Better yet: Build the thing on the summit of Mona Kea in Hawaii. We already have telescope observatories there (I don't remember if Keck is on Hawaii or Maui). We have tracking radars at Barking Sands. The muzzle of the thing is at 10,000+ ft altitude, taking a significant chunk of lower atmosphere out of the friction component, plus a virtual guarantee of good weather most of the time, UNLIKE Florida, and Hawaii is at a reasonably low lattitude that takes advantage of momentum from the Earth's rotation. Plus, you might be able to power the thing with geothermal energy instead of nuclear.
The only barrier to implementation is the relatively weak political power of Hawaiian representatives in congress, compared to those in Florida and Texas (Houston).
However, that would be heavy, to the point where even a Delta-IV Heavy may have trouble launching the module+adaptor combination.
That's an engineering/design problem. I don't see why that would be a show-stopper. Engineers are smart. They get paid to solve these kinds of issues. That's what they're there for.
The ISS is going to fail without the shuttle, yet NASA (or those that set policy for NASA) procrastinated with building a replacement for the shuttle for years and years.
The entire EELV program (Atlas V and Delta IV) was conceived and executed specifically because of the Challenger disaster, as a backup means for the NRO to get payloads on orbit.
The problem was - NASA didn't hop on the bandwagon in 1987 when they should have, and work to get EELVs human-rated. So while the NRO and USAF have their backup vehicles (and the communications satellite industry) - NASA got stuck with the Shuttle as their single-point-of-failure for manned spaceflight.
Ironically, the original Atlas (and Titan) missiles were crucial for the early manned-spaceflight program. (The entire Gemini program relied on Titan.) That their grandchildren didn't get human-rated is a tragic absurdity.
Personally, I think that as long as plural marriage is banned in this country, as far as the Mormons are concerned, we're just playing lip-service to the concept of Freedom of Religion.
There is no scriptural ban on plural marriage. Many biblical figures had multiple wives. The plural marriage ban is just pure hypocrisy. Plus, since the main Mormon denomination went along with it, it lent them undue credibility, and drove the practice of plural marriage underground, opening it up for abuses like guys who live in remote areas who marry their 1st cousins, and girls as young as 13, and do so against their will. If it were a legal and openly accepted practice, these abuses would be easier to halt.
Actually, it may be that this "reporting" is simply just a PR campaign to bolster public pressure to either get this particular drug "fast-tracked" or to undermine the FDA altogether, in order to help the beleagured, almost bankrupt, struggling for every penny of income drug companies. (My first thought was that it's just a pump-and-dump for the company's stock, but after thinking about it, it could a bigger fish they're trying to fry).
Actually, if 6 million AIDS-infected people suddenly dropped dead from using an untested treatment, it would still put a HUGE dent in the infection rate and spread of the disease, so it wouldn't be all bad. I'd say that as long as the dose of the untested drug came with a waiver; "I understand that this drug is untested, and could kill me dead, or make me a vegetable, and I indemnify the drug company and accept all risk upon myself" - and if that waiver were respected (this is critical!) then I don't see why HIV+ people should not have the choice to make themselves a guinea pig. I know I would.
If this theory is saying that myopia is caused by malconditioning of cilial muscles - why not propose a regimen of physical therapy to condition these muscles counter to what causes the condition?
About 5 years ago, I started having severe back pain, muscle spasms, pinched sciatic, disk degeneration, the works.
Various treatments, drugs, etc. failed to reverse the course of the problem. Until I saw a physical therapist. The therapy did not immediately work. In fact, the first therapy I tried, the McKenzie method, didn't do jack squat. But Then my therapist decided to have me do some stretching. Not yoga (I had tried yoga earlier on, and it just increased the inflammation, spasms, and pain). Just some ordinary hamstring and gluteal stretches. They didn't even begin to work for about 6 weeks, but after that period, I started to improve. In fact, it even improved the pain I was feeling in my knees. And I've very gradually improved over the past 6 months or so. I still have a lot of pain and stiffness, I still have badly damaged cartilege, and I still have a patch of numbness the size of a tea saucer on my right leg from a pinched sciatic nerve. But I'm much more mobile now, and in a lot less pain. When I've not done my stretches for about a week, the spasms come back. My therapist says that my job, which had me sitting down for 8 hours a day, and lack of physical activity and excercise, coupled with an overall tendency for inflexibility and muscle stiffness, probably caused the disk degeneration, which itself is irreversible. (In addition, I'm also using a sit-stand tray for my workstation, I stand about 4 hours and sit for the other 4 hours, depending on my comfort level - this seems to have less of an impact on my back pain than the stretching).
