Disability Insurance - Health & Fitness - ThumperTalk

AzMatt, on 08 March 2013 - 03:08 PM, said:

Just curious if anyone out there has disability insurance and if so/ who you use.??I have ridden/raced offroad motorcycles my whole life and am probably never going to give it up.
The problem is, due to the line of work i'm in, and the amount of student loan debt I have accumulated over the years, I have had multiple people tell me I should give up my hobby.??Most of my professors and colleagues have given up doing many things that they love to do just to prevent injury.??I have been out of school 3+ years now and would really like to get back into racing seriously.??My thinking is...why live life if you aren't going to pursue your biggest passions, dangerous or not.??Any thoughts/comments would be appreciated.??Thanks guys.

It's a great thing to have. The younger you are the cheaper it is to buy. Periodically they will offer you additional coverage with the monthly benefit. I grabbed it every time. My policy is with Unum, one of the largest insurers. Not a lot of companies write these now. Try Aflac and New York Life too. The best thing you can insure is your income. At least you know you can maintain your lifestyle if disaster strikes. Go for it, and hope you never need to use your policy.

Source: http://www.thumpertalk.com/topic/1010175-disability-insurance/

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The Supreme Court Considers Biotech Seed Patents - Reason.com

In February, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of an Indiana soybean farmer, Vernon Hugh Bowman, who says he has the right to plant second-generation herbicide-resistant soybean seeds without paying a royalty to Monsanto, the biotech company that created and owns the invention. Monsanto's seeds are Roundup Ready, which means that they resistant to the company's popular herbicide glyphosate, known as Roundup. This technology makes it much easier and cheaper for farmers to control weed infestations in their fields.

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Bowman is asserting the legal doctrine of patent exhaustion. After the first sale of a patented item, the purchaser may use and dispose of that item in any way she chooses; the royalty payment associated with the individual item entirely compensates the patent holder. If you buy a patented screwdriver, for example, you can resell it without owing the patent holder any royalties.

In this case, Bowman each year purchased herbicide-resistant soybean seed covered by Monsanto's patent for a first planting. Bowman, like nearly a quarter of a million American farmers, signed each time the standard technology agreement in which purchasers agree "to use the seed containing Monsanto gene technologies for planting a commercial crop only in a single season." The agreement also requires farmers not to supply it to anyone else for planting, not to save any seeds produced for replanting, and not to use or provide to anyone else the seeds for crop breeding, research, or seed production.?

In 1999, Bowman also bought commodity soybean seeds from a local grain elevator and planted them as a late-season second crop. Since late-season plantings are riskier, Bowman wanted to avoid paying for higher-priced commercial seeds. He expected that the commodity seeds he purchased from the grain elevator would mostly be Roundup Ready and, in fact, he successfully sprayed that crop with Roundup. He then saved seeds from that late-season crop and replanted them for many years, supplementing his subsequent late-season plantings with additional purchases of commodity grains. Bowman did not hide what he was doing. In fact, he forthrightly explained his practices in correspondence with Monsanto's representatives.

In 2009, Monsanto sued Bowman in Federal District Court for infringing its patents. Bowman essentially argued that when the grain elevator sold him seeds, it was in the same position as the owner of a properly purchased patented screwdriver reselling it to another consumer. In its summary judgment against Bowman, the Federal District Court for Southern Indiana found that the owners of the grain elevator "had no right to plant the soybeans and could not confer such a right on Bowman. Consequently, Bowman has infringed on Monsanto's patent rights by planting the commodity soybeans, which contained the patented trait, and then applying a glyphosate-based herbicide to that planted crop." The court ordered Bowman to pay Monsanto $84,000 in unrecovered royalties.?

In 2011, Bowman appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC. In its decision, the three-judge panel reviewed two earlier cases, McFarling and Scruggs, in which farmers asserted patent exhaustion claims. In the McFarling case, a farmer simply violated the technology agreement he signed by saving and subsequently planting Roundup Ready seeds. He claimed that once he purchased seeds from Monsanto he could do whatever he wanted with them.

