My Firefox Add-ons window shows "Microsoft.Net Framework Assistant", version 1.1, with 'Options', 'Disable', and 'Uninstall' buttons. I'm still up in the air about whether I want to disable it completely, although I did open the options and set it to prompt before running ClickOnce applications.
To be honest though, parking a crap add-on and then blaming Firefox for any security issues over it would sound par for the course as per Microsoft...
Well, of course it is... After all, isn't being unable to prevent the company that controls the OS your program runs under from automatically installing unremovable exploit code a severe security hole in your program? So clearly it's a problem with Mozilla, and has nothing to do with Microsoft at all.
NCSoft did it both ways with Aion; there are multiple servers, but "inside" each server, a zone can have one or more "channels", each channel being a separate instance of the zone. The starting zones have ten channels, but the other zones typically only have 3 to 5, with the number of channels being managed to prevent players from being scattered too thinly across a zone or crowded too close together. NCSoft responded to the load at launch by adding two more servers; I think they would have done better to add more channels to the starting zones. However, because of the game background, NCSoft was not only managing the population of each server but the proportion of players on each side, so they had a number of variables to play with that complicated things.
NCSoft's superhero MMORPG, City of Heroes, handles load more dynamically; as a zone gets too crowded, the server dyamically spawns new instances of that zone and prevents people from entering a particular instance of a zone when it reaches capacity; I remember during one event seeing the choices of "Atlas Park", "Atlas Park 2", on up to "Atlas Park 9" when changing zones. CoH is a bit of an oddity in that the vast majority of its content is instanced, and it doesn't matter which zone instance you're in when you enter a mission, everyone on the team enters the same mission instance -- so a team that had players scattered across Atlas Park 2, 3, 5, and 7 could all go to their mission door and be back together once they enter the mission (and then choose which of the zone instances they want to exit into when the mission is done, so they stay together).
The article mentions that the ads are "only" 4-5 minutes in an hour, hardly anything compared to tv. So what are all the complaints about? Because it won't stop there. Advertisers basically want to chain their customer to their ads, forbid them to leave at pain of pain. They WILL increase the amount watched, make it harder and harder to skip until people finally rebel.
It's already happening. Look at how DVDs went from "the main screen where you could select options for viewing the movie" to "copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie" to "unskippable copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie" to "unskippable copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for viewing the movie and several trailers for other movies" to "unskippable copyright notice, followed by two to five 'previews' for other movies or products, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie and still more previews for other products". It's only a matter of time before the previews become as unskippable as the copyright notice.
This is talking about seeing an a billboard for Gatorade in a sports game on the walls of the arena, or walking into a "real" McDonald's while going on a murder spree in something like GTA.
It would probably not go over at all well with the original companies, but I could see a lot of humor possibilities if the game developers were allowed to take the products and make ads that were immersive for games the product's ads would not ordinarily be appropriate for. Take WoW, for example, and consider the possibilities of a Death Knight touting ArmorAll for keeping his gear clean and shiny, or a Tauren shaman doing a pitch for Nike shoes ("Wait. Why am I doing this? I don't even wear shoes?" "Cut! Take 23.").
6 - (I don't understand this claim; can somebody translate for me?)
There are several different types of licenses, of different durations, and a range of possible product keys, and there is some method to assign product keys to each type of license, with additional information being stored that tells the license-management system whether a product key can be shifted from one license type to another. I.e., the system could designate a particular license key as being valid for 30 days after first activation, and convertible to a full license, while another license key could be designated as valid for 60 days after first activation and cannot be changed. The former could be used for a trial copy of a program, where the user could pay for a full license and have it become a regular copy of the program, while the latter might be for copies of the software to be distributed to reviewers, and is intended to become unusable after the review period.
Not being a patent lawyer, my judgement may be suspect, but it appears that the whole process described in the application fails to meet the requirements set out in the recent In re Bilski decision, although since that has been appealed to SCOTUS, which has granted certiorari, the last word on that has yet to be heard. The application certainly doesn't make the process "tied to a particular machine or apparatus", given the text of claim 8, which would seem to make the application's validity hinge on whether changing the data fields associated with a license key in a database constitutes "transforming a particular article into a different state or thing".
All Google has to do is ignore Murdoch's content entirely until Murdoch learns his lesson or until his media empire collapses like the newspapers did.
"Yes, Mr. Murdoch, we'll pay a licensing fee for your content that we present on Google. By the way, here's our bill for returning your sites in search results." "It's the same amount as what you're charging us? That must be a mistake." "You're right; it is a mistake; it's 25% too low. Let me give you a new contract with the correct price."
I want to know where this class was $Big_Num years ago. I would have jumped at the chance to participate in such a class.
