theltemes - Slashdot User

Comment Layman Fusion Technologist (Score 1) 65

by theltemes on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @12:30PM (#37317020) Attached to: Kevin Kelly Answers Your Questions

I do wonder why Slashdotters consider KK to be some kind of authority on the state of fusion research. It is obvious from his replies that he has a cursory knowledge of the field at best. As someone who has published research in the area, I can state a couple of misconceptions being offered by KK. 1) No one doing active research in the fusion community thinks that fusion power is "1 year away." At best, the National Ignition Facility is a few years away from demonstrating breakeven (energy into the laser = fusion neutron energy produced). A realistic plant scenario is 30 years (or more) from that point. ITER is the equivalent experiment on the magnetic fusion side of the house, and that timeline is closer to 2040 now. 2) No one seriously looking at fusion energy is talking about competing with coal or fission based electricity. At best, fusion (so far) can compete with other renewables on a cost per kWh basis - which is about a factor of 5 more expensive than coal or fission power.

Comment The actual tour is better (Score 1) 97

by theltemes on Saturday June 06, 2009 @05:51PM (#28236757) Attached to: Vicariously Tour the National Ignition Facility

At least I hope it is when I go on mine in September.

Spy Drones Take to the Sky in the UK 529

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:27PM from the shoo-fly dept.

Novotny writes to tell us The Guardian is reporting that the UK's has launched a new breed of police 'spy drone'. Originally used in military applications, these drones are being put into use as a senior police officer warns the surveillance society in the UK is eroding civil liberties. In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business. Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"

Submission + - Intel laptop competes against One Laptop Per Child

Submitted by

Tracy Reed

on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:21PM

Tracy Reed writes: "According to this article from the BBC, Intel has designed and begun marketing it's own low-cost laptop targeted at education in developing countries. "Chip-maker Intel 'should be ashamed of itself' for efforts to undermine the $100 laptop initiative, according to its founder Nicholas Negroponte.""

Submission + - MySpace agrees to share sex offender data

Submitted by

mikesd81

on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:20PM

mikesd81 writes: "Seattle Times has an article about MySpace providing a number of state attorneys general with data on registered sex offenders who use the popular social networking Web site.

Attorneys general from eight states demanded last week that the company provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live. MySpace obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., which the company partnered with in December to build a database with information on sex offenders. Attorneys general in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data last week."

A Cynic Rips Open Source 330

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 21, 2007 @12:45PM from the everybodys-a-critic dept.

AlexGr writes to tell us that Howard Anderson chaired an interesting meeting the other day with senior executives from Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell. The discussion took a look at whether or not enterprise users really want open source. "Naturally, I disagreed -- partially because I am a naturally disagreeable person. Any idiot can make friends -- but can you make some really serious enemies? I disagreed, however, because allegiance to open source depends on who you are. Let me give you an example. If you are No. 1 or No. 2 in your industry, you hate open source. You make your money by selling proprietary solutions: Microsoft and Cisco. If you are No. 3 to No. 10, you look at open source as a way to get back to those serious RSEUs, because they are where you make money."

Submission + - Unicode Encoding Implementation Flaw Widespread

Submitted by LordNikon on Monday May 21, 2007 @12:26PM

LordNikon writes: According to CERT "Full-width and half-width encoding is a technique for encoding Unicode characters. Various HTTP content scanning systems fail to properly scan full-width/half-width Unicode encoded HTTP traffic. By sending specially-crafted HTTP traffic to a vulnerable content scanning system, an attacker may be able to bypass that content scanning system.". Proof of concepts affecting IIS are already being posted to security mailing lists, and Cisco IPS and other IDS products are also affected.

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