There are difficult-to-impossible-to-fake signs, if you know what to look/feel for. The sex flush is the best one. Pupil size generally increases when it happens too. The vaginal contractions at 0.8s intervals would be very difficult to fake also. Also there's the whole issue of their acting skills.
I have a slashdot journal but only/.ers can post to that and the interface isn't nearly as good as a lot of the blogs I've seen, not to mention no images. I post semi-regularly to a half dozen communities but often have things to say otherwise. Ideally of course I would like to not just be talking to myself... so I think I should start a blog.
Any recommendations on where and how to start? I don't know where to begin. What sites are free, reliable, easy to use, good looking with clean interfaces, and offer ways to publicize your blog (random sampling perhaps). Is there any way to move my journal over without doing the old cut-and-paste? There's a real emphasis on science and geeky stuff in my journal. Categorizing of posts would be nice for me.
Well seeing as how he can't use a GUI at all, there's no reason to work within a GUI interface. I'm sure it's CLI, just a single terminal window reading back to him like in the old days.
Personally I think methods for using severely limited interfaces is a very interesting subject, and not just for the blind. There are thousands of places where there's just no room/money for a screen or keyboard or mouse, but where you want sophisticated interaction anyway. Your phone, for instance. Standard phones have a mere 12 keys, a microphone, and a speaker. Slightly more sophisticated models have a small 1 or 2 line display. But then there's cellphones which are all fancy nowadays, and the phone company has all sorts of services like voice input and such.
That's a nice system. What would also be interesting would be to have an initial buy-in to the game. In other words, you log on, create a character, pay ~$20 for it and play. If you die, you have to buy a new character. If too many people are not dying, the monsters get tougher:) It would make for an interesting game dynamic, with clans forming to protect their member's investments, assholes picking off the weak and disconnected, badasses risking their powerful characters for a shot at being the best, and so forth.
A variation on that would be to put limits on your characters life - you start out young and weak, become a strong adult, and slowly weaken with time until you die after a certain number of game years.
I'd have to agree. The lengths the cellular companies go to to extract money from you is pathetic.
However AFAIK the european market is more lenient and the Japanese market is more tech-and-style hungry. They could probably market the phone without it being crippled. Wouldn't that be a slap in the face to the American market.
Also, and I'm not sure what the expenses of this would be, they could just make up a network but just roam on others. If it had 802.11b built in you could do internet calls for free, which would help offset that expense. Or convince the more desperate networks (I'm looking at you, Sprint-Nextel) to agree to their terms in order to secure the iPo... uh I mean Apple's help.
I hate to reply to my own post (why why why won't/. let us update/edit them) but I managed to find another link I was looking for. I didn't talk about Apple for no good reason - I think drunkenblog hit the nail on the head with this post.
P2P too efficient and useful to MPAA to destroy
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Not only will they not go after Bram and BT because it's just shifting bits around (they might as well go after FTP), I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to hire him or they built off of exisiting code. BT-style file transfer is just far too efficient and effective to stifle, and with a few modifications could make Video-On-Demand viable.
Hell, the only reason I can see why Apple's iTunes/Quicktime division isn't all over him already is because they're probably cooking up their own software, service, and hardware on their own.
Once there was a company that had the only decent streaming video in town. So they cornered the market on content, bloated up their software with ads, and then sat on their asses while the money rolled in. And just for good measure, made it difficult to download. What kind of company makes a video player that requires virtually all system resources, and then puts animated ads on the sidebar? So whose stellar hardware/software combination do you think they decide to leech off of when their lousy plan starts falling apart? Maybe the one whose operating system you neglected the most, with lousy ports months late? You think Apple was just going to sit there while let you suck their profits away while you drag their reputation down with you?
Goodbye parasites. Fuck you and the shitty bloatware you rode in on.
Seriously. All those college servers aren't blocking BitTorrent over the content - they're blocking it over the sheer cost and congestion of all that traffic.
That's the problem with flat-rate unlimited bandwidth for the consumer. If they can use as much as they want, they will use as much as you let them. Like how when you widen road, the traffic situation doesn't improve because more and bigger cars start using it.
Filesharing of video is a good example. Used to be a 30 minute episode would end up encoded with Real Media at low rates, and turn out to be maybe 50MB total. Then people started getting broadband and DivX was invented, and suddenly all the files ballooned to 175MB or even 225MB. Likewise audio - what was once 96kbs mp3s became 320kbs or even losslessly compressed. As transfer rates improve, don't be surprised to see people trading 1GB+ video files in HDTV resolution.
No, you want to watch from the beginning. However, BitTorrent is not designed for this - it specifically targets the worst represented portions of the file to help make the swarm as diverse as possible, so that as seeds disappear major bottlenecks do not arise. There are implementations like Azureus that can favor the first chunks, but the result is sketchy at best. Specifically delivering a desired chunk has merit anyway - but only for streamable content, and only if it can deliver fast enough for playback.
Also, BT's speed is often bottlenecked by ISPs which cap uploads, therefore penalizing you on the downloading side.
