We are "shackled" into all powergrids our neighbors have, including Russia. You can see the status of the Finnish power grid from here: http://www.fingrid.fi/fi/sahko...

Russians have been a good power supplier. Now when we get our new nukes online the only change will be that we will probably export electricity to Russia sometimes. Also Nordic pool electricity prices will go down for us, now Sweden and Norway have had lower prices due to insufficient grid capacity towards Finland. They are also going to fix that soon, we get a new transit line so that Norwegians can sell their peak hydro power to us. Russians are soon completing their Leningrad 3/4 VVER 1200s, which are only 300km from Helsinki, that means Russians will sell more electricity to anyone willing to buy. Things are actually pretty good here for now, should someone be looking a stable, non-culturally enriched place to do their business.

TFA: "The user's circumvention software tags this innocuous request with a little extra data — basically a secret flag the censor can't see that says "Hey, I actually want this request to go somewhere else.""

Secret flag? That sure sounds really a bullet proof method from the 80's. I'd like to know more details of it. It can't be fixed to anything, because investigating the packet payload is trivial and dropping all the unnecessary headers is also easy. Censors can see every byte you send, so hiding in the plain sight is difficult. Specially if the censors can install the same software, then run it side by side with regular web browser and just run "diff" between the two identical flows trying to access the same site. Not only they will discover where the user is going but who has that software installed.

It is funny how every poster here says "Yeah, but remember that our radio waves have been propagating only for a hundred years or so, they can't know there is any (intelligent) life here". That is wrong on all levels. We have been *very* visible for a long long time, even our intelligence.

Our unnaturally (galaxy-standard) oxygen rich atmosphere has been like this for the last three-point-five BILLION years or so. Our atmosphere has been showing elevated levels of lead and other isotopes for thousands of years, those do not occur naturally. Specially, when the observer has millions or billions of years data of our planets atmospheric contents, our planet should raise an alarm. There is something going on here.

Also we humans are soon able to use telescopes, which can see the gas contents of distant planet atmospheres. So the time from the first amplified observation to planet sensing telescopes is ridiculously short, 500 years in our case and lots of damage from different religious rulers/religion itself. What do you think an advanced civilization would have been doing meanwhile? "Oh, but they are so advanced that they do not need any astronomy anymore" or "They are so noble that they refuse to talk to us" are wrong answers, because the possibility of "history eraser" size rock coming from nowhere, and eradicating their noble alien life, is too high.

So even if they are so noble and advanced, that they refuse to talk to us commoners/newcomers, they still need to keep watching the skies so that their royal asses won't get accidentally wiped out. That leads automatically to a situation "Yo, have you checked out that blue planet on quadrant 42? Haven't seen anything like it!" - "Send probes, now!".

They need to know if there is a bad case of religion here, for example one which says that all other lifeforms are Satan's creations and must be destroyed with C-speed kinetic weapons. That is something what we need to know and be prepared for too. Some humans kill when some other human draws cartoons of the others prophet. If we let that continue and develop technology at the same time we soon face a situation where someone issues a fatwa against alien civilizations. Then we become a galaxy threatening Saudi-North-Korea, which is bad for everyone else. Of course, the explanation for the galactic silence may be that there is already one..

"Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Earth!"

This entire situation looks very familiar to us Finns who experienced the downfall of Nokia. Remember that company? It is still there and making good business, however they have no position in the top end smartphone business. Less than 10 years ago they were number one, globally. That is the rate of the change we experience today.

Some of the /. readers interpret this article "Old Automakers Will Die", just like Nokia "died" from the smartphone business. That is not going to happen. All automakers will gradually offer more and more Hybrid and full E.V.s, at some point there is going to be range+price parity between combustion engine models and electric models, then they will start phasing out combustion engine models. Their business is building and selling cars, "car" itself doesn't mean that they *must* build cars with the same power source year after year. People will vote with their wallets, it will be that simple.

You forgot to mention that also two wedding parties were hit, all dead.

What is this "tremendous amount of extra mass" you are referring to? If we take Hindenburg(not -berg you millennials!) as an example, the solution, and the idea, would be just to replace gas contents of the space between hydrogen cells and the airship outer shell.

This is not increasing mass a lot since the only thing needed is to have a airtight and controlled outer shell where the pressure can be adjusted. Splitting the sections and adding pressure monitoring system would detect the outer shell ruptures immediately, adding time to react and repair damages if possible.

All this does not make the airship fire or accident proof but it would add one very good feature: a spark or a hot spot of heat inside the outer cell would not ignite the hydrogen cells, specially if instead of nitrogen we use helium as the "insulator" gas. Then there is no oxygen for any kind of fire. Any total puncture would result a hydrogen+helium leak. I don't know how they dilute but my guess is probably better than hydrogen and nitrogen.

Point here is that making the hydrogen relatively safe as a lifting gas it would make safe enough autonomous airships. Those can be used for transporting cargo and other tasks which do not need any personnel on board.

Of course it is possible just use hydrogen only and take all of the risks at once... but still I'd estimate that cargo shippers would like high payload and added safety.

No-no-no, the big question here is that how the police force of Dallas, or any police force in any place in any country in the world at all, can have instant access to claymore mines?

This is the first time I have heard that police force ANYWHERE in the world has access to anti personnel mines. Protect and serve... with anti personnel mines? What? Seriously, USA, what the hell are you doing?

I guess the logic is this: "Hmm, I think people know modern diesel engines as well as nuclear power, so lets spin a story claiming that there is a huge pollution problem with the cruise ships". And so they did.

