Slashdot Mirror

Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.

Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)

A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop

Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page

- Mitchell Charity

The geeky story goes that they couldn't find the original plans (if they ever existed), but some gleep supplied a replica chair (search for "relics") that he made.

Technological Singularity is on its way.

The Robot AI Mind is the most advanced of the publically available, free, Open Source AI programs.

Mind.JAVA and Mind.VB in Visual Basic are branch-off species of the Robot AI Mind.

(a) Photons are massless, so you can't use newtonian gravity F=GmM/r^2 to compute gravitation effects on it.

(b) There is no such thing as "stuff" out there to pull light beam away from us. That is even more completely bunk. According to your logic, the planets will be pulled away from us too.

(c) There is a light horizon from the solar system. It is but the future light cone of the event called the 'solar system' now in a space-time diagram. The word you want to use is "event horizon".

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Great minds reading /. who are interested in this article should definitely make their way to Pasadena this summer for the Computing Beyond Silicon Summer School. The dateline for applying has passed, but you can always gatecrash, or monitor the site to read the lecture notes online (they better be available).

The informaton that the LOC is 10 terabytes comes from the Data Powers of Ten page. Whether or not this is entirely accurate, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of reporters and such use it as a reference. They're probably good ballpark numbers. To quote a bit from the section of the page that includes the LOC:

Terabyte (1 000 000 000 000 bytes)

• 1 Terabyte: An automated tape robot OR All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50000 trees made into paper and printed OR Daily rate of EOS data (1998)
• 2 Terabytes: An academic research library OR A cabinet full of Exabyte tapes
• 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress
• 50 Terabytes: The contents of a large Mass Storage System

Another advanced technology which may replace ilicon in the near term is spintronics. These devices have one advantage over nanotube transistors in that they may easily implement quantum computing...

Those of you who are interested in the future of alternative computing, including quantum computing, might want to check out Caltech's Computing Beyond Silicon Summer School program. The top minds from around the world will present the latest information about quantum, molecular, and DNA computing.

I'm the system geek for the USGS earthquake web servers, and the quake.wr.usgs.gov site was slow last night. The site is served through Akamai EdgeSuite, but the origin servers were on their knees. Turns out there is a Perl cgi that displays real-time seismograms, and everyone dogpiled on that. Do you have any idea what 200+ separate instances of Perl running simultaneously on a 1997 Sun Netra looks like? It's not pretty. On the other hand, the 'Did you feel it' questionnaires are processed by a pair of Athlons running FreeBSD and mod_perl, and they had no problem processing the now-17,000+ incoming questionnaires.

Earthquakes provide their own Slashdot Effect on our servers. I wrote an article about this a few years ago after our server got squashed the first time. Web Servers, Earthquakes, and the Slashdot Effect

We're not using Squid any more since we signed up with Akamai, but we still get big traffic spikes whenever the ground shakes. I have a collection of them at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes/

The obligatory question is -- since this fellow is from LA where everyone in the art/entertainment world takes themselves FAR too seriously -- did this fellow really make a sign, or did he make a movie?

My take is that the sign is a nice side-effect of having made the movie. The original impetus might be the same in both cases, but with such high-brow video techniques (rather than a straight documentation), it sure sounds like the movie was not just intended from the start, but a major part of the finished product. After all, he had intended to wow the *art* world with a display of the *movie*. The sign, present or not at that point, was incidental, save for the additional advertising value it gave the so-called artist.

But then, maybe I'm bitter from my years living in LA.

Here's a link to the bionic retina implants in action.

"If you can get it to fly, it means you have got into a nice relaxed state," he explained. The game takes place in a virtual 3D world set aboard a starship in space. The environment is designed to immerse the player, drawing more of their attention and making the feedback more effective.

Why does this remind me of a certain Star Trek: TNG episode I've seen?

You have the option of coding emotions into your Robot AI Mind.

In the Mentifex Theory of Mind, feelings and emotions are a joint physiological and cogitational influence upon the psyche: your muscles tighten, your stomach feels queasy -- you (and/or your robot) are feeling the emotion of fear .

The Tutorial AI Mind is a Seed AI on the threshold of Technological Singularity.

At least, that's what he did in the Star Trek TNG episode "Relics." It was only "50 percent brilliant," though.

oops sorry about that, it's too early for me:

http://toughguy.caltech.edu/pub/redhat/linux/7.3

chad

Such a good story - it's a pity it is not true! Here's a link to David Goodstein's homepage - he's the vice-provost of CalTech - the second link on his homepage is a PDF file which should show you that the accusation is simply wrong.

Take a look - it's not long, and it's well worth it - before slandering a beautiful experiment.

Such a good story - it's a pity it is not true! Here's a link to David Goodstein's homepage - he's the vice-provost of CalTech - the second link on his homepage is a PDF file which should show you that the accusation is simply wrong.

