Not long ago, the demand for a $15 minimum hourly wage was brought up. The greedy corporate answer? Install automation instead. Because it's cheaper.
Automation is targeting higher salary positions - which have a bigger pay-off in replacement. The average hourly U.S. wage is $24.57. If you eliminate 50% of all jobs, it is going to be skewed toward the higher salary end, and thus the average position wage eliminated will be more than $24.57 an hour. Minimum wage is currently only $7.25, and anyone actually living on minimum wage is already having that low wage subsidized by the government (Walmart does this quite deliberately and systematic, it is a fundamental part of their business model - planning on government to pick up a large share of the costs for their labor).
Trying to under-price AI labor, to keep humans employed, is a losing gambit calculated to ensure either working paupers, or an effectively government provided income, but without the benefits of it being *guaranteed* (it has by design lots of gaps, loopholes, complex qualifying formulas, and constant uncertainty), or (most likely) both.
That's not an option in America, the people are too smart and too well armed to stand for that.
Because everyone is going to be feeding themselves by hunting deer? (BTW if every deer in America were slaughtered it would produce no more than 6 lb of meat for every American, or enough calories for about 4 days, and then they would be economically extinct.)
Or are they going to be robbing farmers so their grain can't be exported to paying customers?
How are the guns putting food on the table in a secure manner?
By all means: leave out health care, the relative cost of which has more than tripled since 1960, from 5% of GDP to nearly 18% and housing costs have also risen sharply over the same period. Don't just focus on areas where costs have improved. That is called "cherry picking".
Your objection to the annoyance factor of "downward wind" overlooks the fact that if they are an important means of transportation there will be a lot of them, going over every few seconds, and so what for one "flying car" is "widely dispersed" is not when the total traffic is considered.
Also the argument that "they won't spend much time milling around close to their terminals hovering" is little comfort for anyone anywhere near these terminals, which would need to be in cities to be useful. In fact, within a congested urban environment they would be in hover mode much or most of the time. Simple economics does not negate basic considerations of safety and traffic management. Simple economics does however rule them out completely as anything but a rich man's toy.
True, but flying vehicles would spend a lot less time stuck in traffic, even if they had to fly over existing roadways for safety. Just opening up an additional dimension to roadways would increase capacity massively.
You would be correct to say "opening up an additional dimension to roadways would increase capacity slightly", massively is ridiculous.
Let's actually think about this.
The capacity of a high speed road (call it a freeway or what-have-you) is about 1800 vehicles per lane per hour (one vehicle every two seconds per lane) and each lane is 12 feet wide.. Thus each vehicle occupies an area of 180 feet by 12 feet and travels at an average speed of about 60 MPH.
A flying vehicle will go faster, but that will be likely less than 180 MPH (fuel and vehicle cost climbs steeply with speed), for comparison the Cessna 172 has a cruise speed of only 140 MPH. But lets say it is three times faster than a car. And lets say there is one altitude available for the flying cars (we will return to this in a moment). To double the capacity of the road system (I suppose you could claim doubling is "massive", but anything less would definitely not be) we need to get one flying car through each 12 feet of road width every two seconds. The wingspan of the Cessna 172 is 36 feet (and since flying cars are planes under another name they will need wings too) and if we give them the same minimum clearance we give tractor-trailers ("semis") of 2 feet on either side, this makes an "air lane" 40 feet wide - but I argue this is ridiculous, more clearance will be required, so lets say 48 feet, or 4 lanes in each direction. So we now need to get 2 flying cars through each "plane lane" each second. This means the flying cars have a 1/2 second following distance and are actually closer together in the air than cars are on the ground. See any problems with this?
In practice there are no road systems capable of accommodating more than one "plane lane" in each direction.
Maybe would could thin them out by stacking them up vertically. To get back merely to the effective 2 second following time actual drivers use on the road, that is four layers of flying vehicles, but the higher speed and problems of "plane braking" (ever try to brake one to halt?) requires much greater separation, and thus more layers. This makes a good image for Futurama perhaps but I don't see this as a reality-based idea.
