"We feel you're not really 'fitting in' with the corporate culture, so we're unfortunately going to have to let you go. Security will escort you out."

Remember when information compartmentalization was the concern of 3 letter agencies and not part of the everyday life of the average citizen?

Welp, until someone mods it out, you can get an older version at this page. OldVersion rocks for when companies fuck up their own product (see: Winamp after the AOL buyout).

You'd still pay something like that (if you pay at all) in quite a few European countries that have yet to succumb to private corporate interests. Instead, they actually take care of their citizens.

Well, for now. But now that posts can be flagged and deleted, posts or entire segments of "discussion" are liable to disappear now. Slashdot has jumped the shark.

Thanks. All we need right now are more parents ignorant of what their children are doing to make this a better society.

Hey, you know when your kids fuck up? That's an opportunity to ask why and maybe teach them how to do things better. A mistake (even a huge mistake) on their part isn't necessarily a reflection on your parenting. How you respond to their mistake is a reflection on your parenting. Plugging your fingers in your ears and loudly humming are the sort of things that helps cultivate a culture of ignorance and irresponsibility.

Right, they start somewhere insane and then dial it down. The applications are immediate.

Will it be practical for combat in the next 20 years? Probably not. But it could be used in EOD (Explosives and Ordinance Disposal) where you would have the advantage of human dexterity in disabling a bomb without having to risk an actual person. (They already use small robots as is.) It could also be useful in firefighting situations - a tethered "avatar" robot could go far closer to a fire and fight it (or inside a building in danger of collapsing) than a human could. (I refrain from saying that it would do things a human is unwilling to do, because we have and have had brave men step into incredibly dangerous situations to save lives. It is an important and honorable sacrifice, but with technology it can no longer be a necessity.)

To be fair to the first post, using solar panels or windmills and car batteries is very common in Africa. They're used to recharge cell phones or lightbulbs at night. If there could be an efficient and cheap electrical stove, that could probably be plugged into the existing, ad-hoc infrastructure.

I wonder (and thus pose the question to my fellow Slashdotters) if there's any sort of mathematical or scientific reasoning behind building a really big reactor over a bunch of small ones? Is there some sort of economy of scale that makes it more efficient or profitable to have one 1,000 MW reactor over ten 100 MW reactors?

Yes, because "it isn't constitutional" has stopped our government from doing so many things over the years.

This is one of those things that an amendment would be worth IMO.