Anyway, if we compare the percentage of prostate cancer cases in Guadalajara as opposed to, say, Minneapolis, maybe a "real world" result will stick out plainly and clearly. Then again, maybe not, maybe a race is genetically more susceptible to contract prostate cancer, I dunno, but to dig up the data would cost next to nothing and could be worth a try.
The problem is that the results would also be worth what you paid for them: next to nothing.
I can tell you right now that you'll get different results for incidence of prostate cancer when you compare Guadalajara and Minneapolis. I can also tell you that the rate in Minneapolis will, indeed, be higher.
What I can't tell you is whether or not capsaicin is responsible for the difference. If we just look at dietary factors, it's safe to say that the Minneapolis diet is different from the Guadalajara diet in a lot of ways. Different amounts of fat and dietary fiber, right off the top, and I suspect that Minneapolis comes off worse in both categories.
Average lifespan is longer in Minneapolis, and there is probably appreciably better access to medical care. There will be better prevention of other diseases, which permits more cancers (especially prostate cancer) time to develop. There will be better screening, which means that more cancers will be detected--many of which are likely to be slow-growing and not ultimately fatal.
As the parent mentions, there may also be genetic factors; the populations being compared are definitely genetically distinct.
In other words, such a comparison would be very difficult to draw any useful correlation from. It could probably be used to show just as easily that tequila is associated with lower risk of prostate cancer.
Sorry I don't believe you. Living standards in western countries are now much higher than they were (say) 50 years ago.
And we're sorry you don't understand the statistics to which you allude.
The average person in the United States earns more and has greater purchasing power than he or she did fifty years ago. That doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of incomes across the population, nor does it address specifically the people of New Orleans.
In the 2000 census, Louisiana ranked 47th of 50 states in per capita income (2000 census). New Orleans has the lowestmedian household income of any metropolitan area with a population greater than 1,000,000 (1999 figures).
Looking at trends in the Gini coefficient for the United States shows a steady increase over the last thirty years, indicating a continuing drift of the Lorenz curve away from a uniform distribution of income. In other words, the rich--and even the upper middle class--have gotten richer, but the poor have gotten relatively poorer by a fair margin.
The fact that standards of living are quite high and poverty quite low in San Franciso, or Boston, or Hartford doesn't address the situation in New Orleans.
Agreed. Given that Google is now 24% down and dropping from their peak several weeks ago, I (as a Google Shareholder) don't want to see the stock slide any more.
You'll feel somewhat better to know that GOOG is still trading at about twice what they were a year ago.
When you put all the pieces together, Google needs real intelligence to weather the next few months, or they are going to lose the short-term trader's confidence... and with that, their value drops.
Their market capitalization drops--their value (by any measure except raw dollar valuation) doesn't. Brin and Page warned everyone up front that they wouldn't be chasing quarterly earnings forecasts and kowtowing to Wall Street. It probably means that their share price will take periodic beatings--but you knew that when you bought in. (If you bought early, you've done quite well, even so.) If you still trust the judgement of management, then hang on to your stock. If you expect Google will continue to do things better than other search engines, mapping services, etc., hang on to your stock. If you think that Google will continue to draw the best and the brightest engineers and computer scientists because of its tremendous reputation, hang on to your stock.
Of course, if you think that Google's management is drinking some awfully funny Kool-Aid, or if you just can't stomach having to wait months or years between sharp upward stock movements--then you should probably sell.
Misquote, error or intentional - giving is very simple. It doesn't need an overhaul of method or technique and has worked perfectly well as long as weaker or less fortunate members of our species have benefitted from the strength or fortune of another.
Really?
Take the standard 'starving child in Africa' as the target of our giving. For a modern twist, we can also consider the case where the child happens to be HIV positive; it's up to you.
To feed our child for a year will run us maybe $1000 in food costs. (Alternately, if we subsidize the construction of pharmaceutical plants that ignores drug patents or negotiates a sweetheart drug licensing deal, we could probably provide the child with retroviral drugs for about the same price per year.)
In either case, Google has staved off the end for our darling kid--and a million more just like him--for a full year. Well done. But then Google would be out of philanthropy dollars and the kid is back to dying. Half the money and products probably got nicked by local warlords and sold on the black market to buy guns anyway. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. It's a big drop, but it's a really big bucket.
So I agree with the parent--giving is simple. Solving problems, however, is hard.
