Waa my computer is too flickery, someone call the waambulance.
For people with photosensitive epilepsy, it might more more like "someone call the ambulance."
Generally triggers between 3-30Hz with some rare cases up to 60Hz (who can't do much under indoor lighting). 100Hz for a backlight is not an issue and if it is, make a few thousand bucks selling yourself to science.
Based on the very limited view we are given of this thing, I start to seriously wonder why a real-time Linux system was used. It looks like it is just actuating legs blindly. Real-time systems are tremendously useful for responding to physics in... (wait for it)... real time. "I'm starting to fall! Let me adjust this this way to prevent it. Can't wait 30ms for a response! Need to respond now, otherwise the response will be wrong." Sure, it's actuating its legs in a manner that is fault-tolerant (It can travel down breaks in the terrain up to 20% the length of its legs), but that is entirely based on the springs absorbing the extra unexpected impact and then losing it after the leg leaves the ground again, not a real-time adjustment.
This depresses me a little because, like others, it feels misleading. Mention real-time linux! Does it help or hinder? No, not really. Mention that it's cat like! How is it cat-like? Um... It has four legs and springy bits! Oh, and it goes faster stably than any other quadrupedal robot in its size bracket. How fast? That's not very fast really... But focus on the fast-ER part! It runs like the wind! A very slow, calm wind...
Rookie error #3: Point the radio transmission directly at the star.
Unless the target is moving directly toward or away from us relatively speaking, pointing it at the star will target where the star was 36 light years before the transmission will arrive. If it -is- moving directly toward or away, are they accounting for Doppler?
It is very telling how employers who claim that they can't find "qualified" people never state exactly what qualifications they are looking for. They just make vague statements about "not having skills".
"To qualify in the US, you must have a minimum of 10 years' experience with Windows Server 2008, 30 years of experience with Windows as a whole; You must know C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, ASP,.NET, JavaScript, Python, Perl, ASM, Objective C, HTML, CSS, and at least five other languages of your choice, all at a guru level and never -ever- need to use any reference material; You must be able to code a full working 100,000 lines of code with no bugs within 40 work hours; You must be able to QA test the whole thing in another 40 work hours; You must be able to take every single feature request coming from marketing and implement it within that week of coding - even the features that are requested the day after the week ends; You must have a doctorate in Computer Sciences; And you must be willing to work for no more than $41K/year."
Well, besides the fact that you would need to block TCP as well as UDP (RFC calls for support on both and longer messages, such as zone transfers, require TCP due to UDP's content length limits), you also have the benefit of the fact that this would block exploits that make use of port 53 for communication on the strong likelihood that it is completely unfiltered.
The AS article asks where is the best place to filter though. This gets tricky. The request doesn't indicate whether this is enterprise equipment or consumer. The mention of router-based filtering implies consumer though, so I'll focus on that.
First off, a good number of consumer routers do not have the processing power to handle full filtering at high speed. Even enterprise appliances such as iPrism require heftier units when the pipeline speed exceeds a certain threshold. As a good example, a Linksys 625 Wireless Router can handle filtering with no rulesets up to about 50-60Mb/s. Rules are relatively efficient, but there is no way in many cases to automate rule implementation, and when the ruleset increases in size the capability of the router to handle it drops to around 20-30 Mb/s. Fine if the WAN uplink is perhaps a 15Mb/s line, but catastrophic if you're trying to get full use from a 105Mb/s cable or fiber line.
The end answer really comes down to a balance. Implement filtering at the furthest end that you carry absolute sovereignty over, balanced by duplication of effort and complexity of implementation. Replicating rules over thousands of endpoints is complex enough and lacks enough control that performing the filtering at the trunk is more efficient and effective. By comparison, the ability to control one or a few computers in a home is substantially more likely and will take the burden off the limited processing power of a consumer router. Walking a rule manually to five endpoints is trivial compared to dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
If the uplink is small enough to allow filtering at the router and the eventual change and replacement of equipment will allow easy transfer of rulesets and administration, work from the router or a similar trunk location to globalize and centralize effort. If the endpoints are spread enough or there is sufficient lack of control over them to warrant such, again, work from the trunk. If enough trust exists in the endpoints to offload the work onto their substantially-stronger processors, and administration of rules to and of the endpoints is trivial, filter at the endpoints.
I know that NSIS Installers at the very least base the default progress bar internally* on the line number through the length of the entire set of installation process code. This makes it quite fun when you have long position jumps in the code or repeating loops that have enough code to cover a good chunk of progress. I would expect that several other installers may use the same base internal calculation of the progress bar.
