If you don't buy yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 2" you can't have yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 1!" How can you buy "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 2" if you don't buy yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 1?!?"
Why can't we anglophones just keep calling that sensation the same as we have for hundreds of years: "savory."
My understanding is that we scientists convinced us westerners that because we hadn't found evidence that "savory" existed, it didn't exist. I guess the Japanese ignored the scientists telling them that their miso soup wasn't a unique flavor, it was a combination of other senses, stubbornly insisted that they could taste umami, and then turned out to be right. So I would submit that we should call it umami if for no other reason that we gave up our concept of savory wheras the Japanese kept theirs.
For some reason even if I initially notice the smell of someone's breath when kissing, it goes away after a second or two.
Sensory adaptation. Not sure where most of that comes from, at the receptor level or in the processing of the signal, but basically you would notice it again if the smell were to get stronger somehow. Makes sense when you think about it: it's fine to feel something like a spear you're holding in your hand when you pick it up, but it does you no good to continually be reminded by the touch receptors in your hand that you're holding a spear, at least not at the same level. Pain same way. If you get a cut on your hand, you want to avoid touching dirty things with it and getting infected, and you need to know to move it from whatever injured it initially, but if you're not doing anything more with the hand, you don't want to be in the same amount of pain as when it first was injured.
Smell: you'd want to identify if a predator was there at like 200 yards, but you don't want to be overwhelmed with fear at 200 yards if it stays that distance for very long. Your sense of smell tells you a lion is close, you freeze and stay still. If the lion doesn't notice you and come closer, 5 minutes later the smell hasn't increased, sensory adaptation makes you not smell that same level anymore, you calm down a little and leave.
Are you educated on this subject, or are you just one of those people who likes to think they know better than those boneheaded scientist-types?
Those have suddenly become mutually exclusive?!? When it comes to my subject area, I often think I know better than many of the other boneheaded scientist-types!
That will probably be the next finding. It seems unreasonable to me to demand someone show you not only the phenomenon but the specific mechanism by which it happens all at the same time. For one thing, why would one be looking for a fat taste receptor prior to the discovery that we could taste fat?
Researcher: "I'm applying for a grant to identify the taste receptor for fat!" Reviewer: "Wait... we can taste fat specifically?" Researcher: "Sure, maybe! I don't know!" Reviewer: "So you're wanting to look for a protein, and you have absolutely no evidence it exists? How are you going to look for it?" Researcher: "Look, these are good questions, questions I will answer in later studies after I find the fat taste receptor. It will be a whole lot easier to answer the question 'Can you taste fat specifically' once we've found the protein that does it."
We're discussing the aids virus, not a cell infected with it. virus != cell.
Er, that's embarrassing, I initially wrote "the progenitor cells could carry the virus," then instead meant to type "virus could hide in the progenitor cells." Ugh.
HIV is a retrovirus. It literally becomes a part of your DNA. The only way to truly cure HIV is to remove the HIV DNA from your genome, good luck with that.
Sarcasm isn't warranted. Remember that each cell carries -it's own copy- of the genome. HIV does not infect every cell in your body. Kill off the infected cells and you've gotten rid of all the HIV DNA. Kill off the mature immune system cells and you'll still have this reservoir of stem cells which apperantly produce more virus. Kill off the fraction of bone marrow cells (ideally without killing the patient) and you'll have gotten rid of the HIV DNA.
Your brain cells, for example, don't appear to be infected and their copies of the genome will not have any HIV DNA in them. So it's not nearly as impossible as you've suggested.
Wouldn't it full of mature immune system cells known to harbor HIV anyway?
I think it's interesting that the cells themselves can hide in the progenitor cells, that's clever, but I wouldn't think transplants would be done from HIV carriers to healthy individuals even if the HIV blood levels were reduced to undetectable levels by medicines -and- the cells of the tissue themselves weren't known to carry the virus because the blood always could. I know similar precautions are taken with blood donations and cancer. Blood banks won't take blood from you if you've ever had a melanoma, even if it was caught early and burned off 20 years previously source. The chances that you have lingering cells with metastatic potential at that point has got to be far below the chances that you have independent cancer cells circulating. I'd also assume that due to immune system rejection, any cancer cells from another person aren't going to infect you unless you are a Tasmanian devil.
Better err on the safe side, it's not like it's as annoying as FAA regulations that are clearly crap.
