The reason why more scientists arent interested in performing experiments on the ISS is because we know about everything useful there is to know about zero g vacuum a short distance above Earths surface.
You mean like they wanted to shut down the patent office
because there was nothing left to be patented?
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents (1899)
(Actually, this is a myth, but it seemed amusingly appropriate here...)
..teachers who scream "AHDHD--Drug him up!" the first time
they act out in class...
(emphasis mine)
I see even you have been sucked into the psychobabble.:)
When I was a kid it was called "acting up" i.e. misbehaving.
Now, its called "acting out", as if any misbehavior at all
is caused by deep-rooted emotional problems
that are too painful for the child to express directly. So
the child "acts them out" indirectly through inappropriate
behavior. Often it is accompanied by a
subtle suggestion of past abuse or neglect to guilt out the parents.
So far I've never used a tablet, nor been tempted to, because
being unable to touch-type without looking is a no-go for me.
There needs to be some tactile feedback for finger positioning.
Question: is there such a thing as a removable template with
finger holes - say a transparent silicone-rubber-like mat
that naturally "sticks" to glass, that can be placed on and
removed from the tablet at will? If so, what are people's
experiences with them for touch-typing (without looking)?
The thing I dislike about your OS X
screenshot
is that the fonts
look like they were shoe-horned in to fit the pixels, rather than being carefully
designed for the available pixels. As a result, they look
blurry and non-uniform. This is most noticeable in the reverse-highlighted
"Midnite" on the l.h.s. of your screenshot. The "d" stands out
brightly compared to its neighboring "i" and "n". Even worse,
the first "i" is dim and the second "i" is bright, because the
second "i" happened align better with the pixels.
(and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated
the real damages)
I won't argue that i4i doesn't legally "deserve" $290 million
because of what MS did or that
MS shouldn't be "punished" by that amount; the courts are supposed
(in an ideal world at least) to determine the proper amount
based on patent and contract law.
But I'm assuming that you are using the term "real damages" in the
non-legal sense of what i4i actually suffered (in the sense of
what they would have that that don't have now, had MS not
used their patent). I highly doubt that "real damages"
in that sense have been "substantially underestimated". Small companies
rarely sell $290 million of any kind of software, patent or not.
Instead of $50-$100, make the copyright holder choose
and pay a fee of 1000x the cost of license.
The problem with the cost of license is that it doesn't reflect what
the copyrighted work is worth. A program licensed for $20 that sells
a million copies is certainly worth more that a specialized program
licensed for $1000 with only 25 users.
I like the idea of a "property tax" based on what the holder thinks the
work is worth. (This is not my idea, but I don't have a link handy.)
If copyrighted works are intellectual "property", as is often claimed,
why should it be treated differently from other property?
The idea is to impose (after 7 or 14 years) a 1% tax (or 0.1% or
whatever; a reasonable number would have to be determined) on what the
holder says the copyright is worth, which is also the price they would be
willing (and required, if someone offered) to sell it for. So, if a
cheapskate best-selling author said her book was worth $1000 so that she
would only have to pay $10 per year, it also means she'd be required to
sell the rights for $1000 to anyone who offered. (At which point the buyer
could assign their own estimate of its worth, say $1000000, which they'd
have to pay taxes on.)
As you suggest, there are two possibilities why this advantage hasn't occurred naturally:
1. It adds no selective advantage;
2. The advantage is outweighed by the costs.
There is a third possibility, namely that the set of mutations necessary
to give rise to this advantage are too improbable to occur (or perhaps
even fundamentally impossible).
Maybe there is a 4th possibility. Everyone seems to be focusing on
"survivability", but once that is overcome,
reproduction becomes important. Look at the ostentatious displays
of some birds that have nothing to do with survivability or
might even be detrimental to it.
Maybe a highly intelligent
rat simply becomes less interested in sex, or is less able to
attract females who might prefer the dumb macho rats.
