Not that I really believe Bush planned it, (is he smart enough?)
More like the CIA, or whoever else in the "Intelligence community" that, as a result of 9/11, were granted absolute power. Just watch Bush defend the invasion of Iraq after he admitted that there are no WMDs to be found: He simply says that his actions were right because he did what the intelligence community told him to do.
AND PEOPLE ACCEPT THAT!
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." -- (Gilbert)
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
-- exchange between Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering and Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946, published in Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary
While it would be nice if there was a test or three that a person was required to take in order to do anything online... the fact that anyone is able to buy a PC and plug it into the internet means that there are a lot of... uninformed people out there.
There used to be a test; back before connecting to the Internet was a matter of plugging the cable from your cablemodem into the back of your computer and clicking 'OK' on all the prompts, you actually had to have enough technical savvy to be able to set up your own TCP/IP stack; even for basic dialup shell access (pre-GUI), you needed to be able to figure out Unix command-line functions. This meant that the people who were posting to the newsgroups were almost always people who had exhibited a minimum level of technical skill. The exceptions were freshmen at college getting access to the Net through their institution's terminal farms, and who could readily be identified by the wave of "Greetings. My name is David Rhodes..." pyramid-scheme postings that heralded the start of each semester and trickled off as they had a little common sense mailbombed into them (if only 0.1% of the readers of a newsgroup emailed someone with an explanation of why it's a pyramid scheme, it still floods their mailboxes).
However, as time went on, the various online services (Delphi, GEnie, et al.) began to offer access to the Net as another feature of their service, with their install software being automated, so if you could stick an AOL floppy into your computer, you could get Net access. And with each new online service that added Net access to their services, you saw a flood of people being exposed to the chain letters and pyramid schemes that had maintained a hand-to-mouth existence on the twice-yearly crop of gullible freshmen -- and there was a steady stream of fresh meat arriving as more people subscribed. With the massive expansion of potential victims, it became a lot more profitable to run scams, and the 'market' boomed, with increased automation making it just as easy to spam the world with 'opportunities' as it was to filter newsgroup postings to find accounts that hadn't posted before and spam them directly.
There is evidence to conclude that small doses of radiation, as opposed to high doses, actually have a beneficial effect, reducing the susceptibility to various radiation effects. The term is radiation hormesis.
I would expect that what you would get as your download would be an ISO image of the DVD, which would be burned straight to the DVD, thereby incorporating all of the standard DVD copy protection mechanisms (i.e., find yourself a DeCSS implementation).
I used to get a ton of wrong-number calls at work. I work at a location that is on the military's DSN phone system, where phones have a commercial number with area code, and a DSN number that eliminated the area code and used 3-digit prefixes to designate the location, with the last four being the same as your regular number (i.e, if your commercial number was (838)528-2525, your DSN number might be 580-2525 [numbers made up out of the air]). Until I moved to another office, and took the opportunity to let my phone number changed, if some yahoo called the commercial number for customer service at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Cleveland, Ohio, but used the DSN network to do it, they'd get my phone (i.e., using the numbers above, dialing 528-2525 on DSN). I would have to field between three and nine calls a day from people who couldn't seem to understand that DFAS had a commercial number and a DSN number, and that you couldn't call the commercial number on DSN. The truly idiot thing about this was that on all of DFAS's paperwork (including their website), they listed both numbers, clearly labelled, and people were still unable to tell the two apart.
However, recording a lecture, combined with taking notes, lets you go back later when you go over your notes and check to make sure that you haven't accidentally left out something important. Depending on the class subject, what the professor says in class may not be as significant as what they write on the board, which is impossible to capture with an audio recorder, but trying to keep up with both what the professor is saying and what they're writing can make you lose things; knowing that you have a backup of what they're saying lets you focus on what they're writing, increasing the later utility of your notes.
TFA doesn't mention that this is merely a variation on the Project Daedalus spacecraft, which used fusion devices instead of fission devices, as in the original Project Orion design; Frederick's spacecraft, from the image in the article, looks to be missing many of the important components -- radiation shielding, shock dampers, etc. -- that the Orion and Daedalus spacecraft had.
