Err . . . how would this make it any different than Star Trek???

hawk

I last read one several years ago, which was pretty much a side trip.

I'm not bothering again until his series actually has an end.

So if that ever happens, wake me up . . .

hawk

It's a sensitive clod, you marathoner.

No, wait, that's not right.

In soviet marathon, natalie porter grits you!.

No, that's not it.

hmm.

hawk

If I put an apple in the oven at 340F, I"m not wasting the effort on a computer.

(pass the cinnamon! )

hawk

> I wonder what the rest were? Especially the silent ones flying in formation with large panels on their
>bottoms flashing bright primary colors that I saw go right over my head at night at perhaps 50 feet off the
>ground in the direction of Mt. Rainier,

lysergic acid diethylamide :)

hawk

>And what some people are going to hate is, this approach works in the UK and Australia.

>DUI in Australia carries a mandatory license suspension in most cases.

That is the case in most (all?) US states.

> The only way you get away with just a fine is if you're just over the limit and
>it's your first drink driving infraction in 3 years...

Nevada isn't that lenient . . .

hawk, esq.

The license? How about a reflective Scarlet D on the car, to warn other drivers?

Then again, I want a permanent license suspension on a second DUI conviction, never again to be licensed for anything but a moped.

hawk

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

hawk

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

Anyone who refers to Star Trek by a three letter acronym is just plain not the target audience.

(Unless, perhaps, it's TRO, for "The Real One")

Star Trek and its spinoffs have a minimal amount in common.

hawk