Think about if the Harry Potter series were the books in your example. After 3 books, would Tor have taken over publishing the remaining books even if they only had exclusive printing rights for the remaining books for the first 5 years? Heck yeah. After Rowling and her work was well known, you wouldn't need to be able to print the previous editions to make a huge profit. The hard work was all done in the first 2 books. Once she has her name, everything else she did, at least with the Potter name attached was a guaranteed success. How many Potter sets were sold before book 7 was out? How many fans that had read books 1-4 bought extra copies of those books when they bought 5, 6 & 7?
Besides, at that point, books 1-4 are the entry point in getting new readers up to speed so they can read book 5. Even if you aren't making a full $7 sale on a paperback, it's still worth it to print and sell a $4 copy to allow new readers to get up to speed so they can read book 7 when it's ready to come out.
If sales of most books drop to a few thousand a year after a few years, the publisher has no incentive to continue printing that books, and the author isn't making anything more anyway.
If you limit the book copyright, are some potential sales going to be lost? Sure, but the point of copyright is to give the author and his representative, the publisher, a premium price for a limited time to justify the effort of creating the book in the first place, and hopefully enough profit to fund and encourage the production of the next one or two. This doesn't have to be a long term permanent thing guarantee to get the job done.
Specifically, the unprocessed foods are meats and vegetables. A health diet is 1 serving of meat and 3 vegetables per meal. The variety of vegetables gets you a variety of nutrients to keep you healthy. A carrot is not broccoli and neither are spinach. Have them all and you'll be pretty fit. Great to hear you've got it figured out.
It's not really about the amount of what you eat. It's more about having the right ingredients. I made a long post further up you might check out. Drop the wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, sugar, and limit dairy and fruits, and eat healthy amounts of meat and vegetables, and you can eat until full find yourself at a healthy number of calories, with most of the recommended nutrients covered.
Read marksdailyapple.com for info about this diet and a moderate exercise recommendations (5 hours of walking and 1 hour of actual exercise per week).
The things that will make you fat: Wheat Corn (including HFCS) Rice Oats Potatoes Sugar Too much Dairy Too many fruits
Things that won't make you fat are on this shopping list. 80-90% of what goes in your mouth should be animal proteins and fats and lots of vegetables.
Look at the list of things that makes people fat and think about fast food.
Any burger/sandwich place: Fries or chips, Soda pop, and the bun on any burger or sandwich are a recipe for weight gain. Get a salad and the insides of any burger/sandwich, and drink water, and your weight will move toward a healthy equilibrium. Fried food: What gets you fat is not the oil that it's fried in, it's the breading on the outside. Get something unbreaded. Pizza: All kinds of bad things about the crust. Mexican: Tortillas and chips (plus Chipotle's rice) are the killers. Get a taco salad but skip the chips/shell. Have salsa, meat, lettuce, sour cream, cheese, guacamole and enjoy a supper healthy meal.
Or as you recommend, get some unprocessed meat, add 2-3 vegetables, and you can't go wrong.
The items on that top list down to and including sugar all act like sugar in the blood stream. Anybody who really wants to learn about weight gain should go look at the website the shopping list is on, marksdailyapple.com.
Mark also recommends moderate exercise totaling about 1 hour a week (1 20 minute cardio, 1 20 minute weight carrying, and a small amount of functional exercises like squats and pushups) to stay fit as opposed to the 30 minutes a day. He does recommend averaging 10,000 steps a day. Although Mark recommends the exercise, he says that weight gain or loss is 80% what you put into your body and 20% activity level.
Check out the Friday success stories to see how others have benefited from this lifestyle.
Just stupidity by the movie companies. Just send movies over and write it down as a public relations move. Hell, if I were running one of the big movie studios, that's what I'd be doing. How many soldiers in a combat have the option of going to the theater to watch the movie. I'm pretty sure it's none. Setup each remote base with 2 or 3 projection systems and free movies, and reap tons of positive press from helping soldiers' cope with their situation.
Maybe. But as an activity that can build excitement for the school among potential schools, you can see a loss as an advertising cost to bring in new students and other interest.
An example most folks aren't aware of: Kansas State University (I'm an alumnus) up until 1987 was the worst Division 1A football school as far as historical record, and it wasn't even close. We had a 0-26-1 record in 27 consecutive games. Sports Illustrated did a cover story on how bad we were. Enrollment was trending down, with projections having us losing our football program and other significant loss of status.
Around that time, we hired an assistant coach from the University of Iowa, Bill Snyder. In 1993, we began a 10 year run where we won at least 9 games every year, and finished ranked in the top 25 every year. The decline in enrollment reversed. The school has had many successes academically as well as athletically (one of the top schools for Rhodes, Truman, Goldwater and other graduate scholarship contests, we were awarded the BioDefense facility, although funding may get cut due to politics), much of it due to the enthusiasm generated by having a winning program, and the perception that the people in charge know how to build success.
