Duty of disclosure means that if you are aware of relevant prior art when applying for a patent in the US, you are obligated to inform the USPTO about it. Nest is saying that Honeywell should have at least known about its own prior patents, and that not disclosing them violated the duty of disclosure. This is grounds for the patent being found invalid.

The intent of the organizers is to generate designs with "nice" glide ratios. But to encourage that, the right metric is not distance of flight, but time aloft. A paper airplane that slowly covers 15' is a much "nicer" design then a wadded paper ball that covers 40' in two seconds.

There we go, a more traditional unit: 1 LoC/h

Berkeley is doing similarly cool stuff in their Biomimetic Millisystems Lab .

Does China have a free and liquid labor market? I know next to nothing about China's labor economics and politics, but I would strongly suspect that the labor market is quite illiquid (if that word has any meaning in this context). That is, do factories get to compete for workers with compensation and working condition market based incentives? Or does the Party inhibit the competition among factories so that it really is a Foxconn or nothing type proposition?

That is what this decision is! The title of the suit is:

SIMON GLIK,
Plaintiff, Appellee,
v.
JOHN CUNNIFFE, in his individual capacity; PETER J. SAVALIS, in
his individual capacity; JEROME HALL-BREWSTER, in his individual
capacity; CITY OF BOSTON,

Glik is filing a law suit against the officers individually and the city of Boston alleging a violation of his civil rights. The defendants claimed that the officers have qualified immunity and are not subject to a law suit. The appellate court has said here that "No, you did violate the rights and have no qualified immunity." Now Glik should be able to proceed with the law suit and get damages. My guess would be that after this ruling there will be a settlement, as it doesn't look like the defendants can win the civil suit without immunity and with the evidence so clearly spelled out by the appellate court.

Note the 'D' in the front. That makes this a design patent, not a utility patent. Thus it is restricted to only the ornamental (not functional) aspects of the device. By its very nature, it cannot have substance.

The video says that the servo control is handled on board the module. So, you would need a trajectory planner and interpolator, but not amplifiers or drives. There is no comment on how to set up the tuning (for good control, robots require non-linear control laws). I *think* the newest ABB robot controllers, with some undocumented options, can directly feed interpolation points out over CAN bus (accepted by these modules), so it might be possible.

Because G is no longer the name that National Instruments calls it?

My CS101 class (many moons ago) was taught in Scheme. I thought it was fantastic. Since I didn't come from a high achieving high school, I had no formal software training beyond what I hacked on my home C64 w/ Comal. I was nervous that I was going to have to compete with a bunch of C/C++/Pascal trained gurus. Scheme was the great leveler. Nobody had a clue with the language, and the professor could focus on CS, and the programmers had no advantage in the class (i.e. couldn't coast).

Bring back CS101 as Lisp/Scheme/Logo (not the turtle part, the actual language). Make their brains hurt.

McDonald's tested this a while ago. It was not well received by the customers.

So, I did a little looking around on the web and my question is where do I buy an HDFury? As far as I can tell it is no more. Nobody seems to have any inventory.

Missing two roots in "Take the cube root..."
>> roots([1, 0, 0, 1])

ans =

    -1.0000
      0.5000 + 0.8660i
      0.5000 - 0.8660i

The first equation has two solutions. But the equation x^3+1=0 has three solutions. You chose the one solution that didn't apply. The other two work just fine.

>> roots([1,-1,1])

ans =

      0.5000 + 0.8660i
      0.5000 - 0.8660i

I like the problem though!

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." - Nikolai Tesla