I would appreciate more accurate reporting on the part of the Slashdot editors
Dream on, Kemosabe.
Slashdot's editors have never applied journalistic integrity standards to themselves, and never will. Given the amount of traffic/. receives despite the lack of any kind of journalistic integrity, the marketplace has told them they don't need it.
They make money by the boatload doing what they're doing. There's no evidence that integrity would improve their situation. QED.
that leaves us with 130 million stars, spread out over 11 billion cubic lightyears. Since we have an even distribution of stars, that means intelligent life will happen once every 85 million light years.
Can't be. The diameter of the Milky Way is only about 100,000 ly, so the average star-to-star spacing of any set of stars within it simply can't be 85 million ly. Check your math.
Absolutely. My currently application requireds audio input and output, and does a lot of complex real-time signal analysis and transformation, using a multithreaded dataprocessing library I built in pure Java. It even has a slick little gui.
It builds and runs - including the microphone input - on Mac, Windows, and Linux without a single byte of code change.
Somehow I doubt Apple's processor switch is going to affect my development workflow in the slightest.
As someone who is receiving my PhD in "Computation and Neural Systems" from Caltech this week, and having worked briefly in that lab, I can tell you that the simulation you read about, which is called GENESIS probably simulated the neuron in much greater detail than is ultimately required to create a brain. It simulated the entire physiology and chemistry of the neuron... every ion flow, trans-membrane voltage, etc. One of the many goals is to explore precisely what information-processing behavior arises from the chemistry and biology.
But, once you determine that information-processing behavior, one should in theory be able to simulate that without a detailed model of the underlying structure. I mean, if I know that impulses from X input synapses cause the voltage at the soma to raise/lower according to a certain time function, and that a certain voltage at the soma causes an action potential to be fired, which will trigger the neuron's own output synapses to fire Y milliseconds later, I should be able to simulate these properties without going to the pain of modelling the ion channels, capacitance, and resistance of every patch of membrane on the whole neuron's surface.
That should buy a few years' worth of Moore's law for your prediction. Consider yours an upper bound, and assume we can make shortcuts to bring it sooner than 2040.
I actually think the top supercomputers are within spitting distance of modelling a human brain - or at least smaller mammalian brains now. The trouble is that despite what TFA leads you to believe, far too little is known yet about the interconnections of those neurons. Even less is known about their learning functions. The state of the art in much of the brain is to stick a few electrodes in, hope you find a couple of neurons that are connected in some way, record for a while and then do statistics on their firing patterns to estimate the strength an type of their pairwise connection. Then by using that they hope to work backwards to deducing the connection patterns of whole clusters of neurons. It's slow, messy work.
The group in TFA uses thin slices of brain where they can more accurately observe which neurons are connected to which, and which neurons they are recording from. It's a useful technique, but since the connections in the brain are three-dimensional, taking thin slices fundamentally alters the structure. It can't tell us anything.
Much of the brain is still a black box, effectively. It will still be a while before we can model an entire brain, regardless of CPU power available. My personal gut feeling is that the understanding of the neuronal network is far more the limiting factor at this point.
you gotta be kidding. plain AA/AAA batteries are the WORST way to go.
First of all, they aren't rechargable which creates a steady flow of dead batteries polluting our environment.
Um, I have a charger and a tall stack of rechargeable AA/AAA batteries I use for everything in my house like remotes, cordless mice, etc. And a plastic battery rack to store the charged batts. Don't you?
Second, it ends up costing more money for your mp3 player because you have to constantly purchase more batteries.
See above.
you should get an mp3 player with an easily replacable, rechargable battery.
Maybe. I do agree it would be nice to be able to pull the battery out of my mini and slap a spare fully-charged one in there. Sometimes I realize it's empty and I forgot to plug it in, so I have to go out for my run with no music because I can't wait an hour for it to charge.
But... have you ever seen the inside of an iPod mini? If so you'd realize the thing would be a lot bigger if they had to fit big round AAAs in there. You'd need three AAAs to match the capacity of the new generation iPod mini battery (3.7 volts, 600mAh).
Oh, and about 4 million "morons" bought devices whose batteries cannot be changed, fyi.
