I think you are confusing different issues. Your argument does make sense if applied to copyrights rather than patents. Long terms are only in copyright and trademark. In patents the term in the US is now 20 years from the date of application, not issue, IIRC. The delay between application and issue is usually years. Most inventors never get a chance to profit from their inventions since they are locked into employment agreements. The application costs are high, and in the end a patent is just a license to sue, which literally costs millions. Any inventors who make it through that gauntlet deserve some respect.
Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles.
Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.
*
Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head.
Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a kryptonian. But with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet. (*One can imagine that the Kent home in Smallville was riddled with holes during Superboy's puberty. And why did Lana Lang never notice that?*)...
"One of the Omni readers who scored highest on the Mega Test was John H. Sununu, then the governor of New Hampshire, and later Chief of Staff under President Bush. His score of 44 correct gave him an estimated I.Q. of 180 (achievable by approximately one in 3 million). "
Threatening the life of the President or Federal officials would be a serious crime. I am not doing that. I am saying the President and his administration are subject to trial under the Constitution for violations of the law, including capital offenses, and that I believe there is overwhelming evidence that they have committed such offenses. Proposing that the law be upheld is not proper grounds for issuing a warrant, and would be at best a questionable basis for monitoring the excercise my Constitutional right to free political speech in a public form. That said, yeah, someone at the the FBI or Secret Service (not likely the NSA) will be skimming my posts now, I expect.
How many crimes does Monkeyboy have to commit before he is held to account? There isn't a single person on death row or executed in the history of the USA who has who has ordered so many killings, kidnappings and tortures. His utter contempt for the constitution and human rights is the root of the many forms of his criminality. Ordering illegal spying on thousands of Americans should by itself be enough to get him impeached, tried and sentenced to life in prison, but on the scale of his other misdeeds it barely deserves mention.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Gonzales should be quickly tried and promptly executed as a deterrent to our future officials who might think that they can use power for their own purposes rather than as servants of the electorate. We need to put our so-called leaders in permanent mortal fear of even getting close to violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution. Until then, they will continue to think that they can rule us rather than represent us.
By James Sherman (We take you now to the Oval Office.)
George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening? Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China. George: Great. Lay it on me. Condi: Hu is the new leader of China. George: That's what I want to know. Condi: That's what I'm telling you. George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China? Condi: Yes. George: I mean the fellow's name. Condi: Hu. George: The guy in China. Condi: Hu. George: The new leader of China. Condi: Hu. George: The Chinaman! Condi: Hu is leading China. George: Now whaddya' asking me for? Condi: I'm telling you Hu is leading China. George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China? Condi: That's the man's name. George: That's who's name? Condi: Yes. George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China? Condi: Yes, sir. George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East. Condi: That's correct. George: Then who is in China? Condi: Yes, sir. George: Yassir is in China? Condi: No, sir. George: Then who is? Condi: Yes, sir. George: Yassir? Condi: No, sir. George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone. Condi: Kofi? George: No, thanks. Condi: You want Kofi? George: No. Condi: You don't want Kofi. George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N. Condi: Yes, sir. George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N. Condi: Kofi? George: Milk! Will you please make the call? Condi: And call who? George: Who is the guy at the U.N? Condi: Hu is the guy in China. George: Will you stay out of China?! Condi: Yes, sir. George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N. Condi: Kofi. George: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone. (Condi picks up the phone.) Condi: Rice, here. George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?
Search is an important part of the Platform. Every document in the Data Store is indexed and included in the Platform's search engine, and this engine forms the backbone of all SearchBased collections.
Also, the crawl data includes pictures and movies, and the search engine metadata provides this useful field: CRITERIA,SEARCH FIELD = Adult content, Porn
You are right that "Atheism" means "belief that there is no god" rather than being open to the possibility of there being gods. However, neither atheism, agnosticism nor the GP post are any variety of theism. Theism requires an affirmative belief in god(s).
Perhaps we can bring all the parties together with a combination of monotheism and polytheism or "moneytheism" - it ought to be popular.
