I just read the article... and I am astonished just how little content can make up an article.
So we have one returning character and two babes, one maybe playable, but we don't know. We have different enemies that are different from the different enemies we had before (and yes, I purposely overused the word "different" here). And we have rumors on how they'll die, decompose, all the while burbling and turning into slime.
Could someone please explain to me how this is relevant news concerning a new computer game? No details, no specs, no screenshots, just some Japanese magazine having seen a soon-to-be-released trailer and another newsfeed picking up the story, summarizing ineptly what will become perfectly obvious from watching the trailer which you'll be able to watch soon yourself.
And yes, I must be new here and all, but please... wake me up when there's NEWS to be had.
Unlikely. Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder, and even if new nerves could be generated, they would be just as susceptible to attack by the host immune system.
I agree. It would not have a lasting effect. But repairing existing damage, even if not a permanent effect, would greatly reduce the damage done by the flare-ups.
For patients of both the relapsing-remitting and progressive form of MS, a treatment that would reduce the retained damage would be very helpful.
Patients who can, depending on the degree of the MS, suffer greatly in terms of reduced motor functions and control, for instance, would welcome a treatment that restores their motor skills.
However, causing the growth of nerves where there were none is, to me, significantly different from repairing existing nerves and the mechanisms to do that seem to be quite different.
The Wikipedia article on this describes the damage repair mechanism as follows:
The oligodendrocytes that originally formed a myelin sheath cannot completely rebuild a destroyed myelin sheath. However, the brain can recruit stem cells, which migrate from other unknown regions of the brain, differentiate into mature oligodendrocytes, and rebuild the myelin sheath.
This indicates a completely different mechanism as in this research and I find it doubtful that there would be synergy effects. But I am not a doctor. Unfortunately.:-(
No, it's not a good study... but it was the first that Google spit out and I was too bored to look for better resources.
I do, however, know that the result of the "study" has been the result of a number of other studies, but I can't find them, so you don't have to take my word for it.;-)
This page http://www.unc.edu/~jkullama/inls181/final/serif.h tml has more about the topic and the bibliography contains a number of studies on the topic. Hopefully, they're better.
*chuckles* Quite the contrary. Or maybe not.
It seems that people have a much harder time reading sans-serif fonts on paper than serif fonts. On the computer screen, however, the opposite applies.
Here's a study about it http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm (Google is your friend).
And this is a quote from the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Usage:
"The coarse resolution of computer screens has caused a reassessment of the role of serifs in readability, with a large percentage of web pages employing sans-serif type for body text. Fonts with hinting information, anti-aliased rendering and the ClearType rendering technology has partially mitigated these concerns, yet the basic problem of coarse resolution--typically 100 pixels per inch or less--continues to impose strict limitations on readability and legibility on-screen."
And yes, in the end, it boils down to personal preferences.
I agree with the statements you make about pattern recognition skills.
However, I believe that the skillset you describe is too narrow.
As far as I can tell, most people are well able to distinguish two banks based on their flyers, even if you remove the names of the banks. They don't read the text, they don't look at the offerings, they merely look at the colors, layout and the logo.
On this level, pattern recognition works just fine for them and it's usually enough.
And since trademarks prohibit someone else from using that combination of colors, fonts and logos, this, eroneously, serves as a unique identifier.
Once a "document", electronic or not, passes the initial, faulty "test" of validity, based on colors, layout, logos, it's considered to be valid. No questions asked.
As for the level of pattern recognition you mention, not being able to identify structural components of a page or URL, I agree. Most people don't understand that unless they have been shown.
For most people, the WWW consists of links and pages. The fact that each page has a unique name that can be decomposed is something unknown. They live in a world of "blue underlined text that brings them to other pages", so to speak.
I've seen uses browse without the navigation bar, simply using their bookmarks, the history and search engines (and keyboard shortcuts to go back). For them, the actual text of an URL has no meaning. You might call that faulty pattern recognition, but I believe it's more along the lines of faulty usage patterns. Ymmv, of course.
Why? Why are online scams so much more successful than offline?
As far as I understand the mechanisms, there's several at play:
The technicalities of spoofing an address are lost on most people. So "if it says it's from my bank and it looks like it is, so it must be".
The second problem, to me, is pattern recognition. We've been trained to identify stores or banks by their corporate identity. It is perfectly obvious that the combination of that color and that logo represents that corporation. Nobody else uses these colors, this logo. So everything with these characteristics is automatically associated with that corporation. And since item one is not understood, there's no reason to doubt that assumption.
The third problem is that people want to believe. They want to believe that something is done to keep them and their money safe because it is oh so unsafe and dangerous out there. This has a much wider area of applicability, of course, but on topic, the fact that the bank does something to keep my money safe is good. I want to keep my money safe and so do they. If they want my cooperation in doing that, that's fine. It's in my interst as well. And since they do not understand the implications of spoofing, they accept things on face value. You probably know that line of thought.
The fourth problem that I see is that we've gotten used to being treated as a number. So a mail that does not correctly identify me with my full name and only states "Dear Sir or Madam" or "Dear Customer" is considered acceptable.
The fifth item I think plays a role is the fact that non-technical computer users have become accustomed to do things that they do not understand. If you told them that performing a rain dance every morning over their machine will keep it from crashing, they will do it, because it's no more arcane to them than a sequence of finger-breaking key combinations that they are so accustomed to. This extends to error messages and application failures, etc. Even when there's evidently a problem, the software more often than not does a rotten job at explaning what's wrong. This is why "we have increased the security of your credit card. Please enter all your data." works so fine. It's nonsensical, but it's no more arcane than any number of other messages our machines give us every day.
This leads into the last issue of today. Tunnel-vision. I believe that computer users know exactly as much as they need to to perform a specific task. They look neither left nor right. The classic example is people overlooking UI elements that are right next tho those they've been using for years, simply because they do not use them. Once you leave that comfort zone of things that they know and use regularly, all is new, all is strange. And they have learned that it's lots of work to find out what is going on. It's easier to go with the flow. Unfortunately.
Yes, I noticed them... but my use cases are different.
I need the added punch these things pack... but were it not for that, I'd always go for a Thinkpad.
Yeah... they had some intermittent problems... just try to reload the page... That normally resolves the problem.
Btw, mine's arriving tomorrow.;-)
Re:This is pretty stupid, and not worth a /. artic
on
Enderle's Ferrari Laptop
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If I wanted more than a great paint job, I'd go for a Hypersonic laptop... same great red color (among other colors) and I'd get great performance, too.
