I work in a nanotube lab. We don't use any of the methods developed at NEC. As you said, you don't know the details of this patent, so it seems reasonable. Well, allow me to enlighten you.
They did not invent a new material. They turned on their microscope and found it. Nanotubes are simply a stable phase of carbon. They went through the trouble of trying to grow them, but if they hadn't they still would have found them, because the microscope stage they were using comes covered in them. You can't have any form of amorphous carbon (i.e. coal) without having some nanotubes.
So, they can patent the use of ANY carbon nanotube, in ANY device?
There is a patent for nanotubes as wires, and one for using nanotubes as semiconductors. These are basic facts of physics, provable in a couple of pages of work, not the result of experimentation or laboratory prowess. Are companies allowed to patent "silicon is a semiconductor" or "copper is a conductor"?
Sure, these companies could patent a specific growth technique. In a few months, there will be a dozen papers on how to do it better. Some people can do this stuff better than they can. There are a lot of hard working, smart people in this field who don't want to work for the NECs or IBMs. Rather than compete, the large labs leverage bogus patents to use OUR inventions for free.
No one has a patent on diamond or even things like superfluid helium, to have a patent on a specific phase of an element is absurd!
If there was life on Mars, which is now gone, it will be of critical importance to us as a race to know why it's not there anymore. Not only for how we use Earth, but how we use other planets we may come across in the future.
If there is life, which is still there now, it provides us with another model on the nanometer scale of working machines. Most of our nanoscience is going to be based on how life works on Earth. Perhaps we're not the best model for that though. Perhaps we could figure out new ways of doing things on the molecular scale if we just had a different point of view.
Then again, maybe there is only one way of doing things, and our attempts to artificially mimic biological processes (charge separation, chemical sensing, catalysis) are misguided.
In any case, it would be nice to know.
As a general rule, when scientests say things, we're not just saying them... because. We have very good reasons for not wanting to contaminate Mars. Politics be damned, it's for scientific reasons we want it pristine.
LOTR won for best score, AND best song. It was actually two different categories.
On the other hand, I really didn't love any of the songs nominated for best song. They were all ok.
For improvisation, the song from "The Triplets of Bellville" was very uninteresting. I mean, my marching band in high school did that "found art" thing, and I think we did it with more depth. Maybe the performance of it at the Oscars was just bad, I'll have to see the movie.
If it turns out that we actually need defect free tubes to make this kind of thing, then yeah, it will never get done. You make a good point, that creating a single crystal of ANYTHING that large is virtually impossible, and that with carbon, it's especially hard. My point is just that if we can do it with some reasonable number of defects, I don't think we're as far off as we seemed a year ago.
I'm not saying it's around the corner, but it seems to me, if it's going to be possible, we'll see in perhaps in the next 20 years.
Every stage of major social advancement throughout history has come as a result of increasing opportunity.
Were it not for exploration and technological advancement, we would almost certainly still be living as serfs to some fuedal lord.
When the US was founded as a large republic, many people thought it would never make it. The success of representative government has improved the lot of many people, and arguably, the poor of the entire world.
Now, we are all at a standstill. There is no place for people to go who seek to try something new. There are no experimental governments anymore, and there are no nation-wide experimental social systems. Individuals or small groups fight to improve the world, but there's nothing to be done against the inertia of the status quo. Things will improve, but slowly.
Space offers that opportunity we need. Naive people see space as a playground for the rich. If we're going to have a playground, we're going to need to build it. The first people who will go permanantly up in a space elevator will be construction workers and engineers.
When you take into account the resources available, and what it means for an end to mining and power production on earth, you have a pretty powerfull vision.
It's remarkably short sighted to argue against taking ALL of humanity a step foward because we're not all on equal footing. We NEED to take this step foward, DESPERATELY, in order to help solve poverty, exploitation and many other ills in the world.
I'm a physicist, and I work with carbon nanotubes. In October's Macromolecules, there was a paper put out called "Phase Behavior and Rheology of SWNTs in Superacids". It was done by a huge group of people (for a nanotech paper), including Nobel winner Richard Smalley. A press release about it was posted here somewhere.
To make a long story short: They did it.
By finding a way to dissolve nanotubes, then slowly concentrating the solutions, they formed a liquid crystal of nanotubes. By extruding this through a syringe, they formed an aligned, macroscopic, nanotube rope.
I've seen this stuff... somewhere, and it looks just like black string.
What's left? They used tubes grown by high pressure carbon monoxide, which leads to a lot of defects. If they switch to methane, the defects will largely be gone, but the yeild drops.
