I am still relegated to using IE for some custom sites created by my employer (they're transitioning to new versions, but are not complete yet, it's hundreds of sites tying back to mainframe systems, oracle databases, CBT, calendaring, and more). My wife uses IE (in a tightly hardened vurtual machine) to access her online college assignment and blackboard system. It's not Activex, but the code simply will not run in other browsers. Specifically, she has to use IE 6 with security set to low and even then sereral protections further tunred off.
The web itself, yea, I can go everywhere without IE. proprietary software interfaces to specific systems, especially those that have been online for 4+ years, IE is usually the only option. So much was possible from a code standpoint that many years ago in IE that was either not compatible with Firefox/mozilla/netscape (or was simply too much additional effort for so small a user base), that it all got written for IE.
There's a reason we still have a lot of CoBOL code in this world, the cost to rewrite in another language is simply too high for the results. Requiring IE costs nothing...
I don;t like it, but I have to accept it (for now).
As for the IE requirement, it depends on her online school. My wife took a few classes from a local (major) university online. They not only required IE6 (not 7) but they also required nearly every security protocol in IE to be set to low or turned off entirely. I had a long a serious fight with their IT department and administrators of the online class program. In the end, I built a VM machine to handle the class and had the school provide me a copy of XP at no charge so I could legally do so. I snadboxed that machine down so tight it wasn't funny.
FireFox, Opera, Safari, none of them worked with the online class assignment tracking system. Anyone modifying their home PCs to use such low security standards would have had viruses in minutes. Their own system was continually down for service as I imaging it was being repeatedly infected by all the infected machines that were using it.
Sometimes firefox is not an option. Still no reason she can't run windows in a VM to satisfy her class requirements though. It;s also not Dell's fault she did not check the school's requirements before buying the machine, nor their fault she did not return it within the 14 window provided for a refund/replacement.
OK, this can be simply bypassed by using a $20 router as it can on many other DSL accounts. Verizon support can (and will) assist her with setting that up. They did so for many of my family members who own Macs and no PCs.
"themore they ignore diffs, the more false positives they have"
The first time they gat a single false positive in a court room, firs tthe ISP will be sued for millions for wrongful prosecution, or other similar law. Next courts will stop assuming a match meets the burden of proof to issue a warrent to even seizer the system, which actually is required for prosecution (because they actually have to prove YOU downloaded the file and the you actually posses it. Without warents, this entire process is USELESS!
No, actually they're assuming the hash ios sent in stream, and they're cashing only the hash itself, and comparing it to a list of known hashes.
Simple, and efficient. Unfortunately, there are about a bizillion ways to obfuscate the hash, including simply not sending it at all, packetizing the file into multiple smaller downloads with multiple hashes, encrypting the file on any level, changing a single pixel in the image, adding a random microsecong long gap of silence at the beginning or end of an MP3 or movie, and hundreds of other options, and none of this even requires a change in protocols used, which is probably the easiest way...
It doesn't even have to be encrypted with anything dramatic. Even a simple 16 bit encryption would do it, and that would take extremely little CPU power to implement across the entire P2P as a manditory file transfer setting. Encrypt everything, problem solved.
Actually, every packet sent in a data transfer has a return packet. If the system is dropping packets because it did not request them, then it does not create the tunner, and does not respond with reply packets, meaning they can't capture the MAC address of the system receiving the data. This would be very easy to detect. It's also pretty easy to tell if the file is a push or a pull based on the protocol used.
Next, if you're actually downloading files, and the hash does not match the file downloaded, the file is dropped and errors are reported. Them sending you a bad hash only gets the evil eye drawn upon you, they still actually have to prove posession by getting a warrent, seizing your machine, and proving you have the files. Having a log file showing the bad hash was deleted automatically proves your innocence and shoots holes in the reliability of the system, lowering it's value. If the system is not 100% reliable, the courts will not accept the data as evedence sufficient with which to meet the burden of proof to isse the warent in the first place.
Try to be less paranoid.
Of course, you could allways refrain from using P2P...
My god, a system like this would be SO easy to bypass... Creating a unique type of hash, or a system that transfers files without the hash, or break it up into parts before sending it, even passing through one-time very low encryption randomization systems all would break this technology. Anything transfered without an indentification hash, or even burying the hash inside the file transfered using a proprietary randomization proticol would defeat any efforts to determine what data was being transfered. The only way to defeat that would be to cache and open the files using the same protocol, which would basically be impossible to do in real time, and then they'd just encrypt the data transfers...
