One that would not be directly or indirectly financed by a party that has nothing to loose if cellphones are banned from our lives?
In my experience, nonscientists tend to overestimate the influence of funding sources on research. Most scientists will accept funding from just about anybody, and feel little loyalty to a funding source--they are far more concerned with their reputation and publication record than with making the organization that gave them the money happy. And there's not likely to be a lot of repeat business here, especially if you come up with a negative result. In fact, even with industry funding, you'd probably have a better chance of getting more money if you found an effect, since you could argue that more research is necessary to understand and avoid such problems. For example, if you found brain cancer with older, higher-radiation phones, you could then propose to do a follow-up study to investigate whether modern phones are safer. On the other hand, if the high-radiation phones are safe, then there's clearly no reason to worry about the modern ones. And most certainly, you'll have an easier time getting a positive study published. A negative result is not news, after all, because most scientists tend to figure that there is unlikely to be any real effect, due to the absence of ionizing radiation.
That said, there were numerous scandals over here in France and Spain of schools who rented their rooftop to cell phone companies and three years later the percentage of leucemia over the kiddos skyrocketted by 700%. Of course, there may have been other factors, but three of such scandals were publically related in the press.
This sort of thing always makes a big splash in the popular press, but tends to be discounted by scientists who know enough statistics to realize that such clusters of cases will be fairly common even if there is no real causal effect. Basically, intuition is a very poor guide to the probability of clusters happening by random chance. It's the old "How many people do you need to have in a room before you are more likely than not to have two with the same birthday?" problem. If you haven't seen it before, the tendency is to guess it must be quite a few, perhaps 100 or more, when the correct answer is 23. There are a lot of neighborhoods with power lines, and just by chance there are going to be a few out on the upper limb of the bell curve with several times the average frequency of cancer.
Observations are observations. If someone wants to verify the study, he can copy the methods and see if the results support or discredit the original study, or he can show that the methods were wrong.
Observations are observations, but interpretation is another matter. The observation is that when the investigators questioned a group of brain cancer victims, they reported more cell-phone use than people without cancer. As for interpretation, there are multiple possibilities:
1. Were people who used cell phones back then also more exposed to other cancer-causing influences than people who didn't use cell phones? 2. Are people with cancer more likely to recall or overestimate their cell phone use than people without cancer? 3. Do cell phones induce cancer?
In such a case, it is certainly reasonable to look at questions of mechanism. The first two hypotheses certainly make sense in terms of known mechanisms:
1. People who used cell-phones back then were probably more well-to-do and/or in a different social class than people who didn't, they probably were exposed to a multitude of different foods, liquors, environmental toxins, and drugs.
2. People who have a serious disease often are looking for something to blame, and might reasonably be more likely to remember (and perhaps even overestimate in retrospect) their cell phone use.
On the other hand the 3rd hypothesis has a big problem--cell phone radiation simply doesn't have enough energy to alter chemical bonds, which is a requirement for all established mechanisms of cancer induction. The fact that some studies have failed to pick up such an association provides further reason for skepticism.
A couple of comments: It would be a stupid objection even if it were true, because computers and modeling technology have advanced enormously in 30 years. But in fact it is not. The so called "scare" was pretty much confined to this article in the popular press--nothing in the scientific literature supports the claim of a threat from global cooling. Moreover, the scientific paper that apparently inspired the Newsweek hysteria actually reported that cooling would be expected if the effects of human activities were not considered.
As far as the battery, why would the device let the MP3 use all the battery? When the battery gets to some threshold (say 25% left) the MP3 functionility could turn off, or give some kind of warning (maybe between songs) that it needs to conserve battery for emergency use.
However, if a device is to substitute for my cell phone and iPod, it needs to offer the full battery life of my phone and the full battery life of my iPod. Seems like we're talking a lot of battery weight here. If I'm traveling light, I might leave my iPod behind, but I take my cell phone along.
