If the Fed does as expected and raises interest rates 3 times this year, you'll see a net outflow of capital from the stock market (and hello special dividends to keep investors holding share prices up a little longer) and into long term items like T-bills and higher rate commercial paper. Realistically the US economy needs this cash right now to help sop up all of the QE that was done post 2008 to create "artificial" liquidity in the market just as that fed created liquidity needs to disappear to restore a somewhat healthy balance.
Now if the Fed doesnt Fsck up and let the net-negative interest rates continue, we might have a chance to avoid a debt bomb from the 4 TRILLION in stimulus cash that currently doesn't get considered as part of the US debt/deficit.
Labor indicators are much more volatile than others, but the signals are highly mixed because of major contrarian macro-economic things the Fed undertook post 2008 - QE, QE2, QE ad-infinadum. This is a little like the S&L bust in the mid 80s but in reverse. Instead of a giant drain on available cash & capital for large businesses, instead we've essentially hollowed out the entire capital market for the small businesses. As the Fed increased QE to pump in "liquidity" it was making sole proprieterships harder to run as capital often will flow to the lowest risk with stable returns.
Look at the housing market - growth has not been in single-family dwellings, instead lots of capital has gone into new multi-tennant dwellings and high-end. Both of these are now going to be hit hard by the tax changes. High end housing is being slapped by the SALT and mortgage changes, while leased properties depend on a large supply of families without sufficient capital to purchase a starter property.
On the corporate front, if you look at where large-cap firms have spent their money up till now it has been quite sparse on the capital expenditure front, lots of stock buy-backs and such meant to goose share prices in absence of revenue and income growth. Aside from oil, very little of the hoarded cash and injected cash from the fed was spent on re-tooling and factory upgrades (domestic US that is). Now we're seeing countless announcements of re-tooling, and even surprisingly a number of factory moves _ON_ shore such as the Mazda plant in the southeast and claimed moves of auto production lines from Mexico back to Detroit! That's not possible unless there's capital ready to spend on these investments and the companies think they'll get that money back from revenue.
If you want to know when (not if) the bubble will pop, don't look at bitcoin and Dow Jones Industrials - look at their capital expenditures, as soon as that starts to dry up either we'll see a big market contraction, or the in-flow of capital will have flowed to the workers and personal spending will have caught up. Like we're at least a year out from the next contraction, or it could be 2-3 years before we see the economy get tired of the growth and build up enough errors to start shrinking again.
There is no axiom accepted by science that forbids scientific inquiry into origin questions.
In your zeal to declare science all-powerful, you neglect to account for an infinitesimal fact wedged between existence and "Truth".
You can prove that there are at least the two distinct areas of study which are applicable to the nature of existence, but you cannot prove that they will find ultimate answers which are "TRUE" for any and all 'geometries' or frames of reference, or whatever relativism might be invoked. That is the ultimate difference between science, as a means of learning, and faith as a means of determining "TRUTH". They intertwine in fascinating and unexpected ways, and often in uncomfortable and undesirable ways, but neither exists in a vacuum. For "SCIENCE" to be something of value you must eschew "TRUTH" and remain agnostic about validity of theories, and this is a seemingly transitive equality, to accept faith, one must eschew relativism in some domains.
The really interesting element for all of this is, how does this zero-sum-game between objectivism and absolutism affect the human condition?
Mod this up, not just interesting but incredibly precise. I had never considered looking at Bayes applicability to P=1 and P=0 concepts, but if you follow this math, its just as illuminating as Godel's theorms of incompleteness. Godel attempts to prove that a finite mathematic system or language is also finite, AND requires a-priori statements which are entirely outside of (neither provable, nor dis-provable) from within the finite mathematics. Also see how these statements are consistent with modern physics (Fermi et. al.).
Compare these structural statements and tell me they don't tend to re-enforce one another:
Godel - A finite language can only describe a finite system.
Bayes - A probability of 1 (guaranteed to occur) event cannot be predicted by statistical methods
Fermi - It is impossible to predict any quantum event based solely upon finite observations.
This suggests the human neurological operation has a common observation/understanding limitation which repeats within any area of scientific research - when faced with infinite values [ example: f(x)=(1/X) ] the mind must use a finite substitute ("infinity").
Excellent trolling, refute the summary of an article about poor understanding of the meaning of science with a Popperian negative-proof masquerading as a strawman. Either you are a grand-master of hyperbole, or you don't bother to read to comprehension before declaring something invalid. Irony, since that's pretty much exactly the OP - many humans really love to declare themselves aligned with SCIENCE! Yet few are actually consistently able to operate scientifically.
