Man, reading that list just made me sad that they never made a second season. I enjoyed the Serenity movie thoroughly, but there was so much more to be done with this show. I figure two more seasons before it jumped the shark.
On the other hand, I'll never have to hate the show or become disgusted with what it became like I have with so many other shows that had good first seasons then went down the crapper. In fact, maybe the *reason* so many of us still love Firefly so much is that it didn't get crapped on in later seasons, with played out plotlines, bored writers, and desperate attempts to keep things interesting.
Just throwing in a quick shoutout to a startup (not mine, no financial interest therein) that is commercial but takes a different approach to Wikipedia, and is nerdy enough to appeal to the Slashdot audience.
Skeptive is all about framing hotly debated issues and "crowd-sourcing" (I know, I know, buzzwordy, but it works) pro and con points to help people assess truth on the internet.
It's complementary to a Wikipedia approach - whereas Wikipedia articles present "consensus" that is edited by people who often protect their little information domains like private fiefdoms, and their approach often leads to contested points or simply things that an editor disagrees with getting reverted or wiped out very quickly, Skeptive encourages people to submit points on both sides of a debated topic and has some cool mechanisms to help you assess the relative balance of information on both sides of a debate.
Obviously funding for research from particular corporations alone doesn't mean that a scientist's objectivity is compromised, nor that a study's conclusions are incorrect. But these funding relationships should be disclosed when the conclusions are trumpeted in mainstream media articles by trusted journalists.
And it seems rather obvious that blaming CCD on viruses and fungi is better for Bayer than blaming it on bee-killing pesticides sold by Bayer.
Yeah, except the NY Times article failed to mention that that study was funded by Bayer Crop Sciences, whose product was the principle other suspect behind Colony Collapse Disorder.
Not clear what the real answer is, but it just goes to show that it's easier to mislead a New York Times journalist than one would think and that any scientific study that answers questions of economic significance are subject to meddling with money. Though we sometimes assume that scientists are truly objective, they are human beings and subject to biases and influence like the rest of us.
These sorts of potential conflicts of interest need to be better disclosed - and it's rather embarrassing that the New York Times never published a clarification or follow-up story about this (at least as far as I know).
Not sure if that's true or not, but sociopaths account for something on the order of 1-3% of the population, according to estimates I've read (I'm recalling specifically Sam Harris' book, The Moral Landscape, but you can find some estimates online easily enough). That's obviously plenty of people to inflict lots of death and destruction on the rest of us.
Come on... sandal weather? It's decent enough right now, but three days ago or so it was in the low 20s (Fahrenheit). If you consider that sandal weather, then good sir, you have a stronger constitution than I.
No, I have an iPad too. I'd estimate very roughly that I get about 20-25% more battery life from my iPad than from my G Tablet in terms of actual active usage (browsing, video watching, etc.) - that's from hands-on comparison and isn't that far off from the theoretical manufacturer claims.
In terms of idle duration, I'm not totally clear because I only just installed a new ROM that finally seems to handle idling/sleeping somewhat correctly today - the original TNT-based ROMs suck at this, as do the ZPad ROMs.
I agree that the iPad can idle for on the order of a week and still have battery remaining. I will let you know in a week if the G Tablet can do the same.
I have a Viewsonic G Tablet (a Tegra 2 tablet running Froyo) and I can leave the tablet on all day, browse the web intermittently throughout the day, watch a couple hours of video, listen to streaming music for a while, and still have charge left.
In fact, it's been on the entire time since 10:00AM this morning, it's currently 2:30PM, I've been using it moderately (testing a new ROM out, browsing, downloading from Market, etc.) and I am reading 70% battery still.
People on XDA Developer forums have confirmed ~7 hours of video playback time.
It may have ever-so-slightly less battery life than an iPad, but it's definitely on the same order of magnitude for me.
The Viewsonic G Tablet has all those things, and can be purchased now for less than $400 at Sears or Staples in the US. The Advent Vega is very similar over in the UK, with much better stock software.
The G Tab supports Wireless N (I haven't tested this personally, I just have 802.11b/g, but it supposedly does), it has built-in bluetooth, it has an SD slot that supports SDHC cards, and it has a standard USB port (well, USB-mini, but totally standard) that supports USB host mode.
