Uranium reactors were originally developed over Thorium at least partially BECAUSE you could make bombs with the technology. The nuclear arms race is 'over' in the west but I'm interested to see if this revelation makes Thorium reactor research suddenly interesting to world powers.

If you use a small amount of oil to flash a relatively large amount of water you would get better efficiency, but you'd need to heat the oil to higher temperatures which brings its own problems. Also separating oil and water is easy, seeing as they don't actually mix.

It's the flash heating of the water into steam in the cylinder which creates the pressure to drive the piston. Using oil as the heat carrier is simply how they've chosen to concentrate as much heat as possible into a small volume with high surface area as a liquid. The only other way to achieve this would be to heat the edges of the cylinder to much higher temperatures (as they're solid and have low surface area so they don't transfer heat as well) which would likely damage them and reduce efficiency.

In that case it seems like there should be special classes with dedicated teachers for catching up immigrants rather than teaching to the set curriculum.

On top of the power efficiency I'm also wondering how many times a muscle can be used before it gets too damaged.

wouldn't it make more sense to give extra attention to students with a background disadvantage rather than moving the bar? Letting kids pass with a lower score doesn't actually make them more educated.

Even if fracking IS harmless, and fossil fuel extraction has a history of going wrong, it still isn't any sort of "golden chance for energy independence". The need for energy is increasing exponentially and fracking will in the end be a blip on the radar in terms of energy supply. It is merely prolonging the time spent burning carbon and will only be harmful in the long run as it puts off real long term (the definition of sustainable, as so many people seem to forget) solutions.

Has it occurred to you that Ubuntu is the most used linux distro BECAUSE it has an immature GUI? Most users are not power users.

Ideally, option A. It's like having extra tax money to spend on nice things that the idiots who don't realize tax = services won't complain about!

If waste treatment plants are privately owned then they're already being run for profit and are having 'margins' trimmed to the extent they can inside the law. If waste treatment plants are publicly owned then you don't suddenly need to privatize them if they start making energy and they won't be run for profit. It's just one more part of existing infrastructure, I don't see how it could suddenly lead to waste leaking everywhere.

You missed the point someone made earlier about how day 1 dlc is content you need to pay for, whereas if the only reason it wasn't on the disc was because it was too late then it could have been released as a free patch.

Siri then returns a graphical list :P

After a quick check on http://broadbandguide.com.au/plans the best plan available is 20GB for $80/month. $60/month for unlimited would be unheard of luxury.

It's like you've never been in a city before. If a car went around a block to avoid a pedestrian then it would probably have to pass 3 extra crossings which also all have pedestrians wanting to cross.

The difference in the distance is kinda staggering though, it's much harder to hit a small moving target from space on an also moving satellite, not to mention that even a laser beam diverges.