The way this kind of study is done is that you pick a bunch of people with brain cancer, and you ask them about their cell phone use, then you compare the results with a similar survey of people without cancer. There are several reasons why this kind of study can produce misleading results:
1) You have to assume that people who use cell phones a lot are otherwise identical to people who don't. If they aren't, then they might have been differentially exposed to some other influence that causes cancer. You can control for known risk factors, but not for unknown ones.
2) You have to assume that people with cancer who held their phone on the cancer side are not more likely to remember, or perhaps overestimate, their cell phone use than people without cancer or people with the cancer on the other side. Considering that people with a serioius illness are often strongly motivated to try to figure out somehting to blame, this is a doubtful assumption.
Considering that other studies have been negative, this is still pretty week. But the big problem is that nobody has been able to come up with convincing evidence of a mechanism by which such weak, nonionizing radiation can cause tumors.
In principle, Microsoft could probably suppress Linux for years with a horde of patent infringement suits against anybody distributing Linux. It wouldn't much matter whether or not the lawsuits hold up in court; the cost of fighting them would be enormous.
But it would be a very dangerous policy for MS to pursue. MS has already had a close call with the Justice Dept. They are probably safe under the current administration, but given Bush's approval ratings they can hardly count on that continuing. Attempting to suppress MS's most serious competition--and one that is substantially not-for-profit--with questionable patent claims could easily culminate in the dismemberment of MS.
It is much safer for MS to attack Linux by proxy, by supporting firms like SCO, and to sow a little FUD whenever the opportunity presents itself--like this one.
This sort of thing is fairly common, and it is indeed a perceptual trick. It can be constructed intentionally by building a house on a slope, but it can occurs naturally if there is a hill where trees for some reason grow at an angle such that they are perpendicular to the sloped ground. The key to the effect is that the visual referent to the vertical and horizontal is misleading. Your brain unconsciously tries to adjust your stance so as to match the angle at which you stand to the "vertical" cues around you, but since they are actually at an angle, you can't do so without falling over. This is perceived as a mysterious sideways force. Even when you know what is really going on, the illusion is very convincing.
The other amusing illusion that arises out of this is that people seem to vary in height depending upon where they stand. Somebody standing (actually) uphill has their head at a higher level, and since your brain is unconsciously assuming the ground is level, that must mean that they are taller. Again, the illusion is extraordinarily convincing even if you understand it.
Yeah, right. I challenge you to document a direct quote in which Hansen "flatly declared that based on his computer model, the upcoming winter of 1988-89 would be the warmest on record." No climatologist would "flatly declare" such a prediction for an individual year. Other sources of variability are such that the climate models are incapable of making such a prediction for a single year. Even on a longer time scale, it is typical to present a range of scenarios reflecting the uncertainties in the projections.
Here is what Hansen says about it, including the figure with the predictions that he presented to Congress with the actual temperature data overlaid. Looks like the actual data falls pretty squarel in the range of his predicitons.
Most retailers around here charge for an extended warranty. And a lot of these units break after the first year (I don't think any of my sister's PS2 failures came in year 1). Sony's price to fix one is so close to replacement cost that a lot of people figure that they might as well have a completely new unit.
I'm still on my first PS2, but I'm an adult. My sister has kids, and the unit gets a lot more use. I think she's on her third unit, and I think there was a major repair in there as well.
Indeed, but the original PlayStation came out at a time when people had been VERY satisfied with their previous Nintendo system, the SNES.
However, the original PS was able to offer something that was not available (aside from a couple of cartridges with auxiliary processors) in previous generations--3D polygon graphics, making possible completely new game designs. But there are no further quantum leaps to offer. From here on in, all new systems have to offer is a bit more polish.
except, for it to work they're going to have to disable the "feature" in their players as well. If they don't, all that an enterprising member of HD-DVD has to do is join blue-ray, stamp some blu-ray disks with the "downgrade me please" bit, and release them on the unsuspecting public. It's not like people with sony players are only going to buy movies produced by sony studios.
You don't see Microsoft releasing a poor port of Halo for the PS2. Releasing an intentionally crippled title would just make for bad press. If they really want to undermine the competing format, it would make more sense for them not to release the title at all on that system--which they could easily justify on the grounds that they couldn't afford the expense of producing titles for a losing format.
