Legitimate competition, perhaps. But I think they can justifiably object to competition that significantly copies their technology. [I am not trying to make a statement about 3D systems' patents, their validity, or any possible infringement by Form1's embodiment - I haven't evaluated it enough to judge.]
We're not talking about an Apple-Samsung patent war here, quibbling over bounce-back software patents and rounded corners. Rapid prototyping is the kind of thing that the patent system was designed to protect: genuine, tangible technology that makes things and makes things better. All the current players in the market invested a lot of money, time, and ingenuity to create theirs; they are allowed by law to defend themselves.
One other large difference that the summary glosses over is that there's a big difference between the Katyusha and improvised rockets of Hamas, and the much larger Scud missile used by Iraq. There's almost an order of magnitude difference in size and range, and a several-fold difference in speed.
There's a correspondingly large difference between the Tamir interceptor missiles used as part of the Iron Dome and the Patriot missile.
Still, on the whole, it's probably a good thing that we are getting better at setting our lethal weapons against each other, rather than at people.
While it's true you can get water from the ocean via desalination, it has environmental problems of its own, like what to do with the concentrated briny effluent you output. The big knock against widespread desalination is that it takes a lot of energy. Most energy now and for the foreseeable future will be made in power plants that require, you guessed it, lots of water. You can do both, but you get deminishing returns. See this IEEE series (not paywalled) that goes into great depths about the difficult tradeoffs between water and energy.
The writers and directors of episode VII have the easiest job ever: do better than George Lucas
It's even easier than that: they don't have to create any new source material. The decades after Return of the Jedi have been thoroughly filled in by Lucas-sanctioned books and comics. Some of that material is great (e.g., Timothy Zahn). Some of the material should be taken out behind a shed, beaten, shot, soaked in gasoline, set ablaze, then have the ashes pissed upon and scattered.
The point is: Lucasfilm and the fanbase already know what material is good and what sucks. Not a whole lot of discovery or risky creation necessary. Find a person who is good at screenplay adaptation, put a good director on set, and rake in the profits
In fact, the biggest creative risk I see is overlap. The decades since Return of the Jedi have been so completely filled in with one save-the-galaxy-defeat-the-Dark-Side saga after another that there's no new ground left to cover.
If anyone went through with this kind of thing they SHOULD be charged by the power sent. It is, after all, taking that much power to charge your device. The wastage is your problem for being too lazy to plug in your phone.
And I propose an additional surcharge of 100% for using such a ridiculously inefficient and wasteful technology.
Of course without Tesla's work on wireless power, we wouldn't have "radio" (and various technologies) either. Marconi's famous radio patent used more than 20 Tesla patents...
Yes, because in the 100+ years since, no one, I mean no one could ever have invented the stuff that Tesla did. There's no way that we would have radio, even today, without that man.
How can you be billed? You get billed for the 4 kW of electricity you are pumping into the 3DVox's transmitter to be able to enjoy the innumerable benefits of having one room without wires. What a glorious new age we live in! Where we can waste gobs of power to avoid the awful burden of plugging things in!
You mean all that government-funded R&D into space technology might have some purpose here at home? Wow! I thought anything that the gub'ment spend money on was waste, fraud, an infringement of freedom, handouts to slacking moochers, or just plain pointless.
Interesting factoid I heard on my way into work: all the major banks and trading centers in New York City are closed today in anticipation. The last time that happened due to weather was for Hurricane Gloria back in 1985. Given the fact that Wall St. is just a few blocks from the water on three sides, and all of about 5 feet above sea level (depending on the tides), I'm surprised it isn't more frequent than that.
3D printing isn't really appropriate as a way to make brass parts, and making a plastic copy of the Analytical Engine would be rather tacky
Not to mention that an analytical engine made in 3d-printed plastic (ABS, nylon, etc., depending on the specific technology) probably wouldn't work. Back in the day I designed the mechanics of a grandfather clock in CAD. On a lark, I got to go-ahead to print off a number of parts on the school's stratasys (an FDM machine that extrudes hot ABS). When I started putting things together, I realized that the project would not work very well. The surface finish and dimensional tolerance made for high friction and occasional binding. Plus, the cost of most of these parts was really high - several times the cost of mass-produced gears from, say, stockdriveproducts.com. So, instead, I scrapped the fully custom design I had been working on, and remade it using slightly different-but-vastly-higher-quality-at-lower-price parts available off the shelf.
One of the single largest cost factors in building a 3d printer is the cost of the laser cut gears, I suspect this is a plan to cut that cost considerably
Lasers are great for cutting all manner of parts, but gears are not one of them. For geartrains to properly mesh, transmit load efficiently, and not chew themselves to pieces after a few thousand revolutions, the gears need to be properly made. That means hobbing, broaching, and injection molding. A laser cutter can't produce a smooth involute profile - the best it can do is interpolate it.
