You make a good point, but the name of my book is not a general term. It is very specific. If someone enters exactly that phrase, the odds are extremely high (probably 99%) that they are looking for my book, not for a general search category.
If my book were named "Armageddon", or some other general topic, I would agree. But in this case it makes no sense.
I am a book author. I have three books published by traditional publishers, but my fourth book I published through my own company and sell it through Amazon. Yet, if one searches for the book by its exact name, the search results list fifteen other books of other names before listing mine. Clearly these results are being rigged. I don't care about "popularity" of these other titles: if someone enters the exact name of my book, my book should come up first.
Any power structure attempts to co-opt and influence other power structures, resulting in open or hidden alliances that enhance the power of each. In the feudal days, there was an alliance between most kingdoms and the church. In today's United States, it is more complicated but very much the same. It always boils down to money and control. Corporations are the main means of making money for wealthy individuals, and so corporations infiltrate government using lobbyists to establish hidden relationships. In return, the government officials obtain support to maintain their power. Unions play a similar role, promising election support to certain politicians in return for support of the union so that it can maintain its power. It does not matter: union, politician, corporation, church - they all are power structures. They all seek to influence each other, via hidden relationships.
And that is why multiple independent types of oversight are so important. There must be safe channels for leakers to use, e.g., wikileaks; and the media must be protected. But unfortunately we have seen a-lot of consolidation in our media and so they are a little too uniform in their points of view and not quite independent enough.
The drug cartels of South America are not corporations and they are just as large as any large company - or larger.
There are many very large companies today that are not corporations, but are partnerships.
If I am not mistaken (it has been many decades since I read a biography of Andrew Carnegie), the Carnegie Steel Company was not a corporation, but I could be wrong. But in any case, Andrew Carnegie had full control, so regardless of its legal status it acted as a sole proprietorship. Yet it became one of the largest (the largest?) companies in the world, and the infamous Homestead Steel Strike illustrated how ill-behaved the company was, with the many killings at the hands of privately hired Pinkerton guards.
The kingdoms of the feudal days were nothing other than completely unregulated companies. Like the drug cartels of South America, the feudal regimes were created by bullies who made their own families (clans) into the lords of those around them, in effect hiring armies with their favors. Hierarchy breeds greater hierarchy, and these small fiefdoms grew into kingdoms, and employed "sheriffs" to go around and collect taxes so that the kingdoms could continue to live lavishly from the fruits of the labors of the average person, who had by then had all of his land confiscated by the kingdom and who now lived at the "grace of the king".
Yes, that is what true capitalism it. What we have in the US is highly regulated capitalism.
But I agree that corporations are an evil. They allow people to escape personal accountability for their actions.
I agree. Privatizations of infrastructure rarely go well. We end up with the nuisance of toll roads. And the track record of computer security in private firms has taught us that private enterprise is terrible at proactive security: it is almost entirely reactive.
People who call for capitalism as the solution for everything generally don't understand what capitalism is. We don't have pure capitalism: we have regulated capitalism, with some socialism. Pure capitalism is not stable: it evolves into feudalism, in which there are a small number of clans who have grabbed up everything and built a system for holding onto it, and everyone else is a serf to those clans. Pure capitalism results in consolidation into monopolies. Pure capitalism is not free enterprise or a free market: to maintain a free market in a capitalist system requires extremely active intervention, to prevent monopolies from forming. The US has not been very good about that.
Capitalism is the best allocator of resources, as long as a free market is maintained. But that qualifier is a big one. Companies use every trick they can to manipulate us and to consolidate their power. Just as government cannot be trusted, companies cannot be trusted. And unregulated transportation companies - without a TSA - can be counted on to cut corners wherever they can, to deceive us about that, and to put us at risk.
Computer science is not programming. Computer science is not the same thing as software engineering.
If you just want to learn how to write simple programs or build simple e-commerce sites, don't waste your time going back to school.
A computer science degree will teach you to understand programming and understand computers. It sounds like you just want to learn how to build things.
