I'm impressed. Very good interview. I thought the most interesting part was about the PC being dead, and the question as to whether or not Microsoft has killed the market. It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want. But that idea ignores the fact that competition is all but ignored. Thank God Apple is doing such great things right now, I think they are the ones who will have higher growth than the rest of the industry simply because they are offering really compelling reasons to upgrade.
I think the other factor is that the machine itself doesn't seem to be a limiting factor anymore, it's the connection to the internet. Most people can't take advantage of their fast processors, because everything these days is focused on the pipes to the network. I've got to give McNealy at least partial credit for the whole "the network is the computer" deal, it's become very true. People seem to just use their machines as emailers, browsers, and muedia downloaders/players. True, all the other stuff like word processing is there too, but the fact that communication has become the real killer app of the industry shows where improvements need to be made.
I think he's right to focus on the devices that need embedded Linux, since those markets will continue to grow through phones, PDA's, and whatever niche devices people will come up with for specific industries. However, to say that the PC is dead is a little shortsighted. It's just stalled and waiting for the bandwidth to catch up.
Speaking of which, I think the big killer app for linux, if someone can come up with one, will be a new, or at least cheap and easy, way of communicating. Apache, PHP, and SAMBA are all focused on this, and they are the apps we always point to as big successes. I mean, the whole movement is successful because of the ability for us to communicate and cooperate to make an OS! Shouldn't the apps really reflect that? Maybe it's that we're all geeks and not so good at communicating (just browse -1 to see that;-) but I think that perhaps we need to push beyond what's out there in this space.
I don't know, this is all pointless rambling. I'm obviously no better, or else I'd have some actual idea in mind rather than half-baked theories. Still, I believe that the PC is now a tool for communication rather than productivity. The productivity is still there, but it's not the primary purpose any more.
But how many are even going to go to that trouble to learn how to use these things? There's no doubt that they're better executed than anything on Windows, but so is the whole of the Mac OS, and it still has a meager market share.
The lazy masses are too lazy to go against the status quo, especially when they see Microsoft ads touting XP's video making capabilities. It doesn't matter if it's as good, XP has what they think they want (even though they never end up using it to make movies or whatever) and it's what they have used at work for the past decade. Why switch? This is the great lesson to be learned from Apple's past, and it should not be ignored.
I agree with you, and it's one of those things that makes me really sad about this industry. You can have the absolute best product out there, way ahead of the competition, and you're still relegated to a mediocrity. The amazing thing about Apple is that they're so good that they're still alive, despite these problems.
There's no doubt that if iPhoto works as advertised, it's going to kick ass. The problem is, most people will remain ignorant of it, and we're all the worse off for it.
Ah, but you are forgetting primary rule #1: People Are Lazy. They are so lazy that they will not bother to find out about VPC (great product that it is) and they will certaintly not pay extra just to run some software they could have run under windows for cheaper.
Remember, even though Macs are easier and better designed in general than PC's with windows, they are alien to most people. In addition, they are meant to be easy, and how easy are they if you need to buy this virtual PC thing and run both Windows and MacOS at once? Why can't they just run one?
VPC is a great product, but it's a niche product, especially the platform that's meant to be as simple and easy as possible.
My number one rule with people is that they are generally lazy. People are often too lazy to even look at a Mac, let alone use it long enough to try and understand how to work it. No start button? My God! What do I do?!? It can't run my kid's games? Well, forget that! It takes a relatively rare kind of person to make the switch from PC to Mac, and a clever (albeit weird) new design isn't really going to matter much.
The other thing I have issues with is the whole "digital lifestyle" concept that Jobs keeps pushing. Why is it that you have all these commercials, from Apple, Microsoft, HP, and others going on about how easy it is to create shit on your computer? I just don't understand. Yeah, plenty of people create with their computers (God bless 'em) but the majority of the people out there are still astonished that they can actually buy a device to copy their friend's CD's! Combine that with the fact that most people actually consider themselves far too busy to go about creating some stupid coffee table book or movie, there's no way this will fly. I like the iPhoto idea for actually organizing things, but I'm skeptical that it will matter in the long run, as people will just use the free (Windows) software that came with their camera.
Apple could do very well, the possibility is always there so long as they keep up what they're doing, but it would take some serious serious blunders on Microsoft's part, the likes of which we've never seen before, to make people switch.
I agree with you entirely, but look at it from this perspective: we're trying to meet each other in the middle.