On the other hand, if I were silly enough to consider a sound effect during startup like the one described "cool", I'd never go for performance if I could get the brand name... Silly.
One application that I developed recently makes, imho, great use of OpenOffice (and thus XML). In an application for knowledge management I've used the following setup:
Conversion from Word to OpenOffice. This is currently done in manual mode until I get someone to write me a batch process based on the OO APIs.
Conversion to Simplified DocBook with OOo2sDbk. Works perfect for me.
Analysis with Lucene to find often / rarely used words
Presentation of a subset of these words to the user for definition as important or unimportant for the project
Based on the user decision, the documents are connected in a structure remotely similar to a mindmap.
There are a few more steps possible but these are currently only in planning or not fully implemented, so I'll ignore them here.
Once the map's done, it's all refinement of the mappings through user interaction, gradually refining the map by adding of abstractions (WebSphere here, WebLogic there, abstract to ApplicationServer, etc.) and adding or removing relations, documents, etc.
The result is a hyperindex of the documentation.
It's not really revolutionary in that such a thing as never been done before, but I shudder at the thought to do that with Microsoft Office as a base.
I have a significant number of passwords to remember, for different machines, different services, encrypted file systems, websites, etc.
None of the passwords that protect someting worth protecting are smaller than 16 characters, most are around 30 characters.
But memorizing them is simple... for the difficult part is not in the passwords.
Each password is a phrase that holds a specific meaning for me, like a quote from a movie, a song, etc. Each of these passphrases go through the same algorithm that replaces characters with numbers, adds upper and lower-case, adds non-alpha-numeric values, etc.
The resulting password is pretty hard to recognize as the original passphrase and almost impossible to reverse-engineer.
This approach has several advantages:
The phrases can be of arbitrary length without me ever forgetting one.
The algorithm employed can be sufficiently complex to fool most attacks I am aware of (and I use a password checker and cracker to ascertain that the algorithm is up to suficient strength) and as it rarely changes (normally no more than once a year), it is relatively easy to memorize.
The passwords can be easily reconstructed in the event of me forgetting them.
I have an algorithm for systems that others might need access to. Using that algorithm, I can easily swap passphrases with these people, for instance when I go on vacation and someone needs access to my work machine. If there is only one person who knows the algorithm in the company, I could even put a post-it with the passphrase on my machine for the duration of my vacation. In effect, it's a poor-man's public-key system. (And yes, I change the passwords later)
Soviet propaganda existed in the form of many books, written by different people over quite a long time span. But they all said very much the same things. So?
What I wanted to express was that inconsistencies exist (even if they're only read outside of Russia, but I'll concede that point to keep this from escalating into a political discussion.
> Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races
We know this from JRRT only. This proves nothing. You're trying to prove one party slogan by referring to other party slogans.
The whole cosmology of Arda was created by one person, so all we have are party slogans. But these slogans are consistent with each other, which is not common for party slogans.
> Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building
Again, we know this from JRRT only. I think elves ran a pretty good destruction spree in Mordor too, after they won.
This is nothing cmpared to the repeated destruction of Arda by Morgoth or the war at the end of the Seconds Age.
> The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
That's a lie. Silmarillion tells us that Gondor was founded by conquerors who came from the sea. Do you think these lands were empty before them?
No, I don't think so. Gondor was founded 3320, Second Age by Elendil. That's a few millenia back, so any grudges need to be just as old, or at least as old as TA 1100 (which is rare but might be accepted as given).
To quote this site: "From its founding, Gondor was always under attack by Sauron or his allies in Rhûn, Harad, or Umbar."
Harad is a culture molded after the mongolian culture on Earth, if I am not mistaken. They have lived in Harad for a long time. I still can't quote the source, but they never struck me as being the neighbors of Numenor before its fall... maybe someone else can find the reference to the travels of one of the Numenorean kings and tell us who loved there when he visited.
> Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Ha. Can you guarantee that the elves/people army was completely devoid of villains and marodeers? Get real. A war is a war. It's always a place where bad people feel at home. One thing we know for sure: Aragorn hired a squad of dead bodies to serve him - how'd you like that?
A war is a war. Yes. The elves live directly connected to the song that is all creation.
Elves, by that definition, are one with the world and do not engage in some of the things humans are doing under pressure.
And while I concede that this is a pretty unrealistic and idealistic view of the elves, it is the way they have been designed, so, I must accept that view.
As for the dead bodies... A quote from here:
"Aragorn and his companions enter the Paths of the Dead and are followed south by a great army of ghosts. Coming into Gondor's highlands on the south side of the mountains, Aragorn leads his followers and the dead to the stone of Erech, and there he proclaims his heritage as the Heir of Isildur, to whom the Dead had long before sworn an oath they dared break, and for which they were condemned to wait until an Heir of Isildur should summon them to battle once again."
That sounds like an army of noble warriors, sworn to an oath and betrayed, to me. They then return to uphold their part of the oath as the heir of Isildur upholds his part to find peace.
Doesn't sound to insidious to me.
> This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia?
Again, this is something we learn from the victors. The history (the real one, I mean) teaches us that primordial tribes in general tend to quarrel quite often with each other. It's only natural that they consider their neighbors the Bad Guys. From orcs viewpoint, this might well have been the other way round.
Orcs... maybe... maybe not. The people of Harad or Umbar? No way. They're as diverse as all humans and well enough organized and culturally organized enough to not exhibit the behaviour you describre.
> I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering
Wow, are you trying to prove a this-could-not-happen-in-reality point by referring to you-can't-implement-this-in-RPG? It's a rather strange twist I'd say.
Well... playing RPGs in the way I thing they ought to be played requires all creatures within the frame of reference and the rules you define to act within their capabilities and mindset.
For Sauron to be the good guy and the Elves to be the bad ones, it is neccessary that not only Sauron does a great deal of things within the timeframe of LoTR (he is pretty powerful, so I'll concede that he might be able to do some of it, even in his weakened state), but also before, in all the millenia before that... and that's the problem.
For any short period of time, I can devise strategies how any person could do any act out of any reason you name... but for 10000 years? Sorry... this is very hard to do and as far as I can tell from the endless hours spent devising stories that make ends meet, I don't think it possible.
> And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
Too bad you can't read Russian (see my other post here). You could get a lot of detailed ideas and food for thought.
