There actually may be some amount of demand for a high "burst" speed even if the total amount of bandwidth is capped, at least if you're talking about business class service - depending on the exact numbers involved, of course. If you're running a server, there are times when you want to have that high burst rate (for example, serving up video) but the amount of traffic on your site doesn't warrant paying for having no limits on bandwidth other than what's implicit in the hardware specs. Of course, if this is a "residential-only" service and you can't run a server on it, all of this is a moot point.:-)
I live in fairly large metropolitan area (> 1 million) which is served by Verizon, however because most of the rest of the state is served by another provider our little island is treated by Verizon as one of their "ugly stepchildren." It appears unlikely that we'll get FiOS from Verizon before 2020, if then. (That's not a misprint BTW). In addition, there are lots of places that aren't even served by Verizon for local phone service. Given that Verizon is not interested in our money, if Comcast can provide that kind of service here I think they may well get a lot of subscribers.
nor do they produce offspring who are born with said antibodies pre-infection.
In general offspring are not born with the ability to produce the same set of antibodies as the mother. Any antibodies from the mother's immune system that are passed on to the offspring are fairly quickly eliminated and are not replaced, leaving the offspring without protection from the virus.
If that was true there would be no reason for legislation allowing the government to federalize vaccine production.
That is a singularly bad example. Most of the vaccines that truly require funding by the government are for rare diseases - anthrax, for example, or smallpox (which we still stockpile even though it has been eliminated in the wild for 30 years). For diseases like that, their incidence is so low that they don't make much sense as "investments" - remember that drugs and vaccines have a definite and limited shelf life and if you can't sell them, you lose.
But to show the weakness in your argument, let's say that you run company A and have a patent on a drug that is a long-term treatment for a disease but can never cure it, so that patients have to take the drug for many years or even the rest of their life. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? But let's say that I run company B, and have some researchers working for me who have done promising work on a competing drug that looks like it may CURE that same disease. If they succeed, I can charge a lot for my drug, but the value of your drug will go to ZERO (or near enough as to make no difference). Your stockholders will hammer your stock mercilessly, while buying up mine. Doesn't sound like such a good deal any more, does it? Even worse, if you decide just to stand still and reap the profits from your treatment, even if my drug never gets off the ground your patent will eventually expire - after which all of the cheap generics will come in and take away your big profit stream in any event.
My father was a researcher for one of the major drug companies, and I think I can safely say from his experience that the pharmaceutical industry is very cutthroat like that - they won't leave each other's product spaces alone so that they can all make a big profit; rather, they are each trying to maximize the return on their intellectual property. If that means a cure, so much the better - it will wipe out their competition while making lots of money and good publicity for their company.
I hate to sound jaded, but it *is* more profitable to treat a disease than cure it.
By and large this is just simply not true, though it gets repeated so much that it becomes "common knowledge" much like the old wives' tale that you'll get pneumonia by going out in the cold (it may make an existing infection worse, but unless you're exposed to the disease itself you won't get it). In most cases, you can charge quite a bit for a real cure, and besides that the insurance companies will refuse to pay for a more expensive long-term treatment if they know that a real cure exists.
There are exceptions of course, particularly in cases where the expense of finding a cure is very high and the disease is uncommon, so that it's not possible for a cure to make much money unless you're able to charge an astronomical amount for it. There are quite a few of these "orphan" diseases which don't get much attention because there just aren't very many people who suffer from them. Naturally both investors and investigators tend to focus on diseases that affect more than a handful of people - which brain cancer certainly does; I lost my wife to a brain tumor, and I've known a number of other people of all ages who have had them, many of whom died from them, including small children.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that true "cures" are often very difficult to achieve, especially for tough diseases like cancer. If it were that easy, there are thousands of researchers who would leap at the chance to get their names immortalized in the history of science (not to mention any financial rewards they might obtain).
Sorry, I just don't think that this oft-repeated conspiracy theory will stand up to serious analysis.
I think this was intended to be funny, but it's actually a good question. How much pressure in the tank do you need for this to work, and how many Kg of air do you need in there to keep it going for a significant distance? Does it come with an air compressor that you can plug in when you have access to an electrical outlet, or do you have to look for some place that has a powerful enough compressor to fill the tank?
The bottom line is how many $/mile this thing costs to operate, not just the cost of refilling the tank but also the maintenance costs. If that isn't too high, it does seem like a good idea for areas plagued with auto exhaust pollution, which would include many big cities around the world. It's hard to tell from the description if the total life cycle of this technology is more or less energy-efficient than conventional engines, especially given that I suspect it would require a high level of maintenance to keep everything airtight.
