But if the US cut off the GPS, then they couldn't use it either, right?
It can be turned off selectively. Furthermore, as I understand it, "turned off" only means that the unencrypted data stream is gone. The military has the keys to the encrypted stream, so their GPS units still work.
I have also heard of GPS jammers, but anyone could use those, so that would effectively negate the US's GPS advantage.
GPS jammers are nearly useless. They are only powerful enough to cover a small area, so their only use is to protect a stationary target from attack by GPS guided bombs. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in the Iraq war last year, they don't even do that effectively. All six of the Russian-made GPS jammers fielded by Iraq were destroyed in short order, some of them by GPS guided missiles!
I think that they will need to develop a system in the next 5-10 years that can be used through buildings and underground, otherwise it might be useless. I would think GPS devices would be useful for people like cave explorers, but maybe that's unreasonable or would be too dangerous to the rest of the population.
Forget it, man. You can't get EM radiation through solid rock from orbit. At least not without a lot of power, and then you're frying everything on the surfac. Wishing for an underground-capable GPS is like wishing for a lighthouse you can see through the hull of your boat. It's asking too much.
Around 1978 it appears both Sony and Philips invented the cd-rom,
and there is not a clear distinction who did it first.
http://www.oneoffcd.com/info/historycd.cfm
The page you link to seems to make a pretty clear distinction about when the CD was invented, and by whom:
1969 - Klass Compaan, a Dutch physicist comes up with the idea for the Compact Disc.
Now the CD-ROM, that's hard to say. I'd have to judge that one an obvious application of the CD that was developed rather than invented. The page you link certainly doesn't bother to mention an "inventor".
"What about that Bavarian cream pie joke I told you? There's no truth to that. Nobody with a terminal illness goes from the United States to Europe for a piece of Bavarian cream pie and then when they get there and they don't have it he says, 'Ah, I'll just have some coffee.' There's no truth to that."
Heh. I remember that bit. Funny, but the observation is wrong. That joke is full of truths! The humor of it comes from the intersection of two well-established types of human behavior. People in restaurants will often decide they only want coffee if their dessert choice is unavailable. People with terminal illnesses will often go to great lengths to experience what would otherwise be fairly mundane things. The humor comes from taking those two obvious truths and smashing them together to create a mental conflict, resulting in laughter. The (fusion chernobyl):France joke takes a truth (US dislikes France) and combines it with a falsehood (fusion reactors can melt down) and simply creates puzzlement, not mental conflict. Thus, no humor.
Of course, what kind of idiot (me) watches Seinfeld and criticizes the writers' grasp of the mechanics of humor? When you read the above, put it in the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons; I think it's the most appropriate.
The power loss in the current system is estimated at 9%. From what I understand, more than half of that is in local transmission.
The reason the loss is so low in transmission now is because they generally put the power plants close by. It's a 2200 mile trip from Anchorage, AK to the US-Canadian border near Seattle. Long-haul transmission loss would far overshadow local loss in that case. Electricity really does need to be generated fairly locally.
Read the link that I posted. You're not converting all of it to energy, but you are converting some portion of it to energy. E=mc^2 is the right equation.
Yes, but certainly the whole 1kg isn't being converted to energy. The question is, how much of that 1kg do you plug into E=mc^2 to get the equivalent of 10,000,000kg of "fossil fuel"? If we knew either end of the equation, we could figure out the other.
I think perhaps you don't grasp the fundamentals of what a joke really means.
Jokes really have to have an element of truth to them to be funny. A joke that associates meltdowns with fusion power is as lame as a joke that associates silicone breast implants with microprocessor fabrication. It's not particularly funny when it's that dumb.
think the US government should build two huge clusters of nuclear power plants. The first cluster should be near enough to Yucca Mountain to facilitate secure transport of the waste without traveling near populated areas. The second one should be in Alaska with it's own waste disposal site if possible.
Great idea. Too bad neither Yucca Mountain nor Alaska are significant consumers of electricity. Unless you've discovered a high-temperature superconductor from which to fashion your transmission lines, I don't see how you'd get the electricity to where it's actually needed.
