if amyloid concetrations in the brain are reduced, will the patients be able to remember things that they have forgotten, or will they "just" be capable of remembering new information again?
IANAMD. From my understanding of it, having attended a couple of presentations by a prominent Alzheimer's researcher in Boston, the accumulation of amyloid plaques takes up greater and greater space in the volumes between neurons. This destroys existing links between neurons (physically tearing them apart), impedes the formation of new links, and eventually results in the death of neurons. Those neurons and links, particularly in the hippocampus, are the basis of your memories. Once they're gone, they don't come back magically.
If you can flush out the plaques, then the (surviving) neurons and links go back to more normal functioning, meaning a patient should be able to learn and form memories again. This rejuvenation has been demonstrated in mice, using cognitive tests (maze-learning) and in vivo observations showing visible before-and-after improvements in the structure of the neurons.
Been trying out GoLive vs. Dreamweaver for the last two weeks. GoLive is such an obvious ripoff of Dreamweaver, except that the GoLive GUI is a complete rat's nest, and it crashes. I expected much better from Adobe. I guess they had to whip up something way too fast to round out their application suite.
Go see him play sometime... then tell me he is some kind of "lamer"
I watched him "play" against noobs at CES in Las Vegas last January. It was like watching a fully-loaded freight train play with a cardboard box. Although grimly amusing, I was less than impressed. The challengers were uniformly clueless about the map and their keyboard configuration, and they got about 30 seconds of "warm-up" time. Meanwhile, Fatal1ty is fully wired into the game. Fatal1ty would just zoom around the little 1v1 map, snarf up all the weapons and armor in a semi-repetitive cycle and occasionally unload a barrage on the helpless victim. I didn't get any sense of style or grace from this particular demonstration. It was a classic carnival game, but at least they weren't charging for the privilege of being fragged.
In the future, they should pair up two competent players, or give the pro some sort of handicap, e.g. set his initial health to 5. Otherwise, it's about as interesting as watching an exterminator kill bugs with a hammer.
And that does go somewhat counter to the subscribers of ever increasing complexity and success to evolution.
This is a common, and naive, fallacy. Evolution does not predict increasing complexity, or progress along any metric whatsoever. This is another way of saying that there is no ultimate goal in evolution. Once you start talking about progress and goals, you are only a short step away from I.D.
So, please drop any notions of "progress" in evolution, and do not assume such notions are held by evolutionary scientists.
I see you never owned the model of replaytv that automagically detected and skipped commercials during playback, no manual intervention required except in the rare case where it guessed wrong.
Well, I owned ReplayTV and TiVo, and ReplayTV sucked at detecting commercials because it had too many false positives. I don't miss it one bit. It's the kind of technology that is only good if it practically never fails, like parachutes and scuba tanks.
ReplayTV was particularly bad with shows that had a lot of dark/low-lit scenes, e.g. Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Every damn show it was the same thing. Half-way through the show ReplayTV would start silently blipping through dark scenes and suddenly you'd be watching the conclusion of the episode wondering if you had missed something (and you had). Then you would navigate back to before the problems began, disable the auto-skip, and watch the rest of the episode with commercials. Getting half an episode without commercials was not worth the aggravation.
TiVo's 30 second skip is good enough for me. It works simply and consistently, and it's under my control.
Hmmm, giant lo-res display? Sounds like a job for MAIM. Having people dance in front of (on top of) your screen would add a certain challenge to all those old video games. Now we just need some giant joysticks!
rather than stich a bunch of digital photos, they should have simply photographed it with a very large format camera, and had the resulting negative drum scanned at 8000dpi.
Works great for landscapes at infinite focus, but not so great for up-close work. To avoid nasty spherical aberations, they would have to shoot the tapestry through a mega-telephoto lens from 100 yards away, but the walls of the museum would kinda get in the way. And it can't be just any large format camera, either. Scanning at 8000 dpi will reveal just how imperfect everything about your camera really is, unless you have it specially engineered for the task, which the Gigapxl folks have done.
Putting the actual tapestry through a large drum-scanner would be the ideal solution, but I bet the museum was looking for a slightly gentler process. Seems like the photo-mosaic approach was a decent compromise.
