Having worked with gallium, it is not the easiest metal to work with. It forms oxides easily on its surface, and when these oxides combine with the metal, the metal can stick to metals and glass quite easily. Gallium has been used to back mirrors for that reason.
For those wondering, just because it melts easily, does not mean it has any vapors. Unlike mercury, it has a very high boiling points and has essentially zero vapor pressure at temperatures that can be tolerated by people. As for non-toxic, as far as I know it is not poisonous in reasonable quantities, but neither is it generally recognized as safe (GRAS). Six-nines gallium is probably what to use (99.9999%), as Five-nines gallium (99.999%) usually has signifcant mercury levels in the remaining portion.
It supercools very nicely in plastic containers, and once melted will stay liquid at room temperature for quite a while. It expands upon freezing, like water, and often develops a distinctive cracking pattern when solidifying.
It will eat aluminum instantly. Certain stainless steels are fine for a while, but iron (not plain steel), berylium, tungsten and the like are other metals you can use with it and not have problems with dissolving part of it.
It is a blast, and you can buy small quantities of it from Amazon.
Like the building of the healthcare website, the management of the IRS non-profit review function, or lots of other government operations have great oversight either.
The politicians elected to run the government want to play politics, not actually run the government. So that is what they do.
When my alderman (probably councilman in your city) failed to deliver adequate city services, she was voted out of office. That does not happen higher than the city level.
Hansen's principal point is moving fast enough. His point is that if you are too slow, certain irreversible things will happen. Therefore you have to go with currently executable plans. The United States went dam-happy after Hoover dam, so it is not like we have hydropower waiting to happen. Nuclear is the one thing that we can execute on large scales to provide 24x7x365 power for many nations right now.
Hansen's problems are not with leading engineers. They are with politicians, activists, amatueur busy-body fearmongers and their me-too hangers on. He thinks a tipping point is coming, and that the other side of that tipping point outweighs any worry you have about nuclear power. And you can theorize all you want about your solar panels, windmills, etc. Nuclear is what has been proven to provide a substantial portion of world power without carbon load.
He is not interested in theories. He is interested in precedented engineering. Nuclear provides 20% or so of electricity in the U.S. today, around 80% in France. There is no "renewable" that provides so much power to a major country today.
The fact is that a lot of the global warming band wagoners are only on board so they can bash the same enemies they have been bashing for 40 years. When they hear they have to team up with some of their old enemies or the world is going to flood, well, they get off the bandwagon. They do not give an actual rats ass about the planet. They forgot about it 30 years ago.
The question being criticized requires the child to generalize. Whether the generalization that the child is fairly or unfairly being asked to do the task appears to be the point of disagreement here. Also, the form and length of the test comes into play.
Question #1 is not particularly different from #5 or #7 except that the number is on a drawing of a cup instead of in a drawing of a square. Are we really putting that much weight of fairness on that difference? It seems that perhaps that the particular teacher is missing the point: we can't train students to only respond to numbers in squares. They should respond to numbers in triangles, circles, and cups as well. Yes, the cup is harder. What is wrong with testing contextualizing skills as well as the number skill?
I agree the children will not be helped if teachers are not ready to deliver the lesson. The teacher's guide for following up on this test was either wanting, or unread by the principal in question. It would be nice to hear what the teacher's guide for the test actually said.
It sounds like you have control of the whole machine, which makes you the sysadmin. You don't only get to choose the programming language. You have to design a workflow. The programming language will fall out of you designing your plan of attack. You have to do so within the limitation of your advisor's budget, the assistance you can beg, etc. Take comfort in the fact that procedural languages are deep down 98% the same with different words for things, it is the libraries that get confusing. And read the library documentation like your life depends on it. It does.
> the more complex the product the more complex the printer will need to be and the less efficient doing it on a small scale will be
There's some truth to that. I don't think you're going to have many individuals building a BMW (or even a Nissan Sentra) at home. A few hobbyists, maybe, not on a large scale.
But what is GOING to happen... count on it... is that small, local "custom shops" are going to spring up. What if I could get a cross between a Sentra and a BMW? Or something that looks like a Ferrari, but with the safety and fuel mileage of a small Audi? Now the IP laws are actually *overlapping* between identified brands.
