And on the Mac your choice of sound card is: the one supplied.
Want to upgrade your sound card? Simple! No opening the case, screws, jumpers, none of that. Just throw the whole thing in the trash and go get a new one!
It's painfully easy to support sound cards when you only have to support one.
Well... there are "health sodiums." Which I guess isn't the same as salt. Anyhow...
Sodium Naproxen is the major (only?) ingredient in the "Aleve" painkiller. Something to keep in mind if you're trying to reduce sodium in your diet.
The parent article seems to have a vague concept of what.NET is. (Perhaps this is more MS propaganda's fault.)
MS released C#, and that's what they're toting when they talk about ending COM-based windows development, I think.
If you knew what COM was, you might have a better understanding of what Microsoft is phasing out. COM is the Component Object Model. It allows programs to invoke special versions of other software (which has a COM written for it) and call routines out of that software. For example, I could call the spellchecker for MS Word from my email-writing program, assuming the user had Word installed, of course.
I used COM in writing an application meant to automate customer response letters (the user wanted to have Word-compatible documents when the program was finished - a perfect example of COM) and let me tell you: COM is hairy. You have to pass pointers to functions, call functions with nasty parameters... it's a good idea, it just doesn't work inside the C/C++ syntax very well.
Unless you're looking for your game to be able to read and write MS Word files, or print through Excel, games probably wouldn't have used the Component Object Model.
C# apparently has the same functionality that COM did, but probably does it a little more elegantly.
In any case, game developers didn't use COM, and they're probably not using C#. They WILL, however, be using.NET. Because Visual Studio.NET is Microsoft's latest incarnation of their programming IDE and compiler package.
And the later versions (hopefully) contain more and more code optimization. And Microsoft HAS good code optimization: they bought all of Watcom's optimizing people a few generations back (when game programming was done almost exclusively in Watcom).
In short: Visual Studio.NET is probably phasing out COM. This has absolutely no bearing on game programming.
You will find that a nice cold glass of water/juice more than cures your hunger for the few hours until your next meal
Not only is the above true, but one (real, not food) calorie is equated as the energy required to raise one cc of water one degree C.
One "food" calorie is actually a kcal (or 1000 calories as described above). Convert units, and one food calorie is the energy required to raise one liter of water one degree C.
Drink a liter of water at about 1 degree C (put lots of ice in) throughout your day, and that water has no choice but to reach human body temperature - 37 degrees C.
So, not only does drinking ice water not add calories, your body actually burns some calories by getting it up to the right temperature.
You hydrate yourself, curb hunger, and burn 36 easy calories. Nice.
Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm."
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad."
Homer: "Why thank you, honey."
Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away."
Homer: "Oh, how does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't work."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?"
Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."
</obsimpsons>
Actually, if you were being completely correct, you wouldn't want to use passive voice. But I'm sure you knew that.
"Mozilla renders the HTML."
Furthermore, I don't think animated GIFs qualify as videos.
Are you saying that the CD's people are encoding to mp3 have "inaudible" sounds on them?
I didn't think so.
--
Actually, that is what I'm saying. I did dumb it down a little, but if you'd like to learn how mp3 compression works, check out this site.
A quote from this site: To make a good compression algorithm for sound, a technique called perceptual noise shaping is used. It is "perceptual" part because the MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. For example:
* There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
* There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others.
* If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.
Using facts like these, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener.
That is to say, parts of the audio signal (the parts that are inaudible to the human ear) are removed to save space.
After that is done, a regular compression algorithm is applied to the file, further reducing the size.
Some of the major dissidents of the mp3 format claim that these so-called "inaudible sounds", when removed, can affect the overall quality of the audio. I guess that's why they wanted a lossless compression algorithm in the first place. Actually, a lot of these people don't like digital transfers of music at all. They prefer an analog technology like vinyl.
For most people, though, the difference in quality is negligible, at best - especially when compared to the savings in data space.
Actually, there is such thing as "lossless" compression.
For example, dictionary-style compression (what.zip uses) compresses data by developing a small dictionary of byte sequences that recur in a file, and representing those byte sequences as a single byte, thereby saving space. You develop a large enough dictionary of this type, and you're saving file space.
