San “Oh No”fre
After a leak was detected in a steam tube that’s part of San Onofre nuclear power plant’s three steam generators, that generator was shut down. Some radiation escaped, but not enough to endanger anyone. Since January 31, tubes in the Unit 3 steam generator have been undergoing pressure tests to make sure the plant is safe. Normally, this kind of thing would make me feel safer, but apparently the tubes show unusual wear, and pipes are failing the tests. Three failed Wednesday, and four more failed yesterday. These aren’t old pipes, either. They were installed in the last few years.
Please tell me there are a real life equivalents to Rad-X and RadAway.
San Onofre nuclear plant reports more testing failures – latimes.com
Five Reasons Why the MegaUpload Shutdown Was a Good Thing
You all probably know I’m strongly opposed to legislation like SOPA and PIPA, but that doesn’t mean I support piracy. I covered Anonymous’ response to the MegaUpload shutdown with a post, but I avoided taking a position aside from the stating that a 55 year prison sentence was too much for copyright infringement. The truth is I needed to think about what the shutdown really meant. I’m not one to make an uninformed decision when picking a side. Even though I know this site gets light traffic and is just “some guy’s blog” in the grand scheme of things, I don’t want to be anyone’s tool for propaganda.
After going back and forth on this, I believe shutting down MegaUpload is a good thing. Here are five reasons why in no particular order:
They had to know their site was being used for piracy
If you had gone on MegaUpload and looked at the Top 100, you would have seen a cavalcade of copyrighted material in every category. Not knowing that essentially means you’ve never been to the site, and I’m guessing the guys running the site had seen the site. You can make the argument that there were plenty of legal uses for MegaUpload, but long term storage was dependent upon the number of downloads. Since no one wants to read your term paper, this led to pirated material being stored and legitimate files being deleted.
They clearly knew their site was being used to illegally distribute copyrighted materials and chose to do nothing about it.
It made people less trusting of “the cloud”
The cloud has its place, but relying too heavily on storage that isn’t under your control is a mistake. People who were using MegaUpload as a safe for important files lost those files when the site was shutdown. It was an important reminder for citizens of the internet to keep their data and primary backup local, and use online storage as a secondary backup.
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