The whole pulsed laser fusion effort turned out to be a cover for nuclear weapons research. It lets Lawerence Livermore study H-bomb like fusion reactions on a convenient scale. With a gym-sized bank of lasers aimed at a single point, they can pump enough energy into a tiny space to force fusion. That's a research tool.

So is the Z-machine, for much the same reason. It's yet another pulsed-fusion machine relying on inertial containment.

The tokamak crowd has at least been able to hold a fusion reaction together for 400ms or so. But plasma instability is the curse of all tokamak designs, including ITER. There's much doubt that ITER will work. It's conjectured that a bigger plasma will be more stable, but many physicists question this. ITER has become a pork program, though, and it's hard to stop. Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.

Right now, the new generation of stellerators looks more promising than the tokamaks.

Exactly. As one of the people who spends time cleaning up stuff like that, it's seriously annoying. Fortunately, the tools for automatic jerk identification are improving.

The paid editors are even worse. But they have a recognizable editing pattern; they write PR-type prose. Self-promotion on Wikipedia used to be mostly from garage bands. Now it's more corporate. (Also, the self-promoting garage bands have been replaced by self-promoting DJs.)

This is Minecraft reduced to a 2D sidescroller. With the graphics of the 2D sidescroller era.

If you go too far down, you can fall off the bottom of the world.

Handling layout as a constraint-based system would be promising. If you could represent layout with "upper left corner of box A coincident with upper right corner of box B", or "left edge of box B coincident with right edge of box A", you could represent any box layout. This isn't a notation to be written as text by humans; it's something you do in a layout GUI. Autodesk Inventor, which is a 3D CAD program, has a constraint solver for things like this. 2D is much easier. You could even support curved box boundaries. The browser has to run a constraint solver, but that's not hard for the rectangular-box case.

In the end, CSS didn't matter, because now everybody uses some non-HTML "content management system".

Agreed. The float/clear approach to layout is 1-dimensional, and just stupid. Someone suggested using some boilerplate library for grid-based layout. That's a horrible hack; it gets vertical alignment with code like .container .two.columns { width: 76px; }. "Fluid layout", hah! Some libraries have a layout engine written in Javascript. There's far too much fixed-width stuff like that since CSS came in. With tables, you can express width as a percentage of the page, or let cells self-adjust to content width. Tables have come back for layout purposes. They're now called "layout tables", to avoid humiliating the CSS fanboys. They're just tables.

Then there's absolute positioning, or "now the layout can be screwed up so bad that some text is off the page and can't be reached by scrolling".

Amazon paid $750 million for Kiva Systems robotics, with about 500 employees. A workable solution to the bin-picking problem would create a company with at least that much value.

The rules say "Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations." Or, "we want to steal your technology".

Painfully true. I saw the pilot. I won't be watching any more episodes. The show didn't have to be that lame. In Tokyo Airport, a Japanese drama, a similar problem occurs. The controllers get out hand-held radios and their final backup, a big hand-held spotlight with red and green lenses.

It's a painful demonstration of the fact that Hollywood has an idea shortage. Almost everything is either a sequel, or awful, or by Joss Whedon. The most successful trend in Hollywood now is mining old Marvel comic books for second and third tier characters who haven't had a movie yet. The second most successful trend is recycling novels from the Teen Paranormal Romance section.

Then there's CBS, the Police Procedural Network.

The Oculus Rift tracking method, with various lights blinking at different rates, was first used in Twinkle Box, in 1974. It was really clunky then. They had to use rotating-disk cameras because vidicons had too much lag, and the wearer had to wear a big electronics box. Same idea, though.

This is the guy behind PayPal talking. Before PayPal, he traded derivatives. After PayPal, he ran a hedge fund. He says "We live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age," said Thiel. "We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it."

He's pointing out that runaway capitalism and finance is the problem. He ought to know.

We used to have a simpler, and more locked-down, financial system in the US. Banks accepted deposits, lent money, and handled cash. They weren't allowed to buy and sell stocks. Trading derivatives was definitely out. Brokers did stock transactions for others; brokerage firms didn't trade much for their own accounts. There were mutual funds, regulated by the SEC. Houses were financed mostly by savings and loan companies, which were mostly local and sent people out to check on building sites.

This worked well until the Reagan years, and the beginnings of financial deregulation. S&L and bank executives wanted the freedom to take more risks with other people's money. Within a few years of S&L deregulation, the savings and loan industry tanked. Within a few years of bank deregulation, the banking industry tanked. There's kind of a pattern there.

"Real Genius. (1985)

Only to a topologist is a stellarator a torus. But, yes, stellarators have fewer stability problems, and after three decades of torii, they're starting to come back.

Here's the project conference poster. "Total equipment cost for the development path is less than $1 billion". Nothing on the poster, though, indicates why this should work. It's yet another torus-based design, of which there have been many. The best performance to date is from the Joint European Torus: "In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10MW sustained for over 0.5 sec."

All torus designs run into plasma instability problems. So far, nobody has a working solution. Nobody even has a good theoretical solution. No combination of fixed magnets has yet worked. There's some modest interest in active feedback for stabilization, and some modest success has been reported. The instabilities are on the order of milliseconds, so active feedback is quite feasible.

Even ITER probably won't work. The thinking behind ITER was originally "maybe it will become more stable if we make it bigger." Now, a little "maybe the feedback control people can make it work" has been added. It's not looking good, which is why there really isn't that much enthusiasm for ITER.

That may give you some rights. Post a link to the EULA, please.

Their router may be trying to distinguish, as Windows and most things that connect through WiFi now have to, between real Internet connectivity and fake Internet connectivity. Fake Internet connectivity is when some WiFi access point hijacks all DNS requests to take you to some login web page or ad. So, many devices try to connect to some known site which produces a known response to verify that they can connect to the outside world.

It's the choice of "known site", and not having alternatives for it, that's the problem.

Did Belkin tell you their router was dependent on their site being up?

"When I die, the world ends." - Belkin policy