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From the shorter PDF:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6175789.html — Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7054745.html — Method and system for generating driving directions

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6704032.html — Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7117286.html — Portable computing device-integrated appliance

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6202008.html — Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5579517.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5758352.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.google.com/patents?id=02YIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,256,642 — Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory.

Some other text seems necessary in order to type stuff and get links in.

From the shorter PDF:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6175789.html — Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7054745.html — Method and system for generating driving directions

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6704032.html — Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7117286.html — Portable computing device-integrated appliance

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6202008.html — Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5579517.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5758352.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.google.com/patents?id=02YIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,256,642 — Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory.

Some other text seems necessary in order to type stuff and get links in.

From the shorter PDF:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6175789.html — Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7054745.html — Method and system for generating driving directions

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6704032.html — Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7117286.html — Portable computing device-integrated appliance

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6202008.html — Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5579517.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5758352.html — Common name space for long and short filenames

http://www.google.com/patents?id=02YIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,256,642 — Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory.

Some other text seems necessary in order to type stuff and get links in.

BULL-fucking-SHIT. The ~3 MILLIgrams of Hg in a CFL are in an entirely inorganic metal amalgam form. Stop pulling wacky pseudoscience scare tactic shit out of your ass and claiming it as truth.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/4549302.html

What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.

You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?

While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).

If other patents dealt with singular icons or methods thereof, and if no one has lined out, in writing, a similar system prior to 2001 (the date of submission), then, well... maybe it's time to pass out the Pepto Bismol©.

What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.

You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?

While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).

If other patents dealt with singular icons or methods thereof, and if no one has lined out, in writing, a similar system prior to 2001 (the date of submission), then, well... maybe it's time to pass out the Pepto Bismol©.

What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.

You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?

While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).

If other patents dealt with singular icons or methods thereof, and if no one has lined out, in writing, a similar system prior to 2001 (the date of submission), then, well... maybe it's time to pass out the Pepto Bismol©.

Economy (not just US economy, but especially US) is in deep f.cking shit. This is a symptom. You see, very little is actually produced in the US at this point, but more regulations, lawsuits, patents, various copyrighted materials like movies/music are still made there (I live in Canada, we are not far away from this problem here also, except that our movies/music sucks even more.)

When there is nothing to produce except for more laws/regulations, meaningless, useless, obvious patents and lawsuits, and also the greenback, at this point you have to ask yourself a question: how is this economy, that borrows so much from the rest of the world and then buys the products from the rest of the world going to pay the freaking debt? What is it, 10 trillion in debt at least?

Anyway, I read TFPatent and thought to myself: holy shit. In 1998 I worked on a system for a purchase basket for a promotions company and I had to display thumbnails on the HTML page too.

In fact various stores and also porn sites would be great at showing prior art to this BS patent.

claiming that it holds the patent on a common file preview feature used by browsers and operating systems to show users small snapshots of the files before they are opened

The page for this patent at patentstorm.com shows users a small snapshot of the patent before it is opened.

Sure, but the Microsoft Butt hinge with integrally formed butt straps patent is still valid, so watch out for Microsoft cornering the world market on butt hinges! (I suspect Microsoft does have a fair number of hardware patents for mice, keyboards, etc.)

There is a patent that explains how to radically increase the efficiency of compressed air energy storage.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5832728/description.html

The key it to preserve the heat energy of compression. Most air compressors have multiple stages and cool the air in-between stages. This throws away a lot of useful energy, but they do it because otherwise the compressed air would be hot enough to melt iron.

There is a simple solution. Use wet air. The heat energy of compression is used to change the sate of water from liquid to steam. The resulting temperature of the steam/air mix is low enough for safe and easy storage in insulated pressure vessels. Whether air expands in the engine (or because of a leak in the pressure vessel), the steam returns to harmless water.

A combines steam air engine is vastly more efficient than air alone! Steam Punk indeed.

The future is soon here, no more bulky laptops: http://www.3mmpro.com/specifications.aspx + foldable screen + https://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5847784.html + pda/powerful phone + http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/

... and relies on the cunning use of a rabbit, tree, and hole to tie shoelaces.

Did anyone else hate that as much as I did? My grandmother would run through that thing as if it were a pop song and here I was, not only having to figure out a technique that was difficult for me at the time, but I also had to learn some retarded metaphor about rabbits running through logs and then try to decipher that into something that could be applied to the world around me, in real time.

There's no joke there, I'm just curious if anyone else ever had the same experience...

