It may not seem like a lot of money, but there are now probably at least a more few guys out there looking for solutions than there were before. It really doesn't hurt anyone to offer it, in the grand scheme of things--if they don't have to pay out, they save some cash; if they have to pay out, a major world-spanning crisis has been averted and the money will really seem like peanuts.
Considering the magnetic field strengths necessary to run a standard MR imaging system with any decent resolution--not to mention the blurring with movement and the virtual need for RF coils that lay close around the head--barring a huge advance in magnetic technology it will always be true that the person needs to be stripped of all metal objects, x-rayed to make sure there's no metal plate in their head or anything, brought to the scanner, placed inside, and more or less _totally aware_ that something is going on. They can't zap you with a beam from ten feet away and know what the blood in your head is doing.
Hmph. That doesn't sound like a game so much as Second Life.
While I don't disagree that Sim-type games are fundamentally different, I don't see how mods for something like Morrowind don't count via your parameters. Is that because they're not actually part of the "game" itself and are instead included in an outside package? Or is it because the modding tools aren't the point of the game? If that's the case, then I point to NWN, which was billed as something of a DM's Playset. That latter one doesn't even have to have a fixed plot, which is perhaps an important feature of a Sandbox game--you build the custom missions that you like in the framework of the AD&D setting provided, or one that you mod in yourself (with a huge work investment, yes).
From what I heard (I don't own any MS consoles), Dead Rising also gave you a pretty strict time limit if you wanted to, you know, actually complete the objectives of the game, too.
It seems to me that a good Sandbox type of game--let's take Morrowind or GTA for popular examples--would give you more or less as much time as you like to complete the "story" or "objective" missions, and then have a whole bunch of stuff to just play around with/in. Even if it makes perfect, logical sense to have a strict time limit, that doesn't necessarily mean that it must be done. In fact, I'd think that works strongly against the Sandbox motif--if I want to just dick around in the game for a while--go gain a couple levels or snoop around for useful loot--I shouldn't have to sacrifice the rest of my current play-through.
I'm confused by this. You can run Windows on a Mac with Bootcamp, right?
I suppose what he or the summary meant to say is "PC versus Mac" or, probably, "Windows versus MacOS on a Mac." It's really fallacious to compare an operating system to a computing architecture. You Linux users out there should be angry, since it tacitly implies that the only thing a PC ever runs is Windows.
Personally, I'm a computer gamer. Much of my computer time is spent gaming, with the rest being internet browsing and completion of homework/programming/etc. I use a PC because I want the level of control this architecture provides over my components. I use Windows because, well, for most games I pretty much have to.
(Yes, techincally "PC" means a lot of things. I use the term PC out of convenience, which is probably ironic of me to say given what half of my post is complaining about.)
The part I'm worried about...while pharmacological companies can mass-produce cheaply and without patent overhead, the bigger concern is that this drug shows some shred of a chance to cure some types/cases of cancer. The problem is, as the old saying goes "There's more money in treating the disease than there is in curing it". Just because there's profit to be made, and real potential here, there's a real chance that it won't happen because it won't induce continual and regular profit.
That argument assumes that the people who made the decisions about this kind of thing--doctors for "off-label" uses at the moment, and whomever happens to be in control of a particular grant's pursestrings--are immune to cancer, along with their families, friends, and associates, and therefore have no reason to cure cancer for its own sake. Frankly, everyone does--I guess I'm better off saying should--have a vested interest in curing cancer because it can take pretty much anyone who doesn't die of something else first.
Besides, even as promising as something may look, it's very unlikely that there will ever be one common cure for all cancers period. This drug, although claimed to be safe, might not be able to be administrated in sufficient quantities to destroy widespread cancers (metastasized cancers, for instance). Tumor lines of cells that don't normally undergo apoptosis as a result of a oncogenic change also may resist this drug.
