Me too. And after, crossing fingers, the deal goes through, I will be voting against all of its directors at the next shareholders' meeting. Why in God's name would anyone agree to pay $3 BILLION as a breakup fee even if the breakup occurs for reasons outside the buyer's control?! Everyone knows that US regulators have become completely arbitrary and capricious as the rule of law has disintegrated. To put $3 billion of your shareholders' money on the line betting that they would "allow" the deal (as if the government has any right to decide what I can buy!) is somewhere between insane and a gross breach of fiduciary responsibility. They belong in prison.

We don't have that season. Here in San Francisco, there are four seasons:

Rainy Season: Nov. 1 through Mar. 31
Season of False Hope: Apr. 1 through May 31
Foggy Season: June 1 through Aug. 31
Summer: Sept. 1 though Oct. 31

All dates approximate. Your seasons may vary.

Walking through unknown-to-cops Civil War era tunnels. Fit for purpose then, fit for purpose now.

Because you can bet your last buck that the TSA will be right there, ready to serve up an unconstitutional anal probe. I'll stick to travel modes in which my fourth amendment rights are respected.

Now, when those of us who feel that way are rounded up and given a mandatory 1-way trip on a colony ship, I'll go happily. For many reasons.

What you want is called The Economist.

Does this remind anyone of the South Seas tribes who, after WW2, made wooden radios and beacons in the expectation that they would cause aircraft bearing advanced goods to land?

The studies you cite were all conducted by the government or by people working under government contracts. Those are the same people who would benefit from selling the casks and waste management services to the government, so they all have an interest in making it look like Yucca Mountain is a safe and effective place to store high-level waste. Maybe it is, but they spent so much time and energy trying to convince us that their credibility is nil. After all, if they're so good at managing the transportation and storage of high-level waste, surely there's no reason they couldn't just fill a few empty warehouses in Detroit or Omaha or Baltimore with the casks, right? Because it's all so safe, right?

You even hint at another reason for skepticism. At best, Yucca Mountain might have a few hundred years of safe and effective storage before there's an accident in transport, a geological event, a leak, or some other event that we've all been told is simply impossible or has a 0.00001% chance of happening in 10,000 years. By that time, all the people responsible for designing and implementing the storage and transport system will be long gone. So there is zero accountability in the process: the people involved could know the waste will be in the groundwater in 100 years and no one responsible would live long enough to stand trial for it. Similarly, they could provide even wholly independent testing labs with cask "samples" that are engineered and manufactured to far higher standards than the production casks would be. By the time anyone discovers this, they're all dead and there are thousands of tonnes of extremely hazardous toxic waste in transport or underground with containment less than called for in the design. Of course, we're told that the government has ways of detecting and preventing these kinds of things from happening, which is why every few years you read about that same government giving its soldiers and sailors defective weapons and armour made by those same government contractors and tested using those same government protocols.

Maybe none of these things is true. Maybe Yucca Mountain really is a great choice, and maybe the casks really will last thousands of years and really can survive being smashed by a train or tossed off the Empire State Building by King Kong. It's a stretch, but it's not impossible. But I don't really believe the people who told us all that, I don't trust them, and no one else who would have had to bear the consequences of failure did, either. Hopefully somewhere there is a town full of people who, like you, have more trust in the government and their contractors and would welcome the opportunity to show the world how a skilled labour force can partner with the federal government and its major contracting corporations to deliver a safe and reliable system for transporting waste to their storage facility and keeping it there without leaks for at least 10,000 years (it really needs to be 100,000, but I'll give you credit for a length of time no greater than that of human history to this point). And after 10,000 years of that skilled labour force and those honest government employees -- I should say governmentS employees, since no government has ever lasted longer than a thousand years or so -- and contracting corporations providing a flawless safety record, your town's water supply, genetic health, and agricultural output will all be every bit as good as they are today. Then our descendents can all agree that the people of Nevada way back in the day sure were a bunch of Nervous Nellies who turned away a golden opportunity to employ a few people for no good reason (and that would really be the only benefit, since the state would get no tax revenue from the facility or its construction as it would all be on government land with government labour and contractors domiciled out of state). That's assuming that anyone 10,000 years from now even knows what Nevada or Yucca Mountain or the United States of America were, or for that matter that there's thousands of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste buried under your town. But hey, all of that might happen, and my long-since-decomposed bones sure will look silly then! THAT's a chance I'm very willing to take, and that was and presumably still is the prevailing attitude in Nevada. The potential cost of being too cautious is nil, especially since the state has no nuclear power facilities and would have gained almost no economic benefit from hosting the dump. What did they have to gain? The potential cost of being too trusting is thousands or even millions of people (your constituents, if you're Harry Reid) dying a horrible death and the long-term contamination of YET MORE of your state's territory. Does it make sense now?