They probably need to chemically connect the tubes. You can do that with an electron beam, but that would be a pain industrially. I'm sure there's a way around it.
I'm sure that same group of people has already figured out many more problems and solutions than I can think of. I havn't seen anything out about the mechanical properties of these ropes yet, but I would expect something within a few months, and I would be surprised if it wasn't amazing.
I used to be a skeptic when it came to a space elevator, but now...
If you feel you're a methodical-minded person, who wants to do something cool, but you don't like coding, there's always plain old non-computer science.
Try something like chemisty (or biology), even in physical chemistry, you don't really do any programming, but you get to use some of the most cutting edge tools out there.
If you don't mind some minor coding (think graphical, like LabView) then experimental physics would be good. While many people in physics do a LOT of programming, there are also a lot of people who don't do very much at all.
I think there are too many people out there who feel that just because they are good with a computer, it means they have to go into CS. There are plenty of ways you can further science and technology without doing CS, and still be a very self respecting geek.
Think of it this way, I don't do CS, I don't program very much. I've never used registers, or written a driver, but when I tell my CS friends I'm working on experimental nanotechnology, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Did they even notice that they started off the GTA series with GTA III?
How hard is it to think to yourself: "gee, I wonder if there was a GTA one or two?"
Given all the other games you can vote for, I would like to see GTA one and two in the catagory devoted to the GTA SERIES! Personally (though I realize I'm in the minority) I would have voted for GTA 1.
No, I actually read the Communist Manifesto, and the "killing everyone" kind of communism is what I found there. Engels was all about workers righs, but it was corrupted by Marx into violence.
What most Americans don't know is that the first communist experiments were in the US. We have a long history of "utopian communism".
What about the popular "organic" label. There are a whole lof of pesticides, medicines, preservatives and the like which were developed in the way you mentioned. Evidently, some people don't like or understand that.
You know, an even easier solution is to take down battlenet, then they wouldn't have to deal with any of these types of problems. They might lose players that way too, but they're losing players right now with the way things are.
Removing random player matching takes away one of the the great features of the game. Think about what you're saying. Some people are jerks, so the rest of us should not be able to do something we like to accomodate them. Cooperative play with a random partner is a great idea, provided both people are interested in playing the game.
If this were an ideal world, people would say beforehand if they were interested in actually playing and you could filter theses guys out that way. This being the real world, however, Blizzard is doing the only reasonable thing which is to say that people not wanting to play, can't.
For those of you who didn't read to the bottom of the article, the guy who is supposed to have done this has said:
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule. Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
These were not password protected files, they were on a network available to any members of the Judiciary committee. When the Republican's first learned of this (both sides were affected by the mistake) they fixed their files and told the Democrats to do the same. When they didn't, they took advantage of it.
It was unethical, but the only worse thing in politics is to be incompetent. Think for a minute now, if these had been paper documents which had been left alone in a place where any Senator could get to them, there would be no story here except that the Dems screwed up.
You're giving the reasons the politicians did those things.
But, why did the Russians go? Why did it even occur to us to go in the first place. For all the intelligent people here, I'm amazes at the complete lack of understanding of the scientific progress.
We (as in scientests) went to space, as we do ALL science, because we can. To get funding we might give other reasons, but what drives the scientests and engineers is the challenge, and possibility of understanding more about the universe and ourselves. Who cares it's usefull right now? Who cares if it might not work? Who cares what the politicians think?
From the scientest's point of view, the rest of the world is here to support me. We have all this government and industry so that the equipment I need is available, and the conditions are amenable to research.
The question of why to go to mars is the same as why we are here as a race. Do we have a purpose, and what might it be? If our future is to sit around in this little rock and argue with eachother for the next few million years, that's fine, but I sure as hell am going to do everything I can to change that.
as far as functional genetics goes, this seems reasonable. All they want it to do is add and subtract bits of DNA and see what comes out.
This is evidently a common approach in biology. It would probably work for some types of chemistry as well, but this type of robot would not work well in physics. I would enjoy having a robot to solder all my leads for me, but most of what I do is non-repetitive and requires creative thinking constantly. (Besides, we have undergraduates for the repetitive tasks, they're probably cheaper than a robot as well.)
I personally don't know about CS research, but as far as nanotechnology goes, I know that most of the funding comes from the military. The "holy grail" for a research professor is a five year multi-million dollar DARPA grant.
