the guy whose first claim to fame is writing "Frames of Mind" seems to have some explanation for this. He claims humans posess eight clusters of intelligences (Theory of Multiple Intelligences), and, apparently, it is very possible to multitask if every task requires a different cluster, but it becomes very difficult if you're doing several things at once that are more or less similar to each other. So it's possible to whistle while driving a bike, but it's really difficult to read a book and hold a conversation at the same time. In the first case, you have true multitasking - two different areas of the brain concurrently operate without interruption. The second case is more like multitasking on a computer: the "cycles" of the brain area that concerns itself with verbal tasks have to be divided between two different tasks and both suffer as result.
yeah, but apparently these HeLa cells are even more out of control than ordinary cancer cells. What makes them special is not that they are "immortal", but rather that they have a tendency to contaminate everything they come across. Again from memory: after they were taken from the patient and given a standard lookover just like every other cell sample taken from a cancer patient gets, apparently they were more or less left alone for a while in some sort of whatever it is scientists keep cell samples in, together with samples from other patients. Months (or years, I'm not sure) later, the Thing They Keep Cell Samples In was opened for some reason or other, and they found out *every* sample in the Thing had been contaminated by HeLa. That's when they found out HeLa was special.
It's not like this woman is very special. She just happened to be around when a scientist needed a cell culture. He could have taken them from anyone.
I may be wrong, but to the best of my recollection, these cells *are* very special. The scientists originally just took a standard cell sample the way they always do when someone has cancer, only in this case the cancer cells turned out to multiply like crazy and even contaminated other cell lines - unintentionally.
IIRC, they even *look* special, growths of HeLa look like netting with perls strung on it, which is apparently rather unusual (disclaimer: IANABiologist).
...but, in my experience, only if the acting is more or less "cartoony" or stereotypical. In Grim Fandango, for example, I thought the voice acting was superb, very convincing and hilarious. But then that game also took place in a completely ludicrous setting, with heavily put on stereotypes (remember the beatniks in the cafe, anyone?) that made lack of realism not such a problem. Same with DiscWorld Noir: the heavy film-noir pastiching made unconving dialogue not such a big problem.
I guess what this means is that the problems aren't so much technical, as you suggest. Instead, I believe it has to do more with suspension of disbelief. In a realistic, or "serious" setting (the world is at peril! you must rescue it! hurry!) this is much harder to achieve. Also,most dialogue in games (as well as in B-movies) sucks anyway, so there's no way for someone to make it convincing.
Many German soldiers fought just because they wanted just their side to win. Most German soldiers were not members of the Nazi party. And even many Germans who did become members of the Nazi party did it for non-ideological reasons.
I was talking about nazi's in their popular mythology form, i.e. the symbolic flesh-and-blood incarnation of pure evil, not about the flesh and blood brainwashed fifteen year olds who were sent out in the rubble of Berlin to fight Russian tanks with handguns, while starving half to death.
Any human being, given the chance, will perform acts of great brutality: Japanese soldiers partaking in the Rape of Nanking, Cambodian utopians during the Killing Fields-era, Ottoman government officials determined to wipe out Armenians, American GI's in Vietnam setting children on fire with Napalm, Bosnian (serb, croatian *and* muslim) peasants out to do some ethnic cleansing, ethnic albanians who're currently misguided into believing that because NATO stepped in in Kosovo, they can now go about blowing up Macedonia, etc. etc. The list is far from complete, obviously, and extremely arbitrary.
What makes Nazi Germany such an easy target for moral outrage is the fact that the evil was institutionalized and put forth in such an efficient way (remember the Eichman trial, anyone?). Here you have a state that has a special Secretary for the Eradication of Unwanted People, now that's something you (the human being who will also go around murdering innocent women and children should anyone manage to push the right buttons, whatever they may be) can easily point your finger at and say "bad".
Well, I wasn't speaking from my perspective, but rather (awkwardly worded, that I'll admit) in some sort of abstract way, as in "killing nazi's - the symbol" is fairly easy to justify, morally speaking. I was most certainly not talking about "killing nazi's - the people" or, as another poster claims, "killing german soldiers, many of whom were not nazi's". And I happen to think that in Wolfenstein (any version), you're killing nazi's - the symbol, not true human beings with a complex moral makeup.
