I totally agree your statements, and have also read the "Audacity of Hope". As a perpetual optimist, I'm hoping America is capable of electing a black man, and I even sent Obama $200 (the only political contribution I ever made, or am likely to make). I'm also somewhat of a fan of McCain, one of the few to stand up to Bush regularly. Since you're a fan of Ron Paul, I read up a bit about him. He sounds like my kind of Republican. Polls show him at only 1% while Giuliani is at 28%, followed by McCain at 24%. I'm hoping Americans will come to their senses and figure out that electing a NY mayor or an ex-president's wife just isn't wise. I personally think we should not allow family members of prior presidents to run for president, which is how we got into the current mess in the first place.
Somebody should mod parent as informative! There's a funny bumper sticker on a Mercedes I see in our town now and then: "I never thought I'd miss Nixon" How true....
I'm glad it's here on/. Our media is now mostly owned by politically motivated people like Rupert Murdoch. His control of our media is unbelievable. See this very recent story, for example: http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/070516/1/48l34.html. We've even made it illegal for university professors to voice their political views. Murdoch's self proclaimed 'unbiased' news station, Fox News, is played in every airport in Texas, and there are Fox News stores where you can buy shirts and stuff. The problem is that many of us really do just want our beliefs fed to us, and Bush has been happy to oblige. Normally, I hate seeing one party in control of both houses and the executive branch, but with the way Bush has trashed our country, we may need to get the GOP entirely out of the way for a while. Any chance Obama can get elected?
True... but does that mean kids don't want the ability to play the latest games on their laptops? IMO games still represent the biggest single application area where Linux cannot compete. Eliminating that problem would be a boon for Linux.
That was a funny article. Linus is probably right... Microsoft probably violates more software patents than Linux. Shall we start a web page listing patents that/.-ers believe M$ violates? It might be useful one day, if M$ goes all legal on us.
I also RTFA, and you're 100% right... the article fails point out a single serious or even realistic downside to the Dell/Ubuntu offering. I think the posting above had the only reasonable concern - that Dell/Ubuntu might wake the sleeping giant (M$).
A clueless newbie would do just fine on Feisty. However, being a newbie nowadays means usually one of three things: you're a kid, or you're quite old, or very poor. I might recommend Ubuntu for old people, and possibly poor people (tons of free software out-of-the-box). However, kids want the latest hot games, and that means Windows or Mac. Ubuntu on Dell is huge... bigger than I think people realize, but not because Dell is going to finally convert the masses. The masses will continue to buy Windows. The reasons Dell/Ubuntu is huge is because we geeks will buy them, and we have much more influence than average users.
As I write this response on my Feisty Fawn OS running on my Dell Latitude 9300, I can hardly wait for my new Latitude 9400 that should arrive an a couple weeks. It will predate Dell's Ubuntu release by only days or weeks, but I'm confident my 9400 will be an Ubuntu super-star. Today, I placed an order for about $20K worth of new computers... the only reason that any of them are Dell is because they run Linux much better than the competition. Because of that, I just stared down our CEO who wanted to switch 100% to HP (because HP service rocks). I couldn't argue that the HP server wont run Linux well (it will), so $12K of that $20K is going to HP for a really nice server. If Dell would just Bring Back the Super Geeks http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66653, we'd go back to being a 100% Dell shop.
That makes sense... Bill Gates makes much more than me, so we should charge him $1,000 for a cup of coffee. Seems fair:-) In the real world, big companies typically pay less than small companies for the same service, and I bet Bill gets his coffee for free. Anyway, this just more M$ FUD, with no substance. The only people M$ will scare are the guys who actually pay for free software, so the rest of the world should more or less feel safe, especially outside the US where countries mostly recognize that software should not be patentable.
Competing fairly is something Microsoft hasn't had to do for years. Otherwise, we would all get the OS and Office for free, or close to free, as OSes and word processors are mature technology which has already been fully paid for. How else could OpenOffice and Linux be so successful? In my experience, when a product is still valuable in the marketplace, vendors prefer to sell them rather than give them away for free. Microsoft continues to extort payments for software we already paid for, simply because of it's monopolistic position. The rest of us (I'm a software developer by trade) have to actually innovate in order to convince clients to pony up.
