I had a friend who broke his neck from a fall, so I've researched the topic a little bit. It is possible, in a very small number of cases, that people will spontaneously regrow the damaged nerves. This could be one of those cases.
One isolated incident does not make for a medical breakthrough. They need to demonstrate that this is repeatable.
This from the "rocket scientist" who didn't even read the article summary. Or if you did, you didn't understand what you were reading (not surprising). The stem cells were from umbilical cord blood, not human embryos. The federal ban is on the latter, not the former.
Considering the size of the Slashdot audience and the fact that Slashdot is a "news" site (in theory) and not a "tech support" site... a larger question might be, Is it irresponsible for Slashdot to post a bug report of a single user as a story for a million people to see? How many people will just read the headline and not read the comments, and automatically think that Firefox is having widespread problems?
Are there really a bunch of people who have problems with Firefox? Without even looking at Mozilla's tech support forums, I can tell you, unequivocally, YES. When you distribute a program to millions of users, some people are going to run into problems, that's a given. But how do we know that this fella's problem is really with Firefox, and not with, say, a memory chip he installed last week? Or maybe he has some spyware installed that is screwing it up?
The REAL question that Slashdot ought to be concerned with is, Does the number of people having problems with Firefox 1.0 appear to be statistically significant? If it's not, then this whole story grossly exaggerates the problems and gives Firefox a lot of unnecessarily bad PR.
Me, I just recently reformatted my hard drive, installed Win XP and Firefox 1.0, and have not had any problems with it.
Actually, I thought the Incredibles trailer was hilarious, and was sorry that they didn't incorporate it into the movie. Up to that point, I had my reservations about the premise, but the trailer sold me on the movie.
Many overlooked the fact that Cisco bought a company called P-Cube recently. One of the things P-Cube can do is prioritize the traffic flows on an IP network. SBC could use it and lower the priority of the traffic coming from say Vonage or AT&T. Nothing illegal here: SBC's network and it can do pretty much what it wants on its own network. Poor quality, lags, dropped packets and soon Vonage customers could be switching to SBC VoIP: which is more expensive, has better quality and of course is highly profitable.
Actually, it *is* illegal to directly interfere with a competitor's business. SBC would be criminally liable if they tried to prioritize the traffic of their competitors.
Well, if you want to split hairs, then the logo for Half-Life is screwed up, too. The second letter, which is supposed to be an "A", is actually the Greek letter Lambda -- "L". The logo reads to me as "HLLF-LIFE".
"target-practice online with a .22 caliber rifle"
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 1
Of course, you only get one shot, and then you have to buy a new monitor.
Losslessly compressed songs are still weighing in at around 25-30 MB.
Bandwidth may be relatively cheap for 128bit AAC music, but the next thing that consumers are going to demand from the music industry is higher bitrates and eventually lossless compression. Can Apple transfer a 30 MB file and still make money at $0.99? Probably not.
I guess that what struck me the most about Cars is that the concept already looks so bland. Each of the Pixar films to this point has pushed the boundaries of what the technology and the character animators could do. Maybe I'm just more of a 3D connoisseur than the average Joe.
The Cars trailer was just wholly unimpressive. Animated cartoony cars... yawn. Max Fleisher was doing that kind of stuff over half a century ago. It doesn't exactly push the boundaries, even if it is 3D.
Granted, Pixar may very well be going after a much younger audience this time around. The Incredibles was probably the most "adult" of the movies they've created so far, so maybe it's time to cater to the little kiddies.
If it sucks, Disney will pull the theatrical release and just make it a direct-to-video release, where parents will buy it by the millions and it will mostly avoid the sting of the critics.
Disney has a history of follwing up acclaimed movies by releasing horrible animated sequels direct to video (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), so nobody will really pay it any mind if it blows chunks.
Pixar, on the other hand, doesn't have that same luxury. The public expects Pixar films to rock our world, and a misstep by Pixar could be devestating. And based on the trailer, it looks like Cars is going to be the first bomb to come out of their studios. It sucks for Pixar that they are going to exit the Disney relationship on such a low note.
the super-intelligent roaches will "scorch the sky" in an attempt to keep the robotic cockroaches from using solar energy. The robotic cockroaches will then have to turn the real roaches into "batteries," and create a virtual reality world for them to live in. The roaches will have to await "the One," that roach who is so hyper-intelligent that he can bend the rules of the virtual world with his mind.
While all of this is playing out, I'll just be searching for a very large shoe.
As if my three prescription drugs don't cost enough already (and my co-pays continue to increase) I am going to have to subsidize a possible invasion of my privacy as well?
First of all, 50 cents isn't going to break anybody. Secondly, if this system makes it easier to verify the authenticity of the drugs, that probably means that there's a cost-savings somewhere else in the system to offset the expense.
