Yeah.. a coping mechanism. I mean.. remembering who you, your children, your wife, your family are.. how bothersome. Remembering how to walk, dress yourself, and ultimately.. how to breathe or keep your heart beating.. how tedious.
My grandfather had alzheimers for about 15 years, ultimately he died in a VA hospital, with family all around him. Weeks prior, he had shouted at people [including his wife and daughters] that they were keeping him from his family against his will. At the end he could not even do that, as he had forgotten how to talk. His liver and kidneys shut down, and eventually, his brain forgot how to keep his heart beating.
We should stop and consider how cruel it is to remember things before we go about treating alzheimers.
Thats kind of like saying everyone should get cancer, you know.. to teach them all to stop driving so fast.
Without meaning to brag, I am 160+.. and had exactly the same experience. Technically, they didn't move me OUT of the school, but they had special classes that they only allowed 'certain' kids in. Outside of regular class work, they would pull us out of our 'normal' rooms and bring us to a separate room. Let me reassure you, the normal teachers LOVED this, no.. really.
There was a lot of unstructured learning, although, there was certainly more of a focus on learning for the sake of learning. [Similar to a Montessori like environment.] But the net result was the same. By the time I was into High school, where they no longer had this program, I had learned that it was far easier just to skate in subjects that held no interest, than to try to power through them.
It took me a number of years to unlearn this bad habit. To this day, I will sometimes procrastinate on crap that I *KNOW* is easy or tedious to do, counting on the fact that its easy to allow me to pick up the slack later. Now I force myself to learn things outside of my comfort zone, and consider myself better for it. But man, all that time wasted.
I'm not sure about this.. but maybe its changed in the 20 or so years since high school.
I am well in the 110+ category, and had quite a lot of sexual activity in high school. Certainly not 100's of girls, but 'several' would be a polite guess. I was most certainly a geek, but I was a social geek. I could talk to anyone [If I chose to, which is a different issue], and really, aside from a few people that had issues with me, seldom noticed or would abide by the typical high school hierarchy. I swapped jokes with football players, and chemistry nerds. Hung out with the punk kids, and dated the president of the honors society. [Whom incidentally, also fell well into the 110 + category, and not only surpassed me in numbers, but in sheer wanton gusto - quite the slutty pair we made:P -- ahh memories.] I had friends that were Band geeks, burn outs, and muscle car freaks.
Maybe today its different, maybe with the aids scare in the 90's.. kids that are 'smarter' are really just kids that have a higher emotional understanding of the dangers that go with sex now a days.
Otherwise, I would suggest that social skills, in place of IQ or academics, has more to do with sexual activity in teenagers. I mean.. everyone has seen American Pie right ?
What *IS* curious though, is that personally I have noticed a parallel to their study. It involves the same IQ ranges, and the number of children married folks in those ranges seem to have. Lets face it, who hasn't been to walmart and seen the large group of seemingly uneducated, possibly low IQ'ed, family consisting of like 8 kids and mom, maybe dad. Maybe the real secret here is not that lower IQ people have more sex, but that higher IQ people know when to stop (or at least wear protection).
Kinda makes you wonder what evolutionary quirk set THAT particular survival trait up doesn't it:( One would think that high IQ breeding pairs should biologically desire to produce MORE offspring, not less.
Something you should keep in mind on the 'outside management' front. When a company is looking for the next round of VC funding.. Management, [somewhat on the director level, but mostly higher] is very important in a VC's decision to give you more money.
So what you, someone who is working on the floor, might have interpreted as a rush to hire outside management from a big company - might actually have been a play to make the company more 'fundable' in a VC's eyes.
Additionally, as much as its great to think that employing directors from within, at a company that is a one or two year old startup - thats unrealistic. Fortune 500's can afford to promote from within, because people might be sitting in the next position down for several years. A startup doesn't have that luxury. If a start up needs a director, they need it now.. and they need them to hit the ground running with a proven track record, because even a low 2-3 months ramp up time is a major asset burn.
Also.. something to consider with software etc spending :
Many times, a VC will give a new company starting $$ with caviats. Like : "We promise you 15 million, and here is $3m of it, once you buy all microsoft/sun/oracal platforms, [at a cost of 8 million] we will give you the remaining balance." So those hundreds of thousands they were spending on monitoring software might have been a stipulation along the road of aquiring funds. [This is very common place in the VC world - more so on the west coast vs the east.]
Not saying this is what happened at SunRocket, just that what was going on, might not have been visible to the folks outside of the boardroom.
Imagine.. if you will.. you are in charge of taking the LARGEST e-tailer on line, and maintaining its profitability. Your guys came up with this neat one-click idea. Now.. imagine you DON'T try to protect this asset, and invest hundreds of millions in advertising to promote your new.. speedier service. Three months later, your competition do exactly the same thing, and your investors are looking to replace you.
