It actually fits in amazingly well, considering the major departure in form. The whole point is that this, like everything else in Buffy-world, is caused by some really bad creature. They admit the singing/dancing are not normal, not pretend to try and work it into the world of the show...
Thing is, the iPod isn't *just* a HD based player. It has so many nice little features that make it the best MP3 player to be had. The size, internal battery, elegant navigation system, simple, quick recharging, tremendous transfer speed, and just general good engineering all add up. None of them in and of themselves would be that great, but stick it all in the same package and you have a real winner. I haven't seen any portables that manage to really compete for a whole package. BTW...Xplay has been usable for many months now, and, being Mac-less, is the reason I bought my iPod.
If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
Which is exactly why a MEMS system would be great. You don't have a 1 mW laser per pixel, you have one (or three) light source(s) which are scanned across X by Y positions. Low power, very bright display. I just wonder how difficult it will be to scan fast enough & deal with timings. -Ted
Comic Book Guy: Last night's 'Itchy & Scratchy' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Contrary to popular belief, the main arguement against stem cell research and human cloning is not a religious one but an ethical one. (There is a difference).
However, for many the distinction is incomplete.
Once you start creating humans for the sake of bettering other humans, you have made the judgement that certain humans are worth more than others.
I'd suggest this occurs in nearly every society that's existed. To Americans, Americans are worth more than Mexicans or Somalians or Iraqis...When disasters occur, it's women & children first. When a cop is killed, the response amongst cops is greater than when a crack whore is killed. We make this judgement all the time, and by and large we accept it.
It does not matter that you never intend them to develop fully. Stem cells should be treated with the same respect as anything else human, because they could be part of a human.
Actually, it does for reasons discussed in other posts Re: complexity. 1 cell, blastula, embryo, fetus, 27-year old are all very different in types of existance. Where along the continuum "life" begins is a incredibly complicated question that society as yet does not agree on. By your definition of 'could be part of a human,' any stem cell (and likely any cell at all) could qualify, though the amount of work needed to make it so is overwhelming (though certainly feasible).
Once you start developing human tissues for specific and commercial or medical use
How about epidermal tissue grown from a burn victim's own spidermal stem cells? How about similar muscle fibers? How about individual muscle cells? How about the chemical signals that turn a cell into a muscle cell? Where do you draw the line of acceptable use?
it is only a matter of time before you jump to the logical conclusion that it would be easier to use an entire human. Maybe its a bum, maybe its an infant with a near zero chance of survival, but you are making your way down a slippery slope.
That is hardly the only logical conclusion, and I would submit that it is not even a logical conclusion. As for your bum off the streets argument, that is illogical. A large part of the reason for stem cell research is to avoid the need for such grotesque options.
It might look good at first, but you have to examine all the possible end scenarios, and you have to take the greatest care that the worst of those scenarios stays hypothetical.
Agreed, consideration of the potential uses is needed. However, Issue #1: thinking we could envision even a fraction of the possible end scenarios is naive. That's the thing about progress, you don't know where you'll get till you've gotten there.
Issure #2: I would submit there has not been a technology that has been left unexplored due to moral issues. Humanity simply does not work that way, and trying to make it so is an impossible task.
While on the topic (sort of) - what's the difference between Public Domain and BSD license?
BSD license is a license, one with very few restrictions (do what you want, but leave in the copyright notice), but still a license. Someone still has the copyright to the code. Public domain means no one can make any claim of copyrights to it at all. No one owns it, so in effect everyone does.
I find it interesting that the suggestion is to throw out the expansive verbal language in favor of any kind of point and click interface. I understand that brain usage argument, but it still seems odd to ignore this great tool evolved for communication and return to a time long ago of pointing and grunting. Why interact like a 1 year-old when you don't have to?
Again, where the hell do you get this? A matter of custom? I submit that anytime an MD dealing with the general public would use Dr., a PhD dealing in the same manner would as well. I'd love to hear when this is not true. Pretentious or not (and i'd argue that one too), the fact remains a Doctorate degree is a Doctorate degree. Personal experience suggests your claim of discouragement is lacking in validity.
In the US, PhD's are discouraged from using the title unless they are, in fact, MD's.
Excuse me?
That is just pure bull. Been to a research talk before? Yout know, where they introduce Dr. so-and-so? Ever looked at a faculty list for any graduate institution? Apparently someone forgot to tell these institutions.
