What I'd really like to see is a version of the talking fish that was controlled by a remote microphone, and with software that controlled the head and mouth automatically whenever a person was speaking into the microphone. Imagine inviting passers-by to have a conversation with the fish. Pipe the voice through a sound-blaster live first to get some rather fishy voice-effects and we could really have some fun. Hey, I want this as a hands-free telephone!
Actually, the first book in this series is The Magician's Nephew , telling the story of the first children to find the land of Narnia, who bring back a sapling of a magical tree. When the tree is chopped down many years later, it's wood is made into a wardrobe (which later becomes famous in book 2 of the series).
When I was completing my honours year in Computer Science, the undergraduates spent a lot of time playing a multiplayer unix tetris game, where your own tetris board was displayed alongside that of the other players. If you made two or more rows at once, all the other players received a row of garbage blocks on top of their current boards.
Some of the other post-grads got the client source, and made a bot-player that would play for half a minute, then flood the other players, reporting that it had made lots of multiple rows.
Another time we made a hacked client that always gave the long skinny tetris peice whenever there was a need for one, and you could press a key to change the falling shape to another peice.
Thought we might get the sysadmin dudes irate for "hacking" a program on the system, but were actually encouraged to disrupt any undergrads wasting time (and spare terminals) in the computer labs.
You seem to be saying that the example of airplanes shows that we should not really expect Moore's Law to continue, since we have had only minor advances in this field, keeping the same basic shape and principles as planes from the 60's and 70's.
But the important technology that appeared after the 60's and 70's was not an airplane in every home...it was in things that we didn't even see coming!. Personal computers, the internet, have revolutionised our lives in a way that could not have been preditcted even in 1980. True, its the year 2000 and we don't all have the flying cars that the sci-fi of 30 years ago promised, but we can assured that life in 20 years time will be very different than it is now. Better or worse, remains to be seen.
Have you read the actual patent? There's much more to this than just the use of tabs. Adobe has patented a method of moving tabs around to become separate floating controls, drag and drog other controls that appear on a new tab, and combining sets of controls between sets of tabs.
It seems to me, after briefly reading the patent , Adobe are not trying to protect just any old use of tabs.
Their first claim describes a standard tabbed dialog box UI component, with the additional function:
"and
combining the additional set of information, displayed in a different area of the display from the established area, into the group of multiple sets of information so that the additional sets of information may be selected in the same manner as the other sets of information in the group. "
I have not seen this software in use, but this sounds like a control in which other controls can be dragged into it, and appear on a new tab.
The Bible was originally in Hebrew and Greek. For many centuries, the Catholic church held a monopoly on translations of the bible, only endorsing a Latin version, so that the common people would only be able to hear the bible's interpretation by One True Catholic Faith (or something), instead of that of a few start-ups that actually weren't obsessed about controlling everyone.
this seems similar to a site called "Fish Fight". The site owner would start by drawing a simple underwater scene, and then readers could add either a fish or a human, (taking turns) to destroy each other. It was fun when it got rather bitchy - someone for the fishes team would draw an octopus attacking the human's boat, and then the next update would have a scuba-diver cutting off the octopus' legs with a chainsaw. This would go on until the image had no more room, and one side would be declared the winner. I don't think this site is still operating, does anyone know the URL?
KMart is fine if all you want to listen to is teeny-bopper boy bands and the other top 40 stuff. I can track down any music I like from an online retailer.
The idea of "prior art" in this case may be a little different to what we are used to seeing. True, our genetic structures do "already exist", but the subject of the patent may actually claim something else, such as a method for isolating a gene, modifying it, identifying it, adding it to an organism to produce a certain outcome, and so on.
OF COURSE, the ethical considerations of patenting a genetic sequence are a completely different matter!
I consider myself to not even have a star sign - such is my disgust at the way that astrologers and almost everyone else wants to label me depending on the range of days that my birthday falls in. When people ask what is my star sign and I say "No, don't have one" - you should see the puzzled expression on their face. Like their whole world is caving in because they didn't realise that you can do that .
