If someone's watching your TV through a window, they're probably standing on your property and thus trespassing.
I've often seen people watching TV through a store window while standing on a public sidewalk, which is fairly analogous to this case, which also involved a business.
The anti-global warming lobby would have us believe that there is some kind of scientific orthodoxy suppressing publication of data refuting global warming. They have much in common with the "Intelligent Design" lobby, who have worked very hard to create a false public perception that there are many biologists who doubt evolution, but universities and journals are engaged in some kind of a conspiracy to prevent them from publishing.
Of course, if you have actually followed the scientific literature on global warming, you know that the reality is not a rigid orthodoxy imposed from above, but rather a slowly emerging consensus over the past couple of decades. Whereas early theoretical models tended to make divergent predictions, as the models have improved their predictions have converged. Similarly, improved data collection has eliminated many of the apparent discrepancies with climate models. Scientists have never had any particular vested interest in global warming--they have been led to the concept by their data.
Novelty driven vs. score driven gameplay
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 1
Classic arcade games were designed like traditional sports games--you basically see everything the game has to offer at the outset, and your only reward is your own increasing expertise, and recognition of that expertise in the form of increasing scores. As a reward, that's pretty thin gruel, so the gameplay itself had to be intrinsically rewarding.
But as memory and graphics quality increased, it became possible to offer the player another kind of reward--novelty: "Get good enough at this, and I'll show you something new--something really cool!" Novelty is a much stronger reward. Much as older gamers revere classic games, it's hard to get a kid raised on novelty-driven games to play one more than a few minutes: "Is this all there is? What do you mean the next level is the same thing only harder? Give me a break!" So the introduction of novelty as a reward is basically a good thing, but it carries a drawback. Novelty is such a powerful reward that the game itself no longer has to be much fun. People will work for novelty! So we now have games in which the fundamental gameplay is a chore. One indicator of this is the outcry against fixed save points in games. Nobody minds fixed save points if the gameplay is intrinsically satisfying, with enough depth and subtlety that there is always room for greater expertise and mastery. But when the gameplay is a chore, losing just before winning the "prize" (seeing the boss or the next level) is a real bummer: "You mean I have to go through all that again?!"
I think this is fundamentally what rabbit is complaining about, although I'm not sure that he fully understands it. Even though a book is random access, it does not necessarily yield up its rewards easily. Yes, you can jump to the last page and read whodunnit, but if the story is good enough, you don't want to. And a great novel may not yield its full rewards until after several readings, if then, but the experience is good enough that it doesn't seem like a chore (unless assigned as a chore by an instructor). If the gameplay itself is intrinsically rewarding, with difficulty structured in such a way that essentially every player will eventually gain the expertise, points, etc. to see the grand ending, then nobody will complain about the length of the journey.
So without doing a single study, we already know one thing: Any pro-violence effect of videogames would have to be small relative to other social/demographic factors impacting the indidence of violent crime.
do cite the *proof* to which you refer. it isn't that i don't everyone on slashdot, rather, i like to review the source material.
Yes, the evidence that differences among the DNA of different organisms are of the sort that arise by mutation is available in a number of publicly accessible DNA sequence databases. For comparisons between species, a good place to start is the NCBI taxonomy project, where you may obtain access of the billions of bases of sequence information available for a variety of species, as well as tools for making comparisons between gene sequences.
it seems to me you had a reasonable choice - address the quote and explain why it isn't relevant. you rejected the reasonable option and proceeded to attack the poster.
I did explain why the quote was not relevant: "science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets." To put it more directly: as a scientist I am interested in evidence, not somebody's opinion. Argument from authority may be considered acceptable in religion--in science, it is not. This fundamental principle dates back to the dawn of science--the motto of one of the earliest scientific societies, the Royal Society of London, is "Nullius in Verba," which loosely translated means "Take nobody's word."
you can't explain why a hybrid land/water ear (not advantageous on land, not advantageous in water - no hybrid environment exists) is an advantage.
I can hear pretty well underwater. I guess I must have a "hybrid land/water ear."
I think that Nintendo's best chance of expanding their market is to keep the price as low as possible, not add an additional controller that some people might not need. If Nintendo wanted to "sweeten the pot" rather than lower the price, I think that an included game would attract more people than an additional controller.
That's silly, even a kid with no siblings has friends to play with, or parents. Someone buying the system just for themselves would still have a buddy to play against. And there might even be games that take advantage of two controllers used by both hands, like a virtual drummer.
