My wife plays board games already sometimes, and has played RPGs. When she tries to play video games, it is always at parties or when I have friends over and she wants to join in... but lacks controller skills to even play Little Big Planet. I own a PS3 and several gaming computers and she can practice any time, but she only wants to play when people are doing it socially. Unfortunately, she gets frustrated with me as a teacher and won't do it alone:P
Says the person that never used a Disk ][. The C64 disk drive was only marginally faster than the C64 tape drive, which is to say, go take a nap while loading or saving anything. Also the C64's lack of expandability made it obsolete faster.
I'm not saying the C64 was bad - great graphics and sound for the price at that time compared to pretty much anyone else, but certainly not better in every way. Now Amiga OTOH...
That's right - the rev B motherboard. That was required for double high rez with the 80 column card. I was lucky my mom got a rev B because I had no idea, nor should I have had any idea at that age. Not sure what other features the rev B had though. I do know it was also expandable to about 1.5MB of memory using every slot (we used 4 slots and had around 768k, but I think only Appleworks really took advantage of it).
Yes, most ][+ users added a 16k card. The//e was much more expandable memory-wise - I think my moms had 768k. The big expansion for the//e was the 80 column card which enabled double hi-res graphics with a whopping 16 colors.
The first computer I ever used was an 16k Apple ][ with tape drive at my elementary school. It was a real pain to load or save data on it. The next year (or maybe it was 2 or 3 years later, but still elementary school) the school got 4 48k Apple ][+s with Disk ][ drives and those were far and away superior. The old machine got put in a corner and I doubt it was ever used again.
The US/US industry doesn't care about thorium reactors - the industry is only interested in the Integral Fast Reactor, burning uranium. At least IFR can burn nuclear waste, so it isn't a total loss, but we've already lost the race to develop them to Russia by continuously canceling our test reactors (Russia has two ~2000MW online and is building a full scale reactor from what I remember). The industry estimates that IFRs burning just nuclear wast can power the world for 1500 years. When the US (and British) nuclear industry talks about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in solid fuel reactors where it is an inferior fuel. When thorium advocates talk about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in a liquid fuel design based on the 1960s molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE).
The private industry, China, and France seem to be the only ones that like LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor, the modern update to the MSRE, though France's is liquid lithium, a less toxic salt, so it should be LLTR, but they call it something else), so even if the US eventually goes that direction, we will be last to develop a reactor and buy that tech from other countries. The US is no longer an innovator in this area, we are a consumer, and the NRC and congress is at fault for most of it.
Actually, the first assertion is very close to the truth - the NRC highly regulates access to thorium because of proliferation concerns, even though you'd need a nuclear reactor to make it into a useable nuclear weapon and it wouldn't be terribly effective in a dirty bomb. China just dumps it into landfills. It is an insoluble metal, so worries about it getting into the water table (alpha emitters are only really only dangerous if ingested, and thorium is a relatively slow one) is probably a non-issue.
If you look at the facts, and even if you could tie violent video games in as being the primary factor in this crime (good luck with that), the shooter was still old enough to buy both guns and violent video games on his own. The assault rifle was his mom's, and banning that type of weapon really won't stop the problem because the cat's out of the bag and people own them already (unless you make them illegal to own and ask all owners to turn them in... good luck with that - a friend of mine will let you take his assault rifle collection when you pry them from his cold, dead fingers). Banning guns and taxing violent video games is a knee jerk reaction that ignores the primary problem - the need to improve the mental health program and fix databases used for criminal background checks (for instance, the Virginia shooter wasn't in the background check database despite having mental health and violence issues).
He is dead on with the state of STL 10 years ago, as STL wasn't standard in compilers yet and add ons like STLport were buggy on some platforms. I remember supplying plenty of bug fixes at least, and that certainly wasn't 10 years ago.
