You mean the nuclear waste _from nuclear powerplants_ is processed and safely disposed off in all nuclear power plants? For the sake of reasonable discussion we can limit the range of disposable crap we discuss to waste from Western power plants - is it handled properly and if not are there financial resources allocated to do this task later?

You see I too think that most likely our energy problems would not be solved by renewables, efficient and considerate energy consumption, smart grid and what not - we may really need nuclear energy at some point. It would be better if the morons that store all the waste in little pool here and the little pool somewhere else started thinking already what to do with this shit but I guess they wait till states decide on a law forcing them too and who can blame them - if only one company did it it would be out of market in no time I guess. So yes there is lots of morons among opponents of nuclear energy and what scares the shit out of me is that there is at least as big proportion of morons dealing with nuclear energy and its waste as well as a not insignificant group of people who think only about their own bank account when discussing this subject.

But I am sure that exporting the crap out to some sufficiently sophisticated processing facility say in Zamunda (Somalia would also do I guess as they have experience in sinking toxic waste from Italy in the Indian Ocean) could save quite some money.....

If your bank cannot do it right it does what most of western states also do - borrow in a hope the money to cover the costs will be earned later.

If them banks do it right - the cost of service is on you as a customer just as profit of the company is. If they have no profit and/or do not pay for services they need to keep your money safe and buy insurance to pay for losses if things go wrong etc then you have a good chance of being parted from your money anyway.

The question here is: which banks were they the ones that saved on all but salaries of directors or the ones that tried and failed to protect their business.

I just wonder - were insider help needed there? TFA seems to believe the hacking crew had a clear access into finance systems - so it is not little identity theft, was it possible without any insider? If so then another interesting question/issue can be: states like Germany feel free to bribe anybody who wants to take money and sell secrete data of banks all over the place - the socialists that specialize in this art of 'investigation' claim that if not tax evasion there would be no financial problems in the country but I digress. If I were a bank clerk with access to some fat financial data DB I would consider working with German tax office but in lack of its interest I would cooperate hackers too. I think they will strike again - there is a good reason why the chief of NY street crew was shot dead I guess - the hand is off but the head may still be free and working on a better plan....

I think you go in the right direction with your argument but you missed it slightly. The part of the constitution that is dealing with guns was written for the situation where guns indeed had much smaller firepower as measured with speed they could fire and distance they could be used effectively. The other side i.e. UK military that were just repelled with use of militia like force were not armed that much better than said militia man (except the big guns that is). IN these times a militia armed with weapons that its members could use for hunting made sense. Today it does not. Gosh even argument about use of military on the US soil is circumvented by police units that are armed like a combat army units. Try to fight those with militia like means and you will see that what you need to fight them is not a gun at home but an organisation - guns and munitions you can then get from your enemy or other places. Back then the mostly in the country side living population needed and used guns for living and for own protection as arm of law, i.e. sheriffs back then, was not patrolling streets constantly and you could not call them to rescue you with your mobile phone. I suppose assuming US will deteriorate back to these inspiring times then you may indeed need a gun at home.

Of course for the big part of population the right to own and bear arms is god given so no arguments apply. To make any change in risk caused by said arms you would need to confiscate the existing privately owned weapons which is not going to happen. The discussion is entertaining at times but it is not changing anything really.

I do not know about 30k kills a year but there is a difference between a device that has some utility value besides killing and one that hardly does.

It strikes me that over last few years I see less and less faults indeed. The way I look at it tho is that people will automatically reject the idea that the software is at fault unless it brakes in a visible way. Other than that you are for a tough discussion about it and unless you have it black on white that something should do B after A but it does C instead you have no chance. In other words - because we skipped the specification phase we do not have a specification we can verify the applications against i.e. we have less faults....

OTOH majority of code is not hand written anyway but copy-pasted and/or automatically generated by some fancy tool so of course you have less faults.

I worked so far in the whole chain besides architecture and management and frankly developer job sucks of it most. The only one that sucks even more is technical writer because they are not allowed to touch anything, they have to understand how the document fits the reality however and all yell them because they are the 'authors'. The only thing worse than that is manager as this means you are peers with mostly sociopaths and assholes by choice. Few of them are good enough to either hide their character flaws behind competence or (gosh can I see myself even thinking this) being good people in general. Other than that I heard once I liked that: 'first time right' so no need for testers and maintenance etc. it brings smile to my face every time I recall this....

