But party membership isn't private (at least in Massachusetts). Anyone can join a party by going to the town/city clerk and registering as a member of the party (as simple as checking a checkbox when you register to vote). All of the meetings are open to the public. Membership in the Ward/Town/City/State committees is voted on in the primaries (although, it comes with a time commitment; so, it's often not contested). It's not some secret club that nobody can belong to. The reality is that participation is low because most people are too lazy to get involved.

What's not open is how candidates get money (for the most part, that's not from the party).

They aren't totally private. In theory, anyone who is registered in the party should be able to run. For example in Massachusetts, one can get on the primary ballot for Congress by registering in the party (anybody can do that) and getting 2000 signatures on nominating petitions. Getting 2000 signatures isn't easy, but it is possible. There is an open house seat this year and there are 6 candidates but only one Democrat and one Republican are career politicians. The rest are all people who are ticked off at Congress just as much as everybody else is.

Of course, actually winning the primary is a good bit more difficult. The real thing that keeps the career politicians in control is insider money.

If most voters took the time to actually research the candidates, make up their mind intelligently AND remember to vote on election day, politicians wouldn't do any of this (because they wouldn't get any more votes by doing it).

Believe it or not, the most effective way to win an election is to figure out who is going to vote for you (ahead of time) and nagging them to actually go out on vote on election day!

I've been doing this for a few years, now, and I haven't seen one election where I didn't encounter people (registered voters) who didn't know there was an election that day.

Not really.

The databases behind these tools have all registered voters. If you don't register in a party, ALL the parties will be after you.

And the best way to get them to stop coming around is to say you will never tell them who you are going to vote for. They won't be offended, you are just telling them they will be wasting their time by returning. The worst thing you can do is say you are undecided, because they will keep coming (or calling) back to see if you have made up your mind.

You are probably overstating the dangers of nuclear warming a bit (but not that much). But there is certainly nothing we can't adapt to if we have to. And of course "civilization as we know it" isn't going to be around 20 years from now no matter what happens: 20 years ago, we didn't have the Internet, Cell Phones, GPS and it just took me 20 seconds to think of that. My mother's house didn't have indoor plumbing when she was a girl!

But the important point is that you have no idea how dangerous nuclear waste really is.

Nuclear waste remains dangerous for more than million years. The "design" of nuclear waste disposal facilities involves making an educated guess as to how long it will be before the containers break down and then guessing whether the waste will decay enough before it gets into the water supply. So we are talking about the water supply for a huge geographical area being poisoned essentially forever, not a few people ignoring signs.

Speaking of signs, how do you write a sign an average person will be able to read 100,000 years from now (or even 1000 years from now)? You would need to predict 100,000 years of language evolution! The reality is that even within 1000 years, the only people who can read what we now call English will be scholars!

This just demonstrates how naive it is to assume we can construct anything that lasts for a million years.

In case you are curious, the Yucca Mountain plan was clever enough to realize they couldn't label the site as dangerous; so, they decided it was good enough if a typical drill bit wasn't likely to penetrate the containers when somebody drilled into the waste disposal site -- Mind you these are the same containers they know will deteriorate within one or two half-lives of the stuff inside.

You are forgetting to consider the waste problem. The other life threatening issues pale in comparison. Waste from Uranium fueled reactors is dangerous for more than a million years -- I waded through the licensing materials for Yucca Mountain to find that little gem -- AFIK how much more than a million years is classified because the DOE doesn't want us to know. The Yucca Mountain depository was canceled because any sane (and uncorrupted) engineer reading the plans realized it was brain-dead.

The claim by the thorium reactor proponents is that there is less waste and waste products are safe within a few hundred years. If this is really true, they have a solution to the waste problem. That is a huge deal. Of course, it would be good to find confirmation of the waste claim: Inquiring minds want to know.

And it's also guaranteed to produce more nuclear waste than any other kind of reactor.

