So, theoreticaly, I could greatly enhance my lifespan simply by sleeping more, avoiding stress, and never exercising?
Actually, we already know one thing that reliably produces a substantial increase in life span in every species that has been tested. Starve yourself! A severe calorie-restricted diet increases longevity. We may be sneering at those supermodels now, but they'll be laughing at us when we're all in our graves!
And this is why it can't be stopped. Because there are people who desperately need this technology. But once you have it, the definition of "sick" becomes very slippery. Discover a gene polymorphism that prevents you from having perfect pitch? Congratulations! You've just discovered "Pitch Perception Syndrome." Let's cure it!
You might also conduct studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments [npr.org] which were begun with the understanding that the subjects would be black because black men are naturally more lascivious than white men, and therefore more likely to have syphilis.
Actually, no. At the time of the Tuskegee experiments, the accepted medical wisdom was that black men could not get tertiary (brain syphillis) because their brains were so underdeveloped, so there was no need to treat them to prevent this complication. The experiment was started by relatively progressive doctors who didn't believe this notion, and wanted to prove this incorrect so as to improve the treatment of black people for syphilis. So the "no treatment" group was actually getting the accepted standard of care for the time. Unfortunately, the experiment took on its own momentum (the "we've come this far" syndrome), and was continued long after the "primitive nervous system" notion had been generally abandoned as the racist crap that it was.
However, there is a lot of diversity in the human population. Changing a few nucleotides here and there is going to have negligible impact, short of large-scale cloning. Although we probably should be very careful when it comes to mucking around with the imune system.
This is the usual wide-eyed optimism that one encounters with new technology. Evolution is pretty good at optimising things. If there is a simple modification, such increasing the expression of an existing gene, that improves performance with no risk, then most of us would have it already. Adding significant new abilities is going to be hard--you aren't going to be able to do it by over/under expressing a gene that you already have--you are going to have to add a significantly different gene (octopus genes, anyone?). So what we are going to discover is that such enhancements are no different than enhancing performance with drugs--it works sometimes, but there are signifcant risks and side effects, many of them not immediately obvious. And safety testing is going to be a bear--much worse than for drugs, because you can simply stop taking a drug if you get a side-effect. But that gene is in you for life. Even with drugs, it takes a couple of generations to see all side effects. Remember diethylstilbesterol.
Where I do see potential for improvement is that there are likely a large number of correctable mutations that subtly impair performance in many areas. So while we many not be able to (safely) improve the performance of our top athletes (who presumably already have most of the "good" genes for physical performance), we might be able to make those abilities more widely available. And the risk question would be more approachable, because we could study the families who already have the (hopefully) favorable polymorphism.
Re:The percentage of Safari Users that would use t
on
Hyatt Discusses Tabs
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· Score: 1
When one refers, such to yourself, you are a professional internet/web browser user. Not many Mac owners are like that.
The internet is so pervasive that hardly anybody remains a novice browser user for long.
If you look at the picture I supplied in another post, I actually find the tab implementation confusing.
Since, personally, I am used to multiple windows I can actually navigate through, in and around them VERY quickly.
I don't find it at all confusing. It doesn't take much sophistication to get accustomed to the concept of multiple toolbars. And frankly, I doubt if you are actually confused. Anybody who can easily manage a large number of open windows is pretty far from a novice. And even if tabs were more confusing to a novice than multiple windows (which I doubt) the fact that you have to actually request a tab tends to filter out the less experienced users. The only case where I do think tabs can be confusing is in a tabbed website, where one is confronted with a double row of tabs. But even there, it is pretty benign, since both sets of tabs work pretty similarly. And as tabbed browsers take over, I expect that web sites will design their menus to be less readily confused with browser tabs.
The choice between tabs and multiple windows is really pretty much a matter of taste. An experienced user can navigate either with little difficulty. And it also depends on your style of browsing. When I am dealing with "related" pages, I like to have them in tabs. When I am dealing with unrelated pages, I like to have them is separate windows.
