My god man, the entire American technical community is oriented around pigeonholing. Its not a "IT vs CS" thing. Its how management is trained to treat techs. Its an American cultural thing, not just an oddity.
My cousin the chemical engineer got pigeonholed into semiconductor polymer device packaging early on, never to escape. My father got pigeonholed into DBA work/consulting and he was stuck there until retirement. My high school chemistry teacher started off in some obscure corner of food chem, and was forced to stay there, until she got fed up and went back for an education degree. My Uncle: Once a fine cabinetry maker, always and forever a fine cabinetry maker never to be allowed to do anything else for money (at home he made furniture). My uncle in law: Once a medium size diesel mechanic, always and forever a medium diesel mechanic, never to escape.
I've been doing more or less the same type of work since the summer of 1998. Like everyone in the paragraph above, am I qualified and capable of doing much more? Hell yeah, look at what I do at home. Which brings up the important point that if you're going into a technical career where you're going to eventually be bored to tears, make sure its a field where you can do "cutting edge" work at home. Software development, carpenter, mechanic, yeah that works at home. Biochemist, chemical engineer, umm not so easy to do cutting edge work at home.
If you're going into a technical field, you almost certainly will be doing at age 67 what you were doing at age 23, so make sure you like it...
The only way you'll ever get a job in a different field is: 1) Dating and/or friends and/or related to someone in management 2) Another "tech boom" or similar occurs (for example, I'm told that in certain areas out west, anyone who can pass a drug test can become an instant oil field worker) 3) You go back to school for a new field and new degree, don't worry it'll only be $50K to $200K plus living expenses. 4) You start your own business in a new field you know nothing about. Good Luck, you'll need it. 5) Give up technical work, and start at the bottom of a non-tech field. If you've got enough brains to survive in a tech field, you'll rise to the top of a non-tech field. Non-tech fields actually have career paths and opportunities, unlike tech.
Yes and the marketing got you to pay $250 more because you fell for it, the things you DO do can be done quite well on the nook for $250 less then what you paid
Nah I already had a little handheld that was too small and a netbook that was too big and takes 2 minutes to boot... The ipad screen is about twice the size of the original nook screen. It was an intentional decision to select a device "about the size of a book". Not a postcard, not a really big postage stamp, not a floor tile sized laptop/netbook.
I have not been keeping up with the market, no need for me. It might be that "nook" is like "eee" was, and now refers to a generic family of products, and there's a nook branded device that has the ipad form factor, battery life, and resolution. But in early 2010 there was simply no comparison. In 2012 or 2013 or whenever my ipad meets its demise, I will consider its competitors...
I don't want flash because I'm not interested in animated advertisements.
from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events
George Ure gets really feisty and hot under the collar every time someone mentions this and claims its new... He's been doing this for years now, probably a decade now.
If you want to know what Ure is doing, you can pretty much copy-paste his name on the report and roll all the dates in the report back about a decade.
It would be much like the reaction if I wrote my own crappy homemade webserver this week, and then sent press releases to the entire universe explaining how I just wrote the worlds first webserver and not only that but its also the worlds first open source webserver and carefully avoid mentioning any prior art.
Well, at least we have some common ground, however much we otherwise disagree
Ereaders are a horrible attempt at replacing real books
Find me an e-reader, and I'll let you know. According to marketing you're suppose to play artillery games with animated birds, re-purchase and watch movies, listen to music, listen to audiobooks, pretty much... everything except read... Despite their best attempts, I love reading manuals and datasheets on my ipad. I probably have not printed out a manufacturers datasheet in over a year (think like 200 page tomes from microchip.com for PIC microcontrollers, mosfet transistor datasheets with a zillion performance graphs, that kind of thing, not so much Gibbon and Plutarch)
This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format.
We've certainly got that. Torrent sites up the wazoo for all formats and U****t's format of choice for technical non-fiction is the pdf.
Oh, you meant legal providers. Well, this is kinda like music was in about 1999, maybe a little later... A few crappy proprietary formats, and everyone trading free formats on the net. There are some exceptions... Baen knows what they're doing, and as such, is one of few publishers to make money off me.
will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content
Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc. My coworkers have about the same story... repeating the marketers mantra before purchase of consume consume consume media, yet after purchase it's entirely different, electronic paper plus some video games.
