When, in the arena of Law, is "intentional or unintentional" EVER beside the point?
In one of the very fundamental tenets of our legal system as designed by the Shakers - ignorance of the law is no defense. The only times at which in fact intent is the point is the differentiation between an intentional and an unintentional criminal act. It doesn't matter whether you meant to bankrupt your store; defaulting on the loan has the same consequences whether or not you did. It doesn't matter whether you meant to speed on the highway; unless it was medical, the consequences are the same whether or not you did. It doesn't matter whether you meant to walk out of a store with a product you hadn't paid for; either way, unless someone decides to take pity and let you off the hook, you're equally liable.
Yes, there's a difference in intent in things like manslaughter, but if you think that's the norm, you've been watching too much Law and Order.
The bigger issue, though, is whether or not the game is "episodic." By all definitions of the term I've seen...no, it's not. The games are self-contained, and you don't need to keep paying to advance the plot. You may not be able to catch all of the Pokémon, maybe, but that's not "episodic content."
In many of those instances - red, blue and yellow, fire red and leaf green, the gemstone group, the metal color group - they're the same game with 5% alternate content, and you need the full set to access a further 5% of the content. Therefore, indeed you do need to keep playing in order to advance the game, whose core is so heavily drilled that it's their motto - gotta catch 'em all. And, to catch 'em all, you need all the carts too. The various groups are essentially the same game over and over, with a slight overhaul of some external content, and a few dozen extra creatures and powers.
Pokemon is essentially the definition of episodic content.
Most of Nintendo's highly successful WiFi connection is peer to peer. That said, have you looked at bandwidth prices lately? Fourty dollars up-front at mass bandwidth prices means five years of constant heavy use just isn't a problem.
The "gamer" demographic is not growing significantly in size
It amazes me that in this day and age of harping about older gamers anyone should still believe this. Gaming's growing faster now than it ever has in the past. The only reason game budgets are getting this large is that the market will support them.
Oh. It seems I've overreacted. My apologies as well.
The reason we can only break even for a short period of time is that we're desperately fighting plasma instability. This is the fundamental reason you see so many different shapes for confined fusion devices: we're looking for a way to keep the instability in check.
Consider the case of a balloon filled with smoke. (I use smoke as an example because it's visible and we've all seen its behavior at a variety of temperatures.) When the gas is hotter, it disperses faster, and it moves in more complex patterns; we've all seen that. It's a visible expression of brownian motion; heat is the whacking together of atoms, and there's a fair amount of heat in one of them thar fusion type devices.
The thing people tend to forget about brownian motion is that pressure isn't actually even. When you're dealing with stuff in the tens of millions of degrees, local fluctuations come often and are big. In a lot of ways it's like mean time between failures: there are a lot of small events going on, and every so often enough of them cluster together to cause a fault.
MTBF is actually a convenient analogy here in another way: most computer people understand areal density and its effect on reliability. Or, less cryptically, the smaller you make it, the harder it is to keep it under control. Especially with regards to thermal noise, this is one of current-gen storage's big battlegrounds right now: we're getting to the point where random thermal stress is enough to flip bits, and we're having to break out the bag of tricks to fight that off. The smaller the bit, the more the storage, therefore the better the drive, and so there's this window that's constantly moving: we get a better way to keep the bit stable, we move the crystal size down, we keep our stability window and get better space capacities.
The issue with fusion systems is very similar. The bulk of the reason that most fusion systems aren't break-even is that they put a tremendous amount of energy into two things that the sun gets for free by virtue of gravity: compression of the fuel and temperature (as a result of the brownian motion which is itself a result of the pressure.) I seperate the two because we don't use pressure to generate the temperature; we use current directly applied to the fuel (think neon bulb, then crank it up by a few hundred billion) and sharks. Sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads. Granted the laser is the important part, but it's evil science tradition, and by the way, muhuhahaha.
So, what we're doing is a process race not terribly unlike the hard drive areal density race. What we want is to crank the pressure up, because once it gets high enough, we can get rid of either the electrical current or the laser. Eventually, we could even get rid of both. Magnetic pressure is a much more energy efficient method of heating at that scale; it's just kinda hard to make magnets like that. Kinda hard like we don't really know how to beat what we've got today, not it's just too expensive. Magnet quality is a frontier for fusion in the way that thermal resistance is a frontier for hard drives.
So why can't we run them longer than two minutes? Hell, we can, without problems. But it costs more energy to do so. What we're doing is moving up the bar of pressure, which lowers the energy input. The big deal about TORA SUPRA wasn't that it ran for two minutes; we can run a stellarator indefinately, if someone wants to pay for the juice. The big deal about TORA SUPRA was that it was stable for two minutes with as low an input level as it was, because it relied more on the magnets than its predecessors had. ITER is going to be further down that scale.
The issue isn't the time. It's the time at a given input voltage, and since input voltage is rarely reported on, the media gives a very distorted view of what's actually going on inside yon ivory tower.
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
2006 - 1965 = 41 years.
Yes, and if what I was doing was counting how long it had been since 1965, then that'd be a big error on my part. If, on the other hand, you try reading in context, you might realize that I wasn't in fact talking about today at all.
If we're calling the last period an anomaly, and indeed it was simply linear progression from 1965 to 2004
There are other things than exponential and linear.
I would be willing to bet (and I would love to see the data that disproves this) that when the research first started the scientists involved got milli- or microseconds of production
Why do I get the feeling you're not actually going to love this? There's dispute, but most people believe the effort into fusion began with Lyman Spitzer and the Princeton Plasma Physics Library in 1951. (He's certainly the beginning of the American effort, at least.) The first known successful controlled fusion device was a pinched-Deuterium device at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, losing hard drives for safety since 1997.) The papers governing the discovery were declassified in 1958; the scientists say the actual experiment was successful as early as 1955. So, there's a four year gap before they even got the pinch working.
People like you are why I think we should require a license to use statistics.
What in the holy name of fuck are you talking about? I used simple math to derive that equation
Yes. Simple, completely invented math. That's why I gave those examples you conveniently clipped away. You know, the ones where I said "this isn't exponential" and you said "then they must be linear?"