Since you use Mandrake, you're aware that it's a good desktop OS. All those people who say "Linux is a great server OS, let it be" just don't get it. It's on it's way to becoming a great desktop OS, the same way Windows is on it's way to becoming a great server OS. Windows has gotten security features and stability over the years, while Unix has gotten things like KDE and graphical installers.
Neither is perfect right now, but in the end, what's going to be the difference? It'll be cost and freedom vs. compatibility. The fact is, we've never really seen a battle like this before in the industry. We've seen cost vs. compatibility before, and cost won, but not against this kind of overwhelming force. The question is whether or not freedom will tip the scales at all. I, for one, hope it does.
Yeah, that was my first thought as well. Also, are the nerves even there? I'm far from a neuroscientist, but I have heard things to the effect that nerves can dwindle if left unstimulated. If the retina has been gone long enough, are the nerves still there?
I think if they are there though, the training would be critical. I don't think they would properly line up initially, as you've said. My guess though, is that the brain would eventually rewire things (maybe downstream from the brain too) to sort out the image correctly. That would be the training phase. The fact that the brain can massively rework itself to recover from trauma indicates to me that this is possible.
Once again, I'm no neuroscientist (I've decided that in biology there are neuroscientists and everyone else, and I'm in the latter category) but I have a fair amount of faith in this if it works as well as they say. The problem would be the time and effort to train the person to see correctly.
That's weird, I was just thinking about the artificial eyes in William Gibson's novels and how they'd possibly be done.
I think the most difficult part about this is how the nerves will react. I think they're very right about the brain needing training to adapt to this. I'm pretty confident it could do it, but I don't know how much training it would take.
I thought the process with the dissolving film was an incredible idea too.
I hope this one pulls through. Does anyone with a neuroscience background have any thoughts on the feasibility of this one?
That is an excellent point, that people are too lazy to go to the computer and would just stick to the TV. But I think that no one is going to pay for a service like this because it's more limiting than the computer. AOL makes things pretty easy for most people, and provides things like email and the ability for your kid to run Morphius. TV doesn't do that, although they've tried. WebTV was easy as hell, but it's gone exactly nowhere. People are used to the computer, and it's easy enough for them.
Why not the computer then? The TV limits what people can do necessarily. I can't really imagine anyone wanting a keyboard for their TV any more than I can imagine someone buying one for their gamecube. Note that these peripherals don't sell well on systems like video game consoles that are inherently interactive. There's no way someone is going to use one on a machine that is naturally the exact opposite of interactive.
Producers have spent decades making TV the exact opposite of interactive, and they've done an admirable job of it. I know of no better way to kill your mind than TV, even drugs don't do the job as well or as easily. Then they tried to take this philosophy to the internet with Push technology. Remember when that was the thing? How often do you hear about those guys now? The same way push failed for the internet, interactive TV will fail because it's the antithesis of what people know and love about television. It's not a bad idea, it's just not going to work
Didn't we hear about interactive TV before? Isn't that garbage over? Granted, TiVo is fairly popular, and it deserves it, but everyone I know wants to sit in front of their TV and be a vegetable. That's what it's good at, and that's what people use it for. This one'll sink because people would rather be lazy.
Oval is pretty cool. Weird, but cool. I guess I won't be grabbing that CD though. Maybe I'll get to their back catalog though, as they've been on my list of "bands who I really need to check out more".
It was a good hypothesis, and I don't think it's entirely wrong. I think your freckle example was very good. But I think the problem is that you're just not looking at the right level for the overall effect. For some reason, most people tend to focus on the DNA, which is unfortunate because it totally ignores the living environment inside a cell. Kind of like trying to find a novel by looking at the source code to Emacs. I had the same thoughts when I was taking intro bio classes, but it oversimplifies. You're on the right track though:-)
You make a lot of good points. In a way, the cell was built from scratch. In many ways, you're right, it is still the cell it was millions of years ago, but it is different. It's a "daughter cell" now, which isn't really the same thing. Which cell is the original? The original doesn't exist any more, there are only daughter cells. If you don't let a cell divide, and provide it with enough nutrients and no predators, etc., will it live forever? I don't know, but I don't believe it.
This leads us to a great truism in biology, that life is actually a process, not a state. As a process, you've got to ask why it has to replicate itself. If the parent was right, it wouldn't really need to, but all life does, even semilife like viruses must replicate. In large part, I think that it's competition, and having more on your side as it were, will increase your genetic odds. But I think the other reason is that processes tend to degrade, even with the influx of new energy. All these small interactions within a cell work to produce very fine systems, but these systems will eventually reach a chaotic point and will no longer function. They're very very very good at preventing this, but no complex system can escape chaos forever. Living systems must replicate and create fresh offspring to work around this problem. The process starts over (from scratch, as it were) and life begins anew.
