That's only true if you see education's function as solely to prepare you for a specific vocation.

"I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until."
If the producer was verbally assaulting him then Clarkson could get him canned in a minute.
Time to move past school and into the adult world.

No. I question the ethics of paying people to beat each other for my entertainment.

Apple only counts for money made.
What a load of garbage.
I love OS/X but the latest round of Apple hardware shows what happens when the "designers" run the show.
New Mac Pro... Stuck with Ivy Bridge CPUs when Haswell-e CPUs are out. GPUs are good but not near the best you can get plus no Nividia option for Cuda.
Mac Book line. You can not upgrade the ram and can not upgrade the SSDs. Prices for SSDs are going down but if you need more you have to buy a new notebook.
Apple is making money hand over fist but RIM and Nokia made a lot of money after the iPhone came out as well.
As much as I love OS/X and my MacBook Pro it is PCs that still do most of the real work. Servers run Linux, BSD, or Windows and not OS/X for the most part.
Desktops are running Windows for the most part.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

  I don't know if that is GP's objections but they are pretty good reasons to think radio isotopes are a threat to the environment and ultimately, humanity.

Not if dealt with correctly.
The spent fuel can be recycled. The short lived radio isotopes do not need to be stored very long. The medium waste goes back to fuel. The low level is close to background.

"Newer" reactor designs like the LFTR and I use new only in the sense that the prototype was built and tested about 40 years ago but not put into production. Produce a lot less waste and are walk away safe.

"And speaking of vilification, that is what happened to the peer reviewed science [stormsmith.nl] regarding the energetic return of the nuclear industry"
Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that? All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.

No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.

Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."

It is your choice to make your eventual obliteration the focus of your life. That's something you can either try to change (good luck with that), or it's something you can choose to accept. But choosing to accept that doesn't mean you have to sit around being miserable and resentful while you wait for the Grim Reaper. The world is only as cold and hard as the things in it you choose to focus on. There's also more wondrous and amazing and even funny things in the world than you an get around to thinking about in a lifetime.

It's like summer vacation when you're in school. You only get ten weeks or so of it, not nearly enough to get to all the things you want to do. And there are some people who will react to that by spending the whole time from day 1 unhappy about going back to school. What a waste of existence! But that's definitely a choice open to you.

Imagine your last few seconds of consciousness before you die. How would you like to spend them? Being angry? Sad? I think that's a waste of precious time. I'd like to have someone I love very much tell me a very funny joke.

No, we all make the choice of the kind of world we want -- or maybe it'd be better to say the kind of world we can live with. It just so happens that some people can live with a world that they don't like very much, so long as that doesn't demand very much of them.

Anyone can by choice have an immense effect on the world around them. Maybe they can't change the *whole* world very noticeably, but they can transform their own neighborhood.

The world is cold and hard as we allow it to be. It is a *choice*, albeit one made by default for people who think like you.

Oh, yeah. The rational actor theory. But by the same postulates that underly that theory there should be no human being who eats unhealthy, boozes or gambles excessively, or picks fights he obviously can't win.

I have an alternative theory which states that going by actual behavior most people discount their future welfare to zero when there's an immediate reward, even a trivial one. It's almost impossible to resist an immediate burst of pleasure a nasty habit's got you hooked, whether it's a relaxing smoke or that glow of self-righteousness you get when you act on your bigotry.

People will literally kill themselves for a little short-term reward. Forgoing a little profit is nothing compared to that. If you look at places where segregation was historically sanctioned, you'll see you're entirely right: it's economically irrational. That didn't stop people from doing it.

"Speaking as someone who wants to see the NSA dismantled, I hope these shooters died painfully if they were doing it as a political statement."
Yea and since both statements are pretty much crazy we can now dismiss you.

To hope for someone to die painfully in this case is unethical at best. These people had to be stopped. The best result would have been for no one to be injured but to seek others to die painfully is nothing but revenge and in this case unwarranted.

Geothermal is location limted.
Solar is not useful for baseload because of the state of storage technology. And yes I have read up on molten salt thermal storage and I work with battery technology everyday. Pumped water storage and solar are a poor match because it is very rare to have a lot of water and elevation change in areas with good solar potential.
 

The carbon footprint according to a NASA study including all mining is a small fraction of natural gas and more than an order of magnitude less than coal. Oil does not count since almost no oil is used for electric production in the US.
BTW maintenance is not carbon free of wind turbines.

Bzzzzz.....
Wrong answer.
It is not and Studies by NASA and the UN both support a large increase in nuclear power to reduce pollution in general as well as carbon emissions as does one of the founders of Greenpeace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Of course Greenpeace says he is a paid toady of the nuclear industry.... Vilification of those that disagree with you is the first rule of propaganda.