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2013-10-11

US Fusion Energy Lab Achieves Positive Energy Reaction

In late September, American scientists got more energy out of a fusion reaction than the fuel absorbed in igniting it — the first time that’s been achieved by researchers anywhere in the world. The research team that pulled it off is based at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), in Livermore, California. And in a bitter twist, they were furloughed just days afterward by the government shutdown.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/10/2760911/american-researchers-fusion-breakthrough/

Since 1953, when the fusion program started, the total spent on fusion energy in the US, both Magnetic and Inertial is $22.4 billion dollars. Adjusting for inflation, total fusion spending is $29.1 billion. That’s for 57 years of fusion funding. That’s an average of $510 million per year.http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful

The U.S. federal government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $500 per second. State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars.

http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock

2013-10-03

IE8 is Evil.

>>var d = {1:"one", 2:"two",}
  "Expected identifier, string or number"
But that works in IE9's IE8 mode!

Fortunately IE10 does reproduce this bug; too bad IE9 won't upgrade on this Windows 7 machine due to DLL hell. Good thing i have remote desktops:
>>var d = {1:"one", 2:"two"}
undefined
>>d
{...}
That also works in IE8. Bug solved!

But wait, there's more! IE10's IE8 mode happily skips over
var approved_headcount = {
 "ICT": {201301: 1, 201302: 2, 2013.03: 3, 201304: 1, 201305: 2, 201306: 3},
 "Finance": {201301: 1, 201302: 2, 201303: 3, 201304: 1, 201305: 2, 201306: 3},
}
and is thus buggy at being buggy.

I guess they incinerated the IE8 parser as it also returns incorrect line numbers while parsing that code block.