The pesticide is a seed coating? How frequently do bees come into contact with seeds that are planted? Is this one of those studies where they drench a bee in a thousand times its normal exposure and the bee dies? Or does this residue actually stay on the plant through its entire life and affect the bee?
Also, it's apparently used in the UK. Are only North American bees susceptible to this? The article says:
Clothianidin has already been banned by Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia for its toxic effects.
What about the UK, Russia, China or anyone else? Wouldn't you be able to do surveys on bees inside the UK versus say Germany to get some empirical data to back this up?
I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase food and crop yield. I'm not a chemist or environmental expert so if anyone can explain a little more why this can be considered a key part of CCD, I'd be grateful.
The same guy that went after Michael Mann and others after it was thrown out. He's a young Republican with an agenda that he's forcing down everyone's throat since day one. From trying to change the state seal (it has a mammary in it!) to just stating that "Homosexuality is wrong."
I'm not saying he's right or wrong in this matter (the judge seemed to agree with him) but he's one of those guys and he's a state Attorney General for Virginia pushing his conservative agenda to a national level.
"If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said.
No, that is NOT the information I want. Why in the hell should I care that a bunch of tourists in the restaraunt ordered horseshoes? Why should I care that a bunch of total strangers ordered a hamburger, ehen that's what I had for lunch? This sounds like a really, REALLY useless feature.
Hey bro, I heard you liked menus. So I put a menu in your menu while you wait for a menu.
That was weird. When I looked at you, all I saw was my browser. When I looked back to my browser, there you were.
One night I dreamed I was surfing the internet with Google. Many scenes from my life flashed across the screen.
In each scene I noticed trace routes in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of trace routes, other times there was one only.
This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from lagging, disconnection or defeat, I could see only one set of trace routes, so I said to Google,
"You promised me Google,
that if I followed you, you would search with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of trace routes in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?"
Google replied, "The years when you have seen only one set of trace routes, my child, is when I searched for you."
Hello, gentlemen, look at your browser, now back to me, now back at your browser, now back to me. Sadly, it doesn't have the information you want, but if you stopped using some other search engine and switched to Google, you could have already had your information. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a flying car with the search engine your browser could use. What’s on your screen, back at me. I have it, it’s the search results to some query you have yet to even conceive. Look again, the search results are now pornography. Anything is possible when you use Google. I’m on a server.
Seriously Don't Call Them a Group!
on
Angles On Anonymous
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Or they'll DDoS you.
Who laugh? Hmmm? Who was it? Speak up so you can be added to the list. We'll see to it that your internet connection never functions right again.
I heard that if you post something bad on Slashdot, CmdrTaco hands over your IP address to Anonymous -- where do you think all the GNAA/Goatse trolls went?
Did somebody just sneeze? That's a DDoS. Who laughed when the witnessed testified that Assange has a smaller than average penis? That's a DDoS. If you're replying to this post? Oh, boy, you better believe that's a DDoS. In fact, if you're reading this right now let's just say there's not a lot you can do to stop from being DDoS'd by Anonymous for trying to find out more information about that particular group %*&#$^#%@#$ no carrier
I have no problem with what IBM does. They are a practicing entity which is directly opposite of what IV does. The difference is that a high rate of IBM's patents are granted. This is proper use of the patent system because IBM then makes those products.
I suspect Intellectual Ventures spends a nice chunk of it's money on forcing patents through the system. Thousands of patents that evidently have little business being patents. But their legion of lawyers persists pushing these patents and revisioning them. Yes, they pay thousands of dollars on each patent to do this but this is an abuse of the patent system if they do this just because they have money.
Imagine if this first salvo results in hundreds of millions of dollars going to IV. Then what? Then that money goes into putting more strain on the USPTO and more lawyers are hired to push unwarranted patents through the system. Then those win more suits and more lawyers are hired in a classic breeder model of lawyer propagation. If my calculations are correct, by the year 2054 the Earth will be a mass of patent lawyers expanding outward at the speed of light only to eventually collapse back in on itself causing a "Big Crunch" and ending the universe until the next big bang. Intellectual Ventures must be stopped (with apologies to Stanislaw Lem).
But seriously, the two are totally different in that one produces and one sues.
ddos the patent office, everyone file hundreds of patents.
*chuckles*
Oh Anonymous Coward, not all of life's problems can be solved with a DDOS. Like when my girlfriend left me last week and blocked my phone number -- calling her until her voice mail was full from work and friend's phones did no good.