It's right there on the website though - due to the nature of the technology you have to update your playback/reader/displayer app to take advantage of this. BT just works as is. If the BT developers really wanted to they could update the protocol to allow all this, or even more interesting features - like parchive file repair and recovery, which would effectively eliminate the problem of swarms with lost seeds.
Although many users enjoy shows, 'my cable bill' divided by 'number of shows I watch' will drive end user logic about perceived value of a show. $3 dollars per show is low enough to be reasonable, and hopefully high enough to generate revenue. Offer package deals, if someone is a fan of the show, offer the season at a 25% of 33% discount of all episodes are bought up front.
Uh, no, $3 per show is WAY too high. Via netflix I can watch a whole volume for about $1 or so, which would typically contain 3-5 half hour episodes or 2 hour long episodes. If it were first run, I would say $0.50 per half hour episode and $1 per hour long would make more sense. Better shows may charge more, and possibly ads could be used to lower the cost.
There are three big differences from music files, which are going for $0.99 these days (also too much). Music files are very small and thus incur far less overhead to download. They typically have a smaller market than TV series, which appeal to broader tastes and have less competition. Their buyers will listen to them over and over, unlike TV shows which are generally watched seriously only once, then half-heartedly in reruns. Although the first fact makes them more expensive to distribute, the other two facts mean TV shows should be less expensive than music because they will be used less.
Of course, such a-la-carte purchasing will induce people to watch less TV even if they are ultimately paying more than if they had bought a package - providing free episodes (season premiers mostly) to help draw in viewers for new shows is a necessity. Flat-rate plans and discounted season packages would also become popular.
The whole point of a mouse is just to click on a spot on the screen, which then does something. More mouse buttons means that you can change what it does when you click, but outside certain highly graphical programs this is not really necessary, and you can always modify a plain click with other keys or toggle between states, which is what the mac does.
But if you're talking about real-time control you can do a lot better with more. Ever try running a flight simulator with just a mouse? Forget about it. You NEED a joystick or better. Console-style controllers are a good compromise and are highly flexible.
I watched a couple eps - I was not impressed. Then again I've never been impressed by Joss Whedon's work.
And Babylon 5 had a tendency to get a little... overimportant? Something. I didn't like the look very much either.
I always liked DS9, but that was mainly for the character development and darker plotline rather than sci-fi aspects. Personally I think they could make a great movie out of that, better than the Next Generation films anyway.
Farscape could make an interesting movie, but again that's not so much due to the SF aspects (which could get more than a little flaky, though their alien design was better than many) but because sometimes it seemed like they were holding back due to TV restrictions. But a film could be really wild. And yay alien full-frontal sex scene!
Going a bit backwards in time, the original movie for Alien Nation was a very novel SF concept for TV and much better than the TV series. I think we're due for a retreatment of Buck Rogers. Red Dwarf was the only SF comedy worth mentioning, but would need extensive reworking for the big screen.
The DVD technology has become the most successful consumer technology ever because of the re-release of older movies on the new format for what consumers have deemed reasonable prices. Are all these movies going to be again released on Blu-ray/DVD-HD for the same prices?
In a nutshell, they may be rereleased to fill new orders but there will be no major advantage to rebuying from DVD. Blu-Ray/DVD-HD are significant solely for their ability to carry high-definition content. But TV shows filmed with conventional equipment and older copies of film lack the resolution to take advantage of this feature. In fact, when people first started filming TV shows in high-def they realized that the resolution was so good that things like makeup and props were much harder to get right. So even if they convert to the new standards they would have to do some serious-to-impossible remastering and enhancing work.
However, these high capacity disks will be ideal for packaging an entire season of a TV series in normal definition on one or two volumes. And masterers will no longer have to compromise between features or shoehorn long films onto a single disk. In case you didn't realize, DVD was just a little too small to take advantage of all of its features at once - particularly where multiple language audio is required.
I think this tech will really be useful for able bodied people when they can just put on a scanner on an arbitray machine controlling arbitrary stuff and just use it. Moving a cursor is OK, but unless you can register "clicks" it isn't very useful as a mouse.
Really, if we had the functionality of a typical handheld game controller - with two joysticks, and analog and digital buttons - then this tech can really be useful.
Of course since game controllers are imperfect devices, a mental controller that has more powerful attributes would be welcome. Think 6-axis control x2 or more, plus an arbitrary number of toggles and variable inputs. Feedback so you could know the state and identity of said inputs would also be important.
There ought to be some watchdog group that picks out companies that are willing to actively thwart basic human rights and democratic freedoms in other countries in the pursuit of a quick buck, and organizes boycotts and divestment campaigns against them. I'd say there should be legal provisions against them too, but I know those laws would be heavily misapplied.
I hate to defend the Christian Right, but in fairness I must say that even if you're just scanning the dial, half the time you land on the Howard Stern show you're bound to hear something that would be offensive to a great many people, be it baiting the mentally challenged or lewd commentary re: strippers etc.
Re:Practical Explanation?