They put the most money out there, so more people do research for them. In many cases, I don't think military policy determines what is researched. There are many of these great grants which go unclaimed. Usually I think a professor will try and get a grant offer written to match his or her research. A lot of reserach has obvious military applications, even if it's as mundane as improving field ration shelf life. The military will still fund it if you can write the proper grant proposal.
The Supreme court already has decided where the line between free speech and controllable behavior is, and it comes when you start throwing money around. Raising money for a cause is not totally free speech. This is why we are able to have campaign finance laws.
In case you havn't been paying attention for the last two years, the US has been shutting down groups who raise money for terrorists left and right.
I used an optical ballot last time I voted (the California recall), and it was actually really nice. You marked directly on a list of candidates, so there was no question who you were voting for. The ballot was shaped kind of like the SAT scantron booklets, but instead of rows of numers and boxes, there were columns of candidates and boxes with instructions at the top. Very intuitive and easy to use.
When it comes to touch screen voting, if it is difficult or impossible for the voter to determine if their vote was counted correctly, it is entirely the fault of the system!
It must be EASY to check to see if everything worked well.
There are bad laws out there, and this is one of them.
In theory, it's nice, but the problem comes when you have to determine the intent of the voter. Who decides what the intent of the voter was? Without the voter there to direct the election officials, the ONLY thing they have is the ballot. Perhaps the voter decided not to vote for anyone. What is the difference to an election official between a blank ballot cast on purpose and a blank ballot cast on accident?
There is a means of communicating the intent of the voter, and it is the ballot. This touch screen problem shows this perfectly. A GOOD voter, who follows the instructions of the election officials, will ALWAYS check their paper ballot to make sure the correct vote has been recorded. A properly designed ballot and election system will make that easy to do.
Once you start talking about decoding the intent of the voter from a ballot which was incorrectly marked, you get into a grey area. Which is worse, unfairly giving votes to someone, or taking votes away from someone because their voters didn't follow instructions?
Slashdot Mirror
Right.
They are the only material we know of that could be used to build a space elevator.
I work in a nanotube lab. We don't use any of the methods developed at NEC. As you said, you don't know the details of this patent, so it seems reasonable. Well, allow me to enlighten you.
They did not invent a new material. They turned on their microscope and found it. Nanotubes are simply a stable phase of carbon. They went through the trouble of trying to grow them, but if they hadn't they still would have found them, because the microscope stage they were using comes covered in them. You can't have any form of amorphous carbon (i.e. coal) without having some nanotubes.
So, they can patent the use of ANY carbon nanotube, in ANY device?
There is a patent for nanotubes as wires, and one for using nanotubes as semiconductors. These are basic facts of physics, provable in a couple of pages of work, not the result of experimentation or laboratory prowess. Are companies allowed to patent "silicon is a semiconductor" or "copper is a conductor"?
Sure, these companies could patent a specific growth technique. In a few months, there will be a dozen papers on how to do it better. Some people can do this stuff better than they can. There are a lot of hard working, smart people in this field who don't want to work for the NECs or IBMs. Rather than compete, the large labs leverage bogus patents to use OUR inventions for free.
No one has a patent on diamond or even things like superfluid helium, to have a patent on a specific phase of an element is absurd!
It's called a coin flip for a reason.
As long as the coin flips, you don't have this problem!
Any idiot can tell you that if you don't flip the coin, it's going to be biased.
If there was life on Mars, which is now gone, it will be of critical importance to us as a race to know why it's not there anymore. Not only for how we use Earth, but how we use other planets we may come across in the future.
If there is life, which is still there now, it provides us with another model on the nanometer scale of working machines. Most of our nanoscience is going to be based on how life works on Earth. Perhaps we're not the best model for that though. Perhaps we could figure out new ways of doing things on the molecular scale if we just had a different point of view.
Then again, maybe there is only one way of doing things, and our attempts to artificially mimic biological processes (charge separation, chemical sensing, catalysis) are misguided.
In any case, it would be nice to know.
As a general rule, when scientests say things, we're not just saying them... because. We have very good reasons for not wanting to contaminate Mars. Politics be damned, it's for scientific reasons we want it pristine.
LOTR won for best score, AND best song. It was actually two different categories.
On the other hand, I really didn't love any of the songs nominated for best song. They were all ok.
For improvisation, the song from "The Triplets of Bellville" was very uninteresting. I mean, my marching band in high school did that "found art" thing, and I think we did it with more depth. Maybe the performance of it at the Oscars was just bad, I'll have to see the movie.
I concede.
