Full service gas stations are fairly rare and are generally present only in very affluent locations. Oregon and New Jersey have laws that prohibit customers from pumping their own gas, but the service they provide is not traditional full service - it is termed 'mini-service' in the industry because you don't find amenities like getting your windshield washed or oil checked.
The small inventor gets absolutely nothing if he 'locks up' the idea and nobody builds it. The incentive is clearly there for him to see the invention realized.
There are abuses in the system w.r.t. submarine patents like this one. Most of these occur because some parts of patent law are not properly interpreted or need reform. A ten+ year lag between initial filing and granting the patent is crazy.
But requiring the inventor to build the invention breaks all sorts of very productive business models. University research, small research companies, individual inventors, etc. etc. are a very productive part of the true innovative landscape that would be hurt badly by your proposal. Throwing the baby out with the bath water is not acceptable.
Sadly, people will use a conflict of interest as a means to dismiss someone else's opinions without even evaluating them on their merits. Truth is true regardless of the messenger; if a solar cell maker said the sky was clear, it would not cease to be so merely because the company has a vested interest in the sky being cloudless. What we have now are people who refuse even to look up to the sky to check, instead insisting that the messenger's conflict of interest must necessarily mean their statements are false or tainted.
The problem is that people are not in a position to rigorously determine what is true in most cases. If it were as easy as looking up to see if the sky were clear that is one thing. But that is usually not the case.
What you propose would make a lot of small inventors unable to patent ideas that they cannot afford to build. Also it would make it impossible for certain types of research companies to get funding.
Back in the '60s I saw a news broadcast showing Walter Cronkite playing Space War. About 3 years later I had 6 weeks to do a intersession project, so I learned FORTRAN and reverse engineered Space War from my memory of the TV show, and got it up and running on a PDP-8.
We can extract it out of the air for anyone who needs it.
The problem with Helium is that its atomic velocity as a gas is greater than escape velocity, so it is gradually leaving the Earth's gravitational field. Given no replacement from radioactive decay, its concentration in air will asymptotically decline to zero.
The problem is that his stats are cherry-picked in order to fulfill the 'good old days' fantasy. Back in the 1950's families did not own multiple automobiles, medical care was not what it is today (life expectancies were shorter, diseases like polio were rampant) and houses were much smaller. While job security was better, the number of high paying jobs was much smaller and opportunities for growth were smaller because people were tied to the same employer for most of their careers. A quite high percentage of college graduates (over 50% if you were female) went into teaching in the schools.
And that of course is if you were a white anglo-saxon male. If you weren't you couldn't live in a good school district, or were paid much less for the same work.
Not disclosing any conflict of interests that you may have, and then later getting found out that the conflicts were not disclosed is far more damaging to your reputation than disclosing them up front. There are any number of cases where not disclosing these conflicts is actually illegal; for example if you are a stock analyst, judge, lobbyist or politician.
People are not as dumb as you might think. If you disclose the potential conflict a reasonable person can evaluate what the potential issues are; if not there is always the question regarding what axe you are grinding. If you disclose a reasonable person would at least feel that he is being told what the viewpoint of the person is.
Senator George Mitchell once said when being evaluated for a position as a special envoy to Ireland to negotiate a settlement between the IRA and British government that the conflicts of interest that you have to worry about are the undisclosed ones.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased observer. The best thing is to know the biases so you can evaluate the work in the correct context.
Great, somebody running an online payday loan business is complaining about fraud? You have got to be joking. Payday loan businesses are one of the most abusive forms of lending imaginable (APRs run 400%+), and should be illegal. And probably will be illegal in most places soon.
You whippersnappers don't vote, live in your mother's basements, don't pay taxes because you buy everything out of state on line and otherwise are no-account layabouts.
You are getting what you deserve.
They know better than to mess with the over-50's, half of which belong to some sort of militia, all of who own guns and having achieved adulthood during the 60's are ready to take to the streets on a moment's notice.
Now get off my lawn. If you want to mess up a lawn go out an get your own.
Correlation does not prove causation, however it is necessary condition for causation. If there is no correlation there is no causation.
