caesium 137 bioaccumulates.

Concentrates its way up the food chain.

There is no safe minimum dose once it is in your body, slowly disintegrating, radiating into your organs and cells.

Cesium accumulates in your body because it's chemically similar to potassium, which your body needs for nerves to function (among other things). So it can accumulate no more than potassium does.

Potassium has a naturally occurring radioactive isoltope, K-40, which like Cesium undergoes both beta and gamma decay. The amount of K-40 in the typical human body contributes 4000-5000 becquerel to your natural radiation dose. So your contention that there is "no safe minimum dose once it is in your body" is clearly wrong. Everyone who has ever lived has been exposed to a relative "huge" amount of radiation from K-40 throughout their entire lives, and our species is still here.

The team found a high of just 8 becquerels of radiation per cubic meter in ocean samples off the coast.

A becquerel is the radioactive decay of a single atom per second. Your body has 4400 becquerels of radiation due to a naturally-occurring radioactive isotope of Potassium. If you drank a liter of seawater that would mean Fukushima has increased your radiation dose by 0.008 becquerel - less than a 0.0002% increase in radiation internally in your body. This is literally less than a drop in a bucket. The salt is far more likely to kill you than the radiation.

Politics aside, how is it that republicans want to fuck over everyone but the privileged and corporate, yet get such widespread support from the people who will suffer most from their policies?

Because the Republican stance is more nuanced than the "Republicans are evil and want to eat your babies" crowd portrays.

Why don't other countries have a net neutrality problem? Because they have competition among their ISPs. If an ISP tries to deliberately slow down a popular website to extort the site for extra payments, it doesn't put pressure on the website to pay. Instead it puts pressure on the ISP's customers to switch to another ISP. In most of the rest of the world, any ISP trying to pull this stunt puts itself out of business.

It only works in the U.S. because these ISPs have government-granted monopolies over the local customer base. The customer can't flee to a different ISP because there is none - the local government has made it illegal for there to be a competitor. Essentially, net neutrality is more government regulation to solve a problem caused by government regulation.

That's not to say it can't work (it can - if you convert Internet service into a utility). But the Republican position isn't that the goal of net neutrality is wrong. It's that net neutrality is the wrong way to go about achieving that goal - layering on more government regulation to try to fix a problem entirely caused by government regulation in the first place.

However, that was just par for the course for much of Asia, barring Japan.

Japan is much the same, they are just much better at hiding it.

2) I still believe population is generally the key factor. Although it will never happen, without population control the hole in the bottom of the energy bucket will just keep getting wider and wider.

Why do you think population control is necessary? It already happens on its own. There's a very strong inverse correlation between a country's economic development and population growth. Most developed countries are at or close to zero population growth. A few like Japan and Germany are even shrinking in population. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East. (Also, about half the "population growth" in the U.S. and EU is from immigration, not from people making babies.)

Something about living in a modern, developed economy makes people have fewer kids; probably the high cost of rearing and educating said kids in such an economy. There's no need for population controls - we just have to work at modernizing the rest of the world and people will control their population on their own.

A price drop on an item isn't deflation. Deflation is a general drop in price across all goods, indicating your currency is becoming worth more. When your currency starts increasing in value, people stop trying to spend it and start shoving it under the mattress to wait for it to become worth more. That is bad.

More precisely, they tend to do less productive work while trying to live more off of the appreciating value of the currency. Since the economy is based on people being productive, this behavior tends to tank the economy. Like trying to save gas by shutting off the engine of a car when it hits a downhill grade. If the engine can be restarted instantly the moment the downhill is over, it can be a good strategy. But the "engine" that is the world economy can take months or years to "restart" and "rev up" back to speed. Nowhere near fast enough to respond effectively, and you end up with a stalled car at the bottom of the hill. So in the long-term, deflation is bad.

http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

It's U.S.-centric, but it also includes data for a lot of major non-U.S. cities. Instead of having to guess how much power your solar panels will generate, the site uses latitude and historical weather data to estimate how much your panels will generate. Northern parts of central Europe (like Germany) tends to have pathetic ROI on solar (capacity factor around 0.10). But for lower latitudes in Central Europe you should be able to hit close to 0.15 - about the average for the continental U.S.

