I've seen no studies, but I know a lot of pot smokers and it's all over the board. Some smoke rarely, some grab the bong before they're out of bed. I'd say there are a lot of daily smokers, though, most working-class (construction, factory) folks I know are sober all day, come home, eat dinner, then smoke a few hitters and drink a few beers while watching the tube.
As Oscar Wilde said, "Work is the curse of the drinking class."
I suspect there is another, much more insidious link, and it's along the lines of the withdrawal (period of increased likelihood of suicide) associated with the cold turkey withdrawal from multiple other prescription mood amplifiers.
Dude, we're talking about POT, not heroin or cocaine or alcohol or tobacco. Pot is not addictive. One can of course be habituated; if I'm used to having a glass of orange juice every morning for five years and then there's none, I'm going to miss it. If I'm clinically depressed it may drive me to suicide, but that doesn't reflect on the orange juice, it reflects on a mental illness.
I've been smoking pot for over 40 years. Sometimes none is available and sometimes I can't afford it. Yeah, I miss it when I can't afford it or there isn't any available, but if I can have my coffee or pot but not both, I need my coffee.
This has nothing to do with addiction. It has to do with other mental illnesses.
No matter how popular was the CP/M, it didn't get the microcomputer to the masses. It was IBM which did it.
No, it was IBM clones that did it. Visicalc got microcomputers into offices, and as soon as IBM sold Microcomputers offices bought the same brand of computers as their typewriters and mainframes -- IBM. The masses started buying them when they started getting cheap enough to afford to take their work home. But there were few of them.
It was really the internet that got computers into the masses' homes. I've owned computers since 1982, and until almost the turn of the century everyone kept asking me why in the world I needed a computer.
We don't need to look very far back to see how Apple sued Samsung for the "rounded corner" to know that if IBM really wanted to sue, no matter how *clean* Compaq's *clean room* turned out to be, technically they had the right to do so, and they could very well shut the doors of (at that time) still nascent Compaq with their lawsuits.
Crime,violence, mental illness, addictions, disease, pollution and economic strife all rest upon us having too large a population.
Sorry, Jim, but you're wrong. The only thing you got right in that sentence was pollution, which is better in the US now than it was when we had half the population. All the others have been around since people have existed. There were only 100,000 people living in Europe in the middle ages, you think there were no crazy people, no disease, no murders or robberies? No alcoholism?
Yeah; the use of battery has become almost as bad as the use of magazine
Um, I think you guys' pedantry is a bit misplaced here. 1.5 volt flashlight batteries all have only one cell, and they've called them "batteries" since electrical batteries were invented. In fact, the only battery I think I have that is more than one cell is the one in the smoke alarm. Websters says:
batÂtery noun : a device that is placed inside a machine (such as a clock, toy, or car) to supply it with electricity
: a usually large group of similar people, things, or ideas that work together, are used together, etc.
: a group of two or more big guns used by the military plural batÂterÂies
1a : the act of battering or beating b : an offensive touching or use of force on a person without the person's consent â" compare assault 2a 2[Middle French batterie, from battre to beat] a : a grouping of artillery pieces for tactical purposes b : the guns of a warship 3: an artillery unit in the army equivalent to a company 4a : a combination of apparatus for producing a single electrical effect b : a group of two or more cells connected together to furnish electric current; also : a single cell that furnishes electric current <a flashlight battery> c plural : level of energy or enthusiasm <needs a vacation to recharge her batteries> 5a : a number of similar articles, items, or devices arranged, connected, or used together : set, series <a battery of tests> b : a usually impressive or imposing group : array 6: the position of readiness of a gun for firing 7: the pitcher and catcher of a baseball team
first of all it's so butt ugly that nobody is going to keep a crosshair on it for long: good
I said the same thing about the Hummer, but those big, expensive, ugly as sin things are on the road. As well as the almost as ugly Jeep, which also was first a military vehicle.
I'm seeing a pattern here. I will not buy Apple anymore as a result of their withholding security updates from older and perfectly functional hardware. My response is not to buy a newer model, but to switch away from Apple products.
Considering XP's end of life in a few months, Microsoft is equally bad here (and there are even more reasons to avoid Microsoft). That said, the only Apple I have is an ancient G3 that still works (or did the last time I turned it on). What's the use of quality hardware when you need to landfill it in a few years?
