So how about a hybrid with a diesel engine. Low sulfur fuel plus an engine tuned to run at a set rpm would go a long way to reduce local pollution from diesel engines, as well as being very efficient.
Anyway hybrids are a good idea, they take a very small underpowered but efficient engine and boost it's output for acceleration using an electric motor and some capacitor/battery for energy storage. Energy is recoverd by using regenerative braking instead of wasting it as heat (this is one reason hydrids do so well under stop start driving). The real benefit is right their, in regenerative breaking and the ability to use a small engine and still have decent acceleration. The powerplant could be anything really, petrol, diesel, steam turbine, or even hamsters, but a hybrid system allows you to get more efficiency from your powerplant and recover braking energy that would otherwise be lost as heat.
There is no reason that a point and shoot can't have a larger detector, but they do cost more and obviously need a bulkier camera to accomodate them. The SLR need a larger detector so that the lense systems designed for 35mm film cameras can work reasonable well with the camera. The best being the canon 1d pro camera with a ccd the same size as 35mm film, its cost though puts it at the high end of pro cameras.
Anyway check out the top of the range cameras from the usual suspects. They all have combinations of some of the feature you are looking for. Take the sony DSC-F828 at around $1000. Large CCD, carl-zeiss high quality fixed zoom lense, LCD viewfinder and manually operated focus and zoom.
Professional cameras generally have on an optical viewfinder for a number of very good reasons. You are looking at the original uninterupted picture at the resolution of the optical system of the viewfinder and your eye, and not the resolution of some crappy LCD screen on the back of your camera. Probably most important in a pratical sense for manual focusing and low light conditions, but I personally prefer looking through an slr viewfinder than at an LCD display when taking a photo. Now in a non slr film camera the viewfinder is a little optical system ontop of the film lense, thus interchangeble lenses require a change of the viewfinder as well, and you are still not quite looking from the same angle as the lense (mostly imporant in macro photography). SLRs and digitals with LCDs solve this problem, by using a mirror to reflect light from the lense to the viewfinder (that would be the SLR) or take images of the ccd and display then on a screen. Anyway there is no reason that you can't have both, slr manufacturers could by probably simply updated firmware have a feature that locks the viewfinder mirror up and opens the shutter and displays in realtime the current view on the the cameras LCD.
Macro photography isn't my thing really so I can't really comment on what is good at what isn't.
Well the Ipod went into a new emerging market (hard disk based mp3 players) and set itself up as the standard. Careful design and marketting combined with attention to the whole package (software, music download site and Ipods functionality itself) has maintained that market lead. Now they are doing something very different, the are trying to leverage their brand recognition and the idea of the "complete package" into the far more crowded and competetive market of flash mp3 players. They are also not the only company trying to do this either, for instants sony latest attempt at putting out mp3 players combined with a download service. So will Apple succeed, well they need a flash player to complete the product family, basically the big full sized, and medium players, and then a cheaper indestructable flash player for people who want to use it for joggin etc., that is also compatible with iTunes for those who have paid for a large library of music through iTunes, to compliment their normal larger iPod,
Back to Sony, it's pretty apparent that Sony completely missed the boat on mp3 players. Apple really stole an emerging market that was far more of a natural fit for Sony, actually having pioneered the concept of portable music with the walkman and having great name recognition in that segment, and also already being a music and entertainment publishing company. While Apple before iTunes and the iPod was pretty a specialist in selling computer hardware and the accompaning operating system software. I guess Sony tried first with the minidisc and then held on to that idea far to long after it failed to take off.
"Artificial eyes and camera capable of very fast, accurate focus could be built from these. But they have patented the technology (such as it is) up the ying/yang. What this means is they are now sitting on their duffs, waiting for money to roll in. They technology could be improved and create real breakthroughs...but it's patented, so those good ideas will languish for your great great great great grandchildren."
What are you talking about. If someone could make it work as an artificial lens for an eye they can licence the patent. This is a positive patent, the company spent money and came up with a working and truly innovative product that has many uses. Now they have patent protection to commercialise it. To make a profit they actually have to sell something, thus the more applications that can use the technology, the more profit they will make. So there is a profit drive for this company to come up with as many useful applications of their technology as possible while they still have patent protection. Hardly stifling innovation. This is how patents are supposed to work.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
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"Where price control is used for cost containment, the tendency is to drive out innovation. This happened in Canada and Australia, which have both seen a steep decline in the introduction of new products.
