This will not be an issue for desktops as most new desktops were 64-bit starting in 2004, with the last 32-bit desktop Semprons and Northwood Celerons bowing out around the end of 2005. The only mass-market 64bits desktop chip available in 2004 was the Athlon64... 64bits Prescott/Pentium D did not become widely available until early 2005. Pentium D 5x0 Prescotts that shipped in 2004 do not have EM64T but all other models (5x1, 5x2, 6xx, 8xx, 9xx) that started shipping in 2005 do.
Your first sentence becomes true about half-way through 2005 where even 32bits Celerons started being phased out and Northwood supplies completely dried up.
I remember building my current PC after a few weeks of pondering whether I preferred NW's lower power, the upcoming Prescott's 64bits or dual-dice 8xx. In the end, I opted for the 3.0GHz NW while it was still available at Prescott-like prices in September. Since I upgraded that computer from 1GB RAM to 3GB RAM last year, I plan to tough it out until I can get 2x2GB of reasonably priced DDR3 at some point through 2008 - assuming I will not be more interested in getting a new laptop by then.
Montreal hired nearly 200 new traffic cops and parking inspectors last year... the only net effect so far is something like $30M more in the city's bank accounts from the extra tickets with little effect on the average in tickets issued per cop per month. I would bet they are going to hire a few more for the Summer with all the fancy cars coming out of hiding in my area - half the businesses in the local industrial park are garages, tuning shops or otherwise car-related (machining, painting, custom interiors, etc.) so I get to hear interesting engine/exhaust noises on a regular basis... among other things: the number of illegal turbos (no muffler on the waste-gate) is rising.
If you ever visit Montreal, you will quickly realize that most of the road network is a hazard by its own right. As for road lasting longer, the maximum permissible load in Quebec is about twice what it is elsewhere in North America... abrasives and frost in winter also cause lots more road damage than driving Fast&Furious. Basically, road maintenance here is neglected until the last possible moment because the winter conditions and overweight trucks will scrap the resurfacing jobs within a year or two. BTW, you would not be driving F&F here with all the supersized potholes acting as natural speed bumps. Montreal is also becoming famous for street collapses and neighborhood flooding thanks to waterworks failures... since most of the waterworks is overdue for an overhaul, I am guessing many street repairs are postponed until the underlying waterworks wash it all off.
Quebec officials excel at grab-ass until stuff blows up in their faces... Transport Quebec was warned years ago that the Concorde overpass could collapse, they were warned hours before the fact that unusually large concrete chunks fell off of it in the morning but ignored the symptoms and failed to close it down for in-depth examination before it collapsed. The Qc parliament would be a farce regardless of which one(s) of the three clowns available to us now lead it... it has been a farce for most of the last 15 years.
BTW, here, the law discharges cities from liability for any damage to tires, rims, suspension and drive train caused by potholes or any other road defects. With practically no accountability, many streets will probably degrade to the point of criminal negligence liability before they are fixed. From road work conducted last year, waterworks blow-outs (usually 18" 40psi water pipes or bigger) aside, Montreal's pavement priorities are clearly touristic zones and major commercial avenues along with the shortest routes to get to them, even when they are not in so pathetically bad shape as other (less touristic) major streets and boulevards.
BTW2, as a cyclist, I find that rolling on flat year-old tarmac requires significantly less effort than the older stuff... montrealers would be much safer and probably save a small fortune in gasoline if highways, boulevards and major streets were fixed properly.
Well, I live in Montreal now... a city well known for its world-class bad and/or impatient drivers... and pretty sorry infrastructure state outside touristic areas.
As far as riding on a lane goes, if you tried that here you would get some colorful reactions from whoever ends up on your tail... let's just say I did not feel any safer the few times I tried this when some people who ended up following me started honking, changed lanes and passed by me at something like twice the speed limit.
The only time montrealers drive by-the-book is for their driver's license exam. In the field, driving by-the-book will get you into embarrassing or otherwise ambiguous and potentially dangerous situations because seasoned Montreal drivers are not expecting it - driving around Montreal is a pretty unique and extreme experience due to the strong culture of rule-bending/breaking driving... the bad road surface condition, confusing, bloated and randomly placed signalization, stupid traffic light timings, etc. all contribute to the unique experience.
Around here, it seems many traffic rules are meant to be broken... at least every now and then.