Well, I think the difference is that *nazi's* have become a symbol of absolute, utter evil. The same is not true for Japanese soldiers or Israeli stormtroopers. Which is understandeable, because Nazi's fought a war for a very, very sick reason, spurred by an absolutely disgusting ideology - they were out to kill, remember - whereas WWII Japanese soldiers fought a war not with the end goal of killing a large group of people (though they did do so in the process) but because they wanted to win it. Same with present day Israeli's - these guys kill 12 year old Palestinians because they believe it'll help them protect their own country. However sick that may be, it's not half as sick as invading Russia and killing everyone in sight because you feel the people you're killing don't have any right to be alive. Morally speaking, killing Nazi's is easier to justify than killing Japanese soldiers or Isreali stormtroopers. Nazi's have, in western mythology anyways (you'll find the situation in Asia is a little bit different - remember the Taiwanese add that featured Hitler to drive home sth or other about the product being the result of good, solid German engineering) have taken the place held before by witches, daemons, werewolves etc.
In the real world, you *can* expand on MS Office, charge for your expansions and not pay one cent to MS (you have, of course, already paid them for your copy of Office and maybe for your developer tools). It happens all the time.
say the size of Manhattan. Just concrete, nothing more. Pour the concrete over all the plutonium you want to get rid of, et voila: an enduring monument to the stupidity of man.
There are plenty of WinDOS horror stories to counter every Linux horror that comes along.
That's something a lot of Linux advocates have been saying for a long time, and it simply isn't true. Most hardware works like a snap under Windows. It simply does. Hardly surprising, because Windows is the predominant platform, so it makes sense that a manufacturer will at least make sure Windows-users can get their device to work. Of course there always are exceptions, and, yes, when you have a problem with Windows, it's much harder to fix than when you have a similar problem with Linux. That is to say - if you know what you're doing and you're an experienced UNIX-sysadmin, Linux-problems can be solved, usually. Not so with Windows. There, it either works (most of the time) or it doesn't and you have to reinstall Windows after throwing the offending piece of hardware out.
Correlation issues aside, what people are forgetting is that the rise of Napster coincided with a strong economic boom. CD-sales will go up no matter what during a period of economic growth.
IIRC, a year ago there were reports of cd-stores located near college campuses who were selling *less*, which could, probably, be traced back to Napster usage. This phenomenon was, however, limited to a very small group of retailers, hence it probably didn't affect overall sales figures at all. There's more people buying Britney 'cos the economic boom lets them - this shows up in overall sales figures. Small indie bands sell less - 450 copies instead of 500, the remaining 50 get Napstered. Doesn't show up in the statistics.
be it for media or otherwise. it took me hours to set up a relatively common SBLive under SuSe. Now I'm an idiot, I like doing that. Most people don't. WinMediaPlayer works out of the box (usually). They win. 3D-cards work out of the box as soon as you pop in the driver cd-rom. All games (well, most) will thencefort operate within the blink of an eye. If linux can't provide this ease of use, forget it as a desktop OS.
From what I know, Linux is actually rather big in third world countries, on account of the cost, probably, the argument `paying an experienced systems administrator for a whole year costs more than your Microsoft License' doesn't quite hold true there. Avg. yearly wage in Asia would be around USD 500 (less, probably)- that's less than the cost of one MS license. So you spend that money on hiring someone to learn linux, and in the future you'll have an experienced sysadmin in linux and subsequent OS-updates are fre.
Then there's the small matter of universities in these countries being underfunded, so a free OS on which to teach their students is a great thing, resulting in college graduates having more knowledge of free Linux than MS
Those of you who use SuSe (but it might be true for other distro's as well, i don't know) might rememember that the installation languages you can choose from include, besides English and German, an unlikely language such as Indonesian... there's got to be a reason for that.