Besides the issue of how well this will transmit through walls, I don't think you can assume that 10m will be enough to cover a typical house. Unless you can put it close to the geometric center of the house, you're likely to have the signal attenuated at the other side, not to mention other floors. But often the center of the house is taken up by hallways or a stairway or something else where you wouldn't want to put a router. Available phone or cable connections are another consideration. So often you're left with putting it somewhat off-center, possibly even considerably off-center. If you have a "booster" unit to try to cover more of the house, how much would they interfere with each other? Even current wired consumer-grade LAN connections max out at about 1GB/s, so you couldn't put one at either end of the house (far enough apart so as not to interfere with each other too much) and joined by a wired LAN without losing a good bit of your bandwidth.
"Bluetooth replacement" may well be a better description of it's capabilities than "wireless LAN" enhancement. But is 5GB/s interesting enough for people to want to pay for the chip and the rather hefty power consumption when its main use would be to transfer music between your PC and your iPod? (Remember that limiting power consumption in mobile devices is a serious problem - high power consumption = low battery life). It's not as if the existing technologies for doing that are unbearably slow.
It's a very interesting technology, but we'll have to see what its capabilities and limitations are when and if it's released. I think it's likely that the final version may look significantly different from what's outlined in the article (which is basically a proof-of-concept prototype).
Remember that human chromosomes are diploid - we have two copies of (most) genes. (A few of the genes on the male Y chromosome have no analogue on the X chromosome, but that's a very small percentage of the human genome). So in total they will have roughly 2000 samples for each gene - 2 for every individual.
Of course, that doesn't provide a correlation with specific genetic diseases - but here classical genetics techniques allow you to get an insight on how some of those diseases might be related to specific genes. The easiest to understand are those genetic diseases that are dominant - that is, you need only one copy of the gene in order to have the disease. On average, a dominant genetic disease which has a frequency in the population of 1 in 1000 would have about a 50% probability of being represented in the sample.
The situation is more complex for genetic diseases caused by recessive genes - which form the majority of genetic diseases. People carrying only one copy of the disease will be asymptomatic but a 'carrier' of the disease so that their children would have some chance of getting the disease if their other parent was also a carrier of the disease. However even there, you often have a good idea who might be a carrier for the disease based on family history: how many others in that person's family are affected. If any of those individuals are the person's children, you know that that person is a carrier for the disease; if one of them is a (full) sibling, then there's (at least) a 50% chance that the individual is a carrier, etc.
These sorts of familial relationships are the bread-and-butter of traditional investigations into genetic diseases, and this promises the ability to multiply their effectiveness. In effect you are getting a window into the genomes of many more individuals than merely those whose genomes were sequenced.
For what it's worth, both 64-bit Linux and 64-bit Vista (and 64-bit Xp for that matter) will run 32-bit software. You don't need to have all your software upgraded to 64-bit mode to benefit - if just a couple of mission-critical applications are upgraded, you may find the advantage compelling if the rest of them continue to work.
The two issues are (1) In general you need new 64-bit drivers, both for Windows and for Linux; and (2) 16-bit mode software will not work in 64-bit Windows. The latter is more of an issue than you might think (consider installer programs that might not get upgraded when the rest of the product is upgraded, or specialized utilities in batch files, or even just the odd special-purpose utility program). If neither of these apply in your case, you can upgrade now without having to wait for all (or even any) of your apps to get converted to 64-bits.
64-bit Windows (both Xp and Vista) does exist, and can in fact run both 32-bit and 64-bit programs; 32-bit software runs just as fast on it as it would on a 32-bit version of Windows.
The problem with 64-bit Windows is twofold: First of all, in general you need 64-bit drivers - which is not an issue for notebook manufacturers generally, although if a customer is installing software or external devices that require drivers or other kernel mode extensions they may find that it won't run under 64-bit Windows. Naturally the notebook makers would be reluctant to annoy their customers, so for the time being they'll probably leave it for their customers to decide if they want to upgrade to 64-bits.
Secondly, 64-bit Windows will not run 16-bit software at all. That includes both Windows 3.1-era software, and DOS mode software. It's true that virtually nobody writes to those standards any more, however there is still a surprising amount of legacy software around that was written to those standards and is still in use. For example, installer programs (especially for older software packages) are often partly written in 16-bit mode, as well as the odd batch file that calls up an old 16-bit utility program to do some bit of cruft. There are even a few older programs that might be run directly by the user that run in 16-bits, mostly for specialized tasks. For a lot of home users this may not be much of an issue (as long as they can run IE, Word, and the latest games many home users will be perfectly happy), but for many businesses this can be a big problem, especially since many medium to large businesses may not even have a complete inventory of what software they use was originally written in 16-bit mode - it never used to matter unless it was locally written and they needed to update it. Additionally, if the software was originally part of a third party package they'd have no reason even to be aware of the fact that it was written in 16-bit mode.
