It seems that there's a natural defense against Alzheimer's Disease:
. . . bone marrow-derived microglia infiltrate amyloid plaques and succeed in destroying them most efficiently. These newly-recruited immune cells are specifically attracted by the amyloid proteins that are the most toxic to nerve cells.
Basically it's saying that the microglia in the brain try to destroy the plaques that cause the symptoms of the disease. For whatever reason, the microglia in the brain aren't very effective, but those in the bone marrow work just great. Perhaps the damage caused by Alzheimer's Disease can be stopped by injecting this sort of microglia into the brain, or maybe there's a way to enhance the response by the microglia already in the brain.
I think this is exactly what's covered under fair use:
Personal use also permits music fans to make "mix tapes" or compilations of their favorite songs from their own personal music collection or the radio for their own personal enjoyment in a more convenient format, or "format shifting." Another example of acceptable personal use copying of a copyrighted work is "time-shifting," or the recording of a copyrighted program to enjoy at a later and more convenient time.
Personally, I think they're slowing down sales because the PSP isn't selling all that well and people like to watch movies on big screens as a general rule of thumb. The iPod videos generally works because the costs are in the range of $1 or $2, the install base is huge, and sometimes they let people download the tv show the day before it's on television.
They also have a virtual keyboard for sale. Imagine setting your cell phone on a table, pushing a button, and getting an instant monitor and keyboard. No one will need PCs for surfing the web and common functionality. Give it ten years or so to become widespread.
At work, I find myself peppering my e-mails with these damn cute smiley emoticons even though I feel like a teenage girl (which I'm not, even on the Internet). Sometimes I'll respond with a terse message that basically says "I fixed your damn user error", and then add a smiley face at the end.
I think it means that I'm secretly passive-agressive, trying to cover it up with cute little characters.
I'm not a statistician, but the average is sometimes a poor way to describe data. It's often useful to look at modes, standard deviations, and so on.
For example, the standard deviation for 2005 had Microsoft with a 80.87 stdev and Firefox with a 97.5 stdev.
Firefox had one flaw that took 674 days to fix, nearly twice the max of Microsoft's 357 days. Does that make up for such a larger average? Dunno. I suppose you could look at the issue and decide for yourself.
Averages are important, but it's not always the single most important thing to consider.
Plus, the phones try really hard to minimize the amount of energy they use. 2 Watts is peak power consumption. I wouldn't recommend trying this experiment unless you want egg on your face.
If you're looking to heat water, the focused mirrors on pipe approach works fairly well (or just paint something black and move pipe water through it). Essentially you're just using various tricks to store heat produced from sunlight in a fairly efficient manner.
If you're looking at powering televisions and radios, though, you need to have electricity. Photovoltaics generally work best for that. Turning heated water into electricity does work, though at a lower efficiency.
There's other issues, of course. Just because photovoltaics are more efficient doesn't make them cheaper. There's the long-term costs and how much investment you're willing to make in order to get your cost savings.
Neverwinter Nights was very much geared towards player-created content and has done quite well over the last few years. Thousands of player created modules have been made and there's a number of persistent worlds still running years after the game came out.
These last few years I worked on a few campaigns that were well-received, and am working on a new a new campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2.
I think player created content works well for certain genres, and requires an almost mystical process to attract the right community. I got tons of value out of UT2004 and the original Half-Life. Other games like Doom 3 and Morrowind didn't quite pan out as much as I would have liked. I think it requires the game developer to actively encourage the community, as well as having a solid core game, wide install base, and easy-to-use tools. Tricky business.
I think I have mixed feelings about it. I loved RE4 in general, and thought it a great story with lots of unique environments and interesting gameplay. I guess I just found the "press the right button really fast" option to be not very interesting after awhile.
Perhaps that's just me. I like an element of strategy and thoughtfulness in my gameplay, rather than just pure reflexes. Overall, though, RE4 is a great game.
