With a magstripe, 1D *and* 2D barcode, in Kansas, all your identity are belong to us.

Kansas DL's Rule!

] Stallings called on the industry to stop what he calls
] "bad behaviour" by companies who either seek patents for
] unoriginal work or collect and hoard patents.
]
] "If you are a company and invent patents you should state
] your intent to use them and there should be a period of
] time in which you have to use them," he said. "There are
] companies that are in the business [of] simply collecting
] and want to sleep on it."
]
] "We think software patents are important, but they should
] be granted for things that are new," he added. "We're
] open to sharing information about the patent itself to
] prove that it's new. And we think everyone should be held
] to that standard".
]
] IBM's antidote to the problem is to increase the scope of
] the investigation into 'prior art' associated with
] software patents. Stallings believes that sort of
] undertaking is something the academic community,
] volunteers and others are willing to help in.
]
] "Because of the Internet, you can have thousands if not
] millions of individuals around the world share
] information about whether that invention actually took
] place years and years ago. You'll find volunteers and
] others interested in a public inspection of patents. The
] technology [currently] exists for that."

Here here! I'm not sure how well an "open source patent review process" will work, but its nice to here a major company taking about crubbing the filing of stupid patents.

IBM calls for patent reform: ZDNet Australia: News

While you wait, would you like to learn some Physics?

HA! I almost fell out of my chair!

Movie of NASA's Socially Interactive Robot

] StripeSnoop Documentation

I've had some folks that at meet in San Diego @ E-Tech contact me about working on Stripe Snoop. So I went ahead a finally starting using Doxygen. Its like javadoc on crack. Anyway, while all the functions are not documented yet, the results are impressive.

Doxygen Docs for Stripe Snoop Development

You can sum up college radio in 5 words:
Dead Air. um. Dead Air.
And now, an hour of chanting

Strong Bad : College Radio

Linked off the Atlanta Time Machine site was Georgia Tech's Office of Space and Planning, which has Aerial Photos of Tech and the surrounding area back until the 1940s

Aerial Photographs GT - 200203-aerial-HiRes.jpg

] The Atlanta Time Machine website is dedicated to
] examining the history of Atlanta, Georgia by comparing
] vintage photographs of Atlanta with much more
] contemporary images shot, more or less, from the same
] perspective of the original photographer.

AWESOME!

Atlanta Time Machine- Photos

] Many so called webbots or web spiders are currently used
] for many different things on the Internet. Examples
] include search engines that use them to catalog the
] Internet, email marketing people that search for email
] addresses and many more.
]
] Some of those robots are welcome, others are not. This
] page will show you how I catch the bad ones, and how I
] stop them from bothering me again.

A few neat techniques for detecting and trapping "bad" webrobots. Most are reactionary, and quite frankly stupid.

First of all, if, say tomorrow, Google's crawler googlebot suddenly decided to ignore robots.txt, what would you do? Ban googlebot? HA! No, of course not. Big companies aren't gonna ban any robot that ignores robots.txt. It costs them no more in bandwidth, and maybe its a new robot that they *do* want indexing stuff. Small websites can ban me if they want, if the admin's have time to sit around reading logs and banning IPs, then they aren't spending their time doing anything cool, so who cares if they ban me.

How to keep bad robots

] Click on one of the PayPal buttons below to donate money
] to Stripe Snoop.
(From Forum Post:)

Running Stripe Snoop is a blast. While I do volunteer my time for free, and Source Forge supplies free space and bandwidth, Stripe Snoop has some real and tangible costs.

Readers, wires, chips, parts, long distance phone calls to German Magstripe manufacturers, and the like do add up and comes straight out of my pocket.

Thus I have enabled donations for the Stripe Snoop Project. As it says under the donation page, I will use any/all donations to buy new equipment for Stripe Snoop and to fund research for new interfaces and equipment for Stripe Snoop. Only when these these areas are covered will I use *any* donations for personal use (Like "Supreme" tacos!)

Please support the future development of Stripe Snoop, so it can support things like USB readers, POS keyboards, and even card writters!

Stripe Snoop: Make A Donation!

] I still have a few other of my more obscure direction requests
] to check on Google Maps, but so far it looks much superior to
] Mapquest.

I would be interested in where they get their giant "roads" map. Both Map quest and Google Maps give the wrong directions to a company I am consulting for.

I'd be very interested in scaling and performance issues too. How do you deal with such a large undirected graph? I assume the costs between nodes are distances, but wouldn't it be better if the congestion/num of traffic lights factored in?

They need a SMS frontend to Google Maps! That way if I amn lost, I just message them a street name (or better yet a picture of a street sign), and they give me a map/directions!

RE: Google Maps