However, if you buy a program with the expectation, based on the advertising, box description, and manuals stating that the program will do [insert desired function here], and the program does the wrong thing when you use that function -- i.e., when you sum a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, the total is wrong, or the contents of a cut-and-paste change between cut and paste in a word-processing or graphics program -- then you should have a reasonable expectation that the software company is obligated to release a patch that fixes the problem, because the product that you have purchased is not the product that was described.
Having seen the various odd casings that USB drives are sold in -- tempura, sushi, ducks, a cut-off thumb, dim sum -- as long as you didn't have anything shorting the actual circuitry, and could still slot the drive into a USB port, what you wrap around the electronics is entirely up to you (I recall the pictures of the person who fit the circuitry into the neck of a Barbie doll, so that when you took off the head of the doll, the connector was exposed).
While you're listing America's enemies, you should add in the North Koreans, the Iraqis, and might as well get the little conflicts like Haiti, Guatemala, Panama, and our other banana republic invasions into your "we and our allies are always honorable but our enemies are evil" list. And heck, you should expand your list from the narrow focus of "they shoot medics" to include things like throwing babies from incubators while you're at it.
If I had reliable accounts of the same thing happening in the conflicts you name, I might have cited them, too. Or you could, for example, go ask Walt "Pete" Peters, who served as a Combat Medic in WWII in the 106th Div. 331st Batallion, with the 422, 423 and 424th Regiments, why he didn't wear the Red Cross insignia, or ask Albert Gentile, 84th Infantry Division, Company B, 333 Infantry, why he carried a service.45 automatic. We can't ask Leo Fratella, who was a combat medic attached to the Medical Detachment, 103rd Infantry Regiment, 43rd Division. He took part in the assault of the main Philippine Island of Luzon on January 9, 1945. On January 20th, the 103rd was attacking Japanese positions on Hill 600, near the town of Palac-Palac. Fratella was giving aid to several wounded comrades when he was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire.
But since you bring up Korea, let's look at an account from Leon Thomas, Adjutant of Military Order of the Purple Heart, Chapter 604, Bakersfield, California.:
"A few months out of KCUHS High School in Jan 1951, I enlisted in the US Army for a three year hitch. I was working for Isotherms , a sheet metal/Insulation Company at the time. After Basic Training at Fort Ord I was a Medic during the Korean War, and can attest to the cruelty of the enemy when it came to shooting Medics. On my first day with Charlie Co. 8th Cavalry. Regiment as one of their Two Medics, we were on Patrol as we moved up a hill along a dusty road on a very hot sultry day. The Flank guard on the left of our column was hit. As is usually the case the wounded man yells medic I'm hit. I could see he was down on the ground, I started sprint down the slight incline to give him help, all decked out in my brightly colored arm band and helmet with their distinctive Red Cross to signify first aid. I did not get 10 long steps down the Hill until they enemy opened fire on me. I made it down to carry the guy back to some cover before I patched him up' to stop the bleeding. He lived to fight another day. But, As soon as we got the soldier on his way to the first Aid Station for more medical care. I quickly removed my Red crosses and quickly got my hands on a side arm for protection. It did not take me long to change my mind about carrying a weapon. You see I attended an Assembly of God Church and believed, I did not want to bear arms against another man. That changes when the other man starts shooting at you, even when you do not carry a gun."
There have been violations of the "rules of civilized warfare" as long as people have had the misconception that there can be 'civilized' warfare. And the fact that I cited the Viet Cong, Japan, and Nazi Germany as specific examples doesn't mean that the US, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, or any other participant in a war from WWII forward hasn't done the same thing. The argument was that having the Red Cross insignia in games would encurage people to shoot medics first, and that this would transfer back to the Real World -- but it was in the 'real world' decades before there were FPS shooters from which it could be transferred, so the argument was specious.
If I recall correctly, shooting for the medics first was one of the tactics used by the Viet Cong, as well as by the Japanese in WWII, and to some degree the Germans in WWII as well... And if you ask the medics who served during WWII, and during Korea and Vietnam, you'll find that a large number of them didn't wear any identifying red-cross insignia precisely for that reason, and often carried a personal weapon, despite it being technically against regulations. So there's nothing about shooting the medics first that hasn't been part of Real Life for decades already.
