But if a paramedic is called to an unconscious patent outside their home, then they will not be able to access their medical records. This is a serious problem. I recommend that everyone is forced to have this barcode tattooed on their body somewhere that the medical practitioner can see instantly. For instance the left hand or the forehead.

More seriously, I often come out of the doctor's office after my pharmacist of choice (directly opposite the doctor) has closed for the night. So I use the one up the road. Or maybe I'm just about to leave town and have to take the prescription with me. Is the proposal to put the prescription on some central server - which crashes more often than a piece of paper, or am I stuffed until I can get to the pharmacist that the doctor has an agreement with?

By all means put a bar-code on the paper, and put in a step of checking that against the barcode on the medicine bottle. But don't make life harder just because it seems like a good idea.

Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

Anyone else see the huge warning sign that is a licensing regime so convoluted that you need a boot camp to understand it?

Anybody else wonder how MIT websites managed to be hacked? MIT is supposed to be THE university to go to for a technical education, right? And they can't secure their own websites against a bunch of script-kiddies? Either someone needs to be hauled over the coals for this, or nobody, anywhere is safe.

I wonder if Anonymous even tried to hack the justice system's website, failed and went to MIT instead, or whether they just decided that was a risk too far and went straight to the soft option.

"rejecting Google's Android operating system because it would have been tough differentiating its products from all the other Android handset makers. This rationale has been borne out by the market: Samsung "became very strong and the others are having a hard time"."

That is entirely wrong. Samsung are so successful because they sell good kit: good hardware with an up-to-date OS. They prove that you can differentiate yourself in the Android market. If it was impossible then all the manufacturers would have the same market share.

Nokia were once where Samsung is right now. They got there by selling phones that people wanted to buy. It's the only way to get there. No one, not even Nokia, ever got market share by selling mediocre phones that nobody wanted.

Maybe the lesson they are learning right now is that being the market leader in a small market is worse than being a also-ran in a large market.

Drake?

I wonder what this does to the Drake formula. I suppose we would have to know what proportion of stars are known not to have planets, which this article doesn't hint at.

It's a trifle expensive

At current prices it would cost 60 trillion pounds to put the whole population on the database, and about a trillion pounds every year to keep it up-to-date. I imagine even Cameron has better things to do with our money.

Of course ten years ago it cost 500,000 times as much, so in 2022 it should cost less than a penny to get your DNA sequenced. That's when we need to worry... and the database will be in place and waiting, and the activists will have forgotten about it. The government will be able to privatise it and/or widen its scope without any uproar.

Congratulations on a successful flight. Commiserations on a less than successful landing.

Maybe the next version should come equipped for a watery landing. After all, you can't get a launch site much further from the sea. If the box had a weight on the bottom and a carbon fibre mast with waterproof GPS/radio, and maybe a light, at the top, the chances are that it would continue sending after splashdown, and be more visible.

Patience

The RPi has not been released for educational use. Yet. What we have now is a development (ie Beta) release that has gone viral. The educational release will come with a case. And full educational back-up, like lesson plans and stuff.

As I understand it, the teachers posting on here who can use existing PCs for programming are lucky; many ICT suites are locked down by IT Administrators who may even be external to the school. If there are PCs that can be used, then by all means use them; the Raspberry Pi is not aimed at you.

Similarly there are many parents out there who would love to teach their children to program with the family PC. Go right ahead; the Raspberry Pi is not aimed at you. However there are many more who don't understand the first thing about the home PC, and letting their kids "program" it and possibly break it, and possibly lose their photographs, is a terrifying proposition.

And of course the Raspberry Pi is a pocket-money item. Kids can buy their own or get them for Christmas.

You're doing what!?

You are giving a robot a serious deadly weapon? Are you crazy?

There is no way that patent should be issued. There can be no detail about the invention, because it simply cannot exist at the present moment. In order to insert the information, the computer has to know what it is looking at, and it has very limited and low resolution data to go on. I do not believe that it can do face recognition on faces that far away, shirt recognition, maybe, some of the time, given a state of the art camera. Not a cell-phone one.

Given that no details of the invention mechanism can have been given, all that remains is a simple and obvious concept. And concepts are not patentable.

Any mechanism details that could be supplied are "obvious to one skilled in the art," which invalidates the patent. As one skilled in computers, but not in any sub-field close to this invention, here would be my take, simply from the above article. I have not read the patent.

