The issues here may not be intuitive, so I will elaborate.
The coherent nature of laser light has two effects. First, it allows the energy flux to be focused on tiny areas. This is why there are laser cutters. Second, it allows the energy to be transmitted at relatively constant intensity compared to incoherent light. This is why surveys use lasers instead of flashlights.
However, these two are somewhat contradictory. If you make the beam small, it will spread as it propagates. If you make it (relatively) larger, it will propagate nicely but the intensity will be lower.
A laser at 100kW would be amazingly destructive if focused down to a submillimeter spot. This is great, if you can get your enemy to park his tank 1 meter from your laser cannon.
If you want to use your laser cannon at large distances, you need to expand the beam. The radius when it leaves your system has to be about sqrt(wavelength*distance). Assume 10.6 micron CO2 laser at 1 km, and you get itensity at the target of about 3MW per square meter.
That sounds like a buttload, but compare to a hair dryer; those can be 2kW out of 3cm squared or 3MW per square meter.
You can get factors of ten difference depending on your assumptions, but basically you are attacking stuff with a bunch of hair dryers.
Now, lets give you an ultraviolet laser at the same power. The wavelength is much shorter, so the intensity at the target goes way up. There are no such lasers that could be used. (Thankfully?) CO2 lasers are cheap and reliable (relatively) and the optics don't need to be as good.
There is another tradeoff. If you are working at high intensity, then the systems get fragile. A speck of dust on a mirror will cause power to be absorbed, which will locally worsen the reflectivity, thermal runaway to trashed mirror. Can you imagine a bunch of grunts with lens paper and finger cots doing battlefield mirror replacement?
Oh yeah, eyes. Well, with Class II lasers you can often, but not always, blink and turn away fast enough to avoid any damage. These are up to 3mW. Figure a spot a few mm on a side, you get a kW per square meter, and you probably wouldn't intercept all the power.
Compare a kW to a MW. So brief exposure to those babies will fry eyes and do nothing to equipment or skin. IMHO; don't believe anything you read on the internet.
I would rather switch to an alternative SSHd in the period that we were given from the presence of the exploit being announced to the fix being released
You have found the big hole in the "window of opportunity" description of the danger of a bug (Bruce Schneier, Cryptograms and books). Fortunately, it gives even further support to the "full disclosure" movement.
We don't need to wait for the bug-fix release to secure our systems. We can switch to alternate products, change config files, and even turn off convenient services that are not strictly necessary or block them at the firewall temporarily.
Schneier says the window is open between discovery of the bug and the time when a fix is released (and longer until everyone fixes their systems). This is a perfect example of how full disclosure allows you to close the window even before a patch is developed.
seeds the code with a number (B) of known new bugs, the number and type of bugs should be determined from bugs found in previous debugging cycles.
In other words, you are introducing bugs that you already know your testing can find. But you are assuming that any real bug is equally as easy to find as the bebugs. This may work if your app is full of really brain-dead errors, like buttons that don't do anything or menu selections that crash the app. It doesn't tell you anything about whether subtle errors are being found.
I'm just stunned that you've managed to single out two authors for praise that I'd have placed near the bottom of the pile.
They were what came to mind first. I was really arguing against the parent post, which asserted that Asimov, Herbert, etc. had said all there was to be said in SF and there was no point in reading any more recent works. I agree that in some ways Gibson is over-rated, but I meant that his perspective is much different from that of the previous generation. Similarly, I am amazed at how uneven Benford's stuff is; I think the good is very good but he did put out some unreadable crap.
Look at your bookshelves (I'll wait). Welcome back. How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks? I would guess 90% paperbacks, but the main bestseller lists track sales of new hardcover books.
Thinking at the keyboard here, I would say most hardbacks are bought as gifts. Tracking paperbacks would tell you what people are buying for themselves to read.
The trouble with this is that paperback buying is probably more spread out over time. Did, say, 2001: a Space Odyssey make the best-seller lists? I don't know. But how many copies did it sell in paperback across the decades?
Hence, I conclude that best-seller lists are marketing hoopla, and we should ignore them.