There is quite a separation between what the marketing people demand I purchase it for, and what I've seen people actually use it for after purchase. I have a good feeling about it because the actual use turns out to be more valuable than I was expecting.
Amazon might want to watch out; if competitors start marketing toward what tablets are actually used for, they might get left in the dust. Someday I'll want to buy a replacement for my ipad, at that time I'm going to jump at advertisements for "instant on" and "great email reader" and "really awesome webbrowser" and "smooth pdf rendering". I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.
Energy capacity (assuming constant voltage) is linear with stored charge.. stored charge is linear with quantity of active species, which is going up by a factor of 8, so I'd guess about 8 times.
Voltage is never constant under high discharge rates... lead acid "car" batteries are famous for covering their plates temporarily with gas (h2) and all batteries dump some fraction of their capacity into their internal resistance. For a good example try pulling 10 amps out of a giant deep cycle marine battery, then outta a nicad C size cell, then outta a pre-alkaline, pre-heavy duty zinc C size cell (think radio shack battery of the month club red battery).
expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge
Well, that's fairly terrifying word choice to anyone who did extreme stuff with prior battery techs. Expanding lead acid cell means the vent is clogged and you're about to get a large dose of flammable H2, corrosive electrolyte, and splintering plastic. Expanding lithium means its about to go kaboom. "Expand" is not a cool choice of words around battery people. Call it "volumetrically challenged" or something.
1) rely on Debian and their 500 mirrors to keep your security up to date. The debian maintainer group outnumbers you, oh, about a hundred to one, so if you're planning on deploying your own hand compiled security patches you're doing it wrong... just "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" on a regular basis and/or when you see something interesting on the security mailing list.
2) Speaking of #1 above, "apt-get install phpbb3". Its a maintained package... Unless you're a better maintainer than the package maintainer (sometimes this happens) you are better off using the standard supported package.
with a MySQL backend
Don the asbestos suit... I'm not going to flame you, but others will, especially since phpbb3 supposedly works fine with the php5-pgsql module.
not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI.
Aren't these inherently directly conflicting goals?
Easy to manage, is you change one little thing in your puppet config and puppet magically makes it happen, instead of having to babysit everything.
Easy to manage is someone tells you "make/etc/apache2/apache2.conf look exactly like this" instead of "click on the 2nd icon from the right that looks like two mating centipedes, then look randomly about the screen until you find the icon that looks like a discarded kleenex, oh you're seeing an icon that looks like a black hole, well, then click two pages back" etc for about ten minutes.
An analogy is "teach me physics, without any of that tedious math stuff".
Oh well... I'd like a/. story about how its real easy to have a working nuclear fusion reactor. All you need is to build a reactor, and then turn it on. No big deal, everyone be happy now.
This is not a story about vaccine trials, just a "wouldn't it be great if..."
So there are no more devices that run webOS. What are the OS developers going to be doing? If HP doesn't have faith in the OS, why would anyone else chose to make devices for it?
if I remember correctly they stated that they will put it inside cars and other embedded devices
Decades ago when HP made test equipment, a ultra-high-end spectrum analyzer with webOS would have been cool... I'm not interested in running "angry birds", I'm more interested in being able to email / web from the device itself.. Also embedded training videos would be cool. Yes I'm well aware that many years ago you could save images into diskettes or flash in the form of USB drives or camera cards. But it would be way cool to have a very common UI for phones / scopes / network analyzers / spectrum analyzers / heck even my voltmeter.
Imagine if my spectrum analyzer had not only training videos for itself, but every other product in the HP lineup, with the increase storage costs line itemed as marketing...
Or if I could remote the UIs for multiple meters exactly like they appear on the touchscreen of the device, on a tablet, simultaneously.... So I could hook up three clamp on ammeters on each leg of a 3-phase and watch all three simultaneously. Yes I know there are expensive boxes that are basically three single phase devices in one box for ten times the cost, I was drooling over the idea of just grabbing any random 3 meters and having them work together...
