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.

"It was hard to figure out how do you balance getting ready to go, not go, all that stuff,"

That must be pretty stressful... "hey you MIGHT be going to space in a few months, but maybe not! Plan accordingly!"

Those are some pretty radically different options there, going to space and staying on earth really aren't two separate scenarios that are easy to come up with a flexible plan that can cover both.

I recall Neil saying he wasn't able to get life insurance when he was flying the experimental planes, and so NASA had to cover him. I wonder how that works with astronauts? I can just imagine making that phone call to your insurance company.... heeeey say I'm going to be flying around the moon next month so... "thank you for letting us know, we've suspended your insurance coverage for the next two months". Gee thanks.

That phrase gets tossed around from time to time and this is why. The only reason we don't have warrantless searches and other intensely invasive government surveillance right now is it's specifically banned in the US Constitution. But of course the founding fathers knew nothing of cell phones, so this one is fair game.

Unfortunately for us, the Constitution, which the founding fathers envisioned as a "living document", one that was periodically updated to address new developments, only very rarely gets updated anymore. And all this modern tech that WOULD be in the constitution (like personal electronic devices, online privacy, etc) if they'd have known about it when it was written isn't, so it all just gets trampled on.

The concept of the Constitution as a "living document" is basically dead, and that's unfortunate for all of us. What we really need right now is a "Technology Bill of Rights". That would breathe some life into this important document, and bring us closer to what the founding fathers envisioned a free people to be protected by.

Mostly w/ you here, unless I need to take a picture w/ my phone and then ask questions about it, in which case the phone is more convenient to use

But only in that case

For the latter one, just keep it offline, if you are using it for software that only exists for it, while doing other work on a newer M-series Mac

FreeBSD is not GPL at all: what you seem to be suggesting is installing Linux i.e. replacing the FreeBSD in it, if one wants to use Unix utilities like sed

I thought that under the hood, Apple keeps current the FreeBSD versions - the CLI w/o the X/XLibre or the DEs. Why wouldn't they?

Actually, that may well have been their final transition had Motorola/IBM been capable of showing Steve a roadmap of decreasing power consumption accompanying acceptable performance. They couldn't, but Intel at the time could. Which is why the only 64-bit PowerMac that Apple had was the G5, which was a space heater a tad less than the Itanic.

Since Apple later on purchased PA Semi, I just wonder whether they couldn't have just purchased Motorola? Also, PA Semi was initially a designer of PowerPC CPUs: I just wonder why after their acquisition, they switched to Arm?

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

Maybe not a Raspberry Pi, but maybe if one could have a Framework computer w/ a Snapdragon Elite motherboard, then it should be possible to create a Hackintosh on that platform

They dropped the Roman numerals after X - you had 11 to 15. Starting this year, they changed the numbering to be the year, so it's 26

In the beginning, it used to be something like 11 or 12

Except that Linux too now has this habit of dropping support for older hardware. You're probably best off putting NetBSD on those if you have one

I just wonder: since macOS sits on top of FreeBSD, can't one just go to the terminal and work from there? Incidentally, is XNU still the underlying kernel, or has Apple fully gone w/ FreeBSD? If one upgraded the FreeBSD to version 15, wouldn't that make it reasonably current, including plugging any potential security holes? Or would one have to get rid of Aqua altogether? Also, the file system is HFS+, but if one is wiping it, is it possible to replace it w/ OpenZFS? Or would one have to wipe the storage completely and reinstall FreeBSD from scratch?

Another option, as I mentioned above, is installing a hypervisor like Proxmox, and then, on top of that, have whichever x86 OS one likes - Linux, BSD, OS/2,.....