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GUI

Apple: Dumb As a Patent Trolling Fox On iPhone Prior Art? 408

theodp (442580) writes "GeekWire reports that a Microsoft researcher's 1991 video could torpedo Apple's key 'slide to unlock' patent, one of 5 patents that the iPhone maker cited in its demand for $40 per Samsung phone. Confronted with what appears to be damning video evidence of prior art that pre-dates its 'invention' by more than a decade, Apple has reportedly argued that the sliding on/off switch demoed by Catherine Plaisant is materially different than the slide to unlock switch that its 7 inventors came up with. Apple's patent has already been deemed invalid in Europe because of similar functionality present in the Swedish Neonode N1M." The toggle widgets demoed in the video (attached below) support sliding across the toggle to make it more difficult to swap state (preventing accidental toggling). The video itself is worth a watch — it's interesting to see modern UIs adopting some of the idioms that testing in the early 90s showed were awful (e.g. Gtk+ 3's state toggles).

Comment Re:Modern audiophiles are no different. (Score 1) 469

No human is able to hear 40k and above frequencies, but we all can hear if a 20k frequency is combined with an 40k overtone...

Talk about braindead in math and science. Surely you can calm down your rant and think objectively for one moment that sounds out of the range of human hearing cannot be heard by a human, and interference caused by sound outside the range of human hearing affects sound that IS in the range of human hearing. The result being that it is captured during conversion, and preserved based upon your compression methodology.

Comment Re:BBQ =/= Grilling (Score 1) 179

Most people outside of the southeast use the term "barbecuing" to mean the same thing as grilling. Oddly enough though they use the term BBQ usually to mean what people in the midwest and texas refer to as BBQ.

For example, 20 years ago, virtually no one outside of the southeast referred to pulled pork as BBQ. For most people it meant ribs, or in Texas - brisket, or quite often chicken (not smoked chicken.) Interestingly, Hawaiians have Kalua pork which is roughly equivalent, but doesn't use a barbecue.

Hardware Hacking

Tesla Model S Has Hidden Ethernet Port, User Runs Firefox On the 17" Screen 208

New submitter FikseGTS (3604833) writes "A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla's port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer. The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assigned IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens. Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?" Some more details on this front would be appreciated, for anyone who has a Tesla they'd like to explore.

Comment Re:anti-science pols always Republican (Score 1) 509

There's a much simpler solution. Ban political parties.

Abolish the entire concept of them/us.

Then you can finally have people who can be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or vice versa, or a "Democrat" who can be anti-abortion, or a "Republican" who can be pro-choice, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Let centrists re-emerge from the wilderness, and the crazies fall of the scene.

Comment Re:Blame the rise of dominionism in fundamentalist (Score 2) 509

It is coming from the church dish, and their broadcasting stations and their "universities", and the "Faith Based Initiatives" funding, and from corporate giants like Tyson - it's scary how badly these people (adherents of dominionism) want to remake America into "Christian America." They absolutely despise the separation of church and state. They re-invent phrases like "secular humanism", "liberty", and "freedom" to mean things that those words do not actually mean.

There is a river of money at these people's fingertips and they, unlike most Christians, believe that not only should they tie politics to their religion but that they must ingrain the two. They believe in a Christian sharia. The irony is that many of them disagree theologically, but are united by a hatred of the separation of church and state.

They're just as crazy as those who want to impose Islamic sharia.

Comment Blame the rise of dominionism in fundamentalist... (Score 2, Interesting) 509

...Christianity.

Please note that I didn't say blame Christianity, or fundamentalists, I said blame dominionism.

Their goal is to subvert and abuse the very words people use to describe things like 'science' (i.e. 'historical science'), 'liberty', and 'freedom.' They want nothing to do with science and they're spending amazing amounts of money electing people who are willing to espouse their causes - anything to get elected.

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