Wy would it take ten years before we could return to the moon when it only took us seven or eight years to get there in the 60's? Do you really think NASA and space technology have gone backwards since then?
I think his point was that while technology has advanced, funding has gone backwards. A lot. Remember, "faster, better, cheaper: choose two". We've got better tech, but if we want it faster we'll have to pay. Or you'll have to pay, since Canada doesn't spend a whole lot on space exploration to my knowledge.
I've never found a "women gamer" site that I've liked. Then again, I've never found a "guy gamer" site that I've liked - or at all for that matter. The reasoning is pretty simple - I don't like sexism, applied to me or otherwise.
I like network played games like Tribes because it's similar to playing a sport; but wait, that's a 3D shoot-em-up! Obviously I'm a typical male. Never mind that I don't like Quake because of its small, rabid levels and de-emphasis on team play. My girlfriend, by contrast, is a Quake 2 and Thief addict who at no point in her life would have been caught dead playing with a Barbie PC. Is she abnormal? I prefer to think that she's an individual with an individual's tastes. Otherwise, we'll never find a computer game we can play together.
The problem I see with articles like the one in WomenGamers is that it presupposes a stereotype about both male and female gamers. Rather than selling a game based on its brilliant graphics, fast animation, and stimulating gameplay, apparently we should market it by touting its specialization for boys or girls.
So yes, I find "women gamer" sites hostile. I'd find "men gamer" sites the same way, because what I don't like about them is the fact that their complaint is not with sexist marketing or game design, but that the sexism is too much "in favour" of men. It's wrong thinking and it just serves to perpetuate stereotypes, industry bias, and yes, hostility.
The thing which makes one animal a different species from another is the fact that the two animals cannot interbreed. Two animals who occupy the same niche will compete, and their populations will reach a dynamic equilibrium or one will drive the other to extinction, out of the area, or into another niche. Equilibrium happens, though...
I'm not sure which article you folks were reading, but these things don't heal people. The only reference to anything like that in the original article was near the top, "Some scientists believe that, in the future, small biological computers could roam our bodies monitoring our health and correcting any problems they may find." This is what we've all heard about nanotech robots. The paper itself mentions the ability to release bioactive agents which have been "computed" in response to some stimulus - this is like a smart drug and not something that will repair bullet holes.
There isn't a single reference to health or medicine in the entire paper. This work was done in computing science. We're talking about machines which can store data and all the changes ever made to it. Deleted a file? No problem, just run the machine in reverse. You think IBM's new media is dense? Try this out.
It could mean, for example, that we could finally trust digital data not to have been tampered with - we could check that the whole history of changes were there.
I'm quite happy to read a discussion about nanotechnology and all the wonderous bits, pieces, and moral questions involved. Let's just be straight about what we're talking about. Machines like this will not fix you if you fall. They're designed as computers.
Shapiro's machines could be adapted to serve medical purposes. They could create substances inside your body from materials already present in your body. Insulin, for example, in response to rising glucose levels. One problem is keeping the machines in the body - unlike your own cells, they don't replicate themselves, nor do I think that they could (they're not polymers, they're some other kind of construct).
As for the moral problems with using them for medicine, I don't really see that many. After all, we can do similar things by administering compounds ourselves. In example of diabetes, we simply inject insulin and control it roughly. If the military wants to kill people by poisoning the well, they can use any number of a huge array of chemicals.
I know that the thing's a model right now, but the concept has promise and like most such things, we should bear in mind what exactly that promise is and not what we think it should be.
From what I read here, the big difference between the functionality of Dr. Shapiro's device and that of ribosomes (rRNA), mRNA and tRNA is that Dr. Shapiro's machine could be made to construct strands of nucleic acids (read: more mRNA) while the RNA's can only build protein chains. I think this is a pretty big difference, because the machine's output can also be its input (which you really really don't want in cells). The upshot is that it won't be healing you any time soon - it deals in nucleic acids, not proteins, and it's too small to have little robotic arms or something to sew things up.:)
I have to do some more reading of the paper yet but what will really be interesting is how he proposes to keep the thing operating reliably - even DNA transcription (an incredibly fast and reliable process, IMHO) is prone to the occasional mutation (read/write error). DNA deals with this using redundancy and graceful failure (eg: the last GU in the subject mRNA string doesn't do anything at all instead of coding a second head).
I'm not sure how useful this device will be in doing any real computing - it will take some more work to develop algorithms for what looks like a fundamentally wacky programming paradigm (Have you booted your Turing machine lately? Now, do it with chemicals!) and plus there is no mention of the speed of this device. Who knows, it could be prohibitively slow. What looks nifty is the implications in data storage; in the paper, Dr. Shapiro writes, "The trace polymer created during the computation represents past state changes and head movements, as well as the symbols that were "erased" from the tape during each transition, and as such has several important advantages. First, the trace polymer renders the computer reversible." He goes on to describe how this could also make data storage inherently more efficient. So, rather than looking at cures for cancer I think we should look at very small and very auditable data storages.
Slashdot Mirror
Wy would it take ten years before we could return to the moon when it only took us seven or eight years to get there in the 60's? Do you really think NASA and space technology have gone backwards since then?
