What happened in the Nordics is that for the most part of the 1900's, there was a shared border with a huge imperialist and expansionist superpower, trying to convince the world that their economic and social models were superior. It often did it with some very dirty and violent tricks and supported its sympathizers around the world. Especially in neighboring countries.
In order to keep the people from revolting and gaining permanent global competitive advantage by murdering the factory owners, lenders and their families and stealing their property disregarding any repayment plans - the moderate socialists (who saw that the socialist system would be built organically without violence) and the right wing owner & trader classes made an alliance to fringe the hard-core communists.
Bargains were made and benefits established as all parties knew that every satisfied social democrat was much better than a soviet-devout communist. In Finland, there was a very bloody civil war right in the beginning of independence (where the communists lost), two big gunfights in the WW2 and decades of soviet pressure to turn communist.
The social programs and safety nets were established to ensure the survival of capitalism and private property. The problem being solved with reducing economic inequality was not "poverty" like PG claims, but threat of violent revolutions by people who felt unfairness.
The Soviet Union is gone now and thus the left wing these days has much less bargaining power. These are interesting times.
Pretty much. Hitachi is currently selling their IFR design "on-the-shelf" by name S-Prism. Russians are operating and selling their BN-600 and BN-1200's.
It's not like things are completely problem free, but that's kind of unreasonable expectation for any industrial or commercial project.
E.g. advertising breeders as a solution for the nuclear waste problem is a bit tricky, since we already have centuries worth of waste to dispose of, plants will only be operated for some decades etc. We would need to increase humanity's electric consumption to tenfold or more to justify enough breeders to dispose all current nuclear waste in reasonable time.
Depending on the definition of "safe". Digging a long hole to the ground, towing an old to-be-demolished barge on top of Mariana's trench etc. is not that expensive.
The hard part right now is deciding on suitable ground for the tombs. Doing seismic measurements, analyzing the rock formations and especially forming the policies for burial (e.g. do we reserve the option to dig the stuff back up for use in breeders?) can take decades, but it's hardly an expensive part of the process.
The disposal isn't really an acute problem that needs to be solved today. It's not that dangerous to store the junk at warehouses while we use hundred years if necessary to research best viable options.
Nuclear power is expensive, but only if you compare it to burning hydrocarbons and hydroelectric power generation. It's still decades ahead of photovoltaic and wind turbines.
It's not supposed to dilute. It should stay put and not spread around.
Most human activities tend to displace natural ecosystems. Waste dumps (nor windmills) are no exception. The question is, is the damage lesser than greater than in proposed alternatives?
Though I do not understand why did they choose to dump the waste to the channel? If I would dispose the waste by sinking, I would use a kilometers deep trench to minimize risks for reacquirement and environmental damage. Do they plan to dig up the waste sometime in the future?
However, since people don't easily believe water's a very effective radiation shielding (even if there's an xkcd of it https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/) and that heavier than water metals kind of tend to stay put at the bottom of the ocean, other means of disposal might be more realistic. Recycling in breeder reactors, digging huge holes to the ground, buildings which last longer than pyramids etc.
Of course, how one defines "safely" is tricky. Perfect safety is impossible, of course. One can't guarantee that our hole will stand to the heat death of the universe - but just ensuring that the disposal will cause less harm to earth and its living beings than any other energy production method is fairly easy to do. Even windmills kill some people, animals and fauna during normal operation, so if we set "less murderous than windmills" as an acceptable safety standard, we could settle for the ocean disposal, for example.
When I was studying, we had an active (research) reactor running on the campus under thousands of student dorms. Less than 10km from the center of the capital (Helsinki) too. Most people do not even know it's there. Most people don't know that a lot of hospitals on densely populated areas also house running reactors.
The power plants generally are pretty dull industrial sites. I don't blame for people not wanting them in their back yard. Luckily, one does not need to build them near habitation. There's plenty of space.
So MtGox is basically confirming, that some online criminals have accumulated at least 6% of total Bitcoin market capital?
Not to count the drug dealers, cryptolockers, etc. The banksters are bad, but this kind of stuff isn't good for wider adoption. "Hey, invest in bitcoin and watch how the deflation will boost your friendly local crime empire!"
The funny thing is, that these days the simple 3rd party "fake" and costly clients are often superior against the official apps. Less leaking location, address books, text messages and usage patterns, please.
How the article is designed - it took me a while to understand that 42floors was not the company performing the tracking. I initially went there to find a name of the company (to put it on permaban in my NoScript), yet the only organization popping up while skimming through the page was 42floors. I was a bit spooked when I checked the noscript-list for blocked resources and saw the url I thought was tracking me.
After that, I looked at the URL-bar and it took that long for me to click.
Yes. I agree that LastPass is probably a lot better than alternatives. They kind of have their balls on the line if things go wrong.
That said, I have not dwelled to details of how LastPass handles the site design to avoid unintended leaks, (I believe the issues with leakedin are simply unintended mistakes rather than attempted malice) but I sure as hell would avoid using or recommending their services should I find mishandlings of the data within such trivial applications.
About (2), It matters in the sense, that we have to assume that all of the sensitive data which has been leaked before will continue leaking until they have identified the vuln. The worst thing a user can do, is to insert a recycled password and consider the situation resolved.