Fortunately, for some time Microsoft has offered a time-limited trial download of 64-bit Windows that does allow you to try it out to see how much of an impact these problems have in your particular case. Obviously if you're a home user or a small business you probably don't want to upgrade your primary system with this or you may find that lots of things unexpectedly stop working - install it in a separate partition or on a test machine instead. Hardware has gotten cheap enough that this is reasonable for almost everyone if your computing needs are such that you're even needing to think about upgrading to 64 bits.
The number of leaks that exist in an application has little if any relationship to how much an application leaks memory. A single bad leak that happens often can cause enormous memory consumption, but even a large number of small leaks no one of which happens very often may not appear to leak much at all. Statements like this make me wonder if their author has ever written any nontrivial code at all.
I'm not at all saying that the Mozilla code isn't a memory hog (it's well-known that it is), nor that it doesn't exhibit the symptoms of memory leaks, which is also well-known, although as others have pointed out the issues are complex and often Mozilla gets the blame for leaks that are actually caused by third-party extensions. What I am saying is that you can't just simply count up the number of "memory leak bugs" and say whether an application leaks "a lot of memory" - sometimes the two are correlated, but by no means always.
Obviously there are always costs to maintaining any system. However it is not at all unreasonable to say that there are hidden costs in maintaining older systems, and in fact it's very often - even usually - true. Updates are generally slower, new versions of applications that run on them will gradually become unavailable, security issues or system efficiency or human factors or other flaws may slowly drain productivity.
By contrast there are often costs with new OS versions as well - you often need to upgrade hardware, sometimes older versions of applications won't run on the new OS, and there are often bugs that didn't get caught in beta testing. Additionally when an OS version is very new, sometimes an application that's critical for your business isn't available for it yet.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to point out the hidden costs of maintaining an old system, and many customers may overlook those costs if they're not pointed out. But by the same token, customers need to be aware that they need to look at the whole picture to figure out what makes the best business sense for their particular situation.
And when Kindle fails and Amazon kills it do you think they'll just leave the service running indefinitely? How will you get content to your Kindle then? Does the end user license grant you the right to put content on the device as long as you own it? I didn't think so.
Actually you can download your own content to it via USB without cost. That would include text files, Word files, and simple PDF's (complex PDF's won't display very well on the Kindle). Obviously if Amazon kills the service you won't be able to download anything from their shop, or use their service for emailing your content to your Kindle, but the box doesn't go completely dark even if Amazon terminates their portal.
It's not so much that it's warming but that it's warming relatively fast compared to previous warming periods.
I'm not saying that it's desirable, or that it doesn't present a number of difficulties (increased sea levels, changes in precipitation, etc which can all have serious economic and ecological consequences). However the parent claimed that global warming was making the planet UNINHABITABLE within the next couple hundred years, which is just simply untrue.
You didn't say it had to be 100% efficient. Why would it have to be, anyway? The sunlight is free.
And the wind is free too, but cargo-carrying sailing ships weren't able to compete successfully with steamships.
If the cost of building and launching the solar array and the high-energy laser, amortized over their life expectancy, plus their operating costs (the sunlight may be free but I'll guarantee you that the maintenance and operation of that infrastructure won't be), greatly exceeds the cost of other forms of energy, it won't be practical. If the efficiency is very low, it makes it much harder to make the required payback numbers even if the ultimate energy source is in some sense "free".
We don't have any technology that will last more than a couple of hundred years. Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years.
Wrong on both counts.
Any waste that's sat around for millions of years is no longer very radioactive. Yes, it's true that you will still be able to measure radioactivity in it; but it won't be very significant. You will also be able to measure radioactivity in bricks, stones, trees, dogs, and people, but that doesn't mean much because in all these cases the radiation density will be very low. (Remember that C-14 is present in all living organisms and anything derived from them, and more is constantly being produced by that big nuclear reactor in the sky).
The time scales of greatest concern are more intermediate time scales - say a few thousand years, not either a couple hundred or millions.
Actually an increased rate of birth defects would not be what one would expect to see first if the problem was mainly caused by depleted uranium; an increased rate of lung cancer and other lung diseases would be expected long before you could measure an increased burden of birth defects. The reason for that is that inhalation of particles of pulverized and/or oxidized DU is under those circumstances most likely the primary route for it to enter the body, and the systemic absorption of the material through that route is relatively inefficient; so most of the damage is done in situ.
That data point alone points to the existence of other cause(s) which may be working in concert with each other and/or with the depleted uranium burden as a secondary factor.
None of these passive solutions can make this planet fit for human occupation 200 years from now (assuming no major changes in humans).
