> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.
It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.
Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.
What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?
I think it's an error that International Atomic Energy Agency classified both Fukushima nuclear accident and Chernobyl nuclear accident on International Nuclear Event Scale Level 7 (major accident).
In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.
Dr. Atul Gawande† reported 20 years ago how obstetricians standardized on c-sections because the suppposedly-better alternative, forceps, (i) was very difficult to teach and supervise, and (ii) used incorrectly, could result in horrible injuries to both baby and mother:
<QUOTE>
The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry?
If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big.
You do research to find new techniques.
You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.
But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts.
You seek reliability.
You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques.
You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received.
After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble.
They found it in the Cesarean section. [0]
</QUOTE>
(Formatting edited.)
† Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things.
The patent means only that Google can sue people who practice the claimed subject matter without Google's permission.
That doesn't mean there wouldn't be other prohibitions and restrictions.
Example: Suppose you were to invent a drug that boosted IQ by 50 points, and body strenth and endurance by 80%, for 12 hours. You might be legally entitled to a patent for it. But you'd still have to get FDA approval to market the drug. (And your patent might be sidelined before issuance under a secrecy order because of the potential military applications — see, e.g., "The Rush to Patent the Atomic Bomb" (NPR.org 2008). https://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89127786/the-rush-to-patent-t....)
And as others are pointing out, practicing the claimed method might constitute copyright infringement.
Funny on this type of article linking to Google Patents. Such great possibilities for replacement. Google publishes Google has patented something. Nobody checks.
The Beatles famously stopped touring, and stuck exclusively to studio recording (apart from the Abbey Road rooftop concert), in no small part because they got tired of not being able to hear themselves sing or play due to all the girls' screaming.
> no ban on a married Catholic man (possibly a layman, a Latin Rite deacon, one of the already exceptional Latin Rite priests, or an Eastern Rite priest) being ordained Bishop of Rome after being elected by the College of Cardinals
That was the theme of the third "act" of one of my favorite novels, 1978's The Vicar of Christ by Walter F. Murphy.
Act 1: The protagonist — a young Catholic, son of a U.S. diplomat, and U.S. Marine Corps junior officer, is wounded at Iwo Jima in WWII. After becoming a law professor, he's recalled to active duty for the Korean War, where he's awarded the Medal of Honor for valor as a battalion commander in combat. (The author was himself a decorated Marine officer in Korea.)
Act 2: Years later, the protagonist is a longtime law school dean. He's appointed Chief Justice of the United States because of political deal-making between the President and a couple of different senators who have agendas.
Years after that, after a personal tragedy, the protagonist resigns and joins a monastery.
Act 3: Having been a monk for just a couple of years, the protagonist is elected pope by the College of Cardinals as a compromise candidate after a long deadlock between the two front-runners. He takes the name "Francis" (after Francis of Assisi) and immediately begins shaking things up both institutionally and doctrinally — to the displeasure of traditionalists.
> Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?
The comment to which you're responding includes a note at the end that the commenter is being sarcastic. Perhaps that wasn't in the comment when you responded to it.
It wasn’t thanks for highlighting. Can be hard to tell online because there’s a lot of people genuinely suggesting everyone should build their own software on the fly
If the amount of code corporations produce goes even 2x there's gonna be a lot of jobs for us to fix every company's JIRA implementation because the c-suite is full of morons.
That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a human prompter's specific, detailed instructions — the human prompter might qualify as an "author."
From the U.S. Copyright Office in January 2025:
"The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements.
"This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
"The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.
"It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs."
The closest analogy is to a music producer sampling public domain audio. The composition will be protected by copyright but each individual sample will not.
Every single CGI rendered frame of Shrek is protected by copyright because it was human authored. It they used a diffuser to make Shrek 7, the individual frames would not be protected by copyright but their arrangement into a movie could be. That's a hugely different legal situation (for instance, if I chopped it up and made my own remix of it that would be protected).
Though this is complicated by the fact that the LLM initial training may have been massively illegal (or at least massively tortious). There's still a bunch of legal shoes to drop, one way or the other
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
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