Oh, how I wish that was all that they did. As you can see from their site:
Intellectual Ventures has been actively inventing since August 2003. The company has filed thousands of patent applications in more than 50 technology areas and has thousands of ideas under consideration.
Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications. No mention of how many were issued. It's entirely possible that they were issued to the actual people working at IV and not to IV but a search shows nine patents issued to IV on the USPTO.
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Actually, the response has not been to rid the world of software patents as you so hoped and the threat of Intellectual Ventures has long been affecting companies. From the article:
The threat posed by Intellectual Ventures helped prompt the rise of firms like RPX Corp. It is paid by companies to buy up potentially threatening patents; the companies receive licenses to those patents, and RPX pledges never to sue over them.
Think about that for a second. The system for software patents is so screwed up and backwards that it's cheaper to pay someone to buy up a patent and promise to never sue over it than it is for you to build a patent war chest and wait for the big one to hit. It's like patent insurance. Easily the most interesting thing in the article to me. Unfortunately this shows tolerance and a way to move forward.
Will IV allow licensing of their patent portfolio, or will they do like a lot of companies, just get patents so nobody else can use them?
Well, from their their website they list all their "products" and services:
Purchasing a nonexclusive license to relevant IV portfolio(s) on a term or life-of-patent basis
Purchasing an exclusive license (subject to pre-existing licenses) to selected IV invention(s) on a term or life-of-patent basis
AccessingIntellectual Property to use as defense against the threat of corporate assertions
Leveraging IV’s sophisticated acquisition capabilities to gain access to inventions of particular interest to you
Using IV as a financing source for mergers & acquisitions (M&A) whereby IV agrees to purchase a target company’sIntellectual Property to “bridge” the acquirer’s effective offer
Creating new inventions in conjunction with IV’s inventors and invention process
The first bullet appears to answer your question that yes, they do. But when you say "patent portfolio" I don't think you'll find anyone with enough cash to access to the whole portfolio, most likely it's one license to one patent at a time. I think their big "product" is providing a service to liquidate your patent very easily (like a pawn shop for patents) so far. This salvo may change that.
Because Halomonas species are typically halophiles, they are usually found in water sources with high salinity levels, such as the Dead Sea and even within the frigid waters of Antarctica.
In the paper you can see where this bug sits in the phylogenetic tree.
I'm guessing the Midway Atoll has warmer water but you might find different microbes. I guess I'm more curious if the researchers think this bug already existed or if it was a neighboring microbe in the phylogenetic tree that colonized titanic and prospered, mutating slowly to what it is today -- accustomed to the iron of the wreck? If you drop anything with high surface area into the ocean and check it out fifty years later, it might be the norm to find some microbe busily breaking it down with a slight twist...
I say we surface and nuke the entire site from sea level. It's the only way to be sure those bugs don't attack our buildings and transportation. If they make it out of there, it'll be 9/11 times a hundred.
So what you guys did was only waste the time of everyone who wasn't ignorant enough to mistake it for an obvious joke.
Five stars. You should have been a poet.
Hey Noah, why don't you try reading the product review:
Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown. Shipping Information: We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52. Radioactive minerals are for educational and scientific use only.
$40 for a little canister that varies in size and can only be used for education and scientific use only. Good luck ballasting your boat with that.
But I await your argument for calibrating your Geiger Counter... you know I'm sure the reviews on Amazon are paramount to scientists looking to calibrate a Geiger counter. And the online uranium shopping experience has been once again ruined!
How come you stopped comparing me to fanboys and goatse trolls? Why not Hitler now?
For a start, even as a joke, a lot of those jokes are just a cross between vandalism and fanboyism. E.g., it's trivial to run into reviews for games
Woh, wait a second. Where in the summary or article do they link to a game where this has happened?
You know, TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!! kinda reviews.
Where in the world are you getting this from? Fanboys are a completely different problem. That's not funny and it's not something I do. The joke reviews go on products that nobody in their right mind would buy. If somebody puts up a joke product like uranium, how does it deserve anything other than joke reviews?
Here's a free tip for you: if you try to do a joke review on a very popular product, about a million people rate you down and your review is either removed or never seen again. So keep that in mind when you think I went around poisoning reviews for Fable III or whatever. Signal to noise ratio? Have you ever used the Amazon reviews? Because it really sounds like you haven't. I challenge you to post a joke review that genuinely ruined your shopping experience and explain to me how that happened.
If you ever made a review of "TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!!" it would be moderated down and never seen. It's so obvious you don't read Amazon reviews.
You know, sorta like the guys posting goatse and rickrolling links on an unrelated mailing list.