Perhaps "from scratch" really was a poor choice of words, but I think the point remains. The process has to restart, and the only way it can do this is with fresh materials.
I love when people with high school level education in anything think they understand how to solve something as difficult as cancer or aging.
My first question to your personal theory is that if mutations are random (which they are), and aging is a result of said random mutations, then why is it that all humans age in a predictable manner? Why do they all get wrinkles, bad eyesight, etc? Granted, some effects of aging are different in different people, but overall it is a well known general degredation. Random mutations in actual genes(which aren't that frequent) do not happen in a predictable manner across the species like that.
I don't honestly know much about the telomere thing other than what you've said here, but I am not inclined to believe it. I think apoptosis is far more important because it's so common. Sure, the telomeres could trigger apoptosis, but I somehow doubt it's the primary method of cell death, when there's so many other ways to trigger it. We are multicellular organisms, and most everything has to take in to account interactions between cells. The telomere-as-internal-clock idea pretty much ignores this. I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible, but I don't think that it's any explanation for aging.
My other problem with your theory is that it goes straight to the DNA, and totally forgets the entire living environment within the cell (not to mention among cells). The state of a cell changes. It's not a binary system of life and death, a cell can do any number of things. Aging, to me, is the system of the cell changing, not at the genetic level (kids born to old parents would have these problems if it was) but at the molecular level. It happens via a change in gene expression, rather than mutation. This is a whole other can of worms, and it becomes way way more complex at this point, which makes a lot more sense to me given the complexities of a cell.
Note that this doesn't even begin to get in to cancer, which is just as difficult. Yes, figuring out that cancer and aging are related is not too tough, the problem is finding the actual link between cancer and aging so that they can be separated somehow. Not everyone who ages gets cancer, and not everyone who gets cancer is old. Cancer is such a heterogeneous term that it can't be pinned down by simply saying "it's due to aging." This is why it's so difficult, and it's why there is so much work being done in the field.
So what would you do instead? Stick the cancer in people to get really accurate results?
And you do realize that when we study cancer in rats, it's human cancer cells that get put in the rats? Granted, it's not the same thing, but it's a good model to start from. Unless you'd like to volunteer to be a test subject?
Single cell organisms pretty much live forever
until they are eaten, starve, or encounter an
enviromental hazard.
Care to back that up? I have never seen any kind of data supporting the assumption that single cell organisms live forever, given those kinds of conditions, and without any kind of data, I won't believe it.
The reason being that thermodynamics (or chaos theory, or whatever) says that you're wrong. Any system as complex as a living cell, even something so simple as a yeast cell or E coli can not maintain that level of organisation for long. The cell is very thrifty with its organization, to be sure, but it is not infinitely so. That's why reproduction and evolution are so critical, because no single system can survive by itself for too long, so it must rebuild itself from scratch. Yes, you can put these systems in to hibernation, but that isn't really life functioning in any way shape or form until it's revived.
And of course pre-programmed cell death wasn't present in single cell organisms, it'd be counterproductive for an E coli to simply kill itself. Preprogrammed cell death does not kill the entire organism, and it obviously be detrimental if it did.
And as for sex and evolution evolving together, there are single celled organisms that have sex via plasmids. Granted, it might not be the "one chromosome from each parent" that we are used to in humans, but it is still genetic exchange by conjugation. There is no apoptosis here either.
Ok, the whole "cure for cancer" deal isn't really what people are working for. What we're doing is looking to treat cancer, rather than cure it. First thing to note is that there's a whole lot more money in treatments than cures for any affliction, so many people will naturally look there first.
The major point though is that it's a hell of a lot easier to treat something than to cure it. Take the flu for example. We can sink millions of dollars in to antiviral drugs to get rid of the sickness, or we can give you some antihistamines to treat the symptoms and let your body handle the work. It's a whole lot easier on everyone this way.
The same sort of idea goes for cancer. Treating cancer by slowing its growth is the target of many researchers doing things like antiangiogenesis. The tumor itself isn't deadly (hence, benign tumors), it's the fact that it replicates like mad, spreads throughout your body, and eventually destroys so much of your tissue that you can't handle it. If you can treat the cancer by stopping it's spread, you'll have a much better method of saving lives. As many have mentioned, cancers have to route around mechanisms in place to stop a cell from dividing, but you can't very well stop all the cells in your body from dividing, you'd die within the week.