Apparently, four million morons wanted them anyway. Believe it or not, the benefits of an integrated battery (simplicity, small size, avoiding the hassle of putting separate batteries in a charger and maybe losing them, etc.) are worth it to many. Most people waste money on alkaline batteries just because they hate the hassle of rechargeables...
Besides, it's probably far more than 4 million, because most cellphones have integrated rechargeable batteries as well.
But I think if you WERE to do removeable batteries in such a device, they should be standard AA or AAA. Those are plentiful and cheap. Using a proprietary rechargeable would give you the hassle of removeables PLUS the hassle of a separate charger and expensive, proprietary batteries. I remember going through that with my first cellphone- it was a pain in the a$$.
It doesn't apply to me, sadly, because my iPod is a mini. But barely ten months after I got it, the battery only lasted ~25 minutes of play time and only showed 75% charge immediately after unplugging from a full charge.
Yes, and that theory is highly founded in statistics, including observations of large numbers of civilizations over extensive time. Scientists and historians are quite confident that it holds for the average intelligent species at least 99.9% of the time.
The theory certainly is not just the "theorist" making shit up, and definitely has nothing to do with his/her attitude about nuclear weapons and/or politics at the time the statement was made./snark off
A large percentage of people believe that earth has already been visited by aliens and some people believe that aliens are studying earth right now.
Exactly how much evidence do you have to prove that these statements are not true?
I don't believe them either, but I don't really concern myself with people believe things where there really isn't much evidence one way or the other. I'm a lot more worried about people believing things that are provably untrue, like, say, that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
If, suddenly, 50 or 60 security flaws are detected in various Apple products I'm sure that patches would be developed quickly, but will they be deployed as quickly as Microsoft currently deploys them? Would the users install them? No!
Um, I've been doing daily updates of my computer since OS X was released five years ago. When security flaws have surfaced, I've found them to be patched within 48 hours and available immediately. A pop-up tells me they're there, I click and auth, and I'm done. I can install them while working on other stuff and don't usually even have to reboot. OS X auto-update has been around forever and Apple is extremely good about updating quickly.
Back when that feature was first available on Macs, Windows 2000 was the state of the Microsoft are: it required you to manually visit a website, and reboot after each individual patch. Thousands of Win2k boxen are STILL not up to date.
On top of it, many windows security patches take weeks to months to emerge when an exploit is published. Some aren't released as patches, instead are rolled into the next Service Pack, whenever the hell that gets out. And then... other vulnerabilities don't get fixed even then. SP2 left, what, half a dozen known IE vulnerabilities unpatched?
I'm comfortable running an OS X box -even one running 10.1 or 10.2 - on the internet with no external firewall, if necessary, knowing that any security flaws will be fixed rapidly. I couldn't do that with any of my windows boxes, even the most modern XP SP2 machines, without breaking down in terror over what might happen to my data.
Get a Kinesis with programmable macros
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I use a Kinesis Countoured Programmable keyboard with a footswitch. Mine is in Dvorak layout, but they're switchable in hardware., so use whatever you like. Among other things, I use one of the footswitches as the shift key. That solves part one of your problem. In addition, most of the modifier keys are under your thumbs, which get six keys each instead of sharing just the spacebar.
Aside from the ergonomic benefits (this thing cured my tenosynovitis in college a decade ago and I've never looked back), the keyboard can program a macro to any key. And, it has an additional modifier key that lets you define a second meaning for every key - the idea being that you use this to emulate a keypad.
I use the second layer to define code macros. HTML macros on the left, C-style code macros on the right. I use one of the footswitches to activate the second layer. So, for example,[right foot][k], meaning the key under my middle finger, home row, gives me this:
for (*;;) { }
Where the * represents the location of the cursor after the macro runs, since the macros can include arrow keys. All that from a foot-tap and one non-pinkie homerow keystroke. I make new macros on the fly when I find I'm retyping something too often. Like an identifier, if I'm not in an IDE with auto-complete, or deleting the first character of every line, if i'm in an editor without rectangular selection.
Tapping the footswitch and hitting middle-homerow-left gives me:
<table> *</table>
I have equivalent macros for every HTML entity I use frequently. If I need to add a code around existing text, I use the shifted macro, which I've defined to be "cut - type macro - arrow between the codes - paste". I manage to bang out most programming code and most HTML without touching shift. And most of the long complex strings - like your example - take only a few keystrokes.
