Old(er) geeks must think alike.
My immediate thought was, call the charity and ask some questions.
My limited experience has been that at least some of the answers will be surprising.
Correct. And this article is old news. Quantum announced their acquisition of the rights in this general area a bit over a year ago. Development of the resource will be tricky; for example, disposing of tailings from mining and milling so that neither surface nor ground water is contaminated will be a challenge.
I'm not a lawyer either, but have been through this.
As others have pointed out, patents have a finite life but copyright is basically forever.
If it gets to court,
the only legally safe approach is a standard clean room implementation:
one person/group read the copyrighted code and wrote a spec,
a non-overlapping person/group wrote all new code from that spec.
Be prepared to show your version control history to the court to demonstrate that you started from scratch,
and explain to the court the process you used to limit communication between the two teams to the spec itself.
Can I produce a printed circuit board this way?
Full meaning traces, plated-through holes, solder mask, silkscreen printing.
Doesn't have to be particularly rugged; FR-4 is overkill in terms of strength for most people.
If you could keep such a machine busy, how expensive would the results be?
Just wondering about the business opportunity;
sending designs for simple one-offs to China for fabrication
through a consolidation service like BatchPCB has always seemed extravagant in some fashion.
I also think of cable conduit (Exactly to length and shape of room)
At least today—
who knows about the future, maybe a continuous rather than batch process will be available—
the size of objects is pretty limited.
You might have to settle for snap-together pieces with the last piece being
exactly the 7.468" length that you need.
And forget manufacturing metal spoons unless you're willing to invest in blocks of stainless steel and a plasma cutter.
Direct metal laser sintering machines are already in commercial use (article with pictures of produced items here) that could manufacture metal spoons. Current metals in use include stainless and maraging steel, and titanium alloys. In theory, almost any alloy could be used. I have to believe that machines built around 200-watt lasers, and properly prepared stainless steel powder, are beyond the budget of most hobbyists who would be interested in making spoons:^)
With no disrespect, does the observation of this very short-lived particle take us anywhere useful? Cleaner fission? Fusion? New nano materials that would change our lives? Speaking practically, we can't afford to fund every particle physics experiment that researchers can think of. Why was this a good one to have funded?
At least arguably, the golden age(s) of private sector research all required government-granted monopolies (at least in the form of critical patents) to generate the necessary revenue streams: Edison, AT&T's Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Labs, Xerox PARC. Critical research in the aerospace industry was funded by the military. Some will argue that even large-scale integrated circuits would have gone nowhere without government funding (personally, I disagree with that one). Many of these operated with what was pretty much a swinging door between the private research labs and positions in academia.
Notice that even today, the firms that are funding large amounts of research -- Intel and Microsoft, for example -- are so large that they are, or have been, under investigation for antitrust violations.
I'm a five-digit guy.
On balance, Slashdot is still worth scanning.
The frequency of worthless articles like this one is certainly no worse than most other news aggregation sites.
Ummm...I don't have a black asphalt roof on my home in Mesa, AZ. I have clay tiles.
IIRC, one of the reasons that traditional clay tile roofs have been around so long, particularly in warm climates, is that there is a continuous flow of air between the tiles and the underlayment due to natural convection. The tiles may get quite hot, but the air flow keeps most of that heat from reaching the rest of the building.
I think it costs more to cool down than to heat up...
Lots of considerations go into that question.
What kind of climate is involved?
Very different answers for New York City and Houston.
Different answers for inner city versus outer suburb, based on the "heat island" effect.
Different answers if the weather pattern is sunshine in the summer and cloudy in the winter, or vice versa.
Also depends on the technology that get's used for heating or cooling.
An old oil-fired furnace in a climate zone with cold winters is going to make for expensive heating.
A high-efficiency heat pump in Seattle or Portland with cheap hydro power is going to do the necessary heating
for a lot less money.
The big thing about the white roofs in an inner city
where the "investment" is basically a coat of white paint
is that the materials are cheap and
no skilled labor is involved.
Have you purchased a house? Did you do so without looking at the neighborhood it's a part of? Didn't consider sight lines both to and from the neighbors' houses? Generally speaking, a "peculiar" house will drive down the price of the houses nearby. "Flushed... down the toilet" in the GP post is probably an exaggeration, but there will be an effect.
