Well, to be fair, once a company is in the MS user pool, it is very hard to get out as MS Office is the norm in business. Now, the rent vs own is an interesting take on it. Most large businesses would rather not "own" software as it is often an asset that they have to track, amortize, and depreciate. Renting, or more ideally, annual licensing fits the fiscal year budgeting process much better. So having this as an option really fits the customer's business models better. However, for many companies, having your internet connection go down and losing the ability to function is far too much risk, so "owning" is the more prudent option. So long as MS offers both options, then they are addressing probably 90% of the market. Not really a big deal that they lost subscribers if people are still within the MS Office pool, but if it is a zero sum game (likely saturation) of Google docs vs Office 365 vs OpenOffice vs Other, then it becomes more of a question of whether "3rd party" office programs are slowly climbing their way to corporate acceptability. Having what I consider very few improvements, if any, since Office 2010, competition would be welcome to churn real innovation.

Scientific programming using Monte Carlo methods requires reproducibility based on some initial seed so that an analysis can be reconstructed. A good example of this is benchmarking a code for changes in compiler options. If the code is widely distributed, then a large set of random numbers is not as easily distributed as a Twister or other method. Also there would be problems with acceptability of the results of such a code if a developer were to distribute the code with a specific input and set of random numbers. The temptation to cherry pick results would be too high. For security purposes, where a one-time-pad approach is ideal, a truly random number is fine.

I don't particularly buy the authors approach though, because semiconductor physics is full of things that seem random at the moment, but then turn out to be entirely predictable once a suitable model is found. Sun Microsystems found this out years ago when they tried to base a random number generator based on the rate of soft failures from memory chips. They were using Boron as a dopant, which has a high probability of absorbing neutrons and decays with an alpha particle (He +2 atom), causing a hardware error. They claimed they had a perfect random number generator until they saw that the randomness was dependent on the location of the chips. Denver has more cosmic radiation than Miami, thus the randomness was actually Poisson (as are most things nuclear). The method was thus vulnerable to an attack based on the mean number of failures, which could be determined by knowing the physical location of the device.

Reactors are not becoming more complex, that is a key thing on which the industry, both vendors and utilities, can agree upon with the anti-nukes out there. Complex reactors cause accidents because humans aren't that great at dealing with pressure. So the next generation of reactors, termed Gen IV, are relying on passive safety systems that require little if any human interaction. If something goes wrong, the reactor defaults to a controlled state whether it be a huge loss of coolant accident (LOCA) or otherwise. Before you go saying that legacy reactors are overly complex, massive upgrades and plant optimizations in both control and safety systems have been performed over the last 15 years. Introduction of passive safety systems have significantly lowered PRA's (probabilistic risk assessment) across the board. No one is saying that nuclear power may be a cure all, but it is a prolonged solution that has proven to be quite viable whether people approve or disapprove of it.

Renewable energy would be great it if works. I would love nothing more than to have my house off-grid, if only because of the "coolness" factor. Unfortunately, some renewable forms aren't good everywhere, and people even complain about those. Wind power isn't favored by some because it kills birds or ruins their landscape. Some people don't like the look of solar panels, so many home owners associations have banned their use in their neighborhoods. So unfortunately, while renewables are a hot topic right now, they still have to contend with people's preferences, no matter how petty they are.

I'll say again, it is pretty hard to separate tritium. It's bound in water molecules first of all, so the only way you can really separate it is with gravity-derived methods as there are no chemical differences. The weight difference is fractional, 20g/mol for tritiated water vs 18g/mol for regular. Now, the Canadians use natural uranium reactors with heavy water, D20, well that component of the reactor is very expensive. Separating tritium out of water is ridiculously more expensive as the massive amount of cooling water that is passed through a centrifuge would require quite a large system with a low separation efficiency per CCF of water. Looking at the cross section of hydrogen then deuterium, this double absorption of a neutron isn't going to be a very large product, which is why it is chosen as the moderator in the first place, so very small quantities are produced. The activity is high because of the relatively short half life, not a massive quantity. Now if you do a separations facility for the tritiated water, you would have to either couple it directly to the coolant of the plant or devise a shielded transportation method. Obviously, the coupled method would work the best. Now, you'll also have water at elevated temperatures, probably saturated, so the density will be lower. The loss of thermal efficiency from the separations facility would be huge as you would either have to reheat the feedwater before it enters the reactor, otherwise you'll have a rather nasty reactivity swing, or run the reactor at a much lower power for control reasons. If you see where I'm going with this, you'll see why tritium isn't separated out like this in commercial reactors. The economic cost of producing tritium this way is far more than the benefits would be.

Carbon-14 is low in coal because of its short half-life and atmospheric origin. Uranium and thorium are present in coal, but do not undergo the accelerated fission that occurs in nuclear reactors and so release daughter species at the natural rate rather than concentrating the very hot waste produced by reactors. Owing to the long half-life of uranium, the radioisotopes of iodine or cesium are rarely produced. It would be better to not burn coal, but sulfur, carbon and mercury are much higher reasons to avoid it than trace uranium and thorium.

I'm not sure where you were trying to go with this, but C-14 is a very large release of coal burning, not uranium or thorium. C-14 really won't do too much to anyone in terms of dose, but in terms of total radioactivity, this release is far greater than any other from nuclear.

very crazy