If it takes 1000 of these little guys to make a composite bot that is actually interesting, then they are in fact millibots.

Which means they're only off by six orders of magnitude.

Strictly speaking pretty much everything we sorround ourselves with is a chemical. (Although a coke oven will typically be several chemicals.)

Obvious exceptions include light and other EM phenomena, plasmas, and elementary particles. Neutrinos aren't chemicals but then we don't really see much of them either even if they are everywhere.

Which may be rational enough. Patent examiners are educated, intelligent people and they are inside the patent system so they know it well. They probably realize what a complete and unmitigated disaster it is from end to end and figure they have better things to do with their lives than try to polish a turd.

They do like the wages though.

That $12.4 billion buys them the continued good will of the world's strongest military power. It's not really about the Australian air force, it's simply cheap insurance.

My country does the same but only half heartedly tries to claim it's all about strengthening the air force. Hell, if we're really lucky there might actually be some decent jet fighters in it for us in the end. That's not the main point though.

Given the nature of trademarks, DC is pretty much forced to deny such a request since each request granted represents a dilution of the trademark and introduces a small risk of the trademark being lost to DC.

On the other hand it is not clear why their permission is required at all in this case. Trademarks protect against someone other than the trademark owner selling products displaying that mark, but, there is no reason to believe that the intention is to create this statue and then try to sell it to someone as a genuine Superman product. There therefore cannot exist any confusion in the market as to the provenance of the statue since the statue isn't in the market in the first place, and so it doesn't constitute a violation of anyone's trademark.

This would only be an obvious trademark issue if they also intended to create merchandise based upon the statue and then sell that, I don't know if this is the case since as any good slashdotter I never cared to RTFA.

Had this been a copyright issue things would be different.

(I am not a lawyer and these are the random babblings of an amateur.)

But of course you can, if that is in fact what you are doing.

And apparently they are not anymore: they're no longer selling to China because they've learned they don't tend to end up with developers over there.

The devkits are theirs to sell to whoever they wish, and if they don't want to sell to China then that's their business.

The value of the Oculus brand is greater the more developers they can snag to work on/with their product, and so the more developers that get their hands on the devkit the better for Oculus. They are limited in how many devkits they can build however and so it is important to Oculus that every single one that they make goes to an actual developer, because that developer increases the brand value. Every devkit that goes to a non-developer is a net loss to Oculus because that is a devkit that did not go to a developer.

This would be different if they were not production constrained but I expect that they are.

So is there anything to stop a cop from saying, "I'm your court appointed lawyer now tell me everything"?

The lawyer isn't under suspicion and so need not be afraid that the cops are trying to build a case against him.

A lawyer that is under suspicion should only say "I wish to remain silent and I want a lawyer" just like anyone else.

The main problem with your cynicism in this case is that if the product were to be mainly marketed to imbeciles then why does it have any pretense at privacy protection at all? Such people don't care one whit and so in the previous system they would just always click "accept" and "install" and there wouldn't be a problem (for Google).

The problem instead seems to be that there is in fact a sizable portion of users out there who do care at least a little about their privacy and who do get nervous about it every time an app asks for more permissions on an update. This is why they are (apparently) now changing the permissions system, to give an appearance of privacy protection while not really offering it: they want to sell to people who actually care about their privacy and who are prepared to take reasonable steps to safeguard it, such as click "Hell No" in an installer/updater.

(I don't know why I can't get proper umlauts but you can.)

The main issue is that the public has had hundreds of years to learn that Champagne is a particular type of bubbly alcohol, and now that specific public awareness gets thrown under a train in order to co-opt a couple centuries of goodwill into money into the pockets of local special interests. This is exactly the opposite of what trademarks are meant to be: this explicitly deludes the public as to the nature of the goods that they are buying so that they are tricked into not purchasing the item that they actually wanted which may have been bubbly from California but they can't have this anymore because they're searching for Champagne which no longer means what they thought it meant.

The public perception will correct itself within a couple decades but this shouldn't have been necessary. Trademark laws should help preserve the public awareness, not randomly undermine it.

(Of course these aren't actually trademark laws, they are localised protectionism, but in my opinion proper trademark and consumer protection concerns should trump such shenanigans.)

Give the pilots an Oculus Rift headset with images fed from cameras mounted on the headset. Make sure you don't get a high-end headset "now capable of accurate reproduction of laser beams". While you can still blind the cameras with a laser you cannot burn out the pilot's retinas.

(I do hate myself a little for plugging a Facebook product.)

If you don't buy it then you are part of the problem.

(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!)

The first half of the topmost speculation is probably correct, and the last half is probably not.

It is a mark of the great strength of human culture that we have been able to so effectively suppress our barbaric animal nature.

They very well might, you cannot know that they will not.

Which indeed it is for the vehicles themselves. Now it's time to start working on the power grid.

No you are mistaken, European CO2 caps on electricity generation guarantee that the switch from gas guzzler to EV will cut CO2 emissions to zero for your car use. If you are in Europe, of course.

Meh, "organic" foods is modern voodoo, not interested in the debate.