Re:The percentage of Safari Users that would use t
on
Hyatt Discusses Tabs
·
· Score: 1
The percentage of Safari Users that would use tabs is low at best... it seems that the only people that are wanting this feature which causes interface clutter (eventhough minimal, it is is evasive) are the only ones posting, maybe several thousand.
Tabs are one of those things that you don't realize that you need until you have experienced it. And since the "default" browser, IE, has no tabs, most people don't know what they are missing. So of course they aren't asking for tabs.
But for anybody who keeps more than about three windows open at once, tabs are indispensible, and greatly reduce screen clutter. I used Mozilla for quite some time before even realizing that it had tabs--I didn't see them, so they didn't confuse me. Novices are unlikely to create tabs to be confused by. And the confusion potential of a tab is much less than that of accidentally clicking on the wrong scroll bar of a set of layered windows and wondering what happened to the page, which I have seen novices do frequently.
I've had the same issue. One way of solving it is to enable exit confirmation. That way, when you hit the main exit button, it will ask if you really want to close or not. Kind of a trade off since that can get annoying too, but at least you won't lose all the browser tabs you have open.
Confirmation doesn't work well for me for common actions where the answer is almost always "Yes." I get so used to confirming every time that my hand has already confirmed by the time my brain realizes that I don't want to.
1. Don't take easy courses. You're paying those guys to teach you stuff; don't waste your time and money having them help you learn stuff you could learn easily enough on your own.
2. In college, don't major in what you think you want to do as a career. Major in something different that is peripherally related to what you think you want to do (and preferably harder, see #1). That way, when you eventually get around to what you really want to do, you'll already know a bunch of stuff that most people in that field don't know, and you'll pick up the stuff that everybody knows easily enough.
Dragon's Lair's success convinced the game industry that streamed content from videodisk was the wave of the future. A whole bunch of sequels and clones were rushed out (including one game using great footage from Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostoro), and Sega and NEC (and Nintendo, but they backed out at the last minute) rushed CD-based home systems into production, mainly to support streaming video games. And it all tanked. Once the novelty wore off, gamers found the tight gameplay constraints of streaming video too limiting.
Yes, I had somebody do this to me once. I wrote a script to respond to the complaints with a polite reply pointing out that the headers indicated that the offending message (something to do with Hitler) couldn't have come from me. Only tricky part was writing it so that it wouldn't reverberate if my reply bounced. I had it automatically delete the complaints after responding, so I didn't even see most of them, but I monitored a few at first just to make sure that it was working. There were at least a few outraged but clueless people who refused to believe me, and insisted that I *must* have sent it, because my name was on it.
Is there any way that they could have been rescued, given the intelligence of every engineer and astrophysicist in the entire world and the resources of virtually every nation? Perhaps not, but I don't think anybody can answer that question without having tried. How about resupply via unmanned missile to tide them over until another shuttle could be ready? And of course, we don't know the nature of the damage, so it's hard to be absolutely certain that repair was impossible.
On the other hand, it still may well be that we're all jumping the gun, and there was nothing externally visible to indicate that there was a problem. The falling insulation may still turn out to be a red herring.
Why not just go to a normal stereo store, and buy a normal stereo?
I have a normal stereo in my living room; I'm not going to buy another one for the TV and game system in my bedroom. And really, my purchasing goals are quite different. For listening to music, I want the best stereo performance that I can afford. For movies and games, I'm not particularly concerned about the flattest possible frequency response or really high power, but I do want decent bass and surround sound. The proper comparison is not to a high end stereo or home theater system, but to an unaided TV or PC. By that standard, an el-cheapo surround system (I have a Midiland 8200) provides an enormous improvement at very low cost.
I'm not worrying about TiVo going under. If that happens, somebody else will be lining up to sell the service to TiVo owners. The one real danger is that TiVo could be bought up by a company that wants to destroy it. This is what happened to the excellent VideoGuide system, which was the best thing of the sort until TiVo came along (it controlled your VCR and got listings via pager). It got bought up by the people who own the crappy TVGuidePlus system and discontinued.
But even then, I expect that hackers would come up with a solution to return TiVo to functionality. I have a Series II, which is not as easily hackable as the Series I, but people have managed to do it by pulling out the drive and hooking it into a separate Linux system.