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the guy whose first claim to fame is writing "Frames of Mind" seems to have some explanation for this. He claims humans posess eight clusters of intelligences (Theory of Multiple Intelligences), and, apparently, it is very possible to multitask if every task requires a different cluster, but it becomes very difficult if you're doing several things at once that are more or less similar to each other. So it's possible to whistle while driving a bike, but it's really difficult to read a book and hold a conversation at the same time. In the first case, you have true multitasking - two different areas of the brain concurrently operate without interruption. The second case is more like multitasking on a computer: the "cycles" of the brain area that concerns itself with verbal tasks have to be divided between two different tasks and both suffer as result.
yeah, but apparently these HeLa cells are even more out of control than ordinary cancer cells. What makes them special is not that they are "immortal", but rather that they have a tendency to contaminate everything they come across. Again from memory: after they were taken from the patient and given a standard lookover just like every other cell sample taken from a cancer patient gets, apparently they were more or less left alone for a while in some sort of whatever it is scientists keep cell samples in, together with samples from other patients. Months (or years, I'm not sure) later, the Thing They Keep Cell Samples In was opened for some reason or other, and they found out *every* sample in the Thing had been contaminated by HeLa. That's when they found out HeLa was special.
bzzt ... wrong (I think).
It's not like this woman is very special. She just happened to be around when a scientist needed a cell culture. He could have taken them from anyone.
I may be wrong, but to the best of my recollection, these cells *are* very special. The scientists originally just took a standard cell sample the way they always do when someone has cancer, only in this case the cancer cells turned out to multiply like crazy and even contaminated other cell lines - unintentionally.
IIRC, they even *look* special, growths of HeLa look like netting with perls strung on it, which is apparently rather unusual (disclaimer: IANABiologist).
...but, in my experience, only if the acting is more or less "cartoony" or stereotypical. In Grim Fandango, for example, I thought the voice acting was superb, very convincing and hilarious. But then that game also took place in a completely ludicrous setting, with heavily put on stereotypes (remember the beatniks in the cafe, anyone?) that made lack of realism not such a problem. Same with DiscWorld Noir: the heavy film-noir pastiching made unconving dialogue not such a big problem.
I guess what this means is that the problems aren't so much technical, as you suggest. Instead, I believe it has to do more with suspension of disbelief. In a realistic, or "serious" setting (the world is at peril! you must rescue it! hurry!) this is much harder to achieve. Also,most dialogue in games (as well as in B-movies) sucks anyway, so there's no way for someone to make it convincing.
Many German soldiers fought just because they wanted just their side to win. Most German soldiers were not members of the Nazi party. And even many Germans who did become members of the Nazi party did it for non-ideological reasons.
I was talking about nazi's in their popular mythology form, i.e. the symbolic flesh-and-blood incarnation of pure evil, not about the flesh and blood brainwashed fifteen year olds who were sent out in the rubble of Berlin to fight Russian tanks with handguns, while starving half to death.
Any human being, given the chance, will perform acts of great brutality: Japanese soldiers partaking in the Rape of Nanking, Cambodian utopians during the Killing Fields-era, Ottoman government officials determined to wipe out Armenians, American GI's in Vietnam setting children on fire with Napalm, Bosnian (serb, croatian *and* muslim) peasants out to do some ethnic cleansing, ethnic albanians who're currently misguided into believing that because NATO stepped in in Kosovo, they can now go about blowing up Macedonia, etc. etc. The list is far from complete, obviously, and extremely arbitrary.
What makes Nazi Germany such an easy target for moral outrage is the fact that the evil was institutionalized and put forth in such an efficient way (remember the Eichman trial, anyone?). Here you have a state that has a special Secretary for the Eradication of Unwanted People, now that's something you (the human being who will also go around murdering innocent women and children should anyone manage to push the right buttons, whatever they may be) can easily point your finger at and say "bad".
It's much harder to do this with anyone else
Well, I wasn't speaking from my perspective, but rather (awkwardly worded, that I'll admit) in some sort of abstract way, as in "killing nazi's - the symbol" is fairly easy to justify, morally speaking. I was most certainly not talking about "killing nazi's - the people" or, as another poster claims, "killing german soldiers, many of whom were not nazi's". And I happen to think that in Wolfenstein (any version), you're killing nazi's - the symbol, not true human beings with a complex moral makeup.