When I have to use my laptop, I feel pretty crippled. So I often carry the kinesis with me. Fortunately, all those macros are in hardware, so I can. And the USB keyboard is Mac/PC switchable: it's plugged into my KVM and I drive my windows, mac, and linux boxes all with the same macros. Great for cross-platform development and testing.
By the time holographic discs are around and reach 250G or 1TB, hard drives will be 10TB.
Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.... still waiting. It's never been the case, and probably never will be, because it's much harder to make reliable removable media, period.
I'm going to make one risky point here. I liked that scene: Anakin's near nervous breakdown after the death of his mom, because it gave me the one thing that I felt was entirely lacking from the original trilogy.
Lucas has created this whole mythos that negative emotion - "anger, fear, aggression" - are risky for Jedi in a way that they aren't for other people. As if those emotions are addictive, or overwhelmingly compelling, or something. That if you don't religiously avoid them, you can get sucked to the Dark Side against your will.
Yet in the whole first trilogy, I just never bought it. In the RotJ Luke vs. Vader battle scene, supposedly Luke was right on the edge, but Mark Hamill just never sold it. I watched him Get Real Mad (TM) and open up a Can of Whoop Ass (TM) on Vader, but I never once actually felt any real risk that he would go to the Dark Side. It sure looked like all the world as if Luke could get as pissed as he wanted, kick as much ass as he needed, and still be good old Luke. As much as I loved the original movies, I had to just take it on faith that "negative emotions are dangerous for Jedi".
In Anakin's nervous breakdown, for all the other faults of that scene and movie, I felt like the actor managed to bring across the sense of anguish: that the character was succumbing to a madness and psychological instability that plausibly led to the Dark Side. It made the "risk of bad feelings" mythos real for me for the first time in five movies.
Otherwise, bash the first movies however you will and I won't defend them, even if I like them more than most slashdotters seem to. (It seems out of fashion to enjoy Eps I and II, these days, but when did I ever care about being cool?)
But that one moment definitely added something the series needed.
That's a sunk cost, and it can only serve to bias your decision. Rather, you should be considering, from where you stand right now, what your best options are for the future.
If you get more usability, security, performance, or what have you, out of Linux than you do out of MacOS X, then it does not matter whether or not you have already paid for MacOS X.
This is true, but the article title implied that the reason for installing Linux was that it was free. If that means free as in beer, then it's a specious argument, precisely because the cost of OS X has already been paid: you cannot save money by installing Linux.
Indeed, if your time has monetary value, as everyone does, then taking the time to install Linux in fact adds cost.
afaik, telomerase breaks down telomeres, no matter what kind of cell you have.
That's upside-down. Telomeres automatically shorten themselves with every cell division. Cells with very short telomeres die. This acts to limit cell divison, and probably exists (among other reasons) to limit runaway growth like cancer. Telomerase is not involved in this process at all, and in fact is not present in most normal cells.
Telomerase acts to lengthen telomeres so that the cells in question can keep dividing. Telomerase exists likely so that cell which do need to divide forever (like germ cells and bone marrow cells) can overcome the telomere limit imposed on the rest of the body.
afaik, telomerase breaks down telomeres, no matter what kind of cell you have.
Again, that's backwards. Most cancer cells express telomerase where the normal cell wouldn't. This lengthens the telomeres and allows cell division to continue.
Thus, inhibiting telomerase will re-impose the division limit on cancer cells, suppressing tumor growth. That's what this study claims to do.
Summary:
Telomere: passive cancer suppressor/division limiter present in every cell.
Telomerase: enzyme to allow a few special-case cells to keep dividing despite telomeres.
Cancer: often turns on telomerase in cell types where it should be dormant.
how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?
Actually, what you describe exists. There's a team that was making, a decade ago, transparent gelatinous cubes containing bacteriorhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein similar to the light sensor in your own optical rods in your retina.
By indexing the cube with two different lasers simultaneously, you could cause the bacteriorhodopsin in an indexable 3D location to switch between two different conformations (foldings), or read fluorescence which indicated its' current configuration. Thus storing a rewritable bit in a small region of a 3D transparent cube of "jelly blubber". Data did in fact get read out "where two laserbeams cross".
