The biggest strength of PC games, in my opinion, is that it's fairly easy for 3rd parties to extend games. More and more games like UT24K, Half-Life 2, and Neverwinter Nights get their longevity through the community mods that spring up around them, rather than the game itself.
I'm a long-time NWN mod person. It's amazing how many cool things have appeared for the game, keeping a thriving community going for years after release. I don't think you'll ever see that sort of thing happen to consoles.
Consoles are great for focused, vendor-supplied gameplay. PCs excel in flexibility at the expense of complexity.
If you take a look at the wiki reference for Doom 3, you'll see there was an issue with software patents:
A week before the game's release, it became known that an agreement to include EAX audio technology in Doom 3 reached by id Software and Creative Labs was heavily influenced by a software patent owned by the latter company. The patent dealt with a technique for rendering shadows called Carmack's Reverse, which was developed independently by both John Carmack and programmers at Creative Labs. id Software would have been putting themselves under legal liability if they used the technique in the finished game, so to defuse the issue, id Software agreed to license Creative Labs sound technologies in exchange for indemnification against lawsuits.
Being a parent seems to involve navigating through a host of medical issues, some minor and some major. More and more I'm an advocate of giving as much information as possible to parents. It sounds like the problem you have isn't with the test results, but rather how people respond to getting them.
Information like that can be used to get appropriate medical care and therapy. It's impressive what can be done with good care these days. In the past, I think the sad reality is that parents were on their own to deal with the issues. Now there's lots of good support out there.
I think it's two things. Tests have indeed improved. Also importantly, the counseling that goes along with the tests have improved immensely.
Our OBGYN referred us to a genetic councilor who talked about probibilities and outcomes in a very plain-spoken way. She wasn't advocating anything at all and I feel she'd happily hand over literature on how to raise a child with Down's Syndrome.
That was exactly the sort of thing my wife and I needed just then. I think it's fairly rare for a doctor to simply state "your children will be mentally retarded". At least, I hope it is.
I'm guessing that you don't disagree with giving more information, but rather what people do with the information.
For example, if they discovered that you had CP while an embryo and a treatment existed to fix that, I'm guessing that's fine.
If a test existed for CP and your parents used that information to learn about it and prepare your education and physical therapy, that's fine too.
Unfortunately there are other situations where people simply say "I can't handle that" and choose not to have the child. Sometimes it's for reasons that seem selfish. Sometimes not. There are cases where children are born and life a short and painful life with no hope of a cure.
I wish babies were always healty, born to happy parents. That's not always going to be the case. Personally I feel that giving people as much information as possible is a good thing, along with counciling on what that information means.
That's a good point. When the bloodwork came back on my wife's pregnancy, they reported a one in twenty chance for our daughter having Down's Syndrome. Other results might give a different risk (e.g. 1 in 1,000), but they don't report it to people. The reson for this is that the true test is to have an amnio, which has a small chance of producing birth defects.
So, we had the amnio and it all turned out fine. We're one of the few lucky parents to have a picture of their child's chromosomes in the baby book.
I feel for you. I have two nephews who had birth defects, one mild and one serious. They're great kids and generally happy. Caring for them was very hard on the parents, likely leading to their divorce and a lifetime of constant medical care. I have a second cousin who was born with Down's Syndrome and it's fairly mild. His parents love him very much and he's gotten great support.
We were in a situation with our second daughter where there was a one-in-twenty chance she might be born with Down's Syndrome. We went ahead and got the tests done and fortunately all went well.
On the other hand, we probably wouldn't have carried her to term if she had it. The reasons are complicated, but they didn't feel entirely selfish. What I appreciate about our society is that we're allowed to make decisions about our own family.
Even if you plan on having the child anyway, it can be good to know. Children with Down's Syndrome have a higher chance of birth defects and you can have a surgeon on call should the need arise.
There's always a catch whenever you're able to get more information about a possible big decision. Driving a car around is easy. Learning about all the environmental consequences of doing so makes getting behind the wheel a more difficult choice.
The catch is that people have to make decisions. They can choose not to have all the information, which makes things simpler but more likely to be the "wrong" decision.
I err on the side of giving as much information as possible to people, hoping that they'll take the time to think things through and make the best choice. Naive, probably, but that's just me.
My understanding is that autism is caused by a wide variety of factors. It's unlikely a single gene will be discovered that causes it. Even then, there's a good chance that a trigger of some sort to cause it to occur (virus, environmental factor). Finally, even if a child becomes autistic, there's a range of autism from mild to severe.
Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a complicated thing, made even more difficult when the best a genetic councilor can say that there's a chance that this gene may lead to problems, perhaps severe and perhaps not.
Still, I feel that giving more information to parents is a good thing, even if it causes a fair amount of worries in the long run.
