Comment Re:What's next....? (Score 1) 481
In fact, the entire future of humanity, including all technological advances, was already patented by scifi writers decades ago.
Well, as long as it's been patented at least two decades ago, we're safe...
Comment Re:How much area is 1% of the Sahara desert anyhow (Score 1) 450
Well, it's about 40,000 square km or 18,000 square miles or
.05% of the United States (basically the area of West Virginia).
Or in european units, that's about one Switzerland.
Comment Re:It is not an Apple invention (Score 1) 232
The article makes it sound like a breakthrough by Apple but videocalling has been around for at least 3 years in Italy and has not taken on for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it does not solve a problem the user has.
Same here, I've had a videophone for four years. I'm pretty sure one day Apple will claim they invented smartphones...
Microsoft Patents "Fonts With Feelings" 150
theodp writes "Seems like those old IBM flaming logo commercials (video) should count as prior art, but the USPTO granted Microsoft a patent Tuesday for inventing Fonts With Feelings. Giving font characters sound, motion, and altered appearance, Microsoft asserts, gives a user 'the impression the fonts have personalities,' thereby enhancing the user's understanding and/or fluency of words. From the patent: 'As a few non-limiting examples, the word 'giant' can get very large; the word 'lion' can morph into a line drawing of a lion; the word 'toss' can morph into a hand that animates a ball toss; the word 'bees' could show bees flying around with or without a 'buzz' sound effect'. If you're curious, Microsoft Research offers some explanations and examples of 'fontlings' in action — don't miss 'f' kicks 'a'!"
Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 1123
How do you measure faith?
With a faith-o-meter of course, what else?
Comment Re:Limited study (Score 2, Insightful) 248
The fact that most people don't understand statistics doesn't mean stats are bullshit. It just means people are dumb.
Comment Re:What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2? (Score 4, Insightful) 260
Assuming a constant speed of 17km/s, 30 years for Voyager is 30 years and 1.5s on Earth.
Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2, Funny) 700
Is that legal?
Sony: "I will make it legal"
Comment Re:Disaster (Score 1) 695
ARM is the most successful and widely used architecture, not just in mobile devices but in all kinds of embedded systems, especially the ones geeks know and love, such as Arduino,
Arduino uses ATmega CPUs.
Comment Re:Why the hell does it cost so much to reach orbi (Score 2, Funny) 370
Are you telling me that if I had the best part of $60 million I couldn't design, build and fly my own rocket in to space? Even a brute force solution wouldn't be that expense, surely?
Hear that sound? that's every rocket scientist on Earth laughing at you.
Comment Re:If you're going to debate semantics.... (Score 1) 413
...really? Does a disaster have to be an accident to be classed as a disaster?
Do as the automotive industry does. Call it a Nuclear incident.
The difference between an accident and an incident is well defined. It's clearly an accident.
Comment Re:"Its" is possessive (Score 5, Funny) 218
The law of correcting typos: attemping to correct a previous poster's typo creates a typo from the current poster.
You meant "attempting", apparently it's recursive...
Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 183
It would have to be turned off by default (not everyone wants a $.10+ additional text message charged on their cell phone bill
Wait, you have to pay to receive an SMS?? Even when I'm abroad receiving an SMS is free...
Comment Re:He got away with it. (Score 1) 402
Yes if the father teaches his kids to be thieving POS who have no morals or any since of loyalty.
Yes, because kids always listen to their parents...
Comment Re:Google (Score 1) 354
The GPL has actually caused me to drop Linux. I want ZFS for my home server, zfs is not the answer (maxing out 2 cores to copy files?!). Because of the whole "GPL or the highway" approach, even though ZFS IS opensource, it's not 'compatible'.
Except ZFS being not compatible with the GPL is not an accident, it was done on purpose by Sun to avoid giving ZFS to Linux. If Linux had been under a BSD license and as successful as it is, you can bet Sun would have managed to make it incompatible with BSD...
