Yes, but how well that translates to actual movement of the paper depends on how tightly and firmly all of the blocks are attached to each other and how well they retain their shape while it’s being used.
All of the cheaper LEGO clones aren’t made with the same materials, standards and tolerances... and they snap together. Kinda sorta. Using a cheaper plastic with more flex lets you set your tolerances a lot less strict, but they don’t snap together firmly and stay where you put them like LEGO products.
Many, all incompatible with the patented method. That's the point. When someone sends you an MSWord document containing animated fonts you won't be able to "experience" them when you open the document on Linux. This will be yet another reason to use Linux.
Don’t play coy; we both know how this works. They patent their method and then all the other methods that you think are incompatible with the patented method are somehow covered and anyone using them gets sued later.
Rubbing alcohol actually means poisoned ethanol, but common use has confused it with isopropyl alcohol...
Rubbing alcohol, USP / B.P. is a liquid prepared and used primarily for topical application. It is prepared from a special denatured alcohol solution and contains 97.5-100% by volume of pure, concentrated ethanol (ethyl alcohol). Individual manufacturers can use their own "formulation standards" in which the ethanol content usually ranges from 70-99% v/v. In the UK the equivalent skin preparation is surgical spirit which is always based on an ethyl alcohol-methyl alcohol mixture.
The term "rubbing alcohol" has become a general non-specific term for either isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) or ethyl alcohol (ethanol) rubbing-alcohol products. The confusion comes from the greater popularity of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, and as a result, individuals requesting "rubbing alcohol" generally expect and get an isopropyl alcohol product.
By that logic an inkjet printer that sent a continuous stream of ink as the printhead moved (rather than series of measured pulses) would be a plotter.
Still, a true plotter can draw lines in any direction. This can only draw horizontal lines.
At first I thought it was drawing dots too quickly to see the movement, but I think it actually did draw solid lines for the “HELLO WORLD”... but OTOH there was definitely some jerkiness when it was drawing the horse, almost like it was half-toning it slightly.
It’s a matter of what you’re removing, and what’s left.
Heat distillation: Remove light compounds, including ethanol, leaving the heavy compounds behind, including water. Collect the lighter compounds that you removed and drink them.
Ice distillation: Remove only water, leaving everything else. Drink what’s left. You get lots of heavy compounds left in the mix that wouldn’t be found in a heat-distilled product.
the method of distillation is the only thing that makes this product distinct from traditional whiskey
Wrong.
Traditional whiskey is the lightest, most volatile compounds that are heat-distilled out. All of the heavier compounds, including water, are left.
This high-alcohol beer is all of the ingredients that were present in the beer, but with some of the water removed. It has all the heavy compounds left in that normal heat-distillation would have left out.
Even all that being said, there’s a huge difference between heat distillation and ice distillation. The heat chemically changes some of the compounds, the lighter compounds evaporate, and those are collected and that’s your whiskey. Vs. ice distillation, where only the water is removed, leaving a stronger brew of everything else. You don’t get the same chemical changes that heat would produce, and you get the heavier compounds left in the brew that would never distill out with the whiskey.
FYI, rubbing alcohol (so-called “denatured” alcohol) has poison added to it. Drinking it is highly inadvisable.
This so-called “denatured” alcohol is called that because “denaturing” agents have been added to it. So what precise “nature” of the concoction do they wish to remove, you might ask?
Drinkability.
Otherwise it’d be taxed as an alcoholic beverage, which would make its price exorbitantly high (because the taxes on alcoholic beverages are exorbitantly high).
Hm. I seem to remember working it out and 1.75 L of Paramount 40% gin for $11.87 (if I remember correctly, after tax) was cheaper ounce-for-ounce of alcohol. I might have to check again, or maybe you were just getting a good deal on Everclear...
The gin was actually pretty palatable... I liked it better than the Paramount vodka (also 40%, and cost the same amount).
It’s a raster-based printer, which plots (yes) dots. Devices which print by plotting dots are simply called “printers”.