I took a class laughingly titled "Modern Science Fiction" in college, back in the late 70s. The material covered started with Shelley's Frankenstein, and finished in the early 50s without ever touching authors like E. E. 'Doc' Smith (much less Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Simak, Silverberg, or even Vernor Vinge, who was teaching mathematics there at the time); there were very few works that I would consider SF covered in the class. The telling point for me was discovering that the professor teaching the class did not, himself, actually read science fiction.
Art is not about beauty or aesthetics. Original art has warmth, depth and soul, similar to the way monster cables appeal to audiophiles. (Not that a *real* audiophile would be caught dead with anything as pedestrian as a monster cable, but I digress)
If you can't see the warmth, taste the depth, or perceive the soul of a piece of fine art, well, you are just a philistine and should just stay the f*** out of the museum.
And you miss the point as well. Art is inherently subjective. If you "can't see the warmth, taste the depth, or perceive the soul of a piece of fine art", then that piece is not 'fine art' to you; that doesn't prevent it from being 'fine art' to anyone else. For example, Jackson Pollock's paintings do nothing for me; to me, they may be 'art', but they're not 'fine art'. Many other people disagree; enough to value his paintings highly, have them displayed in museums, and make selling prints of them profitable. Art is inherently an artifact of our differences.
They're also creating a significant risk of destroying genetic diversity, made worse by the fact that they own patents controlling the genotypes that are hedging out the others. Crop genetic diversity isn't just important in some hippie "plant multiculturalism" sense -- it's important if you plan on your children being able to eat in the future.
To explain this in simple terms: - Today's genetically modified insect repellent high yield crop might be tomorrow's "mana from the gods" for some crop pest or other.
If one plant in a crop which is composed of plants all sharing the exact same DNA is/becomes susceptible to one kind of crop pest/disease (which is bound to happen sooner or later since said pests/diseases are also exposed to evolutionary pressures), then the whole crop will be susceptible.
For a clear and unambiguous demonstration of this, all you have to do is look at history -- the Potato Famine, where the "lumper" potato was the only variety of potato planted in Ireland; because potatoes can be propagated vegetally (i.e., just take an eye and plant it, and you get a new potato plant genetically identical to the original), the entire country was planting what was essentially a single genome, and when the potato blight Phytophthora infestans hit Ireland, it wiped out the crop across the entire country.
The same thing happened again in 1970, when the US lost over a billion dollars worth of corn to a single fungus because of widespread cultivation of a single corn variety. And again in the 1980s, when dependence on a single type of grapevine root forced California grape growers to replant two million acres of grapevines because of an infestation of a new species of the pest insect grape phylloxera attacked their crop. But the agribusiness industry just chugs along, fat, dumb, and happy, concentrating more and more of our crops into fewer and fewer species, setting farmers up for the next devastation.
What's wrong with "Parmesan-style", "Champagne-style", etc.
That's what "methode Champignoise" has been used for; it's just a high-falutin' way of saying "by the Champagne method", denoting a sparkling wine that has been produced identically to Champagne except for the origin of the grapes, but somehow the use of a foreign language to describe it makes the resultant wine more highbrow than the run-of-the-mill Chateauneuf du Plonque.
I am also concerned about the amount of public money being thrown about.
And this is something that needs to be considered carefully, in light of the fact that "global warming" -- renamed "global climate change" -- is so heavily politicised. Who benefits from a "crisis" of climate change, and who loses if it's revealed to be not only natural, but beyond our capacity to change? All the scientists -- meteorologists and otherwise -- who leapt so eagerly on the 'anthropogenic global warming' bandwagon have their credibility trashed. All of the government organizations set up to oversee the efforts to combat 'anthropogenic global warming' suddenly find themselves without a reason for existence, with no money for staff and no money to hand out as political plums to companies that come sucking up to them with blue-sky proposals for the Next Great Green Energy Source. Companies wouldn't have government programs throwing money at anything that looks as if it might pan out for reducing C02 emissions, or getting tax breaks for making process changes that make only symbolic reductions in their CO2 emissions. And all that has to be done to keep this going is to keep the populace whipped up about how grave the 'threat' of global warming is, and how we need to do something about it right away. There's far too much ego, money, and reputation already thrown into the issue for something as simple as facts to reverse its progress.
If they have this type of technology - why not just cure the paralysis.
Handwave it that the ability to regrow the damage causing his paralysis has to be started in the "golden hour" after the injury, and he was paralyzed before the process was developed. As argent observes, if they can grow an alien body, they can grow him a new one, but if the process is still too expensive to have filtered down to whatever level of medical care he's getting, that could explain why he's still wheeling around. Still, it is a nagging plot hole.
