I won't argue there's a lot of turds floating in the Country & Western pool... but there are also some gems. You just gotta root around a little. I don't know if you consider Blue Grass/New Grass as a part of, an off shoot, its own genre or a part of Folk, but there's some amazing music in Blue Grass. There are country fusions that are more than acceptable. Lyle Lovett has some amazing stuff like for instance Here I am. Kathy Mattea has a voice like an angel and she sings songs that are deeply touching. "Raising Sand" a collaboration between Alison Krauss of Union Station and Robert Plant of Lead Zeppelin fame is inspired (and pulled down a bevy of Grammy Awards for its inspiration.)

So yeah the old joke about the guy who played the Country song backwards and got sober, and got his dog, truck and girlfriends back, is probably closer to the truth than anybody in the genre would care to admit. That said, you can find crap in any genre, and besides C & W, I'd be happy to point out a vast POP wasteland, or a Rap culture bloated with posers and derivative artists. Anyway, just saying...

Actually, the whole point of fast breeders, is that they "Burn" the fuel at a tremendously accelerated pace, rendering relatively benign in a few years what would have been a nightmare for millennia. The problem as mentioned is safety, and sadly in business there are two opposing (sometimes mutually exclusive) forces at work.

1. Invention/Production; Engineer a working solution, which engineers are only too thrilled to do. They even give you specifications with explicit built in safety limits, and limits for nominal and optimal performance, they also include sane operating life expectancies.

2. Profit Making; Bean counters will continue to forever ask how much can we carve off and not have it explode/implode. You can be certain that with poor management creeping in at some time in the future a bean counter doing his or her job will carve off one thing too many and as is want to happen, let the smoke out. There are dozens of smoking holes in Texas (the most recent barely a week old), a gulf full of spilled oil, and the San Onofre Nuclear Power plant, now operating 20 years beyond its designed life expectancy and falling apart faster than Charlie Sheen.

So fast breeders have a bunch of ways to go horribly wrong, and are perfectly capable of serious criticality events up to and including big bangs. There are some really interesting possibilities for designing a safer fast breeder, and as mentioned liquid salt and/or sodium remain possibilities (though the corrosive effects of molten sodium on a whole host of piping make using it as a heat exchange fluid a challenging engineering problem. That, and if it should ever cool, i.e. freeze, remelting it is going to be a solid gold nightmare.) We won't even discuss the problems involving a red hot sodium leak into a second stage steam turbine system. The Pucker Quotient is very high. Still, if you trade off finding nucleotides in your ground water, food, house dust, against the threat of one big nasty event, you may find the fast breeder is still the better bet. Problem is finding an insurance company to hedge the bet, and the government bailout that'll cost us all out the whazooly if anything nasty ever happens. Or maybe the corporations will get one of those get of jail free "You can't sue us" laws passed.

The European model of bifurcating education between college and trade seems like a very useful model for maximizing employment and having a healthy supply of skilled labor. Sadly, many companies now require a college degree for everything from janitorial work to sorting mail. It's time to set sane standards and bring back meaningful trade apprentice programs.

Am I hearing "This is threatening my world view" in the background? It's a satellite view, the satellites available in 1984 had a dramatically lower resolution than the amazing birds flying today... sheesh!

The key point here is that you can easily see important medium to large scale changes to the earth's surface. Glacial retreat, human development, the strip mining of Canada for tar oil and the Amazon for resources. Anybody not familiar with these events over the last 30 years has either had their head buried in the sand (tar sand?) or has a political agenda that verges on fundamentalist religion (complete with belief system that displaces logic or clear and irrefutable scientific evidence.)

We are drowning in corporate stories of unbridled greed and the wholesale destruction of society, Nestle is trying to push a global patent on the medicinal use of Fennel Flower, a curative that has been well documented for thousands of years. Disney was trying to trademark "Dia de los Muertos" and only when the Hispanic community howled with outrage did they change their minds. Even now the American Supreme Court is hearing whether or not corporations should be able to OWN as patents HUMAN GENES. This has grown into a full on disaster. Because there are companies that have been patenting genes in cows and pigs for years now (think transgenic livestock) and many of those very same genes exist in human being so guess what, somebody owns a piece of you. If fact the best guess is that at this point in time every bit of your genome belongs to somebody. You've been chopped up (like those real estate loan bundles) and your bits now belong to a variety of corporations. You might say so what, here's an example of the problem, Myriad Genetics owns the patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2. They saw a gold mine in the human genome and have been cashing in for over a decade. Because they have patents, the only tests for these two oncogenes you can get are their tests. They've been able to keep the price of these tests incredibly high (because they have a corner on the market) and there are now tests that are BETTER, FASTER and infinitely less expensive, but you can't use them because of the patent. The result is that many thousands of women have screened with false negatives and died of breast and ovarian cancers, with a better test in plain sight, that they can't get.