Zip is living proof that lossless compression exists - you COMPRESS your text files, without LOSING any of the data in it when you DECOMPRESS.
That's what lossless compression is.
For more info, look into the entropy of data, which helps to determine the lossless compressability.
An example of LOSSY compression is mp3 or JPEG, where you (usually) sacrifice some quality for increased compression. Part of what makes mp3 work so well, is that it throws out the parts of the audio signal that are out of the human range of hearing.
--
Re:Kazaa participation level
on
Shutting down Kazaa
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Furthermore, many people (including myself) have cable modems. Upload speeds are "capped" at a fraction of the download speeds. I can DOWNLOAD from KaZaA with relative ease, and still manage to browse webpages, or use a secure shell connection to a remote site, or do anything else I normally do (except play games which require an extremely low latency).
However, introduce just one upload from my computer, and I suddenly find that my HTTP requests take forever to get to webservers, and even Google's front page takes longer to load.
Even so - I tend to allow uploads to continue. What I keep in my "shared" directory are mostly those hard-to-find files that take forever to download because there are a lack of people with that file. I can only hope that people who get those files from me are doing the same.
I was hoping I'd be the first to make the Simpson's "sort tiny screws in space" joke. But now I see that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who posted before me used a quote from the "Homer in Space" episode already.
But, hey, maybe I can still milk this article for more Karma.
"I don't understand, it was non-alcoholic champagne."
or maybe...
"You mean I waxed my bikini zone for NOTHING?"
For me, having the CD-ROM would be like those "check out the first chapter of 's new book!" sections at the back of a lot of novels. You get just a taste, and that encourages you to buy the whole novel.
I realize he has the whole novel on there, but I wouldn't be able to stand reading a book on a computer screen. I'd break down and buy the mass market paperback after the first chapter or so.
I can't curl up in bed on a lazy Saturday morning with a monitor!
I just got the blockbuster special that they're running (at my blockbuster, anyhow).
Pre-order the theatrical (August) release for $24.95, and receive a free 10-week rental card, good for renting one dvd or video per week. (A week starts on sunday, and ends on saturday).
If you rent DVDs a lot, you know they can be about $5 apiece - so basically this means you get 5 free DVD rentals PLUS the theatrical release version, when it comes out.
Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds) was mostly an experiment into the nature of silence.
Cage actually spent a lot of time researching Zen teachings. His research into silence eventually led him to Harvard University and a visit to its Anechoic Chamber - a closed environment supposedly complete free of noise.
"While he literally expected to hear nothing, after leaving the chamber, Cage explained to a nearby engineer that he had heard two sounds in the chamber, one high, and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and that the low sound was his blood circulating"
The point of 4'33" was to state that there is no such thing as silence. For more info, check out this paper by Andrew Schulze on the subject.
I attended a talk given by Sun, where they delved into the J2ME platform, and extolled its benefits. As I understand it, J2ME is a pared-down version of Java for use in mobile devices (what Sun demoed were cellphones and those Blackberry devices).
This would have been a great thing to have - about a year ago. A few select phones support J2ME at the current time (more on the way, I guess) - but what we're seeing, really, is a move towards Convergence cellphones, which are combining PDA's, cellphones, GPS, (you name it), into one tiny phone-shaped device.
With phones running PalmOS or M$-Whatever-its-called-this-week (and Linux, as soon as you nerds get around to it), I see no need for J2ME as a platform. You want software? Use the thousands of applications already written for Palm (and likewise for the M$ solution).
I like the idea of J2ME - I just think it is a day late and a dollar short. Sun is trying to get a handhold on a platform that is being outdated by the next generation of handheld devices. Sure, J2ME will probably run on the next generation of devices - but the user base and development community for those platforms is already in place.
When you're driving, you're in possession of a 3000lb bullet. Please act accordingly. And don't give me excuses like, "But I've been doing this for years!" or, "I'm a good driver, so I don't have to pay attention to the road." That's crap, and both you and I know it.
Granted - people talking on cellphones do increase the number of accidents that happen. Disregarding non-hands-free users (who are just looking for trouble holding a phone up to their ear while driving), the only time I'm distracted by talking on the phone is when I'm looking down at the phone, dialing a number. Which is why I never do that while the car is in motion - only at stoplights or before I start driving.
