If these damm environmentalists hadn't been whinning about nuclear for so long, we WOULDN'T HAVE THE PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH! Yeah, such an original solution, i knew these ppl would solve it for the rest of us!
Actually, from what i understand the brakes were put on nuclear power when the Carter (?) administration banned uranium reprocessing and all the power companies were stuck with finding a place for accumulating dangerous waste with no end in sight.
It doesn't take some radical green giant to know that nuclear waste is dangerous, and it doesn't take an economist to know that storing it is too expensive for profit-driven companies.
just a thought or two.
There was an interesting article in the Minneapolis City Pages (a leftist-ish free publication) about this problem, which may be found HERE
I thought that all monetary aspects of public institutions were available to the public by law. When i was in school in North Dakota (not that ND is the free-information capital of the world or anything) one could go to the library and look up all the professors' salaries and the like because they were all paid with tax dollars.
Why would napster fees be any different? In light of the scrutiny of the increasing tuition/fees at universities as of late, i would think the people would demand transparency (looks like it's going to be a 14% hike this year at the U of MN, 52% over the past 3 years!)
My universe is shaped like a downward spiral, i expect that given enough research, others will come to surmise that their universe is similarily shaped.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with innovative game thinking. I didn't buy Warcraft III because jack had changed between it and its half-decade earlier predecessor. But I would almost guarantee I'd buy WoW if it had this class (much like I bought Horizons for the dragons).
I'll second that, i've sort of been watching WoW with about a 25% interest level, after seeing the 2-headed Ogre my interest is at about a 90% and i will definately be purchasing this game (not to mention the monthly subscription).
The idea doesn't seem far-fetched to me in the slightest, i would term it "innovative" as opposed to "unrealistic." I also suspect that, even if it is an apr01 prank, there will be enough support that Blizzard will strongly consider adding it nonetheless...
Personally i'm tired of playing the same old game in a different body (make a dude, wander around killing shit and talking to other dudes, then making another dude because my first dude is too high level to do anything anymore, ad nauseum...) actually sharing a body/character with another player is the sort of interesting, rewarding, and challenging experiences i've been waiting for with online gaming...
Here in the Midwestern US, the starting salary for a retail pharmacist is more than $80,000. Surely it's even more in other parts of the country where the cost of living is so much higher.
I wonder why they aren't included in the survey.
Alas, one must go to school for 6 years to become a pharmacist (PharmD). Thus, it is not a fair comparison.
Also, RPh salaries are fairly similar the country over despite vast differences in regional supply. Sign-on bonuses are vastly different though, one of my classmates got a 35k sign-on (3 year) in San Fran, good luck finding one of those here in Minneapolis.
As for the notion that cancers will 'evolve' away from treatments, surely not. Yes as more cancers are cured / bypassed & life expectancy increases the relative prevalence of the more esoteric cancers will grow, but cancers do not 'evolve', at least not in the usual sense we apply to say viruses, which are subject to selective pressure and inevitabaly will adapt / evolve to be resistant to treatments.
you're right that cancers don't evolve like other lifeforms floating about the planet, as they're in their own microworld, but cancers do evolve significantly in the individual which can be supported not only by the theory of initiation, promotion, progression, metastaisis (many in the field believe that the malignant cells in the final stages of cancer are virtually indistinguishable from those in early stages), but also in what is known and observed with cell evolution within tumors (a large part of tumor biology), as well as individuals failing specific treatments (hormone abolation in prostate cancer is a prime example). So yes cancers do evolve, but since one cannot contract cancer (in the traditional contageon theory anyway) from someone else, they don't evolve on the macro-level so oft thought of when one speaks of evolution.
but which one is cheaper? I'd wager the one that doesn't involve gold, and is self-replicating.
i can think of quite a few drugs off the top of my head that cost (i'd say 'worth' but that's relative) a hell of a lot more than gold by weight, most of these are biotech/monoclonal_antibody type compounds, you might have heard of some of them, venomous snake antivenons are probably the most well known.
It's also probably a lot easier to get an ounce of gold from the depths of South African hell than it is to conduct all of the necessary bench science, phase I,II, and III clinical trials, and navigate the US FDA regulatory process. Probably a lot cheaper too.
i would suspect that these nanoparticles are just injected and they accumulate in tumor tissue due to blood-vessel irregularities specific to cancerous tissue.
