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

By "demos" I mean the programs you would download and run for no other purpose than to see how far your computer could be pushed in the sound & graphics department. It was a fun time (80s and early 90s). Like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg

That's what hackers used to create, in addition to cracking disks and sharing illegal music. Today's hackers rarely create this unique piece of art.

Even though this is a non-issue (not conclusive by the study's authors), the folks over at CNN talked about the cellphone risk as if it was Certain to cause harm. They left me with the impression that cellphones are irradiating my hip, and they are a definite carcinogen. The one guy even compared cellphone to cigarettes ("People say they can't live without cigarettes either, but they should give up both those and cellphones if they are dangerous."). They even had people texting to say, 'No I won't use my cellphone anymore. I'm getting a landline.' or 'I'm using speakerphone from now on. I don't want to hold it against my head.'

Piss-poor reporting (aka fear-mongering). I wonder how MSNBC and FOX News are covering it.

50 million is a ripoff compared to the billions owed in backpay. That's equivalent to your boss saying, "I'll pay your $50 an hour," waiting years for your paycheck, and then he hands you a measly $5 an hour and says "Oops sorry." I would not have accepted it.

Worse - Since there are lawyers involved, the 50 million will probably shrink to 20 million that has to be distributed amongst the ~1 million singers owed money.

And these nonpaying a-holes in RIAA screw the singers, but they have the nerve to demand WE the customers pay for every single song we make a copy of - $1 if we download it, $1 if we burn it to a CD-R, $1 if we duplicate it across a 2nd PC, and so on.

GRRRR.

(I am a little bitter. Can you tell?)

Better to CYA and say, "I don't know if ____ will happen," then to guess and say, "Oh you're safe. Don't worry." The latter will come back to bite you if you're later proved wrong.

The sites merely have to be ACCUSED of being copyright infringers. Remember when Homeland Security yanked thousands of websites off the net, including several that were merely personal blogs or news sites?

This is no good. We have courts for a reason - to protect the citizenry from overzealous leaders assuming guilt and enacting punishment against innocent persons.

The quality is basically perfect, and the laser printer is cheaper overall (the toner lasts 5000 pages, not a mere 100 like inkjet carts). I'll never go back to my old Commodore dot-matrix, or an inkjet like my brother got. It's worth it to get the Laser.

>>>The casks are...a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.

Yes true. I've heard that the explosion threw some of those pellets into the surrounding neighborhood, therefore getting them converted to stable "casks" is certainly better.

But the *safest* place would be somewhere not subject to earthquakes or drownings by tsunami. Like the Nevada or Sahara desert. That's where Japan should be storing its nuclear waste products for the next 1000 years.