Furthermore: my route home is through an underused rural road. It has four lanes, but hardly any cars, even during rush hour. The drive is boring. I talk to my brother (or friends, other family members, whoever) to kill time while I'm making the monotonous trip home every day.
And besides, when I'm talking on a hands-free set, it is exactly like I'm talking to someone in the car. No different. I've never actually been in a situation where I've required 100% of my brainpower to keep the car inside the lines. I mean, maybe where you're from, the highway designers are purposefully making driving difficult, but here in Texas, they make the roads pretty simple to navigate.
You are also acting as though 100% of all car accidents occur as a direct result of someone's use of a cellphone. What about the radio? I'm sure many people have wrecked up cars attempting to change the CD in their car, or find a good radio station (looking at the radio rather than the road).
I tell you what: I'll stop using my "goddamn cell phone" at the same time you stop listening to your "goddamn radio." Deal?
My point is this: people can become distracted while operating a motor vehicle because of many things, not just cellphones. It is the responsibility of each person on the road to properly manage these distractions so that they can complete their primary responsibility - keeping the car going straight down the road. Your asinine assumption that I cannot do this with a cellphone is analogous to me assuming you can't drive and operate the radio. Don't tell me they are different: you have to look away from the road to change a CD, I can talk on my cellphone without even doing that.
It all boils down to responsibility. Just because I pick up a cellphone doesn't mean I suspend my responsibility.
"The 7135 features a color screen, Global Positioning System technology, a Secure Digital expansion slot with input and output capabilities, and a built-in digital audio player. The device comes with 16MB of memory and runs version 4.1 of Palm's operating system."
That's all well and good (and, based on the picture, a hell of a lot sexier than the Treo's that are running around my office now), but what they need to fix (before adding all the bells and whistles) is the fact that I can't drive from work to home and talk to my brother on the phone for 30 minutes without getting dropped during the handoff between cell towers.
They also need to fix their "nationwide coverage" that doesn't include some key semi-rural areas (I checked - they're in the US) where I go on analog roam, spilling dollars a minute down my phone.
I'm not saying an integrated GPS-PDA-MP3-Web browser-Phone is a bad idea. I think its yet another cool geek toy.
But for god's sake, take some of that R&D money and BUILD SOME MORE TOWERS!
From the literature as I've read it, here's what I've gathered. It might be interesting to some of you.
As far as I know, the majority of multi-cellular organisms have their many cells grouped into rough categories we've dubbed "organs." These include the heart, the stomach, the skin, and the liver. Add to these a number of other cells - hair cells, fingernail cells, earwax-producing cells (the list goes on and on).
Each of these cells is capable (if at all) of only producing more cells like itself - the DNA has been "turned off". They still contain the entire DNA structure - but will never replicate to anything new.
What is amazing is that all these variagated cells are branched from a single cell - the one that is half mom and half dad. The little cell that split in two, then again, and up the exponential curve into the gooey mass that is each of us.
That single cell (and some of its first offsprings) are what we could call "stem" cells - those cells in which the DNA is still all active - those cells which, if incubated properly, could produce a whole being.
Now, if I wanted to grow MY OWN clone, I would have to find one of these "stem cells" in myself somewhere. (Not such an easy task - I can't seem to find my car keys.) I think that's what all the research is about.
If anyone knows more, or sees problems with this stuff, please reply to it - I want to know more!
Well, it was either charge $1024, or $512. Like true computer geeks, they can only think in powers of two. Methinks the organizers have read Snow Crash one too many times.
Slashdot Mirror
And on the Mac your choice of sound card is: the one supplied.
Want to upgrade your sound card? Simple! No opening the case, screws, jumpers, none of that. Just throw the whole thing in the trash and go get a new one!
It's painfully easy to support sound cards when you only have to support one.
Well... there are "health sodiums." Which I guess isn't the same as salt. Anyhow... Sodium Naproxen is the major (only?) ingredient in the "Aleve" painkiller. Something to keep in mind if you're trying to reduce sodium in your diet.
The parent article seems to have a vague concept of what .NET is. (Perhaps this is more MS propaganda's fault.)