The US has three synchronized reliability areas: east, west, and Texas. Very few towns, even those with their own power plant, would not be connected to one of those. Starting in the 1930s, the REA (now RUS) spent a lot of money extending the grid into even remote areas.
Yeah, the best-run large company I worked for was run by a business PhD who had spent some years working his way up through management at another large firm before winding up as our CEO. The business didn't develop new technology, but the services we sold were highly dependent on technology development. I was on the staff as a tech analyst: what's possible, what's not, is the pure tech company that's selling us gear blowing smoke, etc.
The really amazing thing about him was that he got the different organizations to not only talk to each other, but to work together. Our tech organization would get calls from the MBA types, asking for someone to come to meetings to provide an informed tech opinion (and they listened!). We had good relationships with marketing so we could talk to them about the problems that might be encountered if we rolled new tech into the field. Billing and customer service types were brought in at the beginning of a project, rather than as an afterthought.
We weren't the biggest business in our field, so eventually we got bought by one of the bigger firms. Who immediately started building walls between the organizations.
Indeed.
Most commonly used stuff from my wallet, in rough order of frequency:
debit card, which is their point, but less in total than the other things;
grocery store "membership" card, or whatever you want to call that;
rec center card;
library cards, one for the local public library, one for university research library;
blood donor card;
driver's license;
health insurance card;
cash goes in there somewhere, but I'm not sure just where.
While the most common use for my wallet is small payments,
the most important use is to establish identity
for various organizations.
If PayPal really wants to replace my wallet,
identity verification is the service that they really need to add.
Yes.
If nuclear is going to be part of the long-term solution, then thermal neutrons have to go.
Fast neutron reactors that can burn everything except the short-lived fission products,
and that can do breed-and-burn of the million tons of depleted uranium the US and Russia have in storage,
are critical (no pun intended).
With my cynic hat on,
I note that Bill Gates has funded design and simulation studies of one such fast-neutron reactor,
and would probably like the government to fund the first working model built from the design
rather than paying for it himself.
I know people have demonstrated magnetic domain nand and nor gates, which is theoretically sufficient to build anything. Has anyone demonstrated more complex devices? A synchronous shift register? An adder? Something that demonstrates that linking many gates together is viable?
Fabrication, or the actual design? For fab, and if you have the time, Batch PCB does boards for $2.50 per square inch plus a $10 set-up fee. I did a couple of small simple boards through them earlier this year. Once I passed the automated design rule checks (easy for simple boards), 17-21 days from submission to finished boards in my hands. Production is in China, but the quality was more than good enough for my needs. In both cases, I ordered two copies and received four. Apparently there is some duplication as things are panelized and produced, and they send along the extra copies rather than discarding them. No testing, but all of the boards I received worked.
They use Gold Phoenix for the actual production. If you need enough copies to fill, or even mostly fill, 100 or 150 square inches, it's cheaper to deal with Gold Phoenix directly. Other people have suggested DorkbotPDX; their prices may end up cheaper, but it appears to take Dorkbot a long time to fill up a panel; BatchPCB seems to fill a panel every couple of days.
Short of locking him up, how is the state going to stop him from committing suicide? Everything you need for a quick painless death is available from your local well-stocked welding supply shop: a small tank of dry nitrogen, regulator, tubing, and breathing mask. Set it up so the mask is at a slight overpressure and you're in business: pass out after 30-60 seconds, heart stops beating with no chance of restarting after 10-12 minutes. Total cost probably less than £100.
How effective is it? One of the reasons that Halon fire suppression systems were banned was that leaks resulted in odorless Halon pooling under raised floors, and techs working on the cabling passing out and suffocating when they stuck their head down into the pool. The Russian Navy still uses it in submarines; in 2008, 20 people died when the fire suppression system was accidentally activated (the article contains an error; the Russian Navy subsequently issued a clarification that the gas involved was Halon, not freon).
I pulled up the Alaska open records statute.
IANAL, but have previously held a position in state government that required me to render opinions
as to the meaning of particular laws.
Here's the first paragraph, which lays out the basic requirements:
Unless specifically provided otherwise, the public records of all public agencies are open to inspection by the public under reasonable rules during regular office hours. The public officer having the custody of public records shall give on request and payment of the fee established under this section or AS 40.25.115 a certified copy of the public record.