Anyway, back on the point: I don't think they'd transplant any tissue from an HIV carrier to a healthy person even without the current finding.
But what pissed me off (and why I don't host with them anymore) was the overly terse statement that was obviously carefully reviewed to make it damned hard to sue them. Was I ever going to sue them? Probably not, maybe just ask for a break on that month's hosting or something.
Chances aren't bad that someone was looking for a lawsuit, heading it off at the pass had a chance to prevent some stupid lawsuits which would waste time and only benefit lawyers, possibly requiring some invasive, poorly thought-out court-ordered hinderance which would have slowed the recovery.
TF2 represents the fate of every other awesome high skill and/or high speed game that has ever existed. Slowed down and dumbed down.
I never really thought about it like that. First of all my experiences with TFC was that most players simply spammed with grenades. Sometimes that was done skillfully, but usually just felt like luck. And I think there's something to be said about keeping the playing field from being absolutely dominated by vets. As someone who never had the time to put in serious hours, I thought TFC suffered that problem. The only reason I played it at all was because at the time I didn't have any other online games besides counterstrike, which had an even steeper learning curve.
I can certainly understand how those people who took the time to become skilled at a game would feel sold out by valve even if I prefer the bar to be lower. With regard to my original point though, I suspect that although the hardcore TFC players don't like the changes, most of the people who had played TFC would prefer TF2, do you agree?
Wow, I do like that idea. The puzzles in portal 1 were generally only able to be done one way. While I think that was a good way to do it, some puzzles with many different ways of solving it, or much bigger environments, would be a really nice variety. I can't see them doing multiplayer without expanding the levels.
Come to think of it, the mechanic is fun enough even without the full portal game. I'd be interested to see valve do, for example a sandbox game where you have a portal gun, maybe you're a thief or a spy... I don't want "portal" to move that far away from it's roots, but that portal mechanic can be fun in a lot more contexts.
Neurons do in fact divide (or at least we now know new neurons do grow, not sure if the genesis of that growth is known).
Some of that is in fact known, it's not the neurons dividing, it's a niche of neuronal stem cells (not neurons themselves) producing new neurons. Notably, it's the subventricular zone and the subgranular zone. The SVZ for certain and the subgranular zone I'm pretty sure don't contain mature neurons. The proliferative cells of the SVZ are well known to not be neurons. In fact, several factors that seem to be important to actually being a mature neuron appear to stop the cell cycle and prevent cell division, suggesting that a cell is a neuron, it won't be dividing, and if it's dividing, it's not exactly a neuron. Then again, we could have already found an exception to that rule that I don't know about.
Those sites of proliferation might also dry up as a result of telomere shortening, but the mature neurons already present would not be affected as they're not dividing. We also haven't found a function yet for adult neurogenesis, although I've read interesting speculation that "chemo brain" or loss of mental sharpness when taking chemotherapy might be a result of that.
Anyway, neurons of the brain really don't seem to divide, and telomere shortening isn't directly going to kill your neurons before the age of 144.
The upper bound on divisions for cells appears to be about 50 (known as the Hayflick limit) which is speculated to be at the heart of current human maximum lifespan with other factors causing the majority of deaths before the limit is reached for key stem cells.
That is interesting, but 50 cell divisions does not appear to prevent a person from living to 122, I suspect that isn't going to limit a person to below 144 either.
So Valve, what ever happened to Half Life 2 Episode 3? Portal was fun and all but did not leave you with a cliffhanger ending like HL2 Episode 2. I am still patiently waiting.
2. The ending to HL2 episode 2 wasn't much of a cliffhanger if you ask me.
3. Half life1: 1998. Half life 2: 2004 (6 years later) Episode 1: 2006 (2 years later) Episode 2: 2007 (1 year later). It's now 2010, 3 years later. We've got another 3 years before we can really say "This is an unusually long for Valve." Granted, I wouldn't expect them to reinvent the wheel like they did from HL1 to HL2. So I don't think you're being patient. Neither am I though, I want them to hurry the hell up.
The sad thing is that portal 2 will be a disappointment. It may in fact be a fantastic game but it will be judged next to portal which is pretty much a perfect game.
Its worth remembering that this is valve, which consistently defies expectations. Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better. Half life 1 was also really great, but valve managed to improve on it for HL2. A lot of people were disappointed that they put out left 4 dead 2 so quickly, but I think it was an improvement.