However, if you want to build complex, reliable things, you should realize that this is not done through programming: it is done through design. I would recommend that you study some simulation languages, to develop a good feeling for concurrency issues, and that you learn some functional programming languages.
This is indeed an excellent example of what can - and often does - happen.
The majority shareholders can issue themselves more stock and dilute you.
And whenever a company merges or takes on a substantial amount of new capital, it commonly just wipes away any options that it has promised.
To make matters worse, venture capital firms commonly expect a startup to accept very unfair terms. For example, it is common for a VC to have terms in their offer that say that when the company is sold or refinanced, that they will receive all of the returns until they have received at least three times their investment, and only then do the other shareholders (e.g., the founders) start to receive any return. So, e.g., if you build a company from scratch to $1M/year revenue, and then get $5M in venture capital, and then three years later you sell the company for $15M, you (the founder, who built the company) will get zero. Zero. Regardless of how much stock you have. This is because the VC will have "preferred stock".
To protect yourself from this, you should have a lawyer examine any shareholder agreement or term sheet, and express your concerns about dilution. If you can effectively be diluted or your contribution wiped off the books, then the "stock" or "options" are essentially worthless to you, regardless of assurances from the primary shareholders or VC.
Computer science is not a career. It is an academic field of study. It sounds like you want a degree or certificate in Software Engineering, not computer science.
A college degree implies that the degree holder is educated broadly. It sounds like you want something more narrow, such as a certificate from a trade school.
The "life" that you claim to have rests on the existence of the free and relatively safe society in which we live. As you get older (you are obviously very young), I expect that you will come to realize that if we are to expect that we will continue to live in a free society, that we all need to contribute to the national dialog, and we cannot do that unless we are educated. We all should try to understand the big issues of the day, and that requires a-lot of knowledge about things other than computers. If you ever plan to vote, I hope that you will realize that a broad education is crucial.
What is wrong with legalization of marijuana? That is a political opinion. In fact, the Kato institute supports legalization. See http://www.cato.org/drug-war
Problem is, the statute is flawed. Therefore, the only "due process" that can fix it is for Congress to repeal the statute. The outcry over the patent shows that it is obvious; the fact that the law defines a convoluted mechanism that cannot reflect what every programmer knows shows unequivocally that the law is flawed and is detrimental to the industry.
Apple and Google are not the entire software industry.
It is small startups that need protection from the giants that create patent "firewalls" around their products.
With regard to Amazon's one-click patent, the fact is (sorry, but it is a fact: I am not pounding any table, just stating a fact) that (1) the business process of buying something without reviewing the invoice is a simple and obvious concept, and (2) the design specified by Amazon in their patent, consisting of a web session ("shopping cart", etc.) is an obvious design. In fact, if I had no prior knowledge of Amazon's design, and someone told me to design a one-click purchase process, I would have designed it just like is specified in their patent. I.e., the design is obvious. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find another design: their design is the very design used by virtually every web app in the world.
It seems that their great "innovation" is to not display the shopping cart. Wow: that's innovative! - NOT.
Sorry, but in this case (obvious business process) + (obvious design) is still obvious.
You are now resorting to personal attacks to win an argument that is unwinnable.. The fact is, software patents are destroying the software industry. The fact is, anyone who understands software development knows that one-click purchasing is obvious, and is far to simple an idea to be worthy of a patent. If Amazon had not done it first, someone else would have. There is no innovation. They were merely the first to make that particular design choice.
"I can find you rhyming dictionaries hundreds of years old. What do you mean there's no prior art for it?"
And if you can't find a rhyming dictionary that contains the specific rhyme in question, then that rhyme is to be construed as not obvious?
This is all legaleze that is, frankly, far removed from the reality of software development. It shows that lawyers don't understand the process of writing software. As a result, they are mucking it up, and creating a quagmire.
The Amazon patent is simply that the customer clicks once to purchase. That's is all it is. And it is obvious. All the legal technicalities merely prove that the law is too complex on this issue. Any software developer can see that a single click to perform a function - any function - is an obvious thing. It is a design choice whether to present a shopping cart or not. It is not an "innovation".