I don't know if a comparison to humans has any
validity, but the
most intelligent of our species are not necessarily the ones
reproducing the most (or in some cases at all).
This is in spite of the fact that we are intelligent
enough to understand logically what is necessary to propagate
our genes. In terms of the long-term evolution of humans,
intelligence doesn't seem to be one of the characteristics we are
selecting for, for better or worse.
While I'm not saying these costs aren't a problem, just throwing
out cost numbers in order to complain doesn't show the full picture.
Let's start with: The average
OBGYN delivers 100 babies a year.
One of the
worst is OBGYN, which ranged from $80,000 to $120,000.
$800 to $1200 per baby.
That's not including the schooling debt a doctor has,
I keep hearing this complaint about "schooling debt", but if they're
making hundreds of thousands per year, they should be able to pay it off
pretty quickly. Perhaps they just pay back the minimum per year because they
have favorable interest rates, or maybe just so they can keep compaining
about it.
or any
equipment they have to purchase.
Generally a one-time cost, not per year. Anyway, no numbers given here.
Factor in the debt a doctor, especially a specialized doctor
like OBGYN, and you have an additional overhead of between $75,000 and
$150000 before you can even start practicing.
Again, this makes no sense. How many years at $150K per year does it
take to pay off schooling debt?
And those are pure costs that don't take into account administration
overhead (which is huge) and less tangible costs directly relating to
dealing with insurance.
Most doctors I know have a single employee (sometimes two, or another
one part-time) to handle this stuff and more. Unless their practice
is huge, like a dermatologist seeing 10 patients/hr, in
which case perhaps 3 employees (which still barely eats into their
$1000/hr revenue).
If you have your own practice you can count on
$40k at a minimum to hire a lawyer to make sure what you have covers
what you need.
I'm sorry, this sounds like a number pulled out of the air. Or some
very expensive lawyer. Exactly what work are they doing for this $40K?
Is this one-time, or per year?
Then of course there are the extra costs of the
accountant to deal with keeping your finances straight because they are
now becoming a major headache to keep straight.
No different than for other businesses.
If you start looking at the total extra costs a doctor's office has in
order to deal with insurance it becomes a significant portion of the
cost of doing business that is in no way related to actually doing the
business. It is simply an extra cost.
Add in the administrative costs
incurred by having to dick around with a patient's insurance company
Most doctors I know have one employee to handle this and much of the
other overhead you mention. That's their job.
and
you can start to see why delivering a baby costs anywhere from $15,000 -
$25,000.
At 100 babies per year, adds up to $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
If we add all the costs you give (and amortize the fixed costs rather
than implying that they are "per year"), it doesn't add up to this.
My point is that you've thrown out a confusing array of numbers
to make it seem like doctors are being wiped out with expenses or something.
Most doctors I know are living very, very well, thank you.
I've never seen one volunteer to show us their P&L
or their 1040 to prove how little they are making due
to all of these expenses. And as
for your main point, that the insurance is wiping out the OBGYN's
income, that's less than 10% of the price charged per baby.
Don't forget, for each useful drug they invent, they also invest
millions on drugs that don't work, or drugs that are eventually shown to
have toxic side effects and must be pulled from the market. And just
about every death that occurs while a patient is taking their drug ends
up with a lawsuit that must be defended against.
I thought the $x to develop the drug already included
the cost of rejecting drugs that don't work, as well as an actuarial
estimate of liability (e.g. cost of such insurance if not self-insured).
If not, then it should be included (and what would that number be?) -
otherwise, the rest of your argument becomes
hand-waving rhetoric.
A good number of the TV shows have been rewritten and re-acted for audio
only. I believe it's a syndicated radio show in some areas, but we
bought the CDs. My son enjoyed these in his early teens, and we often
listened to them with the lights off when he went to bed. As a result I've collected
all 13(?) volumes (10 stories/volume). (twilightzoneradio.com if it interests you.)
