Sounds like China to me. When I went there, I was curious to see if one could find NON-pirated DVDs for purchase. Never saw one. All DVDs and CDs in the city I was were pirated.
They were all really cheap too. I think it was 10 CDs for $5 and 3 DVDs for $8 if I recall correctly.
I know bonafide scientists who use Excel for analysis. Scary.
I also know quite a few who use numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and python for real science. In fact, I think the astro community specifically was an early supporter of some of these packages. I myself have been using them in science for 5 or 6 years.
A - ITER won't be commercially viable. Good science, probably, but not commercially viable.
B - Even if it were commercially viable, it's still years away. I think the first deuterium-tritium experiments are scheduled 10-15 years from now.
C - Yes it's not completely safe. The vessel will become activated, and tritium itself is radioactive. Never mind the health hazards of beryllium. Regardless, the waste should be a lot easier to deal with than fission products. I don't know the numbers for half lives, but from what I understand, it's 1-100s of years instead of 100,000s of years.
A lot of people have responded to you and they have it mostly right. Deuterium isn't harmful, tritium is. The neutron flux is a serious problem, especially from a structural standpoint. The reactor will become slowly neutron activated, or radioactive, and will need to be treated as low grade waste. Also, once tritium is introduced into the system, people won't be able to go in the reactor for maintenance because of the tritium absorbed into everything, so remote handling will be required. This is a separate issue from the neutron activation of the reactor though.
I don't know what it used to be like, but the fact of the matter is to 'make it' in science, getting a professorship at a tier one research university, you work like a dog. So you say, 'Teach at a college, you'll get summers off.' No, not true either. There is still pressure to publish (to get tenure), so you need to pull in grant money and research all summer. And possibly get paid shit.
One could always go into industry. The pay is better. The hours are long and the pressure is high. The fact of the matter is, many jobs in our society that are important have crap compensation. Teaching, science, etc. The payoff is in business.
And in my experience, it's not that hard to compete with (many of) the foreign born scientists. Some of them are quite good, and some end up staying in the US, but a lot are just so-so.
Don't worry, I'm staying here. I am choosing job satisfaction and quality of life over money. But all my friends who have left are definitely making more money than I am.
The summary got at least one sentence right. Incentives to stay in science are very small. I finished my graduate work not to long ago, and I'd make more money in almost any field compared to staying in physics. I know a number of people who left the field to do finance or something else. The thinking is: "If I have to work 80 hour weeks, I might as well be making several hundred thousand." Go to any of the top colleges/universities, and a large amount of the students want to go into finance or some other money making field.
A lot of labs in my field use IDL and Labview. Labview works pretty well for data acquisition and is nice because it interfaces with a ton of older equipment. And I can just buy a GPIB interface from NI and be done with it. For some of the bigger projects, EPICS is used as well.
As far as data analysis, like I said a lot of IDL and Matlab is used. Some of the more simulation oriented folk tend to write their own code and most if not all of this is open source. But of limited use to the outside world.
I made a break from my group and have been using Python + Scipy + matplotlib for almost all of my research. It's free and great. It does most of what IDL/Matlab would do. I think it's started to get up some steam too...
A very cool 3d visualization tool called Visit is open source. I think it's build around VTK but I could be wrong.
He3 fusion is all good and fine, but one big problem is the cross section doesn't get very usable until much higher energies, > 100 keV as opposed to around 30 keV for D-T. Also, since it's (mostly) aneutronic, you need some way to get the energetic *charged* particles out of your confinement device, which could be pretty difficult in devices that aren't simply connected like tokamaks or stellarators. While there is research being done on simply connected devices (FRCs, etc.), their performance is nowhere near what tokamak performance is even for D-T fusion, so the higher bar set by D-He3 fusion is even more unobtainable.
Long story short - we need to get D-T fusion working first, most likely in tokamaks. Then we can work on advanced fuels and alternative ideas with our full focus. Until then, this kind of research, while it does go on, is much less of a priority.