And your average unversity isn't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars in salary to develop a complex app and then give it away for free to their competitors (ie, other universities).
Actually, that is often not true at all. Speaking as a grad student with experience in structural biology, the majority of programs actually used for NMR structures, X-raystructures, , molecular graphics, etc etc (the list it very long!) are all developed by university labs and given away free, generally open-sourced as well. Universities don't generally hold such things hostage, as there is the understanding that science is based on sharing, nor hoarding.
Cameras set up at Kingston University in London marked everyone coming into the computer lab as "criminal" as it predicted each individual was about to illegally download copyrighted music.
Makes me proud of my Vermont heritage. Remember The other senator from Vermont caused a pretty big stir when he stuck to his principles as well.
Leahy is one of the few politicians who can give politics a good name. In high school, he came to speak to our black history class (mind you, a class of 15 people, not the whole school, not an assembly) and discussed racism and politics. From that time on, I have had immense respect for him, while his policies and actions such as this only deepen it.
every real reviewer who saw it so far said it was the easiest to manage, including ipod
every reviewer (Cnet, forbes, techtv) said it looked super sleek and was nicely designed overal USB only is a bit of a let down but people please
Care to share any of those reviews? On CNet there is nothing useful save 3 user opinions (far too small an n). Forbes reads like nothing more than a press release. Techtv is also not terribly in depth nor quite so fawning as you suggest.
5 Hours to charge? That seems like a bit of a pain to me. Isn't an iPod somewhere around an hour? 10:1 vs 2:1 play to charge ratio is significant.
...that the education system is in complete shambles, when it becomes necessary to introduce courses like this.
Courses like what? Ones that are based on contemporary media? This isn't Simpsons 101, a guide to Bart...it uses a modern satire to discuss religious & philosophical issues in a contemporary setting.
In all likelyhood, they're the equivalent of the underwater soap-carving courses that engineering students take to "satisfy" the arts requirement component of their curriculum.
Maybe, maybe not...you certainly have no real basis to assume that. Course titles are often deceiving.
In the story, who's speaking up about the course? A biology major -- a geek who is apparently too dim to recognize that a broad education is valuable, and has chosen to take a flakey course to satisfy a requisite with minimum effort
Hey, why don't you jump to a few *more* conclusions based oon a single sentence. I bet this geek is ugly too, and has bad hygiene, and only cares about biology. Good god man, i am amazed by your powers of perception through a few quoted syllables.
Why on earth are the universities catering to this sort of limited, lazy thinking?
Well, I would think to hopefully eliminate your sort of limited, lazy thinking. Satire, especially well-done, interesting satire is perhaps *the* hardest style of writing to pull off on a continual basis. Just as something being really old does not mean it is classic, being really new does not make it useless, limited, or lazy. *That* kind of thinking is what i'd hope college eliminates.
The job of the university should be to create a graduation class of people who are going to lead the advancement of the arts and sciences
Perhaps, or perhaps just to produce productive citizens capable of reasonable thought on their own.
To do so, these people are going to require a broad education, one that has challenged them on all fronts and forced them to think creatively and thoughtfully. They need to be people who are eternally curious, doggedly determined, and, above all, brilliant.
A broad education is certainly a good thing, though you seem to want it broad only in certain areas...nothing contemporary apparently. As for your list of traits, i would submit none of those are learned in college, they are either in a person before, or will not be. Education can encourage curiosity & feed it, focus determination, and allow brilliance to shine through, but it will not instill any of these if they aren't there to begin with.
Serving up Simpsons swill as some sort of philosophy substitute is not doing anyone a favour.
Right, and serving up that swill of the masses that shakespeare wrote (and that *is* what it was at the time) won't help anyone. Or that wanker alexander pope, or voltaire, or... I would suggest the majority of 'classical' education contains the swill of any age along with its loftier cream.
Again, this is not saying 'be like bart,' it is using a particularly entertaining subject to illustrate the same kind of philosophical questions that have ben asked throughout history. (And therein lies the beauty of the Simpsons...)
As a side note, if our airline security is so good these days, how come they were abler to use 3 (or is it 4 - just heard Camp David got hit, don't know if this is true or not) airplanes as weapons?
Who said airline security is good? Asking 3 more questions doesn't make anything secure. -Ted
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yeah, sign me up for that job.
Oh wait.... nevermind.