Unless you get one of these servers built into a USB key with fingerprint scanner. Not too expensive, either -$200 / 256MB or $240 for 512MB flash. They're also good for taking over other people's computers, too.
Did you miss the part where I said: "Research is worth doing for the knowledge and the long term..."?
My point is that not that research fails to contribute to clinical practice, but that virtually all efforts and techniques of clinical medicine put together are not effective enough to show up in the vital statistics in increased lifespan, so the liklihood that any given supposed breakthrough will do much for overall human longevity is slim.
It really shows the orientation and priorities of the system when the PTO can can instantly find a list of the top-patent-assignment-receiving companies, but go 9 years between looks at who the top inventors are. It shouldn't be that difficult for any decent database to handle, after all, despite what that jounalist was told.
The system needs to be recast to benefit the inventors and society, not the horrible corporate givaway currently being plotted in Congress under the guise of patent reform.
"25% of people have an IQ 10% or more below the population mean"
IQ is not a ratio scale, so you can't relate IQ scores as proportions like that. If you were talking about Rasch measures like the CSS scale on the new Stanford Binet 5, it'd be a different story. The IQ score as used today is nothing but a measure of standard deviations on a normal curve which does not match the closer to log-normal distribution of raw scores. On an ratio scale humans don't vary that much - say 440 for a 3 year-old, 500 for a ten year-old, 520 for an adult and 592 for the highest score in their large and high-IQ enriched norming sample. (I am too lazy to link but Google "riverside service bulletin 5 - Deborah Ruf and look at CSS scores and also search "Grady Towers IQ Rasch" if you want sources.)
If some gene-dependent trait is "positive" or not depends upon the environment.
Yes, the desirability of a gene's effect is sometimes affected by certain environments, but that does not change the fact that some genes are good and some are bad, particularly when dealing with a given range of environments, for instance such as exists in the US or the developed world in general. In our environment smarter is better.
Ok, great, but still virtually all the increase in lifespan in the world in the past century has been from sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and nutrition. Virtually all the increase in the next 15-30 years is going to come from those four plus smoking reduction. Research is worth doing for the knowledge and the long term, but I don't expct technology's effects will make further big increases in longevity until nano is practical.
You don't know what you're talking about. By all means take the scores with a grain of salt - in fact it requires a pretty decent IQ and a good deal of study to interpret IQ scores - but IQ is not based on mental age and hasn't been for over 75 years. IQ is the best established quantitative measure in human psychology. Some poor questions may depend on "tricks" but that is just a reflection of a limited degree of inaccuracy in a particular test. The tests are limited in precision and not infrequently give incorrectly low scores to an individual on a given administration.
The way we know IQ, or more properly, "g" is a measurable entity is that just about all kinds of tests involving a component of mental skill correlate with one another (usually quite well). IQ tests, which are tests specially made to have the highest correlations with the common factor among all mental tests, also predict job performance across all sorts of different-level jobs better than any other single factor a decicion maker can consult - better than interviews, resumes, or education.
Most of the hydrocarbons on the planet likely have been there since the formation of the solar system, and are not biogenic at all. Why geologists cling to the idea that Earth's hydrocarbons are primarily biogenic is a mystery, considering all the methane on other planets in the solar system, the prevalence of carbonaceous chondrites in asteroids and meteorites, and the discovery of oil under miles of solid Scandinavian granite. It's reminisent of geologists' long denial and condemnation of the idea of continental drift. (Both continental drift and the abiogenic terrestrial hydrocarbon hypotheses were introduced in the US by the late Professor Thomas Gold.) At any rate, while the oil may take a while to percolate up from the deep biosphere, there is lots of methane left in the hydrates and coal in the ground to get us over the hump to better sources of energy.
