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Comment Re:This is a great example. (Score 2) 144

Well.... any long-term confined high temperature isotropic quasi-neutral maxwellian plasma has to be large. Of course, if you start changing those requirements, you start changing the required size for your reactor. It's not theoretically impossible to have a viable fusion power plant that does not follow those constraints; the challenge is achieving it without either imposing a new, even more onerous series of challenges on yourself. Drop the concept of long-term confinement (for example, inertial confinement) and you find yourself with incredibly extreme compression challenges and having to deal with blowing your target apart on every fire. Don't use a quasi-neutral plasma and the plasma density drops by orders of magnitude, meaning your fusion rate drops so low that even little losses in the system will kill the concept. Don't use a maxwellian plasma and you have to find a way to hold the plasma away from thermalization without wasting more energy than the fusion yield, which is impossible by simply applying energy to part or all of the plasma - it's only even theoretically possible if you accelerate only the highest energy ions, creating a plasma only slightly skewed from a thermal distribution, and even if you have such a means, it's not easy. And so forth. You can remove constraints on fusion but then you get hit by others.

Unlike many here, I don't see it as an impossible problem simply because it hasn't been made economical yet despite decades of work. Because in those decades of work there's been orders of magnitude improvement, and I don't see those improvements just suddenly ceasing across every line of research. But no question, this is a Difficult Problem(TM).

Comment Re:Hardware Companies & Telecoms Have Too Much (Score 1) 131

I assume it's reading something off the SIM or on the network, or the carriers are intercepting the "is their a new update" query.

Try this: shut down the device, pull the SIM out, turn it on, connect to Wi-Fi, and manually check for updates. Or is it actually storing what it finds through the SIM?

Comment Re:Linux Mint gets it right. (Score 2) 155

I just tore apart my home lab and I'm reassembling it, reshuffling some motherboards and hard drives.

Tried tossing my Windows drive on a new motherboard. It just crashed.

I found *one* disk from my PC-BSD desktop. Plugged it into the oldest motherboard I could find and it just worked(tm). Missing half of the zfs mirror on completely different hardware.

Between ports, pkg and their installer program software is easier than elsewhere.

I honestly wished that Windows 10 would be them scrapping everything and going with a *BSD. (Just like OS X). Admit defeat, and start over with a different code base. No one knows or cares how it works, just that it does. Apple has managed to move complete platforms 4 times (68k -> PPC, OS 9 -> OS X, PPC->Intel, Intel->ARM). Microsoft has just released C# as open source. It shouldn't be hard.

Then everyone who knows and wants a command prompt will have a real one instead of a half assed Power Shell (or as it is everywhere else Batch file).

Nvidia releases hardware drivers for it. PS4 is based on it (Meaning AMD has drivers for it).

Comment Re:Linux Mint gets it right. (Score 1) 155

> If any program freezes, the WHOLE DESKTOP freezes

That's what this release specifically addresses.

"In case of a freeze or if you need to restart Cinnamon for any reason, you can now do so via a keyboard shortcut. The default key combination is Ctrl+Alt+Escape. Pressing this combination of keys restarts nemo and cinnamon-settings-daemon in case they had crashed, and launches a brand new instance of the Cinnamon desktop," said Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project.

They also claim boosts in speed:

Also, the devs have explained that it's no longer necessary to recompile Cinnamon to choose between consolekit and logind support, the load times have been greatly improved, the CPU usage has been diminished by about 40%, and the support for multiple monitors has been improved as well.

"Un-necessary calculations in the window management part of Cinnamon could also be dropped, leading to reduced idle CPU usage (about 40% reduction in the number of CPU wakes per second)," Lefebvre also noted.

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