Almost no-one knows nothing about guns. They may not know as much as you'd like, but most people know something.

Sadly it seems most of this firearm 'knowledge' is obtained from watching movies, not from taking a safety course and heading down to the range. Most of what they 'know' is more like what they think they know to be true.

What about a mechanism that disables the gun if it detects that an unauthorized person is trying to use it?

I came here to say exactly this. I'd put my children's and all their friends prints in the 'do not fire' category as an added layer of defense against them getting access to one of my firearms until they're of an age to safely and responsibly handle a weapon.

Buy a shaker of "no-salt" (KCl)

You realize that the K40 in that no-salt is already radioactive, right? From the article:

"An adult human body contains about 160 grams of potassium, hence about 0.000117 x 160 = 0.0187 grams of 40K; whose decay produces about 4,400 disintegrations per second (becquerels) continuously throughout the life of the body."

Designing a microwave link below 50 GHz where the path loss is at most 0.2 dB/km is MUCH easier than designing one that can range from 3dB/km to 40dB/km. For every km of path, 37dB of dynamic range/headroom is a factor of around 5000x (closer to 5012, actually). If you need 1W to achieve your desired S/N ratio in dry air (3dB loss) over 1 km, you'll need 5kW when it's raining. Make that 2 km and you go from needing 2W (6dB loss) to needing 50 MW (yes, megawatts at 80dB loss).

Even if the required signal levels are 3 orders of magnitude lower (i.e. 1mW will work over 1 km of dry air) you will still need ridiculous amounts of power past a few km. Even at 2 km you're looking at 50kW at 80dB/2 km.

We haven't even considered the reflectivity/opacity of leaves/plants/etc if you're proposing this for "last mile" use. You'll need a very clear line-of-sight path for this.

Also, washing with alcohol would likely be as effective or possibly more so, but the downside is dryness.

Can you say Hand Sanitizer? 60-85% alcohol, typically.

I can never find organic irradiated ground meat.

Easy - grind your own! Buy the cut(s) of beef you like, and grind away!

This band is not useful for long haul carriage due to atmospheric water vapor absorption. According to this chart, absorption between 200 and 280 GHz varies between 3 and 40 dB/km. That means at the low end only 50% of your signal is absorbed every km. At the high end, only 1/10,000th of your signal remains after each km.

this post speaks to similar issues including refraction.

Germination rates in the area of our facility with wireless access are roughly half of that on the other side of the shed...

There are other variables involved, like whether the sun shines more on one side of the shed (raising the temperature on that side), whether the door is nearer one side or the other, etc. Without validating the other scenarios (no wifi anywhere = germination everywhere; wifi on the other side = swapped germination; wifi on both sides = no germination), your 'data' is nothing more than a coincidence.

As an amateur radio operator I regularly deal with MUCH higher power levels at similar frequencies* - I have never seen any such result, so my 'data' offsets yours.

*We are allowed to transmit with up to 1500W PEP in the same band as Wifi, namely 2300-2450MHz (with gaps). There are no limits to the gain of the antennas we use, so we could easily have an EIRP in the 10's of megawatts. I can legally run a microwave oven with the door open.

If my experience is relevant, it started when the first male human reached about two years of age. That's when my brother and I started throwing spears at each other, at least.

In addition to all of the other comments, the liquid may well be acting as a neutron moderator, preventing criticality in the solid. These tanks are _very_ dangerous - some are right on the edge of criticality and must be stirred and some must be cooled to prevent self-boiling.

Check out the Banana-equivalent dose. Bananas and other high potassium foods are naturally radioactive. Brazil nuts are not only high in Na "... but also radium [and] may have up to 444 Bq/kg" - that's a third of the limit from naturally occurring radiation in food.

Your body's natural Na undergoes 5400 decays every second of your life.

PS - perhaps add enough of that nasty polymer absorptive stuff to stop further mixing/movement before vitrification-in-place?

Moving it would be as dangerous as piping it around. I read the reports from Hanford, and it's an unholy mess. They have tanks that hold a million+ gallons of 'stuff' - stuff that NO ONE knows the recipe for. They have tanks that self-heat to boiling, and tanks that require stirring to prevent criticality events.

It would be a much better proposition, IMHO, to vitrify the waste in place in the tanks, perhaps by cutting off the tank's top, dumping sand into the tanks, lowering in the 'trodes, and zapping the layer on the bottom into glass. Repeat until solid. I'm sure that there's a way to put a temporary barrier in place in the tank if needed as insulation while vitrifying.

... 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.

So don't use Sodium, use FLiBe in a Thorium fast reactor. A LFTR. They are quite a bit safer intrinsically than current reactors are with all their safety systems designed in. As a plus, you don't need water at all for a LFTR (secondary coolant can be helium or other working fluid) - you can build them anywhere, not just near a body of water. Please watch this video it's a great intro to LFTR's and why they're so different than existing PWRs.

Funny - that was another proposal* I made years ago in reference to data-to-the-premises as well as cell towers and radio stations (and power transmission, etc). I wanted to create what I called a '10% company' that had a specific charter to provide connectivity - nothing else - with a guarantee of 10% profit. Any provider could hook into the service for the same yearly fee as any other, leveling the playing field for small telcos/radio stations/etc.

The benefits would be huge especially for data-to-the-premises and cell phones - one strand of fiber to the home for phone, internet, and video regardless of what service you subscribed to. Minimization of cell towers (no more stacks of antennas per cell tower or multiple towers/site) - all of the connectivity would be the same (nationally-mandated) protocol, and all phones could automatically interconnect with any provider. Same idea w/ radio station towers, etc. All the transmitters and antennas could be co-located, or even better, merged into 1 wideband transmitter with all the signals muxed into it.

*The other proposal: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3737343&cid=43712211