To be honest, nobody in their right mind trusts the oil industry anymore to be responsible about these sorts of things. Last winter when I was on the train somewhere in Montana I overheard this young man talking about how bad we were in Washington for not allowing them to tear up our state looking for oil.
Well, the thing is that the oil industry has a lousy record when it comes to environmental cleanliness and ultimately, even when things are done carefully it just results in more pollution. Deepwater Horizon shouldn't have ever happened. Sure they've got religion now, but it's purely because they screwed up in such a massive way that they had to.
Personally, I've found the regularly updated satellite images to be much more helpful than GPS. Typically I can find where I am the traditional way a lot faster than I can get a signal from GPS.
Those towns were a bit like railroad towns in that they relied solely upon one source of revenue. I doubt very many towns like that exist anymore.
Personally, I live right next to a major arterial and it definitely pisses me off having all those jack asses cutting through my street as a way of bypassing the arterial. They'll drive way too fast and the street itself isn't one which can safely be driven at the typical speed limit. There's one lane and it's fairly narrow.
That was my thought. I can't imagine how this is any worse for our ability to navigate than maps and city layouts with convenient signs everywhere. What's more there is the occasional occurrence of death by GPS, so I'm guessing that GPS is probably somewhat less helpful at times than a good map is.
You don't have to now. Unless you live in a small town, chances are that there are people that are paid to provide such services. Around here we call them cab drivers.
There are tens of thousands of road related fatalities in the US every year and often times the number is similar to the total number of American servicemen that died during the Vietnam conflict. I'd say there's plenty of room for improvement.
What's worse is that those are deaths that didn't need to happen, rarely if ever are those deaths that genuinely couldn't be avoided. They tend to be things like drinking, distraction, falling asleep behind the wheel, running a red light etc.
So, I'd have to say that it's way too soon to suggest that robots couldn't do better or that it's not a worthwhile avenue to research. 40k in a good year is still 40k to many fatalities.
This is one of the bigger limitations with human drivers. We can't simultaneously be looking where we're going and looking to see that we can safely change lanes. We have to settle for looking back and forth, which also gives momentary stretches where we aren't looking in either direction.
A robotic driver could be looking in both directions and as you suggest actually asking for permission. Presumably, that would allow the other drivers the chance to adjust slightly to allow for a safer lane change. Which theoretically wouldn't be a problem with human drivers, but folks don't seem to understand what direction signals are for.
I'm guessing that this is going to be like when Toyota was having problems with unexplained acceleration a while back. The matter took on a life of its own due to incompetence on Toyota's part in how they handled the programming.
They did ultimately get a clean bill of health on that aspect of it, but I don't think the problem was ever really solved. Which is different from break failure which is fundamentally a much easier to investigate problem.
Not really. If you're going to blame anybody for wasting money, it really ought to be the GOP. They're the ones that insisted that giving money to the rich in the form of tax cuts would result in increased tax receipts. Not to mention the fact that they were the ones that engaged in 2 off the books wars and numerous other accounting fixes to make it appear that they weren't overspending by as much as they were.
As far as cuts go, if the rich would pay their fair share, even if it's just proportional to the amount of wealth they control, the cuts wouldn't need to be as deep to services.
Precisely what constitutional problems would those be? If that were really the case, then the government would be prohibited from operating schools, hospitals, libraries and others things which have a private sector equivalent.
OTOH, it's a moot point seeing as we don't have a free market economy anyways.
If you're going to do that, you might as well just buy a proper handheld. You'll get a hell of a lot more out of it. Few games are programmed to use that particular device.
I just checked moments ago and for the cost of the icontrolpad you could just get yourself a Ds and a much better gaming experience. I'm sure the icontrolpad is fine if you just want to play old school emulated games on your iphone, but the cost of doing so is very much out of line with what you're getting. Which is understandable given that it's being sold on a small scale.
I play video games, and it's still very much true. There are some genres where you are correct, but as soon as you need more than pointing and clicking a touchscreen gets to be woefully inadequate.
Many games legitimately require 4 buttons, plus a D-pad, and that's for relatively simple ones, the XBox 360 and PS3 have a lot more going on than that. It took me a while to get used to it, but you get a lot more flexibility in the types of stories and gaming experiences that the player can have.
