Right. Apple has certainly wrestled control away from the carriers. Now, instead of just paying the carrier blood money and selling our soul for two years, we get to pay both Apple AND the carrier... and still sell our soul away for two years.
Apple gained design control over the device, not contractual control. Your contract with the carrier has nothing to do with Apple (except to the degree that Apple could and should just sell the phones unlocked, but that doesn't solve the problems of cell phone contracts).
1) The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us.
God, yes. Every other audio device I own has a scale from "only dogs can hear it" up to "you're going to go deaf if you listen at this volume". There is no, NO reason this should not be the case on cell phones. Sure, it'll eat up battery a little faster if you crank it up all the time, but no worse than any of the other million battery-draining features you know for a FACT that 95% of the phone's users will never use. And listening to phone calls is the ONE feature you can be sure 95% of the customers WILL be using.
He's not assuming anything about other versions of the software. He's saying the software on this phone sucks, which you seem to agree with. If MS released a version of XP without mouse support...that would suck, too. The existence of another version would not in any way invalidate the suckiness of the mouseless version. If the software is only good for touchscreen devices (which I would disagree with, it still sucks even on touchscreen devices), then it sounds like MS's big mistake was licensing it for use on non-touchscreen devices.
Why would he "eat his words" about a device he's never written about?
The issue isn't one of Congressional authority, it's of civil rights, which of course the DoJ DOES have the authority to enforce, since they are guaranteed by the Constitution. No state has the ability to pass voting legislation that contradicts the US Constitution by, for example, making it more difficult for black voters to register or vote. That's why the DoJ has been monitoring elections in much of the South for so long.
Of course, the whole point of this legal showdown is that HAVA falls far short of guaranteeing anyone's voting rights, so the DoJ would have to show in court that this particular half-measure they're trying to force is superior to NY state's particular half-measure in guaranteeing voting rights. That is far from a sure thing, since the flaws in electronic voting machines are so easily demonstrable and explainable to even the least technical jurist.
So yes, the DoJ certainly has both the right (and responsibility) to be involved in the voting process, but that doesn't mean they're in control. The courts are the only authority that can say any state's voting equipment is unconstitutional, and I doubt they're going to mandate demonstrably insecure electronic voting if NY state can show them some other means of upholding voter rights.
Why is it wrong to use statistics and data modeling to predict how to protect yourself?
It isn't. But guessing at random stuff out of ignorance and then blacklisting anyone who fits your completely stupid profile, and then claiming it is statistical data modeling IS wrong. it's not only wrong, it's counter-productive -- it means REAL terrorists are more likely to be successful because you've just wasted finite resources on pursuing stupidity. You don't win a war by pissing off the innocent bystanders. At best, they're less likely to cooperate in the future when you need them to, at worst they'll now actively support your enemies.
That's not a sign of a good GUI. That's a GUI that you don't want to see, and only used when forced to.
I'm as critical as anyone of poor GUI design (indeed, it's my comment on the Adobe blog that is ridiculously long and bitchy, posted days before it was linked to slashdot -- I care about this stuff and have actively provided feedback to Adobe for about 15 years).
But your "conclusion" is nonsensical. Saying that someone only accesses tools when they need them is nothing like saying that the tools suck. I don't carry around my hammer 24/7, i "hide" it in my toolbox and only pull it out when I need to hammer something. i think my hammer is pretty darn optimal in terms of discoverability and interface. There's nothing I could conceive of that would improve it, but I still don't need it hanging off my belt when I'm not anticipating using it.
being able to go full-screen and hide all the toolbars and palettes in PS is in no way proof that the toolbars and palettes are bad (except to the degree that a purely psychic interface that allowed full-screen 100% of the time would be ideal).
On the contrary, everyone knows that TRUE Americans don't buy Heinz, after all, John Kerry is a dirty liberal faggot commie who wants to appoint Osama bin Laden the be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and eat Christian babies with lots of his wife's ketchup on top.
Anyone buying the wrong brands of ketchup is clearly a terrorist supporter.