And then there is the specialized nature of this putative flying car. Can't be used in the city or suburbs (except on the ground, but what about those wings?), it can only take to the air on long distance travel between cities (as Musk points out, where in a city would anyone tolerate a plane - err "flying car" -passing them twice a second?). Sure sounds like a rich person's toy to me - expensive and with limited utility. And where do all this "massively" increased vehicle traffic take-off and land?
On the other hand, neurons are severely limited by the biological processes, so it's possible that we can make artificial neurons that are better than the ones in our brains. A small neuron is 4 microns. A small transistor is 0.02 microns, so we can pack a lot of computation in the size of a neuron, and make it run millions of times faster too.
It is true that we can expect artificial neurons, once we know how to make one, will run much faster than natural ones, given the fact that we aren't limited to the materials that natural evolution must work with.
But the scale comparison you make (though a common one) is wildly, unjustly, favorable to current technology. The common "feature size" measure used to compare solid state circuit elements is in no way comparable to the computational units in nervous systems, which actually takes place at the level of individual molecules within a three dimensional neuron, part of a three dimensional closely packed neural structure.
That transistor is lying on (at this scale) an immensely thick slab of silicon, which we are trying to get down to 160 microns; which then gets stuffed into a gigantic package, which is mounted in a very space-inefficient way on a colossal board. So that the density of computational elements in a human-made system is actually many orders of magnitude lower than a biological system. Once you take into account the packaging of the highest gate count device currently on the market, the Stratix 10 FPGA, each of those 30 billion transistors occupies something 400 cubic microns, which isn't even considering the low density of package mounting in a complete computing system. Embedded in an actual computing system that volume grows to something like 10,000 cubic microns per transistor.
The rough (very rough) equivalent of a transistor in a natural neural system is not a neuron but a synapse, the behavior of which is still much more complex that a transistor. The average volume density of synapses in the human brain is about 0.1 cubic micron per synapse. If, for the sake of discussion, each synapse can be modeled with a 10 transistor gate array, then the effective density is one "transistor" per 0.01 cubic micron, or a million times smaller than those tiny transistor features we boast about. So our tiny transistors are "tiny" in only two dimensions, and then only if they are measured in isolation. In reality, compared to neurons, they are gigantic whales.
Given that our knowledge of the computational complexity of a single neuron is growing steadily, I think it's safe to say your FPGA cell estimate for a neuron was significantly too low.
For example, scientists now know that one single neuron (of certain types) is an entire neural network all by itself. Dendrites with multiple localized spikes communicating with each other and with other cells. Ultimately performing non-linear computation prior to forwarding any signal to cell body.
Right you are. The absolute give-away (in addition to the ridiculous low-ball answer he provided) was "... that was pretty straightforward..." which shows the Dunning-Kruger Effect in full bloom. He had no idea now little he knows about the subject.
The example I like to use to illustrate how much smoke is being blown about this my tech types is the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. This 1 mm long nematode has had every one of its 302 neurons in its nervous mapped out, including all connections to every other neuron, as well as the process of development from the initial fertilized egg - we have mapped out exactly how the nervous system develops (indeed every one of the 959 cells in its body have been similarly traced out).
Given this complete map of C. elegans nervous system we must have a spiffy computer of the little worm's "brain" able to replicate its behavior? Right?
Not even close. So far we cannot accurate model the behavior of even a single neuron in C. elegans. Even one single neuron represents computational complexity that we are still trying to understand.
That is not intelligence, not even in thesense of current AI.
When people talk of super-human intelligence, they mean one capable of self-awareness. Something even a toddler lacks.
That is nonsense. Do you not have memories of yourself as a toddler? I do. I was absolutely self-aware.
It would be more general to say - cities are found where people have a reason for wanting to live in large numbers.
Historically that has meant most often natural nexuses of transportation, centers of industrial and other economic activity, and governmental administrative centers. And cities have a natural tendency toward self-reinforcing growth - once economic activity and large numbers of people are located at once place, more of both tends to follow.
In the case of Las Vegas its founding as a major city was due to lax gambling laws, creating a "sin haven", a trick that can pretty much only be done once. Others have copied but with only modest, and often fleeting success - (cough) Atlantic City (cough). Also, it is next to a major river, and grew up at a time that the water rights of the river were not over-subscribed.
