Juries make a real effort

Anyone with half a brain can avoid jury service. (Likewise anyone with a super brain will not get past jury selection). When jury decisions are suprising, the first places to look are the evidence and the reporting. Some reporters like to emphasise the evidence that is contrary to the jury's decision to create some controversy. Some just paraphrase the press release from the losing side. Remember that we see evidence that the jury does not.

The biggest slice of evidence we got to see is about 950 examples of prior art Samsung does not get to show the jury. Apple complained that Samsung did not specify for each example whether the example demonstrated obviousness or prior art. Samsung did not get a response in by the deadline. I think that example of Apple lawyering speaks volumes about how weak they think their case is, but the jury is not allowed to know about it.

Jury selection

The court summons a large bunch of potential jurors. Some are sent home because spending time on the jury would cause undue hardship or because they have a business relationship with one of the parties. They lawyers from each side get to throw out a few potential jurors. Every single time, they throw out the people with experience with technology or law.

The European Patent Office is lobbying hard for a specialist patent court. If they ever get their way, no patent will be too obvious and the concept of non-patentable subject matter will be entirely forgotten. If you ever hear a rumour that the possibility of a specialist patent court will be created, publicise the rumour at once and hope that letters to MEPs will stamp this atrocious idea back into the mud again.

Secure boot would not last long at $199

No DRM has survived determined attention from hackers. At $199, surface would receive lots of attention, and Microsoft losing money on each sale would add more. The only way you will see $199 is if you sign up for some lock-in ware at $20/month for 2 years increasing by $5 per month each year after that.

Just disable javascript

Plenty of websites work better without it. If one relies on javascript, go to a competitor.

PS: I usually get the opposite problem - when I run a browser full screen I get a narrow web page with big blank borders.

There are excellent reasons

Patent examiners are overworked, and it takes far less effort to grant a patent than to do all the paperwork required to delay it. Rejecting a patent just means it will come back with a few words changed. Remember the purpose of the patent system is to divert money from R&D to lawyers. A good patent should be really obvious so there will be plenty of infringers. A better patent has plenty of prior art so plenty of businesses are already profiting and ripe for some nuicance litigation.

Disputed figure: 1 or 2 % disable javascript

A quick web search only found one attempt to measure the percentage of people who disable javascript. There were several pages that disputed the figures.

I can understand why some people cannot believe even one percent disable javascript: If a site does not work well without javascript, I will go to one of the competitors. I assume fellow Luddites do likewise so owners of those sites are convinced everyone enables javascript. I saw a long discussion thread about how pointless it was to cater for lack of javascript. Not a single commentard argued. I tried to speak up, but javascript was required. I enabled javascript, but it did not like my browser. I tried ice weasel, and still could not post a comment.

I can understand why some people are shocked that only two percent disable javascript. When I have tried sites that require javascript, I have run away screaming. Dell's site is particularly abysmal. The only way I could read it was to block out the animations with my hand.

Standards

I too looked at the title, and hoped for the impossible - standard laptop components like we have for desktops. Parts of my desktop are ancient because I can keep using them when I upgrade other bits. You could do with some standard laptop case sizes so you can transfer your good components. I would like to upgrade my CPU/chipset to something quieter, but lack of standards mean I would have to replace the LCD, keyboard, touch pad and case at the same time.

If Intel want a faster upgrade cycle, they will have to sort out some standards - over the dead bodies of the current laptop and LCD manufacturers.

Tiny, tiny sharks

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

Adults are about 20cm long. Newborns are about 6cm. These sharks naturally glow in the dark.

Why not?

Merging a USB hub into a laptop power brick would suit me fine. I currently have power, USB and ethernet cables tied together so they don't tangle. External 2.5" disks eat two USB ports and 3.5" need their own brick. It would be tempting to put a USB/Ethernet converter on a laptop power/hub and reduce the number of cables down to 1.

I am surprised they did not go for 48V like PoE, or take the frequency to 1000Hz so the voltage can go higher without killing people.

Rapid expiration + no previous passwords = ...

... passwords are written on post-it notes stuck to the monitor.

Remove rapid expiration, previous passwords become irrelevant and people stand a chance of remembering a difficult password.

Practice reading and arithmetic

The article gives to beam energy: 1.85e6 Joules. Use the magic formula Power = Energy / Time to get the amount of time this laser can fire continuously (<4nano seconds). While you are at it, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent and find that 1.85e6 Joules is less then .5kg of TNT, or less than £0.10 of electricity. While you are at it, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility and you will find "In the same month [January 2012], the NIF fired a record high of 57 shots, more than in any month up to that point." 0.5 kg of TNT twice per day is not going to put a big dent in the moon. There is some good news: $150 buys the electricity for about 10 shots (~1% efficiency).

