Create a material that is like an aerogel only that dissipates over time in a vacuum. Sticky is good too. Expands after an impact is also good for better LEO aerobraking effects if cleaning LEO paths. In upper paths make it selectively reflective (requires stable insertion and planned impacts ...) then it sails to a safe place or destruction. But simplest is just a material that will entangle, that also dissipates in a vacuum. Set a quantity of it in retrograde orbit that you want cleared. Impact with orbiting junk, momentum is reduced. Pretty fireworks in the upper atmosphere. Remaining material that missed the collecting of something dissipates harmlessly.

France has mandated that they be extremely easy to hack, and outlawed modern Unix systems... Not to mention all manner of ancillary software designed to secure private data (some of which is used to comply with EU directives!)

My dream of grunting like a caveman to control my computer is realized...

I suggest you consider lamp mantles from camping lanterns and gas lamp posts. Much higher yield of Thorium. Then encase the extracted Thorium in depleted uranium in an asymmetric manner. Pack all this in a graphite cylinder with hundred of layers of bimetal sheet thermocouples in a massive series parallel schema. The interstitial material should be silicon dioxide and clay, but make sure it is boron free. Bop down to your local ceramics custom paint shop and borrow their kiln to "fire" the setup into one solid mass to make your own homemade traveling wave radio-thermal-generator. After testing the output of the first one, proceed to manufacture as many as required for your electricity needs. They are after manufacture virtually pollution free. (May we suggest a 1/2 inch stainless steel vessel welded closed around the individual cells, oh, and assure that you use aluminum or silver wiring and avoid copper in the construction.) You may wish to purchase your own kiln after determining the number of units you'll need and the cost of firing them outside of your own facility. Also consider a micro-controller for each cell to monitor its health and power output, as well as a small conditioning circuit to match the outputs into a seamless AC source to minimize interface issue with standard house generation, and provide minimal common failure points. As the controllers will need to be interfaced as a network, you may as well distribute the decisions across all the micro-controllers, thus ending up with a beowulf-cluster of "smartRTG"(tm)s

Actually we sort of do just that. RTG modules have survived range safety officers blowing up space bound rockets only to be recovered and reused. And the most modern nuke plant designs are designed so that a fully loaded commercial jet can impact them without critical damage to the plant. The way military would best take out a nuke plant would be to destroy critical transmission or generation facilities if possible, without the release of nuclear material, or excessive damage to the plant, unless we are talking the Mideast of course. But rational (if that is possible) warfare wants to damage the military capability without excessive damage to civilian targets. We can take out, for example, the power transmission lines cheaper and easier than taking out the nuke plant itself, and if it is a war of territorial aggression, we preserve the nuke plant for occupation later. I am in concordance with some of your other ideas though. We store nuclear waste in reinforced vessels in fenced off sections of what used to be parking lots because the plant operators can't get permits to take the waste elsewhere, and the appropriate disposal sites are blocked from completion as well by people who strategically time the protests after the approval process happens, relying on the courts to stop them after money time and effort are committed but before they open their doors. I would personally like to see a "It's too late to protest more in the courts, file with the regulators." date in the approval procedures.

I'd suggest that we build a series of reactors near White Sands NM then. It is already contaminated far more than any nuke plant failure could cause. But can we say the same for dams. Burst dams have killed hundreds of thousands. Coal plants? They release more radiation each day than 3 Mile Island did. (And so do granite buildings) Chernobyl was a very bad design. North America has no plants with anything close to that. Even the oldest plants online have more safety systems. And, 3 Mile Island was really stupid operator error. Another nearby nuclear plant spotted the release hours before the TMI crew reacted. Initially Peach Bottom called them and TMI ignored them rather than checking into it.

We have limits to what we protect against. Plan against a century high water mark for floods and one will come along that is greater. Some calculations place the Japanese quake at 9.1. That is not an expected value or even close for the area. We have historic highs and lows all the time. So you can't plan for absolute safety.You plan for a statistical safe zone. And as had been previously mentioned. We'll lose more people to rolling blackouts from heat waves this summer than from all the people lost due to all the nuclear accidents in history.