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On another note, I doubt any agency no matter how spooky could have designed or even developed HIV at that point in time. The technology just wasn't there.
Re:"Could this be it?" NO.
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I mean daunting purely in the sense of being able to cure or protect against the disease. Fast moving epidemics are always the most alarming, but it's the ones modern medicine can't control that should inspire the most dread. And HIV/AIDS has been handing modern medicine its ass on a plate for over 20 years. The flip side of that is modern medicine has been forced to get a lot smarter about how to treat viruses as a direct result of that fact, it's just not smart enough for HIV yet.
Incidentally I heard somewhere AIDS may have been killing as early as the 1920s, though it can't be proven. In any case we can assume that HIV spread roughly exponentially, which is characterized by increasingly rapid spread: pretend the virus spreads 10 times as far over a decade - it would go 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000, 100000000. From ten in the first decade to a thousand in the third, to a hundred million in only 70 years. You get the idea. Infections were in the tens of thousands in the early 1980s, now they're in the tens of millions. HIV is doubling ever 2-3 years. Extrapolating backwards would put the progenitor somewhere between 1935-1950, although I'm sure the rate has changed due to other factors along the way.
AFAIK, although we don't have a vaccine for SARS there's no reason to think we can't develop one.
Personally I like to categorize the significance of diseases based on where they fall on three axes: infectiousness, how easily they can move through the population; lethality/virulence, how likely they are to kill you; and destructiveness, how much damage they do in the process of affliction, particularly permanent damage.
Out of 10s, I'd give the following:
HIV: 9 (stealthily infectious for years), 10 (100% fatal), 5 (life largely unaffected until AIDS develops)
The Cold: 10 (unstoppable and rapid), 1 (harmless), 1 (day or two off work)
Rabies: 4 (hard to contract but endemic in mammals), 9 (100% fatal if not treated before symptoms), 10 (painful descent into insanity ending in death)
Responsible sex is practically an oxymoron.
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Who said anything about gay sex being the main method. It used to be the main method. Now there are more women infected than men, and in the hardest hit parts of the world the spread of the epidemic is closely tied to widespread prostitution. In both cases the true factor is promiscuity, what has always been a risky factor with regards to disease but which has been lauded in popular culture for both sexes for the past 40 years or so. How many people you've had sex with is practically a metric for how manly (for men) or liberated (for women) you are these days.
I only made that statement to respond to a specific example in the prior post. I don't know the rates for the industrialized countries but I suspect that even if homosexuals still have a higher percent infected than heterosexuals, the larger numbers of heterosexuals could mean they have as many or more people actually infected - and AFAIK prostitution plays only a relatively small part in the spread of the disease here. When you look at who gets infected in America, what you mainly hear about is a lot of people who thought their partner(s) were safe and decided to skip the condom, and a bunch of people who like to fuck around but don't like condoms, and a lot of people who just can't bring themselves to make the mental and physical effort neccessary to practice safe sex. And even sex with a condom - or even without intercourse - is no guarantee.
Syphillis was indeed a major problem some years back. Not incidentally, it was at its most deadly when and where prostitution was common, in the cities in the late 1800s. Then we could cure it and aggressive tracking and treatment policies and changing social mores reduced it's significance to very little. And now we are seeing a resurgence of syphilis anyway, and AIDS is a major killer. It makes me wonder what's next. (I note in passing that it seems the more intimate the contact the more fatal the disase tends to be, but I don't have any data to back that up).
To be blunt, the idea that a social stigma and religous dogma against extramarital sex and particularly promiscuity is based purely on idealogical justifications is flat out wrong. They are almost certainly based primarily on the eminently practical notions of preventing the spread of disease and ensuring that fathers are both taking responsibility for their own children and not being tricked into doing so for others. Both of those unfortunate events can have been easily avoided with a little reason and responsibility, and yet history has shown time and again that given half the chance people will exercise neither. There is zero evidence that today is any different, and why not? Unbridled lust has always been louder than caution and reason. Ask yourself - how many times in your life have the rigid opinions of other people been the only thing stopping you from making a foolish decision? If you can't think of any, try remembering what it was like to be a teenager.
We may today regard rigid social constraints as something inimical to our pluralistic society, but cold reality is proving them to be vital components of our survival.
Re:"Could this be it?" NO.
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That's called innate immunity, and it has little to do with the immune system. Actually this is a form of evolution, which means that the necessary mutation must occur and be selected for before it has any chance of stifling the spread of the disease. And that process can take decades to hundreds of years.
In fact that innate immunity against HIV is already present in the form of ccr5delta32 individuals, mainly in caucasians and possibly as a result of the Black Death. There are other genotypes where ccr5 has been lost as well, present in other populations. The resistance to infection with a ccr5 knockout is strong but not perfect, and has a lot to do with the fact that HIV usually infects people via macrophages with their ccr5 coreceptors. You can also be infected via your T-cells expressing the cxcr4 coreceptor, although since that may require blood-to-blood transmission it is a far less efficient pathway. It would be wrong to assume that the ccr5delta32 mutation makes us stronger though - it just protects us from this one disease. One could argue that the force of evolution is usually applied not developing novel attributes but simply tweaking the ones we already have to maintain the status quo - the Red Queen Hypothesis. ccr5 is involved in cell signalling, and although it appears we can survive without it, there may be underappreciated side effects, like the possiblity it plays a role in multiple sclerosis, as I said before.