You know... I tried that, and they never gave me ANY discount. Actually, they wouldn't even answer the phone. They just forced Dell to sell me Windows even though I run Linux.
competing with products seems to be something they are unable to do these days
I think I'd word that a bit differently. Microsoft can compete and win against any product. The problem form M$ is that Linux isn't a product. How can a large monopoly undermine something that is given away for free? Well... they try.. SCO, investing in Novel. But Linux is a multi-headed beast that any smart kid can ship for free once M$ buys out a vendor. M$ could probably kill Linux in the US with it's influence in congress (software patents, SCO, etc). However, that would only leave the US behind the rest of the world.
I think Linux will force M$ to do something it hasn't had to do for a very long time... make competitive products that are actually worth buying, rather than forcing us to continue to pay for mature technology that isn't worth a dime (like a basic OS and word processor).
I think of sourceforge.net as the kind of place only the in-crowd on the net goes for software, someplace that Joe Sixpack never heard of. I'm always sad when I review SourceForge's most downloaded list... just the kind of thing Joe Sixpack would want... e-mule, Azurez... programs to get illegal movies and legal porn. I don't think Joe Sixpack has much to say on the net, but HE'S EVERYWHERE!
Microsoft does have a cult religion, it's just that it's so large and pervasive that nobody notices it, and think it's just normal. It's kind of like Catholics during the Inquisition. Nobody would have thought that the truly evil organization was the one that was so pervasive, nobody even thought about it as a cult.
I beg to disagree. Care to take details and numbers? For example, a 9KW A123 battery would power a Tesla Roadster for 40 miles, enough to cover 90% of the driving that such cars are used for. It's wheel-to-well efficiency dramatically cuts oil consumption (read about it yourself at http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/energy_effic iency.php, but a stock Tesla has a $40K Li-on battery that most of us can't afford. According to the Tesla guys, there's no room for both a powerful gasoline engine to make a hybrid. A small 80HP generator (say a rotary), would probably fit, and a 9KW A123 battery (as opposed to the 57KW battery Tesla uses), would be smaller and cheaper. A plug-in hybrid like that might attract a lot more users than the Prius. The Telsa guys are basically right... the "please don't hurt me" electric wimps that most companies have tried to sell in the past just don't sell. A smaller powerful engine that rarely gets used is the way to go with a plug-in-hybrid.
Er... no. If we increased our well-to-wheel efficiency by 2x for all transportation, we would dramatically decrease oil imports. If over half of that was non-oil (gas, coal, nuclear), we would eliminate imports. Do the math.
I feel that way sometimes. How cool would it have been to see the birth of powered flight? In 1907 (according to some spam I got), California had only 1.5 million people, and the average life expectancy was only 47 years old. But... I think we've had amazing advances, just not the sort you see flying overhead. We've built the Internet, and Moore's Law has held for nearly 50 years. My cell phone has more computational power than existed in the world in 1950. I was alive to see the first man set foot on the Moon, and I hope to live to see our greatest creations. In 1907, the average farmer knew a lot about farming, and a bit about the world if he could read the local paper. In 2007, we've shrunk the world to the point that I don't even know what country you're from, yet we can have a debate. I believe that human beings are the animal that network. Ant's build some pretty amazing networks, but nothing compared to us. We have networks for water, sewage, electricity, natural gas, roads, Internet, phone, TV, radio, cell phones, air travel, mail, railroads, and GPS. Your mother is probably not old enough to have experienced the birth of networks for water, sewage, natural gas, roads, mail, phones, radio, railroads, or even early air travel. See probably got to see the birth of TV networks. We got to witness the birth of the Internet, cell phones, and GPS, not to mention on-line gaming. Imagine life before the computer printer, or automated spelling checker... Imagine how hard it was for big geeks like us to find someone to talk to in our dumb little back-water towns. I think we win:-)
This decade has been especially good, I think. We're seeing new technologies that may provide cheap solar power, amazing batteries that can store it, and cars that run off it. Just about every field I can think of has explosive new technology.
