While I have a basic understanding of what spectroscopy is, it doesn't mean it's infallible. Simply put we know how to examine materials based upon spectroscopy over very short distances through known and understood conditions. To this point we've only been able to prove that spectroscopy is capable of determining composition of items over a couple meters to a couple million miles. When you apply this understanding to a example that is light years away with who knows what between us, there is a lot of room for the rules to change.
Furthermore we don't know what kind of compounds might exist on such a distant planet. Conditions, molecules, elements, energies may (probably) exist that we just don't know or understand that could contradict our understanding of material science.
I'm not saying that this "finding" is wrong, just that it's a interpretation of something VERY far away that more than likely will never be proved in our lifetimes. To call it conclusive is rather strong.
I used to be a engineer for a large debit card processor and switch. You are very correct, the amount of legacy support is astonishing. Prior to having ATALLA boxes, the pin block translation and decryption was done in software. After the migration to hardware encryption processors a rogue copy of the old software was kept around offline. A couple times that software was dusted off to break a key block for benevolent reasons (once was a production bug that nobody could figure out and the other was because a institution lost their master key and couldn't generate another one quick enough)
Ultimately in the card processing industry seceurity is mostly a function of access control, not technology. People would ask me if I could steal money through the system and the answer was yes. The only problem is that I would leave my fingerprints all over the place and I couldn't steal enough to make it worth disappearing and leaving my life behind. Ultimately the cost to revamp the industry wide encryption is probably not justified by the actual exposure. In all reality it's going to take a very long time before the entire industry moves to any new technology, there simply isn't enough motivation to force the migration quickly.
Well the real question is, are they using the original set, or a new one. I heard that higher definition displays show lots of flaws in lower def sets.
Your analogy is more like somoene entering a movie theater with two friends, running outside and bringing in two more friends with the first two friends ticket stubs. More people are using the resources expended than were purchased.
If Disney sells a ticket for a whole day, and the price reflects using the park services for a whole day, I'd hope they have enough resources that everyone can be served. As long as the number of people inside the park never exceeds the number of paying customers then Disney is not losing. I don't think it is morally wrong for someone to leave the park midday and let someone else use the pass for the remainder of the day, but granted if the terms of the ticket explicitly state that it's one person by identity, not quantity, then that's the terms of the ticket.
I personally don't have a problem with Disney limiting a ticket to one person (by identity) per day, but on something like a 5 day pass where it's generally accepted that a person will use all 5 days, is it really wrong to give the remainder of a ticket away if someone can't finish using it? Unless of course Disney is banking on a certain number of patrons getting sick and keeping their money. If lets say the original bearer of that 5day pass ended up with a bad sunburn and didn't not feel well enough to enter, I dont' see how Disney would lose by letting them give the 5 day pass to someone else, they've been paid to provide 5 days of service. If Disney offers a refund for people who cannot complete the use of a multi-day pass then it wouldn't bother me.
This is different than a season pass, where a season pass is priced based on the average number of uses it'll get in a season.
It's been years since I went to either Disney park, is a travel agent that books a Disney trip required to explain to a person the terms of the Disney tickets? I can imagine scenario where people would plan on sharing a multi-day pass only to find upon arrival that they have not only been stuck with a multiday pass they can't use as intended but now have to shell out additional money for. (imagine 3 couples going away wit htheir kids with the understanding that each day one couple will take thekids into the park while the other parents go off on their own for the day)
IANAL but for Disney to hold a customer to such terms I would think they would need to disclose the details at the time of sale especially since its different than I think the average person would expect the terms to be. I think it's pretty commonly understood that a 5 day pass would mean one person can enter each day and I doubt few people would intrinsically understand that to mean it's a contract for a particular individual.
You know what's even sader? It takes them almost five years to rubber stamp these things. The microsoft patent in question was filed October 17, 2000 and was approved May 17, 2005. You would think that with over four and a half years to research it that they would have at least stumbled on someone who could explain to them why this is stupid or at least shown them examples of prior art.
