I couldn't find a good thread to add this tidbit to.
It is almost impossible to find a CD-R media which consistently works in a DVD player. It depends on the color of the media, and the burn speed, and the color of the reflective material and.... probably the phase of the moon. The reason is the wavelength (or color) of the laser.
CD-RW's seem to work just fine, however. My understanding is that the color of the CD-RW media is closer to the stuff the DVD is looking for and as a result works. I haven't had any problems to speak of recording audio (or Video CD tracks) onto a CD-RW and reading them in almost any DVD player. I'd try a CD-RW.
I read this article with some interest, although I think the best part was at the bottom, in the copyright section...
...Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including...
Republication? Is that how come we have so many Republicans? I notice that they prohibit it, and since the press is usually considered Democratic, I can see why they wouldn't want it happening...
I have yet to see an opensource project that doesn't need about 10x as many documentation writers as they have.
In fact, it's rather common to open up a documentation file and see something like "There really isn't much documentation here. If you'd like to write some, let us know".
Seriously, I think the best advice would be to find a project they like which seems underdocumented and have them offer to help.
From what I can see the.psf font format (and most other screen font formats) use a single byte (8 bits) to represent each scanline for the font. Thus, an 8x8 "A" could be represented by 8 bytes as follows:
Thus, it would be impossible to write a font editor which actually could save a 9 bit font correctly in this format.
Now, the second problem. Even if you could build a 9 bit font, the VGA card wouldn't take it. The reason for this is that all screen fonts are stored on the VGA card in 8 bit format. Fonts on EGA cards were 8 bit wide, and for compatibility, the VGA cards used the same format, even though the characters were rendered using 9 bits. The 9th bit was usually left blank except for characters 0xC0 through 0xDF (the line drawing characters). On most video cards, the video card renders the 9th bit for these characters by copying the 8th bit. Thus, line draw characters SHOULD be continuous as long as the 8th bit is not blank. Note that I said should. If I recall correctly, some video cards handled the 9th bit stuff incorrectly - either copying when they shouldn't or the other way around.
So, what I would do is create a 8 bit font making sure not to leave a margin on the line draw characters and see if it eliminates your problem. If it doesn't try another video card or just live with it. I guess there is also the possibility that some video cards may have this setting configurable, but that would require some digging and I can't say I've ever seen (or even looked for) a video card with this capability.
Good luck!
Re:There has to be a practical reason...
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Let's assume for a minute that you have 1 "car" per km both up and down. This is 72,000 cars. Assume each car can hold 1000kg. This is 72,000,000kg on the elevator. Assume that it takes 4 days round trip. This means that every day you can move 18,000,000 kg. This equates to 36 million dollars a day. I'd assume that the payload per car would actually be higher, but I'm not sure. Yes a $1-$2 might be low. Even $100 though would be a LOT less than what we are paying now.
Regardless, I think the real point is that unless we are moving a LOT more to space than we are today, then a space elevator is essentially non-useful.
Re:There has to be a practical reason...
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
The idea behind a space elevator is that it will be useful when we get to the point that we are shipping goods (and people) to and from space on a regular basis.
Think of it this way: Which is cheaper: Riding an elevator to the top floor of a skyscraper or using a helicopter to do the same thing? A shuttle ride is around $22,000 per kilogram today. The estimates most people put on a space elevator is around a buck or two a kilogram.
Today, there probably isn't enough practical use for this to justify the expense. In the future, especially when we start mining the moon and/or asteroids, this will become a big issue.
Another point is that a space elevator can actually serve as the initial boost for interplanetary trips. The top end of the elevator is actually above geostationary orbit (the center of mass is at geostationary orbit - 35786 km) and as such when you figure the math using a conservative 36,000 km orbit, you get the fact that the top end is actually traveling well over 225 million kilometers in 24 hours or just under 9500 km/h (roughly 5900 miles/hour). This saves a LOT of fuel costs. You basically just wait until the right point and then "let go" and you're on your way to the moon, or mars, or....
You only need Cat5 Cabling to connect 5 of them. If you only want to connect 3 you use Cat3 cable.
Now, I wish someone at Radio Shack could give me the answer to the question of whether you can either a) buy Cat2 cable (whatever that is) or if you can, in fact connect less than the number of cats than the cable is rated for, such as 2 cats on a cat3 cable or 4 cats on a cat5 cable. If this is the case, maybe we could use Cat6 cable and be ready if we want to connect 6 cats together.;)
To get the blue out of a monitor, perform the following operation:
1. Unplug the monitor cable from the computer. Hold it facing toward you, with the thickest part of the D connector upward.