What Amazon did in the early 90's is *NO* different than what chemical research compainies and bio-tech are doing now.
I work closely with the patents and applications issued/filed each week.. and you haven't LIVED until you have looked at a *TWO* meg text file.. containing the ENTIRE genetic sequence of a particular gene.
So.. what your telling me, is that its not ok if amazon tries to protect itself and its 'assets' by playing within the rules of the system. But it *IS* ok for a biotech company to patent a *HUMAN GENE STRUCTURE* ?
lol.. if you want to pick a fight about how the patent system can be abused, amazon is a layman's choice of example.
Employee is a terminal fuckup. Discharged from Air Force. Stealing from employer and got caught. Why am I not surprised that he isn't smart enough to just take his licks and let it lay low ?
I mean.. if this guy has been falsifying T&E reports and got caught.. thats fraud brother.. over $250 its a felony. Is this REALLY the button he wants to be pushing ?
Meh..
Sounds to me like someone got caught and is trying for a sympathy play.
Virtual(tm) Rape is a Virtual(tm) Crime, and falls under the jurisdiction of the Virtual(tm) Police. These real world schmucks have no business sticking their real world-non-pixilated-noses where they don't belong.
Move along citizen, there is Virtually nothing to see here.
Corporations are the most LIKELY to invest in long term because they have the funds and assets to handle the risk/reward.
As for tech transfer.. and universities spending 'tax payer dollars'.. Do you even KNOW what the semester cost is to go to MIT ? [arguably the school with the best tech transfer program out there.] I'm fairly sure they are not spending 'tax-payer money' in their research programs.
What did Disney do that was special ?
hmm.. I guess basically taking animation and turning it from an idea.. into an art form doesn't count ?
Before all of Walt's [and his original animators] hard work, and sacrifice [and anyone who starts from 2 people in a single room.. has sacrificed.] animation of any quality was unknown in the American theater.
Without Disney, there would be no Warner Brothers Cartoons, maybe not even any Anime. Hell.. most of the original Warner Bros. artists WORKED for Disney at some point.
Whats also funny, is that one of the reasons Disney was so gung-ho on protecting their assets, is that Walt's original animation character 'Oswald the Rabbit' Was stolen by the same Warner brother's artists that stopped working for him.
I have a basement with 10 pins in it.. all Bally machines from between 1990 and 1996.. my 2-year old cut his teeth on them:) Actually, he prefers when we play the pins over us playing a racing game or something on the 360.
We're not going to pass through the tail of a comet are we ? I mean.. solar storms I can handle, but those damn comet tails hold zombies. Self preservation would make me hide out in a tin garden shed, or the back of my big-rig, but really, the world is just doomed from that point on.
If companies don't pay maintenance fees on a patent it will become abandoned, and thus (after a grace period) public domain. Patents that are expired, (17-20 years) are of course already thus.
Try searching on http://www.patentmonkey.com/ and the results will show you status. Roumour has it that just 10 minutes ago they fixed it so you can even be able to SEARCH on status.. like.. show me all the patents with 'cel phone' in the title that are abandoned.
While you are there, you can browse patents by front page - as if you were in the patent office in VA too.
Its fine with me actually. This way, I can educate my child about science, and math, and my wife can teach him about art, and dance. Together we can encourage him to read, and do logic problems.
That way, with all the current hand holding and empowerment, catering to religious jerks who just want to hook kids on god so they can get their tithe, banned book lists, and cancellation of art and sport programs - our kid will have such a huge edge on 99% of the public school systems output in the USA.
While all the kids of parents who couldn't give a crap about teaching their child to learn, drone on in do-nothing positions in go-nowhere jobs, my child can be running one of those companies, and be swapping their sweat and blood for privileges for his OWN kids future.
He can laugh at his employees, who parents insisted on schools having programs in Spanish, or even better, Ebonics - because those children will already be steps behind in dealing with society as a whole in this country. [No offense meant to Spanish or Latin folks who moved here and continue to work their asses off for the betterment of their kids' future - my wife is fluent in Spanish, and of course we are teaching it to our Son, but to insist that kids be taught in Spanish because they don't know English - and its an unfair advantage - well.. you DO live in a country where English is the primary language. Ebonics advocates, your on your own - Ebonics is just plain jack-ass stupid. Why not teach your kids that apples are really bananas while you are at it.. its about the same level of denial.]
He can look at kids who had NO art or sports in school, and were taught to read with phonics - and study for test scores. They wont have problem solving skills, or the ability to be truly creative in finding a solution.
Even better, he will be able to watch the kids who could ONLY learn by watching videos or playing video games - flounder when they have to learn something in the real world, or deal with a presentation, make a speech, or attend a board room meeting. They will be disadvantaged, having been programmed early on to become visual-only learners.
Great.. I say.. great news. My kid needs all the advantages he can get.