Currently my film "A Sound of Thunder" is being filmed in Czechoslovakia
[thinks back to last movie he watched in the theater, and the MPAA PR piece lecturing him about stealing food from Joe American Movie Worker's baby's mouth]
What's wrong with this (pardon the pun) picture?
Heh. To add insult to injury, the guy apparently doesn't know that Czechslovakia is no more a country than Prussia would be. They're filming in the Czech Republic. Sheesh. Doesn't this guy remember the whole cllapsde of the warsaw pact thing?
Why not just assign a bit to a given box and identify the the blocks which have been activated (1) and which have not been activated (0)? That sounds like a much simpler system to me, so why bother with all the complexity of directions and starting and ending points and line identification?
Because "lines, endpoints, etc" maps more closely to the latin alphabet, and thus is faster and easier to learn. Arbitrary combinations of bits would be totally abstracted from the letters they represent.
Why is 3x3 the minimum? 2x2 can map those lines just as well:
Unless a diagonal line goes precisely through the center, it'll look just like an 'L' shaped line. Draw a 2x2 grid. Now draw a diagonal line through it without looking. Note which squares it goes through and in what order.
a circle (or a + sign, etc...) in the exact center which is unresponsive and you avoid any problem of crossing over boxes when moving across the center. Once again, this is a simplier system than the 3x3 system so, naturally it should have been used to satisfy the simplification requirement.
See, you need a "neutral zone" in the middle, at least. But then you have to take into account that people tend to draw lines through the middle of things. With a 2x2 grid you stand the chance of an attempted horizontal line starting just inside the upper bound of the lower left box and "drifting" just above the lower boundary of the upper right box and looking, to the computer, exactly like a diagonal line. Same thing goes for a vertical line. You could introduce a vertical and horizontal "neutral band" between the squares-- but then (combined with the center neutral zone) you've essentially created a 3x3 grid...
Did you read the decision of the court? I didn't, so I don't know for sure what they ruled. If you did, I'd very much like a link to it so I can read it as well. Also, even if this was ruled obvious by the court, it would have been ruled obvious under the legal definition of the term, and not the everyday laymans definitions of the term which is what you are trying to argue for.
Actually, I've been unable to find full text of the decision, but based on the quoted text "The prior art references anticipate and render obvious the claim"
from it, I look at the prior art. One of the patents it was based on was a method of decoding a written "alphabet" consisting of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. What Xerox had patented was the only simple way of decoding such strokes-- something that the prior art essentially took as a given. They can patent a specific simplified alphabet, but they can't claim any degree of novelty on the method of decoding. When I say "obvious", I mean it in the same way the judge did; that is, when you look at the prior art, the obvious method of decoding is a 3x3 grid, or something so close as to render the 3x3 grid non-patentable. When I say "the only obvious way to solve the problem", I mean it with regard to the prior art, Graffiti, Unistroke, or any other simplified straight-line alphabet. If there had never been such an alphabet patented, then perhaps Xerox would've had a valid patent. I would still think it as obvious as using a FOR loop to count from 1 to 10, but yeah, it'd be harder for a judge to rule "obvious".
Simplify eh. There are 26 letters in the english alphabet, since we are creating out own representation of these, we don't have to provide an a system which allows entry of the standard characters and can use any format we wish. We would logically need to represent only 26 combinations, or 5 bits (i.e. 2^5 = 32) to represent each letter. If you were to simplify the problem to the fullest, using 9 bits (i.e. a 3x3 grid) would lead to 512 (i.e. 2^9) possibilities and would be a waste of resources. So why bother with a 3x3 grid when it can be done with only 5 squares? Even adding in numbers and common punctuation marks, there is no reason to jump up to 9 bits of resolution.
Your simplification argument fails to stand up to its own standards.