Re:"Could this be it?" NO.
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It's not so much society that would do the enforcing, it would be the disease. As in if you have sex with anyone who has had multiple partners you have a strong possiblity of catching the disease, and thus anyone who has multiple partners will instantly come under suspicion. Or worse, the uncautious people will just start dying and leaving the cautious people alive.
Keep in mind, the whole extramarital sex thing has only been socially acceptable for 40 years or so. Though it has been practiced for much longer it was never so widespread or so promiscuous. In particular the fact that both sexes are now doing it makes the dynamics of transmission much more difficult to control - wheras before monitoring prostitutes would have been the best way to stifle the illness, that is no longer sufficient.
So while it may be your civil right to have sex with whomever and however many people you choose, ultimately the only responsible course may be to have only one permanent lifetime partner, and demand the same from them. Everything else is risky, however calculated, both to yourself and too the population as a whole.
That men can identify as heterosexual and monogamous and yet secretly engage in promiscuous sex with other men is testament to the ability of the human mind to lie to itself. The real victims are their partners, who should have picked better. Unfortunately honesty and fidelity can sometimes be hard to identify when picking a partner.
There are countries in Africa where something like 30% of the population is infected, thanks to widespread prostitution. It's spreading like wildfire in many 2nd world countries with a poor appreciation for the disease. America has managed to keep the infected population at relatively low levels, but these other countries will now find it near impossible to combat the spread of the disease now, even if they give up the sexual habits that got them there. Their only hope is a vaccine now.
"Could this be it?" NO.
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Like the parent said, it's a therapy, not a vaccine. It looks like it can help people who have been infected with HIV keep from developing AIDS, but it's not a cure and it won't prevent infection. Still, it's a welcome development.
The fact is, HIV is the most daunting disease we have ever faced. If it had hit even 50 years earlier we may very well have faced an epidemic on the order of the Black Death. It infects and kills stealthily, and evolves within our bodies faster than our immune systems can recognize it. If it hadn't hit the gay community so severely and specifically we might not have even been able to identify it, and it's only thanks to advanced sequencing and crystallography technology that we can study it in the necessary depth. But what is really sobering is this: HIV has infected tens of millions of people, living and mutating within their bodies for decades, and as far as we know no one has ever fought off an infection. The human immune system may very well be completely unable to handle HIV, and that means we may never see a traditional vaccine.
But we live in an age of rapid technological progress, and I do know of three promising possiblities that could actually prevent infection. None of them has yet been tested.
The first is another line of french vaccine work. Sequence comparison between various strains of the virus had identified a highly conserved protein region on the GP41 surface protein. The antibodies produced against the peptide seems to target the virus extremely well in the lab. So why don't we see antibodies against this epitope in the real world? It turns out we sometimes do - but those people can still get sick. It may yet be useful but based on that simple fact I'm not holding my breath.
The second hasn't even had an in vitro experiment yet and technically doens't prevent infection, but is a highly unusual and novel approach. Researchers at Berkeley have come up with the idea of a virus that is a parasite of HIV itself. The trick is that the antivirus cannot push the level of HIV too low, or the antivirus itself will die out and latent HIV will come back, which they were able to demonstrate thanks to computer simulations of the population dynamics. However, it can mute HIV activity and thus prevent infection from developing into full-blown AIDS. What's more, if the carrier happens to spread AIDS to someone else, the antivirus will go with it, and when HIV mutates the antivirus can still affect it. HIV would become a virus that people could live with without it killing them. But there is no way to know whether or not something unforseen can happen with what is essentially genetic engineering, and at the very least moving that research from the computer to the real world will be a real task. There is a lot of work to be done there.
The third technology could be the real deal. The fact is, some lucky people are resistant to HIV infection. Their CCR5 receptors are knocked out, and apparently HIV is unable to fuse with the cells as a result. Genetically altering your immune system to suppress this gene might thus offer protection against AIDS. However, that same mutation may be associated with multiple sclerosis. Again, nothing like this has ever been tried.
That's as far as I know, really. I regret that society and the government cynically ignored the epidemic when it was in far fewer people and might have been stopped with quarantine because it happened to affect a group that many people weren't fond of. I suspect now society may have to accept the inevitable and stop people from having multiple sexual partners. I fear the possiblity that HIV could mutate into something that can infect even without sexual contact in the meantime.
I've often thought that rather than having independent blogs and big bloggish sites like slashdot, it would make more sense to have people publish personal blogs with topic indicators on RSS following a universal standard, and then have metasites that gather, filter, consolidate, moderate, and ultimately list interesting posts that meet their specific criteria. They could be specific like slashdot or more universal like a real paper in terms of what topics they emphasize and how much, but in either case they could draw on the entirety of blogosphere. And it would probably be a lot less redundant too. Seems technically feasible to me.