Since tumors are lumps of fairly uncontrolled and uncordinated growth, and are also highly angioneogenic (blood vessel formation promoting) the capillary formations within tomors are also highly uncontrolled and uncordinated, which leads to different circulatory/flow patterns inside these tissue masses than normal healthy tissue.
There has already been a fair amount of research to exploit this principle, i think in the past with toxins such as cyanide derivitives and the like, although i question the actual clinical usage of such approaches, probably a worthwhile therapy, but no panacea nor cure by any means.
The main problem with cancer (and i use the term cancer very loosly) is that tumor biology and selection are intricate as well as extreme, if we develop a therapy that targets a certain trait (such as capillary formations in 'normal' tumors) it generally doesn't take a whole lot of time for the cancers to change in ways rendering them unaffected by therapies which target this trait. In this case possibly differing tumor characteristics (size, morphology, et al)...
Unfortunately we've still got a long way to go with cancer...
Human immortality sounds good, but the human population is already exploding and thats *with* people dying off. If a large number of people are going to become immortal then we need population controls in place, or at least teaching how birth control is used in school;).
this is the kind of rhetoric i hear all of the time, as if people who live to be 1000 years old will still think it's necessary to start having kids when they're 20 and keep having them until they die (actually, in certain religious circles they might, which is pretty damn scary for us apostates).
the most obvious fallicy in all of this is that immortality will be available for everyone. Compare treatments for HIV with what you can probably (and rightly) assume about any hypothetical immortality-treatments - who has access to antiretroviral therapy? - allow me to name countries: USA, Japan, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, etc, etc,. Notice anything odd about said selection of countries? Perhaps that they house about 10% of the world's population, have less than 5% of the world's HIV(+) population, and oh, by the way, they also control about 90% of the world's wealth. Now think of a hypothetical anti-aging pill (about the least-likely route of administration of anti-aging therapy, if you ask me), who do you suppose will have it first? - i'd guess the US and Western Europe (who pretty much all have negative population growths as it is (excluding immigration)), guess who'll own the rights to said therapy? - i'd guess US and/or Western European companies, Guess how much it'll cost? - i'd guess probably a whole lot more than most people in the US and Western Europe can afford, let alone people dying of diarrhea in 3rd world countries. Sure the price might eventually come down to levels affordable by "everyone" but that doesn't change the fact that most people world-wide die of nothing that has much at all to do with ageing.
Even in the US, it is questionable whether many of the biggest killers are really directly caused by ageing, cancer is really the only one that comes to mind that probably is. Heart disease, Diabetes, suicide, accidents, and almost all of the others on the top 10 (for any age group apart from cancer) can't be said to be caused by being old, they may be time-dependent processes, but it doesn't mean that the physiological changes associated with ageing causes them...
if you own a business that's employing people then i promise that you (a person) will be buying the robots, perhaps a few hundred thousand robots if you're in charge of a big company, then you personally (along with the board of directors et al) will reap the rewards of firing every person that was replaced by a robot, and won't give a flying fuck about any social obligation others may think you have to said fired people until no one's wealthy enough to buy your product(s) anymore.
On a side note, maybe this is a leveling mechanism, people consume too much, and they consume themselves out of work... of course this is holistically speaking and does nothing for the welfare of those 'weeded out' of the foodchain.
This is simply an extrapolation of the widening of the income classes that we've been seening for the past few years (decades); generally there're just too many people who simply aren't worth paying very much, speaking from a corporate standpoint of course....
So apparently you missed the bit later in the article that positively correlated said repetitive and maladadaptive bahaviour with a decreased capacity for learning, or amplification of the pathology of various disorders/toxicities(lead, uranium, huntingtons dx mice). But overall (from what i've read thus far) generally you're missing the point (no offense intended of course:), the point of this entire article is that these mice may not live lives congruent with human lives, not because mice and humans are different, but because conditions impinge upon the lives of mice, that do not so for (wo)men.
Perhaps (i think) the most interesting aspect of this entire article is the idea of decreased mental stimulation with respect to causality of myriad non-intellectual disorders. There have been longstanding correlations between, say income and health that can't be explained even when correcting for factors such as access to healthcare, et al. Or the cheapest way to improve society (life expectancy, health, sanitation, blah, blah blah )being public education (as in school, not as in public awareness commercials on the TV), while giving people the incomes a higher education would provide does not. The idea that poor mental stimulation causes unhealthy people is probably pretty close to true.
