How can we petition the US PTO to have a patent re-examined
The simple answer is to sue to have it invalidated. If someone wants to do so I have some prior art from not that long ago that should invalidate their patent. It even has colored cells, although not in a spreadsheet fashion, but does use the value for a cell and start and end color transitions. As an added bonus it is date and time stamped by a reputable source. I have a really crappy one that stated going towards this from even earlier but yet still provides useful information.
While I wouldn't say 1 in 1000 is the number of women who could do that is exceedingly small (I would guess 1 in 100). I would suggest looking at high school (as well as college) girls shot put for potential candidates. Also I would include female body builders and female power lifters but I have a feeling that there is probably a fair amount of overlap between these groups.
That sounds like a really shitty scooter. My dad's old learner motorcycle got close to 150mpg and that was a 70s era Honda 50 that he bought used about 10 years ago and is in pretty rough shape.
With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion
That is it, only $7 billion. To put that number into perspective that is about 2 days of deficit spending (not total spending for those 2 days just the deficit) for the US government.
I check them out every once and a while and it looks like belly tanks are still a popular choice of vehicles. Once you get away from the stream liners there is a surprising variety of vehicles. Personally I don't think I will ever be able to to a trip down the long course but I am curious what a MG A-series engine can do in a midget. Much like the people with the old 36 bhp VW air cooled engines that have been extensively modified but still go out to speed week. I would love to break 200 mph in my midget but know that it would be difficult but doable with the 4 banger.
If you want to see a raw speed challenge that uses a number of reciprocating piston engines you should go check out speed week at the Bonneville Salt Flats. I don't know how many rocket or jet vehicles compete but there are a number of regular vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles) and a ton of categories to compete in. I would love to go some day when I complete my project car.
I don't put forth any effort in to dressing my self. For work I have a few pairs of black and grey pants and some dress shirts that go with either color pant. I just grab one of each and put them on. For weekend cloths all my t shirts go with my jeans so I just grab what ever is on top in the drawer. For me it is pure laziness, while it seems like my wife frets over every thign she wears.
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
A few that come to mind are the model M IBM keyboard and the model 500 telephone.
My observation of the French and their attitudes towards speaking other languages is that they expect you to speak their language while in their country. Really if you are in a foreign country try to speak the language especially if you are American as you demand it of visitors to your country. Most of them know English but don't want to speak it as they are embarrassed by how poor they think they are at it (most speak it as well as the average US high school graduate). If you put forth the effort to communicate in French to a French person often they will respond back to you in English (yes you have an accent they recognize) and they don't get rude as you are putting forth the effort. This was based on my experience while I lived and worked in Paris for 3 months, my French coworkers were much more forgiving and even helped me to learn the language. When I arrived I knew very little (as much as I could absorb part time in 3 weeks in the US) and by the time I left I could hold a conversation that wasn't too complex.
Well speaking of Legos and tight tolerances for snap together pieces it appears that Lego bricks do have extremely good tolerances of about 10 micrometers which puts them on par or close to on par with modern small arms for tolerances. Given that Legos are an inexpensive consumer product that are mass produced it doesn't seem beyond reason to assume that mass produced snap together parts for a rail gun could be produced to similar or better levels of quality.
That discussion was actually about weather a tax can be appealed through before it takes effect. The way things currently are is no a tax can not be appealed until it has taken effect. The question around the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was is the penalty for the individual mandate a tax or not. If it is a tax then it can't be litigated until it takes effect, if it is not a tax then it can be litigated before it goes into effect. The oddity that popped out of the ruling is that Obamacare is both a tax and not a tax. It was not considered a tax as per the first part of the ruling which allowed the 3rd part of the ruling, but for the 3rd part of the ruling it was ruled a tax thus being something congress could enact. There was a second part that dealt with removing funds for states that was overturned but that was a separate issue. Technically speaking the SCOTUS was never granted the constitutionality authority to determine if a law was constitutional but granted them selves that right in the marbury v madison case.
Considering that I bought my house a few years before the crash in a good but inexpensive mid-western blue collier neighborhood I would lose money if I sold now (I owe more than it is worth). Housing on the east coast in places like D.C., Baltimore, or Philadelphia, New York are about 2x-4x what they are where I currently live and I doubt I will find as nice of a place I currently have with a backyard that open up to a park. Also I have access to good cheap sources of food that I wouldn't have access to out east as I doubt I would be able to find a good farmer who raises bison or cattle and buy a 1/4 or 1/8 directly at less than $3 a pound (that includes steaks, roasts, as well as ground). Yes I have money left over each moth that I am socking away for retirement but living out east would require that I sock away a comparable percentage each month to stay there when I retire. So in essence it becomes a wash at best. Also My wife works as a teacher so if I moved mid school year we wouldn't have her income until she found a job which might be the beginning of the next school year. All of that completely ignores other things like traffic, school quality (I live in the best school district in the state), and recreation opportunities (I like to hunt and fish) so it would take quite a bit to relocate out east. Out west is even worse and I don't think I would get along with a large portion of the people in California, Oregon, and Washington as I have been out there a few times for work and have family out there (in-laws).