As posted above, I don't know about vanadium. I've certainly not seen a lot of talk about it. The last I heard, ITER will have a main chamber first wall of beryllium, and a divertor made from graphite and tungsten (i think tungsten, maybe moly). Vanadium is relatively low-z for a metal and has a high melting point - score. But isn't it soft? So it would probably be used in some alloy.
Mind you, nobody wants an 'all metal machine'. Steel, tungsten, moly, or anything else. Performance isn't that good. While the vacuum vessel and other structural components will be built out of fancy steel alloys, steel, inconel, etc, the plasma facing components are usually something else. Graphite is quite popular. JET uses beryllium coatings on something. ITER is going to have (at the moment) beryllium tiles for most of the interior, with a smattering of tungsten and graphite in key locations. More cutting edge research is looking into using liquid lithium, which I think is very promising (I'm biased).
Impurities are the name of the game. We want to dump energy into the fuel, deuterium and tritium, not into whatever comes off the first wall. Refractory materials have lower sputtering coefficients, so less impurities enter the plasma, *but* plasmas a very intolerant of high-z impurities. So the lower the atomic number, the better. High-Z materials have a lot more electrons to ionize, so you end up just dumping all your energy into the impurities and letting it radiate away instead of getting your D+T up to 10's of keV in temperature.
I don't know about vanadium. In terms of the material that is actually facing the plasma, there is a big reason to use low-Z materials, because high-Z impurities in your plasma kill it real quick. So lithium could be big - I worked on it for my Ph.D. and there is a lot of research with going on at Princeton in the US and other labs worldwide.
Beryllium likewise is nice. Graphite is relatively low-Z. Graphite (and other higher-Z materials) is often "boronized" where boron is coated on the material, giving you a low-z surface to a refractory material.
However, I'm skeptical of the use of coatings in a real reactor - the walls can't have some thin coating that comes off with use. This is fine in an experiment that might run for 1,10, or 100 seconds and then is down for a much longer time, allowing a new coating to be applied, but a reactor will run pretty much continuously. Hence one of the benefits of liquid metal - you can constantly flow it in and out of the system.
I didn't think we were going to use some new "super steel" as the vessel lining (plasma facing component) in a fusion reactor/experiment. Current top contenders for this role are beryllium, graphite, tungsten, and moly. Most likely, some combination of them all.
The main chamber of ITER is currently set at beryllium - material with low atomic numbers are highly advantageous. I personally think liquid lithium walls are where its at, but I'm biased; thats what I did my research in.
However, a fusion reactor is going to be run with 'hot walls', where the vessel might be around 600 C, so I could see where you'd want an alloy that is still strong and can withstand 10+ T magnetic fields and not crap out. Of course, if we did come up with some low-Z refractory alloy, we'd probably use it in the first wall.
HAHA... If funding was not so horrendous, maybe it would have happened, or at least be a lot closer. Fusion funding went from around $400 mill/year to around $200 mill in the early 90's. It's finally crept back up to ~$300 mill now, and this year was supposed to be the first big year of ITER funding, but Congress zeroed out the ITER budget with little warning. With the prospect of continuing resolutions for the FY09 budget highly likely, chances are, ITER will not be funded by the US for the first 2 years.
Theres a lot more to the story than it is just a hard problem. It is. I feel confident that we can do it. ITER *should* demonstrate a burning plasma in the 2020 time frame (I think the DT experiments are around 2022?), and the next step (DEMO) should be a functioning demontstration reactor, which will be the prototype for a commercial reactor. Of course, there's a CTF (component test facility) tucked in there somewhere. Take with a grain of salt - ITER has been years in the making and won't start running until 10 years after construction starts. So you figure even if everyone stays on time and on budget, and we say that these things take 10 years minimum to build, you have 10 (ITER) + 10 (DEMO) + 10 (commercial reactor) = 30 years before power is on the grid. And that is super optimistic. So say 50ish. But we are within striking distance.