Why can't photoshop scan negatives in the background while I work on other images in the foreground?
While I could certainly see the use in allowing TWAIN importers to do some magic in the background, ultimately I'd suggest if you're scanning that much you should probably be using scanning software that can operate independently rather than depending solely on a plugin.
Doing any sort of import/export as a background process would raise all sorts of bizarre issues.
as far as i remember you've got to get the updates for sony clie from sony and not from palm.
They were available first from Sony, yes, but they're distributed by Palm as well. Precisely for the reasons talked about. Expecting customers to track down individual hardware OEMs for important software updates is something only a stupid company would make its customers do.
You can do this with one click for any database that runs on MacOS X, I'll give you $5,000.
OK, I live in Austin, when do you want to come down?
Gee, "all they did" was add an API that lets any application restore arbitrary data from any point in time, with no impact on performance and no user configuration necessary. Plus, of course, all the system-level stuff that allows that API to work, which is completely new. But you're right, that's useless, I'd much rather be using VMS on my home computer. VMS can, of course, search all those backups for a single database record and automatically show you the most recent backup that contains that record, with one click, right? You'd rather have a robust system with basic features than a robust system with even more useful features? Interesting choice, I think it's safe to say you're in the minority on that one.
Wow, versioning was not invented by Apple!? Thanks for the newsflash! Next thing you know you'll say that search over a network was not invented by Google, therefore clearly everything they do is just a ripoff of the old Gopher directories that people compiled manually.
File transfer wasn't invented by Bittorrent, therefore obviously it's just some boring API that is ripping off "cp".
Perpendicular magnetic storage? Bunch of bullshit. You were able to store data on punch cards years ago, therefore anything that stores data is just some shiny object for newbies to get excited over because they aren't as smart as you are. All it does is store "more data" in "less space"!? VMS was able to store data years ago.
When you want to get the old version of the file you're looking for, just cd into the snapshots directory and there is your entire filesystem as it existed at that time.
Great, so how do you pull a single database record out of that file and merge it into the currently running database with one click?
Time Machine isn't the same as what "enterprise storage systems" have been doing for years. We're talking about a backup system that can do everything from bare-metal system restoration to bringing back a single deleted digit in a phone number, all with one interface so simple even your grandmother could use it.
MS has been doing it for years with Shadow Copy, the exact same thing...It is just weird to me that on/. of all places no one has mentioned that MS has been doing this
No, Shadow Copy comes up every time Time Machine is mentioned. The difference being, of course, that Time Machine is useful, fast and well-designed, while Shadow Copy is a strange collection of abilities that are bolted on in random locations in ways that they never quite accomplish anything accessible to the non-sysadmin (which makes sense, as the whole technology was never intended for the desktop, it's all a huge kludge to workaround the even older ridiculous MS file systems that won't allow backups to be made of locked files).
Storing all those diffs in the System Restore area of the disk basically defeats the whole purpose of creating backups, and makes it so it's only useful for reverting files from minor user error, though there's no way to know if you'll be able to recover from any particular issue since the configuration of how and when it copies what and how it chooses to delete old versions is a mystery.
So, to deal with all THOSE limitations, instead of fixing them, they included a whole new system backup utility to do REAL backups to separate media, and then made THAT useless by making the configuration abilities a complete joke, so unless you want to create an image of your whole drive and waste tons of space on the backup destination, it's pretty much impossible to be sure your important data is backed up.
Then, to top it off, you get to use this easy-to-read matrix and flowchart combination (because users love poring over product matrices) just to figure out which of the dozen different backup capabilities are allowed to be used in a given version of Vista.
So no, it's not the exact same thing. Copying data and making backups are nothing new for ANY computer company. The only amazing thing happening here is that a company finally made it not suck. Backup hasn't been this easy since the days when you could turn on the tape recorder and have all 64kb of your data on an easy-to-store cassette.
What's the difference? The interface is how you use software. If it's easy to use, it has a good interface.