And frankly, the benefits of TiVo are so great that even if it did tank in a few years, I'd consider it to be worth the cost.
Hey, the poster looked interesting, and the trailers were OK, but let's face it: Star Trek Movies have been more than a bit uneven in quality.
So it went on the list below Two Towers and Harry Potter. Christmas is a busy time, so I only got to see the first two films on my list. By the time I got around to Nemesis after Christmas, I had a hard time finding a theater that was still showing it.
I like Star Trek--and especially the New Generation cast--well enough that I wouldn't intentionally miss a ST film. Yet I nearly did because of the poor timing. It doesn't surprise me that it failed to rope in a general audience. A Star Trek movie simply does not qualify as a genre blockbuster for Christmas--it would be better suited for summer.
I expect that it will do quite well on DVD, if that's any consolation.
The point of Schrodinger's Cat is that this kind of peculiar superposition of states cannot be confined to elementary particles that cannot be directly observed; it is possible to envision ways in which a superposition of a macroscopic object--even a living being--could occur. Recently, a method has been described for forcing a small mirror into a superposition of states, getting very close to a Schrodinger's Cat scenario.
I bought my first VCR at the hight of the beta-vhs wars, before rental shops had really started to take off. At that time, beta blank tapes were available in L-500 length, which recorded for 2 hours in beta-II at quality comparable to or slightly better than VHS's SP. Shortly thereafter, L-750 tapes became available, which recorded for 3 hours. I understand that the very earliest betas had an even faster beta-I speed, but Sony abandoned it as their recording technology improved. I presume that beta-II was the speed used for prerecorded videos. I often rented beta tapes, and I don't think I ever saw a two-tape movie. I'm sure there were some, but they weren't "a very large percentage."
But while the movie-length tapes may have appeared before VHS had taken a lead, the fact that they weren't available from day one may well have encouraged manufacturers to opt for VHS: I would expect the time between the decision and the appearance of the machines in the shops to be at least 6 months, probably nearer 12.
Beta and VHS were both available from multiple manufacturers. And virtually all movies were available in both formats throughout the Beta-VHS wars. I imagine that the vast majority of people who bought a VCR never knew that for a brief time beta tapes did not support movie-length recording at the highest speed.
What really killed Beta was price. The cheapest machines available were always VHS. Sony knew that they had a superior product--they were consistently 6 months ahead of VHS is technical innovation--and they figured they could charge a bit more for their video recorders (and for third party licenses). After all, it was a pricing model that worked just fine for all of Sony's other products. And it made sense if you thought of the primary uses of a VCR as being time-shifting of TV and occasionally playing a purchased tape. What Sony didn't anticipate was that the major use of the VCR would turn out to be playing video rentals.
Carrying two formats was expensive for video stores. And since the cheap VHS players were more popular, they stocked VHS tapes more heavily. Which was another reason, in addition to price, for consumers to buy VHS. Which encouraged rental shops to cut back still further on beta. By the time Sony got wise and cut prices drastically on their low end betas, it was too late for beta to recover.
Both systems could record a movie at "less than perfect quality" The very earliest beta tapes were not long enough to record a movie at the highest quality speed, but movie-length beta tapes became available well before VHS captured a major lead.
The "killer app" for the VCR was the movie, and Betamax was unable to run it. Betamax was a closed, proprietary platform that lost out to superior open standards.
Wrong on both counts. Both beta and VHS were proprietary standards (and both were licensed to multiple companies). And both played movies just fine (very early beta tapes weren't long enough to record the average movies, but this was rectivied well before VHS captured a significant lead)
He has a lot of the timeline confused. He makes a big issue out of the difference in tape length, but by the time VHS started to pull ahead, the difference in length was small. He insists that "Sony cut prices" and that there was no difference in cost, but in fact that was fairly late, when Sony was already in trouble--through most of the competition, the cheapest VCRs available were VHS. As far as the quality is concerned, Sony pretty much had a lead throughout in some aspect of quality--tape transport speed and reliability, picture quality, sound quality--but VHS always caught up, usually within 6 months (although they didn't catch up on tape transport until fairly recently). Super VHS was never really competition for beta's higher picture quality, because until recently Super VHS tapes and players were extremely expensive.