That's one of the things I like about Linux. When the last XP patch comes out I can simply throw kubuntu on it and it will run like a champ. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get Linux on an older Mac box, I'm sure there would be at least driver issues.
Yes, the magazine paid him, but when it was published as books (I forgot the name of the publisher) it didn't sell and he received no royalties for the books; the publisher just didn't have the marketing muscle that Doubleday did. Asimov recounts this story in one of his books, I don't remember which one.
Nobody but me is covered by my insurance. If you wreck my car, you're going to pay for the wreck. Both I and any other injured party will not only sue, but win.
One does indeed need both talent and craft for a work to be good. However,
it's not true you can manufacture success with total swill.
Pet rocks, mood rings, milli vanilli... all you need is money.
For example, the first "manufactured" hit band was 60s TV show group THE MONKEES.
I'm not sure they were the first, but at any rate it was never a secret that they didn't perform their own music; they weren't designed to be a real band, but fiction about a fictional band.
As to Clancy, I only read one of his books (Red October) but if IIRC (It's been years since I've taken it off the shelf) the dialogue fit the situation. I wouldn't call him either a bad writer or a great writer. He did transport me on to that sub. My idea of a bad writer is one that bores me or makes me cringe. Pohl used to be good, but his last book was drivel. I'd borrowed it from the library and returned it only half read; it was just pointless and boring. He seemed to have lost his talent in his extreme old age.
I'm sure the same will happen to Pratchett, since he has early onset Alzheimer's. That fellow has a hell of an imagination and a magical way with words (he knew he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and was afraid that he was a spoon).
Remember that line "if you build it, they(he) would come"?
*Sigh...* Another poor fool who believes what he sees in a movie! Really, dude, "if you build it, they will come" is an utter bullshit statement, as much bullshit as the late Shoeless Joe showing up in your ballpark. There were whole towns built during the housing boom that still stand empty today.
Your history isn't quite accurate. Before the abacus there were fingers. Then stones for numbers greater than ten; your flock would go out the gate, and for every sheep you picked up a rock. When they went back in the pen at night, a rock was discarded for every sheep.
Two centuries before Babbage, William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule. This was, in fact, MY first computer; electronic computers were the size of buildings and cost millions each.
Then came the electrical computer, with diodes.
Sorry, but how exactly would a contraption like that work?? You may be thinking of some primitive pre-computer a German scientist was fiddling with in the 1930s that used relays. Diodes? You're not an electronics engineer or hobbyist, are you? All diodes do is permit electricity to flow only one direction. Send AC through a diode and you get DC pulses. This is how a crystal radio works, more or less. Use four in a bridge and you convert AC to non-pulsed DC.
You also missed a contraption they had in the 1960s (possibly '50s as well), the analog computer. It computed using varying voltages. Its outputs were either voltmeters or patterns on a CRT (no text or graphics, just patterns). You could make a primitive one much like a slide rule with two potentiometers, a battery, and a voltmeter.
It was, in fact, the IBM, an elite corporation (at that time) which popularize the computer - by deciding to *NOT* stopping others in duplicating the original IBM PC design.
No, also incorrect. The computer was popularized by MultiCalc, the first spreadsheet, BEFORE the IBM PC and there were many brands, most of which used CP/M as its operating system that ran that program. "Microcomputers" as PCs were called at the time cost thousands of dollars. When the IBM PC came out it was about the most expensive, but it sold like hot cakes because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Their mistake wasn't leaving the design open, but in licensing PC-DOS rather than buying it outright. There were two valid (but both wrong) reasons for that: One, IBM saw the PC as a toy and saw no futire in it, and secondly since they had the patents and copyrights for the BIOS, there would be no way you could run PC-DOS on another brand.
However, Compaq assembled a team of engineers with no knowledge of the IBM BIOS to design a clean-room BIOS that would run PC-DOS (later named MS-DOS) and by the end of the century almost anybody could afford a Microsoft computer that would also run BE, OS/2, Linux, and other OSes.
And now, it moves back to the elites.
No, the elites never lost it to begin with. In 1970 a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer was less powerful than an iPhone. Your puny devices can't hold a candle to the giant mainframes governments, militaries, and fortune-500 corporations have, and when that capability is affordable, there will still be even more powerful capabilities the elites have.
