Why do you hope that Google can maintain their lead? I would think competition would be good, and last i checked, AltaVista had a feature i really like that Google doesn't. If you give AltaVista a term in quotes, it will search for _exactly_ that string. Google on the other hand will often decide that punctuation is extraneous, and i'll frequently find myself wading through ten times as many pages as i need because Google decided to drop the "'" or "," or whatever.
Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.
I wonder what would happen if the funding for the sports team was based on how well the academic clubs did, and vice versa?
Might make things better, might turn into a disaster. Nerds say "you picked on us so we'll intentionally do poorly to screw your funding," the sports teams reply to that threat by throwing all their games. Hopefully their pride would prevent that from happening. And maybe jocks would show up at nerd events to cheer them on and vice versa.
1) Personal hygene. If you smell like feet, and your greasy hair doesn't look like it's been washed in days, people aren't going to like you. Shower daily. Wear deodorant. Brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Wear clean clothes.
I had good hygene, the bullies didn't seem to care. I was a little smaller than average until midway through Jr. High, at which point the physical bullying tapered off and the emotional harassment started up.
2) At least try to be social. People don't like people who don't talk or won't look them in the eyes. Smile, say hi to people you may not even know. When you talk to someone look at them.
I tried that at first, and it worked in elementary school, i had friends and stuff. Then i got into Jr. High. One of my friends "became" popular and started bullying me, maybe to prove his allegience to his new friends, i don't really know. Other's picked on me too to a greater or lesser degree. Do you know what a fairly normal reaction to that is? To _hide_! If talking to someone will get you teased and bullied, then you tend not to speak up. You stay quiet, stay in the corner, try not to attract anyone's attention.
3) Maybe try to have similar intrests... If you shun everything most people like, you aren't going to have anything at all in common with anyone are you? I'm not saying you have to become a rabid sports fan, or become glued to watching whatever TV shows kids these days watched... But a little effort to have some of the same interests of your peers goes a long way.
Some of the people i had similar interests in turned on my and became bullies. By the time i found other people with similar interests, too much damage had been done to my socialness. When i found a group of people who had the same interests as me but didn't seem to get bullied (they were a Trench Coat Mafia type group) i desperatly wanted to belong, but it didn't seem to work. I was _already_ interested in the same things as them, anime, RPGs, computers, computer games. And we got along okay when we were together in class. However after school they would go off on their own and i wasn't invited. I hoped that if i showed enough obvious interest in their activites, that they would notice, decide i was worthy, and invite me to join them. However by that point years of hiding had destroyed almost any ability to try and actively ask them if i could participate, and i never worked up the courage.
Part of what makes the misfits unpopular is stuff they do, but part of it is how others treat them, and social preconceptions in place before they entered the picture, and part of it is psychological damage done to them by previous bullies.
I never "acted" smarter than anyone else. If people wanted to talk to me about stuff i was interested in, i was happy to talk to them. I had a few friends who weren't the brightest people out there, but they didn't bully me, so we got along okay. The people who bullied me (including an ex-friend who "got" popular) did so because they saw me as an easy victim. I feared and loathed those people, did my best to avoid from them, and yes, tried to take some solace from the fact that i'd hopefully do better in life down the road than they did. But that reaction didn't start till they started picking on my first.
You don't have to put up a front of "being smarter than everyone else" in order to get picked on.
Things got better when i became more successfull at hiding, at not standing out in a crowd, not taking the bus home if possible. (Half the attraction of the after-hours computer club was that it meant my parents would come pick me up directly at school.)
This helped me out in Jr. High and high school, but needless to say it had a pretty disastrous effect on my social abilites, which i still think i probably haven't made up for.
IANAL (I am not a lawyer) however my understanding of the issue is that if you are a salaried employee, then you have no set times that you should be working. You are being hired to do a job, not to work a certian number of hours.
