BugBrother

First I'll note that the remaining problems seems to be engineering more than plasma physics -- and most of the show stoppers seems to be solved. If that don't make you go "wow", well...

>>what distinguishes a power plant from other sorts of nuclear reactors?

Again: I argued the main difference here is connecting a heat exchanger, you had nothing to say?

>>What I'm missing are numbers: how much power do they expect to generate from fusion

Again: The target is 6X the used energy for the pistons, according to the presentation. (It is a private company, details for investors.)

(You know the number of pistons, their size/speed. That should be enough to make a good guess on the target energy from fusion. You can also guess quite well the volume of the lead and hence wuite a bit of the pumping needs.)

There are other GF sources on the internet over the last few years, but since you ignore what I write please check them yourself.

>> How much extra energy is needed to keep the lead-lithium melted

You misunderstand. The energy from the fusion is taken up by the molten lead -- which is then used in a heat exchanger, like the present fission reactors etc.

(The steam pistons also get their energy from the created heat. It seems unlikely that accelerating all those steam pistons won't be the major energy cost in the system, but sure -- pumping lead is hardly easy. But five times more than the pistons?)

So the thing missing from an experimental power plant is a heat exchanger, like fission etc power plants. (And sure, lead is less fun than water!)

I assume THAT is what you missed and assumed was a major problem?

From what I've read, the proposed experimental system will (if it works) not be built to last for long, it is experimental. But again -- the energy system needed for this to be an experimental power plant is very similar to most other power plants that work by heating a medium. Work has been done on much worse than lead (see liquid sodium!).

(About not being built to last: There are lots of moving parts, but those should probably not be a show stopper; boat engine pistons work for quite a while.)

>>However, the link you gave doesn't say that it will be a prototype of a net energy fusion reactor

Uhhh? Are you trolling me?

See the TITLE of the article: "General Fusion will start building a full size prototype fusion reactor as early as this year"

From the first paragraph: "Possibly later this year, General Fusion [website] will begin work on a full-size prototype reactor."

Even the link is "general-fusion-will-start-building-full.html" :-)

For added support, go check the website of GF:

http://www.generalfusion.com/slides/#gallery1

Look at "where we are going", second image from the top.

"Full Scale, Net Gain Prototype

In the next phase of development, General Fusion will be constructing a full scale prototype system. The prototype will be designed for single pulse testing, demonstrating full net energy gain on each pulse, a world first."

Click the arrow -- it says "GOAL: Fusion energy released is 6x the piston energy input"

(I upvoted you for successful trolling. But please stop that.)

They will start to build a (full size iirc) prototype of a net energy fusion reactor this year.

It is not exactly what Asimov predicted, but if the GF power plants works and is economical, it is closer to actual fusion power plants than what was predicted (the parts of real reactors could be made in factories, in a way that Ford would recognize; it could scale up quickly to lots of places. No one really thought that likely even a dozen years ago).

You're not contradicting that they are starting a prototype of the real thing. That is, as you make a point of, quite new.

If that (and/or Polywell et al) will really work out is a bit early to say. The GF people claim to have solved the basic problems, bent a lot of metal already and are getting serious investments.

Sigh, mainstream atomic batteries would be so cool... :-(

But:

>>"experimental fusion-power plant"

Last I read, General Fusion talks about a quite serious prototype for their steam driven power plant in 2014. They seem to have many of the possible show stoppers already solved.

Of course, if the GF approach works they are a few years away from a working system. But before ITER goes online for testing... (The readiness of the other contenders in alternative fusion -- Polywell, Tri Alpha, etc -- are harder to evaluate.)

Edit: GF aims to start building a full size prototype in 2014. I'd call that a win for Asimov :-) http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/general-fusion-will-start-b...

There are articles claiming that the Syrian government have started to bomb civilians using chlorine gas instead.

At least that will be easier to dispose of -- I assume the international community in typical style will help the Syrians dig swimming pools. At least the civilians that aren't starved/tortured/etc to death...

