chopped up or whole? I'm thinking either way with a standard sedan you've just managed to end up on the less protected list.

I'm pretty sure the interesting metric is the fracture toughness.
Interestingly enough there is a NIST page on it:
http://www.ceramics.nist.gov/s...

which ranges from 1.89 to 4.45 MPam1/2

and a nice paper on anealed borosilicate glass fracture toughness:
                http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ph...
which ranges from 1.5 to 1.7 MPam1/2 depending on loading.
Of course Gorilla glass might have slightly higher values.

I think the OP is refering to plastic as in the adjective
plastic
1632, "capable of shaping or molding," from L. plasticus, from Gk. plastikos "able to be molded, pertaining to molding," from plastos "molded," from plassein "to mold" (see plasma). Surgical sense of "remedying a deficiency of structure" is first recorded 1839. The noun

Lol,
shouldn't it be an Otto-Bahn after the inventor/discoverator of the diesel cycle?
Also I laugh a little as the Autobahn (car track?!) here in Austria seems to be a toll road. I'm not sure since I don't own the cars I drive but we have to have a special sticker that costs a couple hundred euro a year to use them.

Yeah, but the cheap solar is poly silicon, which is slightly more labor intensive than aluminium.

NO! I think he should be rewarded by those who can appreciate the mastery and wish to buy a signed print. Do prints of mainstream photography that have made it onto postcards deminish in value? They don't. The artificial scarcity is interacting with creator and recieving an individual product.

Free loaders are fine, people will find a way to show how bad-ass they are that they can afford to advocate art, not only generic art but art that fits their perception of good.

Never. screens are consumables.

maybe in a perfect world... but check out some of honeywell's patents on parasitic power for thermostats that have been reissued without significant changes multiple times. The patent office is broken which is part of the problem.

spoken like someone who has never tried to make a direct copy (even of software) that functions to the same extend as the original. Copying takes work and takes developement. Why do you think that science isn't dominated by the Chinese? They have the grad student populations to put a smart student to work trying to reproduce every interesting scientific paper (where they even give you the recipe most of the time), it doesn't really work out because by the time the student has "discovered" how to do the cutting edge stuff from 2-3 yrs ago; the entire field has moved on to something different.

Another fun example: there is a small korean motorcycle company that literally copies the suzuki SV650 as in the engine castings look nearly identical. They can therefore sell the bike for 20-30% less than the japanese do, however, the copy only makes 70% of the power of the original and has attrocious suspension and brakes.

Copying is not easy with tangible goods or technology

I have to agree! I really want to teach a digital logic course to high-school students. My professor was crazy (in a bad way) but it was the most influential course for me too.

It also works in most American universities if you avoid the engineering prerequisite courses, just dropping your head in and asking to sit in on a course (as long as you are a student) works suprisingly well. Otherwise there is the option to sign up for many more courses than you plan to take and drop the ones you don't want before the drop date. I did that rather often in grad-school with math courses. The university won't tell you to do it but it is a legitimate use of the rules they design. It is really the only advantage to the all you can eat pricing that you get/have to pay as a full time student.

So why is this a game changer?
Well its not yet but it could be...
So basically we have to make small chips, this is because the parasitics decrease with size so we get more efficient as we get smaller (up to a point), we also get cheaper for simply geometric reasons (wafer/exposure area pretty much fixed cost) so yay more goodies from a chip.

Except...
Tooling up is expensive and HARD, dude what do you mean a .032m lithography mask costs $500,000+ and it probably won't work perfectly for at least a couple of revisions??! That sucks!

Why is this placement technique cool?
One of the neat uses for big chips today are graphics chips. They are huge but relatively simple, they have a bunch of repeated processing units and a buttload of cache and some neat front end or back end. The top generation GPUs are usually made about as big as one can physically make a chip (we normally expose wafers in chunks, and precision and field of view are competitive design goals when thinking about the optics for these systems), because they problem is embarrassingly parallel we can use all that performance and it even scales reasonably well across multiple cards/nodes. So imagine we could make a functional dice that contains a very small number of processing units, some cache and some glue logic that makes it easy to connect to some magical buss, now we can make a GPU as big as we want. If we are a GPU company we like this since we now have something like linear scaling for processing costs to go to MUCH bigger chips, which means we can sell a new super computer every few years without having to compromise our consumer line.

Other cool things:
Lab on a Chip, you can throw down MEMS and processing components on a small device, imagine a full digital assay built into the pricking needle.
Harry Potter Newspapers, if you can do alignment and finishing after the fact you can print your e-ink display and driver in whatever size you need. All thats needed is good yield on the sub-displays.
Disposable-lazy-electronics, we are getting here anyway with RFID, but how cool would it be to carry a roll of stickers that would act as line of sight GPS extenders but were solar or wifi powered. Add some sensors and you have a crowd-sourcable metro monitor that knows where every train is and what stops are crowded.

To summarize, this invention has to capability to possibly decrease the cost of sticking widgets together, thus we can have many little widgets instead of monolithic widgets.

except for they aren't refering dies as in what you use to smash semi-soft metal into new shapes but actually dice, as in what you get after you dice (or cut up) a wafer.

TLDR: you are correct with tool dies, he/she is correct with wafer dice.

define blowtorch, in colloquial american english it seems to be a Propane or Oxy-Propane/MAPP torch. If thats what the parent is refering to I've used all 3 within the last year. My first date with my gf was introducing her to glass-working using the lab's Oxy-H torch and she started with fused quartz. I would argue if acess is available and some sort of guide or manual is near many people will pick up any old tool if they think it will help with the job.

I've been in an out of the piracy game since irc times but there was one approach that really worked for me.
The author of Lux (a java based Risk game) had a nice system for detering privacy:
1st: The game was free to play for 10-20 times and then it required registration (simple key code)
2nd: The author had set up a website so when you searched google: lux warez, serialz, serial, keygen, his website was the first site you got to where he asked crackers to respect his tiny cottage industry (I think it was 5-15$ for a lifetime key), and at the same time pointed out to users that by stealing his software they were poisoning his part of the ecosystem.

It seemed to work. I never found keys to the software (this was 6-7 years ago), and we didn't pirate that piece of software. I stopped looking for keys after I'd read his page and that was the important part.

On the other hand I have very little problem pirating professional software to play around with 3DStudio and Photoshop, however once I got into photography (and had spent much more than the cost of software on gear) I've had to change my approach. I pay for my Raw software (Capture One Pro) and I use gimp or open source tools instead of PS. Sometimes I want to dick around with CAE software and I have no problem pirating that since I'm interested in demo-ing it and not using it as a tool in my business. I think reminding users what they would be paying for (its your time not the tool) is the best approach.