The upside to this is that you do not have to work 40 hours a week. I first heard of this because the last time i was in crunch time at my company, my father told me about a law that if your employer requires you to work certain hours and keeps track of those hours, you can sue to be counted as a non-salaried employee and get paid overtime. Since my company had a time sheet that we were supposed to sign in and out of and required us to be there during certain hours, i could theoretically have gone that route. However i didn't think it was worth losing my job for:)
If you work hard and finish up all your tasks and they can't come up with anything else for you to do, you can head home at noon. You don't even have to show up for that matter if you know for sure you've got nothing to do. The downside is if you have to stay late to finish up the stuff they want you to do, too bad. And realistically, how often are you going to tell them you've finished what you had on your plate and they don't have anything else ready to give you?
Theoretically you could tell them that you were going to come in from 5pm to 5am, and some companies would let you get away with that. However others will claim that being available to assist the other employees is one of your tasks, and if all the other employees are in from 9 to 5 (or any other relatively set time frame,) it's not the _company's_ fault, is it?
The US desperatly needs to develop a next generation of heavy unmanned launch vehicles. Or hell, they could just ressurect the Saturn V. (For which i've seen cost estimates ranging between $6 and $10 billion.) The Saturn V could deliver 129,300 kg to orbit and 48,500 kg to the moon. The shuttle can deliver 25,000 kg to LEO, and, well, absolutly nothing to the moon. I'm not even sure if they're counting the shuttle itself and the crew and life-support in that figure or not. The ISS would be _done_ by now if we'd just kept building Saturn Vs in addition to the space shuttle.
I don't really understand the union dispute, well, i understand why they're upset, but i'm not sure how much legal say they have over the issue, however what seems more important to me is the truth in advertising issue. CCC is trying to convince people in multiple cities that Carson Daly is personally running their local top 10 show.
If they told everyone that the program was just a manufactured conglomeration of soundbites recorded over a multi-year period and the audience was still okay with listening to it, that's fine. However CCC is doing their best to keep the issue out of the spotlight, they don't want their audiences having the ability to make an informed choice.
My favorite independent radio station in LA just went bankrupt, and I'm pissed that there are three almost identical CCC stations wasting bandwidth broadcasting almost identical crap. Maybe it wouldn't make any difference, but maybe if CCC was forced to be upfront about how little they care about local audiences, then maybe people would wake up a little and start making some choices.
In the overall scheme of things, you are probably right that Microsoft isn't losing more money _for_the_consoles_ by having XBoxes sitting in the wherehouse instead of being sold.
However that does not mean that the idea of screwing Microsoft over by buying consoles and not buying games has any validity to it either.
Do you think Microsoft cares about losing money on XBoxes? If that really mattered, don't you think they would price them higher? They _knew_ they were going to lose money. Sega tried the same thing and lost a ton of money doing that, and Microsoft obviously expected the same since they said _upfront_ that they _planned_ to lose a billion dollars the first few years.
After the first year when they lost more money than originally expected, did they start panicking and losing their heads? No, they just shruged and said "guess we'll have to throw an extra billion in to crack this problem."
They're willing to throw as much money into this as it takes to gain marketshare. If you buy a console they will be happy even if you never buy another game in your life, because you'll be one more number added to the pile of statistics they're using to sell themselves to console developers, and later to other types of companies once they expand the XBox to do more than play games.
The company consists of 180 people, including 130 engineers, 45 corporate staff and four lawyers.
The company i work for has about 70 people working for it, including me. Since when did 1 = 70? You have many body parts, including an arm, a heart, and an eyeball. Does that mean you don't have a brain?:) It's a bit silly for them to list 179 out of the 180 employees, but not illogical.
FTFC (Read the Fucking Comment) I never claimed that technology is bad, didn't state that in the least. All i stated is that the enviromental costs of production are _not_ calculated into the price of the product, not unless the company voluntarily cleans up after itself or the government forces it to with regulations. And even then in some cases there are side effects that can not be easily measured by capitalism.
Capitalism is not some magical thing that will factor in all the causes and effects in the world and will come up with a price in dollars that measures all the costs of every kind that went into production of an item.
You're displaying the same kind of single-minded idiocy ("admiting that technology can cause illness and death must mean we should get rid of all technology") that causes extreme enviromentalists to believe that we shouldn't build nuclear power plants.
Listen to how different a band sounds on its CD, and how it sounds "unplugged." In many cases there is a huge difference in the quality of the music.