Changing the plug design permits more amps at higher voltage. Their point of comparison is charging a vehicle overnight through a typical North American residential electrical circuit (120 Vac, single phase, 20 A per circuit). If one were to try pumping 100 amps at 500 Vdc through such a 3-prong 120-V plug or cable, it would simply melt.
Of course, the charger being able to supply such high power to a car is predicated on the charger having that kind of power available to it. You won't get charge times on the order of one hour from a typical residential installation - not unless you have your own substation.
There aren't hundreds of different plug varieties. Have a closer look at the summary:
there are hundreds of different methods and plugs to charge a variety of different cars
You can get to hundreds if you multiply out the various permutations of physical connector, charge input voltage, charge input phases, charge output voltage, charge output AC or DC, charge rate, charger-car communications, and who controls the charging behavior. As you point out: because there are only tens of different electric car models out there, the number of actual charging system embodiments out of the total potential space is probably a much smaller number.
This kind of DRM will be about as effective as the copy protection on DVDs or, perhaps, Blu-Ray. That is to say: not very effective at all. Creating machines or software that bypasses this protection will be available to anyone interested not too long after the protection itself has rolled out.
Dunderheads. We are on our way to being able to print anything we need. 3d printing will probably make traditional manufacturing a bygone technology in the next twenty years.
Spoken by someone who, I am willing to guess, has never actually worked in manufacturing. As a practicing engineer, I use 3D printing technology on a near-daily basis. It's great for all kinds of things, but it isn't a wholesale replacement for traditional manufacturing. You aren't about to 3D print a car anytime soon, or even the majority of its parts. Even 3D printers that handle metal (which start at about $250,000) can't produce parts that match the characteristics of the native material, nor reproduce the properties that come about by traditional manufacturing processes like heat treating, forging, etc. Finally, although 3D printing is great for making a limited number of something, it doesn't have the throughput or economy of most traditional manufacturing processes. You could fill a warehouse with Makerbots or-what-have-you, and collectively they wouldn't produce the same number of widgets at the same cost as, say, one conventional injection molding machine.
"Because cheap (or free), clean, unlimited oxygen would collapse the economy overnight and the ramifications of that would change the world as we know it. I'm all for unlimited clean air because I'm sure that stuff is great for people, but not at the expense of my life style. So if someone does come up with this, it better cost a few hundred million (or more) bucks to build a reactor and get it online."
See how stupid that sounds?
Is the Earth's economy endangered by an endless supply of free Oxygen?
I don't know about the economy, but clearly this guy is suffering from oxygen deprivation. No wonder he is gung ho for cheap, unlimited oxygen - he's in such dire need of it. Just don't let him anywhere need the mega-maid
Though you will want to have one or two adapter plugs (cheaters) lying around, to bypass the earth ground in certain equipment. I have run into problems where my scope's earth ground caused problems in circuits I was trying to measure. For certain things, it is fine to have equipment floating. I would not recommend that for your power supply! Better would be to have a power supply that had isolated outputs, with an additional connection available for earth ground.
It is entirely possible that the markets could lose most of their value in a matter of minutes, before anyone knows what's happening - and the unforeseen interaction of algorithms could put a whole generation into poverty
It can only put to poverty people investing in it and only a part of it, summa summarum the money is just running around in circle, is not going in and neither is going out.
Have you been asleep for the last five years? What happens in the stock market has tremendous impact to everyday people - not just those who interact with it on a daily basis. When banks fail due to their own stupidity, that impact extends far beyond just the bank.
I'm from Europe and I don't really get why a strategic reserve of maple syrup is needed
For the same reasons you stockpile any commodity: it makes you less susceptible to price swings in the marketplace. When prices are low, Quebecois producers can have the reserve buy up excess inventory, then later sell it when prices rise, to protect consumers. The U.S. has strategic reserves of oil, corn, and wheat for similar reasons. Like all complex systems, it helps to have some capacitance to buffer transients.
There's been a lot of research into how humans deal with the psychological effects of long-duration spaceflight. The months-long cruise phase of a Mars mission, when neither Earth nor Mars is visible, and all you are doing is waiting for the light-minutes to pass, is supposed to be particularly difficult. Can we speculate on the effects of building spacecraft out at L2, where the Earth will be perpetually obscured by the Moon? You are close enough for near real-time communications, but won't have much to see out the window. For a week or two out of every month, there will be near total darkness. Other times there will be the unfamiliar face of the Moon's far side. It seems like a rather difficult setting to be in.
