That was Bill's net worth at one time, it has long ou since dropped
Which just shoots your argument in the foot further.
BTW, that article was dated 3 days ago. Bill Gates is worth, at a bare minimum, $34B based on his MSFT holdings. His financial planners aren't idiots (well, I'd think they wouldn't be - hell if I know) and he's diversified. The $98B estimate is not far off.
BTW, pledge means you're actually going to come up with the money. For some reason, I don't think the United Way is throwing a party right now.
The Gates Foundation has already been endowed with $21B from Bill Gates. And he's donated to other charities as well.
Do you really think they are going to be accepting handouts after his death?
Yes, of course. Because, clearly, they would be utterly incompetent and unable to earn a living without his money.
Melinda will undoubtably remain in a high position in the Gates Foundation, so it's not really an issue on that end. The children will certainly be given the best education available, go to whatever college they wish, and probably wind up at whatever corporation, law firm, hospital, etc. that they want. I seriously doubt that they'll be unable to earn a living for themselves, and it goes without saying that they will be given every advantage possible.
BTW, you may want to do some research on philanthropy. You seem to think that nobody ever gives away their fortunes. It happens far more often than you think, at both a small and large level.
What have you done? Anything even remotely like that regarding your net worth? Have you promised to give everything to charity (and not to your wife or children) like Bill has?
Didn't think so.
I'm not a Bill Gates fan, but I'm so sick and tired of people attacking the charity work that is being done. It's absolutely sick, and shows just how pathetic zealots can be.
The Gates Foundation has given over $5.5B over the past 8 years, with the majority being in the past 3. I don't know how much Bill and Melissa Gates seeded the foundation with.
I just love the zealots attacking the Gates Foundation. I'm no Bill fan, but the man has stated, repeatedly, that his wife and children will get none of the money and it will all go to charity. And the Gates Foundation is doing a lot of good work, completely unrelated to what Microsoft does. Unless, of course, you think that $50M to Botswana was a wise business investment. Or the several hundred million to fund an HIV/AIDS cure is just to get all those infected people to use MSFT products.
So, this guy gets out when he is 30yrs old, can find a job and move on with his life looking for more buildings to burn down. isnt there something wrong with that?
Well, presumably he'd be required to disclose his conviction to potential employers. I sure wouldn't hire him at that point - if he's a disgruntled employee then I don't want to hire him and possibly piss him off. If he's a fire bug then I just don't want him around, period. He could not report that he was convicted, but unless he gets an entirely new identity a routine background check will show the conviction. This is why more and more companies are doing background checks now.
As far as paying back the damages, it's the insurance company that's going to have to suck up the cost of replacement. Yeah, I know - it means everyone who uses that insurerer will have to pay higher premiums for some time. But they're the ones that would have to sue for damages. And they very well may. But getting repaid is obviously not going to happen.
The idea of debtor's prison is long gone, and for a good reason. The idea was that if you caused material harm then you could be thrown in jail until you repaid the harm. But it's rather difficult to earn money when imprisoned, which leads to a rather vicious circle. Debtors prison was often used to perpetually incarcerate political or business opponents. Let's not even think about bringing it back.
Makes me wonder if the RIAA/MPAA actually had someone clever enough to have foreseen this back in 1998 when the Bono bill was passed, or if they just lucked into it.
Luck.
They lobbied for the bill because the 1976 copyright extention act wasn't going to be long enough for some works -- like Steamboat Willie whose copyright (under the '76 law) would expire in 2003. Because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act it will now expire in 2023.
If the Supreme Court rejects Eldred's case then expect to see another copyright extention lobbied for (and probably won) circa 2015. Disney, et. al. aren't stupid -- they start the campaign several years in advance to avoid, uh, "problems".
I can't think of a Disney movie that wasn't based off a legend or folklore. Even The Lion King and Mulan fall into this category, it's just that they're not well known by Western audiences.
His point was that while Beauty & the Beast is a well known story that is in the public domain, Disney has so squatted on the copyright that trying to make an independant production of it now is likely to get you sued.
