Why not just have the athlete dip his foot into a thin polymer bath for the outer, then a harder compound to coat the sole (with drying time in between, of course) to make the shoe? Seems faster, and would provide a much better fit than a 3D scan. Just dip, dry, race and peel off when done. It's not like the shoe has to last a long time, especially for a sprinting shoe.

Didn't Showtime have something like this about a campy nerd girl jumping around being all super heroine like?

No problem. Build the post-Riker version - saucer section only and half buried in the ground. Problem?

Dolt! It's +/- pi/3.

I'm wondering what would happen if the combined effects of being under pressure (4 kms of ice) and low temperature would make this the worlds largest beer bottle experiment?

It would be tragic, yet somewhat hilarious at the same time.

FTA: "Apparently Warner Bros. takes IP rights seriously only when its own IP rights are involved." Doesn't everybody?

If the terrorists had a missile that could track the beam back to it's source? Kinda like reverse painting a target?

The years spent playing Starcraft will pay off!!! OTOH, the Koreans will take over the world.

If you shake it up and down, yes. Sideways - not so much.

D(c)/D(s) = 2.7014. I'll stick to the old fashioned way, then...

Agreed. We are moving towards a skills-and vocation-based learning model, when we once were theory and concept-based, from which the skills may be developed. We are learning 'click here, do this' to get results fast, when we should be learning *what* we are doing, so that we can develop the 'how' on our own. Knowledge and experience (bad) versus intelligence and wisdom (good). Long term growth are lost for the sake of short term KPI padding. Too many times I've had to deal with 'I don't know OoO because I learned Office' or 'I can't do X because it's not in the software I'm using'. I'm not advocating OoO, but I'm saying we should be working on learning Word Processing, from which we can use both. Anybody who has sat through a Powerpoint with stupid animations but has very little to say knows this.

I used to think this this limit existed - for home use, I hit a wall at full HD video streaming - you'ld only use ~30Mb. Some mention torrent packages - but the actual utilization of this package would still hit the same limit, making the download process redundant. However, if distributed computing (REAL cloud computing - so memory, processors, applications and data are essentially 'out there') becomes real, 1Gbps would get very slow very fast. For now, just give me a game that utilizes realtime streaming of application binaries, and high quality assets over the Net and I'll be happy. Other than games, I'm at a loss as to what these monstrous home applications could be. Anyone?

But yeah, I'm a 'wait and see' on Thunderbolt.

I've been goind through the comments. The problem, IMO, is that the PTO seems to be granting patents without considering the definition of what a patent is, and how one is granted. Yeah, I'm saying the lawyers have lost their way - sue me.

IIRC, the applicant has to show a development or innovation that is not obvious to a normal (or average) practitioner of the craft. The 1/10 argument actually SUPPORTS the patent application, as only 1 out of 10 thought it was obvious. Whether they though to do it first or not is not the issue - it must be non-obvious. Other engineers may simply have not done it as it was not commercially viable.

I'm all for patenting, for example, specific expressions of carrying out encryption. The problem is, that the PTO seems to be allowing patents for the act of encryption itself - this I have a problem with. The former protects the effort put into the expression (and hence the artists work) without preventing improvement and further evolution of the idea, but the latter kind of patents are killing innovation by doing just that. If it's THAT obvious to do, it should never had been patentable in the first case. It's particularly bad in software, where ideas and incremental evolution of ideas is at the root of development. It seems overly broad patents are being granted every day. I mean 'look and feel' patents? Really?

...the consoles may very well become portable. It may already be feasible to put an HDMI out on an iPad and give it wireless bluetooth controllers. On the road, just use it as a portable gaming system - no tradeoff for performance/ portability/ style of play. I'd be very surprised if that screen on the Wii U's controller, and the sheer SIZE of the thing doesn't also include at least a processor of sorts to enable this very thing.

Sorry. Meant to add that in older technique the programmer would have to XOR the older character, effectively erasing it, before drawing the new character to the buffer. This would also involve two operations, both to the video buffer.