Should the hacker still have the backdoor open, he'll just steal the new keys as well. Salting helps a bit, but it's far from solving the problem.
What I'm proposing is that people should change the pw twice. First instantly (and not recycling) and then when LNKD has confirmed that this individual attack vector has been closed.
I wrote a FB-note for my buddies regarding these tools and the leak. I see a lot of bad advice on HN as well, so I should probably paste how I see it here as well:
1. DO NOT check whether or not your password was compromised via services like leakedin.org. If you've used LinkedIn, it was stolen. They only RELEASED around 6 million passwords, though LinkedIn has 161 million users. Odds are, your password is not found from the publicized list. There's very little reason to assume, that those password-hashes were the only ones out there...
By using such services, you just guarantee that your password-hash ends up in a web-server log to be stolen or outright to a hash-dictionary. Especially since most of us are stupid and recycle passwords from other services, you'll just intentionally leak your weak password to a 3rd party.
(Besides, leakedin.org DOES leak that information to a third party. They use an analytic tool, getclicky.com, which commits your search parameters back home every time you do a page reload/search.)
2. As far as we know, LinkedIn HAS NOT DISCOVERED HOW THE ATTACK WAS MADE NOR BLOCKED THE VULNERABILITY. So even though we've all been clever and changed our passwords before any damages were done, the new one might as well have been leaked already. This is especially bad, if the new password is a recycled password as well. So if you lost your LinkedIn & Gmail -password before and replaced it with your FB-password... Congratulations! Odds are that you lost your FB-password as well.
Also, change your password again once LinkedIn has given a statement of fixing the vulnerability. If they don't... Well, sell your NYSE:LNKD.
3. For every leak we know of, there's dozens of leaks we don't. Assume that your password gets stolen. Don't recycle them. Use a Password Manager (I use 1Password, there are others, cheaper and free ones, though. Don't know how good they are.) and/or a system such as passphrases or http://safeandsavvy.f-secure.com/2010/03/15/how-to-create-an... .
4. People can do pretty evil things with your data and by being able to impersonate you. Your account can be used to scam people (you might not want legal trouble), to blackmail you, to spy on you and your neighbors or even for performing crimes. E.g. Money laundering.
> The main difference is in my opinion the visible action - reaction relationship. If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie, while with coal plants you might have just people to "cough a bit more".
Not really. Nuclear disasters are bad for the environment, but considerably less bad than say... Building a city somewhere.
And "cough a bit more" is probably the understatement of a day. Those fuckers even create more radioactive waste (which won't get collected) when they work as intended, than nuclear plants when they break down. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...)
You are on track with the insurance policy. Though it's pretty safe to assume, that real costs of coal and carbon-based fuels are not calculated very well for insurance purposes either.
The end-point of unstoppable climate-change could potentially render the entire earth inhabitable via the Venus-effect. Even most apocalyptic local consequences are pretty minor compared to those.
1. Current renewable power sources need adjusting power (is that how it translates to English?) when it's not shining or windy.
2. Current distribution networks for electricity do not work well enough to transport large quantities of electricity for long distances.
3. Due to getting rid of nuclear, 90% of new electricity production built to Germany before 2020 will be from fossil fuels. (http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2012/05/germany_returns_to_c...) That is what "the global leader" can achieve. And the fossil fuel plant's are not going to be closed any faster than nuclear plants. Those investments are for the next 60 years, and it's likely that there will be more if/when cleantech can't really deliver out all the things we need.
And that's a pretty good result btw, truly a world champion -level achievement. Meanwhile, Japan's nuclear phaseout is done with 99,999478% in fossils. (The bloomberg links are down where they were calculated before, but should be googlable with "Japan's Use of Oil May Surge by 300000 Barrels a Day" & "Japan Will Use More Coal During Maintenance, Deutsche Bank Says".
Yes, you can get rid of nuclear, but for all intents and purposes, it has always resulted with more dinosaur burning, not less. And that's pretty bad.
Even with all flaws, nuclear is a lot cheaper economically and environmentally as an insurance option than what Germany and most global economies are currently pursuing.
"Extortion (also called shakedown, outwresting, and exaction) is a criminal offence which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups."
"Bribery, a form of corruption, is an act implying money or gift given that alters the behavior of the recipient. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty."
In order to keep the people from revolting and gaining permanent global competitive advantage by murdering the factory owners, lenders and their families and stealing their property disregarding any repayment plans - the moderate socialists (who saw that the socialist system would be built organically without violence) and the right wing owner & trader classes made an alliance to fringe the hard-core communists.
Bargains were made and benefits established as all parties knew that every satisfied social democrat was much better than a soviet-devout communist. In Finland, there was a very bloody civil war right in the beginning of independence (where the communists lost), two big gunfights in the WW2 and decades of soviet pressure to turn communist.
The social programs and safety nets were established to ensure the survival of capitalism and private property. The problem being solved with reducing economic inequality was not "poverty" like PG claims, but threat of violent revolutions by people who felt unfairness.
The Soviet Union is gone now and thus the left wing these days has much less bargaining power. These are interesting times.