Slashdot Mirror

• Animals lack a "theory of mind"
• Animals lack the ability to create new words
• Animals lack syntax in their communications

I am not surprised as most immunohistochemical approaches to biomarkers are optimized for proteins that have notoriously variable levels depending upon sampling method and analytical method. Most basic scientists have known this for some time, and are very careful about interpretation of immunohistochemical results, but the medical field has been slow to pay attention.

As an outcome of our work in the visual system, we have been developing a new approach to biomarker analysis based upon quantitative small molecular molecular phenotyping called Computational Molecular Phenotyping (CMP) that is a much more sensitive and reliable assay for not just eyes, but just about any biological system. Small molecular signals are much more tightly regulated between subjects and even remarkably between species. CMP relies upon 1) quantitative immunohistochemistry 2) computational tools derived from methods originally developed by the CIA and NASA for remote sensing and 3) new technologies developed in-house to assist in the the data processing and analysis.

Applications are in not just in pathology such as histological analysis of oncological tissues, but also in drug development, pharmacology and basic science. Also, as an interesting aside, I have also looked not only at a variety of vertebrate and invertabrate organ systems, but I am also looking at plant tissues with these technologies and there are some very interesting results that could assist in agronomics and bioencryption.

Trust me, I am a vision scientist. People are pretty visually oriented and the vast majority of them when presented with images on the Internet, generally do not pay much attention to text content. (I've done a few experiments with content on my blog here.) When presented with a task however, or when looking for information, people will read through text to find out what bit of information they are looking for. And generally, people can decide pretty quickly if the information they are looking for is present. The problems with video blogging are manifold: First, people will not sit through a video blogging episode when they are looking for a specific piece of information. Next, video is not yet conveniently "searchable" or indexable. Next, as opposed to information configured for audio interpretation, usually materials presented for video are poorly prepared for acoustic interpretation and are poorly organized and fragmented. A simple example of this is trying to extract the days news by exclusively listening to the following content and not watching it on television 1) NPR 2) BBC news on television 3) CBS news on television and 4) Fox news on television. You will find that generally, NPR presents the information the best for acoustic followed by BBC, CBS with Fox on the bottom.

http://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/Eratosthenes.html

and http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.divisibleto50 .html

Just when I think the Democratic Party is starting to grow a spine and stand up for some libertarian principles rather than pander.... No, this is not intended as flame-bait - it is an expression of frustration with a binary political system that has segmented every issue into a "They don't think it's right?!?! Then it MUST be right! Write up a bill legislating it for us to vote on, intern! Oh, and say it's to protect the children!!!" - mentality.

Here's a wacky idea - instead of legislating a bill "protecting [kids] from a coarsening culture" (Senator Bayh) in fictional video games, how about a bill protecting kids from real gun violence (Over 5,000 kids killed by guns in the US in 1997), real poverty (35,000,000 in 2003 in the U.S), and real rape (204,000 in the USA 2003-2004)? Oh, right, that would involve hard choices about civil liberties, responsibilities, Constitutional rights and freedom of choice, and other complicated things. Screw it, it won't get votes. Ban those nasty video games instead!!!

http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issues/?page=ki ds#1

http://www.rainn.org/statistics/

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/a rchives/income_wealth/002484.html

http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GU NS/GUNSTAT.html

I will agree that things have changed since 95, 98 and the abomination that was ME, but that doesn't mean all the problems are fixed.

I can understand why, based on previous experiences, people like yourself still have strong feelings about BSODs, but, again, things are different now.

Things may be different and improved, but that does not necessarily mean they've reached an acceptible level of quality. A car where the wheels fall off "only" once a year for only 5% of users is still pretty crappy in my book.

It would also help if leadership at Microsoft spent less time trying to figure out how to "bury" competitors and more time producing quality product.

BTW, thanks for that nice power cord for my first generation Xbox. It speaks volumes about what you guys think about "quality".

Look... deep down, most engineers want to make good products, but that doesn't matter if management won't let them. Even if you have a commitment to quality, the company you work for has demonstrated time and time again that they are only interested in the bare minimum.

As an EE, I feel your nifty Xbox power cord makes a great example. Somebody screwed up and old Xboxes are toasting themselves and the house in which they reside. Rather than actually fixing the problem, you gave me a power cord with some protection circuitry, so my Xbox will still die an untimely death, but won't take my house with it.

If it were up to you, maybe you would have made a different decision, but obviously it's not and the people in charge don't seem to think like you.