And the producers with no major investment in either format will likely turn the downrez flag on for both.
Sony says that they are doing this to promote the BluRay standard. Presumably, once HD-DVD is defeated, they'll be turning down-rezzing back on in their releases. First good reason to hope for a long, nasty, format war...
As for other content producers without a big vested interest in one format or the other, don't expect them to be so generous with their releases. If they set the flag, Sony's BluRay drives will obediently down-rez the analog output.
What people need to realize is that Bill Gates is a ruthless business man who knows how to be in the right place at the right time. He made his entire fortune by embracing other people's ideas and extending them to be successful in the market. Everything from the Altair port of BASIC, to purchasing a CP/M ripoff to sell IBM as DOS, to announcing a non-existant "Windows" to compete with VisiOn, to cheating Spyglass out of a web browser to compete with Netscape. He doesn't know what will work until someone else shows him how. Then, and only then, does he make sure he nails the market before anyone else does.
However, I think these recent comments come from the brilliant ruthless businessman, not the "me-too" technologist side of his personality
These little laptops are a major threat to Microsoft. Not because they are directly taking a market away from Microsoft--MS isn't really interested in people who can't afford more than $100--but because those kids (and the economies of their countries) are going to grow up. And someday, a few of them will be potential MS clients, either because they've somehow managed to make enough money to afford a computer, or because they are hired by a company that uses computers. Except that all of their knowledge and experience will be with Open Source software, and the chance that they will switch to Windows at that point is pretty small.
So Gates is in a real bind here. These are hardware, not software, so MS cannot simply flood the market with free computers the way they did with Internet Explorer when they were trying to capture the Internet. It's one thing to provide shared Wintel computers at a deep discount to schools, but these guys want to give a computer to every kid at $100 a pop! Even Microsoft can't afford to compete with that. Microsoft doesn't even make computers, and nobody who makes Microsoft compatible computers can make them for anything close to that price.
So the best Gates can do is sneer at it, and hope to discourage the project as much he can.
I would say that chemistry is nanotechnology when it is capable of positioning specific atoms at specific locations. So simple solution chemistry lacks this specificity and does not qualify, but chemistry directed by a specific molecular catalyst that recognize a specific site for modification does.
I guess since time began. OWC is a retailer, not a hardware producer.
OWC sells a line of OWC branded products, including the drive in question. I imagine that they do not manufacture the components of the products that they sell under their own brand name, but this is hardly unusual among hardware producers.
Well, there's a link to Other World Computing (the only link in the article). So while it may not be a great endorsement of this device, the article is CERTAINLY an advertisement for OWC.
Since when is an acknowledgment attached to a rather negative review an advertisement?
Sony could follow Microsoft's example, and launch with almost no availability of the actual console. Until very recently, the XBox 360 was virtually unattainable for anybody who was not on a waiting list months before the launch. This sort of limited launch makes good strategic sense:
It convinces people who might otherwise buy a competing console to wait in hopes of actually getting their hands on a PS3.
It reassures investors and developers with an on-time launch
Long lines of people and inflated prices on EBay gives the impression of high demand and a successful launch no matter how limited the actual supply is.
It minimizes the loss on the console hardware. These new consoles are almost certainly sold at a significant loss on the hardware, and with only a few launch titles, there's not much in the way of licensing revenue early on to offset that. The more they sell, the more they lose. The smart strategy is to release as little actual hardware as possible while still maintaining the illusion of a product launch and waiting for prices on components--such as that new Blu-Ray drive--to drop a bit.
If they don't depend on the placement of individual atoms or molecules then it's not really nanotechnology.
Every one of those individual atoms in those peptides is placed at a specific location. Biochemistry is a very powerful tool for placing specific atoms at specific places.
Also, the value of nanotechnology is not only in passive structures whose design is static, and based on its simple physical properties, but also in structures that appear (at our scale of perception) to be solid, but which are actually made of machinery themselves, which can be self-maintaining and -repairing.
Of course. It is no coincidence that evolved nanotechnology...i.e. life...has exactly these properties.
