To be honest I am not a fan of patents for anything. This is not that i am against the idea of patents, but the current implementation. In fact after reading about some of the first patents, I am even more convinced that the current system was never designed to promote disclosure of useful inventions.
I will give an example. Say a person wants to develop video codec for use in a game engine a small indie team have developed (aka a bink replacment). So they this completely independently. They then wish to make the codec free for others to implement so they don't want to get any patents etc.
Now they just need to make sure that they haven't infringed on more than 1000 patents in the MPEG-LA pool. So they go to a patent attorney and ask what they think... And the patent attorney says thats going to cost 10k per patent and then adds that everything he says could be wrong. Thats 10 million, just for the basic infringe/don't infringe. Its not even with a judge....
This example can be easily mapped to non software inventions as well. And thats the problem. Just about everything is granted, and independent invention is not a defense, and finally a lawyer and a judge decide what it all means--often years later.
None of this is useful for an economy other than from a patent attorneys perspective.
The problems of patents are however massively amplified with software. If independent invention was proof of obviousness (I think it should be) or at least a defense then there would be less problems. If you could get a clear answer out of an attorney or judge that would help. But lawyers don't get into trouble for being wrong like engineers and doctors.
I even paid for a patent attorney for a review of some of the MPEG-LA patents. He thought every one he checked had serious grounds for invalidation. But that cost so much too. Even if you have prior art. You are tied up in a legal system run by people with a vested interest in resolving things slowly.
Personally I started off that patents are good for some things. Now i think the proper balance is no patents, or a the very least, they should be much harder to get and much easier to challenge (read quick and cheep). There are massive numbers of granted patents right now that should just be thrown out. Ironically these patents probably should never have been granted in the first place even under the current system.
And for the record. No i don't think google should be able to get a patent on "page rank" any more than RSA should have been able to patent RSA etc...
And inventors, and corporations, and consumers. The only people who don't benefit from this system are people who lack the creativity to invent something, but still want to piggyback on others' hard work for free.
So are you claiming the FSF and kin (and me) are only interested in piggybacking on others hard work? Perhaps you think OSS license damage copyright too.
I release a lot of *my* hard work with BSD. I have worked for a engineering company that where getting litigated by a NPE for stuff we came up with quite independently. Where is the reward for *our* hard work. The company went bust when an injunction *was* awarded. Later they (the NPE) took a different company to court and the very patent that made our company go under was eventually thrown out (after 3 years!).
When it comes to patents, only lawyers win. So of course you defend it. Your winning. You get lots billable hours with the current system.
Yea, if something is really obvious to someone in a given field, why would you write about it... hence obvious things have a distinct lack of prior art. This is even more the case for software.
The PTO does no such thing. It does nothing but rubber stamps patents... even stupid things that are already patented and easily search able in their own data base. [see cat entertainment devices-IIRC there are 6 different laser pointer cat entertainment patents].
This wouldn't be so bad, but the courts default to assuming that the patent office did something, and tends to pass injunctions at the drop of a hat. So good luck staying in business till you "win".
The only people benefiting from this "system" (due process of law etc) are lawyers and patent attorneys.
So apparently he wants every 'content provider', which from my reading seems to be the same as 'hosting platform', or basically, anywhere you can upload content, to retain information about the uploader and make this information available to the 'proper authorities'.
Since i have zero control on what a "content provider" logs right now, I assume that they are logging all this information right now. How exactly can we assume that a web site *isn't* logging your details when posting/uploading content?
You would be surprised how far it wouldn't go in fact. What we constantly forget is the size of the energy problem. For example, you would have a problem with copper supplies to make enough wind and pumped storage to replace current generation capacity. Also its very inefficient, and thus you need even more wind turbine for a given output.
NZ gets a huge chunk of its energy from fossil fuels just like everyone else. Yes we are doing fine without nuclear. But would that still be true *without* fossil fuels.
He3 in the moons regolith is 0.01ppm, so at 100% recovery rate you need to process 100,000 tons of regolith for just 1kg of He3. Its probably going to take more energy to get it, than its got. Then its 300,000km away from where you need it.
It will be easier and cheaper to burn DD to produce He3.
Plus the cells are valid for about 20 years, and then you can trash them.
