What you said about the relationship between products and patents is true and worth adding to the discussion, fwiw.
I think making it an absolute - ie, there is never anything to learn along these lines - is going too far, but there are certainly a lot of patents that never see further development.
It's a little bit of hyperbole, sure, but I don't recall ever seeing a press article that used a patent disclosure to offer any real insight about unreleased products. I'd be happy to see a counterexample.
Yes, it could have. If Google hadn't managed to do every possible thing wrong with it. Seriously, the sheer number of bone-headed catastrophic screw ups involved in G+ is impressive.
The idea that Google could build a unified social network across all their platforms was good. The idea that Google could also make a Facebook-clone was good.
Every other idea they put into G+ after that was awful.
I think the design of G+ is gorgeous. I keep referring to it again and again. And as you say, the vision was great, but the execution of forcing everyone on it was odd.
There are some kinds of stories this can work for - ie, the earthquake bot - but this is not a good general solution. Modern users are sensitive to low-quality content writing as an indicator of product quality. Crappy writing is spam, high-quality writing in an authentic voice is someone worth listening to.
I'm not staking out the claim that this will never be possible, but I've yet to see it executed well.
Crude oil is [primarily] organic if your context is [petro]chemistry. It's not an organic foodstuff however.
Shock, horror, words have contexts which cause them to mean different things.
Why is it that you don't wish people to know where their food has come from and how it has been produced. What is the problem with that for you? If you don't care that your children's food is saturated with growth hormones, fungicides, hormones and pesticides or that the farmers you buy from use so much Tramadol that the environment tests positively for it [as in the current case], fine, but why does it matter so much if other people want to know the conditions their food has been grown in? Say, by looking for organic food certifications. [There see I included "food" in case it confused you, words can be so hard, huh.]
There's no great logic to the insistence that words can't be used for multiple well defined meanings - yes even in associated fields like chemistry and food science/agriculture - and AFAICT there's no detriment to you in others choosing to care more about the rearing or growing conditions of their food (which you don't have to eat).
"Shock, horror, words have contexts which cause them to mean different things."
Dunno what his problem is, but my problem is the context in which "organic" gets used with respect to foods: a massively expensive, misleading, anti-science marketing campaign by huge corporations intent on profiting from people's mistaken belief that "organic" products are--by virtue of being "organic"--healthier or better for the environment.
Since the people behind this huge corporate marketing campaign are also promulgating lies about GMOs in an attempt to force labeling on them and prevent their development, your claim "there's no detriment" to others from those who support them is false.
>an attempt to force labeling on them and prevent their development //
Labelling only provides people with the ability to chose. Against choice? Consumers can make uninformed choices, sure, but that choice is central to a democratic system.
Who are the corporations that you're referring to? The majority of organic stuff we get in the UK is from small corporations or local farms, it is the bigger corps that stand to lose most from a desire from the public to have organic (and similar ethos) production of food. For example factory farming chicken relies on being able to pump them full of antibiotics.
You say it's a mistaken belief that organic food is better - the meta-studies I've seen seem to flip between the two positions pretty rapidly. Can you cite maybe one or two studies that you would say show incontrovertibly that organic production is no better for people, animal welfare and/or the environment? Thanks.
I'm not the parent (I'm GP), but my position is that organic certification is good, but the universal association of "natural = good, synthetic = bad" is only harmful.
Yes, farmers pump animals full of chemicals and this should be documented and, if you are concerned about this, it's a good thing that there are organic food certs out there. However, whole industries fuelled by bullshit have sprung up off the back of this very common fallacy. There are people out there who don't take scientifically-proven medicine because it's "not natural" and lean towards quackery like homeopathy, and this is what I'm opposed to.
To reiterate, IMO organic or free-range farm produce is a good thing and I'm sure most people would agree with that. That's not what I was talking about so don't get rude with people based on a misinterpretation of the subject, it's unnecessarily disruptive.
Can't speak for the GP, but in my case, I object to laws requiring labels on GMO, etc. foodstuffs simply because I don't want to live in California, where literally everything has one or more dire warning labels attached to it. When everything is dangerous, nothing is. The labels end up not being taken seriously, and the consumer ends up less-informed than they otherwise would have been.
"Literally" applies, by the way, when the whole building you're in has a sign in the lobby that reads "This building contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and itchy rashes."
I'm worried that this is where the slippery slope of GMO labeling will lead.
No, you label things when there is scientific evidence, of the peer-reviewed and -reproduced kind, that there is a non-obvious risk associated with a given foodstuff or other item. GMO labeling falls well short of that standard.
We've become very good at the thermal energy differential -> mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy -> electrical energy system, just because it's trivially easy to get that first step since nearly every form of energy can be converted to heat.
Some of our energy production machines use only a subset of these steps (e.g. internal combustion engines just use mechanical energy -> rotational mechanical energy), but pretty much everything save solar uses at least one of these conversions. So I find anything outside this cycle very interesting.
The hydrogen+boron fusion reaction produces three helium nuclei moving at about 2 million volts. All the energy is kinetic and held by charged particles, which means it can be extracted using normal electromagnetic techniques. Charged plates, coils, etc to step down the voltage are all that is needed, no 'boiler' intermediary step.
Who cares how fancy things are, in my province we generate 90% of our electricity from the sun.
We have been doing so for 60 years, we were just smart enough to let the sun boil the ocean for us and harness the power of kinetic energy, rather than try to build fancy schmancy electronics. See the snow on the mountains? That's what we like to call a 'solar battery'.
Often smart people making fancy things look down on those with working systems because the solution to the problem was so obvious that they couldn't make themselves look smart by doing something that actually works.
Like really how hard is it to build a concrete structure that contains water, and allow that water to fall over a wheel... Who cares how inefficient or old it may be when it's so easy and cheap.
It's like the guy who walks into a java shop armed with a few UNIX command line utils and bash and they all look down on him and call his system hacky when it works in a week and they're still figuring out their object model.
I'm no expert in this, but from what I've seen, most of the small players are working on variants of aneutronic fusion[1] a method that reduces the quantity and energy of the neutrons that come out of the reaction. There you have Polywell Fusion, Tri-Alpha Energy, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (Who are supposed to be running tests on their device this month).
There's also Helion Energy[2], which is a YC startup, but their process seems to involve some sort of magnetic reflectivity from the fusion reaction.
I think making it an absolute - ie, there is never anything to learn along these lines - is going too far, but there are certainly a lot of patents that never see further development.