Only it doesn't just work in big town with famous landmarks - again an example from my own photos, it recognized this small French town of about 2000 inhabitants and although there are a couple taken in the centre of the village, many are out in little backwaters like the graveyard. Is this an example of AI? https://goo.gl/photos/v6EHPpvW...

I'm not sure which I find creepiest - the thought that Google is looking at my photos and working out where I've been through matching the views I too to it's own Streetview photos, or the thought that Google is memorizing where I've been from my smartphone location and then matching the timestamp on my photos up with that. Hello my friend Big Brother!

As an example, I've got a Canon IXUS 155 without GPS, but it knew where these were taken https://goo.gl/photos/3rfx3K67...

You can download albums to the desktop version one at a time - open an album and it's under actions, though it does not work under Chrome these days - I guess another bug they will never get round to fixing. Works under Firefox OK though.

It geotags from content as well I'm fairly sure. It's made up albums for me of trips to Paris and the like when I have used my little compact camera without a GPS - I can only assume it's recognizing landmarks in the pictures..

I would suggest you look here http://www.diybookscanner.org/...

I'm planning to do much the same thing as you myself, but I've still not decided how to do it and other things have been occupying my attention recently, so I've not kept up with developments for a year or so.

There are plenty of ideas there and suggestions for software and workflows that will do what you want .

I used an external WD hard drive for my backups, but it decided to not speak to the computer anymore last week. I assume it's the USB interface has died as it's no longer recognized by the computer.

So I pulled the drive out of it and plugged it in as in internal drive to the desktop computer. It could see the drive so it was still working, but it could not recognize the format of it.

Research showed me that western digital use a hardware encryption chip on the driver board to protect user data.

So if someone steals the hard drive out of my external drive they won't be able to read my data. If, on the other hand they steal the whole external hard drive, they will have the encryption chip too and can just plug it into their usb and read everything of mine.

This seems a spectacularly useless feature which just makes life hard for me - but maybe I can fix it now !

My main comment is to to do anything too big or to complicated - if you start something too big, you will probably never finish it and maintenance will occupy a disheartening number of hours.

If you like scenery, look for a copy of Model Railroading with John Allen so see what one modeler built in a suburban basement half a century ago. If your a lone wolf this is probably about as big you can sensibly make a line on your own. There is also a set of DVD's of pictures of the line," John Allen's Gorre and Daphetid Railroad", unobtainable now, but there is a torrent of them on Kat at the moment.

I have to disagree, there are certain areas where 3D printed items are usefully filling gaps in the market.

One group is model railway people who now have many previously unobtainable items made this way. Interesting the first hackers were model railroaders too ! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

I'm one of the small scale manufacturers who makes his living by selling 3-d printed model trains, both direct to public through Shapeways ( https://www.shapeways.com/shop... ) and reselling things I get printed through eBay and other outlets.

Because there is so little up-front costs involved it's possible to cater for market segments where it would not have been economically viable before and make items profitably that may sell in tens rather than thousands - this is the beauty of 3-d printing.

It's just finding those niches - spare parts for household items is probably another one, it just needs someone to start designing them and then workout some sort of online database so the rest of the world knows how to find them.

Sadly too true

not to mention canceling my incorrect moderation .......

Doesn't that also apply to the US one as it is implemented, rather than as it was intended?

Patent Trial Ends in Total Loss for MoFo Client

By Julia Love Contact All Articles
The Recorder

August 26, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — After a two-week trial, Nuance Communications Inc. came up empty Monday when a jury found that a Russian competitor had not infringed any of its patents or trade dress.

Nuance had accused ABBYY Software House of infringing three of its patents and mirroring its packaging. Both companies market software that uses optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to convert scanned images of text so they can be searched and edited digitally.

Represented by a team of lawyers from Morrison & Foerster and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Nuance argued that ABBYY's FineReader was little more than a copy of its signature product OmniPage. The Burlington, Mass.-based company also sued Lexmark International Inc. for its use of ABBYY's products and sought more than $100 million in total damages from the two companies.

Nuance did not prevail on any claims in Nuance Communications v. ABBYY Software House, 08-0912. MoFo partner Michael Jacobs, who is co-lead counsel for Nuance with fellow MoFo partner James Bennett, declined to comment.

From his opening statement to his closing, ABBYY's lead lawyer, Gerald Ivey of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, urged the jury to honor the American spirit of competition.

"That's what [this verdict] does," he said in an interview Monday. "It allows ABBYY to continue to compete fairly and on equal footing with all the other companies that are interested in the OCR technology that ABBYY is a real leader in developing."

The trial before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White revolved around Nuance's U.S. Patent No. 6,038,342, which covers a "trainable template" that is updated during the process of converting scanned images into searchable text. The technology was roundly applauded when OmniPage debuted in 1988, Bennett said during his closing argument.

"It's not often in a patent case where you have the kind of widespread, third-party corroboration of the breakthrough, revolutionary... nature of an invention," Bennett told the jury. "And that's what we have here."

Bennett took ABBYY to task not only for infringing Nuance's patents but also for eroding the prices his client could charge for its products with deep discounting.

"OmniPage and Nuance, from the time that ABBYY entered this market, have been targeted," he said.

But Ivey insisted that the technology underlying ABBYY's products bears little resemblance to its competitor's. In contrast with Nuance's trainable template, ABBYY's program relies on a system of weighted guesses to determine word variance in context, he explained in an interview Monday.

"That is a very different philosophical and technological approach," he said.

Nuance also cried foul over ABBYY's packaging, which for a time made use of similar colors and images. During his closing argument, Ivey questioned the distinctiveness of Nuance's package design. He noted that there had been no documented cases of consumers mistaking the two companies' products. . And he took issue with the suggestion that his client was trying to masquerade as another company.

"ABBYY has proudly displayed its name on its packages since it entered the U.S.," he said in an interview.

During his closing argument, Ivey recounted ABBYY's beginnings as a startup, a story reminiscent of many Silicon Valley companies, though it unfolded in Moscow. The company's founder and CEO both testified in English, though it is their second language.

"Jurors had an opportunity to hear from them directly," he said. "I think that mattered."

Interestingly, out of the first 13 posts on this topic, only 2 have been by named individuals, the rest by anonymous cowards.

Is everyone so scared of getting on the NSA's "of interest" list, no one want's to be identified? Maybe our new tyrannical overlords have won already.

To save having to read the linked articles it's here http://www.d2.vu/

Na, never did know how to spell it, I'm an ex-programer and dyslexic - all the best programers are dyslexic :)

(and I had to look up to see if dysleic was spelt with a i or a y !)