When my wife was pregnant with our second child, her bloodwork suggested that there was a one in twenty chance that she had Down's Syndrome. Fortunately it turned out fine and we got a karyotype of her chromosomes as a souvenir.
Here's a tidbit, but you should read the whole thing:
Microsoft had brought its own supporters along with them, just in case they got a chilly reception at the press conference!
What exactly do you do with a Mac mini that you can't get any visual output from, especially one with a lifespan of two hours? It seems pointless to make it mobile.
Wireless network games? Find the server before the batteries die?
Remember, Live is now part of the system package, available to everyone for free. My guess is that backwards compatibility will require the hard-drive add-on as well as a Live connection. This will allow Microsoft to "patch" the game, allowing it to run on a 360.
Think of it as a pseudo-port of top-selling XBox games.
There's a fairly extensive list of water-related pseudo science listed here, as well as a specific page on ionized water.
I ran across it today when researching the product. I have a coworker whose daughter suffers from ulcerative colitis and I'm always on the lookout for odd breakthroughs. I think the emphasis for this one is on "odd".
Ah, but that's what vitamins and flax seed oil are for. Having a master's degree in biology, I'm quite aware of dietary requirements.
I lift weights most days and have bulked up considerably over the last few years (up to 190 lbs from 165). Most people would consider me in excellent health.
On the other hand, my stepfather recently died of pancreatic cancer, a disease closely linked to eating processed meats. My father-in-law just had a heart attack a few months ago. Both had traditional high-meat American diets.
My father, who married a Japanese woman, has been following a "flexitarian" diet, as well as exercising reguarly. He's in great shape.
All anecdotal, of course, but the research continues to pile up. Diets heavy in fruit, vegitables, and whole grains are generally good for you. Minimizing fats, sugars, and processed foods is best as well.
To further debunk my silly statement, take a look at this Snopes listing. Might as well be complete.
I probably shouldn't have stepped into the issue of correlations with IQ. It seems to correlate very well with test taking, but not so well with factors such as happiness or income. That's my vague recollection when studying for my masters in biology education, anyway. I haven't kept up on the research lately.
For an amusing way to find your IQ based off your SAT score, take a look over here. Since mine is over 140, the intelligent thing to do would clearly be to mod me up.
IQ is a lousy way to determine intelligence. IQ seems most closely associated with the ability to do well on tests, rather than some innate "smarts".
If you want to get silly, take a look at this page. Clearly the future will be populated by idiotic Republicans, breeding like mad, while a handful of super-genius tree-hugging Democrats survive in Utopian nanotech habitats.
More practically, bearing children seems more closely related to urbanization rather than IQ. What's happening is that people are moving to cities where children are a burden. You still have high population growth in rural places, such as parts of India and China. Once 90% of the population are in cities, I say there's a good chance that populations worldwide start to decline.
In Garreau's view of the world, the naturals will be those who eschew enhancements for higher reasons, just as vegetarians forgo meat and fundamentalists forgo what they see as illicit pleasures.
I'm not sure I'm a vegitarian for "higher reasons". Mostly I do it because evidence continues to show that a primarily vegitarian diet is the most healthy for you.
Babies have a certain type of fat cell whose sole purpose is to be "inefficient". It burns fat (instead of sugar) in order to keep their small bodies warm.
Exercise is still important for a variety of reasons. Still, I can imagine an implant in ten to twenty years whose sole purpose is to burn off unneeded blood sugars.
There's nothing inherently evil about drug companies making lots of money. In an ironic sort of way, this may actually increase funding in comparison to treatments that could truly be called "cures".
In some ways, this approach is safer than gene therapy for cancer. Since you don't tinker with the cell's DNA, the iRNA treatment can be stopped if you start accidentally supressing critical RNA. Modifying DNA is permanent.
The tricky part is that each individual cancer must have a particular treatment created for it. It's not a generic cancer cure, but rather one that can be targeted against certain very specific types of cancer. They'd need to know exactly what's genetically wrong with the cell in order to cure it.
Not only that, but if the iRNA sequence not only matches the problem RNA but also a healthy one, you could potentially be interfering with normal gene function. That's why they targeted Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that "provides a clear and unambiguous target".
Finally, this doesn't seem to actually cure the cancer, but rather puts it into submission. Think of the cancer cell's nucleus spitting out bogus RNA, only to be chopped up by iRNA that matches it. You'd need to take the treatment essentially forever. Drug companies could make billions.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been Googling for the last fifteen minutes and couldn't find any reference about the Gartner Group downplaying AIDS.
The biggest strength of PC games, in my opinion, is that it's fairly easy for 3rd parties to extend games. More and more games like UT24K, Half-Life 2, and Neverwinter Nights get their longevity through the community mods that spring up around them, rather than the game itself.
