Can a player be made to ignore everything except to read the data on the disk? IE, assume Divx goes down in flames, if it is legal, could one release a player that ignores all the phone line stuff and play the content regardless?
I was just commenting on the fact that at 8:40 this morning or so, with about 30 comments, a lot were speaking as if how Apple deserved this, this is karma, fate, justice, or how this just shows the universe knows what it's doing.
Now that I check again, my comment has been scored up above most of the negativity, and with more people reading positive comments, there are less negatives too...
They are as much a legitimate competitor, innovator, and supplier of PCs as Intel, Alpha, IBM, M$, etc., though I guess enemies of each firm would pop out if a disaster struck any of them...
It's not as if Apple has some overwhelming market share, and is pushing profit-oriented market decisions on us, or is taking advantage of its market share to push into other markets.
Perhaps people are upset that Apple doesn't exactly target the geeky crowd... or that Apple is too trendy, or something. Whatever happened to rooting for the underdog and being anti-establishment? As pompous or arrogant as Apple is sometimes, they really are in the position of underdog... and they do have a good chance to fight their way back into greater relevance.
It's not even as if Apple isn't useful or hasn't innovated in the market. If I am not mistaken, they still are unprecedented for the level of support they offer for desktop publishing, what with hardware level color pre-press technology, software and OS level support for color calibration among monitors, computers, printers, scanners, etc., even as PCs are just catching up. Likewise they introduced the market to high performance subsystems with SCSI, compared to the PC's IDE/EIDE, or high color graphics vs 256 color, and simple peripheral hookup, though today a PC has access to all of them, and the PC OS of the averaged desktop, Win9x, has effectively caught up and surpassed the Mac OS. Though it was saddled with the Win3x series for the longest time.
Perhaps I'm biased too, because Apple comes from my hometown, but they are still pushing innovation, at the risk of failure. See the Newton, a few years back? Its a shame they halted development on it. Or FireWire, today, to replace/supplement any host of slower more expensive connections? Or, and this is a big gamble, a stable, Unix based, consumer grade, competative OS?
Ah well, c'est la vie, or something like that.
AS
re-inventing the minidisc
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
My mistake.
I haven't looked extremely hard for a MD player, since I originally saw one, thought it was too expensive, and left it alone. I guess the market has changed since.
And a pen-based PalmPilot, while less versatile, is currently more useful...
WinCE machines suffer similarly to eBooks and such; low batter life, poor screen technology(you need bigger displays for such a visual/graphical system), and weight/size problems.
I'm waiting for a GameBoyPalm, an attachment to a Color GameBoy that provides a larger greyscale screen with stylus input, but uses the GameBoy's internals and IR link and such...
For *current* technology, price points, yadda yadda, I'm pretty sure that moving parts is not a transitory solution.
Or I would counter that silicon technology is only transitory(and a waste of effort) until we switch over to GeAs, copper, and SOI. Which, coincidentally, IBM is also working on.
Moving parts aside, the microdrive is much less sensitive to shock, due to size, is much less power hungry, due to size, and much cheaper to implement than solid state, due to current technology. It is definitely an intermediate technology, between CDs, conventional IDE drives, and solid state, in terms of cost, reliability, and size, which gives it a host of advantages(and some disadvantages)...
AS
Progress of technology
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
There are reasons to update and remove old technology like ISA; cheaper and more reliable, simpler newer technology, perhaps...
Rip out ISA and pop in USB for significant cost savings, because USB is serial and chainable. A modem does fine on USB, I think, and M$ already has a sound card/speaker set out on USB. Feed it digital data, and it will do all the processing and output.
If you want to be able to mix and play with 100 voices of sound, I don't think ISA or USB is enough, which is why there are PCI sound cards. 3d sound cards, with their additional 3d positional capability, would also seem to choke on ISA.
So it's not so much that we can't use ISA, its that a simpler, cheaper, and effective alternative exists, USB, and perhaps Firewire will replace IDE sometime in the future too, since IDE has the annoying feature of 2 devices per chain...
