nyan

Well, yes, less is better, but the point is, we're still going to need the holes in the ground. Just not as many or as large.

Posted article indicates that even if the experiment performs to expectations, there will still be waste to be disposed of. They hope to convert most of the nasty, longer-lived radionucleides into something useful, but most is not all. Plus, part of their selling point is conversion into medical radionucleide sources, and to be honest, the market there isn't all that big (like, "a single reactor in Canada supplied a high percentage of these sources for many years" not-that-big). It can probably absorb the output of this reactor, but ramp the idea up into a general solution for all nuclear waste everywhere, and we'll likely end up with more medical and industrial radionucleide sources than we know what to do with.

(There's also the question of what kinds of waste could be reprocessed. Only enriched waste from light-water reactors? What about waste from heavy-water reactors, which tends to be bulkier but considerably less radioactive?)

Completely separate discussion. Making accommodations to keep living humans safe is good and reasonable. (Keep in mind that in the pre-automobile era, there was no safe way to cross a busy street—you stepped out and hoped you didn't get run down by a horse.) But a robot is a tool, not a person, and changes that make traffic easier to navigate for robots may be even more unhelpful for human pedestrians than the current status quo.

Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn't help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you're talking to a human.

To sum up: the article is about how tech companies suck at using the information they have about you for anything of value to you, which is nothing new. I'd take the author with a grain of salt, because instead of trying to get rid of advertising, they actually look at it and want it better-targeted.

Might be nice for a certain age group to make them evaluate multiple search engines as a class project. ("If it provided a summary, did it say what its sources were?" "When you checked the sources, did they actually say what the summary said they said?" "How many actual results did it return for these searches?" "How many of the results on the first page were useful?" etc.) Improved media literacy in general, and they all learn that more than one search engine exists.

Actually, "beg the question" is a linguistic fossil from a time when "beg" didn't mean quite the same thing it does today.

Yeah, but you would think they would have gotten them off the Internet after the first time this happened, even if it means having to hire an extra person to keep an eye on them.

If we were talking about people for whom this was their job, I would agree that they were being way slow, but we're talking about a group of volunteers who're cramming this into their free time along with all their other obligations. In that situation, it sometimes takes as long as it takes.

I'd rather they be thorough, and I expect their technical resources are a bit constrained. (Plus, I'm pretty sure the user-facing site is or was built in Ruby, and I have no idea what security best practices are for that.)

Please, please make it useless for as many use cases as possible. Then maybe it'll go away.

Just disable Javascript altogether and it'll let you past. 90% of these sites are like that, and they're often made better by the omissions. (Or don't bother—it isn't much of an article.)