There we go, go ahead and try to draw some kind of link between these joke reviews for uranium and mailing goatse links out to thousands of people. Whatever helps you justify decrying this as a problem for online shopping. How many goatse links and rickrolls can you point me to in Amazon reviews? Hmmm?
You selfish insensitive clod, your father is still alive while mine was horribly mauled, disfigured and killed by what appeared to be a Bobcat after I gifted him this same office chair! Your father may be in the hospital but mine is dead because I did not read those online reviews. If only I had been so lucky!
Because while some fake reviews are obvious, many may not be.
I am so sorry to whomever purchased the IDC report for $1,499.99 and read the ten PDF pages and found out that there was no plot between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and the holiday season. I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for misrepresenting that product and tricking them into purchasing it. You know I found that IDC report after searching for Blu-Ray players way back in 2005. That's what I was suggested since none were out yet.
I would also like to review geekoid's post above at a +5. After the post arrived to my home via http, I immediately experienced a glowing sensation in my loins and instantly had the clarity and foresight of a million Jesuses plus two -- as advertised!
Seriously, you want to know what's corrupting Amazon? Check out the Wikipedia printing scam that Books LLC has been running. Just the other day I was looking for a book on Washington DC as a gift and was suggested this piece of trash. It's just Wikipedia articles, as discussed on Slashdot. Except now that crap is being suggested to me in searches for books on specific subject matter!
But no, it's the reviews we are putting on products that no one should ever purchase that are "ruining the shopping experience."
And how is this different from the myriad vaporware announcements over the past three decades? At least there's some humor in these.
What the article really seems to miss is that there are meta-moderating for the reviews so you see things like "154 of 156 people found the following review helpful"
And when you see a spam bot or some fan boy getting all hot and bothered over some new product that's being preordered, that review gets buried as people vote it down and add comments like "WTF?" So if you're worried about this being an indication that companies or people are gaming the sale of products through reviews, I usually vote that crap down if I see it. And, honestly, these reviews have helped me. Just last week, I was going to order a set of Barska binoculars but half the reviews reported a mirror alignment defect so I didn't care what kind of sale they had on them.
I've rarely if ever found a review that was misleading and rated up.
You have to sign in with a legitimate account to do any of the above so it's not like there are spam bots out there gaming the reviews and the moderation of the reviews. If anyone else has seen this on Amazon, please speak up and link to examples, I'd be interested.
It's a joke. It's funny. It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny. It's not some evil corporation pimping it's uranium, it's people who think half life jokes and Back to the Future references are the hip new thing.
One of my friends posted the original joke review to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt a long time ago and for about a week, we got our kicks writing joke reviews and people approved of them because, well, they were funny. I'm appalled that you think this is gaming the system when it's just regular people having a good time.
As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me.
How on earth could that bother you? You didn't notice it until you stumbled into a weird category on some beta app. Do you have any sense of humor?
For what it's worth, Amazon is starting to allow reviewers who ordered the item from Amazon to mark on their review that Amazon confirms them as an owner. So you could probably in the future sort those reviews by those that wrote jokes and those that actually ordered the uranium (my god, how is this not on idle).
It really bothers you? How? Please tell me how I've ruined your shopping experience.
Pretty much. There always an "ist" of some sort to battle against. There were fascists, that went away. Then came communists, that got old. Now it's terrorist.
How do I move it along to lobbyist?
You have to tell people who the bad guys are or else they start looking at what you've been up to.
From Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" at the end once the narrator has picked over his friends and family and everyone else with a fine tooth comb:
Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
Someone needs to update that song for DHS and TSA.
So, just to be clear, I do not want to sound like a Chinese sympathizer or proponent but from the article:
In protest, the Chinese Government has set up its own rival awards ceremony to the Nobel prize; the "Confucius peace prize".
I would wait a bit before that's confirmed. The only news in English I can find on it seems to indicate it doesn't exist or at least wasn't given to the recipient reported by the Associated Press. Those guys aren't often wrong but this sounds like a satire or problem in translation.
So, yeah, censorship is bad in any form and I think the Chinese government is terrible in doing this but they do run things their own special way over there and censorship has always been the norm.
The objective is to make money for the charity, so more money can be given out.
Then call it what it is and demand to see how much money is made for charity when the US Stocks plummet.
It does not matter to the foundation if that's an American business or not, just that it has to be profitable. If African companies are not profitable then the foundation will simply squander the money away.