2. Using needle nose pliers or other suitable tool, remove pin 3 from the 15 pin connector. In the orientation as described above, this should be the middle pin on the top row, or counting from the left, skip the first two and remove the third. Usually these can be broken out by either just pulling hard or by wiggling them back and forth.
3. Reinsert cable. Presto, no monitor blues.
If you'd like to know how this works, see any standard VGA monitor pinout diagram such as the one at Technick.net
Important: The author cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by anyone actually attempting this modification. Perform at your own risk!
My understanding, being an amateur radio operator (among other things) and following this closely for the last week or so since launch, is that this satellite was designed in such a way that it automatically goes through some error-correcting procedures, such as changing radios and frequencies for telemetry and command transfers, etc. etc. etc. However the complete cycle takes days, not hours, and as such, the people at AMSAT decided to give it a chance to recover before trying more drastic means.
My understanding is that they also have the equivalent of the "big red power button" or "control-alt-delete", which they haven't even started to try yet.
I do online processing for one of my businesses. In this case, I DO NOT keep any credit card information online. The only electronic CC info is the last four digits of the card, and a "Payment Network Reference ID" I obtained when I authorized the card.
From the Signio (verisign) API manual:
"C - Credit Returns the specified amount to the account holder. It is not necessary to have the credit card number available if you have the original Payment Network Reference ID (PNREF) that was issued with the transaction."
I've also done authorize.net transactions and they have similar requirements.
About the only thing I do is that each CC (and other) transaction is printed on a dot matrix printer complete with all information so that I am covered in the future as far as chargebacks are concerned.
I can't vouch for what verisign does with the credit card numbers, though...
Until you have one of these and use it you don't realize how cool and useful these are. These solve all the problems of @(#$* VCR's. Even an idiot can figure out how to record his favorite TV program every week. Just hit the record button.
Not to start a flame war, but a memory leak is not necessarily the cause of a bad design, but instead of stupid, hard to find errors. Kinda like that infamous misplaced semicolon.
Case in point. Quite a while back I was involved with writing a multithreaded application which (among other things) got events from various sources. Many of these events contained data which several of the running threads needed to look at or keep. Instead of memcpy()'ing the the data block for each process, we wrote a "multithreaded" memory manager. Basically the event "receiver" was responsible for malloc()ing the block. Each thread would then be given a pointer to the block and then each thread could do what they needed to do with it (read-only of course). When they were done, the thread would issue a call to a free()-like function which would basically de-increment a counter of how many threads had a pointer to the process.
Add to that the complexity that some threads could "duplicate" the pointer and hand it to another couple threads (such as a outbound communications threads, etc. etc.). Add to that that some of this data ended up pointed to in a long-term linked list, etc. etc.
All it took to cause a memory leak is missing one free out of hundreds. We ended up adding code to keep track of which threads had "unfreed" pointers assigned to them so we could track it down at least to the thread.
Microsoft does this kinda thing. A good example of it working the other way is from one of my clients.
We have several Win98 machines with File/Print sharing turned on. TCP/IP is installed on the machines and is used for internet through a dial-on-demand server. We have unbound TCP/IP from anything to do with file/print sharing and microsoft networking.
Whenever they go to print, Win98 sends out a query to the DNS servers for the address of the machine the printer is attached to. Why it does this, I have no clue, but it is sure annoying that every time they print, their internet connection dials up.
Basically, If you get slammed you basically don't pay ANY charges for the slamming related changes, PLUS you, by law, don't pay one cent to the company who slammed you.
The great thing is that these companies usually take 2-3 months to send the first bill, and by then I've ended up with at least a couple months of free long distance.
I would look first at GSM coding. I've heard some samples and for voice it does a quite good job. Not so great for non-vocal recordings. Depending on what you want, it might or might not be suitable for your application. Source is available from various sources on the net. Try "GSM Source" or "GSM CODEC source" searches on Google or your favorite search engine.
While I was out looking for a GSM source, I came across this page which has a table of some of the different options, better than I could have put it. They also have sound bites in each format, however, they are in the compressed format so you'll need a decoder for each format to listen.
