Actually this drink does not contain any alcohol at all. I don't think it is really beer. But anyway, for all those nay-saying this patent, I think it's a fairly decent one. It certainly isn't obvious!
From TFA: Nestlé admits it was tricky to preserve the characteristic coffee smell in the production process. Coffee beans are roasted normally, and the chemicals containing the natural aroma collected in a cryogenic condenser, before being converted into coffee oil. The remains of the roast are then ground to powder, mixed with yeast and sucrose, and fermented for 4 hours at just below 22C. At this temperature the yeast can still metabolise but does not generate alcohol.
The aroma oil is then mixed in with the liquid and nitrogen is injected to make it foam. Adding a touch of extra sugar also helps trap the aroma until the drink is poured, Nestlé claim.
Now, ask yourself, is that obvious? I think this patent is perfectly acceptable.
New browser features * 313529 - Support importing home pages from (some) other browsers and multiple versions of Firefox Start. * 220590 - [Mac] Delete (backspace) key should go back on Mac, too.
New web developer features * 302188 - Support:-moz-read-only and:-moz-read-write pseudoclasses. * 230909 - Make the dom.max_script_run_time pref work. (This pref controls the "this script is running slowly" dialog.)
New extension developer features Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.
Notable bug fixes * 313300 - Change default for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 0 to 2. (Make "Force links that open new windows to open in... new tabs" not apply to window.open with specified width, height, or other features.) * 312527 - Need to reduce padding for bookmark menu items. * 245418 - Menus and contextual menus open on wrong screen when using dual screens. * 312227 - Not able to type in textbox of the main window after download completes. * 309027 - Saving image does not open the save location window sometimes. * Many reliability fixes for software update. * 284474 - Converting to UTF-8 a url with an unescaped non-ASCII chars in the query part leads to an incompaitbilty with most server-side programs. (Fixed by backing out the change for 261929, Send urls in UTF-8 by default (images/links with non-ASCII chacters not displayed).) * 245392 - Installer options for shortcuts don't work (update/install adds unwanted icons to desktop/quick launch, creates empty folder in start menu). * 282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com. * 310825 - window.focus() in a background tab can steal focus from foreground tab.
Well, I was running 1.5 beta 1, and I was about to update to beta 2 when I heard the news of RC1. So I tried the automatic update feature, and it spat at me "DIDN'T WORK I'LL DO A MANUAL UPDATE KTHXBYE" (not in those words). After the manual update, and the usual warnings about broken extensions, I am rewarded with... Firefox 1.5 Beta 2! The marvels of technology!
You're in brisbane. Come visit IMB at St Lucia, or QIMR in Herston, or CICR at Greenslopes and you can see what research is really about... these things take time!
Eirinn
Quinine is much less effective against malaria than it used to be. There are more effective treatments - particularly interesting is Artemisinin. In the early 70's the Chinese announced they'd found a powerful anti-malarial drug in a traditional chinese medicinal herb. They wouldn't tell anyone what the plant was, as the Chinese government is very protective of Chinese medicine. Anyway eventually a photo of the plant leaked out, and Western scientists identified the plant as an Artemisia (Wormwood) species and found it growing on the banks of the Potomac river in Washington DC.
Yes it is because of GST:
$220,000 = 2,000 penalty units, each PU being $110. The cost of a PU went up from $100 to $110 with the introduction of the 10% GST, although it gets updated every few years anyway.
It's ISO 8601: ISO 8601 specifies calendar dates like this: YYYY-MM-DD.
The great thing about ISO date is that folders with names like this get correctly sorted alphabetically. Useful for archiving digital camera photos, etc.
Exactly. Also, you may be interested to know that aquired immunity (such as what you get when you survive an infection, or get a vaccine) is not carried in the germline, ie can not be inherited.
Indeed. Well, just to head off about 90% of the comments which will be "oh noes the scientists will kill us all!", they are putting the DNA into plasmids, not a virus capsule. The only way this presents a danger is if they put ALL the DNA in together with the correct promoter and deliberately infected it into a mammalian host, and even then there's little chance.