If anyone here has ever worked in healthcare i'm sure they've noticed a huge disparity between the attitutes of people who have private party insurance, and those on state/federal insurance (aid) programs. It's anecdoctal of coruse, but i oft hear it referred to as the 'welfare attitude'-sort of percieved as people just expecting to get better because they're in a hospital/clinic/whatever but not really being motivated to help themselves. And oddly enough in my state (Minnesota) people on medicaid/CHIP oftentimes have more access to care than those with private party insurance...
Also what i thought was interesting in the article is the assumption that while the mice are confined and have shitty lives, that people are free to just do whatever they want and are happy as can be. For an article to be questioning a cornerstone method of conducting experiements more often than not extrapolated to people, i find it counterintuitive that they would let such a bias slip by (actually i'm not suprised as it's Discover; i generally have little faith in those guys). Please inform me otherwise, but i've seen no studies to date that show that "most people" are uber happy most of the time, and feel free to do whatever they wish. i would really like to do a whole lot of different things next week - but you know what i'm going to be doing? - the same damn thing i'm doing this week. i think there's only 1 or 2 people i know of (out of hundreds/thousands) who really have the ability to be doing any differently. Perspective to the question at hand: i would venture to guess that a fair percentage of our population feel just as trapped in their lives as do those mice stuck in the cages, which is perhaps evidenced by the guestimates of a 5-10% prevalence of mental illness in US adults.
It is interesting to note that this machine works by means of detecting solid tumors, alas the vast majority of cancers (prostate, breast, lung, colon) have a solid tumor component, but i wonder if one of these machines could be used to pick up, say: muliple myeloma. Or leukemias...
Also it would be interesting to know if it could be adapted to detect other disorders of normal tissue via changing microwave resonance: pulmonary fibrosis, alzheimer's disease, et al.
Good ol' BBC didn't even mention the false positive rate either...
"So are you MPAA-boycotters out there gonna stick to your guns and not buy ANY of these DVDs? Or are you going to set your principles aside and buy these movies."
One of the advantages of living in a house with 4 other guys, either someone will buy it, or their girlfriend/mom/dad/brother/grandmother/aunt/etc/et c certainly will, either way i still get to see it:)...
in any event, there's always the option of buying it used, while it could be argued that buying used DVDs supports the MPAA via creating a secondary market demand for their products, i personally think that it's a happy medium between being devoid of art in life and supporting one of the world's most evil empires. Also it should be noted that someone who buys a DVD for $25 and sells it to a disc-whorehouse for $5 probably isn't considerably driven by the market demand for his/her used product...
And (as a sort of sales pitch), EVERYONE who sells a movie or CD isn't necessarily affiliated with the MPAA or RIAA, as an example i am certainly purchasing (brand new) the 'Ohgr' CD (Nivek Ogre and Mark Walk) being released by spitfire records on July 1, and they are not affiliated with the RIAA (according to something i read a while back)... So don't let your boycotts hurt the innocents (like all of those idiots who said they'd boycott Heineken beer because it is German, after the fallout of an Iraq war resolution...)
"More ent scenes so it'll be worth watching for the special effects alone. Sadly it looks like there will be no extra gollum scenes. I can't say I'm as excited about this one as the FotR EE."
i for one would have to disagree with this opinion, i've seen enough of Gollum and am bordering on thinking of him as a more refined (albeit less nauseating) Jar Jar. There were/are several facets of TTT which bothered me, but despite the obviously flawed story-line deviations i would have to say the top two on my list are: 1) the character degredation of Farimir, and 2) the inability of TTT to portray Ents as being very ancient and very wise beyond the comprehension of the fast-paced lives of the more mortal (i know 'mortal' is a qualitative measurement, but you know what i mean by 'more mortal') races.
Perhaps some of the cut scenes will allay some of these grumblings and restore to the Ents what i have always seen as their greatest virtue.
you know, that happened to me with multiplayer Quake (1) with thousands of guys flying all around with grappling hooks... back in my early college days my roomie and i played it so much (like maybe 60-80 hours/week) and deprived ourselves of sleep (between school and quake) that in class i would start to hallucinate and see all sorts of quake guys with grappling hooks scaling the walls and ceiling of the lecture halls and flying all over...
i mentioned it to my roomie and he said: "yea, that's been happening to me all the time too, maybe we shouldn't play so much..."...
