If you're lucky enough to be able to afford a Lamborghini, it doesn't necessarily follow that you have carte blanche to come up with any type of vanity license plate your heart desires.
While typical objections to license plate permutations typically focus on overtly offensive words, a Texas man named Safer Hassan recently learned the hard way that even obfuscating an alleged obscenity might leave you with a revoked plate.
Now Apple is reportedly reaching out to developers who didn’t win the lottery and offering them a chance to buy unclaimed tickets. Some developers are starting to get phone calls from the company informing them that they have been randomly selected to buy one of the tickets that winners failed to claim before the 14th.
Sinnreich pointed out that Shazam has been indexing advertisements broadcast on television, as well as the pre-show ads shown in movie theaters, and in some cases, has stuck deals with advertisers to provide metrics of those who "tag" an ad. In some cases, tagging an ad presents the consumer with additional information, or even a special offer.
"Apple could do whatever a QR code is used for now, but sonically," said Sinnreich of the audio fingerprinting technology. "Someone tags a commercial, and that's entered into a database, effectively targeting [that consumer] for further ads," he said.
Sure, Apple Maps might send you into a death trap in the Australian outback or onto an airport runway, but it does do things that other mapping services don't, such as being able to find imaginary monsters. AppleInsider points out that hunters of the Loch Ness Monster claim that they found an image of the mythical beast on a satellite image provided by Apple's iOS Maps, which was something that they didn't find when they tried looking for it on Google Maps.
Although Samsung often gets tagged as a copycat in the realm of smartphones, the company really does produce some remarkable innovations, particularly in the realm of displays. Patent Shot has spotted a recently filed Samsung patent for a new kind of transparent display technology that can be used to convincingly add digital images to the real world and thus blur the line between virtual reality and physical reality.
"What really drove us to this agreement was a strong pull from customers," said Ana Hunter, Globalfoundries' vice president of product management. "They see the value in really having one process where they have choice and flexibility in the manufacturing options that they have."
"That the jury might draw conclusions about Mr. Jobs' character based on evidence showing the manner in which he pursued the conspiracy at the heart of this case is not grounds to exclude such evidence," they wrote.
Additionally, the plaintiffs seek to introduce evidence about the personal wealth of executives like Google co-founder Sergey Brin - and how it could be enhanced by holding down workers' salaries and boosting margins, according to the filing.
The DMV recently declared the license plate ‘370H55V’ to be obscene – can you guess why?