And there, in one comment, is summarized the entire misunderstanding in some parts of the technical community of why Apple is renowned for designing software that is easy to use. Copying aqua icons and making shiny reflective doodads copies "the interface", therefore our GenericSoftware is just as easy to use as a Mac now, right?
The user interface to Time Machine is, hopefully, something no user will ever have to see (though they'll probably want to).
The ease-of-use comes from the fact that the first time you plug in an external hard drive, the system asks "Do you want to use this disk for Time Machine backups?", and if you say yes, you never have to do anything else. You never have to launch Time Machine, you never have to open the configuration utility, you never even have to know it exists. It comes preconfigured with exclusions and inclusions of what 99% of users need backed up. That's ease of use, and it has nothing to do with the application interface, because the user never even sees the interface.
Now of course in ADDITION, the interface to TM is all gee-whiz and fairly easy to grok for even nontechnical users, so if they do need to restore something some day, it's clear what is being done and which particular bit of data is going where.
Being able to restore a deleted address from WITHIN the Address Book is ease of use, and that has nothing to do with interface, it has to do with imagining how a user will want to manipulate data and not forcing them to dig around on the hard drive to find the address book database file and replace it with the older copy (which of course will also destroy all the other changes that have been made to that file since it was last backed up, so now you'll have to manually reconcile the two versions of the address book).
Rsync with a starfield screen saver does not Time Machine make. Of course, Time Machine without deltas eats up disk space a lot faster than a good rdiff-backup or System Restore alternative. Every solution has its tradeoffs, unfortunately.
Robots only need to be reasonably human-like in appearance and behavior, and humans will meet them more than halfway.
Yeah, I think on a practical level the only reason a general-purpose robot would need to be human-like is so that it can use existing tools and get around in our environment without needing any adaptations. The idea that it needs to be human-like simply to be socially accepted is silly (except for the sexbots, those will have to be pretty human-like).
This one particular experiment isn't intended to solve every problem in space medicine. There are dozens of groups working on different aspects of these problems.
Nobody wants a completely autonomous system -- I don't think even a semi-autonomous one is on anyone's radar for actual use. But using robotics and haptics as a guide, as a training platform, as an assistant, those are all things very high on the list of medical schools around the world as well as NASA. Nobody is going to Mars without a pretty comprehensive, intense medical training program that will allow them to pitch in if necessary regardless of their background. If there's one things astronauts are selected for, it is the ability to learn new things very quickly, very well.
As for the kinds of injuries you'd expect, trauma of all sorts. Nobody is concerned about cancer sprouting up overnight or some congenital disease. There is even discussion of prophylactic appendectomies before long-term missions. This isn't the care anyone is losing sleep over. But if a rock crushes someone's leg or a tool gets driven through a chest cavity, you need to be able to perform some immediate stabilizing procedures and then get comprehensive consultation and advice from specialists back on Earth so that in a few hours you'll be able to rehearse and perform whatever procedure is necessary to save the life and preserve maximum mission resources. Accidents happen everywhere in the universe, and many of them require surgical procedures. Indeed, most of the best astronaut candidates I know who have a shot at going on a Mars mission (assuming it happens in the next 20 years) are ER/trauma docs. Dealing with the consequences of car crashes every day for 20 years is probably the best training we could give someone for these missions. How many different ways can the human body be impaled, crushed, or burned because someone lost their concentration for a split-second at just the wrong time?
Surgery in zero gravity is not very different than surgery on Earth, really. Sure, there are technical issues everyone has to learn to deal with, but that's a matter of a couple days of training, not a reinvention of medicine. Some things are a little harder in microgravity, some things are actually easier. Now we're just trying to improve it by putting in robotic assistants to reduce mistakes. Most of the research proper is going into how to provide for consultations, training, and practice in non-real time.
They can't be doing this in that big ol' fancy space station they got up there? Hmm, I thought this was the kind of stuff it was built for.
It costs a couple thousand dollars to get space and time on the plane -- it costs a couple million to get space and time on the ISS. Most taxpayers would agree it's a good idea to make sure we only spend the millions on things that have already been tested as far as they can possibly go using less expensive means.