If that is the outcome that can come from a winning athletic department, I'm sure many universities consider that an investment in the overall success of the school. Now, our particular athletic department just became profitable enough that it is going to be run without state assistance. All money spent must be generated from sales, media contracts, conference profits, and donations. This year's $20 million profit is funding facility enhancements to keep us competitive with other schools which will probably outspend us in this area long term.
My wife has recently proposed a babysitting exchange. Feed the kids and drop them off at a friends house for an evening. On a different night, return the favor by watching the friends' kids in return.
We haven't actually done this yet, but we may try in a month or two.
You're right, it didn't happen. But maybe by getting the word out, maybe Bob changed IBM's course of action. Maybe instead of laying off most of their domestic workers over the last 7 months of the year, they switched and went with a more gradual move to prevent losing most of their businesses in the U.S. which would have been a very risky undertaking.
If what Bob says is true, then we have a choice. We can let the trend continue, or we can let our state and federal representatives know that we'd rather have work done by small local businesses instead of the megacorps. Of course, we need to let everybody know that we are selecting between two options, a cheap one and a more expensive one. Demand that the more expensive group deliver premium service, and I don't think anybody will complain. Deliver lower quality or have a worse record on up time or missing deadlines than the cheaper alternative, and know that the taxpayers will demand that the next contract will be bid out to the cheapest bidder which will be IBM or another big outsider.
I do this, but if everybody had it as the default, the websites would put all the scripts in the same domain so you would have to choose to get all or nothing.
The companies the host the ad scripts would have to figure out a way to make money without hosting their scripts directly, but I'm sure they would figure out something.
My wife is an RN (nurse) and I'm an IT guy. We've had a few disagreements on medical issues, although we're mostly on the same page now.
My wife was of the opinion that medical professionals are right and always have a good excuse for everything they do. I was rather ambivalent. As we were approaching birth, the issue of circumcision came up. We come from an area where men are usually circumcised, presumably for health reasons although it's really more about that being what everybody else does, and everybody in both of our families has been circumcised. I had read a little on the issue, and had decided that circumcision is not necessary since we aren't doing it for religious reasons. My wife, being a medical professional had encountered a few men who had been circumcised in their 70s, and was certain it was better to circumcise 100% of infants instead of leaving them intact and circumcising the 2% who end up having it done as adults when it became necessary. I fought her hard on the issue, and she gave in. Then she decided to tell her mother, also a nurse, who fought my wife on the issue in favor of cutting even harder than than my wife fought me. In the end my wife had to tell her mom that she didn't get a vote, and she wasn't going to get me to OK it. Now, my wife is firmly in the don't cut camp.
Concerning vaccinations, my wife leans pro and I am a little less pro, but I haven't fought on the issue because I haven't studied the issue much, and bad effects are probably not cause by getting a shot, although it might be a good idea to find out how certain injections are made.
Concerning autism, my wife found a treatment for our first daughter's issues which may work on autistic children and adults. Anybody interested in this should research Interactive Metronome therapy. Anybody who knows somebody with autism should look into this. My wife suspects that our daughter's issues were cause by trauma from our daughter getting stuck in the birth canal, not vaccines, genetics, or other issues. I could definitely see this running in families, since circumstances surrounding birth, mother and doctor from one birth to the next could stay the same, making researchers think there is a genetic link when it's a repeatable environmental connection.
People who love the theater, and will go even if the DVD is available on the day of the premier. People who hate the theater or theater prices, and will not go to the theater even if they have to wait six months. People who would watch at home if available, but will go to the theater instead of waiting.
About this third group of people, some of them will go to the theater, and then buy the DVD. If the DVD is available on release day, or the following Tuesday, more of those people will wait, and only buy the DVD instead of paying for tickets at the theater and then buying the DVD too. Or maybe the guys who used to go see the movie 5 or 10 times at the theater for one of the big superhero/Lord of the Rings/Star Wars releases, will go 1-3 times and then start watching at home.
If you are going to skip the theater and download instead of waiting for the DVD, they'll continue tightening the screws to make sure you don't jump the gun.
I say this as somebody who waits for my turn to get it from my library usually months after it's in the video store. I'm usually not in any hurry to see the movie, so I don't mind the wait. I'll just let other people tell me what's good by the reviews on metacritic and imdb, and save myself some time if a movie is not worth the time.
Men don't have a cycle. Our reproductive impulse that drives our libido is constantly on high. We are often driven by our desire to have sex primarily for the biological pleasure that it brings.
For a woman, it's much different. Near ovulation, a woman's libido is on high, and can be like teenage boys in their desire for sex. The same woman outside of her fertile time is much less likely to be interested, although different women will have different levels of disinterest. Some will be willing to engage in sex for the fun of it and may even initiate, others only will respond to sexual overtures to humor their partner, and others not at all. Some women are more interested not in the biological pleasure, but the emotional connection. If this need is not met, then they will find the biological bit unfulfilling, and they will grow bored and disinterested (kind of the converse of a woman that wants to talk about her day/shopping/gossip/what bff or sis or mom had to say, but isn't interested in listening to your interests, until you stop getting interested in conversations because one side feels like their need is unfulfilled while the other continues to enjoy what they get).