Vs. a line plotter, which is what you are typically referring to when you say “plotter”: some of which are designed exactly like this, with carriages to move the paper and pen. Rather than plotting dots, though, they draw solid lines by moving the pen and/or the paper in solid, continuous movements (only lifting the pen when necessary to break the line and begin a new line somewhere else).
Whether it moved the paper or the pen is relatively irrelevant. I think his main point was, plotters universally draw line art (moving the paper, or pen, in a fluid continuous movement along the path you are tracing)... vs. printers which rasterize their image (print dots of colour which merge together to form a complete image).
Although this project rasterized the page (printing dots), it could have just as easily been designed to set the pen down and then do continuous line art... but you have much less software that’s capable of printing to a line art plotter as opposed to a regular raster image printer. That is most likely the reason for the dot-matrix print style that it used.
This really isn’t that impressive. The main point that impresses me is that LEGO products are precision-built with such a quality as to be able to feed paper and move a pen to accurately position the dots and produce what looks like essentially a flawless page of print (albeit slightly low-res because of the relatively large size of the dots). We always knew that LEGO used top-quality materials with very, very small tolerances on the parts... this takes advantage of that and shows just how high their standards are.
Well, my second guess was it might print onto LEGO bricks themselves... e.g. design-your-own minifig faces. I know for a fact that felt tip pens will smear and smudge on LEGO bricks, though, so that was pretty obviously not what they meant.
There’s already a plugin to block any HTML content you don’t like. It’s called Adblock Plus, and it does selective element hiding using very powerful DOM filters.
For instance, wanna block a <div> by a particular ID on a site? Easy... google.com#div(brs) Wanna just silently hide any links to blacklisted sites? You can do that too... #a(href*=goatse.) Wanna kill <script> almost completely on a site? Not difficult... (note that some of the event javascripts aren’t contained inside script tags and thus will actually still run, so you might actually like this better than if you just nuked JS entirely for the site a la NoScript) snopes.com##script Wanna block Flash? Hey, why not... and make it website-specific if you want by putting the domain in front. #object(type=application/x-shockwave-flash) Newer HTML5 features (SVG and canvas) have you worried about adverts served up using those instead of Flash? Block them... ##svg ##canvas
Well, obviously (you can’t patent an idea), but how many methods exist for “the word 'giant' [to] get very large”? Their patent basically says “but have a computer do it automatically”. That does not meet the non-obviousness criterion.
This style would be great for actually hitting the problem without destroying people and giving them a change to learn and not do it again.
That’s exactly why they’ll never adopt it or anything like it.
They want utter life-ruin. They need utter life-ruin. Anything less than utter life-ruin doesn’t terrify the people they can’t catch enough to prevent widespread copyright infringement.
Ha. Yeah right... you’ve just explained why the patent is completely stupid and unenforceable (both because of prior art, which you just described, and because there is no way in hell that MS can keep everyone from forwarding those e-mails).
As a few non-limiting examples, the word 'giant' can get very large; the word 'lion' can morph into a line drawing of a lion; the word 'toss' can morph into a hand that animates a ball toss; the word 'bees' could show bees flying around with or without a 'buzz' sound effect
Who’s the fucking genius who thought up those examples? I bet an average four-year-old could have come up with something like that, and if your average four-year-old can think of something it’s way to obvious to be patentable.
It makes me want to go out and find those exact examples to prove how obvious they are (I’m sure they’ve been done a time or two), but I don’t have the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but how well that translates to actual movement of the paper depends on how tightly and firmly all of the blocks are attached to each other and how well they retain their shape while it’s being used.
All of the cheaper LEGO clones aren’t made with the same materials, standards and tolerances... and they snap together. Kinda sorta. Using a cheaper plastic with more flex lets you set your tolerances a lot less strict, but they don’t snap together firmly and stay where you put them like LEGO products.
Many, all incompatible with the patented method. That's the point. When someone sends you an MSWord document containing animated fonts you won't be able to "experience" them when you open the document on Linux. This will be yet another reason to use Linux.