How do you leverage that billion dollars? What can you do to make sure that there is some effect after the money has been spent? You can spend it on tools--provide farming equipment and clean water. You can spend it on education--teach people to read, create a service economy, teach birth control, teach crop rotation, teach manufacturing. You can spend it on reform--fund organizations that can provide oversight of elections and get rid of the warlords. You can use it to attract more money--convince government agencies or other philanthropists to chip in matching funds. How do you get the most bang for your buck?
Giving--even a billion dollars--is easy. Cut a check for the Red Cross or the World Health Organization or some other large charity. Funding a lot of smaller, creative projects may give more quantifiable, tangible results, and it's an approach that may influence other, larger organizations (they can see what works for Google.org). It's also more challenging, and requires a lot more planning.
Working is NOT a right. It's a privilege. Employers should be able to fire you if they don't feel you are doing the job they hired you to do.
The grandparent poster was talking about someone who was doing the job he was hired to do.
Employees and employers both have extensive rights and responsibilities that are enshrined in job descriptions, employments contracts, and state and federal laws. Working isn't a right or a privilege--it's a mutually beneficial arrangement extensively regulated by contract and labour law.
An employee who complains because the employer isn't holding up their end of the contractual or legal obligations shouldn't face sanctions (unfair evaluation practices as described by the grandparent poster, for instance).
Question: why has Opera managed to incorporate Bittorrent support into their browser, yet the only torrent plugins for Firefox are in a horrendous state of pre-development? WTF is going on here?
Is it possible that someone at Opera--a company with money, resources, time, and managerial direction--simply stated, "we'd like to have Bittorrent support in our next release. I don't care of getting it to work properly is boring and not nearly as sexy as designing clever widgets, or that there already exist external Bittorrent clients that 133t uberhaxors like you can use. We're paying you guys to implement the features that our clients asked for. Get this done on time, and we'll give everyone a bonus."
Sometimes good things can come out of the cathedral...just sayin', is all.
I have to ask though, what does the pressure of the balloon equate to in 'sea level' pressure--
it must up the density of the helium when you inflate it into the rubber..
I'm not a professional blimp mechanic, and the information seems to be a bit tough to find with Google, but the internal overpressure of a blimp is actually quite small; the gas envelope is very lightweight and takes very little pressure to support. The one reference I found was for a class of small airships that specified the internal pressure at 40mm of water (PDF link), which works out to a shade less than 0.004 atmospheres. In other words, the pressure increases the density by about half of one percent--no biggie.
materials for the space elevator (AS YET UNMADE) are designed to withstand incredible stress..
what if you made your blimp out of the same material, in rigid form, and had an empty blimp.
Space elevator materials are made to support tremendous load in tension. (Think about the behaviour of a steel cable, for example.) The load on a vacuum vessel would be compressive. You'd be trying to push a rope.
The density of air is about 1.29 kilograms per cubic meter at sea level; the density of helium is about 0.18 kg/m^3. Going to hard vacuum (zero kg/m^3) only gets you about fifteen percent more lift per unit of envelope volume; the engineering hassles just aren't worth the trouble.
...it also robs your teeth of bone density by removing calcium.
Er, what?
No calcium is lost when hydroxyapatite is coverted to fluorapatite. It's a substitution of a fluorine ion (F-) for the hydroxide ion (OH-) in Ca_5(PO_4)_3(OH).
You get some added mechanical strength with the substitution, as well as a lower solubility in acid solution--and all your calcium is still there.
"... after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery" This seems to be sensitive and could have caused trouble if such pictures land up in the hands of terrorists.
It depends a great deal on the circumstances, but if the tanks and cylinders are really a sensitive target, the refinery could employ advanced techniques like opaque fencing materials or sheds.
Refineries are actually a pretty popular subject for photography, particularly at night when they're dramatically lit and wreathed with steam. (See Google for examples.)
It's another matter entirely if the photographer were skulking around on refinery property surreptitiously taking photographs. If he's on public property, there really shouldn't be anything he could photograph that's a security risk.
Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.
A minor nitpick--the human genome is big, but it's not that big. It's a shade over three billion base pairs. At two bits per base pair (there are only four choices for each base: A, T, G, or C) you're looking at 800 MB for your whole genome.
Depending on how you want to use that information, you might be able to save quite a bit of space by only storing the diff from a 'standard' genome. (From a disease/risk analysis standpoint, that's going to be your most useful information anyway.)
You have time to dig through page histories and whatnot? I'd rather just go consult a source I already trust.
Which source are you going to trust about U.S. Congressional Representatives and Senators?
