Will it require you to SMACK the restore key to get it to register?
Will it take 1.5 seconds to boot up?
If you press reset will you be able to switch the last bitmap in video RAM onto the screen (easier to do on the C=128 with included reset button and GRAPHICS command)?
Will the power supply be prone to overheating?
Will I/O be painfully slow?

All that said I miss my Commodore, despite all its faults. :-(

If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof. The NSA doesn't have to have a back door into AES (or the other algorithms) when they have an arsenal of zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques at their disposal. The average user should be far more concerned about these attack vectors (from any source, not just NSA) than the security of the underlying encryption algorithm.

The Diceware FAQ sums up the problem rather succinctly: "Of course, if you are worried about an organization that can break a seven word passphrase in order to read your e-mail, there are a number of other issues you should be concerned with -- such as how well you pay the team of armed guards that are protecting your computer 24 hours a day."

Prove that statement, please. ;)

If it weren't for those vaccines, Jenny would be sporting every STD in existence.

See. This is the sort of thing I find really strange. I remember taking a geology course where the professor explained all about the various layers to be found in dirt that develop naturally over thousands of years... then pointed out that we would be very unlikely to ever actually experience those layers in the real world because there's so little dirt in the world that hasn't been turned over by human beings. There's only about 5 acres of land per person on the planet. That's just the people, consider how how much manufacturing waste and resource use and pollution there is for every one of those humans. Consider how long it persists compared to a human lifespan. It's truly baffling how anyone could think that our ability to change the world with our activities would be small.

That's really, really missing the point. It's not as if we've studied _every single_ mouse birth that has ever occurred to make sure that not a single one of them spontaneously popped from a donkey hide or something like that. The point is that of the two groups: denialists and actual climate scientists, the climate scientists actually practice real science, continuously researching and experimenting and challenging their own ideas and the denialists tend to just be sophists. As I said, I'm probably going to bet on the side of the legitimate researchers rather than a bunch of people who tend to scoff indignantly at the very idea that man can alter the environment despite the massive evidence that we really, really can.

Which is what ITER is supposed to do. Demonstrate that it's possible to make a commercially viable fusion reactor and work out the problems involved in actually doing that.

But the point is that these structures are essentially _tents_ and they're a small fraction of the size of the "very large Farnsworth fusor or polywell device, say hundreds of meters in diameter and a few modest free-electron lasers to illuminate portions of the fusing plasma" that you suggested and are still very, very expensive. The construction methods for a device such as you suggest would need to be a lot more robust and would be an order of magnitude more expensive. Since they would also be a _lot_ bigger, it's hard imagining such a project not being in the same budget neighborhood as ITER.

I agree with you on some of the other points. The miracle right now is that any money is being spent on fusion research. Frankly, looking back on the long history of ITER, it's amazing it's moving forward. It's clear that it couldn't have gotten anywhere with just one country supporting it. Not the United States, anyway, which keeps running hot and cold on the project.

That depends heavily on what you mean by an advantage in cyber war. If you're after mutually assured destruction, then maybe patching holes in everyone's defenses doesn't help. If you don't want your own side to be completely destroyed, it's aterrible idea.

Titanium isn't so risky because it's not ferromagnetic. Anything ferromagnetic is going to be about as bad as a magnet, so surgical steel items are out. Drug pumps, pacemakers, etc. are just as much of a problem and as tricky or more tricky to remove for an MRI.

Obviously I should have said: "working fusion reactor highly into the net positive side". I thought it was understood in context.

No, but that doesn't magically make the development costs cheaper than a well-understood consumer machine of which literally billions have been mass-produced.

They could have done that with a very large Farnsworth fusor or polywell device, say hundreds of meters in diameter and a few modest free-electron lasers to illuminate portions of the fusing plasma.

The millenium dome is 52 meters high on the inside and cost a more than a billion dollars and it's basically a giant tent. NASA's Space Power Facility is more the sort of thing you would need for a giant Farnsworth fusor. It's still only about forty meters high. I can't find exact costs for it, but I can guaranty it wasn't cheap and it's only a small fraction of the scale you're talking about.

Maybe your approach would be better. Who am I to say. This is what they're already building. I personally think it would be great if they could find the budget for a few different approaches.

For literally a thousand years people were going around profoundly claiming in tones of authority that baby mice spontaneously appeared through magic. All it takes is throwing some mice in a cage and, unless you're unlucky and get all males or all non-pregnant females, you can verify that this isn't true. The kind of idiotic sophistry that leads to spouting off "wisdom" without the slightest bit of decent research is to be abhorred. The climate researchers, by and large, appear to be doing their due diligence. The denialists, by and large, do not. The climate researchers very well may be wrong. I think, on balance, they're a much safer bet than the people who tend not to understand basic physical principles and who seem to mostly hold an essentially superstitious belief that humans can't alter the world around them.

You're confusing sophistry with science.

Spontaneous generation comes to us by way of Aristotle. It was finally challenged by the emerging field of science.

Lamarckian inheritance was not borne out by empirical evidence, so was effectively discounted. Modern understanding of genetics does recognize some mechanisms that resemble Lamarckian inheritance.

Miasma is an ancient greek magical revenge curse. Emperical scientists like Ignaz Semmelweiss worked away from that idea. For his trouble, he ended up dismissed from his position and replaced by Carl Braun, who stopped the handwashing program Semmelweiss had started and introduced a ventilation system to extract miasmas. The death rate went back up by an order of magnitude from when Semmelweiss was in charge.

Bloodletting goes back to belief in the four humours, which comes down from Hippocrates. Science is what has partially dispelled these ideas in modern times.

Aether is the fifth of the traditional Greek four elements. Once again, the idea comes down from fairly non-scientific thought. The name has cropped up to describe a number of different concepts in science, generally to describe something that may fill the universe in spaces in between regular matter. Science has mostly ruled out most of those theories. The general idea still lives on a bit in concepts such as the quantum foam.

Java Man... You've really got us there. A scientist dug up fossils of ancient hominids and... um... what's the smoking gun supposed to be there?

Unless a Reston style variant decides to transfer to humans. Then we're pretty fucked.

Typical development costs for a car are on the order of about a billion dollars. More than the the $650 million for ITER.
A total cost of $65 billion over six years is about $11 billion a year. To actually refine a working fusion reactor, that would be a bargain.