Later that year, when several of my dormies and myself were playing QTF all the time we happened to come by a propped-open door to a girls' dorm. These doors are normally all locked, my neighbor who played a medic 100% of the time said: "hey!-i could get in an infect them all... *pause*... i didn't just say that did i?"
i don't know that these games changed my life or anything, but they sure changed some of my days:)
but if you want interviews with air-headed actors, just watch the late shows.
Not all actors are airheads, i saw THIS interview on the Charlie Rose show (PBS) on December 3rd with Viggo wearing a shirt stating "No Blood For Oil"
Charlie Rose: You're obviously making a political statement with your T-shirt.
Viggo Mortensen: I wouldn't normally, but it's sort of a reaction to... I've heard a lot of people say to me and I've read in a lot of places about the first movie, and increasingly about the second one... I've seen where people try to relate it to current situation--specifically the United States and their role in the world right now. And I -- if you're going to compare them, then you should get it right--I don't like hearing... I mean I play the character who's defending Helms Deep and I don't think that The Two Towers or Tolkien's writing or Peter's work or our work has anything to do with the United States' foreign ventures at this time. And it upsets me to hear that in a way. And it upsets me even more that questioning what's going on right now, what the United States is doing, is considered treasonous really: "How dare you say that? How un-American of you." And really, this country is founded on the principle that if the government isn't serving the people you at least have the right to say, "Wait a minute. What's going on?" And there're no questions really being asked, at large, about what we're doing. Whereas in The Two Towers you have different races, nations, cultures coming together and examining their conscience and unifying against a very real and terrifying enemy. What the United States has been doing for the past year is bombing innocent civilians without having come anywhere close to catching Osama bin Laden or any presumed enemy, and, as a distraction, we're now--apparently it's a given--we're hell bent on increasing the bombing that's been going on for the past eleven years in Iraq. And I don't think that the civilians on the ground in those countries look at us in the way that maybe Europeans did at the end of World War II, waving flags in the streets, I think that they see the US government as Saruman.
Elijah Wood: As a threat.
VM: Yeah, as a threat. And they're terrified--and have been for a long time--and we are not the good guys, unfortunately, in this case, and...
CR: Even though right after 9/11 there was an extraordinary amount of public support for the United States to do something.
VM: I'm supportive of the United States. I'm an American. And I have nothing against patriotism. But if one is going to compare then the comparison is quite the opposite of what is being made.
CR: Let me just make sure of the comparison. Because I asked you about the T-shirt at the beginning and you said you made it yourself.
VM: Yeah.
CR: The idea... you object to the comparison of this film with respect to American involvement with Iraq or--
VM: United States government
CR: --with the Afghanistan war or the war against terrorism--in comparison with the film because of your opposition to American policy.
VM: And the idea is--in that comparison--is that the United States is like the good guys in our movie against the bad guys in our movie and I think the opposite is true unfortunately.
CR: We're the bad guys because we responded to--
VM: You know, the people who are terrified at Helms Deep, who are outnumbered in this incredible violence and desire to control--to destroy--the people of Rohan and the rest of the free peoples of Middle-earth, and to control their wills, to control their infrastructure--or destroy it--that's what we're doing in these countries. That's really what we're doing unfortunately. I'm not saying to anyone, to you, or to you, or to you: "This is what you should believe." I'm just saying, why not ask the question: "Why are we doing this?"
You know... when i first heard clonaid's claim on the godbox (aka TV) i thought to myself: "hey!-didn't they make totl.net's 'cult of the week' a while back?" The ensueing 'proof' of their cloning success did nothing but lament this initial reaction...
Sure enough. Now who the fuck is dumb enough to actually think that clonaid not being a "real"(tm) company is some kind of news?
Are there any reasons why this metal wouldn't be a good choice for other applications?
One word: Patents.