While its nice to think that the Constitution prevents this kind of thing, it is generally ONLY applicable to criminal defense. You can still be indicted, arrested and jailed awaiting trial, and until you enter the courtroom this presumption of innocence doesn't event matter. You only get the benefit from this Constitutional right _AFTER_ you have been through all of the previous steps, so don't expect to pull out your laminated copy of the Bill of Rights as a shield.
In a civil matters, particularly a trial, you are not entitled to automatic presumption of innocence as a defense, and not even a tiny amount of deference is due to you in the exercise and enforcement of a contract you might have with your ISP.
About the only legal protection an individual might have is a class-action lawsuit alleging fraud against the ISP, and that's something that takes years to work its way up to the pain threshold of settlement or trial.
IANAL but this definitely seems to fall within Tortious Interference or similar acts which would serve to break the contract between you and your ISP. Then again there is probably a clause in your ToS which they will attempt to use to allow this based on their "need" to charge Netflix extra for network peering.
Don't forget to read your contract and notifications of change!
Ehh, a bit adhomenim for my tastes. TFA makes a bit point about how important "IP" is to the new outfit. In the CEO's own words "...people don't give us credit..." which is code for - we're not making enough money from selling hardware, and lookie here at all these wonderful patents we can use to generate licenses fees or sell as an asset.
Let the race to purchase their Patent portfolio begin!
Who might have enough cash to purchase the biggest stick in the phone wars? Apple or Samsung. Like the highlander it seems there can be only one... then again the Highlander kept having sequels so we might see this fight again and again (yuck).
From the article they are using TSMC, which is one of the largest silicon foundries (ASIC manufacturing) in the world.
As for the all out open-source, they also make clear on the project page that hardware patents on the chipset instruction is supposedly strangling innovation for processors. I'm not sure I buy that, ARM, Intel and IBM have moved their architectures along pretty well. Even poor little MIPS has made strides despite losing market share.
No moderation system is perfect, but audience curation (whether intentional or not) does seem to channel the activity into a relatively benign community. While there are plenty of Trolls here, most often these are either bad nerd jokes, or Apple/Microsoft/Linux haters - notice the common theme? Even more importantly however, even our/. trolls are likeminded, and (mostly) tolerated.
The problem I see with Jackson's "solution" is that the Jezabel audience (not the trolls) will lose any voice they had, which in retrospect is probably EXACTLY what the trolls want.
Yes, people get very confused by the fact that nearly all of the headline grabbing GPL enforcement actions to date have "settled" for coming into compliance, with occasional "donations" to GPL enforcement bodies. Remember, a settlement is usually an out of court agreement between the parties to terminate or withdraw legal action, and never involves actually settling the law at hand, and a settlement generally doesn't need to comply the law.
The best way to understand this difference is to realize that if you run off the road and break my fence, and I sue you but settle for $20 instead of the $200 repair bill for whatever reason, you can still be sued by my neighbor for his part of the fence, and he is under no obligation to settle for $20 as I have done.
+1 - A lot of folks are playing amateur lawyer and making claims about what the GPL "does", but you should defer to Rosen here since he actually is a practicing lawyer who has actually been at a Plaintiff's table and enforced the GPL. He is very explicit that the GPL does not create new obligations upon authors who combine original works with GPL works. Your code is always your code, regardless of whether it is in a separate C file, or patched into an existing file licensed to you under the GPL. Go back and re-read the GPL, look for the words "distribution" and "distribute" which are the _ACTS_ that invoke the GPL terms of the upstream author.
The fact that we're still dealing with the "virus" meme suggests that Microsoft's dirty FUD war lives on long beyond it's usefulness to them. I only hope someday that karma pays them back when we have enough solid case law to make GPL the better legal framework for business and that we can repay their little FUD bomb one kick in the proprietary wall at a time.
Thanks for the check in Jeff - sorry for the trolls....
Back to the original OP topic of patents - Do you think that Colorado's congressional delegation is any more informed about the destructive effect of poor patents on this market? I know they have certainly made hay of having you in their districts as a sign of their super-fantastic "stewardship" of Colorado's industrial relevance.
While the concept is "old", the actual technology in use here is hardly "old hat". FDM/FFF itself was stillborn as a product from Stratasys mostly due to the extremely high cost of entry - I have clients that purchased systems from Stratasys 15 years ago, and they are far more excited and anxious to use the capabilities of the new-market FFF systems because the vibrant and competitive market from non-commercial RepRap and all of the commercial spin offs like Aleph is putting a significant number of new eyeballs and creative developers into the mix.