A high quality (ie expensive) studio with high quality engineers and high quality software and equipment can make a decent singer sound good, and a good singer sound great. That's where a big chunk of that change is going.
Another big chunk is probably inflated values given by the RIAA in order to milk as much money out of the artists as they can in fees.
Someone seems to have bought into the over-hyped "Capitalism will fix everything" idea.
As far as the companies making the products are concerned, life is cheap, even human life. (As long as there is no evidence _directly_ linking them.)
Do you think you pay for the cost of the 100+ people killed a year by the coal power plant that (most likely) produces your electricity? No, because nobody who gets lung cancer sues the power company. If you absorb the cost for their deaths at all, it's in higher health insurance premiums and doesn't impact the power company at all. And that's assuming that you can even assign a value to human life.
Makes me wonder if backward compatability will continue to be a trend in the next console wave.
That's definitely going to be the case. There really isn't any technology comng into play now that offers a marked improvement over DVDs. Since all three consoles use DVD disks of one kind or another, there's no reason not to make them backward compatible, and any company that doesn't will have a _huge_ disadvantage against the other two.
If the PS3 maintains backwards compatibility all the way back the PSX that will give them a slight heads up above Nintendo and Microsoft, but nowhere near as telling a difference as PS2s something vs. nothing advantage vs. the GameCube and XBox.
MS will have to give more money to the hardware vendors.
But Microsoft gets to keep the marketing value of each XBox sold for use in its statistics when they try to convince new developers to make games for them. That's worth far more than the amount of money they lose per XBox.
I think you missed the point. Like everyone in the business, MS loses money on each console they sell. The business plan is to get it back in games.
Although people keep going back and forth on this, the current consensus is that that is for the most part untrue. Although it is very likely the case for the XBox, the GameCube and the PS2 are most likely break even or making a small amount of money per console at this point.
The marketing value of each XBox sold far outweighs the amount of money lost selling it. Microsoft has stated that they plan to lose at least a billion dollars the first few years of the XBox, so what if they lose $50 on each XBox? If Microsoft could burn piles of XBoxes at a loss of $50 each, they wouldn't think twice about torching $50 million worth if they could get away with telling developers that they had sold those million XBoxes instead.
That having been said, the actions of the small minority of linux users will have very little effect on Microsoft, but for what little it's worth, that effect will be positive.
Microsoft doesn't care if you buy the XBox and don't get any games, it's still good to them. They want the PR, they want to be able to show that they've trounced the GameCube and are catching up with the PS2. The way to do that is with number of consoles sold. When they publish those numbers, how many people stop to ask how many games were sold per console? Not many.
If Microsoft was able to toss XBoxes into a trash compacter at $150 loss each (one of the numbers I've heard proposed for how much they lose per console) but get away with telling everyone that they'd sold them, they would gladly spend $150 million to "sell" a million consoles and be able to use that marketing info to convince developers to make more games for the XBox. Even with no hope of _ever_ being able to recoup the losses from those particular XBoxes.
Microsoft said they planed to lose a billion dollars for the first few years. Clearly their goal is not short term economic gains, but long range plans for getting a firm place in the market. Every XBox that gets sold helps that goal, even if the buyer turns it into a Linux box and never buys a single game.
Until i realized that at 164% zoom all the equals signs looked like minus signs. I spend several minutes trying to figure out how that code could compile at all before i thought to turn the zoom up to 200%:)
Interestingly enough, 163% zoom doesn't cause the problem, nor does 165%. After a bit of experimenting i couldn't find any other isolated case that had the same results. There's a sudden transition to illegibility at 131%, but everything below that is also illegible. 164% is just odd, strange that that happened to be picked as the default when i opened it.
That's interesting, and it explains tortiseshell cats. However the cat that was cloned was a tabby, and tabbies can be both male or female, so an explantion of how tortiseshells and only torstiseshells develop their coats is largely irrelevant.
You say that transferring could work - but how is transferring different to a copy-and-delete? (I guess, again, it depends on whether one believes in some unique un-copyable property of physical particles).
