This is a load of horse shit. Yes, atomic mercury is bad for you. However, there are several useful and demonstrably non-harmful mercury compounds. "There's no safe amount of arsenic exposure!" "Hey, your cellphone contains some gallium arsenide transistors. OMGYERPOISONED"

They're using a palladium element as their "fusion" site. Palladium can absorb an absolutely amazing amount of hydrogen (900 times its own weight at the proper temperature). That's a supidly large amount of hydrogen which you can use for self-powering a demonstration for quite a long time.

The built-in PDF reader on the Nook Color is decent. It drains the battery faster (maybe 2x or 3x?) than reading epub files but is still quite usable. I've only ever had trouble with one PDF: there was one page with a TON of overlaid vector images and it wouldn't render correctly; all pages after that page were missing images entirely. Otherwise it's been a fine machine.

While it'll be nice to get native lambdas, the above example is a bit contrived; it's a lot prettier than this in current C++. With boost's lambda:

vector<int> foo(5, 0);

// one example
int n = 42;
for_each(foo.begin(), foo.end(), _1 = var(n)++);

// and another
for_each(foo.begin(), foo.end(), cout << _1 << '\n');

The syntax isn't perfect, but can be very handy for throwing together prototypes, descriptive code, etc.

The summary incorrectly states "5 ft" but the other news releases state "5 m." The fuel rods are 4.5m long, so the implication is that 100% of the hanging fuel rods are exposed. Any that fell/slumped to the bottom of the pressure vessel are, of course, probably 100% covered since there is still some water in the vessel.

1. download dd-wrt and flash your router; a decent one with a full 8 MB of flash is probably ideal.
2. set it up to have two SSIDs; one will be encrypted, one will not. DO NOT BRIDGE THEM. (You don't want the open wifi AP traffic to be able to reach your other subnet.)
3. set up traffic rate limiting (QoS) on the router; put the public subnet traffic into the "bulk" (i.e., low) priority and your private subnet's traffic into something higher.
4. turn it on, test it well, and smile because you're doing well and doing good.

The linked article about the nuclear plant problems in Japan is chock full of technical errors and omissions. He skips the primary danger of exposed fuel rods, the danger Japan is facing: thermal damage to the fuel rods themselves, prior to the total meltdown stage, means your steam pressure releases now contain primary radionuclides! He states that the melted fuel rods aren't hot enough to melt steel and concrete, when they most certainly are! (They melted sizeable chunks of the containment vessels at TMI and Chernobyl.) He fails to correctly describe what emergency core cooling systems do and how. He miss-states the actual danger of graphite-moderated reactors: it isn't that graphite is flammable, it's that you're using it as a moderator (as thus, water as some of the neutron absorption) and that makes the system inherently unstable. Once you reach the point of worrying about the graphite burning, you're way past the tremendous explosion/meltdown phase.

Run it as a normal user, bind to port N (where N is >= 1024), and use iptables to forward the ports 80 to port N. It is common enough that a quick Google search will show you exactly how.

As someone who works in the solar and wind controls business, let me state: this is not a surprise or really even a problem. People who install big wind and solar systems understand, because of the payback horizon of such installations, the limitations of the local distribution system. It is completely normal for big turbines to have to feather/furl/divert themselves during strong wind. The owners and installers design for this. It's factored into the payback time of the project!

The problem here is the sensationalist reporting. Yes, we need better electricity distribution systems for distributed generation, but we in the industry know that. We've known it for years. The guys who financed and installed the system at Columbia River Gorge almost certainly knew it.

So, yes, pump money into building bigger lines in the right places, but that's something we've been doing for more than fifty years. Generation locations are rarely at consumption locations, after all, and that was true for coal, natural gas, etc., just as it is for wind, hydro, and solar. The only problem here is that our 1990's generation locations aren't where tomorrow's generation locations are.

I'll never get my speedy zhevra at this rate.

My solution:

• main partition is Win XP
• second tiny partition for /boot
• rest of the drive is an encrypted LVM partition with Linux

When I go to travel, I edit my grub menu and enable (uncomment) "hiddenmenu", make sure the default is to boot to XP and the default timeout is just a couple seconds. If you want more stealth, force the machine to boot XP always, recoverable only if you boot off a Live CD (Knoppix, et al) and go re-enable booting to Linux. If you want even more, put your grub and /boot on a thumb drive.

Agent boots up the laptop, perfectly benign Win XP computer. If they want to clone the drive and examine it off-line at their leisure, they're more than welcome.

Of course, I've long ago forgotten my encryption password, so I can't boot into it even if compelled by a court. I guess that makes me a terrarist.