Their own websites?
Smearing blogs written by their opponents? Fawning blogs written by their shills?
Slanted or sloppy regurgitation of talking points by the 'traditional' media, when you often can't see their archives online beyond a few days in the past?
I have to ask--what readily-available source do you have (on- or offline) that you trust for this type of information? If there's any single source that you trust, you're probably missing a lot.
But they are addicted to a substance that is known to cause cancer, and which will almost certainly damage their health and shorten their lives.
A minor nitpick--the substance to which they are addicted (nicotine) isn't what actually causes the cancer or damages their health.
Although nicotine is toxic in fairly modest amounts (it's used as a pesticide in some commercial gardening products) most of the harm from tobacco use is actually caused by other inhaled and absorbed ingredients. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) like benzo[a]pyrene are potently carcinogenic, as is the radioactive polonium that is often present in cigarettes (it's taken up by the growing plant). Some of these nasties are still present in unburnt tobacco, so you can't avoid it all by going to smokeless stuff.
If we could get people to be addicted to just nicotine without the deadly tobacco around it, it would help quite a bit.
I'm not really trying to make accusations here. I imagine Wikipedia is very upstanding in their goals and practices. It just seems a bit odd to me to say that an author must cite a source whose entire nature seems to be, paraphrased by me, general knowledge shared among lots of people.
The problem isn't really that the Star Bulletin writer (Tim Ryan) used the facts without attribution or citation. The information is readily available from a large number of alternate sources, and so might be (with a bit of a stretch) considered 'common knowledge'. It might have lent more weight to the article to be able to say, "According to an NTSA report on the accident..." or something of that sort, but I guess that would be overkill for an entertainment column.
The issue was that Ryan copied substantial passages verbatim without attribution or quotation marks to indicate that the material came from another source. Someone (actually, several someones) at Wikipedia put in a fair bit of effort to convert factual information into an easily-readable and cohesive narrative form. By directly lifting the text, Ryan passed off their work as his own. The plagiarism Tim Ryan committed was in his failure to acknowledge the source of 'his' words, not in his failure to credit the source of his facts.
I am a regular Wikipedia editor, and I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't always catch plagiarism either. However, we do take action against editors who reuse material from other sources (images or text) inappropriately. In general, we're usually pretty good at detecting when a lump of text appears that seems suspiciously well written, or that doesn't quite fit with the rest of an article.
I'm sure that after a few years, a good doctor would be easily able to predict the average time taken for a diagnosis
And I'm sure they do, and I'm sure that's what the grandparent poster said as well. The physician wants to go home at the end of the day just as much as you do. Any reception and other support staff want to get back to their families. The cleaning crews would like to get in to vacuum the waiting room.
The problem is that patient appointments very seldom last for precisely the average period of time. Unfortunately, there's a very large variance associated with that mean time.
My family physician is one of those few that still delivers babies--at least, for the relatively low-risk pregnancies. My brother and I were both delivered by him. I was born in the middle of the night and probably didn't screw up his appointment schedule too badly, but my brother was likely a nuisance. On the flip side, I've been kept waiting because the good doctor was delayed at the hospital by a time-consuming birth.
Was it inconvenient? Somewhat. Did I mind? Not really. My mother felt much better about having a long-term, trusted doctor who was intimately familiar with her medical history present for the births. I don't mind waiting a bit for a guy who still provides that level of care and attention to his patients.
That means it will not go to a higher court, which in turn means the decision will have little or no precedential effect outside its jurisdiction.
While it does not set a binding legal precedent that other courts are compelled to follow, you can bet your ass that it will be referred to and cited in any similar future cases.
A lot of legwork has been done, and other courts will certainly look at the reasoning and conclusions drawn in this case.
And that was when patents didn't have stupid lifetimes...
I'm pretty sure that patents in the United States are still only good for twenty years from the date of filing. The stupid lifetimes you're thinking of are related to copyrights, which last for the age of Mickey Mouse plus twenty years.
The question of whether or not twenty years is a 'stupid lifetime' is of course open for discussion, as are twists like compulsory licenses.
Here's another reason I dislike online-only games. You're forced to endure the updates they provide, good or bad. If you don't update, you can't play.
Here's another reason I dislike public taverns. You're forced to endure the updates they provide, good or bad. This one time, they started hiring a band that played really crappy music, and they hiked the price of my favourite beer. If you don't accept those changes, you have to find another bar.