As opposed to the alternate situation, where everytime it would need to be deployed the insurance company has to cough up payment to everyone who was affected by the "uncontrolled flight into terrain"? If you happen to survive then they're buying you a new plane too...
This is presuming that the parachute is only deployed in extreme situations where gliding or a glide landing was no longer viable of course.
somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
The most obvious case is It's a Wonderful Life.
The movie was a dismal failure in the box office when released. It languished from that point on until it lapsed into the public domain because a copyright extention was not filed. The networks and independant channels picked it up and used it as filler during Holiday season -- not because they considered it good, or warm and Christmas-y, but because it was cheap. Real cheap. As in free.
If it weren't for this then what is now considered a Christmas classic would've probably rotted away in a vault somewhere. And while I'm sure there are people who wish it would, because they've seen it too much, most people do consider it a good movie, at least the first time or two.
Oh... and ever wondered why it isn't blasted all over the TV during the holidays now? Because it was discovered that while the movie is in the public domain, the screenplay (or maybe the soundtrack) is not. So that copyright is now being used to control the work as a whole.
There are thousands of books and hundreds of movies that were written in the early 1900s that are being lost because they're under copyright but are literally disintegrating. If they were in the public domain then groups like the Guttenburg Project could save them.
The key point is to remember that Copyright laws are there to enrich the public domain. Without copyright law then there is nothing illegal about someone stealing your work in whole. It's generally agreed that people would like recompensation for time spent, and so a limited duration copyright encourages people to publish works. The limited duration ensures that the work does eventually return to its natural state - free. Copyrights are a contrevience to encourage contribution to humanity. I think they're a necessary one as well. But I also think that copyright law has gone too far to one extreme and needs to be set aright.
The problem is, the hardware isn't the best. Apple's only real advantage is in the software side of things, where they possibly have the best consumer grade OS available right now.
The comparison is much more apt if you pay BMW prices for that Chevy Cavalier.
OS-X, however, does not justify the increased HW costs. At least not to me.
As best I could tell (and since I know very little about Apple HW I could very well be wrong), the PowerMacs were the only ones that had additional HD bays as well. That's more important to me than expansion slots.
As it happens I just bought a new PC (as in, the orders are being processed and the parts should be delivered next week). I'll be using precisely one slot - the AGP slot for video. Everything else (USB 2.0, Firewire, SATA, PATA, sound, network (x2), etc.) is on the motherboard. Sure, onboard sound is crap, but I'm not using good enough headphones or speakers for it to matter.
I didn't bother with a DVD-RW or DVD-ROM (I have one that I'll move over), but I at least have the expansion capabilities in the case for putting one in. Unless I bought a PowerMac the same wouldn't be true, at least as best I can tell.
Athlon XP 2100, 512 MB DDR, Nforce2 MB, 80 GB, 48/24/48 CD-RW, and 128 MB GeForce4 4200 for just under $1000. The price/performance compared to an Apple system continues to be staggering. It's why Apple has never succeeded in the general business market or in the home market to any large degree.
As an aside - can Apples use standard AGP cards, or do they have to have a special BIOS on them? If they could then the system I used as a price comparison falls by about $200 since Apple was wanting $350 for a GF4 Ti4200 (and one that's slower than the one I bought above).
Funny. I just comparison shopped. Yes it is. Partially due to idiotic moves by Apple like making the only expandable system be dual CPU. But even the base model system is well over 2x the price of an equivalent PC system.
Yeah, I could go for one of the eMacs, which are less expensive. And I can put together a PC for under $500 too (again, half the price of the eMac). Neither of which are options I'd go for.
I'd be interested in using OS X -- I've only played with it at CompUSA, but I have to say it looks slick. That and the Unix underbelly interests me.
Shame the hardware is 2-3x the price of equivalent PC stuff. It's not worth that, particularly when my home PC is mostly for playing games. It'd be nice for development work at work though.
She was writing a paper, lost it, and had to rewrite it. This lead to the purchase of an Apple PowerBook.
She was later picked for the Switch ad by pure chance and happy (?) coincidence. Apple asks her to write the "letter" to share the story behind her switch.
Thus they're both true. You misapplied cause and effect to imply an effect that wasn't there.
