If we're discussing costs here, the thing is even the very rare nuclear accidents are incredibly expensive. Estimates of the cost of cleaning up Fukushima run between US$180 - US$600 billion.

Estimating US$400 billion, and wikipedia's claim that about 2 PWh of nuclear energy is produced per year, we get a cost of $200/ MWh year, so substitute in how often you think it's reasonable to assume these things happen somewhere in the world (once every 30 years? Gives $6/MWh), and compare to the latest contracts being signed for dispatchable solar (solar with storage) costing less than $50/MWh. It's a significant proportion of the overall cost, not overwhelming, but should not be discounted. And solar costs are coming down fast.

Cleanup costs:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.japantimes.co.jp%2Fnews%2F2017%2F04%2F01%2Fnational%2Freal-cost-fukushima-disaster-will-reach-%26yen;70-trillion-triple-governments-estimate-think-tank/

Contracts being signed around US$50/MWh:
US$55/MWh in South Australia, including storage
US$30/MWh in Arizona, not including storage

The AEC was set up by the parliament, and presumably could be disbanded by the parliament, but it is run independently. The members of the commission are appointed by the Governor-General (a non-political office). It's about as independent as the judiciary.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's what allows it to take the place of SMS. If your contact is on WhatsApp and you message them, you know they will get your message on their phone. If you send a message to someone on facebook messenger, they might not get it until they log in to facebook on their computer next week, so unless you know their habits you have to send an SMS if it needs to be timely.

And there is no reason why a single person using their internet fairly sporadically should pay the same as a house full of people streaming HD video 24x7. Nice things are nice to have, but why should someone else pay for them?

Good luck with that. Traders will just move to more friendly jurisdictions. Most HFT is in deriviatives, which any exchange can list anywhere in the world. Liquidity will decrease in the taxed markets and the spreads will widen by the amount of the tax, hurting anyone who wants to invest there.

Yep, see for example Nonintrusive appliance load monitoring. It's possible to identify common appliances reasonably well using the size of changes to power consumption and, depending on the smart meter hardware used, the shape of the power-usage curve (e.g. the brief initial surge when turning on compact fluorescents). It's not perfect but it's not too bad and it's getting more accurate.

This is really for connecting the two exchanges in Sydney, the ASX and Chi-X. Plenty of stocks trade on both exchanges so the advantages to knowing sooner what is happening on the other exchange are obvious.

Exactly this happened in Australia with fixed-line broadband. ISPs offered 'unlimited' plans, in small print noting you get throttled after a certain figure. They got smacked down by the ACCC (the government consumer watchdog) and now plans are either "x GB - throttled" or "x GB - $y/GB excess fee", or genuinely unlimited.

+1.

I use spotify for almost all my music listening. I don't even bother with offline playlists, I generally just stream music on my mobile when I'm on the go. It's great being able to access such a vast library on the go - when someone is talking about a new track I can bring it up immediately, even if it's an artist I've never heard of.

I haven't paid for music for years, and now I'm spending $10 every month.

A lot of research has been done on the second step of this algorithm in bioinformatics. When sequencing a genome, generally all you get are millions of short sequences that need to be stuck together. The algorithms work by calculating probability scores for various pieces to be adjacent and then doing some funky statistics. It's a non-trivial problem to calculate those probabilities for the document reconstruction problem, and then the reconstruction is in 2d instead of 1d, but the bioinformatics algorithms could provide some interesting approaches.

People understanding things in this way is exactly why everyone chooses bad passwords. His point is that if everyone has passwords like Tr0ub4dor&3, password guessers won't guess random printable ASCII characters, they'll guess a word and then try some substitutions on it.

So 'Troubador' can be guessed with a dictionary attack, which is why the word only gets about 16 bits of entropy (that puts it in the top 64000 most common words in English). There is additional entropy added by the substitutions but substituting '0' for 'o' is much easier to guess than changing the 'o' to a random character.

And again, since an attacker would be using a dictionary attack, the correct way to calculate entropy is per word, not per character. The xkcd calculates 11 bits of entropy per common word which suggests these words are in the top 2^11=2048 most common words which seems reasonable (a quick glance at wikipedia suggests around 80% of the words in written texts are built from the most common 2000 words). So we get 44 bits of entropy. Obviously less than 72 bits but how many people are really going to create a completely random alpha-numeric-punctutation string of 11 characters (not built from a word or pattern)?

Most of the big banks in Sweden allow you to create a temporary (virtual) credit card with a specified limit and expiry date. You type the credit limit and expiry in, push a button and it spits out a new mastercard number. At least one bank (Swedbank, one of the largest in Scandinavia) requires this kind of card for all online transactions.

Just like when the IRA was having their campaigns, I should have told them to shut the hell up so I could go about my business? I'm an Australian, although I look Irish due to my ancestors around 4 generations ago emigrating from there. Racism is not the answer.

Spain is actually a long way from, say, Germany. The middle of Spain is only about 10% closer to Berlin than Tunisia.

I think sporting bodies have researched this thoroughly. For example, in Australian football (the most popular sport in the country) caffeine was legalised a few years ago. The clubs spent big bucks testing their usefulness, but as far as I know none use them any more.