"Hepatitis A is mainly transmitted through contact with contaminated feces... which can be carried to the mouth. This can happen through swallowing food or water that has been in contact with infected faeces or when using the toilet and not properly washing hands afterwards."
The rates are not extraordinarily high. On the order of a thousand cases in New York a year, similar in other large cities. Surprisingly low in Denver. People generally recover from Hep A... but it's much, much worse than the flu.
Don't lick a toilet.
Hepatitis B is spread through contact with bodily fluids. You can get it by sharing toothbrushes. Hep B carriers (1-12% of total cases) are contagious for life.
Women menstruate. Some people have hemmrhoids. People with herpes have open sores around the crotch... you won't catch herpes from a toilet seat, but open sores leave body fluids on the seat, which can transmit Hep B. Don't lick a toilet.
Don't kid yourself about hepatitis transmission... it's surprisingly contagious in certain situations.
"Cholera? Dear ghod - when did you last work in a doctor's office?"
During the mandatory Canadian Doctor's Office work program that all Canucks enter when they reach the age of majority.
I'm kidding. I've never worked in a doctor's office. I wasn't aware the majority of the population had.
More seriously...
"It's been wiped out in America to the point that there is no vaccine made anymore."
I expect that's true. According to this study, the current rate of influenza is in an environment of bad sanitary practices in offices. Our relatively good bathroom habits have reduced the level of cholera to almost nil. We don't lick toilets, after all.
If being careless about the flu and careful about cholera lead to the same rate of fatality, I'd suppose that cholera is more dangerous, and we should continue being careful about cholera. That's just me. So cholera is one of the many reasons I wouldn't lick a toilet.
All that said, clearly you shouldn't lick a desk either!
"Don't worry, it's just your mailing address, name, and your phone number. Telus swears they're not selling your email address but I wonder how much longer before they start to use that as a cashable asset?"
Why would Telus do that? I doubt the amount Telus could get for those addresses would be enough to compensate for the extra load on the Telus mail servers and pipes.
What do you do when someone slips right in front of you? Sometimes you laugh. Falling can be funny. You're not saying "haha, you walk very badly, I walk much better than you." Everyone falls down sometimes.
Indeed, people who are incapable of walking without falling are not funny. They are sad.
The point of my post was the micropayments bit. Hence the subject "money fairies." A Penny Arcade reference usually works on/.
Relying on advertising to fund a new medium doesn't work very well anymore. There are too many advertisments out there, too much mindspace to control. It's as unreliable as micropayments.
There are ads in traditional comics... but comics aren't free. There are ads on cable TV... but cable TV is not free. There are ads on the bus stops... but the bus is not free.
There probably will be advertising in these comics, but you're still going to have to pay.
"the toilet seat probably has a variety of common surface bacteria such as staph plus yeast and maybe a bit of coliform..."
Probably is the key word. Danger is directly proportional to the product of how likely something is to happen AND how bad it is for you when it does. AIDS is more dangerous than the vastly more common herpes. Contrariwise, being shot is so common that it is more dangerous than our sun going nova.
If you lick a desk, you may well get the flu, or the common cold. If you lick a toilet seat, you probably won't get anything, but you might get cholera or hepatitis. Cholera's particularly nasty here... when someone has fatal runs, it isn't just the ass cheeks that might cause contamination. There's a great deal of dribbling and spurting.
Yes.... since it is impossible for a human being to survive without many of these bacteria, the question of what is "part of your body" is subtle.
It goes futher than symbiotic bacterial cells with their own genetic futures. Mitochondria may have originated as separate organisms that evolved to exist symbiotically inside a larger cell... mitochondrial DNA is separate from nuclear DNA. Mitochondria cannot be produced by cells de novo.
It would be foolish to say that only the parts of a cell which are created by genomic DNA are human. Our animal cells cannot function without mitochondria.
The bacteria are not the stonework or metalwork of our bodies' cities, though. A closer metaphor would be that a country is a body made up of humans as cells, and that the animals which support each person are the bacteria that outnumber the cells. America is a country made up of people, not cows.... but it survives by consuming dozens of cows per person every year. Rats eat our garbage.... that is, intestinal bacteria eat our digestive waste. Etc.