What if I can go into a custom tailor's shop and have a suit made while I go have lunch? Just the way I want it, at a reasonable price, and without waiting for days.
THIS is the future. We live in exciting times.
The services may exist. IP enforcement against an actual brick and mortar location is quite possible. Music licensing does it year in and year out one bar and restaurant at a time. Yet, the system works because licenses are easily obtained through a central service.
Yes, but what patented objects can be just scanned in and printed? I can't really thing of any significant ones. An iPhone? A pharmaceutical? Could they print a Teddy bear? And that's not patented. And if you could (at all), could you do it at a reasonable price? One has to think that the manufacturer's cost of making it will always by X/4 or so.
Let's see. This is a molecule in pre-clinical testing. I would give this specific molecule about a 1 in 1,000 chance of actually being marketed. Those are damn good odds for a molecule at this stage. This is why you always have to take the word "potential" with a boulder of salt.
If you go to the article, you can see that this means that you can embed a stretchable wire in a plastic body. The high self-attraction of the metal for itself instead of the plastic means you have a wire that is not going to develop stress and break.
The President is ordering the IRS to not enforce the penalty for the year. The law has not changed. Even if the president changed his mind mid-stream, people will have reasonably relied upon his promise in conducting their affairs, and could have a defense in court even if the president did change his mind.
While the President took an oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States, the line between legitimate prioritization of the activities of government and failure to live up to the oath is not a clear one, and is the subject of controversy from time-to-time. The prior president spent more effort on stopping white slavery and illegal (child mostly) pornography, while the current administration spends more time on civil rights and the environment. The fact is that resources are limited and the weight of enforcement activities legitimately responds to some extent with the perceived needs.
Mind you, failure to enforce a law where Congress overrode a presidentail veto is a clear case of derelication of duty. It is the law, and we get that the president did not like it, but the duties of the office are to enforce the laws the president likes and does not like, within reason.
(1) Civil and criminal copyright infringement are two different things. (2) To be liable for civil infringement, the copyright owner has to enforce.
I am having real difficulties figuring out why a copyright owner would complain about it if AT&T performed the method. I also have difficulty figuring out why a government would care if the copyright owner did not.
If it is merely a method to catch the stupid, well, there are plenty of stupid people so it is not pointless.
Some people have the idea that discoveries can be patented because of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8, clause 8 reads:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
So inventors can be given exclusive rights for a limited time for their discoveries. Or at least, that is what English grammar says.
I would expect that the EFF will get nothing, or if something, a highly redacted version.
The court will only have any effect as long as the government keeps coming to the court. The court is unlikely to provide a strong disincentive for the government coming to the court by providing the full decision.
After all, its job is not to rat out the government, it is to tell the government what not to do.
Well, that would put an end to pharmaceutical development. Many drugs are not even FDA approved in 5-10 years. Seeing as each costs like a billion to develop that would be the end of that. So yeah, banking on the patent system to get time for cost recovery is just so unreasonable.
The parts of the company that develop and sell goods control the expenditures of the legal department all the time. The legal department does not conduct litigation -- it farms that out. And it has to defend all those dollars spent to the CEO And CFO.
Historically, high technology companies have not litigated much. A company has only so many things it can pay attention to. A litigation can divert the attention of top people at the company whose time is probably better spent doing anything else. Entering litigation is not only a dollar cost, there are also opportunity costs. Back when technology companies were essentially expanding into a vacuum taking time off for a law suit would leave both companies behind their respective competitors. Time was too valuable to waste on litigation, so cross-licenses with a transfer of cash became the default model.
It may be that the high technology sector has become a mature enough sector that there is not much vacuum to grab. At that point mergers and acquisitions, patent portfolio acquisition become more viable. And a company's competitors may find that it is easier to expand onto the company's territory than go get new intellectual property territory of their own.
Intellectual property is part of managing competition. Patents preserve features, copyrights preserve authored works, and trademarks preserve goodwill. For any business that can make money any other way litigation is not a preferred way to make money. And just about any other way than litigation is the preferred route. That is, unless a business likes having to dig up emails and tape backups, have their executives set aside time to download their knowledge to their lawyers and then set aside time to be a witness to boot. The only ones in that boat are failing companies and patent trolls.