Is there any sort of public submittal process for showing that prior art exists against someone elses patent application? There should be some formal workflow with a public RFC period for any patent application. I understand why they would be hesistant to do this, as it could be potentially used as a fillibuster against someones application. Thats why I think it should be like all patents should be reviewed within 2 years and any public concerns should be formally submitted no later than 12 months into the process. If after that point no objections are raised and a silly patent slips through the cracks we revert to the current style of fighting.
Regardless of the mechanism used there needs to be some sort of public accountability for patent applications. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to put some time into preventing frivilous patents from being approved.
Uhhhh where does it say all 119 that peeked were going to be accepted? It just states that 119 peeked and those 119 will not be accepted.
What has to hurt is if you peeked and saw that you were rejected, now knowing that there might have been another 50 open slots that you could have had if you didn't peek.
I left the EFT industry in 1999 but well before then they were starting to deploy video and advertisements on ATMs. Oddly enough it was the push to advertise on ATMs that led the company I worked for to implement TCP/IP for ATM deployment. Prior to that they were happy with SNA and the like.
Think of it like a movie, if the article told us what a pivot table was, we wouldn't need to buy the book, then book sales would plummet and then the publishing industry would start building anti-concept copying mechanisms into text. I think it's all for the best it remains a mystery.
What about when you're sitting in the next room watching TV? Let me guess you think that if the parent is home they should stand over the child counting the breaths making sure the child doesn't stop breathing. Please.
No where in the parent post does it state or even hint that he wants the breathing monitor available on the internet, just that he is thinking about a device to monitor the childs breathing. These devices already exist in the form of motion monitors so obviously the parent poster isn't all that far off base that there is a need and a market for such monitors.
It's amazing how many people are posting in this thread that don't have the faintist concept of what it's like to be a parent. The majority of the posts are the "if I had a child" type. If your going to conjecture at least think it through a little bit.
That last line should have said "I also find it kind of odd that you assume that parents only want a baby sitter just so they can go to a movie or go out. Did you stop to think that maybe parents want a baby sitter as an alternative to dropping their kids off at the toddler coral with 20 other ignored rugrats?
FYI they have monitors that detect movement in the crib, or more specifically sound an alarm if there is no movement for more than xx seconds. This is probably a better idea than cosleeping if you say have a problem with tossing and turning or having nightmares. (it's amazing how people assume that if something is ok for them or good in their opinion, it obviously is the only right answer)
I also find it kind of odd that you assume they want a baby sitter just so they can go to a movie or go out. Did you stop to think that maybe they want a baby sitter as a alternative to dropping their kid off at the toddler coral with 20 other ignored rugrats?
Shock therapy should only be used on children to correct bad habbits like chewing with their mouth open, asking to be hugged, asking you to buy them something, etc.
FYI you don't need to use an extension to do "linkification", you can use a bookmarklet. I somehow missed the memo on bookmarklets and only recently found out about them maybe 6 months ago.
For those that don't know, bookmarklets are javascript snippets that you turn into bookmarks and then can be executed on any page you view. I use them primarily for linkification and for URL manipulation. I have one that removes all redirects from urls (if a url is present within the url it sends you directly there) which is really handy for sites like fark when the redirect system takes a dump. Other bookmarklets that I rely on are Links List, which makes a new doc with all the links on a site, top which changes the URL tot he top level of the domain, decrement and increment which decriment or increment the last number in the url (great for boobie links).
At first I thought maybe it's more difficult for an observant person to be fooled. So I opened up a spoofed window and compared it to a real window to see how many differences I could find. Now as a child I was pretty damn good at the spot the difference cartoons in highlights magazine, apparently use it or lose it is valid. Only after I specifically looked for them did I realize that my bookmarks toolbar was missing, and from my navigation toolbar several icons were missing and the search control was present again (I have it turned off). In other words if you're drilling through links on a site and suddenly a couple items disappear, I'm gonna guess it's really easy to not notice, regardless of experience levels (in fact maybe experience or more so familiarity make this even more effective an exploint).
The point being that even though I do fancy myself a pretty observant person (honestly I usually am) I didn't notice right off the bat what was missing from my usual interface and I bet most users wouldn't unless they looked for them on EVERY page load.
