First of all, this is nothing new, it was covered here last year:
Specifically "However looking at the aspects of protactinium separation, I'm wondering if this could be a hole in the process which would allow for much lower U-232. U-232 is the daughter product of Pa-232 just as U-233 is the daugher [sic] of Pa-233. Pa-233 has a half-life of 26.9 days but Pa-232 is only 1.3 days."

They also say "protactinium is not easy to remove from molten salts." and "In a 2 Fluid design we can lower losses to Pa down to almost nothing by simply increasing the volume of blanket salt."

You also would have a problem in that thorium generates just enough neutrons to sustain the reaction. I would think separating the protactinium instead of letting it decay to fissile U233 would be counterproductive, as that would leave less fissile material in the reactor. Why not just build a bomb with the U233 you used as starter fuel?

I highly question whether this is geared toward using thorium in an IFR (integral fast reactor, or what the nuclear industry wants because it is solid fuel based like what they've got already), which also requires reprocessing and starter fuel for optimal usage and burns nearly all of its fuel (but is complex and expensive).

It is the main source of radiation from coal being burned but coal is not necessarily the best source of it. It is found in granite and in deposits with rare earth elements as well.

Korea has a reasonable grudge against Japan - Japan annexed them in 1910 (and occupied them for about 40 years before that and 35 years after) and basically ruled with an iron fist. If you lived under a police state for 75 years and then was set free, I imagine you'd either create a new police state or create the total opposite. Interestingly enough, Korea did both. As for how nationalistic, well, in the north if you were threatened with three generations of punishment for crimes against the state, you probably wouldn't show any dissent. In the South it is more the constant threat from the north and their freedom after WW2 and continued freedom from the Korean war driving patriotism.

H.264 can't (legally) be encoded without paying for a license... interesting choice for an example. Yes, decoding is free at the moment, but these patents will be in effect until around 2020 or later and are part of the highly patented MPEG 4 standard.

I was going to say most LEPs (light emitting plastics) last decades, but they do fade over time. One I was looking into to replace neon said to expect 60-70% brighness after 10 years (but I think 4 hours of use a day, so 12 hours or 24 hours per day would be 3-6x worse). One of the major drawbacks to the LEPs currently available is they are not very bright, so it sounds like Fipel solves that.

Mea Culpa - Costco's CEO is earning about 10x his employees average ($17/hour is about 33k-34 a year and he makes about $350k, though he does have 150 million in stock that is additional pay)

Costco's average pay is $17/hour, not 17k a year. That said, McDonalds is a huge leap over WalMart, as, despite low pay, they include many benefits like health care. WalMart offloads both pay and health care onto the welfare and medicare systems, meaning they create big government and their low prices are subsidized by our tax dollars. If that isn't insulting enough, the Waltons back Republicans that want a reduction in food stamps. Gotta love a master, er, I mean employer that not only makes their poor slaves, er, employees, shovel shit, they shove their faces in it too.

OK, lets go back to 1980; before Reaganomics, the average CEO salary was 10x the average worker. Today it is around 350-400x. Even by those standards, Costco's CEO is taking more than 20x the average employee. Many pollution control and employee welfare measures were in place by then, and the baby boomers didn't need to worry that the Social Security system was built like a Ponzi and they had not bred enough progeny to sustain it. I know for a fact that I will never see most of these unfunded social welfare programs as they exist today, no matter how much the government promises (right now obligation is over 1 million per taxpayer to get funded - I'll take that bet any day).

From what I recall, tech support workers earned about $8000-10000, and new programmers may earn that little (and many intern for 3 months to a year), but most with 2+ years of experience are a bit more expensive than that. About 5 years ago, we were hiring average workers and it was around $15k-16k by my guesstimate, but due to poor quality and attrition I've heard we usually hire better workers and get about 2 for each US worker now, prompting a move to China, where we get 4.

Actually, we've seen some of that at my job - in India we either get job attrition or requesting raises. This has caused a lot of jobs to be outsourced again, to China, where we get 4-5 workers for each US worker instead of 3-4. And the best part about it is the US was paying us to do it when US employees get replaced. Not sure about the current situation, as my company is now owned by Germans (we probably don't get as much US help to outsource anymore).

And just why I don't like the GPL - it is the exact antithesis of commercial software and means anyone that writes just software needs to tie their software to hardware to make money or have donors (which usually are corporations that want exclusive rights on their platform). Wish that wasn't the nature of things, but that's the dilemma of a software only house. Sure you could port the software to other platforms, but if it were my hardware and I was incurring the cost of obtaining the software, I'd go out of my way to make this as complex as possible, and probably only add driver requirements and drivers only for a specific proprietary piece of hardware, etc. I know RMS doesn't like commercial software, but I have the same issues with commercial hardware with software written specifically for it shipped with code that is only meant to run on that hardware.

In a perfect world, I can understand the GPL - I have worked on and still occasionally donate my time to free software including some that is GPL3, but it is just that - donated time. The job that pays me is closed source (with open specification data model).

Already pretty much debunked because an older, longer calendar exists, but you can always give me all your earthly belongings, just in case.

To be fair, America has adopted standards, but hasn't always standardized on them, and sometimes invents a standard that is outdated by the time the rest of the world adopts it.

For instance, metric is used in hospitals, at NASA, in many sciences, etc. It was even taught in school until Ronald Reagan in his infinite wisdom and reverence decided America was too f**king stupid to learn it (sorry about the sarcasm injection - it was a REALLY bad time for me to switch, as I was half way into learning metric when it happened and we all of a sudden had to learn these nonsensical English units - I'm still all for switching to metric).

CDMA predates GSM, and some providers bet big on it early in America. Nothing America can really do about it except wait for it to age and be replaced, hopefully with an international standard. Data already has been merged with LTE.

Almost all cable providers use DOCSYS international standard.

IPv6 is supported by some ISPs and CLECs, but many that supported PPPoE like mine bought IPv4 only hardware. The former owner of this hardware, Qwest, said they would never implement IPv6. Their current owner, CenturyLink, is rolling out IPv6 support, but only currently in areas that were not formerly Qwest. Meanwhile, my IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are registered and just waiting for IPv6 to be supported to go live (I hacked the router to get its IPv6 address just in case this is a server only issue - the underlying hardware supports it, just not the PPPoE connection).

Honestly, the last time I replaced a CPU without also replacing the motherboard and ram, it was on a G3 mac (upgrading it to a G4). The socket changes too fast for my typical 2 year upgrade cycle and I am almost always forced to replace those three components at once. I'm on a 1 year cycle for video cards, so those get replaced much more often. The worst thing about this is it will limit the CPUs sold soldered to the motherboard, but it won't really kill enthusiast PCs.

He is charged with a crime as bad as crossing the border and shooting a couple of police officers - top of the scale zone D federal crime (which is where the 360 months to life lies). The MINIMUM fine for such an offense is $25000 - my guess is bail is $10 million or more. With politicians and judges obviously in the corporations pockets, stealing from them has become worse than mass murder or shooting cops.