Agreed... if you looked at the people inside the Fukushima plant, which was swept by the tsunami; verses people outside the Fukushima plant who're also swept by the tsunami - those inside of the nuclear plant are actually MUCH MORE likely to make it out alive. And that's a 40-year-old plant not designed to handle earthquakes and tsunamis at the same time. That's actually quite amazingly robust.

That was the a century ago when people hadn't discovered how to step up and step down DC voltages. There're still problems with transmitting high voltage AC across long distances - many long distance runs are actually HVDC now.

Ok, let's say you're doing some kind of charity project like the OLPC, and you seriously need money to move your project forward, and you're just a MIT professor who'd been minding his research, and published a few books, for over 40 years.

And Qadaffi, a leader of some African country which just happens to be in your target market, donates money to you so you can move your project forward. You've never been a diplomat so you don't really know what Qadaffi has been up to, but it's good money and probably some goodwill with a non-small African country. All you know is you can use that money to help a bunch of poor kids in Africa.

Now, who wouldn't accept that money?! Seriously, get a grip. An MIT professor isn't some kind of all-knowing god.

Now that you have criminals going to the Internet and disclosing what they're doing... so you can round them up before they commit crimes. And you wanna stop that? Seriously?

A trillion positrons is still a very microscopic amount of particles and mass when macro phenomenons (i.e. blow things up) are concerned. You probably wouldn't feel anything if all that was dumped onto your tongue.

Why do you want yet another currency backed by banksters?

An add-on card means one more component to fail, one more component to find drivers for, more stuff inside the case, more power usage, and probably worse performance as well.

No thanks. I'd take the replacement in April.

This is also what programmers worldwide hate the hear from their PM/VP/CxO right before release - sorry, no software feature is "too simple to delay release in any way". This is an all-too-common blind spot when the requestor only thought about the time needed to make the change, but neglected to consider the effects it can have on other parts of the project and the user. It's actually quite worrying to see Firefox doing that - it's poor project management.

Have you actually used Firefox 4 on a Mac? The usual excuses are simply invalid - you open FF4b10 with Google as home page with barely anything on screen - 230MB is now gone! Safari opening Apple's oh-so-blingy home page is only using 100MB. "Max Number of Pages Stored in Memory" simply doesn't apply.

Plus... I know there're about:config entries that can tune this behavior. But I also know I can use Chrome without setting anything and it'll work without slowing things down (and Chrome did have a similar problem in the past! But they fixed that). Or, I can use FF4, tweak a bunch of stuff and it's still bad, and slower. This "this is not technically a memory leak" thing is irrelevant when user experience is concerned. Chrome does the job better and faster without slowing the computer down, they also seem to fix bugs faster. The decision is really easy for the user.

I used FF4 b7 in my Mac for a while - whenever I closed it, I get half my system's memory (2GB) back, visible from Activity Monitor's pie chart. This thing eats more memory than a Windows 7 VM for opening a bunch of YouTube tabs, there's no way I'll go back until they fixed this.

It happens a lot more than you think. Very often when reporters interview someone, take photos, or take in news materials from another party - the materials on their hand aren't sufficient for them to tell a good story. In that case they'd have to improvise by e.g. adding their own interpretations to make the story complete, and by extension they may add in their own materials as well.

What happened at CCTV can be something like this.. reporter got military footage on flying fighter planes, but no explosion or no good explosion. Reporter wants to make a convincing story on how awesome these new J-10 planes are. Reporter adds in Top Gun footage to make it look awesome.

Now I'm not saying CCTV's practice isn't shoddy - it is. But it's nothing new. Anyone having been interviewed by reporters would tell you the same thing - reporters DO add their own stuff in your story, get used to it.

Hey, if someone is morbidly obese, then he obviously has bigger problems to worry about than his car's MPG. One or two average Joes at 200 lbs commuting with this car should be able to get >150mpg quite easily even accounting for their weight, which is still very awesome.

I've been to the Bay Area, Hong Kong various cities in China (e.g. Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc.) before. I'm in Hong Kong right now but I'm going back to the Bay Area next month.

Bay Area: Engineers are rather well respected from what I can see. My sample may be biased though since I've been working with the upper layer of the valley so far (VCs, CxOs, Stanford PhDs, etc.) But hey, if your company just exited for a few million dollars, the local media and TechCrunch cares. You open a party and your friends love you.

Hong Kong: If you're an engineer (even a CTO "engineer"), you're a loser, period. Nobody ever heard of a VC or angel investor here - these things takes time to pay off, all people want is fast money. I can go rant about HK's economic environment until my face turns blue but suffice to say, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship are thinly veiled insult words here meaning you can't make fast and easy money. Some of my friends got funding of >$100M HKD and the media never paid any attention. Someone else just exited for $1B HKD last week and the mainstream media just don't care.

China: Yes there're many high tech firms in Beijing and Shenzhen and engineers do get much higher salaries (5x - 100x, depending on who you're comparing to) compared to the average uneducated worker (China has high literacy level but very low education level). Things is.. that's only for the lucky people who attended the top Chinese universities (e.g. Tsinghua) and succeeded in getting a job and work permit in the high tech cities only. If you aren't one of those 1-in-a-1000 lucky guys... sorry man but your life is gonna suck. Even if you are one of the lucky engineers - the top of the food chain in China is being a government official, not a C-Suite executive, and 100% not an engineer. The real elites in China aren't looking to become an engineer, but rather join the government and make a few really fast million bucks there.

So, from what I can tell... US's fear on losing its tech edge to Asia is highly overrated. If you really want the top tech companies, engineers and scientists in the world, the people have to love doing it and are financially allowed to keep doing it out of love (not every engineer is a tech company CxO or got hired by Google, you see...). That's simply not happening in China nor Hong Kong. The thing about Chinese engineers being ultra competitive is way overblown - if you're constantly under threat of being evicted from your ultra-expensive (compared to your tiny salary) flat, and your flat sucks - you'd be aggressive too. But it also makes you very short sighted because all you can think of is how to get a nicer house to live in, but not how to make the next Google or figure out how to build rockets cheap. So you're surely not gonna be doing better scientific research, opening a novel tech startup, or doing an open source project. Copying and cutting corners, on the other hand, works short term, but that's doesn't get China any edge ahead of the US.

A C-Suite executive is not legally liable to pay the company's bills (in case the company itself runs out of money) - you're looking at the Board of Directors there. But yes, being close to the power center, or being the power center yourself, does entail legal responsibilities.

The poll results look more like.. "Who can you remember when I ask you for a few names during a random phone call?"

If you just ask me for a few random famous people's name from a phone call, I'd probably answer Obama, Billy Gates too. If I say it's Mark Zuckerburg or even Linus Torvalds, I'd probably have to explain who the fuck Mark Zuckerburg or Linus Torvalds is.