Were any of those plants making key inputs for yours? If they were, and it wasn't practical to consolidate that function, then closing them down would have crippled you. Which individual plants make money is one thing, but where there's internal transfer of items between units of the business, the value attached to those items is fairly nominal in practice; it's the overall business that really makes the profit or the loss.

Or maybe they're just incompetent fucks. That could be true too. Hard to say without the full facts, but the fact that bankruptcy hit is strongly indicative.

WE don't lack the will.

We lack the power.

The ones with the power lack the will (or desire) - because their power depends on control of generation of energy through resources they control; namely fossil fuels. They're not going to give up that power while they have it. Not voluntarily.

The reason thorium never hurt anybody, is because it is complete fantasy. Nobody has ever built one that has demonstrated any degree of industrial reliability and usefulness. Thorium is up there with Fusion, as far as being a demonstrated technology.

Take at least one OO language (Java's fussy and bureaucratic, but its a pretty good example of the breed and is likely to be useful after you get your masters), at least one functional language (probably Haskell these days), at least one declarative language (Prolog or SQL), and don't just learn programming languages. You also need to learn about data, about data structures, about algorithms and their analysis, about parsing and compilation, and about concurrency; these are all independent of any programming language.

But computing is well served by not just learning about computing. If you have time, learn about math, stats and logic too, and learn how to communicate your ideas effectively; you'll never get far if you can't communicate with other people well.

Huh. I use it quite a bit when implementing an API. (You hardly need to use public at all inside interfaces.)

I'd guess something like:
        if(target->ThreatRating = ThreatRating::Trrist) { target->Kill(); }

Let that be a lesson to you: Trrist must evaluate to 0, for humanity's sake!

The problem is that it requires a true breakthrough, and there's no way to predict when that will happen. It also doesn't help that we don't really know what intelligence really is; all we've got is lots of things it isn't. I suspect that when someone cracks it, there'll be lots of people going "Is that all?! Anyone could have got that." and they'd be right, except that nobody did and it involves something both trivial and non-obvious. It might also require a lot of parallel processing, which we're still learning how to do well.

As we don't have any handy breakthroughs right now, we should instead study how brains really work and how to make computers do useful things (including stuff like "understanding" speech, "understanding" written natural language, drive cars safely, etc.) Those might or might not make the breakthrough easier, but they'll have other benefits along the way so they're still right to do.

And your grandmother's business too, assuming you want actually communicate that cooking recipe to her.

... basically, what American Colonists were rebelling against in the first place. . . then adopted.

The other crap in the lines is noise. It's insane to imagine that you could reliably extract any reliable information from it.

Given the cost overruns and the fact the schedule has been already pushed out 20 years any sane person would question what is going on here.

I'm in favor of government funded R&D but this one stinks of gross mismanagement big time.

Writing off a loss generally doesn't do much for you. It might save you 30% of the charge or so.

Insurance companies have a better deal because their business often involves re-insurance, that is off-loading their liabilities to pools.

The best of all is credit cards. They charge fees to merchants to cover the losses. The merchants then bake the fees into the retail price which people pay regardless of whether or not they use the card.

So no, T-Mobile isn't quite in the same league as insurance and credit cards.

I didn't say there is no reason for it. There are in fact a lot of reasons, primarily in the tax code for such.

However the idea of 'group discount' is not one of these reasons. We have lots of other insurance programs that work fine for individual purchasers. Homeowners, auto, term life, umbrella policies etc. My experience (through CORBA) is that you can usually find coverage for LESS than what your employer is paying.

Citations needed.

Why would I? Much like the entire concurring majority, I'm a guy.

Pregnancy: it takes two to happen, but it's always the woman's fault.