It's nice to see another monument to short-sightedness being dismantled.

Actually, what's probably short-sighted is dismantling it at all. The right way to decommision a nuclear plant is almost certainly to fill the containment with concrete and lock the gate. Making them rip it all apart and cart it somewhere else after waiting only 60 years is pretty silly: it raises the costs without improving safety much. I think we do this largely for psychological reasons...

(All this, by the way, makes the inflammatory headline for this story more than a little nutty: it could take *decades* to decommission it-- well yeah, they're allowed to wait 60 years for the hottest of the hot stuff to cool, why not?)

The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest and this is how we do it.

It sure would be nice if we could put this meme to rest, but I'm not holding my breath. (1) radioactive stuff exists already. (2) we gather it up, concentrate it, and stick in a reactor where we generate power by making it less radioactive. (3) We then have the option of deciding what to do with the residue. We can reprocess it, bury it, whatever-- you don't have this option for the waste from the other major competing power sources out there.

By the way, heard about global warming? Wouldn't it be interesting if the 70s anti-nuclear activists were forced to admit they made a wrong call and may have helped doom the planet? But like I said, I'm not holding my breath.

1. This is a ridiculous public relations gaff on Israeli's part, they've choosen to highlight the moment in history when they launched a war of agression and became a rogue state.
2. It's unlikely that this slashdot post was intended as support for Israel, it's far more likely they were providing a forum for people like you-and-I to point out the obvious (or what should've been obvious, if the US media hadn't been asleep for decades).

But obviously you can't believe this, because they came to the wrong answer. They must've been bought. (First post? No, not likely.)

It doesn't inspire confidence in the management of nuclear power plants

True. You need some independant measure, like say, industry-wide stats showing a low rate of death-per-kilowatt compared to competing power sources.

If only such stats were readily available, then we might be able to make an informed judgement about nuclear power.

Obvious point to learn from Fukushima: the emergency pumps need to be up above the flood line. One would hope that's easy enough to understand and fix, and one would hope they don't drag out the necessary changes for too long.

There's admittedly a harder problem to solve pointed at by Fukushima: how do you prevent "regulatory capture"? What can you do to make sure that watchdog agencies really watch? Needless to say this is a problem with every regulatory agency-- it's hard to see how we can deal without them, but overtime they tend to become neutralized and gradually become ineffective.

(I have trouble fathoming what you're getting at with this jazz about disposal of polluted cleaning water... nuclear accidents do indeed suck, because you get stuck releasing a certain amount of radioactives, and there's a chance they'll increase cancer rates, and you should do what you can to avoid all this, but if you want to pick something to stress out about I suggest you think a little more about coal burning. Those guys spew poison all the time as a matter of course, not just when there's been an accident.)

I know what you mean, and you can say similar things about Three Mile Island-- once the operators learn that, no, you really shouldn't over-ride those alerts, the problem goes away... and indeed there's an identical reactor at the same site that's been running fine ever since then.

But the design in use at Chernobyl was genuinely stupid by western standards-- I mean, no containment building! Come on, it's just a bunch of thick reinforced concrete, it's not exactly high tech.

There's no safety reason to slow down the restarting of well maintained nuclear reactors

That's where you would be wrong.

Possibly he might be, but you haven't proven the case. Rolling out new safety checks sounds good, but it's hardly impossible to do that while a reactor is in operation. Even if there's a need for new equipment, you could shut down and install it later.

Seriously, the anti-nuclear side in these debates always seems to feed and feed off of hysteria, in much the same way the national security state gets a boost from terrorist attacks.

So then, people never replace their phones unless they break? Those things are flimsier than I thought.

People love certain types of change. They love cool new features.

I fear you're missing the actual driver. People love getting into the same crap that everyone else is getting into, and it barely matters what it is. The "cool new features" are just fig-leafs they use to justify being trendy crowd followers.

I have two favorite examples: I grew up during what now appears to be a fad for "high fidelity" audio equipment, and people competed for large speakers, loud amps, and "clean" sound. After a number of odd flips and flops, everyone switched to competing to see how many mp3s you could squeeze into a gadget (and never mind what they actually sound like). Many households no longer have anything like a half-way decent sound system at all, and hanging around the house you probably listen to music on whatever speakers came with your TV (if you don't get by with whatever came with your laptop). So: what happened to "HiFi"? Did everyone get into HiFi because of what it could do, or just because it was The Latest?

Second example is more recent, which means it'll get a lot of pushback from slashdot quibblers: digital cameras. Remember when everyone wanted more and more megapixels? And then they all switched to crappy cellphone cameras, didn't they? So did they care about image quality, or could it be that was just The Latest?

