There's a problem with the science in your comment above. It presumes all the boys and girls are Nice. We can scientifically prove that most of them are in fact Naughty. How many parents fake Santa's appearance to mask their children's Naughtiness?

As a result, Santa is mostly underfed, underworked. He's not as chubby as before since he has few morsels to eat every Christmas. He's home by 9PM PST. His elves were able to participate in this year's Occupy protests without any meaningful dent in productivity.

So, I played a little math and it looks like 1 gram of Thorium would power my car for about 11,000 miles. I see the car being pre-equipped with the element, and the auto industry pre-equiping a car with 5 grams... then telling you it cannot be replaced due to the huge economic impact. There won't be gas stations to fill up from. It will be like Apple's integrated battery...

That said, the cost of one gram of Thorium would end up being as high as 7,500 gallons of gas...which is about $26,000.

According to the chart, there are about 400 billion grams in the US, or 3x10(15) gallons of gas. That's equivalent to 15,000,000,000,000 barrels of oil. Based on US consumption, that's 71,428 days or about 195 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Just showing that /. Continues to post old news...

If he's going to show 200 years, he needs to adjust for inflation. If the average UK salary was $400 (in pounds) in 1840, that's 20oz (@$20/oz through the 19thC). Gold price now is ~$1,350/oz. Average salary (from the graph) is about $40,000. That's about 30oz. So, in real (1840) dollars, it's only a net increase of $200, not $39,600.

That's only 44,280 hp*s (horsepower per seconds). It's hurling a small object at a speed of only 16.3 million furlongs per fortnight. They need to get it up to at least 88 million fpf...

As somebody who was there when it happened. I told them it was coming. I said, "Hey, keep driving around those large chariots and eventually this whole place is going to flood." A friend of mine said he was going to build a boat. Took him 100 years. He probably could have done it faster if he had stimulus money. But, hey, times were tough back then.

Heck, I'd like to see her delete passwords and lock IT systems without a computer.

It's more recent than that, actually. If you notice one of the links, that the article summary completely plegerizes, is dated March 2007. So, we not only have old news, we have a three year-old blog entry that laughs about it---and an article summary that plagiarizes.

It's been in Space for seven months? It is a space ship, after all. A future flight will be one of the last of America's deep space probes. I've heard the pilot is William Rodgers; but I don't remember his call sign.

I know you're being cheeky, so I'm a fellow traveler.

A friend's son's research suggested that CO2 levels correlated with temperature change, but only after the temperature had shifted. So, no causation. Of course, there is also the historic data that shows that our temperature swing is not unprecedented, nor accelerated by us.

And while we're trying to create cars that somehow magically scrub CO2 from the air, the quality of air in Beijing is being given "hella bad" ratings.

I wish the focus would be on something akin to "quality of life" or "being good stewards of our environment" than some quasi-religious tilt to Gaia.

No, it's additive, not multiplicative. Totally different result.

God. That's my theory. Proven.

"As copyright law was originally written, you sued only over financial damages. For roughly 200 years, you had no basis to pick and choose except financial harm. The law still doesn't give you that right in the US - if it did, it would include what are called 'moral copyright clauses', as, for example, the ones now used in French law which the US has deliberately avoided including in treaty. Now that parts of copyright law have been criminalised, you are in effect arguing that your right allows you to compel the state to engage in selective prosecution of crimes, as is expressly forbidden in the bill of rights, for damned good reasons."

Where in the U.S. Bill of Rights does it forbid selective prosecution?

"Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously."

I don't accept where our country is going, any more than I would accept my girlfriend is sleeping with my best friend. Some things require a reaction, especially "where things are going" is a retrenchment in what our ancestors sought to leave behind.