Don't talk about SCSI being replaced by FireWire soon, because SCSI still has a performance advantage over FireWire and IDE for a while. Plus, it's more expensive to switch SCSI->FireWire because of the fact that people have chains of 3 to 5 devices to convert, where on IDE there are only 2 devices max.
AS
re-inventing the minidisc
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
Not quite sure of my following statement, but the way the minidisc works is via mpeg compression, isn't it?
I'm actually not sure how much *real* data the mini-disc holds, but I was told it compresses it's music data using something like mp2 or mp3 compression.
The micro-drive uses the ide standard, which is simple, open, and free, last I checked. Minidisc is owned by Sony, isn't it? So not only does it cost media, towards Sony, which probably doesn't want to license it out because of competition with its own music industry, but also because it would compete against it's own version of a portable music device, the MD Player.
I use the library for that purpose. I only buy books I read several times over, until the bindings fall off. Something like how I only buy DVDs of movies I watch several times through.
So the culture definitely exists to buy a 200$ viewer(like a VCR or DVD player), and spending a reasonable sum to read/view/own it, maybe 10$ for an e-book 'chip' that comes in a special version of the regular paperback, viewable in a e-book or something.
I think it's either subjective or really dependent on the situation. Anti-glare cannot eliminate glare in all situations, and sometimes it is worthless. If you are in a low glare situation, you won't notice a difference. However, in arctic situations, anti-glare really is useful and really does work. Likewise for driving against the sun, or flying into the sun, the effects of the sun itself can overwhelm the anti-glare properties of the glasses.
Anti-glare coats on monitors help in similar situations, where there is a bright light over head, but not if it's behind the monitor itself...
So PalmPilot made a concession with handwriting recognition and create Grafiti, or however you spell it, to speed up usage and adoption of the technology.
Imagine something similar, but to replace or supplement styluses! These glasse are either clip ons for regular glasses or a real pai, or if nothing else, a monocle, or something you strap on next to your eyes...
These things will register eye movement.
No more scrolling manually, no more clicks to page flip, to select text, to select links, etc.
Looking at a margin causes scrolling in that direction. If you squint too much, text gets enlarged. If you stare at a word, a popup with its definition and context can appear. Stare at a link, and you are transported there. Look at a button, and it's clicked. Look at an index, and get sent to the correct page. Page scrolling speed adjusts to your reading rate.
Wouldn't that be just cool?
I think it's very possible, see stuff on BioMuse to see more... BioMuse
Imagine a pair of glasses that reduced eye strain as well as tracking eye movement, so that there would no longer be need for scrolling or page flipping or even simple stylus operation!
Glance at the edge, and the page scrolls that direction, or flips, or whatever. Glance at a button, and it presses itself. Stare at a word, and a popup or dialog with a definition and context appears. Stare at a link, and the link is accessed. Look at a row of page numbers and instantly select a page...
There are significant differences between a 'computer' and a electronic device. The premise of a computer is the capability to do many things reasonably or acceptably, at the expense of doing things well. If the target of an e-book is the dissemination of information, then by necessity an e-book *will* be different from a computer, which has among its many varied usages the input of information, modification of information, processing of information, and collection of information. Besides that, a computer also has the ability to modify itself, with regards to information, and if the e-book is a self contained viewer, it need not many of the functions a modern computer has.
A few buttons for a limited amount of data manipulation, perhaps changing of font, display controls, text size, reading speed, graphics, etc. I can see a computing tablet existing alongside an electronic tablet, but with a fourfold price difference, and perhaps a fourfold weight difference as well. I'm not sure its an issue of computer phobia, as much as utility and minimal functionality.
As long as we're being petty... Marathon was slow, without the rush or adrenaline that DooM had, and never had the saturation that DooM had because it was released on a Mac platform. Not to disparage the Mac itself, but that the game wasn't doing itself any favors by being a Mac release without a dual PC release, though I think a later Marathon game was also a PC title.