Notions of new cities growing up in deserts require an explanation of what it will be attracting people to live there in the first place.
Why is there a new city? All cities require an economic basis, a productive economy. The industries of the future are going to be high skill industries. You will note that new high skill businesses are invariably located in/near existing cities, usually in reasonably nice climates, often where costs are already high, because that's where they have to be to get the workers they need . What is going to attract those educated youngish types out to your new desert city? Even if a super billionaire business type decides he is going to found a new city, let's call it "Bezosville" or "Muskopolis", he may find the competitive *disadvantage* of recruiting employees may be too big a hit to take.
Another point to ponder. There is no way that Titleist's actual balls conform to many of the claims in these patents. But they don't have to. These are just claims made by patent lawyers and don't need to be reflected in any actual product. But no doubt some features of Titleist balls match the patents, there are so many of them (hundreds) and are so varied and broadly phrased they would have to. But that is also true of any other golf ball made by anybody.
Therein lies the secret of corporate abuse of the patent system to create virtual monopolies. You don't have to actually invent or show anything - you simply write up vast lists of claims to create hooks for lawyers to threaten to sue other people. The people who write these patents simply spend their lives poring over technical literature, concocting new descriptive language, dreaming up new claims to make, not actually inventing anything useful or even real.
So, patents do expire, right? Companies can't do this forever, right? Eventually after the 20 year time expires we can get nice things for cheap, right? Somebody...
Take a look at the patents (I posted a list and some direct links up-page).
The set of them are enormous grab-bags of literally hundreds of claims over every aspect of golf ball design and construction. You can paste-up Googled polymer chemistry terms, reworded descriptions of geometry, revised lists of hardness scores, etc. etc. to create new tossed-salads of claims until the end of time. This is "patent engineering" - creating dense obscure far reaching webs of claims for lawyers to file, there is not actual innovation in the lot of them.
I think someone at Acushnet is in trouble now for sending threatening letters.
Surely not. This has been an extremely successful tactic to crush competition up to now. The ridiculous margin they are making on their balls surely covers the modest cost of a lawyer who writes threaten letters (and the legal department that is "innovating" by writing up new patents to file).
This being/. lots of people are speculating about what the patents might be, rather than simply following the link and then looking them up and actually knowing.
Here are links to four of the patents mentioned (there are eleven of them I don't have time to create markup links for all of them): US6994638, US8123632, US8444507, US9320944. The other patents are: US8025593, US 8257201, US 7331878, US6358161, US7887439, US 7641572, and US7163472. You can Google them like I did.
Looking over Costco's response, and looking at the patents themselves, I have a strong feeling of deja vu. Acushnet is not a patent troll, since they actually sell a product and are using the patent system to crush competition with litigation threats, but to my eye the patents are written in the finest patent troll tradition. They are all highly complex grab bags of a whole lot of claims written very broadly, a rich shopping list for lawyers to turn into legal accusations. Literally hundreds of separate claims are made in these patents, in a densely cross referenced fashion. They aren't patents of any identifiable invention, they are simply a wall of claims on every possible aspect of a golf ball so that something can be carved out to attack any competitor.
Note that Acushnet has never had to defend any of these claims in court! With the deeply broken patent system we have today, in which its stated purpose (to encourage innovation for the public good) has been turned on its head as a way of suppressing actual innovation and protecting established corporations, a patent cannot be assumed to have any validity until it has actually been litigated. The courts are called on to do the job of the patent examiners.
Most of my favorite movies have low scores, most movies I consider epic and mind blowing have mediocre scores. That website is horribly wrong about movies 99% of the time....
I take you at your word oh AC. In which case Rotten Tomatoes is functioning perfectly even for you! Just apply your own preference metric to the site. If low scores=great to you then it is telling you exactly what you want to know. Go out and see the low scoring movies! Problem solved!
Indeed. Also this jerk has more than a touch of RIAA/MPAA disease - the belief that society owes them arbitrarily large amounts of money regardless of their product, demand, or business model. $850 million makes him cry? It should of been a billion, no make that two billion! How dare people publicly express a negative opinion about my movie! There shouldn't be any source of negative reviews! Only positive reviews should ever be published! It is so unfair to me!