The only issues with it are the out-of-the-box software completely sucks and is dog slow, you need to be comfortable flashing your own ROMs from XDA Developers to get much value out of it at this point, and to do a tiny bit of hacking to get the Market working properly. And the LCD screen is just not as nice as the IPS screen on the iPad, for example, and that's not a software-fixable issue.
I'm running the VEGAn ROM on it right now, which is a port of the Advent Vega software, and it's running great with Froyo. Things will only get better when Gingerbread and Honeycomb are here.
I'm hopeful the next generation of Tegra 2 tablets will be made with better LCD screens. That's what's really necessary to make an iPad-beating device right now.
Ironically, the diversity of Android devices and screen resolutions mean that quite a bit of the existing Android apps in Google's Market run much better on the G Tab than iPhone software ran on the iPad at its release.
Eh? I can select text with Froyo on my Nexus One, and on my G Tablet. The UI for it isn't always great or consistent, but I've used copy and paste with text selection plenty of times.
Wow, that is some batshit crazy stuff you just posted. I know there are some bad people in government, but only a true paranoid schizophrenic thinks that there are roving bands of citizens devoted to "swarming" them as a method of government-sponsored harassment using GPS tracking of their cellphones, all with the nefarious goal of convincing the rest of us that said target is crazy.
Maybe the occam's razor answer is right here - that they *are* crazy, and they mis-perceive normal people going about their lives, walking down the street and so on as "swarming" them in part of a campaign of government harassment.
Sure, the government tracks people and FBI monitors potential domestic terrorist threats and internet crazies they think might become threats, but that doesn't mean this guy isn't paranoid and delusional.
Some web sources seem to claim that quotation is entirely unsourced. However, from looking through Meditations, it seems to be at least partially sourced from Book 2, Number 11. At least the first few parts of the thought, i.e. living a good life, and the general format of inquiring on if there are gods, and they care about human affairs, etc. However, the quotation itself doesn't seem to follow the translations I found on the web very closely at all.
My conclusion is that the quotation seems to me to be something of a rewrite or even a hybrid of that original source with Pascal's wager. Or maybe the translations I found are just bone-achingly awful, and somebody took the liberty of re-translating that section with a bit of a glib tongue.
They've been posting things that embarrass the government and affect its public image.
Specifically, I think you mean the US government. One thing (not the only thing though) that bothers me about Wikileaks is that it seems to be exclusively, or at least principally, dedicated to embarrassing the US government.
I have no problem with calling out lies told by world leaders - for example, George W. Bush was lying when he claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was working with terrorists.
But I don't think that every diplomatic cable ought to necessarily be public and transparent. Nor do I think that the releases of lots of documents that consisted of basically known facts about the war in Afghanistan combined with details that served no overwhelming public interest need were particularly valuable to the world. Basically, I've yet to be convinced that Wikileaks does more good than harm.
And after the debacle where they foolishly released video under the title "Collateral Murder" they gave up any claim to being an unbiased party dedicated to transparency.
So while I like the idea of accountability and agree that journalists don't always do a perfect job at it, I don't particularly think that Wikileaks is doing a better job.
If somebody can provide evidence to the contrary, I'd love to hear it.
Buy the Viewsonic G Tablet now. The software sucks, but there are already several custom ROMs available - a port of CyanogenMod 6.1 (beta), ZPad, and TnT Lite - just check out the XDA Developers forums for all your ROM needs. It has a Tegra 2, 10" capacitive touch screen and has home/search/back/menu buttons like a proper Android device.
It runs Market and gets almost every app after applying the Market fix, all the Android games I've tried run great, YouTube is great for dumb video content in a pinch, my K-9mail push IMAP mail is there, contact sync and calendar sync with Google works, and it plays downloaded video content just fine (I haven't experimented with HD content yet - I don't really see the point on a tablet device). I like the Aldiko and Kindle e-readers and I read PDF ebooks with RepliGo Reader (better than the free Adobe Reader, IMO).
If, on the other hand, you want a tablet that works great out-of-the-box, without installing custom ROMs and recovery images, get an iPad. That's what my wife has. There aren't any Android tablets that are there yet, and most likely won't be until Android officially supports them and will let the official Market ship with the device.
But for the Slashdot early adopter set, the G Tablet is a pretty cool option that you can pick up right now for under $400 at Sears or Staples.
