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I have 5 or so fake Facebook profiles I use for expressly this purpose.

A cursory search reveals no less than 8 companies already selling this

It wouldn't necessarily have to involve any of these. Most of these that I've seen have been cobbled together through Excel, so they have the skills to get everything into Excel. You could offer a product that made really pretty charts around these metrics.

The hardware would be just a 720p TV which they would have to buy and mount - you would just sell teh software.

Re: actually stands for "regarding," not "reply," so the OP could claim to be within the letter of ethical bounds, if not the spirit :)

No - Bay Area is a strike-slip fault whereas Chile is a subduction zone

As handsets become cheaper for the computing they deliver, this will become an accepeted norm for specialized software (my computer costs less than 10% of the value of the software on it)

How about this possible solution? If you're employed by a company and you want to take maternity or paternity leave beyond a standard period, you have to quit your job. Your employer is given a lump sum payment from the government to cover the cost of finding your replacement, based on some metrics such as the salary of the position. These payments are covered by an increase in payroll tax for all employees.

That way, all companies are shouldering the burden of people having children, so they have no real reason to discriminate against women likely to become pregnant.

They got 21% of the company.

> megadollars

actually, gigadollars...

"Business speak" as a term doesn't mean the useful business speak of increasing revenues, lowering costs, serving customers, pressuring suppliers, etc. It means things like "leveraging data," "strategic synergies," etc.

Why will only "douchebags" have a need for these techniques?

Also, the fact that everyone knows that it's a bit difficult ($500 fine for being caught on the roof, locked doors, etc.) makes the hacks more impressive when they do happen.

The fact that you've never heard of Omniture says more about you than it does about Omniture or Adobe.

>Can they threaten to remove sites from their index if you don't write "I love Google" on the top of every webpage?

Sure they can. They wouldn't survive very long. That's why they don't.

What's wrong with that? Read the material critically. Scratch out a few letters on a piece of paper. If it makes sense and you want to go further, buy the book.

As far as advertising goes, this is pretty useful -- it gives me some value even if I don't buy the book, and directs me to a resource that I might be genuinely interested in.

You have already started your inevitable downmodding, but I think you have a lot of truth to your comment. When people assail the change from Futura to Verdana, most give only their personal aesthetic preference for Verdana -- a pure assertion of its superiority.

It's also "random" (more like unpredictable) which kids receive what types of environments. Sometimes, Dad's favorite is the eldest son, sometimes Daddy's favorite is the youngest daughter.

will be rejected by Apple.

A self-replicating printer isn't that until it can build machines to go out and source the materials needed for the continued operation of the printer.

The FDA, on the whole, is quite reasonable and well-run. For treatments where there isn't an alternative and the disease is fatal, they do accelerate approvals and they allow more people to use the drug experimentally. For things like Rogaine they are very cautious and even then sometimes make fatal mistakes.

They don't, (nor do they for Literature, of course), and often the Peace Prize is used as a political platform for the Nobel Committee. E.g. Al Gore.

The Nobel prize is usually awarded for basic science, uncovering the mechanisms of something, rather than engineering applications based on that science.

In many situations you'll be able to find something close by whose width can be estimated -- perhaps a door, a car, a tree...

I think it is pretty obvious that if Bach lived another 10 years (or days), he would have written music that nobody would ever come up with (remember, human existence will not be infinite).

With Turing, it's entirely possible that he could have come up with a novel way of looking at things, or an invention, which we have not achieved today. Thus, even if at some point, all technical discoveries have been made that would have been made in Turing's natural lifespan, we would be much farther along at any point in time if we had those contributions, and our way of looking at our field might be richer.

The highest achievers will always have to fight politics instead of depend on it, since while a top achiever may produce 1000x the societal contribution of an average achiever, he/she will still only have 1 vote.

That's not necessarily true. Brands which sold a lot of different models could sell a large number of cars without making it to the top 10 models.

Business which are based on restricting access to information are threatened, even in the developing world. Information velocity among, say, Vietnamese shrimp fishermen has increased in the last 10 years by an absolutely astonishing amount.

Haha, the Redline EX3250 is an example of one of those 1U servers that can take a lot of load off your servers by doing all your SSL. It sold for $30,000 in 2003 - I bought one on EBay for $225 in 2007 and use it to run SSL for my site. It's amazing what people pay for "enterpriseyness."