Impressive way to flip that around. Any restrictions on a person's behavior is equivalent to slavery? Seriously?

Think about what you're saying, that anyone should be able to anything they want? Anything? or should there be some rules governing behavior? Unless you're in favor of wild west anarchy, you're in favor of *some* type of regulation on society and the blessed free market capitalism.

and you don't think the *Japanese* have already marked this down as a sex toy possibility?

but seriously, expand your mind. This sort of thing has huge potential, just look at existing robo-skeletons already in use. That this initial prototype is unwieldy and rough? it's how progress is made

gah...I blame autocorrect...if I was on my phone....double gah!

Free market capitalism is like a wild horse. Powerful, fast and strong.

Also not terribly productive until you put reigns on it and channel that strength towards useful goals.

Regulations are the reigns by which the power of the free market is harnessed and made productive.

And like reigns...to much is bad, but none is worse. But nuanced conversations like this with 'but free market' morons in the current GOP are next to impossible.

the problem is that Verizon has no competition and the FCC has classified them as an information service so they can't be regulated the way utilities are regulated. Phone services are still regulated, yet the phone service runs over the very same wires as the 'data'. It's all data now and so should be regulated like any other utility.

So yes the FCC is exactly where to complain about this.

A growing number of people don't live where they can get decent OTA reception. I'm close to 40 miles from the DC stations, not even accounting for terrain issues. OTA isn't viable at the outer reaches of a city...which is now bustling suburbs. I don't know of any stations that have multiple transmitters around major cities so the signal area is relatively fixed.

Or in NYC, just getting a signal through all the buildings is a challenge.

but it's a really nice bus that the CEO's are riding...does anything else really matter?

HVAC is either hefty voltage or natural gas. Neither is going to be 'user' plug and play. Electricity *might* get to that point but it's still something a qualified electrician needs to do for the long foreseeable future. Natural gas will always require trained professionals.

HVAC techs specifically are in demand because they must do everything that's required for HVAC: plumbing, electric, gas and minor construction.

Well, yes, yes we are. (filter error: 'Don't use so many caps' I'm QUOTING the OP you moronic filter bastard!)

And you don't think they said that older reactors 'simply cant fail' when they built them?

Wait, if the reactor can't fail, why are you bringing up environmental/situational issues? It shouldn't matter...

My point is you can't tell me the issues that will be faced in the future and therefore can't claim a nuclear reactor is 'safe'.

The 'potential' liability of nuclear is far far far greater than anything else. Operational issues are relevant and coal has many bad things about it...but it simply can't fail catastrophically. A plant can blow up, a waste lake can collapse and flood a single valley. Both sites you can safely walk on the very next day. Nuclear can't do that....and won't every be able to do that.

And as I've said in other posts, nuclear is going to be absolutely required for the next century or so...simply because the scale of climate change damage dwarfs even nuclear's problems. Being the lesser of two evils doesn't make it less 'evil'.

Ahead of time, with plenty of warning that it's going to happen. This is an operational impact and while not small is entirely mitigatable. Fair scenarios aren't because by definition stuff has failed and you can't know what will be working or available.

And of course if you dismantle the damn you can also reclaim the land rather quickly.

Need we mention the fishing and recreation industries that now take advantage of the new lakes? There isn't a 'positive' side to a nuclear accident...

the problem is nuclear has risks like nothing else we've ever done; see failure conditions above.

Nuclear isn't safer. It's only 'safer' until something goes wrong. Every reactor built was built 'to never fail' and yet we found ways to make them fail. New reactor designs may be 'more' resilient to our innate ability to screw something up, but that doesn't make it 'safer'.

Coal has massive 'operational' issues. It's failure scenarios are pretty mundane and localized.

Nuclear has some operational issues (storing waste being the biggest) but the failure issues are the big ones. They occur infrequently but unlike every single other source of fuel, render 100s of square miles uninhabitable for decades. Nothing else has that problem.

Nukes are unfortunately the only realistic answer in the short (100ish or so years) to solve this problem. Believe me, I *hate* nuclear, but I'm willing to realize that it's the lesser of short term evils at this point. Considering the massive damage climate change is going to wreak...it's not a high bar to be 'better' than that...

But you'll need smaller solar panels because the lights use so much less energy.

Manufacturing costs are always less than fuel costs, both in simple cost and effects. One is a fixed one time thing, the other is ongoing.