The same will probably happen to countries which engage in "reference" pricing. The trend will be to encourage the use of older, cheaper and less effective drugs rather than newer, better formulations."
Like Vioxx right, a new and shiny drug isn't always the best, and a preference for older and better know cheaper generic drugs would have done a lot to lessen the impact of the problems of vioxx. You are talking not about drug approval for safety, but the drug approval for subsidisation by the government, which does have a preference for older better known drugs which happen to be out of patent and thus significantly cheaper.
Anyway I don't think that it is the government funding that is effecting the innovation level in Europe, i think it has more to do with the string of drug company mergers originating from the US, and a consequent centralisation of research effort in the US.
If a drug company develops a new variation on an already known drug, they are then putting it into a crowded market where they will have strong downward pricing pressure due to it being in direct competition with other drugs, but if they have an actual breakthrough they have the market to themselves and can price it accordingly.
Bullshit all western countries have strict controls on the safety of drugs, requiring good clinical trials demonstrating efficacy as well as side-effects and the safety of the drug. The clinical trials and other reasearch if sufficiently successful and done competently in any country only has to be done once for all other countries. Drugs are generally targetted first at passing the FDA approval, as the US is the single biggest market from the result of the approval of a single agency. Now after this the drug companies have less problem approving a drug elsewhere due to the fact they have already jumped through the approval hoops once.
Another non-obvious plus for safety in socialised health care systems where drugs are subsidised, is that often prices are depressed because they have a policy driven preference to use cheaper out of patent generic drugs instead of the latest and greatest patented drug. The upside in safety is the side effects are better known in the generic older drugs due to the fact they have already been widely used in that context before they went out of patent, and the side effects are better understood than a similar drug that came out within the last few years. Vioxx is the classic example of this, a pain reliever that is not anymore effective than common over the counter anti-inflammatory pain releivers, but under patent and sold for somewhere like 10 to 100 times the price, with a moderate benefit for people that are sensitive to a side-effect of the cheaper out of patent drugs, which is gastrointestinal problems. The hidden trade-off for the elimination of that side-effect using the new and less tested vioxx was the introduction of a more troubling side-effect, an increased risk of heart-attack and stroke.
Re:FDA approval?
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Well the real cause for concern with the latest scandal with drugs and the FDA is a fundamental problem of pharmaceutical companies continually trying to reinvent the wheel by making new drugs to treat highly common cronic diseases with treatments that are just as effective already ( eg long term prevention of heart disease, athritis, obesity, depression, sleeping disorders), with often a "me to" approach of producing new drugs that work similary to drugs from another company (notice the explosion in erectile disfunction drugs after the introduction of viagra.
In the case of vioxx, the treatment was designed for anti-inflammatory pain relief in arthritis, by inhibiting an enzyme COX2. It is about as effective as another drug many of us have taken ibuprofen (Advil) for this purpose but instead of being 3-5 bucks for a bottle of 50 to 100 pills, it was sold at ~$2 a pill (it is also how aspirin works to relieve pain as, thus the running joke that the pharmaceutical companies had invented the $2 apirin).
So what was so much better about vioxx that it was developed, FDA approved and prescribed by doctors.
Well it doesn't inhibit another enzyme COX1, like aspirin and ibuprofen do. Inhibiting Cox1 has several effects, the two most important are: the negative effect, gastrointestinal problems like stomach bleeding and ulcers; but it also has a positive effect which is prevention of blood platelet aggregation which prevents blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. This is why aspirin is taken to prevent heart attack, if you take aspirin to prevent heart disease and a specific COX2 inhibitor for arthritis like vioxx together you are really losing the benefit vioxx had over ibuprofen.
Anyway not everyone has a sensitivity to asprin and Ibuprofen, there are estimate that only 8% of those prescribed Vioxx actually got a benefit over cheaper alternatives, but vioxx had a great ad campaign that convinced everybody that they should "ask" (read demand) their doctor to prescribe it, even though it is vastly more expensive. Also the FDA approval could be pushed through because of the "benefit" to those 8% of patients that had gastrointestinal sensitivity to aspirin and ibuprofen.
So what have they found out now- well just inhibiting COX2 by itself actually causes increased blood platelet aggregation and increased risk of heart disease and stroke, this effect is balanced out by the inhibition of COX1 in aspirin and ibuprofen etc. that prevents platelet aggregation.
