Slashdot Mirror

https://plus.google.com/100241261662852079434/posts/12kf2e2BGjn
is close

you don't see them suing HTC or Sony or any of several other manufacturers who make Android handsets

You might not, because you're not looking: Apple Sues HTC

Man, that took all of one search on Google to find. (Try "Apple sues HTC.")

If you want others, you can also try just flat-out searching for "Apple sues Android" which will get you such gems as Apple suing Motorola over Android and Amazon.com over having an App Store.

I can't find anything for them suing Sony in particular, but there's a lot of speculation that if they win their HTC suit, they'll be able to use that against every Android phone maker. So the best you can say is that they're not suing Sony yet.

you don't see them suing HTC or Sony or any of several other manufacturers who make Android handsets

You might not, because you're not looking: Apple Sues HTC

Man, that took all of one search on Google to find. (Try "Apple sues HTC.")

If you want others, you can also try just flat-out searching for "Apple sues Android" which will get you such gems as Apple suing Motorola over Android and Amazon.com over having an App Store.

I can't find anything for them suing Sony in particular, but there's a lot of speculation that if they win their HTC suit, they'll be able to use that against every Android phone maker. So the best you can say is that they're not suing Sony yet.

This is an iPad design from 2004 on a TV show;
https://plus.google.com/100241261662852079434/posts/12kf2e2BGjn

Little one sided don't you think?

That you can find an obscure site that works only in a specific browser, means nothing. What about all the Firefox specific pages out there? Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox?

Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!

The site you mention was NOT written by google contrary to your assertion. And Chrome is open source.

I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament. In fact he can't cling to standards and abhor copying features and maintain a straight face.

I'm waiting eagerly for Firefox to catch up to and surpass Chrome again. I enjoy the leap-frog game played by these companies. I use them both. Its just that, today, chrome is my favorite and does more for me than Firefox.

Little one sided don't you think?

That you can find an obscure site that works only in a specific browser, means nothing. What about all the Firefox specific pages out there? Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox?

Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!

The site you mention was NOT written by google contrary to your assertion. And Chrome is open source.

I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament. In fact he can't cling to standards and abhor copying features and maintain a straight face.

I'm waiting eagerly for Firefox to catch up to and surpass Chrome again. I enjoy the leap-frog game played by these companies. I use them both. Its just that, today, chrome is my favorite and does more for me than Firefox.

.. is probably so that they can keep an eye on coordinated protests. There has been a huge hue and cry against corruption in India recently and people have come to the streets to protest against the government's mockery of a bill to curb corruption. People are trying to get a bill passed (Jan Lok Pal) to make an independent body that'll fight corruption. The government, on the other hand, has proposed another draft which is a joke. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR6fmPWnUDE)

Social media has been used quite a bit in co-ordinating meetings and spreading the message. The government is afraid of an Egypt style uprising against corruption. There have been attempts in the past to ask the government to curb corruption, but they have failed. (eg. search for fight against corruption baba ramdev midnight arrest)

Oh, and by the way, if you still haven't got it - I think the reason why the government is shirking responsibility from passing a strong bill is because the government itself has been tainted with numerous allegations of corruption.

PS: A link to Indian Against Corruption's (never thought I'd give a link to an FB page!)

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

That's some serious hording going on there.

Not like the general search engine. No they don't. The reason is mostly due to how people use those apps. With the search engine you are looking for something and entering a term. This is a perfect time to evaluate your search term and then target specific ads to you. Google Docs, Gmail, Picasa, Android products are unable to be monetized as effectively as Google Search. It is pretty clear if you care to read the 10-Q or 10-K. But based on the tone of your previous comment I would say this is very unlikely so I included it for you.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312511032930/d10k.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312511199078/d10q.htm
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings.html

Google's own statement in their last 10-K. "How We Generate Revenue

Advertising revenues made up 97% of our revenues in 2008 and 2009, and 96% of our revenues in 2010. We derive most of our additional revenues from offering display advertising management services to advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers, as well as licensing our enterprise products, search solutions, and web search technology.

In addition, in the past year we have also invested aggressively in our newer businesses—namely display, mobile, and enterprise—to lay the groundwork for future growth. We have also made strategic investments in critical product areas, like Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS—following our core philosophy of building open platforms with optionality, and creating infrastructure that allows everyone on the web to succeed. We also believe that an active acquisition program is an important element of our business strategy. During 2010, we invested $1.8 billion to acquire companies, products, services, and technologies.