Anyone above 13-15 years old, should be riding on the street with the flow of traffic single file and on the shoulder while following all the rules of the road drivers do. This is assuming there is a shoulder and that it is sufficiently large. I went to work by bicycle twice a week last summer and almost got hit by passenger-side mirrors half a dozen times. Seeing mirrors pass within an inch of my handle bars while my wheels are almost scraping the sidewalk is pretty scary... that trip was about 24km long (~15 miles) and at least two cyclists died last year on one of the roads I had to use - one was knocked off then run over, the other fell off her bike while trying to get on the sidewalk and got run over by a truck.
As far as rules are concerned, it is a well known fact that these only represent generally accepted best practice but can fall well short from being adequate in general and specific real world scenarios. On a good day, I could hold 35-40km/h (50km/h max. zone) and running through a red light/stop sign (safely - no perpendicular traffic) often meant I could actually gain distance on the traffic behind me and make my trip safer... and it also means a lot less stamina wasted on cold stops and standing starts. By bending the rules, I made my trip safer, faster, reduced the strain on my cardiovascular system, reduced exhaust inhalation by staying ahead of traffic and stayed generally out of the motorists' hair... a win-win-win-win-win situation.
While it is true that cyclists tend to bend the rules a lot, car/truck drivers have no excuse for knocking cyclists sideways by being so far off their otherwise straight lane's center - the two accidents above happened on straight sections... and these stupidly close calls are far more frequent than I would like them to be. Maybe I'll add a lateral flag to my bicycle and epoxy a few layers of industrial diamond dust on its tip to collect paint samples in case my number should come up.
By pushing the smoking outside from a place where it could be contained we now have the air outside full of smoke where the smokers congregate and cigarette butts all over the sidewalks. I specifically said _most_ in/out-doors areas to leave some room for designated areas... and I implicitly excluded street-level/sidewalks by saying "in the nearby presence of non-consenting non-smokers or minors".
The 30 foot rule is completely and totally asinine Well, it would kind of fulfill the above-implied street-level rule if applied. We have a 10 meters rule here too but seeing how many touristic and commercial streets are often flooded by smokers, it clearly is not being (consistently) enforced... it'd effectively ban smoking downtown.
what many of the proponents of the bans really want is to outlaw smoking. It may come in due time just like weening: make the old habit progressively more inconvenient to take people off of it until the source can be cut off without affecting the next elections. Since medical care where I live is paid by the government, the government would not suffer much of a net loss from losing tobacco tax revenue.
By my narrow definition of "preventable death", the top preventable killers in the USA appear to be: 1) Smoking (~400k/year) 2) Diet / Obesity / insufficient physical activity (~350k/year) 3) Alcohol (~80k/year) 4) Second-hand smoke (~50k/year) 5) Vehicle crashes (~40k/year... but these are not all clearly preventable... or related to texting)
(This was pieced together from various sources, google for "leading causes of preventable deaths" and "passive smoking")
Imagine the economic impact of avoiding over 450k premature deaths each year by declaring an outright ban on cigarettes and cheap cigars...
Please don't tell us that you live somewhere where a person can't smoke in a bar. Personally, I would vote to ban smoking both in the presence of nearby non-consenting non-smokers (this means most public areas both indoors and outdoors) and minors.
Me and my friends like smoke-free bars - playing pool and breathing normally are no longer mutually exclusive. Given how second-hand smoke has been proven to be a considerable health hazard for non-smokers (20-30% more occurrences of typical smoking illnesses/cancers in non-smokers from occupational exposure), I am looking forward to further restrictions being applied to the use of smokable products - outdoors metropolitan smog is bad enough, I do not want unnecessary exposure to more of the same indoors or near crowded outdoors areas.
Just thought of a better definition for DCE: "Digital Consumer Enslavement" - you do not even get to choose between paying protection money or skipping town.
BTW, before anyone asks, 'DCA' in my previous post was a typo... but if anyone asks, I'll claim I tried to be one step ahead of *AA by pre-defining it as "Digital Consumer Abuse" - no more loose ends in my previous post.
Digital Rights Management was deemed a misnomer by educated people, is getting increasing heat from the general public and is now getting called "Digital Restrictions Management"
To "dispose" of the heat, the MAFIAA decides to rename it Digital Consumer Enablement... I'll write it off as "Digital Consumer Extortion" in my book as I expect every control-freak measures to be implemented in the name of DCA to be at least as potentially restrictive and encumbering as anything else that got introduced in the name of DRM.
