chemistry and computing?
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing?
I'm not sure if this is a typo.. but I see no real use for this in computing.. unless you want computers which (at best) work like conventional ones except much, much, much, slower.
However, in chemistry.. it may very well become a big thing. One possible use I can think of is for building automated little microlaboratories, controlling the mixage and flow of different chemicals.
This, in general, is a hot research topic in chemistry.. Already in biotech a lot of things similar to this are being put to practical use (Chip assays is an example).
Basically, it's the revolution of miniaturization which is (finally..) coming to chemistry.
It would be nice if it worked that way, but it would be very inefficient to run such a system. A perfectly run USPTO would result in much fewer lawsuits, saving some money. But it would either make it prohibitively expensive to get a patent (thereby eliminating everyone except large corporations from getting one) or it would have to be paid for with taxes (everyone's favorite topic).
Well.. I have the impression that the European Patent Office does a better job than the USPTO at this. Yet European Patents aren't prohibitively expensive, nore is the EPO tax-financed.
However, I can imagine it'd be difficult. They can go after people one at a time. Once you've signed a license agreement, there's no getting your money back.
How do you prove fraud when they can say "Well, the US Patent Office granted our patent. We can't be liable for acting as though it was valid."?
And they'd have a good point too.. It's the responsibility of the USPTO not to grant invalid patents. Its hard to blame a company for trying to cash in on their patent, even if its not a real invention.
But guess who was the inventor listed on the new patents, and who received royalties for every license granted? And who signed off on the application?
Well, given that it was an extension-type patent, he'd pretty much have to.
Point is, there is quite a bit of pressure from universities to get their staff to patent whatever they can.
The question is, would he have tried to file this extension patent on his own without pressure from his employer. Sure, maybe he's a greedy S.O.B... but it's also quite possible that he was just going along with helping his employer try to secure a source of income.
In a nutshell, this is where I disagree. Terrorists do not seek disruption for its own sake, they want to spread fear. They want to make themselves known and heard.
Killing innocent people does that better than being disruptive. How many people were personally affected by the tragedy of 9/11? Contrast that to the fear it generated. It sent shockwaves through the entire world.
While that is a good example, my answer to that would be that the Sendero Luminoso is/was more of a guerilla movement.
(Of course, one man's guerrilla is another's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.)
But, if you define them by their tactics. I would lean towards calling them both a guerilla and terrorists.
It's not a mutually exclusive thing, and in this case it suits with their goal, which was not to terrify the people of Peru as much as to 'invade the country' (to refer to the grandfather post), or rather in this case, take power over the country.
Al-Quaida does not want to take over the USA. They are not waging a guerilla war. I don't really see how it would make sense for them to do so.
Can someone give an example of terrorists striking the phone system? Anywhere, ever? (Need I remind people that terrorism isn't new or unique to the US.. )
Is there any indication that Al-Quaida even wants this information?
This is just ridiculous to the extreme, no matter how you look at it. Just to play devil's advocate, I'll go along with the fact that the US is engaged in a 'War on terror'.
Is this 'war on terror' a conventional war?
Is the goal of Al-Quaida (or whatever terror group you want) to disable the US military and its supporting infrastructure through strategic attacks? Why? Do they plan to invade?
Hell, no. The goal of terrorist organizations is to create terror. That is best done through spectacular things like hijackings, bombings and the slaughter of civilians.
Terrorists kill people. They don't bomb bridges, bust dams and destroy communications networks. They kill people, as many and as violently and as publicly as possible. The purpose is to create fear and publicitity. Actual military-strategic damage is far less important.
So why can't we know when our phone systems are down? Why are bridges being guarded? Why are people being harassed for photographing locks?
The USA has managed to inflict more fear on itself than Osama ever could.
That page assumes a 0 dose equals 0 risk philosphy, which is incorrect.
Why? You haven't explained why this should be the case. Making analogies to completely different things is just silly.
Fact: A single photon of (UV or gamma) radiation can cause cancer. The chemical processes involved, such as the formation of thymine dimers, are well understood.
Fact: Radiation dosage is the number of photons per unit of time and unit of body mass.
It is quite reasonable to believe that radiation dose is proportional to cancer risk.
Radiation hormesis is not accepted as fact. In fact, there are a good number of people which consider it to be psuedoscience.
And there is signficantevidence to the contrary, both summaries from respectable sources (National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the National Research Council's Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation)
So, if you want to believe this Luckey guy, go do so. But most experts in the field do not - and I'm listening to them.
the answer is that while we can make O3 in the lab, it has properties that distinguish it from natural ozone, which cause it to fall back into the lower atmosphere where it's of little to no use.