Forgive me for possibly being naive, but wouldn't it possibly be a LOT more practical to simply keep a highly-skilled physician on board the mission?
That's great, but what happens when the surgeon gets hurt? Or what happens when your highly skilled endocrine surgeon suddenly has to deal with brain damage? There are hundreds of surgical specialties, and no way any surgeon -- or team of surgeons -- could be prepared to handle them all. Unlike Antarctica, you can't get on the phone or video link with a specialist somewhere else and have them talk you through it, and you can't stabilize the patient and wait for a rescue when there's a break in the weather. You can't cut someone open and then ask "is this the one you said to clamp?" from Mars -- even at the speed of light, it can take 40 minutes for the answer.
Disclaimer: I worked for 5 years with the NASA group doing this research and flew the Vomit Comet in some of the earlier tests.
I can assure you that all this research being done focuses a lot of the energy on coming up with small, portable, low-cost systems that can be used in remote environments. I don't think anyone has ever suggested sending a CAT scan into space except as a joke -- what we HAVE been pushing for is the development of other 3d diagnostic imaging systems that don't weigh thousands of pounds. We test most of the gear in Africa, South America, etc, and part of NASA's project goal is to solve the problems of treating patients on Mars while also improving health care here on Earth. Terrestrial benefits are a top priority in all the research that goes on and the choice of projects that get funded -- being able to teach a doctor to perform an emergency procedure he's never done before from the other side of the Sun means that we'll also be able to teach a traveling nurse in remote Africa how to diagnose and treat something she's never seen before without having to send the patient back to a city, which could be days of hard travel that they'd never survive.
Honestly, I'd just asking him for the USPTO serial/registration number for his trademark (and obviously search the uspto web site to verify it). If he has one, he's shown he actually cares about it, plus he's got all the paperwork he needs to dispute your domain with ICANN. Do you really want to spend time and money fighting at that point?
But of course he doesn't have one, so just asking will show him you're not just going to hand over a domain because you got a nasty email, which is what he's expecting. If he tries to quickly file the papers, he'll discover that just owning a domain name is not enough to even file for a trademark, much less get one. He'll have to find other uses of it (prior to yours) to complete the paperwork, and if his site is just a link farm it's questionable whether even his web site would qualify.
What kind of requirements are there to be a candidate in USA
* natural-born citizens of the United States
* at least thirty-five years old
* must have been resident in the United States for at least fourteen years
That's it. What's being discussed here are the requirements enforced by particular parties to be their candidate for President, and they of course have a lot more restrictions.
Each of the states in the US also has their own requirements for getting a name on the ballot, usually a specific number of signatures from residents of the state. So Colbert can certainly still run for President in South Carolina a year from now by gathering a bunch of signatures, he was just trying to get into the individual party primaries which are in the next few months.
because we're not discussing this case exclusively, we're discussing the legal power of judges and juries in the American court system. I appreciate your valuable comments to the RIAA articles, but we are still allowed to have conversations that aren't specific to the case at hand.
I think you have me confused with somebody else.... please note who is posting a reply here and that more than one person is arguing contrary to what you are trying to say.
And yes, the NAACP does have a right to say that the KKK in white robes and a burning cross is not permitted inside a convention center, or that "fundimentalist Christians" aren't allowed inside of a Mormon temple throwing chicken blood everywhere (they tried).
It doesn't matter whether you're new in responding or not, you're the one who said I was "advocating" free speech in a violent manner, despite the fact that I had said precisely and clearly the opposite. I continue to think that anyone who cannot comprehend the notion of protest without violence has some serious political prejudice that needs to be dealt with before they should enter any discussion of free speech.
Yes, the NAACP does have the right to say who goes inside the convention center, because they reserved that space. You'll note I said they don't have the right to dictate who protests OUTSIDE their gathering. If someone shows up with a "MLK sucks" placard and decides to stand across the street from the convention center so that the attendees will see him as they arrive and depart, the NAACP can't do anything about it. The protester is not required to go 30 blocks away in some back alley where nobody attending the rally will be able to see him. I have no doubt many officers will be dispatched to make sure there is no physical confrontation between the protester or the attendees, but it is perfectly legal for both to be there and be heard. It's quite common for police and the courts to enforce a distance or buffer zone between disagreeing parties, but they don't get to drag one side off into the next county.
