Yes, there was a reason, namely greed. By the time Bell was broken up, you had been able to hook anything you wanted up to the phone system, with the sole provision that it didn't interfere with the operation of the system, for over a decade.. See the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the FCC. Relative pricing was, by and large, and artifact of the time and the relative level of technology. Bell provided immaculate professional level service to all its customers. Equivalent to having a guaranteed mainframe service contracts from a company like IBM then, or now.
You also completely ignore the enormous good Bell did (admittedly because they were forced by Congress) in the Form of Bell Labs. Want to even guess what the computer you're using right now would cost without Bell Labs? Sure, engineers at Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. But Bell Labs developed the transistor out of basic research into quantum mechanics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs. The Transistor, the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, the development of the C Programming Language, UNIX, incredible advances in LASER tech, are just the highlights.
You, or the society you belong to, have been voting for Neoconservative Fascists who worship Milton Friedman! Possibly for the last 30 years starting with the Carter Presidency.
Here's what you win:
1. Complete removal of Anti-Trust enforcement!
2. Busting up and deregulation of Functioning Government Controlled Monopolies that provide Vital Resources!
3. Customer Hostile Corporate Policy!
4. And Much, Much More!
Warning: Side effects may include Black outs, Brown outs, Corporate Fraud at an unheard of level, and militaristic foreign and domestic policy. Not recommend for children of parents, parents of children, women who are nursing, or young men between the ages 18-30.
The causes of all this shit aren't mysterious at all. Remember Ma Bell? If, like the average Slashdotter, you don't, imagine a time in which the phone company had to actually make your service work. Because if they didn't, you had real recourse to complain and make shit happen, on the scale of people getting fired. Imagine a time when the company responsible for the telecommunications infrastructure actually followed government mandates. Remember fiber to the Home? If Ma Bell had still existed, that would have actually happened. But no, Reagan busted up the system and sold the parts to his cronies. And yes, Jimmy Carter was in fact the first. He deregulated the Airline industry, stupid fuck. Note how the Airline industry is such a disaster these days? How the companies keep going out of business? Don't think there might be any correlation there do you?
Acknowledged. However, this isn't really Irrational's fault. Shodan is owned by EA, and they've buried the IP in the lands where great characters go to die when they don't meet sales expectations.
My guess is that you are still probably in the upper percentage range of users. My guess is that by far what most users do is Image Manipulation. By the way, have you tried Gimpshop? It supports PS plug-ins and on Windows at least, has a plug-in available to make the interface a Single window. It's primarily a fork of the interface to make it more like Photoshop however, so you might not like it.
"Couldn't handle what they were aiming for"? You mean CDs full of FMV? Blech.
I say the reality is that by aiming to keep load times unnoticable, Nintendo inadvertently saved its audience for the worst trend in Gaming History. Do you remember the garbage that got produced? Ye gods! The Live Action FMV clips? "Mad Dog McCree" "The Horde" Yes, those both predate the PSX, but they illustrate perfectly the kind of excrement that got produced.
Yes, I was talking out my ass, by exaggerating and using sarcasm to make a point.
You know, one of the perspectives that doesn't actually get taken much, but which is demonstrably accurate is that Square leaving Nintendo was the best thing that ever happened to Nintendo. How's that you say? Because in order to fill the traditional JRPG void left by Square, Nintendo created Pokemon. Pokemon has only been the second most successful franchise in the entire industry, second only to Nintendo's own Mario, and has been twice as successful as Final Fantasy as a franchise.
Low volume levels nothing. Humans are worse at hearing low bass than other frequencies period. That still doesn't mean 150db of 30hz tones won't blow out your hearing just because it only sounds as loud as 300hz at 90db. And yes, I'm exaggerating. The problem with your point is that people aren't just applying a smiley face EQ to listen to light classical or talk radio at low volumes. They're not applying the opposite at high levels at all, They're applying a full +9db or more at both ends while listening to Bass heavy music at concert volume levels (and much higher).
You can't seriously tell me you've never seen people do this. Hell, anything you hear a booming and rattling car car audio system, what I've described is exactly what's going on. Don't try to use Fletcher and Munson to defend what those people are doing as anything other than an a musical atrocity.