Pregnancy complicates things. Some woman want sex as much as they can have it, others have a low libido during this time.
Hormonal contraceptives work over half of the time by shutting down ovulation, basically turning her into a pregnant woman hormonally. At least 30% of women on the pill have low libido all the time.
Some of this fits the bill with my wife. During fertile times, she's very interested, such that she has a hard time keeping her hands to herself. Any other time, it's almost always that I have to initiate, with her deciding based on her 'guilt meter' (how long it's been) and other considerations. When she's pregnant or postpartum, she's always in low libido mode. Sometimes we're looking at 10-15 between sex, and other times we might end up doing it 2-3 times a week. If we do more than a week without sex, she will sometimes get into the mood without having a biological impetus, but it's pretty rare.
Actually, what we need is pure capitalism, with most large businesses replaced with hundreds of small businesses and coops competing for business. The only large businesses needed are for large manufacturing projects like planes and ships.
More small businesses would mean a larger portion of the workers would be the owners, and the profits would be in the hands of those doing the work.
Well they shouldn't be using grains to feed the cattle. Just leave it as natural savannah pasture, and let the animals eat the grass. It's naturally health for the environment, the animals, and the people who eat the meat. I've even read that there are methods of pasture management that can more than triple the number of animals that can live in an area. Do this, and you can support more animals with a given amount of land than with grain feed.
We don't have a laser that can cut apart something as large as a large building much less a mountain sized meteor. The point of the laser is the equivalent of spraying a beach ball ball with a squirt gun. A small shift in trajectory (basically a little nudge), at distances like a parsec can change the final position by more than the diameter of the Earth, which would turn a direct hit into a near miss. As long as we have several decades of warning that a meteor is a threat, we have time to bump the asteroid enough to change its course without too much effort, but if we don't find it until it's on final approach, then the amount of power needed to avert tragedy is much greater.
The low cost of gas in the U.S. relative to other places is due to those places heavily taxing Gas.
The price of gas at the pump is more affected by the strength of the dollar. When the dollar gets stronger, it can buy more oil, and we can buy more at the pump for the same price. When the dollar gets weaker, the dollar can buy less and the price goes up. Everything else we buy from foreign producers is also affected by this as well. The stock market is also heavily affected by this. So a strong dollar makes things cheaper, but lowers exports and encourages outsourcing. A weak dollar encourages domestic production, but causes inflation.
I wonder if Obama is running a loose monetary policy to boost employment, with a plan of reversing direction to drop the price of gas, (although there would also be a drop in the stock market) as the election approaches. It might be a winning strategy. I hope not, because if the budget continues the way it's going, we're going to look like Greece by the end of another term.
Manufacture's sell installs to software on Windows to offset the price difference between Linux and Windows. Heck, if they install enough software, they might make as much profit with a lower price on the Windows machine.
When somebody buys a computer, it comes with some antivirus package on it. Norton, McAfee or some other. "Free" games might be installed. Other software is often included. When the PC vendor sells the machine, they price it based on a certain markup over the cost of producing the machine. If they can sell an install, then they reduce the cost of the machine an appropriate amount, do to the fact that that's what their competitors do for a price advantage.
I went to buy my father-in-law a new machine last Father's Day, found a great deal on a machine from Office Depot, like $415 after tax. The guy at the store was trying to talk me into letting them clean the machine of junk software (Geek Squad at Best Buy does the same thing) for a price.
On more expensive machines, the vendors often omit these programs, but people in that price range probably don't balk at the price of a windows license at $60.
But really, what's the point. Has anybody here ever had an account (their own or a user) get locked out by somebody else trying to guess the password through brute force? I don't know that anybody is trying to guess passwords by setting up a computer to guess hundreds per second. My wife had her yahoo account compromised, fixed by changing the password fixed the problem. I had a friend who had his facebook account get compromised, also fixed by a password change. But my guess is that somebody had access to either the hash either from a cookie or an unencrypted email login (password logged in but the transmission plain text so the hash could be viewed).
If nobody is trying to get the password through a computer entering every possible combination, then all that matters is that your password doesn't show up in the lists of popular or default passwords, or names/mascots that might easily be guessed. Most likely, you could use the password zoologist or some other not so common word, and it'll probably never get cracked, unless somebody knows you are one and specifically tries that password.
Of course, maybe by keeping the cost of using this method of trying passwords difficult (years to guess assuming your password is the last one tried out of all of the possibilities) is what keeps anybody from using it. I think you could easily up the number of tries from 3 or 5 to 100 to reduce the administrative effort of unlocking passwords, since anybody going to the effort of guessing passwords randomly is unlikely to hit the right solution in the first 100 guesses.