My group maintains and enhances an operating system. Obviously, we need full access on the machines we debug on. We also have separate "production" machines used for builds and source control where developers don't default to having admin privileges (and admin privs are generally reserved for the people less likely to break things). We used to give all the new developers admin privs from day 1, but that almost led to a few disasters (new people with full admin privs on an unfamiliar OS is not a good idea).

We generally try to let the admins take care of the production systems and only take over when they aren't around (it's only two people). And we let them know what we fixed because we appreciate the fact that they are normally dealing with it for us...

OTOH, one doesn't need any sort of special access to develop simple applications on decent operating systems like Unix or Max OS. One only needs special access when one starts installing shared libraries, doing kernel work, or setting up shared source control systems (although, it's generally not a good idea to let all the developers have uncontrolled access to the source control system, either).

I started using SPF because the backscatter from spammers forging my domain was getting to be 5-10 times more than the amount of spam I was getting. The backscatter stopped almost completely and it stopped immediately. Every once in a while I get a small burst of backscatter, but it doesn't last long.

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that the spammers are checking for SPF before using a domain for forgeries. It would make sense, because using a domain with SPF records for spam makes it possible for anybody to determine it's spam. In particular, if any tier one suppliers are using SPF combined with mail volume to identify spam, they could spot the spam almost instantly -- no wait for complaints to come in. In particular, the spam could be spotted quickly enough to shut down the sender. It probably doesn't happen that much, but if one was sending spam, why would one forge a domain with an SPF record when there are so many others out there with no SPF record.

Ummh. I've been using hard drives for about 30 years, now. And the manufacturers have always used base 10 for the capacity. I've never seen them use base 2. Same for tape.

Hate to break this to you, but computers originally used base 10. Mainframes support base 10 and base 2 arithmetic. Legacy operating systems tended to print disk and memory sizes in base 10. You don't see "ls -l" in Unix printing the number of blocks in a file in Octal or hexadecimal.

This whole concept of 1K = 1024 didn't come about until microcomputers hit the scene. And it didn't happen because of some grand intellectual revelation. It came about because multiply was hard to do in early microprocessor assembly code.

10KW is kinda high -- unless everybody live in mansions. I figured I could fairly easily cover the A/C in my house with panels on half the roof (the half the points south). It required the good panels (16-18% efficient). One thing to remember is that peak A/C demand coincides with the max amount of sunlight.

I know all about the breeder reactors and other technology we have no plans to ever build. It is totally irrelevant because we have NO PLANS TO EVER BUILD IT. And it's not because of politics, it's because of cost and risk (read your own Wiki reference). Nuclear plants already cost more to build than most other technologies (PV being the exception) and that's without taking into account the true cost of fuel disposal/reprocessing or taking into account they get free liability insurance from the government (which all the other technologies have to pay for). If they had to actually reprocess the waste, the cost might be much higher.

I would hardly call the amount of nuclear waste being generated as minuscule. The entire (huge) Yucca mountain facility is already over subscribed! The total amount we are generating with existing plants is more than the planned Yucca mountain facility is capable of holding (DOE info). Your own references states there are "thousands of tons".

And that's if you buy into the fantasy that something that is dangerous for more than a million years can stay safely buried for that period of time. The "design" of the Yucca facility included estimating how long it would take for the containers to break down and how long after that it would take for the nuclear waste to leach into the groundwater. Given the amount of experience we have at tracking pollutants leeching into groundwater (a few decades), I would expect those estimates to be about as reliable as a Ouija board.

The fundamental problem here is that the entire nuclear industry and the nuclear part of DOE are still operating like it was 1970. They pretend the waste problem doesn't exist (hence, no reprocessing technology deployment) and use secrecy to hide what they are doing to avoid accountability. As long as that's the way they are going to operate, they have to be stopped.

Nuclear waste remains dangerous for a million years (DOE information). The only person who would make the statement it can be "easily contained and controlled" either hasn't researched the problem or has never actually implemented anything that works.