For much the same reason as Windows, allow admittedly Photoshop is a much better product. Even if, The GIMP, was 100% there, market inertia would keep Photoshop around for a long, long time. As it is GIMP is probably 90% there for anything most people use it either for, but people are familiar with Photoshop, so Photoshop they use. Huge installed bases cause huge entrenched contingents of users that would rather put up with being raped (as in the case of Windows) than learn something different.
And also, while there are sound reasons to migrate off Windows that have nothing to do with price (Viruses, arbitrary obsoleteing of formats, etc, etc, etc). And even with all that motivation, people still aren't willing to learn anything new. There's not really any huge reason to migrate off of Photoshop except price. The issues that tend to annoy users of photoshop (like Adobe's glacial pace of implementing substantial updates, like support for use of more than 2 cores.), just aren't that bad. Thus Adobe continues to thrive, and nobody really even complains that much.
Thank you! The magic to "make the sound better" is supposed to happen at the mastering stage. Where people with actual skill (The Johns Brothers, etc) work their voodoo.
I hear that. I was listening to some music with a friend recently. "Your EQ is messed up," he says. He proceeds to rework it into a smiley face bumping the bottom bass up about to about +9db. I had had bass on 0 and treble up about +3db to compensate for some roll off inherent in my speakers, which admittedly are cheap at the moment.
If you don't understand what's wrong with a smiley face EQ, you've probably damaged your hearing pretty badly already.
I do believe Bioshock has one. I think the founder of Rapture is present in some form (whether he's alive or not, I not know), and that he fulfills a similar role.
Duh!
1. Playstation 3: A system that performing so poorly about all you can is its outselling the 360 in Japan.
2. The 360. Piss-poor market in Japan, good everywhere else, but not selling as fast as:
3. The Wii - Fastest selling home console on the market worldwide, as fast as Nintendo can make them. Selling faster than the current numerical market leader (the 360) is or ever has. Popular everywhere, including Square's home turf.
Now, of course the intelligent thing to do would be to just make the damn series Wii exclusive. But of course, Square has be too smart for that! So instead they're pissing around waiting to see if PS3 sales will perk up, and trying to cover their asses in the meantime. I think it's clear they desperately don't want to have to crawl back to Nintendo. They ran off from Casa Nintendo 10 years ago like a spoiled Rich-Bitch, "You don't own me! I don't need you! I've got Sony!"
Of course, I'd really love to see Nintendo turn Square out on their ass "Uhhh, yeah, see, I'm kind of busy, and you're really a lot older and saggy now. Not as hot as you used to be at all." And let them slum it on a system with a barely 7 figure market, while Nintendo's well into 8.
I'd guess they don't want to go to Microsoft because MS poached all their talent. Including fucking Akira Torayama. Who by the way, has the worst fucking art style on the planet. Who the fuck decided that the most bland, uninteresting mangaka on the planet needed to be the most famous? Any schmuck with a one-shot in Shounen Jump can draw better than that hack (and make characters that don't all look alike through every fucking project he's ever been involved in!)
There are a number of nutrients that we are unable to synthesize that have chiral centers. Amino Acids are the big one. All proteins except glycine (glycine has two identical Hydrogens on the chiral carbon) are chiral. Basically its safe to assume that any large molecule that is a necessary nutrient is probably chiral. This does present a problem, yes, in that food from natural plant or animal sources would be severely lacking in vital nutrients (and in many cases poisonous) The real life equivalent would be flooding a normal humans bloodstream with R-alanine or something similar, which I'd guess would be pretty toxic. So yes, at the same time we'd have to create food organisms that were also reverse chiral.
