"A 32MB SmartMedia card can hold up to 24 minutes of video, and 5 hours of audio."
Holy God, compression are they using? On the audio side, a 128 kbps mp3 runs at about 1 MB/min, and that sounds like crap to the discerning ear. I guess on the Gameboy speakers it won't really matter: all you'll hear are pops and cracks.
As for the video, 24 minutes? I guess if the screen is small and the resolution bad, but who wants to watch porn on their Gameboy anyway? I never dreamed of the day I'd see GameBoy Pocket Pool.
I'm almost surprised at how little information this CNN article has. I work in a coagulation/hematology lab, and I'm actually kinda interested into what this bandage really is. Specifically, I'm really curious what "clotting agents" this bandage has in it. Thrombin (factor II)? Platelet Factor 3? rVIIa?
In Israel, I hear, they give their soldiers a bottle of recombinant tissue-factor thromboplastin. This works ridiculously quickly, and it's standard for use in pathology labs for tests. It activates the intrinsic pathway.
The real problem, anyway, isn't with the clotting, it's with fibrinolysis - breaking the clot down. There are lots of products that will clot your blood very rapidly, but the clot doesn't break down when it needs to and get out of the system. That was one of the problems with the "wound glues" that were being developed. Lots of testing is still being done in this area, I think.
As for haemophiliacs - as someone asked - this bandage won't help them. Haemophilia is caused by a deficiency of one of the clotting factors (VII, VIII, IX, XI). We're currently researching treatment using recombinant activated VII. People seem to develop allergies to other factors, but not VII.
I thought we already acquired this vital information circa 1985? You just jump in the air and stomp on it. Or spit fireballs. Or get a starm... ohhhh Roomba.
Finding the genome of each species is much more than they propose. They just want to "find and name," which requires the successful identification of just one of each species.
To come up with the entire genome for everything is something that is impossible. We still only have the genomes of only a handful of species now, and it's taken us forever to get them.
This will be a monumental undertaking. The current rate of discovery is a mere 10,000 a year. With an estimated 100 milion species, it'd take, well, forever.
Animals won't be so bad. We figure we have a good knowledge of 10-15% of the animal species out there. It's only so long before we have them all. 25 years is a pretty long time for that.
However, we only have catalogued something like.1% of all estimated species of microorganisms out there. Finding, isolating, and cataloging all of the microorganisms will take us much longer than animals simply because they're so tiny. This probably will take much longer than 25 years.
Hell, even if we had them all, we'd never know what makes these species special and significant. The most important parts of species discovery could be lost in the mad rush.
Not to mention: "Instead of the time-consuming present system of comparing new discoveries with museum species, there will be a worldwide web-based database."
The issues of hacking/cracking, stability, reliability, and verification all boggle the mind. There's no way we'd be able to be sure.
I think this guy is just trying to get publicity behind the idea that we should speed things up. Like a rallying war cry for the science nerd community.
Maybe someone already said this, but I didn't care to read through all the posts. Anyway.
There was an ad on the radio recently about this. Apparently there's a website (forgot the URL. Like musiccdpayback.com or something) where you can file a claim for a piece of the settlement.
The sucky parts: 1) No one person will get more than $20. 2) If each person's repayment, after dividing by number of claims, is less than $5, the money will go to a non-profit charity instead.
So really, the consumers aren't individually winning anything from this, despite dealing with elevated prices for all those years. Some victory.
"If they're paying a sub-standard wage to bring over a foreigner, then they're just abusing the H1B system for a purpose it wasn't intended for"
This, on one hand, can be true. However, if given the choice between hiring an American citizen for X dollars/year and bringing over some foreigner for the same wage, what will the vast majority of American companies do? They'll hire Americans. By allowing them to offer a lower wage to have a transitory employee, it helps to keep the system working for the benefit of the foreigner.
I'll say that I enjoy Firefly. It has interesting characters, situations that keep you guessing, and well, accents.
I find it funny, however, that the technology of the show goes back so far as to rely on plows and six-shooters. Sure, people who are poor regress in technology, but it's set in the 26th century. For us to use technology would be like saying that when you need to type a paper your computer breaks, instead of whipping out a word processor or even a typewriter, you go and use Gutenberg's printing press.
