Exactly two stories before this one we learn from Nature Communications, a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal; "approximately half of the children's math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup."

The problem isn't that intellectual variability due to genetics is verboten. The problem is that certain people must not be permitted to extrapolate awkward conclusions from these results. If, however, one were to write that Caucasians are, say, genetically predisposed to ruin the environment, subjugate non-Caucasians as slaves, engage in industrial warfare, eat too much meat or any of a number of politically acceptable assertions, that would be just fine.

There you go. Mod the parent up.

The parent perhaps goes too far in dismissing Russia's standing in the world since '91; there has been a huge flow of capital from the West into Russia to fund heavy industry beyond the reach of Western regulatory burdens and this has stimulated rapid economic growth and a resurgence in Russian military capability, including new design ICBM deployments.

But the parent is absolutely correct about the Russian people and the leaders they empower. Russians are once again indulging a cult of personality in Putin. I know there are many Russians in IT and geekery that will say I'm all wrong because that's not what they would have, but the fact is that the majority of Russians are thrilled by their bare chested father figure, sop up every morsel of the propaganda they're being fed and have kept him in power long enough to cement his place as Russia's latest autocrat.

Russia; publicly cultivate your masculinity and say bad things about America and you too can install yourself for life.

They can't. They've been inculcated with the "silent spring" narrative since birth and they indulge the fears and hates with which they've been trained. Stories and reporting that fit the narrative are given the benefit of the doubt, and those that question are for hating.

The current expansion of the Panama canal goes online next year. "New Panamax" ships are 13,000 TEU vs 5,000 for current Panamax ships. All the important East coast ports have already been or a currently being dredged out to accommodate these ships. This was accomplished quickly and quietly beginning in 2012 when Obama exempted the dredging operations from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act.

Guess they'll be needing another bunch of pencil whipped wavers to dredge out the ports even deeper for the EquadorMax ships, because what China wants China gets.

Or China.

Greenies don't actually trump everything, everywhere.

WAMSR is a paper reactor. It has all the problems of any molten salt reactor, plus a few new ones thrown in for good measure.

It requires fuel channels made of unobtainium. We can't actually make unobtainium so we use Hastealloy instead which cracks at some rate faster than anticipated plant life, as found in ORNL's MSRE. Neutron flux embitterment is also an issue for fuel channels and the long term effect of this is not perfectly understood. WAMSR actually runs at slightly higher temperatures than MSRE which will not improve the cracking problems due to even greater temperature gradients. Transatomic speculates about using certain exotic ceramics to solve this, and that could pan out; materials science does actually solve problems from time to time, but this one hasn't been solved yet.

The reactor produces relatively large quantities of tritium (~12y half life) requiring active separation and storage of the gas. It's effectively impossible to capture all the tritium (hydrogen is slippery stuff), however enough could be retained to bring it in line with conventional reactors, they claim. This assumes the capture system works, is maintained and doesn't leak. Good luck with that. Amusingly the Transatomic Power Technical White Paper claims the addition of Lithium-7 can reduce tritium generation, and you can read about it in section 2.6.4, which doesn't actually exist ...... hopefully the ~$2 million funding injection will get that written. Tritium is among the larger spikes being driven through the heart of Entergy's Vermont Yankee right now, in case one wonders how much this might matter.

As with all MSR designs, fuel must be reprocessed on-site concurrent with reactor operation. This is always offered as a nonproliferation benefit of MSRs. Unfortunately handling molten reactor fuel is a difficult mechanical and chemical process that has never actually been fully modeled in an experimental reactor and would probably be a source of the usual drama inherent in chemical processing operations; leaks, fires and whatnot. Personally I believe this to be the biggest risk involved with MSR reactors; any failure mode that leads to uncontained fuel will produce a lethal radiation flux, fires lofting clouds of radionucleotides and other fun stuff. Bear in mind that every single plant and its resident Homer Simpsons will have to operate their own reprocessing facility for the entire life of the plant; it's not a question of if a mistake will happen, but rather; how heinous are the consequences when it happens. Liquids tend to get away from people.