On the other hand, the problem of reverse chirality viruses arising naturally is MUCH, MUCH harder than you seem to think it would be. All life on earth today uses exclusively L-proteins and one or the other chirality of nucleic acids (I can't remember which, although I want to say nucleic acids are R for some reason. In any case, nucleic acids ARE stereospecific, the sugar components, Ribose, in RNA, and Deoxyribose, in DNA, have chiral centers.) All life on earth uses the same stereochemistry. And everything, from metalbolic to reproductive proteins "assumes" that stereochemistry. This barrier is nearly insurmountable (without intelligence) because it makes all the proteins useless simulataneously. The only kinds of organisms that can survive in an environment like that at all, are organisms that can synthesize all of the chemicals they need to survive from elements (and there are bacteria that can do this, and plants obviously do), but even they are at risk of being poisoned. I'd have to study it in more detail but I suspect having intracellular amino acids of the wrong chirality would poison Ribosome functioning by inhibiting protein polymerization, as racemic mixtures do in vitro without anything alive. By that I mean that stereospecific solution of say, L-alanine, can be made to polymerize in vitro, but a racemic mixture of both L- and R-alanine can't. As I think about this would probably be a GREAT way to kill cancer cells, but it would be equally fantastic at killing healthy cells.
So the a virus adapted for natural living things simply couldn't utilize the cellular machinery of a reverse-chiral organism. The two are chemically the wrong shape and incompatible.
Back to why I think treating AIDS is so hard. The problem is that after you annihilate the active virus particles, you have to maintain that indefinitely. Any cell that carries the HIV genome can, essentially instantly, produce millions of active virus particles.
Stephan Hawking NEEDS this thing. All it needs is a set of grasping hands on long arms so he can crush his enemies like Robo-Nixon. That would be so awesome. In any case, add some lasers and missiles and you've got a fully functional Gundam!
Solo? Look, I've tried that on both WoW and FFXI, and when you try to solo, you get your ass handed to you. In FFXI, by the monsters, by lvl 20, anything that gives XP will RAPE any single player character. In WoW, its possible to lvl soloing mobs, however above about lvl 25 or so, you get raped by played of the opposing faction. Who come along in a party and then corpse camp you for half an hour. It's pretty disgusting.
This is sadly true, but is changing over time. Lawyers were some of the first professionals to deploy computer systems in the 1980's. (I remember, I was there) They were mostly using IBM XT/AT with Wordperfect, to type up legal briefs and such. Those lawyers that were fairly young then (20 years ago) are now approaching the age where the more respected among them get elected to judicial positions (late 40's to 50 or so). A lawyer I know personally was involved in the development/deployment of the first standardized database system for case records for a certain part of the judicial system in his state in the early 1990's. These lawyers are now starting to creep into the judiciary. These guys may not be l33t *nix haxxors, but they know what a computer is, how to turn it on, how computer systems made their practices much more efficient, and they are at least aware of and use the internet. They rely on e-mail. Sure, some of them are still clueless, but that's true of any group. It just takes time, but we are getting there. In another 10 years or so all the old fogies will have retired and been replaced by men from the generation I'm talking about. They're at least going to have enough knowledge to ask intelligent questions (e.g. "Spyware, what's that?" "It's like a virus that collects information from your computer and sends it to a third party over the internet" "Ah, I see.")
Nope, There's at least the two of us. The trailer was actually pretty encouraging to me. It looked much more like Fallout than I expected from Bethesda. I'm still concerned about it being first person though. I really like isometric games. On the other hand, if they can pull of a first person RPG-like in the Fallout universe that is as cool as Bioshock looks right now, I'll be happy. I just pray it won't be anything like Oblivion. I'm sorry, I've been playing TES since Daggerfall, and they've all failed pretty horribly to deliver on their promise. They suck IMHO.
VitrosChemistryAnaly, I strongly suggest you look into Bioshock, it's a first person RPG/Shooter/Survival horror hybrid by much of the team that did System Shock (which you should also look into if you haven't played them). I have very high hopes for this game (shipping August this year on PC/XBOX360) on the basis of the history of the team. I really hope they can get some success this time, they really deserve it. System Shock 2 got killed by the release of the original Half-Life. The original by the release of Doom II. The same company also created the Thief series. Also, I don't work for them, I'm just a fan.
What, you mean just like every computer platform? Unless you learn to go out and look for quality freeware that is. Almost all the important F/OSS projects have Mac ports. Plus a number of interesting Mac specific projects, although you may have to research a bit to find them.
There's a lot that can be done with a Mac out of the box. For one, it actually comes with useable Web-browser and e-mail client (Much like linux and unlike Windows). It also comes with the iApps which give usuable utilities for many tasks.