As for cancer as irresistible force, I think it's a very interesting question when you start to dig in to it. Cancer is the ultimate in unregulated positive feedback, and I think its prevelance as a disease is demonstrative of the need for massive amounts of positive feedback in out bodies that are necessary for life. I think that if cells didn't have a natural tendency to keep dividing, and had to constantly be told to grow, that it would put a large damper on cell division, and thus evolution. Look at bacteria, which divide like crazy whenever there's enough food present. Because they do this, the can evolve defenses against drugs by the sheer weight of their numbers (note that this is a real problem, and is likely the next big one we face in terms of disease). While this doesn't directly affect humans in quite the same way, our own multicellular complexity may be a result of it. I think the natural tendency of our cells to divide allows for the greater benefits of growth and evolution that outweigh the negative possibility of cancer.
Re:Umm, right. And Mark Hamill was from where?
on
Attack of the Clones
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What the hell is this troll? You're saying because Lucas signed an unknown actor for his low budget unknown science fiction film in the late 70's, that having what is right now the world's largest, most visible, and most marketable band show up in what is likely the most visible franchise film series the past decades is even comparable?
Lucas is, quite simply, out of touch with his own vision. No one argues that Star Wars is a fairy tale, and a damn good one at that. But look at what makes good fairy tales! Harry Potter is a prime example of a modern day fairy tale that has won the hearts of millions of fanatics of ALL AGES, much the way Star Wars did years ago. Toy Story is another example, where everyone loves it, kids and adults. LOTR is doing it in theaters right this very moment, some half century after its original writing.
The fact is, Lucas did something once upon a time that was magic by creating something for people of all ages to love. You can't really say that about the new movies, something is missing. I think what's missing is both in Lucas and everyone else.
The target demographic of the original movies was not really children, but everyone. Kids don't understand the concept of a Republic vs. an Empire and what that means, or the sexual tension between Han and Leia. That stuff is in there for adults too. And don't forget the violence (which is present in all fairy tales by the way, pick up the Grimms if you don't believe me) which is relatively absent from episode 1. No dead gungans lying around, they're too fucking marketable! Even the Ewoks were slaughtered en masse. These "adult" concepts are things that are very real, that reach out to us and touch us from inside and connect us to the story long after the fantasy has faded away. Harry Potter does this. LOTR does this. Why not episode 1?
I wish I had an answer to these questions, but the fact is that Lucas is simply not targeting his demographic anymore. When he made the first movie, his priority was simply getting it made because he couldn't worry about anything else. Make the movie, and people will come. His demographic was the project itself. Now his demographic is what he thinks audiences will want from him, and he's bending things to this vision. He's not serving the story anymore, he's trying to serve us all, and in doing so he's cheating everyone of something that should have been great.
Once upon a time I would have agreed with you on the idea that Macs have longer lives. Back in the day, I remember my friends having to get new PC's very frequently in order to run the latest stuff. My Mac Plus and IIvx, on the other hand, served me for five years with only minor expansions (hard drive and RAM) each.
Now that processors are so fast though, and RAM is so ubiquitous, most people don't need much faster machines. Bandwidth tends to be the key limiting factor in what people can do, especially now that CD burners are so cheap. My Pentium II is going on in to its fourth year right now, and it hardly feels aged when I don't browse the game isles:-) Aside from adding some more drive space and a burner, there's very little I've done to it.
I think PC's, in general, have reached a point where they all have longer lives. Most people are still very productive with Win95, and until recently they could run everything they wanted on it. I think once upon a time Macs used to have the longer life, which made them a much more worthwhile purchase, but now that PC's have surpassed what people need they've switched to features, like firewire. I think the above poster is right to mention expansion. The capability to add a firewire card to an original iMac would add some extra life to the machine.
How was that? I see plenty of comments both for and against RMS. Your problem is that you don't construct any kind of intelligent criticism, but instead throw trollish arguments out like this and expect to be praised for it.
I don't feel like searching for GNU/BSD arguments, but I can assure you there's plenty of pro-BSD comments that got very high mods. Do the search yourself, I've already wasted enough time on your flamebait.