I also think you could also stop forcing password changes. The only good that does is prevent a shared password from continuing to be exploited after a certain length of time. Much better to educate users that if you suspect a password has been compromised, then they should change it. I've had a bank and a credit union over the last 7 years. Neither account has ever been hacked, with reasonably good password measures. I think Bank of America would show you a picture you'd previously chosen so you would know that you were on the real site (If they have my account ID, couldn't they get my picture after slowly loading while there system went and grabbed the real picture, maybe their was more to it?). Other than that, not much password security. My current Credit Union only allows 6 letter passwords, but then you have to answer a challenge question that you have selected and answered. To those, I jumbled the letters to the right answer making it impossible for somebody to gain access even if they know the answers.
Of course somebody over a hundred years after the original invention of a device could have a complete understanding of the device in question. But the point of the obviousness standard should be to determine if an invention is something that multiple inventors could have come up with today, or if one person came up with the invention and that person is the only one who could have done it. If the industry was at a point where the invention were inevitable because dozens or more engineers could come up with it, then it's obvious and shouldn't be granted a patent. That's what we are trying to figure out. Here is an invention. Is it worthy of a no-competition protection for the inventor for a while to reward them for their work that they've done but haven't made any money off of yet? Or is it something new, but not really worthy of a patent?
If many people could come up with the same invention, then patenting the invention is unnecessary in the public's interest, because there is no real risk of the invention being lost should the inventor pass away and his records are hidden on his hard drive undiscovered when the machine is wiped. I expect half a dozen other companies are able to come along and compete based on quality, cost and customer service. I don't care if I get my copy of the invention from engineer A or X. They are both good engineers, but since the thing they are selling is something that half a dozen different guys could have come up with, I'd rather them compete than having to buy from A because he was the first to file with the patent office. So lets say we're talking the self-driving car that is being worked on by dozens of different groups. Different groups are working on various designs, with different software, but probably using off the shelf sensors and computers to make everything work. I don't think this is going to be something that is really patentable, because every group is working on the same thing that I don't know that it will be worthy of a patent if group 3 is a couple of months ahead of group 6 on filing an application. This is pretty much a case of everybody waiting for all of the necessary component technologies being advanced enough to make the solution easy, but nobody doubts that the problem is a mix of inputting a location, the computer determining current and desired locations, calculating a path (all done), then talking control of the vehicle and safely navigating the selected route.
On the other hand, if the invention is something really unusual, say a worm hole device that will allow a space ship to travel from Earth orbit to any star in our galaxy in a few minutes. Sure somebody a hundred years from now would be able to give the detail on how the machine works, and it would be common knowledge. But the guy who invents it next year? He probably would have found something unique in space time, and be deserving of a patent. So when the device is submitted to the patent office, the patent office releases info that a patent has been filed for a worm hole device. Odds are it gets a full 10 year protection because it's not currently obvious how to make a worm hole. Buy the time the device is removed from patent protection, the science and device are well known and several groups could then compete on producing the best worm hole drive.
Correction for a mis-edit: Any submissions after the end of the second month shall grant the filer a patent for one month for every two business days before the alternative submission is submitted.
To explain: If a patent is filed Jan 2, on March 2+4 business days, if nothing has been submitted, then every business day that no solution is found will make the patent good for 2 weeks/half a month. Since there are 520 weeks in 10 years, 10 years of immunity will be reached after 240/260 business days (depending on if counting by weeks or half months), which is either 11 or 12 months from the end of the initial two month period.
The obviousness standard in place should be replaced with this:
Press Release: USPO announces that Amazon has filed for a patent on annotating digital books. This patent will be considered obvious if somebody else can provide a working model of this within the next two months. Any submissions after the end of the second month 1 month for every 2 business days before the alternative submission is submitted. When the patent length has reached 10 years (on date XXX-XX approximately 1 year from today's announcement), it shall be considered non-obvious, and Amazon shall be approved for 10 years of patent protection beginning today.
-------------------- That way if somebody else has been working on a similar invention, they can still use it even though they can't get a patent of their own. If something is trivially recreated in less than two months (ether by an open source advocate or by IBM, MS or another big companies' research lab with a few engineers and scientists assigned to invalidating each others patents) then they can help keep the number of patents being granted down to a much more reasonable level. If a patent gets through this obviousness test where the solution can't be produced based upon a simple description of what it does, then the solution should be considered novel, and the inventor deserves to be rewarded with a 10 year monopoly as a thank you from the rest of us.
Actually party primaries are a bad idea IMO. If we had a real ballot that allowed us to rank multiple candidates, then each party could have multiple candidates, and we should have open primaries to allow all voters a chance to promote all candidates. Let the top 20 candidates through the primary process, then let everybody rank who they like based on their preferences. I think this would significantly improve voter turnout since more people would have their preferred candidate in the race until the end.
You totally can, if you have an account. Then you can go to options at the top right of the page, go to the exclusions, and limit the politics from your page. I'd much rather be able to build a custom RSS feed so my RSS feed wouldn't see the stories I'm not interested in.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about if the Harry Potter series were the books in your example. After 3 books, would Tor have taken over publishing the remaining books even if they only had exclusive printing rights for the remaining books for the first 5 years? Heck yeah. After Rowling and her work was well known, you wouldn't need to be able to print the previous editions to make a huge profit. The hard work was all done in the first 2 books. Once she has her name, everything else she did, at least with the Potter name attached was a guaranteed success. How many Potter sets were sold before book 7 was out? How many fans that had read books 1-4 bought extra copies of those books when they bought 5, 6 & 7?
