Hah. The other day a friend showed me his Android phone. The screen was black, in the middle there was this dumb looking LEGO robot lying on its back, something like this. "You're the computer whiz. What does this mean?" I looked at it for a moment, jabbed my finger repeatedly on the unresponsive little screen that has no buttons like a bird bumping against a window.

Then I said,

"It appears that clever engineers have managed to make a full color megapixel display that is capable of showing a whole chapter of text say absolutely NOTHING. The machine knows something is wrong, that's why it retrieved the image and is showing it. It knows what it was trying to do, what did not work as expected. There are details and helpful hints inside, but they decided that you wanted to see this dumb robot instead. These people are messing with your mind. They think you are stupid. They think you are easily confused and need to see a picture of a robot and a red triangle when something goes wrong. They don't trust you with details. They don't think you can handle the truth. And you know what? When you call them the person you speak to will probably not know any more than I do, they'll tell you to push some secret reset button and hope for the best. Well here's what you have to do. But does it show a diagram indicating where the reset button is? No, you're supposed to look at a dead robot carcass instead. Because you're nothing to them.

You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

While I was saying all of this, the robot disappeared and the phone rebooted.

People don't ask me for computer help much any more.

You did a fine job. They are not aware that they are modding for false reasons, they just think you're crazy, welcome to the club. And they haven't read enough on the subject.

The Greenhouse Effect page at Wikipedia doesn't help much here. It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier. To discover this you must visit Fourier's own page and see that "Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes."

So to them there is only one Greenhouse Effect and your definition does not fit, so it's a 'taking the Lord's name in vain' kinda thing.

Fourier deserves no ire for this disproved hypothesis, though it does present a challenge to modern editors and mules of consensus: there are two Greenhouse Effects. To honor Dr. Seuss we'll call them Thing One (Fourier's greenhouse) and Thing Two (the re-radiation explanation).

Once upon a time in the dark age of science, January 24, 2005, the Greenhouse Effect Wiki page was short and sweet. Thing One and Thing Two had equal billing in the introduction, although Thing Two "is a matter of some dispute". Then a section "The natural greenhouse effect" which actually described Thing Two and a section "Real greenhouses" for Thing One.

But the "Real Greenhouses" section is undergoing revision. here is the first round of edits and the page as it was then. It features a link to the provocative page Bad Greenhouse which dismisses the term re-radiation as 'nonsense' from a thermodynamical viewpoint and other Crazy Talk.

The Wikipedia discussion pages of these and subsequent edits are interesting and read like a heated Slashdot discussion (on a good day): Talk2, Talk3, Talk4, Talk5, Talk6. Some even wanted to abolish Thing One, or re-state both as 'conflicting' hypotheses. When the dust clears Thing One must describe the greenhouse for which it was named. And it would be really embarrassing to admit in the 21st century that we don't know how a greenhouse works.

All in all I'm pretty comfortable with Wikipedia's definition of Thing One. Thing Two I still consider to be -- as the Wiki page said back in 2005, "a matter of some dispute". CO2 is rising sharply and temp not so much or at all, depending where you look, and how closely you examine the 'adjustments' that have been made. And there are mechanisms unexplored as I've pointed out in other threads ... but as yet these are cautious days for science. People are crowing and squawking about almost-infinitesimal delta in a very complex system.

Joseph Fourier may have nailed Thing One and only glimpsed Thing Two but he really knew his way around noise and how slight miscalculations can perturb data. If he were alive today I would like to think that his voice would be urging caution in all things, especially jumping to 'settles' conclusions.

I, for one, would welcome the moderation of my new Slashdot AGW proponent overlords.

You nailed it. There are two evils here.

The first evil is that the taking of life is necessary. I personally believe this is a necessary evil, there should be such a thing as a 'capital crime', one for which death is the sentence. By no means should it be a fast track slam dunk from conviction to execution. People make mistakes and there must be time and opportunity to appeal, for new evidence or suppressed evidence to come to light.

To anyone who might think that life in prison without chance of parole is an acceptable alternative to execution, I beg you to try to distinguish it from human torture and slavery and ask yourself ... which is more enlightened: an eye-for-an-eye society in which the sentence is compatible with the crime ... or one that places human beings in bare concrete zoos for life? It is a tough question and I'm glad to see some thoughtful answers, especially those with opinions that differ from my own.

The second and more insidious evil is whitewashing the act of execution in ways that make it seem more 'palatable' or 'executioner-friendly'. Replacing the firing squad with a needle is just the lame substitution of one horror for another. What does that say about us? No, I do not believe it is of any value for the accused to suffer or be conscious of the throes of death once the moment arrives.

