If the K-40 didn't get us first...

Because "radioactive environment" actually has to be quantified before it's meaningful. You're sitting in a radioactive environment right now. This is what you and the vast majority of Americans who grew up with the X-Men don't understand. So you have to talk about exactly how much radiation you're sitting in.

So let's talk about it. Let's say you weigh 70kg. That means you are made of approximately 7.0 x 10^26 carbon atoms (among other things). Carbon 14, a naturally occurring unstable radioactive isotope of carbon, makes up about 1 in every trillion carbon atoms. That's 1 in 1 x 10^11. Which means there are somewhere around 7 x 10^15 carbon 14 atoms inside you right now. Carbon 14 has a half life of 5730 years, give or take 40 years. That means that several thousand atoms of carbon 14 undergo radioactive decay inside you every second. I'll spare you the math, since there are already too many scary numbers in this post. That means there are thousands of beta particles running around loose inside you, every second of the day. In short, you are radioactive.

And... so what. Those thousands of decay events per second add up to a millirem per year, so tiny it's not even measurable by a normal Geiger counter. You are unavoidably exposed to radiation simply by existing. And here's what matters to you: that radiation you expose yourself to by being made of carbon has no measurable affect on your lifespan, or anyone else's. Something else will kill you first, long before the radiation of yourself induces a cancer inside yourself. Most cancers are chemically induced, not radioactively induced.

Yes, there ARE safe levels of radiation. The numbers matter.

Easy for you to say, Anonymous Coward...

And that right there is why the whole thing fails.

From the summary:

Wrong. People may or may not believe scientists are still split. It doesn't matter a damn. There is no public support or motivation to solve the problem because nobody has any intention of sacrificing anything. All the consensus in the world is irrelevant in the face of that reality.

And you know what? Nobody SHOULD sacrifice anything. It's unnecessary. The vast majority of single-family suburban homes could be self-powered via photovoltaics, for both the home and personal transportation. Today. The hardware exists. No new science is required. No research is required. The parts can be had today and assembled by any competent electrician.

Why hasn't it happened already? Money. Guess what happens when the richest people in the world manage to suck up all of the productivity gains of the last 40 years, leaving nothing for the people living in those single-family suburban homes? They can't afford a large capital investment that would allow each and every one of them to become energy independent. The fact that they must then continue paying utility bills is not lost on the richest people in the world who own those utilities, either. What was initially simply a side effect of capital has become an overriding priority of capital: keep as much capital as possible out of the hands of individuals because if they manage to acquire capital, they could use it to better their lives and incidentally stop paying their largest utility bill. And that impacts the bottom line. Can't have that.

What's to talk about? The remarks about the blindingly amateurish nature of this guy have already been made. Honey pot or patsy, either way, we know damn well that Russians aren't recruited by the American Third Secretary of the embassy who toddles around with a bag full of wigs. Sounds like Putin called up Obama and said, "I need a Big Bad America thing in the news. What can you do for me?" and Obama responded with, "Hey Rob! Who do we not like in the embassy?" and there you go. Or vice versa. Does it really matter?

In short, we're bored with this story. It's "news" only for particularly lame values of manufactured news. We're so bored with it nobody is even bothering to generate conspiracy theories about this being a calibration test of fake spy stories, to see who reacts and how.

If your drug is useful to people (and therefore they buy it) and it's profitable to manufacture (which is true by definition or you wouldn't have a generic competitor), you will eventually make your billion dollar investment back. It will just take longer than you might wish. There is no need for a patent system, broken or otherwise.

Oh I'm aware it used to be much worse. Cat burning is no longer a regular public spectacle, after all. Nor are state-sponsored executions public. Hell, even the terrorists putting beheading videos up on the Internet don't do it in public (much). In hindsight, the word "contemporary" was a poor choice. It carries connotations I didn't exactly mean. I meant more along the lines of "everyone around me." I refuse to watch torture porn movies (called "horror" movies by marketing). But apparently the Saw movie turned into a franchise and somebody said there's something like 7 of the damn things now. And I still assume everybody is more like me, when they really aren't. It's a human failing...

