Patent trolls are simply motivated by money, and they hardly care about being anonymous (or shamed). I suspect that all this will enable is patent sellers to create a virtually unstoppable army of mini-patent tr0lls that brings the industry to it's knees.

Mini-patent tr0lls will exactly how real-estate tr0lls currently work. Real-estate tr0lls buy up irregular lots (often thin-strips of property that border streets and various rights-of-way) that appear to have no commercial value, but they use them hold them hostage when a developer want to develop the adjacent land and shake them down for lots of money. Of course you really have to know the terrain and the local real-estate market (not to mention schmooze with local planning officials and city council members) to execute this strategy, but if often doesn't take much money. And why yes I have direct (painful) experience dealing with real-life real-estate tr0lls when my parents were trying to develop a subdivision.

Tragically, the MLS (multi-list service for property) made this real-estate tr0ll strategy available to less sophisticated investors in a similar way the MLS enabled small-time chinese investors to invest in the real-estate market in the US. Even though all real-estate transactions (principals and the sale price) are public record, there are so many of them, it creates a form of anonymity.

This new breed of patent-tr0ll instead of having lots of money, will instead use their domain knowledge to looks for specific low-cost patents that they can use to hold the industry hostage. Using this type of patent clearing house will make it easier and lower risk and multiply the number of people trying to do this. Maybe I should think seriously starting a new career as a mini-patent tr0ll... Or maybe I can just patent the idea ;^)

I don't think a patent clearing house like this is even *remotely* a perfect solution and will likely just trade a few well funded pariah patent-tr0ll companies (e.g., intellectual ventures), for a virtual army of anonymous mini-patent-tr0lls...

(f.y.i, used "tr0ll" to avoid the lameness filter)

My guess is that people aren't born super-teachers, but cut there teeth in classroom getting direct feedback on what works and what doesn't. If we eliminate the path to create new super-teachers, how will we ever update these "super-lectures". Even if you believe that these core subjects don't change, you must be forgetting about the ever-present "politically-correct" movement (which will no doubt render recorded versions of lectures obsolete after about 10 years and even likely forcing the super-teacher into oblivion as their clever stock presentation becomes dated).

To pick a more droll example, look at comedians at the top of their game. Nearly all of them still pop-in to dive comedy clubs to test their new material before unrolling it to a more general audience.

If we ever go down this route, we will be dooming ourselves like the companies (or countries) that allow brain-drain until they can't recreate the magic that they had originally.

I guess it makes me sad that people even want to suggest this route. They have to know what the end result it if you kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Maybe that's the one lesson they never learned in school...

That would work if the power distribution network was ideal and didn't have any resistance/reactance.

In real-life, the spike from all the solar installations would cause network instability unless controlled distributively (i.e. measured and limited at the spike sources). The question of who would pay to maintain that type of system is one of the major issues that needs to be solved. Of course the people who pay for solar want to shove all the power they can back on the grid to help subsidize their costs, so it unfortunately, isn't in their best interests to limit power to promote grid instability (unless they would be causing electrical fires on their own property/equipment), and the power company wouldn't want to help people cut the cord, so here we are...

In my experience, "computer science" in high school wouldn't even qualify anyone for being a code monkey...

If by high school you haven't taught yourself programming, you aren't going to learn it taking a class in high school or community college or even university well enough to code yourself out of a paper bag.

If you finally do learn programming later in life, it will probably later when you actually have a job (or if you are one of those recent folks that are learning to code in a boot-camp).

Since this is the LAUSD, perhaps of those schools will probably get those ipads with pearson software... Since they aren't buying that stuff anymore, maybe the larger population will get something "better"...

I don't put much faith in the LAUSD in making this type of school work. If I were in the district, I wouldn't be opposed on the grounds that it is unequal opportunity for boy/girl students, but that it's likely to be a FUCKING WASTE OF MONEY that could be better spent elsewhere...

On the other hand, sometimes, you might just win, by losing.

It may not be sexist, but it might be illegal. Title IX, explicitly prohibits excluding students from participation in or the benefits of ANY education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

The most issue addressed by Title IX is spending money supporting a football and wrestling teams (which is predominately boys). Title IX pretty much says if you spend that money there, you have to spend an *equivalent* amount of money providing sports opportunities for girl on the grounds that in a zero-sum game of money, girls are *harmed* because you spent that money on something that only benefits boys.

Of course things cannot be totally equal in every situation, so there is a 3-part test to be evaluated

1. percentages of M/F students in an activity (e.g., like sports) that accepts federal funds are about the same as the student population (this is the easiest way to show compliance)
2. equal opportunity exists for M/F students in that activity (very hard to show if you exclude 1 gender), OR
3. school is fully providing opportunities that meet the interests and abilities of M/F students

I suspect where this whole things falls downs is #3. By excluding boys from this STEM program and only providing a Language Arts option for boys if there is a significant number interested in STEM (I'm guessing, there are quite a few of them), I don't think this will survive an equitable legal challenge (imagine if it were the reverse). Having said that, legal challenges today are intertwined with politics and judicial activism, so it's hard to say what the result actual legal challenge result might be.