What you'll note is that the primary problem here is you're guessing; That's why you think fusion progress is exponential, when in fact almost no research is. (Don't get confused about Moore's law; that has little to do with research, and everything to do with progress in manufacturing techniques.) That's why you chose doublings, when in fact the progress in power output has been nowhere near annual doubling. In 1992, the highest output was 350mW. Now, in 2006, it's... 420mW. Potheads rejoice. People who like to say double, well, don't. (Mind you, I'm talking about net production, not gross production; yes, there are reactors like the Z Machine rated at 290 terawatts, but those aren't break-even devices, and are consuming more than they produce. When I say 420mW, I mean 420 above break-even.)
The reason I think there should be a license to use statistics is because people like you say "well if we just double it every year, then (google calculator) FUSION IN SEVEN YEARS." It doesn't work that way. You don't just sit on your hands and expect a breakthrough every six months. There aren't predictable rates of raise and decline. Hell, in some years there isn't actually any change at all, and in some other years, the only reason there's change is because someone built a bigger version of the old machine, not because of new science (certain parts of the history of the ZETA were very much like this.) In other years, you see more progress during one year than the previous ten. Some of the big advances towards fusion didn't come out of fusion research at all; lithography gave them much better laser guiding, auto manufacturing taught them how to pull current from 0 to about half the hoover dam in under a second without melting the cables, the heavy magnetics come largely out of NASA and Tokyo universities, and the computer power is thanks to good old Corporate America, <cheer type="text/school">Go Fightin' Bankers<cheer>.
And, if you need further examples of why just picking some progression at random and saying "o
Well, as long as you are so amused... Care to link me to any information regarding the breakeven point and why it can only be surpassed for a short period of time?
Not after the attitude you've given, no. Feel free to look through my replies to others; they contain the information I'm denying you.
In the future, when you want things from people, don't start off with "hey smart guy."
Neither. Why do you feel the need to resort to insults?
H-bombs aren't in any way related to fusion power technology, save only that both use fusion reactions.
Yes, and since your topic was the fusion process, that doesn't seem terribly non-germane to me. Actually, they share quite a bit more in common than that one thing, but since none of the other things matter here, I'll skip all of that mess.
A thermonuclear weapon and a fusion reactor have about as much in common as a chemical explosive and an internal combustion engine.
How apropos. When chemical explosives were originally harnessed, it wasn't as a weapon, but rather as a fuel source, to propel fireworks into the sky (well, originally saltpetered sulfur coal was a health tonic, but whatever.) And, what do you know: something simpler than rocketry was possible with chemical explosions: a weapon. (Several, actually: direct application of explosion for grenades and bombs, as a propellant for bullets and shells, as a shear generator for shaped charges, et cetera.)
And, sure, there are more complex things you can do with explosions: you can make combustion engines, you can crack aquifers, you can clear paths through mountains, you can take down buildings, you can make pretty colors in the night sky, and if you're really really careful, you can even use them to sculpt - try North Dakota some time, because we carved Jefferson's face with dynamite.
If a fusion reactor were as easy to construct as a nuke, we'd have them already.
This is absurd. You were the one who brought up the unlikelihood of weapons proliferation effects based on fusion technology. I point out that there's already been such a proliferation, that it's the most expensive weapons deployment to date in mankind's history, and you think that the appropriate response is to compare how difficult they are to build?
Besides, we do have them already. TORA SUPRA was running for more than two minutes in surplus of break-even. Several Tokamak reactors run at surplus on a regular basis. This absurdist myth on Slashdot that fusion is out of our grasp is mind-boggling; we've had fusion since the 60s, and break-even fusion since the 90s. It's just not reliable yet, and the plants are more expensive than the fuel savings.
With a nuclear reactor there is a danger of weapons proliferation. Iran is a good example of that - reactors that can be used for power generation can also be used both as a valid excuse for obtaining nuclear materials and as a breeder reactor for making them weapons-grade.
Read what you originally wrote again. It looked like you were talking about the concept of fusion, not an actual reactor. Big difference. That said, to suggest that a fusion plant couldn't be used as cover for a weapons program is remarkably naive. Call the Department of Energy. Ask them for the blueprints for any torn-down production nuclear reactor. (They will alert people you don't want alerted if you ask for a current reactor, so make it very clear that you want a torn down one. Also make it clear you want the blueprints, which most people don't realize specifically means the building construction diagrams; you don't want them to think you want the science, either.) Also, ask them for the patrol routes that were taken around the building.
Next, get a ruler, or AutoCAD, or something. Take a look at how much space is solid concrete. Take a look at how many areas nobody is allowed to go into. A fusion plant would be a great place to hide a Walmart without anyone knowing. Someone who knows what they're doing can brew bottulism in a closet.
But wait, I see a new direction coming, since you criticised me for something you didn't actually say last time; therefore let me address what I suspect is another expected subtext: that using the fusion plant to hide a weapons proliferation somehow has to actually have something to do with fusion. (This is silly, but
It's not exactly a neck-and-neck race for the title of "Most Abundend Element."
Nor abundant. Spellcheck would help you. That said, abundance wasn't the issue, and if you were much good at this, you'd realize that; you can fuse the output of hydrogen fusion too. Read what I wrote again, and keep reading it until you understand it.
whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Well, before we leave this planet,...
"This septic tank isn't big enough. It barely handles the staff, and none of the prisoners are in the jail yet." "Well, it's fine *before* the prisoners get here."
Way to miss the point.
And if we're going to be leaving Sol any time soon, we'll have to pass this little thing on the way out called "Jupiter." I hear it has a little bit of raw hydrogen.
Way to continue to miss the exact same point. You really shouldn't take that tone in your voice until you've managed to stop being a dumbass.
"The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars;"
If you're talking interstellar scales, there are nebulae.
Yeah. Except for the stars, the Milky Way is a nebula. In general, wait until you know what you're talking about before you talk back; all you did was to accidentally repeat me. Nebular matter is the result of stellar wind. Now, before you get all huffy and dig up something that says 5% of the galaxy is nebular matter, please try to focus.
