But it's an interesting lesson to see an authoritarian authorship system like that end up irrelevant and forgotten, because this is the sort of road current copyright maximalists would love to lead us down.
I know. Most of the Xanadu people were libertarians of the "markets are the solution to everything" persuasion. The World Wide Web might have turned out that way. There was a previous generation of paid online information businesses - Minitel, Nexis, Lexis, etc. - where you did pay for almost everything you looked at. Xanadu was supposed to be a better implementation of that model.
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power.
It got implemented. Autodesk funded an implementation. I knew the people who did that job. It just wasn't very useful. It was a centralized storage and revision control scheme for text only (No pictures; Nelson was very text-oriented) tied to a micropayments system. You paid to read a document, and payments were parcelled out to everybody who'd contributed to the document.
The fundamental problem was that it assumed that most text documents were worth orders of magnitude than they are now. Pricing was intended to be comparable to what overpriced academic journals charge for online access today.
Another part of the problem was that Nelson had very strong ideas about how it should be implemented, but didn't know much about database technology.
Everybody is digging the music, but no one is dancing.
That's usually a "DJ trying to be too cool" problem.
There are automated DJ programs, but so far, no one seems to have one that takes in video of the dance floor, tracks how many people are dancing, and adjusts the playlist accordingly. I thought of doing that 20 years ago, but now it would be both feasible and cost-effective. (Optional feature: also connects to the bar cash register system to optimize for revenue.)
The next frontier in robotics is installation and maintenance. A robot that can change parts in failed equipment is a ways off, but worth working on. Think of this as something for industrial plants, not homes.
That's one of the few commercial applications that justifies a humanoid robot like Atlas. I wonder if Google is heading in that direction.
Scan every girl in the club. Breakdown the odds each girl could get pregnant tonight. Weed out those menstruating.
There's probably an app for that. (But not a good one; Night Club Girl only has a 1 star review.)
(Hm. Can we figure out a woman's period from her Facebook and Twitter posts? Scan text for negativism, correlate on 28 day cycle, sync to PMS period. OK, that's done. Next, check Foursquare and Twitter location for who's there. Run Anaface on the photos to decide who's hot and who's not. Check friends list to see who's attached to whom, and if their SO is present. Rank and provide list.)
There have been $30 tablets available in Shentzen for a year. Most have an Allwinner ARM SOIC, which is a very cheap part yet quite powerful. It costs $1100 to move an entire shipping container from Shentzen to Los Angeles. Not clear what the hold-up has been.
Tablets will be sold in bubble-packs at the drugstore.
That seems too simplistic. Shared document editing has all the same issues as shared source code editing. Just saving old versions in their entirity isn't too helpful, especially when multiple people are editing. You need something at least as good as Wikipedia history diffs. (Git might be overkill.)
This could be really useful for business use, where you don't want Google to know your business plans. What does the server-side component look like? The demo site lets you edit.odf in your browser, but you can't push it back to the server.
This isn't the first U.S. Army laser system that can shoot down mortar rounds. The Tactical High Energy Laser, in test since 2000, could do it. Here it is in action. That took three semitrailers of equipment and tanks for the chemical laser. Each shot cost $3000 in chemicals. Israel wanted to deploy the thing, even though it was expensive to operate, couldn't run for long, and not very portable. It was just too clunky for combat.
The Army wanted a solid-state laser with that kind of punch, and now they have one. This new truck-mounted system uses a 10KW solid-state laser array. Probably a lot of small solid-state lasers. It might just be an array of 1000 standard 10-watt laser diodes. That's enough to take out artillery shells and small rockets. The only consumable is electricity.
Beam weapons are about to become real. The most likely initial user is, again, Israel, which has to deal with small rocket attacks in known areas. Israel's Iron Dome system works reasonably well but uses a pair of $50,000 guided missiles to take out each $800 attacking rocket.
