Yes, but what will they do if the study shows that gaming is good for you? What if gamers develop better reflexes, enhanced problem solving, and lower stress levels?
Would they then recommend gaming for everyone? Provide gaming systems to those who can't afford them?
The main point of the article is not that laptops aren't useful, but rather that the type of device used is this case (a large laptop) was not well-suited for the job at hand. In fact, this is only one of multiple major shortcomings the article sites:
1) A large desktop replacement laptop was chosen when a thin and light laptop or PDA would have been a better choice.
2) The PDF files required duplex printing when the office had only single-sided printers.
3) Users weren't adequately trained on how to manage the data files. The original PDF files should have been READ-only, and the users trained on where to save the files they created.
4) No database tool was used. This forced each electronic form to be filled in anew each time instead of pulling up client data that had already been entered before.
The gist of the article is not that laptops aren't useful, but that jumping onto a technology bandwagon without first gathering requirements from the actual users and designing a solution to best meet the user's needs leads to half-assed solutions.
The poor users were essentially forced into using large laptops to do the job they could have done just as well with a notebook and pencil. The article maintains a good solution is possible, but in this case was not achieved.
It will truly be an amazing day when NPR advocates nuclear energy. However, this article doesn't exactly constitute a ringing endorsement. The three articles essentially say this:
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
2) "Cold" fusion is not quite dead yet. A small group of researchers claims fusion is taking place with a mechanism requiring "new physics", but the vast majority of physicists don't take them seriously.
3) Pebble bed reactor technology is progressing in South Africa, but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
NPR is still a long way from advocating nuclear power.
Fascinating! The Smithsonian article did not address the point of how syphilis got there.
How then did the disease get to the New World before the arrival of the Europeans? By the vikings? When early settlers crossed the Bering Straight? Any other mechanism?
An interesting sidenote on this comes from the Smithsonian magazines's series of articles on the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. One of the tribes they encountered along the way had the practice of "sharing" their wives with guests. Some members of the expedition took advantage of the offer and came down with a bad case of "the pox". According to the editor's footnotes, this was syphilis.
What's interesting about this is that syphilis is not native to the New World, having been brought over by Europeans. Since this was an "undiscovered" tribe, the only conclusion is that the disease had spread across multiple groups of locals, getting out to the west coast before Lewis and Clark.
Does he get a mulligan ...
on
Golf in Space
·
· Score: 1
Fully Buffered DIMMs won't be in desktop systems from either Intel or AMD, at least not anytime soon. They cost more than standard DDR2 DIMMs and increase the thermal load.
However, they are well suited for servers that require lots of RAM. This is the main advantage of the technology -- allowing increased capacity. FBDs provide higher bandwidth but with increased latency. This means the following:
1) Systems with 1-4 DIMM requirements are better off with standard DDR2. It's cheaper, cooler, and has lower latency. Applications that do a lot of random accesses will actually run faster as long as you don't have to swap to disk very often.
2) Systems that need a lot of RAM (8-32 DIMMs worth) will benefit from FBDs because you can pack in a lot of memory without suffering severe performance penalties. The latency goes up with the number of modules per channel, but the high bandwidth will support many concurrent transactions. It's much faster than swapping out to disk with virtual memory
Bottom line -- FBDs make sense only if your work load needs more RAM than you can fit in a small (1-4) number of slots.
Re:Whoa ... wait a minute...
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Given that some independent film makers do indeed make amazingly good films with shoe-string budgets, is it possible to make a good movie based on the same video games as the ones Boll used?
Boll claims in the article that the reason his films suck is because the material is so shallow. It would be great if some independent film maker could prove him wrong by making a film that's dramatically better using the same material.
Perhaps this has already been done? Anybody know of some independent filming attempts of the same video games?
Addiction implies the brain has been altered to reinforce the desire to continue use of the addictive stimulant. Powerful addictive substances alter the functioning of the brain and can (at least in some cases) be measured either via chemical imbalance or altered brain scans.
Addictive substances are addictive because they've evolved that way -- they exert some type of control over other creatures (like humans) by stimulating the pleasure centers of the host's brain. It's really a symbiotic (or in some cases, parasitic) relationship between two species. Computers don't fit into this picture.
Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books? What about people who play sports? Or pursue any other hobby for that matter? Just because some people choose to spend a lot of time at the keyboard doesn't mean their brains have been altered to *need* the experience.
I turn 50 next week. Like many of the other "grey" posters, I've played many different computer games over the years. The original "Adventure" game was my first (remember "xyzzy"?), and I played a lot on an Apple II+ long before the PC came out. BTW, I have to laugh at the poster who thought Wolfenstein 3D was old -- I played the 2D version on my Apple years before the 3D version came out!
Games that I've played recently and enjoyed? H/L I & II, Diable II, and Counterstrike are my favorites. I played Mario Cart with my kids and enjoyed it, but I don't much care for the controllers on game consoles. I hated the feel of racing games on a console as it's just plain awkward trying to stear with a thumb stick. The keyboard and mouse are much easier to control.
What am I looking for? I think I'd enjoy the MMORPG games, but I've avoided them so far because I just don't have the time. (Several other posters have made this comment, and I heartily agree.) When I retire, though, I expect that will change and I'll spend many hours getting my characters promoted.
I used to go to a LAN party with kids half my age and did okay on UT2 and BFI, but never had the time to learn the games that came out since then. (Plus, declining reflexes is a disadvantage.) I might play a RTS game if reaction time isn't critical and strategy plays the dominant role. Turn-based games may be more appealing, though.