Well, I think the difference is that *nazi's* have become a symbol of absolute, utter evil. The same is not true for Japanese soldiers or Israeli stormtroopers. Which is understandeable, because Nazi's fought a war for a very, very sick reason, spurred by an absolutely disgusting ideology - they were out to kill, remember - whereas WWII Japanese soldiers fought a war not with the end goal of killing a large group of people (though they did do so in the process) but because they wanted to win it. Same with present day Israeli's - these guys kill 12 year old Palestinians because they believe it'll help them protect their own country. However sick that may be, it's not half as sick as invading Russia and killing everyone in sight because you feel the people you're killing don't have any right to be alive. Morally speaking, killing Nazi's is easier to justify than killing Japanese soldiers or Isreali stormtroopers. Nazi's have, in western mythology anyways (you'll find the situation in Asia is a little bit different - remember the Taiwanese add that featured Hitler to drive home sth or other about the product being the result of good, solid German engineering) have taken the place held before by witches, daemons, werewolves etc.
In the real world, you *can* expand on MS Office, charge for your expansions and not pay one cent to MS (you have, of course, already paid them for your copy of Office and maybe for your developer tools). It happens all the time.
say the size of Manhattan. Just concrete, nothing more. Pour the concrete over all the plutonium you want to get rid of, et voila: an enduring monument to the stupidity of man.
There are plenty of WinDOS horror stories to counter every Linux horror that comes along.
That's something a lot of Linux advocates have been saying for a long time, and it simply isn't true. Most hardware works like a snap under Windows. It simply does. Hardly surprising, because Windows is the predominant platform, so it makes sense that a manufacturer will at least make sure Windows-users can get their device to work. Of course there always are exceptions, and, yes, when you have a problem with Windows, it's much harder to fix than when you have a similar problem with Linux. That is to say - if you know what you're doing and you're an experienced UNIX-sysadmin, Linux-problems can be solved, usually. Not so with Windows. There, it either works (most of the time) or it doesn't and you have to reinstall Windows after throwing the offending piece of hardware out.
Correlation issues aside, what people are forgetting is that the rise of Napster coincided with a strong economic boom. CD-sales will go up no matter what during a period of economic growth.
IIRC, a year ago there were reports of cd-stores located near college campuses who were selling *less*, which could, probably, be traced back to Napster usage. This phenomenon was, however, limited to a very small group of retailers, hence it probably didn't affect overall sales figures at all. There's more people buying Britney 'cos the economic boom lets them - this shows up in overall sales figures. Small indie bands sell less - 450 copies instead of 500, the remaining 50 get Napstered. Doesn't show up in the statistics.
be it for media or otherwise. it took me hours to set up a relatively common SBLive under SuSe. Now I'm an idiot, I like doing that. Most people don't. WinMediaPlayer works out of the box (usually). They win. 3D-cards work out of the box as soon as you pop in the driver cd-rom. All games (well, most) will thencefort operate within the blink of an eye. If linux can't provide this ease of use, forget it as a desktop OS.
Which isn't necessarily bad.
From what I know, Linux is actually rather big in third world countries, on account of the cost, probably, the argument `paying an experienced systems administrator for a whole year costs more than your Microsoft License' doesn't quite hold true there. Avg. yearly wage in Asia would be around USD 500 (less, probably)- that's less than the cost of one MS license. So you spend that money on hiring someone to learn linux, and in the future you'll have an experienced sysadmin in linux and subsequent OS-updates are fre.
... there's got to be a reason for that.
Then there's the small matter of universities in these countries being underfunded, so a free OS on which to teach their students is a great thing, resulting in college graduates having more knowledge of free Linux than MS
Those of you who use SuSe (but it might be true for other distro's as well, i don't know) might rememember that the installation languages you can choose from include, besides English and German, an unlikely language such as Indonesian