You can set the mouse position through Core Graphics. No, it's not Cocoa per se, but the CG APIs can be called from Cocoa. "Direct access to memory registers" isn't required.
I implemented this (online elections, blocking duplicate votes, talking to a SQL database, with secure voting, etc.) for Stanford's student association elections in 1998, which concluded prior to the patent filing. That system was based on the system that Stanford had used for the two previous years, which did much the same thing, only in C instead of Perl, and that system itself was preceded by a telnet-based voting system. In other words, it's been done before.
"Sun's announced port of JDK 1.3 to X"? Hardly. Apple's porting Sun's code to X -- and implementing all of the native side of the Java classes, which is no small task -- and Apple's writing the Aqua plaf from scratch. Give credit where credit is due....
It's worth keeping in mind that members of Congress have limited budgets for staff, and that they usually run pretty close to their limits. When I worked in a Representative's office, we had one and a half staffers answering snail mail full-time, out of a staff of about eight. Each letter took at least 3-5 minutes to respond to, and more thought-provoking ones took a lot longer.
Now consider how easy it is to email your Representative. It'd probably take you about thirty seconds to send off a paragraph to all 538 of them. Multiply that by a zillion people emailing, and you'll see why it's simply impossible for them to respond. Ideally they'd at least have autoreplies, but that's up to the individual office, and that means that it really depends on how technically savvy each office is. Simply the cost of the staff to do anything beyond that would run to at least $50,000 per year per office, though...so is the value of being able to email your Representative worth another $25 million or so per year in funding? It depends, but I think that'd have a tough time getting approved.
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You can set the mouse position through Core Graphics. No, it's not Cocoa per se, but the CG APIs can be called from Cocoa. "Direct access to memory registers" isn't required.
I implemented this (online elections, blocking duplicate votes, talking to a SQL database, with secure voting, etc.) for Stanford's student association elections in 1998, which concluded prior to the patent filing. That system was based on the system that Stanford had used for the two previous years, which did much the same thing, only in C instead of Perl, and that system itself was preceded by a telnet-based voting system. In other words, it's been done before.
"Sun's announced port of JDK 1.3 to X"? Hardly. Apple's porting Sun's code to X -- and implementing all of the native side of the Java classes, which is no small task -- and Apple's writing the Aqua plaf from scratch. Give credit where credit is due....
Now consider how easy it is to email your Representative. It'd probably take you about thirty seconds to send off a paragraph to all 538 of them. Multiply that by a zillion people emailing, and you'll see why it's simply impossible for them to respond. Ideally they'd at least have autoreplies, but that's up to the individual office, and that means that it really depends on how technically savvy each office is. Simply the cost of the staff to do anything beyond that would run to at least $50,000 per year per office, though...so is the value of being able to email your Representative worth another $25 million or so per year in funding? It depends, but I think that'd have a tough time getting approved.