You know, it's not actually that difficult to get into DS game development at all. The only significant hurdle is finding someone to pay to do the actual cart manufacturing. It's not god-awfully expensive, but it's more than I had originally expected; I wish I wasn't NDA bound to not give a number, but you can work out an upper bound with some common sense, and I'll just say "it's near that upper bound." If you can convince the people at Nintendo that you're not just going to turn around and sell the SDK, they'll usually sell you one for much cheaper than the price they quote on http://warioworld.com/. If you'd rather take the simple route and jus get going, the homebrew SDK is free, is GCC, and is quite easy to use.
struct fraction { public: long long int numerator; long long int denominator; };// covers anything in that article
There's a reason some people shouldn't be in industrial computing. Problems like this are trivially easy to solve, and have in fact long since been solved by infinite precision math libraries like GMP. There is a common datatype called BCD (binary coded decimal) which handles these problems by just counting 0..9 in each hex digit and then ignoring the other six values, which solves this at arbitrary precision; the first time I saw that was in Paradox in 1988, but I have references to it in books from the late 1960s.
This is a non-story, documenting one author's infamiliarity with basic practices. Nothing to see here. Move along please.
Is it possible that cancer is a form of evolution?
Yes, but not for the reasons you mean. Natural selection (this isn't evolution, which is a far more fundamental process) is a stochaistic system. It's not directed, but rather random and selective. It is a fundamental adaptation to derive utility from chaos.
Cancer is cellular damage. That too is chaos.
It's not that cancer is a form of selection. It's that they're both just a huge rolling of dice.
Symbiotic relationships could occur in the same way. For example, Ruminants eat and rely on billions of micro-oraganisms to break the grasses down for them. Without these organisms, they would not live.
So do we, you know. For example, the e. coli valine-isovaline cycle.
Could this be used as a method for keeping people from rejecting transplants?
Unfortunately, no. The issue here is that this tumor line has learned to never grow its chemical markers in the first place. You can't just knock those markers off of the surface; they're there for reasons other than identification. It's a bit like looking at the back of a computer. You can tell if it's the same kind as your computer at home, because the power cord's over here, and the switch is there, and the monitor plug is here, but the keyboard and mouse plug are over here, and they're colored and yours aren't. You can't just remove all those from a transplant; they're needed.
This tumor is more like a network slab. It has a power line and a network card, and everything else is just gone. It doesn't need a monitor plug because it doesn't care if anything can see what it's thinking. It's not a computer, it's a cluster parasite. The thing is, the way the immune system works is to say "that shouldn't be there," or "that shouldn't look like that." It's too dumb to say "omg where is this, it's not there at all." Because the slab is just missing essentially all its surface, it's completely faceless to the immune system, and so the immune system basically treats it like dust. It clusters it into one spot and tries to secrete it. In the case of actual dead material, that comes out in exfoliation. But, since these are cells, they attach just like any other cells, and end up sticking around.
The cancer is different genetic material from the host dog, it probably also used different blood type in its previous host
The immune system would have to tear a cell in half to see its genetic material. Therefore, the immune system can't see its genetic material. Similarly, since these are individual invading skin cells, they're not making blood, so the host dog has no idea what blood type their genome suggests.
but it seems that the dogs bodies don't reject it.
Think of them as Russian spies in a cold war movie. Why aren't the police putting them in jail? Because the police have no idea they don't belong. Much like movie spies, these cells look like the locals, act like the locals, talk like the locals, and are essentially just too featureless to pay attention to. I bet this cancer drives a Chevy and goes to PTA meetings.
To be clear, the reason this cancer is succeeding is that it has adapted to stealth.
I don't know anything about cell rejection so I could be completely wrong. Are there any doctors that could explain it?
These tumor cells will grow in any dog. It would be interesting to see if they will infect closely related species. Will they grow in wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc.? Are there any breeds of dogs which are immune to these tumor cells?
Agreed, that's a very interesting question, though it'd be difficult to test ethically, and given that we don't know the transmission rate, it might take a tremendous number of animals, which is costly and time consuming. Mind you, I think it'd be worth it, but it leaves a university open to fire from animal rights groups, so it's definately a very difficult topic to approach.
Will they grow in prey bitten by a dog, such as rabbits?