There aren't many. And that's my problem right there. If they figured out a way to give all this money out to build infrastructure, jobs and profitable companies and avoid corruption then those in need might have a chance at coming out of this persistent state.
How is what the foundation doing largely detrimental?
I don't know where I said or implied this was largely detrimental. If I could simplify this down to analogy, let's say I meet you on the street and you have no jacket. So I say that I am giving you $100 to buy a new jacket. But I am afraid you will spend it on drugs. So I invest that $100 in the stock market and a year later I have $5 to give you. But I don't give it to you, I give it to my friend who is also very well off and employed and he takes that five dollars and starts making you a jacket. But he's going to make you a designer jacket because we don't want to give you the cheap stuff. And so this goes for eternity or until the investments I have put that $100 in suffer from some economic problems.
It's not detrimental but would you be okay if I went to the press and made the statement that I had donated $100 to you?
What bothers me primarily is that we're starting to talk about the amount of money it would take to 'prime the pump' on an economy. If you look at the Congo or whoever as a country in a recession, one could use the money to set up a banking system and distribute the money directly to the people themselves. You'd have to stop corruption at the least inside your banking system which means working with the U.N. or some organization you trust to install people who will report corruption. This is going to be overhead on the cost but the end result is going to be handing each family a small lump of money and trying to get education and businesses set up so that people have knowledge and job opportunities. After a generation of public education and some businesses that you can contract locally to do good honest work for you, then you're really starting to make a difference. Instead, the foundations look to foreign companies that are already doing well to contract out this work. And you're not really donating money when you pay yourself with it.
Nowhere in my post did I advocate giving this money to a corrupt government. But I do say they are being treated like children. Children can be taught and leading by example is one way to teach. I'm surprised that human beings can solve so many problems but not these problems.
Also, I think the foundation concept is a great idea. My primary problem is that they are committed to investing in primarily American and foreign companies then giving a small percent at the end of the year while claiming that the original amount is "given away."
No, you're full of bullshit. A one-time shot of a half-billion dollars will get pissed away in a year. Put that money in a foundation and consistently donate the interest, however, and you get a significant chunk of change going to the cause every year, forever.
Forever? Just like the stock market is going to last forever? Just like the money the foundation lost from the BP oil spill? They lowered their payout they had promised following the American housing and financial crisis and I'm sure it's because they didn't get the money they thought was "already in the bag." Of course we can't get at any hard figures of how much they had pre-market crash and right after it but I'm going to go ahead and say you're full of bullshit in thinking that they are investing in things that are consistently going to help. They are investing in the stock market. The stock market is a gamble. Any thoughts otherwise are true bullshit.
Call me old fashion but when you "give something away." You let it go. You don't set up a foundation and put the money in that foundation and then parcel out small percentages yearly as your foundation invests it back into businesses and countries that you have an interest in. I've bitched about this before (I'm aware that the couple hundred I've donated in my life does not measure up to tens of billions) but I think it should be clarified. A lot of these billionaires do not give the money away. They put the money into a foundation that then invests the large amounts of money into the American economy and sometimes businesses or areas of development that they hold an interest in. Once the return is netted at the end of the year, then this is what is "given away" in the strictest sense of the words. They treat researchers and poor starving nations like children. It has its benefits but I see it as largely detrimental. I understand that in doing this the foundation can continue to give indefinitely (until the American stock market dumps) but what I don't understand is that potential that the money has could be equally useful to the target medicines and poor that are supposed to be helped. If you don't think that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is American-centric and nationalistic in its investments, why don't you read his warning letter about China developing alternative energy. To quote Kenny Powers: "Sure, I've been called a xenophobe, but the truth is, I'm not. I honestly just feel that America is the best country and the other countries aren't as good. That used to be called patriotism."
Here's my prediction for Zuck's money: He's going to pledge a trillion dollars it to something like stopping malaria in Africa. It's going to go into a foundation. The foundation will make money yearly by investing in indexes and mutual funds spread across American (not African) companies managed by some genius living comfortably far from any malaria parasite. At the end of each year, they're going to have ~5.5% to give away. They have American medical research companies apply for research grants. They arrange to have malaria medicine created and licensed from American companies shipped to Africa. They can't give that money to governments like the Democratic Republic of the Congo because government corruption will wick away much of that. And they might buy small arms and attack their neighbors with them. They get treated like children and they stay children. At the end of that year, America prevails economically with a sound infrastructure while the DRC remains malaria infested, corrupted and without any sort of infrastructure to provide clean potable water, sewage treatment or electricity to large areas of populace.