Your argument fails to take into account how the system actually works. You can't just compare the 9 squares grid with a 9-bit number. For one thing, a square can be "entered" more than once while drawing a character; for another, you can't have a continuous line that "hits" only the top left and bottom right square without hitting the middle one too. You've entirely failed to understand the purpose of the grid. Let me explain:
Characters can be said to consist of four types of lines: vertical (|), horizontal (-), diagonal up (/), and diagonal down (\) . These four lines each have two possible "directions" (e.g. "-" can be left-to-right or right-to-left). A 3x3 grid is the minumum required resolution for accurately mapping those four types of lines. Conveniently, a 3x3 grid is also the easiest for humans to use, as each axis is divided into three parts: left-middle-right and top-middle-bottom. Furthermore, the "pixelation" effect of mapping drawn characters onto a 3x3 grid naturally converts even curved lines into the four simple lines -,|,\, and/. It really is the obvious solution to decoding a simplified alphabet, which (by the way) is what the court ruled!
What kind of University of Hick doesn't have a scanner anyway.
Universities aren't monlithic entities with a giant pool of common resources. For example, if you work in the lit department you can't just wander over to the chemistry department and borrow a spectrographic analyzer. Universities are a collection of small fiefdoms where resorces are guarded jealously. Every department stencils, stamps, or engraves its name all over its equipment not so much to prevent theft by outsiders (who can remove such markings at their leisure once they get it off campus), but to prevent "permanent borrowing" by other departments. There are constant battles over office space, "turf wars" over grants, and even attempts to mount "hostile takovers" of portions of other departments. It's just not one big happy university family.
So basically, only a "University of Hick" would be small enough to "have a scanner". There are likely dozens of scanners at the university in question, but the department he works for is too small to have needed one yet.
Actually, I think that you miss my point. What may be "obvious" to one in the art is legally meaningless if there is no documentary proof of it's legal "obviousness". That is not to say that the patent claims are not "obvious", it is only to say that the legal record before the USPTO (apparently) showed no sign of it to the examiner.
The objective standard of "obviousness" in patent examintion requires documentary proof, on the record. The idea is to make patent examination objective rather than subjective. The examiner may well have thought that the 'invention' was obvious in the normal sense, but without documentary proof, the examiner must allow the patent.
I see what you're saying. Of course, in this particular case, the court basically said that the examiner was on crack because the claims of the Xerox patent weren't different enough from the cited prior art to justify a whole new patent.
"Obviousness" in patent law is an objective standard, and not some subjective reconstruction of the claims. To be legally "obvious" there must be written documentation (publications, patents) and/or sworn, signed declarations that provide documentary evidence that the invention would have been "obvious" to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made. To say "I knew that..." after the fact is insufficient for the establishment of legal obviousness. Absent such objective evidence, patent claims are legally non-obvious. Legal terms (e.g., "obvious",) generally do not carry the same meaning as their more commonplace usage.
I understand what you're trying to say, but in this case it's not the kind of thing that only seems obvious after someone shows how it's done. This is a case of them patenting the only reasonable approach to simplified handwriting recognition. If you were to plot all the lines used in the Graffiti alphabet, or any other simplified alphabet for that matter, you'd notice the intersections and endpoints of those lines will tend to fall in the center of each square on a standard 3x3 grid. It's not a startling epiphany-- it's obvious. Three "sections" is the minimum resolution necessary to recognize the full alphabet, and the maximum a human can inuitively handle. Three scetions-- left, middle, right; top, middle, bottom. Combine the two and you get a 3x3 grid.
This isn't by the way, the first time I've seen this. Twenty years ago, a classmate of mine demonstrated handwriting recognition using an Apple 2e and a Koala Pad using the same principle. His alphabet was crude (not quite as intuitive as Graffiti), and the system required that you trace through the grid squares in a very specific order, but it used the same 3x3 grid. There does not exist another simple path to the goal. It's not quite as daft as Amazon's One-Click patent, but it's pretty close! The real question is, is it reasonable to allow patents to effectively lock up huge swathes of algorithmic "solution space" like this? There are too many solutions that are obvious to programmers but are way over a patent examiner's head. Subsequently, we see patents approved solely because the applicant was bold enough (or dumb enough, or self-impressed enough) to patent the obvious.
