seems to be in Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

They are getting plasma pressures at levels similar to tokamaks and stellerators, which is pretty impressive, while using a fraction of the magnetic field. If you didn't know, 1 keV temperature is a little over 10 million K, and a density of 10^20 m^-3 is close to vacuum, but because of the high temperature the pressure is fairly significant, on the order of one atmosphere. It's refreshing that they don't exaggerate their progress (they admit that tokamaks are more advanced as of yet). But if they were trying to offer a cheaper alternative to tokamaks, they have a way to go. At 23m long, their FRC is not small. If they need to scale it up considerably to reach reactor levels, well, it's going to be an expensive project like ITER is.

If the FRC turns out to be the way forward, most our research into tokamaks hasn't been wasted. There's a lot of overlap in the theory and the technologies used. Neutral beams are also used in tokamaks, for heating and diagnostics, and are also being used to provide torque to the plasma, which can stabilize the plasma in various ways which can be understood in turbulence theory. The NIMROD code is also used in tokamaks, as is the technique of lithium wall conditioning. I suppose the point is, a lot of slashdotters will condemn the work of government research but this research wouldn't have been possible without decades of groundwork backed by government funded grants.

Helping a lot of people to sell drugs.. actually, that sounds quite a bit worse than selling drugs to me. --Well, taking the assumption that selling drugs is bad.

We'll perfect Terminator robots before we perfect the fountain of youth, so the problem will be taken care of.

So really, we should be importing our executives, not our engineers.

Because people like carrots more than sticks. Taxing externalities makes sense until you add greedy assholes to the equation. So what ends up happening is that you tax everything and you give back something to some of the less polluting industries. It's easier to corrupt that way, and irrational humans are happier.

gives a whole new meaning to the phrase bit rot

It's not really lying if they believe it to be true.

You're kidding, right?

Eh, I think a bigger reason is that cost of living had become too high elsewhere.

Ah, that sounds like the intended purpose of the ADA. It sounds like you are actually making changes, and not paying off the plaintiffs. I can't understand how it can be legal to settle with a plaintiff who is supposedly bringing a suit on behalf of a general population.

It's bullshit. There should be no award for damages. The business should simply be required to fix the problems. If it is not feasible to fix, then the law needs to be fixed.

A lot of people who abuse drugs do so because their lives suck. Maybe they don't care about their long term health because they have no hope for the future and don't care if it kills them. Efforts to penalize them for using drugs simply makes their lives suck more and their future even more hopeless.

If, by drug cartels, you mean Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis, then yes, they will find a way to get this.

We can't actually take a trip around the universe. I'm talking about a thought experiment in which you mathematically translate some position around the universe. In a Mobius strip, you flip around when you go around the universe. Since you never cross a boundary while going around the Mobius universe, the laws of physics must stay the same as you go around, so the laws of physics have to be independent of parity.

Of course we don't know that the universe doesn't have boundaries. It's just a reasonable guess. And, yes, we don't know the universe is homogeneous. Some of the conjectures for the shape of space, like the Picard horn, aren't homogenous at all.