Can't tell if sarcasm.

Step 1: Provide funding for free and interoperable social networks.
Step 2: Wait for those networks to become dependent on said funding.
Step 3: Attach strings to funding, or cut it off if they don't comply with government demands.

See "Corporation for Public Broadcasting" and "Harvard".

That's fine, as long as they get off my lawn.

Mr. Whipple can be replaced. We have the technology.

Half-lives:

U-235: 700 million years
Pu-239: 24 thousand years
Tritium: 12 years

But most modern fusion weapons use lithium deuteride instead of tritium, and Li-7 and H-2 are both stable.

The parts of modern weapons which degrade are the explosives and triggering mechanism. If the explosion isn't perfectly symmetrical, the weapon fizzles.

And the missiles the warheads launch on.

That's why DoE labs periodically removes the fissionable pit from a nuclear warhead, reassembles it with an inert pit, and blows up the explosives to see if they still work. And why we periodically launch missiles from subs or land for testing.

However, if Russian nukes are anything like their reactive armor as seen in Ukraine, some of those warheads and missiles are filled with bricks and sand. Of course, that just means they'll launch enough of them to guarantee some working ones make it to their targets.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember the last century. Like Pepperidge Farms, though, I remember as far back as the 1970s.

We had two kinds of rechargeable battery: lead-acid and nickel-cadmium. Both were, um, great for the environment. Oh, and big oil still put lead in the gasoline itself. I remember smog, too. And gas lines after the OPEC embargo. But there was no way to make a practical EV back then, so if you wanted to go faster than you or your horse could walk, there was only one way you were getting somewhere, and that's with an internal combustion engine.

Electricity could come from carbon fuels, nuclear, or hydropower. But Three Mile Island set nuclear back, and we'd pretty much run out of rivers to dam for hydro. Solar panels still sucked. Rare earth magnets and carbon fiber just weren't things yet, so wind power wasn't viable at scale. So, if you wanted electricity, odds were you were getting it from big oil, or big coal.

They were evil back then too (see tetraethyl lead). But saying they should be responsible for all end-user emissions is either saying we had viable alternatives that they somehow squashed, or that we should have stayed in the horse-drawn buggy and whale oil lamp era until we could seamlessly transition to renewables 50 years later. So, which one of those do you believe?

I'm sure it would be easy to calculate how much crap fast food has generated post-consumption, and how much the methane emissions from same have contributed to global warming.

I'm fine if we want to go after big oil for *their* emissions (methane leaks, flaring, CO2 output of refining).

But people seem to want to say all the emissions from their *own* tailpipes are big oil's fault, while ignoring that's the only way they were able to commute to work, school, fly on vacation, etc. for decades. And also likely ignoring the amount of oil stocks in their 401k and the dividends paid out over those decades.

And please change your car's oil every 47 days.

For the exact same reason.

Though I'm not sure Emperor Mengsk is interested in an alliance anymore.

Berkelium doesn't stick around long enough to be in the waste stream. And anything the waste stream decays into will be lower on the atomic table, not higher where berkelium is.

The carbon bonding of other longer-lived actinides in the waste stream can be measured directly because they are longer-lived and present in larger quantities.

This actually made the front page of the Mercury News with the awesome headline:

which makes it sound like an infomercial for OxiClean.

The real truth is that this is cool but esoteric science (it's hard to work on a sample which transmutes in 48 hours)... which stands a better chance of getting funded if they can mislead politicians into thinking it will help with nuclear waste.

"Beautiful isn't it? It took me half a lifetime to invent it. I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. Presently I'm writing the definitive work on the subject, so I want you to be totally honest with me on how the machine makes you feel. This being our first try, I'll use the lowest setting."

"As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life. I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don't know what that would do to you. So, let's just start with what we have. What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?"

(from The Princess Bride)

I added a dozen to my legacy domain, and it's showing an extra 30GB/user when I refresh my Drive account.
* Grandchild1
* Grandchild2
* Grandchild3 ...
Must remember to add more later. I could have a really big family, and I want to be prepared.

Everyone's in such a rush to put AI in everything, whether it's ready or not.

Sure, go ahead. Just *please* give me a setting to turn it off for each thing you're trying to do. Even if that only sticks for a month at a time before it resets, it'd be worth it...

Oh, I see. 5,000-capacity sphere. I read the OP as 5,000 mini-spheres. Which seemed like a lot.

5,000-capacity is still pretty big. That's just going down from a Venti-Sphere to a Tall-Sphere.

At 1/4 the size, they'd cost 1/4 as much... so... only $600 million each. They'll lose money on each one, but make it up in volume?

Can't tell how much they're scaling it down. From 20,000 people to 2,000? 200? 20? 2?

AI could give all us Americans an Indian accent when we call in.

Honestly, that probably helps both sides of the call.

I work in tech, so I'm used to pretty much all the accents. But my 80+ year old mom with hearing aids - who for decades taught English as a second language at our local library - now has a *terrible* time understanding people with accents. It was rough even in person during COVID, because she lost all visual cues under masks.