Here's another reason I dislike courier services. You're forced to endure the updates they provide, good or bad. I once had to change the mailing labels we use because the courier company changed their setup. If you don't accept those changes, you have to find another courier company.
Dude--it's a monthly service. If you stop enjoying it, stop giving them money.
They would no longer be able to cover up just how inefficient and horrible they really are. They last thing want is somebody to start compiling databases about their on-time percentages.
If someone publically-minded wanted to get access to on-time percentages and such, it's not particularly difficult to ride the bus. Sure, you'd have to equip those bus monitors with hi-tech equipment like clipboards and digital watches, but it ain't rocket science. High school students are pretty cheap, too....
It's quite common for these specialized examiners to be as adept in the field as any inventor working in that same field.
Do you really believe this? I'm sorry, but it just doesn't ring true to anyone who has browsed through many of these patents and read their contents. The truth is, patent examiners are overworked, underpaid, and under incredible pressure (by those giving the USPTO money for applications) to grant patents.
I'm a bit confused as to how the latter statement refutes the former. Patent examiners can be highly competent and well-informed while still being overworked and underpaid.
Tell a thoracic surgeon that he needs to do four lung transplants per day and you're going to get shoddy workmanship and patients dying no matter how competent a cutter he is. Tell a programmer that he has to write a substitute for AutoCAD by Friday and corners are going to get cut. If you give good people bad policy, bad management, too much work, and not enough funding, what do you expect?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the results would also be worth what you paid for them: next to nothing.
I can tell you right now that you'll get different results for incidence of prostate cancer when you compare Guadalajara and Minneapolis. I can also tell you that the rate in Minneapolis will, indeed, be higher.
What I can't tell you is whether or not capsaicin is responsible for the difference. If we just look at dietary factors, it's safe to say that the Minneapolis diet is different from the Guadalajara diet in a lot of ways. Different amounts of fat and dietary fiber, right off the top, and I suspect that Minneapolis comes off worse in both categories.
Average lifespan is longer in Minneapolis, and there is probably appreciably better access to medical care. There will be better prevention of other diseases, which permits more cancers (especially prostate cancer) time to develop. There will be better screening, which means that more cancers will be detected--many of which are likely to be slow-growing and not ultimately fatal.
As the parent mentions, there may also be genetic factors; the populations being compared are definitely genetically distinct.
In other words, such a comparison would be very difficult to draw any useful correlation from. It could probably be used to show just as easily that tequila is associated with lower risk of prostate cancer.
Actually, it's proof that God exists and that He is a woman.
And we're sorry you don't understand the statistics to which you allude.
The average person in the United States earns more and has greater purchasing power than he or she did fifty years ago. That doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of incomes across the population, nor does it address specifically the people of New Orleans.
In the 2000 census, Louisiana ranked 47th of 50 states in per capita income (2000 census). New Orleans has the lowest median household income of any metropolitan area with a population greater than 1,000,000 (1999 figures).
Looking at trends in the Gini coefficient for the United States shows a steady increase over the last thirty years, indicating a continuing drift of the Lorenz curve away from a uniform distribution of income. In other words, the rich--and even the upper middle class--have gotten richer, but the poor have gotten relatively poorer by a fair margin.
The fact that standards of living are quite high and poverty quite low in San Franciso, or Boston, or Hartford doesn't address the situation in New Orleans.
You'll feel somewhat better to know that GOOG is still trading at about twice what they were a year ago.
When you put all the pieces together, Google needs real intelligence to weather the next few months, or they are going to lose the short-term trader's confidence... and with that, their value drops.
Their market capitalization drops--their value (by any measure except raw dollar valuation) doesn't. Brin and Page warned everyone up front that they wouldn't be chasing quarterly earnings forecasts and kowtowing to Wall Street. It probably means that their share price will take periodic beatings--but you knew that when you bought in. (If you bought early, you've done quite well, even so.) If you still trust the judgement of management, then hang on to your stock. If you expect Google will continue to do things better than other search engines, mapping services, etc., hang on to your stock. If you think that Google will continue to draw the best and the brightest engineers and computer scientists because of its tremendous reputation, hang on to your stock.
Of course, if you think that Google's management is drinking some awfully funny Kool-Aid, or if you just can't stomach having to wait months or years between sharp upward stock movements--then you should probably sell.
Really?
Take the standard 'starving child in Africa' as the target of our giving. For a modern twist, we can also consider the case where the child happens to be HIV positive; it's up to you.