Risks? By making a sequal to Metroid, and a sequel to Zelda, and a sequel to Star Fox, and a sequal to Mario, and a sequel to...:)
With Nintendo, a familiar title often serves to make major innovations more palatable. The "safe" --and probably more profitable--way would be to make the sequel as much like the original as possible. For example, Metroid is fundamentally a platform game. First person platform games have never been successful in the past. Nintendo could easily have chosen to make it a side-view game with 3D graphics (like the recently released PS2 Contra title). They didn't even use the "standard" console control arrangement for first person games, but chose to invent their own control layout--just as with the GC they chose not to follow other manufacturer's controller designs, but to take a risk on an unusual button layout. Similarly, the safe approach would have been to keep the "Peter Pan" look that they defined for Link in the N64 titles, rather than going for a highly stylized cartoon look as they are doing in the GC Zelda. Even the StarFox game abandons the shooter design that has been so successful in the past, moving the character into an adventure game.
With both Zelda and Metroid, there were howls of protest from fans of the originals when the first screenshots came out, but Nintendo held fast. With Metroid garnering rave reviews, and early reviews of Zelda looking very good, it appears that Nintendo's determination to go with its own creative vision has been vindicated.
during the saturn/ps1 wars, sega again had first mover advantage. but they negated that advantage by 1) coming out at too high a price point (i think $300) and 2) missing the boat w.r.t 3D gaming - the saturn just couldn't handle it.
Later Saturn games looked about as good as PS1 games. Of course, neither of them could really do 3D properly--both filled their polygons with "distorted sprites" instead of scaling textures in 3D. Sony's real advantage (aside from price, which was probably the decisive difference) was that they were ahead of Sega in developing software libraries that made it easier for developers to use Gouraud shading and fancy lighting effects.
during the latest dreamcast/ps2 wars, sega again had first mover advantage, and the DC did do well initially. i think what screwed it was that ps2 was LIGHT YEARS ahead of DC tech-wise
No, it really wasn't. It had a bit of an advantage in pumping out polygons, but a disadvantage in handling textures (small cache). There were several games, like DoA2, that looked decidedly better on DC. PS2 surpassed the DC with graphics only after Sega bowed out of the race. Sega's problem was marketing and a war chest so depleted from the Saturn days that they had to drop out just as their online games were taking off, years ahead of the competing consoles.
Man, I can't believe someone would consider Nintendo a mom and pop operation. That's just so ridiculous. Listen, just because a company isn't Microsoft, that doesn't make them "good." Do a little bit of research before you spout off.
The sad thing is that next to companies like Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo looks warm and fuzzy by comparison. At least Nintendo is taking advantage of its position as console producer to take risks (a first person Metroid? a cartoon-style Zelda game?) and innovate in game development. Sony and Microsoft have just been skimming the cream, for the most part. Whether Sega, the other major center of innovation, will be able to retain that status not that they no longer have their own console remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we already know one thing that reliably produces a substantial increase in life span in every species that has been tested. Starve yourself! A severe calorie-restricted diet increases longevity. We may be sneering at those supermodels now, but they'll be laughing at us when we're all in our graves!
And this is why it can't be stopped. Because there are people who desperately need this technology. But once you have it, the definition of "sick" becomes very slippery. Discover a gene polymorphism that prevents you from having perfect pitch? Congratulations! You've just discovered "Pitch Perception Syndrome." Let's cure it!
Actually, no. At the time of the Tuskegee experiments, the accepted medical wisdom was that black men could not get tertiary (brain syphillis) because their brains were so underdeveloped, so there was no need to treat them to prevent this complication. The experiment was started by relatively progressive doctors who didn't believe this notion, and wanted to prove this incorrect so as to improve the treatment of black people for syphilis. So the "no treatment" group was actually getting the accepted standard of care for the time. Unfortunately, the experiment took on its own momentum (the "we've come this far" syndrome), and was continued long after the "primitive nervous system" notion had been generally abandoned as the racist crap that it was.
