I dunno, but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
I, for one, am not over 50 but certainly associate The Beatles and "Apple" so perhaps you should reconsider making blanket statements.
Regarding submarine patents, I believe there have been changes made to the law to address this problem. Apparently the way submarine patents worked was the filer would stall the patent before it issued -- sometimes for many years....
IANAPL but AFAIK...
The US has fixed its laws to match the rest of the world to stop this "aquatic" practice. Once a patent application is filed there is an 18-month period before the application automatically becomes public. It may still take some number of years, however, before the patent is granted.
Messenger has had PC to PC calling for quite some time already. In their most recent release of Messenger they introduced a voicemail system that is actually rather cool. They have had webcam functionality for a really long time but the voice/webcam integration could be better (as best I can tell you have to start a webcam session AND a separate voice call to do web conferencing).
In the UK, Yahoo messenger has had PC to phone calling for some time. You just had to link it to a BT (Brit' Telecom) account. Having said this, I haven't actually tried it (yet). I suspect it would be of most use if you were abroad and wanted to make a call to a UK phone at "UK local" rates.
True, DMHO vapor has been intimately associated with the "greenhouse effect". Not to mention, high levels of DMHO are found in the bodies of cancer victims. Is this really the stuff we want to be making more of? It's corrosive, for pete's sake!
Yes, it was rather vague. A quick search with google turned up a more detailed report on their earlier work:( I used "bug me not" to login to read it:-) )
Just to give the flavour of this report, it states...
"Physicists at the University of Durham (Durham, UK) have fabricated a magnetic NOT gate that can operate at room temperature. It is the first wholly magnetic logic device to be formed on a microchip, and offers a key to what could become a completely new micro- and nano-magnetic chip technology.
The Durham NOT gate consists of a track of a naturally ferromagnetic alloy shaped like an inverted "Y." The magnetism of this ferromagnetic alloy tends to run parallel to its track length and points in one of two opposite directions. A single ferromagnetic track can contain different regions, each magnetized in one of these two directions. Where these opposite magnetizations meet, a transition region or "domain wall" is formed in which the..."
Do they really have to obey the speed limits? I thought they had a pretty well closed course...
I don't think they have a closed course - there aren't many roads between Darwin and Adelaide. You couldn't stop the other traffic.
As for speed limits, unless something has changed recently, the open roads in the Northern Territory don't have limits. To make things even more "interesting", they also have road trains which are very, very scary.
I dont know how accurate that is... Back when I was part of a college Solar Rayce (now Formula Sun) team, suspension design was an important part of the design, and that was in '99.
The Australian competition has been running since 1987 (and I remember coverage of the first one in the news).
It may be that only a few vehicles didn't have suspension. I suspect that, back then, the chasis of many was probably not much more than a couple of cannibalised racing-bike frames welded together.:-)
This is from my recollection of a news report of one of the very first Solar Challenge races, so the details may be a bit vague...
One other improvement was adding suspension! Some teams left out suspension as a means of saving weight. They then found that although the cars had the power to go faster, it was simply impossible to drive them due to handling or comfort problems.
Well, as one who manages the family computer, which runs WinXP, AutoUpdate is actually pretty useful.
Indeed.. but unfortunately on Win2K the auto-update patch order got messed up. The result was that on my machine it was repeatedly installing the same patch over and over and....:-|
Evententually found a fix which involved manually uninstalling and then re-installing 2 updates in the correct order.
The kind of people wanting to run CPU intensive tasks enough to be willing to pay someone for it are likely to be universities and companies that could get their own systems.
Chip companies need to run extensive simulations of the functionality of their chips before committing to actual silicon (which is a very expensive step). Although they tend to have large server farms to do this, these might already be busy.
When a (possibly even very small) change is made to the design of a chip you need to run a lot of CPU-time-hungry regression tests. If this is being done towards the end of the project, being able to do the tests in a shorter amount of time (by renting the extra CPU time) could be very beneficial.
How can the olympics be trademarked when the term was originated a couple thousand years ago in Greece? Sure, they can trademark the interlocking circle glyph, but the word?
And in news just in, Mount Olympus has been summonsed to appear in court in London for breach of the 2012 Olympic Corporation's trademark.
the idea of requiring ISP's to retain all data of their customer's online activities for at least several months. The SEC already mandates that publicly traded firms retain all company emails for at least 2 years
AHH! At last! A valid reason for SPAM. Clog up the backups...
Seriously though, surely to be thorough this would also require the post office to steam open and photocopy all correspondence? It'd be a return to the so-called Black Chambers that once existed in the US and Europe that opened dipolomatic letters.
