SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – A US weapons lab on Friday pulled back the curtain on a super laser with the power to burn as hot as a star.

The National Ignition Facility’s main purpose is to serve as a tool for gauging the reliability and safety of the US nuclear weapons arsenal but scientists say it could deliver breakthroughs in safe fusion power.

“We have invented the world’s largest laser system,” actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said during a dedication ceremony attended by thousands including state and national officials.

“We can create the stars right here on earth. And I can see already my friends in Hollywood being very upset that their stuff that they show on the big screen is obsolete. We have the real stuff right here.”

NIF is touted as the world’s highest-energy laser system. It is located inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about an hour’s drive from San Francisco.
Equipment connected to a house-sized sphere can focus 192 laser beams on a small point, generating temperatures and pressures that exist at cores of stars or giant planets. NIF will be able to create conditions and conduct experiments never before possible on Earth, according to the laboratory.

A fusion reaction triggered by the super laser hitting hydrogen atoms will produce more energy than was required to prompt “ignition,” according to NIF director Edward Moses.

“This is the long-sought goal of ‘energy gain’ that has been the goal of fusion researchers for more than half a century,” Moses said.
“NIF’s success will be a scientific breakthrough of historic significance; the first demonstration of fusion ignition in a laboratory setting, duplicating on Earth the processes that power the stars.”

Construction of the NIF began in 1997, funded by the US Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

“NIF, a cornerstone of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s effort to maintain our nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing, will play a vital role in reshaping national security in the 21st century,” said NNSA administrator Tom D’Agostino.
“This one-of-a-kind facility is the only place in the world that is capable of providing some of the most critical technical means to safely maintain the viability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.”

Scientists say that NIF also promises groundbreaking discoveries in planetary science and astrophysics by recreating conditions that exist in supernovas, black holes, and in the cores of giant planets.

Electricity derived from fusion reactions similar to what takes place in the sun could help sate humanity’s growing appetite for green energy, according to lab officials.
“Very shortly we will engage in what many believe to be this nation’s greatest challenge thus far, one that confronts not only the nation but all of mankind — energy independence,” said lab director George Miller.

The lab was founded in 1952 and describes itself as a research institution for science and technology applied to national security.
“This laser system is an incredible success not just for California, but for our country and our world,” Schwarzenegger said.
“NIF has the potential to revolutionize our energy system, teaching us a new way to harness the energy of the sun to power our cars and homes.”

Microsoft officially announced the Zune HD today, confirming the earlier rumors and fleshing out the hardware side a bit. It’s clearly going to go head-to-head with the iPod touch, featuring multitouch and a web browser, but will its high-end media features be enough to dethrone the touch?

The flash-based Zune HD features a new industrial look compared to the line’s earlier understated matte style, and is the first to feature a touchscreen: In this case, it’s a 3.3″ 16:9 widescreen capacitive OLED with multitouch, packing a resolution of 480×272. The “HD” badging comes from the inclusion of HD radio and HD (720p) video-out, though the latter is available only with an optional docking station. The Zune HD will thus be the world’s first portable media player to include HD radio, which offers song and artist info and far better sound quality than traditional radio. It’ll also include an accelerometer, which is pretty much standard at this point.

Wi-Fi has always been a part of the Zune brand (however half-assedly implemented), and the Zune HD might be the first Zune that actually encourages its owners to keep that battery-sucking Wi-Fi turned on. Yes, the Zune HD will feature multitouch browsing, using a portable browser based on Internet Explorer.

Head on over to Gizmodo for more information about the release…

Alas, poor Itanium; it may not be long for this world. At the very least, one would think so after hearing what Intel said today about Nehalem-EX, its upcoming (and fastest yet) multi-socket x86 processor.

Nehalem-EX is based on the same underlying technology as the Core i7 and the Xeon 5500 series, but it’s supercharged in almost every way. Intel has outfitted it with eight cores, 16 threads, 24MB of shared cache, four QuickPath links, four memory channels, and support for up to 16 memory modules per socket (with the help of external Intel Scalable Memory Buffer chips). Most impressively, Intel has crammed all of the above into a single, massive die made up of 2.3 billion transistors. Yikes.

In a four-processor server, the chip’s four QuickPath links allow it to talk directly to any one of the other three CPUs. The quadruple QuickPath links also enable eight-way configs with a whopping 128 threads (that’s eight times eight cores with two threads per core, thanks to the magic of Hyper-Threading).

And that’s not all. Intel says Nehalem-EX has even inherited some key reliability features from its Itanium cousins:

Nehalem-EX will add new reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features traditionally found in the company’s Intel® Itanium processor family, such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery. Together with new levels of performance, both high-end processors should speed the move away from more expensive, proprietary RISC-processor based systems.

Incidentally, Intel’s presentation included some numbers showing how Nehalem-EX stacks up against the company’s previous multi-socket x86 processors, the six-core Xeon 7400 series (a.k.a. Dunnington). According to the company’s internal tests, Nehalem-EX delivers up to nine times the memory bandwidth, 2.5 times the database performance, 1.7 times the integer throughput, and 2.2 times the floating-point throughput.

So, when can you get some Nehalem-EX systems delivered to your server farm? Intel says the CPU will enter production “in the second half of 2009,” with more than 15 eight-socket designs coming from eight different server makers.

There is an important lesson to learn here. Your privacy is valuable.

Last.fm has millions of users who are heavy music consumers, and many of them download Last.fm’s Scrobbler software which keeps track of every single song you listen to on your computer, no matter which music player you use. In other words, it captures tracks played from illegal BitTorrent downloads just as easily as from iTunes.

Last.fm members knowingly share what they are listening to with the rest of the Last.fm community, and in return receive social recommendations of music they might like. That is the whole point of the service. And Last.fm’s privacy policy does clearly state:

. . . your record collection (including your skipping history) may be viewed by all other users of Last.fm (who may include other organisations or representatives of other organisations who have registered as Last.fm users) and that they may easily associate this information with your Last.fm username.

But most probably never even considered it a possibility that individually identifiable information about their listening habits (legal, illegal, or otherwise) could be handed over to an organization known for taking consumers to court for file-sharing. What makes this even more egregious is that it appears to be absent any legal precedent (such as a pending lawsuit) for which Last.fm could at least hide behind as an excuse.

Incidents like this highlight how the social Web can sometimes bite back if you are not careful. It also raises the issue of who owns all of this data about you and what they can do with it. (The same issue that caused Facebook to backtrack on recent changes to its data policy). Unfortunately, it’s come down to this: you really shouldn’t share any data on the Web you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing in a court of law.

Valve’s new Meet the Spy video is up now. Fantastic as always.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis. http://www.crisisofcredit.com