You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.

Limiting spending in elections inherently favors incumbents. Keep that in mind when you're talking about getting money out of politics.

Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post. I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.

Mod parent up. Reposting to get past AC filter.

There's an Anime series (a remake of Neon Genesis Envangelion) I would have purchased by now, except it's coded in a different region. That means I have to want to watch it enough to not only pay for the discs, but a region-free player as well. So I haven't purchased anything, when they could have had my money already for the discs.

I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.

He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.

Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.

Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.

You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.

I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.

If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

You die. Seriously, the stuff that's radioactive enough to make a dirty bomb is radioactive enough to kill you before you get offsite. New fuel (less than 5% enriched uranium) is not particularly radioactive. It's perfectly safe to stand next to it; to inspect it before you put it in the nuclear reactor. On the other hand, spent fuel is incredibly radioactive, and when it's being handled it's kept under 30' of water so it doesn't kill everyone in the building.

Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.

Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.

That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.

If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day.

I don't contest the logic of this statement in and of itself, but I do wonder were this kind of thinking ends. The Government has it's own critical tasks to perform, and officials should focus their efforts on, well, governing what they're supposed to look after. Should the government build it's own office chairs? It's own cars? How about servers? Handguns?

Those 'other reasons' are pretty simple: Liberal and wealthy societies become complacent due to the ease of their lives, and that makes them neglect the principles and practices that made them powerful and wealthy to begin with.

The default human condition is poverty, misery and violence. Escaping that is rare, and it takes a special society to make wealth, power and security seem normal. Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes, the parts of a society that make it special are neglected (because, hey, they're 'mean' and 'hard work'), and rot sets in.

Don't forget that OPEC countries have been found financing anti-Keystone XL 'environmental' groups as a means to keep competition out of their oil markets and keep prices up. Then there's the railway owners, who would lose out if a pipeline was built. Much of the inland oil development is shipped by BSNF, a Berkshire-Hathaway company. Buffet is an Obama supporter who has publicly supported Keystone XL, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors? (my apologies if this is a repeat post, the last one didn't seem to take.)

There's more though. Arab oil-producing companies have been found backing environmental groups, to fight the introduction of new supply into their markets, which would depress prices. Then there's the owners of the railroads, who would lose out if the pipe network was expanded. If I remember correctly, BSNF railway ships much of the recent inland oil development, and it's owned by Warren Buffet, a notable supporter of Obama. Buffet (again IIRC) has come out in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors?.

There's no reason to think the melted core will get that far down, or even burn through the concrete floor, or even leave the reactor vessel in any sort of coherent form. Chernobyl's overheated core just spread through the lower parts of the structure (look for the 'elephant's foot' picture), Three Mile island's core was scraped off the inside of the reactor vessel, having only blued the metal.

'Corium' is basically molten ceramic (The fuel is a uranium-oxide matrix.) It has such poor heat conducting properties that during normal operations, it could be 3000F in the center of a pellet, and 650F on the surface of the cladding- 3/16" away from the center.

The most important reason is that 'corium' isn't actually hot enough to burn through the earth like that, nor does it conduct heat all that well, even if any part of it became hot enough.

The integrity of the fuel rods is challenged at 2200F (zircaloy-water reaction, which released the hydrogen that caused the reactor building roofs to blow off on three of the Daichi units.)

Steel melts at about 2600F. Concrete breaks down at about 1800F.

In addition, the fuel is a uranium-oxide mix, a sort of ceramic. This class of material is generally known for poor thermal conductivity. That's why the pellets are the size of a pencil eraser, they need to be small and have a high surface area in order to conduct heat from the center of the pellet- which might be at 3000F in normal operations- to the fuel cladding and into the reactor coolant, which might be around 600F.

Anyway, from what I know about western reactors (it's my line of work, but i'm not a reactor engineer per se), I seriously doubt the fuel would 'burn' through steel or concrete. The fission products escape because of physical destruction to the facility caused by the Tsunami, or because of relief valves that limit reactor coolant system pressure, or primary containment structure pressure.

Chernobyl's release was due to a massive overpressure event that physically broke the reactor vessel. Nothing ever burned through concrete (check out the photos of the 'elephant's foot')

Three Mile Island's core was found in the bottom of the reactor vessel; a small amount of fission products was released by mis-operation of support systems. The integrity of the reactor vessel was never threatened, though the containment building (much larger than Daichi primary containment structures) withstood several hydrogen burns.