Curse my A.D.D. :/ Sorry about that.

Anyone with 5 years of experience can make $120k easily in Atlanta.

Sure, but it's a bit disingenuous to not mention the $85k/year spent on air-conditioning :)

I'd like to think ...

I suggest trying to avoid holding a given belief just because you like it.

STEM jobs are far less about theory and more about practical applications.

Ah! Welcome, web developer!

Why did you bother? I'm assuming from your low /. ID number that you're well out of high school.

If you want a non-bullshit view of Tesla, read his patents. His real achievement was that he figured out most of the kinds of modern AC motors. It's not at all obvious how you get an AC motor started and turning in the right direction. Clever tricks with bits of copper in the magnetic circuit are used to bias starting direction, and synchronous motors start up as induction motors. Tesla worked all that out. It's very elegant. AC machine design is hard, and, unlike DC machine design, requires calculus. That was a big jolt for engineering at the time. Nothing before had required that much math to make it work.

You can also read his thinking about the Wardenclyffe tower in his patents. He had RF propagation all wrong. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. His plan was to punch through to the ionosphere by ionizing a path all the way up (!), and transmit power and signals conductively, using the ionosphere and the ground as a pair of conductors.

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.)

We've been "making progress" in fusion research for 50 years now and still are no where close to turning Pinocchio into a real boy.

You can't know that, unless you have foreknowledge of exactly which steps will have proven necessary to accomplish the ultimate goal.

Sorry, 70s level tech is a still massive, massive, massive interconnected tech tree reaching across the globe with billions of people involved and billions of tonnes of industrial equipment involving over a hundred elements comprising hundreds of thousands of compounds used to produce tens of millions of types of industrial components.

Just think of the concept of a petrochemicals industry on Mars where you lack oil as an input - petrochemicals having a tremendous range of differing properties being one of the most fundamental aspects for modern space technology. Your first step has to be to make oil in the first place, which means freezing out CO2 from Mars's incredibly sparse atmosphere. You also have to spend a tremendous amount of energy electrolysing mined water ice (mining being a very resource-and-wear intensive process) to make hydrogen (which tends to embrittle the materials that work with it, and electrolysis itself is hardly a wear-free process - and we won't even get into the power aspect). Then you need to make town gas from a high temperature catalyst bed reaction (which you poison with time and have to regenerate, and repair the reactor itself). Then you have to turn the town gas into oil via fischer-tropsch, again, another high temperature catalyst bed reaction. But the chains from fischer-tropsch aren't going to be suitable for all products, so there's a number of other processes with various consumables. Then you've got your right mix of hydrocarbons, but that's hardly all you need, most petrochemical products aren't just carbon and hydrogen, there's chlorine, fluorine, and all sorts of other things to react with it in many different processes, nasty chemicals with long tails... it's just a tremendously, tremendously difficult task.

This stuff is very hard to do as-is on Earth with massive resources and international trade and billions of people. On Mars? No time soon, that's for sure...

Except for the fact that to maintain that crew with sledgehammers, you have to make sledgehammers (yes, they do wear), but more importantly, to maintain your crew you need and vast quantities of food, oxygen, CO2 scrubbing, space suits and repairs, lodging, light, medicine, and about 50 other things, each of which have massive interlocked tech trees of their own.

You've made the problem far worse, not better.

Then we get into the efficiency problem. Yes, you *can* cut efficiency - for example, using super-slow, inefficient processors in your example. But every time you cut efficiency on one thing, you increase the demands on everything else. You can afford to lose some degree of efficiency, but what you absolutely can't do is just act like it's a nothing thing.

And it's not like you face this efficiency problem for just one thing - say, processors. You face it for *everything*. Want to cut the list of plastics you have to manufacture? Sure, you can, but that means that you're going to have parts in different environments wear down and break faster, which means more replacement parts. Want to use iron magnets? Fine, but that means that your motors are going to have to be way larger and heavier, which means a lot more manufacturing for all of the other components and a lot more wear on your machines from the added weight. And on and on down the line.

If your response to the tech tree problem is just "simplify even if it costs you efficiency", you're going to eliminate yourself from the game long before you've simplified even a percent of the tech tree.

Most of the ethics questions around Alexander involve his company IronNet Cybersecurity. He founded it when he retired. He's charging big banks $1,000,000 a month to protect them in cyberspace, and its not exactly clear what he has to offer to justify the price tag, other than classified insider knowledge of cyber threats from his NSA years, he probably shouldn't be selling to the highest bidder.

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.