I guess they figured that since Fingerworks, the manufacturers of the Touchstream keyboards, has gone out of business, they don't have to worry about being sued into the ground on the basis of prior art. The Touchstream keyboards were programmed to recognize a wide variety of gestures ranging from basic window control to application-specific actions.
They're going to have to have a serious MTBF advance, or the 'keysaver' is going to have to be pretty aggressive. From the website: "Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) in our screens last for 5000 hours of continuous use. The screen saving mode is designed to extend the keyboard's lifetime." Now, that's less than eight months of always-on lifespan. What is the lifespan in intermittent use? Is it still 5000 hours of 'on' time? In that case, the mention under the Optimus keyboard of graphical 'keysavers' would be counterproductive -- you would want the keysaver to turn off the key displays fairly quickly after the keyboard goes idle, not draw pretty pictures across the keyboard for hours. If the lifespan goes up under intermittent use -- i.e., 5000 hours continuous use, but 7000 hours of use on a 50% 'on' cycle, 10,000 hours on a 25% 'on' cycle, etc. -- then something like the existing screensavers (turn the screensaver on after X minutes, blank the screen after Y minutes) would be viable. I'd be pretty annoyed to have to buy a new unit every 18 months because I liked to watch the keysaver...
In the respect that they were killed in the vain of trying to push our boundaries of what we can do as humans, this accident qualifies as a tragedy.
But they weren't pushing out any boundaries; that mission would have established no technological milestone, nothing that hadn't already done before, except for the public-relations bonus of sending a 'common man' into space. It was just one more routine mission among routine missions -- and that is where the tragedy lay: that the continued routine success of the space shuttle missions blinded people to the fact that it wasn't safe, it wasn't routine, that it was still dangerous, so that concerns raised by the engineers about where the design limits of the vehicle were, and whether the launch was outside them, might be dismissed with a "never happened before, won't happen now" attitude because the shuttle program's image was suffering from repeated launch delays, a decision more readily reached because the NASA management had turned over, the original technical management aging out and replaced by managers versed in business models, but who hadn't participated in the technological progress of Nasa's spacecraft, and were thereby distanced from the engineers.
This is a somewhat scary decision, as much as I like the nailing Pedophile's balls to walls. For example, that case in Vermont that made the news about the judge giving the guy 60 days, I'd have given him 40 years.
And the followon to that story, where the judge changed his sentence, giving him something on the close order of forty years. But you have to read down to find out why he handed out the original sentence -- the mental health bureaucracy had originally said that they wouldn't take him for treatment until after he'd finished his jail term, so the judge issued a sentence that would get him quickly into a mental treatment program. After the mental health director changed their policy, and stated that they would accept him while serving his jail term, the judge modified his sentence to one appropriate to the man's crime.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth(1), And danced(2) the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed(3) and joined the tumbling mirth(4) Of sun-split clouds(5) and done a hundred things(6) You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung(7) High in the sunlit silence(8). Hov'ring there(9) I've chased the shouting wind(10) along and flung(10) My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious(12), burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights(13) with easy grace, Where never lark, or even eagle(14) flew; And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space(15), Put out my hand(16), and touched the face of God.
FAA Supplement to "High Flight" (1) Pilots must ensure that all surly bonds have been slipped entirely before aircraft taxi or flight is attempted. (2) During periods of severe sky dancing, crew and passengers must keep seatbelts fastened. Crew should wear shoulder belts as provided. (3) Sunward climbs must not exceed the maximum permitted aircraft ceiling. (4) Passenger aircraft are prohibited from joining the tumbling mirth. (5) Pilots flying through sun-split clouds under VFR conditions must comply with all applicable minimum clearances. (6) Do not perform these hundred things in front of Federal Aviation Administration inspectors. (7) Wheeling, soaring, and swinging will not be attempted except in aircraft rated for such activities and within utility class weight limits. (8) Be advised that sunlit silence will occur only when a major engine malfunction has occurred. (9) "Hov'ring there" will constitute a highly reliable signal that a flight emergency is imminent. (10) Forecasts of shouting winds are available from the local FSS. Encounters with unexpected shouting winds should be reported by pilots. (11) Pilots flinging eager craft through footless halls of air are reminded that they alone are responsible for maintaining separation from other eager craft. (12) Should any crewmember or passenger experience delirium while in the burning blue, submit an irregularity report upon flight termination. (13) Windswept heights will be topped by a minimum of 1,000 feet to maintain VFR minimum separations. (14) Aircraft engine ingestion of, or impact with, larks or eagles should be reported to the FAA and the appropriate aircraft maintenance facility. (15) Aircraft operating in the high untrespassed sanctity of space must remain in IFR flight regardless of meteorological conditions and visibility. (16) Pilots and passengers are reminded that opening doors or windows in order to touch the face of God may result in loss of cabin pressure.