Actually, none of those things will deter a bloodhound from separating out scents they are trained to find. [And Chemical Mace would certainly set off the airport's sniffers - resulting in searched luggage anyways.
Coffee beans.. heh.. thats what happens to your brain when you SMOKE too much pot, coffee beans will clear lingering residue from a human's nose, barely, if your like.. smelling perfume, or candles.. because its normally of of a differnt tone of scent, not because it masks smells:P
I can see the conversation in Amsterdam now :
'Dude, I was in a Yankee Candle, and I was smelling a Berry-Bliss candle, and man, then I tried to smell a vanilla-bean candle, and I couldn't smell it man - so like.. they had these coffee beans there man, and I smelled them, and it TOTALLY hid the Berry-Bliss smell, So I could like, smell the vanillia then man. We should put coffee in our luggage to hide the pot smell man.'
At its worst, it would clear the dog's nose inbetwen sniffs, so they could smell the Pot better:P
Generic corn is dangerous.. as opposed to the alternative I suppose, which is starving.
Starving has been proven to cause damage to not only the liver and kidneys, but the heart, lungs, prostrate, genitals, and even the brain.
Given the choice, corn is certainly the lesser of two evils.
Seriously though, Greenpeace is not exactly on the 'feed the world' bandwagon. I mean, its better that people eat only natural foods, farmed with traditional methods that prove costly and ineffectual in certain climates and indeed, whole land masses.
Far better to convince people that its evil food, than to just accept that evil food could be slightly better than NO food. Especially if the evil part is mostly PR, so you can meet your fund raising goals next quarter.
Just in case anyone was interested, here is a full list of Microsoft's Issued Patents [Current as of a week or two ago]. Its hosted at a free patent searching tool, so don't blame me if their servers melt.:)
Just because he is an idiot doesn't make him a libertarian. I'm certainly a libertarian, but i find his idea moronic. The reality of the situation is that the school system isn't failing for all the reasons people think it is, the school system is failing simply because the majority of parents out there consider it nothing more than baby sitting.
Teachers would never get 'fair market value' for their skills. They don't get it now. A new teacher in Baltimore MD starts off at approximately $30k a year, for someone who is going to play a big part in your child's future. $30k. By comparison, again in Baltimore, you can get a job answering phone calls for the local Cable company that STARTS at 32k a year. They recommend that you have a high school diploma, but do not really check.
Privatizing a school system isn't going to make salary better. People think of Teachers as baby sitters. If you make Teacher salary dependent on how people 'value' them, then they will be paid about as much as someone would be willing to pay a baby sitter to watch their kid all day.
What we NEED to do, is stop the school system from being a political game. Math teachers shouldn't get paid any more than English teachers, or Music Teachers, or Art Teachers, or Gym teachers for that matter.
Thats like saying you will pay a computer programmer more because he writes his code in blue fonts as opposed to red fonts.
Teachers don't get paid by their subject matter, they get paid because they have been trained to *TEACH*. Any idiot can do calculus, assuming of course, that they had a good teacher show them how.. ironic.. isn't it. You can take a mathematician, who can do linear algebra matricides in his/her head, but unless they know how to pass that information on to other people, they will never get a teaching job.
They saying 'those who can't.. teach' really *ISN'T* a slight against teachers, its more a slight against people who are brilliant in their field. To be brilliant at something, anything.. normally requires an intense amount of work with the subject matter. (or a big gift) People who are that close to their work (or who's work is easier than thought for them) normally have a hard time showing others how to do things the same way.
So long story short, teachers don't get the respect they deserve. I know, I'm married to one. She has changed COUNTLESS kids lives, and makes less than I did as a Cable call center technician. Which, by the way, was a job I could do in my sleep, because somewhere along the line, someone who was a good teacher, showed me how.
What a crock. This is an example of the religious folks of the world trying to exude some pressure to 'convince' folks that if you don't believe in a god too.. then your not normal.
I postulate that, if a kid is raised by strictly religious parents, and indoctrinated into religious belief as a child, then its certainly not a surprise that they might become religious as an adult.
Conversely, very few of those raised, non-religiously - the key phrase here is *RAISED* not.. *ABANDONED* and not cared for - sudden find a craving for Religion to make their lives complete.
Kids do what their parents do. If you don't believe this, go to any hospital in the USA, on any given day, and ask new parents if they had their son's circumcised. Then ask them why.
Not that I have a care on either side of the fence on circumcision, just that its another thing people tend to 'follow their family trend' on. [Oddly enough, almost parallel.]
But to say that people are hard wired for religion is crap, its safer to say we are hard wired to kill each other, than to suggest that religion is part of our DNA. Of course, the religious right doesn't want you to know about DNA in the first place. I mean.. if religion was REALLY part of our genetic makeup, then there couldn't exist a culture where religion was simply non-existant. Certainly not a town, or an entire COUNTRY where religion was basically abandoned for several decades. Right Soviet Russia ?