Having just finished Resident Evil 4, I'm not sure the cutscenes always worked well for me. Mashing a button repeatedly isn't always fun gameplay. Fortunately it was relatively rare and admittedly kept the tension up during what is typically a relaxing point in a game.
Cutscenes are typically in place to move the plot forward or explain some complexity to the player. In general, there's a few ways that cutscenes have worked for me in the past:
Thief & Splinter Cell. In stealth games, you can often overhear NPCs talking to each other as you go about your business. Information is passed along, yet the action doesn't stop.
Sheer beauty. Some games have cutscenes that are almost a reward. The cinematics of Diablo were stunning and a fun point in the game.
Respite. In games that are non-stop action, having a cutscene to give the player to take a breath can be most welcome.
Short and Necessary Sometimes there's critical information that you simply must give to the player. Keeping them short and to the point works best.
Where cutscenes don't work well is if the game forces them to be repeated upon failure, they're not skippable, and if they take too much time away from the primary gameplay.
That being said, people can die when hardware and software changes aren't implemented immediately too. If a doctor can't perform a procedure because of some issue, it gets taken care of very quickly.
I'm still leaning towards the "culture" comment. I really think there are different ways to interpret laws that can result in very different workflows.
Well, I was attempting to be funny and evidently failing. I actually am familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley, which focuses on retention of data (e.g. e-mail and business records). I don't think it applies to adding hardware to servers.
I work for a large healthcare organization, dealing with HIPPA regulations and the like. That doesn't seem to stop our network team from tossing in new hardware left and right. Shucks, we had a brief downtime for one of our servers and within a couple weeks they were ordering hardware to set up a cluster. It sounds more like a staffing and culture issue than anything else.
That's exactly what I was thinking of, thanks for the direct link.
At the moment the technology seems overly expensive and cumbersome. I can imagine a time when you buy the glasses at a cheap discount, and then some company sells you little chips for specialized tasks: traveling around a city, working on certain types of hardware, and so on. Ideally you'd have some sort of wireless connection as well, updating the software with the latest information.
I suppose you could even have ad-supported glasses, with virtual signs plastered on buildings. Not that I'd want to drive with the things on, but you could give them away to tourists if they end up being cheap enough.
Sounds a lot like Virtual Light, a book from William Gibson. More and more you'll see this sort of thing done, especially as technology shrinks down the size of these things. Imagine a pair of sunglasses that overlay details of the car engine you're looking at or map notes as you travel around town.
Al-Qaeda's goals are to drive out Western influence from the middle east, Saudia Arabia in particular, and establish a pan-Islamic state. I suspect they don't care much about our civil liberties one way or another. That's up to us.
I work for a healthcare organization in the same state as Providence (the number of them is pretty small so you could probably guess). Just last month we were reviewing policies to cover just this contingency.
Washington law demands that notification occur if there's any chance that the information could be used criminally. Since we too operate in Washington, we're also complying with that law.
Essentially you must notify each person directly unless the cost of doing so is upwards of a million dollars or so. There's then some contingencies where you can take out ads in major newspapers.
There's some strange exceptions to the rule. If our hospital accidentally sends clinical information to the wrong insurance provider and it's your normal mix-up rather than a potentially criminal act, that doesn't require notification. It sounds like if it wasn't the case, people would get notified all the time.
I expect to hear about this tomorrow when we go to work. I work fairly closely with the woman who manages these risks in our organization and she'll likely be hearing all about it. Scary stuff.
It's extremely hard to find completely objective research into this area. The best I could find is an essay on the consolidation of media over the last twenty years and what effect it has had. It's biased, of course, though the facts inside seem to be correct.
If you'd like something more generic, there's the wiki entry, though that doesn't really make a point one way or the other.
It seems like nearly any post I make for a Politics thread is going to get modded -1 Flamebait by somebody. It's hard to tiptoe around that middle ground where everybody can agree or at least tolerate what I've posted.
It may also be a way to bypass the more common venue of television, which some argue is becoming increasingly controlled by Republican interests. Newspapers are generally seen as more liberal, though readership is declining across the board. Regardless of who controls the big television news outlets, I think it's extremely valuable to have a broad range of methods for politicians to reach constituents.