On comparison, I believe that the Mac always had a richer color palette than a PC, because it always had access to more colors and a better color range. We're talking about an era when 256 colors was hot stuff on a PC, where the Mac had a choice between thousands and millions of colors available to them. And which iD game has ever strayed from browns and reds? And succeeds despite it?
The DooM phenomenon is about visceral thrill, adrenaline, and apprehension, where a plot, story, and advanced graphics add little to the game. If you're not into those aspects, then obvisouly DooM will not appeal to you as much as, say, Alone in the Dark, or Half Life, or many other Lucas Arts games.
Yeah, recycling of people doesn't work *unless* they can supplement it with real energy from an external source to offset the loses due to inefficiencies and heat waste. One thought that occurred to me was the machines also tapping the earth's core to generate the necessary input energy to sustain the humans, with the humans just acting as a sort of bioreactor to convert that warmth/heat energy(maybe they also grew fungi to feed the people?) via the Morpheus mentioned fusion process to power the machines?
The earth's core shouldn't have cooled much, unless it's much more than 100 years in the future, or the machines and Zion have seriously drained it in powering their respective cultures... and that's hard to believe.
I'm not sure where it was mentioned that the creators of the Matrix could not modify it... The agents could do some really wacked out things in the Matrix, bending it to their will, as it were, unless you mean something else entirely.
I couldn't tell if it was serious to the point of being satire, or outrageously satirical to begin with to the point of camp, or what...
The fight scenes, for example, what with all the classical mannerisms drawn from old Kung Fu movies; Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and others...
"I know kung fu!" -Neo "Show me" -Morhpeus
It seemed as if, since all their fighting was done in the Matrix we can't tell how skilled they *really* are, that they just downloaded all the best fight scenes from the best kung fu movies!
It's cool to see Keanu switch between different styles, especially when he goes Bruce Lee and gets bouncy and relaxed, where Morpheus goes Bruce Lee and gets serious and beckons with his hand, come hither...
Haha, one of my friends mentioned the Ascension, Virtual Adepts, and iterations, or something like that...
I myself got a big kick out of all the injected meta-physical philosophical stuff about reality being all in your head. While not quite so literally interpreted outside the Matrix, it still applies insomuch that reality is only what our wetware wants to see, interpret, and feel. Gosh I liked this movie.
The ending seemed perfectly fine... The movie was like 2 hours already, and I wouldn't want to cut a single minute of it...
Why was the ending vague babble? It was just a speech, with him *directly* calling up the Matrix, halting it's search on him, and telling them either they would be part of the problem or they would be part of the solution... He wasn't out to kill the machines, if they were willing to work together with the humans, I felt, and he gave them a choice.
AS
Bloody furby clones...
on
Robotic Dogs
·
· Score: 1
As was previously mentioned, the success and value of these things are not tied to their feelings or real-ness.
People obviously get attached to cars, to computers, to tamagotchis, to stuffed animals... Imagine the level of attachment someone could get out of their robo-pet? What does it matter that it's programmed to 'like' you? How is a real dog any different?
Robots are good for one thing:fulfilling a purpose. If it's to give someone a boost of joy or pleasure, then so be it. Slave labor is very over hyped in today's service society, esp with the value of entertainment and such.
Its as much a waste of silicon as a car (in my case, a Yellow NeoBeetle) is a waste of iron and plastic. I'm very attached to it, and if you bad mouthed it or scratched it or something, I would get upset way beyonds it's monetary worth.
Katz likes to add lots of ancillary supporting evidence, some anecdotal quotes, and is quite complex in his sentence structure.
Whoever wrote this doesn't sound like Katz, unless Katz is deliberately trying not to sound like hisself. The cursing for example, gives it away, and I don't know that I can believe Katz would be so computer literate to write # cp/usr/local/lib/kermit/ckermod.ini~/mykermrc
It would have been a much better joke if the work were more serious, a little stuffy, pedantic, and much longer. But then again, people might have taken it seriously. Except for it being April Fools. Ah, I don't know. Good attempt, but no points awarded.