This is tangential (I'm just a student still), but I was also under the impression that apoptosis started in the _nucleus,_ with the cell's DNA basically being cut to ribbons first of all. It's very possible that I'm wrong--I'm not an oncologist and not studying to be one.
So _that's_ why the ??AA are having so much trouble backing up those statistics about unlawfully copied movies/CDs/etc.--the copies have all been buried!
.... litigation after (sometimes perceived) errors by scientists and drug companies has caused reluctance to make new medicines rapidly available.
And then people complain that doctors have some kind of conspiracy to hold back new medications. It's a sad, vicious cycle.
(Please note: I'm not accusing anyone in this discussion of this. I'm speaking only of majority or vocal minority opinion. It's only understandable to wish that a cure had come just a few years sooner.)
Well, think about it. If developers see that there's lots more money to be made in sequel-churning than in fronting risky but potentially innovating games, or redefine "risky game" to include anything that ISN'T a sure-fire bet, don't you think they're a lot more likely to put a lot more money and time behind things that aren't risky? Don't they have limited budgets? Doesn't that leech money and "talent" away from more risky projects? Games _are_ getting more expensive to develop, and it's going to be harder and harder for smaller developers to stay in the game--after all, as the masses enter the hobby, they're going to have expectations that everything looks at least as good as Madden and has licensed music like NFS. The proportion of "old" style gamers will naturally drop over time until _everyone_ has those expectations, no matter the type of game.
Let me put it another way: do you think that EA would've come out so strongly in support of the Wii back before they knew exactly how popular it would turn out to be?
I'm lamenting the _very fact_ that gaming has gone mainstream. I frankly don't care to consider what the huddled masses are buying, because I don't believe those franchises are advancing games as a medium. OK, it's wonderful that lots of people out there enjoy their shiny new camera angle every year--what I (and most gamers who've been around for a while--an unfortunately shrinking proportion of "gamers") care about are things like "plot" and "innovation" and "fun." It's great that people get enjoyment out of buying a new Madden game every year--those of us who feel like we've had our hobby stolen from us generally DO NOT enjoy that sort of thing, and we're going to complain to beat the band.
So I say again: who cares what console "wins"? Who cares what people are buying? I'm not a shareholder in EA. I don't care if the company sinks or swims except insofar as it hurts or helps my gaming experience. I'm a gamer, and I'm bemoaning the downfall of my hobby.
(For the record and in the interests of disclosure: I'm a PC gamer. I frankly would like to see all the consoles lose so that they'll stop grabbing all the market share; PC gamers would hopefully then stop seeing crappy console ports cropping up.)
It's going to be sad when we hear the first reports of college kids in "spoiler" t-shirts being torn limb from limb by hordes of enraged 12-year-old-girls' parents.
One can only hope that the designers plan to kick off every GoW game with an intense fight scene...
I, for one, hope that there aren't sufficiently more God of War games to bear out a theory like this. I have nothing against GoW in particular, but _any_ series will get stagnant after a finite number of outings. I'd rather see the developers focus their energies on something new and different--sure, OK. THAT can have an intense fight kick it off, too, if that's what matters to people.
This is off-topic, but don't MMOs deserve their own slashdot "section icon" by now? I can't be the only one who's tired of seeing Tellah and Gilbert associated so closely with "role"-playing games like WoW.
And, yeah, I understand that, going by my definition of role-playing games--ones where you play a role besides healer, nuker, or tank--Final Fantasy doesn't technically count, either. Considering the number of games articles that seem to pop up on slashdot, perhaps it's time to reorganize that section a bit?
... since I don't own an XBox360. How much writing, exactly, went into the game? From what I've seen, it looks like a bulked-up, deadlier, more flashy version of Quake II where you can take cover and chainsaw guys in the face. Indeed, those seem to be the draws, rather than the compelling plot or dialog. The writing for QII, I can remember, was basically contained within the manual, and that was something a guy like me (moderately creative and loves spending time writing long, pointless descriptions of make-believe things--I invented a fictional naming convention for every race in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for god's sake) could've pounded out in a day or two.