I always had this problem after a marathon session of Super Mario Kart or Mario Kart 64. I was all over the road, and a power slide couldn't save you...
We were a Neilsen family for a while and I have no idea how they made sense of the data. Little to no sports, random shows late at night, no reality shows. Basically nothing that was particularly popular or current ( except maybe Letterman).
The 4 main family members (age, sex) were keyed in permanently, but guests had to be entered in when they were over. I always enjoyed keying friends in as 85 year old women, 3 year olds, etc. Of course we'd get sick of it and just leave the TV on a channel and wonder off. I can't imagine what they thought of an 85 year old women watching a Sailor Moon marathon.
"Actually, it was successful in getting plasma, usually called "first plasma" in the field. I had heard it was 200kA for 1.2 seconds. I'm would be shocked if they actually were using tritium in the system at this early stage, but I could be wrong. I'm betting that was the result of the scientist media interface."
I heard an early report of their first plasma being 200kA for 1.2 seconds. Sounds like they finished up the first go around at a bit higher current and twice the discharge length. There is also NO FUCKING WAY that they put tritium in the first week of operation. I think actually most machines don't even run with deuterium at first (which is the normal operating gas) but instead use plain old hydrogen. I don't think ITER is going to have tritium for the first 3 or 4 years of its operation. And yes, even if you are running just a deuterium plasma, you can still get DD fusion reactions.
I personally think "hoax" is a bit strong. Someone in the press got the story wrong and miscommunicated some facts. Sounds like to me China really has got their stuff together and they mean business. Hoaxes don't fit into that.
And before someone says some stupid shit about all tokamaks are going away for fusion research because z-pinches generate such hot plasmas...
Actually, it was successful in getting plasma, usually called "first plasma" in the field. I had heard it was 200kA for 1.2 seconds. I'm would be shocked if they actually were using tritium in the system at this early stage, but I could be wrong. I'm betting that was the result of the scientist media interface.
ITER, which is designed for a Q of 5-10 I think and most definitely for DT plasmas, is supposed to reach first plasma in 2016. I think the first DT plasmas for ITER are scheduled for 2019. The other 2 tokamaks that I know of that have done DT experiments (TFTR and JET) took quite a while before they started using tritium in the system as well. Which is why I'd be very surprised if EAST was trying DT plasmas from the get go. Getting a plasma at all with a measurable plasma current is enough.
Most hefty fusion research devices have fusion events. That in and of itself is not that ground breaking. There is a big difference between having fusion events and achieving break even though.
EAST is a big deal because it is all super conducting and I believe designed and made entirely in China (for less than $50 million from what I heard). I would imagine it's going to be quite an amazing machine, but as far as I know, it is meant to play a support role for ITER, not to beat it to the punch.
I always thought computer game RPG's kinda sucked. Why even call them RPG's? My friends and I used RPG's (D&D, Shadowrun, Top Secret... Fuck Whitewolf and Magic) as an excuse to hang out, eat snack food, and generally goof off for a couple hours in a town where their was nothing to do. The whole point was that it was social and there was interaction with friends. It's a creative and social outlet -- something that PC RPG's lack in my mind.
For a web page not properly designed into multiple columns, reading can get mighty difficult. I'm sure the number varies depending on the source, but 66 characters per line is optimal for legibility (depending on the subject matter 85-90 can be ok). Resizing that web page onto a 21" monitor and getting lines 150-200 characters long is annoying and can get difficult to read extended passages. The solution is to obviously design web page with multiple columns, *like your newspaper*, but then people will complain that half the screen is blank. Technically you could make your page 10 columns wide, but then we'd all be scrolling to the right, and like it or not, computer systems seem to favor scrolling in the vertical direction.
I personally don't upgrade all my software every release, and OS X is similar. I've skipped releases with Logic, Photoshop, and others because I couldn't justify the cost for the new features. That being said, a new version of OS X comes out about every 18 months. A lot of people buy new computers every 3-4 years, so you're probably only buying 1 or 2 upgrades then you get the newest OS when you buy a new computer. Those who don't are probably happily running 10.3 right now, like my parents.
