By the standards of Star Wars and Game of Thrones he should get a Nobel prize! Darth Vader brings peace to Alderaan, Daenarys brings peace to Westeros.

They need an ETHICAL update. Make the OS secure by default. Stop running garbageware so it runs faster, like Linux. Stop spying on the users. Then maybe it would be more pleasant to use.

TO clarify, he's going to drop some people from orbit. They won't be able to land softly, which solves the pesky problem of keeping them alive after.

We're inside some cosmic being's brain. Psychadelic, man.

I'm sure he's got the experience. He's a natural.

... and have your next of kin call me in the morning. It won't cure COVID, but it will cure our nation's headache.

It is different in every college of course, but I teach live by zoom, asking students to build code together on the screen, saving to github, then on to the next program. Teaching online isn't all that different for me than being in person. In the fall, assuming we are still online I will be asking students to collaborate via zoom (or other chat like www.securemeeting.org which comes out of our school).

Theaters are almost as dead as airlines. And in 5-6 years, some people will want to fly again (and can afford it). No one is going to go to the movies again in the same kind of numbers, not with current large screen TVs and direct releases. Amazon will just pay $10 for the real estate.

In the 1970s, chess players said, chess requires real intelligence. No computer could ever think like a human. In 1997, IBM Deep Blue completely outclassed humans. Then go players said, well chess is a single goal, but go is much harder. It did take about 20 years, and Google essentially solved go with machine learning. Yes, full intelligence is harder. Now some blowhard is saying robots will never take our jobs. Well, if he means in the next 12 months while we battle a virus, he's probably right. But the reason normal CS people are rightly worried is that anyone in our industry can see the writing on the wall. It might be 50 years. I doubt it. It might be 10. But when it happens, it can happen really fast and the result is incredibly unpleasant. So people are sensibly talking about the problem that any CS student can see is happening, and as usual some windbag is making pronouncements If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke (whose track record on predictions is a hell of a lot better than this yahoo)

After it mutates into a flesh-eating, hemorrhagic zombie apocalypse, when all humans and higher mammals are dead and decay, there will be no trace of any of it. There will however be a recording of Donald Trump saying what a great job he is doing.

make him lick Donald Trump's hand for the next 30 days.

25% = 2billion * 1% mortality ~ approx 20 million.

If COVID were allowed to replicate unchecked, it would conservatively result in 25% of the world population, 1%, or 20 million deaths. That's not counting the deaths due to the overloading of the medical system. It could easily be triple that, or 60 million deaths just from people dying for lack of ventilators, let alone the other treatement not available. So the fact that people are willing to self-quarantine and therefore the death toll is lower than that saved by air pollution, car crashes, etc. seems somewhat irrelevant. No, we don't see the alternative reality, which is what should really be compared.

There are substantive issues that you don't address. If you just park 60MW plants in various remote places, you create a target that can be attacked, or seized. Granted grabbing highly radioactive materials isn't easy but if you are going to park (dozens? hundreds?) around the world, you can be sure someone will do it. So my claim that you are creating an easy road to dirty bombs seems reasonable to me. I'm not going to comment on any personal attacks. What I have repeatedly seen is a pattern of behavior which agrees with what I read in the book. The nuclear industry gets to end of life. It would be dreadfully expensive to close down a plant. Therefore, the standards are eased. There have been enough accidents to show the difference between estimates of probability of catastrophe, and reality. We haven't had a major earthquake at a nuclear facility, or some other problem, and some sites like Indian point are diabolically poorly located. No one is willing to insure operating nuclear plants. Suppose you build a crop of these new plants. The old ones will be uneconomical and need to be mothballed. Who will pay for it? When the companies go bankrupt or walk away, who is going to maintain those plants? The history of corporate america has yet to include a nuclear problem, but if we want an example we can look at the chemical industry, which has repeatedly screwed workers. Lead in gasoline was allowed to continue for decades, with workers dying horrible deaths and generations of children more subtly poisoned. Asbestos has a settlement fund at least, but coal tailings being dumped into rivers? What makes you think that the political structure governing nuclear plants is any more reasonable? I'm all for Yucca mountain, though as I recall if created as envisioned, it would be full around now. I am less enthusiastic about transporting radioactive fuel. Hopefully that could be done without incident. You are not in a position to guarantee anything. The US navy has had its own problems, but at least they have no profit motive and are 100% focused on safety in the engine spaces. I think aside from any technological choices, the only way to run a security risk like a nuclear program is as the military does, with focus on the mission rather than the bottom line.

The idiocy of the assumptions here are mind boggling. Let's assume that it's safer than current plants. A lot safer. But at 60MW, you need 18 to reach 1GW. So you have 18 of these, according to this fanboy article, distributed around the landscape. How are they guarded from terrorists? Whether modular or not, nuclear needs to be centralized, heavily guarded and armored because a nuclear plant turns anyone's conventional weapons into a nuclear dirty bomb arsenal. Then there's the human factor. If you start scattering these around, they will get put in places they shouldn't, like flood zones, unknown faults, etc. We know what happens. If cars get safer, people drive more recklessly. It's human nature. If plants are safer, more corners will be cut. Either way, we will see continuing failures. Don't get me wrong, we desperately need to do something about the current nuclear setup. Keeping 40 years spent fuel onsite is a huge disaster waiting to happen. The idea of a factory where they can recycle the plant and centralize the waste is good. I just wish someone would perfect a LFTR, use Thorium rather than Uranium, and most important do liquid chemical separation so the low-level waste can be segregated from the highly radioactive materials. I want to see nuclear waste reduced to levels below the original ore and buried, with the highly radioactive waste fed back and irradiated near the core to rapidly degrade them. We haven't had a major disaster in the US, but we have come ridiculously close. In confessions of Rogue Nuclear Regulator, Jaszco says he visited a plant that was nearly flooded. If the river had crested two feet higher, they would have been in trouble. Passive cooling is great but not enough. Making sure the plant is highly secure, watertight, above any potential flood plain, heavily armored, these are the important things. The people who should evaluate the sites for nuclear reactors are not nuclear fanboys, but wargamers and nuclear critics.The fanboys just say the chances are "1 in a million" which is the modern euphemism for "unsinkable" which is no longer permissible since we know better. We need new nuclear capacity, so we can remove all the current (unsafe) reactors and burn through 40-50 years of fuel that is in those cooling tanks on site. But solar and batteries are much better for most of the load. As a matter of national security, having overcapacity is a great idea. We should have solar on all new roofs that have access to sun, so that people have distributed communications and refrigeration backups and use less power.