Put another way, we are much more at risk from Asian Bird Flu than we are from this virus. Incidentally, how is Avian Flu being reported in america? Here in Aus we don't hear much, even though I (and the WHO) are convinced it's the next big pandemic. Personally I'm much more scared of avian flu than terrorists...
Actually, it's the intestines that have bacteria, not the stomach, but you're otherwise correct.
Interestingly, the cultures that people have been making yoghurt with for thousands of years do not contain the "good" bacteria (such as L. acidophilus) that modern yoghurts have. It was only last century that we realised the benefit of "probiotics" and we switched to making yoghurt with acidophilus (and bifidus and casei) rather than Streptococcus.
I know this is a major breach of privacy/security, but I'm curious about what kinds of malicious things one could do with this information.
It seems to me that the only useful thing is the names/SSN combination.
Unless you could blackmail some poorly-achieving students by threatening to tell their parents their real marks?
It's Kary Mullis, and he made an absolute fortune from PCR. The patent on Taq-pol is one of the most valuable patents ever.
Secondly, you should be modded down for copy-and-pasting that diatribe against HIV/AIDS which is quite off topic.
And while Kary Mullis made a brilliant discovery (PCR) he came up with it while he was stoned (no joke). This explains a lot of his unconventional theories...
For all those saying "huh?" From the Google blog:
Why use mobile phones? It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.
Right now, sign-ups only work with U.S. mobile phone numbers, but we're eager to support others.
Honestly, it would have been useful to have that in the/. writeup...
This thing doesn't do video at all! And I don't think it has a hard drive (specs page doesn't mention it).
So really, it's not nearly as functional as an XBOX running XBMC.
But I suppose it's aiming for the audiophile market. If you look at the website you can see it's clearly marketed towards classical music lovers.
As another poster mentioned, it's a fairly common practise to add non-existent roads to maps. The roads never go anywhere, so no one should get misled. This allows the map-makers to quickly check for unauthorised use of their maps.
There was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago about this. The map-makers said that in 15 years of doing it, no one has ever noticed!
if the ' X ' button has moved for maximised windows as well then it will be the worst GUI decision EVER! Gone will be the quick hand flick up and to the right to close a window.
I doubt it... with winXP, the 'X' button on a maximized window isn't completely flush with the corner of the screen, but this is just graphically. In functionality, the button IS in the corner, thus utilising the infinite area.
Microsoft continually abuse the said space and assign these areas as no-action spaces.
Actually, this is one area that Microsoft actually do pretty good on. All corners use the infinite space (apart from the clock).
The BBC is speculating that the reason it's been difficult to reach people on their mobiles is because the government switched the network off, in anticipation of phone-triggered bombs. This is apparently part of the government's planned response to this sort of situation (the bombs in Madrid were triggered by mobile phone).
Interesting that it's for 'protecting the children'. Why not just let all Michigan residents opt-out of spam? It's almost as if the legislators are making a compromise...
With this $100 phone, I have to open it up, wait for it to respond to me pressing the address book button, type the first letter of the person's name, scrol through the other 10 people I have with the same first letter in their name,
Press the green "call" button when you're at this stage - it will dial the default number for that contact. This works on all phones.
Joe Richguy gave a million dollars to Anonymous Charity! He's a good guy! Nevermind he sits on a pile of a hundred million, ninety percent of which he earned by underpaying his employees, or overcharging for his products, or polluting the river and giving everyone cancer (for which he was sued for another, say, $25 million), or having competitors liquidated by hook or by crook, or by paying off senators who then slashed social spending or cut foreign aid or voted for a war to prop up Richguy's failing business model...
Geez, calm down.
There's a big difference between agressive business tactics and polluting rivers. Has Microsoft ever given anyone cancer?
Besides, the GP was not claiming that Bill Gates' donations absolve him of "ethical lapses". He was merely pointing out that he has given a vast amount of money to charity, which is always a good thing, no matter who is doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
...a trophy for "geekiest comment of the month". Congratulations!
"why oh why can't I just get a phone that works as a phone?!"
There, hopefully that'll stop this discussion from having 80% comments like this...
Actually this drink does not contain any alcohol at all. I don't think it is really beer.