I hate those moronic execs who try to convince the general public that the likes of DRM allows people to do stuff people could not already do... the only thing DRM enables is taking the willing consumers' wallets to the cleaners without said consumers being able to do anything about it when they hit a DRM brick wall they did not see coming.
Yikes! That's one awfully plain, retro-looking bank note. I could hardly believe such a thing was still being printed as recently as 2003. You should have posted links to a more recently redesigned (how old is that $1 design?) and much better looking bill like the $20 - though that one - and none of the others for that matter - has no high-res scan.
Canadian bank notes started featuring explicit copyright notices only a few years ago - when the current thematic re-design cycle started. None of the scans I have seen on wikipedia has remotely sufficient resolution to make the notice readable - it is printed in near-microprint (~500um tall) lettering near the bottom-right of the printed area.
Depending on how the Federal Reserve is affected by the "no copyrights for feds" bit of the US copyright law, adding the 'magic (c)' to USA bank notes may be more or less readily feasible should they ever feel like getting a (c) in there. Well, the fact that the USA copyright law has such a clause seems like an insight into how much the drafters trusted (not) feds, courts, lawyers, judges and juries with common sense.
The tiny tiny text below the signature on the very bottom-right of each of these notes (it is unreadable and looks like a fuzzy horizontal line on these low-res scans) reads "(c) YYYY Bank of Canada (c) YYYY Banque du Canada". I looked at some scans of older bills and it appears the explicit copyright notice on Canadian notes is a somewhat recent (post-Y2k) addition.
IIRC, any creative/artistic work is covered by implicit copyright unless the publisher/creator explicitly states otherwise - the (c) mark only makes it explicit and unambiguous.
Printing counterfeit bank notes is simply unlicensed printing. (Well, there is more to bank notes today than simply ink but I'll still call the overall process printing.)
Now, because forging bank notes and other official documents may cause significant economic, social and other damage, special laws are added on top because copyright violations do not carry sufficient deterrent penalties for these cases... but the basis of all this still is copyright: only the relevant agencies are allowed to order blanks, possess the blank media and issue the documents. Copyright already makes it illegal for unlicensed entities to manufacture the stuff, counterfeiting-related laws simply promote these violations to criminal/felony charges.
BTW, if you examine a bank note, you will most likely see a copyright notice somewhere... I have "(c) Bank of Canada" printed in the bottom-right corner of a $5 note I had lying around. More likely than not, US notes have a similar statement on them - this shows that even federal government agencies can (and do) claim copyrights for their publications.
I'm pretty sure one state would throw a fit if it realized that some other state plagiarized their cards/forms' designs and could sue for copyright infringement or some other similar laws.
Since these designs are deployed as document authentication measures, unlicensed reproduction of the artwork (graphics, embossing, watermarks, etc.) would technically be a violation of copyright... but as I said in my previous post, whoever does it would be more likely to get sued for forgery, conspiration to forge documents, conspiration to impersonate, etc.
One cool thing about copyright (in the US): it does not protect the government. Anything the gov't puts out is in the public domain. In that case I'll start printing my own money... if the designs are public-domain, I will not need a license to do so.
Passports, driver licenses, bank notes, etc. - only the relevant authorities are licensed to print and issue the notes, response paperwork and cards. Unauthorized possession of blanks could be considered as a criminal offense in many places... so copyright (civil) lawsuits by the authorities would be redundant.
Unlike private interests, governments are not publishing stuff for money (other than bank notes) and have only rare justifiable occasions to enforce copyright on public (published) documents. Because an entity has no motive to enforce its copyrights on most of its publications does not make them any less copyrighted.
ID cards are meant to cram all the information deemed necessary for the intended purpose on a wallet-sized piece of plastic or plastified cardboard. Basically, all that the card contains is a graphical template copyrighted by the organization that issued the ID with cold-hard-facts printed on top of said template.
Cold-hard-facts are non-copyrightable. The ID's graphical design and layout are copyrighted by the agency. Since the relevant agency here is public, issued documents are practically public-domain as far as faithful duplication is concerned. By inappropriate use of the template, whoever manufactured the fake ID is infringing the agency's copyright on the ID's graphical design... but this is a minor inconvenience compared to felony charges for forgery.