(I'm guessing for the sake of the example; don't waste your time getting an almanac.) Ten percent of all oil is bound up in grass. Does that mean grass is a good place to get oil? No: it's spread far too thin over far too big a space (the great plains) to be usable in any realistic fashion. Sure, let's say 80% of the salt on Earth is in the ocean. Why do we mine it? Why don't we just dredge the ocean? Let's say 50% of all topsoil is spread across the dustbowl states. Why don't we collect it? Why do we go to the effort of creating it?
One day, you'll try gathering something on a large scale in the physical world. On that day you will learn about the overhead of doing the actual collection. On that day, remember this post.
"Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous."
But Jupiter is.
Wait, let me get this straight. I was talking about a timescale in which stars aren't much of a source of hydrogen, and you're still stuck on mining Jupiter? Has nobody pointed out to you how much bigger Jupiter isn't than our sun?
By the way, have you actually thought through the logistics of mining Jupiter? (No.) The hydrogen starts several hundred miles below the frozen helium. The metallic hydrogen is 6000 MILES down. Are you going to set up a flying mining base, then send big-ass cables down with balloons? Maybe just a really, reallllllly long pipe? (Is it filled with weed?)
Mining Jupiter is ridiculously unrealistic. There are better sources of hydrogen in this solar system. Quit flogging Jupiter.
Heck, there's enough in those to make Bussard ramjets feasable.... Lay off the Star Trek.
Ahahahhahahahhaha. Lemme get this straight. First you're going to call Ramjets by their star trek name, falling for the wikipedia deception that somehow they're different than the ramjets from 1906 by Ren
I hope those are time travelling beers. Maybe we can use the TORE SUPRA to power them, which achieved 20% above break-even in 1996.
In as regards your being facetious, I find it quite amusing that the word doesn't mean what you think it means, but that as a result of your mistake the impression you give is what the word actually means. Witness:
Facetious 1592, from Fr. facétieux, from facétie "a joke," from L. facetia, from facetus "witty, elegant," of unknown origin, perhaps related to facis "torch." It implies a desire to be amusing, often intrusive or ill-timed.
Nonsense. The TORE SUPRA reactor in 1996 was at 20% over break-even, and ran for a hair over two minutes. The Large Helical Device isn't even a power plant - it's a stellarator used as a fusion plasma confinement device for high-energy materials research. Nobody's drawing any current from it at all, and stellarators cannot break even. You don't know what you're talking about.
Er. You do know that only 20% of oil is used for fuel, and that the bulk of it goes to the plastics, fertilizer, industrial chemical and paint industries, right?
Perhaps, but when your fuel source is the most abundant substance in the universe, there's "close enough for engineering purposes."
Yes, and 640k ought to be enough for energy. Engineering is the science of finding new ways to suck down resources at unprecedented rates. As soon as the power's available, we'll find a way to make it scarce again. Hell, just imagine the look on the face of the Schoellkopfs 100 years ago, whose two cutting edge hydroelectric plants on the Niagara Falls were producing about 26mW together, and when people were telling them there was no need for that much electricity.
Just because it's the most abundant thing in the universe doesn't mean there's enough in the local area to do whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous. If you want to fly around gathering that stuff, you have fun. I'll see you in a few billion years. The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars; pretty hard to mine. The areas which are convenient to harvest have already been mopped clean by planets.
Laugh it up. Wait'll you realize how badly people are going to want the tea they grow on Europa. Humans are pigs. We throw energy away for nothing. The lower the cost of energy is, the more important it's going to be that we use focussed high-frequency neutrino beams to light the area under the pen, because it's such a nicer shade of off-white, and it looks better when the pen is hovering above the table. And, y'see, it's only a gigawatt, which is totally reasonable, because it prevents eyestrain and even wrist strain against actually picking it up off the table, which leaves your wrist in an unnatural position briefly. And what's a gigawatt for eye and wrist health, since we got fusion?
Cough. But really, that's the human way. There is no such thing as abundance. There's just the current scale limit. Remember the buffalo?
Forgive me if I'm missing something completely obvious here, but why is progress in fusion research still progressing so slowly?
It isn't. It's proceeding at an extremely fast pace. It just turns out that building a star inside a box is pretty difficult. There's a lot to work out.
I wonder how much time could be shaved off that estimate, as well as the ~2050 estimate, if (a lot) more money were put into fusion research.
Yeah, those people repeating that Spider Man was as expensive than the US DOE's fusion program for that year don't know what the hell they're talking about. Spider Man was as expensive as that program before the cost of experiments. To give you a sense of scale, we're dumping about $1.2 billion into ITER alone (we meaning the USA - the total cost is in the neighborhood of $12b,) and it's not as if that's the only thing we're dumping money into. I've lived within a half hour drive of three of these plants in the US. There are something like 60 of them here. On top of that, energy several corporations and universities have been dumping large dollarage into the matter. And, one supposes the foreigners have done their share too, particularly in Russian, Japanese and (grumble) French laboratories.
The primary problem in fusion research isn't money. It's grey matter. The sheer count of large obstacles to fusion is enormous; there are several dozen genuinely hard (ie, make you famous for getting halfway) problems yet to go. There are thousands of the smartest men and women on earth, plus some French people, working on this as hard as they can. They're making tremendous progress. Reasonable estimates put the chit around 2035, though I'm a pessimist and think that the remainder is going to turn out to be ~1/3 more difficult than expected (ie, 2050.)
To give you a sense of scale, ITER is actually past the breakeven point already; it's just not far enough past breakeven to be worth trying to develop yet, and while we're still researching we don't want to screw around with the extra hardware required to turn heat into juice. ITER is expected to be able to hold it together for about 8 minutes at a pop, cranking out roughly 500 megawatts. (Amusingly, SimCity schedules a fusion reactor to be available in 2035, and to crank out 550mW. Way to call it, Will Wrightstradamus.) For a sense of comparison, there are at the end of 2005 441 active nuclear reactors, with an average of 834 megawatts capacity (368 gW globally are produced by fission plants.) ITER's experiments are in fact well within usable production ranges, except for the 8 minute run thing. 2035 is a genuinely reasonable number.