No it doesn't. Ozone is ozone. It's a simple molecule. O3.. three oxygen atoms. If it's got three oxygen atoms, it's ozone. There no difference. Identical molecules are not distinguishable. They have no difference in properties.
You are drawing ridiculous conclusions from the facts here. The facts are that there is ground-near ozone, which is produced by car exhausts and the like, don't make it up to the top of the stratosphere, because ozone is a very reactive molecule (it forms radicals easily).
Since it's very reactive, this also means it's toxic, which means ground-near ozone is an environmental problem in itself.
The ozone at the top of the atmosphere is a different story, it's being produced there by UV radiation causing the oxygen atoms to break apart and reform as ozone molecules.
First, if you're going to be a smart-ass perhaps you should get your facts right. Volcanos don't spew CFCs. They spew other chemicals (mostly sulphur compounds) which destroy the ozone layer.
You're argumenting that since volcanos damage the ozone layer, it's OK if we humans contribute further to the destruction.
That's stupid. We can't do anything about the former, we can certainly do something about the latter. Why shouldn't we? UV radiation has been an increasing problem in the polar regions. I live in Sweden. The skin cancer rate here has tripled since the 50's.
By the same rationale, we shouldn't bother about nuclear waste either. After all, there's natural background radiation out there which causes cancer too.
Reading the article.. I think the reference to the fact that 5mW laser pointers can be dangerous is quite misleading.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such a laser was used in this case. (And it does seem rather unlikely)
The article mentions that there have been incidents in the past with aviation and laser shows. The wattage of those lasers is a completely different story.
So it's an old problem with a new post-9/11-paranoic "it could be a terrorist tool!" spin to it.
No matter how good Gnome and KDE have gotten, if the.net and JAVA software is lacking (Mono is not nearly complete, and is exactly fighting this catch-up game, JAVA is a nifty SUN Trap)
I'd say that Free java is alive and kicking. Yeah, it still hasn't become usable with respect to AWT/Swing. But most of the core is there, even up to some 1.4 stuff. (and work on 1.5 features is underway)
I don't buy the "catch-up game" argument. Most people don't write programs for the absolute latest and greatest. Platforms tend to reach a certain level of maturity which is 'good enough' for most people, and then it slows down. I think that soon enough, the free Java implementations will be able to compete with Sun's.
For example, how many compilers can you name which fully implement the C99 standard?
Everything is a catch-up game... it's just a question of what the game looks like. MS can arbitrarily change things in the Word file format just to screw with people. APIs don't work that way though, you don't change an API unless you have to.
Well.. I certainly agree public education should be better.
But I'm not sure it should really matter when it comes to liability.
For example- Should a auto maker be liable for accidents caused by unlicensed drivers?
It's the responsibility of society (IMHO) to provide people with this basic knowledge. It's not the responsibility of the people making products which require 'common sense' to use. So it shouldn't be their liability either.
They are not farces in that the ultimate stakes are very, very high.
(not the previous respondent) This is only if you assume that SCO ever had a snowball's chance of winning, which is something they never ever had. Maybe in the view of the press, but not in reality.
In reality, this is just yet another frivolous lawsuit which happens to have managed to generate an unusual amount of FUD. Apart from that, it has zero signficicance.
No laws are going to be changed just becase of the SCO cases. Come back in a year or two when it's all over and don't say I didn't tell you so.
Although I don't think a DNA scan would be necessary.. AFAIK the Basarab family (that of Vlad III) is not extinct.
Although the Basarab name alone is not distinctive. Moldova, which was once part of Wallachia, was named 'Basarabia' (after the family) when it was a Russian province, so there are people originating from there named 'Basarab' too.
(*An ancestor of mine (Mátyus Maróti, 1446-1476) was a brother-in-law to Vlad III.)
There was a 30-year study that found that for every person whose life was saved by the FDA, between 65 and 360 people died prematurely because new lifesaving drugs were still waiting for FDA approval.
Well that's just complete nonsense.
Do you know how many drugs make it through FDA testing? (And that's out of thousands and thousands of candidates which the drug companies weed out themselves?)
About 17% of all drugs which apply to do human studies eventually make it to market. (and again, that's a very small fraction of the candidates)
That means that 83% of drug candidates are eliminated by FDA testing. Eighty-three procent that either don't work, or give dangerous side-effects or are downright toxic.
And you talk about cherry-picking studies?!