Of course I don't know for certain, but I can make an educated guess. In most cases, cells from animal one can't live in animal two before you even consider the immune system. The chemistries are different: more sugar, less salt, different kinds of ion channels. The neighboring cells are the wrong size and shape; imagine trying to build 7x7 lego blocks into a design made out of 5x13s. Cells require significant communication support, to control various processes; the communications markers are different. Senescence is suppressed in cancer cells, true, but there are other support processes going on. Moving a salt lake fish to the ocean will kill it based on salt content alone; either in a freshwater lake similarly. This is a lot more than just salt content, and it's got a much less complex and capable organism making the transition.
That said, there are odd cases. The environmental needs of several bacteria have led to their being hosted in our gastrointestinal tracts. It's as much an issue of coincidence as anything: they were close enough to eke out a living, and they did something useful, so we adjusted to let them, and consequently us, flourish. The common example is (IIRC) e. cola performing the valene->isovalene transition: it eats half and converts the other half. That's useful because isovalene is an important amino acid, and we're not able to make it on our own.
Now, in the case of cancer, right now it's not really doing anything bad. At least, not on cancer scale: it's uncomfortable, and that's about it. Not much for cancer. But, here's an odd thought: what if this cancer began to help the host, in the way that e. coli does for us? One possibility is that a branch of this cancer becomes chitinous, which would lead to a thicker and tougher skin. This could make the dog much hardier in combat without changing its fundamental developmental makeup. Dogs which adapted to be available to the transmissable cancer would thus become more apt to survive combat. Indeed, the genetic exchange that would happen between the transmitted cells and the host dog would lead to a higher rate of odd cancers in the host dogs which were relatively weak, since they were on differing cells whose genomes were already only somewhat stable, and as a result, dogs would have a gentle pressure towards a stunningly broad range of cancers. If dogs came to select for this cancer, it could make them largely immune to many others.
This in fact could be a very highly versatile source of genetic material in the long run.
Will they host in rabbits? Probably not. Will they host in some prey, somewhere? The chances are low, but not zero. Consider also that prey are smaller, which means cancers hit them harder, and if prey got bitten by a dog, cancer is the least of its problems; chances are good that if a rabbit was bitten by a dog, even if it got away, it's not lasting the night. The circumstances to infect a host and have it survive, let alone a broad enough range to find a suitable host, are very low.
But sure, it's possible. Monoclonal colonies get genes from invading bacteria all the time, and lots of people believe this is how hemoglobin was introduced (as a parasite - it's very, very different from the rest of the genome) into the animalian seed line.
Weirder things have happened. They're just uncommon.
If every cell of this cancer is a clone, and not the dog's own cells screwing up, then I'd say this is more like an infection. An alien organism has invaded the dog's body and then replicates. What's the difference (in terms of the vector) between this and a bacterial infection (also single-celled)?
Not much. That's why it's called a contagion. The nature of the contagion is still that of a highly specialized dog cancer. Similarly, nano-robots breeding on the iron in your liver would be a contagion; that wouldn't make them any less robots.
I mean, part of the whole problem with cancer is that the cells are in fact your own cells, so your body never attacks the infection.
Actually, the human body attacks cancers with an amazing speed and dedication. That's why when you get an immune suppressive disease like HIV, GRID or Hep C, you start getting all these weird cancers that nobody ever gets. The most common in the case of AIDS patients is Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is caused by a strain of herpes that we all have (HHV-8,) because once our natural resistance to KS is gone, it spreads like wildfire. Doctors suggest that we each actually get two cases of KS every week, and that we just give the cancers the beat-down.
Similarly, there are many cases in which the body attacks its own cells - sometimes by design, such as immune response to a cut, where the white cells kill themselves to provide the mass for a seal (pus and yellow scabs,) in tumor and growth suppression, to prevent bone spurs, etc; sometimes by disease, such as with lupus, perineoplastic syndrome and so on.
I mean, it's hard to even transplant a finger in a human without using huge amounts of anti-rejection drugs.
That's because legitimate tissue is covered in markers, so that they're easy to tell apart. These cells, like parasites, simply don't express almost any such markers. It turns out that our immune system ignores what it can't identify, and in this specific case, these tumor cells have become remarkably adept at hiding their identity. They're like Russian spies: they just blend in really well, and so nobody singles them out.
How is there a tumor growing inside the dog, with cells that must have a totally different DNA and chromosone pattern?
The immune system can't check DNA.
Why is the dog's host system not attacking it?
Because it doesn't know they're foreign. Parasites do this all the time; the human immune system manages to miss several dozen bloodworms (tape worms but in your veins, and six meters long) in the average equatorial African. The immune system doesn't get patched every friday, like your virus checker does; the only way to get something into it is if it makes a big enough difference for the change to provide an evolutionary advantage. Very few parasites are noticed by the immune system; the ones that are are the ones that are either there briefly, presumably to eat, or the ones which are strong enough to fight off the host's immune system, which is rare.
