Legally there is no difference between buying 30 sec advertising spots and running a political blog on a company website.
This does not change the regulations about the amount of money a corporation can donate to a candidate. It doesn't change the regulations about in kind donations to candidates.
Corporations are run by people and those people have the right to speak about political issues. How those people structure their organization should not limit their ability to speak their mind
This ruling helps advocacy groups that are organized as corporations, such as the Sierra Club, ACLU, PETA, Unions, as much as it helps businesses.
Most, if not all, major media outlets in the US are corporations
Because of their Corporate structure, are you arguing that Congress could make laws regulating their news reporting or election coverage?
Many editorial boards of these organizations have a long history of supporting specific candidates or issues
I think crafting a law that allowed media corporations to have freer speech than non-media corporations would probably have a sticky time with the 14th Amendment Equal Protection rules
If such a law could be crafted, how would you decided what is a protected media corporation at what isn't. For example is GE a media corporation, it owns, or did own, a significant portion of NBC
I would guess about 60% of the residents can get DSL service from a local phone company, but there are lots of homes and ranches that are over 20 miles from the closest town.
These have always been financial losers for the phone company anyway (installation costs of running 20 miles of phone line). I can't imagine them being very excited about ever running enough fiber or DSLAMS out to remote locations like this.
And yeah, most of these locations don't have Cell Towers either. It's POTS or nothing for them.
This is how I do it too. Pretty much the same situation, 40 employees instead of 50. I am also in charge of the ESOP Committee, the Safety Committe, the Lean Production Task Force, the Technology Committee
Notebooks, Outlook Tasks and Appointments are what I use to keep it all straight. It took me a long time to learn the value, but I am much better about keeping meeting minutes up to date and using them to track my various sub tasks.
The door analogy is horrible. In this case it was more like he had the keys to the box that let him change access codes to the automatic door system for a building. The building never closed, the doors all functioned normally. Except for the manager who couldn't get to the controls, everything worked normally for everyone else.
Problem with software patents is they have never been specific enough. They try to patent a function of how something works. Mechanical patents don't work that way.
If you patent a universal joint for a car using roller bearings, and I can patent one using ball bearings and a different joint style. Even though my universal joint provides the same function as yours, it does the function differently enough that I don't have to license your design.
Uniloc patented a licensing system. Yes. Microsoft built their own licensing system that provides the same function, but there was no evidence that Microsoft used any part of Uniloc's software to do that function. Therefore, Microsoft didn't violate Uniloc's patent
For many years the Patent courts have upheld business model and software function patents as valid, but the Supreme Court ruled that style invalid last year. The Judge in this case is just apply the time tested rules about mechanical patents in the method that the Supreme Court has instructed them to apply to software.
But in this case, we are talking about the production of SUGAR
At the end of the day, when the beets are processed and the sugar is produced into nice little bags for you to buy in the grocery store, no genetic material is left in the sugar.
A good chemistry lab should be able to easily prove that there is no chemical difference between sugar produced from GM beets and non-GM beets. Anti-GM fear mongering over sugar is not science based.
In my region of Idaho, family farms are still the fairly common, 300-400 acres, not getting wealthy, but able to support the family. There are quite a few retired farmers, who have 200 acres that they rent out to a neighbor. There are some agribusiness farms in the area. But we still have lots of family farms (and ranches)
I live in a rural area that grows a significant amount of sugar beets
What this article and the judge are missing is that sugar beets are not like corn. They don't go to seed until the 2nd year.
A farmer has to plan to raise sugar beets for seed. Growing seed is an expensive proposition. Most of them don't do it on speculation, they do it only if they have a contract to produce the seed in advance. They are working with a seed company to produce the specific variety that the seed company wants to purchase. It is planted one year, winters over and then will flower and produce seed the next year. This is true of many root type crops.
It would seem fairly straight forward for the seed company to do their seed contracts by geographic region. This region will produce GM seed, this region will produce un-GM seed.
Growing GM plants in an adjoining field to non-GM plants has no risk of pollen contamination for the normal sugar production process.
