15 million dollars in equipment was lost. What's the big deal? I'm sure they spend that much in air-conditioning per day.

From your link:

>The shot resulted in the highest DT neutron yield obtained to date, estimated at nearly 3 × 1015 (three quadrillion), or almost 8,000 joules of fusion energy

And then:

>All 192 NIF beams delivered 1.7 megajoules (MJ) to the hohlraum

That doesn't look like break even...

Fusion achieved. Sometimes we are awesome creatures, congrats to all involved.
And not a minute too soon.

Fair enough, just two questions:
1) An electron hitting an atom will produce photons with the same energy via the Bremsstrahlung effect. As electrons will hit atoms sometimes, 300 MeV electrons means you will have 300 MeV photons, right?
2) How much energy a photon needs to transmute an atom? I believe it's lower than 300 MeV (but as a commenter said, it's 300 MeV *per meter* so really you need a lot of those devices chained together for them to become dangerous, I guess)

Ahh didn't see it was 300 Mev *per meter*. Small detail, thanks!

Unless you can somehow turn down the volume of the device, 300 Mev photons are high-power gamma rays, not x-rays. BTW unlike regular x-rays, at gamma energy levels you can actually activate matter, I.E. turn it radioactive.

Not wifi, wimax, 3g, 4g, ethernet, satellite, etc.
All those tecnologies are just "last-mile" ways to bring data from this big pipes to the users. Internet is made of optical fibre.

Most modern digital oscilloscopes have USB interfaces and are controllable with C or a python api. For example, Rigol scopes have python drivers since some years ago.

The parkes telescope making history again. It is one of my favorites radiotelescopes, it was used to track the apollo 11 mission, and there is a movie documenting this that I highly recommend: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

That huge CPU coupled with the memory and flash disk has to consume arround 200mw, no way it can last more than 1 hour on that tiny battery.
IMHO cramming a 500 MB Linux distro into something that is basically a proxy for google services is a complete waste of resources.

To think the amount of food, power, and time wasted in projects like this one... that only contributes to the ultimate heat-death of the universe.

He is great but he doesn't make miracles ;)

Meet him once, he's awesome, very humble and funny in person. There is a documentary about him even before he became an astronaut. He certainly have the right stuff.

I don't think I can walk for 6 hours, much less spacewalk, and I'm 30. The training of those guys is amazing.