Pending means they've filed the claim. It means that someone at the USPTO has the documentation stamped with a date on it. It's a warning to the potential rippers-off that once the patent is awarded he can come and sue you, even though he hasn't been issued the number.

That's how corporations work. They are not allowed to be satisfied with "enough". If their management want to keep their jobs, they either need to keep up the growth and the profits or have a reason that will appease the board of directors. "We're big enough, time to be nice now" isn't going to cut it.

You mean replace the search bar at the top of every homescreen with a 1X4 slot for the widget of your choice? Sounds good to me, I'd fill it with the music player.

Because consumer culture dictates that an appealing product is more important than judging a company by how it behaves in the marketplace and how it treats its customers.

That's the problem, if they spend the money on R&D but not lawyers to protect the result, they'll be beaten out by an opponent who can copy their stuff without paying for either lawyers or R&D.

The idea is that most inventions can't get made without outside help. So, an inventor can patent his invention before he goes and gets the investment or industrial backing he needs. This way, none of his investors or partners or workers can rip him off. That was always the problem patents were intended to solve,…

She couldn't handle a long infantry career, so therefore no woman could. That's certainly valid and airtight logic, right there. Also, a bit of hubris in thinking that there are no women in the world better suited to being in the infantry than her (though about on par with the level of self-worship I've come to expect…

Didn't Scott Adams do something like this ages ago, have some dietitian design a line of frozen burrito-esque foods that were a balanced vegan meal? Dilberitos?

This is not necessarily a game breaker. Mining new nickel is a bit dirty, but nickel used in a battery can be recovered and reused, so not the entire rare metal component of the car is mined for every unit built. As for using more energy than it saves, the real thrust of it is not how much energy we use to drive, but…

Don't know if anything else will slot into the space as perfectly as a hard drive. If they made anything like this I'd want to put in a closable bay with USB ports in the bottom to hold a 4g modem and my wireless mouse receiver. Maybe make it pop open like a DVD drive.

Insurance means you can get a new pole if the company breaks yours, which is functionally identical to borrowing one at the event. As in, it's not the pole you practiced with, so it throws off your performance.

Lots of stuff targets kids. Nintendo's whole catalog targets kids. Sly Cooper targets kids. So there's nothing to say a game for eight year olds won't be fun to play, just as there's nothing to say a game targeting adults will be.

2000 RPM, according to the text, but that seems small for a tiny thing with one moving part. I'm used to hearing about microturbines spinning at 20,000. 2000 seems almost sedate, like a dang car engine.

The Chicago express lanes have two or three lanes as well as medians and shoulders to themselves, so it's a great solution if you have a lot of horizontal space. People in the express lanes can pass each other, the accesses are closed completely in the middle of the day so that the lanes are empty before they change…

Not just survival, reproductive success is a big deal. A a man who lives to be a hundred but never breeds is an evolutionary failure. A man who dies at thirty and leaves behind seven kids who do exactly as he did just won at the Darwin game.

That's what I'm thinking the market for this is. Short hauls with a heavy passenger demand, like UK and within Europe or domestic US, not trans-ocean flights. The short flights are so short that it's impossible to get up to altitude or top speed in a 747 anyway, but the volume of the route justifies a really big…

My pants retention apparatus of choice is a brown leather beast of a thing I got at the workin-man's shoestore where I buy my workboots. Claims to be Amish-made, and I believe it given that they used screws to hold the thing together instead of rivets.

One, two and three from your list are classic stereotypes people trot out against young women. Four through six are what folks say about young black men (if they don't go so far as to assume they're criminals). Seven I can't help you with, I'm from America.

Compasses don't respond fast enough. In aircraft, they periodically check for drift on the gyroscopic compass (non magnetic, tracks the rotation of the plane) against a magnetic one when they're flying straight and level, but they rely on the gyroscope for their actual heading when maneuvering because it responds…

Because they were trying to move away from that in the wii remote plus. They didn't even want the sensor bar in the first place, they did it because this same problem came up when they tried to do a pure motion controlled wii remote.