"A judgement to be performed using prior art at the time of filing of the application. If you disagree that hindsight shouldn't be used, then, sorry, Congress and the courts disagree with you and have for 220 years."
And that is part of the problem. In software, there often is no prior art for obvious things.
If someone tells me their name is Carl Parker and I point out that it rhymes with "car parker", does the fact that there is no "prior art" for that make it non-obvious?
Prior art means someone already thought of it: but the absence of prior art does not mean that something is not obvious.
So here are the phrases in the claims, all debunked:
1. "under control of a client system" - Well, all online systems consist of a client system.
2. "displaying information identifying the item purchasable through a shopping cart model" - This is just on online client session state (which is all a shopping cart is).
3. "in response to only a single action being performed" - I.e., a button click. Nothing new there.
4. "sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system" - I.e., placing an order. Nothing new. Has been done in the real world for milllenia. The "identifier" is just the identity of the customer. Nothing new. The request for the order is just - well, the request for the order. What is new here? Nothing.
5. "under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system" - Oh, so they mean a piece of software. Nothing new.
6. "receiving the request" - Yeah, so? Kind of need this to do anything, right? Nothing new.
7. "retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the indentifier in the received request" - Oh, so they do a lookup on the purchaser. Quite obvious, if there is a business need to do this. Nothing innovative. Absolutely nothing. Nothing any programmer would not have thought of if there was a business need to do this.
8. "generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information" - I.e., place the purchase. What is new here? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing.
9. "fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item" - Well what else would you do? Discard the order? Duh.
10. "whereby the item is ordered without using the shopping cart model" - But it did use the shopping cart. The shopping cart is the session state.
I am sorry: there is nothing new or innovative here. It is obvious, obvious, obvious. And it is just as I described it: a single click to purchase.
This should never have been given a patent. It is a travesty.
"The only way to determine whether a patent is obvious or not is to look at prior art. Otherwise, you're engaging in impermissible hindsight."
I disagree. Obviousness is a judgment.
Since you disagree with my statement of what the patent entails, perhaps you would care to paraphrase the substance of the patent, for the sake of this discussion, and for the consideration of the other readers?
I have followed this patent. I am familiar with the specifics.
As you might recall, Amazon had to rewrite the patent when it was rejected upon initial re-examination. The rewrite limited the patent's scope.
Even so, the prior art criteria, which was the basis for the re-examination, is not the crux of the issue. The issue is that the patent is obvious. The criteria used by the USPTO for what is not obvious is too weak.
The Amazon patent has to do with storing one's credit card permanently (using encryption), and re-using that information to enable the customer to make a purchase with a single click. To me, that is obvious in the extreme.
That is the problem with the current regime: the criteria for what is not obvious is too weak. As a result, the things that programmers do in the normal course of their work, creating features based on the circumstances and needs of their customer, is now a perilous mine field.
But in software, things change so rapidly that patent protection for even five years is an eternity: by then, it is game over.
The fundamental problem with software patents is that companies patent simple ideas. The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious" by the USPTO, but unfortunately these kinds of things are routinely patented. The result is that there is a minefield of patents around every simple idea, every basic thing that one can do in software. Anyone who wants to create a startup company around a software product is at great risk, and instead of investing their time and energy into product development they now have to invest it in legal research. That is not a very good state of affairs for an industry that thrives on innovation.
If patents are to be allowed to exist for software, the bar for what is not obvious should be much, much, much higher than it currently seems to be.
Interesting. Of course there is the matter of transporting existing spent fuel, and new spent fuel as it is produced in existing reactors, to this type of facility. But even so, the advantage of being able to dispose of existing waste is compelling.
But what about existing reactors? The question posed was probably intended to ask whether we should shut down existing reactors (over time, of course).
You make a good point, that by operating this type of reactor, we might actually decrease the hazard that currently exists, while also producing power.
What would be the proliferation (terrorism) risks?