Q=CV

The basic formula for a capacitor is: Charge = Capacitance x Voltage. A linear relationship, not logarithmic. Batteries have a more complicated relationship that changes when a resource becomes limited and when the temperature changes because of the charge or discharge current.

Plenty of loony units of measuments measurements

A Watt is a unit of power (1 Joule per second). The SI unit of energy is the Joule. Take your pick from:

kilo Watt hours (Energy supplied by an electricity company): 1kWh = 3.6MJ

British thermal unit (Energy supplied by a gas company): 1BTU = 1.055kJ

Foot pound force (A unit of energy - honest): 1ft·lbf = 1.356J

Calorie (Energy spent while exercising): 1cal = 4.2J

Calorie (Energy content of food): 1Cal = 4.2kJ

Electron Volts (Energy per particle in a particle accelerator): 1eV = 1.602E-19J

Litre (1/1000 of a cubic metre) of petrol: 34.2MJ

Kiloton (Energy in 1 ton of TNT): 1kt = 4.184GJ

The units of power are just as bad. The most common is:

1Windturbine = electrical energy used by 10billion homes with gas hot water, cooking and heating, petrol driven transport, food from high energy content fertilisers, candles for lighting and the average number of gadgets for a family living in a remote corner of a rain forest.

But who gets the money?

I have no problem with fools being parted from their money - only with the damage that money does in places like Nigeria. Skilled Nigerian 419 scammers can afford to buy their way into politics. I think part of the answer is bigger and more selective taxes on stupidity. Anyone want to buy some lottery tickets?

So what will teach them?

I have tried asking politely. I have tried not buying nVidia for 20 years. Please tell us, wise guru, what is the magical incantation that will get nVidia to properly document their products?

Yes really

£30 bulk price. Retail price would be a little higher. Retailers would not sell on the Windows license at cost either.

The real danger to this product comes from the channel. You are required to pay at least £200 for a no-margin computer with no useful software. They only tolerate that price because they expect to make some money on the software. Microsoft will not need to bury this product - the channel will do that for them.

Here comes the small cheap computer again. Blink and you will miss it.

Re: Shopping trip

All of these block access, which causes the venders' sites to lock up or all the links to point at the current page. Is there anything that spoofs replies from tracking web sites?

PC's last for ages

My laptop is 7 years old. XP got wiped before it could boot. Vista and Windows 7 have been and almost gone. Windows 8 is nearly here, and I will not bother to look at the required specs or available drivers. Microsoft could bring out hundreds of new operating systems, but I doubt if any of them will be a reason to replace my laptop. Eventually some part of it will break and I will not be able to find a replacement. For that day, I am thinking of something like a raspberry pi and a monitor glued to the inside of a suit case. A Pi is already pushing my (partly older) desktop towards retirement.

I do not see Intel promising to compete with ARM on price yet. Ultrabooks will stay expensive for another year, perhaps two before Intel admit that an £800 computer is a niche market.

Galaxies in clusters

Milky way, Andromeda and about 50 small satellite galaxies make up the local group. These are all so close together that their gravitational fields affect each other. The local group is part of a cluster of groups of galaxies. There are many clusters of groups. Galaxies inside a group orbit the centre of mass of the group. The distance between clusters increases with the expansion of the universe.

Take a look at the diagram at the end of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group

Wrong BIOS password - really scarey

Some kind person just enters "password" 5 times and my expensive new ultra-book is broken. I think I will just stick with computers that are so cheap that they are not worth nicking.

"Chip level" is not an answer

Does "not make any difference" mean anti-theft activates when a thief or I swap the OS or hard disk, or does it mean anti-theft does not activate when a thief or I change the OS or hard disk? Is there some kind of naughty or nice detector that decides who has changed the OS or hard disk?

Cut & Paste

The first time i used XP, I found that the middle mouse button did not work (as expected). Luckily the machine's owner was near by to explain that paste was Ctrl-something-I-have-forgotten. The usual default Linux settings are:

Left click: Do what I usually mean.

Left click and drag: Select for pasting.

Middle click: Paste.

Right click: Show a menu with less commonly used choices.

Alt-left click & drag: Move window - handy if the window is bigger than the screen.

Shift right triple click while singing the Monty Python spam song with your left knee behind you ear: Not normally assigned but I am sure someone will thing of a suitable use.

Tagadab's strategy is working

You have not seen adverts for the competitors.

1 Core 2xF MHz or 2 Cores F MHz

Both strategies would provide about equal performance and power use if manufactured with same process. In real life, the single core part has to be made with a much more expensive process to run at twice the frequency of a dual core part. There are savings in die area because only half the number of transistors are required and because the transistors are smaller. Despite that, the 2 core part is still cheaper.