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I'm impressed. Very good interview. I thought the most interesting part was about the PC being dead, and the question as to whether or not Microsoft has killed the market. It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want. But that idea ignores the fact that competition is all but ignored. Thank God Apple is doing such great things right now, I think they are the ones who will have higher growth than the rest of the industry simply because they are offering really compelling reasons to upgrade.
;-) but I think that perhaps we need to push beyond what's out there in this space.
I think the other factor is that the machine itself doesn't seem to be a limiting factor anymore, it's the connection to the internet. Most people can't take advantage of their fast processors, because everything these days is focused on the pipes to the network. I've got to give McNealy at least partial credit for the whole "the network is the computer" deal, it's become very true. People seem to just use their machines as emailers, browsers, and muedia downloaders/players. True, all the other stuff like word processing is there too, but the fact that communication has become the real killer app of the industry shows where improvements need to be made.
I think he's right to focus on the devices that need embedded Linux, since those markets will continue to grow through phones, PDA's, and whatever niche devices people will come up with for specific industries. However, to say that the PC is dead is a little shortsighted. It's just stalled and waiting for the bandwidth to catch up.
Speaking of which, I think the big killer app for linux, if someone can come up with one, will be a new, or at least cheap and easy, way of communicating. Apache, PHP, and SAMBA are all focused on this, and they are the apps we always point to as big successes. I mean, the whole movement is successful because of the ability for us to communicate and cooperate to make an OS! Shouldn't the apps really reflect that? Maybe it's that we're all geeks and not so good at communicating (just browse -1 to see that
I don't know, this is all pointless rambling. I'm obviously no better, or else I'd have some actual idea in mind rather than half-baked theories. Still, I believe that the PC is now a tool for communication rather than productivity. The productivity is still there, but it's not the primary purpose any more.
But how many are even going to go to that trouble to learn how to use these things? There's no doubt that they're better executed than anything on Windows, but so is the whole of the Mac OS, and it still has a meager market share.
The lazy masses are too lazy to go against the status quo, especially when they see Microsoft ads touting XP's video making capabilities. It doesn't matter if it's as good, XP has what they think they want (even though they never end up using it to make movies or whatever) and it's what they have used at work for the past decade. Why switch? This is the great lesson to be learned from Apple's past, and it should not be ignored.
But what possible benefit could there be in letting it leak? It's not like they would have had to wait much longer, Macworld is tomorrow.
Plus, Jobs is a total control freak who really loves the surprise his keynotes give every year. Given that, I'd say someone fucked up big time.
I agree with you, and it's one of those things that makes me really sad about this industry. You can have the absolute best product out there, way ahead of the competition, and you're still relegated to a mediocrity. The amazing thing about Apple is that they're so good that they're still alive, despite these problems.
There's no doubt that if iPhoto works as advertised, it's going to kick ass. The problem is, most people will remain ignorant of it, and we're all the worse off for it.
Ah, but you are forgetting primary rule #1: People Are Lazy. They are so lazy that they will not bother to find out about VPC (great product that it is) and they will certaintly not pay extra just to run some software they could have run under windows for cheaper.
Remember, even though Macs are easier and better designed in general than PC's with windows, they are alien to most people. In addition, they are meant to be easy, and how easy are they if you need to buy this virtual PC thing and run both Windows and MacOS at once? Why can't they just run one?
VPC is a great product, but it's a niche product, especially the platform that's meant to be as simple and easy as possible.
My number one rule with people is that they are generally lazy. People are often too lazy to even look at a Mac, let alone use it long enough to try and understand how to work it. No start button? My God! What do I do?!? It can't run my kid's games? Well, forget that! It takes a relatively rare kind of person to make the switch from PC to Mac, and a clever (albeit weird) new design isn't really going to matter much.
The other thing I have issues with is the whole "digital lifestyle" concept that Jobs keeps pushing. Why is it that you have all these commercials, from Apple, Microsoft, HP, and others going on about how easy it is to create shit on your computer? I just don't understand. Yeah, plenty of people create with their computers (God bless 'em) but the majority of the people out there are still astonished that they can actually buy a device to copy their friend's CD's! Combine that with the fact that most people actually consider themselves far too busy to go about creating some stupid coffee table book or movie, there's no way this will fly. I like the iPhoto idea for actually organizing things, but I'm skeptical that it will matter in the long run, as people will just use the free (Windows) software that came with their camera.
Apple could do very well, the possibility is always there so long as they keep up what they're doing, but it would take some serious serious blunders on Microsoft's part, the likes of which we've never seen before, to make people switch.