You may know more about this than I do. I have been out of the nuclear field since 1981. I used to do reactor physics simulations at American Electric Power. But my recollection of alternative fuel cycles is a little dated.
But even if the cycle that you refer to is feasible, is it worth it? It is undoubtedly complex, and as you know, the cost of safety compliance is extremely large. What about the alternatives? Solar technologies, along with high voltage transmission and also energy storage technologies, are not so complex. The technology is not cost-competitive with oil or coal, but it has other benefits (it is renewable and it would free us from dependence on OPEC), and the technology is certainly there. And it is completely safe, and solar energy collection can also be deployed locally (even in the home), to give us a distributed energy production system that is resilient to centralized failure.
Perhaps the best thing to do is not have government decide on the best solution, but to let the market decide. But in that case, each source of energy should bear its full costs. These should include the intangible cost of removing a limited resource from the ground, the costs of R&D and refinement of each technology, the costs of defending the associated infrastructure (the way that we use the Fifth Fleet to defend our access to oil), and the geo-political costs (e.g., the huge political costs of maintaining relations with a part of the world that is suspicious of us).
But there are mitigating facts. (1) The complexity of the thorium cycle and lack of established reprocessing systems make it somewhat as unproven as other forms of energy production, such as solar energy cells; (2) it is not clear to me that thorium is immune to use for nuclear terrorism; (3) thorium is still a limited resource, so it must be mined, and there is not enough of it to consider it to be a permanent source of fuel: it will eventually run out. It is not "renewable".
Thorium might be viable, as you say. But it is not a clear-cut case, in my opinion.
I personally prefer renewable forms of energy. I liken burning anything that we dig up to "burning the house to heat it". The plant life of the entire world use the energy from the sun: why can't we? Why must we dig things up - sometimes hazardous things - and burn them? As a species we can do better.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point, but the name of my book is not a general term. It is very specific. If someone enters exactly that phrase, the odds are extremely high (probably 99%) that they are looking for my book, not for a general search category.
If my book were named "Armageddon", or some other general topic, I would agree. But in this case it makes no sense.
I am a book author. I have three books published by traditional publishers, but my fourth book I published through my own company and sell it through Amazon. Yet, if one searches for the book by its exact name, the search results list fifteen other books of other names before listing mine. Clearly these results are being rigged. I don't care about "popularity" of these other titles: if someone enters the exact name of my book, my book should come up first.
Yes, very true.
Any power structure attempts to co-opt and influence other power structures, resulting in open or hidden alliances that enhance the power of each. In the feudal days, there was an alliance between most kingdoms and the church. In today's United States, it is more complicated but very much the same. It always boils down to money and control. Corporations are the main means of making money for wealthy individuals, and so corporations infiltrate government using lobbyists to establish hidden relationships. In return, the government officials obtain support to maintain their power. Unions play a similar role, promising election support to certain politicians in return for support of the union so that it can maintain its power. It does not matter: union, politician, corporation, church - they all are power structures. They all seek to influence each other, via hidden relationships.
And that is why multiple independent types of oversight are so important. There must be safe channels for leakers to use, e.g., wikileaks; and the media must be protected. But unfortunately we have seen a-lot of consolidation in our media and so they are a little too uniform in their points of view and not quite independent enough.
The drug cartels of South America are not corporations and they are just as large as any large company - or larger.
There are many very large companies today that are not corporations, but are partnerships.
If I am not mistaken (it has been many decades since I read a biography of Andrew Carnegie), the Carnegie Steel Company was not a corporation, but I could be wrong. But in any case, Andrew Carnegie had full control, so regardless of its legal status it acted as a sole proprietorship. Yet it became one of the largest (the largest?) companies in the world, and the infamous Homestead Steel Strike illustrated how ill-behaved the company was, with the many killings at the hands of privately hired Pinkerton guards.
The kingdoms of the feudal days were nothing other than completely unregulated companies. Like the drug cartels of South America, the feudal regimes were created by bullies who made their own families (clans) into the lords of those around them, in effect hiring armies with their favors. Hierarchy breeds greater hierarchy, and these small fiefdoms grew into kingdoms, and employed "sheriffs" to go around and collect taxes so that the kingdoms could continue to live lavishly from the fruits of the labors of the average person, who had by then had all of his land confiscated by the kingdom and who now lived at the "grace of the king".