... and relies on the cunning use of a rabbit, tree, and hole to tie shoelaces.

It's also oozing with potential patent abuse:

U.S. Patent No. 7,403,392: A portable, self-contained liquid submersion cooling system that is suitable for cooling a number of electronic devices, including cooling heat-generating components in computer systems and other systems that use electronic, heat-generating components.

How delightfully generic and self evident. Nobody has ever thought to immerse components in liquid to cool them.

And as long as they're building a wire grid across the entire damned state there's no reason why we can't have some taxpayer-owned or power company owned fiber optic cable up on that tower too.

Maybe they wouldn't need to string a separate cable:

US Patent 6343172 - Composite fiber optic/coaxial electrical cables

However, I haven't been able to find anyone actually manufacturing or using this composite cable.

Any attempt to enter the market without a license would bring down Intel legal on them like flying monkeys blackening the sky.

How is it that AMD is able to release x86 chips, but nVidia can't without a license from Intel? Why would nVidia need AMD to be gracious?

nVidia could do so without a license from anyone. The problem here is that it would have to be a 'clean sheet' design to avoid AMD and Intel patents. This is very, very difficult to do, especially if one has no engineers on staff who have worked on previous x86 designs.

The last company to do this, successfully anyway, that I'm aware of, was Nexgen. The company was founded by a group of engineers who left Intel around 1993/94 thinking they could build a better x86 'mousetrap'. They did. They created the first RISC/CISC hybrid core which was first implemented in the Nx586.

Because Nexgen designed a RISC core with a fixed length instruction set and executed the variable length x86 instructions decoded as multiple sequences of the RISC instructions, they avoided all of Intel's patents relating to the ISA. They also used a different pin out with their first chip, thus avoiding Intel's motherboard interface (socket) patents. Intel later adopted a similar RISC/CISC microarchitecture starting with the Pentium Pro. AMD then acquired Nexgen, put the Nx686 into a socket 7 pinout due to their Intel license and sold it as the AMD K6, a direct competitor to the Pentium. From that point forward, all Intel and AMD x86 core designs are based on this RISC/CISC concept, including the current quad core chips. That's 12 years of the same basic microarchitecture.

If you want good x86 performance today, you have to use this RISC86 (TM AMD) like RISC/CISC core design in order to enable pipelining. AMD owns the RISC86 patent due to the Nexgen acuisition:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5926642/description.html

If you don't your performance ends up like VIA's chips which are still using a plain old fully CISC core.

In summary, unless nVidia does an extremely clever clean sheet design based on something like VLIW and decoding/emulation, they must have licenses for some x86 related patents from either Intel or AMD to build a competitive chip. Intel and Transmeta already tried the VLIW route for x86 emulation and the performance was abysmal. So, as I've explained here, nVidia has two options: build or buy. If they try the clean sheet route they may bankrupt themselves due to R&D costs before they succeed. That's a huge gamble to make with shareholders' money. The only smart way for nVidia to enter this chip segment is by acquiring a company who already owns the relevant patents or has the necessary licenses, or to write a check for a license to the patents. And apparently, neither AMD nor Intel are willing to accept such a check, or have demanded a figure on it greater than nVidia is willing to pay.

If you're still a bit unclear on the x86 patent stuff...

Intel owns patents on:
x86 ISA, x86 microcode, back side L2 cache bus, AGTL+ CPU to chipset interface bus logic

AMD owns patents on: x86-64 ISA, RISC-86 decoder core

This is by no means a complete list of each company's relevant patents, but demonstrates those minimally necessary to even think about building a competitive chip.

I'll throw this trivia in here as many of you are likely unaware of it. The "back side cache bus" mentioned above, that came to PCs with the Pentium Pro and has been with every chip since, was invented by a RISC workstation company or yore called Intergraph. To give you an idea of how important this back side bus is, disable the L2 cache in your system BIOS and then run a game. You'll lose about 80% of your PC's performance--no joke, try it. They had their own propriety RISC processor called the Clipper chip, and it was at the time the fastest thing on planet, mainly d

You can't patent an instruction set, because an instruction set is an interface, not an implementation.

Maybe that can't be done, but it hasn't stopped people from trying to get around that.

Patents must and do include "details on how to recreate such an idea". It's called the "description". While you no longer need to produce a prototype there is generally enough in the description for "someone skilled in the art2 to recreate it.