Now the real issue, Vioxx was pushed out to compete with very cheap, safe and well charactised drugs (so we know all the side effects etc., why do you think you can buy them at the supermarket) due to a very long history of use. Patent it and get it approved for use by the FDA targeting it to one small specific group that have a problem with current treatments to help push the approval through. Once it is approved marketing it to a much wider group of people that are not the specific target group, and will not gain any benefit over a cheaper, better characterised and now known to be safer alternative. To compound the problem the TV advertising of prescription drugs now almost approaching saturation increases this problem by getting the public to demand drugs they don't need.
Well for some things it will be possible to use umbilical cord stem cells. But there are several possible reasons why embryonic stem cells could be more useful than umbilical cord stem cells.
1.Umbilical cord stem cells are at some level of differentiation (set to become a particular group of cell) well as embryonic stem cells are not and can become any type of cell, or be implanted in a women resulting in a pregnancy and baby which is in vitro fertilisation (IF).
As a result of the wastefulness of IF techniques many fertilised embryos are left over after a couple have had a sucessful implantation and pregnancy. Currently these embryos are destroyed, so some researches want to instead use them to develop treatments, and better understand early stem cell differentiation. We really don't know what we can do with embryonic stem cells vs umbilical cord stem cells, which is one of the reasons why scientist want to do research on it.
2. Immune rejection of implanted stem cells. The spinal cord stem-cells are not from the woman but some (possibly related) baby, thus prone to be destroyed by the immune system in a similar manner to organ rejection. This is the idea behind thearaputic cloning, an even bigger ethics mine field than stem cell research. Clone the patient to create a new embryo with their DNA, but instead of implanting to produce a cloned baby, use these stem cells which are genetically identical to the patient, to implant into the patient to regrow damaged tissue, or maybe grow whole organs for transplantation without a risk of rejection.
As an aside the success (if it is true) of the treatment described here (fixing spinal cord damage using stem cells from an umbilical cord that has dfferent genetic material to the patient) may have been successful due to a thing called the blood brain barrier. The central nervous system including the spinal cord is separated from the blood stream by the blood brain barrier. Nutrients are passed from the blood stream to a separate system that supplies the nerves in the central nervous system, and important in this case immune cells are not normally allowed across the blood brain barrier, thus these introduced stem cells may be protected from attack from the immune system.
Except for one thing, they need people in america to make american games for the american market. A good example is the sporting games that is a huge part of EA's business. At the game design and artwork level it really has to be in the US, otherwise they won't have access to the sporting talent that they have to intergrate into the game. Then it also often important that all the rest of the team is in the same place so they can communicate effectively.
This could backfire. There is something like 3 million or more americans eligible to vote living overseas. Normally the vote turnout is low (30% or lower) due to the extra trouble of having to do an absentee ballot, and heavily slanted towards the republicans due to the large number of military personal that are stationed overseas. Interestingly there has been a massive upswing in voter registration and requests for absentee ballots for overseas voters due to how close the last election was, and how important overseas votes became (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6342710/). Expect a large increase in overseas voting this election, and so a need by the candidates to attract that vote. So it isn't really smart to actively snub those voters by blocking them from your website.
Wrong. The immune system is a very powerful system in our bodies that is simply designed to identify nasty pathogens in our body, and kill them with extreme prejudice. Now an allergy is simply an inappropriate reaction by the immune system something that is present in the environment but is not actually a risk to us, like pollen and food. Basically through some process that is not well understood the immune system was supposed to learn that these things are not a threat and should be ignored, except they often are not. Even more extreme example of the immune system making a complete balls up is autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes and ms, where the immune system gets so wayward it actually attacks the body itself and kills off some important component, for example the cells that make insulin.
Wait staff in the US work primarily for tips with their wage being woefully low, where in Australia we pay a decent wage and don't tip. It's a cultural thing from the egalitarianism of Australia where everyone is considered equal and should just do your job, to America where it is fight to the top to get as much money as possible, and nobody gives anybody the time of day unless you pay for the service.
The nice advantage to tipping is that you can choose not to tip if the service is really shitty and send a message to you waiter or waitress.
The flip side is that waiters can be very pushy constantly asking if the meal is OK and asking if you need anything when all you want to do is eat and talk with your companions.
Another bad point about tipping is there are extra stupid jobs created just for working for tips. Like waitresses in nightclubs and bars bringing you drinks instead of you buying it over the bar. Or the weirdest one, the bathroom attendants in nightclubs, that is just creepy and weird. These guys stand at the basin in the toilets and when you wash your hands, they give you soap and paper towels. Like it is so hard to do it yourself. I really don't like the idea of some poor bastard whose job is to spend all night in the toilets to help people wash their hands and to spray the odd bit of cologne over people, and it is highly insulting personally to me that the bar manager thinks that I need help washing my hands.