That would be S0–2, a star orbiting Sagittarius A* - the gigantic black hole at the Milky Way's center.
S0-2 has a longer orbit than 47 Tucanae X9, because it is highly elliptical, but at closest approach to Sagittarius A* is reaches 5000 km/sec. The speed of 47 Tucanae X9 is 3500 km/sec.
Reading the very first (short) paragraph of the TFA reveals that printing is only being used for rapid prototyping. They are not going to be manufacturing deployed weapons this way.
Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.
In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.
But that's not the only destructive aspect of Iceland's volcanoes. In 1783 the eruption of the Laki volcano released 14 cubic kilometers of basalt and 1 cubic kilometer of airborne ash. It killed 25% of Iceland's population through poison gas: 500 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide were released poisoning the population and the livestock. The fatalities were both from direct poisoning (mostly from the hydrogen fluoride) and later starvation since most of the livestock was killed. The toxic cloud affected much of Europe as well, though not as severely. This eruption also created a three-year long period of unseasonable cold in the northern hemisphere leading to famine killing thousands, and possibly contributing to the French Revolution.
This is only one example of a long series of discoveries over the last 40 years. An extensive system of earth works, causeways, and canals have been found along the Xingu river (an Amazon tributary). Large sections of jungle have turned out to be fruit tree orchards that over-grew with forest (which would have happened quite quickly once left untended). The entire Amazonian basin itself was virtually unknown to European civilization until the 20th Century - for most of that time it was outside of the control of colonial and later Brazilian government, being instead controlled by societies of Indians and escaped slaves. Societies of many tens of thousands of Indians, like the Yanomamo, only started being studied by westerners starting in the 1950s and to this day live in areas outside of state administrative control. Discoveries like this are being made all over the Amazonian basin, now that westerners are actually examining it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not long ago, the demand for a $15 minimum hourly wage was brought up. The greedy corporate answer? Install automation instead. Because it's cheaper.
Automation is targeting higher salary positions - which have a bigger pay-off in replacement. The average hourly U.S. wage is $24.57. If you eliminate 50% of all jobs, it is going to be skewed toward the higher salary end, and thus the average position wage eliminated will be more than $24.57 an hour. Minimum wage is currently only $7.25, and anyone actually living on minimum wage is already having that low wage subsidized by the government (Walmart does this quite deliberately and systematic, it is a fundamental part of their business model - planning on government to pick up a large share of the costs for their labor).
Trying to under-price AI labor, to keep humans employed, is a losing gambit calculated to ensure either working paupers, or an effectively government provided income, but without the benefits of it being *guaranteed* (it has by design lots of gaps, loopholes, complex qualifying formulas, and constant uncertainty), or (most likely) both.
50% of all jobs??
About 11M people in the US are working with manufacturing. In a country of 321M..
They are talking about the elimination of service jobs which are 80% of all U.S. jobs. Do try to keep up.
In horrific poverty lacking food security.
That's not an option in America, the people are too smart and too well armed to stand for that.
Because everyone is going to be feeding themselves by hunting deer? (BTW if every deer in America were slaughtered it would produce no more than 6 lb of meat for every American, or enough calories for about 4 days, and then they would be economically extinct.)
Or are they going to be robbing farmers so their grain can't be exported to paying customers?
How are the guns putting food on the table in a secure manner?
By all means: leave out health care, the relative cost of which has more than tripled since 1960, from 5% of GDP to nearly 18% and housing costs have also risen sharply over the same period. Don't just focus on areas where costs have improved. That is called "cherry picking".
In Putin's Russia there are so many jobs everyone has two - and will soon be out of both of them!
Your objection to the annoyance factor of "downward wind" overlooks the fact that if they are an important means of transportation there will be a lot of them, going over every few seconds, and so what for one "flying car" is "widely dispersed" is not when the total traffic is considered.
Also the argument that "they won't spend much time milling around close to their terminals hovering" is little comfort for anyone anywhere near these terminals, which would need to be in cities to be useful. In fact, within a congested urban environment they would be in hover mode much or most of the time. Simple economics does not negate basic considerations of safety and traffic management. Simple economics does however rule them out completely as anything but a rich man's toy.