Anything an ISP can do to snoop on P2P sharers, the sharers can adapt to, sometimes in days. It can not be stopped. Give it up, spend the money elsewhere.
Actually, XP gamers want DX10 badly, it's only availably for Vista. There's a ton of open source work going in to try to crack that nut, none really successful yet. Even with DX10 specific effects diabled, games coded for DX10 run better framerates than games coded for DX9. There IS a hardware component to DX10 that takes advantage of special pipelines, and special algorithms, and that does have an impact on frame rates on the same hardware.
Dungeon runners has a nice alternative to this. It's a spell that converts all the trash assigned to you on the ground to gold automatically, everything that's not at least unique or higly rare that you didn't already pick up.
Though I agree, eliminating useless drops in favor of gold, or simply lowering the item purchase price to offset the lack of recycled items, sounds good, but it takes something away from the game. Why should the undead carry gold, and what happens to their own generic items they drop?
Fortunately, I have read that not only do the new items have more uniform sizing, and more items fit in the pack space, but they also not only make the pack bigger, but further added bads that drop of various sizes, allowing greatly increased storage capacity.
I also read there WILL be potions, just very few... The ide will be most mobs drop health or mana orbs, but in a pinch, and against bosses, potions will still be of use. They also hinted that mana and health won't be the only potions (I'm imagining things like stoneskin, increassed agility or strenght for short bursts, etc)
Apple licensed aspects of that GUI from IBM, who licenced it from Xerox. Apple and Xerox also partnered on many aspects of their early OS's and had multiple joint ventures. Those patents are not disputed.
The cheapest place to get energy is Wind. It;s infinite, and clean.
Use wind to make H2. BUT, instead of trying to battle with the completiy, cost, and dangers of H@, we put it in a more usable form: hydrocarbon (ethanol).
Doty Energy's WindFuels process used tried and true RFTS (same technology we made ethanol with for the army in WWII), to make fuels, lubricants, anything we need. They have over 60 patents in improving the RFTS process. It can be done for about $80 / barrel (or less).
It;s clean, has little or no pollution, we DO have enough wind energy, we certainly have enough waste CO2, and 60% of the water used is recycled (there's enough water anyway)
The sun is too expensive and requires too much land even if we trippled efficiency. Wind renders about 1% of the land it occupies useless. Farmers could easily continue to grow crops right under wind farms. 75MW RFTS plants would produce significant amounts of fuel, locally nearby large cities, limiting pipelining and trasporation costs.
Anyone can build one of these plants. (with between $5 and 40 million depending on the size)
Building enough infrastructure (wind, RFTS, H2, CO2 sequestratrion, all of it) to completely replace fossil fuel use will take between 30 and 40 trillion over 30 years. Sounds bad, but considder nearly 10 trillion of that is already earmerked to be spent upgrading our electric grid (and that's already started), and the other 20 trillion, the cost annd operation of the plants, well, a plant can pay itself off in as little as 3 years, at most 6, at current competitive price per gallon produced.
There's nothing stoping us from using this process other than government FUD and media monopolization. Everyone is focused on H2 (never going to happen, too complex, too dangerous, too expensive), fuel cells (a million dollar car? not...), and ethanol (just providing 10% of our fuel, we starved 400,000 people!)
or... you could use RFTS, a proven technology that requires only H2, CO2, and energy. DotyEnergy (www.same) has patented over 60 improvements to this process, and are selling and licensing them to anyone who will buy. Make any hydrocarbon fuel or lubricant (most likely ethanol for cars as its the cheapest compatible fuel) for between $60 and 80 a barrel. That's nearly half the cost of gas today, and we have enough wind energy availability and waste CO2 to make enough fuel here in the USA (mostly in just the texas an northwest wind coridors alone) to make fuel for the entire hemesphere!
RFTS is not a scam, it's been in use since the 40s. The patents from Doty are all in cost reduction, heat exchanger efficincy, and other minor and unique changes to the preocess that reduced the cost of making the fuels 2-3 fold, making it not only competitive with oil, but allowing a full 75 MW plant to viably pay it construction and operating costs off in 3-6 years...