As for the article and as an old C programmer that moved to C++, I agree for the most part. I do admit I don't like public val and prefer getVal() setVal() functions, or the opposite of what he said; they may add code, but using them also forces encapsulation, and friend functions have caused debug hell for me more than once (I despise the f**kers, but sometimes they are necessary).
It still would take years to get past the public perception of nuclear, despite the fact that a reactor in cold shutdown would have little risk, even as a "dirty bomb" explosion that spread all of its radioactive materials around. Public perception is still any amount of any kind of radiation is bad.
The USSR had a bunch of nuclear powered spy satellites, but AFAIK, the only non-radioisotope reactor the US has launched into space is SNAP-10A (in fact, confirmed). I vaguely remember the Soviets had nuclear powered spy satellites, as well (also confirmed - they were called Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyj or US-A, lol).
While I agree with the modding, I'd flip that around - the US is a republic by definition; it uses (and has always used) representative democratic principles to elect its representatives in that republic. There has not been a democracy (form of government) since ancient Athens because, like true communism (and I mean not the dictatorships we have called communism), it doesn't scale well.
The problem is increasing taxation isn't really fixing the problem. Even increasing taxes on the top 2% like Obama demanded only affects about 15% of taxpayers; the rest pay AMT or capital gains taxes only. And don't think people in the top 15% are rich - that is only about a joint income of ~$80000 I believe ($100k was top 8-9% when I checked last). Also using income alone as judgment for taxation is a bad measuring stick - I know a married doctor and lawyer, and by occupation I'm sure you think they're loaded, but they have over $350000 in student loan debt and the wife/doctor didn't work several years after school because she was bearing/rearing her two children.
Also the Iraq war is over; Afghanistan was never about oil because they don't have much, if any. If you want to see oil companies being enriched, look at how they are taxed, or rather how they are not taxed and subsidized and pay negative taxes while reaping billions in profits.
I imagine that depends on where you live... for a time I lived on the Canadian border with the nearest town about 15 minutes away across the border and the nearest US town bigger than 26 people (which consisted of a post office and a bar and was about 3 miles away, so not much of a town) over an hour away. I couldn't drink in the US bar because I was 19/20 when I lived there, so my housemate and I crossed the border to hit the bars pretty much every weekend. In any case, having km/h was a nice thing because my housemates 1960s era muscle car didn't have it.
Easier said than done - you can't link against LGPL or GPL code statically - those licenses explicitly forbid it, and there are many proprietary but free libraries that are used by games (i.e. OpenGL, OpenAL [also OpenAL Soft is LGPL iirc], etc) that don't offer a statically linkable library.
Case in point: my brother-in-law, a hardcore gamer (and serious shooter fan), let his 11 year old kid play GTA 3 when I was there ~3 years ago. My nephew was courteous, obeyed the rules of the road, and apologized when he accidentally hit a pedestrian. His mom, on the other hand, came down there and then threw a fit and was like "how can you let him play a game like that!!!" and shut it off immediately before chewing out her husband. My nephew was supervised, never even came close to finding inappropriate for his age content, and was having fun. The kicker is he has been deer hunting and pheasant hunting since he was 12 and owns airsoft guns, but his mom still won't let him play shooters because of the ESRB rating
I don't care if people criticize video games - I'm opposed to people demonizing video games, when the facts seem to say otherwise. In regards to video game related crime, from http://www.theeca.com/video_games_violence website:
As videogames have become more popular in the U.S., violent crime has decreased dramatically, particularly among youth.
In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General found that: "...it was extremely difficult to distinguish between the relatively small long-term effects of exposure to media violence and those of other influences."
In the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report on school violence, Lessons Learned: An FBI Perspective School Violence Seminar, they include a school shooter profile listing thirty factors that may be indicators of potentially devastating violent acts, but the FBI excluded playing video games from that list.
In a four part series on rampage killings, the New York Times examined the influence of media on offenders' actions and found: "While the killings have caused many people to point to the violent aspects of the culture, a closer look shows little evidence that video games, movies or television encouraged many of the attacks."