Noone ever said I couldn't (most of all with a first name like Juri), but I am surprised that you write russian in an english forum while it is perfectly obvious that you're fluent in english. As for your other posts... I did check out your commments and could not find anything in russian there.:-(
And without any reference to the books you mention, your claims lack the validity they should have. I don't doubt them, but I'd like to be able to verify such things.
I couldn't disagree more (long)
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 2, Informative
DISCLAIMER: This is somewhat long...
I couldn't disagree more with a lot of his commentary, but let's keep this shorter than this article and just focus on his "see through the eyes of Sauron" idea after a small excursion into romanticism
Brin claims that Tolkien is a romantic and basically promoted a "back to the past" attitude.
Morgoth, Sauron, Galadriel, Saruman, Gandalf... most of the key powers in his book are millenia older than the society they live in now.
Galadriel is more than 5000 years old, after all.
The war they have fought is gust as ancient and predates the First Age (Morgoth against the rest of the Valar). The struggle is not past-against-future ("Good Races" vs. Sauron) but future against past (Free development of the Good Races vs. the Old Evil).
My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.
The tales were written down much earlier (when you take the Simarillion and all the other books into account). And they all, different victors in different wars, independently of each other, wrote similar things.
Yes, I know, it's all Tolkien's work, but for his analogy to work, we need a "real scenario" where there clearly is none.
So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?
We know that because Sauron was a Maia (lesser demi-god) of Aule, the Smith. He was a fire-demon, remotely similar to the Balrog (which are also Maia of Aule). I don't have the Simarillion with me here, but I am reasonably sure that this is mentioned there.
I am reasonably sure that the eyes of a Balrog glow with his inner fire, so the leap of faith isn't too far... Furthermore, the eye is not red, but fiery, swathed in flames, whatever... Any that is entirely reasonable for a fire-demon.
Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?
No, as explained above.
Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute: Next time you reread LOTR, count the number of powerful beings who are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?
Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races (Elves transformed into Orcs, etc.) and as Morgoth is only a Valar working alone, without the support of the others or the guiding hand of Illuvatar, his creations are bound to be less perfect (in the sense of beauty through symmetry).
Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building. and destruction is never pretty, I'd say.
As for ugliness helping you to rule... If you're truly powerful, beauty isn't important. Power is.
Then unleash your imagination a bit further.
Ask yourself: "How would Sauron have described the situation?"
And then: "What might 'really' have happened?"
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?
Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
Since Gondor's strength has been waning for a few centuries by the time of LOTR, it is reasonable to assume that no recent incursions into the lands of thr East have taken place either.
Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.
Sounds good to me. Let's find proof for that. The One Ring has been made to control all other rings, to bind their purpose to the will of the wielder of the One Ring. Does that sounds like the Hero of the Masses tm? If he were to distribute the power, it would be different, but the Ring was not crafted for that purpose.
Brin's notion of the Nine as tragic figures for the idea of "power corrupts" goes along the same lines. This, too, is false. The Nine Rings were not made to corrupt but the connection to the One Ring brought about this fate. Without Sauron's intervention the Nine Kings of Men would not have become the anathema of life.
If that's going too far, here's a milder version. Those orcs and low elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron's propaganda.
Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron's dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they're slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.
Come on, folks, a little empathy!
This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia? Never suspecting anything was amiss? Even Orcs are too intelligent for that. So, there must have been a strong incentive to not question Sauron's propaganda... like a secret police with their magical spy-eyes, which would make him no better than his rivals.
Instead of railing against "evil," try to understand it. That's always been the best way to defeat it.
This is what Saruman tries and he fails to do so. I do not know whether understanding evil might work for anyone else, but the "heros" of LOTR have seen an example of what Sauron can do, subverting their most powerful... I don't fault them for declining to try that stunt again.
Am I pulling your leg? You bet! I don't take speculations about fictional villains quite that seriously.
My real point is more general.
Don't just receive your adventures. Toy with them. Re-mold them in your mind. Keep asking "What if...?"
It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right.
I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering. It is completely unfeasible without a great deal more power, magic and technology than this setting provides. And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
And remember this too: Enlightenment, science, democracy and equal opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years.
And..?
Sauron has not yet been proven a rebel, so where's the similarity?
So, all in all, I can't buy his suggestions and I truly wonder whether he's actually read the Simarillion (or the Lost Tales, or Tales from Middle Earth,...)
Hmmm... if I increase the distance the sun has to travel to the elliptical orbit, the gravitational pull of the black hole has to be even stronger to keep the sun on its path... and it doesn't seem to be strong enough for the current speed... but I am no expert and hope that someone can show me the error in my analysis...
And yes, I am aware of the fact that I have reduced a complex problem to a two-object problem. Probably that's why my calculations don't make sense...
I am a bit rusty in that kind of calculation, but I have tried to calculate the relative gravimetric pull of that black hole on a sun like ours which is 17 light hours away from a gravitational source which is between 2.6 and 3.7 million times the mass of the sun orbitinh it...
Our sun is about 10^30x2 kg while the earth is 10^25x0.6 kg
That makes the sun about 10^6 times heavier than the earth([1])
This black hole now is about 2.6 to 3.7 times that heavy when compared to a sun of the size of our own.
Our planet roates around the Sun at about 150,000,000 km at a speed of ca. 29.658 km / s if my math isn't wrong.
That other sun rotates around the black hole at about 17 light hours at a speed of 240.652 km / s (if I am not mistaken here either).
The speed of that sun is more than 8x the speed of the Earth, generating a significantly higher centrifugal force.
Now, that sun is 127.5 times further away from the black hole's event horizon than Earth is from Sun.
At the same time, the increased distance should provide a significantly lower gravitational pull than the 3.6 x relative weight of the sun could provide.
As this sounds completely bogus to me, I'd be happy if someone could enlighten me how this is supposed to work.
I concur with the above statement and would like to add some more comments.
I am a dark blonde with no redheads in my family for roughly three generations back (No jokes about inbreeding here, please.;-))
My tolerance for novocaine, diazepam (valium) and a host of other anesthetics is about 12x normal (tripple the dosage, 1/4th of the duration) and has puzzled more than one specialist. The result of careful analysis has shown that my body eliminates most anesthetics at a much higher rate than normal.
My pain level is no higher or lower than average though my sensitivity to stimuli is much higher than average (I can read a photocopy with my fingertips, sometimes even writing in ink).
Based on that point of data, I'd say that equating sensitivity to stimuli to sensitivity to pain, as it has happened in many posts is probably not a good (i.e. valid) idea. I should be screaming of pain most the time if this were true.
