Very good summary of the arguments against Thorium, but your first point can be put more succinctly:

1) There is no economic advantage to Thorium reactors.

And make no mistake: the main factor holding back nuclear all over the developed world is not safety issues, public opinion, waste management or proliferation, but cost.

You need to share this info. A few more people like you and we'll be able to triangulate the site of impact (if there is one). To quote the Bad Astronomer:

Or at least contact the BadAss himself, see links in TFS.

Will you JUST FUCKING STOP spreading this lie? The energy payback time for photovoltaic modules according to most studies is between 1-4 years, depending on the material and manufacturing process used. Their technical lifetime is 25 years or more.

(I know I'm late to the party and hardly anyone will read this, but this is for the three of you who will.)

Funny, but unfortunately the RIAA/MPAA aren't that clever. If they were, they wouldn't issue takedown notices to all the free advertising they get in fan videos on Youtube of movie scenes and teens dancing to pop songs, which would be deemed fair use in any sane legal universe.

Also, definitely not fair use but still remarkable: it's astonishing how they happily piss money away in their idiotic war on pirated films and music - imagine what this word-of-mouth marketing would cost them if they actually had to PAY for it.

Sorry, I'm SO not clicking that link. When you have a story about a game manufacturer claiming 95% piracy rates, and say "Data pulled from here:" with a URL, I just assume I'm gonna get goatse'd.

I imagine it will go away as quietly as this wafer-thin MintChip.

Umm, no. If you had actually RTFA, you would have seen that the iOS market share in the same quarter was only 17% (RIM, Symbian, Windows, make up the rest). I'm pretty sure one or two of the major Android suppliers (Samsung? HTC?) can match that 17% figure all by themselves.

(But yes, this was measured in Q2 - expect iOS to do much better in Q4 when the next model is released. Also, matching Apple's smartphone *profits* is a different story.)

By that logic, Rottentomatoes (which averages reviews using only a binary fresh/rotten scale) should be utterly useless. Except it isn't. It's IMHO the most dependable rating site on the net.

It seems the magic lies not in the rating resolution, but in the quality and size of the reviewer pool (100+ for Rottentomatoes). In other words, make the law of averages work for you.

I'm with Musk on this one. It's really easy to underestimate the growth of emerging technologies.

In the 2000 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency forecasted that the installed capacity of PV solar cells in Europe in 2010 would be 1.6 GW (see page 294). To hedge their bet, they also included an "alternative policy scenario" where PV capacity reached 2 GW in 2010, corresponding to an average capacity growth rate over 1997 levels (0.5 GW) of 11.3% per year. So, what really happened? In 2010, there was 28 GW of PV capacity in the EU. And just last year Europe installed another 22 GW.

Sometimes, revolutions happen.

BTW, this technique is also useful for other sites that have anal search facilities, e.g. IMDB or Rottentomatoes.

IncidentalIy, I wish Slashdot would allow you to edit your post post-posting ...

Totally agree. But I fixed this by mapping a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search to a Chrome bookmark keyword. Now I just type "w search-terms" and it nearly always teleports me to the right wikipedia page. Like so:

http://pastebin.com/QX8t1fwS

(Posted to Pastebin because I can't get the Slashdot message composer to print this correctly.)

Even more sadly, this is not news. IE has been effectively sabotaging the non-IE community for years. The need to specifically code for IE6 and IE7 due to their crappy compliance with web standards has swallowed immense amounts of global developer effort, which could otherwise have been invested in improving the interwebs for everyone.

Just die already.

Yes, it was way ahead of its time. Or in other words, it never existed. It was just a concept. All the PR fluff you saw was just Microsoft's way of saying "we got nothing, but please don't buy an iPad".

Much like Apple's "accidental leaks" of a future 7" miniPad because they're sincerely afraid of the Nexus 7.

Your little brain freeze notwithstanding, that was an exemplary summary of a complex report. The mea culpa is also appreciated.

For those who want to read a little more, there's a very good article over at Ars Technica, which in turn links to the full English report from the Japanese parliamentary inquiry as well as an IEEE Spectrum account of the immediate aftermath.

Alternatively, you could sleep with someone to double the wattage. I didn't mention this option in my first post because I assumed most Slashdot readers would find this alternative prohibitively expensive.