They may fall like snowflakes on Buffalo here,

Maybe if you mean Buffalo, NY

I have yet to come across a BSOD joke "in the wild." A quick search of Google returned 81 pages of what passes for Geek humor. But damn few questions from end-users, and nothing from sources like "Consumer Reports."

That's funny, my Google search for BSOD yielded all sorts of links:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 647
http://www.ntbrad.com/bsod.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsu pport/learnmore/russel_july09.mspx
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.pd f
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.pd f
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm

Talking about advances in technology . . . They've just managed to create a new organically based micro processor from human flesh. But it takes a lot of power, which is a real downer. So far they can't talk any of the volunteers to stick their butt plugs into the 220w outlet. And the data lines come out of a really inconvenient orifice. Check this out for fun: http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/04/feb/spin.htm l

Not quite Twain, not quite Will Rogers, but perhaps Josh Billings:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2000m 06.2/msg00022.htm

> in GURPS, if you take damage in one round, the amount taken is subtracted
> from your DX (effectively, skills) during the next round, as you are
> reeling from the blow. Now you'll say, "but then whoever gets the first
> shot in wins". Perhaps so. What do you think happens in a real fight?

Adrenaline prevents you from feeling the pain - maybe even from realizing you've been injured - until later. link

> in GURPS, there are crushing, cutting, and impaling damage types.
> Armour is subtracted from raw damage, then afterwards, crushing damage
> is the same, cutting is multiplied by 1.5, and impaling by 2. Weapons
> like maces deal a lot of crushing damage - helps penetrate armour, yet
> less lethal generally. Impaling weapons like daggers deal a small
> amount of damage, but are lethal against unarmoured opponents.

Making a needlessly complex system which - due to its unrealistic flaws elsewhere (Strength increases damage with a bread knife just as much as with a greatsword, 10 1-point hits are just as dangerous as 1 10-point hit, arrows are either poor against armour or overly deadly, ...) - is more complicated but at best marginally more realistic than more playable systems.

> In GURPS, weapon skill is used to parry attacks from the opponent.
> Thus, two highly skilled swordsmen will probably always make their hit
> rolls, and usually parry. So you have...fencing! When a hit does
> happen, it can be deadly. Again, realistic. Various maneuvers such as
> feints serve to speed this up a bit so that fencing doesn't go on
> indefinitely.

And a target has the same chance of defending against a lightning-fast, brilliantly-placed attack from the world's greatest swordmaster that he does of defending against a clumbsy swing from Joe Trainee. Not realistic in the slightest to require extra rounds of action to overcome this flaw.

> How about this simple rule from Cyberpunk: head shots deal double
> damage. Point blank gunshots deal maximum damage (rather than rolling,
> eg d6 always deals 6). Thus point blank headshots almost always kill.
> Similarly, expert marksmen can easily kill with a single shot. When two
> square off, the slower one usually dies. Maybe all those westerns were
> on to something...

They were on to something, but it wasn't realism - check out how fast someone gutshot with a pistol dies in a western, and how long it takes in real life. Neither does the point-blank rule correspond to reality - bullets lose only about 1/4 of their energy after 100 yards of travel link). Of course, GURPS's firearm damage rules are also nonsensical - there is no scope for a grazing wound and 98% of all rifle bullet hits to the torso will knock the target out within seconds - so maybe these changes would fit right in.

> GURPS uses 3d6 instead of a d20 for most actions. With a d20, all
> results are equally likely, including critical successes and failures
> fully 5% of the time each. (Cyberpunk is sadly even more guilty of this
> than d20, as it uses a d10). With 3d6, the rolls follow a more normal
> distribution - 3's and 18's are extremely unlikely, whiles 9's and 10's
> are very likely. Thus, highly skilled characters almost never fail at
> simple tasks, and skill improvements yield rapid gains at low levels
> and diminishing returns later on.

And most characters are built with high Int and Dex and tiny investments in their skills, making characters a group of absurdly talented amateurs. The level of proficiency GURPS assigns to those with high stats but minimal training, even in training-heavy tasks such as science, is laughable.

Although it's better than the nonsensical claim that distance and speed should be added for ranged attack penal

I'd should put in a plug for iBlog from lifli software. After trying a few blogging software packages over the past three years or so, I have standardized on iBlog for my site. If you run OS X, iBlog is one of the easiest packages out there that allows a fairly decent degree of flexibility. I chose it because of the ease of hosting images from my photography and media files along with the minimal time required to manage and back up the entire database. My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.