And no one seems to speak of the environmental impact of these "100% pollution free" solutions. Like covering several square miles of delicate ecology with solar collectors or mirrors, or the strip mines to extract rare earths for high efficiency solar cells, or that hydrogen releases expected from the so called hydrogen economy will result in depletion of the ozone faster than CFCs ever could. In the meantime even one of the Greenpeace founders has gotten behind nuclear power as the safest and most eco-friendly power solution. We have many many newer and safer designs than the ones from the seventies that represent the latest of the US plants in operation. Instead we develop them for overseas operators. And Canada has what is likely the most inefficient but safest design. The CANDU reactor fails safe. But so do pebble bed reactors. When they lose cooling they slow down fission reactions instead of them speeding up if cooling is lost in a conventional hot water reactor. Personally I'd like to see the Intellectual Ventures wave reactor get an NRC license. But that is years away. I watched as Seabrook in NH was being built and the same protests that happen today, happened then and the cost went through the roof. So much so they didn't complete the project and not all the assets were able to be brought online. If the public looked at the tradeoffs like dams damage to the ecology and the risk of a dam bursting and that the WY wind power pilot farm eliminated a sub-spiecies of migrating birds, to tidal power damage to estuaries and so on, nuclear is the clear winner. We also need to make it easier to process the waste products or design nuclear plants (like the wave reactor) that minimize the created waste. It is somewhat perverse that purposely create radioisotopes for medicine while those same isotopes could be refined from existing "waste". So America needs to stop being driven my rule of the mob and proper science needs to be considered with all the tradeoffs and ignoring the psuedo-science and FUD. We have the technology to make safe nuclear power (well orders of magnitude safer than a coal plant with negligible radioactive release in comparison to the vast quantities released by coal plants world wide, along with all the rest of coals nastiness. (Hey coal can be preprocessed to make it cleaner too and burnt while containing the radioactive material released in burning, but the cost gets higher and the power companies are not required to do so, so they don't.) But with all that except for natural gas which adds to greenhouse gases (mind you, not a bad thing, but that's another argument thread) nuclear is the cleanest power we have, and natural gas just can't supply all the needed energy demand.

If Apple (where Tim Cook, interim leader of Apple, has been outed as gay) removes this App for gay bashing, then all the religious apps will need to be removed to satisfy the atheists, "sexy" male oriented apps removed for the feminists and vice versa (although straight males seem to have an attachment to lesbian sexuality), and so on until the PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals, oh no, the first amendment died that day and that other PETA won in court), well those guys demand all the animal cruelty Apps be removed (i.e., it has an animal image therefore encourages animal exploitation. So no more Penguin Catapult or Angry Birds will remain. All in All after everyone is done objecting the Apple "App Store"(tm) will look as barren as the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phone Applet Market.

Stop the political correctness overreaching because they're well beyond the point of affecting my individual rights. It is equal protection under the law, not the orwellian equal protection for all but some are more equal than others ...

This is a bad decision.This is the wrong direction. Approve .kids as a TLD. .xxx only creates a percieved value that the rest of the Internet is safe. But local regulations and laws vary so much it will never be able to be enforced. And on top of that you have created a gold mine where the registrar of .xxx can charge whatever the want, domains will have conflicts registering in the one .xxx tld where in the rest of the Internet they have the same mark for different organizations in .net and .com, etc.

By having a .kids domain the registrar can be held liable for policing the registrations they allow. And you simply limit the kids to .kids TLD. That does force major sites to have a kid safe version of representative content. Of course, again, laws vary worldwide on whats acceptable.

The most responsible action would be for parents to take control and responsibility for their kids actions on the Internet. It is not too tough. And it is their role to guide their child's development.

To pass this to government is akin to "It takes a village to raise an idiot."

< Ad hominium debate attack="follows" >
Perhaps it can be attributed to the ICANN not understanding sex as a business, or, well, sex at all ...
< / Ad Hominum debate >

So now I am free to teach my own theory that 1+1 = 3 for very large values of 1!!!!

I am a Direct TV subscriber since near the beginning. (Viacom messed up too many times and I canceled, as they were disconnecting on the pole, coincidence was with me and I chatted to the guy saying I was dissatisfied. he said well, there is our cable comany, then there is yours, with a smirk. I pulled out the Direct TV receiver boxes and said I had already chosen mine ... He'd not seen a direct broadcast sat dish yet. I told him it was about 1 hour to set up. He seemed not happy.)