Have you every actually tried to parse a binary file that you didn't know the exact file spec for?
Yeah. It's no fun.
Ever tried to parse an XML file that you don't have the exact file spec for? It's not much more fun. At least excluding the absurdly trivial cases you just gave.
If you don't have the spec you are fucked, period, end of story. You can't reliably decode the file without spending hundreds (or more) of man-hours trying multitudes of files to ensure that you've figured out all the idiosynchracies.
Look, I've coded with binary. I've coded with XML. I've coded with flat file, CSV, and pretty much any other file format you care to discuss. XML is not a panacea, and I question that it's even an improvement over other formats.
Why do people think XML is a panacea for proprietary document formats?
[Insert binary blob of data that is currently a.doc file here]
Lookeee! Now it's XML. Isn't that so much better?
No, I don't think MS is going to do anything that awful, but realize that XML is not magic. It does nothing by itself to make a document more open. If you have lookup table values in the XML data then you're still screwed unless you know what the actual lookup table is. You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point. And look! You can do it with less memory and CPU. Funny that.
Blood that you get from blood banks is not the same as what comes out of your arm though -- donated blood is processed into three different parts - red blood cells, platelets, and plasma. White blood cells (leukocytes) are usually removed because they're often not well tolerated by the recipient.
Red blood cells are generally referred to as a "unit". It's fairly easy to type-match since there's only 8 different base types (A, B, AB, O, and +/- RH of each; RH factors can now be removed so it's no longer a big factor - I'm O+ but the red cross stalks me down every 56 days because I'm as good as an O- for being a universal donor).
Platelets are needed for coagulation - when you get a cut platelets gather at the area and cause the blood to thicken and form a scab.
Plasma is the majority of the blood - it's essentially a suspension which everything else is in. It's also how the body gets rid of wastes and transports stuff around (including red blood cells, horomones, etc).
Apparantly so... but how many patients die due to surgeon error while on the table? Or afterwards due to complications from surgery?
Complications include things like having your chest split open again a few hours later. Yes, it happens. I've had to pick up 12 units of blood for a patient that had this happen (and at one of the best cardiac hospitals in the US too, not some random place). Those 12 units lasted long enough to get him from ICU to surgery. No idea if he survived or not - I was just a gopher.
Will the robot be flawless? Seriously doubt it. But you don't reject a new tool just because it has flaws -- as long as it has fewer flaws (or, hell, even more predictable flaws) than the tool or method that preceded it.
I'm very sorry for the person that died, as well as their families, and I hope that whatever situation caused that will be analyzed and fixed so that it doesn't occur again.
Ok, so if you upgraded and bought a new system (because putting a GF Fx in that old of a system would be so deeply pointless it's not even funny) you'd be able to ditch at least 1 card and possibly 2 - the extra graphics card goes, since all GF Fx are dual-head capable, and possibly the TV card if you get a version with one built in (presuming they become available - it's a maybe).
Most people don't use all their slots. Of the four PCs I have at home none has more than 3 slots used, excluding AGP. My next PC will have 0-2 PCI slots used as well. The cost of an integrated MB is a non-issue - MBs with decent sound and ethernet cost only $10 more than the regular ones. And I've yet to see any benchmarks showing network speed issues from a Realtek chipset (not to mention that you won't even approach 10 Mbit, much less 100 Mbit, on cable/DSL). Computer sound is such utter crap that I don't see any reason to buy a soundcard either. I'm an audiophile and I've yet to hear a computer speaker setup that's worth a shit. When I want to hook my PC up to my stereo I'll buy an M-Audio card and do it right. Until then integrated is adequate.
The demo board, which NVIDIA demonstrated in an nForce2 system, produced a lot of heat. The air coming out of the fan grille is hot to the touch. While the system was quite loud overall, we could still make out the Flow FX fan - not a very positive trait. NVIDIA has promised to refine the design to make it quieter.
And, frankly, do you have any idea how loud some of the Ti4600 coolers are? 60dB+. No thanks.
2.5 years to be precise. The GF2 was released in May, 2000. I wound up having to buy one the 2nd day it was out, so I remember (old V2 setup wouldn't work in new system).
