Figure 1. The 2.5 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for just over 350 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That’s $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. They took about 6 years to build. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2 electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. Oconee’s average capacity factor over the last 5 years was 98.2%. All three of these reactors have been licensed into the 2050’s, a gift from the Greatest Generation. Oconee and its cooling pond Lake Keowee have turned a depressed part of western South Carolina into a second home and tourist magnet.

Nuclear power in the West is a disastrously expensive mess. Table 1 shows where we are. Current builds have capital costs that are more than ten times higher than Oconee and her sisters. Only the wealthiest nations can afford these kind of costs, and then only sporadically. The construction times are such that there is no way nuclear can put a dent in global warming, or anything else. And it keeps getting worse. If this is the way things must be, nuclear power is a dead end, and rightly so. //

Yet in 2015, the German utility RWE commissioned their Eemshaven plant in the northeast corner of Holland at a cost of 2.2 billion euros. This is a little under $1500/kW for a 2 by 800 MW plant, or just under $2000/kW in 2024 dollars. This is for the latest and greatest ultra-super-critical plant meeting stringent EU pollution limits, sited in one of the most expensive places to build on the planet. The rule of thumb is $500/kW for the turbine hall and switchgear. The rest is fuel handling, the boiler, and pollution control. //

Figure 4. Fuel for 1 GW plant for one day. The coal plant’s fuel requires a 70 car train. The nuclear plant’s fuel fits in a two gallon jug. Newcastle 6700 is a good coal. Most coal’s are worse. //

A 1 GW nuclear, Figure 5, plant will burn about 82 kg’s of fuel per day, producing the same amount of solid waste. That’s about 100,000 times less than a coal plant. The coal yard and the coal receiving terminal disappear, as do the dryers and pulverizers. The nuke’s Fission Island volume will be smaller than the coal plant’s boiler. The turbine hall will be slightly larger. There will no stack gas handling equipment, no massive Forced Draft and Induced Draft fans, no SCR, no baghouses, no scrubbers, no massive stack. The ash landfill and slurry pond will be replaced by less than an acre of 5.9m(19 ft) high by 3.5m(11 ft) diameter casks. The nuclear plant should be cheaper to build with far cheaper fuel costs. //

Figure 15. Coal should be easy to beat

The reason why it is not is a tragically misdirected, autocratic regulatory system. We give an omnipotent regulator final approval of any nuclear power plant, and judge him on his ability to prevent a release of radiation. He gets no credit for the cheap, pollution-free, CO2-free, on-demand, power generated by a successful plant, nor the avoided mortality and morbidity that would have resulted if the plant had not been built. But he owns any problems. The regulator responds accordingly; and, since he has the final say, it’s his incentives, not society’s, that determines what happens. NRC Chairman Hendrie put it succinctly “The NRC’s responsibility is [nuclear] safety without regard to economic and social costs.” [Joseph Hendrie, NRC Chairman, 1979] The NRC’s definition of nuclear safety is preventing a release.

Figure 16. Hinkley Point tombstone.
No. Human welfare is our overriding priority.

This auto-genocidal myopia produces technical stagnation, a demoralized workforce, lack of competition, and shoddy quality. The end result is nuclear power that costs five or more times what it should-cost and build times that are three or more times longer than they need be. This in turn means nuclear is replaced by far more harmful technologies. It means nuclear can never be cheaper than the competition, which means humanity is far poorer than it could be. The greatest health hazard of all is poverty.

Firewalld provides a dynamically managed firewall with support for network/firewall zones that define the trust level of network connections or interfaces. It has support for IPv4, IPv6 firewall settings, ethernet bridges and IP sets. There is a separation of runtime and permanent configuration options. It also provides an interface for services or applications to add firewall rules directly.

But, according to numerous studies, polygraphs cannot reliably detect lying, or truth-telling, and their use in the justice and employment systems is regulated due to those problems with scientific reliability. A landmark 2003 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found the quality of research about polygraphy to be low, the theoretical explanation of how it functions (and why it detects lying, and not, say, nervousness) to be inadequate, the rate of false positives to be unacceptable, and the rate of false negatives to be a risk. Researchers still cite this study. //

But if media audiences find themselves in a polygraph exam room, they should probably feel twinges of doubt, perhaps especially if they are innocent. Citing evidence from William G. Iacono, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, he said that polygraphs can identify just 75 percent of guilty people. But critically, they only accurately judge truth-tellers around 57 percent of the time. “The research generally shows that the people who are innocent are at a disadvantage,” he said. //

Of the 36 cases with a definitive polygraph examiner judgment, a correct exculpatory outcome only occurred in eight cases. But Denkinger’s issues with the dataset went further: “Every single person who took a polygraph in the set was done a disservice by the polygraph,” he said. “Either they were told they failed because the examiner thought that the result was a deceptive response, which was a false interpretation, or they were truthful, and the interrogators or the examiner misrepresented the result and told them that they were lying.”