There hasn't been a single good sci-fi novel since Herbert.
Pfui. Snow Crash. Neuromancer or almost anything else by Gibson. Many titles by Gregory Benford.
Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein had much less of an idea of how technology would affect society. For example, Asimov's robot stories are brilliant, but the connection to real life is subtle, because so much else of society is going to change radically before we have sufficient AI to get Asimov's robots.
"Modern authors" have been "rehashing the same old plots" for thousands of years. Read Joseph Campbell.
Ximian and the GNOME project have learned from standard, existing
industry practices for building usable software.
Existing industry practices?
This one is a real problem...
The results of the comprehensive GNOME desktop usability study that
Sun performed last year are worth a read
I read the study, and it was terrifying. The conclusion was "anything that is not identical to MS windows is confusing." People in the study were all windows users, and any deviation from from the way windows menus, icons, hotkeys, etc. worked was considered a point of confusion and therefore a flaw in the interface.
Usability flows [from] predictability which flows from consistency.
Consistency and predictability are not the most important parts of the user interface. This claim denies the obvious fact that we learn to use these interfaces. This is the argument that leaves us all using the qwerty keyboard today. Simply repeating the sins that have given us the crappy interfaces we have now (because we are used to them) is not "usability".
Can the ximians speak the truth, and say "For business reasons we have to make our interface as similar to windows as is legally possible"? I can accept that, as I can accept any honest statement.
I have not read the book, but I have read some of the criticisms, so I will discuss some issues which are relevent without claiming anything about the book.
As a scientist, I can tell you that analysis and presentation of data is treacherous. The best scientists will sometimes find their preconceived results regradless of the actual data. All scientists must try to present their results in the best light in order to keep working. In a small subfield, researchers are often personally acquainted and are intimately familiar with the analysis techniques, so they are capable of seeing what valid results lie underneath the veneer.
This is my most difficult problem with climate change. I do not work in that field, and I can't personally analyze the validity and importance of various claims. This makes it very hard for me to have an opinion. I can point out two problems, though.
Numerical models of things such as weather or resource consumption are complicated. At best, the model can be shown to be consistent with past trends. But any model is only valid over a range of parameters. Outside of this range, the believability of the results drops to nothing. Furthermore, the ability to reproduce short-term variations is no indication that the model will be a valid predictor of long-term trends. We must constantly skeptically re-evaluate these results.
(Dont't misread me; I think that a huge and dangerous climate change is on the way unless we drastically change how we live in the environment.)
This has been discussed so many times that I can't believe that I have not seen it here yet. MacOSX will never go on Intel because of hardware issues. Either 1) Apple has to support an infinite variety of hardware configurations at immense cost or 2) vendors will create their own drivers which lead to tremendous instability in the system and (unfairly) harm the repuatation of the OS.
How many Linux hackers are there around the world trying to keep hardware drivers up to date? And despite this huge effort, how much hardware is still not supported under Linux (with a reasonably complete feature set)?
One possible answer would be for Apple to specify a small number of officially supported systems, a number sufficiently small that the hardware can be fully supported. What is going to happen the first time someone comes home from Circuit City with an unsupported peripheral and decides that the OS sucks? People in the Linux community expect this and know to look out for it, but what will the regular Wintel/PC crowd think?
Another redundancy: the Apple market share may not be large, but the total market is still huge compared to many industries. They do not need these shenanigans.
Re:RMS says not to do this kind of thing?
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Probably RMS would immediately see the distinction between
1) Sending messages encoded in a proprietary format which is not documented publicly.
and
2) Formatting a message in a way that makes it unreadable to certain users because of bugs in their software.
I probably don't agree with what he is doing, but I can see that it is in some ways a good idea to punish people whose email programs do not follow the RFC's, because that may be the only way to get people to put pressure on the vendors to provide correct software.
Remember, part of MS strategy is to make life difficult for people who don't use MS software and want to interact with those who do. Selling clients that don't follow the RFC's is just a part of this. Maybe this will make a few users complain to microsoft that they can't read a properly formated email using their MS email clients and force MS to change its practices.
