Feeding four sodas a day to a 40 lbs 5 year old is like giving an adult 2 galons of soda each day. In ddition to all that sugar, it is a great deal of caffein to give a child. Caffein causes the body to lose magnesium. "Symptoms of magnesium deficiency may include agitation and anxiety, restless leg syndrome (RLS), sleep disorders, irritability, nausea and vomiting, abnormal heart rhythms, low blood pressure, confusion, muscle spasm and weakness, hyperventilation, insomnia, poor nail growth, and even seizures." Source: Magnesium | University of Maryland Medical Center http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/magnesium#ixzz2cM8HGbnh
University of Maryland Medical Center)
Seems pretty straightforward to me. If you wanted to determine whether this was so, you could do a double blind study with coke and 7-up. If your epected symptoms appeared in the coke group and didn't arise in the 7-up group, I'd say we're talkng about caffein induced manesium defficiency. You could then give the coke group magnesium supplements and see if the symptoms decreased.
So, when will microchips replace bacteria as the most successful lifeform? The certainly have done a good job getting their host (us) to replicate them and distribute them among all the plethora of creations we turn our hands to.
Dorothy Parker had a column in the New Yorker called "The Constant Reader" in which she provided short reviews of many titles. When "The House at Pooh Corner" by A.A. Milne appeared in 1928, her review was especially terse and priceless:
"Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up!"
Remember that any concern you can have another buyer can have. This will effect the value of the apartment negatively. It is highly probable that other health-affective environmental factors may kill you before you would succumb to the radiation exposure from this apartment and exhibit any symptoms therefrom... or it might be the straw that broke the camel's back. But I guarantee you one thing: you will never be able to prove anything in a court of law that would win you damages in a law suit.
This is the real reason why poor kids get doped up by doctors - the school has so many zero tolerance policies and the transgressing student's parents have a choice of having their kid kicked out of school, placed in special ed, or drugged. The alternatives, like costly theapy, which more affluent parents can avail themselves of, poor parents can't possibly afford. It's criminal.
"The term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting, to surveillance cameras, to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring." What "legitimate crime-fighting" is rather depends on what you classify as a "crime." Surveillance of whom and for what purpose? We may agree that corporate network usage monitoring of their own corporate email and network is not invasion of privacy, but when the same technology is used by the government to mine for people with subversive attitudes and opinions...
We got Linux (Caldera 1.0) for our home because I have children and I didn't want endless squabbles about "he did this to my stuff" With Linux, each person had their own stuff and none could trespass on the others. They could also not accidentally invade my work files. It has worked great for us for all these years. True, we have some windows computers, but they're game boxes, period. It's also really nice not to be a full-time admin in your own home. Linux essentially runs itself, compared to Windows.
The problem with cash for clunkers programs is that they ignore the environmental impact of making the vehicles. Compare changing cars every 3 years, each time getting a progressively more fuel efficient car, with keeping the same inefficient clunker for 12 years. The carbon footprint of extracting the materials that went into making the car, especially a hybrid, cancels out any gains you might have made from fuel economy. Then, too, are we recycling the clunkers, or are we dumping them?
The biggest flaw in the US elections is that you have a system in which only candidates from the two principle parties can be elected. Add to that the fact that the backers and leadership of both parties is essentially the same (admittedly some minor differences) and you have what amounts to a single party system. We all know what a great idea that is.
In other parts of the world, you can have eleven serious candidates for an election and have a real horse race between 3-4 really different candidates. This is good.
Although I realize that my vote is meaningless, I often vote for other party candidates on principle. Better to vote for the good guy who won't win than the lesser of two evils - though in a tight race I will vote against someone who is really bad.
Ours is a system designed to create apathy.
One aspect of this attack on the facts is seldom mentioned: the attack was discovered and corrected. certainly, it is possible to mount an attack on Wiklipedia and get some degree of partisan spin on their pages for a while, but Wikipedia has been remarkably resistant to both partisan and just plain malicious tampering - much more so than my children's text books. I have two kids in high school and I was appalled when one of their science text books said that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by anti-American political groups... and then I was incensed to learn that their science teacher taught this view as gospel.
Lord knows, Wikipedia isn't perfect, but that's nothing special. There's naught that involves humans that can lay claim to any kind of perfection. Kudos to the whistle blowers and editors at Wikipedia for doing such a good job overall.