MS released C#, and that's what they're toting when they talk about ending COM-based windows development, I think.
If you knew what COM was, you might have a better understanding of what Microsoft is phasing out. COM is the Component Object Model. It allows programs to invoke special versions of other software (which has a COM written for it) and call routines out of that software. For example, I could call the spellchecker for MS Word from my email-writing program, assuming the user had Word installed, of course.
I used COM in writing an application meant to automate customer response letters (the user wanted to have Word-compatible documents when the program was finished - a perfect example of COM) and let me tell you: COM is hairy. You have to pass pointers to functions, call functions with nasty parameters... it's a good idea, it just doesn't work inside the C/C++ syntax very well.
Unless you're looking for your game to be able to read and write MS Word files, or print through Excel, games probably wouldn't have used the Component Object Model.
C# apparently has the same functionality that COM did, but probably does it a little more elegantly.
In any case, game developers didn't use COM, and they're probably not using C#. They WILL, however, be using .NET. Because Visual Studio .NET is Microsoft's latest incarnation of their programming IDE and compiler package.
And the later versions (hopefully) contain more and more code optimization. And Microsoft HAS good code optimization: they bought all of Watcom's optimizing people a few generations back (when game programming was done almost exclusively in Watcom).
In short: Visual Studio .NET is probably phasing out COM. This has absolutely no bearing on game programming.
You will find that a nice cold glass of water/juice more than cures your hunger for the few hours until your next meal
Not only is the above true, but one (real, not food) calorie is equated as the energy required to raise one cc of water one degree C.
One "food" calorie is actually a kcal (or 1000 calories as described above). Convert units, and one food calorie is the energy required to raise one liter of water one degree C.
Drink a liter of water at about 1 degree C (put lots of ice in) throughout your day, and that water has no choice but to reach human body temperature - 37 degrees C.
So, not only does drinking ice water not add calories, your body actually burns some calories by getting it up to the right temperature.
You hydrate yourself, curb hunger, and burn 36 easy calories. Nice.
Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm."
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad."
Homer: "Why thank you, honey."
Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away."
Homer: "Oh, how does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't work."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?"
Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."
</obsimpsons>
Actually, if you were being completely correct, you wouldn't want to use passive voice. But I'm sure you knew that. "Mozilla renders the HTML." Furthermore, I don't think animated GIFs qualify as videos.
Seriously. Let's look at the comparisons:
- The Captain faces a difficult, headstrong, and menacing character from his past, bent on destruction.
- A crew member is working against their will for the opposition, sort-of.
- An apocalyptic battle ensues, leaving both ships very crippled, but still working, floating in space.
- A weapon of mass destruction is pointed at the Enterprise. (Okay, in Khan it would've destroyed Khan's ship too.)
- Wesley Crusher appears at the wedding, but is robbed of even a single spoken line.
- The ever-logical first-in-command sacrifices himself in order to save the ship.
- ...But not before "mind-melding" to possibly (probably) save his soul from actually being gone!
My prediction: Star Trek XI: The Search for Spo^H^H^HData.If anyone needs a sample of the influenza virus, please contact me. It is running rampant through my system.
Research inquiries only.
Are you saying that the CD's people are encoding to mp3 have "inaudible" sounds on them?
I didn't think so.
--
Actually, that is what I'm saying. I did dumb it down a little, but if you'd like to learn how mp3 compression works, check out this site.
A quote from this site:
To make a good compression algorithm for sound, a technique called perceptual noise shaping is used. It is "perceptual" part because the MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. For example:
* There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
* There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others.
* If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.
Using facts like these, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener.
That is to say, parts of the audio signal (the parts that are inaudible to the human ear) are removed to save space.
After that is done, a regular compression algorithm is applied to the file, further reducing the size.
Some of the major dissidents of the mp3 format claim that these so-called "inaudible sounds", when removed, can affect the overall quality of the audio. I guess that's why they wanted a lossless compression algorithm in the first place. Actually, a lot of these people don't like digital transfers of music at all. They prefer an analog technology like vinyl.
For most people, though, the difference in quality is negligible, at best - especially when compared to the savings in data space.
Actually, there is such thing as "lossless" compression.
