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).

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.

No, I haven't submitted a paper on it. It's just a concept that I'm still working on at this point, and I want to have a proper simulation to back it up.

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

Oh, god, space technology is full of brilliant hacks. For example, New Horizons' radio. It has two amps connected to one dish, designed as a primary and a backup. But while it was en route, an engineer hit upon an idea to have them both transmit at the same time through the same dish, doubling the bandwidth. Normally that wouldn't make sense, except that the amplifiers have signals with different polarization, and these can be separated back out on Earth.

Great, except for one problem. The second radio was designed as a backup, they weren't planned for simultaneous operation - so there's not enough power to run them both and everything else at the same time. There's barely enough power to run just the radios - and I mean, it's not like you can just shut off the flight computer to free up more power. Well... actually, that's exactly what they do. When have a ton of data accumulated that they want to get to Earth and no critical science to do, they spin the craft up like a bullet to keep it stable and the dish pointing at Earth. Then they shut down the whole guidance and control system and pretty much everything else on the craft not essential for reading and transmitting data. It stays in this mode for days for a week or two, until all of the onboard data is transmitted, then they spin it back down so that they can do things like take pictures once again.

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...

all of them will only offer one because of the rampant stupidity of the Consumers to want smaller and lighter.

Sadly most laptop consumers are weak waifs that can barely carry 3 pounds. Those of us that do real work on laptops want a 21 pound 21" laptop with at least 10 USB ports 2 serial and frigging lasers.

Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.

What sort of environmentalists have you been hanging around with? Environmentalist opposition to dams is so well known that "blowing up dams" is one of the cliche stereotypes of "eco-terrorists".

The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident.

Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.

What on Earth are you talking about? Did the government foot the bill after the Deepwater Horizon incident? After any of the coal ash slurry failures? Of course not, the companies responsible did, and it cost them an utter fortune. The difference here is that unlike with nuclear power, their liability is uncapped. With nuclear power, the liability in the case of catastrope is a cost borne by taxpayers.

If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance.

Which is why BP and the coal mining companies responsible are now bankrupt?

And FYI, industries carrying major risk are effectively required to have what amounts to insurance against those who go bankrupt. It's called Superfund, and it's supported by taxes on polluting industries - a "polluter pays" principle. Price-Anderson is based on a "public pays" principle. The money to cleanup in the event of a major nuclear disaster (over $12B) doesn't even come from a levy on the nuclear power industry. In fact, there is no money there for such a cleanup, the government is just supposed to come up with it if it happens. Fukushima for example is expected to cost over $100B in direct cleanup costs alone, let alone the much larger potential liability for claims.

So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either.

Um, yes they are. You mention Deepwater Horizon. Are you unaware that it was insured, with liability coverage?

To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.

To wit, once again, the company didn't go bankrupt. They minimized the cost through a very effective legal campaign, of course. The government did not socialize the damages; it remained their responsibility to pay them. The fact that they managed to weasel out of having to pay a lot of what they should have paid doesn't change who the responsible party was. Nor does it make it logical that the solution to companies like Exxon weaseling out of payments is to have the government assume liability for major disasters and let those who caused them off the hook.

THIS PROGRAM HAS DONE ITS JOB

If you mean creating a small number of jobs, like hiring professional sock puppets to troll social media, to try to sway people who can't think rationally ... then maybe you have a point, AC!

Tell me again about how the economy will collapse without slavery - I love it when you government types talk dirty. Hey, maybe the TSA could get some training on that? A junket to Hawaii maybe?

The Soviets were hardly unique in terms of bad reactor design. Have you seen the design used for the British Windscale plant? It makes you want to hit your head against a wall when you read it. They literally just stuck canisters of fuel into holes in the wall, hit them in by hand with ram rods, and hoped that the old canisters would fall out the back into a narrow trench of water. The designers got mad and nearly derailed it when one physicist wanted to put a really trivial pollution scrubber on the stack; they taunted him over it afterwards for wasting money. Now, saying "canisters" makes it sound fancier than they were, they were basically glorified aluminum cans full of highly flammable uranium, stuck into a hot reactor. Then they changed their fuel mix that they put inside without redoing any of the engineering. Including having them full of more flammable stuff like lithium and magnesium metal. And then they cut off the cooling fins from the canisters. Their monitoring was so poor that when the system inevitably caught fire they didn't notice it for days. They then went down there and started poking around in a hole with the ramrod; it came out covered in molten uranium.

Chernobyl was a paragon of safety compared to Windscale.

Yeah, it seems thorium has become the nuclear-reactor-hype of the day, the ShinyNewTech replacing PBMRs. The pattern repeats. I wish these people would at least google "ShinyNewTech disavantages" before spouting off about how ShinyNewTech is the savior of the world.