I am also not a doctor, but I'd point out that you're comparing apples and oranges -- or more accurately: urethrae and cervices. The high cell turnover is a property of the cervix, which men do not have. Women's urethrae are just like men's urethrae, neither of which have the duality of epithelial cells.

(Patent Application, for those interested.)

I like your take on this. The whole application should be reject because it's based on a faulty premise (statement 6, below).

[0004] Searching online for various media such as video, audio, and still images is known. Further, searching for such media on a user's local hard drive is also known. For example, programs such as Microsoft's Media Center.RTM., Google.RTM., Yahoo.RTM., Youtube.RTM., OSX.RTM., iTunes.RTM., Windows.RTM., and TIVO.RTM., all include integrated search mechanisms to locate specific data.

[0005] However, each of these programs compartmentalizes the search process to specific kinds of data. For example, iTunes.com.RTM. locates all media stored or available within the iTunes.RTM. system, which is a small subset of all the video, images, and audio available online. iTunes.RTM. also only searches for data stored in its own format, and does not search a users locally or remotely stored available data. Youtube.RTM. only searches for videos on Youtube.RTM.. Windows.RTM. only searches for data on the user's internal and external hard drives. Yahoo.RTM. only searches the internet and not the user's hard drive or local media storage devices. Google.RTM., while providing a mechanism to search both the internet and the user's hard drive, cannot search both the internet and the user's hard drive simultaneously and provide a single set of search results. Further, Google only allows searches dedicated to video, audio, or images, and does not provide a mechanism for searching for all media types at the same time.

[0006] Thus, there does not exist a system that searches all known media sources, both local and remote, and presents to a user a consolidated list of search results that is grouped according to media content and filtered and sorted according to the user's preferences.

A quick Google search for Trains shows relevant webpages, images, videos, and news articles. I'm pretty sure they've done this for awhile now, though I couldn't prove it.

Mine (T-Mobile HTC G2) shows one icon with a letter indicating what technology it's using: G for GPRS, E for EDGE, H for (well, I thought HSPA+, but it's showing it now for UMTS), and I think one other that I see infrequently. Maybe it's all just a trick to make me feel better about the money I shell out.

Funny thing about redundant power supplies: that technology transfers. It's not that cell tower operators haven't figured it out, it's that they do/might not do it because that costs extra and so far they can get away without. If PSTN goes away, that regulatory requirement will almost surely be applied to the tower ops.

Sometimes you have to physically walk in and make the effort.

Yes, but cold calls on the phone are still cold calls. Bigger companies can afford sales staff across the geography, but the companies that I've dealt with (Dell, EMC, SAP, Oracle) have significantly more sales staff in a central office operating by phone than "in the field" making the face-to-face cold calls and wining/dining the customers. Watson won't replace the field guys, it'll augment/replace the centralized sales and support teams.

The big companies are smart enough to know that they can't completely replace their human phone staff any more than they can successfully outsource all of it. People prefer a neighbor over a another person half a world away, same as they'd prefer any other person over a machine. Dell enterprise support, for instance, has a large call center a few miles from my school, where all of our calls go, but when my $300 netbook has a problem I can call India, talk to India in online chat, or email India. Some of these segments are candidate for replacement/augmentation by fully automated systems.

In short: they'll shrink one segment of the sales/support teams and add a new segment to them that's completely automated.

Very well played AC. You'd have my points if I had any.

You make several good points, I only take exception to one small part.

JS is SIMPLE. In the browser it is single threaded. You don't need to worry about concurrent programming. The language itself is also dead simple, but still very powerful if needed.

C (or most any other language) is single threaded too, and you don't have to worry about concurrent programming. That is, until a single thread just isn't good enough anymore and it's time to break out a threading library. Then you have to worry about concurrency, blocking, etc. Incidentally, this has a tendency to come about when you're writing server software.

Businesses are not people

Not all businesses are corporations, but corporations are people for most purposes in the US (and others) today. Google "corporate personhood" or "legal personality" for more information.

It sounds like you've already read about the efforts of the State Department with their shiny website. Feel free to submit a write-up on it for everyone else's reading pleasure.

I'm curious, as the school I work for is currently rolling out SSO for the various staff and student systems, what sort of things were they complaining about? Try as I might, I just can't comprehend anybody thinking it's a bad idea.

An Apple fanboi friend of mine has their 30" cinema display. It's absolutely gorgeous from all angles, is probably one of the 6 GP refers to, and retails for about $1600. I think our staff graphics artist has one too.

In my school we had "employability points" that made up some 10-20% of our grade in each class. This was a discretionary grade from which points were subtracted for things like tardiness, failing to do homework, etc. It's a fairly transparent step toward the goal of making profitable worker bees. It's not really a bad thing, though. I don't like working with people who can't be bothered to show up on time, I can't imagine why anyone would.

<criticism type='constructive'>It's "fewer" employees, not "less". Fewer is for discrete objects.</criticism>

PGP did it first.

Bad analogy--It's freedom of the press he's hiding behind, not freedom of speech.

Hot cocoa out my nose... thanks for that.