If it turns out that we actually need defect free tubes to make this kind of thing, then yeah, it will never get done. You make a good point, that creating a single crystal of ANYTHING that large is virtually impossible, and that with carbon, it's especially hard. My point is just that if we can do it with some reasonable number of defects, I don't think we're as far off as we seemed a year ago.
I'm not saying it's around the corner, but it seems to me, if it's going to be possible, we'll see in perhaps in the next 20 years.
Every stage of major social advancement throughout history has come as a result of increasing opportunity.
Were it not for exploration and technological advancement, we would almost certainly still be living as serfs to some fuedal lord.
When the US was founded as a large republic, many people thought it would never make it. The success of representative government has improved the lot of many people, and arguably, the poor of the entire world.
Now, we are all at a standstill. There is no place for people to go who seek to try something new. There are no experimental governments anymore, and there are no nation-wide experimental social systems. Individuals or small groups fight to improve the world, but there's nothing to be done against the inertia of the status quo. Things will improve, but slowly.
Space offers that opportunity we need. Naive people see space as a playground for the rich. If we're going to have a playground, we're going to need to build it. The first people who will go permanantly up in a space elevator will be construction workers and engineers.
When you take into account the resources available, and what it means for an end to mining and power production on earth, you have a pretty powerfull vision.
It's remarkably short sighted to argue against taking ALL of humanity a step foward because we're not all on equal footing. We NEED to take this step foward, DESPERATELY, in order to help solve poverty, exploitation and many other ills in the world.
I'm a physicist, and I work with carbon nanotubes. In October's Macromolecules, there was a paper put out called "Phase Behavior and Rheology of SWNTs in Superacids". It was done by a huge group of people (for a nanotech paper), including Nobel winner Richard Smalley. A press release about it was posted here somewhere.
To make a long story short:
They did it.
By finding a way to dissolve nanotubes, then slowly concentrating the solutions, they formed a liquid crystal of nanotubes. By extruding this through a syringe, they formed an aligned, macroscopic, nanotube rope.
I've seen this stuff... somewhere, and it looks just like black string.
What's left?
They used tubes grown by high pressure carbon monoxide, which leads to a lot of defects. If they switch to methane, the defects will largely be gone, but the yeild drops.
They probably need to chemically connect the tubes. You can do that with an electron beam, but that would be a pain industrially. I'm sure there's a way around it.
I'm sure that same group of people has already figured out many more problems and solutions than I can think of. I havn't seen anything out about the mechanical properties of these ropes yet, but I would expect something within a few months, and I would be surprised if it wasn't amazing.
I used to be a skeptic when it came to a space elevator, but now...
If you feel you're a methodical-minded person, who wants to do something cool, but you don't like coding, there's always plain old non-computer science.
Try something like chemisty (or biology), even in physical chemistry, you don't really do any programming, but you get to use some of the most cutting edge tools out there.
If you don't mind some minor coding (think graphical, like LabView) then experimental physics would be good. While many people in physics do a LOT of programming, there are also a lot of people who don't do very much at all.
I think there are too many people out there who feel that just because they are good with a computer, it means they have to go into CS. There are plenty of ways you can further science and technology without doing CS, and still be a very self respecting geek.
Think of it this way, I don't do CS, I don't program very much. I've never used registers, or written a driver, but when I tell my CS friends I'm working on experimental nanotechnology, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Did they even notice that they started off the GTA series with GTA III?
How hard is it to think to yourself: "gee, I wonder if there was a GTA one or two?"
Given all the other games you can vote for, I would like to see GTA one and two in the catagory devoted to the GTA SERIES! Personally (though I realize I'm in the minority) I would have voted for GTA 1.
I guess it depends on how far back you want to go, and what you define as communist.
I was referring to specifically, the "utopian" communes which were set up in the midwest US prior to the modern communist movement.
Did that start in France? I could be wrong. I do know I prefer that brand of communism to what came later.
No, I actually read the Communist Manifesto, and the "killing everyone" kind of communism is what I found there. Engels was all about workers righs, but it was corrupted by Marx into violence.
What most Americans don't know is that the first communist experiments were in the US. We have a long history of "utopian communism".
Explain to me how that is not physics.
Bio-mechanics. Sounds like physics to me.
No you can't.
What about the popular "organic" label. There are a whole lof of pesticides, medicines, preservatives and the like which were developed in the way you mentioned. Evidently, some people don't like or understand that.