What is happening here is that they are sending a pulse of light, and the envelope or shape of the pulse changes as it travels. Previous papers have shown a pulse that starts out as a Gaussian and becomes progressively more skewed as it propagates.
This allows the peak of the pulse to move faster than light speed. However, the leading edge of the pulse does not.
This is why this is not a technique for sending information faster than the speed of light.
I believe it is not at all related. Cerenkov radiation is the result of a charged particle moving through a medium at a speed faster then the speed of light in that medium, like a proton moving through water at 0.9c. This generates photons, but they move at the speed of light in the medium.
Why does Dell bother to offer Linux at all if they are going to give it such lousy support? I think it is because of the deals that they have with businesses and institutions.
I have a Dell on my desk which was bought with Linux on it (actually, they sent it to me with a blank hard drive, but that is a different story). Why? Because if I had bought a machine from one of the
many vendors that sell Linux boxes, I would have had to file Selection of Source paperwork, get references for the vendors, et cetera. With Dell, all I had to do was get a web quote and send it to purchasing. Their mediocre Linux support was just barely sufficient to not drive me to another vendor.
Note that they flat-out refuse to sell hardware with Linux installed to an individual consumer. Why? They charge more for Linux than for Windoze, so the profit margin is higher. The only possible reason is (dare I say it?) anti-competitive marketing agreements with MS. Pure speculation on my part, of course.
Whether or not such searches are reasonable depends on what is done at your particular lab.
Duh.
If you are working on, I don't know, maybe cancer research, then the searches are probably not reasonable. If the lab works with highly infectious strains of fatal diseases, then daily searches may be necessary.
If you know that they are going to be doing such searches, then you should minimize what you carry to work. Most of us carry around backpacks full of paper, pens, and 10 dollar calculators even though we have those things in our homes and offices already. Why not try to make security's job a little easier and don't carry things you don't need to?
As Bruce Schneier mentioned in a special Cryptogram, IDs at airline check-ins don't do anything for security, partly because getting fake IDs is so easy. What it does accomplish is to keep semi-honest people from selling their airline tickets to each other.
There are two separate issues here. A national ID is not necessarily so bad. However, assigning a uniques identification number to each American is what threatens privacy. Having a unique ID number which is accessible to anyone permits cross-correlating databases and other methods of mining data and constructing profiles of people. Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
I am not saying this would happen, or is even likely, but it would be possible and that is scary enough.
I think you are missing the point, along with e.g. William Safire in today's NYTimes.
No one sensible thinks Bush should have headed directly toward DC or NYC. I figured he was going to end up in the mountain in Colorado we saw in War Games (part of NORAD, right? Can't think of the name.)
Airforce 1 is touted as having the best in communications systems so that the president can do his part to run the country after all the nice bits have been blown into radioactive rubble. Why didn't we hear from him then?
When he finally made a statement from Shreveport, it was not what I expected. It was vague, disconnected, and threatening. He said things like (paraphrasing) "We have now done the things necessary to make the country secure," which was a lie. More secure I would believe.
When he made statements about "aiding local authorities" he never mentioned NY or the Pentagon by name. It was as if he didn't actually know what had happened. Maybe he just can't pronounce "Giuliani".
"Mr. President, there will be some pompous gruff nonsense appearing on the teleprompter. Try to read the words and don't worry about what they mean."
The endless harping on retalliation reminded me of the debate where he giggled like a schoolgirl when he was gloating over executing prisoners. A little respect for human life would be nice.
People wanted to see a leader, a leader who was informed, who cared about his people, and who was ready to plan for the future. Nobody cared where his plane was going.
Maybe there'd be more demands for Linux on Dell desktops and notebooks if I could actually select it on their website.
I went crazy with this a few weeks ago. Only businesses and educational institutions can buy Linux machines from Dell.
That's why I am typing this on a Sony Vaio (running Linux) and not a Dell. (Install was a piece of cake with a few glitches.)