Slashdot Mirror
There are difficult-to-impossible-to-fake signs, if you know what to look/feel for. The sex flush is the best one. Pupil size generally increases when it happens too. The vaginal contractions at 0.8s intervals would be very difficult to fake also. Also there's the whole issue of their acting skills.
So... go run some experiments with this new data.
I have a slashdot journal but only /.ers can post to that and the interface isn't nearly as good as a lot of the blogs I've seen, not to mention no images. I post semi-regularly to a half dozen communities but often have things to say otherwise. Ideally of course I would like to not just be talking to myself... so I think I should start a blog.
Any recommendations on where and how to start? I don't know where to begin. What sites are free, reliable, easy to use, good looking with clean interfaces, and offer ways to publicize your blog (random sampling perhaps). Is there any way to move my journal over without doing the old cut-and-paste? There's a real emphasis on science and geeky stuff in my journal. Categorizing of posts would be nice for me.
Well seeing as how he can't use a GUI at all, there's no reason to work within a GUI interface. I'm sure it's CLI, just a single terminal window reading back to him like in the old days.
Personally I think methods for using severely limited interfaces is a very interesting subject, and not just for the blind. There are thousands of places where there's just no room/money for a screen or keyboard or mouse, but where you want sophisticated interaction anyway. Your phone, for instance. Standard phones have a mere 12 keys, a microphone, and a speaker. Slightly more sophisticated models have a small 1 or 2 line display. But then there's cellphones which are all fancy nowadays, and the phone company has all sorts of services like voice input and such.
That's a nice system. What would also be interesting would be to have an initial buy-in to the game. In other words, you log on, create a character, pay ~$20 for it and play. If you die, you have to buy a new character. If too many people are not dying, the monsters get tougher :) It would make for an interesting game dynamic, with clans forming to protect their member's investments, assholes picking off the weak and disconnected, badasses risking their powerful characters for a shot at being the best, and so forth.
A variation on that would be to put limits on your characters life - you start out young and weak, become a strong adult, and slowly weaken with time until you die after a certain number of game years.
I'd have to agree. The lengths the cellular companies go to to extract money from you is pathetic.
However AFAIK the european market is more lenient and the Japanese market is more tech-and-style hungry. They could probably market the phone without it being crippled. Wouldn't that be a slap in the face to the American market.
Also, and I'm not sure what the expenses of this would be, they could just make up a network but just roam on others. If it had 802.11b built in you could do internet calls for free, which would help offset that expense. Or convince the more desperate networks (I'm looking at you, Sprint-Nextel) to agree to their terms in order to secure the iPo... uh I mean Apple's help.
I hate to reply to my own post (why why why won't /. let us update/edit them) but I managed to find another link I was looking for. I didn't talk about Apple for no good reason - I think drunkenblog hit the nail on the head with this post.
Not only will they not go after Bram and BT because it's just shifting bits around (they might as well go after FTP), I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to hire him or they built off of exisiting code. BT-style file transfer is just far too efficient and effective to stifle, and with a few modifications could make Video-On-Demand viable.
Hell, the only reason I can see why Apple's iTunes/Quicktime division isn't all over him already is because they're probably cooking up their own software, service, and hardware on their own.
Once there was a company that had the only decent streaming video in town. So they cornered the market on content, bloated up their software with ads, and then sat on their asses while the money rolled in. And just for good measure, made it difficult to download. What kind of company makes a video player that requires virtually all system resources, and then puts animated ads on the sidebar? So whose stellar hardware/software combination do you think they decide to leech off of when their lousy plan starts falling apart? Maybe the one whose operating system you neglected the most, with lousy ports months late? You think Apple was just going to sit there while let you suck their profits away while you drag their reputation down with you?
Goodbye parasites. Fuck you and the shitty bloatware you rode in on.
Seriously. All those college servers aren't blocking BitTorrent over the content - they're blocking it over the sheer cost and congestion of all that traffic.
That's the problem with flat-rate unlimited bandwidth for the consumer. If they can use as much as they want, they will use as much as you let them. Like how when you widen road, the traffic situation doesn't improve because more and bigger cars start using it.
Filesharing of video is a good example. Used to be a 30 minute episode would end up encoded with Real Media at low rates, and turn out to be maybe 50MB total. Then people started getting broadband and DivX was invented, and suddenly all the files ballooned to 175MB or even 225MB. Likewise audio - what was once 96kbs mp3s became 320kbs or even losslessly compressed. As transfer rates improve, don't be surprised to see people trading 1GB+ video files in HDTV resolution.
No, you want to watch from the beginning. However, BitTorrent is not designed for this - it specifically targets the worst represented portions of the file to help make the swarm as diverse as possible, so that as seeds disappear major bottlenecks do not arise. There are implementations like Azureus that can favor the first chunks, but the result is sketchy at best. Specifically delivering a desired chunk has merit anyway - but only for streamable content, and only if it can deliver fast enough for playback.