Doom 3, which isn't even on the release radar yet (2003? 2004?), is the first game that's going to require the pixel shaders of the GeForce 3 and beyond
Doom3 is allegedly scheduled for Christmas of 2003. I'd be surprised if they missed that, but id software is usually more focused on getting it done right than on time, so who knows.
As for the features - by that time everyone will be going out on the same limb. As usual, the D3 engine will be licensed by many people and all those games will require the same level of hardware. D3 will take advantage of most of the features present in the GF4/GFFx as well, so now we're back to the games being only a year behind the hardware.
I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage
Well, I have no idea what the power consumption of the GF Fx is, but it's not a 1:1 trade of speed to MHz - the GF Fx runs at a 500 MHz core, which is roughly a 40% improvement over the Ti4600. For that speed improvement you get (allegedly) up to 400% of the speed. Not bad.
Realistically, though, you've got to be kidding. Science and technology rarely deal with sudden massive jumps in capability or performance. It's all building blocks. If you want a sudden massive jump then you have to skip a few iterations.
Did I mention that I'm still using the aforementioned GF2? Yes, I'm looking to upgrade right now and I do expect a considerable leap in capability and performance.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs
So vote with your wallet and stop buying stuff you don't need. The only blatent wrongness is in buying crap you don't need and then whining about it being evil.
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That was Bill's net worth at one time, it has long ou since dropped
Which just shoots your argument in the foot further.
BTW, that article was dated 3 days ago. Bill Gates is worth, at a bare minimum, $34B based on his MSFT holdings. His financial planners aren't idiots (well, I'd think they wouldn't be - hell if I know) and he's diversified. The $98B estimate is not far off.
BTW, pledge means you're actually going to come up with the money. For some reason, I don't think the United Way is throwing a party right now.
The Gates Foundation has already been endowed with $21B from Bill Gates. And he's donated to other charities as well.
Do you really think they are going to be accepting handouts after his death?
Yes, of course. Because, clearly, they would be utterly incompetent and unable to earn a living without his money.
Melinda will undoubtably remain in a high position in the Gates Foundation, so it's not really an issue on that end. The children will certainly be given the best education available, go to whatever college they wish, and probably wind up at whatever corporation, law firm, hospital, etc. that they want. I seriously doubt that they'll be unable to earn a living for themselves, and it goes without saying that they will be given every advantage possible.
BTW, you may want to do some research on philanthropy. You seem to think that nobody ever gives away their fortunes. It happens far more often than you think, at both a small and large level.
Heh. We're both wrong!
Sigh.
It's Melinda. So the OP was closer than I was.
I'd be glad to see India going OS, since I think it's a far smarter choice than MS, but the rampant charity bashing is absurd.
And don't get me going on how generous they are, with MS giving away such small percentages compared to other corporations...
I don't know about MS, but you've managed to confuse and befuddle the distinction between Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Not to mention that his wife's name is Melissa, not Linda.
Or that Bill Gates has donated (or pledged to do so) $45.5B of his ~$98B net worth in the past 5 years.
What have you done? Anything even remotely like that regarding your net worth? Have you promised to give everything to charity (and not to your wife or children) like Bill has?
Didn't think so.
I'm not a Bill Gates fan, but I'm so sick and tired of people attacking the charity work that is being done. It's absolutely sick, and shows just how pathetic zealots can be.
The Gates Foundation has given over $5.5B over the past 8 years, with the majority being in the past 3. I don't know how much Bill and Melissa Gates seeded the foundation with.
But you give more of your net worth to charity? Really? More than 46% of your net worth has been donated to charity?
No. I didn't think so.
I just love the zealots attacking the Gates Foundation. I'm no Bill fan, but the man has stated, repeatedly, that his wife and children will get none of the money and it will all go to charity. And the Gates Foundation is doing a lot of good work, completely unrelated to what Microsoft does. Unless, of course, you think that $50M to Botswana was a wise business investment. Or the several hundred million to fund an HIV/AIDS cure is just to get all those infected people to use MSFT products.
