The only mechanism I can think of which would case a solar flare to render optical disks unreadable would be radiation damage. A solar flare which delivered that kind of dose would likely wipe out all life on earth so you probably wouldn't be worrying about your backups.

You've got the wrong end of the stick. HEU works just fine in an implosion weapon and in a gun type, plut works only in an implosion type. The reason most weapons are plut is cost and availability. You're also misusing 'Teller-Ulam design'. This refers to the design of the fusion secondary in a H-bomb and not the design of the primary.

You are right about non proliferation buggering isotope production though.

Thorium has a heat capacity of 0.113 J g-1 K-1
It's not high, or remarkable. This is a scam no matter what they're proposing to do with the thorium.

Some crackpot or conman has mixed some genuine stuff about sub-critical, accelerator driven, fission reactors in with the word 'lasers' and is presumably even now coining in investment.

Has the science savvy of the editors really deteriorated this badly?

Some people seem to think this is too draconian - an infringement of rights etc. Thing is, the way I see it, once you get caught drunk driving once you've demonstrated that you are not competent enough to be trusted with a motor vehicle. There's nobody who needs to drive drunk and there's no excuse to do it. Basically, fuck 'em. They're lucky they're allowed a car at all any more.

It is at our university (Birmingham, UK). How anonymous they actually are varies strongly as a function of class size.

He had to be playing on ITYTD. He would have got a shotgun basically straight away otherwise and he would have NEEDED it.

Shit. I just had one of those realisations that I'm properly middle aged.

I was reading this 'review' of a guy vaguely dabbling in Doom and it was annoying me. A proper 'you young people, you don't understand' moment. Doom was fucking mind blowing at the time.

Those 10,000 have already demonstrated that they'll buy any old shit, provided it's shiny, though. Very desirable marketing demographic.

There are software packages and appropriate cables available to let you deal with OBD on a laptop for peanuts. From what I've seen it's superior even to what the main dealers tend to have. I agree that, if anything, modern OBD makes it far easier to troubleshoot electric issues. I've been chasing a misfire on my early 80's Porsche 928 for weeks now!

At the height of the blaster outbreak a few UK ISPs cut off blaster infected PC's and redirected to a 'clean up your PC' page.