Hormesis is currently controversial among health scientists--I'm fairly certain most agree that it can occur, but nobody is quite sure of the mechanism for it yet. Personally, I would call it akin to relying upon the placebo effect in order to cure a patient: it's not something we're able to control well enough at this point to try using it as a medical tool, and suggesting that it be done is bad professional practice. It's akin to suggesting that regulations on radiation workers be relaxed because the constant low-level dose protects them from accidental higher doses. While I will allow that MAY, in the future, be something that is actually considered, at this point we simply don't know enough about hormesis to rely upon it in any way. Furthermore, any dose is extra dose, whether protective or not.
This is a widely-held consequence of our current model for radiation response in tissue. The current "best" model for radiation response is a "linear no-threshold" model--the "no-threshold" part means that no dose of radiation is completely without risk, although the "linear" parts do say that the risk _can_ be vanishingly small. It is still prudent to avoid all doses _that have no clear and present benefit._ I don't call a "security" measure of questionable value (not to mention the many privacy issues) a justification for giving the entire public extra radiation doses. This is especially true since, unlike in medicine, there's no radiation professional around (assumedly) to explain to them the risks and the benefits from their procedure. I continue to be shocked that anti-radiation groups aren't stepping in to complain about this project or at least bring it into public light.
I think that to medical or health physicists, if you say "x-ray" I'm pretty sure they'll respond "ionizing." I don't know many people who would call photons in the optical range "x-rays" because of the way they were generated when there's a more useful label (optical) to give them. X-Ray is a useful label to distinguish nuclear gamma from electronic x-ray, but I wouldn't assume that pedantry to the extreme you suggest is as widespread in physics as you've claimed.
The actual New Scientist article mentions x-rays specifically. The attached patent application--which is what the article summarizes--deals with backscatter x-ray technology but then mentions millimeter wave later on in I guess "section" 0030. The patent, however, appears to be dealing with a backscatter x-ray device since x-ray devices are mentioned literally constantly throughout, whereas millimeter is mentioned only once. Their first link is to their writeup on millimeter-wave. I don't have a clue why millimeter-wave keeps popping up. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on Backscatter x-ray has the same problem--the first link leads to a millimeter-wave article that has nothing to do with backscatter x-ray technology.
If x-rays are directed onto the human body, then there is some energy deposited and thus a radiation dose. If they aren't x-ray machines and are instead some other scanning modality, they damn well better stop calling them x-ray machines.
I don't know much about flight doses. However, this calculator gave me a dose equivalent on the order of 10 microSv for an hour-long flight. For a ten-hour flight, it gives less than 1 mSv. PA chest radiographs give dose equivalents on the order of 10 microSv (at about 100 kVp or so), if I'm not mistaken--I think that's on the right order.
We can say that it seems that this scan (assuming it "behaves" dose-wise just like a PA chest radiograph) just adds a dose of about an extra hour of flight-time. Of course, since we're not provided any of the dose profile information ourself (if they use lower energy x-rays the dose goes up a bit) there's no way for us to really be sure. We can sit here and approximate and hand-wave all we'd like, but as a medical physics student I haven't heard a word about these machines or their potential health effects OR about any regulations for these machines. Now, I can't expect to hear everything about every new radiographic device, but I consider this a pretty important advancement in the field, and I never hear anyone discussing putting health physicists in airports to monitor these machines. Considering how closely watched and regulated are medical radiographic instruments, it seems that these machines should be subject to similar close monitoring--which is probably not feasible in an airport-security environment.
Slashdot Mirror
It may not seem like a lot of money, but there are now probably at least a more few guys out there looking for solutions than there were before. It really doesn't hurt anyone to offer it, in the grand scheme of things--if they don't have to pay out, they save some cash; if they have to pay out, a major world-spanning crisis has been averted and the money will really seem like peanuts.