The problem isn't the pollen, the problem is the processing. From what I have seen in my hometown, is there isn't a really good segregation process that would keep GM beets seperate from un-GM beets once they got the the dump site. The dump is where all the local farmers bring their beets from the field and the Sugar Factory reps weigh the trucks, analyze the sugar content and purchase the beets. It is a 20 acre dirt area. Once the harvest is over, the dump personnel load the beets into rail cars or over-the road trucks for transportation to the sugar factory. If John the Farmer is raising GM crops, and Frank the Farmer is raising non-GM beets, once they get to the beet dump, it is extremely likely the loads are getting mixed into the same pile.
Politicians are addicted to big omnibus "comprehensive" bills because it gives them cover with the voters that they are in Washington "doing the people's business". If they could hammer out small bills that quickly made a noticeable difference, they would have too much free time, and people might actually expect them to spend time at home in their own districts.
I'm pretty libertarian,
but I am more in favor of insurance companies using Community Based risk analysis for setting their rates than individual risk analysis
No one ever has perfect knowledge about an individual. Even attempting to gather it is fairly intrusive. But actuarial tables for the nation as a whole are fairly complete. Insurance companies could easily design rates that would allow them to make a profit based on the general population rather than specific individuals.Currently there is no advantage for an insurance company to do that however. It would lead to lower rates for high risk individuals and higher rates for low risk individuals. If only one or two companies adopted this model of setting rates, fairly quickly their rolls would fill with only high risk people and no low risk people. The increased claim rates would put them out of business. If the whole industry went to a community model, then the variation in rates from company to company would reflect their operational efficiency, giving good companies a competitive edge This is why Community based risk analysis is sometimes mentioned in the health care debate. Heck, I would be a fan of someone passing a 1 page bill that addressed just this one issue and seeing what happened from there.
I had a friend who's ex-wife told the authorities that she was home schooling her daughters.
The reality is she was ignorant lazy and spineless. She wasn't willing to fight with her kids about going to school because she didn't like school.
The oldest quit going to school at 13, the middle one left to live with her Dad. The youngest quit school at 12.
The two that stayed with their mother turned into unemployed baby-making welfare queens. Their dream is to become disabled so that they have an excuse not to work.
Is this the type of un-schooling we are talking about?
Its because they can see it out their backdoor
Alaska had 2 600,000 acre fires this year, but because no structures where threatened and it was a hassle to see them, no media reports were made.
2 years ago, I spent 30 days defending homes on a 300,000 acre fire in Idaho. Again, it was extremely remote, no homes were lost, no one died, the homes were scattered widely and had low valuations, so no real media stories.
The depleted uranium in a M1 Tank Armor is encased in steel. It does not "coat" the tank
The crew is not going to be exposed to the uranium unless the armor gets penetrated. If the armor is penetrated the crew has bigger problems.
Even then, it is not a big risk it will be penetrated, Of almost 5,000 M1 tanks built, only 10-12 tanks lost due to enemy action have had their armor penetrated. Only 7 soldiers have died in combat in an M1, 4 of those drowned when their tank collapsed a bridge.
The crew members smoking or chewing tobacco is far greater cancer risk than the tank armor.
you haven't dealt with software costs for niche applications before.
The ERP software my company uses costs $1800 per seat, it replaced a system that cost $5000 per seat.
I use Solidworks for design work. It is in the $5-6000 per seat range
10 years ago I was working for a bank. I was a DBA for a document management system. The software cost us $25,000 per seat. We had to buy 10 seats at a time. We owned 200 seats.
The smaller the market you sell into, the higher the software cost is going to be. The development costs have to paid for by a smaller number of customers. $4.1 million for 13,000 students seems reasonable. If it worked. If it doesn't work, it wasn't worth $10.
This was my first thought too. If the process could be made in a small enough package, with a high volume output, a carrier could possibly produce enough jet fuel to power all its aircraft and helicopters.