Perhaps that's part of the atmosphere they're trying to paint, but it doesn't hold. These people have traveled through space and can't come up with anything better than a projectile weapon from the 1900s? How would they even find ammo for such a thing?
I'm not even gonna get started on how everyone they encounter is a hardcore fundamentalist Christian. Sure, they'll burn that doctor's sister for being a witch, but a guy flies through space and uses an energy weapon and he's the right-hand man of the Lord.
Even the idea of trading livestock using a spaceship seems rather ridiculous. Still, it's entertaining.
This story says that people get and use broadband service because they don't use a phone line or get charged per-minute charges.
I'm sure that's fine and dandy in the UK, but here I don't think anyone pays per-minute charges for dial-up and the cost of a second phone line + AOL or MSN about equals the cost of broadband. Hell, broadband is even a little cheaper than that combination where I live.
They say that the big selling point of broadband is that it's always on, but say absolutely nothing to elaborate. Gee, thanks.
They say that most people aren't downloading, so increased download speeds aren't important. Sure, few people download as a majority of their online time, but it's certainly an important factor when people do download.
They end with "broadband doesn't do what it says on the tin." How the hell they got to that conclusion isn't even evident.
I guess the criteria for getting a story on Slashdot is just that it has a fancy headline and is about tech? Even if some idiot n00b wrote it? Even if it's totally wrong? Hell, it doesn't even mention Linux or Open Source. Eesh.
For all the Square bashing and virtual disappearance from Enix in the US game market, I'm really excited to see this.
From Square: Kingdom Hearts was good. Reminded me a lot of the Seiken Densetsu series (number 2 was Secret of Mana) and was leagues better than Legend of Mana. FFX was good, too, though more of a playable movie. I mean, when every scene involves talking to everyone until you talk to the right person and transition to FMV, you feel like you have no part except for slaying monsters. The rest of the Final Fantasies weren't that great. So Enix can put some development effort (which they have a lot of) into Square. There's a reason that their games can only be released on weekends and holidays in Japan. Definitely a good thing.
For Enix: They have so little penetration here anymore, it's ridiculous. How many people bought/played Dragon Warrior 7? (or even 5 and 6, but in Japanese) I did, and they were marvelous. Dragon Warrior 7 took *easily* 80 hours to complete and was a fantastic game. They just need more of an influence here, and more releases, which Square certainly has in abundance.
Everyone's waiting for Enix to bring another great game here, and also waiting for Square to release a great game (to rival FFVI). This merger will hopefully bring this all to fruition, and should usher in a golden age of console RPGs unseen since the days of the SNES.
I'm a college student (in my 4th year of undergrad) and I use my Handspring Visor Prism all the freaking time. I used to have a paper organizer, but I'm very disorganized and wouldn't always write in it because I'd run out of inserts, or lose it, or it was too big to carry.
With my PDA, I can stash it in my backpack - or even my pocket. I never worry about losing it, because it cost me so much that I know its location at all times. I never have to worry about running out of inserts or paper and etc.
It helps me keep motivated to use it because by pulling it out in class I can assert my geekiness and show up all those n00bs around me.
I don't have anything installed on it, however, except what came on it. I only use the HotSync for charging it, which lasts me two or three weeks.
As for other stuff, well, I've been thinking about getting some games, but all the games worth playing seem to be for Win CE/Pocket PC machines. My friend's iPAQ has an NES emulator, and I'm all jealous. I've had real difficulty finding a warez version of the Liberty emulator, too.
I tried getting porn pics on it with the PhotoAlbum, but they're so small that it's hard to make out any juicy details. I could get a SmartMedia expansion for the Springboard slot and watch porn movies, but the sound is very low quality, and that's what does it for me. This still leaves the question of where I'd masturbate with it? I'd be worried about damaging it during the process anyway.
So yeah, I just use it for organizing. It's good for that.
I believe it's the day after Thanksgiving, aka like the biggest shopping day of the year?