Building GUIs for Unix systems makes them implementors not innovators. Pushing open systems makes them cheerleaders, not innovators. Opening APIs up to the public at the time is a big enough shift in thinking to qualify as innovation. Implementing RISC, I remember when RISC was gonna be the next big thing, nice to see that Sun jumped on the bandwagon by bringing it in house, we see how well it's working for them today.
Now I will give you that Java was an innovation. So here we have a case of Sun innovation and they didn't seem to know what to do with it. As far as Sun making millions on Java, in the words of Dr. Evil "Why make billions, when we can make... MILLIONS.. Muuauahahahah". Unfortunately for Sun, their business model for java was wrong, they thought they'd make it on the hardware, and while they wasted time on that front, the likes of IBM and BEA ran away with the market for consultancy services using it. Only after Sun hit the skids did they identify the trend and try to go after the pie, at this point IBM and BEA and a host of other people have longer, deeper relationships with enterprises that have a demand for those services. It was almost like Sun was so surprised that they innovated something that they didn't recognize it as a trend they could capitalize on.
Not that it is a very reliable indicator given the current state of IP law, but how many patents did Sun apply for and have granted in the past 5-10 years compared to other major players? Relatively few. A couple years ago Sun was trying to push for increased in house patent application and approval, mainly because patent granting was developing as a benchmark of innovation that showed how sorely Sun lagged behind other industry players in terms innovation.
Ultimately Sun needs more than layoffs or patents, they need a change in corporate culture and strategy. The corporate culture within Sun is the same old stodgy work flow that plagued IBM back in the 80's.
I still maintain that Sun is far from innovative and if you consider how inventive or more precisely uninventive they are it's an even bigger mystery how they survive at all.
I was once told by someone in the top three executive tiers at Sun that they are an opportunistic company, meaning that they see a trend and jump on it. I didn't quite realize how true this was or more specifically how dangerous it was until it sank in. If you look back, they jumped on the band wagon catering to databases, then the jumped on webserver train, then they tried jumping on the low cost linux server trail, then they jumped in the Office Suite cubicle and finally grabbed onto the OSS bandwagon, each time spending more money for less or no profit. There has not been a concise vision or plan for this company for quite some time and they're paying for it now.
Unfortunately for Sun, they're not innovators and there are no current trends directly in their area for them to latch on to. Unfortunatley in lean times you need to either a) innovate and create new markets or b) produce commodity items cheaper. Neither of these things are congruent to Scott's vision or Sun's current form.
Even if Scott was to step down, what do you do with Sun? Java is not going to make it any money as a product, their in house developers are terrible and IBM has pretty much gobbled up large enterprise development market, Microsoft, agreement or not, is always looming in the corner looking to spank McNealy. If McNealy was smarter, he would have tried to be a visionary by latching onto biotech or something, developing other hardware that would leveraged his existing product base and created a reason to use his products over someone elses. But again, not innovators, regardless of how much they complain about Microsoft stiffling innovation.
Ultimately, Sun isn't quite a ship headed towards an iceberg, nor is it headed toward land. It's just circling in the middle of no where waiting for a volcano to build an island in its path.
It's pretty obvious your intentions were genuine originally, but it does raise questions about peoples resopnsibilities in general. I'm sure had you known that they would shelve the idea you wouldn't have empowered them with the patents. But I really do wonder how often this happens and we don't know about it.
I bet there are tons of examples where someones exuberance or naivety has impared developments.
I used to use nospam@yeah.com or something to that effect when I knew it was going to be worthless and a junk account on hotmail if there was a chance I may need to receive an email (confirmations, etc). After a while I started receiving junk email on my private account, which I believe was a result of my email address being in joke emails forwarded to many people. So after reaming people out for forwarding me jokes also addressed to other people I decided to get serious about spam tracking.
I removed the catch-all from my domain and now every time I sign up somewhere I use a uniquely identifiable alias, like buy.com@mydomain.com or jackass.forum@mydomain.com. This way if I start receiving junkmail I can identify who sold my email address (also handy for filtering). Interestingly enough I haven't found a site that has sold my address yet, but I haven't really done this on any smaller sites like forums, etc.
There is nothing to stop someone from building a knock off of this kit. Except maybe your math (17 joints = 17 motors) =].
