"Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong)."
I'm confused: you object because you learn something? Maybe I misunderstood.
Personally, I prefer the ones I don't know... (sorry if this seems snotty - I'm perfectly sincere.)

"Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it."
Douglas Adams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_agriculture#Food_security
Your scenario of cutting emissions causing collapse is not clear to me - please explain. I'm not advocating cutting all emissions - increasing carbon efficiency of existing modes of production is the main tool in the toolbox.

ok, this stinks of troll, but I'll take it:
"So calm the fuck down about religion, deniers, AGW, man made causes, SUVs, smug ass Californians, and Al Gore. Just realize accordingly, spend less money on ski equipment and more money on boats."

I dig your cool complacency, and actually I kind of agree. Global climate change probably won't make much of difference to your life during your lifetime, and maybe not even to your kids. Because you're rich. You can afford to pay 50% more for food (as agriculture is disrupted): the worst that will happen is you might move house, accept a slightly lower standard of living and bitch about the price of things. Oh, and 'buy more boats'.

It's the poor who will pay. I don't mean the middle class, I mean the 1 billion+ people who live on less than $1 a day. They will starve in greater numbers and die in greater numbers - they can't move, or "buy less ski equipment". I get that you don't care about that, but I hope that as a society we can bring ourselves to give a shit.

Another weird thing about those books: great as they are (Pirsig's was my instinctive answer to the question posed) both of their sequels (Lila, Te of Piglet) are quite terrible, dull and to be avoided. For some reason they both lapse into a similar mode of complaining about the modern world, feminism, etc, etc...

;) +1 insightful!
Not entirely true, though: people like Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck are the real high-priests. SJ did believe that the user experience wins over everything else - it's just he also believed in polling a user-group of precisely 1 person.

You're right: the summary dramatically undersells what Bill Moggridge achieved: he was a passionate believer that the experience of a product was the true definition of success (not the look or even the functionality), and that only you could only design great products by deeply understanding your users. Essentially, he took design out of the hands of the 'high-priests' of taste and aesthetics, and put the power back in the hands of the users.

This drove him to co-found IDEO (full disclosure - I'm an ex-employee), which gave him the leverage take interaction design (a term he invented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design#History) beyond GUI's to all products and services, and to define a lot of what matters most about design today.

Well, if you're willing to trust uncited Wiki-facts, Carl Sagan negotiated with the rights-holders specifically to get permission for playing the pieces of music copyright-free outside of the solar system. It's a cool work-around: of course pretty much any recorded performance has copyright restrictions, but Carl Sagan figured the disk itself wasn't intended to be played by any human so legally he just needed rights outside some geographically restricted zone (say, the entire solar system) to have all the rights he needed to create potentially the widest distribution mixtape of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

We're arguing across each other: You're arguing about about what Apple will do with this patent, based on past example, and I'm arguing that the patent, as filed, is entirely reasonable and valid. Both can be true.

Feel free to take the last word...

I think you're arguing that Apple shouldn't be allowed to patent their designs because they are too simple, right? Their 'efficiency' is the problem. I can't imagine how you'd decide whose designs are 'complex enough' to be worthy of protection.

I've looked at this patent 3 times and I don't see how you decided that Apple are doing what you say they are: it's honestly just a set of pictures of their product. There's no 'claims'. In the text they describe it as "an ornamental design". I think you're saying that it's not ornamental because it's too simple, but what can be done about that? Disallow simple design from any protection? Force Apple to add curlicues?

At the end of the day, the decisions on infringement are made by a court based on whether it would cause confusion with customers. On the issue of wedge-shaped computers, there is plenty of prior art (passim) that means this is not a 'wedge-shaped' land-grab, and wouldn't work if it was. Design patents do not include prior art searches, AFAIK.

If you take a look at the linked patent, you'll see it is essentially nothing but pictures of the MacBook Air, with no commentary on what features are/aren't protected. You'd expect Apple to do nothing less, and they aren't make any specific claims about edges/corners/wedges. Just 'something that looks like this'.

Design patents are (by intent) subjective. If you came up with a soft-drink with a logo in your hand-writing, there has to be a process to decide if you were deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it was Coca-cola, but we don't want rules defining what your hand-writing is supposed to look like. So Coca-cola just submit pictures of the logo, and we figure the rest out later.

If your objection is the existence of design patents, then fair enough. A judge taking a point of view on 'generic elements' is healthy and normal part of the process.

This is a DESIGN patent, not a UTILITY patent. It protects a very specific appearance of a thing. Essentially, if you made something similar enough to this that it could be easily confused by a customer, you infringe.

You can make all the wedge-shaped laptops you like. Apple is not pretending to ANYONE that they "invented" wedge shaped computers.

We do this EVERY time a design patent comes up on Slashdot. Editors: please take 15 mins to learn the difference between design and utility patents if you're going to persist in posting up flamebait articles on the topic.

Your example could hardly better contradict your point:
Universal healthcare in the UK (the NHS) was implemented nationwide in about 3 years, covering 50million people with comprehensive and free healthcare (give or take a modest prescription fee at the time). It replaced a complex network of private, state (county) and charity organizations, and came up against bitter opposition from the vested interests in private healthcare at the time. It has its limitation, but public support for it is consistently very strong.

I appreciate your point on IT systems is probably true, and this project is clearly a disaster - but expanding it to general provision of healthcare ignores every functional single-payer system in the world.

"Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day"