Why should they expect to profit off of those cells? They haven't done any actual work with them, just simply posessed them. The people who took those cells and did something with them are the ones who deserve to profit. For the family to expect anything reeks of entitlement.
The Lacks family should be paid $0.0008 for every mitotic cell division, since each one makes a digital copy of her genome. And those fees should be retroactive to 1951.
I mean, how'd you feel if the pharma industry made a killing on your dead mom's back while not giving you a cent of it, then comes back to you and asks for more?
Not that I disagree at all but that's an ironic stance for someone with your username.
Cancer is immortal because the tumor cells have lost their chromosomal integrity; some of them are missing parts of chromosome arms that have the genes for triggering apoptosis. Part of an arm of chromosome 3 in particular seems to confer certain superpowers of cancer on cells that lose it; without it the cells can't recognize intercellular signals, but in general these genes do not aid cancer cells in their competition with one another. So as the population starts to evolve as a gene pool of individuals with distinct genotypes (variations on your original) that compete with each other to dominate the tumor, the cells that survive are the ones that lose the ability to control themselves for the greater good of the entire population (i.e. you).
If taken care of, cancer cell populations can easily be kept alive for decades. HeLa cells were first cultured from a cervical tumor in a patient named Henrietta Lacks. There must be tons of HeLa cells in labs all over the world; all together they probably weigh hundreds of times as much as Henrietta ever did.
I hope to see commercials advertising fear-curing pills within the next few years so I can rush to the pharmacy with a prescription. In fact I think we should charge ahead with this and eliminate fear everywhere by putting it in the water with the fluoride. I see no downside or risk!
This story broke six weeks ago (I wrote up a great story submission that got rejected). Senator Stevens and a group of unnamed "friends" from a local oil company involved in bribery schemes got together one weekend to renovate the senator's house as a weekend project. They were going to lift the first floor off its foundation, build a new first floor, and drop the old first floor back on top as a second floor. Unfortunately they screwed it up somehow (imagine) and they had to bring in a local contractor; that's where the trail started on that one.
Care to explain why someone might have tagged this story "badnews?"
I figured it was because this plant will generate a third of a gallon of ethanol per year for each of us. That will get you about one trip to the local store. I hope this is just a proof of concept.
I would have used octal somewhere. Octal can make obfuscated code really mysterious because the only hint is the prepended zero. Unfortunately one of the obfuscation mechanisms here relies on sign flipping; changing the base from 8 to 10 won't screw with the result (I think). A switch statement on a loop variable with octal-valued case statements would be nice, especially with case fall-throughs and loop exits or manipulations of the variable, which should be quietly declared as a byte. That way you can loop from 0 to an int above +127 and so while everyone is looking at case 0200 you break out of the loop from within a negatively-valued case. It can be cleverly disguised as a "sanity check" that innocently throws an exception.
Although this is a more standard kind of obfuscation. It's more like a puzzle. The Hello World is funny because it's a straightforward overapplication of GoF patterns on a program that obviously doesn't need them, and it has no further obfuscation than that. It illustrates its point efficiently just by being unreadable. But it was easy to write because it doesn't take a lot of brain power to apply patterns to code. I didn't even really follow the control flow all the way through until after I had posted it.
Wow! That's impressive- I feel guilty now for carving so many minutes out of someone's life. Although if there were javadocs, I'd imagine that most of these disparaging comments would be within the HelloWorld class itself. The library code javadocs should always have lofty descriptions of themselves as if they're going to do brain surgery. Especially if they have empty implementations.
If I wrote this code in 2007 I would have used "setPayload()" instead of "configure()" so that MessageBody would follow standard JavaBean conventions. That would let me easily wire one up in a Spring XML file. Maybe I could even insert AOP pointcuts somewhere. After all Hello World is the sort of application that practically screams for aspect oriented programming.
Ahh never mind- the initial reference to the AtomicReference itself would require synchronization on the class lock. Plus we might add more fields to DefaultFactory as we extend it in the future to add more features, so the explicit synchronization is more maintainable. Although maintainability is a questionable objective for this project.