Go back and look at the diagram of the dam in the second BBC story; the control gates are at the top of the penstocks; all closing them rapidly would do is deprive the turbines of a source of fast-moving water to drive them. The "hydraulic impact" you are describing comes from the opposite action -- slamming the gates open, which suddenly drops water through the penstocks and into the turbine, which can't spin up instantly, and usually fails explosively. For the same reason, you don't want to open the feed full on a steam turbine (with the additional complication that, if the turbine is cold, the thermal shock can damage the turbine blades even if the impact of the steam jet doesn't rip it apart).
The problem with balancing classes is that all classes are essentially expected to fulfill the same basic role - namely, that they are adventurers (well, in sword&sorcery/fantasy MMOs) out to kill monsters for xp/lewt. Can you please explain to me how a wizard's training would be furthered by killing hordes of monsters? Or a thief's? Or a cleric's? For some kind of a warrior or gladiator or what have you, I can see it making sense, at least to a point.
It would depend on the circumstances. True, the classic 'scholar of abstruse lore in a tower' mage wouldn't be going out zapgunning monsters for kicks, but if you tweak the world background a bit so that combat mages are the 'artillery' of armies, then you would have mages who need to learn how to handle throwing spells around while someone's trying to beat on them; you could take the other kind and make them the ones who provide a good chunk of the training for the PC mages, making them go out after the relics and materials they needed for their spells in exchange for teaching them. For a thief, it's a lot harder to justify; aside from looting the field after the battle is over, I don't see a reason why a thief would want to get within _miles_ of a battle, or go adventuring. Clerics can swing in a number of different ways; you have militant orders that would be trained for combat, but then you need to work into the game a reason why they would be running around doing the random quests, rather than training for the battles to defend the faith.
However, developing from the start with the intent of incorporating PvP and balancing PvP before balancing PvE ensures that PvP will integrate with the rest of the gameplay, instead of being spatchcocked onto PvE. To use your example, City of Heroes was released with no PvP at all, and when the developers decided to add PvP, it exposed a number of severe imbalances between the archetypes, as well as hate and discontent from the player base as the developers made change after change to the game mechanics while weaseling from "We won't make any PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make any PvE changes for purely PvP reasons" (with convoluted explanations of why something that was a problem in PvP but had never been a problem in PvE really was a problem in PvE to justify 'movement suppression' being implemented in both PvP and PvE), and eventually ripped out the entire PvP mechanics and replaced it with a completely redesigned (and more byzantine) set of PvP-only mechanics that gimped many character builds that had been tweaked to work well under the old mechanics.
While I don't care for PvP in general (my experience being that it suffers too much from the problems of "Me and my fifteen friends can mop the field with you all by your lonesome" and "This character I've been tweaking for two years using all the gold I can buy can mop the field with your character you've been playing for two weeks", both leavened with big helpings of "H4 H4 H4! PWNZ0RD UR AZZ B10TCH!" attitudes from people whose sole apparent validation of themselves as people seems to be how many players they can dry-gulch using a massive advantage while running away hurling insults if it even looks as if the fight is going to be close to fair), NetDevil's route is by far the better way to go about it; AI for NPCs in games is still significantly less capable than a live player can be, and it's much easier to tweak the way the game cheats to balance this deficit in PvE is much less obtrusive than the kind of changes that are required to take a PvE game and try to balance it in PvP.
Re:What Plunky is talking about
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Tron Legacy Exposed
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· Score: 3, Informative
When you create something under copyright, you are making a contract with the government; the government establishes your legal right to control copying of that work (and the profits thereof) for a specified period of time, during which the government will enforce penalties for infringement of your copyright, after which the work becomes freely available to all. You agreed to that contract when you filed the copyright. Now you come back, seventy years later, and claim that -- even though you already agreed that your work would fall into the public domain five years from now -- you deserve to have the terms of that contract changed, and should be allowed to continue to profit from and control distribution of that work. You already got the term of protection you agreed to, and you're arguing that you shouldn't have to be required to carry out your end of the agreement.
Yes, Disney still makes money off Mickey Mouse, both as copyrighted cartoons and as a trademark. However, the work "Steamboat Willie" was created and copyrighted for a specific period of time, which would have by now expired, making the cartoon public domain. Disney went back to Congress and lobbied successfully to get the term of copyright changed retroactively. And that is what the "huge issue" is. I don't think that people would have had a problem with the Copyright Term Extension Act if its effect were to amend the term of copyright so that any copyrights granted after it took effect had a longer term. What is objectionable about the Act is that it went back and changed the terms of copyrights that already existed -- and I fully expect Disney to keep going back, as the extended copyrights come up on expiration, to go back to Congress again and again, attempting to keep control of their creations in perpetuity, rather than being required to comply with their obligation to release them into the public domain.