The point is precisely that any technology, no matter how capable, will be under utilized and see limited functionality if it is only allowed to be used by a single company - think Unix at AT&T/Bell in 1960 vs. *Nix in 2010 in phones, cars, elevators, watches, glasses, power plants, airplanes, battle tanks, space craft, and 3D printers.
"Important" is meaningless in the eyes of the law - think "swipe to unlock" lawsuits between Apple and Samsung. ANY infringement can bollox your nice little innovative startup and crush novel products. Component costs are not now, nor have they ever been the barrier to innovation, if that was the case then we should be seeing a massive wave of innovation coming from China, Thiland and Maylasia. Instead most of it is still coming from Taiwan and California.
Capital (human and cash) is the real driver, and currently capital is captive to the legal fiction of the value and necessity of Patents - aka "IP Rights". The OP and Aleph's CEO's comments above are very nice to see efforts to break the stranglehold, but its pretty thin gruel to assume one company in Loveland Colorado is going to topple the billions of IPO dollars sloshing around SFO/SJC area chasing and perpetuating the artificial monopolies created by the USPTO.
If you have ever been to the HP (now Agilent) facility here in Colorado Springs, you can walk the graveyard of literally bulldozed cubicles, behind the remaining old cube farm walls. On the walkways are thousands of plaques with US Patent numbers and inventors. The inventors are gone, their cubes are piled like trash, and the shell of the old company exists as not much more than a US based front for a Penang Maylasia based manufacturing outfit with an ever shrinking number of US "engineers" designing more and more expensive systems for fewer and fewer clients every year.
I don't think the Patents have actually resulted in real "advancement of human progress"...
Nope, US based. While the "CEO"s are usually MBAs, in many companies from Intel on down the real decision makers of whether things get open sourced are engineers who have climbed the ladder. Think "VP of Engineering", "VP of Product Development" - these are the folks that usually crush open source movements within established firms... "because". They don't understand open source, they didn't do it that way in the 80s, and no amount of argument will convince them otherwise. Add in a corporate legal counsel who wants to be a CFO or CEO and you get "opinions" that GPL is unenforceable and contrary to shareholder interest.
MBAs are actually _easier_ to convince that open source can work since they are more likely to be swayed by graphs and slide ware - tell them "RedHat is doing it" or "Google does it" and they queue up to join the party...
It certainly helps Aleph that the original FDM patent has expired so at least they aren't under immediate assault. On the other hand it is worrisome that they have to think so hard about the "prior art" aspect - is that really what the open source actions is about? If so I'm skeptical that this is a valid solution since the current regime of patentability (I'm looking at you software patents) means there is plenty of danger for them in the dependent/follow-on patents that Stratasys has filed. Lots of necessary and related improvements to the FFF/FDM process are "obvious" if you are building a machine to be useful for additive manufacturing, but USPTO does not use that approach to determining patentability. The worse bit is that if one takes the time to actually dig into the PTO database looking for other's patents, and trying to "work around" - you might be open to contributory infringement (at least stateside), so most folks actively ignore the PTO database to prevent such skeletons. That means LESS information sharing rather than more...
On the gripping hand, I'm happy to see Aleph using the lessons of the software world as a viable business model - forget the 3D printer part. All electronics hardware businesses should be able to follow this model if they are willing - the end result for human productivity, creativity and technological advancement seems inevitable. Assuming Patents are somehow overcome as an obstacle (and for example here we can assume that BRICS nations will take up the flags if US based companies like Aleph are strangled by patents), what else stands in the way of getting more hardware companies to act like Aleph?
My suspicion, having worked in electronics manufacturing for 20+ years is that hardware companies are mostly run by old-line (80s and 90s era) engineers, who cling to privacy, NDAs, trade-secret, etc. by force of habit and comfort. Having spent years coaching my last company about the benefits of open-source (both hardware and software) to naught, I'm betting we won't see more of these kinds of firms until more CEOs die and retire...
Ockham's razor applied here might do you a bit of good.
It appears that nearly every single member of Congress, both House and Senate, have been effectively co-opted by personal interest in porkbarrel. While we no longer have William Proxmire posting the outlandish and downright shameful pork projects, a fairly casual search on Bing/Yahoo/Google brings up quite a few articles about various "Waste" programs. There a programs like the NEA and NPR/CPB championed by "progressives" and F35/M1A1 and the perennial favorite "Bridge to Nowhere" of Sen. Stevens fame. Neither the DNC nor RNC can claim innocence, nor do any of the NGO/SuperPac/504 groups get a clean bill of health based on their own lobbying for everything from money to build the Mexico border wall, to petitions for the HHS Secretary to start allowing the sale of human organs (Kidneys). Every single one of these people has at least one axe to grind, maybe more.
