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.
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.
The channel's a really dumb place to dump waste. There's a massive difference between a life-rich continental shelf with a complex ecosystem, and the barren abyssal seafloors five miles down. Put the waste there and it will just stay there for millennia.
This doesn't seem like a very straightforward process. If it were, I'm sure we'd get rid of all sorts of nasty shit that way. Is every component of "the safe nuclear power we'll have in future" yet to be developed?
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.
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?
If you want safe nuclear power, including demolishing the reactors safely, safely getting rid of all the materials, nine nines safety, etc, then it won’t be profitable.
If you want for-profit nuclear power, then either the government has to subsidize it, or it has to be unsafe.
Usually, it’s both unsafe (companies save money everywhere, including stuff like not securing the generator cough Fukushima cough) and barely profitable.
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.
> Das Gesetz zur Beschleunigung der Rückholung radioaktiver Abfälle und der Stilllegung der Schachtanlage Asse II („Lex Asse“) wurde am 28. Februar 2013 durch den Bundestag beschlossen.[70] Die Kosten werden auf vier bis sechs Milliarden Euro geschätzt.[71] Sie sollen nicht durch die Betreiber, sondern durch den Bund getragen werden.
Translation:
> The "Nuclear Waste Retrieval Speed Up and Asse II mine closing law" was passed on February 28, 2013. The costs are expected to be between four and six billion Euro. They will be paid not by the owner, but by the federal government.
Germany built one. Turns out it wasn’t that safe. Now we have to dig up all the waste again, and put it back underground into a different mine. And this mine was our only hope, actually, because it was the only semi-stable unused salt mine left in Germany.
Now the government passed a tax "Brennelementsteuer" (Nuclear Fuel Tax) that means the owners of nuclear power plants have to pay parts, approx up to 20% of the costs for demolishing the plants, and still 0% of getting rid of the waste, this money will be gotten as a tax for using nuclear fuel.
And, with this tax, nuclear energy is now, even despite getting similar subsidies as renewables, more expensive than wind. Several large energy companies already sold their nuclear plants and switched over to wind; even the few plants in Germany that were still running after Fukushima are now not profitable anymore.
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.
MIT has a nuclear reactor on campus right on Massachusetts Ave, between Harvard and Boston. (It's not a power-generating reactor.) There is also a cogeneration plant that produces electricity, steam heat, chilled water, and compressed air. I've never heard anyone complain about either.
Most people don't know or care except if it's super obvious (generating tons of obvious smoke/steam). However, they will raise all sorts of fuss while it's being proposed.
Sure. UIUC had one for many years, also Rolla, and no doubt many other engineering-oriented universities. My office was literally in the next building over from the UIUC reactor for a while, and I never worried about it. That's about as "in my backyard" as you can get. :-)
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.
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.
Playing Devil's advocate (as in, I agree with you, site A should never under any conditions ask people to enter their password for site B):
Lastpass does encourage visitors to that page to change their LNKD pw on LNKD and anywhere else it might be reused. The checker form is placed below that recommendation.
Anyone inclined to enter their (old?) LNKD pw on the Lastpass page would probably enter it on some other "leakedin" password checker page that's less secure. At least Lastpass tries to be trustworthy.
Regarding your point (2), I don't think it matters if the LNKD vulnerability has not been patched. Everyone should still change their LNKD pw, because the compromise might have been temporary. I agree that Lastpass and everyone else encouraging a LNKD password change should emphasize not to reuse passwords, but universally, and not specific to LNKD.
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.
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.