Can you please return your geek credentials? The judge didn't tell the jury Google was guilty,

True. But on the point that the jury did find (that, before considering the fair use defense and assuming that APIs are copyrightable), the judge essentially directed the jury that Google had infringed. The jury instructions included both:
1. An instruction that, on the issue of the "API copyright" point, infringement should be found if the defendant had access to the copyright-protected work and the alleged-infringing work was substantially similar, and
2. A note that Google had admitted that the APIs at issue were substantially similar to those that the jury was instructed to assume were protected.

If Google admitted that the APIs were substantially similar, then the instruction was perfectly correct. Why should the jury not be reminded that a party admitted an essential element of a judgment of infringement?

The grandparent wrongly attributed the request for a mistrial to the content of the jury instructions. That is not why Google is asking for a mistrial in the copyright phase. Google essentially argued that APIs are not copyrightable (question of law for the judge to resolve, as you touched upon) and that even if the APIs were copyrightable, the use was fair use (question of fact for the jury to resolve). In order for fair use to be relevant, there has to be a prima facie case for copyright infringement. As I understand it Google has conditionally admitted that there is such a case, and raised its fair use defense. The request for a mistrial is due to the fact that the jury did not resolve the key question before it -- was the copyright infringment (if the API is protected by copyright) excused as fair use.

If the jury hangs on a key judgment, it is normal to request a mistrial since the question must be resolved by the jury (absent settlement or agreement by the parties to convert the issue to one to be resolved by a bench decision). A hung verdict does not tranlate into either "guilty" or "not guilty" (in the terms of the discussion -- there is no finding of "guilt" as such in a civil case). A new trial can be held and directed only to the copyright aspect at a later date (assuming no other jury-related issues arise), and the patent phase can proceed.

Screw you. Go parent that four year old instead of throwing a shiny bauble at them.

As if the latter necessarily means the former.
I will not take parenting advice from an AC.

Why not sue the developer, you know, the one that made the app, created a (presumably) deceptive money making scheme and made all of the actual money from these purchases.

Apple reviews the apps, takes a 30% cut from the purchases, and took until IOS 4.3 to add an option not to cache a password for 15 minutes. Apple also chose to enable in-app purchases (with the cached password) by defaut. Why not sue both?

"The plaintiff here filed suit in April 2011, shortly after the issue came to light in the press and after it had already been fixed by Apple."

If that is the case, then this is nothing more than extortion by the plaintiff. If Apple addressed the issue quickly and effectively then there is no "lawsuit" needed nor warranted, especially if it is class action.

You do realize that you have at least 1-2 years in which to file a suit after you've been injured, so that filing a class action after you discover that you and a bunch of other people were injured is not extortion, but rational and appropriate. Its also far easier to justify a hiring a lawyer to pursue a case where a large number of people have been harmed then to either hire a lawyer to pursue a case worth only $200, or learn how to navigate small claims court on your own.

Also, define "quickly" and "effectively" -- these sorts of games pretty much existed in the app store from the get-go, and IOS 4.3 was released in March 2011. The iPad was released in April 2010, which ignores all the phones that came before it. Shall we google for the first complaints from iPhone users, or is 11 months sufficiently beyond "quickly" for you?

Additionally, the "father" is not worthy of that title. If he couldn't trust his daughter to not buy "in-app" upgrades, she shouldn't have a friggin iPhone to start with.

Screw you. I've bought an iPad for a four year old. Four year olds barely understand the concept of "money," much less what an in app purchase is. Fortunately it was an iPad 2, I'd read about the issue, and I configured the thing to always require a password (as well as to disable in app purchases, although frankly that just makes the times that you want to make them far more painful -- 1 password vs. exit, settings, restrictions, pin, switch, double-home, app, password).

You want to reward Apple (gatekeeper/reviewer of all, for a healthy 30%) and software developers like Zynga by freeing them from any responsibility to learn their own lesson and modify their own "get rich quick schemes." The parent and child deserve at least some blame, but the experts (i.e., Apple and developers) were being predatory and quite blameworthy. Is Apple's defense at trial going to be "we couldn't possibly foresee this issue since none of us have children"? Apple is all about the user experience, but does anyone other than an idiot, an addict, or a child buy a $99 consumable immediately after buying a "free" game? I'd love to see a demographic study of what goes on here.

It's irrelevant how much of a technical genius and/or disciplinarian you may be -- the law protects consumers who are average citizens from unconscionable acts, such as where a seller takes advantage of consumers "lack of knowledge, ability, experience, or capacity to a grossly unfair degree." (Use your mad skills to Google the phrase)

First time iPhone/iPad buyers are not going to have the knowledge or experience to know that their purchase password not only is cached to allow other app store purchases, but cached to allow in app purchases as well. First time iPhone/iPad buyers are not going to that there is an option to turn in-app purchases off. You buy an app for your kid, you hand the iPad to the kid to play the app once it's installed. Not 15 minutes later. You buy a free app, you don't expect progress in the app to essentially require you to buy "a basket of coins" for $99.

If people were such geniuses, then the default configuration would be require passwords to be entered immediately, and possibly to delve into the settings to enable in-app purchases. That's the more secure and fail safe configuration, after all. Why is that not the default? Because your average person is not a genius, does not have time to read a user manual, and learns by use and experiance. If they become annoyed, they might look for setting to change, but they might *GASP* just give up on the device. Since that would cost Apple money (rather than costing their customers money), those can't be the defaults. Perfectly understandable.

Or not. That's what the court gets to work out.