-Ted
Probably 'cuz of what a bitch it is to find 3.25" disks. (;
-Ted
It actually fits in amazingly well, considering the major departure in form. The whole point is that this, like everything else in Buffy-world, is caused by some really bad creature. They admit the singing/dancing are not normal, not pretend to try and work it into the world of the show...
-Ted
Thing is, the iPod isn't *just* a HD based player. It has so many nice little features that make it the best MP3 player to be had. The size, internal battery, elegant navigation system, simple, quick recharging, tremendous transfer speed, and just general good engineering all add up. None of them in and of themselves would be that great, but stick it all in the same package and you have a real winner. I haven't seen any portables that manage to really compete for a whole package.
BTW...Xplay has been usable for many months now, and, being Mac-less, is the reason I bought my iPod.
-Ted
If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
Which is exactly why a MEMS system would be great. You don't have a 1 mW laser per pixel, you have one (or three) light source(s) which are scanned across X by Y positions. Low power, very bright display. I just wonder how difficult it will be to scan fast enough & deal with timings.
-Ted
Bart: What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.
-Ted
Wow, where did you get the One-True-Way-as-Told-by-Science book? I think I must've misplaced mine.
-Ted
However, for many the distinction is incomplete.
Once you start creating humans for the sake of bettering other humans, you have made the judgement that certain humans are worth more than others.
I'd suggest this occurs in nearly every society that's existed. To Americans, Americans are worth more than Mexicans or Somalians or Iraqis...When disasters occur, it's women & children first. When a cop is killed, the response amongst cops is greater than when a crack whore is killed. We make this judgement all the time, and by and large we accept it.
It does not matter that you never intend them to develop fully. Stem cells should be treated with the same respect as anything else human, because they could be part of a human.
Actually, it does for reasons discussed in other posts Re: complexity. 1 cell, blastula, embryo, fetus, 27-year old are all very different in types of existance. Where along the continuum "life" begins is a incredibly complicated question that society as yet does not agree on. By your definition of 'could be part of a human,' any stem cell (and likely any cell at all) could qualify, though the amount of work needed to make it so is overwhelming (though certainly feasible).
Once you start developing human tissues for specific and commercial or medical use
How about epidermal tissue grown from a burn victim's own spidermal stem cells? How about similar muscle fibers? How about individual muscle cells? How about the chemical signals that turn a cell into a muscle cell? Where do you draw the line of acceptable use?
it is only a matter of time before you jump to the logical conclusion that it would be easier to use an entire human. Maybe its a bum, maybe its an infant with a near zero chance of survival, but you are making your way down a slippery slope.
That is hardly the only logical conclusion, and I would submit that it is not even a logical conclusion. As for your bum off the streets argument, that is illogical. A large part of the reason for stem cell research is to avoid the need for such grotesque options.
It might look good at first, but you have to examine all the possible end scenarios, and you have to take the greatest care that the worst of those scenarios stays hypothetical.
Agreed, consideration of the potential uses is needed. However, Issue #1: thinking we could envision even a fraction of the possible end scenarios is naive. That's the thing about progress, you don't know where you'll get till you've gotten there.
Issure #2: I would submit there has not been a technology that has been left unexplored due to moral issues. Humanity simply does not work that way, and trying to make it so is an impossible task.
-Ted
BSD license is a license, one with very few restrictions (do what you want, but leave in the copyright notice), but still a license. Someone still has the copyright to the code. Public domain means no one can make any claim of copyrights to it at all. No one owns it, so in effect everyone does.
-Ted
I'm sure personalized videos are just around the corner.
-Ted
I understand that brain usage argument, but it still seems odd to ignore this great tool evolved for communication and return to a time long ago of pointing and grunting. Why interact like a 1 year-old when you don't have to?
-Ted
-Ted
Excuse me?
That is just pure bull. Been to a research talk before? Yout know, where they introduce Dr. so-and-so? Ever looked at a faculty list for any graduate institution? Apparently someone forgot to tell these institutions.
-Ted
Funny, the sense I got from the screenshots was: "it's just too damn dark to see anything in here."
-Ted
Actually, that is often not true at all. Speaking as a grad student with experience in structural biology, the majority of programs actually used for NMR structures, X-ray structures, , molecular graphics, etc etc (the list it very long!) are all developed by university labs and given away free, generally open-sourced as well. Universities don't generally hold such things hostage, as there is the understanding that science is based on sharing, nor hoarding.