Interestingly, it is amazing how much traffic and the variety of opportunities that have popped up from posting to a blog. There have been invitations to give talks, queries for visits from folks like Adobe and Apple, requests for images to publish and purchase etc....etc...etc... Additionally, blogs serve as a means for professional contacts to get to know a side of you that never really appears in a professional setting. For instance, a couple of potential investors have found my site and a common dialogue about photography certainly helped smooth early meetings out a bit.

I never would have thought about these possibilities as the blog was originally simply set up to communicate with friends and family. I hate the term, but the "Web 2.0" is starting to fulfill the promise of the Internet back in the late 80's. With a blog, publishing becomes relatively straight forward such as the quirky children's books that I just posted. Granted, the signal to noise ratio is going down with increased blogspace traffic, but search engines have realized where the growth is and will help with that over the next little while. Now if we could just get rid of the spamblogs....

I'd should put in a plug for iBlog from lifli software. After trying a few blogging software packages over the past three years or so, I have standardized on iBlog for my site. If you run OS X, iBlog is one of the easiest packages out there that allows a fairly decent degree of flexibility. I chose it because of the ease of hosting images from my photography and media files along with the minimal time required to manage and back up the entire database. My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.

Interestingly, it is amazing how much traffic and the variety of opportunities that have popped up from posting to a blog. There have been invitations to give talks, queries for visits from folks like Adobe and Apple, requests for images to publish and purchase etc....etc...etc... Additionally, blogs serve as a means for professional contacts to get to know a side of you that never really appears in a professional setting. For instance, a couple of potential investors have found my site and a common dialogue about photography certainly helped smooth early meetings out a bit.

I never would have thought about these possibilities as the blog was originally simply set up to communicate with friends and family. I hate the term, but the "Web 2.0" is starting to fulfill the promise of the Internet back in the late 80's. With a blog, publishing becomes relatively straight forward such as the quirky children's books that I just posted. Granted, the signal to noise ratio is going down with increased blogspace traffic, but search engines have realized where the growth is and will help with that over the next little while. Now if we could just get rid of the spamblogs....

Prestwich's research into hydrogels has had some other benefits, too... look what a quick Googling turned up:

Prestwich's lab page

More info on the cancer drug delivery mechanism -- not a scientific explanation, more of a press release similar to TFA.

Prestwich's research into hydrogels has had some other benefits, too... look what a quick Googling turned up:

Prestwich's lab page

More info on the cancer drug delivery mechanism -- not a scientific explanation, more of a press release similar to TFA.

Well, in a sense, we already are. I know Glen (the creator of the biogel in the linked article), and one of the problems they are going to have is determining the identity of cells within complex tissues that were previously thought to be homogeneous. It turns out that kidneys (and many other appearing homogeneous tissues) are actually incredibly complex. New methodologies in tissue identity and tracking need to be applied here and we have the tools. Check out some of the images generated by these tools here.

I am sure that there have been some issues, that I have written about before, notably the porting of hand coded Altivec instruction sets to equivalent Intel specific instructions. However, the code bases between Intel and PPC have been pretty close to one another going back to the NeXTstep days. You do remember that NeXTstep ran on Intel, right? At any rate, the next step, no pun intended :-), should be interesting indeed. I am hoping for additional professional plans that Intel specific chips should allow, particularly at the subnotebook (or even Newton formfactor) level. I have been travelling more and even the 12in Powerbook, which has been the best laptop I've ever owned, is starting to be cumbersome.

If they really want to push more efficient automobiles, perhaps we could wean the American preference for the large SUV? I wrote about this some time ago here, talking about small car companies like Smart who really should be looking harder at the American market and employing creative marketing approaches to specific markets that would be most receptive to the small car.

Of course a real way of going "green" would be to simply make it easier for people to telecommute. We saw a huge interest in telecommuting a couple of years ago, but since then, many corporations have cut back on telecommuting or reversed earlier policies.

Programs to make broadband more ubiquitous and accessible would enable inexpensive video conferencing technologies (like iChat with an iSight), audio conferencing and the ability to be persistently available, which could be a bad thing for salaried employees though :-)

It was explained to me this way when I was researching the cost of medicine in New Zealand versus the USA. "Look mate, we got rid of all the lawyers in the system and can actually afford to provide healthcare to every single one of our citizens as well as many visitors to our country". Perhaps that is a little simplistic, but there is an element of truth to that. I've written before on the number of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bentlys and Maybachs! that I've seen in Sarasota, Florida. Apparently, a good number of the class action lawyers for the tobacco settlements live there and in fact, there was one law firm out on the key where I was staying that routinely had the most amazing high dollar automobiles out there. (Ever seen a Mclaren on the street?) That money comes from somewhere.