But it sounds like this theory of myopia is the same; muscles get conditioned by too much near-focussing, to be in cronic spasm. Maybe excercises, like alternate focussing on near/far objects for some time could forstall the process that causes the eyeball elongation?
as PPC and Intel don't share the same endian-ness.
I don't think that this is going to be nearly as much of an issue in terms of code portability as other things will, such as driver interfaces, etc.
PPC and Intel are opposite endian-ness, that's true; but the G4 (and earlier) were bi-endian. It was a simple matter to switch modes. That's why Virtual PC worked so well (though in G4 and earlier, it was hobbled by Apple's terrible system bus architecture - and then once they solved that problem with the G5, IBM yanked the bi-endian op). I'm only speculating here, but I think I recall that a couple of generations back, Intel also slapped-on a bi-endian op as well, which is probably why Rosetta works as well as it does. So, at the end of the day, I don't think this is going to be nearly as much of an issue. But it looks like stuff like firewire 800 is going to not see a tomorrow on x86, just as SCSI never really worked all that well from the 68k-to-PPC transition, nor does non-serial-ATA work very well on G5 Power Macs. These may all be hardware design issues, but this is going to equate to a platform difference that's going to end up causing different behavior in the software.
Yes, I would love very much to be the manufacturer of a product which I could sell to a customer for $50, and the government would chip in an additional $350 for each widget. Better still, if the customer would die without this product. . .
Most of the herpes family of viruses tends to retreat to the spinal cord where the immune system can't get at it to finish it off. Hence, when you get an outbreak of herpes zoster (chicken pox/shingles) - it travels along nerve clusters and surfaces on the skin in very distinct patterns deliniating the specific area that's covered by a given nerve.
For everyone who had chicken pox as a child, and is dreading an occurrance of shingles later in life (my wife was struck by this after a cortisone shot in her back supressed her immune response enough to give the virus a shot at an attack), this potential treatment is very good news indeed.
Wait till Muslims get a hold of your fag asses, you won't laugh as they murder you in public for your sins.
They won't get ahold of our "fag asses" because our fag asses have jet bombers and depleted uranium bullets and lasers and shit like that. (yeah, that's right, "fag asses" like Alan Turing are smart, and invent things and figure things out). They've got rocks. That's what religious fundamentalists get. Because, you see, if you believe your scripture is inerrant, than you must accept that Pi=3.0, and your backwards ass is not going to be designing a lot of jet bombers or nuclear bombs or any shit at all. (certainly nothing as advanced as a "round wheel" but I guess that was invented BEFORE scripture came around. Good thing too.)
Hell, it's a sin to draw cartoons? Where would we be without Dilbert? Well, if the Christian fundamentalists get their way, we'll be back in the stone age soon enough, and THEN the Muslims will come and get our fag asses.
Or - we could just round up all the fundamentalists, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, and send them to their Holy land, build a fence 'round it and wave 'bye.
Profit and not "socializing the results" is all fine and dandy. But if you consider that the existence of poor people infected with a deadly disease they cannot afford to cure IS A THREAT TO ME AND YOU AND OUR LOVED ONES (ie. blood transfusions, etc.) then this is clearly a matter of public health and safety. It has nothing to do with charity for the poor unfortunate (immoral gays/johns/perverts/etc.).
If the mushroom farmer thinks he can extract a higher price, then he should try. And watch Chef Batali go to a different mushroom farmer for less costly mushrooms.