There's always the old fashioned cut the physical brain out of the old body and put it in the new one:)
I might also accept some system where the brains could be dirrectly connected together and synchronized, ie the result is one person controlling two bodies at once. Then either wait for the older body to die naturally, or deconstruct the old brain while mainting the synch. That wouldn't be a definite way of making sure you didn't die, but it's better than most of the alternatives.
(note to self, always copy/paste a long comment to somewhere else before Slashdot decides to be difficult and refuse to update)
You're getting a bit carried away with some minor randomness. Your genes _do_ determine your haircolor, and the cat's genes determined that it would be a tabby. However genes control things at a very high level, and have no direct influence at a lower level. Your genes determined that you would have fingerprints, but they didn't determine the exact shape of the fingerprints, and if you had had a twin or if you make a clone of yourself their fingerprints would be different from yours despite identical genes. Tabby patterns are formed in approximatly the same way, the exact pattern is decided at the cellular level in a very chaotic way depending upon the local conditions (hormone, chemicals, whatver) which results in a different pattern everytime you go through the process.
Furthermore, the pattern is decided when the cells are first created. If you cut your finger or a cat loses some fur, it will grow back in the same pattern. (Unless the injury is particularly traumatic, in which case unpatterened scar tissue or uncolored hair might grow back, but that's a different issue)
As for diseases, for some you might cause other problems by trying to fix the problem genes. For others it's as simple as flipping one gene with no other side effects. Nature is rarely an either-or porposition. Cancer usually occurs when a carcinogen damages the DNA in one of your cells, but certain genes seem to make that kind of damage more or less likely to occur.
Oh, and if the disease Y you created was more dangerous than the disease X you were trying to cure, it wouldn't spread through the population very well. The big risks from genetic engineering are not through changing our own genes, but through changing the genes of bacteria and viruses that could infect us.
You're confusing apples with oranges, or perhaps bananas with oranges:)
The original comment was that copying a copy is bad, because errors will accumulate. That's only true if there are errors in the copying process. Assuming you can extract the DNA without damaging it, and inject it into the egg cell without damaging it, then there will be no more errors than there are in naturally grown organisms, which is damn few.
The reason there are so few errors in natural cloning is _why_ (the cloned variety of) Bananas are in danger. They are such perfect copies of each other that they are failing to adapt to a changing enviroment. A sudden change in enviromental conditions are a bacteria or virus that figures out how to take advantage of that stability could theoretically kill every Banana of that variety on the planet.
In that particular case having more genetic drift would be a good thing, but it just doesn't happen very fast with clones, which is why cloning a clone is perfectly safe as long as you're carefull about the original DNA extraction.
As in most things, extremes are bad. No genetic change means you don't adapt to the enviroment at all, and sooner or later changing conditions or something that _does_ adapt will wipe you out. Too much genetic change means that the entire species will either mutate themselves to death or run head-on into an evolutionary dead-end.
These are the first ten I came up with, so I figured I'd stop with that since I could keep coming up with more all day:)
Robin Hobb: Farseer trilogy and the Liveship Trdaers trillogy
Vernor Vinger: A Fire Upon the Deep, Marooned in Realtime
James P. Hogan: Voyage From Yesteryear, the Giants of Ganymede trilogy
James Alan Gardner: Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted
Joan D. Vinge: Snow Queen, Summer Queen, Psion, Catspaw
C. S. Friedman: The Madness Season, The Coldfire trilogy
George R. R. Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire series
S. M. Stirling: Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, the Peshawar Lancers
David Brin: The Uplift Trilogy, Glory Season, the Postman, Kiln People (see the recent slashdot review)
Mercedes Lackey: The Valdemar series. (Pretty light reading, but if you liked Weis & Hickman, you might like this too)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, and AltaVista has Babblefish, that's cool too.
Might make things better, might turn into a disaster. Nerds say "you picked on us so we'll intentionally do poorly to screw your funding," the sports teams reply to that threat by throwing all their games. Hopefully their pride would prevent that from happening. And maybe jocks would show up at nerd events to cheer them on and vice versa.
I had good hygene, the bullies didn't seem to care. I was a little smaller than average until midway through Jr. High, at which point the physical bullying tapered off and the emotional harassment started up.