Where I do see potential for improvement is that there are likely a large number of correctable mutations that subtly impair performance in many areas. So while we many not be able to (safely) improve the performance of our top athletes (who presumably already have most of the "good" genes for physical performance), we might be able to make those abilities more widely available. And the risk question would be more approachable, because we could study the families who already have the (hopefully) favorable polymorphism.
The internet is so pervasive that hardly anybody remains a novice browser user for long.
If you look at the picture I supplied in another post, I actually find the tab implementation confusing.
Since, personally, I am used to multiple windows I can actually navigate through, in and around them VERY quickly.
I don't find it at all confusing. It doesn't take much sophistication to get accustomed to the concept of multiple toolbars. And frankly, I doubt if you are actually confused. Anybody who can easily manage a large number of open windows is pretty far from a novice. And even if tabs were more confusing to a novice than multiple windows (which I doubt) the fact that you have to actually request a tab tends to filter out the less experienced users. The only case where I do think tabs can be confusing is in a tabbed website, where one is confronted with a double row of tabs. But even there, it is pretty benign, since both sets of tabs work pretty similarly. And as tabbed browsers take over, I expect that web sites will design their menus to be less readily confused with browser tabs.
The choice between tabs and multiple windows is really pretty much a matter of taste. An experienced user can navigate either with little difficulty. And it also depends on your style of browsing. When I am dealing with "related" pages, I like to have them in tabs. When I am dealing with unrelated pages, I like to have them is separate windows.
Tabs are one of those things that you don't realize that you need until you have experienced it. And since the "default" browser, IE, has no tabs, most people don't know what they are missing. So of course they aren't asking for tabs.
But for anybody who keeps more than about three windows open at once, tabs are indispensible, and greatly reduce screen clutter. I used Mozilla for quite some time before even realizing that it had tabs--I didn't see them, so they didn't confuse me. Novices are unlikely to create tabs to be confused by. And the confusion potential of a tab is much less than that of accidentally clicking on the wrong scroll bar of a set of layered windows and wondering what happened to the page, which I have seen novices do frequently.
1. Don't take easy courses. You're paying those guys to teach you stuff; don't waste your time and money having them help you learn stuff you could learn easily enough on your own.
2. In college, don't major in what you think you want to do as a career. Major in something different that is peripherally related to what you think you want to do (and preferably harder, see #1). That way, when you eventually get around to what you really want to do, you'll already know a bunch of stuff that most people in that field don't know, and you'll pick up the stuff that everybody knows easily enough.
Dragon's Lair's success convinced the game industry that streamed content from videodisk was the wave of the future. A whole bunch of sequels and clones were rushed out (including one game using great footage from Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostoro), and Sega and NEC (and Nintendo, but they backed out at the last minute) rushed CD-based home systems into production, mainly to support streaming video games. And it all tanked. Once the novelty wore off, gamers found the tight gameplay constraints of streaming video too limiting.
Yes, I had somebody do this to me once. I wrote a script to respond to the complaints with a polite reply pointing out that the headers indicated that the offending message (something to do with Hitler) couldn't have come from me. Only tricky part was writing it so that it wouldn't reverberate if my reply bounced. I had it automatically delete the complaints after responding, so I didn't even see most of them, but I monitored a few at first just to make sure that it was working. There were at least a few outraged but clueless people who refused to believe me, and insisted that I *must* have sent it, because my name was on it.
Is there any way that they could have been rescued, given the intelligence of every engineer and astrophysicist in the entire world and the resources of virtually every nation? Perhaps not, but I don't think anybody can answer that question without having tried. How about resupply via unmanned missile to tide them over until another shuttle could be ready? And of course, we don't know the nature of the damage, so it's hard to be absolutely certain that repair was impossible.
On the other hand, it still may well be that we're all jumping the gun, and there was nothing externally visible to indicate that there was a problem. The falling insulation may still turn out to be a red herring.