Please remember, it took several decades to go from making fission happen to making it energy-profitable. We've only been making fusion happen in any serious, sustainable way since (depending on who you ask) the 1996 TORE SUPRA experiments. Fusion is a much bigger problem than fission is - it's the difference between shooting a can of soda to make it blow up, and slamming two cans of soda together so hard that they melt together. (I think the energy output issue would be probably similar too, which for reasons I can't explain I find hilarious.)
However, when I hear discussions on the energy crises, the efficiency of solar/wind/water power, whether more nuclear fission reactors should be built, fusion isn't even mentioned, let alone considered by politicians for larger investments. Is it simply because it's so far away, and that for the most of us, only our descendants would benefit from those investments?
No. It's because we don't know when it's going to happen, or in fact whether it's going to happen. There's no proof that commercially viable break-even fusion is even possible (though it seems pretty likely by now,) much less what the methodology will be, when we're going to get to the point that it was reliable, what the output is, what the failure rate is, where the economic balance is for scale of output versus degradati
Even taken in the awareness that the device causes irradiation of its constituent materials, when you consider the case of a fission reactor, the irradiation is minimal. Most of the emitted radiation from a fusion device is absorbed back into the fuel cloud, causing a change in the constituent gasses, slightly lowering the efficiency of the fusion process, and leading to trace amounts of odd output elements (usually carbon or lower on the periodic scale, but very rarely above the sqaure root of iron; in the context of accumulating probabilities, the square root of the position of the exchange limit seems to be a crux for combinations, though there are several possible reasons and we're not yet entirely sure why.)
By contrast, the specific mechanism of fission is to shed energy in the fragmentation of heavy nuclei, which isn't at all a clean process; much like you might get a lot of glass dust if you broke glass to capture the noise, if you break atoms to capture the heat, you end up with a lot of atom dust (primarily a/b/g radiation, since apparently Greek letter entities are verboten.) A whole lot. Several orders of magnitude more.
Then, once you get past that, you have to deal with spent fuel, which though not specifically an issue of reactor irradiation is an issue for the same concerns. The spent fuel is the much larger problem, ofcoz, and that the spent fusion fuel is better spent lifting balloons than making salt mines deadly is certainly helpful.
Still, I think the biggest benefit of fusion is the complete lack of a meltdown condition.
Mind you, I'm not inclined to expect installation failure; even given the ridiculously backwards technology and low standards involved in the Chernobyl disaster, those reactors have only had two real failures (I grew up in Pittsburgh, so don't think I'm ignoring Three Mile Island.) Granted there are also seven partial meltdowns on record, they're all from 1967 or earlier, comparatively the dark age of nuclear ability. With modern designs like pebble bed reactors or the reverse pressure cooling system used by nuclear submarines, meltdown without active tampering even without proper maintenance is virtually impossible. They're self-regulating systems; effects resulting of a beginning runaway process halt the process.
What I think the difference is is the (maybe legitimate, I have no idea) fear of sabotage. All the political posturing aside, we do live in a world where psychopaths will cause disasters to make a point; in my opinion the primary thing preventing the large-scale deployment of small pebble bed reactors throughout the united states electrical grid is the fear that someone will turn one of them into a kaboom device.
You can't really do that with a fusion plant. Sure, if you have a nuke already, the fusion plant is a great place to find enough hydrogen to turn that nuke into a holy shit weapon, but power plants aren't close enough to cities for that change to make a positive (to the terrorist) difference in terms of kills, so that's not so big an issue if you really think it through.
In my opinion, the single biggest benefit of fusion plants is that they aren't as vulnerable to abuse, meaning we can deploy them on a large scale without serious fear. That means we really can start moving away from a fuel economy and towards an energy economy. That is likely to be as big a change for the human race as the industrial revolution, electrifaction or the deployment of the modern rail infrastructure.
Fusion isn't the future because it's a plentiful cheap energy source; we already have that in fission. Fusion is the future because it's a plentiful cheap energy source which has extraction plants that you can't turn into a weapon.
If you assume that they'll only be able to increase the time linearly, then yes, it's about fifty years.
If you assume that they'll be able to keep refining the technology and keep doubling the time every two years, then we're only looking at 7.6118259 [2*log(400/28.6)/log(2)] years.
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
Generally you want to stick to linear when something has been linear throughout the vast bulk of its existence, rather than to arbitrarily switch to some equation which has both a name you recognize and a number output you prefer. Otherwise you'd be much better advised to look at it as an order ten polynomial, which could give us fusion by Thursday. Also, gas consumption should fall off as the fifth logarithm if usage, we'll discover oil fields as a stepwise linear expansion of current capacity, and France's population will zero right away.
I was at this panel, and that's not what Warren Spector said at all. I don't have the recordings yet, so I can't get him verbatim. However, it's worth noting that Warren is creating a startup right now, something he said when they asked him to introduce himself; he clearly wouldn't have done that if he believed this was the wrong time. What Mr. Spector actually did say was that this was a difficult time for startups. He gave some brutal truths in particular as surrounds funding. He said that this wasn't a good time for free games, and that anyone making a startup in this climate needed to have a business model built in from day one even if they had a lot of capital to burn.
Yes, he was a bit of a wet blanket, but in a good and common sense fashion. Anyone who took away "indie games should give up" should - if you go from "you can't start a business without a business model" to "you can't start a business," then frankly you specifically cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
When, in the arena of Law, is "intentional or unintentional" EVER beside the point?
In one of the very fundamental tenets of our legal system as designed by the Shakers - ignorance of the law is no defense. The only times at which in fact intent is the point is the differentiation between an intentional and an unintentional criminal act. It doesn't matter whether you meant to bankrupt your store; defaulting on the loan has the same consequences whether or not you did. It doesn't matter whether you meant to speed on the highway; unless it was medical, the consequences are the same whether or not you did. It doesn't matter whether you meant to walk out of a store with a product you hadn't paid for; either way, unless someone decides to take pity and let you off the hook, you're equally liable.