WindFuels, a process for converting waste CO2 into ANY HYDROCARBON (jet fuel, propane, ethanol, lubricants, whatever you want). The process is powered by free wind energy using RFTS, a process used in the second world war. They have made over 60 patented improvements to this process and the efficiency is sufficient to make gas for cars at between $60 and $80 per barrel, depending on access to local markets for materials and transportation costs. The process is nearly pollution free (WAY less than existing refining of fules, and no higly toxic elements, something that's not bad to have nearby residential communities...
It's been done, it does work, they're just collecting investments to build a 5MW large scale facility.
As for the competitor the article is about: no info on required energy inputs on their site, no info on cost analysys, no info on toxic waste products, no info on how much fuel can be made at a facility in a year's time (or how many facilities it takes to meet our demand). No info on where we get the bio catylists, or how much crop or other land will be needed, no on the outputs and energy requirements for making the catylists.
DotyEnergy has completely solved the problem. The process is not only proven, it;s profitable, and self sustaining, and we have everything we need to make it work. The only question make is in how good their heat exchanger techology patents will improve the SPEED of the process, we know the process works... This bio process? not yet proven, extremely complicated, and lots of question marks...
Yea, I remember the old days of rotating players back to town, littering Diablo's chamber with potions before summoning him, and having people blow 16 potions in 10 seconds while they're close enough to hit him...
I'll also not miss the compensation they put in for that (the 1 hit and your dead otherwise Diablo can't kill you). I don't like anything that can one shot that's not avoidable.
I've beta tested a few dozen versions of the ATI and nVidia driver sets for linux. They're consistantly late to market and have either compatability, stability, or quality issues. Also, ATI and nVidia continually make driver fixes for Windows to correct issues with specific games. The linux drivers rarely get this attention. Besides, the games really do all look better under DX 10... not available to Linux.
Every 10 years is nice. I also want to add 1 detail. I want medical professionals to be bound to notify the DMV when they feel one of their patients is no longer able to safely operate a car, and have them required to take one of these driving tests to re-certify. Elderly slip quickly in driving ability and a 10 year gap is about 10 years too long, but you'll never be able to legislate something based on age to mandate more frequent testing... so, we place the liability on the medical community. After a stroke, diagnosis of alzheimers, or any other mental or physical deficiency that might effect driving, you have a medical review, and if you fail, you have to take the test. NEat and simple, and we can keep the elderly off the road.
Around me, there are a lot of retirement communities. Most of the wrecks here are people driving when on medication, taking left turns into oncomming traffic, and failure to maintain safe speeds (doing 30 in a 55 is more dangerous than doing 90 in a 55, as slow dirvers cause hundreds of cars to avoid them, and fast drivers only avoid a few cars...) Also, it happens to be common that when elderly are involved in a wreck that includes a fatality, usually the elderly survive it! (older people drive nicer, safer cars in most cases).
I'm not even going to begin to argue against how screwed up our patent system is.
On the other hand, this really is unique, the whole resizing and automatically moving the icons thing. They in fact are not patenting "the dock" but the way it manages to display more icons then there is otherwise room for in a user friednly fashion.
This could have a big impact on Android, since it uses this same idea...
Yup, based on and as an extention of the dock area in Mac OS 1.0... You know, that dynamic area with menus at the top of the screen that included the clock, running apps, the ability to switch between apps, customizable menus, and more. Quite sure the Woz borrowed this idea when he was at NeXT.
And the Apple dock in Mac OS 1.0 predates that by several more years, being in development for the Lisa as early as 1981, and released in 83. You know, the top of the screen area where the menus were, that also allwed access to the finder (for launching programs), kept a list of running apps that could be switched to by clicking, and had other dynamic status indicators available. No, icons were not yet included in it, but the dock itself was there.
And Apple has had this at the top of the screen since Mac OS 1 in 1982, which was in development for years earlier and clearly documented as prior art. Try predating the first GUI... I dare you.
Docking a bar on the sceeen is not what this patent is for. It;s for an organized location to contol multiple aspects of the machine across multiple software programs, for providing user feedback, and for the use of dynamic features.
Want to challenge that? how about we simply look at who owns the patent on the Icon itself...