Get off your damn high horse.
So, this guy gets out when he is 30yrs old, can find a job and move on with his life looking for more buildings to burn down. isnt there something wrong with that?
Well, presumably he'd be required to disclose his conviction to potential employers. I sure wouldn't hire him at that point - if he's a disgruntled employee then I don't want to hire him and possibly piss him off. If he's a fire bug then I just don't want him around, period. He could not report that he was convicted, but unless he gets an entirely new identity a routine background check will show the conviction. This is why more and more companies are doing background checks now.
As far as paying back the damages, it's the insurance company that's going to have to suck up the cost of replacement. Yeah, I know - it means everyone who uses that insurerer will have to pay higher premiums for some time. But they're the ones that would have to sue for damages. And they very well may. But getting repaid is obviously not going to happen.
The idea of debtor's prison is long gone, and for a good reason. The idea was that if you caused material harm then you could be thrown in jail until you repaid the harm. But it's rather difficult to earn money when imprisoned, which leads to a rather vicious circle. Debtors prison was often used to perpetually incarcerate political or business opponents. Let's not even think about bringing it back.
Makes me wonder if the RIAA/MPAA actually had someone clever enough to have foreseen this back in 1998 when the Bono bill was passed, or if they just lucked into it.
Luck.
They lobbied for the bill because the 1976 copyright extention act wasn't going to be long enough for some works -- like Steamboat Willie whose copyright (under the '76 law) would expire in 2003. Because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act it will now expire in 2023.
If the Supreme Court rejects Eldred's case then expect to see another copyright extention lobbied for (and probably won) circa 2015. Disney, et. al. aren't stupid -- they start the campaign several years in advance to avoid, uh, "problems".
I can't think of a Disney movie that wasn't based off a legend or folklore. Even The Lion King and Mulan fall into this category, it's just that they're not well known by Western audiences.
His point was that while Beauty & the Beast is a well known story that is in the public domain, Disney has so squatted on the copyright that trying to make an independant production of it now is likely to get you sued.
Hrm... I'm not even 30 and I have a net worth of around $100k.
Yeah. I suck.
As opposed to the alternate situation, where everytime it would need to be deployed the insurance company has to cough up payment to everyone who was affected by the "uncontrolled flight into terrain"? If you happen to survive then they're buying you a new plane too...
This is presuming that the parachute is only deployed in extreme situations where gliding or a glide landing was no longer viable of course.
somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
The most obvious case is It's a Wonderful Life.
The movie was a dismal failure in the box office when released. It languished from that point on until it lapsed into the public domain because a copyright extention was not filed. The networks and independant channels picked it up and used it as filler during Holiday season -- not because they considered it good, or warm and Christmas-y, but because it was cheap. Real cheap. As in free.
If it weren't for this then what is now considered a Christmas classic would've probably rotted away in a vault somewhere. And while I'm sure there are people who wish it would, because they've seen it too much, most people do consider it a good movie, at least the first time or two.
Oh... and ever wondered why it isn't blasted all over the TV during the holidays now? Because it was discovered that while the movie is in the public domain, the screenplay (or maybe the soundtrack) is not. So that copyright is now being used to control the work as a whole.
There are thousands of books and hundreds of movies that were written in the early 1900s that are being lost because they're under copyright but are literally disintegrating. If they were in the public domain then groups like the Guttenburg Project could save them.
The key point is to remember that Copyright laws are there to enrich the public domain. Without copyright law then there is nothing illegal about someone stealing your work in whole. It's generally agreed that people would like recompensation for time spent, and so a limited duration copyright encourages people to publish works. The limited duration ensures that the work does eventually return to its natural state - free. Copyrights are a contrevience to encourage contribution to humanity. I think they're a necessary one as well. But I also think that copyright law has gone too far to one extreme and needs to be set aright.
The problem is, the hardware isn't the best. Apple's only real advantage is in the software side of things, where they possibly have the best consumer grade OS available right now.
The comparison is much more apt if you pay BMW prices for that Chevy Cavalier.
OS-X, however, does not justify the increased HW costs. At least not to me.
