Uranium fueled reactors are the result of a premature optimization... they aren't reactive enough to work with oxides as fuel.. so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea...
Which is why every commercial power reactor on the planet uses uranium oxide fuel?
You need to get the facts in your thorium-is-the-answer pitch straight. (I leave aside the matter of "What was the question?")
People in power should stop forcing islam down our throat and force it out of civilized countries. Islam is a mono-cultural ideology that by definition tolerates no other cultures on basis of equality. People in power should recognize this and act accordingly. Stop allowing mosques, islamic preachers and islamic education in the Western world. This who are still determined to believe in islam should move out. If that means dividing the world in two, so be it.
The irony here is amazing.
First: Christianity itself is a mono-cultural ideology that by definition tolerates no other cultures on basis of equality. Consider how the ancient religions of Europe were entirely wiped out by the Christians, a policy of cultural dominance that continued with similar efforts in the New World, Australian and Oceania, and then (with less overall success) Africa. Although governments have recently backed off from this sort of official cultural subjugation, at the NGO level the effort is still in full swing.
Second: the utter blindness of someone advocating ethnic cleansing on a world-wide basis, imposing stringent discrimination and stripping away civil liberties, on Muslims because they are intolerant is just astounding. Wow. Just, wow!
Perhaps more reasonable, though less likely in my opinion, is the pursuit of a pardon, as Aighearach noted. The President's office would have to be convinced that Snowden's actions were not deserving of punishment, regardless of what the law or courts say. Snowden would still be a convicted felon, but most of the punishment would be removed. However, a pardon would have to be pursued after a conviction, and I expect that Snowden would rather be a martyr in exile than face a proper American trial.
President Ford pardoned former President Nixon for all offenses, despite Nixon never having been formally actually charged with a crime, much less convicted.
Your statement that "a pardon would have to be pursued after a conviction" has the sound of plausibility (aka "truthiness") but clearly is not true.
TFTR had 15 MW of fusion reactions in the 90s, which is what is usually meant by fusion power in these reactors. That is the same definition for which ITER is using to, as it is not until DEMO that actual generators will be hooked up and electrical power comes out.
Nope. DEMO won't do this - no actual generators. That has to wait for the follow-on to DEMO, called PROTO. And even that may not an actual first power plant, but rather a technology demonstration of power production.
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system.
The excessive optimism for controlled fusion, followed by skepticism, predates this by several years, and started with the US projects Matterhorn/Sherwood starting in 1951. For their first several years the two closely related projects were highly classified, as working fusion reactors were expected to be produced within a few years. By 1958, all of the optimism had been dashed, and the work was declassified and relegated to basic research, the prospects for imminent success having become quite bleak, with new estimates that it was 20 years away.
... When it turns out that some rather notable mass murderers turned out to have been subjects of MK-Ultra, the story changed back to, "Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory."...
That sounds intriguing. Who were the murderers involved?
They could have, but their bid would have been in no way competitive with SpaceX since the Delta 4 is a lot more expensive, and doesn't make economic sense to use on a small launch.
SpaceX should seize the opportunity to set their bidding to whatever ULA was charging before SpaceX came along. That's what happens when "bidding contracts" can be fulfilled by exactly one supplier. Isn't that what the Russians did with sending NASA astronaughts to the ISS? NASA is now paying >60 million USD per seat, when the shuttle was flying the cost was 20 million USD per seat.
According to NASA the average cost of a shuttle launch was $450 million dollars*. When were they sending up a crowd of 23 people per launch? (The largest crew every flown was 8.)
*Even this is a low-ball that does not include the cost of the ground infrastructure required to support the shuttle, nor pro-rating development costs. The total program cost, adjusted for inflation, was $200 billion, and there were 135 launches, for a naive per-launch cost of $1.5 billion per. That would require 75 people to bring the per seat cost down to $20 million.
Is there any knowledge about environmental impact this fantasy has?
Heaving the tons of equipment and initial human support environment against native planets gravity - does it help the ionosphere destruction some more and if so, how much and what is put into the atmosphere, is it just burnt hydrogen (water) or ?? and how much energy is used to produce the fuel?
The cost of space launches will always be very high, due to the cost of the hardware, even if it is reusable. Airline flight costs on the order of $4 a pound. Spaceflight costs on the order of $4000 a pound. Spaceflight will always have a minor impact on the world environment, compared to air travel (for example).