Another thought though, people forget all the escort ships, Destroyers and Cruisers are also Gas Turbine engines. Normal practice these days is for these ships to refuel from the carrier and burn the same fuel the aircraft use. If the carrier could produce enough fuel for it's escorts too, the whole fleets staying time on station could be fuel independent.
Why bother using a drive shaft? Put the 4 eletric motors at the wheels and just run electric wire to power them. Otherwise, I like your idea, it is probably overpowered for the normal driver, but a good idea.
Depending on who you get your numbers from, somewhere between 60% and 80% of the firefighters in this country are volunteers. The level of training varies between departments can vary greatly, but most are well trained dedicated professionals. They just don't get paid for it. Same can be said about HAMs who specialize in emergency communications. They are professionals who don't get paid for it.
The law of unintended consequences plays a huge role here.
During years that have few hurricanes, most of the SE US experiences drought conditions. Yes, hurricanes have a great ability to do large amounts of damage, but they also bring large quantities of rain to many regions of the planet.
If we eliminate hurricanes, how do we replace this moisture?
The Federal Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program uses volunteer grant reviewersOf course, the program was designed by the fire service. Reviewers are pulled from fire departments across the country. Volunteers are not allowed to review applications from their part of the country.Very view criticisms of the program are critical of the grant reviewers. In fact, it is considered to be a program that is very good at getting money to where it is most needed with little overhead.Many people trying to improve te quality of their own apps, volunteer specifically to get exposed to more applications so that they get a better understanding of what makes a good application and what is a poor application.I am not going to be critical of the idea of using volunteer grant reviewers, for this program, until I have more information about what kind of qualificaitons they have for reviewers and safeguards against people gaming the system that have been put in place.
Note: I have applied for and won over $1,000,000 in grants for my community through the AFG process
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A person's ability to purchase a stage on which to speak has never been a factor in calculating whether or not they can speak.
My Freedom of Speech is exactly the same as Monsanto's or PETA's or the President of the US.
My ability to get my message across may be less than any of those people or organizations, but that doesn't mean my Freedom is less.
Equality of results is not guaranteed in our Constitution, nor should it be.
No, I don't see the difference
Legally there is no difference between buying 30 sec advertising spots and running a political blog on a company website.
This does not change the regulations about the amount of money a corporation can donate to a candidate. It doesn't change the regulations about in kind donations to candidates.
Corporations are run by people and those people have the right to speak about political issues. How those people structure their organization should not limit their ability to speak their mind
This ruling helps advocacy groups that are organized as corporations, such as the Sierra Club, ACLU, PETA, Unions, as much as it helps businesses.
Who or what is the press these days though?
That was one of the points that the majority made in their opinion.
Just because someone isn't a paid professional doesn't mean that they don't have the freedom of the press too.
A Corporate Blog talking about issues relating to their industry has the same freedom of the press as the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Most, if not all, major media outlets in the US are corporations
Because of their Corporate structure, are you arguing that Congress could make laws regulating their news reporting or election coverage?
Many editorial boards of these organizations have a long history of supporting specific candidates or issues
I think crafting a law that allowed media corporations to have freer speech than non-media corporations would probably have a sticky time with the 14th Amendment Equal Protection rules
If such a law could be crafted, how would you decided what is a protected media corporation at what isn't. For example is GE a media corporation, it owns, or did own, a significant portion of NBC
Broadband access in my county is very spotty.
I would guess about 60% of the residents can get DSL service from a local phone company, but there are lots of homes and ranches that are over 20 miles from the closest town.
These have always been financial losers for the phone company anyway (installation costs of running 20 miles of phone line). I can't imagine them being very excited about ever running enough fiber or DSLAMS out to remote locations like this.
And yeah, most of these locations don't have Cell Towers either. It's POTS or nothing for them.
This is how I do it too. Pretty much the same situation, 40 employees instead of 50. I am also in charge of the ESOP Committee, the Safety Committe, the Lean Production Task Force, the Technology Committee
Notebooks, Outlook Tasks and Appointments are what I use to keep it all straight. It took me a long time to learn the value, but I am much better about keeping meeting minutes up to date and using them to track my various sub tasks.