I took plenty of CS classes when I was in college, and I also went to business school. I never saw a professor in a finance/econ class nor a professor in a CS class give a canned test like this at the college or grad school level.
But I went to an excellent university and an excellent B-school.
I think this is principally a function of a shitty school/department/professor. If this is what your professor does, you've wasted your money on this "education".
There is exactly one hole described in Android in this story, that involves fake Market authentication tokens. That sounds like a real vulnerability that needs to be addressed.
The other issue is a hole that HTC opened up in the browser app to update Flash Light. If you run a proper Android phone with a proper version of the OS (2.2) and have Flash installed, it updates via Market like every other app. This is a stupid HTC kludge. You can't completely stop stupid people from shooting themselves in the foot with open source - HTC gets to recompile stuff their way, and in this case, their way was a dumb way. But yeah, Google should probably give them a talking-to about this.
The big stick Google has to enforce security, updating, rules-compliance, etc. is Market access. Nobody wants an Android phone that can't get Market access because apps are a big part of the appeal of having a smartphone and getting them easily is critical. Google clearly needs to fix the issue with fake Market auth tokens, and they need to start holding handset vendors accountable for securing their releases of Android, and for keeping phones supported and updated within reasonable timeframes, or else face losing access for future products to Market.
I hope Google learns to start enforcing some rule on the Android landscape. We don't want things as locked down as the Apple world, but complete chaos isn't good either.
Brilliant suggestion: buy a Nexus One. Best phone you can get right now. If you buy one of these locked down Android phones and whine about it, it's your own fault, and you are voting with your dollars for carriers to lock phones down. You are now part of the problem. Be part of the solution instead.
Wow, what a rant. Just get a Nexus One. Best phone on the market right now. Just pay the $25 developer tax to Google to buy it. If you buy a locked down Android phone, it's your own fault, you're voting with your dollars.
If you look at Rick Cavallero's replies to posts here, you'll see he directly answers that question, clarifying that there is a ratchet to prevent the propeller from directly turning the wheels (i.e. only the wheels can turn the propeller). This was how they proved to NALSA that they were not using stored energy from the propeller as a flywheel to accelerate the vehicle.
You know what's really stupid? I actually went through the Dick Measuring Device (aka back-scatter machine) for the first time about 6 weeks ago at Ft. Lauderdale Airport. Every single one of myself, the gentleman in front of me, and the gentleman behind me in line all agreed to do it, and yet the TSA staff vaguely apologized to each of us that the machine hadn't gotten a "sufficiently clear" image, and then did a nice little enhanced pat-down anyway. I suppose this was before the full rub-and-tug rules kicked in, but the three of us guys were just kind of guffawing about what a waste it was walking through the dick-imager if you're going to get felt up anyway.
Next time, I'm declining the Dick Measuring Device. I don't really care about an agent looking at my dick if that's what gets their rocks off, but I'm sick of the security theater and I'm even more sick of these morons wasting my time with things like back-scatter technology if they don't know how to use it properly anyway.
As far as I can tell, the scanner failed to produce a conclusive result on every single male that was scanned and every one was subject to pat down regardless. This has just become a way for more agents to pass the buck - the guy sitting in the other room just hits a button that says "I'm not sure" every time and forces the guys out in the main room to give you a reach-around.
Next time I have to go to Florida, I'm flying through West Palm Beach. Hopefully they don't have this retardedly useless technology there yet.
Agreed. Also, this is all from exactly one source code file. It does appear that a list of variable names in one file may have been copied inappropriately from the Sun JDK source code.
Except, that according to the full diff posted here of the two files in question, there are several of those fields specifically required by an RFC. And the actual diff shows other minor differences that don't appear in the examples given in the court filing. If this is the only such example, I'd be inclined to write it off as a reimplmentation. If there are lots of examples of files that are this similar, I'd be more inclined to believe some of them were inappropriately copied from the JDK source.
If you just want to frag each other online, download Urban Terror for free and go to town. The Quake 3 engine is good enough and plenty of modders out there creating basic maps for online fragging, CTF, etc.
If you are going to pay $60 for a game, there should really be single player content.