The energy investment in space travel is vastly smaller than people imagine. It seems huge because a relatively large amount of energy is transferred to a small amount of material quickly, but launches are rare and intermittent, and the amount of material being launched is tiny. The mighty Saturn V burned up energy equivalent to $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity, an afternoons output from an average power plant.
How about bringing the harvest back - using the atmosphere as brake - how many more trillion-joules of energy would be put into the air and below?
There you have a valid cause for concern. The amount of platinum group metals consumed annually is quite small, a few hundred tons a year, and asteroids are about ten times richer than the best ores on Earth, but that is still only 0.01% PGM, so a few million tons of asteroid material will need to be deorbited a year. It will be interesting to see the proposals for doing this. The cost of doing anything in space is so high that the idea of actually processing the ore in space is truly fantasy for a long time to come.
I believe the Americans call this principle "Eminent Domain" which means, not to put too fine a point on it: "Although we allowed you to have guns, we have way more of them, so f**k off your land. This is our lawn now. Get off it."
To be fair, you left out the part about "And here's a check for the full fair market value of the lawn. Buy yourself another one, if you like.
Under the UN Space Treaty, all government on space settlements must arise from the culture of the settlement itself, rather than being imposed from Earth. A law like SPACE can only affect how our own legal system treats space settlers within our own jurisdiction.
Nothing like this in is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Is there some other UN Space Treaty I do not know about?
This claim is, frankly, impossible to credit. The whole focus of the the 1967 treaty is to make sure that States are responsible for the regulation in space of all entities under the authority. The UN does everything through the world state system.
The history of claim-jumping argues against you. More efficient than prospecting on your own someplace away from other claims, is to let someone else do your prospecting for you and then take the claim for your own. If they're working an asteroid, presumably it's rich enough to make it worth taking from them.
The Earth is big but humanity has always been willing to kill each other for chosen and desirable bits of it. Space probably won't be different, because even if Space is different, humanity is still humanity.
I'm sorry this not the Wild West in space*. Not even the bill just passed lets you claim an asteroid - which is still explicitly prohibited by international treaty. It lets you claim the the stuff you got from the asteroid only, which is quite reasonable.
Translating notions of "claim jumping" to a space mining operation does not take into account the vast differences. For one, asteroids never had ore concentration processes, beyond what differentiation on formation might have accomplished, and space mining relies on the high average abundance of siderophile** elements in various classes of asteroids. The entire asteroid will be the ore body, and even a small one will vastly exceed the scale of plausible human mining operation. The whole point of space mining is the lack of scarcity up there. Earth mining practices are based on the fact that scarcity is normal.
*In science fiction this is called a "Bat Durston", translating notions of the Wild West into a space opera. For good reason these are looked upon with derision.
**The rare iron-loving elements that sank to the core of the Earth.
In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated...
[sarcasm]Clearly it is far more important to compensate artists after they have died. That really stimulates their creativity and productivity.[/sarcasm]
On the other hand, in Giger's case, maybe post-mortem artistic output is possible. Still, I expect to see him publishing his works-from-beyond-the-grave.
Ya, my dream job is "independently wealthy", which I am -- or, at least, I'm debt-free and financially independent within my budget indefinitely, so I'm good to go. Of course, I'd give it all up to get my wife back - she died in 2006. (I had my dream and now she's only in my dreams...) In case anyone is wondering, I do still work - to support my teammates (who rely on me and need their jobs) and because I don't know what else to do.
Sorry to hear that. You will always dream about her. Finding new purpose is hard. I know.
Knuth put it pretty well (though I don't recall the exact verbiage) when he said something along the lines of "P=NP but the solution is going to be virtually useless outside of the one problem it solves." On a philosophical note if you proved P=NP you would essentially have God-like creative power, knowing in an instant how to do anything...
Absolutely not.
What Knuth argues is that he thinks P=NP, but any proof to that effect will be a non-constructive proof (aka "existence proof"), i.e. merely a proof that such a fact is true. It would not solve any problem in that case. And is would most especially not give you any "God-like powers". This sort of thing is common in mathematics - you can prove a thing exists, but that proof provides no clue how to actually find an example of the that thing.
Who is going to pay for that? The police, who will stop sending samples and money to the lab that tells them "You're wrong" too often?
Who is paying to lock people up for years? Compared to that cost lab tests are trivial.
The police should have no say about the labs. These should be certified and run by professionals, with quality control procedures in place (blind test samples in the test stream, etc.), with regular reviews. You know, like real labs. "Police labs" are not real labs.
...And even if there isn't any cheating, there is the possibility that the two labs would come to different conclusions honestly, due to the inherent messiness of most criminal matters.