You also missed the fact that a computer is in fact an abacus. Stored electrical charges are its beads and wires, and there is only one bead per wire. Now tell me, how many beads do I have to put on my abacus before it becomes sentient?
Watson will never actually think. It's an electric abacus.
True, self-driving cars will be safer, but that doesn't answer the question. At first you'll still need insurance. If one of them does cause a crash because of a mechanical malfunction, why would anything change? Automakers and mechanics are sued all the time for crashes caused by mechanical problems (which are actually rare, almost all car wrecks are human error). Example: Ford and Firestone for the SUV rollovers.
I think eventually driving without insurance will be legalized when the human factor is removed.
Right, and since now posting negative reviews can get you sued, what will happen?
What's getting these reviewers sued isn't negative reviews, but negative comments about a product they may have no experience whatever with. From TFA:
The Virginia Court of Appeals agreed this week, ruling that the comments were not protected First Amendment opinions if the Yelp users were not customers and thus were making false claims.
You have no 1st amendment right to spread lies about me. If I write a negative review of a product I've never seen, that's libel. If I write a negative review of something I actually used, I'm in the clear.
I keep thinking it's time for some of the other undead to break out. Where's the best-selling ghoul story?
I couldn't write a story like that. Well, I could but it would suck because my heart wouldn't be in it. It takes a special kind of ghoul to hack out nonsense that people will pay for that the author has no interest whatever in.
Mark my words though, those reactors will be fired up, because they need to be. They should build more.
Bad idea, did you learn nothing from Fukishama? Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone places on Earth, and places prone to earthquakes are terrible places to site a nuke. It would be worse than a nuke sited on the San Andreas fault in California; that's just madness. Japan simply is a bad place for nukes, they're stuck with whatever green energy they can extract and the rest will have to be carbon. No problem to their sovereignty, there's carbon almost everywhere BUT Japan. They can buy it from us, the Chinese, the Australians...
Thankfully, China may save us.
Considering the huge environmental air quality problems there from fossil fuels, you might be right.
Yeah, my site is hosted in Canada. I'm waiting for a visit from them wanting to know how I knew who the Area 51 Grays really were and who really killed Kennedy.
First off, to quote the esteemed Mr. Leghorn, "it's a joke, son." To quote your blow drier, "woosh".
The entire concept is strawman-like. The Bible says that it was mankind that neded to perish, because fallen angels mated with human women and the offspring needed to be destroyed (Genesis chapter six). Note this quote: "And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." So it seems he was OK with sea creatures.
I've wondered for a long time just how old Genesis is? Not the written Hebrew but the stories that were passed from generation to generation before writing was invented? I wonder of these "giants" mentioned that were the offspring of "fallen angels" were some now-extinct species of human fifty or more thousand years ago? I've read in various places that during the period that Neanderthals became extinct, homo sapiens almost did, too, with only a few thousand human survivors. Could this be the genesis of Genesis?
"Oh, cool. So, what does that mean in English?" That's the answer you'll get from a surprisingly large number of people if you're involved in research and try to dazzle them with technical jargon
That's not the reaction I get. If I'm talking to one person it's a dumb look and "Uh, OK." If there are two people one will turn and say "did you understand a word of that?" and the other will shake his head. The worst part is that they're asking me questions about their own computers.
Well, it is to me but if you're a literature or English major I'd say your opinion carries quite a bit of weight since wikipedia says "From 1966, King studied English at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English." So I'd say his opinion (terrible) carries far more weight than mine (not that good).
he obviously writes stories that a lot of people like.
Yes, he writes murder mysteries with sex. Women eat those up, he panders to them. Actually, the book I read had a pretty good story that wasn't told badly, but the writing didn't transport me into the book's world. If a writer is any good at all I'll lose myself.
You may not like switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, but it's not an unusual technique.
Perhaps you're right, I've surely seen it before but never noticed it. With Patterson's book, the first several chapters are written from the female protagonist's point of view, then there's a chapter where the protagonist is absent and is 3rd person, which kind of worked. But then it went back for several chapters to 1st person, then switched mid-chapter from first to third person in the sex scene. It just seemed really clumsy, contrived, and artificial to me. I was disappointed, I thought since he was so popular he must be good.