When I was in my third year of high school, the teacher for my History class used to mark essays by just assigning twenty keywords, and you got one mark for each "correct" topic that you mentioned. No marks for creativity, or even understanding the material in any way. No marks for thinking of new points that the teacher had not considered. I think this sort of attitude makes computer grading an attractive option.
why not by-pass this whole messy technology, and develop the means to transfer a person into a holographic projection of their former selves? Of course, to avoid any confusion as to who is real and who is a hologram, all the holograms must have a letter 'h' imprinted prominently on their foreheads.
Of course, a close approach is still is complete miss. When you are used to seeing astronomical distanced expressed in units of millions of miles, it's odd to see a figure of such a small order of magnitude.
Hmmmm. This would have been far, far spiffier if they were actually autonomous, rather than large, armed remote-control vehicles.
It says somewhere on the battlebots web page that they tried this a couple of years ago, but it was embarassingly boring - the robots just wandered around bumping into each other for 5 minutes.
In an ideal world, it would be obvious to any reasonable person that like any other tool, a computer/network can and will be used for any number of purposes, including some that lead to harmful influence or harmful behaivour. The internet is NOT television, and MUST not be used as a baysitting device. To those who want to regulate the internet to protect their children, I ask "what happened to parental supervision?"
The question of liability here is a complex one, and I don't claim to offer any advice here. It's just unfortunate that society's recent trend is to increasingly avoid one's own responsibility in favour of finding others to blame. In this case it threatens the disadvantaged. "The internet has warped my kid's fragile little mind! I'll sue the kindly chaps who donated the computer and set it up."
Slashdot Mirror
If GOD is really infinite, there is no way a finite human mind can possibly hope to encapsulate that infinite being in a book, or creed, or any other set of rules©
Christianity teaches that although God IS infinite, we do not face the dilemma that you describe ¥unable to understand anything about him, or required to understand ALL about him, because he has approached us first© He has revealed what we need to understand about his nature, firstly in a general sense in the Universe and the Earth, and then specifically in the scriptures© In this, it is revealed that God indeed invites all to approach him, and also that God himself provides the means to do this - that his son took the punishment for sin, and we are then credited with ¥in God's sight Jesus' own unsinfulness©
By the way, as a Christian with a background in science, I find these recent discoveries ¥theories©©? very interesting© Seems to me that God "programmed" all of chemistry, physics, subatomic interaction etc to have just the right properties so that life has a tendancy to appear all throughout the universe©
Can I have all 1,000,000 of them?
Got a OEM version of Office 2K Small Business©©©after starting program 20 times, will not activate until you register it© But if you decline to register online, it just prints out a form for you to fill out and send to Microsoft, and basically trusts that you really did send it in©
What I'd really like to see is a version of the talking fish that was controlled by a remote microphone, and with software that controlled the head and mouth automatically whenever a person was speaking into the microphone. Imagine inviting passers-by to have a conversation with the fish. Pipe the voice through a sound-blaster live first to get some rather fishy voice-effects and we could really have some fun. Hey, I want this as a hands-free telephone!
Actually, the first book in this series is The Magician's Nephew , telling the story of the first children to find the land of Narnia, who bring back a sapling of a magical tree. When the tree is chopped down many years later, it's wood is made into a wardrobe (which later becomes famous in book 2 of the series).
Not sure if you are just a troll or what, but, have you ever heard of a LINKED LIST?
When I was completing my honours year in Computer Science, the undergraduates spent a lot of time playing a multiplayer unix tetris game, where your own tetris board was displayed alongside that of the other players. If you made two or more rows at once, all the other players received a row of garbage blocks on top of their current boards.
Some of the other post-grads got the client source, and made a bot-player that would play for half a minute, then flood the other players, reporting that it had made lots of multiple rows.
Another time we made a hacked client that always gave the long skinny tetris peice whenever there was a need for one, and you could press a key to change the falling shape to another peice.
Thought we might get the sysadmin dudes irate for "hacking" a program on the system, but were actually encouraged to disrupt any undergrads wasting time (and spare terminals) in the computer labs.
Perfect for serving ice-cream and sorbet. Might make a baked chicken dinner a bit soggy though.
You seem to be saying that the example of airplanes shows that we should not really expect Moore's Law to continue, since we have had only minor advances in this field, keeping the same basic shape and principles as planes from the 60's and 70's.