*The progress bar can also be controlled manually within the code for the coder to be nice or exceptionally evil as they see fit.
Group 1 makes a third-party add-on that works with Company A's and Company B's product. Neither company controls Group 1.
Company A is not using anything at all from Company B, but makes use of Group 1's items.
Company B is telling Company A to remove the feature of using Group 1's items because it violates ToS.
So either Company B's person somehow thinks that the Company A product violates B's ToS (which is not in effect, since B is not in use at all and the interaction is with a third party), or B thinks that A's implementation violates Group 1's ToS and is giving a "courtesy" alert. If the former, then a simple response pointing out that A's product and feature does not utilize anything under the control of Company B and thus Company A is not subject to B's Terms of Service since B is not providing any services to A would suffice. If the latter, then check the ToS of Group 1 and remedy if the allegations are correct.
I suspect that somebody (Louise) saw the words "CCleaner's Winapp2.ini files" in the ghacks article that implies (apparently incorrectly) that the files are created by and owned by Piriform, so assumed that her company owns them and nobody else is allowed to use them. Instead the case looks to be that "Group 1" creates and owns them and her company USES them, so her company's ToS does not apply to the use of a third party item they don't own or control.
So what happens when the "copyright enforcement agencies" decide that somebody on that NAT IP has downloaded a movie and three strikes or something similar gets kicked in for the IP? (I know it's perfectly possible given port, IP, and Time to back-track a connection through a properly-logged NAT.Just an amusing side effect if somebody is dumb, and dumb happens a lot these days.)
Boot away from the hard drive (Linux live CD for example). Replace the MBR with a known-good copy. Check that the primary partition of the drive is Active, not the dinky space area. The TDL4 stuff primarily hits the MBR to bootstrap a malign active partition that it boots from. Wiping the MBR alone leaves the partition active but unable to boot. Wiping the partition alone leaves the MBR corrupted and unable to boot.
Self-Recompiling Polymorphic threats are effectively intelligently-designed evolution, then. You can't ignore either factor in their operation without looking odd.
Prevx joined Webroot (is Webroot now? Took over Webroot (all old Webroot code is gone)?) and while their immediate detection rate is not that great, their response time looks like it averages around 10-15 minutes automated and 1-2 hours when you get a human involved in looking.
Way behind the times. Webroot took over the light factor by a huge margin (sub-MB total installer size anybody?). Instead of trying to make a spot heuristic decision about unknowns to figure if they are viruses or force them to run in a VM and not have any access to system resources (let's break legitimate stuff), or have access that is monitored and cut off, but the damage done is still there, it journals changes made by the unknown thing and if it's determined to be a problem, rolls it all back. If it's good, it just tosses out the journal. Upside: Light. Really. Downside: You can be "infected" for an average of ten minutes before it catches, neuters, and then guts the infection. Upside to the downside: The unknown is not given access to sensitive things (screenshots, keylogging, etc) while it's unknown. Downside to the upside to the downside: It can still get sensitive information from gullible users. Upside to the downside to the... Meh...: When something is detected in one place, it's detected globally within seconds.
Far too appropriate if you throw this into the wrong (or right?) Text to Speech engine, at which point Microsoft seems to be targeting the Harlequin Publishing market as they invest in "nookie readers" (Thank you computer voices).
There is indeed a huge difference between the Google TOS and the others. A few important words in the Google TOS are pretty ominous -- "publicly perform", "publicly display", and "promoting".
You give a document to Google, say one that contains sensitive information like your passwords, tax returns, or bank account numbers, and they can take a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing the content of your document. They might not, but they can under these terms.
Or, you store an MP3 your band recorded with them, say one that's destined to be a barn-burner of a single, and they can use it in their television ads, for free. They might not, but again, "publicly perform" and "promoting" are dangerously broad terms.
No thank you.
Still subject to Privacy Policy. So yes, if you put a document of your passwords or tax return on the internet and click "Share with Anybody who has the URL", they will show it to anybody who has the URL, whether you gave that URL to them or not. However if you say "Viewable by me only", showing your MP3 on their commercial would be a violation of their Privacy Policy, which would quite properly fall back on them.
Then I shall say "Good for You".:) It's all subjective and your comprehension or lack thereof has no impact for good or bad, so your lack of upsetness simply indicates a good duck back or apathy, and either way you're avoiding being upset.