The Federal Government has just completed some legislation that grants legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the administration's illegal domestic surveillance program. This is tantamount to a passive admission of guilt. Whay aren't more people mad about this?
Now, I am not a big fan of laws on conspiracy. I don't think that they're generally a good idea, but they are the law of the land and tens of thousands of people are in jail today because of them. But they don't apply, apparently, if you're a bif telecommunications company and you aided and abedded the government in breaking the law.
Here's what happened, if you need a refresher: the Bush administration went to the major telecommunications firms and asked them to set up wire taps on an unspecified number of US citizens. The telecommunications companies said, "where's the warrants?" The Bush administration replied that they did not need warrants and that it was a matter of national security. Most of the telecommunications companies (except for Quest) went along with the administration and complied with the illegal request.
Now, if this was you or me and some agent of the US government asked us to do something illegal, we'd be in danger of going to jail for a vbery long time if we just went along with them and broke the law - this is particularly true if we used any special knowledge or tools to accomplish the illegal act, especially if the lillegal act required that knowledge or those tools.
Evidently, the folks at the telecommunications company read the rules the same way, because their lobbyists have been busy as bevers on this issue -- and this week they've been effectively pardoned for their role in what might be the largest single act of anti-constitutional piracy in this nation's history.
This is another example of the Bush administration's lack of respect for the law - their obvious lack of respect for the other branches of government and the Consitution. During World War I and World War II, the government sought and got special powers to deal with threats to national security - but in both instances, the Supreme Court said "so far and no further" and in neither case was the administration released from judicial oversight - they had to get a sitting judge to issue a warrant. In the 1970's, the Nixon administration was caught breaking the law and spying on US citizens. This is one of the reasons why Nixon had to resign from office. At that time, the legislature considered the problems of national security and came up with the FISA court compromise - a way for the administration to get what they said they needed and still protecting the rights of ordinary citizens.
This legal means was not good enough for the Bush administration (which includes many of the same players who were responsible for the Nixon domestic spying scandal, like Mr. Cheney). Citing the 911 tragedy, the Bush administration claimed the right to spy on any citizen without any oversight whatsoever, provided that they claimed to have a good reason for doing it.
Allowing your government to do whatever it wants to do because they claim to have good intentions is a recipe for tyranny. When the government tries to do things like this, it is the responsiblity of every responible citizen of the republic to oppose them in whatever way they legally can. If they fail to do so -- if they fail to hold the law breakers accountable and demand justice -- then they deserve what they get.
This used to be a pretty good country, where the government was held accountable by the people and we used to send government officials, legislators, and even judges to jail fairly regularly when they broke the law. But today, when legislators connive with the administration to retroactivly pardon wrongdoers before they've even been brought to the bar of justice, we shrug our shoulders and accept the inevitability of bad government. Bad government does not come about by itself, nor is it inevitable. Bad government is allowed to flourish when we enable it by our apathy and acceptance.
While
My ubuntu box was so secure, apparently, that when I went to the original article referred to from slashdot, Firefox closed pre-emptorily and I was never able to read the article.
He won't run again, he may declare a "national emergency" and suspend the election. We're "at war" after all and he, the decider in chief might just have to send Congress packing and rule by simple decree, for the "good of the nation."
I am reminded of the book "The Experts Speak" (Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky) in which Herbert Hoover was reported to have said in June of 1930: "Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over." The experts are always wrong.
Education should develop the students' critical faculties and prepare them for a real world in which fact and fiction often cohabitate. If you think that Wikipedia is inaccurate, have a good look at Encarta - what about newspapers? And we should definitely never expose our dear young pupils to television (horrors!)
This is one of the worst kinds of censorship: santizing and bounding the knowledge we're allowed to have. It is the flip side of PR people paid to "correct" and beautify Wikipedia content. Both fit within the realm of evil in the modern world.
As others have said, Jim Sampson is blaming Linux for a lack of Windows interoperability. Depends on what you want to do. I have a friend who is a Web developer - he HATES Microsoft but he's stuck with them because he has to see how his stuff looks on a Windows box. That isn't a defect of Linux - Linux isn't a reverse engineered Windows. The people I know who can't run Linux are people who have some mandatory application or operation they MUST run on Windows - for example a VPN application that only works with IE 6.x and cannot run on anything else. That this does not run in Linux is not a defect of Linux.