Kodak was in the black and white picture printing business since the 1880s. It was in the color printing business by 1835. Hewlett-Packard was not founded until 1939, and it did not start in printers. Brother made its splash in dox-matrix printers in 1971.
Kodak could have been far, far ahead of these companies with what we now consider printers. It would have moved in the direction of Xerox and gotten into the printer business. It just did not. It did not ask itself: who is going to cannibalize me, and how do I get in front? Change hit the accelerator pedal, and Kodak was left in the dust.
Please don't confuse FDA with other organizations. FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) generally handles inspections of food. I think fish are actually inspected by the Fish and Wildlife Service which is part of the Department of the Interior.
Regarding food, FDA deals with approvals, labeling and definitions. (Definitions such as: evaporated milk: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2008/aprqtr/21cfr131.130.htm), not inspections.
We went through this with the butterfly ballots in Florida. People who thought they knew how to design ballots did not actually know how to design ballots. The idea that design only affects how pretty something is is wrong. Apple succeeds in large part because its designs make the products enjoyable to use. There are some people who can handle the entire chain of abilities, but that is not by and large how the economy works.
And the bosses have to know this also. Arguably you should cut functionality before design, because without design functionality often becomes inaccessible (that is to say, non-functional). What good is a book if you get a headache reading it?
IBM makes something like $1 billion a year from licensing its patents, many of which are software patents.
Also, a big pile of patents constitutes a defensive patent portfolio. A potential plaintiff has to ask whether IBM has patents that would hurt more in a counter-suit. IBM is the biggest recipient of patents in the U.S. They probably have something on the order of 50,000 active U.S. patents.
I represent generic drug companies. I can tell you that brand operations do not go after, and would not go after, individual doctors. It would be impractical. Interestingly, the Caraco v. Novo Nordisk case heard on Monday by the Supreme Court was exactly about a situation where Novo Nordisk was going after Caraco not because of anything Caraco did, but because of what doctors and patients would do. So much for that straw man.
The Supreme Court is dealing with a line-drawing problem in Mayo v Prometheus. You can't patent gravity but you could have (long in the past) patent a pile driver. The Prometheus patent is about titrating medication levels for a certain class of prior art drugs using prior art tests. Too low, and the medicine is ineffective, too high and it is toxic. Nobody denies that Prometheus was the first to make the investment to come up with the decisional protocol it claimed. There is no doubt that if the claim had added the step "and administering an appropriate dose to a patient" or something like that it would be patent eligible subject matter.
This is an important question. Drug companies do expensive research to find new indications to treat with a drug all of the time. Anti-psychotics often will treat other conditions, but who knows which ones? At what doses? If you cannot patent the process of treating the new disease, you cannot get a patent: the molecule is already patented. We are talking high-8 to low-9 figures here to find that out. Let me assure you, nobody will ever know if you cannot patent the result.
None of the attorneys offered help to the Supreme Court in how to word the drawing of the line so that it can be applied. The Supreme Court does not take a case to take a case. It takes it to solve a problem in the law. Here, the decision will apply to non-medical as well as medical patents.
As another poster pointed out, the problem that Chas complains about has been solved by Congress. It would have been impractical to sue doctors in any event. Companies go after competitors, in this case a competing testing lab. This is just about the Benjamins to both of them.
Well, not being misused is one reason why the Scientologists copyright their materials, and sue anyone who uses the material to criticize the organization. But copyright is subject to fair use. So a parody of his speech, to the extent it is transformative, could be protected and thought to be a misuse of the material. In fact, the more misused it is, the arguably more transformative the misuse is. E.g. "The Wind Done Gone." As always, one needs to consider the commercial impact of the use. While say, "Hamlet" could become "Hamlet the Musical" and be transformative, it also might cut into the draw of Hamlet since they tell the same story.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked with gallium, it is not the easiest metal to work with. It forms oxides easily on its surface, and when these oxides combine with the metal, the metal can stick to metals and glass quite easily. Gallium has been used to back mirrors for that reason.