The only thing that appears to be special about the servos is the position sensing. Based on someones translation of the page, you can program the robot by positioning its limbs and clicking a mouse button.
Since the servos only have three leads coming out of them (white, black and red like a regular RC servo) I'm going to guess that the servos are gutted of their electronics and their functionality is integrated into the controller. This would benefit the robot by reducing unecessary weight at the limbs (those nifty kung f u moves) and allow you to sense the positions of the limbs.
In a homebrew project the internal electronics in the servo are what make RC servos so attractive. You can get a positionable, speed regulated geartrain in a very compact package for very little money compared to fabricating your own. So unless you modify each servo you would have to give up the position sensing programability (which I could live with).
That said, if my guess is correct, it may be easier to make one of these things self balancing than previously thought since half the needed functionality is there (positioning).
At first when I read the article I figured that this guy was really kind of taking it to Ericson. There is definately a hint of anger at Ericson for not developing the idea further. I really thought this guy was trying to do something noble.
As I think about it though, he basically helped a company with no interest in developing the product, obtain some IP that could prevent other companies from selling an apparently much needed product. I wonder if the lack of BT equipped hearing aids is a result of these patents.
I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he thought he would help bring a product to market sooner since he felt he had a "in" at a manufacturer, but in the end did he sell out other hearing impared persons for 50GBP?
"It's hard for many people to believe that there are extraordinary things inside themselves, as well as others. I hope you can keep an open mind." - Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price
I can't believe that I'm the only one that thought of Unbreakable while reading this article. What kind of geeks are you people.
The submitter mentions "you will get a mention in the article if it gets published" but never states who will own the image after it's complete. In this day of intellectual property pissing contests I think it's rather interesting and important to address.
Personally if I contributed to the project I'd like a copy of the image myself. This could actually be a model for collaborative work, give me your cycles and I'll give you a copy of what we create together.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have a basic understanding of what spectroscopy is, it doesn't mean it's infallible. Simply put we know how to examine materials based upon spectroscopy over very short distances through known and understood conditions. To this point we've only been able to prove that spectroscopy is capable of determining composition of items over a couple meters to a couple million miles. When you apply this understanding to a example that is light years away with who knows what between us, there is a lot of room for the rules to change.
Furthermore we don't know what kind of compounds might exist on such a distant planet. Conditions, molecules, elements, energies may (probably) exist that we just don't know or understand that could contradict our understanding of material science.
I'm not saying that this "finding" is wrong, just that it's a interpretation of something VERY far away that more than likely will never be proved in our lifetimes. To call it conclusive is rather strong.
I used to be a engineer for a large debit card processor and switch. You are very correct, the amount of legacy support is astonishing. Prior to having ATALLA boxes, the pin block translation and decryption was done in software. After the migration to hardware encryption processors a rogue copy of the old software was kept around offline. A couple times that software was dusted off to break a key block for benevolent reasons (once was a production bug that nobody could figure out and the other was because a institution lost their master key and couldn't generate another one quick enough)
Ultimately in the card processing industry seceurity is mostly a function of access control, not technology. People would ask me if I could steal money through the system and the answer was yes. The only problem is that I would leave my fingerprints all over the place and I couldn't steal enough to make it worth disappearing and leaving my life behind. Ultimately the cost to revamp the industry wide encryption is probably not justified by the actual exposure. In all reality it's going to take a very long time before the entire industry moves to any new technology, there simply isn't enough motivation to force the migration quickly.
Well the real question is, are they using the original set, or a new one. I heard that higher definition displays show lots of flaws in lower def sets.
Your analogy is more like somoene entering a movie theater with two friends, running outside and bringing in two more friends with the first two friends ticket stubs. More people are using the resources expended than were purchased.
If Disney sells a ticket for a whole day, and the price reflects using the park services for a whole day, I'd hope they have enough resources that everyone can be served. As long as the number of people inside the park never exceeds the number of paying customers then Disney is not losing. I don't think it is morally wrong for someone to leave the park midday and let someone else use the pass for the remainder of the day, but granted if the terms of the ticket explicitly state that it's one person by identity, not quantity, then that's the terms of the ticket.