Also, BT's speed is often bottlenecked by ISPs which cap uploads, therefore penalizing you on the downloading side.
It's right there on the website though - due to the nature of the technology you have to update your playback/reader/displayer app to take advantage of this. BT just works as is. If the BT developers really wanted to they could update the protocol to allow all this, or even more interesting features - like parchive file repair and recovery, which would effectively eliminate the problem of swarms with lost seeds.
Although many users enjoy shows, 'my cable bill' divided by 'number of shows I watch' will drive end user logic about perceived value of a show. $3 dollars per show is low enough to be reasonable, and hopefully high enough to generate revenue. Offer package deals, if someone is a fan of the show, offer the season at a 25% of 33% discount of all episodes are bought up front.
Uh, no, $3 per show is WAY too high. Via netflix I can watch a whole volume for about $1 or so, which would typically contain 3-5 half hour episodes or 2 hour long episodes. If it were first run, I would say $0.50 per half hour episode and $1 per hour long would make more sense. Better shows may charge more, and possibly ads could be used to lower the cost.
There are three big differences from music files, which are going for $0.99 these days (also too much). Music files are very small and thus incur far less overhead to download. They typically have a smaller market than TV series, which appeal to broader tastes and have less competition. Their buyers will listen to them over and over, unlike TV shows which are generally watched seriously only once, then half-heartedly in reruns. Although the first fact makes them more expensive to distribute, the other two facts mean TV shows should be less expensive than music because they will be used less.
Of course, such a-la-carte purchasing will induce people to watch less TV even if they are ultimately paying more than if they had bought a package - providing free episodes (season premiers mostly) to help draw in viewers for new shows is a necessity. Flat-rate plans and discounted season packages would also become popular.
The whole point of a mouse is just to click on a spot on the screen, which then does something. More mouse buttons means that you can change what it does when you click, but outside certain highly graphical programs this is not really necessary, and you can always modify a plain click with other keys or toggle between states, which is what the mac does.
But if you're talking about real-time control you can do a lot better with more. Ever try running a flight simulator with just a mouse? Forget about it. You NEED a joystick or better. Console-style controllers are a good compromise and are highly flexible.
I watched a couple eps - I was not impressed. Then again I've never been impressed by Joss Whedon's work.
And Babylon 5 had a tendency to get a little... overimportant? Something. I didn't like the look very much either.
I always liked DS9, but that was mainly for the character development and darker plotline rather than sci-fi aspects. Personally I think they could make a great movie out of that, better than the Next Generation films anyway.
Farscape could make an interesting movie, but again that's not so much due to the SF aspects (which could get more than a little flaky, though their alien design was better than many) but because sometimes it seemed like they were holding back due to TV restrictions. But a film could be really wild. And yay alien full-frontal sex scene!
Going a bit backwards in time, the original movie for Alien Nation was a very novel SF concept for TV and much better than the TV series. I think we're due for a retreatment of Buck Rogers. Red Dwarf was the only SF comedy worth mentioning, but would need extensive reworking for the big screen.
The DVD technology has become the most successful consumer technology ever because of the re-release of older movies on the new format for what consumers have deemed reasonable prices. Are all these movies going to be again released on Blu-ray/DVD-HD for the same prices?
In a nutshell, they may be rereleased to fill new orders but there will be no major advantage to rebuying from DVD. Blu-Ray/DVD-HD are significant solely for their ability to carry high-definition content. But TV shows filmed with conventional equipment and older copies of film lack the resolution to take advantage of this feature. In fact, when people first started filming TV shows in high-def they realized that the resolution was so good that things like makeup and props were much harder to get right. So even if they convert to the new standards they would have to do some serious-to-impossible remastering and enhancing work.
However, these high capacity disks will be ideal for packaging an entire season of a TV series in normal definition on one or two volumes. And masterers will no longer have to compromise between features or shoehorn long films onto a single disk. In case you didn't realize, DVD was just a little too small to take advantage of all of its features at once - particularly where multiple language audio is required.
I think this tech will really be useful for able bodied people when they can just put on a scanner on an arbitray machine controlling arbitrary stuff and just use it. Moving a cursor is OK, but unless you can register "clicks" it isn't very useful as a mouse.
Really, if we had the functionality of a typical handheld game controller - with two joysticks, and analog and digital buttons - then this tech can really be useful.
Of course since game controllers are imperfect devices, a mental controller that has more powerful attributes would be welcome. Think 6-axis control x2 or more, plus an arbitrary number of toggles and variable inputs. Feedback so you could know the state and identity of said inputs would also be important.
There ought to be some watchdog group that picks out companies that are willing to actively thwart basic human rights and democratic freedoms in other countries in the pursuit of a quick buck, and organizes boycotts and divestment campaigns against them. I'd say there should be legal provisions against them too, but I know those laws would be heavily misapplied.
I hate to defend the Christian Right, but in fairness I must say that even if you're just scanning the dial, half the time you land on the Howard Stern show you're bound to hear something that would be offensive to a great many people, be it baiting the mentally challenged or lewd commentary re: strippers etc.