For that matter, my Mac at work is running 10.3 even though I could get the help desk (hinder desk) to upgrade it to 10.4 at no cost to me. It's an older computer and I just don't need any features that 10.4 offers for my work.
One of the exciting things for me about new releases of OS X isn't always the features that Apple adds for the users, but for the developers. Some really interesting programs will probably come out that only work on 10.5 because they take advantage of new API's. I think Aperture is a perfect example - 10.4 only and it is really nice.
I didn't read the article. I am a plasma physicist though. Just because a plasma gives off energy doesn't mean its burning. Heck it doesn't even mean it has any fusion reactions going on. No doubt EAST will have fusion events though. I really didn't think EAST was shooting for break even; I thought they were focussing on high plasma current almost steady state discharges which is quite significant in and of itself. It's a very cool machine - superconducting field coils, discharges up to 1000s, 1 MA of current. I wish it was in the US.
But I don't think they are going for break even. They'd have to put tritium in it, and if that does happen, it won't happen for a bunch of years. You might read about them claiming break even based on a DD shot they did and extrapolating what the fusion output would have been if was a DT reaction... But its not quite the same.
Actually, to my knowledge they are not shooting for an actual "fusion burn". You can have a 1000 second discharge in a tokamak without it being a burning plasma. I don't even think they are shooting for break even. That could be in their road map though. They'd have to use tritium though and many large fusion devices don't want to do too many DT (deuterium tritium) experiments because then you have a neutron activated device that you have to work with.
To see a burning plasma, I think most of us are going to have to wait for ITER.
Not to steal EAST's thunder - it's a pretty amazing machine, and from what I hear, it only cost a couple tens of millions (like 40-50). If we tried to build something like that in the US it would have cost over 1 billion. yay for cheap labor.
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Sounds like China to me. When I went there, I was curious to see if one could find NON-pirated DVDs for purchase. Never saw one. All DVDs and CDs in the city I was were pirated.
They were all really cheap too. I think it was 10 CDs for $5 and 3 DVDs for $8 if I recall correctly.
I know bonafide scientists who use Excel for analysis. Scary.
I also know quite a few who use numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and python for real science. In fact, I think the astro community specifically was an early supporter of some of these packages. I myself have been using them in science for 5 or 6 years.
A - ITER won't be commercially viable. Good science, probably, but not commercially viable.
B - Even if it were commercially viable, it's still years away. I think the first deuterium-tritium experiments are scheduled 10-15 years from now.
C - Yes it's not completely safe. The vessel will become activated, and tritium itself is radioactive. Never mind the health hazards of beryllium. Regardless, the waste should be a lot easier to deal with than fission products. I don't know the numbers for half lives, but from what I understand, it's 1-100s of years instead of 100,000s of years.
A lot of people have responded to you and they have it mostly right. Deuterium isn't harmful, tritium is. The neutron flux is a serious problem, especially from a structural standpoint. The reactor will become slowly neutron activated, or radioactive, and will need to be treated as low grade waste. Also, once tritium is introduced into the system, people won't be able to go in the reactor for maintenance because of the tritium absorbed into everything, so remote handling will be required. This is a separate issue from the neutron activation of the reactor though.
And no, no meltdown.
I don't know what it used to be like, but the fact of the matter is to 'make it' in science, getting a professorship at a tier one research university, you work like a dog. So you say, 'Teach at a college, you'll get summers off.' No, not true either. There is still pressure to publish (to get tenure), so you need to pull in grant money and research all summer. And possibly get paid shit.
One could always go into industry. The pay is better. The hours are long and the pressure is high. The fact of the matter is, many jobs in our society that are important have crap compensation. Teaching, science, etc. The payoff is in business.
And in my experience, it's not that hard to compete with (many of) the foreign born scientists. Some of them are quite good, and some end up staying in the US, but a lot are just so-so.