This works on fighters because 1) in flight, they're always going really fast by automotive standards, and 2) their canopies are angled far into the windstream. If water can be broken free of surface tension, it will be blown away. For a car stopped in heavy rain in traffic, it probably won't do much.
That part will interface to external RAM, but they don't include any or connectors for it, so all you get is 576K. The Litecoin miners will be disappointed.
The Raspberry Pi has a connector layout problem, with connectors on three edges. Then these guys stack another board on top, with connectors on three different edges. They have header connectors hanging over the edge on one side, preventing a panel connection to the USB port. Then, I think, you can stack Arduno shields on top. The result is the electronics equivalent of the sillier Swiss army knife models with 50 tools.
They might have been better off making a single board with the FPGA and an ARM SOIC, along with some RAM, rather than stacking boards. It could still be Raspberry Pi software compatible, but mechanically simpler than a board stack. Like this.
The main thing is to get rid of Internet Explorer, which, on Windows 7, you can do.
If you lock down the browser hard enough, viruses stop being a problem, but some sites don't run. (This is sometimes amusing. I have Abine's Do Not Track Me installed, which blocks almost every tracking thing known, and I have third-party cookies blocked. As a result, if I watch a CBS TV show, I get the same commercials, over and over again.)
This is rather like Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield, etc people working for the USDA. There needs to be serious enforcement of the conflict of interest prevention.
Right. She's only temporary, though. She's been appointed deputy director, and the director slot is vacant. There's a power vacuum at the top of the USPTO; in the last few months, the director (Kappos, who was a good guy), the deputy director, and the general counsel quit.
"Head of the Silicon Valley office of the USPTO" - not. There is no Silicon Valley office of the USPTO. It was killed by budget cuts. So the USPTO had a spare manager around. There's a power vacuum at the top of the USPTO; in the last few months, the director, the deputy director, and the general counsel quit.
The whole "USPTO branch office" thing was a pork program for Detroit; a Congressman stuck a provision for a Detroit office in a bill two years ago, which also provided for a few other branches at locations to be determined. The Detroit office was opened, but none of the others were. The USPTO is completely on-line now; no user has to go to a USPTO office to do anything. There was a time when people had to go to a USPTO location to search patents on paper or microfilm, but that era, thankfully, is over.
Here's their plan, from 2012. Space-X wants to assemble the Falcon Heavy horizontally, so they'll have to build a big mechanism to lift it up to vertical. For the Falcon 9, they use this. It runs on multiple railroad tracks from the assembly shed to the pad. They'll need something more than three times as big for the Falcon Heavy, a bigger shed, a way to lug the thing up the hill to the pad, etc. All doable, but they're already setting that up at Vandenberg, where the weather is better (no hurricanes).
Pad 39A is overkill for Space-X's Falcon 9. That's built and transported horizontally, then lifted to a vertical position for launch. The Falcon Heavy may need a more elaborate assembly process. Do they need the whole VAB/crawler-transporter rig? That seems the only justification for wanting all the Pad 39A infrastructure.
Here's a description without the hype.
This has a small containment vessel, only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel. It's a vacuum bottle setup - there's normally a vacuum between the pressure vessel and the containment, as insulation. In an emergency, the reactor vents into the containment vacuum, which allows more heat conduction to the outside. The outside water pool is just a big heat sink.
Most containment vessels are much bigger than the reactor vessel. One of the problems with the reactors at Fukushima was that the containment wasn't big enough to contain the overpressure produced in a hydrogen explosion. Presumably there's some justification for the small containment vessel in this new design.
The Ford vehicle has four Velodyne HDL-32 LIDAR units. This is the generation after the one Google uses. They're smaller, but the field of view is wider vertically and the resolution is lower.
They spin and get full-circle images, so for research purposes they're usually mounted on top of the vehicle. But that has to change for production vehicles. A production system wiill need more sensors better integrated into the auto body.
There's no danger of a fuel shortage. The new US centrifuge enrichment plant is up and running, and the second section of the plant is under construction.