Incidentally, something like 2 days later a guy kills a couple of firemen with the same gun (a Bushmaster.223) and the guy is obviously not a video game player, but we won't mention that anywhere. Another guy shoots up a shopping mall and also is not known to be a video game player, so no talk of what caused his craziness. Suddenly the media hears "the shooter is a video game player" and Jesus is on the fucking cross and video games are to blame.
In any case, the NRA argument is ridiculous; the FBI already did a study, and found violent writings (books, blog posts, etc) and movies have more influence on youth than video games as sales of video games have gone up, youth violent crime has gone down (as one shoots exponentially up, the other goes exponentially down)
Other countries have violent video games, why don't they have school shootings? My guess is the media doesn't go into a hype about the killer like they do in America, giving the bastard 15 minutes of post-mortem fame.
From what I understand, they were counting service contracts as sales for that year instead of splitting it up over the service life of the contract. Apparently in US bookkeeping these need to be handled like depreciating assets and accounted for over a period of time (or that's how I understood it). Since Autonomy makes a good chunk of its money on contracts, that could add up fast.
Not quite so, as they had a robust server market for HP-UX on the high end with its lucrative services market. Yes, that has been dying to Linux recently, but it was a cash cow for a long time after the Compaq purchase. Compaq itself died from making the massive misstep of buying DEC, which had started making the transition to services (and incidentally part of the eventual appeal of HP buying them). HP has continued to move into services, acquiring EDS, which had dumped almost all of its non-services based, primarily, IMO, to keep its stock from going junk (despite saying it was to streamline... why else dump profitable divisions?). In fact, HP was attempting to get out of the PC market entirely fairly recently.
As an oddity, I've worked for every one of these companies at some point, and only one during transition (UGS back to EDS).
As an additional oddity, I currently work for an autonomy customer that had questioned autonomy's stability and direction before the merger and started supporting Solr in parallel. I don't know why they believed autonomy was in danger, but apparently our marketing folk are smarter than they look. In any case, the only way we dump autonomy is if they stop supporting it because we have customers giving us boatloads of money to support it.
A thermal reactor can't explode - it is like a pot of hot water (or in this case, a liquid fluoride salt), not like a pot of water on a burner you are constantly adjusting to keep from boiling up or boiling out of the kettle like a LWR is. Yes, it is possible to build a pressurized water reactor with thorium as the fuel, but this is not what we are talking about. A LFTR type design can potentially leak if the containment vessel is cracked, but if it did it would rapidly cool and become a solid, meaning there is little chance it would spread. The containment vessel would likely contain a floor drain, draining a leak into underground storage. Thermal reactors can be shut down and started in a very short period of time (minutes as opposed to days for LWR). There is certainly no need for anyone to stick around if the containment vessel is cracked - it passively drains and cools and no generators are needed to actively cool it.
The only way you could even get close to a Chernobyl like spread of radiation is to blow the reactor up with a really, really big bomb. Tsar bomba or Massive Ordinance Penetrator ought to do it. That would create a large dirty bomb and get the radiation spread desired. Of course, the logistics of such an attack is a bit less than trivial - buying a nuke on the black market and setting it off is probably easier.
OK, I'll bite. You need not only the land, but also relatively unpopulated land that gets lots of sun for most sun farms. That means long transmission lines and lots of power loss. It is estimated that the huge wind farms starting 100 miles or so south of me loses 40% of its power in transmission.