You cite that like it is a problem with double checking results. No, that is the very feature we wish to implement. It two labs come to different conclusions, that throws them both into doubt - and then additional checking must be initiated to resolve the discrepancies. If a repeatable result is not possible, then it is not evidence. Period.
I'm not sure why you would want to punish the people allowing the prosecutors to resign. They should resign. That won't release them from being punished if they should be found to have tampered with or asked the lab to tamper with evidence.
I think the objection to "resignation" is that is appears voluntary. They should not be allowed to resign, they should be fired. Yes prosecution should follow also.
Right . He has only arranged a deal to shut down the Iranian nuclear weapons program. You know, that thing that Mitt Romney called "the greatest threat that the world faces"? Nothing at all.
I think this guy was talking through his hat. Average Martian soil is about 18% iron oxides which makes it lower in iron content than many Hawaiian volcanic soils, in fact the composition of Martian and minimally weathered Hawaiian soils are often compared. And we know what a barren wasteland devoid of life the Hawaiian islands are...
Martian regolith contains perchlorates. It's toxic. We're not talking about nutrient levels. It's up to 2% by mass perchlorate ion..
First you have to bake the regolith to break down the perchlorates. Then you have to rinse it to remove the extra salts. Then if you have a reverse osmosis system you could add the water back in....
From what I read the perchlorate content is 0.5-1.0%, which is still a lot, but there is no need to "high-ball" the estimate. Watney would have known about this quite well, and could very well chosen soil at the low end of the range.
Also the perchlorate removal process could be a lot simpler than you assert. As the article above points out: "Perchlorate salts are very soluble in water...". Simply leaching the soil through his evaporative recovery cycle could remove perchlorates just fine (although the length of time to do this would likely be a problem giving his limited quantity of water).
Your reference to "reverse osmosis" mystifies me. The water is being recovered by simple condensation is quite pure.
... Lincoln was a two bit lawyer with zero experience that many believed was largely responsible for the Civil War. He took the highest office of a deeply divided country and it literally fell apart under his leadership. As a leader, he failed in his first term and almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term. Yet we remember him as a leader, as an important part of the Civil War, one of the BEST presidents on record.
What bizarrely ignorant claptrap!
Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861. By that date seven of the eleven states of Confederacy had already seceded (with the secession process in full swing the last four); the CSA government had already been declared, and the first hostilities of the war (by the South) had already occurred when South Carolina fired on the Star of the West that was resupplying Ft. Sumter, which was under siege, on 9 January 1861.
Very odd notion of a "failed first term". When Lincoln was re-elected the western half of the Confederacy had been defeated, and the last remaining Confederate army of any strength (Lee's army) was pinned down, unable to move or act against the Union in any way, was shrinking through desertion, and was only five months from final surrender. Basically the war was already won, it was then only a matter of time to get the defeated to lay down their arms.
Lincoln had also abolished slavery in fact everywhere in the Confederacy where Union troops had set foot (most of it), and gotten the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere, completely, passed by the Senate, and well on the way to ratification.
Oh, and his diplomacy had kept even a single nation anywhere in the world from recognizing the Confederacy.
And his first term wasn't even all about the war either. He had gotten the Pacific Railroad Bill passed in July 1862, that set in motion the transcontinental railroad project that would unite the two coasts of America by rail in 1869.
The bit about "almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term" is truly bizarre. First, there were no primaries. Second, the challenger to Lincoln - Salmon P. Chase - withdrew in March and Lincoln faced no opposition when he was renominated in June. He won the election 212-21. If by "almost didn't win" you meant "easily crushed all opposition" then you would be far closer to the truth.
Please cite who these "many" are that think he was "largely responsible for the Civil War".
The paperwork is not Wood's responsibility. Intellectual Ventures has an army of lawyers to do that. Wood's job is to throw out plausible sounding variations of the existing patent literature, to be turned into new patents, so that IV can sue other people. Patent trolls like IV are a serious obstacle to real innovation.
The different is the Edison had hundreds of workers actually doing research. That is, actually inventing things. Intellectual Ventures has hundreds of lawyers writing patent applications.
Intellectual Ventures is very well known as the worst of the patent trolls. It is not an "invention company" it is an intellectual property litigation company.
Lowell Wood is notorious for his brazenly fraudulent claims about SDI technology (especially the X-ray laser chimera) during the 1980s.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the restrictions.
Breeder reactors could burn up all that waste.