This is a reasonable idea. The items to be delivered are small and light, and pharmacies tend to have a customer base within a few miles. Many pharmacies already deliver. This would be cheaper and faster than sending out people in cars and trucks to carry tiny packages.
could you please provide a reference or two to support it?
Here's a list compiled in 2011.. The last of the "orginal 27" patents expires on March 28, 2014. MPEG-LA has later patents, but maybe you don't need the technology they cover, or can attack those patents.
The original application on which this is based is dated May 3, 1999. So this predates Bitcoin. Only prior art earlier than the priority date is relevant.
The life of the patent counts from the priority date, so this patent, if issued, will run out in 2019. The USPTO doesn't consider this patent to contain patentable subject matter; they've issued a 101 Non Final Rejection. (You have to look up the patent application in USPTO Public PAIR to see this. Public PAIR has the status info for all patents as they go through examination, and images of all the actual documents. All the letters and forms back and forth between the applicant and the USPTO are in there. PAIR is kind of slow, and there's a CAPTCHA to prevent it from being scraped in bulk, so the data in PAIR isn't indexed by search engines.)
Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?
No, DVDs use some of the newer MPEG 4 features. But online video doesn't need all that stuff. Youtube, Netflix, etc. are probably within the base MP4 spec, for which the patents have mostly expired.
A third-party web application our company uses encountered Javascript problems in Firefox 24. Waiting for five minutes until Firefox 25 showed up fixed the problem again.
That's reality. I had to post this for one of my Firefox add-ons:
"Due to Firefox Bug 886329, "drop-down list in Jetpack add-on breaks entire UI", the preferences menu in Ad Limiter is not working in Firefox version 23 only. It worked in Firefox 22, and is fixed in Firefox 24, which is now available. We suggest not using Firefox 23."
Slashdot Mirror
But it's an interesting lesson to see an authoritarian authorship system like that end up irrelevant and forgotten, because this is the sort of road current copyright maximalists would love to lead us down.
I know. Most of the Xanadu people were libertarians of the "markets are the solution to everything" persuasion. The World Wide Web might have turned out that way. There was a previous generation of paid online information businesses - Minitel, Nexis, Lexis, etc. - where you did pay for almost everything you looked at. Xanadu was supposed to be a better implementation of that model.
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power.
It got implemented. Autodesk funded an implementation. I knew the people who did that job. It just wasn't very useful. It was a centralized storage and revision control scheme for text only (No pictures; Nelson was very text-oriented) tied to a micropayments system. You paid to read a document, and payments were parcelled out to everybody who'd contributed to the document.
The fundamental problem was that it assumed that most text documents were worth orders of magnitude than they are now. Pricing was intended to be comparable to what overpriced academic journals charge for online access today. Another part of the problem was that Nelson had very strong ideas about how it should be implemented, but didn't know much about database technology.
Everybody is digging the music, but no one is dancing.
That's usually a "DJ trying to be too cool" problem.
There are automated DJ programs, but so far, no one seems to have one that takes in video of the dance floor, tracks how many people are dancing, and adjusts the playlist accordingly. I thought of doing that 20 years ago, but now it would be both feasible and cost-effective. (Optional feature: also connects to the bar cash register system to optimize for revenue.)
The next frontier in robotics is installation and maintenance. A robot that can change parts in failed equipment is a ways off, but worth working on. Think of this as something for industrial plants, not homes. That's one of the few commercial applications that justifies a humanoid robot like Atlas. I wonder if Google is heading in that direction.
Scan every girl in the club. Breakdown the odds each girl could get pregnant tonight. Weed out those menstruating.
There's probably an app for that. (But not a good one; Night Club Girl only has a 1 star review.)
(Hm. Can we figure out a woman's period from her Facebook and Twitter posts? Scan text for negativism, correlate on 28 day cycle, sync to PMS period. OK, that's done. Next, check Foursquare and Twitter location for who's there. Run Anaface on the photos to decide who's hot and who's not. Check friends list to see who's attached to whom, and if their SO is present. Rank and provide list.)
