That is the next stage of development. When they say "the design can be built and tested within a year", they're talking about the smaller proof of concept versions. They are aiming for a full-scale prototype within 10 years.

Run out of oil? You do realize that we are constantly running out of oil, and the oil companies have just gotten really good at finding new sources? The latest breakthroughs are twofold:

• Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", making accessible broad swaths of previously unharvestable shale oil.
• New reserves opening up in the Arctic, primarily opening up due to longer summers and milder winters melting the ice caps.

How long do you think before these sources dry up, like every other source before them already has? Pennsylvania, Texas, and California all used to be world-class suppliers of oil. Saudi Arabia is believed to have reached its peak oil extraction and is declining, although they won't admit to it. And do we really want to count it as a good thing that global scale climate change has opened up more fossil fuels with which we can induce even more global scale climate change?

And as for trees, deforestation in northern Europe had major economic consequences and contributed to the constant stream of instability and war over the last 3000 years. The Amazonian rainforest and the African jungles are our largest remaining reserves of trees, and the Brazilians are in the process of systematically clearing them for farmland. But we won't run out of trees. Unlike fossil fuels or water, it is possible to grow enough of certain trees (especially pine) to sustain forest ecosystems and supply human needs.

Water, at least, is a bit more abundant, but still not renewable. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.

And I suppose you have magical powers that let you convert mass into energy at will? And E is measured in Joules, or for some reason when we're talking about electricity consumption, Kilowatt-Hours. 1 Megawatt would mean 1 Megajoule per second. In any case, the energy source is still your magical mass-to-energy power, not the concrete.

If An Atomic Bomb Explodes...

Bomb Safety Drill from Matinee (1993)

Unfortunately the video does not quite touch on the lynchpin of the operation: how they are achieving the high ß. He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself, but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself. If it's as simple as superconducting magnets, then what makes this a breakthrough? Is it just another useful but ignored approach like Thorium reactors?

An idea I've been rattling around in my head recently is that marriage may have actually been about clan building. Think about it: the oldest traditions of marriage involve the wife going off to be with the husband, at a time when families otherwise tended to stick pretty close together. There were many arranged marriages often made for strategic reasons, even among the common people in smaller tribes. The husband even had to pay the wife's family a dowry - presumably because they were essentially buying a young, healthy worker away from her family. On top of that, polygamy was also very common. What's the overall result? Birthing HUGE numbers of children all definitely belonging to the same tribe (at least the boys), despite high mortality rates for childbirth. Since the wives go off to be with the husband's family, they aren't striking out on their own or finding any kind of balance; they just are part of this large, loyal hierarchy that ultimately can accomplish more together. And according to the book of Genesis in the bible, this was God's plan to raise up the nation of Israel. Even if you don't believe the story, the people of the resulting ancient nation must have thought it plausible and believed it; otherwise it would not still be held up as part of the foundational story of three major religions.

Of course there's no use for clan building now. We have enough people and enough newer and fairer ways of organizing people. But this kind of marriage tradition could bootstrap a nation in a time when there was no such thing as national loyalty.

P.S.: According to tradition, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, Israel's brother that Abraham conceived with a slave woman because he doubted God's word that he would conceive with his wife. Ishmael and his mother were then cast out into the wilderness because Israel's mother was jealous. Just a little wrinkle in Arab-Israeli relations of which most of them are probably aware but most Americans, even alleged Christians, probably aren't.

In name (and ritual) only.

It only takes 18 years of supervision to raise one child. With two or three, you're looking at about 19-24 years of child rearing, only half of which really takes constant supervision, the rest of which take a bit more intelligence and emotional stamina but less physical presence. Between the age of 20 and 65, that leaves you another ~20 years with no children in the home. Have fun.

An objective of maintaining order is not bad. It's also not necessary to be some evil subjugation of our right to define "love" however we please. Government just chooses to recognize and encourage an institution which existed otherwise. You'll notice that the United States state and federal governments have been slowly legalizing one type of marriage over the loud objections of some of the population, primarily because the the government does not define marriage in terms of what kinds of love are legitimate or not. Government makes the exact same argument that you do, that it's not their responsibility to tell you what "love" is. It's only the proto-fascist religious zealots who think it is.

You must work in a pretty dedicated corner of open source to think that you can actually get all your flaws fixed. I myself write and post patches to fix bugs and my patches are ignored like the bug doesn't exist. I've got a nice suite of patched open source projects since the flaw was in my way and I needed it gone. Getting other people to do stuff you want, even if it's as simple as accept a patch to make their own project work better, is non-trivial. 100x as much when you're dealing with proprietary code.

OK, so we can't give the tasks to fresh recruits. So we give them to people who have 5+ years with C++. What happens when those people disappear? What happens when you can't find enough engineers anymore with the kind of experience? How do you get from zero knowledge to competence in not blowing up C++, if not by actually blowing it up a few times?

If you don't like the mess in C++, find a better language and use that. C++ is actually the most popular language for performance-critical code? Hm, I wonder how that happened? Because of or despite its C compatibility?

The world is full of bad technology that is popular because its version 1.0 was really popular at the time. The fact we still use all of it says something about the market for technology; apparently, backwards compatibility to a fault makes for more long-term popular systems than do-it-right-this-time. It is, unfortunately, the way of the computer industry. Or fortunately, if you need a job.

I've seen it suggested elsewhere that people who delay marriage and live together for a while first get separated as frequently or perhaps more than people who get married quickly. Which is right? Or is it just that the years spent living together are basically a lower stakes version of the first couple of years of marriage, which are when most divorces happen otherwise?

It sounds like you aren't a couple of shallow narcissists and you both have strong community support structures. Those, in my opinion are the most important parts; the parts about money and honeymoon I think are only important to preventing friction in less stable relationships. It's all statistics anyway; the correlations might be useful for predicting the success of a marriage, but they are only about as valuable as the odds in a horse race. What we really want to do is control the outcome, but we can't figure out how with just the odds. A controlled scientific study is the only way to get that kind of certainty, and I don't know how you would design one. I strongly suspect nobody does.

(for those who aren't aware of how the mod system works, PineHall posting a comment cancels all of his/her previous moderation in this story and prevents further moderation; posting the comment undid the mistake)