This is not even close to true. 20 years is a figure thrown around often enough, but they do in fact last much longer (40-50 years have been claimed). Also they are not trash at the end of life. A module recondition is probably good enough for at least another 20 years. Since there is little ionizing radiation at earths surface, the silicon cells themselves don't degrade in sunlight.
This is factually false. It more like ~200 years assuming that you don't use ocean supplies and don't reprocess. With reprocessing its more like 5000 years without ocean supplies.
Focusfusion is a Dense Plasma focus. I discuss this in the last few paragraphs in the post above. Its got 2 really good points.
Eric Learner (he/. sometimes did you know) has not just sweep the standard theory and results under the rug for B-p fusion. He address the problem and suggests some theory that can help solve the problem. In particular massive magnetic feilds (mega Tesla). I have my doubts about such magnetic fields.
The second good point is that if you are not burning B-p then burning DT or even DD (or DHe3) does not need these kind of magnetic fields. So even if he is partly wrong, it could still work quite well (in theory).
Personally i think that Eric Learner overestimates the economics of dealing with neutrons. I think the extra power density you get with DD or DT will worth dealing with neutrons. My idea of the holy grail of fusion is DD and perhaps DHe3. You breed the He3 in DHe3 reactors (its the main component of DD fusion ash) and then use DHe3 in cases where dealing with neutrons is too heavy.
The third cool thing about focus fusion is the constant updates. I check the web page regularly. But its still a dark horse.
Energy security is a long term problem. 20 years is nothing. A true alternative to fossil fuels is what we need, even if it takes 50-100 years to get it. Yes there are alternatives but lets not be so short sighted that we think 20 years is a long time. Its not.
Theoretically there is nothing wrong with it. But practically its hard work having a superconducting magnet in the middle of your fusion chamber. Also the magnetic field gradients that are part of the design tend to drive plasma instabilities.
I can't see it doing better than a stellarator/ITER type system personally.
In god we trust, the rest of you show me the data.
Aside from Bussard's results, there is no data on systems operating within the wiffleball regime. This is a necessary condition.
This is demonstrably false. I have plenty of papers on experiments that operate in this "regime". You want to believe its different, so you have a leg to stand on. But its not.
Fusion does NOT require collisions between the electrons and ions. Unlike a thermal system which depends on the long tail, most of the ions have sufficient energy to fuse in a collision.
And you don't need collisions with electrons to show that this still does not work. The ions end up in a Maxwelleian distribution before any decent fusion has taken place because of *ion-ion* collisions. If you have electrons anywhere around the device, which the polywell does, you get collisions with them too. You can't prevent it, since the electromagnetic force is long ranged. Ions will interact (collide in a manner of speaking) with electrons too. And far more often than the ions can fuse.
Tokamaks are in thermal equilibrium with a neutral charge distribution, which allows approximations to be reasonably accurate. The Polywell is not, and would require a full N-body simulation, which is intractable for the values of N in question.
This demonstrates your total lack of understanding of modern physics and how systems are simulated (hint: fluid dynamic codes don't simulate every atom). This is completely wrong. I have read papers where polywell type devices and fusors *are* simulated. Hell even I have written some of my own code to do it.
If what you say is even remotely true, then where are all these predictions of awesome fusion power coming from? Its intractable and you can't solve anything, so therefore you can't have any predictions about performance.
I am rather disappointed that the scientific community at large is so dogmatic about presently accepted theories,...
It not just theories, its data. Data does not go away because you don't like it. Many of these type of schemes have been taken very seriously in the past. Thats why we have the data. Thats why we have these theories. I have also wanted this type of small scale fusion device to work. Perhaps something small can work. But the polywell is not it. The numbers and the data don't add up.
Extraordinary claims require at least *some* data to support claims. At least some evidence that the criticisms are somehow incorrect. The polywell has none.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest I am not a fan of patents for anything. This is not that i am against the idea of patents, but the current implementation. In fact after reading about some of the first patents, I am even more convinced that the current system was never designed to promote disclosure of useful inventions.
I will give an example. Say a person wants to develop video codec for use in a game engine a small indie team have developed (aka a bink replacment). So they this completely independently. They then wish to make the codec free for others to implement so they don't want to get any patents etc.
Now they just need to make sure that they haven't infringed on more than 1000 patents in the MPEG-LA pool. So they go to a patent attorney and ask what they think... And the patent attorney says thats going to cost 10k per patent and then adds that everything he says could be wrong. Thats 10 million, just for the basic infringe/don't infringe. Its not even with a judge....