I personally don't have a problem with Disney limiting a ticket to one person (by identity) per day, but on something like a 5 day pass where it's generally accepted that a person will use all 5 days, is it really wrong to give the remainder of a ticket away if someone can't finish using it? Unless of course Disney is banking on a certain number of patrons getting sick and keeping their money. If lets say the original bearer of that 5day pass ended up with a bad sunburn and didn't not feel well enough to enter, I dont' see how Disney would lose by letting them give the 5 day pass to someone else, they've been paid to provide 5 days of service. If Disney offers a refund for people who cannot complete the use of a multi-day pass then it wouldn't bother me.
This is different than a season pass, where a season pass is priced based on the average number of uses it'll get in a season.
It's been years since I went to either Disney park, is a travel agent that books a Disney trip required to explain to a person the terms of the Disney tickets? I can imagine scenario where people would plan on sharing a multi-day pass only to find upon arrival that they have not only been stuck with a multiday pass they can't use as intended but now have to shell out additional money for. (imagine 3 couples going away wit htheir kids with the understanding that each day one couple will take thekids into the park while the other parents go off on their own for the day)
IANAL but for Disney to hold a customer to such terms I would think they would need to disclose the details at the time of sale especially since its different than I think the average person would expect the terms to be. I think it's pretty commonly understood that a 5 day pass would mean one person can enter each day and I doubt few people would intrinsically understand that to mean it's a contract for a particular individual.
You know what's even sader? It takes them almost five years to rubber stamp these things. The microsoft patent in question was filed October 17, 2000 and was approved May 17, 2005. You would think that with over four and a half years to research it that they would have at least stumbled on someone who could explain to them why this is stupid or at least shown them examples of prior art.
Is there any sort of public submittal process for showing that prior art exists against someone elses patent application? There should be some formal workflow with a public RFC period for any patent application. I understand why they would be hesistant to do this, as it could be potentially used as a fillibuster against someones application. Thats why I think it should be like all patents should be reviewed within 2 years and any public concerns should be formally submitted no later than 12 months into the process. If after that point no objections are raised and a silly patent slips through the cracks we revert to the current style of fighting.
Regardless of the mechanism used there needs to be some sort of public accountability for patent applications. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to put some time into preventing frivilous patents from being approved.
Uhhhh where does it say all 119 that peeked were going to be accepted? It just states that 119 peeked and those 119 will not be accepted.
What has to hurt is if you peeked and saw that you were rejected, now knowing that there might have been another 50 open slots that you could have had if you didn't peek.
I left the EFT industry in 1999 but well before then they were starting to deploy video and advertisements on ATMs. Oddly enough it was the push to advertise on ATMs that led the company I worked for to implement TCP/IP for ATM deployment. Prior to that they were happy with SNA and the like.
I hope you used them on a SFF box, I shudder to think of the woman who wears pantyhose that can fit over the gigantic tower I have.
Think of it like a movie, if the article told us what a pivot table was, we wouldn't need to buy the book, then book sales would plummet and then the publishing industry would start building anti-concept copying mechanisms into text. I think it's all for the best it remains a mystery.
What about when you're sitting in the next room watching TV? Let me guess you think that if the parent is home they should stand over the child counting the breaths making sure the child doesn't stop breathing. Please.
No where in the parent post does it state or even hint that he wants the breathing monitor available on the internet, just that he is thinking about a device to monitor the childs breathing. These devices already exist in the form of motion monitors so obviously the parent poster isn't all that far off base that there is a need and a market for such monitors.
It's amazing how many people are posting in this thread that don't have the faintist concept of what it's like to be a parent. The majority of the posts are the "if I had a child" type. If your going to conjecture at least think it through a little bit.
Errrrr I knew that didn't sound right.
That last line should have said "I also find it kind of odd that you assume that parents only want a baby sitter just so they can go to a movie or go out. Did you stop to think that maybe parents want a baby sitter as an alternative to dropping their kids off at the toddler coral with 20 other ignored rugrats?
