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Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

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Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#121

Post by plorg »

Finster wrote: post #98
bbosh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those PDFs are normally watermarked with a unique identifier for your account. It's not worth it.

I didn't log in. For almost all of these they detect that I'm connecting from my campus IP block and unlock everything.

I accessed over a vpn link into campus, signed-in by my user ID. The md5sum of the link provided above (and the others in the thread) are identical to the copy I downloaded from my campus IP block. Unless you're also on the campus of Iowa State, I don't think they're watermarking this paper.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#122

Post by Retric »

leobelle wrote: post #112
Retric wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is saying Drug Patents lasting 20 years vs copy write on a tweet lasting the lifetime of the author plus what 80 years a subjective statement?

IMO, IP is a loaded term that distorts the wide range of issues. IM for Intellectual Monopoly is much closer to the truth. To be clear I have no problem with the idea of copyright or a well run power company being run as a local monopoly, but there outside of the normal business. And the goals should be finding rules that best serve society not the owners of said monopoly.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#124

Post by wavesounds »

leobelle wrote: post #81
yosyp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cheers https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26434203/nature13008.pdf

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.

"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) founded by the University of California in 1952" [1].

My tax dollars paid for this research I should be able to read it.

As far as YC is concerned AirBNB and Uber encourage people to break the law all the time, some rules are just stupid and outdated and don't make sense and should be broken. This is "Hacker" News after all.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Lab...

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#125

Post by wavesounds »

leobelle wrote: post #110
snowwindwaves wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC companies aren't funded by taxpayer dollars

I don't understand what argument you are making here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Lab...

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#126

Post by chrstphrhrt »

JackFr wrote: post #20
dj-wonk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what question you are asking. If the question is "should we fund projects even if we don't know if or when they will have demonstrable results?" then I would argue that, yes, some portion of research should go towards that. How long is "long enough" to deem that a line of experimentation "didn't work out?" There is no period long enough. Sometimes a negative result is quite useful down the road. Some resea…

Without harsh assessments, a massive project will eventually dedicate some of its resources into self-perpetuation, that is justifying its existence rather than producing results.

Well, we are talking about a perpetual motion machine. Would only make sense to dogfood it at all levels.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#127

Post by leobelle »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #118
leobelle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commi…

Psychopath is not name calling. It's an honest question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#128

Post by beefman »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #54

Here's the paper. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature -ally. The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289 [WaPo]…

17.3 kJ for the latest shot, according to the paper. But only some 8 kJ of that came from fusion (the balance came from the laser input).

D-T fusions are about 17.6 MeV, but 80% of that is in neutrons, which escape unless captured in a special blanket. The 8 kJ reported was all alphas. So 8 kJ / 3.5 MeV = 1.4e16 fusions, vs. 5e15 in the quote. He was probably talking about a previous shot.

For comparison, a typical AA battery stores 16 kJ.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#129

Post by YokoZar »

yaur wrote: post #89
wcoenen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future I have a feeling that if we had fusion plants providing limitless cheap power, we'd get back on an 8% yearly growth track for energy consumption, like with oil consumption before 1970. Then within a century or so, we'd be producing an amount of power equivalent to 20% of what the earth receives from the s…

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.

It is a tiny bit unreasonable to project continuous exponential growth in human energy usage on such a ridiculously long timescale. It's like arguing that Moore's law will continue for another 200 years.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#130

Post by sillysaurus2 »

leobelle wrote: post #127
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commi…

Psychopath is not name calling. It's an honest question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Names which offend people the most are those which are also true. It's still name calling, and it's also irrelevant to your argument in this case.

I suppose my question is, do you care more about expressing yourself than convincing others? If so, then that's detrimental to a message board.

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