And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER. Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3. I am having a hard time thinking of other ways they could make it better, but there are many reasons why I don't work at Valve.
A way to cap telomere's he's not going to see 144. Antioxidants can keep in-gene encoding errors low but when the telomere's unravel there's nothing we can currently do to reverse the effects.
I'm going to need a citation for the rate here to prove he wouldn't be able to make it to 144. One person lived to 122. I have no idea what she eventually died of, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that 22 more years would be impossible due to telomere shortening. How fast the telomere burns down until further cell proliferation is no longer possible, how many divisions this requires, and how many divisions are happening in the important tissues per year? Because I don't think most of those things are known or even necessarily estimated, and I'd be suprised as all heck if that estimate suggested somewhere between 122 and 144.
While it's quite obvious he won't live to infinity, I've never seen anything to indicate that his intestinal stem cells, for example, are going to be exhausted before the age of 144. The current textbook model for intestinal stem cells is that they divide rarely, and when they do they usually produce one stem cell and one transiently amplifying cell that divides like mad to actually produce the terminal cells that don't proliferate further. So while there are now maybe 200 cells from that one cell division, the stem cell that is going to continue has only effectively divided once.
Furthermore, cell proliferation doesn't happen in the entire adult body. You brain cells for example don't continue diving and would not be directly limited by telomere shortening.
That being said, I kind of doubt that antioxidants are going to keep him from getting cancer or heart disease, or dying of an accident.
While I find this story hilarious (if true), according to the article, the actual DRM scheme of requiring constant internet connection has not been cracked. What happened is that Ubisoft chickened out and didn't implement the scheme fully - it included a feature (to be enabled by a patch if necessary) that allowed games to be played without internet connection after all, and this is what has been hacked.
I'm a little fuzzy as to the difference here. You say the DRM scheme of constant internet connection wasn't cracked... but then it sounds like people are playing without constant internet connection. I'm guessing I'm confused as to what "cracked" means here. I thought "DRM cracked" meant you could play a pirated game, that's not what's going on here?
I've long felt that lawyers should be subject to the same outcome as their client. Don't want to get electrocuted, don't represent a murder. Don't want to end up a million dollars in the hole? Don't represent a doctor who's clearly guilty of malpractice.
I've heard lots of ideas for improving the legal system... some of them have been really good, and some of them have been really bad. Of all those, this is the worst idea I've ever.
I've heard a few worse ones, but I hold out hope that they were mostly jokes. I mean, ethical issues aside, I think we'd increase the deficit by buying enough chain to secure all our lawyers at the bottom of the ocean.
And if your workstation updates daily you're not part of the IT department and have no real reason to be an admin other than the updates? What if you come into work, turn on your machine which takes far longer than it should anyway, you logon and immediately get a message telling you the computer is going to restart in 4 mins, no delay feature available because other users were abusing it and not updating ever?
What if you are running an expensive qPCR experiment, and the laptop capturing the data undergoes an automatic restart midway through when you've stepped out, ruining the entire experiment?
I ask because all those things have happened to people I know (not me). Sure, there are workarounds for those, but when you're running an automated experiment, "make sure the IT guys remembered to set the automatic update correctly" is somewhere around #300 on the list of things to do, and is easily forgotten. If you don't have control over every computer you need to use, it can vary from really annoying to a real problem. A real taxpayer-supported-grant-wasting problem.
"I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. If an artist is dead or retired, shouldn't their work be released into the public domain, or should a record label be able to profit in this situation?"
Well, let's not try to make this such a black and white issues.
Okay, we can talk about Michael Jackson if you want. Personally, I say his work, ESPECIALLY black and white should be public domain, as they're instant classics that belong to the world, not whatever greedy bastard has the rights, probably his Dad who was busy advertising at Michael's funeral...
Wow. Started out as a joke, quickly revealed my lingering anger over the way the world treated Michael...
Slashdot Mirror
Seems too good to be true. I wonder what the downside is.
The cold fart smell.
If you don't buy yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 2" you can't have yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 1!" How can you buy "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 2" if you don't buy yer "Another Brick in the Wall: Part 1?!?"
So would one of these hermaphrodite chickens be called a half-cock?
I agree with the section "Clucking confusing."
