, but in digital that's not the case...

I use them. I use software like ReGet that doesn't put out one connection for a truckload of data. It creates in my case by default minimal of 32 (or in serious congestions even 64 and 100+) connections and downloads them all at the same time. It's like a ton of motorists transferring your data around slow moving trucks. I never get less than 100% of my 2Mbit downlink downloading this way.

Online Test Measures Speed of your Brain 256

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the new-kind-of-quick-draw dept.
KingSkippus writes "According to CNet, a company named Posit Science has produced an online test using Flash that uses sounds to measure the speed of your brain down to the millisecond. According to the company, the test 'measures auditory processing (listening) speed—one of many measures of brain function...The faster we can take in information accurately, the better we can keep up with, respond to and remember what we hear.'"

Highly Critical Hole Found in IE 336

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the must-be-thursday dept.
dotpavan writes "Eweek reports on a highly critical MS Internet Explorer hole found by Secunia Research's Andreas Sandblad. The vulnerability is due to the processing of the "createTextRange()" method call applied on a radio button control. From Secunia, "The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2." The vulnerability has also been confirmed in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview (January edition) though it could be avoided by turning off Active Scripting, as suggested by Microsoft Security Response Center blog. How would this put MS in the market, hit by the ever-growing shots of vulnerabilties? And would the divorce of IE7 from Vista's Windows Explorer help?"

If some day we are defeated, well, war has its fortunes, good and bad. -- Commander Kor, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3201.7