Apparantly they have all been used to transfer a virus, that was originally an experiment in Santa Cebeza to produce larger meat breed cows. The fact that they can be trapped in a glass bottle, and smashed to eliminate dozens off zombies at once, has lead to their demise.
Wake me up when they find a meteor in one of them that proves our oceans were seeded by alien bugs that rode a comet into our atmosphere. Of course, some spunky senator's daughter that works for NSA will probably figure it all out to be a farce. And fall in love. But.. what can you do ?
Because.. ahh.. EVERY bomb that a terrorist would plant in a busy metro area would *BLINK FLASHING LIGHTS* That makes them easier to hide i hear. Almost as easy if the Blinking Lights spell out BOMB, or if there is a loudspeaker attached to the device that shouts out the countdown until explosion.
Everyone knows, the best way to hide anything is to call all the attention to it that you can.
So to repeat the objection, any *idiot* should have known this was not a bomb. Someone trying to hide an explosive payload certainly wouldn't have taken the time to build a blinking LED display to go over the bomb. At least not outside of hollywood.
See this article also on Crunchgear. Microsoft filed patent applications for a wireless cellphone rich media device in 2005, chances are they DO have something in development.
About 20 mins later crunch gear posted this article as well, which features a links to the Patent Applications they filed a few years ago, as well as a VERY interesting link to M$'s entire patent portfolio (5800+ patents !!)
Who killed the webmaster, what an interesting question.
My last job, at a fortune 500 power tool manufacturing company, my title was actually 'Webmaster' and I hated it. I took the job in 2000, Coming from another large company, the one that 90% of you use for your cable modem in the U.S. There I was a 'Web Designer', or sometimes a 'Web Developer'.. they were never too clear on the title, and I had business cards for both at one point.
In 1998, when I took the job at the 'Cable Company', they were just rolling out their Cable Modems, and looking for sales-men. Having spent the last five years local, and over the pond, selling metal toy soldiers, paint, and full colour hobby magazines to kids [or to reluctant store owners, who didn't understand that kids spend a lot of money on my former company's products.] I sent a resume in. I was hired. Quickly. And spent 6 months in the number one,two, or three spot on their sales floor.
Someone, somewhere found out that I actually had a degree in Computer Science.. and started asking for help with the websites for the local markets. Then they asked about help with the servers, setting up software, database design, etc etc etc. And I was migrated into the roll. Lots and lots of work in a brand new 'field', learning something new every day.
Skip forward to 2000, and I changed companies for a 50% pay increase. I figured any company willing to almost double my salary HAD to have a challenging environment. Woah boy was I wrong. Most of the other 'web masters' there knew html. maybe a little javascript out of a book. NONE of them had any experience in programming. My job quickly turned into churning out HTML filled spam-email, and endlessly updating the look-and-feel of a few corporate websites to keep up with marketing driven initiatives.
I did get to write a cool football pick program for a well known cystic fibrosis charity the last year there though.. and we gave away like a dozen trips to Hawaii.
I spent FIVE years there, trying to make my job a better one. But that great salary was becoming less so, as I had few raises. I was moved from my original department that had a bonus scheme - to another that didn't. [like a 10-15k a year pay cut on good years] I worked for a number of bosses who had NO idea what I could actually do, and when I tried to explain to them - couldn't understand what they didn't understand:P [Not their fault, advertising / marketing people are not code folks.. what did I expect ?]
It got so I was embarrassed to mention my title to anyone in the company. I was doing NO real work, just busywork, and watching folks who went to other companies that I doing all the cool stuff, for the same or more money. I had chosen poorly.
So.. I left.. Now i run a tech department at a start up doing some interesting stuff and the future looks to be interesting, lucrative with some luck.
So what killed the webmaster ? I think it was a little bit of a lot of things:
Many early webmasters were code heads who learned html early on, and went with it. Hacking away at a new idea was like breathing to those guys. These guys became in high demand, as there were very few full time coders who wanted to give that up for 'html' crap, but people did give it up, when the salaries surpassed what they were making. With clear second site, it seemed such easy work for good money.. a cake walk. Those people go t bored. Most left.
The other kind of early webmaster was the person who saw html code, and dremweaver or (shudder) frontpage, and set up shop as a webmaster, with no coding experience - and PROUD of the fact that they were self taught. They could do layout, many had a good eye for design, and carved a niche and hung on to it desperately in the early 2ks. There were LOTS of these guys.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah .. a coping mechanism. I mean .. remembering who you, your children, your wife, your family are .. how bothersome. .. how to breathe or keep your heart beating .. how tedious.
.. to teach them all to stop driving so fast.
