DGolden - Slashdot User

Taser hygiene 0

Submitted by Leave Blank on Monday November 24 2008, @02:28PM

Leave Blank writes "Just wondering — are taser darts (and stunner prongs) reused or disposable? If the former, are they at least sanitised between uses? AFAIK they're quite pointy and sometimes stick right into the skin? I doubt the small amount of electricity needed to shock a human is sufficient to self-clean the devices either. I haven't manged to find any information online about the issue. I'd hate to be tased and catch hepatitis or something from a previous tasee, is all. If it's possible, it sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen..."

Microsoft propaganda campaign still going strong.-> 0

Submitted by Leave Blank on Friday February 15 2008, @04:18PM

Leave Blank writes "While microsoft claimed its ridiculous get the "facts" anti-linux propaganda campaign was ending, really they just offshored. It is still underway in europe under the same old banner (If you can't see that, they might be geographical filtering, so google cache). How did I find out? Geotargetted banner ad on slashdot. Just sayin'. Not that you'd expect better from micro$oft, but do we really need this crap on /.?"
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Multi color font glyphs? 0

Submitted by The Goggles They Do Nothing on Saturday November 03 2007, @10:28PM

The Goggles They Do Nothing writes "Back in the day (late 1980s onward), Amigas supported "colorfonts", where individual glyphs had multicolored data — very useful for fancy (or cheesy) video titling, graffiti-themed GUIs and so on (and some applications even supported colored+animated glyphs IIRC!). Though in those days, most fonts were bitmaps, and on today's high-res displays you really want outlines, so the completely obvious thing would be to support multicolored (and perhaps even animated?) outline glyph data in fonts. However, the closest I could find to that in a casual search was Harold's fonts where Harold has made sets of monochrome outline fonts suitable for careful overlaying in different colors to produce multicolored glyphs — a clever hack, but a hack. I can't quite believe there's no way to store RGB or CMYK (or whatever colorspace) multicolored outline glyphs in modern outline font file formats (though I could believe people omitting animation...), yet I can't seem to find anything about it online. Sooo... Am I just ignorant — is there a contemporary standard for such things? If so, hey, is there already linux support for it?"

Microsoft to identify european software patents 0

Submitted by Leave Blank on Thursday October 25 2007, @08:45PM

Leave Blank writes "Microsoft is reportedly about to identify specifically the 4 already-granted and 10 pending European software patents (though they do not call them "software patents", that is what they must of course be. They'll also identify US patents, but software patents are already really real in the USA) that they believe allow them to charge royalties for interoperation in the EU and exclude commercial competitors that base their work on the GPL licensed Samba project. On the plus side, this will be a high-profile, concrete example of the EPO's astonishingly abusive practice of granting software-patents-by-another-name even though they are illegal in the EU, and serve to confirm that Neelie Kroes of the European Commission was indeed talking poppycock a few days ago when she said that this would help open source competitors.

A more realistic way to help competition in the European market would be to prevent the EPO handing out 20-year monopolies on subject matter they shouldn't be going near in the first place, but given the European Commission led the last attempt to legitimise software patents in europe, expecting Neelie Kroes to do anything meaningful about the situation is probably rather overly optimistic."