So you say build them on every rooftop... well I live in a typical over-regulated city in the US, I can't, and I'm guessing many others can't, as well, at least to install efficient ones that turn toward the sun. The problem is they are considered unsightly (as are wind turbines), so the only way you can have them is to build them into the home itself. If you think they wouldn't enforce, well, I've been ticketed for having grass 8" long when it rained for 2 weeks straight and again for having garbage cans visible from the street (despite being in an enclosure - I had to add 2" to the enclosure height to meet that city ordinance, for crying out loud). Hell, to use a mobile fire pit on my cement patio requires me to pull a permit, notify the police and fire department that I have the permit, and call both of them any day I use the fire pit. The police actually laughed when I called, saying they had never heard of that law (I knew of it because it was printed in the city distributed newsletter). The fire department thanked me for obeying the law and wished more people did.
Most of these issues are solved in the LFTR design, from what I recall. Some of the problems with long term storage after decommission are known only because they mothballed the MSRE. Mainly, they know radioactive fluoride gasses build up, and the cracking issues should be resolved with changes to the blanket.
Oh, and the only reason one hasn't been built is because Nixon killed the program (really, and pretty much exclusively because LWRs meant jobs in California and the MSRE threatened those jobs) and the nuclear industry prefers to stick with their patented designs, which bring more money to Westinghouse and the like. The exact dollar figure invested since Nixon killed the program: $0. Meanwhile, the US has tossed almost $750 billion into IFR with zero success (Russia has had success on a lesser investment). Congress tends to get in the way in the US.
Actually, it is fairly trivial, but not straightforward. The "easy' way is to separate out the Protactinium-233 and ignore U233 (what you want) and U232, which can't easily be separated. Protactinium-233 naturally decays into U-233, however, producing protactinium-233 is undesirable (because it sucks up scarce neutrons - a LFTR produces about 1.07 for every 1) in a LFTR and can be limited or (practically) eliminated by increasing the size of the blanket. Of course, if you WANTED protactinium, you could design your blanket accordingly and separate them, but you need to siphon it off carefully or the reaction will stop and you will need to inject more U233. Obviously leaving the Protactinium in the reactor is fine, as after it decays to U233 it is fuel.
The nice thing about either LFTR or IFR (4th generation reactors) is they burn the actinides off, so the dangerous waste only lasts about 300 years. The US has dumped billions into IFR (about 3/4 of a trillion last I checked, and incidentally, nothing into LFTR) and has zero working reactors. Russia spent far less and has two and is building a third.
LFTR uses liquid Fluoride, not liquid Sodium. More than likely, the water would vaporize due to the extreme heat. If you want to be paranoid about liquid sodium, take a look at the US government and nuclear industry's preferred reactor type, the IFR (integral fast reactor) which uses both high pressure and liquid sodium.
When I was a kid, checking out certain library books immediately put you on an FBI list. Now it's much easier - they just grab all your emails and non-https posts as they get routed through servers and toss them in a file on you. All of your secure emails probably get tossed into an NSA supercomputer and cracked and filed as well. I'm sure visiting certain web sites like fertilizer-R.us or terrorism.com puts you on a watch list as well. No, I'm not paranoid, but my government is.
I think you severely underestimate North Korea - they have an immense reserve army (the largest in the world) in addition to an active army, all brainwashed into unswerving loyalty. Any dissent is punished by 3 generations of imprisonment in a remote work camp (that means you and your next two generations of children grow up with lifetime jail sentences if you are a dissenter, and yes, you get conjugal visits just to create additional generations to punish, but they also are brainwashed with loyalty just like other children). Their special operations forces regularly infiltrate the south but retain complete loyalty to the north. Any invasion by the US would be a massive folly - like Afghanistan but instead of Allah, you have the living god Kim Jong Un and his parents and grandparents to worship.
That said, NK really has no interest in defeating the United States - its main goal is conquering the South and reuniting Korea under the North's oppressive regime and throwing out their "corrupt" western influences. China would actually like it if the North took the South, as it gives them less competition in the region, but if America and South Korea pushed back the North again (highly unlikely given the massive troop numbers they have, but many probably would be armed with little more than pointed sticks - but China did that and just used massive numbers of bodies to win, so NK could, too), they'd more than likely join into the war on the side of the North, as they did in the Korean war. When that happened the US got their butts kicked back from the northern border to where the DMZ is today. A secondary goal of NK is to bomb the shit out of Japan and invade them and torture and kill the entire population in retaliation for the treatment they had under Japan's yoke last century. Koreans hold serious grudges...
