"...many data centers use gycol as it caries more heat than pure water."

No it doesn't. The heat capacity of ethylene glycol is only half that of water. But mixed with water it acts as anti-freeze, which is convenient since the evaporator that cools the water may reach freezing temperatures occasionally.

A friend of me lost his phone that way, so it does happen. (busy station in Amsterdam at 9 am).

I once received such a request. I let him tell me the phone number and the message and I made the actual call. (in the train)

I once made such a request myself (flat battery, on the platform at 6 pm, needed to tell that my train was 2 hours late). Fortunately the other one didn't make a big deal out of lending me his 40 euro feature phone. Composing an sms on a phone with a different UI is tough, though...

I'm fiddling with my phone most of the time when I'm waiting for something in public (often reading slashdot, see signature). I might be an easy target for someone who just sneaks up on me, grabs it, and runs away with it.

it seems at first glance that a bit too many of the entries relied in part on turning code into ascii art.

If you have been hacking for a week to squeeze a complex program into 2 kB (excluding whitespace), which by itself will lead to hard-to-read code, then spending another half hour on creative formatting is just the icing on the cake. Actually, the contest rules state that ascii obfuscation doesn't count towards the scoring; the jury will run it through a C beautifier anyway.

That said, the program endoh2 generates an ascii-art obfuscated program. The program 'deckmyn' uses the white space in the source code as data.

I find it pretty impressive what the authors manage to squeeze in tiny programs. Notable things in previous years that I remember include a C compiler and an x86 virtual machine, if I recall correctly. This year, the 'tromp' program is an interpreter - although I don't fully get what it does. :-)

Too bad that this slashdot story draws so few comments.

"we need two levels of driver's license. A higher level ... which brings privileges like ... exceed speed limits on certain roads like divided highways."

Surely you believe that you will pass the test, since you know that you are an above-average driver?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Driving_ability

You are probably right about the risk of no-lights at night. Besides the Orlando study, I have read, somewhere, that the most-vigorously enforced cycling safety law in the Netherlands is that one.

Well, "vigorously enforced"... Typically, about 30% of the cyclists in the cities don't have a light. In practice the enforcement means that the police sets up a trap when it's dark during rush hour and fines everyone cycling through without light. That would happen a couple of times at various locations in the bigger cities every winter. I think a car driver has a far greater chance of being caught speeding than a cyclist cycling being caught without lights.

A soft compound, knobby tire results in a smaller area, higher pressure and thus melting snow.

The freezing-point depression of ice induced by pressure is 13 MPa/K. If you concentrate 100 kg (1 kN) on 1 cm2 of ice, the freezing point will go down from 0 C to -0.8 C. So that won't make much of a difference. And even if it would, it's not clear to me why this would help you while cycling in the snow.

bicycles don't damage the road, they are far too light for that.

That argument of course becomes less valid once L.A. (from TFA) has built those 1600 mi of bike lanes, supposedly with maintenance costs for special traffic lights, road markings, and damage from weather and tree roots.

Deaths per mile traveled are spectacularly higher, ... You're "about" four times safer driving on road than biking ... roads are for cars and motorcycles, not for bicycles.

I would like to see a source for that. One of the first pages that I found on Google reads: "However, there is no reliable source of exposure data to really answer this question: we don't know how many miles bicyclists travel each year, and we don't know how long it takes them to cover these miles (and thus how long they are exposed to motor vehicle traffic).".

Moreover, I think one of the points of TFA is that the bike infrastructures (i.e., bike lanes) is being expanded, which is likely to reduce the accident rate (per bike-mile) by quite a bit.

there will be tracks where the people who cycled before you have crushed the snow to the point where it melts

Compressing the snow will only make it melt if the roads were salted just before the snow fell - which is usually the case here in Netherlands on main cycling routes when freezing temperatures with precipitation are expected. I have cycled plenty of distance over unsalted snowy roads; it's quite doable (even at 20 km/h or 12 mph) as long as you brake well in advance of sharp turns and you don't use knobby tires which are counterproductive with snow. (The tricky bit is when the snow has started to melt and then freezes again, though).

I used to live and bike in Southern Sweden, where often they don't sprinkle salt (less effective at low temperatures), but rather fine gravel, which also works fine.

When you use a fourier transform to put a signal into frequency domain you end up with positive/negative components.

That's more a mathematical artifact of using a complex-valued Fourier transform for real-valued signals; the amplitudes of the positive and negative components are each other's complex conjugate, so there is not really any information in the negative half of the spectrum. For real-valued signals, you can write the Fourier transform in terms of sines and cosines, with only positive frequencies. It's just that it's more work to write it like that.

Owned original HTC Desire and still love it, despite browsing Slashdot on it was soo slow.

Blatant plug: AvantSlash - mobile version of slashdot.org. Works fine even with my wife's HTC Tattoo (Android 1.6, 256 MB RAM) and my old Nokia N82. It's implemented as a kind of proxy, so you'll need to install it on an internet-facing web server (don't all hard-core Slashdot readers have one?)

There are multiple processes available to kill this patent (reexamination, post-grant review, inter partes review). However, they are all fairly expensive.

Normally, a patent application is published 18 months after filing, well before the patent is granted. Why do I never read here about attacking silly patents when they are still an application?

About this patent: when I saw the slashdot summary, I hoped that it was a bit exaggerated and that the patent claims actually were much more narrow. But no, the essential part of claim 1 is actually:

A computer-implemented method for formatting a range of cells according to a spectrum of cell formats, .... for each respective value between the minimum value and the maximum value, causing a processor to apply, to the cells of each respective value, a respective cell format ....

In plain English: automatic color-mapping cells based on a range of numeric values corresponding to a range of colors. To me, this sounds rather obvious: I did once search for such a feature in Excel (or was it LibreOffice?) and was irritated that I had to make a verbose list of conditional formatting (if value > 0 and < 1, then green; if value >=1and <2, then cyan, etc.).

But apart from the question of obviousness, which is a bit subjective, I wonder whether the claims cannot be attacked directly for unambiguous prior art. The word 'cell' does not seem to be defined strictly as applying to spreadsheet cells, since the patent summary talks about "cells in spreadsheets, tables, and other computer documents", where the term "document" is not defined. If e.g. MatLab files or finite-element model files can be considered as a special kind of documents, that would immediately invalidate claim 1.

Unfortunately, if you invalidate claim 1, the following claims may still be valid. They treat cases where the numerical value of a cell is not color-coded, but e.g. as little bar or pie charts.

Notch filters are based on multilayer coatings which are (a) expensive and (b) normally designed for a single angle of incidence. The notch wavelength depends on the angle of incidence, so turning a multilayer notch filter into a safety eyewear means that it must block a much wider range of wavelengths.

"a welding helmet with a LCD shutter, as soon as the the photo-voltaic cell detects a bright light, the lcd goes black"

The problem is that most of the danger with laser light is not the power per unit surface, but rather the high degree of collimation that causes the eye to focus the light onto a spot on the retina. A photosensor wouldn't detect the difference between diffuse and collimated light.

Too bad that TFA only mentions "high power", which could mean 5 mW (the highest that is still in the somewhat safe class 3a) or one of the crazy 300 mW handheld lasers which can cause permanent eye damage in a fraction of a second and are legally required to have a keylock.

"mix up a coating to apply to the windows that contains the same dye that laser safety goggles use."

All goggles for 532 nm that I've seen block everything in the range 300--550 nm, which makes them look orange. Most goggles are based on dyes, and those don't come in 10 nm bandwidths.

It would be cheaper to place a few cube corner retroreflectors in the cockpit, to give send the beam back to the guy who's holding the laser.