A body without bacteria is no more desirable than a country without non-human animals. It's beyond silly.
"although the game points you to Death Mountain after completing the Forest Temple, you can actually complete the Water Temple first."
Moreover, there's no particular reason at all to complete the Shadow Temple before the Spirit Temple. Indeed, the first time I played the game, I only realized after the spirit temple that I'd done them in the "wrong" order and had to go "back" to find one because of the order on the medallion chart.
"And of course all the Zelda games (except maybe II) have had little things like extra equipment and heart pieces scattered around to find outside the "main" sequence."
In Majora's Mask, the number of masks is so great that it completely destroys the notion of linearity... it's nothing like clear whethr helping a certain townsperson will be necessary to move forward in the dungeons or not. Great fun, because you're never really stuck, and the gameplay varies so much.
I've used them for that purpose. So what, you want ATI to give us the open-source driver without ANY comments?
That's practically no use at all. The backlash from the open-source community would be enormous. It would take years to work from that. Remember that the catalyst drivers are for many, many chipsets, integrated into one. Many assignment codes for different chipset capabilities would be gibberish without the documentation.
If you can make a program to eliminate only secret comments, though, and let all the others through, I expect the same program will be able to run and win the Loebner Prize. As far as I know, the only way to figure out if there are any trade secrets in the comments is to have humans read them.
Remember that secret comments are not prefaced with "// THIS IS A SECRET:" They're only secrets for a little while. The engineers who wrote the code may not have really known it was a secret. There may be no secrets at all! But if I were a non-coding executive, I'd be worried, and I might doubt the advisability of open-sourcing it for little or no gain for my company.
On the other hand, if I were starting a new company, I'd set a policy of making all comments open-safe, in case we wanted to open-source the drivers, or in case a court-order required that we expose our code to legal scrutiny.
Aha, um, yes. Perhaps I did when I first heard it. I've had so many names since then... nations have risen and fallen, leaving only dust in their wake.
Perhaps if, instead of a statue of himself to stand as immortal tribute, Ozymandias had merely released a tasty urban legend about himself, he'd be as well-remembered as Catherine the Great.
I don't laugh about the horse thing anymore, either... or at least mostly. There are certain videos...
It isn't just about stelaing the technology. ATI and nVidia both have support for future features in their drivers. For example, nVidia just added PCIX support to their detonator drivers, even without any available cards on the market which need it.
Imagine actually looking at the comments of code that's designed for internal use at ATI... this goes way beyond reverse engineering. I'm sure the code for the drivers says all sorts of helpful things like "we use a 24-bit number here because we've committed to 24-bit floating point for the R-V4xx line in the forseeable future..."
That's a naive and simple example, but it demonstrates the concept. There's way more in that code than just the variables and algorithms you get from reverse-engineering. Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.
Once you have that information, sure, it's too late to incorporate it into your cards. nVidia isn't going to say "cancel the tape-out! we just read the comments in the new open-source driver!" But it might give their marketing people a lead on how to spin things. Open-source mean openness in more than source, and I can understand any conventional company being loathe to give in to that.
I can only think of one instance. The official word from Sierra was that Quest for Glory V was only developed because of enormous fan support in the form of letters, faxes, and e-mails.
Of course, that was before people got so blase about these things. It's like running a hunger strike these days, instead of the sixties; nobody pays attention.
Oh sure, when you're first fighting over a piece of territory, the value of Mechs vs. tanks is arguable... but which do you think the U.S. army would rather have had AFTER the battle?
A mech could, quite reasonably, lift parts of fallen buildings to rescue people, disassemble roadblocks, dig irrigation canals, replace pipes...
As with human bipedalism, the advantage would be adaptablity. Three fingered hands alone would be able to handle very large custom tools like shovels, as well as any debri that happened to be lying around.
Of course, you could just give a tank robot arms if you felt like it... but then you'd need a raised cockpit or shoulder assembly to be able to use those arms in a decent range of motion. Mech on treads. Whee.
The point is, with this adaptability and the increase in labor efficiency, you're not just replacing a tank. You're replacing a tank, a group of six marines doing manual labor, a steamshovel, a forklift... and what you get in return is a forklift/steamshovel/work team/tank with nightvision, radar, gps, etc. Much, much more reasonable than duplicating those features in each one of those tools...