Having worked in retail during the holidays/sales(at Victoria's Secret) I gotta say that this day and the day after Christmas are the worst days of the year. Why people go shopping on these days - knowing full well that everyone else is going shopping too - is insane. Sure it's a day off, but the whole day spent that Friday is all of an hour or two any other day. We had lines that circled the entire store and went outside, and the fitting rooms were so full that people (ie. fat old ladies) were getting naked in the middle of the store.::shudder::
Back to being on-topic: What's the point of ads and sale prices if people don't get to know about them? No one would ever choose a small or specialty store over a giant megastore if they had no knowledge of price differences or selection. It's idiotic.
Yeah, the cards are a major hassle. There was a big thing in the past about tracking purchases and selling the information to insurance companies (Shopper X bought 85 cartons of Marlboros and 50 cases of Heineken in the past week) so they could use it to raise raise. However, they don't verify names and such when signing up (at least they didn't), so I didn't have a problem with getting one.
I always offer to let cardless patrons use my card when I'm behind them in line, because it's absolutely insane to shop at Ralph's without it - they'll gouge the shit out of you.
"This will finally allow me to play the Castlevania games without fusing my naked retina to the screen"
If you bothered to pick up Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, you'd see that Konami has put some things in the game to combat the lack of backlighting. Large characters/monsters, some bright colors, lighting effects, spell effects that center on the character, and even Juste's "blue-shadow" all contribute a lot to making the game very playable when other games on the sustem aren't.
You still need decent light, but it's not a total eye-strainer. You can even play Harmony of Dissonance well in moderate indoor lighting, which is a feat on the GBA.
Still, I'd like to see it on a TV. That'd hopefully fix some issues with the crappy sound (which few people seem to bitch about, but which sucks).
Once again the Slashdot lemming mentality strikes.
Had anyone but a few people bothered to read the article, or even the headline of it at the LA Times link, they'd see that only documents from 1922-1939 would be opened. They seem to be doing this to reduce criticism of the papacy's role in pre-WWII events. (With all the bad press they've been getting lately, who can blame them?)
So no really important mystery-solving and faith-smashing texts will be released. Boo hoo.
Anyway, I can understand why people didn't go look. I mean, you had to click on the link in the post, and then click on the "The World" link, and then scroll down half a page, and maybe even click again. That's a lot of effort to not sound like an ignorant jackass. Hell, I did it, and I probably still do.
Because the NRA fights for the rights granted in the Constitution does not mean you will be shot. In fact, most crimes are committed by firearms obtained illegally anyway, so the things the NRA stands for do not come into play.
The DMA, however, has no ties to any governing document (while it may be free speech to advertise, it is not free speech to fill my HD with data), and we all know that it is nearly impossible to NOT get spam sent your way. The DMA does not have anything to do with free speech, but only with the ability to determine who or what has control of what data is allowed to be sent to and collected in your Inbox.
I was trying to do 100 trillion flops on my cluster, and it was like beep beep bleep bleep, and then, like, half of my data was gone, and I was like, "What?" It couldn't do it. It was totally good data. It was a bummmer.
I can't believe this story was reported here, let alone even on MSN.
Essentially, what these guys did was find a way to add a gene into a pig by messing with the sperm. This technique can't be used for removing genes, and can't replace genes. They can only add genes.
So they added DAF, because they say it helps fight rejection. Great. That is still a pig heart/liver/kidneys that you would be getting. There are lots of reasons that you can't transplant organs, including but not limited to:
1) Marker proteins. Your body won't even take organs from other people, let alone pigs. You'd have to replace pig markers with your own, which they cannot do.
2) Other surface proteins. They think they can ADD genes to do stuff to combat the sugars that pigs have on the surfaces of their cells. No removal, just throwing some gene for creating a suppressing chemical into the mix.
3) Cell morphology/DNA. Pig DNA is not human DNA. Pig cells are not human cells. Pig cells expressing "human genes" are closer, but when these cells replicate, when you get a virus, when something goes wrong.. what's gonna fix it? How do we know what will happen? Your body isn't built to have weird cells throw into it - that's why it destroys them. They have a long way to go before they even understand just membrane/cell surface reactions, and yet they wanna throw them into people.