Again, this is not about whether nuclear power is safe or necessary or a good idea. Nor is it even about whether the technically best solution to the problem of existing high-level waste is to bury it under Yucca Mountain as opposed to burying it somewhere else, reprocessing it in fast reactors, glassifying it, shooting it into space, or whatever. It's about whether the people of the State of Nevada acted reasonably and correctly in opposing that solution. I believe very strongly that they did. If you disagree, the government is now giving you an opportunity to put your life and those of your neighbours on the line to prove it. Good!

I guess my point was that there are particular reasons Nevada was and remains a highly inappropriate choice. NIMBY sounds a lot less compelling when you're living next to a reactor and running your gear on its juice.

I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years. There was absolutely no way we wanted that stuff stored at Yucca Mountain; it is a geologically active area and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city. All that would be mere hypocrisy if not for the fact that Nevada has no nuclear power plants and derives virtually none of its electricity from nuclear sources outside the state. This is completely orthogonal to whether nuclear power is a good idea, whether it can be made safe, whether fast reactors are better, whether waste should instead be reprocessed or turned into glass or shot into space, and just how bad coal or hydro or other sources are for us and the rest of earth's inhabitants. It's nothing more complicated than the fact that Yucca Mountain is at best a mediocre site, the local residents don't want it, and the waste is generated elsewhere for the primary benefit of people who do not live in Nevada. That should have been sufficient to make the feds look elsewhere 15 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't. That the state won the fight is cheering; that a fight was even necessary is an appalling violation of states' rights. Finding a geologically suitable site in a state with nuclear power plants and residents who trust the government to transport and store the waste safely in their vicinity is an excellent idea. If they'd done that in the first place, we'd all have billions of dollars back -- and we'd probably have a nuke dump, too. But it certainly wouldn't be at Yucca Mountain; the federal government has abused and betrayed Nevadans from the day the state was admitted to the union, and there is absolutely no way its residents will ever trust it with their lives and property. That they gain little or nothing from nuclear power serves only to reinforce their already compelling case. Let those who like the federal government and think it's full of good, kind, well-meaning and competent public servants take the waste from their own power plants instead. It's the right thing for everyone.

And where do YOU live, sir? In a state with nuclear power plants? Far away from Nevada? Right. It's just as meaningful for me to say that your basement is the best choice.

While everyone else is looking for bars packed with women, I'll be able to see which places with good beer selections have open seats at the bar. There's nothing better than a quiet bar with good beer and a friendly barkeep.

Different skills take differing amounts of time and experience to master. In general, professional musicians start playing in or even before high school. No one shows up at a university with no experience and expects to become a concert pianist or cellist. The expectation is that it takes at least 5-10 years of experience to become a top-notch musician. The counterexample offered of a surgeon having been expected to operate on his pets in high school is also silly; while the expectation is that experience with musical instruments is gained starting in the early teens, that same ten years of experience for surgeons begins in college and extends well beyond, into medical school, internship, and then residency. So it's incorrect to compare the three fields.

Part of the difficulty these academics are having is that "computer science" encompasses many different fields. Some academics are really borderline mathematicians. Some students really belong in a vocational school, because the general knowledge of computer science most university programs teach is not needed nor useful if your plan is to go write business logic in Java for some megacorporation. Those students would be much better served by a 1- or 2-year program that focuses on the specific technologies they'll be using. And there are other students who plan to make programming a career in any of several different fields, each involving its own specialised tools, terminology, and mixture of theory and practical knowledge. All of this lives under one roof in most universities. Complicating matters further, students show up with many different levels of experience; some may have grown up with little access to computers, while others may already be accomplished programmers in the open source community looking for a degree and the opportunity to gain advanced knowledge of theory. It will never be possible to come up with a plan for the first two semesters that works for all of these cases. In that sense, the one-size-fits-all approach is indeed broken. But that is completely different from insisting that "up-or-out" is wrong, or that the basics need to be introduced even more slowly or in even more courses.