By the by, that's why sickle cell anemia isn't actually a disease. It's a partially complete adaptation: malaria can't kill someone with sickle cell, because it can't burst the oddly shaped cells. That two or three times in one's lifetime it might cause near-fatal crisis, because the sickle cells get stuck, is significantly less dangerous than being susceptible to malaria; indeed, that we're stepping in with medicine right now is unfortunate, because another two thousand years or so, and we'd be immune.
Linux vs. FreeBSD, in many many ways FreeBSD was obviously better at earlier points. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that FreeBSD "won".
Which branch of unix is in use in the most places right now? Remember Apple when you consider your answer. FreeBSD? No. BSD? Yes, actually I think it has. It's got the server market and it's got the end user market. The hobbyist market will come around.
wuftpd vs. vsftpd, wuftpd is a custom BSD like license (pretty common with "BSD")... again wuftpd failed and had decades unopposed.
I would hardly call either of those the dominant FTP daemon. It's a bit like suggesting real free doesn't always win because Plan 9 isn't huge. Sure, there are real free things that didn't win. The germane thing to point out isn't real free things that didn't win, but GPL free things that did. You'll find that the list is remarkably short. Of the major projects, the office suites are the only things I'm aware of where GPL free is in significant lead among the free projects.
Xt vs. gtk+, there's no way you can say Xt won and it also had decades unopposed.
GTK+ is X-Windows. X is real free. Besides, I'm hard pressed to think of GTK+ as dominant. You'll notice that KDE has begun its path into the Macintosh and Win32 markets, both places where Gnome doesn't tread. KDE's license has a specific commercial exception. You'll note that's an alternative solution to the problem I annoted.
bind and dhcpd, are OK examples
I don't think they are. They're tiny and easily replaced. The only reason bind is still around is that there's no reason to gut it. I'm talking about the big stuff: operating systems, web servers, programming languages, compilers (check that gcc license again, folks, it's not pure gpl,) office suites, that sort of thing.
Like I said, as far as I know, office suites are the only place that GPL free is in the lead. I'd appreciate some counterexamples of significant size.
commercial usage... proprietary usage. Big difference.
Not as big as you imagine. In most cases, commercial products for public release must be proprietary, either through naïve stockholder beliefs about security or business positioning, or due to NDA with related parties. Remember the Matrox and NVidia driver gap? Those companies weren't refusing to vend to Linux to be obstinant, and both companies were willing to address even smaller markets, like the Macintosh (before the mac users get up in arms, please remember that very few Mac users upgrade their video cards; in terms of sales, video card upgrades to the Linux market are a far larger market.) They just weren't able to satisfy the Linux market, because the Linux market has completely hedged itself into its dogma, and refuses to play well with anyone who works differently.
Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years? It's because corporations aren't these mysterious dark villains you imagine them to be, and they're not stupid. Corporations understand collaboration; it reduces costs dramatically. Corporations donate more source than individuals do, and if you're going to argue that, please remember that you're not running Hurd yet. I run a corporation which makes Nintendo DS games. There are a ton of libraries I'd love to use, but because of my NDAs with Nintendo and some appallingly bad choices of wording in the LGPL, I'm simply not able to. I've had to skip dozens of awesome interface toolkits because they're simply unavailable to me. There are nineteen web browsers I've been able to find which will compile on the Nintendo DS. Exactly one of them is commercially available: KHTML. It's nothing short of a miracle that it happens to be the best choice; that's rarely true.
Wish you had PicoGUI games? So do I. Nano-X's codebase is a mess, and wxUniversal has performance and feature problems. PicoGUI is faster, prettier and compiles without problems. It skins, it scales, and the default skin is just gorgeous.
It's also a dead project, because the author lost interest and it never gained enough momentum. If it wasn't LGPL, I would personally resurrect and dramatically extend it; it would be far less work than starting over. Unfortunately, it's LGPL. Nobody's touched it since mid-2003. It's a beautiful project. And, because of its choice of license, it's dead, probably forever, while the dramatically inferior Nano-X project continues happily along, because companies can put their weight behind it.
I stand by my opinion, which I continue to repeat openly: GPL/LGPL are the paired most destructive forces in open source software today. The unix way is interoperability and cross-usability. The specific purpose of the GPL is to destroy that, and the LGPL, though it wants to be different, fails to be different. Unix has always been a genuinely free product, available to anyone who wanted it. It was originally a commercial product, and was released by corporations to the public freely.