It is pretty easy to prove that ebay.com is broken.
Go to http://validator.w3.org/ and type in "http://ebay.com". The latest time I tried
it there were 253 errors on the home page alone. (Weirdly, it seems to vary; the first time I tried it 10 minutes ago there
were 240 errors.)
It is surprising that the site works at all. I guess it's called "web page design by trial and
error until it works most of the time in the developer's current browser version."
One might wonder what kind of impression such an error printout would make on a judge,
in a dispute related to lost
sales due to
ebay's broken pages.
Sigh. I agree with your main point, that the company does good work
and deserves to be paid. But for crissake, it's not "stealing", it's
copyright infringement. They are not deprived of anything they had
before - that's what stealing is. Not even the copyright law itself
calls it stealing. You have been brainwashed by big media interests.
"It is every American's Constitutional right to avoid paying taxes to the maximum extent permissible by law." -- Judge David R. Hansen, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
I agree with this 100%. The question isn't whether he had
a right to do it, it is whether, given his circumstances,
it was ethical for him to do it. Compared, say, to an ordinary
individual like you or me where saving some tax dollars could
improve our own lives.
There seems to be a kind of moral affliction among some people
who become extremely
wealthy, I don't know exactly what to call it, but it is a kind
of sense of entitlement, that they "deserve" everything they have
because it's all due to their "hard work". Well, most of it is
actually due to the hard work of many individuals who worked under
them, earning ordinary salaries while they (in effect) skimmed off the
top in the form of stocks, options, executive salaries and bonuses,
etc. Now, there is nothing fundamentally wrong about this - it is
the way capitalism works, and it seems to have been beneficial to
society on the whole.
It seems that as some people get wealthier and wealthier, what initially
might be an attitude of gratitude, over time turns more and more into
greed, a kind of microscopic view of society where they are the only
ones who matter and all others (who aren't wealthy) are fundamentally
inferior and deserve as little as possible. One manifestation
(at least with at least a couple of wealthy families I know) is a
miserly approach to household help where they will
pride themselves on negotiating the lowest possible hourly rate,
hire illegal immigrants to save even more, and in general bend
the rules where possible to exploit their help as much as possible. Never mind
how those people struggle to survive as a result, it doesn't matter
because they are inherently inferior. There is a complete lack
of empathy for them.
Now let's get to the issue of taxes. He already has more money than
he can possibly need if he were to live 100 lifetimes.
The taxes he saves by a questionable tax
shelter, even if strictly legal, will have no measurable effect on
his quality of life. But it ignores the big picture of what taxes
are for and whether it is his responsibility to in some small
way return to society part of what it has enabled him to accomplish.
While we can debate forever the wisdom of how
taxes are spent, the fact is that much of it is spent providing a
social net for the less fortunate, for example medical care and
food. Maybe some of those people brought their misfortune on themselves
due to drug addiction or just laziness and thus in some way don't
"deserve" help from society. Nonetheless, this social net is
important to keep our society civilized and humane.
I suppose I could say much more with regard to the inevitable
arguments that this should be supported by
volunteer charity, that many wealthy people are philanthropists,
that they can determine better how to help people with their money
than the government can,
etc. But I'll just stop here, and hopefully what I've written
may provide some food for thought and debate.
Sometimes, in your calculations (in physics class especially for me), you come across what seem to be magical numbers, and later realize it's something like e^5 or something weird like that.
Voice recorders by themselves, while better than nothing, are inefficient
for what you (or at least I) need to do the most: find out what the
teacher said at the point where you have an illegible scrawl in your notes
you can't decipher anymore.
I've been going back to school in my middle age for some graduate physics courses,
and taking good notes while at the same time trying to pay attention
to the teacher is hard for me.