Well, see, I'm not a kid. In fact, likely, I'm older than you, and have been working in IT for more than 23 years, not including all the time I spend working on DOS and pre-DOS systems before I ever went to college. I was probably writing ForTRAN and COBOL before you knew what a keyboard was.
This has nothing to do with hacking, it has to do with ACCESSIBILITY. It is impossible for a single hacker to effect more than a single machine unless we're talking about an inside job.
Since the method to hack it is not published, since it uses a proprietary OS you can't tinker with unless you have physical access to one of these machines (which are under armed guard at all times even when not in use), since the machine does not even have an accessible port to connect to without removing screws, and since any access to the machines at all, even by pollsters, will be in groups, with people never being left alone with access to the machines, it's pretty much impossible for anyone to hack one, even if they KNEW how, without having inside access.
Even if a polling center gets hacked from the inside, we're talking about 20 or 30 machines that could potentially be compromised, out of nearly 10,000 in new Jersey alone.
Statistically, if the machines differ by more than a few percentage from other precincts in the same area, or from exit polls, someone will take notice. If the screws are tampered with, someone will take notice. Election officials will be awars of how to spot the signs of a hack attempt on the machines. You simply can't make all the machines in a location give all the votes to one candidate, it;s too obvios. They may be able to swing the vote a few percent at their location and get away with it. For 1 location, even if they hacked every machine at it by 5%, we're talking about less than 0.005% deviation in the vote, in a state where the margin is 10%. That would mean even if EVERY polling center was hacked, it would STILL have no effect on who NJ is picking for president...
The possibility, statistically, that a hacking event on these machines could alter the outcome of the election is so small that it is considdered a non-issue.
Also remember this: paper ballots? thay are NOT all counted. Each prcinct counts in batches of 250 - 500 votes when hand counting, and reports that to election officials. As soon as a statistical probability reaches predefined threasholds, they stop counting anyway. In hand counted elections, typically less than 60% of ballots are even counted.
If these were network connected systems, I'd have a completely different opinion. Since we'd need over 1000 hackers to effect the outcome of this election, just in NJ, and since any efforts to distribute a how-to to such a force, and remain unnoticed, and ensure not one of those 1000 people squeals, well, basically that's impossible.
Are ther machines tamper proof? no. Is hand counting tamper proof? NO! Which has a higher statistical probability of tampering? hand counting. Which has fewer votes as a percentage of all tallied counted at all? hand counting. Which costs more? hand counting. Which has issues with logistics that might cause entire polling stations to not vote at all, due to missing or incorrect ballots? hand counting. There are a dozen more reasons why hand counting is LESS SECURE and LESS ACCURATE than even these machines that COULD be tampered with...
This is the right decision for the judge, weighing all factors. Should this decision have been prevented through better advanced testing: YES! We do not argue this whole debackle could have been prevented, but it was not. Those responsible for the cost to NJ and it's voting public will certainly pay for it, likely with bankruptcy, and possibly some of the key executive could see prisin time for it.
PLaying across battlenet when a LAN game was available had much lower game performance. I assume with high speed cable this might not be so bad, but I'd really like to play on the LAN with my wife while we've got some big download or upload in the background. (I use online backup software that runs in the background, and don't like turning it off just to eliminate lag in games. QoS helps, but I don;t have the money for a router that supports it being dynamic, which means if I use it, the backups allways run slow... I also don;t feel the need to spend another $25 a month on a higher speed connection... LAN play is what I did 90% of the time. Taking it out will mean not only frustration for me, but also 90% more load on Blizzard, and since it;s free, I don;t think that was a good business decision...
Besides, I happen to have 2 pretty nice laptops for gaming. I'd like playing DIII against the wife out in the back yard on a nice day, in the gazebo out back (where we have power outlets, but no wifi). I could see people equally wanting to play in airports or coffee shops, but not wanting to pop for wi-fi connection fees... damnit.
If LAN is out, I might considder another game altogether... Put it back in and I'd be buying DIII and SCII, without it, Blizzard might be lucky to get me to buy either.
I bough 2 copies each of DII, SC, and the DII and SC expansion packs....
And yea, loosing my toons after a few months if I don't log on, not a good thing... Probably the biggest reason we played LAN games in the first place.
