What is the best estimate of the operating size of tokomak power plant? How many do we need to convert the US away from coal & gas power plants while switching to electric cars? What is the answer if we look at 100-year projections for population, energy usage patterns, and density? Will a tokamak-based power grid be more or less useful in parts of the world with different needs, like Europe, Japan, India, or China?

What is a reasonable cost to assign to the carbon and pollutants put into the atmosphere during operation of a coil, oil, or gas power plant? Can you compare the price of fusion-generated electricity to other known technologies, including *all* costs to society.?

"costs much less than paper to distribute."

This is almost certainly not true in any practical sense.

We are concerned about the cost to consumers, so the cost to produce the copy is not important. What matters is that cost minus the advertising revenue. Advertisements on the web don't make anywhere near as much money for the NYT as ads in the paper. A digital-only subscription does not necessarily bring in more money for them; there is however a shift in the fraction of the cost paid by the reader vs. the amount paid for by ad revenue.

First, please note that I do not think the application of these laws is justified in this case (that's my personal opinion, based on what I have read).

But I would ask you to rethink the justification for hate crimes laws. Consider the kind of actions that were committed in the southern US earlier in the last century, such as burning a cross in the yard of an African American family. Is trespassing in the yard the only crime committed? The action was a message to the entire African American community, telling them not to step out of line or irritate the white community or they risk the lives of their families. This is one kind of intimidation that hate crime laws are meant to address. For one group of people to attempt to control another group using threats of violence is indeed a crime by itself.

None of this argues that the actual laws we have were well written or are appropriately enforced. On those matters, I don't know enough to have an opinion.

"another person felt so bad about having his private live revealed that he killed himself"

Did he? There is no evidence of this at all. The suicide note was apparently deemed to be not relevant to the case and was never made public. It isn't justice to assume that the suicide was caused by the webcam and then judge Ravi based on it. It was reported that Tyler's coming out caused some extreme conflict with some of his close family members. Can we say definitively which thing caused the suicide?

JD, your question as posted by the editors is contradictory and either uninformed or uninformative.

You seem to say first that one company has something they are entitled to offer a closed-source license for that includes part of the Linux kernel. This makes no sense. Second, you seem to claim that a company that offers version 1 of its code under the GPL must also make version 2 GPLed even if it owns the code, and that is simply wrong.

If you can't make a clearer case for a GPL violation, you shouldn't "harass" anyone. Let the copyright owners of the GPLed code know what is happening--they are the only ones who can do anything out it.

It is unclear...if...perhaps...unless...

"When is it a good time to complain?" Sometime after you understand the facts and the laws relevant to the matter at hand.

Weird that "confusing to newbies" is not in TFA. Was it invented by the submitter?

The reasons stated were 1. "clean up the mess that was made when the /sbin and /bin directories were first split" 2. "it would be far simpler to run multiple instances of the operating system on different machines on a network," 3. "facilitate the use of snapshots"

The first of these is begging the question (what mess?). I can't make heads or tails of the other two.

If Lennart Poettering is a primary advocate, it means that the change would make something the Lennart wants to do on his personal desktop easier for him.

"there should be cooperation between the Linux and BSD camps"

Of course there should be, but you won't see it from Pottering. He doesn't care if anything works on Linux except under Gnome. He certainly isn't going to care if things work on BSD.

Oddly, as someone trying to use a modern Linus distro without Gnome, Potterings antics have made me wonder if I should switch to a BSD.

Laboratory-grade surfaces are needed to reflect laboratory-grade laser intensities, like GW/m^2 cw, or much higher for brief exposures.

What's the highest power laser you can deploy in the field? What's the tightest beam you can fire a km or so at a target after accounting for diffraction? These are not the kinds of numbers that give you instant vaporization of your target.