There's an incredibly boring book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which I've mostly read (it's easier than reading the Old Testament!). The basic question posed in the first paragraph is "Why did Europe dominate the world?" He goes into fairly convincing arguments for why we are advancing faster and faster... technology feeds on itself in a positive feedback loop. He discounts the importance of the giants, like Newton, and focuses on the size of populations, the ease of communication of ideas and domesticated plants and animals between them. Technology is advancing at an unstoppable pace. The way it's going, it seems likely we'll either use it to kill ourselves, or birth a new race that we design... either biological through genetic manipulation, or electronic, or perhaps a combination of both.
I forgot to mention the fun part... an 80HP generator feeding a modern 300HP induction drive engine (about a cubic foot in volume) could be a LOT of fun... forget these "Please help me!" electrics!
Of course, better efficiency just means more people before we strip the planet of resources. Anyway, I don't want a more efficient engine. I want a smaller, more powerful one, so I can buy a plug-in-hybrid and seriously reduce oil dependence. We need more room and weight for the batteries, not a more complex, bigger more efficient engine. If I can do most of my driving around town off the grid, it wont matter much if I get 20 MPG or 50 for the occasional road-trip. With 9KWH A123 Systems battery, an 80HP light engine (rotary? how about something like http://www.regtech.com/), I can do a lot more than the 20% reduction these guys promise.
I think it's nonsense for RedHat to say that the Windows desktop is dead. RedHat has always gone after the business server and workstation markets, and have done a great job taking down Sun while avoiding pissing off M$. The whole reason that Ubuntu has so much momentum is how they've made the desktop familiar and easy to use, and less buggy. RedHat could still hammer Ubuntu if they'd just ship a desktop focused OS and stop claiming that M$ is doing it all wrong.
The great thing about OSS is that we'll just keep on making it, regardless of what the big companies do, because we do it for those other reasons, not money. You've just gotta love watching this steam-roller grow through recessions, grow during economic bubbles, and grow in spite of every evil plot against it (mostly M$). My biggest fear was that OSS leaders could be bought - Microsoft could buy RedHat and Suse with a fraction of their cash on hand. Can Ubuntu be bought? I don't think so... and no way Debian can be bought. As technology more and more becomes software-based, OSS will become more and more valuable to humanity. Not all at once, but year by year.
Managers at high-tech companies seem to almost universally fear OSS, since most high-tech companies now days have some proprietary software. That's just silliness. I almost never run across an OSS project that would have made anybody much money as a closed-source project. That's because if you can make money selling it, you do. We write software for fun, but if you can get paid for it, double bonus! Thus, OSS programs naturally don't compete against the new high-tech innovative stuff we get paid to work on. Rather, it enables us to complete that new stuff faster, with less effort, and at a higher level quality. It enables us to build better commercial products, and companies that adopt OSS have a competitive advantage.
I've got a friend with an MBA from a respected university. She is in charge of setting a big company's OSS policy. No matter how I state the case for OSS, she's simple dead-set against allowing Joe Engineer to bring any OSS in-house on their own. The policy will require marketing to review each case for using OSS! Now, that's a company with a sever handicap in the market.
It would be really nice to go into specifics, if he'll reply. However, I think you're answers are basically correct. He listed the common objects I've read on the Internet that are posted by those who have not actually listened to the Google talk. I would be very interested in hearing more about specific problems that either were poorly addressed in the talk, or additional problems not mentioned. For example, how the heck do you put super conducting magnets 1.5m away from a tiny spot that's generating 100MW of fusion power, without the thing melting away in seconds? There can be nothing between the magnets and the core but vacuum, and SFAIK reaction products fly out way to fast to deflect and randomly in all directions. Do the helium nuclei simply fly through the magnets without causing damage or disruption? Also, how many volts are we talking about needing to stop the ions? Will these grids make the machine smaller or larger than a football field, and does it all have to be in a vacuum? How will the arcing between the containment walls and the reactor be stopped? My own intuition is that any set of electrified grids that can stop microscopic amounts of ions per second yet generate 100MW while doing so is: that grid will have to be unreasonably huge and apply totally insane voltages. So, is fusion power just a nice theory, or are there practical solutions to these engineering problems?