The problem is the description is written in verbose, obscure "patent speak" which is not enough to reproduce the patent. Like this nonsense (picked, I might say, pretty much at random from a Google search on computer patents):

The most recent data is copied from the first memory location to a second memory location, where the most recent data is added to the historical data. Once the copying is done, the most recent data is deleted from the first memory location. Once the first memory location is cleared, the polling of the heterogeneous computers begins. The initial polling is to determine if each one of the plurality of heterogeneous computers is active. [Source]

At best you can say that "most recent data is copied [etc]" is a computer program crudely and inaccurately translated into lawyer speak. At worse you could say that this is just obfuscation. Provide source code in a common programming language to make what you're trying to say clear and precise.

Rich.

Why not just cut out the middleman?

Alpha particles cause errors in memory chips - see jargon file:

Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.

Obviously, modern memory chips are designed to be properly shielded from those, otherwise as memory densities increase, memory errors caused by that radiation would render them useless.

See also: US patent 6531759 - Alpha particle shield for integrated circuit from IBM.

Wrong spinel; there are several (just for manganese alone, there's LiMnO2, LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, and combinations thereof). This spinel is the primary one being investigated for automotive applications. Read more about the differences and Argonne's work on the subject (they have their own version). For LG Chem's cells, accelerated aging tests suggests a lifespan of 15 to 40 years. When referring to automotive batteries, when someone says "spinel", it's cells like LG chem's that they're talking about.

Look, before you start spouting off, educate yourself. If you had to look up the terms on these most basic issues of battery chemistry, you're way out of the loop and need to get in the loop before you debate the topic. It's not like these are esoteric details; we're talking about the fundamentals.

The phosphates probably are the most widely known. These are what powered, among many other different vehicles, the Killacycle electric motorcycle, with its 0-60 in less than 1 second. Check into them -- A123 reports over 7,000 normal cycles on them, while independent testing by people on the RC Groups forum (they're becoming popular for RC aircraft) put them through over a thousand incredibly abusive cycles (3-4C charge, 6-8C discharge, sometimes all the way down to 0V) and only lost 20% capacity. And, heck, while you're at it, check out the titanates. They're even more impressive, IMHO, than the phosphates and spinels. AltairNano has done over *20,000 cycles* on a single pack. They're so stable that they're being used for grid load balancing, where the cells go from drawing 2MW from the grid to feeding 2MW to the grid, over and over whenever demand or supply fluctuates, to give peaking plants time to come online.

Actual Chemical Process:

Wiki

PatentStorm

Interesting in a science project sort of way, but as a marketable product... one would think that there are better things we could be wasting our money and brains on.

As it so happens, you are entirely correct.

I became aware of this through a friend. He became aware of it while working on such a project. There is in fact a relevant patent. You probably would be more interested in reading ADVANCED INTEGRATED WASTEWATER POND SYSTEMS (AIWPS) By Tuba Ertas and Victor M. Ponce or Methane fermentation, submerged gas collection, and the fate of carbon in advanced integrated wastewater pond systems (the basis for the patent, I believe?)

I'm really hoping that those medical face masks get popular again. That's a look that should really be cyclic like bell-bottoms and thongs.

You need full Respirator gear if you want to stop nano-tubes from getting in your lungs. Even then, with it being so small, your only chance of stop those tubes is if they are even long enough to get caught in the filter.

Thank GOD people have taken the initiative and developing nanotube filters.

Looks like the idea has already been patented.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7295132/description.html

Hopefully no one (or everyone) gets the copyright from the drugs, and the researchers are just doing this from the sheer goodness in their hearts that drives them to find the cure to cancer. . .

Unless you consider yourself an input device[patentstorm.com]

How about a way of using a piece of software to create a text document that has never been seen before, but is known to exist?

Right, I think the shark got me after the first paragraph.

I was thinking hey neat till I read this in the article.

For one thing, the light comes to a focus far away from the foil sheet - with distances measured in kilometres, which means the camera and other instruments have to be mounted on a separate spacecraft. The instrument spacecraft would have to stay precisely aligned with the foil sheet, to within a millimetre or so.

Certainly not impossible, and still exciting, but this isn't going to be a mainstream or amateur tool any time soon.

Looks like there also may be a related patent to get past...

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6375326-claims.html

If so, hope they are paying royalties to the patent-holder:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6084285.html

Obvious means 'Easily seen through because of a lack of subtlety'

We are talking about the ability to manipulate a buffer. Or to work with something half-downloaded. I have personally re-invented this concept, pretty much independently of Tivo -- in this case, it was figuring out that you can play back a file that is partially downloaded, before the download finishes. Looks like YouTube and everyone else are doing the same thing there.