This would primarily be useful in the first few days after the U.S. sweeps in somewhere because of course commodity bulldozers are very cheap, compared to a battle machine, but as the last war showed, people have more and more come to expect the U.S. to have the entire territory that's been damaged repaired within a week. When your genuine bulldozers have to follow five days behind the advance sweeping in somewhere, you can't even begin reapirs until a week after securing the area.
These days, the stumbling block for an adventure game is not the programming, it's the art. Halo could get away with thousands of identical hallways. A good adventure game needs new art assets for every single scene.
It's very much like producing an animated movie, except that you also have to script everything, and put in funny descriptions should the player choose to try the rasp on everything he can see...
" Why is it that whenever Nintendo zealots give their list of games, they include every single game Nintendo has ever made?"
He didn't... he only listed the good ones, and those are the only ones you've heard of or remember. Simple.
Luigi's Mansion isn't on that list... fun it might have been, but it was basically a tech demo. Offensive that it was full price.
If you want a real stinker, go back to something like Yoshi's Safari, Yoshi's Story, or Paper Mario. Shudder. Some will tell you Paper Mario was pretty good... I don't know if these people are thick in the head or don't know about Super Mario RPG or what.
" Is Nintendo REALLY 100% infallible, that every title they have ever produced is SO great that everyone 'must own' it?"
They aren't infallible, but you know what I never hear about Nintendo? I never hear "The game sucked because it was rushed to market." I don't hear, as I did of Beyond Good and Evil "The game would have been better if the heroine's personality and appearance hadn't been changed at the last second for market reasons."
As far as I can tell, they give their teams as long as it takes to do a new game. If the game isn't working out, they kill it and move on.
That seems to work pretty well, huh?
Further, when soemthing really IS bad, like Yoshi's Story, Nintendo is pretty good at making it disappear. The biggest black eye Nintendo has is the virtual boy... other failures don't come up much.
And in the bigger scheme of things, he said, it doesn't really matter if people push a working button. "The public is going to get the walk signal regardless," he said. "I guess that's the point. There's no harm in having it at the locations."
Where disease transmission vectors are concerned, a walk button is rather dangerous. Everyone who comes to the intersection pushes... some just in case the others forgot, others because there's a belief that the computer monitors and responds to the number of pedestrians.
So as many as forty people hit the same tiny area within a short period of time, then stand about waiting for the light to change. While waiting, they probably relax by rubbing their faces, as people do.
Bad, bad news. It begs for an epidemiological grad thesis... how many fewer colds might there be for the minor price tag of $1 million to remove the buttons?
Maybe they could save on that price tag by, instead of removing the buttons and filling in the hole in the post, instead changing the signs to read "Do not press button."
There ought to be more do not press buttons in life... and eventually people would be tired of pushing it just to see what happens.
" The Famicom (Japanese version of the NES) was apparently in production from 1983 to 2003. I think Neo-Geo was actually availible in 1989, or at least that's the earliest game copyright dates for the system."
But certainly, no major games were published for the NES just before it was shut down in 2003. The production was for people who wanted to continue playing older games.
The Neo-Geo still had some of the best-honed series around being produced for it. The games were selling.
Perhaps a system like this explains how the Old Republic, despite being a spacefaring civilisation, could have such flickering fuzzy 3-D communicators.
"there's a very good chance that the brain will eventually make sense of it."
It's almost guaranteed... long, long before we could put chips in brains, there were experiments with hooking a video monitor up to a matrix of pins on the skin of the back.
The pixels of the video were transformed into electrical impulses which prickled the back. This was 70s era research, so naturally the computer involved was huge... the person was tethered, with a large and heavy camera helmet.
In any case, blind people were able to learn to "see" through this method. They didn't get the normal visual impression we do... the brain wasn't turning it into a picture. But it wasn't long before the person could move around the room based on this mechanical sense alone... reach for a ball, avoid a wall...
Resolution was pitifully low... the back can't feel much more than a 20x20 matrix. Still, it shows quite clearly that the brain can pick up strange information and just rely on it.