The set of all patent trolls are a subset of the set of large corporations? I don't think so. Not even "most" or "majority".
That's my point. Why beat on the drums that large corporations are gonna be the problem, when all you need is an unemployed attorney with about $5K startup costs, and look, insta-troll.
For a monopoly provider like microsoft, its not so bad, but a player in a competitive field like GOOG would get terrible PR, so "on average" the little trolls are going to be more numerous and more brutal than the large corps, aren't they?
Whoa there big time mistake on my part. I forgot to add that before the new act, false patent marking was financial suicide. After the act, it doesn't look so bad. So as a business methods patent troll, I don't even have to bother patenting "post goatse on/." as a method. I just have to threaten you that it I have done so. Then post my licensing fee as lower than the cost of you even hiring a lawyer to figure out if my patent is even valid.
The two parts of the act turns patent trolling into a legal extortion business.
Actually, your website would serve as prior art to their patent, same as it would under the old law. They may sue you, but they would lose.
Absolutely irrelevant. They only lose if the cost of protection money / licensing they offered was greater than the spectacular cost of legal defense.
I could patent posting goatse on/., god only knows that has plenty of prior art. Somebody posts goatse, I make my offer. It'll cost $50K to defend yourself at which time I'll lose and you'll get the patent overturned and you'll get no legal fees back because I (or my corporation) are judgment proof. Or, you can pay me $100 for a license to my patent, and that problem all goes away... If you have more than $100 in the bank (statistically likely) and less than $50K in the bank (statistically likely) then I win and you lose.
Does anyone have a cost benefit analysis of false patent marking before and after the new act?
Looks like before the act takes effect, false patent marking is pretty business-suicidal, and after the act it seems like little more than an annoyance.
Can we expect that in the future most patent claims will be false, since it will be cheaper to lie than to actually do the paperwork? In other words it'll make more sense economically to stamp "patent pending" on everything and only actually patent one in ten things just to keep copiers "honest"?
I do see the standard american business model trend of find something historically trustworthy (like writing the patent numbers and/or patent pending on a product) then breaking that trust for profit, until the market falls apart and disintegrates... I can clearly see the first step, second is looking kind of fuzzy. How are the megacorps planning to make money off this particular form of dishonesty? If its not to make money for the megacorps, why promote this kind of dishonesty (or rephrased, who's paying for it?)
He also said that the act clearly favors larger corporations
Why? He never explained why. I realize they are the boogy-man now, so any time you want to imply something is bad, you imply its good for the big corporations, but the logic seems to be missing. I guess the argument is something like submarine patents will be harder to implement, but...
I propose deletion of the configs on the following rationales:
1) Too obscure. As a percentage of the population, no one uses Puppet.
2) Almost impossible to verify the facts. Can a significant fraction of the population hack into wikimedia and verify the obscure corners of their config?
3) No original research on wikipedia. This is way too self referential to be "encyclopedic"
4) Generic lack of notability. A blog-like/. post does not count as a cite. Show me the page of the New York Times citing this.
Until someone who has economies of scale can print the same car at half of the cost of you printing your own.
Also time. I could print that car, but it would take a month of continuous printing to do it, and I really need to print up some disposable plates, cups, and spoons to eat lunch in a couple hours, so... Some things can't be done as sub assemblies, or require too much skill and talent to assemble, or there is just a fundamental gross bandwidth limit where I need to print 100 pounds of stuff per month to live and I've only got 150 pounds per month of printing bandwidth available so...
The other problem is parallel invention. Once society is at a certain level it just seems to pop certain things out literally simultaneously. All you need is one guy, anywhere out there, to realize the same idea, and then...
It sounds like a lovely idea, but I think anyone inventing this would be killed. The reason being that the implications for society are huge - and I don't think society could change quickly enough to cope.
LOL as if the inventor wouldn't say "oh, hey, look at that ICBM, maybe I could use one of those..." all the way down to an infinite supply of bullets. Or, if he gets hit, units of transfusion blood... "look at that nifty hospital ER, that could come in handy now" "A bullet proof limousine, should have cloned that first".