Remembering how to walk, dress yourself, and ultimately
My grandfather had alzheimers for about 15 years, ultimately he died in a VA hospital, with family all around him. Weeks prior, he had shouted at people [including his wife and daughters] that they were keeping him from his family against his will. At the end he could not even do that, as he had forgotten how to talk. His liver and kidneys shut down, and eventually, his brain forgot how to keep his heart beating.
We should stop and consider how cruel it is to remember things before we go about treating alzheimers.
Thats kind of like saying everyone should get cancer, you know
Without meaning to brag, I am 160+ .. and had exactly the same experience. Technically, they didn't move me OUT of the school, but they had special classes that they only allowed 'certain' kids in. Outside of regular class work, they would pull us out of our 'normal' rooms and bring us to a separate room. Let me reassure you, the normal teachers LOVED this, no .. really.
There was a lot of unstructured learning, although, there was certainly more of a focus on learning for the sake of learning. [Similar to a Montessori like environment.] But the net result was the same. By the time I was into High school, where they no longer had this program, I had learned that it was far easier just to skate in subjects that held no interest, than to try to power through them.
It took me a number of years to unlearn this bad habit. To this day, I will sometimes procrastinate on crap that I *KNOW* is easy or tedious to do, counting on the fact that its easy to allow me to pick up the slack later. Now I force myself to learn things outside of my comfort zone, and consider myself better for it. But man, all that time wasted.
I'm not sure about this .. but maybe its changed in the 20 or so years since high school.
:P -- ahh memories.] I had friends that were Band geeks, burn outs, and muscle car freaks.
.. kids that are 'smarter' are really just kids that have a higher emotional understanding of the dangers that go with sex now a days.
.. everyone has seen American Pie right ?
:( One would think that high IQ breeding pairs should biologically desire to produce MORE offspring, not less.
I am well in the 110+ category, and had quite a lot of sexual activity in high school. Certainly not 100's of girls, but 'several' would be a polite guess. I was most certainly a geek, but I was a social geek. I could talk to anyone [If I chose to, which is a different issue], and really, aside from a few people that had issues with me, seldom noticed or would abide by the typical high school hierarchy. I swapped jokes with football players, and chemistry nerds. Hung out with the punk kids, and dated the president of the honors society. [Whom incidentally, also fell well into the 110 + category, and not only surpassed me in numbers, but in sheer wanton gusto - quite the slutty pair we made
Maybe today its different, maybe with the aids scare in the 90's
Otherwise, I would suggest that social skills, in place of IQ or academics, has more to do with sexual activity in teenagers. I mean
What *IS* curious though, is that personally I have noticed a parallel to their study. It involves the same IQ ranges, and the number of children married folks in those ranges seem to have. Lets face it, who hasn't been to walmart and seen the large group of seemingly uneducated, possibly low IQ'ed, family consisting of like 8 kids and mom, maybe dad. Maybe the real secret here is not that lower IQ people have more sex, but that higher IQ people know when to stop (or at least wear protection).
Kinda makes you wonder what evolutionary quirk set THAT particular survival trait up doesn't it
Something you should keep in mind on the 'outside management' front. .. Management, [somewhat on the director level, but mostly higher] is very important in a VC's decision to give you more money.
.. and they need them to hit the ground running with a proven track record, because even a low 2-3 months ramp up time is a major asset burn.
.. something to consider with software etc spending :
When a company is looking for the next round of VC funding
So what you, someone who is working on the floor, might have interpreted as a rush to hire outside management from a big company - might actually have been a play to make the company more 'fundable' in a VC's eyes.
Additionally, as much as its great to think that employing directors from within, at a company that is a one or two year old startup - thats unrealistic. Fortune 500's can afford to promote from within, because people might be sitting in the next position down for several years. A startup doesn't have that luxury. If a start up needs a director, they need it now
Also
Many times, a VC will give a new company starting $$ with caviats. Like :
"We promise you 15 million, and here is $3m of it, once you buy all microsoft/sun/oracal platforms, [at a cost of 8 million] we will give you the remaining balance." So those hundreds of thousands they were spending on monitoring software might have been a stipulation along the road of aquiring funds. [This is very common place in the VC world - more so on the west coast vs the east.]
Not saying this is what happened at SunRocket, just that what was going on, might not have been visible to the folks outside of the boardroom.
I have got to call the prom queen from highschool, because apparantly hell *CAN* freeze over.
Get YOUR head out of your ass.
.. if you will .. you are in charge of taking the LARGEST e-tailer on line, and maintaining its profitability. .. imagine you DON'T try to protect this asset, and invest hundreds of millions in advertising to promote your new .. speedier service. Three months later, your competition do exactly the same thing, and your investors are looking to replace you.
.. and you haven't LIVED until you have looked at a *TWO* meg text file .. containing the ENTIRE genetic sequence of a particular gene.
.. what your telling me, is that its not ok if amazon tries to protect itself and its 'assets' by playing within the rules of the system. But it *IS* ok for a biotech company to patent a *HUMAN GENE STRUCTURE* ?