To quote: "Lavitrano said that five to seven other pig genes will need to be silenced or replaced by human genes before useful organs could be harvested from the animals."
So tell me, how is this really news? The headline should have read "Scientists develop new but limited method for gene implantation." It's been done.
I know I read Japanese very poorly, but what I gather from this is:
a) This came out April 1, 2002? b) Has shortcuts for use with the thumbs, called Thumbphrase. c) Has a Standby button to prolong battery life. At one touch, even. d) A zoom in button? I didn't get much of that section. I think you can change from 1024x768 to 800x600 with one push. e) It supports some wireless card from some company, 'cause I guess it has a PCMCIA slot. Well, they call it 'PC card slot.' f) It can have 802.11b compatibility with a Sony card. g) Connectivity between itself and a desktop through a port. I think ethernet. You can drag and drop file copy really easily. (Flying Pointer) h) Adobe Acrobat ebook crap.
I hope that helps. And just asking... is there a Sony site in English that I just don't see?
Did you even think before submitting this post? And who modded it as insightful?
"* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power"
Oh, okay, good plan. Now I can install and run my software off of floppies. "Hey, where's install disk 649 of 700?"
"Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar)."
Did you ever think that maybe some people (i.e. old businessmen) might have trouble using a small screen?
"Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more."
Okay, so now I can just install and run my software off of.. what? You mean I don't have any real input devices? I guess I could download warez copies of everything.
Please. A laptop without any functionality isn't even worth having. Even just for work, you still need a lot of battery-sucking stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
"A 32MB SmartMedia card can hold up to 24 minutes of video, and 5 hours of audio."
Holy God, compression are they using? On the audio side, a 128 kbps mp3 runs at about 1 MB/min, and that sounds like crap to the discerning ear. I guess on the Gameboy speakers it won't really matter: all you'll hear are pops and cracks.
As for the video, 24 minutes? I guess if the screen is small and the resolution bad, but who wants to watch porn on their Gameboy anyway? I never dreamed of the day I'd see GameBoy Pocket Pool.
I'm almost surprised at how little information this CNN article has. I work in a coagulation/hematology lab, and I'm actually kinda interested into what this bandage really is. Specifically, I'm really curious what "clotting agents" this bandage has in it. Thrombin (factor II)? Platelet Factor 3? rVIIa?
In Israel, I hear, they give their soldiers a bottle of recombinant tissue-factor thromboplastin. This works ridiculously quickly, and it's standard for use in pathology labs for tests. It activates the intrinsic pathway.
The real problem, anyway, isn't with the clotting, it's with fibrinolysis - breaking the clot down. There are lots of products that will clot your blood very rapidly, but the clot doesn't break down when it needs to and get out of the system. That was one of the problems with the "wound glues" that were being developed. Lots of testing is still being done in this area, I think.
As for haemophiliacs - as someone asked - this bandage won't help them. Haemophilia is caused by a deficiency of one of the clotting factors (VII, VIII, IX, XI). We're currently researching treatment using recombinant activated VII. People seem to develop allergies to other factors, but not VII.
"important information on how to kill a Roomba"
I thought we already acquired this vital information circa 1985? You just jump in the air and stomp on it. Or spit fireballs. Or get a starm... ohhhh Roomba.
Well, I guess those three techniques still work.
Finding the genome of each species is much more than they propose. They just want to "find and name," which requires the successful identification of just one of each species.
To come up with the entire genome for everything is something that is impossible. We still only have the genomes of only a handful of species now, and it's taken us forever to get them.
This will be a monumental undertaking. The current rate of discovery is a mere 10,000 a year. With an estimated 100 milion species, it'd take, well, forever.
.1% of all estimated species of microorganisms out there. Finding, isolating, and cataloging all of the microorganisms will take us much longer than animals simply because they're so tiny. This probably will take much longer than 25 years.
Animals won't be so bad. We figure we have a good knowledge of 10-15% of the animal species out there. It's only so long before we have them all. 25 years is a pretty long time for that.
However, we only have catalogued something like
Hell, even if we had them all, we'd never know what makes these species special and significant. The most important parts of species discovery could be lost in the mad rush.
