tvashtarkatena

That all may well be, but where's my flying car, bitch?

IT'S 2035???!!! Damn, I must have slept through the alarm(s)....

I have a waffle that weeps maple syrup.

My friends, that's John McCain.

If Potter can do the Nordwand that way....

Is that avatar pic Bruce Lee or did my brother in law shave? Masahiro, is that YOU?

Grigris, grid bolting, stick clips...it's gettin so you can't get hurt no matter how baked you are.

One word: Titan. Problem solved.

I drove past that place coming back from the Sierras last time. The sign said they accept Visa, Mastercard, or Meth.

The way I'm tracking, I'll need to aid 5.4 pretty soon, so I'm all for it.

Hatin' = batin' Just sayin'...

One way to lose your lover is to sport that unfortunate comb over.

One to a few months on a regular basis throughout one's life can recharge the spirit more effectively than taking a year off per century. If you don't hate your job, and your presence is actually valued at work, a leave of absence is one option that doesn't require hitting the reset button. Don't 'ask' for it. 'Inform' your employer that you need some time off and that you're going to take advantage of this great opportunity to do the first nude ascent of Makalu or whatever; you'd be surprised how flexible employers become...if they don't already want to flush your ass. It's gonna be way cheaper for them to figure something out than to hire somebody new if the leave of absence is relatively short. The trick is, of course, to keep your expenses reasonable throughout your life. A lot of younger folks blow a sizable chunk of their disposable income on booze and bling, particularly their ride. Fine if you're rolling on cash, but if you even need to think about priorities; say FU to Madison Ave and cut that shit down; even a modest income will support a month or more off per year unpaid if no kids are involved. And learn how to cook from scratch, for fucks sake. Your cooworkers will invariably say "I wish I could afford to do that" as the glower at you, simmering with resentful admiration, but it's almost always more about making choices rather than not having enough.

Who Killed the Javelin?

I never thought the recycling craze would include the 70's and 80's, but there you have it.

I think we've collectively identified the gene for obtusivity here.

Yeah, despite the tomes above, the ruling was pretty simple. Genes aren't inventions. Not hard.

Body hair was in then

Mark, you are so damn cool. We're all so very impressed down here.

no, we traversed the slab for p2.

I have no problem with patents in general. Their value depends on the value of what they're protecting and its corresponding competitive environment. Most are a waste of money, of course, but every now and then they provide either a deterrent or sanction against copycatting, which is, of course, rampant. I used to work for Fluke (electronic test tools) as a design engineer. Like any good design department, we regularly dissected competing products. We dissected on Asian made product (outsourced by a US company) and found that they copied our design to such an extent that they even included those injection molding design errors we'd deemed too minor to fix. One of our reps went to an Asian trade show and they had the copied multimeter there, complete with our manuals, printed by us...only with stickers printed with their company logo literally glued over the top of our logo wherever it appeared. We sued, won, and barred them from selling that product in the US. International protection? Yeah, good luck with that. It's hard to say whether such a sanction was worth it, given the time, effort, and cost of the suit. The deterrent value for future encroachment was probably worth more than the sanction itself. It's often not hard to circumvent many utility patents, particularly if they're not well written, and even if there is a little encroachment the cost of suit usually prohibits pursuing all but the most blatant cases. Most patents are minor perks for the folks named on them, and not much more.

You can't patent human DNA, but you could, until this decision, patent a gene; something that is not invented and that already exists in nature. you can't patent a newly discovered species, but you can a newly discovered, not invented, gene. Go figure. The patenting process is for invention, not identification. Patenting a therapy is great, patenting a way to identify genes is great, patenting the gene itself is hogwash. The fear that this will slow research is probably crap. The incentives for chasing after gene therapies are so enormous and lucrative that this won't even represent a minor hiccup. Rather, it will likely increase the pace of innovation by reducing the proprietary nature of this research. Funny that the integrated circuit was mentioned. A company that maintains a long term monopoly on a genetic test (due to gene patents) that is priced so high as to prevent most folks from getting it effectively maximizes overall health care costs down the road by acting as too tight a gate...much like an economic transistor. Much better to ease off on the filtering a bit and allow all willing research groups to come up with a cheapest, most accessible test possible.

That fully autonomous jug mounted cam worked great.

Private companies partnering with public research facilities seems to be today's most common model for basic research.

I'm not a soundbyte junkie either way. The Rfucks do so many patently stupid and dysfunctional things that I don't have to be.