The door analogy is horrible. In this case it was more like he had the keys to the box that let him change access codes to the automatic door system for a building. The building never closed, the doors all functioned normally. Except for the manager who couldn't get to the controls, everything worked normally for everyone else.
If you patent a universal joint for a car using roller bearings, and I can patent one using ball bearings and a different joint style. Even though my universal joint provides the same function as yours, it does the function differently enough that I don't have to license your design.
Uniloc patented a licensing system. Yes. Microsoft built their own licensing system that provides the same function, but there was no evidence that Microsoft used any part of Uniloc's software to do that function. Therefore, Microsoft didn't violate Uniloc's patent
For many years the Patent courts have upheld business model and software function patents as valid, but the Supreme Court ruled that style invalid last year. The Judge in this case is just apply the time tested rules about mechanical patents in the method that the Supreme Court has instructed them to apply to software.
At the end of the day, when the beets are processed and the sugar is produced into nice little bags for you to buy in the grocery store, no genetic material is left in the sugar.
A good chemistry lab should be able to easily prove that there is no chemical difference between sugar produced from GM beets and non-GM beets. Anti-GM fear mongering over sugar is not science based.
In my region of Idaho, family farms are still the fairly common, 300-400 acres, not getting wealthy, but able to support the family. There are quite a few retired farmers, who have 200 acres that they rent out to a neighbor. There are some agribusiness farms in the area. But we still have lots of family farms (and ranches)
What this article and the judge are missing is that sugar beets are not like corn. They don't go to seed until the 2nd year.
A farmer has to plan to raise sugar beets for seed. Growing seed is an expensive proposition. Most of them don't do it on speculation, they do it only if they have a contract to produce the seed in advance. They are working with a seed company to produce the specific variety that the seed company wants to purchase. It is planted one year, winters over and then will flower and produce seed the next year. This is true of many root type crops.
It would seem fairly straight forward for the seed company to do their seed contracts by geographic region. This region will produce GM seed, this region will produce un-GM seed.
Growing GM plants in an adjoining field to non-GM plants has no risk of pollen contamination for the normal sugar production process.
The problem isn't the pollen, the problem is the processing. From what I have seen in my hometown, is there isn't a really good segregation process that would keep GM beets seperate from un-GM beets once they got the the dump site. The dump is where all the local farmers bring their beets from the field and the Sugar Factory reps weigh the trucks, analyze the sugar content and purchase the beets. It is a 20 acre dirt area. Once the harvest is over, the dump personnel load the beets into rail cars or over-the road trucks for transportation to the sugar factory. If John the Farmer is raising GM crops, and Frank the Farmer is raising non-GM beets, once they get to the beet dump, it is extremely likely the loads are getting mixed into the same pile.
Politicians are addicted to big omnibus "comprehensive" bills because it gives them cover with the voters that they are in Washington "doing the people's business". If they could hammer out small bills that quickly made a noticeable difference, they would have too much free time, and people might actually expect them to spend time at home in their own districts.
I'm pretty libertarian, but I am more in favor of insurance companies using Community Based risk analysis for setting their rates than individual risk analysis No one ever has perfect knowledge about an individual. Even attempting to gather it is fairly intrusive. But actuarial tables for the nation as a whole are fairly complete. Insurance companies could easily design rates that would allow them to make a profit based on the general population rather than specific individuals.Currently there is no advantage for an insurance company to do that however. It would lead to lower rates for high risk individuals and higher rates for low risk individuals. If only one or two companies adopted this model of setting rates, fairly quickly their rolls would fill with only high risk people and no low risk people. The increased claim rates would put them out of business. If the whole industry went to a community model, then the variation in rates from company to company would reflect their operational efficiency, giving good companies a competitive edge This is why Community based risk analysis is sometimes mentioned in the health care debate. Heck, I would be a fan of someone passing a 1 page bill that addressed just this one issue and seeing what happened from there.
I had a friend who's ex-wife told the authorities that she was home schooling her daughters.
