

Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews - suninwinter
http://www.teleread.com/kindle/greenpeace-deluges-amazon-fire-phone-with-one-star-protest-reviews/

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DigitalSea
Once upon a time I used to think Greenpeace stood for something, wanted to
make a real change in the world and then they go and pull crap like this.
Sorry Greenpeace, but this is just plain childish and in the end, does very
little to bring attention to your plight and just makes you look bad.

There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green
data centres...

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drewcrawford
Hang on a minute. I've reverse-engineered icloud and I have personally
verified that it is hosted, in significant part, on AWS and Azure.

Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the
information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at
this?

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gress
When did you perform that verification? I know they started out by hosting
storage chunks on AWS and Azure in 2011, but they have massively increased
their own data center capacity since then.

Have you reverified recently?

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wcchandler
And "how" was it verified? When Apple was building a large datacenter in North
Carolina[1], a lot of local techies were saying it was for 2 purposes -- Siri
and iCloud. Granted, that was the popular technology at the time for Apple, so
it may have been inferred knowledge, and not directly stated...

I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing,
geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to
their datacenter.

[1] [http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-
reig...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reigning-
over-the-greenest-data-centers-on-the-planet)

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jstanek
I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After
reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon
seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?

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umeshunni
Slacktivism at its finest

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pkulak
Nuclear is dirty now?

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cbd1984
If you're being generous, it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the
good: "We wouldn't need nuclear if we went all-in with renewables!" is the
cry, even if it's not necessarily the case in every environment. But if that's
your cry, and you ignore all the waste renewables create (what, are solar
panel factories 100% efficient now?), then doing anything other than 100%
renewable all the time is unjustifiable.

If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people
who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it
takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and
waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if
you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation.

So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean",
and they will not be convinced otherwise.

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7952
It is fascinating how difficult it is to find a good argument for opposing
nuclear power. The discussion usually turns into an endless round of
meaningless comparison that pretends that we only need one perfect choice
instead several imperfect ones.

The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be
the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or
operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly
coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering
perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on
staff to maintain and operate.

Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went
wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and
still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real
threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I
personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good
choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs
minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely
destroyed.

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wodenokoto
I actually don't think that is a good argument either. Even with the 3 mile,
Fukushima and Chernobyl disaters, more people have died falling of windmills
than from nuclear power (per megawatt hour).

I think the concentration of energy (making it a good target for terrorists),
and the probable long term damage of waste which has not yet been realized are
better arguments, but still not good enough to have coal over nuclear in my
opinion.

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7952
I agree that it is a risk worth taking. But those risks are not merely
unscientific fear mongering and meed to be mitigated by more than just
incredibly expensive human processes.