In the Scruggs case, a farmer claimed that he had bought Roundup Ready seeds but never signed the technology agreement and so was not infringing Monsanto's patent by replanting saved seeds. In Scruggs, the Appeals Court rejected this claim, noting that "there was no unrestricted sale because the use of the seeds by seed growers was conditioned on obtaining a license from Monsanto.? The fact that Scruggs had not obtained a license meant that he had no right to use the seeds. The Court further found that the "fact that a patented technology can replicate itself does not give a purchaser the right to use replicated copies of the technology. Applying the first sale doctrine to subsequent generations of self-replicating technology would eviscerate the rights of the patent holder." Just because a technology is self-replicating does not change the fact that making copies of a patented item is an infringement.

In both cases, the Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Monsanto. Given these earlier rulings, it is not at all surprising that the Appeals Court found for the company again: "While farmers, like Bowman, may have the right to use commodity seeds as feed, or for any other conceivable use, they cannot 'replicate' Monsanto's patented technology by planting it in the ground to create newly infringing genetic material, seeds, and plants." In other words, Bowman infringed.

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Bowman v. Monsanto last month, the justices' questions to the attorneys do not appear to bode well for Bowman's case. Bowman's lawyer had barely cleared his throat before Chief Justice John Roberts got right to the heart of the matter by asking: "Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?"

Bowman's attorney tried to deflect the Chief Justice's query by suggesting that Monsanto and other seed companies could protect their inventions through contracts. Later Justice Elena Kagan opined that relying contracts would be "peculiarly insufficient." Why? Because if one self replicating seed escapes "the web of these contracts [that]...essentially makes all the contracts worthless." Of course, that is exactly the argument the farmer in Scruggs was making: He hadn't signed a contract so he could grow and sell as many patented seeds as he wanted.

The Justices were also skeptical of Bowman's patent exhaustion argument. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, declared that the "Exhaustion Doctrine permits you to use the good that you buy. It never permits you to make another item from that item you bought." Similarly, Justice Stephen Breyer noted, "When you create a new generation [of seeds], you have made a patented item, which you cannot do without the approval of the patent owner."

As a friend of the court, Assistant U.S. Solicitor General Melissa Arbus Sherry piled on against applying the patent exhaustion argument to self-replicating technologies like seeds. "In order to encourage investment, the Patent Act provides 20 years of exclusivity," said Sherry. "This would be reducing the 20-year term to essentially one and only sale." If that were to be the case, Sherry added, there would be "no incentive to invest, not just in Roundup Ready soybeans or not even agricultural technology" but any future self-replicating technologies.

As it happens, Bowman had the option of planting conventional soybeans whose seeds he could legally save for replanting each year. It's clear that he chose not to do this because he specifically wanted the weed-control convenience Roundup Ready seeds afforded him; he just didn't want to pay for them.

If the Supreme Court does "eviscerate" seed patent protections, agricultural biotech companies could turn to genetic engineering solutions similar to the Technology Protection System (TPS), an approach developed in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the seed company Delta & Pine Land Company (now owned by Monsanto). TPS consists of an array of three genes that causes a second generation of seeds to be sterile so that farmers would gain nothing by saving them. Bowman himself suggested in 2009 to the Federal District Court that Monsanto could protect itself against people like him by deploying TPS.

Back in 1999, anti-biotech activists were quick to denounce the TPS, dubbing it Terminator technology. The activists were against TPS precisely because it would prevent farmers from saving seeds. In addition, prominent anti-biotech activist Vandana Shiva worried in 2000 that one dire outcome of TPS would be "the gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants [that] would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet." This is, of course, biologically impossible: A gene technology that causes sterility is, by definition, one that can't spread.

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/08/seeds-of-invention

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Sessions on Dems' budget plans: "These destructive policies cannot continue" (Washington Bureau)

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Chocolate Museum in Brixton Satisfies All Cravings

The Chocolate Museum is situated in a small building on Ferndale Road, off of Brixton Road. Formed in December 2012 by Melange Chocolate Shop operator Isabelle Alaya, it is a budding organization, half-exhibit and half-shop, that adds another element to chocolate lovers? obsession with the food: the history.

Vintage memorabilia ? newspaper clippings, magazine advertisements and ancient store signs ? line the walls of the museum. Sculptures of cocoa goddesses, who the Mayans and Aztecs praised, sit pensively in glass cabinets. Boards of information about chocolate?s history in London as well as in Spain and Belgium invite viewers to learn more about their favorite dessert.