Read the article more closely; it's not about cloning at all. The reprogrammed stem cells were injected into already-developing embryos to create artificial chimeras -- mice that contained cells from the donor line, not just the parents'. The intent of the research is to achieve true cloning, but they still have to get past the hurdle of starting the embryonic development. However, using this technique to grow organs, since the organs will grow as part of the embryos' normal development, will be "harvesting our own young" -- taking normal embryos, usurping them to grow organs with another genotype, and then removing them for use as transplants. Getting organs to grow in vitro is a much more complex and daunting prospect.
For one, the size and weight of books. For a casual reader, the KindleDX is overkill. It's large, expensive and the benefits don't outweigh the hassles (recharging, fragility, etc). For those of us that have large libraries of tech books, the KindleDX allows us to store our entire bookshelf on a single device that takes up less room and weighs significantly less than a single book.
No. You are missing the point. A Kindle 2 or a Kindle DX allows you to store your entire bookshelf on a single device for you to read. If I have 500 books on my bookshelf, I can read any of them I want... and I can loan one to my friend, or to my neighbor, or to a co-worker, and we can all be reading those books at the same time. If I have 500 books on my Kindle, I can read them. If I want my friend, or my neighbor, or my co-worker, to read one of those books, I have to loan them all of them at once, by loaning them my Kindle, which prevents me from reading any of them. And I can only loan books to one person at a time, because there is only one interface to access the stored books. And I'm willing to bet that the manufacturers of the various e-book readers are counting on this; where someone might have bought a book and loaned it to several people after reading it, when Amazon sells a Kindle book, they know that that buyer, if they like the book enough to recommend it to others, becomes an unpaid sales agent for them -- if they'd bought a dead-tree edition, they could say "Here, you need to read this" and hand them the book, and Amazon makes nothing unless that person decides they need their own copy. But if the first person only has a Kindle edition, the second person has to buy their own copy, or find someone who has a dead-tree edition to borrow it.
Third point: When using ebooks for reference (or following a tutorial in the book) while you're doing work on the laptop, it's nice to have a separate device. This was one reason why I stuck to buying physical books rather than purchasing PDFs exclusively.
However, both the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX, while they work very well for reading through a book, and are much more convenient to carry around than a half-dozen reference works, fall down badly when you try to use them as a reference book. For example, when I'm looking up how to do something in a book on, say, SQL Server Integration Services, I would look up the task in the index, then page back to that part of the book, a task which a properly-organized Kindle document can handle. While I'm reading that section, it references doing a subtask, which was explained two chapters earlier. With a hardcopy book, I can flip back in chunks of pages until I find the right chapter (think about how you find the right page in a phone book for "Jones, William J" -- you open to a page a bit before the middle of the phone book, then page forward or back in smaller and smaller groups of pages until you get the right page) -- but with the Kindle, I can back up a page or go forward a page; jumping back and forth multiple pages is tedious, as is going back to the index and finding what I want, or jumping to a bookmark, assuming you have one already made in the right spot.
Kindles and the other e-book readers are useful -- I own a Kindle 2 myself, and am debating whether the larger screen size of a Kindle 2 is worth the cost for the storage convenience with books whose content becomes less than legible on the Kindle 2's screen; I read enough that carrying around enough books that I don't run out (and having to swap them out as I finish them) is tedious; my Kindle lets me go from one book to the next just by picking the next book out of the title list. But for all its utility, I still buy dead-tree editions of books, particularly when it's a book that I expect to use in something other than the 'start at the front page, read through to the end' reading for entertainment mode. However, I may
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
I remember reading in, IIRC, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way that the author presented, as an illustration of how insular dialectic variations were, the way people spoke the number '21', describing how as you went north from London, the usage flipped back and forth between 'twenty-one' and 'one-and-twenty' at about that interval of distance.
Eternal backward compatibility is an inevitable result of Microsoft's "Every current Windows user needs to buy a new OS from us every 3 years" cash-flow model. Look at how lackluster the adoption of Vista has been, when it's just the lack of any clear advantage from upgrading. Now consider what purchasing decisions will be made when the cost analysis is choosing between "continue using our existing OS and applications" and "Upgrade to the new version of Windows and replace every single application we're using" -- the benefits to be achieved from upgrading will have to be very significant to justify a complete replacement of all applications, with the attendant problems associated with legacy data and applications. Not to mention that the lead time on releasing a new OS that broke backward compatibility would need to be much higher to allow application developers to get the development tools for the new OS and build compatible applications.
It's the BBC; if he used a term in Mat', the colloquial translation would be outside the range of what could be considered 'good taste', and in many cases the literal translation would be equally vulgar.