GPL is an abomination. It's a bunch of programmers who think that just because they have the ethical right to tell companies to screw off, that it's suddenly a good idea. What they fail to understand is that they're taking from the mouths of the people who gave it to them in the first place, and from the mouths of the people who do the vast bulk of software development today. Yes, it's your right to constrain your work however you want to, and I will honor that. I will not respect it, however, and I will call you small-minded to your face. I will leave your software in your hands because you refuse to share, all the while banging the open source drum. But you know what? Real open source is open to everyone, and has been for decades before GNU reared its ugly head.
There's a difference between being sympathetic to the abuser next door and condoning one's own bad behavior. To be clear, I'd be costing that cop his job for not getting it fixed.
Sounds to me like this investment will make resolution harder. The best time to fix this would have been before lots of money was invested in war-making machines.
And, what, that's a good reason to not even try being a social adult and fixing it appropriately?
Well as long as we're emboldening things, I'd like to point out that sound doesn't propagate at all (write that spelling down, son.) To propagate is to have children or otherwise to breed, not to move outwards. Sound waves "transmit" instead.
Destroying a device put there for the sole purpose of causing people misery is not a wrong.
Abby Hoffman used to make the same broad proclamations about prisons. Problem was, it wasn't true back then either. You don't know the story. This might, in fact, be the old man fighting back against the poster, who's been being obnoxious. It's funny how everyone here seems to be saying "omg fight back," and can't seem to understand that that makes the poster into the villain.
Destroying someone else's property is not justified just because it pisses you off. In this society, we do not have that kind of authority. What he needs to do is to go to the police a second time, and if the cop refuses to investigate, he needs to get the cop's badge number.
This isn't rocket science, and you can deal with bad neighbors without being a sociopath. Just because your first try didn't work doesn't mean it's time to start ignoring the rules. They're not inconveniences.
I've had to deal with people of this sort in dealing with my condo association and let me tell you, there are certain segments of the elderly who literally hate everyone.
Maybe that's because every time they do something their neighbor doesn't like, he sneaks up in the middle of the night and smashes it with a hammer. Did it ever occur to you that you might have earned the reaction you're getting?
You're lucky you don't live here. I got someone kicked out of my condo for doing that sort of thing to my neighbor.
Neither is that what irony means, nor is that how wonderful is spelled. Also, the word "BLOC" is an acronym, doesn't have a K, and had nothing to do with the laws, so to suggest that our law system is BLOC doesn't actually make sense.
I'm sure you'll say something nasty about spelling and grammar flames, but really, when your quality of discourse is this low, do you actually expect to be taken seriously? Do you really believe that the two hundred fourty years of our style of government was to make a country that didn't even exist until 1917 look bad? What were the first hundred and thirty years? Practice?
Bashing the Russians blindly is passe. If you want to sound hot-button and don't know what you're talking about, the current national villain is capital-t Terrorism. You'll need to point your finger at turbans, not red coats. You know, that, or read a book. 'S really up to you.
It's funny how many people go "omg that guy is such a jerk because he made a noise," and then suggest destroying a thousand dollars' worth of hardware as appropriate retribution. It's almost as if you have no sense of scale. Hell, even if you want to be a jerk back, be creative: send him some low frequency back.
Destroying a thousand dollar device is a good way to get thrown in jail. Do not underestimate the angry nature of someone willing to dump a thousand bucks into pissing you off.
Remember that vigilantism is necessary when the police and relevent authorities refuse to do their jobs.
Yeah, you're not Batman, and an anti-mosquito device passed by the FCC isn't reason to go trapsing onto other people's property to destroy things. Believe it or not, even your mighty minor miscomfort does not empower you to behave however you see fit.
If the police refuse to do their jobs. Honestly. The boys in blue aren't here to settle minor complaints between one oversensitive and one undersensitive neighbor. Tell him to bring the old man a six pack and ask about his time in the war, not to go breaking things. You really think the old man would just say "oh well, I give up" if this guy lashes out?
Your lack of self control and your obvious deep commitment to decent behavior is appalling.
Slashdot Mirror
I took another route, but that route does work. You show it to publishers, not Nintendo.