Finally, WAMSR uses zirconium hydride as the primary neutron moderator, which is pretty novel and a source of some unknowns. The zirconium hydride exists as rods inside the reactor core which also contains the molten fuel and the primary loop coolant water. If, for whatever reason, the zirconium hydride came into contact with the super-heated water in (the inevitable) presence of oxygen, huge quantities of explosive molecular hydrogen would be produced. This is what blew up the reactor buildings of Fukushima no. 1 and 3. The moderator, fuel and coolant are all in close proximity inside the reactor core, flowing through what appear to be relatively fine tubes. Again, due to the chronic shortage of uncrackable unobtainium, we make vessels and tubing such as these out of various steel alloys which frequently crack and corrode and leak.

So, WAMSR is not without its problems.

You have to upgrade to 4.3.0.37 on Linux to obtain connections. They've cut off earlier versions.

This is the sort simple minded behavior that seriously limits the value of Skype. I received no warning. Suddenly Skype stops working and my subscriber access is cut off. I find this out just as an important phone conference is getting underway.

When it works (which aside from this is all the time) Skype is absolutely great, even on Linux. $30-ish a year for unlimited call termination in North America and caller id that shows my regular cell phone, text messages (again with correct ID) — it's wonderful. But interfering with service by cutting off anything older than the most recent clients is just ridiculous.

C and C++ trade places with "managed" languages in surveys year after year. There will never be a day when the cost of VMs and GCs will not be tolerable in some large fraction of new applications, so "close to the metal" won't be going out of fashion anytime soon. That's why C/C++ toolchains are very actively developed today; I'd argue more so than Java, for instance.

So churning out Java developers that do not understand non-GC memory management, pointer arithmetic, stack allocation, macros and all the other common features of lower level languages does seem like a fail. Are people seriously racking up a lifetime worth of education debt and leaving with basically just Java programming competence?

WORLD STAR HIP HOP BOI !!!1

I've got a better idea. Put Comcast and all other ISPs in the Common Carrier category where they belong, break up Comcast and the rest of the oligopoly ISPs into small, regional companies limited with few exceptions to state lines, outlaw vertical ownership of both media and content, force the now tamed, small ISPs to wholesale their bandwidth to competitors and watch prices for bandwidth collapse to below the $10/month craptastic deal Comcast is supposed to be providing so that we may ALL partake in the benefits of competition we're supposed to be enjoying in a supposedly "capitalist" economy.

Because dealing with Comcast should be about more than buying votes with a wired manifestation of the Obama Phone.

See Venezuela.

If you can catch a flight (kinda tough at the moment because the Government has effectively nationalized airline ticket revenue so the airlines have canceled most regular service) you might take a trip and stay if you like it so much.

Bring extra toilet paper.

All of the above has either been or is under imminent threat of nationalization. Lets look at the results;

Energy: Venezuelan president’s live speech about blackouts interrupted by blackouts
Water: Caracas Goes Thirsty as Taps Run Dry and Bottles Vanish
Medicine: Patients urged to show up at hospitals with their own disinfectant, gauze and pain killers

Tragic isn't it? Wasting Slashdot time-wasters time with non-US bashing stories.

Quick, someone find a Climate Change or Snowden story before these people lose it.

Russia; cultivate your masculinity and say bad things about America and you too can install yourself for life.

Yes, which is probably why this is coming from a Facebook engineer. PHP is pretty central to Facebook and Facebook has been re-implementing PHP for many years now. Facebook created a PHP to C++ translator (HPHPc) which has since been deprecated in favor of a new PHP virtual machine; HHVM. So Naturally formalizing PHP is of great interest to Facebook.

Respectfully, that is profoundly naive. The language used is carefully chosen to foster this ambiguity and instigate the blame you anticipate. Instilling hate in the hoi polloi necessitates rounding off corners that would otherwise need qualification.

Smoking == crime. Smokers == enemies of the people.

That's all you need to know.

Yeah. If only Citizens United hadn't happened then Comcast/SBC couldn't have done this — 10 years ago — six years before Citizens United.