Since forgery of an official document necessarily infringes on the issuing agency's copyright for the original's graphical design, a forgery is most likely not entitled to any sort of copyright protection.
Does it really matter that a key has been revoked?
All this means is that future HD-DVDs will carry that key in their key revocation list. Hack the revoked players to make them ignore the revocation list and everything is fine as long as the players remain satisfactorily usable. Again, this proves that only legitimate users get shafted by anti-piracy measures, real "pirates" will only be somewhat inconvenienced.
Personally, I will not be buying into the HD movie hype until AACS and all other secondary locks have been completely broken... just like I held off buying into DVDs until DeCSS became available - time-shifting viewing of rental/borrowed media can be quite convenient.
The method is suitable for CD/DVD discs since they are typically written TAO/DAO but for HDDs and most other spindle-based random-write media (DVD-RAM, MO, floppies, etc.) but for HDDs, this would be a nightmare... it would make read/write operations much more complex and increase the sector latency by whatever the distance between the begining of the sector's data and the end of its distributed error-recovery information.
If error-recovery information is spread over 32 sectors on the same cylinder, all single-sector reads would then incur 32x the single-sector read/write latency. This would be horrible for many benchmarks but most operations would still require only one rotation.
Actually, going up to 4KB sectors may already be horrible for applications that routinely rewrite tiny pieces within files (update fixed-length fields within a binary file for example) thanks to larger read-modify-write operations.
Power LED emitters are fairly efficient (incandescent is under 20 lumens/watt while many monochromatic power LEDs can exceed 40) but these things definitely are expensive: at $5 per emitter, doing a 100W-equivalent fixture easily costs over $50 in LEDs alone. These power LEDs also need heatsinks and a power supply.
Since LEDs are directional light sources, they are not really suitable as direct bulb replacements... they really need purpose-built fixtures to truly shine. A light source built from mixed monochromatic power LEDs can be more efficient than fluorescent bulbs, add a microcontroller and some extra power electronics, you get a programmable light source. The only problem really is the price.
You can still use prior art for defense and file to get the patent scrapped.
If someone patented something and you possess prior art items, you could still get the patent invalidated but you would not be able to claim the patent for yourself anymore.
Superconductors are much more expensive and require cooling equipment. AFAIK, curently deployed superconducting power distribution links are only used as an alternative to laying down new pipes for underground distribution in congested areas.
Also, since the tunnel would have passengers in it, you wouldn't want to asphyxiate or freeze them should a cooling pipe break and leak thousands of cubic meters worth of gaseous nitrogen... and the thermal shock could compromise the tunnel's structural integrity too.
I went to check out what Wikipedia had to say about this... losses for 400-500kV HVDC systems are apparently under 3% per 1000km now, quite a bit better than what I thought it was and certainly better than what can be achieved by AC for such distances.
HVDC requires only two wires (instead of three) and this alone pays for the inverter-rectifier stations for aerial runs over 300km and underwater runs over 50km on top of the many other advantages for long-haul. Also, since that line would cross continents and connect two independently operated grids, an AC-DC-DC-AC transformation would be necessary to transfer energy from one grid to the other to avoid phase/frequency issues anyway - transferring or pooling energy across independent grids is the primary motivation for most past, present and future HVDC deployments.
Up the voltage? Long-haul bulk power transmission lines already operate at up to 735kV. Power companies have been trying to go over 1MV for the last ~20 years now but have yet to deploy the first production 1MV line up due to various issues including transformer insulation breakdown - even 735kV is only used for long stretches over uninhabited areas due to environmental issues with high-voltage electric fields.
As for using some sort of mechanical power system, these would be far less reliable, at least as costly and far more lossy than electrical conduction. To avoid inductive voltage drop and accelerating corrosion of the tunnel structure rebars by AC induction, the power would have to be HVDC. Currently deployed HVDC installations can transport over 2GW with >90% efficiency instead of >90% loss over hundreds of kilometers, that would be a good starting point - and a few extra cable sets could be laid down as headroom insurance.
Penryn is supposed to be lower-power at higher clock speeds than the current C2D for the same core count.
10% more IPC + 10% higher clocks + same (or possibly smaller) power budget = a formerly 10 days job becomes a 8 days job without any CPU-specific tuning or extra cooling/power costs. Sounds like a good deal to me - even more so considering that I am still using a 3GHz Northwood as my primary PC.
