Even if it DOES grow much faster, you're still talking faster in Geological terms.

It will be thousands and more likely tens of thousands of years before Lo'ihi breaks the surface.

Also (was on the big island not 2 weeks ago) while visiting I the USGS site in Volcanoes National park, the prevailing belief is that long term Lo'ihi will merge with the big island as another peak the way Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea already have.

Better yet, try working in a job that does everything in GMT (UDT), but needs to process data given by users in all of their locales.

Its all normalized on our end but you need to do a lot of "is it DST right now?", "Am I -4 or -5 right now?" kind of thinking every day. Gets even worse when you need to compare to AZ or British Standard Time, or other countries that have different DST schedules. And don't even get me started on Indiana.

And the things you will discover. I'm so psyched about the RTG on this thing. Certainly years, and hopefully decades of work to be done.

Some of us also registered 2-3 times before settling on an account. I still wonder if I could ever recover my 5 digit account. Not even sure what email I used now.

Could be worse, I lost the login info for my 5 digit and had to re-register with this gaudy 6 digit thing.

OR, just buy an unlocked phone. I've had ZERO issues using Tethering since March '10 on my N1 and more recently on my Nexus S on ATT.

I wonder if ATT/Verizon are purely targeting jailbroken phones or will unlocked phones fall under this as well.

I think thats partly true. More so in contested offices.

Someone like Barney Frank can be as blunt and to the point about what he feels and thats exactly the reason he gets re-elected. That being said he represents a district where thats exactly what his constituents want.

The problem is when there needs to be all out pandering in order to get elected. Then you seldom get what you think you're getting when you elect someone.

And to the points made in the dissent in this case, at least they were well thought out and reasonable. I think the court made the right call, but I did find it interesting in Thomas' argument about how even in speech matters the parent is still the intermediary, I can say what I want, but the parent has control over what their children can here. I don't find this totally unreasonable of a concept.

My issue with the law was that government would have to make a determination of what content meets a violent standard and that is definitely against the free speech framework. Its also a slipper slope in terms of ever changing social standards.

I think in this case the 2 dissenting votes had more to do with interpretation of the role of the parent in the law as it was structured, versus the role of government in the law.

The whole point to the CDC even mentioning this I believe was some recent research pointing out how a potential zombie apocalypse makes a great case study for any type of outbreak. Tweak a constraint here or there and you get some very interesting outbreak scenarios to study.

For instance, what if the infection vector changes, such that its airborne and emitted from rotting zombies? How do the infection rates change, how does this impact quarantine procedure, and on and on.

These are the sorts of things that the CDC needs to consider as a matter of course for ANY disease.

As for zombies specifically, I think the more important aspect of the mythos is how it relates to our society and our place within it. You could probably keep every aspect of the lore and simply change the infection criteria and you would suddenly have something very plausible. (microbe in the water? asymptomatic pest carrier? airborne or multiple infection vectors? extended incubation time, these are all minimal mutations to the lore)

Godzilla.

Then again, he could save us when Mothra attacks, so maybe its not that big a deal.

In general I've been staunchly pro-nuclear, especially with the current generation technology (pellet reactors etc).

My issue is mostly with:

1) oversight of existing reactors. At some point they SHOULD be decommissioned, but profiteering means that thats not going to happen and they will keep running them until accidents DO start to occur more frequently.

2) The issue with nuclear in my mind isn't with the death toll, but rather the land impact. If something of the Japan scale was to happen at a plant in the Northeast US, you're looking at HEAVILY populated areas that would need to be evacuated potentially for years. That would have MASSIVE economic impact. For instance a quick look at a map in my area (Boston), puts much of the metro Boston area within 30 miles of Pilgrim. Last I heard the evac zone in Japan was 20-30 miles at least from the plant. Thats like 3-4 million people in the case of Boston. While few people might die, it would SERIOUSLY impact the country as a whole.

I personally would like to see US policy shift from maintaining old aging reactors shift to building newer/safer/more efficient ones and decommissioning aging ones. I realize that reactors are cheap to operate and in order to recoup costs you need to keep running them, but eventually the cost of an accident also needs to be factored into the maintenance cost (X likelihood of accident * cost / time, etc).

Additionally many have postulated that it would take going to the stars to truely put humanity in perspective and allow us to co-exist. There will always be political infighting, but going to the stars will make many of the things we squabble over seem rather minor in comparison. Additionally any generational craft like this would likely have to be a cross national mission, which has the potential to foster a more unified humanity as it progresses.

The somewhat depressing thing is that back 30 years ago NASA was given a supply of fuel by the Energy Department for RTG's. They were given a specific allotment of them that they could use over the years for various spacecraft.

If I recall correctly the last one is going into the new Mars rover (MSL/Curiosity).

Its a shame all the insane nuclear fear mongering is preventing them from really developing new RTG technology. I imagine with some decent research the things we could be doing with these would be incredible. Alas, we have things like the massive campaign to prevent New Horizon from launching for fear its plutonium would end up crashing back to earth.

Except that when I paid for my last ATT contract it was 2005 and NOBODY was tethering. I got a razr with their "unlimited" data plan. Since then I've been using a collection of unlocked devices as upgrades (Currently a Nexus One). I signed nothing that restricted my data use. Admittedly at the time the most I could use in a month was MAYBE 100KB from java apps for gmail, etc, but still I paid for unlimited and I am still paying for the terms of THAT contract.

That being said I'm sure there is some BS in there about how they can amend and alter the terms of the contract at any time, which seems to pretty much defeat the point of a contract in the first place.

Not even just Windows. I've been doing tethering since Day one on my Nexus 1 since I got it.

This is obviously a money grab from ATT directed specifically at iPhone users.

Yet one more reason I will never buy a locked phone. Nexus S or follow on unlocked phones for me.