2) At least try to be social. People don't like people who don't talk or won't look them in the eyes. Smile, say hi to people you may not even know. When you talk to someone look at them.
I tried that at first, and it worked in elementary school, i had friends and stuff. Then i got into Jr. High. One of my friends "became" popular and started bullying me, maybe to prove his allegience to his new friends, i don't really know. Other's picked on me too to a greater or lesser degree. Do you know what a fairly normal reaction to that is? To _hide_! If talking to someone will get you teased and bullied, then you tend not to speak up. You stay quiet, stay in the corner, try not to attract anyone's attention.
3) Maybe try to have similar intrests... If you shun everything most people like, you aren't going to have anything at all in common with anyone are you? I'm not saying you have to become a rabid sports fan, or become glued to watching whatever TV shows kids these days watched... But a little effort to have some of the same interests of your peers goes a long way.
Some of the people i had similar interests in turned on my and became bullies. By the time i found other people with similar interests, too much damage had been done to my socialness. When i found a group of people who had the same interests as me but didn't seem to get bullied (they were a Trench Coat Mafia type group) i desperatly wanted to belong, but it didn't seem to work. I was _already_ interested in the same things as them, anime, RPGs, computers, computer games. And we got along okay when we were together in class. However after school they would go off on their own and i wasn't invited. I hoped that if i showed enough obvious interest in their activites, that they would notice, decide i was worthy, and invite me to join them. However by that point years of hiding had destroyed almost any ability to try and actively ask them if i could participate, and i never worked up the courage.
Part of what makes the misfits unpopular is stuff they do, but part of it is how others treat them, and social preconceptions in place before they entered the picture, and part of it is psychological damage done to them by previous bullies.
I was rejected by the nerds, how sad is that?
You don't have to put up a front of "being smarter than everyone else" in order to get picked on.
Things got better when i became more successfull at hiding, at not standing out in a crowd, not taking the bus home if possible. (Half the attraction of the after-hours computer club was that it meant my parents would come pick me up directly at school.)
This helped me out in Jr. High and high school, but needless to say it had a pretty disastrous effect on my social abilites, which i still think i probably haven't made up for.
The upside to this is that you do not have to work 40 hours a week. I first heard of this because the last time i was in crunch time at my company, my father told me about a law that if your employer requires you to work certain hours and keeps track of those hours, you can sue to be counted as a non-salaried employee and get paid overtime. Since my company had a time sheet that we were supposed to sign in and out of and required us to be there during certain hours, i could theoretically have gone that route. However i didn't think it was worth losing my job for :)
If you work hard and finish up all your tasks and they can't come up with anything else for you to do, you can head home at noon. You don't even have to show up for that matter if you know for sure you've got nothing to do. The downside is if you have to stay late to finish up the stuff they want you to do, too bad. And realistically, how often are you going to tell them you've finished what you had on your plate and they don't have anything else ready to give you?
Theoretically you could tell them that you were going to come in from 5pm to 5am, and some companies would let you get away with that. However others will claim that being available to assist the other employees is one of your tasks, and if all the other employees are in from 9 to 5 (or any other relatively set time frame,) it's not the _company's_ fault, is it?
The US desperatly needs to develop a next generation of heavy unmanned launch vehicles. Or hell, they could just ressurect the Saturn V. (For which i've seen cost estimates ranging between $6 and $10 billion.) The Saturn V could deliver 129,300 kg to orbit and 48,500 kg to the moon. The shuttle can deliver 25,000 kg to LEO, and, well, absolutly nothing to the moon. I'm not even sure if they're counting the shuttle itself and the crew and life-support in that figure or not. The ISS would be _done_ by now if we'd just kept building Saturn Vs in addition to the space shuttle.
If they told everyone that the program was just a manufactured conglomeration of soundbites recorded over a multi-year period and the audience was still okay with listening to it, that's fine. However CCC is doing their best to keep the issue out of the spotlight, they don't want their audiences having the ability to make an informed choice.