Obviously you don't know the level of supervision the FDA has either. Every Single Thing is monitored by them. And not just during approval. They do random inspections of production plants around the world. Any place which makes drugs targeted at the US market.
Following the European system? The European system is a joke. (And I live in Europe and I have a good knowledge of the systems here.) Ask anyone in the pharma industry. They approve everything the FDA approves. That's it. All the pharma companies are completely commited to FDA regulations. The rest of the world is equal or more lax.
Besides that, the approval time has been going down for years.
What about time to market + 2 years up to a maximum pf 10 (maybe 15 if pharmaceuticals really take that long).
You have to consider that pharmaceuticals (and anything) are patented at the conceptual stage. For a pharmaceutical, that means further development, and then development of a synthesis method and manufacturing procedure, and then loads of tests and finally leading up to clinical tests and FDA approval.
Typically, a drug has about 5 years on the market now to recoup it's costs before the patent runs out. So what you're suggesting is actually more generous than the system today.
Because liability should be limited to common sense and reason.
It's not reasonable someone should be held liable for every concievable damage caused by their product or actions. At some point you must assume "people know better than that".
This line of thinking is embodied in the law. However, a lot of people (myself included) feel that the large number (huge actually, in an international context) of liability lawsuits in the USA have established a body of case law which has 'dumbed down' this level of "common sense" to unreasonable extents.
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Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing?
I'm not sure if this is a typo.. but I see no real use for this in computing.. unless you want computers which (at best) work like conventional ones except much, much, much, slower.
However, in chemistry.. it may very well become a big thing. One possible use I can think of is for building automated little microlaboratories, controlling the mixage and flow of different chemicals.
This, in general, is a hot research topic in chemistry.. Already in biotech a lot of things similar to this are being put to practical use (Chip assays is an example).
Basically, it's the revolution of miniaturization which is (finally..) coming to chemistry.
It would be nice if it worked that way, but it would be very inefficient to run such a system. A perfectly run USPTO would result in much fewer lawsuits, saving some money. But it would either make it prohibitively expensive to get a patent (thereby eliminating everyone except large corporations from getting one) or it would have to be paid for with taxes (everyone's favorite topic).
Well.. I have the impression that the European Patent Office does a better job than the USPTO at this. Yet European Patents aren't prohibitively expensive, nore is the EPO tax-financed.
So obviously, there is room for improvement.
Class action would be a way.
However, I can imagine it'd be difficult. They can go after people one at a time. Once you've signed a license agreement, there's no getting your money back.
How do you prove fraud when they can say "Well, the US Patent Office granted our patent. We can't be liable for acting as though it was valid."?
And they'd have a good point too.. It's the responsibility of the USPTO not to grant invalid patents.
Its hard to blame a company for trying to cash in on their patent, even if its not a real invention.
$1,000 a quarter totals $80,000 for 20 years, the duration of any patent.
That is presumably far less than patent litigation would cost to defend yourself against that patent.
So, regardless if the patent is valid or not, you're better off paying up.
Wonderful system, eh?
But guess who was the inventor listed on the new patents, and who received royalties for every license granted? And who signed off on the application?
.. but it's also quite possible that he was just going along with helping his employer try to secure a source of income.
Well, given that it was an extension-type patent, he'd pretty much have to.
Point is, there is quite a bit of pressure from universities to get their staff to patent whatever they can.
The question is, would he have tried to file this extension patent on his own without pressure from his employer. Sure, maybe he's a greedy S.O.B.
IMHO, terrorists cause disruption.
In a nutshell, this is where I disagree. Terrorists do not seek disruption for its own sake, they want to spread fear. They want to make themselves known and heard.
Killing innocent people does that better than being disruptive. How many people were personally affected by the tragedy of 9/11? Contrast that to the fear it generated. It sent shockwaves through the entire world.
No power outage could've had that effect, IMHO.
Yes it's the same Axel.
No, it doesn't have much to do with what he's getting the prize.
And I'm not certain these 'sleazly practices' necessarily have anything to do with him directly either.
He got a patent for a valid discovery. (noone is questioning the original patent)
Columbia made a lot of money off it. So much money that they apparently tried to re-patent the same discovery.
I'd say it's more likely a greedy Columbia board of trustees than him personally.
But anyway, it's still not very relevant.
While that is a good example, my answer to that would be that the Sendero Luminoso is/was more of a guerilla movement.
(Of course, one man's guerrilla is another's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.)
But, if you define them by their tactics. I would lean towards calling them both a guerilla and terrorists.