I found the
Pulse Smartpen
I purchased for $150
to more than pay for itself (if I place any value on my time). I simply
tap the illegible scrawl, and it replays what the teacher said at that
point. Just as important, my notes are necessarily incomplete, and sometimes
a few crucial missing words - esp. in math/physics - can make the notes
incomprehensible. With the Smartpen I can easily replay problematic areas
over and over until I have grasped the concept and
filled in additional notes on it.
I've even become somewhat dependent on it: if I forget to bring it
to class, I feel a vague sense of panic. (I don't mean this as a plug,
although I like the product. There are probably others too but the Pulse
Smartpen is what I'm familiar with.)
She then wound up having violent sex she wasn't at all in to,
I don't know what "wasn't at all in to" means here. I've done
lots of things
(admittedly of a much milder nature) that I "wasn't at all in to",
because it was part of my job. The question is, was she coerced
against her will, e.g. raped? If so, she should have
involved law-inforcement immediately after the crime
occurred.
But I would guess that she agreed to do these things because
she wanted the money. Especially if she continued
to do them.
then the
tape got sold out of gas stations everywhere,
"gas stations everywhere"?? I wonder how much of this you're making up.
and she couldn't show here
face in her home town,
"Couldn't show her face in her home town"? Sure there going to be
prudes who will ostracize her, but if her home town is so
backwards that they're going to lynch her for it, she should get
out.
now she's some kind of shut-in.
I just don't believe that unless that's her own choice. Or maybe she needs
psychiatric help. If everyone is snubbing
her in her home town - unlikely, but possible I suppose - she should get out. In a big city, employers and people
in general don't care that much about her past, assuming she has no
criminal record, if she demonstrates her
value in the present. (Certainly in the case of countless celebrities, such
a sleazy kind of past seems only to enhance their fame.)
Sorry, the BS meter on your story is pointing way up there.
My cell phone doesn't work in the basement, where I spend time at my workbench (or doing laundry) and
have a landline extension. I also get only 2 signal bars in some parts of the house, and
have to walk to a different part of the house when receiving a cell phone
call there if I don't want chopped speech and
unexpected dropped calls. Surely I'm not the only one with this problem.
I haven't given up my landline, but if I do I'll need a solution like Cell2Tel or something to provide
landline-type extension phones.
The point is that Apple decided to lie about Steve Jobs health to avoid a stock price crash.
There is a good reason why stockholders and the SEC should be angry
Well, the financial impact on stockholders is certainly a concern, but I
think there is a deeper issue here. It is one thing to say that "Mr.
Jobs' health is a private matter and it is not our policy to discuss
it." That is perfectly acceptable. But to LIE about it is deeply
morally flawed. The fact that it is even tolerated is an indication of
something wrong with our society. If I find out that a friend has
purposely deceived me, generally speaking I can no longer trust him and
will no longer consider him my friend. Why should it be different with
a corporation? If anything, a public corporation should be held to even
higher standards.
Is there any way to turn off all this superfluous and stupid javascript and AJAX shit that is totally ruining slashdot these days?
(I know this is offtopic, but it provides a partial answer.)
If you are seeing gray rectangles scattered all over the page in Firefox, blocking text, the thing that worked for me was to right-click on a gray rectangle and tell AdBlock to block it. That magically cleared up all that garbage. BTW NoScript did not help, it was AdBlock that did the trick.
I wish they described how the discovered got funneled up to the supernova scientists on the paper published on it. She must have been with someone who really knew that the "new star" she saw there wasn't supposed to be there, and that person deserves some credit, too!
So you want something with a 20 hour battery life, a dual mode e-ink display, running full ubuntu and dirt cheap? Would you like a pony thrown in as well?
Well, the OLPC XO comes pretty close for my purposes. While Ubuntu may be pushing it - I think
some people have installed it - XFCE suits me for the kinds of things I do
with it.
The tremendous advantage of the OLPC is the e-ink mode of the screen, its 5-6 hour
battery life, and its small size. I've taken it to the beach many times and
have gotten a lot of work done relaxing under my umbrella while my tanned gf suns, swims,
and flirts with skin cancer.