How can Russia/Iran/China get away with supporting this horror militarily? Why is no one upset about these new attacks?

Edit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/1...

I got a bit of cognitive dissonance here. But I guess it connects, in a way.

>> Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great. Khrushchev made a lot of changes, and problems began cropping up

OK, this was in the middle of the great depression in USA/Europe -- while Soviet had tens of millions of dead/prisoners (hunger, political executions, camps, etc) in the 1930s.

So I can believe there was a lack of workers and lots of jobs in Soviet... :-)

And since many of the new immigrants (some from Sweden) were executed and put in camps, the lack of workers would continue...

From a strict economic perspective, if not humanitarian, I guess that could be called "great"? In a similar way that the Nazi Germany had "great" revenues from stealing murdered/fleeing jews' belongings.

(The discussion of markets and valuation I leave for economists, they've been discussing that a long time. I tend to think the capitalist method is less bad than the alternatives I've ever heard of, even despite the bubbles ever two decades.)

Which groups are hungry in England? How bad is it?

On a sliding scale: Mentally ill? Illegal immigrants without jobs? Drug users? Unemployed? Retired?

A related question for ending up homeless?

(Not English, just curious about the safety net there. Not trying to argue about anything, please. :-) )

GP: >>You cannot pay to gain privileged access. [my emphasis]

>>To avoid payment for access, presumably access would need to be free

(Also, high frequency trading can't have much to do with finding the price points of stuff.)

I don't have a horse in this race (I don't know the subject area), but most of that comment was a straw man argument.

I realise that was probably a mistake in reading, but even I can see the implementation ought to be somewhere between simple and possible: Publicise the algorithm for a random delay between a tenth of a second and (more seldom) ten seconds for all buys/sells. Or something similar.

Make certain to have good random number generators.

Edit: If it is a good thing (or possible) to do this I don't know.

I was talking of the standard way of sllocating extra buffers, to keep new data. With a layer on top of this, using a series of pointers (8-16) to the underlaying memory areas.

(When you fill up the sub-buffers, you do a realloc to all of them. Future sub-buffers get the new size.)

This needs less copying and (potentially) free calls. On the other hand: An access would need some extra operation to find the right buffer and get an offset into it.

Edit: Ok, thanks. I explained if I was unclear, since you went off on a tangent. It was informative, so it is all good. (I'm not going back to C++ et al anyway. :-) )

Huh, is it really implemented like that?!

Why use realloc when growing an array you have an interface to? Just add another allocated buffer to the previous allocated areas. When there are too many small areas, consolidate with realloc/free.

Much faster (yes yes, almost always).

(Disclaimer: Last time I used C++ I had hair. :-) )

Edit: OK, thanks plorkyeran.

The volumes for desktop/laptop are almost trivial compared to the volumes for handheld. (At least for Apple.) So making the processors in volume for a Macbook Air would probably not be a problem.

Also, Apple probably have little problem getting preferential treatment from manufacturers.

I could also note, re your claims about Office and corporate environments, that there were virtual machines that ran Windows and Office.

An anecdote:

One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)

But you almost certainly knew this.

You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?

But ok, I can comment:

As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.

Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.

The probable killer problem: What is the page switch time? Can I browse pdf manuals on this? (My iPad 3 is a bit too slow imho. Will get an Air)

Speed in general? How is it to write notes on? Linux/wireless support?

If they plough well where you are, get winter tires for the bicycle. They are magical. For clothes, use double gloves and pull over pants. I can guarantee this down to less than -20C.

Caveats: Good winter tires are expensive, the magic isn't the spikes but the rubber. Be careful when you step off the bicycle, you have no clue how slippery it is. After bicycling a while with winter tires you can't bicycle without them, you lose all reflexes for handling slippery ice.

You really quote a marketing spin presentation as truth?! From Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs?!

Again, this is an old subject. Google "video for windows" "source code" apple quicktime

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows#Overview

"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."

>> part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back

Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.

I googled this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...

Let me put it like this...