The real reason Apple didn't choose Be
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...was that JLG kept jacking up the price. He saw that Apple was running out of time and options, and thought that Be was the only viable option for Apple at that point. I think that his attitude left Gil Amelio and the rest of the Apple board cold.
Of course, Apple spent far more to acquire NeXT, but they got Steve Jobs along with it, which was easily worth as much as the operating system.
Can you imagine JLG as Apple CEO, trying to push fruity-colored iMacs? It just wouldn't have happened...
If, as you say, "there are costs over and above salary that keep outsourcing from being profitable in almost all cases," then there is nothing to worry about. The market will eventually correct itself, and IT jobs will come flooding back to the US.
Companies aren't in the business of losing money, if they can help it. If US IT workers do truly offer more value, then the jobs market will shift again.
Now virtually the entire code-producing industry has left our shores, and taken most of the intellectual property value of our investment in technology with it.
"Investment" (if you want to call it that) always carries risk. Risk is inherently part of investing, and the greater the risk, the greater the potential reward (or loss).
And we did have a tremendous run through the 90's, but the economy started to overheat in '98 or '99, causing the bubble to pop in 2000. Another part of investing; you have to know when to cash out in one area, and shift your capital over to another.
Add to all of this the fact that other nations wanted their slice of the prosperity we were enjoying, and their workforces responded accordingly.
That is the nature of business, that if you have a good thing, it's nearly impossible to keep it to yourself. Competition enters in and drives down demand, and thus price.
This is not a good thing, and trying to make it look like a good thing is putting lipstick on a virus.
It is not my position that it is a "good thing" that high wage jobs have left the US, my position is that it was an inevitable thing. Rather than crying about what has already happened, we should be responding to the market and changing our workforce and changing the way we do business.
Let's face it, too many college students piled onto IT, thinking that it was a pot of gold. A shakeout is very painful at this point, but it is necessary.
US companies would have continued to run their domestic operations and even import labor, while selling the results overseas.
Dude, common sense ought to tell ya that, all things being equal, the company that can underbid everyone else is the one that gets the contract. If US labor costs 10 times more than Indian labor, how is the US company supposed to compete globally?
We can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
At least if a US company can outsource labor, those profits still come back to the US. If we run companies out of the US by jacking up labor costs, then we lose everything.
Just remember that George W. Bush reduced the outsourcing tax from 25% to 5% when you vote on November 2.
Let's suppose Bush RAISED rather than lowered the outsourcing tax... how would this have helped?
Big IT companies, recognizing that they compete on a global, rather than national basis, would have simply closed out their US headquarters and started doing business out of Europe. The IT jobs still would have gone overseas, AND we would have lost even more jobs and revenue.
By lowering the outsourcing tax, it's not enough to drive big companies out of the US, it provides at least SOME incentive to hire US workers, and we still get a tax revenue out of it.
Last I checked, Google was a corporation in the private sector, and not a branch of the federal government. You got proof of government involvement in a cover-up?
Damn, dude, just because you're probably bitter about the election, you don't have to go spreading lies about the President. Try to maintain at least the illusion of objectivity.
Hillary is too millitant, too far-left, and carries too much baggage to win. You think conservatives were mobilized in THIS election? Just wait until we start seeing Bill and Hillary out on the stump again. The Clintons are VERY polarizing.
Personally, I think it'd be great to see a woman win the White House. I think Elizabeth Dole has a much better chance than Hillary Clinton.
First of all, they have to check to make sure each one of the provisional ballots is leagally eligible to be cast, and it's anybody's guess how many would survive that process. I've heard 17% and I've heard 90%, depending on which pundit you hear it from.
Secondly, Kerry would have to win better than 90% of all the provisional ballots, and there no reason to think that the provisional ballots would break out any differently than the regular ballot has. You could expect that Bush and Kerry would get roughly the same percentage of provisionals that they got with normal ballots.
Third, remember that we are talking about a 140,000 vote spread... this isn't Florida in 2000, when the vote spread was 1,900 or so. A Kerry campaign staffer said early this morning that 50,000 might be a number they could fight, but 140,000 is just overwhelming.
Remember, it wasn't the Republicans who brought up the draft, it was the Democrats.
It was Democratic congressmen Charley Rangel and Fritz Hollings who introduced the bill to reinstate the draft. Fortunately, the Republican-controlled House killed it and it was DOA.
Republicans know that an all-volunteer military is far, FAR preferable to conscription. It's the Democrats who are obsessed with draft-talk.
Slashdot Mirror
My sentiments, exactly; I wish I had mod points.
I had a friend who broke his neck from a fall, so I've researched the topic a little bit. It is possible, in a very small number of cases, that people will spontaneously regrow the damaged nerves. This could be one of those cases.
