Scenario: the bad thing that happens is Monsanto realizes that they have more than 60% market share, and raises the price 20:1, because they'll make an enormous profit. There's nowhere nearly enough regular seed corn to plant, so everyone has to pay the piper. It's a monopoly in the making, and you know Monsanto and many other businesses have already thought of this and are just wriggling with anticipation.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...:

"In October 1976,[8] concern of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. ...
President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing."
"In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility. ... the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies."

It's nothing to do with the ban on reprocessing that was only in place from 1977 to 1981, and everything to do with reprocessing being completely uneconomical. If we're going to reprocess, the government has to pay for it, as companies won't, but there are no technical or legislative barriers to doing so, as multiple other countries that are already reprocessing their waste demonstrate.

Echoing this thread.
Assessing G+ activity by counting public posts is like assessing a community's sexual activity by looking at marriage licenses.

This is a useless thread.

I dated a woman who was involved in transcranial magnetic stimulation projects. She said it was like someone was flicking the inside of her brain, and similarly to tdcs, it had significant effects on her mental abilities: she'd sometimes be measurably better at math, or measurably worse at coming up with words during conversations. I hadn't heard of tpu before.

In the Radiolab discussion, they were doing tests with the woman who was doing the sniper training, both with and without the system running. She thought her performance was about the same, but the people analyzing it said it was dramatically different, because among the things affected was her perception of time. She felt like she was playing the game until she got killed, which was maybe a matter of a minute or two, but when she was playing really well, she was playing for much longer periods of time and didn't realize it.
As I recall, they specifically compared it to programmers who talk about The Zone, where they're coding very effectively and have reduced perception of the passage of time, and making the claim that the two effects, of heightened efficiency and reduced perception of time passage, may be related.

There was a recent Radiolab about this general technique, that's totally worth listening to: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
(It's also a lot better-written than the summary.)

The idea is that by applying DC voltages to different parts of your skull, you can affect how your brain works. The theory is that the current passing across part of your brain changes how your brain learns from mistakes, messing with the pattern-acquisition feedback. In the story, they specifically concentrated on a woman training in a sniper video game, who was having to identify attackers vs. civilians, and how much it changed her ability to do that, but they also discussed a big underground scene of people trying this out at home for other purposes or just to learn about what happens. They were moving the contact patches around and then trying things to see what they were or weren't good at. One guy doing this found a spot that left him largely blind for several hours afterwards, so it's not all roses, but the people trying language acquisition and finding it much easier both to acquire and, later, post-treatment, to recall, new languages, really got me interested.

Do you remember TechAmerica, RadioShack's last attempt to embrace the maker culture, in 1996? They opened five stores in major metro areas.
They were wonderful. I could go in and decide which 10-bit A/D I preferred. The guy behind the counter knew what a 74141 was.
They lasted five years. Over the three year lifetime of the Denver store, the electronics section got smaller, the toys and gadget section got larger, and they still didn't manage to make their rent.

After that, is it any surprise that their current maker section consists of half a dozen arduino boards and shields and a shelf of TH resistors in the back? How do you compete with Digikey, if you have to pay rent?

A friend who does hardware security has had to deal with an exploited internet-connected refrigerator that had been hacked into a spam relay.
So: wait until the day when internet thugs encrypt your data, hold your house for ransom, and while doing that, use your devices to attack other people's houses and encrypt their data, plus rent out your house's bandwidth to DDoS farms.

As far as I know, every current Tek scope has either Windows (higher-end) or embedded Linux running it. All our 4000-series and up scopes have a mix of Win2K and XP, which is for us a disaster since we're not allowed to use them on the corporate network now that there's no longer any OS support for them. Weirdly, the Linux-based systems, which appear to have 2.2-era kernels, are freely allowed on the network and feature integral webservers so you can control them remotely without needing any fancy software.