.zip uses) compresses data by developing a small dictionary of byte sequences that recur in a file, and representing those byte sequences as a single byte, thereby saving space. You develop a large enough dictionary of this type, and you're saving file space.
For example, dictionary-style compression (what
Zip is living proof that lossless compression exists - you COMPRESS your text files, without LOSING any of the data in it when you DECOMPRESS.
That's what lossless compression is.
For more info, look into the entropy of data, which helps to determine the lossless compressability.
An example of LOSSY compression is mp3 or JPEG, where you (usually) sacrifice some quality for increased compression. Part of what makes mp3 work so well, is that it throws out the parts of the audio signal that are out of the human range of hearing.
--
Furthermore, many people (including myself) have cable modems. Upload speeds are "capped" at a fraction of the download speeds. I can DOWNLOAD from KaZaA with relative ease, and still manage to browse webpages, or use a secure shell connection to a remote site, or do anything else I normally do (except play games which require an extremely low latency).
However, introduce just one upload from my computer, and I suddenly find that my HTTP requests take forever to get to webservers, and even Google's front page takes longer to load.
Even so - I tend to allow uploads to continue. What I keep in my "shared" directory are mostly those hard-to-find files that take forever to download because there are a lack of people with that file. I can only hope that people who get those files from me are doing the same.
---
I was hoping I'd be the first to make the Simpson's "sort tiny screws in space" joke. But now I see that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who posted before me used a quote from the "Homer in Space" episode already.
But, hey, maybe I can still milk this article for more Karma.
"I don't understand, it was non-alcoholic champagne."
or maybe...
"You mean I waxed my bikini zone for NOTHING?"
---
Huh? That thing looks a little like the Gungan Bongo from Episode I. Hopefully, the flying sub doesn't come standard with an annoying muppet.
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" Homer mutters this when Lisa, bored at being out of school, creates a perpetual motion machine.
"Maybe we should finally tell them that the monkeys we sent into space came back super-intelligent!"
"No, I don't think we'll be telling them that."
Trailblazer will also carry a time capsule containing messages and personal items that will remain on the moon where the craft crashes.
Children's letters to God to jettison -- check.
For me, having the CD-ROM would be like those "check out the first chapter of 's new book!" sections at the back of a lot of novels. You get just a taste, and that encourages you to buy the whole novel. I realize he has the whole novel on there, but I wouldn't be able to stand reading a book on a computer screen. I'd break down and buy the mass market paperback after the first chapter or so. I can't curl up in bed on a lazy Saturday morning with a monitor!
I just got the blockbuster special that they're running (at my blockbuster, anyhow).
Pre-order the theatrical (August) release for $24.95, and receive a free 10-week rental card, good for renting one dvd or video per week. (A week starts on sunday, and ends on saturday).
If you rent DVDs a lot, you know they can be about $5 apiece - so basically this means you get 5 free DVD rentals PLUS the theatrical release version, when it comes out.
NICE!
Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds) was mostly an experiment into the nature of silence.
Cage actually spent a lot of time researching Zen teachings. His research into silence eventually led him to Harvard University and a visit to its Anechoic Chamber - a closed environment supposedly complete free of noise.
"While he literally expected to hear nothing, after leaving the chamber, Cage explained to a nearby engineer that he had heard two sounds in the chamber, one high, and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and that the low sound was his blood circulating"
The point of 4'33" was to state that there is no such thing as silence. For more info, check out this paper by Andrew Schulze on the subject.
Yeah, teenagers controlling battles. Someone reads a little too much Orson Scott Card maybe...
I attended a talk given by Sun, where they delved into the J2ME platform, and extolled its benefits. As I understand it, J2ME is a pared-down version of Java for use in mobile devices (what Sun demoed were cellphones and those Blackberry devices).
This would have been a great thing to have - about a year ago. A few select phones support J2ME at the current time (more on the way, I guess) - but what we're seeing, really, is a move towards Convergence cellphones, which are combining PDA's, cellphones, GPS, (you name it), into one tiny phone-shaped device.
With phones running PalmOS or M$-Whatever-its-called-this-week (and Linux, as soon as you nerds get around to it), I see no need for J2ME as a platform. You want software? Use the thousands of applications already written for Palm (and likewise for the M$ solution).