One isolated incident does not make for a medical breakthrough. They need to demonstrate that this is repeatable.
This from the "rocket scientist" who didn't even read the article summary. Or if you did, you didn't understand what you were reading (not surprising). The stem cells were from umbilical cord blood, not human embryos. The federal ban is on the latter, not the former.
What's your IP?
It's 127.0.0.1, but don't tell anyone!
Considering the size of the Slashdot audience and the fact that Slashdot is a "news" site (in theory) and not a "tech support" site... a larger question might be, Is it irresponsible for Slashdot to post a bug report of a single user as a story for a million people to see? How many people will just read the headline and not read the comments, and automatically think that Firefox is having widespread problems?
Are there really a bunch of people who have problems with Firefox? Without even looking at Mozilla's tech support forums, I can tell you, unequivocally, YES. When you distribute a program to millions of users, some people are going to run into problems, that's a given. But how do we know that this fella's problem is really with Firefox, and not with, say, a memory chip he installed last week? Or maybe he has some spyware installed that is screwing it up?
The REAL question that Slashdot ought to be concerned with is, Does the number of people having problems with Firefox 1.0 appear to be statistically significant? If it's not, then this whole story grossly exaggerates the problems and gives Firefox a lot of unnecessarily bad PR.
Me, I just recently reformatted my hard drive, installed Win XP and Firefox 1.0, and have not had any problems with it.
Actually, I thought the Incredibles trailer was hilarious, and was sorry that they didn't incorporate it into the movie. Up to that point, I had my reservations about the premise, but the trailer sold me on the movie.
Many overlooked the fact that Cisco bought a company called P-Cube recently. One of the things P-Cube can do is prioritize the traffic flows on an IP network. SBC could use it and lower the priority of the traffic coming from say Vonage or AT&T. Nothing illegal here: SBC's network and it can do pretty much what it wants on its own network. Poor quality, lags, dropped packets and soon Vonage customers could be switching to SBC VoIP: which is more expensive, has better quality and of course is highly profitable.
Actually, it *is* illegal to directly interfere with a competitor's business. SBC would be criminally liable if they tried to prioritize the traffic of their competitors.
Well, if you want to split hairs, then the logo for Half-Life is screwed up, too. The second letter, which is supposed to be an "A", is actually the Greek letter Lambda -- "L". The logo reads to me as "HLLF-LIFE".
Of course, you only get one shot, and then you have to buy a new monitor.
For a compressed song, though.
Losslessly compressed songs are still weighing in at around 25-30 MB.
Bandwidth may be relatively cheap for 128bit AAC music, but the next thing that consumers are going to demand from the music industry is higher bitrates and eventually lossless compression. Can Apple transfer a 30 MB file and still make money at $0.99? Probably not.
I guess that what struck me the most about Cars is that the concept already looks so bland. Each of the Pixar films to this point has pushed the boundaries of what the technology and the character animators could do. Maybe I'm just more of a 3D connoisseur than the average Joe.
The Cars trailer was just wholly unimpressive. Animated cartoony cars... yawn. Max Fleisher was doing that kind of stuff over half a century ago. It doesn't exactly push the boundaries, even if it is 3D.
Granted, Pixar may very well be going after a much younger audience this time around. The Incredibles was probably the most "adult" of the movies they've created so far, so maybe it's time to cater to the little kiddies.
If it sucks, Disney will pull the theatrical release and just make it a direct-to-video release, where parents will buy it by the millions and it will mostly avoid the sting of the critics.
Disney has a history of follwing up acclaimed movies by releasing horrible animated sequels direct to video (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), so nobody will really pay it any mind if it blows chunks.
Pixar, on the other hand, doesn't have that same luxury. The public expects Pixar films to rock our world, and a misstep by Pixar could be devestating. And based on the trailer, it looks like Cars is going to be the first bomb to come out of their studios. It sucks for Pixar that they are going to exit the Disney relationship on such a low note.
the super-intelligent roaches will "scorch the sky" in an attempt to keep the robotic cockroaches from using solar energy. The robotic cockroaches will then have to turn the real roaches into "batteries," and create a virtual reality world for them to live in. The roaches will have to await "the One," that roach who is so hyper-intelligent that he can bend the rules of the virtual world with his mind.
While all of this is playing out, I'll just be searching for a very large shoe.
As if my three prescription drugs don't cost enough already (and my co-pays continue to increase) I am going to have to subsidize a possible invasion of my privacy as well?
First of all, 50 cents isn't going to break anybody. Secondly, if this system makes it easier to verify the authenticity of the drugs, that probably means that there's a cost-savings somewhere else in the system to offset the expense.
...was that JLG kept jacking up the price. He saw that Apple was running out of time and options, and thought that Be was the only viable option for Apple at that point. I think that his attitude left Gil Amelio and the rest of the Apple board cold.
