I have been reading about these patent wars for ages now. Most peoples reaction seems to be to grumble but put up with it. Is there nothing can be done? Our leaders seem unable or not interested. This is killing innovation in the electronics industry. Soon we'll be left with just a few big fish controlling everything. Maybe its time for the revolution!

This seems such an elementary mistake that I tend to believe it isn't a mistake. Most people like to believe that their governments and security agencies are incompitent so they easily believe the obvious explanation as it fits their view of the world. Maybe someone in the MOD wanted this information known. What was in the hidden information anyway?

I actually had a jon interview with these people a few months back. It was the shortest interview I ever had. They are based on an industrial estate near the south end of the gateway bridge in Brisbane. There offices are quite small.. When I visited there were only one or two people there. Sadly they gave no clues as to how there technology works, all I can say is its something involving octrees and voxels. This area has been covered by a lot of people before. They seem to think they have developed the technolgy to the extent that the rendering time is only dependant upon the screen resolution, no matter what the detail in the scene. The main thing that makes me skeptical is that they are getting there money from a government department set up to encourage technology and past experience tells me that these sort of people arent really at judging the viability of things high tech things. If there technology was that good they would have investors cueing up round the block. Reminds me a bit of a TV show I saw years ago about a guy in California who said he had made a car run on water. I wanted to believe that was true, being only young and foolish. Obviously nothing came of that or we would all be driving them now. Anyway, back to the interview. They never got back to me, despite the fact that the guy seemed keen to get back to me for a second interview. When I finally got back to them they said the job was no longer available. Seemed a bit funny as just after the interview there was an announcement in the press of the winning the grant and they were saying how they were going to expand their team to develop the technology on different platforms. Havent seen any more job opening advertised. As an aside, if you want to see a good demo of voxel technology. Check out the web site of Dennis Bautembach. Hes at Hamburg university in Germany. Hes written some code for animating octrees. You can download demo code to see how it works and hes also written a paper about it. So good on him for developing it and sharing it with the rest of us. The link is http://bautembach.de/wordpress/?page_id=7

There is an obvious flaw in this scheme. What if someone at google delibratley wrote a bug? He could tell a friend outside the company who would collect the bounty and then share it with him. They would end up basically paying their programmers to write bugs.

Yes its true that C/C++ is generally faster than other languages, but when it comes to writing bug proof code, its not so good. Its very easy to write past the end of arrays and use bad pointers amongst other things. From a career point of view, C/C++ is bad. I should know, my main expertise is in it and I am struggling to find a job. There seems to be way more jobs for Java and C# programmers.