My favorite independent radio station in LA just went bankrupt, and I'm pissed that there are three almost identical CCC stations wasting bandwidth broadcasting almost identical crap. Maybe it wouldn't make any difference, but maybe if CCC was forced to be upfront about how little they care about local audiences, then maybe people would wake up a little and start making some choices.
However that does not mean that the idea of screwing Microsoft over by buying consoles and not buying games has any validity to it either.
Do you think Microsoft cares about losing money on XBoxes? If that really mattered, don't you think they would price them higher? They _knew_ they were going to lose money. Sega tried the same thing and lost a ton of money doing that, and Microsoft obviously expected the same since they said _upfront_ that they _planned_ to lose a billion dollars the first few years.
After the first year when they lost more money than originally expected, did they start panicking and losing their heads? No, they just shruged and said "guess we'll have to throw an extra billion in to crack this problem."
They're willing to throw as much money into this as it takes to gain marketshare. If you buy a console they will be happy even if you never buy another game in your life, because you'll be one more number added to the pile of statistics they're using to sell themselves to console developers, and later to other types of companies once they expand the XBox to do more than play games.
Whoever you are, if there is a hell, i hope you burn in it.
The company i work for has about 70 people working for it, including me. Since when did 1 = 70? You have many body parts, including an arm, a heart, and an eyeball. Does that mean you don't have a brain? :) It's a bit silly for them to list 179 out of the 180 employees, but not illogical.
(130 + 45 + 4 = 79)
Speaking of fuzzy math... :)
All of the death without any of the pleasant side effects! Just what i wanted!
My eyes! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
Dear goddess, please don't do the same thing for games, please?
Capitalism is not some magical thing that will factor in all the causes and effects in the world and will come up with a price in dollars that measures all the costs of every kind that went into production of an item.
You're displaying the same kind of single-minded idiocy ("admiting that technology can cause illness and death must mean we should get rid of all technology") that causes extreme enviromentalists to believe that we shouldn't build nuclear power plants.
A high quality (ie expensive) studio with high quality engineers and high quality software and equipment can make a decent singer sound good, and a good singer sound great. That's where a big chunk of that change is going.
Another big chunk is probably inflated values given by the RIAA in order to milk as much money out of the artists as they can in fees.
As far as the companies making the products are concerned, life is cheap, even human life. (As long as there is no evidence _directly_ linking them.)
Do you think you pay for the cost of the 100+ people killed a year by the coal power plant that (most likely) produces your electricity? No, because nobody who gets lung cancer sues the power company. If you absorb the cost for their deaths at all, it's in higher health insurance premiums and doesn't impact the power company at all. And that's assuming that you can even assign a value to human life.
That's definitely going to be the case. There really isn't any technology comng into play now that offers a marked improvement over DVDs. Since all three consoles use DVD disks of one kind or another, there's no reason not to make them backward compatible, and any company that doesn't will have a _huge_ disadvantage against the other two.
If the PS3 maintains backwards compatibility all the way back the PSX that will give them a slight heads up above Nintendo and Microsoft, but nowhere near as telling a difference as PS2s something vs. nothing advantage vs. the GameCube and XBox.
But Microsoft gets to keep the marketing value of each XBox sold for use in its statistics when they try to convince new developers to make games for them. That's worth far more than the amount of money they lose per XBox.
I think you missed the point. Like everyone in the business, MS loses money on each console they sell. The business plan is to get it back in games.
Although people keep going back and forth on this, the current consensus is that that is for the most part untrue. Although it is very likely the case for the XBox, the GameCube and the PS2 are most likely break even or making a small amount of money per console at this point.
That having been said, the actions of the small minority of linux users will have very little effect on Microsoft, but for what little it's worth, that effect will be positive.
If Microsoft was able to toss XBoxes into a trash compacter at $150 loss each (one of the numbers I've heard proposed for how much they lose per console) but get away with telling everyone that they'd sold them, they would gladly spend $150 million to "sell" a million consoles and be able to use that marketing info to convince developers to make more games for the XBox. Even with no hope of _ever_ being able to recoup the losses from those particular XBoxes.