And even for genres that can be played with just one mouse button, a touch screen is still limited as it makes it a lot harder to drag, sure you can drag, but your finger covers the screen whilst you do it, again limiting the sorts of mechanics one can use.
I'm not sure how true that is any more. Sure people in their 20s and younger are more likely to have time to dedicate to gaming, but I hardly think that it's the case anymore where people associate gaming with kids and nerds to that extent.
Casual gaming via the iPhone is popular largely because it's casual and on a device that people are likely to be carrying with them. I'll often times break out my Nexus One to do a bit of gaming when I'm waiting somewhere, mainly because I carry my phone with me more than my GBA.
I hope you realize that there's a difference between a $1 game and a $30 game typically. There are definitely some games that are underpriced and others that are overpriced, but by and large the games that are listed for $1 wouldn't sell for even $10 let alone $30.
There's also the matter of controls, the iPad2 does not have any provision for gaming built in, you're stuck with using the touch screen, which is great for games like angry birds, but if you're wanting to play even a classic platformer, you're largely out of luck.
The virtual boy wasn't really very good. I did have a chance a number of years ago to play around with some 80s era virtual reality gear, complete with blocky graphics and the virtual boy was a poor facsimile. Granted, it was also significantly cheaper costing probably only a few pennies on the hundred for what a proper set up would cost, but the device itself wasn't really very well marketed. They named it Virtual Boy, which was right there a huge mistake as it wasn't really a Gameboy successor and wouldn't have been even if successful. And they were only able to come out with I think something like 6 titles at launch.
As for the 3Ds, if it weren't for the battery life and cost, I'd get one, it's a much better unit than I would have expected. I was genuinely surprised at how good it was.
For some gaming niches the games never make it to the US. Also individuals that are looking for gaming in foreign languages are going to have a tougher time playing games if they have to buy a second unit to play those games.
And, if it really only applied to the GP, then they wouldn't be doing it. They're doing it because it applies to a lot of people.
The iPhones are not suitable gaming devices for anything other than casual gaming and possibly more hardcore card games. They just don't have the controls necessary to allow much in the way of gaming.
The reason why Apple is moving so many more units is that people need phones, even if not smartphones and with AT&T not offering a discount for people that buy their own, the phones are a lot cheaper than buying a Ds on top of a phone.
At the end of the day, it's mostly folks that are playing casual games that aren't worth the price that you'd have to pay if you bought the games for Ds.
Right now yes, but first you get the basic technology down, then you work on hardening it. What you're suggesting would be like trying to build predator drones without first having figured out how to build toy airplanes.
To be honest, I was watching that a few nights ago and commented that they must be getting pretty close to being able to deploy those. The technology has to be pretty much there, I'd expect it to be mostly down to making them cost effective.
I got chewed out for saying this a while back, but it bears repeating. Any exposure to a carcinogen no matter how small the amount could conceivably cause a cell to get mutated in a way that leads to cancer. It's unlikely that you're going to end up like that with only a few molecules of exposure, but it definitely is possible for one cosmic ray to happen to hit the right spot in a cell to do that.
That being said, it is worth looking to elimintate substantial risks, but you're not going to prevent all cases of cancer with any technology that we've got. Probably the only way would be to have something go into the individuals cells and elongate the telomeres and manually repair the DNA. Which is definitely not going to happen in the near future, if it ever does.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 1
Even if this was cheap, it would still be profitable for pharmaceutical companies to sell it at a reasonable price. Every individual that dies from cancer is one less potential customer for quite a few other medications that they'd be taking. What's worse, the real money making medications tend not to be of much use in younger people.
That being said, some medications are just really expensive to produce once you factor in the cost of production, testing and getting FDA approval. And in some cases the ingredients themselves are really expensive even without gouging.
I wonder how this treatment would work for the rare individuals that are immune to HIV or for the more common individuals that just have a natural resistance to it.
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To be honest, nobody in their right mind trusts the oil industry anymore to be responsible about these sorts of things. Last winter when I was on the train somewhere in Montana I overheard this young man talking about how bad we were in Washington for not allowing them to tear up our state looking for oil.
