A comment containing absolutely nothing but handwaving conjecture is moderated "Interesting".
I often find conjecture to be more interesting than dull facts. GP was a good example, I personally find the mechanics of the random number generator to be boring. "It might be non-random but beyond our current prediction methods" is more interesting.
Also... hi, you're on the internet. What the hell did you expect?
Yeah...because Mike & Ikes look just like illicit drugs.
Additionally I'd argue it's none of the school's fucking business what candy OR illegal drugs the student was taking when he was not at school. If the student were taking poison, committing suicide, then the school officials have a duty to report it and they'd be thanked for that after their jail sentences for being peeping toms.
So if the government invents it, this company promises to make money from it? That's real philanthropy for you!
Someone has to do it, unless you think the government should try making and selling these implants. As far as the "government inventing it" half, it would appear that private enterprises haven't invented it yet, and you have to wonder if it isn't because they weren't trying because they didn't think it would be profitable. The government might be selling the tech for a premium, maybe not. This might not be a very profitable enterprise, "Second Sight" might be taking a big risk here. The DoE might say "Here's the perfected version of the artificial retina. It takes a month to make each one at the cost of $300k. Few blind people are going to be able to afford that out of pocket, and the insurance companies are going to say they won't cover this when it's 'experimental' and a perfectly good alternative, the cane, exists, so good luck finding a way of selling it at anything less than a $250k loss."
Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.
Maybe it will turn out to be a good way of bypassing the damage. I'm not a neuroscientist or a medical professional, that statement is based entirely on the fact that weirder things have turned out to work for other medical problems. For example, I think few people would have had the foresight in the 1900's to guess that a substance isolated from fungi would be a revolutionary medicine.
What does the Department of Energy has to do with the development of an artificial retina?
Ideally they saw good science that needed funding and funded it even though it didn't fall neatly into their mission statement. I'd rather have them spending money on something that appears to be paying off than funding more repetitive studies which will tell us again that clean coal really isn't good for anything.
If they achieve VGA resolution, it's a steady road to full vision for the blind. I'm more interested in, at this point, exceeding human abilities.
It's not as if to achieve one goal, we need to abandon the other goal. In fact, being able to give VGA resolution to the blind seems in many ways like it's on the path to achieving beyond human sight. Get an artificial retina that gets VGA resolution perfected. It will take a lot of money to get this right. Restoring sight is a payoff that will help fund refinements on that, like higher resolution artificial retinas, increased spectrum retinas etc.
Furthermore, I suspect the main reason you're more interested in exceeding human abilities is because you personally have no use for restoring vision to the blind, which seems a little selfish.
Did you want to place your cities close together to maximize usage the tiles within your territory but forcing cities to compete with each other over resources, or space your cities out so that each city got as many resources as possible even though that would mean some areas in between wouldn't be exploited at all?
I always put my cities far apart, and when their territories expanded to the point where my land was confluent, that's when I knew to build tanks to roll over my neighbors. I only played on easy and against the computer. Not as much of an accomplishment, but being a superwarlord slaughtering the defenseless, stone age competition just feels right.
Civ IV got a console port, was called Civilization Revolution [wikipedia.org]. Mind you, it was beyond dumbed down. Graphics have nothing to do with the port of strategy games like Civilization to a console, it's more of an audience problem. It has more than two buttons to press, it doesn't have shiny ultra realistic 3D graphics and it's... 'complex'.
PC gamers really go out of their way to try to make a bad name for themselves. If they're not being elitists about their choice of platform, they're criticizing developers, either for not putting out a better PC version than consoles, or for not putting out a PC version. Come to think of it, they seem to spend far more time being general assholes talking about games than actually playing games. Get a hobby people!
Second and third worlders pirate like crazy. Haven't you seen the comments by folks from places like Brazil where everyone pirates because they simply don't have the money for or simply can't get the legit stuff.