Actually it's difficult to say what Toyota will do to make licensing difficult for 3rd parties. While they obviously have a vested interest in making competetors pay for it (if use it at all), probably much less so in keeping Girard Perregaux from using it in their chrongraphs, or Volkl building better skis with it. Point in fact, Toyota is the only company in the world with the infrastructure to scale-up their hybrid engines (actually the only company with a hybrid program of any commercial merit apart from Honda), yet they are talking about licensing the technology to their competetors (like GM), apparently in a manner fairly affordable...
i've seen quite a few posts on this thread making an association between internet use/access with other forms of media such as telivision, cable networks, magazines, newspapers, pda's, phones and the like...
i, for one, don't think that there's a very clear relationship between these different flavors of 'media_x avoiders.' Not that i'm at all average, but to point out the fact that i do NOT have a telivision (and therefore obviously neither cable nor dish), i do NOT read the newspaper, i currently do NOT have a phone (i will never own a land-line, and am in between mobile carriers at the moment), and i am VERY picky about which magazines i will read (mostly just 'scientific american,' 'the economist,' and 'CAR' (the British one) and very few others), i do NOT own a PDA, etc, etc. But i DO have and use internet access avidly.
i think that there is often a propensity here on slashdot to assume that using a certain service or good necessitates that said service or good is used in a manner consistent with how a slashdot user would use it. This, however disheartening, is simply a falicial idea. It is reasonable to assume that many people will abstain from using the 'net for the same reasons justifying shying away from other similar goods/services, but much of the time this simply isn't the case; especially in terms of the internet. As Beebos pointed out there are both positive and negative facets of using the internet, telivision et al, and when comparing such multifaceted services it's not a question of what kind of service to which one subscribes, but rather what one ultimately uses his/her services for. This is very similar to this servey lumping people who use the internet solely for the purposes of e mail into a broad group of 'internet users.' Sure, they use the internet, but to such a limited degree that they should, by reasonable accounts, be considered non-users (analogous to having a mobile phone just to have the time of the day beamed to your pocket, or getting a newspaper just to remember what day it is, or just to get the coupons)... but i digress
But to return to my original point, to say that people who use the internet are stereotypically people who necessarily watch TV (for example), is misinterpreting and/or confusing correlation with causation, for which the logical conclusion would be: if we give people free internet, then they'll watch more TV (in a purist sense anyway, i realize that one can get "free" cable from many cable ISPs), which is probably an incorrect thing to assume. And on a personal note whether i use the internet 6o or 1o hours in a week, it makes absolutely no difference to the fact that i watch zero telivision hours...
If one were to view the market penetrations more objectively one might simply say that: "the market penetration of most devices that may provide some useful utility to the majority of people will stabolize at around 1 standard deviation above an 'average' uptake of the population." By statistical logic most technologies probably will not be overly useful in the lives of more than 1 or 2 standard deviations above the mean, especially in the first decade or so of the product/service's lifetime. So it shouldn't be hugely suprising that many ubiqutious technologies will achieve a similar market presence, while the reasons for uptake and the populations utilizing each technology may not necessarily be the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, from what i understand the brakes were put on nuclear power when the Carter (?) administration banned uranium reprocessing and all the power companies were stuck with finding a place for accumulating dangerous waste with no end in sight.
It doesn't take some radical green giant to know that nuclear waste is dangerous, and it doesn't take an economist to know that storing it is too expensive for profit-driven companies.
just a thought or two.
There was an interesting article in the Minneapolis City Pages (a leftist-ish free publication) about this problem, which may be found HERE
-tid242
Why would napster fees be any different? In light of the scrutiny of the increasing tuition/fees at universities as of late, i would think the people would demand transparency (looks like it's going to be a 14% hike this year at the U of MN, 52% over the past 3 years!)
-tid242
-tid242
(Space Ghost c2c)
-tid242
I'll second that, i've sort of been watching WoW with about a 25% interest level, after seeing the 2-headed Ogre my interest is at about a 90% and i will definately be purchasing this game (not to mention the monthly subscription).
The idea doesn't seem far-fetched to me in the slightest, i would term it "innovative" as opposed to "unrealistic." I also suspect that, even if it is an apr01 prank, there will be enough support that Blizzard will strongly consider adding it nonetheless...
Personally i'm tired of playing the same old game in a different body (make a dude, wander around killing shit and talking to other dudes, then making another dude because my first dude is too high level to do anything anymore, ad nauseum...) actually sharing a body/character with another player is the sort of interesting, rewarding, and challenging experiences i've been waiting for with online gaming...