I'm actually reading a book called Blood and Fire which has a preface stating that the original idea was for a Star Trek Next Generation episode which had a gay character in it. Evidently Gene Roddenbury's lawyer read the script, freaked out, and it never saw the light of day. It's a bit of a shame. Blood and Fire would have made a good Start Trek episode.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a hysterical clip from the Daily Show about this very topic. Wait for the punch line at the end.
They also have a virtual keyboard for sale. Imagine setting your cell phone on a table, pushing a button, and getting an instant monitor and keyboard. No one will need PCs for surfing the web and common functionality. Give it ten years or so to become widespread.
Are we talking x-ray laser sort of technology? Is 200,000 electron volts enough to do significant damage? Surface burns and radiation poisoning?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
:P
At work, I find myself peppering my e-mails with these damn cute smiley emoticons even though I feel like a teenage girl (which I'm not, even on the Internet). Sometimes I'll respond with a terse message that basically says "I fixed your damn user error", and then add a smiley face at the end.
I think it means that I'm secretly passive-agressive, trying to cover it up with cute little characters.
I'm not a statistician, but the average is sometimes a poor way to describe data. It's often useful to look at modes, standard deviations, and so on.
For example, the standard deviation for 2005 had Microsoft with a 80.87 stdev and Firefox with a 97.5 stdev.
Firefox had one flaw that took 674 days to fix, nearly twice the max of Microsoft's 357 days. Does that make up for such a larger average? Dunno. I suppose you could look at the issue and decide for yourself.
Averages are important, but it's not always the single most important thing to consider.
I wonder how much the CO2 output of the barges would be? That can't be especially good for the greenhouse gases.
Plus, the phones try really hard to minimize the amount of energy they use. 2 Watts is peak power consumption. I wouldn't recommend trying this experiment unless you want egg on your face.
If you're looking to heat water, the focused mirrors on pipe approach works fairly well (or just paint something black and move pipe water through it). Essentially you're just using various tricks to store heat produced from sunlight in a fairly efficient manner.
If you're looking at powering televisions and radios, though, you need to have electricity. Photovoltaics generally work best for that. Turning heated water into electricity does work, though at a lower efficiency.
There's other issues, of course. Just because photovoltaics are more efficient doesn't make them cheaper. There's the long-term costs and how much investment you're willing to make in order to get your cost savings.
Neverwinter Nights was very much geared towards player-created content and has done quite well over the last few years. Thousands of player created modules have been made and there's a number of persistent worlds still running years after the game came out.
These last few years I worked on a few campaigns that were well-received, and am working on a new a new campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2.
I think player created content works well for certain genres, and requires an almost mystical process to attract the right community. I got tons of value out of UT2004 and the original Half-Life. Other games like Doom 3 and Morrowind didn't quite pan out as much as I would have liked. I think it requires the game developer to actively encourage the community, as well as having a solid core game, wide install base, and easy-to-use tools. Tricky business.
I think I have mixed feelings about it. I loved RE4 in general, and thought it a great story with lots of unique environments and interesting gameplay. I guess I just found the "press the right button really fast" option to be not very interesting after awhile.
Perhaps that's just me. I like an element of strategy and thoughtfulness in my gameplay, rather than just pure reflexes. Overall, though, RE4 is a great game.
Cutscenes are typically in place to move the plot forward or explain some complexity to the player. In general, there's a few ways that cutscenes have worked for me in the past:
- Thief & Splinter Cell. In stealth games, you can often overhear NPCs talking to each other as you go about your business. Information is passed along, yet the action doesn't stop.
- Sheer beauty. Some games have cutscenes that are almost a reward. The cinematics of Diablo were stunning and a fun point in the game.
- Respite. In games that are non-stop action, having a cutscene to give the player to take a breath can be most welcome.
- Short and Necessary Sometimes there's critical information that you simply must give to the player. Keeping them short and to the point works best.