I'm really, genuinely saddened by your seeming inability to comprehend that peaceful free speech in a public place is a virtue worth defending. You keep bringing up arguments of rioters and people going into private property to justify your views that people should be shuffled off to some remote location where they cannot possibly be heard by anyone outside of designated zones. I don't know if you're truly confused as to what free speech means in America, or if you simply don't care that anyone has a right to speak.
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Apple gained design control over the device, not contractual control. Your contract with the carrier has nothing to do with Apple (except to the degree that Apple could and should just sell the phones unlocked, but that doesn't solve the problems of cell phone contracts).
God, yes. Every other audio device I own has a scale from "only dogs can hear it" up to "you're going to go deaf if you listen at this volume". There is no, NO reason this should not be the case on cell phones. Sure, it'll eat up battery a little faster if you crank it up all the time, but no worse than any of the other million battery-draining features you know for a FACT that 95% of the phone's users will never use. And listening to phone calls is the ONE feature you can be sure 95% of the customers WILL be using.
He's not assuming anything about other versions of the software. He's saying the software on this phone sucks, which you seem to agree with. If MS released a version of XP without mouse support...that would suck, too. The existence of another version would not in any way invalidate the suckiness of the mouseless version. If the software is only good for touchscreen devices (which I would disagree with, it still sucks even on touchscreen devices), then it sounds like MS's big mistake was licensing it for use on non-touchscreen devices.
Why would he "eat his words" about a device he's never written about?
The issue isn't one of Congressional authority, it's of civil rights, which of course the DoJ DOES have the authority to enforce, since they are guaranteed by the Constitution. No state has the ability to pass voting legislation that contradicts the US Constitution by, for example, making it more difficult for black voters to register or vote. That's why the DoJ has been monitoring elections in much of the South for so long.
Of course, the whole point of this legal showdown is that HAVA falls far short of guaranteeing anyone's voting rights, so the DoJ would have to show in court that this particular half-measure they're trying to force is superior to NY state's particular half-measure in guaranteeing voting rights. That is far from a sure thing, since the flaws in electronic voting machines are so easily demonstrable and explainable to even the least technical jurist.
So yes, the DoJ certainly has both the right (and responsibility) to be involved in the voting process, but that doesn't mean they're in control. The courts are the only authority that can say any state's voting equipment is unconstitutional, and I doubt they're going to mandate demonstrably insecure electronic voting if NY state can show them some other means of upholding voter rights.
It isn't. But guessing at random stuff out of ignorance and then blacklisting anyone who fits your completely stupid profile, and then claiming it is statistical data modeling IS wrong. it's not only wrong, it's counter-productive -- it means REAL terrorists are more likely to be successful because you've just wasted finite resources on pursuing stupidity. You don't win a war by pissing off the innocent bystanders. At best, they're less likely to cooperate in the future when you need them to, at worst they'll now actively support your enemies.
I'm as critical as anyone of poor GUI design (indeed, it's my comment on the Adobe blog that is ridiculously long and bitchy, posted days before it was linked to slashdot -- I care about this stuff and have actively provided feedback to Adobe for about 15 years).
But your "conclusion" is nonsensical. Saying that someone only accesses tools when they need them is nothing like saying that the tools suck. I don't carry around my hammer 24/7, i "hide" it in my toolbox and only pull it out when I need to hammer something. i think my hammer is pretty darn optimal in terms of discoverability and interface. There's nothing I could conceive of that would improve it, but I still don't need it hanging off my belt when I'm not anticipating using it.
being able to go full-screen and hide all the toolbars and palettes in PS is in no way proof that the toolbars and palettes are bad (except to the degree that a purely psychic interface that allowed full-screen 100% of the time would be ideal).
