One thing not mentioned previously is that you want currency to have meaning even if the electricity is off, or the network is disrupted, like a natural disaster or whatnot. You need something that's fungible with no external dependencies.

Also, bitcoin is a limited resource, which is why proponents think it's always going to go up in value. Opponents like me also point out that a collapse is just as sure, when people realize the limit and see that there isn't really enough to go around, it's being hoarded by people like Peter Theil.

Another issue is the alarming frequency of cryptocurrency theft. Cybersecurity is extremely hard to get right. If your currency is in a bank, often you have options if it ever gets stolen.

It would be nice if you could develop a currency that is independent of government too, but if you do that thought experiment, very quickly you realize that this would require collaboration with many other people (8 billion different currencies is a useless idea) which is a lot like government. Plus, with a government issued currency you at least have the government to turn to for justice, if your money gets stolen.

No, that's a secondary problem to losing your primary coolant. As other posts have said, even if what they say is true and the fuel is "meltdown-proof" (unlikely) there will be serious problems if you lose your primary coolant: heat stress, lack of power production, radiation, corrosion, pump failure/burnout, etc.

The only more difficult molecule to contain in a pressure vessel/coolant loop is hydrogen, but hydrogen can be much more easily produced and therefore replaced in the case of a leak. Helium is a lot harder to find. I also wonder that if Helium is not a moderator for slow neutrons, then is reactor operation inherently stable or inherently unstable? That is, if you raise power output, will the reactor naturally reach a new equilibrium or does that require a second operation to avoid thermal runaway?

I personally think molten salt is a better primary coolant, but pressurized water is also acceptable.

... yes, especially if you add in multiple threads, then accidentally run those threads through code that you originally wrote as single threaded. The strange behavior you may observe can almost be spooky. With experience, when you observe such behavior in a program, you know instantly there's some sort of multithreading problem.

-- Quantum mechanics is the observed multiple thread bug in the simulation we're in

"which refers to technologies that can allow computers to learn or perform tasks typically requiring human decision makers"

I've come to the conclusion that AI isn't this at all, but rather it is just pattern matching. AI could generate code that matches the pattern of other mobile applications, but it really doesn't "know" what it's doing, and can't make knowledgeable decisions about how that code would differ from the code it "learned" from, in order to accomplish whatever the new mobile application is supposed to do.

AI is certainly useful because it can match patterns faster than humans, and draw upon more data than humans can store in a brain, but I don't think it can "perform tasks requiring human decision makers", especially when the human decisions require an understanding of the domain.

I watched the full four-minute video, and was struck by how much the capsule was spinning and lurching beneath the parachutes. I imagined myself in the capsule and it didn't look like a lot of fun. I wonder if the stresses on the astronauts are worse during the return (pitch and yaw) than the launch (nearly vertical acceleration).

One example is 40-60 seconds into the video, but there are others: Video link

One problem with this bill is that it wants the government to run the transition. This is a non-starter for those on the right who will note how often the government has failed to add value. As just one example, note the debt problems in Greece basically because a too-large percentage of workers were employed by the government and the government took on too much debt. Government, by definition, does not contribute to GNP. It's administrative overhead. Yet this bill is supposedly promising a large number of jobs being created. A government bill can really only create government jobs

The transition to vastly reduced emissions should instead be made by industry, with government incentives. The government should make it financially beneficial for energy companies to figure out how to supply green energy, even at night. Energy companies will make it happen if it helps them survive. Something like a tax credit for a megaton or gigaton of CO2 emissions removed. And government should not specify things like it can't be nuclear. Nuclear should definitely be an option if the energy producers can make it economically viable.

A combination of carrot (tax credits for CO2 not generated) and stick (fines for generating CO2) may be necessary to goad private industry into making the necessary changes.

From TFA about halfway in:

"Today, scientists still generally agree that it's impossible to attribute any individual weather phenomenon solely to climate change. ...

But what scientists can do is investigate the extent to which climate change has influenced a given event. Generally, researchers do this with the help of climate models, ..."

