Slashdot Mirror

Fluffeh writes "The World Bank is taking steps toward greater transparency. It announced recently that it would be instituting a new 'Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products' beginning July 1. The policy's full title is 'World Bank Open Access Policy for Formal Publications,' and the Bank says it will apply to 'manuscripts and all accompanying data sets... that result from research, analysis, economic and sector work, or development practice... that have undergone peer review or have been otherwise vetted and approved for release to the public; and... for which internal approval for release is given on or after July 1, 2012,' as well as the final reports prepared by outside parties for the Bank. Over 2,100 books and papers from 2009-2012 are already available in the repository"

suraj.sun writes "We've seen quite a few Android malware discoveries in the recent past, mostly on unofficial Android markets. There was a premium-rate SMS Trojan that not only sent costly SMS messages automatically, but also prevented users' carriers from notifying them of the new charges, a massive Android malware campaign that may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users, and an malware controlled via SMS. Ars Technica is now reporting another Android malware discovery made by McAfee researcher Carlos Castillo, this time on Google's official app market, Google Play, even after Google announced back in early February that it has started scanning Android apps for malware. Two weeks ago, a separate set of researchers found malicious extensions in the Google Chrome Web Store that could gain complete control of users' Facebook profiles. Quoting the article: 'The repeated discoveries of malware hosted on Google servers underscore the darker side of a market that allows anyone to submit apps with few questions asked. Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them.'"

suraj.sun writes "We've seen quite a few Android malware discoveries in the recent past, mostly on unofficial Android markets. There was a premium-rate SMS Trojan that not only sent costly SMS messages automatically, but also prevented users' carriers from notifying them of the new charges, a massive Android malware campaign that may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users, and an malware controlled via SMS. Ars Technica is now reporting another Android malware discovery made by McAfee researcher Carlos Castillo, this time on Google's official app market, Google Play, even after Google announced back in early February that it has started scanning Android apps for malware. Two weeks ago, a separate set of researchers found malicious extensions in the Google Chrome Web Store that could gain complete control of users' Facebook profiles. Quoting the article: 'The repeated discoveries of malware hosted on Google servers underscore the darker side of a market that allows anyone to submit apps with few questions asked. Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them.'"

suraj.sun writes "We've seen quite a few Android malware discoveries in the recent past, mostly on unofficial Android markets. There was a premium-rate SMS Trojan that not only sent costly SMS messages automatically, but also prevented users' carriers from notifying them of the new charges, a massive Android malware campaign that may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users, and an malware controlled via SMS. Ars Technica is now reporting another Android malware discovery made by McAfee researcher Carlos Castillo, this time on Google's official app market, Google Play, even after Google announced back in early February that it has started scanning Android apps for malware. Two weeks ago, a separate set of researchers found malicious extensions in the Google Chrome Web Store that could gain complete control of users' Facebook profiles. Quoting the article: 'The repeated discoveries of malware hosted on Google servers underscore the darker side of a market that allows anyone to submit apps with few questions asked. Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them.'"

D H NG writes "In a study by Careercast.com, software engineers retain their position as having the top jobs in 2012. The #1 and #2 positions remain the same from last year. One surprise entry was human resources manager in the #3 position. The worst job was lumberjack, beating out last year's roustabout."

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that Carpathia Hosting, which is hosting the frozen data of 'up to 66 million users', would like to be released from that expense. But Judge Liam O'Grady has another idea: 'Lawyers for Megaupload, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Web hosting provider Carpathia Hosting and other groups fighting over who should maintain 1,100 servers formerly used by Megaupload should sit down and work out an arrangement,' O'Grady said Friday.' Stay tuned: The lawyers are due to report back in two weeks."

suraj.sun writes "A German regional court Friday backed an earlier court decision that banned Apple from offering push emails in Apple's iCloud and MobileMe services in Germany, granting Motorola Mobility a victory in a global patent war among several technology companies. The Mannheim regional court also said Apple must pay damages to Motorola Mobility, but didn't specify the amount."

astroengine writes "Astronomers believe they have found a second distant planet around Fomalhaut, a bright young neighbor star, and that the far-out world — like its sister planet — is shepherding and shaping the star's ring of dust. If confirmed, theorists have some work to do explaining how the planet, believed to be a few times bigger than Mars, ended up 155 times as far away from its parent star as Earth is to the sun. 'We're learning a lot about planets that are close to their stars, but that is not the full picture. We also want to know about systems where planets are very far out. By considering near-, far- and mid-range, we can get a complete picture of planet formation,' University of Florida astronomer Aaron Boley said." There was another fascinating bit of news about Fomalhaut a few days ago: "ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day."

An anonymous reader writes "Following on the heels of the FCC and U.S. mobile carriers finally announcing plans to create a national database for stolen phones, a group of iPhone users filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T on Tuesday claiming that it has aided and abetted cell phone thieves by refusing to brick stolen cell phones. AT&T has '[made] millions of dollars in improper profits, by forcing legitimate customers, such as these Plaintiffs, to buy new cell phones, and buy new cell phone plans, while the criminals who stole the phone are able to simply walk into AT&T stories and 're-activate' the devices, using different, cheap, readily-available 'SIM' cards,' states their complaint. AT&T, of course, says the suit is 'meritless.'"

New submitter boner writes "In a follow-up to an earlier Slashdot story, scientists at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands yesterday published their findings that they have indeed found the Majorana particle. The announcement on the university website provides both a summary of the academic paper (PDF) and background of this groundbreaking discovery. Quoting: 'Majorana fermions are very interesting – not only because their discovery opens up a new and uncharted chapter of fundamental physics; they may also play a role in cosmology. A proposed theory assumes that the mysterious ‘dark matter, which forms the greatest part of the universe, is composed of Majorana fermions. Furthermore, scientists view the particles as fundamental building blocks for the quantum computer.'"

After the recent failure of North Korea's rocket launch test, experts are warning that the country's leadership will likely try to save face by following it up with a nuclear weapons test. According to CBS, "The rocket launch had been hailed as a moment of national pride, but it disintegrated over the Yellow Sea, earning it embarrassment as well as condemnation from a host of nations that deemed it a covert test of missile technology. In a rare move for Pyongyang, the government admitted that the rocket did not deliver a satellite, but it also pressed ahead with grandiose propaganda in praise of the ruling Kim family." The Guardian adds, "Speculation is mounting that the North will attempt to claw back some of its credibility with a third nuclear test. Recent satellite images from the site used for previous nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009 suggested plans for another underground explosion were already in place before the Unha-3 rocket broke apart and splashed into the Yellow Sea on Friday morning."

Fluffeh writes "The United States' global trade representative has strongly criticized a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organizations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for U.S. technology firms. A number of U.S. companies had expressed concerns that various departments in the Australian Government, namely the Department of Defence had been sending negative messages about cloud providers based outside the country, implying that 'hosting data overseas, including in the United States, by definition entails greater risk and unduly exposes consumers to their data being scrutinized by foreign governments.' Recently, Acting Victorian Privacy Commissioner Anthony Bendall highlighted some of the privacy concerns with cloud computing, particularly in its use by the local government. He said the main problems were the lack of control over stored data and privacy, in overseas cloud service providers."

bhagwad writes "When a statue in Mumbai began to miraculously drip tears, huge crowds began to gather, pray, and collect the water in vials. Sanal Edamaruku has exposed such bogus miracles before, and when he was called in, his investigations showed that it was nothing more than a nearby drainage. The entire investigation was caught on tape. The priests were outraged and demanded an apology. When he refused, a case of 'blasphemy' was registered at the police station and they now want to have him arrested." In related news, today Kuwait's parliament "passed amendments to the Gulf state's penal code stipulating the death penalty for those who curse God, Islam's Prophet Mohammed or his wives." However, they made no change to the penalty for playing a joke national anthem at a sporting event.

Fluffeh writes "In the third update to Java that Apple has released this week, the update now identifies and removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware that has infected over half a million Apple machines. 'This Java security update removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware,' Apple wrote in the support document for the update. 'This update also configures the Java web plug-in to disable the automatic execution of Java applets. Users may re-enable automatic execution of Java applets using the Java Preferences application. If the Java web plug-in detects that no applets have been run for an extended period of time it will again disable Java applets.'"