Our business is primarily focused around the following key areas: search, advertising, operating systems and platforms, and enterprise. "

The island of Yap may have something to say about it.

"Getting rid of patents, at least in software, would free up vast amounts of resources."

That's the problem, isn't it. What would all the lawyers do for an income? Especially when many people have already passed the point of diminishing returns for more stuff?

Excessive bureaucracy is a from of "make work" to prop up a society that can not admit its socioeconomic model (based on an income-through-jobs link) is broken in an age of abundance from cheap technology (like from an Android-powered supercomputer in your pocket relative to a 1970s definition of supercomputer); see also this knol I put together on good and bad ways to deal with that:
    http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

When I read your statement that the US is not nearly as indebted as other nations, I thought that cannot be correct, the US is topped only by Greece and Iceland. Europe is much better off. So I go to the wiki, and see, US only at 58% of GDP... pretty impressive. That's CIA and Eurostat. Right next to it, there's IMF: wow, 92% of GDP. That's more than Portugal (though still less than Italy). A bit more digging, brings me to a site for which I don't have a clue how reliable it is. More than 100% of GDP. So how big is GDP, according to some world bank data about as big as the US debt.

So, maybe the 58% of GDP number is a bit of an underestimation... or there's something really weird going on here. Two public sources, almost a factor of two difference, and a completely different ranking. In the CIA/Eurostat ranking, US is 36th worst of in the world, with most of the EU even more in debt. In the IMF ranking, US is 11th worst off, with only the EU-members Greece, Italy, Iceland, Belgium and Ireland (not even 25% of EU economy) more in debt than the US.

There's some major number juggling going on here.

Also what about the links in the website that using the domain name rather than the IP. An example of a website not using a redirect:
host google.com
google.com has address 74.125.93.103
google.com has address 74.125.93.105
google.com has address 74.125.93.104
google.com has address 74.125.93.147
google.com has address 74.125.93.99
google.com has address 74.125.93.106

Now punch 74.125.93.103 and click on the images link and were do we end up http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

which is why hosts file is suggested

Row upon row of mindless litigant bastards that will close ranks when one of their number is befallen by a fatal case of morals or common sense.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

OMG OMG Princess Bride reference! Original! So original! This guy knows what he's talking about! Durrrrrrrr ...

Perhaps you mean "litigious?"

Or perhaps litigant works as well?

litigant
Noun: A person involved in a lawsuit.
Adjective: Involved in a lawsuit: "the parties litigant".

Hey thanks for your lesson in how to not look something up before obnoxiously correcting someone though.

There is something wrong with Google's handling of that query
http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%3CFILEHARD%3E&type=cs -- Searching for the same thing in Google Code search brings up "Search query flow failed". Probably the first time I've seen that message from Google.
It does not seem to happen when searching for other queries which are in between greater-than less-than signs. For eg: < ERROR > works fine.

In the early 19 hundreds before, before any income taxes and without any unions, Ford was paying his assembly line workers $5/day.

From wikipedia:

Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. ...
Ford announced his $5-per-day program on January 5, 1914, raising the minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers. (Using the consumer price index, this was equivalent to $111.10 per day in 2008 dollars.) It also set a new, reduced workweek, although the details vary in different accounts. Ford and Crowther in 1922 described it as six 8-hour days, giving a 48-hour week

$5/day, 6 days a week. That's $30/week.

Google document viewer: Historic gold prices

1 ounce of gold was just under 19USD. With 30 dollars, that's 1.5 ounces of gold.

At current prices (over USD1700/ounce) that makes it USD2550

Assume 52 weeks in a year, that's USD132,600 a year.

That's take home pay, no unions, no government regulations, no income taxes.

What would be the equivalent pay today, if you take into account that there was no government involvement into health care or education or pension plans at that time, so people took care of their own health care, education and retirement, yet were able to do so on that salary and have a stay at home wife with a bunch of kids and they didn't have much credit, they paid out of pocket for all expenses? What would the equivalent salary be today?

BTW, a standard 4-seat open tourer Ford Model T cost 850USD.

-
My point is that you are blaming corporations for the failure of the system, I am pointing out that corporations are perfectly capable of building products that people want to buy, while creating good paying jobs without unions or regulations, and the real difference between that time and now? Government involvement into the economy with all the spending, regulations, laws, income taxes, SS, Medicare, tuition loans, subsidies to monopolies, etc.

Aha! I found the real reason.