"Inspection" is almost always interpreted to mean "You can look at a paper copy."
The agency is not required (or allowed) to provide you with access to their computers, microfiche readers, etc.
"During regular office hours" is almost always interpreted to mean
the person making the request has to come to the state agency to perform that inspection
or pick up their copies.
But the real kicker is the phrase "shall give... a certified copy".
To quote from Wikipedia, a certified copy "has on it an endorsement or certificate that it is a true copy of the primary document."
No choice for the agency — they have to certify any copies they provide.
A downloaded copy is certainly not certified, so agencies are simply not allowed to do it that way.
A write-once CD might be certifiable, so long as the courts have interpreted the law to mean that a single certification can be applied to a large collection of documents.
If the individual documents (ie, each e-mail message) must be individually certified,
paper is the only practical way to do it.
Nonsense.
Historical redaction fiascos involving soft copies of documents occurred because
people were too stupid to realize that simply adding a black rectangle to the document
didn't remove the obscured text.
Adobe Acrobat includes a set of redaction tools that replaces the redacted content with a placeholder such as
the traditional black rectangle.
Microsoft offers a free redaction add-in for Word that removes the redacted text from the document
so that it can't be recovered.
Redact-It sells a product that reliably redacts text from documents of various formats, including Outlook messages.
Whether the Dalvik VM -- register based, different instruction set (although sufficiently consistent with the JVM set that byte code can be converted), built from a published JVM specification but without access to a JVM implementation -- can be subject to any Oracle license will ultimately be settled in court, but I find it unlikely. Note the quote from the blue book JVM specification:
We intend that this specification should sufficiently document the Java Virtual Machine to make possible compatible clean-room implementations. Oracle provides tests that verify the proper operation of implementations of the Java Virtual Machine.
The summaries of the documents filed in the case make it appear to be a straight patent and copyright infringement case, not a license violation case.
In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.
Depends.
Much of my career was real-time programming, both hard and soft.
In many cases,
one of the critical questions the programmer needed to be able to answer was
"What's the worst-case run time for this code?"
The person who spent four years in college almost certainly has been exposed to
computational complexity and analysis of algorithms;
the self-taught coder, probably not so much.
Or the (typically) opposite side of the coin that may crop up in embedded systems:
speed is not critical, but we're damned tight on main memory,
how can you pack the needed functionality into less space?
Again,
the degreed person seems more likely to have been exposed to
concepts like special-purpose languages and virtual machines
that may provide the answer.
Clean room implementations generally protect you from copyright infringement.
From a legal perspective, patents are a different beast altogether.
If I hold a valid patent,
your independent invention of the patented device/algorithm/whatever infringes.
The only way you get to legally use that independent invention is to either
(a) invalidate my patent or
(b) get a license from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Old(er) geeks must think alike. My immediate thought was, call the charity and ask some questions. My limited experience has been that at least some of the answers will be surprising.
Correct. And this article is old news. Quantum announced their acquisition of the rights in this general area a bit over a year ago. Development of the resource will be tricky; for example, disposing of tailings from mining and milling so that neither surface nor ground water is contaminated will be a challenge.
This has missing tags, right?
I'm not a lawyer either, but have been through this. As others have pointed out, patents have a finite life but copyright is basically forever. If it gets to court, the only legally safe approach is a standard clean room implementation: one person/group read the copyrighted code and wrote a spec, a non-overlapping person/group wrote all new code from that spec. Be prepared to show your version control history to the court to demonstrate that you started from scratch, and explain to the court the process you used to limit communication between the two teams to the spec itself.
Can I produce a printed circuit board this way? Full meaning traces, plated-through holes, solder mask, silkscreen printing. Doesn't have to be particularly rugged; FR-4 is overkill in terms of strength for most people. If you could keep such a machine busy, how expensive would the results be? Just wondering about the business opportunity; sending designs for simple one-offs to China for fabrication through a consolidation service like BatchPCB has always seemed extravagant in some fashion.
At least today— who knows about the future, maybe a continuous rather than batch process will be available— the size of objects is pretty limited. You might have to settle for snap-together pieces with the last piece being exactly the 7.468" length that you need.