I'm a long-time NWN mod person. It's amazing how many cool things have appeared for the game, keeping a thriving community going for years after release. I don't think you'll ever see that sort of thing happen to consoles.
Consoles are great for focused, vendor-supplied gameplay. PCs excel in flexibility at the expense of complexity.
If you take a look at the wiki reference for Doom 3, you'll see there was an issue with software patents:
A week before the game's release, it became known that an agreement to include EAX audio technology in Doom 3 reached by id Software and Creative Labs was heavily influenced by a software patent owned by the latter company. The patent dealt with a technique for rendering shadows called Carmack's Reverse, which was developed independently by both John Carmack and programmers at Creative Labs. id Software would have been putting themselves under legal liability if they used the technique in the finished game, so to defuse the issue, id Software agreed to license Creative Labs sound technologies in exchange for indemnification against lawsuits.
You can find more detail here
Being a parent seems to involve navigating through a host of medical issues, some minor and some major. More and more I'm an advocate of giving as much information as possible to parents. It sounds like the problem you have isn't with the test results, but rather how people respond to getting them.
Information like that can be used to get appropriate medical care and therapy. It's impressive what can be done with good care these days. In the past, I think the sad reality is that parents were on their own to deal with the issues. Now there's lots of good support out there.
I think it's two things. Tests have indeed improved. Also importantly, the counseling that goes along with the tests have improved immensely.
Our OBGYN referred us to a genetic councilor who talked about probibilities and outcomes in a very plain-spoken way. She wasn't advocating anything at all and I feel she'd happily hand over literature on how to raise a child with Down's Syndrome.
That was exactly the sort of thing my wife and I needed just then. I think it's fairly rare for a doctor to simply state "your children will be mentally retarded". At least, I hope it is.
I'm guessing that you don't disagree with giving more information, but rather what people do with the information.
For example, if they discovered that you had CP while an embryo and a treatment existed to fix that, I'm guessing that's fine.
If a test existed for CP and your parents used that information to learn about it and prepare your education and physical therapy, that's fine too.
Unfortunately there are other situations where people simply say "I can't handle that" and choose not to have the child. Sometimes it's for reasons that seem selfish. Sometimes not. There are cases where children are born and life a short and painful life with no hope of a cure.
I wish babies were always healty, born to happy parents. That's not always going to be the case. Personally I feel that giving people as much information as possible is a good thing, along with counciling on what that information means.
That's a good point. When the bloodwork came back on my wife's pregnancy, they reported a one in twenty chance for our daughter having Down's Syndrome. Other results might give a different risk (e.g. 1 in 1,000), but they don't report it to people. The reson for this is that the true test is to have an amnio, which has a small chance of producing birth defects.
So, we had the amnio and it all turned out fine. We're one of the few lucky parents to have a picture of their child's chromosomes in the baby book.
I feel for you. I have two nephews who had birth defects, one mild and one serious. They're great kids and generally happy. Caring for them was very hard on the parents, likely leading to their divorce and a lifetime of constant medical care. I have a second cousin who was born with Down's Syndrome and it's fairly mild. His parents love him very much and he's gotten great support.
We were in a situation with our second daughter where there was a one-in-twenty chance she might be born with Down's Syndrome. We went ahead and got the tests done and fortunately all went well.
On the other hand, we probably wouldn't have carried her to term if she had it. The reasons are complicated, but they didn't feel entirely selfish. What I appreciate about our society is that we're allowed to make decisions about our own family.
Even if you plan on having the child anyway, it can be good to know. Children with Down's Syndrome have a higher chance of birth defects and you can have a surgeon on call should the need arise.
There's always a catch whenever you're able to get more information about a possible big decision. Driving a car around is easy. Learning about all the environmental consequences of doing so makes getting behind the wheel a more difficult choice.
The catch is that people have to make decisions. They can choose not to have all the information, which makes things simpler but more likely to be the "wrong" decision.
I err on the side of giving as much information as possible to people, hoping that they'll take the time to think things through and make the best choice. Naive, probably, but that's just me.
My understanding is that autism is caused by a wide variety of factors. It's unlikely a single gene will be discovered that causes it. Even then, there's a good chance that a trigger of some sort to cause it to occur (virus, environmental factor). Finally, even if a child becomes autistic, there's a range of autism from mild to severe.
Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a complicated thing, made even more difficult when the best a genetic councilor can say that there's a chance that this gene may lead to problems, perhaps severe and perhaps not.
Still, I feel that giving more information to parents is a good thing, even if it causes a fair amount of worries in the long run.
When my wife was pregnant with our second child, her bloodwork suggested that there was a one in twenty chance that she had Down's Syndrome. Fortunately it turned out fine and we got a karyotype of her chromosomes as a souvenir.
