Pakistan has nuclear weapons (and India has the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Bombs as well), but aside from their border conflicts around Kashmir (for which the nukes make war less likely but more risky), their big invasion problem is non-governmental forces like Taliban, for whom nukes are really no use at all.

And Israel, of course, has the bomb (probably also the hydrogen bomb), but you're not allowed to say that in discussions about whether Iran can make one also. Wouldn't be a total surprise if the Saudis had it too.

When I'm talking on the phone, the timer for the screen-lock should NOT be running. I frequently have calls that last more than 15 minutes, often set the phone down and use headphones during the call, and it's really annoying that after I hang up, the phone's locked. (If somebody else calls me when me phone's locked, locking when the call's done is fine, but not when I'm the one who made the call or the phone was unlocked when the call came in.)

I'm running 4.4.2 on a Samsung. The phone is provided by $DAYJOB, so they specify which locking options are available (face-unlock isn't), but otherwise it's pretty vanilla. The code used to require 8 digits, now it seems to be text-input instead; both require me to put on my reading glasses to unlock the phone, especially because the numerical unlocker was really bad at touch-screen control, so I had to look at every digit I pressed and count how many actually got detected. Keypress beeps help, unless you're trying to unlock the phone after silencing it, which I often do, but those have a non-zero time lag after the keypress before it notices it should beep, and you can't always tell 1 beep from N beeps. I can now use Swype, which I couldn't when the requirement was all-digits, but it's not much of an improvement since my password isn't a dictionary word, though I suppose I could set it to "qwertyuiop" or "asdfghjkl".

Wired had an article back in the late 90s about Julian Simon's predictions of "The Long Boom", where our high-tech economy with the Internet connecting everybody and delivering education and liberal economics was going to keep growing and making the world a better place indefinitely. Wasn't the Late 90s a great time!

Yeah, unfortunately, several sets of thugs decided war was a much better way to run a world, but even before that hit us, we'd started to question the value of buying dogfood online, and the parts of the tech boom that depended on Y2K-driven replacement of everything were thanked for their fine job and let go, and people started manipulating the US interest rates to affect the upcoming elections (2% rate change in a couple of months), which really didn't help a capital-intensive tech sector that was already getting threatened with anti-trust. And lots of other bad things happened, and good things stop happening, and good things happened in ways that make stuff enough cheaper it's hard to make a profit (Moore's Law etc.), and yeah, too bad.

There's starting to be some interesting science fiction about the problems of what happens when we can cure Alzheimer's.

And I suspect Sir Terry Pratchett would have volunteered to try this if they'd announced it a few months earlier.

I picked storage, and that's what I've had the most problems with at home, but it's especially what I've had the most problems with at work, because if the storage goes bad, I can lose data, whereas if most other parts of the machine go bad, it's the IT department's problem. Back in the 1980s, when I used VAXen instead of laptops, lots of things had problems, but it was still usually either disk head crashes or tape drives doing something odd.

Reality? It's the SOFTWARE that's been the problem.

No! You're only allowed to worry about one or the other!

Really? If only there was some one out at sea on a boat who could corroborate that. . .

http://www.internationalpolicy...

Anything that becomes molten will mix into the fuel and dilute it,

Not really. Anything that becomes molten, will pretty much vaporize, because Uranium melts at like 2000 F. If the Uranium is molten, everything else will boil away.

However: It's bollocks because the hole in which the uranium is burning, has fissures and crevases, and the Uranium would unevenly flow into small, tight spaces, spreading out and; ultimately diluting and cooling.

Experiments done at Argonne labs back a few years ago also suggested that the Uranium will form a cooler coating, as an outer shell. The core may remain molten, but the shell is cool enough to harden, and contain the molten core. The core may burn through the shell, but much of the mass will be left behind, as the molten part runs down into the burned-out cavity below, and the process repeats.

In any case, either of these scenarios would generate significant ongoing outgassing, and none of that has been observed at Fukushima; so it's likely the fuel melted and diffused and cooled. Just like Chernobyl.

They know what they are doing - for the first time in many years. Windows devices are currently 14% of global computing devices sales. Their 1.5 billion unit installed base is already less than Android's 2 billion plus and its advantage is eroding at a billion units a year. It is incredibly fragmented, with only 15% of their own users on version 8+ able to access the latest version of their browser. They must consolidate their base if they hope to leverage it into a credible entry into the mobile space. And they are out of time. If this fails, by the time a "next version" is ready they will be in Blackberry share land because between them Android and iOS will be moving 2 billion units a year, their installed base will be greater than 4 billion, and there are only 7 billion humans - many of whom are too young, one, poor to count at all.

Reboot. * Install all updates. Reboot three times. * Uninstall all third party software and start over. * Reinstall the OS and drivers, all service packs, all patches. * Uninstall all third party hardware and start over. * Still a problem? Contact the PC manufacturer.

* Check for proper function.

There. Paste that to a file. You have Microsoft OS support forever.