And civil unrest becomes vastly more likely in a future with runaway global warming and the climatic changes, floods, draughts, food shortages, rising sea levels, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, economic upheavals and the like it will bring. Nuclear power, wind, solar, hydro and geothermal are ALL essential to combat it.

CO2's atmospheric lifetime is something like 1,000 years. How come those who fret about the longevity of nuclear waste never seem to talk about this? With fast reactors that burn the actinides (including plutonium) as fuel, the remaining fission products decay to the level of the original uranium ore (while being considerably more compact) in only a few hundred years, much less than the atmospheric lifetime of CO2.

The hype about "carbon capture" is just that -- hype. But it serves one useful purpose: its utter impracticality shows just how minor the nuclear waste "problem" is by comparison.

Not far from Yucca Mountain you will find hundreds if not thousands of craters under which are buried the fission and activation products of decades of US nuclear testing. They're not reprocessed and contained in silica glass, they were simply mixed (quite violently) with the soil and rock. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere. There is no need for Yucca Mountain to contain reactor waste for even a hundred years because it will surely be removed and burned as fuel in fast reactors. Once people wake up to the fact that global warming is a vastly greater threat than nuclear power, and that nuclear power is just as essential as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro in combating it, people will realize that "spent" fuel from light water reactors is far too valuable to just throw away.

Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap, reliable and long-lived utility scale battery. Otherwise we'll never be able to retire all the CO2-belching fossil-fuel plants to match the varying supply with the varying demand.

I agree that waste in casks at nuclear power plants is reasonably safe but it would still be better to move it to Yucca Mountain. If nothing else, security would be a lot cheaper. It's utterly ridiculous that all that money was spent on a waste repository that, thanks to NIMBYism on the part of Nevada politicians, doesn't look like it'll be used any time soon. At least nuclear waste is the one form of toxic waste that will eventually go away on its own. Arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium and other chemical poisons remain toxic forever.

You act like this contradictory. Alpine is NOT some overgrown blob, it's nice because it does one thing - email - and does it in the way a fair number of people think sucks least. It may try to be your editor too but at least it is easy and straightforward to tell it to knock it off, and it listens.

Systemd is not like that. It takes over everything and wont give it back, even when it pretends to. For instance, it logs in binary. IF you read the docs and throw the right switches, you CAN get it to put out text logs. Ok, so no big deal, just flip the switch, right?

No. The main reason we want text logs is because of what happens when the system crashes. Even if you flip the switch, systemd is still logging in binary and just writing out a text version to make you happy, a few milliseconds later. So this fix is, well, not totally pointless, it does at least make the logs manipulable using standard tools again. Except on occasions when you really need to read them.

A friend of my was involved in a road rage incident while in standstill traffic at night. The guy up ahead pulled out a crowbar and started walking back. My friend took his camera out of the glovebox, took a picture of the guy and the license plate on his truck. The flash on the camera going off may have stunned the guy, as he backed away and got back into his truck without further incident.

Three years after being a video game tester, I became a lead tester for another three years. Recognizing that it was dead end job, I went back to college to get an associate degree in commputer programming. After I got my I.T. certifications, I was branded as "not being a team player" since I had an exit strategy. Not long after I left to pursue a career in help desk support, the company got delisted from the stock market, traded on pink sheets, and became a private company. All my former coworkers got fired.

GCC Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store

Something else for Linus Torvalds to complain about after GCC 4.9.0. :/

If you're a tech contractor, you may very well get fired tomorrow. Prior to the Great Recession, I used to change jobs every three years. My last three jobs each ended after nine months. My current job is a one-year contract, but my employment is in jepoardy because someone complained that my pants were wrinkled were last week. My newest resume is already on the job search websites. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Mod up. Cynical, no doubt. But very true. Good advice if you plan to become a grumpy programmer.

Or downloading one CD over a 56K modem took a better part of a week?

The trouble is they know exactly why they are better, but cannot be forced to see why they are also worse. New technologies always have flaws, and it takes time for the kinks to be worked out in practice, leaving a mature technology. There is a delicate balance between early adopters that keep the new technologies alive enough to have a chance to mature, and the slower moving segments of the market that need maturity and reliability.

In the tech market, in this century, the latter segment is riotously underserved. Supporting mature products is considered a waste of resources that should be instead used to push the boundaries of in-your-face ad delivery. The entire situation is ridiculous and could only occur in a market where the buyer typically has no better way of choosing between competitors than flipping a coin - because he has no idea what he his buying!

I didn't feel the earthquake in San Jose, which is further south than Sunnyvale. The real fun begins when the East Coast media starts running stories about how California is sliding into the ocean. CNN once did a story about a minor 3.0 quake in Los Angeles by showing a grocery store surveillance tape with nothing falling off the shelves as the camera shook from being mounted on the wall. Most Californians don't even notice quake unless its 5.0 or higher.

That's why corporations have subsidiaries and sister corporations. MS Ireland is not the same company as MS USA.

Most of it is not actually earned abroad, due to accounting practices. MS USA sold all of their IP to MS Ireland, and pays MS Ireland a fee for every copy of MS software sold in the USA. That fee is almost certainly for an amount nearly (or actually) equal to the sales price. As a result, they claim a write-off on every title sold that's just about equal to that title's sales price. As a result, MS USA says they earned nothing on those titles. It's all based on technicalities that are unavailable to real people. Only corporations are allowed to account for profits and losses in such a way as to reduce their tax bills to nothing.