No need to synchronize anything; since the object and its superclass declare no corruptible fields that can be observed in an inconsistent state, protecting the singleton with a static AtomicReference will prevent the worst case scenario (two threads each having their own copy of a stateless singleton) with less overhead than explicit synchronization.
Not so secure when the company is sued for stealing source code. He took credit (with his copywright notice) for a very old joke. A blatent copy-and-paste. One has to wonder how much of that he does on the job.
Ha ha, joke's on you, you dick- that "old joke" was written by me five years ago as part of a larger post and I was not at work- in fact it was way after hours and I was about to go home. I just started with the base concrete implementation and this is what it looked like after a few minutes of stuffing patterns into it- Singleton, Factory, and Strategy. I keep thinking one of these days I'll release a 2.0 version with Proxy and Bridge. Since I was the original author I retain the right to paste it wherever I want and to attach any license agreement I feel like attaching.
This has become the most famous code I've ever written which is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your career. So far it has netted me about 20-30 karma points over the years (lord knows how much karma was gotten from pirated copies). I found it being examined in some software engineering papers and it even made its way into one of the patterns books (as an example of "Patterns Happy" code). When I found out about that, I made the guy send me a free copy and acknowledge me in print so I can maybe net some jobs unnecessarily screwing up simple code with GoF patterns which always pays well. Now that I released it under the terms of the Apache license he might come back for his book.
Ooops, I almost forgot: /*
Hello World
Copyright 2002 MillionthMonkey
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License. */
I think Slashdot is rapidly working towards another corollary to Godwin's Law....
When something is obvious I'll point it out. I prefer to avoid Bush as a topic because of "congratulations" replies like this; unfortunately Bush affects too many things that need talking about and we can't talk about them if he gets his own Godwin's Law before he even leaves office. We can't even talk about Hitler anymore because indiscriminate application of Godwin's Law shut down down all conversation about him too.
Yes, my wife goes there too with the money I make. And we get it about once a week at work too- we get catered lunches. So I'm eating a lot of Whole Foods but if it gets expensive we'll just get whole foods instead of Whole Foods.
From an anticompetitive standpoint this just makes no sense. It would be like preventing Hooters and Winghouse from merging. Although that's a bad example because Hooters did try to stick it to Winghouse by seeking trademark protection for its scantily clad hot chicks.
On reflection, this should have little to nothing to do with the acquisition of another company.
It has ZERO to do with the acquisition of another company and the FTC knows it.
Mr. Mackey's online alter ego came to light in a document made public late Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission in its lawsuit seeking to block the Wild Oats takeover on antitrust grounds. Submitted under seal when the suit was filed in June, the filing included a quotation from the Yahoo site. An FTC footnote said, "As here, Mr. Mackey often posted to Internet sites pseudonymously, often using the name Rahodeb."
This is typical Bush Administration crap to justify an ad hoc regulatory decision after the fact, a decision that appears to be based on the lefty politics of the two companies involved. These guys always have the same M.O. They relentlessly take politics into consideration whenever they have to decide in an official government capacity who to help or hurt. Help goes right and hurt goes left. My guess is, this was basically all the dirt that opposition research could find on Whole Foods. A bunch of stupid posts from a CEO at home.
How were these posts even found? If a CEO posts as an AC, what databases (secret or otherwise) would contain this information? How would the FTC even know to look for something like this? Did they find his home IP and do a wide search for it in hopes of fishing something up? (I imagine the information path was NSA-DHS-FTC-WSJ.) Are they looking for posts from CEOs of other companies that merge, or just this one?
There is simply no basis to the argument that Whole Foods' acquisition of Wild Oats should be called into question because of stupid online posts from a CEO. If SBC and AT&T want to merge, that's OK. If the nation's largest hog producer buys the second largest, that's OK too. But a less than 1 billion dollar merger between Whole Foods and Wild Oats, well we can't have that because then yuppies will have no place to go to get their overpriced fruits and vegetables!
Ever since the Democrats got a slender majority in the House, the Republicans in the Senate have been using filibusters to block even routine legislation from getting through. Unless there are 60 votes for this in the Senate it will die there. Or it won't come to a vote for months. And once it comes back after the veto, there will have to be 67 votes. The courts can't be relied on to fix things anymore because Bush stuffed them with ideologues and corporatists who will now have lifetime careers in the federal judiciary issuing judgments like this one. He almost got Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court- a woman who just illegally blew off a Congressional subpoena today, leading to the spectacle of an empty chair being screamed at in the House Judiciary committee. Steve Ballmer would have thrown it.