I'm not worrying about TiVo going under. If that happens, somebody else will be lining up to sell the service to TiVo owners. The one real danger is that TiVo could be bought up by a company that wants to destroy it. This is what happened to the excellent VideoGuide system, which was the best thing of the sort until TiVo came along (it controlled your VCR and got listings via pager). It got bought up by the people who own the crappy TVGuidePlus system and discontinued.
But even then, I expect that hackers would come up with a solution to return TiVo to functionality. I have a Series II, which is not as easily hackable as the Series I, but people have managed to do it by pulling out the drive and hooking it into a separate Linux system.
And frankly, the benefits of TiVo are so great that even if it did tank in a few years, I'd consider it to be worth the cost.
Hey, the poster looked interesting, and the trailers were OK, but let's face it: Star Trek Movies have been more than a bit uneven in quality.
So it went on the list below Two Towers and Harry Potter. Christmas is a busy time, so I only got to see the first two films on my list. By the time I got around to Nemesis after Christmas, I had a hard time finding a theater that was still showing it.
I like Star Trek--and especially the New Generation cast--well enough that I wouldn't intentionally miss a ST film. Yet I nearly did because of the poor timing. It doesn't surprise me that it failed to rope in a general audience. A Star Trek movie simply does not qualify as a genre blockbuster for Christmas--it would be better suited for summer.
I expect that it will do quite well on DVD, if that's any consolation.
The point of Schrodinger's Cat is that this kind of peculiar superposition of states cannot be confined to elementary particles that cannot be directly observed; it is possible to envision ways in which a superposition of a macroscopic object--even a living being--could occur. Recently, a method has been described for forcing a small mirror into a superposition of states, getting very close to a Schrodinger's Cat scenario.
I bought my first VCR at the hight of the beta-vhs wars, before rental shops had really started to take off. At that time, beta blank tapes were available in L-500 length, which recorded for 2 hours in beta-II at quality comparable to or slightly better than VHS's SP. Shortly thereafter, L-750 tapes became available, which recorded for 3 hours. I understand that the very earliest betas had an even faster beta-I speed, but Sony abandoned it as their recording technology improved. I presume that beta-II was the speed used for prerecorded videos. I often rented beta tapes, and I don't think I ever saw a two-tape movie. I'm sure there were some, but they weren't "a very large percentage."
What really killed Beta was price. The cheapest machines available were always VHS. Sony knew that they had a superior product--they were consistently 6 months ahead of VHS is technical innovation--and they figured they could charge a bit more for their video recorders (and for third party licenses). After all, it was a pricing model that worked just fine for all of Sony's other products. And it made sense if you thought of the primary uses of a VCR as being time-shifting of TV and occasionally playing a purchased tape. What Sony didn't anticipate was that the major use of the VCR would turn out to be playing video rentals.
Carrying two formats was expensive for video stores. And since the cheap VHS players were more popular, they stocked VHS tapes more heavily. Which was another reason, in addition to price, for consumers to buy VHS. Which encouraged rental shops to cut back still further on beta. By the time Sony got wise and cut prices drastically on their low end betas, it was too late for beta to recover.
Both systems could record a movie at "less than perfect quality" The very earliest beta tapes were not long enough to record a movie at the highest quality speed, but movie-length beta tapes became available well before VHS captured a major lead.
He has a lot of the timeline confused. He makes a big issue out of the difference in tape length, but by the time VHS started to pull ahead, the difference in length was small. He insists that "Sony cut prices" and that there was no difference in cost, but in fact that was fairly late, when Sony was already in trouble--through most of the competition, the cheapest VCRs available were VHS. As far as the quality is concerned, Sony pretty much had a lead throughout in some aspect of quality--tape transport speed and reliability, picture quality, sound quality--but VHS always caught up, usually within 6 months (although they didn't catch up on tape transport until fairly recently). Super VHS was never really competition for beta's higher picture quality, because until recently Super VHS tapes and players were extremely expensive.
With both Zelda and Metroid, there were howls of protest from fans of the originals when the first screenshots came out, but Nintendo held fast. With Metroid garnering rave reviews, and early reviews of Zelda looking very good, it appears that Nintendo's determination to go with its own creative vision has been vindicated.