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My wife plays board games already sometimes, and has played RPGs. When she tries to play video games, it is always at parties or when I have friends over and she wants to join in... but lacks controller skills to even play Little Big Planet. I own a PS3 and several gaming computers and she can practice any time, but she only wants to play when people are doing it socially. Unfortunately, she gets frustrated with me as a teacher and won't do it alone :P
Says the person that never used a Disk ][. The C64 disk drive was only marginally faster than the C64 tape drive, which is to say, go take a nap while loading or saving anything. Also the C64's lack of expandability made it obsolete faster.
I'm not saying the C64 was bad - great graphics and sound for the price at that time compared to pretty much anyone else, but certainly not better in every way. Now Amiga OTOH...
That's right - the rev B motherboard. That was required for double high rez with the 80 column card. I was lucky my mom got a rev B because I had no idea, nor should I have had any idea at that age. Not sure what other features the rev B had though. I do know it was also expandable to about 1.5MB of memory using every slot (we used 4 slots and had around 768k, but I think only Appleworks really took advantage of it).
Yes, most ][+ users added a 16k card. The //e was much more expandable memory-wise - I think my moms had 768k. The big expansion for the //e was the 80 column card which enabled double hi-res graphics with a whopping 16 colors.
The first computer I ever used was an 16k Apple ][ with tape drive at my elementary school. It was a real pain to load or save data on it. The next year (or maybe it was 2 or 3 years later, but still elementary school) the school got 4 48k Apple ][+s with Disk ][ drives and those were far and away superior. The old machine got put in a corner and I doubt it was ever used again.
The US/US industry doesn't care about thorium reactors - the industry is only interested in the Integral Fast Reactor, burning uranium. At least IFR can burn nuclear waste, so it isn't a total loss, but we've already lost the race to develop them to Russia by continuously canceling our test reactors (Russia has two ~2000MW online and is building a full scale reactor from what I remember). The industry estimates that IFRs burning just nuclear wast can power the world for 1500 years. When the US (and British) nuclear industry talks about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in solid fuel reactors where it is an inferior fuel. When thorium advocates talk about thorium, they ALWAYS mean in a liquid fuel design based on the 1960s molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE).
The private industry, China, and France seem to be the only ones that like LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor, the modern update to the MSRE, though France's is liquid lithium, a less toxic salt, so it should be LLTR, but they call it something else), so even if the US eventually goes that direction, we will be last to develop a reactor and buy that tech from other countries. The US is no longer an innovator in this area, we are a consumer, and the NRC and congress is at fault for most of it.
Actually, the first assertion is very close to the truth - the NRC highly regulates access to thorium because of proliferation concerns, even though you'd need a nuclear reactor to make it into a useable nuclear weapon and it wouldn't be terribly effective in a dirty bomb. China just dumps it into landfills. It is an insoluble metal, so worries about it getting into the water table (alpha emitters are only really only dangerous if ingested, and thorium is a relatively slow one) is probably a non-issue.
If you look at the facts, and even if you could tie violent video games in as being the primary factor in this crime (good luck with that), the shooter was still old enough to buy both guns and violent video games on his own. The assault rifle was his mom's, and banning that type of weapon really won't stop the problem because the cat's out of the bag and people own them already (unless you make them illegal to own and ask all owners to turn them in... good luck with that - a friend of mine will let you take his assault rifle collection when you pry them from his cold, dead fingers). Banning guns and taxing violent video games is a knee jerk reaction that ignores the primary problem - the need to improve the mental health program and fix databases used for criminal background checks (for instance, the Virginia shooter wasn't in the background check database despite having mental health and violence issues).