The reasons for high number of suits in healthcare are somewhat different that that for tech companies lawsuits, which are more dependent upon a broken patent system which allows frivolous patents.

Looked up the article. The picture looked a lot like a solar powered calibration system that some colleagues and I set up in the Pampas of Argentina.

http://casab.physics.utah.edu/clf

To clarify for everyone else who may not know where that quote came from: you are quoting from my blog which is really written for friends and family. Many of my friends are scientists and know what I am talking about with respect to phosphodiesterases (PDE), but I also try and make things accessible to a wider variety of folks who may drop by from the Internet, principally through my photography. Thanks for the feedback though. I will try and make things more accessible.

To clarify for everyone else who may not know where that quote came from: you are quoting from my blog which is really written for friends and family. Many of my friends are scientists and know what I am talking about with respect to phosphodiesterases (PDE), but I also try and make things accessible to a wider variety of folks who may drop by from the Internet, principally through my photography. Thanks for the feedback though. I will try and make things more accessible.

What are we doing with them? Scientific Visualization.

Except of course that java is completely insuitable for writing an operating system in,

Really? What makes you say that?

Java works just fine for Operating Systems, just like LISP did before it. It's just that the idea of *needing* assembly/C for OSes is so ingrained that people can't get over it.

running an OS written in java we would need the average machine from five to ten years from now

Bull. In fact, Java OSes have the potential to be *faster* than today's OSes. Why? Because no hardware protection is needed from code. It's all handled in the memory model, making it impossible for GPF/segfaults to occur.

What we should be focusing on is improving the security of native code execution through mecahnisms such as pro-police, systrace, chroot/jails, improvements in memory guards for instance see the recent changes to openbsd for the way it should be done.

Dead. End. Until you can absolutely control the code, someone will always find a way out of your little cage.

No its not hyperbole, look at eclipse it needs (with the jvm) 450MB of ram and is miserably slow to work with, all of other software running on my machine at the same time has a smaller footprint and is much more responsive.

It is hyperbole. Eclipse is a development environment, not a regular desktop app. Comparing footprints there is just silly. I can find you plenty of "native" development environments with very similar footprints.

What needs to happen is the realization that software development cannot be undertaken by the lowest common denomitator, bridge design isn't, java, C#, are not a panacea, they are a bandage for a social problem not a technical one.

As long as you trust the programmer instead of a system that makes the problem impossible, you WILL have security holes. Not because the programmer is lazy (though that doesn't help), but because he's human and makes mistakes.

If you want homebrew, pick up a DS/flash cart+passthrough package(or SD reader cart + passthrough). They already have a mostly-working SNES emulator(Super Metroid works), a touchscreen-enabled version of ScummVM, and a bunch of cool little tech-demo apps(calculators and what not). Doesn't break DS game-capabality or GBA game-capability either. You also get that huge-back-catalog of GBA homebrew(which includes completely working emulators for everything pre-SNES/Genesis, Nethack, Ebooks, tons of craziness).

After using that touch screen, pointing with an analog is just so... primitive. About the only thing the PSP does better than the DS is graphics and platformers/racers.

Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server.

I am shocked that it has taken this long to implement these features. Come on now. The rest of the industry has known that this increases stability, eases management and reduced computational overhead for years. Why is it do they think that an eight year old Linux box running Apache can serve up such huge volume versus a latest and greatest IIS server? Also, "simple configuration. IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the "Metabase" and replaces it with XML configuration files, Well, yeah! The fact that they are even talking about doing this rather than simply implementing the feature and then talking about it troubles me though. For myself, I am not running anything sophisticated for the sites I manage but I want simplicity of management and therefore went with standard OSX hosting systems. For heavier lifting, an OS X server system for our scientific databases is not quite as fast as Linux based solutions for some data types, but it is certainly easier to manage than Linux or IIS. If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.

Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server.

I am shocked that it has taken this long to implement these features. Come on now. The rest of the industry has known that this increases stability, eases management and reduced computational overhead for years. Why is it do they think that an eight year old Linux box running Apache can serve up such huge volume versus a latest and greatest IIS server? Also, "simple configuration. IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the "Metabase" and replaces it with XML configuration files, Well, yeah! The fact that they are even talking about doing this rather than simply implementing the feature and then talking about it troubles me though. For myself, I am not running anything sophisticated for the sites I manage but I want simplicity of management and therefore went with standard OSX hosting systems. For heavier lifting, an OS X server system for our scientific databases is not quite as fast as Linux based solutions for some data types, but it is certainly easier to manage than Linux or IIS. If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.