You know, it's not actually that difficult to get into DS game development at all. The only significant hurdle is finding someone to pay to do the actual cart manufacturing. It's not god-awfully expensive, but it's more than I had originally expected; I wish I wasn't NDA bound to not give a number, but you can work out an upper bound with some common sense, and I'll just say "it's near that upper bound." If you can convince the people at Nintendo that you're not just going to turn around and sell the SDK, they'll usually sell you one for much cheaper than the price they quote on http://warioworld.com/. If you'd rather take the simple route and jus get going, the homebrew SDK is free, is GCC, and is quite easy to use.
struct fraction { public: long long int numerator; long long int denominator; }; // covers anything in that article
There's a reason some people shouldn't be in industrial computing. Problems like this are trivially easy to solve, and have in fact long since been solved by infinite precision math libraries like GMP. There is a common datatype called BCD (binary coded decimal) which handles these problems by just counting 0..9 in each hex digit and then ignoring the other six values, which solves this at arbitrary precision; the first time I saw that was in Paradox in 1988, but I have references to it in books from the late 1960s.
This is a non-story, documenting one author's infamiliarity with basic practices. Nothing to see here. Move along please.
Is it possible that cancer is a form of evolution?
Yes, but not for the reasons you mean. Natural selection (this isn't evolution, which is a far more fundamental process) is a stochaistic system. It's not directed, but rather random and selective. It is a fundamental adaptation to derive utility from chaos.
Cancer is cellular damage. That too is chaos.
It's not that cancer is a form of selection. It's that they're both just a huge rolling of dice.
Symbiotic relationships could occur in the same way. For example, Ruminants eat and rely on billions of micro-oraganisms to break the grasses down for them. Without these organisms, they would not live.
So do we, you know. For example, the e. coli valine-isovaline cycle.
Could this be used as a method for keeping people from rejecting transplants?
Unfortunately, no. The issue here is that this tumor line has learned to never grow its chemical markers in the first place. You can't just knock those markers off of the surface; they're there for reasons other than identification. It's a bit like looking at the back of a computer. You can tell if it's the same kind as your computer at home, because the power cord's over here, and the switch is there, and the monitor plug is here, but the keyboard and mouse plug are over here, and they're colored and yours aren't. You can't just remove all those from a transplant; they're needed.
This tumor is more like a network slab. It has a power line and a network card, and everything else is just gone. It doesn't need a monitor plug because it doesn't care if anything can see what it's thinking. It's not a computer, it's a cluster parasite. The thing is, the way the immune system works is to say "that shouldn't be there," or "that shouldn't look like that." It's too dumb to say "omg where is this, it's not there at all." Because the slab is just missing essentially all its surface, it's completely faceless to the immune system, and so the immune system basically treats it like dust. It clusters it into one spot and tries to secrete it. In the case of actual dead material, that comes out in exfoliation. But, since these are cells, they attach just like any other cells, and end up sticking around.
The cancer is different genetic material from the host dog, it probably also used different blood type in its previous host
The immune system would have to tear a cell in half to see its genetic material. Therefore, the immune system can't see its genetic material. Similarly, since these are individual invading skin cells, they're not making blood, so the host dog has no idea what blood type their genome suggests.
but it seems that the dogs bodies don't reject it.
Think of them as Russian spies in a cold war movie. Why aren't the police putting them in jail? Because the police have no idea they don't belong. Much like movie spies, these cells look like the locals, act like the locals, talk like the locals, and are essentially just too featureless to pay attention to. I bet this cancer drives a Chevy and goes to PTA meetings.
To be clear, the reason this cancer is succeeding is that it has adapted to stealth.
I don't know anything about cell rejection so I could be completely wrong. Are there any doctors that could explain it?
You're in the right neighborhood; normally you'd be correct. You just didn't realize what this tumor is doing differently. It's sly; stealthy. I have made a diagram to assist in your understanding of why the immune system cannot flush this cancer.
These tumor cells will grow in any dog. It would be interesting to see if they will infect closely related species. Will they grow in wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc.? Are there any breeds of dogs which are immune to these tumor cells?
Agreed, that's a very interesting question, though it'd be difficult to test ethically, and given that we don't know the transmission rate, it might take a tremendous number of animals, which is costly and time consuming. Mind you, I think it'd be worth it, but it leaves a university open to fire from animal rights groups, so it's definately a very difficult topic to approach.
Will they grow in prey bitten by a dog, such as rabbits?
Of course I don't know for certain, but I can make an educated guess. In most cases, cells from animal one can't live in animal two before you even consider the immune system. The chemistries are different: more sugar, less salt, different kinds of ion channels. The neighboring cells are the wrong size and shape; imagine trying to build 7x7 lego blocks into a design made out of 5x13s. Cells require significant communication support, to control various processes; the communications markers are different. Senescence is suppressed in cancer cells, true, but there are other support processes going on. Moving a salt lake fish to the ocean will kill it based on salt content alone; either in a freshwater lake similarly. This is a lot more than just salt content, and it's got a much less complex and capable organism making the transition.