I actually enjoyed work as self employed system tester but as soon as I got a local contract the job turned bad - nobody wanted to listen anymore and somehow quality of a product I was to test determined my bonus i.e. if it was good I got one if it was as it was I did not as opposed to pay as you go and if stream of faults did not subside go on and get paid per hour. Not sure if management gurus have brains for anything more than counting the money they took away from gullible and stupid. Having social techniques problem meself never wanted to go up but I guess I would feel good there :)

It is indeed true that people especially competent ones tend to despair and suffer from burnout symptoms especially if exposed to too many assholes 'knowing' things and ignoring advice even if they were the ones to ask for it in the first place and then blaming the old ones for projects not being on time. It is also true that creative natures usually suffer more from savage swings of mood. Still there are plenty of others who just come at 8 and go at 16 - some of them skilled folk some of them just clerks and common technicians 'waiting' for instruction. This is the majority and it does not go into burnout mode just because management had suddenly a new brilliant idea. The spectrum is wide and your black and white view of the situation may have difficulty with applicability to the real life. I say fuck it and live on - the problems is not the age really but the assholes who hire: you are always bad for the job, that is just basic power grab mechanism for HR folk as well as a technique useful in negotiations over your remuneration.

Come to think of it this never changes. That is how humans are. In 17th century in England - globalization and rapid pace of technological change caused that on regular base people went to the streets and hanged bailiffs and sheriffs because they were not compensated for their work properly, gov sent troops to subdue the protest and introduced regulation to prevent it in the future and businesses avoided regulation by moving overseas (to Holland among other places back then). Today we do not go to the streets anymore but ask for another does of prozac and the leading industries changed - back then it was textile now it is IT and finance.

oh and /. is a perfect example of how to make decisions in most reasonable way i.e. based on common sense, fair and informed opinions. Based on this I think humanity deserves to die and we will when some stupid asshole automates all then this automatic system will optimize us out of existence.

What one may also say is that if you do not know how certain things work in society you take statistics. This shows you some trends and with some luck and quite some sophistication you can actually deduce how humans society (in this case subset of FB members) tick. You also suggest that Wolfram has no clue which I find very likely - he is a clever guy with a lots of fancy tools.

how true - I looked at the parliament of my country once and saw only pigs there. I was shocked. Then I looked around and I found out that majority of people:

• have no interest, and who can blame them
• have not enough information and brain capacity to understand even less complex problems
• we all are corrupt to some extent

Bottom line: The parliament is an essence of the society it exists in. If you are disappointed try to change the society if possible in a peaceful way. That is of course impossible in a huge country with huge groups of conflicting interests. I guess the social cohesion is also a factor as well as reasonable approach to this decision making - that is why in Switzerland it kind of works. It must be understood of course that no system is perfect and as we somehow lack places to migrate at the moment we will have to live with imperfect system and hope it works best for us as well as in cases it seriously malfunctions - go to the streets and sometimes even risk our lives in attempt to modify it. The unfortunate fact about society is that it is built of people.

It works/does not work exactly the same way as all the other systems. The only difference is that this particular way of doing so would be sanctioned by the high priest of social data mining, venerable Wolfram and done by some automatic by minority controlled system spitting 'view of the people'. How exactly is this better? The control of the algorithm is in hands of the few, the decision has to be enforced possibly with the power of the state so that the minorities that were not counted in can be coerced into submission.

To the 'all agree' dogma there is nothing to say - if you do it that way you will not find many decisions being done in the first place.

I do not say that it is bad idea to have public opinion taken into account especially if technology makes it cheaper and more reliable but you need to do something with following items:

1. what to do with opinions of the minorities who were of different view than majority - always ignore may be a reason society dissolves
2. you cannot effectively do it all the time, more people are involved the more time it needs to discuss it.
3. are all people really willing and have the energy to take part in constant decision making
4. what to do with situations where no clear answer is possible or requires special knowledge?

There are many more but whichever system you do you still will have a need for executive branch and leaders of the nation.

Also a system that arguably uses wisdom of the crowd i.e. american courts of justice are flowed. I do not find German system much better but it is better in many ways still and we do have professional judges doing most of the work.

if they swallow them and thengo to get MRI

That is actually interesting albeit slightly OT. The meat that is not fat does not really exist. Breeding pigs that are low in fat makes them unhappy, sick and the pork so produced does not taste well. I guess it is similar with beef. However it is a nice sell because that fat bodies think that by consuming lean stuff they can avoid exercise and eat as much as their poor big bodies can handle physically and lose weight in a process.

if you admit that these gluten-avoiding-without-medical-gluten-related-condition is such a small minority whey did you mention it in the first place - to make your argument about ignorance sound better or what? There are ignorants everywhere. Not a small proportion of us /.-ers are ignorant on lots of issues.yet we freely express our uninformed opinions making the whole discussion usually difficult and in some less frequent cases entertaining.