I think it would help a lot if the USPTO would contact authors of the patents and papers listed in the "prior art" section and ask for their input. The problem the patent officers seem to have is that they are clueless as to what is obvious to a practitioner of a specific domain. Well, those prior art links usually give you a set of pointers to some people who are specialists in the area. They're precisely the ones you might want to consult and who might have an interest in patents in that area. Unfortunately, with the broken legal system around patents, no inventor will want to look at patent filings because it would open 'em up to treble damages down the road if the patents go through. Sigh.

Also if it's closed source then *somebody* must have sold you the license to it and if you get in trouble you can go back to them and drag them into the lawsuit too. If it's a typical open source project, then there's really nobody you can lean on if someone finds you're infringing. At least that's another reason I've heard for licensing code from $big_corp rather than using something open source.

According to Wikipedia C was designed by Dennis Ritchie. Ken Thompson worked on Unix and Plan 9.

Is that a joke? If not please turn in your slashdot card. You have no business being here. If it was, it was terrible. You're right where you belong.

He's not the spiderman guy. He's the "I'm a PC" guy from the Apple commercials.

Google Groups serves as a face to Usenet, yes, but it also advertises itself as a place to create new groups which are hosted by Google, as an alternative to setting up your own mailing list. I suspect the jQuery folks are using a Google hosted group. The spam situation is indeed ridiculous, and Google could indeed do something about it. They even have "report spam" buttons on all the messages, but so far as I can tell clicking on those buttons has no effect. At the very least it should hide the messages from me that I mark as spam. But no, it doesn't even remember which messages I've marked as spam from login to login. They've just dropped the ball for some reason.

The cell phone company Au in Japan was giving Pleos away as some kind of sign-up premium for a while. A deal like that could potentially account for a big chunk of those 500K-1M units all by itself.

Except it's not that great for small mobile devices because you need an input surface big enough to accommodate up to 10 fingers at once.

I'm not really sure why the submitter was so ga ga over this. It's a neat idea to use different numbers of fingers to determine the "scale" drag and zoom operations happen at, but for instance Apple's been specializing gestures on finger-count for a while now. And I'm not sure it's going to be that easy to remember (or accurately execute) the concept of "3 fingers means window" "4 fingers means desktop". In real life I don't have to ever think about how many fingers I'm using to manipulate something. It seems like it would be unnatural and unintuitive to have to always keep that in mind. Something (like current window managers) that specialized actions based on *where* they take place would be better I think. I.e. do a zoom gesture near the titlebar of a window, and the window zooms. Do it near the task bar and the desktop zooms. etc.

That sounds more like software engineering than CS to me.

I was kind of inclined to think so too. But this talk by one of the guys working on the ribbon convinced me there was more to it than that.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

They really were trying to solve the problem of ever-growing menus and ever-growing numbers of toolbars filling up the user's screen.

Part of the problem of the Turing test is that the results depend to a large degree upon the cleverness of the examiner. But Turing does not give us any guidelines for what makes a good examiner.

At best I think the Turing test gives a confidence interval for sentience/intelligence. The probability goes up with the number of questions and responses and the number of examiners. But you can never reach 100%. The same goes for other actual people in the world. We can't be 100% certain that other people besides ourselves are really sentient. They could just be elaborate simulations. But the probability of that is extremely low given all the evidence we each have about the world around us.

Alt, H, K, Down, Down, Down, Enter

That's the Bible, Genesis 1:1.

Maybe not for touring, but Street View was very useful to me recently when I was looking to buy a house in an area far from where I live. With Street view I could get a better feel for the neighborhoods where these houses were located without actually having to be in the city. The overhead satellite view really does not give you the same feel. Using Street View significantly influenced my decisions on which houses to investigate further.

Also, a temporary advantage, but Street View was in many cases the most recent imagery available. The satellite photos available were all from several years ago, so they didn't show any houses built within the last year or two.

This list is just silly. I mean Japan?! Come on. Japan is the size of the entire east coast of the US. How much sense would it make to put "The entire east coast" as one of the top 10 "places" where Tech is pooling. None. This list is nonsense.

Sweet! I've been waiting for that feature to come to Windows since 1995! (which was when a co-worker first showed me the feature in tvtwm.)