It is not a chip, it is just firmware and/or drivers. As for definite information, try scanning money sometime, or copy it if you have a combination scanner/printer. There is a specific yellow dot pattern on currency to avoid having to teach scanners/printers about all currencies in the world. Have a look, it is not hard to see once you know it is there. If you remove the dot pattern, the counterfeit money is not detected as money by machines (not that most people could make money that even the cheapest machines would accept, dot pattern or otherwise).

If you manage to get a scan, you can print it if you enlarge or shrink the notes, then the pattern will not be recognized -- but people get suspicious when they receive double-size currency.

It would be a lot more difficult to tell the firmware not to scan/print guns. A gun does not depend on yellow dots to function.

You know, that was my first thought. But you know, it seems to me that the Borg is kind of a short sighted vision. Gene Roddenberry was never very good at going more than 40 years into the future with any of his technology detail predictions. After all, we are now, further along than he thought we would be in the 23rd century, minus holy grail technologies like warp drive, which he knew would take more than a century to figure out. If we ever do see the Borg happen, it'll be with technology so small, that something like glass would be rendered totally unnecessary. In fact, even without a borg singularity, glass is a rough prototype at this point. Five iterations in, you won't even know it's there.

It beats tattoos.

This is a good example of why I prefer to live where the local top police official is elected, not appointed.

I really wish I'd pirated a copy of MacBasic instead of buying Microsoft's lame BASIC for Macintosh ( http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt ).

Every time I pick up my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, I wish it were running Go Corp.'s PenPoint ( http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314 http://www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-Different-J-Gerry-Purdy/dp/0672317567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368791379&sr=1-1&keywords=thinkpad )

It kills me that I can't buy Creaturehouse Expression for a new version of Mac OS X ( http://www.creativemac.com/article/Microsoft-Buys-Creature-House-Assets-21443 )

Or that I can't upgrade my copy of Altamira Composer or that the plug got pulled on Altsys Virtuoso for Windows NT.

&c.

Well, for the automated greenhouse there are some commercial ones, and on a small scale there're Aerogrow tabletop gardens (but I don't think their fertilizer usage is sustainable (search for ``peak phosphorous'')

I've thought for a while that FEMA should develop a concrete block for disaster relief which could be poured on site and filled with:

  - window greenhouses for food
  - rain water collection system and filtration system
  - small sink
  - composting toilet
  - solar panels, LED lighting and a bicycle connected to a generator
  - fold up sleeping pallets which double as seating

Once the disaster was over people could build a house around it.

Disposing of humans through disasters, man-made or otherwise, has historically been unsuccessful. When you lower the number of humans that way, birth rates go up dramatically.

It is possible that the increased killing efficiency of a robot-human war would be able to change that pattern.

There were a number of HyperCard clones for Windows:

  SuperCard
  Runtime Revolution
  Asymetrix Toolbook

If Microsoft is at all clever, the request headers are identical to the ones sent by the default WP8 browser. That is not technically faking anything (they probably even use the same code to do the requests) and it would be bad PR for Google to block that.

Software patents are actually defined in terms of a physical object, the medium on which it's stored. They often include magic phrases like "a computer readable memory device having stored thereon a computer program".

IMHO, the problem isn't with the physicalness of the invention. After all, in the end it's really the insight and effort that you're trying to reward. The problem, I believe, is that the USPTO has done a terrible job of encouraging insight and effort by granting vague and obvious patents which contain neither, and the only "insight" was in how to game the patent office.

Judging what's insightful enough to merit a patent is tricky, but the patent trolls rely exclusively on patents where anybody "skilled in the art" would tell you that it was too trivial to bother writing down. The trolls rely on the fact that judges and juries are not skilled in the art, and are easily confused. Even in this case, the judge who came to the correct conclusion ends up making it (IMHO) needlessly complicated:

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/2011-1009.Opinion.1-17-2013.1.PDF

He explicitly makes "obviousness" a matter of law, i.e. a thing defined by the details of previous cases, rather than the universal opinion of those who would have done precisely the same thing if presented with the same problem.

Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoomracks

I just want to see a tool which makes it easy to collect information, sort it out, edit it and keep it all consistent --- been using tools for this since Zoomracks came out, and still haven't found the perfect tool.

Yeah, I was afraid of that. Fortunately, the "medical marijuana" back door appears to be much more effective than the "really, you need it for industrial applications for which no other plants are as magical" back door. At least within some states, that one is slowly wedging the door into recreational use.

That doesn't solve the federal problem, which still presents problems even in legal states, and which will have to be solved before the actual (as opposed to delusional/wishful) advantages of hemp over other products can be realized. That one, I'm afraid, make take a few decades, even after public opinion shifts.

The main complaint about Firefox, right from the start, has been memory leaks. You are rewriting history, Firefox was never lean and mean.

If anything Firefox is like Emacs in that the median power of computers is increasing faster than the resource consumption.

> MTBF ... the machine will fail before it can compute anything meaningful

MTBF is statistical though. This can be overcome. Look at it this way. Surely the totality of servers on the Internet would exceed exascale computing power but how many servers fail at any instant in time? Perhaps a few. Ok, but somehow when I surf to my favorite sites, they are almost always up. That means they are doing something to keep them reliable. Such measures may increase the cost of each node but if you want to achieve the necessary uptime in order to finish the job, that would be required.

Node reliability might receive less investment for the sake of keeping nodes compact though. So it comes down to the manufacturers to increase MTBF for all consumers. And assemblers have to be careful not to slam the hardware around

Also, each node or cluster has to be periodically tested or probed to determine whether it is reliable. If a node or cluster can perform a calculation reliably at random times, then the results from the node may be deemed correct. If not, then the circumstances that cause the node to misbehave may have to be worked around or the node has to be replaced. A highly reliable system may emerge.

The exascale system will be built but there may be a limit on the number of nodes that any organization is willing to pony up for because if there is a huge leap of size from the previous #1 system, there is the obvious expense to consider as well as the obsolescence factor as new technology makes the same speed achievable for less only a few years later.