Unlikely in the extreme. Greatly impoverished (both from economic and biodiversity standpoints), quite possibly; uninhabitable, almost certainly not. The planet has seen much warmer periods in its history (just not very recently).
The real honest truth is that naturally occurring uranium (of which there is a substantial amount) is not very radioactive. It has a half-life of roughly 4.5 billion years and so radiates weakly.
The gist of your article is correct but your numbers are not. U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years but "natural" uranium is a mixture of various isotopes of which all but U-238 have a half-life of significantly less than 4.5 billion years, so the effective "average" half-life of the uranium is significantly less than that. Depleted uranium is, very roughly, half as radioactive as "natural" uranium (the exact amount depending on just how depleted the uranium is).
But you are correct - if you live in a brick house, or you sleep in the same bed with your partner, you are most likely being exposed to more radiation than you would be if you had a brick of the stuff under your bed. The problem only comes about when something makes that relatively inert block of metal more biologically available.
Unfortunately a lot of people have a fuzzy understanding of what radiation is, what the different types are, when it's potentially dangerous, and when it's not anything to worry about. Most people probably don't understand very clearly that radioactive materials emit vastly different densities of radiation. They just think (radiation == bad) and stop thinking at that point.
Sure. And there is 'depleted' uranium ammunition too, which is the cause of 'Iraq War Syndrome' and a massively increased rate of birth defects by Iraq war veterans ( US and Iraqi civilians ).
This is still unproven (there are lots of other noxious things people are being exposed to over there, any of which could be contributing to such problems).
However more to the point, depleted uranium is not particularly radioactive; if you had a brick of it in your hand, you would be exposed to relatively little radiation. Remember also that much of the radiation in that brick will itself be locked up in the interior of the brick because it is also a good shield material.
The issue with depleted uranium is not so much the density of its radioactivity, but the fact that when it's used in munitions it gets burned and pulverized into dust particles which are more easily absorbed by the body. You're not likely to eat a brick of DU and, quite frankly, even if you did swallow a small marble of DU the body is not able to absorb much of it and it will quickly be eliminated. However you could easily inhale small particles of oxidized or pulverized DU which allows for both heavy metal poisoning and longer-term exposure to the radioactivity since the small particles and heavy metal oxides would remain in the body for longer periods of time, and the smaller particles present a higher surface-to-volume ratio for the radioactivity to escape into your body.
The jury is still out on whether this is enough to account for the observed health issues, though there is cause for concern. But it is not an issue outside of military scenarios because you wouldn't be making pulverized and oxidized DU and spreading it all over the environment.
Doubling that distance could increase the number of homes covered by a factor of four.
I doubt that. At best, it quadruples the area covered. However by increasing the area, you increase the probability of the service areas from the exchanges overlapping, meaning that your total coverage area doesn't quadruple, however your coverage still should increase significantly and the "dead" zones that aren't quite covered by any of the existing exchanges should diminish making the coverage more continuous.
Moreover, you are assuming that the customer density in the new service area is the same as in the original service area. This is unlikely; probably the original service area was chosen because the density was higher and was therefore cheaper and easier to service.
Not to say that this isn't worth doing, but it's probably not quite as much of a win as it looks at first glance.
I've bought a fair number of components off eBay, mostly for keeping older PC's going. However what you get is often very much of a mixed bag - I generally figured that I need to buy as much as 2-2.5 times as much memory as I'd actually need, for example, because of the high failure rate for memory bought off eBay. Still sometimes it was worth it for situations where the replacement memory for the old PC was either unavailable or ridiculously priced. I suspect a not insignificant number of the parts on eBay, while not exactly "bad," are there because they've started to become flaky.
Network appliances (routers/hubs/switches), on the other hand, in my experience tend to be less risky purchases on eBay.
YMMV. However unless you're willing to buy enough spare parts to be able to, in effect, provide your own in-house warranty service, you may want to consider carefully whether you want the additional hassle rather than just doing an RMA to a well-known company like Newegg.
Fans aren't very expensive unless you have an oddball case. And even if you aren't upgrading, you'll have to keep up with replacing the fans if you don't want your rig to burn up.
The IDE drives can be more of an issue, however most motherboards still support 1 IDE connection (=2 devices). Unless you want more than 1 hard drive and 1 CD/DVD that's enough - and if you do want more, there are still a number of options; a few motherboards still support 2 IDE connectors, and even if the one you choose doesn't, an IDE controller for your old drives only costs about $20-25 assuming you don't need RAID (which IMHO is kind of overkill if you use the PC primarily for gaming). Even if you decide to upgrade your hard drive to SATA you can get a 250 GB HD for under $65, or less than $45 if you're satisfied with 80GB.