I bought a desktop from Dell with Linux installed for the office. This cost $300 more than the identical machine with Windoze (this was for work so needed to go with large vendor). Then they delivered it without the OS installed! The HD was blank. And then they were very unhelpful about it. Actually, as long as they sent Linux-compatible hardware I preferred installing it myself, but I wasted a lot of time trying to determine whether the drive was broken or just blank. I have no use for Dell.
Biometrics do not provide the security that you claim they do. They can be useful in authenticating a user between two secure machines. Say you need to use a thumbprint on your desktop to log into the file server. If your desktop has been rooted, the biometric information can be sniffed and used later by the attacker to get into the fileserver. In this sense biometrics are no better than passwords.
There is no magic bullet to allow secure remote authentication from insecure hardware.
It sounds like your comments are tinged by personal bitterness.
"Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion (getting more energy out than you put in)" I am not sure what you mean. Creating a plasma that generates more fusion power than the external power put into it could be done today. It is not done because none of the current experimental facilities can handle the radiation load. JET achieved 0.8 or 0.9 years ago.
Your statement about ITER "collapsing" is misleading. The design produced by the ITER team is incredibly important. They have a complete design for the machine and do not gloss over any of the details (for example specifying the material for the insulation of sensor wires, because they studied the issue and turned out to matter a lot). The price tag made it politically unfeasible. Most of the work is immediately transferable to other designs.
Nothing in the abstract you link to suggests that the Trisops achieved a "stable plasma structure". Any plasma structure is stable for some period of time, which can be set by the time scales of the diffusion of electrical current or heat, global instabilities, neutral gas dynanmics, or a million other things. Many plasma configurations give tantalizingly good results in very small experiments, but become rapidly unsuitable as the size/power/density is increased to the levels needed for a reactor.
No further comment on your claiming to link to a "report" when all the link points to is a freakin' poster session abstract.
You ask "Why on earth isn't US Energy Policy pushing hard for the development of fusion based technology?"
There are two reasons. First, the US is a rich country. If global energy supplies dwindle, the US will still be able to purchase more than its share. The US does not need fusion. The problem is more grave for the rest of the world.
Second, because scientific research is generally underfunded (ideologues may disagree). After defense, welfare programs, and interest on the debt are taken away, there is only a small slice of the budget that Washington can really play around with and hack away at without offending too many constituents. This small slice includes funding of research.
Canada has submitted a proposal to host Iter. Proposals from the Japanese are also expected. The final decision is a ways down the road.
The point about stellarators and other alternate devices is interesting. The tokamak effort is mature; problems and solutions to problems that scale directly to reactors are understood. Stellarators, ST's, RFP's etc. are not as well developed, and there are many problems that will appear as the performance is pushed closer to the reactor-relevant regime that cannot be predicted now.
Unfortunately, lack of computational power is still a major problem and will continue to be for a long time. Detailed calculations of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stability may be well within range, but predictive modelling of turbulence and transport in a real 3D geometry is not going to happen for a while.
Oops. There's a link to safety on the General Atomics website, but when I try it I get a "403 forbidden" error from their server. maybe they still have a few bugs to wrok out?
That page is about generic work safety procedures of the current experimental facility, which may be why it is not available externally. It is not about the safety of a fusion reactor.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably more robust
http://freshmeat.net/projects/checkinstall/
The coherent nature of laser light has two effects. First, it allows the energy flux to be focused on tiny areas. This is why there are laser cutters. Second, it allows the energy to be transmitted at relatively constant intensity compared to incoherent light. This is why surveys use lasers instead of flashlights.
However, these two are somewhat contradictory. If you make the beam small, it will spread as it propagates. If you make it (relatively) larger, it will propagate nicely but the intensity will be lower.
A laser at 100kW would be amazingly destructive if focused down to a submillimeter spot. This is great, if you can get your enemy to park his tank 1 meter from your laser cannon.
If you want to use your laser cannon at large distances, you need to expand the beam. The radius when it leaves your system has to be about sqrt(wavelength*distance). Assume 10.6 micron CO2 laser at 1 km, and you get itensity at the target of about 3MW per square meter.