The first consideration is that PC Gamers, who already spend a ton of money on the gaming rigs and have a lot more capability than any console's half-decade-old tech, feel now like the game manufacturer is treating them like second-class citizens. PC games that have Console-optimized content, focus on the console development over PC development, generally a perceived lack of respect for the PC gaming population. Literally to the point where, in this case, development of mods for the PC is not only effectively almost Open Source, but Bethesda isn't even making any official mods except HD packs that don't look as good as the third party ones.
It's to the point where the people who spend the most money on their hardware have the least support. Then the fact that the game is throttled to work best on what is effectively nearly ancient technology these days, their super-hardware does them little good. Try using a 1x3 surround-screen setup and you'll quickly discover that the menus and UI are sized based on the width of the screen without accounting for the height. Unusable. Skyrim could have been a beautiful experience for the high-powered gamer, but it isn't unless the gamers themselves fix it. Fixing it is often a battle against the official developers also, as official patches that fix a handful of things also break dozens of third-party fixes.
Now that it's to the point where PC gamers are feeling like they're being told "Sorry, your gaming experience can be far too much better than those peoples'. We need to give you a handicap.", we're getting less and less pleased. Here's a comparison: What would you do if Amazon.com said "We're giving out cool stuff to people who buy things from us! But... We decided not to give it to anybody who lists a book on our system. Sorry, Michael, you've got all the benefits of publishing a book, so you can't have this stuff." I would expect you to potentially feel slighted. All in all, it's human nature to not want to be considered an afterthought, unsupported, inferior market segment, etc. People buy high end PCs to have a better gaming experience than the people who spend a quarter as much on a console. They don't expect to be tossed the scraps and told to fend for themselves by the game developers just because they have better hardware.
On the other side of the coin, there are many times more users buying it for the consoles. It's just a "business decision" to make the important stuff for the bigger market. One can also consider that the "additional content" probably has a strong propensity for carrying a cost, so the highest revenue will come from the larger market segment. Money speaks, after all.
PC gamers aren't upset about the lack of voice control. We've had that forever by comparison.
What we ARE upset about is:
"...been hard at work on creating the first set of game add-ons that will be exclusive to the Xbox 360. This additional content will add new quests, locations, features, and much more to the world of Skyrim."
Sometimes I think that people like to throw around numbers because they realize how few people understand the true impact.
Let's take "Only 5%" in real terms...
That means one in twenty people are being throttled. Crit in a d20 system? You're throttled. 1,000,000 Customers? 50,000 are throttled. That's a medium rural city being throttled. AT&T's nearly hundred million customers? Potentially five million throttled customers each month.*
5% is not a lot with a small total, but can be a pretty big number when you get to the subscriber count they have.
(* I am aware of the fact that they had around 95 million subscribers in January 2011, and that not all of them will be data users. There are plenty of dumb phones still around. Feel free to cut it down to, say, twenty million smart phone users at risk of bring throttled, and you still catch a million.)
If your product is on the market before the slimy scum bag files for a patent, he'll be rejected at the patent office, because your product is prior art. Every aspect of the product is prior art, whether it was patented or not. Under a first to file system, you can't sue someone (successfully) for patent infringement if their product was for sale to the public before you filed. Under a first to invent system, the slimy scum bag might win, if he actually invented the "trivial aspect of your product" before you did, plus various other conditions. Under the first to file system, that messy problem of proving who invented first is removed.
The above statement (parent), if true, is the most informative item I have read in this entire comment discussion.
Things that are small enough will not arc or destruct. You'll notice that if you microwave a CD, it will arc and separate the foil down to a given size, and no smaller no matter how long you bombard it. A (house) fly in a microwave is too small as well. (Horseflies are SOL).
The chip itself is of course too small, but the radio antennas that actually allow it to operate as an RF tag are not. So now the question comes up: Is it possible to create an RF tag that works at a high enough frequency that the antenna can be small enough to evade 2.4 GHz?
How long before they lock out microwaves from starting up when it reads an RFID tag inside?
The next worry though that I have is that now I'm afraid to take my towel to the pool. Somebody can swap theirs for mine. I turn in theirs and they're good. They steal mine and I get charged.
Slashdot Mirror
Append "with no technology knowledge who met salespeople." and you're set.
Waa my computer is too flickery, someone call the waambulance.
For people with photosensitive epilepsy, it might more more like "someone call the ambulance."
Generally triggers between 3-30Hz with some rare cases up to 60Hz (who can't do much under indoor lighting). 100Hz for a backlight is not an issue and if it is, make a few thousand bucks selling yourself to science.
