The short description of the patent sounds very much like the help system that appeared in several incarnations on MacOS. AFAIK the bubble help gave context sensitive information on GUI elements after activating it with a button. Apparently MacOS 7 came out two years before the patent was filed. Here's a screenshot of MacOS 7 with the help icon and a copyright notice.
But in this case you risk that someone else patents your invention and threatens to sue you over your own ideas - even if you published them before the patent was filed.
The PMA430 was never planned with a hi-res screen. It supports video playback with up to 704x480 pixels. But you can only profit of the resolution if you connect the device to a TV screen.
The VG Wort is also the reason why scanners, printers and copy machines often are slower in Germany than in the rest of the world. The VG Wort gets a fee based on the throughput of these machines. To lower this fee, many devices sold in Germany are (or were?) sold with reduced speed. Sometimes you could speed up peripherals by installing english drivers.
In Germany, we have the PayBack system, where you get something like 1% of each purchase on a separate account or something. It's pretty big over here, and I guess it must be comparable to the courtesy cards you mentioned.
The clue is that these cards are tranferable. So FoeBud got a card, made "Privacy-Cards" with the same barcode, and offered them to people interested in consumer privacy. Several thousand euro were collected, but PayBack wouldn't pay out.
So the whole thing went before a court. The court apparently decided that FoeBud could tell their barcode number to others, but were not allowed to print it out.
I've recently started to toy around with C#. One of the first tutorials let you embed an HTML control and connect it to forward and back buttons and a simple list of bookmarks. I made the mistake of pointing that thing to slashdot.org.
As a result, I got a hijacked homepage, two popunders and a prompt offering to install Gator like software. Apparently the web control is fully featured, but without any safeguards. I never realized that slashdot had so crappy advertisers.
A voting machine can be tampered with in many ways. Even if you audit the code of the voting software itself, you can not trust the machine. F.e. you would also have to audit the toolchain (in binary - not the source), the whole OS, the means of transportation (exchanging CF cards or tampering with routers) and the backend. (How can you be sure the database isn't changed afterward?)
And you have to make absolutely sure only the revieved components are used on each machine.
This is perfectly not doable.
You can only treat such a system as a black box. A paper trail would make it possible to manually recount the results for some randomly selected machines to make sure the results match.
Funny. My own little script can unhide the paragraphs one by one. S5 cannot. I always considered this the key feature of PowerPoint like presentations.
For my presentations at university, I implemented my own HtmlPresenter this spring. If you're curious how a more basic implementation looks like, or want to use a more simple system, be welcome to use it.
It has the potential to be great, but we need to get past all this "add more features" and fix security programs.
Maybe Firefox is not yet as secure as it should be. But people are intensely at work tightening things up. According to The Burning Edge no less then 10 security related bugs have been fixed in the last week. The developers are obviously using the random HTML script, and the security bug hunting program seems to pay off.
I'm under the impression that Firefox developers are working very hard to provide a secure version 1.0 of Firefox.
But while some people do at least try to count the civilian victims of te latest Iraq war (here), I never heard any estimates on the number of Iraq military victims.
AFAIK Indymedia servers don't log IP addresses. So it's questionable whether any useful information was found. However, installing a backdoor could enable agencies to log and retrieve IP addresses from now on.
When I first heard of the story, I looked for mirrors of what is supposed to be the incriminating site. It contains four pictures of two guys who are supposedly undercover policemen. The photos have _not_ been redacted. I guess it doesn't hurt to post the short text that came with it. But my french is a little rusty and the automatic tranlators do a poor job on this: GENÈVE post-G8 : Vidéos, photos et témoignages ; tout est bon pour remonter la piste des casseurs. Un travail minutieux poursuivi aujourd'hui par deux inspecteurs, et qui a conduit à 200 arrestations à ce jour.
La cellule G8 avait pourtant été dissoute en décembre 2003. Elle a repris du service, en plus petit : deux inspecteurs.
Ces inspecteurs visionnent des films et photos reçu par des balancent et des collègues.
Ils viennent aux manifs sur Genève où ils pensent retrouver des "casseurs"
De plus ils prennent de nouvelles photos afin peut être de constituer une bande de données de photos d'activistes suceptibles d'être les futures casseurs des futures émeutes Genevoises.