Well, the thing is that the oil industry has a lousy record when it comes to environmental cleanliness and ultimately, even when things are done carefully it just results in more pollution. Deepwater Horizon shouldn't have ever happened. Sure they've got religion now, but it's purely because they screwed up in such a massive way that they had to.
Personally, I've found the regularly updated satellite images to be much more helpful than GPS. Typically I can find where I am the traditional way a lot faster than I can get a signal from GPS.
Those towns were a bit like railroad towns in that they relied solely upon one source of revenue. I doubt very many towns like that exist anymore.
Personally, I live right next to a major arterial and it definitely pisses me off having all those jack asses cutting through my street as a way of bypassing the arterial. They'll drive way too fast and the street itself isn't one which can safely be driven at the typical speed limit. There's one lane and it's fairly narrow.
That was my thought. I can't imagine how this is any worse for our ability to navigate than maps and city layouts with convenient signs everywhere. What's more there is the occasional occurrence of death by GPS, so I'm guessing that GPS is probably somewhat less helpful at times than a good map is.
You don't have to now. Unless you live in a small town, chances are that there are people that are paid to provide such services. Around here we call them cab drivers.
There are tens of thousands of road related fatalities in the US every year and often times the number is similar to the total number of American servicemen that died during the Vietnam conflict. I'd say there's plenty of room for improvement.
What's worse is that those are deaths that didn't need to happen, rarely if ever are those deaths that genuinely couldn't be avoided. They tend to be things like drinking, distraction, falling asleep behind the wheel, running a red light etc.
So, I'd have to say that it's way too soon to suggest that robots couldn't do better or that it's not a worthwhile avenue to research. 40k in a good year is still 40k to many fatalities.
This is one of the bigger limitations with human drivers. We can't simultaneously be looking where we're going and looking to see that we can safely change lanes. We have to settle for looking back and forth, which also gives momentary stretches where we aren't looking in either direction.
A robotic driver could be looking in both directions and as you suggest actually asking for permission. Presumably, that would allow the other drivers the chance to adjust slightly to allow for a safer lane change. Which theoretically wouldn't be a problem with human drivers, but folks don't seem to understand what direction signals are for.
I'm guessing that this is going to be like when Toyota was having problems with unexplained acceleration a while back. The matter took on a life of its own due to incompetence on Toyota's part in how they handled the programming.
They did ultimately get a clean bill of health on that aspect of it, but I don't think the problem was ever really solved. Which is different from break failure which is fundamentally a much easier to investigate problem.
Not really. If you're going to blame anybody for wasting money, it really ought to be the GOP. They're the ones that insisted that giving money to the rich in the form of tax cuts would result in increased tax receipts. Not to mention the fact that they were the ones that engaged in 2 off the books wars and numerous other accounting fixes to make it appear that they weren't overspending by as much as they were.
As far as cuts go, if the rich would pay their fair share, even if it's just proportional to the amount of wealth they control, the cuts wouldn't need to be as deep to services.
Precisely what constitutional problems would those be? If that were really the case, then the government would be prohibited from operating schools, hospitals, libraries and others things which have a private sector equivalent.
OTOH, it's a moot point seeing as we don't have a free market economy anyways.
Look for ways to fund education.
If you're going to do that, you might as well just buy a proper handheld. You'll get a hell of a lot more out of it. Few games are programmed to use that particular device.
I just checked moments ago and for the cost of the icontrolpad you could just get yourself a Ds and a much better gaming experience. I'm sure the icontrolpad is fine if you just want to play old school emulated games on your iphone, but the cost of doing so is very much out of line with what you're getting. Which is understandable given that it's being sold on a small scale.
I play video games, and it's still very much true. There are some genres where you are correct, but as soon as you need more than pointing and clicking a touchscreen gets to be woefully inadequate.
Many games legitimately require 4 buttons, plus a D-pad, and that's for relatively simple ones, the XBox 360 and PS3 have a lot more going on than that. It took me a while to get used to it, but you get a lot more flexibility in the types of stories and gaming experiences that the player can have.