So I have to kind of wonder if they're "giving money away" or if they're putting money into an engine that just persists existing problems while helping the American economy? Because people have been donating vast extensive sums of money to stop malaria historically and where are we at in that fight?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that something is happening but I really question when I read "give away" in the news articles when a better term might be "endowed" or just call it what it often is, "an investment in America resulting in good will."
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it's apparently used in the UK. Are only North American bees susceptible to this? The article says:
Clothianidin has already been banned by Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia for its toxic effects.
What about the UK, Russia, China or anyone else? Wouldn't you be able to do surveys on bees inside the UK versus say Germany to get some empirical data to back this up?
I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase food and crop yield. I'm not a chemist or environmental expert so if anyone can explain a little more why this can be considered a key part of CCD, I'd be grateful.
The same guy that went after Michael Mann and others after it was thrown out. He's a young Republican with an agenda that he's forcing down everyone's throat since day one. From trying to change the state seal (it has a mammary in it!) to just stating that "Homosexuality is wrong."
I'm not saying he's right or wrong in this matter (the judge seemed to agree with him) but he's one of those guys and he's a state Attorney General for Virginia pushing his conservative agenda to a national level.
No, that is NOT the information I want. Why in the hell should I care that a bunch of tourists in the restaraunt ordered horseshoes? Why should I care that a bunch of total strangers ordered a hamburger, ehen that's what I had for lunch? This sounds like a really, REALLY useless feature.
Hey bro, I heard you liked menus. So I put a menu in your menu while you wait for a menu.
That was weird. When I looked at you, all I saw was my browser. When I looked back to my browser, there you were.
One night I dreamed I was surfing the internet with Google. Many scenes from my life flashed across the screen.
In each scene I noticed trace routes in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of trace routes, other times there was one only.
This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from lagging, disconnection or defeat, I could see only one set of trace routes, so I said to Google,
"You promised me Google,
that if I followed you, you would search with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of trace routes in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?"
Google replied, "The years when you have seen only one set of trace routes, my child, is when I searched for you."
Hello, gentlemen, look at your browser, now back to me, now back at your browser, now back to me. Sadly, it doesn't have the information you want, but if you stopped using some other search engine and switched to Google, you could have already had your information. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a flying car with the search engine your browser could use. What’s on your screen, back at me. I have it, it’s the search results to some query you have yet to even conceive. Look again, the search results are now pornography. Anything is possible when you use Google. I’m on a server.
Or they'll DDoS you.
Who laugh? Hmmm? Who was it? Speak up so you can be added to the list. We'll see to it that your internet connection never functions right again.
I heard that if you post something bad on Slashdot, CmdrTaco hands over your IP address to Anonymous -- where do you think all the GNAA/Goatse trolls went?
Did somebody just sneeze? That's a DDoS. Who laughed when the witnessed testified that Assange has a smaller than average penis? That's a DDoS. If you're replying to this post? Oh, boy, you better believe that's a DDoS. In fact, if you're reading this right now let's just say there's not a lot you can do to stop from being DDoS'd by Anonymous for trying to find out more information about that particular group %*&#$^#%@#$ no carrier
She's already been reported to Anonymous as the lead prosecutor in the Assange case. She will feel my love yet.
I have no problem with what IBM does. They are a practicing entity which is directly opposite of what IV does. The difference is that a high rate of IBM's patents are granted. This is proper use of the patent system because IBM then makes those products.
I suspect Intellectual Ventures spends a nice chunk of it's money on forcing patents through the system. Thousands of patents that evidently have little business being patents. But their legion of lawyers persists pushing these patents and revisioning them. Yes, they pay thousands of dollars on each patent to do this but this is an abuse of the patent system if they do this just because they have money.
Imagine if this first salvo results in hundreds of millions of dollars going to IV. Then what? Then that money goes into putting more strain on the USPTO and more lawyers are hired to push unwarranted patents through the system. Then those win more suits and more lawyers are hired in a classic breeder model of lawyer propagation. If my calculations are correct, by the year 2054 the Earth will be a mass of patent lawyers expanding outward at the speed of light only to eventually collapse back in on itself causing a "Big Crunch" and ending the universe until the next big bang. Intellectual Ventures must be stopped (with apologies to Stanislaw Lem).
But seriously, the two are totally different in that one produces and one sues.
ddos the patent office, everyone file hundreds of patents.
*chuckles*
Oh Anonymous Coward, not all of life's problems can be solved with a DDOS. Like when my girlfriend left me last week and blocked my phone number -- calling her until her voice mail was full from work and friend's phones did no good.
