And what you will see is that you pay about 100 times what you paid before and a semi truck pulls up to your house rather than a mini-van. Because you pay per piece (with possible bulk reductions) for material objects. But that's not the deal that Comcast and AT&T have made with their customers.

You're completely correct. And I, not being a design specialist, can look at the Fluke design and make about 10 different variants that wouldn't match their designs while still using just grey and yellow. Seriously, just reversing the colors probably would have bypassed the trade dress requirements. If not, any number of different options could have been used. Having looked at images of the devices in question, it's clear they're trying to mimic Fluke's trade dress.

Whether you agree with trade dress or not, it's obvious that the Chinese version is trying to mimic, probably to mislead potential buyers. The effort to make a reasonably standard design of their own, with standard safety colors (which doesn't include grey), would have been a minimal effort.

They've been dead here for 5 or 10 years. Before that, they were the norm. With banks that had a stated focus on customer service, if you didn't fill one out, they would and have you sign it.

I personally wouldn't mind having a proctologist who can get in and out without my noticing. "Alright, drop your drawers, tuck up your knees...and we're done!" This idea should be promoted!

And all that said, the current system is designed to condone and promote abuse of prisoners, whether they are in the category you believe can't be rehabilitated or not. Unless your premise is that prison is primarily for punishment in those situations, and not for the protection of society, there is no need or benefit for this attitude. The article's author merely takes it to extremes.

You're also missing the component of rehabilitation for the minor offenders. If you like revolving-door imprisonment, forget about rehabilitation. If you want to slow down the revolving door, increase the terms. But it still seems like a better alternative would be to get the people to not want to bother breaking the law again. It seems that both the US and Canada (and others, I'm sure) consistently fail in that category.

Go shopping in China, enjoy the additional benefit of knockoffs with the competitor name already glued on.

And how is it not a failure to barely even tap the potential of on of their students? Not helping the gifted to do their best is as much of a travesty as not helping the poorest student do his best, however poor it is.

Sure, run-of-the-mill people with no special awareness in the public mind who show up multiple times in national and world news. Just like the Kardashians, Martha Stewart and Tom Brokaw. Gotcha.

No, but I find atheism is no guarantor of benevolent behaviour, either.

Yes, but they tend to use other languages than Latin.

I was merely pointing out the actions of a rather notable atheist, much like you were pointing out the antics of some rather notorious religious figures. It seems that neither Stalin nor his subjects were particularly happy with the choice. And I'd rather have a chapter of Westboro Baptist Church in my town than one such as he. To be clear, not because he was an atheist so much as he felt an overburdening desire to enforce his beliefs on others.

Fortunately, atheism is a viable alternative. In fact, let's make it a national requirement.

Chanting a long etcetera. Sounds more like Catholicism than Buddhism...

See, there's the problem, right there. You could meet every point of that patent on a touchscreen phone using an image of a latch with "Slide to Unlock" written below it. But some legal pedant would still say the idea behind this, when combined with the concept of touch-style drag and drop, which I personally used in 1996 and is a simple extrapolation of the mouse interface which was designed before I was alive, is a new and novel concept. Hence, millions of patents that basically read "[Something people have been doing for some period of time between a generation and the beginning of recorded history] on a computer/the internet/a tablet/a touchscreen.

Um, yes they are. Physics instructs my physical latch that it has been touched, and physics causes the image I receive of it to move while I continue to maintain contact with it and move my hand. Physics may also cause it to move back to its original position if I remove my hand, depending on the design of the physical latch.

If your 'simulation' is throwing so much computing power at it that you can use actual physics to design the fire, smoke, and atmosphere, and just let them interact with believable results, I don't think it deserves a patent. Your processor might, if it isn't merely a progression of currently-patented ideas. However, if your simulation is a bunch of special algorithms that effectively reproduce the effect of real life without having to calculate what all the pieces are doing, that's may be worthy of a patent, and will doubtless require something more than and 80-year-old physics reference.

The fact that computing power has improved to the point that we can track physical contact and move high-res images with a responsiveness that is indistinguishable from reality by the human mind doesn't make using physical analogs in that environment innovative - that just makes sense. If they want to patent the painful, almost-intuitive design of the quicktime interface, circa v5, feel free. There's nothing obvious there, from the setting panel that can't be used on a low-res screen on up.