Fluffeh writes "In the third update to Java that Apple has released this week, the update now identifies and removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware that has infected over half a million Apple machines. 'This Java security update removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware,' Apple wrote in the support document for the update. 'This update also configures the Java web plug-in to disable the automatic execution of Java applets. Users may re-enable automatic execution of Java applets using the Java Preferences application. If the Java web plug-in detects that no applets have been run for an extended period of time it will again disable Java applets.'"

itwbennett writes "Audi's electric cars are quiet, maybe too quiet, which is why Audi spent 3 years creating replicated engine noise for its electric car models. We're so conditioned to the noise of an engine revving that a driver behind the wheel of a too-quiet car may not realize how fast he's driving, and a pedestrian relying on auditory clues may be unaware of an approaching vehicle, says Ralf Kunkel, Head of Audi Acoustics." Nissan's been on this for years (as has Honda); one day, you may only get to choose which noise your car makes, rather than whether it does.

itwbennett writes "Audi's electric cars are quiet, maybe too quiet, which is why Audi spent 3 years creating replicated engine noise for its electric car models. We're so conditioned to the noise of an engine revving that a driver behind the wheel of a too-quiet car may not realize how fast he's driving, and a pedestrian relying on auditory clues may be unaware of an approaching vehicle, says Ralf Kunkel, Head of Audi Acoustics." Nissan's been on this for years (as has Honda); one day, you may only get to choose which noise your car makes, rather than whether it does.

mpol writes "Statcounter released new statistics today and 1366x768 is now the most used screen resolution on the internet. These screens are available in most cheap laptops, and therefore probably sold and used very much. With 19.2%, it is beating the old 4:3 resolution, which still has 18.6% usage share. (But as you know, you have lies, damn lies, and statistics.)" The numbers are still close, but it sounds like the tide has turned.

jrepin writes "The Calligra team has announced the first release of the Calligra suite of office and creativity applications. This marks the end of a long development period lasting almost one and a half year. It is the first release in a long series which is planned to make improved applications every 4 months. Calligra is a continuation of the old KOffice project and it may be interesting for KOffice users to know what they will get. Some highlights are: a completely rewritten text layout engine that can handle most of the advanced layout features of OpenDocument Format (ODF), simplified user interface, support for larger parts of the ODF specification (for example line endings like arrows), and improved import filters for Microsoft document formats. There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking. Calligra Active is a new interface for touch based devices and especially for the KDE Plasma Active environment. Several companies have already used Calligra as a base for their own office solution. One of them is Nokia with their N9 high end smartphone where Calligra is embedded into the so called Harmattan Office."

Oldcynic writes "The Canadian mint has allowed 500 developers to enter a contest to create a new digital currency. The currency would allow micro payments using electronic devices. From the article: 'Less than a week after the government announced the penny’s impending death, the Mint quietly unveiled its digital currency called MintChip. Still in the research and development phase, MintChip will ultimately let people pay each other directly using smartphones, USB sticks, computers, tablets and clouds. The digital currency will be anonymous and good for small transactions — just like cash, the Mint says. To make sure its technology meets the gold standard in a world where digital transactions are gaining steam, the Mint is holding a contest for software developers to create applications using the MintChip.'" It looks like the Canadian Mint might have a bit of Sweden envy.

h00manist writes "Nicholas Merrill ran a New York based ISP and got tired of federal 'information requests.' He is now planning an ISP which would be built from the ground up for privacy. Everything encrypted, maximum technical and legal resistance to information requests. Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project. Kickstarter-like IndieGoGo has a project page."

stoolpigeon writes "It is a well known fact that the United States has an obesity problem. There are numerous causes that ultimately lead to an imbalance in the ratio between the number of calories taken in to the number of calories burned. The size of the American diet industry is another good indicator of how widespread the problem has become. Clay Johnson believes that the issues the U.S. has with food have become mirrored in how we consume information." Read below for the rest of stoolpigeon's review. The Information Diet author Clay A. Johnson pages 160 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer stoolpigeon ISBN 978-1449304683 summary A Case for Conscious Consumption Understanding, and buying into, this metaphor of information obesity is key to The Information Diet. Johnson is aware of this and the text never wanders far from the comparisons. He begins with an extensive telling of the physical obesity issue that plagues the United States and then always frames the rest of his work in nutritional/fitness terms. A few chapters are "Welcome to Information Obesity", "The Symptoms of Information Obesity", "Attentions Fitness" and "How to Consume." Readers who don't buy into the parallels are going to have a really hard time with the book. The comparison and prescriptions for behavior never wander far from the picture and so it's not something one can brush off early on and then ignore for the rest of the book. I think that Johnson is right, so I dug into the book, eager to see what he recommended.

I don't think that anyone would argue about the physical obesity problem. I think what readers may be skeptical about is this idea of information obesity. The premise that Johnson puts forward is that we have access to more information than ever before, much in the same way that developed nations have more food available than ever before. (I will let the reader continue to draw the parallels — this example should be enough to figure it out.) While we have more information than ever before, not all information is equal. Some information is good for us and some is not. Another problem is that we tend to seek certain kinds of information that can give us a skewed and inaccurate view of the world we live in. People have access to more information yet they become more ignorant.

Johnson is an activist. Much of his life has been about affecting change. He is very upfront about this and the book contains a large amount of biographical information. Of course this is because he must. Johnson is laying out an argument for digging past the fluff, the bias and finding ways to be informed by facts. But he has his own built in bias and internal spin that he must counter even as he encourages the reader to do the same. I think that for the most part he has managed to do this well, not necessarily by being completely objective but by being transparent. Some of his examples felt a little weak to me, but this is because I had such a different approach to the event, topic or people that he chose as examples. I think his underlying observations were correct, and his sharing freely about his background and default positions helped me to reconcile his main point with my reservations about the specific examples.

The first six chapters are part of the introduction section and lay out Johnson's case for the information obesity problem. The next four chapters are the actual "Information Diet". Here Johnson moves from describing the problem to full on advocacy. Always striving for objectivity Johnson is always quick to describe what science is out there to give light to his position. The problem is that there just isn't much of it out there. This means that the diet itself is a mix of what has seemed to work well for Johnson himself and some broad recommendations. This may be frustrating to anyone who is looking for hard and fast direction. It's not that Johnson doesn't give concrete suggestions, it's just that he can't claim any assurance that they will work for anyone but himself. That said, I think there is a good chance that many of his ideas about how we spend our time taking in information, how we find sources and tools as well as attitudes that may help seem to be good. I think that anyone who moves from being unaware of the issue to being intentional in how they take in information is better off by that change alone.

Working through this process of finding the "diet" that works for someone is something they may want to do with others. With this in mind, and I think reflecting Johnson's bent as an activist, there is an Information Diet web site with a blog, resources and information on things like events. It is tied into some social tools and so one is able to interact with other information dieters.

Unfortunately this site is at once a marketing tool for the book (hoped 'movement' I guess) and this reflects the constant tension that exists in the fact that Johnson is at once pushing for social change and seeking to profit at the same time. He is constantly in danger, while writing and in the external resources for the book, of violating the principles he is endorsing. A friend recently told me, "David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, which argues against procreation, dedicates this book to his parents." It's that appearance of contradiction that pops up here as well. I'm told to filter out more noise, seek out better information and twitter and if I like the idea here are the buttons to let the world know on Facebook, Twitter, g+ or email. It's not that this can't all be reconciled, it is just jarring. This is something that will drive skeptics nuts and I dinged my rating of the book for it, though I think the good outweighs the bad in this regard. Just because the site exists, I don't think that invalidates the thought and I don't have to go there. I feel I've benefited from the book alone.

The book is squarely aimed at an American audience. That's pretty clear from the get-go. Much of Johnson's life has been involved in American politics, the obesity metaphor works well for an American audience and so it makes sense that this would be the scope of the work. I think that is unfortunate because I believe there is a broader application for his ideas with regard to how information is processed and the explosion in the amount of information available. A person who is not an American could read the book and I am sure find some good things to take away but understanding many of the stories and examples would be difficult without some knowledge and understanding of American culture and recent history.

The third section of the book, "Social Obesity", Johnson returns to his enumeration of the ills caused by information obesity. The people who lose out due to poor information habits are not just the individuals but the society as a whole. Johnson invites readers to become a part of a "Vast Rational Conspiracy." I believe he is genuine in this call to action and that is what allows me to forgive some of the efforts around the book that look more self-serving. I believe he is truly trying to fuel a fundamental shift in discourse and knowledge in the United States. This also causes me to be more sympathetic about the geographical focus, though I think it is only fair that readers from other countries be warned. Johnson has created a call to action and he's starting with his home. I am sure he would love to see it spread and move beyond the borders of his native country. The skeptic would again see this happiness as a function of increased personal gain. I'm a little more optimistic, or maybe just a sucker.

This last section is the shortest. It includes a note to programmers that ought to at least be a bit of an ego boost, as they learn they are the new "scribes" of our age. Or having, as Johnson puts it, "...a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else." The appendix with further reading has some great pointers to good reading on-line and in books.

I've rated The Information Diet 8 of 10 because I think Johnson at moments loses the battle to not engage in the kind of objectivity that he advocates and because the book has such a regionally focused audience. That said, it has changed my behavior and I think that it has a positive place. In fact I've become an advocate for many of the ideas, even when I don't recommend the book itself. I recently ran into a barrage of emails from various co-workers advocating that we "turn off technology" because it is too distracting from real life. I found this to be rather annoying because there are always distractions and tech is also important and a force for better lives. The ideas in The Information Diet have given me options to offer people that let them gain control of the information sources in their life rather than giving up and just shutting them all off.

Will the The Information Diet have a great impact over time? I am really not sure. I think that it is definitely a precursor of things to come. Just by being published it will encourage others to copy it and I think we will see the parallel to physical diet and eating continue. But will Johnson finally achieve his goal of making the world a better place? Only time will tell, but I think it is a noble effort.