I like the idea of J2ME - I just think it is a day late and a dollar short. Sun is trying to get a handhold on a platform that is being outdated by the next generation of handheld devices. Sure, J2ME will probably run on the next generation of devices - but the user base and development community for those platforms is already in place.
Granted - people talking on cellphones do increase the number of accidents that happen. Disregarding non-hands-free users (who are just looking for trouble holding a phone up to their ear while driving), the only time I'm distracted by talking on the phone is when I'm looking down at the phone, dialing a number. Which is why I never do that while the car is in motion - only at stoplights or before I start driving.
Furthermore: my route home is through an underused rural road. It has four lanes, but hardly any cars, even during rush hour. The drive is boring. I talk to my brother (or friends, other family members, whoever) to kill time while I'm making the monotonous trip home every day.
And besides, when I'm talking on a hands-free set, it is exactly like I'm talking to someone in the car. No different. I've never actually been in a situation where I've required 100% of my brainpower to keep the car inside the lines. I mean, maybe where you're from, the highway designers are purposefully making driving difficult, but here in Texas, they make the roads pretty simple to navigate.
You are also acting as though 100% of all car accidents occur as a direct result of someone's use of a cellphone. What about the radio? I'm sure many people have wrecked up cars attempting to change the CD in their car, or find a good radio station (looking at the radio rather than the road).
I tell you what: I'll stop using my "goddamn cell phone" at the same time you stop listening to your "goddamn radio." Deal?
My point is this: people can become distracted while operating a motor vehicle because of many things, not just cellphones. It is the responsibility of each person on the road to properly manage these distractions so that they can complete their primary responsibility - keeping the car going straight down the road. Your asinine assumption that I cannot do this with a cellphone is analogous to me assuming you can't drive and operate the radio. Don't tell me they are different: you have to look away from the road to change a CD, I can talk on my cellphone without even doing that.
It all boils down to responsibility. Just because I pick up a cellphone doesn't mean I suspend my responsibility.
Article:
"The 7135 features a color screen, Global Positioning System technology, a Secure Digital expansion slot with input and output capabilities, and a built-in digital audio player. The device comes with 16MB of memory and runs version 4.1 of Palm's operating system."
That's all well and good (and, based on the picture, a hell of a lot sexier than the Treo's that are running around my office now), but what they need to fix (before adding all the bells and whistles) is the fact that I can't drive from work to home and talk to my brother on the phone for 30 minutes without getting dropped during the handoff between cell towers.
They also need to fix their "nationwide coverage" that doesn't include some key semi-rural areas (I checked - they're in the US) where I go on analog roam, spilling dollars a minute down my phone.
I'm not saying an integrated GPS-PDA-MP3-Web browser-Phone is a bad idea. I think its yet another cool geek toy.
But for god's sake, take some of that R&D money and BUILD SOME MORE TOWERS!
From the literature as I've read it, here's what I've gathered. It might be interesting to some of you.
As far as I know, the majority of multi-cellular organisms have their many cells grouped into rough categories we've dubbed "organs." These include the heart, the stomach, the skin, and the liver. Add to these a number of other cells - hair cells, fingernail cells, earwax-producing cells (the list goes on and on).
Each of these cells is capable (if at all) of only producing more cells like itself - the DNA has been "turned off". They still contain the entire DNA structure - but will never replicate to anything new.
What is amazing is that all these variagated cells are branched from a single cell - the one that is half mom and half dad. The little cell that split in two, then again, and up the exponential curve into the gooey mass that is each of us.
That single cell (and some of its first offsprings) are what we could call "stem" cells - those cells in which the DNA is still all active - those cells which, if incubated properly, could produce a whole being.
Now, if I wanted to grow MY OWN clone, I would have to find one of these "stem cells" in myself somewhere. (Not such an easy task - I can't seem to find my car keys.) I think that's what all the research is about.
If anyone knows more, or sees problems with this stuff, please reply to it - I want to know more!
Well, it was either charge $1024, or $512. Like true computer geeks, they can only think in powers of two. Methinks the organizers have read Snow Crash one too many times.