idiotic you bet, as are the first two comments to the 3D pistol print non-threat

I agree completely. After 30 YEARS of development no one has even come close to using a printer type technology to make high strength, high temperature materials sufficient to sustain even a poor ball bearing or a gun barrel.

Never say never, but do say WHY. Why with perfectly good systems for machining high grade materials like steel, scandium-aluminum, titanium, ceramics and other materials all capable of making high performance weapons would any but the brain dead waste a lifetime trying to make a rabbit into bear.

So we are left with the likelihood that these little minds are afraid of real and suitable material.

Now for the first two comments:

EddieD says they just started WRONG! Apparently he just heard about it. Over 30 year history this isn't the first try to make a high force bearing, close tolerance object. They are a long ways away from achieving that goal.

Next up is JDX who thinks that a machine like the 3D printer with an accuracy and resolution of (at best) .003 inch can match a simple lathe bored and threaded (which is what rifling is) steel tube easily accurate to better then .001 (such accuracy has been available everywhere in the world for centuries).

And in a final act of ignorance this fellow JDX states that a 3D printer will be building up the ultimate high strength material diamond! Perhaps he means diamond in a thermoplastic matrix- essentially worthless for this purpose or he means a contiguous diamond structure. Diamond can be grown to conform to any shape at 900 C the temperature of molten lava. JDX please hold your breath until these miracles arrive.

I'll leave the other idiot comments to rational and knowledgeable folk.

Finally like many English and Aussies with little regard for the USA's Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, the basic desire to obtain and hold weapons for all freemen seems unreasonable. The author of this piece tells us that weapons will be easily confiscated. He fails to understand that when doing improper acts the police and military are subject to the justice of the people and are as likely to revolt against tyranny as obey their leaders.

As long as we see visual and aural proof on CNN (in Boston recently) that squads of police armed with machine guns can freely move through a major city and begin firing in peaceful neighborhoods with out regard to public safety even though no fire of any kind was directed to them. The police chief lied about the action for days.

We saw for ourselves that over reaction and improper acts by government are very possible in our society.

A teeny problem folk- we don't actually know c

Cassimir Experiments have clearly shown that all of space is permeated by quantum foam. Therefor no measurement has ever been made of c, because it turns out up to now no true vacuum has ever existed where it could be measured and the speed of light measured in it.

Now let's hear some suggestions for how to make a true vacuum in space/time.

choice of wavelength dictates size

The example of the platter include the resonant antenna and is about 150 microns square. It's visible to the naked eye!

Without going to plasmons (surface electrons that can transform from and to photons (with a loss of linked quantum uncertainty-entanglement) it is difficult to see this system getting smaller and therefor sets serious limits on the performance of a quantum computer using this form of storage.

How lovely in scope and color and charming to behold

the Standard Model is beautiful. One should also appreciate the purpose of naming unique mathematical characterizations charm, and color. How sad that we have up and down, top and bottom, for these words impart to the mind a familiar behavior with no connection to their use in the SM.

What is amusing is that we are told that only "serious physicists" etc. No one in their right mind will accept the results of the LHC as proven until the Higgs has shown by further yet to be defined experimentation that it has the right "stuff".

ANd how can anyone be satisfied with this years accelerator energies when Dark Matter and Dark Energy rule the Universe and are untamed by "serious physicists".

I predict the way forward will be through the DARKness and into the light of Beyond the Standard Model.

Please don't take me seriously.

Buzzers get a charge out of a pause to sniff the roses

I admit to having the electrical sense myself (one of my many extra-senses). The hair on my arms and other parts of my hair endowed anatomy signal the lay of the land.

Obama needs to listen to the little guy, he's not beholden to big money now!

President Obama does not seem to realize how his approval of a deeply flawed patent reform act, the America Invents Act, has injured start-ups and individual inventors.

An indiscriminate attack on all who might fit the simplistic description of "troll" used by the President in this forum would further reduce the new inventions being filed and most importantly the really new and disruptive ideas that have powered our economy since the founding of the Republic.

No small inventors were asked or allowed to comment on the bill President Obama signed into law. This fact alone speaks more eloquently then I about the problems now plaguing our Patent System.

Best Solution

The lack of surface water and air to conduct away heat is a great advantage. Solar collectors on the moon or in synchronous orbit can turn the loose rock and rock outcroppings into lava.

Lava can line pits dug into the surface to form components which then can assembled into surface structures. Subsurface areas can be coated with lava.