Only empirical evidence with a very limited set of data, I know, but as e8johan stated: "but this does not say anything about any single individual".
The next question is whether sensitivity to pain has any relevance to the effect of an anesthetic.
If I remember correctly, local anesthetics work vastly different from general anesthesia by targeting different areas in the body. [1] states that Novocaine et al. supress the transmission of stimuli through the nerve while general anesthetics act in the brain ([2] has something about some anesthetics triggering the sleep cycle, for others, I don't know).
Desflurane now is a geneal anesthetic, acting in the brain. So, any reference to "I can do this, I can do that" that does not duplicate the function of a geneal anesthetic is useless...
This means that my impressive tolerance for Novocaine et al. does not have any significance for the research performed as it targets a different type of anesthetic. The same goes for many other comments along the same lines, including alcohol.
Alcohol acts as an inhibitor ([3] states: "Alcohol acts primarily at the GABAa receptor to facilitate its action, thus in essence creating enhanced inhibition.") but does not have a sufficiently strong effect that the person affected could consciously compare it to a geneal anesthetic...
As for the use of alcohol as geneal anesthetic, which would be the next logical argument... it's not been very effective prior to complete unconsciousness and the level and speed of alcohol absorption plays a huge role. That also rules out any comment along the lines of "I can drink more than an ox".
I won't ask for people to check what they're writing for relevance... after all, I enjoy many of the comments I read here, but it is considered bad style to criticize the work of others without enough commonalities between the work and the critical remarks.
I stand corrected... I did assume Mars had a magnetosphere and didn't distinguish that in my reply. Here's some information that I should have researched before.
I may be mistaken here, but as far as I remember, one of the great advantages of these gravity wells is that you can forget about the lead underwear in the morning...
If I remember correctly, you need about a foot of lead between you and outer space to insulate yourself from the radiation... or a gravity well...
Of course, the efficiency of travel from one planet to another is... well... let's say that there is no really efficient way... only more or less efficient variants, in that I concur.
So, space stations are a good idea... and new insulation against radiation will be found... eventually... but until then, I'd be very happy if people started developing technologies for more efficient space travel... I'm still waiting for someone to actually get to the asteroid belt...efficient habitats, which are able to deal with micro-asteroids in an adequate manner (i.e. not: "Ok guys, get some insulation and glue and start searching") and a host of other things that, eventially, will lead to usable space stations...
One more comment... I do remember something about the effects of even a short space flight on the ability to procreate...
It's been at least 10 years since I heard that, so please correct me, but I think I remember that the damage is significant after only a few hours in space...
In that case, I'll stick to that gravity well for a while longer...
I read very fast in everyday life... somewhere between 300 and 400 words per minute, I'd guess, with a rate of recall of about 90% for a day and still 60% after a week (Yes, I have a good memory).
Recently, I tried out GnomeRSVP to find out what that is all about...
Much to my surprise, I must say that, for texts which are available on the computer, it is a very convenient and fast tool to quickly absorb huge amounts of text.
I can read somewhere around 1000 to 1200 words per minute and remember about 90% of it for about 12 hours.
That is more than enough if you have to get a quick overview about a subject.
It is not enough to write a paper about a specific topic as you loose most abbreviations or references to other texts. You also can't really enjoy the experience.
I ran a test and held a talk about a topic I know exactly nothing about, just based on the texts I read... and my recall was comprehensive and precise.
After 12 hours, the rate of recall was down to about 60% though... so, in my case, the data is not permanently absorbed, as the context is lost and I can't recall longer paragraphs as a whole...
Some additional information, if I may... *chuckles* and as this is a free system, I may.;-)
On major danger is see in the efforts scientology puts into gagging their opposition is not that they might win... that is a well-known and agreed upon danger.
I am worried more about the effect a success would have on the "free world".
Search engines are, by nature, the major medium for information gathering.
In a/. article a few weeks back here, a successful way of internet censorship is described.
Scientology performs a similar feat... but at a much cheaper price. It they are successful, who's to keep other organizations from doing the same?
And when the data is removed form the search engine, it, on the long run, is removed from the public conscious.
The result is devastating and turns the, essentially unmoderated and free, internet into a huge heap of information noone can use, as he / she doesn't know how to get hold of the data he / she wants...
I wait for terrorist regimes requesting google to remove news agancies from their database...
I agree that scientology is more present on the web than other religious communities.
Unfortunately, it is completely in sync with their overall strategy.:-(
One major leg of their operations is to get the managers of companies. Through them, they then infiltrate the rest of the company. For that, they offer "management seminars" and the like, which are not visibly scientology-seminars, if my memory of the news doesn't fault me here...
This top-down approach is, as far as I know, unique to them. No other religious grouping that I am aware of does that.
Of course, their seminars are so hideously expensive that they need financially potent customers, so it is understandable.
What I find dangerous about that presence is not that they're "here" but that they are allowed to bully people into believing that their claims hold some validity...
After all, google did remove the links, so there must be some valid claim behind it.
Of course, there isn't... but the impression is created... and impressions are mightier than fact on the web (and most other places in the world).
The fact that scientology has never filed any infringement suit should make it obvious that there is no validity in their claim.
That is not the case though...
After all, this is a possible way to look at things: The google lawyers looked at the allegation, found it valid, acted accordingly. And thus, it was not neccessary to file a suit.
This is the classic "I can turn my weakness into a strength" trick... and again, perception is mightier than the fact.
The confusing thing about AspectJ is that it is really not Java but rather a different language that happens to share a lot of the syntax and is able to compile to bytecode (just like e.g. Jython).
I totally concur with that and would like to add a few sentences here.
Regardless of whether you like it or not, it is, imho, not anywhere near correct to talk about Java and AspectJ in one sentence.
Of course, AspectJ applies aspects to Java code and generates code that is written in Java, but the basic capability to write in AspectJ requires the user to learn completely new structures which look like a language extension, but when you look at the way i.e. the pointcuts are defined, it's a new language.
Regardless of whether that is good or not, I think it needs to be understood.
It is also worth pointing out that there's a difference between AOP and AspectJ. AspectJ is one of the many aspect oriented languages. Other examples include IBM's HyperJ and Karl Lieberherr's Demeter Java (do a search on google if you are interested).
Thank you for pointing that out. it's a fact often forgotten. The term for all these technologies which is now widely used is AOSD (the Hyper/J people used MDSOC, for Multi-dimensional deparation of concerns).
