If you have to lug around a huge backpack of support gear, why not just carry a larger display, such as Apple's 17" laptop or a future roll-up screen. Now, I know everyone will jump on me and say that they will reduce the size of the support gear but, it is still going to be impractical.
Why would you need a backpack? There are tiny chip-based accelerometers available. Everything else is software.
Who needs a set-top box that crashes or a computer that slows down because it's recording today's episode of Friends?
I don't want a set-top box that is also my work computer--but I wouldn't mind a computer that is dedicated to entertainment functions. After all, that is basically what a TiVo is. I like my TiVo, but I'd rather have something open-source, with a variety of software producers all competing for my business--not to mention hackers providing features that the big companies are sometimes reluctant to offer, like commercial-skip and data export.
Don't forget, there is still the good old VCR. If I miss a show that I want, and somebody I know has it on TiVo, I'll just ask them to download it to tape and mail it to me. I know that's not as sexy as sending it over the web, but it still works.
I started out expecting to buy a Replay, because it has some very cool features, like sending shows over the net and trying to auto-skip commercials. But after reading some comparisons, I ended up going for TiVo. Basically, it seems that the TiVo software is just more user-friendly for the day-to-day functions. TiVo's ToDo List was a major consideration. I also appreciate being able to get an alphabetically sorted list of movies. Its system for prioritizing recordings also made more sense to me.
Tivo also has 30s skip, but it's an unsupported software hack that they could disable at any time.
As the widely known "cheat code" to turn on the 30 s skip (select-play-select-30-select) has remained through multiple updates, it is unlikely to go away short of a court order. Of course, eithr Replay or TiVo could remove features remotely if a court ordered it, so Replay's commercial and 30s skip could potentially also go away
As the saying goes, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." Some products roll the cost of service into the base price, some add it on, and some let you choose.
One thing I like about the subscription model, however, is that there is a continued incentive to maintain the service, no matter how well the base product is doing. The exception is when a company is purchased by a competitor. The GuidePlus people bought up VideoGuide, a superior system with many of the features of TiVo (although it controlled a VCR instead of using a HD) and immediately discontinued its service, which broadcast schedule information over the pager network.
Please, that is just ignorant. Did your teacher have any idea if it was POSSIBLE for the mammalian eye to run connections BEHIND the light sensors, and still function properly? Taking into account light penetration depths for different wavelengths, etc? No?
Of course it is possible. There is no functional reason why the connections have to be in front of the photoreceptors. The layers could just as well be arranged in the reverse order, and it would work just the same way, without the light having to pass through all those extra layers of cells. But of course, evolution isn't rational, and often "paints itself into a corner." Remember, the earliest form of eye was almost certainly a simple light sensor based upon neurons that fortuitously happened to be sensitive to light. For that, there's not much advantage to having the photoreceptor cells in front of the connections. By the time advanced imaging functions developed for the organ, it was stuck with an inferior architecture. And since evolution has no real memory, it couldn't "back up" to correct the mistake. The octopus was more fortunate--it's eye evolved independently, and it was lucky enough to get things the right way around from the start, with the connections behind the photoreceptors.
I think the point is that we don't have three detectors in our eyes to see base colors and then construct the true color
Except...we do. (Well, 4 detectors if you count the rods). But our brains are probably smarter in using the "sidebands" of the three color detectors to help construct the true colors.
This foveon system is like the human eye inasmuchas the light photons penetrate multiple layers and register at more than one levels in the same spot.
Uh, no. Only one of those layers actually registers light--the others are just "wiring" (yes the mammalian eye actually runs its connections in front of its light sensors). Actually, it is less like the way the eye works. That doesn't mean that it isn't better, however. The notion that a camera should work like an eye is fundamentally misguided--would you wanted a camera that only captured color and high resolution at the very center of the image, and was low resolution black & white every where else?
No it shows absolutely nothing. It shows that if you assume GR, then a sub assumption of GR can be proven. If I use trig for a given, I better find PI~=3.14!
Nope. He used the assumption of GR to calculate a physically measurable parameter. If GR were wrong, that parameter could be something completely different--and indeed, some other theories would predict different results, incompatible with his measurements. It's more like actually measuring the perimeter and radius of your circle, and calculating pi from that. The result could in fact be different from pi--if your circle were on the surface of a sphere, for example.