The reality is she was ignorant lazy and spineless. She wasn't willing to fight with her kids about going to school because she didn't like school.
The oldest quit going to school at 13, the middle one left to live with her Dad. The youngest quit school at 12.
The two that stayed with their mother turned into unemployed baby-making welfare queens. Their dream is to become disabled so that they have an excuse not to work.
Is this the type of un-schooling we are talking about?
Its because they can see it out their backdoor
Alaska had 2 600,000 acre fires this year, but because no structures where threatened and it was a hassle to see them, no media reports were made.
2 years ago, I spent 30 days defending homes on a 300,000 acre fire in Idaho. Again, it was extremely remote, no homes were lost, no one died, the homes were scattered widely and had low valuations, so no real media stories.
The crew is not going to be exposed to the uranium unless the armor gets penetrated. If the armor is penetrated the crew has bigger problems.
Even then, it is not a big risk it will be penetrated, Of almost 5,000 M1 tanks built, only 10-12 tanks lost due to enemy action have had their armor penetrated. Only 7 soldiers have died in combat in an M1, 4 of those drowned when their tank collapsed a bridge.
The crew members smoking or chewing tobacco is far greater cancer risk than the tank armor.
you haven't dealt with software costs for niche applications before.
The ERP software my company uses costs $1800 per seat, it replaced a system that cost $5000 per seat.
I use Solidworks for design work. It is in the $5-6000 per seat range
10 years ago I was working for a bank. I was a DBA for a document management system. The software cost us $25,000 per seat. We had to buy 10 seats at a time. We owned 200 seats.
The smaller the market you sell into, the higher the software cost is going to be. The development costs have to paid for by a smaller number of customers.
$4.1 million for 13,000 students seems reasonable. If it worked. If it doesn't work, it wasn't worth $10.
Could you mount the engines centerline with axles to the wheels?
It would seem like that would solve the suspension problems without adding the complication of a driveshaft and differential
This was my first thought too. If the process could be made in a small enough package, with a high volume output, a carrier could possibly produce enough jet fuel to power all its aircraft and helicopters.
Another thought though, people forget all the escort ships, Destroyers and Cruisers are also Gas Turbine engines. Normal practice these days is for these ships to refuel from the carrier and burn the same fuel the aircraft use. If the carrier could produce enough fuel for it's escorts too, the whole fleets staying time on station could be fuel independent.
Why bother using a drive shaft? Put the 4 eletric motors at the wheels and just run electric wire to power them. Otherwise, I like your idea, it is probably overpowered for the normal driver, but a good idea.
Depending on who you get your numbers from, somewhere between 60% and 80% of the firefighters in this country are volunteers.
The level of training varies between departments can vary greatly, but most are well trained dedicated professionals. They just don't get paid for it.
Same can be said about HAMs who specialize in emergency communications. They are professionals who don't get paid for it.
Get your license now.
No morse code required for any level of licensing anymore
KD7FDS
What about a larger scale project where the sewage treatment plant produces enough electricity to be self sustaining?
The law of unintended consequences plays a huge role here.
During years that have few hurricanes, most of the SE US experiences drought conditions. Yes, hurricanes have a great ability to do large amounts of damage, but they also bring large quantities of rain to many regions of the planet.
If we eliminate hurricanes, how do we replace this moisture?
The Federal Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program uses volunteer grant reviewersOf course, the program was designed by the fire service. Reviewers are pulled from fire departments across the country. Volunteers are not allowed to review applications from their part of the country.Very view criticisms of the program are critical of the grant reviewers. In fact, it is considered to be a program that is very good at getting money to where it is most needed with little overhead.Many people trying to improve te quality of their own apps, volunteer specifically to get exposed to more applications so that they get a better understanding of what makes a good application and what is a poor application.I am not going to be critical of the idea of using volunteer grant reviewers, for this program, until I have more information about what kind of qualificaitons they have for reviewers and safeguards against people gaming the system that have been put in place. Note: I have applied for and won over $1,000,000 in grants for my community through the AFG process