Man, it is tiring to have to explain this to the slashdot drones every time one of these stupid patent stories comes up.

THE PATENT ONLY PATENTS WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE _CLAIMS_ IN THE PATENT. NOT THE TITLE OF THE PATENT. NOT THE ABSTRACT. NOT THE DESCRIPTION. NOT THE STUPID SLASHDOT STORY. ONLY THE CLAIMS.

For this patent that means if you implement this ideas EXACTLY AS IN THE 39 CLAIMS except for, for example '7. The method as recited in claim 6, wherein the pixel offset includes a range of 1 to 16 pixels.' and your pixel offset is 17, you are cool. You are fucking golden. Gedit? So quit your whining about previous art until you find something that follows THE CLAIMS. OK? THE FUCKING CLAIMS!!!!!!!

>And Google knows better.

Apparently not.

> The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society.

And it's a coincidence that they actually want copyrighted stuff for free?

>anyway, googletroopers, expect them to have home-brew equipment which might seem slightly crude, but is actually miles ahead of modern day military hardware,

Also expect it to read the minds of the troopers and gather statistics of how to best show them commercials directly in their brains, for the benefit of the soap and tootphaste companies.

>After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Not to defend the broadband providers in any way, but electronics get cheaper because of Moore's law on transistors and lower cost if you produce big volumes. This does not apply to ditches and cables. The biggest reason that you don't get cheaper broadband in USA is of course that you have elected senators that are bribed by the companies.

>How is this 'funny'? That's how I've archived 15 years worth of email. Really.

I don't understand the funny mod either. Even though I think I might be even more lo-tech. All outgoing mail for the last 15 years are concateneted to a plain text file (cause that's what rmail in emacs does) and old incoming mail is in a emacs rmail file (also plain text). With less, grep and some shell or perl oneliners I can search 2GB faster than all the gui-clickers.

>Can't even imagine writing in assembly code for this monster. I miss dinking around with a nice 6502 system. To each his own. I kinda agree though. I also grew up on hand coding machine code on the 6502 and it sure was fun, and educational. But now working on designing 32-bit embedded chips I feel really comfortable with a couple of hundreds of instructions instead of ~60. And I sure wouldn't want to do anyhing more complex with the limited addressing modes on the 6502. And you will never see Linux on a 6502... Btw we actually designed a 6502 once and it used a couple of thousand gates, compared with a couple of billion in a high end CPU. Hard not to be impressed by the oldschool designs.

>Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between >American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...

The varieties of grapes in those wines where, and are, the same regardless of in which country they are made.

>If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.

Religious people?

>+++ No Carrier

I think the problem might be that you are tunneling your call over the modem...

>All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.

Funny. Personally I generate 3000 pages of technical documentation for our chips in about 20 seconds with latex. Secretaries and salesdrones can play with the wysiwyg toys, while we who need serious results for serious work use serious tools. Having spent the last week reading a lot of scientific papers it amazes even me that close to 100% of them are done in latex.
 

How about realising that it doesn't have to be either or? We have both well-educated aces and selftought aces at our company. Of course here in sweden the latter are much more rare as almost all intelligent people with interests in technology get a higher education, but they certainly do exist and it is a real shame if your company doesn't use them.

>I really miss Byte :(

I totally agree. Having recycled my old Byte magazines I have gone to the University library and read through all issues of Byte. Twice. You get the entire computer history from the microcomputer onwards. And I swear there is magic in them there pages.

This reminds me of a long time ago when each issue of Byte had a card where you could fill in all the ads you were interested in and send in to Byte. They then forwarded this to all the companies and you actually got a boatload of brochures and stuff from them, often printed on really nice, thick, expensive luxuriant paper. They really wanted to do business with you. To bad for them I only was a twelve year old in Sweden who thought it would be fun with some brochures. No surprise they stopped doing that...

If chiropractice is bogus or not of course depends on what they say they cure. I haven't checked every chiropractor here in sweden but generally they are definitely serious and fix real problems when for example discs in your back are out of alignment and nerves become pinched. They are part of the medical establishment. And as someone from a family with serious back problems I say thank good for swedish chiropractors. It's either bed-ridden with maximum dosage of morphine or going to a chiropractor to fix it.

Always funny to read how americans complain about how fundraising wrecks your democracy. Don't know if you know this over there in the USA, but in the civilized world (in my case sweden) it is not called fundraising, it is called bribery and is illegal. You understand? No company, private person or organization is allowed to give money or things or services to any politician. Nada. Zip. Because they are elected by the people and allowing bribery naturally wrecks the whole concept of democracy. Don't know why you put up with your trainwreck of political system, but nevermind, I'm sure there's some good on the telly between the commercials.