Casualties from modern, western nuclear designs are easy: zero. You get more exposure from a banana than standing next to TMI during the event. And yes, the nimby folks are the source of most of the problems. We wouldn't have plants decades past their intended life using obsolete designs, and we'd be storing nuclear waste in geologically sound facilities rather than temporary storage pools.

As for scalability, you can add a reactor to a nuclear site much more easily than you can add a dam to a hydro site.

In which parallel universe is it that PhDs bother with teaching at the high school level?

A factual statement followed by a mischaracterisation followed by a statement that really doesn't mean anything but is supposed to sound like it does.

And we're supposed to accept this rather poor attempt at being clever in lieu of logic.

Yes sir, we are indeed on Slashdot.

So all the cool kids are rewriting their DB servers and OS kernels in Python? How did I miss that?

My dad taught me that when Bill Gates was still stealing code out of dumpsters.

Thanks for the reminder, I'd fallen out of the habit of reading this strip.

Yeah, I stopped at "unique to ..., and ...". No need to have my intelligence insulted any further.

Basically, Putin was all palsy-walsy with the West until he saw this wasn't going to give him any sort of license to reincorporate the Baltics/Ukraine. Then it turned into "They're all out to get us".

Stop feeding the trolls, JC.

Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

Errr... the UK still has an reasonable approximation of a well-functioning court system. That the police say something is illegal isn't enough to get you thrown in jail.

It is under Tony Blair's Anti-Terror Laws. You only need to be suspected of something that could be vaguely related to terrorism to be locked up. No jury trial involved, just the police, some politicians and a few judges.

Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

It's actually several thousand frames that play out a sequence of events. It was notable both because of the unique presentation (most frames, particularly the early ones, change only subtly) and because of the details that go into establishing the otherwise unexplained setting.