Based on the very limited view we are given of this thing, I start to seriously wonder why a real-time Linux system was used. It looks like it is just actuating legs blindly. Real-time systems are tremendously useful for responding to physics in... (wait for it)... real time. "I'm starting to fall! Let me adjust this this way to prevent it. Can't wait 30ms for a response! Need to respond now, otherwise the response will be wrong." Sure, it's actuating its legs in a manner that is fault-tolerant (It can travel down breaks in the terrain up to 20% the length of its legs), but that is entirely based on the springs absorbing the extra unexpected impact and then losing it after the leg leaves the ground again, not a real-time adjustment.
This depresses me a little because, like others, it feels misleading. Mention real-time linux! Does it help or hinder? No, not really. Mention that it's cat like! How is it cat-like? Um... It has four legs and springy bits! Oh, and it goes faster stably than any other quadrupedal robot in its size bracket. How fast? That's not very fast really... But focus on the fast-ER part! It runs like the wind! A very slow, calm wind...
Rookie error #3: Point the radio transmission directly at the star.
Unless the target is moving directly toward or away from us relatively speaking, pointing it at the star will target where the star was 36 light years before the transmission will arrive. If it -is- moving directly toward or away, are they accounting for Doppler?
It is very telling how employers who claim that they can't find "qualified" people never state exactly what qualifications they are looking for. They just make vague statements about "not having skills".
"To qualify in the US, you must have a minimum of 10 years' experience with Windows Server 2008, 30 years of experience with Windows as a whole; You must know C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, ASP, .NET, JavaScript, Python, Perl, ASM, Objective C, HTML, CSS, and at least five other languages of your choice, all at a guru level and never -ever- need to use any reference material; You must be able to code a full working 100,000 lines of code with no bugs within 40 work hours; You must be able to QA test the whole thing in another 40 work hours; You must be able to take every single feature request coming from marketing and implement it within that week of coding - even the features that are requested the day after the week ends; You must have a doctorate in Computer Sciences; And you must be willing to work for no more than $41K/year."
Previous Story: "Show me the money"
This story: "Here's the snowflakes! And the money."
Just in case this page gets updated and the penny gets bumped off, hopefully the direct link to the beautiful high-speed photo of a falling penny will persist in the records and the annals of time forever.
Well, besides the fact that you would need to block TCP as well as UDP (RFC calls for support on both and longer messages, such as zone transfers, require TCP due to UDP's content length limits), you also have the benefit of the fact that this would block exploits that make use of port 53 for communication on the strong likelihood that it is completely unfiltered.
The AS article asks where is the best place to filter though. This gets tricky. The request doesn't indicate whether this is enterprise equipment or consumer. The mention of router-based filtering implies consumer though, so I'll focus on that.
First off, a good number of consumer routers do not have the processing power to handle full filtering at high speed. Even enterprise appliances such as iPrism require heftier units when the pipeline speed exceeds a certain threshold. As a good example, a Linksys 625 Wireless Router can handle filtering with no rulesets up to about 50-60Mb/s. Rules are relatively efficient, but there is no way in many cases to automate rule implementation, and when the ruleset increases in size the capability of the router to handle it drops to around 20-30 Mb/s. Fine if the WAN uplink is perhaps a 15Mb/s line, but catastrophic if you're trying to get full use from a 105Mb/s cable or fiber line.
The end answer really comes down to a balance. Implement filtering at the furthest end that you carry absolute sovereignty over, balanced by duplication of effort and complexity of implementation. Replicating rules over thousands of endpoints is complex enough and lacks enough control that performing the filtering at the trunk is more efficient and effective. By comparison, the ability to control one or a few computers in a home is substantially more likely and will take the burden off the limited processing power of a consumer router. Walking a rule manually to five endpoints is trivial compared to dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
If the uplink is small enough to allow filtering at the router and the eventual change and replacement of equipment will allow easy transfer of rulesets and administration, work from the router or a similar trunk location to globalize and centralize effort. If the endpoints are spread enough or there is sufficient lack of control over them to warrant such, again, work from the trunk. If enough trust exists in the endpoints to offload the work onto their substantially-stronger processors, and administration of rules to and of the endpoints is trivial, filter at the endpoints.
I know that NSIS Installers at the very least base the default progress bar internally* on the line number through the length of the entire set of installation process code. This makes it quite fun when you have long position jumps in the code or repeating loops that have enough code to cover a good chunk of progress. I would expect that several other installers may use the same base internal calculation of the progress bar.