Besides, at that point, books 1-4 are the entry point in getting new readers up to speed so they can read book 5. Even if you aren't making a full $7 sale on a paperback, it's still worth it to print and sell a $4 copy to allow new readers to get up to speed so they can read book 7 when it's ready to come out.
If sales of most books drop to a few thousand a year after a few years, the publisher has no incentive to continue printing that books, and the author isn't making anything more anyway.
If you limit the book copyright, are some potential sales going to be lost? Sure, but the point of copyright is to give the author and his representative, the publisher, a premium price for a limited time to justify the effort of creating the book in the first place, and hopefully enough profit to fund and encourage the production of the next one or two. This doesn't have to be a long term permanent thing guarantee to get the job done.
Specifically, the unprocessed foods are meats and vegetables. A health diet is 1 serving of meat and 3 vegetables per meal. The variety of vegetables gets you a variety of nutrients to keep you healthy. A carrot is not broccoli and neither are spinach. Have them all and you'll be pretty fit. Great to hear you've got it figured out.
It's not really about the amount of what you eat. It's more about having the right ingredients. I made a long post further up you might check out. Drop the wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, sugar, and limit dairy and fruits, and eat healthy amounts of meat and vegetables, and you can eat until full find yourself at a healthy number of calories, with most of the recommended nutrients covered.
Read marksdailyapple.com for info about this diet and a moderate exercise recommendations (5 hours of walking and 1 hour of actual exercise per week).
The things that will make you fat:
Wheat
Corn (including HFCS)
Rice
Oats
Potatoes
Sugar
Too much Dairy
Too many fruits
Things that won't make you fat are on this shopping list. 80-90% of what goes in your mouth should be animal proteins and fats and lots of vegetables.
Look at the list of things that makes people fat and think about fast food.
Any burger/sandwich place: Fries or chips, Soda pop, and the bun on any burger or sandwich are a recipe for weight gain. Get a salad and the insides of any burger/sandwich, and drink water, and your weight will move toward a healthy equilibrium.
Fried food: What gets you fat is not the oil that it's fried in, it's the breading on the outside. Get something unbreaded.
Pizza: All kinds of bad things about the crust.
Mexican: Tortillas and chips (plus Chipotle's rice) are the killers. Get a taco salad but skip the chips/shell. Have salsa, meat, lettuce, sour cream, cheese, guacamole and enjoy a supper healthy meal.
Or as you recommend, get some unprocessed meat, add 2-3 vegetables, and you can't go wrong.
The items on that top list down to and including sugar all act like sugar in the blood stream. Anybody who really wants to learn about weight gain should go look at the website the shopping list is on, marksdailyapple.com.
Mark also recommends moderate exercise totaling about 1 hour a week (1 20 minute cardio, 1 20 minute weight carrying, and a small amount of functional exercises like squats and pushups) to stay fit as opposed to the 30 minutes a day. He does recommend averaging 10,000 steps a day. Although Mark recommends the exercise, he says that weight gain or loss is 80% what you put into your body and 20% activity level.
Check out the Friday success stories to see how others have benefited from this lifestyle.
Just stupidity by the movie companies. Just send movies over and write it down as a public relations move. Hell, if I were running one of the big movie studios, that's what I'd be doing. How many soldiers in a combat have the option of going to the theater to watch the movie. I'm pretty sure it's none. Setup each remote base with 2 or 3 projection systems and free movies, and reap tons of positive press from helping soldiers' cope with their situation.
Unlikely considering Dan Glickman and Chris Dodd are both Democrats, Senators even, and were the last two CEOs of the MPAA.
I also seem to recall the SOPA debate, large numbers of each party were on each side of the issue, so it wasn't really a partisan issue.
Maybe. But as an activity that can build excitement for the school among potential schools, you can see a loss as an advertising cost to bring in new students and other interest.
An example most folks aren't aware of:
Kansas State University (I'm an alumnus) up until 1987 was the worst Division 1A football school as far as historical record, and it wasn't even close. We had a 0-26-1 record in 27 consecutive games. Sports Illustrated did a cover story on how bad we were. Enrollment was trending down, with projections having us losing our football program and other significant loss of status.
Around that time, we hired an assistant coach from the University of Iowa, Bill Snyder. In 1993, we began a 10 year run where we won at least 9 games every year, and finished ranked in the top 25 every year. The decline in enrollment reversed. The school has had many successes academically as well as athletically (one of the top schools for Rhodes, Truman, Goldwater and other graduate scholarship contests, we were awarded the BioDefense facility, although funding may get cut due to politics), much of it due to the enthusiasm generated by having a winning program, and the perception that the people in charge know how to build success.
