Is fusion success in sight?

Essentially if they can make the equipment small enough, there could be serious potential for a pure-fusion bomb, which could skirt the test ban treaty as it doesn't fall under the terminology of a nuclear weapon (fissile or fissile and fusion; pure fusion isn't in the CTBT terminology, IIRC).

Although the Ares 1 under development is currently capable of putting 25,000KG into LEO, and the Ares V is expected to be capable of up to 188,000KG. So it's not like the equipment has to be exceptionally small if it's capable of producing pure-fusion, it just has to be slightly smaller than the ISS!

I do not know if you're being funny or not, because there is indeed a study of the minimum raw energy requirements for a given computation in our universe[1], so it is technically possible to rate the amount of computation something requires in terms of joules or your choice of energy unit. So I don't know if you know of this and are confused, or if you're trying to make a bad joke/pun on "power" (seems to be lolcraft's theory). Since there is a serious angle to your post, deliberate or otherwise, a serious answer:

Because encryption difficulties tend to scale exponentially as you add bits, it is relatively easy to make encryption that brute forcing would require more energy than exists in the known universe. As big as the Universe is, exponential is "bigger".

That's why even now the real problem is algorithms that have something far more clever than "brute force" available; we could already guarantee that even a post-Singularity adversary can't brute force our encryption (assuming they don't get new physics to play with), what we can't guarantee is that such an intelligence couldn't find a far more practical attack.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation

Power in the street = muscle

Power in politics = money

Power in physics = watts

Power in computer science = FLOPS

Different meanings for different contexts.

I can't even imagine how to make this commercially viable. Even if they reach breakeven, I can't imagine a process that would take less than a minute to reset the reactor for the next run, given the incredible precision necessary with the target, and I suspect my "minute" is grotesquely optimistic.

I guess what this goes to show is that "breakeven" itself isn't even all that interesting. "Commercially viable" is what we are looking for. Here's hoping Polywell works out. Vaguely promising signs seem to be coming from the project but it's hard to see much detail through the Navy classification.

The Inertial Containment folks are going to go for exciting a hohlraum with their 192 lasers. I don't think blasting a precisely machined gold-plated metal cylinder every second is going to be economically viable.