I think the rapid growth of HD sizes, coupled with the fact that you have to keep the cube moist, is why they've not managed to make a marketable product yet. (Incidentally, allowing the cube to dehydrate would make the data unreadable. But, it didn't destroy it. If you rehydrated the cube, you could get the data back... which is kinda cool...)
Not only that but they couldn't possibly get insurance on a vehicle who's brakes can not be replaced due to the part not being available.
Ford doesn't make replacement brakes for model T's, either. Yet people still collect, own, and yes even in some circumstances drive them.
Because there are collectors, there is a market, and *someone* makes replacement parts, even if it's a machinist down the block making them custom.
The EV1 would have made a fantastic collectible, even if it wasn't licensable as a primary driving vehicle. No court in this country would have listened to a collector trying to sue GM after his unlicensed EV1's brakes failed. GM could easily have sold them off to collectors at the very least.
Someone would have been willing to make custom replacement parts (even computerized ones) for collector's EV1's, because their existence would have made a market for it.
GM's argument is a red herring - they explicitly wanted the cars to disappear, and they aren't saying why.
but all this does is shift the pollution elsewhere
Shifting the pollution elsewhere can be a very good thing.
It is a LOT easier and more cost-effective to scrub emissions at a few large single sources (electrical generation plants) than at a few million tiny ones (automobiles). Also, you can and usually do locate your generation facilities away from population centers where emissions would be more likely to cause health problems in humans. That's impossible to do if the combustion is occuring directly in people's commuting vehicles.
"Shifting the pollution elsewhere" is exactly the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Dream on, Kemosabe.
Slashdot's editors have never applied journalistic integrity standards to themselves, and never will. Given the amount of traffic
They make money by the boatload doing what they're doing. There's no evidence that integrity would improve their situation. QED.
that leaves us with 130 million stars, spread out over 11 billion cubic lightyears. Since we have an even distribution of stars, that means intelligent life will happen once every 85 million light years.
Can't be. The diameter of the Milky Way is only about 100,000 ly, so the average star-to-star spacing of any set of stars within it simply can't be 85 million ly. Check your math.
Absolutely. My currently application requireds audio input and output, and does a lot of complex real-time signal analysis and transformation, using a multithreaded dataprocessing library I built in pure Java. It even has a slick little gui.
It builds and runs - including the microphone input - on Mac, Windows, and Linux without a single byte of code change.
Somehow I doubt Apple's processor switch is going to affect my development workflow in the slightest.
As someone who is receiving my PhD in "Computation and Neural Systems" from Caltech this week, and having worked briefly in that lab, I can tell you that the simulation you read about, which is called GENESIS probably simulated the neuron in much greater detail than is ultimately required to create a brain. It simulated the entire physiology and chemistry of the neuron ... every ion flow, trans-membrane voltage, etc. One of the many goals is to explore precisely what information-processing behavior arises from the chemistry and biology.
But, once you determine that information-processing behavior, one should in theory be able to simulate that without a detailed model of the underlying structure. I mean, if I know that impulses from X input synapses cause the voltage at the soma to raise/lower according to a certain time function, and that a certain voltage at the soma causes an action potential to be fired, which will trigger the neuron's own output synapses to fire Y milliseconds later, I should be able to simulate these properties without going to the pain of modelling the ion channels, capacitance, and resistance of every patch of membrane on the whole neuron's surface.
That should buy a few years' worth of Moore's law for your prediction. Consider yours an upper bound, and assume we can make shortcuts to bring it sooner than 2040.
I actually think the top supercomputers are within spitting distance of modelling a human brain - or at least smaller mammalian brains now. The trouble is that despite what TFA leads you to believe, far too little is known yet about the interconnections of those neurons. Even less is known about their learning functions. The state of the art in much of the brain is to stick a few electrodes in, hope you find a couple of neurons that are connected in some way, record for a while and then do statistics on their firing patterns to estimate the strength an type of their pairwise connection. Then by using that they hope to work backwards to deducing the connection patterns of whole clusters of neurons. It's slow, messy work.