Microsoft said they planed to lose a billion dollars for the first few years. Clearly their goal is not short term economic gains, but long range plans for getting a firm place in the market. Every XBox that gets sold helps that goal, even if the buyer turns it into a Linux box and never buys a single game.
Interestingly enough, 163% zoom doesn't cause the problem, nor does 165%. After a bit of experimenting i couldn't find any other isolated case that had the same results. There's a sudden transition to illegibility at 131%, but everything below that is also illegible. 164% is just odd, strange that that happened to be picked as the default when i opened it.
That's interesting, and it explains tortiseshell cats. However the cat that was cloned was a tabby, and tabbies can be both male or female, so an explantion of how tortiseshells and only torstiseshells develop their coats is largely irrelevant.
There's always the old fashioned cut the physical brain out of the old body and put it in the new one :)
I might also accept some system where the brains could be dirrectly connected together and synchronized, ie the result is one person controlling two bodies at once. Then either wait for the older body to die naturally, or deconstruct the old brain while mainting the synch. That wouldn't be a definite way of making sure you didn't die, but it's better than most of the alternatives.
You're getting a bit carried away with some minor randomness. Your genes _do_ determine your haircolor, and the cat's genes determined that it would be a tabby. However genes control things at a very high level, and have no direct influence at a lower level. Your genes determined that you would have fingerprints, but they didn't determine the exact shape of the fingerprints, and if you had had a twin or if you make a clone of yourself their fingerprints would be different from yours despite identical genes. Tabby patterns are formed in approximatly the same way, the exact pattern is decided at the cellular level in a very chaotic way depending upon the local conditions (hormone, chemicals, whatver) which results in a different pattern everytime you go through the process.
Furthermore, the pattern is decided when the cells are first created. If you cut your finger or a cat loses some fur, it will grow back in the same pattern. (Unless the injury is particularly traumatic, in which case unpatterened scar tissue or uncolored hair might grow back, but that's a different issue)
As for diseases, for some you might cause other problems by trying to fix the problem genes. For others it's as simple as flipping one gene with no other side effects. Nature is rarely an either-or porposition. Cancer usually occurs when a carcinogen damages the DNA in one of your cells, but certain genes seem to make that kind of damage more or less likely to occur.
Oh, and if the disease Y you created was more dangerous than the disease X you were trying to cure, it wouldn't spread through the population very well. The big risks from genetic engineering are not through changing our own genes, but through changing the genes of bacteria and viruses that could infect us.
The original comment was that copying a copy is bad, because errors will accumulate. That's only true if there are errors in the copying process. Assuming you can extract the DNA without damaging it, and inject it into the egg cell without damaging it, then there will be no more errors than there are in naturally grown organisms, which is damn few.
The reason there are so few errors in natural cloning is _why_ (the cloned variety of) Bananas are in danger. They are such perfect copies of each other that they are failing to adapt to a changing enviroment. A sudden change in enviromental conditions are a bacteria or virus that figures out how to take advantage of that stability could theoretically kill every Banana of that variety on the planet.
In that particular case having more genetic drift would be a good thing, but it just doesn't happen very fast with clones, which is why cloning a clone is perfectly safe as long as you're carefull about the original DNA extraction.
As in most things, extremes are bad. No genetic change means you don't adapt to the enviroment at all, and sooner or later changing conditions or something that _does_ adapt will wipe you out. Too much genetic change means that the entire species will either mutate themselves to death or run head-on into an evolutionary dead-end.
Robin Hobb: Farseer trilogy and the Liveship Trdaers trillogy
Vernor Vinger: A Fire Upon the Deep, Marooned in Realtime
James P. Hogan: Voyage From Yesteryear, the Giants of Ganymede trilogy
James Alan Gardner: Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted
Joan D. Vinge: Snow Queen, Summer Queen, Psion, Catspaw
C. S. Friedman: The Madness Season, The Coldfire trilogy
George R. R. Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire series
S. M. Stirling: Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, the Peshawar Lancers
David Brin: The Uplift Trilogy, Glory Season, the Postman, Kiln People (see the recent slashdot review)
Mercedes Lackey: The Valdemar series. (Pretty light reading, but if you liked Weis & Hickman, you might like this too)