Specifically, the IIS feature set has been broken down into modules to reduce overhead. Modules can be changed on the fly, without restarting the Web server.

I am shocked that it has taken this long to implement these features. Come on now. The rest of the industry has known that this increases stability, eases management and reduced computational overhead for years. Why is it do they think that an eight year old Linux box running Apache can serve up such huge volume versus a latest and greatest IIS server? Also, "simple configuration. IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the "Metabase" and replaces it with XML configuration files, Well, yeah! The fact that they are even talking about doing this rather than simply implementing the feature and then talking about it troubles me though. For myself, I am not running anything sophisticated for the sites I manage but I want simplicity of management and therefore went with standard OSX hosting systems. For heavier lifting, an OS X server system for our scientific databases is not quite as fast as Linux based solutions for some data types, but it is certainly easier to manage than Linux or IIS. If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.

Like playing your NES and SNES roms on the go? Tough luck; go buy a

...Nintendo DS. PocketNES for GBA and snesDS have come along rawther nicely.

And though Nintendo has released a new firmware in the Chinese "iQue DS" units and in the Japanese "Jump Super Stars Special Edition" units, those are 1. not yet sold in North America, 2. already cracked, and 3. irrelevant for emulators that also work on GBA such as PocketNES.

Gradually, men begin to disappear as old ones die and no new ones are born to replace them, until finally Earth is entirely populated by women.

Actually this could help save humans because as it is now the humans male is headed for extinction anyway... Generally what makes a human a male is the X chromosome. Most, not all (more explained later), humans have two sex chromosomes, either an X and a Y chromosome or two X chromosomes with females having two Xs. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome acts like a switch that controls male sexual differentiation. However the gene is decaying and will disappear.

The exceptions mentioned above are intersexuals commonly called Hermaphrodites. There are different types of intersexuals with different karyotypes. Some have the "normal" XX or XY but other may have XXY, XXXY, or XXXXY. Most intersexuals born with ambiguous genitalia go through Genital Plastic Surgery. However, no matter how they're medically treated and reared as children many don't fit into "normal" society and some may be considered "homosexual", gay or lesbian because they had their gender surgically altered, said ambiguous genitalia may include a larger than average clitoris or a smaller than average penis.

A pretty damn long time, really, if you start counting at the first release of the first PPC machine. That was March 1994, according to this timeline. The last Apple OS to support 68k machines was OS 8.1, which was released in 1997.

So, three years, in a sense, although plenty of people used their 68k macs for a whole lot longer than that...

I can't seem to find any record of what kind of hardware service contracts you could get back then, but three years sounds like a long time for computer hardware, and is probably about right...

OK, here is the deal. Keeping secrets is simple for one reason: You have to fact check each new bit of classified information with a whole database of older information in order to decide whether or not something has bearing. It is often easier to simply start classifying everything that *might* have some bearing on national security than it is to actually go looking all of the time. So, what we are left with is an increasingly chaotic and poorly indexed "database" of national security "secrets" that are costing the taxpayer more and more to maintain and data mine. The problem of over exuberance with classification of documents is simply that costs of declassification to preserve history start spiraling out of control.

The thing that absolutely amazed me has been investigating my Grandfathers history. Many of his records going back to WWII are still classified and it was only a few years ago that he had certain medals delivered to his family after the declassification of other records. Of course it is likely that they do not have any real bearing on todays issues, and nobody likely checks them anymore against new issues, but the amount of history that is being kept away from American citizens is stunning. I am not saying that declassification is easy. Quite the contrary, it takes skilled analysis to sit down and go through documents line by line and word for word while retaining a comprehensive knowledge of current and past events that may or may not have bearing on the request.

[delete rant about proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, along with a WTF regarding your use of the "double period".]

1) A Creative Commons license is not an EULA. The Creative Commons licenses does not say anything about how the end user can use the work being licensed. Like the GPL, the CC licenses only grant additional rights to potential redistributors, which is a distinct group.

2) Not all EULAs are equally enforceable. For example, good luck trying to enforce mine.

3) An EULA is NOT necessary for enforcing copyright. Quite the contrary, EULAs are generally where people shove stuff that they know damned well wouldn't be enforceable under simple copyright.

4) Okay, I have to know. What is it with those double-periods?