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I am still relegated to using IE for some custom sites created by my employer (they're transitioning to new versions, but are not complete yet, it's hundreds of sites tying back to mainframe systems, oracle databases, CBT, calendaring, and more). My wife uses IE (in a tightly hardened vurtual machine) to access her online college assignment and blackboard system. It's not Activex, but the code simply will not run in other browsers. Specifically, she has to use IE 6 with security set to low and even then sereral protections further tunred off.
The web itself, yea, I can go everywhere without IE. proprietary software interfaces to specific systems, especially those that have been online for 4+ years, IE is usually the only option. So much was possible from a code standpoint that many years ago in IE that was either not compatible with Firefox/mozilla/netscape (or was simply too much additional effort for so small a user base), that it all got written for IE.
There's a reason we still have a lot of CoBOL code in this world, the cost to rewrite in another language is simply too high for the results. Requiring IE costs nothing...
I don;t like it, but I have to accept it (for now).
As for the IE requirement, it depends on her online school. My wife took a few classes from a local (major) university online. They not only required IE6 (not 7) but they also required nearly every security protocol in IE to be set to low or turned off entirely. I had a long a serious fight with their IT department and administrators of the online class program. In the end, I built a VM machine to handle the class and had the school provide me a copy of XP at no charge so I could legally do so. I snadboxed that machine down so tight it wasn't funny.
FireFox, Opera, Safari, none of them worked with the online class assignment tracking system. Anyone modifying their home PCs to use such low security standards would have had viruses in minutes. Their own system was continually down for service as I imaging it was being repeatedly infected by all the infected machines that were using it.
Sometimes firefox is not an option. Still no reason she can't run windows in a VM to satisfy her class requirements though. It;s also not Dell's fault she did not check the school's requirements before buying the machine, nor their fault she did not return it within the 14 window provided for a refund/replacement.
OK, this can be simply bypassed by using a $20 router as it can on many other DSL accounts. Verizon support can (and will) assist her with setting that up. They did so for many of my family members who own Macs and no PCs.
"themore they ignore diffs, the more false positives they have"
The first time they gat a single false positive in a court room, firs tthe ISP will be sued for millions for wrongful prosecution, or other similar law. Next courts will stop assuming a match meets the burden of proof to issue a warrent to even seizer the system, which actually is required for prosecution (because they actually have to prove YOU downloaded the file and the you actually posses it. Without warents, this entire process is USELESS!
No, actually they're assuming the hash ios sent in stream, and they're cashing only the hash itself, and comparing it to a list of known hashes.
Simple, and efficient. Unfortunately, there are about a bizillion ways to obfuscate the hash, including simply not sending it at all, packetizing the file into multiple smaller downloads with multiple hashes, encrypting the file on any level, changing a single pixel in the image, adding a random microsecong long gap of silence at the beginning or end of an MP3 or movie, and hundreds of other options, and none of this even requires a change in protocols used, which is probably the easiest way...
It doesn't even have to be encrypted with anything dramatic. Even a simple 16 bit encryption would do it, and that would take extremely little CPU power to implement across the entire P2P as a manditory file transfer setting. Encrypt everything, problem solved.
Actually, every packet sent in a data transfer has a return packet. If the system is dropping packets because it did not request them, then it does not create the tunner, and does not respond with reply packets, meaning they can't capture the MAC address of the system receiving the data. This would be very easy to detect. It's also pretty easy to tell if the file is a push or a pull based on the protocol used.
Next, if you're actually downloading files, and the hash does not match the file downloaded, the file is dropped and errors are reported. Them sending you a bad hash only gets the evil eye drawn upon you, they still actually have to prove posession by getting a warrent, seizing your machine, and proving you have the files. Having a log file showing the bad hash was deleted automatically proves your innocence and shoots holes in the reliability of the system, lowering it's value. If the system is not 100% reliable, the courts will not accept the data as evedence sufficient with which to meet the burden of proof to isse the warent in the first place.
Try to be less paranoid.
Of course, you could allways refrain from using P2P...
My god, a system like this would be SO easy to bypass... Creating a unique type of hash, or a system that transfers files without the hash, or break it up into parts before sending it, even passing through one-time very low encryption randomization systems all would break this technology. Anything transfered without an indentification hash, or even burying the hash inside the file transfered using a proprietary randomization proticol would defeat any efforts to determine what data was being transfered. The only way to defeat that would be to cache and open the files using the same protocol, which would basically be impossible to do in real time, and then they'd just encrypt the data transfers...