You can purchase The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

stoolpigeon writes "It is a well known fact that the United States has an obesity problem. There are numerous causes that ultimately lead to an imbalance in the ratio between the number of calories taken in to the number of calories burned. The size of the American diet industry is another good indicator of how widespread the problem has become. Clay Johnson believes that the issues the U.S. has with food have become mirrored in how we consume information." Read below for the rest of stoolpigeon's review. The Information Diet author Clay A. Johnson pages 160 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer stoolpigeon ISBN 978-1449304683 summary A Case for Conscious Consumption Understanding, and buying into, this metaphor of information obesity is key to The Information Diet. Johnson is aware of this and the text never wanders far from the comparisons. He begins with an extensive telling of the physical obesity issue that plagues the United States and then always frames the rest of his work in nutritional/fitness terms. A few chapters are "Welcome to Information Obesity", "The Symptoms of Information Obesity", "Attentions Fitness" and "How to Consume." Readers who don't buy into the parallels are going to have a really hard time with the book. The comparison and prescriptions for behavior never wander far from the picture and so it's not something one can brush off early on and then ignore for the rest of the book. I think that Johnson is right, so I dug into the book, eager to see what he recommended.

I don't think that anyone would argue about the physical obesity problem. I think what readers may be skeptical about is this idea of information obesity. The premise that Johnson puts forward is that we have access to more information than ever before, much in the same way that developed nations have more food available than ever before. (I will let the reader continue to draw the parallels — this example should be enough to figure it out.) While we have more information than ever before, not all information is equal. Some information is good for us and some is not. Another problem is that we tend to seek certain kinds of information that can give us a skewed and inaccurate view of the world we live in. People have access to more information yet they become more ignorant.

Johnson is an activist. Much of his life has been about affecting change. He is very upfront about this and the book contains a large amount of biographical information. Of course this is because he must. Johnson is laying out an argument for digging past the fluff, the bias and finding ways to be informed by facts. But he has his own built in bias and internal spin that he must counter even as he encourages the reader to do the same. I think that for the most part he has managed to do this well, not necessarily by being completely objective but by being transparent. Some of his examples felt a little weak to me, but this is because I had such a different approach to the event, topic or people that he chose as examples. I think his underlying observations were correct, and his sharing freely about his background and default positions helped me to reconcile his main point with my reservations about the specific examples.

The first six chapters are part of the introduction section and lay out Johnson's case for the information obesity problem. The next four chapters are the actual "Information Diet". Here Johnson moves from describing the problem to full on advocacy. Always striving for objectivity Johnson is always quick to describe what science is out there to give light to his position. The problem is that there just isn't much of it out there. This means that the diet itself is a mix of what has seemed to work well for Johnson himself and some broad recommendations. This may be frustrating to anyone who is looking for hard and fast direction. It's not that Johnson doesn't give concrete suggestions, it's just that he can't claim any assurance that they will work for anyone but himself. That said, I think there is a good chance that many of his ideas about how we spend our time taking in information, how we find sources and tools as well as attitudes that may help seem to be good. I think that anyone who moves from being unaware of the issue to being intentional in how they take in information is better off by that change alone.

Working through this process of finding the "diet" that works for someone is something they may want to do with others. With this in mind, and I think reflecting Johnson's bent as an activist, there is an Information Diet web site with a blog, resources and information on things like events. It is tied into some social tools and so one is able to interact with other information dieters.

Unfortunately this site is at once a marketing tool for the book (hoped 'movement' I guess) and this reflects the constant tension that exists in the fact that Johnson is at once pushing for social change and seeking to profit at the same time. He is constantly in danger, while writing and in the external resources for the book, of violating the principles he is endorsing. A friend recently told me, "David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, which argues against procreation, dedicates this book to his parents." It's that appearance of contradiction that pops up here as well. I'm told to filter out more noise, seek out better information and twitter and if I like the idea here are the buttons to let the world know on Facebook, Twitter, g+ or email. It's not that this can't all be reconciled, it is just jarring. This is something that will drive skeptics nuts and I dinged my rating of the book for it, though I think the good outweighs the bad in this regard. Just because the site exists, I don't think that invalidates the thought and I don't have to go there. I feel I've benefited from the book alone.

The book is squarely aimed at an American audience. That's pretty clear from the get-go. Much of Johnson's life has been involved in American politics, the obesity metaphor works well for an American audience and so it makes sense that this would be the scope of the work. I think that is unfortunate because I believe there is a broader application for his ideas with regard to how information is processed and the explosion in the amount of information available. A person who is not an American could read the book and I am sure find some good things to take away but understanding many of the stories and examples would be difficult without some knowledge and understanding of American culture and recent history.

The third section of the book, "Social Obesity", Johnson returns to his enumeration of the ills caused by information obesity. The people who lose out due to poor information habits are not just the individuals but the society as a whole. Johnson invites readers to become a part of a "Vast Rational Conspiracy." I believe he is genuine in this call to action and that is what allows me to forgive some of the efforts around the book that look more self-serving. I believe he is truly trying to fuel a fundamental shift in discourse and knowledge in the United States. This also causes me to be more sympathetic about the geographical focus, though I think it is only fair that readers from other countries be warned. Johnson has created a call to action and he's starting with his home. I am sure he would love to see it spread and move beyond the borders of his native country. The skeptic would again see this happiness as a function of increased personal gain. I'm a little more optimistic, or maybe just a sucker.

This last section is the shortest. It includes a note to programmers that ought to at least be a bit of an ego boost, as they learn they are the new "scribes" of our age. Or having, as Johnson puts it, "...a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else." The appendix with further reading has some great pointers to good reading on-line and in books.

I've rated The Information Diet 8 of 10 because I think Johnson at moments loses the battle to not engage in the kind of objectivity that he advocates and because the book has such a regionally focused audience. That said, it has changed my behavior and I think that it has a positive place. In fact I've become an advocate for many of the ideas, even when I don't recommend the book itself. I recently ran into a barrage of emails from various co-workers advocating that we "turn off technology" because it is too distracting from real life. I found this to be rather annoying because there are always distractions and tech is also important and a force for better lives. The ideas in The Information Diet have given me options to offer people that let them gain control of the information sources in their life rather than giving up and just shutting them all off.

Will the The Information Diet have a great impact over time? I am really not sure. I think that it is definitely a precursor of things to come. Just by being published it will encourage others to copy it and I think we will see the parallel to physical diet and eating continue. But will Johnson finally achieve his goal of making the world a better place? Only time will tell, but I think it is a noble effort.

You can purchase The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "Posting as AC for obvious reasons. The company I work for put an app in an app store. The marketing people think it isn't selling very well, so they sent out an email asking people to get on all their social media sites and friend or like the app to build up traffic. The thing is, most of the employees have not used the app, but we are being asked to say that we like it. We just saw stories about companies not being allowed to ask employees or interview candidates for access to social sites, but what does it mean when a company asks employees to astroturf? Will the marketing or HR people look at who has astroturfed, and who has not at raise time? How would you deal with this?"

joemite writes "On early Wednesday, Nokia said it had found a software bug in the new Lumia 900 smartphone, its big hope to take on Apple's iPhone, and was effectively giving the model away until it is fixed. It is offering anyone who has bought a Lumia 900 phone, or who buys one by April 21, a $100 US credit to their AT&T bill. The operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract. Both Microsoft and Nokia still have big hopes for this phone. The bug apparently causes a random data connection drop. Nokia plans to push a patch the phone later in April."

coondoggie writes "When it comes to stirring the brains of genius, a good competition can bring forward some really great ideas. That's the driving notion behind myriad public competitions, or challenges, as they are often labeled, that will take place in the near future sponsored by the U.S. government. The competitions are increasing by design as part of the $45 billion America Competes Act renewed by Congress last year that gave every federal department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions, according to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy."

coondoggie writes "When it comes to stirring the brains of genius, a good competition can bring forward some really great ideas. That's the driving notion behind myriad public competitions, or challenges, as they are often labeled, that will take place in the near future sponsored by the U.S. government. The competitions are increasing by design as part of the $45 billion America Competes Act renewed by Congress last year that gave every federal department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions, according to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy."

MrKevvy writes "The Tennessee 'Teaching the Controversy' bill was passed into law today. 'A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."'" The governor adds: "However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools."

forkfail writes "The Department of Justice has filed suit against Apple and a number of book publishers, including Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, claiming that they worked in collusion to artificially rig prices on eBooks."

You recently got the chance to ask a group of MIT researchers questions about fusion power, and they've now finished writing some incredibly detailed answers. They discuss the things we've learned about fusion in the past decade, how long it's likely to take for fusion to power your home, the biggest problems fusion researchers are working to solve, and why it's important to continue funding fusion projects. They also delve into the specifics of tokamak operation, like dealing with disruption events and the limitations on reactor size, and provide some insight into fusion as a career. Hit the link below for a wealth of information about fusion. 1. What have we learned?
by jank1887

Fusion is one of those technologies that is always '50 years away,’ even 50 years ago, maybe even 50 years from now. So, looking at what's actually happened recently: What do we actually know now that we didn't know 10-15 years ago that gives support to the notion that we're making progress? Or, what are the 'big' things we know now? Similarly, what are the things we still don't know that we could reasonably expect to find answers for in the next 10-15 years?