He is dead on with the state of STL 10 years ago, as STL wasn't standard in compilers yet and add ons like STLport were buggy on some platforms. I remember supplying plenty of bug fixes at least, and that certainly wasn't 10 years ago.
As for the article and as an old C programmer that moved to C++, I agree for the most part. I do admit I don't like public val and prefer getVal() setVal() functions, or the opposite of what he said; they may add code, but using them also forces encapsulation, and friend functions have caused debug hell for me more than once (I despise the f**kers, but sometimes they are necessary).
It still would take years to get past the public perception of nuclear, despite the fact that a reactor in cold shutdown would have little risk, even as a "dirty bomb" explosion that spread all of its radioactive materials around. Public perception is still any amount of any kind of radiation is bad.
The USSR had a bunch of nuclear powered spy satellites, but AFAIK, the only non-radioisotope reactor the US has launched into space is SNAP-10A (in fact, confirmed). I vaguely remember the Soviets had nuclear powered spy satellites, as well (also confirmed - they were called Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyj or US-A, lol).
While I agree with the modding, I'd flip that around - the US is a republic by definition; it uses (and has always used) representative democratic principles to elect its representatives in that republic. There has not been a democracy (form of government) since ancient Athens because, like true communism (and I mean not the dictatorships we have called communism), it doesn't scale well.
The problem is increasing taxation isn't really fixing the problem. Even increasing taxes on the top 2% like Obama demanded only affects about 15% of taxpayers; the rest pay AMT or capital gains taxes only. And don't think people in the top 15% are rich - that is only about a joint income of ~$80000 I believe ($100k was top 8-9% when I checked last). Also using income alone as judgment for taxation is a bad measuring stick - I know a married doctor and lawyer, and by occupation I'm sure you think they're loaded, but they have over $350000 in student loan debt and the wife/doctor didn't work several years after school because she was bearing/rearing her two children.
Also the Iraq war is over; Afghanistan was never about oil because they don't have much, if any. If you want to see oil companies being enriched, look at how they are taxed, or rather how they are not taxed and subsidized and pay negative taxes while reaping billions in profits.
I imagine that depends on where you live... for a time I lived on the Canadian border with the nearest town about 15 minutes away across the border and the nearest US town bigger than 26 people (which consisted of a post office and a bar and was about 3 miles away, so not much of a town) over an hour away. I couldn't drink in the US bar because I was 19/20 when I lived there, so my housemate and I crossed the border to hit the bars pretty much every weekend. In any case, having km/h was a nice thing because my housemates 1960s era muscle car didn't have it.
Easier said than done - you can't link against LGPL or GPL code statically - those licenses explicitly forbid it, and there are many proprietary but free libraries that are used by games (i.e. OpenGL, OpenAL [also OpenAL Soft is LGPL iirc], etc) that don't offer a statically linkable library.
ESRB ratings are a guideline only.
Case in point: my brother-in-law, a hardcore gamer (and serious shooter fan), let his 11 year old kid play GTA 3 when I was there ~3 years ago. My nephew was courteous, obeyed the rules of the road, and apologized when he accidentally hit a pedestrian. His mom, on the other hand, came down there and then threw a fit and was like "how can you let him play a game like that!!!" and shut it off immediately before chewing out her husband. My nephew was supervised, never even came close to finding inappropriate for his age content, and was having fun. The kicker is he has been deer hunting and pheasant hunting since he was 12 and owns airsoft guns, but his mom still won't let him play shooters because of the ESRB rating
I don't care if people criticize video games - I'm opposed to people demonizing video games, when the facts seem to say otherwise. In regards to video game related crime, from http://www.theeca.com/video_games_violence website:
Incidentally, something like 2 days later a guy kills a couple of firemen with the same gun (a Bushmaster .223) and the guy is obviously not a video game player, but we won't mention that anywhere. Another guy shoots up a shopping mall and also is not known to be a video game player, so no talk of what caused his craziness. Suddenly the media hears "the shooter is a video game player" and Jesus is on the fucking cross and video games are to blame.