Don't worry, I'm staying here. I am choosing job satisfaction and quality of life over money. But all my friends who have left are definitely making more money than I am.
The summary got at least one sentence right. Incentives to stay in science are very small. I finished my graduate work not to long ago, and I'd make more money in almost any field compared to staying in physics. I know a number of people who left the field to do finance or something else. The thinking is: "If I have to work 80 hour weeks, I might as well be making several hundred thousand." Go to any of the top colleges/universities, and a large amount of the students want to go into finance or some other money making field.
A lot of labs in my field use IDL and Labview. Labview works pretty well for data acquisition and is nice because it interfaces with a ton of older equipment. And I can just buy a GPIB interface from NI and be done with it. For some of the bigger projects, EPICS is used as well.
As far as data analysis, like I said a lot of IDL and Matlab is used. Some of the more simulation oriented folk tend to write their own code and most if not all of this is open source. But of limited use to the outside world.
I made a break from my group and have been using Python + Scipy + matplotlib for almost all of my research. It's free and great. It does most of what IDL/Matlab would do. I think it's started to get up some steam too...
A very cool 3d visualization tool called Visit is open source. I think it's build around VTK but I could be wrong.
He3 fusion is all good and fine, but one big problem is the cross section doesn't get very usable until much higher energies, > 100 keV as opposed to around 30 keV for D-T. Also, since it's (mostly) aneutronic, you need some way to get the energetic *charged* particles out of your confinement device, which could be pretty difficult in devices that aren't simply connected like tokamaks or stellarators. While there is research being done on simply connected devices (FRCs, etc.), their performance is nowhere near what tokamak performance is even for D-T fusion, so the higher bar set by D-He3 fusion is even more unobtainable.
Long story short - we need to get D-T fusion working first, most likely in tokamaks. Then we can work on advanced fuels and alternative ideas with our full focus. Until then, this kind of research, while it does go on, is much less of a priority.
Oh yeah, there are plenty of non-magnetic varieties of steel. 316 SS is used a lot in fusion research.
As posted above, I don't know about vanadium. I've certainly not seen a lot of talk about it. The last I heard, ITER will have a main chamber first wall of beryllium, and a divertor made from graphite and tungsten (i think tungsten, maybe moly). Vanadium is relatively low-z for a metal and has a high melting point - score. But isn't it soft? So it would probably be used in some alloy.
Mind you, nobody wants an 'all metal machine'. Steel, tungsten, moly, or anything else. Performance isn't that good. While the vacuum vessel and other structural components will be built out of fancy steel alloys, steel, inconel, etc, the plasma facing components are usually something else. Graphite is quite popular. JET uses beryllium coatings on something. ITER is going to have (at the moment) beryllium tiles for most of the interior, with a smattering of tungsten and graphite in key locations. More cutting edge research is looking into using liquid lithium, which I think is very promising (I'm biased).
Impurities are the name of the game. We want to dump energy into the fuel, deuterium and tritium, not into whatever comes off the first wall. Refractory materials have lower sputtering coefficients, so less impurities enter the plasma, *but* plasmas a very intolerant of high-z impurities. So the lower the atomic number, the better. High-Z materials have a lot more electrons to ionize, so you end up just dumping all your energy into the impurities and letting it radiate away instead of getting your D+T up to 10's of keV in temperature.
I don't know about vanadium. In terms of the material that is actually facing the plasma, there is a big reason to use low-Z materials, because high-Z impurities in your plasma kill it real quick. So lithium could be big - I worked on it for my Ph.D. and there is a lot of research with going on at Princeton in the US and other labs worldwide.
Beryllium likewise is nice. Graphite is relatively low-Z. Graphite (and other higher-Z materials) is often "boronized" where boron is coated on the material, giving you a low-z surface to a refractory material.
However, I'm skeptical of the use of coatings in a real reactor - the walls can't have some thin coating that comes off with use. This is fine in an experiment that might run for 1,10, or 100 seconds and then is down for a much longer time, allowing a new coating to be applied, but a reactor will run pretty much continuously. Hence one of the benefits of liquid metal - you can constantly flow it in and out of the system.