But the important technology that appeared after the 60's and 70's was not an airplane in every home...it was in things that we didn't even see coming!. Personal computers, the internet, have revolutionised our lives in a way that could not have been preditcted even in 1980. True, its the year 2000 and we don't all have the flying cars that the sci-fi of 30 years ago promised, but we can assured that life in 20 years time will be very different than it is now. Better or worse, remains to be seen.
--
Have you read the actual patent? There's much more to this than just the use of tabs. Adobe has patented a method of moving tabs around to become separate floating controls, drag and drog other controls that appear on a new tab, and combining sets of controls between sets of tabs.
It seems to me, after briefly reading the patent , Adobe are not trying to protect just any old use of tabs.
Their first claim describes a standard tabbed dialog box UI component, with the additional function:
"and
combining the additional set of information, displayed in a different area of the display from the established area, into the group of multiple sets of information so that the additional sets of information may be selected in the same manner as the other sets of information in the group. "
I have not seen this software in use, but this sounds like a control in which other controls can be dragged into it, and appear on a new tab.
Jeeves, is this the first post?
The Bible was originally in Hebrew and Greek. For many centuries, the Catholic church held a monopoly on translations of the bible, only endorsing a Latin version, so that the common people would only be able to hear the bible's interpretation by One True Catholic Faith (or something), instead of that of a few start-ups that actually weren't obsessed about controlling everyone.
this seems similar to a site called "Fish Fight". The site owner would start by drawing a simple underwater scene, and then readers could add either a fish or a human, (taking turns) to destroy each other. It was fun when it got rather bitchy - someone for the fishes team would draw an octopus attacking the human's boat, and then the next update would have a scuba-diver cutting off the octopus' legs with a chainsaw. This would go on until the image had no more room, and one side would be declared the winner. I don't think this site is still operating, does anyone know the URL?
KMart is fine if all you want to listen to is teeny-bopper boy bands and the other top 40 stuff. I can track down any music I like from an online retailer.
IANAGS (I Am Not A Genetic Scientist), but:
The idea of "prior art" in this case may be a little different to what we are used to seeing. True, our genetic structures do "already exist", but the subject of the patent may actually claim something else, such as a method for isolating a gene, modifying it, identifying it, adding it to an organism to produce a certain outcome, and so on.
OF COURSE, the ethical considerations of patenting a genetic sequence are a completely different matter!
It's "One Point Twenty-One" Jigawatts, and 88 MPH.
I consider myself to not even have a star sign - such is my disgust at the way that astrologers and almost everyone else wants to label me depending on the range of days that my birthday falls in. When people ask what is my star sign and I say "No, don't have one" - you should see the puzzled expression on their face. Like their whole world is caving in because they didn't realise that you can do that .
Current mouse technology cannot detect when the hand leaves the mouse.
When I was in my third year of high school, the teacher for my History class used to mark essays by just assigning twenty keywords, and you got one mark for each "correct" topic that you mentioned. No marks for creativity, or even understanding the material in any way. No marks for thinking of new points that the teacher had not considered.
I think this sort of attitude makes computer grading an attractive option.
why not by-pass this whole messy technology, and develop the means to transfer a person into a holographic projection of their former selves?
Of course, to avoid any confusion as to who is real and who is a hologram, all the holograms must have a letter 'h' imprinted prominently on their foreheads.
Of course, a close approach is still is complete miss. When you are used to seeing astronomical distanced expressed in units of millions of miles, it's odd to see a figure of such a small order of magnitude.
apparently, enough plutonium to cause approx 8 billion inevitable cases of lung cancer
first?
Hmmmm. This would have been far, far spiffier if they were actually autonomous, rather
than large, armed remote-control vehicles.
It says somewhere on the battlebots web page that they tried this a couple of years ago, but it was embarassingly boring - the robots just wandered around bumping into each other for 5 minutes.
In an ideal world, it would be obvious to any reasonable person that like any other tool, a computer/network can and will be used for any number of purposes, including some that lead to harmful influence or harmful behaivour.
The internet is NOT television, and MUST not be used as a baysitting device. To those who want to regulate the internet to protect their children, I ask "what happened to parental supervision?"
The question of liability here is a complex one, and I don't claim to offer any advice here. It's just unfortunate that society's recent trend is to increasingly avoid one's own responsibility in favour of finding others to blame. In this case it threatens the disadvantaged. "The internet has warped my kid's fragile little mind! I'll sue the kindly chaps who donated the computer and set it up."