A fun board game, and excellent for teaching the basic mental skills used in queuing up a list of instructions and then having them all execute in the order that you specified.

http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-of-the-Coast-217580000WOC/dp/B0009HLSP0/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1350385716&sr=1-1&keywords=robo+rally

Does DOSSHELL count as a GUI? If so, that was the first one that I ever used, back when I had my first computer and was still learning the command line via trial and error. The computer was a 386 (DX, not SX!) and had a Turbo button that bumped it up from 16MHz to a blistering 25MHz. As far as I can tell, the only point of said button was to slow down old games so that they wouldn't run so fast that you couldn't see them. (Yes, the speed that a lot of games ran at depended on how fast your computer was.) Ah, those were the days.

Actually, I am running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on the same hardware that I was previously running a clean XP installation, and Windows 8 is definitely snappier, plus has better search/launch functionality. I can't say that I am particularly fond of the Metro UI (I mostly use the Explorer-style interface), and I preferred the search UI in Windows 7 to the one in Windows 8. But saying that Windows 8 is a worse OS than such champions as Vista, 98, and ME is quite a stretch.

For many modern cars with internal combustion engines, I hear their wheel noise at low speeds before I hear the engine. Certainly, some of them are quiet enough that I am not confident that I could tell if one was about to back up. Personally, I would prefer less background noise, as it makes it easier for me to pick out sounds that are actually close to me.

Three original and talented groups from France that I found to be interesting:

Pin-Up Went Down

Akphaezya

Polichinel

This being an article about a Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel, a Suk Doctor would have been more appropriate than a Sak Doctor, but close!

I own a Samsung Galaxy Note (purchased unlocked from handtec), and I am very happy with it. It is your phone, too, and unlike most tablets, you can have it with you at all times without needing a backpack or briefcase. My brief review:

Size: The 5.3" screen is big enough for me to comfortably read non-mobile websites in landscape without any trouble, and it's great for reading ebooks and gaming. I have also used it in a pinch for Remote Desktop or Telnet. It fits in my (not skinny) jeans easily, and is actually much less noticeable when there than the dumbphone that it was replacing, which was much smaller but thicker. Depending on how I am standing, I sometimes have to check to make sure that it is there. I have average-sized hands and I can operate it with one hand, but if my hands were much smaller, I couldn't. (Personally, I never use smartphones with one hand, anyway, but some people seem to care.)

Display quality: 1280 x 800 resolution. Good colors, very dark blacks, excellent clarity (the PPI is high enough that the fact that it is SAMOLED doesn't hurt if it isn't a few inches from your face), excellent outdoor visibility. On the downside, it has some issues with banding in 16-bit images with slow gradients. That issue should be fixable in a future update (or custom ROM), but that doesn't mean that it will happen.

Speed: Dual-core 1.4GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9, one of the fastest out there right now. Everything is very responsive.

Cellular: Uses the GSM1800MHz band, which is pretty standard Internationally so would be good considering that you plan on traveling abroad. In the US, I am using it with AT&T (GoPhone plan, $25.00/month for 500MB of data, $0.10 per talk minute), and it works with their HSPA+ network.

Battery life: With light use, many days. For continuous gaming, about 6 hours. On a day in which I make a few calls and spend a few hours browsing the web, reading, and/or play games for a few hours, it usually has 30-60% battery remaining at the end of the day.

Stylus: I find it easy to use and accurate, good for taking quick notes or sketches. The one problem that I have had is it doesn't really work well if you are lying down and holding the phone upside-down; in that position, it doesn't track the position of the stylus properly.

Camera: 8MP rear camera, 2MP front camera. Good quality and color accuracy on both most of the time, but doesn't always handle very high contrast pictures well.

Sound quality: Middling. Max speakerphone volume is not terribly loud.

GPS: Excellent, one of the best out there.

OS: Samsung reports that it will be getting ICS in the next couple months.

If you care about this issue and are a US citizen, then I strongly urge you to sign the a petition relating to the matter or start and promote a new one. The existing petition only has 2 days left. You can find it at:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/amend-constitution-making-internet-unalienable-right/YJ3fXQcm

It might not fix the problem by itself, but it does get us a response and also gives the White House an idea of how many people are opposed to it.

As an aside, signing petitions at whitehouse.gov takes much less than voting and (given the 25,000 signature threshold) may actually have more of an impact than voting. I strongly urge you to do so.

It is regressive relative to income, since low income earners spend a greater proportion of their income on things that the sales tax applies to, therefore losing a greater proportion of their income to the tax.

I agree, but I think that it is worthwhile to say why instead of simply calling it "broken".

Personally, I have three main problems with the sales tax specifically. First, it is a regressive tax, which is to say that it takes a greater proportion of the income of lower-income earners than of higher income earners. That alone would be enough to convince me to abolish it and replace it with accordingly increased income taxes.

Second, it introduces significant overhead on the part of businesses that must calculate, track, and pay this tax. Then there is the matter of the government collecting and enforcing it. This time, money, and energy is simply wasted. If it were a value-added tax like they have in many European countries, then this effect would be far worse due to the increased complexity of calculation and the increased number of parties that need to collect and pay it.