You may want to check out Ogg Vorbis, which is an alternative patent-free opensource audio compression. I haven't heard any low bitrate samples and the implementation is rather new, so I really can't vouch for this.
In my state, the local Public Utilities (Service?) Commission does NOT regulate cable companies. If the PSC does regulate the cable industry in a state, that should be the first avenue. When I have had problems with USWest billing issues (which is regulated by the PSC) a written, certified, letter to USWest with a CC to the State PSC has always gotten the job done.
You need to remember that AT&T cable services is not the same as AT&T the long distance provider or AT&T the cellular company, etc. etc. in most PSC's eyes.
The key here is to get the right person's attention. The flunkies you talk to on the phone usually either don't care or don't know how to fix it.
The FIRST thing I would do is to send them a Certified letter explaining the current status and what EXACTLY you want them to do about it. If you just want the billing to go away, then tell them. If you want the service back also, let them know also. Give them a deadline to respond. Hopefully this will be the fix. A certified letter generally HAS to be looked at by a manager.
If they don't respond, the next step I normally do is to get an attorney to send them a letter. Note I didn't say write them a letter. Usually you can find an attorney willing to put a letter you wrote (or at least outlined) on their letterhead and sign and mail it for a nominal cost. CC this to the CEO of AT&T cable services and to billing. Make sure it includes words like "illegally collecting", "unlawfully terminated service" and my favorite "harrassment".
If this gets to collection state and it impacts your credit rating, you can sue for defamation of character, along with harassment and a whole bunch of other stuff. You paid the bill - they are trying to collect it illegally and this is where it gets fun. (There are times I'd just love to have my day in court with these bozos.).
Another tactic which sometimes works is to call and ask for "someone who can tell you where you need to serve papers for a lawsuit you are filing for illegal collection actions and harrassment". This usually scares anyone one the front line, as most people don't want to be named in a lawsuit, and the person answering the phone sure isn't going to give you THEIR name and contact information. And if they don't know, they're probably going to be asking someone who will want to deal with this instead of having to explain to a supervisor why the peons in the front line let it get to lawsuit stage.
There is one other option - and I mention it last because I'm not sure about this. I understand that the FCC has a similar department to handle consumer complaints as most state PSC's. And they WOULD be authoritative over AT&T. This might be worth the research.
The first thing you can do is overload their servers by posting their url's to/. and letting the/. effect take care of it. Oh, it looks like you aready took care of that...</humor>
All humor aside, there are things you might be able to do depending on how much money you DO want to spend. IANAL, so realize this isn't necessarily 100% accurate.
I'm also assuming that the people you are complaining about are in the US, as I really can't get through due to the./ effect.
If you both were in the US, then this would be really simple. You send them a certified letter asking them to cease and desist. If they don't stop, you go down to your local federal court and file a copyright suit against them. Usually they settle at this point and everything is solved. Usually you can get them to pay the court costs at the very least.
Internationally, this gets a little bit more hairy. According to the Copyright Office's Circular 38a, your country has copyright relations with ours. From my understanding of this, this basically means is if you have a valid copyright in your country, it will be honored in the US.
In addition, according to the Copyright Office's FAQ Question 33 you can register the copyright ALSO in the US. This isn't strictly necessary, but will probably add legitimacy to your claim.
The tricky part is how to get the claim filed. I'm assuming you can have someone in the US do this for you, and have them act on your behalf in this matter. Exactly how you do this and if it can be just anybody you know in the US or if it has to be an Attorney, I don't know. I do know that the claim is relatively cheap to file if you do it yourself.
In any case, good luck! I really hate to see people steal other people's work and take credit for it themselves. It seems to be going around right now, though. I'm aware of at least one person who has had their entire site ripped off and used on a commercial site.
One last thing, one good resource would be the US Copyright office at http://www.loc.gov/copyright. They have lots of copyright info. Start with the FAQ.
I just did some research along these lines. The following is a summary of the solution I found. I can't really guarantee that this will work but everything I read indicated it would.
DVD-R Burner. Pioneer makes a DVD-R drive (Model DVR-S201) which according to spec will write a DVD-R which is readable in a Consumer DVD player. It also will support "Cutting Master Format" which will (in theory) allow you to burn a DVD and send it off to be pressed into "real" DVD's. About $5k.
Mastering Software and Capture Hardware. There's a whole bunch of options. I was looking at the stuff from Pinnacle Systems. I was more specifically looking at the DV500 product. It runs about $1000, but includes not only a Video codec (ala capture card), but also all the software you need to get going with DVD production. There are also other options, but this seemed to be the best value.
