The Titanic had to sink before the fools listened to people saying "ships should have enough lifeboats for everyone, and the radio should always be on."
Hundreds of people had to burn to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire before the fools listened to progressives saying "locking the doors is bullshit."

So yes, I fully expect that we're going to have to see a large city or small nation vaporized before the threat is taken seriously.

So, then, why did Fukushima fail so badly, even though it had fast-acting shutdown systems, a negative void coefficient, diverse and redundant safety systems, and a containment design that satisfied all of the regulations that existed at the time? That's the real story here, and its moral has a lot to do with the idea of "beyond design basis" accidents and designing to be more robust than required by regulation.

The Mark I and Mark II reactors installed at Fukushima 1-4 were part of an effort by GE to design lower-cost reactors that could be afforded by nations that weren't rich like America (in the 50s/60s post-WWII era, that was "everybody else"). This is where things like the now-infamous suppression torus originated.

One of GE's own engineers resigned because he was certain that the design was not safe. Analyses conducted in the late 1970s concluded that the Mark I would almost certainly result in disaster in the event of sustained power loss - and it did.

Inflation is not negligible, it's been held to a few percent a year. In the aftermath of the CDO scam's collapse, the abrupt destruction of vast amounts of imaginary "wealth" did threaten deflation by reducing the available money supply (which is exactly what happened in 1929) - this is as good as the mark of death for an economy, hence the Fed's extraordinary moves to prevent it from happening.

If NASA were receiving this mythical "automatic 5-10% annual budget increase" you speak of since 1990, their present budget would be somewhere between 25 and 80 billion dollars a year. In reality, NASA's inflation indexed budget has been essentially flat since then and they have declined to representing one percent to less than half a percent of the federal budget over the same timespan.

Meanwhile, America's one-of-a-kind privatized healthcare system that already costs more per capita than any other on earth by a factor of several continues to inflate costs at double-digit rates. The concentration of wealth in the 1% of the 1% has reached levels not seen since the start of the Great Depression. The GOP has clearly indicated that they will sooner burn our government to the ground than entertain the suggestion that top-tier tax rates be raised from the lowest levels in living memory, or that investment income be taxed at more than half the rate of personal income, at the same time they scream at the top of their lungs that the deficit can only be fixed by doing things that overwhelmingly hurt the poor and middle class.

Of all the problems we're facing, the fact that our government spends a whopping few percent of its budget on actual science (nasa, nsf, doe combined) is not one of them. In fact, given the almost inconcievably huge returns on investment that investments in science historically bring, it's quite insane that we're not spending more on it. I think of a trillion dollars of wealth poured into a black hole in Iraq, never to return, and imagine what if, instead of the wealth-destruction described to the letter in 1984, that trillion dollars had been spent on research into fusion reactors, fuel cells, batteries, solar technologies, computing...

Meanwhile at the DOD: Pallets of shrinkwrapped Benjamins equal to 13 years of savings from NASA budget cuts simply vanished and no one can explain where they went.

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

In fact, the march of inflation means that if you don't automatically get a raise/budget increase, then yes your budget is shrinking in real terms. So the only part of your post that refrains from whining like a Randroid version of Chris Crocker for long enough to make a vaguely factual claim is... factually wrong.

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Seriously? You think that if you refuse to go through the porn-o-scope, the President will put you on his personal kill list alongside the worst mass-murdering terrorists in the world? Your ego must be the size of a small planet.

Get real: the people on that list are stone-cold psychopath murderers, leading cadres of stone-cold murderers, most of them trying to murder Americans. The President would be in remiss if he didn't have list of them titled "exterminate on sight." There are plenty of examples of actual executive overstep in the last 12 years to get pissed at, pick one of those.

You are appalled that they would consider the use of a drone to attack an American citizen if that citizen were collaborating in another Pearl Harbor or 9/11? Because that's what the actual letter says - that drones will not be used to attack American citizens (because we have a functioning legal system such that they are never beyond the reach of law enforcement here), but that in the event of extraordinary circumstances like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the president would be advised about the legality of it.

Frankly, I would be more worried if Holder said "Nope, if a drone were the only thing that could stop Flight 93 from reaching the White House we'd let it be destroyed."

And for when the "the 9th circuit is overturned more times than any other" talking point comes up: well duh, they hear more cases than any other circuit too. IIRC by a significant margin...

It's our fault the Chinese government permits corporations to poison their people, because Americans insist that our government not permit corporations to poison us?

I find your reasoning... flawed.

Odds of a probe (or orbiter) that survives the initial impact also surviving trillions of tons of rock raining hellfire down on the entire planet's surface for days afterward: Not good.

It's easy to talk a tough game about how "I'll take those motherfuckers down with me if they try to bust in" or how you'll never bow to the "sonuvabitch fascist corporate bootlicker prosecutors" in Internet chat rooms. Turns out the rate of following through when the motherfuckers show up with body armor, stun grenades and heavy rifles, or the sonuvabitch is actually in your face threatening to destroy your life, is rather a bit lower.

See also: Enthusiasm for war from actual veterans who've served vs from chickenhawks in the Bush administration.

Copying large amounts of personal information from corps with bad security and posting it on the Intarwebs, while not stealing, isn't exactly legal. Now that being said, threatening a 124 year sentence for it is bullshit of the highest order.

But that's the wonderful thing about the US criminal code, isn't it? It doesn't matter if you've actually done anything wrong or not - A DA or cop with a vendetta will find something to fuck you over with eventually because so many things have been criminalized that it's impossible to conduct a meaningful life without being a criminal any more. And all the time on Law & Order, the cops extort business owners into cooperating because "wouldn't it be awful if you had inspectors and tax auditors crawling up your ass forever?" and the district attorneys openly extort witnesses into cooperating by threatening to steal the rest of their lives, but it's a Good Thing because they're after Bad People.

And if it goes too far, that's exactly how dictatorship works - it's not that you have to cooperate, but bad things might happen if you don't.

Does OpenCL support device-to-device remote copy over Infiniband?

Honestly asking, because that's an absolute killer feature for HPC applications. PCIx is abhorrently, soul-crushingly slow from the GPU's perspective, and being able to RDMA without ever moving through the hosts' memory saves half your pcix bandwidth use.

The electrons in the metal lattice are made to oscillate so that the energy applied to the electrons is concentrated into only a few of them. When they become energetic enough, the electrons are forced into the hydrogen protons to form slow neutrons. These are immediately drawn into the nickel atoms, making them unstable. This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.

It does look like the process at least conserves baryon and lepton number, so it's at least prima facie plausible. Unfortunately, e+p is a full 782KeV short of the energy to make a neutron at rest which makes me doubt that this is actually going on.

In the West, where we have so much food available 24/7 that the #1 problem is being fat, we have fertility rates that are at or just below replacement.
In parts of Africa where famine/starvation are endemic, population growth continues to consume all advances in GDP and prevent escape from poverty.

How, in light of these two well-known facts, can anyone still believe Malthus' "any improvement in living standards will just result in more poors consuming it all" bullshit?