No they couldn't. This is an imaginary property of breeder reactors. They still produce fission products that must be stored for centuries.
Uranium fueled reactors are the result of a premature optimization... they aren't reactive enough to work with oxides as fuel.. so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea...
Which is why every commercial power reactor on the planet uses uranium oxide fuel?
You need to get the facts in your thorium-is-the-answer pitch straight. (I leave aside the matter of "What was the question?")
People in power should stop forcing islam down our throat and force it out of civilized countries. Islam is a mono-cultural ideology that by definition tolerates no other cultures on basis of equality. People in power should recognize this and act accordingly. Stop allowing mosques, islamic preachers and islamic education in the Western world. This who are still determined to believe in islam should move out. If that means dividing the world in two, so be it.
The irony here is amazing.
First: Christianity itself is a mono-cultural ideology that by definition tolerates no other cultures on basis of equality. Consider how the ancient religions of Europe were entirely wiped out by the Christians, a policy of cultural dominance that continued with similar efforts in the New World, Australian and Oceania, and then (with less overall success) Africa. Although governments have recently backed off from this sort of official cultural subjugation, at the NGO level the effort is still in full swing.
Second: the utter blindness of someone advocating ethnic cleansing on a world-wide basis, imposing stringent discrimination and stripping away civil liberties, on Muslims because they are intolerant is just astounding. Wow. Just, wow!
Perhaps more reasonable, though less likely in my opinion, is the pursuit of a pardon, as Aighearach noted. The President's office would have to be convinced that Snowden's actions were not deserving of punishment, regardless of what the law or courts say. Snowden would still be a convicted felon, but most of the punishment would be removed. However, a pardon would have to be pursued after a conviction, and I expect that Snowden would rather be a martyr in exile than face a proper American trial.
President Ford pardoned former President Nixon for all offenses, despite Nixon never having been formally actually charged with a crime, much less convicted.
Your statement that "a pardon would have to be pursued after a conviction" has the sound of plausibility (aka "truthiness") but clearly is not true.
TFTR had 15 MW of fusion reactions in the 90s, which is what is usually meant by fusion power in these reactors. That is the same definition for which ITER is using to, as it is not until DEMO that actual generators will be hooked up and electrical power comes out.
Nope. DEMO won't do this - no actual generators. That has to wait for the follow-on to DEMO, called PROTO. And even that may not an actual first power plant, but rather a technology demonstration of power production.
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system.
The excessive optimism for controlled fusion, followed by skepticism, predates this by several years, and started with the US projects Matterhorn/Sherwood starting in 1951. For their first several years the two closely related projects were highly classified, as working fusion reactors were expected to be produced within a few years. By 1958, all of the optimism had been dashed, and the work was declassified and relegated to basic research, the prospects for imminent success having become quite bleak, with new estimates that it was 20 years away.
... When it turns out that some rather notable mass murderers turned out to have been subjects of MK-Ultra, the story changed back to, "Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory."...
That sounds intriguing. Who were the murderers involved?
They could have, but their bid would have been in no way competitive with SpaceX since the Delta 4 is a lot more expensive, and doesn't make economic sense to use on a small launch.
SpaceX should seize the opportunity to set their bidding to whatever ULA was charging before SpaceX came along. That's what happens when "bidding contracts" can be fulfilled by exactly one supplier. Isn't that what the Russians did with sending NASA astronaughts to the ISS? NASA is now paying >60 million USD per seat, when the shuttle was flying the cost was 20 million USD per seat.
According to NASA the average cost of a shuttle launch was $450 million dollars*. When were they sending up a crowd of 23 people per launch? (The largest crew every flown was 8.)
*Even this is a low-ball that does not include the cost of the ground infrastructure required to support the shuttle, nor pro-rating development costs. The total program cost, adjusted for inflation, was $200 billion, and there were 135 launches, for a naive per-launch cost of $1.5 billion per. That would require 75 people to bring the per seat cost down to $20 million.
Is there any knowledge about environmental impact this fantasy has? Heaving the tons of equipment and initial human support environment against native planets gravity - does it help the ionosphere destruction some more and if so, how much and what is put into the atmosphere, is it just burnt hydrogen (water) or ?? and how much energy is used to produce the fuel?
The cost of space launches will always be very high, due to the cost of the hardware, even if it is reusable. Airline flight costs on the order of $4 a pound. Spaceflight costs on the order of $4000 a pound. Spaceflight will always have a minor impact on the world environment, compared to air travel (for example).