Now you can argue the accuracy of the experiment involved and make a statement like "given the expected rate variability of sample size xyz we can place a 99% confidence interval on the causation being no higher than one case every 100 million vacinations" at which point it becomes far more sensible to spend your time and resources worrying about things far more likely to harm your child like riding in automobiles or getting E.coli in bad beef.
The assumption of power in absence of authority is a good argument, but my criticism of the report is still valid becuase it does not recognize the fundamental structure of the Constitution when it criticizes the US for not having a specific privacy right enumerated in the Constitution.
Yes a frustration prevention system would be much more valuable. Frustration detection is easy - an accelerometer in the monitor to detect when the user hits the screen with their fist, or picks it up and throws it on the floor.
The frustration prevention system is closely related to the DWIM (do what I mean) interface.
Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington and Maine have passed legislation opposing it.
Similar bills are pending in Alaska, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., Wyoming and Vermont.
That is roughly 80% of the US States.
The other thing that seems to missing is the understanding of how the US Constitution works. Individual rights are natural, and cannot be legislated away. It Constitution only provides enablement of government activities; i.e. it defines when Habeas Corpus may be suspended, but does not list Habeas Corpus as a right because it is recognized as a natural right (and is much older than the Constitution). The Magna Carta was forced on the British Kings in large part because they were playing fast and loose with the Great Writ. Privacy is recognized the same way, and in several Supreme Court decisions it is invoked via the 9th amendment. There are some very important Supreme Court rulings based on it, including Roe v. Wade, Loving, Griswald and Eisenstadt. There is also recognition of the right to privacy in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments.
You would think that a study based in GB would recognize the importance of Common Law.
This assessment also totally misses the fact that many US State Constitutions include an explicit right to privacy clause. These clause tend to codify the Supreme Court decisions mentioned above.
This report to me to be a fairly weak bit of research.
1. DVR remote 2. AV Receiver Remote 3. HDTV remote 4. DVD Player remote
Each with it's own on-screen menu system.
When you have full-featured remotes with direct access buttons it is much easier to put together programming for a universal remote. Menus are very much a big problem when you are trying to do this sort of integration.
The problem I have with a menu system is that it is sometimes hard to find the option you are looking for. My cable box uses a menu system, and it is really atrocious.
Great, with this proposal my remote control won't provide me with the access to advanced features that I use because some off-the-street idiot doesn't understand the difference between PCM and THX II?
Procrustean feature limitation is NOT the answer. Maybe providing two remotes, one for Dummies and one for people who actually want to use their equipment - maybe.
Most people learn to not mess with things they don't understand on a full-featured remote. And you know what? That is a good lesson in life. The universe does not provide a 'for dummies' interface.
True, not all electricity is obtained from burning coal. But the percentages are well known, and are used in the calculation of the relative amounts of mercury.
Also, we probably are entitled to a little more information about how the mercury is recovered safely and efficently in this nebulous 'recycling' scheme you mention. What is the process, and how much of the mercury is recovered. At what energy cost?
I normally assume that users of Slashdot are aware of Google, and are capable of their own research but since this seems to be a mystery, here it is:
Not that is particularly matters though - since mercury recovery from coal burning is 0.0% and is very unlikely to change.
Don't figet and fumble through your leaflet looking for a market-speak response, we want real figures, since you're the enthusiast for spouting answers to every reasonable doubt expressed.
They are hardly 'reasonable' doubts, but rather stupid neo-Luddite responses to a well understood technology. It is really absurd as to what passes for thought on slashdot. Put up an article on the nanotechnology of dark energy and you get rapt acceptance of extremely speculative ideas. Put up an article on some worthwhile, proven technology and you get uninformed objections.
Slashdot Mirror
Full service gas stations are fairly rare and are generally present only in very affluent locations. Oregon and New Jersey have laws that prohibit customers from pumping their own gas, but the service they provide is not traditional full service - it is termed 'mini-service' in the industry because you don't find amenities like getting your windshield washed or oil checked.
The small inventor gets absolutely nothing if he 'locks up' the idea and nobody builds it. The incentive is clearly there for him to see the invention realized.