Sites pay for their connection, users pay for their connection. . . what the fuck are they whining about? If they want to jack up their rates for a given bandwith, then they can go ahead and do so - and watch the free market kick them in the asses as people go to other providers.
there was too much developer overhead to compile/test for rarely-used processor variants,
As the hardware manufacturer, Apple would be determining the relative share of processor variants, so this is hardly a valid argument in this case. True - it would make most sense to split the product lines along CPU-competencies: PPC for servers and high-end workstations, x86 for iMacs, laptops, etc. - which would necessarily lead to balkanization along software lines - - ie. you don't need to test-out x86 versions of high-end databases and web apps, since such apps would most likely only run on PPC variants, on the other hand, you don't need to test-out PPC versions of iTunes or web browsers, because those are run mostly on the x86 systems - so some degree of test-balkanization would be inevitable.
On the other hand - this would give Apple a tremendous amount of bargaining leverage among the chip vendors, and maintain compatability and flexibility among it's user-base. That's easily worth any testing heartache they might encounter.
You use the same installer, the same compiler, the same debugger, the same test procedures (even the same test-harness software - if you're that lucky). It doubles your hardware costs, and doubles the hours billed to actual test performance, but that's actually a small fraction of what's involved in a proper testing process. Unfortunately, most software vendors don't use a proper testing process, and only use the minimal components, which is why their cost is doubled, and utterly ineffective on either platform alone.
Maybe not, but maybe MS can sell those users VirtualPC. Running OS X on OS X seems sort of redundant, but it'd work.
I'd sooner run YellowDog Linux.
VPC is extremely slow as an x86 emulator - even on my Dual 2GHz G5. I hear it's almost useful on some of the higher-end G4 systems, back when IBM shipped chips with the little/big endian translation op. But they hacked that out of the G5 for some reason. I think this is a big part of the reason why Connectix had to sell-out to Microsoft. They saw this coming and knew their sales were going to evaporate when the G5 came out.
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Better yet:
Build the thing on the summit of Mona Kea in Hawaii. We already have telescope observatories there (I don't remember if Keck is on Hawaii or Maui). We have tracking radars at Barking Sands. The muzzle of the thing is at 10,000+ ft altitude, taking a significant chunk of lower atmosphere out of the friction component, plus a virtual guarantee of good weather most of the time, UNLIKE Florida, and Hawaii is at a reasonably low lattitude that takes advantage of momentum from the Earth's rotation. Plus, you might be able to power the thing with geothermal energy instead of nuclear.
The only barrier to implementation is the relatively weak political power of Hawaiian representatives in congress, compared to those in Florida and Texas (Houston).
However, that would be heavy, to the point where even a Delta-IV Heavy may have trouble launching the module+adaptor combination.
That's an engineering/design problem. I don't see why that would be a show-stopper. Engineers are smart. They get paid to solve these kinds of issues. That's what they're there for.
The ISS is going to fail without the shuttle, yet NASA (or those that set policy for NASA) procrastinated with building a replacement for the shuttle for years and years.
The entire EELV program (Atlas V and Delta IV) was conceived and executed specifically because of the Challenger disaster, as a backup means for the NRO to get payloads on orbit.
The problem was - NASA didn't hop on the bandwagon in 1987 when they should have, and work to get EELVs human-rated. So while the NRO and USAF have their backup vehicles (and the communications satellite industry) - NASA got stuck with the Shuttle as their single-point-of-failure for manned spaceflight.
Ironically, the original Atlas (and Titan) missiles were crucial for the early manned-spaceflight program. (The entire Gemini program relied on Titan.) That their grandchildren didn't get human-rated is a tragic absurdity.
Personally, I think that as long as plural marriage is banned in this country, as far as the Mormons are concerned, we're just playing lip-service to the concept of Freedom of Religion.
There is no scriptural ban on plural marriage. Many biblical figures had multiple wives. The plural marriage ban is just pure hypocrisy. Plus, since the main Mormon denomination went along with it, it lent them undue credibility, and drove the practice of plural marriage underground, opening it up for abuses like guys who live in remote areas who marry their 1st cousins, and girls as young as 13, and do so against their will. If it were a legal and openly accepted practice, these abuses would be easier to halt.
You definitely would NOT mention it to the press if you wanted to get published in a top journal like Nature,
Yeah, just ask Watson and Crick.
This kind of reporting is terribly irresponsible.
Actually, it may be that this "reporting" is simply just a PR campaign to bolster public pressure to either get this particular drug "fast-tracked" or to undermine the FDA altogether, in order to help the beleagured, almost bankrupt, struggling for every penny of income drug companies. (My first thought was that it's just a pump-and-dump for the company's stock, but after thinking about it, it could a bigger fish they're trying to fry).