No imperial is less usable, you are just used to using fractions of units because that is how imperial works. You don't say 0.25 inches you say 1/4 inch. Where as in metric it is 0.25 cm not a 1/4 cm. Also the other fact is that there is no need to use fractions or decimals, with milli micro etc. extensions converting decimals into integer values ie 4.4x10-4 m = 0.044mm = 44m for example. The reason that factors of a thousand work is that the units are base 10, where it is hard to relate say 44 thousands of an inch to yards for example. This last point has scientific importance as metric has units outside the range of human experience, to measure very small values to very large values not just the width of a lump of wood or how far it is to the next town.
I doubt there is any reference to the media format. Just legalese for a recorded work of x songs for x minutes which constitutes an album. This legalese would have been refined in the 80's, as the market then consisted of CD vinyl and tape and so contracts had to take care of differing types of media being released at the same time.
It is not true 3d as there is no depth of field effect. Yes there is a 3d effect from the left right info, but your eyes are focused on the flat screen even when you are concentrating on a near or far object. This is the main cause of the sick feeling and headache that this type of display can cause, as the focus of your eyes is not corresponding to what you are actually looking at.
This isn't a laptop built for normal business or student customers. This is a laptop made for engineering and science applications where people have been used to dropping 10 or so grand 10 years ago for the same functionality in a workstation. For instance here is a nutty situation, crystal eyes pioneered LCD shutter glasses. OK, now you can buy good lcd shutter glasses for about $100 dollars, but if you want to buy crystal eyes its about $1000. Now the build quality of the crystal eyes are better, and the lcd shutter in them is larger, but this is definately not worth 10 times as much, they are just the standard that everybody buys.
Except for the many different legit mailing lists that people subscribe to. Any kind of bulk email will be screened by this, thus crippling gmail by preventing mailing lists that people subscribe to from being delivered.
That is the point of having a paper receipt that is put into a ballot box. Person reads what the printer spat out, and it looks like what they voted for and they are happy and puts paper ballot in the ballot box, if it isn't they know its not right and complain very loudly to the officials and they do something about it, like shutdown that machine for the day. If something weird happens in the election or as just an occasional precautionary measure for some randomised set of polling places, count the paper ballots and see if they tally with the votes recorded by the voting machines. If they do not correlate, use the results from the paper ballot count to determine the winner, and launch an investigation into what happened to the voting machines electronic records.
Without the paper trail how can they investigate this? And so if Diebold should modify the machines illegally, how will you hold them accountable? Simple solution to voting fraud by manipulating electronic voting machines.
There is no profit in curing something. Now a continual treatment for a chronic ailment is where the money is. Get the patients tied to a medicine for the rest of their lives and watch the cash role in.
Love is rational from a evolutionary aspect. A strong bond between a man and a women to first pursue a compatible mate, then produce offspring and to make sure that they both stay together for the good of their children, and of course love for those children so that the parents will devote a huge amount of attention and resources to their children and guarantee a healthy and prosperous new generation.
Within a single persons life the intense feelings that love is seems irrational, as it is not from conscious thought and is a source of much anguish. But the reason it exists is perfectly rational as long as we are sexually reproducing animals with children that require a lot of care to raise to maturity.
That and the old jag 12 cylinders were notoriously unreliable and really needed a good redesign. 8 cylinders increases reliability simply by having fewer moving parts, and is the standard for high power luxury sedans anyway so it was a little bit of follow the herd as well.
"Maybe the BMW acted this way because you were insulting it by using 'beemer' as it's nickname."
Please, since when has slang had hard defined language rules. It's a beemer or a bimmer, and you understand what that means, live with it. Frankly bimmer sounds pretty stupid.
Marketing to kids starts a problem that is carried into adulthood. It is systemic, there is tiny trickle of information reaching kids about healthy eating compared to the massive flood of advertisments from the food industry. Kids are bombarded with advertisements for high sugary foods and mac donalds, school lunches are also often high fat, high in sugar and highly processed so the wrong message is coming from the schools, and if the parents aren't eating well (which a very large number don't) it isn't coming from home. So exactly where do you learn to diet properly and live a healthy lifestyle?
Natural gas is a very clean fuel, so if you run a car on natural gas it is imperitive that you have some additive system to add a lubricant into the cylinder to lubricate the upper part of the cylinder and piston. If you do this the engine will actually last a lot longer than if the engine is run on petrol.