Comme le dit l'un des 2 inspecteurs : J'ai vu deux de mes collègues se faire lyncher pendant les manifs anti-OMC, en 1998, raconte un inspecteur. Je ne l'oublierai jamais.
Peut etre qu'il y a d'autres choses que cet inspecteur n'obliera jamais ! Car il n'y a pas que le Carpacio comme plat qui se mange froid !
I never had a problem with the ending in "The Diamond Age". Who cares about the stuff you described above?
The point IMO was that technology shapes culture. The central feeder system led to the Vickies with their rigorous self-discipline to become a dominant phyle. But their culture is inadequate to deal with the more powerful tech of the seed. So confucianism will be the next dominant culture.
I'd say the Gmini 400 is more attractive than the AV400 to most people. Unlike the AV400 it can't record video, has a smaller screen and only limited video playback.
But the Gmini is very small, can play audio, video, display images and has a nice gaming engine. It also is cheap by comparison and a real alternative to the iPod.
Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
One of the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein was that he sold oil for Euros and also converted the cash reserves of the nation to Euros (~ $10 billion). He served as a bad example to the region.
And now you claim the cost of occupying Iraq destabilizes the Dollar?
Personally I think the intimidation factor to be more important than the US deficit (at least in the short term).
What do you use to move something that masses 100 million tons, anyway? That's about what an asteroid 1/2 mile in diameter will mass.
The obvious answer is: Part of the asteroid. The energy almost certainly would have to come from nuclear reactors. And you already mentioned mass drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
One easy solution could be to declare that a pure software product cannot infringe on patents.
Perhaps people are trying to tackle the whole thing from the wrong end.
You can choose between any of this government.
Structs:
Important for the efficient implementation of custom math types.
Unsigned numbers:
Important for image and video processing.
Support for caching native code:
Important for reducing the startup times of GUI applications.
Support for multiple languagues in the CLI:
Important for migrating existing applications.
The short description of the patent sounds very much like the help system that appeared in several incarnations on MacOS.
AFAIK the bubble help gave context sensitive information on GUI elements after activating it with a button.
Apparently MacOS 7 came out two years before the patent was filed. Here's a screenshot of MacOS 7 with the help icon and a copyright notice.
You do not have to patent an invention.
But in this case you risk that someone else patents your invention and threatens to sue you over your own ideas - even if you published them before the patent was filed.
Sound ridiculous? It has happened in a prominent case.
The PMA430 was never planned with a hi-res screen. It supports video playback with up to 704x480 pixels. But you can only profit of the resolution if you connect the device to a TV screen.
If so, you may want to consider to book a parabolic flight with ZERO-G.
John Carmack has taken the ride and seems to have liked it a lot.
The VG Wort is also the reason why scanners, printers and copy machines often are slower in Germany than in the rest of the world.
The VG Wort gets a fee based on the throughput of these machines. To lower this fee, many devices sold in Germany are (or were?) sold with reduced speed.
Sometimes you could speed up peripherals by installing english drivers.
In Germany, we have the PayBack system, where you get something like 1% of each purchase on a separate account or something. It's pretty big over here, and I guess it must be comparable to the courtesy cards you mentioned.
The clue is that these cards are tranferable. So FoeBud got a card, made "Privacy-Cards" with the same barcode, and offered them to people interested in consumer privacy. Several thousand euro were collected, but PayBack wouldn't pay out.
So the whole thing went before a court. The court apparently decided that FoeBud could tell their barcode number to others, but were not allowed to print it out.
Microsoft did get caught.
They just were not punished.
I've recently started to toy around with C#. One of the first tutorials let you embed an HTML control and connect it to forward and back buttons and a simple list of bookmarks. I made the mistake of pointing that thing to slashdot.org.
As a result, I got a hijacked homepage, two popunders and a prompt offering to install Gator like software.
Apparently the web control is fully featured, but without any safeguards. I never realized that slashdot had so crappy advertisers.
A voting machine can be tampered with in many ways. Even if you audit the code of the voting software itself, you can not trust the machine.
F.e. you would also have to audit the toolchain (in binary - not the source), the whole OS, the means of transportation (exchanging CF cards or tampering with routers) and the backend. (How can you be sure the database isn't changed afterward?)
