California was debating requiring a serial number on home made guns independent of how they were made.

Actually, the legislature passed that. But, in a fit of sanity, governor Jerry Brown vetoed it.

Anyone familiar with California politics will realize how extrordinary that is. B-)

And so it starts exactly as I predicted here: He went to the emergency room with flu like symptoms and they ... wait for it .... SENT HIM HOME.

Seems like a big flock of pigeons over a big crowd would be an effective way to spread a virus that is contagious between birds and people.

Don't worry about Ebola, though. It doesn't do "airborne transmission". (Yet.)

However, the Ebola Reston strain is airborne though only dangerous to monkeys.

I have oftten wondered whether the Reston virus had mutated to be spread by things like sneezes, or if it might be another matter entirely.

A number of monkey species throw feces (and/or other bodily secretions) when under stress and perceived attack. (I don't know if this is one of them, but assume for the moment it is.) Might being confined to cages along with others provoke such behavior? Wouldn't a sick monkey's feces, and tiny particles separated by airflow during the flight, carry an ebola-family virus just fine, without any mutation to make it, say, shed into nasal mucus and be carried by a sneeze?

(Granted this might fit the literal definition of "airborne transmission". B-) )

Raise your hand if you honestly think that Mickey Mouse as a trademark will enter the public domain in 2023. ....

Me neither.

Ok. You are obviously much better informed than I am, and I guess you are quite pessimistic about the total amount of oil that would ever be found. But as prices rise, things which are hopelessly uneconomic become more plausible.

Mind you, I consider this totally the wrong way to go. But when prices rise enough there will be a lot more oil available. But there are lots of reasons that that it only becomes available when the prices rise dramatically. Small fields, difficult access, expensive construction, dangerous conditions, etc. Not to mention continuing CO2 pollution.

We *need* to develop renewable energy resources. I'm not really sure that we should be moving into full scale deployment now...except for cases where there isn't much downside, or whether the technology is already mature. (Hydro comes to mind.) But we need significant investment in developing renewable technologies to the "demonstration project" stage. (I.e., one step past the pilot project.) Some of the investment should continue to be in basic research, but more needs to be invested in moving from research result to useful plant. (Don't take that too literally. Rooftop solar isn't exactly a plant, but it falls within the pervue of what I mean.)

Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.

Now THAT'S frightening!

Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".

While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...

The ability to network is a skill I've spent a significant amount of time to become adept at.

Nice to see *informed* input!

I would argue that the problem is the flat rate pricing of $/KWH. A KWH produced at 1 AM has far less value than one produced at 7:00 PM. Why are we charging them the same? Much of the issue you mention would largely vanish if electricity prices were negotiated more frequently. EG: hourly or 15 minute increments. If there really is a surplus of power between 10:00-2:00, as you state, then the price during that time of day would be low to accommodate. This would create an incentive to input power when there's matching demand, and let the utility company profit off the difference.

Yes, it's a significant cost to upgrade the power grid and contracts to work this way, but when has it been bad to connect buyers to sellers in a way that reflects an accurate use of resources?

For example, I read a study a while back that pointing solar panels West of due South resulted in a much better match between electricity use and demand

AFAIK, neither the deep ocean nore the sides of the continental shelf have yet been thoroughly explored. Some early explorations were discouraging, but MOST exploration is discouraging.

Have you noticed at all that these new finds are in areas where it is more expensive to extract the oil? Underwater is a lot more expensive than on land. Under the Arctic Ocean? Well, waiting 5 years will probably make it cheaper, as ice heaves are terrible to construct around. Of course, 5 years may not be long enough to clear the ice.

FWIW, I'd bet that there are lots of undiscovered oil fields under deep ocean, or perhaps that you need to access by drilling sideways into the continental shelf. But that's expensive even compared to working in the Arctic Ocean.

Additionally, of course, every gallon of oil we burn increases our CO2 level. That's not just greenhouse, that's also ocean acidification. But you can't measure the damage that is done in any one day...so you don't need to worry about that, right?

3D printing was the result of a lot of researchers working on a lot of parts, and when the dust settled, none of them could build a really practical printer without paying off all the other patent holders, most of whom were playing dog-in-the-manger with their patents while trying to elbow out the competition.

You see that with a lot of inventions. They may go through several cycles of invention / related invention / non-conbination / wait / patent expiration until enough necessary parts of the technology are patent-expired that the remaining necessary inventions can be assembled in a single company's product and the technology finally deployed.

Thermoacoustics, for instance, just had its second round of patent expiration and is in its third round of innovation. The basic idea is to make a reasonably efficient heat-engine and/or refrigerator (or a machine that combines, for instance, one of each) with no moving parts except a gas. Mechanical power in the form of high-energy sound inside a pipe is extracted from, or used to create, temperature differences.

There are some really nice gadgets coming out of it, built mainly out of plumbing comparable to automotive exhaust systems and tuned manifolds, maybe with some industrial-grade loudspeakers built in, or their miniaturized or micro-minaturized equivalent. (Example: A hunk of pluming with a gas burner, about 12 feet high and maybe eight feet on a side. Oil fields often produce LOTS natural gas in regions, like big deserts, where it's uneconomic to ship it to market. It gets burned off and vented. (CO2 is weaker greenhouse gas than CH4, by a factor of several). Pipe the gas into the plumbing, light the burner, and it burns part of it to get the power to cool and liquify the rest. As a liquid it's economic to ship and sell it. Then you get to use much of the otherwise wasted energy, displacing other fuel supples and reducing overall carbon emssion.