-tid242
That's why it's so complicated. You think having more than 1 girlfriend is difficult to swing? - better not try the "another wife every year" thing.
-tid242
I wonder why they aren't included in the survey.
Alas, one must go to school for 6 years to become a pharmacist (PharmD). Thus, it is not a fair comparison.
Also, RPh salaries are fairly similar the country over despite vast differences in regional supply. Sign-on bonuses are vastly different though, one of my classmates got a 35k sign-on (3 year) in San Fran, good luck finding one of those here in Minneapolis.
-tid242
Good riddance, i'm sick of the plethora of shitty games that survive solely because they have 'good graphics.'
Maybe now people will actually develop good games instead of their own graphical egos.
-tid242
you're right that cancers don't evolve like other lifeforms floating about the planet, as they're in their own microworld, but cancers do evolve significantly in the individual which can be supported not only by the theory of initiation, promotion, progression, metastaisis (many in the field believe that the malignant cells in the final stages of cancer are virtually indistinguishable from those in early stages), but also in what is known and observed with cell evolution within tumors (a large part of tumor biology), as well as individuals failing specific treatments (hormone abolation in prostate cancer is a prime example). So yes cancers do evolve, but since one cannot contract cancer (in the traditional contageon theory anyway) from someone else, they don't evolve on the macro-level so oft thought of when one speaks of evolution.
-tid242
i can think of quite a few drugs off the top of my head that cost (i'd say 'worth' but that's relative) a hell of a lot more than gold by weight, most of these are biotech/monoclonal_antibody type compounds, you might have heard of some of them, venomous snake antivenons are probably the most well known.
It's also probably a lot easier to get an ounce of gold from the depths of South African hell than it is to conduct all of the necessary bench science, phase I,II, and III clinical trials, and navigate the US FDA regulatory process. Probably a lot cheaper too.
-tid242
Since tumors are lumps of fairly uncontrolled and uncordinated growth, and are also highly angioneogenic (blood vessel formation promoting) the capillary formations within tomors are also highly uncontrolled and uncordinated, which leads to different circulatory/flow patterns inside these tissue masses than normal healthy tissue.
There has already been a fair amount of research to exploit this principle, i think in the past with toxins such as cyanide derivitives and the like, although i question the actual clinical usage of such approaches, probably a worthwhile therapy, but no panacea nor cure by any means.
The main problem with cancer (and i use the term cancer very loosly) is that tumor biology and selection are intricate as well as extreme, if we develop a therapy that targets a certain trait (such as capillary formations in 'normal' tumors) it generally doesn't take a whole lot of time for the cancers to change in ways rendering them unaffected by therapies which target this trait. In this case possibly differing tumor characteristics (size, morphology, et al)...
Unfortunately we've still got a long way to go with cancer...
-tid242
this is the kind of rhetoric i hear all of the time, as if people who live to be 1000 years old will still think it's necessary to start having kids when they're 20 and keep having them until they die (actually, in certain religious circles they might, which is pretty damn scary for us apostates).
the most obvious fallicy in all of this is that immortality will be available for everyone. Compare treatments for HIV with what you can probably (and rightly) assume about any hypothetical immortality-treatments - who has access to antiretroviral therapy? - allow me to name countries: USA, Japan, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, etc, etc,. Notice anything odd about said selection of countries? Perhaps that they house about 10% of the world's population, have less than 5% of the world's HIV(+) population, and oh, by the way, they also control about 90% of the world's wealth. Now think of a hypothetical anti-aging pill (about the least-likely route of administration of anti-aging therapy, if you ask me), who do you suppose will have it first? - i'd guess the US and Western Europe (who pretty much all have negative population growths as it is (excluding immigration)), guess who'll own the rights to said therapy? - i'd guess US and/or Western European companies, Guess how much it'll cost? - i'd guess probably a whole lot more than most people in the US and Western Europe can afford, let alone people dying of diarrhea in 3rd world countries. Sure the price might eventually come down to levels affordable by "everyone" but that doesn't change the fact that most people world-wide die of nothing that has much at all to do with ageing.
Even in the US, it is questionable whether many of the biggest killers are really directly caused by ageing, cancer is really the only one that comes to mind that probably is. Heart disease, Diabetes, suicide, accidents, and almost all of the others on the top 10 (for any age group apart from cancer) can't be said to be caused by being old, they may be time-dependent processes, but it doesn't mean that the physiological changes associated with ageing causes them...
anyway, just a thought (or two).