That latter part is the focus of Denkinger’s most recent work: how the polygraph is used coercively. For example, law enforcement is permitted to tell subjects they’re failing the polygraph even if they’re not—a practice that can induce false confessions. And it is confessions that law enforcement is after. //

At the University of Utah, where he got his doctorate, Honts developed a method of polygraph examination that used standardized questions and relied less on the expertise of the examiner. He says that unlike some other countries, examiners in the US haven’t adopted the methods he sees as best-practice at a large scale, in large part because they see polygraphs more as interrogation tools than lassos of truth.

That practice can let guilty people go free, send innocent people to court, and make the most sensitive parts of our government—the defense and nuclear establishments, which both use polygraphy to vet employees—less secure. For instance, infamous spy Aldrich Ames, a three-decade CIA employee who passed secrets for close to a decade prior to his arrest, to the Soviets and later the Russians, passed a polygraph twice while actively committing espionage. Ames later said his polygraph savvy was aided by advice from the KGB, who told him to be cooperative and stay calm to pass the examination. //

Scientists like Lee may be getting closer to an accurate lie detector, and improving on the traditional polygraph. But there’s currently no superhero solution. And the problem, as Lee’s research hints, may be ontological, not technological.

That’s definitely Maschke’s view. “It’s all pseudoscience,” he said. “There is no lie detector. So my thinking is that it’s better not to pretend that you can detect lies, because it’s a way of deceiving yourself.”

Vibe Gel Memory Foam Mattress, 12-Inch CertiPUR-US Certified Bed-in-a-Box, Full, White

The Big Misconception About AI and Copyright

Many people believe that any use of AI eliminates copyright protection. This is fundamentally wrong and contradicts actual legal precedent. //

Key Facts
🏛️ What Thaler v. Perlmutter Actually Said
The widely-cited Thaler case held that AI cannot be listed as the author on a copyright application. The court explicitly stated:

"We are not faced with the question of whether a work created with the assistance of AI is copyrightable."
This case addressed AI as sole author, NOT humans using AI tools.

📋 What the Copyright Office Says
From the January 2025 Copyrightability Report:

"Using AI as a tool to assist in the creative process does not render a work uncopyrightable."
The key requirement: human authors must determine "sufficient expressive elements."

Clean Room as a Service
Finally, liberation from open source license obligations.

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

• AGPL Contamination
  Does your company forbid AGPL code? One wrong import and suddenly your entire proprietary codebase must be open sourced. The horror!

• Apache License Attribution
  Is your legal team frustrated with the attribution clause? Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?

• License Compliance Overhead
  Tracking licenses across hundreds of dependencies? Legal reviews taking weeks? Third-party audits finding "issues"? What if you could just... not deal with any of that?

• Giving Back to Community
  Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers.

Robot-Powered Clean Room Recreation
Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. They independently analyze documentation, API specifications, and public interfaces to recreate functionally equivalent software from scratch.

The result is legally distinct code that you own outright. No derivative works. No license inheritance. No obligations.

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If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.*

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On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

A password manager is great for remembering all your logins, but you still need to keep track of the details for logging into that password manager! Some items to keep tabs on include the account email address, master password, two-step login (2FA) details, recovery codes, and more. vaultwarden

Secure Boot is a feature of UEFI, and it's a requirement for any computer that wants to run a modern version of Windows. It exists to protect us against malware that infects your computer's bootloader. There's a security certificate stored in the UEFI which your computer uses to check the Windows bootloader, to ensure it's legitimately signed by Microsoft, and not an imposter.

So far, so good, but what happens when the certificate in your UEFI expires? Well, we're all about to find out.

IanRS
Bigger problems
In my work as a security architect I occasionally get asked by an assurer or auditor why I think running AWS infrastructure in just two availability zones without a second region is enough. The latest was just earlier this week. It shows that they do not understand risk/impact balance outside their own little box. I have to point out that if something can take out two geographically separated data centres simultaneously then the impact is not restricted just to their website, and they probably have bigger problems to worry about. Some of them accept this. Some still think another region would help.

20 hrs
Anonymous Coward

Re: Bigger problems
I worked for a small public sector body. An auditor once asked what would happen if both our main and DR sites went dark. I said if that happened, something very big & bad was happening and no-one was going to care about our organisation.

Auditor ticked their box as we had clearly considered the possibility and we had a plan. (Do nothing is still a plan!)

Mar 02 4:22 PM PST We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1). Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.

In the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region, two of our three Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) remain significantly impaired. The third Availability Zone (mec1-az1) continues to operate normally, though some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones.

Mar 02 4:22 PM PST We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1). Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.

In the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region, two of our three Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) remain significantly impaired. The third Availability Zone (mec1-az1) continues to operate normally, though some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones.

I received an email / billing notification from AWS this week that may be the most diplomatically crafted communication in the history of cloud computing. Here it is, stripped of the usual boilerplate around it:

"AWS is waiving all usage-related charges in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region for March 2026. This waiver applies automatically to your account(s), and no action is required from you."