I am aware that overseas content piracy is rampant. I was responding to the idea that stopping piracy will be a huge boon to US business. Specifically, I doubted GP's assertion that preventing piracy means all that pirated software will translate into legit sales. It won't. You pointed out they don't have money to buy the legit copy. If there are a million pirated copies sold every year of a game, and you make it impossible to pirate, that's not suddenly going to get you a million legit sales unless you're selling your game at the exact price as the pirates were.
Imagine... every pirated movie and every pirated software in asia/eurasia/south america were paid.... What would happen to the US trade deficit and what would happen to happen to US debt... it would be significantly decreased.
This is exactly the type of statement that the following statement was made for:
Citation needed.
How many -american- games are pirated overseas? How many of those games would be actually purchased at full price if piracy were not an option? How much would be made from those sales? How much is the national debt in comparison? How much is "significantly?"
Because I think the answers respectively are
-X -A small fraction of X -Y -Y ^ some big number Z -Depends on who is answering. A shill for DRM or the game industry? Y. A person who is not extremely biased? Y^a number less than Z but still pretty high
Since most of the time the LHC is down that doesn't seem like a big problem:-p
Not to mention, does that comparison mean anything to anyone else? I've never stood in front of the LHC personally and don't know anyone who has. I can -assume- it wouldn't be healthy, but... well, it doesn't really ring home with me. It's not like "Oh shit, interstellar FTL would be like standing in front of the LHC? Well the last time I did that, I got horrible hemorrhoids. Good to know. Note to self: do not drive faster than light to a nearby solar system."
How hard would it have been to make a more visceral if less accurate car metaphor. "99.999998 percent of the speed of light through hydrogen atoms would be like trying to drive your car at 90 miles an hour into a concrete wall."...although I haven't done that either recently...
One question for the warmers reading. Can the theory of AGW be falsified?
Sure. If we keep emitting and the climate doesn't change, then it's falsified. Kind of like if how the theory that 4 cheeseburgers and a pack of cigarettes every day will kill -you- specifically can be falsified by -you- specifically eating 4 cheeseburgers and smoking a pack of cigarettes each day and not dying. Try it, let us know, the rest of us are foolishly following the religion of "Carcinogens and cholesterol will kill us specifically."
So, to everyone in Australia, the guy who made that threat is fucking it up for the rest of you.
I'd argue that it's mostly the target that is fucking it up for everyone else. He was blocking it well before the claimed threat. Banning all adult games for sale to because one gamer threatened you is incredibly bad justification for an incredibly bad move.
And dont worry about the posers that think they can shoot a gun... We had a open house day at the range and had some gamer geeks come in wanting to shoot a assault rifle. I watched as 4 out of the 5 never hit the target and 1 cut his eye open as he put his eye on the scope and did not put the butt tight to the shoulder like he was told... And this is all from a wimpy AK-47 a gun with some real kick would have owned them hard. 12 Ga shotguns would have thrown these jokers tot he floor.
So that means that if the threat was specific to using a 12 gauge shotgun against his family from those 5 specific gamers, he has little to worry about. I wouldn't conclude he is completely safe from all threats from all gamers, that would be a foolish stereotype.
What about the plants? and stuff that can't move away fast enough?
It's not like WWII happened yesterday. They had plenty of time to move away from the bombs. If they didn't that's their own damn fault for choosing to grow right near an old bomb! [/joke]
To be fair, the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door. I think in general, zombies are scarier than my next door neighbor, but if my next door neighbor says he's going to burn down my house, and zombies remain fictional, temporarily my neighbor becomes scarier than zombies.
It's not a statement that should have been made by a politician in public though, and since he's keeping censorship going, he deserves whatever he gets (quotes taken out of context AND the threats). Furthermore, for him to fairly make the comparison, he needs to try banning motorcycles and then telling us which is scarier. I don't know much about motorcycle gangs, but I think they probably wouldn't have slid a note under his door, I think they would have slid a note on the end of their boot up his ass.
