The goal of nuclear fusion research is to produce clean, renewable energy. It seeks to do this by replicating the same conditions that power the sun.
Clean is misleading here - the public's idea of "clean" does not line up with any known fusion reaction that we can hope to achieve. They're all going to produce radioactive waste, just less so (and generally less nasty stuff) than fission reactors. But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Replicating the same conditions that power the sun... good god, no. Never. No one for a thousand years to come will ever seriously think about trying to smush two protons together hard enough for them to fuse without a sun-sized gravity well to assist with it. It takes an incredible amount of time for any two hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun, on the order of millions of years.
I realize that journalists need to summarize their stories, but fusion is a topic that is already understood more-poorly-than-normal by most people. They need to not be making people think about Spiderman 2.
Obviously, there's no way fusion results in free energy. First, let us count the advantage it provides:
* Virtually free & unlimited fuel.
Now we count some of the impediments:
* The machine to create fusion needs to be meticulously manufactured.
* Infrastructure to distribute the power needs to be built and maintained.
* The very best fusion reaction we currently know about ( p + B ) still generates side-reactions that produce Neutrons. There will be radioactive waste to deal with.
* Neutron flux means that the difficult to manufacture machine will need ongoing maintenance.
* The lack of a viable mass-scale superconductor means that many such fusion plants will be needed.
Neither of these lists are complete, obviously. But I feel that they do an OK job to demonstrate the point.
I'm not particularly knowledgable, just an armchair physicist. I can only dream of a different path taken where I would have done this research. And keep in mind that fuel costs are a tiny drop in the bucket for a modern fission reactor. They could increase 100-fold without significantly altering the end-user cost of power. Fusion is still going to require big, expensive plants (they will just have lower fuel and waste handling costs). With that being said, there are a few BIG problems to overcome (but no one climbed a mountain with a single step).
Materials - Tritium / Deuterium fusion is NASTY, but it's what we're going to be able to get to at first. As in, higher neutron-flux than a commercial fission reactor nasty. Neutron damage causes lots of weird effects including metal embrittlement and radioactivation. Getting confinement good enough for net power generation is a big problem, but so is keeping the machine pieces operable for an economically feasible length of time.
Energy harvesting - T + D fusion is again unpleasant for this. Because a large portion of the energy released from this fusion is in the neutron it throws, most of the schemes for turning fusion into electrical power involve using the neutron to heat stuff up (like a liquid lithium blanket) and then go through a standard heat-to-steam turbine cycle. Less than ideal.
Confinement - We're going to start with T + D fusion. Which has already been super hard to get a magnetic field the right shape and strength to support. But where we want to end up is simple Hydrogen (a proton) + Boron. There are several challenges (power balance, temperature/pressure/density) here but they can be summarized as being 500 times greater than simple T + D fusion. This kind of fusion won't produce nearly as many neutrons, which means most of the energy will be in the form of charged particles that can be directly harvested for energy. Which is great, but it's 500 times as hard as the thing we haven't achieved yet.
How about restoring the 5th amendment? How about abiding by the fucking constitution and protecting it? You know real important shit that has been ignored for the past 14 years because of the boogymen of terrorism.. Instead you are all upset about something that will actually help people?
This is why I don't call myself republican anymore, people like you prefer to hate instead of doing what is right.
You seem to be suffering from the delusion that I think that there is an appreciable difference between being screwed by someone with an (R) after their name instead of a (D).
And I wish them godspeed. Energy and information are the fundamental limits of the human condition. Fundamental leaps in either arena will be transformative.
I absolutely agree with you, for what it's worth. I'd like to add the handful of points below:
* - The Republican frontrunners are all awful. Bigoted and racist, bought off, stupid-religious pandering turds.
* - Mind you, there's nothing wrong with religion by itself. You know how the Founding Fathers were pretty much all Diests? Why can't we get back to that, instead of today's superficial Cracker-Jesus?
* - Bush followed by Bush the 2nd should have taught us that anything resembling family dynasties are a terrible mistake. The Clintons had their time. I would avoid voting for Hillary on that basis alone, even if she wasn't an awful liar and generally horrible person.