A reminder that for something to invalidate this patent, it must have been known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before November 7, 1991. From the patent:
This application is a division of application Ser. No. 08/196,765 filed Feb. 14, 1994, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,497,502, which is a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/784,450, filed Nov. 7, 1991 now abandoned.
The question is, what exactly did those now abandoned applications actually say? It's only been a few years since the US (finally) fixed their laws to prevent submarining. I wonder if this is such a situation.
The kid pierced the Li Ion battery with a screwdriver. It wouldn't matter if this was an iPod, rio, nomad, dell dj, mobile phone or the interior of a LiIon laptop battery from any manufacturer.
Good thing it wasn't powered by one of the other choices on the current slashdot poll. If it had been a diatium cell, who knows how big the crater would have been.....?:-)
Hmm... I might have been talking utter rubbish there. The wikipedia link further down the page would seem to indicate that there were lots of incremental steps....
There's no disputing the invention of Zero as Indian (AFAIK), but I seem to recall reading that algebra was considered "created" in the Islamic world when they began to substitute "symbols" for numbers.
I think you are thinking about trademarks, not patents. Hence why submarine patents are such a big problem.
It may have been in the past, but the practice of "submarining" patents in the US should now no longer be possible because they've adopted the same practices as the rest of the world. I.E. a patent application automatically becomes public after (IIRC) 18months. Previously, (AFAIAA) it only became public when granted, hence the ability to leave it in limbo.
Wasn't that supposed to be the big selling point for Li-ion battery's several years ago when they first appeared on the horizon. "No recharge memory like Ni-Cad!". Well it's clear they don't have "recharge memory". It's more like "recharge Alzheimer's", i.e. they completely forget how to recharge:-(
That's fine, but how about my nutty idea? Imagine a service where music could be transmitted wirelessly, and you could have a receiving device even smaller than an iPod to listen to the music with. I wonder if anyone would or could ever invent something like this?
Yeah but it'd probably go the way the internet: First it'd be a nice public service but eventually they'd start filling it with adverts:-)
Yeah, I have to admit that there is a super geeky little kid somewhere inside me that thinks a multithreaded version of solitare, or freecell, or heart, would be REALLY cool.
FWIW I wrote a version of Tetris that was multi-threaded, but it was in Occam which makes that sort of thing trivial. (Of course, the fact that Occam doesn't have any data structures other than the array makes it a PITA to do anything more complex:( )
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
I, for one, am not over 50 but certainly associate The Beatles and "Apple" so perhaps you should reconsider making blanket statements.
Regarding submarine patents, I believe there have been changes made to the law to address this problem. Apparently the way submarine patents worked was the filer would stall the patent before it issued -- sometimes for many years....
IANAPL but AFAIK...
The US has fixed its laws to match the rest of the world to stop this "aquatic" practice. Once a patent application is filed there is an 18-month period before the application automatically becomes public. It may still take some number of years, however, before the patent is granted.
Messenger has had PC to PC calling for quite some time already. In their most recent release of Messenger they introduced a voicemail system that is actually rather cool. They have had webcam functionality for a really long time but the voice/webcam integration could be better (as best I can tell you have to start a webcam session AND a separate voice call to do web conferencing).
In the UK, Yahoo messenger has had PC to phone calling for some time. You just had to link it to a BT (Brit' Telecom) account. Having said this, I haven't actually tried it (yet). I suspect it would be of most use if you were abroad and wanted to make a call to a UK phone at "UK local" rates.
True, DMHO vapor has been intimately associated with the "greenhouse effect". Not to mention, high levels of DMHO are found in the bodies of cancer victims. Is this really the stuff we want to be making more of? It's corrosive, for pete's sake!
Won't somebody please think of the children?
Indeed! In 2000, in the USA alone, for example, this so called harmless chemical directly killed over 3000 people. Worldwide, it was much, much higher.
Yes, it was rather vague. A quick search with google turned up a more detailed report on their earlier work:( I used "bug me not" to login to read it
Just to give the flavour of this report, it states...
Do they really have to obey the speed limits? I thought they had a pretty well closed course...
I don't think they have a closed course - there aren't many roads between Darwin and Adelaide. You couldn't stop the other traffic.
As for speed limits, unless something has changed recently, the open roads in the Northern Territory don't have limits. To make things even more "interesting", they also have road trains which are very, very scary.
I dont know how accurate that is... Back when I was part of a college Solar Rayce (now Formula Sun) team, suspension design was an important part of the design, and that was in '99.
:-)
The Australian competition has been running since 1987 (and I remember coverage of the first one in the news).
It may be that only a few vehicles didn't have suspension. I suspect that, back then, the chasis of many was probably not much more than a couple of cannibalised racing-bike frames welded together.
This is from my recollection of a news report of one of the very first Solar Challenge races, so the details may be a bit vague...