There are abuses in the system w.r.t. submarine patents like this one. Most of these occur because some parts of patent law are not properly interpreted or need reform. A ten+ year lag between initial filing and granting the patent is crazy.
But requiring the inventor to build the invention breaks all sorts of very productive business models. University research, small research companies, individual inventors, etc. etc. are a very productive part of the true innovative landscape that would be hurt badly by your proposal. Throwing the baby out with the bath water is not acceptable.
Sadly, people will use a conflict of interest as a means to dismiss someone else's opinions without even evaluating them on their merits. Truth is true regardless of the messenger; if a solar cell maker said the sky was clear, it would not cease to be so merely because the company has a vested interest in the sky being cloudless. What we have now are people who refuse even to look up to the sky to check, instead insisting that the messenger's conflict of interest must necessarily mean their statements are false or tainted.
The problem is that people are not in a position to rigorously determine what is true in most cases. If it were as easy as looking up to see if the sky were clear that is one thing. But that is usually not the case.
Not economically feasible. Running wires all over a city entails a LOT of infrastructure work, digging up streets, etc.
What you propose would make a lot of small inventors unable to patent ideas that they cannot afford to build. Also it would make it impossible for certain types of research companies to get funding.
Bad idea.
What are you supposed to do? Drive out to the substation every time you want to change a setting or make a reading?
Back in the '60s I saw a news broadcast showing Walter Cronkite playing Space War. About 3 years later I had 6 weeks to do a intersession project, so I learned FORTRAN and reverse engineered Space War from my memory of the TV show, and got it up and running on a PDP-8.
It was a lot of fun.
We can extract it out of the air for anyone who needs it.
The problem with Helium is that its atomic velocity as a gas is greater than escape velocity, so it is gradually leaving the Earth's gravitational field. Given no replacement from radioactive decay, its concentration in air will asymptotically decline to zero.
The problem is that his stats are cherry-picked in order to fulfill the 'good old days' fantasy. Back in the 1950's families did not own multiple automobiles, medical care was not what it is today (life expectancies were shorter, diseases like polio were rampant) and houses were much smaller. While job security was better, the number of high paying jobs was much smaller and opportunities for growth were smaller because people were tied to the same employer for most of their careers. A quite high percentage of college graduates (over 50% if you were female) went into teaching in the schools.
And that of course is if you were a white anglo-saxon male. If you weren't you couldn't live in a good school district, or were paid much less for the same work.
Not disclosing any conflict of interests that you may have, and then later getting found out that the conflicts were not disclosed is far more damaging to your reputation than disclosing them up front. There are any number of cases where not disclosing these conflicts is actually illegal; for example if you are a stock analyst, judge, lobbyist or politician.
People are not as dumb as you might think. If you disclose the potential conflict a reasonable person can evaluate what the potential issues are; if not there is always the question regarding what axe you are grinding. If you disclose a reasonable person would at least feel that he is being told what the viewpoint of the person is.
Senator George Mitchell once said when being evaluated for a position as a special envoy to Ireland to negotiate a settlement between the IRA and British government that the conflicts of interest that you have to worry about are the undisclosed ones.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased observer. The best thing is to know the biases so you can evaluate the work in the correct context.
The point is that videogame use is not correlated to obesity. Duh.
Ooops. Forgot the fact that the two most videogame obsessed countries don't have obesity problems.
Doh!
Great, somebody running an online payday loan business is complaining about fraud? You have got to be joking. Payday loan businesses are one of the most abusive forms of lending imaginable (APRs run 400%+), and should be illegal. And probably will be illegal in most places soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payday_loan
You whippersnappers don't vote, live in your mother's basements, don't pay taxes because you buy everything out of state on line and otherwise are no-account layabouts.
You are getting what you deserve.
They know better than to mess with the over-50's, half of which belong to some sort of militia, all of who own guns and having achieved adulthood during the 60's are ready to take to the streets on a moment's notice.
Now get off my lawn. If you want to mess up a lawn go out an get your own.
Take as much of these as possible while in college:
1. Writing.
2. Mathematics.
Everything else is vocational and can be picked up on the job or by self study.