However, even these people can benefit from a Linux server their desktop interacts with. Can't tell it's a Linux file server, except that it doesn't break down or contract viruses. Ditto for Web server or print server. Again - Linux will never be "ready" on Sampson's terms because Microsoft intentionally keeps changing Windows to stay out of reach of real interoperability - not by freak accident but by deliberate design.
As a newby Linux user, I'd go with the majority and suggest ubuntu - except that the tetex debian package that is available for download onto ubuntu is flawed. Fedora has a better standard load of LaTeX it works better out of the box for LaTex. I really like Kile (GUI front end to LaTeX available in both Fedora and ubuntu) and it is a time-saver that doesn't automagically break things, like most GUI front ends. There are some long-term weirdnesses you should be aware of with Fedora - when you install it, choose as your user some other ID than the one you want to use for yourself - the opposite of the ubuntu advice, where you want to be the install-user.
Another alternative - you're probably a TUG member. You can very easily install LaTex from the TeX Live CD/DVD. It's easier than installing MiKTeX in Windows (from that very confusing PDF) - this gives you the advantage of a dead stable LaTeX set on your computer - rather than one that automatically updates and might become temporarily unstable with respect to your personal custom code.
So, I guess, I'd suggest a best of both worlds approach - installing ubuntu and then installing LaTeX manually. You'll be really happy. It's so simple to do things - such as dvi2pdf - you'll never want to go back to Windows. Which reminds me, do go and get the Acrobat reader for Linux and install it - it works better than the standard app (in Fedora). In ubuntu the standard reader works OK. Drop me a line if you want assistance.
Using Linux is rather like driving an old classic car. When you drive into a gas station, you have people come over and talk to you about your car. They want to share their stories more often than they want to hear yours, but they mean well. Two kinds of people drive old classic cars: people who really love them and people who want to look down on the common folk. The former welcomes the duffers who come over to chat and the latter brushes them off and warns them not to touch their car.
Linux users come in many more than two flavors, but they can be grouped in the helpful and the arrogant varieties, too. One of the things I used to love about Open Source was the ability to send a terse question or two to the developers - and get a prompt courteous answer. That is rarer these days than of yore, but it still is more prevalent than COTS software support.
Every time one of these discussions comes up, I wonder why. Years ago there was an excellent article in New Scientist that very simply laid the argument to rest. It went something like this:
Building a new nuclear powerplant takes X amount of energy.
Running a new nuclear powerplant takes Y amount of energy per annum.
Nuclear powerplants produce Z amount of energy per annum for N years.
Maintaining a mothballed nuclear powerplant safely takes T amount of energy per annum.
Question: if you build 5 new nuclear powerplants per year, for how many years do you get a new positive net return from all the plants... ergo, how soon does the energy cost of maintaining mothballed facilities (safely) exceed the total output of the currently functioning plants? Each year, iff n is the number of currently producing plants and m is the number of mothballed ones, then total net output = n(Z-Y) - mT. Add it up year by year and don't forget to subtract from the sumtotal the total of (m+n)X. Do the math. Depending on whose numbers you use, it ends up somewhere between 55-125 years of positive net energy output.
Rememebr, too, that if you are looking at making nuclear power plants for 20 years (100 plants) you have 3000 plant years of power generation, more or less, as compared with 800,000 - 1,200,000 plant years of energy consumption (for safe maintenance) to look forward to.
Lastly, they made the point that France, which generates most of its electric power by nuclear reactors is today about 10% smaller than it was in 1945, because they have given over approximately 10% of the land surface of their country to a single use that precludes any other human occupation or use for at least the next 10,000 years - if you can't use it anymore for anything else, it effectively does not exist anymore.
The only counter to this argument is that our technology will advance to such an extent that we'll be able to make things unradioactive and reclaim these facilities for productive, non-energy consumptive uses in the near future. Predicating your energy policy on this kind of scientific speculation is like depedning on the development of antigravity as a means of disposing of landfill toxins.
Sustainable nuclear technology using fusion power is a fantasy.
My kids love Abiword because it has a unique feature (I think): you can open a little word-count window that updates as you type. Typical concluding comment by 15 yr old: "398, 399, 400. There, done. He wanted 400 words on South American frogs, he's got 400 words on South American frogs."