The CoH/CoV characters appear to rely mostly on texturing for their distinctive appearance, not the polygon model, at least as far as I could tell from the period where their connection lag got bad enough that I could pick a character in the selection screen and watch the polygon model, shading model, and textures load separately; aside from the shifting of some vertexes available with the sliders, there appears to be only the three human polygon models (plus the Kheldian forms), so anything OGLE extracted would be massively generic. If you could get the textures as well, that would make it possible, although I expect that Cryptic/NCsoft would want to control anything that might result in parts of their game -- models and textures being a big part of a game's 'feel -- getting beyond their control.
A lot of the 'look' of the characters appears to be a function of the texturing, which OGLE doesn't do. There was a period a while back where Cryptic was having communication problems from its servers to the users' client programs; besides the lag, rubberbanding, and disconnects, one of the ways this manifested was in slow loads of the character data in the character selection screen -- for some people, including me, what would happen was that the character's polygon shape would be transmitted, then an indeterminate lag would occur before the character's texture data would be sent. The actual polygon forms for the CoX (CoH/CoV) characters appears to be fairly simple and generic; all the detail is in the costume textures. So being able to save and reconstruct the 3D model for your character wouldn't get you much. Now, if NCsoft/Cryptic offered a service where you could, for a price, specify the server, character name, and costume slot, and have them ship you a figure 3D-printed from your character's model and painted to match their costume, I think they'd make a bundle from it; I know that people on the CoH/CoV boards have asked for something like that repeatedly.
I've seen both the hero and villain costume designer programs standalone programs at booths NCsoft/Cryptic had at conventions, and been told the same thing -- that it would be too much work to separate it from the game -- while standing at the computer running the software. I wonder, though, if what they thought we were asking for was something that would let us go through the CoH/CoV character creation offline, and then upload a character into the game, instead of just a costume-design program almost exactly like the ones they use for con demos that would let you design the character's appearance and then save it, with the additional feature of being able to save just the rendered design without a background in a transparent-background PNG file, so you could drop the design on top of backgrounds without having to play games with removing the screenshot background (which doesn't work well for things like auras).
They've always had the character-design module as a separate package; that's one of the things they trot around to conventions, so they can have a computer dedicated to letting people play with the character designer, without having to worry about them actually creating a character and borking the game's configuration.
A device like a USB key fob is blank storage. Like a really big floppy. It doesn't violate because it doesn't have an algorithm that implements FAT. Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way. They do implement a FAT algorithm.
Not always. My two SanDisk Micro USB drives both came with a filesystem already on the drive, with the SanDisk encryption software on them. So the patent would apply to the device.
Except for AOL CDs, in which case using them as coasters actually ennobles them by giving them a purpose, instead of their content being designated as 'landfill'.
This just adds to my dubious attitude toward EE majors... Back when I was in college, two friends of mine -- one an EE major, the other a Math/CS major like me -- convinced me to add a EE course they were taking... EE 575, Microprocessors. The numbering scheme sets the course as "upper division, suitable for graduate-level work. The class turns out to be assembly-language programming directly to the device level, with details about hardware timing and the like. The first test, I get an 86, my Math/CS friend gets a 68, and my EE friend gets a 48... and we were the three highest scores in the class. Half the class couldn't read a timing diagram to answer a question like "If an address is put on the address bus at time 0 for a memory read, how many clock cycles later does the data on the data bus become valid?" We found out later that the professor had to give the three of us 'A's, then grade the rest of the class on a curve, in order to avoid failing half the class... which would have been ugly, since the EE department was undergoing accreditation that year, and it would not have been pretty watching them explain why they failed a dozen EE graduate students because two Math/CS undergraduates were making the EE majors look like idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." -- (Gilbert)
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
-- exchange between Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering and Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946, published in Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary
There used to be a test; back before connecting to the Internet was a matter of plugging the cable from your cablemodem into the back of your computer and clicking 'OK' on all the prompts, you actually had to have enough technical savvy to be able to set up your own TCP/IP stack; even for basic dialup shell access (pre-GUI), you needed to be able to figure out Unix command-line functions. This meant that the people who were posting to the newsgroups were almost always people who had exhibited a minimum level of technical skill. The exceptions were freshmen at college getting access to the Net through their institution's terminal farms, and who could readily be identified by the wave of "Greetings. My name is David Rhodes..." pyramid-scheme postings that heralded the start of each semester and trickled off as they had a little common sense mailbombed into them (if only 0.1% of the readers of a newsgroup emailed someone with an explanation of why it's a pyramid scheme, it still floods their mailboxes).
