Here you go: With Liberty and Justice for Some. Aside from the book, Glenn Greenwald has a lot of interesting insights at Salon, and now writes for The Guardian.

There are supposedly mirasol products available, but it looks like they are limited to the Chinese market at this point. Hopefully they will gain wider traction, as I would love a decent Android based tablet with a high-quality reflective display. Add an active digitizer and it would be about perfect.

It is really annoying how manufacturers have pigeonholed tablets as media consumption devices.

without trackpads. My notebook keyboard has an aspect ratio of ~22:9; so we are almost there. Just think: with a bit more "progress" we could put the trackpad to the side of the keyboard! How awesome would that be?

Yucca Mountain was an expensive non-solution for a problem that only exists because we choose not to solve it. Modern reactors have a very different waste profile, as well as the capability to safely consume spent fuel from existing reactors while producing energy. Spent fuel is not something that should be buried, but rather is a vast energy resource that should be tapped. We need a change in policy in order to allow this, and people need to educate themselves and get behind it.

The Nuclear Waste Fund currently has about $25B intended for dealing with the "waste". If even a small fraction of this were spent developing modern reactors like the LFTR, not only would we solve the waste problem in short order, but we would also be well on our way to replacing fossil fuels entirety. More information about the possibilities enabled by this technology can be found at Energy from Thorium.

Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? The short answer, is "hell no"; while there is a very small part of spent fuel which could actually be considered waste, the vast bulk of it is a goldmine of energy and a source of other highly valuable fission products.

It is totally silly to talk of "waste treatment" or "destruction"--this is just another way of doing fission. It is equally silly to talk about destroying enormously vast reserves of energy, just because our antiquated reactors are terribly inefficient and make a mess of the partially burned fuel. It does not have to be that way, and modern molten salt reactors like LFTR burn the fuel so completely that there is barely any waste left at all.

We need to take another look at spent fuel. Aside from burying it, which merely delays the problem, the only way to rid ourselves of it is by fissioning it. There are many ways of doing so, but the best would be to harness the energy contained within in safe and inexpensive LFTRs. Such reactors are capable of providing not only for our electrical needs, but also the production of liquid fuels, as well as process heat for water desalination, foundries, fertilizer, concrete, and more.

Certainly, fissile material like U235 and Pu239 should be disposed of, but it should be done so in a manner which maximizes its value, and fast reactors or other waste eaters are terrible in this respect. LFTRs require much less fissile material to start up, and if we were to use the fissile in this way, we could ramp up their production very quickly, and eliminate it just the same. Only this way would be safer, simpler, more efficient, and vastly cheaper.

The end result may come within 10% for optimized code, but at what expense? As a user, you may not appreciate the extra burden placed on hardware and software engineers alike, but it has significant consequences on the rate and cost of development, for everyone involved. Look at x86, as contrasted with the rapid progress on a clean architecture like the Alpha, and this point becomes abundantly clear. With ARM as well, Intel has had to expend massive resources, and even with their advanced process technology, they are having great difficulty competing with much smaller firms.

Where would we be today, if the Alpha hadn't been euthanized by incompetent management at Compaq, or ARM and other RISC competitors could compete on an even process with Intel? Thankfully, as time goes by, x86 compatibility is decreasingly important. Open source linux, bsd, and mobile development are largely processor agnostic, and are free to use better architectures.

You appeal to CPU designers, but how many of them wouldn't rather be working on anything but an x86 design? That feeling is also shared by most assembly and systems programmers, I promise you. Any opportunity to remove a convoluted and unnecessary layer of abstraction from a system is a good thing, and should be welcomed.

The problem is collecting that energy, which invariably requires massive amounts of land and resources.

Yes, and so it would be far preferable to use technologies which have a very small environmental footprint, and which can be placed anywhere. Conventional nuclear has the same problem, though arguably on a smaller scale, and it is still intractable.

An objective view does not support this conclusion. That aside, conventional nuclear does have scalability and cost issues. Our failing is not in designing safe reactors, but embracing the technology, which looks nothing like today's reactors. Long ago, Alvin Weinberg showed us a safer nuclear, with molten salt reactors like the LFTR. Those solve all of the aforementioned problems, among many others. All we need is the will to commercially develop an already proven technology.

