the problem with that 250k year halflife is that the stuff gets PHYSICALLY hot as it's stored. Like, hot enought that it sets stuff on fire. And the decay byproducts are short-lived; some of them are some pretty nasty short-term gasses.

So they have to be kept sealed, and cooled under water for many months at first. (in some cases, many years).

They have a method of "dry cask" storage - for waste that has cooled somewhat. But you STILL can't get an unprotected human being anywhere near it without lethally dosing your maintenance workers, and setting work-equipment or storage containers on fire. You maybe have animals (birds, bugs) flying near the stuff and picking up byproduct contamination, and carrying it away. (this is happening at Hanford, in Washington State). The spent fuel's in this state for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. No human civilzation has yet lasted that long - we're going to figure out how to manage that?

I would think that a NASA dude would be advocating for solar-placed PV arrays. Or at the very least, some form of space-based nuclear waste disposal (like "Space 1999") - I agree that we need to get away from a carbon-based energy infrastructure. But nuclear isn't a good answer. So says all the Cesium-137 particles all over my property from Fukushima 2 years ago, and for the next 28 or so years. Thanks a lot, TEPCO.

yeah - you guys store your nuclear waste THERE, then.

That's right. My brother-in-law Wayne, can actually build a working reactor in 3 and a half years, if you just cut all the bullshit red-tape. Give him a call.

This - THIS; holy fuck listen to this guy.
I was there. I remember. "The end of business cycles." "P/E ratios don't mean anything anymore." and the ever popular: "the end of history."

Companies were given money for the sake of being vehicles for investors' pump-n-dump schemes.

  I think that's happening today too. (though - I seriously can't tell what the fuck is going on with Facebook. They are trying so hard to piss-off their user base and give every competitor every opportunity to eat their lunch - and their monopoly remains resilient for some insane god damned reason.)

The "out of town coup" is a very typical Silicon Valley dirty-trick.

It was done (successfully) at my startup. It was after a merger, in 1996, when my company was bought by another company (a competitor), but as part of the deal, our CEO was placed in-charge. It had been a heavily leveraged deal.

It's been long enough, and this company doesn't exist anymore, so I'll name names.
Seagate Software. (They were later bought by Veritas, later bought by Symantec).

  (we had gotten a lot of options - and the buy-out made even junior-level employees rather wealthy) - About a year after. . . some managers from the other company arranged a deal with an Asian distributor, and sent our CEO to China for a 2 week trip. Their product had had a very bad quarter, and they had missed a delivery for a major upgrade. (we later found out that this was intentional; their project manager took ownership of a couple of major bugs, and sat on them, on purpose). While our CEO was gone to China, they got the board to vote on his ouster. (it turned out to be a completely bogus trip - there was no deal, just a guy at the distributor willing to waste our CEO's time and keep him busy and out of contact for 2 weeks). Fuckers showed up at our office on Monday morning, handing us all big fat layoff packages, (some of us got retention and relocation deals), and they basically pushed a plan to close our branch office.

By the time the CEO and his allies knew what the fuck was going on, all of the major talent at our branch fucked-off, took their severance, stock deals, and got other jobs.

The sad thing was, it was our customer base that really got fucked over. People paid REAL money for our software back then.

Later - I heard that this was a pretty common trick in takeovers and leveraged buyouts. The sleazebags who ran the other company weren't even technical people - they were financiers. They made a fuckton of money, the technology all got shut down, the engineers went elsewhere. They took that money and used it for other IPO buyouts later.

By the time 4 or 6 years passed, we're into 2000, 2001, 2002, and that's where you started to see a real squeeze in our industry, and old-school players like Sun, DEC, and HP were feeling the heat from these shenanigans. A whole fuckton of people who used to innovate and work with technology for a living, pretty
much either retired, or found something else to do for a living. They called it an "industry consolidation". We also have not really seen much in the way of innovation since then, either. Unless you count iPads and "cloud computing".

Dirty fuckers who had nothing at all to do with technology.

Yeah, we needed money to do all this stuff. But the guys who make the money available, are basically the devil.

They seem to get a lot of mileage out of this Jesus guy.

Yeah - basically, if you could turn-on a computer, you were "golden". Bushnell's trying to take credit for being "the genius who hired Steve Jobs" when really - things were different back then, and standards were just plain lower. Steve Jobs was a one in a million lucky shot, and there's no way that their "cultivating" could have intentionally discovered or created some genius.

I agree that a lot of typical corporate culture DOES stifle creativity, and there are probably a lot of great ideas out there stuck inside people who are chained into cubicles and dead-end jobs. But to use a gardening analogy: if you scatter fertilizer over a huge field, all you're going to get is a bunch of crappy weeds.

This is all part of the "fellatio competition" that Torvalds was talking about. (with regard to the UEFI encryption).

this was my experience as well.

Larger surface area would work, but if you're on the move, in semi-shaded woodland, you're not going to get enough to charge an ipod in an 8 hr day of hiking.

Vice President Cheney?

most likely, the guys who have solved this problem, are working for the large financial institutions around the world, writing trading algorithms. Darpa's not worth their time, and neither is the ad industry.

It started with the Lewis Powell Memo, in 1972. (Powell was the head of the US Chamber of Commerce - then was a Nixon appointee to SCOTUS).

And now, with a volkswagen, an electrical OR vacuum fault will strand you. Or just because it feels like stranding you.

. . . 2003 with just over 130k miles.

Blown turbo, brakes that didn't release properly, fuel-pump leaked, bad glow-plug harness, blown airbag controller, broken dvd player (replaced with aftermarket), blown dual-mass clutch, broken turbo actuator, broken vacuum solenoid, blows tail-light bulbs on an average of one every 2 months, popped shift-linkage clip, don't even get me started - this car has been a complete piece of shit.

When I first got it, the glow-plug harness kept throwing codes even when I replaced the glow-plugs. Took it in for service, and 4 visits later, they had no clue, and wanted to charge me $1500 for a new "glow plug module" (supposedly a computer? there is no such thing). I reported them to the better business bureau, and learned to fix the car myself. (I did all the other, above, listed work).

Though, yeah, when I've got it all running nice, I get 45+ mpg. It's got some nuts too. Probably in about 50k miles, I'm going to replace the nozzles.

I use a trailer too.

Actually bought the damn thing in Phoenix. :)