That said, there are odd cases. The environmental needs of several bacteria have led to their being hosted in our gastrointestinal tracts. It's as much an issue of coincidence as anything: they were close enough to eke out a living, and they did something useful, so we adjusted to let them, and consequently us, flourish. The common example is (IIRC) e. cola performing the valene->isovalene transition: it eats half and converts the other half. That's useful because isovalene is an important amino acid, and we're not able to make it on our own.
Now, in the case of cancer, right now it's not really doing anything bad. At least, not on cancer scale: it's uncomfortable, and that's about it. Not much for cancer. But, here's an odd thought: what if this cancer began to help the host, in the way that e. coli does for us? One possibility is that a branch of this cancer becomes chitinous, which would lead to a thicker and tougher skin. This could make the dog much hardier in combat without changing its fundamental developmental makeup. Dogs which adapted to be available to the transmissable cancer would thus become more apt to survive combat. Indeed, the genetic exchange that would happen between the transmitted cells and the host dog would lead to a higher rate of odd cancers in the host dogs which were relatively weak, since they were on differing cells whose genomes were already only somewhat stable, and as a result, dogs would have a gentle pressure towards a stunningly broad range of cancers. If dogs came to select for this cancer, it could make them largely immune to many others.
This in fact could be a very highly versatile source of genetic material in the long run.
Will they host in rabbits? Probably not. Will they host in some prey, somewhere? The chances are low, but not zero. Consider also that prey are smaller, which means cancers hit them harder, and if prey got bitten by a dog, cancer is the least of its problems; chances are good that if a rabbit was bitten by a dog, even if it got away, it's not lasting the night. The circumstances to infect a host and have it survive, let alone a broad enough range to find a suitable host, are very low.
But sure, it's possible. Monoclonal colonies get genes from invading bacteria all the time, and lots of people believe this is how hemoglobin was introduced (as a parasite - it's very, very different from the rest of the genome) into the animalian seed line.
Weirder things have happened. They're just uncommon.
Wouldn't it be ironic
Nope. Bargain basement word-bins like Merriam Webster aside, irony is a form of word play.
Actually, you're host to tens of millions of prions right now. Very, very few of them are damaging.
If every cell of this cancer is a clone, and not the dog's own cells screwing up, then I'd say this is more like an infection. An alien organism has invaded the dog's body and then replicates. What's the difference (in terms of the vector) between this and a bacterial infection (also single-celled)?
Not much. That's why it's called a contagion. The nature of the contagion is still that of a highly specialized dog cancer. Similarly, nano-robots breeding on the iron in your liver would be a contagion; that wouldn't make them any less robots.
Sorry, I'm watching Star Trek.
Yes, it says that right in the slashdot story. By the way, Decimate means to destroy one tenth of.
I mean, part of the whole problem with cancer is that the cells are in fact your own cells, so your body never attacks the infection.
Actually, the human body attacks cancers with an amazing speed and dedication. That's why when you get an immune suppressive disease like HIV, GRID or Hep C, you start getting all these weird cancers that nobody ever gets. The most common in the case of AIDS patients is Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is caused by a strain of herpes that we all have (HHV-8,) because once our natural resistance to KS is gone, it spreads like wildfire. Doctors suggest that we each actually get two cases of KS every week, and that we just give the cancers the beat-down.
Similarly, there are many cases in which the body attacks its own cells - sometimes by design, such as immune response to a cut, where the white cells kill themselves to provide the mass for a seal (pus and yellow scabs,) in tumor and growth suppression, to prevent bone spurs, etc; sometimes by disease, such as with lupus, perineoplastic syndrome and so on.
I mean, it's hard to even transplant a finger in a human without using huge amounts of anti-rejection drugs.
That's because legitimate tissue is covered in markers, so that they're easy to tell apart. These cells, like parasites, simply don't express almost any such markers. It turns out that our immune system ignores what it can't identify, and in this specific case, these tumor cells have become remarkably adept at hiding their identity. They're like Russian spies: they just blend in really well, and so nobody singles them out.
How is there a tumor growing inside the dog, with cells that must have a totally different DNA and chromosone pattern?
The immune system can't check DNA.
Why is the dog's host system not attacking it?
Because it doesn't know they're foreign. Parasites do this all the time; the human immune system manages to miss several dozen bloodworms (tape worms but in your veins, and six meters long) in the average equatorial African. The immune system doesn't get patched every friday, like your virus checker does; the only way to get something into it is if it makes a big enough difference for the change to provide an evolutionary advantage. Very few parasites are noticed by the immune system; the ones that are are the ones that are either there briefly, presumably to eat, or the ones which are strong enough to fight off the host's immune system, which is rare.