Where cutscenes don't work well is if the game forces them to be repeated upon failure, they're not skippable, and if they take too much time away from the primary gameplay.People can die when things go horribly wrong.
That being said, people can die when hardware and software changes aren't implemented immediately too. If a doctor can't perform a procedure because of some issue, it gets taken care of very quickly.
I'm still leaning towards the "culture" comment. I really think there are different ways to interpret laws that can result in very different workflows.
Well, I was attempting to be funny and evidently failing. I actually am familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley, which focuses on retention of data (e.g. e-mail and business records). I don't think it applies to adding hardware to servers.
I work for a large healthcare organization, dealing with HIPPA regulations and the like. That doesn't seem to stop our network team from tossing in new hardware left and right. Shucks, we had a brief downtime for one of our servers and within a couple weeks they were ordering hardware to set up a cluster. It sounds more like a staffing and culture issue than anything else.
Moving to another company besides Microsoft?
That's exactly what I was thinking of, thanks for the direct link.
At the moment the technology seems overly expensive and cumbersome. I can imagine a time when you buy the glasses at a cheap discount, and then some company sells you little chips for specialized tasks: traveling around a city, working on certain types of hardware, and so on. Ideally you'd have some sort of wireless connection as well, updating the software with the latest information.
I suppose you could even have ad-supported glasses, with virtual signs plastered on buildings. Not that I'd want to drive with the things on, but you could give them away to tourists if they end up being cheap enough.
Sounds a lot like Virtual Light, a book from William Gibson. More and more you'll see this sort of thing done, especially as technology shrinks down the size of these things. Imagine a pair of sunglasses that overlay details of the car engine you're looking at or map notes as you travel around town.
Al-Qaeda's goals are to drive out Western influence from the middle east, Saudia Arabia in particular, and establish a pan-Islamic state. I suspect they don't care much about our civil liberties one way or another. That's up to us.
they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans."
Whew. It's a good thing I'm an ordinary American, unlike the rest of you commie techno-freak Slashdotters.
I work for a healthcare organization in the same state as Providence (the number of them is pretty small so you could probably guess). Just last month we were reviewing policies to cover just this contingency.
Washington law demands that notification occur if there's any chance that the information could be used criminally. Since we too operate in Washington, we're also complying with that law.
Essentially you must notify each person directly unless the cost of doing so is upwards of a million dollars or so. There's then some contingencies where you can take out ads in major newspapers.
There's some strange exceptions to the rule. If our hospital accidentally sends clinical information to the wrong insurance provider and it's your normal mix-up rather than a potentially criminal act, that doesn't require notification. It sounds like if it wasn't the case, people would get notified all the time.
I expect to hear about this tomorrow when we go to work. I work fairly closely with the woman who manages these risks in our organization and she'll likely be hearing all about it. Scary stuff.
It's extremely hard to find completely objective research into this area. The best I could find is an essay on the consolidation of media over the last twenty years and what effect it has had. It's biased, of course, though the facts inside seem to be correct.
If you'd like something more generic, there's the wiki entry, though that doesn't really make a point one way or the other.
It seems like nearly any post I make for a Politics thread is going to get modded -1 Flamebait by somebody. It's hard to tiptoe around that middle ground where everybody can agree or at least tolerate what I've posted.
It may also be a way to bypass the more common venue of television, which some argue is becoming increasingly controlled by Republican interests. Newspapers are generally seen as more liberal, though readership is declining across the board. Regardless of who controls the big television news outlets, I think it's extremely valuable to have a broad range of methods for politicians to reach constituents.
I'm actually reading a book called Blood and Fire which has a preface stating that the original idea was for a Star Trek Next Generation episode which had a gay character in it. Evidently Gene Roddenbury's lawyer read the script, freaked out, and it never saw the light of day. It's a bit of a shame. Blood and Fire would have made a good Start Trek episode.
I wonder if Sony's DRM screw-up and evidence that GPL'ed code was in their DRM software played any role in this rather firm approach.