I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?
I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.
It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.
I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.
The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.
The problem is that fusion research does not tend to receive a lot of funding, especially relative to the huge challenges it presents. Even the National Ignition Facility, where this milestone was reached, was only built because it was needed for nuclear weapons research, with advances into using fusion for energy generation being essentially a side benefit (at least, from the perspective of its government funders).
The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.
One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.