Some neuroscientists still work with the giant squid axon. And yes, it was used extensively in neuroscience, an elegant collection of works by Hodgkin and Huxley (foundation of modern electrophysiology) comes to mind. They even received a Nobel prize for their work in 1963 (the research was published in the early 50s).
I guess my bias was showing a little there:-P My undergrad neuroscience prof must have been better than I thought if I even vaguely remembered that.
I think #2 could easily be "open chain of squid restaurants" or "conquer the world"
You could also sell them as exotic pets to rich, stupid people.
A more legitimate use would be to prevent them from going extinct. They don't seem to be classified as endangered, but I'd guess that might have more to do with our ability to observe and count them than their actual likelyhood of going extinct.
What came to my mind first though was that giant squids might then be useful as model organisms for various studies. The giant axons of squids (regular sized squids, giant axons) were useful for first identifying the motor protein kinesin, and I've heard were also useful for early studies on neurons. Different animals may be particularly useful for doing research on, but if you can't keep them in a lab setting or catch many fresh, that really prevents that. Maybe the giant squid has some really interesting cellular process, we could study it, and learn something that will eventually cure cancer. Maybe not.
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
The university that I work at switched from it's own e-mail system to Gmail. You really have to ask who you find more competent and trustworthy, google or your own IT staff. I wasn't at all involved in that switch, don't know how the decision was made, and haven't seen any stats from the university's own e-mail system. Since the migration though, mail service has been down once in about 2 years, while it was more like once every 2 months with the university mail system. I suspect the university's system was also much less secure.
I suppose gmail does represent a much bigger target than "yale-mail."
Slashdot Mirror
A comment containing absolutely nothing but handwaving conjecture is moderated "Interesting".
I often find conjecture to be more interesting than dull facts. GP was a good example, I personally find the mechanics of the random number generator to be boring. "It might be non-random but beyond our current prediction methods" is more interesting.
Also... hi, you're on the internet. What the hell did you expect?
Yeah...because Mike & Ikes look just like illicit drugs.
Additionally I'd argue it's none of the school's fucking business what candy OR illegal drugs the student was taking when he was not at school. If the student were taking poison, committing suicide, then the school officials have a duty to report it and they'd be thanked for that after their jail sentences for being peeping toms.
So if the government invents it, this company promises to make money from it? That's real philanthropy for you!
Someone has to do it, unless you think the government should try making and selling these implants. As far as the "government inventing it" half, it would appear that private enterprises haven't invented it yet, and you have to wonder if it isn't because they weren't trying because they didn't think it would be profitable. The government might be selling the tech for a premium, maybe not. This might not be a very profitable enterprise, "Second Sight" might be taking a big risk here. The DoE might say "Here's the perfected version of the artificial retina. It takes a month to make each one at the cost of $300k. Few blind people are going to be able to afford that out of pocket, and the insurance companies are going to say they won't cover this when it's 'experimental' and a perfectly good alternative, the cane, exists, so good luck finding a way of selling it at anything less than a $250k loss."
Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.
Maybe it will turn out to be a good way of bypassing the damage. I'm not a neuroscientist or a medical professional, that statement is based entirely on the fact that weirder things have turned out to work for other medical problems. For example, I think few people would have had the foresight in the 1900's to guess that a substance isolated from fungi would be a revolutionary medicine.
What does the Department of Energy has to do with the development of an artificial retina?
Ideally they saw good science that needed funding and funded it even though it didn't fall neatly into their mission statement. I'd rather have them spending money on something that appears to be paying off than funding more repetitive studies which will tell us again that clean coal really isn't good for anything.
If they achieve VGA resolution, it's a steady road to full vision for the blind. I'm more interested in, at this point, exceeding human abilities.
It's not as if to achieve one goal, we need to abandon the other goal. In fact, being able to give VGA resolution to the blind seems in many ways like it's on the path to achieving beyond human sight. Get an artificial retina that gets VGA resolution perfected. It will take a lot of money to get this right. Restoring sight is a payoff that will help fund refinements on that, like higher resolution artificial retinas, increased spectrum retinas etc.
