I was wondering how long a drug patent lasts right now and if it is tied at all to how long it took to research whatever the drug patent is for? A solution could be simply to put a time limit on drug patents, after which it becomes a part of the public domain.

Way back when, 1986-ish, San Diego & LA was the hub of places to purchase computing things from. I was a local business back in those days so purchased from a number of distributors/retail stores in SoCal, including that place in Oceanside that became geeks.com, The online part, which of course did not show up until after 1993, was very useful to me due to their carrying things that were hard to find elsewhere, their pricing and replacement policy was great, and I no longer lived in the area so could not "pop-in" for stuff.

I really am not sure which 1k gorilla geeks is alluding to, because there has been a lot of them over the years. For example, tigerdirect used to be a source I'd purchase from until they totally screwed a large order. Ecost.com was yet another but their web site became a bear to navigate. And Newegg actually started out in retail stores in SoCal as Egghead, though I use neweggbusiness.com now. Another place I use for hard to find items is CyberGuys.com, which has a distributor side. When I need consumables, I go to go4supply.com. I used to buy cpu's and memory chips (remember those?) from thechipmerchant.com, another SoCal store that is online.

And that really is why so many of you may never have heard of some of the other companies I mentioned, because they started out selling only to VARs, VADs, OEMs, etc, though geeks is an exception because of their store you could walk in to.

Amazingly enough, a Moderator has indicated my original message as being off topic. I don't think so. My questions are valid and those who replied to them pointed out that the cell phone, especially the enhanced types, are being used in a manner the subscriber may not have wished for.

Are we Bees all of a sudden? I would hope that companies do not make any more drones who only follow a strict set of policies. Who would then think outside of the box to fix a problem or think up a new product or service?

Sorry, I have a copyright on Xtreme.. :p

Do none of your phones have an OFF button? You know, turn the phone off at night or must you be reachable 24/7/365?

As far as light-weight AV, I am running with MSE only because the others bog computers down too badly to be of any use. As another poster said, why haven't you switched them to some kind of Linux that looks like Win XP but isn't? That deadline of 8 April 2014 will be here soon and having a computer running XP on the internet on 9 April 2014 is a horrible idea.

My 3 cents:
1993, weather predictions are pretty much accurate, 1, 3, 7, 14 days, whatever, works.
2003, daily forecasts would help if people looked outside a window though generally accurate and long range forecasts are broken.
2013, same day forecasts are broken and long range, pfft.

A couple things I have observed, which seem fairly important.
#1) The Arctic Jet is missing. In years past, there was a physical circle of water vapor orbiting at 10 to 15 North Latitude and when a finger broke off, the area that finger went to would get REALLY cold. http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjetstream_model.html If you look at the images right now (build animation for 20 days, every 6 hours), you would see really strange things. Like a finger of the Northern Jet going up and through the arctic circle. Which brings me to
#2) The Tropical Jet, maybe it is also called the Gulf stream, is merging every so often with the Northern Jet. You can see it on the animation site I linked but if you also view the water vapor page, (which my site has had for quite some time: http://agrisea.net/weather/wv.html), you can see where all the stuff is going.

If you are in to agriculture, get your own monitoring equipment so you know what is happening for your locations. The rest of you, hold on, it is going to be bumpy.

The Titan Supercomputer showcases the power of AMD processors and for £97m it is a deal, but the power plant needed to run it is not included in that price...

It Expired 13.5 Billion Years Ago, Sorry. Guess the mice should have bought the extended warranty... ;)

Oregon has no State Sales Tax, which is why my corp is based here.

It is my opinion that if a retailer is based in a particular state that has a sales tax, even if they have no physical retail store but are selling online, they must collect whatever taxes are required from sales to people in their state - It is only fair. That is how mail order sales operated for decades so online sales should not be exempt from it.

I find this entire issue to be rather odd. I was under the impression that when Sun Microsystems was developing Java that its code was heavily looked at to make sure holes of the type found could not be there. Yet now that Oracle has it, "we should disable Java" because the Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT says so. If that is the case, then why isn't a warning issued so that people stop using Windows? After all, it too is full of holes that allows hackers to target it constantly. And Microsoft has been constantly fixing it and yet more holes appear.

Baryte, or barite, (BaSO4) is a mineral consisting of barium sulfate. Baryte itself is generally white or colorless, and is the main source of barium.

The major baryte producers (in thousand tonnes, data for 2010) are as follows: China (3,600), India (1,000), United States (670), Morocco (460), Iran (250), Turkey (150) and Kazakhstan (100). In just the USA, It is mined in Arkansas, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Nevada & Missouri. [Source]

Now that you know where it comes from and where it is found in the USA, why aren't those mines increasing their production? Has everyone become so lazy that it makes sense to import everything?

Meanwhile, down under is burning. Could you all topic drift back to that huge problem?

As someone who has been to both a real four year college and a tech school, I personally think the tech school was worth the money spent. It introduced me to all the types of technology in use at the time and what the future might bring, plus gave me the history about the technology. I should point out that I was in college at the beginning of the PC era, where new technologies were popping out every year.

The thing is, though, that I have spoken with people who are recently graduated from a number of different tech schools, and their learning is not at all like mine. They were much more heavily instructed in the software aspect and don't really know much more about the hardware other than a general overview. Tech schools must have a balance in what is taught instead of this heavy leaning towards specific vendor products. Otherwise, they are graduating educated idiots.

I would rather hire new people who have hands-on experience with computers in the wild than any of the tech school graduates I have met over the past ten years. Those tech grads did not have the skills to troubleshoot hardware or even know what to look for unless they used a software program.

As far as online courses, I have taken a few over the years on things that I had an interest in. Personally, I would prefer to be at a live class instead of online because there is more social interaction available and it is a richer learning environment. However, some of my interests are simply not taught at a college any where close so online is the only option. However, colleges offering online classes might want to use some of this wonderful technology to make it more like a virtual classroom instead of what is in use right now.