Someone else mentioned this possibility; take a non-critical fissionable mass, and start it on the path to fission with this laser; as long as it produces more power than is necessary to power the laser, we now have a fission reactor that generates its own power, and can't melt down because of a failure in the control process; if the laser shuts down, then the entire system stops fissioning! Instead of huge containment and control systems, a simple fuse and feedback loop to kill the laser if it overworks itself would do the job!
Yeah, there are always negative consequences to new discoveries and revelations, but imagine if sustainable fission in a room the size of your closet were possible?
It's similar thinking to a few hundred years ago: Wow. So some scientist discovers electrons. Yippee. What is the average agrarian uneducated illiterate peasant going to do with this? What is the average uneducated illiterate noble going to do with this? What a waste of money/effort/time.
So in 10 years we can figure out a way to apply this towards real sustainable fusion, or table top fission(As another reply to your post mentioned...), or something else totally wacky unthought of (like computers - electrons!)...
It's research, and its science, which means it doesn't have/need applications. That's what us engineers are for... And I guess complaining about the process is what you're good for? Geez
But the researchers feel there is applicable research into generating sustainable fusion reactions. Hot neutrons evidently aren't the only thing; are you arguing that all the cheaper sources you've sited were also sources of fusion? If so, then my arguments are wrong and I apologize. If they were not the products of fusion, then this product/development allows the study of the fusion process on a fairly intimate scale, compared to a tokamak or other more exotic setups of lasers and such
Slashdot Mirror
Can a player be made to ignore everything except to read the data on the disk? IE, assume Divx goes down in flames, if it is legal, could one release a player that ignores all the phone line stuff and play the content regardless?
AS
The thing in life is to demand the best, but settle for compromise.
There are many choices made for the tradeoffs seen in DVD, and for the most part are liveable.
Good compression, good quality, good sound, many pluses like multi-language, multi-scene, multi-subtitle, extra footage, etc.
AS
I run a WinNT machine on an Intel PPro200...
I was just commenting on the fact that at 8:40 this morning or so, with about 30 comments, a lot were speaking as if how Apple deserved this, this is karma, fate, justice, or how this just shows the universe knows what it's doing.
Now that I check again, my comment has been scored up above most of the negativity, and with more people reading positive comments, there are less negatives too...
AS
What is with all the anti-Apple sentiment?
They are as much a legitimate competitor, innovator, and supplier of PCs as Intel, Alpha, IBM, M$, etc., though I guess enemies of each firm would pop out if a disaster struck any of them...
It's not as if Apple has some overwhelming market share, and is pushing profit-oriented market decisions on us, or is taking advantage of its market share to push into other markets.
Perhaps people are upset that Apple doesn't exactly target the geeky crowd... or that Apple is too trendy, or something. Whatever happened to rooting for the underdog and being anti-establishment? As pompous or arrogant as Apple is sometimes, they really are in the position of underdog... and they do have a good chance to fight their way back into greater relevance.
It's not even as if Apple isn't useful or hasn't innovated in the market. If I am not mistaken, they still are unprecedented for the level of support they offer for desktop publishing, what with hardware level color pre-press technology, software and OS level support for color calibration among monitors, computers, printers, scanners, etc., even as PCs are just catching up. Likewise they introduced the market to high performance subsystems with SCSI, compared to the PC's IDE/EIDE, or high color graphics vs 256 color, and simple peripheral hookup, though today a PC has access to all of them, and the PC OS of the averaged desktop, Win9x, has effectively caught up and surpassed the Mac OS. Though it was saddled with the Win3x series for the longest time.
Perhaps I'm biased too, because Apple comes from my hometown, but they are still pushing innovation, at the risk of failure. See the Newton, a few years back? Its a shame they halted development on it. Or FireWire, today, to replace/supplement any host of slower more expensive connections? Or, and this is a big gamble, a stable, Unix based, consumer grade, competative OS?