Yes, that is what true capitalism it. What we have in the US is highly regulated capitalism.
But I agree that corporations are an evil. They allow people to escape personal accountability for their actions.
I agree. Privatizations of infrastructure rarely go well. We end up with the nuisance of toll roads. And the track record of computer security in private firms has taught us that private enterprise is terrible at proactive security: it is almost entirely reactive.
People who call for capitalism as the solution for everything generally don't understand what capitalism is. We don't have pure capitalism: we have regulated capitalism, with some socialism. Pure capitalism is not stable: it evolves into feudalism, in which there are a small number of clans who have grabbed up everything and built a system for holding onto it, and everyone else is a serf to those clans. Pure capitalism results in consolidation into monopolies. Pure capitalism is not free enterprise or a free market: to maintain a free market in a capitalist system requires extremely active intervention, to prevent monopolies from forming. The US has not been very good about that.
Capitalism is the best allocator of resources, as long as a free market is maintained. But that qualifier is a big one. Companies use every trick they can to manipulate us and to consolidate their power. Just as government cannot be trusted, companies cannot be trusted. And unregulated transportation companies - without a TSA - can be counted on to cut corners wherever they can, to deceive us about that, and to put us at risk.
Computer science is not programming. Computer science is not the same thing as software engineering.
If you just want to learn how to write simple programs or build simple e-commerce sites, don't waste your time going back to school.
A computer science degree will teach you to understand programming and understand computers. It sounds like you just want to learn how to build things.
However, if you want to build complex, reliable things, you should realize that this is not done through programming: it is done through design. I would recommend that you study some simulation languages, to develop a good feeling for concurrency issues, and that you learn some functional programming languages.
This is indeed an excellent example of what can - and often does - happen.
The majority shareholders can issue themselves more stock and dilute you.
And whenever a company merges or takes on a substantial amount of new capital, it commonly just wipes away any options that it has promised.
To make matters worse, venture capital firms commonly expect a startup to accept very unfair terms. For example, it is common for a VC to have terms in their offer that say that when the company is sold or refinanced, that they will receive all of the returns until they have received at least three times their investment, and only then do the other shareholders (e.g., the founders) start to receive any return. So, e.g., if you build a company from scratch to $1M/year revenue, and then get $5M in venture capital, and then three years later you sell the company for $15M, you (the founder, who built the company) will get zero. Zero. Regardless of how much stock you have. This is because the VC will have "preferred stock".
To protect yourself from this, you should have a lawyer examine any shareholder agreement or term sheet, and express your concerns about dilution. If you can effectively be diluted or your contribution wiped off the books, then the "stock" or "options" are essentially worthless to you, regardless of assurances from the primary shareholders or VC.
Computer science is not a career. It is an academic field of study. It sounds like you want a degree or certificate in Software Engineering, not computer science.
A college degree implies that the degree holder is educated broadly. It sounds like you want something more narrow, such as a certificate from a trade school.
The "life" that you claim to have rests on the existence of the free and relatively safe society in which we live. As you get older (you are obviously very young), I expect that you will come to realize that if we are to expect that we will continue to live in a free society, that we all need to contribute to the national dialog, and we cannot do that unless we are educated. We all should try to understand the big issues of the day, and that requires a-lot of knowledge about things other than computers. If you ever plan to vote, I hope that you will realize that a broad education is crucial.
What is wrong with legalization of marijuana? That is a political opinion. In fact, the Kato institute supports legalization. See http://www.cato.org/drug-war
Problem is, the statute is flawed. Therefore, the only "due process" that can fix it is for Congress to repeal the statute. The outcry over the patent shows that it is obvious; the fact that the law defines a convoluted mechanism that cannot reflect what every programmer knows shows unequivocally that the law is flawed and is detrimental to the industry.