Direct metal laser sintering machines are already in commercial use (article with pictures of produced items here) that could manufacture metal spoons. Current metals in use include stainless and maraging steel, and titanium alloys. In theory, almost any alloy could be used. I have to believe that machines built around 200-watt lasers, and properly prepared stainless steel powder, are beyond the budget of most hobbyists who would be interested in making spoons :^)
With no disrespect, does the observation of this very short-lived particle take us anywhere useful? Cleaner fission? Fusion? New nano materials that would change our lives? Speaking practically, we can't afford to fund every particle physics experiment that researchers can think of. Why was this a good one to have funded?
At least arguably, the golden age(s) of private sector research all required government-granted monopolies (at least in the form of critical patents) to generate the necessary revenue streams: Edison, AT&T's Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Labs, Xerox PARC. Critical research in the aerospace industry was funded by the military. Some will argue that even large-scale integrated circuits would have gone nowhere without government funding (personally, I disagree with that one). Many of these operated with what was pretty much a swinging door between the private research labs and positions in academia.
Notice that even today, the firms that are funding large amounts of research -- Intel and Microsoft, for example -- are so large that they are, or have been, under investigation for antitrust violations.
I'm a five-digit guy. On balance, Slashdot is still worth scanning. The frequency of worthless articles like this one is certainly no worse than most other news aggregation sites.
IIRC, one of the reasons that traditional clay tile roofs have been around so long, particularly in warm climates, is that there is a continuous flow of air between the tiles and the underlayment due to natural convection. The tiles may get quite hot, but the air flow keeps most of that heat from reaching the rest of the building.
Lots of considerations go into that question. What kind of climate is involved? Very different answers for New York City and Houston. Different answers for inner city versus outer suburb, based on the "heat island" effect. Different answers if the weather pattern is sunshine in the summer and cloudy in the winter, or vice versa. Also depends on the technology that get's used for heating or cooling. An old oil-fired furnace in a climate zone with cold winters is going to make for expensive heating. A high-efficiency heat pump in Seattle or Portland with cheap hydro power is going to do the necessary heating for a lot less money.
The big thing about the white roofs in an inner city where the "investment" is basically a coat of white paint is that the materials are cheap and no skilled labor is involved.
Have you purchased a house? Did you do so without looking at the neighborhood it's a part of? Didn't consider sight lines both to and from the neighbors' houses? Generally speaking, a "peculiar" house will drive down the price of the houses nearby. "Flushed... down the toilet" in the GP post is probably an exaggeration, but there will be an effect.
The US has three synchronized reliability areas: east, west, and Texas. Very few towns, even those with their own power plant, would not be connected to one of those. Starting in the 1930s, the REA (now RUS) spent a lot of money extending the grid into even remote areas.
Yeah, the best-run large company I worked for was run by a business PhD who had spent some years working his way up through management at another large firm before winding up as our CEO. The business didn't develop new technology, but the services we sold were highly dependent on technology development. I was on the staff as a tech analyst: what's possible, what's not, is the pure tech company that's selling us gear blowing smoke, etc.
The really amazing thing about him was that he got the different organizations to not only talk to each other, but to work together. Our tech organization would get calls from the MBA types, asking for someone to come to meetings to provide an informed tech opinion (and they listened!). We had good relationships with marketing so we could talk to them about the problems that might be encountered if we rolled new tech into the field. Billing and customer service types were brought in at the beginning of a project, rather than as an afterthought.
We weren't the biggest business in our field, so eventually we got bought by one of the bigger firms. Who immediately started building walls between the organizations.
Indeed. Most commonly used stuff from my wallet, in rough order of frequency: debit card, which is their point, but less in total than the other things; grocery store "membership" card, or whatever you want to call that; rec center card; library cards, one for the local public library, one for university research library; blood donor card; driver's license; health insurance card; cash goes in there somewhere, but I'm not sure just where.
While the most common use for my wallet is small payments, the most important use is to establish identity for various organizations. If PayPal really wants to replace my wallet, identity verification is the service that they really need to add.
Yes. If nuclear is going to be part of the long-term solution, then thermal neutrons have to go. Fast neutron reactors that can burn everything except the short-lived fission products, and that can do breed-and-burn of the million tons of depleted uranium the US and Russia have in storage, are critical (no pun intended). With my cynic hat on, I note that Bill Gates has funded design and simulation studies of one such fast-neutron reactor, and would probably like the government to fund the first working model built from the design rather than paying for it himself.
