josaka
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
560
Submissions
147
Member since
Aug 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
I suspect it's, in part, because humidity is low. The fab needs to tightly control humidity and temperature. Pulling water from air is energy intensive. Facilities team in the fab I used to work in said their most energy intensive days where the most humid days.
Comment · 3 years ago
My intuition matches yours. It's abundant enough to find its way into alloys for jet engine blades at single digit percentages: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/science-features... And if used in chips, you don't need to make the full substrate with this material, just a few hundred nanometers at the top, in the active area.
Comment · 3 years ago
Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.
Comment · 3 years ago
Lawfare did a nice analysis of whether Section 230 shields model hosts (likely no): https://www.lawfareblog.com/section-230-wont-protect-chatgpt Professor Volohk has a public draft article on liability for output of AI models, with an emphasis on defamation: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/ailibel.pdf
Both suggest that this is a real area of concern. Folks have gotten complacent that Section 230 protects platform providers, but it is not clear that the protection extends to outputs from generative models, indeed one of the Supreme Court Justices implied that it would not in oral arguments for one of the recent Section 230 cases.
Comment · 3 years ago
It would be wonderful if it was easy for most people to represent themselves. My sense is most people struggle to express themselves precisely and clearly enough to avoid being at a massive disadvantage to someone who can do so. To my untrained eye though, AI seems poised to get us there. What LLMs are doing for code, translating imprecise natural language expressions of intent into machine-readable, precise code, looks similar to what I do as a lawyer when translating between a client request and legal work product. Lots of filling in boilerplate defaults, some assumptions based on context, etc. Differences include that sometimes we engineer ambiguity into that work product, and we can assume an adversary will exploit plausible interpretations unfavorable to our side, but I see no reason AI won't be able to do that as well.
Comment · 4 years ago
Customers with assets in custodial accounts of an exchange that goes bankrupt are likely general unsecured creditors, and the assets are probably property of the bankruptcy estate. https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/02/what-happens...
This means that, in the line of people to get paid out of those assets, you're not even at the front. Custodial accounts leave you with little protection.
Comment · 4 years ago
Yes, but in practice, this is just an opening offer in a negotiation. Parties will typically counter with something like: depose me in my home town for no more than x hours, and I'll produce what docs I have if you sign a protective order that makes produced info attorney's-eyes-only, i.e., business people cannot review. Unlikely a court would require more than this.
Comment · 4 years ago
A related issue is whether the availability of AI as a tool for creating innovation should raise the bar for non-obviousness. Both effects could make it harder to obtain patents.
Comment · 4 years ago
This ruling did not survive on appeal: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=542088572460013...
Comment · 4 years ago
Bahy-Dole Act and DoD Federal Acquisition Regs. are the answer to your question about "who gets access to these patents" and should be the focus of reform if you find them inadequate. Outside my area of the law, but my understanding is prior to Bahy-Dole, it was common for the Gov. to take title to patents arising from Gov. funded research, and that this was seen as a disincentive to commercializing the technology. So Bahy-Dole adjusted the balance, with certain lesser rights (like march in rights and a license) going to the government to try to drive more commercialization of the technology that was invented under Gov. contracts.
Comment · 4 years ago
I think this might be the PCT application in question (same name as the founder, and about fusion): https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20... Discusses an "orbital confinement fusion reaction."
(They might be overstating things with "secured a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) International Patent." No such thing as a PCT patent. PCT's are just notice under a set of treaties that you might file an application in any of the 193 WIPO member states. No one ever has asserted a "PCT Patent." That said, PCT applications are examined, but the result is only advisory and countries often reach a different result when the examine the national phase filings.)
Comment · 4 years ago
It's a common tactic in patents in my experience. You're not going to sue yourself. So you describe your invention in the context in which a competitor would use it. Of course, this would typically be coupled with a disclosure to the examiner that the thing describing the context is in the prior art.
Comment · 4 years ago
There are gaps, but in almost all cases in the US in my experience, non-inventor owners record their interest in pubic records at the USPTO assignment database to perfect title: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/searc.... If they fail to do this, the previous owner could re-sell the asset to someone else who records and could have superior title. 35 USC 261, para. 4. In practice, gaps arise when patent assets are transferred between entities controlled by the same party, who doesn't need to worry about the prior owner trying to re-sell the same asset they already transferred. But event then, the public records get you pretty close to the owner.
Comment · 4 years ago
I think the sweet spot for some blockchain use cases is where contract enforcement doesn't work well. It's really hard to seek redress for diffuse, low-grade breach. A 10 million people with one dollar in damages are less likely to be made whole than 1 person with 10 million in damages. And contract enforcement often fails in insolvency. Try enforcing a how warranty against a builder that's gone bankrupt.
Comment · 4 years ago
True, but there's value in reducing the number of parties you must trust to get something done. It's easy to imagine that, at the margin, there are a subset of collective action problems that will get solved if you can reduce the number of parties that must be trusted. Worrying about the need to sue 3 people has to be better than worrying about the need to sue 6.