The amusing thing is the really good games on XBox 360 are the XBox Live Arcade titles--most of which would have run just fine on consoles from a couple of generations back.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you...I'm too busy trying to recapture my former expertise at Robotron.
They don't have working Blu-Ray drives, and in fact the specs there are changing. (latest news: no degradation on analog HDTV sets, which is good
Actually, my understanding is that the drives will still include the ability to degrade resolution with analog output--Sony is just promising that in the interests of promoting the format they won't set the flag to activate this feature in their own movies...at least, not right away. Once Blu-Ray wins out over HD-DVD, of course, all bets are off.
The first good reason to hope for a long, long format war....
Great. Now show me a condition of concentration such that only one molecule is being made, not at a time but being made period, and you are able to find it and do something with it, and I'll concede the point.
Again, this is easy to do. One can easily find a dilution such that there is no more than one molecule of substrate per tube, while immunological and fluorescence methods are capable of binding and tracking individual molecules, if for some reason it was necessary to do so. But you are begging the question: What is it that causes it to be nanotechnology to make a nanometer scale molecule one at a time, but not nanotechnology to make the exact same nano-scale molecule efficiently in quantity? Note that most proposed applications of nanotechnology do not involve the use of single molecules, but rather the use of a population of nanoscale molecules or molecular assemblies. So your argument is a bit like insisting that it is automotive mechanics to build one car by hand, but not if you build the same car in a factory on an assembly line.
They're not making one peptide at a time, though. They're using a process that creates groups of molecules.
Chemical reactions typically occur one molecule at a time. One could easily set up conditions of concentration such that only one molecule is being made at any given time, although this would be rather inefficient when you need a lot of them. Are you seriously trying to argue that a "factory" efficiently producing a nanoscale molecule does not qualify as nanotechnology, while producing exactly the same molecule, for exactly the same function, one at a time does?
Slashdot Mirror
One that would not be directly or indirectly financed by a party that has nothing to loose if cellphones are banned from our lives?
In my experience, nonscientists tend to overestimate the influence of funding sources on research. Most scientists will accept funding from just about anybody, and feel little loyalty to a funding source--they are far more concerned with their reputation and publication record than with making the organization that gave them the money happy. And there's not likely to be a lot of repeat business here, especially if you come up with a negative result. In fact, even with industry funding, you'd probably have a better chance of getting more money if you found an effect, since you could argue that more research is necessary to understand and avoid such problems. For example, if you found brain cancer with older, higher-radiation phones, you could then propose to do a follow-up study to investigate whether modern phones are safer. On the other hand, if the high-radiation phones are safe, then there's clearly no reason to worry about the modern ones. And most certainly, you'll have an easier time getting a positive study published. A negative result is not news, after all, because most scientists tend to figure that there is unlikely to be any real effect, due to the absence of ionizing radiation.
That said, there were numerous scandals over here in France and Spain of schools who rented their rooftop to cell phone companies and three years later the percentage of leucemia over the kiddos skyrocketted by 700%. Of course, there may have been other factors, but three of such scandals were publically related in the press.
This sort of thing always makes a big splash in the popular press, but tends to be discounted by scientists who know enough statistics to realize that such clusters of cases will be fairly common even if there is no real causal effect. Basically, intuition is a very poor guide to the probability of clusters happening by random chance. It's the old "How many people do you need to have in a room before you are more likely than not to have two with the same birthday?" problem. If you haven't seen it before, the tendency is to guess it must be quite a few, perhaps 100 or more, when the correct answer is 23. There are a lot of neighborhoods with power lines, and just by chance there are going to be a few out on the upper limb of the bell curve with several times the average frequency of cancer.
Observations are observations. If someone wants to verify the study, he can copy the methods and see if the results support or discredit the original study, or he can show that the methods were wrong.
Observations are observations, but interpretation is another matter. The observation is that when the investigators questioned a group of brain cancer victims, they reported more cell-phone use than people without cancer. As for interpretation, there are multiple possibilities:
1. Were people who used cell phones back then also more exposed to other cancer-causing influences than people who didn't use cell phones?