The country is full of people that didn't get that the govt was getting rid of factories and importing illegals to basically make the lower classes perma-unemployed, didn't get that newfangled internet thingy, didn't get that the current national business model is find an area of trust and then abuse it for profit. We'll get by with another disruption OK.
It just gets problematic as long as there is any discernable difference between the self-made product and a commercial alternative. Any small defect in the self-made product will lead to a percieved lack of value.
Until if flips around, which it already has in furniture. You want "perfect" mass produced furniture exactly like every other dorm room? Pay $200 at ikea, or maybe $50 at walmart for the not-so-perfect, no-so-durable version. On the other hand the hand crafted amish store will sell you a truly unique handmade one for $1000.
Also the market kinda breaks down for something very generic like "bookcase", because there's only so much room for customization / styling, its just a buncha shelves with a common side and back. But the market for dining room tables will probably never implode like that because there's so much space for hand-carved legs and strange styling.
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
The economics of 3D printing are worth noting. Complexity doesn't cost much, but material volume does. Watch size objects, yes. Auto bumpers, no.
This is somewhat different from CNC machining, where complexity and high detail costs machining time. You have to use smaller tools and can't remove metal fast in high-detail areas. Big smooth surfaces can be machined quickly with big tools.
Also, accuracy and surface finish. My CNC mill operates to at least 100 times the accuracy of the 3d printer I want to get. Seeing myself in the reflection on milled aluminum is normal. cheap 3d printer output looks like a slightly finer version of my kids playdough projects. . I think they will work well together... I'm planning on making sand casting mold patterns using the 3d printer, cast in aluminum (I don't have the safety gear for anything hotter, like brass or iron), then machine in the mill/lathe.
Slashdot Mirror
pigeon-hole me
My god man, the entire American technical community is oriented around pigeonholing. Its not a "IT vs CS" thing. Its how management is trained to treat techs. Its an American cultural thing, not just an oddity.
My cousin the chemical engineer got pigeonholed into semiconductor polymer device packaging early on, never to escape. My father got pigeonholed into DBA work/consulting and he was stuck there until retirement. My high school chemistry teacher started off in some obscure corner of food chem, and was forced to stay there, until she got fed up and went back for an education degree. My Uncle: Once a fine cabinetry maker, always and forever a fine cabinetry maker never to be allowed to do anything else for money (at home he made furniture). My uncle in law: Once a medium size diesel mechanic, always and forever a medium diesel mechanic, never to escape.
I've been doing more or less the same type of work since the summer of 1998. Like everyone in the paragraph above, am I qualified and capable of doing much more? Hell yeah, look at what I do at home. Which brings up the important point that if you're going into a technical career where you're going to eventually be bored to tears, make sure its a field where you can do "cutting edge" work at home. Software development, carpenter, mechanic, yeah that works at home. Biochemist, chemical engineer, umm not so easy to do cutting edge work at home.
If you're going into a technical field, you almost certainly will be doing at age 67 what you were doing at age 23, so make sure you like it...
The only way you'll ever get a job in a different field is:
1) Dating and/or friends and/or related to someone in management
2) Another "tech boom" or similar occurs (for example, I'm told that in certain areas out west, anyone who can pass a drug test can become an instant oil field worker)
3) You go back to school for a new field and new degree, don't worry it'll only be $50K to $200K plus living expenses.
4) You start your own business in a new field you know nothing about. Good Luck, you'll need it.
5) Give up technical work, and start at the bottom of a non-tech field. If you've got enough brains to survive in a tech field, you'll rise to the top of a non-tech field. Non-tech fields actually have career paths and opportunities, unlike tech.
Yes and the marketing got you to pay $250 more because you fell for it, the things you DO do can be done quite well on the nook for $250 less then what you paid
Nah I already had a little handheld that was too small and a netbook that was too big and takes 2 minutes to boot... The ipad screen is about twice the size of the original nook screen. It was an intentional decision to select a device "about the size of a book". Not a postcard, not a really big postage stamp, not a floor tile sized laptop/netbook.
