Hiroshima was long time ago, that's not scary. When I think about what the US faces (screw Japan) if those 400 tons of fuel catch fire and start burning for years, I'm already scared. When I think about TEPCO trying to 'fix' that alone, I'm more scared. Rocky Flats and Hanford and a terrorist with two halves of a plutonium baseball are a joke by comparison.

Something better get us all scared soon, because there's nothing else scarier on the planet right now ... and few people in the US seem to realize that.

It looks as though Earhardt might have washed up on an island somewhere, so yeah, it seems worth holding out hope.

I was just reading the other day about some Japanese guys whose boat was blown out to sea and they eventually wound up in the US. At the time it was illegal to leave Japan, so it was decades before some of them found a safe way back in. Their families were stunned.

[these clocks] could help industry build GPS systems that can rapidly pinpoint locations with sub-centimeter-scale precision

Now, if only I could get transceivers to strap to fruit flies, I might find out where they're all coming from.

But this is the Internet. You don't have to know anything about a subject, or even understand what someone's saying to remit some dopey argument because there's nothing worth watching on TV.

But this is Slashdot. So thanks for making the modest suggestion, even though that never seems to penetrate the cloud cover.

What a BS title. Snowden and Greenwald -were- using GPG/PGP ... long-established fact.

It comes at a price...

Yes, global warming trends show the price of the alternative: seashores being drowned and lengthy, very hot summers and an eventual massive die-off of humanity for lack of foodstuffs. I'm SO glad I won't live to see and suffer it.

Bravo to Germans for sholdering the burden. Here in the US we'd actually have to do without all the stuff we cram into our "Public Storage" spaces. And that 4th iPad.

I'm ready for the flood of excuses (technical and not) about how the US could do it but...

Man, we are so fat and lazy.

Semi-humorously, since WA state banned plastic bags, the stores have used that as an excuse to start charging for paper bags. Which are completely recyle-able. As though they decided to punish the voters for doing the right thing.

Your situation is dually atypical. All-electric remains rare, and WA has a surplus of hydroelectric power.

Five houses into $1M is too expensive. Five houses into $100,000, on the other hand, could certainly make sense in well-off housing clusters located in a more rural setting. The first units will no doubt be purchased by corporate-sized entities that would have no problem with price and the investment could pay for itself with the efficiency gain.

As the effects of climate-warming become so obvious that not even our insane so-called leaders can ignore them, such devices will come in handy to power the massive air-conditioning they'll need to continue their worthless existences.

As Terry Winograd proved looooong ago with SHRDLU, a computer can have a chance at navigating the contents of a query/command IFF it understands the context.

In the case of "Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?" we know from experience that an alligator is a big animal, a reptile, with short legs. And we know from experience that 100m hurdles are about 3 feet high and require a runner to repeatedly leap into the air. And we know from experience that alligators can run but can't jump. THEN we logically conclude the answer is no with high probability.

Winograd's SHRDLU could be modified to let the computer solve the problem. But general intelligence learns these things through nature and nurture. We're not so intelligent about what makes us intelligent. Some of our "experts" still insist we're not conscious. On the other hand, if they spent their whole lives asleep, they'd be pretty crappy experts. And so the nonsense plows on.

Don't see it working out for long-distance travel (turns at high speed, elevation changes, land-purchasing/leasing problems), but for regional/urban transport, the whole air-pressure-differential tube-transport thing (preferably in transparent tubes for the view) is a winner ... with individual programmable capsules that do the driving with built-in collision dampers. All the motive power is created at one location; powered by renewable energy, it eliminates pollution and fuel costs.

I was instantly reminded of Steve Jobs saying that 7-inch tablets were dumb.

Then I was reminded of an education conference I attended long ago and said that lots of PCs could be connected together and work on the same problem. The University's CS prof just blinked like he'd never heard anything so wacky.

Oh yeah, and I also remember IBM laughing at how cute PC's were. A year or two before they started sweating blood.

PCs could also paid for themselves within a year when they first came out. If you could program, you had to hide not to find countless opportunities to make a buck. Small businessmen who could finally afford a computer needed (or at least wanted to brag about) customized software to help them with alla stuff people had been doing manually/on paper for years.

It'll be the same story here.

You gotta be kidding me -- a b&w vector diagram lifted from some tech website, cheesy drum riffs for 20 seconds over a third-grader title screen, then two greybeards sitting in an ill-miked boxy echo chamber start out "Tell me Doug, what is a slingatron" ?????

Best parody of old-skool production values, or quarter-serious proposal for a $10 kickstarter?

For how many more generations -- in the complete absense of -any- result from -any- gravity-wave detector -- will people continue to hold onto the concept?

We finally let go of instantaneous-action-at-a-distance some time ago. But we continue to make ineffable mystical inferences from our love of simpifying mathematics. Occam-pretty models aside, there is zero evidence that gravity is wavelike or particle-like in any way. Suggesting that it is an emergent quantum property. Whatever we see that appears to "curve space" that photons travel through, the Newtonian "gravity" model has failed utterly. It's just waiting for someone too unorthodox to stay inside the box to sweep aside generations of stubborn clinging.