It's just a Design Patent, or a Registered Design to our UK readers. You can get exactly the same kind of registration, in the same way, at the USPTO.
Regardless the article is factually incorrect on several points, not least is assertion that Apple somehow got an automatic injunction for showing up with the paperwork. The injunction was granted on an inspection of the actual devices by the court, which evaluated whether the design was likely to have been infringed.
Technical: Most of the good journals have excellent RSS feeds, with the full abstract and the ToC graphic, so follow the feeds for the journals in your area and make sure you go through them completely at least once a week. I get about 1000 new abstracts in that time, including a shedload of PNAS, Science and Nature stuff that's totally irrelevant but it only takes about 30 minutes to skim for relevant stuff. Even if I'm away from my institutional access, I can mark the abstract in my aggregator for future reference (stars on Google Reader, for instance).
For general news: podcasts and/or magazines, basically anything that acts as a digest. If you try to keep up with the broader news by following all the primary sources, you will exhaust yourself with boredom. SGU's a good, entertaining podcast.
By the standards of this market segment, Apple's actually slow to render its products obsolete. In the past nine months, Samsung has released the Galaxy S, the Galaxy S II, and the Nexus S, while HTC has had the Desire, the Desire S, and the Desire's explicit replacement, the HTC Sensation. The mobile phone industry runs on a three-month cycle, with conferences set to that rhythm. By releasing phones once a year, Apple's actually going relatively slowly.
The retailers don't have a say in the matter, really. Previously, publishers would set a "wholesale" price for the book and the retailer got to keep whatever margin they wanted. Now all of the major publishers are on an "agency model" where they set the price, and the retailer has to abide by it in exchange for getting a fixed percentage off each sale. It's partly publisher greed and partly Apple's opportunism. They were willing to adopt an agency model for iBooks at a time when Amazon was holding out, and they require that publishers adopt the agency model when they're selling to anyone else too.
The unfunded mandate for Constellation worked well enough for the last administration. Get the public excited about a huge new space project, don't provide any money, and count on being out of office so that it's the new guy that has to cancel it and get yelled at for ruining everyone's dreams.
I'm pretty sure that adding occlusion culling would increase the size of MC's codebase, not decrease it. The issue isn't that MC has too many lines, it's that certain useful technical tricks are missing.
At the risk of overstretching an analogy, people used to plug everything into their light socket because they got electricity for the lightbulbs (facebook) and other useful applications for electricity began to appear later (???) which they needed to plug them in somewhere. (?facebook connect?).
I think "at the risk of" should've read "quite absolutely certainly".
You do realise that people use Skype precisely because there are situations in which it is impractical or uneconomical to use a regular old phone line? The people who use Facebook to communicate to overseas relatives would probably be very happy to give Skype their money and make a voice call if they only knew it existed.
And let's not forget pre-launch failures like this one.
(NOAA. Environmental craft seem to have the same sort of elevated failure rate as Mars missions. What is it that the martians do not want us to know about the environment?)
I was thinking something along the lines of launching to LEO from the back of hypervelocity suborbital cargo aircraft, like that X-Prize competitor but on a bigger scale. We're still talking old-fashioned chemical propulsion, of course, and there will have to be a chemical->physical switchover in launch systems eventually.
That's an interesting thought, actually. I found this blog post on the impact of Shuttle launches, at least. Turns out that you wouldn't want to be in the wake of one for reasons other than the obvious uncomfortable warmth and gustiness. In the grand scheme it's not a whole lot of pollution of course.
I think we're a long way from any 2000km-long megastructure being a viable solution to the problem. There's a lot of good ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech that should be explored first.
Who says they wouldn't be? The cost of those devices probably isn't huge, and once you've got them distributed you can probably loosely track a few dozen people for each agent on the case. Why wouldn't they widen the net to people who have some third-, fourth-, or fifth-degree connection to an actual "person of interest"? It seems like it would be terribly efficient to me.
That the greatest barriers to our exploration of space are no longer technological ones, but matters of political and financial pragmatism and conservatism, speaks more. When we're ready again, we'll be up there, and with even more cool stuff than today.
It's not good journalism if your audience doesn't know what you're talking about, and many more people are familiar with the idea of an online social forum through Facebook than through discussion boards. It doesn't mean the audience are ignorant in the pejorative sense. Once upon a time we called all first-person games "Doom clones" because we'd all played Doom but nobody knew what the fuck "first-person" meant.