also wrestler Chris Benoit
In any case, the NRA argument is ridiculous; the FBI already did a study, and found
violent writings (books, blog posts, etc) and movies have more influence on youth than video games
as sales of video games have gone up, youth violent crime has gone down (as one shoots exponentially up, the other goes exponentially down)
Other countries have violent video games, why don't they have school shootings? My guess is the media doesn't go into a hype about the killer like they do in America, giving the bastard 15 minutes of post-mortem fame.
From what I understand, they were counting service contracts as sales for that year instead of splitting it up over the service life of the contract. Apparently in US bookkeeping these need to be handled like depreciating assets and accounted for over a period of time (or that's how I understood it). Since Autonomy makes a good chunk of its money on contracts, that could add up fast.
Not quite so, as they had a robust server market for HP-UX on the high end with its lucrative services market. Yes, that has been dying to Linux recently, but it was a cash cow for a long time after the Compaq purchase. Compaq itself died from making the massive misstep of buying DEC, which had started making the transition to services (and incidentally part of the eventual appeal of HP buying them). HP has continued to move into services, acquiring EDS, which had dumped almost all of its non-services based, primarily, IMO, to keep its stock from going junk (despite saying it was to streamline... why else dump profitable divisions?). In fact, HP was attempting to get out of the PC market entirely fairly recently.
As an oddity, I've worked for every one of these companies at some point, and only one during transition (UGS back to EDS).
As an additional oddity, I currently work for an autonomy customer that had questioned autonomy's stability and direction before the merger and started supporting Solr in parallel. I don't know why they believed autonomy was in danger, but apparently our marketing folk are smarter than they look. In any case, the only way we dump autonomy is if they stop supporting it because we have customers giving us boatloads of money to support it.
Once again, ignorance...
A thermal reactor can't explode - it is like a pot of hot water (or in this case, a liquid fluoride salt), not like a pot of water on a burner you are constantly adjusting to keep from boiling up or boiling out of the kettle like a LWR is. Yes, it is possible to build a pressurized water reactor with thorium as the fuel, but this is not what we are talking about. A LFTR type design can potentially leak if the containment vessel is cracked, but if it did it would rapidly cool and become a solid, meaning there is little chance it would spread. The containment vessel would likely contain a floor drain, draining a leak into underground storage. Thermal reactors can be shut down and started in a very short period of time (minutes as opposed to days for LWR). There is certainly no need for anyone to stick around if the containment vessel is cracked - it passively drains and cools and no generators are needed to actively cool it.
The only way you could even get close to a Chernobyl like spread of radiation is to blow the reactor up with a really, really big bomb. Tsar bomba or Massive Ordinance Penetrator ought to do it. That would create a large dirty bomb and get the radiation spread desired. Of course, the logistics of such an attack is a bit less than trivial - buying a nuke on the black market and setting it off is probably easier.
OK, I'll bite. You need not only the land, but also relatively unpopulated land that gets lots of sun for most sun farms. That means long transmission lines and lots of power loss. It is estimated that the huge wind farms starting 100 miles or so south of me loses 40% of its power in transmission.
So you say build them on every rooftop... well I live in a typical over-regulated city in the US, I can't, and I'm guessing many others can't, as well, at least to install efficient ones that turn toward the sun. The problem is they are considered unsightly (as are wind turbines), so the only way you can have them is to build them into the home itself. If you think they wouldn't enforce, well, I've been ticketed for having grass 8" long when it rained for 2 weeks straight and again for having garbage cans visible from the street (despite being in an enclosure - I had to add 2" to the enclosure height to meet that city ordinance, for crying out loud). Hell, to use a mobile fire pit on my cement patio requires me to pull a permit, notify the police and fire department that I have the permit, and call both of them any day I use the fire pit. The police actually laughed when I called, saying they had never heard of that law (I knew of it because it was printed in the city distributed newsletter). The fire department thanked me for obeying the law and wished more people did.
