That brings forth a real interesting legal question. Design patents protect ornamental design, but how does that relate to design which is characterized by a lack of ornamentation? If you include an inlay in a bezel around a screen that is clearly an ornamental design, but is a design which specifically includes no inlay also ornamental in nature and deserving of protection? What if that piece provides a function, but the function is not dependent upon the lack of ornamentation (an inlaid bezel works just as well as a plain one for providing gripping space and room for electrical connections around a screen).

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" but it would be interesting to see an actual ruling on these issues.

There has been noise, unable to be confirmed of course, that Hamas has been intentionally botching the rocket launches because they are little more than publicity for Hamas in Gaza and Hamas knows they are not an effective threat against Israel. Haaretz (which is admittedly a left-leaning Israeli newspaper) interviewed Gershon Baskin who indicated:

'“during the past two years Jabari [whose assassination marked the start of the current fight] internalized the realization that the rounds of hostilities with Israel were beneficial neither to Hamas nor to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and only caused suffering, and several times he acted to prevent firing by Hamas into Israel.” Even when Hamas was pulled into participating in rocket fire, its rockets would always land in open spaces. “And that was intentional,” Baskin said.'

We will likely never know if this is true or not, however it certainly seems plausible given the massive increase in the Iron Dome intercepts lately (which only trigger when a rocket is going to hit a populated area), indicating the rockets are capable of being aimed better than they have been in the past.

Simply put Apple could nearly completely kill the theft market for iPhones, similarly to how integrated ignition immobilizers have drastically cut hotwire thefts of late model cars. If a reported iPhone would stop functioning as a smart phone (still allowing emergency calls) if someone attempted to connect it with an Apple service (app store, maps, etc) the market for stolen iPhones would evaporate overnight. They could also kill the whole problem with people reassigning IMEI numbers: IMEI and serial don't match = hobbled phone. We know they can do it because they that and more to the lost iPhone 4 prototyples.

Apple's stance is pretty awful on this issue and I wonder how legally OK it is. With a police report they KNOW that a certain iPhone is stolen, yet they still do business with it and presumably would repair it (if the new owner paid). Would a car dealer do work on a car that was known stolen? No, they would call the police.

I would really like to know if the FCC is still preventing them from setting the CCI flag on the encrypted channels. Time Warner already sets the CCI flag on everything else to "record only, no transfer" which kills multi-room functionality on TiVo, as well as preventing you from putting your legally recorded program on your smart phone to watch on the go (of course multi-room viewing works on time-warner DVRs and they hype their streaming services).

The commonly stated reason is that the connector includes stuff like an HDMI interface. Now of course that ignores the fact there exists standards which integrate such things into a micro-usb connector, such as MHL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_High-Definition_Link

So it is part functionality, and part lock-in.

A good bit of trouble could have been avoided if 802.11n had been made 5GHz only. The 2.4GHz spectrum was simply too crowded already and never offered enough non-interfering channels anyway. In a dense environment the limited propagation distance of 5GHz is a GOOD THING. From my apartment I can "see" 27 APs in the 2.4GHz band, many of them running the 40MHz mode which effectively occupies the entirety of the spectrum. I can see three 5GHz APs, one of which is mine.

The problem we face now is that because 802.11n didn't mandate 5GHz everyone has that one gadget that doesn't support 5GHz so they have to use 2.4GHz. It isn't even like we can blame people for keeping around a super old obsolete device: The iPhone 4S doesn't support 5Ghz!

That is a different design/layout, missing the indentations between the points of the screw driver. Here's the one used on the iPhone: http://twitpic.com/3rt9sa

You might be able to drive the Apple screw with the torx bit,but the bumps in the screw head look like they would block it. That's assuming you could get one small enough. Nobody is saying that there were not 5-spline screw heads before the iPhone 4, just that this particular head is new and apparently chosen as it was esoteric enough that existing 5-spline bits wouldn't fit.

No, three per second and that is a conservative estimate. 175 wafers per hour means 21 seconds per wafer and with 75 exposures on a wafer you are looking at around nearly four per second average, although some of those might be off the edge and not yield. The actual exposure speed is faster because there is some dead time when the wafer is not actively under the optics and exposing. Then remember that an exposure can have multiple chips in it (because no processor out there is 26mm by 33mm) and you will start to get a real grasp of how fast the production goes.

