Containment has almost nothing to do with cold shutdown.

Cold shutdown is defined as a fissionable material no longer requiring active cooling to remain at a stable temperature. This indicates that whatever fission may still be occurring in the nuclear material (whether it breached containment or not) it is in such small and sporadic amounts as to not be a concern to restart itself and continue melting through containment or into the open air.

Please back the truck of panic up.

1) People are facing a wall, not each other.
2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.
3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.
4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them
5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.

/you have to consider these things if you want to keep going all weekend

So what are the substances generally used for modern fracking operations?

/personally I use her rack, some Caprican brandy and a stogie or two.

Affordable health care is a pipe dream. The more efficient healthcare becomes the more margin there is for profit. I liken it to the cost of gas...

I think you mean invested in marketing new wonder drugs not efficient.

An NT user-security ruleset on allowable surgery for the user might be nice tho.

"Sir your visual cortex is extremely complex. At these percentages of activity and size, you should be able to spot perfect-10 curves from 5000 feet in the air. Of course someday you'll just magically go blind, with no medical explanation, so there's that."

Federal Agencies never die, they just get re-spun with more responsibility so they can then complain for more funding when their current responsibilities are abandoned.

The examples given in this slashdot article are not cuts, they amount to normal civil-servant bashing and behavior. The only thing surprising is that the unionization of TSA workers isn't the most frightening thing imaginable.

Future TSA worker:

"Ah, you can't fly, in fact, I'm supposed to arrest you. Come here please."

"Oh, you say this is a mistake?"

"Don't worry, this is just a result of a feature with a work-around. I'm sure they'll fix these bugs in CIA 2.0. In the meantime, enjoy your stay in Leavenworth."

The goal of special effects shouldn't necessarily be to look realistic, they should be works of art themselves and help create a mood or tell a story.'

So are they saying that CGI artists are not artists? I know a lot of people who would disagree.

That's not what's needed for Peak Oil. Peak Oil means even with higher demand, as we have now, there won't be more Oil on the market. And that's exactly what happens since around 2005/2006: the absolute amount of oil extracted and sold sinks slowly every year, while before that it increased always except in times of severe crisis, economic or price hikes (1970s).

And why don't we have more oil on the market? Please ask yourself this question honestly. You seem to jump to the conclusion that the *ONLY* reason we don't have more on the market is because there just isn't any more to produce. That is not true.

1) China's and India's economies have been expanding at an insane pace in the last 10 years. More people in those countries drive cars now than every before. The demand has continually been increasing.

2) Developed nations (most notably the U.S. and Canada) have politically decided that oil is "dirty" and entire industries have been prevented from expanded production of oil in these 2 nations (which have vast tracks of land, full of oil), this is to say nothing of the rest of the world, which seemed quite content to just let the monopoly OPEC exist and just deal with them.

World oil isn't running out, our demand is not out-stripping our potential supply, it's just monopolized.

Soot, by the way, has always been the worst human health hazard from burning coal, oil, etc... If you could eliminate particulate soot you can solve real human health problems and save lives. No one talks about it though.

Peak Oil is a largely politically driven fear. There is no proof of any future "end" of oil being available, or even any future net loss of oil production due to oil not being available.

^^^ Try and prove that statement incorrect. I would be very interested in actual proof that the world has no more oil available. Don't forget to look 20 miles into the Earth's crust, we can't ignore any potential new source, now can we?

History has shown every prediction thus far of us running out of oil to be incorrect. Those who own energy wells will do anything to make their product more expensive, even and especially pretending their resources is scarce and is running out.

is that assault?

CERN can get neutrinos to energy levels greater than a supernova? I think you mean energy levels greater than those detected from the supernova. Also, if the energy level were a factor in velocity, then light speed would not be a fundamental speed limit, or neutrinos behave like no mass we know (but we sorta knew that).

As far as overall percentage of the voting-age population is concerned, it can be that low. Turnout for presidential elections can only be about 30% of the voting-age population, and during the Gore/Bush election those numbers were evenly split. So, order-of-magnitude, yeah.