Well, humans have very limited ability to distinguish two simultaneous touches over much of the body - on parts of the arms, for example two points as much as 20 cm apart may seem to be a single touch. The advantage of fabric sensors is that you get thousands of them with just a few electrical connections. Pressure switches have to be handled individually in design and assembly, which greatly limits their use. Also $7 for an electronic part is very expensive - that will add $15-$35 to the retail price of a device. Lots of very capable microcontrolers can be found for $7 - to spend that kind of money on a such a limited sensor is unthinkable in all but specialized, gold-plated designs. You can get ordinary on/off pressure switches much cheaper, but they are still limited in durability, frequency response, pressure discrimination, and price per sensor compared with cloth. Also, there is no reason why a two-layer cloth (a routing layer and a sensor layer) couldn't be made that would allow finer two-point discrimination without addditional complexity for the application designer. Another point is that in active systems, where the sources or receptors of the pressure are moving, the two points can often be distinguished in the frequency domain - the simplest example is the way the two-point test is foiled when the two points do not contact simultaneously. More advanced frequency effects can be achieved with texturing of the skin, as in fingertips.
I'm not interested in learning an obsolete vector graphics scripting language, so if you have a point, could you list how RIP anticipates each claim in the Eolas patent? Otherwise it's like a lot of stuff in the Eolas case that has been claimed as prior art and repeatedly tossed out by the courts and the Patent Office.
The patent is very, very specific and Mike Doyle actually built the software covered by the patent before filing the patent. His employer, a university, holds the patent for his invention. He then founded Eolas and licensed the patent back from his employer. Also, this is not the only big thing Mike Doyle invented, just the only one he tried to get paid for. Your idea of ending patents for inventors who don't have the ability to manufacture their inventions themselves is something the big companies would push hard for if there were any chance of it happening.
It wasn't easy - it's been in the courts for many years. Microsoft was offered a good deal early on but decided that they could get away with just using the patent without paying at all. They counted on their legal machine being able to crush tiny Eolas regardless of the merits of the case. Eolas is just one guy, Mike Doyle. He invented this technology legitimately, albeit about a month or two before other people. Nevertheless, if you read the patent carefully the details aren't really obvious. The patent and the legal issues around it are more complex than reports have indicated, and the alleged prior art differs in significant ways from the patent. Also, this isn't the only or most important thing Mike was the first to do - in the '80s he was the first person to create a networked hypertext system with the links stored in the content pages themselves rather than in a seperate central database. This was a much more fundamental technological and conceptual advance than the derivative implentation of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee, HTML. So I look at this as a rare case of a lone innovator actually getting a shot at the big bucks that corporations take as their due. Software patents are the problem, not Eolas, and as long as the system is as it is, the best than one can hope is that actual inventors will see some royalties.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confusing different issues. Your argument does make sense if applied to copyrights rather than patents. Long terms are only in copyright and trademark. In patents the term in the US is now 20 years from the date of application, not issue, IIRC. The delay between application and issue is usually years. Most inventors never get a chance to profit from their inventions since they are locked into employment agreements. The application costs are high, and in the end a patent is just a license to sue, which literally costs millions. Any inventors who make it through that gauntlet deserve some respect.
From: "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", by Larry Niven:
I wish I had said that.
Oops - that was John H. Sununu, the former Governor and White House Chief of Staff, who is senator John E. Sununu's dad.
He's not cuddly but he is smart.
"One of the Omni readers who scored highest on the Mega Test was John H. Sununu, then the governor of New Hampshire, and later Chief of Staff under President Bush. His score of 44 correct gave him an estimated I.Q. of 180 (achievable by approximately one in 3 million). "
You forgot Waco, among others. Also, I have heard that the practice of "rendition" of prisoners to foreign countries got its start under Clinton.
The difference is that under Clinton, violating the Constitution was on a more-or-less retail basis, while Bush has gone wholesale with the operation.
Threatening the life of the President or Federal officials would be a serious crime. I am not doing that. I am saying the President and his administration are subject to trial under the Constitution for violations of the law, including capital offenses, and that I believe there is overwhelming evidence that they have committed such offenses. Proposing that the law be upheld is not proper grounds for issuing a warrant, and would be at best a questionable basis for monitoring the excercise my Constitutional right to free political speech in a public form. That said, yeah, someone at the the FBI or Secret Service (not likely the NSA) will be skimming my posts now, I expect.
