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).

Well, you could always turn the crackpipe around on them and let them burn their lips. The equipment is available to anyone. Used/refurbished, even.

http://www.testequipmentdepot....

Stream the data realtime to storage in a non-Five-Eyes nation. Maybe Ecuador? They are not too happy with the US/Airstrip One about now.

Strat

And equipment to do the same thing to them is easily obtainable by the public.

http://www.testequipmentdepot....

If it's not illegal for them to do without a judge/warrant then it's not illegal for citizens either. Just make sure to stream the data obtained in realtime to storage located outside the Five Eyes nations.

Strat

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.

n/t

No, I was just trying to put myself in the head of the wack-a-doodles who think that FB & Google are out to get them in particular, rather than to just make billions of $$$s.

Because that is exactly how the free market works.

"Free market power companies." Cool, where can I get one?

The ones I have available are state-granted monopolies (fascism). They take any operating profits and pay a "healthy" dividend to investors - there's no need to invest in future-benefit infrastructure because the PUC will always give them a rate increase if they can show present supply and demand data, discounting all past squandered opportunity. It would be foolish for them to ever do anything else because they face no competitive pressure.

That's where solar comes in ... the only feasible competition to the extant fascisitic power system. Solar itself isn't that smart, but a second choice is leagues better than no choice at all.

Daimler and dozens of other companies have been doing battery storage power facilities for decades before Tesla existed.

Is it just that Tesla has better marketing? Because none of these other "players" have put out a press release with a website to sign up for an install in the next year, at functional prices, that I've ever seen.

Links appreciated to equivalent product, since Tesla sold out before the SolarCity offices opened in my state (the drywall is still going in).

they didn't stop to think if they should.

They definitely should. It's a great connector - everything will be using it in the near future and then for a long time. I have twenty solder-pad connectors on the way from China for a "completely unrelated" project prototype (unrelated to anything USB has been proposed for - not even for traditional "computers", really).

If you think Micro-A USB is popular, wait until you see your grandkids getting devices with USB-C. Sure, it's no Anderson Powerpole, but it's the next-best thing.

People can have their Centronics parallel, HD-15 and RJ-45 crap - I'll take something less onerous, expensive, and/or fragile any day!

At least Hot Topic owning ThinkGeek was amusing

I think, of the two, Hot Topic could have significantly grown the brand - and ultimately that would have been good for geekdom, writ large.

Not sure how the deal is being structured, but if it's a stock deal, this is bad for shareholders. Gamers aren't going to spend their cash on a bunch of crap that they can't play and non-gamer geeks aren't going to go hang around in Gamestop shopping for stuff with all the smelly gamers in there. Whatever the difference per diluted share Gamestop is bringing, that'll all get pissed away within the first year.

One presumes, though, that it's a partial cash deal and the extra dozen-million bucks or so will be split up among the managers. So ... good news for the competition. Around here we have a chain called Newbury Comics that competes in this space. Right now is the time for them to get a huge funding round...

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.

It is indiscriminate, but then, I have different job search requirements than you do, likely.

I would never put all my eggs in one or two baskets. This is a perfect match market, and one or two companies isn't enough for a good job search.

Monster.com. Dice.com. Simplyhired.com. LinkedIn.com There are millions of sites, you just have to tune your searches.

After 12 years of doing that, I became so well known that now recruiters call me, several times a week.