Just remember, if you're travelling with that blob, then you're not the one going so fast, instead it's the rest of the nearby universe that seems to be tearing up the turf.
This article provides some insight. My guess is that this has very little to do with Microsoft, and a lot to do with proprietary software vendors based in Massachusetts.
Pacheco, a Democrat, said the new policy is "perceived to be an exclusionary policy that excludes proprietary software." He is chairman of the Post Audit and Oversight Committee and said he has received "lots of calls" from software companies whose business revolves around proprietary software, many of whom are concerned that they will be locked out of Massachusetts' $80 million IT budget.
Of course, there's also the typical Beacon Hill power struggle aspect to this. If Gov. Romney wants OSS, then Democrats must find something to oppose in it. FWIW, I'm a Mass. Dem., but not in Pacheco's district.
I think mandating open formats, if managed thoughtfully to discourage large chunks of inscrutable binary, is a very nice compromise.
DSL is so 1900's, it just isn't worth worrying about. DSL cannot reach far enough to affect all that many Comcast cable customers.
What Comcast is really worried about is Verizon's new fiber rollout, which provides far more bandwidth (15Mbps/2Mbps) for a whole lot of customers at a very reasonable price ($50/mo.).
And now we have people getting arrested for pointing out someone else's mistake...
Since he's not in France at the moment, I doubt he's been arrested. And anyway, the court has not rendered a judgement yet, so maybe they will tell these flakey anti-virus clowns to get stuffed? We could use a precedent like that. Every challenge is an opportunity.
Steam makes it impossible to sell HL2 once you completed it.
You paid for some entertainment, which you received, and now you want your money back? Was the product defective? Did it fail to live up to your expectations? Were you not fully informed of the cost of the entertainment? Help me out here.
Would you also like to re-sell your used movie tickets? Or perhaps you would like to re-sell the gourmet meal you just ate in a restaurant? This is known as wanting to "have your cake and eat it, too." Grow up.
Can we just have a special/. category for l33t case-mods? Please? That way I can filter it out completely. This is not a meaningful form of hardware hacking, any more than putting Batman(tm) fins on a Cadillac is automotive hacking.
Re:Short version...
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's cutting it just a bit short. KDevelop now has Ruby bindings... but why? Perhaps because Ruby is gaining momentum and mindshare, which is a good (IMHO) and newsworthy thing.
As for the Python vs. Ruby soapbox: I think it'a a valid component of the news because the two languages are fighting for mindshare in the same pool of savvy OO-script developers.
Without getting into particulars, I must say I've been through Perl, then Python, and now Ruby, and I'm most satisfied with Ruby. Sadly, Ruby folks seem to be so busy doing cool things that they are just awful at evangelizing their language. The language a little bit younger and less polished than Python, but they're catching up fast. The inclusion in KDE is an indication of this progress.
This announcement says that Microsoft has joined the CCIA. Check out the summary of the CCIA's mission at the bottom:
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is a nonprofit membership organization for companies and senior executives from diverse sectors of the computer and communications industry.
CCIA's mission is to further our members' business interests by being the leading industry advocate in promoting open, barrier-free competition in the offering of computer and communications products and services worldwide.
So, now that Microsoft is a member, CCIA is working for them to further their member's business interests. Barrier-free competition means Microsoft shouldn't have to deal with annoying lawsuits.
IMHO, the announcement says the CCIA is now Microsoft's bitch.
Oh, so we're supposed to play a "game" where the owners will be out some serious dough if we can do something in their game that they say is "impossible". And we should trust them that they have made a perfectly unbiased simulator where any action that is physically possible could be performed?
Have you ever seen a rigged game at a carnival? Do you see any similarities in this situation?
Either these guys are running a scam on a bunch of suckers, or they actually do want somebody to prove the Warren Commission correct, because if it can be done then somebody will do it, and then what?
Why, oh why, do I want to step into this? I dunno, it's Monday and I'm cranky, and I've used a few different languages, including LISP, in my time. Forgive me.
when other languages improve, they almost invariably get closer to Lisp
Except in one crucial (and rather obvious) regard: they never adapt the lexical model of LISP. It was an experiment that people have learned from. It is sad that it has taken this long for the power of dynamic languages to re-emerge in popular languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, but better late than never.
