Slashdot Mirror

The Ford Fusion hybrid has/had green leaves that would light up on the dash if you were driving in an acceleration/speed envelope that gave good fuel mileage results:
https://designobserver.com/fea...

More (much more) info

The result would be that examiners would reject everything

You sound like it's a bad think. In fact, less "intellectual property" would do the US economy right now wonders. Look at the fashion industry, there you have none "intellectual property", no copyright, no patents, and they doing quite well. Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture

But of course Cooperate America is now on it's best way to ruin that industry as well. The Costs of Ownership: Why Copyright Protection Will Hurt the Fashion Industry

I think this proves your point: http://www.designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=16492

half.com, OR anyone?

One of Nielsen's points is that commenting on someone else's comments doesn't really add value to your site in the long term. It becomes part of a kind of conversation, a web of context that doesn't make too much sense by itself. Readers have to follow the trail in order to piece together the whole story. (Your post references this blog post, which references another blog post reprinting an original article from The Architect's Newspaper.) Over time sites go down, links go bad and it becomes impossible to piece together the whole story.

It also undercuts your authority to say "here's what I think about what somebody else said". If you want to be a leader in your field, you don't comment on other people's ideas, you let them comment on your ideas. Google bases their entire PageRank algorithm on this principle. Getting people to link to you is far more important than you linking to them.

That's not to say you shouldn't give credit where it's due. If someone else's article inspires you to write something related, it's only fair to mention that, but leave it for the end as a reference. OTOH, if your article relies too much on someone else's idea and only incrementally improves upon it, you might want to reconsider posting it entirely.

I was not impressed by the table shown in the Slate article, but IANAC.

Surfing around to look at other versions, I saw one (this link for the jpg, which is also shown on this web page as the work of one Christian Drury), which I thought both beautiful and practical.

The elements seem to be laid out in the same way that they are in the traditional table, but instead of the boxes with text, the elements are portrayed by orbital diagrams. The jpg is low resolution and cut off at the edges. I could not find any additional information about the table on google.

The ones in the article are way cool (they start a ways down). Amazing what actual design knowledge (rather than a geek thinking it's easy) can do.