This is a very good thing - it means that scammer have a more difficult job of ripping people off. Anything that pushes the cost/benefit ratio towards being less profitable to defraud should be encouraged.

"I have an amazing investment opportunitiy that will make you a lot of money very quickly but I can't explain the details; just give me your cash and don't ask questions" should always be regarded as a scam until proven otherwise because scammers have been using minor variations of that line for centuries. Legitimate businesses don't need to keep their business models secret and don't promise returns on investment that are mathematically impossible to sustain. Notice that several successful Bitcoin businesses like BitInstant and Bit-Pay don't get constantly accused of being Ponzi schemes. It may be related to the fact that they don't exhibit all the classic signs of one.

Julian Assange will be digitized and smuggled out of the UK via the blockchain while wearing alpaca underwear.

Right, because surrounding the neutron emitters by flammable metals and a convienient source of hydrogen gas is a much better idea than storing it in chemically and radiologically stable salts.

That's not exactly true. There will be some plutonium produced but it won't accumulate in large quantities.

Everything the online reprocessing doesn't remove stays in the fuel salt until it either fissions, decays or get transmuted into something that either fissions or decays. Transuranics will be present in small quantities but once the removal rate matches the production rate they will stay at that equilibrium concentration until the reactor is shut down. Presumably the fuel salt would be reused in the replacement reactor so there is never a need to put transuranics in long term storage.

That's disingenuous. Nobody forces you to use the forum.

The accurate term would be a subscription fee.

If you'd take the time to browse the Wikipedia page on LFTR you might discover that some of your assumptions about it may not be accurate.

My UID is a palindrome: 25252

So someone other than Assange is going to be digitized and smuggled out of the UK?

It was a name invented by Slashdot and it was a real effect. That effect was far more common about 10 years ago than it is now. Back in the early 2000s a mention on the Slashdot front page would regularly bring down unprepared web servers. Note the date on this article: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/10/65165p

At one time there was a Firefox plugin that would automatically add Google Cache, Coral Cache and Mirrordot links to each URL published on Slashdot so that people could still read the original article after the server publishing it had crashed.

Correct about the ET part. The training manuals the Navy uses aren't classified for the science in them; they are classified because they talk about specific design features of naval reactors, and sometimes classified details of other military experiments/prototypes. The basic science of how fission works and now reactors are designed in general is public knowledge and has been for decades.
Any solid object can melt under the right conditions. It is, however, possible to design a nuclear reactor in such a way that the fission that takes place inside it is incapable of producing those conditions.

If "meltdown" is understood to include the effects that are associated with traditional reactor failures such as explosions, fire, plumes of radioactive material being injected into the atmosphere, and a molten blob of radioactive material melting its way into the ground then it is entirely accuate to say that "meltdown" is impossible in a LFTR design because the elements which produce those outcomes in a solid-fueled reactor do not exit.

This isn't PhD material nor classified. I said that my particular textbook was classified but the same information is available on Wikipedia or any college textbook.

The reason I keep mentioning college physics textbooks is because I assume that anyone who declares that a fundemental property of reactor design is "bullshit" has at least some educational background in the subject to be able to make such a definitive claim.

Or maybe not. I could have been right the first time and the person in question has no understanding of physics or engineering and is just displaying his emotional baggage on the Internet.

You're just making yourself look like an ass and displaying your own ignorance. The effect of temperature on fission rates isn't something new - it's was already well-understood physics by 1950.

Any college physics textbook should describe the phenomenon and give you the information and the background to understand it.

If you're genuinely interested then my suggestion to find textbook was serious. To really understand you need to start from first principles of subatomic physics and work your way up to the macro implications. The specific term I was referring to is "temperature coefficient of reactivity". I can't recommend any of the textbooks I learned from because they are all considered Classified - you'd have to enlist with the Evil Empire to get access to them.

I understand that you have some kind of anxiety problem and want to manage it by controlling the facts you are exposed to but you really should really find a more productive way to deal with it.

A therapist could help you out with the anxiety and a physics textbook could rectify the deficiencies in your understanding of how nuclear reactions work.

The situation is so completely different than what happens in a traditional reactor that it's deceptive to use the same word to describe it.

First of all the reactor couldn't operate at full power with no cooling for more than a very short period of time because of physics. High temperatures shut down the fission reaction.

Even if there was fracture in the reactor vessle or associated piping you wouldn't get an explosion, fire, uncontrolled criticiality resulting in a "China Syndrome", or massive release of airborne radioactivitiy

There would be a mess on the floor which would cool and freeze into an inert solid.

Please explain what a "meltdown" means in the context of a liquid fueled reactor?

Read the Wikipedia article; it covers most of the basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR. Take particular note of the "Safety" section. There are no high pressures in this design, nor flammable metals which generate explosive hydrogen gas when they get hot enough (zirconium).

There was a test reactor that was successfully built and operated from 1964-1969, based on a set of ideas that had been floating around the Manhatten Project engineers since 1945. All the possible show-stoppng engineering challenges were solved during that set of experiments.

The LFTR design can burn a wide variety of fuels, or even a mixture of them. It could be started on waste from existing reactors, or on uranium recovered from dismantled nuclear reactors, or on the same mined and enriched natural uranium that power existing reactors. It can also burn plutonium. It could take all the waste that's building up around existing plants, recover more energy from it, and convert into something that only requires 300 years of long term storage instead of 10000.

The only reason this technology didn't take off in the 1960s is because of politics. There is no engineering or technological reason this shouldn't have been done 40 years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI

That does not preclude the existance of wallet software which could optionally send the payments automatically, without requiring user intervention each time.

Most of the comments were mud slinging vis a vis the drug war and very few were actually about Bitcoin.

This story will hit the front page of Slashdot shortly.