Wonder if McLaren considered putting this technology on Formula1 racing helmets to replace the tearoff strips, and to keep debris and rain off the onboard video cameras.

An interesting foot note is that Purolator is 90%+ owned by Canada Post.

If the jurors had read the courts instructions (which the foreman claimed they didn't need to) then it was about "damages". The court instructions made that clear "You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer." The foreman told a court official that the verdict was arrived at without needing the court's instructions. However, the foreman had this to say after the trial "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist... We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable." So I totally agree with you when you say this was about damages and not penalties from the judge's perspective. I would say that wasn't the case from the juries perspective. To me Hogan's statement suggests that the award itself WAS punishment. I don't know how else to read his comment.

PPC was a major architecture change when they shifted to Intel. I could understand that they didn't support the PPC systems through all of their future OS'es. The I64 bit Intel Mac Mini won't work for 2 reasons. 32Bit EFI (Although there is a work around for that). Not supporting a 5 year old video card is harder to swallow. Boot loading and video just seems to be a poor excuse for not being able to us Mountain Lion. At least the Mac Pro's prior to 2008 that Mountain Lion won't run on can be hacked to get around the 32bit EFI issue (although it isn't guaranteed to work), and the video card can be upgraded. If I were an pre-2008 Intel Mac Pro user who invested thousands of dollars only to find out that 4 years later I can't run (out of the box) a new OS - I wouldn't be happy.

Yesterday I went to the App Store, only to learn that my 2007 Mac Mini (Purchased in 2008) didn't have the hardware requirements to run OS/X Mountain Lion. I have a 64bit CPU, 2GB ram, but only have 32bit EFI. Apparently the video in this unit isn't supported. I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support. If someone asks why I needed to upgrade - it was required to build and test some open source projects I work on.

640TB

The link in my post was to another talk he gave. The one I meant to post was: http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html

I'll single out one facet of education, and that is mathematics. The pinnacle of pre-college math study is calculus. Arthur Benjamin(of Mathemagics fame) in my view has a simple solution for math education in school. Rather than making calculus the pinnacle, you make statistics the pinnacle. These days I feel that school doesn't teach what regular people need for life skills. We use statistics and probability every day in one form or another. Arthur Benjamin gave his talk about this at a TED convention, and it can be found here: ere http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html . I think if people start breaking down education into core areas and start finding solutions to more specific problems that plague educational system. Art has a simple, but good idea.

That this judgement isn't reproduced in the future

I have grown accustomed to doing statistical analysis using Python and R using http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2

I totally agree. I thought it unbelievable that SINGLE monkey (or virtual instance) created the entire work. When I saw "9 characters at a time", I was thinking "Time to click the next Slashdot article"

Good idea, we could recommend an Apple Crate II which previously appeared on /.

No, I am saying that Apple didn't do due diligence. if you think that all is needed is a search at USPTO you are sadly mistaken. Apple was not serious when it registered iCloud. They of course looked at who was registered, but clearly dismissed the ones that were not. I think that you assume that when registering a trademark that it is a simple go an search the USPTO and that is it. I believe Apple probably knew all about iCloud Communications but decided that it was easier to ignore it and plead ignorance. There is precedence for companies with unregistered trademarks being victorious if they can prove prior usage of the name for the purpose of conducting business and of course being in the same general business. As well, a serious company doesn't need to file a patent for every invention. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to battle it in court though! Again prior art from an unregistered entity can invalidate patents that are registered. Companies that may not patent everything or register every trademark does not mean they are not serious - but they definitely make it harder on themselves when they do have to fight.

USPTO is only good for registered or pending trademarks. It in no way covers those who are unregistered. You don't need a registered trademark at the USPTO to make a claim to a name - it just makes fighting it in court a lot easier. USPTO is only ONE tool that any serious company would use to find similar names in the same business.

This would never have happened if Apple had their own search engine. An Apple search engine would have told them about the existing iCloud Communications name. Now they can blame inferior products like Google and Bing for their troubles. ;-)