And you have to make absolutely sure only the revieved components are used on each machine.
This is perfectly not doable.
You can only treat such a system as a black box. A paper trail would make it possible to manually recount the results for some randomly selected machines to make sure the results match.
Funny. My own little script can unhide the paragraphs one by one. S5 cannot. I always considered this the key feature of PowerPoint like presentations.
For my presentations at university, I implemented my own HtmlPresenter this spring. If you're curious how a more basic implementation looks like, or want to use a more simple system, be welcome to use it.
I hereby put it into the public domain.
It has the potential to be great, but we need to get past all this "add more features" and fix security programs.
Maybe Firefox is not yet as secure as it should be. But people are intensely at work tightening things up.
According to The Burning Edge no less then 10 security related bugs have been fixed in the last week.
The developers are obviously using the random HTML script, and the security bug hunting program seems to pay off.
I'm under the impression that Firefox developers are working very hard to provide a secure version 1.0 of Firefox.
I now this is somewhat offtopic.
But while some people do at least try to count the civilian victims of te latest Iraq war (here),
I never heard any estimates on the number of Iraq military victims.
Does anyone now of any estimates?
Is the US economically able to not be at war for a prolonged time?
AFAIK Indymedia servers don't log IP addresses. So it's questionable whether any useful information was found.
However, installing a backdoor could enable agencies to log and retrieve IP addresses from now on.
When I first heard of the story, I looked for mirrors of what is supposed to be the incriminating site.
It contains four pictures of two guys who are supposedly undercover policemen. The photos have _not_ been redacted.
I guess it doesn't hurt to post the short text that came with it. But my french is a little rusty and the automatic tranlators do a poor job on this:
GENÈVE post-G8 : Vidéos, photos et témoignages ; tout est bon pour remonter la piste des casseurs. Un travail minutieux poursuivi aujourd'hui par deux inspecteurs, et qui a conduit à 200 arrestations à ce jour.
La cellule G8 avait pourtant été dissoute en décembre 2003. Elle a repris du service, en plus petit : deux inspecteurs.
Ces inspecteurs visionnent des films et photos reçu par des balancent et des collègues.
Ils viennent aux manifs sur Genève où ils pensent retrouver des "casseurs"
De plus ils prennent de nouvelles photos afin peut être de constituer une bande de données de photos d'activistes suceptibles d'être les futures casseurs des futures émeutes Genevoises.
Comme le dit l'un des 2 inspecteurs : J'ai vu deux de mes collègues se faire lyncher pendant les manifs anti-OMC, en 1998, raconte un inspecteur. Je ne l'oublierai jamais.
Peut etre qu'il y a d'autres choses que cet inspecteur n'obliera jamais ! Car il n'y a pas que le Carpacio comme plat qui se mange froid !
I never had a problem with the ending in "The Diamond Age". Who cares about the stuff you described above?
The point IMO was that technology shapes culture. The central feeder system led to the Vickies with their rigorous self-discipline to become a dominant phyle. But their culture is inadequate to deal with the more powerful tech of the seed. So confucianism will be the next dominant culture.
The point is made. Story ends.
I'd say the Gmini 400 is more attractive than the AV400 to most people. Unlike the AV400 it can't record video, has a smaller screen and only limited video playback.
But the Gmini is very small, can play audio, video, display images and has a nice gaming engine. It also is cheap by comparison and a real alternative to the iPod.
The Archos Gmini 400 already has all the features that this article hints at. It doesn't cost much more than the iPod and is of good quality.
Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
One of the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein was that he sold oil for Euros and also converted the cash reserves of the nation to Euros (~ $10 billion). He served as a bad example to the region.
And now you claim the cost of occupying Iraq destabilizes the Dollar?
Personally I think the intimidation factor to be more important than the US deficit (at least in the short term).
I would predict that by 2014, you will have global flights with max times of 90 minutes...
90 minutes around the globe means orbital speed pretty much exactly. Once you are in orbit, you can choose the time you're up at your leisure.
What do you use to move something that masses 100 million tons, anyway? That's about what an asteroid 1/2 mile in diameter will mass.
The obvious answer is: Part of the asteroid.
The energy almost certainly would have to come from nuclear reactors.
And you already mentioned mass drivers.