.. if you want to pick a fight about how the patent system can be abused, amazon is a layman's choice of example.
Imagine
Your guys came up with this neat one-click idea. Now
What Amazon did in the early 90's is *NO* different than what chemical research compainies and bio-tech are doing now.
I work closely with the patents and applications issued/filed each week
So
lol
Employee is a terminal fuckup. Discharged from Air Force. Stealing from employer and got caught. Why am I not surprised that he isn't smart enough to just take his licks and let it lay low ?
.. if this guy has been falsifying T&E reports and got caught .. thats fraud brother .. over $250 its a felony. Is this REALLY the button he wants to be pushing ?
..
I mean
Meh
Sounds to me like someone got caught and is trying for a sympathy play.
Virtual(tm) Rape is a Virtual(tm) Crime, and falls under the jurisdiction of the Virtual(tm) Police.
These real world schmucks have no business sticking their real world-non-pixilated-noses where they don't belong.
Move along citizen, there is Virtually nothing to see here.
Ummm ...
.. and universities spending 'tax payer dollars' .. Do you even KNOW what the semester cost is to go to MIT ? [arguably the school with the best tech transfer program out there.] I'm fairly sure they are not spending 'tax-payer money' in their research programs.
.. I guess basically taking animation and turning it from an idea .. into an art form doesn't count ?
.. has sacrificed.] animation of any quality was unknown in the American theater.
.. most of the original Warner Bros. artists WORKED for Disney at some point.
Black & Decker ?
IBM ?
Microsoft ?
Corporations are the most LIKELY to invest in long term because they have the funds and assets to handle the risk/reward.
As for tech transfer
What did Disney do that was special ?
hmm
Before all of Walt's [and his original animators] hard work, and sacrifice [and anyone who starts from 2 people in a single room
Without Disney, there would be no Warner Brothers Cartoons, maybe not even any Anime. Hell
Whats also funny, is that one of the reasons Disney was so gung-ho on protecting their assets, is that Walt's original animation character 'Oswald the Rabbit' Was stolen by the same Warner brother's artists that stopped working for him.
I have a basement with 10 pins in it .. all Bally machines from between 1990 and 1996 .. my 2-year old cut his teeth on them :) Actually, he prefers when we play the pins over us playing a racing game or something on the 360.
Interesting .. i wonder how this patent fares vs the irobot patents.
We're not going to pass through the tail of a comet are we ? .. solar storms I can handle, but those damn comet tails hold zombies.
I mean
Self preservation would make me hide out in a tin garden shed, or the back of my big-rig,
but really, the world is just doomed from that point on.
If companies don't pay maintenance fees on a patent it will become abandoned, and thus (after a grace period) public domain.
.. like .. show me all the patents with 'cel phone' in the title that are abandoned.
Patents that are expired, (17-20 years) are of course already thus.
Try searching on http://www.patentmonkey.com/ and the results will show you status. Roumour has it that just 10 minutes ago they fixed it so you can even be able to SEARCH on status
While you are there, you can browse patents by front page - as if you were in the patent office in VA too.
All food for the entrepreneur.
Its fine with me actually.
.. you DO live in a country where English is the primary language. Ebonics advocates, your on your own - Ebonics is just plain jack-ass stupid. Why not teach your kids that apples are really bananas while you are at it .. its about the same level of denial.]
.. I say .. great news. My kid needs all the advantages he can get.
This way, I can educate my child about science, and math, and my wife can teach him about art, and dance. Together we can encourage him to read, and do logic problems.
That way, with all the current hand holding and empowerment, catering to religious jerks who just want to hook kids on god so they can get their tithe, banned book lists, and cancellation of art and sport programs - our kid will have such a huge edge on 99% of the public school systems output in the USA.
While all the kids of parents who couldn't give a crap about teaching their child to learn, drone on in do-nothing positions in go-nowhere jobs, my child can be running one of those companies, and be swapping their sweat and blood for privileges for his OWN kids future.
He can laugh at his employees, who parents insisted on schools having programs in Spanish, or even better, Ebonics - because those children will already be steps behind in dealing with society as a whole in this country. [No offense meant to Spanish or Latin folks who moved here and continue to work their asses off for the betterment of their kids' future - my wife is fluent in Spanish, and of course we are teaching it to our Son, but to insist that kids be taught in Spanish because they don't know English - and its an unfair advantage - well
He can look at kids who had NO art or sports in school, and were taught to read with phonics - and study for test scores. They wont have problem solving skills, or the ability to be truly creative in finding a solution.
Even better, he will be able to watch the kids who could ONLY learn by watching videos or playing video games - flounder when they have to learn something in the real world, or deal with a presentation, make a speech, or attend a board room meeting. They will be disadvantaged, having been programmed early on to become visual-only learners.