Hey, it's really nice to find someone knowledgeable about fusion. I agree that the engineering challenges are likely very difficult or impossible to overcome, far from what Bussard is saying. For example, I have no idea how the magnets are suppose to survive for any reasonable length of time when only 1.5m away from a 100 megawatt fusion source, with nothing but empty space in between. I would want to hear about potential solutions to those kinds of engineering problems before putting up $200M, even though $200M is relatively cheap. I'm a total noob at fusion - I watched the Google video, so now I'm an expert:-P - so please correct me.
Some of your statements confuse me. The polywell device isn't based on magnetic inertial confinement. Magnetism isn't the force used to trap ions - an electric field is used instead. It's inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), just like a Farnsworth table-top fusor, where the ions are accelerated to high speeds and collided in the middle. It's much more like the ideal case you stated where particles are accelerated against each other, and Bussard also wants to use the boron reaction you refer to which doesn't generate neutrons directly, and where we could use electrified grids to stop the fusion products, directly converting their momentum to electricity. The main difference from a Farnsworth fusor is that the grid is removed as an obstacle, so you don't have ion losses due to collisions with the grid. The ions are electrically attracted to oscillate through the center tens of thousands of times before a collision. They don't hit the magnets because their oscillation radius is less than the distance from the center of the machine to the magnets. The magnetic field has nothing to do with containing the ions, but are instead there to contain the high energy electrons which are there to attract the oscillating ions. Without ion losses to the grid like a Farnsworth fusor, are there any theoretical reasons a high ratio of power out to power in can't be achieved? From my poorly informed point of view, it seems that engineering problems dominate. If I'm ill-informed, I'd love to hear about it, and I'd love to hear why "in practice there are all kinds of reasons why such a scheme is not practical." Thanks!
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I totally agree your statements, and have also read the "Audacity of Hope". As a perpetual optimist, I'm hoping America is capable of electing a black man, and I even sent Obama $200 (the only political contribution I ever made, or am likely to make). I'm also somewhat of a fan of McCain, one of the few to stand up to Bush regularly. Since you're a fan of Ron Paul, I read up a bit about him. He sounds like my kind of Republican. Polls show him at only 1% while Giuliani is at 28%, followed by McCain at 24%. I'm hoping Americans will come to their senses and figure out that electing a NY mayor or an ex-president's wife just isn't wise. I personally think we should not allow family members of prior presidents to run for president, which is how we got into the current mess in the first place.
Somebody should mod parent as informative! There's a funny bumper sticker on a Mercedes I see in our town now and then: "I never thought I'd miss Nixon" How true....
I'm glad it's here on /. Our media is now mostly owned by politically motivated people like Rupert Murdoch. His control of our media is unbelievable. See this very recent story, for example: http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/070516/1/48l34.html. We've even made it illegal for university professors to voice their political views. Murdoch's self proclaimed 'unbiased' news station, Fox News, is played in every airport in Texas, and there are Fox News stores where you can buy shirts and stuff. The problem is that many of us really do just want our beliefs fed to us, and Bush has been happy to oblige. Normally, I hate seeing one party in control of both houses and the executive branch, but with the way Bush has trashed our country, we may need to get the GOP entirely out of the way for a while. Any chance Obama can get elected?
True... but does that mean kids don't want the ability to play the latest games on their laptops? IMO games still represent the biggest single application area where Linux cannot compete. Eliminating that problem would be a boon for Linux.
Oh! And we should keep the list secret!
That was a funny article. Linus is probably right... Microsoft probably violates more software patents than Linux. Shall we start a web page listing patents that /.-ers believe M$ violates? It might be useful one day, if M$ goes all legal on us.
Did you like the super-geek photo? I still laugh when I see it.
I also RTFA, and you're 100% right... the article fails point out a single serious or even realistic downside to the Dell/Ubuntu offering. I think the posting above had the only reasonable concern - that Dell/Ubuntu might wake the sleeping giant (M$).