However, as time went on, the various online services (Delphi, GEnie, et al.) began to offer access to the Net as another feature of their service, with their install software being automated, so if you could stick an AOL floppy into your computer, you could get Net access. And with each new online service that added Net access to their services, you saw a flood of people being exposed to the chain letters and pyramid schemes that had maintained a hand-to-mouth existence on the twice-yearly crop of gullible freshmen -- and there was a steady stream of fresh meat arriving as more people subscribed. With the massive expansion of potential victims, it became a lot more profitable to run scams, and the 'market' boomed, with increased automation making it just as easy to spam the world with 'opportunities' as it was to filter newsgroup postings to find accounts that hadn't posted before and spam them directly.
There is evidence to conclude that small doses of radiation, as opposed to high doses, actually have a beneficial effect, reducing the susceptibility to various radiation effects. The term is radiation hormesis.
I would expect that what you would get as your download would be an ISO image of the DVD, which would be burned straight to the DVD, thereby incorporating all of the standard DVD copy protection mechanisms (i.e., find yourself a DeCSS implementation).
I used to get a ton of wrong-number calls at work. I work at a location that is on the military's DSN phone system, where phones have a commercial number with area code, and a DSN number that eliminated the area code and used 3-digit prefixes to designate the location, with the last four being the same as your regular number (i.e, if your commercial number was (838)528-2525, your DSN number might be 580-2525 [numbers made up out of the air]). Until I moved to another office, and took the opportunity to let my phone number changed, if some yahoo called the commercial number for customer service at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Cleveland, Ohio, but used the DSN network to do it, they'd get my phone (i.e., using the numbers above, dialing 528-2525 on DSN). I would have to field between three and nine calls a day from people who couldn't seem to understand that DFAS had a commercial number and a DSN number, and that you couldn't call the commercial number on DSN. The truly idiot thing about this was that on all of DFAS's paperwork (including their website), they listed both numbers, clearly labelled, and people were still unable to tell the two apart.
However, recording a lecture, combined with taking notes, lets you go back later when you go over your notes and check to make sure that you haven't accidentally left out something important. Depending on the class subject, what the professor says in class may not be as significant as what they write on the board, which is impossible to capture with an audio recorder, but trying to keep up with both what the professor is saying and what they're writing can make you lose things; knowing that you have a backup of what they're saying lets you focus on what they're writing, increasing the later utility of your notes.
No, no, no...
We will patent no invention before it becomes profitable to sue someone for violating it.
TFA doesn't mention that this is merely a variation on the Project Daedalus spacecraft, which used fusion devices instead of fission devices, as in the original Project Orion design; Frederick's spacecraft, from the image in the article, looks to be missing many of the important components -- radiation shielding, shock dampers, etc. -- that the Orion and Daedalus spacecraft had.
However, if you buy a program with the expectation, based on the advertising, box description, and manuals stating that the program will do [insert desired function here], and the program does the wrong thing when you use that function -- i.e., when you sum a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, the total is wrong, or the contents of a cut-and-paste change between cut and paste in a word-processing or graphics program -- then you should have a reasonable expectation that the software company is obligated to release a patch that fixes the problem, because the product that you have purchased is not the product that was described.
Having seen the various odd casings that USB drives are sold in -- tempura, sushi, ducks, a cut-off thumb, dim sum -- as long as you didn't have anything shorting the actual circuitry, and could still slot the drive into a USB port, what you wrap around the electronics is entirely up to you (I recall the pictures of the person who fit the circuitry into the neck of a Barbie doll, so that when you took off the head of the doll, the connector was exposed).