Can you post in a thread about a handheld game system that doesn't involve mentiong the Gizmodo? Yes, we're all happy for you that you got your own, but spamming Slashdot about it isn't going to change the fact that none of the other kids on the playground have any idea what you're talking about. That's like asking for a Transformer for your birthday and getting a Go-Bot.

Besides, the Gizmodo doesn't have that "main device functionality" you mentioned, i. e. the ability to play games outside of homebrew.

Well seeing as how you CAN'T play the latest PSP games AND run homebrew, if homebrew is what you're after then the new Gizmondo handheld does it just as well for wayyy less money. No, it has no commercial main-dev house support, but it's built and catered for small companies and homebrew. Hell dev for the thing is SIMPLE and well documented. But you bought a PSP, you're faced with a choice, don't play any game that's not out already, thus making you an overspending fool, or cripple the ability to run home-developed stuff AND play the new stuff.

Sony never had any intention of people being able to run unsigned code on the platform, never even hinted at any such intention and in fact has all but said they will actively destroy any exploits that allow it via future firmware upgrades. You're NOT going to run the latest games AND run any unsigned code on the thing if Sony can do anything about it.

First and foremonst, I want to play SNES games. Assuming you can get a GBA-based emulator that can play such games full speed (I have yet to see much of anything on the DS), there's still the lack of an X and Y button to deal with.

SnesDS made by loopy, the guy who created pocketNES and pocketSNES(which is buggy due to the GBAs slow processor and doesn't have sound support).

YOU just don't know where to look because you must not have gotten into the scene with the GBA.

Secondly, I already shelled out $$$ for my Super Wild Card so I can dump the SNES carts, why should I have to go through the hassle yet again of getting a similar device for the GBA so I can load these programs?

Because it's still cheaper than buying a PSP? Because it also allows you to play GBA ROMs natively? Because it lets you back up GBA games?

And how about a platform where the flash format isn't so... you know... proprietary?

Like Memory Stick Duo? Or UMD? Flash carts are made by a range of manufacturers, they're LESS proprietary. You could even get carts that read standard SD at one point. The schematics for passthrough DS adapters are FREELY available.

There aren't "legions" of homebrew for the Nintendo platforms as you sugest. Programmers are about as likely as games to buy all that extra hardware to creat and run such code, while the PSP requires no more extra proprietary, gray market hardware beyond an industry-standard USB cable.

Yes, there are. There are TONS of GBA projects done by different people. Ebook readers, movie players, home rolled games, tech demos, libraries, emulators(everything pre-genesis, there's even a port of nethack). The GBA had(has) an enormously active and mature homebrew community, much larger than the PSPs. A lot of those people moved onto the DS if the GBA couldn't float their boat btw(already had the hardware, why not?), some went onto the PSP. It's about the CHALLENGE and the featureset.

You also need to have the 1.5 firmware, a sufficient capacity proprietary memory stick, and never run a game that updates that firmware. What a deal. You're faced with a choice you don't want to make but were a fool not to expect, play the PSP the way Sony allows you to, or not play the latest games.

Seriously, is every Sony fan perpetually late to the party or something?

I didn't know that telomerase was necessary for sperm production, but in retrospect it's kind of obvious - sperm need to have their telomere clock reset so that the cells that they become have their 'division counter' reset. I did some googling, and found this

http://gslc.genetics.utah.edu/features/telomeres/

But that makes you wonder - if you did block telomerase and didn't try to repair damaged DNA, the cancer cells would either repair themselves or die. They certainly wouldn't be able to keep dividing and spreading, so surely the cancer would be less dangerous. Maybe you could have another treatment so that the cancer cells all stick together to make it easier to remove them surgically once they hit their division limit.

Is it as easy that? Would a telomerase blocker stop cancer from spreading, or can it still do it without telomerase, just a bit slower?

And it's uber cool that real (as far as I can see) scientists are talking seriously about living for thousands of years given fixes for oxidative stress, telomere shortening etc.

That wouldn't be backwards compatibility would it? It would be compatibility with a completely different system.

Architecturally, the GBA is "a completely different system" from the GBC, but the GBA can play GB and GBC games. Nintendo also sold an adapter to let the Super NES play 99% of GB games and one to let the GameCube play 99% of GB, GBC, and GBA games.

How many games designed for a 4:3 TV screen would even be usable on a 16:9 handheld

The Game Boy Advance (3:2 display) in both its original and SP iterations can run games for Game Boy and Game Boy Color system (10:9 display) out of the box; by default, it draws a black border around the screen.

with a different control scheme?