So even if you have to replace components like the hard drives you're looking at well under $600, and possibly still under $500 depending on the options you choose. Somehow this doesn't strike me as the costs "escalating fast" compared to the traditional pricing for gaming PC's.
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There actually may be some amount of demand for a high "burst" speed even if the total amount of bandwidth is capped, at least if you're talking about business class service - depending on the exact numbers involved, of course. If you're running a server, there are times when you want to have that high burst rate (for example, serving up video) but the amount of traffic on your site doesn't warrant paying for having no limits on bandwidth other than what's implicit in the hardware specs. Of course, if this is a "residential-only" service and you can't run a server on it, all of this is a moot point. :-)
I live in fairly large metropolitan area (> 1 million) which is served by Verizon, however because most of the rest of the state is served by another provider our little island is treated by Verizon as one of their "ugly stepchildren." It appears unlikely that we'll get FiOS from Verizon before 2020, if then. (That's not a misprint BTW). In addition, there are lots of places that aren't even served by Verizon for local phone service. Given that Verizon is not interested in our money, if Comcast can provide that kind of service here I think they may well get a lot of subscribers.
nor do they produce offspring who are born with said antibodies pre-infection.
In general offspring are not born with the ability to produce the same set of antibodies as the mother. Any antibodies from the mother's immune system that are passed on to the offspring are fairly quickly eliminated and are not replaced, leaving the offspring without protection from the virus.
Sure there would be...To give the rest of us a reason to believe that the government has our best interests in mind.
"I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you."
Yeah right. :-)
If that was true there would be no reason for legislation allowing the government to federalize vaccine production.
That is a singularly bad example. Most of the vaccines that truly require funding by the government are for rare diseases - anthrax, for example, or smallpox (which we still stockpile even though it has been eliminated in the wild for 30 years). For diseases like that, their incidence is so low that they don't make much sense as "investments" - remember that drugs and vaccines have a definite and limited shelf life and if you can't sell them, you lose.
But to show the weakness in your argument, let's say that you run company A and have a patent on a drug that is a long-term treatment for a disease but can never cure it, so that patients have to take the drug for many years or even the rest of their life. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? But let's say that I run company B, and have some researchers working for me who have done promising work on a competing drug that looks like it may CURE that same disease. If they succeed, I can charge a lot for my drug, but the value of your drug will go to ZERO (or near enough as to make no difference). Your stockholders will hammer your stock mercilessly, while buying up mine. Doesn't sound like such a good deal any more, does it? Even worse, if you decide just to stand still and reap the profits from your treatment, even if my drug never gets off the ground your patent will eventually expire - after which all of the cheap generics will come in and take away your big profit stream in any event.
My father was a researcher for one of the major drug companies, and I think I can safely say from his experience that the pharmaceutical industry is very cutthroat like that - they won't leave each other's product spaces alone so that they can all make a big profit; rather, they are each trying to maximize the return on their intellectual property. If that means a cure, so much the better - it will wipe out their competition while making lots of money and good publicity for their company.
I hate to sound jaded, but it *is* more profitable to treat a disease than cure it.
By and large this is just simply not true, though it gets repeated so much that it becomes "common knowledge" much like the old wives' tale that you'll get pneumonia by going out in the cold (it may make an existing infection worse, but unless you're exposed to the disease itself you won't get it). In most cases, you can charge quite a bit for a real cure, and besides that the insurance companies will refuse to pay for a more expensive long-term treatment if they know that a real cure exists.
There are exceptions of course, particularly in cases where the expense of finding a cure is very high and the disease is uncommon, so that it's not possible for a cure to make much money unless you're able to charge an astronomical amount for it. There are quite a few of these "orphan" diseases which don't get much attention because there just aren't very many people who suffer from them. Naturally both investors and investigators tend to focus on diseases that affect more than a handful of people - which brain cancer certainly does; I lost my wife to a brain tumor, and I've known a number of other people of all ages who have had them, many of whom died from them, including small children.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that true "cures" are often very difficult to achieve, especially for tough diseases like cancer. If it were that easy, there are thousands of researchers who would leap at the chance to get their names immortalized in the history of science (not to mention any financial rewards they might obtain).
Sorry, I just don't think that this oft-repeated conspiracy theory will stand up to serious analysis.
I think this was intended to be funny, but it's actually a good question. How much pressure in the tank do you need for this to work, and how many Kg of air do you need in there to keep it going for a significant distance? Does it come with an air compressor that you can plug in when you have access to an electrical outlet, or do you have to look for some place that has a powerful enough compressor to fill the tank?