I liked Atlas Shrugged as much as the next person, but for every visionary Dagny Taggart out there, there are ten Gordon Gekkos. Greedy, self serving, money grubbing bastards who'd part their own Moms out for seed capital. You can't swing a stick any more without hitting the damage done to our society or our government by greedy people bent on inflicting their wealth and egos on society. So I say to the Libertarians, by all means, please shrink government to its logical minimum (but no more please), ensure the greatest amount of civil liberties (but remember while exercising your Second Amendment rights, that your bullets don't recognize property lines), and please take off the rose colored glasses with regards to rampant, unbridled capitalism. It's rapacious, and prone to cannibalizing the very society in which it lives. Even Adam Smith warned of the dangers of monopolies and erosion of the middle class. Control rods like Glass Steagall aren't just niceties, they're full on necessities. The banks are mainlining OE, they're clearly addicted, the economy is inflating again, property values just had their highest jump in a single month in living memory, we just set a new record on the Stock Exchange and you can already smell the smoke from the fire that will set off the next blowout, and you best believe it will dwarf the previous economic blowouts. Its time far sanity children, because the craziness is getting life threatening.

This little Piggy went to market...

These folks are completely safe... head open... nothing there but echoes!

To declare "I'm with STUPID ->" The official Louisiana State T-Shirt! In fact they're only a couple idiot acts away from the "I R Stupid" T-Shirt.

They have a over a billion people and their economy is slated to pass ours this decade. They're out-spending and out-developing us in science, education, space exploration, national infrastructure, environmentally friendly energy and resources, and telecommunications. The only way we're going to compete is to regain and maintain our technological edge. This would require giving up a corporate state that is busily figuring how to sell off the next generation to the highest bidder. If there's any good news, its that China has even more greedy bastards than the U.S. and they may implode in an orgy of economic cannibalism even before we do.

It would be fun to build a small radar array with a synthetic aperture antenna so you could tell the difference from let's say a Cessna 152 flying by and a drone. The next step would be to use the spacial information to aim a small high performance maser to fry the electronics on said drone (of course, only if it was invading your privacy.) It would be entertaining for the drones' owners to find in post mortem that their sky spy was a crispy critter.

Yeah, because the Chinese have bases in countries all over the world... Oh, wait that's us. No, it's the Chinese who are spending themselves into oblivion on weapons of war... Oh, wait, that's us again. We spend more on our military than the next 13 nations combined (but we can't afford to educate our children... bright.) I dunno, perhaps if we moved from offense to defense, these things wouldn't be issues?

Just a thought.

That's because if we actually made too big a stink, we'd have to deal with the dirty deeds we did in the first place to prompt such a response and the last thing we really want to do is to begin airing our dirty laundry. Grumbling under our breath about what a bunch of douches the Chinese are is about as far as we can go without having to scrape large amounts of egg off of our collective faces.

Latest research says brain aging is most commonly a function habitual use of pre-existing neural pathways to the exclusion of growing new ones. This is what "Couch Potato Syndrome" does. Most of the aging programmers I know, are always looking at new tech. They have a burning curiosity about the universe in general and about how to keep a razors edge honed on their chosen craft. Most of these people have shockingly large libraries. Many read a slug of journals. Many game. Many have wildly eclectic and diverse personal lives. None of these things tends to result in the mummification of the human brain attributed to the normal processes associated with the average citizens aging.

Its completely arguable that our chosen lifestyles are the perfect means by which to ensure healthy and productive brain function into extreme old age. Add to that the growing use of nootropics and other brain enhancing technologies by mind workers and I can easily imagine mentally agile and productive engineers in their 80s and 90s. There was a study on human productivity that talks about two markedly different trajectories in math and physics. One group shoots to prominence in their 20s making world changing discoveries and solving insanely hard problems then slowly fading over time as they never reach that singular height again. Call them shooting stars. The other group, start off slower, but keep rising, in fact they continue to slowly but surely ascend their entire lives and by the end of their careers have achieved remarkable productivity right up until the end. Call these folks comets.

By the nature of our work, I suspect most software engineers are comets, or they find other lines of work that inspire them after 20 years. You either love intellectual puzzled or your don't. There is no good evidence or logic pointing to older engineers being less in any significant way. In fact the evidence is to the contrary.

Again, the greatest value of math is not the math itself, but the ability to abstract, extract metastructures and isolate higher order patterns from what might otherwise be just chaos or noise. Agreed some, fields are more math intensive that others. Whereas studying primates in the wild (what few are left) mostly needs only the math to get your time and GPS values properly recorded, I would be a little more concerned for the folks a the Large Hadron Collider armed only with algebra. The same goes for most other hard sciences and specializations of the softer sciences.

There are other forces at work besides gravity. The star has a solar wind. If you have countless small intelligent devices poised out at the place where gravity and the solar wind cancel, and these devices are dynamically connected through a variety of energies and forces including EMR including lasers and possibly masers further back, and the collective gravitational force they all exert on one another, It would seem to me a nonsolid shell of computational matter could effectively envelope a star, absorb most of it's energy and use some of that energy to maintain it's relative position around that star. It is an interesting questions.

Watching Slashotters talking about women is like watching pygmies talking about slam dunking. It's so dang entertaining! Oh, Don't stop! I got popcorn.