MP3 is patented by side-effect; The MP3 patent covers a particular wavelet function that mp3 decoders need to use. It's entirely possible there's another function that produces the same result, but it's not the act of playing wavelet-compressed sounds that's patented here.

It is, however, the act of playing back any file which conforms to that mp3 standard. Yes, it is by side effect, but the result is the same -- despite the implementation being completely different, and the context being completely different, royalties must be paid.

Perhaps you simply hate patents, and hate TiVO because they patented something?

I don't have TiVo. And I am interested to see how this plays out.

I do hate patents. I feel that they retard progress more than promote it, and thus defeat their own original purpose. And I feel that 15 years is an insanely long time in today's world -- the patented item would either be irrelevant or already dominant within maybe two years.

But I don't actually know enough about the patents in question. However, if the concept is simply "pausing live TV", then it absolutely was an obvious idea, in that anyone forced to use Linux video tools from that time period would likely have come up with the same thing.

Would MythTV have come up with the idea of pausing and rewinding live TV using the method described by TiVO *without* TiVO?

The MythTV project, as is, might not exist. But someone would have.

The MythTV developers seem to think not, do you?

From that page:

It's credited with being a major influence on MythTV...

Nowhere does it say that MythTV could never have come up with the idea without TiVo.

Ah no. There's a very old light bulb which demonstrates that there's a significant amount of wiggle room in both the manufacturing and the materials.

And nothing on that page says anything about the manufacturing or the materials.

Do you just like to post impressive-looking links, hoping that people won't actually read them? Or is there a substance I am missing? That's not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.

You can't patent a mere idea. You patent an *invention*. It has to be something that can be built (although not necessarily work).

Yes, in theory. But that's not what's happening.

Allow me to direct you to this patent on what is effectively "dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/my-flash-device/mbr.img bs=512 count=1"

Or maybe you'd like to know about this patent...

I could go on. And on. The fact is, the patent system is so thoroughly broken right now that my first reaction to just about any patent is to question whether or not it should actually be a patent. I mean, somebody's got to question it, and the US Patent Office certainly isn't...

Nobody's patented "playing mp3 files" either.

They have, however, patented an "invention" which is required to play MP3 files. Which is the whole point, really -- I can't legally play MP3 files without permission to use that wavelet function, which is, after all, even more general than MP3. It's also, by the way, one reason people are wary of MSOOXML.

When a company, a non corporeal legal entity, has more rights than the meat sacks something is seriously out of whack.

Companies now hold more of an interest in the inner workings of your own body than you do, and have laid successful claim to elements of orbital mechanics.

What's next? Patents being issued on the revitalizing and energizing properties of sunshine? The hydrating effects of water?

What are 1000 patent lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

A patent on hash tables in 2006. There is nothing terribly special about the data structure. Wtf?

At a glance the patent "Method and apparatus for identifying unique client users from user behavioral data" seems to apply: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7092926-description.html

For a given amount of charge, an ultracapacitor is a lot *heavier* than a battery bank.

--- SER

"Medicinal nitroglycerin is chemically identical to the explosive, but it is safe because it is far more dilute than pure nitroglycerin, and is bound to other inert substances that disrupts its perfect oxygen balance."

It's also put in condoms to improve erectile function, as it's a vasodilator.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4829991.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5741511-description.html
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_health_story_skin/529240%3Fformat=html

I can't wait until they combine one of these with one of these and get this. A patent abstract is here.

Well hell, at least Amazon is sticking to ideas from the current era. It's not like they applied for AND GOT a patent for a coordinate transformation that PREDATES THE FRICKING PATENT OFFICE!

Bemopolis

OK.

Google search. Video appears to be especially popular.

Or a patent for such technology.

Second, a digital file never wears out, so there is no point to a "used market". On the other hand, it is easy to make unlimited perfect copies of a file

Oh but digital files do wear out. Media, both analogue and digital, wears out. And when digital files are duplicated random errors are introduced.

The article, I notice, is rather light on details about what sort of patents they're talking about. As the OP says, people don't buy patents--they buy products. So concretely, what sort of innovation is Microsoft involved in? The article doesn't really go into that.

Frankly, I think the patent system hasn't been a good gauge of innovation in many, many years. Patents are issued for everything from BS "perpetual motion machines" to the grilled cheese sandwich are granted routinely.