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I've seen no studies, but I know a lot of pot smokers and it's all over the board. Some smoke rarely, some grab the bong before they're out of bed. I'd say there are a lot of daily smokers, though, most working-class (construction, factory) folks I know are sober all day, come home, eat dinner, then smoke a few hitters and drink a few beers while watching the tube.
As Oscar Wilde said, "Work is the curse of the drinking class."
I would think it's likely a combination.
If you don't want the story posted then vote against it in the firehose. If it's posted and you're not interested, just don't click the fucking link.
Sheesh. If you don't want to read about scientific research you're at the wrong site.
I suspect there is another, much more insidious link, and it's along the lines of the withdrawal (period of increased likelihood of suicide) associated with the cold turkey withdrawal from multiple other prescription mood amplifiers.
Dude, we're talking about POT, not heroin or cocaine or alcohol or tobacco. Pot is not addictive. One can of course be habituated; if I'm used to having a glass of orange juice every morning for five years and then there's none, I'm going to miss it. If I'm clinically depressed it may drive me to suicide, but that doesn't reflect on the orange juice, it reflects on a mental illness.
I've been smoking pot for over 40 years. Sometimes none is available and sometimes I can't afford it. Yeah, I miss it when I can't afford it or there isn't any available, but if I can have my coffee or pot but not both, I need my coffee.
This has nothing to do with addiction. It has to do with other mental illnesses.
If group A's symptoms start earlier than group B and both self-medicate, group A will self-medicate first.
And there may be no causality at all. A third factor may trigger both schitzophrenia and marijuana use in some group of people.
Obviously, more study is needed.
Yes. Not the GP but the AC you responded to.
No matter how popular was the CP/M, it didn't get the microcomputer to the masses. It was IBM which did it.
No, it was IBM clones that did it. Visicalc got microcomputers into offices, and as soon as IBM sold Microcomputers offices bought the same brand of computers as their typewriters and mainframes -- IBM. The masses started buying them when they started getting cheap enough to afford to take their work home. But there were few of them.
It was really the internet that got computers into the masses' homes. I've owned computers since 1982, and until almost the turn of the century everyone kept asking me why in the world I needed a computer.
We don't need to look very far back to see how Apple sued Samsung for the "rounded corner" to know that if IBM really wanted to sue, no matter how *clean* Compaq's *clean room* turned out to be, technically they had the right to do so, and they could very well shut the doors of (at that time) still nascent Compaq with their lawsuits.
They did, in fact, sue Eagle Computer for copying the BIOS. The Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not copy the BIOS directly as a result of the court decision in Apple v. Franklin, but it could reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS and then write its own BIOS using clean room design. They must not have patented the BIOS, since they surely would have sued (as shown by suing Franklin). Wikipedia says clean-room design defends against everything BUT patents.
Crime,violence, mental illness, addictions, disease, pollution and economic strife all rest upon us having too large a population.
Sorry, Jim, but you're wrong. The only thing you got right in that sentence was pollution, which is better in the US now than it was when we had half the population. All the others have been around since people have existed. There were only 100,000 people living in Europe in the middle ages, you think there were no crazy people, no disease, no murders or robberies? No alcoholism?
Yeah; the use of battery has become almost as bad as the use of magazine
Um, I think you guys' pedantry is a bit misplaced here. 1.5 volt flashlight batteries all have only one cell, and they've called them "batteries" since electrical batteries were invented. In fact, the only battery I think I have that is more than one cell is the one in the smoke alarm. Websters says:
first of all it's so butt ugly that nobody is going to keep a crosshair on it for long: good
I said the same thing about the Hummer, but those big, expensive, ugly as sin things are on the road. As well as the almost as ugly Jeep, which also was first a military vehicle.
There's no accounting for taste.
I'm seeing a pattern here. I will not buy Apple anymore as a result of their withholding security updates from older and perfectly functional hardware. My response is not to buy a newer model, but to switch away from Apple products.
Considering XP's end of life in a few months, Microsoft is equally bad here (and there are even more reasons to avoid Microsoft). That said, the only Apple I have is an ancient G3 that still works (or did the last time I turned it on). What's the use of quality hardware when you need to landfill it in a few years?
