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In 'Surely you're joking' he describes the last days of the Manhattan project, where they made up patent ideas for nuclear everything (cars, planes, etc). They considered it a joke at the time. There's a copy of that bit of the story online here.
However, if you did come up with some fundamental technology, and had the cash to file all the patents, it seems like a plan - though not for the inventor. Feynman's cut was just $1.
I don't think its at all odd that he'd consult with his partner - in fact I never said that so why put in 'quotes'? My assumption was that he'd already done so, its the obvious thing to do. I don't expect he's come to
And "geek attention whoring"? Really raising the tone of the conversation there.
Anyway, glad your weddings went well.
-B
"Don't worry about it, your wife will (thankfully) veto this (stupid) idea."
"Hey Moron, Seek advice from your wife-to-be!"
etc
The submitter's name was Qa2. Nothing in the post says if its a man or a woman (even their email address only gives the initial of their given name).
You could say, sure, but this is
Would that really be so strange?
-B
20 odd years ago...I had been doing the usual round of physics graduate interviews, GCHQ's was a little different. After getting the security pass to get in and being escorted to the interview room, they told me that I wouldn't be able to ask any questions about the job (except pay). Or rather, that I could ask if I liked, but they weren't going to answer. Weird.
The point I guess, is that GCHQ don't recruit clandestinely like spooks, even if the interview process is odd. They're part of the civil service, they advertise in the paper, and recruit graduates in the milk round.
Cost of roads, parking spaces, *were* explicitly included in the study. I've seen estimates done for the air pollution side of things but it skews things massively, depending on what you estimate the health care costs due to pollution to be.
The article misrepresents the Ofcom report. Here's what the report actually said:
However, in the more rural areas that the phones were tested, the feature/entry-level phones generally returned somewhat better performance than smartphones for call completion and call setup. This may be due to the reduced complexity of antenna on these devices and 2G phones not having issues in switching between 2G and 3G networks. These performance differences are likely in practice to be modest, and not necessarily a factor that consumers should base their choice of phone on.
They go on to say that this may be in part due to the complexity of switching between 3G and 2G and that it can be mitigated by turning off 3G in your smartphone in rural areas...construing this as "users should invest in mobile phones different than latest Smartphones" is a bit of a leap.
If the reason for it being spherical is to allow it to recover being rolled on the ground, why not build the shell as a gömböc, so it'll always self-right?
The big downside is that it's all images and you can't do all those fancy things you can do with text. Like select, copy & search.
I'm working on it. To get text out of pdf.js as is, you just implement a TextGraphics object (like their existing CanvasGraphics one) and just implement the text and coordinate transform commands. There's lots of ways of getting that into a copy/pasteable form afterwards, but its early days and I'm just coding up the OCR-ish algorithms needed to infer reading order from non-tagged pdf (the most common case).
I'm not associated with the project, but this is on their todo list too, and someone else might get it done before me. But it will be done.
the problem though is that they will never be able to test it on more platforms than those that have native pdf rendering.
Wrong. The test suite compares the canvas rendering against reference images (potentially generated on a different device).
Ok so I got bored and wrote a quine patent application. Almost as painful as COBOL. Havent tested it by running it through the lawyers.
METHOD FOR RECREATING THIS PATENT APPLICATION
CLAIMS
1. A method for constructing a textual representation of this patent
application, by executing the method described in its claims; the
method comprising:
(i) emitting the text result of applying a decoding procedure to a
data string S, followed the content of S, followed by a period
character ('.').
2. The method according to Claim 1, wherein the decoding procedure
comprises:
(i) splitting the data string S into pairs of characters H;
(ii) converting the pair of characters H into a number N via a primary
decimalization procedure;
(iii) Returning the result of replacing each number N by the by the
corresponding ASCII character.
3. The method according to claim 2, wherein the primary decimalization
procedure for a character pair H comprises:
(i) Splitting the character pair H into two characters, the first H1
and the second H2;
(ii) Converting the first character H1 into a number N1 via a
secondary decimalization procedure;
(ii) Converting the first character H1 into a number N2 via a
secondary decimalization procedure;
(iv) Returning the result of adding 16 times N1 to N2.
4. The method according to claim 3, wherein the secondary
decimalization procedure for a character C comprises:
(i) if the character C is a digit from 0 to 9, then the result is the
value of that digit;
(ii) otherwise, the result is 55 subtracted from
the ASCII value of the character C.
(iii) Return the result.
5. The method according to claim 4, wherein the data string S
comprises:
4D4554484F4420464F52205245...(and I had to remove the rest of
the hex-encoded version of the text above because the slashdot
lameness filter objected. Quite reasonably, I think)...
65696E20746865206461746120737472696E6720530D0A
636F6D7072697365733A0D0A.
The code in the patent application has been translated into legalese, wonder if that's done by machine? If so, it would produce predictable patterns and be compilable back into C.
My next entry for the Obfuscated C contest will be*:
A method or apparatus for compiling a patent into a C program that, when executed, outputs its patent.
Inventors: Bazzargh, W.V.V. Quine
*) of course I can't be arsed actually writing this
That's not the link to released betas. This is:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
You'll notice FF4 isn't there. That's because the article has jumped the gun and is pointing you at a nightly instead, almost certainly not what you want.
As the weekly status meeting minutes say, the beta is coming soon and what is there right now is the nightly, for developers.
If we got hundreds of civil engineers together and told them about this, just think what we could power with their watering mouths!
Oh I've set them off again...
That's exactly the same horribleness that made me drop it. However you can actually get that feature to work: once the menu appears, lift your finger, NOW tap the menu. Of course if you move your finger AT ALL the menu is gone and you are left dragging over a bookmark you didn't want to open (it won't ever reappear again)
Its also inexplicably worse than having these bookmarks as icons on your phone. At least there you can drag them to reorder them - in opera mini, you have to re-bookmark something to have it appear somewhere else (or maybe there's a trick to this one too)
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.