There is a bluetooth input code here: http://code.google.com/p/android-bluez-ime/

And they state "Wiimote support is ready, but many devices lack the L2CAP ability and thus cannot communicate with the Wiimote."

I imagine it is the same reason for the PS3.

As a European commenting on our domestic policy, you apparently aren't getting the full story or are choosing to ignore it.

Everybody knows the explosion of the deficit has nothing to do with Obama

Oh, but it does. The president must sign or veto each spending appropriation. And Obama has approved and encouraged plenty. Wikipedia can show you that since Obama has entered office the rate at which the debt is growing has increased substantially.

You blame defense spending for all our woes. Defense spending is still high, but not historically out of line for the past 50 years and it is set to decrease in the next few years. Well, except for interest on debt, which is stupidly high.

You know what else costs a gigantic pile of money? Entitlements. Here's another picture for you that is showing what is happening on that side of things. Note that historically it is only increasing. At least defense spending had had a cut once in a while, but entitlements are not sustainable at their current growth rate. But don't worry. Obama has nothing to do with this. It's just a coincidence that we use the word "Obamacare". Really.

So no, Obama isn't the only one to blame. It is insane to think that he is. But saying that he has nothing to do with the problem at all is similarly pathetic.

To say it in a analogy: If you have ordered something a restaurant, its not an option to say: "oh, i just dot pay this and dont eat it". Thats what they [the Tea Party] suggested.

That is not at all what the TP wanted to do. They wanted to cut spending so that we were still meeting debt obligations but cutting back on everything else. Your analogy is flawed. What the TP wants is to order dinner at a restaurant but then leave off the expensive dessert at the end so that they can afford to pay the entire bill.

Heh, but what do I care, I'm sitting on $4 million worth of gold krugerrands, [...]

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=gold+bubble

I agree and share your sentiments. The specific issue you asked though, can probably be explained. The results that match none of the words in the query is probably due to other pages that contain those search terms point to the page.

Eg. http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure used to point to GW Bush's official page in the whitehouse website.

Sorry about slow response, but you leave me more confused.

Perhaps my examples were not the best. Most of the patents seem to attack the web browser. Does this mean you consider any linux distro maker, which is including webkit but not offering protection, an evil coward? (I said webkit, but I'm afraid any browser is infringing on the patents I've seen listed so far.)

For this to work they'd need to charge a license per copy, red hat style. But a free one like Android? Well free without Android Market at least.

Oh and screwdrivers seem to very patentable. Ditto for compilers.

Sorry about slow response, but you leave me more confused.

Perhaps my examples were not the best. Most of the patents seem to attack the web browser. Does this mean you consider any linux distro maker, which is including webkit but not offering protection, an evil coward? (I said webkit, but I'm afraid any browser is infringing on the patents I've seen listed so far.)

For this to work they'd need to charge a license per copy, red hat style. But a free one like Android? Well free without Android Market at least.

Oh and screwdrivers seem to very patentable. Ditto for compilers.

>>Create an email address for each service, site, etc.

>Do you have tools for that task?

Set up your Postfix to allow plus signs in the email address.

Set the recipient_delimiter property in main.cf, if it's not already.

Then you can just add arbitrary text after your email address, like this:

me+yahoo@example.com
me+mysocalledfriends@example.com
me+spammysite@example.com

All of these will be delivered to me@example.com .

The US had already been downgraded by Egan Jones back in July:

In the March 2011 quarter, trade in goods and services resulted in a deficit of $562B, many because of the high price of petroleum. However, the major factor driving credit quality is the relatively high level of debt and the difficulty in significantly cutting spending. We are taking a negative action not based on the delay in raising the debt ceiling but rather our concern about the high level of debt to GDP in excess of 100% compared to Canada's 35%. Nonetheless, since the US's debt is denominated in dollars, a hard default is unlikely.

So S&P isn't really a "one off" if you thought that.

All these "yes but X were wrong about A, so they're probably wrong about B" is halo affected thinking. It may feel logical, but it's not rational.

Whilst the technology exists for the cloud to deliver fault tolerant distributed storage, when you choose to put data in the cloud, you are choosing to relinquish control of the data. You are placing it in the hands of someone else. Quite probably an organisation that you do not know intimately. Quite probably an organisation that is based in a different legislative region - probably another country.
 

Which is the real issue: No way for a European company to use a US cloud provider - Amazon, Azure, Google. The Patriot Act is prohibitive here.

So where can I find a copy of the source code for Android 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2?