The bottom line is how many $/mile this thing costs to operate, not just the cost of refilling the tank but also the maintenance costs. If that isn't too high, it does seem like a good idea for areas plagued with auto exhaust pollution, which would include many big cities around the world. It's hard to tell from the description if the total life cycle of this technology is more or less energy-efficient than conventional engines, especially given that I suspect it would require a high level of maintenance to keep everything airtight.
Besides the issue of how well this will transmit through walls, I don't think you can assume that 10m will be enough to cover a typical house. Unless you can put it close to the geometric center of the house, you're likely to have the signal attenuated at the other side, not to mention other floors. But often the center of the house is taken up by hallways or a stairway or something else where you wouldn't want to put a router. Available phone or cable connections are another consideration. So often you're left with putting it somewhat off-center, possibly even considerably off-center. If you have a "booster" unit to try to cover more of the house, how much would they interfere with each other? Even current wired consumer-grade LAN connections max out at about 1GB/s, so you couldn't put one at either end of the house (far enough apart so as not to interfere with each other too much) and joined by a wired LAN without losing a good bit of your bandwidth.
"Bluetooth replacement" may well be a better description of it's capabilities than "wireless LAN" enhancement. But is 5GB/s interesting enough for people to want to pay for the chip and the rather hefty power consumption when its main use would be to transfer music between your PC and your iPod? (Remember that limiting power consumption in mobile devices is a serious problem - high power consumption = low battery life). It's not as if the existing technologies for doing that are unbearably slow.
It's a very interesting technology, but we'll have to see what its capabilities and limitations are when and if it's released. I think it's likely that the final version may look significantly different from what's outlined in the article (which is basically a proof-of-concept prototype).
Remember that human chromosomes are diploid - we have two copies of (most) genes. (A few of the genes on the male Y chromosome have no analogue on the X chromosome, but that's a very small percentage of the human genome). So in total they will have roughly 2000 samples for each gene - 2 for every individual.
Of course, that doesn't provide a correlation with specific genetic diseases - but here classical genetics techniques allow you to get an insight on how some of those diseases might be related to specific genes. The easiest to understand are those genetic diseases that are dominant - that is, you need only one copy of the gene in order to have the disease. On average, a dominant genetic disease which has a frequency in the population of 1 in 1000 would have about a 50% probability of being represented in the sample.
The situation is more complex for genetic diseases caused by recessive genes - which form the majority of genetic diseases. People carrying only one copy of the disease will be asymptomatic but a 'carrier' of the disease so that their children would have some chance of getting the disease if their other parent was also a carrier of the disease. However even there, you often have a good idea who might be a carrier for the disease based on family history: how many others in that person's family are affected. If any of those individuals are the person's children, you know that that person is a carrier for the disease; if one of them is a (full) sibling, then there's (at least) a 50% chance that the individual is a carrier, etc.
These sorts of familial relationships are the bread-and-butter of traditional investigations into genetic diseases, and this promises the ability to multiply their effectiveness. In effect you are getting a window into the genomes of many more individuals than merely those whose genomes were sequenced.
For what it's worth, both 64-bit Linux and 64-bit Vista (and 64-bit Xp for that matter) will run 32-bit software. You don't need to have all your software upgraded to 64-bit mode to benefit - if just a couple of mission-critical applications are upgraded, you may find the advantage compelling if the rest of them continue to work.
The two issues are (1) In general you need new 64-bit drivers, both for Windows and for Linux; and (2) 16-bit mode software will not work in 64-bit Windows. The latter is more of an issue than you might think (consider installer programs that might not get upgraded when the rest of the product is upgraded, or specialized utilities in batch files, or even just the odd special-purpose utility program). If neither of these apply in your case, you can upgrade now without having to wait for all (or even any) of your apps to get converted to 64-bits.
64-bit Windows (both Xp and Vista) does exist, and can in fact run both 32-bit and 64-bit programs; 32-bit software runs just as fast on it as it would on a 32-bit version of Windows.
The problem with 64-bit Windows is twofold: First of all, in general you need 64-bit drivers - which is not an issue for notebook manufacturers generally, although if a customer is installing software or external devices that require drivers or other kernel mode extensions they may find that it won't run under 64-bit Windows. Naturally the notebook makers would be reluctant to annoy their customers, so for the time being they'll probably leave it for their customers to decide if they want to upgrade to 64-bits.
Secondly, 64-bit Windows will not run 16-bit software at all. That includes both Windows 3.1-era software, and DOS mode software. It's true that virtually nobody writes to those standards any more, however there is still a surprising amount of legacy software around that was written to those standards and is still in use. For example, installer programs (especially for older software packages) are often partly written in 16-bit mode, as well as the odd batch file that calls up an old 16-bit utility program to do some bit of cruft. There are even a few older programs that might be run directly by the user that run in 16-bits, mostly for specialized tasks. For a lot of home users this may not be much of an issue (as long as they can run IE, Word, and the latest games many home users will be perfectly happy), but for many businesses this can be a big problem, especially since many medium to large businesses may not even have a complete inventory of what software they use was originally written in 16-bit mode - it never used to matter unless it was locally written and they needed to update it. Additionally, if the software was originally part of a third party package they'd have no reason even to be aware of the fact that it was written in 16-bit mode.