I think the real take home point from this article is that expertise on one platform doesn't fully transfer to any other platform. Amazing revelation, I know. Just because you already know your laundry list of preferred apps on windows, and how to tweak around, doesn't mean you won't have spend some time learning and finding replacement apps.
Of course, creating reverse chirality people carries with it the risk that someone might create reverse chirality viruses, but I think its significant to note that that is essentially the only way viruses would ever be able to affect those people. They would be immune, by nature to every naturally occurring virus on the earth, from the common hold, all the way up to HIV. They would also have some fairly strong resistance to any bacterial infection that relies on nutrients in the host being of a specific chirality (which is a good percentage), at best any pathogen would have a significantly harder time in that environment, which is often enough to let an immune system win completely. So while my suggestion is certainly difficult (and impossible with today's technology) it is not without significant merit.
The last I was aware, we don't actually test for HIV by detecting the Virus particles themselves, we test by detecting the presence of a certain class of antibodies the body creates in response to the Virus. That may not be true any more, however. The difficulty with simply testing every human alive and then incincerating all of the infected is that there is another reservoir of HIV. The great apes. So we'd either have to kill them as well (a solution I do NOT find acceptable), stop Africans from eating bush meat (which is probably the origin of HIV in humans in the first place). Another problem that you are forgetting is that HIV is an RNA reverse transciptase virus. It copies its genome into the DNA of the cells it infects. The virus can exist dormantly with no virus particles in the body at all, and then reemerge when the transcription of its genes is triggered. You have to be able to either remove the DNA, or disable it somehow to prevent it from being transcribed. Hard, hard problem, which also makes it very difficult to know if you've succeeded. This phenomena is what occurs in the people who manage to survive as HIV+ for many years, or decades.
There seem to be a lot of academics posting in threads on this item so I'd like to ask if anyone has any opinions on Lyx as a typesetter? Is it good enough for journal submissions?
And for those who don't know, Lyx is a GPL'd TEX front end that attempts to give a WYSIWYG-like front-end that produces TEX output. I'm just honestly interested to know if its good enough for professional use.
How much do you know about the way the AIDS virus works? That problem is so much harder than putting a man on the moon its insane.
Look, I'm no friend of Big Pharma. Personally, I think all medical research should be government funded and the results public domain. All drugs should be generic.
I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and searching through the genomes of all cells in the immune system and excising the HIV genome. That's how hard the problem is. Reverse transciptase utilizing viruses are fucking nasty. If you think you can accomplish that, go wild. But what I just described is so far out of technological capabilities it is effectively magic at the moment. And either that, or something which accomplishes the same thing is really what it will take to make an AIDS cure.
There are a couple of alternatives actually, we could reengineer the human immune system to have different cellular surface proteins to prevent the virus from binding. And then create a way to culture cells and introduce the new engineered immune system into AIDs patients. That would probably work, please note that those people would still be contagious carriers. An alternative I've though of is to make mirror image people based on reversed chirality body chemistry. Which is to say, reversed chirality DNA, RNA, Protein, the whole shebang. If you know enough to understand what I've said, you'll understand why that would be fucking hard, and wouldn't help people alive now, it would just create a new generation of engineered people who would be immune to viral diseases of all types, but they wouldn't be able to be nourished by naturally occurring food. If you don't understand what I've said, just ignore it.
The issue is how far below 10C. Between 5C-10C just isn't that cold. Even 0C-5C isn't that bad. People who's body temperature has dropped down to 10C are routinely brought back relatively unharmed. Even if they have no vital signs at all. On the other hand, someone who's body temperature is increased by an equivalent amount, say to around 60C, they aren't just without vital signs. They're very dead, as in proteins denatured, irreversible widescale cell damage dead. Hell, if your body temperate hits 40C you're in bad shape and at significant risk of dying.