Ah well, c'est la vie, or something like that.
AS
My mistake.
I haven't looked extremely hard for a MD player, since I originally saw one, thought it was too expensive, and left it alone. I guess the market has changed since.
I guess Good Guys is a place to look?
AS
And a pen-based PalmPilot, while less versatile, is currently more useful...
WinCE machines suffer similarly to eBooks and such; low batter life, poor screen technology(you need bigger displays for such a visual/graphical system), and weight/size problems.
I'm waiting for a GameBoyPalm, an attachment to a Color GameBoy that provides a larger greyscale screen with stylus input, but uses the GameBoy's internals and IR link and such...
AS
For *current* technology, price points, yadda yadda, I'm pretty sure that moving parts is not a transitory solution.
Or I would counter that silicon technology is only transitory(and a waste of effort) until we switch over to GeAs, copper, and SOI. Which, coincidentally, IBM is also working on.
Moving parts aside, the microdrive is much less sensitive to shock, due to size, is much less power hungry, due to size, and much cheaper to implement than solid state, due to current technology. It is definitely an intermediate technology, between CDs, conventional IDE drives, and solid state, in terms of cost, reliability, and size, which gives it a host of advantages(and some disadvantages)...
AS
There are reasons to update and remove old technology like ISA; cheaper and more reliable, simpler newer technology, perhaps...
Rip out ISA and pop in USB for significant cost savings, because USB is serial and chainable. A modem does fine on USB, I think, and M$ already has a sound card/speaker set out on USB. Feed it digital data, and it will do all the processing and output.
If you want to be able to mix and play with 100 voices of sound, I don't think ISA or USB is enough, which is why there are PCI sound cards. 3d sound cards, with their additional 3d positional capability, would also seem to choke on ISA.
So it's not so much that we can't use ISA, its that a simpler, cheaper, and effective alternative exists, USB, and perhaps Firewire will replace IDE sometime in the future too, since IDE has the annoying feature of 2 devices per chain...
Don't talk about SCSI being replaced by FireWire soon, because SCSI still has a performance advantage over FireWire and IDE for a while. Plus, it's more expensive to switch SCSI->FireWire because of the fact that people have chains of 3 to 5 devices to convert, where on IDE there are only 2 devices max.
AS
Not quite sure of my following statement, but the way the minidisc works is via mpeg compression, isn't it?
I'm actually not sure how much *real* data the mini-disc holds, but I was told it compresses it's music data using something like mp2 or mp3 compression.
The micro-drive uses the ide standard, which is simple, open, and free, last I checked. Minidisc is owned by Sony, isn't it? So not only does it cost media, towards Sony, which probably doesn't want to license it out because of competition with its own music industry, but also because it would compete against it's own version of a portable music device, the MD Player.
AS
Wah!
Don't tell me you do VLSI layout!
Do you use Magic or something else? Or am I waaaay of topic, from your via comment?
AS
Is this true?
I use the library for that purpose. I only buy books I read several times over, until the bindings fall off. Something like how I only buy DVDs of movies I watch several times through.
So the culture definitely exists to buy a 200$ viewer(like a VCR or DVD player), and spending a reasonable sum to read/view/own it, maybe 10$ for an e-book 'chip' that comes in a special version of the regular paperback, viewable in a e-book or something.
AS
I think it's either subjective or really dependent on the situation. Anti-glare cannot eliminate glare in all situations, and sometimes it is worthless. If you are in a low glare situation, you won't notice a difference. However, in arctic situations, anti-glare really is useful and really does work. Likewise for driving against the sun, or flying into the sun, the effects of the sun itself can overwhelm the anti-glare properties of the glasses.
Anti-glare coats on monitors help in similar situations, where there is a bright light over head, but not if it's behind the monitor itself...
AS
eGlasses!