"Probably even have increased secondary trade" doesn't even begin to cover it. My wife works in ophthalmology and she has four patients who have moved to colorado just because of pot. That's likewise cited as a primary reason that housing prices have increased recently. I find it hard to believe that people would uproot their lives just for weed, but it appears to be happening.
Colorado is making an estimated $1M/day in taxes on pot and that's probably significantly lower than the actual revenue, since because there are virtually no banks (one credit union) that'll deal with marijuana dispensaries, it's a cash-only business so the businesses could in theory only report as much business as they wish, and pocket the rest. If/when more financial institutions start dealing with them, and people feel they can use credit cards to pay for pot, the tax revenues are likely to increase.
It's also not clear that the novelty is outweighed by the convenience. There are a lot of people who didn't use pot previously because it was just a hassle to get and there was a bit of risk involved. The people I know who are long-term smokers have stayed with their black-market dealers because they know it's safe and it's cheaper. But people who want to use it occasionally, or don't know/want to deal with black-market stuff, is apparently a huge market. They may overwhelm the local novelty effect.

My wife has one because she can't fit any modern cellphone in her pockets, and her Veer finally died, so the phone lives in her handbag and she uses her watch. She can answer calls, talk, and hang up without (I believe) even having to touch it, and can send texts ("galaxy, send text. next patient has piece of steel stuck in eyeball, will need more lidocane.") which she then previews visually and tells it verbally to send, again without having to touch it. She's pretty thrilled with it. And it tells time. I'm not sure what else I'd want/need in a watch.
(I haven't gotten one because I destroy everything I touch so it'd be a waste. But I'm quite envious.)

There are two parts to making big moves: you may lose swing voters (which in this case is pretty unlikely) but just as important you may motivate fringe voters to go vote in greater numbers (which in this case is pretty likely.) If you don't gain voters, but manage to get more people to vote against you, that's a big deal in political calculus. Of course, the opposite also happens -- by doing something big you may motivate fringe voters on your side to come out and vote for you (which is arguably how Obama got elected in the first place, along with running against terrible opponents) but the number of people who feel very positive about restoring relations with Cuba is extremely small compared to the number of people who will be infuriated by this, I suspect. It's a single issue voter thing.

I'm (in a more civil way) with the GP: the distaste for Bennett and the vitriol in the comments feels like people driving across town to picket a porn store, when they could just stay home and not buy porn.
But your post -- "I usually don't notice it is a Bennett piece until I am halfway through reading it and say "Oh man, this is terrible"" -- makes me realize a lot of people read Slashdot differently than I do. I see Bennett's name before anything else, like this big BLINK hashtag, and know what I'm going into when I choose to click on that 'read more' link.
I'd love moderation on articles, but in the same way that groupthink buries unpopular comments with no basis on their actual merit, we might lose some good material.
I'm not saying Bennett's articles are chock-full of merit. He definitely has a higher word-to-concept ratio than I'd use. But I can't help feeling like at least some of the hatred for his stuff is because those of us who are both socially aware individuals and geeks cringe when we hear someone monopolizing a conversation by holding forth on his/her own pet subject of interest.
Maybe Bennett should set up an amazon turk survey for figuring out just how much text on a given subject is too much, and how much is just right.
But in the meantime, the internet is a dynamic array and I'd much prefer someone spend his time vastly expanding one small chunk of it, behind a link, than a lot of other things he could be doing.

I know people in their thirties who are willing to believe that obama is going to declare martial law. Jumping to wild conclusions has no age restrictions.
I may be reading you wrong, but one thing I think about every time I hear discussion of vaccination is how I've never met a single person who was 10 or older in 1952, who is even slightly anti-vaccine, because they all remember the terror of the polio epidemics in the early 1950's. They all knew people who died, or people who walked into hospitals and then spent the rest of their lives in iron lungs, and they all remember how the introduction of polio vaccines managed to turn 60K cases/year into ten cases/year in two years. It's people who don't remember a world full of crippled people in wheelchairs who think they can do just fine without vaccines. So in that sense, I think the anti-vax hysteria is almost entirely a stupidity of younger people.