But what about if something really bad happens on the Moon? What if there are lots of explosions and the Moon gets hurled out of its orbit and goes sailing through space from one adventure to another?? After about a year we will have lost interest in them so an alien with amazing technology will suddenly show up on the moon base, but it will be too late and they'll never make it to a third year . . .

In the case of Fluke, I don't see this as any different than the other well-known trademark cases mentioned. In my own experience, at least within the last 20 years, if someone wanted you to measure a voltage or current, they were equally as likely to tell you to "grab a Fluke meter" as they were to tell you to "grab a multimeter." And Fluke has been very consistent with giving their multimeters this particular look since the 90's, which is an important point to this discussion. Twenty years before that, you'd grab a "Simpson meter," which incidentally also had a very distinctive look and feel (I don't know if they ever trademarked their design, but you know a Simpson meter with just a quick glance).

I don't think it is as much of a big, bad entity buying off anyone with lawyers. From the PTO FAQ:

As pointed out in the Wiki article on design patents, an object (like the Coca-Cola bottle shape) can be both covered by a design patent and a trademark. As you mentioned, a design patent runs out after a certain amount of time, but a trademark is valid as long as it is used in commerce. Also, from this article:

If you work around lots of multimeters, as I do, Fluke certainly has distinguished itself by looks. So, don't start up your new package delivery company and paint all your box trucks a certain color brown, don't sell jewelry in little boxes that have a certain shade of blue, and don't design your housing insulation products to be pink. However, I believe you could sell tractors that are a certain shade of green because within that context, green is identified as a functional color.

I agree that it is a whole lot more fun, even if you only have two people, to have them in the same room. You get that whole extra level of trash talking, finger gesturing, head slapping, etc. that you can't get over a headset. This is especially true on something like the Wii where you have multiple people either on the same screen (like the Mario games), or in a split screens (like in Wii Sports). Plus, it is just nice to have a multiplayer mode where you don't need to connect to an online server.

and pissed in a number of esoteric theories cheerios

I'm not inclined to think this is the case. I think their result was many orders of magnitude over the previous measurement because there was only one other measurement made in this frequency range. The previous experiment was a torsion bar experiment done in a modest-sized lab. According to the LISA folks:

In general, a ground-based interferometer is limited to frequencies above about 10 Hz because of seismic noise

I didn't read the torsion bar paper to see what they did to eliminate noise sources.

The two used much different frequency regimes. The Stanford paper looked for waves with periods of 30 minutes to 24 hours. The one in the article looked for waves with periods of 1 to 20 seconds.

Every time you make a Powerpoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten

Wow, I didn't know the problem was so widespread that there is a whole web site devoted to it. I ended up ordering what I needed from Digikey, but that site probably would have saved me some time as I tried to narrow down what I needed. The good news is that if anyone is having issues with their LCD screens, the fix is really simple.

The shame of it all is that, this scenario is exactly what Radio Shack was so darn nice for back in the day.

When I saw their The 80's called and they want their store back commercial, I thought it was pretty funny and clever, but I also thought that the real problem is that they should go back to their 80's version. I recently needed to replace some blown-out capacitors in an LCD TV so I went to "The Shack". The selection they had was pretty pathetic and not what I needed. Thinking maybe it was just this store, I went to another one (both stores not located inside of a mall) and they had the exact same electronic components cabinet with the same measly selection of capacitors. It was disappointing because I used to enjoy going there in the 70's through 90's (except when they used to hound you for your address every time you wanted to buy a stupid fucking watch battery). I think I still have my battery club membership card stuck in a drawer somewhere.

This reminds me of Scott Adam's travel expense story that ends with "now find the umbrella!"

I don't think QED means what you think it does.

I missed the joke. There were testimonies and NDAs involved with that?

My sister had the Merlin, but before that I had an LED football game, and I remember an auto racing game as well. I know those predated Merlin, and I'm not sure if the ones I had were "first" either.

Maybe he came to realize that, just like every other successful game on a portable, most of those "relaxing little moments" are actually when people are sitting and passing time (and other things) on the pot.

I'd like to see a stability analysis on this kind of system. I suppose it would be a nice exercise for the student, so maybe I'll give it a whirl when I've got some downtime.