Actually, if 6 million AIDS-infected people suddenly dropped dead from using an untested treatment, it would still put a HUGE dent in the infection rate and spread of the disease, so it wouldn't be all bad. I'd say that as long as the dose of the untested drug came with a waiver; "I understand that this drug is untested, and could kill me dead, or make me a vegetable, and I indemnify the drug company and accept all risk upon myself" - and if that waiver were respected (this is critical!) then I don't see why HIV+ people should not have the choice to make themselves a guinea pig. I know I would.
I guess the real question is:
If this theory is saying that myopia is caused by malconditioning of cilial muscles - why not propose a regimen of physical therapy to condition these muscles counter to what causes the condition?
About 5 years ago, I started having severe back pain, muscle spasms, pinched sciatic, disk degeneration, the works.
Various treatments, drugs, etc. failed to reverse the course of the problem. Until I saw a physical therapist. The therapy did not immediately work. In fact, the first therapy I tried, the McKenzie method, didn't do jack squat. But Then my therapist decided to have me do some stretching. Not yoga (I had tried yoga earlier on, and it just increased the inflammation, spasms, and pain). Just some ordinary hamstring and gluteal stretches. They didn't even begin to work for about 6 weeks, but after that period, I started to improve. In fact, it even improved the pain I was feeling in my knees. And I've very gradually improved over the past 6 months or so. I still have a lot of pain and stiffness, I still have badly damaged cartilege, and I still have a patch of numbness the size of a tea saucer on my right leg from a pinched sciatic nerve. But I'm much more mobile now, and in a lot less pain. When I've not done my stretches for about a week, the spasms come back. My therapist says that my job, which had me sitting down for 8 hours a day, and lack of physical activity and excercise, coupled with an overall tendency for inflexibility and muscle stiffness, probably caused the disk degeneration, which itself is irreversible. (In addition, I'm also using a sit-stand tray for my workstation, I stand about 4 hours and sit for the other 4 hours, depending on my comfort level - this seems to have less of an impact on my back pain than the stretching).
But it sounds like this theory of myopia is the same; muscles get conditioned by too much near-focussing, to be in cronic spasm. Maybe excercises, like alternate focussing on near/far objects for some time could forstall the process that causes the eyeball elongation?
Still, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money to do stuff that we never have to think about.
. . . yeah, like producing a mind-bogglingly diverse array of Viagra commercials. . .
What do you think drove the demand for early computers? Actuaries, the fathers of nerd-dom.
I thought it was AAA gunners trying to shoot down V-1s over London.
as PPC and Intel don't share the same endian-ness.
I don't think that this is going to be nearly as much of an issue in terms of code portability as other things will, such as driver interfaces, etc.
PPC and Intel are opposite endian-ness, that's true; but the G4 (and earlier) were bi-endian. It was a simple matter to switch modes. That's why Virtual PC worked so well (though in G4 and earlier, it was hobbled by Apple's terrible system bus architecture - and then once they solved that problem with the G5, IBM yanked the bi-endian op). I'm only speculating here, but I think I recall that a couple of generations back, Intel also slapped-on a bi-endian op as well, which is probably why Rosetta works as well as it does. So, at the end of the day, I don't think this is going to be nearly as much of an issue. But it looks like stuff like firewire 800 is going to not see a tomorrow on x86, just as SCSI never really worked all that well from the 68k-to-PPC transition, nor does non-serial-ATA work very well on G5 Power Macs. These may all be hardware design issues, but this is going to equate to a platform difference that's going to end up causing different behavior in the software.
Yes, I would love very much to be the manufacturer of a product which I could sell to a customer for $50, and the government would chip in an additional $350 for each widget. Better still, if the customer would die without this product. . .
Most of the herpes family of viruses tends to retreat to the spinal cord where the immune system can't get at it to finish it off. Hence, when you get an outbreak of herpes zoster (chicken pox/shingles) - it travels along nerve clusters and surfaces on the skin in very distinct patterns deliniating the specific area that's covered by a given nerve.
For everyone who had chicken pox as a child, and is dreading an occurrance of shingles later in life (my wife was struck by this after a cortisone shot in her back supressed her immune response enough to give the virus a shot at an attack), this potential treatment is very good news indeed.