MIT Researchers: As researchers in this field, we have heard the expression "Fusion is 50 years away and always will be" more times than we would like to admit. The implication of this statement is that no real progress has been made in the field, which is simply not true! We have made a great deal of progress, even in the last 10–15 years (which have been very lean times for funding). We’ll try to summarize some of the new findings, in no particular order:

1) Internal Transport Barriers/Reversed Shear operation –
We have actually discovered a way to improve upon the performance that we get in H- mode plasmas. These improvements come in the form for so called internal transport barriers. In the past 10–15 years we have begun to understand how to modify the current flowing in tokamak plasmas so that we create effectively what is a barrier in the middle of the plasma. Like the edge barrier in H-mode plasmas, this barrier restricts particles and energy from escaping the plasma and enhancing the overall performance. 2) I-mode –
In just the last 5 years, a new operational regime has been discovered on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT. This is termed the I-mode, or “Improved L-mode” regime. When the tokamak is operated in this manner it exhibits excellent energy confinement properties, keeping the plasma hot. At the same time the plasma does an excellent job of expelling impurities which dilute the fusion fuel and reduce the number of fusion reactions which can occur. It is particularly important to us as it was first observed on Alcator C-Mod, and is now under active development at many other tokamaks around the world.

3) Development of Predictive Models –
Great advances have been made in the development of predictive computer models, such as gyrokinetic and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) formulations. Years of experiments have revealed that plasma turbulence is often primarily responsible for the loss of particles and energy from fusion reactors. In the past 10–15 years we have developed advanced models which are thought to contain sufficient physics to simulate plasma turbulence and predict the performance of future fusion devices. At this time we are in the process of validating these models, i.e. comparing them directly with experiment to ensure they are correct, but we are approaching the ability to reliably predict the performance of fusion plasmas without the need for a fusion reactor. This can motivate engineering design and operational choices for future fusion devices.

4) Self-acceleration of the plasma (intrinsic rotation) –
Over the past decade, it has been discovered (on Alcator C-Mod and elsewhere) that plasmas can spontaneously rotate, at speeds of tens of kilometers per second. (Imagine the donut-shaped plasma spinning on its axis.) This turns out to have beneficial effects for stabilizing turbulence at the edge, as the spinning plasma causes the turbulent eddies to break up before they can carry hot plasma out of the core. This is an exciting area of research that could have big implications for the performance of a tokamak reactor.

5) Disruption mitigation –
One of the main problems with a tokamak is the ‘disruption’, when the plasma energy is suddenly lost, stopping any fusion that is occurring and requiring a restart of the reactor. (See the question below for a lot of detail about this!) In extreme cases, these disruptions can cause damage to the wall of the tokamak – which would require repairs before the machine can be restarted. Over the past decade, we have developed techniques to mitigate these disruptions, causing the plasma to come to a rapid shutdown that does not negatively affect the wall condition. Work is underway to scale these techniques up to a reactor-size device (ITER).

6) ELM control/avoidance –
Another longstanding problem with tokamaks is periodic ‘bursts’ of energy from the edge called Edge-Localized Modes (ELMs). In today’s devices, ELMs are not a problem, but in ITER and future reactors, they could carry enough energy to damage the wall in the divertor region (where most of the energy comes out). There has been rapid progress lately (past 15 years) in ways to control these ELMs by making them more rapid and smaller, such as using resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) coils to distort the shape of the confining magnetic field, or ‘pellet pacing’ (firing small pellets of deuterium fuel into the machine 50–60 times per second, which triggers an ELM), or vertical ‘kicks’ in which the control system suddenly jogs the plasma position a few centimeters vertically, also triggering an ELM. Between these techniques and the recently discovered I-mode (which doesn’t have ELMs), this is a problem that is well on the way to being solved.

7) High-Z walls –
This is a particular point of pride for Alcator C-Mod. Running a tokamak with walls made of refractory metals has many advantages because of the extreme capacity of these materials to absorb heat loads, but there are disadvantages as well, such as how radiative these high atomic number elements are if they get into the plasma as impurities, or how metallic materials distort when they melt, rather than ablating like carbon-fiber composites. Alcator C-Mod (which has a molybdenum wall) and other tokamaks have recently shown that it is possible to reliably run a tokamak with high-Z refractory metal walls, which will almost certainly be a feature of future reactors.

2. Power Loss Scenario in Alcator C-Mod?
by eldavojohn

Not to raise any fears -- rather out of genuine curiosity -- what happens when the magnetic fields that hold the 90,000,000 degrees Celsius plasma in place fail or loser power on the Alcator C-Mod? I understand it's probably in prototype mode, but what sort of safety advantages or disadvantages do Alcator C-Mod designs offer over conventional, large-scale designs? Does the plasma come into contact with the toroidal superconducting coil? Then what?

Geoff Olynyk answers: Actually, that’s exactly what my research is on! The event you describe is called a "disruption." Holding a hot plasma stationary using magnetic fields without it ever touching material surfaces is very difficult – Richard Feynman once compared it to trying to "hold Jello with rubber bands." For any number of reasons, like a magnetic coil losing power, the control system not being able to juggle the plasma position quickly enough, or the plasma hitting a stability limit (pressure or density goes too high), it’s possible for the plasma to hit the wall. The most important thing to know, though, is that when this occurs (and it does, frequently, in today’s experiments – although it’ll have to be a very rare occurrence in a real power reactor so it produces uninterrupted electricity), it is no risk to the environment or to safety.

To understand what happens, you have to realize that the plasma is very, very light. In the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, it has a mass of only about 0.001 grams – about one- fiftieth as much as the smallest drop of water you can get from an eyedropper. (This is with a plasma volume of about a cubic meter – a fusion plasma is actually a pretty good vacuum!) So even though it’s very hot, it doesn’t actually have a lot of thermal stored energy to flow into the wall if confinement is suddenly lost. There is actually more energy stored in the current flowing in the plasma (in C-Mod, about a million amperes), which also gets deposited on the wall. In C-Mod, thermal stored energy is about 50– 150 kJ and magnetic stored energy is almost 1000 kJ. The problem is that as we go to larger machines (like ITER, or a reactor), the amount of stored energy in the plasma scales like the cube of the size, and the wall area only scales like the square of the size. So the energy deposited per square meter of wall area gets worse (larger) as we go up in machine size.

The plasma doesn’t hit the superconducting coils - it hits (really, deposits its energy on) the “first wall” of the chamber closest to the plasma. So, we do two things to make sure that the walls can survive these disruption events. The first is making them out of materials that can take a blast of heat, like tungsten, or else materials that ablate away rather than melting, like carbon fiber composites. The second is to develop “disruption mitigation” systems which can cause the plasma to radiate all its energy evenly over the entire wall surface, spreading the heat out and lessening the chance of causing localized melting. But I want to stress again - disruptions are an operational problem, meaning they might cause a power plant to be offline for a while, but they’re not a safety problem. There is no chance of a runaway reaction or meltdown in a fusion reactor.

3. Ubiquitous Fusion Power
by monsted

When will fusion power my house (or vehicle)?

MIT Researchers: This is obviously an impossible question to answer, but we can give some thoughts about when it might happen, and why. First, the current official plan is that ITER will demonstrate net fusion gain (Q = 10, that is, ten times more fusion power out than heating power put in) in about 2028 or 2029. (Construction will be done by about 2022 but there’s a six-year shakedown process of steadily increasing the power and learning how to run the machine before the full-power fusion shots.) At that point, designs can begin for a “DEMO”, which is the fusion community’s term for a demonstration power plant. That would come online around 2040 (and would putt watts on the grid, although probably at an economic loss at first), and would be followed by (profitable, economic) commercial plants around 2050.

This seems like a long time, and it is, but it’s important to understand that this is not the only possible path. You might say that we’re not a certain number of years away from a working fusion power plant, but rather about $80-billion away (in worldwide funding). We’ll get into this more in response to one of the other questions, but there are other experiments that could be done in parallel with ITER that would certainly speed up the goal of a demonstration power plant, if there were the money for it. Here is a graph based on a 1976 ERDA (predecessor to today’s DOE) fusion development plan, showing their four paths to a reactor, as well as a business-as-usual funding case that would never lead to a reactor, and in black is the actual funding amounts. (All values are adjusted to 2012 dollars.)

In the U.S. at least, fusion funding hasn’t been anywhere close to what would be required for a “crash program” to get to a reactor. If it were, it would probably be possible to have a demonstration reactor in about twenty years. (This is not actually that long - given that it takes almost a decade to build a large fission reactor or hydroelectric dam!)

Fusion has a reputation of “always being thirty years away” (or fifty, or twenty). We want to address that head-on here: aside from a few over-optimistic predictions made in the very early days of magnetic fusion research (the 1950s), this reputation is undeserved. The reason it has taken so long to get to breakeven (ITER) is because since the end of the 1970s, funding for fusion research has been continually slashed, up to today, when the U.S. is proposing shuttering one of three remaining tokamak experiments, the Alcator C-Mod device at MIT that we all work on. Despite this, progress has been continuous. But if we had the money, we would be getting there quicker.

4. What are the economic numbers for a successful, commercial reactor?
by kestasjk
I know that the economics of larger reactor = more economical are well known with tokamaks. Does this mean you have a good idea of the minimum cost / generating capacity of the first commercial reactors? If so, what do those numbers look like?
7. Lower Limit on Tokamak Design
by gyepi
Are there any good guesstimates on how small a tokamak-based fusion reactor (which produces more energy than it consumes) can become? Theoretical limitations on the size of the reactor would have obvious implications for pragmatic issues.