True, but flying vehicles would spend a lot less time stuck in traffic, even if they had to fly over existing roadways for safety. Just opening up an additional dimension to roadways would increase capacity massively.
You would be correct to say "opening up an additional dimension to roadways would increase capacity slightly", massively is ridiculous.
Let's actually think about this.
The capacity of a high speed road (call it a freeway or what-have-you) is about 1800 vehicles per lane per hour (one vehicle every two seconds per lane) and each lane is 12 feet wide.. Thus each vehicle occupies an area of 180 feet by 12 feet and travels at an average speed of about 60 MPH.
A flying vehicle will go faster, but that will be likely less than 180 MPH (fuel and vehicle cost climbs steeply with speed), for comparison the Cessna 172 has a cruise speed of only 140 MPH. But lets say it is three times faster than a car. And lets say there is one altitude available for the flying cars (we will return to this in a moment). To double the capacity of the road system (I suppose you could claim doubling is "massive", but anything less would definitely not be) we need to get one flying car through each 12 feet of road width every two seconds. The wingspan of the Cessna 172 is 36 feet (and since flying cars are planes under another name they will need wings too) and if we give them the same minimum clearance we give tractor-trailers ("semis") of 2 feet on either side, this makes an "air lane" 40 feet wide - but I argue this is ridiculous, more clearance will be required, so lets say 48 feet, or 4 lanes in each direction. So we now need to get 2 flying cars through each "plane lane" each second. This means the flying cars have a 1/2 second following distance and are actually closer together in the air than cars are on the ground. See any problems with this?
In practice there are no road systems capable of accommodating more than one "plane lane" in each direction.
Maybe would could thin them out by stacking them up vertically. To get back merely to the effective 2 second following time actual drivers use on the road, that is four layers of flying vehicles, but the higher speed and problems of "plane braking" (ever try to brake one to halt?) requires much greater separation, and thus more layers. This makes a good image for Futurama perhaps but I don't see this as a reality-based idea.
And then there is the specialized nature of this putative flying car. Can't be used in the city or suburbs (except on the ground, but what about those wings?), it can only take to the air on long distance travel between cities (as Musk points out, where in a city would anyone tolerate a plane - err "flying car" -passing them twice a second?). Sure sounds like a rich person's toy to me - expensive and with limited utility. And where do all this "massively" increased vehicle traffic take-off and land?
On the other hand, neurons are severely limited by the biological processes, so it's possible that we can make artificial neurons that are better than the ones in our brains. A small neuron is 4 microns. A small transistor is 0.02 microns, so we can pack a lot of computation in the size of a neuron, and make it run millions of times faster too.
It is true that we can expect artificial neurons, once we know how to make one, will run much faster than natural ones, given the fact that we aren't limited to the materials that natural evolution must work with.
But the scale comparison you make (though a common one) is wildly, unjustly, favorable to current technology. The common "feature size" measure used to compare solid state circuit elements is in no way comparable to the computational units in nervous systems, which actually takes place at the level of individual molecules within a three dimensional neuron, part of a three dimensional closely packed neural structure.
That transistor is lying on (at this scale) an immensely thick slab of silicon, which we are trying to get down to 160 microns; which then gets stuffed into a gigantic package, which is mounted in a very space-inefficient way on a colossal board. So that the density of computational elements in a human-made system is actually many orders of magnitude lower than a biological system. Once you take into account the packaging of the highest gate count device currently on the market, the Stratix 10 FPGA, each of those 30 billion transistors occupies something 400 cubic microns, which isn't even considering the low density of package mounting in a complete computing system. Embedded in an actual computing system that volume grows to something like 10,000 cubic microns per transistor.
The rough (very rough) equivalent of a transistor in a natural neural system is not a neuron but a synapse, the behavior of which is still much more complex that a transistor. The average volume density of synapses in the human brain is about 0.1 cubic micron per synapse. If, for the sake of discussion, each synapse can be modeled with a 10 transistor gate array, then the effective density is one "transistor" per 0.01 cubic micron, or a million times smaller than those tiny transistor features we boast about. So our tiny transistors are "tiny" in only two dimensions, and then only if they are measured in isolation. In reality, compared to neurons, they are gigantic whales.
