Reply To: Space Fountain

[Ivy Matt]

“Focii” is incorrect in Latin. The singular form of focii would be *focius, which as far as I am aware is not a Latin word. (Oddly enough, the Latin word [em]ſocius[/em] turns up in a Google search for “focius”, but it’s nothing more than the word [em]socius[/em] in antiquated orthography.) The correct Latin plural of focus is focī. Of course, that just covers the nominative case. See here if you want to know how to use the singular and plural forms in all six Latin cases.

As a Latinate English word, however, “focus” has two alternative plural forms: “focuses” and “foci” (usually pronounced “foh-sye”, sometimes “foh-kye”, neither of which is a native Latin pronunciation). I find it interesting that some English-speakers insist on the use of the “correct” (i.e. Latin) plural forms for Latinate English words that end in “-us” and, with somewhat less frequency, “-ex”, “-a”, and “-um” in the nominative case, when it never occurs to them to insist that the correct plural form of “animal” is “animalia”; that the “dense plasma focus” fires, but one should fire the “dense plasma focum”; or that the correct plural form of the word “sauna”, should one ever need to use it, is “saunat”.

Regarding the rest, it is my opinion—reasonably informed by history, I hope—that the only thing that will ever cause any monopoly to be somewhat benevolent is strong competition. As fusion power is a (pre-)nascent field, strong competition is probably inevitable at first anyway. If LPP doesn’t license their design, I expect other companies will find ways to work around their patents, or to produce fusion power using different methods, before long. Once it is proven possible to get net power from fusion, investment money will pour in to fund all sorts of different techniques. The more LPP tries to maintain control over the growing market, the smaller its share of that market will be.