The 486DX @ 66mhz with 8MB of ram, a 28.8 modem, a Sound Blaster 16, 4x CDROM, and Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 or 6.22 and you were at the top of the pile for computing power back then (just before the first Pentiums came out, man do I feel old now). I mean you could run Syndicate Wars at the highest settings, as well as X-Wing and Tie Fighter, Doom and all the other games that were out. I was 17 at the time and bought that box so I would have something to do my school work on and to take off to college.
In a professional setting I would agree that something like RHEL, or CentOS would be better as there is good documentation and support, but Slackware is rock solid and for what I do at home and seems to be far easier to accomplish what I want. It isn't remotely bleeding edge but then it doesn't make me feel like punching my monitor when trying to compile or install GIS tools like Ubuntu did. Toss in that there are a few libraries that I will do a targeted compile on for my machine so that things run faster and something like Slackware (possibly Gentoo) is a better choice. I was surprised by the speed up of the GIS programs when recompiling the libraries they used as it was noticeable. From what I have seen a number of the GIS tools I use run quite well on Macs but I have never plunked down the extra money to get one.
'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'
How about pay STEM people reasonable wages and offer reasonable benefits. I am sick of getting offers in the $30-$40k range to jump from my current position that currently pays over double that. I do get real offers now and then but probably 80% are the joke ones where they want people with 5 to 10+ years experience in a laundry list of not widely used technologies, want a minimum of a BS with a MS or PhD preferred, and expect you to start at $30k a year with 2 weeks vacation. I got a call from a recruiter the other day who thought I might be interested in some positions that ended up I laughing at because the offerings were absurd. She was shocked at the amount of money it would take to get me to change my job, even though it was only about a 10% increase over what I currently make. I have gotten offers for almost twice what I make but would have to move to places I don't want to live that cost over twice what it costs where I currently live so it would have been a net loss for me.
Mostly the latter but some of the former. I regularly get job offers (about 3 a month) of some head hunter of company looking to for someone with my specialized skill set. I frequently turn them down because they often are for 30-40k/yr while I currently make over twice that. I have had some real offers from companies my company does work for that would have been a pay increase, but I would have to move to a more expensive area (D.C.) that would eat up the raise and then some.
Hell even a $50 card is massively better. I don't play games but the performance improvement in doing GIS and cartography I have seen from going from integrated or on board graphics to a discrete ~$50 card have always been impressive.
You will still learn Linux with Slackware but won't learn the ins and outs of compiling the thing. I have thought about trying Gentoo to delve even further but playing with the OS at that level doesn't do it for me. Maybe with my next computer I will give it a try.
I think it is more of the right tool for the job granted there are some personal preferences involved. At home I do a lot of GIS/Cartography stuff and there I find that windows just isn't up to snuff and the Ubuntu is kind of a pain with simplistic ways. I know there are people on OS X doing what I am doing (so many tutorials show OS X screen shots) that I could probably get by with ease on OS X but haven't plunked down the extra money for a Mac.
Now did you order the CDROM like I did (I think I still have it some where I should find it show off my geek cred) or do the floppy download? I had tried to download the army of floppies but AOL would get disconnected all the time so it probably took less time to order the CDROM (I think it was like $5) and wait for it to arrive in the mail than to download. I was running on what was originally a 486dx 66 with 8mb of ram that eventually became a P133 (overdirve chip) with 32mb ram. Since then I have bounced from one distro to another usually going back to Slackware between other distros. I have run Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu but seem to always come back to Slackware. Right now at work I am working with RHEL (as well as AIX and Solaris), but at home am have been running Slackware consistently for several years now that Patrick finally decided that there really should be an official Slackware AMD64 bit version
Which is rather unfortunate. The only beers we seem to export are the cheap crap ones you know of, the best ones tend to only be available locally or regionally. I have had some very good German, Belgian, and Austrian style beers that are on par with ones I have had in those countries. These tend to be craft beers or micro breweries, some even being available only at the restaurant, so they are difficult to impossible to find in my home state.
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Sticks and Stones, people...
I would be careful with bringing up sticks and stones with religious nut jobs.