But anyway, for all those nay-saying this patent, I think it's a fairly decent one. It certainly isn't obvious!
From TFA:
Nestlé admits it was tricky to preserve the characteristic coffee smell in the production process. Coffee beans are roasted normally, and the chemicals containing the natural aroma collected in a cryogenic condenser, before being converted into coffee oil. The remains of the roast are then ground to powder, mixed with yeast and sucrose, and fermented for 4 hours at just below 22C. At this temperature the yeast can still metabolise but does not generate alcohol.
The aroma oil is then mixed in with the liquid and nitrogen is injected to make it foam. Adding a touch of extra sugar also helps trap the aroma until the drink is poured, Nestlé claim.
Now, ask yourself, is that obvious? I think this patent is perfectly acceptable.
If anyone's curious, here's the changelog from 1.5 Beta 2:
:-moz-read-only and :-moz-read-write pseudoclasses.
New browser features
* 313529 - Support importing home pages from (some) other browsers and multiple versions of Firefox Start.
* 220590 - [Mac] Delete (backspace) key should go back on Mac, too.
New web developer features
* 302188 - Support
* 230909 - Make the dom.max_script_run_time pref work. (This pref controls the "this script is running slowly" dialog.)
New extension developer features
Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.
Notable bug fixes
* 313300 - Change default for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 0 to 2. (Make "Force links that open new windows to open in... new tabs" not apply to window.open with specified width, height, or other features.)
* 312527 - Need to reduce padding for bookmark menu items.
* 245418 - Menus and contextual menus open on wrong screen when using dual screens.
* 312227 - Not able to type in textbox of the main window after download completes.
* 309027 - Saving image does not open the save location window sometimes.
* Many reliability fixes for software update.
* 284474 - Converting to UTF-8 a url with an unescaped non-ASCII chars in the query part leads to an incompaitbilty with most server-side programs. (Fixed by backing out the change for 261929, Send urls in UTF-8 by default (images/links with non-ASCII chacters not displayed).)
* 245392 - Installer options for shortcuts don't work (update/install adds unwanted icons to desktop/quick launch, creates empty folder in start menu).
* 282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com.
* 310825 - window.focus() in a background tab can steal focus from foreground tab.
What?
I hope this isn't the warning signs of imminent slashdot spamming...
Well, I was running 1.5 beta 1, and I was about to update to beta 2 when I heard the news of RC1. So I tried the automatic update feature, and it spat at me "DIDN'T WORK I'LL DO A MANUAL UPDATE KTHXBYE" (not in those words).
After the manual update, and the usual warnings about broken extensions, I am rewarded with... Firefox 1.5 Beta 2!
The marvels of technology!
You're in brisbane. Come visit IMB at St Lucia, or QIMR in Herston, or CICR at Greenslopes and you can see what research is really about... these things take time!
Eirinn
Quinine is much less effective against malaria than it used to be. There are more effective treatments - particularly interesting is Artemisinin. In the early 70's the Chinese announced they'd found a powerful anti-malarial drug in a traditional chinese medicinal herb. They wouldn't tell anyone what the plant was, as the Chinese government is very protective of Chinese medicine.
Anyway eventually a photo of the plant leaked out, and Western scientists identified the plant as an Artemisia (Wormwood) species and found it growing on the banks of the Potomac river in Washington DC.
Yes it is because of GST:
$220,000 = 2,000 penalty units, each PU being $110.
The cost of a PU went up from $100 to $110 with the introduction of the 10% GST, although it gets updated every few years anyway.
It's ISO 8601:
ISO 8601 specifies calendar dates like this: YYYY-MM-DD.
The great thing about ISO date is that folders with names like this get correctly sorted alphabetically. Useful for archiving digital camera photos, etc.
Exactly. Also, you may be interested to know that aquired immunity (such as what you get when you survive an infection, or get a vaccine) is not carried in the germline, ie can not be inherited.
Indeed. Well, just to head off about 90% of the comments which will be "oh noes the scientists will kill us all!", they are putting the DNA into plasmids, not a virus capsule. The only way this presents a danger is if they put ALL the DNA in together with the correct promoter and deliberately infected it into a mammalian host, and even then there's little chance.