Dispense with the drugs, the gasses, the electricity, even the rope-hangin'. Drugs and electricity are heinous because due to human physiology they are unable to accurately deliver a precise and unequivocal moment of death. Hanging is particularly heinous, it is merely a form of beheading where the brain is guaranteed seconds of torment. I say we can dispense with that.

By all means use technology. Bring back the firing squad: multiple large caliber guns directed by computer software that targets the head and neck. The usual multiple enable buttons that seem to help several executioners sleep better at night (but why I'm not sure). Then a random delay, then the guns electrically fire in unison so the bullets arrive before the sound. No pain or even cognition for the accused, but lots of mess.

For the families of the condemned -- every funeral is a closed casket funeral. No amount of cosmetic surgery will re-create that peaceful, angelic innocent face lying in the casket, arms folded, that invites denial and confirmation bias.

And use Google Glass facial recognition software for the firing squad guns. I love Google but I also like to rattle their cages.

You beat me to it, you insensitive clod!

At least I get to supply the link: HELLO LAMPOST

Forget the talking lampposts and Wifi enabled potholes. Although it would be cool if traffic lights broadcast riddles and puzzles, awarding an immediate green light to the first driver to solve it.

My idea for a Smart City would be to re-vamp and modernize the CB radio concept, every vehicle would have a short range hands-free digital two way radio so drivers could speak to other drivers in close proximity: you could make general comments to all or incline your head towards a particular car and send a more private message. With a certain gesture after a reply was received, the system could 'lock' the connection so you could continue the conversation even after you leave the zone.

It's easy to see this as an absurd novelty that would be used to pass on road rage... and there would be a shake-down period in which that may be its most common use... but thinking past that I find a lot of promise in the idea. Pedestrians could join in. Cafes or other buildings could have a corner in which one could hear road-talk, or even participate. Little billboards would soon pop up, like a new era of Burma-Shave, that try to suggest topics or invite a response.

In other words, the Smartest thing to do is not award some sweetheart contract to a tech firm to 'redesign' the city at all. Don't mess with the damned city. Use technology to find new ways for the people in the city to communicate with one another. Every time we develop new technology that allows strangers with mutual interests to meet who would not otherwise meet (such as academia or the Internet) we take human evolution up a notch.

The only Smart City that I'd really want to live in would be one where all the buildings and road signs were on hydraulic struts, and everything bobs and dances like Toon Town.

A modern Richard Guindon cartoon that best represents this Slashdot story ... an urban legend ... [1998, archived] essay on teachers' and students' increasingly virtual role in a tech society ... a mad hunt for the original 1963 New Yorker cartoon that started it all ... and an ugly mouse squeak toy.

Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.

We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.

What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.

Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.

Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.

If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Of course you're right. Etching by laser on solid sheets of plastic or slow-corrosion metal is the thing. Just desperately trying to come up with ways in which 3D printing might be useful to salvage the time I've spent reading about it. Never mind all the time others have spent trying to make it work.

If you want to place a barrier between knowledge levels, call them 'magnification-stops' in your approach where certain technology and knowledge obtained by the years like 1700, 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000 is encoded with successive difficulty --- then if history is any clue you're best bet is to change medium and method at each stop.

Optics for example. The advancement from a lens allowing the eye to discern Mars clearly to one able to construct a great microscope may be an accident of local geology, quartz and silica, or a single individual's experiments in glass manufacture. There could even be an alternate history where mercury in spinning dishes is optics. You have a clean progression to 100x magnification with a single stage, then it takes compound lenses and take it to 1000x You can push it a little further by using filters to reduce the color component, but you hit the wall of visible light.

Now to break that Reading Rainbow 800-1000x barrier we're in the realm of coherent photons using lasers to 'read' (project and reflect through optics) or scatter (holography). And further on into using streams of electrons where the only usable means optick is electromagnetism shaped by precisely wound coils and some gruesome electronics.

Could there be a single object that is an Easy Reader through all possible optical resolutions, but also incorporates successive levels, the greatest of which is only readable with electrons? That is a challenge but do-able since you can read through things with electrons. The visible stages act as protection for this fragile inner layer.

Perhaps for the intermediate stages requiring laser technology the colorful yet color-challenged field of 2 dimensional holography might offer a solution... something that resembles Asimov's Prime Radiant without the computey stuff, where a coherent beam of laser light will scatter off of foil and project material onto the wall, and precise movement of the object or the beam will 'scroll'.