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So how about a hybrid with a diesel engine. Low sulfur fuel plus an engine tuned to run at a set rpm would go a long way to reduce local pollution from diesel engines, as well as being very efficient.
Anyway hybrids are a good idea, they take a very small underpowered but efficient engine and boost it's output for acceleration using an electric motor and some capacitor/battery for energy storage. Energy is recoverd by using regenerative braking instead of wasting it as heat (this is one reason hydrids do so well under stop start driving). The real benefit is right their, in regenerative breaking and the ability to use a small engine and still have decent acceleration. The powerplant could be anything really, petrol, diesel, steam turbine, or even hamsters, but a hybrid system allows you to get more efficiency from your powerplant and recover braking energy that would otherwise be lost as heat.
There is no reason that a point and shoot can't have a larger detector, but they do cost more and obviously need a bulkier camera to accomodate them. The SLR need a larger detector so that the lense systems designed for 35mm film cameras can work reasonable well with the camera. The best being the canon 1d pro camera with a ccd the same size as 35mm film, its cost though puts it at the high end of pro cameras.
Anyway check out the top of the range cameras from the usual suspects. They all have combinations of some of the feature you are looking for. Take the sony DSC-F828 at around $1000. Large CCD, carl-zeiss high quality fixed zoom lense, LCD viewfinder and manually operated focus and zoom.
Professional cameras generally have on an optical viewfinder for a number of very good reasons. You are looking at the original uninterupted picture at the resolution of the optical system of the viewfinder and your eye, and not the resolution of some crappy LCD screen on the back of your camera. Probably most important in a pratical sense for manual focusing and low light conditions, but I personally prefer looking through an slr viewfinder than at an LCD display when taking a photo. Now in a non slr film camera the viewfinder is a little optical system ontop of the film lense, thus interchangeble lenses require a change of the viewfinder as well, and you are still not quite looking from the same angle as the lense (mostly imporant in macro photography). SLRs and digitals with LCDs solve this problem, by using a mirror to reflect light from the lense to the viewfinder (that would be the SLR) or take images of the ccd and display then on a screen. Anyway there is no reason that you can't have both, slr manufacturers could by probably simply updated firmware have a feature that locks the viewfinder mirror up and opens the shutter and displays in realtime the current view on the the cameras LCD.
Macro photography isn't my thing really so I can't really comment on what is good at what isn't.
Well the Ipod went into a new emerging market (hard disk based mp3 players) and set itself up as the standard. Careful design and marketting combined with attention to the whole package (software, music download site and Ipods functionality itself) has maintained that market lead. Now they are doing something very different, the are trying to leverage their brand recognition and the idea of the "complete package" into the far more crowded and competetive market of flash mp3 players. They are also not the only company trying to do this either, for instants sony latest attempt at putting out mp3 players combined with a download service. So will Apple succeed, well they need a flash player to complete the product family, basically the big full sized, and medium players, and then a cheaper indestructable flash player for people who want to use it for joggin etc., that is also compatible with iTunes for those who have paid for a large library of music through iTunes, to compliment their normal larger iPod,
Back to Sony, it's pretty apparent that Sony completely missed the boat on mp3 players. Apple really stole an emerging market that was far more of a natural fit for Sony, actually having pioneered the concept of portable music with the walkman and having great name recognition in that segment, and also already being a music and entertainment publishing company. While Apple before iTunes and the iPod was pretty a specialist in selling computer hardware and the accompaning operating system software. I guess Sony tried first with the minidisc and then held on to that idea far to long after it failed to take off.
"Artificial eyes and camera capable of very fast, accurate focus could be built from these. But they have patented the technology (such as it is) up the ying/yang. What this means is they are now sitting on their duffs, waiting for money to roll in. They technology could be improved and create real breakthroughs...but it's patented, so those good ideas will languish for your great great great great grandchildren."
What are you talking about. If someone could make it work as an artificial lens for an eye they can licence the patent. This is a positive patent, the company spent money and came up with a working and truly innovative product that has many uses. Now they have patent protection to commercialise it. To make a profit they actually have to sell something, thus the more applications that can use the technology, the more profit they will make. So there is a profit drive for this company to come up with as many useful applications of their technology as possible while they still have patent protection. Hardly stifling innovation. This is how patents are supposed to work.
"Where price control is used for cost containment, the tendency is to drive out innovation. This happened in Canada and Australia, which have both seen a steep decline in the introduction of new products.
The same will probably happen to countries which engage in "reference" pricing. The trend will be to encourage the use of older, cheaper and less effective drugs rather than newer, better formulations."