The group in TFA uses thin slices of brain where they can more accurately observe which neurons are connected to which, and which neurons they are recording from. It's a useful technique, but since the connections in the brain are three-dimensional, taking thin slices fundamentally alters the structure. It can't tell us anything.
Much of the brain is still a black box, effectively. It will still be a while before we can model an entire brain, regardless of CPU power available. My personal gut feeling is that the understanding of the neuronal network is far more the limiting factor at this point.
you gotta be kidding. plain AA/AAA batteries are the WORST way to go.
... have you ever seen the inside of an iPod mini? If so you'd realize the thing would be a lot bigger if they had to fit big round AAAs in there. You'd need three AAAs to match the capacity of the new generation iPod mini battery (3.7 volts, 600mAh).
...
First of all, they aren't rechargable which creates a steady flow of dead batteries polluting our environment.
Um, I have a charger and a tall stack of rechargeable AA/AAA batteries I use for everything in my house like remotes, cordless mice, etc. And a plastic battery rack to store the charged batts. Don't you?
Second, it ends up costing more money for your mp3 player because you have to constantly purchase more batteries.
See above.
you should get an mp3 player with an easily replacable, rechargable battery.
Maybe. I do agree it would be nice to be able to pull the battery out of my mini and slap a spare fully-charged one in there. Sometimes I realize it's empty and I forgot to plug it in, so I have to go out for my run with no music because I can't wait an hour for it to charge.
But
Oh, and about 4 million "morons" bought devices whose batteries cannot be changed, fyi.
Apparently, four million morons wanted them anyway. Believe it or not, the benefits of an integrated battery (simplicity, small size, avoiding the hassle of putting separate batteries in a charger and maybe losing them, etc.) are worth it to many. Most people waste money on alkaline batteries just because they hate the hassle of rechargeables
Besides, it's probably far more than 4 million, because most cellphones have integrated rechargeable batteries as well.
But I think if you WERE to do removeable batteries in such a device, they should be standard AA or AAA. Those are plentiful and cheap. Using a proprietary rechargeable would give you the hassle of removeables PLUS the hassle of a separate charger and expensive, proprietary batteries. I remember going through that with my first cellphone- it was a pain in the a$$.
It doesn't apply to me, sadly, because my iPod is a mini. But barely ten months after I got it, the battery only lasted ~25 minutes of play time and only showed 75% charge immediately after unplugging from a full charge.
I replaced it with a third-party 750mAh.
Yes, and that theory is highly founded in statistics, including observations of large numbers of civilizations over extensive time. Scientists and historians are quite confident that it holds for the average intelligent species at least 99.9% of the time.
/snark off
The theory certainly is not just the "theorist" making shit up, and definitely has nothing to do with his/her attitude about nuclear weapons and/or politics at the time the statement was made.
A large percentage of people believe that earth has already been visited by aliens and some people believe that aliens are studying earth right now.
Exactly how much evidence do you have to prove that these statements are not true?
I don't believe them either, but I don't really concern myself with people believe things where there really isn't much evidence one way or the other. I'm a lot more worried about people believing things that are provably untrue, like, say, that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
If, suddenly, 50 or 60 security flaws are detected in various Apple products I'm sure that patches would be developed quickly, but will they be deployed as quickly as Microsoft currently deploys them? Would the users install them? No!
... other vulnerabilities don't get fixed even then. SP2 left, what, half a dozen known IE vulnerabilities unpatched?
Um, I've been doing daily updates of my computer since OS X was released five years ago. When security flaws have surfaced, I've found them to be patched within 48 hours and available immediately. A pop-up tells me they're there, I click and auth, and I'm done. I can install them while working on other stuff and don't usually even have to reboot. OS X auto-update has been around forever and Apple is extremely good about updating quickly.
Back when that feature was first available on Macs, Windows 2000 was the state of the Microsoft are: it required you to manually visit a website, and reboot after each individual patch. Thousands of Win2k boxen are STILL not up to date.
On top of it, many windows security patches take weeks to months to emerge when an exploit is published. Some aren't released as patches, instead are rolled into the next Service Pack, whenever the hell that gets out. And then
I'm comfortable running an OS X box -even one running 10.1 or 10.2 - on the internet with no external firewall, if necessary, knowing that any security flaws will be fixed rapidly. I couldn't do that with any of my windows boxes, even the most modern XP SP2 machines, without breaking down in terror over what might happen to my data.