That's one of the things I like about Linux. When the last XP patch comes out I can simply throw kubuntu on it and it will run like a champ. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get Linux on an older Mac box, I'm sure there would be at least driver issues.
Yes, the magazine paid him, but when it was published as books (I forgot the name of the publisher) it didn't sell and he received no royalties for the books; the publisher just didn't have the marketing muscle that Doubleday did. Asimov recounts this story in one of his books, I don't remember which one.
Nobody but me is covered by my insurance. If you wreck my car, you're going to pay for the wreck. Both I and any other injured party will not only sue, but win.
One does indeed need both talent and craft for a work to be good. However,
it's not true you can manufacture success with total swill.
Pet rocks, mood rings, milli vanilli... all you need is money.
For example, the first "manufactured" hit band was 60s TV show group THE MONKEES.
I'm not sure they were the first, but at any rate it was never a secret that they didn't perform their own music; they weren't designed to be a real band, but fiction about a fictional band.
As to Clancy, I only read one of his books (Red October) but if IIRC (It's been years since I've taken it off the shelf) the dialogue fit the situation. I wouldn't call him either a bad writer or a great writer. He did transport me on to that sub. My idea of a bad writer is one that bores me or makes me cringe. Pohl used to be good, but his last book was drivel. I'd borrowed it from the library and returned it only half read; it was just pointless and boring. He seemed to have lost his talent in his extreme old age.
I'm sure the same will happen to Pratchett, since he has early onset Alzheimer's. That fellow has a hell of an imagination and a magical way with words (he knew he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and was afraid that he was a spoon).
Remember that line "if you build it, they(he) would come"?
*Sigh...* Another poor fool who believes what he sees in a movie! Really, dude, "if you build it, they will come" is an utter bullshit statement, as much bullshit as the late Shoeless Joe showing up in your ballpark. There were whole towns built during the housing boom that still stand empty today.
Your history isn't quite accurate. Before the abacus there were fingers. Then stones for numbers greater than ten; your flock would go out the gate, and for every sheep you picked up a rock. When they went back in the pen at night, a rock was discarded for every sheep.
Two centuries before Babbage, William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule. This was, in fact, MY first computer; electronic computers were the size of buildings and cost millions each.
Then came the electrical computer, with diodes.
Sorry, but how exactly would a contraption like that work?? You may be thinking of some primitive pre-computer a German scientist was fiddling with in the 1930s that used relays. Diodes? You're not an electronics engineer or hobbyist, are you? All diodes do is permit electricity to flow only one direction. Send AC through a diode and you get DC pulses. This is how a crystal radio works, more or less. Use four in a bridge and you convert AC to non-pulsed DC.
You also missed a contraption they had in the 1960s (possibly '50s as well), the analog computer. It computed using varying voltages. Its outputs were either voltmeters or patterns on a CRT (no text or graphics, just patterns). You could make a primitive one much like a slide rule with two potentiometers, a battery, and a voltmeter.
It was, in fact, the IBM, an elite corporation (at that time) which popularize the computer - by deciding to *NOT* stopping others in duplicating the original IBM PC design.
No, also incorrect. The computer was popularized by MultiCalc, the first spreadsheet, BEFORE the IBM PC and there were many brands, most of which used CP/M as its operating system that ran that program. "Microcomputers" as PCs were called at the time cost thousands of dollars. When the IBM PC came out it was about the most expensive, but it sold like hot cakes because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Their mistake wasn't leaving the design open, but in licensing PC-DOS rather than buying it outright. There were two valid (but both wrong) reasons for that: One, IBM saw the PC as a toy and saw no futire in it, and secondly since they had the patents and copyrights for the BIOS, there would be no way you could run PC-DOS on another brand.
However, Compaq assembled a team of engineers with no knowledge of the IBM BIOS to design a clean-room BIOS that would run PC-DOS (later named MS-DOS) and by the end of the century almost anybody could afford a Microsoft computer that would also run BE, OS/2, Linux, and other OSes.
And now, it moves back to the elites.
No, the elites never lost it to begin with. In 1970 a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer was less powerful than an iPhone. Your puny devices can't hold a candle to the giant mainframes governments, militaries, and fortune-500 corporations have, and when that capability is affordable, there will still be even more powerful capabilities the elites have.