More surface regolith can be refined to make glass.

Not in any way a non practicing entity

When a team creates an invention as is true here in 5,597,520 and then tries directly or even indirectly to enforce that patent it is absolutely honorable and correct for them to try to do so.

It may not be wise or good business, but they have the high moral ground.

Every yahoo who bleats on this and other blogs about the evil of patents in general rather a specific patent or specific players actions, and who implies some vague moral failing of people who frequently give their lives for their visions for mens futures is the voice of powerful companies who would like nothing better then that juries favor the wealthy and powerful over the EVIL INVENTOR and PATENT OWNER.

The patent 5,597,520 (at least partially) expired in 2010

The patent at issue was partially complete and filed in 1990 and therefor expired at least in part in 2010. Other parts expire in 2013. Formlabs certainly has only the most modest of sales now (one presumes) and had none at all in 2010.

Such a suit at best can collect damages based on lost revenues etc. Hard to see much damages.

I certainly believe 3D has done the world a service working in the late 80's on 3D printing issues when much of the crew at Formlabs were still in diapers still there is little here and 3D should not waste many hundreds of thousands of dollars to chase an empty cup.

In two years their patent 5,597,520 will be completely in the public domain.

For the same reason Formlabs should avoid paying lawyers and just make a deal that provides something to 3D for the max time they have left. Understanding that the time depends on exactly what is infringing and which of the continuations it became part of the patent. Could be anything from 0 to 2 years but not more.

There is one possible nasty bug in ointment Dennis R. Smalley put himnself as principal inventor and as PATENT COUNSEL!

This could mean he is a great genius or that Formlabs was so poor he had to do the patent attorney duty or (God save Formlabs) he could be an ego maniacal Lawyer who intrudes on the engineers domain and uber pugnacious... a schmuck who must win at all cost and one who has no cost of suit to moderate the choices of 3D's governing counsel.

I certainly could find out more about Smalley and maybe even offer a work around to Formlabs but I've got to focus on the paying tasks. Hopefully this will help.

Woz is a real mensch, and sweet person....but neither Steve nor Apple invented the Personal Computer

Of course that has not stopped the Apple history rewriters from trying to assert this unacceptable lie.

It's too bad since the truth is actually even better then the lie. The truth is that the Steve's made a product that for it's day was focused on the everyday person rather then a computer literate clientele.

And the biggest, most important truth that the combination of Apple II and Visicalc MADE A TURN KEY SOLUTION< AND IT MADE APPLE"S FORTUNE. Too bad Visicalc got screwed but then no one said Jobs wasn't greedy.

What I find amazing is that no one wants to give credit for the first desk top graphics PC which was being shipped before Apple was formed as a company. This million point display complete computer with integrated display, keyboard, digital tape drive, and ROM packs included a RS232C or high speed GPIB bus also was combined with one of if not the first PC board, and Mechanical design software applications years before autocad existed. The magic turnkey solution included a 48 inch digital roll plotter and small flatbed plotter (to prototype PCBs up to 8 inches). Could not sell enough of them in 1978 so the plotter company bought out the little Berkeley start-up and history was then written by autocad.

The Graphics computer Tektronix, the software company iCorp. iCorp also had a touch screen, touch pad pointing product it called the joypad or ipad which it tried to sell to the major pointing device user of the day Atari and all the small little start-ups, kentucky fried computers, and many others including a LATE comer named Apple. The guy in the front part of the little store front Steve Jobs said that he and his partner could not see any real use for such a pointing device or why anyone would need more then the character graphics offered by Apple that very day. Anyway, said Steve, their customers could always buy a real joystick.

So let's get it straight there was a visionary at Apple his name is Alan Kay and he left a long time ago.

Jobs could drive a mean team to completion in a mean way.

Woz is a great guy not a visionary then or now. However in no way am I saying he could not prove me wrong tomorrow and I really hope he does.

Woz designed the crappy Apple I, better with Apple II - Disruptive? That's a load of Roo Poo

Woz is dare I say it EYE Candy for those easily convinced by the Apple BS history of the PC and Graphics PC. He is a good guy who spread around the wealth and sought to teach kids instead of feeding his ego until it finally exploded him like his self-centered fellow founder Jobs.

I hope this forgettable company FU-IO, which is unlikely to be long alive if they continue to waste marketing dollars on things like Woz shows is paying the great one wads of moolah so he live out his boyhood dream of life in the outback.