*The progress bar can also be controlled manually within the code for the coder to be nice or exceptionally evil as they see fit.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but....
Group 1 makes a third-party add-on that works with Company A's and Company B's product. Neither company controls Group 1.
Company A is not using anything at all from Company B, but makes use of Group 1's items.
Company B is telling Company A to remove the feature of using Group 1's items because it violates ToS.
So either Company B's person somehow thinks that the Company A product violates B's ToS (which is not in effect, since B is not in use at all and the interaction is with a third party), or B thinks that A's implementation violates Group 1's ToS and is giving a "courtesy" alert. If the former, then a simple response pointing out that A's product and feature does not utilize anything under the control of Company B and thus Company A is not subject to B's Terms of Service since B is not providing any services to A would suffice. If the latter, then check the ToS of Group 1 and remedy if the allegations are correct.
I suspect that somebody (Louise) saw the words "CCleaner's Winapp2.ini files" in the ghacks article that implies (apparently incorrectly) that the files are created by and owned by Piriform, so assumed that her company owns them and nobody else is allowed to use them. Instead the case looks to be that "Group 1" creates and owns them and her company USES them, so her company's ToS does not apply to the use of a third party item they don't own or control.
So what happens when the "copyright enforcement agencies" decide that somebody on that NAT IP has downloaded a movie and three strikes or something similar gets kicked in for the IP? (I know it's perfectly possible given port, IP, and Time to back-track a connection through a properly-logged NAT.Just an amusing side effect if somebody is dumb, and dumb happens a lot these days.)
Boot away from the hard drive (Linux live CD for example). Replace the MBR with a known-good copy. Check that the primary partition of the drive is Active, not the dinky space area. The TDL4 stuff primarily hits the MBR to bootstrap a malign active partition that it boots from. Wiping the MBR alone leaves the partition active but unable to boot. Wiping the partition alone leaves the MBR corrupted and unable to boot.
Self-Recompiling Polymorphic threats are effectively intelligently-designed evolution, then. You can't ignore either factor in their operation without looking odd.
it does however provide infinite times as much protection as not running one.
Fails logic smoke test.
Infinity times zero is zero.
Infinity times a fraction of a picopercent is infinity.
Prevx joined Webroot (is Webroot now? Took over Webroot (all old Webroot code is gone)?) and while their immediate detection rate is not that great, their response time looks like it averages around 10-15 minutes automated and 1-2 hours when you get a human involved in looking.
Way behind the times. Webroot took over the light factor by a huge margin (sub-MB total installer size anybody?). Instead of trying to make a spot heuristic decision about unknowns to figure if they are viruses or force them to run in a VM and not have any access to system resources (let's break legitimate stuff), or have access that is monitored and cut off, but the damage done is still there, it journals changes made by the unknown thing and if it's determined to be a problem, rolls it all back. If it's good, it just tosses out the journal. Upside: Light. Really. Downside: You can be "infected" for an average of ten minutes before it catches, neuters, and then guts the infection. Upside to the downside: The unknown is not given access to sensitive things (screenshots, keylogging, etc) while it's unknown. Downside to the upside to the downside: It can still get sensitive information from gullible users. Upside to the downside to the... Meh...: When something is detected in one place, it's detected globally within seconds.
So yeah, not perfect, but sucks less.
What secure OS? There are only Very Insecure OSes and Less Insecure OSes.
Embrace and extend...
Far too appropriate if you throw this into the wrong (or right?) Text to Speech engine, at which point Microsoft seems to be targeting the Harlequin Publishing market as they invest in "nookie readers" (Thank you computer voices).
There is indeed a huge difference between the Google TOS and the others. A few important words in the Google TOS are pretty ominous -- "publicly perform", "publicly display", and "promoting".
You give a document to Google, say one that contains sensitive information like your passwords, tax returns, or bank account numbers, and they can take a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing the content of your document. They might not, but they can under these terms.
Or, you store an MP3 your band recorded with them, say one that's destined to be a barn-burner of a single, and they can use it in their television ads, for free. They might not, but again, "publicly perform" and "promoting" are dangerously broad terms.
No thank you.
Still subject to Privacy Policy. So yes, if you put a document of your passwords or tax return on the internet and click "Share with Anybody who has the URL", they will show it to anybody who has the URL, whether you gave that URL to them or not. However if you say "Viewable by me only", showing your MP3 on their commercial would be a violation of their Privacy Policy, which would quite properly fall back on them.
