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A comment on Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough. Parent comment

Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by oblio on Monday December 19, 2022 @05:28AM (#34050526)
The internet was a military need from what I remember.

The military said something like: "Telephone routing is point to point and inflexible, if the enemy cuts out 1-2 lines of communication, an entire section is completely cut off. We need something better." That something better turned out to be packed switching where you just throw stuff along a network and the network ensures that the packet reaches the destination, but you could theoretically have two packets going from Bucharest to Johannesburg, one through India and the second one through Canada.

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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by noobermin on Monday December 19, 2022 @05:34AM (#34050566)
That said while the intent the current internet is pretty centralized at least in some senses.
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by DecoPerson on Monday December 19, 2022 @06:06AM (#34050783)
But it’s software defined, so it’s much quicker to work around failures of those centralised points.
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by est31 on Monday December 19, 2022 @06:48AM (#34051042)
Yeah compare broken water pipes with broken facebook/whatsapp etc. If the former is broken, people don't have water until the issue is fixed. With latter, at least they can use one of the alternatives (and they do, usage counts of alternatives go up during outages).
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by HPsquared on Monday December 19, 2022 @07:12AM (#34051184)
That is, unless the water pipes require internet to work.
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by noobermin on Monday December 19, 2022 @07:01AM (#34051116)
Yeah, I'm not talking about broken facebook or twitter, I'm talking about the various cdns out there, cloudfare, etc
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by oblio on Monday December 19, 2022 @07:17AM (#34051213)
Even for those. Swapping a CDN or infra provider is difficult, but hardly impossible.

It's much easier than the same operation for physical infrastructure.

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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by thereddaikon on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:42AM (#34052550)
It started as a way to network air defense bases for AESA radars, NORAD and Nike missiles together across CONUS. Feature creep and increased scope grew it into a general purpose data network that linked not only military sites but also research institutes by the 80's.
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Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ... by hinkley on Monday December 19, 2022 @11:54AM (#34054359)
There’s about ten years’ of NSF funding between The Internet and the dotcom boom. So yes, but actually no.
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