Yes, there's a difference in intent in things like manslaughter, but if you think that's the norm, you've been watching too much Law and Order.
The bigger issue, though, is whether or not the game is "episodic." By all definitions of the term I've seen...no, it's not. The games are self-contained, and you don't need to keep paying to advance the plot. You may not be able to catch all of the Pokémon, maybe, but that's not "episodic content."
In many of those instances - red, blue and yellow, fire red and leaf green, the gemstone group, the metal color group - they're the same game with 5% alternate content, and you need the full set to access a further 5% of the content. Therefore, indeed you do need to keep playing in order to advance the game, whose core is so heavily drilled that it's their motto - gotta catch 'em all. And, to catch 'em all, you need all the carts too. The various groups are essentially the same game over and over, with a slight overhaul of some external content, and a few dozen extra creatures and powers.
Pokemon is essentially the definition of episodic content.
Most of Nintendo's highly successful WiFi connection is peer to peer. That said, have you looked at bandwidth prices lately? Fourty dollars up-front at mass bandwidth prices means five years of constant heavy use just isn't a problem.
The "gamer" demographic is not growing significantly in size
It amazes me that in this day and age of harping about older gamers anyone should still believe this. Gaming's growing faster now than it ever has in the past. The only reason game budgets are getting this large is that the market will support them.
And I still don't know what in the holy name of fuck you're talking about.
It's painfully obvious. I think I'll let it go here; you're not even trying to understand what you're arguing with.
Bar. Pressure. That's a joke, son, y'missed it.
Oh. It seems I've overreacted. My apologies as well.
The reason we can only break even for a short period of time is that we're desperately fighting plasma instability. This is the fundamental reason you see so many different shapes for confined fusion devices: we're looking for a way to keep the instability in check.
Consider the case of a balloon filled with smoke. (I use smoke as an example because it's visible and we've all seen its behavior at a variety of temperatures.) When the gas is hotter, it disperses faster, and it moves in more complex patterns; we've all seen that. It's a visible expression of brownian motion; heat is the whacking together of atoms, and there's a fair amount of heat in one of them thar fusion type devices.
The thing people tend to forget about brownian motion is that pressure isn't actually even. When you're dealing with stuff in the tens of millions of degrees, local fluctuations come often and are big. In a lot of ways it's like mean time between failures: there are a lot of small events going on, and every so often enough of them cluster together to cause a fault.
MTBF is actually a convenient analogy here in another way: most computer people understand areal density and its effect on reliability. Or, less cryptically, the smaller you make it, the harder it is to keep it under control. Especially with regards to thermal noise, this is one of current-gen storage's big battlegrounds right now: we're getting to the point where random thermal stress is enough to flip bits, and we're having to break out the bag of tricks to fight that off. The smaller the bit, the more the storage, therefore the better the drive, and so there's this window that's constantly moving: we get a better way to keep the bit stable, we move the crystal size down, we keep our stability window and get better space capacities.
The issue with fusion systems is very similar. The bulk of the reason that most fusion systems aren't break-even is that they put a tremendous amount of energy into two things that the sun gets for free by virtue of gravity: compression of the fuel and temperature (as a result of the brownian motion which is itself a result of the pressure.) I seperate the two because we don't use pressure to generate the temperature; we use current directly applied to the fuel (think neon bulb, then crank it up by a few hundred billion) and sharks. Sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads. Granted the laser is the important part, but it's evil science tradition, and by the way, muhuhahaha.
So, what we're doing is a process race not terribly unlike the hard drive areal density race. What we want is to crank the pressure up, because once it gets high enough, we can get rid of either the electrical current or the laser. Eventually, we could even get rid of both. Magnetic pressure is a much more energy efficient method of heating at that scale; it's just kinda hard to make magnets like that. Kinda hard like we don't really know how to beat what we've got today, not it's just too expensive. Magnet quality is a frontier for fusion in the way that thermal resistance is a frontier for hard drives.
So why can't we run them longer than two minutes? Hell, we can, without problems. But it costs more energy to do so. What we're doing is moving up the bar of pressure, which lowers the energy input. The big deal about TORA SUPRA wasn't that it ran for two minutes; we can run a stellarator indefinately, if someone wants to pay for the juice. The big deal about TORA SUPRA was that it was stable for two minutes with as low an input level as it was, because it relied more on the magnets than its predecessors had. ITER is going to be further down that scale.
The issue isn't the time. It's the time at a given input voltage, and since input voltage is rarely reported on, the media gives a very distorted view of what's actually going on inside yon ivory tower.
And now you know why the Scopes monkey trials. (By the way, it's only 6.3 weeks ago in Kansas.)
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
... 420mW. Potheads rejoice. People who like to say double, well, don't. (Mind you, I'm talking about net production, not gross production; yes, there are reactors like the Z Machine rated at 290 terawatts, but those aren't break-even devices, and are consuming more than they produce. When I say 420mW, I mean 420 above break-even.)
2006 - 1965 = 41 years.
Yes, and if what I was doing was counting how long it had been since 1965, then that'd be a big error on my part. If, on the other hand, you try reading in context, you might realize that I wasn't in fact talking about today at all.
If we're calling the last period an anomaly, and indeed it was simply linear progression from 1965 to 2004
There are other things than exponential and linear.
I would be willing to bet (and I would love to see the data that disproves this) that when the research first started the scientists involved got milli- or microseconds of production
Why do I get the feeling you're not actually going to love this? There's dispute, but most people believe the effort into fusion began with Lyman Spitzer and the Princeton Plasma Physics Library in 1951. (He's certainly the beginning of the American effort, at least.) The first known successful controlled fusion device was a pinched-Deuterium device at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, losing hard drives for safety since 1997.) The papers governing the discovery were declassified in 1958; the scientists say the actual experiment was successful as early as 1955. So, there's a four year gap before they even got the pinch working.
People like you are why I think we should require a license to use statistics.
