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.

Anonymity isn't what crypto currencies provide. In fact, far from the opposite: Their whole structure is based on publicly broadcasting every transaction, that then everyone in the network store in its local copy of the common ledger (= into the blockchain). At best your can call it "pseudonymous" (wallets are identified by a base32 hash. it's not obvious at first look which real person is behind a wallet, just like the username on a forum doesn't immediately looks tied to an identity).

The main argument for bitcoin is decentralisation: because everyone has a copy of the blockchain, every one can verify that a transaction is legit and did indeed happen. There is no need for a central authority. Things are kept in balance by the whole network, no single entity can take control. (Unless they control 51% of all mining hash power).

Another peculiarity which stems from the above is that you aren't bound to any specific company. As long as both ends of a transaction support the bitcoin protocole, they can do whatever transaction suits them.
(you could be using a web-based coin payment processor like coinbase, i could be using a wallet running locally on my machine like bitcoin.org's own, and we can still exchange BTCs)

Well, we are both in Europe, so thanks to SEPA we already have reasonably fast and cheap transfers, that can work between any participating banks (I don't need to be at the same bank as you, or even in the same country. Because your dutch and my swiss bank are both participating in SEPA, we can send each other funds).

But that's not the case everywhere else.

Also, even if they are relatively fast, they still take between 24 and 72 inside the same country, and a few days up to a week for international payment. That makes it still usable for ordering goods around, for example.

One of the small advantage of bitcoin protocol is that it works much faster: between a few minutes up to half an hour at worst. Between any end-point wherever on the world as long as both support the protocol. That makes it usable for buying services.
It gives the easy and quick possibilities of cash transaction (here's your 5EUR note).
- but without the limitation of needing physical present (I can't send a 5EUR note over e-mail)
- and without relying necessarily on a third party or the same 3rd party.

Yet still, these are form of payment where there is one single company in charge or supervising everything (most credit cards issued by banks will rely on the VISA or MasterCard companies). When paying an online merchant through a credit card, you need to have a credit card at the same company (e.g.: MasterCard) and that company is going to charge you both for the transaction.
Also, the company can decide to stop receiving payments (see Visa and MasterCard deciding to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks).

Same with PayPal: a single company, requires that both ends of the transaction use paypal.
Is known for making troubles and locking account on a very regular base.
And very often, you need to give your credit cards info to paypal anyway, in order to be able to add funds to your paypal account.

One of the reason bitcoin gained some traction, is to work around the blocking of funds by Paypal and credit card companies.

That's not the case, neither with SEPA as you mentioned in Europe, nor with bitcoins.
I could by exchanging my BTCs with CHFs face-to-face by meeting people (like localbitcoins) and sending them using a wallet running on my laptop. You could be storing them on your wallet of a big exchange platform (like BTC-e) and convert them back to euros there. Or one of us could be using a payment processor like coinbase, or whatever.

Well atleast, unlike paypal, you can choose your poison.

This even stupider, because the original "Bechdel Test" is about the *content* of the movie.

i.e.: the Alien movie discussed in Bechdel's comics happens to have been written and directed by guys. But none the less, it depicted strong female caracters, who actually have motivations, goals, etc. of their own.
the female *characters* of the movie aren't passive decorations, they are not only here to observe (or obsess about) the guys, they have a life of they own, their actions are here to move the plot forward.

counter exemple: you can probably find tons of romantic film or novels, written by author which happen to be female, but completely fail the test as their female protagonists are more or less only here for the sole purpose of falling in love with male caracters.

This "Programmer's test" is stupid because it only considers the *author* of code.
An author should be judged solely based on the quality of the work produced, no matter what sets of reproductive organs the author happens to be equipped with.
What should be judged in theory, is the depiction of gender role in the produced work. As code is sexless, there is no point in that. It doesn't depict roles or creates models for future generation, in merely gives instruction to hardware.

If you want to use a Dell, I would advise to pick one from the "Business" line of products (Lattitude), instead of the "End-User" line (Precision).
Although they sometime don't have the latest bells and whistles, they tend to be much more supported, both hardware-wise (easier to find replacement parts later on) and software-wise (easier to get Linux running reliably on them).

I have a Latitude E6510.

if "Wireless charging has hit the mainstream 1-2 years ago" like the thread above is saying, wireless exchange of data even more so.

Beaming single files (contacts infos, sending some piece of data, etc) over IrDA was all th craze back then when the first PDA emerged (PDA: you rememmber, those pocket computer with a touch screen that where here ago long ago before Apple 'rediscovered' the form factor).