Somebody has to start making phone calls. For Internet radio the Senate bill to call about is S.1353. The House bill is HR.2060. Make especially sure to call Senators. Even as of today (12th) people are reporting that people in Congress haven't even heard of this thing.
This is the most hilariously worded Slashdot headline I've seen in like a week. The guy was basically describing an algorithm, nothing more. For technical reasons page view statistics are becoming irrelevant- so now they calculate a new metric that supposedly gives weight to longer user session lifetimes. Maybe they just pay more attention to overall HTTP query traffic or something. The effect of this would be, say, to boost a site such as AOL chat (an extreme example of a site with a low page view count and long session lifetime), and de-emphasize a site such as Google (an extreme example of a site with a high page view count and short session lifetime). For purposes of illustration, he just picked two examples that would make sense to people.
The article submission takes the angle that this is a kick in the nuts for Google! As if Google depends on Nielsen's reporting high metrics to advertisers so that they can charge more for banner ads! So Nielsen would report a low metric for Google! Oooh, what intrigue! Nielsen has their balls in a sling now! How will Google retaliate?
But that wasn't the point the guy was making at all; for him Google was just a good example of an extreme example. I would guess that nobody in either company is really concerned about Nielsen's calculated metric for Google. Google acts as its own Nielsen and competes with Nielsen using a not-quite-equivalent business model. It's a sort of integrated content provider/ratings company all on its own. They don't need to have their metrics reported to advertisers. Advertisers are showing up with money already for that AdSense program, and the cost is associated with a metric calculated for a search term, not Google as a content provider itself. The advertiser has already chosen Google (as the content provider) so implicitly of course they also have to agree to the terms of Google's ratings service since it's part of the package. Nielsen's rating of the Google home page doesn't enter into it! Just ask anyone using AdSense if they gave a crap about Google's Nielsen rating.
The rubber ducks story makes me wonder if stationary platforms are really a necessity.
Here's an idea. We can mass produce floating rubber ducks. Each duck has leg appendages for traction in the water, a portable generator and nickel metal hydride battery in its base, and a propeller sticking up from a little hat on its head. Every year, we'll dump massive quantities of ducks- billions of ducks- into the North Pacific from cargo ships. They'll wash into the pack ice in Alaska, and then they'll move a mile a day, frozen in the ice, with their propellers whirring. This is ideal since the wind there is intense and the ice anchors the duck from blowing around too much. Eventually in 15 years they make it down into the north Atlantic where they can be collected by British people who relieve them of their fully recharged NiMH cells, swapping them for exhausted cells harvested from last year's ducks, and then the little guys continue their trek around the oceans delivering cheap renewable energy to people all around the world. And it really is renewable since 50 years later when the ducks wear out and arrive back in the north Pacific, the nickel can be melted back out of the cells.
Or instead of NiMH energy storage, we can have the rubber ducks shoot little lasers from their eyes at a satellite in geosynchronous orbit which would gather the energy and emit an intense maser beam at a giant microwave antenna somewhere in the southwest. That would be much more convenient.
While we're at it, we can have the ducks do wireless packet routing for us across the surface of the water. They can also have little spy cameras mounted in their heads in case the British need a little convincing. There just has to be something cool you could do with a billion rubber ducks spread across the ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to evaluate 6cos(pi/2). It's constant, so d/dx is zero.
444r6h (4n'7 y0u r34d? 7h47 15 3x4(7|y wh47 1 ju57 wr073!
4nd y0u'r3 571|| m1551n6 7h3 73rm f0r d5(053x/dx.
..OMG, did anyone see that to register you have to solve a math problem like:
derivative of (5*sin 3x +6cos(-pi/2))
7h15 15 345y. 6 * (05(-p1/2) = z3r0), 50 7h3 4n5w3r 15 ju57 15 * (05(3x).
|\/|y m07h3r (0u|d h4v3 d1ff3r3n71473d 7h47.