The AOSP git repository? Here's the announcement for 3.2: http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/browse_thread/thread/6a3b3a1c225a11f5/6f36c6c857cfe57f

Not sure where GP's 800c::6a leads to, but try http://2001:4860:8006::6a instead. If that doesn't work, you may not have an IPv6 route to google's IPv6 service. See also http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/ and http://www.ipv6tools.org/

Also Surge Protectors can't really take a direct lighting strike.

But lightning arrestors can. A serious lightning arrestor is a spark gap (sometimes open air, sometimes in an inert gas) to ground, with a very heavy cable or busbar to multiple ground rods, and no sharp turns in the path to ground. This is followed up by an inductor which is a few turns of busbar. This gear is usually placed where power lines or antenna feeds enter a building. MOV-type protection is further downstream.

Antenna towers are struck by lightning frequently, and the associated radio gear routinely continues to operate. This isn't rocket science. It's big hunks of copper.

The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, in their publication "The Locomotive" (they've been at this since 1867) has a good article on lightning protection. Hartford Steam Boiler insures not only against boiler explosions, but things like downtime due to lightning strikes. But only after their inspectors (they have 1200) have visited the plant and are satisfied with the equipment.

A question to ask your "cloud" provider - who handles your business interruption insurance, and do they inspect your faclities?

No, he produced a certificate of live birth. These are provided to anyone, and you can get them saying you were born wherever.

Saying words in a different order does not make them a different thing. A 'certificate of live birth' is, indeed, a 'live birth certificate'.

In fact, almost no government certificate at all, says 'X certificate'. They mostly say 'certificate of X'. Go look at a marriage certificate if you don't believe me. The fact it says words in the 'wrong order' does not make it not a 'birth certificate', anymore than something saying 'certificate of marriage' does not mean it's not a 'marriage certificate'.

That is literally what it is saying, in English you can put the words in either order. A 'birth certificate' is 'certificate of birth'. Anyone who argues otherwise is simply too dumb to be allowed to comment politically, and probably should be in some sort of home for the mentally incompetent.

Nor is it important it puts the word 'live' before that, which is just to distinguish it from being born dead, which would be a 'certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth'. Or a 'stillborn birth certificate'. These are combination birth/dead certificates. (That's rather moot, I don't think anyone's arguing Obama was not alive when he was born, but who knows what sort of stupid conspiracies have show up.)

And you can't just go and invent any of those. They are birth certificates. They aren't things 'sorta like birth certificates', they aren't 'we'll use it in place of a birth certificate', they are actual, real, true, birth certificates. They are so valuable, that criminals have a black market in existing ones where the person is dead, for fake identities.

What Obama produced in May was simply the long form. That's it. The short form, which he produced years ago, is a one without all the hospital stuff on it, intended to be use for authentication, which is record in a database and gets printed out when people need a certified copy.

This is opposed to what Obama eventually produced in May, which is a photocopy of the hospital birth certificate, which has a bunch of other, random stuff on it. (And is not kept by the state, but rather the hospital you were born in. The state cares not one bit who delivered you.)

And, I should point out, the long form also says 'certificate of live birth'. (In fact, almost all of them do. Mine does.)

I seem to remember that the IE 7 fan's answer to that was along the lines of "why should I waste space on my PC's hard drive with two browsers?"

Firefox is around 80MB. I don't think you can still even buy a hard drive smaller than 80GB. Nobody actually cares about 0.1% of their disk space, it sounds like the guy was just looking for a reason to argue.

And besides, without some sort of MSI version of Firefox that can be administered with the Group Policy system, how will larger companies deploy Firefox alongside IE?

Such things exist.

You appear not to understand how the United States mobile phone market works. The carriers are completely in control of the whole process because smartphones are priced for subsidized sale through a carrier, not sale directly to end users.

The customers can still choose which make of phone they get. Moreover, the carriers might choose who gets OS updates, but they don't really choose what goes in the app stores. And if people start complaining that iOS Safari doesn't support DNSSEC, Apple could easily silence them by publishing a free version-agnostic DNSSEC plugin in the app store.

I have another question: I want to deploy DNSSEC on a web site once my hosting provider supports it. Is the format of a certificate record standardized yet?

There is an RFC.

And which plug-in should I recommend to users of Google Chrome?

It appears that they're working on making the Firefox plugin work for Chrome but it isn't ported yet as of April, see here. There is also this which appears to be related to the same.

