If by "C6 sugar" you mean sugar molecules with a ring of six (6) carbon atoms in them, you are correct. Almost all of the simple sugars have rings of five (5) carbon atoms, and then a leg containing the sixth one hanging off. If you refer to double sugars (ultimate formulae of the form C12H22Owhatever, I think I disagree.

Carbon ring compounds are a very interesting rabbit hole for exploration during idle time.

If we have enough water and arable land to grow corn to make fuel ethanol, we have enough to grow corn for food.

See also widely published remarks comparing recent Indian subcontinent farming and land use efficiencies with the same stats for 15th and 16th (I think) Japanese farmers - and then think about how much of the Japanese landscape is unusable for farming because of the radical topography.

I believe I said "almost".
  there.
The lack of a containment building at Chernobyl was not the real problem there. The problem was that the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were of a water-cooled and graphite-moderated positive void coefficient design. That design has an inherent thermal runaway failure mode, and such a runaway is what caused the accident.

That design is currently illegal everywhere on the planet, precisely because of that failure mode and the associated risk. No other examples of it now exist, anywhere. It was in fact illegal when the Chernobyl accident occurred, but those reactors had been grandfathered in, because the host country desperately needed the power they produced and could not afford to start over. That design has NEVER been legal for power generation reactors in the United States, because of that risk. A few were assembled, to prove the concept, and then immediately torn down and never rebuilt.

ANY large, complex industrial structure is going to be expensive and time-consuming to build. What makes nuclear facilities interesting is that almost all of those costs are politically imposed and politically driven. They have nothing to do with the actual construction costs.

Two factors missing from that analysis.

First, there have been MANY technologies proposed and developed for this. The problem is to choose one and put it to work.

Closely related: NOBODY ever says a word about "how MUCH nuclear waste" we are talking about. The one thing I've seen strongly suggests that the plants are storing ALL of their accumulated waste on-site, in basically an Olympic-size swimming pool. That just ain't very much waste, compared to e.g. ash from burning wood.

One of the simpler solutions proposed is to go out to Yonder Hill, a really desolate spot in (as I recall) Death Valley, a really desolate spot in its own right, build an Astrodome-sized facility, and haul the stuff in with robot bulldozers. A mile or two out from the building, you build a barbed wire fence, with signs every few hundred feet, that say "If you cross this fence, you will die, and we will NOT go in to recover your corpse."

The best solution, in my personal opinion, is reprocessing. A "spent" nuclear fuel rod still contains a lot of perfectly usable fuel-grade material, but the reactions are poisoned by very radioactive combustion/reaction products. High radioactivity implies and requires short half-life. Use mass spectroscopy techniques to separate out the really nasty stuff, which is a relatively small amount of the rod, and reuse the rest of the rod. In every other industry, this is called Recycling and is considered a Good Thing.

And, ya know, some bright boy or girl might well find some very viable uses for that nasty hot stuff. Coal tar was originally this highly toxic, nasty sludge, that was left over after refining crude oil to make gasoline, kerosene, Jet A, industrial motor oil, and other "stuff". It was expensive to handle and difficult to dispose of. Some oil company executive somewhere said "I am sick and tired of paying a fortune to haul this trash out. Find something good to do with it." The research labs went to work, and thus was born a whole new industry, coal tar derivatives, which included some REALLY effective, really novel new medicines that started saving lives almost immediately.

Hydrogen is not a fuel the way coal or uranium are.

There is no such thing as a "hydrogen well". To get hydrogen, you either do electrolysis on water, which requires a LOT of electricity, which has to come from somewhere, or you reform natural gas, breaking it down to carbon and hydrogen, which leaves you with a lot of carbon being thrown away. This actually throws away a good bit of the energy in the natural gas.

Incidentally, carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant, but rather a very critical chemical compound for planetary life support.

        6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy --> C6H12O6 + 6 O2

This requires chlorophyll, which is more than just a catalyst, but is not consumed. C6H12O6 can be a variety of things, including lots of different simple sugars, i.e. FOOD. The energy generally comes from sunlight.

Run the other way around,

        C6H12O6 + 6 O2 --> 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy

This is where someone eats and digests the food, producing carbon dioxide and water, and USES THE RECOVERED ENERGY to do "stuff". This is why carbon dioxide sequestration is idiotic: it is LITERALLY throwing food away instead of eating it and recovering the energy content.

ARE YOU SURE (Y/N)?

NASA does simulation testing on command sequences. Certain commands and/or results should probably trigger something like this.

Canon does a LOT of things. Cameras are a pretty small piece of their total business universe.

Nikon, as far as I know, is strictly cameras.

My personal first 35mm SLR was a factory-refurbished Canon EOS Elan IIe. The price was right.

Some years later, when I decided it was time to drag myself into the digital world, part of what spurred the decision was learning that Nikon was dropping almost all of their 35mm film SLRs, except for the absolute bottom-end student camera and the absolute top-end pro camera. I quickly figured out that Nikon and Canon were shooting it out for Numbers One and Two in the DSLR space, and everyone else (specifically including Sony!) was way back in the back.

