If you worked for Oracle or Apple would they expect you to walk in the door with the source code to OS X or Oracle DB? If you mention an open source project you've worked on would they expect to get copyrights on all your contributions? Why should a patent be any different?

A resume isn't a business proposal saying what you'll do, it's a list of qualifications that shows what you've done. There should be absolutely no expectation that a license to any patents would be given to a future employer free of charge. If you think it will impress the employer and raise your chances then leave the patents on.

As I said previously PETA claims that they focus their intake efforts on animals that are generally unsuitable for adoption.

Could PETA be lying about this? Of course. I wouldn't trust PETA about a load of other stuff.

But let me turn the question around, why do you think PETA euthanizes over 90% of their intakes?

PETA members are about as hardcore as you can get when it comes to animal rights, I don't understand what you think is driving them to needlessly kill animals.

And I've already discussed it previous comments in the thread. The only thing you seem to have added is criticism over how they dispose of the bodies, which raises the question of how you propose they dispose of the bodies, and why the body disposal method really matters in the first place.

On the contrary I think PETA is completely ridiculous in their view of animal rights.

What I'm arguing against is bone-headed criticism of them. Of all the things PETA is guilty of being callous towards animals is not one of them.

Well according to the source:

The majority of adoptable dogs are never brought through our doors (we refer them to local adoption groups and walk-in animal shelters). Most of the animals we house, rescue, find homes for, or put out of their misery come from miserable conditions, which often lead to successful prosecution and the banning of animal abusers from ever owning or abusing animals again.

So according to PETA the reason for their outsized euthanasia rate is their population of incoming animals is highly atypical.

Now you can assume they're lying and misleading, and the most extreme of the pro animal rights groups is also killing animals for fun, or you can consider the fact they're euthanizing those animals for a very good reason.

I don't understand why you're so convinced that these people who are so zealous they'll work for next to nothing are also killing animals for no cause.

If they have enough experience to know the animal won't get adopted then yes.

Think of it this way. PETA is the most extreme of the major animal rights organizations, they're staffed by people who are so passionate that they're willing to endure ridicule and crappy pay to work for them.

Now either these animal rights nutbags who won't even drink milk because it enslaves cows are at the same time committing a completely unnecessary massacre of pets every day. Or, you've completely underestimated the necessity of euthanization.

Sure, if you know from experience that the particular animal will be almost impossible to place.

First PETA doesn't take in $35 million a year to place less than two thousand animals. They take in $35 million to do everything that PETA currently does which includes paying 300 employees.

And yes, they'd get some food donations and volunteers, but do you realize how much food donations and volunteers would be required to care for 30,000 animals? And that's just for one year, animals typically live longer than that and with a no-kill policy they'd soon end up housing over a hundred thousand animals. Unless you expect them to have a small city dedicated to caring for those animals euthanasia is your only option.

I'm not a fan of PETA by any stretch but I can't criticize them for this.

I'm sure PETA would adopt out all of the animals they were given if there were enough people willing to adopt them. But the fact is there simply aren't that many people looking for pets, and the people who are looking generally don't want the kinds of pets who are given up for adoption.

So given there's no one to adopt those animals what do you propose they do with them? Pets require a lot of food and care, you basically have a choice between storing them in conditions that are slightly expensive and really horrific, really expensive and somewhat pleasant, or cheaply euthanizing them. Given the fact that $35 million is completely insufficient to humanely care for that many animals what would you suggest they do instead?

Or maybe they'll still hire you, they just want your dirty laundry in the open.

It's like any politician, it's not the bad stuff you admitted to that gets you, it's the bad stuff you lied about.

If I'm the FBI I'm worried about my agents having undisclosed secrets, not just for the potential of people blackmailing them, but because defence attorneys might find out those dirty secrets, use them to discredit an investigator, and get a case thrown out.