The energy investment in space travel is vastly smaller than people imagine. It seems huge because a relatively large amount of energy is transferred to a small amount of material quickly, but launches are rare and intermittent, and the amount of material being launched is tiny. The mighty Saturn V burned up energy equivalent to $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity, an afternoons output from an average power plant.
How about bringing the harvest back - using the atmosphere as brake - how many more trillion-joules of energy would be put into the air and below?
There you have a valid cause for concern. The amount of platinum group metals consumed annually is quite small, a few hundred tons a year, and asteroids are about ten times richer than the best ores on Earth, but that is still only 0.01% PGM, so a few million tons of asteroid material will need to be deorbited a year. It will be interesting to see the proposals for doing this. The cost of doing anything in space is so high that the idea of actually processing the ore in space is truly fantasy for a long time to come.
I believe the Americans call this principle "Eminent Domain" which means, not to put too fine a point on it: "Although we allowed you to have guns, we have way more of them, so f**k off your land. This is our lawn now. Get off it."
To be fair, you left out the part about "And here's a check for the full fair market value of the lawn. Buy yourself another one, if you like.
Under the UN Space Treaty, all government on space settlements must arise from the culture of the settlement itself, rather than being imposed from Earth. A law like SPACE can only affect how our own legal system treats space settlers within our own jurisdiction.
Nothing like this in is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Is there some other UN Space Treaty I do not know about?
This claim is, frankly, impossible to credit. The whole focus of the the 1967 treaty is to make sure that States are responsible for the regulation in space of all entities under the authority. The UN does everything through the world state system.
The history of claim-jumping argues against you. More efficient than prospecting on your own someplace away from other claims, is to let someone else do your prospecting for you and then take the claim for your own. If they're working an asteroid, presumably it's rich enough to make it worth taking from them.
The Earth is big but humanity has always been willing to kill each other for chosen and desirable bits of it. Space probably won't be different, because even if Space is different, humanity is still humanity.
I'm sorry this not the Wild West in space*. Not even the bill just passed lets you claim an asteroid - which is still explicitly prohibited by international treaty. It lets you claim the the stuff you got from the asteroid only, which is quite reasonable.
Translating notions of "claim jumping" to a space mining operation does not take into account the vast differences. For one, asteroids never had ore concentration processes, beyond what differentiation on formation might have accomplished, and space mining relies on the high average abundance of siderophile** elements in various classes of asteroids. The entire asteroid will be the ore body, and even a small one will vastly exceed the scale of plausible human mining operation. The whole point of space mining is the lack of scarcity up there. Earth mining practices are based on the fact that scarcity is normal.
*In science fiction this is called a "Bat Durston", translating notions of the Wild West into a space opera. For good reason these are looked upon with derision.
**The rare iron-loving elements that sank to the core of the Earth.
In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated...
[sarcasm]Clearly it is far more important to compensate artists after they have died. That really stimulates their creativity and productivity.[/sarcasm]
On the other hand, in Giger's case, maybe post-mortem artistic output is possible. Still, I expect to see him publishing his works-from-beyond-the-grave.
Ya, my dream job is "independently wealthy", which I am -- or, at least, I'm debt-free and financially independent within my budget indefinitely, so I'm good to go. Of course, I'd give it all up to get my wife back - she died in 2006. (I had my dream and now she's only in my dreams...) In case anyone is wondering, I do still work - to support my teammates (who rely on me and need their jobs) and because I don't know what else to do.
Sorry to hear that. You will always dream about her. Finding new purpose is hard. I know.
Knuth put it pretty well (though I don't recall the exact verbiage) when he said something along the lines of "P=NP but the solution is going to be virtually useless outside of the one problem it solves." On a philosophical note if you proved P=NP you would essentially have God-like creative power, knowing in an instant how to do anything ...
Absolutely not.
What Knuth argues is that he thinks P=NP, but any proof to that effect will be a non-constructive proof (aka "existence proof"), i.e. merely a proof that such a fact is true. It would not solve any problem in that case. And is would most especially not give you any "God-like powers". This sort of thing is common in mathematics - you can prove a thing exists, but that proof provides no clue how to actually find an example of the that thing.
Who is going to pay for that? The police, who will stop sending samples and money to the lab that tells them "You're wrong" too often?
Who is paying to lock people up for years? Compared to that cost lab tests are trivial.
The police should have no say about the labs. These should be certified and run by professionals, with quality control procedures in place (blind test samples in the test stream, etc.), with regular reviews. You know, like real labs. "Police labs" are not real labs.