No explanation. No mention of the Iranian drone strikes that physically destroyed two of three availability zones in the region on March 1st. No reference to the 109 services that went down, nor the customers who spent weeks unable to terminate EC2 instances via the console because the control plane was as dead as the hardware underneath it. No acknowledgment that an entire month of cloud infrastructure effectively ceased to exist. Not even a link to their remarkably short (presumably because it wasn't insulting the Financial Times' reporting) corporate blog post explaining that you probably shouldn't expect that region to be working reliably again any time soon.

Just: we're waiving the charges. You're welcome. Move along.

I want to be clear: I have no problem with this. It's a tough situation, and it's not AWS' fault, given that there is not yet an Amazon standing military force.

But here's the part that caught my attention. The email continues: "You will not see any March 2026 usage for the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region in your Cost and Usage Report or Cost Explorer once processing is complete."

They're not just waiving customer charges for a month; they're erasing the billing and inventory data! //

For most organizations, the AWS bill isn't just an invoice. It's the canonical record of what infrastructure exists, where it's running, and how long it's been there. The Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the closest thing many companies have to a single source of truth that accurately describes their cloud footprint.

Would you rather have a smoke alarm that goes off 33% of the time you make toast, or one which never goes off when there's a fire ?

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
The problem is not with the "smoke alarm" it's with the fire engine.

1 day
MOH

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
When I'm making toast, I'm making toast.

I'm aware of what I'm doing and ensuring that the toast making doesn't escalate to a house fire.

If it does, that is fully on me.

I don't need a wonky security camera setting off a fire alarm for times a day because my dark brown slippers have vaguely the same shade as burnt toast and it blindly assumes a fire is in progress.

1 day
Yet Another Anonymous coward

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
But it could be useful if you're very confused and might be about to put marmalade on your slippers

Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away. //

No one is quite sure what's behind it. Asked what changed, Kroah-Hartman was blunt: "We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going, 'Hey, let's start looking at this.' It seems like lots of different groups, different companies." What is clear is the scale. "For the kernel, we can handle it," he said.

"We're a much larger team, very distributed, and our increase is real – and it's not slowing down. These are tiny things, they're not major things, but we need help on this for all the open source projects." Smaller projects, he implied, have far less capacity to absorb a sudden flood of plausible AI-generated bug reports and security findings – at least now they're real bugs and not garbage ones. //

The trick for Kroah-Hartman and his peers will be to keep AI as a force multiplier, without drowning the open source maintainers.

As NASA prepares to send four astronauts around the moon for the 10-day Artemis II mission, a veteran space flier's unexplained illness in orbit is spotlighting one of the biggest risks of deep-space travel: the need for medical systems in case of emergencies.

NASA astronaut Michael Fincke said a sudden episode aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in January left him unable to speak and forced NASA's first-ever medical evacuation from the orbiting laboratory. Doctors have ruled out a heart attack, Fincke told the Associated Press, but they still don't know what caused the medical issue.

NASA was able to get Fincke (along with the three other members of the crew) back to Earth relatively quickly from the ISS. But that may not be the case for the longer lunar missions the agency envisions under the Artemis program.

Caddy web server with automatic HTTPS and reverse proxy configuration.

Ewen therefore again made the long drive, and within moments of arriving, he noticed the giant PC was very quiet.

A quick look showed why: the fans weren't working.

Ewen asked if anyone had noticed a problem.

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires." //

Bill GraySilver badge
Chesterton's fence
G. K. Chesterton wrote something that boils down to : if you see a fence running across a road, you shouldn't tear it down until you figure out why it was put there. Somebody presumably went to the time, trouble, and expense of erecting the fence, and had some reason for doing it.

You may eventually learn that their reason no longer applies, or just doesn't matter as much as it used to, and then you might pull the fence down on a suitably informed basis. But you shouldn't equate "I don't see why that's there" with "there's no good reason for that to be there".

As I recall, he was mostly thinking in terms of politics. The idea is that each generation comes along and assumes its parents were idiots, and that society should be rebuilt on more sensible, modern principles... usually without first considering why the parents did such idiotic things. But it's a good engineering principle as well.

Raymond I. Smithjr
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Drumbeat, a well researched and objective historical novel.
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2012
Format: Hardcover
Beginning with an apolitical description of the German u-boat navy prior to WW2, its development and deployment in the Atlantic and the tragic consequences of an inept and unprepared outmoded U.S. Navy,,, through the naivete' and politically mismanaged response of the early military leadership...The U.S. experienced losses far greater than at Pearl Harbor. The author takes us on a thrilling excursion in to both sides of the battle in a very balanced presentation of the behind the scenes as well as the in the thick of the encounters. A good read difficult to put down until finished.

KP57 George
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
German Submarines controlled the East Coast in 1942
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2014
Format: Hardcover
Excellent; well done research, amazing how unprepared America was for submarine attacks off our East Coast and how highest ranking naval officers let their anti-British feelings deny relevance of British provided intelligence. Thus unfortunately for many reasons our government felt it was necessary to deny the attacks took place and many ships were sunk and many men died.