Anything an ISP can do to snoop on P2P sharers, the sharers can adapt to, sometimes in days. It can not be stopped. Give it up, spend the money elsewhere.
Actually, XP gamers want DX10 badly, it's only availably for Vista. There's a ton of open source work going in to try to crack that nut, none really successful yet. Even with DX10 specific effects diabled, games coded for DX10 run better framerates than games coded for DX9. There IS a hardware component to DX10 that takes advantage of special pipelines, and special algorithms, and that does have an impact on frame rates on the same hardware.
Dungeon runners has a nice alternative to this. It's a spell that converts all the trash assigned to you on the ground to gold automatically, everything that's not at least unique or higly rare that you didn't already pick up.
Though I agree, eliminating useless drops in favor of gold, or simply lowering the item purchase price to offset the lack of recycled items, sounds good, but it takes something away from the game. Why should the undead carry gold, and what happens to their own generic items they drop?
Fortunately, I have read that not only do the new items have more uniform sizing, and more items fit in the pack space, but they also not only make the pack bigger, but further added bads that drop of various sizes, allowing greatly increased storage capacity.
I also read there WILL be potions, just very few... The ide will be most mobs drop health or mana orbs, but in a pinch, and against bosses, potions will still be of use. They also hinted that mana and health won't be the only potions (I'm imagining things like stoneskin, increassed agility or strenght for short bursts, etc)
I'm not arguing about the patent, I'm arguing about the people arguing about wether apple can patent the dock at all.
I read the patent summary, it's about resizing icons using 2D and 3D elements to allow more data to fit in the same screen space.
Others are unfortunately arguing about differnt things, and most of my posts in this thread were in reaction to that.
Apple licensed aspects of that GUI from IBM, who licenced it from Xerox. Apple and Xerox also partnered on many aspects of their early OS's and had multiple joint ventures. Those patents are not disputed.
The cheapest place to get energy is Wind. It;s infinite, and clean.
Use wind to make H2. BUT, instead of trying to battle with the completiy, cost, and dangers of H@, we put it in a more usable form: hydrocarbon (ethanol).
Doty Energy's WindFuels process used tried and true RFTS (same technology we made ethanol with for the army in WWII), to make fuels, lubricants, anything we need. They have over 60 patents in improving the RFTS process. It can be done for about $80 / barrel (or less).
It;s clean, has little or no pollution, we DO have enough wind energy, we certainly have enough waste CO2, and 60% of the water used is recycled (there's enough water anyway)
The sun is too expensive and requires too much land even if we trippled efficiency. Wind renders about 1% of the land it occupies useless. Farmers could easily continue to grow crops right under wind farms. 75MW RFTS plants would produce significant amounts of fuel, locally nearby large cities, limiting pipelining and trasporation costs.
Anyone can build one of these plants. (with between $5 and 40 million depending on the size)
Building enough infrastructure (wind, RFTS, H2, CO2 sequestratrion, all of it) to completely replace fossil fuel use will take between 30 and 40 trillion over 30 years. Sounds bad, but considder nearly 10 trillion of that is already earmerked to be spent upgrading our electric grid (and that's already started), and the other 20 trillion, the cost annd operation of the plants, well, a plant can pay itself off in as little as 3 years, at most 6, at current competitive price per gallon produced.
There's nothing stoping us from using this process other than government FUD and media monopolization. Everyone is focused on H2 (never going to happen, too complex, too dangerous, too expensive), fuel cells (a million dollar car? not...), and ethanol (just providing 10% of our fuel, we starved 400,000 people!)
or... you could use RFTS, a proven technology that requires only H2, CO2, and energy. DotyEnergy (www.same) has patented over 60 improvements to this process, and are selling and licensing them to anyone who will buy. Make any hydrocarbon fuel or lubricant (most likely ethanol for cars as its the cheapest compatible fuel) for between $60 and 80 a barrel. That's nearly half the cost of gas today, and we have enough wind energy availability and waste CO2 to make enough fuel here in the USA (mostly in just the texas an northwest wind coridors alone) to make fuel for the entire hemesphere!
RFTS is not a scam, it's been in use since the 40s. The patents from Doty are all in cost reduction, heat exchanger efficincy, and other minor and unique changes to the preocess that reduced the cost of making the fuels 2-3 fold, making it not only competitive with oil, but allowing a full 75 MW plant to viably pay it construction and operating costs off in 3-6 years...