High Thermal Conductivity - this is another reason why it is such a good coolant, it is able to pull a lot of heat easily. This is one reason why it is a candidate working fluid for new (fission) reactor designs and for Stirling engines. It's low reactivity also makes it ideal in this regard.
Low Viscosity - helium very closely hews to an ideal gas in terms of its flow behavior. Its low density and low viscosity make it really easy to move around using pumps and convection. This, again, makes it an excellent coolant (in liquid or gaseous form) or working fluid.
For the most part, He-3 isn't what people are using. There are uses for it (it makes for an excellent neutron detector, if I remember), but due to its scarcity it isn't used for much. Nearly all of what's available to us, on Earth, is He-4, which we get mostly from alpha decays of fissile elements (an alpha particle is a He-4 nucleus).
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Legitimate competition, perhaps. But I think they can justifiably object to competition that significantly copies their technology. [I am not trying to make a statement about 3D systems' patents, their validity, or any possible infringement by Form1's embodiment - I haven't evaluated it enough to judge.]
We're not talking about an Apple-Samsung patent war here, quibbling over bounce-back software patents and rounded corners. Rapid prototyping is the kind of thing that the patent system was designed to protect: genuine, tangible technology that makes things and makes things better. All the current players in the market invested a lot of money, time, and ingenuity to create theirs; they are allowed by law to defend themselves.
One other large difference that the summary glosses over is that there's a big difference between the Katyusha and improvised rockets of Hamas, and the much larger Scud missile used by Iraq. There's almost an order of magnitude difference in size and range, and a several-fold difference in speed.
There's a correspondingly large difference between the Tamir interceptor missiles used as part of the Iron Dome and the Patriot missile.
Still, on the whole, it's probably a good thing that we are getting better at setting our lethal weapons against each other, rather than at people.
While it's true you can get water from the ocean via desalination, it has environmental problems of its own, like what to do with the concentrated briny effluent you output. The big knock against widespread desalination is that it takes a lot of energy. Most energy now and for the foreseeable future will be made in power plants that require, you guessed it, lots of water. You can do both, but you get deminishing returns. See this IEEE series (not paywalled) that goes into great depths about the difficult tradeoffs between water and energy.
It's even easier than that: they don't have to create any new source material. The decades after Return of the Jedi have been thoroughly filled in by Lucas-sanctioned books and comics. Some of that material is great (e.g., Timothy Zahn). Some of the material should be taken out behind a shed, beaten, shot, soaked in gasoline, set ablaze, then have the ashes pissed upon and scattered.
The point is: Lucasfilm and the fanbase already know what material is good and what sucks. Not a whole lot of discovery or risky creation necessary. Find a person who is good at screenplay adaptation, put a good director on set, and rake in the profits
In fact, the biggest creative risk I see is overlap. The decades since Return of the Jedi have been so completely filled in with one save-the-galaxy-defeat-the-Dark-Side saga after another that there's no new ground left to cover.
And I propose an additional surcharge of 100% for using such a ridiculously inefficient and wasteful technology.
Yes, because in the 100+ years since, no one, I mean no one could ever have invented the stuff that Tesla did. There's no way that we would have radio, even today, without that man.
How can you be billed? You get billed for the 4 kW of electricity you are pumping into the 3DVox's transmitter to be able to enjoy the innumerable benefits of having one room without wires. What a glorious new age we live in! Where we can waste gobs of power to avoid the awful burden of plugging things in!
You mean all that government-funded R&D into space technology might have some purpose here at home? Wow! I thought anything that the gub'ment spend money on was waste, fraud, an infringement of freedom, handouts to slacking moochers, or just plain pointless.
Interesting factoid I heard on my way into work: all the major banks and trading centers in New York City are closed today in anticipation. The last time that happened due to weather was for Hurricane Gloria back in 1985. Given the fact that Wall St. is just a few blocks from the water on three sides, and all of about 5 feet above sea level (depending on the tides), I'm surprised it isn't more frequent than that.
Not to mention that an analytical engine made in 3d-printed plastic (ABS, nylon, etc., depending on the specific technology) probably wouldn't work. Back in the day I designed the mechanics of a grandfather clock in CAD. On a lark, I got to go-ahead to print off a number of parts on the school's stratasys (an FDM machine that extrudes hot ABS). When I started putting things together, I realized that the project would not work very well. The surface finish and dimensional tolerance made for high friction and occasional binding. Plus, the cost of most of these parts was really high - several times the cost of mass-produced gears from, say, stockdriveproducts.com. So, instead, I scrapped the fully custom design I had been working on, and remade it using slightly different-but-vastly-higher-quality-at-lower-price parts available off the shelf.