Yeah, I too wonder how RIM managed to lose this: my laptops have been wireless-eMail-enabled for the last four years and I have been able to send/receive mail on my cell phone (up to 140 characters) for the last seven years.
I could convert a desktop PC to receive wireless mail too... I just need to plug it into an UPS, charge the battery, disconnect the wall plug and add an USB WiFi card.
My guess is that RIM used custom wireless protocols for mail instead of tunneling TCP/IP with standard eMail services... they tried to lock-in their customers by using proprietary technologies and got whacked by another company that had patented that business model.
For hit&run, using your own registered weapon would be stupid... from this angle, the registry exposes honest gun owners to framing. Even worse, some people may end up "owning" a gun they've never seen or heard of until the police interrogates/jails them as the primary suspect after the weapon was used in a shoot-out/murder.
So, not only is the registry unfit for its primary purpose, it can also be used to frame people by misleading police investigators.
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Your first sentence becomes true about half-way through 2005 where even 32bits Celerons started being phased out and Northwood supplies completely dried up.
I remember building my current PC after a few weeks of pondering whether I preferred NW's lower power, the upcoming Prescott's 64bits or dual-dice 8xx. In the end, I opted for the 3.0GHz NW while it was still available at Prescott-like prices in September. Since I upgraded that computer from 1GB RAM to 3GB RAM last year, I plan to tough it out until I can get 2x2GB of reasonably priced DDR3 at some point through 2008 - assuming I will not be more interested in getting a new laptop by then.
Montreal hired nearly 200 new traffic cops and parking inspectors last year... the only net effect so far is something like $30M more in the city's bank accounts from the extra tickets with little effect on the average in tickets issued per cop per month. I would bet they are going to hire a few more for the Summer with all the fancy cars coming out of hiding in my area - half the businesses in the local industrial park are garages, tuning shops or otherwise car-related (machining, painting, custom interiors, etc.) so I get to hear interesting engine/exhaust noises on a regular basis... among other things: the number of illegal turbos (no muffler on the waste-gate) is rising.
If you ever visit Montreal, you will quickly realize that most of the road network is a hazard by its own right. As for road lasting longer, the maximum permissible load in Quebec is about twice what it is elsewhere in North America... abrasives and frost in winter also cause lots more road damage than driving Fast&Furious. Basically, road maintenance here is neglected until the last possible moment because the winter conditions and overweight trucks will scrap the resurfacing jobs within a year or two. BTW, you would not be driving F&F here with all the supersized potholes acting as natural speed bumps. Montreal is also becoming famous for street collapses and neighborhood flooding thanks to waterworks failures... since most of the waterworks is overdue for an overhaul, I am guessing many street repairs are postponed until the underlying waterworks wash it all off.
Quebec officials excel at grab-ass until stuff blows up in their faces... Transport Quebec was warned years ago that the Concorde overpass could collapse, they were warned hours before the fact that unusually large concrete chunks fell off of it in the morning but ignored the symptoms and failed to close it down for in-depth examination before it collapsed. The Qc parliament would be a farce regardless of which one(s) of the three clowns available to us now lead it... it has been a farce for most of the last 15 years.
BTW, here, the law discharges cities from liability for any damage to tires, rims, suspension and drive train caused by potholes or any other road defects. With practically no accountability, many streets will probably degrade to the point of criminal negligence liability before they are fixed. From road work conducted last year, waterworks blow-outs (usually 18" 40psi water pipes or bigger) aside, Montreal's pavement priorities are clearly touristic zones and major commercial avenues along with the shortest routes to get to them, even when they are not in so pathetically bad shape as other (less touristic) major streets and boulevards.
BTW2, as a cyclist, I find that rolling on flat year-old tarmac requires significantly less effort than the older stuff... montrealers would be much safer and probably save a small fortune in gasoline if highways, boulevards and major streets were fixed properly.
Well, I live in Montreal now... a city well known for its world-class bad and/or impatient drivers... and pretty sorry infrastructure state outside touristic areas.
As far as riding on a lane goes, if you tried that here you would get some colorful reactions from whoever ends up on your tail... let's just say I did not feel any safer the few times I tried this when some people who ended up following me started honking, changed lanes and passed by me at something like twice the speed limit.