Furthermore, I suspect the main reason you're more interested in exceeding human abilities is because you personally have no use for restoring vision to the blind, which seems a little selfish.
Did you want to place your cities close together to maximize usage the tiles within your territory but forcing cities to compete with each other over resources, or space your cities out so that each city got as many resources as possible even though that would mean some areas in between wouldn't be exploited at all?
I always put my cities far apart, and when their territories expanded to the point where my land was confluent, that's when I knew to build tanks to roll over my neighbors. I only played on easy and against the computer. Not as much of an accomplishment, but being a superwarlord slaughtering the defenseless, stone age competition just feels right.
Civ IV got a console port, was called Civilization Revolution [wikipedia.org]. Mind you, it was beyond dumbed down. Graphics have nothing to do with the port of strategy games like Civilization to a console, it's more of an audience problem. It has more than two buttons to press, it doesn't have shiny ultra realistic 3D graphics and it's ... 'complex'.
PC gamers really go out of their way to try to make a bad name for themselves. If they're not being elitists about their choice of platform, they're criticizing developers, either for not putting out a better PC version than consoles, or for not putting out a PC version. Come to think of it, they seem to spend far more time being general assholes talking about games than actually playing games. Get a hobby people!
I played through Mirror's Edge start to finish in between turns during an extended Civ 4 LAN weekend.
You know there's another mirror's edge coming out as well. If they hurry up and announce more about it, you might be able to repeat that weekend.
Second and third worlders pirate like crazy. Haven't you seen the comments by folks from places like Brazil where everyone pirates because they simply don't have the money for or simply can't get the legit stuff.
I am aware that overseas content piracy is rampant. I was responding to the idea that stopping piracy will be a huge boon to US business. Specifically, I doubted GP's assertion that preventing piracy means all that pirated software will translate into legit sales. It won't. You pointed out they don't have money to buy the legit copy. If there are a million pirated copies sold every year of a game, and you make it impossible to pirate, that's not suddenly going to get you a million legit sales unless you're selling your game at the exact price as the pirates were.
Uh, not "answers" I guess. And probably some other stuff... not a math guy.
Imagine... every pirated movie and every pirated software in asia/eurasia/south america were paid.... What would happen to the US trade deficit and what would happen to happen to US debt... it would be significantly decreased.
This is exactly the type of statement that the following statement was made for:
Citation needed.
How many -american- games are pirated overseas? How many of those games would be actually purchased at full price if piracy were not an option? How much would be made from those sales? How much is the national debt in comparison? How much is "significantly?"
Because I think the answers respectively are
-X
-A small fraction of X
-Y
-Y ^ some big number Z
-Depends on who is answering. A shill for DRM or the game industry? Y. A person who is not extremely biased? Y^a number less than Z but still pretty high
Since most of the time the LHC is down that doesn't seem like a big problem :-p
Not to mention, does that comparison mean anything to anyone else? I've never stood in front of the LHC personally and don't know anyone who has. I can -assume- it wouldn't be healthy, but... well, it doesn't really ring home with me. It's not like "Oh shit, interstellar FTL would be like standing in front of the LHC? Well the last time I did that, I got horrible hemorrhoids. Good to know. Note to self: do not drive faster than light to a nearby solar system."
How hard would it have been to make a more visceral if less accurate car metaphor. "99.999998 percent of the speed of light through hydrogen atoms would be like trying to drive your car at 90 miles an hour into a concrete wall." ...although I haven't done that either recently...
One question for the warmers reading. Can the theory of AGW be falsified?
Sure. If we keep emitting and the climate doesn't change, then it's falsified. Kind of like if how the theory that 4 cheeseburgers and a pack of cigarettes every day will kill -you- specifically can be falsified by -you- specifically eating 4 cheeseburgers and smoking a pack of cigarettes each day and not dying. Try it, let us know, the rest of us are foolishly following the religion of "Carcinogens and cholesterol will kill us specifically."