As near as I can tell both by review of his issued patents and other communications Woz has followed others lead into the disruptive general classes but has never actually been a leader of disruption himself. But, hey he isn't dead yet!

Wait didn't Woz just put down the Cloud right here at the Register?

Woz Waz Waxing strong on how that server based Cloud crap was nowhere.

Nuclear fusion to the rescue. Green and lean.

No Patents, No Companies bringing boodles and goodles of lucre to the Queenie yet he's a SIR?

Great new idea... Rent a Sir for those who have everything except the praise and snooty regard of some old poops and pretend Shake Your Spear Players.

Bill of Faire:

Plain Sir 1d per click

Sir with Cream cheese and Onion 2d per click

Slur (a Sir with character) 4d per click

The value of Berniers-Lee opinion about the use of a system so grossly beyond him before he started playing with it, making his opinion today like anyone else's essentially worthless. That he attempts to give it anyway sad and all too telling.

Arrest? Not at all, the shooter was to receive an award

This story is badly misconstrued. Local police were trying to bring the sportsman his award.

Shooting with a pistol while pedaling a bicycle hands free, holding your pistol in a two hand grip and accurately grouping your shots in a pattern on plate glass is one of the most challenging events in the famous Texas Long Hornithon.

A very difficult act to follow though all of our friends in New Zealand and Australia are truly challenged to duplicate the event. We recommend if no Dell building is handy an Apple Store.

Australians may want to fix small explosive charges to their target boomerangs while New Zealanders are free to use suicide Kiwis.

Sun was not known for reliability in their first two years

The person who believes otherwise should check the facts.

As to Vinod's support for transformative invention or even innovation I am more then willing to be convinced he is a star in the area.

Please name the companies he was first backer to that meet this criteria.

Understand that to join the crowd of banker VCs once opportunity is fully vetted is more like an early stock play and means nothing in establishing new beginnings. Such investments do not count only those where Vinod was the earliest and first and held in for a reasonable period of time say a year or two.

Vinod prognosticator who brought us Sun now predicts new stuff

Vinod and Sun did nothing new at the start. They marketed a motorola 68000 micro in grossly over designed rack mount using Berkeley UNIX. Programmers bought it and for some time Sun didn't quite deliver it.

I presented new technology to Sun's exec committee including Vinod. They didn't care about pointing devices, touch screens or gesture control (1985) Vinod and company were as staid and conservative as bankers.

It's in fact bankers that is what they were with 100 million in Stanford connected monies.

Now Vinod's on his own so what has he picked as the prognosticator and put his money on and won? Why nothing at all.

He may have bought into some deals that does not count. We are not talking about sympathy investments but about a new idea recognized by Vinod alone and backed as the first backer.

NOTHING, Vinod has found NOTHING. NOTHING AGAIN, and it isn't even new.

So Vinod you want to lecture us, you want to impress us with your forward thinking ability? It's easy fellow JUST DO IT.

Here are the RULES.

It has to be NEW. You have to FUND it first.

Inductive couple and optical near infrared power transmission

We did the 8xx nm near infrared power transmission to meet the medical transformer limits in a bio appliance in 1975. Wasn't worth patenting. Worked great even with the poor LEDs of the day.

Certainly energy could be coupled inductively but this is exactly the kinds of magnetic fields, things like pacemakers and their leads do not want to see.

The guys and girls at Stanford seem to have missed the biggest point. I know all you inventors in the Reg audience get it. Sure you do....

Fixing the System

The US Patent system today is heavily tilted to the benefit of large corporations, the USPTO is actually run by IBM's chief patent attorney!

All applicants with fewer then 10 people should pay 1/10th the rate of small entities. These will called Inventors

All Inventors with a history of successful and socially useful "innovations" (meaning that their inventions participated in powering successful products) will have their unsold inventions extended by 10 years and will be heralded as Recognized American Inventors by their names in titanium on the granite walkway into the USPTO in Alexandria VA.

All suits involving Inventors will have the losing party paying the winner's legal costs and fees. Further any losing party with a history of similar loses will be assessed additional sanctions of 10 times the costs and fees of BOTH parties paid to the winner. This change would both make believers of bullies like Apple, and make the temptation for misbehaving Inventors come at a very high risk.

Achievement for Australia National University Science

Down under researchers at ANUS have produced an amazing entangled specimen of light beams. Looking at the full article leaves me with some concern about the stability of the entanglement but we can all hope that further work will bring improvement.