I think that you are falling into the common error of assuming that everybody is like you. I know lots of people who play games mostly solo. If most game play was between two or more people, there wouldn't be so many one-player games on the market. And considering that the Wii controller in its "nunchaku" mode already occupies both hands, it is hard to imagine what kind of one-player game would use two of them.
When the X-box released before x-mas, they sold every single one. Heck, my little bro had his pre-paid at EB in November. We received it in February. If they're going to sell out, why don't they just make more before they start selling? MS doesn't make more money from people re-selling the unit on e-bay, but MS lost a lot of goodwill by failing to deliver a unit in reasonable time.
You are under the impression that Microsoft actually wanted to sell a lot of consoles. But in fact, those first consoles sold will probably over their entire lifetime never pay back their costs. Microsoft benefits from delaying purchases as long as possible, until the components are cheaper.
So the strategy that makes the most business sense is to sell as few units as possible at launch while maintaining the impression of a successful launch. It is far better to have people in line and going away disappointed than to have big stacks of boxes in stores waiting to be sold. Note that they can't limit sales by cranking the price way up, even if they are being snapped up for double on EBay, because this would be perceived as profiteering on a shortage that they created. Also, a high price would raise public doubts about the viability of the console, and whether Microsoft has priced themselves out of the broader gamer market, such as we are now hearing for the PS3.
I imagine that Sony will do the same thing with the PS3, for the same reasons. Nintendo now seems to be pursuing a different strategy--they probably will not be taking a loss on the Wii, even at first, so maybe we'll have a chance of seeing a decent supply at launch.
I think making two controllers standard is a very bad idea. People with one child or who purchase the unit to play by themselves would feel ripped off paying extra for a controller they won't use. Better to ship it with one controller at the lowest reasonable price, and let people buy another controller with the savings if they want. Or they could offer a premium "family pack" at a higher price with two controllers.
9. Consider some self-defense classes (For defense, don't become the aggressor). Bullies will pass you over for easier targets.
I'd move this one up to #1. In my experience as a student, going through adults to deal with bullies never helped, and usually made things worse. They can't be around all the time, and you lose respect of other students. I'd go up to the adult level only if you think you can make it a police matter--for example--if somebody flashes a weapon at you, and try to do it anonymously.
In terms of self-defense, I strongly recommend judo. It is the best equalizer if you are smaller, and being thrown to the ground or held down by a smaller person is very demoralizing, and hurts the attacker's status. I think that it feeds into instinctive domination/submission responses. I found that once they'd been thrown, bullies simply didn't want to mess with me, even if I didn't really hurt them. They'd bluster at me, but they wouldn't get within arm's reach. And if you simply take somebody to the ground and hold them down, it is hard to get blamed for escalating the violence--and if things do get nasty you can always break an arm or choke them out.
Actually, people have been taking GABA-receptor enhancers to get to sleep for decades. Ambien is just the latest. It has good pharmacokinetics, but it is also still under patent, so it is heavily marketed. Before Ambien, it was benzodiazepines like diazepam (Valium), which worked in essentially the same way. All of them have the potential to induce a kind of "hypnotic" state, particularly if you mix them with alcohol. And before the benzodiazepines, it was the barbiturates, which are even more dangerous, because at high doses they can activate the GABA receptor directly, rather than just helping GABA.
The GABA modulators that people take to sleep are probably less dangerous than the ones that they take for anxiety, because normally you don't take a sleeping pill and get into your car (although I know somebody who had a harrowing automotive experience as a result of accidentally taking an Ambien when he thought he was taking his similarly-shaped Lipitor). But people take anxiety-reduction drugs just to get through the day. There's been a lot of work on developing targeted GABA receptor modulators that are less sedating, but it has proved to be a difficult task.
It's interesting to me that these things seem to always deal with Gaba. Is Gaba the only thing in our brains?
GABA is not the only thing in our brain, but there are a lot of GABA neurons, located in all parts of the brain. It is primarily an inhibitory neurotransmitter, whose function is to "damp out" neural activity. Drugs that enhance the action of GABA are typically anti-anxiety, anti-convulsive, muscle relaxant, and sedative. It has a rich pharmacology reflecting the early discovery of drugs that subtly "tweak" the activity of the receptor rather than overwhelmingly activating or blocking them. There are a lot of subtly different variants of the GABA receptor, and there is considerable interest in developing better drugs that target only specific types of GABA receptors. So when you are concerned with anxiety, convulsions, or sleep, GABA is the major game in town. But drug abuse researchers tend to be particularly interested in dopamine, while learning researchers are interested in glutamate, and people working on depression are very interested in serotonin. And there are lots more, particularly if you include some of the slower-acting transmitters like the peptides.
You *could* induce a vegitative state in someone by stopping the action of GABA, but it wouldn't exactly be "persistent"
No, you have it backwards. Anti-anxiety medications typically enhance the action of GABA, and the effect of stopping the action of GABA is typically seizure. There is currently research into the possibility that blocking particular subtypes of GABA receptors might reverse cognitive impairment. This result is surprising because excess activation of GABA receptors is typically sedative, and zolpidem (trade name Ambien) enhances GABA action a type of GABA receptors that are thought to be particularly involved in sedation, so this result is the opposite of what would be expected from a simple point of view. However, there are a lot of GABA receptors in the brain, and because they are inhibitory you can get some paradoxical effects depending upon how the neurons are hooked up. In particular, you can get "disinhibition," when two GABA neurons are hooked up in series: activating the first neuron releases GABA to inhibit the second neuron, which then releases less GABA--so its targets are less inhibited.
Unfortunately, there are many conditions where none of the available drugs are entirely satisfactory. In psychiatric illnesses, especially, some people respond to one drug and not another, and some people find the side effects of one drug intolerable while others have no difficulty. Psychiatric illness is still poorly understood, but it's suspected that psychiatric illness can arise from multiple causes, and at present there is no good method other than trial and error to identify the best treatment for a particular individual. Current medications are largely derived from trial-and-error experimentation, because it is difficult to develop good animal models for psychiatric illness. Without a better understanding of how these illnesses arise, true cures, as opposed to palliative medications, are unlikely to arise.
If somebody was mirroring an entire site and skimming off the advertising clicks, I'd agree that the source has reason to complain.
But the real reason why people go to aggregator sites is because they are often more interesting than the sites they quote. I almost always at least check out the sites referenced by interesting articles on aggregator sites. If the aggregated article is representative of the content, then I end up reading more, and often the blog ends up on my regular list of bookmarks, and I start reading it directly.
So if you don't want to have aggregators bleeding off your readers, all you need to do is have so much interesting materials that nobody can possibly quote it all.
That's got the same problem as the stupid "Mighty Mouse"... it's too easy to accidentally register the wrong button (I can't reliably right-click with the MM, I have to stop and deliberately lift my index finger), plus you can't chord for the middle button in X11 apps.
Considering that I'm already using two-finger scrolling routinely, I doubt if I'd have any trouble learning that one finger gives me a left click, while putting down the second finger gives me a right click. I didn't have any problem learning the Mighty Mouse. After the first few days, it just seemed to magically know what I had in mind. I'm sure that I made some unconscious adaptation, but it wasn't anything that I had to think about. In fact, I put away the 3-button wireless mouse that I had been using. As much as I prefer a wireless mouse, the Mighty Mouse is just so much more comfortable to use.
Hit it it with your little finger or your ring finger.
If anything, that puts my wrist in an even more stressed position than hitting the right button with my thumb.
To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice??? That is a bit more specific then a casino predicting they'll win a little less then one percent of the time in craps.
More like the winning hand in a poker game of a billion players being the same several times in a row: "Oh my god, the winning hand is a royal flush once again!!!! The game must be fixed!"
An interesting addition is one that people have speculated about ever since Apple introduced two-finger scrolling on its trackpads (a feature that I now find nearly indispensable)--the ability to generate a right click without touching the keyboard by clicking with two fingers touching the trackpad. This lets Apple stick with their single button philosophy. (Doex anybody really like two-button trackpads? I feel like I'm flirting with carpal tunnel every time I twist my hand into that awkward position needed to reach the right button with my thumb).
I wonder if in "tap" mode you can just tap the pad with two fingers to get a right click?
The point is that people who think the MacBook is cheap
I doubt if Apple computers will ever qualify as "cheap." Apple now seems to be price-competitive with other name-brand computer manufacturers such as Sony, HP, IBM. Occasionally, they are even competitive with the semi-bargain PC's from Dell. But true bargain hunters will always be able shave off a few bucks by going with a PC made by NeverHeardOfEm.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often seen people watching TV through a store window while standing on a public sidewalk, which is fairly analogous to this case, which also involved a business.
As for "SINGLE, HIGHLY UNRELIABLE", the Bible is THE most accurate historical document of its time.
Isn't that a bit like being the world's tallest dwarf?