The real problem here is that the game lampoons science that neither the game's authors nor the game's users understand well enough to fairly and impartially evaluate. To "bring it home" to Slashdot, it would be as if a game depicted a computer running linux as a slow and unfriendly old VAX/VMS machine with a command prompt reading
"$ Hey let's pirate some songs, write a few viruses and h4x0r a bank's network! >"
You have a reasonable point, but to be fair to the authors of the game, the point isn't that the science is wrong... the point is that it's funny to imagine the helpless animals so many people cry about suddenly turning the tables. Indeed, it's the classic "the worm turns" story, so I'll make that the subject of this post. Underdogs, poor huddling little creatures, now ironically freed due to the powers given to them by the very research that was such hell.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with the science, and if anything, it cuts against the animal-rights protestors just as hard... if these animals were really free to do what they wanted, they'd exact a horrible, and very human, revenge. You wouldn't just watch them hop out into the field and make love in the clover.
Artists. It remains the best solution for many art tasks... at least in theory. The implementation stinks, but only because of the weight, heat, and cost issues. Serious problems, but not insoluble in the future.
A sketchbook with unlimited colors, the thousands of tools available in Photoshop, Illustrator, and such, the ability to undo a mistake, to work on a sketch for as long as you like without wearing out the paper....
Yeah, sure sign me up for that. Art can be fantastically frustrating in that to do a colour work away from the studio, I need to carry a drawing surface, my colours, and supporting tools like blenders. There's the weight, the bulk, and the chance of ruining my clothes.
A tablet is clean, small, and I can carry it while I'm wearing a suit.
PCs are tied to the desk... conventional tablets have the screen/drawing surface disconnect... PDAs have small screens, low resolution, are slow, don't have the software, and most of all aren't pressure sensitive.
It's true, though, that I can't understand the MS marketing on this AT ALL. They're selling to completely the wrong market. Someone who already spends a couple thousand a year on art supplies may well pop for a tablet instead of a laptop, saving some money and working digitally at the start.... but competing with a pad of paper for scribbled notes? Insane. A napkin works better, and that's free.
Re:See a doctor
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Whilst that's undoubtedly true, a lot of (mostly male) people are reluctant to visit their doctor, for a number of reasons. For men it usually comes down to macho "I'm fine, really" attitudes,
Very much so. And the "I'm fine, really" attitude can be a major problem. Checking whether a pain in your gut should be there or not can be an important factor... it may be the website says "All clear." It may also be that the spot you've indicated means "Get to the damn hospital now."
Two particularly scary problems one can have are
a) Partial vision loss. If a friend has ever had this as the result of a migraine, you might assume that's all it is. If it's an aneurysm, though, and you don't treat it... big trouble.
b) Epidydimitis. Every man sits down wrong as squeezes his testicles in his jeans once in his life. They hurt for a while, then it stops. A person who has testicular pain may chalk it up to that... but if it lasts two hours, it's time to visit the hospital. Wait much longer, and the pain becomes intense to the point of requiring morphine and may cause sterility.
This is exactly the sort of thing the internet is useful for... so that we don't have to have warning labels on our pants. "Warning, if you experience testicular pain, do not assume it is due to wearing a size too small to you. Visit the doctor. Flashy colours may induce epileptic seizures."
Slashdot Mirror
The rates are not extraordinarily high. On the order of a thousand cases in New York a year, similar in other large cities. Surprisingly low in Denver. People generally recover from Hep A... but it's much, much worse than the flu.
Don't lick a toilet.
Hepatitis B is spread through contact with bodily fluids. You can get it by sharing toothbrushes. Hep B carriers (1-12% of total cases) are contagious for life.
Women menstruate. Some people have hemmrhoids. People with herpes have open sores around the crotch... you won't catch herpes from a toilet seat, but open sores leave body fluids on the seat, which can transmit Hep B. Don't lick a toilet.
Don't kid yourself about hepatitis transmission... it's surprisingly contagious in certain situations.
"Cholera? Dear ghod - when did you last work in a doctor's office?"
During the mandatory Canadian Doctor's Office work program that all Canucks enter when they reach the age of majority.
