A president hasn't overturned an ITC decision since the early 90s, IIRC.

Samsung can now use this decision in a court case against Apple to get damages.

FTR for one patent in thousands used in a phone, I think that 2.5% of the phone retail price is not reasonable, it seems a high price to enter a closed FRAND gang who have cross-licensed patents to each other for nearly nothing, whilst setting a high barrier of 2.5% that none of them have had to pay. However if that 2.5% covers all the necessary patents in that FRAND pool, that's potentially a different matter (I still don't think it should be related to the retail price, as that price already covers the licensing of other patents and R&D, etc).

But I don't think Samsung would have gone this route if Apple hadn't sued them so aggressively, so meh.

I'm sure they could space the two parts exactly one revolution apart (even taking the asteroid's relative velocity into account).

I think this is the type of problem done in high school mathematics?

I still prefer the odds on the broken up asteroid than the guaranteed end of human life full asteroid.

In addition it could be that many of the pieces will miss us anyway. The relative speed of the asteroid to earth could be as high as 70km/s, so if we hit it with 24 hours to go, that's 86400 seconds for each piece to shear away from us from a distance of 6 million km. We only need to change the asteroid piece trajectory slightly to make it miss the Earth entirely. Indeed it may be prudent to have a second warhead to explode after the first one to give the pieces more momentum away from the line of impact (we'd need around 100m/s, that's a lot of momentum to be giving to potentially massive lumps of rocky iron).

The issue here though is that the domain was registered quite some time ago, and prior to that also had a history as a real site.

The absence of a website does not mean the domain is unused either. Email is an obvious example. In addition websites take a long time to develop, and are often parked until the site is ready - the absence of a website does not mean an absence of intent to have a website.

"Handing over" something that someone else paid for based upon such vague reasoning is very wrong. It isn't stolen property to be confiscated and handed back to the original owner. The domain wasn't trademarked at the time it was registered, and I'm certain that there are no rules in the terms and conditions about handing back domains you've bought in the case that someone else trademarks that name.

In my opinion this domain owner got lucky and Microsoft should be paying him money for the name that they themselves have recently made valuable. And he should still have the right to not sell the domain name if he chooses not to.

Next step is real force feedback - I'm thinking of a fast moving boxing glove on a robot arm that can position itself within a fraction of a second.
A head shot will never be the same again (system can do head tracking to stop you ducking the punch).

Imagine a portal jump with real feedback. A car crash in a racing game?

You could have an axe on a robot arm for simulating medieval battle games.

Why would you ever let any social network trawl your email accounts (and other social networks)?

I'm annoyed that I can't "facet" my Facebook account into family, friends and work, and hide things from each of these. Google's thing can do that.

Last thing I want is exes popping up again.

Unfortunately that means you have to run a Windows server for your website, and Windows is dropping like a lead balloon in terms of web server statistics.

The current enterprise web stack is actually something along the lines of Java + Spring (Beans, DI, Security) + Apache Wicket (OO Ajax UI) + Hibernate (DB). The DAO layers being abstracted enough that they could be direct database access or remote method calls via your favoured protocol (RMI, SOAP, JSON, PB, etc).

Never, ever, use ISP provided email.

Firstly, you might change ISP, so you lose your old email.
Secondly, they pull tricks like this.
Thirdly, they won't provide as good a solution as a dedicated email provider.

What I am wondering is if you can set up a new personal GMail account, and get it to sync your old emails from the ISP's own gmail service.

Apache Wicket for the web UI (bye bye JSPs), and Spring (or Guice) for DI, beans, etc.

Indeed it is. People are getting their knickers in a twist over microcode for the GPU (which is probably just a microcode update) that probably target a custom architecture, compiled by a custom compiler, and which in themselves provide the advertised functionality (decoding h.264, etc). It's firmware, it's conjoined to the hardware (which is also closed-source) to make the hardware do something useful. By having firmware, you can add features down the line (e.g., VP8, H.265) as well, that you couldn't do with totally fixed hardware.

Note that many CPUs include lots of microcode themselves, where the advertised ISA instructions are actually small microcode programs. Of course they're less complex than video decode microcode, but they're the same thing overall. The CPU microcode is probably also generated via a custom assembler/compiler or hand-written.

So it could come down to the parcels being marked as suspicious, going to the suspicious parcels department (leading to a 3 day delay), where one guy now has a nice line in selling second hand shoes in the bar after work (leading to higher incidence of "lost" packages).

For a one or two story arched roof that is printed (sintered) in place as one solid construction? In 1/6th the Earth's gravity? I'm sure the lack of rebar will not be a problem.

Now when they're printing domes to cover entire craters, then they might need a means to strengthen the structure. And much as I would like that to happen within twenty years, I suspect it will be more like two hundred years before this happens.

I would imagine that the human trip to the moon would be *after* all the robotic colony printers have done their work in building the external structures.

If the structures that are built are robust (especially in regard to flaking away when rubbed/hit/etc) enough, then even furniture could be printed using this mechanism.

And these robots can keep on building stuff, as long as they are powered. As soon as the first module is built, it can build another module, and structures between modules. All we need to do is get the inflatable protective air-tight internal structures on the moon to be installed inside them. And lots of solar panels to mount on the outside. And some means of extracting water and air from the rocks (although initially these would be sent from Earth as well).

For each year of refinement to the equipment done here before launch, I'm sure many many years of work on the moon would be saved, as the equipment becomes more reliable, robust, useful, flexible, and faster.

I had a Palm IIIc (which I won, thanks ZDNet) which was really quite neat. And it was easy to use, and snappy. And the desktop software was pretty good.

Downsides - Serial connection was slow, low resolution display, lack of central repository for software - although some websites did step up to the mark.

Upsides - http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/560/palm-simcity-in-color/