] 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

] 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

] Parallel Port Adapter (El Cheapo!)
]
] WARNING!
] This is a horrible hack that I happened to make work.
] Unlike the other design, this one does not use a buffer
] chip to protect your computer's parallel port or
] motherboard.
] You could very well fry/destroy your computer doing this!
] Proceed at your own risk!
] I used an Omron V3A-4K for this Mod. I assume this will
] work with any reader from the V3A family. (Remember, V3B
] readers are simply V3A readers with black cases).
] Included in instruction are hints about making this mod
] work with other readers. Please email me (Acidus @t
] msblabs.com) if you manage to make this mod work with
] other readers
]
] Want to have the parallel port based reader with out
] soldering a cumbersome design or carrying around a
] battery all the time? This parallel port adapter requires
] no external power source, no chips, really nothing at
] all. This will be used to allow a gameport-based reader
] tp be used with a parallel port.

Haven't had a new hardware design in a while, so here you go!

Stripe Snoop :: Parallel Port Adapter (El Cheapo)

] While consumers have learned to delete cookies, most are
] unaware of shared objects, and don't know how to disable
] them.
]
] Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United
] Virtualities, says the company is trying to help
] consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that
] help website operators deliver better services.
]
] "The user is not proficient enough in technology to know
] if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum
] said.

Well this wouldn't be an issue if you STOPPED MAKING TRACKING COOKIES!

Company Bypasses Cookie-Deleting Consumers

] The simplest magnetic stripe reader
] by
] Luis Padilla Visdómine

I've emailed back and forth with Luis several times, and he is a smart guy. I may add support for this before USB!

Basically you attach either a maghead or a simple cassette tape head to the MIC of a soundcard, and sample really damn fast! He is using SOX to do his sampling, and then a simple C program to act like a filter/ADC to extract the bitstream.

As Stripe Snoop already can deal with bitstreams off cards, this is simply a matter of creating a new Reader class in SS 2.0! (And extracing the needed code out of SOX, which luckily is GPL is SS is!) The best part is almost all architectures have sound support. This might be a better cross-platform reader than any USB type!

The simplest magnetic stripe reader

Final tool I needed to make the switch to Thunderbird complete!

Evolution DB/Vcard to Thunderbird CSV Converter

] wgrab is a perl script that can be used to selectively
] download parts of a foreign website and store things in
] the local filesystem.

Much better than my collection of shell/Perl scripts

wgrab - Perl grabber for comics, etc