Given that our knowledge of the computational complexity of a single neuron is growing steadily, I think it's safe to say your FPGA cell estimate for a neuron was significantly too low. For example, scientists now know that one single neuron (of certain types) is an entire neural network all by itself. Dendrites with multiple localized spikes communicating with each other and with other cells. Ultimately performing non-linear computation prior to forwarding any signal to cell body.
Right you are. The absolute give-away (in addition to the ridiculous low-ball answer he provided) was "... that was pretty straightforward..." which shows the Dunning-Kruger Effect in full bloom. He had no idea now little he knows about the subject.
The example I like to use to illustrate how much smoke is being blown about this my tech types is the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. This 1 mm long nematode has had every one of its 302 neurons in its nervous mapped out, including all connections to every other neuron, as well as the process of development from the initial fertilized egg - we have mapped out exactly how the nervous system develops (indeed every one of the 959 cells in its body have been similarly traced out).
Given this complete map of C. elegans nervous system we must have a spiffy computer of the little worm's "brain" able to replicate its behavior? Right?
Not even close. So far we cannot accurate model the behavior of even a single neuron in C. elegans. Even one single neuron represents computational complexity that we are still trying to understand.
That is not intelligence, not even in thesense of current AI. When people talk of super-human intelligence, they mean one capable of self-awareness. Something even a toddler lacks.
That is nonsense. Do you not have memories of yourself as a toddler? I do. I was absolutely self-aware.
It would be more general to say - cities are found where people have a reason for wanting to live in large numbers.
Historically that has meant most often natural nexuses of transportation, centers of industrial and other economic activity, and governmental administrative centers. And cities have a natural tendency toward self-reinforcing growth - once economic activity and large numbers of people are located at once place, more of both tends to follow.
In the case of Las Vegas its founding as a major city was due to lax gambling laws, creating a "sin haven", a trick that can pretty much only be done once. Others have copied but with only modest, and often fleeting success - (cough) Atlantic City (cough). Also, it is next to a major river, and grew up at a time that the water rights of the river were not over-subscribed.
Notions of new cities growing up in deserts require an explanation of what it will be attracting people to live there in the first place.
Why is there a new city? All cities require an economic basis, a productive economy. The industries of the future are going to be high skill industries. You will note that new high skill businesses are invariably located in/near existing cities, usually in reasonably nice climates, often where costs are already high, because that's where they have to be to get the workers they need . What is going to attract those educated youngish types out to your new desert city? Even if a super billionaire business type decides he is going to found a new city, let's call it "Bezosville" or "Muskopolis", he may find the competitive *disadvantage* of recruiting employees may be too big a hit to take.
Another point to ponder. There is no way that Titleist's actual balls conform to many of the claims in these patents. But they don't have to. These are just claims made by patent lawyers and don't need to be reflected in any actual product. But no doubt some features of Titleist balls match the patents, there are so many of them (hundreds) and are so varied and broadly phrased they would have to. But that is also true of any other golf ball made by anybody.
Therein lies the secret of corporate abuse of the patent system to create virtual monopolies. You don't have to actually invent or show anything - you simply write up vast lists of claims to create hooks for lawyers to threaten to sue other people. The people who write these patents simply spend their lives poring over technical literature, concocting new descriptive language, dreaming up new claims to make, not actually inventing anything useful or even real.
There is also no such thing as a free market when there is no regulation and monopolies and cartels and control the markets.
"Free market" is a political buzz phrase with no real meaning in economics (look it up).
So, patents do expire, right? Companies can't do this forever, right? Eventually after the 20 year time expires we can get nice things for cheap, right? Somebody...
Take a look at the patents (I posted a list and some direct links up-page).
The set of them are enormous grab-bags of literally hundreds of claims over every aspect of golf ball design and construction. You can paste-up Googled polymer chemistry terms, reworded descriptions of geometry, revised lists of hardness scores, etc. etc. to create new tossed-salads of claims until the end of time. This is "patent engineering" - creating dense obscure far reaching webs of claims for lawyers to file, there is not actual innovation in the lot of them.
I think someone at Acushnet is in trouble now for sending threatening letters.
Surely not. This has been an extremely successful tactic to crush competition up to now. The ridiculous margin they are making on their balls surely covers the modest cost of a lawyer who writes threaten letters (and the legal department that is "innovating" by writing up new patents to file).