I didn't think we were going to use some new "super steel" as the vessel lining (plasma facing component) in a fusion reactor/experiment. Current top contenders for this role are beryllium, graphite, tungsten, and moly. Most likely, some combination of them all.
The main chamber of ITER is currently set at beryllium - material with low atomic numbers are highly advantageous. I personally think liquid lithium walls are where its at, but I'm biased; thats what I did my research in.
However, a fusion reactor is going to be run with 'hot walls', where the vessel might be around 600 C, so I could see where you'd want an alloy that is still strong and can withstand 10+ T magnetic fields and not crap out. Of course, if we did come up with some low-Z refractory alloy, we'd probably use it in the first wall.
HAHA... If funding was not so horrendous, maybe it would have happened, or at least be a lot closer. Fusion funding went from around $400 mill/year to around $200 mill in the early 90's. It's finally crept back up to ~$300 mill now, and this year was supposed to be the first big year of ITER funding, but Congress zeroed out the ITER budget with little warning. With the prospect of continuing resolutions for the FY09 budget highly likely, chances are, ITER will not be funded by the US for the first 2 years. Theres a lot more to the story than it is just a hard problem. It is. I feel confident that we can do it. ITER *should* demonstrate a burning plasma in the 2020 time frame (I think the DT experiments are around 2022?), and the next step (DEMO) should be a functioning demontstration reactor, which will be the prototype for a commercial reactor. Of course, there's a CTF (component test facility) tucked in there somewhere. Take with a grain of salt - ITER has been years in the making and won't start running until 10 years after construction starts. So you figure even if everyone stays on time and on budget, and we say that these things take 10 years minimum to build, you have 10 (ITER) + 10 (DEMO) + 10 (commercial reactor) = 30 years before power is on the grid. And that is super optimistic. So say 50ish. But we are within striking distance.
I always had this problem after a marathon session of Super Mario Kart or Mario Kart 64. I was all over the road, and a power slide couldn't save you...
We were a Neilsen family for a while and I have no idea how they made sense of the data. Little to no sports, random shows late at night, no reality shows. Basically nothing that was particularly popular or current ( except maybe Letterman).
The 4 main family members (age, sex) were keyed in permanently, but guests had to be entered in when they were over. I always enjoyed keying friends in as 85 year old women, 3 year olds, etc. Of course we'd get sick of it and just leave the TV on a channel and wonder off. I can't imagine what they thought of an 85 year old women watching a Sailor Moon marathon.
I just want to say what I said last week:
"Actually, it was successful in getting plasma, usually called "first plasma" in the field. I had heard it was 200kA for 1.2 seconds. I'm would be shocked if they actually were using tritium in the system at this early stage, but I could be wrong. I'm betting that was the result of the scientist media interface."
I heard an early report of their first plasma being 200kA for 1.2 seconds. Sounds like they finished up the first go around at a bit higher current and twice the discharge length. There is also NO FUCKING WAY that they put tritium in the first week of operation. I think actually most machines don't even run with deuterium at first (which is the normal operating gas) but instead use plain old hydrogen. I don't think ITER is going to have tritium for the first 3 or 4 years of its operation. And yes, even if you are running just a deuterium plasma, you can still get DD fusion reactions.
I personally think "hoax" is a bit strong. Someone in the press got the story wrong and miscommunicated some facts. Sounds like to me China really has got their stuff together and they mean business. Hoaxes don't fit into that.
And before someone says some stupid shit about all tokamaks are going away for fusion research because z-pinches generate such hot plasmas...
Actually, it was successful in getting plasma, usually called "first plasma" in the field. I had heard it was 200kA for 1.2 seconds. I'm would be shocked if they actually were using tritium in the system at this early stage, but I could be wrong. I'm betting that was the result of the scientist media interface.