I have not been keeping up with the market, no need for me. It might be that "nook" is like "eee" was, and now refers to a generic family of products, and there's a nook branded device that has the ipad form factor, battery life, and resolution. But in early 2010 there was simply no comparison. In 2012 or 2013 or whenever my ipad meets its demise, I will consider its competitors...
I don't want flash because I'm not interested in animated advertisements.
from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events
George Ure gets really feisty and hot under the collar every time someone mentions this and claims its new... He's been doing this for years now, probably a decade now.
http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
If you want to know what Ure is doing, you can pretty much copy-paste his name on the report and roll all the dates in the report back about a decade.
It would be much like the reaction if I wrote my own crappy homemade webserver this week, and then sent press releases to the entire universe explaining how I just wrote the worlds first webserver and not only that but its also the worlds first open source webserver and carefully avoid mentioning any prior art.
And I love to read
Well, at least we have some common ground, however much we otherwise disagree
Ereaders are a horrible attempt at replacing real books
Find me an e-reader, and I'll let you know. According to marketing you're suppose to play artillery games with animated birds, re-purchase and watch movies, listen to music, listen to audiobooks, pretty much ... everything except read... Despite their best attempts, I love reading manuals and datasheets on my ipad. I probably have not printed out a manufacturers datasheet in over a year (think like 200 page tomes from microchip.com for PIC microcontrollers, mosfet transistor datasheets with a zillion performance graphs, that kind of thing, not so much Gibbon and Plutarch)
This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format.
We've certainly got that. Torrent sites up the wazoo for all formats and U****t's format of choice for technical non-fiction is the pdf.
Oh, you meant legal providers. Well, this is kinda like music was in about 1999, maybe a little later... A few crappy proprietary formats, and everyone trading free formats on the net. There are some exceptions... Baen knows what they're doing, and as such, is one of few publishers to make money off me.
will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content
Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc. My coworkers have about the same story... repeating the marketers mantra before purchase of consume consume consume media, yet after purchase it's entirely different, electronic paper plus some video games.
There is quite a separation between what the marketing people demand I purchase it for, and what I've seen people actually use it for after purchase. I have a good feeling about it because the actual use turns out to be more valuable than I was expecting.
Amazon might want to watch out; if competitors start marketing toward what tablets are actually used for, they might get left in the dust. Someday I'll want to buy a replacement for my ipad, at that time I'm going to jump at advertisements for "instant on" and "great email reader" and "really awesome webbrowser" and "smooth pdf rendering". I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.
Energy capacity (assuming constant voltage) is linear with stored charge.. stored charge is linear with quantity of active species, which is going up by a factor of 8, so I'd guess about 8 times.
Voltage is never constant under high discharge rates... lead acid "car" batteries are famous for covering their plates temporarily with gas (h2) and all batteries dump some fraction of their capacity into their internal resistance. For a good example try pulling 10 amps out of a giant deep cycle marine battery, then outta a nicad C size cell, then outta a pre-alkaline, pre-heavy duty zinc C size cell (think radio shack battery of the month club red battery).
expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge
Well, that's fairly terrifying word choice to anyone who did extreme stuff with prior battery techs. Expanding lead acid cell means the vent is clogged and you're about to get a large dose of flammable H2, corrosive electrolyte, and splintering plastic. Expanding lithium means its about to go kaboom. "Expand" is not a cool choice of words around battery people. Call it "volumetrically challenged" or something.
1) rely on Debian and their 500 mirrors to keep your security up to date. The debian maintainer group outnumbers you, oh, about a hundred to one, so if you're planning on deploying your own hand compiled security patches you're doing it wrong... just "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" on a regular basis and/or when you see something interesting on the security mailing list.
2) Speaking of #1 above, "apt-get install phpbb3". Its a maintained package... Unless you're a better maintainer than the package maintainer (sometimes this happens) you are better off using the standard supported package.
with a MySQL backend
Don the asbestos suit... I'm not going to flame you, but others will, especially since phpbb3 supposedly works fine with the php5-pgsql module.
not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI.
Aren't these inherently directly conflicting goals?
Easy to manage, is you change one little thing in your puppet config and puppet magically makes it happen, instead of having to babysit everything.