You are right that while sufficient, harvesting those energy sources efficiently is the crux of the problem, and that is unlikely to change. Their diffuse nature inherently requires massive areas and resources to be consumed for their capture. All except the third one: geothermal; though not in the way you might expect.

Fundamentally, geothermal is actually nuclear, as the heat comes from the natural decay of thorium and uranium in the earth, which incidentally, will outlast the sun itself. In that sense, it is even more sustainable. The energy contained in the nucleus is incredibly dense, and in the right machine, we can harvest it very efficiently, safely, cheaply, and with virtually no impact on the environment.

That machine is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a proven technology which is not only fundamentally superior to conventional nuclear reactors, but also lower impact than any of the other "green" energy sources. Furthermore, it solves the nuclear waste issue, as it can also consume existing waste and weapons materials, while producing virtually no waste of its own. (There is no spent fuel at all--only fission products, most of which are stable within 10 years, and many of which are highly valuable themselves.)

You may be interested in Flattr.

NASA's (mis-)management aside, congress added an extra $2.2B to the cost by disregarding the review panel's findings and not funding the project in a timely manner. Read more about it here, courtesy of an earlier slashdot article: How the Webb Space Telescope Got So Expensive.

See The fanless heatsink: Silent, dust-immune, and almost ready for prime time, and an interview with the inventor.

Disbelief of the dust-immune property of this cooler is addressed in the first question of the interview:

Once again, it is disappointing how many people so yearn for the status quo, when presented with clearly superior technologies. Not that they always pan out, but it is disheartening to see such hostility toward progress.

It is a convenient hack which allows Apple to move forward without solving the real problems. We see that they are very fond of this approach with filesystems as well, and it is disgraceful that a company with their resources doesn't focus more effort on proper solutions. Hiding problems behind a pretty veneer only works so well, and for so long.

A true resolution independent interface is needed as much today as ever. Not for high-DPI support, but for accessibility. Doubling pixel dimensions does no good to address that problem; user eyesight varies, and we need to be able to scale the interface appropriately. It is as simple as that really, and a solution to that problem is long overdue.

This is total nonsense. While overheating and fire is a risk with fuel freshly removed from an operating reactor--after it has been sitting this long, nothing catastrophic will happen. The fuel rods will get a bit hotter than usual, though nothing will burn.

That said, fuel should be moved to dry cask storage or further reprocessed in a timely manner. Stockpiling huge quantities of spent fuel in pools is not a good idea, as every time you add hot fuel, that does introduce a window of danger for about six months. Outside of that window though, the pools could be drained without consequence.

We do not want, and should not aim for an Internet which is 100% full. Inevitable network congestion issues aside, the Internet only has real value when there is significant room for growth. It is disturbing to see the concept of "efficiency" increasingly applied in this manner, as it is indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the Internet, and to pursue it, is to deliberately damage the Internet.

The only "efficiency" here is in how efficiently existing infrastructure is monetized, and how thoroughly startups and other newcomers can be squeezed out by the large incumbents. Metering removes any incentives to actually grow the Internet. The problem is a fundamental disconnect between what is sold and what is provided; by metering data, the relationship is entirely arbitrary, and lacking the most crucial parameter: time.

Data, which is measured in bits, is not an actual consumable, and there is no fair way to attach a price to it. What is consumed is bandwidth on the Internet links the data traverses at the time of usage; both of which are time-dependent. Needless to say, it would be insane, both technically and otherwise, to try to bill in this way. Furthermore, there still remains no incentive to actually grow the Internet, in the absence of competition.

Rather than data based metering, ISPs could be required to sell connections based on minimum guaranteed bandwidth to customers, at regulated prices. This is not the only fair scheme, but regardless, there needs to be a correlation between what is sold, and what is provided. If people want to purchase more, there must be an incentive to build out the networks, rather than to adopt a model of artificial scarcity, and bill accordingly.

Of course, selling connections fairly in this way also has technical difficulties, and it would be far simpler and cheaper if they just dispensed with all of this nonsense, and reverted to the way it used to be. Sell connections based on bandwidth, and build out the networks until there are no significant congestion issues. Other countries have proven that this model is still economically viable, even while providing people with gigabit connections. The only thing preventing it here is the lack of competition and associated stagnation of infrastructure and gouging. Let's not adopt new models of pricing which encourage more of that.