This example can be easily mapped to non software inventions as well. And thats the problem. Just about everything is granted, and independent invention is not a defense, and finally a lawyer and a judge decide what it all means--often years later.
None of this is useful for an economy other than from a patent attorneys perspective.
The problems of patents are however massively amplified with software. If independent invention was proof of obviousness (I think it should be) or at least a defense then there would be less problems. If you could get a clear answer out of an attorney or judge that would help. But lawyers don't get into trouble for being wrong like engineers and doctors.
I even paid for a patent attorney for a review of some of the MPEG-LA patents. He thought every one he checked had serious grounds for invalidation. But that cost so much too. Even if you have prior art. You are tied up in a legal system run by people with a vested interest in resolving things slowly.
Personally I started off that patents are good for some things. Now i think the proper balance is no patents, or a the very least, they should be much harder to get and much easier to challenge (read quick and cheep). There are massive numbers of granted patents right now that should just be thrown out. Ironically these patents probably should never have been granted in the first place even under the current system.
And for the record. No i don't think google should be able to get a patent on "page rank" any more than RSA should have been able to patent RSA etc...
And inventors, and corporations, and consumers. The only people who don't benefit from this system are people who lack the creativity to invent something, but still want to piggyback on others' hard work for free.
So are you claiming the FSF and kin (and me) are only interested in piggybacking on others hard work? Perhaps you think OSS license damage copyright too.
I release a lot of *my* hard work with BSD. I have worked for a engineering company that where getting litigated by a NPE for stuff we came up with quite independently. Where is the reward for *our* hard work. The company went bust when an injunction *was* awarded. Later they (the NPE) took a different company to court and the very patent that made our company go under was eventually thrown out (after 3 years!).
When it comes to patents, only lawyers win. So of course you defend it. Your winning. You get lots billable hours with the current system.
Yea, if something is really obvious to someone in a given field, why would you write about it... hence obvious things have a distinct lack of prior art. This is even more the case for software.
There are no legit software patents, and quite a bit of planet sees it that way.
The PTO does no such thing. It does nothing but rubber stamps patents... even stupid things that are already patented and easily search able in their own data base. [see cat entertainment devices-IIRC there are 6 different laser pointer cat entertainment patents].
This wouldn't be so bad, but the courts default to assuming that the patent office did something, and tends to pass injunctions at the drop of a hat. So good luck staying in business till you "win".
The only people benefiting from this "system" (due process of law etc) are lawyers and patent attorneys.
This decision does the opposite. More employed lawyers and more unemployed engineers.
Next up all the employed lawyers will argue how awesome patents are for the economy.
What did you expect. They (lawyers etc ) get paid by the hour. This decision (or lack thereof) incresses billable hours for all concerned.
Lawyers win again.
So you passed linear algebra, but fail at google foo? ;)
Socrates wasn't teaching engineers or doctors, etc.
Would you be happy with a doctor working on you, that never asked about spleens 'cus they are boring... when operating on your spleen.
When you complete a course, you are supose to have some minimum level of "competence" in the subject. Not just know more than before.
So apparently he wants every 'content provider', which from my reading seems to be the same as 'hosting platform', or basically, anywhere you can upload content, to retain information about the uploader and make this information available to the 'proper authorities'.
Since i have zero control on what a "content provider" logs right now, I assume that they are logging all this information right now. How exactly can we assume that a web site *isn't* logging your details when posting/uploading content?
A large part of the world would say the death penalty *even* for homicide is terribly wrong.
I was quoted 1500EU for a implant and crown (composite crown).
Well, our water was tasting funny. So i checked the tank, we had a dead possum in there. Didn't make us sick or anything. Filtering rainwater indeed.
You would be surprised how far it wouldn't go in fact. What we constantly forget is the size of the energy problem. For example, you would have a problem with copper supplies to make enough wind and pumped storage to replace current generation capacity. Also its very inefficient, and thus you need even more wind turbine for a given output.
NZ gets a huge chunk of its energy from fossil fuels just like everyone else. Yes we are doing fine without nuclear. But would that still be true *without* fossil fuels.
It has not shown any such progress. Tokamaks have burnt DT (at JET) for 10s of seconds, while polywell haven't even beaten fusors in fusion yield.
Atomic batteries are also less efficient than boiling water.