-tid242
On a side note, maybe this is a leveling mechanism, people consume too much, and they consume themselves out of work... of course this is holistically speaking and does nothing for the welfare of those 'weeded out' of the foodchain.
This is simply an extrapolation of the widening of the income classes that we've been seening for the past few years (decades); generally there're just too many people who simply aren't worth paying very much, speaking from a corporate standpoint of course....
-tid242
Perhaps (i think) the most interesting aspect of this entire article is the idea of decreased mental stimulation with respect to causality of myriad non-intellectual disorders. There have been longstanding correlations between, say income and health that can't be explained even when correcting for factors such as access to healthcare, et al. Or the cheapest way to improve society (life expectancy, health, sanitation, blah, blah blah )being public education (as in school, not as in public awareness commercials on the TV), while giving people the incomes a higher education would provide does not. The idea that poor mental stimulation causes unhealthy people is probably pretty close to true.
If anyone here has ever worked in healthcare i'm sure they've noticed a huge disparity between the attitutes of people who have private party insurance, and those on state/federal insurance (aid) programs. It's anecdoctal of coruse, but i oft hear it referred to as the 'welfare attitude'-sort of percieved as people just expecting to get better because they're in a hospital/clinic/whatever but not really being motivated to help themselves. And oddly enough in my state (Minnesota) people on medicaid/CHIP oftentimes have more access to care than those with private party insurance...
Also what i thought was interesting in the article is the assumption that while the mice are confined and have shitty lives, that people are free to just do whatever they want and are happy as can be. For an article to be questioning a cornerstone method of conducting experiements more often than not extrapolated to people, i find it counterintuitive that they would let such a bias slip by (actually i'm not suprised as it's Discover; i generally have little faith in those guys). Please inform me otherwise, but i've seen no studies to date that show that "most people" are uber happy most of the time, and feel free to do whatever they wish. i would really like to do a whole lot of different things next week - but you know what i'm going to be doing? - the same damn thing i'm doing this week. i think there's only 1 or 2 people i know of (out of hundreds/thousands) who really have the ability to be doing any differently. Perspective to the question at hand: i would venture to guess that a fair percentage of our population feel just as trapped in their lives as do those mice stuck in the cages, which is perhaps evidenced by the guestimates of a 5-10% prevalence of mental illness in US adults.
-tid242
Also it would be interesting to know if it could be adapted to detect other disorders of normal tissue via changing microwave resonance: pulmonary fibrosis, alzheimer's disease, et al.
Good ol' BBC didn't even mention the false positive rate either...
-tid242
One of the advantages of living in a house with 4 other guys, either someone will buy it, or their girlfriend/mom/dad/brother/grandmother/aunt/etc/et c certainly will, either way i still get to see it :) ...
in any event, there's always the option of buying it used, while it could be argued that buying used DVDs supports the MPAA via creating a secondary market demand for their products, i personally think that it's a happy medium between being devoid of art in life and supporting one of the world's most evil empires. Also it should be noted that someone who buys a DVD for $25 and sells it to a disc-whorehouse for $5 probably isn't considerably driven by the market demand for his/her used product...
And (as a sort of sales pitch), EVERYONE who sells a movie or CD isn't necessarily affiliated with the MPAA or RIAA, as an example i am certainly purchasing (brand new) the 'Ohgr' CD (Nivek Ogre and Mark Walk) being released by spitfire records on July 1, and they are not affiliated with the RIAA (according to something i read a while back)... So don't let your boycotts hurt the innocents (like all of those idiots who said they'd boycott Heineken beer because it is German, after the fallout of an Iraq war resolution...)
Sorry, i'm mumbling again...
-tid242
i for one would have to disagree with this opinion, i've seen enough of Gollum and am bordering on thinking of him as a more refined (albeit less nauseating) Jar Jar. There were/are several facets of TTT which bothered me, but despite the obviously flawed story-line deviations i would have to say the top two on my list are: 1) the character degredation of Farimir, and 2) the inability of TTT to portray Ents as being very ancient and very wise beyond the comprehension of the fast-paced lives of the more mortal (i know 'mortal' is a qualitative measurement, but you know what i mean by 'more mortal') races.