On another note, I doubt any agency no matter how spooky could have designed or even developed HIV at that point in time. The technology just wasn't there.
I mean daunting purely in the sense of being able to cure or protect against the disease. Fast moving epidemics are always the most alarming, but it's the ones modern medicine can't control that should inspire the most dread. And HIV/AIDS has been handing modern medicine its ass on a plate for over 20 years. The flip side of that is modern medicine has been forced to get a lot smarter about how to treat viruses as a direct result of that fact, it's just not smart enough for HIV yet.
Incidentally I heard somewhere AIDS may have been killing as early as the 1920s, though it can't be proven. In any case we can assume that HIV spread roughly exponentially, which is characterized by increasingly rapid spread: pretend the virus spreads 10 times as far over a decade - it would go 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000, 100000000. From ten in the first decade to a thousand in the third, to a hundred million in only 70 years. You get the idea. Infections were in the tens of thousands in the early 1980s, now they're in the tens of millions. HIV is doubling ever 2-3 years. Extrapolating backwards would put the progenitor somewhere between 1935-1950, although I'm sure the rate has changed due to other factors along the way.
AFAIK, although we don't have a vaccine for SARS there's no reason to think we can't develop one.
Personally I like to categorize the significance of diseases based on where they fall on three axes: infectiousness, how easily they can move through the population; lethality/virulence, how likely they are to kill you; and destructiveness, how much damage they do in the process of affliction, particularly permanent damage.
Out of 10s, I'd give the following:
HIV: 9 (stealthily infectious for years), 10 (100% fatal), 5 (life largely unaffected until AIDS develops)
The Cold: 10 (unstoppable and rapid), 1 (harmless), 1 (day or two off work)
Rabies: 4 (hard to contract but endemic in mammals), 9 (100% fatal if not treated before symptoms), 10 (painful descent into insanity ending in death)
Who said anything about gay sex being the main method. It used to be the main method. Now there are more women infected than men, and in the hardest hit parts of the world the spread of the epidemic is closely tied to widespread prostitution. In both cases the true factor is promiscuity, what has always been a risky factor with regards to disease but which has been lauded in popular culture for both sexes for the past 40 years or so. How many people you've had sex with is practically a metric for how manly (for men) or liberated (for women) you are these days.
I only made that statement to respond to a specific example in the prior post. I don't know the rates for the industrialized countries but I suspect that even if homosexuals still have a higher percent infected than heterosexuals, the larger numbers of heterosexuals could mean they have as many or more people actually infected - and AFAIK prostitution plays only a relatively small part in the spread of the disease here. When you look at who gets infected in America, what you mainly hear about is a lot of people who thought their partner(s) were safe and decided to skip the condom, and a bunch of people who like to fuck around but don't like condoms, and a lot of people who just can't bring themselves to make the mental and physical effort neccessary to practice safe sex. And even sex with a condom - or even without intercourse - is no guarantee.
Syphillis was indeed a major problem some years back. Not incidentally, it was at its most deadly when and where prostitution was common, in the cities in the late 1800s. Then we could cure it and aggressive tracking and treatment policies and changing social mores reduced it's significance to very little. And now we are seeing a resurgence of syphilis anyway, and AIDS is a major killer. It makes me wonder what's next. (I note in passing that it seems the more intimate the contact the more fatal the disase tends to be, but I don't have any data to back that up).
To be blunt, the idea that a social stigma and religous dogma against extramarital sex and particularly promiscuity is based purely on idealogical justifications is flat out wrong. They are almost certainly based primarily on the eminently practical notions of preventing the spread of disease and ensuring that fathers are both taking responsibility for their own children and not being tricked into doing so for others. Both of those unfortunate events can have been easily avoided with a little reason and responsibility, and yet history has shown time and again that given half the chance people will exercise neither. There is zero evidence that today is any different, and why not? Unbridled lust has always been louder than caution and reason. Ask yourself - how many times in your life have the rigid opinions of other people been the only thing stopping you from making a foolish decision? If you can't think of any, try remembering what it was like to be a teenager.
We may today regard rigid social constraints as something inimical to our pluralistic society, but cold reality is proving them to be vital components of our survival.
That's called innate immunity, and it has little to do with the immune system. Actually this is a form of evolution, which means that the necessary mutation must occur and be selected for before it has any chance of stifling the spread of the disease. And that process can take decades to hundreds of years.
In fact that innate immunity against HIV is already present in the form of ccr5delta32 individuals, mainly in caucasians and possibly as a result of the Black Death. There are other genotypes where ccr5 has been lost as well, present in other populations. The resistance to infection with a ccr5 knockout is strong but not perfect, and has a lot to do with the fact that HIV usually infects people via macrophages with their ccr5 coreceptors. You can also be infected via your T-cells expressing the cxcr4 coreceptor, although since that may require blood-to-blood transmission it is a far less efficient pathway. It would be wrong to assume that the ccr5delta32 mutation makes us stronger though - it just protects us from this one disease. One could argue that the force of evolution is usually applied not developing novel attributes but simply tweaking the ones we already have to maintain the status quo - the Red Queen Hypothesis. ccr5 is involved in cell signalling, and although it appears we can survive without it, there may be underappreciated side effects, like the possiblity it plays a role in multiple sclerosis, as I said before.