Don’t play coy; we both know how this works. They patent their method and then all the other methods that you think are incompatible with the patented method are somehow covered and anyone using them gets sued later.
Rubbing alcohol actually means poisoned ethanol, but common use has confused it with isopropyl alcohol...
Rubbing alcohol, USP / B.P. is a liquid prepared and used primarily for topical application. It is prepared from a special denatured alcohol solution and contains 97.5-100% by volume of pure, concentrated ethanol (ethyl alcohol). Individual manufacturers can use their own "formulation standards" in which the ethanol content usually ranges from 70-99% v/v. In the UK the equivalent skin preparation is surgical spirit which is always based on an ethyl alcohol-methyl alcohol mixture.
The term "rubbing alcohol" has become a general non-specific term for either isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) or ethyl alcohol (ethanol) rubbing-alcohol products. The confusion comes from the greater popularity of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, and as a result, individuals requesting "rubbing alcohol" generally expect and get an isopropyl alcohol product.
Note that no matter what you put in the driver, for conventional printers you will never be able to produce anything but dots.
Not true. Conventional printers are also perfectly capable of drawing solid, smooth horizontal lines...
By that logic an inkjet printer that sent a continuous stream of ink as the printhead moved (rather than series of measured pulses) would be a plotter.
Still, a true plotter can draw lines in any direction. This can only draw horizontal lines.
At first I thought it was drawing dots too quickly to see the movement, but I think it actually did draw solid lines for the “HELLO WORLD”... but OTOH there was definitely some jerkiness when it was drawing the horse, almost like it was half-toning it slightly.
Distillation by freezing carries the stuff that is around the freezing point of water or higher.
Not only that: Water is relatively unique. When frozen, it floats. Anything else that happened to solidify at that temperature would sink.
You really are removing only the water.
It’s a matter of what you’re removing, and what’s left.
Heat distillation: Remove light compounds, including ethanol, leaving the heavy compounds behind, including water. Collect the lighter compounds that you removed and drink them.
Ice distillation: Remove only water, leaving everything else. Drink what’s left. You get lots of heavy compounds left in the mix that wouldn’t be found in a heat-distilled product.
the method of distillation is the only thing that makes this product distinct from traditional whiskey
Wrong.
Traditional whiskey is the lightest, most volatile compounds that are heat-distilled out. All of the heavier compounds, including water, are left.
This high-alcohol beer is all of the ingredients that were present in the beer, but with some of the water removed. It has all the heavy compounds left in that normal heat-distillation would have left out.
Even all that being said, there’s a huge difference between heat distillation and ice distillation. The heat chemically changes some of the compounds, the lighter compounds evaporate, and those are collected and that’s your whiskey. Vs. ice distillation, where only the water is removed, leaving a stronger brew of everything else. You don’t get the same chemical changes that heat would produce, and you get the heavier compounds left in the brew that would never distill out with the whiskey.
I put "best" in quotations because I'd rather have a mouthful of habanero than a mouthful of everclear.
I like hot food... but this has its limits...
And then I like everclear...
Guess which one I’d rather have a mouthful of?
Hint: One of them numbs quickly, then goes down and quits burning...
FYI, rubbing alcohol (so-called “denatured” alcohol) has poison added to it. Drinking it is highly inadvisable.
This so-called “denatured” alcohol is called that because “denaturing” agents have been added to it. So what precise “nature” of the concoction do they wish to remove, you might ask?
Drinkability.
Otherwise it’d be taxed as an alcoholic beverage, which would make its price exorbitantly high (because the taxes on alcoholic beverages are exorbitantly high).
Hm. I seem to remember working it out and 1.75 L of Paramount 40% gin for $11.87 (if I remember correctly, after tax) was cheaper ounce-for-ounce of alcohol. I might have to check again, or maybe you were just getting a good deal on Everclear...
The gin was actually pretty palatable... I liked it better than the Paramount vodka (also 40%, and cost the same amount).