Students in most programs get 2 semesters of extremely basic instruction. This covers things like what variables, expressions, and functions are, the concepts of sequence, decision, and iteration, the basics of syntax in one or two languages, what memory is, and maybe some simple data structures like arrays and structures. Anyone who comes in with any programming experience at all, in any language or context, already knows at least 90% of everything taught in these courses. Forcing everyone to take them constitutes a tax. Value is given in the form of tuition and time spent but none is received in the form of increased knowledge. Students with no experience may well benefit from these courses, however. To suggest that they're "too fast" is ridiculous, however. In those two semesters, students will receive about 80 hours of lecture instruction, 2 300-page textbooks, usually at least 1 textbook with practical exercises in it, at least 15 hours of structured practical instruction from teaching assistants, generally unlimited access to computers, compilers, interpreters, and other tools as needed, unlimited access to a library with thousands of relevant documents ranging from trivial to cutting-edge research, access to a peer group, and dozens of office hours with the instructor and teaching assistants. It's silly to suggest that in 8 months a committed student with access to all those resources cannot pick up the basics of computer use and programming in at least one high-level language. And that's really all that's expected; there are separate courses for computer architecture, advanced data structures, operating systems, compilers, graphics, linear algebra, logic, calculus, programming language theory and features, algorithms, networking, databases, and so on. No one is expecting a student completing those two courses to be a master of anything. No one is suggesting that a student with those two courses completed should receive a computer science degree. And no one is suggesting that a student should be ready to get a job as a programmer after completing those two courses. They are introductory, covering the basics that other coursework will leverage to teach more advanced concepts and practices.

A student who can't successfully complete these two courses in 8 months needs to reevaluate his or her plans. That's not at all unusual for freshmen; most students change their field of study at some point. Some of those students may decide computer science is not interesting to them, or that they're ill-suited to it. Others may find that they lacked commitment and dedication and should repeat one or both of the courses with greater focus. But someone who is genuinely trying and using all the resources available and still can't grasp these basic concepts after 2 years has to face the fact that he or she simply is not going to master computer science or programming, regardless of what his or her plans were after graduation. Here's where the opportunity arises to make the right analogies with other fields. Not everyone is cut out to be a surgeon or master musician. No amount of training, practice, and study will ever put a mediocre violinist in the first chair at the San Francisco Symphony. So too are there people who simply aren't cut out to be programmers. No one knows why. Maybe that CS1 dropout will end up in neuroscience and be the first to figure it out. That's a much better outcome for everyone than extending the introductory material across two years, boring the more advanced students to tears and confiscating their time and money while stringing along the inevitable failures for a second wasted year instead of letting them know early on that this field of study isn't right for them so they can move on to something else.

While we're at it, we should be doing what other engineering disciplines do and specialising job functions and programs of study a bit more. For example, a graduate with a degree in civil engineering is a full engineer, with the knowledge required to design a wide range of structures. He or she can then take the professional engineer's exam, conferring mastery and opening doors professionally. That is not the same line of work as steelworker, concrete pump operator, excavator operator, or welder. All of those functions are necessary to construct something, but no one pretends that an engineering degree is needed to operate an acetylene torch, nor does anyone suggest that acetylene torch operators are qualified to design a dam. One way to solve this problem would be to split off computer engineering. A few schools do this already. Unfortunately, in most cases the differences from computer science are superficial, usually consisting of dropping a theory course and adding one or two from an electrical engineering program. This is not necessarily bad for the computer engineering students, but it leaves far too much emphasis on practice for true computer science. Better would be to move computer science into the Mathematics department, which is usually separate from Engineering. All engineering disciplines require some study of mathematics; computer engineering is no different. That gives us true computer engineers, analogous to civil engineers. But it still leaves most employers hiring them to operate acetylene torches. We solve that problem with vocational programs designed to teach students the practical aspects of basic programming in commonly encountered environments. This is where students go to learn about EC2 APIs, writing and deploying J2EE apps, customising PeopleSoft, or writing apps for iOS. Such a program needs an abbreviated version of a computer engineering degree, so that the students can understand the tools they're working with. But it does not require much theory, math, or advanced concepts. These tasks tend to be quick and dirty; get it done now, deploy it for a quick buck, and move on. To the extent that more thought is required, a computer engineer or a team of them should be involved in that, breaking down the project into tasks that can be done by people with practical knowledge but little understanding of engineering principles. This is usually what "good" programmers or architects end up doing anyway; the fiction lies in the fact that they have the same apparent credentials as the functionaries who can't be trusted to choose a sane algorithm, do basic design, or create an interface. It's unfair to the "architects" who studied and mastered computer science to force them to compete for jobs with "functionaries" who lack that knowledge, and it's unfair to the "functionaries" to waste 4 years of their time and stick them with $150k in debt just to qualify them for menial jobs. A building, bridge, or dam can collapse because of a bad weld, or because of bad design. So too can a computer system fail because of an off-by-one error or a misdesigned interface. For these reasons, we require that civil engineers understand the strength of various welds in different materials, and that computer engineers understand how to test modules and identify common errors by inspection or from QA data. But we do not require that welders understand fluid dynamics, nor do we give civil engineering students 4 semesters to figure out statics. Why haven't we reached the same point with computer engineering programs?

For the purposes of public safety and emergency response, this was a local incident in a single city. There was nothing useful or actionable for anyone outside New York.

Yes, this was the obvious answer I overlooked. It's also the best answer I've seen in this thread so far. Winner!

This, exactly.