TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record. ... It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids.
Despite the alarm inside Japan and abroad, specific information about radiation levels and its range are still mostly unavailable. This lack of information is what Safecast is trying to overcome.
The contentions filed with the NRC address reactors at nuclear facilities nationwide, including 11 plants in the South ... North Carolina regulators have dealt a blow to Duke Energy's plans to build two new reactors at the Lee plant, citing concerns that Fukushima may require construction revisions that call into question the project's costs and timeline.
According to the NYT "Green Blog", new South Texas Project reactors have been taken few regulatory steps and the nuclear renaissance is in full swing. Perhaps Govenor Perry is praying for them but,
one of the partners in that venture was the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which was sidelined from participation by the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan. NRG itself cited the accident when it said it would not put more money into the project. Fukushima aside, the economics of the expensive nuclear project are far from clear because low natural gas prices have depressed electricity prices in Texas’s competitive market.
At 4 cents a kilowatt hour — roughly what natural gas is now going for — the coastal wind is about as cheap an electricity source, renewable or otherwise, as Austin Energy officials say they could find. The deal will not raise rates, according to an Austin Energy analysis. ... By way of comparison, the operators of the South Texas Project nuclear facility had approached Austin earlier this year about investing in an expansion of that facility. But NRG Energy's emissaries were floating a price around 8 cents per kilowatt hour. Austin Energy officials were skeptical, and the deal fell apart before negotiations could begin because one of the deal's backers, Tokyo Electric Power Company , owns the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that was hit by the tsunami earlier this year.
Good for Austin, perhaps there won't be a Fukushima on the Gulf after all.
Data in the letter undermines AT&T's primary justification for the massive deal, while highlighting how AT&T is willing to pay a huge premium simply to reduce competition and keep T-Mobile out of Sprint's hands.
Microsoft's "decision engine" more likely to lead users to a Web page than searches through rival Google, study finds.
This is what Microsoft has claimed all along, that their advertising engine was more effective at leading to advertisers. The problem with this study is population bias in the 10% of people who keep Bing around. These are people more likely to take what they are given and exert less effort, which is why they use Microsoft's default search engine in the first place. Given that bias, the 13% difference in "success rate" probably indicates what we already know, that most users don't want Bing because it does not work well. I hope this "success rate" is more a twist by Information Week than an indication that Hitwise has been taken into Microsoft orbit.
I was set up like a bowling pin.
Pretty soon only the community colleges — you know, the lowest level of the system — will be state-financed in any serious sense. And even they're under attack. And analysts generally agree, I'm quoting, "The era of affordable four-year public universities heavily subsidized by the state may be over." ... Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product.
5: Improper NXDOMAIN handling, 4: Clickstream Tracking, 3: Ad Swapping, 2: Affiliate Program Pumping, 1: Rolling Over ... I’ve got more to say on this last topic, but there is a clock that must run out before I am permitted to write. Tick-tock, a couple days to go.
Glen Moody looks at the argument that software patents don't exist because everything is just math.
Splendid stuff - totally wrong, but splendid. ... speaking as a mathematician, I certainly concur with the view that everything is "just maths" in a certain deep sense. ...