The best store I located on the net which has all of the above, plus more is videoguys.com
As has been said a whole bunch previously, you need a lawyer. As IANAL either, I can't give you real legal advice, but I can see where you could get sued:
By your ex-employer for withholding the signature.
By your new employer for one of many reasons including the possibility of this new patent conflicting with your existing work.
By the people who sue your old employer after they get the patent.
And so on and so on.
Get a lawyer FIRST...
I think I would make sure the lawyer knows your concerns. Myself, I would like to know if I could, regardless of whether I have to sign or not, submit an opposition document to the Patent Office, or if you are limited due to a Nondisclosure, etc. I suspect that if you do this, you might be sued, but I also expect that you would come out on top. See if you are able to recover court and attourney costs if they sue you for this.
Nah, the very definition of bad latency is the transmission of IP as defined in rfc1149, and with guaranteed "Quality" of Service as defined in rfc2549.
Other interesting concepts in IP transport can be found in RFC's 1216, 1217, 1926,
and others.
Unfortunately, this seems like (almost) as bad of an idea - and it seems like this might just be for real.
Slashdot Mirror
It is almost impossible to find a CD-R media which consistently works in a DVD player. It depends on the color of the media, and the burn speed, and the color of the reflective material and.... probably the phase of the moon. The reason is the wavelength (or color) of the laser.
CD-RW's seem to work just fine, however. My understanding is that the color of the CD-RW media is closer to the stuff the DVD is looking for and as a result works. I haven't had any problems to speak of recording audio (or Video CD tracks) onto a CD-RW and reading them in almost any DVD player. I'd try a CD-RW.
Republication? Is that how come we have so many Republicans? I notice that they prohibit it, and since the press is usually considered Democratic, I can see why they wouldn't want it happening...
Yeah, I know, bad pun :)
You may want to find out what the current status is.
In fact, it's rather common to open up a documentation file and see something like "There really isn't much documentation here. If you'd like to write some, let us know".
Seriously, I think the best advice would be to find a project they like which seems underdocumented and have them offer to help.
Binary Hex
00010000 10
00101000 28
01000100 44
01111100 7C
01000100 44
01000100 44
00000000 00
00000000 00
Thus, it would be impossible to write a font editor which actually could save a 9 bit font correctly in this format.
Now, the second problem. Even if you could build a 9 bit font, the VGA card wouldn't take it. The reason for this is that all screen fonts are stored on the VGA card in 8 bit format. Fonts on EGA cards were 8 bit wide, and for compatibility, the VGA cards used the same format, even though the characters were rendered using 9 bits. The 9th bit was usually left blank except for characters 0xC0 through 0xDF (the line drawing characters). On most video cards, the video card renders the 9th bit for these characters by copying the 8th bit. Thus, line draw characters SHOULD be continuous as long as the 8th bit is not blank. Note that I said should. If I recall correctly, some video cards handled the 9th bit stuff incorrectly - either copying when they shouldn't or the other way around.
So, what I would do is create a 8 bit font making sure not to leave a margin on the line draw characters and see if it eliminates your problem. If it doesn't try another video card or just live with it. I guess there is also the possibility that some video cards may have this setting configurable, but that would require some digging and I can't say I've ever seen (or even looked for) a video card with this capability.
Good luck!
Regardless, I think the real point is that unless we are moving a LOT more to space than we are today, then a space elevator is essentially non-useful.
Think of it this way: Which is cheaper: Riding an elevator to the top floor of a skyscraper or using a helicopter to do the same thing? A shuttle ride is around $22,000 per kilogram today. The estimates most people put on a space elevator is around a buck or two a kilogram.
Today, there probably isn't enough practical use for this to justify the expense. In the future, especially when we start mining the moon and/or asteroids, this will become a big issue.
Another point is that a space elevator can actually serve as the initial boost for interplanetary trips. The top end of the elevator is actually above geostationary orbit (the center of mass is at geostationary orbit - 35786 km) and as such when you figure the math using a conservative 36,000 km orbit, you get the fact that the top end is actually traveling well over 225 million kilometers in 24 hours or just under 9500 km/h (roughly 5900 miles/hour). This saves a LOT of fuel costs. You basically just wait until the right point and then "let go" and you're on your way to the moon, or mars, or....