...(some say LISP is short for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses). That's a valid point. In C syntax, at least there's variation. Besides parentheses there are curly braces, straight brackets, commas, semicolons, etc. Seriously, the parentheses make for a very simple and consistent syntax.
To me, this sounds like someone trying to justify using binary numbers instead of base ten. I mean, why confuse things with ten arbitrary symbols when two are clearly sufficient? Why not go to base one and shave off another superfluous symbol?
An overly "simple and consistent" syntax does not yield a rich expressive environment for human brains. I do respect LISP as a language, but I'll be damned if I can reliably tell the difference between a string of 8 parentheses and a string of 9 without interactive editor support, and that seriously hampers code legibility. LISP also fails its readers by imposing prefix notation for every operation. If that's how we taught math from the first grade on up, and if talked like Yoda we all did, that would be great. The language should be adapted to my mind's kinks, not vice versa.
I don't fast forward on my TiVo, I use the 30-second skip button. That's the easter egg you access by pressing "SELECT PLAY SELECT 3 0 SELECT", which makes the "->|" button into something useful. Six clicks on the skip button and 3 minutes of commercials are excised with barely a moment's distraction. Yeah, I have to use the 10-second backskip once or twice, but it still beats straining to watch ultra-fast video looking for the end of the adverts.
If they ever take this away, the TiVo's go in the trash (figuratively) and MythTV will probably be the new option.
I use relatively tight network security and I haven't noticed any problems with this new client from United Devices. It certainly doesn't need to have port 443 open.
Back to Folding@Home for me!
In fact, it's a hell of a lot better behaved than Folding@Home, in terms of only grabbing the "unused" cycles from my PC. I thought BOINC was reasonably good, but it's still rather immature, and the folks at SETI@Home seem to encounter one disaster after another. Frankly, I think they've got more CPUs than they can handle. Projects related to human health seem like a much more fruitful investment, IMHO.
Interesting note: If you follow the links to the United Devices site, you will see that they boast about having folks from both SETI@Home and distributed.net on their staff.
Amen, brother. This is one of the most pathetic articles yet. I can get more useful techie information reading the back of my cereal box.
Can we have a referendum on Slashdot editors today? After all, it's election day in America. Cast your votes, my Slashdot brethren. Click your mouse and be counted: In or out? Toss the poseurs, or give 'em another chance?
Delicious quote in the parent, and so timely. Sadly, I don't expect any presidential candidate (with a prayer of being elected) to further our understanding of war.
A classic must read: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. This will give you a deeper understanding of the core mechanics of groups that are willing to sacrifice lives "for a cause". That goes for radical Islam and also for America.
Why not put a 1000 simple sensors plus one small "aggregator" in each fingertip? Then reduce 1000 inputs down to one digital datastream on one wire. Add another aggregator in each hand to do the same for all the nearby fingertips. Repeat design pattern ad infinitum.
Human biology evolved very thin "wires" (neurons) that do a full homerun to the CPU, but we are not constrained to emulate that design.
Slashdot Mirror
"loose = advective, opposite of tight."
What's an "advective"?
People who can't spell shouldn't pick on other people's grammar.
IANAMD. From my understanding of it, having attended a couple of presentations by a prominent Alzheimer's researcher in Boston, the accumulation of amyloid plaques takes up greater and greater space in the volumes between neurons. This destroys existing links between neurons (physically tearing them apart), impedes the formation of new links, and eventually results in the death of neurons. Those neurons and links, particularly in the hippocampus, are the basis of your memories. Once they're gone, they don't come back magically.
If you can flush out the plaques, then the (surviving) neurons and links go back to more normal functioning, meaning a patient should be able to learn and form memories again. This rejuvenation has been demonstrated in mice, using cognitive tests (maze-learning) and in vivo observations showing visible before-and-after improvements in the structure of the neurons.
What do I call it? Dermi-Spam (tm)
Been trying out GoLive vs. Dreamweaver for the last two weeks. GoLive is such an obvious ripoff of Dreamweaver, except that the GoLive GUI is a complete rat's nest, and it crashes. I expected much better from Adobe. I guess they had to whip up something way too fast to round out their application suite.