Why can't we anglophones just keep calling that sensation the same as we have for hundreds of years: "savory."
My understanding is that we scientists convinced us westerners that because we hadn't found evidence that "savory" existed, it didn't exist. I guess the Japanese ignored the scientists telling them that their miso soup wasn't a unique flavor, it was a combination of other senses, stubbornly insisted that they could taste umami, and then turned out to be right. So I would submit that we should call it umami if for no other reason that we gave up our concept of savory wheras the Japanese kept theirs.
For some reason even if I initially notice the smell of someone's breath when kissing, it goes away after a second or two.
Sensory adaptation. Not sure where most of that comes from, at the receptor level or in the processing of the signal, but basically you would notice it again if the smell were to get stronger somehow. Makes sense when you think about it: it's fine to feel something like a spear you're holding in your hand when you pick it up, but it does you no good to continually be reminded by the touch receptors in your hand that you're holding a spear, at least not at the same level. Pain same way. If you get a cut on your hand, you want to avoid touching dirty things with it and getting infected, and you need to know to move it from whatever injured it initially, but if you're not doing anything more with the hand, you don't want to be in the same amount of pain as when it first was injured.
Smell: you'd want to identify if a predator was there at like 200 yards, but you don't want to be overwhelmed with fear at 200 yards if it stays that distance for very long. Your sense of smell tells you a lion is close, you freeze and stay still. If the lion doesn't notice you and come closer, 5 minutes later the smell hasn't increased, sensory adaptation makes you not smell that same level anymore, you calm down a little and leave.
Are you educated on this subject, or are you just one of those people who likes to think they know better than those boneheaded scientist-types?
Those have suddenly become mutually exclusive?!? When it comes to my subject area, I often think I know better than many of the other boneheaded scientist-types!
Our brains run on ATP.
MY brain runs mostly on GTP, caffeine, and spite, you insensitive clod!
That will probably be the next finding. It seems unreasonable to me to demand someone show you not only the phenomenon but the specific mechanism by which it happens all at the same time. For one thing, why would one be looking for a fat taste receptor prior to the discovery that we could taste fat?
Researcher: "I'm applying for a grant to identify the taste receptor for fat!"
Reviewer: "Wait... we can taste fat specifically?"
Researcher: "Sure, maybe! I don't know!"
Reviewer: "So you're wanting to look for a protein, and you have absolutely no evidence it exists? How are you going to look for it?"
Researcher: "Look, these are good questions, questions I will answer in later studies after I find the fat taste receptor. It will be a whole lot easier to answer the question 'Can you taste fat specifically' once we've found the protein that does it."
accidental mod correcting
We're discussing the aids virus, not a cell infected with it. virus != cell.
Er, that's embarrassing, I initially wrote "the progenitor cells could carry the virus," then instead meant to type "virus could hide in the progenitor cells." Ugh.
HIV is a retrovirus. It literally becomes a part of your DNA. The only way to truly cure HIV is to remove the HIV DNA from your genome, good luck with that.
Sarcasm isn't warranted. Remember that each cell carries -it's own copy- of the genome. HIV does not infect every cell in your body. Kill off the infected cells and you've gotten rid of all the HIV DNA. Kill off the mature immune system cells and you'll still have this reservoir of stem cells which apperantly produce more virus. Kill off the fraction of bone marrow cells (ideally without killing the patient) and you'll have gotten rid of the HIV DNA.
Your brain cells, for example, don't appear to be infected and their copies of the genome will not have any HIV DNA in them. So it's not nearly as impossible as you've suggested.
Wouldn't it full of mature immune system cells known to harbor HIV anyway?
I think it's interesting that the cells themselves can hide in the progenitor cells, that's clever, but I wouldn't think transplants would be done from HIV carriers to healthy individuals even if the HIV blood levels were reduced to undetectable levels by medicines -and- the cells of the tissue themselves weren't known to carry the virus because the blood always could. I know similar precautions are taken with blood donations and cancer. Blood banks won't take blood from you if you've ever had a melanoma, even if it was caught early and burned off 20 years previously source. The chances that you have lingering cells with metastatic potential at that point has got to be far below the chances that you have independent cancer cells circulating. I'd also assume that due to immune system rejection, any cancer cells from another person aren't going to infect you unless you are a Tasmanian devil.
Better err on the safe side, it's not like it's as annoying as FAA regulations that are clearly crap.