2. Are people with cancer more likely to recall or overestimate their cell phone use than people without cancer?
3. Do cell phones induce cancer?
In such a case, it is certainly reasonable to look at questions of mechanism. The first two hypotheses certainly make sense in terms of known mechanisms:
1. People who used cell-phones back then were probably more well-to-do and/or in a different social class than people who didn't, they probably were exposed to a multitude of different foods, liquors, environmental toxins, and drugs.
2. People who have a serious disease often are looking for something to blame, and might reasonably be more likely to remember (and perhaps even overestimate in retrospect) their cell phone use.
On the other hand the 3rd hypothesis has a big problem--cell phone radiation simply doesn't have enough energy to alter chemical bonds, which is a requirement for all established mechanisms of cancer induction. The fact that some studies have failed to pick up such an association provides further reason for skepticism.
A couple of comments: It would be a stupid objection even if it were true, because computers and modeling technology have advanced enormously in 30 years. But in fact it is not. The so called "scare" was pretty much confined to this article in the popular press--nothing in the scientific literature supports the claim of a threat from global cooling. Moreover, the scientific paper that apparently inspired the Newsweek hysteria actually reported that cooling would be expected if the effects of human activities were not considered .
As far as the battery, why would the device let the MP3 use all the battery? When the battery gets to some threshold (say 25% left) the MP3 functionility could turn off, or give some kind of warning (maybe between songs) that it needs to conserve battery for emergency use.
However, if a device is to substitute for my cell phone and iPod, it needs to offer the full battery life of my phone and the full battery life of my iPod. Seems like we're talking a lot of battery weight here. If I'm traveling light, I might leave my iPod behind, but I take my cell phone along.
The way this kind of study is done is that you pick a bunch of people with brain cancer, and you ask them about their cell phone use, then you compare the results with a similar survey of people without cancer. There are several reasons why this kind of study can produce misleading results:
1) You have to assume that people who use cell phones a lot are otherwise identical to people who don't. If they aren't, then they might have been differentially exposed to some other influence that causes cancer. You can control for known risk factors, but not for unknown ones.
2) You have to assume that people with cancer who held their phone on the cancer side are not more likely to remember, or perhaps overestimate, their cell phone use than people without cancer or people with the cancer on the other side. Considering that people with a serioius illness are often strongly motivated to try to figure out somehting to blame, this is a doubtful assumption.
Considering that other studies have been negative, this is still pretty week. But the big problem is that nobody has been able to come up with convincing evidence of a mechanism by which such weak, nonionizing radiation can cause tumors.
In principle, Microsoft could probably suppress Linux for years with a horde of patent infringement suits against anybody distributing Linux. It wouldn't much matter whether or not the lawsuits hold up in court; the cost of fighting them would be enormous.
But it would be a very dangerous policy for MS to pursue. MS has already had a close call with the Justice Dept. They are probably safe under the current administration, but given Bush's approval ratings they can hardly count on that continuing. Attempting to suppress MS's most serious competition--and one that is substantially not-for-profit--with questionable patent claims could easily culminate in the dismemberment of MS.
It is much safer for MS to attack Linux by proxy, by supporting firms like SCO, and to sow a little FUD whenever the opportunity presents itself--like this one.
This sort of thing is fairly common, and it is indeed a perceptual trick. It can be constructed intentionally by building a house on a slope, but it can occurs naturally if there is a hill where trees for some reason grow at an angle such that they are perpendicular to the sloped ground. The key to the effect is that the visual referent to the vertical and horizontal is misleading. Your brain unconsciously tries to adjust your stance so as to match the angle at which you stand to the "vertical" cues around you, but since they are actually at an angle, you can't do so without falling over. This is perceived as a mysterious sideways force. Even when you know what is really going on, the illusion is very convincing.
The other amusing illusion that arises out of this is that people seem to vary in height depending upon where they stand. Somebody standing (actually) uphill has their head at a higher level, and since your brain is unconsciously assuming the ground is level, that must mean that they are taller. Again, the illusion is extraordinarily convincing even if you understand it.