But it *is* like CTRL and ALT,

A 'space cadet keyboard' can still be patented in the US, e.g. USP 6885315, "The present invention relates to a keyboard having special keys provided thereon, and more particularly to a keyboard that enables a user to perform professional and convenient operation or document editing directly under a computer operating system without the need of memorizing and combining multiple keys or using a mouse as an aid."
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6885315-description.html
filed 2002-04-08, Issued on April 26, 2005

That is, 'when the inmates run the asylum'.

CC.

You mean things like these? http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6153958.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6211589.html http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:-TuUthMBszcJ:www.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/pdf/mecatronique/EnergiesRenouv/Flywheel_Bernard_PCIM2003.PDF+energy+storage+centrifuge&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11 http://www.google.com/search?q=energy+storage+centrifuge&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

Curious myself, I did a little googling and found quite a few references to Namco's patent #5718632 Issued on February 17, 1998.

I probably should have googled in the first place, it wasn't that hard to find.

The ultimate in safety, especially if combined with modern glassification techniques. But why bother? Recycle using breeder reactors -- there is after all a finite supply of mine-able uranium on the planet.

What I don't is get that the idea of letting the tires with the road make noise is already old..
It is used to keep the drivers awake: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6547484-description.html

So what is the big deal.. making a song of something that can make noise is just a step further,
there are many who do so with strange devices, like:

- a HP Scanjet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHcV8vZ96OM
- a hard disk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61dv64sZWnA

Strange, I thought that was a Cingular/AT&T feature.

You're confusing that with the "Giant Sphere of Static" feature. The Cone of Silence got patented. Really. It did.

All you need is an appropriate length of oxygen free copper cable/wire with sufficient shielding and appropriate gauge. All but the lowest of low end OEM cables meet these needs. Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding. Any perceived difference is in the listeners head.

Close but a few facts are left out. Lets touch base on speaker cable and what it needs to do. It needs to move electric power from one place to another. Along the way it needs to keep most of the power (all cable has resistance and loss even superconductors which have a bit less). In moving power is should deliver all frequencies the same.

Now back to your statement... oxygen free copper cable/wire Hmm, the first step seems to trend to snake oil. I'll grant you that oxygen free has lower resistance than plain copper, but how much? Is it worth the money? Would the money be better spent on maybe a larger wire size? You will find the lack of copper wire resistance tables for copper wire and oxygen free copper wire almost completely absent. The reason is because the change is almost not measurable. If it essentially makes no change, why spend the money.

Copper wire facts are easy to find and are well docummented.

http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346
http://www.stealth316.com/2-wire-resistance.htm
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/wiring/wire_resistance.html
http://amasci.com/tesla/wire1.txt
http://www.thelenchannel.com/1wire.php

On the other hand the data on oxygen free seems to be tied up in perceptions and not solid facts. Where are the tables?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060198757.html
http://mobile-emotions.com/speakerwire_faq.html?1062644160781
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5443665-description.html
http://www.cda.org.uk/megab2/elecapps/pub122/sec72.htm

"Oddly enough, it isn't the freedom of oxygen in copper wire that makes any difference. The process of removing oxygen also removes the impurity of iron and it's this impurity that can cause the resistance to be slightly higher."

Could someone please define and give a measurement to me for Slightly higher? As in is the change enough to spend money on? Until someone publishes a table, I would assume slightly higher is slightly less than the measuring test equipment. A larger wire size is a measurable change. Oxygen free as far as I am concerned is below the threshold of measurement.

Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding.

OK here I disagree with you again. The number of strands and twist in the wire affect the ability of a wire to withstand repeated flexing. When I worked doing some TV studio stuff, I had to show some of the features of some of the cable to the staff. The low loss and low price was a draw to the PHB who thought he was a studio engineer. I showed him the flaw in his reasoning when I held up a 3 foot piece of coax and pushed out a ceiling tile. Then I held up a 1 foot length of super flex which had much poorer response and the 1 foot length flopped over like a piece of braided nylon rope. The signal loss for the studio was a trade off for cable that stood up well following the cameras without breaking. A cable that lays flat instead

First, I'm sorry to bring this comment to your attention:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=292837&cid=20543831

I've only looked at one of them:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6738294.html

Second - what can you say about NH as an entropy distiler? Are there any nice provable properties that follow from it being a universal hash function?

Thanks for doing interesting work!