Go see him play sometime... then tell me he is some kind of "lamer"
I watched him "play" against noobs at CES in Las Vegas last January. It was like watching a fully-loaded freight train play with a cardboard box. Although grimly amusing, I was less than impressed. The challengers were uniformly clueless about the map and their keyboard configuration, and they got about 30 seconds of "warm-up" time. Meanwhile, Fatal1ty is fully wired into the game. Fatal1ty would just zoom around the little 1v1 map, snarf up all the weapons and armor in a semi-repetitive cycle and occasionally unload a barrage on the helpless victim. I didn't get any sense of style or grace from this particular demonstration. It was a classic carnival game, but at least they weren't charging for the privilege of being fragged.
In the future, they should pair up two competent players, or give the pro some sort of handicap, e.g. set his initial health to 5. Otherwise, it's about as interesting as watching an exterminator kill bugs with a hammer.
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
"Eh? What? Did you say something?"
Next time, try asking them when you're standing somewhere they can see your lips moving.
So, please drop any notions of "progress" in evolution, and do not assume such notions are held by evolutionary scientists.
ReplayTV was particularly bad with shows that had a lot of dark/low-lit scenes, e.g. Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Every damn show it was the same thing. Half-way through the show ReplayTV would start silently blipping through dark scenes and suddenly you'd be watching the conclusion of the episode wondering if you had missed something (and you had). Then you would navigate back to before the problems began, disable the auto-skip, and watch the rest of the episode with commercials. Getting half an episode without commercials was not worth the aggravation.
TiVo's 30 second skip is good enough for me. It works simply and consistently, and it's under my control.
Hmmm, giant lo-res display? Sounds like a job for MAIM. Having people dance in front of (on top of) your screen would add a certain challenge to all those old video games. Now we just need some giant joysticks!
Putting the actual tapestry through a large drum-scanner would be the ideal solution, but I bet the museum was looking for a slightly gentler process. Seems like the photo-mosaic approach was a decent compromise.
Just remember, if you're travelling with that blob, then you're not the one going so fast, instead it's the rest of the nearby universe that seems to be tearing up the turf.
Of course, there's also the typical Beacon Hill power struggle aspect to this. If Gov. Romney wants OSS, then Democrats must find something to oppose in it. FWIW, I'm a Mass. Dem., but not in Pacheco's district.
I think mandating open formats, if managed thoughtfully to discourage large chunks of inscrutable binary, is a very nice compromise.
DSL is so 1900's, it just isn't worth worrying about. DSL cannot reach far enough to affect all that many Comcast cable customers.
What Comcast is really worried about is Verizon's new fiber rollout, which provides far more bandwidth (15Mbps/2Mbps) for a whole lot of customers at a very reasonable price ($50/mo.).
Steam makes it impossible to sell HL2 once you completed it.
You paid for some entertainment, which you received, and now you want your money back? Was the product defective? Did it fail to live up to your expectations? Were you not fully informed of the cost of the entertainment? Help me out here.
Would you also like to re-sell your used movie tickets? Or perhaps you would like to re-sell the gourmet meal you just ate in a restaurant? This is known as wanting to "have your cake and eat it, too." Grow up.
Can we just have a special /. category for l33t case-mods? Please? That way I can filter it out completely. This is not a meaningful form of hardware hacking, any more than putting Batman(tm) fins on a Cadillac is automotive hacking.
That's cutting it just a bit short. KDevelop now has Ruby bindings... but why? Perhaps because Ruby is gaining momentum and mindshare, which is a good (IMHO) and newsworthy thing.
As for the Python vs. Ruby soapbox: I think it'a a valid component of the news because the two languages are fighting for mindshare in the same pool of savvy OO-script developers.
Without getting into particulars, I must say I've been through Perl, then Python, and now Ruby, and I'm most satisfied with Ruby. Sadly, Ruby folks seem to be so busy doing cool things that they are just awful at evangelizing their language. The language a little bit younger and less polished than Python, but they're catching up fast. The inclusion in KDE is an indication of this progress.