What in the holy name of fuck are you talking about? I used simple math to derive that equation
Yes. Simple, completely invented math. That's why I gave those examples you conveniently clipped away. You know, the ones where I said "this isn't exponential" and you said "then they must be linear?"
What you'll note is that the primary problem here is you're guessing; That's why you think fusion progress is exponential, when in fact almost no research is. (Don't get confused about Moore's law; that has little to do with research, and everything to do with progress in manufacturing techniques.) That's why you chose doublings, when in fact the progress in power output has been nowhere near annual doubling. In 1992, the highest output was 350mW. Now, in 2006, it's
The reason I think there should be a license to use statistics is because people like you say "well if we just double it every year, then (google calculator) FUSION IN SEVEN YEARS." It doesn't work that way. You don't just sit on your hands and expect a breakthrough every six months. There aren't predictable rates of raise and decline. Hell, in some years there isn't actually any change at all, and in some other years, the only reason there's change is because someone built a bigger version of the old machine, not because of new science (certain parts of the history of the ZETA were very much like this.) In other years, you see more progress during one year than the previous ten. Some of the big advances towards fusion didn't come out of fusion research at all; lithography gave them much better laser guiding, auto manufacturing taught them how to pull current from 0 to about half the hoover dam in under a second without melting the cables, the heavy magnetics come largely out of NASA and Tokyo universities, and the computer power is thanks to good old Corporate America, <cheer type="text/school">Go Fightin' Bankers<cheer>.
And, if you need further examples of why just picking some progression at random and saying "o
Well, as long as you are so amused... Care to link me to any information regarding the breakeven point and why it can only be surpassed for a short period of time?
Not after the attitude you've given, no. Feel free to look through my replies to others; they contain the information I'm denying you.
In the future, when you want things from people, don't start off with "hey smart guy."
Are you foolish or just trolling?
Neither. Why do you feel the need to resort to insults?
H-bombs aren't in any way related to fusion power technology, save only that both use fusion reactions.
Yes, and since your topic was the fusion process, that doesn't seem terribly non-germane to me. Actually, they share quite a bit more in common than that one thing, but since none of the other things matter here, I'll skip all of that mess.
A thermonuclear weapon and a fusion reactor have about as much in common as a chemical explosive and an internal combustion engine.
How apropos. When chemical explosives were originally harnessed, it wasn't as a weapon, but rather as a fuel source, to propel fireworks into the sky (well, originally saltpetered sulfur coal was a health tonic, but whatever.) And, what do you know: something simpler than rocketry was possible with chemical explosions: a weapon. (Several, actually: direct application of explosion for grenades and bombs, as a propellant for bullets and shells, as a shear generator for shaped charges, et cetera.)
And, sure, there are more complex things you can do with explosions: you can make combustion engines, you can crack aquifers, you can clear paths through mountains, you can take down buildings, you can make pretty colors in the night sky, and if you're really really careful, you can even use them to sculpt - try North Dakota some time, because we carved Jefferson's face with dynamite.
If a fusion reactor were as easy to construct as a nuke, we'd have them already.
This is absurd. You were the one who brought up the unlikelihood of weapons proliferation effects based on fusion technology. I point out that there's already been such a proliferation, that it's the most expensive weapons deployment to date in mankind's history, and you think that the appropriate response is to compare how difficult they are to build?
Besides, we do have them already. TORA SUPRA was running for more than two minutes in surplus of break-even. Several Tokamak reactors run at surplus on a regular basis. This absurdist myth on Slashdot that fusion is out of our grasp is mind-boggling; we've had fusion since the 60s, and break-even fusion since the 90s. It's just not reliable yet, and the plants are more expensive than the fuel savings.
With a nuclear reactor there is a danger of weapons proliferation. Iran is a good example of that - reactors that can be used for power generation can also be used both as a valid excuse for obtaining nuclear materials and as a breeder reactor for making them weapons-grade.
Read what you originally wrote again. It looked like you were talking about the concept of fusion, not an actual reactor. Big difference. That said, to suggest that a fusion plant couldn't be used as cover for a weapons program is remarkably naive. Call the Department of Energy. Ask them for the blueprints for any torn-down production nuclear reactor. (They will alert people you don't want alerted if you ask for a current reactor, so make it very clear that you want a torn down one. Also make it clear you want the blueprints, which most people don't realize specifically means the building construction diagrams; you don't want them to think you want the science, either.) Also, ask them for the patrol routes that were taken around the building.
Next, get a ruler, or AutoCAD, or something. Take a look at how much space is solid concrete. Take a look at how many areas nobody is allowed to go into. A fusion plant would be a great place to hide a Walmart without anyone knowing. Someone who knows what they're doing can brew bottulism in a closet.
But wait, I see a new direction coming, since you criticised me for something you didn't actually say last time; therefore let me address what I suspect is another expected subtext: that using the fusion plant to hide a weapons proliferation somehow has to actually have something to do with fusion. (This is silly, but
It's not exactly a neck-and-neck race for the title of "Most Abundend Element."
...
... Lay off the Star Trek.
Nor abundant. Spellcheck would help you. That said, abundance wasn't the issue, and if you were much good at this, you'd realize that; you can fuse the output of hydrogen fusion too. Read what I wrote again, and keep reading it until you understand it.
whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Well, before we leave this planet,
"This septic tank isn't big enough. It barely handles the staff, and none of the prisoners are in the jail yet." "Well, it's fine *before* the prisoners get here."
Way to miss the point.
And if we're going to be leaving Sol any time soon, we'll have to pass this little thing on the way out called "Jupiter." I hear it has a little bit of raw hydrogen.
Way to continue to miss the exact same point. You really shouldn't take that tone in your voice until you've managed to stop being a dumbass.
"The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars;"
If you're talking interstellar scales, there are nebulae.
[G]alactic nebulae, [] are composed of the interstellar medium (the gas between the stars, with its accompanying small solid particles) within a single galaxy. Today the term nebula generally refers exclusively to the interstellar medium.
Yeah. Except for the stars, the Milky Way is a nebula. In general, wait until you know what you're talking about before you talk back; all you did was to accidentally repeat me. Nebular matter is the result of stellar wind. Now, before you get all huffy and dig up something that says 5% of the galaxy is nebular matter, please try to focus.
