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Comment A Challenger Appears! (Score 1) 214

Ohio: It's not illegal to sell your cars here.

Tesla: Fuck you. *sells cars*

Ohio: You can't do that! Stop it!

Tesla: Fuck you. No.

Ohio: We'll arrest you!

Tesla: On a civil matter? *snort* Good luck. And fuck you.

Ohio: We'll arrest your customers!

Elon Musk: I'll bail them out, provide them with 10 lawyers and unlimited funds for the lawsuit. Fuck you.

Ohio: You're being arrested for contempt of court!

Tesla: *lawyer power-up* (Tesla has evolved!) *supreme court power-up* (Tesla has evolved!) *social media campaign* (Tesla has evolved!) *political contributions power-up* (Tesla has evolved! Maximum evolution achieved!)

Tesla uses Intergalactic Level Supreme Court Bitchslap! Ohio is destroyed!

Elon Musk: Fuck you.

Comment Wait, wait..UNused Rods??? (Score 2) 101

Hang on a moment, unused rods are non-radiating. They're *ready* to start working, but they won't start radiating until they're brought together in a core. That's called "criticality", or "going critical", which is a self-sustaining reaction.

Prior to core insertion, unused rods are handled in open air, without any shielding, and can even be touched without a problem. You definitely don't want to bring them close to another fuel bundle, nor do you want them anywhere near a neutron reflector.

That would be a Bad Thing.

The only way this would be a threat, is if any of the debris in the storage pool damages the fuel bundles. Such as bending them and bringing the rods within criticality range of each other. Or if some stray metal got down inside the storage slots, acting as a neutron reflector and creating a hot-spot.

Outside of that, unless I'm wrong about unused fuel not being hot, then this is just a scare story.

Comment Re:Once Again Missing Perspectives (Score 2) 291

The problem with your list, is that without exception, every one of them has a well-established and documented reputation for hunting down and killing those who target them for assassination.

So please! By all means, go for it. I'd ask you to tell us how it went, but somehow, I don't think we'll need you to tell us?

We'll find what's left of you on the 6-o-clock news.

Comment PsyOps? (Score 1) 291

I wonder if this isn't an operation to sour the public on Bitcoin? I mean, not that it needs much to sour the folks here on Slashdot, but the common Joe/Jane on the street might need some Emmanuel Goldsteins to scream at for two minutes.

And with all the revelations of Snowden and Wikileaks, calling someone a "tinfoil hatter" has lost most of it's sting.

Comment Re:Bottom Line (Score 1) 276

Do you even know what a bubble is?

A bubble grows, bursts, then vanishes. *pop!* Gone. No longer exists. A perfect example is the Dot-Com Bubble, or Enron. They came in, burst and went away.

But real estate, stocks, petroleum and other so-called "bubbles" are still here, still being bought/sold/traded, and show no signs of going anywhere, anytime soon.

And neither is Bitcoin.

Do I advise jumping in now???

HELL NO!!! That would be crazy! Sooner or later, the price of Bitcoins will drop again, so it's just a matter of waiting for it to happen. But I think it's reasonably safe to say that it will never go back down below $50.

Comment Bottom Line (Score 0) 276

Jan 9, 2009 14:00:00 EDT: Bitcoin introduced to the world. Initial value $1 = 250 BTC

Jan 9, 2009 14:00:01 EDT: Bitcoin scam/bubble/fraud/fake/waste of money/never gonna last/shill accusations start on Slashdot and everywhere else.

Flash forward through 4 years of ups and downs, where the OVERALL TREND has been up...

Current value as of 16:30:10: $429 = 1 BTC.

So please! Keep kai-yai-yaiing about shills and bubbles. Your tears are delicious.

Comment Demolition Man Style Driving? (Self-drive on!) (Score 2) 449

Quite frankly, I would not object to this, provided we have a choice of purchasing it. (There would be privacy issues I'd like to see addressed prior to buying, and if I don't like what I see, I'd prefer to not be forced into it.)

If I could hand over the driving to the computer when I'm doing a long-distance drive, ESPECIALLY when driving on a major highway that goes through a metropolitan area like Washington DC, I would be all over that. If for no other reason that a computer will not succumb to "Brake Light Accordion Games", where the idiot ahead of me rides with their left foot on the brake.

I hate drivers that do that. They cause all the drivers behind them to step on their brakes, which causes a ripple-effect all they way back, resulting in a 3-mile stretch of highway where traffic is moving at a snail's pace, but there are no obstructions of any kind.

That reason alone is more than sufficient reason to turn driving over to a computer. I could hop on to the I-95 auto-drive lane and say, "Self-drive off. Destination Boston, Massachusetts." And just go to sleep for the duration of most of the drive.

Heck, if it's a Tesla, I could set it up to automatically drive into a SwapStation to change out the battery without even waking me up!

Comment Be Afraid of What You're Not Seeing (Score 1) 182

Storytime!

My friend was at his friend's house back in 1990, when their dad came home. My friend noticed something on his tie, and it was a microchip. My friend was-and still is-really into computers, so he asked about it. The gentleman explained that it was a 250 megabyte memory chip.

Once again, a 250 megabyte chip, back in 1990.

He explained that they had a failure rate of 90%, and that most of them were simply blowing up the moment they were powered up. And indeed, the one on his tie had a small burn hole in the back, hence it's retasking as a tie clip.

The question you all need to be worried about, is: "What happened to the 10% that survived????"

What project did they end up in? How long did they have chips with a 100% success rate before they were released to the public? I mean, look at TEMPEST? It wasn't until 1985 that the non-military scientific sector was even made aware of it.

Did you think that the 1960 Monty Python sketch, "Fish License" mentioning the "Cat Detector Van" came out of the blue? They were poking fun at the TV Detector Vans, which everyone thought was ludicrous. But what we were not told, is that those vans are driving around, with their equipment tuned to the same oscillation frequency of the electron gun in the cathode ray tubes.

TV detectors in 1960.

So. Here we have a nice, public show with all kinds of clunky, ker-bonky, teeter-totter, weeble-wobble toys that look like they came out of a K'nex kit at Toys-r-Us.

Meanwhile, in some nondescript building in Reston Virginia, a group of researchers are laughing about this video/story while they wait for US Navy nukes with TS-SCI clearances to replace the Plutonium power core in the android that looks like something out of a Battlestar Galactica / Terminator cross-over.

Comment Re:Evidently not that vulnerable (Score 2) 190

I think the point they were trying to make, is that an electronic switch is a lot more fragile than a hardware switch. Electronics are particularly susceptible to damage from radiation, which is why you can't just send in robots to do all the cleanup work in a reactor accident. Chips get fried just like we do, sometimes even faster.

So technically, once you drag the irradiated corpses out of an analog control room, you'll be able to use the same switches that are already there. With electronic switches, they'll all need to be replaced.

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