Then bluetooth started gaining traction and its OBEX feature was even more popular (the standard to sync your contacts list between your feature-phone and your PDA) in addition to other data exchange (sync over Bluetooth between a PC and a PDA) or for connection sharing (phone acting as a modem as DUN - i.e. PPP over Bluetooth serial. That was back before hour ISPs in the US decided that "thetering" was yet another thing that could get charged extra)

So by the time wireless charging started to appear a couple of weeks ago, wireless data was long established (case in point: Palm's webos-powered Pre was among the first to bring wireless charging into mainstream.. That was also a phone without any SD card, instead heavily net-oriented and constantly syncing over 3G or WiFi to the cloud. Later, the HP Pre3 even got a dual-band N, just to make this even more easy and transparent).

Thus, removing the stupid lightning-whatever cable annd keeping sync? Problem solved since long time ago.
In fact, go to your local store and have a look: most of the small speakers for phones and tablets operate over Bluetooth any way. That helps them circumvent the fact that some constructors use non-staandard connectors (like Apple, specially since they also ask for royalties). Only half of them will feature an actual iphone dock.

Still, you can contrast with DockPort, which is a *VESA* standard.

Like Thunderbolt, it does enable an additional flux of data for peripherals and docks, but unlike ThunderBolt, it uses USB3.0 instead of PCIe for the peripherals.
(Also meaning that it will be more easy to use with portable devices, which tend to already have USB support built-in, but not necessarily a PCIe bus).

Also DockPort introduce high power availability for charging portable devices (again an advantage for portable device).

Now with TFA's anouncement, that means that even further does the two grow closer.
You can imagin USB-C to DisplayPort cable for portable devices using this (just like MHL standart enabled using micro-USB to HDMI cables).
Except that it also delivers power to charge the device (and doesn't rely on a 3rd different protocol like MHL).

Human with failing car:

• Adaptability: Living being are known to be highly adaptable and creative. There's a chance that, encountering an unexpected event, the human driver will react and manage to save the day by pulling some weird manoeuvre and avoid causing any casualty. That's different from an AI where an engineer must be sure to have taken into account every possible situation, and also be sure that the car will fail safely/take correct actions even in the course of an unplanned event. Bascially you need to engineer the adaptability that comes for free with a real flesh driver
• Liability: at least there's a clear first line of responsibility with a car: the driver - the one responsible for the car. Then it's up to the driver to decide to sue the car manufacturer or the car dealer if it seems that it's more a car defect than a piloting error / failure to properly maintain. Whereas with a truely autonomous car (with no steering wheel) you can bet that there is going to be huge legal mess about whom to blame

With cars you get:

• Cold blood: a computer will always follow it's programming, no matter what. Whereas a human being might panic and freak out instead of act accordingly and might cause more damage/casualties due to innapropriate reaction (e.g: a person less used of slippery roads can panic and be unable to stop the car on icy roads and lose control of the car), a car will stick to the plan. If the engineer has correctly planned ahead and has correctly provided a safe failing strategy, in the event of danger the car will follow the plan and manage to keep the damages low (e.g., although not an autonomous car: in the rare few accident involving a critical battery failure, the on board computer has given a warning well in advance and the driver has been able to pull the car to the side, exit and be at a safe distance well before it burst into flame. Similarily, if an autonomous car senses something really problematic, it might be able to pull out to the side, stop in a safe spot, and eventually call for help).
• Concentration: Not directly incident-related, but preventing them. A human has a limited concentration span. More and more stupid useless things are competing for the small mental capabilities that our brain can provide (people texting on their smartphone is a common cited exemple here on /. There has even a crowd funding project to create a voice- and gesture-controller HUD for cars which among other advertised twitter connectivity). With machine, it's just easy to throw more dedicated computing power for each task that needs attention. A semi-autonomous car with adaptive cruise control (like lots of high-end car nowadays) will always be watching ahead, no matter what. A driver will probably glance quickly in the side mirror before doing a manouvre. A car's blinds spot system is constantly looking back/using sonnar all the time. etc.
  To go back to the mechanical failure: a driver might be too distracted to notice early since of imminent failure and it might be too late to react. A car's computer will always be controlling tire pressure. An collision avoidance system will always notice when the truck in front is losing a big heavy object and will to an emergency breaking on time
• upgradeability: when an incident happens (or even better, when a human managed to successfully avoid an incident), it's possible to analyse it, and create an upgrade that will better handle similar situation in the future. Such upgrades can potentially even be made available instantly over-the-air to current owner of similar cars (Tesla is known to propose such uploads).