This being /. lots of people are speculating about what the patents might be, rather than simply following the link and then looking them up and actually knowing.
Here are links to four of the patents mentioned (there are eleven of them I don't have time to create markup links for all of them): US6994638, US8123632, US8444507, US9320944. The other patents are: US8025593, US 8257201, US 7331878, US6358161, US7887439, US 7641572, and US7163472. You can Google them like I did.
Looking over Costco's response, and looking at the patents themselves, I have a strong feeling of deja vu. Acushnet is not a patent troll, since they actually sell a product and are using the patent system to crush competition with litigation threats, but to my eye the patents are written in the finest patent troll tradition. They are all highly complex grab bags of a whole lot of claims written very broadly, a rich shopping list for lawyers to turn into legal accusations. Literally hundreds of separate claims are made in these patents, in a densely cross referenced fashion. They aren't patents of any identifiable invention, they are simply a wall of claims on every possible aspect of a golf ball so that something can be carved out to attack any competitor.
Note that Acushnet has never had to defend any of these claims in court! With the deeply broken patent system we have today, in which its stated purpose (to encourage innovation for the public good) has been turned on its head as a way of suppressing actual innovation and protecting established corporations, a patent cannot be assumed to have any validity until it has actually been litigated. The courts are called on to do the job of the patent examiners.
I doubt Costco is going to lose this case.
Most of my favorite movies have low scores, most movies I consider epic and mind blowing have mediocre scores. That website is horribly wrong about movies 99% of the time....
I take you at your word oh AC. In which case Rotten Tomatoes is functioning perfectly even for you! Just apply your own preference metric to the site. If low scores=great to you then it is telling you exactly what you want to know. Go out and see the low scoring movies! Problem solved!
Indeed. Also this jerk has more than a touch of RIAA/MPAA disease - the belief that society owes them arbitrarily large amounts of money regardless of their product, demand, or business model. $850 million makes him cry? It should of been a billion, no make that two billion! How dare people publicly express a negative opinion about my movie! There shouldn't be any source of negative reviews! Only positive reviews should ever be published! It is so unfair to me!
That would be S0–2, a star orbiting Sagittarius A* - the gigantic black hole at the Milky Way's center.
S0-2 has a longer orbit than 47 Tucanae X9, because it is highly elliptical, but at closest approach to Sagittarius A* is reaches 5000 km/sec. The speed of 47 Tucanae X9 is 3500 km/sec.
Yeah, and that special property is that it is "just" a rapid prototype, revealed in the second sentence of TFA.
Reading the very first (short) paragraph of the TFA reveals that printing is only being used for rapid prototyping. They are not going to be manufacturing deployed weapons this way.
Another proponent of NSBATUAA!
THAT is a lot of warm water.
A jökulhlaup is actually ice cold.
Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.
In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.
But that's not the only destructive aspect of Iceland's volcanoes. In 1783 the eruption of the Laki volcano released 14 cubic kilometers of basalt and 1 cubic kilometer of airborne ash. It killed 25% of Iceland's population through poison gas: 500 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide were released poisoning the population and the livestock. The fatalities were both from direct poisoning (mostly from the hydrogen fluoride) and later starvation since most of the livestock was killed. The toxic cloud affected much of Europe as well, though not as severely. This eruption also created a three-year long period of unseasonable cold in the northern hemisphere leading to famine killing thousands, and possibly contributing to the French Revolution.
Very true.
This is only one example of a long series of discoveries over the last 40 years. An extensive system of earth works, causeways, and canals have been found along the Xingu river (an Amazon tributary). Large sections of jungle have turned out to be fruit tree orchards that over-grew with forest (which would have happened quite quickly once left untended). The entire Amazonian basin itself was virtually unknown to European civilization until the 20th Century - for most of that time it was outside of the control of colonial and later Brazilian government, being instead controlled by societies of Indians and escaped slaves. Societies of many tens of thousands of Indians, like the Yanomamo, only started being studied by westerners starting in the 1950s and to this day live in areas outside of state administrative control. Discoveries like this are being made all over the Amazonian basin, now that westerners are actually examining it.