Fortunately, for some time Microsoft has offered a time-limited trial download of 64-bit Windows that does allow you to try it out to see how much of an impact these problems have in your particular case. Obviously if you're a home user or a small business you probably don't want to upgrade your primary system with this or you may find that lots of things unexpectedly stop working - install it in a separate partition or on a test machine instead. Hardware has gotten cheap enough that this is reasonable for almost everyone if your computing needs are such that you're even needing to think about upgrading to 64 bits.
The number of leaks that exist in an application has little if any relationship to how much an application leaks memory. A single bad leak that happens often can cause enormous memory consumption, but even a large number of small leaks no one of which happens very often may not appear to leak much at all. Statements like this make me wonder if their author has ever written any nontrivial code at all.
I'm not at all saying that the Mozilla code isn't a memory hog (it's well-known that it is), nor that it doesn't exhibit the symptoms of memory leaks, which is also well-known, although as others have pointed out the issues are complex and often Mozilla gets the blame for leaks that are actually caused by third-party extensions. What I am saying is that you can't just simply count up the number of "memory leak bugs" and say whether an application leaks "a lot of memory" - sometimes the two are correlated, but by no means always.
Sheesh.
Obviously there are always costs to maintaining any system. However it is not at all unreasonable to say that there are hidden costs in maintaining older systems, and in fact it's very often - even usually - true. Updates are generally slower, new versions of applications that run on them will gradually become unavailable, security issues or system efficiency or human factors or other flaws may slowly drain productivity.
By contrast there are often costs with new OS versions as well - you often need to upgrade hardware, sometimes older versions of applications won't run on the new OS, and there are often bugs that didn't get caught in beta testing. Additionally when an OS version is very new, sometimes an application that's critical for your business isn't available for it yet.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to point out the hidden costs of maintaining an old system, and many customers may overlook those costs if they're not pointed out. But by the same token, customers need to be aware that they need to look at the whole picture to figure out what makes the best business sense for their particular situation.
And when Kindle fails and Amazon kills it do you think they'll just leave the service running indefinitely? How will you get content to your Kindle then? Does the end user license grant you the right to put content on the device as long as you own it? I didn't think so.
Actually you can download your own content to it via USB without cost. That would include text files, Word files, and simple PDF's (complex PDF's won't display very well on the Kindle). Obviously if Amazon kills the service you won't be able to download anything from their shop, or use their service for emailing your content to your Kindle, but the box doesn't go completely dark even if Amazon terminates their portal.
It's not so much that it's warming but that it's warming relatively fast compared to previous warming periods.
I'm not saying that it's desirable, or that it doesn't present a number of difficulties (increased sea levels, changes in precipitation, etc which can all have serious economic and ecological consequences). However the parent claimed that global warming was making the planet UNINHABITABLE within the next couple hundred years, which is just simply untrue.
And the wind is free too, but cargo-carrying sailing ships weren't able to compete successfully with steamships.
If the cost of building and launching the solar array and the high-energy laser, amortized over their life expectancy, plus their operating costs (the sunlight may be free but I'll guarantee you that the maintenance and operation of that infrastructure won't be), greatly exceeds the cost of other forms of energy, it won't be practical. If the efficiency is very low, it makes it much harder to make the required payback numbers even if the ultimate energy source is in some sense "free".
I think you just proved my point. And yours was ....?
Wrong on both counts.
Any waste that's sat around for millions of years is no longer very radioactive. Yes, it's true that you will still be able to measure radioactivity in it; but it won't be very significant. You will also be able to measure radioactivity in bricks, stones, trees, dogs, and people, but that doesn't mean much because in all these cases the radiation density will be very low. (Remember that C-14 is present in all living organisms and anything derived from them, and more is constantly being produced by that big nuclear reactor in the sky).
The time scales of greatest concern are more intermediate time scales - say a few thousand years, not either a couple hundred or millions.
Actually an increased rate of birth defects would not be what one would expect to see first if the problem was mainly caused by depleted uranium; an increased rate of lung cancer and other lung diseases would be expected long before you could measure an increased burden of birth defects. The reason for that is that inhalation of particles of pulverized and/or oxidized DU is under those circumstances most likely the primary route for it to enter the body, and the systemic absorption of the material through that route is relatively inefficient; so most of the damage is done in situ.
