I got the impression from TFA that this was just based on drivers (and the extra heads), and has nothing to do with the actual GPU processor. So, wouldnt NVIDIA also be able to do this by just releasing a new driver and their card manufactuers by releasing a card with more heads? Whats so special about what ATI did?

It produces more heat, maybe 7% of full power - which is below self-sustaining. That means the reactor plant can not produce electricity for you on decay heat alone.

While I support nuclear power to no end, i do want to ensure that misconceptions are NOT spread. Modern pebble bed reactors and modern reactors in general still have radioactive waste. They still have alot of radioactive waste. What you may be confusing for waste is the amount of uranium in the 'pebbles': modern pebble bed reactors are more effective at burning the uranium that they are given (and the Pu that comes from taht uranium). But in the end, every time you have a fission event (of which you have lots) you produce many radioactive isotopes which create radioactive waste.

They make me furious! Okay, so the buttons are not well labeled, because these things sit in the sun all day and of course, the stickers, and the LCD screen will fade/lose intensity and become unreadable. Well, there is a button next to the add-time button that is 'add maximum time'. Okay, so what if you accidentally press that (which I've done) and cant see the dollar amount it tells you, it just says 'REMOVE CARD' and you have to remove your credit card to get it back, so when you remove it, it swipes, and boom, the transaction goes through for the maximum amount of time possible! So, yes I could have avoided it had I 1) not pressed the wrong button 2) been able to see the screen 3)known what happened and pressed the cancel button - BUT NONE of those happened and instead I paid more than I've ever paid for parking - including in a garage. Great engineering their folks.

That sounds like nothing different than giving the parents of home-schooled kids free textbooks, textbooks which are written by everyone. Given that thats what it sounds like, I think you arguing for everyone in the world/country to be home-schooled with wikipedia as their reference material?? If you 'get the for money players' out of the loop that means you get the professional teachers out of the loop and thus everyone teaches for free (i.e. amateurs). if they teach for free, they will be horrible at it.

I am a manager in a highly technical organization that relies on computer codes to do our job. In my experience, there isn't ENOUGH FORTRAN teaching in the college level. Maybe its location based, but most of our new-hires (we get most from the northeast, but still get a noticeable amount from as far away as University of Washington, Univ of Hawaii, and USC) actually are NOT taught FORTRAN and instead are taught something object-oriented, typically C++ or Java. I know for a fact that Penn State suggests C++ for all undergrad engineers (FORTRAN is offered though - the classes hold less than 50% total students than does the C++ course). In my organization we also have a 'double-hump' age distribution: lots of people ready to retire (or could have retired 5 years ago...) and lots of people who are within 5 years of their first day on the job. This creates a problem of knowledge management; our new guys need to know the details of the FORTRAN code they are using every day to the extent that our ready-to-retire guys know it, and fast. If they are not taught FORTRAN, this creates an even larger learning curve for them which isn't desirable. So one option would be to 'rewrite the code for the future generation'.. We definitely do not have the resources to rewrite our workhorse codes that have been in use and development since the 70s. I don't know if an organization as large as Microsoft could rewrite Windows in a new language. Also, we can't retire our old codes because they are still actively needed to respond to emergent issues (it is easier to maintain the codes than it is to make a new model to be inputted into a new code). So, our hands are tied (mine specifically!) and my organization actually needs MORE FORTRAN programmers coming from the university just to maintain the status quo.

Like it or not, today's kids already know far, far more about technology than their teachers (college-level engineering professors excepted, and sometimes even then). In particular, the research and collaborative aspects of technology that most apply to education, kids "get" in a way only the uber-geeks among their elders will ever grasp.

I would agree to that.. but not for EVERY child in the classroom.

Assuming that the computers being used in schools are not allowed to be customized by students (not being root, or not having admin priv in windows), what really is the difference between open source and using windows? Opening a program is honestly the same between the two (assuming icons are on the desktop). Students/teachers not knowing how to use the computers is not an issue as long as they can get to the encyclopedia, or whatever learning software they need on the PC.

Now, if we both accept public school as merely a form of socialized babysitting with the occasional unintended side effect of imparting a bit of knowledge from the tedious daily busy-work, I'll agree that having the prisoners more competent than the jailers raises serious control issues... But from the "education" perspective, the brand of tool doesn't matter, only that it works. And mind your metaphors!

Agreed, its sad that alot of teachers do just use busy-work as a way to get through their day, instead of giving work to help the students learn. I know thats the way it is at least in inner city schools (aka Washington DC... its fun down here...), but certainly not in the ones I grew up in in suburban NY, there, the teachers at least care and are not just trying to 'survive another day.'

I've read a good amount of the posts and I wanted to clear up some of the misconceptions I've seen, as I deal with this stuff every day at my day job. 1) critical reactor. A critical reactor is a good reactor. not a bad reactor like made for tv movies would have you think. A supercritical reactor is still not bad, a prompt critical reactor or prompt supercritical reactor is. See the first posts on this article for what critical means. 2) reprocessing. It is true that there is a whole lot of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 that goes unused when spent nuclear fuel is 'thrown out.' Reprocessing does allow you to use more of the earth's resources. However, reprecessing does NOT significantly reduce the longevity or amount of nuclear waste. Lets say there are X curies of isotope Y. When you reprocess, that is, seperate out the elements that you need, isotope Y will still be there, and it will still be at X curies, you just seperated it from all the other stuff in the waste. 3) Uranium is barely radioactive. The half-life of Uranium-238 (which makes up 99.28% of the uranium you pull out of the ground), is 4.5E9 years. The definition of stable is loosely defined as 10^10 years.... (for those who dont know, half-life can be thought of as radioactivity). 4) "Burning" Uranium-238 instead of 235 is NOT new. We've been able to do it for years. Look up the history of fast reactors for examples. 5) Thorium can be used to produce U-233. This also has been done in the past. 6) Safety. The design of reactors and the instrumentation and control systems that allow them to be operated has gotten immensely better since we last built a plant in the US. Given that those plants back then were still relatively safe (three mile island was more a result of erroneous human intervention... if left on its own there wouldnt have been a problem), imagine what they are like now. Just like McCain said so many times during his campaign, the navy has steamed on nuclear power for how many millions of miles without incident??

Well said.