Yeah, right. I challenge you to document a direct quote in which Hansen "flatly declared that based on his computer model, the upcoming winter of 1988-89 would be the warmest on record." No climatologist would "flatly declare" such a prediction for an individual year. Other sources of variability are such that the climate models are incapable of making such a prediction for a single year. Even on a longer time scale, it is typical to present a range of scenarios reflecting the uncertainties in the projections.
Here is what Hansen says about it, including the figure with the predictions that he presented to Congress with the actual temperature data overlaid. Looks like the actual data falls pretty squarel in the range of his predicitons.
Most retailers around here charge for an extended warranty. And a lot of these units break after the first year (I don't think any of my sister's PS2 failures came in year 1). Sony's price to fix one is so close to replacement cost that a lot of people figure that they might as well have a completely new unit.
I'm still on my first PS2, but I'm an adult. My sister has kids, and the unit gets a lot more use. I think she's on her third unit, and I think there was a major repair in there as well.
Indeed, but the original PlayStation came out at a time when people had been VERY satisfied with their previous Nintendo system, the SNES.
However, the original PS was able to offer something that was not available (aside from a couple of cartridges with auxiliary processors) in previous generations--3D polygon graphics, making possible completely new game designs. But there are no further quantum leaps to offer. From here on in, all new systems have to offer is a bit more polish.
except, for it to work they're going to have to disable the "feature" in their players as well. If they don't, all that an enterprising member of HD-DVD has to do is join blue-ray, stamp some blu-ray disks with the "downgrade me please" bit, and release them on the unsuspecting public. It's not like people with sony players are only going to buy movies produced by sony studios.
You don't see Microsoft releasing a poor port of Halo for the PS2. Releasing an intentionally crippled title would just make for bad press. If they really want to undermine the competing format, it would make more sense for them not to release the title at all on that system--which they could easily justify on the grounds that they couldn't afford the expense of producing titles for a losing format.
And the producers with no major investment in either format will likely turn the downrez flag on for both.
Sony says that they are doing this to promote the BluRay standard. Presumably, once HD-DVD is defeated, they'll be turning down-rezzing back on in their releases. First good reason to hope for a long, nasty, format war...
As for other content producers without a big vested interest in one format or the other, don't expect them to be so generous with their releases. If they set the flag, Sony's BluRay drives will obediently down-rez the analog output.
What people need to realize is that Bill Gates is a ruthless business man who knows how to be in the right place at the right time. He made his entire fortune by embracing other people's ideas and extending them to be successful in the market. Everything from the Altair port of BASIC, to purchasing a CP/M ripoff to sell IBM as DOS, to announcing a non-existant "Windows" to compete with VisiOn, to cheating Spyglass out of a web browser to compete with Netscape. He doesn't know what will work until someone else shows him how. Then, and only then, does he make sure he nails the market before anyone else does.
However, I think these recent comments come from the brilliant ruthless businessman, not the "me-too" technologist side of his personality
These little laptops are a major threat to Microsoft. Not because they are directly taking a market away from Microsoft--MS isn't really interested in people who can't afford more than $100--but because those kids (and the economies of their countries) are going to grow up. And someday, a few of them will be potential MS clients, either because they've somehow managed to make enough money to afford a computer, or because they are hired by a company that uses computers. Except that all of their knowledge and experience will be with Open Source software, and the chance that they will switch to Windows at that point is pretty small.
So Gates is in a real bind here. These are hardware, not software, so MS cannot simply flood the market with free computers the way they did with Internet Explorer when they were trying to capture the Internet. It's one thing to provide shared Wintel computers at a deep discount to schools, but these guys want to give a computer to every kid at $100 a pop! Even Microsoft can't afford to compete with that. Microsoft doesn't even make computers, and nobody who makes Microsoft compatible computers can make them for anything close to that price.
So the best Gates can do is sneer at it, and hope to discourage the project as much he can.
I would say that chemistry is nanotechnology when it is capable of positioning specific atoms at specific locations. So simple solution chemistry lacks this specificity and does not qualify, but chemistry directed by a specific molecular catalyst that recognize a specific site for modification does.
