51–60 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I feel that even stuff like this should not be patentable and that all patents should be abolished but I know many here disagree.
How would you suggest society repay the guy who invented the material? I can't think of any way except a temporary monopoly on its use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you suggest society repay the guy who invented the material? I can't think of any way except a temporary monopoly on its use.
Trade secrets.
Can we remove the "shames scientists" bit from the headline? This guy is a scientist by definition if he has any experimental validation, and I didn't see a citation for anyone being shamed.
Can we remove the "shames scientists" bit from the headline? This guy is a scientist by definition if he has any experimental validation, and I didn't see a citation for anyone being shamed.
Second this. Don't understand why a sensationalist headline should translate as is to HN.
The sensationalist title appeals to the autodidact that learned how to earn 100k+ without college through programming.
I might have to disappoint you all... An Australian company, BHP (my employer at the time), was working on this method of steel production in the early 1990's. They had big hopes and put a lot of R&D investment in it, but were unable to commercialize it as the sheets of metal produced did not have consistent ductility and were prone to cracking. So - the idea is not new, and the challenges of going from a concept to…
There is something about the parent article that doesn't sit entirely well with me. It might just be my inner skeptic, though.
In spite of our understanding of chemistry, metallurgy still has quite a few mysteries in store for us. Some of them go back thousands of years. For instance we still have not been able to come up with a convincing reproduction of Damascus steel, the prized material that middle eastern swords were built of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel . Another supposedly related and "lost" steel is wootz steel. http:/…
The interesting thing about steel is that the tiny grains that make it up are immensely strong, far stronger than any other material we have. But we have no known method of making steel out of just those grains, it's always mixed with other weaker parts. That's why spider silk is so incredibly strong - it's manufactured (essentially) one atom at a time. If we could manufacture steel in the same way it would be far st…
That's not true, there are many materials stronger than steel:
1) Graphene
2) Titanium
3) Spider silk
4) Carbon nanotubes (buckypaper for instance)
5) IsoTruss carbon fiber
6) Metallic (palladium) glass
7) Transparent aluminum
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I feel that even stuff like this should not be patentable and that all patents should be abolished but I know many here disagree.
How would you suggest society repay the guy who invented the material? I can't think of any way except a temporary monopoly on its use.
You used the word repay - there's no way to be confident that a temporary monopoly will come within an order of magnitude of repayment.
Further we need to consider the destructive side-effects of these flawed attempts at compensation. Patents create an environment that stifles innovation: consider the threat of being taken down for inadvertently doing something that has a monopoly has granted on discourages both innovation and communication. Imagine applying for a patent, publishing, and only through that process discovering that you were infringing an existing patent! You need to pay lawyers lots to protect against that. And many inventors couldn't even be bothered with applying for a patent even if it were easy - many are inventing technologies because they have a problem to solve, not because they're aiming to create something thaqt will milk repayment from society.
The net beneficiaries of the patent system are business processes that are dedicated to playing that system.
Given the choice between something very complicated, expensive and unreliable (patent system), and something simple, free and also unreliable (the default - absence of patents), I opt for the latter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting thing about steel is that the tiny grains that make it up are immensely strong, far stronger than any other material we have. But we have no known method of making steel out of just those grains, it's always mixed with other weaker parts. That's why spider silk is so incredibly strong - it's manufactured (essentially) one atom at a time. If we could manufacture steel in the same way it would be far st…
> The interesting thing about steel is that the tiny grains that make it up are immensely strong, far stronger than any other material we have. That's not true, there are many materials stronger than steel: 1) Graphene 2) Titanium 3) Spider silk 4) Carbon nanotubes (buckypaper for instance) 5) IsoTruss carbon fiber 6) Metallic (palladium) glass 7) Transparent aluminum
He said there's lots of legends about this material or that could be remade at the research lab my dad worked at that were not feasible to be mass produced. Process too costly, or too toxic, or maybe too dangerous when you have to make several thousand tons of it.
If my Dad had been given two weeks to just go and play at his company's lab, he could have walked out the door with Excalibur.