I hope this is the cycle where things hit the market.

Patents don't matter for making a printer for your own use.

They can matter if you build a business on them, like by selling objects built using them.

Especially if they improve make your process cheaper, easier, more convenient, flat-out possible, or produce a better part. (And if there ARE cheaper, etc. ways to do it, why are you using the patented tech anyhow? B-) )

Patents in the US were about increasing innovation by making first mover advantage truump second mover advantage: Giving the little guy with the bright idea time to set up manufacturing, make back his costs, reap some benefits, and get established enough to compete with existing large companies once they expire. Without them, it was thought, the existing big guys with the infrastructure in place could quickly clone the little guy's new invention and out-compete him in the market, but they wouldn't bother until the little guy had proved it was worth the effort. This would suck the incentive out of the little guys, the big guys would have little incentive to improve, and progress would be slow-to-stalled. The short-term inhibition on others deploying the invention was seen as less of an impediment to progress than having most inventions not be deployed, or even made, at all.

The idea was to set the time limit to maximize progress to the benefit of all/the country, and make manufacturing and technology grow like yeast (ala silicon valley B-) ). Part of the intent was to bias it toward innovators and make established processes free to use, because when the country was getting started the established players were owned by foreign interests. The founders wanted the country to develop its own industry, rather than being dependent on, and sending most of the profit to, big businesses in Europe.

But the time was set for heavy manufacturing at the pace of the period. It's a horrible mismatch for, say, software: With the availability of general purpose computing platforms, able to make distributable copies at electronic speed and copyright to prevent verbatim cloning, a person or company with a new software product can go from steath-mode program development to market establishment, profitibility, and even market dominance in a matter of months, before competitors can engineer their own version. So patents aren't necessary to promote innovation, leaving just their retarding effect holding down the blaze of creativity. (Then there's open source, with its alternitive monitization and/or reward strategies. But that's a "new invention". B-) )

It seems to me that:
  - The expiration of patents on stereolithography did help produce the initial explosion of new, and often inexpensive, devices and the improvements in what can be made, how accurately, and how inespensively.
  - The availability of machines suitable for practical industrial prototyping - even before the cheap machine explosion - pretty much forced the high-end CAD software producers to include some form of stereolithography output format, while an open output format made the choice obvious. That's a big benefit to the toolmaker for a small effort. The availability in the high-grade commercial tools is a great synergy and helps a lot. But the hobby machines needed CAD tools and open source was already up to the task: Had the big players not gone along it still would have been done, and those big players not "with the program" would be experiencing major competitive pressure from open source tools and competitors that did provide such output.

And here's the key:
  - The availabitiy of these rapid general-purpose maufacturing tools will bring (is already bringing!) software's high-speed innovation and entrepenurial models to the manufacture of physical objects. Patents could be shortened in term or reduced to "design patents" - the manufacturing equivalent of copyright - and produce a physical-product explosion comparable to the computer revolution. (Or patents, like "content" copyright, could become the tool of obsoleted established players in the suppression of the competing business models.)

Brace yourself for either the physical-manufacture ramp-up to science-fiction's "singularity" or an ongoing RIAA / MPAA / conglomerate - style legal battle.

You aren't understanding. Since it was explained fairly clearly, I'd guess you don't want to understand. But I'll try again anyway.

These chips are broken. So they are sold cheap. You don't want to pay full price for seconds. Before they sell them, they use software to set the broken parts as not working. Some of them aren't broken enough that you'll immediately notice, but that doesn't mean they aren't broken.

Usually the breaks are only in one area. Some die didn't burn properly, or traces weren't properly laid down. Whatever. So that area is sealed off. The manufacturer doesn't do a detailed investigation of exactly what's broken, just one that's good enough so they can figure out what needs to be sealed off to have a working chip. Then the sell the working chip (with reduced functionality) for a much cheaper price.

So if you don't need the full functions of the chip, you can buy the cheaper, reduced functionality, model at a cheaper price.

IC manufacturers have been doing this since the i8086, or maybe the i80186. (Intel was the first one I ever heard of doing it.)

This is a deal for those who don't need the functionality of the full model. It also cuts the prices for those that do, as selling the seconds defrays some of the cost of manufacturing.

Those who are removing the imposed limits and selling the seconds as if they were first quality are the ones who are cheating the customers. They are also impugning the name of the original manufacturer.

Underwater earthquakes often, perhaps even usually, set off huge underwater landslides. Sometimes the tsunami from the landslide is worse than that from the quake. Quite often they will reinforce each other, at least in some directions.

So in this case it sounds like a huge earthquake acted in a normal way, but with an unfortunate direction of reinforcement. It also sounds as if it could have been a lot worse. The landslide was not huge as such things go. IIUC the one in Indonesia a year or so earlier had a larger associated landslide. And even that one is a lot smaller than some that there is evidence for. IIUC (again) a *LONG* time ago Puget Sound (in Washington on the Pacifc US coast) once had a much bigger tsunami that was triggered by an underwater landslide.

Please note: I am not an Oceanographer or even a Geologist. These "facts" are derived from general reading.