...And even if there isn't any cheating, there is the possibility that the two labs would come to different conclusions honestly, due to the inherent messiness of most criminal matters.
You cite that like it is a problem with double checking results. No, that is the very feature we wish to implement. It two labs come to different conclusions, that throws them both into doubt - and then additional checking must be initiated to resolve the discrepancies. If a repeatable result is not possible, then it is not evidence. Period.
I'm not sure why you would want to punish the people allowing the prosecutors to resign. They should resign. That won't release them from being punished if they should be found to have tampered with or asked the lab to tamper with evidence.
I think the objection to "resignation" is that is appears voluntary. They should not be allowed to resign, they should be fired. Yes prosecution should follow also.
Right . He has only arranged a deal to shut down the Iranian nuclear weapons program. You know, that thing that Mitt Romney called "the greatest threat that the world faces"? Nothing at all.
I think this guy was talking through his hat. Average Martian soil is about 18% iron oxides which makes it lower in iron content than many Hawaiian volcanic soils, in fact the composition of Martian and minimally weathered Hawaiian soils are often compared. And we know what a barren wasteland devoid of life the Hawaiian islands are...
Martian regolith contains perchlorates. It's toxic. We're not talking about nutrient levels. It's up to 2% by mass perchlorate ion..
First you have to bake the regolith to break down the perchlorates. Then you have to rinse it to remove the extra salts. Then if you have a reverse osmosis system you could add the water back in....
From what I read the perchlorate content is 0.5-1.0%, which is still a lot, but there is no need to "high-ball" the estimate. Watney would have known about this quite well, and could very well chosen soil at the low end of the range.
Also the perchlorate removal process could be a lot simpler than you assert. As the article above points out: "Perchlorate salts are very soluble in water...". Simply leaching the soil through his evaporative recovery cycle could remove perchlorates just fine (although the length of time to do this would likely be a problem giving his limited quantity of water).
Your reference to "reverse osmosis" mystifies me. The water is being recovered by simple condensation is quite pure.
... Lincoln was a two bit lawyer with zero experience that many believed was largely responsible for the Civil War. He took the highest office of a deeply divided country and it literally fell apart under his leadership. As a leader, he failed in his first term and almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term. Yet we remember him as a leader, as an important part of the Civil War, one of the BEST presidents on record.
What bizarrely ignorant claptrap!
Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861. By that date seven of the eleven states of Confederacy had already seceded (with the secession process in full swing the last four); the CSA government had already been declared, and the first hostilities of the war (by the South) had already occurred when South Carolina fired on the Star of the West that was resupplying Ft. Sumter, which was under siege, on 9 January 1861.
Very odd notion of a "failed first term". When Lincoln was re-elected the western half of the Confederacy had been defeated, and the last remaining Confederate army of any strength (Lee's army) was pinned down, unable to move or act against the Union in any way, was shrinking through desertion, and was only five months from final surrender. Basically the war was already won, it was then only a matter of time to get the defeated to lay down their arms.
Lincoln had also abolished slavery in fact everywhere in the Confederacy where Union troops had set foot (most of it), and gotten the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere, completely, passed by the Senate, and well on the way to ratification.
Oh, and his diplomacy had kept even a single nation anywhere in the world from recognizing the Confederacy.
And his first term wasn't even all about the war either. He had gotten the Pacific Railroad Bill passed in July 1862, that set in motion the transcontinental railroad project that would unite the two coasts of America by rail in 1869.
The bit about "almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term" is truly bizarre. First, there were no primaries. Second, the challenger to Lincoln - Salmon P. Chase - withdrew in March and Lincoln faced no opposition when he was renominated in June. He won the election 212-21. If by "almost didn't win" you meant "easily crushed all opposition" then you would be far closer to the truth.
Please cite who these "many" are that think he was "largely responsible for the Civil War".
The paperwork is not Wood's responsibility. Intellectual Ventures has an army of lawyers to do that. Wood's job is to throw out plausible sounding variations of the existing patent literature, to be turned into new patents, so that IV can sue other people. Patent trolls like IV are a serious obstacle to real innovation.
The different is the Edison had hundreds of workers actually doing research. That is, actually inventing things. Intellectual Ventures has hundreds of lawyers writing patent applications.
Intellectual Ventures is very well known as the worst of the patent trolls. It is not an "invention company" it is an intellectual property litigation company.
Lowell Wood is notorious for his brazenly fraudulent claims about SDI technology (especially the X-ray laser chimera) during the 1980s.