* - On a personal level, my policy for the last 16 years has been to vote for the strongest third party candidate that emerges. I'd love to see an end to the two-party system, however impossible that actually is.
* - It really doesn't matter, because the state I live in votes so strongly for whoever the Democrat candidate is that there's no hope of it changing.
Lastly, for my single point of contention with you I offer this. The USA's current Healthcare system is already awful, expensive, and sub-standard. The situation exists that SOMETHING will be done about it, unfortunately the something will likely be worse. The "Free Health Care Giveaway" Sanders proposes is probably going to be awful. I also remember how terrible Hillary's healthcare proposal from the early 90's was (and trust me, she hasn't changed in the past 30 years). Basically, I feel that whichever Democrat wins (I really hope the Republicans can't win), we're in for another round of grab-your-ankles-without-lube.
It's already here, they are just getting more brazen about revealing its existence. I don't really know how many fig leaves are left, this might be the second-to-last one.
NSA can't "legally" wiretap everyone in the US? That's ok, let the GCHQ do it and turn the results over to the NSA through a 'cooperative' agreement. GCHQ can't "legally" wiretap British citizens? Why look at that nice cooperative agreement just sitting there!
I hadn't read or heard much about this guy, but since he seems like he'll be the #3 between Cruz and Trump (who are both so unelectable it hurts) it's good to know that he's as awful a candidate as anyone else the Republicans have up.
Never expect anything from a politician, and you might be disappointed by them only half the time...
I did not initially understand what you meant with this post; it was very helpful to go hunt down your other contribution which included the layout of your 'charity share'. I'm not able to fully picture what you mean, but It's an interesting thought. http://ask.slashdot.org/commen...
As for the greedy assholes who signed up for DevShare, they did so knowing full well they were putting a paltry few dollars in their own pockets at the expense however-many person-hours lost to malware infections. Not to mention PII compromises, hacked accounts, etc. I'm sure they justified it with "well it's not like I'm the one writing the Malware".
There are plenty of successful projects that fled Sourceforge to distribute clean software outside the confines of SourceForge's ruined reputation. Notepad++, Gimp, VLC, to name a few. Do you believe that replacing their support-by-donation model with charity sharing would enhance their popularity and development?
I also missed in the charity share description - is this a global pool to SourceForge? If so, who determines (and how so) which projects deserve funding?
Any thoughts on how to attract back some of the quality software that SourceForge previously chased off? Also, can I take the parent post to mean that you're also removing malware added outside of of the DevShare program? Is SourceForge going to commit to serving no Malware (or badware or adware or pick your euphemism), ever?
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
If Whipslash is reading this - one thing that would be a REALLY interesting addition to Slashdot would be to go find someone from the company to speak to these issues, if possible. Something of an immediate Q&A to either clear up the news or confirm that the situation is as crummy as it appears.
That asshole (botg) understands it just fine. He's just doing what every sellout has ever done - spin and misdirection. This thread shows it quite clearly - https://forum.filezilla-projec...
Maybe in time. For now, SourceForge is going to stay blocked for everyone except my lockdown VM. Too many broken promises and lies to extend any measure of good faith here. Show me that it is fixed, don't bother telling me.
I've said some of this elsewhere in this topic, but Sourceforge has a real problem on both ends of the equation.
On the demand side - what knowledgeable IT worker would download anything ever again from SourceForge after they started the fake download buttons, not to mention the bundle-some-shit-ware (if they had continued to be owned by Dice). I have blocked my organization from using Sourceforge, many others have done so to, most antivirus and webfilters block their downloads now... No one is downloading from SourceForge.
On the supply side - what do they even have left? NAS4Free and 7-Zip (and FileZilla and PDFCreator, both of which can rot in hell). A non-exhaustive list of the things they have lost: Notepad++, VLC, GIMP, NMap and a whole host of related tools, and practically every project-of-the-month of note from 2012 and earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It boils down to a simple question. At this point, who would go there and what would they download?
Slashdot Mirror
The goal of nuclear fusion research is to produce clean, renewable energy. It seeks to do this by replicating the same conditions that power the sun.
