Abstract: There is provided a computer-implemented method for a first party to control permission for access to first party information to a second party while preserving privacy, the method comprising the following steps taken by the first party at first party computing apparatus: establishing with the second party a set of information classes for first party information to be provided to the second party and establishing permitted use for the first party information in the set of information classes; providing a first party consent to the permitted use for the first party information in the set of information classes, encrypting the first party consent for inspection limited to the first party and the second party, and providing the first party consent to the second party in a first party digitally signed consent grant structure for the second party to decrypt, validate and sign the first party consent and for a consent validating party to store the first and second party digitally signed consent grant structure on a

Abstract: There is provided a computer-implemented method for a first party to control permission for access to first party information to a second party while preserving privacy, the method comprising the following steps taken by the first party at first party computing apparatus: establishing with the second party a set of information classes for first party information to be provided to the second party and establishing permitted use for the first party information in the set of information classes; providing a first party consent to the permitted use for the first party information in the set of information classes, encrypting the first party consent for inspection limited to the first party and the second party, and providing the first party consent to the second party in a first party digitally signed consent grant structure for the second party to decrypt, validate and sign the first party consent and for a consent validating party to store the first and second party digitally signed consent grant structure on a

Abstract: Tooth-whitening strip articles, packages, arrays and methods including one or more tooth-whitening strip articles having a power configuration corresponding to a consumer desirable level of treatment, the tooth-whitening strip articles being enclosed in a package; a brand indicator disposed on the package; a line-up indicator disposed on the package, the line-up indicator including at least one line-up indicia selected from visual indicia, narrative indicia or combinations thereof; and optionally, a power specific indicator disposed on the package; wherein the line-up indicator associates the tooth-whitening strip article configuration with a corresponding whitening power, the association enabling a consumer to identify the appropriate tooth-whitening strip article configuration for a user.

Abstract: To facilitate high throughput, disclosed are lightweight processes, suitable for implementation on a network processor unit, for assigning new workloads to a pool of processing resources, in which the processes include considering each processing resource's relative loading. The disclosed techniques facilitate coping with assigning new work to individual processing resources in a ratio relating to their most recently advertised spare capacity. Also, the disclosed techniques include assigning workloads to buckets, which in turn are allocated to processing resources as a means of load distribution. Thus, the allocations are amenable to rapid redistribution within a subset of active services so as to recover from the failure of a processing resource. Support for elastic provisioning is facilitated by blocking any new load going to a processing resource that has been marked for eventual graceful shutdown.

Abstract: Tooth-whitening strip articles, packages, arrays and methods including one or more tooth-whitening strip articles having a power configuration corresponding to a consumer desirable level of treatment, the tooth-whitening strip articles being enclosed in a package; a brand indicator disposed on the package; a line-up indicator disposed on the package, the line-up indicator including at least one line-up indicia selected from visual indicia, narrative indicia or combinations thereof; and optionally, a power specific indicator disposed on the package; wherein the line-up indicator associates the tooth-whitening strip article configuration with a corresponding whitening power, the association enabling a consumer to identify the appropriate tooth-whitening strip article configuration for a user.

Abstract: Tooth-whitening strip articles, packages, arrays and methods including one or more tooth-whitening strip articles having a power configuration corresponding to a consumer desirable level of treatment, the tooth-whitening strip articles being enclosed in a package; a brand indicator disposed on the package; a line-up indicator disposed on the package, the line-up indicator including at least one line-up indicia selected from visual indicia, narrative indicia or combinations thereof; and optionally, a power specific indicator disposed on the package; wherein the line-up indicator associates the tooth-whitening strip article configuration with a corresponding whitening power, the association enabling a consumer to identify the appropriate tooth-whitening strip article configuration for a user.

Abstract: A file server system tolerant to hardware and software failures is located over a plurality of hardware nodes. The nodes of the system act as hosts for software components of the system. Several of the software components can be replicated. The replicable software components include the system file store, a checker and a logger. The replicated components have one primary copy and one or more back-up copies. Replica copies of a given replicated component are each located at different nodes. Location and handling of replica copies of a given replicable component is under the control of a replication manager which is a (non-replicable) software component of the system. The replication manager is distributed meaning it can have one of its instances running on each node of the system. These instances inter-communicate to maintain coherence. The failure detector is also distributed, its instances running on each of the nodes, and contributing to an early detection of hardware and software failures.