So instead of walking across their own parking lot Google has to bus them in from the surrounding community. This is the solution to the traffic problem?

Back in the Ford administration. Or maybe Nixon.

OK, that's enough nightmare fuel for one day.

Which is run by a former Microsoft executive who was in charge of security. I guess he can gloat about being personally responsible.

An accountancy firm found a way to get taxable profits off the books? Say it ain't so.

Verizon stopped in return for wireless spectrum. Google is accelerating at an exponential rate. They are hiring salespeople in NYC now. They were slow to start because it takes time to grow this sort of business organically, but is was important to do that to avoid the old thinking buying an existing cableco would bring with it. Once they have a solid org and process there is no reason not to grow by acquisition. It may happen faster than you think.

This is the most important part.

It is not nice to gloat, you lucky bastige.

And while we are at it we could reclaim the thermal energy of those spent fuel ponds. Dammit there is no reason not to exploit that free energy just because it is lower intensity than the main reactor. Adapt the binary cycle systems used in next-gen geothermal and turn those BTUs into watts!

Admiral Rickover is generally seen as the father of commercial nuclear power. He pushed the boiling water designs scaled up from successful navy submarine reactors. The idea was "now is better" and "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!". Maybe he was right at the time, but that was 60 years ago. Now we have all this spent fuel from his reactors and we have to do something with it. We could bury it now at horrific expense. Or we could use it as input for breeder reactors, burn up the uranium and difficult mid-halflife actinides generating 200x the power we have got so far and then bury what's left at horrific expense. No mining, mining injuries, mining environmental costs or fossil fuel usage because our mine is the dangerously overfull spent fuel cooling ponds of boiling water reactors.

A lot of people in these threads have accused me of being anti-nuke because I don't want more boiling water reactors. I am not anti-nuke, I'm anti-stupid. We have more spent fuel than we will need for 100 years. I don't see any need to make more of it until we have a plan for what to do with what we have. IFR solves that.

In fact, breeder reactors enrich Uranium so well they can feed themselves and all the boiling water reactors too, so we could shut down mining right now and not mine another gram of natural uranium for 100 years. Enriched uranium is a natural byproduct of a breeder reactor. It is almost free! How is that for solving two problems (or eight) at once?

The downside is we wind up with a bunch of plutonium, some of which NASA needs, and the rest can be securely buried with less risk of than the wastes we already have.

I like the thorium thing too - a reactor that can only fission while you radiate it is a nice safe design. The traveling wave thing holds promise too.

He knows we are going to talk about how Microsoftie Howard Schmidt is chairman of the board of codenomicon.

Back before white rot fungus evolved to break down lignin. So the plants fell and their woody parts did not ever decompose. Now they are broken down into CO2 and Methane through biological action.

The type of reactor is important. There isn't enough uranium for us to power out of this with light water reactors. We need breeders. Thorium, traveling wave, IFR that take spent fuel as input and self-enrich.

It's OK. In the winter the gorillas will freeze to death.