The thinkgeek toy probably goes marginally slower (although I've seen some very fast R/C cars, so don't be too sure that it can't do 20mph) and is less rugged. Although if you are placing a really big order you can go tot he manufacturer and ask them to make the exact same thing out of a stronger plastic - add a few hundred per unit at most.
I mentioned the microphone and the sensors, those can easily be bought, and would not cost more than a thousand or so (your home security system has them).
"unified hand-held controller/view screen (with force-feedback cues to indicate direction of detected motion!)"
Like a portable color tv? somehting like the PS controler has? I didn't realize that either of those cost that much - try ebay if you really want to save money maybe:)
Range can be jacked up by giving more power to the transmitters - the 100ft range is probably more to do with not being so powerful as to come under a different set of FCC regulations, rather then the transmitter (even then, how expensive do you think a transmitter is?).
To put the cost of this toy into perspective, 40 to 50 percent of $45K is still more than what you can buy a car for - they are getting ripped of.
So the question still stands, what are the extra 40K being spent on?
All of those "cheaper" methods you outline are inadequate. "Stronger plastic" alone won't make the toy survive a 3 story drop. The microphone and sensors are not the same as the ones your home security system uses, not by a long shot. The controller isn't just an LCD color monitor attached to a vibrating playstation controller. While range CAN be extended by boosting power, you lose battery life. Neither of those thinkgeek toys can climb a 3 foot pile of concrete rubble. None of this stuff comes cheap.
But a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached, right?
My understanding of the algorithm is that Xerox devides the Graffiti area into 9 ``blocks.'' The recognition algorithm tracks which block the stylus starts in, the end block, and the blocks through which the stylus travels. The recognition is fast and accurate, because each letter is simply an encoding of (start, end, intermediate blocks).
This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious.
It's obvious, e.g. the graffiti area can discern the position of the stylus with a resolution of, say, 45 along the vertical axis and 90 horizontally. Now, trying to come up with a quick, low processing requirement method of mapping characters leads directly to the question of "how fine a resolution do we need to track?" This then leads to the answer, "if we come up with our own simple alphabet, we can cut it down to as low as a three by three grid". It may not be obvious to YOU, but anyone trying to solve the problem of handwriting recognition would think of it based on the first rule of solving ANY problem: SIMPLIFY.
The reason graffiti2 sucks so badly is that they were forced to use a decoding method that was neither simple nor elegant, as Xerox claimed a patent on the obvious solution to the problem.
I under stand that if you found the original pre-indian corn, it would be worth millions.
I think they finally "re-bred" early corn. I recall reading something about it a year or so ago. The "ear" is only a few inches long and has only four or five rows of tiny kernals. I believe they narrowed down Teosinte grass as the original ancestor of corn and "bred up" from there, just like the indians did. I wish I could remember where I read that...
Actually that only applies to the judicial system. Investigators have never pretended assume that people are innocent while looking for evidence of criminal activity. In fact, they tend to view EVERYONE as "potentially guilty".
I dunno, fry's out here has server cases and they're right near the desktop cases. The prices are real good too, they have some 1U, 2U and 4U cases. Maybe you didn't look hard enough, did you even look at all?
Not every Fry's carries the exact same stock. They're a discount electronics store, not Wal-Mart.
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
So MS thinks people will repeatedly confuse local files with offsite files and their answer is to facilitate such confusion? Lunacy!
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
This is one of the silliest notions I've ever heard. If they make no distinction between local files (in user's control) and files "on the internet" (beyond user's control), what kind of crap are we going to have to put up with when people start saying "hey, where's that document I was looking at yesterday?" because they never knew it was on someone else's hard drive and got erased.
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It can be turned off selectively. Furthermore, as I understand it, "turned off" only means that the unencrypted data stream is gone. The military has the keys to the encrypted stream, so their GPS units still work.