Slashdot Mirror
The only suitible phone for a 4 year old.
Feeding four sodas a day to a 40 lbs 5 year old is like giving an adult 2 galons of soda each day. In ddition to all that sugar, it is a great deal of caffein to give a child. Caffein causes the body to lose magnesium. "Symptoms of magnesium deficiency may include agitation and anxiety, restless leg syndrome (RLS), sleep disorders, irritability, nausea and vomiting, abnormal heart rhythms, low blood pressure, confusion, muscle spasm and weakness, hyperventilation, insomnia, poor nail growth, and even seizures." Source: Magnesium | University of Maryland Medical Center http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/magnesium#ixzz2cM8HGbnh University of Maryland Medical Center) Seems pretty straightforward to me. If you wanted to determine whether this was so, you could do a double blind study with coke and 7-up. If your epected symptoms appeared in the coke group and didn't arise in the 7-up group, I'd say we're talkng about caffein induced manesium defficiency. You could then give the coke group magnesium supplements and see if the symptoms decreased.
Oddly enough, when it's born, it'll look just like Dr Church.
So when did Microprocessors pass McDonalds hamburgers?
So, when will microchips replace bacteria as the most successful lifeform? The certainly have done a good job getting their host (us) to replicate them and distribute them among all the plethora of creations we turn our hands to.
Dorothy Parker had a column in the New Yorker called "The Constant Reader" in which she provided short reviews of many titles. When "The House at Pooh Corner" by A.A. Milne appeared in 1928, her review was especially terse and priceless: "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up!"
Remember that any concern you can have another buyer can have. This will effect the value of the apartment negatively. It is highly probable that other health-affective environmental factors may kill you before you would succumb to the radiation exposure from this apartment and exhibit any symptoms therefrom... or it might be the straw that broke the camel's back. But I guarantee you one thing: you will never be able to prove anything in a court of law that would win you damages in a law suit.
This is the real reason why poor kids get doped up by doctors - the school has so many zero tolerance policies and the transgressing student's parents have a choice of having their kid kicked out of school, placed in special ed, or drugged. The alternatives, like costly theapy, which more affluent parents can avail themselves of, poor parents can't possibly afford. It's criminal.
"The term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting, to surveillance cameras, to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring." What "legitimate crime-fighting" is rather depends on what you classify as a "crime." Surveillance of whom and for what purpose? We may agree that corporate network usage monitoring of their own corporate email and network is not invasion of privacy, but when the same technology is used by the government to mine for people with subversive attitudes and opinions...
We got Linux (Caldera 1.0) for our home because I have children and I didn't want endless squabbles about "he did this to my stuff" With Linux, each person had their own stuff and none could trespass on the others. They could also not accidentally invade my work files. It has worked great for us for all these years. True, we have some windows computers, but they're game boxes, period. It's also really nice not to be a full-time admin in your own home. Linux essentially runs itself, compared to Windows.
Why nothing could be easier. Back up your data and then reboot from the Ubuntu install disk.
The problem with cash for clunkers programs is that they ignore the environmental impact of making the vehicles. Compare changing cars every 3 years, each time getting a progressively more fuel efficient car, with keeping the same inefficient clunker for 12 years. The carbon footprint of extracting the materials that went into making the car, especially a hybrid, cancels out any gains you might have made from fuel economy. Then, too, are we recycling the clunkers, or are we dumping them?
The biggest flaw in the US elections is that you have a system in which only candidates from the two principle parties can be elected. Add to that the fact that the backers and leadership of both parties is essentially the same (admittedly some minor differences) and you have what amounts to a single party system. We all know what a great idea that is. In other parts of the world, you can have eleven serious candidates for an election and have a real horse race between 3-4 really different candidates. This is good. Although I realize that my vote is meaningless, I often vote for other party candidates on principle. Better to vote for the good guy who won't win than the lesser of two evils - though in a tight race I will vote against someone who is really bad. Ours is a system designed to create apathy.
They're in the state-run public school for my locality, not any kind of Christian or other fee-pay school.
One aspect of this attack on the facts is seldom mentioned: the attack was discovered and corrected. certainly, it is possible to mount an attack on Wiklipedia and get some degree of partisan spin on their pages for a while, but Wikipedia has been remarkably resistant to both partisan and just plain malicious tampering - much more so than my children's text books. I have two kids in high school and I was appalled when one of their science text books said that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by anti-American political groups... and then I was incensed to learn that their science teacher taught this view as gospel.