Except a battery isn't an energy source in itself, it's an energy storage device. Now if you had a way to create antimatter and an efficient (90% or better) way to recover energy from it, you'd have a permanent battery suitable for colonies. Imagine a battery rated in terawatt-hours. I could see it running a colony, a mass driver (railgun), and beamed energy for orbital vehicles (laser-ablative propulsion). Energy could be stored from nuclear batteries, solar arrays, and maybe even methane-powered internal combustion generators.

If you read Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, you could see how a mission could be launched at around $2B/launch. Certain billionaire individuals could start it if they could be convinced to give it a go (Buffet, Gates, Pickens, etc...). The Sultan of Brunei would be more likely. He only has around $22 billion, but expensive tastes in transportation with over 7000 cars.

https://plus.google.com/up/start/ -- "Google+ is in limited Field Trial". So no, it's not.

"And as to (7): ok Alfie, name any area of life where the possibility of success and/or winning does *not* lead to cheating."

Self-improvement. Spirituality. Being a good friend. Planting a tree. Setting a good example. Upholding a sense of honor. Developing free and open source software.

See also:
    "No contest: the case against competition" By Alfie Kohn
  http://books.google.com/books?id=bLudHIk3gsMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
    http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Alfie Kohn ... argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."

At least google has proven their worth with standing up to the US gov't in stead of just bending over and giving them all plus some extra as some others have.

Sure about that? http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google+owned+by+the+cia

There seems to be a link between them in the past that goes pretty deep.

Well - that's what maintaining an XBMC box is for :) Till Google does that...

http://www.google.com/tv/

Of course, it turned out to be a horrible failure, but that's beside the point.

I believe the Daily Mail are aggressively targeting social news sites. This story is a fine example - it's about an American company and its American workers and the effects on its American customers, yet somehow we get the report from a UK tabloid!? It's not like it's gone unnoticed in the US.

I see where to apply, a link in one of the articles:
    https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=406db188e0e1935a806c143a5603eb48&tab=core&_cview=0

If slashdot allowed longer tittle I woudl have called it: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats AND OPPORTUNITIES"

We'll see if they like some variation on:
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

At least I could spin it that way... :-)

And have:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

Where do I apply? :-)

Aw, fuck me. I fucked up the link. here

SquirrelMail is awesome for being simple, fast, and non-JavaScript.

If you want something more JavaScripty, there's Roundcube.

It's not gmail, but the point is your data's yours.

Postfix/Dovecot setup tutorials

Thanks for mentioning this. Here's some more info for folks on that argument:

The power that allows Congress to have a copyright law is in the original Constitution.

But, after that, the Constitution was amended with the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech") effectively nullifies the copyright clause.

Note: Even though the amendment rescinding Prohibition specifically mentioned the Prohibition amendment, there are a bunch of other famous/infamous clauses (like the 3/5 clause) which were superseded but weren't specifically mentioned in the superseding amendment.

This is the argument, though probably most people don't agree with it.

It's probably too late to get modded up so you can see this, but:

The technical term you are looking for is "coverage path planning", and there are well known algorithms to solve it efficiently such as Choset's Boustrophedon. I don't think any of them are optimal for a nontrivial shape, but they will probably beat most human heuristics.

In addition to lawns, this is important for machining (material removal), de-mining (completeness is essential, but overlap is expensive), and large floor cleaning.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=coverage+path+planning

slashdot mentions ed felten and his association with the same princeton organization a few times a month. some things are just taken for granted eventually.

They'd operate faster, but sometimes, especially even with code from THOSE days? It could be a "detriment" - even older code, say, developed for 8088's (especially gaming-wise), in fact, I am sure you've possibly even seen it yourself...

I did, & had, + know: In fact, @ times, I had to use programs that "lagged the system" once faster systems came out, to play older games for instance! The programs would be faster, you even note this, but with some code?? That "gain" can be a "loss"... read on!

(Used to be a "big gamer" in the mid to late 90's & I wrote stuff to improve gaming in 3d in fact folks liked & I was astounded to see there's still links to it active online in fact even to this very day -> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22APK+3dFx+Tuning+Engine%22&btnG=Google+Search )

I suppose on your statement of "when they're broken I just fix them" then, we have something in common & both code then (see the above for a tiny evidence thereof from my end)...

I.E.-> WE can build our own solutions, most folks cannot.

* So, in the end here? Well, I suppose you should be glad then if I understood you correctly, that you have put in the time for such abilities on your part, I guess is what I am trying to say (you can be your own "mechanic/tech").