I think the solution you're looking for actually is to plant more humans--six feet deep.
Considering the magnetic field strengths necessary to run a standard MR imaging system with any decent resolution--not to mention the blurring with movement and the virtual need for RF coils that lay close around the head--barring a huge advance in magnetic technology it will always be true that the person needs to be stripped of all metal objects, x-rayed to make sure there's no metal plate in their head or anything, brought to the scanner, placed inside, and more or less _totally aware_ that something is going on. They can't zap you with a beam from ten feet away and know what the blood in your head is doing.
Alert me after anyone ameliorates alliteration, an absolutely agonizing ailment.
Hmph. That doesn't sound like a game so much as Second Life.
While I don't disagree that Sim-type games are fundamentally different, I don't see how mods for something like Morrowind don't count via your parameters. Is that because they're not actually part of the "game" itself and are instead included in an outside package? Or is it because the modding tools aren't the point of the game? If that's the case, then I point to NWN, which was billed as something of a DM's Playset. That latter one doesn't even have to have a fixed plot, which is perhaps an important feature of a Sandbox game--you build the custom missions that you like in the framework of the AD&D setting provided, or one that you mod in yourself (with a huge work investment, yes).
From what I heard (I don't own any MS consoles), Dead Rising also gave you a pretty strict time limit if you wanted to, you know, actually complete the objectives of the game, too.
It seems to me that a good Sandbox type of game--let's take Morrowind or GTA for popular examples--would give you more or less as much time as you like to complete the "story" or "objective" missions, and then have a whole bunch of stuff to just play around with/in. Even if it makes perfect, logical sense to have a strict time limit, that doesn't necessarily mean that it must be done. In fact, I'd think that works strongly against the Sandbox motif--if I want to just dick around in the game for a while--go gain a couple levels or snoop around for useful loot--I shouldn't have to sacrifice the rest of my current play-through.
I'm confused by this. You can run Windows on a Mac with Bootcamp, right?
I suppose what he or the summary meant to say is "PC versus Mac" or, probably, "Windows versus MacOS on a Mac." It's really fallacious to compare an operating system to a computing architecture. You Linux users out there should be angry, since it tacitly implies that the only thing a PC ever runs is Windows.
Personally, I'm a computer gamer. Much of my computer time is spent gaming, with the rest being internet browsing and completion of homework/programming/etc. I use a PC because I want the level of control this architecture provides over my components. I use Windows because, well, for most games I pretty much have to.
(Yes, techincally "PC" means a lot of things. I use the term PC out of convenience, which is probably ironic of me to say given what half of my post is complaining about.)
This entire post is just an awful excuse for the horrid pun in the subject line. Nothing (more) to see here; please move along.
The part I'm worried about...while pharmacological companies can mass-produce cheaply and without patent overhead, the bigger concern is that this drug shows some shred of a chance to cure some types/cases of cancer. The problem is, as the old saying goes "There's more money in treating the disease than there is in curing it". Just because there's profit to be made, and real potential here, there's a real chance that it won't happen because it won't induce continual and regular profit.
That argument assumes that the people who made the decisions about this kind of thing--doctors for "off-label" uses at the moment, and whomever happens to be in control of a particular grant's pursestrings--are immune to cancer, along with their families, friends, and associates, and therefore have no reason to cure cancer for its own sake. Frankly, everyone does--I guess I'm better off saying should--have a vested interest in curing cancer because it can take pretty much anyone who doesn't die of something else first.
Besides, even as promising as something may look, it's very unlikely that there will ever be one common cure for all cancers period. This drug, although claimed to be safe, might not be able to be administrated in sufficient quantities to destroy widespread cancers (metastasized cancers, for instance). Tumor lines of cells that don't normally undergo apoptosis as a result of a oncogenic change also may resist this drug.
This is tangential (I'm just a student still), but I was also under the impression that apoptosis started in the _nucleus,_ with the cell's DNA basically being cut to ribbons first of all. It's very possible that I'm wrong--I'm not an oncologist and not studying to be one.