I've been very happy with the Fluke Cable-IQ qualification tester, which doesn't just make sure that the wiring is correct, but actually tests the cable up to gigabit speed to make sure everything is kosher.
Reading this reminds me of the 'Rejected Marketing Slogans' entry "If it's good, it's a Fluke."
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My Firefox Add-ons window shows "Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant", version 1.1, with 'Options', 'Disable', and 'Uninstall' buttons. I'm still up in the air about whether I want to disable it completely, although I did open the options and set it to prompt before running ClickOnce applications.
To be honest though, parking a crap add-on and then blaming Firefox for any security issues over it would sound par for the course as per Microsoft...
Well, of course it is... After all, isn't being unable to prevent the company that controls the OS your program runs under from automatically installing unremovable exploit code a severe security hole in your program? So clearly it's a problem with Mozilla, and has nothing to do with Microsoft at all.
NCSoft did it both ways with Aion; there are multiple servers, but "inside" each server, a zone can have one or more "channels", each channel being a separate instance of the zone. The starting zones have ten channels, but the other zones typically only have 3 to 5, with the number of channels being managed to prevent players from being scattered too thinly across a zone or crowded too close together. NCSoft responded to the load at launch by adding two more servers; I think they would have done better to add more channels to the starting zones. However, because of the game background, NCSoft was not only managing the population of each server but the proportion of players on each side, so they had a number of variables to play with that complicated things.
NCSoft's superhero MMORPG, City of Heroes, handles load more dynamically; as a zone gets too crowded, the server dyamically spawns new instances of that zone and prevents people from entering a particular instance of a zone when it reaches capacity; I remember during one event seeing the choices of "Atlas Park", "Atlas Park 2", on up to "Atlas Park 9" when changing zones. CoH is a bit of an oddity in that the vast majority of its content is instanced, and it doesn't matter which zone instance you're in when you enter a mission, everyone on the team enters the same mission instance -- so a team that had players scattered across Atlas Park 2, 3, 5, and 7 could all go to their mission door and be back together once they enter the mission (and then choose which of the zone instances they want to exit into when the mission is done, so they stay together).
The article mentions that the ads are "only" 4-5 minutes in an hour, hardly anything compared to tv. So what are all the complaints about? Because it won't stop there. Advertisers basically want to chain their customer to their ads, forbid them to leave at pain of pain. They WILL increase the amount watched, make it harder and harder to skip until people finally rebel.
It's already happening. Look at how DVDs went from "the main screen where you could select options for viewing the movie" to "copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie" to "unskippable copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie" to "unskippable copyright notice, then the main screen where you could select options for viewing the movie and several trailers for other movies" to "unskippable copyright notice, followed by two to five 'previews' for other movies or products, then the main screen where you could select options for watching the movie and still more previews for other products". It's only a matter of time before the previews become as unskippable as the copyright notice.
This is talking about seeing an a billboard for Gatorade in a sports game on the walls of the arena, or walking into a "real" McDonald's while going on a murder spree in something like GTA.
It would probably not go over at all well with the original companies, but I could see a lot of humor possibilities if the game developers were allowed to take the products and make ads that were immersive for games the product's ads would not ordinarily be appropriate for. Take WoW, for example, and consider the possibilities of a Death Knight touting ArmorAll for keeping his gear clean and shiny, or a Tauren shaman doing a pitch for Nike shoes ("Wait. Why am I doing this? I don't even wear shoes?" "Cut! Take 23.").
6 - (I don't understand this claim; can somebody translate for me?)
There are several different types of licenses, of different durations, and a range of possible product keys, and there is some method to assign product keys to each type of license, with additional information being stored that tells the license-management system whether a product key can be shifted from one license type to another. I.e., the system could designate a particular license key as being valid for 30 days after first activation, and convertible to a full license, while another license key could be designated as valid for 60 days after first activation and cannot be changed. The former could be used for a trial copy of a program, where the user could pay for a full license and have it become a regular copy of the program, while the latter might be for copies of the software to be distributed to reviewers, and is intended to become unusable after the review period.
Not being a patent lawyer, my judgement may be suspect, but it appears that the whole process described in the application fails to meet the requirements set out in the recent In re Bilski decision, although since that has been appealed to SCOTUS, which has granted certiorari, the last word on that has yet to be heard. The application certainly doesn't make the process "tied to a particular machine or apparatus", given the text of claim 8, which would seem to make the application's validity hinge on whether changing the data fields associated with a license key in a database constitutes "transforming a particular article into a different state or thing".
All Google has to do is ignore Murdoch's content entirely until Murdoch learns his lesson or until his media empire collapses like the newspapers did.