So PalmPilot made a concession with handwriting recognition and create Grafiti, or however you spell it, to speed up usage and adoption of the technology.
Imagine something similar, but to replace or supplement styluses! These glasse are either clip ons for regular glasses or a real pai, or if nothing else, a monocle, or something you strap on next to your eyes...
These things will register eye movement.
No more scrolling manually, no more clicks to page flip, to select text, to select links, etc.
Looking at a margin causes scrolling in that direction. If you squint too much, text gets enlarged. If you stare at a word, a popup with its definition and context can appear. Stare at a link, and you are transported there. Look at a button, and it's clicked. Look at an index, and get sent to the correct page. Page scrolling speed adjusts to your reading rate.
Wouldn't that be just cool?
I think it's very possible, see stuff on BioMuse to see more...
BioMuse
AS
Imagine a pair of glasses that reduced eye strain as well as tracking eye movement, so that there would no longer be need for scrolling or page flipping or even simple stylus operation!
Glance at the edge, and the page scrolls that direction, or flips, or whatever. Glance at a button, and it presses itself. Stare at a word, and a popup or dialog with a definition and context appears. Stare at a link, and the link is accessed. Look at a row of page numbers and instantly select a page...
Am I missing anything in this?
AS
There are significant differences between a 'computer' and a electronic device. The premise of a computer is the capability to do many things reasonably or acceptably, at the expense of doing things well. If the target of an e-book is the dissemination of information, then by necessity an e-book *will* be different from a computer, which has among its many varied usages the input of information, modification of information, processing of information, and collection of information. Besides that, a computer also has the ability to modify itself, with regards to information, and if the e-book is a self contained viewer, it need not many of the functions a modern computer has.
A few buttons for a limited amount of data manipulation, perhaps changing of font, display controls, text size, reading speed, graphics, etc. I can see a computing tablet existing alongside an electronic tablet, but with a fourfold price difference, and perhaps a fourfold weight difference as well. I'm not sure its an issue of computer phobia, as much as utility and minimal functionality.
AS
As long as we're being petty...
Marathon was slow, without the rush or adrenaline that DooM had, and never had the saturation that DooM had because it was released on a Mac platform. Not to disparage the Mac itself, but that the game wasn't doing itself any favors by being a Mac release without a dual PC release, though I think a later Marathon game was also a PC title.
On comparison, I believe that the Mac always had a richer color palette than a PC, because it always had access to more colors and a better color range. We're talking about an era when 256 colors was hot stuff on a PC, where the Mac had a choice between thousands and millions of colors available to them. And which iD game has ever strayed from browns and reds? And succeeds despite it?
The DooM phenomenon is about visceral thrill, adrenaline, and apprehension, where a plot, story, and advanced graphics add little to the game. If you're not into those aspects, then obvisouly DooM will not appeal to you as much as, say, Alone in the Dark, or Half Life, or many other Lucas Arts games.
AS
Yeah, recycling of people doesn't work *unless* they can supplement it with real energy from an external source to offset the loses due to inefficiencies and heat waste. One thought that occurred to me was the machines also tapping the earth's core to generate the necessary input energy to sustain the humans, with the humans just acting as a sort of bioreactor to convert that warmth/heat energy(maybe they also grew fungi to feed the people?) via the Morpheus mentioned fusion process to power the machines?
The earth's core shouldn't have cooled much, unless it's much more than 100 years in the future, or the machines and Zion have seriously drained it in powering their respective cultures... and that's hard to believe.
I'm not sure where it was mentioned that the creators of the Matrix could not modify it... The agents could do some really wacked out things in the Matrix, bending it to their will, as it were, unless you mean something else entirely.
AS
I couldn't tell if it was serious to the point of being satire, or outrageously satirical to begin with to the point of camp, or what...
The fight scenes, for example, what with all the classical mannerisms drawn from old Kung Fu movies; Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and others...