For those wondering, just because it melts easily, does not mean it has any vapors. Unlike mercury, it has a very high boiling points and has essentially zero vapor pressure at temperatures that can be tolerated by people. As for non-toxic, as far as I know it is not poisonous in reasonable quantities, but neither is it generally recognized as safe (GRAS). Six-nines gallium is probably what to use (99.9999%), as Five-nines gallium (99.999%) usually has signifcant mercury levels in the remaining portion.
It supercools very nicely in plastic containers, and once melted will stay liquid at room temperature for quite a while. It expands upon freezing, like water, and often develops a distinctive cracking pattern when solidifying.
It will eat aluminum instantly. Certain stainless steels are fine for a while, but iron (not plain steel), berylium, tungsten and the like are other metals you can use with it and not have problems with dissolving part of it.
It is a blast, and you can buy small quantities of it from Amazon.
Like the building of the healthcare website, the management of the IRS non-profit review function, or lots of other government operations have great oversight either.
The politicians elected to run the government want to play politics, not actually run the government. So that is what they do.
When my alderman (probably councilman in your city) failed to deliver adequate city services, she was voted out of office. That does not happen higher than the city level.
Hansen's principal point is moving fast enough. His point is that if you are too slow, certain irreversible things will happen. Therefore you have to go with currently executable plans. The United States went dam-happy after Hoover dam, so it is not like we have hydropower waiting to happen. Nuclear is the one thing that we can execute on large scales to provide 24x7x365 power for many nations right now.
Hansen's problems are not with leading engineers. They are with politicians, activists, amatueur busy-body fearmongers and their me-too hangers on. He thinks a tipping point is coming, and that the other side of that tipping point outweighs any worry you have about nuclear power. And you can theorize all you want about your solar panels, windmills, etc. Nuclear is what has been proven to provide a substantial portion of world power without carbon load.
He is not interested in theories. He is interested in precedented engineering. Nuclear provides 20% or so of electricity in the U.S. today, around 80% in France. There is no "renewable" that provides so much power to a major country today.
The fact is that a lot of the global warming band wagoners are only on board so they can bash the same enemies they have been bashing for 40 years. When they hear they have to team up with some of their old enemies or the world is going to flood, well, they get off the bandwagon. They do not give an actual rats ass about the planet. They forgot about it 30 years ago.
The question being criticized requires the child to generalize. Whether the generalization that the child is fairly or unfairly being asked to do the task appears to be the point of disagreement here. Also, the form and length of the test comes into play.
Question #1 is not particularly different from #5 or #7 except that the number is on a drawing of a cup instead of in a drawing of a square. Are we really putting that much weight of fairness on that difference? It seems that perhaps that the particular teacher is missing the point: we can't train students to only respond to numbers in squares. They should respond to numbers in triangles, circles, and cups as well. Yes, the cup is harder. What is wrong with testing contextualizing skills as well as the number skill?
I agree the children will not be helped if teachers are not ready to deliver the lesson. The teacher's guide for following up on this test was either wanting, or unread by the principal in question. It would be nice to hear what the teacher's guide for the test actually said.
It sounds like you have control of the whole machine, which makes you the sysadmin. You don't only get to choose the programming language. You have to design a workflow. The programming language will fall out of you designing your plan of attack. You have to do so within the limitation of your advisor's budget, the assistance you can beg, etc. Take comfort in the fact that procedural languages are deep down 98% the same with different words for things, it is the libraries that get confusing. And read the library documentation like your life depends on it. It does.
> the more complex the product the more complex the printer will need to be and the less efficient doing it on a small scale will be
There's some truth to that. I don't think you're going to have many individuals building a BMW (or even a Nissan Sentra) at home. A few hobbyists, maybe, not on a large scale.
But what is GOING to happen ... count on it ... is that small, local "custom shops" are going to spring up. What if I could get a cross between a Sentra and a BMW? Or something that looks like a Ferrari, but with the safety and fuel mileage of a small Audi? Now the IP laws are actually *overlapping* between identified brands.
What if I can go into a custom tailor's shop and have a suit made while I go have lunch? Just the way I want it, at a reasonable price, and without waiting for days.
THIS is the future. We live in exciting times.
