Hugin

Have you read Darths and Droids? It's a webcomic using the plot of the movies as if they are a RPG season.

R2D2 is a min maxer player who put all their stats into hacking and in intelligence. So strength 1 dexterity 1 charisma 1 etc.

That man should have been a DP. He is so good at visuals but can't handle a story better then a 5 year old.

It's not a hierarchy. They protect different things.

For trademark they try to determine if a normal person could confuse it for an existing trademark. So a drink called cocaKola with white lettering on a red background isn't going to get protection. You could easily think you are buying a Coke but you are not.

You register to help get your origin date on record. Being first is super important in a trademark dispute. It also helps to show that a infringer should have known about your trademark because it was registered.

Patent means you can't take my idea and use it without my permission no matter what you call it. Patent pending means we asked for a patent but don't have it yet. If you copy our idea and we get the patent we can come after you.

It's not a hierarchy of enforcability but they grant different protections for different lengths of time.

So trademark is you can't call your soda Coke forever if they maintain trademark. But you can make a different identical tasting soda with a different name.

Copyright means you can't make a copy of Harry Potter until the copyright ends 70 years after the author dies. You can however make your own story about a boy who goes to wizard school and fights a previously defeated evil.

Patent gives you the most protection because they protect the idea but only last up to 20 years depending on the type. So the RISC patent meant you couldn't make a computer with fewer instructions allowing it to go faster until it expired.

This isn't correct. Even when someone who has lost weight hits caloric balance they stay hungry. Fat cells produce hunger signals when it's at lower than it's previous stored energy levels.

It takes several years for fat cells to adapt to the new normal and not try to reach their previous levels.

Some people can see classified systems and some can't.

We should have totally called it a unit test.

So the area for this was used for both training of soldiers and demos for people without security clearances. So it frequently had to be switched between the two. So you get everything setup and ready.

As a last test you drop the unit in and blam it. Then you go to each system and check the unit status. If it's ok you are good to demo to civilians.

A unit test wouldn't work because it's a deployment situation and a lot the software wasn't under our control. A lot of time it was just making sure the DIS HLA gateway was properly configured and entities remapped.

I used to work in serious sim. Think using game engines for realistic combat stimulation and training by the army. Systems had to interact and had different jobs rts, fps, driving simulator, etc.

So they each needed a unit database that was unique to that system. They also usually had a two versions a classified database and a less accurate non classified database.

A quick way to test was there was a unit type that was always set to invulnerable in unclassified databases. So drop one in the sim and drop some artillery on it. If it wasn't destroyed you were unclassified.

Thanks that makes sense.

What kind of things need to be machined out of graphite?

Even the replacement and most modern remotes (with an LED at the tip that you have to point at the device) use pretty cool tech.

Usually to send data you want a data channel and a clock channel. When the clock changes say from high to low you read the next bit in the data channel. With one LED to send info you need to combine them.

For transmission that's easy. You make the low to high change at a fixed frequency. For the high to low change if it's a zero you make the high to low change 1/3 the way through the cycle. For a 1 you make the change 2/3 the way through the cycle.

On the receiver you you sync up a signal at the same frequency rising with the start of the transmission at a 1/2 on 1/2 off. You look at the data when the reference falls 1/2 the way through the cycle.

If a zero was sent the line had fallen at the 1/3 and it is a zero. If a one was sent the line doesn't drop until 2/3 and it's a one.

The trick is how do you get a signal at the same frequency and in synch. You compare the transmission frequency revived to the frequency of a voltage controlled oscillator. If it's slower you up the voltage and increase the frequency if it's faster you lower the voltage and lower the frequency.

You similarly use a phase detector to determine if they are in phase slightly boosting the frequency until they are in sync.

This system is called a phased lock loop (pll). All this so you don't have to getup to change the channel. The same sort of system is used for reading data from the magnetic disk on a hard drive.

For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.

CRT TVs didn't need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.

The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.

The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.

This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.

To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.

Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.

VCRs didn't usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.