Just pointing out that the *whole point* is to transport a substance E (with as much ethanol as possible inside) and dilute it before consumption.
It's not a problem that 100% ethanol attract water: you'll be throwing water in it anyway.

(But indeed: 95%-98% is probably the easiest to get, and that few 2-5% of water won't change much the reasoning).

In switzerland, they do. And it's 10 year, at which point the owner can choose to extend it again for the next period of 10 year.

As this trademark was registered on 5 december 1985, the next such 10 year cycle finishes on 5 december 2015. At which point the owner - Leonard Timepieces - can choose to extend it yet again until 5 december 2025.

Trademarks are registered by domain. This "apple" and apple-logo trademark was registered for the domain "timepiece and components" by the whatch maker "Leonard Timepieces".
iPads aren't in the same category anyway.

The only thing remotely related was the wrist strap that could convert the small square iPad Nano into a touch screen watch. And even back then Leonard didn't care to sue.
In fact, in Switzerland, a patent violation is define as someone try to profit by abusing consumer confusion and trying to copycat another product to try to leverage its brand recognition.

For the record, the luxury watches industry was jump-started in switzerland when Calvin decided to outlaw jewelry as an excessive display of wealth, not inline with his protestant views of the world.

Rich people then turned to watches as a mean to display their wealth, luxury watches were born.
as in: "HEY, IT'S NOT A PIECE OF JEWELRY! IT'S A [rather very expensive] TOOL TO GIVE TIME!! IT'S JUST A [luxury] WATCH !!!"

Leonard Timepiece could complain if they think that Apple is trying to earn money by taking advantage of consumer confusion and is trying to copycat Leonard's deisgn of "Apple" watch (something Wilhelm Tell themed, perhaps ?!)

Otherwise nothing happens.
Given that they are not exactly in the same market, (Leonard Timepiece produce luxury timepieces, Apple produces electronics) the risk of confusion is low anyway and probably they won't give a fuck about it.

It's a different category of product. The trademark was registered for "timepieces and components of timepieces".

And they don't need to produce anything. Leonard already owns the trademark, and they are allowed to renew it for yet another 10 year in december 2015 (so keep owning the trademark until 2025).

Not in Switzerland.
In Switzerland, a trademark is granted for 10 years, and the can subsequently be extended, again for 10 year on each successive extension.

The trademark was registered on 5 december 1985.
The next periodic renewal is due on 5 december 2015.
If Leonard Timepiece (the original owner) chooses to do so, they can renew it, and it will get extended to 5 december 2025.

The summary and the Reuters article are *wrong*. It's not a patent, it's a trademark. Here's the original RTS' report (in french).
Here's an announcement from Steiger Legal (in Standard German) that indeed Reuters translated it wrong and then everybody sheepishly repeated it every where.

In 1985, the watch maker "Leonard Timepieces" registered the usage of an apple and the word "Apple" in the domain of timepieces (probably thinking about a "Wilhelm Tell"-themed timepiece design at some point in time).
This trademark was registered on 5 december 1985. The next trade mark periodic renewal (once every 10 years) is on 5 december this year (at which point, if Leonard Timepieces indeed choose to renew it, it will remain valid until 2025).

Now given the Swiss legal system, Apple aren't automatically forbidden to sell their watches in Switzerland. Leonard *could* file a complain (if they think that there's a reasonable risk that Apple is trying to earn money by exploiting consumer confusion and trying to abuse Leonard's brand recognition of *their* apple watch), in which case Apple *could* be barred from selling the watch. But now, there's nothing automatic.

source

100g of powder with 25cl (250ml) of water gives you 4.8%. i.e.: the content of a small can of a rather weak beer (by European standard).

Which is 12ml of pure ethanol (less than a 2cl shot). Which weights ~10g. So you need to transport a power 10x as heavy as the ethanol it self. It one of the least efficient form for transporting ethanol. And is therefore COMPLETELY STUPID.

You're better off transporting a small flask vial of pure ethanol. For reference to another item that you would probably be carrying in your backpack: an AA battery is ~8cm^3, so you need the same volume as about 1 and a half battery of pure ethanol to mix your weak-beer-like beverage small can. So the actual volume is negligible.

Whereas if you pack them with ~90mg of extra powdered sugar cyclic polymer, you'll probably need a space around roughly ~130cm^3 - that's about the volume of 1 and half deck of cards that you need to transport as extra sugar in addition to the ethanol itself, just for the small advantage to keep the ethanol trapped in a powder instead of carrying it in a small plastic liquid container.
(it's an estimation. I don't know the exact density of the specific types of powdered cycle of sugars used in palcohol, I'm doing a rough estimation using starch as a starting point).

You can't beat pure ethanol. It's a liquid. That's as densely as you can pack it at room temperature.
That's the form of pure alcohol, once you remove all the water out of it. Dried alcohol isn't a powder. It's still a liquid (just a liquid that contains no molecule of water, only ethanol). It's not like for example salt nor sugar (salt or sugar diluted in water is a liquid. Dry it, remove all the water and you get powder of NaCl or of glucose. Or crystals of them if you do the drying correctly).
Palcohol is, basically, adding huge sugar cyclic polymer to trap it into a powder. It's a huge waste of space. It's not *concentrated* alcohol (as, I presume, all the people who buy into these stupidity are thinking - by analogy of sugar or salt). It's alcohol cut with heavy space consuming sugar.