I'm kidding. I've never worked in a doctor's office. I wasn't aware the majority of the population had.
More seriously...
"It's been wiped out in America to the point that there is no vaccine made anymore."
The vaccine is still made for travel purposes and of course, they still need it in Africa. It's true that cases are rare in the United States.
"It's not far off from influenza in fatality."
I expect that's true. According to this study, the current rate of influenza is in an environment of bad sanitary practices in offices. Our relatively good bathroom habits have reduced the level of cholera to almost nil. We don't lick toilets, after all.
If being careless about the flu and careful about cholera lead to the same rate of fatality, I'd suppose that cholera is more dangerous, and we should continue being careful about cholera. That's just me. So cholera is one of the many reasons I wouldn't lick a toilet.
All that said, clearly you shouldn't lick a desk either!
Why would Telus do that? I doubt the amount Telus could get for those addresses would be enough to compensate for the extra load on the Telus mail servers and pipes.
Indeed, people who are incapable of walking without falling are not funny. They are sad.
The point of my post was the micropayments bit. Hence the subject "money fairies." A Penny Arcade reference usually works on /.
Relying on advertising to fund a new medium doesn't work very well anymore. There are too many advertisments out there, too much mindspace to control. It's as unreliable as micropayments.
There are ads in traditional comics... but comics aren't free. There are ads on cable TV... but cable TV is not free. There are ads on the bus stops... but the bus is not free.
There probably will be advertising in these comics, but you're still going to have to pay.
As opposed to the possibility that it could be driven by ads being a chickensaurus?
I think they should make the cartridges really, really small, so we can use micropayments.
Probably is the key word. Danger is directly proportional to the product of how likely something is to happen AND how bad it is for you when it does. AIDS is more dangerous than the vastly more common herpes. Contrariwise, being shot is so common that it is more dangerous than our sun going nova.
If you lick a desk, you may well get the flu, or the common cold. If you lick a toilet seat, you probably won't get anything, but you might get cholera or hepatitis. Cholera's particularly nasty here... when someone has fatal runs, it isn't just the ass cheeks that might cause contamination. There's a great deal of dribbling and spurting.
I'll stick to desks.
It goes futher than symbiotic bacterial cells with their own genetic futures. Mitochondria may have originated as separate organisms that evolved to exist symbiotically inside a larger cell... mitochondrial DNA is separate from nuclear DNA. Mitochondria cannot be produced by cells de novo.
It would be foolish to say that only the parts of a cell which are created by genomic DNA are human. Our animal cells cannot function without mitochondria.
The bacteria are not the stonework or metalwork of our bodies' cities, though. A closer metaphor would be that a country is a body made up of humans as cells, and that the animals which support each person are the bacteria that outnumber the cells. America is a country made up of people, not cows.... but it survives by consuming dozens of cows per person every year. Rats eat our garbage.... that is, intestinal bacteria eat our digestive waste. Etc.
A body without bacteria is no more desirable than a country without non-human animals. It's beyond silly.
Moreover, there's no particular reason at all to complete the Shadow Temple before the Spirit Temple. Indeed, the first time I played the game, I only realized after the spirit temple that I'd done them in the "wrong" order and had to go "back" to find one because of the order on the medallion chart.
"And of course all the Zelda games (except maybe II) have had little things like extra equipment and heart pieces scattered around to find outside the "main" sequence."
In Majora's Mask, the number of masks is so great that it completely destroys the notion of linearity... it's nothing like clear whethr helping a certain townsperson will be necessary to move forward in the dungeons or not. Great fun, because you're never really stuck, and the gameplay varies so much.
That's practically no use at all. The backlash from the open-source community would be enormous. It would take years to work from that. Remember that the catalyst drivers are for many, many chipsets, integrated into one. Many assignment codes for different chipset capabilities would be gibberish without the documentation.
If you can make a program to eliminate only secret comments, though, and let all the others through, I expect the same program will be able to run and win the Loebner Prize. As far as I know, the only way to figure out if there are any trade secrets in the comments is to have humans read them.
Remember that secret comments are not prefaced with "// THIS IS A SECRET:" They're only secrets for a little while. The engineers who wrote the code may not have really known it was a secret. There may be no secrets at all! But if I were a non-coding executive, I'd be worried, and I might doubt the advisability of open-sourcing it for little or no gain for my company.