Although I'm willing to take it on faith that it might be 'stiction' on the actuator side, I'm pretty sure extreme variations which can cause unanticipated phase lag from a measurement system (say a gyro or a flow meter) is equally disruptive to a control system and can generically explain control system oscillation events as well.

Sometimes you never really know until you set up the conditions and simulate the crap out of it in an controlled testbed as it is much harder to distinguish the difference in a "live" situation.

That's why they call it *practicing* medicine...

But seriously, most doctors (esp pediatricians) simply follow protocols. For example, see a certain progression of symptoms, combine with a little patient history and what they have observed during their time in the field, and then proscribe a course of action associated with that, and monitor to adjust course. That's the protocol.

Doctors aren't generally doing anything remotely scientific unless they happen to be experimenting on your kids with an untested protocol, (which sometimes happens), or perhaps if they are trying to get a complaining parent out of their hair (but even though that might be an experiment, it's generally w/o a control group which isn't very scientific)...

Proportional Integral Derivative (a very primitive type of feedback loop controller that modifies the control input a fraction proportional to the error signal, another fraction relative to the integrated/smoothed error signal, and yet another fraction relative to the first derivative of the error signal). In the old days people spent lots of time "tuning" these fractions (e.g., like ziegler nichols) to get acceptable performance.

I suspect they don't use anything this primitive in their control loop (at least I hope they don't). That's control-systems 101 in college before you get to smith controllers and state based systems feedback (which is also quite primitive)...

Apple seems to offer quite a spacious jail with lots of useful apps/amenities.
They also seem to charge more for the experience.

If you can offer an attractive cage at a discount, maybe no one will care they are in a white-washed cage instead of a gilded cage...

Asphalt is aggregate (usually crushed rocks) stabilized with petroleum tar products. Concrete on the other hand uses similar aggregate, but is bonded with cement (often portland cement), which although doesn't contain petrol products, but takes a lot of energy to mine and kiln fire which gives it a large carbon footprint which is only partially offset by the fact that during the "setting" process, cement actually absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (converting calcium-hydroxide into hard interlocking calcium-carbonate crystals).

FWIW, they already have a way to make asphalt equivalent material by replacing tar with pine-rosin and pitch.

Perhaps you are talking about an ANSI X3.171-1989 90mm drive? ;^)

Which some people in the UK occasionally called a 3.5" "stiffy" to distinguish it from its larger/floppier predecessor like the 8" floppy and the 5.25" mini-floppy...

FWIW, although I never personally had a 3.25" drive, one of my buddies did purchase the Amdisk 3" compact floppy disc system for his Apple ][+....

Although you may be in the field of chip design, you don't appear to be as knowledgeable about the field of sino-taiwanese politics. Given the politics of the folks in charge at TSMC, I'm not sure they would side with China over the USA. Many of them exited China during the cultural revolution and generally have a dim view of the Mainland.

In fact, the chairman of TSMC (morris chang, a harvard, mit, stanford alum) cut his teeth in the semiconductor business in the USA (in TI and General Instruments) before being recruited back by the Taiwanese government to found TSMC. Other than being born in mainland china, he's about as American as you can get (fwiw, he was also the guy in charge of bringing us TI's wonderful speak-n-spell). He's also on record supporting the Wassenaar Arrangement even though Taiwan isn't a signator, and I think I remember hearing that most of his daughters attended school and live in the US.

AFAICT, the technique used by this imager is FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) which basically give you a very accurate time-of-flight measurement. In this type of system, the received optical frequency difference from the transmitted frequency is measured by optical-coherent mixing and sensing the resultant beat signal frequency. Apparently this groups contribution to this technique is to measure both the phase and amplitude of this beat signal digitally so multiple algorithms can be deployed to analyze the beat signal.

In any case, given a very accurate distance to an object, the solid angle projection to the imaged object, and some basic optical system calibration data, it is presumably fairly straightforward compute the actual size of the object w/o guessing.

This isn't the "arrival" of man-made earthquakes. Ever since man has been doing large scale environmental modification, we have been inducing seismic activity.

The most common induced seismic events occur when we build dams to create reservoirs. One of the first examples was the filling of the Oued Fodda Dam in 1933. Others occur due to depletion of underground reservoirs (like the Lorca earthquake in 2011) or enhanced geothermal energy extraction (Cerro Prieto in 1979).

Of course all phenomena is new to the non-research reporting that passes for news today. The only difference is that today the perpetrators are seeking evil oil rather than life giving water or "renewable" energy...