Or in the case of Chrome, that the extension didn't auto-install on a work device when they logged in.
435 karma · joined September 17, 2017
I don't know if the second point is a big deal. Even if they choose to settle, you've still mitigated your risk without going to court. And I suspect a patent litigation insurance agency is going to be motivated to negotiate very small settlements and/or actually fight it out in court, lest they gain a reputation as the company that hands out license fees.
As per the article:
> Outsourcing jobs abroad for the purpose of punishing or discouraging union organizing, as opposed to a valid business reason, would violate the National Labor Relations Act.
The difficulty arises when trying to implement something in ladder that is too complex for simple Boolean operations, and would probably be much clearer if written in a few dozen lines of Structured Text (assuming an IEC 61131-3 PLC). Unfortunately, company policies (especially in North America) mean that engineers are often forced to use ladder, resulting in a ladder logic program which is inscrutable for both the electrician and the engineer.
What would be sensible is using the right tool for the job: ladder for simple Boolean operations, and ST for more complicated stuff. Tech schools should also teach electricians and technologists the basics of how to read structured text - they do this in Europe, but I don't think it's common in North America yet.
If civilization remains on an upward trajectory of technological development, or even stays flat, we will continue to understand the risks of radioactive waste. We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason. Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them, either - we will either reprocess the waste down the road when breeder tech catches up, or we'll continue to make risk-appropriate investments in maintaining the perimeter fence and keeping the sites secure. Now, one could argue that 10 millennia of site maintenance is an expensive endeavor to foist upon our descendants, but that's a different discussion.
The only scenario where we forget about these sites and the dangers of them is some hypothetical future collapse of civilization, where records are gone and the survivors have regressed to a pre-industrial understanding of the world.
If you're an optimist, you don't expect that scenario to happen. But suppose it could - doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse, rather than worry about a small number of the survivors dying of radiation sickness?
Hydro is one of the few forms of baseload power that can be ramped in a hurry: you can increase or decrease production just by increasing or reducing flow through the turbine. If you use less water, it builds up in the reservoir as potential energy and you can use it later.
Compare this to thermal plants, which require many hours to have a significant swing in energy output. I have heard of ramp figures on the order of days for very large nuclear reactors.
Because thermal stations run with pretty flat power output, hydroelectric stations have a critical role smoothing out load conditions, ramping down at night and up during the day. Since electricity is traded on a market system, utilities with significant hydro operations really benefit from this: they can reduce production and import excess capacity from thermal plants at night, and increase production during the day to export at a much higher rate.
This is part of why regions with predominantly hydro power have such low rates: in addition to hydroelectric being pretty cheap once a dam is built, hydro operators make significant amounts of money by appropriate import/export to thermal operators. Since a lot of hydro utilities are state owned (eg: BC Hydro, Hydro Quebec, Bonneville Power Administration), the profits are used to subsidize lower rates for ratepayers.
What I meant (and should have expressed more clearly) is that the pacemaker will have some minimum current it needs to be able to draw from the TEG to operate, and after the plutonium has decayed to a certain point it won't be able to source enough current to operate, so the pacemaker will brown out.
* Pacemakers are hermetically sealed, usually laser-welded in a titanium case. Adding a replaceable battery with seals would complicate this arrangement.
* By the time the battery winds down, there may be a newer, better pacemaker on the market that fits the patient's needs.
* Since a battery replacement necessitates surgery, you might as well replace the whole unit and get all new parts rather than put an old one back in that may be reaching MTTF.
As for how long the cells last, modern Lithium Thionyl Chloride cells last 5-10 years depending on the pacemaker. They probably actually last longer, manufacturers are pretty conservative with lifetime estimates.
As for plutonium supplies like those in the article, they don't really die since they're thermoelectric. The amount of current you can draw will be proportional to the amount of heat generated by the isotope and the temperature gradient. Since the heat is related to the amount of isotope remaining, the power available will follow an exponential decay. The half-life of Pu-238 is about 88 years, so the battery will last a very long time. The exact lifetime depends on how much current the pacemaker takes to operate.
