Up there with belly button fluff studies IMHO

The difference being that the government does not require that you purchase non-bald tyres, car insurance, or clothing from a particular (monopoly) retailer.

The ice-strengthened vessel is within 100nm of Dumont D'Urville with a typical December daytime temperature hovering around freezing (http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDT60803/IDT60803.89642.shtml). This ice did not suddenly appear in clear water because it got cold, the ship was sailing through broken ice floes when weather conditions pushed the ice and the ship into tight formation. The water between the sheets froze and the rest, as they say, is history.

Download and manually install Microsoft Security Bulletin MS13-097 - Critical, Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2898785) for IE8 and turn updates back on

In the immortal words of Sherman T Potter, "Horse hockey!"

The ability to mass disrupt the US economy is of great utility to the Chinese government in the event that the US and China are on opposite sides of a war. Just the same as the United States would seek to destroy the economy of China in the same circumstances. Even without the war, the threat of being able to do this to the US is the same threat the US relies on every time it claims nuclear weapons are a deterrent: don't pick a fight with us because we will cripple you.

Remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

This has been happening on and off for more than a year. I found the last couple of times that it was helped if I manually fetched and installed the latest "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer" for version 8 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-088 at time of writing). Never understood why; perhaps it allows a serious chunk of the search tree to be pruned quickly avoiding the exponential stupidity.

If you need to stop the 100% CPU while you fetch this then Start -> Run, "Services.msc", locate and stop "Automatic Updates".

No, not "Mori", "Maori" with a macron on the a... it's just that Slashdot is too 1970's to realise that ASCII just doesn't cut it in the Internet age.

If we are discounting prehistoric claimants (much as the Europeans did at the time in discounting the native population)... the continent of Australia. Dutch, French, Portuguese and other groups had found parts of the continent prior to Cook's flag planting and claim of the eastern regions in 1770. The first British colony exploiting the explicit claim was established in 1788 (Sydney). The British claim stuck and it was not challenged in any substantive way. The French claimed western Australia (1772) and the Dutch Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania, 1642) but neither nation settled or defended these claims in material ways when challenged by British settlement.

New Zealand is an another example that comes close, although the French did manage to create a settlement on purchased land there (Akaroa) and Mori settlement occurred inside the time span of documented European history.

Elsewhere in the world of dead tree consumption: White Elephant

Lets us, just for argument sake, accept your maths as to the total high-level spent fuel at 861 tons for the global generated power at 2010, and let's pretend we can transport and densely store it on hypothetical football fields without encasing it much larger volumes of other material to stop it getting too hot. From your reference site we see that the world electricity consumption increased from 16391 billion kwH to 18466 billion kWh over five years (2006-2010). That's exponential growth at 3% and new generating capacity will have to match that for the foreseeable future. So you start with 861 tons (2430 cu ft) next year you will need to find storage for another 887 tons (2500 cu ft), the next for 913 tons (2580 cu ft)... In 10 years time you will need to find space for an extra 1157 tons (3270 cu ft), after 20 add 1555 tons (4390 cu ft), after 50 the annual addition will be 3774 tons (10600 cu ft) and total under storage will be a shade over 100000 tons (285000 cu ft). I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; in the exceptionally unlikely event consumption does not plateau in the meantime, by the time your first fuel is expiring at 300 years the current year's waste will be 6.11 million tons and the total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).

The Yucca Mountain facility has a statutory limit of 85,000 short tons. Even by your no-growth estimate Yucca mountain is already too small to hold 300 year's worth of thorium waste (let alone 300 years of current fuel wastes). At 3% consumption growth it will be full in less than 50 years. Of course, political reality means there will never be a single repository (or indeed universal nuclear power) but the requirement to manage the global total amount of waste would remain.

NSA employees operate in a strictly compartmentalised environment where the need to know is enforced. Some people are in positions of extreme trust, but the vast majority are not. We all need to understand that the revelations coming from Snowden's leaks are just as surprising to the vast majority of NSA employees as they are to the public at large. A good number of these people will be equally dismayed at the actions of their employer. We don't need to hound the individuals. The organisation is fair game though.

So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe (for some definition of safe). What about the small but slightly larger amount of waste produced next year, and the year after, and the year after? The nuclear waste dump does not become safe until 300 years after the last thorium waste product is added to the pile and the pile has grown exponentially in the meantime. There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.