Perhaps you should google some studies. While the impact of purity is has been identified as a means to limit corrosion, most agree more work needs to be done to understand the impact of radiation and salt purity. One study found minimal corrosion with high purity salts after 3000 hours or about 1/3 of a year; so long term impact over a reactor life is not known. As for common sense, that has never stopped someone selling an idea. As I have said, thorium reactors do not appear to be a viable near term solution, which seems to be the goal of the administration’s policy. Whether they can achieve the scale needed to meet growing energy needs is an open question.

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.

How about perform an exploratory laparotomy just in case you implanted a bomb?

I doubt it rises to that level. The device had a name that happened to be Bomb. Yelling FIRE is a specific communication of a dangerous condition.

The bluetooth name has nothing to do with security. It is more likely that MattsSpeaker is a bomb than the thing named BOMB. Any number of things with no bluetooth or bluetooth turned off are also more likely to be a bomb than the bluetooth thing called BOMB.

IMHO, intent is the design specification that is created before the first line of code is written, and lays out clearly what needs to be done and teh intended purpose and outputs. It then gets updated everyone something is changed. However, like unicorns, it is a mythical creature beloved by all but seen by no one.

It's S&S, not Subscribe and get the lowest possible price on every shipment. Amazon offers a slight break in price if you subscribe, and even don't require a second purchase. It is a convenient way to regularly get items that need replenishment, and Amazon lets you know before the next shipment so you can cancel or skip as needed. If you don't like the new price, you're free to cancel and use another option to get your item.

Amazon has a number of practises I think are shady, but this isn't one of them.

Good points and analogy. It will be interesting to see the social disruption caused by AI; ad it may disproportionately impact lower skill/wage employees. One of my clients provided medical reviews of physicals and had a number of data entry clerks who processed the incoming paperwork and several doctors who reviewed it. AI should be bl to greatly speed up the process, flagging missing information and informing the sender of it, entering data from either the electronic or secure fax copy, flag any anomalies and send the electronic record to the doctor for review. An office full of data entry clerks can be replaced by a few people to monitor teh system to ensure it is working properly and respond to customer inquiries. Data entry may be one of the skills that simply is not transferable and thus lower wage or off shored job opportunities will disappear. My client's jobs were actually pretty good if low wage, since they included benefits such as healthcare, PTO and a matching 401K in addition to a living wage.

Certainly. There’s enough crazy in the idea for everyone.

In 1971, 'Creeper' proved the concept of a computer virus. Years later, experts were calmly and sometimes patiently explaining to people that you couldn't get a virus from an email.

Then Microsoft threw the weight of it's huge dev team into the effort and finally made the email virus a reality.

Now, 30 years later, LLMs have at last given teeth to "the honor system virus".

IIRC from power plant days, our simulator’s programming ran on an emulator because the program was only certified for the mainframe’s OS.

We used to find a remote terminal - with paper and an acoustic coupler to play Trek. By remote, I mean hidden away in the bowels of a university building where the computer police wouldn’t find us an explain that computer s weren’t for playing games. We also learned that as long as you had 1 cent in your uni account you could log in and stay on as long as you wanted so end of term games lasted for tag team hours. Fun times. When we saw the first remote terminal with a screen instead of paper it was like a whole new world.