This being Slashdot, I have to suggest that at some point the Thing will might digital, where we apply leverage to Hamming and Huffman for encoding and error correction... BUT now the content is sub-coded in a series of arbitrary choices that represent our evolution of information technology... and not necessarily anyone else's. To one familiar with the optick perusal of language-symbols, going digital, which we've done gradually -- to those who have only our Prime Radiant as a guide -- it would be a wall of incomprehensibility that would take time to crack.

I just had this idea that at some low resolution text might offer a delicious recipe for Taco Sauce, and a tiny dollop of this concoction makes its way into a tiny space between the letters... completely obliterating the 13th century.

Completely losing the 13th century has happened before. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance (but not its present whereabouts) can be seen here in the brief clip from the 1975 movie "Rollerball".

If you obfuscate the boomy stuff, what will keep kids interested in science?

"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"

But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.

But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.

Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.

But that should be obvious too.

I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

Friend, you should condense your post a bit and submit it as a topic on its own: "Ask Slashdot: What form could the best modern Rosetta Stone take?" Rosetta not just for language cross-translation of course, but the general idea of knowledge preservation.

Reading this I think immediately of 3D printing technology. So far I have seen a few great uses for it, such as the printing of replacement parts necessary to keep something running or to fashion the unique precise shapes to replace body parts... and so many not-so-great or BLAH uses such as soap dishes, uncomfortable weird-looking chairs or (my un-favorite) guns that will some day explode in yer face because those 'casual' 3D printed molecular bonds are just not up to the challenge.

But a 3D printed book with pages of stable plastic and holes that are letters could still be be like-new and readable in 1000 years, if stored properly. It's DO-ABLE.

Hocus's Whats-The-Use Law of knowledge preservation:

When civilization is simple, the useful laws of nature are so damned obvious that no one wastes their time carving them in stone, so all you may read from that era is silly political fluff about kings and wars.

When civilization is complicated and knowledge immense, despite advances in technology no one bothers to create textbooks that might last more than 30 years because what's the use, at the end of that period they might be *slightly* incorrect. There's no viable business model for knowledge preservation that pays off in the short term. Most people are too distracted to sift through the noise to gather and present essential knowledge. Those few who do have the time are typically unable to produce a viable product (which is where 3D printing comes in).

So raw science data is DOOMED and WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE.

I go for your Rosetta stone at successive levels of magnification, though each level should be a separate object. Books you can read directly will be handed around casually, while 100x and 1000x texts must be carefully stored.

But there should be texts printed in all resolutions. In some hypothetical future dark age, nothing would jump-start the re-invention of precision optics faster than showing them a continuous spiral of text that recedes into optical "invisibility".

I think the boom stuff (gunpowder and runaway nuclear fission) should be represented on all levels with the benefits and hazards clearly indicated, because you do not want to encourage the formation of secret societies and tyrants who confiscate microscopes and go around to destroy all high resolution copies (except their own) to keep some temporary strategic advantage. Dynamite has helped us to build more infrastructure than it has destroyed. Far more nuclear fission has been released to keep us warm in Winter than to take human life. The more people aware of these possibilities the better tha chance that we will make the right decisions. If every classic civilization had run their own Alexandria Library and traded copies freely with it, so much more history would be available today.

I look forward an Ask Slashdot on the topic that explores it better than the one last June where the Whats The Use doom sayers seemed to defend the court against new ideas.

While Tandy TRS-DOS was my first OS, CP/M on Vector Graphic, Kaypro and Televideo systems was the first one I dove into. In the BDOS I could disassemble memory to instructions and actually figure out what was going on. CP/M was the 8-bit bread and butter of the 8080/Z80 age.

In 1980 at age 16 I wrote a proof of concept product, a TSR (terminate and stay resident') program for CP/M systems called DataCrypt. You'd load it on startup and be prompted for a pass phrase and it would hash the phrase, tuck itself into ~2k above your COMMAND.COM and terminate-resident, intercepting file I/O. When any running program created or opened a file matching one of several (user-settable) wildcard patterns such as $$??????.???, it would perform transparent crypt or de-crypt of each 128-byte sector.

So with DataCrypt resident you could use WordStar and work with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted documents. If the program used your primary name with a special extension (like *.$$$) for temporary files even those would be encrypted on disk.