It's not a mutually exclusive thing, and in this case it suits with their goal, which was not to terrify the people of Peru as much as to 'invade the country' (to refer to the grandfather post), or rather in this case, take power over the country.
Al-Quaida does not want to take over the USA. They are not waging a guerilla war. I don't really see how it would make sense for them to do so.
Why is this necessary?
Can someone give an example of terrorists striking the phone system? Anywhere, ever?
(Need I remind people that terrorism isn't new or unique to the US.. )
Is there any indication that Al-Quaida even wants this information?
This is just ridiculous to the extreme, no matter how you look at it. Just to play devil's advocate, I'll go along with the fact that the US is engaged in a 'War on terror'.
Is this 'war on terror' a conventional war?
Is the goal of Al-Quaida (or whatever terror group you want) to disable the US military and its supporting infrastructure through strategic attacks? Why? Do they plan to invade?
Hell, no. The goal of terrorist organizations is to create terror. That is best done through spectacular things like hijackings, bombings and the slaughter of civilians.
Terrorists kill people. They don't bomb bridges, bust dams and destroy communications networks. They kill people, as many and as violently and as publicly as possible. The purpose is to create fear and publicitity. Actual military-strategic damage is far less important.
So why can't we know when our phone systems are down? Why are bridges being guarded? Why are people being harassed for photographing locks?
The USA has managed to inflict more fear on itself than Osama ever could.
[/rant]
That page assumes a 0 dose equals 0 risk philosphy, which is incorrect.
Why? You haven't explained why this should be the case. Making analogies to completely different things is just silly.
Fact:
A single photon of (UV or gamma) radiation can cause cancer. The chemical processes involved, such as the formation of thymine dimers, are well understood.
Fact:
Radiation dosage is the number of photons per unit of time and unit of body mass.
It is quite reasonable to believe that radiation dose is proportional to cancer risk.
Radiation hormesis is not accepted as fact. In fact, there are a good number of people which consider it to be psuedoscience.
And there is signficant evidence to the contrary, both summaries from respectable sources (National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the National Research Council's Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation)
So, if you want to believe this Luckey guy, go do so. But most experts in the field do not - and I'm listening to them.
Molecules with different isotopic compositions are not identicial. They are chemically very, very similar, but not identical.
And no, the background radiation does not cause cancer, or at least it doesn't at the current dose you're getting.
The background radiation does cause cancer.
the answer is that while we can make O3 in the lab, it has properties that distinguish it from natural ozone, which cause it to fall back into the lower atmosphere where it's of little to no use.
No it doesn't. Ozone is ozone. It's a simple molecule. O3.. three oxygen atoms. If it's got three oxygen atoms, it's ozone. There no difference. Identical molecules are not distinguishable. They have no difference in properties.
You are drawing ridiculous conclusions from the facts here. The facts are that there is ground-near ozone, which is produced by car exhausts and the like, don't make it up to the top of the stratosphere, because ozone is a very reactive molecule (it forms radicals easily).
Since it's very reactive, this also means it's toxic, which means ground-near ozone is an environmental problem in itself.
The ozone at the top of the atmosphere is a different story, it's being produced there by UV radiation causing the oxygen atoms to break apart and reform as ozone molecules.
Nobody ever proposed such a thing.
First, if you're going to be a smart-ass perhaps you should get your facts right. Volcanos don't spew CFCs. They spew other chemicals (mostly sulphur compounds) which destroy the ozone layer.
You're argumenting that since volcanos damage the ozone layer, it's OK if we humans contribute further to the destruction.
That's stupid. We can't do anything about the former, we can certainly do something about the latter. Why shouldn't we? UV radiation has been an increasing problem in the polar regions.
I live in Sweden. The skin cancer rate here has tripled since the 50's.
By the same rationale, we shouldn't bother about nuclear waste either. After all, there's natural background radiation out there which causes cancer too.
Poor Grant, even after death, has become quiet the specimen. Poor guy. Can't we let him RIP?
Not until I figure out where they buried him!
Reading the article.. I think the reference to the fact that 5mW laser pointers can be dangerous is quite misleading.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such a laser was used in this case. (And it does seem rather unlikely)
The article mentions that there have been incidents in the past with aviation and laser shows. The wattage of those lasers is a completely different story.
So it's an old problem with a new post-9/11-paranoic "it could be a terrorist tool!" spin to it.
No matter how good Gnome and KDE have gotten, if the .net and JAVA software is lacking (Mono is not nearly complete, and is exactly fighting this catch-up game, JAVA is a nifty SUN Trap)
Between gcj, Kaffe, JamVM, SableVM, all driven by the GNU Classpath library, experimental stuff like Jnode, and the massive wealth of Java code in projects like Eclipse and those driven by the Apache Foundation..
I'd say that Free java is alive and kicking. Yeah, it still hasn't become usable with respect to AWT/Swing. But most of the core is there, even up to some 1.4 stuff. (and work on 1.5 features is underway)
I don't buy the "catch-up game" argument. Most people don't write programs for the absolute latest and greatest. Platforms tend to reach a certain level of maturity which is 'good enough' for most people, and then it slows down. I think that soon enough, the free Java implementations will be able to compete with Sun's.
For example, how many compilers can you name which fully implement the C99 standard?
Everything is a catch-up game... it's just a question of what the game looks like. MS can arbitrarily change things in the Word file format just to screw with people. APIs don't work that way though, you don't change an API unless you have to.
Well.. I certainly agree public education should be better.
But I'm not sure it should really matter when it comes to liability.
For example- Should a auto maker be liable for accidents caused by unlicensed drivers?
It's the responsibility of society (IMHO) to provide people with this basic knowledge. It's not the responsibility of the people making products which require 'common sense' to use. So it shouldn't be their liability either.
or are brought to market for something different than their original purposes
It's worth pointing out, though, that each use of a drug is a separate patent. It's not the compound itself that gets patented.
They are not farces in that the ultimate stakes are very, very high.
(not the previous respondent)
This is only if you assume that SCO ever had a snowball's chance of winning, which is something they never ever had. Maybe in the view of the press, but not in reality.
In reality, this is just yet another frivolous lawsuit which happens to have managed to generate an unusual amount of FUD. Apart from that, it has zero signficicance.
No laws are going to be changed just becase of the SCO cases. Come back in a year or two when it's all over and don't say I didn't tell you so.
But what about non-blood relationships?*
Although I don't think a DNA scan would be necessary.. AFAIK the Basarab family (that of Vlad III) is not extinct.
Although the Basarab name alone is not distinctive. Moldova, which was once part of Wallachia, was named 'Basarabia' (after the family) when it was a Russian province, so there are people originating from there named 'Basarab' too.
(*An ancestor of mine (Mátyus Maróti, 1446-1476) was a brother-in-law to Vlad III.)
There was a 30-year study that found that for every person whose life was saved by the FDA, between 65 and 360 people died prematurely because new lifesaving drugs were still waiting for FDA approval.
Well that's just complete nonsense.
Do you know how many drugs make it through FDA testing? (And that's out of thousands and thousands of candidates which the drug companies weed out themselves?)
About 17% of all drugs which apply to do human studies eventually make it to market. (and again, that's a very small fraction of the candidates)
That means that 83% of drug candidates are eliminated by FDA testing. Eighty-three procent that either don't work, or give dangerous side-effects or are downright toxic.
And you talk about cherry-picking studies?!
Obviously you don't know the level of supervision the FDA has either. Every Single Thing is monitored by them. And not just during approval. They do random inspections of production plants around the world. Any place which makes drugs targeted at the US market.
Following the European system? The European system is a joke. (And I live in Europe and I have a good knowledge of the systems here.) Ask anyone in the pharma industry. They approve everything the FDA approves. That's it. All the pharma companies are completely commited to FDA regulations. The rest of the world is equal or more lax.
Besides that, the approval time has been going down for years.
What about time to market + 2 years up to a maximum pf 10 (maybe 15 if pharmaceuticals really take that long).
You have to consider that pharmaceuticals (and anything) are patented at the conceptual stage. For a pharmaceutical, that means further development, and then development of a synthesis method and manufacturing procedure, and then loads of tests and finally leading up to clinical tests and FDA approval.
Typically, a drug has about 5 years on the market now to recoup it's costs before the patent runs out. So what you're suggesting is actually more generous than the system today.
>I'd say exempli gratia Shamil Basayev is islamist enough.
Yes. He's an islamist. Still, I don't think it's fair to imply that everyone in Abkhazia supports him just because they're muslims.
Because liability should be limited to common sense and reason.
It's not reasonable someone should be held liable for every concievable damage caused by their product or actions. At some point you must assume "people know better than that".
This line of thinking is embodied in the law. However, a lot of people (myself included) feel that the large number (huge actually, in an international context) of liability lawsuits in the USA have established a body of case law which has 'dumbed down' this level of "common sense" to unreasonable extents.