In that light if an applicant is so secretive they won't even admit to something as inane as copyright infringement then how do you expect that they'll disclose the serious stuff. For instance that one of their former best friends is now a drug smuggler so you shouldn't assign them to investigate a rival cartel so it doesn't look like an attempt to eliminate the competition.

Partially true though I think a factor there might be that height isn't a big factor. If height is only loosely correlated with sprinting speed then the typical height of elite sprinters will be the typical heights of the seed population.

As for marathon running they may be short because a shorter physiology is advantageous. Or may be short because the seed population (Ethiopians, Kenyans, Kalenjins particularly) is very short. If they can get taller with nutrition, and that doesn't adversely affect their running, then elite marathon runners may get taller too.

Very doubtful, to go from a 2:06:23 to 2:02:57 they needed to drop ~5 seconds/km, to drop below 2:00 they need to drop another ~5 seconds/km. Yes that's possible (and people can do it over the distance of a half marathon). But even assuming the current progression continues we're looking at another 16 years. If we assume the 16 years got a lot of the low hanging fruit (East African population getting access to elite coaching and training methods) we may start to see a stagnation in times.

Well you've got 177 seconds to play with, which means you're projecting a 7 second margin for each increment, the typical margins have been 20-30 seconds though that will likely shrink the lower we go.

25 new world records by 2020 is a LOT harder than 2:00 by 2020. There's no risk of someone milking the system. Elite marathon runners have very short windows where they can set world records and they only do 2-3 marathons a year. even if you go in perfectly healthy and trained to have a WR shot not only do you need an ideal course (ie Berlin), but perfect weather too. For instance Reid Coolsaet has been trying to be the first Canadian to break the 2:10 barrier, and while he had a window of a few years where he was likely fast enough the factors never came together. Either no one else was at the right pace, the weather was poor, sick before the race, injury interfered with training, etc. He's still got a shot but the window is closing.

I wouldn't be shocked if 2:00 takes 25 world records, but if it does then we're looking at 2050 or 2075 to see it happen.

Not to mention the motivation for this article was fact that the 2:03 minute barrier was just broken and the current world isn't 2:03:23 but 2:02:57.

Exactly. I see two major advantages to a Moon base.

1) You have the ability to re-supply them on a reasonable schedule when you inevitably discover they need critical item X or they're all going to die.

2) People can come back so it doesn't have to be a one way trip.

If you want to go to Mars a Moon base should be a pre-requisite as a proof of concept to make sure your system actually works. Sure the environment is slightly more challenging but it doesn't compare to the challenge caused by the distance and gravity well of Mars. The fact they're not talking about going to the Moon tells me they're not really serious about going to Mars either.

So your control group consists of people in poor health and weak immune systems?

Any experimental intervension will look effective against that control.

The current research University system was designed for a period of rapid expansion. Post-secondary education started as a luxury available to the elite and turned into a standard part of the middle class experience. To expand the supply of teachers each Professor had to train multiple other Professors, even then this was insufficient so you could still get an tenure track position without a PhD.

But for the last few decades the percentage of University students has stabilized and the number of Professors with it. Thus the system designed to pump out Professors has created an oversupply, one of the places where those unused PhDs build up is in postdocs.

The solution is either to train fewer PhDs or to create more pure research jobs to use the PhDs we produce.

To discover a continent you need to find a continent your culture wasn't previously aware of.

So early Native Americans discovered the Americas while coming over from Siberia.

A long time later the Thule (ancestors of the Inuit) also came from Siberia and discovered North America.

Then the Norse discovered the Americas from Europe, but that knowledge wasn't really preserved even among Norse culture.

Meaning the Americas were still available to be discovered by Columbus when he sailed over.

The reason we generally consider Columbus to discover North America is because most of us are culturally white Europeans and for us his was the discovery that stuck around.

If you consider an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon jungle, have one of those tribesmen go on a long journey and find Rio De Janeiro. Within his tribe I'd say that tribeman had discovered Rio De Janeiro.