Agreed. Chrome's rendering, display and scrolling are significantly slower on messy, complicated HTML than Firefox. There was a big advantage on Javascript-heavy pages, but with Firefox 4 that's gone since the browsers are now roughly on par in Javascript performance. And Firefox 4 has GPU-accelerated rendering now which speeds up certain types of intense rendering quite a bit too.
Given all the advantage of Firefox in terms of extension-availability, there's no particularly strong argument in favor of Chrome. And don't you dare say "Firefox leaks memory" - this is the most tired meme at this point. If you have issues on your PC configuration, just try adjusting the caching settings mentioned here. There haven't been any real issues with Firefox memory usage since FF 2, for your average use case user (people who open 30-40 tabs simultaneously may conceivably have some legitimate gripes, but their usage patterns are definitely not typical).
Of course those terms are subjective. But there is a very significant different between something like Relativity, that required (at the time) both a creative leap and connecting obscure mathematics with physical intuition, and combining several elements in a manner that is entirely within their design parameters.
In other words, I would agree that there are obviously many borderline cases that are questionable and need to be debated and argued. But I believe the Theory of Relativity unarguably required a creative leap. On I believe that taking existing router software that was already a core part of the Linux operating system, which already ran on embedded systems, and connecting it to a wireless networking card, which somebody had already written drivers for, contains no new *ideas* at all and therefore required no creative leap.
My point is that this isn't even the straightforward combination of existing ideas into a fundamentally new idea, which we could argue in terms of patentability - rather it is a straightforward combination of existing engineering elements into a system in essentially the way that the elements were intended to be used.
Do they have to prove exact prior art, if they can prove that the differences between the prior art and the patent are obvious to a practitioner of the art?
A patent really should only cover non-obvious extensions of existing ideas. As the guy himself states, there was nothing in what he did that was particularly non-obvious to any person who did networking at the time, so it's silly that it should even be patentable, let alone an example of prior art. Rather, their effort just happened to occur at a point in time where wireless networking was just being introduced.
So why on earth should merely combining the words "embedded", "Linux", "wireless" and "router" make something patentable? These are not novel combinations that required a leap of creative insight, but rather extremely straightforward and obvious combinations.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, reading that list just made me sad that they never made a second season. I enjoyed the Serenity movie thoroughly, but there was so much more to be done with this show. I figure two more seasons before it jumped the shark.
On the other hand, I'll never have to hate the show or become disgusted with what it became like I have with so many other shows that had good first seasons then went down the crapper. In fact, maybe the *reason* so many of us still love Firefly so much is that it didn't get crapped on in later seasons, with played out plotlines, bored writers, and desperate attempts to keep things interesting.
Just throwing in a quick shoutout to a startup (not mine, no financial interest therein) that is commercial but takes a different approach to Wikipedia, and is nerdy enough to appeal to the Slashdot audience.
Skeptive is all about framing hotly debated issues and "crowd-sourcing" (I know, I know, buzzwordy, but it works) pro and con points to help people assess truth on the internet.
It's complementary to a Wikipedia approach - whereas Wikipedia articles present "consensus" that is edited by people who often protect their little information domains like private fiefdoms, and their approach often leads to contested points or simply things that an editor disagrees with getting reverted or wiped out very quickly, Skeptive encourages people to submit points on both sides of a debated topic and has some cool mechanisms to help you assess the relative balance of information on both sides of a debate.
Obviously funding for research from particular corporations alone doesn't mean that a scientist's objectivity is compromised, nor that a study's conclusions are incorrect. But these funding relationships should be disclosed when the conclusions are trumpeted in mainstream media articles by trusted journalists.
And it seems rather obvious that blaming CCD on viruses and fungi is better for Bayer than blaming it on bee-killing pesticides sold by Bayer.
Yeah, except the NY Times article failed to mention that that study was funded by Bayer Crop Sciences, whose product was the principle other suspect behind Colony Collapse Disorder.
See this CNN piece in response to the NY Times article: http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/08/news/honey_bees_ny_times.fortune/index.htm
And this article posted a few threads up: http://www.ktradionetwork.com/tag/dr-jerry-bromenshenk/
Not clear what the real answer is, but it just goes to show that it's easier to mislead a New York Times journalist than one would think and that any scientific study that answers questions of economic significance are subject to meddling with money. Though we sometimes assume that scientists are truly objective, they are human beings and subject to biases and influence like the rest of us.
