Also the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. An informant brought it to the FBI's attention before the attempt was made, but it seems to have been a relatively serious conspiracy.

This stuff is not just talk.

that particular amendment was voted down, bozo - the system works, no hand wringing required

doesn't mean hate speech doesn't exist

This is an example of the broken windows theory from sociology (not to be confused with the broken window fallacy from economics), which states that if visible signs of low-level disorder (e.g. broken windows in unused buildings) are tolerated, then more serious forms of social disorder will occur as well.

This definitely holds in online fora. As the level of abuse you allow rises linearly, the abuse that occurs grows exponentially. Up to a point, I guess. Once you're 4chan there's just nowhere worse to go unless people start using your forum to explicitly plan and conduct crimes. But if you try to draw the line at "anything that isn't illegal is perfectly fine", your forum is going to get nasty. Slashdot addresses this with community moderation, but that only works as long as the community isn't too permissive. If Slashdot were to someday get its own Eternal September (not likely; /. is fading, not growing), it could become a cesspit in short order.

The first American to orbit, John Glenn, was also a Marine.

I'd put this more strongly. AFAICT, and I've been involved in various privacy-sensitive international standards processes, Germany is the most privacy-protective jurisdiction in the world. In general, if you have a problem that creates a tension between privacy and enforcement, one of the best things you can do is go find out how Germany handles it. Their solutions aren't always good, but if you don't like their approach you're far more likely to walk away shaking your head at their excessive focus on privacy than the opposite.

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).

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.

That's one perspective. Another is that while the US shouldered the cost of defense for much of the world, the US got a lot of goodwill for that, and that goodwill and other aspects of its reputation helped to build and extend a massive, decades-long economic expansion that outpaced the rest of the wealthy world. There's a good argument to be made that being the world's superpower was expensive, but came with an enormous ROI that justified every penny of it and more.

It also provided the more-concrete benefit that the western world bought a lot of their weapons from the US defense industry, which helped to keep it strong and able to provide US needs (somewhat... our actual defense manufacturing capability has been gradually eroding for a long time because Pax Americana was so strong that no one needed to expend our munitions at scale, so we lost the ability to build them at scale).

That's likely all gone now. Europe is re-arming, and they're not going to be buying American weapons if they can avoid it, because in part they're arming against us. The Greenland threats did not go unnoticed. Trump has turned us from a global, mostly beneficent superpower into a regional bully, able to push around the likes of Venezuela (though apparently not to cause a regime change), but struggling with a low-middling power like Iran.