I agree with you entirely, but look at it from this perspective: we're trying to meet each other in the middle.
Since you use Mandrake, you're aware that it's a good desktop OS. All those people who say "Linux is a great server OS, let it be" just don't get it. It's on it's way to becoming a great desktop OS, the same way Windows is on it's way to becoming a great server OS. Windows has gotten security features and stability over the years, while Unix has gotten things like KDE and graphical installers.
Neither is perfect right now, but in the end, what's going to be the difference? It'll be cost and freedom vs. compatibility. The fact is, we've never really seen a battle like this before in the industry. We've seen cost vs. compatibility before, and cost won, but not against this kind of overwhelming force. The question is whether or not freedom will tip the scales at all. I, for one, hope it does.
Yeah, that was my first thought as well. Also, are the nerves even there? I'm far from a neuroscientist, but I have heard things to the effect that nerves can dwindle if left unstimulated. If the retina has been gone long enough, are the nerves still there?
I think if they are there though, the training would be critical. I don't think they would properly line up initially, as you've said. My guess though, is that the brain would eventually rewire things (maybe downstream from the brain too) to sort out the image correctly. That would be the training phase. The fact that the brain can massively rework itself to recover from trauma indicates to me that this is possible.
Once again, I'm no neuroscientist (I've decided that in biology there are neuroscientists and everyone else, and I'm in the latter category) but I have a fair amount of faith in this if it works as well as they say. The problem would be the time and effort to train the person to see correctly.
That's weird, I was just thinking about the artificial eyes in William Gibson's novels and how they'd possibly be done.
I think the most difficult part about this is how the nerves will react. I think they're very right about the brain needing training to adapt to this. I'm pretty confident it could do it, but I don't know how much training it would take.
I thought the process with the dissolving film was an incredible idea too.
I hope this one pulls through. Does anyone with a neuroscience background have any thoughts on the feasibility of this one?
That is an excellent point, that people are too lazy to go to the computer and would just stick to the TV. But I think that no one is going to pay for a service like this because it's more limiting than the computer. AOL makes things pretty easy for most people, and provides things like email and the ability for your kid to run Morphius. TV doesn't do that, although they've tried. WebTV was easy as hell, but it's gone exactly nowhere. People are used to the computer, and it's easy enough for them.
Why not the computer then? The TV limits what people can do necessarily. I can't really imagine anyone wanting a keyboard for their TV any more than I can imagine someone buying one for their gamecube. Note that these peripherals don't sell well on systems like video game consoles that are inherently interactive. There's no way someone is going to use one on a machine that is naturally the exact opposite of interactive.
Producers have spent decades making TV the exact opposite of interactive, and they've done an admirable job of it. I know of no better way to kill your mind than TV, even drugs don't do the job as well or as easily. Then they tried to take this philosophy to the internet with Push technology. Remember when that was the thing? How often do you hear about those guys now? The same way push failed for the internet, interactive TV will fail because it's the antithesis of what people know and love about television. It's not a bad idea, it's just not going to work
Didn't we hear about interactive TV before? Isn't that garbage over? Granted, TiVo is fairly popular, and it deserves it, but everyone I know wants to sit in front of their TV and be a vegetable. That's what it's good at, and that's what people use it for. This one'll sink because people would rather be lazy.
I think the reason is that he'd be forced to have VA Software as his cause of the month every month. [ducks]
Oval is pretty cool. Weird, but cool. I guess I won't be grabbing that CD though. Maybe I'll get to their back catalog though, as they've been on my list of "bands who I really need to check out more".
It was a good hypothesis, and I don't think it's entirely wrong. I think your freckle example was very good. But I think the problem is that you're just not looking at the right level for the overall effect. For some reason, most people tend to focus on the DNA, which is unfortunate because it totally ignores the living environment inside a cell. Kind of like trying to find a novel by looking at the source code to Emacs. I had the same thoughts when I was taking intro bio classes, but it oversimplifies. You're on the right track though :-)
You make a lot of good points. In a way, the cell was built from scratch. In many ways, you're right, it is still the cell it was millions of years ago, but it is different. It's a "daughter cell" now, which isn't really the same thing. Which cell is the original? The original doesn't exist any more, there are only daughter cells. If you don't let a cell divide, and provide it with enough nutrients and no predators, etc., will it live forever? I don't know, but I don't believe it.