I have also heard of GPS jammers, but anyone could use those, so that would effectively negate the US's GPS advantage.
GPS jammers are nearly useless. They are only powerful enough to cover a small area, so their only use is to protect a stationary target from attack by GPS guided bombs. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in the Iraq war last year, they don't even do that effectively. All six of the Russian-made GPS jammers fielded by Iraq were destroyed in short order, some of them by GPS guided missiles!
Actually, They're worried about cruise missiles, not ICBMs. ICBMs don't use GPS, they use ballistics.
Forget it, man. You can't get EM radiation through solid rock from orbit. At least not without a lot of power, and then you're frying everything on the surfac. Wishing for an underground-capable GPS is like wishing for a lighthouse you can see through the hull of your boat. It's asking too much.
http://www.oneoffcd.com/info/historycd.cfm
The page you link to seems to make a pretty clear distinction about when the CD was invented, and by whom:
1969 - Klass Compaan, a Dutch physicist comes up with the idea for the Compact Disc.
Now the CD-ROM, that's hard to say. I'd have to judge that one an obvious application of the CD that was developed rather than invented. The page you link certainly doesn't bother to mention an "inventor".
If I can't win, then I'm taking everyne down with me! :)
"What about that Bavarian cream pie joke I told you? There's no truth to that. Nobody with a terminal illness goes from the United States to Europe for a piece of Bavarian cream pie and then when they get there and they don't have it he says, 'Ah, I'll just have some coffee.' There's no truth to that."
Heh. I remember that bit. Funny, but the observation is wrong. That joke is full of truths! The humor of it comes from the intersection of two well-established types of human behavior. People in restaurants will often decide they only want coffee if their dessert choice is unavailable. People with terminal illnesses will often go to great lengths to experience what would otherwise be fairly mundane things. The humor comes from taking those two obvious truths and smashing them together to create a mental conflict, resulting in laughter. The (fusion chernobyl):France joke takes a truth (US dislikes France) and combines it with a falsehood (fusion reactors can melt down) and simply creates puzzlement, not mental conflict. Thus, no humor.
Of course, what kind of idiot (me) watches Seinfeld and criticizes the writers' grasp of the mechanics of humor? When you read the above, put it in the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons; I think it's the most appropriate.
The reason the loss is so low in transmission now is because they generally put the power plants close by. It's a 2200 mile trip from Anchorage, AK to the US-Canadian border near Seattle. Long-haul transmission loss would far overshadow local loss in that case. Electricity really does need to be generated fairly locally.
Yes, but certainly the whole 1kg isn't being converted to energy. The question is, how much of that 1kg do you plug into E=mc^2 to get the equivalent of 10,000,000kg of "fossil fuel"? If we knew either end of the equation, we could figure out the other.
Jokes really have to have an element of truth to them to be funny. A joke that associates meltdowns with fusion power is as lame as a joke that associates silicone breast implants with microprocessor fabrication. It's not particularly funny when it's that dumb.
Heh. Yeah, my sig is a veritable GOLD MINE of passwords.
Great idea. Too bad neither Yucca Mountain nor Alaska are significant consumers of electricity. Unless you've discovered a high-temperature superconductor from which to fashion your transmission lines, I don't see how you'd get the electricity to where it's actually needed.
[thinks back to last movie he watched in the theater, and the MPAA PR piece lecturing him about stealing food from Joe American Movie Worker's baby's mouth]
What's wrong with this (pardon the pun) picture?
Heh. To add insult to injury, the guy apparently doesn't know that Czechslovakia is no more a country than Prussia would be. They're filming in the Czech Republic. Sheesh. Doesn't this guy remember the whole cllapsde of the warsaw pact thing?
Because "lines, endpoints, etc" maps more closely to the latin alphabet, and thus is faster and easier to learn. Arbitrary combinations of bits would be totally abstracted from the letters they represent.
