Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>the chances of anyone dying of cancer as a result of the Fukushima accident are remote.
Nope - if you are in Eastern Europe and about to get a couple of million tonnes of coal power station ash dumped on you as Germany shuts down it's nukes - they are quite high.
It's going to drop a lot more Becquerels on them than Chernobyl did - however it won't affect anyone west of the oder so we don't give a .....
We just finished building a new multi-million $ treatment plant for the chemical soup pouring out of a mine that closed 50years ago. The mercury, arsenic, cadmium etc will be safe in 10^32 years if certain theories about proton decay are correct. Until then we can just keep cleaning the water and burying the toxic sludge.
Removing 100years of the same stuff from the bottom of a 1000m deep fjord is going to be a little more tricky.
>I don't feel any warmer about eating fish from the Pacific.
You would prefer fish from the North Sea?
Take every factory, refinery, chemical plant from Basel to Rotterdam and filter all it's waste through that fish.
Then add every particle of brake dust, rubber additives, catalyst, and paint chips that flaked off every car in europe, Then add in all the human and animal sewage and pathogens
>The calculations were made to harden the plant against a massive tsunami
That is precisely what engineering means.
The plants should have been hardened against any conceivable tsunami/earthquake?
What about the schools and homes- 1000s of people died in those.
Surely all primary schools should be proof against a magnitude 10 earth quake?
Here on the other side of the same fault zone we spend only a few million $$ bolting classroom bookcases to walls.
If society had priorities then all the children would be protected by schools built deep underground in bunkers, and all the old peoples homes, and all the hospitals etc etc - in fact nobody would be allowed to live within 100km of the pacific ocean
But those were brown people - and even worse, poor brown people.
The correct order of concern is:
White Americans
Europeans
Japanese
Black / poor Americans
South Americans/Russians/Chinese
3rd world smiling children
3rd world starving children
Other
So Fukismima/Chernoby are about equal to a 3mile island, only because it may affect sushi or Welsh Lamb, a Bhopal is about equal to a Katrina
You can send public links to somebody - so that file you need to send to a client that is too large for email or blocked by some firewall policy, just dropbox it and email them a link.
Want free reliable back-up for a few Gb of stuff without needing to run a btsync server?
Have a non-techie that wants to just keep their pictures/docs safe without understanding what backup means?
>Ask yourself why they designed the system this way
Deduplication = less diskspace/bandwidth
Dropbox heavily dedupe files. So a million copies of that same cat picture only takes up a few K
If they are all encrypted they can't tell the files (or parts of the file) are the same and so need to store and transmit everything
I am an inventor (at least I wrote a bunch of patents)
I have worked abroad a number of times.
I currently live abroad in the land above the land of the free
But although I always have to fill in a lot of documentation for the place i'm going to - I don't remember ever telling the UK government I left.
I thought it was the Iraqis who had secret invisible weapons of mass destruction that could hit London in 45mins ?
Now the Iranians have them as well !
Whose next on the list - India, Ireland and Israel?
We must invade Italy at once to stop Iceland using it's secret volcano weapons.
Then for the next crisis we can open Bush and Blair's big book of countries to 'H'
However the same argument doesn't apply to putting backdoors in products.
Microsoft / IBM / Cisco / Siemens / etc all have divisions that sell classified systems - staffed with people who can be trusted - they all have valuable government contracts that make them very accommodating and they all have enough zero-day exploits that even if one is discovered who is going to blame the feds? And anyway a replacement can be pushed out next tuesday.
In the US you can sack people for no reason and no notice in many states, it's called "right to work" (who said Americans don't do irony !)
If the person you are firing is a visible minority there is normally an automatic lawsuit - just from no-fee lawyers. The result is that you never tell anyone the reason they are being fired - because it gives their lawyers ammunition. Which is a shame because quite often it's not their fault, it's just the company's needs change.
This clause just gives the lawyers another class to chase. One side effect is that it would force people to be openly (even flamboyantly) gay in the office in order to show that you knew they were gay when you fired them.
The figures are normally from university careers services - and they typically only track the first job after graduating and they don't include people who don't work form $MEGACORP$ who return surveys.
It used to be a classic statistic that Chem Eng grads earned more than anyone else. Simply because all Chem Engs immediately got a job with the company the careers service sent them to, and their starting salary was above average.
When you tracked how much they earned over their career - it doesn't make sense to do a technical job.
That happens here - but there are downsides.
To get the "engineer" title new grads have to serve years as an engineers-in-training and so work for a company with an engineering training program. That means new eng grads can be paid peanuts by large companies because if they don't jump through these extra hoops they wasted their degree.
Startups can't hire engineers because they don't have their own chartered engineers to sign off on the training.
Want to employ a maths PhD as a software engineer? You can't.. Want to hire that American CS grad from MIT/Stanford, you can't because they don't qualify.
The result is that all 'engineers' immediately jump to management, because managers (especially in the public service) have to be professionals. You also get a majority of people doing the softest 'engineering' course they can find - usually environmental eng - so that they can become civil servants.
While the actual technical work is outsourced or off-shored.
> the number one area of work for social sciences graduates is Social Work
That doesn't mean that a majority work in social work.
If psychology leads to a wide range of jobs - then 10% might be social workers, 9% in HR, 8% in fast food, 7% in subway music playing etc etc
In return for h264 become the new web standard ( as opposed to flash, or some open source codec) I'm sure the MPEG-LA looked favourably on the licensing cost.
Just like MP3 offering free license to open source decoders. How popular would ogg be if the MP3 license holders tracked down every non-Apple user of an MP3 ?
The problem is that, with this - Cisco have effectively halted all development on alternate codec and allowed a patent encumbered one to be widely adopted as a standard.
All because it's free - for now, or until they change their mind, or another patent holder objects, or that part of Cisco get sold to somebody else.
Suppose sun had offered free downloads of solaris-x86 in the early 90s. Then we wouldn't have needed linux and today the world would be owned by Larry "blofeld" Ellison
Would an IBM only PC really have benefited IBM?
There wouldn't have been a PC software market, and certainly not Windows if IBM had kept it an IBM only product.
It's like claiming that if Mercedes had been the only one building cars all cars today would be MB - in fact there just wouldn't be cars today.