Optics be damned, for near Earth where's the sense in the Aussie sensor set?

Near earth needs to be scoped early and flagged immediately. The article fails utterly to tell us what special tricks in early recognition and identification are in or at least contemplated for this instrument to be used in conjunction with Gaia.

Korean's should sue their lawyers for malpractice

Jobs rejected the touch screen when it was shown him in 1977. In the following years versions of motion control including stroking to scroll and other related motions were incorporated in software for various pointer related products including touch pad and touch screen products. Big yawn at the PC and Apple world where graphics were still unborn or still born (Lisa).

Most of us got out of the business after Gates made it clear that the stupid mouse was the only pointing device he would allow on a PC. He did this by not telling us little guys about software changes affecting the "Mickeys" or graphic move commands for pointers, and putting us right out of business as our pointers stopped working for our customers when they upgraded Windows 1.X.

So it's clear to me that the Korean's counsel made no effort to find previous art.

It's also clear that the Korean's are too proud to ask our community of pointing device people to invent them out of their rut.

Just in case someone would like to know, all the Koreans have to do is tell us what area in general needs to be avoided and exactly how much they will pay us to find a pathway to avoid it. Of course our solution will be more appealing then Apple's and it will overcome the one major remaining problem of touch screens.

The core of innovation is frequently invention- but someone must pay the inventor

Invention is the provence of small companies, individuals and little groups in large entities.

The truly important inventions like the touch screen (both resistive and its close cousin capacitive) invented in the '70's and used both by fingers (including a form of multi-touch) and with styli emerged from small companies/inventors trying to solve problems of using the new microprocessor in new product applications like GAMES (Atari's Pong is one such).

These devices were for the most part rejected by PC companies large and small who had no idea about the tablet computers and small games the size of calculators the inventors had in mind.

I can assure you that tremendous advances could have been made in the pointing device area but small minds at Microsoft and Apple decided the mouse was good enough, and self fulfilling prophecy it was indeed.

Now to point. the touch screen inventors were not paid, their work went public and free.

Apple paid less then nothing for its touch screen, and anyone who wants to kick the multi-touch patents down the toilet need only call. The inventors saw their work was going no where and stopped. The bean counters got the left overs. The innovators (Apple) got the paycheck and they are not sharing in any way at all.

So celebrate the licensing effort this article bemoans! For some of us licensing is the only reason we are still (very carefully) in the game. I can tell you all though that for some years now we always make the new stuff with a healthy dose of trade secret unobtanium so who ever comes along after these patents expire may well wish for the old days.

Remember Patents only last 20 years from the filing date but good trade secrets are forever!

And for those who admire Techdirt and others who hate patents (but who think their prattle 's copyright is precious). Patents mean the next generation gets to see the last generations solutions so they can improve and build on them. Only works, though, in a world in which the creators are allowed to make a living.

Oh the best computer?

The one between your ears.

Must be the just about the peak of Apple. If you nerds had any you'd short the fruits for the worms can't be far behind.

Pixar is a great group started by Lucas with some siggraph stars of the mid-seventies. They worked hard on Renderman but in the end they were a drag on Lucas operations and he sold them to the highest bidder Jobs.

Jobs bought Pixar, he did not create ANY software, think up any algorithms, or even work on any story lines. He did keep the money coming and insist on perfection in the product.

So this B.S. tag "Jobs -derived" means he owned Pixar and acted like a Producer or Chairman of the Board and nothing more.

Pixar will miss Jobs like a fish misses a suntan.

Permanent Independent Secret Storage vs Accessible and Relatively Secure Electronic data

Acronym Alert !

In any event I challenge most people to read that deck of punch cards you found moldering in the basement or the DC300A cassette tape with your best video games from 1977(yes I still have it and there were some).

The 45,000 year old French cave paintings are the most persistent human communication we have. If we really want to worry about the future we should be talking about a universal storage medium whose properties transcend device limits. This in fact is basically what the stone tablet and the vinyl record almost have in common.

It is possible now with nanotech to build structures that have multiple levels of data. Very soon we will be using spin to store information and data densities will make another enormous leap.

We can at a level still perceptible to the human eye and in material obdurate and nearly diamond hard build both a simple vocabulary and language map along with instructions on how to read the information levels stored in the media. This approach should become a standard for all future high density media.

