wiggles_md

Why does Freeman Dyson earn a black bar, and Katherine Johnson not?

The Toyota Way. Totally transformed manufacturing.

> With that background, the morality of "smuggling" these cells is a bit of a gray area.

The grey area here is from lack of foundational knowledge surrounding these cells, and your assumptions aren’t useful (nor are they likely, I suspect, to hold). For example, we have no idea if these cells were originally provided to the lab under an MTA, nor any restrictions placed by the funding source.

> Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein.

This is not a grey area: lab notebooks and lab data are generally speaking the property of the lab. The proper procedure is to request permission to create a copy of them when you move to a new institution. Check your university’s IP policy, it should be the governing rule set.

There isn’t enough information in the linked article to say how unique or important these particular cells are or how difficult they would be to replicate. On the more valuable end could be cells provided by a company for testing (maybe transformed to express some sort of protein they’ve created), or primary cells (isolated from an organism) that are unique in some way, or hybridomas that produce monoclonal antibodies for something druggable or diagnostically relevant.

The Boston Herald article linked by another commentator suggests that in at least one element this case fits the pattern of others that have been appearing: the accused is receiving funds from the Chinese government under an ostensible scholar program. In some of the other cases, such as with the Thousand Talents program, the scholars signed contracts that agreed to disclose or assign IP only to the Chinese institutions, conceal the source of funding for studies (both to journals or funding agencies), or agree to work at the Chinese institutions in excess of the norms for visiting appointments. The Thousand Talents program and others like it are a coordinated, calculated, and deliberate effort run by the Chinese government, not the accidental missteps of some aloof academics.

IIRC Logitech used to do this with warranty replacements on Harmony remotes—don’t know if they still do. It made purchasing one used risky.

I assign some blame to always-on modern gauge clusters. You couldn’t see the old-style front lit ones at night unless you turned on your headlights, so there was a sort of natural reminder.

Might have to do with the claims are they seeking for Maxigesic?

That’s what I was trying to say but didn’t successfully, the BEV fires I’ve seen in testing accelerate quite a bit faster. Plus, the battery tends to be located below the passenger compartment, whereas fuel fires tend to start in the engine compartment. It doesn’t feel like the two types of vehicle fires are directly comparable by frequency of incidents alone.

The lithium battery fires I’ve seen associated with BEVs accelerate faster (edit, was: are quite a bit more vigorous) than those I’ve seen associated with gasoline or diesel fueled vehicles. Shouldn’t the violence of the fire (not just the number of incidents) figure into the safety calculus?

At what point do Musk’s statements represent a moderate legal risk?

For the sake of argument, could Musk’s statement, along with his very public insistence of being actively engaged in the design process, demonstrate a cavalier disregard for proper safety engineering at the management level (outside acceptable industry practice) and so a defective process?