I sent it out to several folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for review but got no bites. At the time there were few computer folk as interested in data security as I was. But even then I was aware that TRUE security was a long distance away. The prototype's CRC32/XOR snake oil encryption had only 32 bits of entropy, which is a wink and a chuckle these days. True DES encryption would have been a slow deal.

We'd call 'em overlays.

One project I did, a series of mods c.1981 to bring real POS invoicing to an early version of Peachtree Accounting, was a BEAR. It was written in MBASIC running under CP/M -- Interpreted tokenized BASIC running on a machine that started with a 64k transient program area. No extended memory then!

Minus OS call kernel, COMMAND.COM, minus BASIC interpreter, your program was born with ~32k to use in its lifetime. So 32k minus the size of the program itself left you with a memory heap for variables. The heap grew downward with every string assignment and when it bumped into the code there would be this pause for "garbage collection" while the heap was de-fragged and re-written to the top of memory again.

No comments, too much room! No long var names! You'd use CHAIN to jump to another program leaving vars in memory. But if you your were clever you'd carve out line number ranges and place temporary functions into 'overlays' that loaded over existing portions. When you did a MERGE no p-code optimization or block was going on here, any load command did its work line by line, it was like a really fast monkey typing in the program code.

So in place of Peachtree's default invoice which was clunky and required lots of input steps (mostly useless for cash sales) to implement a streamlined invoice was difficult. They use lots of strings. My first attempt worked great --- but every couple of line items the heap would touch and trigger global garbage collection -- ~3 to 5 seconds where the machine would be unresponsive. In those THREADLESS 8-bit days when garbage collection began your keyboard controller would save ONE keystroke but the rest would be LOST. This is a total wash. Clearly it needed a whole re-write.

The only way I could make the entry portion useable was to throw out the programming concepts that made things 'easy' (yet caused heap movement). Don't assemble a string of spaces, use a loop to emit them one CHR$() at a time. Don't assign to strings, pre-allocate a number of strings of reasonable length and use MID$() to replace its contents, keep a separate string length var so you can only emit the portion of the string that was being used.

It was sorta like coding in C, in BASIC. That was kind of a 'door' problem. But it worked. Then the world went CBASIC and all our problems magically vanished.

I tend to side with the pragmatic individuals here who are saying, it's bad enough that our modern historical record lacks the fine grain of Matthew Brady's silver emulsion plates and are generally USELESS for blow-ups of large groups of humans standing in groups --- "Mommy why does granny look like my LEGO people?"

In order to preserve what vibrant detail can be captured and push focus tricks into post-production where they belong, how about this,

A stereo multi-megapixel camera, where a second ccd+lens is on an outrigger that stores against the body but can be slid or swung out to human eye separation or better. It would click into position parallel with the main lens, but could also swivel outward and click precisely ~30,45 degrees out, so you could more easily build stitchable panoramas.

The operating modes:

1. Ultimate 3D HQ stereo photographs where the max resolution of both lenses is committed to memory, for panorama stitching or delaying 3D parallax calcs to post processing.

2. A series of more economical 2.5D modes from high to low resolution where a single photo is captured into memory --- but also --- a separate grey channel is saved, which is built by calculating parallax displacement of the pictures arriving from the lenses to the best of the camera's ability at max internal resolution, a smooth overlay that ranges from black=none=distant to nearby=white=close.

Your separate grey parallax channel saved in the 2.5 modes arrives into Photoshop ready to serve as a range selection mask so you can do these evil information-destroying transforms to your heart's content -- based on 'true' depth information.

'Designer' Drones
'Ubiquitous' Babies

or combine. Anything folded into the cause of 'good parenting', however tenuous, puts it off-limits culturally,

Drone Baby Monitor
Baby's First Drone

Marketing tags revisited,
1950s: Drone-A-Tron, Atomic Baby
1970s: 'Euro' Drones, 'Euro' Babies
1980s: Power Drones, Power Babies
1990s: My Little Drone, My Little Baby
2000s: Green Drones, Carbon Neutral Babies
2010s: 'Flava' Drones, Organic Babies

Perhaps Americans are uncomfortable these days generally. Was there an adequate control? Did Pew select a group to not ask any questions at all, just stare silently to observe for signs of fidgeting or restlessness?

Should
Comcast be allowed to
Control both what
Content you
Consume and how you get to
Consume it?"

'C' is for COOKIE that's good enough for me!

There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.

When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.

Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.

The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.

David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.

So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.

ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.

In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.

The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Until sustainable scalable fusion arrives and makes the heavens quake with the suddenness of its arrival, and makes the angels sing, at which time I will eat my hat.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate