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I'm placing my bets on this guy doing it first or some other amateur tinkerer. I hate to mention the billions of dollars wasted on tokamak "make it bigger and it will work" technology that completely does a reverse 180 from Farnsworth's discovery of potential wells where smaller is better (most people can't vacuum out the inert neutrons quick enough). I'd like to mention that nobody has yet met the fusor challenge, amateur or professional. Produce enough excess energy to light a 60watt lightbulb. I believe there's a million or two dollars out there as a reward if I'm not mistaken.

despite the myth that these projects seem to continuate, fussion can be accomplished easy with a very simple installation.

this guy, for example made 4 'fusors' that created plasma, and even achieved proton counts at levels indicative of fusion (the link has some pretty pictures of his fusion experiments)

What projects such as this one are really trying to demonstrate is not how to create fusion for a long time, but how to have fusion in a way that produces more energy that it takes to make it, which has eluded scientists so far.

None of these produce any usable power of course.

v0.9.6 was released a couple days ago.

Link: Naturally, knowledge regarding the safety aspects of such an effort is essential! Among the more common concerns are the work
with the explosive hydrogen gas, deuterium. High voltage hazards abound as over 20,000 volts is needed to
accelerate the deuterons. Radiation in the form of X-rays and neutrons must be dealt with as well.

Where is the kids-don't-try-this-at-home-disclaimer?

...it's a damn shame that he's largely unknown by the public, not unlike Tesla.

He'd invented numerous devices, 165 of them in fact, many revolving around television. RCA screwed him out of their value- Sarnoff, the CEO of RCA at that time, did everything he could to destroy Farnsworth in the courts.

Because of this, devices like the Fusor, perhaps the smallest working hot fusion device ever devised, went by the wayside until recently.

Fusor Links:

Fusor Patent at the USPTO
A 1999 article in American Scientist about the Fusor
Richard Hull's webpages

Aircraft

Automobile even more links if you look for "build your own sports car"

Nice looking Computer

I can not think of an example where such advancements are made for mass producing consumer goods. But i think the above examples invalidate much of your story.

One point is that lots of inventors never(seldom earn any money, and only few exceptions make a lot of money.

I think that whilst the great discoveries of our time and times gone by will more often be found by scientists and visionaries of the academic kind
Another point is that a lot of inventions were made by accident.

I say we force everyone to get geographically-specific domain names...

Honestly, I would be perfectly happy with pillars.norfolk.va.us for a domain name. Just didn't think it was possible, given the front page of the US domain registry home page. But let's find out for sure... Okay, the norfolk.va.us domain is controlled by infi.net. I'm calling them now....

Apparently the receptionist has never heard of this kind of request before.

I got referred to Tony Rolls' voicemail and left a message.

I'll keep you posted. Maybe it IS possible to get a geographically specific subdomain, even if you're not a part of city government, but I've never seen it done before.

As for fast lean web browsers, chimera, arena, and amaya all come to mind, except they've all been in beta-state with no development since 1996. Arena would be great if it didn't segfault trying to load most web pages. Amaya would be even better if it didn't try to be something I don't need (an html editor) and crash whenever I try to follow a hyperlink. Chimera looks nice but I have yet to see it do anything Mosaic couldn't do. And the newest version won't even compile for me. Of course, the newest version was released over 2 years ago. I'd be willing to work on some of those older browsers, trying to get them to a functional state, if there was any interest. Anyone else? mail me if you're interested in something like that. I don't want the newest and shiniest with all the features, like the Mozilla team, just something that works right and doesn't take up more than 4 megs of ram to run.

Netscape is bloated because of the mail, news, composer, instant messenger, and everything else even vaguely internet-related built in. I remember that 3.0 was a lot better for not using up as much ram but I had to dump it because it was hideously unstable. Heh. Now I can't even surf without filling up my 32 megs of ram and watching netscape fandango on core.

I'm really looking forward to Opera's linux release. Unfortunately, it's payware, but if the linux version is as good as the windows version, I'll shell out the $20. It's definately worth the money. Until then, I'm finding Mozilla to my liking. Everything except the hideous "chrome" bits. When I use mozilla, I only use the "viewer" part, with the bare-minimum user interface and the "my, that's alpha" feel. And it only consumes 10 megs of ram running. (heh. Only. I seem to recall running netscape 2.0 in 4 megs of ram sometime long, long ago.)

Maybe I need to try Mosaic again. If I remember my specs right, it didn't support any of the things I dislike about the "modern web", things like animated gifs, java(script), CSS, dhtml, and frames. Maybe I should just get off my duff and start coding something better. Mozilla tries too hard to be like netscape. I want something for just plain old browsing the web. Is that too much to ask? Oh, and it has to have pictures. lynx is great, but I need to get my pr0n somehow.

Enough of my ranting. Please feel free to point me in the direction of any other projects like this, or if there isn't any, I can damn well do it myself. Or die trying.

Leapfrog, (pfitzger@fyiowa.infi.net)