To feed our child for a year will run us maybe $1000 in food costs. (Alternately, if we subsidize the construction of pharmaceutical plants that ignores drug patents or negotiates a sweetheart drug licensing deal, we could probably provide the child with retroviral drugs for about the same price per year.)
In either case, Google has staved off the end for our darling kid--and a million more just like him--for a full year. Well done. But then Google would be out of philanthropy dollars and the kid is back to dying. Half the money and products probably got nicked by local warlords and sold on the black market to buy guns anyway. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. It's a big drop, but it's a really big bucket.
So I agree with the parent--giving is simple. Solving problems, however, is hard.
How do you leverage that billion dollars? What can you do to make sure that there is some effect after the money has been spent? You can spend it on tools--provide farming equipment and clean water. You can spend it on education--teach people to read, create a service economy, teach birth control, teach crop rotation, teach manufacturing. You can spend it on reform--fund organizations that can provide oversight of elections and get rid of the warlords. You can use it to attract more money--convince government agencies or other philanthropists to chip in matching funds. How do you get the most bang for your buck?
Giving--even a billion dollars--is easy. Cut a check for the Red Cross or the World Health Organization or some other large charity. Funding a lot of smaller, creative projects may give more quantifiable, tangible results, and it's an approach that may influence other, larger organizations (they can see what works for Google.org). It's also more challenging, and requires a lot more planning.
Would violate the law of Conservation of Mod Points...?
The grandparent poster was talking about someone who was doing the job he was hired to do.
Employees and employers both have extensive rights and responsibilities that are enshrined in job descriptions, employments contracts, and state and federal laws. Working isn't a right or a privilege--it's a mutually beneficial arrangement extensively regulated by contract and labour law.
An employee who complains because the employer isn't holding up their end of the contractual or legal obligations shouldn't face sanctions (unfair evaluation practices as described by the grandparent poster, for instance).
Is it possible that someone at Opera--a company with money, resources, time, and managerial direction--simply stated, "we'd like to have Bittorrent support in our next release. I don't care of getting it to work properly is boring and not nearly as sexy as designing clever widgets, or that there already exist external Bittorrent clients that 133t uberhaxors like you can use. We're paying you guys to implement the features that our clients asked for. Get this done on time, and we'll give everyone a bonus."
Sometimes good things can come out of the cathedral...just sayin', is all.
I'm not a professional blimp mechanic, and the information seems to be a bit tough to find with Google, but the internal overpressure of a blimp is actually quite small; the gas envelope is very lightweight and takes very little pressure to support. The one reference I found was for a class of small airships that specified the internal pressure at 40mm of water (PDF link), which works out to a shade less than 0.004 atmospheres. In other words, the pressure increases the density by about half of one percent--no biggie.
The density of air is about 1.29 kilograms per cubic meter at sea level; the density of helium is about 0.18 kg/m^3. Going to hard vacuum (zero kg/m^3) only gets you about fifteen percent more lift per unit of envelope volume; the engineering hassles just aren't worth the trouble.
Er, what?
No calcium is lost when hydroxyapatite is coverted to fluorapatite. It's a substitution of a fluorine ion (F-) for the hydroxide ion (OH-) in Ca_5(PO_4)_3(OH).
You get some added mechanical strength with the substitution, as well as a lower solubility in acid solution--and all your calcium is still there.
It depends a great deal on the circumstances, but if the tanks and cylinders are really a sensitive target, the refinery could employ advanced techniques like opaque fencing materials or sheds.
Refineries are actually a pretty popular subject for photography, particularly at night when they're dramatically lit and wreathed with steam. (See Google for examples.)
It's another matter entirely if the photographer were skulking around on refinery property surreptitiously taking photographs. If he's on public property, there really shouldn't be anything he could photograph that's a security risk.
A minor nitpick--the human genome is big, but it's not that big. It's a shade over three billion base pairs. At two bits per base pair (there are only four choices for each base: A, T, G, or C) you're looking at 800 MB for your whole genome.
Depending on how you want to use that information, you might be able to save quite a bit of space by only storing the diff from a 'standard' genome. (From a disease/risk analysis standpoint, that's going to be your most useful information anyway.)
Which source are you going to trust about U.S. Congressional Representatives and Senators?
Their own websites?
Smearing blogs written by their opponents? Fawning blogs written by their shills?
Slanted or sloppy regurgitation of talking points by the 'traditional' media, when you often can't see their archives online beyond a few days in the past?
I have to ask--what readily-available source do you have (on- or offline) that you trust for this type of information? If there's any single source that you trust, you're probably missing a lot.