On the other hand, if I were starting a new company, I'd set a policy of making all comments open-safe, in case we wanted to open-source the drivers, or in case a court-order required that we expose our code to legal scrutiny.
It won't be long before you don't cast a shadow either.
Perhaps if, instead of a statue of himself to stand as immortal tribute, Ozymandias had merely released a tasty urban legend about himself, he'd be as well-remembered as Catherine the Great.
I don't laugh about the horse thing anymore, either... or at least mostly. There are certain videos...
Imagine actually looking at the comments of code that's designed for internal use at ATI... this goes way beyond reverse engineering. I'm sure the code for the drivers says all sorts of helpful things like "we use a 24-bit number here because we've committed to 24-bit floating point for the R-V4xx line in the forseeable future..."
That's a naive and simple example, but it demonstrates the concept. There's way more in that code than just the variables and algorithms you get from reverse-engineering. Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.
Once you have that information, sure, it's too late to incorporate it into your cards. nVidia isn't going to say "cancel the tape-out! we just read the comments in the new open-source driver!" But it might give their marketing people a lead on how to spin things. Open-source mean openness in more than source, and I can understand any conventional company being loathe to give in to that.
Of course, that was before people got so blase about these things. It's like running a hunger strike these days, instead of the sixties; nobody pays attention.
Also, Quest for Glory V sucked, and sold badly.
A mech could, quite reasonably, lift parts of fallen buildings to rescue people, disassemble roadblocks, dig irrigation canals, replace pipes...
As with human bipedalism, the advantage would be adaptablity. Three fingered hands alone would be able to handle very large custom tools like shovels, as well as any debri that happened to be lying around.
Of course, you could just give a tank robot arms if you felt like it... but then you'd need a raised cockpit or shoulder assembly to be able to use those arms in a decent range of motion. Mech on treads. Whee.
The point is, with this adaptability and the increase in labor efficiency, you're not just replacing a tank. You're replacing a tank, a group of six marines doing manual labor, a steamshovel, a forklift... and what you get in return is a forklift/steamshovel/work team/tank with nightvision, radar, gps, etc. Much, much more reasonable than duplicating those features in each one of those tools...
This would primarily be useful in the first few days after the U.S. sweeps in somewhere because of course commodity bulldozers are very cheap, compared to a battle machine, but as the last war showed, people have more and more come to expect the U.S. to have the entire territory that's been damaged repaired within a week. When your genuine bulldozers have to follow five days behind the advance sweeping in somewhere, you can't even begin reapirs until a week after securing the area.
It's very much like producing an animated movie, except that you also have to script everything, and put in funny descriptions should the player choose to try the rasp on everything he can see...
And enormous task.
I suppose Japanese AIBO already does.
In this climate though, an American robot had damn well better know how to salute!
He didn't... he only listed the good ones, and those are the only ones you've heard of or remember. Simple.
Luigi's Mansion isn't on that list... fun it might have been, but it was basically a tech demo. Offensive that it was full price.
If you want a real stinker, go back to something like Yoshi's Safari, Yoshi's Story, or Paper Mario. Shudder. Some will tell you Paper Mario was pretty good... I don't know if these people are thick in the head or don't know about Super Mario RPG or what.
" Is Nintendo REALLY 100% infallible, that every title they have ever produced is SO great that everyone 'must own' it?"
They aren't infallible, but you know what I never hear about Nintendo? I never hear "The game sucked because it was rushed to market." I don't hear, as I did of Beyond Good and Evil "The game would have been better if the heroine's personality and appearance hadn't been changed at the last second for market reasons."
As far as I can tell, they give their teams as long as it takes to do a new game. If the game isn't working out, they kill it and move on.
That seems to work pretty well, huh?
Further, when soemthing really IS bad, like Yoshi's Story, Nintendo is pretty good at making it disappear. The biggest black eye Nintendo has is the virtual boy... other failures don't come up much.
Where disease transmission vectors are concerned, a walk button is rather dangerous. Everyone who comes to the intersection pushes... some just in case the others forgot, others because there's a belief that the computer monitors and responds to the number of pedestrians.
