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Haha, they were careful not to issue that news on April 1st 🙂

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Admin wrote: Can you send an example of such a background? Attach jpg.

No image would be a good start – just plain white like the forums maybe. Other than that, I can’t draw well – but why do you need more?

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But people use facebook to send each other /pictures/ of drinks. And they /pay/ for the pictures too! It’s a toy. And myspace is full of musicians and emos.

Twitter is used for simple information exchange – even straight conversations. People are writing clustering algorithms for it to aid browsing the news, etc. It’s the merging of web, IM, IRC and search and, if only they’d open it up a bit so you didn’t need an account from the one vendor, it will become a significant new method of communicating.

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lol – Eric’s reply!

Seriously. Facebook and MySpace would make the society look like a silly teenager. Twitter seems appropriate though.

BTW, change the repeating background of the website. Try to look like the end result rather than a technical element of the technology. Cleanliness and elegance. Simple life. etc.

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rashidas wrote: Can focus fusion compete against this emerging technology?

With a website that bad, yes, focus fusion will compete.

The introduction is where the primary navigation should be and the primary navigation is where the introduction should be.

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Transmute wrote: Does DPF pump out DC?

AIUI, it is like rectified AC – that is you get a rising edge from zero then a falling edge, then nothing, then another rising edge, etc. This is easily smoothed to DC and really shouldn’t be sent over transmission cables (even short ones) directly but should be converted either to DC or AC.

I imagine the first round of focus generators would have AC converters but due to the cost savings of DC at the point of use there will be great demand for DC services so people will pay for infrastructure upgrades in the cost of their energy. The cost will be low, look at how easily the UK installed cable TV infrastructure. Demand was not even all that great.

Let the DC be supplied from the focus generator at a high voltage and let each house have DC steppers.

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Oh please god no! There are browser plugins for people that like these sorts of things. I don’t understand the use case since you can barely read what pops up anyway.

This just makes the place look messy like on eof those pointless hardware review websites that nobody reads anymore because they are such a niusance.

The problem is that this is a bother for anybody that hasn’t come to the site before and who won’t realise they can opt out because they won’t come to the forums. They’ll just turn and leave and never come back.

It gives entirely the wrong impression.

If you need advertising to aid in funding, just use google adsense and say something nice somewhere like “Thank you for visiting this ad. sponsored site. Your clicks can save the world. Please also consider donating“

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Breakable wrote: Very interesting video:
http://herebedragonsmovie.com/

Interestingly he accepts that people in the dark ages generally believed in a flat earth without seeing any evidence. Mainly because there is only evidence that a handful of people (regarded at the time as nutters even by the religious establishment) believed it.

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dash wrote: Rather I expect vehicles to shift from oil/gasoline to electric using dense capacitors.

I sometimes wonder about that. Without a practical superconducting cable, this may take a while due to oil being delivered to a vehicle at several MW and electricity being deliverable at only a few hundred kW. I can fill up for a 400 mile journey in 1 minute with next to no personal risk or charge up for a 130 mile journey in 10 minutes with a high risk of electrocution.

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Brian H wrote: The direction is inherent in the magnetic plasmoid which finally implodes during the fusion event. It squirts out 2 beams in opposite directions, one of which is the He4+ beam.

So the reaction products are not ejected from the plasma in a beam as they are produced, but rather collect and heat the plasma delaying its collapse and encouraging more fuel to react? The heat of the plasma finally being reclaimed by the self-organising plasma matter converting its “heat” into kinetic energy of charged particles (a current) – which, of course, is all its heat is to begin with. Does the collapse of the plasma thus lose further energy as x-rays until it is at or below the carnot efficiency wrt the fusion energy or is the plasma matter organised enough that it is wrong to say that it is hot in the first place thus no extra loss need be expected?

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Transmute wrote: A small scuba tank of this stuff that can power it for years does not seem like a problem, but people often have very wacko threat-assessment and any technology that has “nuclear” anywhere near it will get some peoples heart rates going.

MRI scanners (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) would have been called NMR imagers but they had to drop the “nuclear” from the front (not many people wanted to lay in a humming tube for half an hour if it had the word “nuclear” printed on the side 🙂

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Brian H wrote:

You haven’t paid attention to the actual hardware involved. A focus fusion reactor’s core has elements on the order of a few inches on a side. There just aren’t any big ticket items involved. So the numbers are not “plucked” out of the air.

Your coal plant example is utterly irrelevant.

Dude, I was arguing that $200,000 was too big, not too small. And if you bothered to read instead of deciding you wanted to just argue with somebody and picked just some 5 or 6 words they said sometime to take as the entirety of their current opinion you might not look like such an arse.

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Trying to get funding for small things is a good idea. Each person considering donating will feel that they would achieve more and so be more willing to cough up, and then you’re further on and future donations will seem more valuable to people.

I think it would be really important, in any system, to document what’s happening much better.

It would be good for confidence if we could hear more about the people involved, where work is being done, what equipment is being used, how it will be modified, what is being done and when, what meetings are held (vlogs of the non-confidential parts of meetings?). If the FFS people could start blogging in some detail (what is the nature of the theoretical work, what are the computer programs that implement the simulations, how are the chilian labs organised, how much lab time is spent on focus fusion, etc) and link that to what funding is needed I think it would make pledging much more popular.

It would build an easily accessible media base to build up some buzz.

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What’s makes a coupon sold as a loss-leader an investment? I see coupons in the newspapers all the time. Is it that there is no guarantee that they will be redeemable because they depend on successful completion of a research program?

I saw it that LPP would license coupon sales to FFS, but for no per-coupon fee – as a charitable donation. And FFS sells them under the expected energy retail price in order to encourage charitable income.

Combining this with a pledgebank system would be good – We’d be guaranteed our money back if not enough coupons are sold.

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ailabs wrote: … focus fusion will provide energy at $60/kW vs. $1,000/kW…

That’s not the energy cost, it’s the plant cost. You have to add plant decommissioning and recycling costs and multiply by the amount of plant to keep a whole number of people employed and maximise the power-to-business-rates ratio, add the salaries and business rates for running the plant throughout its lifetime + service charges for recycling waste, etc. Finally divide that by the expected number of Joules that you will supply from that plant during its lifetime. That’s the generation cost

Now add a profit margin and cover the transmission losses. That’s the wholesale price.

Add the margin and costs of the grid power retailer including their marketing and what-have-you, then add the sales tax. That is the retail price per Joule.

Estimate the risk from the perspective of the potential credit purchaser and deduct from the above retail energy cost accordingly – that gives you the coupon price, including sales tax – assuming that the labour to manage this is donated by FFS staffers. Estimating what value would have been transferred from LPP to FFS for tax returns and auditing is left as an exercise to the reader. I for one am glad that I would not have to do any of that part if this is even legal :o)

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