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Uranium generally isn't a problem in radioactive spills or contamination. It's not particularly biotoxic as a metal or oxide and with very long half-lives for the two most common isotopes (U-235's half-life is 700 million years and for U-238 it's 4.5 billion years) it's not even very radioactive by itself. Most uranium ore bodies contain a lot of decay products like radium, thorium, polonium etc. which have built up over millions or billions of years and these are exposed to the wider environment when the uranium ore is mined and refined. A method of concentrating and sequestering such short-halflife isotopes from mine tailings would be more useful than this biological method which only, it seems, concentrates uranium. Right now the Japanese would really like a variant that, say, concentrated cesium in a similar manner as Cs-134 and Cs-137 are 99.9% of the contamination problem in the area around Fukushima.

It might be this particular form of the bacteria could be better used to extract uranium from lesser ore bodies or even seawater where it is present in quantities of about 3 tonnes per cubic kilometre but right now and for the next fifty years or more uranium ore is plentiful enough that the costs of such marginal operations would outweigh the value of uranium metal (currently trading on world markets for 60 dollars a kilo) extracted by them.

Of course uranium has a scary reputation -- see this news report for an example. Further comments suggest the uranium in question was 500 milligrammes of yellowcake in a sealed vial, a gift from a friend studying chem eng who had prepared it from ore found in New Mexico (just lying about out in the open! Horrors!).

Yes, replying to myself... a better article:
http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/local/east-volusia/2011/02/24/worker-charged-after-virus-clubs-whac-a-mole.html

This semi-answers my questions. This and another article mention that this guy wrote the logic bomb only in 2008, presumably for much more modern incarnations of the hardware (modern microcontrollers almost always have onboard NVRAM of some kind, making this kind of trick easy to pull off with a field-deployed firmware 'upgrade'). For Whac-A-Mole, it stops working at the 512th reboot, although the original(er) article states he also bugged other games, one with a counter that kills the game at "48 or 49" cycles.

Better than MIT is the Florida attempt... Florida students transmitted some science data, and not just download from a phone after landing... http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/florida/space/2010/04/14/experiment-off-the-ground-for-erau-students.html

http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/florida/space/2010/04/14/experiment-off-the-ground-for-erau-students.html

We have given plenty of limelight to launching phones etc and data collection post-landing. What we haven't discussed is using the high altitude balloon platform as an space systems design education tool... and downlinking data rather than just collecting it after landing... Check out these florida students... http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/florida/space/2010/04/14/experiment-off-the-ground-for-erau-students.html

This is why public nudity is against the law, and no law governing it will ever be struck down on terms of constitutionality.

Or if not never, then at least not this month... d'oh!

Wow ... you're uninformed.

You're right on the first point (they get a whole lot of money sent home), but you're wrong about the elections.

Mexico changed its election laws this summer, so it now allows absentee ballots from the US

Here in Daytona Beach, there's been a debate across several years (and at least two county-councils) about what to do with the boardwalk. It's a carnival type affair with shops and games, the "big swing" and various other contraptions that launch you into the air whilst simultainously appearing decidedly unsafe. The whole thing recently became bordered by a huge mega-hotel complex that wants (big surprise) to expand onto the boardwak.

Everyone involved pretty much agrees that the boardwalk is inappropriate for the city's future vision: its carnival like atmosphere and rusting rides is somewhat unsightly and it would be nice if the whole thing was updated with less campy shops and things.

The 'Problem' is that the current owner has not abandoned it to become a blight, instead he makes his living maintaining the shops, rides, and game rooms. They are honkey-tonk, but they are safe and clean. Since he's been under threat of eminant domain seizure, not only has the owner not been able to sell (which he doesn't want to do, the property has been in his family for several generations i believe), he is also unable to obtain financing to make capital improvements on his property. The fact that he's not making such improvements was used as a principle argument FOR seizure. So he's been in this catch-22 for a few years now.