By the way, did anyone else find the quoted margin of error of.25 to be kinda ridiculous? So based on their measurements, the speed of gravity could actually be anywhere from 30% slower to 20% faster than light.
Well, yes and no. It is a rather big error, and there's clearly plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately, as is all too often the case, the article doesn't state whether the "margin of error" is a standard error, 95% confidence limit, or what. However, the true value is not equally likely to be anywhere in that range--it is most likely to be close to the middle of the range, but there is a small probability that it is off by even more than 20%. It's still probably good enough to discriminate between some theories.
I totally agree on a shift of scope on the part of nintendo. I just finishe mario sunshine, and while my gf and myself enjoy playing animal crossing, I would really like to see something above the 'kiddie' market.
I think Nintendo does a very good job in providing games for the kiddie market and the adult market. Where they are weak is in the male teenage/young adult market--the demographic that is big on games with extreme violence.
AOL is not simply being a "nice guy" in buying ICQ, Mozilla, and Winamp, though you're right that they fund Moz development.
It is unrealistic to expect any company to spend stockholder-owned assets simply to be "a nice guy." Nevertheless, there are different ways to make money, some barely on the legal side of banditry, and others more consumer-friendly. AOL has clearly decided that supporting open-source development such as Mozilla is beneficial to their business plan. Other companies have made very different judgements.
and to head you off TiVo provides you with a service for you fee stop shut your whine hole before you open it
Actually, you can regard Tivo as a cheap device with a monthly fee, or as an expensive device with no fee, depending upon which service plan you choose.
Watermarking will not work. The whole point is to make it so you can NOT watch a copy of it. If you can display it on ANYTHING it can be copied. Screen scraping if it comes down to it.
Effective watermarking depends upon compliance by A/D converters. This means that for this scheme to work, there have to be serious restrictions on ownership of A/D code.
I don't know about your class of researcher, but I can tell you failure to check whether a citation is valid is quite common elsewhere.
Oh, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, although to the best of my knowledge I've never done it myself. I'm just questioning the conclusion that "most" scientists do this.
I've noticed the multiple citations of an incorrect reference in Citations Index, even back before people used software with "copy" and "paste" features that make it easy to replicate an error. I've been surprised to discover how often "classic" papers fail to contain the result or method for which they are commonly cited. There is also the phenomenon where somebody's speculation becomes accepted as fact, repeated in reviews without the original author's qualifications and doubts. This introduces problems for later researchers--if they actually prove that it is true, they get little credit because everybody already "knew" it was true. And if they show it to be false, they have a hard time convincing people that they haven't made some sort of an error.
I agree. I have never cited a paper without having read it. But I have shared my citations file with many students who have passed through my lab. And I have also, when I couldn't remember the exact citation of a paper that I'd read, looked it up from another published paper that cited the same reference.
Another problem is that they seem to be estimating the frequency with which people read papers they cite from the frequency of repeating errors. The underlying assumption of this analysis is that scientists who read all the papers they cite and those who don't are equally likely to make errors. But it seems quite likely to me that scientists who are careful not to cite papers they have not read are also extra careful to get their citations correct. So sloppy scientists will tend to be overrepresented in the authors' statistics.
You, and any other reader knows quite well what the term "natural" is supposed to mean. Claiming that no artificial work is not natural is just verbal sleight-of-hand.
This is not "verbal sleight of hand;" drawing a distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" parts of the natural world has always struck me as completely irrational, fostering the dangerous and delusion that we are apart from the rest of nature. And nobody has ever managed to explain it to me in a manner that makes sense. As far as I have ever been able to tell, "natural" generally translates into "stuff I approve of," and "unnatural" translates into "stuff I don't approve of." If this distinction actually has some real meaning, you will have to explain and justify it.
The fact that the sperm and egg cell, as haploid cells, are not complete beings capable of growing into a human regardless of their environment. Creating a zygote with no intention of allowing it to live can be at least construed as callous if the term malicious does not apply.