ITER, which is designed for a Q of 5-10 I think and most definitely for DT plasmas, is supposed to reach first plasma in 2016. I think the first DT plasmas for ITER are scheduled for 2019. The other 2 tokamaks that I know of that have done DT experiments (TFTR and JET) took quite a while before they started using tritium in the system as well. Which is why I'd be very surprised if EAST was trying DT plasmas from the get go. Getting a plasma at all with a measurable plasma current is enough.
Most hefty fusion research devices have fusion events. That in and of itself is not that ground breaking. There is a big difference between having fusion events and achieving break even though.
EAST is a big deal because it is all super conducting and I believe designed and made entirely in China (for less than $50 million from what I heard). I would imagine it's going to be quite an amazing machine, but as far as I know, it is meant to play a support role for ITER, not to beat it to the punch.
I always thought computer game RPG's kinda sucked. Why even call them RPG's? My friends and I used RPG's (D&D, Shadowrun, Top Secret... Fuck Whitewolf and Magic) as an excuse to hang out, eat snack food, and generally goof off for a couple hours in a town where their was nothing to do. The whole point was that it was social and there was interaction with friends. It's a creative and social outlet -- something that PC RPG's lack in my mind.
For a web page not properly designed into multiple columns, reading can get mighty difficult. I'm sure the number varies depending on the source, but 66 characters per line is optimal for legibility (depending on the subject matter 85-90 can be ok). Resizing that web page onto a 21" monitor and getting lines 150-200 characters long is annoying and can get difficult to read extended passages. The solution is to obviously design web page with multiple columns, *like your newspaper*, but then people will complain that half the screen is blank. Technically you could make your page 10 columns wide, but then we'd all be scrolling to the right, and like it or not, computer systems seem to favor scrolling in the vertical direction.
I have too. However, this particular machine is RAM limited and the prospects of me getting more RAM are slim.
I personally don't upgrade all my software every release, and OS X is similar. I've skipped releases with Logic, Photoshop, and others because I couldn't justify the cost for the new features. That being said, a new version of OS X comes out about every 18 months. A lot of people buy new computers every 3-4 years, so you're probably only buying 1 or 2 upgrades then you get the newest OS when you buy a new computer. Those who don't are probably happily running 10.3 right now, like my parents.
For that matter, my Mac at work is running 10.3 even though I could get the help desk (hinder desk) to upgrade it to 10.4 at no cost to me. It's an older computer and I just don't need any features that 10.4 offers for my work.
One of the exciting things for me about new releases of OS X isn't always the features that Apple adds for the users, but for the developers. Some really interesting programs will probably come out that only work on 10.5 because they take advantage of new API's. I think Aperture is a perfect example - 10.4 only and it is really nice.
I didn't read the article. I am a plasma physicist though. Just because a plasma gives off energy doesn't mean its burning. Heck it doesn't even mean it has any fusion reactions going on. No doubt EAST will have fusion events though. I really didn't think EAST was shooting for break even; I thought they were focussing on high plasma current almost steady state discharges which is quite significant in and of itself. It's a very cool machine - superconducting field coils, discharges up to 1000s, 1 MA of current. I wish it was in the US.
But I don't think they are going for break even. They'd have to put tritium in it, and if that does happen, it won't happen for a bunch of years. You might read about them claiming break even based on a DD shot they did and extrapolating what the fusion output would have been if was a DT reaction... But its not quite the same.
Actually, to my knowledge they are not shooting for an actual "fusion burn". You can have a 1000 second discharge in a tokamak without it being a burning plasma. I don't even think they are shooting for break even. That could be in their road map though. They'd have to use tritium though and many large fusion devices don't want to do too many DT (deuterium tritium) experiments because then you have a neutron activated device that you have to work with.
To see a burning plasma, I think most of us are going to have to wait for ITER.
Not to steal EAST's thunder - it's a pretty amazing machine, and from what I hear, it only cost a couple tens of millions (like 40-50). If we tried to build something like that in the US it would have cost over 1 billion. yay for cheap labor.
To my knowledge, all of the national labs are up for contract renewal.