Dont confuse the actual "Taxed Enough Already" fiscal refuseniks for your assumed evil "other" Koch funded secret cabal that is running the world at the behest of the jews. Most who marched in 2011, and remain allied with the formal TEA organizations such as PACs/504s and ThinkTanks are hostile to quite a broad variety of Federal spending, INCLUDING aerospace/NASA spending, but also sweeping up the Department of Education, Agriculture Department, and the Federal Reserve. If there is unequal pain to be endured from a uniform cut of the Federal piggy bank, then perhaps that only highlights the extent to which our collective polity has distorted ordinary arithmetic and common sense.
Assuming that Rand Paul and/or crazy uncle Ron Paul is an official spokesman for anything other than themselves is a convenient way for you to simply ignore the fact that NASA's current total expenditures are less than one second's activity by the US Treasury in any given fiscal year September-to-September. Want to make sure Congress doesn't get out their knives for the ISS, Webb Space Telescope and other worthy projects, then tell us what other department should be cut? Milk subsidies for hipster Vermont "gentlemen farmers"? Bullet and MRAP purchases for the US Department of Education? Salary for IRS agents that have already retired, and lied to their superiors for 10 years about being in the CIA? There are plenty of bad expenditures in a government with 4.3 MILLION employees.
Blind anger and blame will not restore comity amongst the citizens of the US, but its just slightly possible that an army of concerned citizens taking sensible, cautious, and incremental action to peek and poke our way around the budget looking for waste and standing up to it (even when that waste is in your hometown!) might chip away at the bloated machine enough to keep leviathan running through our lifetimes. Or we could just take Venezuela's lead and blame whomever is today's convenient scapegoat for every failed attempt to violate physics, causality, and microeconomics.
The amount of practical metallurgy knowledge we have under microgravity conditions falls in the "Not A Number" section of a floating-point unit calculation result.
Assuming you have some "dust' - you have to purify it, and then convert the refined ore into a chemically neutral granular material that is compatible with electron-beam or infared laser spot heating/sintering. On earth, buy the refined metal from Grainger in whatever format its available (screws, bar stock, etc.) - reformulate it as a powder (preferably something very chemically stable, uniform, and with particle sizes compatible with the resolution of the final use). None of these have been performed on-orbit that I am aware of.
Second, its a leaky system, volatile chemicals (water and Nitrogen come to mind) are needed for many of these stages for buffering and chemical conversion (reduction/oxidation), transport, lubrication, mixing, heat-treating and quenching, etc. etc.
Also, we don't yet know the true relative abundance of the important ores vs. locations for collection, Lunar surface? Lunar drilling? Trojan "asteroids"? NEO objects? Or do we have to go beyond Mars to get any decent quantities of these raw materials.
One more item - if you do have a perfect NEO rock with a nice mix of Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, Cobolt, Copper, and Silicon, first you will need to break this up into manageable chunks. A hand pick and a canvas bag won't work. Jackhammer and auger drills will also fail if they cannot be anchored to something in order to generate force on an ore vein. Once its in small chunks, how do you refine it? Chemical refining, gas/vapor distillation, electric arc furnaces, and other standard tools for metallurgy are used in the presence of 1 standard G. Will the use of a centrifuge to approximate 1G conditions work - think tidal forces, shear forces, and other non-linear effects that will pop up to create inconsistencies in the local environment around the refining process.
All of the above can and should be solved, but won't unless we are _there_ and there to stay.
Also per Rand Simberg and others, it appears that Space X is going to launch their 54-ton capable heavy launch vehicle THIS year - thats something like 6 years ahead of NASA's porkbarrel SLS.
Lets cross our fingers and hope that Elon's engine of creative destruction will blow up the market for government directed launch vehicle technology, and start using the Billions allocated for 1960s rocket technology for something like permanent cis-Lunar habitation, asteroid visits, and/or experimenting with off-planet manufacturing so we can start learning how to build and stay beyond LEO.
From human perception, there is no difference between these statements, and that's the problem addressed. The fact that something is statistically likely to "someone" (i.e.: not you) does not make something "probable" for you, which is included in the SA summary of the book.
Same information, but the visual aspect of the animated GIF is somehow much more accessible. One more data point on how the human brain is so poorly adapted to statistical inference as compared to our natural abilities with visual information like "is that tiger going to eat me", or "can I make it across the gap between this tree and that tree when I jump".