Anyway, back on the point: I don't think they'd transplant any tissue from an HIV carrier to a healthy person even without the current finding.
But what pissed me off (and why I don't host with them anymore) was the overly terse statement that was obviously carefully reviewed to make it damned hard to sue them. Was I ever going to sue them? Probably not, maybe just ask for a break on that month's hosting or something.
You wouldn't but come on, you know how we Americans are. We sue when we can't play Halo for a few days.
Chances aren't bad that someone was looking for a lawsuit, heading it off at the pass had a chance to prevent some stupid lawsuits which would waste time and only benefit lawyers, possibly requiring some invasive, poorly thought-out court-ordered hinderance which would have slowed the recovery.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
[Citation needed.] :-P
TF2 represents the fate of every other awesome high skill and/or high speed game that has ever existed. Slowed down and dumbed down.
I never really thought about it like that. First of all my experiences with TFC was that most players simply spammed with grenades. Sometimes that was done skillfully, but usually just felt like luck. And I think there's something to be said about keeping the playing field from being absolutely dominated by vets. As someone who never had the time to put in serious hours, I thought TFC suffered that problem. The only reason I played it at all was because at the time I didn't have any other online games besides counterstrike, which had an even steeper learning curve.
I can certainly understand how those people who took the time to become skilled at a game would feel sold out by valve even if I prefer the bar to be lower. With regard to my original point though, I suspect that although the hardcore TFC players don't like the changes, most of the people who had played TFC would prefer TF2, do you agree?
Wow, I do like that idea. The puzzles in portal 1 were generally only able to be done one way. While I think that was a good way to do it, some puzzles with many different ways of solving it, or much bigger environments, would be a really nice variety. I can't see them doing multiplayer without expanding the levels.
Come to think of it, the mechanic is fun enough even without the full portal game. I'd be interested to see valve do, for example a sandbox game where you have a portal gun, maybe you're a thief or a spy... I don't want "portal" to move that far away from it's roots, but that portal mechanic can be fun in a lot more contexts.
Neurons do in fact divide (or at least we now know new neurons do grow, not sure if the genesis of that growth is known).
Some of that is in fact known, it's not the neurons dividing, it's a niche of neuronal stem cells (not neurons themselves) producing new neurons. Notably, it's the subventricular zone and the subgranular zone. The SVZ for certain and the subgranular zone I'm pretty sure don't contain mature neurons. The proliferative cells of the SVZ are well known to not be neurons. In fact, several factors that seem to be important to actually being a mature neuron appear to stop the cell cycle and prevent cell division, suggesting that a cell is a neuron, it won't be dividing, and if it's dividing, it's not exactly a neuron. Then again, we could have already found an exception to that rule that I don't know about.
Those sites of proliferation might also dry up as a result of telomere shortening, but the mature neurons already present would not be affected as they're not dividing. We also haven't found a function yet for adult neurogenesis, although I've read interesting speculation that "chemo brain" or loss of mental sharpness when taking chemotherapy might be a result of that.
Anyway, neurons of the brain really don't seem to divide, and telomere shortening isn't directly going to kill your neurons before the age of 144.
The upper bound on divisions for cells appears to be about 50 (known as the Hayflick limit) which is speculated to be at the heart of current human maximum lifespan with other factors causing the majority of deaths before the limit is reached for key stem cells.
That is interesting, but 50 cell divisions does not appear to prevent a person from living to 122, I suspect that isn't going to limit a person to below 144 either.
So Valve, what ever happened to Half Life 2 Episode 3? Portal was fun and all but did not leave you with a cliffhanger ending like HL2 Episode 2. I am still patiently waiting.
1. Yes it did! Especially now that they updated the ending to portal!
2. The ending to HL2 episode 2 wasn't much of a cliffhanger if you ask me.
3. Half life1: 1998. Half life 2: 2004 (6 years later) Episode 1: 2006 (2 years later) Episode 2: 2007 (1 year later). It's now 2010, 3 years later. We've got another 3 years before we can really say "This is an unusually long for Valve." Granted, I wouldn't expect them to reinvent the wheel like they did from HL1 to HL2. So I don't think you're being patient. Neither am I though, I want them to hurry the hell up.
The sad thing is that portal 2 will be a disappointment.
It may in fact be a fantastic game but it will be judged next to portal which is pretty much a perfect game.
