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from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-part01.h tml

Same crap, different technology.

Fusors are a common source of neutrons; specially seemingly simple arrangements like the Farnsworth fusor (that's right, the same guy who invented TV). The hard thing about fusion is getting excess energy from it.

Just one thing about your temperature requirements... You only need these temperatures in a Maxwellian situation where the temperature you are measuring is due to the random motion of particles. If you can constrain the motion of the particles you are fusing to interact head on, then of course your local temperatures can be very high but your global temperatures quite reasonable.

You can read up on the Farnsworth Fusor to find out about a real Fusion device that operates at normal temperatures (of course there is a plasma generated that is very hot, but very small).

The theory behind cold fusion (Not that I am convinced) is that the Platinum can store up to 97%(?) of its weight in hydrogen, and that the hydrogen atoms in this matrix, under enough density have local energies high enough for fusion.

I have a way to make more.

You got that right!
Philo T Farnsworth invented television while he was still in highschool. And build a fusion reactor in a jelly jar!

... it's that all great things are built on the shoulders of giants. In other words, many brilliant people contributed to the early development of television. But, due credit must be given to the one person who had that 'something extra' to produce a real breakthrough. A relevant quote:

The creative inventor takes ideas out of their original contexts and uses them in new contexts. He turns bread-mold into penicillin, coal into electricity - or, I suppose, lead into gold - because he isn't constrained to keep each thought in its own container."

-John Lienhard


There's no doubt that Farnsworth's work doing drew on the state of the art at the time - from Baird, Zworykin, and others. However, it was Farnsworth who first put it all togther in an all-electronic system by developing not just the critcial piece - the image dissector tube - but also many technical details that we take for granted such as sync pulses, linear sweep and retrace - - all Farnsworth's inventions. (we have Vladimir Zworykin to blame for interlace ;-)

Taken together, this all-electronic system was nothing short of a sea-change, a fact that most other workers in the field were quick to recognize (especially Zworykin, who after visting Farnsworth's lab in 1930 quickly set about using the ideas gleaned there to improve his Iconoscope.)

Much of the flamage here is some jingoistic rabble about Logie Baird vs. Philo Farnsworth as the presumed "Father of Television". Baird, like Farnsworth, was a brilliant, tireless engineer determined to make television work. Both men were hackers, in the best sense of that shopworn term. But, Baird stayed stuck on mechanical scanning, which ultimately saw use for telecine. Telecine is an important development but relatively invisible compared to imaging tubes.

If there's someone that deserves to be trashed, it's the meglomaniacal David Sarnoff and his well-funded PR machine determined to rob everyone else in the field of due credit.

- dvd_tude

I'd agree - but we're going for "most beautiful". While I'd agree that Trinity has its own sort of beauty, I'd say it falls down on two points:

> > must not be too complicated or expensive, and, most importantly, be within the reach of students

Even if it's within the reach of your students, it's disqualified on the grounds that it's (a) very complicated, and (b) even more expensive. Not just to build it, but to clean up after it. Building a new city to house the rebuilt university to house the rebuilt lab can get pricy, y'know.

On the other hand, I suppose there are physics "students" working on this problem in Baghdad at the moment, and I happen to think that Baghdad is in rather desperate need of, uh, "urban renewal"... it'd look way cool on CNN if one of those were to go off in a Baghdad basement, remind the rest of the world that Some Things Are Not To Be Fucked With By People Who Don't Know What They're Doing, and simultaneously qualify as the Greatest Darwin Award in human history. I could live with that. ('Specially as I'm not downwind :)

> until a hole is successfully opened in the spacetime, splitting the atom is the greatest scientific achievement ever.

...well, greatest Darwin Award until then, at any rate :) Schluuuuuuuuuuur*poof*

So I'll one-up your fission experiment with a (Farnsworth Fusor. It's relatively safe to build, fuses hydrogen, emits detectable neutrons to confirm that you've got real, honest-to-God fusion, and looks way cool.

(Don't expect to get breakeven with it - it's orders of magnitude too inefficient. It's just... well... kinda neat.)

For extra safety or regulatory compliance, your students can build and run it with H2 instead of deuterium and it'll look just as cool without any emissions at all. (And it'll be just about as far from breaking even either way ;-)

In short, the Farnsworth Fusor is rather like his other big invention (a little thing called "television", which you may have heard of) -- both inventions consume more energy than they produce, neither serves any useful function, and both look pretty cool anyway :)