There was another variation where you could give the expert system a list of ingredients that you had available, and the system would tell you which drinks you could make and optionally how many.

Back in the 1990's, having a expert system that could generate the course timetables for the whole university was a holy grail of all AI departments. Most of the time it worked but every now and again it would generate courses that clashed, requiring some extra modification. Never knew whether they got it finally working.

It's the last 2.5% which involves a controlled collision with a rocky planet which is the worrying part.

Instruments are rendered in software on generic high-contrast LCD monitors. If one monitor fails, they can switch over to another display. If engine power fails, they have an auxiliary generator. The only time all four engines have failed is when going through the ash-cloud plume of a volcano.

The patent describes a 3D view or holographic view. That's going to be interesting. Some sci-fi stories have described the idea of flying an aircraft using a 360 view dome/cylinder with cameras projecting images from each direction. The pilot would have a complete 360 degree view all around. With the latest projection technology, this would work with stereoscopic glasses. If the system could see infra-red, then it would be possible to see through fog, mist and haze.

Agreed. DOS mail clients from 20 years ago could handle hierarchical email discussions. But somehow 20 years on, we're back to a single list.
While you can create folders, you still have to move the messages manually, and then as soon as the title changes, it's back to the main list.

Then you could always CC the email to a company mail distribution list. There have been times where sysadmins have updated the mail client to do this as default, only to shut down the system once there was a category 5 mailstorm across the network.

Maybe they want to reduce the number of trees cut down to make those plywood sheets? Don't forget the amount of chemicals used to kill off insects, make the wood fireproof, adjust the color, bind the woodchips together.

Back in the 1960's, we used to build high-rise buildings using pre-fabricated blocks. Bits of geometry like stairwells, floors, blank walls and window frames. The only problem was that these structures were completely air-tight with no ventilation or air conditioning. Combine that with people cooking, drying off laundry in their living room and airing closets, there wasn't anywhere for the moisture to go. So it just condensed into the walls creating mold and other health problems.

In those days, they had punt guns. These were wide bore barrels mounted directly onto a punt. and each could propel pellets in a wide and long enough range to take out a good number of a flock of ducks at one time. But there seem to be others that might have been used on land:

http://homemadedefense.blogspo...

I'd imagine they decompress the video into it's constituent frames. That's easy to do with various Linux command line tools. Now you have to determine whether each adjacent pair of images are moving forwards or backwards in time. You can split this task up into small tiles to make use of parallel processing. Now you've got various sorts of movement; no change (eg. blue sky), upwards movement (smoke, clouds, rockets), sideways movement (cars, people), downwards movement (stuff falling, parachutists). Each of those will have it's own pattern of pixel movement and colors.

If you can understand what an object is, you can impose some sort of expectations on how it will move. You just need to look at some of those early comedy movies where the directors discovered how to play a film reel backwards. A tractor/trailer going backwards wasn't unusual, but someone lying on the ground, rolling backwards then jumping back into a standing position on the trailer was. Another one would be paratroopers receive an order to retreat, standing in a field, inflating their parachutes and jumping upwards into the back of an aircraft. So some rules are: human figures don't jump higher than 2 or 3 feet without help of a trampoline or unless they are a super hero. Smoke doesn't concentrate itself back into a small tube. Liquids don't fall upwards into the ceiling. If the system can understand those rules, it can tell when a video is being played backwards or forwards.

Neighbors have gone to war over the location of a fence. What happens is that a building company does two things; apply for planning permission and apply for change of registered land ownership. Sometimes they do one, and the paperwork fails to complete for the other. So the builder constructs a row of terraced homes and say, "Oh, by the way, a bit of your garden is owned by the residents on the other side of the fence, but they don't mind, so there really isn't anything to worry about".

Then the ownership of the other property changes, the new owner sees a way of increasing their market value of their property as well as gain new resources, and the bulldozers move in, leading to court action and bankruptcy.

Anyone has visited or lived in Africa will tell you that. You just need to look at satellite photographs of Earth at night to see that Africa has electricity. Like any rural area, the main hazards to power supply are thunderstorms and local wildlife. Power failures are frequent, along with the associated power surges and fluctuating power line voltages.

Africa is on the equator, so the climate is like Florida or New York in Summer but all year round. Sunrise at 6am, sunset at 6pm. Air conditioning is a luxury usually available only to office blocks and hotels. Any building without air conditioning becomes an oven. So having a 32" 600 watt plasma display wouldn't be appreciated. A small 12" black/white CRT is ideal and the bulkiness prevents looters from stealing it.

If it is a small mini-portable TV that fits in the corner of a mud-brick hut, then probably yes. There isn't much space once you have a couple of bunk-beds on each side of the door, a cooker and refrigerator on the far wall, and some cupboards on each side. The only space left is an upper corner, which is just enough space for a small TV.

Then we end up putting dioxins into the environment. You have to burn the plastic in high-temperature incinerators to prevent that from happening.

The problem is that you also end up filtering out all the other life out of the ocean; amoeba, plankton, larvae stages of fish and crustaceans, which sortof defeats the purpose of trying to filter out the plastic in the first place.

That's the hard part - finding something that will remove the plastic but not the DNA lifeforms.

Something significant would be a decades worth of pay-rises for each employee affected.

That would be $10,000 x 10 x 64000 = $6.4 billion