If that is the outcome that can come from a winning athletic department, I'm sure many universities consider that an investment in the overall success of the school. Now, our particular athletic department just became profitable enough that it is going to be run without state assistance. All money spent must be generated from sales, media contracts, conference profits, and donations. This year's $20 million profit is funding facility enhancements to keep us competitive with other schools which will probably outspend us in this area long term.
My wife has recently proposed a babysitting exchange. Feed the kids and drop them off at a friends house for an evening. On a different night, return the favor by watching the friends' kids in return.
We haven't actually done this yet, but we may try in a month or two.
I submitted the original article on Slashdot 5 years ago.
You're right, it didn't happen. But maybe by getting the word out, maybe Bob changed IBM's course of action. Maybe instead of laying off most of their domestic workers over the last 7 months of the year, they switched and went with a more gradual move to prevent losing most of their businesses in the U.S. which would have been a very risky undertaking.
If what Bob says is true, then we have a choice. We can let the trend continue, or we can let our state and federal representatives know that we'd rather have work done by small local businesses instead of the megacorps. Of course, we need to let everybody know that we are selecting between two options, a cheap one and a more expensive one. Demand that the more expensive group deliver premium service, and I don't think anybody will complain. Deliver lower quality or have a worse record on up time or missing deadlines than the cheaper alternative, and know that the taxpayers will demand that the next contract will be bid out to the cheapest bidder which will be IBM or another big outsider.
I do this, but if everybody had it as the default, the websites would put all the scripts in the same domain so you would have to choose to get all or nothing.
The companies the host the ad scripts would have to figure out a way to make money without hosting their scripts directly, but I'm sure they would figure out something.
My wife is an RN (nurse) and I'm an IT guy. We've had a few disagreements on medical issues, although we're mostly on the same page now.
My wife was of the opinion that medical professionals are right and always have a good excuse for everything they do. I was rather ambivalent. As we were approaching birth, the issue of circumcision came up. We come from an area where men are usually circumcised, presumably for health reasons although it's really more about that being what everybody else does, and everybody in both of our families has been circumcised. I had read a little on the issue, and had decided that circumcision is not necessary since we aren't doing it for religious reasons. My wife, being a medical professional had encountered a few men who had been circumcised in their 70s, and was certain it was better to circumcise 100% of infants instead of leaving them intact and circumcising the 2% who end up having it done as adults when it became necessary. I fought her hard on the issue, and she gave in. Then she decided to tell her mother, also a nurse, who fought my wife on the issue in favor of cutting even harder than than my wife fought me. In the end my wife had to tell her mom that she didn't get a vote, and she wasn't going to get me to OK it. Now, my wife is firmly in the don't cut camp.
Concerning vaccinations, my wife leans pro and I am a little less pro, but I haven't fought on the issue because I haven't studied the issue much, and bad effects are probably not cause by getting a shot, although it might be a good idea to find out how certain injections are made.
Concerning autism, my wife found a treatment for our first daughter's issues which may work on autistic children and adults. Anybody interested in this should research Interactive Metronome therapy. Anybody who knows somebody with autism should look into this. My wife suspects that our daughter's issues were cause by trauma from our daughter getting stuck in the birth canal, not vaccines, genetics, or other issues. I could definitely see this running in families, since circumstances surrounding birth, mother and doctor from one birth to the next could stay the same, making researchers think there is a genetic link when it's a repeatable environmental connection.
Lets say there are 3 types of movie watchers
People who love the theater, and will go even if the DVD is available on the day of the premier.
People who hate the theater or theater prices, and will not go to the theater even if they have to wait six months.
People who would watch at home if available, but will go to the theater instead of waiting.
About this third group of people, some of them will go to the theater, and then buy the DVD. If the DVD is available on release day, or the following Tuesday, more of those people will wait, and only buy the DVD instead of paying for tickets at the theater and then buying the DVD too. Or maybe the guys who used to go see the movie 5 or 10 times at the theater for one of the big superhero/Lord of the Rings/Star Wars releases, will go 1-3 times and then start watching at home.
If you are going to skip the theater and download instead of waiting for the DVD, they'll continue tightening the screws to make sure you don't jump the gun.
I say this as somebody who waits for my turn to get it from my library usually months after it's in the video store. I'm usually not in any hurry to see the movie, so I don't mind the wait. I'll just let other people tell me what's good by the reviews on metacritic and imdb, and save myself some time if a movie is not worth the time.
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Men don't have a cycle. Our reproductive impulse that drives our libido is constantly on high. We are often driven by our desire to have sex primarily for the biological pleasure that it brings.
For a woman, it's much different. Near ovulation, a woman's libido is on high, and can be like teenage boys in their desire for sex. The same woman outside of her fertile time is much less likely to be interested, although different women will have different levels of disinterest. Some will be willing to engage in sex for the fun of it and may even initiate, others only will respond to sexual overtures to humor their partner, and others not at all. Some women are more interested not in the biological pleasure, but the emotional connection. If this need is not met, then they will find the biological bit unfulfilling, and they will grow bored and disinterested (kind of the converse of a woman that wants to talk about her day/shopping/gossip/what bff or sis or mom had to say, but isn't interested in listening to your interests, until you stop getting interested in conversations because one side feels like their need is unfulfilled while the other continues to enjoy what they get).