Meanwhile the Google-able people can google "Wärtsila 46F" and see this statement from the Finnish manufacturer (we Finns take environmental matters seriously too even though we also have a Green party advancing coal power):

"The technologically advanced Wärtsilä 46F can be run on either heavy fuel oil (HFO), marine diesel oil (MDO), or on light diesel when being operated within strict coastal or port emissions areas. This fuel switching can take place smoothly and without power interruption across all engine loads.

This flexibility enables the operator to select the fuel according to price, availability, and the need to meet local emissions regulations."

More fun facts: Port of Helsinki is going to receive record number of these large cruise ships this year, over 300. Since our summer is short the density is higher than in Southampton which has ~450 cruise ship visits per year. Is air pollution a problem here? No, like previously stated, cruise ships, ferries, all big ships, are able to switch to low polluting diesel when they are in port. And they do so. We have shore electricity support and waste water treatment. Actually we just completed legislation with other countries which forbids any waste water discharge in to Baltic Sea, that being sea-wide legislation of the entire area.

So, things are actually good in real life. It just seems that the Southamptonians(?) either have outdated port rules and equipment or they are victims of another "green" FUD scare.

LZ-129 (airship Hindenburg) surface area: 27,299 square meters. If upper half is covered with solar panels there would be ~4MW of power if we use current off the shelf 30% efficient solar panels. That power is actually more than the four 16 cylinder Daimler Benz diesels provided for that airship.

However when flying over water the reflected sunlight would provide energy too. It would be probably wiser to wrap the entire airship with solar panels. Remove diesel engine weight three times (one left for emergency backup) and reduce fuel volume to one quarter of the original amount of diesel. It might actually work during daytime. However I don't have any idea would even the lightest thin film solar panels be light and strong enough to replace current materials used as outer shells. Then there is the night cruising issue, there should be batteries or some other energy source for that.

If I recall correctly there are some solar powered airship projects where U.S. military is seeking a "all seeing eye" functionality, unmanned high altitude airship where solar power is the primary source of energy. Maybe something interesting spawns from there.

Yep I have been wondering the same thing. A lot of new things, "news for nerds", are happening on the nuclear industry, next generation designs are approved and soon built. 90's and 00's slashdot would have published those stories. I think eco-hipster coup happened at some time and now this is the new "green slashdot" where nuclear is evil, no matter what. What a pity.

7000GW of nuclear power is coming to Iran right now. Iran signed a deal with Rosatom, Busehr is going to have three more 1GW units and they are going to build four 1GW units to the coast of Caspian sea. It seems that "someone" noticed this, especially when you look through Google Earth. Busehr 2nd unit renovation started this autumn and suddenly there is a bi-monthly picture update on it.

However I am not saying that solar power is a flawed solution for Iran, on the contrary: Iran is also a good place for solar power, they can build CSPs easily and use solar panels too. Their energy mix is going to be very wide from traditional fossils fuels to renewables and nuclear power. Just too bad USA is not going to receive a cent from that market. Or actually not, you economy is already too good, we europoors need some new business opportunities. :)

If the rest of the world will go to 1/3th of 1st world energy consumption we will need a lot of new power in near future. "Renewables" are not enough even if we focus everything on building them.

I quote Dr. Ripudaman Malhotra @ TEAC7: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpXG3zyg3gk)

If we want to replace one cubic mile of oil by 2050 we need:

200 Three Gorges dam. One built quarterly. We have perhaps three (3) rivers left for such installations. So, no new big hydro. Small perhaps but I personally enjoy more of free flowing rivers than dam lakes.

2500 900MW nuclear plants. One built every week. Completely possible, no shortage of fuel with fast neutron reactors where the remaining 97% of nuclear fuel gets used.

7700 900MW consentrated solar parks 25% availability (10x size of Andasol CSP). 3 a week for next 50 years. This is possible but getting difficult.

3 000 000 1.65MW windmills 35% availability. 1200 per week for next 50 years. This is where it starts getting hard. We need 50 million tonnes of steel/year (possible) and lots of rare earths (not possible) for generators, transmission lines and electronics and billions of tons concrete for offshore installations. All of them are big carbon emitters. Low power density creates need for large power networks, transmissions losses reduce the efficiency of such system. Still I say go for it where the wind is constant, like trade wind regions.

4 200 000 000 (4.2 billion) solar roofs 2.2kw 20% availability. 250 000 new installations _every_ day till 2050. I am sorry, this is not possible. We don't have enough roofs at places where people can actually afford solar roofs and their lifetime, even if increased to 35 years, is not enough.

So this is why we must build 4th gen Uranium-Thorium reactors with passive safety systems. Reactors which operate at 700-800C and produce process heat. Then we can decarbonize things like concrete production and recycle municipal waste/biomass to liquid fuels etc.

These new plants are modular where every part except of the concrete can be swapped when it gets old or fails some way. Concrete is long lasting stuff. It is possible to get Colosseum like lifetimes for these installations, 2000 years easily. 4th gen reactors close the nuclear fuel cycle so the unusable radioactive byproducts are minimal and they have a short half life.

What is worrying me is that the projected energy consumption is nine CMO (all energy forms converted to oil) by 2050. We are using 3.5CMO now. So basically we have to build everything non-fossil source we can. This is possible with nuclear because that is the one which actually makes money to finance the other not-so efficient energy sources.

Apple Inc. Eula: "..You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons."

However I am ok with this. These nuclear explosions should be classified as art nowadays. Just do the dirty math with Linux and everyone should be happy.