In the past, L.L. Bean and American Express all experimented with greeting customers by name when they called. They did this by linking the ANI information received on their incoming 1-800-telephonenumber line with a computerized database. People were creeped out to have a person greet them by their name before they'd even said "Hello", and both American Express and L.L. Bean stopped doing this. Affinity marketing campaigns also did this and the FTC regulated this away, partially.

link to ftc pdf, see page 42 and other.

What ATT is trying to hide about what they've already done is steps beyond this.

kris

In Louisiana they will always have ManBearPigs. In other parts of the country they call it a menage a trois.

Only by a few cents if you determine the value based on the raw mineral material. If you consider the utility of either when alive it depends very much on the mother. Some might be quite productive, while others might drive your balance sheet into the red.

A third more financially attractive alternative would favor the mother for the much higher bone mass, protein and available fats to render.

Sure venture capital may drive the financing of the hi-tech sector of Silicon Valley and indeed corporate clout goes a long way to influence elections.

Still, come that first Tuesday in November individuals step up to a little private booth and selects their electoral choices. My bet is that a minority of them understand or hold a strong opinion on federal policy as it pertains to venture capital. If past California elections are any indication turnout and passion will be driven by some gut emotional issue and the election will be a "Southpark" style fiasco with both sides of hot button issues behaving like spoiled toddlers.

Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley also does work on biomimetic materials such as synthetic gecko pads:

his biomimetics lab

has a link to their self-cleaning gecko adhesive material on the front page.

Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)

First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008

Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley also does work on biomimetic materials such as synthetic gecko pads:

biomimetics lab

has a link to their self-cleaning gecko adhesive material on the front page.

Sorry about the prior post.

Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)

First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008

Self-Cleaning Gecko Adhesive (Sep. 2008)

First synthetic gecko adhesive which cleans itself during use, as the natural gecko does. After contamination by microspheres, the microfiber array loses all adhesion strength. After repeated contacts with clean glass, the microspheres are shed, and the fibers recover 30% of their original adhesion. The fibers have a non-adhesive default state, which encourages particle removal during contact.
Contact Self-Cleaning of Synthetic Gecko Adhesive, Langmuir 2008

Ah, serves me right for not RTFA and just reading the /. summary which states fiction rather than science fiction. Mea culpa.

"Oxford University Press has a blog post listing nine words used in science and technology which were actually dreamed up by fiction writers. Included on the list are terms like robotics, genetic engineering, deep space, and zero-g. What other terms are sure to follow in the future?"

Quark is partially based on James Joyce's work, Finnegan's Wake, though it seems to be a retro-explanation by Gell Mann.

Good luck getting the remote back from them!

Toss as much CPU and memory as you want at a chatty transaction and you won't solve the problem. What about the cost of your 2000 users of the application that wander off to the coffee machine while they wait for an hour glass to relinquish control to them? Over the years I have seen wanton ignorance from programmers that ought to know better about efficiency, scalability and performance.

Really the climbing at that altitude is an abuse of the human body. The people doing so are managing risk and doing a bit of personal extrapolation to sense whether with the current environmental conditions and how they feel will allow for a summit attempt.
So it only makes sense that errors in this estimation process are going to be revealed in the later half (i.e. the descent).

Unless Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Clint Eastwood heroically fly a rocket into it and blow it up...they will be missed.

And if so we will have a remarkably short period of time to write a paper about it.

I have observed that engineers can write bad FORTRAN in almost all programming languages.