Easy to manage is someone tells you "make /etc/apache2/apache2.conf look exactly like this" instead of "click on the 2nd icon from the right that looks like two mating centipedes, then look randomly about the screen until you find the icon that looks like a discarded kleenex, oh you're seeing an icon that looks like a black hole, well, then click two pages back" etc for about ten minutes.
An analogy is "teach me physics, without any of that tedious math stuff".
Scientists say
traditional indication of hype
could lead
Oh its just hype after all.
Oh well... I'd like a /. story about how its real easy to have a working nuclear fusion reactor. All you need is to build a reactor, and then turn it on. No big deal, everyone be happy now.
This is not a story about vaccine trials, just a "wouldn't it be great if ..."
Why is it important to know who "unfriended" you?
Think of professional paid astroturfers who are paid by the quantity of followers. Number stops dropping, time to put up a newer, hotter .jpg, etc.
...and how is that different from the old patent system?
Costs 15% more to file, but most of the punishments for falsely claiming a patent exists when it doesn't, have been removed.
So there are no more devices that run webOS. What are the OS developers going to be doing? If HP doesn't have faith in the OS, why would anyone else chose to make devices for it?
if I remember correctly they stated that they will put it inside cars and other embedded devices
Decades ago when HP made test equipment, a ultra-high-end spectrum analyzer with webOS would have been cool... I'm not interested in running "angry birds", I'm more interested in being able to email / web from the device itself.. Also embedded training videos would be cool. Yes I'm well aware that many years ago you could save images into diskettes or flash in the form of USB drives or camera cards. But it would be way cool to have a very common UI for phones / scopes / network analyzers / spectrum analyzers / heck even my voltmeter.
Imagine if my spectrum analyzer had not only training videos for itself, but every other product in the HP lineup, with the increase storage costs line itemed as marketing...
Or if I could remote the UIs for multiple meters exactly like they appear on the touchscreen of the device, on a tablet, simultaneously.... So I could hook up three clamp on ammeters on each leg of a 3-phase and watch all three simultaneously. Yes I know there are expensive boxes that are basically three single phase devices in one box for ten times the cost, I was drooling over the idea of just grabbing any random 3 meters and having them work together...
The set of all patent trolls are a subset of the set of large corporations? I don't think so. Not even "most" or "majority".
That's my point. Why beat on the drums that large corporations are gonna be the problem, when all you need is an unemployed attorney with about $5K startup costs, and look, insta-troll.
For a monopoly provider like microsoft, its not so bad, but a player in a competitive field like GOOG would get terrible PR, so "on average" the little trolls are going to be more numerous and more brutal than the large corps, aren't they?
Hmm that argument would fit in with the other part of the act which is to increase cost by 15%.
But it works just as well with "individual" vs "small businessman" or "tiny business" vs "microscopically larger business".
Whoa there big time mistake on my part. I forgot to add that before the new act, false patent marking was financial suicide. After the act, it doesn't look so bad. So as a business methods patent troll, I don't even have to bother patenting "post goatse on /." as a method. I just have to threaten you that it I have done so. Then post my licensing fee as lower than the cost of you even hiring a lawyer to figure out if my patent is even valid.
The two parts of the act turns patent trolling into a legal extortion business.
Actually, your website would serve as prior art to their patent, same as it would under the old law. They may sue you, but they would lose.
Absolutely irrelevant. They only lose if the cost of protection money / licensing they offered was greater than the spectacular cost of legal defense.
I could patent posting goatse on /., god only knows that has plenty of prior art. Somebody posts goatse, I make my offer. It'll cost $50K to defend yourself at which time I'll lose and you'll get the patent overturned and you'll get no legal fees back because I (or my corporation) are judgment proof. Or, you can pay me $100 for a license to my patent, and that problem all goes away... If you have more than $100 in the bank (statistically likely) and less than $50K in the bank (statistically likely) then I win and you lose.
Does anyone have a cost benefit analysis of false patent marking before and after the new act?
Looks like before the act takes effect, false patent marking is pretty business-suicidal, and after the act it seems like little more than an annoyance.