Take a look - it's not long, and it's well worth it - before slandering a beautiful experiment.

Everything comes into existence for a purpose, however hidden and recondite that purpose may be. All of Computer Science and all of Java Tools for Extreme Programming is tending towards the extreme emergence of Artificially Intelligent Robot Minds.

You, too, may use XP Java tools to code your own version of an AI Mind Species in Java.

One Mind.JAVA species is not enough; we need many diverging species of Mind on the way to Technological Singularity.

Other countries are ahead of us... We're doing the same things at the university level already.

This site is a great one for more info about solar sails. Exciting technology, I remember watching Cosmos and Segan talking about it.

Ultimately, mate, what good are soccer-playing robots if they do not contain a Robot AI Mind?

This planet is headed for a potentially catastrophic Technological Singularity.

Uncle Sing wants you to code a new species of Mind beyond the Mind.VB in Visual Basic and Mind.JAVA copied from the Tutorial Robot AI Mind in JavaScript.

The Robot AI Mind Programmer's Manual is an example of Open Source meta tools changing the world with Artificial Intelligence living immortally.

Already the Seed AI has been ported into Java as Mind.JAVA and the Robot AI Mind has been translated into Mind.VB in Visual Basic.

Your Majesty, You are about to witness a Technological Singularity based on the Open Meta Tools of Artificial Intelligence.

As a student at a school where collaboration is the only method of survival on homework sets, I find this to be a rather stupid rule. Often, the only way I've learned my lessons is by asking other students - the professor is not often available, and TAs tend to be of less help than one would hope.

Without collaboration, Techers would be dead. I'm even more glad than ever, now, that I didn't decide to go to Georgia Tech.

We specimens of Homo Sapiens grow old and infirm, but thanks to the Robot AI Mind Rejuvenate Module, the new species of Robo Sapiens may live forever. Therefore we are on the verge of a Cybernetic-Economy Prosperity Engine that will give all human beings (not just the super-rich elite) the birth-right to have, when elderly or infirm, a robotic caretaker as a kind of physical guardian angel to watch over thee and keep thee.

Such Robot AI Mind caregivers need not be socially isolating for the elderly, because each old person may say, "I'll have my (robotic) people get in touch with your (robotic) people." In other words, we will not replace humans with robots but rather enhance humans with robots.

First, however, the original Robot AI Mind needs to be developed further and translated (ported) into more languages than Visual Basic and Java (as Mind.JAVA).

1 Library of Congress == 10 terabytes of text!.

That's a little hard to believe - I figure 10TB would be on the order of 20 billion printed pages of text.

The Robot AI Mind in Win32Forth and other programming languages ( add yours ), approaching a major new release as Mind-1.1, needs a little work before it reports for duty in mission-critical hospital care of its fellow sentient organisms and co-stewards of Earth. Nevertheless, Hospital Robots are a prime example of the coming Cybernetic Economy in which human beings will be freed up to work in humane jobs such as caring for the young, the sick and the elderly.

Already the object-oriented free AI source code has been ported into Visual Basic as Mind.VB and into Java as Mind.JAVA AI. Get working on Hospital Robot AI, stat!

Professor David Goodstein of Caltech has a very interesting paper on the physics of cold fusion and the history of the initial "discovery". He doesn't predict Mr. Fusion reactors strapped to the backs of our DeLoreans anytime soon.

Actually, I'm not too sure about Vinge yet, having only just discovered him, but so far he's incredible.

HTH!

Well, you should get in touch with Bill Gates, since he thinks this will be a big breakthrough.

A black hole is a term for a mass that is compact enough that it lies within an event horizon. Heuristically speaking, light cannot escape because the escape velocity from the object is faster than the speed of light, so it appears dark.

In General Relativity, given a sufficiently large mass (say, a 10 solar mass star), there is no source of rigidity strong enough to withstand gravitational collapse, so black holes will eventually form.

Big stars exist, so avoiding black holes requires either a new theory of space time (or gravitation), or a new type of matter.

These guys have opted for a new type of matter,_analogous_ to a Bose-Einstein condensate. The existance of Bose-Einstein condensates in the lab for regular matter (routine, now), says nothing about whether this exotic matter exists out there.

This is still pretty wide open from a theory vs experiment sense. Most claims for black holes are really observations of dense collections of matter. Some would be black holes for sure in General Relativity, but this is no proof.

The best source of proof for black holes will probably come from detection of Gravitational waves from their formation, which should come in the next few years from experiments such as LIGO or LISA .

See Question 5. And this story, which has been fowarded all over the place.

Some here, here, here, and here to name a few, for a large listing try here.

This is nothing new, except maybe that a company with the consumer influence of Sony is backing the project.

Go here for a list of more interesting projects...

Reminds me of Tibetan sky burials.

Sorry ... this might be a little more convenient: For the love of PI.