Not to mention:
"Instead of the time-consuming present system of comparing new discoveries with museum species, there will be a worldwide web-based database."
The issues of hacking/cracking, stability, reliability, and verification all boggle the mind. There's no way we'd be able to be sure.
I think this guy is just trying to get publicity behind the idea that we should speed things up. Like a rallying war cry for the science nerd community.
Maybe someone already said this, but I didn't care to read through all the posts. Anyway.
There was an ad on the radio recently about this. Apparently there's a website (forgot the URL. Like musiccdpayback.com or something) where you can file a claim for a piece of the settlement.
The sucky parts:
1) No one person will get more than $20.
2) If each person's repayment, after dividing by number of claims, is less than $5, the money will go to a non-profit charity instead.
So really, the consumers aren't individually winning anything from this, despite dealing with elevated prices for all those years. Some victory.
"If they're paying a sub-standard wage to bring over a foreigner, then they're just abusing the H1B system for a purpose it wasn't intended for"
This, on one hand, can be true. However, if given the choice between hiring an American citizen for X dollars/year and bringing over some foreigner for the same wage, what will the vast majority of American companies do? They'll hire Americans. By allowing them to offer a lower wage to have a transitory employee, it helps to keep the system working for the benefit of the foreigner.
I refuse to ever compromise my moral beliefs just because morally bankrupt and spiritually dead people seem to be pulling ahead.
That's totally great, but that does that mean that I have to follow yours?
"I remember reading on the side of my McDonalds Happy Meal box that we'd see the "edge" of the universe within the decade."
That's the first article I've seen quoted from The McDonalds Happy Meal box. Odd, since it is truly the most reliable scientific resource of our time.
I'll say that I enjoy Firefly. It has interesting characters, situations that keep you guessing, and well, accents.
I find it funny, however, that the technology of the show goes back so far as to rely on plows and six-shooters. Sure, people who are poor regress in technology, but it's set in the 26th century. For us to use technology would be like saying that when you need to type a paper your computer breaks, instead of whipping out a word processor or even a typewriter, you go and use Gutenberg's printing press.
Perhaps that's part of the atmosphere they're trying to paint, but it doesn't hold. These people have traveled through space and can't come up with anything better than a projectile weapon from the 1900s? How would they even find ammo for such a thing?
I'm not even gonna get started on how everyone they encounter is a hardcore fundamentalist Christian. Sure, they'll burn that doctor's sister for being a witch, but a guy flies through space and uses an energy weapon and he's the right-hand man of the Lord.
Even the idea of trading livestock using a spaceship seems rather ridiculous. Still, it's entertaining.
This story says that people get and use broadband service because they don't use a phone line or get charged per-minute charges.
I'm sure that's fine and dandy in the UK, but here I don't think anyone pays per-minute charges for dial-up and the cost of a second phone line + AOL or MSN about equals the cost of broadband. Hell, broadband is even a little cheaper than that combination where I live.
They say that the big selling point of broadband is that it's always on, but say absolutely nothing to elaborate. Gee, thanks.
They say that most people aren't downloading, so increased download speeds aren't important. Sure, few people download as a majority of their online time, but it's certainly an important factor when people do download.
They end with "broadband doesn't do what it says on the tin." How the hell they got to that conclusion isn't even evident.
I guess the criteria for getting a story on Slashdot is just that it has a fancy headline and is about tech? Even if some idiot n00b wrote it? Even if it's totally wrong? Hell, it doesn't even mention Linux or Open Source. Eesh.
For all the Square bashing and virtual disappearance from Enix in the US game market, I'm really excited to see this.
From Square: Kingdom Hearts was good. Reminded me a lot of the Seiken Densetsu series (number 2 was Secret of Mana) and was leagues better than Legend of Mana. FFX was good, too, though more of a playable movie. I mean, when every scene involves talking to everyone until you talk to the right person and transition to FMV, you feel like you have no part except for slaying monsters. The rest of the Final Fantasies weren't that great. So Enix can put some development effort (which they have a lot of) into Square. There's a reason that their games can only be released on weekends and holidays in Japan. Definitely a good thing.