-Ted
Let's see:
You enter "http://msdn.microsoft.com" in your browser address bar.
Sounds much easier to me.
Gee, and where is the full, correct
-Ted
Cameras set up at Kingston University in London marked everyone coming into the computer lab as "criminal" as it predicted each individual was about to illegally download copyrighted music.
Wow, so it really does work!
-Ted
Wow, now there's a description of nearly everything ever created.
-Ted
Makes me proud of my Vermont heritage. Remember The other senator from Vermont caused a pretty big stir when he stuck to his principles as well.
Leahy is one of the few politicians who can give politics a good name. In high school, he came to speak to our black history class (mind you, a class of 15 people, not the whole school, not an assembly) and discussed racism and politics. From that time on, I have had immense respect for him, while his policies and actions such as this only deepen it.
-Ted
Um, either or? (;
-Ted
every reviewer (Cnet, forbes, techtv) said it looked super sleek and was nicely designed overal USB only is a bit of a let down but people please
Care to share any of those reviews? On CNet
there is nothing useful save 3 user opinions (far too small an n). Forbes reads like nothing more than a press release. Techtv
is also not terribly in depth nor quite so fawning as you suggest.
5 Hours to charge? That seems like a bit of a pain to me. Isn't an iPod somewhere around an hour? 10:1 vs 2:1 play to charge ratio is significant.
-Ted
I don't see that it does. Please explain why one media is less valid than another. And as an exercise, could you rank media in order of validness?
-Ted
Courses like what? Ones that are based on contemporary media? This isn't Simpsons 101, a guide to Bart...it uses a modern satire to discuss religious & philosophical issues in a contemporary setting.
In all likelyhood, they're the equivalent of the underwater soap-carving courses that engineering students take to "satisfy" the arts requirement component of their curriculum.
Maybe, maybe not...you certainly have no real basis to assume that. Course titles are often deceiving.
In the story, who's speaking up about the course? A biology major -- a geek who is apparently too dim to recognize that a broad education is valuable, and has chosen to take a flakey course to satisfy a requisite with minimum effort
Hey, why don't you jump to a few *more* conclusions based oon a single sentence. I bet this geek is ugly too, and has bad hygiene, and only cares about biology. Good god man, i am amazed by your powers of perception through a few quoted syllables.
Why on earth are the universities catering to this sort of limited, lazy thinking?
Well, I would think to hopefully eliminate your sort of limited, lazy thinking. Satire, especially well-done, interesting satire is perhaps *the* hardest style of writing to pull off on a continual basis. Just as something being really old does not mean it is classic, being really new does not make it useless, limited, or lazy. *That* kind of thinking is what i'd hope college eliminates.
The job of the university should be to create a graduation class of people who are going to lead the advancement of the arts and sciences
Perhaps, or perhaps just to produce productive citizens capable of reasonable thought on their own.
To do so, these people are going to require a broad education, one that has challenged them on all fronts and forced them to think creatively and thoughtfully. They need to be people who are eternally curious, doggedly determined, and, above all, brilliant.
A broad education is certainly a good thing, though you seem to want it broad only in certain areas...nothing contemporary apparently. As for your list of traits, i would submit none of those are learned in college, they are either in a person before, or will not be. Education can encourage curiosity & feed it, focus determination, and allow brilliance to shine through, but it will not instill any of these if they aren't there to begin with.
Serving up Simpsons swill as some sort of philosophy substitute is not doing anyone a favour.
Right, and serving up that swill of the masses that shakespeare wrote (and that *is* what it was at the time) won't help anyone. Or that wanker alexander pope, or voltaire, or... I would suggest the majority of 'classical' education contains the swill of any age along with its loftier cream.
Again, this is not saying 'be like bart,' it is using a particularly entertaining subject to illustrate the same kind of philosophical questions that have ben asked throughout history. (And therein lies the beauty of the Simpsons...)
-Ted
Huh? According to the CIA factbook Japan's population is ~ 1/2 the United States'.
Perhaps I'm being nit-picky, but I hope you are referring to the console-buying population or some other population
-Ted
As a side note, if our airline security is so good these days, how come they were abler to use 3 (or is it 4 - just heard Camp David got hit, don't know if this is true or not) airplanes as weapons?
Who said airline security is good? Asking 3 more questions doesn't make anything secure.
-Ted