If anything, this is proof that the Flash player is no longer needed.
So you want to author some media-rich content? Who you gonna call?
It’s a raster-based printer, which plots (yes) dots. Devices which print by plotting dots are simply called “printers”.
Vs. a line plotter, which is what you are typically referring to when you say “plotter”: some of which are designed exactly like this, with carriages to move the paper and pen. Rather than plotting dots, though, they draw solid lines by moving the pen and/or the paper in solid, continuous movements (only lifting the pen when necessary to break the line and begin a new line somewhere else).
Whether it moved the paper or the pen is relatively irrelevant. I think his main point was, plotters universally draw line art (moving the paper, or pen, in a fluid continuous movement along the path you are tracing)... vs. printers which rasterize their image (print dots of colour which merge together to form a complete image).
Although this project rasterized the page (printing dots), it could have just as easily been designed to set the pen down and then do continuous line art... but you have much less software that’s capable of printing to a line art plotter as opposed to a regular raster image printer. That is most likely the reason for the dot-matrix print style that it used.
This really isn’t that impressive. The main point that impresses me is that LEGO products are precision-built with such a quality as to be able to feed paper and move a pen to accurately position the dots and produce what looks like essentially a flawless page of print (albeit slightly low-res because of the relatively large size of the dots). We always knew that LEGO used top-quality materials with very, very small tolerances on the parts... this takes advantage of that and shows just how high their standards are.
It’s designed in such a way, yeah, but it seems to me that it could have just as easily been designed to lower the pen and draw line art.
However your average software probably expects you to rasterize the output when you print...
Well, my second guess was it might print onto LEGO bricks themselves... e.g. design-your-own minifig faces. I know for a fact that felt tip pens will smear and smudge on LEGO bricks, though, so that was pretty obviously not what they meant.
I thought it printed LEGO creations from LEGO blocks.
Y’know, your average 3D printer... but with LEGO bricks.
That would be cool.
There’s already a plugin to block any HTML content you don’t like. It’s called Adblock Plus, and it does selective element hiding using very powerful DOM filters.
For instance, wanna block a <div> by a particular ID on a site? Easy...
google.com#div(brs)
Wanna just silently hide any links to blacklisted sites? You can do that too...
#a(href*=goatse.)
Wanna kill <script> almost completely on a site? Not difficult... (note that some of the event javascripts aren’t contained inside script tags and thus will actually still run, so you might actually like this better than if you just nuked JS entirely for the site a la NoScript)
snopes.com##script
Wanna block Flash? Hey, why not... and make it website-specific if you want by putting the domain in front.
#object(type=application/x-shockwave-flash)
Newer HTML5 features (SVG and canvas) have you worried about adverts served up using those instead of Flash? Block them...
##svg
##canvas
Well, obviously (you can’t patent an idea), but how many methods exist for “the word 'giant' [to] get very large”? Their patent basically says “but have a computer do it automatically”. That does not meet the non-obviousness criterion.
This style would be great for actually hitting the problem without destroying people and giving them a change to learn and not do it again.
That’s exactly why they’ll never adopt it or anything like it.
They want utter life-ruin. They need utter life-ruin. Anything less than utter life-ruin doesn’t terrify the people they can’t catch enough to prevent widespread copyright infringement.
Ha. Yeah right... you’ve just explained why the patent is completely stupid and unenforceable (both because of prior art, which you just described, and because there is no way in hell that MS can keep everyone from forwarding those e-mails).
As a few non-limiting examples, the word 'giant' can get very large; the word 'lion' can morph into a line drawing of a lion; the word 'toss' can morph into a hand that animates a ball toss; the word 'bees' could show bees flying around with or without a 'buzz' sound effect
Who’s the fucking genius who thought up those examples? I bet an average four-year-old could have come up with something like that, and if your average four-year-old can think of something it’s way to obvious to be patentable.
It makes me want to go out and find those exact examples to prove how obvious they are (I’m sure they’ve been done a time or two), but I don’t have the time.