Speaking as a former patent examiner

"No". In my time patent applications could be rejected as "not novel" though not, as I recall, by us lowly examiners. This is not novel. It says "let's take an existing technology for impact protection and apply it in an area where, so far, it hasn't been applied". You might as well try patenting bumpers for boats. Of course, if Bezos and Heart had actually discovered some way of overcoming the technical difficulties of transferring the technology to the new context they'd have a basis for a claim, but my admittedly cursory, reading of the application reveals nothing of the sort. It's just <stoner voice> "hey, let's put airbags on phones"</stoner voice>.

If you're in Australia

you can use "The Australian National Public Toilet Map". Or more correctly the "Dunny Diviner"*. www.toiletmap.gov.au . Not very mobile-friendly but it does work. For the UK there's: www.looseeker.co.uk. Again, strangely, apparently without a mobile version. I'm not a great fan of the everything as an app paradigm but this could be an exception. At least for the fact that you could have GPeeS integration.

*OK, I just made that up.

It appears

that in your eagerness to chant the mantra you've missed the rather obvious point that a RAID array makes a perfectly decent backup target.

But they had

at one time at least, some awesome toy boats.

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

Position it

a few nanometres above one of the rings* and you can read all the Jovian porn.

*yes it does.

It's been said before

but it looks like it needs to be said again: Einstein's involvement in the Manhattan Project began and ended with his signing of a letter to Roosevelt urging the US to build the bomb before Germany did.

Relativity != nuclear physics.

You're just pised off that

you don't get as much sex as you did back then.

Yes

Damn those socialist Lehman Brothers!

I'm not an engineer

but I've always thought that adding material in the plane of the stresses increases mass efficiency, which is why plate girders are typically aligned vertically not horizontally.

Spoken

like a true Java user.

Pretty much my point

High densities coupled with large smart caches mean the moderate speed increase you get from spinning faster is becoming increasing irrelevant when balanced against the costs (heat, noise power, $s). I'm getting 140 MB/s from the first 200 GBs of my drive. Even with a 15000 Cheetah Seagate can only promise me 200 MB/s for a puny few hundred gigs at something like 20 times the price per unit capacity of the Baracuda. If I wanted to pay that sort of money I'd go for an SSD.

Spindle speed

doesn't mean much these days. I have a 2TB Seagate Barracuda that runs at 5900 and yet manages to be the fastest drive I've ever owned. I doubt I'll even consider a 7200 drive from now on.

Nice to see a spellchecker in action

Or it would be.

And I'm a forker

I believe all true Pastafarians should wear the ceremonial spaghetti fork tucked into their belt at all times.

Sure people have heard of it.

They just couldn't work out how to pronounce it.

Someone at MS was being too clever by half.

You obviously haven't seen

the smart crow video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ykewnc0oE

Now that's a true Sherlock.

They're just using the wrong birds.

re:re: That's not quite correct

Agreed. Research comes cheap. I can't help suspecting Apple's enthusiasm for the 10" form factor has more to do with the hope that it will supplant the pc as a general purpose home computing device (thus replacing a semi-open platform with one that is as locked down as hell - 30% cut on all web transactions!) and for that 7" just won't cut it.

Sent from my 7" tablet while sitting in a very nice little cafe.

Surely you mean Fosters

One thing Australians can agree on when it comes to beer: Fosters = alcoholic hygiene product.

I'd take a crack at VB (Victoria Bitter) since this is Melbourne but my friends tell me it's really quite good. (I don't drink beer myself - not enough caffeine in it.)

Exactly

And that is about all that needs to be said on the matter. Consider yourself upgraded to version 1.1.

Fail indeed

But a win for nominative determinism.

Make that a third

AFAIK el Reg hasn't reported on the success or otherwise of that august journal (now that's sarcasm) so I'm left scratching my head.

As I was at pains to point out

I don't think all, or even most, of Hipster Hitler works. I certainly wouldn't walk down the street wearing that particular shirt. But though Hipster Hitler is about the Hitler not the Holocaust (the vast majority of items on the site don't reference the Holocaust) not mentioning it would be like talking about Jack the Ripper and neglecting to mention he was a murderer.

And no I'm not trying to defend "a bit of fun at the expense of the victims of the Nazis" What I'm trying to defend is actual free speech not the ersatz kind where you can say anything as long as there's no chance that anyone, anywhere, will ever be upset by it. The simple fact is that you don't know that publishing that shirt comes at "the expense of the victims of the Nazis". How is that supposed to work? It looks to me that the only harm is to your sense of propriety.

You mention the morons on Stormfront. So they like Hipster Hitler. They probably liked the Downfall parodies too. According to Wikipedia the American Nazis Party put Norman Spinrad's Iron Dream on their recommended reading list. Which proves only that fascists tend not to be very bright and don't get satire.

The problem is, your approach inevitably leads to a fear of discussing sensitive issues lest someone misunderstands and responds in the wrong way. And that way lies fascism by stealth.

Seriously

none of "this stuff" is "parodying the holocaust". It's parodying Hitler, something that has a long and honourable tradition dating back to at least Chaplain's Great Dictator in 1940. (Actually a lot longer - there was a strong tradition of political cartooning in Germany in the 20s.)

As for David Duke, well that's the thing about free speech - it's always going to apply to people you don't agree with and that includes people you regard as outright evil. But, like democracy, it's the worst of the alternatives except for all the others. Incidentally while I don't find Hipster Hitler particularly funny or particularly effective satire a similar principle applies - genuine free speech is inevitably going to include things you regard as low quality or unsuccessful. freedom is the freedom to fail.

You find this stuff sickening and really off. I feel the same when I see a t-shirt with a picture of Mao (a man who killed millions more people than Hitler and managed to die in power thus making Hitler look like a rank amateur). And ironically that's the point of the parody which seems to have gone whizzing over your head.

Congratulations

You've just invented active camouflage or at least one version of it. (Other versions include Lewis' beloved invisible sheds .) Better give DARPA a call.

More downvotes

than there are comments in the thread is certainly an impressive achievement.

If you think open source is a gift

you don't understand open source. Also your understanding of the logic of gift giving is a little shaky. I'm guessing you're not very popular at Christmas.

Wow

The equivalent of almost 4000 bar radiators. That's sure to melt the glaciers!

Is that a bug

or. . .

Exactly

The problem is not working out what sort of device we will all be using in five years time but coming up with a way of syncing the data on a range of devices without just dumping everything "in the cloud".

How's that working out for

Wordperfect.

Try playing with a gravity simulator

The difficult thing is to create a system in which something doesn't get ejected.

Sheesh

It 's enough to make me want to sit down and write replacements for all the GNU utils just to stop nonsense like this and I only know Javascript.

Wait . . .

Also

because it's just like Star Trek - if captain Picard wore a backpack with a bloody great box in it.

What is the radar on these boats?

Wired up to Huawei 3g units* which as we know send all their data straight back to the PLA.

*Black helicopter because I'm using one now.

All* airships look like giant penises

That's (the main) part of their appeal.

*except the ones that look like Thunderbird 2, obviously.

Don't you mean

People are just looking at it wrong.