"The fact that they managed to keep up with this and publish massive amount of patches is a sign of excellence."

That's assuming they did meaningful fixes and not just some AI slop bullshit that will create more problems than it fixed.

I don't give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, they have proven that is not sensible time and again.

Oh look the dipshits who get mod points haven't heard of Snowden either

The ancient American cars people are thinking of when they think of Cuba were made of thicker, softer metal, which is easier to work on. Those vehicles were made of 100% virgin steel. Modern cars have substantial recycled content and the steel is much harder, therefore harder to work, and they use harder steel specifically so that they can make it thinner, which is also harder to work without destroying the metal. You simply cannot restore a modern vehicle as easily as you can the older ones, even putting complexity aside.

That's literally what this story is about.

Realistically, this will accomplish nothing significant in the positive direction, while it will hurt a few people. In the process it will cost a lot of money. Therefore it's a shit plan.

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH

"we don't have warrantless searches and other intensely invasive government surveillance right now"

HAHhaHAHAHAHHAHahAHAHA HaHAHHA Ha HA HAHHAHAHAHAHAH

Oh, lol, I just noticed that the person you cited was BUSSARD.

Yes, I know most people here know him as the Bussard Ramjet guy. But he was also the Polywell guy ;) He's was hardly the guy you'd want to be citing for "mainstream" fusion commentary even back in 2006.

(Also for the record, Bussard Ramjets don't work either).

I like to place reading comprehension tests on the internet for people to, apparently, fail.

more like the type most understood to not work.

Simply false. The Q factor is eminently predictable with scale. It is by far the most predictable form of high-Q factor fusion (outside of gravitational, and we're not going there any time soon ;) )

as Robert Bussard said in his famous Google TechTalk in Nov 2006

What, you mean BEFORE we got commercial-scale HTS magnets that scale down the size requirements by an order of magnitude?

Also, pointing to things like ITER to say that cost-effective fusion is impossible is like pointing to the ISS and saying SpaceX is impossible.

And also pointing to a single person's two decades-old view as if it represents a whole field, today (FYI, it doesn't, at all) is pretty damned funny.

Candiakenvirchusevania?

All these commenters who think they're so smart coming out with the same "Fusion power is 20 years away and always will be, har har har!"-quip who don't know a damned thing about the field and its progression is so tiring. One error with neutron measurements at ZETA before we even knew what we were doing, and the entire field was turned into a permanent joke, even as Q factors continued to climb almost monotonically. The press had their story and now we're cursed with an endless stream of these people.

Yeah, so, this is not true.

First off, turning it "to powder" is hyperbole; metals just become increasingly brittle.

Secondly, claiming that there's "no solution" is not just wrong (there are many), the particular solutions used by Commonwealth are literally discussed in the papers that this Slashdot article is about. Specifically, they use a molten FLiBe breeder blanket to absorb the fast neurons, which also breeds tritium. Since it's molten, there are no "structural" issues with it at all. The inner core (mainly tungsten) does need periodic replacements (every 1-2 years), but the reactor is designed to be easy to open up for swap-outs. It is treated as an expendable consumable, and is melted down and recast/rebuilt for the next replacement. In terms of complexity, cost, and downtime, it's probably roughly on par with fission reactor maintenance periods, perhaps superior.

Third, there are many types of magnetic confinement fusion, not just magnetized target fusion. These are less mature than tokamaks, and generally considered more longshots. Even ignoring that the fusion itself is more challenging, they trade something relatively simple - materials science and swapping - for something much harder (immense mechanical and fluid dynamics challenges)

Fourth, if you really hate neutrons, there are also aneutronic fusion designs. Again, though, less mature.

Assuming sparc (no power) costs $1 billion, then guessing that arc costs $5 billion and makes 400MW. You could install about 2GW of sea based wind for the same. With such a huge power surplus over fusion you could probably melt rocks to store power for the still days

1) ~$5B is about right for the first ARC plant, but that's to be expected, because first-of-a-kind plants are always much more expensive. Nth-of-a-kind for ARC is expected to be about $2B.

2) Wind is variable load, not baseload, not load following and certainly not peaking. Its power is worth much less.

3) If you want your wind farm to be able to get through a mere 5 day dunkelflaute and guarantee a steady 400MW output, then, with a 40% round trip efficiency, you have to store 120GWh of thermal energy. Even if your storage is a mere $25/kWh, which is extremely optimistic, that's $3B. And since your wind farm is throwing a lot of its energy away to the losses inherent with thermal storage, you're looking at $5B for the wind farm. And then there's $500M for the power block on top of that. You're looking at a $8,5B project.

(Of course, thankfully, that's not actually how we build out high-renewables grids)

HIGH temperature, not ROOM temperature.

*Facepalm*

God, Slashdot comments sections are so embarrassing these days.

For YHVH's sake, first off "suggest" is not Commonwealth's wording, they wrote five bloody peer-reviewed papers. You're criticizing them based on a word that a Slashdot author chose, likely without even thinking about their wording.

Secondly, there's nothing mystical about tokamak fusion, it's the most well understood type of fusion out there. The scaling factors are well understood. What the "entities" whose "corpses" litter the field didn't have was high-temperature superconducting magnets, as commercial-scale availability of HTS tapes only emerged in relatively recent times. These let you double the field strength. Under tokamak scaling factors, doubling the field strength lets you get the same Q factor at around 1/10th the volume.

There's many other interesting aspects of note, but at a fundamental level, that's all you need to know.

No one suggested that it should be. Don't make things up to be upset about.