By the by, that's why sickle cell anemia isn't actually a disease. It's a partially complete adaptation: malaria can't kill someone with sickle cell, because it can't burst the oddly shaped cells. That two or three times in one's lifetime it might cause near-fatal crisis, because the sickle cells get stuck, is significantly less dangerous than being susceptible to malaria; indeed, that we're stepping in with medicine right now is unfortunate, because another two thousand years or so, and we'd be immune.
This might be the single funniest thing I've read on Slashdot all year.
Way to repeat the last sentence of the article.
Linux vs. FreeBSD, in many many ways FreeBSD was obviously better at earlier points. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that FreeBSD "won".
... again wuftpd failed and had decades unopposed.
Which branch of unix is in use in the most places right now? Remember Apple when you consider your answer. FreeBSD? No. BSD? Yes, actually I think it has. It's got the server market and it's got the end user market. The hobbyist market will come around.
wuftpd vs. vsftpd, wuftpd is a custom BSD like license (pretty common with "BSD")
I would hardly call either of those the dominant FTP daemon. It's a bit like suggesting real free doesn't always win because Plan 9 isn't huge. Sure, there are real free things that didn't win. The germane thing to point out isn't real free things that didn't win, but GPL free things that did. You'll find that the list is remarkably short. Of the major projects, the office suites are the only things I'm aware of where GPL free is in significant lead among the free projects.
Xt vs. gtk+, there's no way you can say Xt won and it also had decades unopposed.
GTK+ is X-Windows. X is real free. Besides, I'm hard pressed to think of GTK+ as dominant. You'll notice that KDE has begun its path into the Macintosh and Win32 markets, both places where Gnome doesn't tread. KDE's license has a specific commercial exception. You'll note that's an alternative solution to the problem I annoted.
bind and dhcpd, are OK examples
I don't think they are. They're tiny and easily replaced. The only reason bind is still around is that there's no reason to gut it. I'm talking about the big stuff: operating systems, web servers, programming languages, compilers (check that gcc license again, folks, it's not pure gpl,) office suites, that sort of thing.
Like I said, as far as I know, office suites are the only place that GPL free is in the lead. I'd appreciate some counterexamples of significant size.
"Hi I'm going to claim it's the same thing about a guess about a product I've never used."
Man, won't you be embarrassed when you try it? Oh right, you won't bother to check. Nevermind.
commercial usage ... proprietary usage. Big difference.
Not as big as you imagine. In most cases, commercial products for public release must be proprietary, either through naïve stockholder beliefs about security or business positioning, or due to NDA with related parties. Remember the Matrox and NVidia driver gap? Those companies weren't refusing to vend to Linux to be obstinant, and both companies were willing to address even smaller markets, like the Macintosh (before the mac users get up in arms, please remember that very few Mac users upgrade their video cards; in terms of sales, video card upgrades to the Linux market are a far larger market.) They just weren't able to satisfy the Linux market, because the Linux market has completely hedged itself into its dogma, and refuses to play well with anyone who works differently.
Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years? It's because corporations aren't these mysterious dark villains you imagine them to be, and they're not stupid. Corporations understand collaboration; it reduces costs dramatically. Corporations donate more source than individuals do, and if you're going to argue that, please remember that you're not running Hurd yet. I run a corporation which makes Nintendo DS games. There are a ton of libraries I'd love to use, but because of my NDAs with Nintendo and some appallingly bad choices of wording in the LGPL, I'm simply not able to. I've had to skip dozens of awesome interface toolkits because they're simply unavailable to me. There are nineteen web browsers I've been able to find which will compile on the Nintendo DS. Exactly one of them is commercially available: KHTML. It's nothing short of a miracle that it happens to be the best choice; that's rarely true.
Wish you had PicoGUI games? So do I. Nano-X's codebase is a mess, and wxUniversal has performance and feature problems. PicoGUI is faster, prettier and compiles without problems. It skins, it scales, and the default skin is just gorgeous.
It's also a dead project, because the author lost interest and it never gained enough momentum. If it wasn't LGPL, I would personally resurrect and dramatically extend it; it would be far less work than starting over. Unfortunately, it's LGPL. Nobody's touched it since mid-2003. It's a beautiful project. And, because of its choice of license, it's dead, probably forever, while the dramatically inferior Nano-X project continues happily along, because companies can put their weight behind it.
