PhotonHunter

And a lot of what gets reported as ghost guns in the press aren’t 3d printed, they’re commercially-made serialized firearms that have had the serial number obliterated.

In some verticals, like advanced materials or medical devices (outside of consumer/wellness at least), patents are expected.

Great customer service?

Due to how turbulent federal funding has been over the past year, many or most PhD programs are being extremely picky about how many candidates they can extend offers to and are also on the eye for signs that applicants may be trying for the very option you're bringing up.

If you use radar a lot, have you tried RadarScope? Nothing else even comes close to comparing.

Interestingly, while on-patent medications in the US tend to be significantly more expensive than elsewhere, generics in the US tend to be less expensive than generics available elsewhere.

The increase in F&A rates is due to the facilities portion, which in the "before times" was negotiated every 4 years with DHHS and had concrete data in the negotiation process to help ensure it was fair. The admin portion for universities has been capped at 26% since 1991.

I read SubiculumCode's post in the same context as bane's, speaking to the current environment.

You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.

Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.

edit: best study I could casually find is Anderson and Slade (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-015-9376-9) from 2016 that estimates grant writing at about 10% effort.

The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.

I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.

One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.

Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.

It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.

During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.

My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.

Note that it depends on the grant if indirects are included in the award amount or on top; NIH is the latter.

I can't speak to the meso or macro regimes, but for nano (and in my case, colloids) dislocations are certainly a problem.

Re strain, sometimes you want that! It can be used to tune nanoparticles for example.

Was there ever a recall of the ECU, and if not, why did the UA events go away? Were UA events more common at higher elevations, where there would be more cosmic ray activity?

This story is like Baba Yaga, it comes out from the shadows to scare people every now and then, but Barr’s theory has the interesting property that the ECU would be cleared by the error and so there could never be evidence of the event as he postulated.

The service brakes of anything short of a supercar are sufficient to stop a car at WOT.

I don't think that copyright would apply because the EV1 design largely serves a functional purpose, and design patent infringement would face an uphill battle for the same reasons. For copyright of a "useful article" the functional aspects of the design cannot be protected, only the artistic ("separability"). For design patents, elements of the design that are dictated by function cannot be protected (N.B., there is some nuance there for alternative designs). The strongest exposure for EV1 replicas is probably trade dress, and the iconic design ("secondary meaning") of the EV1 should strengthen those claims.

Also, trademarks do not need to be registered to be enforced, although it is wise to register them.

When I was teaching product development I called this the Mechanical Turk strategy. Completely agree that it isn’t automatically fraud, it can also be a cheap prototype that lets you start testing hypotheses ASAP.

Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.

The obvious retort would be, if the situation were so favorable for corporations before Bayh-Dole, why were so few licensing deals in place before the passage of Bayh-Dole (fewer than 5% of technologies were licensed)?

All else being equal, it's most straightforward to demonstrate infringement of a composition of matter claim (which tends to be the earliest for pharma) and so these are more valuable. Also, they tend to be the earliest to issue and possibly litigate over, which also increases value.

• Cleaner air at street level because vehicle exhaust stays underground and can be filtered, which would have massive health and environmental benefits

What exhaust? These are all electric cars running in the tunnels.

    For drugmakers, we treat research and development as an asset that is depreciated over 15 years, which is more or less the lifetime of their patents.

I'm unsure how this revised assumption would alter the conclusions.

†one reference of many in support: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10242760/

I would argue that primacy in safety was insufficient: Volvo's consumer division was offloaded to Ford, and then Geely. Saab was even more obsessive about safety to the point of being pathologic, to their downfall, looted by GM for their knowledge of 4-cylinder turbos and engine management (truly ahead of their time) and left to wither on the vine. And it isn't like Mercedes was a laggard with safety, they had a number of firsts to their name and in the US did have a reputation as a safe car, just not an affordable one; safety was a part of the constellation of "the best or nothing", just not the whole thing. What true differences in safety exists between marques now?

I would also argue that efficiency is insufficient, at least in the US. For Toyota, while their hybrid tech is an incredible engineering accomplishment and certainly put them on the radar for many consumers, I don't know that it's the crown jewel; to wit, they started offering their hybrid tech royalty free a few years ago. If you want an efficient car, you can get one from a number of marques, but is there real demand for that?

You're right I think to call out Toyota as a counterexample, but I think it's the Toyota Way that truly distinguished Toyota and continues to do so. That seems to be the only hedge against decay, to bake a lasting, long-termism culture into the organization in day one and ruthlessly enforce it. There's a few other Japanese companies that come to mind that have similar storylines. It needs to be there in the beginning too, TPS isn't a secret, and JV attempts to share the knowledge (NUMMI) didn't seem to make a lasting impact without the culture to enforce it long-term.

It's an interesting question for sure!

Yes, I'd argue it is incompatible, at least for companies dealing with atoms. At some point, the technology lead erodes, "not bad" becomes good enough, and mature businesses are unable to adapt while maintaining engineering at the center. Technology development at the frontier is too irregular to rely on for the long-term.

If I were designing these newer style aerodynamic handles, I think it would be done such that the handles default to the open graspable state. Retract them when the car is in motion for aerodynamics (is it really that much of a benefit?) such that when the circuit is de-energized in a crash, the handles return to the default open graspable state.

Back in the glory days of Mercedes, they proudly advertised how their pull-style door handles were a safety feature intended to make it easier for rescuers to open doors from the outside: http://oudemercedesbrochures.nl/Images/W126/USA_1990/016.jpg

Alas, “build the best car you can” wasn’t compatible with long-term viability. Something engineering-driven companies seem to keep encountering.

The whole brochure is an neat time capsule to browse through: http://oudemercedesbrochures.nl/W126_USA1990.html

No, the roof: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0Mzci2Sks

My daily is a W126 with the OM603. It's getting harder every day to find parts (when I need them, which is infrequent) but it's worth the hassle because like you say there is nothing modern that has the same combination of feel and ride quality. Or visibility! I can parallel park this car (long wheelbase too) in tiny spots easier than a modern compact because you can actually see.

I've got a W140 with the M120 and a W123 with the OM616 and a 4-speed too, and while they have their charms (especially the W123) nothing tops the W126. It truly was not just the finest production sedan Mercedes made, but ever made by anyone. (Other contenders being the W100, the W140, and the Lexus LS.)

Is it completely correct to say they have no legal bearing? As I understand things, they can be used to establish a date when someone was made aware of infringement, and that date can be used to start the clock on enhanced damages.