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Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

npr.org

111–120 of 194 posts

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#111
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't get after you because of one paper. Please, do it for the betterment of mankind :).

It's not worth it. The terrorists won.

By terrorists you mean those illusionary guys that the politicians use as the boogie man, to beat down the rationality of ordinary people by provoking fear, so they are legally allowed to do virtually anything without nobody to stop them?

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#112
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.

Not all IP laws are equivalent. Also, civil disobedience has been known to work in the past.

Your first sentence is a subjective value statement (that I probably don't agree with). Both your first and second sentence are irrelevant to my argument.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#113
post #61
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The B-2 Bomber is child's play compared to the F-35's 1 Trillion USD program [1], but the comparison to the LHC's pricetag really puts things in prespective. 1: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighte...

Or even better failed military projects, such as the $25+ billion spent on a spy satellite project before it was killed in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...

The F-35 is not exactly a resounding success: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/flawed-f-35-fighter...

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#114
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not worth it. The terrorists won.

By terrorists you mean those illusionary guys that the politicians use as the boogie man, to beat down the rationality of ordinary people by provoking fear, so they are legally allowed to do virtually anything without nobody to stop them?

I want to downvote this. I really do. And I think when I feel justified in doing so that things will have improved.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#115
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not worth it. The terrorists won.

By terrorists you mean those illusionary guys that the politicians use as the boogie man, to beat down the rationality of ordinary people by provoking fear, so they are legally allowed to do virtually anything without nobody to stop them?

Whether illusionary or real, their goals are the same, and they're winning because people exchange their rational thinking for illusions of safety.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#116
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An old article on exactly that which I found interesting http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e... To sum it up "Free energy" buys us about 300-400 years of growth before thermodynamics kicks our ass.

Fortunately, if we had a lot more cheap energy we could probably get to space pretty easily too. So a lot of the growth wouldn't be happening on this planet.

Covered by the linked article to an extent and Asimov IIRC. Exponential growth requires FTL travel within a period shorter than recorded history even with free energy + space travel.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#117
post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

The cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2] [1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost

> The cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders.

This is the kind of thing that makes me really wanna ragequit on human nature.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't protesting the law with civil disobedience, it is breaking the law because the direct expected value of breaking the law (people having access to this specific paper) is greater then the expected cost of breaking the law (~0).

Are you a psychopath? In what world does personal expected value versus expected cost of breaking the law ever become a good way to make moral decisions? If you have the chance to get a promotion by killing your boss but have near zero chance of being caught due to some circumstance, would you kill your boss? What the fuck.

Why call your opponent names and become emotional? It's not effective.

In what world does personal expected value versus expected cost of breaking the law ever become a good way to make moral decisions?

There are at least two counterarguments to this.

1) The law is written for precisely this reason. Most people do live by a cost vs benefit mindset, and the penalties of laws are generally tuned until people stop committing the crime. I wouldn't want to live in a world where the penalty for murder was only a week in prison.

2) Anyone who uses the law as a way to guide their own moral compass probably isn't very moral, because throughout history every society has had laws which are later agreed to be evil.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think fusion power plants are going to be that much cheaper to run than current nuclear power plants. Fuel costs are a small part of the operating costs of a nuclear plant (16% to 28%) and the capex costs probably won't be that different (e.g. they will still be based on heating water to create steam to power turbines to turn generators). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plan...

I totally agree with you, but now I'm wondering what the upside to fusion is over fission, besides being a great science landmark. No radioactive inputs or outputs?

I guess availability of fuel is one big advantage, along with the cleanup of a fusion plant hopefully being a lot easier and cheaper than a fission reactor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

A lot safer too!

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