A clueless newbie would do just fine on Feisty. However, being a newbie nowadays means usually one of three things: you're a kid, or you're quite old, or very poor. I might recommend Ubuntu for old people, and possibly poor people (tons of free software out-of-the-box). However, kids want the latest hot games, and that means Windows or Mac. Ubuntu on Dell is huge... bigger than I think people realize, but not because Dell is going to finally convert the masses. The masses will continue to buy Windows. The reasons Dell/Ubuntu is huge is because we geeks will buy them, and we have much more influence than average users.
As I write this response on my Feisty Fawn OS running on my Dell Latitude 9300, I can hardly wait for my new Latitude 9400 that should arrive an a couple weeks. It will predate Dell's Ubuntu release by only days or weeks, but I'm confident my 9400 will be an Ubuntu super-star. Today, I placed an order for about $20K worth of new computers... the only reason that any of them are Dell is because they run Linux much better than the competition. Because of that, I just stared down our CEO who wanted to switch 100% to HP (because HP service rocks). I couldn't argue that the HP server wont run Linux well (it will), so $12K of that $20K is going to HP for a really nice server. If Dell would just Bring Back the Super Geeks http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66653, we'd go back to being a 100% Dell shop.
That makes sense... Bill Gates makes much more than me, so we should charge him $1,000 for a cup of coffee. Seems fair :-) In the real world, big companies typically pay less than small companies for the same service, and I bet Bill gets his coffee for free. Anyway, this just more M$ FUD, with no substance. The only people M$ will scare are the guys who actually pay for free software, so the rest of the world should more or less feel safe, especially outside the US where countries mostly recognize that software should not be patentable.
Competing fairly is something Microsoft hasn't had to do for years. Otherwise, we would all get the OS and Office for free, or close to free, as OSes and word processors are mature technology which has already been fully paid for. How else could OpenOffice and Linux be so successful? In my experience, when a product is still valuable in the marketplace, vendors prefer to sell them rather than give them away for free. Microsoft continues to extort payments for software we already paid for, simply because of it's monopolistic position. The rest of us (I'm a software developer by trade) have to actually innovate in order to convince clients to pony up.
You know... I tried that, and they never gave me ANY discount. Actually, they wouldn't even answer the phone. They just forced Dell to sell me Windows even though I run Linux.
I think I'd word that a bit differently. Microsoft can compete and win against any product. The problem form M$ is that Linux isn't a product. How can a large monopoly undermine something that is given away for free? Well... they try.. SCO, investing in Novel. But Linux is a multi-headed beast that any smart kid can ship for free once M$ buys out a vendor. M$ could probably kill Linux in the US with it's influence in congress (software patents, SCO, etc). However, that would only leave the US behind the rest of the world.
I think Linux will force M$ to do something it hasn't had to do for a very long time... make competitive products that are actually worth buying, rather than forcing us to continue to pay for mature technology that isn't worth a dime (like a basic OS and word processor).
I think of sourceforge.net as the kind of place only the in-crowd on the net goes for software, someplace that Joe Sixpack never heard of. I'm always sad when I review SourceForge's most downloaded list... just the kind of thing Joe Sixpack would want... e-mule, Azurez... programs to get illegal movies and legal porn. I don't think Joe Sixpack has much to say on the net, but HE'S EVERYWHERE!
Microsoft does have a cult religion, it's just that it's so large and pervasive that nobody notices it, and think it's just normal. It's kind of like Catholics during the Inquisition. Nobody would have thought that the truly evil organization was the one that was so pervasive, nobody even thought about it as a cult.
I beg to disagree. Care to take details and numbers? For example, a 9KW A123 battery would power a Tesla Roadster for 40 miles, enough to cover 90% of the driving that such cars are used for. It's wheel-to-well efficiency dramatically cuts oil consumption (read about it yourself at http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/energy_effic iency.php, but a stock Tesla has a $40K Li-on battery that most of us can't afford. According to the Tesla guys, there's no room for both a powerful gasoline engine to make a hybrid. A small 80HP generator (say a rotary), would probably fit, and a 9KW A123 battery (as opposed to the 57KW battery Tesla uses), would be smaller and cheaper. A plug-in hybrid like that might attract a lot more users than the Prius. The Telsa guys are basically right... the "please don't hurt me" electric wimps that most companies have tried to sell in the past just don't sell. A smaller powerful engine that rarely gets used is the way to go with a plug-in-hybrid.
