There's still one nuclear reactor technology they haven't actually scaled up yet: the molten-salt reactor, where the nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten fluoride salts. Alvin Weinberg's experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only a small 5 MW unit that actually ran successfully but was shelved because it couldn't produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

I'd like to see someone scale up MSR technology as a technology demonstrator to prove it can work to generate large amounts of electricity, at least in the 85 to 100 MW range. If they can do that, that could mean we can get far safer nuclear power plants, especially since shutting down the reactor is very easy to do (just drain the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor) and it only generates a very small amount of radioactive waste, waste that has a radioactive half-life of around 300 years.

You misunderstand. It's impossible to verify a scientific theory, though one should be able to replicate the results. But the possibility of falsification is what makes a theory scientific.

WRT verification, all you can say is "It fits the available evidence, and of that evidence xxxx was not known at the time the theory was constructed." You can NEVER prove it true.

Perhaps you need to refer to the original article. And I suspect that you have misunderstood the antecendant used by the GP.

Also to those who actually had to read the stupid and obscene book. I admit to enjoying the part about Lot and his daughters, but I didn't understand it until much later. (Also "Lot's wife's name was Ester. Because she was an organic salt."...That's from when I had to reread it in high school.)

I will admit that there are selected verses that support a decent morality. But most of them are the morality of a street gang. Even in the "New Testament" in the gospels you find considerable immorality, though I'll admit it's much closer to moral. But what did that poor fig tree ever do to Jesus, and why should he expect figs in April? Or, possibly, March. And while it's reasonable to say that business shouldn't be conducted in the temple, perhaps you haven't considered the function of money changers. Their purpose was to allow you to make an offering, even if your coins were issued in another country, or by another government. (And probably to do the equivalent of breaking a $20.) So was it moral to mob them? Not hardly.

Because the marketing team does visuals?

The characterization of humans as animals is, indeed, arbitrary, just as the heliocentric solar system is arbitrary. Ptlomeics CAN handle the same information.

I would be interested in the definition that you use for animal that includes all other animals, and does not include humans.

I'll admit that I've no more than looked at the Gtk's objectivication of C. I shuddered, and went elsewhere, but I can't really say that I analyzed it.

I would never say that higher level languages are faster. Most of the features I consider most valueable slow down execution at run time. (Array bounds checking, garbage collection, etc.) But the penalty doesn't need to be large, and when the concept you are working with is, say, a hash table, it works a lot better if it's built into the language rather than added on as a library. (And yes, the language implementation will probably be in C, or something like it [which is mainly assembler].)

OTOH, it's also true that higher level languages often make bad choices as to how to represent their abstract features. C++ templates come to mind. Or Java generics. Or Ada string literals. (Note that the Ada string literal problem is likely to be BECAUSE the language has only an optional [and rarely implemented] garbage collector. So strings are by default of a fixed length. And can only work with other strings of the same length. This is fixed with bounded strings [and with unbounded], but that's not the default.)

But do note that these arguments are only for general purposes. For specific purposes different languages are superior. There are even places where assembler is superior to C (timing loops, e.g.) but those tend to be CPU dependent.

> You're probably not the target customer.

Well DUH. Delcaring that you are not MADE OF MONEY is a very legitimate sort of thing to say in this kind of discussion. Also it doesn't just apply to "mere individuals". Many if not MOST corporations probably feel the same way.

SSD solutions that are far too expensive to be relevant for most individuals or even corporations are nothing new.

> I've used them at a Global Top 100 website

Doesn't mean squat really. That doesn't really tell us anything about the mix of IO operations you're doing or how that compares to what the other guy is doing.

"website"? Big deal...

There is nothing special about iTunes. Why anyone remains fixated on it in 2013 is a bizzare mystery.

A "brand X" fixation is for clueless losers.

I think they should change the "Reactive" to something like "Proactive" as Reactive has such a negative connotation.

It's late on Friday, lots of plans for the weekend, but need to hit a few stores on the way home and maybe top of the tank ...

then it hits, "Oh, you're still here we need WHUMP (massive request hits the inbox) kthxbaihavagudwkendlol" ... yuh.

George Jetson, have you been playing with the time machine at Spacely Sprockets again?

That's a real problem when different areas have different laws. It means that you are responsible for knowing all possible laws that might affect you in every country of the world, and that's actually impossible. Because you don't know what a law means until a court decides what it means....and the next court may decide something different.

IIRC, in Germany anyone can bring suit to enforce a copyright, not just the owner. In fact, I seem to recall that they can even do it when the owner of the copyright declines to enforce it. And that they can claim a share of the winnings for enforcing it. And that there are some companies of lawyers that do almost nothing else.

It was a few years ago, so the details are hazy, but I read about it on Slashdot, and I seem to recall that they were enforcing one of SuSE's pattents against the will of the company.

There ARE competent people doing C. Then there are the others. For some applications it's the right choice for a language to write in. But often it's "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". C is often used in inappropriate contexts. It's an excellent portable assembler, and it's usually appropriate where assembly code would otherwise be appropriate. But it's a poor choice for a complex program, and it encourages bad habits. There are other valid criticisms, but almost all of them are directed at the poor fit between the design of C and the thought processes of humans. It's an excellent language to compile a "higher" language into. ("Higher" here means that it deals with concepts that are more difficult to map into assembler.)