Well designed OO programs also exhibit some separation of concerns. Typically you will find stuff like design patterns being used to do so.
I would like to add to that as well.
Peri Tarr et al. have named that the "Tyranny of the dominant decomposition". That means that for every given module of software, you have one major decomposition, by class.
If you have accounting software, you have a class called "Account" and a class "transferal". There is, normally, no class first class entity which encalsulates the UI for the "Account" class, or its logging or any of the other tasks the "Account" class has to perform in addition to being the representation of an account.
That brings us to your next paragraph...
The price you pay is a more complex design.
The trouble with normal OO design is that, no matter how dilligent you design, how much patterns you use, how many factories and facade objects you use, there still remain concerns which have not been encapsulated or new concerns will be added which have not been anticipated.
These concerns become cross-cutting concerns which can not be implemented completely in one separate artifact.
That's the moment your application starts to get difficult to maintain and evolve.
AOP potentially offers you a cleaner and easier to maintain solution than design patterns.
Imho, AOSD is an addition to patterns. There are patterns which can be removed through use of AOSD technologies (see http://www.research.ibm.com/sop/sopcpats.htm for examples).
Maybe I can add something here...
I've been working with AOSD technologies, namely Hyper/J (the competitor to AspectJ) for two years.
While it is imho true that AspectJ has a problem when you get to larger and larger compositions, the good thing about AOSD approaches (though not neccessarily of AspectJ, but I don't want to start a religious discussion here) is that the components you weave together, regardless of how large they become, remain distinctly apart.
That way, the impact of chage is clearly limited.
What AOSD technologies like AspectJ or Hyper/J do is to merge together these distinct aspects.
The result looks ugly as hell and should not be considered of any use.
The catch is to keep writing aspects if you have to change the component, not change the merged code. (And if you're calling the component from the outside, you should not care about the internals anyway.)
So, as long as you don't make a transition from aspects (or concerns) back to normal OO methodology within the same class / component after you've weaved things together, the code of each aspect / concerns remains clean and concise.
I hope that helped a bit... but I am really no AOP expert (when you consider AOP = AspectJ. Hyper/J handles things differently).
I can understand the confusion at the language extensions AspectJ is introducing.
I'm not overly fond of that either.
If you have the time and inclination, it might be fruitful to look at Hyper/J from IBM's alpahworks.
It is a similar technology, with a steeper learning curve but far more capabilities and a much cleaner structure.
Slashdot Mirror
I just read the article... and I am astonished just how little content can make up an article. So we have one returning character and two babes, one maybe playable, but we don't know. We have different enemies that are different from the different enemies we had before (and yes, I purposely overused the word "different" here). And we have rumors on how they'll die, decompose, all the while burbling and turning into slime. Could someone please explain to me how this is relevant news concerning a new computer game? No details, no specs, no screenshots, just some Japanese magazine having seen a soon-to-be-released trailer and another newsfeed picking up the story, summarizing ineptly what will become perfectly obvious from watching the trailer which you'll be able to watch soon yourself. And yes, I must be new here and all, but please... wake me up when there's NEWS to be had.
For patients of both the relapsing-remitting and progressive form of MS, a treatment that would reduce the retained damage would be very helpful.
Patients who can, depending on the degree of the MS, suffer greatly in terms of reduced motor functions and control, for instance, would welcome a treatment that restores their motor skills.
However, causing the growth of nerves where there were none is, to me, significantly different from repairing existing nerves and the mechanisms to do that seem to be quite different.
The Wikipedia article on this describes the damage repair mechanism as follows: This indicates a completely different mechanism as in this research and I find it doubtful that there would be synergy effects. But I am not a doctor. Unfortunately.
No, it's not a good study... but it was the first that Google spit out and I was too bored to look for better resources. ;-)h tml has more about the topic and the bibliography contains a number of studies on the topic. Hopefully, they're better.
I do, however, know that the result of the "study" has been the result of a number of other studies, but I can't find them, so you don't have to take my word for it.
This page http://www.unc.edu/~jkullama/inls181/final/serif.
*chuckles* Quite the contrary. Or maybe not.m (Google is your friend).
It seems that people have a much harder time reading sans-serif fonts on paper than serif fonts. On the computer screen, however, the opposite applies.
Here's a study about it http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.ht
And this is a quote from the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Usage:
"The coarse resolution of computer screens has caused a reassessment of the role of serifs in readability, with a large percentage of web pages employing sans-serif type for body text. Fonts with hinting information, anti-aliased rendering and the ClearType rendering technology has partially mitigated these concerns, yet the basic problem of coarse resolution--typically 100 pixels per inch or less--continues to impose strict limitations on readability and legibility on-screen." And yes, in the end, it boils down to personal preferences.
I agree with the statements you make about pattern recognition skills.
However, I believe that the skillset you describe is too narrow.
As far as I can tell, most people are well able to distinguish two banks based on their flyers, even if you remove the names of the banks. They don't read the text, they don't look at the offerings, they merely look at the colors, layout and the logo.
On this level, pattern recognition works just fine for them and it's usually enough.
And since trademarks prohibit someone else from using that combination of colors, fonts and logos, this, eroneously, serves as a unique identifier.
Once a "document", electronic or not, passes the initial, faulty "test" of validity, based on colors, layout, logos, it's considered to be valid. No questions asked.
As for the level of pattern recognition you mention, not being able to identify structural components of a page or URL, I agree. Most people don't understand that unless they have been shown.
For most people, the WWW consists of links and pages. The fact that each page has a unique name that can be decomposed is something unknown. They live in a world of "blue underlined text that brings them to other pages", so to speak.
I've seen uses browse without the navigation bar, simply using their bookmarks, the history and search engines (and keyboard shortcuts to go back). For them, the actual text of an URL has no meaning. You might call that faulty pattern recognition, but I believe it's more along the lines of faulty usage patterns. Ymmv, of course.
Yes, I noticed them... but my use cases are different.
I need the added punch these things pack... but were it not for that, I'd always go for a Thinkpad.
Yeah... they had some intermittent problems... just try to reload the page... That normally resolves the problem. ;-)
Btw, mine's arriving tomorrow.
If I wanted more than a great paint job, I'd go for a Hypersonic laptop... same great red color (among other colors) and I'd get great performance, too.
On the other hand, if I were silly enough to consider a sound effect during startup like the one described "cool", I'd never go for performance if I could get the brand name... Silly.