The only thing that the PSP lacks vs. the PS1 digital controller is that L2 and R2 are missing. Sure, Ape Escape and other PS1 games that require both analog sticks wouldn't work, but those are few and far between because publishers wanted to target those who bought the PS1 in the first two years before Sony packed in the Dual Shock controller.

Does the DS play N64 games? Or Gamecube games? No. It plays

...most NES and many Super NES games, with a PassMe adapter and a GBA flash card. And unlike Sony, Nintendo doesn't play the cat-and-mouse firmware upgrade game.

Sony doesn't have any previous handhelds.

I beg your pardon?

I do think that GBA compatibility is an advantage of the DS, but as a GBA owner, it doesn't make me want to buy a DS.

If you buy a Nintendo DS, you can carry one device to play your DS games and your GBA games, unlike a GBA SP/PSP combination. This parallels the PSP fanboy argument that if you buy a PSP, you can carry one device to play your PSP games and your MP3 music, unlike a Nintendo DS/iPod Shuffle combination.

Unless there are good DS-only games, why should I upgrade?

There are good DS-only games.

I patiently await your rebuttal of the alleged FUD.

Bogus. What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed. The reality is much more complicated than that and encompasses reasons of yes, CPU speed, but also platform flexibility, heat, management of media rights and others. I covered some of these reasons here back on June 9th, but the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move. Additionally, Michael goes on to state that Macintosh users will "first have to suffer through a period of uncertainty and forced upgrades.". I also talked about this in my article, but to summarize, there really is no uncertainty about this process. It is going forward and most users will not notice or care about whether their Macintosh has an Intel or a PPC inside of it. They just want their computers to work as seamlessly as they have before and help them manage their lives and be more productive. Users will not have to be making any tough decisions as both platforms will be supported for years and years to come. Apple has proven this ability by maintaining parity between the PPC and Intel codebases already since the beginning of OS X and is showing the industry how to proceed when it comes to backwards and forwards compatibility.

Any other objection that Michael has to this switch has to do with OS X not being able to run on commodity PC hardware. Well, .......yeah. As we used to say when we were kids, "No Duh". Why would Apple want to get into the game of supporting literally millions of combinations of hardware compatibility issues and troubleshooting? Why? Where is the income from that going to come from? They already make available (and will continue to) make Darwin available for PPC and Intel, so if you want to swing that way, go for it.

Don't get me wrong. I really do appreciate what he has done with Linspire, but it is not OS X and I cannot imagine that Apple will simply hand over their technologies.

You should look into ApE,
it has many of the same functions as Strider, plus some that strider dosen't have.
Works on windows, linux, OS X etc

http://www.biology.utah.edu/jorgensen/wayned/ape/

It just boggles the mind that people would throw out a Windows machine and then replace it with another! Windows machine which is immediately susceptible and commonly infected within twenty minutes or so of being re-connected to the Internet. This happens often even before you have time to install updates. The old fool me once, fool me twice adage comes to mind.

The smarter move would be to migrate to a system that is less affected by worms/virus/security issues. For the vast majority, I would think that system would be OS X. But hey, that's just me. If your time is that valuable that you would simply replace your system rather than wiping it and reinstalling the OS, you think that you would either be smart enough to think different. Of course clicking on the referenced article makes you sit through an ad for Dell unless you dismiss the ad, so what does that mean? :-) Interestingly in the linked article, Dr. Wong does replace her HP system with a Powerbook. This has been our experience as well. We have replaced most of our Windows based systems with Macs running OS X leaving our Windows systems headless and sitting behind a Macintosh and a firewall with respect to the Internet. For grad student systems, giving them a Mac is the best possible solution. They can download all the software they want, surf the web and write their email all on the same system they use for their data analysis without worry and I'm not getting calls or visits to my office saying "Ummmmmmm. I think my system is infected" Time devoted to troubleshooting has gone to essentially nothing. Additionally, the last meeting I had down in our computer science department revealed that a good portion of the faculty were also switching from Windows/Linux/SGI to OS X. That was encouraging for a whole lot of reasons.

to an utterly bland, vanilla logo

HAH! exactly what is logical about the semi-random assignment of gender to nouns (die-das-der)?
The Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate:(as literally translated into English)

