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Belgium's Aging Nuclear Plants Worry Neighbors (phys.org) 319

mdsolar writes with news that Belgium's decision to restart a reactor at its Tihange nuclear power plant and its aging Doel plant have some of its European neighbors uneasy. Phys.org reports: "As the two cooling towers at Belgium's Doel nuclear power belch thick white steam into a wintry sky, people over the border in the Dutch town of Nieuw-Namen are on edge. They are part of a groundswell of concern in the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg over the safety of Belgium's seven aging reactors at Doel and at Tihange, further to the south and east. 'I'm happy Holland, Germany and Luxembourg are reacting because they (officials) don't listen to you and me,' butcher Filip van Vlierberge told AFP at his shop in Nieuw-Namen, where people can see the Doel plant. Benedicte, one of his customers, nodded in agreement. Van Vlierberge said he was particularly uneasy with the Belgian government's decision in December to extend the lives of 40-year-old reactors Doel 1 and Doel 2 until 2025 under a deal to preserve jobs and invest in the transition to cleaner energy."

Comment Vendor lock-in (Score 4, Interesting) 292

Microsoft wants everyone on the planet to pay it every month for the right to use a computer. Who wouldn't, really? Microsoft has proven it cannot be trusted maintaining interoperability with formal or other standards or even previous versions of their own software. Why would you trust that every update to Office 365 will be in your best interest when Microsoft has proven time and again that they'll make major changes just to shift the goal posts on competitors trying to interoperate with them? If a large majority of people get on board with this it will put Microsoft in an incredible position of power to keep them locked in and competitors locked out.

Comment SPF is designed to be implemented aggressively (Score 1) 187

SPF's great benefit is protecting your users against phishing attacks. Common phishing targets such as Paypal, eBay and Gmail, as well as banks and other finance organisations have very well managed SPF records. The onus for ensuring SPF records are correct falls on the sender, not the recipient. If someone inputs an SPF record for their server, then sends an e-mail via a different server you're doing exactly as requested by blocking the message. Problems of misconfigured SPF records will ease once more organizations implement it aggressively so that administrators will not be able to assume their mail is flowing correctly when delivery is initially successful to a few lax servers.

Comment Re:Yeah, heard it before (Score 1) 255

So you'd be saying the same thing if the Internet were censored by government? Or if any company could sue you for a blog post criticizing their products? Freedom doesn't just need protection, it needs to be built in to systems from the ground up. HTTP is open so anyone can have a web server, SMTP is open so anyone can have a mail server, social networking? Facebook.

Comment Re:No ARM MacBook (Score 1) 178

Maybe I'm living in a bubble here but Microsoft's surface seems like a *competitive* product. It runs on ARM which puts it in the tablet space for power consumption whilst doing most of the things Windows users want to do (Exchange, Office etc) with a real keyboard. I won't be buying one but I would imagine that a smart company like Apple would want to offer an iWhatever alternative, or at least plan for one in this market which has just been given prod by M$.

Comment Drive too much? (Score 3, Insightful) 345

How long before the insurance company succumbs to the temptation of penalizing those who use their cars too much? The more time you spend on the road the higher the chance that you'll be involved in an incident, regardless of how well you drive. You can see how such information could be used to discriminate against people living in rural areas and those living further from their place of work.

Comment Proven technology will be built by someone (Score 1) 128

If the technology has been proven I think it will get out there eventually regardless of whether it's deployed commercially in the west or not. Even if it's through a fresh development effort which would not have been undertaken had the technology not been previously proven. It seems to me that the best chance we have at detecting any future clandestine SILEX lab would be to use the technology now under a well established regulatory system and gain experience which may be valuable in detecting labs in the future. Do we really want to let someone else be first to build these things?

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