I use a Kinesis Countoured Programmable keyboard with a footswitch. Mine is in Dvorak layout, but they're switchable in hardware., so use whatever you like. Among other things, I use one of the footswitches as the shift key. That solves part one of your problem. In addition, most of the modifier keys are under your thumbs, which get six keys each instead of sharing just the spacebar.
Aside from the ergonomic benefits (this thing cured my tenosynovitis in college a decade ago and I've never looked back), the keyboard can program a macro to any key. And, it has an additional modifier key that lets you define a second meaning for every key - the idea being that you use this to emulate a keypad.
I use the second layer to define code macros. HTML macros on the left, C-style code macros on the right. I use one of the footswitches to activate the second layer. So, for example,[right foot][k], meaning the key under my middle finger, home row, gives me this:
Where the * represents the location of the cursor after the macro runs, since the macros can include arrow keys. All that from a foot-tap and one non-pinkie homerow keystroke. I make new macros on the fly when I find I'm retyping something too often. Like an identifier, if I'm not in an IDE with auto-complete, or deleting the first character of every line, if i'm in an editor without rectangular selection.
Tapping the footswitch and hitting middle-homerow-left gives me:
I have equivalent macros for every HTML entity I use frequently. If I need to add a code around existing text, I use the shifted macro, which I've defined to be "cut - type macro - arrow between the codes - paste". I manage to bang out most programming code and most HTML without touching shift. And most of the long complex strings - like your example - take only a few keystrokes.When I have to use my laptop, I feel pretty crippled. So I often carry the kinesis with me. Fortunately, all those macros are in hardware, so I can. And the USB keyboard is Mac/PC switchable: it's plugged into my KVM and I drive my windows, mac, and linux boxes all with the same macros. Great for cross-platform development and testing.
ASOT is strangely silent in this thread.
By the time holographic discs are around and reach 250G or 1TB, hard drives will be 10TB.
... still waiting. It's never been the case, and probably never will be, because it's much harder to make reliable removable media, period.
Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.
I'm going to make one risky point here. I liked that scene: Anakin's near nervous breakdown after the death of his mom, because it gave me the one thing that I felt was entirely lacking from the original trilogy.
Lucas has created this whole mythos that negative emotion - "anger, fear, aggression" - are risky for Jedi in a way that they aren't for other people. As if those emotions are addictive, or overwhelmingly compelling, or something. That if you don't religiously avoid them, you can get sucked to the Dark Side against your will.
Yet in the whole first trilogy, I just never bought it. In the RotJ Luke vs. Vader battle scene, supposedly Luke was right on the edge, but Mark Hamill just never sold it. I watched him Get Real Mad (TM) and open up a Can of Whoop Ass (TM) on Vader, but I never once actually felt any real risk that he would go to the Dark Side. It sure looked like all the world as if Luke could get as pissed as he wanted, kick as much ass as he needed, and still be good old Luke. As much as I loved the original movies, I had to just take it on faith that "negative emotions are dangerous for Jedi".
In Anakin's nervous breakdown, for all the other faults of that scene and movie, I felt like the actor managed to bring across the sense of anguish: that the character was succumbing to a madness and psychological instability that plausibly led to the Dark Side. It made the "risk of bad feelings" mythos real for me for the first time in five movies.
Otherwise, bash the first movies however you will and I won't defend them, even if I like them more than most slashdotters seem to. (It seems out of fashion to enjoy Eps I and II, these days, but when did I ever care about being cool?)
But that one moment definitely added something the series needed.
There are workarounds, but you won't like them.
I swear I heard Alan Rickman's voice reading this line to me.
One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other),
... TypeStyler!
IntelliDraw? PageMaker? umm.... LiveMotion? wait, wait, it's
Dunno. I give up.
That's a sunk cost, and it can only serve to bias your decision. Rather, you should be considering, from where you stand right now, what your best options are for the future.
If you get more usability, security, performance, or what have you, out of Linux than you do out of MacOS X, then it does not matter whether or not you have already paid for MacOS X.
This is true, but the article title implied that the reason for installing Linux was that it was free. If that means free as in beer, then it's a specious argument, precisely because the cost of OS X has already been paid: you cannot save money by installing Linux.