It was stealing because they broke into her office and took it, or used a similar method equally dishonest. And that's completely apart from the issue of taking someone's unfinished work and then submitting it for publication as your own. What they did was close enough to plaigarism that I think the difference is insignificant. I've read about how it happened and basically Watson and Crick realized that whoever solved the problem of DNA structure would be famous. So they started bumming data off other scientists working on that and related problems, and in some cases resorted to actual theft. But they were right, they solved the problem and now they're famous and tenured. I think their submission of the correct answer (a scientific paper submitted to a journal whose name I can't remember) beat Linus Pauling's by mere hours.
The X-ray diffraction data was "vital" in the sense that it showed what the structure of DNA was, it was just necessary to interpret it correctly.
Would you people please grow up. For one thing, the "Cure Cancer" meme needs to die. There is never going to be a magic bullet solution to cancer, because cancer refers to large and diverse class of diseases that really only share one trait in common. That being the anomalous and detrimental growth of new tissue. Some cancers are causes by Viruses, some by other diseases, some by exposure to radiation, some are caused by genetic predisposition. Work on the treatment of any of these diseases requires an exceptional command of highly diverse and complex fields of knowledge. By and large, the people can contribute generally are, and the ones who aren't directly are usually working in related fields that may serendipitously lead to major breakthroughs. Get over it.
And secondly, are you seriously suggesting that humanity should give up all other pursuits in order to work on this problem? There are other diseases you know. And other problems that face humanity. Besides that, how do you know that this project, as frivolous as it may sound, may not produce some knowledge that will contribute to the treatment of disease?
"On the other, property rights should be respected."
Articulate an argument for why this should be true in all cases. Arguing that you should be able to smoke your dope in your house makes sense. However more absolute conceptions of a right to property make less sense, or give rise to consequences that are outright disturbing. Should Slavery be allowed? If you go to a foreign Country and buy a human being, why shouldn't you have the right to take your property anywhere? You paid for him, he's yours isn't he?
Just look at what the most successful Single Player RPGs are and then see what differentiates them from MMORPGs. The best selling single player RPGs in recent years have been in no particular order:
Oblivion - 3 million, Baldur's Gate 1&2 - 2 million each, and the various Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Games from Square - Around 3 million each
How are these games different from the most successful Fantasy MMO, WoW? Depth and immersiveness of combat comes immediately to mind. Also Story, all of these games have a much more cohesive story than WoW itself (whose story is mostly conveyed reading background information on the WoW website. To be honest, that really ought to be enough to build games around. Create a game with a solid combat system and a story, and you've got the basis for a solid single player RPG. The trick really, is not to be misled into thinking you can build a WoW-killer. You can't. Blizzard has the budget and the installed base to bury you. So don't even try.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there was a reason, namely greed. By the time Bell was broken up, you had been able to hook anything you wanted up to the phone system, with the sole provision that it didn't interfere with the operation of the system, for over a decade.. See the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the FCC. Relative pricing was, by and large, and artifact of the time and the relative level of technology. Bell provided immaculate professional level service to all its customers. Equivalent to having a guaranteed mainframe service contracts from a company like IBM then, or now.
You also completely ignore the enormous good Bell did (admittedly because they were forced by Congress) in the Form of Bell Labs. Want to even guess what the computer you're using right now would cost without Bell Labs? Sure, engineers at Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. But Bell Labs developed the transistor out of basic research into quantum mechanics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs. The Transistor, the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, the development of the C Programming Language, UNIX, incredible advances in LASER tech, are just the highlights.
Here's what you win:
1. Complete removal of Anti-Trust enforcement!
2. Busting up and deregulation of Functioning Government Controlled Monopolies that provide Vital Resources!
3. Customer Hostile Corporate Policy!
4. And Much, Much More!
Warning: Side effects may include Black outs, Brown outs, Corporate Fraud at an unheard of level, and militaristic foreign and domestic policy. Not recommend for children of parents, parents of children, women who are nursing, or young men between the ages 18-30.
The causes of all this shit aren't mysterious at all. Remember Ma Bell? If, like the average Slashdotter, you don't, imagine a time in which the phone company had to actually make your service work. Because if they didn't, you had real recourse to complain and make shit happen, on the scale of people getting fired. Imagine a time when the company responsible for the telecommunications infrastructure actually followed government mandates. Remember fiber to the Home? If Ma Bell had still existed, that would have actually happened. But no, Reagan busted up the system and sold the parts to his cronies. And yes, Jimmy Carter was in fact the first. He deregulated the Airline industry, stupid fuck. Note how the Airline industry is such a disaster these days? How the companies keep going out of business? Don't think there might be any correlation there do you?