Third, just as paying someone incentivizes them to do something, taxing a behavior incentivizes people to not do it. Given that part of our recent economic problems have resulted from a surplus of goods and services with not enough people buying them, eliminating the sales tax would have a (possibly small) beneficial effect.

From my perspective, all taxes are means of the government collecting money. I would prefer that we start with just the income tax and inheritance tax and think very hard about each additional tax that we add to make sure that what it adds to the system is worth the additional costs and side-effects. In the case of the sales tax, I don't see any significant benefits over the income tax and the many negative effects make it a huge negative overall. I would like to see it done away with on all levels of government.

I like the general idea, I am afraid that it would either result in an overly complicated, lawsuit-entangled system, or one that was too easily circumvented by trivial "commercial uses" whose only real purpose would be to meet this criteria. I think that requiring patent renewal fees might be more effective. If the fees are properly structured, if the company does continue to have a legitimate commercial interest in the patent, it will be worth it to pay them. If they are just sitting on them, it will not.

This could turn into a litigation nightmare when trying to determine whether or not infringement was "accidental".

I definitely agree. Achieving this in practice would probably require funding the PTO better and/or discouraging useless patents, whether through a fee system like the one described or otherwise.

I'm not sure how well such a system would account for differences between industries (a lot of patents go into a new CPU) or between inventions that incorporate a large number of minor patents versus a few major patents. You are probably right about shell companies being the biggest potential obstacle.

Thanks for your input.

Some universities (Stanford comes to mind) are pretty good about getting their technology into the hands of companies that actually produce something with it. I am familiar with others that have a tendency to patent things on general principle and then basically sit on them without making much of an attempt to either use or license them. Such practices would be discouraged under such a system.

Agreed, and I am not sure that the practice of transferring a patent from one party to another is incompatible with the described system.

Under the current system, they have no motivation to. Under the described system, they would.

I agree. The expense of defending one's patents is a major problem under the current system. This problem is one not addressed by the described model.

Thanks for your input.

For investors who want to actually use the technology for something else, yes. For particularly valuable patents (which, to be fair, individual inventors do not actually get with any kind of frequency), I was thinking more of VC-types, who would assess how valuable they think the patent is and if there would be money to be made off of contributing to the registration fees.

I'm not sure that it benefits us as a society to give anyone unconditional, sole control over a technology. They should be rewarded for it, certainly, but there are too many things that a party with sole control over a technology can do to stymie overall technological progress for me to be completely comfortable with the idea. As to founding companies, if the IP is so valuable that you could start a company and outcompete any potential rivals on the basis of it alone, that sounds to me like a valuable patent that you could afford a higher licensing fee for.

If someone invents something that ends up being useful in part for reasons or in combination with other inventions that they did not think of? Possibly yes.

While I certainly agree with this sentiment in principle, attempting to codify principles like what constitutes "attempting to produce" a product in such a way that is sufficiently specific that it does not encourage lawsuits could be challenging.

They could, but then since the fee that they pay to register the patent is based at least partially on the stated licensing fee, they would have to pay an unusually high amount to license the patent, so they would gain little by doing so.

I have been thinking about a possible model for handling the awarding of patents that might mitigate certain problems with our current patent system. I'm curious as to if anyone has any feedback on it.

As the last stage of the patent registration process (so when the applicant already knows that the patent will be awarded), the applicant declares how much they will charge to license the patent. There would probably need to be multiple licensing models (flat-rate, per product sold, etc.) that the applicant could opt for - I don't know enough about patent law to go into detail here. The applicant must then pay a fee whose amount is related to the declared licensing cost before the patent is officially awarded. (The clock is already ticking on the patent's expiration, of course.) The applicant is free to charge less to parties to license the patent if they choose, but are obligated to license it to any interested party for no more than the previously declared amount.

Here are the advantages of the system:

1. Under the current system, there are currently parties who file or acquire a large number of cheap, vague patents solely in the hopes that some other party develops a massively profitable technology that happens to make use of them so they can extort a large sum of money from them. This practice is a parasitic load on technological development and should not be unnecessarily enabled by our patent system. The fact that the patent registration fee under the model I describe is related to the size of the licensing fee would discourage this practice. If the applicant didn't pay much to register the patents, then they cannot charge much for licensing. If the applicant did have enough confidence that the patents would actually be used profitably when they registered the patents, then that would indicate that the patents were actually of some value.

2. If the applicant is the proverbial "private inventor" without much in the way of financial resources but develops what they believe to be highly valuable IP, the fact that the fee need not be declared until it is already known that the patent will be awarded will aid in them acquiring investment capital to cover the fees to complete the registration of any relevant patents.

3. Under the current system, there are some industries in which companies acquire patents on potentially competing technology for the sole purpose of sitting on them and preventing what would otherwise be a better alternative to their business from developing. The mandatory licensing system would effectively prevent this practice, and the relation of registration fees to licensing costs would discourage setting unreasonably high prices to potential competitors.

Thoughts? Criticisms?