Least-effort solution (minimum number of seat position changes) is for the person who uses the toilet to move it into the configuration they need it in, then leave it.

Least-agony solution (minimum number of gross incidents) is to always lower the seat after use. However, the fact that "men won't follow" this solution is merely coincidence - this solution happens to coincide with the configuration women always use so they can never be guilty of transgressing it. When I was living alone I had a dog who liked to drink out of the toilet. Consequently, I always told guests to lower the lid of the toilet after using it. My female guests always left the lid up. About half the men would lower it (probably due to being scolded about it by women all too often).

Yeah. Screwup by the fisheries officer. If he had secured the box with some sort of official "evidence" tape to make it tamperproof, this never would have gotten to this point. Seal the box, get the signature of the accused testifying that they have the sealed box, and it's ok to leave it in their possession until they get to shore. (Most of these fisheries enforcement officers work in small/medium high-speed power boats, so it would be impractical for them to take aboard all the illegal fish they find for safekeeping as evidence.)

However, in this case they have the testimony of the crew that the captain ordered them to throw out the (purportedly) undersized fish. So I think the Feds are still going to win based on that. It's not solely the officer's word that a crime was committed.

However, in 1990, the DoD decreased the accuracy of the system - before the start of the First Gulf War.

That was the original plan. But during the first Gulf War so many soldiers were relying on commercial GPS units (military ones being in short supply) that they just turned off selective availability for the duration of the war.

This chip has a base clock speed of 1.2GHz, but is burstable through Turbo up to 2.9GHz.

If it's like their first M processor, the turbo boost mode only works when using a single core. i.e. You can run one core at 2.9 GHz, or you can run both cores at 1.2 GHz. That's the price you pay for the extremely low TDP. In contrast, an i5-4250U has a base clock of 1.3 GHz, can turbo boost to 2.3 GHz on two cores, and 2.6 GHz on a single core.

The concept that it's "underhanded" to use espionage to steal secrets from your competitors (be they people, companies, or countries) is very Western. In the East, it's considered fair play and expected behavior, and your own damn fault for not protecting your secrets if they get stolen. Employees are frequently fired if they have an opportunity to steal secrets from a competitor, are ordered to do so, and refuse.

Oddly, the concept gets reversed if the espionage is overt. If you're doing it openly like the U.S. was when it flew EP-3s just off the coast of China in International waters to collect electronic intel, the East considers that to be dishonorable, while the West considers it playing by the rules.

I don't know where the poster got their numbers from, but an average coal plant is around 500 megawatts not 1000. This would imply that you only need 500 of the hammerfest machines to equal a powerplant.

That thought crossed my mind too. But a 1 MW tidal generator is not going to generate 1 MW. On average it's going to generate closer to 0.64 MW (2/pi if you do the integral of a sinusoudal current flowrate) before taking into account biological fouling, maintenance, etc. So TFS is still correct that it's about a 1000:1 ratio.

Without changing anything about products themselves, statistically significant numbers of people will select the more advertised one more often.

Marketing is social poison.

You're conflating marketing with poor decision making. Marketing in itself is an essential part of a functioning economy. If you invented the wheel but nobody else knew about it, nobody would ask you to make wheels for them, nobody would copy them, and the idea would die when you did. Likewise, even if you don't change anything about the products themselves, if marketing informs people of a real advantage of one product over the others, it can cause statistically significant changes in people's purchasing decisions - for legitimate reasons. That is, marketing can cause the effect you describe simply because more advertising means more people are informed of one product's real advantages over the other.

Marketing becomes a poison when it's used to make people choose a product because the ad made them feel better about it. Not because marketing is bad per se, but because it's being used to leverage people's penchant for making poor decisions when an appeal is made to their emotions.

"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."

One of my favorite quotes, from Mary Shafer, SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.