The only time montrealers drive by-the-book is for their driver's license exam. In the field, driving by-the-book will get you into embarrassing or otherwise ambiguous and potentially dangerous situations because seasoned Montreal drivers are not expecting it - driving around Montreal is a pretty unique and extreme experience due to the strong culture of rule-bending/breaking driving... the bad road surface condition, confusing, bloated and randomly placed signalization, stupid traffic light timings, etc. all contribute to the unique experience.
Around here, it seems many traffic rules are meant to be broken... at least every now and then.
As far as rules are concerned, it is a well known fact that these only represent generally accepted best practice but can fall well short from being adequate in general and specific real world scenarios. On a good day, I could hold 35-40km/h (50km/h max. zone) and running through a red light/stop sign (safely - no perpendicular traffic) often meant I could actually gain distance on the traffic behind me and make my trip safer... and it also means a lot less stamina wasted on cold stops and standing starts. By bending the rules, I made my trip safer, faster, reduced the strain on my cardiovascular system, reduced exhaust inhalation by staying ahead of traffic and stayed generally out of the motorists' hair... a win-win-win-win-win situation.
While it is true that cyclists tend to bend the rules a lot, car/truck drivers have no excuse for knocking cyclists sideways by being so far off their otherwise straight lane's center - the two accidents above happened on straight sections... and these stupidly close calls are far more frequent than I would like them to be. Maybe I'll add a lateral flag to my bicycle and epoxy a few layers of industrial diamond dust on its tip to collect paint samples in case my number should come up.
By my narrow definition of "preventable death", the top preventable killers in the USA appear to be:
1) Smoking (~400k/year)
2) Diet / Obesity / insufficient physical activity (~350k/year)
3) Alcohol (~80k/year)
4) Second-hand smoke (~50k/year)
5) Vehicle crashes (~40k/year... but these are not all clearly preventable... or related to texting)
(This was pieced together from various sources, google for "leading causes of preventable deaths" and "passive smoking")
Imagine the economic impact of avoiding over 450k premature deaths each year by declaring an outright ban on cigarettes and cheap cigars...
Me and my friends like smoke-free bars - playing pool and breathing normally are no longer mutually exclusive. Given how second-hand smoke has been proven to be a considerable health hazard for non-smokers (20-30% more occurrences of typical smoking illnesses/cancers in non-smokers from occupational exposure), I am looking forward to further restrictions being applied to the use of smokable products - outdoors metropolitan smog is bad enough, I do not want unnecessary exposure to more of the same indoors or near crowded outdoors areas.
Just thought of a better definition for DCE: "Digital Consumer Enslavement" - you do not even get to choose between paying protection money or skipping town.
BTW, before anyone asks, 'DCA' in my previous post was a typo... but if anyone asks, I'll claim I tried to be one step ahead of *AA by pre-defining it as "Digital Consumer Abuse" - no more loose ends in my previous post.
Goatsie is not quite what it used to be... "This domain is for sale!" and the current bid is $110.
No need to believe me, just click away.
Looks like that photoshop hole may have been closed down for good.
Digital Rights Management was deemed a misnomer by educated people, is getting increasing heat from the general public and is now getting called "Digital Restrictions Management"
To "dispose" of the heat, the MAFIAA decides to rename it Digital Consumer Enablement... I'll write it off as "Digital Consumer Extortion" in my book as I expect every control-freak measures to be implemented in the name of DCA to be at least as potentially restrictive and encumbering as anything else that got introduced in the name of DRM.
I hate those moronic execs who try to convince the general public that the likes of DRM allows people to do stuff people could not already do... the only thing DRM enables is taking the willing consumers' wallets to the cleaners without said consumers being able to do anything about it when they hit a DRM brick wall they did not see coming.
Yikes! That's one awfully plain, retro-looking bank note. I could hardly believe such a thing was still being printed as recently as 2003. You should have posted links to a more recently redesigned (how old is that $1 design?) and much better looking bill like the $20 - though that one - and none of the others for that matter - has no high-res scan.
Canadian bank notes started featuring explicit copyright notices only a few years ago - when the current thematic re-design cycle started. None of the scans I have seen on wikipedia has remotely sufficient resolution to make the notice readable - it is printed in near-microprint (~500um tall) lettering near the bottom-right of the printed area.