It's not so much society that would do the enforcing, it would be the disease. As in if you have sex with anyone who has had multiple partners you have a strong possiblity of catching the disease, and thus anyone who has multiple partners will instantly come under suspicion. Or worse, the uncautious people will just start dying and leaving the cautious people alive.
Keep in mind, the whole extramarital sex thing has only been socially acceptable for 40 years or so. Though it has been practiced for much longer it was never so widespread or so promiscuous. In particular the fact that both sexes are now doing it makes the dynamics of transmission much more difficult to control - wheras before monitoring prostitutes would have been the best way to stifle the illness, that is no longer sufficient.
So while it may be your civil right to have sex with whomever and however many people you choose, ultimately the only responsible course may be to have only one permanent lifetime partner, and demand the same from them. Everything else is risky, however calculated, both to yourself and too the population as a whole.
That men can identify as heterosexual and monogamous and yet secretly engage in promiscuous sex with other men is testament to the ability of the human mind to lie to itself. The real victims are their partners, who should have picked better. Unfortunately honesty and fidelity can sometimes be hard to identify when picking a partner.
There are countries in Africa where something like 30% of the population is infected, thanks to widespread prostitution. It's spreading like wildfire in many 2nd world countries with a poor appreciation for the disease. America has managed to keep the infected population at relatively low levels, but these other countries will now find it near impossible to combat the spread of the disease now, even if they give up the sexual habits that got them there. Their only hope is a vaccine now.
Oops, forgot the link about the Berkeley work.
Like the parent said, it's a therapy, not a vaccine. It looks like it can help people who have been infected with HIV keep from developing AIDS, but it's not a cure and it won't prevent infection. Still, it's a welcome development.
The fact is, HIV is the most daunting disease we have ever faced. If it had hit even 50 years earlier we may very well have faced an epidemic on the order of the Black Death. It infects and kills stealthily, and evolves within our bodies faster than our immune systems can recognize it. If it hadn't hit the gay community so severely and specifically we might not have even been able to identify it, and it's only thanks to advanced sequencing and crystallography technology that we can study it in the necessary depth. But what is really sobering is this: HIV has infected tens of millions of people, living and mutating within their bodies for decades, and as far as we know no one has ever fought off an infection. The human immune system may very well be completely unable to handle HIV, and that means we may never see a traditional vaccine.
But we live in an age of rapid technological progress, and I do know of three promising possiblities that could actually prevent infection. None of them has yet been tested.
The first is another line of french vaccine work. Sequence comparison between various strains of the virus had identified a highly conserved protein region on the GP41 surface protein. The antibodies produced against the peptide seems to target the virus extremely well in the lab. So why don't we see antibodies against this epitope in the real world? It turns out we sometimes do - but those people can still get sick. It may yet be useful but based on that simple fact I'm not holding my breath.
The second hasn't even had an in vitro experiment yet and technically doens't prevent infection, but is a highly unusual and novel approach. Researchers at Berkeley have come up with the idea of a virus that is a parasite of HIV itself. The trick is that the antivirus cannot push the level of HIV too low, or the antivirus itself will die out and latent HIV will come back, which they were able to demonstrate thanks to computer simulations of the population dynamics. However, it can mute HIV activity and thus prevent infection from developing into full-blown AIDS. What's more, if the carrier happens to spread AIDS to someone else, the antivirus will go with it, and when HIV mutates the antivirus can still affect it. HIV would become a virus that people could live with without it killing them. But there is no way to know whether or not something unforseen can happen with what is essentially genetic engineering, and at the very least moving that research from the computer to the real world will be a real task. There is a lot of work to be done there.
The third technology could be the real deal. The fact is, some lucky people are resistant to HIV infection. Their CCR5 receptors are knocked out, and apparently HIV is unable to fuse with the cells as a result. Genetically altering your immune system to suppress this gene might thus offer protection against AIDS. However, that same mutation may be associated with multiple sclerosis. Again, nothing like this has ever been tried.
That's as far as I know, really. I regret that society and the government cynically ignored the epidemic when it was in far fewer people and might have been stopped with quarantine because it happened to affect a group that many people weren't fond of. I suspect now society may have to accept the inevitable and stop people from having multiple sexual partners. I fear the possiblity that HIV could mutate into something that can infect even without sexual contact in the meantime.
I've often thought that rather than having independent blogs and big bloggish sites like slashdot, it would make more sense to have people publish personal blogs with topic indicators on RSS following a universal standard, and then have metasites that gather, filter, consolidate, moderate, and ultimately list interesting posts that meet their specific criteria. They could be specific like slashdot or more universal like a real paper in terms of what topics they emphasize and how much, but in either case they could draw on the entirety of blogosphere. And it would probably be a lot less redundant too. Seems technically feasible to me.