"Yes, Mr. Murdoch, we'll pay a licensing fee for your content that we present on Google. By the way, here's our bill for returning your sites in search results." "It's the same amount as what you're charging us? That must be a mistake." "You're right; it is a mistake; it's 25% too low. Let me give you a new contract with the correct price."
I want to know where this class was $Big_Num years ago. I would have jumped at the chance to participate in such a class.
I took a class laughingly titled "Modern Science Fiction" in college, back in the late 70s. The material covered started with Shelley's Frankenstein, and finished in the early 50s without ever touching authors like E. E. 'Doc' Smith (much less Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Simak, Silverberg, or even Vernor Vinge, who was teaching mathematics there at the time); there were very few works that I would consider SF covered in the class. The telling point for me was discovering that the professor teaching the class did not, himself, actually read science fiction.
Art is not about beauty or aesthetics. Original art has warmth, depth and soul, similar to the way monster cables appeal to audiophiles. (Not that a *real* audiophile would be caught dead with anything as pedestrian as a monster cable, but I digress)
If you can't see the warmth, taste the depth, or perceive the soul of a piece of fine art, well, you are just a philistine and should just stay the f*** out of the museum.
And you miss the point as well. Art is inherently subjective. If you "can't see the warmth, taste the depth, or perceive the soul of a piece of fine art", then that piece is not 'fine art' to you; that doesn't prevent it from being 'fine art' to anyone else. For example, Jackson Pollock's paintings do nothing for me; to me, they may be 'art', but they're not 'fine art'. Many other people disagree; enough to value his paintings highly, have them displayed in museums, and make selling prints of them profitable. Art is inherently an artifact of our differences.
To explain this in simple terms:
- Today's genetically modified insect repellent high yield crop might be tomorrow's "mana from the gods" for some crop pest or other.
If one plant in a crop which is composed of plants all sharing the exact same DNA is/becomes susceptible to one kind of crop pest/disease (which is bound to happen sooner or later since said pests/diseases are also exposed to evolutionary pressures), then the whole crop will be susceptible.
For a clear and unambiguous demonstration of this, all you have to do is look at history -- the Potato Famine, where the "lumper" potato was the only variety of potato planted in Ireland; because potatoes can be propagated vegetally (i.e., just take an eye and plant it, and you get a new potato plant genetically identical to the original), the entire country was planting what was essentially a single genome, and when the potato blight Phytophthora infestans hit Ireland, it wiped out the crop across the entire country.
The same thing happened again in 1970, when the US lost over a billion dollars worth of corn to a single fungus because of widespread cultivation of a single corn variety. And again in the 1980s, when dependence on a single type of grapevine root forced California grape growers to replant two million acres of grapevines because of an infestation of a new species of the pest insect grape phylloxera attacked their crop. But the agribusiness industry just chugs along, fat, dumb, and happy, concentrating more and more of our crops into fewer and fewer species, setting farmers up for the next devastation.
What's wrong with "Parmesan-style", "Champagne-style", etc.
That's what "methode Champignoise" has been used for; it's just a high-falutin' way of saying "by the Champagne method", denoting a sparkling wine that has been produced identically to Champagne except for the origin of the grapes, but somehow the use of a foreign language to describe it makes the resultant wine more highbrow than the run-of-the-mill Chateauneuf du Plonque.
I am also concerned about the amount of public money being thrown about.
And this is something that needs to be considered carefully, in light of the fact that "global warming" -- renamed "global climate change" -- is so heavily politicised. Who benefits from a "crisis" of climate change, and who loses if it's revealed to be not only natural, but beyond our capacity to change? All the scientists -- meteorologists and otherwise -- who leapt so eagerly on the 'anthropogenic global warming' bandwagon have their credibility trashed. All of the government organizations set up to oversee the efforts to combat 'anthropogenic global warming' suddenly find themselves without a reason for existence, with no money for staff and no money to hand out as political plums to companies that come sucking up to them with blue-sky proposals for the Next Great Green Energy Source. Companies wouldn't have government programs throwing money at anything that looks as if it might pan out for reducing C02 emissions, or getting tax breaks for making process changes that make only symbolic reductions in their CO2 emissions. And all that has to be done to keep this going is to keep the populace whipped up about how grave the 'threat' of global warming is, and how we need to do something about it right away. There's far too much ego, money, and reputation already thrown into the issue for something as simple as facts to reverse its progress.
If they have this type of technology - why not just cure the paralysis.
Handwave it that the ability to regrow the damage causing his paralysis has to be started in the "golden hour" after the injury, and he was paralyzed before the process was developed. As argent observes, if they can grow an alien body, they can grow him a new one, but if the process is still too expensive to have filtered down to whatever level of medical care he's getting, that could explain why he's still wheeling around. Still, it is a nagging plot hole.