Like Vioxx right, a new and shiny drug isn't always the best, and a preference for older and better know cheaper generic drugs would have done a lot to lessen the impact of the problems of vioxx. You are talking not about drug approval for safety, but the drug approval for subsidisation by the government, which does have a preference for older better known drugs which happen to be out of patent and thus significantly cheaper.
Anyway I don't think that it is the government funding that is effecting the innovation level in Europe, i think it has more to do with the string of drug company mergers originating from the US, and a consequent centralisation of research effort in the US.
If a drug company develops a new variation on an already known drug, they are then putting it into a crowded market where they will have strong downward pricing pressure due to it being in direct competition with other drugs, but if they have an actual breakthrough they have the market to themselves and can price it accordingly.
Bullshit all western countries have strict controls on the safety of drugs, requiring good clinical trials demonstrating efficacy as well as side-effects and the safety of the drug. The clinical trials and other reasearch if sufficiently successful and done competently in any country only has to be done once for all other countries. Drugs are generally targetted first at passing the FDA approval, as the US is the single biggest market from the result of the approval of a single agency. Now after this the drug companies have less problem approving a drug elsewhere due to the fact they have already jumped through the approval hoops once.
Another non-obvious plus for safety in socialised health care systems where drugs are subsidised, is that often prices are depressed because they have a policy driven preference to use cheaper out of patent generic drugs instead of the latest and greatest patented drug. The upside in safety is the side effects are better known in the generic older drugs due to the fact they have already been widely used in that context before they went out of patent, and the side effects are better understood than a similar drug that came out within the last few years. Vioxx is the classic example of this, a pain reliever that is not anymore effective than common over the counter anti-inflammatory pain releivers, but under patent and sold for somewhere like 10 to 100 times the price, with a moderate benefit for people that are sensitive to a side-effect of the cheaper out of patent drugs, which is gastrointestinal problems. The hidden trade-off for the elimination of that side-effect using the new and less tested vioxx was the introduction of a more troubling side-effect, an increased risk of heart-attack and stroke.
Well the real cause for concern with the latest scandal with drugs and the FDA is a fundamental problem of pharmaceutical companies continually trying to reinvent the wheel by making new drugs to treat highly common cronic diseases with treatments that are just as effective already ( eg long term prevention of heart disease, athritis, obesity, depression, sleeping disorders), with often a "me to" approach of producing new drugs that work similary to drugs from another company (notice the explosion in erectile disfunction drugs after the introduction of viagra.
In the case of vioxx, the treatment was designed for anti-inflammatory pain relief in arthritis, by inhibiting an enzyme COX2. It is about as effective as another drug many of us have taken ibuprofen (Advil) for this purpose but instead of being 3-5 bucks for a bottle of 50 to 100 pills, it was sold at ~$2 a pill (it is also how aspirin works to relieve pain as, thus the running joke that the pharmaceutical companies had invented the $2 apirin).
So what was so much better about vioxx that it was developed, FDA approved and prescribed by doctors.
Well it doesn't inhibit another enzyme COX1, like aspirin and ibuprofen do. Inhibiting Cox1 has several effects, the two most important are: the negative effect, gastrointestinal problems like stomach bleeding and ulcers; but it also has a positive effect which is prevention of blood platelet aggregation which prevents blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. This is why aspirin is taken to prevent heart attack, if you take aspirin to prevent heart disease and a specific COX2 inhibitor for arthritis like vioxx together you are really losing the benefit vioxx had over ibuprofen.
Anyway not everyone has a sensitivity to asprin and Ibuprofen, there are estimate that only 8% of those prescribed Vioxx actually got a benefit over cheaper alternatives, but vioxx had a great ad campaign that convinced everybody that they should "ask" (read demand) their doctor to prescribe it, even though it is vastly more expensive. Also the FDA approval could be pushed through because of the "benefit" to those 8% of patients that had gastrointestinal sensitivity to aspirin and ibuprofen.
So what have they found out now- well just inhibiting COX2 by itself actually causes increased blood platelet aggregation and increased risk of heart disease and stroke, this effect is balanced out by the inhibition of COX1 in aspirin and ibuprofen etc. that prevents platelet aggregation.