The anti-global warming lobby would have us believe that there is some kind of scientific orthodoxy suppressing publication of data refuting global warming. They have much in common with the "Intelligent Design" lobby, who have worked very hard to create a false public perception that there are many biologists who doubt evolution, but universities and journals are engaged in some kind of a conspiracy to prevent them from publishing.
Of course, if you have actually followed the scientific literature on global warming, you know that the reality is not a rigid orthodoxy imposed from above, but rather a slowly emerging consensus over the past couple of decades. Whereas early theoretical models tended to make divergent predictions, as the models have improved their predictions have converged. Similarly, improved data collection has eliminated many of the apparent discrepancies with climate models. Scientists have never had any particular vested interest in global warming--they have been led to the concept by their data.
Classic arcade games were designed like traditional sports games--you basically see everything the game has to offer at the outset, and your only reward is your own increasing expertise, and recognition of that expertise in the form of increasing scores. As a reward, that's pretty thin gruel, so the gameplay itself had to be intrinsically rewarding.
But as memory and graphics quality increased, it became possible to offer the player another kind of reward--novelty: "Get good enough at this, and I'll show you something new--something really cool!" Novelty is a much stronger reward. Much as older gamers revere classic games, it's hard to get a kid raised on novelty-driven games to play one more than a few minutes: "Is this all there is? What do you mean the next level is the same thing only harder? Give me a break!" So the introduction of novelty as a reward is basically a good thing, but it carries a drawback. Novelty is such a powerful reward that the game itself no longer has to be much fun. People will work for novelty! So we now have games in which the fundamental gameplay is a chore. One indicator of this is the outcry against fixed save points in games. Nobody minds fixed save points if the gameplay is intrinsically satisfying, with enough depth and subtlety that there is always room for greater expertise and mastery. But when the gameplay is a chore, losing just before winning the "prize" (seeing the boss or the next level) is a real bummer: "You mean I have to go through all that again?!"
I think this is fundamentally what rabbit is complaining about, although I'm not sure that he fully understands it. Even though a book is random access, it does not necessarily yield up its rewards easily. Yes, you can jump to the last page and read whodunnit, but if the story is good enough, you don't want to. And a great novel may not yield its full rewards until after several readings, if then, but the experience is good enough that it doesn't seem like a chore (unless assigned as a chore by an instructor). If the gameplay itself is intrinsically rewarding, with difficulty structured in such a way that essentially every player will eventually gain the expertise, points, etc. to see the grand ending, then nobody will complain about the length of the journey.
Rates of violent have been dropping quite steadily as video games (and other media) have become more realistically violent--and dropping most sharply in precisely the segment of the population who are the most ardent consumers of such entertainments.
So without doing a single study, we already know one thing: Any pro-violence effect of videogames would have to be small relative to other social/demographic factors impacting the indidence of violent crime.
Sounds like they are trying to drive companies like Google and Yahoo out of the US.
Should be a real boon to foreign anonymizer services...
do cite the *proof* to which you refer. it isn't that i don't everyone on slashdot, rather, i like to review the source material.
Yes, the evidence that differences among the DNA of different organisms are of the sort that arise by mutation is available in a number of publicly accessible DNA sequence databases. For comparisons between species, a good place to start is the NCBI taxonomy project, where you may obtain access of the billions of bases of sequence information available for a variety of species, as well as tools for making comparisons between gene sequences.
it seems to me you had a reasonable choice - address the quote and explain why it isn't relevant. you rejected the reasonable option and proceeded to attack the poster.
I did explain why the quote was not relevant: "science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets." To put it more directly: as a scientist I am interested in evidence, not somebody's opinion. Argument from authority may be considered acceptable in religion--in science, it is not. This fundamental principle dates back to the dawn of science--the motto of one of the earliest scientific societies, the Royal Society of London, is "Nullius in Verba," which loosely translated means "Take nobody's word."
you can't explain why a hybrid land/water ear (not advantageous on land, not advantageous in water - no hybrid environment exists) is an advantage.
I can hear pretty well underwater. I guess I must have a "hybrid land/water ear."
How about Geometry Wars on XBox Live?
I think that Nintendo's best chance of expanding their market is to keep the price as low as possible, not add an additional controller that some people might not need. If Nintendo wanted to "sweeten the pot" rather than lower the price, I think that an included game would attract more people than an additional controller.
That's silly, even a kid with no siblings has friends to play with, or parents. Someone buying the system just for themselves would still have a buddy to play against. And there might even be games that take advantage of two controllers used by both hands, like a virtual drummer.