On the contrary, everyone knows that TRUE Americans don't buy Heinz, after all, John Kerry is a dirty liberal faggot commie who wants to appoint Osama bin Laden the be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and eat Christian babies with lots of his wife's ketchup on top.
Anyone buying the wrong brands of ketchup is clearly a terrorist supporter.
While I could certainly see the use in allowing TWAIN importers to do some magic in the background, ultimately I'd suggest if you're scanning that much you should probably be using scanning software that can operate independently rather than depending solely on a plugin.
Doing any sort of import/export as a background process would raise all sorts of bizarre issues.
He's German, you insensitive clod!
They were available first from Sony, yes, but they're distributed by Palm as well. Precisely for the reasons talked about. Expecting customers to track down individual hardware OEMs for important software updates is something only a stupid company would make its customers do.
OK, I live in Austin, when do you want to come down?
Gee, "all they did" was add an API that lets any application restore arbitrary data from any point in time, with no impact on performance and no user configuration necessary. Plus, of course, all the system-level stuff that allows that API to work, which is completely new. But you're right, that's useless, I'd much rather be using VMS on my home computer. VMS can, of course, search all those backups for a single database record and automatically show you the most recent backup that contains that record, with one click, right? You'd rather have a robust system with basic features than a robust system with even more useful features? Interesting choice, I think it's safe to say you're in the minority on that one.
Wow, versioning was not invented by Apple!? Thanks for the newsflash! Next thing you know you'll say that search over a network was not invented by Google, therefore clearly everything they do is just a ripoff of the old Gopher directories that people compiled manually.
File transfer wasn't invented by Bittorrent, therefore obviously it's just some boring API that is ripping off "cp".
Perpendicular magnetic storage? Bunch of bullshit. You were able to store data on punch cards years ago, therefore anything that stores data is just some shiny object for newbies to get excited over because they aren't as smart as you are. All it does is store "more data" in "less space"!? VMS was able to store data years ago.
The beauty of Slashdot's level of nerdosity is that I can't even tell if you're being sarcastic :)
Great, so how do you pull a single database record out of that file and merge it into the currently running database with one click?
Time Machine isn't the same as what "enterprise storage systems" have been doing for years. We're talking about a backup system that can do everything from bare-metal system restoration to bringing back a single deleted digit in a phone number, all with one interface so simple even your grandmother could use it.
No, Shadow Copy comes up every time Time Machine is mentioned. The difference being, of course, that Time Machine is useful, fast and well-designed, while Shadow Copy is a strange collection of abilities that are bolted on in random locations in ways that they never quite accomplish anything accessible to the non-sysadmin (which makes sense, as the whole technology was never intended for the desktop, it's all a huge kludge to workaround the even older ridiculous MS file systems that won't allow backups to be made of locked files).
Storing all those diffs in the System Restore area of the disk basically defeats the whole purpose of creating backups, and makes it so it's only useful for reverting files from minor user error, though there's no way to know if you'll be able to recover from any particular issue since the configuration of how and when it copies what and how it chooses to delete old versions is a mystery.
So, to deal with all THOSE limitations, instead of fixing them, they included a whole new system backup utility to do REAL backups to separate media, and then made THAT useless by making the configuration abilities a complete joke, so unless you want to create an image of your whole drive and waste tons of space on the backup destination, it's pretty much impossible to be sure your important data is backed up.
Then, to top it off, you get to use this easy-to-read matrix and flowchart combination (because users love poring over product matrices) just to figure out which of the dozen different backup capabilities are allowed to be used in a given version of Vista.
So no, it's not the exact same thing. Copying data and making backups are nothing new for ANY computer company. The only amazing thing happening here is that a company finally made it not suck. Backup hasn't been this easy since the days when you could turn on the tape recorder and have all 64kb of your data on an easy-to-store cassette.
And there, in one comment, is summarized the entire misunderstanding in some parts of the technical community of why Apple is renowned for designing software that is easy to use. Copying aqua icons and making shiny reflective doodads copies "the interface", therefore our GenericSoftware is just as easy to use as a Mac now, right?