Kick them in the nuts really hard. If they don't fold over in pain and whimper an octave higher, they're female.
If they don't fold over in pain, they're wearing a cup. Or the female equivalent.
Go back and look at the diagram of the dam in the second BBC story; the control gates are at the top of the penstocks; all closing them rapidly would do is deprive the turbines of a source of fast-moving water to drive them. The "hydraulic impact" you are describing comes from the opposite action -- slamming the gates open, which suddenly drops water through the penstocks and into the turbine, which can't spin up instantly, and usually fails explosively. For the same reason, you don't want to open the feed full on a steam turbine (with the additional complication that, if the turbine is cold, the thermal shock can damage the turbine blades even if the impact of the steam jet doesn't rip it apart).
The problem with balancing classes is that all classes are essentially expected to fulfill the same basic role - namely, that they are adventurers (well, in sword&sorcery/fantasy MMOs) out to kill monsters for xp/lewt. Can you please explain to me how a wizard's training would be furthered by killing hordes of monsters? Or a thief's? Or a cleric's? For some kind of a warrior or gladiator or what have you, I can see it making sense, at least to a point.
It would depend on the circumstances. True, the classic 'scholar of abstruse lore in a tower' mage wouldn't be going out zapgunning monsters for kicks, but if you tweak the world background a bit so that combat mages are the 'artillery' of armies, then you would have mages who need to learn how to handle throwing spells around while someone's trying to beat on them; you could take the other kind and make them the ones who provide a good chunk of the training for the PC mages, making them go out after the relics and materials they needed for their spells in exchange for teaching them. For a thief, it's a lot harder to justify; aside from looting the field after the battle is over, I don't see a reason why a thief would want to get within _miles_ of a battle, or go adventuring. Clerics can swing in a number of different ways; you have militant orders that would be trained for combat, but then you need to work into the game a reason why they would be running around doing the random quests, rather than training for the battles to defend the faith.
However, developing from the start with the intent of incorporating PvP and balancing PvP before balancing PvE ensures that PvP will integrate with the rest of the gameplay, instead of being spatchcocked onto PvE. To use your example, City of Heroes was released with no PvP at all, and when the developers decided to add PvP, it exposed a number of severe imbalances between the archetypes, as well as hate and discontent from the player base as the developers made change after change to the game mechanics while weaseling from "We won't make any PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make any PvE changes for purely PvP reasons" (with convoluted explanations of why something that was a problem in PvP but had never been a problem in PvE really was a problem in PvE to justify 'movement suppression' being implemented in both PvP and PvE), and eventually ripped out the entire PvP mechanics and replaced it with a completely redesigned (and more byzantine) set of PvP-only mechanics that gimped many character builds that had been tweaked to work well under the old mechanics.
While I don't care for PvP in general (my experience being that it suffers too much from the problems of "Me and my fifteen friends can mop the field with you all by your lonesome" and "This character I've been tweaking for two years using all the gold I can buy can mop the field with your character you've been playing for two weeks", both leavened with big helpings of "H4 H4 H4! PWNZ0RD UR AZZ B10TCH!" attitudes from people whose sole apparent validation of themselves as people seems to be how many players they can dry-gulch using a massive advantage while running away hurling insults if it even looks as if the fight is going to be close to fair), NetDevil's route is by far the better way to go about it; AI for NPCs in games is still significantly less capable than a live player can be, and it's much easier to tweak the way the game cheats to balance this deficit in PvE is much less obtrusive than the kind of changes that are required to take a PvE game and try to balance it in PvP.
When you create something under copyright, you are making a contract with the government; the government establishes your legal right to control copying of that work (and the profits thereof) for a specified period of time, during which the government will enforce penalties for infringement of your copyright, after which the work becomes freely available to all. You agreed to that contract when you filed the copyright. Now you come back, seventy years later, and claim that -- even though you already agreed that your work would fall into the public domain five years from now -- you deserve to have the terms of that contract changed, and should be allowed to continue to profit from and control distribution of that work. You already got the term of protection you agreed to, and you're arguing that you shouldn't have to be required to carry out your end of the agreement.
Yes, Disney still makes money off Mickey Mouse, both as copyrighted cartoons and as a trademark. However, the work "Steamboat Willie" was created and copyrighted for a specific period of time, which would have by now expired, making the cartoon public domain. Disney went back to Congress and lobbied successfully to get the term of copyright changed retroactively. And that is what the "huge issue" is. I don't think that people would have had a problem with the Copyright Term Extension Act if its effect were to amend the term of copyright so that any copyrights granted after it took effect had a longer term. What is objectionable about the Act is that it went back and changed the terms of copyrights that already existed -- and I fully expect Disney to keep going back, as the extended copyrights come up on expiration, to go back to Congress again and again, attempting to keep control of their creations in perpetuity, rather than being required to comply with their obligation to release them into the public domain.