Whenever I read the words 'climate model', I generally replace them in my head with the words 'wildly inaccurate climate model'. Scott Adams has some interesting things to say about the subject. The point is that the scientists trying to attribute a specific event to climate change can simply sift through hundreds (thousands?) of climate models until they find the one that gives the highest probability that the specific event was due to climate change. Then they hold a press conference to proclaim they know this with "near certainty".

I personally believe humans definitely do influence climate, but I think it's the wrong approach to try and convince the public using computer simulations that have no hope of being accurate.

Instead, I suggest a better approach is to point out that digging shit out of the ground and burning it into the air is not a long term solution. The planet is quite livable with all that shit underground. What makes us think that bringing it up out of the ground and burning it into the atmosphere will have no effect? Logically thinking, it's not a good idea. It will definitely cause problems, and science has demonstrated what those problems could be (acidic rain and oceans, warming temps, mercury from coal, etc.). We must find other ways to harness energy.

It also appears this attack needs the Distributed Transaction Coordinator service to be running, which is rarely used. The linked Microsoft article on NTFS transactions says it uses DTC. I always turn that service off to Manual or Disabled, otherwise it just wastes resources and slows boot time. Also, since the attack writes nothing to disk, how does it survive a reboot or power cycle?

New or not, it has at least some potential. The article states the vortex could be maintained with industrial waste heat. This might improve efficiency for power generation plants that have waste heat effluent. The nice thing about that is the grid connection and switchgear is already local.

Slapping one of these generators on any other industrial heat source could help power the plant itself, but could prove challenging to connect to the grid.

I wonder what it sounds like.

Why would any intelligent parent give an important legal document to a "young child" anyway? I would never do such a thing. I have 4 kids and I'll only trust them with something like a passport when they exceed age 12 and understand their responsibilities for tracking and caring for said passport.

a) The various independent papers were publicly presented in August 2011 to a large group of medical physicists and professionals in the radiation oncology industry, of which I'm a member. The papers were presented by knowledgeable authorities, and a TSA rep phoned in and took questions. The only thing the audience took TSA to task for was that they did not disseminate this information very well to the public.
b) You should have a healthy amount of wariness (avoid being naive), but given what I read in these documents and the presentation mentioned above that I attended, I do not see any reason to be paranoid or cynically distrustful by assuming malevolence. The TSA is a bungling bureaucracy like so many other parts of the government, and they screwed up how they handled public inquiries on the safety of these devices. That doesn't mean they are hiding harmful effects or that the devices are unsafe.
c) X-ray devices can be compared with light bulbs, they fail off (zero dose) but due to physics it is hard to conceive of them failing in the more-powerful direction.
I worry about how much X-ray radiation I get from my dentist and my doctor. After learning about airport scanners, I lose no sleep at all about them.

The article is filled with speculation and disinformation. Here are the research links on both backscatter and millimeter wave technologies, provided by TSA:
http://www.tsa.gov/research/reading/index.shtm

You can see in the John's Hopkins August 2010 assessment that passengers get less than 2 microrem from a scan. You get about 238 microrem per hour of flight, two orders of magnitude larger (per hour!):
http://www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html

Stick to the science. 6 to 100 cancers per year is pure speculation, and impossible to verify. I don't believe it at all.

Swearing or cursing as a habit during general discourse is a bad thing because it is a sign of both mental weakness and lack of self control. Have you heard about the study that found that dogs bark because they don't know what else to do? People curse because they can't find anything else useful to say. Sometimes it's okay, like when you hammer your finger by accident. But wolf puppies bark, and as they grow more mature they bark less or not at all. They are able to intercept the urge, they show the self control to avoid barking. As the mental capacity and self control of people increases, they will curse/swear less. As noted by the article, people are cursing and swearing more, which means it is likely their mental capacity is also diminishing. Recent studies on how Google and the constant barrage of information has a negative effect on cognition may provide a hint as to why swearing is becoming more prevalent. That's my theory.