Heh... some of this reminds me of some of the goings-on in the "Freefall" online comic strip. Among all the slapstick humor is a good bit of serious discussion about what personhood really means, and when does an AI (either electromechanical, or biological) have it.

One of the characters has been introducing the robots to religions... plural. All of them.

Never mind... firefox -new-tab www.mozilla.org apparently works like firefox -remote "openURL(www.mozilla.org, new-tab)" used to. (At least, for my use case.)

Dang. I use this a lot.

Crap. Crapity crapity crapity crap.

I don't go nuts with extensions, but there are some I really need to use -- LastPass, Tree Style Tab, Certificate Patrol, NoScript. The "big ones", of course, will get signed, but some of these (like Tree Style Tab) seem to be an "individual working in his garage" type plugin. Will it get signed? If not... that's a problem.

I like Jerry Pournelle's approach -- You can sell snake oil pills, but if you advertise it as snake oil, it had better contain actual oil extracted from actual snakes.

Well... go to Google Earth and take a look at what's already there in the general area of Yucca Mountain.

Search for "Sedan Crater" and start scanning south. That moonscape of craters? Atom bomb test craters, every one, lined with completely uncontained fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (Which is a substantial fraction of each bomb's load.)

I submit that what is already there is a much bigger hazard than anything that would ever be put in the Yucca Mountain repository.

Parent commits the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

Germans, in general, are not willing to work 60 hour weeks to support Greeks working 20 hour weeks. All the necessary reforms are things that are anathema to the new Greek administration, who (by all accounts) intends to double-down on everything that has made the Greek economy what it is today. We'll see how that works out for them.

With insurance, you don't really know for sure how good it is until the day you hope never comes happens, and you have to make a claim. Do they drag their feet or low-ball payment of the claim? Do they drop you? Do they hike up your rate?

My car insurance is kind of on the middle-low end of cost. I get ads for other insurance that could have cheaper premiums. But... With my current insurer, I have had a few experiences with having minor and not-so-minor claims, and they have treated me well, and not dropped me, and not jacked my rates up.

I don't think losing that kind of peace of mind is worth some marginal rate decrease.

Saudi Arabia is trying to bankrupt the oil shale producers to get rid of potential serious competition. (Remember the stories of more oil than Saudi Arabia being found in the Dakotas?)

From TFA:

There are surely examples of people who would be better off in an era of cable unbundling, such as those who watch only a very small number of channels, none of them high-fee sports channels, with great regularity.

That describes my viewing exactly. (Ditto Empty-V and its myriad tedious clones.)

> The heart of the question about him is 'where did he come from and why does he exist?"

"I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?

Tin foil. TIN. Aluminum foil is worse than useless. There's a reason actual tin foil is hard to find. (And you won't find it at Costco.)

When you say "Material must be handled over and over again because containers break down" it shows you have not bothered to even look at the actual proposals for how to deal with the waste; what was actually going to be put into the repository at Yucca Mountain. (Or, you're being deliberately disengeuous, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.)

This. Tolkein's story "grew with the telling"; he'd done all this imaginary mythology background stuff, epic poetry, and tales. He wrote some of it up as a childrens' book, "The Hobbit".

"The Lord of the Rings" came later. At the time he wrote "The Hobbit", he didn't realize that the ring Bilbo found was The One Ring. I'm not sure the whole "three for the elves, seven for the dwarf lords, nine for mortal men, and one ring to rule them" thing was developed in his mind at the time.

Jackson chose to adapt "The Hobbit" as a prequel to "Lord of the Rings". That decision is ... controversial. But it was probably necessary, given that the "Lord of the Rings" movies existed.

Yeah, it should have been one movie, maybe two. Sauron showing up Just Does Not Work in the continuity; in LOTR, they didn't know Sauron had returned at the beginning of the story. There are a lot of things I wish Jackson had done better, or differently.

And too much Coyote Physics, way, way, *WAY* too much Coyote Physics, especially in the second movie. I enjoy Roadrunner cartoons as much as anyone, maybe more, but I don't want Coyote Physics in something more serious.

Still, my biggest beef of all with Jackson was from the original "Lord of the Rings" movies; wrecking Faramir's character was a huge blunder.

Oh, well, I still found them mostly enjoyable,