I know people have demonstrated magnetic domain nand and nor gates, which is theoretically sufficient to build anything. Has anyone demonstrated more complex devices? A synchronous shift register? An adder? Something that demonstrates that linking many gates together is viable?
Fabrication, or the actual design? For fab, and if you have the time, Batch PCB does boards for $2.50 per square inch plus a $10 set-up fee. I did a couple of small simple boards through them earlier this year. Once I passed the automated design rule checks (easy for simple boards), 17-21 days from submission to finished boards in my hands. Production is in China, but the quality was more than good enough for my needs. In both cases, I ordered two copies and received four. Apparently there is some duplication as things are panelized and produced, and they send along the extra copies rather than discarding them. No testing, but all of the boards I received worked.
They use Gold Phoenix for the actual production. If you need enough copies to fill, or even mostly fill, 100 or 150 square inches, it's cheaper to deal with Gold Phoenix directly. Other people have suggested DorkbotPDX; their prices may end up cheaper, but it appears to take Dorkbot a long time to fill up a panel; BatchPCB seems to fill a panel every couple of days.
Short of locking him up, how is the state going to stop him from committing suicide? Everything you need for a quick painless death is available from your local well-stocked welding supply shop: a small tank of dry nitrogen, regulator, tubing, and breathing mask. Set it up so the mask is at a slight overpressure and you're in business: pass out after 30-60 seconds, heart stops beating with no chance of restarting after 10-12 minutes. Total cost probably less than £100.
There's a woman in the US distributing instructions and selling partial kits for doing much the same thing with a large plastic bag and a tank of helium from the party-supply store.
How effective is it? One of the reasons that Halon fire suppression systems were banned was that leaks resulted in odorless Halon pooling under raised floors, and techs working on the cabling passing out and suffocating when they stuck their head down into the pool. The Russian Navy still uses it in submarines; in 2008, 20 people died when the fire suppression system was accidentally activated (the article contains an error; the Russian Navy subsequently issued a clarification that the gas involved was Halon, not freon).
"Inspection" is almost always interpreted to mean "You can look at a paper copy." The agency is not required (or allowed) to provide you with access to their computers, microfiche readers, etc. "During regular office hours" is almost always interpreted to mean the person making the request has to come to the state agency to perform that inspection or pick up their copies. But the real kicker is the phrase "shall give... a certified copy". To quote from Wikipedia, a certified copy "has on it an endorsement or certificate that it is a true copy of the primary document." No choice for the agency — they have to certify any copies they provide.
A downloaded copy is certainly not certified, so agencies are simply not allowed to do it that way. A write-once CD might be certifiable, so long as the courts have interpreted the law to mean that a single certification can be applied to a large collection of documents. If the individual documents (ie, each e-mail message) must be individually certified, paper is the only practical way to do it.
Nonsense. Historical redaction fiascos involving soft copies of documents occurred because people were too stupid to realize that simply adding a black rectangle to the document didn't remove the obscured text. Adobe Acrobat includes a set of redaction tools that replaces the redacted content with a placeholder such as the traditional black rectangle. Microsoft offers a free redaction add-in for Word that removes the redacted text from the document so that it can't be recovered. Redact-It sells a product that reliably redacts text from documents of various formats, including Outlook messages.
Correct. I should have said, "The only way you get to legally use that independent invention in the US is to either...".
The summaries of the documents filed in the case make it appear to be a straight patent and copyright infringement case, not a license violation case.
Depends.
Much of my career was real-time programming, both hard and soft. In many cases, one of the critical questions the programmer needed to be able to answer was "What's the worst-case run time for this code?" The person who spent four years in college almost certainly has been exposed to computational complexity and analysis of algorithms; the self-taught coder, probably not so much. Or the (typically) opposite side of the coin that may crop up in embedded systems: speed is not critical, but we're damned tight on main memory, how can you pack the needed functionality into less space? Again, the degreed person seems more likely to have been exposed to concepts like special-purpose languages and virtual machines that may provide the answer.
Programming is often more than just coding.
Clean room implementations generally protect you from copyright infringement. From a legal perspective, patents are a different beast altogether. If I hold a valid patent, your independent invention of the patented device/algorithm/whatever infringes. The only way you get to legally use that independent invention is to either (a) invalidate my patent or (b) get a license from me.