There have been $30 tablets available in Shentzen for a year. Most have an Allwinner ARM SOIC, which is a very cheap part yet quite powerful. It costs $1100 to move an entire shipping container from Shentzen to Los Angeles. Not clear what the hold-up has been.
Tablets will be sold in bubble-packs at the drugstore.
That seems too simplistic. Shared document editing has all the same issues as shared source code editing. Just saving old versions in their entirity isn't too helpful, especially when multiple people are editing. You need something at least as good as Wikipedia history diffs. (Git might be overkill.)
Great, except for the fact that, you know, mortar rounds don't slow down in mid-air.
If you can explode their warhead in flight, when they hit, they're just rocks, lethal radius of a few inches.
This could be really useful for business use, where you don't want Google to know your business plans. What does the server-side component look like? The demo site lets you edit .odf in your browser, but you can't push it back to the server.
This isn't the first U.S. Army laser system that can shoot down mortar rounds. The Tactical High Energy Laser, in test since 2000, could do it. Here it is in action. That took three semitrailers of equipment and tanks for the chemical laser. Each shot cost $3000 in chemicals. Israel wanted to deploy the thing, even though it was expensive to operate, couldn't run for long, and not very portable. It was just too clunky for combat.
The Army wanted a solid-state laser with that kind of punch, and now they have one. This new truck-mounted system uses a 10KW solid-state laser array. Probably a lot of small solid-state lasers. It might just be an array of 1000 standard 10-watt laser diodes. That's enough to take out artillery shells and small rockets. The only consumable is electricity.
Beam weapons are about to become real. The most likely initial user is, again, Israel, which has to deal with small rocket attacks in known areas. Israel's Iron Dome system works reasonably well but uses a pair of $50,000 guided missiles to take out each $800 attacking rocket.
This works on fighters because 1) in flight, they're always going really fast by automotive standards, and 2) their canopies are angled far into the windstream. If water can be broken free of surface tension, it will be blown away. For a car stopped in heavy rain in traffic, it probably won't do much.
That part will interface to external RAM, but they don't include any or connectors for it, so all you get is 576K. The Litecoin miners will be disappointed.
The Raspberry Pi has a connector layout problem, with connectors on three edges. Then these guys stack another board on top, with connectors on three different edges. They have header connectors hanging over the edge on one side, preventing a panel connection to the USB port. Then, I think, you can stack Arduno shields on top. The result is the electronics equivalent of the sillier Swiss army knife models with 50 tools.
They might have been better off making a single board with the FPGA and an ARM SOIC, along with some RAM, rather than stacking boards. It could still be Raspberry Pi software compatible, but mechanically simpler than a board stack. Like this.
No, it doesn't have a racing fuel cell as standard. There's an aftermarket fuel cell made just for that vehicle.
The main thing is to get rid of Internet Explorer, which, on Windows 7, you can do.
If you lock down the browser hard enough, viruses stop being a problem, but some sites don't run. (This is sometimes amusing. I have Abine's Do Not Track Me installed, which blocks almost every tracking thing known, and I have third-party cookies blocked. As a result, if I watch a CBS TV show, I get the same commercials, over and over again.)
This is rather like Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield, etc people working for the USDA. There needs to be serious enforcement of the conflict of interest prevention.
Right. She's only temporary, though. She's been appointed deputy director, and the director slot is vacant. There's a power vacuum at the top of the USPTO; in the last few months, the director (Kappos, who was a good guy), the deputy director, and the general counsel quit.
"Head of the Silicon Valley office of the USPTO" - not. There is no Silicon Valley office of the USPTO. It was killed by budget cuts. So the USPTO had a spare manager around. There's a power vacuum at the top of the USPTO; in the last few months, the director, the deputy director, and the general counsel quit.