Why should they expect to profit off of those cells? They haven't done any actual work with them, just simply posessed them. The people who took those cells and did something with them are the ones who deserve to profit. For the family to expect anything reeks of entitlement.
The Lacks family should be paid $0.0008 for every mitotic cell division, since each one makes a digital copy of her genome. And those fees should be retroactive to 1951.
I mean, how'd you feel if the pharma industry made a killing on your dead mom's back while not giving you a cent of it, then comes back to you and asks for more?
Not that I disagree at all but that's an ironic stance for someone with your username.
Cancer is immortal because the tumor cells have lost their chromosomal integrity; some of them are missing parts of chromosome arms that have the genes for triggering apoptosis. Part of an arm of chromosome 3 in particular seems to confer certain superpowers of cancer on cells that lose it; without it the cells can't recognize intercellular signals, but in general these genes do not aid cancer cells in their competition with one another. So as the population starts to evolve as a gene pool of individuals with distinct genotypes (variations on your original) that compete with each other to dominate the tumor, the cells that survive are the ones that lose the ability to control themselves for the greater good of the entire population (i.e. you).
If taken care of, cancer cell populations can easily be kept alive for decades. HeLa cells were first cultured from a cervical tumor in a patient named Henrietta Lacks. There must be tons of HeLa cells in labs all over the world; all together they probably weigh hundreds of times as much as Henrietta ever did.
I hope to see commercials advertising fear-curing pills within the next few years so I can rush to the pharmacy with a prescription. In fact I think we should charge ahead with this and eliminate fear everywhere by putting it in the water with the fluoride. I see no downside or risk!
This story broke six weeks ago (I wrote up a great story submission that got rejected). Senator Stevens and a group of unnamed "friends" from a local oil company involved in bribery schemes got together one weekend to renovate the senator's house as a weekend project. They were going to lift the first floor off its foundation, build a new first floor, and drop the old first floor back on top as a second floor. Unfortunately they screwed it up somehow (imagine) and they had to bring in a local contractor; that's where the trail started on that one.
Care to explain why someone might have tagged this story "badnews?"
I figured it was because this plant will generate a third of a gallon of ethanol per year for each of us. That will get you about one trip to the local store. I hope this is just a proof of concept.
I would have used octal somewhere. Octal can make obfuscated code really mysterious because the only hint is the prepended zero. Unfortunately one of the obfuscation mechanisms here relies on sign flipping; changing the base from 8 to 10 won't screw with the result (I think). A switch statement on a loop variable with octal-valued case statements would be nice, especially with case fall-throughs and loop exits or manipulations of the variable, which should be quietly declared as a byte. That way you can loop from 0 to an int above +127 and so while everyone is looking at case 0200 you break out of the loop from within a negatively-valued case. It can be cleverly disguised as a "sanity check" that innocently throws an exception.
Although this is a more standard kind of obfuscation. It's more like a puzzle. The Hello World is funny because it's a straightforward overapplication of GoF patterns on a program that obviously doesn't need them, and it has no further obfuscation than that. It illustrates its point efficiently just by being unreadable. But it was easy to write because it doesn't take a lot of brain power to apply patterns to code. I didn't even really follow the control flow all the way through until after I had posted it.
Wow! That's impressive- I feel guilty now for carving so many minutes out of someone's life. Although if there were javadocs, I'd imagine that most of these disparaging comments would be within the HelloWorld class itself. The library code javadocs should always have lofty descriptions of themselves as if they're going to do brain surgery. Especially if they have empty implementations.
If I wrote this code in 2007 I would have used "setPayload()" instead of "configure()" so that MessageBody would follow standard JavaBean conventions. That would let me easily wire one up in a Spring XML file. Maybe I could even insert AOP pointcuts somewhere. After all Hello World is the sort of application that practically screams for aspect oriented programming.
Ahh never mind- the initial reference to the AtomicReference itself would require synchronization on the class lock. Plus we might add more fields to DefaultFactory as we extend it in the future to add more features, so the explicit synchronization is more maintainable. Although maintainability is a questionable objective for this project.
No need to synchronize anything; since the object and its superclass declare no corruptible fields that can be observed in an inconsistent state, protecting the singleton with a static AtomicReference will prevent the worst case scenario (two threads each having their own copy of a stateless singleton) with less overhead than explicit synchronization.