Acknowledged. However, this isn't really Irrational's fault. Shodan is owned by EA, and they've buried the IP in the lands where great characters go to die when they don't meet sales expectations.
My guess is that you are still probably in the upper percentage range of users. My guess is that by far what most users do is Image Manipulation. By the way, have you tried Gimpshop? It supports PS plug-ins and on Windows at least, has a plug-in available to make the interface a Single window. It's primarily a fork of the interface to make it more like Photoshop however, so you might not like it.
I say the reality is that by aiming to keep load times unnoticable, Nintendo inadvertently saved its audience for the worst trend in Gaming History. Do you remember the garbage that got produced? Ye gods! The Live Action FMV clips? "Mad Dog McCree" "The Horde" Yes, those both predate the PSX, but they illustrate perfectly the kind of excrement that got produced.
Yes, I was talking out my ass, by exaggerating and using sarcasm to make a point.
You know, one of the perspectives that doesn't actually get taken much, but which is demonstrably accurate is that Square leaving Nintendo was the best thing that ever happened to Nintendo. How's that you say? Because in order to fill the traditional JRPG void left by Square, Nintendo created Pokemon. Pokemon has only been the second most successful franchise in the entire industry, second only to Nintendo's own Mario, and has been twice as successful as Final Fantasy as a franchise.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_games#Fr anchise
You can't seriously tell me you've never seen people do this. Hell, anything you hear a booming and rattling car car audio system, what I've described is exactly what's going on. Don't try to use Fletcher and Munson to defend what those people are doing as anything other than an a musical atrocity.
And also, while there are sound reasons to migrate off Windows that have nothing to do with price (Viruses, arbitrary obsoleteing of formats, etc, etc, etc). And even with all that motivation, people still aren't willing to learn anything new. There's not really any huge reason to migrate off of Photoshop except price. The issues that tend to annoy users of photoshop (like Adobe's glacial pace of implementing substantial updates, like support for use of more than 2 cores.), just aren't that bad. Thus Adobe continues to thrive, and nobody really even complains that much.
Thank you! The magic to "make the sound better" is supposed to happen at the mastering stage. Where people with actual skill (The Johns Brothers, etc) work their voodoo.
If you don't understand what's wrong with a smiley face EQ, you've probably damaged your hearing pretty badly already.
I do believe Bioshock has one. I think the founder of Rapture is present in some form (whether he's alive or not, I not know), and that he fulfills a similar role.
2. The 360. Piss-poor market in Japan, good everywhere else, but not selling as fast as:
3. The Wii - Fastest selling home console on the market worldwide, as fast as Nintendo can make them. Selling faster than the current numerical market leader (the 360) is or ever has. Popular everywhere, including Square's home turf.
Now, of course the intelligent thing to do would be to just make the damn series Wii exclusive. But of course, Square has be too smart for that! So instead they're pissing around waiting to see if PS3 sales will perk up, and trying to cover their asses in the meantime. I think it's clear they desperately don't want to have to crawl back to Nintendo. They ran off from Casa Nintendo 10 years ago like a spoiled Rich-Bitch, "You don't own me! I don't need you! I've got Sony!"
Of course, I'd really love to see Nintendo turn Square out on their ass "Uhhh, yeah, see, I'm kind of busy, and you're really a lot older and saggy now. Not as hot as you used to be at all." And let them slum it on a system with a barely 7 figure market, while Nintendo's well into 8.
I'd guess they don't want to go to Microsoft because MS poached all their talent. Including fucking Akira Torayama. Who by the way, has the worst fucking art style on the planet. Who the fuck decided that the most bland, uninteresting mangaka on the planet needed to be the most famous? Any schmuck with a one-shot in Shounen Jump can draw better than that hack (and make characters that don't all look alike through every fucking project he's ever been involved in!)