One other improvement was adding suspension! Some teams left out suspension as a means of saving weight. They then found that although the cars had the power to go faster, it was simply impossible to drive them due to handling or comfort problems.
Well, as one who manages the family computer, which runs WinXP, AutoUpdate is actually pretty useful.
.. but unfortunately on Win2K the auto-update patch order got messed up. The result was that on my machine it was repeatedly installing the same patch over and over and.... :-|
Indeed
Evententually found a fix which involved manually uninstalling and then re-installing 2 updates in the correct order.
I can imagine a fella being arrested for refilling his cartridge. As he's handcuffed, he listens to the lecture of a bald man with a monocule:
"You only ink twice, Mr. Bond"
Surely you meant "Dye another day"?
The kind of people wanting to run CPU intensive tasks enough to be willing to pay someone for it are likely to be universities and companies that could get their own systems.
Chip companies need to run extensive simulations of the functionality of their chips before committing to actual silicon (which is a very expensive step). Although they tend to have large server farms to do this, these might already be busy.
When a (possibly even very small) change is made to the design of a chip you need to run a lot of CPU-time-hungry regression tests. If this is being done towards the end of the project, being able to do the tests in a shorter amount of time (by renting the extra CPU time) could be very beneficial.
How can the olympics be trademarked when the term was originated a couple thousand years ago in Greece? Sure, they can trademark the interlocking circle glyph, but the word?
And in news just in, Mount Olympus has been summonsed to appear in court in London for breach of the 2012 Olympic Corporation's trademark.
All normal people can withstand 15 minutes
Err no. That depends on other factors.
IIRC, in Brisbane (Australia) in Summer at noon, I believe the figure quoted by the skin cancer awareness people** is that unprotected skin will begin to burn in 5~6 minutes.
**Scroll down the page a bit to find the scary figures.
I enjoyed reading your post, but perhaps this is a bit dubious:
For one thing, film is an analogue, within it exists infinite possibilities for shade and color.
Is it really analogue? Surely, the fact that we can see grain would indicate there must be some sort of step function occuring?
the idea of requiring ISP's to retain all data of their customer's online activities for at least several months. The SEC already mandates that publicly traded firms retain all company emails for at least 2 years
AHH! At last! A valid reason for SPAM. Clog up the backups...
Seriously though, surely to be thorough this would also require the post office to steam open and photocopy all correspondence? It'd be a return to the so-called Black Chambers that once existed in the US and Europe that opened dipolomatic letters.
imagine that would be pretty tough, since NTSC is interlaced, unlike PAL
Errrr....
IIRC, PAL stands for "Phase Alternate Line" which basically means interlaced....
The question is, what exactly did those now abandoned applications actually say? It's only been a few years since the US (finally) fixed their laws to prevent submarining. I wonder if this is such a situation.
The kid pierced the Li Ion battery with a screwdriver. It wouldn't matter if this was an iPod, rio, nomad, dell dj, mobile phone or the interior of a LiIon laptop battery from any manufacturer.
.....? :-)
Good thing it wasn't powered by one of the other choices on the current slashdot poll. If it had been a diatium cell, who knows how big the crater would have been
Hmmm, most modern programmers would just pick "Tools->Beautify Code" in their modern editor and not care how the other person formatted their code.
But surely, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and not someone else's formating algorithm?
Hmm... I might have been talking utter rubbish there. The wikipedia link further down the page would seem to indicate that there were lots of incremental steps....
There's no disputing the invention of Zero as Indian (AFAIK), but I seem to recall reading that algebra was considered "created" in the Islamic world when they began to substitute "symbols" for numbers.
I think you are thinking about trademarks, not patents. Hence why submarine patents are such a big problem.
It may have been in the past, but the practice of "submarining" patents in the US should now no longer be possible because they've adopted the same practices as the rest of the world. I.E. a patent application automatically becomes public after (IIRC) 18months. Previously, (AFAIAA) it only became public when granted, hence the ability to leave it in limbo.
Wasn't that supposed to be the big selling point for Li-ion battery's several years ago when they first appeared on the horizon. "No recharge memory like Ni-Cad!". :-(
Well it's clear they don't have "recharge memory". It's more like "recharge Alzheimer's", i.e. they completely forget how to recharge
Yeah but it'd probably go the way the internet: First it'd be a nice public service but eventually they'd start filling it with adverts
Yeah, I have to admit that there is a super geeky little kid somewhere inside me that thinks a multithreaded version of solitare, or freecell, or heart, would be REALLY cool.
:( )
FWIW I wrote a version of Tetris that was multi-threaded, but it was in Occam which makes that sort of thing trivial. (Of course, the fact that Occam doesn't have any data structures other than the array makes it a PITA to do anything more complex