I think his point was that while technology has advanced, funding has gone backwards. A lot. Remember, "faster, better, cheaper: choose two". We've got better tech, but if we want it faster we'll have to pay. Or you'll have to pay, since Canada doesn't spend a whole lot on space exploration to my knowledge.
"subcle" was a typo. It should be "cubicle."
Subcle (n): A subdivided cubicle space. See also Subcling.
Subcling (v): The act of sharing a cubicle with others.
I like it better this way...
I've never found a "women gamer" site that I've liked. Then again, I've never found a "guy gamer" site that I've liked - or at all for that matter. The reasoning is pretty simple - I don't like sexism, applied to me or otherwise.
I like network played games like Tribes because it's similar to playing a sport; but wait, that's a 3D shoot-em-up! Obviously I'm a typical male. Never mind that I don't like Quake because of its small, rabid levels and de-emphasis on team play. My girlfriend, by contrast, is a Quake 2 and Thief addict who at no point in her life would have been caught dead playing with a Barbie PC. Is she abnormal? I prefer to think that she's an individual with an individual's tastes. Otherwise, we'll never find a computer game we can play together.
The problem I see with articles like the one in WomenGamers is that it presupposes a stereotype about both male and female gamers. Rather than selling a game based on its brilliant graphics, fast animation, and stimulating gameplay, apparently we should market it by touting its specialization for boys or girls.
So yes, I find "women gamer" sites hostile. I'd find "men gamer" sites the same way, because what I don't like about them is the fact that their complaint is not with sexist marketing or game design, but that the sexism is too much "in favour" of men. It's wrong thinking and it just serves to perpetuate stereotypes, industry bias, and yes, hostility.
It's south of Vancouver, and that makes it south of me, and my whole country. That's the South. Sheesh.
The thing which makes one animal a different species from another is the fact that the two animals cannot interbreed. Two animals who occupy the same niche will compete, and their populations will reach a dynamic equilibrium or one will drive the other to extinction, out of the area, or into another niche. Equilibrium happens, though...
I'm not sure which article you folks were reading, but these things don't heal people. The only reference to anything like that in the original article was near the top, "Some scientists believe that, in the future, small biological computers could roam our bodies monitoring our health and correcting any problems they may find." This is what we've all heard about nanotech robots. The paper itself mentions the ability to release bioactive agents which have been "computed" in response to some stimulus - this is like a smart drug and not something that will repair bullet holes.
There isn't a single reference to health or medicine in the entire paper. This work was done in computing science. We're talking about machines which can store data and all the changes ever made to it. Deleted a file? No problem, just run the machine in reverse. You think IBM's new media is dense? Try this out.
It could mean, for example, that we could finally trust digital data not to have been tampered with - we could check that the whole history of changes were there.
I'm quite happy to read a discussion about nanotechnology and all the wonderous bits, pieces, and moral questions involved. Let's just be straight about what we're talking about. Machines like this will not fix you if you fall. They're designed as computers.
Shapiro's machines could be adapted to serve medical purposes. They could create substances inside your body from materials already present in your body. Insulin, for example, in response to rising glucose levels. One problem is keeping the machines in the body - unlike your own cells, they don't replicate themselves, nor do I think that they could (they're not polymers, they're some other kind of construct).
As for the moral problems with using them for medicine, I don't really see that many. After all, we can do similar things by administering compounds ourselves. In example of diabetes, we simply inject insulin and control it roughly. If the military wants to kill people by poisoning the well, they can use any number of a huge array of chemicals.
I know that the thing's a model right now, but the concept has promise and like most such things, we should bear in mind what exactly that promise is and not what we think it should be.
From what I read here, the big difference between the functionality of Dr. Shapiro's device and that of ribosomes (rRNA), mRNA and tRNA is that Dr. Shapiro's machine could be made to construct strands of nucleic acids (read: more mRNA) while the RNA's can only build protein chains. I think this is a pretty big difference, because the machine's output can also be its input (which you really really don't want in cells). The upshot is that it won't be healing you any time soon - it deals in nucleic acids, not proteins, and it's too small to have little robotic arms or something to sew things up. :)
I have to do some more reading of the paper yet but what will really be interesting is how he proposes to keep the thing operating reliably - even DNA transcription (an incredibly fast and reliable process, IMHO) is prone to the occasional mutation (read/write error). DNA deals with this using redundancy and graceful failure (eg: the last GU in the subject mRNA string doesn't do anything at all instead of coding a second head).
I'm not sure how useful this device will be in doing any real computing - it will take some more work to develop algorithms for what looks like a fundamentally wacky programming paradigm (Have you booted your Turing machine lately? Now, do it with chemicals!) and plus there is no mention of the speed of this device. Who knows, it could be prohibitively slow. What looks nifty is the implications in data storage; in the paper, Dr. Shapiro writes, "The trace polymer created during the computation represents past state changes and head movements, as well as the symbols that were "erased" from the tape during each transition, and as such has several important advantages. First, the trace polymer renders the computer reversible." He goes on to describe how this could also make data storage inherently more efficient. So, rather than looking at cures for cancer I think we should look at very small and very auditable data storages.
Don't take my word for it. Go /. the horse's mouth! Buried in Dr. Shapiro's web site at the Weizmann institute is some Supporting material for the lecture including the paper itself (RTF).
If the processor is the same, is it possible to flash-update a 48G with the new OS? If so, is it legal to do so?