Indeed, if your time has monetary value, as everyone does, then taking the time to install Linux in fact adds cost.
Oops - second quote should have been:
most cancer cells inhibit telomerase to allow survival, so you'd have to inhibit the telomerase inhibitor.
afaik, telomerase breaks down telomeres, no matter what kind of cell you have.
That's upside-down. Telomeres automatically shorten themselves with every cell division. Cells with very short telomeres die. This acts to limit cell divison, and probably exists (among other reasons) to limit runaway growth like cancer. Telomerase is not involved in this process at all, and in fact is not present in most normal cells.
Telomerase acts to lengthen telomeres so that the cells in question can keep dividing. Telomerase exists likely so that cell which do need to divide forever (like germ cells and bone marrow cells) can overcome the telomere limit imposed on the rest of the body.
afaik, telomerase breaks down telomeres, no matter what kind of cell you have.
Again, that's backwards. Most cancer cells express telomerase where the normal cell wouldn't. This lengthens the telomeres and allows cell division to continue.
Thus, inhibiting telomerase will re-impose the division limit on cancer cells, suppressing tumor growth. That's what this study claims to do.
Summary:
Telomere: passive cancer suppressor/division limiter present in every cell.
Telomerase: enzyme to allow a few special-case cells to keep dividing despite telomeres.
Cancer: often turns on telomerase in cell types where it should be dormant.
how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?
Actually, what you describe exists. There's a team that was making, a decade ago, transparent gelatinous cubes containing bacteriorhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein similar to the light sensor in your own optical rods in your retina.
By indexing the cube with two different lasers simultaneously, you could cause the bacteriorhodopsin in an indexable 3D location to switch between two different conformations (foldings), or read fluorescence which indicated its' current configuration. Thus storing a rewritable bit in a small region of a 3D transparent cube of "jelly blubber". Data did in fact get read out "where two laserbeams cross".
I think the rapid growth of HD sizes, coupled with the fact that you have to keep the cube moist, is why they've not managed to make a marketable product yet. (Incidentally, allowing the cube to dehydrate would make the data unreadable. But, it didn't destroy it. If you rehydrated the cube, you could get the data back... which is kinda cool...)
Here's a link to
an early description of the technique from 1996.
Because the release would double the number of high-end games available for Linux, so it would get a lot of downloads.
... provided the RIAA gets to shock you on a per megabyte basis - negative conditioning.
The RIAA would never agree to per-megabyte shocking.
Because if you did it per-meg instead of per-file, then the MPAA would get to have all the fun; RIAA would feel left out.
I take it I'm not the only one who thinks the ipod's scroll wheel interface was designed by watching women masturbate?
This is why I think the iPod shuffle is ultimately doomed.
Unless they give it a "vibrate" mode.
Not only that but they couldn't possibly get insurance on a vehicle who's brakes can not be replaced due to the part not being available.
Ford doesn't make replacement brakes for model T's, either. Yet people still collect, own, and yes even in some circumstances drive them.
Because there are collectors, there is a market, and *someone* makes replacement parts, even if it's a machinist down the block making them custom.
The EV1 would have made a fantastic collectible, even if it wasn't licensable as a primary driving vehicle. No court in this country would have listened to a collector trying to sue GM after his unlicensed EV1's brakes failed. GM could easily have sold them off to collectors at the very least.
Someone would have been willing to make custom replacement parts (even computerized ones) for collector's EV1's, because their existence would have made a market for it.
GM's argument is a red herring - they explicitly wanted the cars to disappear, and they aren't saying why.
but all this does is shift the pollution elsewhere
Shifting the pollution elsewhere can be a very good thing.
It is a LOT easier and more cost-effective to scrub emissions at a few large single sources (electrical generation plants) than at a few million tiny ones (automobiles). Also, you can and usually do locate your generation facilities away from population centers where emissions would be more likely to cause health problems in humans. That's impossible to do if the combustion is occuring directly in people's commuting vehicles.
"Shifting the pollution elsewhere" is exactly the point.
So a 5 cent song will break before a 99 cent song?
Yeah, probably. A time-limited DRM system would likely be the only way to get the record companies to agree to this.