- Conversion from Word to OpenOffice. This is currently done in manual mode until I get someone to write me a batch process based on the OO APIs.
- Conversion to Simplified DocBook with OOo2sDbk. Works perfect for me.
- Analysis with Lucene to find often / rarely used words
- Presentation of a subset of these words to the user for definition as important or unimportant for the project
- Based on the user decision, the documents are connected in a structure remotely similar to a mindmap.
There are a few more steps possible but these are currently only in planning or not fully implemented, so I'll ignore them here.Once the map's done, it's all refinement of the mappings through user interaction, gradually refining the map by adding of abstractions (WebSphere here, WebLogic there, abstract to ApplicationServer, etc.) and adding or removing relations, documents, etc.
The result is a hyperindex of the documentation.
It's not really revolutionary in that such a thing as never been done before, but I shudder at the thought to do that with Microsoft Office as a base.
But memorizing them is simple... for the difficult part is not in the passwords.
Each password is a phrase that holds a specific meaning for me, like a quote from a movie, a song, etc. Each of these passphrases go through the same algorithm that replaces characters with numbers, adds upper and lower-case, adds non-alpha-numeric values, etc.
The resulting password is pretty hard to recognize as the original passphrase and almost impossible to reverse-engineer.
This approach has several advantages:
What I wanted to express was that inconsistencies exist (even if they're only read outside of Russia, but I'll concede that point to keep this from escalating into a political discussion.
> Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races
We know this from JRRT only. This proves nothing. You're trying to prove one party slogan by referring to other party slogans.
The whole cosmology of Arda was created by one person, so all we have are party slogans. But these slogans are consistent with each other, which is not common for party slogans.
> Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building
Again, we know this from JRRT only. I think elves ran a pretty good destruction spree in Mordor too, after they won.
This is nothing cmpared to the repeated destruction of Arda by Morgoth or the war at the end of the Seconds Age.
> The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
That's a lie. Silmarillion tells us that Gondor was founded by conquerors who came from the sea. Do you think these lands were empty before them?
No, I don't think so. Gondor was founded 3320, Second Age by Elendil. That's a few millenia back, so any grudges need to be just as old, or at least as old as TA 1100 (which is rare but might be accepted as given).
To quote this site: "From its founding, Gondor was always under attack by Sauron or his allies in Rhûn, Harad, or Umbar."
Harad is a culture molded after the mongolian culture on Earth, if I am not mistaken. They have lived in Harad for a long time. I still can't quote the source, but they never struck me as being the neighbors of Numenor before its fall... maybe someone else can find the reference to the travels of one of the Numenorean kings and tell us who loved there when he visited.
> Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"? Ha. Can you guarantee that the elves/people army was completely devoid of villains and marodeers? Get real. A war is a war. It's always a place where bad people feel at home. One thing we know for sure: Aragorn hired a squad of dead bodies to serve him - how'd you like that?
A war is a war. Yes. The elves live directly connected to the song that is all creation.
Elves, by that definition, are one with the world and do not engage in some of the things humans are doing under pressure.
And while I concede that this is a pretty unrealistic and idealistic view of the elves, it is the way they have been designed, so, I must accept that view.
As for the dead bodies... A quote from here: "Aragorn and his companions enter the Paths of the Dead and are followed south by a great army of ghosts. Coming into Gondor's highlands on the south side of the mountains, Aragorn leads his followers and the dead to the stone of Erech, and there he proclaims his heritage as the Heir of Isildur, to whom the Dead had long before sworn an oath they dared break, and for which they were condemned to wait until an Heir of Isildur should summon them to battle once again."
That sounds like an army of noble warriors, sworn to an oath and betrayed, to me. They then return to uphold their part of the oath as the heir of Isildur upholds his part to find peace.
Doesn't sound to insidious to me.
> This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia?
Again, this is something we learn from the victors. The history (the real one, I mean) teaches us that primordial tribes in general tend to quarrel quite often with each other. It's only natural that they consider their neighbors the Bad Guys. From orcs viewpoint, this might well have been the other way round.
Orcs... maybe... maybe not. The people of Harad or Umbar? No way. They're as diverse as all humans and well enough organized and culturally organized enough to not exhibit the behaviour you describre.
> I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering
Wow, are you trying to prove a this-could-not-happen-in-reality point by referring to you-can't-implement-this-in-RPG? It's a rather strange twist I'd say.
Well... playing RPGs in the way I thing they ought to be played requires all creatures within the frame of reference and the rules you define to act within their capabilities and mindset.
For Sauron to be the good guy and the Elves to be the bad ones, it is neccessary that not only Sauron does a great deal of things within the timeframe of LoTR (he is pretty powerful, so I'll concede that he might be able to do some of it, even in his weakened state), but also before, in all the millenia before that... and that's the problem.
For any short period of time, I can devise strategies how any person could do any act out of any reason you name... but for 10000 years? Sorry... this is very hard to do and as far as I can tell from the endless hours spent devising stories that make ends meet, I don't think it possible.
> And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
Too bad you can't read Russian (see my other post here). You could get a lot of detailed ideas and food for thought.
Noone ever said I couldn't (most of all with a first name like Juri), but I am surprised that you write russian in an english forum while it is perfectly obvious that you're fluent in english. As for your other posts... I did check out your commments and could not find anything in russian there. :-(
And without any reference to the books you mention, your claims lack the validity they should have. I don't doubt them, but I'd like to be able to verify such things.
I couldn't disagree more with a lot of his commentary, but let's keep this shorter than this article and just focus on his "see through the eyes of Sauron" idea after a small excursion into romanticism
Brin claims that Tolkien is a romantic and basically promoted a "back to the past" attitude.
Morgoth, Sauron, Galadriel, Saruman, Gandalf... most of the key powers in his book are millenia older than the society they live in now.
Galadriel is more than 5000 years old, after all.
The war they have fought is gust as ancient and predates the First Age (Morgoth against the rest of the Valar). The struggle is not past-against-future ("Good Races" vs. Sauron) but future against past (Free development of the Good Races vs. the Old Evil).
My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.
The tales were written down much earlier (when you take the Simarillion and all the other books into account). And they all, different victors in different wars, independently of each other, wrote similar things.
Yes, I know, it's all Tolkien's work, but for his analogy to work, we need a "real scenario" where there clearly is none.
So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?
We know that because Sauron was a Maia (lesser demi-god) of Aule, the Smith. He was a fire-demon, remotely similar to the Balrog (which are also Maia of Aule). I don't have the Simarillion with me here, but I am reasonably sure that this is mentioned there.