Now the real issue, Vioxx was pushed out to compete with very cheap, safe and well charactised drugs (so we know all the side effects etc., why do you think you can buy them at the supermarket) due to a very long history of use. Patent it and get it approved for use by the FDA targeting it to one small specific group that have a problem with current treatments to help push the approval through. Once it is approved marketing it to a much wider group of people that are not the specific target group, and will not gain any benefit over a cheaper, better characterised and now known to be safer alternative. To compound the problem the TV advertising of prescription drugs now almost approaching saturation increases this problem by getting the public to demand drugs they don't need.
Well for some things it will be possible to use umbilical cord stem cells. But there are several possible reasons why embryonic stem cells could be more useful than umbilical cord stem cells.
1.Umbilical cord stem cells are at some level of differentiation (set to become a particular group of cell) well as embryonic stem cells are not and can become any type of cell, or be implanted in a women resulting in a pregnancy and baby which is in vitro fertilisation (IF).
As a result of the wastefulness of IF techniques many fertilised embryos are left over after a couple have had a sucessful implantation and pregnancy. Currently these embryos are destroyed, so some researches want to instead use them to develop treatments, and better understand early stem cell differentiation. We really don't know what we can do with embryonic stem cells vs umbilical cord stem cells, which is one of the reasons why scientist want to do research on it.
2. Immune rejection of implanted stem cells. The spinal cord stem-cells are not from the woman but some (possibly related) baby, thus prone to be destroyed by the immune system in a similar manner to organ rejection. This is the idea behind thearaputic cloning, an even bigger ethics mine field than stem cell research. Clone the patient to create a new embryo with their DNA, but instead of implanting to produce a cloned baby, use these stem cells which are genetically identical to the patient, to implant into the patient to regrow damaged tissue, or maybe grow whole organs for transplantation without a risk of rejection.
As an aside the success (if it is true) of the treatment described here (fixing spinal cord damage using stem cells from an umbilical cord that has dfferent genetic material to the patient) may have been successful due to a thing called the blood brain barrier. The central nervous system including the spinal cord is separated from the blood stream by the blood brain barrier. Nutrients are passed from the blood stream to a separate system that supplies the nerves in the central nervous system, and important in this case immune cells are not normally allowed across the blood brain barrier, thus these introduced stem cells may be protected from attack from the immune system.
Except for one thing, they need people in america to make american games for the american market. A good example is the sporting games that is a huge part of EA's business. At the game design and artwork level it really has to be in the US, otherwise they won't have access to the sporting talent that they have to intergrate into the game. Then it also often important that all the rest of the team is in the same place so they can communicate effectively.
This could backfire. There is something like 3 million or more americans eligible to vote living overseas. Normally the vote turnout is low (30% or lower) due to the extra trouble of having to do an absentee ballot, and heavily slanted towards the republicans due to the large number of military personal that are stationed overseas. Interestingly there has been a massive upswing in voter registration and requests for absentee ballots for overseas voters due to how close the last election was, and how important overseas votes became (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6342710/). Expect a large increase in overseas voting this election, and so a need by the candidates to attract that vote. So it isn't really smart to actively snub those voters by blocking them from your website.
Wrong. The immune system is a very powerful system in our bodies that is simply designed to identify nasty pathogens in our body, and kill them with extreme prejudice. Now an allergy is simply an inappropriate reaction by the immune system something that is present in the environment but is not actually a risk to us, like pollen and food. Basically through some process that is not well understood the immune system was supposed to learn that these things are not a threat and should be ignored, except they often are not. Even more extreme example of the immune system making a complete balls up is autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes and ms, where the immune system gets so wayward it actually attacks the body itself and kills off some important component, for example the cells that make insulin.
Wait staff in the US work primarily for tips with their wage being woefully low, where in Australia we pay a decent wage and don't tip. It's a cultural thing from the egalitarianism of Australia where everyone is considered equal and should just do your job, to America where it is fight to the top to get as much money as possible, and nobody gives anybody the time of day unless you pay for the service.
The nice advantage to tipping is that you can choose not to tip if the service is really shitty and send a message to you waiter or waitress.
The flip side is that waiters can be very pushy constantly asking if the meal is OK and asking if you need anything when all you want to do is eat and talk with your companions.
Another bad point about tipping is there are extra stupid jobs created just for working for tips. Like waitresses in nightclubs and bars bringing you drinks instead of you buying it over the bar. Or the weirdest one, the bathroom attendants in nightclubs, that is just creepy and weird. These guys stand at the basin in the toilets and when you wash your hands, they give you soap and paper towels. Like it is so hard to do it yourself. I really don't like the idea of some poor bastard whose job is to spend all night in the toilets to help people wash their hands and to spray the odd bit of cologne over people, and it is highly insulting personally to me that the bar manager thinks that I need help washing my hands.