"After seizing Webber's laptop, police discovered details of 100,000 stolen credit cards and a trail back to the Gh0stMarket website. Webber and Thomas jumped bail that December, fleeing to Majorca, but were rearrested when they flew back to Gatwick airport on 31 January 2010."
Yeah, just wait two months, they'll totally forget about you and you can come back.
Nobody has time to digest all the outside remarks about their project. All you get by listening out is the loudest consensus, which crushes out all the useful discussion like this comment thread and boils it down to "deletion isn't working", which we already knew. Bring the battle to the wiki.
Totally right about the target audience, though. It grew organically so the current infrastructure for getting things done is rather at odds with the project's few vaguely stated aims. They need to figure out what they're trying to do, and rewrite the rules to suit that.
Citing a primary source for descriptive purposes is sensible, but if that's the only source, you're just going to recapitulate it by writing a Wikipedia article. If you're going to rewrite Sherlock Holmes in encyclopedia form, I'm not sure you've actually written an encyclopedia article that's going to help anyone out. Hence, secondary sources. There's enough secondary writing about Holmes to thoroughly analyse him, for example.
"News" shouldn't be the measure of suitability, that's for damn usre.
You'd have more of a point if "Wikipedia" was a person. It's not. The clique that handles anime articles has different standards than the clique that handles this, that, and the other. You can impose consistency but at the cost of causing people to complain about this or that article being left in or deleted.
Begging your pardon, but if you had to write the articles yourself, I'm not sure that your webcomic needed "entire pages of material" written about it.
Interesting/informative isn't the defining characteristic of an encyclopedia, though. I mean, my PhD thesis is interesting, but it's not going up there. Encyclopedias are about a different kind of content, specifically a review of a subject. They've at least reached a useful metric for suitability with the guideline that articles should have proper secondary sources. That, IMO, should be the sole criterion - "can you write a properly referenced review of this subject?".
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a Design Patent, or a Registered Design to our UK readers. You can get exactly the same kind of registration, in the same way, at the USPTO.
Regardless the article is factually incorrect on several points, not least is assertion that Apple somehow got an automatic injunction for showing up with the paperwork. The injunction was granted on an inspection of the actual devices by the court, which evaluated whether the design was likely to have been infringed.
Technical: Most of the good journals have excellent RSS feeds, with the full abstract and the ToC graphic, so follow the feeds for the journals in your area and make sure you go through them completely at least once a week. I get about 1000 new abstracts in that time, including a shedload of PNAS, Science and Nature stuff that's totally irrelevant but it only takes about 30 minutes to skim for relevant stuff. Even if I'm away from my institutional access, I can mark the abstract in my aggregator for future reference (stars on Google Reader, for instance).
For general news: podcasts and/or magazines, basically anything that acts as a digest. If you try to keep up with the broader news by following all the primary sources, you will exhaust yourself with boredom. SGU's a good, entertaining podcast.
By the standards of this market segment, Apple's actually slow to render its products obsolete. In the past nine months, Samsung has released the Galaxy S, the Galaxy S II, and the Nexus S, while HTC has had the Desire, the Desire S, and the Desire's explicit replacement, the HTC Sensation. The mobile phone industry runs on a three-month cycle, with conferences set to that rhythm. By releasing phones once a year, Apple's actually going relatively slowly.
Nobody ever bought anything "just in case" in the 18th century?
The retailers don't have a say in the matter, really. Previously, publishers would set a "wholesale" price for the book and the retailer got to keep whatever margin they wanted. Now all of the major publishers are on an "agency model" where they set the price, and the retailer has to abide by it in exchange for getting a fixed percentage off each sale. It's partly publisher greed and partly Apple's opportunism. They were willing to adopt an agency model for iBooks at a time when Amazon was holding out, and they require that publishers adopt the agency model when they're selling to anyone else too.
The unfunded mandate for Constellation worked well enough for the last administration. Get the public excited about a huge new space project, don't provide any money, and count on being out of office so that it's the new guy that has to cancel it and get yelled at for ruining everyone's dreams.
I'm pretty sure that adding occlusion culling would increase the size of MC's codebase, not decrease it. The issue isn't that MC has too many lines, it's that certain useful technical tricks are missing.