Perhaps some of the cut scenes will allay some of these grumblings and restore to the Ents what i have always seen as their greatest virtue.
-tid242
So apparently no one was supposed to be asking you about your age anyway. :)
-tid242
i mentioned it to my roomie and he said: "yea, that's been happening to me all the time too, maybe we shouldn't play so much..."...
Later that year, when several of my dormies and myself were playing QTF all the time we happened to come by a propped-open door to a girls' dorm. These doors are normally all locked, my neighbor who played a medic 100% of the time said: "hey!-i could get in an infect them all... *pause* ... i didn't just say that did i?"
i don't know that these games changed my life or anything, but they sure changed some of my days :)
-tid242
Not all actors are airheads, i saw THIS interview on the Charlie Rose show (PBS) on December 3rd with Viggo wearing a shirt stating "No Blood For Oil"
Sure enough. Now who the fuck is dumb enough to actually think that clonaid not being a "real"(tm) company is some kind of news?
i rest my case...
-tid242
One word: Patents.
Actually it's difficult to say what Toyota will do to make licensing difficult for 3rd parties. While they obviously have a vested interest in making competetors pay for it (if use it at all), probably much less so in keeping Girard Perregaux from using it in their chrongraphs, or Volkl building better skis with it. Point in fact, Toyota is the only company in the world with the infrastructure to scale-up their hybrid engines (actually the only company with a hybrid program of any commercial merit apart from Honda), yet they are talking about licensing the technology to their competetors (like GM), apparently in a manner fairly affordable...
Have faith in the Nippon-jin :)
-tid242
i, for one, don't think that there's a very clear relationship between these different flavors of 'media_x avoiders.' Not that i'm at all average, but to point out the fact that i do NOT have a telivision (and therefore obviously neither cable nor dish), i do NOT read the newspaper, i currently do NOT have a phone (i will never own a land-line, and am in between mobile carriers at the moment), and i am VERY picky about which magazines i will read (mostly just 'scientific american,' 'the economist,' and 'CAR' (the British one) and very few others), i do NOT own a PDA, etc, etc. But i DO have and use internet access avidly.
i think that there is often a propensity here on slashdot to assume that using a certain service or good necessitates that said service or good is used in a manner consistent with how a slashdot user would use it. This, however disheartening, is simply a falicial idea. It is reasonable to assume that many people will abstain from using the 'net for the same reasons justifying shying away from other similar goods/services, but much of the time this simply isn't the case; especially in terms of the internet. As Beebos pointed out there are both positive and negative facets of using the internet, telivision et al, and when comparing such multifaceted services it's not a question of what kind of service to which one subscribes, but rather what one ultimately uses his/her services for. This is very similar to this servey lumping people who use the internet solely for the purposes of e mail into a broad group of 'internet users.' Sure, they use the internet, but to such a limited degree that they should, by reasonable accounts, be considered non-users (analogous to having a mobile phone just to have the time of the day beamed to your pocket, or getting a newspaper just to remember what day it is, or just to get the coupons)... but i digress
But to return to my original point, to say that people who use the internet are stereotypically people who necessarily watch TV (for example), is misinterpreting and/or confusing correlation with causation, for which the logical conclusion would be: if we give people free internet, then they'll watch more TV (in a purist sense anyway, i realize that one can get "free" cable from many cable ISPs), which is probably an incorrect thing to assume. And on a personal note whether i use the internet 6o or 1o hours in a week, it makes absolutely no difference to the fact that i watch zero telivision hours...
If one were to view the market penetrations more objectively one might simply say that: "the market penetration of most devices that may provide some useful utility to the majority of people will stabolize at around 1 standard deviation above an 'average' uptake of the population." By statistical logic most technologies probably will not be overly useful in the lives of more than 1 or 2 standard deviations above the mean, especially in the first decade or so of the product/service's lifetime. So it shouldn't be hugely suprising that many ubiqutious technologies will achieve a similar market presence, while the reasons for uptake and the populations utilizing each technology may not necessarily be the same.
anyway, just my worthless $2*10^(-2)...
-tid242
"She has the blood of reptile just underneath the skin!" -NIN, Reptile, Downward Spiral
-tid242
Although if someone kills it to see what it is, and it is in fact an Albatross, they'll have bad luck...
-tid242