The other reason to use metric, the units have been standardised from the start.
No imperial is less usable, you are just used to using fractions of units because that is how imperial works. You don't say 0.25 inches you say 1/4 inch. Where as in metric it is 0.25 cm not a 1/4 cm. Also the other fact is that there is no need to use fractions or decimals, with milli micro etc. extensions converting decimals into integer values ie 4.4x10-4 m = 0.044mm = 44m for example. The reason that factors of a thousand work is that the units are base 10, where it is hard to relate say 44 thousands of an inch to yards for example. This last point has scientific importance as metric has units outside the range of human experience, to measure very small values to very large values not just the width of a lump of wood or how far it is to the next town.
I doubt there is any reference to the media format. Just legalese for a recorded work of x songs for x minutes which constitutes an album. This legalese would have been refined in the 80's, as the market then consisted of CD vinyl and tape and so contracts had to take care of differing types of media being released at the same time.
It is not true 3d as there is no depth of field effect. Yes there is a 3d effect from the left right info, but your eyes are focused on the flat screen even when you are concentrating on a near or far object. This is the main cause of the sick feeling and headache that this type of display can cause, as the focus of your eyes is not corresponding to what you are actually looking at.
This isn't a laptop built for normal business or student customers. This is a laptop made for engineering and science applications where people have been used to dropping 10 or so grand 10 years ago for the same functionality in a workstation. For instance here is a nutty situation, crystal eyes pioneered LCD shutter glasses. OK, now you can buy good lcd shutter glasses for about $100 dollars, but if you want to buy crystal eyes its about $1000. Now the build quality of the crystal eyes are better, and the lcd shutter in them is larger, but this is definately not worth 10 times as much, they are just the standard that everybody buys.
Except for the many different legit mailing lists that people subscribe to. Any kind of bulk email will be screened by this, thus crippling gmail by preventing mailing lists that people subscribe to from being delivered.
That is the point of having a paper receipt that is put into a ballot box. Person reads what the printer spat out, and it looks like what they voted for and they are happy and puts paper ballot in the ballot box, if it isn't they know its not right and complain very loudly to the officials and they do something about it, like shutdown that machine for the day. If something weird happens in the election or as just an occasional precautionary measure for some randomised set of polling places, count the paper ballots and see if they tally with the votes recorded by the voting machines. If they do not correlate, use the results from the paper ballot count to determine the winner, and launch an investigation into what happened to the voting machines electronic records.
Without the paper trail how can they investigate this? And so if Diebold should modify the machines illegally, how will you hold them accountable? Simple solution to voting fraud by manipulating electronic voting machines.
There is no profit in curing something. Now a continual treatment for a chronic ailment is where the money is. Get the patients tied to a medicine for the rest of their lives and watch the cash role in.
Love is rational from a evolutionary aspect. A strong bond between a man and a women to first pursue a compatible mate, then produce offspring and to make sure that they both stay together for the good of their children, and of course love for those children so that the parents will devote a huge amount of attention and resources to their children and guarantee a healthy and prosperous new generation.
Within a single persons life the intense feelings that love is seems irrational, as it is not from conscious thought and is a source of much anguish. But the reason it exists is perfectly rational as long as we are sexually reproducing animals with children that require a lot of care to raise to maturity.
That and the old jag 12 cylinders were notoriously unreliable and really needed a good redesign. 8 cylinders increases reliability simply by having fewer moving parts, and is the standard for high power luxury sedans anyway so it was a little bit of follow the herd as well.
"Maybe the BMW acted this way because you were insulting it by using 'beemer' as it's nickname."
Please, since when has slang had hard defined language rules. It's a beemer or a bimmer, and you understand what that means, live with it. Frankly bimmer sounds pretty stupid.
Marketing to kids starts a problem that is carried into adulthood. It is systemic, there is tiny trickle of information reaching kids about healthy eating compared to the massive flood of advertisments from the food industry. Kids are bombarded with advertisements for high sugary foods and mac donalds, school lunches are also often high fat, high in sugar and highly processed so the wrong message is coming from the schools, and if the parents aren't eating well (which a very large number don't) it isn't coming from home. So exactly where do you learn to diet properly and live a healthy lifestyle?
Natural gas is a very clean fuel, so if you run a car on natural gas it is imperitive that you have some additive system to add a lubricant into the cylinder to lubricate the upper part of the cylinder and piston. If you do this the engine will actually last a lot longer than if the engine is run on petrol.