I'll often pop it in my tote bag if I'm going to wait for a drs. appt. or
something rather than lugging my big main laptop. Its awful keyboard, though, is
its worst feature
and the main reason I don't use it more often. So bad that at home, I just
ssh to it and never touch it.
This was late 1990s. My company had just completed an important
40-page spec in the form of a Word document, which we emailed to
a dozen technical and management people at our client company
for discussion and
approval. We set up a phone conference between our people
and theirs. After going over the first few pages, confusion
started to ensue: the page numbers on our version was different
from theirs, because the default printer chosen
in Word was different. The "paragraph at the bottom of page 30" was at the
top of page 31 on their version.
The workaround: we canceled the meeting and faxed
the 40 pages of a physical printout to the people involved, so we would all
be looking at the same thing when the meeting was rescheduled.
meth is so clearly destroying the heartland of America (and even making
inroads into big cities) that legalization and taxation is not an
option.
I think it already is legal as a prescription, but
doctors are reluctant to prescribe it due to the DEA breathing down
their necks.
Different people are affected differently by it,
and I don't think it makes sense to make a blanket condemnation.
Under the right
circumstances, there may be situations where it can
be beneficial.
People
are not properly informed about the drug but instead it is simply
condemned as evil. The quality and purity of the
illegal version varies all over
the place, people have no idea how much they are taking,
and there are probably deeper problems in their lives that
motivate them to overdo it in the first place (which of course just compounds those problems).
The prolific mathematician Erdos was a meth user into his 80s.
Once he
won a bet that he could abstain for a
month, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month:
"Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with
ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdos
What this does is have \ref's jump to the actual point of the anchor in the
PDF document instead of just the top of the page, making the PDF (IMO) far
nicer to use. (It's been a few years - if hyperref now does this,
someone kindly correct me.)
To use it, \usepackage{hyperref} followed by \usepackage{realref}.
I've used it many times and it has worked perfectly for me.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like they wanted to shut down the patent office because there was nothing left to be patented? "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents (1899) (Actually, this is a myth, but it seemed amusingly appropriate here...)
(emphasis mine)
I see even you have been sucked into the psychobabble. :)
When I was a kid it was called "acting up" i.e. misbehaving.
Now, its called "acting out", as if any misbehavior at all
is caused by deep-rooted emotional problems
that are too painful for the child to express directly. So
the child "acts them out" indirectly through inappropriate
behavior. Often it is accompanied by a
subtle suggestion of past abuse or neglect to guilt out the parents.
So far I've never used a tablet, nor been tempted to, because being unable to touch-type without looking is a no-go for me. There needs to be some tactile feedback for finger positioning. Question: is there such a thing as a removable template with finger holes - say a transparent silicone-rubber-like mat that naturally "sticks" to glass, that can be placed on and removed from the tablet at will? If so, what are people's experiences with them for touch-typing (without looking)?
The thing I dislike about your OS X screenshot is that the fonts look like they were shoe-horned in to fit the pixels, rather than being carefully designed for the available pixels. As a result, they look blurry and non-uniform. This is most noticeable in the reverse-highlighted "Midnite" on the l.h.s. of your screenshot. The "d" stands out brightly compared to its neighboring "i" and "n". Even worse, the first "i" is dim and the second "i" is bright, because the second "i" happened align better with the pixels.
I won't argue that i4i doesn't legally "deserve" $290 million because of what MS did or that MS shouldn't be "punished" by that amount; the courts are supposed (in an ideal world at least) to determine the proper amount based on patent and contract law.
But I'm assuming that you are using the term "real damages" in the non-legal sense of what i4i actually suffered (in the sense of what they would have that that don't have now, had MS not used their patent). I highly doubt that "real damages" in that sense have been "substantially underestimated". Small companies rarely sell $290 million of any kind of software, patent or not.
