Wall Street has plenty of things they are scared of, and plenty of things they ought to be scared of.

People having the ability to turn astonishingly expensive plastic fiber into pitifully low-quality plastic doodads is not one of them.

Open source is a nice idea, but I'll take thoroughly documented, reliable PIC hardware and IDE over an Arduino any day of the week, but I'm getting off topic...

Just like to say, there's nothing inherently wrong with the Arduino's hardware (the fact that a stm32f4-series device of comparable price is about two orders of magnitude more powerful notwithstanding). But their silly "hide the reality of microcontrollers" IDE and most-C language made me intensely stabby. I guess what I'm saying is, get an stm32. Or msp430 if you're ok writing in windows only.

In defense of "bury it," the sarcophagus at Chernobyl was built using late-Soviet era materials, under unbelievable constraints of time and construction difficulty. You try "doing it right" when your welders can literally work for about 15 minutes before they have to leave and never return, building structurally sound walls to support your dome is impossible, and all while knowing that every single vehicle and piece of equipment you bring in will have to be abandoned and left to rot because it's now Contaminated.

Any sarcophagus built at Fukushima will be as if construction at Chernobyl were to begin today: "This area is somewhat contaminated. Mind your dosimeter, wear your protective clothes, take a shower after every shift and don't lick your tools and you'll be fine. Oh, and smile for the tourists."

The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die.

I think it's very unlikely that we'll still have gas to burn at the rate we're going by the 2090s. Coal, perhaps, but hopefully we won't be insanely stupid enough to completely and irreversibly rape our environment (dumping that much CO2 into the air would be a catastrophe beyond description due to ocean acidification) and then be left practically in the dark when everything except nuclear, hydro and solar becomes too expensive to fuel.

Fukushima, in short, has cesium contamination like Chernobyl (because cesium is volatile at low temperatures) but basically none of the heavy isotope contamination. So we can fast forward about 20 years on the recovery (virtually the entire open-air dose rate near Chernobyl is now Cesium decay). So while the radiation levels at Chernobyl have decreased from lethal to sorta-dangerous relatively quickly, it will still be another 120 years or so until they go from sorta-dangerous to pretty-much-not-dangerous.

Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.

And yet, all the places in the world one who has the choice would actually want to live have tons of regulations, while the places whose names are synonymous with hell in the public zeitgeist have none or next to none.

It might have to do with how unrestrained human behavior creates problems when there are millions of them living in close quarters, and all those horrible, awful laws and taxes and regulations are our way of kinda making it work anyway.

See, that's what would take care of the gambling problem, couple that with dismantling the FDIC and all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals.

1. Yeah, because Joe Average Worker really has time to monitor "real market signals" on the bank into which he deposits his paycheck once a week. We can't all be John Galt like you, so brilliant you can single-handedly be an expert in every kind of transaction you will ever engage in and have no reason to fear ever being defrauded.
2. It's funny because the FDIC was created when the exact opposite of what you appear to think will happen happened.

If you were in a foreign country and your image appeared on tv as the main suspect of an act of terror, would you hand yourself in of hide?

I think the campus security guard, the Mercedes owner who was carjacked and forced to withdraw cash at gunpoint, and the cops who were attacked with automatic weapons and explosives that the "possibly innocent suspect" just happened by pure chance to have on him, might disagree with the characterization of Dzhokhar's actions as a scared boy trying to hide.

Well the security guard won't I suppose, but that's because he's kind of dead. Which doesn't exactly go in the "wrongly accused and just trying to hide" column either.

Option 1: Police/govt over-react, nothing bad happens: Grumbling about over reaction
Option 2: Police/govt over-react, something bad still happens: Grumbling that still not enough was done
Option 3: Police/govt under-react, nothing bad happens: No problem
Option 4: Police/govt under-react, another attack happens: Everyone "responsible" as good as burnt alive at stake

In light of the potential outcome of option 4 (which based on what these psychopaths did before and during capture was altogether probable) risk-averse structures, like governments, will choose to over-react every time.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=astounding+stories+of+super+science

Yep, sometimes oldies are goodies.

That's only the best commercially available. Since we're talking about what are currently lab fantasies here, why not consider triple-junction cells which have acheived efficiencies north of 50% (and which will never be commercially viable outside of cost-is-no-object because they're as insanely expensive to make as you might imagine)?

I succeeded in installing Gentoo and XCFE on a now 16 year old SGI Indy (one 150MHz MIPS R5K, 160MB 60ns ram, Fast SCSI HDD, framebuffer-only Linux graphics driver). It's not snappy by any means, and it makes it very obvious which programs "do it right" and which ones rely on hardware to cover up bad algorithms. Yet none the less, it boots right up, I can login and start the GUI no problem, I can play music back and do ssh consoles, IRC (with a gui client no less) and even browse the web with a WebKit browser.

Can't imagine what even kde 3.5 would do to the poor thing, let alone kde 4 or gnome 3. Kde 3 might actually have been borderline usable... When my desktop had 256M ram, kde 3 started grinding the hard drive after about 6-7 tabs and 3-4 konsoles were opened.

You do realize that biological agents do something that chemicals don't, right?

Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.

Adobe: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. It'll be like a darkroom in your computer... let's call it... photo - shop!
Marketers: "I can work with this!"
GNU: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. Let's give it a name which means "person who is crippled!"
Marketers: "Please tell me this is a joke."

This would be a more convincing Both Sides Are Equally Bad if both sides were even remotely equally bad.