How can we petition the US PTO to have a patent re-examined
The simple answer is to sue to have it invalidated. If someone wants to do so I have some prior art from not that long ago that should invalidate their patent. It even has colored cells, although not in a spreadsheet fashion, but does use the value for a cell and start and end color transitions. As an added bonus it is date and time stamped by a reputable source. I have a really crappy one that stated going towards this from even earlier but yet still provides useful information.
While I wouldn't say 1 in 1000 is the number of women who could do that is exceedingly small (I would guess 1 in 100). I would suggest looking at high school (as well as college) girls shot put for potential candidates. Also I would include female body builders and female power lifters but I have a feeling that there is probably a fair amount of overlap between these groups.
That sounds like a really shitty scooter. My dad's old learner motorcycle got close to 150mpg and that was a 70s era Honda 50 that he bought used about 10 years ago and is in pretty rough shape.
No but from what his bio looks like I kind of wish I was him, I would be way better off.
With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion
That is it, only $7 billion. To put that number into perspective that is about 2 days of deficit spending (not total spending for those 2 days just the deficit) for the US government.
I check them out every once and a while and it looks like belly tanks are still a popular choice of vehicles. Once you get away from the stream liners there is a surprising variety of vehicles. Personally I don't think I will ever be able to to a trip down the long course but I am curious what a MG A-series engine can do in a midget. Much like the people with the old 36 bhp VW air cooled engines that have been extensively modified but still go out to speed week. I would love to break 200 mph in my midget but know that it would be difficult but doable with the 4 banger.
Already been done and beaten by an order of magnitude. Much like these ultra fast vehicles you wouldn't use it as a daily driver though.
If you want to see a raw speed challenge that uses a number of reciprocating piston engines you should go check out speed week at the Bonneville Salt Flats. I don't know how many rocket or jet vehicles compete but there are a number of regular vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles) and a ton of categories to compete in. I would love to go some day when I complete my project car.
I don't put forth any effort in to dressing my self. For work I have a few pairs of black and grey pants and some dress shirts that go with either color pant. I just grab one of each and put them on. For weekend cloths all my t shirts go with my jeans so I just grab what ever is on top in the drawer. For me it is pure laziness, while it seems like my wife frets over every thign she wears.
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
A few that come to mind are the model M IBM keyboard and the model 500 telephone.
My observation of the French and their attitudes towards speaking other languages is that they expect you to speak their language while in their country. Really if you are in a foreign country try to speak the language especially if you are American as you demand it of visitors to your country. Most of them know English but don't want to speak it as they are embarrassed by how poor they think they are at it (most speak it as well as the average US high school graduate). If you put forth the effort to communicate in French to a French person often they will respond back to you in English (yes you have an accent they recognize) and they don't get rude as you are putting forth the effort. This was based on my experience while I lived and worked in Paris for 3 months, my French coworkers were much more forgiving and even helped me to learn the language. When I arrived I knew very little (as much as I could absorb part time in 3 weeks in the US) and by the time I left I could hold a conversation that wasn't too complex.
As with all DHS work it only increases entropy at an ever increasing rate, so no.
Well speaking of Legos and tight tolerances for snap together pieces it appears that Lego bricks do have extremely good tolerances of about 10 micrometers which puts them on par or close to on par with modern small arms for tolerances. Given that Legos are an inexpensive consumer product that are mass produced it doesn't seem beyond reason to assume that mass produced snap together parts for a rail gun could be produced to similar or better levels of quality.
That discussion was actually about weather a tax can be appealed through before it takes effect. The way things currently are is no a tax can not be appealed until it has taken effect. The question around the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was is the penalty for the individual mandate a tax or not. If it is a tax then it can't be litigated until it takes effect, if it is not a tax then it can be litigated before it goes into effect. The oddity that popped out of the ruling is that Obamacare is both a tax and not a tax. It was not considered a tax as per the first part of the ruling which allowed the 3rd part of the ruling, but for the 3rd part of the ruling it was ruled a tax thus being something congress could enact. There was a second part that dealt with removing funds for states that was overturned but that was a separate issue. Technically speaking the SCOTUS was never granted the constitutionality authority to determine if a law was constitutional but granted them selves that right in the marbury v madison case.