The problem with the cost of license is that it doesn't reflect what the copyrighted work is worth. A program licensed for $20 that sells a million copies is certainly worth more that a specialized program licensed for $1000 with only 25 users.
I like the idea of a "property tax" based on what the holder thinks the work is worth. (This is not my idea, but I don't have a link handy.) If copyrighted works are intellectual "property", as is often claimed, why should it be treated differently from other property?
The idea is to impose (after 7 or 14 years) a 1% tax (or 0.1% or whatever; a reasonable number would have to be determined) on what the holder says the copyright is worth, which is also the price they would be willing (and required, if someone offered) to sell it for. So, if a cheapskate best-selling author said her book was worth $1000 so that she would only have to pay $10 per year, it also means she'd be required to sell the rights for $1000 to anyone who offered. (At which point the buyer could assign their own estimate of its worth, say $1000000, which they'd have to pay taxes on.)
Maybe there is a 4th possibility. Everyone seems to be focusing on "survivability", but once that is overcome, reproduction becomes important. Look at the ostentatious displays of some birds that have nothing to do with survivability or might even be detrimental to it. Maybe a highly intelligent rat simply becomes less interested in sex, or is less able to attract females who might prefer the dumb macho rats. I don't know if a comparison to humans has any validity, but the most intelligent of our species are not necessarily the ones reproducing the most (or in some cases at all). This is in spite of the fact that we are intelligent enough to understand logically what is necessary to propagate our genes. In terms of the long-term evolution of humans, intelligence doesn't seem to be one of the characteristics we are selecting for, for better or worse.
Let's start with: The average OBGYN delivers 100 babies a year.
$800 to $1200 per baby.
I keep hearing this complaint about "schooling debt", but if they're making hundreds of thousands per year, they should be able to pay it off pretty quickly. Perhaps they just pay back the minimum per year because they have favorable interest rates, or maybe just so they can keep compaining about it.
Generally a one-time cost, not per year. Anyway, no numbers given here.
Again, this makes no sense. How many years at $150K per year does it take to pay off schooling debt?
Most doctors I know have a single employee (sometimes two, or another one part-time) to handle this stuff and more. Unless their practice is huge, like a dermatologist seeing 10 patients/hr, in which case perhaps 3 employees (which still barely eats into their $1000/hr revenue).
I'm sorry, this sounds like a number pulled out of the air. Or some very expensive lawyer. Exactly what work are they doing for this $40K? Is this one-time, or per year?
No different than for other businesses.
Most doctors I know have one employee to handle this and much of the other overhead you mention. That's their job.
At 100 babies per year, adds up to $1.5 million to $2.5 million. If we add all the costs you give (and amortize the fixed costs rather than implying that they are "per year"), it doesn't add up to this.
My point is that you've thrown out a confusing array of numbers to make it seem like doctors are being wiped out with expenses or something. Most doctors I know are living very, very well, thank you. I've never seen one volunteer to show us their P&L or their 1040 to prove how little they are making due to all of these expenses. And as for your main point, that the insurance is wiping out the OBGYN's income, that's less than 10% of the price charged per baby.
I thought the $x to develop the drug already included the cost of rejecting drugs that don't work, as well as an actuarial estimate of liability (e.g. cost of such insurance if not self-insured). If not, then it should be included (and what would that number be?) - otherwise, the rest of your argument becomes hand-waving rhetoric.
A good number of the TV shows have been rewritten and re-acted for audio only. I believe it's a syndicated radio show in some areas, but we bought the CDs. My son enjoyed these in his early teens, and we often listened to them with the lights off when he went to bed. As a result I've collected all 13(?) volumes (10 stories/volume). (twilightzoneradio.com if it interests you.)
Go to http://validator.w3.org/ and type in "http://ebay.com". The latest time I tried it there were 253 errors on the home page alone. (Weirdly, it seems to vary; the first time I tried it 10 minutes ago there were 240 errors.)