I think that you are falling into the common error of assuming that everybody is like you. I know lots of people who play games mostly solo. If most game play was between two or more people, there wouldn't be so many one-player games on the market. And considering that the Wii controller in its "nunchaku" mode already occupies both hands, it is hard to imagine what kind of one-player game would use two of them.
When the X-box released before x-mas, they sold every single one. Heck, my little bro had his pre-paid at EB in November. We received it in February. If they're going to sell out, why don't they just make more before they start selling? MS doesn't make more money from people re-selling the unit on e-bay, but MS lost a lot of goodwill by failing to deliver a unit in reasonable time.
You are under the impression that Microsoft actually wanted to sell a lot of consoles. But in fact, those first consoles sold will probably over their entire lifetime never pay back their costs. Microsoft benefits from delaying purchases as long as possible, until the components are cheaper.
So the strategy that makes the most business sense is to sell as few units as possible at launch while maintaining the impression of a successful launch. It is far better to have people in line and going away disappointed than to have big stacks of boxes in stores waiting to be sold. Note that they can't limit sales by cranking the price way up, even if they are being snapped up for double on EBay, because this would be perceived as profiteering on a shortage that they created. Also, a high price would raise public doubts about the viability of the console, and whether Microsoft has priced themselves out of the broader gamer market, such as we are now hearing for the PS3.
I imagine that Sony will do the same thing with the PS3, for the same reasons. Nintendo now seems to be pursuing a different strategy--they probably will not be taking a loss on the Wii, even at first, so maybe we'll have a chance of seeing a decent supply at launch.
I think making two controllers standard is a very bad idea. People with one child or who purchase the unit to play by themselves would feel ripped off paying extra for a controller they won't use. Better to ship it with one controller at the lowest reasonable price, and let people buy another controller with the savings if they want. Or they could offer a premium "family pack" at a higher price with two controllers.
9. Consider some self-defense classes (For defense, don't become the aggressor). Bullies will pass you over for easier targets.
I'd move this one up to #1. In my experience as a student, going through adults to deal with bullies never helped, and usually made things worse. They can't be around all the time, and you lose respect of other students. I'd go up to the adult level only if you think you can make it a police matter--for example--if somebody flashes a weapon at you, and try to do it anonymously.
In terms of self-defense, I strongly recommend judo. It is the best equalizer if you are smaller, and being thrown to the ground or held down by a smaller person is very demoralizing, and hurts the attacker's status. I think that it feeds into instinctive domination/submission responses. I found that once they'd been thrown, bullies simply didn't want to mess with me, even if I didn't really hurt them. They'd bluster at me, but they wouldn't get within arm's reach. And if you simply take somebody to the ground and hold them down, it is hard to get blamed for escalating the violence--and if things do get nasty you can always break an arm or choke them out.
Actually, people have been taking GABA-receptor enhancers to get to sleep for decades. Ambien is just the latest. It has good pharmacokinetics, but it is also still under patent, so it is heavily marketed. Before Ambien, it was benzodiazepines like diazepam (Valium), which worked in essentially the same way. All of them have the potential to induce a kind of "hypnotic" state, particularly if you mix them with alcohol. And before the benzodiazepines, it was the barbiturates, which are even more dangerous, because at high doses they can activate the GABA receptor directly, rather than just helping GABA.
The GABA modulators that people take to sleep are probably less dangerous than the ones that they take for anxiety, because normally you don't take a sleeping pill and get into your car (although I know somebody who had a harrowing automotive experience as a result of accidentally taking an Ambien when he thought he was taking his similarly-shaped Lipitor). But people take anxiety-reduction drugs just to get through the day. There's been a lot of work on developing targeted GABA receptor modulators that are less sedating, but it has proved to be a difficult task.
Yet more evidence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?
It's interesting to me that these things seem to always deal with Gaba. Is Gaba the only thing in our brains?
GABA is not the only thing in our brain, but there are a lot of GABA neurons, located in all parts of the brain. It is primarily an inhibitory neurotransmitter, whose function is to "damp out" neural activity. Drugs that enhance the action of GABA are typically anti-anxiety, anti-convulsive, muscle relaxant, and sedative. It has a rich pharmacology reflecting the early discovery of drugs that subtly "tweak" the activity of the receptor rather than overwhelmingly activating or blocking them. There are a lot of subtly different variants of the GABA receptor, and there is considerable interest in developing better drugs that target only specific types of GABA receptors. So when you are concerned with anxiety, convulsions, or sleep, GABA is the major game in town. But drug abuse researchers tend to be particularly interested in dopamine, while learning researchers are interested in glutamate, and people working on depression are very interested in serotonin. And there are lots more, particularly if you include some of the slower-acting transmitters like the peptides.