So as many as forty people hit the same tiny area within a short period of time, then stand about waiting for the light to change. While waiting, they probably relax by rubbing their faces, as people do.
Bad, bad news. It begs for an epidemiological grad thesis... how many fewer colds might there be for the minor price tag of $1 million to remove the buttons?
Maybe they could save on that price tag by, instead of removing the buttons and filling in the hole in the post, instead changing the signs to read "Do not press button."
There ought to be more do not press buttons in life... and eventually people would be tired of pushing it just to see what happens.
Sacagawea dollar.
Now a serious mumistmatist will tell me that King Louis the Very Small was on a french coin in 1712.
But certainly, no major games were published for the NES just before it was shut down in 2003. The production was for people who wanted to continue playing older games.
The Neo-Geo still had some of the best-honed series around being produced for it. The games were selling.
It's just strobe interference with the cameras!
That's just what I was wondering.
It's almost guaranteed... long, long before we could put chips in brains, there were experiments with hooking a video monitor up to a matrix of pins on the skin of the back.
The pixels of the video were transformed into electrical impulses which prickled the back. This was 70s era research, so naturally the computer involved was huge... the person was tethered, with a large and heavy camera helmet.
In any case, blind people were able to learn to "see" through this method. They didn't get the normal visual impression we do... the brain wasn't turning it into a picture. But it wasn't long before the person could move around the room based on this mechanical sense alone... reach for a ball, avoid a wall...
Resolution was pitifully low... the back can't feel much more than a 20x20 matrix. Still, it shows quite clearly that the brain can pick up strange information and just rely on it.
You have a reasonable point, but to be fair to the authors of the game, the point isn't that the science is wrong... the point is that it's funny to imagine the helpless animals so many people cry about suddenly turning the tables. Indeed, it's the classic "the worm turns" story, so I'll make that the subject of this post. Underdogs, poor huddling little creatures, now ironically freed due to the powers given to them by the very research that was such hell.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with the science, and if anything, it cuts against the animal-rights protestors just as hard... if these animals were really free to do what they wanted, they'd exact a horrible, and very human, revenge. You wouldn't just watch them hop out into the field and make love in the clover.
A sketchbook with unlimited colors, the thousands of tools available in Photoshop, Illustrator, and such, the ability to undo a mistake, to work on a sketch for as long as you like without wearing out the paper....
Yeah, sure sign me up for that. Art can be fantastically frustrating in that to do a colour work away from the studio, I need to carry a drawing surface, my colours, and supporting tools like blenders. There's the weight, the bulk, and the chance of ruining my clothes.
A tablet is clean, small, and I can carry it while I'm wearing a suit.
PCs are tied to the desk... conventional tablets have the screen/drawing surface disconnect... PDAs have small screens, low resolution, are slow, don't have the software, and most of all aren't pressure sensitive.
It's true, though, that I can't understand the MS marketing on this AT ALL. They're selling to completely the wrong market. Someone who already spends a couple thousand a year on art supplies may well pop for a tablet instead of a laptop, saving some money and working digitally at the start.... but competing with a pad of paper for scribbled notes? Insane. A napkin works better, and that's free.
Very much so. And the "I'm fine, really" attitude can be a major problem. Checking whether a pain in your gut should be there or not can be an important factor... it may be the website says "All clear." It may also be that the spot you've indicated means "Get to the damn hospital now."
Two particularly scary problems one can have are
a) Partial vision loss. If a friend has ever had this as the result of a migraine, you might assume that's all it is. If it's an aneurysm, though, and you don't treat it... big trouble.
b) Epidydimitis. Every man sits down wrong as squeezes his testicles in his jeans once in his life. They hurt for a while, then it stops. A person who has testicular pain may chalk it up to that... but if it lasts two hours, it's time to visit the hospital. Wait much longer, and the pain becomes intense to the point of requiring morphine and may cause sterility.
This is exactly the sort of thing the internet is useful for... so that we don't have to have warning labels on our pants. "Warning, if you experience testicular pain, do not assume it is due to wearing a size too small to you. Visit the doctor. Flashy colours may induce epileptic seizures."