Clean is misleading here - the public's idea of "clean" does not line up with any known fusion reaction that we can hope to achieve. They're all going to produce radioactive waste, just less so (and generally less nasty stuff) than fission reactors. But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
... good god, no. Never. No one for a thousand years to come will ever seriously think about trying to smush two protons together hard enough for them to fuse without a sun-sized gravity well to assist with it. It takes an incredible amount of time for any two hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun, on the order of millions of years.
Replicating the same conditions that power the sun
I realize that journalists need to summarize their stories, but fusion is a topic that is already understood more-poorly-than-normal by most people. They need to not be making people think about Spiderman 2.
I wish I had mod points (and hadn't posted a couple of times already), but thank you for an excellent post.
Obviously, there's no way fusion results in free energy. First, let us count the advantage it provides:
* Virtually free & unlimited fuel.
Now we count some of the impediments:
* The machine to create fusion needs to be meticulously manufactured.
* Infrastructure to distribute the power needs to be built and maintained.
* The very best fusion reaction we currently know about ( p + B ) still generates side-reactions that produce Neutrons. There will be radioactive waste to deal with.
* Neutron flux means that the difficult to manufacture machine will need ongoing maintenance.
* The lack of a viable mass-scale superconductor means that many such fusion plants will be needed.
Neither of these lists are complete, obviously. But I feel that they do an OK job to demonstrate the point.
I'm not particularly knowledgable, just an armchair physicist. I can only dream of a different path taken where I would have done this research. And keep in mind that fuel costs are a tiny drop in the bucket for a modern fission reactor. They could increase 100-fold without significantly altering the end-user cost of power. Fusion is still going to require big, expensive plants (they will just have lower fuel and waste handling costs). With that being said, there are a few BIG problems to overcome (but no one climbed a mountain with a single step).
Materials - Tritium / Deuterium fusion is NASTY, but it's what we're going to be able to get to at first. As in, higher neutron-flux than a commercial fission reactor nasty. Neutron damage causes lots of weird effects including metal embrittlement and radioactivation. Getting confinement good enough for net power generation is a big problem, but so is keeping the machine pieces operable for an economically feasible length of time.
Energy harvesting - T + D fusion is again unpleasant for this. Because a large portion of the energy released from this fusion is in the neutron it throws, most of the schemes for turning fusion into electrical power involve using the neutron to heat stuff up (like a liquid lithium blanket) and then go through a standard heat-to-steam turbine cycle. Less than ideal.
Confinement - We're going to start with T + D fusion. Which has already been super hard to get a magnetic field the right shape and strength to support. But where we want to end up is simple Hydrogen (a proton) + Boron. There are several challenges (power balance, temperature/pressure/density) here but they can be summarized as being 500 times greater than simple T + D fusion. This kind of fusion won't produce nearly as many neutrons, which means most of the energy will be in the form of charged particles that can be directly harvested for energy. Which is great, but it's 500 times as hard as the thing we haven't achieved yet.
How about restoring the 5th amendment? How about abiding by the fucking constitution and protecting it? You know real important shit that has been ignored for the past 14 years because of the boogymen of terrorism.. Instead you are all upset about something that will actually help people?
This is why I don't call myself republican anymore, people like you prefer to hate instead of doing what is right.
Well said.
Democrats, obviously.
You seem to be suffering from the delusion that I think that there is an appreciable difference between being screwed by someone with an (R) after their name instead of a (D).
And I wish them godspeed. Energy and information are the fundamental limits of the human condition. Fundamental leaps in either arena will be transformative.
Lastly, for my single point of contention with you I offer this. The USA's current Healthcare system is already awful, expensive, and sub-standard. The situation exists that SOMETHING will be done about it, unfortunately the something will likely be worse. The "Free Health Care Giveaway" Sanders proposes is probably going to be awful. I also remember how terrible Hillary's healthcare proposal from the early 90's was (and trust me, she hasn't changed in the past 30 years). Basically, I feel that whichever Democrat wins (I really hope the Republicans can't win), we're in for another round of grab-your-ankles-without-lube.
