I don't pretend to be a climate scientist, so I have to go off of charts and information they provide. I also didn't jump on a bandwagon, I read arguments by both sides and studies.

In the end, there was a paper where something like 97% of scientists in the climate sciences field agree in climate change/global warming including the biggest naysayer that most republicans were using as a reference for a long time. The major flaw in the 97% study I believe was that about 75% of them assumed humans were at fault as part of their study, but you've still got 22% vs 3% or less with no pre-assumptions. If you don't believe them, here is a simple NASA chart showing carbon dioxide levels for the past 650000 years. That shows greenhouse gasses up a lot in a short period of time. It could be caused by emissions, chopping down rainforests, or whatever combo, but the bottom line is carbon dioxide is at the highest level in 650000 years and it happened in a short period of time. The earth takes a long time to warm and cool - we may not notice the effects of this for 20000 years or more and we may be able to fix it in the meantime and never see change.

But if you are like my brother, you will deny any climate results older than 10000 years because the devil put them there. As I said, there always will be naysayers.

The problem is, the code looks something like this right now

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int dem = 1;
int rep = 1;

void main() {
    while (dem||rep)
    {
        fork();
    }
}

For you non programmers, that is a slight take on an old UNIX joke for taking down the mainframe before we had process limits. Pretty sure congress doesn't have any limits, and they certainly can't budget.

Religion and political ideology indoctrination sometimes trump science, even with otherwise intelligent people. Proof: my brother believes both evolution and climate change are not real. He is a rich religious conservative republican that eats up both ideologies and listens to pretty much nothing but conservative talk radio. Other than that, he is also a brilliant electrical engineer with hundreds of patents that both codes and owns an electrical/computer engineering contracting company. Whenever people suggest global warming he says there is not enough evidence, and says the devil created old fossils and such to sway Christians from God and the truth. There is no way I can possibly fully disprove either assertion - no matter how much science I shove in his face, he will counter it with "not enough research," "the earth is in a warming cycle and will soon begin a cooling cycle like it has for millenniums" or some bullshit like that.

Can't say I've castrated a pig, but I did butcher chickens and shear sheep at my grandpa's farm. I got skillz.

I pay my use tax when I go over the catalog exception. It doesn't happen often, but I feel it's my civic duty when it does.

I also REALLY HATE paying use tax, however - it is based on where I live and both my city/county combination has the highest sales tax in the state. Since use tax is based on where you live, you have to pay as if your house is the point of sale. I can drive 5 minutes away and pay nearly 2% less tax (1.86% I believe).

Incidentally, the USSR largely chose that for themselves. Lenin wanted Trotsky in charge and Trotsky wanted the party to elect a leader democratically. Unfortunately, Stalin grabbed power in the wake of Lenin's death and exiled Trotsky, convicted him of treason in absentia and eventually had one of his secret service agents assassinate him with an ice axe in Mexico.

Yeah - my schedule is usually at the beck-and-call of half the world, anyway. Sometimes I start at 4AM (Israel), other times have meetings at 9 at night (China), others 7AM (India). My meetings dictate my work schedule already, and when Europe switches at a different time than the US my meeting schedule gets tossed into a blender.

But the Libertarians want some ass-backward policies. Go back to the gold standard, for instance, which would completely wreck the economy. I've also disagreed with the Libertarian party on taxes such as supporting flat taxes (which usually shift most of the tax burden to the middle class due to subsidies for the poor and without those, the poor pay significantly more taxes).

I'm all for getting rid of the Fed, but I'd rather the US have a gold backed co-currency than just shifting to the gold standard. Fixing the IRS would be huge, but flat taxes aren't the answer. Fortunately for me, there is an Independent party that differs from the Libertarians on these issues and tends to be in lock step as far as personal freedoms go. Ending the 1 trillion dollar drug war that catches 3% of drug traffic (pretty sure that was Eric Holder's number) is a pathetic waste of money. I'm guessing spending 1 trillion on treatment, education, and maintenance plans would have a lot better results than 3%, and you could tax the shit out of the more dangerous stuff (and have reasonable dosages and such).

Um, uranium isn't all that radioactive or even dangerous to handle. The only reason people actually wear gloves when handling it is to keep contaminants like oils from the hand off of them. Sticking it on a lathe isn't going to make a bomb, though. You could make a pretty poor dirty bomb because breathing uranium dust isn't healthy (the skin stops alpha and beta emitters pretty well, but the lungs don't), but it also isn't the best emitter. In fact, with a dirty bomb you want something with a high alpha emission rate like polonium. Spent reactor fuel contains all kinds of actinides with high emission rates, so nuclear waste makes a much better dirty bomb than raw uranium.

As for getting fissile uranium out of pieces of uranium, well it isn't particularly hard, but it is time consuming. You basically dissolve the uranium into a solution and then run it in a centrifuge and the heavier stuff moves to the walls and lighter stuff toward the center. You then remove the lighter solution and repeat over and over again to get more purity. You need to do this to a certain level for a reactor and a much higher level for a bomb. If you wanted to take it one step further, you could use reactor level uranium and build a breeder reactor that converts uranium to plutonium and then make a plutonium bomb. Just to get it to reactor grade requires a lot of centrifuges and/or a lot of time... I think I read Iran has something like 77000 of them just to create fuel grade nuclear material.

Well WINE should run Windows games relatively well, since they implement Windows API calls on Linux. Basically, it's Windows on a different kernel. As for graphics, there were two versions last I checked - one converted DirectX to OpenGL and the other (Gallium3D) used DirectX calls directly. I haven't used WINE in a couple of years, so I'm not sure what the state of things is today or which they default to using.

yesish... If they use API calls that depend on other window managers toolkits (since SteamOS is a Debian with GNOME fork), you would at least need a dependencies package and sometimes even that doesn't work. I remember having such issues with metacity (GNOME 2, this was replaced with Mutter in Gnome 3) dependencies when running a different window manager, I think Enlightenment. I pretty much needed to kill Enlightenment, start GNOME, and then could run the program. I had a lot better luck with GTK apps running in KDE, which was my primary desktop for a long time (more because my work provided it than personal preference).

The Kim family is built on Stalin's "Cult of Personality" style leadership. Basically, the person in power runs the entire system like a cult, brainwashing those underneath and threatening/killing anyone outside of their core belief system. It would be frightening to have a non-human AI take over as the cult leader, especially one that isn't programmed for emotions. That said, I completely agree - disassociate the AI with any ability to get resources on its own except knowledge and there isn't much it will be able to do. You could also program it with rules that forbid it to do certain things, like take over the internet or subway system or whatever.

Half that - it sounds like the proof of concept is done (announced in 2013, this article seems to confirm they finished that), 5 years to the operational prototype and 10 years to production.

Lockheed has tight military ties and the military doesn't have to obey NRC regulatory restrictions and can do basically anything they want. It would not surprise me if they built one or more of these for the military before they even started trying to push one through the NRC. It also is a good way to avoid the nuclear lobby, which would do everything in its power to delay construction of such a reactor for as long as possible (because their clients have a vested interest in this technology failing).

Which, as other posters have said, that exhaust is awfully hot, curious to how it would be contained without melting stuff. You certainly could use a Brayton Cycle turbine by keeping that heat relatively high with whatever you heat with it (but MUCH, MUCH cooler than the vented plasma).

Even with fission if we just built breeder reactors the hundred thousand year storage becomes a 300 year storage problem (and you'll have much less of it to store).