Most people had these devices replaced with more modern versions, but there are still a few people who have the old plutonium devices which were implanted decades ago.
Not to mention that the currency's extreme volatility means that when you sell it to convert it to greenbacks (the currency your investors actually care about) it probably won't be the same amount you were paid for.
Good luck launching a consumer hardware product without raising money if you're not independently wealthy. Even getting a relatively simple product to mass production is going to take on the order of 12-18 months and 1-2 million: you've got several iterations of prototyping and testing, UL/IEC approvals, set-up at a CM, and the long tail of retail to deal with. If you have something truly innovative, consider adding an order of magnitude to that cost estimate.
FreeRTOS' license is GPLv2 plus an addendum to permit its incorporation in commercial products. FreeRTOS allows you to statically link your own modules as long as you don't modify the FreeRTOS kernel. If you do modify the kernel, you have to contribute back upstream.
The wording of the license is somewhat troublesome which makes it GPL-incompatible (see: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4676/is-it-wr...), but the developers have been very clear as to the spirit of the license in many public forums: you can use you own code alongside FreeRTOS and link it into a binary blob, but if you modify the kernel, share your changes. The no-benchmarking clause is sort of annoying, but really isn't a showstopper for most people.
FreeRTOS is intended for use on severely resource-constrained embedded systems where you have a few kB of RAM. Most people developing in that sort of environment don't really care about the existence of a benchmarking clause that probably won't get enforced anyway.
Freescale (formerly Motorola) was purchased by NXP (formerly Phillips) in 2015. Qualcomm is in the process of buying NXP, although apparently there's been some difficulty getting it past the European regulators. Now it sounds like Qualcomm is going to get swallowed up by Broadcom. That's going to be a huge company.
Last year, Microchip bought Atmel, ADI bought Linear Tech, ON Semiconductor bought Fairchild, and Renesas bought Intersil. The year before, Intel bought Altera.
Any bets on the last two semiconductor conglomerates standing? I'm thinking Intel vs. Samsung. I hope whoever swallows up ON Semiconductor rebrands to the Fairchild name - there's almost something poetic about a reverse-Fairchildren split.
EDIT: I should also point out that "Broadcom" isn't really Broadcom anymore - Avago Technologies purchased Broadcom last year and took on the Broadcom name for itself. Avago was previously the semiconductor division of Agilent which in turn was a spinoff of Hewlett-Packard. Avago traces its lineage back to the semiconductor division of HP which was formed way back in 1961.
The limiting factors, I think, are more (1) lack of VC interest in funding something where the company is going to be based in the middle of nowhere, and (2) the lack of job security for tech workers who choose to live somewhere like that.
On the first point, VCs are very attached to the orbit of their cities. Silicon Valley is of course the big innovation centre, but basically any city above around 250k people now has at least a small tech industry with affiliated venture capital firms. Unfortunately, I can't see VCs interested in something where if they want to go see their investment they have to go get on a plane, then rent a car, and drive a couple of hours. So, any successful rural tech startup is going to need to be at least partially bootstrapped.
The second point is the inherent risk in moving somewhere like that for a job, especially a job as volatile as a tech startup. You move out there, buy a house, maybe start a family - and then the company folds or downsizes. You basically have no choice at that point but to uproot and move, leaving all your friends and your home behind.
Of course, you could also maybe spin this as a positive point: the "company man" is considered dead these days, especially so in high tech. Nobody sticks around anymore, there's very little loyalty on both the part of the employer and employee. However, in an environment where you're literally the only tech employer in town, you would probably get employees who actually stuck with the company and stayed committed.
Despite the name, they aren't related to old-school photomultipliers - they're basically large arrays of very tiny Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes on a single chip. This solves the low dynamic range issues from traditional large-area avalanche photodiodes. Traditional APDs have a long recovery time, whereas an array of small APDs has both a shorter recovery time per cell as well as a greater overall dynamic range due to the ability of multiple cells to be struck at once by incident photons.
SensL actually has a bunch of videos of their products in use for a LIDAR application: http://sensl.com/applications/lidar1/