So, now that Microsoft is a member, CCIA is working for them to further their member's business interests. Barrier-free competition means Microsoft shouldn't have to deal with annoying lawsuits.
IMHO, the announcement says the CCIA is now Microsoft's bitch.
Oh, so we're supposed to play a "game" where the owners will be out some serious dough if we can do something in their game that they say is "impossible". And we should trust them that they have made a perfectly unbiased simulator where any action that is physically possible could be performed?
Have you ever seen a rigged game at a carnival? Do you see any similarities in this situation?
Either these guys are running a scam on a bunch of suckers, or they actually do want somebody to prove the Warren Commission correct, because if it can be done then somebody will do it, and then what?
Why, oh why, do I want to step into this? I dunno, it's Monday and I'm cranky, and I've used a few different languages, including LISP, in my time. Forgive me.
...(some say LISP is short for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses). That's a valid point. In C syntax, at least there's variation. Besides parentheses there are curly braces, straight brackets, commas, semicolons, etc. Seriously, the parentheses make for a very simple and consistent syntax.
when other languages improve, they almost invariably get closer to Lisp
Except in one crucial (and rather obvious) regard: they never adapt the lexical model of LISP. It was an experiment that people have learned from. It is sad that it has taken this long for the power of dynamic languages to re-emerge in popular languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, but better late than never.
To me, this sounds like someone trying to justify using binary numbers instead of base ten. I mean, why confuse things with ten arbitrary symbols when two are clearly sufficient? Why not go to base one and shave off another superfluous symbol?
An overly "simple and consistent" syntax does not yield a rich expressive environment for human brains. I do respect LISP as a language, but I'll be damned if I can reliably tell the difference between a string of 8 parentheses and a string of 9 without interactive editor support, and that seriously hampers code legibility. LISP also fails its readers by imposing prefix notation for every operation. If that's how we taught math from the first grade on up, and if talked like Yoda we all did, that would be great. The language should be adapted to my mind's kinks, not vice versa.
I don't fast forward on my TiVo, I use the 30-second skip button. That's the easter egg you access by pressing "SELECT PLAY SELECT 3 0 SELECT", which makes the "->|" button into something useful. Six clicks on the skip button and 3 minutes of commercials are excised with barely a moment's distraction. Yeah, I have to use the 10-second backskip once or twice, but it still beats straining to watch ultra-fast video looking for the end of the adverts.
If they ever take this away, the TiVo's go in the trash (figuratively) and MythTV will probably be the new option.
willy-nilly connect over SSL ports (443)
I use relatively tight network security and I haven't noticed any problems with this new client from United Devices. It certainly doesn't need to have port 443 open.
Back to Folding@Home for me!
In fact, it's a hell of a lot better behaved than Folding@Home, in terms of only grabbing the "unused" cycles from my PC. I thought BOINC was reasonably good, but it's still rather immature, and the folks at SETI@Home seem to encounter one disaster after another. Frankly, I think they've got more CPUs than they can handle. Projects related to human health seem like a much more fruitful investment, IMHO.
Interesting note: If you follow the links to the United Devices site, you will see that they boast about having folks from both SETI@Home and distributed.net on their staff.
Slashdot just isn't aimed at us anymore
Amen, brother. This is one of the most pathetic articles yet. I can get more useful techie information reading the back of my cereal box.
Can we have a referendum on Slashdot editors today? After all, it's election day in America. Cast your votes, my Slashdot brethren. Click your mouse and be counted: In or out? Toss the poseurs, or give 'em another chance?
Delicious quote in the parent, and so timely. Sadly, I don't expect any presidential candidate (with a prayer of being elected) to further our understanding of war.
A classic must read: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. This will give you a deeper understanding of the core mechanics of groups that are willing to sacrifice lives "for a cause". That goes for radical Islam and also for America.
Why not put a 1000 simple sensors plus one small "aggregator" in each fingertip? Then reduce 1000 inputs down to one digital datastream on one wire. Add another aggregator in each hand to do the same for all the nearby fingertips. Repeat design pattern ad infinitum.
Human biology evolved very thin "wires" (neurons) that do a full homerun to the CPU, but we are not constrained to emulate that design.