If it was an accident, then the guy should have made the daughter work off the debt and learn the valuable lesson that nothing is free in life. But rather than deal with the daughter's selfish behavior, he is trying to reward her with a "get rich quick" scheme.

How is the father getting rich and the daughter being rewarded? I think we deserve an explanation here.

Douchebags like that need to be humiliated (if that is even possible) into shame for total lack of parental skills.

So long as you can find fault on one side, you don't need to examine fault on the other, eh?

while the 16:9 folk just roll their eyes, and their monitor by 90 degrees, and put on a trollface.

It's not quite that easy. The 16:9 TN panel folk only do that if they are masochists. The "vertical" viewing angle on a TN display is usually substantially worse that the "horizontal" viewing angle on a TN display (color and brightness shifts are anisotropic) so that when they rotate their monitor by 90 degress virtually any horizontal shift from dead center causes problems.

The 16:9 IPS and PVA folk can do that, but the monitors cost 2-3x as much. The cheapest I've seen is a Dell (a 23 or 24" 16:10) eIPS that goes for $300. Before that, it was DELL (24" 16:10) IPS that went for $700.

Of course then those groups transmogrify into the response time and color accuracy people and start a whole new religiotechno war.

Thank you for the report. Unlike the linked articles, this is the first one I've seen that reports what happens with the water (steam) side of the process.

However, the report raises an even nastier set of issues:

Challenges and Weaknesses
1. The reverse reaction of Zn(g) with O2 limits overall conversion of Reaction (1); Using a gas quench to âoefreezeâ Zn prior to reaction with O2 poses major challenges with regard to recovery of sensible heat out of the solar reactor; It may be possible to use Zn metal powder to provide the quench, but development of this process is very challenging and would result in growth of particle size, thus reducing reactivity of Zn in Reaction (2).
2. [omitted]
3. Since inert gas is used to reduce the partial pressure of Zn(g) in the system so as to reduce the required reaction temperature (i.e. ~ 1750oC), it must be separated from produced O2 and recycled.
recycled.
4. It may be possible to develop a high temperature O2 transport membrane for use within the reactor, but this is particularly difficult due to the presence of Zn vapor.

I'll add (although the report does discuss conversion efficiency generally) that conversion efficiency will be very poor since you have flash/boil liquid water into 400 C steam to produce ZnO and hydrogen from the second step. You're putting a lot of effort into producing hot oxygen and hot hydrogen, and then you have to compress/cool the hydrogen for storage in a fuel cell or tank.

Also, keep in mind, ZnO is not a salt. It will not dissociate in liquid water to form Zn ions. Also, Zn when added to water will not form zinc hydroxide.

The ZnO bond is primarily ionic. It is generally insoluble in water, but it is most certaily a salt.

And Zn when added to water will most certainly form zinc hydroxide, particularly when powdered or added as a vapor. It may not form zinc hydroxide in supercritical steam above 800 C, but you did not specify that and I clearly referred to aqueous systems. Water spontaneously disscociates to yield the hydronium and hydroxide that forms the zinc hydroxide skin on bulk zinc metal. It's not a rapid process, as I already suggested, but your blanket statement is wrong.

If this system is truely closed with respect to zinc, then the zinc hydroxide has to be converted into zinc oxide or somehow directly smelted back into zinc vapor. That's the missing element from the article in my opinion.

Just to be clear, chemically this is not hard:

Zn(OH)2 -> ZnO + H2O at about 800 C (this is a calcination reaction)

It's a materials handling issue. Dewatering a sludge, drying a dewatered sludge, and, if necessary, calcining the zinc hydroxide separately from forming the zinc metal, all involve some technically complicated additional steps.

The zinc is then reacted with water to produce zinc oxide and hydrogen.

Zn(vapor)+H2O -> H2 + ZnO

Nope. Zn(OH)2. You have to do something else to convert the hydroxide into an oxide.

I agree that you can't simply condense the Zn vapor into a liquid or solid. In normal thermal smelting the metal is chemically reduced to draw off the oxygen using a reducing agent such as carbon monoxide. At very high temperatures, you can force a metal oxide to form a plasma of dissociated ions, but as you indicated something has to draw off or separate the oxygen, and something also has to donate electrons to the zinc ion plasma. Might be a set of high temperature electrodes?

How do you produce the zinc oxide powder?

You burn zinc metal. Really. The zinc oxide and tower are not the interesting part. That is simply an alternative method of smelting a source of zinc to obtain zinc metal.

The deeper linked articles say "the hoppers will feed zinc oxide powder (a benign substance resembling baking soda) onto the ceramic layer, causing a reaction that decomposes the powder into pure zinc vapor. In a subsequent step, the zinc will be reacted with water to produce solar hydrogen."

Ok.

Zn(s) + 2H+ -> Zn2+(aq) + H2(g)

but

Zn2+ + 2OH- -> Zn(OH)2(s)

So the water that's left over will contain a zinc hydroxide particulate (or sludge).

The zinc hydroxide is an emission. Might be better than a gaseous emission, but it's still a waste product. If this system is truely closed with respect to zinc, then the zinc hydroxide has to be converted into zinc oxide or somehow directly smelted back into zinc vapor. That's the missing element from the article in my opinion.

Other questions: how fast is the aquoeous reaction (toss zinc in a glass of water -- it's slow at standard temperature and pressure); what is the equilibrium pressue of H2 above the liquid (if it's a low partial pressure, then you need to both maintain a vacuum over the liquid and compress the drawn-off gas); what is the net energy output of H2 versus the input of heat (assuming that you close the system with respect to zinc by drying and converting the sludge back to zinc metal).