The services may exist. IP enforcement against an actual brick and mortar location is quite possible. Music licensing does it year in and year out one bar and restaurant at a time. Yet, the system works because licenses are easily obtained through a central service.
Yes, but what patented objects can be just scanned in and printed? I can't really thing of any significant ones. An iPhone? A pharmaceutical? Could they print a Teddy bear? And that's not patented. And if you could (at all), could you do it at a reasonable price? One has to think that the manufacturer's cost of making it will always by X/4 or so.
Yes, an old Benjamin Franklin experiment to find the thickness of an oil particle.
http://www.avs.org/PDF/richmond.pdf
Many, many hits on google for this experiment. It actually happened unlike the kite/lightning storm thing.
Let's see. This is a molecule in pre-clinical testing. I would give this specific molecule about a 1 in 1,000 chance of actually being marketed. Those are damn good odds for a molecule at this stage. This is why you always have to take the word "potential" with a boulder of salt.
The first patent act was in 1790. The Constitution only permitted Congress to have patents. Congress had to decide to do it.
If you go to the article, you can see that this means that you can embed a stretchable wire in a plastic body. The high self-attraction of the metal for itself instead of the plastic means you have a wire that is not going to develop stress and break.
The President is ordering the IRS to not enforce the penalty for the year. The law has not changed. Even if the president changed his mind mid-stream, people will have reasonably relied upon his promise in conducting their affairs, and could have a defense in court even if the president did change his mind.
While the President took an oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States, the line between legitimate prioritization of the activities of government and failure to live up to the oath is not a clear one, and is the subject of controversy from time-to-time. The prior president spent more effort on stopping white slavery and illegal (child mostly) pornography, while the current administration spends more time on civil rights and the environment. The fact is that resources are limited and the weight of enforcement activities legitimately responds to some extent with the perceived needs.
Mind you, failure to enforce a law where Congress overrode a presidentail veto is a clear case of derelication of duty. It is the law, and we get that the president did not like it, but the duties of the office are to enforce the laws the president likes and does not like, within reason.
Let's keep a few things straight here...
(1) Civil and criminal copyright infringement are two different things.
(2) To be liable for civil infringement, the copyright owner has to enforce.
I am having real difficulties figuring out why a copyright owner would complain about it if AT&T performed the method. I also have difficulty figuring out why a government would care if the copyright owner did not.
If it is merely a method to catch the stupid, well, there are plenty of stupid people so it is not pointless.
Some people have the idea that discoveries can be patented because of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8, clause 8 reads:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
So inventors can be given exclusive rights for a limited time for their discoveries. Or at least, that is what English grammar says.
I would expect that the EFF will get nothing, or if something, a highly redacted version.
The court will only have any effect as long as the government keeps coming to the court. The court is unlikely to provide a strong disincentive for the government coming to the court by providing the full decision.
After all, its job is not to rat out the government, it is to tell the government what not to do.
That was a veto-proof margin: more than 2:1. If that happens in the Senate too, then it does not matter what the president thinks.
Well, that would put an end to pharmaceutical development. Many drugs are not even FDA approved in 5-10 years. Seeing as each costs like a billion to develop that would be the end of that. So yeah, banking on the patent system to get time for cost recovery is just so unreasonable.
The parts of the company that develop and sell goods control the expenditures of the legal department all the time. The legal department does not conduct litigation -- it farms that out. And it has to defend all those dollars spent to the CEO And CFO. Historically, high technology companies have not litigated much. A company has only so many things it can pay attention to. A litigation can divert the attention of top people at the company whose time is probably better spent doing anything else. Entering litigation is not only a dollar cost, there are also opportunity costs. Back when technology companies were essentially expanding into a vacuum taking time off for a law suit would leave both companies behind their respective competitors. Time was too valuable to waste on litigation, so cross-licenses with a transfer of cash became the default model. It may be that the high technology sector has become a mature enough sector that there is not much vacuum to grab. At that point mergers and acquisitions, patent portfolio acquisition become more viable. And a company's competitors may find that it is easier to expand onto the company's territory than go get new intellectual property territory of their own. Intellectual property is part of managing competition. Patents preserve features, copyrights preserve authored works, and trademarks preserve goodwill. For any business that can make money any other way litigation is not a preferred way to make money. And just about any other way than litigation is the preferred route. That is, unless a business likes having to dig up emails and tape backups, have their executives set aside time to download their knowledge to their lawyers and then set aside time to be a witness to boot. The only ones in that boat are failing companies and patent trolls.