As best I could tell (and since I know very little about Apple HW I could very well be wrong), the PowerMacs were the only ones that had additional HD bays as well. That's more important to me than expansion slots.
As it happens I just bought a new PC (as in, the orders are being processed and the parts should be delivered next week). I'll be using precisely one slot - the AGP slot for video. Everything else (USB 2.0, Firewire, SATA, PATA, sound, network (x2), etc.) is on the motherboard. Sure, onboard sound is crap, but I'm not using good enough headphones or speakers for it to matter.
I didn't bother with a DVD-RW or DVD-ROM (I have one that I'll move over), but I at least have the expansion capabilities in the case for putting one in. Unless I bought a PowerMac the same wouldn't be true, at least as best I can tell.
Athlon XP 2100, 512 MB DDR, Nforce2 MB, 80 GB, 48/24/48 CD-RW, and 128 MB GeForce4 4200 for just under $1000. The price/performance compared to an Apple system continues to be staggering. It's why Apple has never succeeded in the general business market or in the home market to any large degree.
As an aside - can Apples use standard AGP cards, or do they have to have a special BIOS on them? If they could then the system I used as a price comparison falls by about $200 since Apple was wanting $350 for a GF4 Ti4200 (and one that's slower than the one I bought above).
Funny. I just comparison shopped. Yes it is. Partially due to idiotic moves by Apple like making the only expandable system be dual CPU. But even the base model system is well over 2x the price of an equivalent PC system.
Yeah, I could go for one of the eMacs, which are less expensive. And I can put together a PC for under $500 too (again, half the price of the eMac). Neither of which are options I'd go for.
I'd be interested in using OS X -- I've only played with it at CompUSA, but I have to say it looks slick. That and the Unix underbelly interests me.
Shame the hardware is 2-3x the price of equivalent PC stuff. It's not worth that, particularly when my home PC is mostly for playing games. It'd be nice for development work at work though.
How are the two mutually exclusive?
She was writing a paper, lost it, and had to rewrite it. This lead to the purchase of an Apple PowerBook.
She was later picked for the Switch ad by pure chance and happy (?) coincidence. Apple asks her to write the "letter" to share the story behind her switch.
Thus they're both true. You misapplied cause and effect to imply an effect that wasn't there.
Have you every actually tried to parse a binary file that you didn't know the exact file spec for?
Yeah. It's no fun.
Ever tried to parse an XML file that you don't have the exact file spec for? It's not much more fun. At least excluding the absurdly trivial cases you just gave.
If you don't have the spec you are fucked, period, end of story. You can't reliably decode the file without spending hundreds (or more) of man-hours trying multitudes of files to ensure that you've figured out all the idiosynchracies.
Look, I've coded with binary. I've coded with XML. I've coded with flat file, CSV, and pretty much any other file format you care to discuss. XML is not a panacea, and I question that it's even an improvement over other formats.
I hate it when I forget to preview, and it bites me -- there was supposed to be this in there:
.doc file here]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE InvoiceDocument SYSTEM "msword.dtd">
<worddata>
[Insert binary blob of data that is currently a
</worddata>
Why do people think XML is a panacea for proprietary document formats?
.doc file here]
[Insert binary blob of data that is currently a
Lookeee! Now it's XML. Isn't that so much better?
No, I don't think MS is going to do anything that awful, but realize that XML is not magic. It does nothing by itself to make a document more open. If you have lookup table values in the XML data then you're still screwed unless you know what the actual lookup table is. You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point. And look! You can do it with less memory and CPU. Funny that.
As another poster said, it's roughly a pint.
Blood that you get from blood banks is not the same as what comes out of your arm though -- donated blood is processed into three different parts - red blood cells, platelets, and plasma. White blood cells (leukocytes) are usually removed because they're often not well tolerated by the recipient.
Red blood cells are generally referred to as a "unit". It's fairly easy to type-match since there's only 8 different base types (A, B, AB, O, and +/- RH of each; RH factors can now be removed so it's no longer a big factor - I'm O+ but the red cross stalks me down every 56 days because I'm as good as an O- for being a universal donor).