Lasers are great for cutting all manner of parts, but gears are not one of them. For geartrains to properly mesh, transmit load efficiently, and not chew themselves to pieces after a few thousand revolutions, the gears need to be properly made. That means hobbing, broaching, and injection molding. A laser cutter can't produce a smooth involute profile - the best it can do is interpolate it.
Changing the plug design permits more amps at higher voltage. Their point of comparison is charging a vehicle overnight through a typical North American residential electrical circuit (120 Vac, single phase, 20 A per circuit). If one were to try pumping 100 amps at 500 Vdc through such a 3-prong 120-V plug or cable, it would simply melt.
Of course, the charger being able to supply such high power to a car is predicated on the charger having that kind of power available to it. You won't get charge times on the order of one hour from a typical residential installation - not unless you have your own substation.
You can get to hundreds if you multiply out the various permutations of physical connector, charge input voltage, charge input phases, charge output voltage, charge output AC or DC, charge rate, charger-car communications, and who controls the charging behavior. As you point out: because there are only tens of different electric car models out there, the number of actual charging system embodiments out of the total potential space is probably a much smaller number.
This kind of DRM will be about as effective as the copy protection on DVDs or, perhaps, Blu-Ray. That is to say: not very effective at all. Creating machines or software that bypasses this protection will be available to anyone interested not too long after the protection itself has rolled out.
Spoken by someone who, I am willing to guess, has never actually worked in manufacturing. As a practicing engineer, I use 3D printing technology on a near-daily basis. It's great for all kinds of things, but it isn't a wholesale replacement for traditional manufacturing. You aren't about to 3D print a car anytime soon, or even the majority of its parts. Even 3D printers that handle metal (which start at about $250,000) can't produce parts that match the characteristics of the native material, nor reproduce the properties that come about by traditional manufacturing processes like heat treating, forging, etc. Finally, although 3D printing is great for making a limited number of something, it doesn't have the throughput or economy of most traditional manufacturing processes. You could fill a warehouse with Makerbots or-what-have-you, and collectively they wouldn't produce the same number of widgets at the same cost as, say, one conventional injection molding machine.
I don't know about the economy, but clearly this guy is suffering from oxygen deprivation. No wonder he is gung ho for cheap, unlimited oxygen - he's in such dire need of it. Just don't let him anywhere need the mega-maid
Or you could dangle a bit of chain from the underside of the chair to the floor.
Though you will want to have one or two adapter plugs (cheaters) lying around, to bypass the earth ground in certain equipment. I have run into problems where my scope's earth ground caused problems in circuits I was trying to measure. For certain things, it is fine to have equipment floating. I would not recommend that for your power supply! Better would be to have a power supply that had isolated outputs, with an additional connection available for earth ground.
Have you been asleep for the last five years? What happens in the stock market has tremendous impact to everyday people - not just those who interact with it on a daily basis. When banks fail due to their own stupidity, that impact extends far beyond just the bank.
For the same reasons you stockpile any commodity: it makes you less susceptible to price swings in the marketplace. When prices are low, Quebecois producers can have the reserve buy up excess inventory, then later sell it when prices rise, to protect consumers. The U.S. has strategic reserves of oil, corn, and wheat for similar reasons. Like all complex systems, it helps to have some capacitance to buffer transients.
Dean Kamen is known for wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and workboots ever day. Same idea.
I am going to guess this project was named for Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose x-ray crystallography work illuminated the double-helix structure of DNA
There's been a lot of research into how humans deal with the psychological effects of long-duration spaceflight. The months-long cruise phase of a Mars mission, when neither Earth nor Mars is visible, and all you are doing is waiting for the light-minutes to pass, is supposed to be particularly difficult. Can we speculate on the effects of building spacecraft out at L2, where the Earth will be perpetually obscured by the Moon? You are close enough for near real-time communications, but won't have much to see out the window. For a week or two out of every month, there will be near total darkness. Other times there will be the unfamiliar face of the Moon's far side. It seems like a rather difficult setting to be in.
Other features include:
High Thermal Conductivity - this is another reason why it is such a good coolant, it is able to pull a lot of heat easily. This is one reason why it is a candidate working fluid for new (fission) reactor designs and for Stirling engines. It's low reactivity also makes it ideal in this regard.
Low Viscosity - helium very closely hews to an ideal gas in terms of its flow behavior. Its low density and low viscosity make it really easy to move around using pumps and convection. This, again, makes it an excellent coolant (in liquid or gaseous form) or working fluid.
For the most part, He-3 isn't what people are using. There are uses for it (it makes for an excellent neutron detector, if I remember), but due to its scarcity it isn't used for much. Nearly all of what's available to us, on Earth, is He-4, which we get mostly from alpha decays of fissile elements (an alpha particle is a He-4 nucleus).