Now, I wish someone at Radio Shack could give me the answer to the question of whether you can either a) buy Cat2 cable (whatever that is) or if you can, in fact connect less than the number of cats than the cable is rated for, such as 2 cats on a cat3 cable or 4 cats on a cat5 cable. If this is the case, maybe we could use Cat6 cable and be ready if we want to connect 6 cats together. ;)
1. Unplug the monitor cable from the computer. Hold it facing toward you, with the thickest part of the D connector upward.
2. Using needle nose pliers or other suitable tool, remove pin 3 from the 15 pin connector. In the orientation as described above, this should be the middle pin on the top row, or counting from the left, skip the first two and remove the third. Usually these can be broken out by either just pulling hard or by wiggling them back and forth.
3. Reinsert cable. Presto, no monitor blues.
If you'd like to know how this works, see any standard VGA monitor pinout diagram such as the one at Technick.net
Important: The author cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by anyone actually attempting this modification. Perform at your own risk!
My understanding is that they also have the equivalent of the "big red power button" or "control-alt-delete", which they haven't even started to try yet.
From the Signio (verisign) API manual:
"C - Credit Returns the specified amount to the account holder. It is not necessary to have the credit card number available if you have the original Payment Network Reference ID (PNREF) that was issued with the transaction."
I've also done authorize.net transactions and they have similar requirements.
About the only thing I do is that each CC (and other) transaction is printed on a dot matrix printer complete with all information so that I am covered in the future as far as chargebacks are concerned.
I can't vouch for what verisign does with the credit card numbers, though...
Until you have one of these and use it you don't realize how cool and useful these are. These solve all the problems of @(#$* VCR's. Even an idiot can figure out how to record his favorite TV program every week. Just hit the record button.
Case in point. Quite a while back I was involved with writing a multithreaded application which (among other things) got events from various sources. Many of these events contained data which several of the running threads needed to look at or keep. Instead of memcpy()'ing the the data block for each process, we wrote a "multithreaded" memory manager. Basically the event "receiver" was responsible for malloc()ing the block. Each thread would then be given a pointer to the block and then each thread could do what they needed to do with it (read-only of course). When they were done, the thread would issue a call to a free()-like function which would basically de-increment a counter of how many threads had a pointer to the process.
Add to that the complexity that some threads could "duplicate" the pointer and hand it to another couple threads (such as a outbound communications threads, etc. etc.). Add to that that some of this data ended up pointed to in a long-term linked list, etc. etc.
All it took to cause a memory leak is missing one free out of hundreds. We ended up adding code to keep track of which threads had "unfreed" pointers assigned to them so we could track it down at least to the thread.
They have a tivo-equivalent called a DishPlayer. It comes out of the box being able to record 12 hours, but if you're into hacking you can swap the drive out for a 40gig drive and get 24. This records the "real" mpeg stream so it varies on how many hours you get, but it's the real satellite quality. It also has Dolby Digital out, etc. etc. etc.
We have several Win98 machines with File/Print sharing turned on. TCP/IP is installed on the machines and is used for internet through a dial-on-demand server. We have unbound TCP/IP from anything to do with file/print sharing and microsoft networking.
Whenever they go to print, Win98 sends out a query to the DNS servers for the address of the machine the printer is attached to. Why it does this, I have no clue, but it is sure annoying that every time they print, their internet connection dials up.
I discovered this from a page which covers exactly what you are looking for. The page is here.
Or Even better.... Perl Poetry.
Why?
Basically, If you get slammed you basically don't pay ANY charges for the slamming related changes, PLUS you, by law, don't pay one cent to the company who slammed you.
The great thing is that these companies usually take 2-3 months to send the first bill, and by then I've ended up with at least a couple months of free long distance.
While I was out looking for a GSM source, I came across this page which has a table of some of the different options, better than I could have put it. They also have sound bites in each format, however, they are in the compressed format so you'll need a decoder for each format to listen.
You may want to check out Ogg Vorbis, which is an alternative patent-free opensource audio compression. I haven't heard any low bitrate samples and the implementation is rather new, so I really can't vouch for this.
And the satellites are going to get REALLY REALLY (like flaming) hot anytime now.... (That is, just before they take a bath in the ocean).
You need to remember that AT&T cable services is not the same as AT&T the long distance provider or AT&T the cellular company, etc. etc. in most PSC's eyes.