Can we expect that in the future most patent claims will be false, since it will be cheaper to lie than to actually do the paperwork? In other words it'll make more sense economically to stamp "patent pending" on everything and only actually patent one in ten things just to keep copiers "honest"?
I do see the standard american business model trend of find something historically trustworthy (like writing the patent numbers and/or patent pending on a product) then breaking that trust for profit, until the market falls apart and disintegrates... I can clearly see the first step, second is looking kind of fuzzy. How are the megacorps planning to make money off this particular form of dishonesty? If its not to make money for the megacorps, why promote this kind of dishonesty (or rephrased, who's paying for it?)
He also said that the act clearly favors larger corporations
Why? He never explained why. I realize they are the boogy-man now, so any time you want to imply something is bad, you imply its good for the big corporations, but the logic seems to be missing. I guess the argument is something like submarine patents will be harder to implement, but ...
I propose deletion of the configs on the following rationales:
1) Too obscure. As a percentage of the population, no one uses Puppet.
2) Almost impossible to verify the facts. Can a significant fraction of the population hack into wikimedia and verify the obscure corners of their config?
3) No original research on wikipedia. This is way too self referential to be "encyclopedic"
4) Generic lack of notability. A blog-like /. post does not count as a cite. Show me the page of the New York Times citing this.
...download a car. And print it!
Until someone who has economies of scale can print the same car at half of the cost of you printing your own.
Also time. I could print that car, but it would take a month of continuous printing to do it, and I really need to print up some disposable plates, cups, and spoons to eat lunch in a couple hours, so... Some things can't be done as sub assemblies, or require too much skill and talent to assemble, or there is just a fundamental gross bandwidth limit where I need to print 100 pounds of stuff per month to live and I've only got 150 pounds per month of printing bandwidth available so ...
The other problem is parallel invention. Once society is at a certain level it just seems to pop certain things out literally simultaneously. All you need is one guy, anywhere out there, to realize the same idea, and then...
It sounds like a lovely idea, but I think anyone inventing this would be killed. The reason being that the implications for society are huge - and I don't think society could change quickly enough to cope.
LOL as if the inventor wouldn't say "oh, hey, look at that ICBM, maybe I could use one of those..." all the way down to an infinite supply of bullets. Or, if he gets hit, units of transfusion blood... "look at that nifty hospital ER, that could come in handy now" "A bullet proof limousine, should have cloned that first".
The country is full of people that didn't get that the govt was getting rid of factories and importing illegals to basically make the lower classes perma-unemployed, didn't get that newfangled internet thingy, didn't get that the current national business model is find an area of trust and then abuse it for profit. We'll get by with another disruption OK.
It just gets problematic as long as there is any discernable difference between the self-made product and a commercial alternative. Any small defect in the self-made product will lead to a percieved lack of value.
Until if flips around, which it already has in furniture. You want "perfect" mass produced furniture exactly like every other dorm room? Pay $200 at ikea, or maybe $50 at walmart for the not-so-perfect, no-so-durable version. On the other hand the hand crafted amish store will sell you a truly unique handmade one for $1000.
Also the market kinda breaks down for something very generic like "bookcase", because there's only so much room for customization / styling, its just a buncha shelves with a common side and back. But the market for dining room tables will probably never implode like that because there's so much space for hand-carved legs and strange styling.
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
The economics of 3D printing are worth noting. Complexity doesn't cost much, but material volume does. Watch size objects, yes. Auto bumpers, no.
This is somewhat different from CNC machining, where complexity and high detail costs machining time. You have to use smaller tools and can't remove metal fast in high-detail areas. Big smooth surfaces can be machined quickly with big tools.
Also, accuracy and surface finish. My CNC mill operates to at least 100 times the accuracy of the 3d printer I want to get. Seeing myself in the reflection on milled aluminum is normal. cheap 3d printer output looks like a slightly finer version of my kids playdough projects. . I think they will work well together... I'm planning on making sand casting mold patterns using the 3d printer, cast in aluminum (I don't have the safety gear for anything hotter, like brass or iron), then machine in the mill/lathe.