Read the article more closely; it's not about cloning at all. The reprogrammed stem cells were injected into already-developing embryos to create artificial chimeras -- mice that contained cells from the donor line, not just the parents'. The intent of the research is to achieve true cloning, but they still have to get past the hurdle of starting the embryonic development. However, using this technique to grow organs, since the organs will grow as part of the embryos' normal development, will be "harvesting our own young" -- taking normal embryos, usurping them to grow organs with another genotype, and then removing them for use as transplants. Getting organs to grow in vitro is a much more complex and daunting prospect.
No. You are missing the point. A Kindle 2 or a Kindle DX allows you to store your entire bookshelf on a single device for you to read. If I have 500 books on my bookshelf, I can read any of them I want... and I can loan one to my friend, or to my neighbor, or to a co-worker, and we can all be reading those books at the same time. If I have 500 books on my Kindle, I can read them. If I want my friend, or my neighbor, or my co-worker, to read one of those books, I have to loan them all of them at once, by loaning them my Kindle, which prevents me from reading any of them. And I can only loan books to one person at a time, because there is only one interface to access the stored books. And I'm willing to bet that the manufacturers of the various e-book readers are counting on this; where someone might have bought a book and loaned it to several people after reading it, when Amazon sells a Kindle book, they know that that buyer, if they like the book enough to recommend it to others, becomes an unpaid sales agent for them -- if they'd bought a dead-tree edition, they could say "Here, you need to read this" and hand them the book, and Amazon makes nothing unless that person decides they need their own copy. But if the first person only has a Kindle edition, the second person has to buy their own copy, or find someone who has a dead-tree edition to borrow it.
However, both the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX, while they work very well for reading through a book, and are much more convenient to carry around than a half-dozen reference works, fall down badly when you try to use them as a reference book. For example, when I'm looking up how to do something in a book on, say, SQL Server Integration Services, I would look up the task in the index, then page back to that part of the book, a task which a properly-organized Kindle document can handle. While I'm reading that section, it references doing a subtask, which was explained two chapters earlier. With a hardcopy book, I can flip back in chunks of pages until I find the right chapter (think about how you find the right page in a phone book for "Jones, William J" -- you open to a page a bit before the middle of the phone book, then page forward or back in smaller and smaller groups of pages until you get the right page) -- but with the Kindle, I can back up a page or go forward a page; jumping back and forth multiple pages is tedious, as is going back to the index and finding what I want, or jumping to a bookmark, assuming you have one already made in the right spot.
Kindles and the other e-book readers are useful -- I own a Kindle 2 myself, and am debating whether the larger screen size of a Kindle 2 is worth the cost for the storage convenience with books whose content becomes less than legible on the Kindle 2's screen; I read enough that carrying around enough books that I don't run out (and having to swap them out as I finish them) is tedious; my Kindle lets me go from one book to the next just by picking the next book out of the title list. But for all its utility, I still buy dead-tree editions of books, particularly when it's a book that I expect to use in something other than the 'start at the front page, read through to the end' reading for entertainment mode. However, I may
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
I remember reading in, IIRC, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way that the author presented, as an illustration of how insular dialectic variations were, the way people spoke the number '21', describing how as you went north from London, the usage flipped back and forth between 'twenty-one' and 'one-and-twenty' at about that interval of distance.
Eternal backward compatibility is an inevitable result of Microsoft's "Every current Windows user needs to buy a new OS from us every 3 years" cash-flow model. Look at how lackluster the adoption of Vista has been, when it's just the lack of any clear advantage from upgrading. Now consider what purchasing decisions will be made when the cost analysis is choosing between "continue using our existing OS and applications" and "Upgrade to the new version of Windows and replace every single application we're using" -- the benefits to be achieved from upgrading will have to be very significant to justify a complete replacement of all applications, with the attendant problems associated with legacy data and applications. Not to mention that the lead time on releasing a new OS that broke backward compatibility would need to be much higher to allow application developers to get the development tools for the new OS and build compatible applications.
It's the BBC; if he used a term in Mat', the colloquial translation would be outside the range of what could be considered 'good taste', and in many cases the literal translation would be equally vulgar.
I've been very happy with the Fluke Cable-IQ qualification tester, which doesn't just make sure that the wiring is correct, but actually tests the cable up to gigabit speed to make sure everything is kosher.
Reading this reminds me of the 'Rejected Marketing Slogans' entry "If it's good, it's a Fluke."
Certainly the game is rigged. But if you don't play, you can't win.