The key here is to get the right person's attention. The flunkies you talk to on the phone usually either don't care or don't know how to fix it.
The FIRST thing I would do is to send them a Certified letter explaining the current status and what EXACTLY you want them to do about it. If you just want the billing to go away, then tell them. If you want the service back also, let them know also. Give them a deadline to respond. Hopefully this will be the fix. A certified letter generally HAS to be looked at by a manager.
If they don't respond, the next step I normally do is to get an attorney to send them a letter. Note I didn't say write them a letter. Usually you can find an attorney willing to put a letter you wrote (or at least outlined) on their letterhead and sign and mail it for a nominal cost. CC this to the CEO of AT&T cable services and to billing. Make sure it includes words like "illegally collecting", "unlawfully terminated service" and my favorite "harrassment".
If this gets to collection state and it impacts your credit rating, you can sue for defamation of character, along with harassment and a whole bunch of other stuff. You paid the bill - they are trying to collect it illegally and this is where it gets fun. (There are times I'd just love to have my day in court with these bozos.).
Another tactic which sometimes works is to call and ask for "someone who can tell you where you need to serve papers for a lawsuit you are filing for illegal collection actions and harrassment". This usually scares anyone one the front line, as most people don't want to be named in a lawsuit, and the person answering the phone sure isn't going to give you THEIR name and contact information. And if they don't know, they're probably going to be asking someone who will want to deal with this instead of having to explain to a supervisor why the peons in the front line let it get to lawsuit stage.
There is one other option - and I mention it last because I'm not sure about this. I understand that the FCC has a similar department to handle consumer complaints as most state PSC's. And they WOULD be authoritative over AT&T. This might be worth the research.
Good luck!
All humor aside, there are things you might be able to do depending on how much money you DO want to spend. IANAL, so realize this isn't necessarily 100% accurate.
I'm also assuming that the people you are complaining about are in the US, as I really can't get through due to the ./ effect.
If you both were in the US, then this would be really simple. You send them a certified letter asking them to cease and desist. If they don't stop, you go down to your local federal court and file a copyright suit against them. Usually they settle at this point and everything is solved. Usually you can get them to pay the court costs at the very least.
Internationally, this gets a little bit more hairy. According to the Copyright Office's Circular 38a, your country has copyright relations with ours. From my understanding of this, this basically means is if you have a valid copyright in your country, it will be honored in the US.
In addition, according to the Copyright Office's FAQ Question 33 you can register the copyright ALSO in the US. This isn't strictly necessary, but will probably add legitimacy to your claim.
The tricky part is how to get the claim filed. I'm assuming you can have someone in the US do this for you, and have them act on your behalf in this matter. Exactly how you do this and if it can be just anybody you know in the US or if it has to be an Attorney, I don't know. I do know that the claim is relatively cheap to file if you do it yourself.
In any case, good luck! I really hate to see people steal other people's work and take credit for it themselves. It seems to be going around right now, though. I'm aware of at least one person who has had their entire site ripped off and used on a commercial site.
One last thing, one good resource would be the US Copyright office at http://www.loc.gov/copyright. They have lots of copyright info. Start with the FAQ.
DVD-R Burner. Pioneer makes a DVD-R drive (Model DVR-S201) which according to spec will write a DVD-R which is readable in a Consumer DVD player. It also will support "Cutting Master Format" which will (in theory) allow you to burn a DVD and send it off to be pressed into "real" DVD's. About $5k.
Mastering Software and Capture Hardware. There's a whole bunch of options. I was looking at the stuff from Pinnacle Systems. I was more specifically looking at the DV500 product. It runs about $1000, but includes not only a Video codec (ala capture card), but also all the software you need to get going with DVD production. There are also other options, but this seemed to be the best value.
The best store I located on the net which has all of the above, plus more is videoguys.com
Good Luck!
Get a lawyer FIRST...
I think I would make sure the lawyer knows your concerns. Myself, I would like to know if I could, regardless of whether I have to sign or not, submit an opposition document to the Patent Office, or if you are limited due to a Nondisclosure, etc. I suspect that if you do this, you might be sued, but I also expect that you would come out on top. See if you are able to recover court and attourney costs if they sue you for this.
Good luck!
Other interesting concepts in IP transport can be found in RFC's 1216, 1217, 1926, and others.
Unfortunately, this seems like (almost) as bad of an idea - and it seems like this might just be for real.