They only license their patent portfolio.
Oh, how I wish that was all that they did. As you can see from their site:
Intellectual Ventures has been actively inventing since August 2003. The company has filed thousands of patent applications in more than 50 technology areas and has thousands of ideas under consideration.
Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications. No mention of how many were issued. It's entirely possible that they were issued to the actual people working at IV and not to IV but a search shows nine patents issued to IV on the USPTO.
So remember the TED Laser Mosquito/Malaria technology? That's just a patent waiting to be issued then licensed but until then I wouldn't recommend building any.
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Actually, the response has not been to rid the world of software patents as you so hoped and the threat of Intellectual Ventures has long been affecting companies. From the article:
The threat posed by Intellectual Ventures helped prompt the rise of firms like RPX Corp. It is paid by companies to buy up potentially threatening patents; the companies receive licenses to those patents, and RPX pledges never to sue over them.
Think about that for a second. The system for software patents is so screwed up and backwards that it's cheaper to pay someone to buy up a patent and promise to never sue over it than it is for you to build a patent war chest and wait for the big one to hit. It's like patent insurance. Easily the most interesting thing in the article to me. Unfortunately this shows tolerance and a way to move forward.
Will IV allow licensing of their patent portfolio, or will they do like a lot of companies, just get patents so nobody else can use them?
Well, from their their website they list all their "products" and services:
The first bullet appears to answer your question that yes, they do. But when you say "patent portfolio" I don't think you'll find anyone with enough cash to access to the whole portfolio, most likely it's one license to one patent at a time. I think their big "product" is providing a service to liquidate your patent very easily (like a pawn shop for patents) so far. This salvo may change that.
Because Halomonas species are typically halophiles, they are usually found in water sources with high salinity levels, such as the Dead Sea and even within the frigid waters of Antarctica.
In the paper you can see where this bug sits in the phylogenetic tree.
...
I'm guessing the Midway Atoll has warmer water but you might find different microbes. I guess I'm more curious if the researchers think this bug already existed or if it was a neighboring microbe in the phylogenetic tree that colonized titanic and prospered, mutating slowly to what it is today -- accustomed to the iron of the wreck? If you drop anything with high surface area into the ocean and check it out fifty years later, it might be the norm to find some microbe busily breaking it down with a slight twist
I say we surface and nuke the entire site from sea level. It's the only way to be sure those bugs don't attack our buildings and transportation. If they make it out of there, it'll be 9/11 times a hundred.
So what you guys did was only waste the time of everyone who wasn't ignorant enough to mistake it for an obvious joke.
Five stars. You should have been a poet.
Hey Noah, why don't you try reading the product review:
Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown. Shipping Information: We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52. Radioactive minerals are for educational and scientific use only.
$40 for a little canister that varies in size and can only be used for education and scientific use only. Good luck ballasting your boat with that.
... you know I'm sure the reviews on Amazon are paramount to scientists looking to calibrate a Geiger counter. And the online uranium shopping experience has been once again ruined!
But I await your argument for calibrating your Geiger Counter
How come you stopped comparing me to fanboys and goatse trolls? Why not Hitler now?
For a start, even as a joke, a lot of those jokes are just a cross between vandalism and fanboyism. E.g., it's trivial to run into reviews for games
Woh, wait a second. Where in the summary or article do they link to a game where this has happened?
You know, TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!! kinda reviews.
Where in the world are you getting this from? Fanboys are a completely different problem. That's not funny and it's not something I do. The joke reviews go on products that nobody in their right mind would buy. If somebody puts up a joke product like uranium, how does it deserve anything other than joke reviews?
Here's a free tip for you: if you try to do a joke review on a very popular product, about a million people rate you down and your review is either removed or never seen again. So keep that in mind when you think I went around poisoning reviews for Fable III or whatever. Signal to noise ratio? Have you ever used the Amazon reviews? Because it really sounds like you haven't. I challenge you to post a joke review that genuinely ruined your shopping experience and explain to me how that happened.
If you ever made a review of "TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!!" it would be moderated down and never seen. It's so obvious you don't read Amazon reviews.
You know, sorta like the guys posting goatse and rickrolling links on an unrelated mailing list.
There we go, go ahead and try to draw some kind of link between these joke reviews for uranium and mailing goatse links out to thousands of people. Whatever helps you justify decrying this as a problem for online shopping. How many goatse links and rickrolls can you point me to in Amazon reviews? Hmmm?
