The salts used in these reactors are (according to the Wikipedia article):

MSRs can be safer than ordinary light water reactors. Molten salts trap fission products chemically, and react slowly or not at all in air. Also, the fuel salt does not burn in air or water.

As I understand it, they are using more stable fluoride salts like uranium tetraflouride, which is still potentially reactive with water, but much more slowly and is quite manageable, so I hear.

Although, I do admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid on MSR's, so I hope someone more knowledgeable in the chemistry comes along to correct me if my faith is misplaced. :-)

There are newer, better designs like pebble bed, or molten-salt reactors which, when it fails, fails by shutting itself down and locking the radioactive materials in the core. I see some people talking about the thorium cycle reactors above too.

PWR can be safe, but frankly, there are far more effecient, potentially more cost effective and definitely safer designs out there. We have to stop using 1960 light-water reactor designs meant for nuclear submarines.

That's a BINGO!

For the last two years, we've been dutifully reporting the work we do in--at first--one then two separate systems showing that we were, in fact, operating the LoB's business. Still no effect on the higher ups--they didn't even look at the reports. They just saw a big number and thought, "Geez! We should cut costs! I'm sure we can get cheaper labour and that will solve the problem."

Yes, I am trying to escape this asylum. Thank you for asking. :-)

Where I work, us, the IT teams that program and support the applications, often have to tell the employees how the business works. So many people retired in the 2000-2010 that a huge chunk of institutional memory walked out the door. The new folks doing the jobs often don't know how to handle the Once Every Five year situation, etc. I know the company keeps buying these Knowledge Sharing portals, but it seems more like oral history is the primary knowledge transfer.

They also terrorized Loyalists, which is why most of them fled to Canada.

Indentation as syntax.

I thought you needed to license the protocols in order to use it. Has the EU changed it's mind and made it a proper public infrastructure?

I've been in corporate IT for over 10 years now.

The corporate standard version for Crystal Reports was so old, the version wasn't even listed on their website.

They were creating classic ASP (not .Net) applications as recently as 2005.

The most recently approved version of Visual Studio is... 2005.

There are still active VB6 programmers in the company.

Most of my department uses VSS 5 (yes 5, not 6).

The main corporate Java web app servers were Java 1.4 until last year.

On the other hand, if you come work for my sub-group, we've recently decided to screw corporate standards. We use mercurial, continuous integration with Hudson, Glassfish, latest version of Eclipse IDE, Java 6 and jQuery. None of this is corporate "approved", but we get high marks from our users! ;-)

At my work, the IT department has crippled Outlook e-mail searching because their poor, massively underpowered Exchange server kept crashing under the load. Then, because the XP version of Windows desktop search was slowing boot up times, they crippled that too. Oh yeah, we're not allowed to run any other searching system.

When I search for stuff in GMail, I find it. I rarely use labels as anything other than marking stuff I can safely delete. In Outlook, because of the crippled search, I put things into folders to help Outlook focus its search.

So odd... As you said, when a programmer (like me) wants to program. We CODE!

Games I have played in the last year (which I don't think have anything to do with me being a programmer) in no particular order:

• Portal
• Starcraft II
• Company of Heroes
• Dragon Age
• Mass Effect 2

I think I play those games for reasons non-programmers play them: they suit my taste & temperment. I think each programmer will have their own list of games they enjoy to play which, again, have nothing to do with being a programmer. 'Cause we can CODE if we want to scratch that itch. ;-)

SAIC's greatest FAILs:

• FBI Virtual Case File
• NSA Trailblazer
• NYC's CityTime

Wow. The hits just keep coming...

Actually, the vast majority of Ig Noble recipients love it. They have a great sense of humor, and several real Nobel prize winners show up to hand out the awards. The awards are mostly a celebration of the quirky and funny, and an honest celebration of obscure and (seemingly) trivial research. Although in one case, an Ig Nobel preceded a real Nobel prize: http://boingboing.net/2010/10/05/scientist-wins-both.html

Archer, FTW!

Mod parent +1

The vast majority of people will not do that. And then the companies lobby to make it illegal to do that.