More the latter than the former. But I can do my part and sleep at night.

The problem with that in this case is then you have a relationship with them by their standard and are then bound by their TOS. :-)

Mind you, I am pro-nuclear.

Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions â" overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island â" would be virtually impossible at sea."

Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.

A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.

If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.

I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.

Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.

The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.

Do you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO%E2%80%93Russia_relations? I don't see where "WHY we've been violating our agreement with Russia and expanding NATO east" comes into play, unless there are other agreements.

'nuf said.

That's the only way to get companies to stop doing shit like this. Hit them where it hurts...the bottom line.

Of course I'm not. You're arguing that, short of complete knowledge, I should sit down and shut up?
Get bent. I'm a paying customer, and I'll call it like I see it.

The whole Bill of Rights, if you read Amar's book, one discovers they are directed at specific abuses suffered at the hands of the British (e.g. quartering).
That's not hyperbolic nonsense, sir: that's history.

That there was funny.

The underlying motivation is that all of the actors happen to be human.
The 1787 Constitution was a novel approach to minimizing the federal effects, until the Wilson era.

How else are you going to do it, without delegitimizing the proceedings?

Yeah, her record as SecState is only less marked by accomplishment than her stint in the Senate.

This. Most people still incorrectly concentrate on sequential read/write times. SSDs are only about 4x faster by that metric - 550 MB/s vs 125-150 MB/s.

Where SSDs really shine are the small, rapid read/writes. If you look at the 4k r/w benchmarks, a good SSD will top 50 MB/s 4k speeds, and over 300 MB/s with NCQ. A good HDD is only about 1.5 MB/s, and maybe 2 MB/s with NCQ because of seek latency - the head needs to be physically moved between each 4k sector. That 100-fold difference is what makes SSDs so much faster in regular use, not the sequential r/w speeds.

We've shown Americans how we deal with leakers by our handling of Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Snowden had no choice but to go to our enemies for asylum.

Please don't compare Manning to Snowden. Manning copied everything he could get his hands on and released it all without any consideration for whether or not it had a valid reason to be secret. He threw the baby out with the bathwater. Snowden has been careful to release only the things he feels violated the oath he and others took to the U.S. Constitution. One is a vandal. The other is a genuine whistleblower if not a patriot and hero.

For him to be a hypocrite, he'd have to spy on americans. If he has to do propaganda for the Russians to survive, then who cares? It's the Russians' problem, not ours.

I dunno why you think he has to spy on Americans to be a hypocrite. By doing propaganda for the Russians, he is affirming that sometimes you have to compromise your lesser values in order to protect greater ones. That's exactly what he's whistleblowing the U.S. government for doing - compromising Americans' privacy in order to (in their best estimation) protect their safety. If you actually listen to what Feinstein and others who defend these programs are saying, they're not evilly rubbing their hands together while cackling with glee that they're violating the Constitution. They implemented these programs because they genuinely thought the benefit (improved safety for Americans) was worth the cost (warrant-less searches and degradation of privacy).

What differentiates what he's doing IMHO is that if something is written in the Constitution, that kinda implies that it's an uncompromisable value. That you cannot violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights even if doing so would result in greater safety. Exceptions can be made during martial law and war, but no such declarations were made (unless you consider the war on terrorism to be a real, declared, and unending war).

To the Left, yes.

My favorite question to Democrats is: Quick, tell me 5 things that George W Bush said that were commendable.

I can easily find 5 banal positive things that Obama, or Kerry, or Clinton said that I agree with, despite disagreeing with them politically. I don't find them evil, just ignorant or misprioritizing things, so it's simple to find basic human statements I agree with.

If you can't find 5 positive things to say about your opponent, you're a zealot, and any discussion you enter is a waste of time.