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The patent is rejected here in Canada. Mainly, I think, to set precedent against (and continuing with precedent of) patenting the "higher life forms", as was mentioned.

If you want, you can also look here for a local article on the topic. The methodologies etc are patentable, the life form is not (in Canada).

Really, it should be this way in the rest of the world too, patenting the methologies and general process (not the lifeform) should be quite enough to prevent against scientific pilfering.

No salt needed. I'll vouch for what you've said. My full disclosure is that I do own a TV. It's a 1976 12" Electrohome. No cable. :-)

KCTS, Beautiful BC Magazine, and Overwaitea Foods grocery stores funded a project to film British Columbia. The video is named Over BC.

It is stunning.

To promote the video, it was shown in Overwaitea and Save-On stores, running off uncompressed digital tape and displayed on a true HDTV. No artifacting: 20MHz bandwidth sent to a 1080x1920x60Hz (120Hz interlaced) professional-grade display.

Mindblowing quality. It's like watching film, but without the flicker. Amazing detail. Rock-solid imaging. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Naturally, the HDTV that we're actually ending up with can't compare. It's been compressed, so there's all sorts of obnoxious aliasing. And the screen quality isn't quite up to the pro-quality $50,000 rig they had at the store. And it's impossible to pump 20MHz of information to consumers; current standards limit HDTV to about 6MHz bandwidth, with a subsequent loss of detail and quality.

But, still, even the consumer-grade stuff looks a helluva lot better than the age-old NTSC format.

Shame there's still nothing on TV worth watching.

You think that's bad, check this out.

Have you seen this?

On a somewhat related note, free speech seems to be threatened from several directions lately. An article was in the papers here a couple days ago. This poor woman has been accused of hate crimes for criticizing US foreign policy.

Sad that gold has turned away from being the world's foremost item of currency into a ping-pong ball for physics experiments.

Let's see, at US$270.30/troy ounce (London PM fix), works out to US$8.69/gram.

So how many gold atoms were subjected to this horribly painful experiment? I don't know, the articles didn't say. But then the Ministry of Forests doesn't release numbers of spotted owls either. But I digress...

There are 6.02*10^23 gold atoms in a gram (it is monovalent usually in an isometric crystal as a native mineral). Let us assume that two hundred innocent gold atoms were subjected to this "experiment". That works out to 3.32*10^-22 grams of gold! (Or in other numbers, that is 3.32*10^-28 TONNES!). At the present gold price, that works out to US$0.0289*10^-19 !!! Wasted, I say!

Are all you US taxpayers as horrified at the expenditure of your tax dollars on this experiment? Here is what you do:

Fire up your web browser and point it to the white house web site

send them a message expressing your outrage. I suggest the following:
GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

That should get our message out there. Save the Gold!

-AD

This one should have been an Ask Slashdot

What are the best/funniest April Fools jokes and articles on the web that you've seen? My favourite was the Mybc.com article about a bridge shutdown because of a rare bird. What makes it even better troll is that we are in the middle of a transit strike.

Richer still the NDP (aka) socialists are about to be trounced -- check out the latin bird names

There are provincial prefixes for many of the Canadian TLD like this one, but there are also lots of ones like this one. Heck, even this one doesn't bother with the provincial prefix.

I was registering a domain a few years back, and the price was the same for a .com or a .ca, so I don't know why the US can't get it together...

Actually, Telus still offers a reverse number lookup service online.

For BC: click here.

I assumed there was one for Alberta, but don't see it. I don't remember whether one ever existed, though.

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windows users.. yeah.. don't scare them with VI - they wouldn't know what to do with a program that works reliable and efficiently to the point that it hardly uses and resources and requires only knowledge of a few basic commands to make it work powerfully.. instead.. give em emacs. bastard