Whatevs. I co-built a web service on Python that handled 250,000 requests per second with a horizontally scaleable design. We could bump that up to 1,000,000 requests per second by deploying 4 times the servers (which isn't as easy as it sounds because most things don't scale out well like that). I left that company and went to another employer that handled "only" 80,000 requests per second, averaged over a month. If you can ditch the chattiness of HTTP, well, I've written single-threaded UDP servers in Python that could handle 200,000 requests per second per server. How fast do you want it to be?

Unless you're seeing extremely low numbers or your design requires vertical scaling because it was architected in 1965, choice of language isn't all that important. Ruby is slow, too, but Heroku manages to shovel the data pretty well.

I love Python because it maps very neatly onto how I model problems in my head. I'm not averse to using other languages, but Python is my comfort zone because Guido and I apparently think about algorithms in the same ways. As it turns out, I make a decent living with it.

So, do I have a good job because I know Python, or is it because the thought patterns of the people who are drawn to Python are the same ones that companies want to pay for, regardless of language? If the former and you want a good job, then by all means learn Python. But if knowing Python is just a side effect of the properties that employers are actually looking for, then it's probably not going to help you all that much.

Yeah, Cs-137 is definitely something to worry about at least in the short-to-medium term, because it is water soluble and both a beta and gamma emitter (meaning exposure and ingestion are a factor), but risk depends on how much exposure you get. It also should be about half of what it initially was, since its half life is around 30 years. Some of the longer lived (miilions of years) particles are not something you really need to worry much about - you get worse stuff from natural gas (radon in particular) and probably higher concentrations from coal (fly ash contains lots of uranium and thorium in particulate form released into the air - in solid form these two are not particularly dangerous since the skin is a very good at absorbing alpha and beta).

In any case, radiation is a vague term, since it depends on type of emitter, half life, and type of exposure (i.e.skin, lungs, stomach) as for how dangerous it is. Generally, long half life=lower risk, which is why potassium isn't a big deal to have in our bodies despite being radioactive.

I have a cheap combination lock that lets me set my own "key". This isn't exactly alien technology, and I think a judge would be able to see the analogy.

Do you also have a fixie? If so, $5 says you're a software engineer at a Bay Area startup.

Ken Thompson had something to say about that. Are you hand-compiling that OS using your own tools and not the vendor-supplied toolchain?

...and are largely from countries with no cultural history of valuing privacy. Now instead of being suspicious of Apple or Microsoft, you have to be suspicious of 100 individual vendors.

...and US court lawsuits. For the first time maybe ever, it seems like the non-geek people around me are starting to get why security is important and are taking it seriously. Apple and MS have a lot more to lose than $RANDOM_CHINESE_VENDOR who can still sell their bad-American-repped $30 phones in developing countries if they're kicked out of America. Take away Apple's North American market and they'd fold overnight. They've been bragging about their security and crypto for a while now to the point of making it a marketing point, and breaking their promise to consumers would likely be catastrophic.

Like basketball, which will suddenly explode in popularity. Or you'll have an elite rowing team picking on freshmen. Perhaps a thug squad of a lacrosse team.

If football were to go away tomorrow, I promise you something would replace it, and quickly.

Highly radioactive usually has more to do with faster decay rate. As for how dangerous, it depends on the emitter and how it is absorbed. As for how much energy, it depends on substance, if it is fissile (at least for energy producing), and its neutron efficiency. Thorium, uranium, and plutonium generate more neutrons than they consume and thus can be used for a sustainable nuclear reaction. If it isn't one of those three, it probably isn't desirable - Protactinium, for example, has a huge cross section and absorbs neutrons slowing the reaction, so in a reactor it is usually desirable to pull it out, wait for it to decay to Uranium, and toss it back in (but this is a proliferation concern :P ).

Alpha - Ok for skin exposure, bad in stomach, lungs, or other tissues
Beta - relatively OK for skin exposure, bad in stomach lungs or other tissues (but not as bad as certain alpha emitters, I believe)
Gamma - pass through organics, bad for them.

For instance, Polonium is a fast alpha emitter. Skin is very good at protecting against alpha emitters, so you could wear gloves and handle it (to avoid any chance of dermal absorption). You, however, in no way want to ingest it - in the lungs and tissues it wreaks havoc and can kill in days (which is why Polonium was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident). Beta emitters are mostly absorbed by the skin, but penetrate deeper than alpha emitters. Gamma emitters go through most everything except heavy metals like lead, so it is recommended that you get as little exposure to these as possible (either inside you or outside).

Wrong - fast breeders in the United States were killed over basically proliferation concerns and safety issues. Financial was never a reason - you go from .5-5% fuel efficiency to 70% (without reprocessing) or 99.5% (with reprocessing) - that's pretty much like going from a Abrams tank to a Prius - you basically go from a subsidized industry (because it can't compete with coal in the US due to the overhead) to an industry that can sustain itself and could beat coal handily. Sadly, the "facts" given to kill the program were largely based on Gen I and II reactors and largely didn't apply to the FBR program.

Meanwhile, Russia is already exporting theirs. China bought the BN-800 design in 2009, making it the first exported Fast Breeder (though they won't get it until Russia's goes fully online in 2015 - it currently is running in low power mode).

In this case, what we call waste is actually a viable fuel. We (and I'm talking about most countries, not just the US) just have an aversion to breeder reactors that can make it so and on-site reprocessing that makes the process more fuel efficient (up to about 99.5%). Whether a need for such reactors appears before fusion is a viable alternative is the question, though if we keep throwing money at tokamak designs like ITER instead of much cheaper designs like polywell it may be.

Plutonium is the fuel a fast breeder reactor burns, actually. You use fertile uranium (aka nuclear waste) with a starter of fissile plutonium (or uranium?) and breed the fertile uranium up to fissile plutonium and split it. Usually this is U-238 to P-239. The main issue with this type of reactor is designs call for on-site reprocessing for better fuel efficiency and this is considered a proliferation risk. The proliferation issue is why Russia's fast breeder designs at Beloyarsk don't have on-site reprocessing and only achieve about 70% fuel efficiency (the US abandoned fast breeders in 1996, though private work continues). Still, 70% > .5-5% for conventional reactors, and it burns actinides and nuclear waste.

Fast breeder isn't the only Gen IV design, just the one most like conventional reactors, which is why the US and Russia both initially adopted that design.

Step one: put barely-thawed turkey breast in crock pot.
Step two: turn it to medium and walk away for 8 hours
Step three: eat a ridiculously moist and tender bird

There are tastier methods, but the marginal gain per effort exerted isn't worth it to me.

I think you're really grasping at straws. Note that Apple is donating all of the proceeds to charity. It's kind of hard to make a profit in volume when you're losing money on each individual sale.