I think you aren't recognizing the significance of being able to quickly and efficiently clean nuclear waste water. All the major nuclear waste storage sites in US are struggling to find the area necessary to store waste. This cuts down the waste volume by a huge margin. As for solid "waste" as you describe, I agree with you that I'm all for thorium and salt reactors. India and China is actually leading in this area if I'm not mistaken.

But as to your implication that nuclear waste is a serious issue, it's really not even close to the damage caused by coal fly ash, which is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Today we can count the number people who die prematurely from coal; how many people die from nuclear waste? Statistically none.

As a Dem, I can understand some members of the party seeing a need for this, but I'm shocked that Lamar Alexander is co-sponsoring this. So much for anti-regulation republicans. While I agree that voice calls should not be permitted in planes, there is no reason to legislate this. It is very reasonable that in the future there may be airlines dedicated to business passengers who would find value in having phone calls on a flight.

Let us also forget the fact that many airplanes already have seat tethered phones that no one uses. A passenger etiquette policy determined by airlines would be preferable than a blanket ban. I see this more as a generational issue where old people are once again on the losing side.

I actually wondered about this back when I was going through puberty.

Science has solved the waste issue. Titanate nanofibers. One gram cleans a ton of waste water.

Download it before the llama dies.

Hold the boat, a return to C or C++ would be a HUGE boost, no need to throw the baby out with bath water.

ASM programmers could never build rich content apps that the world relies on today. The code would be ridiculous, think the worst COBOL app times a 1000 for every application used today.

No, moving dynamic languages and compiling them to optimized C or chunking out high level critical code into optimized C/C++ is what every major web service is focusing on today. Facebook for example is realizing well over 50% gains by just scraping some PHP components with unmanaged code.

While most non-tech people would agree with your 99% statement, if left to people with this belief, we'd still be stuck with command line PC. Hell, why innovate at all?! The reality is that we are really just scratching the surface of ubiquitous computing. PC absolutely need to get faster because life has more resolution, more data, and ever increasing demand for analysis. I have a perfectly working iBook G4 that can't even browse today's web because it's so media intense. Imagine a world where HD content or HI DPI displays are the norm. Imagine the amount of number crunching a future version of Kinect needs to better understand sensor data.

The point is that if you spend a few minutes to think about all the things that would be nice to be able to do when not at a computer, you will realize that our demand for local compute capacity is not really slowing. The business model maybe changing, but we all still want better faster cheaper and more.

Its fucking 2013 and voice recognition still sucks beyond belief in real-world scenarios. Need more compute and storage and bandwidth to address the issues.

Your excellent explanation is exactly why bitcoin will never be a primary currency, because people will almost never buy products in BTC irrespective of exchange rates. The product sold using BTC are priced not based on BTC fundamentals, they are priced based on the local currency fundamentals and than converted to the Exchange rate on BTC markets. Because of the volatility in the BTC market, ecommerce sites must implement hedging systems pegged with the market.

It is worth noting that the cost projections for children that you have outlined are unique to American society. The way we've engineered the economic incentives in this country have made it so that children are seen as an "expense" as opposed to an investment for future societal returns. Not all countries are structured in this manor. In America we incentivize middle and upper income people to not reproduce.

From the two-page report: "When compared to a 6-core CPU (m-cpu), the speedup ratios range from 1.54 to 3.20."

so yeah, the 17x is misleading because what network monitoring load would run on a single core?

Actually researchers are required by state laws and university guidelines to follow research consent laws regardless of whether they are done via the university or not. In this case however, the issue is blurred because it depends what the researcher is doing. The line between research using aggregated data and using platform BI tools to benchmark effectiveness are related things but different. It may not be easy to draw the lines as easily as before because data is used for everything now.

No speculation on NHS funding at this point will matter. The UK has the same ability to to spend more money on NHS as does the US and issuing more reserve currency. Even if NHS doesn't issue more currency to cover the gap, they can easily reallocate spending from their tax revenues.

Comparatively the UK spends roughly HALF of what the US does and achieve far better outcomes. NHS funding base been cut and flattened so today it is massively underfunded. As a former UK expat, the British people will throw out any government that changes the social contract of the NHS. £30B is chump change for the UK economy. This article exist simply as a comparative fodder for news between US and UK. It's totally apples and oranges.

...insurance company states that extended warranties and their corresponding value to consumers are a function of individual risk factors....duhhhhhhhhhh.

I totally agree. They should start Socratic method I high school if they want more critical thinking.

I did a personal experiment in college. I bought a vintage engineering calculus text book from the 1940s to see if I could learn from it and apply I learned in class. My hypothesis was correct.

I failed miserably. Those Manhattan project boys were one of a kind.