"disenchanted/upset customer"? Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.

My sympathies are with the Comcast tech support on this one. As bad as Comcast can be, which is at least 300 milli-Hitlers bad, the tail-end of the worst people to call customer support can be worse still. Or just too stupid to be allowed to own a computer.

That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin. As evidence, I'd point to the yanking of a substantial portion of the OSX team onto iOS development to get those features added. I think he was just putting a positive spin on his not-quite-finished product. "Reality Distortion Field"

Brady Haran is neither, but he puts actual scientists on his YouTube channels, and they talk about honest science (and occasional amusing trivia), with no CGI or celebrity required. No politics, no manufactured quotes, many Nobel prizes.

I enjoyed the first few, but the latest book was rubbish and I've entirely lost interest in the story thanks to the pace of his writing. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of original plot ideas, so it's mostly about character moments, and you have to keep that sort of writing coming for me to stay interested in those characters.

The series, however, I rather enjoy. While it's probably the first series to ever make me say "there is such a thing as too much gratuitous nudity", the pacing is vastly better than the books, the important character moments are all there, and the gaps between seasons aren't so long that I forget who everyone is.

It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.

Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.

The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.

It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.

No, I think it is completely unacceptable that we don't have a permanent solution in place. I was just responding to TWX's post - which to my reading implied that the spent fuel requires a lot more attention than it actually does.

The pools aren't necessary forever - 5 to 10 years and then they can be moved to dry casks. Already, over 20% of spent fuel is stored this way. Hardly permanent, as the casks need to be reconditioned/rebuilt every 30-100 years - but not the active process that you describe.

At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.

A recent GAO report said that $106 BILLION was spent by the US government through 2010 on global warming research. If you figure that was through the end of 2010, that was still 4 years ago, so the number is now much larger.

That number absolutely dwarfs even the imagined amount of money that fossil fuel companies have been accused of spending in campaigns against "climate change". I mean it's easily more than 2 orders of magnitude larger.

Even scientists are human, and they are smart enough to know which side of their bread the butter is on.

Maybe where you live, but the cost of my iPad 2 3G service is $15 a month. On top of that, if you I've in an urban centre, you're probably well covered by WiFi anyway. So that $15 goes quite a long way. I can pay for 2 years of 3G service at the cost of what a Windows laptop would cost me, with the benefit being (wait for it)...I don't have to carry a crappy sub-$300 Windows laptop with me everywhere I go. The EC2 Windows instance living in the cloud I use most frequently is a quad-core with 24GB of RAM and a few TB of hard disk space -- and you're not going to find a cheap sub-$300 Windows laptop with those sorts of specs.

Yaz

Of course there is. You install an RDP or VNC client on your phone or tablet, take a few minutes to setup a cloud OS instance on your favourite cloud service (EC2, Azure, whatever), and connect. You now have the full PC experience on your phone or tablet, running whatever you want, from wherever you want, for however long you want it.

Yaz