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The problem is they wanted to carve out a completely new product space by copying the dominant leader. Doing that is a saturated market usually means you develop a fanatically loyal following in the cook islands or some other place equally pointless. Its like that great cartoon... Balmer makes a smart phone -> Then a miracle Happens -> and it garners a top market share. He needs to work on that middle part of the business plan a wee bit. Better yet, would someone give this poor man a dip into the clue bucket. For the love-o-jebus, I'm tired of seeing this lost soul twisting in the breeze.

A: I have roughly the same number of memories as Oprah and Bill G -- and, for that matter, the homeless guy who lives under a bridge across the street from my house. Clearly, just having lots of memories has loose correlation with what defines a person. Hell, I probably remember a lot more, and with much higher quality, than Keith Richards does.

B: My mom is a weird Christian. It's her belief that when the bible talks about life after death, it doesn't mean a separate existence ("heaven") but in the memory people have of you, and if you did good, their memory of you will be good, and that's as close as anyone gets to heaven. By her definition, it's not your memory that defines you, but the memories of those who know you -- which I think correlates much better with defining a person (as per point A) than personal memories.

C: Not to get all postmodern here, but people's memories are unreliable: they color what they remember by what they expect to remember, what their society has conditioned them to regard as important. Their memories are contextual. The Chabris/Simons Gorilla Experiment is a beautiful demonstration of an extreme example of selective attention and the unreliability of memory.

Getting a (so-called) neutral-point-of-view copy of someone's life, a la Being John Malkovich, would remove a lot of subjectivity, in one way, but someone else viewing it would see entirely different things and come away with a completely separate experience. (Read about eye tracking in autism, for instance: non-autistic people pay attention to wholly different parts of pictures than autistic people do.)

Care to name a theme that hasn't been used about a bazallion times since the invention of storytelling? There are only 36 plots. Nothing new under the sun, son.

Sorry to bust any bubbles but I know I submitted the prior art over a year ago as an article (that was turned down) as this was and is actually an invention of a Japanese Gentleman who has been working on it most of his life. The original inventor is a Mr Kohei Minato who has a number of patents already on this motor.

Here are some links

article 1
article 2
google search

"ghosts, psychics, etc."

at first i read that as "ghosts, physics, etc." that made me laugh :)

this page has a portion of the new scientist article "13 things that don't make sense" that in part covers some interesting findings on homeopathy. (#4) i would have linked to the original article, but it cuts off shortly and asks you to subscribe.

anyway, it seems to me that the majority of places employing cobblestone as a walking surface usually have a pleasant atmosphere as well. that also might have something to do with their findings

research aside, i just like cobblestone; it seems more natural to me.

In 2002 Diebold accquired Global Election Systems.

* = CEO is Bob Urosevich, who founded ES&S.

http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#discl osure

Sequoia uses the same hardware.

Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
Ownership: Eighty-five percent De La Rue, 15 percent Jefferson Smurfit Group; Smurfs are in the process of selling to Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago.

* = Sequoia bought Business Records Corporation's optical scan vote tabulation business as part of a 1997 Dept. of Justice anti-trust action with ES&S ? under a licensing agreement, both companies used the same equipment and software.

OK, I goofed with respect to Sequoia. I think my confusion was based on Diebold/Sequoia using the same hardware. My apologies to anybody at either the McCarthy Group companies or Sequoia who find their public association embarrassing.

With respect to the shared hardware, I recommend to Sequoia that they hire some reasonably honest second or third year EE and CS students to design and build some voting machines whose accuracy might be considered believable. Recording and counting votes honestly is NOT rocket science.

They might find it profitable to go Open Source; as they might be able to both differentiate their product and charge premium prices for a product whose honesty and accuracy nobody argues about, assuming that there is a market for honest voting machines and vote tabulation equipment.

There is a whiff of immorality in all of this. America's balance of trade deficit with the rest of the world is interesting, especially when you read this or this

The numbers here indicate a country with a bankrupt morality.

The fact that America is a net importer of oil speaks volumes.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.