And even for genres that can be played with just one mouse button, a touch screen is still limited as it makes it a lot harder to drag, sure you can drag, but your finger covers the screen whilst you do it, again limiting the sorts of mechanics one can use.
I'm not sure how true that is any more. Sure people in their 20s and younger are more likely to have time to dedicate to gaming, but I hardly think that it's the case anymore where people associate gaming with kids and nerds to that extent.
Casual gaming via the iPhone is popular largely because it's casual and on a device that people are likely to be carrying with them. I'll often times break out my Nexus One to do a bit of gaming when I'm waiting somewhere, mainly because I carry my phone with me more than my GBA.
I hope you realize that there's a difference between a $1 game and a $30 game typically. There are definitely some games that are underpriced and others that are overpriced, but by and large the games that are listed for $1 wouldn't sell for even $10 let alone $30.
There's also the matter of controls, the iPad2 does not have any provision for gaming built in, you're stuck with using the touch screen, which is great for games like angry birds, but if you're wanting to play even a classic platformer, you're largely out of luck.
The virtual boy wasn't really very good. I did have a chance a number of years ago to play around with some 80s era virtual reality gear, complete with blocky graphics and the virtual boy was a poor facsimile. Granted, it was also significantly cheaper costing probably only a few pennies on the hundred for what a proper set up would cost, but the device itself wasn't really very well marketed. They named it Virtual Boy, which was right there a huge mistake as it wasn't really a Gameboy successor and wouldn't have been even if successful. And they were only able to come out with I think something like 6 titles at launch.
As for the 3Ds, if it weren't for the battery life and cost, I'd get one, it's a much better unit than I would have expected. I was genuinely surprised at how good it was.
For some gaming niches the games never make it to the US. Also individuals that are looking for gaming in foreign languages are going to have a tougher time playing games if they have to buy a second unit to play those games.
And, if it really only applied to the GP, then they wouldn't be doing it. They're doing it because it applies to a lot of people.
The iPhones are not suitable gaming devices for anything other than casual gaming and possibly more hardcore card games. They just don't have the controls necessary to allow much in the way of gaming.
The reason why Apple is moving so many more units is that people need phones, even if not smartphones and with AT&T not offering a discount for people that buy their own, the phones are a lot cheaper than buying a Ds on top of a phone.
At the end of the day, it's mostly folks that are playing casual games that aren't worth the price that you'd have to pay if you bought the games for Ds.
Right now yes, but first you get the basic technology down, then you work on hardening it. What you're suggesting would be like trying to build predator drones without first having figured out how to build toy airplanes.
None, this is a tremendously useful technology that will revolutionize at least two different industries when they nail it.
The better question is why one would shill for the Tea Party without being paid for the damage to ones reputation.
It's SOX spelled backwards. I'm pretty sure that Apple wouldn't have any more of a claim to it than the various folks that have a claim to sox.
To be honest, I was watching that a few nights ago and commented that they must be getting pretty close to being able to deploy those. The technology has to be pretty much there, I'd expect it to be mostly down to making them cost effective.
I got chewed out for saying this a while back, but it bears repeating. Any exposure to a carcinogen no matter how small the amount could conceivably cause a cell to get mutated in a way that leads to cancer. It's unlikely that you're going to end up like that with only a few molecules of exposure, but it definitely is possible for one cosmic ray to happen to hit the right spot in a cell to do that.
That being said, it is worth looking to elimintate substantial risks, but you're not going to prevent all cases of cancer with any technology that we've got. Probably the only way would be to have something go into the individuals cells and elongate the telomeres and manually repair the DNA. Which is definitely not going to happen in the near future, if it ever does.
Even if this was cheap, it would still be profitable for pharmaceutical companies to sell it at a reasonable price. Every individual that dies from cancer is one less potential customer for quite a few other medications that they'd be taking. What's worse, the real money making medications tend not to be of much use in younger people.
That being said, some medications are just really expensive to produce once you factor in the cost of production, testing and getting FDA approval. And in some cases the ingredients themselves are really expensive even without gouging.
I wonder how this treatment would work for the rare individuals that are immune to HIV or for the more common individuals that just have a natural resistance to it.