These sorts of potential conflicts of interest need to be better disclosed - and it's rather embarrassing that the New York Times never published a clarification or follow-up story about this (at least as far as I know).
Not sure if that's true or not, but sociopaths account for something on the order of 1-3% of the population, according to estimates I've read (I'm recalling specifically Sam Harris' book, The Moral Landscape, but you can find some estimates online easily enough). That's obviously plenty of people to inflict lots of death and destruction on the rest of us.
Come on... sandal weather? It's decent enough right now, but three days ago or so it was in the low 20s (Fahrenheit). If you consider that sandal weather, then good sir, you have a stronger constitution than I.
No, I have an iPad too. I'd estimate very roughly that I get about 20-25% more battery life from my iPad than from my G Tablet in terms of actual active usage (browsing, video watching, etc.) - that's from hands-on comparison and isn't that far off from the theoretical manufacturer claims.
In terms of idle duration, I'm not totally clear because I only just installed a new ROM that finally seems to handle idling/sleeping somewhat correctly today - the original TNT-based ROMs suck at this, as do the ZPad ROMs.
I agree that the iPad can idle for on the order of a week and still have battery remaining. I will let you know in a week if the G Tablet can do the same.
I have a Viewsonic G Tablet (a Tegra 2 tablet running Froyo) and I can leave the tablet on all day, browse the web intermittently throughout the day, watch a couple hours of video, listen to streaming music for a while, and still have charge left.
In fact, it's been on the entire time since 10:00AM this morning, it's currently 2:30PM, I've been using it moderately (testing a new ROM out, browsing, downloading from Market, etc.) and I am reading 70% battery still.
People on XDA Developer forums have confirmed ~7 hours of video playback time.
It may have ever-so-slightly less battery life than an iPad, but it's definitely on the same order of magnitude for me.
The Viewsonic G Tablet has all those things, and can be purchased now for less than $400 at Sears or Staples in the US. The Advent Vega is very similar over in the UK, with much better stock software.
The G Tab supports Wireless N (I haven't tested this personally, I just have 802.11b/g, but it supposedly does), it has built-in bluetooth, it has an SD slot that supports SDHC cards, and it has a standard USB port (well, USB-mini, but totally standard) that supports USB host mode.
The only issues with it are the out-of-the-box software completely sucks and is dog slow, you need to be comfortable flashing your own ROMs from XDA Developers to get much value out of it at this point, and to do a tiny bit of hacking to get the Market working properly. And the LCD screen is just not as nice as the IPS screen on the iPad, for example, and that's not a software-fixable issue.
I'm running the VEGAn ROM on it right now, which is a port of the Advent Vega software, and it's running great with Froyo. Things will only get better when Gingerbread and Honeycomb are here.
I'm hopeful the next generation of Tegra 2 tablets will be made with better LCD screens. That's what's really necessary to make an iPad-beating device right now.
Ironically, the diversity of Android devices and screen resolutions mean that quite a bit of the existing Android apps in Google's Market run much better on the G Tab than iPhone software ran on the iPad at its release.
Eh? I can select text with Froyo on my Nexus One, and on my G Tablet. The UI for it isn't always great or consistent, but I've used copy and paste with text selection plenty of times.
Wow, that is some batshit crazy stuff you just posted. I know there are some bad people in government, but only a true paranoid schizophrenic thinks that there are roving bands of citizens devoted to "swarming" them as a method of government-sponsored harassment using GPS tracking of their cellphones, all with the nefarious goal of convincing the rest of us that said target is crazy.
Maybe the occam's razor answer is right here - that they *are* crazy, and they mis-perceive normal people going about their lives, walking down the street and so on as "swarming" them in part of a campaign of government harassment.
Sure, the government tracks people and FBI monitors potential domestic terrorist threats and internet crazies they think might become threats, but that doesn't mean this guy isn't paranoid and delusional.
Some web sources seem to claim that quotation is entirely unsourced. However, from looking through Meditations, it seems to be at least partially sourced from Book 2, Number 11. At least the first few parts of the thought, i.e. living a good life, and the general format of inquiring on if there are gods, and they care about human affairs, etc. However, the quotation itself doesn't seem to follow the translations I found on the web very closely at all.