Not so secure when the company is sued for stealing source code. He took credit (with his copywright notice) for a very old joke. A blatent copy-and-paste. One has to wonder how much of that he does on the job.
Ha ha, joke's on you, you dick- that "old joke" was written by me five years ago as part of a larger post and I was not at work- in fact it was way after hours and I was about to go home. I just started with the base concrete implementation and this is what it looked like after a few minutes of stuffing patterns into it- Singleton, Factory, and Strategy. I keep thinking one of these days I'll release a 2.0 version with Proxy and Bridge. Since I was the original author I retain the right to paste it wherever I want and to attach any license agreement I feel like attaching.
This has become the most famous code I've ever written which is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your career. So far it has netted me about 20-30 karma points over the years (lord knows how much karma was gotten from pirated copies). I found it being examined in some software engineering papers and it even made its way into one of the patterns books (as an example of "Patterns Happy" code). When I found out about that, I made the guy send me a free copy and acknowledge me in print so I can maybe net some jobs unnecessarily screwing up simple code with GoF patterns which always pays well. Now that I released it under the terms of the Apache license he might come back for his book.
Ooops, I almost forgot:
/*
Hello World
Copyright 2002 MillionthMonkey
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
*/
You're welcome, "World"!
public interface MessageStrategy {
public void sendMessage();
}
public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}
public class MessageBody {
Object payload;
public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
ms.sendMessage();
}
}
public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
private DefaultFactory() {}
static DefaultFactory instance;
public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
return instance;
}
public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
return new MessageStrategy() {
MessageBody body = mb;
public void sendMessage() {
Object obj = body.getPayload();
System.out.println(obj.toString());
}
};
}
}
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
mb.configure("Hello World!");
AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
mb.send(strategy);
}
}
I think Slashdot is rapidly working towards another corollary to Godwin's Law....
When something is obvious I'll point it out. I prefer to avoid Bush as a topic because of "congratulations" replies like this; unfortunately Bush affects too many things that need talking about and we can't talk about them if he gets his own Godwin's Law before he even leaves office. We can't even talk about Hitler anymore because indiscriminate application of Godwin's Law shut down down all conversation about him too.
Yes, my wife goes there too with the money I make. And we get it about once a week at work too- we get catered lunches. So I'm eating a lot of Whole Foods but if it gets expensive we'll just get whole foods instead of Whole Foods.
From an anticompetitive standpoint this just makes no sense. It would be like preventing Hooters and Winghouse from merging. Although that's a bad example because Hooters did try to stick it to Winghouse by seeking trademark protection for its scantily clad hot chicks.
It has ZERO to do with the acquisition of another company and the FTC knows it.This is typical Bush Administration crap to justify an ad hoc regulatory decision after the fact, a decision that appears to be based on the lefty politics of the two companies involved. These guys always have the same M.O. They relentlessly take politics into consideration whenever they have to decide in an official government capacity who to help or hurt. Help goes right and hurt goes left. My guess is, this was basically all the dirt that opposition research could find on Whole Foods. A bunch of stupid posts from a CEO at home.
How were these posts even found? If a CEO posts as an AC, what databases (secret or otherwise) would contain this information? How would the FTC even know to look for something like this? Did they find his home IP and do a wide search for it in hopes of fishing something up? (I imagine the information path was NSA-DHS-FTC-WSJ.) Are they looking for posts from CEOs of other companies that merge, or just this one?
There is simply no basis to the argument that Whole Foods' acquisition of Wild Oats should be called into question because of stupid online posts from a CEO. If SBC and AT&T want to merge, that's OK. If the nation's largest hog producer buys the second largest, that's OK too. But a less than 1 billion dollar merger between Whole Foods and Wild Oats, well we can't have that because then yuppies will have no place to go to get their overpriced fruits and vegetables!
And by "taxpayers", they mean Randall Stephenson and Richard Lindner.
Never mind "taxpayers"- what's the real name of the stupid company that is calling themselves "AT&T" this week? Is it still Cingular?
No, they've got time to do this.