APK

... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first impressions can be misleading, although I still feel there are major missing pieces or standards. We need to push on to a social semantic desktop, IMHO, and I've tried some in that direction myself...
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

By the way, a little known fact -- the 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, about a culturally sophisticated networked culture that "defeats" a huge military empire that comes to conquer it, inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (I asked Ted Nelson about this directly when he gave a talk at at IBM Research, and he had forgotten the name of the story, but that's where the name came from), and then his work obviously was one of the inspirations of the web. The story is floating around on the web, like in Google Books:
    http://www.google.com/#q=the+skills+of+xanadu

So you've seen the great computer at Apraphul? I remember when that article came out and wished I could go see it too.

A Faraday cage to block or strongly reduce 2.4Ghz signals doesn't have to be that ugly, since the allowable size of holes in the mesh is dependent on the wavelength. 2.4Ghz is a wavelength of just under 5 inches. A 2-inch grid could easily be incorporated in to the right kind of industrial-themed decor.

This. Or window screen. Or chicken wire. Or... (It doesn't have to be copper.)

Also, a Faraday cage doesn't have to be small. And the goal is not to create a totally isolated environment, but simply an environment which is quiet enough for things to work, so it doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect either.

So. Surround the booth, or just a dedicated demonstration area within the booth, with appropriate conductive mesh.

I don't know the booth in question, but if it already has three sides, it'd be easy to get a fair bit of RFI reduction just by using conductive materials instead of (or in addition to) whatever they are made from now.

Adding even a partial roof would help more.

Bond the sections together with non-insulated copper wire. It's easy to work with, easy to find in a pinch (craft stores), very adjustable for differing layouts, and cheap enough to throw away when you're done with the show.

Grounding would also be good measure. The armchair electrician in me says that the grounding should be substantial so that in case the thing accidentally gets energized somehow, it won't present a safety hazard for those around it...but I doubt that anyone else bothers with that for random metal stuff on their other booths, even if they should.

And the RF guy in me says that a couple of runs tied to different parts of the "cage" (or more, depending on the size of the booth) of 12 AWG stranded copper, connected to an available outlet or conduit or structural steel or [insert thing here] should work just fine for RF shielding purposes.

And the inspector asshat in me says the grounding conductor should have appropriately-colored insulation, which varies by locality: Green for the US, brown in some other places, but whatever it is can be found at the local hardware store. This will make it abundantly clear what the intent of the wire is to anyone with enough clue to be questioning things like that, and will reduce their questioning to a minimum.

Oh. And try to avoid creating a parabola if using curved panels for any of this, or the partial cage may variously do the opposite of what is wanted...

I'll drive 1/2 the length of the UK in an evening to go see friends for a weekend.
Once I drove the length of the UK (700ish miles) just to go on a white water rafting trip.
Last summer we drove more than the length of the UK to go to NYC for a week.

I searched for "High Mileage Car United Kingdom" and this was one of the first hits, here was another.

Those are some very low numbers. My '98 has 250k and I haven't really even driven it the last 4 years. I know people with '00-'02 that have at least that. Somehow I doubt that those in the UK drive as much as us.

Very cool of them! See, in my experience @ least? Well, I don't see too many other software game production houses doing the same, OR nearly as often, do you??

Please, feel free to correct me IF I am "off/wrong" here, because for a decade++ now I am NOT anywhere NEAR the "gamer"/gaming enthusiast that I was in the mid 90's to early 21st century!

(Even to the point of my designing a Voodoo 3DFx enchancing program -> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22APK+3dFx+Tuning+Engine%22&btnG=Google+Search because I "needed more speed" etc./et al, as all gamers are "wont to do" & THAT came from my enjoying playing Quake II mostly back then in those "halycyon days of yore", really)...

It's just that I really don't recall any other software gaming production house doing as much this way as Mr. Carmack & crew have over time - & I feel I have a "pretty good memory", especially for someone whose nearing 50 nowadays (wow, time flies)...

APK

P.S.=> Mr. C & company - Hey: They keep on, KEEPING ON, putting out "the hits" too! Beat that with a stick, naysayers...

... apk

I didn't see the accident or the aftermath, I haven't been over on that side of the block today. The intersection is this one: I've positioned the street view so that you can see the side of the Costco building which is pictured in the background of the car. The intersection sucks in general: it is fairly busy at various times during the day (including during the morning commute) and I'm not at all surprised that there was an accident there. You can see in the street view that there are cars waiting for the light pretty much everywhere and that straight through and turning traffic have to rely on everyone yielding properly for anything to happen.