A 1 minute dose close to 3000 Ci of Co-60 is intense enough to be 50% lethal within 2 weeks with medical care. The article mentioned a 30 second dose being 50% fatal -- its biology so it is not exact science. A five minute exposure is 100% lethal within 2-days. During that 5 minute exposure the victim would start vomiting, suffer seizures and spasms, and start losing mental faculties. This isn't a cancer in 10 year type of terror. This is almost immediate and monstrous.

I would not characterize the loss of Co-60 as Media FUD. There is some stuff on the planet that truly is scary.

I love it when liberals say "Republicans think this or do that". Demonstrates a total lack of understanding of groups and susceptibility to propaganda. Republicans have their corporate welfare types, libertarian types, religious wackos, and atheists, and others. The subsets of the various groups makes for an intricate Venn diagram. When one of those yahoos speaks, they're not likely speaking for me.

How much a utility pays for co-generated power isn't a left versus right issue. You have a government regulated monopoly, the utility, which owns both generation and transmission facilities, arbitrarily setting the price for power from co-generators. Perhaps the transmission lines need to be a government regulated monopoly with every generator and co-generator paying for access to the transmission lines. This really doesn't appear to be a solar power issue but one about who controls the life blood of our society, electricity.

Remember NASA was originally created through the cannibalization of military programs such as the X-15. Also recall that NASA actively discouraged the development of commercial space launchers to drum up business for its space shuttle. It purposely delayed permits for the commercial sales of Atlas and Titan rockets. I personally worked on reusable launchers and cheap satellites only to be told on multiple occasions to cease work or my company would never receive another NASA contract. If you're a space company, NASA was the only game in town. TRW created a million pound thrust engine for $40K (it had limited re-use -- they fired it 3 times on the San Juan Capistrano test stand). It went nowhere because of NASA.

Now also note that NASA's management and culture is incompatible with space exploration. We lost two space shuttles through wishful thinking and shortcuts. In this case it is hard to distinguish treason from incompetence.

Given NASA's history of actually impeding the development of space, their demonstrated incompetence, and our national debt, we're past due selling NASA off. We need to beef up other means of funding space research. Think of the Ansari X prize. NASA exists to perpetuate itself without regard to benefits to the nation.

Stallman is being silly again. The cloud is like a giant parking lot for data. If you leave your data unlocked, of course someone will steal it. Encrypt everything, including the unimportant, so you don't need to remember what's encrypted and what's not. Route your data through anonymizing servers, even your Amazon transactions.

Everyone needs to use encryption, not just the political activists and child pornographers. You have bank statements and health records to protect. No one needs to know what you buy but you. If the world knows what you buy and need, like your collection of garden gnomes, the price of garden gnomes will go up.

Just because you encrypt everything does't mean you can't share. Encryption keys can be split and shared. Some people are working on anonymous group keys so you can subscribe to the online New York Times without getting spam from 3rd parties. I know one fellow who encrypts his Facebook postings with his private key. When I want to read what he has to say I decrypt with his public key. He can use a shared key if he wants to communicate with a particular group of friends.

As for the threat of quantum computers -- its true that quantum computers can factor billions of times faster than conventional computers, but all that means that the average time to break my key has gone from billions of times the age of the universe to merely the age of the universe. I'm not worried yet. I note the U.S. military recommends 1024 bit keys for secret data and 2048 bits for top secret.

Stallman got one part right. You can't trust commercial operating systems. You need to be able to see what you're running to trust it. We don't have a secure cloud because commercial interests aren't concerned with your privacy. They want to track you so they can sell to you. They have not realized that if they are tracking us, they are being tracked. We don't have a secure internet because big companies don't want it. You need to do it yourself.

Encryption is the infrastructure for this century. Use it and insist that others use it.