You know, an even easier solution is to take down battlenet, then they wouldn't have to deal with any of these types of problems. They might lose players that way too, but they're losing players right now with the way things are.
Removing random player matching takes away one of the the great features of the game. Think about what you're saying. Some people are jerks, so the rest of us should not be able to do something we like to accomodate them. Cooperative play with a random partner is a great idea, provided both people are interested in playing the game.
If this were an ideal world, people would say beforehand if they were interested in actually playing and you could filter theses guys out that way. This being the real world, however, Blizzard is doing the only reasonable thing which is to say that people not wanting to play, can't.
For those of you who didn't read to the bottom of the article, the guy who is supposed to have done this has said:
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule. Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
These were not password protected files, they were on a network available to any members of the Judiciary committee. When the Republican's first learned of this (both sides were affected by the mistake) they fixed their files and told the Democrats to do the same. When they didn't, they took advantage of it.
It was unethical, but the only worse thing in politics is to be incompetent. Think for a minute now, if these had been paper documents which had been left alone in a place where any Senator could get to them, there would be no story here except that the Dems screwed up.
You're giving the reasons the politicians did those things.
But, why did the Russians go? Why did it even occur to us to go in the first place. For all the intelligent people here, I'm amazes at the complete lack of understanding of the scientific progress.
We (as in scientests) went to space, as we do ALL science, because we can. To get funding we might give other reasons, but what drives the scientests and engineers is the challenge, and possibility of understanding more about the universe and ourselves. Who cares it's usefull right now? Who cares if it might not work? Who cares what the politicians think?
From the scientest's point of view, the rest of the world is here to support me. We have all this government and industry so that the equipment I need is available, and the conditions are amenable to research.
The question of why to go to mars is the same as why we are here as a race. Do we have a purpose, and what might it be? If our future is to sit around in this little rock and argue with eachother for the next few million years, that's fine, but I sure as hell am going to do everything I can to change that.
as far as functional genetics goes, this seems reasonable. All they want it to do is add and subtract bits of DNA and see what comes out.
This is evidently a common approach in biology. It would probably work for some types of chemistry as well, but this type of robot would not work well in physics. I would enjoy having a robot to solder all my leads for me, but most of what I do is non-repetitive and requires creative thinking constantly. (Besides, we have undergraduates for the repetitive tasks, they're probably cheaper than a robot as well.)
I personally don't know about CS research, but as far as nanotechnology goes, I know that most of the funding comes from the military. The "holy grail" for a research professor is a five year multi-million dollar DARPA grant.
They put the most money out there, so more people do research for them. In many cases, I don't think military policy determines what is researched. There are many of these great grants which go unclaimed. Usually I think a professor will try and get a grant offer written to match his or her research. A lot of reserach has obvious military applications, even if it's as mundane as improving field ration shelf life. The military will still fund it if you can write the proper grant proposal.
5.6
exactly
The Supreme court already has decided where the line between free speech and controllable behavior is, and it comes when you start throwing money around. Raising money for a cause is not totally free speech. This is why we are able to have campaign finance laws.
In case you havn't been paying attention for the last two years, the US has been shutting down groups who raise money for terrorists left and right.
That's the point, they're not properly designed.
I used an optical ballot last time I voted (the California recall), and it was actually really nice. You marked directly on a list of candidates, so there was no question who you were voting for. The ballot was shaped kind of like the SAT scantron booklets, but instead of rows of numers and boxes, there were columns of candidates and boxes with instructions at the top. Very intuitive and easy to use.
Oh, I agree with you completely on that.
When it comes to touch screen voting, if it is difficult or impossible for the voter to determine if their vote was counted correctly, it is entirely the fault of the system!
It must be EASY to check to see if everything worked well.
There are bad laws out there, and this is one of them.
In theory, it's nice, but the problem comes when you have to determine the intent of the voter. Who decides what the intent of the voter was? Without the voter there to direct the election officials, the ONLY thing they have is the ballot. Perhaps the voter decided not to vote for anyone. What is the difference to an election official between a blank ballot cast on purpose and a blank ballot cast on accident?
There is a means of communicating the intent of the voter, and it is the ballot. This touch screen problem shows this perfectly. A GOOD voter, who follows the instructions of the election officials, will ALWAYS check their paper ballot to make sure the correct vote has been recorded. A properly designed ballot and election system will make that easy to do.
Once you start talking about decoding the intent of the voter from a ballot which was incorrectly marked, you get into a grey area. Which is worse, unfairly giving votes to someone, or taking votes away from someone because their voters didn't follow instructions?