The only thing is that, getting food-grade ethanol (that is pure ethanol, not degraded ethanol) at pure concentration without a drop of water inside is heavily regulated in most countries (to avoid that people use it to make their own housemade liquor and sell these without a proper license).
The sugar-ethanol mix isn't (well in some countries. Sugar and ethanol happens to be regulated in some countries due to alcopops.) so probably some people think it's a handy way to transport alcool without needing to get the necessary license / paper work for pure ethanol ("I want to transport my booze in space convenient matter, not start a liquor factory! The paper work is over kill !") The problem is that even then, packing a water-diluted ethanol solution (strong vodka, etc.) is still more space efficient than the powdered sugar.

As a way to pack alcohol, this poweder is asinine.
As a novelty item, with the funnily simple factor ("Powdered cocktail! Just add water and instant* mojitos!!! [*- with a much weaker alcohol content than an actual mojito]") yup, maybe. (Works, because most of the other ingredients *can* be packed as solids/powder, and they can complex a bit of ethanol, specially the sugars).
But it's nothing more than an adult themed cousin of Sherbet-powder to be drank after adding water.

Actually, politics and technology ARE linked.
Because the technology will roll-out *very* slowly, it's going to start appear in everyday life very progressively. People will get time to get accustomed to it in small baby steps. By the time technology actually get mature enough, people will have grown up with it and are completely accustomed to it. They won't see it as bringing the end of the civilisaiton as we know it, only as a useful thing that was always there.

I was naively think that *THIS* is the exact reason why they have their own ugly DRM/online management system that you need to install even when you download a game from Steam.

(Like: you buy a EA game from steam, download it from steam, and it subsequently installs Origin. I've actually seen this DRMception monstruosity).

Apparently they only make these horrors just because they can.

+Funny.

To keep with today's theme:
- Yo mama's so fat, her picture need to "Google Maps" to be viewable
- Yo mama's so fat, said picture can provide secure hash random seeds for the rest of the whole internet's existence.

In theory, your "you mama" joke approach should work. (For a good enough hash. Things like SHA2 or SHA3/Keccak should be okay).

But, in practice, that would require:
- a device with a camera (well, duh...)
- a device that is easy programmable enough (because very few camera are known to automatically display a has on the screen by default)
- a device that is *offline* (the whole point of doing it on something different than a laptop is to do it on a device that has low risk of virus/trojan/backdoor)

That strongly limits the possibilities:
- TFA's Ti 89 doesn't have a camera
- point-and-shoot camera usually don't have an easy way to install your "picture hashing your mom as a random number generator" system
- smartphone aren't offline and could be susceptible to hacking, the exact thing you wanted to avoid by going to a portable device.

Appart from a few old-school PDAs (e.g.: a Palm IIIc, with the PalmPix dongle), few devices will qualify all of the above.

Why a new agreement?! Wasn't this all part of the deal from the beginning?
Is there anyone around having experience with steam about this subject?

I was under the impression that this is part of the agreement between valve and game producers.
As such a trustee *stopping* the release would be a breach of contract and could get class-action sued by the gamers.

That was the case already in other such arrangement, like TrollTech/Nokia/Digia/QtCompany and KDE. I've kind of expected Valve to setup a similar framework.

Which could all be mitigiated.
- Free CA (like CACert or StartCom)
- Server Name Indication (serving several virtual domains, each with its own certificate, but all mapping to the same IPv4 address)
- IPv6 (enabling you to assign 1 different address for each virtual domain)
etc.

But that would require work. Lots of it. And rethinking the infrastructure and reorganising it in a way that actually works better and is more forward upgradeable.

So yeah, expect HTTP to day in the 20s...
2120s...

These two (and assassins-for-hire) are probably the use case where the governments would be accepting to throw the necessary resources to do the kind of big-data analysis necessary to track down the culprits.
(Follow the money trail. i.e.: follow the life of bitcoins along transactions, until a real-life event can be mapped to a transaction [e.g.: bitcoins were used to order some product online which was delivered at an adress. Or bitcoins were exchanged for cash at an exchange and were wired to a bank acount]. Do a huge amount of these trackings. After a while some pattern is going to emerge. This pattern might be used to get leads for real-world investigations).

Such tracking is well within the reach of various tree-letter agencies in the US (and in Russia, and in China, etc.)
Had not the founder of Silk Road been caught on some very stupid operational mistake, its likely that the US government would have gone this route to track him down (or it's still possible that they indeed tried the route, and on their way discovered a few operationnal mistakes, and decided to use those as evidence, in order not to admit their tracking capabilities)

Anonymity can be better achieved by what is kown as tumblers.
The cryptocurrency equivalent of money laundering.

You send bitcoins to a tumbler. These bitcoins are added to a big pool that is constantly mixed.
After a while, a similar amount of bitcoins (minus some fee) is sent out of random wallets from the mixing pool, to another address of you choosing.
Nothing is linking the 2 adresses.
If you try tracking the money (not easy because the tumbler itself is constantly mixing them) you see that the emerging BTCs come initially from a dozen of unrelated accounts.