The best thing about the Chocolate Museum, though, is the staff. Julien Farrout and Maille Derouet greet me as I walk in. They immediately ask if I need help. When I tell him I?m writing an article about the museum, Julien launches into an explanation of the objects surrounding me. Maille watches, smiling. They are both young and French, and came to work at the Chocolate Museum in London to better their English.

Though they may have trouble stringing sentences together in English, that doesn?t ?stop them from giving a successful interview. Julien opens his computer to a translating site, and he and Maille stumble over each other to answer my questions, laughing.

?We love chocolate,? said Derouet. ?It?s very interesting. We want to speak better about cocoa.?

?Our boss, she wanted to explore the history of chocolate and create a new concept with the exhibition,? said Farrout. ?There?s a new piece for the exhibition downstairs. The piece will be presented at the launch party.?

This launch party that Farrout refers to is on Saturday, 16 March. The museum will display the new exhibit proudly, while also offering chocolate bars and truffles from UK Artisan Chocolatiers, hot chocolate, free tastings, workshops, and special gifts for holidays such as Mother?s Day and Easter.

?It?s a very interesting work experience for us,? said Farrout. It?s a very interesting experience for viewers of the exhibit, too, who venture through time to learn about the history of chocolate, only to turn around to see that chocolate is not a meager relic of the past, but a lavish delicacy of the present.

The Chocolate Museum is a cozy place where chocolate lovers young and old can enjoy workshops, tastings and knowledge about the food.

As Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz said, ?All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn?t hurt.?

Find the?Chocolate Museum?at 187 Ferndale Road, Brixton. It is open Tuesday to Friday from 12 to 7 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Celebrate the launch party with the friendly staff Saturday, 16 March at noon.

Source: http://dulwichonview.org.uk/2013/03/08/chocolate-museum-in-brixton-satisfies-all-cravings/

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The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution [Excerpt]

Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu?Arabic numeral system in Europe, which revolutionized not only mathematics but commerce and trade as well. How did the system spread from the Arab world to Europe, and what would our lives be without it?

By Keith Devlin

Image: Keith Devlin and Bloomsbury Publishing

Reprinted with permission from The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution, by Keith Devlin. Copyright ? 2011, by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Your days are numbered
Try to imagine a day without numbers. Never mind a day, try to imagine getting through the first hour without numbers: no alarm clock, no time, no date, no TV or radio, no stock market report or sports results in the newspapers, no bank account to check. It?s not clear exactly where you are waking up either, for without numbers modern housing would not exist.

The fact is, our lives are totally dependent on numbers. You may not have ?a head for figures,? but you certainly have a head full of figures. Most of the things you do each day depend on and are conditioned by numbers. Some of them are obvious, like the ones listed above; others govern our lives behind the scenes. The degree to which our modern society depends on numbers that are hidden from us was made clear by the worldwide financial meltdown in 2008, when over-confident reliance on the advanced mathematics of futures predictions and the credit market led to a total collapse of the global financial system.

How did we ? as a species and as a society ? become so familiar with and totally reliant on these abstractions our ancestors invented just a few thousand years ago? As a mathematician, this question had puzzled me for many years, but for most of my career as a university professor of mathematics, the pressures of discovering new mathematics and teaching mathematics to new generations of students did not leave me enough time to look for the answer. As I grew older, however, and came to terms with the unavoidable fact that my abilities to do original mathematics were starting to wane a bit ? a process that for most mathematicians starts around the age of forty (putting mathematics in the same category as many sporting activities) ? I started to spend more time looking into the origins of the subject I have loved with such passion since I made the transition from ?It?s boring? to ?It?s unbelievably beautiful? around the age of sixteen.

For the most part, the story of numbers was easy to discover. By the latter part of the first millennium of the Current Era, the system we use today to write numbers and do arithmetic had been worked out ? expressing any number using just the ten numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing them by the procedures we are all taught in elementary school. (Units column, tens column, hundreds column, carries, etc.) This familiar way to write numbers and do arithmetic is known today as the Hindu-Arabic system, a name that reflects its history.

