Abstract: Apparatus for protecting a door and rear sill of a trailer comprises a U-shaped body formed of resilient, rubbery material having a web from which two arms extend, the arms being spaced apart a distance sufficient to straddle a sidewall of the trailer. The arms of the body also may embrace not only a sidewall of the trailer but also an adjacent door which occupies a position alongside and parallel such trailer sidewall. The protective body also has a depending lip which projects downwardly from the web a distance to overlap at least a part of the trailer floor sill.

Abstract: An enhanced scrambled video signal, method for making an enhanced scrambled video signal and apparatus for enhanced scrambling of a video signal are all characterized by a pattern added to a video signal. The pattern is formed from a pair of segments, including a black segment and a white segment which forms a high contrast transition therebetween. The transitions vary in horizontal location from one horizontal line to the next. The pattern causes an unauthorized television receiver to mistakenly lock onto the transitions in the pattern, as if the transitions represented horizontal sync signals, thus scrambling the video display. The apparatus for inserting the pattern may be formed by a sync detector, a video amplifier, a multiplexor and a control logic device. The video amplifier sets the video signal to a DC reference level. The sync detector detects the horizontal sync of the video signal which is sent from the video amplifier.

Abstract: A system and method employing computer speech recognition of users' vocal tag utterances to create a catalog (1) of the contents of user-recorded audio-video media such as VCR tapes. Numeric labels are affixed to each tape for identification. A vocal tag (24) is spoken into a microphone (5), associated with each recorded program and stored in a database of tape contents within a VCR (13). The matching of a new, reference utterance (7) with those stored in the database provides a means to review the contents of all tapes containing the selected program.

Abstract: A scrambling system for a cable television system in which a group of channel frequencies are reused over a plurality of service areas includes an access controller, an encoder and a plurality of simplified scrambling units. Each service area receives different television signals on the group of channel frequencies. The access controller provides signal authorization information for a given channel frequency to a plurality of receiver/decoders located in the different services areas. The access controller also provides descrambling information corresponding to the signal authorization information to the encoder for the given channel frequency. The encoder produces a conditional access code by placing the descrambling information into a scrambled reference signal. An extracting unit removes the conditional access code from the scrambled reference signal and distributes the conditional access code to each of the simplified scrambling units operating at the given channel frequency.

Abstract: The present invention utilizes the otherwise unproductive minutes and hours when a networked client computer is not in use by a local human operator. The method and system described herein allow multiple partitioned computations to be queued for distribution to any number of client computers when the clients indicate their availability. Availability may be determined by the same criteria used to activate screen-saver programs, i.e., a predetermined time without any keyboard or mouse input. Application programs are designed to accept a common calling sequence. An application-independent master control program coordinates the distribution of computation segments, the combination of partial results, and the formatting of the final result. An application-independent client control program reports availability of client computers, downloads application program files, invokes the application to compute partial results for a range of computation segments, and uploads the partial results to the master computer.