Sorry, but the substance of the patent is obvious. That why there has been such an uproar over it. It just is. No legaleze can change that.
Apple and Google are not the entire software industry.
It is small startups that need protection from the giants that create patent "firewalls" around their products.
With regard to Amazon's one-click patent, the fact is (sorry, but it is a fact: I am not pounding any table, just stating a fact) that (1) the business process of buying something without reviewing the invoice is a simple and obvious concept, and (2) the design specified by Amazon in their patent, consisting of a web session ("shopping cart", etc.) is an obvious design. In fact, if I had no prior knowledge of Amazon's design, and someone told me to design a one-click purchase process, I would have designed it just like is specified in their patent. I.e., the design is obvious. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find another design: their design is the very design used by virtually every web app in the world.
It seems that their great "innovation" is to not display the shopping cart. Wow: that's innovative! - NOT.
Sorry, but in this case (obvious business process) + (obvious design) is still obvious.
You are now resorting to personal attacks to win an argument that is unwinnable.. The fact is, software patents are destroying the software industry. The fact is, anyone who understands software development knows that one-click purchasing is obvious, and is far to simple an idea to be worthy of a patent. If Amazon had not done it first, someone else would have. There is no innovation. They were merely the first to make that particular design choice.
"I can find you rhyming dictionaries hundreds of years old. What do you mean there's no prior art for it?"
And if you can't find a rhyming dictionary that contains the specific rhyme in question, then that rhyme is to be construed as not obvious?
This is all legaleze that is, frankly, far removed from the reality of software development. It shows that lawyers don't understand the process of writing software. As a result, they are mucking it up, and creating a quagmire.
The Amazon patent is simply that the customer clicks once to purchase. That's is all it is. And it is obvious. All the legal technicalities merely prove that the law is too complex on this issue. Any software developer can see that a single click to perform a function - any function - is an obvious thing. It is a design choice whether to present a shopping cart or not. It is not an "innovation".
"A judgement to be performed using prior art at the time of filing of the application. If you disagree that hindsight shouldn't be used, then, sorry, Congress and the courts disagree with you and have for 220 years."
And that is part of the problem. In software, there often is no prior art for obvious things.
If someone tells me their name is Carl Parker and I point out that it rhymes with "car parker", does the fact that there is no "prior art" for that make it non-obvious?
Prior art means someone already thought of it: but the absence of prior art does not mean that something is not obvious.
So here are the phrases in the claims, all debunked:
1. "under control of a client system" - Well, all online systems consist of a client system.
2. "displaying information identifying the item purchasable through a shopping cart model" - This is just on online client session state (which is all a shopping cart is).
3. "in response to only a single action being performed" - I.e., a button click. Nothing new there.
4. "sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system" - I.e., placing an order. Nothing new. Has been done in the real world for milllenia. The "identifier" is just the identity of the customer. Nothing new. The request for the order is just - well, the request for the order. What is new here? Nothing.
5. "under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system" - Oh, so they mean a piece of software. Nothing new.
6. "receiving the request" - Yeah, so? Kind of need this to do anything, right? Nothing new.
7. "retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the indentifier in the received request" - Oh, so they do a lookup on the purchaser. Quite obvious, if there is a business need to do this. Nothing innovative. Absolutely nothing. Nothing any programmer would not have thought of if there was a business need to do this.
8. "generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information" - I.e., place the purchase. What is new here? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing.
9. "fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item" - Well what else would you do? Discard the order? Duh.
10. "whereby the item is ordered without using the shopping cart model" - But it did use the shopping cart. The shopping cart is the session state.
I am sorry: there is nothing new or innovative here. It is obvious, obvious, obvious. And it is just as I described it: a single click to purchase.
This should never have been given a patent. It is a travesty.
"The only way to determine whether a patent is obvious or not is to look at prior art. Otherwise, you're engaging in impermissible hindsight."
I disagree. Obviousness is a judgment.
Since you disagree with my statement of what the patent entails, perhaps you would care to paraphrase the substance of the patent, for the sake of this discussion, and for the consideration of the other readers?