Depending on how the Federal Reserve is affected by the "no copyrights for feds" bit of the US copyright law, adding the 'magic (c)' to USA bank notes may be more or less readily feasible should they ever feel like getting a (c) in there. Well, the fact that the USA copyright law has such a clause seems like an insight into how much the drafters trusted (not) feds, courts, lawyers, judges and juries with common sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Canadian_bills2 .jpg
The tiny tiny text below the signature on the very bottom-right of each of these notes (it is unreadable and looks like a fuzzy horizontal line on these low-res scans) reads "(c) YYYY Bank of Canada (c) YYYY Banque du Canada". I looked at some scans of older bills and it appears the explicit copyright notice on Canadian notes is a somewhat recent (post-Y2k) addition.
IIRC, any creative/artistic work is covered by implicit copyright unless the publisher/creator explicitly states otherwise - the (c) mark only makes it explicit and unambiguous.
Printing counterfeit bank notes is simply unlicensed printing. (Well, there is more to bank notes today than simply ink but I'll still call the overall process printing.)
Now, because forging bank notes and other official documents may cause significant economic, social and other damage, special laws are added on top because copyright violations do not carry sufficient deterrent penalties for these cases... but the basis of all this still is copyright: only the relevant agencies are allowed to order blanks, possess the blank media and issue the documents. Copyright already makes it illegal for unlicensed entities to manufacture the stuff, counterfeiting-related laws simply promote these violations to criminal/felony charges.
BTW, if you examine a bank note, you will most likely see a copyright notice somewhere... I have "(c) Bank of Canada" printed in the bottom-right corner of a $5 note I had lying around. More likely than not, US notes have a similar statement on them - this shows that even federal government agencies can (and do) claim copyrights for their publications.
Since these designs are deployed as document authentication measures, unlicensed reproduction of the artwork (graphics, embossing, watermarks, etc.) would technically be a violation of copyright... but as I said in my previous post, whoever does it would be more likely to get sued for forgery, conspiration to forge documents, conspiration to impersonate, etc. One cool thing about copyright (in the US): it does not protect the government. Anything the gov't puts out is in the public domain. In that case I'll start printing my own money... if the designs are public-domain, I will not need a license to do so.
Passports, driver licenses, bank notes, etc. - only the relevant authorities are licensed to print and issue the notes, response paperwork and cards. Unauthorized possession of blanks could be considered as a criminal offense in many places... so copyright (civil) lawsuits by the authorities would be redundant.
Unlike private interests, governments are not publishing stuff for money (other than bank notes) and have only rare justifiable occasions to enforce copyright on public (published) documents. Because an entity has no motive to enforce its copyrights on most of its publications does not make them any less copyrighted.
What is the purpose of an ID card?
ID cards are meant to cram all the information deemed necessary for the intended purpose on a wallet-sized piece of plastic or plastified cardboard. Basically, all that the card contains is a graphical template copyrighted by the organization that issued the ID with cold-hard-facts printed on top of said template.
Cold-hard-facts are non-copyrightable.
The ID's graphical design and layout are copyrighted by the agency. Since the relevant agency here is public, issued documents are practically public-domain as far as faithful duplication is concerned.
By inappropriate use of the template, whoever manufactured the fake ID is infringing the agency's copyright on the ID's graphical design... but this is a minor inconvenience compared to felony charges for forgery.
Since forgery of an official document necessarily infringes on the issuing agency's copyright for the original's graphical design, a forgery is most likely not entitled to any sort of copyright protection.
Does it really matter that a key has been revoked?
All this means is that future HD-DVDs will carry that key in their key revocation list. Hack the revoked players to make them ignore the revocation list and everything is fine as long as the players remain satisfactorily usable. Again, this proves that only legitimate users get shafted by anti-piracy measures, real "pirates" will only be somewhat inconvenienced.
Personally, I will not be buying into the HD movie hype until AACS and all other secondary locks have been completely broken... just like I held off buying into DVDs until DeCSS became available - time-shifting viewing of rental/borrowed media can be quite convenient.
The method is suitable for CD/DVD discs since they are typically written TAO/DAO but for HDDs and most other spindle-based random-write media (DVD-RAM, MO, floppies, etc.) but for HDDs, this would be a nightmare... it would make read/write operations much more complex and increase the sector latency by whatever the distance between the begining of the sector's data and the end of its distributed error-recovery information.