That sounds like a buttload, but compare to a hair dryer; those can be 2kW out of 3cm squared or 3MW per square meter.
You can get factors of ten difference depending on your assumptions, but basically you are attacking stuff with a bunch of hair dryers.
Now, lets give you an ultraviolet laser at the same power. The wavelength is much shorter, so the intensity at the target goes way up. There are no such lasers that could be used. (Thankfully?) CO2 lasers are cheap and reliable (relatively) and the optics don't need to be as good.
There is another tradeoff. If you are working at high intensity, then the systems get fragile. A speck of dust on a mirror will cause power to be absorbed, which will locally worsen the reflectivity, thermal runaway to trashed mirror. Can you imagine a bunch of grunts with lens paper and finger cots doing battlefield mirror replacement?
Oh yeah, eyes. Well, with Class II lasers you can often, but not always, blink and turn away fast enough to avoid any damage. These are up to 3mW. Figure a spot a few mm on a side, you get a kW per square meter, and you probably wouldn't intercept all the power.
Compare a kW to a MW. So brief exposure to those babies will fry eyes and do nothing to equipment or skin. IMHO; don't believe anything you read on the internet.
You have found the big hole in the "window of opportunity" description of the danger of a bug (Bruce Schneier, Cryptograms and books). Fortunately, it gives even further support to the "full disclosure" movement.
We don't need to wait for the bug-fix release to secure our systems. We can switch to alternate products, change config files, and even turn off convenient services that are not strictly necessary or block them at the firewall temporarily.
Schneier says the window is open between discovery of the bug and the time when a fix is released (and longer until everyone fixes their systems). This is a perfect example of how full disclosure allows you to close the window even before a patch is developed.
In other words, you are introducing bugs that you already know your testing can find. But you are assuming that any real bug is equally as easy to find as the bebugs. This may work if your app is full of really brain-dead errors, like buttons that don't do anything or menu selections that crash the app. It doesn't tell you anything about whether subtle errors are being found.
Beware a fool armed with an equation.
They were what came to mind first. I was really arguing against the parent post, which asserted that Asimov, Herbert, etc. had said all there was to be said in SF and there was no point in reading any more recent works. I agree that in some ways Gibson is over-rated, but I meant that his perspective is much different from that of the previous generation. Similarly, I am amazed at how uneven Benford's stuff is; I think the good is very good but he did put out some unreadable crap.
Look at your bookshelves (I'll wait). Welcome back. How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks? I would guess 90% paperbacks, but the main bestseller lists track sales of new hardcover books.
Thinking at the keyboard here, I would say most hardbacks are bought as gifts. Tracking paperbacks would tell you what people are buying for themselves to read.
The trouble with this is that paperback buying is probably more spread out over time. Did, say, 2001: a Space Odyssey make the best-seller lists? I don't know. But how many copies did it sell in paperback across the decades?
Hence, I conclude that best-seller lists are marketing hoopla, and we should ignore them.
Pfui. Snow Crash. Neuromancer or almost anything else by Gibson. Many titles by Gregory Benford.
Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein had much less of an idea of how technology would affect society. For example, Asimov's robot stories are brilliant, but the connection to real life is subtle, because so much else of society is going to change radically before we have sufficient AI to get Asimov's robots.
"Modern authors" have been "rehashing the same old plots" for thousands of years. Read Joseph Campbell.
Aw rats. I been trolled...
This one is a real problem...
I read the study, and it was terrifying. The conclusion was "anything that is not identical to MS windows is confusing." People in the study were all windows users, and any deviation from from the way windows menus, icons, hotkeys, etc. worked was considered a point of confusion and therefore a flaw in the interface. Consistency and predictability are not the most important parts of the user interface. This claim denies the obvious fact that we learn to use these interfaces. This is the argument that leaves us all using the qwerty keyboard today. Simply repeating the sins that have given us the crappy interfaces we have now (because we are used to them) is not "usability".Can the ximians speak the truth, and say "For business reasons we have to make our interface as similar to windows as is legally possible"? I can accept that, as I can accept any honest statement.