Put another way, we are much more at risk from Asian Bird Flu than we are from this virus.
Incidentally, how is Avian Flu being reported in america? Here in Aus we don't hear much, even though I (and the WHO) are convinced it's the next big pandemic.
Personally I'm much more scared of avian flu than terrorists...
Actually, it's the intestines that have bacteria, not the stomach, but you're otherwise correct.
Interestingly, the cultures that people have been making yoghurt with for thousands of years do not contain the "good" bacteria (such as L. acidophilus) that modern yoghurts have. It was only last century that we realised the benefit of "probiotics" and we switched to making yoghurt with acidophilus (and bifidus and casei) rather than Streptococcus.
...the dolphins are trained to kill insturgeons.
(sorry!)
FWIW, Greenpeace now consider nuclear power the "lesser of two evils".
I know this is a major breach of privacy/security, but I'm curious about what kinds of malicious things one could do with this information.
It seems to me that the only useful thing is the names/SSN combination.
Unless you could blackmail some poorly-achieving students by threatening to tell their parents their real marks?
It's Kary Mullis, and he made an absolute fortune from PCR. The patent on Taq-pol is one of the most valuable patents ever.
Secondly, you should be modded down for copy-and-pasting that diatribe against HIV/AIDS which is quite off topic.
And while Kary Mullis made a brilliant discovery (PCR) he came up with it while he was stoned (no joke). This explains a lot of his unconventional theories...
For all those saying "huh?"
/. writeup...
From the Google blog:
Why use mobile phones? It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.
Right now, sign-ups only work with U.S. mobile phone numbers, but we're eager to support others.
Honestly, it would have been useful to have that in the
This thing doesn't do video at all! And I don't think it has a hard drive (specs page doesn't mention it).
So really, it's not nearly as functional as an XBOX running XBMC.
But I suppose it's aiming for the audiophile market. If you look at the website you can see it's clearly marketed towards classical music lovers.
As another poster mentioned, it's a fairly common practise to add non-existent roads to maps. The roads never go anywhere, so no one should get misled.
This allows the map-makers to quickly check for unauthorised use of their maps.
There was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago about this. The map-makers said that in 15 years of doing it, no one has ever noticed!
if the ' X ' button has moved for maximised windows as well then it will be the worst GUI decision EVER! Gone will be the quick hand flick up and to the right to close a window.
I doubt it... with winXP, the 'X' button on a maximized window isn't completely flush with the corner of the screen, but this is just graphically. In functionality, the button IS in the corner, thus utilising the infinite area.
Microsoft continually abuse the said space and assign these areas as no-action spaces.
Actually, this is one area that Microsoft actually do pretty good on. All corners use the infinite space (apart from the clock).
The BBC is speculating that the reason it's been difficult to reach people on their mobiles is because the government switched the network off, in anticipation of phone-triggered bombs.
This is apparently part of the government's planned response to this sort of situation (the bombs in Madrid were triggered by mobile phone).
Interesting that it's for 'protecting the children'. Why not just let all Michigan residents opt-out of spam?
It's almost as if the legislators are making a compromise...
With this $100 phone, I have to open it up, wait for it to respond to me pressing the address book button, type the first letter of the person's name, scrol through the other 10 people I have with the same first letter in their name,
Press the green "call" button when you're at this stage - it will dial the default number for that contact. This works on all phones.
Joe Richguy gave a million dollars to Anonymous Charity! He's a good guy! Nevermind he sits on a pile of a hundred million, ninety percent of which he earned by underpaying his employees, or overcharging for his products, or polluting the river and giving everyone cancer (for which he was sued for another, say, $25 million), or having competitors liquidated by hook or by crook, or by paying off senators who then slashed social spending or cut foreign aid or voted for a war to prop up Richguy's failing business model...
Geez, calm down.
There's a big difference between agressive business tactics and polluting rivers. Has Microsoft ever given anyone cancer?
Besides, the GP was not claiming that Bill Gates' donations absolve him of "ethical lapses". He was merely pointing out that he has given a vast amount of money to charity, which is always a good thing, no matter who is doing it.