Everything Facebook as bought up until now have been products relating to the use of Facebook and social media content. This is the first company that Facebook has bought that is hardware oriented and not a product which is integral to Facebook. Therefore it is hard to extrapolate their previous acquisitions to what they will do with Oculus. I look at the situation (optimistically) as sort of like Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, starting SpaceX. Hopefully Zuckerburg is interested in Oculus because he thinks it is a worthwhile technology to invest in, not because he wants to absorb it into Facebook.

It can. The main problem with this type of operation is that the main generator and turbine are not designed for very low power operation, there is not enough steam pressure to drive them below a minimum threshold (~5-10% power). The Chernobyl accident occurred during an attempted test to see for how long the reactor could run its cooling pumps on decay heat after shutdown (the accident was not caused by this test directly, but due to the inappropriate actions by the operators leading up to the test).

The problem is mostly engineering and the way plants are designed. While there are steam-driven and axillary cooling systems, on older plants they can only provide decay heat cooling for a limited time, and generally require at least some power to operate valves and monitor levels. They were not designed to cope with an extended loss of all electrical power. Some newer plant types are designed to be passively safe, such as the ESBWR, which can remain safe with zero electrical power or operator actions due to its natural circulation design and enormous gravity-fed cooling pools.

Braindead soundbites like this gem from 2008?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PMmY20nJ8E

Your last part is right on. The fed is printing money like a firehose to fill the enormous whirlpool of money being poofed out of existence by bad debt, and debt being paid off. This is why we haven't seen much if any inflation even though we are printing dollars - the expansion of dollars by the Fed is being countered by the destruction of dollars by removal of debt. The government certainly loves this situation - the ability to spend unlimited money without having to worry about inflation. The true cost of the hidden tax of government deficit spending is hidden in the losses of the economy as a whole due to the recession.

Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously. You cannot point to one product getting cheaper and say "that's deflation".

Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply.

Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash. The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody.

Even if private individuals could use the NICS system there's no point in making a law requiring it. The honest people will use it whether it is required or not since it protects them from liability, while the criminals will just ignore the law regardless.

We should have laws for things that are inherently wrong, like murder. Owning a gun is not inherently wrong, and therefore should not be prohibited since the attempt to do to won't prevent criminals from getting guns illegally anyway.

$100 million is nothing compared to the scope of the problem. The Manhattan project was around $25 billion over about 4 years. The Apollo program cost $170 billion over about 15 years. The reason why fusion hasn't worked yet is simply because it hasn't been funded to those levels yet.

The notions that solar power doesn't work and that solar power hurts utility company's profits are not mutually exclusive. It is called negative power prices. Due to laws requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power at any time, combined with the inability to store or transport natural gas supplies due to lack of pipelines, the cost of electricity often becomes negative where the power company pays customers to waste electricity because of unpredictable excess capacity. This hurts utility company earnings as well as being wasteful and counterproductive to the economy and environment.

Oh yeah? Just ask this guy. He was absolutely arrested for not consenting to a search by lying cops. And as shown in the video, the prosecutor states that if he wasn't lucky to have had a clear recording they would have no qualms about and would have gotten away with lying to convict him. The linked video is full of all sorts of blatant gestapo corruption on the part of the cops AND the court (at one point the judge called the sheriff to arrest him for not letting the prosecutor see exculpatory evidence, when sheriff arrived he simply told the judge he couldn't arrest him for that).

Thorium is not fuel, it is only fertile material which can be turned into Uranium in a breeder reactor (which requires high-enriched uranium or plutonium to operate). Thorium has the same properties as Uranium in terms of risk of melting down. Making a reactor melt-down-proof is a matter of reactor and coolant type, not fuel. Same goes for nature of spent fuel/radioactive waste. The only real advantage of using thorium as a breeder material instead of natural uranium is that it is more common and cheaper.

EBR-II was a 60 MW sodium cooled fast breeder reactor with on-site reprocessing that successfully operated from 1965 until 1994 when the program was cancelled by Bill Clinton.

There's a simpler way of looking at the electric car conundrum. Of all the energy used in the industrialized world, about half is used for transportation in the form of oil. In order to replace all cars with electrics, we would have to literally double all electric generation and transmission capability. No small undertaking.

Actually that is not true either. The plants were in fact originally designed to load follow and were only later adapted to constant full power operation based on economic factors. It is not hard at all to engineer the plants to load follow. And xenon poisoning has nothing to do with it, the primary challenge is in axial offset control which becomes more difficult later in the cycle, but only because the cycles are optimized to run at constant full power with maximum fuel loading. It would only require modest adjustments typical of cycle-to-cycle operational changes to design to load follow. IAANE.

Everyone one of your points is entirely false.

1) No. Wind and solar vary with clouds and wind patterns and have no correlation to usage patterns. Renewables do not cut into anyone's profits, only natural gas does that with massive oversupply with lack of storage/transmission capability. In fact, renewables tend to be big profit cash cows for industries because of government subsidies that pay for them to build them, even when and where they don't work, and then they get to write off the losses from taxes. Why do you think there are so many idle wind power farms all over the country?

2) Renewables are also highly centralized in that they are totally dependent on federal government subsidies and all the cronyism and corruption that comes along with it. The rest of point two I won't even go into as it is just loony bullshit.

3) What do you think causes the cost overruns? Environmentalist protests and lawsuits. Nice catch 22 there.