Wait till Muslims get a hold of your fag asses, you won't laugh as they murder you in public for your sins.
They won't get ahold of our "fag asses" because our fag asses have jet bombers and depleted uranium bullets and lasers and shit like that. (yeah, that's right, "fag asses" like Alan Turing are smart, and invent things and figure things out). They've got rocks. That's what religious fundamentalists get. Because, you see, if you believe your scripture is inerrant, than you must accept that Pi=3.0, and your backwards ass is not going to be designing a lot of jet bombers or nuclear bombs or any shit at all. (certainly nothing as advanced as a "round wheel" but I guess that was invented BEFORE scripture came around. Good thing too.)
Hell, it's a sin to draw cartoons? Where would we be without Dilbert? Well, if the Christian fundamentalists get their way, we'll be back in the stone age soon enough, and THEN the Muslims will come and get our fag asses.
Or - we could just round up all the fundamentalists, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, and send them to their Holy land, build a fence 'round it and wave 'bye.
I like that plan.
That plan sounds good.
Name a cure for a serious disease that came from their research engine?
They seem to have a jim-dandy cure for the dreaded Middle-class.
Profit and not "socializing the results" is all fine and dandy. But if you consider that the existence of poor people infected with a deadly disease they cannot afford to cure IS A THREAT TO ME AND YOU AND OUR LOVED ONES (ie. blood transfusions, etc.) then this is clearly a matter of public health and safety. It has nothing to do with charity for the poor unfortunate (immoral gays/johns/perverts/etc.).
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Not "Make $$$ Fast!!!"
It will be available cheaply to everyone.
Everyone who considers $800 per dose "cheap".
Well, don't take this personally, but only when the last CEO is strangled with the entrails of the last Accountant, will we truly be free.
Screw that noise. Google can just stop indexing any server that's sitting on Verizon's network.
Any server that wants to be ranked on Google would have to start thinking about changing providers.
If the mushroom farmer thinks he can extract a higher price, then he should try. And watch Chef Batali go to a different mushroom farmer for less costly mushrooms.
But I am a neuroscientist and not a rocket scientist, so what do I know?
Yeah. That's the real question, innit?
Sites pay for their connection, users pay for their connection. . . what the fuck are they whining about? If they want to jack up their rates for a given bandwith, then they can go ahead and do so - and watch the free market kick them in the asses as people go to other providers.
there was too much developer overhead to compile/test for rarely-used processor variants,
As the hardware manufacturer, Apple would be determining the relative share of processor variants, so this is hardly a valid argument in this case. True - it would make most sense to split the product lines along CPU-competencies: PPC for servers and high-end workstations, x86 for iMacs, laptops, etc. - which would necessarily lead to balkanization along software lines - - ie. you don't need to test-out x86 versions of high-end databases and web apps, since such apps would most likely only run on PPC variants, on the other hand, you don't need to test-out PPC versions of iTunes or web browsers, because those are run mostly on the x86 systems - so some degree of test-balkanization would be inevitable.
On the other hand - this would give Apple a tremendous amount of bargaining leverage among the chip vendors, and maintain compatability and flexibility among it's user-base. That's easily worth any testing heartache they might encounter.
Actually, it does not double testing costs.
You use the same installer, the same compiler, the same debugger, the same test procedures (even the same test-harness software - if you're that lucky). It doubles your hardware costs, and doubles the hours billed to actual test performance, but that's actually a small fraction of what's involved in a proper testing process. Unfortunately, most software vendors don't use a proper testing process, and only use the minimal components, which is why their cost is doubled, and utterly ineffective on either platform alone.
Maybe not, but maybe MS can sell those users VirtualPC. Running OS X on OS X seems sort of redundant, but it'd work.
I'd sooner run YellowDog Linux.
VPC is extremely slow as an x86 emulator - even on my Dual 2GHz G5. I hear it's almost useful on some of the higher-end G4 systems, back when IBM shipped chips with the little/big endian translation op. But they hacked that out of the G5 for some reason. I think this is a big part of the reason why Connectix had to sell-out to Microsoft. They saw this coming and knew their sales were going to evaporate when the G5 came out.