Pregnancy complicates things. Some woman want sex as much as they can have it, others have a low libido during this time.
Hormonal contraceptives work over half of the time by shutting down ovulation, basically turning her into a pregnant woman hormonally. At least 30% of women on the pill have low libido all the time.
Some of this fits the bill with my wife. During fertile times, she's very interested, such that she has a hard time keeping her hands to herself. Any other time, it's almost always that I have to initiate, with her deciding based on her 'guilt meter' (how long it's been) and other considerations. When she's pregnant or postpartum, she's always in low libido mode. Sometimes we're looking at 10-15 between sex, and other times we might end up doing it 2-3 times a week. If we do more than a week without sex, she will sometimes get into the mood without having a biological impetus, but it's pretty rare.
Actually, what we need is pure capitalism, with most large businesses replaced with hundreds of small businesses and coops competing for business. The only large businesses needed are for large manufacturing projects like planes and ships.
More small businesses would mean a larger portion of the workers would be the owners, and the profits would be in the hands of those doing the work.
Well they shouldn't be using grains to feed the cattle. Just leave it as natural savannah pasture, and let the animals eat the grass. It's naturally health for the environment, the animals, and the people who eat the meat. I've even read that there are methods of pasture management that can more than triple the number of animals that can live in an area. Do this, and you can support more animals with a given amount of land than with grain feed.
We don't have a laser that can cut apart something as large as a large building much less a mountain sized meteor. The point of the laser is the equivalent of spraying a beach ball ball with a squirt gun. A small shift in trajectory (basically a little nudge), at distances like a parsec can change the final position by more than the diameter of the Earth, which would turn a direct hit into a near miss. As long as we have several decades of warning that a meteor is a threat, we have time to bump the asteroid enough to change its course without too much effort, but if we don't find it until it's on final approach, then the amount of power needed to avert tragedy is much greater.
The low cost of gas in the U.S. relative to other places is due to those places heavily taxing Gas.
The price of gas at the pump is more affected by the strength of the dollar. When the dollar gets stronger, it can buy more oil, and we can buy more at the pump for the same price. When the dollar gets weaker, the dollar can buy less and the price goes up. Everything else we buy from foreign producers is also affected by this as well. The stock market is also heavily affected by this. So a strong dollar makes things cheaper, but lowers exports and encourages outsourcing. A weak dollar encourages domestic production, but causes inflation.
I wonder if Obama is running a loose monetary policy to boost employment, with a plan of reversing direction to drop the price of gas, (although there would also be a drop in the stock market) as the election approaches. It might be a winning strategy. I hope not, because if the budget continues the way it's going, we're going to look like Greece by the end of another term.
Manufacture's sell installs to software on Windows to offset the price difference between Linux and Windows. Heck, if they install enough software, they might make as much profit with a lower price on the Windows machine.
When somebody buys a computer, it comes with some antivirus package on it. Norton, McAfee or some other. "Free" games might be installed. Other software is often included. When the PC vendor sells the machine, they price it based on a certain markup over the cost of producing the machine. If they can sell an install, then they reduce the cost of the machine an appropriate amount, do to the fact that that's what their competitors do for a price advantage.
I went to buy my father-in-law a new machine last Father's Day, found a great deal on a machine from Office Depot, like $415 after tax. The guy at the store was trying to talk me into letting them clean the machine of junk software (Geek Squad at Best Buy does the same thing) for a price.
On more expensive machines, the vendors often omit these programs, but people in that price range probably don't balk at the price of a windows license at $60.
But really, what's the point. Has anybody here ever had an account (their own or a user) get locked out by somebody else trying to guess the password through brute force? I don't know that anybody is trying to guess passwords by setting up a computer to guess hundreds per second. My wife had her yahoo account compromised, fixed by changing the password fixed the problem. I had a friend who had his facebook account get compromised, also fixed by a password change. But my guess is that somebody had access to either the hash either from a cookie or an unencrypted email login (password logged in but the transmission plain text so the hash could be viewed).
If nobody is trying to get the password through a computer entering every possible combination, then all that matters is that your password doesn't show up in the lists of popular or default passwords, or names/mascots that might easily be guessed. Most likely, you could use the password zoologist or some other not so common word, and it'll probably never get cracked, unless somebody knows you are one and specifically tries that password.
Of course, maybe by keeping the cost of using this method of trying passwords difficult (years to guess assuming your password is the last one tried out of all of the possibilities) is what keeps anybody from using it. I think you could easily up the number of tries from 3 or 5 to 100 to reduce the administrative effort of unlocking passwords, since anybody going to the effort of guessing passwords randomly is unlikely to hit the right solution in the first 100 guesses.