Slashdot Mirror
If the Fed does as expected and raises interest rates 3 times this year, you'll see a net outflow of capital from the stock market (and hello special dividends to keep investors holding share prices up a little longer) and into long term items like T-bills and higher rate commercial paper. Realistically the US economy needs this cash right now to help sop up all of the QE that was done post 2008 to create "artificial" liquidity in the market just as that fed created liquidity needs to disappear to restore a somewhat healthy balance.
Now if the Fed doesnt Fsck up and let the net-negative interest rates continue, we might have a chance to avoid a debt bomb from the 4 TRILLION in stimulus cash that currently doesn't get considered as part of the US debt/deficit.
not that you could afford anything a Trump supporter would deign to sell you.
You seem to suggest here that Trump supporters own the expensive properties?
I'm just going to put this here.... (20 to 1 ratio of Billionaire donors to Clinton campaign)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
Labor indicators are much more volatile than others, but the signals are highly mixed because of major contrarian macro-economic things the Fed undertook post 2008 - QE, QE2, QE ad-infinadum. This is a little like the S&L bust in the mid 80s but in reverse. Instead of a giant drain on available cash & capital for large businesses, instead we've essentially hollowed out the entire capital market for the small businesses. As the Fed increased QE to pump in "liquidity" it was making sole proprieterships harder to run as capital often will flow to the lowest risk with stable returns.
Look at the housing market - growth has not been in single-family dwellings, instead lots of capital has gone into new multi-tennant dwellings and high-end. Both of these are now going to be hit hard by the tax changes. High end housing is being slapped by the SALT and mortgage changes, while leased properties depend on a large supply of families without sufficient capital to purchase a starter property.
On the corporate front, if you look at where large-cap firms have spent their money up till now it has been quite sparse on the capital expenditure front, lots of stock buy-backs and such meant to goose share prices in absence of revenue and income growth. Aside from oil, very little of the hoarded cash and injected cash from the fed was spent on re-tooling and factory upgrades (domestic US that is). Now we're seeing countless announcements of re-tooling, and even surprisingly a number of factory moves _ON_ shore such as the Mazda plant in the southeast and claimed moves of auto production lines from Mexico back to Detroit! That's not possible unless there's capital ready to spend on these investments and the companies think they'll get that money back from revenue.
If you want to know when (not if) the bubble will pop, don't look at bitcoin and Dow Jones Industrials - look at their capital expenditures, as soon as that starts to dry up either we'll see a big market contraction, or the in-flow of capital will have flowed to the workers and personal spending will have caught up. Like we're at least a year out from the next contraction, or it could be 2-3 years before we see the economy get tired of the growth and build up enough errors to start shrinking again.
There is no axiom accepted by science that forbids scientific inquiry into origin questions.
In your zeal to declare science all-powerful, you neglect to account for an infinitesimal fact wedged between existence and "Truth".
You can prove that there are at least the two distinct areas of study which are applicable to the nature of existence, but you cannot prove that they will find ultimate answers which are "TRUE" for any and all 'geometries' or frames of reference, or whatever relativism might be invoked. That is the ultimate difference between science, as a means of learning, and faith as a means of determining "TRUTH". They intertwine in fascinating and unexpected ways, and often in uncomfortable and undesirable ways, but neither exists in a vacuum. For "SCIENCE" to be something of value you must eschew "TRUTH" and remain agnostic about validity of theories, and this is a seemingly transitive equality, to accept faith, one must eschew relativism in some domains.
The really interesting element for all of this is, how does this zero-sum-game between objectivism and absolutism affect the human condition?
Mod this up, not just interesting but incredibly precise. I had never considered looking at Bayes applicability to P=1 and P=0 concepts, but if you follow this math, its just as illuminating as Godel's theorms of incompleteness. Godel attempts to prove that a finite mathematic system or language is also finite, AND requires a-priori statements which are entirely outside of (neither provable, nor dis-provable) from within the finite mathematics. Also see how these statements are consistent with modern physics (Fermi et. al.).
Compare these structural statements and tell me they don't tend to re-enforce one another:
Godel - A finite language can only describe a finite system.
Bayes - A probability of 1 (guaranteed to occur) event cannot be predicted by statistical methods
Fermi - It is impossible to predict any quantum event based solely upon finite observations.
This suggests the human neurological operation has a common observation/understanding limitation which repeats within any area of scientific research - when faced with infinite values [ example: f(x)=(1/X) ] the mind must use a finite substitute ("infinity").
Excellent trolling, refute the summary of an article about poor understanding of the meaning of science with a Popperian negative-proof masquerading as a strawman. Either you are a grand-master of hyperbole, or you don't bother to read to comprehension before declaring something invalid. Irony, since that's pretty much exactly the OP - many humans really love to declare themselves aligned with SCIENCE! Yet few are actually consistently able to operate scientifically.
