I'm still a bit puzzled. I've heard it said that the major cost of nuclear is the capitol costs of getting it licensed, financed, built, and started operating. Once that's done, the operations, maintenance, and fuel are very low compared to most competitors.

So, in discussing this Wisconsin nuclear plant, either the original capitol costs have been paid for (most likely, since it's over 40 years old now), or they are still paying for it. If they were still paying for it, wouldn't they want to run it till it was at least paid off?

If it's paid off, shouldn't the plant have a very low cost to fuel and operate, and be competitive even with (temporarily) low-cost natural gas turbines? My understanding is that even at today's low prices for Natural Gas, the price-per BTU/kWh if you just look at fuel costs, is still favorable to nuclear. . . just not *as* favorable?

Isn't it reasonable to presume that in the next 20 years (and that plant just got a 20 year license renewal), the price of gas and/or demand will increase again? It just seems so. . . unbelievable that a *paid for* nuclear power plant would *lose* money.

All I can figure is they just want to reduce supply, so that prices go up. I mean, if they cut supply by 10%, and if that causes the price to go up enough (say 20 to 50% increase), then I suppose simply by reducing supply, all their other plants make more money.

Go netflix. I have no problem with legitimate rights holders stealing from thieves. Spend your time working on something you have a legitimate right to (like your own, original creative works).

But, you say, translating is an original work - I won't even argue with that - copyright law is pretty clear that translations *are* a creative work that can be copyrighted; but since they were pirating the movies to begin with, I see no reason they should be granted any copyright on the translated subtitles.

Looking at that plug, I have to wonder how easy it will be to plug and unplug.

Is all the food you eat cooked with Perrier?

. . . we can print Rials for them. . . then just flood their economy until hyperinflation sets in.

First, I totally agree with you about the magazine/smartphone thing - I'm not sure why reading news and articles on your smart phone is any different than reading them on a dead tree - except that the dead tree is more likely to be 6 months old and only of historical interest.

"And didn't people make the same arguments about television? And then, later, about videogames?"

I think the focus there is that people weren't generally playing video games standing in store lines, or sitting at the doctors office (well, Gameboy/PSP, duh; so it still seems this article is about 15 years late to the party).

That is, in the past, when entertainments were more rooted to a particular place, we had more downtime in our lives that was forced on us, but smartphones (and probably gameboys, though they don't seem to be called out in the article) give us the chance to reach nearly 100% "occupation" of our minds.

""Mistreats minorities", what you mean like the way that non-white people in the USA still statistically are more likely to not be"

No, I mean, "We have no problem with Gays in Iran like you do in the West."

In the US, we are not perfect - but we largely acknowledge the problems, and are trying to work to resolve them. The US doesn't have to be perfect, in order for us to acknowledge that it is basically a good actor. Whereas Iran is a whole different story.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Do you really want to see the Ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad with Nukes? I would say that Iran's "reserved foreign policy" right now is a direct result of them not having nukes. As soon as they get Nukes, I expect there is a high probability that they become more belligerent and aggressive towards neighbors.

"The same status is not enjoyed by Iran, whom if the US had their way would be tracking roentgens in the colon of every persian on earth."

Ahh, the old "double standard/hypocrisy" argument. You know what, I've got absolutely no problem with that argument, because the United States and Iran are not the same thing.

The United States is a Republic where the people can vote and change government. No, it's not perfect, but it basically respects human rights, free speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law (yes, you can find abuses and scandals where the US hasn't perfectly upheld its ideals, but overall, it's been pretty good).

Iran is a religious and military dictatorship which routinely ignores elections, suppresses free speech, imprisons and kills dissenters, kidnaps foreign nationals near (but not within) their borders, mistreats minorities, etc.

I like that the police/military have different rules than criminals, and at an international level, I like that strong Republics and Democracies have nuclear weapons to defend themselves, and have no problem with having a double standard of not letting dictators and the like have nuclear weapons. Got no problem with that at all.

I'm not so sure that nuclear weapons lead to long, drawn out wars. We already have enough nukes to basically nuke every square inch of the planet. Do we need to have the ability to make more in a hurry, for some reason?

I mean, with airplanes, and bullets, you expect a lot of attrition - planes get shot down pretty easily, and need to be replaced constantly throughout the war, because each side is basically "picking at the edges" of the enemy's territory.

I wouldn't expect global nuclear war to last more than a couple hours (and that is just while we all watch the radar of the ICBM's crossing 4000 mile distances). . .

If nuclear war breaks out, the best you can do is what they used to teach kids in school - crawl under the desk, bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.

But it's all just trying to make IPv4 work, and in the end, it won't add up - there's 7 billion people on earth and 4 billion IPv4 addresses.

They are not wrong that those /16 won't (ultimately) make much of a difference.

Now what *would* make a difference is a 128-bit address space. . .

Numbers are free, why should people jump through so many hoops to try to save IPv4?

If it's a completely private network, couldn't they release the public block and use a private block (like 10.*)?

The point of *unique* addresses is to allow global routing. But if you never intend to do global routing of traffic to/from endpoints in the private network, well, isn't that what the private network blocks are for - non-globally unique, but locally unique, use?

I call dibs on B16B:00B5!

You don't think that you, as a consumer and taxpayer, will just end up paying that 1Bn quid? Companies never pay for anything - their customers do. If the government raises revenue on them, it'll just get past right back to you.

Is abc1:2345::10 that much harder? Ok, solution:

In your OS, set an environment variable that persists across logins:
6NET=abc1:2345

Then when using networking tools:
ping %6NET%::10

Was that so hard?

Just because the government *did* order an evacuation doesn't mean that was the right decision. You could go back there *today*. The evacuation only needed to last about a month - long enough for the radioactive Iodine to decay. That happened a year and a half ago.

Make no mistake - the evacuation zone is about politics, no actual public health.