Most of these issues are solved in the LFTR design, from what I recall. Some of the problems with long term storage after decommission are known only because they mothballed the MSRE. Mainly, they know radioactive fluoride gasses build up, and the cracking issues should be resolved with changes to the blanket.
Oh, and the only reason one hasn't been built is because Nixon killed the program (really, and pretty much exclusively because LWRs meant jobs in California and the MSRE threatened those jobs) and the nuclear industry prefers to stick with their patented designs, which bring more money to Westinghouse and the like. The exact dollar figure invested since Nixon killed the program: $0. Meanwhile, the US has tossed almost $750 billion into IFR with zero success (Russia has had success on a lesser investment). Congress tends to get in the way in the US.
Actually, it is fairly trivial, but not straightforward. The "easy' way is to separate out the Protactinium-233 and ignore U233 (what you want) and U232, which can't easily be separated. Protactinium-233 naturally decays into U-233, however, producing protactinium-233 is undesirable (because it sucks up scarce neutrons - a LFTR produces about 1.07 for every 1) in a LFTR and can be limited or (practically) eliminated by increasing the size of the blanket. Of course, if you WANTED protactinium, you could design your blanket accordingly and separate them, but you need to siphon it off carefully or the reaction will stop and you will need to inject more U233. Obviously leaving the Protactinium in the reactor is fine, as after it decays to U233 it is fuel.
The nice thing about either LFTR or IFR (4th generation reactors) is they burn the actinides off, so the dangerous waste only lasts about 300 years. The US has dumped billions into IFR (about 3/4 of a trillion last I checked, and incidentally, nothing into LFTR) and has zero working reactors. Russia spent far less and has two and is building a third.
LFTR uses liquid Fluoride, not liquid Sodium. More than likely, the water would vaporize due to the extreme heat. If you want to be paranoid about liquid sodium, take a look at the US government and nuclear industry's preferred reactor type, the IFR (integral fast reactor) which uses both high pressure and liquid sodium.
When I was a kid, checking out certain library books immediately put you on an FBI list. Now it's much easier - they just grab all your emails and non-https posts as they get routed through servers and toss them in a file on you. All of your secure emails probably get tossed into an NSA supercomputer and cracked and filed as well. I'm sure visiting certain web sites like fertilizer-R.us or terrorism.com puts you on a watch list as well. No, I'm not paranoid, but my government is.
I think you severely underestimate North Korea - they have an immense reserve army (the largest in the world) in addition to an active army, all brainwashed into unswerving loyalty. Any dissent is punished by 3 generations of imprisonment in a remote work camp (that means you and your next two generations of children grow up with lifetime jail sentences if you are a dissenter, and yes, you get conjugal visits just to create additional generations to punish, but they also are brainwashed with loyalty just like other children). Their special operations forces regularly infiltrate the south but retain complete loyalty to the north. Any invasion by the US would be a massive folly - like Afghanistan but instead of Allah, you have the living god Kim Jong Un and his parents and grandparents to worship.
That said, NK really has no interest in defeating the United States - its main goal is conquering the South and reuniting Korea under the North's oppressive regime and throwing out their "corrupt" western influences. China would actually like it if the North took the South, as it gives them less competition in the region, but if America and South Korea pushed back the North again (highly unlikely given the massive troop numbers they have, but many probably would be armed with little more than pointed sticks - but China did that and just used massive numbers of bodies to win, so NK could, too), they'd more than likely join into the war on the side of the North, as they did in the Korean war. When that happened the US got their butts kicked back from the northern border to where the DMZ is today. A secondary goal of NK is to bomb the shit out of Japan and invade them and torture and kill the entire population in retaliation for the treatment they had under Japan's yoke last century. Koreans hold serious grudges...