What's the matter with your college? I've never been in one that didn't have a radio station. Volunteer! Create a radio hour that is uniquely your own!
College radio can be terrific: weird, oddball, quirky stuff gets played, and you typically get DJs who actually care about the music, yet have their own personalities. I'm listening to KUMM right now -- and it is great, if you want something other than the usual pablum.
(No, it is not a porn site -- this is the University of Minnesota, Morris, and those really are our call letters)
I'm amazed, too. Why did you bother to comment here when you clearly know nothing about Macs?
There is a good, solid gaming industry for Macs. We don't usually get the games quite as promptly, and we don't see the less popular, marginal games from the PC world being ported over at all, but there is no dearth of good games available. Right now, my kids are playing various incarnations of the Sims, Black & White, Unreal, Age of Empires, etc...they have more games available than I can keep track of, at any rate.
"People try to debunk it as much as possible, but in truth, it's becoming more of a reality. Think stem cells. If you can harvest a few stem cells from a frozen body, and then help patch and repair the old body with them, could we not come back from the dead?"
Urgh. Stem cells have nothing at all to do with repairing the massive damage from freezing.
Look at it this way. The conscious state that you think of as "you" is the product of a delicate and precise arrangement of a trillion cells, each with a thousand specific connections, and each of those connections having specific physiological properties. Freezing turns all that to scrambled mush. Having the ability to use stem cells to reassemble a completely different network of neurons so that they can scoop out the scrambled mush and replace it with a new brain will NOT reconstitute "you".
The only people I know who have Macs are people in their early 30's who dropped out of school to persue jobs in web design in the mid to late 90's
Ah, perhaps that explains a few things. The misperceptions by many of the PC users here are based on the fact that they hang around with stupid people -- it's a problem of a selected, biased population.
I also see a biased population. Most of the Mac users I know are college professors and biomedical researchers.
Well, I happen to know a university professor who has used UNIX since the '70s, and he was puzzled by exactly the same OS X dialog -- it really isn't obvious at first sight that it is just a graphical "sudo".
Do you realize how puzzling and unobvious your succinct description of it as a "graphical sudo" would be to 99% of the people who will be using these machines?
It's an interesting example of how a metaphor can be totally opaque to one group of people, yet very clear to another -- just like the mysterious padlock icon.
No.. This comment is ill-informed and simply wrong.
It is correct that radiation as applied is a destructive, high-energy force that rips through the DNA. It will typically cause major deletions.
There will be no three-eyed flies. Scientists have been zapping flies with radiation for almost a century, and we've got a pretty good idea of what kind of variants will emerge. The chances of a beneficial (for the fly) mutant arising from this kind of treatment is much, much lower than the chances of a beneficial mutant arising spontaneously in the natural population.
What books do I want? Stuff to help me figure out what the heck I'm doing while I make the big transition from the old Macintosh OS to the shiny new OS X.
I'm an old Mac hand, used to the simple point-and-click, but in the last month I've been seduced by the power of mySQL, php, PostFix, and who knows what else. I spend way too much time tracking down byzantine installation and configuration procedures, typing in weird commands that I mostly don't understand, but some unix geek tells me I need to do them. It sure would be nice to have some gentle but thorough introductions to these things so that I would understand them.
I'm not alone. I suspect there are a lot of us naive Mac people who are blundering along, ripe for the picking.
I'm a biology professor. Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean the animal colony doesn't need to eat; it just means there aren't any student workers to help out.
Also, I've got 100 cell biology exams to plow through -- grades are due on Thursday.
I agree. Brooks is not only derivative, he is simply appallingly bad as a writer. I've never been able to read more than a few chapters before getting so disgusted that I throw the book down.
This is the kind of comment that could only be made by a narrow-minded engineer who lacks any appreciation of the state of modern biology. The naivete expressed here is rather appalling.
I see absolutely no hope, not even a serious promise, that nanotechnology will accomplish anything at all against disease at any time in the foreseeable future, let alone in 10 years. Can anyone show me so much as a sketch of a nanotech machine that could feasibly operate against HIV, or rhabdovirus, or salmonella, or botulism toxin? The very idea is ludicrous, and is offered only by people who are unaware of what's going on in molecular biology.
In biology, we already know what is possible. For example, there exists a naturally evolved biological machine that is a mere dot only a few hundred microns across that can, given an energy source and the proper environment, assemble a completely functional human being. If that sounds too ambitious for you, a related small blob exists that requires only a little sugar, water, and yeast to assemble a flying machine with a sophisticated onboard computer -- it's called Drosophila. It posesses a sophistication that trivializes the grandest dreams of the nanotechnologist wanna-bes. Heck, even (especially?) E. coli looks like a colossal dreadnought of overwhelming complexity when stacked against the rubber-band powered toys promised (not even delivered!) by nanotech!