You selfish insensitive clod, your father is still alive while mine was horribly mauled, disfigured and killed by what appeared to be a Bobcat after I gifted him this same office chair! Your father may be in the hospital but mine is dead because I did not read those online reviews. If only I had been so lucky!
Because while some fake reviews are obvious, many may not be.
I am so sorry to whomever purchased the IDC report for $1,499.99 and read the ten PDF pages and found out that there was no plot between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and the holiday season. I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for misrepresenting that product and tricking them into purchasing it. You know I found that IDC report after searching for Blu-Ray players way back in 2005. That's what I was suggested since none were out yet.
I would also like to review geekoid's post above at a +5. After the post arrived to my home via http, I immediately experienced a glowing sensation in my loins and instantly had the clarity and foresight of a million Jesuses plus two -- as advertised!
Seriously, you want to know what's corrupting Amazon? Check out the Wikipedia printing scam that Books LLC has been running. Just the other day I was looking for a book on Washington DC as a gift and was suggested this piece of trash. It's just Wikipedia articles, as discussed on Slashdot. Except now that crap is being suggested to me in searches for books on specific subject matter!
But no, it's the reviews we are putting on products that no one should ever purchase that are "ruining the shopping experience."
And how is this different from the myriad vaporware announcements over the past three decades? At least there's some humor in these.
What the article really seems to miss is that there are meta-moderating for the reviews so you see things like "154 of 156 people found the following review helpful"
And when you see a spam bot or some fan boy getting all hot and bothered over some new product that's being preordered, that review gets buried as people vote it down and add comments like "WTF?" So if you're worried about this being an indication that companies or people are gaming the sale of products through reviews, I usually vote that crap down if I see it. And, honestly, these reviews have helped me. Just last week, I was going to order a set of Barska binoculars but half the reviews reported a mirror alignment defect so I didn't care what kind of sale they had on them.
I've rarely if ever found a review that was misleading and rated up.
You have to sign in with a legitimate account to do any of the above so it's not like there are spam bots out there gaming the reviews and the moderation of the reviews. If anyone else has seen this on Amazon, please speak up and link to examples, I'd be interested.
It's a joke. It's funny. It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny. It's not some evil corporation pimping it's uranium, it's people who think half life jokes and Back to the Future references are the hip new thing.
One of my friends posted the original joke review to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt a long time ago and for about a week, we got our kicks writing joke reviews and people approved of them because, well, they were funny. I'm appalled that you think this is gaming the system when it's just regular people having a good time.
As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me.
How on earth could that bother you? You didn't notice it until you stumbled into a weird category on some beta app. Do you have any sense of humor?
For what it's worth, Amazon is starting to allow reviewers who ordered the item from Amazon to mark on their review that Amazon confirms them as an owner. So you could probably in the future sort those reviews by those that wrote jokes and those that actually ordered the uranium (my god, how is this not on idle).
It really bothers you? How? Please tell me how I've ruined your shopping experience.
Pretty much. There always an "ist" of some sort to battle against. There were fascists, that went away. Then came communists, that got old. Now it's terrorist.
How do I move it along to lobbyist?
You have to tell people who the bad guys are or else they start looking at what you've been up to.
From Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" at the end once the narrator has picked over his friends and family and everyone else with a fine tooth comb:
Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
Someone needs to update that song for DHS and TSA.
In protest, the Chinese Government has set up its own rival awards ceremony to the Nobel prize; the "Confucius peace prize".
I would wait a bit before that's confirmed. The only news in English I can find on it seems to indicate it doesn't exist or at least wasn't given to the recipient reported by the Associated Press. Those guys aren't often wrong but this sounds like a satire or problem in translation.
Furthermore, here's the point of view from the horse's mouth (angry version here and refusal to resolve here) and they are propping up external support (though I think it's selective in choosing Heffermehl's words).
So, yeah, censorship is bad in any form and I think the Chinese government is terrible in doing this but they do run things their own special way over there and censorship has always been the norm.
The objective is to make money for the charity, so more money can be given out.
Then call it what it is and demand to see how much money is made for charity when the US Stocks plummet.
It does not matter to the foundation if that's an American business or not, just that it has to be profitable. If African companies are not profitable then the foundation will simply squander the money away.
There aren't many. And that's my problem right there. If they figured out a way to give all this money out to build infrastructure, jobs and profitable companies and avoid corruption then those in need might have a chance at coming out of this persistent state.
How is what the foundation doing largely detrimental?