My conclusion is that the quotation seems to me to be something of a rewrite or even a hybrid of that original source with Pascal's wager. Or maybe the translations I found are just bone-achingly awful, and somebody took the liberty of re-translating that section with a bit of a glib tongue.
They've been posting things that embarrass the government and affect its public image.
Specifically, I think you mean the US government. One thing (not the only thing though) that bothers me about Wikileaks is that it seems to be exclusively, or at least principally, dedicated to embarrassing the US government.
I have no problem with calling out lies told by world leaders - for example, George W. Bush was lying when he claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was working with terrorists.
But I don't think that every diplomatic cable ought to necessarily be public and transparent. Nor do I think that the releases of lots of documents that consisted of basically known facts about the war in Afghanistan combined with details that served no overwhelming public interest need were particularly valuable to the world. Basically, I've yet to be convinced that Wikileaks does more good than harm.
And after the debacle where they foolishly released video under the title "Collateral Murder" they gave up any claim to being an unbiased party dedicated to transparency.
So while I like the idea of accountability and agree that journalists don't always do a perfect job at it, I don't particularly think that Wikileaks is doing a better job.
If somebody can provide evidence to the contrary, I'd love to hear it.
Buy the Viewsonic G Tablet now. The software sucks, but there are already several custom ROMs available - a port of CyanogenMod 6.1 (beta), ZPad, and TnT Lite - just check out the XDA Developers forums for all your ROM needs. It has a Tegra 2, 10" capacitive touch screen and has home/search/back/menu buttons like a proper Android device.
It runs Market and gets almost every app after applying the Market fix, all the Android games I've tried run great, YouTube is great for dumb video content in a pinch, my K-9mail push IMAP mail is there, contact sync and calendar sync with Google works, and it plays downloaded video content just fine (I haven't experimented with HD content yet - I don't really see the point on a tablet device). I like the Aldiko and Kindle e-readers and I read PDF ebooks with RepliGo Reader (better than the free Adobe Reader, IMO).
If, on the other hand, you want a tablet that works great out-of-the-box, without installing custom ROMs and recovery images, get an iPad. That's what my wife has. There aren't any Android tablets that are there yet, and most likely won't be until Android officially supports them and will let the official Market ship with the device.
But for the Slashdot early adopter set, the G Tablet is a pretty cool option that you can pick up right now for under $400 at Sears or Staples.
I took plenty of CS classes when I was in college, and I also went to business school. I never saw a professor in a finance/econ class nor a professor in a CS class give a canned test like this at the college or grad school level.
But I went to an excellent university and an excellent B-school.
I think this is principally a function of a shitty school/department/professor. If this is what your professor does, you've wasted your money on this "education".
There is exactly one hole described in Android in this story, that involves fake Market authentication tokens. That sounds like a real vulnerability that needs to be addressed.
The other issue is a hole that HTC opened up in the browser app to update Flash Light. If you run a proper Android phone with a proper version of the OS (2.2) and have Flash installed, it updates via Market like every other app. This is a stupid HTC kludge. You can't completely stop stupid people from shooting themselves in the foot with open source - HTC gets to recompile stuff their way, and in this case, their way was a dumb way. But yeah, Google should probably give them a talking-to about this.
The big stick Google has to enforce security, updating, rules-compliance, etc. is Market access. Nobody wants an Android phone that can't get Market access because apps are a big part of the appeal of having a smartphone and getting them easily is critical. Google clearly needs to fix the issue with fake Market auth tokens, and they need to start holding handset vendors accountable for securing their releases of Android, and for keeping phones supported and updated within reasonable timeframes, or else face losing access for future products to Market.
I hope Google learns to start enforcing some rule on the Android landscape. We don't want things as locked down as the Apple world, but complete chaos isn't good either.
Brilliant suggestion: buy a Nexus One. Best phone you can get right now. If you buy one of these locked down Android phones and whine about it, it's your own fault, and you are voting with your dollars for carriers to lock phones down. You are now part of the problem. Be part of the solution instead.
Wow, what a rant. Just get a Nexus One. Best phone on the market right now. Just pay the $25 developer tax to Google to buy it. If you buy a locked down Android phone, it's your own fault, you're voting with your dollars.
If you look at Rick Cavallero's replies to posts here, you'll see he directly answers that question, clarifying that there is a ratchet to prevent the propeller from directly turning the wheels (i.e. only the wheels can turn the propeller). This was how they proved to NALSA that they were not using stored energy from the propeller as a flywheel to accelerate the vehicle.