Quite. What a miserable mess. They rewrote it basically from scratch. Kept the names and the We Win part and redid everything else. Half of the point of the book was Ender didn't know. That he fought every single battle thinking it was just particularly grueling training. That the military lied to him and almost everyone else throughout the entire book. Little doubt? How about no doubt whatsoever? How can he "come to a realization" when that entire element has been completely removed from the plot? 5 seconds of footage is enough to know they completely rewrote the destruction of the alien planet. Where is Ender's despair? Where is his giving up on the "training"? The only part that's left is his decision to just blow it all up with the Little Doctor, and they turned that into a triumph, rather than the training failure Ender believed it to be.

No better than I expected. There was no way in hell they were going to do the book justice. Odds went up after Hunger Games, I guess. I could have sworn audiences would rebel against kids killing kids, but I constantly underestimate the bloodthirstiness of contemporary audiences. Still, looks like they failed, as expected, despite being able to keep the violence.

Argh. Buggy-ass Firefox. I did NOT click on this post to moderate it, let alone moderate it to overrated. Posting to undo... >_

Yes. Because if you don't, wait a little while and there's no more community.

Uhm. Yeah. There's your problem. Video imagery? Dream on. No, you are not going to get a unique video stream into and out of every single one of 5000 ad hoc wireless network nodes functioning in a mesh. It's stupid even to consider the idea. And no amount of protocol fudgery is going to fix that. The bandwidth simply isn't there in the hardware.

Could all 5000 nodes connect to an IRC server and provide text chat? Yup. With great reliability. I guarantee that would work flawlessly. And you also wouldn't want to do that either. Ever been in an IRC channel with 100 active users? I have. It's bedlam. Readable, if you're REALLY paying attention, and read quickly, but still bedlam. 1000-5000? Useless. Especially when you're busy trying to avoid getting shot. But it would work. So divvy up the people into individual channels for companies, platoons, squads, and fire teams, and now everybody has a reasonable amount of information to keep track of. And everybody's dead. 'cause if you thought trying to text and drive was hazardous...

So here's the thing. What do they really want to do with it? The phrase "enhanced situational awareness" is probably the only really useful thing in that quote. If I was out trying to avoid getting shot, knowing ahead of time where people are who are likely to shoot me seems like the most valuable thing. And that isn't a machine to machine communications problem. That's a man to machine and machine to man communications problem. Mostly it's a man to man mediated by machine communications problem, and I have a feeling if you asked any marine what he wants most, his answer is going to be "make sure my voice radio always always works." 'cause that's the standard any "enhanced situational awareness" has to exceed. Not meet. Exceed.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a human-computer interface problem, not a networking problem.

That's an interesting prediction. It's true that the part that does the actual processing just gets smaller and smaller. The I/O devices, however, are fixed size, because humans aren't getting smaller. Aside from the difficulty of getting wireless to reliably communicate with disconnected pieces, I'd say the main reason what you describe hasn't already happened is the power requirements. The processing part is tiny, but it sucks an amazing amount of power (desktop CPUs) and dissipates an amazing amount of heat. Even after you're willing to give up desktop performance, ARM chips still use enough power that your watch doesn't have enough space for sufficient battery to be useful. Even the current smartphone form factor is marginal, as far as battery goes.

The other reason is hasn't (and may not) happen is cost. When the cost of the chip required to put a full CPU into a tablet is a small fraction of the total cost of the tablet parts, why the hell not? It'd be different if ARM CPUs were as expensive as Intel wishes they were. In that case, what you describe would have happened already. But they're not. No need to economize on CPU chips when they both cost less and use less power than the display device itself.

My mother is a cat picture you insensitive clod.

Also known as the Capitalize On The Boston Bombing Act.

The FBI, apparently. Since they want to wiretap what the peasants are doing in real time on all communications mediums, not just phones.