On the other hand, the problem of reverse chirality viruses arising naturally is MUCH, MUCH harder than you seem to think it would be. All life on earth today uses exclusively L-proteins and one or the other chirality of nucleic acids (I can't remember which, although I want to say nucleic acids are R for some reason. In any case, nucleic acids ARE stereospecific, the sugar components, Ribose, in RNA, and Deoxyribose, in DNA, have chiral centers.) All life on earth uses the same stereochemistry. And everything, from metalbolic to reproductive proteins "assumes" that stereochemistry. This barrier is nearly insurmountable (without intelligence) because it makes all the proteins useless simulataneously. The only kinds of organisms that can survive in an environment like that at all, are organisms that can synthesize all of the chemicals they need to survive from elements (and there are bacteria that can do this, and plants obviously do), but even they are at risk of being poisoned. I'd have to study it in more detail but I suspect having intracellular amino acids of the wrong chirality would poison Ribosome functioning by inhibiting protein polymerization, as racemic mixtures do in vitro without anything alive. By that I mean that stereospecific solution of say, L-alanine, can be made to polymerize in vitro, but a racemic mixture of both L- and R-alanine can't. As I think about this would probably be a GREAT way to kill cancer cells, but it would be equally fantastic at killing healthy cells.
So the a virus adapted for natural living things simply couldn't utilize the cellular machinery of a reverse-chiral organism. The two are chemically the wrong shape and incompatible.
Back to why I think treating AIDS is so hard. The problem is that after you annihilate the active virus particles, you have to maintain that indefinitely. Any cell that carries the HIV genome can, essentially instantly, produce millions of active virus particles.
Stephan Hawking NEEDS this thing. All it needs is a set of grasping hands on long arms so he can crush his enemies like Robo-Nixon. That would be so awesome. In any case, add some lasers and missiles and you've got a fully functional Gundam!
Solo? Look, I've tried that on both WoW and FFXI, and when you try to solo, you get your ass handed to you. In FFXI, by the monsters, by lvl 20, anything that gives XP will RAPE any single player character. In WoW, its possible to lvl soloing mobs, however above about lvl 25 or so, you get raped by played of the opposing faction. Who come along in a party and then corpse camp you for half an hour. It's pretty disgusting.
This is sadly true, but is changing over time. Lawyers were some of the first professionals to deploy computer systems in the 1980's. (I remember, I was there) They were mostly using IBM XT/AT with Wordperfect, to type up legal briefs and such. Those lawyers that were fairly young then (20 years ago) are now approaching the age where the more respected among them get elected to judicial positions (late 40's to 50 or so). A lawyer I know personally was involved in the development/deployment of the first standardized database system for case records for a certain part of the judicial system in his state in the early 1990's. These lawyers are now starting to creep into the judiciary. These guys may not be l33t *nix haxxors, but they know what a computer is, how to turn it on, how computer systems made their practices much more efficient, and they are at least aware of and use the internet. They rely on e-mail. Sure, some of them are still clueless, but that's true of any group. It just takes time, but we are getting there. In another 10 years or so all the old fogies will have retired and been replaced by men from the generation I'm talking about. They're at least going to have enough knowledge to ask intelligent questions (e.g. "Spyware, what's that?" "It's like a virus that collects information from your computer and sends it to a third party over the internet" "Ah, I see.")
VitrosChemistryAnaly, I strongly suggest you look into Bioshock, it's a first person RPG/Shooter/Survival horror hybrid by much of the team that did System Shock (which you should also look into if you haven't played them). I have very high hopes for this game (shipping August this year on PC/XBOX360) on the basis of the history of the team. I really hope they can get some success this time, they really deserve it. System Shock 2 got killed by the release of the original Half-Life. The original by the release of Doom II. The same company also created the Thief series. Also, I don't work for them, I'm just a fan.
There's a lot that can be done with a Mac out of the box. For one, it actually comes with useable Web-browser and e-mail client (Much like linux and unlike Windows). It also comes with the iApps which give usuable utilities for many tasks.
I think the real take home point from this article is that expertise on one platform doesn't fully transfer to any other platform. Amazing revelation, I know. Just because you already know your laundry list of preferred apps on windows, and how to tweak around, doesn't mean you won't have spend some time learning and finding replacement apps.