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What's the matter with your college? I've never been in one that didn't have a radio station. Volunteer! Create a radio hour that is uniquely your own!
College radio can be terrific: weird, oddball, quirky stuff gets played, and you typically get DJs who actually care about the music, yet have their own personalities. I'm listening to KUMM right now -- and it is great, if you want something other than the usual pablum.
(No, it is not a porn site -- this is the University of Minnesota, Morris, and those really are our call letters)
I'm amazed, too. Why did you bother to comment here when you clearly know nothing about Macs?
There is a good, solid gaming industry for Macs. We don't usually get the games quite as promptly, and we don't see the less popular, marginal games from the PC world being ported over at all, but there is no dearth of good games available. Right now, my kids are playing various incarnations of the Sims, Black & White, Unreal, Age of Empires, etc...they have more games available than I can keep track of, at any rate.
"People try to debunk it as much as possible, but in truth, it's becoming more of a reality. Think stem cells. If you can harvest a few stem cells from a frozen body, and then help patch and repair the old body with them, could we not come back from the dead?"
Urgh. Stem cells have nothing at all to do with repairing the massive damage from freezing.
Look at it this way. The conscious state that you think of as "you" is the product of a delicate and precise arrangement of a trillion cells, each with a thousand specific connections, and each of those connections having specific physiological properties. Freezing turns all that to scrambled mush. Having the ability to use stem cells to reassemble a completely different network of neurons so that they can scoop out the scrambled mush and replace it with a new brain will NOT reconstitute "you".
Ah, perhaps that explains a few things. The misperceptions by many of the PC users here are based on the fact that they hang around with stupid people -- it's a problem of a selected, biased population.
I also see a biased population. Most of the Mac users I know are college professors and biomedical researchers.
All that work done, all to accomplish nothing at all. Other than flinging pseudoscientific displays on a lot of people's computer screens.
Do you realize how puzzling and unobvious your succinct description of it as a "graphical sudo" would be to 99% of the people who will be using these machines?
It's an interesting example of how a metaphor can be totally opaque to one group of people, yet very clear to another -- just like the mysterious padlock icon.
No.. This comment is ill-informed and simply wrong.
It is correct that radiation as applied is a destructive, high-energy force that rips through the DNA. It will typically cause major deletions.
There will be no three-eyed flies. Scientists have been zapping flies with radiation for almost a century, and we've got a pretty good idea of what kind of variants will emerge. The chances of a beneficial (for the fly) mutant arising from this kind of treatment is much, much lower than the chances of a beneficial mutant arising spontaneously in the natural population.
What books do I want? Stuff to help me figure out what the heck I'm doing while I make the big transition from the old Macintosh OS to the shiny new OS X.
I'm an old Mac hand, used to the simple point-and-click, but in the last month I've been seduced by the power of mySQL, php, PostFix, and who knows what else. I spend way too much time tracking down byzantine installation and configuration procedures, typing in weird commands that I mostly don't understand, but some unix geek tells me I need to do them. It sure would be nice to have some gentle but thorough introductions to these things so that I would understand them.
I'm not alone. I suspect there are a lot of us naive Mac people who are blundering along, ripe for the picking.
I'm a biology professor. Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean the animal colony doesn't need to eat; it just means there aren't any student workers to help out.
Also, I've got 100 cell biology exams to plow through -- grades are due on Thursday.
I agree. Brooks is not only derivative, he is simply appallingly bad as a writer. I've never been able to read more than a few chapters before getting so disgusted that I throw the book down.
This is the kind of comment that could only be made by a narrow-minded engineer who lacks any appreciation of the state of modern biology. The naivete expressed here is rather appalling.
I see absolutely no hope, not even a serious promise, that nanotechnology will accomplish anything at all against disease at any time in the foreseeable future, let alone in 10 years. Can anyone show me so much as a sketch of a nanotech machine that could feasibly operate against HIV, or rhabdovirus, or salmonella, or botulism toxin? The very idea is ludicrous, and is offered only by people who are unaware of what's going on in molecular biology.
In biology, we already know what is possible. For example, there exists a naturally evolved biological machine that is a mere dot only a few hundred microns across that can, given an energy source and the proper environment, assemble a completely functional human being. If that sounds too ambitious for you, a related small blob exists that requires only a little sugar, water, and yeast to assemble a flying machine with a sophisticated onboard computer -- it's called Drosophila. It posesses a sophistication that trivializes the grandest dreams of the nanotechnologist wanna-bes. Heck, even (especially?) E. coli looks like a colossal dreadnought of overwhelming complexity when stacked against the rubber-band powered toys promised (not even delivered!) by nanotech!
Have you ever seen an STM? I think it is rather blind to claim that only the size of the tips matter.
If they're using driver's license photos, I would think there is no threat at all -- how often do DL photos look anything like their subject?