I've got my own house and I was thinking of all the neat tech stuff I could do in it. A custom thermostat system and other home automation type things... a handheld (ipod touch, andorid, what have you with custom software) instead of switches and the like in each room.

Then I realized what this would do to the value of the house. All the software would be written by me. This would mean that any buyer would either: a) rip it out because they don't understand it and need to replace it (thus lowering the value of the house) or b) need to do a code audit on everything I wrote to avoid any back doors (costing money and thus lowering the value of the house) and possibly c) be calling me for support when something breaks.

Me putting in the time and money to do such a level of home automation would ultimately make the house worth significantly less. And thus I came up with the order of things that are done in the house: Maintain the current value of the house (if there is something that needs to be done that is otherwise causing the value of the house to decrease (leaky basement walls) do that). Don't do anything that will decrease the value of the house (crazy personalized custom stuff that only has value to me is out). Increase the value of the house - a standard zone system with a Nest in each room is cheaper, likely more efficient, and improves the value of the house over a custom system.

So unless you are never thinking of selling this house in your lifetime, avoid doing anything crazy customized to you unless you are going to accept that ultimately another buyer is going to rip it out and replace it - and factor in the ripping it out and replacing it into the resale value. Not everyone out there is a geek.

In Dread Empire's Fall series, this is handled by having a pilot in a small ship that stays within a few light seconds of the missiles (AI was one of the things that the Shaa prohibited). The idea being that an antimatter missile (the prime weapon of the series) will take out a ship no matter how big. Part of the interesting bit of this series is that aside from infrastructure and wormholes - the tech used is imaginable (slingshots around gravity wells, having to burn in the other direction to slow down rather than magically stoping).

(not exactly related to the issue, bug a good series nonetheless)
In the Star Carrier series, small manned ships were the primary thing, accelerating to near C and then releasing a kinetic slug just before decelerating. One technique employed was launching what was intended to be anti-missile 'sand' in a wide dispersion (again, at near C) which took out a number of large ships and crippled the rest. The physics of this series is a bit more out there (makes use of the Alcubierre drive and highly advanced physics to accelerate to near C within a few minutes).

Hypercard didn't have any access natively to the serial port or similar interfaces. To do this, one had to write an XCMD (wow, Dr Dobbs has a good archive) resource in pascal or C (or possibly assembly) to talk to the low level system/hardware. This created an additional command / function that Hypercard could call. To an extent, this did cause some fragmentation of the language

Looking at an old archive at umich, you can get an idea of what these xcmds could do.

To do anything beyond the basic capability of Hypertalk, it required you to be able to go in with resedit, download (or write) and add the appropriate additional functionality. This was a tool that was part of a programmer's toolkit - not a user's.

Syria has been under trade embargo since October 29th, 1991 as specified in Amendment to ITAR 126.1. The appears to apply to the Arms Export Control and include Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. The key thing is the 'arms export'. This appears to cover defense articles and defense services - not regular commercial items. Strong encryption is classified as a munition. If the Syrian app store doesn't use strong encryption algorithms for its drm or the sdk, one would presume that developer licenses and app store would be allowed.

With iOS 5, the unique identifier is a combination of app/device - not just device. See Apple Insider for a change with the UDID.

It is possible (necessary?), that Apple retains private APIs to be able access this and does so with their applications - while the game that you propose writing wouldn't be able to access the UDID. If you want to do so, do so rapidly and hope your app doesn't get rejected.

Pardon me, but are you serious? Claiming that code is clean (or correct) because it compiles to a small executable isn't necessarily true. The demo scene prides itself on small executables and optimizes for this. Such optimizations are rarely the product of clean and correct code but rather hand crafted dark compiler (or assembler) magic.

There was an article a couple of years ago that looked into the history of one of the patents. Patent 6,269,361 that covers bid for advertisement placement in search results was developed by a company named Overture. Gates wanted it, but Yahoo bought the company in '03 for $1.63 billion. Microsoft started licensing the patent from Yahoo. There was also a settlement between Google and Yahoo over the patent. This could be the key that Microsoft wants to go after Google's ad words and keep any other competitors out of the market.

So you've seen the great computer at Apraphul? I remember when that article came out and wished I could go see it too.

They are recording the locations of 3, 5, 7, and 11 so that if you ever realized you can see 5 and 7 you don't need to count on your fingers to figure out you are near location #35 the second time. It by no means implies that you've been at location #77 just because you have those locations in cache.

If you've ever turned on a GPS device that had been off for a long time and/or moved significantly it can take minutes (the key information for GPS is only broadcast every 30 seconds and the satellite data has expired) for it to get a lock on the satellites. http://jeepx.blogspot.com/2006/01/cold-start-and-aided-gps.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix are good reads about the issue. The short version of it is that in order to determine which satellites are there to listen to quickly, you need approximate information about the time and location of the receiver.

The 3.1.3 iOS version is unaffected because data collection started with iOS 4. There is no need to to update that version. One option would be to downgrade the 3G phone to iOS 3.2.

Monoply's patent was challenged and invalidated because of prior art. This was discovered during the anti-monoply legal battle.

Another example of a board game patent is on Khet. Claims 31-54 cover the play of the board game. It isn't unheard of for boardgammers to poke around expired patents (yes, the search is broken) for games to implement (the biggest challenge being translating legalease back into board game rules). Most games that I've come across while looking at patents I've never seen implemented/sold. Oh, another game that is covered by a patent - icehouse. Mr. Loony was quite happy and even made a Tshirt of it. Yes, that hippy is very much into patenting his games (though he also has a freeware licensing policy for computer implementations of his games).

One tends not to go to court to challenge a patent that is valid in the first place