Of course, Apple spent far more to acquire NeXT, but they got Steve Jobs along with it, which was easily worth as much as the operating system.
Can you imagine JLG as Apple CEO, trying to push fruity-colored iMacs? It just wouldn't have happened...
If, as you say, "there are costs over and above salary that keep outsourcing from being profitable in almost all cases," then there is nothing to worry about. The market will eventually correct itself, and IT jobs will come flooding back to the US.
Companies aren't in the business of losing money, if they can help it. If US IT workers do truly offer more value, then the jobs market will shift again.
Now virtually the entire code-producing industry has left our shores, and taken most of the intellectual property value of our investment in technology with it.
"Investment" (if you want to call it that) always carries risk. Risk is inherently part of investing, and the greater the risk, the greater the potential reward (or loss).
And we did have a tremendous run through the 90's, but the economy started to overheat in '98 or '99, causing the bubble to pop in 2000. Another part of investing; you have to know when to cash out in one area, and shift your capital over to another.
Add to all of this the fact that other nations wanted their slice of the prosperity we were enjoying, and their workforces responded accordingly.
That is the nature of business, that if you have a good thing, it's nearly impossible to keep it to yourself. Competition enters in and drives down demand, and thus price.
This is not a good thing, and trying to make it look like a good thing is putting lipstick on a virus.
It is not my position that it is a "good thing" that high wage jobs have left the US, my position is that it was an inevitable thing. Rather than crying about what has already happened, we should be responding to the market and changing our workforce and changing the way we do business.
Let's face it, too many college students piled onto IT, thinking that it was a pot of gold. A shakeout is very painful at this point, but it is necessary.
It's being phased in, though, so not every gmail account yet has POP access.
/. in order to get an invite to use the POP3 access.
Apparently, you have to go around begging people on
US companies would have continued to run their domestic operations and even import labor, while selling the results overseas.
Dude, common sense ought to tell ya that, all things being equal, the company that can underbid everyone else is the one that gets the contract. If US labor costs 10 times more than Indian labor, how is the US company supposed to compete globally?
We can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
At least if a US company can outsource labor, those profits still come back to the US. If we run companies out of the US by jacking up labor costs, then we lose everything.
Just remember that George W. Bush reduced the outsourcing tax from 25% to 5% when you vote on November 2.
Let's suppose Bush RAISED rather than lowered the outsourcing tax... how would this have helped?
Big IT companies, recognizing that they compete on a global, rather than national basis, would have simply closed out their US headquarters and started doing business out of Europe. The IT jobs still would have gone overseas, AND we would have lost even more jobs and revenue.
By lowering the outsourcing tax, it's not enough to drive big companies out of the US, it provides at least SOME incentive to hire US workers, and we still get a tax revenue out of it.
Wow, that means so much, coming from an AC who obviously doesn't value truth.
from Cmdr Taco for accusing the Bush administration of performing a cover-up?
Last I checked, Google was a corporation in the private sector, and not a branch of the federal government. You got proof of government involvement in a cover-up?
Damn, dude, just because you're probably bitter about the election, you don't have to go spreading lies about the President. Try to maintain at least the illusion of objectivity.
... how the "cosmic rays" can make Mr. Fantastic so stretchy.
Oh, I'm sorry... did I snicker?
Hillary is too millitant, too far-left, and carries too much baggage to win. You think conservatives were mobilized in THIS election? Just wait until we start seeing Bill and Hillary out on the stump again. The Clintons are VERY polarizing.
Personally, I think it'd be great to see a woman win the White House. I think Elizabeth Dole has a much better chance than Hillary Clinton.
First of all, they have to check to make sure each one of the provisional ballots is leagally eligible to be cast, and it's anybody's guess how many would survive that process. I've heard 17% and I've heard 90%, depending on which pundit you hear it from.
Secondly, Kerry would have to win better than 90% of all the provisional ballots, and there no reason to think that the provisional ballots would break out any differently than the regular ballot has. You could expect that Bush and Kerry would get roughly the same percentage of provisionals that they got with normal ballots.
Third, remember that we are talking about a 140,000 vote spread... this isn't Florida in 2000, when the vote spread was 1,900 or so. A Kerry campaign staffer said early this morning that 50,000 might be a number they could fight, but 140,000 is just overwhelming.
Here's the HOWTO:
Just vote Republican.
Remember, it wasn't the Republicans who brought up the draft, it was the Democrats.
It was Democratic congressmen Charley Rangel and Fritz Hollings who introduced the bill to reinstate the draft. Fortunately, the Republican-controlled House killed it and it was DOA.
Republicans know that an all-volunteer military is far, FAR preferable to conscription. It's the Democrats who are obsessed with draft-talk.