Or, if you were an early mac gamer and weren't into Doom, it's because it's the wrong moon. The UESC Marathon was made out of -demios-, not Phobos.
So, to everyone in Australia, the guy who made that threat is fucking it up for the rest of you.
I'd argue that it's mostly the target that is fucking it up for everyone else. He was blocking it well before the claimed threat. Banning all adult games for sale to because one gamer threatened you is incredibly bad justification for an incredibly bad move.
And dont worry about the posers that think they can shoot a gun... We had a open house day at the range and had some gamer geeks come in wanting to shoot a assault rifle. I watched as 4 out of the 5 never hit the target and 1 cut his eye open as he put his eye on the scope and did not put the butt tight to the shoulder like he was told... And this is all from a wimpy AK-47 a gun with some real kick would have owned them hard. 12 Ga shotguns would have thrown these jokers tot he floor.
So that means that if the threat was specific to using a 12 gauge shotgun against his family from those 5 specific gamers, he has little to worry about. I wouldn't conclude he is completely safe from all threats from all gamers, that would be a foolish stereotype.
One teenage girl telling everyone about a party can look a lot like a spammer.
And what would be so bad about ISPs blocking that???
What about delicious spam?
What about it? It's slightly less fictional than unicorn bacon?
What about the plants? and stuff that can't move away fast enough?
It's not like WWII happened yesterday. They had plenty of time to move away from the bombs. If they didn't that's their own damn fault for choosing to grow right near an old bomb! [/joke]
To be fair, the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door. I think in general, zombies are scarier than my next door neighbor, but if my next door neighbor says he's going to burn down my house, and zombies remain fictional, temporarily my neighbor becomes scarier than zombies.
It's not a statement that should have been made by a politician in public though, and since he's keeping censorship going, he deserves whatever he gets (quotes taken out of context AND the threats). Furthermore, for him to fairly make the comparison, he needs to try banning motorcycles and then telling us which is scarier. I don't know much about motorcycle gangs, but I think they probably wouldn't have slid a note under his door, I think they would have slid a note on the end of their boot up his ass.
If you voted for Bush the lefties already know who you are and where you live.
Yup. We know where you live. And we're going to use that information just as effectively as we used the majority we had in congress. Be very afraid!
So if you are a gay homosexual you can expect that your medical records will be accessed.
What if I'm just a homosexual OR gay, not a gay homosexual?
Some neuroscientists still work with the giant squid axon. And yes, it was used extensively in neuroscience, an elegant collection of works by Hodgkin and Huxley (foundation of modern electrophysiology) comes to mind. They even received a Nobel prize for their work in 1963 (the research was published in the early 50s).
I guess my bias was showing a little there :-P My undergrad neuroscience prof must have been better than I thought if I even vaguely remembered that.
1. Raise giant squid
2. ???
3. Profit!
I think #2 could easily be "open chain of squid restaurants" or "conquer the world"
You could also sell them as exotic pets to rich, stupid people.
A more legitimate use would be to prevent them from going extinct. They don't seem to be classified as endangered, but I'd guess that might have more to do with our ability to observe and count them than their actual likelyhood of going extinct.
What came to my mind first though was that giant squids might then be useful as model organisms for various studies. The giant axons of squids (regular sized squids, giant axons) were useful for first identifying the motor protein kinesin, and I've heard were also useful for early studies on neurons. Different animals may be particularly useful for doing research on, but if you can't keep them in a lab setting or catch many fresh, that really prevents that. Maybe the giant squid has some really interesting cellular process, we could study it, and learn something that will eventually cure cancer. Maybe not.
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
The university that I work at switched from it's own e-mail system to Gmail. You really have to ask who you find more competent and trustworthy, google or your own IT staff. I wasn't at all involved in that switch, don't know how the decision was made, and haven't seen any stats from the university's own e-mail system. Since the migration though, mail service has been down once in about 2 years, while it was more like once every 2 months with the university mail system. I suspect the university's system was also much less secure.
I suppose gmail does represent a much bigger target than "yale-mail."