MIT Researchers: Questions 4 and 7 are similar and we answer them together here.

The current thinking is that a tokamak fusion reactor will be about 1 gigawatt electrical, and about 2–3.5 gigawatts thermal (depending on how high-temperature the blanket is and thus how thermally efficient it can be). This is about the size of a current fission reactor or large coal-fired power plant.

Fusion researchers are working on smaller designs, though! At MIT, some students are working on a concept for a 350–500 MW (thermal) class fusion reactor, which would be cheaper to field and thus more likely to be built by private industry with limited access to capital. This is still early work, though, and the economic analysis is not done yet.

Cost estimates for a new technology like fusion cannot be terribly reliable, but several studies suggest that, with suitable developments in science and technology, the costs could be competitive with other methods of electricity generation. We recommend you read the ARIES-AT study (google it), which goes through all the factors that go into the cost of electricity (COE) for a fusion reactor, and compares their concept to other electricity generation options (fission, fossil fuels, etc.) A key advantage of fusion is in what economists call "external costs." These are costs borne by society as a whole and not by the generating industry. Environmental pollution, nuclear proliferation, and military operations to protect oil supplies are all examples of external costs for energy.

5. What Problems are Holding Back Successful Reactions?
by Bucc5062

Can you explain to a non-scientist what the biggest stumbling blocks are for an effective fusion reaction? Is it truly a matter of throwing money down an energy hole, or are there verifiable, measurable benchmarks that lead us from one step to the next? I.e. we’ve achieved X, now we need Y; when we get Y, we get Z and then achieve fusion. Is it the technology holding us back, the politics, or the science?

MIT Researchers: We know exactly what we need to do. Not everything has a solution yet – that’s why it’s still a research project! – but we generally know what the big challenges are to get to a working magnetic fusion reactor. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• 1 – Non-inductive current drive. We can’t rely on inductors to drive the plasma current since they are inherently pulsed (not steady-state). We think that lower hybrid current drive might be the solution, and are actively researching this on Alcator C-Mod.
• 2 – Confining a 'burning plasma.' This is the big question that ITER will resolve – can we really confine a plasma that is dominantly self-heated – that is, most of its energy comes from fusion reactions rather than external heating. Will new instabilities appear? Or can we confine the plasma as we expect we can.
• 3 – Confining a steady-state burning plasma while avoiding off-normal events. We have to do both of the previous points at the same time! And we can’t have disruptions too often or else the power plant won’t have a high enough duty factor. The goal is to have disruptions (which require a shutdown) occur less than once per year.
• 4 – Validated predictive capability for fusion-grade plasmas. We have made great progress in this field already (see our answer to an earlier question), but it’s not at the point yet that, say, fluid mechanics codes are, where Boeing can design an entire plane in the computer before ever building a scale model. We need our models of fusion plasma behavior to be accurate and reliable enough to design first-of-a-kind machines that we are 100% sure will work the way we think they will.
• 5 – Diagnosing a burning plasma. It’s really hard to tell any of the properties of the plasma even today, when we use pure deuterium fuel (instead of ‘live’ deuterium–tritium fuel), and our plasmas are colder than they would be in a reactor! You can’t, for example, stick a thermometer in to tell the temperature! We have to use subtle effects like bouncing a laser beam off the electrons and telling the temperature from the Doppler shift of the laser from the moving electrons (a technique known as Thomson scattering). Making these diagnostics work in the reactor environment, with higher plasma temperatures and a ferocious flux of neutrons coming out, is a great challenge.
• 6 – Better understanding of plasma–wall interactions. The plasma is confined by magnetic fields, and ideally doesn’t touch the wall at all, except in a very small area called the divertor. This means that the material challenges in the divertor are severe – we have to figure out a way to operate the plasma so that it’s hot in the center, but cold near the divertor, so that it doesn’t erode the wall too fast. This will be a limiting factor on how long you can run a fusion power plant for before you have to shut it down in order to do maintenance. Ideally, we’d want this to be every 2 years or so, like fission power plants today.
• 7 – Materials for plasma-facing components. We need to develop new materials that can withstand the high temperatures of the wall of a fusion reactor while resisting neutron damage and not becoming too activated by the neutrons that will pass through them. (There is some progress on this front with ferritic steels and silicon carbide.)
• 8 – Magnets that meet the plasma physics requirements and allow reactor maintainability at reasonable costs. (Some of us are working on demountable superconducting coil concepts that may eventually be the solution to this!)
• 9 – Design and materials for tritium fuel cycle and power extraction. Fusion reactors will breed their own tritium fuel from deuterium – this process has to be experimentally tested on a large scale (which will obviously require a burning plasma tokamak).
• 10 – Reliability, availability, maintainability, and inspectability (RAMI) of the reactor designs. We have to show that our concepts for reactors really are as good as we think they can be.

The point is that it’s not a money pit. There are unsolved challenges, but we know what they are, and with adequate support, these challenges will be overcome. This is why we are urging everyone to go to fusionfuture.org and write Congress asking them to keep supporting U.S. fusion research! (It’s very easy – there’s a link at the right on the website.)

6. NIMBY
by GeneralTurgidson

How do you explain the safety/benefits of fusion to a generation of people terrified of nuclear anything?

MIT Researchers:This is where fusion really shines. The two big problems (at least, perceived problems) of fission reactors are the risk of a meltdown, and what you do with the high-level radioactive waste. Fusion has neither of these issues!

Regarding the first, the reason why a worst-case accident in a fission reactor can be so devastating is because there is a lot of fuel in the reactor at any one time. There are well known accidents at Chernobyl (where the reaction ‘ran away’, making more power than the reactor was designed to handle) and Fukushima, where the fission chain reaction was safely shut down, but the cores melted down when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, due to ‘decay heat’ which is produced by the used fuel even after shutdown.

In a fusion reactor, it’s a completely different story. There will be less than a gram of fuel in a reactor at any one time—fresh deuterium–tritium fuel is continually added as it is burned—and so a runaway reaction is simply not possible. Decay heat isn’t a problem in a pure fusion system, again because there just isn’t any fuel sitting there undergoing nuclear reactions once the reactor is shut down. In general, this is one area where it’s a benefit that a fusion reaction is so hard to sustain! We have to try really hard to keep the plasma hot enough to undergo fusion in the first place, so if we just turn off the heating and fuelling systems, the fusion reaction will shut down very quickly.

As for the second benefit of fusion (waste), the reaction is completely different from that in a fission reactor. In fission, uranium (or other heavy elements like plutonium) split into pieces, producing hundreds of different isotopes, some of which are radioactive, with half-lives ranging from fractions of a second to millions of years. In fusion, the reaction is simple, deuterium + tritium helium + neutron. So there is no “waste” from the unburned fuel – any tritium that isn’t burned gets pumped out of the chamber and recirculated back in.

This is not to say that there will be no radioactive waste from a fusion plant. The reactor vessel itself will become activated because of the flux of neutrons passing through it, and will have to be treated accordingly when the plant is decommissioned (after, say, a 50-year operational period). But it’s important to note that this kind of radioactive waste is of a much lower level – it won’t have to be stored for very long before it will be “cool” enough to simply bury in the ground safely. And there is active research going on into new materials for fusion reactors that are more resistant to activation by neutrons, such as ferritic steel and silicon carbide.

Finally, fusion has great advantages for nuclear non-proliferation. Creating enough fission power plants to avoid climate change would mean that the plutonium moving around the world would be enough to create about 100,000 nuclear weapons. For fusion, it is much more difficult to use a reactor to make fuel for weapons. This is also something that we think a nuclear-skeptical public will appreciate about fusion power.

All of us are strong supporters of fission power, and we agree that at times, the nuclear power industry has not received a fair shake when compared to other sources of energy. But we think that the advantages of fusion power speak for themselves, and the public will be able to understand the risks and will support the construction of these plants. Obviously, having media that are able to explain things clearly and fairly are a necessity.

8. What do the numbers really look like?
by Erich

ITER is a hugely expensive project, and won't produce a commercially viable power generation system. In a lot of areas where research is done on things which don't work yet -- rockets, bridges, transmission systems, etc -- there's a general idea of how things might be able to "scale up" to meet the goals. Is tokamak fusion really in sight of being a commercially viable source of energy? If we need unobtanium to make a commercially viable reactor, wouldn't it make sense to wait until the materials are viable before making even larger tokamaks? Or is it still worth learning from these new, bigger, more expensive reactors?

MIT Researchers: You are exactly correct in your statement; ITER is an expensive project which will not produce electricity upon completion. However, ITER’s main purpose is not to put watts on the grid, but to demonstrate the scientific feasibility of fusion by creating a Q=10 plasma (10 times as much energy out as we put in). We do have a good idea of how to proceed with devices following ITER, namely DEMO, a full demonstration fusion power plant which will use the steam cycle to generate electricity from the fusion reactor. The basic layout of a reactor can be found here: http://www.fusionfuture.org/what-is-alcator- c-mod/c-mod-for-energy/

Although there is still plenty of research which remains, fusion is in sight of being a commercially viable energy source. We believe that we now understand the physics well enough to create the appropriate plasma conditions (this will be demonstrated on ITER) and we are working on the engineering challenges that lay between us and a commercial fusion reactor.