"It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye, and it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm. And now a Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a Fin, she holds her in her Mouth -- will she swallow her? No, the Fishwife's brave Mother-dog deserts his Puppies and rescues the Fin -- which he eats, himself, as his Reward. O, horror, the Lightning has struck the Fish-basket; he sets him on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the doomed Utensil with her red and angry Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife's Foot -- she burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even she is partly consumed; and still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys it; she attacks its Hand and destroys her also; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys her also; she attacks its Body and consumes him; she wreathes herself about its Heart and it is consumed; next about its Breast, and in a Moment she is a Cinder; now she reaches its Neck -- he goes; now its Chin -- it goes; now its Nose -- she goes. In another Moment, except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more. Time presses -- is there none to succor and save? Yes! Joy, joy, with flying Feet the she-Englishwoman comes! But alas, the generous she-Female is too late: where now is the fated Fishwife? It has ceased from its Sufferings, it has gone to a better Land; all that is left of it for its loved Ones to lament over, is this poor smoldering Ash-heap. Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him up tenderly, reverently, upon the lowly Shovel, and bear him to his long Rest, with the Prayer that when he rises again it will be a Realm where he will have one good square responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of having a mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him in Spots."
-Mark Twain

For the full laundry list of the difficulties of the German language see The Awful German Language, by Mark Twain

Indeed. If you want some really geeky art, check this out. For the three wild/biological looking images there, the computational background, chemistry and physics behind their creation are fairly impressive. The first two are of retina, while the third is hippocampus.

Disclaimer: the images are mine.

Actually, this attack doensn't work "well" with Firefox on Mac, which uses sheets to display JavaScript dialog (alert, promt, confirm). By tying the dialog to the window, it becomes visually obvious which window the pop-up belongs to.

Now why doesn't Safari use this? Seems strange Apple wouldn't use their own UI convention.

This wasn't a man-rated rocket. In the U.S. non-man-rated rockets (like Russian non-man-rated rockets) have a significant failure rate (2%, I think. According to this post, it was 25% for Arianne 5 in 2002. The Delta rocket program is not scrapped when a rocket fails (neither is Arianne).

You are comparing this with shuttle losses, which do shut down the program while investigations are carried out and suggested remedies are implemented. The idea with man-rated rockets is to _minimize_ risk to humans. The technology is obviously there to put people into space with a 2% failure rate, and I'm sure there would be plenty of astronauts willing to accept those risks, but it would be a public image nightmare for NASA and the United States to accept those odds and do nothing to improve them.

Now the pear: this is a non-government organisation which bought space on a Russian rocket to put their payload into space. The question is not whether they have the cajones to dust themselves off and try again (as you say the Russians do) but rather can they get the money to do it again. It is an expensive venture. (And how do you say "cajones" in Russian?)

Science has become both too specialized and too skeptical. There is little in the way of grand overview coming from scientists, and far too much by way of dismissal of normal human concerns, such as what to do with our freedom.

Speak for yourself. We are busy working on a revolution which will have import to fields as disparate as cancer research to agronomics to drug development.

http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/CMP.html

Where'd that come from?

Science was best represented by the Death Star. And that's about where it's going: to the mechanized service of empire, whether through robotics or cloning, and denial of the romance of the individual, or of the importance of the individual's struggle with character, with the difficulty of finding the truly good courses in life, with not being suckered into the bad merely because of the power and satisfaction available there.

That is an interesting thesis. Work it up. Write it down. However, I suspect that the skeptical and pessimistic one here is you. Many of the scientists I know are passionate about their work and how it will benefit others.

The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.

More likely that they'll do the following * Use Open Firmware
* Lock it to their custom Northbridge as they usually do

Actually, no. I wrote this last week during WWDC to keep my readers/friends informed as to what the switch will mean. Apple will not be using Open Firmware.

No, that's a different project. As the only one from Utah directly working on this project, I can tell you it wasn't me. Utah has another project that is also quite interesting. csafe is involved in simulating explosions and fires. It was likely someone working on that.

Shoot, this is one more reason not to have cell phones on airplanes during flight. I worry about the public's lack of concern for science especially given the extreme right wing movements going on right now in the USA, but people do not want to be remotely inconvenienced even if it means screwing science. Perhaps if the appeal can be made to them from a personal sanity perspective. I got a brief taste of how bad cell phones on planes can be last month on a flight that I wrote about it here.

Perhaps if this has to happen the picocell solution might be the way to go, but please let there be phone free zones on aircraft.

Thank for the advice, I found people you mentioned here. I might contact them. I am looking also at this USB DAQ for linux here.

Unlike hungover pilots, once the software glitch is identified it'll be fixed and won't re-occur.

I'd bet on fewer problems from the software than from the real pilot.