I went through YUL (Montreal) a couple weeks ago and they had security drones with wireless barcode scanners checking boarding passes at every identifiable stage of the queue. By the time I got through security my boarding pass had been scanned no less than 12 times, which was a rather annoying experience. One of the drones said this was being done to measure time between different parts of the process.

So thats manual queue tracking on crack or something, but point being people are already conveying unique-id tracked pieces of paper...

Pilots expect to go through the machine every day over a 30 year career, and they already have the highest radiation exposure of any job except maybe astronauts. The addition of the backscatter machine increases their exposure by about 0.1% which is small but not totally insignificant. That said they are still well under the federal occupational limit of 5000 mrem per year.

Given the facts my best guess is that the pilot unions are actually more concerned about issues of privacy and humane treatment by TSA staff, and raising the issue of the backscatter machine is a tactic for gaining leverage in negotiations about things they actually care about.

High-altitude flight in a passenger plane exposes the body to a dose of radiation much larger than the backscatter machine.

- Eat cookies
- Take a nap
- Check the time again
- Double check your math
- Triple check your math
- Check the time again
- Put on Nike shoes
- Repent
- Burn down a church*
- Buy stocks
- Buy a sports car
- ...Profit?

* Not an actual suggestion

The dynamics of in-app purchases change the basic nature of game play, that much is certain. I think those dynamics present a conflict of interest or at least a moral dilemma of some sort. For example developers are motivated to create exceedingly frustrating and/or impossible "scenarios" that can be by-passed with a purchase, where those scenarios don't crop up until the user is sufficiently invested in the game-play to consider making the purchase. Its one thing to sell add ons / extra levels, its another to manipulate user behavior through what is essentially a form of false advertising. In the razor/blades scenario, we can at least say that the blades have a concrete value and the user can estimate the total cost of using that platform over time. Not so with a game that may require some unknown number of additional purchases to play. Its more like the neighborhood crack dealer "first hit is free" promotion.

Apple should revise the app-store policy to include consideration of how in-app purchase mechanisms are used. They already have a plethora of criteria based on what are essentially moral grounds, which is already a key value proposition of their app store vs the competition. Since they are presumably already benefiting from in-app revenue it might take a bit of convincing before they see the light (such as a class action lawsuit?).

This is only true if the output product of an algorithm is itself not patentable (e.g. it is obvious, not novel, etc), in which case someone is just wasting time and money on the patent process anyways.

Otherwise, according to the doctrine of equivalence an alternative algorithm will still be infringing if it produces identical results. For example its not possible to patent "a compression algorithm" but if someone had a patent on an algorithm for producing a specific kind of compressed data structure (e.g. MP3), it would be infringing to use an alternative algorithm that produced identical (or substantially similar) output. That alternative algorithm might actually be useful and is in fact patentable, for example if it was faster, more reliable, etc., but the patent holder would still have to license the original algorithm first to practice the invention (as it is deemed an improvement over a prior art so it is dependent on that). A patent does not necessarily grant the right to practice the invention.

Note there may be significant differences in the interpretation of the doctrine of equivalents depending on jurisdiction (see Wikipedia).

Fair use is an aspect of copyright law created by the intersection of two conflicting positive rights: one being the right to make scientific progress and intellectual inquiry, and the other being the right to economic protection of intellectual property.

As for the Righthaven cases, it appears that many (but not all) of the alleged violations are blatant by most criteria (verbatim reproduction of entire articles), however the amount of actual economic damage done is arguably to zero (a lawsuit over a post on soc.retirement? really??). On the other hand, people should be a bit more careful when posting stuff like that on public forums... probably not the brightest idea...

There are plenty of consumer products that are harmful or even lethal if mishandled. But the hot coffee case isn't about the product at all, its about having sensible safety precautions for customers that are appropriate to the context where business is conducted. Specifically, an item handed to people through a car window shouldn't be one that is is dangerous to their health if it is mishandled, because the car is an environment where mishandling of such items is likely. Keep in mind that the temperature of McDonalds coffee wasn't just an incidental artifact of setting the dial wrong on the machine that day, it was a company-wide policy.

Suppose I ran a lumber supply company, and the floor of the store was littered with broken 2x4s with rusty nails sticking out. People know better than to step on nails, so thats no problem right? Well it doesn't matter if people should "know better", it just isn't ethical to run a business with that level of inherent danger to the customer.

Its also true that we tend to push the protections a bit far sometimes in America, in particular when compared to Europe. But in Europe they also have things like universal health care, so its likely that the woman in this case would not have been stuck with the medical bill if this happened in an EU country, and it was the medical bill that started the whole lawsuit off in the first place.

In the case of the US government most of the tax money gets spent on weapons and the military, which has no real benefit to anyone except the defense industry. A little readjustment of priorities would go a long way towards making government spending beneficial to society in general.

IMHO the most fair form of taxation would be only on money that is taken out of circulation, i.e. whatever is *not* spent at the end of the year, the exact inverse of sales tax. Money saved is by definition in excess of what is needed. In the days of commodity-as-currency the limited lifespan of currency was a feature.

Yup, the biggest of them all.

Actually the project is a testbed for some software algorithms for optimal control of systems in the context of variable power availability (as is the case with solar). Presumably this "smart" controller can achieve significantly higher throughput than a naive approach, for example it can probably optimize the process so that the power-consuming components are operating in their most efficient range over a wide range of input power availability.

The components of the device are all off the shelf items, the component engineering and related issues are not part of the research scope.

The project is better described on the research group's website: http://robots.mit.edu/projects/KFUPM/index.html

Yeah they are in it for the sex! Duh.

Sonar and radar arrays have a narrow operating bandwidth, usually just a single frequency. The audio domain is wide bandwidth (20-20khz) which makes the beamforming problem significantly more challenging.

Expected earthquake power is entirely predictable from the buildup of potential energy, which is a constant factor over time (inches per year). This energy is held in the elastic property of the plates and retained by a friction "potential well". Occasionally the friction coefficient is overcome and the plate "snaps" converting potential into kinetic energy, and the magnitude of the energy conversion follows an exponential distribution.

The accumulated stress since the last "big one" is more or less exactly equal to the predicted magnitude of the next "big one", the only unknown is when. For example the magnitude of the recent quake in Haiti exactly correlates with the last 200 years of stress build up since the last major quake in that area, and similar predictions will be true for the San Francisco area which is "due" since it has been over 100 years since the last major quake.

Anyways the point is that if it were possible to trigger a small earthquake, this would actually be beneficial since it reduces stress at the fault in a controlled way, although very many small earthquakes would be needed to prevent a large earthquake. Furthermore, if someone were to manage to trigger a large earthquake then it would be no worse than the amount of potential energy stored in the fault line, which is going to be released at some point anyways, which in term of culpability is sort of like blaming someone for causing a fire by dropping a cigarette into a field of dry grass. In other words, mining and drilling cannot cause earthquakes, it can only trigger them.