I've had trouble with files on the mac that are bonafide jpegs, opening in simpletext (I didn't have PC exchange set up properly, and the file types werent set to PHSD (or whatever the magic number for photoshop is)).

That magic number is 8BIM

I use two programs to handle file type/creator metadata in the MacOS A Better Finder: Creators & Types which is a contextual menu for changing file types. And Filetyper to create droplets for common changes.

I wish Apple included utilities like this out of the box.

As the Technological Singularity approaches and engulfs us, the widening tech-savvy gap does not matter in the long run, Maynard, where we are all dead.

What does matter is the contribution that each one of us can make in a smooth transition from sole dominance of the planet by Homo sapiens to a joint stewardship of Earth with Robo sapiens.

Your Majesty, You have it in Your geek power to transform the world for the better -- regardless of Your high or low level of tech-savvy -- if You web-host the Tutorial AI Mind or make an original AI contribution or simply tweak some code in the Robot AI Mind.

If anyone can do such simulations in realtime at home in 2050, then one possible outcome has to be that any government or large organization or wealthy individual can fairly easily design (and then make) such devices -- or ones even more advanced (smaller, easier to assemble, etc.). Einstein warned, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." My feeling is one way to transcend the threat of everyone being able to quickly destroy using nuclear or other weapons is to create the means where everyone can create even faster than, just like duckweed in a pond keeps growing even as fast as ducks eat it. That means true defense requires a sustained investment in advanced manufacturing technology and organizing manufacturing knowledge(including self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.) We must accept that such things aren't pipe dreams -- they are absolute necessities (as is a simultaneous focus on reducing the causes of war such as injustice, want, and ignorance).

I don't mind spending money on defense -- I just want to see the money spent well on defending against true threats to human survival -- want, ignorance, injustice, corruption, "love of money", and weapons of mass destruction (whoever controls them at the moment -- like the Russian Mafia?). We are over 50 years beyond the creation of nuclear weapons; the defense department should be willing to think at least another 50 years ahead. The defense department is instructed by Congress to win wars and in the long term this strategy will fail because of technological amplification swamping the biosphere's capacity to support humans (such as through Moore's law leading to every home computer being a nuclear weapons design station in 2050 or sooner). I want to see a defense department that learns how to transcend wars and thus be able to truly defend all of humanity.

Would not it take at least as much courage to transcend wars as to win them? Our armed forces have no short supply of courage, and so perhaps there is hope.

One of the problems with this sort of weapons design work is it is too exciting for technically minded people to easily resist doing it. See for example: Ted Taylor: Confessions of a nuclear weapons design addict. We need alternative technical projects that are even more exciting and cost even more (shameless plug for OSCOMAK!)

Of course, according to Moravec and Kurzweil and Vinge, AI will be rampant before then and we will be passing through the AI singularity -- another cause for hope or despair about transcending nuclear war depending on your perspective.

Chris Locke & Ilk are rank amateurs in the use of Bombast Transcripts to reverse the entropy gradient of the Universe. Somebuddy ought to wake them up to the oh, never Mind, it's hopeless.

The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of Rageboy pales before Technological Singularity.

The wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) craze has extended even into the Sensorium module of the Robot AI Mind, where it is envisioned that a Robot AI will be equipped with Wi-Fi sensors that detect the presence of nearby wireless 'Net access, across which the AI may not only send messages but send itself in a beam-me-up,-Scottie modality.

Technological Singularity is coming at you on the wings of wireless.

I believe that anything related to tabletop fusion coming from Pons and Fleischmann should be treated with the highest circumspection, bearing in mind that those two might have an agenda. I doubt very much top-class scientists around the world would have been trying to build Tokamaks at the cost of billions of dollars, and been through so much frustration with them, if it was even remotely possible to do fusion with a pyrex full of deuterium and a paladium electrode in a second grade lab in Utah.

So, even though there is an infinitesimal chance that P. and F. have stumbled on something legit and promising, there a much greater chance that they're crooked scientists, and an even greater chance that they're just plain crackpots.

There is another alternative: having a working honor system. One of the underlying flaws of systems like this that try to impose ever stricter rules against cheating is that students view them as a challenge. The tougher you make the anti-cheating system, the cleverer students will be in trying to break it. The only real solution is to turn the sytem on its head. Instead of challenging the students to ever cleverer methods of cheating, challenge them to higher standards of honesty.

My alma mater had a very simple honor system, and it worked very well. Anonymous surveys showed that the level of cheating was substantially lower than at schools that tried the other way. This was despite the fact that almost all of the exams were take home. When the professor told students that there was a 3 hour time limit and it was closed book, people listened and obeyed even though there was nobody looking over their shoulder. It was great because we got the freedom to take our tests where and when we wanted to. Of course you could be expelled for cheating (that wasn't a guarantee, but it was a possibility) but very few people were.