You *could* induce a vegitative state in someone by stopping the action of GABA, but it wouldn't exactly be "persistent"
No, you have it backwards. Anti-anxiety medications typically enhance the action of GABA, and the effect of stopping the action of GABA is typically seizure. There is currently research into the possibility that blocking particular subtypes of GABA receptors might reverse cognitive impairment. This result is surprising because excess activation of GABA receptors is typically sedative, and zolpidem (trade name Ambien) enhances GABA action a type of GABA receptors that are thought to be particularly involved in sedation, so this result is the opposite of what would be expected from a simple point of view. However, there are a lot of GABA receptors in the brain, and because they are inhibitory you can get some paradoxical effects depending upon how the neurons are hooked up. In particular, you can get "disinhibition," when two GABA neurons are hooked up in series: activating the first neuron releases GABA to inhibit the second neuron, which then releases less GABA--so its targets are less inhibited.
Unfortunately, there are many conditions where none of the available drugs are entirely satisfactory. In psychiatric illnesses, especially, some people respond to one drug and not another, and some people find the side effects of one drug intolerable while others have no difficulty. Psychiatric illness is still poorly understood, but it's suspected that psychiatric illness can arise from multiple causes, and at present there is no good method other than trial and error to identify the best treatment for a particular individual. Current medications are largely derived from trial-and-error experimentation, because it is difficult to develop good animal models for psychiatric illness. Without a better understanding of how these illnesses arise, true cures, as opposed to palliative medications, are unlikely to arise.
If somebody was mirroring an entire site and skimming off the advertising clicks, I'd agree that the source has reason to complain.
But the real reason why people go to aggregator sites is because they are often more interesting than the sites they quote. I almost always at least check out the sites referenced by interesting articles on aggregator sites. If the aggregated article is representative of the content, then I end up reading more, and often the blog ends up on my regular list of bookmarks, and I start reading it directly.
So if you don't want to have aggregators bleeding off your readers, all you need to do is have so much interesting materials that nobody can possibly quote it all.
I agree. It may be wrong, it may even be copyright violation, but it is not plagiarism.
The essence of plagiarism is fraud--passing somebody else's work off as your own. Absent that element, it is not plagiarism.
That's got the same problem as the stupid "Mighty Mouse" ... it's too easy to accidentally register the wrong button (I can't reliably right-click with the MM, I have to stop and deliberately lift my index finger), plus you can't chord for the middle button in X11 apps.
Considering that I'm already using two-finger scrolling routinely, I doubt if I'd have any trouble learning that one finger gives me a left click, while putting down the second finger gives me a right click. I didn't have any problem learning the Mighty Mouse. After the first few days, it just seemed to magically know what I had in mind. I'm sure that I made some unconscious adaptation, but it wasn't anything that I had to think about. In fact, I put away the 3-button wireless mouse that I had been using. As much as I prefer a wireless mouse, the Mighty Mouse is just so much more comfortable to use.
Hit it it with your little finger or your ring finger.
If anything, that puts my wrist in an even more stressed position than hitting the right button with my thumb.
Cell membranes may well have formed independently of other elements of protolife. For example, fatty acid molecules can can spontaneously self-assemble into vesicles and tranport protons into their interiors, providing a pH gradient that could serve as an energy source for other processes
To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice??? That is a bit more specific then a casino predicting they'll win a little less then one percent of the time in craps.
More like the winning hand in a poker game of a billion players being the same several times in a row: "Oh my god, the winning hand is a royal flush once again!!!! The game must be fixed!"
An interesting addition is one that people have speculated about ever since Apple introduced two-finger scrolling on its trackpads (a feature that I now find nearly indispensable)--the ability to generate a right click without touching the keyboard by clicking with two fingers touching the trackpad. This lets Apple stick with their single button philosophy. (Doex anybody really like two-button trackpads? I feel like I'm flirting with carpal tunnel every time I twist my hand into that awkward position needed to reach the right button with my thumb).
I wonder if in "tap" mode you can just tap the pad with two fingers to get a right click?
The point is that people who think the MacBook is cheap
I doubt if Apple computers will ever qualify as "cheap." Apple now seems to be price-competitive with other name-brand computer manufacturers such as Sony, HP, IBM. Occasionally, they are even competitive with the semi-bargain PC's from Dell. But true bargain hunters will always be able shave off a few bucks by going with a PC made by NeverHeardOfEm.