'no statistical correlation' != 'doesn't cause'
'statistical correlation' != 'causes'
Correlation does not prove causation, however it is necessary condition for causation. If there is no correlation there is no causation.
Now you can argue the accuracy of the experiment involved and make a statement like "given the expected rate variability of sample size xyz we can place a 99% confidence interval on the causation being no higher than one case every 100 million vacinations" at which point it becomes far more sensible to spend your time and resources worrying about things far more likely to harm your child like riding in automobiles or getting E.coli in bad beef.
Don't hold your breath.
The assumption of power in absence of authority is a good argument, but my criticism of the report is still valid becuase it does not recognize the fundamental structure of the Constitution when it criticizes the US for not having a specific privacy right enumerated in the Constitution.
Yes a frustration prevention system would be much more valuable. Frustration detection is easy - an accelerometer in the monitor to detect when the user hits the screen with their fist, or picks it up and throws it on the floor.
The frustration prevention system is closely related to the DWIM (do what I mean) interface.
REAL-ID is pretty much dead in the water.
Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington and Maine have passed legislation opposing it.
Similar bills are pending in Alaska, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., Wyoming and Vermont.
That is roughly 80% of the US States.
The other thing that seems to missing is the understanding of how the US Constitution works. Individual rights are natural, and cannot be legislated away. It Constitution only provides enablement of government activities; i.e. it defines when Habeas Corpus may be suspended, but does not list Habeas Corpus as a right because it is recognized as a natural right (and is much older than the Constitution). The Magna Carta was forced on the British Kings in large part because they were playing fast and loose with the Great Writ. Privacy is recognized the same way, and in several Supreme Court decisions it is invoked via the 9th amendment. There are some very important Supreme Court rulings based on it, including Roe v. Wade, Loving, Griswald and Eisenstadt. There is also recognition of the right to privacy in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments.
You would think that a study based in GB would recognize the importance of Common Law.
This assessment also totally misses the fact that many US State Constitutions include an explicit right to privacy clause. These clause tend to codify the Supreme Court decisions mentioned above.
This report to me to be a fairly weak bit of research.
How do you do this when you have:
1. DVR remote
2. AV Receiver Remote
3. HDTV remote
4. DVD Player remote
Each with it's own on-screen menu system.
When you have full-featured remotes with direct access buttons it is much easier to put together programming for a universal remote. Menus are very much a big problem when you are trying to do this sort of integration.
Maybe I will have to modify my sig to something like "the probability of my signature being lower than your is 99.995%".
perhaps you should be doing it via a menu system
The problem I have with a menu system is that it is sometimes hard to find the option you are looking for. My cable box uses a menu system, and it is really atrocious.
Great, with this proposal my remote control won't provide me with the access to advanced features that I use because some off-the-street idiot doesn't understand the difference between PCM and THX II?
Procrustean feature limitation is NOT the answer. Maybe providing two remotes, one for Dummies and one for people who actually want to use their equipment - maybe.
Most people learn to not mess with things they don't understand on a full-featured remote. And you know what? That is a good lesson in life. The universe does not provide a 'for dummies' interface.
True, not all electricity is obtained from burning coal. But the percentages are well known, and are used in the calculation of the relative amounts of mercury.
Also, we probably are entitled to a little more information about how the mercury is recovered safely and efficently in this nebulous 'recycling' scheme you mention. What is the process, and how much of the mercury is recovered. At what energy cost?
I normally assume that users of Slashdot are aware of Google, and are capable of their own research but since this seems to be a mystery, here it is:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mercury+recovery+from+CFL+lamps&btnG=Google+Search
Not that is particularly matters though - since mercury recovery from coal burning is 0.0% and is very unlikely to change.
Don't figet and fumble through your leaflet looking for a market-speak response, we want real figures, since you're the enthusiast for spouting answers to every reasonable doubt expressed.
They are hardly 'reasonable' doubts, but rather stupid neo-Luddite responses to a well understood technology. It is really absurd as to what passes for thought on slashdot. Put up an article on the nanotechnology of dark energy and you get rapt acceptance of extremely speculative ideas. Put up an article on some worthwhile, proven technology and you get uninformed objections.