Considering that I bought my house a few years before the crash in a good but inexpensive mid-western blue collier neighborhood I would lose money if I sold now (I owe more than it is worth). Housing on the east coast in places like D.C., Baltimore, or Philadelphia, New York are about 2x-4x what they are where I currently live and I doubt I will find as nice of a place I currently have with a backyard that open up to a park. Also I have access to good cheap sources of food that I wouldn't have access to out east as I doubt I would be able to find a good farmer who raises bison or cattle and buy a 1/4 or 1/8 directly at less than $3 a pound (that includes steaks, roasts, as well as ground). Yes I have money left over each moth that I am socking away for retirement but living out east would require that I sock away a comparable percentage each month to stay there when I retire. So in essence it becomes a wash at best. Also My wife works as a teacher so if I moved mid school year we wouldn't have her income until she found a job which might be the beginning of the next school year. All of that completely ignores other things like traffic, school quality (I live in the best school district in the state), and recreation opportunities (I like to hunt and fish) so it would take quite a bit to relocate out east. Out west is even worse and I don't think I would get along with a large portion of the people in California, Oregon, and Washington as I have been out there a few times for work and have family out there (in-laws).
The 486DX @ 66mhz with 8MB of ram, a 28.8 modem, a Sound Blaster 16, 4x CDROM, and Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 or 6.22 and you were at the top of the pile for computing power back then (just before the first Pentiums came out, man do I feel old now). I mean you could run Syndicate Wars at the highest settings, as well as X-Wing and Tie Fighter, Doom and all the other games that were out. I was 17 at the time and bought that box so I would have something to do my school work on and to take off to college.
In a professional setting I would agree that something like RHEL, or CentOS would be better as there is good documentation and support, but Slackware is rock solid and for what I do at home and seems to be far easier to accomplish what I want. It isn't remotely bleeding edge but then it doesn't make me feel like punching my monitor when trying to compile or install GIS tools like Ubuntu did. Toss in that there are a few libraries that I will do a targeted compile on for my machine so that things run faster and something like Slackware (possibly Gentoo) is a better choice. I was surprised by the speed up of the GIS programs when recompiling the libraries they used as it was noticeable. From what I have seen a number of the GIS tools I use run quite well on Macs but I have never plunked down the extra money to get one.
'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'
How about pay STEM people reasonable wages and offer reasonable benefits. I am sick of getting offers in the $30-$40k range to jump from my current position that currently pays over double that. I do get real offers now and then but probably 80% are the joke ones where they want people with 5 to 10+ years experience in a laundry list of not widely used technologies, want a minimum of a BS with a MS or PhD preferred, and expect you to start at $30k a year with 2 weeks vacation. I got a call from a recruiter the other day who thought I might be interested in some positions that ended up I laughing at because the offerings were absurd. She was shocked at the amount of money it would take to get me to change my job, even though it was only about a 10% increase over what I currently make. I have gotten offers for almost twice what I make but would have to move to places I don't want to live that cost over twice what it costs where I currently live so it would have been a net loss for me.
Mostly the latter but some of the former. I regularly get job offers (about 3 a month) of some head hunter of company looking to for someone with my specialized skill set. I frequently turn them down because they often are for 30-40k/yr while I currently make over twice that. I have had some real offers from companies my company does work for that would have been a pay increase, but I would have to move to a more expensive area (D.C.) that would eat up the raise and then some.
Hell even a $50 card is massively better. I don't play games but the performance improvement in doing GIS and cartography I have seen from going from integrated or on board graphics to a discrete ~$50 card have always been impressive.
You will still learn Linux with Slackware but won't learn the ins and outs of compiling the thing. I have thought about trying Gentoo to delve even further but playing with the OS at that level doesn't do it for me. Maybe with my next computer I will give it a try.
I think it is more of the right tool for the job granted there are some personal preferences involved. At home I do a lot of GIS/Cartography stuff and there I find that windows just isn't up to snuff and the Ubuntu is kind of a pain with simplistic ways. I know there are people on OS X doing what I am doing (so many tutorials show OS X screen shots) that I could probably get by with ease on OS X but haven't plunked down the extra money for a Mac.
Now did you order the CDROM like I did (I think I still have it some where I should find it show off my geek cred) or do the floppy download? I had tried to download the army of floppies but AOL would get disconnected all the time so it probably took less time to order the CDROM (I think it was like $5) and wait for it to arrive in the mail than to download. I was running on what was originally a 486dx 66 with 8mb of ram that eventually became a P133 (overdirve chip) with 32mb ram. Since then I have bounced from one distro to another usually going back to Slackware between other distros. I have run Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu but seem to always come back to Slackware. Right now at work I am working with RHEL (as well as AIX and Solaris), but at home am have been running Slackware consistently for several years now that Patrick finally decided that there really should be an official Slackware AMD64 bit version
which unless your blind or a moron will not going be mistaken for windows.
Well we are talking about a congress critter here.
Which is rather unfortunate. The only beers we seem to export are the cheap crap ones you know of, the best ones tend to only be available locally or regionally. I have had some very good German, Belgian, and Austrian style beers that are on par with ones I have had in those countries. These tend to be craft beers or micro breweries, some even being available only at the restaurant, so they are difficult to impossible to find in my home state.