If error-recovery information is spread over 32 sectors on the same cylinder, all single-sector reads would then incur 32x the single-sector read/write latency. This would be horrible for many benchmarks but most operations would still require only one rotation.
Actually, going up to 4KB sectors may already be horrible for applications that routinely rewrite tiny pieces within files (update fixed-length fields within a binary file for example) thanks to larger read-modify-write operations.
Power LED emitters are fairly efficient (incandescent is under 20 lumens/watt while many monochromatic power LEDs can exceed 40) but these things definitely are expensive: at $5 per emitter, doing a 100W-equivalent fixture easily costs over $50 in LEDs alone. These power LEDs also need heatsinks and a power supply.
Since LEDs are directional light sources, they are not really suitable as direct bulb replacements... they really need purpose-built fixtures to truly shine. A light source built from mixed monochromatic power LEDs can be more efficient than fluorescent bulbs, add a microcontroller and some extra power electronics, you get a programmable light source. The only problem really is the price.
You can still use prior art for defense and file to get the patent scrapped.
If someone patented something and you possess prior art items, you could still get the patent invalidated but you would not be able to claim the patent for yourself anymore.
Superconductors are much more expensive and require cooling equipment. AFAIK, curently deployed superconducting power distribution links are only used as an alternative to laying down new pipes for underground distribution in congested areas.
Also, since the tunnel would have passengers in it, you wouldn't want to asphyxiate or freeze them should a cooling pipe break and leak thousands of cubic meters worth of gaseous nitrogen... and the thermal shock could compromise the tunnel's structural integrity too.
I went to check out what Wikipedia had to say about this... losses for 400-500kV HVDC systems are apparently under 3% per 1000km now, quite a bit better than what I thought it was and certainly better than what can be achieved by AC for such distances.
HVDC requires only two wires (instead of three) and this alone pays for the inverter-rectifier stations for aerial runs over 300km and underwater runs over 50km on top of the many other advantages for long-haul. Also, since that line would cross continents and connect two independently operated grids, an AC-DC-DC-AC transformation would be necessary to transfer energy from one grid to the other to avoid phase/frequency issues anyway - transferring or pooling energy across independent grids is the primary motivation for most past, present and future HVDC deployments.
Up the voltage? Long-haul bulk power transmission lines already operate at up to 735kV. Power companies have been trying to go over 1MV for the last ~20 years now but have yet to deploy the first production 1MV line up due to various issues including transformer insulation breakdown - even 735kV is only used for long stretches over uninhabited areas due to environmental issues with high-voltage electric fields.
As for using some sort of mechanical power system, these would be far less reliable, at least as costly and far more lossy than electrical conduction. To avoid inductive voltage drop and accelerating corrosion of the tunnel structure rebars by AC induction, the power would have to be HVDC. Currently deployed HVDC installations can transport over 2GW with >90% efficiency instead of >90% loss over hundreds of kilometers, that would be a good starting point - and a few extra cable sets could be laid down as headroom insurance.
They're waiting for you to post this comment and become unable to mod in this story... happened to me quite a few times.
Penryn is supposed to be lower-power at higher clock speeds than the current C2D for the same core count.
10% more IPC + 10% higher clocks + same (or possibly smaller) power budget = a formerly 10 days job becomes a 8 days job without any CPU-specific tuning or extra cooling/power costs. Sounds like a good deal to me - even more so considering that I am still using a 3GHz Northwood as my primary PC.
Yeah, I too wonder how RIM managed to lose this: my laptops have been wireless-eMail-enabled for the last four years and I have been able to send/receive mail on my cell phone (up to 140 characters) for the last seven years.
I could convert a desktop PC to receive wireless mail too... I just need to plug it into an UPS, charge the battery, disconnect the wall plug and add an USB WiFi card.
My guess is that RIM used custom wireless protocols for mail instead of tunneling TCP/IP with standard eMail services... they tried to lock-in their customers by using proprietary technologies and got whacked by another company that had patented that business model.
I know, that's why I said it was pointless.
For hit&run, using your own registered weapon would be stupid... from this angle, the registry exposes honest gun owners to framing. Even worse, some people may end up "owning" a gun they've never seen or heard of until the police interrogates/jails them as the primary suspect after the weapon was used in a shoot-out/murder.
So, not only is the registry unfit for its primary purpose, it can also be used to frame people by misleading police investigators.