The last I was aware, we don't actually test for HIV by detecting the Virus particles themselves, we test by detecting the presence of a certain class of antibodies the body creates in response to the Virus. That may not be true any more, however. The difficulty with simply testing every human alive and then incincerating all of the infected is that there is another reservoir of HIV. The great apes. So we'd either have to kill them as well (a solution I do NOT find acceptable), stop Africans from eating bush meat (which is probably the origin of HIV in humans in the first place). Another problem that you are forgetting is that HIV is an RNA reverse transciptase virus. It copies its genome into the DNA of the cells it infects. The virus can exist dormantly with no virus particles in the body at all, and then reemerge when the transcription of its genes is triggered. You have to be able to either remove the DNA, or disable it somehow to prevent it from being transcribed. Hard, hard problem, which also makes it very difficult to know if you've succeeded. This phenomena is what occurs in the people who manage to survive as HIV+ for many years, or decades.
And for those who don't know, Lyx is a GPL'd TEX front end that attempts to give a WYSIWYG-like front-end that produces TEX output. I'm just honestly interested to know if its good enough for professional use.
Look, I'm no friend of Big Pharma. Personally, I think all medical research should be government funded and the results public domain. All drugs should be generic.
I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and searching through the genomes of all cells in the immune system and excising the HIV genome. That's how hard the problem is. Reverse transciptase utilizing viruses are fucking nasty. If you think you can accomplish that, go wild. But what I just described is so far out of technological capabilities it is effectively magic at the moment. And either that, or something which accomplishes the same thing is really what it will take to make an AIDS cure.
There are a couple of alternatives actually, we could reengineer the human immune system to have different cellular surface proteins to prevent the virus from binding. And then create a way to culture cells and introduce the new engineered immune system into AIDs patients. That would probably work, please note that those people would still be contagious carriers. An alternative I've though of is to make mirror image people based on reversed chirality body chemistry. Which is to say, reversed chirality DNA, RNA, Protein, the whole shebang. If you know enough to understand what I've said, you'll understand why that would be fucking hard, and wouldn't help people alive now, it would just create a new generation of engineered people who would be immune to viral diseases of all types, but they wouldn't be able to be nourished by naturally occurring food. If you don't understand what I've said, just ignore it.
The issue is how far below 10C. Between 5C-10C just isn't that cold. Even 0C-5C isn't that bad. People who's body temperature has dropped down to 10C are routinely brought back relatively unharmed. Even if they have no vital signs at all. On the other hand, someone who's body temperature is increased by an equivalent amount, say to around 60C, they aren't just without vital signs. They're very dead, as in proteins denatured, irreversible widescale cell damage dead. Hell, if your body temperate hits 40C you're in bad shape and at significant risk of dying.
The X-ray diffraction data was "vital" in the sense that it showed what the structure of DNA was, it was just necessary to interpret it correctly.
And secondly, are you seriously suggesting that humanity should give up all other pursuits in order to work on this problem? There are other diseases you know. And other problems that face humanity. Besides that, how do you know that this project, as frivolous as it may sound, may not produce some knowledge that will contribute to the treatment of disease?
Articulate an argument for why this should be true in all cases. Arguing that you should be able to smoke your dope in your house makes sense. However more absolute conceptions of a right to property make less sense, or give rise to consequences that are outright disturbing. Should Slavery be allowed? If you go to a foreign Country and buy a human being, why shouldn't you have the right to take your property anywhere? You paid for him, he's yours isn't he?
Oblivion - 3 million, Baldur's Gate 1&2 - 2 million each, and the various Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Games from Square - Around 3 million each
How are these games different from the most successful Fantasy MMO, WoW? Depth and immersiveness of combat comes immediately to mind. Also Story, all of these games have a much more cohesive story than WoW itself (whose story is mostly conveyed reading background information on the WoW website. To be honest, that really ought to be enough to build games around. Create a game with a solid combat system and a story, and you've got the basis for a solid single player RPG. The trick really, is not to be misled into thinking you can build a WoW-killer. You can't. Blizzard has the budget and the installed base to bury you. So don't even try.