If my (insert profanity here) ISP ever gets off its cheap, lazy butts and makes IPv6 available to me...

But hang on a few seconds - your cores are already a happening event, so what have you got to achieve? Stop it going anywhere ; stop any nuclear reactions ; minimise venting of volatiles ; cool it down. For stopping the nuclear reactions, you need either boron by the tonne or cadmium (and of the two, cadmium is a poisonous heavy metal and boron a bio-not-particularly-nasty ; easy choice) ; IIRC. For cooling it down and stopping it going anywhere, you really need thermal inertia ; dumping heat you can do by running it into a bed of sand or anything with a high thermal mass, as long as it contains enough (dispersed) boron to kill the reaction. Arranging your flow paths so the the core separates into multiple smaller, isolated units to increase the cooling surface - would that make clean up harder or easier. Reducing volatiles - I guess you need to choose your mineralogy.

Can you make cement with 30% by weight boron? Or cement with an aggregate of a high-melting boron mineral?

I'm sure this has been well discussed before, but I don't know the state of the art, and after an 8 hour meeting today, I'm going to the bar!

With multipath TCP, I can hit my quota on the DSL link, the DOCSIS based link, and the cellular link, all simultaneously.

I'll sign up for that newsletter.

Texas, one can be self-insured by ponying up a $55,000 bond to the state, or posting a bond that a lien can be placed on one's real estate.

Honestly, I'll just take the insurance. $55k isn't a lot, relatively. Tap a car, and that is often less than the medical bills of the driver + the vehicle (which likely would wind up having to be replaced.) Plus, insurance companies provide lawyers while without them, you have to provide your own and fight all court cases yourself, which can be a major time waster.

As for insurance and autonomous cars, I would be genuinely surprised if rates drop, mainly for one simple fact: The first gen of these vehicles will need to have a manual override, especially for vehicles that go into rural areas or on farmland. So, insurance on those will stay the same. Vehicles only used in cities, and subsequent generations that never require driver interaction? Who knows. I wouldn't be surprised to see rates dropped, only to be raised on some other facet of life, such as health insurance.

Hey maybe they should put a camera on the Google car! Then you could see if you were following a truck. Gee I wonder if they can add some cameras to them...

Somebody should have showed him how to use Program Manager.

and the keyboard default layout will never change because at this stage almost everyone in the (developed, at least) world uses a keyboard in that layout.

Dream on, Sunshine.

You describe your frustrations with switching between US and UK layouts. Well, I have that fun, because I'm a Brit and the client's laptop includes software (which I don't use, but "meh") which requires a US-ian layout. But, of course, the physical key caps are laid out in the Dutch pattern (about as different from UK and US as they are from each other. But I've got a Russian keyboard layout installed, for when I'm chatting to the wife from the other side of the world. Three month's ago the trainee (uses the machine on night shift) had German installed because she's German. The partner representatives - who also use the machine - had added Arabic and Turkish layouts. And the next job, we'll have Francophones along, so they'll probably go AZERTY too.

I doubt that a USian or British QWERTY layout is even a majority, worldwide.

Or both?

I've seen dozens of them when I've been catching core (and I just had the lovely news that I'll probably be catching my next series of cores in breathing apparatus. Oh joy!), but I've never seen one that had significant signs of heat damage.

What sort of coring do you do that burns out catchers?

It is Qi so most will work it's pretty much the winner.

Care to back that claim up with some stats?

I've never seen any wireless charging technology in the wild, so I've literally no idea which one of the standards is likely to be the one that wins. From wiki-ing, I get that there are at least Qi,

Open Dots, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Open Dots Alliance
PMA / Powermat, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Power Matters Alliance
Rezence, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Alliance for Wireless Power
WiPower

All of which leads me to the inevitable XKCD.

I've chosen VL-bus over PCI ; SCSI over IDE ; parallel port over USB (1.0), I dodged the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray question by realising that neither offered any real (to me) use case. I see no reason at all to dive into another standards war until all bar one of the competing standards are dead on the field of battle.

Just checking if my current phone has a wireless charge capability - it's that invisible a technology ... well, that's a surprise - my phone (Samsung, by coincidence) actually does have an official Qi-charging alternative back cover (or flip case). That's vaguely interesting. Since I'm travelling over the next few days for business, I'll see if I can actually spot the charging places. See if they're common enough to actually be a useful discriminator (i.e. let's coffee there not here, because there has Qi pads available and here doesn't.

It's the same problem as those people who are prescribed antibiotics and don't finish their full course: that's how you get antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Even with a population composed entirely of people who take the full antibiotic course, you'd still develop bacterial resistance, but you'd do it a lot slower. Unless your antibiotic dose is so high that you kill every single solitary one of the bacteria in your body, then the antibiotic will change the structure of the bacterial population by killing off the most susceptible strains first. Since most antibiotics have significant side effects at high doses (trashing gut bacterial populations, skin bacteria, sometimes out right toxicity to humans), the dosage is set at a level that will provide sufficient effect without excessive side effects. That dosage information one of the significant outputs from later stages of human testing.

Fisher and Haldane, and later Hamilton, set up the neo-Darwinian synthesis understanding of evolution with significant amounts of statistics because evolution is a thing that happens to populations, not individuals. You really do need to keep awareness of the underlying population statistics when you're thinking about evolution.

And my Civic coupe (gas) was $13k after all taxes and licensing were paid, and for my style of driving (>90% highway, most trips 40+ miles) I get nearly equivalent fuel mileage (35-42mpg). On top of that, it's WAY more fun than driving a Prius, I can work on it myself, and it'll probably go at least 400k miles before I decide to replace it, and though I may have to replace the battery a couple times, I'll never have to replace the entire battery pack.

So yeah, EVs cost significantly more than gas cars.

More and more, as the hipster commies push their $15/hr minimum wage agenda, these stores will go away and you'll have to get to the suburbs to get your groceries. Have fun doing that on your bicycle.

SPARC and POWER still have a place. There are some computing tasks that can't really be split up among multiple nodes, so they still require gigantic CPU requirements. Usually this is related to legacy databases which cost less to keep on the legacy architecture than spend the time to try to move it to PC clusters.

Another use for SPARC and POWER (and to a lesser extent, ARM) are security applications. In theory (and this is theory, mind you), if another F0 0F bug is found on the x86 platform, perhaps giving attackers remote access to ring 0, having multiple architectures will help mitigate the effects of it.

Of course, with SPARC and POWER, virtualization is an integral component of both platforms, and for some tasks, it just might be the case that slicing off a lot of LPARS and zones may be cheaper than buying a lot of PCs and using a VMWare cluster, due to the license fees involved.