It is obviously impossible to predict when fusion will put power on the grid since the estimate can change drastically based on demand and overall funding levels. You are however, correct in noting that some of the biggest challenges involve the discovery/ development of materials which can resist the unique and harsh conditions associated with fusion reactors, namely, high heat and neutron fluxes. Due to its importance to the success of future devices, this is a very active and important area of research.

The international fusion community is attempting to address these issues in the following manner: Given the scope of the ITER project and the time required to build and test it, we are planning on constructing a materials testing facility named, IFMIF which stands for International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. This facility should be operated at the same time as ITER and will be addressing the materials issues associated with an eventual fusion power plant while ITER is demonstrated the scientific feasibility of a fusion reactor.

Given the time-scales for reactor construction, we think it would be unwise to wait for this materials testing to be complete before starting new machine construction. Addressing the remaining problems in parallel will most likely result in the quickest path to fusion energy.

9. Careers in Fusion?
by benjfowler

As practicing researchers, can you tell us about the health of the pipeline of young researchers coming into the field? Is there a glut of trained physicists at this stage, or is there still a need for trained specialists to enter the field, especially with ITER and follow-on machines coming online in the next couple of decades?

Nathan Howard answers: At this point in time fusion is actually a pretty healthy field in terms of young researchers and with emergence of the next generation devices such as ITER, there should be an influx of researchers stepping up to meet the need for trained specialists on these next gen devices. Currently in Europe and Asia, emphasis on fusion research is ramping up to support the research needs. These newly trained researchers are going to be the scientists working on ITER in 10-15 years.

Unfortunately, the US fusion program is in danger of going the opposite direction of the Asian and European programs. The current proposals made by the US are threatening the health of fusion in the US. The President’s 2013 budget proposal calls for drastic cuts to the domestic fusion budget to pay for increased funding for the ITER budget. However, if these cuts continue, there will not be a field for the young researchers to enter and the US fusion program is in danger of dissolving before ITER comes online.

This does not mean that a need for trained specialist will not remain, it just means that the young researchers in Europe and Asia will be filling these positions. Dr. Stewart Prager, the head of Princeton Plasma Physics Lab said it best, “We have a clear choice before us: The United States can either design and build fusion energy plants or we can buy them from Asia or Europe.”

As a young researcher myself, I am particularly affected by the choices that the US is currently making. Myself and other graduate students have been urging others who support fusion research to contact congress and tell them to continue to fund domestic fusion research. We put together a website, www.fusionfuture.org, which provides more information and people the ability to quickly and easily contact their congressmen to tell them to support research. Please support US fusion research and check out the site.

12. Patents?
by Anonymous Coward

Will patents get in the way of your research?

MIT Researchers: In general, we find that the tokamak labs of the world are extremely cooperative; patents have never been a problem. It does seem likely that the technologies supporting power plants will be highly patentable, but the sort of scientific knowledge we’re accumulating at present really isn’t. At some point, we expect to move from a collaborative to a competitive phase – but we’re not there yet.

11. What level of investment would get fusion going?
by Tragek
Do you think a program the size of the Apollo program could kickstart fusion to general availability? Or would a smaller program suffice?
14. What could you do with unlimited resources?
by petes_PoV
Given $1 trillion, the pick of the best brains in the world to work willingly on the project, a large enough location away from any and all governmental regulation and every facility you could ever need - when would fusion be commercially viable?

MIT Researchers: Questions 11 and 14 are similar and we have answered them together.

Any kind of question asking about a hypothetical massive increase in funding is tricky to answer. We probably couldn’t even spend a trillion dollars if we wanted to – just because it would take a long time to get enough people trained in plasma physics and fusion energy.

We can say this: an increase in funding would allow for different paths to be tried in parallel, like stellarators, tokamaks (ITER), spherical tokamaks, etc. Plus, we could build a facility in the United States to study the problem of plasma–wall interactions, which is a very important topic that has not been adequately studied up to this point (see our answer above about what steps are needed to get to a reactor).

We think that we’re roughly $80-billion away from a reactor. At current levels of funding (worldwide), that’s about 40 years. Even given access to huge amounts of money, it’s unlikely that a working reactor could be built in less than a decade – there are just too many facilities to build between current devices and a full-scale reactor in order to ensure success. But we could certainly do it faster than 40 years!

We want to note that “crash” programs like Apollo or the Manhattan Project succeeded because they took risks – they started work on building their systems before they had done all the homework. That is inherently risky, but these risks are mitigated by pursuing alternatives in parallel. Something similar could be done in fusion, given the money.

15. Your favorite books?
by eldavojohn

I'm not a physicist (software guy), but I've taken a few physics classes. At an early age I found a tattered copy of George Gamow's One Two Three . . . Infinity, which, although incorrect in some parts (I guess that's why they revised it and that's why 'speculations' was in the title), was perfectly written for my then-fifth-grade mind. It set me on a path toward science, and a few weeks ago I saw the same 1960s Viking Press edition and flipped through it, noticing what was slightly off and remembering it. I've since grown to love other obvious books by authors like Hawking, Penrose, Hofstadter, etc. So, quite simply, what are your favorite books for all minds, young and old? Also, can you annotate which are written for the layman's entry into the given field and which are written to encompass the field for the researcher? I find that some books start off with the jargon so strong and the references and footnotes so thick that you start to have to re-read every paragraph, as they're clearly condensing entire historic papers into lengthy sentences. Any fiction books worthy of influencing your work and desires?

Ian Hutchinson: My all time favorite novel is Godric by Fredrick Buechner. It's a wonderful first-person portrait of the prior life of a medieval hermit. My favorite physics teaching text is the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which comes from a remarkable effort by the most widely acclaimed american physicist of the 20th century to explain really advanced physics to undergraduates.

I really don't enjoy the genre of books that combine science popularization with metaphysical speculation. They are of course quite popular, but most are philosophically naive in a way that I find annoying.

Anne White: I like detective/adventure stories. I also enjoy reading plays, poetry and short stories – some authors I read over and over are Wolfgang Borchert, Julio Cortazar, Ray Bradbury and Samuel Beckett.

Recently, I've enjoyed reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.

Influential books/stories that I remember reading when I was young : The Pearl (John Steinbeck), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), Flatland, and Ender's Game.

Dennis Whyte:

• For science non-fiction books, it’s a tie: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould.
• Novel (in general subject area of science): The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
• Speculative fiction: Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Geoff Olynyk: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. It’s a bit long, but is a fascinating, well-written exploration of the project to develop the atom bomb (both in the U.S. and elsewhere).

This is not a science book, but The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (sold in the United States as Nation of Rebels) changed my life. I was into counterculture, "culture jamming," anti-advertising, that kind of stuff, and this book made me seriously reconsider all of it. I now understand that trying to be unique is futile in a world of seven billion, and I should just try to be a good person and do good for the world (hence working on fusion!) Potter’s follow-up The Authenticity Hoax, explores the search for authenticity in more detail, but it’s not nearly as good of a book as Rebel Sell.

Nathan Howard: I first became interested in physics by reading about astrophysics. I was specifically interested in black holes and so one of the first books I read (after some of the popular books by Hawking which are written for general audiences, e.g. A Brief History of Time) was a book by Kip S. Thorne called Black Holes and Time Warps. I really enjoyed this book. It did not require much technical background, just some basic mathematics, and it gave good explanations of black holes, relativity, and gravitational waves.

16. Why is fusion more useful than exploiting thorium?
by gestalt_n_pepper

I understand that in the long term, we would want fusion. But we face increasing energy problems over the next 50 years and severe energy problems before 2100. Wouldn't it make sense to allocate research and development resources to something that we know works?

MIT Researchers: First of all, fusion will be putting watts on the grid before 2100. It’s not going to be tomorrow, but it’s not going to be a hundred years, either.

We know how to build thorium fission reactors. It's been done. They have none of the major attractions of a fusion reactor in terms of safety, fuel resources, reduced waste, or non-proliferation. Worldwide thorium fuel resources are about the same as those of uranium. Thorium reactors might become part of the commercial fission reactor mix in the future, but they don't offer transformative possibilities for nuclear power the way fusion does.

That said, we think that the that the scale of the energy/climate problem demands that we (meaning: government and private industry where appropriate) pursue multiple lines of development into new energy sources. Obviously nobody wants to waste taxpayer money, so all proposals have to be evaluated for chance of success – but today, it’s limited by funding more than by a lack of good ideas. This shouldn’t be the case.

The key thing we want to get across is that it shouldn’t be a contest between “fund fusion” or “fund thorium research”. Fusion is extremely important for humankind and should be funded – if thorium fission also has promise, it should be funded too.

17. How is fusion power harnessed?
by circletimessquare

The talk is always about reaching break-even with fusion. What about capturing the power? Are we generating heat that will drive steam turbines? What schemes exist for capture and harnessing the power generated by fusion?