He3 in the moons regolith is 0.01ppm, so at 100% recovery rate you need to process 100,000 tons of regolith for just 1kg of He3. Its probably going to take more energy to get it, than its got. Then its 300,000km away from where you need it.
It will be easier and cheaper to burn DD to produce He3.
Plus the cells are valid for about 20 years, and then you can trash them.
This is not even close to true. 20 years is a figure thrown around often enough, but they do in fact last much longer (40-50 years have been claimed). Also they are not trash at the end of life. A module recondition is probably good enough for at least another 20 years. Since there is little ionizing radiation at earths surface, the silicon cells themselves don't degrade in sunlight.
This is factually false. It more like ~200 years assuming that you don't use ocean supplies and don't reprocess. With reprocessing its more like 5000 years without ocean supplies.
Sorry missed the second question.
D =deuterium, T= Tritium. So DD is Deuterium Deuterium fusion.
B-p =Boron+proton fusion.
Focusfusion is a Dense Plasma focus. I discuss this in the last few paragraphs in the post above. Its got 2 really good points.
/. sometimes did you know) has not just sweep the standard theory and results under the rug for B-p fusion. He address the problem and suggests some theory that can help solve the problem. In particular massive magnetic feilds (mega Tesla). I have my doubts about such magnetic fields.
Eric Learner (he
The second good point is that if you are not burning B-p then burning DT or even DD (or DHe3) does not need these kind of magnetic fields. So even if he is partly wrong, it could still work quite well (in theory).
Personally i think that Eric Learner overestimates the economics of dealing with neutrons. I think the extra power density you get with DD or DT will worth dealing with neutrons. My idea of the holy grail of fusion is DD and perhaps DHe3. You breed the He3 in DHe3 reactors (its the main component of DD fusion ash) and then use DHe3 in cases where dealing with neutrons is too heavy.
The third cool thing about focus fusion is the constant updates. I check the web page regularly. But its still a dark horse.
Energy security is a long term problem. 20 years is nothing. A true alternative to fossil fuels is what we need, even if it takes 50-100 years to get it. Yes there are alternatives but lets not be so short sighted that we think 20 years is a long time. Its not.
Theoretically there is nothing wrong with it. But practically its hard work having a superconducting magnet in the middle of your fusion chamber. Also the magnetic field gradients that are part of the design tend to drive plasma instabilities.
I can't see it doing better than a stellarator/ITER type system personally.
The evidence may not be publicly available...
In god we trust, the rest of you show me the data.
Aside from Bussard's results, there is no data on systems operating within the wiffleball regime. This is a necessary condition.
This is demonstrably false. I have plenty of papers on experiments that operate in this "regime". You want to believe its different, so you have a leg to stand on. But its not.
Fusion does NOT require collisions between the electrons and ions. Unlike a thermal system which depends on the long tail, most of the ions have sufficient energy to fuse in a collision.
And you don't need collisions with electrons to show that this still does not work. The ions end up in a Maxwelleian distribution before any decent fusion has taken place because of *ion-ion* collisions. If you have electrons anywhere around the device, which the polywell does, you get collisions with them too. You can't prevent it, since the electromagnetic force is long ranged. Ions will interact (collide in a manner of speaking) with electrons too. And far more often than the ions can fuse.
Tokamaks are in thermal equilibrium with a neutral charge distribution, which allows approximations to be reasonably accurate. The Polywell is not, and would require a full N-body simulation, which is intractable for the values of N in question.
This demonstrates your total lack of understanding of modern physics and how systems are simulated (hint: fluid dynamic codes don't simulate every atom). This is completely wrong. I have read papers where polywell type devices and fusors *are* simulated. Hell even I have written some of my own code to do it.
If what you say is even remotely true, then where are all these predictions of awesome fusion power coming from? Its intractable and you can't solve anything, so therefore you can't have any predictions about performance.
I am rather disappointed that the scientific community at large is so dogmatic about presently accepted theories,...
It not just theories, its data. Data does not go away because you don't like it. Many of these type of schemes have been taken very seriously in the past. Thats why we have the data. Thats why we have these theories. I have also wanted this type of small scale fusion device to work. Perhaps something small can work. But the polywell is not it. The numbers and the data don't add up.
Extraordinary claims require at least *some* data to support claims. At least some evidence that the criticisms are somehow incorrect. The polywell has none.