If golf, bowling, and baseball are sports . . .

hawk

I also tried to read the Silmarillion and was unsuccessful. It is about as exciting as the Book of Numbers in the Bible.

Well they had to fight off the troop of Orcs that were hell-bent on chasing them down even though there was no such troupe of Orcs in the book and the lead Orc, Azog although referencing an actual character in Middle Earth lore, had long since been killed by Thorin.

Served no purpose? He gave them weapons from the Barrow Downs. These are the weapons with which they fought off the wraiths on weather top. In the movie there is no explanation for how they started out with no weapons and then suddenly had them when they needed them.

Buy your coffee already roasted???

*yech*

hawk

>Not everybody's cats are as dumb as mine

Yes they are.

It is a Statistical Mystery as to how 99% of cats are it the bottom quartile of intelligence.

It may have to do with having a brain the size of a walnut . . .

hawk

> I can make an adapter for a Gillette razor if I
> wanted to without breaking any DMCA laws.

When I was in college, Safeway's generic/house brand used the same head.

I bought those, and pulled off the heads to snap on to the better handle . . .

(these were made with nice hard metal, unlike the bic disposables which would cut my face the first time I used them)

hawk

One of my partners bought one of these for the office.

Then we found reusable filter canisters that we could load with better coffee.

Then it broke.

Our staff makes better coffee without having to clean several of those a day.

hawk

Not just obvious, but prior art.

Just about any market does this; the change of price brings other players in, or causes them to leave.

I wrote code for a simulation in '95 or so that had the simulated merchants applying a quadratic equation to the amount that their sales missed the sell-out quantity. It was trivial to cause markets to clear, on just that one piece of information. (In fact, at one point, due to a coding error, the product was a "bad" rather than a "good"--and it still cleared at a negative price.

The algorithm for Uber would be trivial: once the wait time goes above or below its usual band, the price adjusts by some portion per time unit (e.g., 1%/minute) until the wait time is normal. Or include lagged time periods to damp oscillations.

This is just plain trivial. I, or any other computational economist, could sit around all day kicking out new algorithms for this.

It's really pretty simple: if you sell out to quickly, or can't service all your customers, raise your prices; if you have excess, lower them. Doing it by algorithm is nothing new; the trick to patentability would be to find an algorithm that not only hasn't been done before, but is actually better than the other trivially reachable algorithms.

I drove the demand in that model various ways, whether constant, sine waves, stochastic, saw tooth, and probably others I'm not recalling off-hand. A rather simple genetic algorithm rapidly converged in all cases. Mathematically, that method was probably mathematically equivalent to large classes, possibly all, other second order and lower and lower methods or solutions--and the method rather clearly could be extended to nth order . . . (second order methods tend to be sufficient for most things).

hawk

It's not the hyphens.

*ANYTHING* that cuts another vampire/zombie/werewolf book needs to be viewed as a goodthing . . .

hawk

Well, I know NOW, but I did not know before. Most people don't go to TSA.gov and read all of the rules, they just go by what they see at the airport, where it says don't lock your luggage or they will blow it up.

I think if this is allowed then the restriction should also be clearly disclosed at the time when a potential guest is choosing whether to make a booking. I err on the side of not limiting what someone can do within their own premises without a very good reason, but the flip side of that is customers must be able to vote with their wallet for a competing hotel that does not impose the same limitation if that's what they want to do.

As I remember, the "happy ending" in Manna was only available to those whose ancestors had the foresight to invest in the libertarian Australia Project.....

That was my thought. I want to know the location of his sea steading city so that if I'm forced to be a pirate, I know where to raid for supplies.

There goes the new series of Game of Thrones...