Lord knows, Wikipedia isn't perfect, but that's nothing special. There's naught that involves humans that can lay claim to any kind of perfection. Kudos to the whistle blowers and editors at Wikipedia for doing such a good job overall.
The Federal Government has just completed some legislation that grants legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the administration's illegal domestic surveillance program. This is tantamount to a passive admission of guilt. Whay aren't more people mad about this? Now, I am not a big fan of laws on conspiracy. I don't think that they're generally a good idea, but they are the law of the land and tens of thousands of people are in jail today because of them. But they don't apply, apparently, if you're a bif telecommunications company and you aided and abedded the government in breaking the law. Here's what happened, if you need a refresher: the Bush administration went to the major telecommunications firms and asked them to set up wire taps on an unspecified number of US citizens. The telecommunications companies said, "where's the warrants?" The Bush administration replied that they did not need warrants and that it was a matter of national security. Most of the telecommunications companies (except for Quest) went along with the administration and complied with the illegal request. Now, if this was you or me and some agent of the US government asked us to do something illegal, we'd be in danger of going to jail for a vbery long time if we just went along with them and broke the law - this is particularly true if we used any special knowledge or tools to accomplish the illegal act, especially if the lillegal act required that knowledge or those tools. Evidently, the folks at the telecommunications company read the rules the same way, because their lobbyists have been busy as bevers on this issue -- and this week they've been effectively pardoned for their role in what might be the largest single act of anti-constitutional piracy in this nation's history. This is another example of the Bush administration's lack of respect for the law - their obvious lack of respect for the other branches of government and the Consitution. During World War I and World War II, the government sought and got special powers to deal with threats to national security - but in both instances, the Supreme Court said "so far and no further" and in neither case was the administration released from judicial oversight - they had to get a sitting judge to issue a warrant. In the 1970's, the Nixon administration was caught breaking the law and spying on US citizens. This is one of the reasons why Nixon had to resign from office. At that time, the legislature considered the problems of national security and came up with the FISA court compromise - a way for the administration to get what they said they needed and still protecting the rights of ordinary citizens. This legal means was not good enough for the Bush administration (which includes many of the same players who were responsible for the Nixon domestic spying scandal, like Mr. Cheney). Citing the 911 tragedy, the Bush administration claimed the right to spy on any citizen without any oversight whatsoever, provided that they claimed to have a good reason for doing it. Allowing your government to do whatever it wants to do because they claim to have good intentions is a recipe for tyranny. When the government tries to do things like this, it is the responsiblity of every responible citizen of the republic to oppose them in whatever way they legally can. If they fail to do so -- if they fail to hold the law breakers accountable and demand justice -- then they deserve what they get. This used to be a pretty good country, where the government was held accountable by the people and we used to send government officials, legislators, and even judges to jail fairly regularly when they broke the law. But today, when legislators connive with the administration to retroactivly pardon wrongdoers before they've even been brought to the bar of justice, we shrug our shoulders and accept the inevitability of bad government. Bad government does not come about by itself, nor is it inevitable. Bad government is allowed to flourish when we enable it by our apathy and acceptance. While
My ubuntu box was so secure, apparently, that when I went to the original article referred to from slashdot, Firefox closed pre-emptorily and I was never able to read the article.
He won't run again, he may declare a "national emergency" and suspend the election. We're "at war" after all and he, the decider in chief might just have to send Congress packing and rule by simple decree, for the "good of the nation."
I am reminded of the book "The Experts Speak" (Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky) in which Herbert Hoover was reported to have said in June of 1930: "Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over." The experts are always wrong.
Education should develop the students' critical faculties and prepare them for a real world in which fact and fiction often cohabitate. If you think that Wikipedia is inaccurate, have a good look at Encarta - what about newspapers? And we should definitely never expose our dear young pupils to television (horrors!) This is one of the worst kinds of censorship: santizing and bounding the knowledge we're allowed to have. It is the flip side of PR people paid to "correct" and beautify Wikipedia content. Both fit within the realm of evil in the modern world.