For Enix: They have so little penetration here anymore, it's ridiculous. How many people bought/played Dragon Warrior 7? (or even 5 and 6, but in Japanese) I did, and they were marvelous. Dragon Warrior 7 took *easily* 80 hours to complete and was a fantastic game. They just need more of an influence here, and more releases, which Square certainly has in abundance.
Everyone's waiting for Enix to bring another great game here, and also waiting for Square to release a great game (to rival FFVI). This merger will hopefully bring this all to fruition, and should usher in a golden age of console RPGs unseen since the days of the SNES.
I'm a college student (in my 4th year of undergrad) and I use my Handspring Visor Prism all the freaking time. I used to have a paper organizer, but I'm very disorganized and wouldn't always write in it because I'd run out of inserts, or lose it, or it was too big to carry.
With my PDA, I can stash it in my backpack - or even my pocket. I never worry about losing it, because it cost me so much that I know its location at all times. I never have to worry about running out of inserts or paper and etc.
It helps me keep motivated to use it because by pulling it out in class I can assert my geekiness and show up all those n00bs around me.
I don't have anything installed on it, however, except what came on it. I only use the HotSync for charging it, which lasts me two or three weeks.
As for other stuff, well, I've been thinking about getting some games, but all the games worth playing seem to be for Win CE/Pocket PC machines. My friend's iPAQ has an NES emulator, and I'm all jealous. I've had real difficulty finding a warez version of the Liberty emulator, too.
I tried getting porn pics on it with the PhotoAlbum, but they're so small that it's hard to make out any juicy details. I could get a SmartMedia expansion for the Springboard slot and watch porn movies, but the sound is very low quality, and that's what does it for me. This still leaves the question of where I'd masturbate with it? I'd be worried about damaging it during the process anyway.
So yeah, I just use it for organizing. It's good for that.
You know, when I first saw the annotations in the post, I thought you were going to reference scientific papers or articles.
Man you really had me going.
I believe it's the day after Thanksgiving, aka like the biggest shopping day of the year?
::shudder::
Having worked in retail during the holidays/sales(at Victoria's Secret) I gotta say that this day and the day after Christmas are the worst days of the year. Why people go shopping on these days - knowing full well that everyone else is going shopping too - is insane. Sure it's a day off, but the whole day spent that Friday is all of an hour or two any other day. We had lines that circled the entire store and went outside, and the fitting rooms were so full that people (ie. fat old ladies) were getting naked in the middle of the store.
Back to being on-topic: What's the point of ads and sale prices if people don't get to know about them? No one would ever choose a small or specialty store over a giant megastore if they had no knowledge of price differences or selection. It's idiotic.
Yeah, the cards are a major hassle. There was a big thing in the past about tracking purchases and selling the information to insurance companies (Shopper X bought 85 cartons of Marlboros and 50 cases of Heineken in the past week) so they could use it to raise raise. However, they don't verify names and such when signing up (at least they didn't), so I didn't have a problem with getting one.
I always offer to let cardless patrons use my card when I'm behind them in line, because it's absolutely insane to shop at Ralph's without it - they'll gouge the shit out of you.
"This will finally allow me to play the Castlevania games without fusing my naked retina to the screen"
If you bothered to pick up Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, you'd see that Konami has put some things in the game to combat the lack of backlighting. Large characters/monsters, some bright colors, lighting effects, spell effects that center on the character, and even Juste's "blue-shadow" all contribute a lot to making the game very playable when other games on the sustem aren't.
You still need decent light, but it's not a total eye-strainer. You can even play Harmony of Dissonance well in moderate indoor lighting, which is a feat on the GBA.
Still, I'd like to see it on a TV. That'd hopefully fix some issues with the crappy sound (which few people seem to bitch about, but which sucks).
/. (or rather, /.ers) is/are against bugging, I would say, when it violates civil liberties or infringes on current laws (which this does).
./ or "bizarro slashdot" (might just be that extreme. Their readers also are all black and breathe water, as I hear it.
This
Once again the Slashdot lemming mentality strikes.
