Nukes are theoretically safe and efficient. As I understand it, there's not enough known uranium sources on Earth to power the world, but in conjunction with solar, wind, hydro and bio-fuels (preferably from waste) there's enough.

Unfortunately, theories don't build nuke plants. Corporations do. And we can't manage to regulate large retail stores to make them behave in a socially responsible way, why do we think we can regulate a giant power company? Japan generally comes across as a competent, long-term thinking country. And yet even their political culture couldn't prevent fraud and corruption in the building of their nuke plants.

Until our political systems can effectively regulate large corporations, I'm opposed to nuclear power. The theory's great, but so far I don't see designs that can survive large-scale corruption.

The maximum airspeed in coffin corner is because the plane doesn't have any more thrust to go faster - not a structural limit.

It's coffin corner because it's relatively easy to stall there, not because the aircraft could go too fast and break up. There is little risk in immediately descending. Certainly, the risks of stalling are far magnitudes greater.

My source: A retired jet pilot who had precisely the same thing happen to them as what happened to AF447 - iced up pitots and loss of airspeed indicators.

Bear in mind, the captain was responsible for some of the mistakes that led to them running out of fuel in mid-air in the first place.

"ABSes have saved many lives when drivers slammed on the brakes to avoid a collision, or started slipping on ice." [citation needed]

If anything, the evidence is somewhat to the contrary. Studies on taxis with and without ABS (the cabs are otherwise very similar vehicles), showed that ABS equipped cars did not have lower accident rates overall. Indeed, certain types of accidents, e.g. in snow, where significantly higher for ABS equipped cars. Cite:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rI4c24VTriEC&pg=PA219&lpg=PA219&dq=Aschenbrenner+and+Biehl+ABS&source=bl&ots=RgRKvw7Qnx&sig=1hNW1rAyzlSw5hpcGjgFnpn4Qpc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3xmPUrDcOYX40gXHm4DYDw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage

The computer did not give any instruction. The computers went into alternate law (i.e. "act dumb, do 100% what the pilots command") precisely because the computer had detected sensors were giving conflicting readings. It was down to the pilots to determine what was needed to be done. The correct course of action was fairly obvious. They were flying at altitude, where maximum speed and stall speed are very close to each other. That is, any significant loss of airspeed risks stalling and disaster. The correct course of action, if there's a problem with airspeed indicators, then is to ensure airspeed is preserved - i.e. descend. This is real 101 stuff when it comes to "Flying high".

The senior co-pilot, in command at the time, knew what had to be done, so did the captain (who was not on the flight deck initially). Unfortunately, despite both of them clearly ordering the junior co-pilot to descend and, later, leave the fucking controls alone (though, by that time, they were almost certainly doomed), the junior co-pilot inexplicably kept taking control and ordering the aircraft to climb - precisely the wrong to do. What was going through his mind we will never know.

MAC addresses are useless for tracking pretty much anything except on a LAN (and even then they're pretty useless - particularly with virtual machines becoming more prevalent). In addition MAC address info ages out insanely quickly. Half the MAC addresses in my house post-date the street view car passing. And in fact several others aren't here.

ESSID info is useful for geolocation, but even it rapidly ages. And Google is hardly the only company that sniffs that.

And Microsoft applications bleed private info far more sensitive than MAC addresses. I once got a job offer as a Word document which also contained job offers for four other people. Some versions of Word and Excel save random bits of RAM into docs. Honestly if you're using Microsoft products and expect to have any privacy you're an idiot.

We know Google sniffed the data it sniffed because they reported themselves for doing it.

If you think about this technically, there is absolutely zero useful info one could get from such data (other than using it as a source for randomness and even then...).

All these stories do is punish a company for self-reporting a perceived privacy concern - one which they quickly addressed.

Bit of a FUDish comment. This code comes with a licence from Sun^WOracle that grants all the needed patent rights to use and redistribute the code.

Exactly! Where's the "comment must be added to article" button?

Just email your thoughts on copyright to someone who sounds foreign. The NSA will forward it to them.

You really think the BBC is _never_ a truth factory? :)

[citation needed].

Cetacea derives from the Latin for 'whale'. Its extant 2 branches are called "toothed whales" and "baleen whales", i.e. each branch is a class of whale and the encompassing order is therefore 'whales', so far as any living animal is concerned. Dolphins and porpoises come under "toothed whales", and are thus whales.