Hence, his passwords are "AOLsucks", "EBAYsucks",...
As a scientist, I can tell you that analysis and presentation of data is treacherous. The best scientists will sometimes find their preconceived results regradless of the actual data. All scientists must try to present their results in the best light in order to keep working. In a small subfield, researchers are often personally acquainted and are intimately familiar with the analysis techniques, so they are capable of seeing what valid results lie underneath the veneer.
This is my most difficult problem with climate change. I do not work in that field, and I can't personally analyze the validity and importance of various claims. This makes it very hard for me to have an opinion. I can point out two problems, though.
Numerical models of things such as weather or resource consumption are complicated. At best, the model can be shown to be consistent with past trends. But any model is only valid over a range of parameters. Outside of this range, the believability of the results drops to nothing. Furthermore, the ability to reproduce short-term variations is no indication that the model will be a valid predictor of long-term trends. We must constantly skeptically re-evaluate these results.
(Dont't misread me; I think that a huge and dangerous climate change is on the way unless we drastically change how we live in the environment.)
Enough for now...
This has been discussed so many times that I can't believe that I have not seen it here yet. MacOSX will never go on Intel because of hardware issues. Either 1) Apple has to support an infinite variety of hardware configurations at immense cost or 2) vendors will create their own drivers which lead to tremendous instability in the system and (unfairly) harm the repuatation of the OS.
How many Linux hackers are there around the world trying to keep hardware drivers up to date? And despite this huge effort, how much hardware is still not supported under Linux (with a reasonably complete feature set)?
One possible answer would be for Apple to specify a small number of officially supported systems, a number sufficiently small that the hardware can be fully supported. What is going to happen the first time someone comes home from Circuit City with an unsupported peripheral and decides that the OS sucks? People in the Linux community expect this and know to look out for it, but what will the regular Wintel/PC crowd think?
Another redundancy: the Apple market share may not be large, but the total market is still huge compared to many industries. They do not need these shenanigans.
and
I probably don't agree with what he is doing, but I can see that it is in some ways a good idea to punish people whose email programs do not follow the RFC's, because that may be the only way to get people to put pressure on the vendors to provide correct software.
Remember, part of MS strategy is to make life difficult for people who don't use MS software and want to interact with those who do. Selling clients that don't follow the RFC's is just a part of this. Maybe this will make a few users complain to microsoft that they can't read a properly formated email using their MS email clients and force MS to change its practices.
This allows the peak of the pulse to move faster than light speed. However, the leading edge of the pulse does not.
This is why this is not a technique for sending information faster than the speed of light.
I believe it is not at all related. Cerenkov radiation is the result of a charged particle moving through a medium at a speed faster then the speed of light in that medium, like a proton moving through water at 0.9c. This generates photons, but they move at the speed of light in the medium.
I have a Dell on my desk which was bought with Linux on it (actually, they sent it to me with a blank hard drive, but that is a different story). Why? Because if I had bought a machine from one of the many vendors that sell Linux boxes, I would have had to file Selection of Source paperwork, get references for the vendors, et cetera. With Dell, all I had to do was get a web quote and send it to purchasing. Their mediocre Linux support was just barely sufficient to not drive me to another vendor.
Note that they flat-out refuse to sell hardware with Linux installed to an individual consumer. Why? They charge more for Linux than for Windoze, so the profit margin is higher. The only possible reason is (dare I say it?) anti-competitive marketing agreements with MS. Pure speculation on my part, of course.
Duh.
If you are working on, I don't know, maybe cancer research, then the searches are probably not reasonable. If the lab works with highly infectious strains of fatal diseases, then daily searches may be necessary.
If you know that they are going to be doing such searches, then you should minimize what you carry to work. Most of us carry around backpacks full of paper, pens, and 10 dollar calculators even though we have those things in our homes and offices already. Why not try to make security's job a little easier and don't carry things you don't need to?
There are two separate issues here. A national ID is not necessarily so bad. However, assigning a uniques identification number to each American is what threatens privacy. Having a unique ID number which is accessible to anyone permits cross-correlating databases and other methods of mining data and constructing profiles of people. Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
I am not saying this would happen, or is even likely, but it would be possible and that is scary enough.