That data point alone points to the existence of other cause(s) which may be working in concert with each other and/or with the depleted uranium burden as a secondary factor.
Unlikely in the extreme. Greatly impoverished (both from economic and biodiversity standpoints), quite possibly; uninhabitable, almost certainly not. The planet has seen much warmer periods in its history (just not very recently).
The gist of your article is correct but your numbers are not. U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years but "natural" uranium is a mixture of various isotopes of which all but U-238 have a half-life of significantly less than 4.5 billion years, so the effective "average" half-life of the uranium is significantly less than that. Depleted uranium is, very roughly, half as radioactive as "natural" uranium (the exact amount depending on just how depleted the uranium is).
But you are correct - if you live in a brick house, or you sleep in the same bed with your partner, you are most likely being exposed to more radiation than you would be if you had a brick of the stuff under your bed. The problem only comes about when something makes that relatively inert block of metal more biologically available.
Unfortunately a lot of people have a fuzzy understanding of what radiation is, what the different types are, when it's potentially dangerous, and when it's not anything to worry about. Most people probably don't understand very clearly that radioactive materials emit vastly different densities of radiation. They just think (radiation == bad) and stop thinking at that point.
This is still unproven (there are lots of other noxious things people are being exposed to over there, any of which could be contributing to such problems).
However more to the point, depleted uranium is not particularly radioactive; if you had a brick of it in your hand, you would be exposed to relatively little radiation. Remember also that much of the radiation in that brick will itself be locked up in the interior of the brick because it is also a good shield material.
The issue with depleted uranium is not so much the density of its radioactivity, but the fact that when it's used in munitions it gets burned and pulverized into dust particles which are more easily absorbed by the body. You're not likely to eat a brick of DU and, quite frankly, even if you did swallow a small marble of DU the body is not able to absorb much of it and it will quickly be eliminated. However you could easily inhale small particles of oxidized or pulverized DU which allows for both heavy metal poisoning and longer-term exposure to the radioactivity since the small particles and heavy metal oxides would remain in the body for longer periods of time, and the smaller particles present a higher surface-to-volume ratio for the radioactivity to escape into your body.
The jury is still out on whether this is enough to account for the observed health issues, though there is cause for concern. But it is not an issue outside of military scenarios because you wouldn't be making pulverized and oxidized DU and spreading it all over the environment.
Doubling that distance could increase the number of homes covered by a factor of four.
I doubt that. At best, it quadruples the area covered. However by increasing the area, you increase the probability of the service areas from the exchanges overlapping, meaning that your total coverage area doesn't quadruple, however your coverage still should increase significantly and the "dead" zones that aren't quite covered by any of the existing exchanges should diminish making the coverage more continuous.
Moreover, you are assuming that the customer density in the new service area is the same as in the original service area. This is unlikely; probably the original service area was chosen because the density was higher and was therefore cheaper and easier to service.
Not to say that this isn't worth doing, but it's probably not quite as much of a win as it looks at first glance.
I've bought a fair number of components off eBay, mostly for keeping older PC's going. However what you get is often very much of a mixed bag - I generally figured that I need to buy as much as 2-2.5 times as much memory as I'd actually need, for example, because of the high failure rate for memory bought off eBay. Still sometimes it was worth it for situations where the replacement memory for the old PC was either unavailable or ridiculously priced. I suspect a not insignificant number of the parts on eBay, while not exactly "bad," are there because they've started to become flaky.
Network appliances (routers/hubs/switches), on the other hand, in my experience tend to be less risky purchases on eBay.
YMMV. However unless you're willing to buy enough spare parts to be able to, in effect, provide your own in-house warranty service, you may want to consider carefully whether you want the additional hassle rather than just doing an RMA to a well-known company like Newegg.
Fans aren't very expensive unless you have an oddball case. And even if you aren't upgrading, you'll have to keep up with replacing the fans if you don't want your rig to burn up. The IDE drives can be more of an issue, however most motherboards still support 1 IDE connection (=2 devices). Unless you want more than 1 hard drive and 1 CD/DVD that's enough - and if you do want more, there are still a number of options; a few motherboards still support 2 IDE connectors, and even if the one you choose doesn't, an IDE controller for your old drives only costs about $20-25 assuming you don't need RAID (which IMHO is kind of overkill if you use the PC primarily for gaming). Even if you decide to upgrade your hard drive to SATA you can get a 250 GB HD for under $65, or less than $45 if you're satisfied with 80GB. So even if you have to replace components like the hard drives you're looking at well under $600, and possibly still under $500 depending on the options you choose. Somehow this doesn't strike me as the costs "escalating fast" compared to the traditional pricing for gaming PC's.