Ever since the Democrats got a slender majority in the House, the Republicans in the Senate have been using filibusters to block even routine legislation from getting through. Unless there are 60 votes for this in the Senate it will die there. Or it won't come to a vote for months. And once it comes back after the veto, there will have to be 67 votes. The courts can't be relied on to fix things anymore because Bush stuffed them with ideologues and corporatists who will now have lifetime careers in the federal judiciary issuing judgments like this one. He almost got Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court- a woman who just illegally blew off a Congressional subpoena today, leading to the spectacle of an empty chair being screamed at in the House Judiciary committee. Steve Ballmer would have thrown it.
Somebody has to start making phone calls. For Internet radio the Senate bill to call about is S.1353. The House bill is HR.2060. Make especially sure to call Senators. Even as of today (12th) people are reporting that people in Congress haven't even heard of this thing.
You already have fifty friends. To add more friends, please first select one or more of your existing friends and drag them to the Dead To Me folder.
NOTE: Subscribers can have up to 500 friends!
[x] Tell me more
A person should have 50 friends, max. Problem solved.
This is the most hilariously worded Slashdot headline I've seen in like a week. The guy was basically describing an algorithm, nothing more. For technical reasons page view statistics are becoming irrelevant- so now they calculate a new metric that supposedly gives weight to longer user session lifetimes. Maybe they just pay more attention to overall HTTP query traffic or something. The effect of this would be, say, to boost a site such as AOL chat (an extreme example of a site with a low page view count and long session lifetime), and de-emphasize a site such as Google (an extreme example of a site with a high page view count and short session lifetime). For purposes of illustration, he just picked two examples that would make sense to people.
The article submission takes the angle that this is a kick in the nuts for Google! As if Google depends on Nielsen's reporting high metrics to advertisers so that they can charge more for banner ads! So Nielsen would report a low metric for Google! Oooh, what intrigue! Nielsen has their balls in a sling now! How will Google retaliate?
But that wasn't the point the guy was making at all; for him Google was just a good example of an extreme example. I would guess that nobody in either company is really concerned about Nielsen's calculated metric for Google. Google acts as its own Nielsen and competes with Nielsen using a not-quite-equivalent business model. It's a sort of integrated content provider/ratings company all on its own. They don't need to have their metrics reported to advertisers. Advertisers are showing up with money already for that AdSense program, and the cost is associated with a metric calculated for a search term, not Google as a content provider itself. The advertiser has already chosen Google (as the content provider) so implicitly of course they also have to agree to the terms of Google's ratings service since it's part of the package. Nielsen's rating of the Google home page doesn't enter into it! Just ask anyone using AdSense if they gave a crap about Google's Nielsen rating.
If I owned that many Treasury bonds AND a nuclear submarine I'd unfurl a big legible banner in English across the top of it:
PAY UP
The rubber ducks story makes me wonder if stationary platforms are really a necessity.
Here's an idea. We can mass produce floating rubber ducks. Each duck has leg appendages for traction in the water, a portable generator and nickel metal hydride battery in its base, and a propeller sticking up from a little hat on its head. Every year, we'll dump massive quantities of ducks- billions of ducks- into the North Pacific from cargo ships. They'll wash into the pack ice in Alaska, and then they'll move a mile a day, frozen in the ice, with their propellers whirring. This is ideal since the wind there is intense and the ice anchors the duck from blowing around too much. Eventually in 15 years they make it down into the north Atlantic where they can be collected by British people who relieve them of their fully recharged NiMH cells, swapping them for exhausted cells harvested from last year's ducks, and then the little guys continue their trek around the oceans delivering cheap renewable energy to people all around the world. And it really is renewable since 50 years later when the ducks wear out and arrive back in the north Pacific, the nickel can be melted back out of the cells.
Or instead of NiMH energy storage, we can have the rubber ducks shoot little lasers from their eyes at a satellite in geosynchronous orbit which would gather the energy and emit an intense maser beam at a giant microwave antenna somewhere in the southwest. That would be much more convenient.
While we're at it, we can have the ducks do wireless packet routing for us across the surface of the water. They can also have little spy cameras mounted in their heads in case the British need a little convincing. There just has to be something cool you could do with a billion rubber ducks spread across the ocean.