Its worth remembering that this is valve, which consistently defies expectations. Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better. Half life 1 was also really great, but valve managed to improve on it for HL2. A lot of people were disappointed that they put out left 4 dead 2 so quickly, but I think it was an improvement.
And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER. Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3. I am having a hard time thinking of other ways they could make it better, but there are many reasons why I don't work at Valve.
I'm a little worried about multiplayer though.
A way to cap telomere's he's not going to see 144. Antioxidants can keep in-gene encoding errors low but when the telomere's unravel there's nothing we can currently do to reverse the effects.
I'm going to need a citation for the rate here to prove he wouldn't be able to make it to 144. One person lived to 122. I have no idea what she eventually died of, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that 22 more years would be impossible due to telomere shortening. How fast the telomere burns down until further cell proliferation is no longer possible, how many divisions this requires, and how many divisions are happening in the important tissues per year? Because I don't think most of those things are known or even necessarily estimated, and I'd be suprised as all heck if that estimate suggested somewhere between 122 and 144.
While it's quite obvious he won't live to infinity, I've never seen anything to indicate that his intestinal stem cells, for example, are going to be exhausted before the age of 144. The current textbook model for intestinal stem cells is that they divide rarely, and when they do they usually produce one stem cell and one transiently amplifying cell that divides like mad to actually produce the terminal cells that don't proliferate further. So while there are now maybe 200 cells from that one cell division, the stem cell that is going to continue has only effectively divided once.
Furthermore, cell proliferation doesn't happen in the entire adult body. You brain cells for example don't continue diving and would not be directly limited by telomere shortening.
That being said, I kind of doubt that antioxidants are going to keep him from getting cancer or heart disease, or dying of an accident.
While I find this story hilarious (if true), according to the article, the actual DRM scheme of requiring constant internet connection has not been cracked. What happened is that Ubisoft chickened out and didn't implement the scheme fully - it included a feature (to be enabled by a patch if necessary) that allowed games to be played without internet connection after all, and this is what has been hacked.
I'm a little fuzzy as to the difference here. You say the DRM scheme of constant internet connection wasn't cracked... but then it sounds like people are playing without constant internet connection. I'm guessing I'm confused as to what "cracked" means here. I thought "DRM cracked" meant you could play a pirated game, that's not what's going on here?
I've long felt that lawyers should be subject to the same outcome as their client. Don't want to get electrocuted, don't represent a murder. Don't want to end up a million dollars in the hole? Don't represent a doctor who's clearly guilty of malpractice.
I've heard lots of ideas for improving the legal system... some of them have been really good, and some of them have been really bad. Of all those, this is the worst idea I've ever.
I've heard a few worse ones, but I hold out hope that they were mostly jokes. I mean, ethical issues aside, I think we'd increase the deficit by buying enough chain to secure all our lawyers at the bottom of the ocean.
if you wanted options, you would have gone android... fucksticks.
Why am I reminded of the "Love it or leave it" statements from the days of the Bush administration here?
Oh right, the cursing...
And if your workstation updates daily you're not part of the IT department and have no real reason to be an admin other than the updates? What if you come into work, turn on your machine which takes far longer than it should anyway, you logon and immediately get a message telling you the computer is going to restart in 4 mins, no delay feature available because other users were abusing it and not updating ever?
What if you are running an expensive qPCR experiment, and the laptop capturing the data undergoes an automatic restart midway through when you've stepped out, ruining the entire experiment?
I ask because all those things have happened to people I know (not me). Sure, there are workarounds for those, but when you're running an automated experiment, "make sure the IT guys remembered to set the automatic update correctly" is somewhere around #300 on the list of things to do, and is easily forgotten. If you don't have control over every computer you need to use, it can vary from really annoying to a real problem. A real taxpayer-supported-grant-wasting problem.
"I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. If an artist is dead or retired, shouldn't their work be released into the public domain, or should a record label be able to profit in this situation?"
Well, let's not try to make this such a black and white issues.
Okay, we can talk about Michael Jackson if you want. Personally, I say his work, ESPECIALLY black and white should be public domain, as they're instant classics that belong to the world, not whatever greedy bastard has the rights, probably his Dad who was busy advertising at Michael's funeral...
Wow. Started out as a joke, quickly revealed my lingering anger over the way the world treated Michael...