This leads us to a great truism in biology, that life is actually a process, not a state. As a process, you've got to ask why it has to replicate itself. If the parent was right, it wouldn't really need to, but all life does, even semilife like viruses must replicate. In large part, I think that it's competition, and having more on your side as it were, will increase your genetic odds. But I think the other reason is that processes tend to degrade, even with the influx of new energy. All these small interactions within a cell work to produce very fine systems, but these systems will eventually reach a chaotic point and will no longer function. They're very very very good at preventing this, but no complex system can escape chaos forever. Living systems must replicate and create fresh offspring to work around this problem. The process starts over (from scratch, as it were) and life begins anew.
Perhaps "from scratch" really was a poor choice of words, but I think the point remains. The process has to restart, and the only way it can do this is with fresh materials.
I love when people with high school level education in anything think they understand how to solve something as difficult as cancer or aging.
My first question to your personal theory is that if mutations are random (which they are), and aging is a result of said random mutations, then why is it that all humans age in a predictable manner? Why do they all get wrinkles, bad eyesight, etc? Granted, some effects of aging are different in different people, but overall it is a well known general degredation. Random mutations in actual genes(which aren't that frequent) do not happen in a predictable manner across the species like that.
I don't honestly know much about the telomere thing other than what you've said here, but I am not inclined to believe it. I think apoptosis is far more important because it's so common. Sure, the telomeres could trigger apoptosis, but I somehow doubt it's the primary method of cell death, when there's so many other ways to trigger it. We are multicellular organisms, and most everything has to take in to account interactions between cells. The telomere-as-internal-clock idea pretty much ignores this. I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible, but I don't think that it's any explanation for aging.
My other problem with your theory is that it goes straight to the DNA, and totally forgets the entire living environment within the cell (not to mention among cells). The state of a cell changes. It's not a binary system of life and death, a cell can do any number of things. Aging, to me, is the system of the cell changing, not at the genetic level (kids born to old parents would have these problems if it was) but at the molecular level. It happens via a change in gene expression, rather than mutation. This is a whole other can of worms, and it becomes way way more complex at this point, which makes a lot more sense to me given the complexities of a cell.
Note that this doesn't even begin to get in to cancer, which is just as difficult. Yes, figuring out that cancer and aging are related is not too tough, the problem is finding the actual link between cancer and aging so that they can be separated somehow. Not everyone who ages gets cancer, and not everyone who gets cancer is old. Cancer is such a heterogeneous term that it can't be pinned down by simply saying "it's due to aging." This is why it's so difficult, and it's why there is so much work being done in the field.
So what would you do instead? Stick the cancer in people to get really accurate results?
And you do realize that when we study cancer in rats, it's human cancer cells that get put in the rats? Granted, it's not the same thing, but it's a good model to start from. Unless you'd like to volunteer to be a test subject?
The reason being that thermodynamics (or chaos theory, or whatever) says that you're wrong. Any system as complex as a living cell, even something so simple as a yeast cell or E coli can not maintain that level of organisation for long. The cell is very thrifty with its organization, to be sure, but it is not infinitely so. That's why reproduction and evolution are so critical, because no single system can survive by itself for too long, so it must rebuild itself from scratch. Yes, you can put these systems in to hibernation, but that isn't really life functioning in any way shape or form until it's revived.
And of course pre-programmed cell death wasn't present in single cell organisms, it'd be counterproductive for an E coli to simply kill itself. Preprogrammed cell death does not kill the entire organism, and it obviously be detrimental if it did.
And as for sex and evolution evolving together, there are single celled organisms that have sex via plasmids. Granted, it might not be the "one chromosome from each parent" that we are used to in humans, but it is still genetic exchange by conjugation. There is no apoptosis here either.
Ok, the whole "cure for cancer" deal isn't really what people are working for. What we're doing is looking to treat cancer, rather than cure it. First thing to note is that there's a whole lot more money in treatments than cures for any affliction, so many people will naturally look there first.
The major point though is that it's a hell of a lot easier to treat something than to cure it. Take the flu for example. We can sink millions of dollars in to antiviral drugs to get rid of the sickness, or we can give you some antihistamines to treat the symptoms and let your body handle the work. It's a whole lot easier on everyone this way.
The same sort of idea goes for cancer. Treating cancer by slowing its growth is the target of many researchers doing things like antiangiogenesis. The tumor itself isn't deadly (hence, benign tumors), it's the fact that it replicates like mad, spreads throughout your body, and eventually destroys so much of your tissue that you can't handle it. If you can treat the cancer by stopping it's spread, you'll have a much better method of saving lives. As many have mentioned, cancers have to route around mechanisms in place to stop a cell from dividing, but you can't very well stop all the cells in your body from dividing, you'd die within the week.
