Fast spetcrum breeder type reactors hold the promise of providing millenia of carbon free power, perhaps much longer if the Uranium in seawater is used. There are significant economic and political challenges to this technology, but what are some of the significant technical challenges?

The roads sucked hard back then. A fast car would have been pointless. But there wasn't anything wrong with the propulsion technology. One of the cars mentioned in the linked article averaged 57 mph over a mile course, so it would have been rather more than that measured instantaneously at maximum speed.

We call those things white dwarfs, and they are quite bright. Eventually, they'll become black dwarfs, but the Universe isn't nearly old enough yet.

So you're saying that all you "normal" people are really relationship experts? Lots of people have relationship
problems, and a helpful tip or two might be the deciding factor in marginal cases. Even if your relationship is a happy one, who wouldn't want to grab some low hanging fruit (snickersnack!) and pump it up a notch?

Thumbing your nose at free (possibly useful) advice concerning as aspect of your life you presumably care about sounds like maladjusted behavior to me!

It's hard to see this being much of an impact, even for stressed sites with a lot of Chrome users; people don't usually sit there mashing the refresh button when their page won't load. Most folk will actually implement their own"back-off" feature, Sure, there are outliers, but this is a game of big numbers and average statistics.

Where this can help is with automated page loading. Your saved session has twenty tabs with pages from a single site? That's all loaded at once, in parallel in the browsers I know about. I imagine it can be a considerable load in some cases.

Yes, but Reagan rescinded that order. There was a rather nice breeder reactor that ran until Clinton defunded it, the Integral Fast Reactor.

You guys do read Slashdot, right?
story

Amen, brother! But you missed one. I long for the days when the kernel fit on a 3.5 inch floppy. A 720k one.

In Soviet Russia, the gov't wants YOU to use free/libre software!

I don't see where hybrids help here. The whole point is to use a smaller, more efficient engine, then add extra juice from the batteries at peak demand. Aircraft don't vary in their power demand by much once they get to cruising altitude. I didn't see this explained, but I've just started reading the links.

Maybe they save up a little juice and use it to help with taking off with the next flight? Short on details.

Hydrogen can be stored and converted to electricity when you need it.

This is in fact, precisely one of the bigger challenges with Hydrogen as an energy storage/delivery medium. It's not so easy to store it, or pipe it over long distances. Its molecules are so tiny that they diffuse through almost anything, leaking out and embrittling the tank or pipe in the process.

Or this one from about the same time. They were trying to develop a consumer version. When they gave up, it was due to a lack of interest (the heyday of SUVs!), not technical problems, from everything I've read.

It's so hard making a tent that works right. This'd be just the thing to keep the glare off!

In practice, discriminating torrent content is very difficult. And there's nothing stopping from going after all of it; the language is too vague. It might seem pointless, since such a fuss was made the first time around, but the next time, they'll have this nice bit of explicit policy to fall back on, and some of the voices raised before will not be as loud the next time, as fatigue and cynicism set in.

Speaking of cynics, why don't all you comment-posters invest that time you put into posting your rants into signing the petition linked to in the article, since we all know you didn't read it :)

That's the most extreme upper limit. Only a handful of these extremem events have been recorded. Furthermore, cosmic rays (like particles from solar wind) almost never impact you directly, unless you're in space. They interact with the atmosphere, creating showers of particles, which spread the energy over a large area. I'm not going to do the math now, but the useful figure for effecting electronics might be per square cm per year, at ground level. Most of the cross section of your computer wouldn't notice much if some ionizing radiation passed through it. The CPU and major chips are a pretty small portion of total area. The magnetic domains on your disk platters are probably large enough to be unaffected.