No one sensible thinks Bush should have headed directly toward DC or NYC. I figured he was going to end up in the mountain in Colorado we saw in War Games (part of NORAD, right? Can't think of the name.)
Airforce 1 is touted as having the best in communications systems so that the president can do his part to run the country after all the nice bits have been blown into radioactive rubble. Why didn't we hear from him then?
When he finally made a statement from Shreveport, it was not what I expected. It was vague, disconnected, and threatening. He said things like (paraphrasing) "We have now done the things necessary to make the country secure," which was a lie. More secure I would believe.
When he made statements about "aiding local authorities" he never mentioned NY or the Pentagon by name. It was as if he didn't actually know what had happened. Maybe he just can't pronounce "Giuliani".
"Mr. President, there will be some pompous gruff nonsense appearing on the teleprompter. Try to read the words and don't worry about what they mean."
The endless harping on retalliation reminded me of the debate where he giggled like a schoolgirl when he was gloating over executing prisoners. A little respect for human life would be nice.
People wanted to see a leader, a leader who was informed, who cared about his people, and who was ready to plan for the future. Nobody cared where his plane was going.
I went crazy with this a few weeks ago. Only businesses and educational institutions can buy Linux machines from Dell.
That's why I am typing this on a Sony Vaio (running Linux) and not a Dell. (Install was a piece of cake with a few glitches.)
I bought a desktop from Dell with Linux installed for the office. This cost $300 more than the identical machine with Windoze (this was for work so needed to go with large vendor). Then they delivered it without the OS installed! The HD was blank. And then they were very unhelpful about it. Actually, as long as they sent Linux-compatible hardware I preferred installing it myself, but I wasted a lot of time trying to determine whether the drive was broken or just blank. I have no use for Dell.
There is no magic bullet to allow secure remote authentication from insecure hardware.
"Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion (getting more energy out than you put in)" I am not sure what you mean. Creating a plasma that generates more fusion power than the external power put into it could be done today. It is not done because none of the current experimental facilities can handle the radiation load. JET achieved 0.8 or 0.9 years ago.
Your statement about ITER "collapsing" is misleading. The design produced by the ITER team is incredibly important. They have a complete design for the machine and do not gloss over any of the details (for example specifying the material for the insulation of sensor wires, because they studied the issue and turned out to matter a lot). The price tag made it politically unfeasible. Most of the work is immediately transferable to other designs.
Nothing in the abstract you link to suggests that the Trisops achieved a "stable plasma structure". Any plasma structure is stable for some period of time, which can be set by the time scales of the diffusion of electrical current or heat, global instabilities, neutral gas dynanmics, or a million other things. Many plasma configurations give tantalizingly good results in very small experiments, but become rapidly unsuitable as the size/power/density is increased to the levels needed for a reactor.
No further comment on your claiming to link to a "report" when all the link points to is a freakin' poster session abstract.
There are two reasons. First, the US is a rich country. If global energy supplies dwindle, the US will still be able to purchase more than its share. The US does not need fusion. The problem is more grave for the rest of the world.
Second, because scientific research is generally underfunded (ideologues may disagree). After defense, welfare programs, and interest on the debt are taken away, there is only a small slice of the budget that Washington can really play around with and hack away at without offending too many constituents. This small slice includes funding of research.
The point about stellarators and other alternate devices is interesting. The tokamak effort is mature; problems and solutions to problems that scale directly to reactors are understood. Stellarators, ST's, RFP's etc. are not as well developed, and there are many problems that will appear as the performance is pushed closer to the reactor-relevant regime that cannot be predicted now.
Unfortunately, lack of computational power is still a major problem and will continue to be for a long time. Detailed calculations of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stability may be well within range, but predictive modelling of turbulence and transport in a real 3D geometry is not going to happen for a while.
That page is about generic work safety procedures of the current experimental facility, which may be why it is not available externally. It is not about the safety of a fusion reactor.