As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:

- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering

- Build bigger tsunami barriers, to cope with the once in a hundred years of flooding.

- Do not place backup generators on low ground.

I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.

More like pro-physics/reality to be honest. I would characterize the nuclear power plant event as an accident that should be a minor note in the japanese coverage. Tens of thousands of people might be dead from the tsunami and oil refineries / chemical plants are/were on fire with a lot more serious effects than a minor radioactivity release and a partial meltdown. Even a full meltdown would only have had effects that were confined to the power plant. The media coverage and the evacuation zone is a total overkill. This is costing lives, they are evacuating people from a non-event when other people need assistance. It's winter and they are still finding people trapped on rooftops etc.

The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.

The lesson that anti-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that 1960s-era reactors shouldn't be operating in the year 2011, but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.

While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.

Sure, a meltdown might happen, but once people realise that it only costs a lot to clean up, but doesn't have major effects outside the power plant and doesn't make 400 km^2 uninhabitable, then it might actually reverse itself, at least hopefully. Personally though, I wouldn't bet on a full meltdown happening in the next 30 years. Even a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami wasn't enough to achieve that.

Haha, sorry I couldn't not notice the irony of this. Geothermal energy is from radioactive decay in Earth's core.

Yeah, right after Ayn Rand comes back from the grave to ride on a monster truck and flattens George Monbiot's prius.

There is no risk. Even forgetting the fact that the USA has uranium deposits, the simple fact is that it's very easy to stockpile a supply of uranium that would power a nuclear power plant for a decade. It takes very little uranium to do that as opposed to let's say coal or oil that cannot be stockpiled in any comparable sense. Where do you stockpile a couple tons of uranium? That's easy. Where do you stockpile half a billion barrels of oil? That's hard.

Sure, urianium is rare, but of course we only need very little of it.

I think a student phrased it perfectly.

What you propose is just dancing around the problem. The slow hop has finite throughput. You either tell the sender to send only as much as the pipe can transfer, or you force the limit on the sender by queueing things which in turn increases latency, which in turn decreases the transfer's bandwidth.

Ok, I'm getting a new business laptop in a week or so anyway, so it's the perfect time to start using debian instead of Ubuntu anyway.

I can't say I will mind, the last couple of Ubuntu releases were shit, I couldn't even upgrade to the last one as a bug is still unfixed that makes wifi speeds crawl at 70kbyte/s tops for certain wireless cards.

I was in the audience when he explained the concept. The comments and the article I've seen so far does it no justice. Just watch the video.

...given the billions of dollars in military aid and training the USA has offered to Mubarak's regime - the teargas branded "made in USA" was just the obvious part.

It is widely used with a huge range of hardware implementations.

Quoting from wikipedia: AMD, ARM, and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration of the WebM format.[31][32] Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity.[33] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,[34][35] with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor.[36] Chip&Media have announced the fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD resolution VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.[37]

It gives much better compression than WebM will ever have.

No. VP8 already has better compression efficiency than h.264 and at the same time being on par in quality with h.264. From the technical point of view, WebM has the potential to be a lot better than H.264.

This is really irresponsible on Cisco's part. I don't care about their monetary considerations, adding IPv6 support into their Linux derived routers wouldn't have been all that hard or costly for them.

Their refusal to enable IPv6 support is having a bad effect on IPv6 adoption. I don't think most people realise how bad IPv4 exhaustion can be. IPv4 exhaustion puts a cap on internet growth, which in turn retards economic growth.

Seriously Cisco, fuck you, just fuck you.

The purpose of a salt is to compartmentalize a password hash. I agree with what you said, I just wanted to add a quick soundbyte to use when explaining why a salt is needed for say, anything above 10 users.

Why? Without an estimation of deaths caused by patents vs lives saved by Gates' work on vaccines, how would it be possible to say whether his contribution is positive or negative? What if without Bill Gates Warren Buffet would have decided to spend money on generic drug research, for example?

Quite apart from where Bill Gates comes from, saying that Bill Gates is wrong to support patents because they kill is a valid statement. I for one, won't give anyone a break on that.

The evidence says that passive smoking is responsible for about 1% of total premature deaths worldwide.

Worldwide, 40% of children, 33% of male non-smokers, and 35% of female non-smokers were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004. This exposure was estimated to have caused 379 000 deaths from ischaemic heart disease, 165 000 from lower respiratory infections, 36 900 from asthma, and 21 400 from lung cancer.

So yeah, it's not that big issue for lung cancer, but a stunningly large for heart disease.

To refute my point, please provide links to peer reviewed studies contradicting the study I linked, no older than 5 years, otherwise I have to say that your statement "tremendously trumped up and in some cases just as falsified as the wakefield BS" seems like astroturfing propaganda from some of those PR companies working for the tobacco industry.