Sure, without any security updates. That is a brilliant idea on today's web.

The Guardian isn't a very good news source for science (nor is any other mainstream newspaper that I know of). However, when even George Monbiot supports nuclear you've got to wonder about who doesn't.

Before the decision to shut down nuclear power in Germany, they were a major exporter of electricity with about 90 gigawats of domestic usage and producing 130 gigawatts. Taking away the 25 gigawatts from nuclear and they can just about meet their internal demand, if all goes to plan.

This winter, Amprion predicts its grid will have 84,000 megawatts of electricity at its disposal, to provide 81,000 megawatts needed for consumption - an uncomfortably slim margin of safety, Mr. Vanzetta said. In prior years, electricity was readily available for purchase on the European grid if the price was right. But exported German power is what helped keep France glowing in winter.

Talking about Fukushima, let's try to be more factual: the expected death toll is less than you'd expect from a major bus accident. So far we know of no deaths related to Fukushima.

If instead of trying to increase renewable capacity desperately - I'm doubtful about the execution of a very large ramp-up in renewable energy generation capacity in itself - the German government would try to decrease fossil fuel use, they'd save at least 25k lives per year as compared to shutting down nuclear plants and letting fossil fuel based ones operate.

Based on deaths per TWh(which includes Chernobyl for nuclear), it takes about 160 lives to generate one TWh by coal and 0.04 lives per TWh by nuclear fission. Germany in 2008 generated 291TWh of electricity from coal, that's about 47'000 lives lost in one year.

Keeping all the nuclear capacity and spending the ramp-up in renewables to shut down coal plants would save tens of thousands of lives. Shutting down nuclear plants forces Germany to open about 20 new fossil fuel based plants, because even with a substantial increase in renewable capacity they cannot meet demand.

This is nothing short of mass murder through ignorance.

It's all a bit condescending isn't it? There is a reason why drug commercials shouldn't be permitted to be broadcast to the general public, but that doesn't mean people in general are dumbasses.

Doctors while an entirely different ballgame with regards to drug related propaganda, they still fail on average pretty hard in trying to understand basic study design and statistics. Read Ben Goldacre's excellent book, Bad Science, especially the 10th chapter. If what's in there is not news to you, then maybe you're one of the more qualified doctors, however you can't say with a straight face that the average doctor doesn't fail pretty hard at reading an industry-sponsored study with a good understanding of the underhand tactics and subtle details.

(I'm not a doctor, however I do understand fairly advanced statistics and I read methodology sections and study designs in various areas for fun.)

Saying religion is not some bronze age fairytale and coexisting with the scientific knowledge of the 21st century is something I find deeply offensive.

It is time we stopped treating fairytales with undeserved respect or reservation.

Lies! It was the Cone Of Silence!

The point you're missing is that there is no in-game seed of PLEX. All PLEX that is on the in-game market was purchased by a player for real cash and put on the in-game market by a player.

Now, it should be pretty obvious as to why a company the size of CCP would be worried about "unclaimed" pre-paid subscriptions worth anything between 1 and 5 million dollars floating around inside their own game.

Well, I might be missing the point here, but it doesn't seem obvious to me. Could you spell it out please?

I'd think that having lots of unclaimed PLEX in game would be the best use of PLEX from CCP's point of view, since they got paid for the PLEX, but didn't have to provide a service for it (yet) and any in-game trading just moves resources around between players. The unclaimed PLEXes are probably highly decentralized and a large fraction will never be used to buy service for it.

If there is a time to use it, this is it.

I'm an advanced slashdot user, I don't even read the summary anymore.

What the fuck did you expect, excellent design practices and high quality code?

Nuclear safety is amazingly safe as-is, what is needed is replacing older plants with new designs that are inherently more safe and provide that safety more cost effectively.

The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.

We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.

If Obama has a sense of humour he should admit he wasn't born in the US, but that he actually is a 400 year old dutch soldier and he was a citizen of the united states at the time of the adoption of the constitution.