What? I tell my friends to blow away the competition all the time. What's wrong with that?

"Telecommunications sales manager Saad Allami says..."
Oh, wait, there you go.

Then there's games like ARMA2 Free which gives you basically a free version of ARMA2 with lower quality textures. Then there's TF2, which allows you to play the game normally and get drops as normal.

The type of laser you'd put up in orbit to get rid of orbital debris would only be good for taking out objects in orbit. It wouldn't have any utility in attacking ground-based installations, because the beam would scatter.

Now, it *could* be used against space stations and space vehicles, I'll grant that.

Problem is, Thor is hilariously expensive. Doing some basic calculations, each kinetic rod strike (given the figures listed on Wikipedia) has an impact energy of around 10 tons of TNT. For the same cost of launching that amount of tungsten into orbit on the cheapest launcher available, you could buy 10 KT worth of JDAM with GPS guidance packages. Plus, the instant you launch it, everybody knows you have it- that plasma sheath is not exactly subtle, and radars would pick it up. Hard to pass off an object arriving at Mach 10 as "stealth bomber" without admitting that A) Project Thor is a Thing, or B) Aurora never got retired.

...Okay, and? Where's the issue with that, exactly?

This doesn't make me feel "safe". It makes me feel like a prisoner in my own country.

That's the best kind of story!

Free as in beer, not free as in freedom.

I can't help but think you might be able to do some cool things if you taped a Wii Motion Plus remote to a Kinect and waved it around. Easy all-aspect 3-D?

If somebody walked up to you and said, "We're going to be building a new experimental reactor design in your backyard, funded by Bill Gates", would you give it the thumbs up?

Uh, point of fact, the evacuations are mandatory. There are capital-L Laws in place globally that enforce the amount of radiation that one can be exposed to for various situations, and they are very strictly enforced. They didn't have a choice, and still, they didn't quit.

I don't know about the TWR design, but the pebble bed reactor design basically put flecks of uranium oxide inside graphite balls and use that to generate heat. That heat goes through the wall of the vessel they're contained in, heating the water, which turns the turbine. If there's a failure in a pump somewhere, you drain the primary coolant loop and leave the pebbles. There's no way the heat of the uranium could cause any sort of problem, and because there's no water anymore, you can't get an explosion.

I'm kinda getting an Uplink vibe here, with all these "X was hacked" "Another X was hacked, the government is taking it very seriously" on and on and on.

I'm sorry, this isn't a story. This is a blog entry, and a short one at that.

They're doing some crazy testing to make sure that it won't interfere. They're not going to deploy a technology that could take down the entire US without making damn sure it won't. Besides, Garmin's guys are the ones saying it'll mess everything up- testing sponsored by LightSquared shows that is has a small effect, if any. I don't think they'd bias the tests- most of those labs, if not all, are good labs.