You know what's really stupid? I actually went through the Dick Measuring Device (aka back-scatter machine) for the first time about 6 weeks ago at Ft. Lauderdale Airport. Every single one of myself, the gentleman in front of me, and the gentleman behind me in line all agreed to do it, and yet the TSA staff vaguely apologized to each of us that the machine hadn't gotten a "sufficiently clear" image, and then did a nice little enhanced pat-down anyway. I suppose this was before the full rub-and-tug rules kicked in, but the three of us guys were just kind of guffawing about what a waste it was walking through the dick-imager if you're going to get felt up anyway.
Next time, I'm declining the Dick Measuring Device. I don't really care about an agent looking at my dick if that's what gets their rocks off, but I'm sick of the security theater and I'm even more sick of these morons wasting my time with things like back-scatter technology if they don't know how to use it properly anyway.
As far as I can tell, the scanner failed to produce a conclusive result on every single male that was scanned and every one was subject to pat down regardless. This has just become a way for more agents to pass the buck - the guy sitting in the other room just hits a button that says "I'm not sure" every time and forces the guys out in the main room to give you a reach-around.
Next time I have to go to Florida, I'm flying through West Palm Beach. Hopefully they don't have this retardedly useless technology there yet.
Agreed. Also, this is all from exactly one source code file. It does appear that a list of variable names in one file may have been copied inappropriately from the Sun JDK source code.
Except, that according to the full diff posted here of the two files in question, there are several of those fields specifically required by an RFC. And the actual diff shows other minor differences that don't appear in the examples given in the court filing. If this is the only such example, I'd be inclined to write it off as a reimplmentation. If there are lots of examples of files that are this similar, I'd be more inclined to believe some of them were inappropriately copied from the JDK source.
If you just want to frag each other online, download Urban Terror for free and go to town. The Quake 3 engine is good enough and plenty of modders out there creating basic maps for online fragging, CTF, etc.
If you are going to pay $60 for a game, there should really be single player content.
Agreed. Chrome's rendering, display and scrolling are significantly slower on messy, complicated HTML than Firefox. There was a big advantage on Javascript-heavy pages, but with Firefox 4 that's gone since the browsers are now roughly on par in Javascript performance. And Firefox 4 has GPU-accelerated rendering now which speeds up certain types of intense rendering quite a bit too.
Given all the advantage of Firefox in terms of extension-availability, there's no particularly strong argument in favor of Chrome. And don't you dare say "Firefox leaks memory" - this is the most tired meme at this point. If you have issues on your PC configuration, just try adjusting the caching settings mentioned here. There haven't been any real issues with Firefox memory usage since FF 2, for your average use case user (people who open 30-40 tabs simultaneously may conceivably have some legitimate gripes, but their usage patterns are definitely not typical).
Of course those terms are subjective. But there is a very significant different between something like Relativity, that required (at the time) both a creative leap and connecting obscure mathematics with physical intuition, and combining several elements in a manner that is entirely within their design parameters.
In other words, I would agree that there are obviously many borderline cases that are questionable and need to be debated and argued. But I believe the Theory of Relativity unarguably required a creative leap. On I believe that taking existing router software that was already a core part of the Linux operating system, which already ran on embedded systems, and connecting it to a wireless networking card, which somebody had already written drivers for, contains no new *ideas* at all and therefore required no creative leap.
My point is that this isn't even the straightforward combination of existing ideas into a fundamentally new idea, which we could argue in terms of patentability - rather it is a straightforward combination of existing engineering elements into a system in essentially the way that the elements were intended to be used.
Do they have to prove exact prior art, if they can prove that the differences between the prior art and the patent are obvious to a practitioner of the art?
A patent really should only cover non-obvious extensions of existing ideas. As the guy himself states, there was nothing in what he did that was particularly non-obvious to any person who did networking at the time, so it's silly that it should even be patentable, let alone an example of prior art. Rather, their effort just happened to occur at a point in time where wireless networking was just being introduced.
So why on earth should merely combining the words "embedded", "Linux", "wireless" and "router" make something patentable? These are not novel combinations that required a leap of creative insight, but rather extremely straightforward and obvious combinations.