I think a diligent trademark examiner would approved the trademark registration, but would have inserted the line "NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE THE SYMBOL 'PI' APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN"

The original deep link to USPTO.GOV is broken. Are we talking about registration# 4473631? That specifically covers the stylized "pi mathematical symbol followed by a period." There is no exclusive right given for the symbol pi by itself or in other contexts.

i thought it was to siphon money into corn-producing states in the midwest, states which are obscenely overrepresented in the US Senate.

They require you to take 8 subjects, of which several are distributed among predefined categories. I believe they discontinued the most ridiculous requirement of having a specific HUM-D/HASS-D subset of 20 or so subjects which were frequently oversubscribed because everyone in the school had to take ~three subjects from that subset. Those HASS-D subjects often covered obscure topics like "fairy tales".

Years and years ago, MIT's humanities department had a simple mission to "teach these nerds something about civilization" but since then it's grown and tries to compete with Harvard. They give out minors and majors. From what I've seen, half the the students who major/minor in HASS do it on top of a STEM degree, since it's not that hard to complete the extra subjects if you work efficiently. The other half of HASS majors are mostly dropouts from STEM courses.

I challenge you to print out a first class envelope with (or without) a 49-cent stamp from click-n-ship.

USPS is still about 15 years behind in adopting the Internet. Today in 2014 you still cannot go online and print out a stamped (or unstamped) first class envelope or address label. You still have to fill out silly ink forms to send mail certified, registered, or proof of mailing. USPS has self service kiosks in a few post offices, but not any supermarkets. It's far easier to get a zipcode from a search engine than USPS.com.

USPS needs to just buy Stamps.com for a billion dollars or whatever they're worth, and make it a free service available to the public.

Not to mention, batteries for cars are are optimized for weight, while batteries for grid power are optimized for everything but weight.

If you want to treat this as an engineering tradeoff, then you have to not only measure deaths but property damage.

Myself I've never reversed into a human being, but I have reversed the car into 1) dozens of other bumpers in tight parallel-parking spots, 2) a fence 3) several curbs 4) the side of a car, 5) a stone wall, and just two months ago 6) a trailer hitch. All those dings and dents cost money, and are much easier to assess than the actuarial dollar-value of 15 deaths.

The real scandal in this news, though, is that the NHTSA has delayed crafting this simple rule for so long. The law was passed in 2008 with a deadline of early 2011. The Obama administration delayed the rulemaking for so long presumably because most auto makers make money selling cameras as optional equipment. The NHTSA gave the excuse that they needed time to do a 'required cost-benefit analysis' of the 15/deaths per year against the $150 cost of the camera. What the heck takes so long? Congress already passed the law requiring the cameras. All NHTSA had to do is take out a piece of letterhead, write down "10 million cars/year * $150/car / 15 lives/year equals $100 million/life", sign it, and file it away.

You should care. If someone needs your widget right now, is unwilling to wait a week for your auction to end, and is willing to pay more than your reserve price, then you're losing that sale opportunity. That's where the reserve == BIN assumption fails.

eBay could be the perfect place to sell used electronics. The problem is the way they handle auction / buy-it-now listings.

Suppose you have a used Dell-brand server. You know that almost nobody is going to spend more than $800 on it, because for that money you could buy a new model. On the other hand, you figure someone out there might spend $500 on it because they're nearby and need it ASAP. And, you're willing to let people bid on it for a week and get it rid of it at the end of the week.

You can't accomodate all three parameters at once. If you set a reserve price, then once auctioning hits that reserve, then the buy-it-now is killed. On the other hand, if final bids are less than reserve, then the auction is effectively cancelled, and you're stuck holding the item.

Until eBay changes this, it will remain a non-ideal place to sell old IT equipment.

Most people are never involved in an airplane crash. Making air travel more expensive makes travel a tiny bit less safe, because more people will drive instead of fly.

Autodesk has done this before. GeneriCAD, Drafix, were just a few competitors which Autodesk acquired and shutdown. Their practices are very anticompetitive.

Powerpoint has been best described as a "projector operating system".

"Unregulated and not watched by the government"

You mean like silver and gold?

I thought it's Sussudio.