As others have said, Jim Sampson is blaming Linux for a lack of Windows interoperability. Depends on what you want to do. I have a friend who is a Web developer - he HATES Microsoft but he's stuck with them because he has to see how his stuff looks on a Windows box. That isn't a defect of Linux - Linux isn't a reverse engineered Windows. The people I know who can't run Linux are people who have some mandatory application or operation they MUST run on Windows - for example a VPN application that only works with IE 6.x and cannot run on anything else. That this does not run in Linux is not a defect of Linux.
However, even these people can benefit from a Linux server their desktop interacts with. Can't tell it's a Linux file server, except that it doesn't break down or contract viruses. Ditto for Web server or print server. Again - Linux will never be "ready" on Sampson's terms because Microsoft intentionally keeps changing Windows to stay out of reach of real interoperability - not by freak accident but by deliberate design.
As a newby Linux user, I'd go with the majority and suggest ubuntu - except that the tetex debian package that is available for download onto ubuntu is flawed. Fedora has a better standard load of LaTeX it works better out of the box for LaTex. I really like Kile (GUI front end to LaTeX available in both Fedora and ubuntu) and it is a time-saver that doesn't automagically break things, like most GUI front ends. There are some long-term weirdnesses you should be aware of with Fedora - when you install it, choose as your user some other ID than the one you want to use for yourself - the opposite of the ubuntu advice, where you want to be the install-user.
Another alternative - you're probably a TUG member. You can very easily install LaTex from the TeX Live CD/DVD. It's easier than installing MiKTeX in Windows (from that very confusing PDF) - this gives you the advantage of a dead stable LaTeX set on your computer - rather than one that automatically updates and might become temporarily unstable with respect to your personal custom code.
So, I guess, I'd suggest a best of both worlds approach - installing ubuntu and then installing LaTeX manually. You'll be really happy. It's so simple to do things - such as dvi2pdf - you'll never want to go back to Windows. Which reminds me, do go and get the Acrobat reader for Linux and install it - it works better than the standard app (in Fedora). In ubuntu the standard reader works OK. Drop me a line if you want assistance.
Using Linux is rather like driving an old classic car. When you drive into a gas station, you have people come over and talk to you about your car. They want to share their stories more often than they want to hear yours, but they mean well. Two kinds of people drive old classic cars: people who really love them and people who want to look down on the common folk. The former welcomes the duffers who come over to chat and the latter brushes them off and warns them not to touch their car.
Linux users come in many more than two flavors, but they can be grouped in the helpful and the arrogant varieties, too. One of the things I used to love about Open Source was the ability to send a terse question or two to the developers - and get a prompt courteous answer. That is rarer these days than of yore, but it still is more prevalent than COTS software support.
Every time one of these discussions comes up, I wonder why. Years ago there was an excellent article in New Scientist that very simply laid the argument to rest. It went something like this:
Question: if you build 5 new nuclear powerplants per year, for how many years do you get a new positive net return from all the plants... ergo, how soon does the energy cost of maintaining mothballed facilities (safely) exceed the total output of the currently functioning plants? Each year, iff n is the number of currently producing plants and m is the number of mothballed ones, then total net output = n(Z-Y) - mT. Add it up year by year and don't forget to subtract from the sumtotal the total of (m+n)X. Do the math. Depending on whose numbers you use, it ends up somewhere between 55-125 years of positive net energy output.
Rememebr, too, that if you are looking at making nuclear power plants for 20 years (100 plants) you have 3000 plant years of power generation, more or less, as compared with 800,000 - 1,200,000 plant years of energy consumption (for safe maintenance) to look forward to.
Lastly, they made the point that France, which generates most of its electric power by nuclear reactors is today about 10% smaller than it was in 1945, because they have given over approximately 10% of the land surface of their country to a single use that precludes any other human occupation or use for at least the next 10,000 years - if you can't use it anymore for anything else, it effectively does not exist anymore.
The only counter to this argument is that our technology will advance to such an extent that we'll be able to make things unradioactive and reclaim these facilities for productive, non-energy consumptive uses in the near future. Predicating your energy policy on this kind of scientific speculation is like depedning on the development of antigravity as a means of disposing of landfill toxins.
Sustainable nuclear technology using fusion power is a fantasy.
My kids love Abiword because it has a unique feature (I think): you can open a little word-count window that updates as you type. Typical concluding comment by 15 yr old: "398, 399, 400. There, done. He wanted 400 words on South American frogs, he's got 400 words on South American frogs."