"I know kung fu!" -Neo
"Show me" -Morhpeus
It seemed as if, since all their fighting was done in the Matrix we can't tell how skilled they *really* are, that they just downloaded all the best fight scenes from the best kung fu movies!
It's cool to see Keanu switch between different styles, especially when he goes Bruce Lee and gets bouncy and relaxed, where Morpheus goes Bruce Lee and gets serious and beckons with his hand, come hither...
Coolness
AS
Haha, one of my friends mentioned the Ascension, Virtual Adepts, and iterations, or something like that...
I myself got a big kick out of all the injected meta-physical philosophical stuff about reality being all in your head. While not quite so literally interpreted outside the Matrix, it still applies insomuch that reality is only what our wetware wants to see, interpret, and feel. Gosh I liked this movie.
AS
The ending seemed perfectly fine...
The movie was like 2 hours already, and I wouldn't want to cut a single minute of it...
Why was the ending vague babble? It was just a speech, with him *directly* calling up the Matrix, halting it's search on him, and telling them either they would be part of the problem or they would be part of the solution... He wasn't out to kill the machines, if they were willing to work together with the humans, I felt, and he gave them a choice.
AS
As was previously mentioned, the success and value of these things are not tied to their feelings or real-ness.
People obviously get attached to cars, to computers, to tamagotchis, to stuffed animals... Imagine the level of attachment someone could get out of their robo-pet? What does it matter that it's programmed to 'like' you? How is a real dog any different?
Robots are good for one thing:fulfilling a purpose. If it's to give someone a boost of joy or pleasure, then so be it. Slave labor is very over hyped in today's service society, esp with the value of entertainment and such.
Its as much a waste of silicon as a car (in my case, a Yellow NeoBeetle) is a waste of iron and plastic. I'm very attached to it, and if you bad mouthed it or scratched it or something, I would get upset way beyonds it's monetary worth.
AS
My thoughts exactly.
Katz likes to add lots of ancillary supporting evidence, some anecdotal quotes, and is quite complex in his sentence structure.
Whoever wrote this doesn't sound like Katz, unless Katz is deliberately trying not to sound like hisself. The cursing for example, gives it away, and I don't know that I can believe Katz would be so computer literate to write
# cp/usr/local/lib/kermit/ckermod.ini~/mykermrc
It would have been a much better joke if the work were more serious, a little stuffy, pedantic, and much longer. But then again, people might have taken it seriously. Except for it being April Fools. Ah, I don't know. Good attempt, but no points awarded.
AS
Someone else mentioned this possibility;
take a non-critical fissionable mass, and start it on the path to fission with this laser; as long as it produces more power than is necessary to power the laser, we now have a fission reactor that generates its own power, and can't melt down because of a failure in the control process; if the laser shuts down, then the entire system stops fissioning! Instead of huge containment and control systems, a simple fuse and feedback loop to kill the laser if it overworks itself would do the job!
Yeah, there are always negative consequences to new discoveries and revelations, but imagine if sustainable fission in a room the size of your closet were possible?
AS
It's similar thinking to a few hundred years ago:
Wow. So some scientist discovers electrons. Yippee. What is the average agrarian uneducated illiterate peasant going to do with this? What is the average uneducated illiterate noble going to do with this? What a waste of money/effort/time.
So in 10 years we can figure out a way to apply this towards real sustainable fusion, or table top fission(As another reply to your post mentioned...), or something else totally wacky unthought of (like computers - electrons!)...
It's research, and its science, which means it doesn't have/need applications. That's what us engineers are for... And I guess complaining about the process is what you're good for? Geez
AS
But the researchers feel there is applicable research into generating sustainable fusion reactions. Hot neutrons evidently aren't the only thing; are you arguing that all the cheaper sources you've sited were also sources of fusion? If so, then my arguments are wrong and I apologize. If they were not the products of fusion, then this product/development allows the study of the fusion process on a fairly intimate scale, compared to a tokamak or other more exotic setups of lasers and such
AS