Anyone with the info off the bottom of a check can withdraw money from your account. There is basically no security.

Join the modern world, folks.

"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.

Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.

The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.

This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.

And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.

The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.

If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.

Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.

Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.

Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.

Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.

Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.

And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.

A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.

You wouldn't get more for your money elsewhere. Energy returned on Investment for nuclear is high.

More bullshit from you.

Cause solar is going to have a high capacity factor in Canada. \s And yes I want a nuclear power plant in my backyard.

Climate change, air pollution, and energy poverty. Having a reliable grid is a good reason in itself.

In the absence of a moon, I would have thought plate tectonics unlikely?

its a noble effort, but you are posting to an environment where everyone here knows that wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than gas or coal, because the wind and the sun are free, and they have no fuel costs. They also know that the only people who are skeptical about this are climate deniers.

These deniers keep talking about something called Net Present Value and claiming that is the correct way to evaluate and compare costs of generating systems. Net Present Value is a concept you will find in all kinds of Corporate Finance textbooks, well, do I need to say more? Its hetero-normative, racist, patriarchal and neo-colonial, and probably Islamophobic and transphobic with it and denies indigenous wisdom. Its on the wrong side of history, like coal, gas and nukes. Of course it pretends that wind+solar+batteries is actually a very expensive technology.

Well it would, wouldn't it?

What's the problem?

All they have to do is build more wind and solar (and batteries). Everyone except a few climate denialists knows that wind+solar+batteries is far cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear and can generate all the electricity anyone could conceivably need from free fuel, the sun and the air.

There is absolutely no need to restrict the installation of data centers, and there is no reason whatever why their power demands should raise prices. In fact, they should lower prices, because they will be at the spearhead of the energy transition, because it will lead to a larger and larger proportion of generation moving away from legacy technology to cheap clean power.

This is so obvious to us all here on Slashdot that its a mystery why the local politicians don't see it too.

...just around the corner - and has been for 50 years.

They not only need to show that they can generate net energy - a lot of net energy. For commercial success, they also need to show that the reactor can sustain that level of output for weeks, months, and years. That's an area that has not really been looked at, because no one has sustained a fusion reaction for longer than minutes. Personally, I expect that to be a huge hurdle, because of the temperatures involved.

The RBMK from 1980s Chernobyl is hardly a "modern" reactor. That's from ancient history. Even the RBMK reactors that were operating in the 1990s are hardly like those operating in the 1980s, after the Chernobyl incident the remaining RBMK reactors were decommissioned or updated with new safety systems.

Does anyone claim that a Tesla car could explode because of reports of exploding Fords and Chevys from decades ago? Does anyone claim that an electric car can't go more than 80 miles on a charge because that's all the GM EV1 could do? While I know someone will want to point this out as yet another bad car analogy but given the huge gains in safety, efficiency, and more in cars in only 30 years, and compare that to gains in nuclear power technology over the same time there's many parallels.

It's mind boggling that you believe a 40 year old meltdown in the USSR is somehow relevant to nuclear power safety in the USA today.

Who is listening to this BS any more? What makes anyone believe that the meltdown at Chernobyl is any kind of argument against building next generation nuclear power today?

I'm seeing huge shifts in the public attitude on nuclear fission power in the last decade or so, with perhaps the most notable shift around about 2020 when Andrew Yang was advocating for new nuclear power plants during his campaign for POTUS in 2019/2020. Yang obviously didn't win the election but he did force Democrats running against him to comment on the issue. Those outright opposed to nuclear power dropped out first. Those that supported nuclear power hung on a bit longer. The last to hold out were those that offered stupid "split the baby" options like keeping old nuclear power plants running but not building any new plants.

It's thinking like that that created the fear of nuclear power from Fukushima. TEPCO had new reactor units 7 & 8 planned at Fukushima to replace the older units 1, 2, & 3, the units that self destructed after being hit with a tsunami. Had those units been closed as originally scheduled, and units 4, 5, & 6 been in a maintenance shutdown as they were at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, then we could have expected units 7 & 8 to keep operating through the event as they were designed to hold up to such an event. People opposed to nuclear power like @phantomfive are creating the safety problems in nuclear power that scare them so much.