I stand by my opinion, which I continue to repeat openly: GPL/LGPL are the paired most destructive forces in open source software today. The unix way is interoperability and cross-usability. The specific purpose of the GPL is to destroy that, and the LGPL, though it wants to be different, fails to be different. Unix has always been a genuinely free product, available to anyone who wanted it. It was originally a commercial product, and was released by corporations to the public freely.
GPL is an abomination. It's a bunch of programmers who think that just because they have the ethical right to tell companies to screw off, that it's suddenly a good idea. What they fail to understand is that they're taking from the mouths of the people who gave it to them in the first place, and from the mouths of the people who do the vast bulk of software development today. Yes, it's your right to constrain your work however you want to, and I will honor that. I will not respect it, however, and I will call you small-minded to your face. I will leave your software in your hands because you refuse to share, all the while banging the open source drum. But you know what? Real open source is open to everyone, and has been for decades before GNU reared its ugly head.
GPL is a major lose, and i
There's a difference between being sympathetic to the abuser next door and condoning one's own bad behavior. To be clear, I'd be costing that cop his job for not getting it fixed.
Sounds to me like this investment will make resolution harder. The best time to fix this would have been before lots of money was invested in war-making machines.
And, what, that's a good reason to not even try being a social adult and fixing it appropriately?
Well as long as we're emboldening things, I'd like to point out that sound doesn't propagate at all (write that spelling down, son.) To propagate is to have children or otherwise to breed, not to move outwards. Sound waves "transmit" instead.
Destroying a device put there for the sole purpose of causing people misery is not a wrong.
Abby Hoffman used to make the same broad proclamations about prisons. Problem was, it wasn't true back then either. You don't know the story. This might, in fact, be the old man fighting back against the poster, who's been being obnoxious. It's funny how everyone here seems to be saying "omg fight back," and can't seem to understand that that makes the poster into the villain.
Destroying someone else's property is not justified just because it pisses you off. In this society, we do not have that kind of authority. What he needs to do is to go to the police a second time, and if the cop refuses to investigate, he needs to get the cop's badge number.
This isn't rocket science, and you can deal with bad neighbors without being a sociopath. Just because your first try didn't work doesn't mean it's time to start ignoring the rules. They're not inconveniences.
I've had to deal with people of this sort in dealing with my condo association and let me tell you, there are certain segments of the elderly who literally hate everyone.
Maybe that's because every time they do something their neighbor doesn't like, he sneaks up in the middle of the night and smashes it with a hammer. Did it ever occur to you that you might have earned the reaction you're getting?
You're lucky you don't live here. I got someone kicked out of my condo for doing that sort of thing to my neighbor.
What a surprise: the device you're saying is similar to the mosquito ... is the mosquito.
Neither is that what irony means, nor is that how wonderful is spelled. Also, the word "BLOC" is an acronym, doesn't have a K, and had nothing to do with the laws, so to suggest that our law system is BLOC doesn't actually make sense.
I'm sure you'll say something nasty about spelling and grammar flames, but really, when your quality of discourse is this low, do you actually expect to be taken seriously? Do you really believe that the two hundred fourty years of our style of government was to make a country that didn't even exist until 1917 look bad? What were the first hundred and thirty years? Practice?
Bashing the Russians blindly is passe. If you want to sound hot-button and don't know what you're talking about, the current national villain is capital-t Terrorism. You'll need to point your finger at turbans, not red coats. You know, that, or read a book. 'S really up to you.
It's funny how many people go "omg that guy is such a jerk because he made a noise," and then suggest destroying a thousand dollars' worth of hardware as appropriate retribution. It's almost as if you have no sense of scale. Hell, even if you want to be a jerk back, be creative: send him some low frequency back.
Destroying a thousand dollar device is a good way to get thrown in jail. Do not underestimate the angry nature of someone willing to dump a thousand bucks into pissing you off.
Remember that vigilantism is necessary when the police and relevent authorities refuse to do their jobs.
Yeah, you're not Batman, and an anti-mosquito device passed by the FCC isn't reason to go trapsing onto other people's property to destroy things. Believe it or not, even your mighty minor miscomfort does not empower you to behave however you see fit.
If the police refuse to do their jobs. Honestly. The boys in blue aren't here to settle minor complaints between one oversensitive and one undersensitive neighbor. Tell him to bring the old man a six pack and ask about his time in the war, not to go breaking things. You really think the old man would just say "oh well, I give up" if this guy lashes out?
Your lack of self control and your obvious deep commitment to decent behavior is appalling.