(I'm guessing for the sake of the example; don't waste your time getting an almanac.) Ten percent of all oil is bound up in grass. Does that mean grass is a good place to get oil? No: it's spread far too thin over far too big a space (the great plains) to be usable in any realistic fashion. Sure, let's say 80% of the salt on Earth is in the ocean. Why do we mine it? Why don't we just dredge the ocean? Let's say 50% of all topsoil is spread across the dustbowl states. Why don't we collect it? Why do we go to the effort of creating it?
One day, you'll try gathering something on a large scale in the physical world. On that day you will learn about the overhead of doing the actual collection. On that day, remember this post.
"Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous."
But Jupiter is.
Wait, let me get this straight. I was talking about a timescale in which stars aren't much of a source of hydrogen, and you're still stuck on mining Jupiter? Has nobody pointed out to you how much bigger Jupiter isn't than our sun?
By the way, have you actually thought through the logistics of mining Jupiter? (No.) The hydrogen starts several hundred miles below the frozen helium. The metallic hydrogen is 6000 MILES down. Are you going to set up a flying mining base, then send big-ass cables down with balloons? Maybe just a really, reallllllly long pipe? (Is it filled with weed?)
Mining Jupiter is ridiculously unrealistic. There are better sources of hydrogen in this solar system. Quit flogging Jupiter.
Heck, there's enough in those to make Bussard ramjets feasable.
Ahahahhahahahhaha. Lemme get this straight. First you're going to call Ramjets by their star trek name, falling for the wikipedia deception that somehow they're different than the ramjets from 1906 by Ren
In as regards your being facetious, I find it quite amusing that the word doesn't mean what you think it means, but that as a result of your mistake the impression you give is what the word actually means. Witness:
Nonsense. The TORE SUPRA reactor in 1996 was at 20% over break-even, and ran for a hair over two minutes. The Large Helical Device isn't even a power plant - it's a stellarator used as a fusion plasma confinement device for high-energy materials research. Nobody's drawing any current from it at all, and stellarators cannot break even. You don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, um, the plasma you get from a match in the microwave has a temperature around 450 degrees fahrenheit with excited electrons around 17,450 degrees fahrenheit. By contrast, deuterium/tritium fusion starts at about 180 million degrees fahrenheit.
They're not terribly similar.
Er. You do know that only 20% of oil is used for fuel, and that the bulk of it goes to the plastics, fertilizer, industrial chemical and paint industries, right?
Perhaps, but when your fuel source is the most abundant substance in the universe, there's "close enough for engineering purposes."
Yes, and 640k ought to be enough for energy. Engineering is the science of finding new ways to suck down resources at unprecedented rates. As soon as the power's available, we'll find a way to make it scarce again. Hell, just imagine the look on the face of the Schoellkopfs 100 years ago, whose two cutting edge hydroelectric plants on the Niagara Falls were producing about 26mW together, and when people were telling them there was no need for that much electricity.
Just because it's the most abundant thing in the universe doesn't mean there's enough in the local area to do whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous. If you want to fly around gathering that stuff, you have fun. I'll see you in a few billion years. The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars; pretty hard to mine. The areas which are convenient to harvest have already been mopped clean by planets.
Laugh it up. Wait'll you realize how badly people are going to want the tea they grow on Europa. Humans are pigs. We throw energy away for nothing. The lower the cost of energy is, the more important it's going to be that we use focussed high-frequency neutrino beams to light the area under the pen, because it's such a nicer shade of off-white, and it looks better when the pen is hovering above the table. And, y'see, it's only a gigawatt, which is totally reasonable, because it prevents eyestrain and even wrist strain against actually picking it up off the table, which leaves your wrist in an unnatural position briefly. And what's a gigawatt for eye and wrist health, since we got fusion?
Cough. But really, that's the human way. There is no such thing as abundance. There's just the current scale limit. Remember the buffalo?
My argument is thus:
1) Hit
2) Return
3) Less
4) Often
Forgive me if I'm missing something completely obvious here, but why is progress in fusion research still progressing so slowly?
It isn't. It's proceeding at an extremely fast pace. It just turns out that building a star inside a box is pretty difficult. There's a lot to work out.
I wonder how much time could be shaved off that estimate, as well as the ~2050 estimate, if (a lot) more money were put into fusion research.
Yeah, those people repeating that Spider Man was as expensive than the US DOE's fusion program for that year don't know what the hell they're talking about. Spider Man was as expensive as that program before the cost of experiments. To give you a sense of scale, we're dumping about $1.2 billion into ITER alone (we meaning the USA - the total cost is in the neighborhood of $12b,) and it's not as if that's the only thing we're dumping money into. I've lived within a half hour drive of three of these plants in the US. There are something like 60 of them here. On top of that, energy several corporations and universities have been dumping large dollarage into the matter. And, one supposes the foreigners have done their share too, particularly in Russian, Japanese and (grumble) French laboratories.
The primary problem in fusion research isn't money. It's grey matter. The sheer count of large obstacles to fusion is enormous; there are several dozen genuinely hard (ie, make you famous for getting halfway) problems yet to go. There are thousands of the smartest men and women on earth, plus some French people, working on this as hard as they can. They're making tremendous progress. Reasonable estimates put the chit around 2035, though I'm a pessimist and think that the remainder is going to turn out to be ~1/3 more difficult than expected (ie, 2050.)
To give you a sense of scale, ITER is actually past the breakeven point already; it's just not far enough past breakeven to be worth trying to develop yet, and while we're still researching we don't want to screw around with the extra hardware required to turn heat into juice. ITER is expected to be able to hold it together for about 8 minutes at a pop, cranking out roughly 500 megawatts. (Amusingly, SimCity schedules a fusion reactor to be available in 2035, and to crank out 550mW. Way to call it, Will Wrightstradamus.) For a sense of comparison, there are at the end of 2005 441 active nuclear reactors, with an average of 834 megawatts capacity (368 gW globally are produced by fission plants.) ITER's experiments are in fact well within usable production ranges, except for the 8 minute run thing. 2035 is a genuinely reasonable number.
