As I read the application, it doesn't even require the period. It's confusingly written, as it says "The literal element of the mark consists of PI." where the period is part of the sentence, not the mark, and the mark is described simply as "PI", with no period. The images all depict the period, though what's being trademarked is the character, not the image; it is not restricted about font, color, size, or style. One image depicts the actual letters P and I, with no period.

The domain is "athletic apparel", and as far as I know the mark is not in wide use for that purpose, though it's surely not the first use of pi on a tee shirt.

So I'm a bit baffled as to just what has been trademarked here. The Declaration specifically says that they are the "owner" of the mark, and I can't conceive of how Paul Ingrisiano could claim to own either a single character or two letters, even just in the domain of athletic apparel.

G+ isn't a Q&A site, and it's a really poor substitute for one since its whole point is just to link you up with your social circle. Q&A sites are designed to attract people by interest without having to become socially acquainted (even virtually).

Google did have a Q&A site, Google Answers, but it never really got going. It's too bad, since they were nearly unique in trying to actually pay for good answers. I'm not sure why it didn't work out, though of course trying to monetize anything has always been a pain in the butt so I assume it's just that kind of thing. They canned it (as Google is wont to when things aren't working out as well as they'd hoped.)

He *is* producing stuff. It's just stuff that people want to read, rather than physical stuff. Advertising is how he gets paid to produce it, simply because it's awkward to charge $.0001 directly to the reader for a page-view. The advertising, in turn, is intended to draw people to other things that they might want to buy, usually stuff that comes in bigger units and so is easier to pay for with money.

Very little of it is necessary. The bare necessities were a problem solved long ago, and require the efforts of a tiny fraction of the population. The rest is various forms of luxury. I'm actually pretty happy about that. If the mechanism by which producers are linked to consumers is awkward and ungainly, I'm content to live with that until a better system comes along. I strongly suspect the GP would be happier getting paid directly, but most consumers would rather pay in the form of a microscopic portion of attention.

The issue is that in California they have to sell a certain portion of their fleet with zero and low emissions. He is saying that in order to convince people to buy the zero or low emission vehicles in adequate proportion, they have had to subsidize the price by $14,000. He does not expect that they will "sell too many" â" they picked this price because it's the number they expect will sell exactly the right amount.

The 2nd SOMALGET country was first leaked by defense contractor resume. Hinted at, in any case. Defense Contractors put all the illegal shit they do in their resumes to get more jobs doing those things.

Christopher Soghoian's tweet on the subject.

Erica A's resume

Erica A spent December 2012 to October 2013 in Afghanistan, is an expert in "Somalget Retro GUI" and is available for hire immediately.

Honestly... if McVeigh is his hero, I'm pretty happy about never having to be stuck in a tin can 35,000 feet up with him. Maybe he'd like to be a martyr to his cause, but I don't wish to be.

You can't fit even the shortest of his books into 640K of RAM. AGoT clocks in at 298k words, which is going to take up considerably more than 640k.

I suspect he's probably got each chapter in a separate file. And if I remember correctly the CP/M version of Wordstar had an overlay feature that was a kind of primitive virtual memory. So yeah, I believe it's possible, and there's a lot to be said for Just A Plain Glorified Typewriter. (I got to review the draft of a book by one of the Mac's original designers; it was done in double-spaced Courier with crude hand-drawn illustrations. The formatting was to be done by those who did formatting.)

I'm increasingly using Google Docs for my work because I like the fact that it doesn't allow, and thus doesn't require, much formatting. Less time fiddling is more time working.

Thanks for confirming that. I had a feeling this was gibberish and had to scroll down a long, long way to find a post that wasn't either a joke or sci-fi blithering.

Can you actually fly a parabolic flight in a light plane like that? Safely, I mean? I'm sure it's designed to have that within its tolerance, but is it really possible to do that without dramatically increasing risk of getting pushed outside the tolerances by the unexpected?

Good point, though I note that the moratorium expires in July. I am not aware of the status of any attempt to extend it.

Except, of course, for the countries that make huge sums of money producing land mines, and the countries (and non-country actors) with a grudge against somebody and a disposition to not care who else it blows up.

So according to this site, land mine usage is nearly flat despite the treaty.

It would be great to get the US to give up making land mines, but unfortunately China and Russia would almost certainly ramp up production to fill any shortfall. That's not a good enough reason for us to keep doing it, but it also wouldn't save many lives. (Worse, it deprives us of a negotiating point to try to force reductions from other top producers, but since those negotiations are largely nonexistent anyway that too is a bad reason.)

They're also moving a lot slower. On surface streets they're often not moving much more than 10-12 mph even when they're moving, so they're getting a good view of the whole intersection for quite some time before approaching it. It's even longer when you take into account that they're slowing down.

I have no trouble believing that it's perfectly safe to have cyclists do a rolling stop when they can clearly see a lack of traffic. The pause is so awkward (especially for cyclists wearing clipless cleats) that the acceleration time puts them in more danger in the middle of the intersection than just rolling through when they can.

Well, yes and no. Quantum-mechanically it IS deterministic in the sense that any given quantum state will evolve in a perfectly defined way. There isn't any "random number" in the Schroedinger equation (or its relativistic descendants).

It's really the macro-scale stuff that introduces the randomness. At the quantum scale, things exist perfectly happily in a superposition of two states that we never observe at large scales. The more objects you put together, the harder it is to maintain the superposition, and by the time you get to even microscopic objects it will take one state or the other, but not both. Once it tips slightly in one direction, it cascades, and you end up with something that is entirely X or Y, not (X+Y).

The other half of the wave function is largely a matter of philosophy, not physics. In one sense it's "still there", off in some other utterly inaccessible universe. Or you can say that at some point where you weren't looking the other part just vanished. That's two ways of saying the same thing; the math is the same and the results are the same, regardless.

It's not a question of our inability to measure it. It's simply not there. No advances in physics will make it measurable, not without utterly throwing out everything we know and replacing it with something completely different. Which isn't impossible, but it's purely speculative: physics by "I wanna believe".

Why we end up in "this part" rather than "that part" is, similarly, just idle speculation. I've got my suspicions that if you could, in fact, discuss the wave function of the entire universe you'd say that it could only go one way when you put all of it together, but that's just navel-gazing. It doesn't really matter, since you'll never actually know the wave-function of the universe as a whole. You can only observe a few macro parts of it since you (by definition) are a macro organism, and the total underlying wave function will always be forever shaded from your eyes.

With an oversimplifying assumption that bad, I assumed they were physicists of the "why does your field need a journal anyway" school. Nope, turns out this time it's two computer scientists, somebody in "computation and neural systems", and a business school (!).

News Corp will sell anything they think they can sell. They'll sell science on Fox Broadcasting and paranoia on Fox News. The various properties don't have to get along, so long as they're profitable. Witness this jab at Fox News by The Simpsons, which also appears on Fox Broadcasting:

http://www.thewrap.com/sites/d...