So _that's_ why the ??AA are having so much trouble backing up those statistics about unlawfully copied movies/CDs/etc.--the copies have all been buried!
.... litigation after (sometimes perceived) errors by scientists and drug companies has caused reluctance to make new medicines rapidly available.
And then people complain that doctors have some kind of conspiracy to hold back new medications. It's a sad, vicious cycle.
(Please note: I'm not accusing anyone in this discussion of this. I'm speaking only of majority or vocal minority opinion. It's only understandable to wish that a cure had come just a few years sooner.)
Well, think about it. If developers see that there's lots more money to be made in sequel-churning than in fronting risky but potentially innovating games, or redefine "risky game" to include anything that ISN'T a sure-fire bet, don't you think they're a lot more likely to put a lot more money and time behind things that aren't risky? Don't they have limited budgets? Doesn't that leech money and "talent" away from more risky projects? Games _are_ getting more expensive to develop, and it's going to be harder and harder for smaller developers to stay in the game--after all, as the masses enter the hobby, they're going to have expectations that everything looks at least as good as Madden and has licensed music like NFS. The proportion of "old" style gamers will naturally drop over time until _everyone_ has those expectations, no matter the type of game.
Let me put it another way: do you think that EA would've come out so strongly in support of the Wii back before they knew exactly how popular it would turn out to be?
Who cares about which console "wins"?
I'm lamenting the _very fact_ that gaming has gone mainstream. I frankly don't care to consider what the huddled masses are buying, because I don't believe those franchises are advancing games as a medium. OK, it's wonderful that lots of people out there enjoy their shiny new camera angle every year--what I (and most gamers who've been around for a while--an unfortunately shrinking proportion of "gamers") care about are things like "plot" and "innovation" and "fun." It's great that people get enjoyment out of buying a new Madden game every year--those of us who feel like we've had our hobby stolen from us generally DO NOT enjoy that sort of thing, and we're going to complain to beat the band.
So I say again: who cares what console "wins"? Who cares what people are buying? I'm not a shareholder in EA. I don't care if the company sinks or swims except insofar as it hurts or helps my gaming experience. I'm a gamer, and I'm bemoaning the downfall of my hobby.
(For the record and in the interests of disclosure: I'm a PC gamer. I frankly would like to see all the consoles lose so that they'll stop grabbing all the market share; PC gamers would hopefully then stop seeing crappy console ports cropping up.)
The company reported $1.281 billion in their revenue stream, fueled by the Sims, Madden, and Need for Speed franchises.
See the subject line. If it needs explanation, you'll probably never get it.
I have to wonder how many office pools out there are taking bets: what page does Harry Potter die on?
It's going to be sad when we hear the first reports of college kids in "spoiler" t-shirts being torn limb from limb by hordes of enraged 12-year-old-girls' parents.
We already have a genre for "Magic Fiction."
Fantasy.
Let us only hope that virgin concrete balls are equally as easy to come by.
One can only hope that the designers plan to kick off every GoW game with an intense fight scene...
I, for one, hope that there aren't sufficiently more God of War games to bear out a theory like this. I have nothing against GoW in particular, but _any_ series will get stagnant after a finite number of outings. I'd rather see the developers focus their energies on something new and different--sure, OK. THAT can have an intense fight kick it off, too, if that's what matters to people.
This is off-topic, but don't MMOs deserve their own slashdot "section icon" by now? I can't be the only one who's tired of seeing Tellah and Gilbert associated so closely with "role"-playing games like WoW.
And, yeah, I understand that, going by my definition of role-playing games--ones where you play a role besides healer, nuker, or tank--Final Fantasy doesn't technically count, either. Considering the number of games articles that seem to pop up on slashdot, perhaps it's time to reorganize that section a bit?