The user interface to Time Machine is, hopefully, something no user will ever have to see (though they'll probably want to).
The ease-of-use comes from the fact that the first time you plug in an external hard drive, the system asks "Do you want to use this disk for Time Machine backups?", and if you say yes, you never have to do anything else. You never have to launch Time Machine, you never have to open the configuration utility, you never even have to know it exists. It comes preconfigured with exclusions and inclusions of what 99% of users need backed up. That's ease of use, and it has nothing to do with the application interface, because the user never even sees the interface.
Now of course in ADDITION, the interface to TM is all gee-whiz and fairly easy to grok for even nontechnical users, so if they do need to restore something some day, it's clear what is being done and which particular bit of data is going where.
Being able to restore a deleted address from WITHIN the Address Book is ease of use, and that has nothing to do with interface, it has to do with imagining how a user will want to manipulate data and not forcing them to dig around on the hard drive to find the address book database file and replace it with the older copy (which of course will also destroy all the other changes that have been made to that file since it was last backed up, so now you'll have to manually reconcile the two versions of the address book).
Rsync with a starfield screen saver does not Time Machine make. Of course, Time Machine without deltas eats up disk space a lot faster than a good rdiff-backup or System Restore alternative. Every solution has its tradeoffs, unfortunately.
Thank God we have insightful objective rationalists like you to show us how to stop drinking the political party Kool Aid.
::rolleyes:: when you need one?
Damn, where a BBcode
Yeah, I think on a practical level the only reason a general-purpose robot would need to be human-like is so that it can use existing tools and get around in our environment without needing any adaptations. The idea that it needs to be human-like simply to be socially accepted is silly (except for the sexbots, those will have to be pretty human-like).
This one particular experiment isn't intended to solve every problem in space medicine. There are dozens of groups working on different aspects of these problems.
Nobody wants a completely autonomous system -- I don't think even a semi-autonomous one is on anyone's radar for actual use. But using robotics and haptics as a guide, as a training platform, as an assistant, those are all things very high on the list of medical schools around the world as well as NASA. Nobody is going to Mars without a pretty comprehensive, intense medical training program that will allow them to pitch in if necessary regardless of their background. If there's one things astronauts are selected for, it is the ability to learn new things very quickly, very well.
As for the kinds of injuries you'd expect, trauma of all sorts. Nobody is concerned about cancer sprouting up overnight or some congenital disease. There is even discussion of prophylactic appendectomies before long-term missions. This isn't the care anyone is losing sleep over. But if a rock crushes someone's leg or a tool gets driven through a chest cavity, you need to be able to perform some immediate stabilizing procedures and then get comprehensive consultation and advice from specialists back on Earth so that in a few hours you'll be able to rehearse and perform whatever procedure is necessary to save the life and preserve maximum mission resources. Accidents happen everywhere in the universe, and many of them require surgical procedures. Indeed, most of the best astronaut candidates I know who have a shot at going on a Mars mission (assuming it happens in the next 20 years) are ER/trauma docs. Dealing with the consequences of car crashes every day for 20 years is probably the best training we could give someone for these missions. How many different ways can the human body be impaled, crushed, or burned because someone lost their concentration for a split-second at just the wrong time?
Surgery in zero gravity is not very different than surgery on Earth, really. Sure, there are technical issues everyone has to learn to deal with, but that's a matter of a couple days of training, not a reinvention of medicine. Some things are a little harder in microgravity, some things are actually easier. Now we're just trying to improve it by putting in robotic assistants to reduce mistakes. Most of the research proper is going into how to provide for consultations, training, and practice in non-real time.
It costs a couple thousand dollars to get space and time on the plane -- it costs a couple million to get space and time on the ISS. Most taxpayers would agree it's a good idea to make sure we only spend the millions on things that have already been tested as far as they can possibly go using less expensive means.