As for cancer as irresistible force, I think it's a very interesting question when you start to dig in to it. Cancer is the ultimate in unregulated positive feedback, and I think its prevelance as a disease is demonstrative of the need for massive amounts of positive feedback in out bodies that are necessary for life. I think that if cells didn't have a natural tendency to keep dividing, and had to constantly be told to grow, that it would put a large damper on cell division, and thus evolution. Look at bacteria, which divide like crazy whenever there's enough food present. Because they do this, the can evolve defenses against drugs by the sheer weight of their numbers (note that this is a real problem, and is likely the next big one we face in terms of disease). While this doesn't directly affect humans in quite the same way, our own multicellular complexity may be a result of it. I think the natural tendency of our cells to divide allows for the greater benefits of growth and evolution that outweigh the negative possibility of cancer.
What the hell is this troll? You're saying because Lucas signed an unknown actor for his low budget unknown science fiction film in the late 70's, that having what is right now the world's largest, most visible, and most marketable band show up in what is likely the most visible franchise film series the past decades is even comparable?
Lucas is, quite simply, out of touch with his own vision. No one argues that Star Wars is a fairy tale, and a damn good one at that. But look at what makes good fairy tales! Harry Potter is a prime example of a modern day fairy tale that has won the hearts of millions of fanatics of ALL AGES, much the way Star Wars did years ago. Toy Story is another example, where everyone loves it, kids and adults. LOTR is doing it in theaters right this very moment, some half century after its original writing.
The fact is, Lucas did something once upon a time that was magic by creating something for people of all ages to love. You can't really say that about the new movies, something is missing. I think what's missing is both in Lucas and everyone else.
The target demographic of the original movies was not really children, but everyone. Kids don't understand the concept of a Republic vs. an Empire and what that means, or the sexual tension between Han and Leia. That stuff is in there for adults too. And don't forget the violence (which is present in all fairy tales by the way, pick up the Grimms if you don't believe me) which is relatively absent from episode 1. No dead gungans lying around, they're too fucking marketable! Even the Ewoks were slaughtered en masse. These "adult" concepts are things that are very real, that reach out to us and touch us from inside and connect us to the story long after the fantasy has faded away. Harry Potter does this. LOTR does this. Why not episode 1?
I wish I had an answer to these questions, but the fact is that Lucas is simply not targeting his demographic anymore. When he made the first movie, his priority was simply getting it made because he couldn't worry about anything else. Make the movie, and people will come. His demographic was the project itself. Now his demographic is what he thinks audiences will want from him, and he's bending things to this vision. He's not serving the story anymore, he's trying to serve us all, and in doing so he's cheating everyone of something that should have been great.
Oh no! Didn't we just have this discussion?
Once upon a time I would have agreed with you on the idea that Macs have longer lives. Back in the day, I remember my friends having to get new PC's very frequently in order to run the latest stuff. My Mac Plus and IIvx, on the other hand, served me for five years with only minor expansions (hard drive and RAM) each.
:-) Aside from adding some more drive space and a burner, there's very little I've done to it.
Now that processors are so fast though, and RAM is so ubiquitous, most people don't need much faster machines. Bandwidth tends to be the key limiting factor in what people can do, especially now that CD burners are so cheap. My Pentium II is going on in to its fourth year right now, and it hardly feels aged when I don't browse the game isles
I think PC's, in general, have reached a point where they all have longer lives. Most people are still very productive with Win95, and until recently they could run everything they wanted on it. I think once upon a time Macs used to have the longer life, which made them a much more worthwhile purchase, but now that PC's have surpassed what people need they've switched to features, like firewire. I think the above poster is right to mention expansion. The capability to add a firewire card to an original iMac would add some extra life to the machine.
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RMS Running For GNOME Board Of Directors
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GNOME Foundation Elections - Final Candidate List
- Stallman Responds To GNOME Questionaire
- Gnome Preliminary Election Results In
How was that? I see plenty of comments both for and against RMS. Your problem is that you don't construct any kind of intelligent criticism, but instead throw trollish arguments out like this and expect to be praised for it.I don't feel like searching for GNU/BSD arguments, but I can assure you there's plenty of pro-BSD comments that got very high mods. Do the search yourself, I've already wasted enough time on your flamebait.