I have followed this patent. I am familiar with the specifics.
As you might recall, Amazon had to rewrite the patent when it was rejected upon initial re-examination. The rewrite limited the patent's scope.
Even so, the prior art criteria, which was the basis for the re-examination, is not the crux of the issue. The issue is that the patent is obvious. The criteria used by the USPTO for what is not obvious is too weak.
The Amazon patent has to do with storing one's credit card permanently (using encryption), and re-using that information to enable the customer to make a purchase with a single click. To me, that is obvious in the extreme.
That is the problem with the current regime: the criteria for what is not obvious is too weak. As a result, the things that programmers do in the normal course of their work, creating features based on the circumstances and needs of their customer, is now a perilous mine field.
Yes, the lifespan of patents is a big problem.
But in software, things change so rapidly that patent protection for even five years is an eternity: by then, it is game over.
The fundamental problem with software patents is that companies patent simple ideas. The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious" by the USPTO, but unfortunately these kinds of things are routinely patented. The result is that there is a minefield of patents around every simple idea, every basic thing that one can do in software. Anyone who wants to create a startup company around a software product is at great risk, and instead of investing their time and energy into product development they now have to invest it in legal research. That is not a very good state of affairs for an industry that thrives on innovation.
If patents are to be allowed to exist for software, the bar for what is not obvious should be much, much, much higher than it currently seems to be.
That is a clever idea. You should propose that idea to the industry. Are you still a practicing nuclear engineer?
Interesting. Of course there is the matter of transporting existing spent fuel, and new spent fuel as it is produced in existing reactors, to this type of facility. But even so, the advantage of being able to dispose of existing waste is compelling.
But what about existing reactors? The question posed was probably intended to ask whether we should shut down existing reactors (over time, of course).
You make a good point, that by operating this type of reactor, we might actually decrease the hazard that currently exists, while also producing power.
What would be the proliferation (terrorism) risks?
Yes, you are right. I was not trying to be exact.
Yes, your guess is right. I was a nuclear engineer until 1981. I did reactor physics simulations at American Electric Power.
But isn't it the case the a thorium cycle produces plutonium? I can't recall, but I thought that it did.
You may know more about this than I do. I have been out of the nuclear field since 1981. I used to do reactor physics simulations at American Electric Power. But my recollection of alternative fuel cycles is a little dated.
But even if the cycle that you refer to is feasible, is it worth it? It is undoubtedly complex, and as you know, the cost of safety compliance is extremely large. What about the alternatives? Solar technologies, along with high voltage transmission and also energy storage technologies, are not so complex. The technology is not cost-competitive with oil or coal, but it has other benefits (it is renewable and it would free us from dependence on OPEC), and the technology is certainly there. And it is completely safe, and solar energy collection can also be deployed locally (even in the home), to give us a distributed energy production system that is resilient to centralized failure.
Perhaps the best thing to do is not have government decide on the best solution, but to let the market decide. But in that case, each source of energy should bear its full costs. These should include the intangible cost of removing a limited resource from the ground, the costs of R&D and refinement of each technology, the costs of defending the associated infrastructure (the way that we use the Fifth Fleet to defend our access to oil), and the geo-political costs (e.g., the huge political costs of maintaining relations with a part of the world that is suspicious of us).
Yes, good point.
But there are mitigating facts. (1) The complexity of the thorium cycle and lack of established reprocessing systems make it somewhat as unproven as other forms of energy production, such as solar energy cells; (2) it is not clear to me that thorium is immune to use for nuclear terrorism; (3) thorium is still a limited resource, so it must be mined, and there is not enough of it to consider it to be a permanent source of fuel: it will eventually run out. It is not "renewable".
Thorium might be viable, as you say. But it is not a clear-cut case, in my opinion.
I personally prefer renewable forms of energy. I liken burning anything that we dig up to "burning the house to heat it". The plant life of the entire world use the energy from the sun: why can't we? Why must we dig things up - sometimes hazardous things - and burn them? As a species we can do better.