That's great, but what happens when the surgeon gets hurt? Or what happens when your highly skilled endocrine surgeon suddenly has to deal with brain damage? There are hundreds of surgical specialties, and no way any surgeon -- or team of surgeons -- could be prepared to handle them all. Unlike Antarctica, you can't get on the phone or video link with a specialist somewhere else and have them talk you through it, and you can't stabilize the patient and wait for a rescue when there's a break in the weather. You can't cut someone open and then ask "is this the one you said to clamp?" from Mars -- even at the speed of light, it can take 40 minutes for the answer.
Disclaimer: I worked for 5 years with the NASA group doing this research and flew the Vomit Comet in some of the earlier tests.
I can assure you that all this research being done focuses a lot of the energy on coming up with small, portable, low-cost systems that can be used in remote environments. I don't think anyone has ever suggested sending a CAT scan into space except as a joke -- what we HAVE been pushing for is the development of other 3d diagnostic imaging systems that don't weigh thousands of pounds. We test most of the gear in Africa, South America, etc, and part of NASA's project goal is to solve the problems of treating patients on Mars while also improving health care here on Earth. Terrestrial benefits are a top priority in all the research that goes on and the choice of projects that get funded -- being able to teach a doctor to perform an emergency procedure he's never done before from the other side of the Sun means that we'll also be able to teach a traveling nurse in remote Africa how to diagnose and treat something she's never seen before without having to send the patient back to a city, which could be days of hard travel that they'd never survive.
Honestly, I'd just asking him for the USPTO serial/registration number for his trademark (and obviously search the uspto web site to verify it). If he has one, he's shown he actually cares about it, plus he's got all the paperwork he needs to dispute your domain with ICANN. Do you really want to spend time and money fighting at that point?
But of course he doesn't have one, so just asking will show him you're not just going to hand over a domain because you got a nasty email, which is what he's expecting. If he tries to quickly file the papers, he'll discover that just owning a domain name is not enough to even file for a trademark, much less get one. He'll have to find other uses of it (prior to yours) to complete the paperwork, and if his site is just a link farm it's questionable whether even his web site would qualify.
* natural-born citizens of the United States
* at least thirty-five years old
* must have been resident in the United States for at least fourteen years
That's it. What's being discussed here are the requirements enforced by particular parties to be their candidate for President, and they of course have a lot more restrictions.
Each of the states in the US also has their own requirements for getting a name on the ballot, usually a specific number of signatures from residents of the state. So Colbert can certainly still run for President in South Carolina a year from now by gathering a bunch of signatures, he was just trying to get into the individual party primaries which are in the next few months.
because we're not discussing this case exclusively, we're discussing the legal power of judges and juries in the American court system. I appreciate your valuable comments to the RIAA articles, but we are still allowed to have conversations that aren't specific to the case at hand.
It doesn't matter whether you're new in responding or not, you're the one who said I was "advocating" free speech in a violent manner, despite the fact that I had said precisely and clearly the opposite. I continue to think that anyone who cannot comprehend the notion of protest without violence has some serious political prejudice that needs to be dealt with before they should enter any discussion of free speech.
Yes, the NAACP does have the right to say who goes inside the convention center, because they reserved that space. You'll note I said they don't have the right to dictate who protests OUTSIDE their gathering. If someone shows up with a "MLK sucks" placard and decides to stand across the street from the convention center so that the attendees will see him as they arrive and depart, the NAACP can't do anything about it. The protester is not required to go 30 blocks away in some back alley where nobody attending the rally will be able to see him. I have no doubt many officers will be dispatched to make sure there is no physical confrontation between the protester or the attendees, but it is perfectly legal for both to be there and be heard. It's quite common for police and the courts to enforce a distance or buffer zone between disagreeing parties, but they don't get to drag one side off into the next county.
I'm really, genuinely saddened by your seeming inability to comprehend that peaceful free speech in a public place is a virtue worth defending. You keep bringing up arguments of rioters and people going into private property to justify your views that people should be shuffled off to some remote location where they cannot possibly be heard by anyone outside of designated zones. I don't know if you're truly confused as to what free speech means in America, or if you simply don't care that anyone has a right to speak.
If you'd stop using "leftist" as a synonym for "everything bad", you'd look a lot less silly.