I'm not sure how you can reason that Skype isn't in competition with those services. Unless you have a different sense of "competition" than I.
Who said you did?
At the risk of overstretching an analogy, people used to plug everything into their light socket because they got electricity for the lightbulbs (facebook) and other useful applications for electricity began to appear later (???) which they needed to plug them in somewhere. (?facebook connect?).
I think "at the risk of" should've read "quite absolutely certainly".
You do realise that people use Skype precisely because there are situations in which it is impractical or uneconomical to use a regular old phone line? The people who use Facebook to communicate to overseas relatives would probably be very happy to give Skype their money and make a voice call if they only knew it existed.
And let's not forget pre-launch failures like this one.
(NOAA. Environmental craft seem to have the same sort of elevated failure rate as Mars missions. What is it that the martians do not want us to know about the environment?)
I was thinking something along the lines of launching to LEO from the back of hypervelocity suborbital cargo aircraft, like that X-Prize competitor but on a bigger scale. We're still talking old-fashioned chemical propulsion, of course, and there will have to be a chemical->physical switchover in launch systems eventually.
That's an interesting thought, actually. I found this blog post on the impact of Shuttle launches, at least. Turns out that you wouldn't want to be in the wake of one for reasons other than the obvious uncomfortable warmth and gustiness. In the grand scheme it's not a whole lot of pollution of course.
I think we're a long way from any 2000km-long megastructure being a viable solution to the problem. There's a lot of good ground between rockets and sci-fi megatech that should be explored first.
Who says they wouldn't be? The cost of those devices probably isn't huge, and once you've got them distributed you can probably loosely track a few dozen people for each agent on the case. Why wouldn't they widen the net to people who have some third-, fourth-, or fifth-degree connection to an actual "person of interest"? It seems like it would be terribly efficient to me.
That the greatest barriers to our exploration of space are no longer technological ones, but matters of political and financial pragmatism and conservatism, speaks more. When we're ready again, we'll be up there, and with even more cool stuff than today.
It's not good journalism if your audience doesn't know what you're talking about, and many more people are familiar with the idea of an online social forum through Facebook than through discussion boards. It doesn't mean the audience are ignorant in the pejorative sense. Once upon a time we called all first-person games "Doom clones" because we'd all played Doom but nobody knew what the fuck "first-person" meant.
"After seizing Webber's laptop, police discovered details of 100,000 stolen credit cards and a trail back to the Gh0stMarket website. Webber and Thomas jumped bail that December, fleeing to Majorca, but were rearrested when they flew back to Gatwick airport on 31 January 2010."
Yeah, just wait two months, they'll totally forget about you and you can come back.
Nobody has time to digest all the outside remarks about their project. All you get by listening out is the loudest consensus, which crushes out all the useful discussion like this comment thread and boils it down to "deletion isn't working", which we already knew. Bring the battle to the wiki.
Totally right about the target audience, though. It grew organically so the current infrastructure for getting things done is rather at odds with the project's few vaguely stated aims. They need to figure out what they're trying to do, and rewrite the rules to suit that.
Citing a primary source for descriptive purposes is sensible, but if that's the only source, you're just going to recapitulate it by writing a Wikipedia article. If you're going to rewrite Sherlock Holmes in encyclopedia form, I'm not sure you've actually written an encyclopedia article that's going to help anyone out. Hence, secondary sources. There's enough secondary writing about Holmes to thoroughly analyse him, for example.
"News" shouldn't be the measure of suitability, that's for damn usre.
You'd have more of a point if "Wikipedia" was a person. It's not. The clique that handles anime articles has different standards than the clique that handles this, that, and the other. You can impose consistency but at the cost of causing people to complain about this or that article being left in or deleted.
Begging your pardon, but if you had to write the articles yourself, I'm not sure that your webcomic needed "entire pages of material" written about it.
The relevant deletion review is here.
Interesting/informative isn't the defining characteristic of an encyclopedia, though. I mean, my PhD thesis is interesting, but it's not going up there. Encyclopedias are about a different kind of content, specifically a review of a subject. They've at least reached a useful metric for suitability with the guideline that articles should have proper secondary sources. That, IMO, should be the sole criterion - "can you write a properly referenced review of this subject?".