Sorry all, I copy/pasted this in haste. I should have blockquoted it and I should have mentioned that this was the reply posted on the Duke U. blog (just so it is obvious these aren't my comments and where it came from).

Kevin, I’m posting this as a comment here to provide clarity for all, given the interest this has generated. I’ve also written to you to suggest a conversation. I am sorry that we didn’t talk with you before we started requesting waivers from authors at Duke University, that would have been better all round. You raise two concerns: about our requesting that authors provide formal waivers of Duke University open access policy; and the ‘moral rights’ statement in our license to publish. I’ll start with the second. We take seriously our responsibility for the integrity of the scientific record. The “moral rights” language included in the license to publish is there to ensure that the journal and its publisher are free to publish formal corrections or retractions of articles where the integrity of the scientific record may be compromised by the disagreement of authors. This is not our preferred approach to dealing with corrections and retractions, and we work with authors and institutions to seek consensus first. We always attribute articles to authors, we have clear contribution policies. See: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... and http://www.nature.com/authors/... We believe researchers should be credited for their work, and as a founding member of ORCID, we have implemented ORCID integration on nature.com to foster disambiguated accreditation. We are requesting waivers from Duke University authors, because of the wide grant of rights as per your open access policy. If we do not request a waiver, Duke University has the rights not only to archive in Dukespace, but to publish and distribute the final version of a subscription article freely to the world at large, in any medium, immediately on publication. We started requesting waivers recently, following an enquiry from a Duke University author. NPG is supportive of open access. We have no problem with you archiving accepted manuscripts in DukeSpace, for public access six months after publication. We encourage self-archiving, and have done so since we implemented our policy in 2005: http://www.nature.com/authors/... This is in addition to open access publication options available on many journals we publish. We are happy to try to answer further questions, and would welcome a discussion with you. We have worked constructively with PubMed Central and institutional repositories for many years, and do not want our intentions and commitment to academic integrity and open access to be misunderstood. Grace Baynes Head of Communications, Nature Publishing Group

Space 1999 (I kid you not in how I described the plot. A lot of it is summarized in the title sequence). I watched all the episodes when they aired. It was very cheesy, but entertaining for me as a pre-teen, and remarkably good special effects for TV at the time. I also used to watch Mission Impossible reruns in the early 70's, and I knew Martin Landau from that. Later, when Landau won an oscar and he was receiving all the accolades for his career, I couldn't help but remember him from that cheesy show. To be fair, Space 1999 was pretty much where his career really bottomed out.

Just like Jon Stewart said about entitlements (in context of the Megyn Kelly maternity leave comments):

Since you are spinning up a high-speed gyroscope, if you are braking through a turn I wonder if it effects handling in any significant way.

That definition would be consistent with The Little Prince

It made me laugh out loud as well.

I've really taken a liking to that show. It is hilarious.

They are neat tech, and they are affordable, but for the majority of people out there I just don't see them as particularly useful. We picked up a Makerbot for our lab at work, and it is proven to be extremely useful. We have a Solidworks guy and it is trivial for him to design and fabricate custom mounts and such that we would otherwise have had to kludge up some other solution because it wouldn't have been worth the time and money to have something temporary mount made in a machine shop.

However, for the home user, at least for quite a while yet I see these as being akin to something like a specialized machine in your kitchen like a dedicated espresso maker, bread machine, or yogurt maker. They're really neat and do a great job at what they do, but eventually for most people they sit there unused. I think the 3D printer will be the same thing. People will get them, download really cool models to print, make some of their own stuff, then eventually realize there are just so many charms for charm bracelets, or curio type stuff you can make before the novelty wears off.

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.