Not sure about the sodium cooled reactor, but they did have a high temperature reactor cooled with liquid lead.
Glitch there was that the molten lead started to dissolve the reactor insides.

Secrecy in the military is really harmful to any kind of progress. We could have much higher reliability high temperature reactors if these experiments had been disclosed and followed up on, instead of getting buried under a layer of secrecy until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Mr Jaczko is no fan of nuclear power, which made his tenure at the head of the NRC turbulent. His most notable public appearance was during the Fukushima disaster, where he asserted that the spent fuel pool of Reactor 3 was emptying. That led the Japanese to mount a kamikaze effort to refill it by helicopter until it was determined that Mr Jaczko was mistaken.
His anti nuclear bias notwithstanding, he makes a valid point, nuclear is currently too slow and too costly to build to be economically viable in any western country.
Some of the delays and costs are regulatory, but the regulations generally reflect efforts to ensure basic quality and safety.
The poor performance imho reflect both deteriorating education and capability norms in the labor force as well as declining management skills and integrity. When the emphasis is on shareholder value as the prime metric, it becomes career limiting to do an honest job. Yet an honest job is a prerequisite for building a safe nuclear industry.

It is obvious that this cheating was approved by the then chairman and family head, Ferdinand Piech, who ran the company until 2015.
Piech was an engineer and engine specialist, famous for his detailed involvement in new designs.

This is a spectacular piece of aerospace engineering, basically a huge flying wing built to lift several hundred ton boosters.
The recent SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy launch with full booster recovery destroys the economic advantage of air launch.
SpaceX's success indicates that launching can become a refuel and repeat process, so there is no need for a hugely expensive aircraft launch vehicle. Especially as that aircraft has limited speed and range and requires an enormous runway to operate from, which undercuts the idea that it can launch to any azimuth from anywhere.
From a business perspective, the operation was successful, but the patient died. Sad.

Chrome is the preeminent global browser.
Why am I not reassured when it adds the capability to allow Google to remove blacklisted extensions.
Blacklisted and removed from user installations on what basis? Who decides and what are the criteria. Is there any appeal?
Sure seems to grant a lot of trust to a firm that is quite often in the courts.

Not sure that matters.
The Ethiopian flight never got up high enough to engage the auto pilot, they were in trouble essentially from the time the wheels left the runway.
Separately, the autopilot is only as good as its inputs. If there is a sensor problem, as was the case with both these accidents, the autopilot is equally misled.

.It seems unlikely that Tesla would have been able to persuade anyone to help finance the venture unless he had a significant idea that at least neutralized some of the obvious objections.
Tesla was not stupid, but rather a truly ingenious engineer, nicely illustrated by his development of 3 phase power. Ingenuity matters in these circumstances, The H bomb development stayed blocked for years, despite diligent effort, until Stanislaw Ulam conceived of the idea of radiation compression.

There is a piece in a Tesla biography which quotes him saying that he understood the energy flows involved from observing thunderstorms moving across the landscape while on vacation in the Rockies. It suggests he had an 'eureka' moment

The main question is what prompted Bloomberg to publish this story in the first place.
They are well aware that the Chinese government carries grudges and will exact a large penalty from anyone harming China's interests.
So why would Bloomberg, a firm that historically has tried hard to avoid offending China, publish a story designed to damage the reputation of the Chinese subcontractor base? Given the importance of China in the world financial framework, they are not an entity Bloomberg would casually offend.
Yet they have done just that, with a very high profile story that is thus far lacking in hard evidence. What made Bloomberg, a very profit oriented firm, do that?

I'd expect Bloomberg would make sure they were bulletproof on the facts, because the article has lots of potential downsides for them. They must have hardware evidence at a minimum.
For one, it will surely anger the Chinese government, an entity which holds grudges better than anyone. This story burned a lot of bridges.
For another, the various named businesses who are reported to have knowingly operated penetrated services will need to clear their reputations with their customers.
Lastly, Supermicro is very damaged by this and may get put out of business, they will be fighting for survival and will pull no punches.
Afaik, retired intelligence personnel is still bound by their oath to not disclose classified information. That makes it challenging to mount a defense, so the hardware will have to provide the needed proofs.

There are about 200 million voter records and 24 terabytes of data, so about 100,000 bytes/voter.
That is lot more than just vote records or census data.
The person who uncovered this data pool did note that it included among other things projections of each voters opinions and likely vote patterns, with surprising accuracy insofar as he was concerned, based on what his own profile showed.

Iirc, it did not contain the leak, except in the narrow sense that the barrel did not leave the site.
In actuality, the barrel contents, a sloppy mix of nitric acid process waste and sawdust, hugely overheated and much of the material was vaporized.
Because of contractor negligence, the fire doors that should have automatically closed could not, so the contamination spread widely. The doors had been wired open because they had too many false alarms, which was inconvenient.
The venting system that should have contained the fumes did not work, so the plant environs were contaminated.
The estimated $2 billion clean up cost is an estimate, probably will be exceeded, as these cleanups rarely work as planned.
Afaik, apart from some bonus payment reductions, there has been no penalties to any entity from this disaster.
Accountability is entirely lacking by all appearances.

Seems a clever ploy to highlight his efforts and thereby enhance his career prospects.
The good professor is ranked as an 'assistant professor', which is a non tenured position.
To make tenure, he needs to get promoted to 'associate professor', which is the first tenured career step.
There are very many more assistants than associates, the competition is brutal and getting some recognition is essential.
Good on him for finding an encouraging way to document the rejections he has endured.

Card skimming is much too piecemeal an approach.
The preferred technique (well over 100 uses in 2015) in Germany is to hook the ATM to a cylinder of ethylene, add a spark, collect the cash and scram.
This takes about 2 minutes and produces about 10,000E per application, with about 100,000E collateral damage.
Best of all, it is not vulnerable to changes in the card technology

The FDA has set up a real world test of consumer willingness to accept GMO foods.
All farmed salmon can now be considered to be GMO, because no labeling is required.
If consumers care, all farmed salmon sales will fall. Industry will react accordingly.

Coming after the Stuxnet experience and the recent hack of a steel mill in Germany, which forced an emergency shutdown of the furnace, with 'heavy damage', the complacent assertion that no cyber attack could cause a reactor malfunction just seems witless. Of course these reactors are susceptible to getting hacked, the main obstacle is the relative obscurity of the control systems and the reality that there are multiple different designs in service, so that a wide ranging attack is very complicated. By the same token, the diversity of targets makes the defense much more difficult, no 'one size fits all' protocol is likely to be effective.

The hope may be that hacking a nuclear plant might be seen as an act of war, so not something most states would pursue, but the proliferation of devices makes it easier to create a hard to attribute hack. There is plenty of ill will around as well, so this is likely to be just the first such attack post Stuxnet.