How many crimes does Monkeyboy have to commit before he is held to account? There isn't a single person on death row or executed in the history of the USA who has who has ordered so many killings, kidnappings and tortures. His utter contempt for the constitution and human rights is the root of the many forms of his criminality. Ordering illegal spying on thousands of Americans should by itself be enough to get him impeached, tried and sentenced to life in prison, but on the scale of his other misdeeds it barely deserves mention.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Gonzales should be quickly tried and promptly executed as a deterrent to our future officials who might think that they can use power for their own purposes rather than as servants of the electorate. We need to put our so-called leaders in permanent mortal fear of even getting close to violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution. Until then, they will continue to think that they can rule us rather than represent us.
By James Sherman
(We take you now to the Oval Office.)
It does provide searching:
Alexa Web Platform User Guide > Search > Criteria > Overview
Also, the crawl data includes pictures and movies, and the search engine metadata provides this useful field:
CRITERIA,SEARCH FIELD = Adult content, Porn
Could be popular.
You are right that "Atheism" means "belief that there is no god" rather than being open to the possibility of there being gods. However, neither atheism, agnosticism nor the GP post are any variety of theism. Theism requires an affirmative belief in god(s).
Perhaps we can bring all the parties together with a combination of monotheism and polytheism or "moneytheism" - it ought to be popular.
Unless you get one of these servers built into a USB key with fingerprint scanner. Not too expensive, either -$200 / 256MB or $240 for 512MB flash. They're also good for taking over other people's computers, too.
.50" W: 1.75" L: 3.5" / 1.6 ounces
H:
400Mhz PowerPC Processor / 64MB RAM
MMC Expansion Slot
Debian-based Linux / 2.6.10 Kernel
USB-powered
Did you miss the part where I said: "Research is worth doing for the knowledge and the long term..."?
My point is that not that research fails to contribute to clinical practice, but that virtually all efforts and techniques of clinical medicine put together are not effective enough to show up in the vital statistics in increased lifespan, so the liklihood that any given supposed breakthrough will do much for overall human longevity is slim.
Well, we got hobbits, anyway, so there's some progress.
1st world - developed multi-party democracies
2nd world - communist bloc
3rd world - underdeveloped former colonies
I had heard the remainder being listed as 4th world in the original schema but I can't find anything on that.
It really shows the orientation and priorities of the system when the PTO can can instantly find a list of the top-patent-assignment-receiving companies, but go 9 years between looks at who the top inventors are. It shouldn't be that difficult for any decent database to handle, after all, despite what that jounalist was told.
The system needs to be recast to benefit the inventors and society, not the horrible corporate givaway currently being plotted in Congress under the guise of patent reform.
"25% of people have an IQ 10% or more below the population mean"
IQ is not a ratio scale, so you can't relate IQ scores as proportions like that. If you were talking about Rasch measures like the CSS scale on the new Stanford Binet 5, it'd be a different story. The IQ score as used today is nothing but a measure of standard deviations on a normal curve which does not match the closer to log-normal distribution of raw scores. On an ratio scale humans don't vary that much - say 440 for a 3 year-old, 500 for a ten year-old, 520 for an adult and 592 for the highest score in their large and high-IQ enriched norming sample. (I am too lazy to link but Google "riverside service bulletin 5 - Deborah Ruf and look at CSS scores and also search "Grady Towers IQ Rasch" if you want sources.)
If some gene-dependent trait is "positive" or not depends upon the environment.
Yes, the desirability of a gene's effect is sometimes affected by certain environments, but that does not change the fact that some genes are good and some are bad, particularly when dealing with a given range of environments, for instance such as exists in the US or the developed world in general. In our environment smarter is better.
Ok, great, but still virtually all the increase in lifespan in the world in the past century has been from sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and nutrition. Virtually all the increase in the next 15-30 years is going to come from those four plus smoking reduction. Research is worth doing for the knowledge and the long term, but I don't expct technology's effects will make further big increases in longevity until nano is practical.
You don't know what you're talking about. By all means take the scores with a grain of salt - in fact it requires a pretty decent IQ and a good deal of study to interpret IQ scores - but IQ is not based on mental age and hasn't been for over 75 years. IQ is the best established quantitative measure in human psychology. Some poor questions may depend on "tricks" but that is just a reflection of a limited degree of inaccuracy in a particular test. The tests are limited in precision and not infrequently give incorrectly low scores to an individual on a given administration.
