Great idea for the FTC to do this, and very appropriate. The breach business is getting out of hand.

Unfortunately, in a situation like this, it is common, if not habitual, for organizations to be compliant with
the standard, or the government rules, and rest there. Those standards, such as PCI in this case, should be
regarded as the minimum they have to do, not the maximum.

This was done... Many years ago,probably mid-70s, I bought a kit to make the windshield wipers on my
Saab 99 intermittent... The kit probably cost $15 at the time...

Well, it's not *impossible*, but it is pretty unlikely. If you have a patent in the US, it protects only
against infringement in the US. And when you say "approved", that's slightly unusual terminology.
If the patent was granted by the USPTO, then please say that (or alternately, the patent was "issued.")

The original description makes it sound as if the invention isn't really a stand-alone thing, but something
which needs to be "incorporated" into other, existing products. Is that right? Hard to advise you without
knowing a little more. Please post patent (or application) number.

Wow. Can you give any more specific details? I believe the Pave Paws radar
used a pair of 7600s that were modded to be a single systems, but was unaware of
any 6600s.

Where is this? (What city?)

Actually, that's not true. Prior to 1970, I used at least 3 different pieces of
software which maintained detailed change histories on source files which
were (mostly) assembler source files, but in some cases were a higher level
language like FORTRAN. All 3 systems allowed deleting an update (and
thus restoring the lines which that update had deleted), and at least 2 of the
3 let a mod change multiple source files. It was all batch, but the capabilities
were there. Two were provided by a computer manufacturer (Control Data)
and the third was home-brew.

As good and impressive as this is, in 2012, there was a "chain" of 60 people, 30 kidneys,
transplanted... It's quite amazing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02...

What possible reason is there for the passport office to need to expose this information outside the agency?

How can it possibly be worth the risk, even if there is some minor function which they outsourced to the
fraudsters.

The gummint ought to be forced to do an analysis of the risk and value before the outsource a function
which provides this kind of access to the data of citizens. Private companies might do well also to do it.

I was describing something that happened in a machine that was built before the world settled
on 8-bit bytes. The machine had 36-bit words, and each word had an address. The 6-bit
nibbles were not addressable. It was 32,768 (2**15) words of 36 bits. Equivalent
to a little over 100K bytes!

This problem is remarkably similar to a problem I encountered in the memory of a 7094 (old
IBM computer) which had a core memory which stored 36-bit words. The memory was supposed
to work by operating on 6 bits at a time at 200 nanosecond intervals. The reason for this was to avoid
creating a magnetic field that was too strong. The problem occurred when the timing was off due
to failure of a component and two of the intervals overlapped. This meant that when one attempted
to store a word with 35 1s, the field created was strong enough to store 36 1s. We wrote a
diagnostic to demo the problem, and with that the engineers were able to isolate and fix the problem
in short order.

"why perpetuate the myth that Google "drops products without warning/reason"?

Well, you're right... that's a bit unfair. There's usually some warning, and occasionally even a reason.
But relying on their stuff is indeed somewhat risky.

Hmm..... sounds a lot like prior restraint, doesn't it? Someone leaks some information
that the gummint doesn't want known, and so the press can't publish the leak? This is
pretty scary...

I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have
so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but
it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?

I think perhaps someone already did notice some prior art. It looks like 155 claims - the first 155 - were
already deleted, though it's not clear if it was the Patent Office or the applicant that did that. I bet there's a
good story behind that.