Check this out: dotyenergy.com
WindFuels, a process for converting waste CO2 into ANY HYDROCARBON (jet fuel, propane, ethanol, lubricants, whatever you want). The process is powered by free wind energy using RFTS, a process used in the second world war. They have made over 60 patented improvements to this process and the efficiency is sufficient to make gas for cars at between $60 and $80 per barrel, depending on access to local markets for materials and transportation costs. The process is nearly pollution free (WAY less than existing refining of fules, and no higly toxic elements, something that's not bad to have nearby residential communities...
It's been done, it does work, they're just collecting investments to build a 5MW large scale facility.
As for the competitor the article is about: no info on required energy inputs on their site, no info on cost analysys, no info on toxic waste products, no info on how much fuel can be made at a facility in a year's time (or how many facilities it takes to meet our demand). No info on where we get the bio catylists, or how much crop or other land will be needed, no on the outputs and energy requirements for making the catylists.
DotyEnergy has completely solved the problem. The process is not only proven, it;s profitable, and self sustaining, and we have everything we need to make it work. The only question make is in how good their heat exchanger techology patents will improve the SPEED of the process, we know the process works... This bio process? not yet proven, extremely complicated, and lots of question marks...
Yea, I remember the old days of rotating players back to town, littering Diablo's chamber with potions before summoning him, and having people blow 16 potions in 10 seconds while they're close enough to hit him...
I'll also not miss the compensation they put in for that (the 1 hit and your dead otherwise Diablo can't kill you). I don't like anything that can one shot that's not avoidable.
I've beta tested a few dozen versions of the ATI and nVidia driver sets for linux. They're consistantly late to market and have either compatability, stability, or quality issues. Also, ATI and nVidia continually make driver fixes for Windows to correct issues with specific games. The linux drivers rarely get this attention. Besides, the games really do all look better under DX 10... not available to Linux.
Every 10 years is nice. I also want to add 1 detail. I want medical professionals to be bound to notify the DMV when they feel one of their patients is no longer able to safely operate a car, and have them required to take one of these driving tests to re-certify. Elderly slip quickly in driving ability and a 10 year gap is about 10 years too long, but you'll never be able to legislate something based on age to mandate more frequent testing... so, we place the liability on the medical community. After a stroke, diagnosis of alzheimers, or any other mental or physical deficiency that might effect driving, you have a medical review, and if you fail, you have to take the test. NEat and simple, and we can keep the elderly off the road.
Around me, there are a lot of retirement communities. Most of the wrecks here are people driving when on medication, taking left turns into oncomming traffic, and failure to maintain safe speeds (doing 30 in a 55 is more dangerous than doing 90 in a 55, as slow dirvers cause hundreds of cars to avoid them, and fast drivers only avoid a few cars...) Also, it happens to be common that when elderly are involved in a wreck that includes a fatality, usually the elderly survive it! (older people drive nicer, safer cars in most cases).
I'm not even going to begin to argue against how screwed up our patent system is.
On the other hand, this really is unique, the whole resizing and automatically moving the icons thing. They in fact are not patenting "the dock" but the way it manages to display more icons then there is otherwise room for in a user friednly fashion.
This could have a big impact on Android, since it uses this same idea...
Yup, based on and as an extention of the dock area in Mac OS 1.0... You know, that dynamic area with menus at the top of the screen that included the clock, running apps, the ability to switch between apps, customizable menus, and more. Quite sure the Woz borrowed this idea when he was at NeXT.
And the Apple dock in Mac OS 1.0 predates that by several more years, being in development for the Lisa as early as 1981, and released in 83. You know, the top of the screen area where the menus were, that also allwed access to the finder (for launching programs), kept a list of running apps that could be switched to by clicking, and had other dynamic status indicators available. No, icons were not yet included in it, but the dock itself was there.
And Apple has had this at the top of the screen since Mac OS 1 in 1982, which was in development for years earlier and clearly documented as prior art. Try predating the first GUI... I dare you.
Docking a bar on the sceeen is not what this patent is for. It;s for an organized location to contol multiple aspects of the machine across multiple software programs, for providing user feedback, and for the use of dynamic features.