It is surprising that the site works at all. I guess it's called "web page design by trial and error until it works most of the time in the developer's current browser version."
One might wonder what kind of impression such an error printout would make on a judge, in a dispute related to lost sales due to ebay's broken pages.
Sigh. I agree with your main point, that the company does good work and deserves to be paid. But for crissake, it's not "stealing", it's copyright infringement. They are not deprived of anything they had before - that's what stealing is. Not even the copyright law itself calls it stealing. You have been brainwashed by big media interests.
I agree with this 100%. The question isn't whether he had a right to do it, it is whether, given his circumstances, it was ethical for him to do it. Compared, say, to an ordinary individual like you or me where saving some tax dollars could improve our own lives.
There seems to be a kind of moral affliction among some people who become extremely wealthy, I don't know exactly what to call it, but it is a kind of sense of entitlement, that they "deserve" everything they have because it's all due to their "hard work". Well, most of it is actually due to the hard work of many individuals who worked under them, earning ordinary salaries while they (in effect) skimmed off the top in the form of stocks, options, executive salaries and bonuses, etc. Now, there is nothing fundamentally wrong about this - it is the way capitalism works, and it seems to have been beneficial to society on the whole.
It seems that as some people get wealthier and wealthier, what initially might be an attitude of gratitude, over time turns more and more into greed, a kind of microscopic view of society where they are the only ones who matter and all others (who aren't wealthy) are fundamentally inferior and deserve as little as possible. One manifestation (at least with at least a couple of wealthy families I know) is a miserly approach to household help where they will pride themselves on negotiating the lowest possible hourly rate, hire illegal immigrants to save even more, and in general bend the rules where possible to exploit their help as much as possible. Never mind how those people struggle to survive as a result, it doesn't matter because they are inherently inferior. There is a complete lack of empathy for them.
Now let's get to the issue of taxes. He already has more money than he can possibly need if he were to live 100 lifetimes. The taxes he saves by a questionable tax shelter, even if strictly legal, will have no measurable effect on his quality of life. But it ignores the big picture of what taxes are for and whether it is his responsibility to in some small way return to society part of what it has enabled him to accomplish. While we can debate forever the wisdom of how taxes are spent, the fact is that much of it is spent providing a social net for the less fortunate, for example medical care and food. Maybe some of those people brought their misfortune on themselves due to drug addiction or just laziness and thus in some way don't "deserve" help from society. Nonetheless, this social net is important to keep our society civilized and humane.
I suppose I could say much more with regard to the inevitable arguments that this should be supported by volunteer charity, that many wealthy people are philanthropists, that they can determine better how to help people with their money than the government can, etc. But I'll just stop here, and hopefully what I've written may provide some food for thought and debate.
Yes, but did he produce any significant science after that? (I mean real science, not popular writing/speculation/politics)
Try Inverse Symbolic Calculator. Entering 148.413159 returns 1484131591025766 = exp(5).
I've been going back to school in my middle age for some graduate physics courses, and taking good notes while at the same time trying to pay attention to the teacher is hard for me.
I found the Pulse Smartpen I purchased for $150 to more than pay for itself (if I place any value on my time). I simply tap the illegible scrawl, and it replays what the teacher said at that point. Just as important, my notes are necessarily incomplete, and sometimes a few crucial missing words - esp. in math/physics - can make the notes incomprehensible. With the Smartpen I can easily replay problematic areas over and over until I have grasped the concept and filled in additional notes on it.
I've even become somewhat dependent on it: if I forget to bring it to class, I feel a vague sense of panic. (I don't mean this as a plug, although I like the product. There are probably others too but the Pulse Smartpen is what I'm familiar with.)
I don't know what "wasn't at all in to" means here. I've done lots of things (admittedly of a much milder nature) that I "wasn't at all in to", because it was part of my job. The question is, was she coerced against her will, e.g. raped? If so, she should have involved law-inforcement immediately after the crime occurred. But I would guess that she agreed to do these things because she wanted the money. Especially if she continued to do them.