Excuse me for opening a new line of discussion but really let's put cloud vs hardware to bed OK? Let's all tell the truth we all (including Woz) use both and are not likely to stop any time soon. Anyone who makes the extreme effort to be completely clear of cloud or hardware is already in serious trouble and needs very much to get a life.

Hmm... In 1979 we were shipping a full PC based 16 million point color display desktop 24 inch diagonal graphic system with CAD, PC layout and Mechanical Design and selling a 36 inch roll plotter along with it. The Display/computer/storage/keyboard package sold for less then three times the cost of Apples latest offering 33 years later. Of course Jobs had not yet ahem..licensed? Xerox PARC or even really learned what the hell a GUI was about in 1979.

Apple is way ahead of the pack.. you bet!

Just understand that the lone wolves are at least a decade ahead of Apple. Now the general population just has to learn that wolves need to feed on pieces of the fat boys carcass or the everyday user will never see real change, and the U.S. can go back to farming.

What this means is that inventors need to be able to get paid by the big companies that innovate/steal their inventions or they will dry up and disappear.

All those who claim that invention stultifies innovation have never actually created anything that is new or been involved in the process in which a Jobs or his ilk conveniently innovate someone else's ideas to slake his/her ego and thirst for power.

Things do change and it may well be that Apple has now made a place for real creators to invent and a new era of a creative Apple contributing as many new ideas as it takes but don't hold your breath.

It helps a little if you were there. When Jobs was shown a touch pad and introduced to the idea of a tablet (Dynabook) in 1977 he did not have a clue.

Jobs went on to steal many great ideas, much more than Gates who preferred to steal from Apple.

Jobs innovated others inventions.

Gates caused death and destruction by his criminal use of the OS monopoly. No amount pretense to philanthropy will buy him peace.

May he live long and suffer.sufer, lt

Yes its Science and it's VERY specific

50 nanoseconds faster then the speed of light in a vacuum sounds specific right? However 50ns over 500ns is enormous while 50ns over 500 km is piddling and questionable.

Why questionable because the Einstein limit is for the THEORETICAL Speed of light in a perfect vacuum. However there is no perfect vacuum and recent tests of quantum foam interactions says there can never be a non-plasmonic vacuum at light speeds and time frames.

Therefor we do not yet know the Einstein speed of light against which to measure.

However it is possible we can exceed the speed of light in real vacuums by the proposed method and others.

Moore's Wannabe Law of Device Physics

Gordon expressed a hope and goal, not a law of nature or of man. Ever since inventors have used their imagination to sustain the hope and goal and the economy of much of the world.

Spoiled brat's like the readers of this rotter's blog haven't a clue where the miracles that make their culture and life come from or in many cases how core and critical they are to their well being until they are denied. Then like the obscene reaction of lawmakers and courts to the loss of their crackberry fix a few years ago the addicts will do anything, break any code, blame any helpless group to get back their drug.

When the miracle of ongoing Moore's Law Invention ends, so does the love affair with ever more powerful, less expensive personal computing including iPads, iPhones and all their contemporaries, and successors.

So also does the preeminence of Silicon Valley, and the economy of the USA.

PC dead A LONG TIME AGO- long live the PC

Ah, gee IBM did not create the personal computer and neither did Mr. Dean. Although I'm happy to accept that Dean may well have created the late comer IBM PC product. The IBM PC was essentially dead by 1994 as a product.

The personal computer is alive and well and thriving in all its forms as smart phones, and a myriad of programmable personal computing devices.

Who gives a fck? Apple is shipping crap hardware but otherwise is pretty good

Who cares what ego maniac Jobs does?

I guess I'll look for an android system because the disk drive in the air mac barely lasted a year.

Apple should have a cloud back-up integrated into the OS if they expect us to continue buying their cheap hardware. Hey Jobs get off you ass and buy from the quality supplier in Shanghai for a change.

Lame Jobs- YOU ARE FIRED SUCKER!!

Sad the whole lot! Twins, Schmuckerburg, and Judge Bred

Facebook as its competitor Myspace is noWARE,

That is a few styles of treating users, a few underlying monitization features etc., easily copied in another online meeting place like MyPad!

It's great that the Twins told the truth about the schmuck, and greater still if they can create something better in next few years.

In the end though the whole crew think there is something happening at FB. It's a huge bore, waste of time and resource. Certainly its a waste of scientific and technical talent so only schmuckburgers should be involved- keeps them off the streets.