Er... no. If we increased our well-to-wheel efficiency by 2x for all transportation, we would dramatically decrease oil imports. If over half of that was non-oil (gas, coal, nuclear), we would eliminate imports. Do the math.
Hey! I'm only 2/3rds of the way through this damned book! Don't spoil the ending :-)
I feel that way sometimes. How cool would it have been to see the birth of powered flight? In 1907 (according to some spam I got), California had only 1.5 million people, and the average life expectancy was only 47 years old. But... I think we've had amazing advances, just not the sort you see flying overhead. We've built the Internet, and Moore's Law has held for nearly 50 years. My cell phone has more computational power than existed in the world in 1950. I was alive to see the first man set foot on the Moon, and I hope to live to see our greatest creations. In 1907, the average farmer knew a lot about farming, and a bit about the world if he could read the local paper. In 2007, we've shrunk the world to the point that I don't even know what country you're from, yet we can have a debate. I believe that human beings are the animal that network. Ant's build some pretty amazing networks, but nothing compared to us. We have networks for water, sewage, electricity, natural gas, roads, Internet, phone, TV, radio, cell phones, air travel, mail, railroads, and GPS. Your mother is probably not old enough to have experienced the birth of networks for water, sewage, natural gas, roads, mail, phones, radio, railroads, or even early air travel. See probably got to see the birth of TV networks. We got to witness the birth of the Internet, cell phones, and GPS, not to mention on-line gaming. Imagine life before the computer printer, or automated spelling checker... Imagine how hard it was for big geeks like us to find someone to talk to in our dumb little back-water towns. I think we win :-)
This decade has been especially good, I think. We're seeing new technologies that may provide cheap solar power, amazing batteries that can store it, and cars that run off it. Just about every field I can think of has explosive new technology.
There's an incredibly boring book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which I've mostly read (it's easier than reading the Old Testament!). The basic question posed in the first paragraph is "Why did Europe dominate the world?" He goes into fairly convincing arguments for why we are advancing faster and faster... technology feeds on itself in a positive feedback loop. He discounts the importance of the giants, like Newton, and focuses on the size of populations, the ease of communication of ideas and domesticated plants and animals between them. Technology is advancing at an unstoppable pace. The way it's going, it seems likely we'll either use it to kill ourselves, or birth a new race that we design... either biological through genetic manipulation, or electronic, or perhaps a combination of both.
I forgot to mention the fun part... an 80HP generator feeding a modern 300HP induction drive engine (about a cubic foot in volume) could be a LOT of fun... forget these "Please help me!" electrics!
Of course, better efficiency just means more people before we strip the planet of resources. Anyway, I don't want a more efficient engine. I want a smaller, more powerful one, so I can buy a plug-in-hybrid and seriously reduce oil dependence. We need more room and weight for the batteries, not a more complex, bigger more efficient engine. If I can do most of my driving around town off the grid, it wont matter much if I get 20 MPG or 50 for the occasional road-trip. With 9KWH A123 Systems battery, an 80HP light engine (rotary? how about something like http://www.regtech.com/), I can do a lot more than the 20% reduction these guys promise.
I think it's nonsense for RedHat to say that the Windows desktop is dead. RedHat has always gone after the business server and workstation markets, and have done a great job taking down Sun while avoiding pissing off M$. The whole reason that Ubuntu has so much momentum is how they've made the desktop familiar and easy to use, and less buggy. RedHat could still hammer Ubuntu if they'd just ship a desktop focused OS and stop claiming that M$ is doing it all wrong.