We aren't going to close down nuclear power in the USA any time soon because it produces nearly 20%, or about 100 GW, of the electricity in the USA and there's no quick and easy path to replacing that. KEPCO built about 5.5 GW of new nuclear power capacity in UAE over about 12 years, not including the planning time before that. What would it take for renewable energy construction companie to produce similar amounts of electrical output in the same time period?

What's your plan for generating electricity, or energy more generally, for the future? More of the same with wind and solar? I see more nuclear fission power in our future, or more energy shortages and the rising energy costs that come with those shortages.

That's not relevant unless the pollution and other problems of other options are also considered. Someone could give some kind of volume, mass, or cost for mitigation on the waste and pollution produced from nuclear power but that would be meaningless. We'd have to consider how much of this downside is produced when compared to upside (such as the watt-hours or dollar value of energy produced) then compare that to other options like solar, wind, hydro, or simply doing without this energy.

Most any thing can "potentially" happen. What we have now is over 50 years of experience with 2nd generation nuclear power, something like 30 years of experience with 3rd generation nuclear power, which means we can apply that experience to produce 4th generation and "3-1/2" generation nuclear power for even greater safety, efficiency, and reduced costs.

I watched some YouTube videos in the last week that laid out how new rules from the US NRC should reduce costs of future nuclear power beyond just that achieved with new technology, this is because a large part of nuclear power costs are from regulation than that from materials and labor. Current rules on nuclear safety are from a time when there were very high standards on safety because the real risks of nuclear power were not understood as well as they are now. We benefit from this somewhat today because the over engineered reactors built at the time can now be expected to run for 80, 100, or possibly more years with exceptional safety margins remaining. Spreading out the cost of construction over this amount of time means we are likely to enjoy very low energy costs in the future, we need only use the new proposed rules based on evidence and science than the old rules based on speculation and superstition.

It's been clear to me for some time that the majority of people that frequent Slashdot are deeply opposed to new nuclear power. They maintain this opposition by believing that future nuclear power will be something like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island. While most people will claim that the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl wee 2nd generation I could make an argument that it was instead a late 1st generation plant. Chernobyl lacked the containment dome that is nearly the definition of 2nd generation. The RBMK, as designed at the time, was a "dual use" reactor built with the intent for producing weapon grade plutonium than produce power, and such dual use ability was a defining feature of 1st generation reactors. The failed reactors at TMI and Fukushima were 2nd generation reactors built at about the same time as the RBMK at Chernobyl and so lacked so many safety features that would have come later on, such as a number of passive systems that when combined would make what we consider 3rd generation. Nobody has built a 2nd generation nuclear power plant for some time. We've yet to see a 3rd generation power plant produce anything close to the kind of safety issues that 2nd generation has produced. Anything new would be built to the higher safety standards of 3-1/2 or 4th generation nuclear power.

No currently operating civilian nuclear power reactor is capable of a "China Syndrome" as posed in popular culture, or a rapid steam explosion as seen in the RBMK. Nobody would dare build such a reactor today since no such design would be licensed, or if somehow some people could build a reactor without some kind of government oversight they'd not be built simply because that puts the reactor at risk of self destruction when well documented designs that avoid these risks can be built with no real added costs in construction. We know how to build better reactors now, fears of repeats of events from 40 years ago are unfounded. Fear of nuclear power today would be like fear of buying a new Tesla car because of reports of gasoline explosions from Ford cars and Chevy trucks from decades ago. Because of new technology, and a better understanding of radiation safety, we need new rules. It appears we are finally getting new rules, and from that I expect lower costs and higher safety. It's not like nuclear power was "unsafe" before, it is merely that we better understand the risks and so can provide higher safety with lower costs because we are putting our money and efforts into places where it counts than waste it on places where it does not.

Translation: We're one of the leaders, let us keep our lead.

Even if they are serious, it's just not going to happen. The genie is out of the bottle - many groups are working on AI, and all of them want to improve their models faster than the competition. it's a bit late to get cold feet...

The only winning move (for either side) is the same as it was years ago: sincere diplomacy that works toward a permanent peace. The alternative is (essentially) a war of attrition, unless NATO is going to send a million troops to the front along with huge amounts of firepower, and if NATO was going to do that, it would have happened years ago. I suppose there is another alternative that is "unthinkable", but it's definitely there... *sigh*