If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.

Maybe, but the other possibility is that the model has always been wrong.

It was always assumed, "we're going to put thing n into space" - how much is that going to cost?

When the question instead became, "we're going to put things into space for $50M - how are we going to do that?" a whole new engineering methodology unfolded.

I've spent time at a plasma physics lab - they're amazing, and everything inside is amazing, and massive, and expensive. The scale of some of the things is enough to make a nerd giddy.

But maybe it's not the right approach to actually solving the problem. I'll forgo the cynicism and not assert that it was the right approach for getting lots of grant money over the years, because fusion is one of the three key technologies of the 21st century's technological revolution (genetic engineering and AI being the other two breakthroughs about to happen; computing is just evolutionary at this point).

For that matter, another good parallel between the Paul family and fascism is in the wikipedia entry on Benito Moussolini:

Going on...

Team America: World Police.

Seriously, though, we all know (or those of us with CT experience), that the only programs that have worked are those in the Middle East and nearby countries. Spying on Americans in America has proved very worthless. Traditional police investigations using targetted individual warrants and traditional police interrogation (not torture) have resulted in all the successes to date.

We need to stop wasting time on promoting Fear to justify wasting taxes on unneeded spying and focus on the true threats, which are not here.

That said, expect numerous false flag media reports over the next few weeks in a vain attempt to prove we should all live in Fear.

For all *you* care. But thousands of other people (and a growing number at that) watch the videos. Is it okay if we run a few video pieces for them? Please? Maybe three or four a week? We'd appreciate it. Thx

Wow. I would *love* to have budget to turn out 23-minute scripted, animated videos. That would be GREAT!

These videos are "Meet the Press" style on purpose. They exist to let you see some of the people behind the software, stories, and hardware they (or their companies) make. Steven, for instance, is one of the world's more popular tech journalists. Next time you see his byline, you can mentally call up his image. You may not want to do that, but others obviously do; thousands of people watch /. videos.

I agree with you about charts and graphs, up to a point. And people who have some sort of device or whatever should have a working model to show off. Otherwise, it's like my favorite PR pet peeve: Sending out a press release about a google glass look-sort-of-alike thing that is only a display and saying, "...I would love to schedule an interview for you with a Vufine team member." Instead of a review unit? Come on!

This is not a hypothetical situation. It's a press release I got today from this company: http://www.vufine.com/

Obviously, a hands-on test of an eyeglass-mount projector would be more informative than either a video or text interview -- and more fun for me, too. Why didn't they offer a test unit? Not to keep, of course. Just for a few days. Hmm?

Back to the talking head syndrome. I've made a lot of screencap videos, TV news shorts, online ad videos, TV spots, and a few music videos. So yeah, I can do fairly complex video work. 30 cuts in a 60 second piece? Sure. I've done that. BUT here we're sharing information, and a lot of it is pretty dry. We have no budget for motion video or animation, either. I could have included some shots of Steven's articles and pics of TV antennas, cableco logos, and other pieces of "visual interest." If you and a bunch of others feel the extra work/time/money is worthwhile, I'm happy to do that in future videos.

There's a whole other reason for videos of people talking: You know they're not being misquoted. Raw source material protects you against reporters changing meanings or opinions. I've been the misquoted person more than once, and I didn't like it. Even in a case like today's, where we ran a 4 minute video and 20 minutes' worth of text transcript, you can reasonably (and correctly) assume that I have the rest of the interview on a hard drive somewhere. Accuracy insurance.

Audio only? Be my guest! Listen to this video's audio on your smartphone while driving if you like. 100% up to you. But if it was sound only, you wouldn't have the option of watching the video. I was talking with someone else today about video vs. audio podcasts. His company did audio casts for a while, but he says they got a lot more response when they switched to video. And they do *not* provide transcripts.

A lot of this discussion falls into the "can't please everyone" category. Some people prefer watching people talk to reading what they say. (I'm a reader, myself.) But some people prefer visual information intake. Not you, obviously -- which is okay. Read the transcripts, don't watch or listen to the videos.

Last note: You said, "(I need to point out that anyone can grab a camera and record someone talking for ten minutes. What makes Slashdot better than all the YouTube teenagers who do this for their HS project? You have the intent, time, and money to do this. Do it right, then learn to do it well.)"

Geez! You're big on catching flies with vinegar, aren't you? :)

BUT if making simple videos is all that easy, why have we only gotten *one* usable video actually submitted by a Slashdot reader - ever? And it was over an hour long, and our management now wants our videos to be under 5 minutes. So we ran an excerpt of the guy's video and provided a link to the full-length version at his (non-commercial) site.

I have a guy who offered himself up for an interview because he though his product was better than one we did a video about. He does some interesting stuff I'm sure at least some /. readers will enjoy learning about. I'm going to try to schedule him in for next week, and see if he has any raw product demo footage around that I can use to make the video more interesting.

Do you have a video you want to run on Slashdot? Or a topic suggestion? Happy to check them out. Use the usual submission bin or email robin at roblimo dot com.

Thx.

Perl updates for the past ten years have been mostly unloved features and cruft. If 5.6 didn't get the job done then 5.22 won't either.

This is just a "look at me, I'm uninformed about the languages landscape" post (good thing you went AC). Like Perl or not, most people who care about open source development know that the Perl nuts have been busy backporting the ideas that were supposed to show up in Perl 6 to Perl 5.

Whether or not that goes anywhere is separate from being ignorant about what's going on.

Isn't Ruby the true heir to Perl, though?

That was the theory. People got tired of waiting for a fast, memory-efficient runtime. Python is faster, if you have tremendous amounts of memory and can accept the syntax.

That perl hasn't been supplanted by a better scripting language doesn't say as much about perl as about everything else. There's some scuttlebut that Rust may do that, but it's early days and Mozilla still has plenty of opportunity to destroy it.

All your base is belong to NSA. Currently there are no non-frontdoor secure systems.

n/t