While its nice to think that the Constitution prevents this kind of thing, it is generally ONLY applicable to criminal defense. You can still be indicted, arrested and jailed awaiting trial, and until you enter the courtroom this presumption of innocence doesn't event matter. You only get the benefit from this Constitutional right _AFTER_ you have been through all of the previous steps, so don't expect to pull out your laminated copy of the Bill of Rights as a shield.
In a civil matters, particularly a trial, you are not entitled to automatic presumption of innocence as a defense, and not even a tiny amount of deference is due to you in the exercise and enforcement of a contract you might have with your ISP.
About the only legal protection an individual might have is a class-action lawsuit alleging fraud against the ISP, and that's something that takes years to work its way up to the pain threshold of settlement or trial.
IANAL but this definitely seems to fall within Tortious Interference or similar acts which would serve to break the contract between you and your ISP. Then again there is probably a clause in your ToS which they will attempt to use to allow this based on their "need" to charge Netflix extra for network peering.
Don't forget to read your contract and notifications of change!
Ehh, a bit adhomenim for my tastes. TFA makes a bit point about how important "IP" is to the new outfit. In the CEO's own words "...people don't give us credit..." which is code for - we're not making enough money from selling hardware, and lookie here at all these wonderful patents we can use to generate licenses fees or sell as an asset.
Let the race to purchase their Patent portfolio begin!
Who might have enough cash to purchase the biggest stick in the phone wars? Apple or Samsung. Like the highlander it seems there can be only one... then again the Highlander kept having sequels so we might see this fight again and again (yuck).
From the article they are using TSMC, which is one of the largest silicon foundries (ASIC manufacturing) in the world.
As for the all out open-source, they also make clear on the project page that hardware patents on the chipset instruction is supposedly strangling innovation for processors. I'm not sure I buy that, ARM, Intel and IBM have moved their architectures along pretty well. Even poor little MIPS has made strides despite losing market share.
No moderation system is perfect, but audience curation (whether intentional or not) does seem to channel the activity into a relatively benign community. While there are plenty of Trolls here, most often these are either bad nerd jokes, or Apple/Microsoft/Linux haters - notice the common theme? Even more importantly however, even our /. trolls are likeminded, and (mostly) tolerated.
The problem I see with Jackson's "solution" is that the Jezabel audience (not the trolls) will lose any voice they had, which in retrospect is probably EXACTLY what the trolls want.
Yes, people get very confused by the fact that nearly all of the headline grabbing GPL enforcement actions to date have "settled" for coming into compliance, with occasional "donations" to GPL enforcement bodies. Remember, a settlement is usually an out of court agreement between the parties to terminate or withdraw legal action, and never involves actually settling the law at hand, and a settlement generally doesn't need to comply the law.
The best way to understand this difference is to realize that if you run off the road and break my fence, and I sue you but settle for $20 instead of the $200 repair bill for whatever reason, you can still be sued by my neighbor for his part of the fence, and he is under no obligation to settle for $20 as I have done.
+1 - A lot of folks are playing amateur lawyer and making claims about what the GPL "does", but you should defer to Rosen here since he actually is a practicing lawyer who has actually been at a Plaintiff's table and enforced the GPL. He is very explicit that the GPL does not create new obligations upon authors who combine original works with GPL works. Your code is always your code, regardless of whether it is in a separate C file, or patched into an existing file licensed to you under the GPL. Go back and re-read the GPL, look for the words "distribution" and "distribute" which are the _ACTS_ that invoke the GPL terms of the upstream author.
The fact that we're still dealing with the "virus" meme suggests that Microsoft's dirty FUD war lives on long beyond it's usefulness to them. I only hope someday that karma pays them back when we have enough solid case law to make GPL the better legal framework for business and that we can repay their little FUD bomb one kick in the proprietary wall at a time.
Thanks for the check in Jeff - sorry for the trolls....
Back to the original OP topic of patents - Do you think that Colorado's congressional delegation is any more informed about the destructive effect of poor patents on this market? I know they have certainly made hay of having you in their districts as a sign of their super-fantastic "stewardship" of Colorado's industrial relevance.
While the concept is "old", the actual technology in use here is hardly "old hat". FDM/FFF itself was stillborn as a product from Stratasys mostly due to the extremely high cost of entry - I have clients that purchased systems from Stratasys 15 years ago, and they are far more excited and anxious to use the capabilities of the new-market FFF systems because the vibrant and competitive market from non-commercial RepRap and all of the commercial spin offs like Aleph is putting a significant number of new eyeballs and creative developers into the mix.