It seems ridiculous to refer to a zygote as a "complete being" when it is so manifestly incomplete--it has yet to develop most of the parts required for independent survival, not to mention the neural machinery required for thought, sentience, and sensation. And a distinction between haploid and diploid makes little sense, biologically speaking; there are plenty of examples of haploid organisms. Besides, the sperm and egg, collectively have a diploid set of genes before fertilization. All that happens at fertilization is membrane fusion--merely the rearrangement lipid molecules. How does that make them a "being"?
"Callous" also seems inflammatory. The normal meaning is "insensitive to the pain of another," which is a quite serious accusation. But an embryo is incapable of suffering pain--it has no nerves to perceive pain, and no brain capable of interpreting that sensation as suffering. It seems no more callous to me than abstaining from sex, thereby condemning to death the living human cells that would otherwise create a new human being.
The first part is a semantics debate. An embryo is not naturally created outside of an environment that will nurture it.
You'll have to explain the word "natural." We are part of nature, so everything we do is necessarily natural. Perhaps that you are using natural in the sense of "not guided by human intelligence?" However, there is then no logical reason to rank "natural" as ethically superior to "intelligent." The embryos created for the purposes of stem research are created in vitro, so they have no more prospect of becoming a human being than do the sperm and egg once outside the body--i.e. none whatsoever. Absolutely nothing is added, in a biological sense, when the sperm is allowed to fuse with the egg in a dish. So on what logical basis does the zygote acquire a greater ethical status a moment after fertilization than the sperm and egg had the moment before?
Their intentions towards the lives they work to save are generally as noble as they can be, but their actions towards those they use for their research are quite different.
The word "malice" refers specifically to intent. While the people who do such work are not motivated by malice, there are certainly people who feel malice toward them--indeed, quite possibly to the point of doing them harm. This being the case, there are serious ethical concerns regarding the use of such inflammatory language.
Left to its own devices, an embryo will grow into a child and then an adult.
No, left to its own devices, an embryo will die quite rapidly. That's why an embryo is not left to its own devices but nurtured within the mothers body. And even there, a large fraction, perhaps as many as half, die anyway.
These cells die naturally without human malice.
The people doing stem cell research are not acting out of malice; they are trying to save people's lives and health--about as far from malice as it is possible to get.
Age 3 or 4 weeks after conception would also be clearly defined moments which would be convenient for law.
It is only "clearly defined" for a person who has only had sex once in the last couple of months. Otherwise, the age of the embryo is a matter of estimation and approximation. However, I was thinking more about the question of birth vs. a later date. Even if, as you suggest, the child is not sentient at birth, children develop at somewhat different rates, so even if the child becomes sentient at a later time, the precise time will be different from child to child.
Regardless of whether the newborn is "parisitic" on the mother is not a good argument. A newborn still cannot survive without the aid of a caretaker -- it is just no longer dependent on a single one. You say that there should be limits on how much a being is entitled to impose upon another.
Incorrect. I said that their should be limits on how much a being is entitled to impose upon another's body. I'm not talking about convenience, but about biology. At birth, the child ceases to draw nutrients from the mother. It ceases to leak foreign antigens into her system. It ceases to expose the mother to risk of illness or death from a variety of pregnancy-related complications such as diabetes and preeclampsia, nor a future risk of death from birth-related complications. And at birth, the mother is capable of handing the infant over to another caretaker if she finds caring for an infant too onerous a task
The sentience of a newborn is debateable. There are certainly animals that are not widely considered sentient, such as certain parrots and octopi, who are capable of functioning at a much higher level of intelligence that a newborn human.
As you say, it is debatable. I fall on the side of considering newborns, as well as parrots and octopi, to be sentient (I'll admit to some doubts about insects). However, I think we can all safely agree that an organism without a functional brain cannot be considered sentient by any reasonable measure.
As for sperm, ova, and other cells of the body, they are not viable and capable of growing into a seperate person yet.
An embryo also is not capable of growing into a separate person unaided. Under appropriate conditions, sperm and ovum (and most likely any cell in the body) are capable of growing into a separate person.
For the first point, it depends on the level of retardation and your view of what sentience is.