I don't know where I said or implied this was largely detrimental. If I could simplify this down to analogy, let's say I meet you on the street and you have no jacket. So I say that I am giving you $100 to buy a new jacket. But I am afraid you will spend it on drugs. So I invest that $100 in the stock market and a year later I have $5 to give you. But I don't give it to you, I give it to my friend who is also very well off and employed and he takes that five dollars and starts making you a jacket. But he's going to make you a designer jacket because we don't want to give you the cheap stuff. And so this goes for eternity or until the investments I have put that $100 in suffer from some economic problems.
It's not detrimental but would you be okay if I went to the press and made the statement that I had donated $100 to you?
What bothers me primarily is that we're starting to talk about the amount of money it would take to 'prime the pump' on an economy. If you look at the Congo or whoever as a country in a recession, one could use the money to set up a banking system and distribute the money directly to the people themselves. You'd have to stop corruption at the least inside your banking system which means working with the U.N. or some organization you trust to install people who will report corruption. This is going to be overhead on the cost but the end result is going to be handing each family a small lump of money and trying to get education and businesses set up so that people have knowledge and job opportunities. After a generation of public education and some businesses that you can contract locally to do good honest work for you, then you're really starting to make a difference. Instead, the foundations look to foreign companies that are already doing well to contract out this work. And you're not really donating money when you pay yourself with it.
Nowhere in my post did I advocate giving this money to a corrupt government. But I do say they are being treated like children. Children can be taught and leading by example is one way to teach. I'm surprised that human beings can solve so many problems but not these problems.
Also, I think the foundation concept is a great idea. My primary problem is that they are committed to investing in primarily American and foreign companies then giving a small percent at the end of the year while claiming that the original amount is "given away."
No, you're full of bullshit. A one-time shot of a half-billion dollars will get pissed away in a year. Put that money in a foundation and consistently donate the interest, however, and you get a significant chunk of change going to the cause every year, forever.
Forever? Just like the stock market is going to last forever? Just like the money the foundation lost from the BP oil spill? They lowered their payout they had promised following the American housing and financial crisis and I'm sure it's because they didn't get the money they thought was "already in the bag." Of course we can't get at any hard figures of how much they had pre-market crash and right after it but I'm going to go ahead and say you're full of bullshit in thinking that they are investing in things that are consistently going to help. They are investing in the stock market. The stock market is a gamble. Any thoughts otherwise are true bullshit.
Call me old fashion but when you "give something away." You let it go. You don't set up a foundation and put the money in that foundation and then parcel out small percentages yearly as your foundation invests it back into businesses and countries that you have an interest in. I've bitched about this before (I'm aware that the couple hundred I've donated in my life does not measure up to tens of billions) but I think it should be clarified. A lot of these billionaires do not give the money away. They put the money into a foundation that then invests the large amounts of money into the American economy and sometimes businesses or areas of development that they hold an interest in. Once the return is netted at the end of the year, then this is what is "given away" in the strictest sense of the words. They treat researchers and poor starving nations like children. It has its benefits but I see it as largely detrimental. I understand that in doing this the foundation can continue to give indefinitely (until the American stock market dumps) but what I don't understand is that potential that the money has could be equally useful to the target medicines and poor that are supposed to be helped. If you don't think that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is American-centric and nationalistic in its investments, why don't you read his warning letter about China developing alternative energy. To quote Kenny Powers: "Sure, I've been called a xenophobe, but the truth is, I'm not. I honestly just feel that America is the best country and the other countries aren't as good. That used to be called patriotism."
Here's my prediction for Zuck's money: He's going to pledge a trillion dollars it to something like stopping malaria in Africa. It's going to go into a foundation. The foundation will make money yearly by investing in indexes and mutual funds spread across American (not African) companies managed by some genius living comfortably far from any malaria parasite. At the end of each year, they're going to have ~5.5% to give away. They have American medical research companies apply for research grants. They arrange to have malaria medicine created and licensed from American companies shipped to Africa. They can't give that money to governments like the Democratic Republic of the Congo because government corruption will wick away much of that. And they might buy small arms and attack their neighbors with them. They get treated like children and they stay children. At the end of that year, America prevails economically with a sound infrastructure while the DRC remains malaria infested, corrupted and without any sort of infrastructure to provide clean potable water, sewage treatment or electricity to large areas of populace.
So I have to kind of wonder if they're "giving money away" or if they're putting money into an engine that just persists existing problems while helping the American economy? Because people have been donating vast extensive sums of money to stop malaria historically and where are we at in that fight?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that something is happening but I really question when I read "give away" in the news articles when a better term might be "endowed" or just call it what it often is, "an investment in America resulting in good will."