I am reasonably sure that the eyes of a Balrog glow with his inner fire, so the leap of faith isn't too far... Furthermore, the eye is not red, but fiery, swathed in flames, whatever... Any that is entirely reasonable for a fire-demon.
Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?
No, as explained above.
Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute: Next time you reread LOTR, count the number of powerful beings who are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?
Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races (Elves transformed into Orcs, etc.) and as Morgoth is only a Valar working alone, without the support of the others or the guiding hand of Illuvatar, his creations are bound to be less perfect (in the sense of beauty through symmetry).
Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building. and destruction is never pretty, I'd say.
As for ugliness helping you to rule... If you're truly powerful, beauty isn't important. Power is.
Then unleash your imagination a bit further.
Ask yourself: "How would Sauron have described the situation?"
And then: "What might 'really' have happened?"
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?
Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
Since Gondor's strength has been waning for a few centuries by the time of LOTR, it is reasonable to assume that no recent incursions into the lands of thr East have taken place either.
Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.
Sounds good to me. Let's find proof for that. The One Ring has been made to control all other rings, to bind their purpose to the will of the wielder of the One Ring. Does that sounds like the Hero of the Masses tm? If he were to distribute the power, it would be different, but the Ring was not crafted for that purpose.
Brin's notion of the Nine as tragic figures for the idea of "power corrupts" goes along the same lines. This, too, is false. The Nine Rings were not made to corrupt but the connection to the One Ring brought about this fate. Without Sauron's intervention the Nine Kings of Men would not have become the anathema of life.
If that's going too far, here's a milder version. Those orcs and low elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron's propaganda.
Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron's dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they're slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.
Come on, folks, a little empathy!
This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia? Never suspecting anything was amiss? Even Orcs are too intelligent for that. So, there must have been a strong incentive to not question Sauron's propaganda... like a secret police with their magical spy-eyes, which would make him no better than his rivals.
Instead of railing against "evil," try to understand it. That's always been the best way to defeat it.
This is what Saruman tries and he fails to do so. I do not know whether understanding evil might work for anyone else, but the "heros" of LOTR have seen an example of what Sauron can do, subverting their most powerful... I don't fault them for declining to try that stunt again.
Am I pulling your leg? You bet! I don't take speculations about fictional villains quite that seriously. ...?"
My real point is more general.
Don't just receive your adventures. Toy with them. Re-mold them in your mind. Keep asking "What if
It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right.
I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering. It is completely unfeasible without a great deal more power, magic and technology than this setting provides. And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
And remember this too: Enlightenment, science, democracy and equal opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years.
And..?
Sauron has not yet been proven a rebel, so where's the similarity?
So, all in all, I can't buy his suggestions and I truly wonder whether he's actually read the Simarillion (or the Lost Tales, or Tales from Middle Earth, ...)
Mobile phones are no status symbol.
Those who have really made it have a competent secretary and won't need it.
As far as I can tell, it's still true.
And yes, I am aware of the fact that I have reduced a complex problem to a two-object problem. Probably that's why my calculations don't make sense...
Our sun is about 10^30x2 kg while the earth is 10^25x0.6 kg That makes the sun about 10^6 times heavier than the earth([1])
This black hole now is about 2.6 to 3.7 times that heavy when compared to a sun of the size of our own.
Our planet roates around the Sun at about 150,000,000 km at a speed of ca. 29.658 km / s if my math isn't wrong.
That other sun rotates around the black hole at about 17 light hours at a speed of 240.652 km / s (if I am not mistaken here either).
The speed of that sun is more than 8x the speed of the Earth, generating a significantly higher centrifugal force.
Now, that sun is 127.5 times further away from the black hole's event horizon than Earth is from Sun.
At the same time, the increased distance should provide a significantly lower gravitational pull than the 3.6 x relative weight of the sun could provide.
As this sounds completely bogus to me, I'd be happy if someone could enlighten me how this is supposed to work.
I am a dark blonde with no redheads in my family for roughly three generations back (No jokes about inbreeding here, please.
My tolerance for novocaine, diazepam (valium) and a host of other anesthetics is about 12x normal (tripple the dosage, 1/4th of the duration) and has puzzled more than one specialist. The result of careful analysis has shown that my body eliminates most anesthetics at a much higher rate than normal.
My pain level is no higher or lower than average though my sensitivity to stimuli is much higher than average (I can read a photocopy with my fingertips, sometimes even writing in ink).
Based on that point of data, I'd say that equating sensitivity to stimuli to sensitivity to pain, as it has happened in many posts is probably not a good (i.e. valid) idea. I should be screaming of pain most the time if this were true.
Only empirical evidence with a very limited set of data, I know, but as e8johan stated: "but this does not say anything about any single individual".
The next question is whether sensitivity to pain has any relevance to the effect of an anesthetic.
If I remember correctly, local anesthetics work vastly different from general anesthesia by targeting different areas in the body.
[1] states that Novocaine et al. supress the transmission of stimuli through the nerve while general anesthetics act in the brain ([2] has something about some anesthetics triggering the sleep cycle, for others, I don't know).
Desflurane now is a geneal anesthetic, acting in the brain. So, any reference to "I can do this, I can do that" that does not duplicate the function of a geneal anesthetic is useless...
This means that my impressive tolerance for Novocaine et al. does not have any significance for the research performed as it targets a different type of anesthetic. The same goes for many other comments along the same lines, including alcohol.
Alcohol acts as an inhibitor ([3] states: "Alcohol acts primarily at the GABAa receptor to facilitate its action, thus in essence creating enhanced inhibition.") but does not have a sufficiently strong effect that the person affected could consciously compare it to a geneal anesthetic...
As for the use of alcohol as geneal anesthetic, which would be the next logical argument... it's not been very effective prior to complete unconsciousness and the level and speed of alcohol absorption plays a huge role. That also rules out any comment along the lines of "I can drink more than an ox".
I won't ask for people to check what they're writing for relevance... after all, I enjoy many of the comments I read here, but it is considered bad style to criticize the work of others without enough commonalities between the work and the critical remarks.
I stand corrected... I did assume Mars had a magnetosphere and didn't distinguish that in my reply.
Here's some information that I should have researched before.
If I remember correctly, you need about a foot of lead between you and outer space to insulate yourself from the radiation... or a gravity well...
Of course, the efficiency of travel from one planet to another is... well... let's say that there is no really efficient way... only more or less efficient variants, in that I concur.
