BB did have a patent on the angled keys that they sued Palm over back in the late 90's. It actually is a fairly innovative design that optimizes the direction of the bevel on each key based on the kinematics of your thumbs so that the keys act much larger than they are (if they actually cloned it correctly). It has also become sort of a mark of BB (both because of the exclusivity and the general unpopularity of portrait QWERTY layouts), so I guess that might even be grounds after the patent expires (which has to be coming up soon ...).

I think you missed the point ... the language was formed out of references to a common body of knowledge. The universal translator was doing just fine figuring out what the individual words meant, but without the common story to refer to they made to sense. It's essentially as if an entire culture communicated only in pop culture references. For example, someone might say "You're such a Samantha", but if you haven't watched many hours of Sex and the City, you would have no idea what they meant despite knowing all of those words.

The GMA500 driver might be doing fine, but for some reason they keep licensing third party graphics for the integrated solution on Atom processors, or at least the ones making it into industrialized products. Getting OpenGL up under Linux on PC/104 or other embedded board is a royal pain in my experience.

As Truman famously said, The Buck Stops Here. The president is the head of the executive branch and the commander in chief of the armed forces. He absolutely has authority over his personal security. My opinion? Take a queue from the Queen and take public transit. Or from the Pope and walk. Even heads of states who have boots on the ground in Afghanistan fly commercial. Nothing supports a culture of fear more than a leader who doesn't have enough faith in his people to travel among them.

Does anyone do verification on the "airplane mode" setting of phones? The FCC and FAA seem to have come to the conclusion that there's no way you can detect active radios via undesired behavior of an aircraft, and are down to sorting out the social ramifications of phone use on planes. I'd like to see an independent (and preferably paranoid) lab check to make sure that "all radios off" means that the radios are off, and not just that they stop passing traffic from the PDA OS.

I saw these at the time, and wondered if they actually did show speed improvements for a long sequential read. Since CD tracks are laid out in a spiral, wouldn't you only read 7 new tracks at a time for the first revolution, then each track would be re-read 6 times?

This. Every optical standard has had a double-sided variety, and every time it has failed to be adopted. The closest they got was with DVDs where there were different films or different aspect ratios on the two sides (so you still would never flip).

Also, the jump in capacity here just seems to be a plateau from previous optical technology:

0.6 GB => 9.4 GB => 50GB => 150GB

We were supposed to have 150GB/side blu-rays, for crying out loud (whatever happened to 5-layer discs anyway?).

I don't think the idea is to have the assembly weigh less, but for the overhead of the truck and trailer to be less. 4klbs less trailer means 4klbs more cargo.

The single tire trucks and trailers are on the road today, at least here in the northeast US. I haven't heard of any accidents caused by the tires, but advances in tire technology may make them less apt to blow out than semi tires years ago.

Some carriers go all-out and also install fairings under the trailer and around the trailer doors. Particularly the long under-trailer pieces could probably benefit from whatever manufacturing advances allowed them to produce the trailer side panels.

That's really the core problem worth this ruling. The police had probable cause up the wazoo, but it's been turned into a test case for how far you can go to coerce consent.

The police absolutely were in the right to enter this apartment, but it was because they were responding to domestic abuse, not because arresting someone removes their right to deny warrantless search.

The only software recalls I've ever had on a car were efficiency fixes for the fuel map. While hypothetically the environmental damage done by millions of mistuned ECUs pushes us one step closer to environmental apocalypse, I don't think we can say it's directly killing people. Even the Toyota "stuck throttle" bug was more of a training issue than a software flaw (yes, the off sequence for the push-start is unintuitive in the heat of the moment, but shifting to neutral isn't). The one company that might have a potentially-fatal-but-purely-software issue is Tesla, but even their fix for charger fires was a hardware one.

He mentions that you can set up a fiscal year which deviates from the calendar year. He was unable to do this because he was already operating under an LLC and changing your fiscal year after you've set it is non-trivial.

I read the article, and he brings up some interesting points that even a business owner might find interesting about crowdfunding. Because your revenues are exponentially larger for a single quarter, your tax situation gets all screwed up and you have to be very careful on your estimated taxes. He also brings up some timing advice: since businesses are allowed to deduct the costs of doing business, you don't want kickstarter to cut your check on December 31st.

It's really the opposite of most business tax situations. Rather than paying for material, wages, and capital expenditure and then waiting for invoices to come back, you're given a huge amount of revenue and then have to try and get it off the books as fast as possible.

There is much rumor of the Paul family having racist leanings, but the best citation I have seen is an article written by a 3rd party published in a newsletter published under his father's name. Do you have an example of a more overt act or statement to support the allegation? As someone who does support their calls for fiscal restraint and reduced powers of government, but who also finds an equal treatment of all mankind to be a higher ideal, I am interested in evidence.

In all but a small number of "battleground" states, all votes are wasted votes because the entrenched party will take all of the delegates. Given that the winner is a forgone conclusion, you should vote for the candidate you like best overall without trying to metagame the outcome (since you can't). I bigger message is sent if the vote in say, New York, gets split 51/39/10 than 51/49. The traction gained by a (losing) showing by a 3rd party presidential candidate can be used by 3rd party candidates at the state level, where they actually DO have a chance of winning (it isn't even unheard of (though it is rare) for such a candidacy to be successful even for representatives at the Federal level).

So ... the right-wing, neo-con Republicans under Bush were known for domestic and foreign overreach in the name of perceived terrorist threats, massive spending to support corporate interests, and being general enemies of an open goverment. How do the ideas espoused by Libertarian candidates, such as Paul, form the "extreme" version of that? The closest I can see is that an anti-regulation stance might be seen as supporting established (corporate) interests, but I think that there are just as many cases of new regulation being used to do that as striking down old regulation.

There are plenty of points worth arguing against Libertarianism, but I don't think that "extreme republican" is one of them. While many (but not all!) of the libertarian-leaning members of congress are members of the GOP, and their views could be considered extreme (ie, differing from the norm) within it, they are not extreme (ie, exaggerated) versions of the central planks of that party.