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
FYI they have monitors that detect movement in the crib, or more specifically sound an alarm if there is no movement for more than xx seconds. This is probably a better idea than cosleeping if you say have a problem with tossing and turning or having nightmares. (it's amazing how people assume that if something is ok for them or good in their opinion, it obviously is the only right answer)
I also find it kind of odd that you assume they want a baby sitter just so they can go to a movie or go out. Did you stop to think that maybe they want a baby sitter as a alternative to dropping their kid off at the toddler coral with 20 other ignored rugrats?
Shock therapy should only be used on children to correct bad habbits like chewing with their mouth open, asking to be hugged, asking you to buy them something, etc.
FYI you don't need to use an extension to do "linkification", you can use a bookmarklet. I somehow missed the memo on bookmarklets and only recently found out about them maybe 6 months ago. For those that don't know, bookmarklets are javascript snippets that you turn into bookmarks and then can be executed on any page you view. I use them primarily for linkification and for URL manipulation. I have one that removes all redirects from urls (if a url is present within the url it sends you directly there) which is really handy for sites like fark when the redirect system takes a dump. Other bookmarklets that I rely on are Links List, which makes a new doc with all the links on a site, top which changes the URL tot he top level of the domain, decrement and increment which decriment or increment the last number in the url (great for boobie links).
Various bookmarklets
At first I thought maybe it's more difficult for an observant person to be fooled. So I opened up a spoofed window and compared it to a real window to see how many differences I could find. Now as a child I was pretty damn good at the spot the difference cartoons in highlights magazine, apparently use it or lose it is valid. Only after I specifically looked for them did I realize that my bookmarks toolbar was missing, and from my navigation toolbar several icons were missing and the search control was present again (I have it turned off). In other words if you're drilling through links on a site and suddenly a couple items disappear, I'm gonna guess it's really easy to not notice, regardless of experience levels (in fact maybe experience or more so familiarity make this even more effective an exploint).
The point being that even though I do fancy myself a pretty observant person (honestly I usually am) I didn't notice right off the bat what was missing from my usual interface and I bet most users wouldn't unless they looked for them on EVERY page load.
Building GUIs for Unix systems makes them implementors not innovators. Pushing open systems makes them cheerleaders, not innovators. Opening APIs up to the public at the time is a big enough shift in thinking to qualify as innovation. Implementing RISC, I remember when RISC was gonna be the next big thing, nice to see that Sun jumped on the bandwagon by bringing it in house, we see how well it's working for them today.
Now I will give you that Java was an innovation. So here we have a case of Sun innovation and they didn't seem to know what to do with it. As far as Sun making millions on Java, in the words of Dr. Evil "Why make billions, when we can make... MILLIONS.. Muuauahahahah". Unfortunately for Sun, their business model for java was wrong, they thought they'd make it on the hardware, and while they wasted time on that front, the likes of IBM and BEA ran away with the market for consultancy services using it. Only after Sun hit the skids did they identify the trend and try to go after the pie, at this point IBM and BEA and a host of other people have longer, deeper relationships with enterprises that have a demand for those services. It was almost like Sun was so surprised that they innovated something that they didn't recognize it as a trend they could capitalize on.
Not that it is a very reliable indicator given the current state of IP law, but how many patents did Sun apply for and have granted in the past 5-10 years compared to other major players? Relatively few. A couple years ago Sun was trying to push for increased in house patent application and approval, mainly because patent granting was developing as a benchmark of innovation that showed how sorely Sun lagged behind other industry players in terms innovation.
Ultimately Sun needs more than layoffs or patents, they need a change in corporate culture and strategy. The corporate culture within Sun is the same old stodgy work flow that plagued IBM back in the 80's.
I still maintain that Sun is far from innovative and if you consider how inventive or more precisely uninventive they are it's an even bigger mystery how they survive at all.
I was once told by someone in the top three executive tiers at Sun that they are an opportunistic company, meaning that they see a trend and jump on it. I didn't quite realize how true this was or more specifically how dangerous it was until it sank in. If you look back, they jumped on the band wagon catering to databases, then the jumped on webserver train, then they tried jumping on the low cost linux server trail, then they jumped in the Office Suite cubicle and finally grabbed onto the OSS bandwagon, each time spending more money for less or no profit. There has not been a concise vision or plan for this company for quite some time and they're paying for it now.