But I digress due to old man syndrome (in my day we tied an onion to our belt as was the fashion of the day ... no wait) When Comcast came around and hooked up our Internet, they tried to sell us the cable TV package as well, but I said I was happy with DTV. Well, a few days later and about once a year since, Comcast has offered me free basic cable because we have a business Internet connection. They reason I suspect is so we'd no longer meet the 90 days since subscribing to cable rule for certain of the DTV packages with local sports and local networks (and distant networks if you're grandfathered in). But yes, all service providers say they have the same rules for everyone, but loss retention and new customer sales have extraordinary latitude to make exceptions. If you want to fight them. But In the above case I have a nice 3 inch portable LCD TV. Oh, and TYING is illegal in some jurisdictions and legal in others and product dependent in almost all.

The second case is not true. There are two methods to load software outside the App store. Note GPL does not require tools or equipment used to be free.

• First - jailbreak the phone. Then your world is opened. And it is legal to do. There are risks the user assumes for this, but that is normal.
• Second - Get a developer license. Pay Apple $99 a year to develop software for the iPhone. Build the App from scratch, or well lets just say if you're a legit developer and your device is flaged for developer use, certain other venues are open. Which you can discover elsewhere

And open source licensed under BSD/MIT/many more ... That is available as a resource to use for App Store Apps. No software that I have used (but experiences vary) has refused to give me access to a copy of the open source items they used even as they modified them.

Lastly, I am actually looking to modify the GPL v2 text (as allowed by FSF) to accommodate the App Store (tm)Apple, Google and Microsoft market place (Google is sort of easier, but maybe not for long after the virus-ware there). Interested in helping me and a lawyer willing to donate some time? write me at the very disposable email address slashlegalhelp @ chammy.info . After a few weeks this will not be monitored.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge the need to distinguish the various aspects of computer knowledge that is useful for a task by splits into different disciplines. I propose that we consider

• Software Engineering - The generic goal of manipulation of software to accomplish a goal, so object oriented design, basic logic, basic math, and a general acceptance as axiomatic the tenets of "good software design" to prevent obvious problems
• Computer Science - The study of the more abstract aspects of the problem sets, such as proving software correct, p v np, etc. so higher level math and calculus and in some cases differential analysis.
• Computer Operations - The "underwater basket weaving" related curriculum for those who are more challenged. This would be the college level credit courses for Word and other Microsoft Office products. The course of study that is popular in some institutions but whose graduates are more likely to be admin assistants than productive software authors.
• Computer Hardware Design - These are folks who not only should know theoretical computer science, but should also have even broader mathematics background and a smattering of graduate level physics at the post grad level of the curriculum.

I'd also offer minors or sub-specialties in graphics, which is math intensive, and game design, where knowledge of physics is good so you know what rules to break, and where you need some psychology as well. And then a security sub-specalization, and many more. But the one thing this article does invoke is the need to define a better set of characteristic goals for the degree. And anything that requires a for credit "Office" course really needs to be rethought by the schools board of regents. If you're going to be programming nuke plant safety systems, you better be smart enough to pick up how to use office while typing papers up in the quad without any lectures. Of course feel free to RTFM.

As a point of reference in the varying needs, I worked for a physics department that analyzed spark chamber lab data. This involved taking their sets of differential and other equations and creating code to implement the various tests. So if you didn't know diff eqs you could fake it, but if you knew them you could write code that didn't just mirror their equations, which in some cases results in non-deterministic run times, and you could create software that performed equivalent operations within the accuracy limitations of the incoming data and was deterministic. That takes a more in depth knowledge of theory of computing as well as advanced math. Of course if you are just programming financial transaction software, well, no wait, that is likely more important, and so you need to know security aspects of software so you don't leave bugs to be exploited by hackers. So bad example, so then maybe if you write the 99% of iPhone Apps that don't pay back the cost of the developer SDK license, sure you don't need much math back ground or even advanced theory. But for real world problem solving we just open up a whole nasty can of worms as we take the science out of computer science. And is training a computer hack even worth the cost of getting or giving a four year degree, can't we just leave this to the associates degree from some obscure community college (and that's hack not hacker please!).

Even music majors know the importance of math and use it for transposition of keys and scales.

Is a post saying the other posts are off topic off topic itself? In any case I posted on topic in about 5 minutes in the future from this post.