"gas stations everywhere"?? I wonder how much of this you're making up.
"Couldn't show her face in her home town"? Sure there going to be prudes who will ostracize her, but if her home town is so backwards that they're going to lynch her for it, she should get out.
I just don't believe that unless that's her own choice. Or maybe she needs psychiatric help. If everyone is snubbing her in her home town - unlikely, but possible I suppose - she should get out. In a big city, employers and people in general don't care that much about her past, assuming she has no criminal record, if she demonstrates her value in the present. (Certainly in the case of countless celebrities, such a sleazy kind of past seems only to enhance their fame.)
Sorry, the BS meter on your story is pointing way up there.
My cell phone doesn't work in the basement, where I spend time at my workbench (or doing laundry) and have a landline extension. I also get only 2 signal bars in some parts of the house, and have to walk to a different part of the house when receiving a cell phone call there if I don't want chopped speech and unexpected dropped calls. Surely I'm not the only one with this problem. I haven't given up my landline, but if I do I'll need a solution like Cell2Tel or something to provide landline-type extension phones.
Well, the financial impact on stockholders is certainly a concern, but I think there is a deeper issue here. It is one thing to say that "Mr. Jobs' health is a private matter and it is not our policy to discuss it." That is perfectly acceptable. But to LIE about it is deeply morally flawed. The fact that it is even tolerated is an indication of something wrong with our society. If I find out that a friend has purposely deceived me, generally speaking I can no longer trust him and will no longer consider him my friend. Why should it be different with a corporation? If anything, a public corporation should be held to even higher standards.
(I know this is offtopic, but it provides a partial answer.) If you are seeing gray rectangles scattered all over the page in Firefox, blocking text, the thing that worked for me was to right-click on a gray rectangle and tell AdBlock to block it. That magically cleared up all that garbage. BTW NoScript did not help, it was AdBlock that did the trick.
She shares the hobby with her dad. There's some more on that part of the story, along with a picture of her rig, here: http://www.areavoices.com/astrobob/?blog=37663
Well, the OLPC XO comes pretty close for my purposes. While Ubuntu may be pushing it - I think some people have installed it - XFCE suits me for the kinds of things I do with it. The tremendous advantage of the OLPC is the e-ink mode of the screen, its 5-6 hour battery life, and its small size. I've taken it to the beach many times and have gotten a lot of work done relaxing under my umbrella while my tanned gf suns, swims, and flirts with skin cancer. I'll often pop it in my tote bag if I'm going to wait for a drs. appt. or something rather than lugging my big main laptop. Its awful keyboard, though, is its worst feature and the main reason I don't use it more often. So bad that at home, I just ssh to it and never touch it.
The workaround: we canceled the meeting and faxed the 40 pages of a physical printout to the people involved, so we would all be looking at the same thing when the meeting was rescheduled.
I think it already is legal as a prescription, but doctors are reluctant to prescribe it due to the DEA breathing down their necks. Different people are affected differently by it, and I don't think it makes sense to make a blanket condemnation. Under the right circumstances, there may be situations where it can be beneficial.
People are not properly informed about the drug but instead it is simply condemned as evil. The quality and purity of the illegal version varies all over the place, people have no idea how much they are taking, and there are probably deeper problems in their lives that motivate them to overdo it in the first place (which of course just compounds those problems).
The prolific mathematician Erdos was a meth user into his 80s. Once he won a bet that he could abstain for a month, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdos
http://us.metamath.org/latex/realref.sty
What this does is have \ref's jump to the actual point of the anchor in the PDF document instead of just the top of the page, making the PDF (IMO) far nicer to use. (It's been a few years - if hyperref now does this, someone kindly correct me.)
To use it, \usepackage{hyperref} followed by \usepackage{realref}. I've used it many times and it has worked perfectly for me.