Realistically that, or a surfeit of pedestrian overpasses, is the only thing that would ever remove any chance of an unfortunate vehicle encounter outside a school. People can be assholes behind the wheel just as easily as anywhere else, and it only takes one.

Well, yes, less is better, but the point is, we're still going to need the holes in the ground. Just not as many or as large.

Posted article indicates that even if the experiment performs to expectations, there will still be waste to be disposed of. They hope to convert most of the nasty, longer-lived radionucleides into something useful, but most is not all. Plus, part of their selling point is conversion into medical radionucleide sources, and to be honest, the market there isn't all that big (like, "a single reactor in Canada supplied a high percentage of these sources for many years" not-that-big). It can probably absorb the output of this reactor, but ramp the idea up into a general solution for all nuclear waste everywhere, and we'll likely end up with more medical and industrial radionucleide sources than we know what to do with.

(There's also the question of what kinds of waste could be reprocessed. Only enriched waste from light-water reactors? What about waste from heavy-water reactors, which tends to be bulkier but considerably less radioactive?)

Completely separate discussion. Making accommodations to keep living humans safe is good and reasonable. (Keep in mind that in the pre-automobile era, there was no safe way to cross a busy street—you stepped out and hoped you didn't get run down by a horse.) But a robot is a tool, not a person, and changes that make traffic easier to navigate for robots may be even more unhelpful for human pedestrians than the current status quo.

On the one hand, the Russian government deserves some punishment for its actions over the past few years.

On the other hand, this is a trivial symbolic gesture at most and Gretzky's endorsement makes it feel icky.

Quest for Odin is the only anime I have ever fallen asleep during. Take that as you will.

Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn't help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you're talking to a human.

Well, pretty much everyone in the first season of Promised Neverland is good at mind games, regardless of their role in the story. (As for the second season, it never existed, m'kay?)

Might be nice for a certain age group to make them evaluate multiple search engines as a class project. ("If it provided a summary, did it say what its sources were?" "When you checked the sources, did they actually say what the summary said they said?" "How many actual results did it return for these searches?" "How many of the results on the first page were useful?" etc.) Improved media literacy in general, and they all learn that more than one search engine exists.

Actually, "beg the question" is a linguistic fossil from a time when "beg" didn't mean quite the same thing it does today.

Yeah, but you would think they would have gotten them off the Internet after the first time this happened, even if it means having to hire an extra person to keep an eye on them.

I seem to recall that there have been cases where it turned out that the kids planted the needles in a bid for attention. So: might be real, but not guaranteed by a long shot.