I tend to fall on the conservative side, regarding anybody with a functional brain as at least possibly sentient. But even if some people are so retarded as to be nonsentient, it might make sense, as a matter of law, to protect them as well, simply on the grounds that the legal system is not qualified to accurately make that discrimination. For a law, practicality sometimes must take precedence over absolute logical consistency
Both methods have potential. At this point, it is not possible to say which will work. Given the number of people in need, the only ethical choice is to proceed energetically along both lines of research. The concern about stem cells giving rise to cancers is a real one, but it will remain a concern with any undifferentiated cell, whatever its source.
I imagine there are plenty of people who would limit stem cell research for non-religious reasons.
I doubt it. Nobody really believes that all human life should be protected. Every cell in your body is human, and we shed cells all the time, but nobody is concerned about protecting them. Sperm and ova are human, yet nobody worries about protecting them. Yet there is absolutely nothing present at conception that wasn't in the sperm and egg before the moment before. Abstinence is even considered a virtue, even though it insures the death of a human ovum. The only semi-rational reason for objecting to stem-cell research is the religious belief that there is something magical and undetectable--a soul--that enters an embryo at conception (presumably with another being provided later on if the embryo twins).
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Don't worry. I'll send them two polite requests first to stop spamming me. If I get more spam, then I'll send the "Falun Gong" letter.
Don't forget, there is still the good old VCR. If I miss a show that I want, and somebody I know has it on TiVo, I'll just ask them to download it to tape and mail it to me. I know that's not as sexy as sending it over the web, but it still works.
I started out expecting to buy a Replay, because it has some very cool features, like sending shows over the net and trying to auto-skip commercials. But after reading some comparisons, I ended up going for TiVo. Basically, it seems that the TiVo software is just more user-friendly for the day-to-day functions. TiVo's ToDo List was a major consideration. I also appreciate being able to get an alphabetically sorted list of movies. Its system for prioritizing recordings also made more sense to me.
So far, I'm very pleased.
As the saying goes, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." Some products roll the cost of service into the base price, some add it on, and some let you choose.
One thing I like about the subscription model, however, is that there is a continued incentive to maintain the service, no matter how well the base product is doing. The exception is when a company is purchased by a competitor. The GuidePlus people bought up VideoGuide, a superior system with many of the features of TiVo (although it controlled a VCR instead of using a HD) and immediately discontinued its service, which broadcast schedule information over the pager network.
It is unrealistic to expect any company to spend stockholder-owned assets simply to be "a nice guy." Nevertheless, there are different ways to make money, some barely on the legal side of banditry, and others more consumer-friendly. AOL has clearly decided that supporting open-source development such as Mozilla is beneficial to their business plan. Other companies have made very different judgements.
I've noticed the multiple citations of an incorrect reference in Citations Index, even back before people used software with "copy" and "paste" features that make it easy to replicate an error. I've been surprised to discover how often "classic" papers fail to contain the result or method for which they are commonly cited. There is also the phenomenon where somebody's speculation becomes accepted as fact, repeated in reviews without the original author's qualifications and doubts. This introduces problems for later researchers--if they actually prove that it is true, they get little credit because everybody already "knew" it was true. And if they show it to be false, they have a hard time convincing people that they haven't made some sort of an error.
I agree. I have never cited a paper without having read it. But I have shared my citations file with many students who have passed through my lab. And I have also, when I couldn't remember the exact citation of a paper that I'd read, looked it up from another published paper that cited the same reference.
Another problem is that they seem to be estimating the frequency with which people read papers they cite from the frequency of repeating errors. The underlying assumption of this analysis is that scientists who read all the papers they cite and those who don't are equally likely to make errors. But it seems quite likely to me that scientists who are careful not to cite papers they have not read are also extra careful to get their citations correct. So sloppy scientists will tend to be overrepresented in the authors' statistics.
"Callous" also seems inflammatory. The normal meaning is "insensitive to the pain of another," which is a quite serious accusation. But an embryo is incapable of suffering pain--it has no nerves to perceive pain, and no brain capable of interpreting that sensation as suffering. It seems no more callous to me than abstaining from sex, thereby condemning to death the living human cells that would otherwise create a new human being.
Both methods have potential. At this point, it is not possible to say which will work. Given the number of people in need, the only ethical choice is to proceed energetically along both lines of research. The concern about stem cells giving rise to cancers is a real one, but it will remain a concern with any undifferentiated cell, whatever its source.