The point is precisely that any technology, no matter how capable, will be under utilized and see limited functionality if it is only allowed to be used by a single company - think Unix at AT&T/Bell in 1960 vs. *Nix in 2010 in phones, cars, elevators, watches, glasses, power plants, airplanes, battle tanks, space craft, and 3D printers.
"Important" is meaningless in the eyes of the law - think "swipe to unlock" lawsuits between Apple and Samsung. ANY infringement can bollox your nice little innovative startup and crush novel products. Component costs are not now, nor have they ever been the barrier to innovation, if that was the case then we should be seeing a massive wave of innovation coming from China, Thiland and Maylasia. Instead most of it is still coming from Taiwan and California.
Capital (human and cash) is the real driver, and currently capital is captive to the legal fiction of the value and necessity of Patents - aka "IP Rights". The OP and Aleph's CEO's comments above are very nice to see efforts to break the stranglehold, but its pretty thin gruel to assume one company in Loveland Colorado is going to topple the billions of IPO dollars sloshing around SFO/SJC area chasing and perpetuating the artificial monopolies created by the USPTO.
If you have ever been to the HP (now Agilent) facility here in Colorado Springs, you can walk the graveyard of literally bulldozed cubicles, behind the remaining old cube farm walls. On the walkways are thousands of plaques with US Patent numbers and inventors. The inventors are gone, their cubes are piled like trash, and the shell of the old company exists as not much more than a US based front for a Penang Maylasia based manufacturing outfit with an ever shrinking number of US "engineers" designing more and more expensive systems for fewer and fewer clients every year.
I don't think the Patents have actually resulted in real "advancement of human progress"...
Nope, US based. While the "CEO"s are usually MBAs, in many companies from Intel on down the real decision makers of whether things get open sourced are engineers who have climbed the ladder. Think "VP of Engineering", "VP of Product Development" - these are the folks that usually crush open source movements within established firms... "because". They don't understand open source, they didn't do it that way in the 80s, and no amount of argument will convince them otherwise. Add in a corporate legal counsel who wants to be a CFO or CEO and you get "opinions" that GPL is unenforceable and contrary to shareholder interest.
MBAs are actually _easier_ to convince that open source can work since they are more likely to be swayed by graphs and slide ware - tell them "RedHat is doing it" or "Google does it" and they queue up to join the party...
It certainly helps Aleph that the original FDM patent has expired so at least they aren't under immediate assault. On the other hand it is worrisome that they have to think so hard about the "prior art" aspect - is that really what the open source actions is about? If so I'm skeptical that this is a valid solution since the current regime of patentability (I'm looking at you software patents) means there is plenty of danger for them in the dependent/follow-on patents that Stratasys has filed. Lots of necessary and related improvements to the FFF/FDM process are "obvious" if you are building a machine to be useful for additive manufacturing, but USPTO does not use that approach to determining patentability. The worse bit is that if one takes the time to actually dig into the PTO database looking for other's patents, and trying to "work around" - you might be open to contributory infringement (at least stateside), so most folks actively ignore the PTO database to prevent such skeletons. That means LESS information sharing rather than more...
On the gripping hand, I'm happy to see Aleph using the lessons of the software world as a viable business model - forget the 3D printer part. All electronics hardware businesses should be able to follow this model if they are willing - the end result for human productivity, creativity and technological advancement seems inevitable. Assuming Patents are somehow overcome as an obstacle (and for example here we can assume that BRICS nations will take up the flags if US based companies like Aleph are strangled by patents), what else stands in the way of getting more hardware companies to act like Aleph?
My suspicion, having worked in electronics manufacturing for 20+ years is that hardware companies are mostly run by old-line (80s and 90s era) engineers, who cling to privacy, NDAs, trade-secret, etc. by force of habit and comfort. Having spent years coaching my last company about the benefits of open-source (both hardware and software) to naught, I'm betting we won't see more of these kinds of firms until more CEOs die and retire...
Ockham's razor applied here might do you a bit of good.
It appears that nearly every single member of Congress, both House and Senate, have been effectively co-opted by personal interest in porkbarrel. While we no longer have William Proxmire posting the outlandish and downright shameful pork projects, a fairly casual search on Bing/Yahoo/Google brings up quite a few articles about various "Waste" programs. There a programs like the NEA and NPR/CPB championed by "progressives" and F35/M1A1 and the perennial favorite "Bridge to Nowhere" of Sen. Stevens fame. Neither the DNC nor RNC can claim innocence, nor do any of the NGO/SuperPac/504 groups get a clean bill of health based on their own lobbying for everything from money to build the Mexico border wall, to petitions for the HHS Secretary to start allowing the sale of human organs (Kidneys). Every single one of these people has at least one axe to grind, maybe more.