The way we know IQ, or more properly, "g" is a measurable entity is that just about all kinds of tests involving a component of mental skill correlate with one another (usually quite well). IQ tests, which are tests specially made to have the highest correlations with the common factor among all mental tests, also predict job performance across all sorts of different-level jobs better than any other single factor a decicion maker can consult - better than interviews, resumes, or education.
Most of the hydrocarbons on the planet likely have been there since the formation of the solar system, and are not biogenic at all. Why geologists cling to the idea that Earth's hydrocarbons are primarily biogenic is a mystery, considering all the methane on other planets in the solar system, the prevalence of carbonaceous chondrites in asteroids and meteorites, and the discovery of oil under miles of solid Scandinavian granite. It's reminisent of geologists' long denial and condemnation of the idea of continental drift. (Both continental drift and the abiogenic terrestrial hydrocarbon hypotheses were introduced in the US by the late Professor Thomas Gold.) At any rate, while the oil may take a while to percolate up from the deep biosphere, there is lots of methane left in the hydrates and coal in the ground to get us over the hump to better sources of energy.
Well, humans have very limited ability to distinguish two simultaneous touches over much of the body - on parts of the arms, for example two points as much as 20 cm apart may seem to be a single touch. The advantage of fabric sensors is that you get thousands of them with just a few electrical connections. Pressure switches have to be handled individually in design and assembly, which greatly limits their use. Also $7 for an electronic part is very expensive - that will add $15-$35 to the retail price of a device. Lots of very capable microcontrolers can be found for $7 - to spend that kind of money on a such a limited sensor is unthinkable in all but specialized, gold-plated designs. You can get ordinary on/off pressure switches much cheaper, but they are still limited in durability, frequency response, pressure discrimination, and price per sensor compared with cloth. Also, there is no reason why a two-layer cloth (a routing layer and a sensor layer) couldn't be made that would allow finer two-point discrimination without addditional complexity for the application designer. Another point is that in active systems, where the sources or receptors of the pressure are moving, the two points can often be distinguished in the frequency domain - the simplest example is the way the two-point test is foiled when the two points do not contact simultaneously. More advanced frequency effects can be achieved with texturing of the skin, as in fingertips.
I'm not interested in learning an obsolete vector graphics scripting language, so if you have a point, could you list how RIP anticipates each claim in the Eolas patent? Otherwise it's like a lot of stuff in the Eolas case that has been claimed as prior art and repeatedly tossed out by the courts and the Patent Office.
You are totally off base. see my earlier post: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170066&cid =14174958
The patent is very, very specific and Mike Doyle actually built the software covered by the patent before filing the patent. His employer, a university, holds the patent for his invention. He then founded Eolas and licensed the patent back from his employer. Also, this is not the only big thing Mike Doyle invented, just the only one he tried to get paid for. Your idea of ending patents for inventors who don't have the ability to manufacture their inventions themselves is something the big companies would push hard for if there were any chance of it happening.
It wasn't easy - it's been in the courts for many years. Microsoft was offered a good deal early on but decided that they could get away with just using the patent without paying at all. They counted on their legal machine being able to crush tiny Eolas regardless of the merits of the case. Eolas is just one guy, Mike Doyle. He invented this technology legitimately, albeit about a month or two before other people. Nevertheless, if you read the patent carefully the details aren't really obvious. The patent and the legal issues around it are more complex than reports have indicated, and the alleged prior art differs in significant ways from the patent. Also, this isn't the only or most important thing Mike was the first to do - in the '80s he was the first person to create a networked hypertext system with the links stored in the content pages themselves rather than in a seperate central database. This was a much more fundamental technological and conceptual advance than the derivative implentation of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee, HTML. So I look at this as a rare case of a lone innovator actually getting a shot at the big bucks that corporations take as their due. Software patents are the problem, not Eolas, and as long as the system is as it is, the best than one can hope is that actual inventors will see some royalties.