If I had reliable accounts of the same thing happening in the conflicts you name, I might have cited them, too. Or you could, for example, go ask Walt "Pete" Peters, who served as a Combat Medic in WWII in the 106th Div. 331st Batallion, with the 422, 423 and 424th Regiments, why he didn't wear the Red Cross insignia, or ask Albert Gentile, 84th Infantry Division, Company B, 333 Infantry, why he carried a service .45 automatic. We can't ask Leo Fratella, who was a combat medic attached to the Medical Detachment, 103rd Infantry Regiment, 43rd Division. He took part in the assault of the main Philippine Island of Luzon on January 9, 1945. On January 20th, the 103rd was attacking Japanese positions on Hill 600, near the town of Palac-Palac. Fratella was giving aid to several wounded comrades when he was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire.
But since you bring up Korea, let's look at an account from Leon Thomas, Adjutant of Military Order of the Purple Heart, Chapter 604, Bakersfield, California.:
There have been violations of the "rules of civilized warfare" as long as people have had the misconception that there can be 'civilized' warfare. And the fact that I cited the Viet Cong, Japan, and Nazi Germany as specific examples doesn't mean that the US, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, or any other participant in a war from WWII forward hasn't done the same thing. The argument was that having the Red Cross insignia in games would encurage people to shoot medics first, and that this would transfer back to the Real World -- but it was in the 'real world' decades before there were FPS shooters from which it could be transferred, so the argument was specious.
If I recall correctly, shooting for the medics first was one of the tactics used by the Viet Cong, as well as by the Japanese in WWII, and to some degree the Germans in WWII as well... And if you ask the medics who served during WWII, and during Korea and Vietnam, you'll find that a large number of them didn't wear any identifying red-cross insignia precisely for that reason, and often carried a personal weapon, despite it being technically against regulations. So there's nothing about shooting the medics first that hasn't been part of Real Life for decades already.
In the spirit of a line from the Vietnam War, "We have to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
I guess they figured that since Fingerworks, the manufacturers of the Touchstream keyboards, has gone out of business, they don't have to worry about being sued into the ground on the basis of prior art. The Touchstream keyboards were programmed to recognize a wide variety of gestures ranging from basic window control to application-specific actions.
They're going to have to have a serious MTBF advance, or the 'keysaver' is going to have to be pretty aggressive. From the website: "Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) in our screens last for 5000 hours of continuous use. The screen saving mode is designed to extend the keyboard's lifetime." Now, that's less than eight months of always-on lifespan. What is the lifespan in intermittent use? Is it still 5000 hours of 'on' time? In that case, the mention under the Optimus keyboard of graphical 'keysavers' would be counterproductive -- you would want the keysaver to turn off the key displays fairly quickly after the keyboard goes idle, not draw pretty pictures across the keyboard for hours. If the lifespan goes up under intermittent use -- i.e., 5000 hours continuous use, but 7000 hours of use on a 50% 'on' cycle, 10,000 hours on a 25% 'on' cycle, etc. -- then something like the existing screensavers (turn the screensaver on after X minutes, blank the screen after Y minutes) would be viable. I'd be pretty annoyed to have to buy a new unit every 18 months because I liked to watch the keysaver...
But they weren't pushing out any boundaries; that mission would have established no technological milestone, nothing that hadn't already done before, except for the public-relations bonus of sending a 'common man' into space. It was just one more routine mission among routine missions -- and that is where the tragedy lay: that the continued routine success of the space shuttle missions blinded people to the fact that it wasn't safe, it wasn't routine, that it was still dangerous, so that concerns raised by the engineers about where the design limits of the vehicle were, and whether the launch was outside them, might be dismissed with a "never happened before, won't happen now" attitude because the shuttle program's image was suffering from repeated launch delays, a decision more readily reached because the NASA management had turned over, the original technical management aging out and replaced by managers versed in business models, but who hadn't participated in the technological progress of Nasa's spacecraft, and were thereby distanced from the engineers.