Want to challenge that? how about we simply look at who owns the patent on the Icon itself...
Well, see, I'm not a kid. In fact, likely, I'm older than you, and have been working in IT for more than 23 years, not including all the time I spend working on DOS and pre-DOS systems before I ever went to college. I was probably writing ForTRAN and COBOL before you knew what a keyboard was.
This has nothing to do with hacking, it has to do with ACCESSIBILITY. It is impossible for a single hacker to effect more than a single machine unless we're talking about an inside job.
Since the method to hack it is not published, since it uses a proprietary OS you can't tinker with unless you have physical access to one of these machines (which are under armed guard at all times even when not in use), since the machine does not even have an accessible port to connect to without removing screws, and since any access to the machines at all, even by pollsters, will be in groups, with people never being left alone with access to the machines, it's pretty much impossible for anyone to hack one, even if they KNEW how, without having inside access.
Even if a polling center gets hacked from the inside, we're talking about 20 or 30 machines that could potentially be compromised, out of nearly 10,000 in new Jersey alone.
Statistically, if the machines differ by more than a few percentage from other precincts in the same area, or from exit polls, someone will take notice. If the screws are tampered with, someone will take notice. Election officials will be awars of how to spot the signs of a hack attempt on the machines. You simply can't make all the machines in a location give all the votes to one candidate, it;s too obvios. They may be able to swing the vote a few percent at their location and get away with it. For 1 location, even if they hacked every machine at it by 5%, we're talking about less than 0.005% deviation in the vote, in a state where the margin is 10%. That would mean even if EVERY polling center was hacked, it would STILL have no effect on who NJ is picking for president...
The possibility, statistically, that a hacking event on these machines could alter the outcome of the election is so small that it is considdered a non-issue.
Also remember this: paper ballots? thay are NOT all counted. Each prcinct counts in batches of 250 - 500 votes when hand counting, and reports that to election officials. As soon as a statistical probability reaches predefined threasholds, they stop counting anyway. In hand counted elections, typically less than 60% of ballots are even counted.
If these were network connected systems, I'd have a completely different opinion. Since we'd need over 1000 hackers to effect the outcome of this election, just in NJ, and since any efforts to distribute a how-to to such a force, and remain unnoticed, and ensure not one of those 1000 people squeals, well, basically that's impossible.
Are ther machines tamper proof? no.
Is hand counting tamper proof? NO!
Which has a higher statistical probability of tampering? hand counting.
Which has fewer votes as a percentage of all tallied counted at all? hand counting.
Which costs more? hand counting.
Which has issues with logistics that might cause entire polling stations to not vote at all, due to missing or incorrect ballots? hand counting.
There are a dozen more reasons why hand counting is LESS SECURE and LESS ACCURATE than even these machines that COULD be tampered with...
This is the right decision for the judge, weighing all factors. Should this decision have been prevented through better advanced testing: YES! We do not argue this whole debackle could have been prevented, but it was not. Those responsible for the cost to NJ and it's voting public will certainly pay for it, likely with bankruptcy, and possibly some of the key executive could see prisin time for it.
PLaying across battlenet when a LAN game was available had much lower game performance. I assume with high speed cable this might not be so bad, but I'd really like to play on the LAN with my wife while we've got some big download or upload in the background. (I use online backup software that runs in the background, and don't like turning it off just to eliminate lag in games. QoS helps, but I don;t have the money for a router that supports it being dynamic, which means if I use it, the backups allways run slow... I also don;t feel the need to spend another $25 a month on a higher speed connection... LAN play is what I did 90% of the time. Taking it out will mean not only frustration for me, but also 90% more load on Blizzard, and since it;s free, I don;t think that was a good business decision...
Besides, I happen to have 2 pretty nice laptops for gaming. I'd like playing DIII against the wife out in the back yard on a nice day, in the gazebo out back (where we have power outlets, but no wifi). I could see people equally wanting to play in airports or coffee shops, but not wanting to pop for wi-fi connection fees... damnit.
If LAN is out, I might considder another game altogether... Put it back in and I'd be buying DIII and SCII, without it, Blizzard might be lucky to get me to buy either.
I bough 2 copies each of DII, SC, and the DII and SC expansion packs....
And yea, loosing my toons after a few months if I don't log on, not a good thing... Probably the biggest reason we played LAN games in the first place.