Check out the logo for AVG antivirus. Even though they aren't exactly identical, they are so close that I predict a trademark lawsuit. I don't know if AVG would actually *win*, but I bet they try.

Hey, has anybody mentioned Mothra yet?

We do not know that this is forever. Natural Selection pressures which lead to the development of larger forewings my over the next few decades lead the butterflies right back to the larger wingspans. Or not.

That's evolution. There is no *should* - there is only what is; and what is, is constantly changing. Bigger wings, smaller wings, it's all the same to me, until you can show me species *dieing out*, or having abnormally high rates of birth defects (and smaller wings are NOT a birth defect if they otherwise function normally), cancers, etc.

We should keep watching, with interest, what happens in the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima, but so far, the evidence doesn't suggest catastrophic failure of life, nor is it likely too - the increase in background radiation was temporarily very high, but quickly subsided as the radiactive substances released by the plant dispersed and dilluted.

Finally, I will need a chance to look in more depth at this "study", but I have to wonder if they really proved these changes were due to Fukushima, and not due to something else which was co-temporal (e.g. result of selective pressures do to local ecological changes due to the tsunami; or possibly from the lots of chemical contamination of the environment due to the tsunami washing out industrial facilities, hospitals, etc).

As others have said, I'm not sure that 11-Venn is useful for most people's comprehension, but I'd love to have it on a t-shirt. Mathematicians come up with some awesome abstract art, sometimes.

Yeah, more or less, FTTN is probably as good a classification as any. I live in an apartment building with like 40 apartments. I believe the entire building is serviced by a single fiber. However, I am also on the lowest speed tier they offer for the fiber service. I think it goes up to like 100/10 as the top tier, but that's pretty pricey. Inside the building, it essentially uses a high-speed form of DSL on the building's telephone lines to get the signal to each apartment - and television service over the coax lines.

I'm currently lucky in that I'm in a pretty small part of Cincinnati, OH that is currently served by Cincinnati Bell's fiber-optic service, so I get 10/2 service through them. The place where I find having the extra speed is nice is that I can better "multi-task". Previously, with slower-speed Internet offerings, if I was, say, downloading a large file (like a Linux distro .iso or game download on Steam or Direct2Drive), I could read webpages, of course, though they would load a bit slower, but I couldn't, for example, watch full-resolution Netflix or Hulu video (the resolution would downgrade pretty often).

With the higher speed offering, I can watch HD video streams while downloading stuff in the background, or have multiple file downloads going and they'll all download pretty fast, etc.

That's kind of nice - but I agree with the parent that it's not necessarily worth an extra $30/mo - but for me, the 10/2 tier on the fiber optic package is only $40/mo total, which is the same as I'd be paying for the lowest tier on Time-Warner Cable (which also offers comparable speeds), and I think is only about $10/mo more than I was paying for CB DSL (which was 5/1, IIRC) previously.

So, most organic compounds break down over time in the environment. Won't caffeine also break down? At what sort of rate does it break down?

The only way I'd really be worried about caffeine in the water is if it's going to keep accumulating forever, or at such a high rate that it reaches meaningful concentrations.

*Whoosh*

It doesn't really matter the reason. If property owners can legally restrict your use of camera flash, they can restrict other uses of technology too - for pretty much any reason they wish.

I'm not sure if the size of population matters - with more population, you have more money. So the question is, how does the economics of the system scale on a per-capita basis?

If it's affordable on a per-capita basis for 1400 people, why not 140 million people?

It's an interesting experiment at a small scale which will help answer either if solar is viable (technically and financially) at a smaller scale, or not.

I would point out that I doubt that this tiny pacific island has much in the way of heavy industry, however. I think wind and solar could potentially (if they get cheap enough), become a larger portion of the U.S. and other developed nations economies (perhaps something like 40-50% of total generation. I don't think for an industrialized nation, it can become 100% of the power grid - industry uses just too much power.

Also - I wonder how much air conditioning is used on that island? I imagine that, since historically their electric has been expensive, they probably largely haven't depended a lot on A/C? I also wonder what the weather is like there? South Pacific, I believe, is pretty much warm year 'round - but does it ever really get stiflingly hot like it does in places on the mainland (in Ohio, where I live, and surrounding states, back at the end of June and beginning of July, we had 2 or 3 weeks of 100+ degree days).

As someone else pointed out - you are free to use Wifi [em]outside the Olympic Park[/em] which is private property. You are only allowed on the grounds according to the rules by which they setup and you agree to when you purchase a ticket? Don't like the rules - then you become a trespasser and they eject you from the Park.

It sucks, but it would seem to be quite legal. They aren't regulating wireless spectrum, per se, they are regulating access to their property.

So, uhh, I'm a bit confused how anyone would provision outside internet access to their WiFi hotspot in the olympic park? The only answer which comes to mind is phones with built-in WiFi hotspots - but in Britain, if you're getting your phone data connection from BT (which you've paid for), why would they be able to stop you from using it?

It is, after all, a BT wifi hotspot which they have been paid for.

Well, if you're phone is getting service from BT, your phone in hotspot mode may possibly qualify as a sanctioned wifi hotspot. Interesting question, that.

1) Do you really understand how much power a nuclear reactor generates every day? A single decent mine can produce enough fuel each year to power multiple power plants.

I saw a nuclear engineer make a post once about a nuclear fuel enrichment facility in France (I believe it was called Georges-Besse). This was a gas diffusion plant. IIRC, he said it used the power output of four nuclear reactors to enrich enough fuel to run all of France's nuclear reactors (according to Wikipedia, there's 57 reactors in service).

So, you would far more than 'break-even' using power from nuclear plants to mine, transport, and enrich fuel. You might understand why that's the case if you can wrap your head around the mind-blowing fact that a pound of fissile material has the energy of over a million pounds of fossil fuels.

The problem is, with current nuclear economics, the fuel is *already* "cheap" - most of the costs of nuclear, from what I'm told, are the upfront costs of getting a nuclear plant sited, approved, constructed, then interest charges on the loans used to build the reactors when the construction inevitably hits delays from anti-nuke lawsuits designed to add a year or two to the construction schedule, etc.

The fact that it costs something like $5Bn-$10Bn per GW. Compared to that the fuel is already almost free, and making it cheaper won't really change the cost of nuclear-generated electricity.

So, I think GE just plans to increase its profit margins on fuel - I mean, if they are the exclusive licensee of the Australian patents and trade secrets on this tech, and because of proliferation concerns the government basically gives them additional levels of secrecy protection beyond normal IP protections, I don't see there being a lot of market pressure on them to sell the fuel any cheaper than their competition, do you?

I found this with a quick Google search:

http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/laser.html

That mentions the process as being Australian, so I'm going to conclude that is likely the same process you refer to.

Looks like, at least in the US, it hasn't been buried. Maybe in AU they buried it, dunno.