Hillary claims to be Obama's natural successor. Just something to keep in mind as they weigh her against Sanders...
It's already here, they are just getting more brazen about revealing its existence. I don't really know how many fig leaves are left, this might be the second-to-last one.
NSA can't "legally" wiretap everyone in the US? That's ok, let the GCHQ do it and turn the results over to the NSA through a 'cooperative' agreement. GCHQ can't "legally" wiretap British citizens? Why look at that nice cooperative agreement just sitting there!
I hadn't read or heard much about this guy, but since he seems like he'll be the #3 between Cruz and Trump (who are both so unelectable it hurts) it's good to know that he's as awful a candidate as anyone else the Republicans have up.
...
Never expect anything from a politician, and you might be disappointed by them only half the time
I did not initially understand what you meant with this post; it was very helpful to go hunt down your other contribution which included the layout of your 'charity share'. I'm not able to fully picture what you mean, but It's an interesting thought. http://ask.slashdot.org/commen...
As for the greedy assholes who signed up for DevShare, they did so knowing full well they were putting a paltry few dollars in their own pockets at the expense however-many person-hours lost to malware infections. Not to mention PII compromises, hacked accounts, etc. I'm sure they justified it with "well it's not like I'm the one writing the Malware".
There are plenty of successful projects that fled Sourceforge to distribute clean software outside the confines of SourceForge's ruined reputation. Notepad++, Gimp, VLC, to name a few. Do you believe that replacing their support-by-donation model with charity sharing would enhance their popularity and development?
I also missed in the charity share description - is this a global pool to SourceForge? If so, who determines (and how so) which projects deserve funding?
How about adding readers who can spell correctly and understand English grammar while you're at it? There are more important worries ...
The critical difference is that posters don't get paid (well, at least the non-shills). Editors are presumably paid for their work.
Thank you for the information. I'll wait to see that then, before getting into it too heavily.
Any thoughts on how to attract back some of the quality software that SourceForge previously chased off? Also, can I take the parent post to mean that you're also removing malware added outside of of the DevShare program? Is SourceForge going to commit to serving no Malware (or badware or adware or pick your euphemism), ever?
In no particular order:
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
Will there be a separate "How do we fix Sourceforge" thread or do you want those questions here?
This is an interesting exchange in the comments to Brian's article, between him and a former employee of Norse: http://krebsonsecurity.com/201...
The ex-employee has written a blog post here (might be a liiiiiitle one-sided): http://pandawhale.com/post/703...
If Whipslash is reading this - one thing that would be a REALLY interesting addition to Slashdot would be to go find someone from the company to speak to these issues, if possible. Something of an immediate Q&A to either clear up the news or confirm that the situation is as crummy as it appears.
In all seriousness, what project is even left at SourceForge that you care about? FileZilla can DIAF.
No, not yet. They haven't removed anything as of this post, only stated their intentions to do so.
That asshole (botg) understands it just fine. He's just doing what every sellout has ever done - spin and misdirection. This thread shows it quite clearly - https://forum.filezilla-projec...
Maybe in time. For now, SourceForge is going to stay blocked for everyone except my lockdown VM. Too many broken promises and lies to extend any measure of good faith here. Show me that it is fixed, don't bother telling me.
I've said some of this elsewhere in this topic, but Sourceforge has a real problem on both ends of the equation.
... No one is downloading from SourceForge.
On the demand side - what knowledgeable IT worker would download anything ever again from SourceForge after they started the fake download buttons, not to mention the bundle-some-shit-ware (if they had continued to be owned by Dice). I have blocked my organization from using Sourceforge, many others have done so to, most antivirus and webfilters block their downloads now
On the supply side - what do they even have left? NAS4Free and 7-Zip (and FileZilla and PDFCreator, both of which can rot in hell). A non-exhaustive list of the things they have lost: Notepad++, VLC, GIMP, NMap and a whole host of related tools, and practically every project-of-the-month of note from 2012 and earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It boils down to a simple question. At this point, who would go there and what would they download?
SourceForge has a much larger staff.
If ever there was a situation to aggressively reduce headcount, this seems like it.