You also missed the fact that a computer is in fact an abacus. Stored electrical charges are its beads and wires, and there is only one bead per wire. Now tell me, how many beads do I have to put on my abacus before it becomes sentient?
Watson will never actually think. It's an electric abacus.
True, self-driving cars will be safer, but that doesn't answer the question. At first you'll still need insurance. If one of them does cause a crash because of a mechanical malfunction, why would anything change? Automakers and mechanics are sued all the time for crashes caused by mechanical problems (which are actually rare, almost all car wrecks are human error). Example: Ford and Firestone for the SUV rollovers.
I think eventually driving without insurance will be legalized when the human factor is removed.
Right, and since now posting negative reviews can get you sued, what will happen?
What's getting these reviewers sued isn't negative reviews, but negative comments about a product they may have no experience whatever with. From TFA:
You have no 1st amendment right to spread lies about me. If I write a negative review of a product I've never seen, that's libel. If I write a negative review of something I actually used, I'm in the clear.
I keep thinking it's time for some of the other undead to break out. Where's the best-selling ghoul story?
I couldn't write a story like that. Well, I could but it would suck because my heart wouldn't be in it. It takes a special kind of ghoul to hack out nonsense that people will pay for that the author has no interest whatever in.
Mark my words though, those reactors will be fired up, because they need to be. They should build more.
Bad idea, did you learn nothing from Fukishama? Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone places on Earth, and places prone to earthquakes are terrible places to site a nuke. It would be worse than a nuke sited on the San Andreas fault in California; that's just madness. Japan simply is a bad place for nukes, they're stuck with whatever green energy they can extract and the rest will have to be carbon. No problem to their sovereignty, there's carbon almost everywhere BUT Japan. They can buy it from us, the Chinese, the Australians...
Thankfully, China may save us.
Considering the huge environmental air quality problems there from fossil fuels, you might be right.
Yeah, my site is hosted in Canada. I'm waiting for a visit from them wanting to know how I knew who the Area 51 Grays really were and who really killed Kennedy.
First off, to quote the esteemed Mr. Leghorn, "it's a joke, son." To quote your blow drier, "woosh".
The entire concept is strawman-like. The Bible says that it was mankind that neded to perish, because fallen angels mated with human women and the offspring needed to be destroyed (Genesis chapter six). Note this quote: "And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." So it seems he was OK with sea creatures.
I've wondered for a long time just how old Genesis is? Not the written Hebrew but the stories that were passed from generation to generation before writing was invented? I wonder of these "giants" mentioned that were the offspring of "fallen angels" were some now-extinct species of human fifty or more thousand years ago? I've read in various places that during the period that Neanderthals became extinct, homo sapiens almost did, too, with only a few thousand human survivors. Could this be the genesis of Genesis?
Not only that, but James Clapper, head of the NSA, perjured himself before congress and was not held accountable. It's hard to trust a proven liar.
"Oh, cool. So, what does that mean in English?" That's the answer you'll get from a surprisingly large number of people if you're involved in research and try to dazzle them with technical jargon
That's not the reaction I get. If I'm talking to one person it's a dumb look and "Uh, OK." If there are two people one will turn and say "did you understand a word of that?" and the other will shake his head. The worst part is that they're asking me questions about their own computers.
"Terrible writer" is subjective.
Well, it is to me but if you're a literature or English major I'd say your opinion carries quite a bit of weight since wikipedia says "From 1966, King studied English at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English." So I'd say his opinion (terrible) carries far more weight than mine (not that good).
he obviously writes stories that a lot of people like.
Yes, he writes murder mysteries with sex. Women eat those up, he panders to them. Actually, the book I read had a pretty good story that wasn't told badly, but the writing didn't transport me into the book's world. If a writer is any good at all I'll lose myself.
You may not like switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, but it's not an unusual technique.
Perhaps you're right, I've surely seen it before but never noticed it. With Patterson's book, the first several chapters are written from the female protagonist's point of view, then there's a chapter where the protagonist is absent and is 3rd person, which kind of worked. But then it went back for several chapters to 1st person, then switched mid-chapter from first to third person in the sex scene. It just seemed really clumsy, contrived, and artificial to me. I was disappointed, I thought since he was so popular he must be good.