Apparantly, the situation's been resolved with the land being reappropriated to the development company. It appears they have avoided use of eminant domain, but only the actual exercise of it, the threat was apparantly enough to force the owner's hand. Details can be found at the Daytona News-Journal website: http://www.news-journalonline.com/special/beach/bo ardwalk103004.htm

Yesterday, a judge threw out the case against Greenpeace. Still, it shows just what a corrupt, authoritarian bunch of crooks are in charge in the administration.

Now, I would guess that Beta VCRs would be a better analogy, but I think that TV stations used much of them for archival, and they could be more popular than I think.

I was suprised to learn a few months ago that Sony is *still* making new Betamax VCRs, though they said they were going to stop making by the end of this year. (Article about the end of Betamax)

As long as a format reaches critical mass, I think you will be able to find readers for as long as the media will hold up. If people are still using the media, then other people will keep making or repairing the readers for them.

Unfortunatly we have been unable to get the Canadian Geese to carry any significant payloads when they fly south.

You're doing better than you think! New Jersey citizens have been up in arms about the sh*t Canada Geese are dumping on them en masse for months. See here, here and here.

As for your highway argument, keep in mind that bad drivers account for 300 deaths yearly in Florida alone, due precisely to lenient driving laws. While a few hundred may seem petty, keep in mind that if you proportion that number to the entire population of the United States, nearly 10,000 people die yearly from poor driving. Perhaps stricter laws would help, after all.

Actually, it got its name from teh guys who did the initial analysis late at night and they drank a lot of Code Red to stay awake. BUt it sure was descriptive and catchy once this took off

Check out the returns from Volusia after the recount, and compare them to the initial Volusia returns

In the recount:

Harris went from 9,888 votes to 8 votes.
Philips went from 2,927 votes to 20 votes.
Browne went from 3,211 votes to 442 votes.
Nader went from 2,436 votes to 2,903 votes.
Buchanan went from 396 votes to 496 votes.
Hagelin went from 33 votes to 36 votes.
McReynolds went from 3 votes to 5 votes.
Moorehead went from 59 votes to 69 votes.

George W. Bush and Al Gore had returns that were completely unchanged.

That's right. The recount from Volusia claims in effect, "We screwed up the vote on every other candidate, reported 16,000 erroneous votes in total... and yet managed to get the count for the major candidates exactly right!"

I hope someone's keeping track of pre-recount and post-recount totals by county in Florida. CNN.com has only pre-recount data up by county, and doesn't list Harris in it's table. FOX has both pre and post recount data by county, but only for Gore and Bush. That Daytona Beach news website basically overwrote their prerecount returns page with the postrecount returns. As soon as CBS news updates it's page, I'll be out of links to records of the initial 10,000 Harris votes.

Check out the CBS page for presidential election results in Florida, by county.

Now take a look at the votes for the Socialist Workers Candidate, Harris. Scroll down the page.

6 votes..
5 votes..
0 votes.. (what a loser)
88 votes.. (ok, I take that back)
0 votes..
36 votes..
Volusia County: 9,888 votes!!! That's 5% of the county residents, and 95% of Harris' total vote.

Same thing with Philips, the Constitution guy, who got 2,927 votes in Volusia, almost 3/4 of his total count for Florida. Hell, Browne, who only got 1% in other counties by generosity of rounding, beat out Nader in Volusia to get 3,211 votes. Is there some ultraeffective "pro third party, anti Green" ad campaign that decided to spam just one city in Florida?

Perhaps, but that's not enough for those wacky Volusers; apparantly they've been having some computer trouble, too. According to a section of this ABC News article, the vote count for Gore in Volusia may have decreased by about 10,000 votes while they were sending in returns Wednesday morning. WTF?

Yeah. So, I guess my point is that Florida sucks. I guess they weren't expecting to be swarmed over by national news coverage, though; this kind of stuff probably happens everywhere, but never takes on this kind of importance.