So, space stations are a good idea... and new insulation against radiation will be found... eventually... but until then, I'd be very happy if people started developing technologies for more efficient space travel... I'm still waiting for someone to actually get to the asteroid belt...efficient habitats, which are able to deal with micro-asteroids in an adequate manner (i.e. not: "Ok guys, get some insulation and glue and start searching") and a host of other things that, eventially, will lead to usable space stations...
One more comment... I do remember something about the effects of even a short space flight on the ability to procreate...
It's been at least 10 years since I heard that, so please correct me, but I think I remember that the damage is significant after only a few hours in space...
In that case, I'll stick to that gravity well for a while longer...
Recently, I tried out GnomeRSVP to find out what that is all about...
Much to my surprise, I must say that, for texts which are available on the computer, it is a very convenient and fast tool to quickly absorb huge amounts of text.
I can read somewhere around 1000 to 1200 words per minute and remember about 90% of it for about 12 hours.
That is more than enough if you have to get a quick overview about a subject.
It is not enough to write a paper about a specific topic as you loose most abbreviations or references to other texts. You also can't really enjoy the experience.
I ran a test and held a talk about a topic I know exactly nothing about, just based on the texts I read... and my recall was comprehensive and precise.
After 12 hours, the rate of recall was down to about 60% though... so, in my case, the data is not permanently absorbed, as the context is lost and I can't recall longer paragraphs as a whole...
On major danger is see in the efforts scientology puts into gagging their opposition is not that they might win... that is a well-known and agreed upon danger.
I am worried more about the effect a success would have on the "free world".
Search engines are, by nature, the major medium for information gathering. /. article a few weeks back here, a successful way of internet censorship is described.
In a
Scientology performs a similar feat... but at a much cheaper price. It they are successful, who's to keep other organizations from doing the same?
And when the data is removed form the search engine, it, on the long run, is removed from the public conscious.
The result is devastating and turns the, essentially unmoderated and free, internet into a huge heap of information noone can use, as he / she doesn't know how to get hold of the data he / she wants...
I wait for terrorist regimes requesting google to remove news agancies from their database...
Unfortunately, it is completely in sync with their overall strategy.:-(
One major leg of their operations is to get the managers of companies. Through them, they then infiltrate the rest of the company. For that, they offer "management seminars" and the like, which are not visibly scientology-seminars, if my memory of the news doesn't fault me here...
This top-down approach is, as far as I know, unique to them. No other religious grouping that I am aware of does that.
Of course, their seminars are so hideously expensive that they need financially potent customers, so it is understandable.
What I find dangerous about that presence is not that they're "here" but that they are allowed to bully people into believing that their claims hold some validity...
After all, google did remove the links, so there must be some valid claim behind it.
Of course, there isn't... but the impression is created... and impressions are mightier than fact on the web (and most other places in the world).
The fact that scientology has never filed any infringement suit should make it obvious that there is no validity in their claim.
That is not the case though...
After all, this is a possible way to look at things:
The google lawyers looked at the allegation, found it valid, acted accordingly.
And thus, it was not neccessary to file a suit.
This is the classic "I can turn my weakness into a strength" trick... and again, perception is mightier than the fact.
I totally concur with that and would like to add a few sentences here.
Regardless of whether you like it or not, it is, imho, not anywhere near correct to talk about Java and AspectJ in one sentence. Of course, AspectJ applies aspects to Java code and generates code that is written in Java, but the basic capability to write in AspectJ requires the user to learn completely new structures which look like a language extension, but when you look at the way i.e. the pointcuts are defined, it's a new language.
Regardless of whether that is good or not, I think it needs to be understood.
It is also worth pointing out that there's a difference between AOP and AspectJ. AspectJ is one of the many aspect oriented languages. Other examples include IBM's HyperJ and Karl Lieberherr's Demeter Java (do a search on google if you are interested).
Thank you for pointing that out. it's a fact often forgotten. The term for all these technologies which is now widely used is AOSD (the Hyper/J people used MDSOC, for Multi-dimensional deparation of concerns).
Well designed OO programs also exhibit some separation of concerns. Typically you will find stuff like design patterns being used to do so.
I would like to add to that as well. Peri Tarr et al. have named that the "Tyranny of the dominant decomposition". That means that for every given module of software, you have one major decomposition, by class.
If you have accounting software, you have a class called "Account" and a class "transferal". There is, normally, no class first class entity which encalsulates the UI for the "Account" class, or its logging or any of the other tasks the "Account" class has to perform in addition to being the representation of an account.
That brings us to your next paragraph...
The price you pay is a more complex design.
The trouble with normal OO design is that, no matter how dilligent you design, how much patterns you use, how many factories and facade objects you use, there still remain concerns which have not been encapsulated or new concerns will be added which have not been anticipated.
These concerns become cross-cutting concerns which can not be implemented completely in one separate artifact.
That's the moment your application starts to get difficult to maintain and evolve.
AOP potentially offers you a cleaner and easier to maintain solution than design patterns.
Imho, AOSD is an addition to patterns. There are patterns which can be removed through use of AOSD technologies (see http://www.research.ibm.com/sop/sopcpats.htm for examples).
I hope that did add some informative tidbits...
Maybe I can add something here... I've been working with AOSD technologies, namely Hyper/J (the competitor to AspectJ) for two years. While it is imho true that AspectJ has a problem when you get to larger and larger compositions, the good thing about AOSD approaches (though not neccessarily of AspectJ, but I don't want to start a religious discussion here) is that the components you weave together, regardless of how large they become, remain distinctly apart. That way, the impact of chage is clearly limited. What AOSD technologies like AspectJ or Hyper/J do is to merge together these distinct aspects. The result looks ugly as hell and should not be considered of any use. The catch is to keep writing aspects if you have to change the component, not change the merged code. (And if you're calling the component from the outside, you should not care about the internals anyway.) So, as long as you don't make a transition from aspects (or concerns) back to normal OO methodology within the same class / component after you've weaved things together, the code of each aspect / concerns remains clean and concise. I hope that helped a bit... but I am really no AOP expert (when you consider AOP = AspectJ. Hyper/J handles things differently).
I can understand the confusion at the language extensions AspectJ is introducing. I'm not overly fond of that either. If you have the time and inclination, it might be fruitful to look at Hyper/J from IBM's alpahworks. It is a similar technology, with a steeper learning curve but far more capabilities and a much cleaner structure.