Prior to the thirteenth century, however, the only Europeans who were aware of the system were, by and large, scholars, who used it solely to do mathematics. Traders recorded their numerical data using Roman numerals, and performed calculations either by a fairly elaborate and widely used fingers procedure or with a mechanical abacus. That state of affairs started to change soon after 1202, the year a young Italian man, Leonardo of Pisa ? the man who many centuries later a historian would dub ?Fibonacci? ? completed the first general purpose arithmetic book in the West, Liber abbaci, that explained the ?new? methods in terms that ordinary people could understand ? tradesmen and businessmen as well as schoolchildren. While other lineages can be traced, Leonardo?s influence, through Liber abbaci, was by far the most significant and shaped the development of modern western Europe.

Leonardo learned about the Hindu-Arabic number system, and other mathematics developed by both Indian and Arabic mathematicians, when his father brought his young son to join him in the North African port of Bugia (now Beja?a, in Algeria) around 1185, having moved there from Pisa to act as a trade representative and customs official. Years later, Leonardo?s book not only provided a bridge that allowed modern arithmetic to cross the Mediterranean, it also bridged the mathematical cultures of the Arabic and European worlds, by showing the west the algebraic way of thinking that forms the basis of modern science and engineering (though not our familiar symbolic notation for algebra, which came much later).

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=8d2ac61f5f23d3da27946f6b225db206

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Funeral for Chavez a bid to continue his legacy

In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, mourners walk beside the coffin containing the body of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez on display during his wake at a military academy where his body will lie in state until his funeral in in state in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 7, 2013. While Venezuela remains deeply divided over the country's future, the multitudes who reached the president's coffin were united in grief and admiration for a man many considered a father figure. Chavez died on March 5 after a nearly two-year bout with cancer.(AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office)

In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, mourners walk beside the coffin containing the body of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez on display during his wake at a military academy where his body will lie in state until his funeral in in state in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 7, 2013. While Venezuela remains deeply divided over the country's future, the multitudes who reached the president's coffin were united in grief and admiration for a man many considered a father figure. Chavez died on March 5 after a nearly two-year bout with cancer.(AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office)

In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, Cuba's President Raul Castro salutes as he stands next to the coffin containing the remains of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez during his wake at a military academy where his body will lie in state until his funeral in in state in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 7, 2013. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's acting president, said Chavez's remains will be put on permanent display at the Museum of the Revolution, close to the presidential palace where Chavez ruled for 14 years. A state funeral for Chavez attended by some 33 heads of government is scheduled to begin Friday morning. At right is Chavez's daughter Rosa Virginia Chavez and left is Vice-President Nicolas Maduro.(AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office)

A supporter of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez wears a sticker with an image of him as she waits in line outside the military academy to see the body of Chavez lying in state in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 7, 2013. While Venezuela remains deeply divided over the country's future, the multitudes who reached the president's coffin were united in grief and admiration for a man many considered a father figure. Chavez died on March 5 after a nearly two-year bout with cancer. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Workers paint a mural that is symbolic of the eyes of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez on the stairs at the El Calvario monument in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 7, 2013. Chavez died on March 5 after a nearly two-year bout with cancer. He was 58. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Military police carry a woman who fainted while waiting in line to see the body of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez lying in state at the military academy in Caracas, Thursday, March 7, 2013. While Venezuela remains deeply divided over the country's future, the multitudes weeping and crossing themselves as they reached the president's coffin early Thursday were united in grief and admiration for a man many considered a father figure. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) ? The stage is set for President Hugo Chavez's last appearance on the world stage, with leaders from five continents in Venezuela's anxious capital for a funeral Friday to remember a man who captivated the attention of millions and polarized his nation during 14 tumultuous years in power.

The ceremony will mark a dramatic exit for a president who quarreled publicly with presidents and kings and ordered troops via live television to defend his country's borders. It promises to also give his successors a prime opportunity to rally public support for continuing his political legacy.

Yet with basic details about the event unknown just hours before its scheduled start, the funeral also reflected a leader who tightly controlled all aspects of his government. Government officials said it would begin at 11 a.m. local time, but didn't specify where it would take place or what would actually happen.

For nearly two years, and even after his death Tuesday, Chavez's government has been similarly tight-fisted with information about Chavez's cancer, not indicating exactly where or what it was.