Had anyone but a few people bothered to read the article, or even the headline of it at the LA Times link, they'd see that only documents from 1922-1939 would be opened. They seem to be doing this to reduce criticism of the papacy's role in pre-WWII events. (With all the bad press they've been getting lately, who can blame them?)
So no really important mystery-solving and faith-smashing texts will be released. Boo hoo.
Anyway, I can understand why people didn't go look. I mean, you had to click on the link in the post, and then click on the "The World" link, and then scroll down half a page, and maybe even click again. That's a lot of effort to not sound like an ignorant jackass. Hell, I did it, and I probably still do.
Edible gold foil could be used for the wiring."
People EAT gold?!?!?
Where are these people, and how easy is it to remove their precious insides?
Your logic is specious.
Because the NRA fights for the rights granted in the Constitution does not mean you will be shot. In fact, most crimes are committed by firearms obtained illegally anyway, so the things the NRA stands for do not come into play.
The DMA, however, has no ties to any governing document (while it may be free speech to advertise, it is not free speech to fill my HD with data), and we all know that it is nearly impossible to NOT get spam sent your way. The DMA does not have anything to do with free speech, but only with the ability to determine who or what has control of what data is allowed to be sent to and collected in your Inbox.
I was trying to do 100 trillion flops on my cluster, and it was like beep beep bleep bleep, and then, like, half of my data was gone, and I was like, "What?" It couldn't do it. It was totally good data. It was a bummmer.
My Cray's never let me down once.
www.cray.com/switch
I can't believe this story was reported here, let alone even on MSN.
Essentially, what these guys did was find a way to add a gene into a pig by messing with the sperm. This technique can't be used for removing genes, and can't replace genes. They can only add genes.
So they added DAF, because they say it helps fight rejection. Great. That is still a pig heart/liver/kidneys that you would be getting. There are lots of reasons that you can't transplant organs, including but not limited to:
1) Marker proteins. Your body won't even take organs from other people, let alone pigs. You'd have to replace pig markers with your own, which they cannot do.
2) Other surface proteins. They think they can ADD genes to do stuff to combat the sugars that pigs have on the surfaces of their cells. No removal, just throwing some gene for creating a suppressing chemical into the mix.
3) Cell morphology/DNA. Pig DNA is not human DNA. Pig cells are not human cells. Pig cells expressing "human genes" are closer, but when these cells replicate, when you get a virus, when something goes wrong.. what's gonna fix it? How do we know what will happen? Your body isn't built to have weird cells throw into it - that's why it destroys them. They have a long way to go before they even understand just membrane/cell surface reactions, and yet they wanna throw them into people.
To quote: "Lavitrano said that five to seven other pig genes will need to be silenced or replaced by human genes before useful organs could be harvested from the animals."
So tell me, how is this really news? The headline should have read "Scientists develop new but limited method for gene implantation." It's been done.
I know I read Japanese very poorly, but what I gather from this is:
a) This came out April 1, 2002?
b) Has shortcuts for use with the thumbs, called Thumbphrase.
c) Has a Standby button to prolong battery life. At one touch, even.
d) A zoom in button? I didn't get much of that section. I think you can change from 1024x768 to 800x600 with one push.
e) It supports some wireless card from some company, 'cause I guess it has a PCMCIA slot. Well, they call it 'PC card slot.'
f) It can have 802.11b compatibility with a Sony card.
g) Connectivity between itself and a desktop through a port. I think ethernet. You can drag and drop file copy really easily. (Flying Pointer)
h) Adobe Acrobat ebook crap.
I hope that helps. And just asking... is there a Sony site in English that I just don't see?
Did you even think before submitting this post? And who modded it as insightful?
"* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power"
Oh, okay, good plan. Now I can install and run my software off of floppies. "Hey, where's install disk 649 of 700?"
"Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar)."
Did you ever think that maybe some people (i.e. old businessmen) might have trouble using a small screen?
"Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more."
Okay, so now I can just install and run my software off of.. what? You mean I don't have any real input devices? I guess I could download warez copies of everything.
Please. A laptop without any functionality isn't even worth having. Even just for work, you still need a lot of battery-sucking stuff.