And if they are, it doesn't matter to me if what they're doing can be called useful or not.
Useful or not, life vests are a legal requirement on ocean-bound flights.
But at least this is a result of a thought-out policy, thought-out approach as to what is useful or not useful to the United States of America.
And almost two-thirds described a tick-box approach to measuring progress as "unhelpful" or "not useful at all".
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It could also be a vital stop-gap, "preventing hasty youngsters from rushing into courses which many will simply give up or not find useful to find a future career", it says.
Anonymous centres for treatment or advice, useful in cities, will not stay anonymous for very long in small towns or villages.
But they also pollinate nearby apple trees, a useful service that is not purchased or priced.
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It might or might not be useful to discover that Yalies prosper, but it would be extremely useful to know how two business schools or cooking schools compare.
This may or may not prove a useful thing to know on certain Saturday nights.
"I really do think that strategic thinkers who never adjust their strategy or their thinking are not useful, " she says.
Filling a need means working towards something that is useful for others, which may or may not solve their problems in the strictest sense.
The oil sands are located in a region which, until this resource began to be exploited, was thinly populated and not considered useful for agriculture or much of anything else.
The ultimate goal is publication in a prestigious academic journal, but that does not make it useful, or even offer a guarantee that the research findings provide much insight into the workings of business reality.
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Speaking on Radio Four's Today programme, 17-year-old student Tomos Dafydd claimed he had applied to Bristol to study politics but had been told his A-level in Welsh was not "relevant or useful" to the degree.
During the process they also learned that obtaining useful information does not have to be difficult or expensive.
We love ETFs, but they are not all equally valuable or useful.
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It offers a class titled How to Build a Startup that, believe it or not, is a terrifically useful resource for entrepreneurs to develop their business plans and transform their ideas into tangible products, all according to lean startup best practices.
With the software that is intended to make that hardware useful, things get better much more slowly, or not at all.
It does not matter how many or how useful government on-line services are if they cannot be found is a straightforward manner.
For others, the realisation that they were "not going anywhere or doing anything useful" might lead them to stand down, he added, while others took the decision for personal reasons.
Conversely, the smaller ones that might crave awareness will only get it if they make a point of saying nothing relevant, useful, or true (otherwise, their ads might not win in the entertainment ratings).
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Those who think it could be useful may not, therefore, be swayed by moral or legal arguments.
In my case, because titanium does not rust or fatigue appreciably, its useful life is until I die.
Still, even to non-technical people, it was clear that there were logical processes that controlled the gears of mechanical systems or the circuits of computers in ways that were useful and not, at the time, obvious.
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Cholinesterase inhibitors are not useful in dementia caused by Huntington's disease or traumatic brain injury.
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What they did not get was much useful information about how either Romney or Obama would govern.
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