And the followon to that story, where the judge changed his sentence, giving him something on the close order of forty years. But you have to read down to find out why he handed out the original sentence -- the mental health bureaucracy had originally said that they wouldn't take him for treatment until after he'd finished his jail term, so the judge issued a sentence that would get him quickly into a mental treatment program. After the mental health director changed their policy, and stated that they would accept him while serving his jail term, the judge modified his sentence to one appropriate to the man's crime.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth(1),
And danced(2) the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed(3) and joined the tumbling mirth(4)
Of sun-split clouds(5) and done a hundred things(6)
You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung(7)
High in the sunlit silence(8). Hov'ring there(9)
I've chased the shouting wind(10) along and flung(10)
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious(12), burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights(13) with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle(14) flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space(15),
Put out my hand(16), and touched the face of God.
The CoH/CoV characters appear to rely mostly on texturing for their distinctive appearance, not the polygon model, at least as far as I could tell from the period where their connection lag got bad enough that I could pick a character in the selection screen and watch the polygon model, shading model, and textures load separately; aside from the shifting of some vertexes available with the sliders, there appears to be only the three human polygon models (plus the Kheldian forms), so anything OGLE extracted would be massively generic. If you could get the textures as well, that would make it possible, although I expect that Cryptic/NCsoft would want to control anything that might result in parts of their game -- models and textures being a big part of a game's 'feel -- getting beyond their control.
A lot of the 'look' of the characters appears to be a function of the texturing, which OGLE doesn't do. There was a period a while back where Cryptic was having communication problems from its servers to the users' client programs; besides the lag, rubberbanding, and disconnects, one of the ways this manifested was in slow loads of the character data in the character selection screen -- for some people, including me, what would happen was that the character's polygon shape would be transmitted, then an indeterminate lag would occur before the character's texture data would be sent. The actual polygon forms for the CoX (CoH/CoV) characters appears to be fairly simple and generic; all the detail is in the costume textures. So being able to save and reconstruct the 3D model for your character wouldn't get you much. Now, if NCsoft/Cryptic offered a service where you could, for a price, specify the server, character name, and costume slot, and have them ship you a figure 3D-printed from your character's model and painted to match their costume, I think they'd make a bundle from it; I know that people on the CoH/CoV boards have asked for something like that repeatedly.
I've seen both the hero and villain costume designer programs standalone programs at booths NCsoft/Cryptic had at conventions, and been told the same thing -- that it would be too much work to separate it from the game -- while standing at the computer running the software. I wonder, though, if what they thought we were asking for was something that would let us go through the CoH/CoV character creation offline, and then upload a character into the game, instead of just a costume-design program almost exactly like the ones they use for con demos that would let you design the character's appearance and then save it, with the additional feature of being able to save just the rendered design without a background in a transparent-background PNG file, so you could drop the design on top of backgrounds without having to play games with removing the screenshot background (which doesn't work well for things like auras).
They've always had the character-design module as a separate package; that's one of the things they trot around to conventions, so they can have a computer dedicated to letting people play with the character designer, without having to worry about them actually creating a character and borking the game's configuration.
Not always. My two SanDisk Micro USB drives both came with a filesystem already on the drive, with the SanDisk encryption software on them. So the patent would apply to the device.
Except for AOL CDs, in which case using them as coasters actually ennobles them by giving them a purpose, instead of their content being designated as 'landfill'.
This just adds to my dubious attitude toward EE majors... Back when I was in college, two friends of mine -- one an EE major, the other a Math/CS major like me -- convinced me to add a EE course they were taking... EE 575, Microprocessors. The numbering scheme sets the course as "upper division, suitable for graduate-level work. The class turns out to be assembly-language programming directly to the device level, with details about hardware timing and the like. The first test, I get an 86, my Math/CS friend gets a 68, and my EE friend gets a 48... and we were the three highest scores in the class. Half the class couldn't read a timing diagram to answer a question like "If an address is put on the address bus at time 0 for a memory read, how many clock cycles later does the data on the data bus become valid?" We found out later that the professor had to give the three of us 'A's, then grade the rest of the class on a curve, in order to avoid failing half the class... which would have been ugly, since the EE department was undergoing accreditation that year, and it would not have been pretty watching them explain why they failed a dozen EE graduate students because two Math/CS undergraduates were making the EE majors look like idiots.