Better yet, let's ban the use of bad analogies in Slashdot posts....
A minor nitpick--the substance to which they are addicted (nicotine) isn't what actually causes the cancer or damages their health.
Although nicotine is toxic in fairly modest amounts (it's used as a pesticide in some commercial gardening products) most of the harm from tobacco use is actually caused by other inhaled and absorbed ingredients. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) like benzo[a]pyrene are potently carcinogenic, as is the radioactive polonium that is often present in cigarettes (it's taken up by the growing plant). Some of these nasties are still present in unburnt tobacco, so you can't avoid it all by going to smokeless stuff.
If we could get people to be addicted to just nicotine without the deadly tobacco around it, it would help quite a bit.
The problem isn't really that the Star Bulletin writer (Tim Ryan) used the facts without attribution or citation. The information is readily available from a large number of alternate sources, and so might be (with a bit of a stretch) considered 'common knowledge'. It might have lent more weight to the article to be able to say, "According to an NTSA report on the accident..." or something of that sort, but I guess that would be overkill for an entertainment column.
The issue was that Ryan copied substantial passages verbatim without attribution or quotation marks to indicate that the material came from another source. Someone (actually, several someones) at Wikipedia put in a fair bit of effort to convert factual information into an easily-readable and cohesive narrative form. By directly lifting the text, Ryan passed off their work as his own. The plagiarism Tim Ryan committed was in his failure to acknowledge the source of 'his' words, not in his failure to credit the source of his facts.
I am a regular Wikipedia editor, and I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't always catch plagiarism either. However, we do take action against editors who reuse material from other sources (images or text) inappropriately. In general, we're usually pretty good at detecting when a lump of text appears that seems suspiciously well written, or that doesn't quite fit with the rest of an article.
And I'm sure they do, and I'm sure that's what the grandparent poster said as well. The physician wants to go home at the end of the day just as much as you do. Any reception and other support staff want to get back to their families. The cleaning crews would like to get in to vacuum the waiting room.
The problem is that patient appointments very seldom last for precisely the average period of time. Unfortunately, there's a very large variance associated with that mean time.
My family physician is one of those few that still delivers babies--at least, for the relatively low-risk pregnancies. My brother and I were both delivered by him. I was born in the middle of the night and probably didn't screw up his appointment schedule too badly, but my brother was likely a nuisance. On the flip side, I've been kept waiting because the good doctor was delayed at the hospital by a time-consuming birth.
Was it inconvenient? Somewhat. Did I mind? Not really. My mother felt much better about having a long-term, trusted doctor who was intimately familiar with her medical history present for the births. I don't mind waiting a bit for a guy who still provides that level of care and attention to his patients.
It's too bad that nobody will buy a $600 television to go with their $200 VCR/DVD player, either....
Surely you mean parking....
While it does not set a binding legal precedent that other courts are compelled to follow, you can bet your ass that it will be referred to and cited in any similar future cases.
A lot of legwork has been done, and other courts will certainly look at the reasoning and conclusions drawn in this case.
And that was when patents didn't have stupid lifetimes...
I'm pretty sure that patents in the United States are still only good for twenty years from the date of filing. The stupid lifetimes you're thinking of are related to copyrights, which last for the age of Mickey Mouse plus twenty years.
The question of whether or not twenty years is a 'stupid lifetime' is of course open for discussion, as are twists like compulsory licenses.
Here's another reason I dislike public taverns. You're forced to endure the updates they provide, good or bad. This one time, they started hiring a band that played really crappy music, and they hiked the price of my favourite beer. If you don't accept those changes, you have to find another bar.
Here's another reason I dislike courier services. You're forced to endure the updates they provide, good or bad. I once had to change the mailing labels we use because the courier company changed their setup. If you don't accept those changes, you have to find another courier company.
Dude--it's a monthly service. If you stop enjoying it, stop giving them money.
If someone publically-minded wanted to get access to on-time percentages and such, it's not particularly difficult to ride the bus. Sure, you'd have to equip those bus monitors with hi-tech equipment like clipboards and digital watches, but it ain't rocket science. High school students are pretty cheap, too....
Tell a thoracic surgeon that he needs to do four lung transplants per day and you're going to get shoddy workmanship and patients dying no matter how competent a cutter he is. Tell a programmer that he has to write a substitute for AutoCAD by Friday and corners are going to get cut. If you give good people bad policy, bad management, too much work, and not enough funding, what do you expect?