With a bunch of billion of people, there are certainly smart and competent people that believe in Santa Claus and can do a wonderful job in some subject areas, because they follow what Santa tells them...

Statistically, some of those guys can also be trusted with more general areas. How can you distinguish those? (Consider that Santa might tell them to lie to you when your hire/vote for them. Or Santa might change his mind.)

Agreed. My formulation also included people that "know" what god's will is.

>> NK can oppress because nobody gives a shit.

Am I missing something?

Are you judging people morally for not doing the impossible? Or are you just generally outraged by dirty realpolitik? I just can't see a third alternative to these non-starters:

- China could stop the regime, maybe even without a catastrophe. How would you motivate China to do that, when the West today is as dependent on China as China is on the West?

- The military way to help the NK population would be an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, not only in NK.

Edit: I could agree with that position on e.g. Zimbabwe, but NK seems carefully designed by the junta to keep them safe by using their own population as hostages (as long as China don't sell them down the river).

Edit 2: A third possibility is to offer the junta a better deal than to control the lives of many millions of slaves. But they are obviously happy as it is.

As a hard line atheist:

After the bloody history with kings who argued their position "came from God" and now islamist politicians in Turkey/Egypt, how about humanity get the message that "Being on a mission from God" is not necessarily a good thing outside of "Blues Brothers"?

Sorry for going OT, I am probably as fanatic on this subject as Erdogan himself. :-)

Edit: English grammar.

You're totally correct. I have just been trolled too much. The first few dozens of times I was polite.

There was a testing revolution over a decade ago. Then came Moose (2007ish?). You have syntax extensions now. And so on.

See e.g.

http://search.cpan.org/~mauke/Keyword-Simple-0.02/lib/Keywor...

http://search.cpan.org/~mauke/Function-Parameters-1.0401/lib...

What seems to happen the coming years in Perl 5 (unless the Python language trolls manages to discredit it enough to kill it :-) ) is probably gelling around language [syntax] extensions and Moose going to the Perl core.

But it will still keep backwards compatibility.

(And I write horrible Perl code most days myself, as one line liners. :-) Best damn shell functionality on this planet imho, along with Emacs command line editing.)

Ok, I get what you're saying.

Well, it is quite natural that the tools for large code bases are more common in Java. Not only because Java is traditionally used on conceptually larger projects... :-)

Anyway, as a Perl guy I can tell you that DI is commonly used in Perl, if nothing so because of the testing culture.

>>You do realize you're making this in defense of someone starting a language war, right?

No, I am questioning your specific claims about things you obviously have no clue about.

That was a pathetic attempt to change the subject. I stop waiting for a serious answer from you now. Bye.

Edit: And if you're a high schooler, sorry if I'm brusque. There is too much of this language war garbage on HN, I want to keep the quality up.

>>[Perl is not readable]

>>after having been in a position to maintain some Perl code before.

Sigh... You "supported some code" and know how modern Perl looks like?! :-)

Could you carefully explain e.g. the problems with Moose and the latest [syntax] extensions you find on CPAN?

To start with.

Making wild claims like that without support makes you seem like a language war troll or a complete asshat. To be taken seriously, show that you know what you make such big claims about.

Edit: And since you have nothing to say about the subject matter -- what is it in the Python culture that brews such fanatic language war trolls? (I assume you're a Python guy?)

I am no Python expert, but there must be modules (easyinstall etc) for inversion of control etc in Python too, as there should be in all scripting languages. (Is it really in the std lib of Java?! Ah, maybe I'm not that surprised...)

(I am from a Perl environment which have a bit emphasis on tools/libraries and language extensions, because it is easy to do with automatical tests on most every platform/Perl version.)

"It is a Perl guy, so ignore his opinion" :-)

I learned more about you than about Dominus with that comment.

Here is a link to his well received book, by the way: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/

(But the book you should probably look at to understand the world better, is "Perl best practices".)

Edit: fuzzix -- you are certainly right about most useful modern books, I was making a point to what I comment on. The idi.. cough.. Which insinuated that readable code is an unknown concept to typical Perl programmers.