Platelets are needed for coagulation - when you get a cut platelets gather at the area and cause the blood to thicken and form a scab.
Plasma is the majority of the blood - it's essentially a suspension which everything else is in. It's also how the body gets rid of wastes and transports stuff around (including red blood cells, horomones, etc).
Until this technology is perfected and absolutely error-free/failsafe/100% accurate, I'll opt for the human to do the surgery.
Yes, because human surgeons are perfect!
That's why malpractice insurance is so damn cheap.
Apparantly so... but how many patients die due to surgeon error while on the table? Or afterwards due to complications from surgery?
Complications include things like having your chest split open again a few hours later. Yes, it happens. I've had to pick up 12 units of blood for a patient that had this happen (and at one of the best cardiac hospitals in the US too, not some random place). Those 12 units lasted long enough to get him from ICU to surgery. No idea if he survived or not - I was just a gopher.
Will the robot be flawless? Seriously doubt it. But you don't reject a new tool just because it has flaws -- as long as it has fewer flaws (or, hell, even more predictable flaws) than the tool or method that preceded it.
I'm very sorry for the person that died, as well as their families, and I hope that whatever situation caused that will be analyzed and fixed so that it doesn't occur again.
Doesn't help the noise floor, nor does it help your hearing in the long term.
Noise floor is the bigger issue -- if the fan is churning out 60 dB, then you aren't going to be able to hear anything quieter clearly.
Shrug, if it's a big enough issue then building a noise dampening box is easily doable.
Ok, so if you upgraded and bought a new system (because putting a GF Fx in that old of a system would be so deeply pointless it's not even funny) you'd be able to ditch at least 1 card and possibly 2 - the extra graphics card goes, since all GF Fx are dual-head capable, and possibly the TV card if you get a version with one built in (presuming they become available - it's a maybe).
Most people don't use all their slots. Of the four PCs I have at home none has more than 3 slots used, excluding AGP. My next PC will have 0-2 PCI slots used as well. The cost of an integrated MB is a non-issue - MBs with decent sound and ethernet cost only $10 more than the regular ones. And I've yet to see any benchmarks showing network speed issues from a Realtek chipset (not to mention that you won't even approach 10 Mbit, much less 100 Mbit, on cable/DSL). Computer sound is such utter crap that I don't see any reason to buy a soundcard either. I'm an audiophile and I've yet to hear a computer speaker setup that's worth a shit. When I want to hook my PC up to my stereo I'll buy an M-Audio card and do it right. Until then integrated is adequate.
From the Tom's Hardware article:
And, frankly, do you have any idea how loud some of the Ti4600 coolers are? 60dB+. No thanks.
years after the introduction of the GeForce 2
2.5 years to be precise. The GF2 was released in May, 2000. I wound up having to buy one the 2nd day it was out, so I remember (old V2 setup wouldn't work in new system).
Doom 3, which isn't even on the release radar yet (2003? 2004?), is the first game that's going to require the pixel shaders of the GeForce 3 and beyond
Doom3 is allegedly scheduled for Christmas of 2003. I'd be surprised if they missed that, but id software is usually more focused on getting it done right than on time, so who knows.
As for the features - by that time everyone will be going out on the same limb. As usual, the D3 engine will be licensed by many people and all those games will require the same level of hardware. D3 will take advantage of most of the features present in the GF4/GFFx as well, so now we're back to the games being only a year behind the hardware.
I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage
Well, I have no idea what the power consumption of the GF Fx is, but it's not a 1:1 trade of speed to MHz - the GF Fx runs at a 500 MHz core, which is roughly a 40% improvement over the Ti4600. For that speed improvement you get (allegedly) up to 400% of the speed. Not bad.
Realistically, though, you've got to be kidding. Science and technology rarely deal with sudden massive jumps in capability or performance. It's all building blocks. If you want a sudden massive jump then you have to skip a few iterations.
Did I mention that I'm still using the aforementioned GF2? Yes, I'm looking to upgrade right now and I do expect a considerable leap in capability and performance.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs
So vote with your wallet and stop buying stuff you don't need. The only blatent wrongness is in buying crap you don't need and then whining about it being evil.