Do you only use braces or do you indent as well?

I guess Activity Monitor doesn't show a prediction, but it does have a line graph of the percentage of remaining charge as a function of time over the past 12 hours. Not sure if that got removed in the new update.

A basic lens is pretty cheap; the cost goes up when you start adding various coatings or have to do special optics (extreme astigmatism, etc.). In fact, the frame ends up being the costliest part of my glasses, because I want ones that look good on me. I find it curious these adjustable glasses don't correct for astigmatism, though I suppose it's because you'd double the price if you had two cylindrical adjustable lenses instead of a spherical one in there.

Does anyone have a link to the actual patent application? The summary on the linked blog pretty much gives no details about the specifics of the patent (i.e., pretty much any design for a holographic display would have the components listed in the summary of the patent given by the blog) The big elephants in the room are: (1) how do you build a spatial light modulator that has micron-size pixels and yet be big enough to comfortably view a big image, and (2) how do you compute in real time what values those pixels need to be? A holographic display would need one or two orders of magnitude higher pixel density than Apple's "Retina Displays". The summary unfortunately sounds like the equivalent of "we present a patent for making a horse-drawn carriage, wherein you have a horse and it's attached to a carriage, which may be made of metal or wood or some other material, and wow look at the equation that gives you the shape of one of the pieces of the carriage!"

Sure, technology made this fraud a lot easier to commit, but technology isn't an intrinsic part of this ploy; he simply used computer algorithms to implement a lightning-fast pump-and-dump scheme.

Basically, what he did was the equivalent of putting out fake advertisements in a newspaper saying that he'd buy a lot of shares of a certain stock at elevated prices. Traders, seeing these ads, get the feeling that this stock is now worth a lot more than what it is trading at, so they start buying this stock at higher and higher prices. This allows him to eventually sell at high prices the shares he had already owned, making a profit. Meanwhile, when these other traders try to answer these ads, they get no answer and are thus left with a ton of overvalued stock.

Pump-and-dump, insider trading, etc. can all screw up the value of stocks, and they need to be prevented for the market to operate "correctly"; that's why there's laws making these schemes illegal. And while laws don't prevent these crimes, they can certainly help in reducing them.

Since you linked to Wikipedia, I'm going to assume that Wikipedia didn't do a very good job at explaining the difference. While OAM and circular polarisation both describe some sort of spinning, they correspond to different phenomena. As you may know, electromagnetic waves are oscillations of the electric (and magnetic) field, with the field at each spatial position varying over time. You may also recall from your high school physics class that the electric field at any position is a vector quantity --- it has both a strength and a direction. The polarisation of a electromagnetic field is a description of the direction that the electric field points, and circular polarisation can be roughly seen as the electric field direction rotating as you travel in the direction of propagation. What OAM is describing is the phase relationship between the oscillations of the field at different positions (whether the oscillation at one point is lagged or ahead compared to a different point); it can be roughly thought of as a spinning motion in the transfer of energy inside an electromagnetic field.

For a rather inaccurate, but perhaps intuitive, analogy, try imagining a giant stream of asteroids coming your way in outer space. If the rocks are following a spiral trajectory as they come at you, then this corresponds to the rocks having "orbital angular momentum". If the rocks are themselves spinning, then this corresponds the rocks being "circularly polarised".

I think Twitter is a bit faster than that. Twitter users in Japan seem to respond really fast when they feel any moderate level of shaking; at times, if you follow enough Japanese people on Twitter, your entire timeline gets filled with people saying "oh hey, something's shaking" or "it's rocking" or "boobs!". So yes, you will get advanced warning if there are people closer to the epicentre than you posting on Twitter (and as long as they are not using a certain phone provider which got overloaded during the big earthquake/tsunami last year while all the other providers were fine). And yes, this obviously doesn't work if the earthquake knocks out all the cell phone infrastructure in the areas between you and the epicentre.

Amusingly enough, I was watching a UStream broadcast run by some Japanese guy and people from a different area of Japan told him that they just had an earthquake, and he replied saying he didn't get any info here. Then, several seconds later, the earthquake alarm went off in the broadcast. So, I think Twitter isn't going to be very far off in terms of speed and definitely should be able to inform you about an ongoing earthquake as long as it's not a super short one and you're like next to the epicentre.

This new lens is not just a diffraction grating since it uses sub-wavelength structures to alter the apparent optical density (refractive index) of the material, i.e. metamaterials.

The analogy kind of works and kind of doesn't. A parallax barrier has an image layer and a fixed mask layer. What these guys did was to allow for multiple layers with time-varying patterns and optimize the pattern on each layer so as to create a better image. So it's more like "this is to integral what parallax on crack is to lenticular."

The company website is scant on details of their technology, but it's obvious that a different implementation is used and my guess from what they do say is that it's a lenticular device that only generates horizontal parallax. In that case, try tilting your head 90 degrees to the side and you'll lose depth perception, whereas this wouldn't be the case for the tensor display mentioned in the article. It might not be that important of an issue, until you want to lie down on a couch and watch a 3D program on TV...

Oh interesting, so they finally gave it a name. I remember coming across the 2-layer version of the display sometime ago. Looks like they also have an interesting theoretical foundation to go with it; the abstract of the first paper from Gordon Wetzstein's page gives a nice overview.

What essentially is going on is that you can model (at least when talking about things much larger than the wavelength of light) light as a four-dimensional function (i.e. intensity of light along all the possible rays that fill space), which is referred to in this research area as a "light field." Putting a mask somewhere in space will mask out a 2D-extrusion of the mask shape in 4D space. Putting multiple masks at different planes will mask out the product of this 2D-extrusions (and the extrusion angle varies as a function of depth). Hence, what they are doing is attempting to piece together the original 4D function by piecing together unmasked portions at each time frame.

For a more simplified view, you can think of this as trying to create a 2D picture through a sequence of special single-color 2D pictures created by placing stripe patterns oriented at a fixed set of angles on top of a light panel.

If you've taken linear algebra, it is somewhat like decomposing a matrix into a sum of rank-one matrices, except here each component needs to be positive (masks cannot create "negative" light).

Well, Adobe isn't exactly complaining or crying about it since Adobe didn't write the lines quoted in the summary; the writer over at Security Week did. It seems the only thing we got out of Adobe so far is that now they're working on it.

I'm pretty sure this already happens without secret patents. For example, companies will tell software engineers to never read anything about patents so that if they do infringe, it won't be wilful.

I actually got this here in Singapore with my DSL from SingNet. Basically, they give you a free entry-level mobile internet plan if you sign up for DSL, although this is only with the DSL service and not with their fiber service.

I only briefly looked at the patent, and it looks like it's simply the application of OFDM to wireless communication between computers. OFDM, for those who aren't very familiar, is a way to deal with linear time invariant systems that can corrupt the data. For example, you can consider the signal going from one antenna to the other as going through such a system. Since these types of systems will only modify the amplitude and phase of each frequency band separately, instead of mixing them together as would be the case in the time domain, you encode the information you want to send as specific frequencies. For example, if you send out a wireless signal and it echoes all over the place, the time domain signal gets all mixed up and "slushy". However, if you perform a Fourier transform on the input signal and the output signal, you'll notice that the echoing only caused frequency bands to individually get attenuated/magnified and/or shifted in phase, but none of the frequency bands has mixed together. OFDM exploits this property to provide for robust communication (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist of it). However, it sounds like this patent is simply saying "hey, OFDM is good for wireless communication", which feels kind of obvious to me considering the point of OFDM.