I'm sure they would have been great, had they made sequels.
It also would have been cool to see a sequel to Highlander, or any other movies after the second Alien.
HardOCP did a great expose on this company.
Of course, they then sued HardOCP and were generally nasty, so I'm pretty happy about the way this all turned out.
That might explain this.
Here's a tidbit, but you should read the whole thing:
Microsoft had brought its own supporters along with them, just in case they got a chilly reception at the press conference!
What exactly do you do with a Mac mini that you can't get any visual output from, especially one with a lifespan of two hours? It seems pointless to make it mobile.
Wireless network games? Find the server before the batteries die?
I believe they are plan on offering gamplay to everyone on the weekends, though I could imagine this could change in the future.
Remember, Live is now part of the system package, available to everyone for free. My guess is that backwards compatibility will require the hard-drive add-on as well as a Live connection. This will allow Microsoft to "patch" the game, allowing it to run on a 360.
Think of it as a pseudo-port of top-selling XBox games.
There's a fairly extensive list of water-related pseudo science listed here, as well as a specific page on ionized water.
I ran across it today when researching the product. I have a coworker whose daughter suffers from ulcerative colitis and I'm always on the lookout for odd breakthroughs. I think the emphasis for this one is on "odd".
Ah, but that's what vitamins and flax seed oil are for. Having a master's degree in biology, I'm quite aware of dietary requirements.
I lift weights most days and have bulked up considerably over the last few years (up to 190 lbs from 165). Most people would consider me in excellent health.
On the other hand, my stepfather recently died of pancreatic cancer, a disease closely linked to eating processed meats. My father-in-law just had a heart attack a few months ago. Both had traditional high-meat American diets.
My father, who married a Japanese woman, has been following a "flexitarian" diet, as well as exercising reguarly. He's in great shape.
All anecdotal, of course, but the research continues to pile up. Diets heavy in fruit, vegitables, and whole grains are generally good for you. Minimizing fats, sugars, and processed foods is best as well.
To further debunk my silly statement, take a look at this Snopes listing. Might as well be complete.
I probably shouldn't have stepped into the issue of correlations with IQ. It seems to correlate very well with test taking, but not so well with factors such as happiness or income. That's my vague recollection when studying for my masters in biology education, anyway. I haven't kept up on the research lately.
For an amusing way to find your IQ based off your SAT score, take a look over here. Since mine is over 140, the intelligent thing to do would clearly be to mod me up.
IQ is a lousy way to determine intelligence. IQ seems most closely associated with the ability to do well on tests, rather than some innate "smarts".
If you want to get silly, take a look at this page. Clearly the future will be populated by idiotic Republicans, breeding like mad, while a handful of super-genius tree-hugging Democrats survive in Utopian nanotech habitats.
More practically, bearing children seems more closely related to urbanization rather than IQ. What's happening is that people are moving to cities where children are a burden. You still have high population growth in rural places, such as parts of India and China. Once 90% of the population are in cities, I say there's a good chance that populations worldwide start to decline.
In Garreau's view of the world, the naturals will be those who eschew enhancements for higher reasons, just as vegetarians forgo meat and fundamentalists forgo what they see as illicit pleasures.
I'm not sure I'm a vegitarian for "higher reasons". Mostly I do it because evidence continues to show that a primarily vegitarian diet is the most healthy for you.
Babies have a certain type of fat cell whose sole purpose is to be "inefficient". It burns fat (instead of sugar) in order to keep their small bodies warm.
Exercise is still important for a variety of reasons. Still, I can imagine an implant in ten to twenty years whose sole purpose is to burn off unneeded blood sugars.
This thread is useless without pics!
There's not even a Google cache of the site. Oopsie.
For the curious, here's someone else who had a similar idea.
There's nothing inherently evil about drug companies making lots of money. In an ironic sort of way, this may actually increase funding in comparison to treatments that could truly be called "cures".
In some ways, this approach is safer than gene therapy for cancer. Since you don't tinker with the cell's DNA, the iRNA treatment can be stopped if you start accidentally supressing critical RNA. Modifying DNA is permanent.
The tricky part is that each individual cancer must have a particular treatment created for it. It's not a generic cancer cure, but rather one that can be targeted against certain very specific types of cancer. They'd need to know exactly what's genetically wrong with the cell in order to cure it.
Not only that, but if the iRNA sequence not only matches the problem RNA but also a healthy one, you could potentially be interfering with normal gene function. That's why they targeted Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that "provides a clear and unambiguous target".
Finally, this doesn't seem to actually cure the cancer, but rather puts it into submission. Think of the cancer cell's nucleus spitting out bogus RNA, only to be chopped up by iRNA that matches it. You'd need to take the treatment essentially forever. Drug companies could make billions.