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.

At least in Canada, nuclear operators are required to put a portion of their revenue into a fund to pay for decommissioning. It's something like 0.5 cents per kWh.

OPG stated (in the Darlington New Nuclear Joint Review Panel) that they have between 11 and 12 billion in the fund at this time.

As it is a segregated fund required by the regulator, it will only continue to grow prior to the shutting down of any reactor.

What? Like the back of a Volkswagen?

I absolutely loved my Dreamcast. I tend to play sports games, and the fact that EA didn't make any games for the Dreamcast originally bothered me a great deal... but I soon got over it, as the 2k Sports games were excellent (and were surprisingly realistic in difficulty, even on the lower settings. What, you mean you can't just abuse the exact same scoring trick that has been in the EA NHL games for 5+ years at that point?).

And of course, there was Powerstone! Most people agreed that it was a fun little game! Heck, even House of the Dead 2 was pretty good if you had the guns.

Not only that, I loved the VGA adapter. The DC games looked phenomenal on a monitor.

I guess I just never saw the appeal of the PS2/N64. Their exclusive titles didn't (and still don't) appeal to me.

My only experience is in Ontario, Canada. However, it's likely similarly worded:

http://www.peo.on.ca/registration/eit.html

http://www.peo.on.ca/Applications/LicensingGuide&Application2011.pdf

There is a section to meet the minimum academic requirements. You don't necessarily need a Bachelor in Engineering, but you do need to meet some minimum requirements.

As a general rule, they aren't keeping the numbers down. They're just making sure there is a minimum standard.

If you have a better way of providing reasonable assurances that designs conform to standards/best practices and persons stamping them are professionally liable for them, I'd love to hear it.

Otherwise, it would be like hiring a handyman from the classifieds to do some renovations. Some are awesome, some are terrible. The ceiling to their talents is pretty high, but the floor is really low.

Professional licensing bodies (engineers/doctors) work to raise the floor.

There is nothing stopping a self-taught individual who has sufficient technical knowledge and experience from writing the P.Eng exams. I know someone who went to community college for a certificate as a Mechanical Technologist, and he's a licensed P.Eng right now.