The whole "USPTO branch office" thing was a pork program for Detroit; a Congressman stuck a provision for a Detroit office in a bill two years ago, which also provided for a few other branches at locations to be determined. The Detroit office was opened, but none of the others were. The USPTO is completely on-line now; no user has to go to a USPTO office to do anything. There was a time when people had to go to a USPTO location to search patents on paper or microfilm, but that era, thankfully, is over.
Here's their plan, from 2012. Space-X wants to assemble the Falcon Heavy horizontally, so they'll have to build a big mechanism to lift it up to vertical. For the Falcon 9, they use this. It runs on multiple railroad tracks from the assembly shed to the pad. They'll need something more than three times as big for the Falcon Heavy, a bigger shed, a way to lug the thing up the hill to the pad, etc. All doable, but they're already setting that up at Vandenberg, where the weather is better (no hurricanes).
Pad 39A is overkill for Space-X's Falcon 9. That's built and transported horizontally, then lifted to a vertical position for launch. The Falcon Heavy may need a more elaborate assembly process. Do they need the whole VAB/crawler-transporter rig? That seems the only justification for wanting all the Pad 39A infrastructure.
Here's a description without the hype. This has a small containment vessel, only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel. It's a vacuum bottle setup - there's normally a vacuum between the pressure vessel and the containment, as insulation. In an emergency, the reactor vents into the containment vacuum, which allows more heat conduction to the outside. The outside water pool is just a big heat sink.
Most containment vessels are much bigger than the reactor vessel. One of the problems with the reactors at Fukushima was that the containment wasn't big enough to contain the overpressure produced in a hydrogen explosion. Presumably there's some justification for the small containment vessel in this new design.
The Ford vehicle has four Velodyne HDL-32 LIDAR units. This is the generation after the one Google uses. They're smaller, but the field of view is wider vertically and the resolution is lower.
They spin and get full-circle images, so for research purposes they're usually mounted on top of the vehicle. But that has to change for production vehicles. A production system wiill need more sensors better integrated into the auto body.
There's no danger of a fuel shortage. The new US centrifuge enrichment plant is up and running, and the second section of the plant is under construction.
This is a reasonable idea. The items to be delivered are small and light, and pharmacies tend to have a customer base within a few miles. Many pharmacies already deliver. This would be cheaper and faster than sending out people in cars and trucks to carry tiny packages.
could you please provide a reference or two to support it?
Here's a list compiled in 2011.. The last of the "orginal 27" patents expires on March 28, 2014. MPEG-LA has later patents, but maybe you don't need the technology they cover, or can attack those patents.
The original application on which this is based is dated May 3, 1999. So this predates Bitcoin. Only prior art earlier than the priority date is relevant.
The life of the patent counts from the priority date, so this patent, if issued, will run out in 2019. The USPTO doesn't consider this patent to contain patentable subject matter; they've issued a 101 Non Final Rejection. (You have to look up the patent application in USPTO Public PAIR to see this. Public PAIR has the status info for all patents as they go through examination, and images of all the actual documents. All the letters and forms back and forth between the applicant and the USPTO are in there. PAIR is kind of slow, and there's a CAPTCHA to prevent it from being scraped in bulk, so the data in PAIR isn't indexed by search engines.)
Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?
No, DVDs use some of the newer MPEG 4 features. But online video doesn't need all that stuff. Youtube, Netflix, etc. are probably within the base MP4 spec, for which the patents have mostly expired.
A third-party web application our company uses encountered Javascript problems in Firefox 24. Waiting for five minutes until Firefox 25 showed up fixed the problem again.
That's reality. I had to post this for one of my Firefox add-ons:
"Due to Firefox Bug 886329, "drop-down list in Jetpack add-on breaks entire UI", the preferences menu in Ad Limiter is not working in Firefox version 23 only. It worked in Firefox 22, and is fixed in Firefox 24, which is now available. We suggest not using Firefox 23."