Why is 3x3 the minimum? 2x2 can map those lines just as well:
Unless a diagonal line goes precisely through the center, it'll look just like an 'L' shaped line. Draw a 2x2 grid. Now draw a diagonal line through it without looking. Note which squares it goes through and in what order.
a circle (or a + sign, etc...) in the exact center which is unresponsive and you avoid any problem of crossing over boxes when moving across the center. Once again, this is a simplier system than the 3x3 system so, naturally it should have been used to satisfy the simplification requirement.
See, you need a "neutral zone" in the middle, at least. But then you have to take into account that people tend to draw lines through the middle of things. With a 2x2 grid you stand the chance of an attempted horizontal line starting just inside the upper bound of the lower left box and "drifting" just above the lower boundary of the upper right box and looking, to the computer, exactly like a diagonal line. Same thing goes for a vertical line. You could introduce a vertical and horizontal "neutral band" between the squares-- but then (combined with the center neutral zone) you've essentially created a 3x3 grid...
Did you read the decision of the court? I didn't, so I don't know for sure what they ruled. If you did, I'd very much like a link to it so I can read it as well. Also, even if this was ruled obvious by the court, it would have been ruled obvious under the legal definition of the term, and not the everyday laymans definitions of the term which is what you are trying to argue for.
Actually, I've been unable to find full text of the decision, but based on the quoted text "The prior art references anticipate and render obvious the claim" from it, I look at the prior art. One of the patents it was based on was a method of decoding a written "alphabet" consisting of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. What Xerox had patented was the only simple way of decoding such strokes-- something that the prior art essentially took as a given. They can patent a specific simplified alphabet, but they can't claim any degree of novelty on the method of decoding. When I say "obvious", I mean it in the same way the judge did; that is, when you look at the prior art, the obvious method of decoding is a 3x3 grid, or something so close as to render the 3x3 grid non-patentable. When I say "the only obvious way to solve the problem", I mean it with regard to the prior art, Graffiti, Unistroke, or any other simplified straight-line alphabet. If there had never been such an alphabet patented, then perhaps Xerox would've had a valid patent. I would still think it as obvious as using a FOR loop to count from 1 to 10, but yeah, it'd be harder for a judge to rule "obvious".
Your simplification argument fails to stand up to its own standards.
Your argument fails to take into account how the system actually works. You can't just compare the 9 squares grid with a 9-bit number. For one thing, a square can be "entered" more than once while drawing a character; for another, you can't have a continuous line that "hits" only the top left and bottom right square without hitting the middle one too. You've entirely failed to understand the purpose of the grid. Let me explain:
Characters can be said to consist of four types of lines: vertical (|), horizontal (-), diagonal up (/), and diagonal down (\) . These four lines each have two possible "directions" (e.g. "-" can be left-to-right or right-to-left). A 3x3 grid is the minumum required resolution for accurately mapping those four types of lines. Conveniently, a 3x3 grid is also the easiest for humans to use, as each axis is divided into three parts: left-middle-right and top-middle-bottom. Furthermore, the "pixelation" effect of mapping drawn characters onto a 3x3 grid naturally converts even curved lines into the four simple lines -,|,\, and /. It really is the obvious solution to decoding a simplified alphabet, which (by the way) is what the court ruled!
Universities aren't monlithic entities with a giant pool of common resources. For example, if you work in the lit department you can't just wander over to the chemistry department and borrow a spectrographic analyzer. Universities are a collection of small fiefdoms where resorces are guarded jealously. Every department stencils, stamps, or engraves its name all over its equipment not so much to prevent theft by outsiders (who can remove such markings at their leisure once they get it off campus), but to prevent "permanent borrowing" by other departments. There are constant battles over office space, "turf wars" over grants, and even attempts to mount "hostile takovers" of portions of other departments. It's just not one big happy university family.
So basically, only a "University of Hick" would be small enough to "have a scanner". There are likely dozens of scanners at the university in question, but the department he works for is too small to have needed one yet.
I love google.
Results 1 - 2 of about 57 for Phn'glui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn. (0.24 seconds)
Did you mean: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn
Heh. Google rules. No wonder the ancient ones don't come when I call. I shall correct the error at once!