More than 30 heads of government, including Cuban President Raul Castro and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were scheduled to attend. U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, and former Rep. William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, represented the United States, which Chavez often portrayed as a great global evil even as he sent the country billions of dollars in oil each year.

Two hours before midnight Thursday, National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello added yet more complications to the day's schedule, appearing on national television to announce that Vice President Nicolas Maduro will also be sworn in on Friday.

That drew criticism from former Venezuelan Supreme Court Judge Blanca Rosa Marmo, who said the government would be violating Venezuela's Constitution, which specifies that the speaker of the National Assembly, currently Cabello, should assume the interim presidency if a president can't be sworn in.

The government has designated Maduro, Chavez's hand-picked successor, as the official socialist party candidate in a special presidential election that the constitution requires be held within 30 days.

For many Chavez supporters, the task ahead will be continuing the president's political movement beyond his death.

"We must think about the future and how we are going to guarantee the continuity of the revolution," said Rolando Tarazon, a street vendor who was waiting with his wife to see Chavez's body lying in state at the army's military academy in Caracas.

The funeral, for one, would likely be an important bid at continuing the Chavez legacy in what promises to become an extravagant exercise in political myth-making.

The government already launched that effort, organizing a six-mile-long funeral cortege Wednesday that drew hundreds of thousands of mourners.

Maduro also announced Thursday that the late president's body will be embalmed and forever displayed inside a glass tomb at a military museum not far from the presidential palace from which he ruled. That puts Chavez in the company of Communist revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, as well as father and son dictators of North Korea, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Maduro said Chavez would first lie in state for "at least" seven more days at the museum, which will eventually become his permanent home. It was not clear when exactly he would be moved from the military academy where his body had been since Wednesday.

Oscar Valles, a political analyst at the Metropolitan University in Caracas, said the perpetual display of Chavez's body was about keeping his power structure alive, long after his death at age 58.

"Nicolas Maduro and his government is building an aura that makes it very difficult, I would say, that in the future, the opposition tries to promote an alternative to the government," Valles said.

The announcement of the embalming plans came after two wrenching days for Chavez's admirers. A sea of sobbing, heartbroken people jammed Venezuela's main military academy Thursday to view his body, some waiting hours and hours. On Thursday night, Castro and Uruguayan President Jose Mujica visited the viewing site.

Amid the mourning, some Venezuelans worried openly whether the nation's anointed leaders are up to the task of governing. Others said they wanted to learn when the election will be held.

"People are beginning to get back to their lives. One must keep working," said 40-year-old Caracas resident Laura Guerra, a Chavez supporter who said she was not yet sold on Maduro, the acting head of state and designated ruling party candidate. "I don't think he will be the same. I don't think he has the same strength that the 'comandante' had."

___

Associated Press writers Fabiola Sanchez, Frank Bajak and Christopher Toothaker contributed to this report.

___

Paul Haven on Twitter: www.twitter.com/paulhaven

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-08-Venezuela-Chavez/id-172848de47864647b4f11ff7a485e28a

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Porn, cocaine and stolen soda land California man in jail

By Andrew Rafferty, Staff Writer, NBC News

A very eventful trip to a Safeway grocery store ended with a California man's arrest after police say they found him in a bathroom with porn, drugs, and a child.

Police in El Cerrito, Calif. were responding to a shoplifting report early Sunday morning when alerted that a man had been spotted in the women's bathroom with a small child, a pornographic magazine and the heavy smell of smoke.

The 32-year-old El Sobrante, Calif. man was found by police in the men's bathroom, where he admitted to having been in the women's bathroom where he smoked a marijuana cigarette laced with?cocaine, according to the incident report. Officers determined the man was under the influence of a controlled?substance?and arrested him.

The Californian also admitted to stealing a bottle of soda from the Safeway.

A young girl originally discovered the drug and porn-filled binge when she entered the women's bathroom. The girl told her mother, who alerted store employees.

Police just happened to already be on scene after responding to a complaint about a woman who had stolen batteries from the grocery store

The whereabouts of the child with him are unknown, according to NBCBayArea.com.

Police arrested the unidentified man on suspicion of theft, drug?possession, possessing of drug paraphernalia and being under the influence of a controlled substance.

Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/06/17213504-california-man-busted-in-grocery-bathroom-with-porn-cocaine-and-small-child?lite

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