Then I shall say "Good for You". :) It's all subjective and your comprehension or lack thereof has no impact for good or bad, so your lack of upsetness simply indicates a good duck back or apathy, and either way you're avoiding being upset.
I'll hit both sides in this case.
The first consideration is that PC Gamers, who already spend a ton of money on the gaming rigs and have a lot more capability than any console's half-decade-old tech, feel now like the game manufacturer is treating them like second-class citizens. PC games that have Console-optimized content, focus on the console development over PC development, generally a perceived lack of respect for the PC gaming population. Literally to the point where, in this case, development of mods for the PC is not only effectively almost Open Source, but Bethesda isn't even making any official mods except HD packs that don't look as good as the third party ones.
It's to the point where the people who spend the most money on their hardware have the least support. Then the fact that the game is throttled to work best on what is effectively nearly ancient technology these days, their super-hardware does them little good. Try using a 1x3 surround-screen setup and you'll quickly discover that the menus and UI are sized based on the width of the screen without accounting for the height. Unusable. Skyrim could have been a beautiful experience for the high-powered gamer, but it isn't unless the gamers themselves fix it. Fixing it is often a battle against the official developers also, as official patches that fix a handful of things also break dozens of third-party fixes.
Now that it's to the point where PC gamers are feeling like they're being told "Sorry, your gaming experience can be far too much better than those peoples'. We need to give you a handicap.", we're getting less and less pleased. Here's a comparison: What would you do if Amazon.com said "We're giving out cool stuff to people who buy things from us! But... We decided not to give it to anybody who lists a book on our system. Sorry, Michael, you've got all the benefits of publishing a book, so you can't have this stuff." I would expect you to potentially feel slighted. All in all, it's human nature to not want to be considered an afterthought, unsupported, inferior market segment, etc. People buy high end PCs to have a better gaming experience than the people who spend a quarter as much on a console. They don't expect to be tossed the scraps and told to fend for themselves by the game developers just because they have better hardware.
On the other side of the coin, there are many times more users buying it for the consoles. It's just a "business decision" to make the important stuff for the bigger market. One can also consider that the "additional content" probably has a strong propensity for carrying a cost, so the highest revenue will come from the larger market segment. Money speaks, after all.
PC gamers aren't upset about the lack of voice control. We've had that forever by comparison.
What we ARE upset about is:
"...been hard at work on creating the first set of game add-ons that will be exclusive to the Xbox 360. This additional content will add new quests, locations, features, and much more to the world of Skyrim."
Sometimes I think that people like to throw around numbers because they realize how few people understand the true impact.
Let's take "Only 5%" in real terms...
That means one in twenty people are being throttled. Crit in a d20 system? You're throttled. 1,000,000 Customers? 50,000 are throttled. That's a medium rural city being throttled. AT&T's nearly hundred million customers? Potentially five million throttled customers each month.*
5% is not a lot with a small total, but can be a pretty big number when you get to the subscriber count they have.
(* I am aware of the fact that they had around 95 million subscribers in January 2011, and that not all of them will be data users. There are plenty of dumb phones still around. Feel free to cut it down to, say, twenty million smart phone users at risk of bring throttled, and you still catch a million.)
If your product is on the market before the slimy scum bag files for a patent, he'll be rejected at the patent office, because your product is prior art. Every aspect of the product is prior art, whether it was patented or not. Under a first to file system, you can't sue someone (successfully) for patent infringement if their product was for sale to the public before you filed. Under a first to invent system, the slimy scum bag might win, if he actually invented the "trivial aspect of your product" before you did, plus various other conditions. Under the first to file system, that messy problem of proving who invented first is removed.
The above statement (parent), if true, is the most informative item I have read in this entire comment discussion.
Yup. There's no way Microsoft will pull any features out.
Things that are small enough will not arc or destruct. You'll notice that if you microwave a CD, it will arc and separate the foil down to a given size, and no smaller no matter how long you bombard it. A (house) fly in a microwave is too small as well. (Horseflies are SOL).
The chip itself is of course too small, but the radio antennas that actually allow it to operate as an RF tag are not. So now the question comes up: Is it possible to create an RF tag that works at a high enough frequency that the antenna can be small enough to evade 2.4 GHz?
How long before they lock out microwaves from starting up when it reads an RFID tag inside?
The next worry though that I have is that now I'm afraid to take my towel to the pool. Somebody can swap theirs for mine. I turn in theirs and they're good. They steal mine and I get charged.