Unfortunately for Sun, they're not innovators and there are no current trends directly in their area for them to latch on to. Unfortunatley in lean times you need to either a) innovate and create new markets or b) produce commodity items cheaper. Neither of these things are congruent to Scott's vision or Sun's current form.
Even if Scott was to step down, what do you do with Sun? Java is not going to make it any money as a product, their in house developers are terrible and IBM has pretty much gobbled up large enterprise development market, Microsoft, agreement or not, is always looming in the corner looking to spank McNealy. If McNealy was smarter, he would have tried to be a visionary by latching onto biotech or something, developing other hardware that would leveraged his existing product base and created a reason to use his products over someone elses. But again, not innovators, regardless of how much they complain about Microsoft stiffling innovation.
Ultimately, Sun isn't quite a ship headed towards an iceberg, nor is it headed toward land. It's just circling in the middle of no where waiting for a volcano to build an island in its path.
Every ship needs to refuel at some point.
It's pretty obvious your intentions were genuine originally, but it does raise questions about peoples resopnsibilities in general. I'm sure had you known that they would shelve the idea you wouldn't have empowered them with the patents. But I really do wonder how often this happens and we don't know about it.
I bet there are tons of examples where someones exuberance or naivety has impared developments.
Good luck to you.
I used to use nospam@yeah.com or something to that effect when I knew it was going to be worthless and a junk account on hotmail if there was a chance I may need to receive an email (confirmations, etc). After a while I started receiving junk email on my private account, which I believe was a result of my email address being in joke emails forwarded to many people. So after reaming people out for forwarding me jokes also addressed to other people I decided to get serious about spam tracking.
I removed the catch-all from my domain and now every time I sign up somewhere I use a uniquely identifiable alias, like buy.com@mydomain.com or jackass.forum@mydomain.com. This way if I start receiving junkmail I can identify who sold my email address (also handy for filtering). Interestingly enough I haven't found a site that has sold my address yet, but I haven't really done this on any smaller sites like forums, etc.
here is another Kondo movie from that page.
There is nothing to stop someone from building a knock off of this kit. Except maybe your math (17 joints = 17 motors) =].
The only thing that appears to be special about the servos is the position sensing. Based on someones translation of the page, you can program the robot by positioning its limbs and clicking a mouse button.
Since the servos only have three leads coming out of them (white, black and red like a regular RC servo) I'm going to guess that the servos are gutted of their electronics and their functionality is integrated into the controller. This would benefit the robot by reducing unecessary weight at the limbs (those nifty kung f u moves) and allow you to sense the positions of the limbs.
In a homebrew project the internal electronics in the servo are what make RC servos so attractive. You can get a positionable, speed regulated geartrain in a very compact package for very little money compared to fabricating your own. So unless you modify each servo you would have to give up the position sensing programability (which I could live with).
That said, if my guess is correct, it may be easier to make one of these things self balancing than previously thought since half the needed functionality is there (positioning).
At first when I read the article I figured that this guy was really kind of taking it to Ericson. There is definately a hint of anger at Ericson for not developing the idea further. I really thought this guy was trying to do something noble.
As I think about it though, he basically helped a company with no interest in developing the product, obtain some IP that could prevent other companies from selling an apparently much needed product. I wonder if the lack of BT equipped hearing aids is a result of these patents.
I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he thought he would help bring a product to market sooner since he felt he had a "in" at a manufacturer, but in the end did he sell out other hearing impared persons for 50GBP?
Isn't that how evolution starts? Mutation, beneficial result, more desirable mate, stronger chance of survival.
"It's hard for many people to believe that there are extraordinary things inside themselves, as well as others. I hope you can keep an open mind." - Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price
I can't believe that I'm the only one that thought of Unbreakable while reading this article. What kind of geeks are you people.
The submitter mentions "you will get a mention in the article if it gets published" but never states who will own the image after it's complete. In this day of intellectual property pissing contests I think it's rather interesting and important to address.
Personally if I contributed to the project I'd like a copy of the image myself. This could actually be a model for collaborative work, give me your cycles and I'll give you a copy of what we create together.