I also think you could also stop forcing password changes. The only good that does is prevent a shared password from continuing to be exploited after a certain length of time. Much better to educate users that if you suspect a password has been compromised, then they should change it. I've had a bank and a credit union over the last 7 years. Neither account has ever been hacked, with reasonably good password measures. I think Bank of America would show you a picture you'd previously chosen so you would know that you were on the real site (If they have my account ID, couldn't they get my picture after slowly loading while there system went and grabbed the real picture, maybe their was more to it?). Other than that, not much password security. My current Credit Union only allows 6 letter passwords, but then you have to answer a challenge question that you have selected and answered. To those, I jumbled the letters to the right answer making it impossible for somebody to gain access even if they know the answers.
Toejam & Earl is available for down load on the Wii.
Of course somebody over a hundred years after the original invention of a device could have a complete understanding of the device in question. But the point of the obviousness standard should be to determine if an invention is something that multiple inventors could have come up with today, or if one person came up with the invention and that person is the only one who could have done it. If the industry was at a point where the invention were inevitable because dozens or more engineers could come up with it, then it's obvious and shouldn't be granted a patent. That's what we are trying to figure out. Here is an invention. Is it worthy of a no-competition protection for the inventor for a while to reward them for their work that they've done but haven't made any money off of yet? Or is it something new, but not really worthy of a patent?
If many people could come up with the same invention, then patenting the invention is unnecessary in the public's interest, because there is no real risk of the invention being lost should the inventor pass away and his records are hidden on his hard drive undiscovered when the machine is wiped. I expect half a dozen other companies are able to come along and compete based on quality, cost and customer service. I don't care if I get my copy of the invention from engineer A or X. They are both good engineers, but since the thing they are selling is something that half a dozen different guys could have come up with, I'd rather them compete than having to buy from A because he was the first to file with the patent office. So lets say we're talking the self-driving car that is being worked on by dozens of different groups. Different groups are working on various designs, with different software, but probably using off the shelf sensors and computers to make everything work. I don't think this is going to be something that is really patentable, because every group is working on the same thing that I don't know that it will be worthy of a patent if group 3 is a couple of months ahead of group 6 on filing an application. This is pretty much a case of everybody waiting for all of the necessary component technologies being advanced enough to make the solution easy, but nobody doubts that the problem is a mix of inputting a location, the computer determining current and desired locations, calculating a path (all done), then talking control of the vehicle and safely navigating the selected route.
On the other hand, if the invention is something really unusual, say a worm hole device that will allow a space ship to travel from Earth orbit to any star in our galaxy in a few minutes. Sure somebody a hundred years from now would be able to give the detail on how the machine works, and it would be common knowledge. But the guy who invents it next year? He probably would have found something unique in space time, and be deserving of a patent. So when the device is submitted to the patent office, the patent office releases info that a patent has been filed for a worm hole device. Odds are it gets a full 10 year protection because it's not currently obvious how to make a worm hole. Buy the time the device is removed from patent protection, the science and device are well known and several groups could then compete on producing the best worm hole drive.
Correction for a mis-edit: Any submissions after the end of the second month shall grant the filer a patent for one month for every two business days before the alternative submission is submitted.
To explain: If a patent is filed Jan 2, on March 2+4 business days, if nothing has been submitted, then every business day that no solution is found will make the patent good for 2 weeks/half a month. Since there are 520 weeks in 10 years, 10 years of immunity will be reached after 240/260 business days (depending on if counting by weeks or half months), which is either 11 or 12 months from the end of the initial two month period.
The obviousness standard in place should be replaced with this:
Press Release: USPO announces that Amazon has filed for a patent on annotating digital books. This patent will be considered obvious if somebody else can provide a working model of this within the next two months. Any submissions after the end of the second month 1 month for every 2 business days before the alternative submission is submitted. When the patent length has reached 10 years (on date XXX-XX approximately 1 year from today's announcement), it shall be considered non-obvious, and Amazon shall be approved for 10 years of patent protection beginning today.
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That way if somebody else has been working on a similar invention, they can still use it even though they can't get a patent of their own. If something is trivially recreated in less than two months (ether by an open source advocate or by IBM, MS or another big companies' research lab with a few engineers and scientists assigned to invalidating each others patents) then they can help keep the number of patents being granted down to a much more reasonable level. If a patent gets through this obviousness test where the solution can't be produced based upon a simple description of what it does, then the solution should be considered novel, and the inventor deserves to be rewarded with a 10 year monopoly as a thank you from the rest of us.
Actually party primaries are a bad idea IMO. If we had a real ballot that allowed us to rank multiple candidates, then each party could have multiple candidates, and we should have open primaries to allow all voters a chance to promote all candidates. Let the top 20 candidates through the primary process, then let everybody rank who they like based on their preferences. I think this would significantly improve voter turnout since more people would have their preferred candidate in the race until the end.
You totally can, if you have an account. Then you can go to options at the top right of the page, go to the exclusions, and limit the politics from your page. I'd much rather be able to build a custom RSS feed so my RSS feed wouldn't see the stories I'm not interested in.