Dont confuse the actual "Taxed Enough Already" fiscal refuseniks for your assumed evil "other" Koch funded secret cabal that is running the world at the behest of the jews. Most who marched in 2011, and remain allied with the formal TEA organizations such as PACs/504s and ThinkTanks are hostile to quite a broad variety of Federal spending, INCLUDING aerospace/NASA spending, but also sweeping up the Department of Education, Agriculture Department, and the Federal Reserve. If there is unequal pain to be endured from a uniform cut of the Federal piggy bank, then perhaps that only highlights the extent to which our collective polity has distorted ordinary arithmetic and common sense.
Assuming that Rand Paul and/or crazy uncle Ron Paul is an official spokesman for anything other than themselves is a convenient way for you to simply ignore the fact that NASA's current total expenditures are less than one second's activity by the US Treasury in any given fiscal year September-to-September. Want to make sure Congress doesn't get out their knives for the ISS, Webb Space Telescope and other worthy projects, then tell us what other department should be cut? Milk subsidies for hipster Vermont "gentlemen farmers"? Bullet and MRAP purchases for the US Department of Education? Salary for IRS agents that have already retired, and lied to their superiors for 10 years about being in the CIA? There are plenty of bad expenditures in a government with 4.3 MILLION employees.
Blind anger and blame will not restore comity amongst the citizens of the US, but its just slightly possible that an army of concerned citizens taking sensible, cautious, and incremental action to peek and poke our way around the budget looking for waste and standing up to it (even when that waste is in your hometown!) might chip away at the bloated machine enough to keep leviathan running through our lifetimes. Or we could just take Venezuela's lead and blame whomever is today's convenient scapegoat for every failed attempt to violate physics, causality, and microeconomics.
The amount of practical metallurgy knowledge we have under microgravity conditions falls in the "Not A Number" section of a floating-point unit calculation result.
Assuming you have some "dust' - you have to purify it, and then convert the refined ore into a chemically neutral granular material that is compatible with electron-beam or infared laser spot heating/sintering. On earth, buy the refined metal from Grainger in whatever format its available (screws, bar stock, etc.) - reformulate it as a powder (preferably something very chemically stable, uniform, and with particle sizes compatible with the resolution of the final use). None of these have been performed on-orbit that I am aware of.
Second, its a leaky system, volatile chemicals (water and Nitrogen come to mind) are needed for many of these stages for buffering and chemical conversion (reduction/oxidation), transport, lubrication, mixing, heat-treating and quenching, etc. etc.
Also, we don't yet know the true relative abundance of the important ores vs. locations for collection, Lunar surface? Lunar drilling? Trojan "asteroids"? NEO objects? Or do we have to go beyond Mars to get any decent quantities of these raw materials.
One more item - if you do have a perfect NEO rock with a nice mix of Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, Cobolt, Copper, and Silicon, first you will need to break this up into manageable chunks. A hand pick and a canvas bag won't work. Jackhammer and auger drills will also fail if they cannot be anchored to something in order to generate force on an ore vein. Once its in small chunks, how do you refine it? Chemical refining, gas/vapor distillation, electric arc furnaces, and other standard tools for metallurgy are used in the presence of 1 standard G. Will the use of a centrifuge to approximate 1G conditions work - think tidal forces, shear forces, and other non-linear effects that will pop up to create inconsistencies in the local environment around the refining process.
All of the above can and should be solved, but won't unless we are _there_ and there to stay.
Also per Rand Simberg and others, it appears that Space X is going to launch their 54-ton capable heavy launch vehicle THIS year - thats something like 6 years ahead of NASA's porkbarrel SLS.
Lets cross our fingers and hope that Elon's engine of creative destruction will blow up the market for government directed launch vehicle technology, and start using the Billions allocated for 1960s rocket technology for something like permanent cis-Lunar habitation, asteroid visits, and/or experimenting with off-planet manufacturing so we can start learning how to build and stay beyond LEO.
From human perception, there is no difference between these statements, and that's the problem addressed. The fact that something is statistically likely to "someone" (i.e.: not you) does not make something "probable" for you, which is included in the SA summary of the book.
Same information, but the visual aspect of the animated GIF is somehow much more accessible. One more data point on how the human brain is so poorly adapted to statistical inference as compared to our natural abilities with visual information like "is that tiger going to eat me", or "can I make it across the gap between this tree and that tree when I jump".