MIT Researchers: In a magnetic fusion reactor, each deuterium-tritium fusion produces a 3.5 MeV (mega- electronvolt) alpha particle (helium nucleus) which deposits its energy in the plasma (this self-heating is how you can have an ‘ignited’ plasma which doesn’t require much or any external heating), and a 14.1 MeV neutron, which deposits its energy in a thick lithium blanket surrounding the toroidal reaction chamber. But in the end, all of it comes out as heat!

For a conservative fusion reactor design, this heat would be removed by a primary cooling loop (high-pressure steam or some sort of liquid metal) which would give the heat to a secondary steam loop (Rankine cycle) in a heat exchanger (steam generator). The steam would then turn a turbine, producing electricity, just like in a fission or coal power plant.

Of course, with a thermal process like a steam cycle, one is always limited by the Carnot efficiency, which increases as the temperature of the high-temperature reservoir goes up. So there are also designs to use a very high-temperature (800–1000 C) gas cooling loop and a Brayton cycle.

But the short answer is: the alpha power is captured by the plasma, and the neutron power is captured by the blanket. It all comes out as heat, which is used to heat a working fluid, which turns a turbine, producing electricity. This is not expected to be a technological problem – the challenge is in getting a confined thermonuclear plasma to produce the fusion energy in the first place!

19. Fusion Milestone Prizes?
by Baldrson

In 1992, with the assistance of fusion technologists such as Robert W. Bussard, I developed legislative language for a series of 12 milestones, each of which would be awarded a $(1992)100M prize for the achievement of objectives toward the attainment of practical fusion energy. This legislation also provided a grace period during which scientists and technologists that had been working on the US fusion program would be provided full salaries, without obligation, during which time they could seek support for their ideas to achieve these milestones. This legislation presaged a number of other prizes including the X-Prize and BAFAR / CATS prize. In 1995, Robert W. Bussard submitted this legislation to all relevant Congressional committees, copying all US plasma physics laboratories. Needless to say, the legislation wasn't passed. Do you think the time is right?

MIT Researchers: We think that the current approach, in which government-funded labs are not in direct competition, but have to justify their funding to the agency (in our case, the DOE), is the best option for the moment. Perhaps the X-PRIZE approach might work for the alternative concepts? (see our answer below regarding Polywell/Dense Plasma Focus/ IEC etc.)

20. ITER
by MpVpRb

Is the ITER project good science? Or is it a politically-motivated, pork-laden boondoggle?

MIT Researchers: ITER is absolutely good science. Governments representing over half the population of the world are backing the project because it is the logical next step – a prototype reactor that will produce ten times more fusion energy than heating power put in, for a few minutes at a time. It is also pushing forward the development of fusion reactor technology (materials, control systems, remote handling systems, etc.). The U.S. fusion community endorsed ITER as the best option for a next-step experiment at the Snowmass II conference in 2002 (see proceedings here).

All of that said, the cost of ITER has risen substantially from the original estimates, and because overall magnetic fusion funding has remained nearly flat in the United States, the U.S. contribution to ITER is threatening to swallow up the entire domestic program. This is starting with the planned closure of Alcator C-Mod in September 2012, but unless more money is allocated to fusion research, all three U.S. tokamak facilities are at risk in the next few years.

Graduate students at Alcator C-Mod have put together a web page explaining the problem: http://www.fusionfuture.org/faq/the-fusion-budget-problem/ and we urge you to go to this website and click the link to contact your member of Congress and urge them to fully fund a strong domestic program and the U.S. contribution to ITER!

21. NIF
by Grond

Is the NIF approach even plausibly capable of generating electricity in a useful way? Or is it purely a research platform / smokescreen for nuclear weapons research?

MIT Researchers: The primary mission of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is "stockpile stewardship." That is, to ensure that U.S. nuclear weapons continue to be a credible deterrent. This is why NIF is funded by the National Nuclear Security Agency (the agency in charge of the nation’s nuclear stockpile), not the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences program. Thus, the weapons research mission of NIF is not a smokescreen, but is actually the publicly acknowledged primary objective for the facility.

Some researchers at NIF believe that their inertial fusion approach can be used for an energy source as well. We don’t want to speculate here on the plausibility of the LIFE (Laser Inertial Fusion Energy) concept. There is a National Academy of Science review of the prospects of inertial fusion energy under way right now; the final report is expected to be published before the end of this year.

18. Dense Plasma Focus
by mbradmoody
Do you see any merit in the "dense plasma focus" approach to commercial fusion power production, specifically the work of the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics group?
22. Focus Fusion / aneutronic fusion?
by mwk88
Focus Fusion Society is posting research on their project to do aneutronic (e.g. Proton Boron (pB11)) fusion. The concept sounds great, and as an engineer, I find several parts of their design, such as direct extraction of electric power, to be elegant. Is this credible research or pie-in-the-sky? I have not seen much mention of them in mainstream fusion research.
23. Polywell Fusion
by mknewman
What do you think of the efforts at EMC2 Fusion and Polywell Fusion? They seem to be making real, measurable, and open results, but the mainstream physics community seems to ignore this progress.
24. What’s wrong with IECs / Fusor?
by claytongulick
Why aren't IEC reactors based on Farnsworth's designs taken more seriously? From what I understand, IECs have been more effective at producing fusion, and they are cheap to build. People even build them in the garage. From everything I've read, no one really takes the "fusor" seriously in the fusion science realm, and it's considered a dead line of inquiry. I've never understood why.

MIT Researchers: These four questions (18, 22–24) are answered together here.

None of us are experts on inertial electrostatic confinement, magnetized target fusion / dense plasma focus, or Polywells, and so we don’t want to say too much about the specifics of those designs. We can say the following:

1. The amount of money that is being spent, especially in the United States, on fusion is far lower than the field deserves, given its track record and potential. This sounds self-serving, but we think it’s justifiable based on the facts. The graph we posted above shows how the fusion budget is far lower today than it was thirty years ago, even as we continue to make steady progress toward a reactor and the seriousness of the coupled energy/climate problem becomes more obvious.

The alternate confinement concepts program has also seen cuts. (“Alternative” in DOE Fusion Energy Sciences parlance means, basically, anything that isn’t tokamaks, stellarators, or laser [inertial] fusion.) The Levitated Dipole Experiment, an innovative magnetic-confinement arrangement based on planetary magnetic fields, was cancelled just as they were about to add significant auxiliary heating for the first time. And these small-scale alternative confinement projects are not very expensive! Some of these alternative concepts may very well be promising and deserve taxpayer money to be developed.

2. But on the other hand, these groups need to show that they deserve funding. It’s not enough to just tease these promising results and be secretive about the methods or technologies. Public funding can only come when the details are published in the open literature, and subjected to the scrutiny of peer review and the wider community reading the papers. The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago - so it’s very important for the proponents of these alternate concepts to push the researchers to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. Whatever negatives the tokamak might have, one thing you can’t say about it is that the research has been too secretive, and this has allowed the funding agencies to make the judgement that the tokamak is currently the most promising route to a fusion reactor, which is why this line of research gets the most money.

Special thanks to Dr. Martin Greenwald, Prof. Ian Hutchinson, Asst. Prof. Anne White, Prof. Dennis Whyte, Nathan Howard, and Geoff Olynyk for taking the time to answer our questions.

redletterdave writes "Not 24 hours after Sony announced it would slash about 10,000 jobs by the end of the year, the Japanese electronics maker announced on Tuesday that it has again doubled its annual net loss to a record $6.4 billion. The new annual estimate is Sony's fourth revision of its original forecast. The company had already more than doubled its loss forecast for fiscal 2011 on April 5 to $2.9 billion, blaming floods in Thailand, poor foreign exchange rates, and a failed partnership with Samsung... Kazuo Hirai, the company's new president and CEO hired 10 days ago, will take 'painful steps' to revive Sony, and will unveil a 'revival strategy' at a Thursday press briefing."

redletterdave writes "Not 24 hours after Sony announced it would slash about 10,000 jobs by the end of the year, the Japanese electronics maker announced on Tuesday that it has again doubled its annual net loss to a record $6.4 billion. The new annual estimate is Sony's fourth revision of its original forecast. The company had already more than doubled its loss forecast for fiscal 2011 on April 5 to $2.9 billion, blaming floods in Thailand, poor foreign exchange rates, and a failed partnership with Samsung... Kazuo Hirai, the company's new president and CEO hired 10 days ago, will take 'painful steps' to revive Sony, and will unveil a 'revival strategy' at a Thursday press briefing."

redletterdave writes "Not 24 hours after Sony announced it would slash about 10,000 jobs by the end of the year, the Japanese electronics maker announced on Tuesday that it has again doubled its annual net loss to a record $6.4 billion. The new annual estimate is Sony's fourth revision of its original forecast. The company had already more than doubled its loss forecast for fiscal 2011 on April 5 to $2.9 billion, blaming floods in Thailand, poor foreign exchange rates, and a failed partnership with Samsung... Kazuo Hirai, the company's new president and CEO hired 10 days ago, will take 'painful steps' to revive Sony, and will unveil a 'revival strategy' at a Thursday press briefing."