Please remember, it took several decades to go from making fission happen to making it energy-profitable. We've only been making fusion happen in any serious, sustainable way since (depending on who you ask) the 1996 TORE SUPRA experiments. Fusion is a much bigger problem than fission is - it's the difference between shooting a can of soda to make it blow up, and slamming two cans of soda together so hard that they melt together. (I think the energy output issue would be probably similar too, which for reasons I can't explain I find hilarious.)
However, when I hear discussions on the energy crises, the efficiency of solar/wind/water power, whether more nuclear fission reactors should be built, fusion isn't even mentioned, let alone considered by politicians for larger investments. Is it simply because it's so far away, and that for the most of us, only our descendants would benefit from those investments?
No. It's because we don't know when it's going to happen, or in fact whether it's going to happen. There's no proof that commercially viable break-even fusion is even possible (though it seems pretty likely by now,) much less what the methodology will be, when we're going to get to the point that it was reliable, what the output is, what the failure rate is, where the economic balance is for scale of output versus degradati
Efficient. Reliable. Decentralized. Pick any two.
<voice class="text/wayne">A fission says what?</voice>
Even taken in the awareness that the device causes irradiation of its constituent materials, when you consider the case of a fission reactor, the irradiation is minimal. Most of the emitted radiation from a fusion device is absorbed back into the fuel cloud, causing a change in the constituent gasses, slightly lowering the efficiency of the fusion process, and leading to trace amounts of odd output elements (usually carbon or lower on the periodic scale, but very rarely above the sqaure root of iron; in the context of accumulating probabilities, the square root of the position of the exchange limit seems to be a crux for combinations, though there are several possible reasons and we're not yet entirely sure why.)
By contrast, the specific mechanism of fission is to shed energy in the fragmentation of heavy nuclei, which isn't at all a clean process; much like you might get a lot of glass dust if you broke glass to capture the noise, if you break atoms to capture the heat, you end up with a lot of atom dust (primarily a/b/g radiation, since apparently Greek letter entities are verboten.) A whole lot. Several orders of magnitude more.
Then, once you get past that, you have to deal with spent fuel, which though not specifically an issue of reactor irradiation is an issue for the same concerns. The spent fuel is the much larger problem, ofcoz, and that the spent fusion fuel is better spent lifting balloons than making salt mines deadly is certainly helpful.
Still, I think the biggest benefit of fusion is the complete lack of a meltdown condition.
Mind you, I'm not inclined to expect installation failure; even given the ridiculously backwards technology and low standards involved in the Chernobyl disaster, those reactors have only had two real failures (I grew up in Pittsburgh, so don't think I'm ignoring Three Mile Island.) Granted there are also seven partial meltdowns on record, they're all from 1967 or earlier, comparatively the dark age of nuclear ability. With modern designs like pebble bed reactors or the reverse pressure cooling system used by nuclear submarines, meltdown without active tampering even without proper maintenance is virtually impossible. They're self-regulating systems; effects resulting of a beginning runaway process halt the process.
What I think the difference is is the (maybe legitimate, I have no idea) fear of sabotage. All the political posturing aside, we do live in a world where psychopaths will cause disasters to make a point; in my opinion the primary thing preventing the large-scale deployment of small pebble bed reactors throughout the united states electrical grid is the fear that someone will turn one of them into a kaboom device.
You can't really do that with a fusion plant. Sure, if you have a nuke already, the fusion plant is a great place to find enough hydrogen to turn that nuke into a holy shit weapon, but power plants aren't close enough to cities for that change to make a positive (to the terrorist) difference in terms of kills, so that's not so big an issue if you really think it through.
In my opinion, the single biggest benefit of fusion plants is that they aren't as vulnerable to abuse, meaning we can deploy them on a large scale without serious fear. That means we really can start moving away from a fuel economy and towards an energy economy. That is likely to be as big a change for the human race as the industrial revolution, electrifaction or the deployment of the modern rail infrastructure.
Fusion isn't the future because it's a plentiful cheap energy source; we already have that in fission. Fusion is the future because it's a plentiful cheap energy source which has extraction plants that you can't turn into a weapon.
Likely no immediate danger of weapon proliferation...
Yeah, there's no proliferation of fusion weapons at all. Were you awake when you wrote that, or have you just never heard of Russia?
If you assume that they'll only be able to increase the time linearly, then yes, it's about fifty years.
If you assume that they'll be able to keep refining the technology and keep doubling the time every two years, then we're only looking at 7.6118259 [2*log(400/28.6)/log(2)] years.
If you go by the progress rate of existing fusion devices starting from 1965, it goes right back to 50 years (52.3 specifically, but who's counting?)
Generally you want to stick to linear when something has been linear throughout the vast bulk of its existence, rather than to arbitrarily switch to some equation which has both a name you recognize and a number output you prefer. Otherwise you'd be much better advised to look at it as an order ten polynomial, which could give us fusion by Thursday. Also, gas consumption should fall off as the fifth logarithm if usage, we'll discover oil fields as a stepwise linear expansion of current capacity, and France's population will zero right away.
People like you are why I think we should require a license to use statistics. In the hands of the wrong people they're as deadly as cars, guns, poisons or pop music.
I was at this panel, and that's not what Warren Spector said at all. I don't have the recordings yet, so I can't get him verbatim. However, it's worth noting that Warren is creating a startup right now, something he said when they asked him to introduce himself; he clearly wouldn't have done that if he believed this was the wrong time. What Mr. Spector actually did say was that this was a difficult time for startups. He gave some brutal truths in particular as surrounds funding. He said that this wasn't a good time for free games, and that anyone making a startup in this climate needed to have a business model built in from day one even if they had a lot of capital to burn.
Yes, he was a bit of a wet blanket, but in a good and common sense fashion. Anyone who took away "indie games should give up" should - if you go from "you can't start a business without a business model" to "you can't start a business," then frankly you specifically cannot.
!noitaidar fo tceffe yreve wonk I raews I