You could use GPS to locate the event, and get the running order and commentary from online sources or maybe a dedicated server. You could do shirt number recognition or face recognition (given a superb camera too big to mount on glasses). You can recognise the layout of the ground and thereby identify players in specific well-known positions. That would work very well for baseball, much less well for American football, and horribly for most other events, such as horse-racing or (association or rugby) football. Once identified, players could be tracked from frame to frame, and other factors of their appearance could be logged to re-identify them after the chap passing out the huge order of burgers and soda stops standing in the way and sits the hell down again. Given that you recognise the playing field and have live commentary, you can also display the game score, state and other data, including which way the teams are playing and so forth. You could even have an action replay from on-line or over-the-air services. Since loads of people in the stadium are using the glasses, and they are all on-line, you could even have multiple viewpoint replays.

In fact why bother with expensive camera teams? just edit down the view from a few dozen members of the public. The cameras are good enough to see shirt details, and therefore plenty good enough to supply a TV .

Ask Hollywood

Laws against targeting civilians? I think you'll find that is just a minor legal point that is getting in the way of big business making money. Just like the copyright fair-use restrictions.

"Give lunch to elrond and say to elrond give lunch to snori and say to snori give lunch to thori and say to thori ... give lunch to thorin and say to thorin give lunch to gandalf and say to gandalf give lunch to me."

It was a huge amount of typing and you had to be very lucky, but sometimes the lunch went all the way round and got back to you.

This could work, but it wont.

Now if there was a central repository of orphaned works, and if it had a quarantine period of say one year, and if it had a good heuristic image search algorithm and a very cheap method of claiming copyright... It would probably be advantageous.

But everyone knows that this pool will be set up with zero funds and Kafkaesque bureaucracy will be required to claim copyright on its contents.

There is an old saw which states....

The Internet views censorship as network damage, and routes around it.

I'd be the first to bash Apple at any opportunity, but in this case the Apple ][ deserves its place here. It was the first micro-computer to allow third-party plug-in cards, and it prospered for that reason. Maybe without the Apple ][, the IBM engineers would never have had the idea.

But where is the Manchester Baby? It was the first computer to store the program in rewritable memory. So no rewiring or punching film to reprogram it.

And I think you will find the Ferranti Mark One may give LEO a run for its money.

So they will be paying you then?

One might assume that if the phone company is using my infrastructure to carry calls that they might pay me for the traffic. One might assume that they would pay rent for the right to site their equipment on my premises. One might even assume that call costs would be lower when almost none of Vodafone's expensive infrastructure is being used to route them.

But of course one would be wrong; you wont even get a thank-you. If you are lucky, they wont charge you extra for the honour of using your own money to fill the holes in their coverage. No wonder they are cutting back on building real cell-towers, which cost huge amounts in PR, construction, maintenance, site rent, insurance, power and connectivity, when they can dupe the punters into providing the same thing free of charge.

fanbois get burned

So you're an Apple fanboi. You want the latest and the best. So back in June 2007 you bought an iPhone on a 30 month contract (otherwise you couldn't have afforded it.) A year later you had an obsolete device. That wasn't cool, but you were an early adopter. "yes", you said, "this is an old phone; it was one of the first batch in the country."

Then along comes December 2009, Finally you could ditch the old tech and buy the new 3GS that everyone had been waving in your face for the last six months. Another 30 month contract, and six months later the new iPhone 4 comes out, and you have to start explaining that it isn't an ancient iPhone 3, it's a 3GS, which is nearly as cool as a 4. At least the 4S was late and a disappointment, but you're still two generations behind.

Finally it's June 2012, and you rush out an get a 4S on another long contract. But a mere three months later Apple release the 5, and it is obviously a new phone. No mere slimming down and bezel detailing on this one, the thing is much longer and instantly recognisable. Your old 4S immediately looks like a fossil, even to you.

And then some survey git stops you in the street and asks you if your next phone will be an iPhone.

Correction

The Jury foreman's name is "Hogan", with an "n".

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121002201632770

" judging by their results on minehunting tasks it appeared that the dolphins may not have been taking the whole business entirely seriously."

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. " -- Douglas Adams.

Is it just me, or does that Sky Rep fail the Turing test? His responses sound very much like ELIZA or PARRY.

It's more likely of course that English is a second language for him, (which with a name like Abbas seems likely,) and that could be why he was not aware of the emotional baggage associated with Hitler. After all, you don't need to teach sales drones about European history in order to up-sell Sky Movies.

On a plane?

"One can imagine copying off a book to read in bed, or on a plane,"

With your phone in Flight-Safe mode?

Miles, miles per hour, all else metric. Just like the good old UK itself. -- Well apart from gallons of course, but the yanks have messed up our liquid measures so much that we're probably best to stay away from that.

(I could understand making a pint a fluid pound, and keeping a gallon at eight pints is understandable pedance, but why change the size of a fluid ounce?)

...((and yes, the chances are that it was us that changed, in which case I'm sure there was a damned good reason.))