... since I don't own an XBox360. How much writing, exactly, went into the game? From what I've seen, it looks like a bulked-up, deadlier, more flashy version of Quake II where you can take cover and chainsaw guys in the face. Indeed, those seem to be the draws, rather than the compelling plot or dialog. The writing for QII, I can remember, was basically contained within the manual, and that was something a guy like me (moderately creative and loves spending time writing long, pointless descriptions of make-believe things--I invented a fictional naming convention for every race in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for god's sake) could've pounded out in a day or two.
Hormesis is currently controversial among health scientists--I'm fairly certain most agree that it can occur, but nobody is quite sure of the mechanism for it yet. Personally, I would call it akin to relying upon the placebo effect in order to cure a patient: it's not something we're able to control well enough at this point to try using it as a medical tool, and suggesting that it be done is bad professional practice. It's akin to suggesting that regulations on radiation workers be relaxed because the constant low-level dose protects them from accidental higher doses. While I will allow that MAY, in the future, be something that is actually considered, at this point we simply don't know enough about hormesis to rely upon it in any way. Furthermore, any dose is extra dose, whether protective or not.
This is a widely-held consequence of our current model for radiation response in tissue. The current "best" model for radiation response is a "linear no-threshold" model--the "no-threshold" part means that no dose of radiation is completely without risk, although the "linear" parts do say that the risk _can_ be vanishingly small. It is still prudent to avoid all doses _that have no clear and present benefit._ I don't call a "security" measure of questionable value (not to mention the many privacy issues) a justification for giving the entire public extra radiation doses. This is especially true since, unlike in medicine, there's no radiation professional around (assumedly) to explain to them the risks and the benefits from their procedure. I continue to be shocked that anti-radiation groups aren't stepping in to complain about this project or at least bring it into public light.
I think that to medical or health physicists, if you say "x-ray" I'm pretty sure they'll respond "ionizing." I don't know many people who would call photons in the optical range "x-rays" because of the way they were generated when there's a more useful label (optical) to give them. X-Ray is a useful label to distinguish nuclear gamma from electronic x-ray, but I wouldn't assume that pedantry to the extreme you suggest is as widespread in physics as you've claimed.
The actual New Scientist article mentions x-rays specifically. The attached patent application--which is what the article summarizes--deals with backscatter x-ray technology but then mentions millimeter wave later on in I guess "section" 0030. The patent, however, appears to be dealing with a backscatter x-ray device since x-ray devices are mentioned literally constantly throughout, whereas millimeter is mentioned only once. Their first link is to their writeup on millimeter-wave. I don't have a clue why millimeter-wave keeps popping up. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on Backscatter x-ray has the same problem--the first link leads to a millimeter-wave article that has nothing to do with backscatter x-ray technology.
If x-rays are directed onto the human body, then there is some energy deposited and thus a radiation dose. If they aren't x-ray machines and are instead some other scanning modality, they damn well better stop calling them x-ray machines.
I don't know much about flight doses. However, this calculator gave me a dose equivalent on the order of 10 microSv for an hour-long flight. For a ten-hour flight, it gives less than 1 mSv. PA chest radiographs give dose equivalents on the order of 10 microSv (at about 100 kVp or so), if I'm not mistaken--I think that's on the right order.
We can say that it seems that this scan (assuming it "behaves" dose-wise just like a PA chest radiograph) just adds a dose of about an extra hour of flight-time. Of course, since we're not provided any of the dose profile information ourself (if they use lower energy x-rays the dose goes up a bit) there's no way for us to really be sure. We can sit here and approximate and hand-wave all we'd like, but as a medical physics student I haven't heard a word about these machines or their potential health effects OR about any regulations for these machines. Now, I can't expect to hear everything about every new radiographic device, but I consider this a pretty important advancement in the field, and I never hear anyone discussing putting health physicists in airports to monitor these machines. Considering how closely watched and regulated are medical radiographic instruments, it seems that these machines should be subject to similar close monitoring--which is probably not feasible in an airport-security environment.