Hanford announced last week that their spent fuel vitrification plant is officially in operation, converting nuclear waste into glass ingots that can be safely stored for millenia. If they keep going for about a century they might be able to vitrify the spent fuel we already have. But we still have no place to store the ingots.

All these small modular reactors have the same deficits. They require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) produced only in Russia. They're a proliferation risk. They require a substantial footprint with passive and active defenses, 24/7 armed security, security clearances for all the highly paid professionals involved. They're slow to approve, finance, build. They're more costly even than classic nuclear reactors to build and operate, and those are the slowest building and most costly form of energy which means high energy costs when (if) they are finally built. Traditional nuclear reactor projects have a 95% failure rate from proposal to generation so 19 times of 20 they never deliver a single watt hour. Those times the money is just spent and lost. The one time in 20 that the generation comes online to produce the world's most costly power doesn't even include those costs.

At Hanford cold war nuclear waste continues to seep gradually toward the mighty Columbia river. Inch by inch.

Somewhere in America just now a homeowner just plugged his DIY solar panels into the inverter and battery he bought on Amazon for the first time. It will give power 24/7 for 30 years at no additional cost. It was quick and cheap. He didn't even need permission. It won't kill his family, nor yours, nor mine. There is no chance that his solar panels will result in radioactive salmon or other seafood.

More along the lines of Noble Prince Khaleed and the ungrateful peasant uprise.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

Then they'll find out the hard way that Steve was right.

this is the nut of the problem here. "keeping politics out of X" is much more doable and makes much more sense when you live in a stable political environment. having someone bitch about the president in your local forum seems annoying and stupid back when, say, clinton was president. but when you live in a world where the president decides to send military troops to your neighborhood claiming it's on fire when it most clearly is not, there's no way to keep politics out of it.

They watched him do his double hand-job dance for 45 minutes... and cheered.

Trump fans are the ones who listen to Trump the least.

Considering it's now just a phone in a laptop form, they've got to be making money hand over fist. I think I'll stick to my ordinary laptop/PC that can play video games. There is at least some competition in that market keeping prices sane (well, somewhat sane, not paying 3000 Euro for a oversized phone).

Not really, these are travel authorisations (the TA in ESTA) and are considered visa waivers, not visas. They've essentially replaced the old arrival cards you used to have to fill out.

I recently went back to Australia and my gast was flabbered by the mere fact I had to fill out a paper slip on entry... What used to be commonplace has almost completely disappeared in the last 5 odd years. I'm a UK/AU dual national for context, so I didn't need a visa to enter but still needed to complete an incoming passenger card (everyone does, citizen, visitor or otherwise).

Because being lied to is "freedom".

Seriously, I've had more than one American use this argument to defend fraudulent advertising practices. Apparently its up to the audience to determine what is true or not despite most of the audience being completely unable to do so.

This morning I read about another ad being banned for misleading information and I thought, "won't this make companies more afraid to use risky advertising techniqes" and my second thought was "good".

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

and it's here today. No homelessness. No medical bankruptcy. No food insecurity. Affordable education. Decent places for everyone to live.

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

Corporate America really reminds me of the Syndicate from Jack Cambell's Lost Fleet/Lost Stars novels. A corporate state where skulduggery rules amongst the executive classes and fear is used to rule the worker classes. Probably where the author got the idea for it.

Mark my words, unless your country decides to stand up for itself against corporate greed, you'll have to call them "honoured CEO" before too long.

OTOH, work really doesn't have to suck, it just tends to most of the time.