Great
Actually, none of those things will deter a bloodhound from separating out scents they are trained to find. [And Chemical Mace would certainly set off the airport's sniffers - resulting in searched luggage anyways.
.. heh .. thats what happens to your brain when you SMOKE too much pot, coffee beans will clear lingering residue from a human's nose, barely, if your like .. smelling perfume, or candles .. because its normally of of a differnt tone of scent, not because it masks smells :P
.. they had these coffee beans there man, and I smelled them, and it TOTALLY hid the Berry-Bliss smell, So I could like, smell the vanillia then man. We should put coffee in our luggage to hide the pot smell man.'
:P
Coffee beans
I can see the conversation in Amsterdam now :
'Dude, I was in a Yankee Candle, and I was smelling a Berry-Bliss candle, and man, then I tried to smell a vanilla-bean candle, and I couldn't smell it man - so like
At its worst, it would clear the dog's nose inbetwen sniffs, so they could smell the Pot better
lol
Generic corn is dangerous .. as opposed to the alternative I suppose, which is starving.
Starving has been proven to cause damage to not only the liver and kidneys, but the heart, lungs, prostrate, genitals, and even the brain.
Given the choice, corn is certainly the lesser of two evils.
Seriously though, Greenpeace is not exactly on the 'feed the world' bandwagon. I mean, its better that people eat only natural foods, farmed with traditional methods that prove costly and ineffectual in certain climates and indeed, whole land masses.
Far better to convince people that its evil food, than to just accept that evil food could be slightly better than NO food. Especially if the evil part is mostly PR, so you can meet your fund raising goals next quarter.
Just in case anyone was interested, here is a full list of Microsoft's Issued Patents [Current as of a week or two ago]. :)
Its hosted at a free patent searching tool, so don't blame me if their servers melt.
Microsoft's Patents
Just because he is an idiot doesn't make him a libertarian. I'm certainly a libertarian, but i find his idea moronic.
.. ironic .. isn't it. You can take a mathematician, who can do linear algebra matricides in his/her head, but unless they know how to pass that information on to other people, they will never get a teaching job.
.. teach' really *ISN'T* a slight against teachers, its more a slight against people who are brilliant in their field. To be brilliant at something, anything .. normally requires an intense amount of work with the subject matter. (or a big gift) People who are that close to their work (or who's work is easier than thought for them) normally have a hard time showing others how to do things the same way.
The reality of the situation is that the school system isn't failing for all the reasons people think it is, the school system is failing simply because the majority of parents out there consider it nothing more than baby sitting.
Teachers would never get 'fair market value' for their skills. They don't get it now. A new teacher in Baltimore MD starts off at approximately $30k a year, for someone who is going to play a big part in your child's future. $30k. By comparison, again in Baltimore, you can get a job answering phone calls for the local Cable company that STARTS at 32k a year. They recommend that you have a high school diploma, but do not really check.
Privatizing a school system isn't going to make salary better. People think of Teachers as baby sitters. If you make Teacher salary dependent on how people 'value' them, then they will be paid about as much as someone would be willing to pay a baby sitter to watch their kid all day.
What we NEED to do, is stop the school system from being a political game. Math teachers shouldn't get paid any more than English teachers, or Music Teachers, or Art Teachers, or Gym teachers for that matter.
Thats like saying you will pay a computer programmer more because he writes his code in blue fonts as opposed to red fonts.
Teachers don't get paid by their subject matter, they get paid because they have been trained to *TEACH*. Any idiot can do calculus, assuming of course, that they had a good teacher show them how
They saying 'those who can't
So long story short, teachers don't get the respect they deserve. I know, I'm married to one. She has changed COUNTLESS kids lives, and makes less than I did as a Cable call center technician. Which, by the way, was a job I could do in my sleep, because somewhere along the line, someone who was a good teacher, showed me how.
Who'da thunk it ?.
What a crock. This is an example of the religious folks of the world trying to exude some pressure to 'convince' folks that if you don't believe in a god too .. then your not normal.
.. *ABANDONED* and not cared for - sudden find a craving for Religion to make their lives complete.
.. if religion was REALLY part of our genetic makeup, then there couldn't exist a culture where religion was simply non-existant. Certainly not a town, or an entire COUNTRY where religion was basically abandoned for several decades. Right Soviet Russia ?
I postulate that, if a kid is raised by strictly religious parents, and indoctrinated into religious belief as a child, then its certainly not a surprise that they might become religious as an adult.
Conversely, very few of those raised, non-religiously - the key phrase here is *RAISED* not
Kids do what their parents do. If you don't believe this, go to any hospital in the USA, on any given day, and ask new parents if they had their son's circumcised. Then ask them why.
Not that I have a care on either side of the fence on circumcision, just that its another thing people tend to 'follow their family trend' on.