The great thing about OSS is that we'll just keep on making it, regardless of what the big companies do, because we do it for those other reasons, not money. You've just gotta love watching this steam-roller grow through recessions, grow during economic bubbles, and grow in spite of every evil plot against it (mostly M$). My biggest fear was that OSS leaders could be bought - Microsoft could buy RedHat and Suse with a fraction of their cash on hand. Can Ubuntu be bought? I don't think so... and no way Debian can be bought. As technology more and more becomes software-based, OSS will become more and more valuable to humanity. Not all at once, but year by year.
Managers at high-tech companies seem to almost universally fear OSS, since most high-tech companies now days have some proprietary software. That's just silliness. I almost never run across an OSS project that would have made anybody much money as a closed-source project. That's because if you can make money selling it, you do. We write software for fun, but if you can get paid for it, double bonus! Thus, OSS programs naturally don't compete against the new high-tech innovative stuff we get paid to work on. Rather, it enables us to complete that new stuff faster, with less effort, and at a higher level quality. It enables us to build better commercial products, and companies that adopt OSS have a competitive advantage.
I've got a friend with an MBA from a respected university. She is in charge of setting a big company's OSS policy. No matter how I state the case for OSS, she's simple dead-set against allowing Joe Engineer to bring any OSS in-house on their own. The policy will require marketing to review each case for using OSS! Now, that's a company with a sever handicap in the market.
It would be really nice to go into specifics, if he'll reply. However, I think you're answers are basically correct. He listed the common objects I've read on the Internet that are posted by those who have not actually listened to the Google talk. I would be very interested in hearing more about specific problems that either were poorly addressed in the talk, or additional problems not mentioned. For example, how the heck do you put super conducting magnets 1.5m away from a tiny spot that's generating 100MW of fusion power, without the thing melting away in seconds? There can be nothing between the magnets and the core but vacuum, and SFAIK reaction products fly out way to fast to deflect and randomly in all directions. Do the helium nuclei simply fly through the magnets without causing damage or disruption? Also, how many volts are we talking about needing to stop the ions? Will these grids make the machine smaller or larger than a football field, and does it all have to be in a vacuum? How will the arcing between the containment walls and the reactor be stopped? My own intuition is that any set of electrified grids that can stop microscopic amounts of ions per second yet generate 100MW while doing so is: that grid will have to be unreasonably huge and apply totally insane voltages. So, is fusion power just a nice theory, or are there practical solutions to these engineering problems?
Hey, it's really nice to find someone knowledgeable about fusion. I agree that the engineering challenges are likely very difficult or impossible to overcome, far from what Bussard is saying. For example, I have no idea how the magnets are suppose to survive for any reasonable length of time when only 1.5m away from a 100 megawatt fusion source, with nothing but empty space in between. I would want to hear about potential solutions to those kinds of engineering problems before putting up $200M, even though $200M is relatively cheap. I'm a total noob at fusion - I watched the Google video, so now I'm an expert :-P - so please correct me.
Some of your statements confuse me. The polywell device isn't based on magnetic inertial confinement. Magnetism isn't the force used to trap ions - an electric field is used instead. It's inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), just like a Farnsworth table-top fusor, where the ions are accelerated to high speeds and collided in the middle. It's much more like the ideal case you stated where particles are accelerated against each other, and Bussard also wants to use the boron reaction you refer to which doesn't generate neutrons directly, and where we could use electrified grids to stop the fusion products, directly converting their momentum to electricity. The main difference from a Farnsworth fusor is that the grid is removed as an obstacle, so you don't have ion losses due to collisions with the grid. The ions are electrically attracted to oscillate through the center tens of thousands of times before a collision. They don't hit the magnets because their oscillation radius is less than the distance from the center of the machine to the magnets. The magnetic field has nothing to do with containing the ions, but are instead there to contain the high energy electrons which are there to attract the oscillating ions. Without ion losses to the grid like a Farnsworth fusor, are there any theoretical reasons a high ratio of power out to power in can't be achieved? From my poorly informed point of view, it seems that engineering problems dominate. If I'm ill-informed, I'd love to hear about it, and I'd love to hear why "in practice there are all kinds of reasons why such a scheme is not practical." Thanks!