The equipment is insanely fast and a modern fab will complete millions of operations per day. It just takes thousands of steps to make a modern processor so the only real way to make it profitable is to make each step as fast as possible and have enough of material at each stage in the production line so no equipment goes idle except for maintenance, yet there isn't so much that you have a glut anywhere.

The ability of the Twinscan to maintain the positional accuracy that it can at the speeds and accelerations involved is just jaw dropping. I'm sure they are telling you that you cannot do the logical thing to keep the forces manageable by dropping the scan speed much (if any) in the changeover from 300mm to 450mm because everyone would freak out as the whole point is to maximize exposures per second while minimizing wafer exchange time. I do think that other processes will also have some pretty awful trouble getting to 450mm though. Think of all that wafer warping, layer uniformity trouble, and backside contamination!

(former litho overlay engineer, your hard work helped make my vector maps happy)

Exactly, once the wafer is chucked and aligned litho is really only concerned with little 40mm by 80mm blocks of the wafer and the rest is just step and repeat. Several years ago when I left the industry the 300mm litho tools were already fully capable of introducing exposure-by-exposure correction offsets, with different correction maps depending on what exposure system the wafer ran on for a previous exposure layer. However everything is always focused on the exposure side because they are the most expensive equipment in terms of wafers produced per hour per $ of cost due to all those fancy Zeiss optics.

I remember some plasma etch and CVD engineers singing the praises of 300mm, but I think that was mostly because the wafer flats were replaced by notches and better automation keep their equipment consistently loaded. The Chemical Mechanical Planarization engineers however were never having a good time and that is going to be a beast and a half for 450mm.

The lithography is one aspect but what about the deposition/etching equipment? It is spread across multiple vendors and getting them all to support 450mm is going to be one heck of a challenge when for the most part they have only just gotten 300mm production perfected. The chip manufacturers won't/can't settle for 450mm tools that don't hit or exceed the quality of work produced by current 300mm tools because the process nodes now depend on that quality to produce working chips. Maintaining anisotropic plasma etch selectivity or deposition thickness uniformity on over double the area without resorting to much slower processing is going to be a really tough target to hit.

They had already used up all their jury strikes on people with more patents (one had 120!), as well as excluding owners of Samsung/Apple products, people who had read the Steve Jobs book, anyone who had worked for Apple, Samsung, or Google, people who worked for companies which did work for A/S/G, and anyone who developed for the iOS/Android ecosystems. I mean this was in San Jose... that doesn't leave you much left to choose from!

Many of the problems in the patent system can be tracked back to specific phrasing in patent law, for example in section 102: "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless..." That means that the default is that you get one, unless it can be proven by the Patent Office that you do not deserve one. There just feels like a mismatch. It seems like there should be a requirement for showing that the invention is sufficiently new or non-obvious that it merits locking out the public from practicing it.

That would be OK if the government allocated the time and money needed to really deeply investigate the applications, but when you consider that the person in the process who bears the burden of proof is someone on a very strict quota system (often less than 15 hours per case) and the applicant can just make arguments forever if they want, and the examiner has to address them all no matter what ... yeah there's a problem in practice.

That quote needs to be considered in context. They were sent back to resolve some inconsistencies with their verdict (damages awarded for devices found non-infringing), and they asked for the judge to send them some instructions. But between the time they asked and the time the judge had compiled the instructions they evidently had worked their way through what was giving them trouble so they didn't need the instructions anymore.

While there are many other points that raise serious questions with the verdict, this one matter isn't really fishy.

"It's quite a bit harder to make such a distinction when the alleged occurrence happens the same night, without having even left the bed yet from the former undisputed consensual liaison. I believe that comes close to the colloquial trope "lovemaking session"."

No, it is not hard to make the distinction. Was she able to and did she give meaningful consent for the second time? The answer is no, as she was asleep when he initiated (and never had consented to unprotected sex). Under nearly every single standard out there that is indeed rape, it just isn't the stereotypical violent assault that actually comprises a very small number of actual rapes.

This whole thing has brought up so much disgusting nitpicking saying the accusations are not "real" rape.