[Oddly enough, almost parallel.]
But to say that people are hard wired for religion is crap, its safer to say we are hard wired to kill each other, than to suggest that religion is part of our DNA. Of course, the religious right doesn't want you to know about DNA in the first place. I mean
meh
Apparantly they have all been used to transfer a virus, that was originally an experiment in Santa Cebeza to produce larger meat breed cows.
The fact that they can be trapped in a glass bottle, and smashed to eliminate dozens off zombies at once, has lead to their demise.
Wake me up when they find a meteor in one of them that proves our oceans were seeded by alien bugs that rode a comet into our atmosphere. .. what can you do ?
Of course, some spunky senator's daughter that works for NSA will probably figure it all out to be a farce. And fall in love. But
Because .. ahh .. EVERY bomb that a terrorist would plant in a busy metro area would *BLINK FLASHING LIGHTS*
That makes them easier to hide i hear.
Almost as easy if the Blinking Lights spell out BOMB, or if there is a loudspeaker attached to the device that shouts out the countdown until explosion.
Everyone knows, the best way to hide anything is to call all the attention to it that you can.
So to repeat the objection, any *idiot* should have known this was not a bomb. Someone trying to hide an explosive payload certainly wouldn't have taken the time to build a blinking LED display to go over the bomb. At least not outside of hollywood.
See this article also on Crunchgear. Microsoft filed patent applications for a wireless cellphone rich media device in 2005, chances are they DO have something in development.
About 20 mins later crunch gear posted this article as well, which features a links to the Patent Applications they filed a few years ago, as well as a VERY interesting link to M$'s entire patent portfolio (5800+ patents !!)
Link to the Article on CrunchGear.
Its interesting to see that Microsoft was thinking about this a few years ago long before Apple announced their I-phone.
Who killed the webmaster, what an interesting question.
.. they were never too clear on the title, and I had business cards for both at one point.
.. and started asking for help with the websites for the local markets. Then they asked about help with the servers, setting up software, database design, etc etc etc. And I was migrated into the roll.
.. and we gave away like a dozen trips to Hawaii.
:P [Not their fault, advertising / marketing people are not code folks .. what did I expect ?]
.. I left .. Now i run a tech department at a start up doing some interesting stuff and the future looks to be interesting, lucrative with some luck.
:
.. a cake walk. Those people go t bored. Most left.
My last job, at a fortune 500 power tool manufacturing company, my title was actually 'Webmaster' and I hated it. I took the job in 2000, Coming from another large company, the one that 90% of you use for your cable modem in the U.S. There I was a 'Web Designer', or sometimes a 'Web Developer'
In 1998, when I took the job at the 'Cable Company', they were just rolling out their Cable Modems, and looking for sales-men. Having spent the last five years local, and over the pond, selling metal toy soldiers, paint, and full colour hobby magazines to kids [or to reluctant store owners, who didn't understand that kids spend a lot of money on my former company's products.] I sent a resume in. I was hired. Quickly. And spent 6 months in the number one,two, or three spot on their sales floor.
Someone, somewhere found out that I actually had a degree in Computer Science
Lots and lots of work in a brand new 'field', learning something new every day.
Skip forward to 2000, and I changed companies for a 50% pay increase. I figured any company willing to almost double my salary HAD to have a challenging environment. Woah boy was I wrong. Most of the other 'web masters' there knew html. maybe a little javascript out of a book. NONE of them had any experience in programming. My job quickly turned into churning out HTML filled spam-email, and endlessly updating the look-and-feel of a few corporate websites to keep up with marketing driven initiatives.
I did get to write a cool football pick program for a well known cystic fibrosis charity the last year there though
I spent FIVE years there, trying to make my job a better one. But that great salary was becoming less so, as I had few raises. I was moved from my original department that had a bonus scheme - to another that didn't. [like a 10-15k a year pay cut on good years] I worked for a number of bosses who had NO idea what I could actually do, and when I tried to explain to them - couldn't understand what they didn't understand
It got so I was embarrassed to mention my title to anyone in the company. I was doing NO real work, just busywork, and watching folks who went to other companies that I doing all the cool stuff, for the same or more money. I had chosen poorly.
So
So what killed the webmaster ? I think it was a little bit of a lot of things
Many early webmasters were code heads who learned html early on, and went with it. Hacking away at a new idea was like breathing to those guys. These guys became in high demand, as there were very few full time coders who wanted to give that up for 'html' crap, but people did give it up, when the salaries surpassed what they were making. With clear second site, it seemed such easy work for good money
The other kind of early webmaster was the person who saw html code, and dremweaver or (shudder) frontpage, and set up shop as a webmaster, with no coding experience - and PROUD of the fact that they were self taught. They could do layout, many had a good eye for design, and carved a niche and hung on to it desperately in the early 2ks. There were LOTS of these guys.
Throw on top of that the cha