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threatpost: "Apple is planning to release a software fix that will find and remove the Flashback malware that has been haunting Mac users for several months now. ... Apple said on Tuesday that it was in the process of developing a tool that would detect and remove Flashback, but the company did not specify when the fix would be available. Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now."

gbrumfiel writes "The Square Kilometre Array will be the world's most powerful telescope, assuming the nations involved can agree on where to build it. A scientific panel recently backed South Africa over Australia to host the project, but neither side has conceded defeat. Rather than splitting the partners, project leaders are now thinking about splitting the telescope between the two countries. There's little scientific advantage, but the thinking is that a split telescope would be better than no telescope."

OverTheGeicoE writes "Jonathan Corbett, creator of the video showing that TSA's body scanners can't see metal objects on our sides, has a new video out. This time he's interviewing an experienced TSA screener identified only as 'Jennifer,' and her allegations point to 'fatal flaws' in TSA and its procedures. Worse, TSA's screeners are well aware of these flaws. According to Jennifer, body scanners frequently fail to detect objects on passengers, and this flaw is well known to the screeners on the job. People with visible items in their pockets can pass through scanners without detection, even when the items are simulated weapons or explosives. Jennifer also alleges that training for screeners is severely lacking. Screeners are directed to operate body scanners, even the X-ray scanners, without any training whatsoever. The manual of standard operating procedures often can't be found at the checkpoints, let alone read. Jennifer was so alarmed by what she experienced that she wrote her congressional representative to complain. She was ultimately fired as a result, effective yesterday."

angry tapir writes "Slashdot recently discussed some of the problems with the One Laptop Per Child program in Peru, where, in general, teachers did not make creative use of the technology by just regarding the laptops as an end in themselves. In Australia, the local OLPC organization is attempting to address similar issues by creating an educational framework around the laptops that involves training students how to teach others about the technology and even conduct hardware repairs on the XOs. Some of the early results at XO-equipped schools, which in Australia are generally in remote and disadvantaged schools, have been impressive."

We've heard recently of CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a bill currently making its way through Congress that many are calling the latest incarnation of SOPA. Reader SolKeshNaranek points out an article at Techdirt explaining exactly why this bill is bad, and how its backers are trying to deflect criticism by using language that's different and rather vague. Quoting: "The bill defines 'cybersecurity systems' and 'cyber threat information' as anything to do with protecting a network from: '(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or (B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.' It's easy to see how that definition could be interpreted to include things that go way beyond network security — specifically, copyright policing systems at virtually any point along a network could easily qualify."

judgecorp writes "Intel security subsidiary McAfee has claimed a successful wireless attack on insulin pumps that diabetics rely on to control blood sugar. While previous attempts to attack insulin pumps have met with mixed success, McAfee's Barnaby Jack says he has persuaded an insulin pump to deliver 45 days worth of insulin in one go, without triggering the pump's vibrating alert safety feature. All security experts still say that surgical implants are a benefit overall."

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Now that it's being increasingly targeted by botnet herders, Apple has a thing or two to learn about cooperating with friendly security researchers. Boris Sharov, the CEO of Dr. Web, the Russian security company that first reported more than half a million Macs were infected with Flashback malware last week, says when his company alerted Apple to the botnet, it never responded to him. Worse yet, on Monday Apple asked a Russian registrar to take down a domain it said was being used to host a command and control server for Flashback, but in fact was a 'sinkhole' that Dr. Web had set up to observe and analyze the botnet. Sharov describes the lack of communication and cooperation as a symptom of a company that has never before had to work closely with the security industry. 'For Microsoft, we have all the security response team's addresses,' he says. 'We don't know the antivirus group inside Apple.'"

An anonymous reader writes "I finally started looking at my taxes and instead of handing over my personal information and money to TurboTax I was wondering if there were any recommendations for freely available/open source tax software? Ideally, the data would be stored in a portable, open format. I wouldn't really need a GUI, but something that filled out PDF forms would be nice." It's a question that just won't go away. Open source solution or not, if you're a U.S. taxpayer, the deadline for filing is nearly to hand.

An anonymous reader writes "I finally started looking at my taxes and instead of handing over my personal information and money to TurboTax I was wondering if there were any recommendations for freely available/open source tax software? Ideally, the data would be stored in a portable, open format. I wouldn't really need a GUI, but something that filled out PDF forms would be nice." It's a question that just won't go away. Open source solution or not, if you're a U.S. taxpayer, the deadline for filing is nearly to hand.

An anonymous reader writes "I finally started looking at my taxes and instead of handing over my personal information and money to TurboTax I was wondering if there were any recommendations for freely available/open source tax software? Ideally, the data would be stored in a portable, open format. I wouldn't really need a GUI, but something that filled out PDF forms would be nice." It's a question that just won't go away. Open source solution or not, if you're a U.S. taxpayer, the deadline for filing is nearly to hand.

suraj.sun writes "Iran topped a recent list of repressive regimes that most aggressively restrict Internet freedom. The list, published by Reporters Without Borders, is a part of the 2012 edition of the organization's Enemies of the Internet report. One of the details addressed in that report is the Iranian government's bizarre plan to create its own 'clean' Internet. The proposed system, an insular nation-wide intranet that is isolated from the regular Internet, will be heavily regulated by the government. In addition to developing its own Intranet system, the Iranian government is also creating its own custom email service and a national search engine called Ya Haq (Oh Just One) that is intended to replace Google. In order to obtain an account on the state-approved mail service, users will have to register their identity with the government." The "clean Internet" part, at least, was also mentioned earlier this year; Iran is one of the recurring champions when it comes to such dubious honors.

suraj.sun writes "Iran topped a recent list of repressive regimes that most aggressively restrict Internet freedom. The list, published by Reporters Without Borders, is a part of the 2012 edition of the organization's Enemies of the Internet report. One of the details addressed in that report is the Iranian government's bizarre plan to create its own 'clean' Internet. The proposed system, an insular nation-wide intranet that is isolated from the regular Internet, will be heavily regulated by the government. In addition to developing its own Intranet system, the Iranian government is also creating its own custom email service and a national search engine called Ya Haq (Oh Just One) that is intended to replace Google. In order to obtain an account on the state-approved mail service, users will have to register their identity with the government." The "clean Internet" part, at least, was also mentioned earlier this year; Iran is one of the recurring champions when it comes to such dubious honors.

inode_buddha writes "It's part of the $1 billion AOL patent deal, and it's something that would have made many minds explode back in the 1990s. It still makes my mind explode today. Marc Andreesen points out that MS now has a significant chunk of the old Netscape. What are the ramifications for Mozilla?"

An anonymous reader writes "Utah's Medicaid hack estimate has grown a second time. This time we have gone from over 180,000 Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) recipients having their personal information stolen to a grand total of 780,000. More specifically, the state now says approximately 500,000 victims had sensitive personal information stolen and 280,000 victims had their Social Security numbers (SSNs) compromised."

Fluffeh writes "Back in 2007, Heartland had a security breach that resulted in a 130 million credit card details being lifted. A class action suit followed and many thought it would send a direct message to business to ensure proper security measures protecting their clients and customers. With the Heartland case now over and settlements paid out and divided up, the final breakdown is as follows: Class members: $1925 (11 cases out of 290 filed were 'valid'). Lawyers for the plaintiff class action: $606,192. Non-Profits: around $1,000,000 (The Court ruled a minimum of $1 million in payouts). Heartland also paid its own lawyers around $2 million. Eric Goldman (Law Professor) has additional commentary on his Law Blog: 'The opinion indicates Heartland spent $1.5M to advertise the settlement. Thus, it appears they spent over $130,000 to generate each legitimate claim. Surprisingly, the court blithely treats the $1.5M expenditure as a cost of doing business, but I can't wrap my head around it. What an obscene waste of money! Add in the $270k spent on claims administration, and it appears that the parties spent $160k per legitimate claimant. The court isn't bothered by the $270k expenses either, even though that cost about $1k per tendered claim (remember, there were 290 total claims).'"

Fluffeh writes "Back in 2007, Heartland had a security breach that resulted in a 130 million credit card details being lifted. A class action suit followed and many thought it would send a direct message to business to ensure proper security measures protecting their clients and customers. With the Heartland case now over and settlements paid out and divided up, the final breakdown is as follows: Class members: $1925 (11 cases out of 290 filed were 'valid'). Lawyers for the plaintiff class action: $606,192. Non-Profits: around $1,000,000 (The Court ruled a minimum of $1 million in payouts). Heartland also paid its own lawyers around $2 million. Eric Goldman (Law Professor) has additional commentary on his Law Blog: 'The opinion indicates Heartland spent $1.5M to advertise the settlement. Thus, it appears they spent over $130,000 to generate each legitimate claim. Surprisingly, the court blithely treats the $1.5M expenditure as a cost of doing business, but I can't wrap my head around it. What an obscene waste of money! Add in the $270k spent on claims administration, and it appears that the parties spent $160k per legitimate claimant. The court isn't bothered by the $270k expenses either, even though that cost about $1k per tendered claim (remember, there were 290 total claims).'"

MrSeb writes with ExtremeTech's account of how director (and deep sea explorer) James Cameron spent a reported $18 million converting his blockbuster movie, Titantic, to 3D. The article "looks at the primary way of managing depth in 3D films (parallax), how you add depth to a movie that was originally filmed in 2D, and some of the software (both computer and human-brain) difficulties that Cameron had to overcome in the more-than-two-year process to convert Titanic into 3D."