I guess since time began. OWC is a retailer, not a hardware producer.
OWC sells a line of OWC branded products, including the drive in question. I imagine that they do not manufacture the components of the products that they sell under their own brand name, but this is hardly unusual among hardware producers.
Well, there's a link to Other World Computing (the only link in the article). So while it may not be a great endorsement of this device, the article is CERTAINLY an advertisement for OWC.
Since when is an acknowledgment attached to a rather negative review an advertisement?
A power adapter? You've got to be kidding - Most external 2.5" HD enclosures can be powered by the USB bus itself.
Really? Which ones have you verified to work on a Mac laptop? The only one that I know of that will work off the USB bus of a Mac is the iPod.
The only USB drive that I know that will work on a Mac Aluminum Powerbook USB port without external power is the iPod. Haven't tried a Y-cable.
Firewire, on the other hand, generally is not a problem.
Sony could follow Microsoft's example, and launch with almost no availability of the actual console. Until very recently, the XBox 360 was virtually unattainable for anybody who was not on a waiting list months before the launch. This sort of limited launch makes good strategic sense:
It convinces people who might otherwise buy a competing console to wait in hopes of actually getting their hands on a PS3.
It reassures investors and developers with an on-time launch
Long lines of people and inflated prices on EBay gives the impression of high demand and a successful launch no matter how limited the actual supply is.
It minimizes the loss on the console hardware. These new consoles are almost certainly sold at a significant loss on the hardware, and with only a few launch titles, there's not much in the way of licensing revenue early on to offset that. The more they sell, the more they lose. The smart strategy is to release as little actual hardware as possible while still maintaining the illusion of a product launch and waiting for prices on components--such as that new Blu-Ray drive--to drop a bit.
If they don't depend on the placement of individual atoms or molecules then it's not really nanotechnology.
Every one of those individual atoms in those peptides is placed at a specific location. Biochemistry is a very powerful tool for placing specific atoms at specific places.
Also, the value of nanotechnology is not only in passive structures whose design is static, and based on its simple physical properties, but also in structures that appear (at our scale of perception) to be solid, but which are actually made of machinery themselves, which can be self-maintaining and -repairing.
Of course. It is no coincidence that evolved nanotechnology...i.e. life...has exactly these properties.
The amusing thing is the really good games on XBox 360 are the XBox Live Arcade titles--most of which would have run just fine on consoles from a couple of generations back.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you...I'm too busy trying to recapture my former expertise at Robotron.
They don't have working Blu-Ray drives, and in fact the specs there are changing. (latest news: no degradation on analog HDTV sets, which is good
Actually, my understanding is that the drives will still include the ability to degrade resolution with analog output--Sony is just promising that in the interests of promoting the format they won't set the flag to activate this feature in their own movies...at least, not right away. Once Blu-Ray wins out over HD-DVD, of course, all bets are off.
The first good reason to hope for a long, long format war....
Great. Now show me a condition of concentration such that only one molecule is being made, not at a time but being made period, and you are able to find it and do something with it, and I'll concede the point.
Again, this is easy to do. One can easily find a dilution such that there is no more than one molecule of substrate per tube, while immunological and fluorescence methods are capable of binding and tracking individual molecules, if for some reason it was necessary to do so. But you are begging the question: What is it that causes it to be nanotechnology to make a nanometer scale molecule one at a time, but not nanotechnology to make the exact same nano-scale molecule efficiently in quantity? Note that most proposed applications of nanotechnology do not involve the use of single molecules, but rather the use of a population of nanoscale molecules or molecular assemblies. So your argument is a bit like insisting that it is automotive mechanics to build one car by hand, but not if you build the same car in a factory on an assembly line.
They're not making one peptide at a time, though. They're using a process that creates groups of molecules.
Chemical reactions typically occur one molecule at a time. One could easily set up conditions of concentration such that only one molecule is being made at any given time, although this would be rather inefficient when you need a lot of them. Are you seriously trying to argue that a "factory" efficiently producing a nanoscale molecule does not qualify as nanotechnology, while producing exactly the same molecule, for exactly the same function, one at a time does?