(Responses I expect: "But I have a MegazillaPixoid for some purposes, and the cellphone camera for others." But the MegazillaPixoid has been sitting at home gathering dust for a year, and you aren't even thinking about upgrading it.)

Where things get interesting though, is even once you know all this, once you learn to recognize yet another deranged fad, you still need to keep half an eye on the fad, because economies of scale and competitve pressures are driving the evolution of some technology that might actually have some utility to something you really do care about -- e.g. in my case I suspect I've got multi-core ARM processor servers in my future, even though I couldn't care less about those smart phones everyone is stupified by.

"Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?" I can't tell if you know what a Dyson sphere is. The idea is that civilizations may tend to evolve to the point where they need to capture all the output from their sun-- and presumably they would do this with layers of orbiting collectors, not literally a solid "sphere". This would imply that SETI efforts should look for radiation shifted down into the infrared. (Dyson credits Olaf Stapledon with the original notion, by the way.)

If you're looking for visions of the future, you might look at Dyson's books, e.g. "Infinite In All Directions". His imagination leans in the direction of things like colonizing the Oort cloud with genetically modified plants.

Nope: you don't understand DLL hell at all. The real problem Windows had was there was no way for an app to know it was going to have the right version of a library without actually shipping a copy of it with itself. So every time you installed an app, you could potentially change versions of any of your DLLs. What versions you ended up with were path dependent: if you installed apps in one order, everything might work, if you did it in a different order, half of your stuff might be broken.

Library version management is handled pretty well by dpkg/apt and (as far as I know) it's competitors, like yum.

There is still a problem with linux in that it can be difficult to install multiple versions of the same thing and switch between them, and that's actually a pretty common need. In the Debian world the work around has been for major versions to leak into the package names, so, for example, you can install postgres8 and postgres9 and run them on the same system fairly eaisly. Of course, this doesn't help so much if you'd like to compare version 8.5 and 8.6...

Is it possible - maybe not likely, just possible - that the submitter is in the right?

No it isn't. Or not a possibility worth considering. Take a look at the original question and actually read it: the OP has nothing. He's whining about style and elegance, but the one thing he touches on that might be a real maintenance problem is inconsistent naming, but without more info it's hard to tell if that's for real.

Software is a collaborative process, none of us really know anything about the right way of doing it, and that means when you're starting work in a new group you've got to find out something about the culture of the people you're working with and try to blend in with it. You may be able to gradually change that culture if you've got a good case, but the OP is just egotripping about how he knows the Right Way to do everything. If the senior programmer is changing things back to the way they were, we're talking about the equivalent of tab wars.

And if you're going to make changes to a group's practices the way to start is talking to them about it You don't try to slip in changes in the hopes they'll be impressed with your brilliance after the fact.

Software development == collaborative process --> communicating with human beings.

I thought it has been long established through research that even a hands free cradle talking on the phone is a dangerous distraction while driving, Can't see how this can be less of a distraction than that even if it is better than manual texting. People have enough accidents without additional distractions.

Oh please, issues like that pale in significance compared to the important business of selling the latest consumer crap electronics.

I forgot to mention "The Wire" (which has nothing to do with "Wired", or the television show, for that matter). It's an excellent British magazine for anyone interested in the grand old tradition of cutting-edge, avant-garde music.

Why are you pretending that you have expertise in an area you provably do not- climatology-

You need to review Dyson's bio a little more closely. He was one of the first physicists to work on global warming at all, and I would venture to say that a lot of the experimental work that's been taken place in the last 20 years has happened because of his prompting.

and making dramatic pronouncements which are directly counter to what people who DO have the requisite educational and research specialization are making?

If you'd like to know why he said what he said, you might start by reading his argument: The Question of Global Warming.

It's great that you have cultivated an impish, child-like , authority-resistant public persona, but science is not really interested in any of that.

Actually, Dyson disagrees with you on this point, he's argued that there's a need for scientific heretics. Ane previously, he's had a book published on this subject: The Scientist as Rebel

Interestingly enough, this book did not provoke any great controversy. We all like the idea of intellectual rebels and heretics in principle, but when they go up against one of our own beliefs, then they're just incredibly arrogant for going against the authorities.

(By the way... speaking of arrogance, it takes some balls to lecture Freeman Dyson about science... but whatever.)

If you want to attack Dyson's policy recommendation on global warming, by the way, I suggest going after him on the economics. I guarantee you that he knows more about climate science than you or I do, but on a subject like the costs of imposing heavy carbon taxes he's got to defer to economists, and they've got they're own problems with objectivity.