I see what you're saying. Of course, in this particular case, the court basically said that the examiner was on crack because the claims of the Xerox patent weren't different enough from the cited prior art to justify a whole new patent.
I understand what you're trying to say, but in this case it's not the kind of thing that only seems obvious after someone shows how it's done. This is a case of them patenting the only reasonable approach to simplified handwriting recognition. If you were to plot all the lines used in the Graffiti alphabet, or any other simplified alphabet for that matter, you'd notice the intersections and endpoints of those lines will tend to fall in the center of each square on a standard 3x3 grid. It's not a startling epiphany-- it's obvious. Three "sections" is the minimum resolution necessary to recognize the full alphabet, and the maximum a human can inuitively handle. Three scetions-- left, middle, right; top, middle, bottom. Combine the two and you get a 3x3 grid.
This isn't by the way, the first time I've seen this. Twenty years ago, a classmate of mine demonstrated handwriting recognition using an Apple 2e and a Koala Pad using the same principle. His alphabet was crude (not quite as intuitive as Graffiti), and the system required that you trace through the grid squares in a very specific order, but it used the same 3x3 grid. There does not exist another simple path to the goal. It's not quite as daft as Amazon's One-Click patent, but it's pretty close! The real question is, is it reasonable to allow patents to effectively lock up huge swathes of algorithmic "solution space" like this? There are too many solutions that are obvious to programmers but are way over a patent examiner's head. Subsequently, we see patents approved solely because the applicant was bold enough (or dumb enough, or self-impressed enough) to patent the obvious.
All of those "cheaper" methods you outline are inadequate. "Stronger plastic" alone won't make the toy survive a 3 story drop. The microphone and sensors are not the same as the ones your home security system uses, not by a long shot. The controller isn't just an LCD color monitor attached to a vibrating playstation controller. While range CAN be extended by boosting power, you lose battery life. Neither of those thinkgeek toys can climb a 3 foot pile of concrete rubble. None of this stuff comes cheap.
But a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached, right?
My understanding of the algorithm is that Xerox devides the Graffiti area into 9 ``blocks.'' The recognition algorithm tracks which block the stylus starts in, the end block, and the blocks through which the stylus travels. The recognition is fast and accurate, because each letter is simply an encoding of (start, end, intermediate blocks).
This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious.
It's obvious, e.g. the graffiti area can discern the position of the stylus with a resolution of, say, 45 along the vertical axis and 90 horizontally. Now, trying to come up with a quick, low processing requirement method of mapping characters leads directly to the question of "how fine a resolution do we need to track?" This then leads to the answer, "if we come up with our own simple alphabet, we can cut it down to as low as a three by three grid". It may not be obvious to YOU, but anyone trying to solve the problem of handwriting recognition would think of it based on the first rule of solving ANY problem: SIMPLIFY.
The reason graffiti2 sucks so badly is that they were forced to use a decoding method that was neither simple nor elegant, as Xerox claimed a patent on the obvious solution to the problem.
I think they finally "re-bred" early corn. I recall reading something about it a year or so ago. The "ear" is only a few inches long and has only four or five rows of tiny kernals. I believe they narrowed down Teosinte grass as the original ancestor of corn and "bred up" from there, just like the indians did. I wish I could remember where I read that...
Actually that only applies to the judicial system. Investigators have never pretended assume that people are innocent while looking for evidence of criminal activity. In fact, they tend to view EVERYONE as "potentially guilty".
Not every Fry's carries the exact same stock. They're a discount electronics store, not Wal-Mart.
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
So MS thinks people will repeatedly confuse local files with offsite files and their answer is to facilitate such confusion? Lunacy!
This is one of the silliest notions I've ever heard. If they make no distinction between local files (in user's control) and files "on the internet" (beyond user's control), what kind of crap are we going to have to put up with when people start saying "hey, where's that document I was looking at yesterday?" because they never knew it was on someone else's hard drive and got erased.