Kodak was in the black and white picture printing business since the 1880s. It was in the color printing business by 1835. Hewlett-Packard was not founded until 1939, and it did not start in printers. Brother made its splash in dox-matrix printers in 1971. Kodak could have been far, far ahead of these companies with what we now consider printers. It would have moved in the direction of Xerox and gotten into the printer business. It just did not. It did not ask itself: who is going to cannibalize me, and how do I get in front? Change hit the accelerator pedal, and Kodak was left in the dust.
Please don't confuse FDA with other organizations. FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) generally handles inspections of food. I think fish are actually inspected by the Fish and Wildlife Service which is part of the Department of the Interior. Regarding food, FDA deals with approvals, labeling and definitions. (Definitions such as: evaporated milk: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2008/aprqtr/21cfr131.130.htm), not inspections.
We went through this with the butterfly ballots in Florida. People who thought they knew how to design ballots did not actually know how to design ballots. The idea that design only affects how pretty something is is wrong. Apple succeeds in large part because its designs make the products enjoyable to use. There are some people who can handle the entire chain of abilities, but that is not by and large how the economy works. And the bosses have to know this also. Arguably you should cut functionality before design, because without design functionality often becomes inaccessible (that is to say, non-functional). What good is a book if you get a headache reading it?
IBM makes something like $1 billion a year from licensing its patents, many of which are software patents. Also, a big pile of patents constitutes a defensive patent portfolio. A potential plaintiff has to ask whether IBM has patents that would hurt more in a counter-suit. IBM is the biggest recipient of patents in the U.S. They probably have something on the order of 50,000 active U.S. patents.
I represent generic drug companies. I can tell you that brand operations do not go after, and would not go after, individual doctors. It would be impractical. Interestingly, the Caraco v. Novo Nordisk case heard on Monday by the Supreme Court was exactly about a situation where Novo Nordisk was going after Caraco not because of anything Caraco did, but because of what doctors and patients would do. So much for that straw man. The Supreme Court is dealing with a line-drawing problem in Mayo v Prometheus. You can't patent gravity but you could have (long in the past) patent a pile driver. The Prometheus patent is about titrating medication levels for a certain class of prior art drugs using prior art tests. Too low, and the medicine is ineffective, too high and it is toxic. Nobody denies that Prometheus was the first to make the investment to come up with the decisional protocol it claimed. There is no doubt that if the claim had added the step "and administering an appropriate dose to a patient" or something like that it would be patent eligible subject matter. This is an important question. Drug companies do expensive research to find new indications to treat with a drug all of the time. Anti-psychotics often will treat other conditions, but who knows which ones? At what doses? If you cannot patent the process of treating the new disease, you cannot get a patent: the molecule is already patented. We are talking high-8 to low-9 figures here to find that out. Let me assure you, nobody will ever know if you cannot patent the result. None of the attorneys offered help to the Supreme Court in how to word the drawing of the line so that it can be applied. The Supreme Court does not take a case to take a case. It takes it to solve a problem in the law. Here, the decision will apply to non-medical as well as medical patents. As another poster pointed out, the problem that Chas complains about has been solved by Congress. It would have been impractical to sue doctors in any event. Companies go after competitors, in this case a competing testing lab. This is just about the Benjamins to both of them.
Well, not being misused is one reason why the Scientologists copyright their materials, and sue anyone who uses the material to criticize the organization. But copyright is subject to fair use. So a parody of his speech, to the extent it is transformative, could be protected and thought to be a misuse of the material. In fact, the more misused it is, the arguably more transformative the misuse is. E.g. "The Wind Done Gone." As always, one needs to consider the commercial impact of the use. While say, "Hamlet" could become "Hamlet the Musical" and be transformative, it also might cut into the draw of Hamlet since they tell the same story.
Considering that TiVO sues just about everything in the set-top box area, that raises its own patent problems.