I looked at their respective lines. Canon had two separate lines, one for amateurs, one for pros. Nikon made professional cameras for all levels of professional, including amateurs who weren't pros YET. Canon's product lines were confusing, no obvious pattern. Nikon's line made perfect sense from bottom to top, with one strange outlier: it was specifically optimized for high-action sports photography.

I quickly settled on two possible candidates. Years earlier, I'd handled a Nikon F2, their top-line 35mm SLR. It belonged to an Air Force aerial photographer. The FIRST time I picked up the Nikon D80, it was instantly obvious that this was a descendant of that F2, and all the professional design work in the F2 was also in the D80.

It has given me good service for probably something over fifteen years now.

A friend of mine, a pro photographer, swears by Canon DSLRs. We had a very productive chat a while back. What I got out of it was that my D80 body was still doing the job I needed done, and the correct choice for a while longer would be to spend my money on lenses.

It isn't "pure looks".

A 35mm SLR form factor camera, which includes DSLRs and most mirrorless cameras, is designed to have not only lens and image sensor, but also to provide a human interface that minimizes the photographer's effort in just pointing and shooting, allowing him to concentrate on the literal myriads of creative decisions that go into getting a really good image. EVERY critical control is directly under the photographer's fingers. The camera form factor is designed to be absolutely natural to grasp, with the fingers in exactly the right places, WITHOUT the photographer having to think about it.

Yes, IN THEORY, you can get "good enough" photos from a cellphone, if you have the necessary knowledge of light, color, and composition - among other things. IN PRACTICE, it is a lot easier to get lots better images with the same knowledge using an actual camera with a decent human interface.

Some things just can't be done with cellphone cameras. For example, it is dam' near impossible to do depth-of-field control on a cellphone, because the sensors and lenses are too small and too slow. It is HARD to zoom a cellphone to exactly where you want it, to get the composition and detail you want, compared to doing it on a real camera.

However, when it was Trump being sarcastic, when he called Putin "smart", every Democrat in the country, and a lot of RINOs to boot, screamed bloody murder about it. They ignore sarcasm when it is in their interest to do so, and they scream about other people ignoring their sarcasm when they want to be sarcastic.

The unfortunate fact is that sarcasm is generally only effective in audible speech. It generally does not survive translation to the written word.

I saw a similar demo in freshman physics, all those years ago. It use a feather, a penny, a glass tube with a valve at one end and a vacuum pump. At the beginning of the hour, the instructor loaded up the tube, and showed us the usual result. He then hooked it all to the vacuum pump, and started pumping it down while he lectured. Near the end of the hour, after the pump had had time to establish a decent vacuum in the tube, he closed the valve, disconnected the pump, and did it again - and the feather and the penny hit together.

My mind was BLOWN.

Not really.

Acquisitions, one company buying another, happens all the time in the US defense industry. It is absolutely routine.

Continuation of benefits is also absolutely routine, as is maintenance of salary levels. This is NORMAL.

The only time that salaries and/or benefits are not maintained is when the purpose of the acquisition was to put an annoying competitor out of business. EVEN THEN, usual practice is to keep salaries and benefits in place, because the PEOPLE at the annoying competitor are generally very good at what they do and they are a valuable resource to the new employer.

Something about this one stinks to high heaven.

An acquaintance of mine wanted to impress me one night, so he showed me Adventure on a TI 990 at his small business.

He sat me down, started it up, and handed me the keyboard, expecting the usual newbie fumbling around.

Within single-digit minutes, I had us in areas that he had NEVER seen before, and I wasn't bothering to map or keep notes. I had about half of the cave memorized, including all the early puzzles.

Memories...

Depends on your definition of "lifted".

Adventure started as a text game, a model of Colossal Cave (a real cave in the real world). It was heavily extended and became a game. It was written in FORTRAN. The command parser was quite simple.

Zork was an independent development at the MIT-AI lab. It was ARGUABLY an early experiment in computational linguistics, a question of "How smart a parser for English could you make?". It was written in MDL, a language distantly related to LISP. There was an INCOMPLETE translation to FORTRAN, that was distributed by DECUS as "Dungeon". The command parser was VERY complex, and arguably was Zork's real contribution to the state of the art and science. There were a few papers published about it. It inspired a lot of other work. The original MDL source code still exists and is easy to find and download. I *THINK* there are MDL language processors available that allow the code to be compiled and run.

"HAUNT", a haunted house game, was one of them. What made Haunt interesting was that it was written in OPS83 (an early production system language, that was used for rule-base expert system development). Partial source code exists, as part of a port to OPS5 (a later system). The complete source code MAY still exist, on a magnetic tape somewhere that may or may not be readable today. Tapes deteriorate if not maintained carefully. Executables that run on PDP-10 emulators do still exist.

According to Marcinko, there are three levels of FU'd-ness.

SNAFU is the first, and lowest level. It is the Normal situation: "Situation Normal, All F'ed Up."

TARFU is the intermediate level: "Things Are REALLY F'ed Up."

The highest level is FUBAR: "F'ed Up Beyond All Recognition". (Some authorities, Marcinko included, expand the acronym as "F'ed Up Beyond All Repair".) This event clearly rises to that highest level.

Would you be terribly offended if I asked you to post the actual data supporting that claim?

I've heard lots of people claiming that. I have not seen ANY data to back it up.