A positive energy balance was achieved in 2013.

http://www.nature.com/news/laser-fusion-experiment-extracts-...

For only a hundredth of a second, and not even remotely economically viable yet. But it's a step in the right direction.

It's an inherently pulsed design, so the duration of energy production isn't a problem. It would be the same short duration in a production power plant. Many other designs are also pulsed.

What is a problem is that they simply measured the energy output of a small portion of fuel to the energy absorbed by that fuel. If you take into account things like the large energy losses in powering the lasers, they're actually pretty far from breakeven.

By contrast, the JET tokamak in the UK is expected by many to achieve real overall breakeven by 2020.

I stand corrected, thanks! I guess I'd need to add "sustained" to my shopping list of implied necessary criteria.

Add in 'with a practical mass budget' as well. Right now the best known way to produce power from fusion is to build a star, and put solar panels around it.

Same for me on Iceweasel 31.2.0 on Debian

Zuse Z3? Babbage's Analytical Engine!

"Babbage's Analytical Engine!"

First computer not first vaporware

The Z3 was the first operational turing-complete computer (May 1941, a few years before ENIAC). Babbage's analytical engine was never actually built.

Inequality and lack of social mobility.

It's mind boggling how uneven wealth distribution is in some countries.

Those serf-like structures disappeared in the 15th century.

The equivalent of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes would be a tax on unhealthy food, not a tax on unhealthy people.

That was the solution I was implying, although I did so badly :)

Some of those already exist, and some of those should never exist.

Because the real present is constantly moving. To prevent confusion several sciences use 1950 as the present, so if somebody quotes an article where something is radiocarbon dated as 80 years BP, you don't then have to look up the age of the article.

There's no significant link between prison sentences and crime rates.

If there was, Norway would have a high crime rate and the US would have a low crime rate.

Your first point may be true, but the US/Norway example is not good evidence for it. There are significant other confounding factors -- relative homogeneity of the population, economic differences, population size, cultural history are just a handful that spring to mind.

Those oft-repeated "factors" can only be factors if you show that they are.

Simply mentioning that there are differences between those two countries does not make any difference you care to list a "factor".

A bit of a broadly brushed analysis. This assumes all other variables/characteristics are equal: economic, social, political, etc.

In that case, maybe there is a link, it's just the other way round...

The first time I heard about this was around 2005. It's amazing that it's taken this long to become news.

Well, hackers have been finding ways to view others' webcams since webcams have been a thing, but this article is about the Insecam website in particular [although it's not mentioned by name].

I guess they didn't want people going to the site, so they left the name out.

Thanks for mentioning it though, I didn't know what the site was.