Who to play with? I don't mind playing with kids as long as hacks are impossible and there's no way for one obnoxious player to ruin the experience for everyone else. In fact, it might be fun roasting the more obnoxious kids using superior strategy and teamwork with the more honorable players!
I didn't read the original research, and the frustrating thing is that the summary is so awful it's hard to understand. My interpretation of what they're saying is that mutations lead to new recessive genes instead of dominant ones. This means the the first generation of ancestors with the new gene don't display the new characteristics as they would with a new dominat gene. Then, after several generations when the recessive gene is possessed by a sufficiently large number of ancestors, many individuals appear in the same generation with the gene from both parents and thus there's a "sudden" appearance of many individuals with the new trait at the same time.
At least that's what I understand the article to say. It's really pretty vague, so I may just be mis-reading it.
Punctuated equilibrium is different in that it posits many mutations in a relatively short period of time. However, it's still based on new dominant genes appearing in the first generation.
... please RTFA. All the guy is saying is that sudden changes are brought about by environmental stress creating recessive genes, and these bring about rapid changes in a population after the recessives start combining in offspring.
The only feature of classic Darwinism that he's refuting is about a single organism's offspring being the only one with the new trait. Interesting notion, but hardly revolutionary.
The article doesn't say what happened in the 8th century, just that tree rings don't reliably go back any farther. They must be using only specific species of trees, though, because there there are several species of living trees that are much, much older. Do their rings not reflect temperature, too?
The article contains almost no technical data, but it does say there have been been conflicting results:
"In 2003, a team led by researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that it believed the 20th century wasn't the warmest, nor the one with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years.
"But this research has been criticized for its selection of the indicators used to estimate historic temperatures, among other problems."
The article doesn't say what indicators the Harvard-Smithsonian group used, just that they think their indicators are better.
I think what this article is trying to say is that the Battle for the Living Room is what Sony really wants to win, and the PS3 probably won't win it.
Consumers want a command center to stream audio and video, play games, connect to the interenet, etc. from the comfort of their easy chairs. At least we think that's what we want. Many attempts have been made to produce "one ring to rule them all", but no one has yet succeeded. Sony is trying to make the PS3 the hub by cramming in all these features, but the real challenge is not marketing but capability.
Is a solution on the horizon? Apple, are you listening?
... and apparently you didn't hear that the wife of a Republican congressman was escourted out of the room for wearing a "Support the Troops" t-shirt.
The reason these steps were taken was in an attempt to bring dignity to the office of the President. This is a good thing, regardless of one's political leanings. If you want examples of Thought Police in action, a better place to look would be in the speech codes on college campuses.
Did you see The Daily Show broadcast on Tuesday? Jon Stewart made a joke about Buddhists and then wondered if he would be surrounded by protesters shouting him down with the sound of many one-hands clapping.
Longevity notwithstanding, it's still fascinating to see how much people are willing to pay for their avatars. I suppose it's really not any differant than people paying large sums for physical non-essentials such as trendy art or fashionable clothing, but it's interesting that people are willing to pay to spruce up their virtual characters just like they do themselves.
In fact, the biggest threat a virtual designer has is not if the business will dry up, but just the opposite -- that it will become so big that they'll be squeezed out. When the potential profit reaches a sufficiently high level, the companies that make these games are going to step in and take over. This happens in the real world, too, so perhaps this won't come as too much of a surprise.
This just reinforces what we all already knew -- that virtual reality is getting ever closer to the real thing!
The pipeline is the key, and Jobs said this explicitly in the original x86 announcement. In the third quarter of this year, Intel will debut the Merom CPU. It's dual-core, 64-bit, faster than Yonah (the current Intel Mac CPU) at the same clock speed, and consumes even less power. It's performance/watt will be significantly better than anything on the market, including anything IBM or AMD has to offer.
Furthermore, Intel has a 45nm design in the works called "Penryn" that will tape out this year and go into production 2H07. This roadmap is why Apple is going Intel.
CableCards extend the cable monopoly
on
CableCARD In-Depth
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The really annoying thing about cablecards is that they were supposed to break the cable company's monopoly on set-top boxes. But as the article says, the existing 1.0 cablecard spec sucks so badly it makes the cable company's STB the only viable option for almost all users. With a cablecard inserted in your TV, you must live with these limitations:
1) No interactive menu. 2) No pay-per-view. 3) No DVR. (No HD DVR at all, and even SD recording requires that you route the TV outputs into your recording device and back in through an unused input. This is both ugly and inconvenient.)
Meanwhile, the cable company can rent you a box that does all of these things, including HD recording. The crappy cablecard 1.0 spec guarantees there will be no competition. Essentially, the intention of opening the STB market up to competion has been completely circumvented.
Although the article points out that things will get better in 2008, the cable companies will still be in control since they'll own the software you must run to decrypt the signal. It might be possible to use your (OEM-only) PC of choice with your (certified Trusted Computing) software of choice, but the content providers will still be calling the shots.
What's ironic about this is that when the Big Bang Theory first became popular, the biggest objections to it came not from religious conservatives, but from liberal scientists. The theory was (at least partially) consistent with the Genesis account of a creation event, and that was philosophically unacceptable. The Steady-State Theory was put forth to refute the notion that the universe has a beginning and to eliminate the possibility that God had anything to do with it.
Isn't it odd that the current generation of fundamentalists now oppose the Big Bang? Hopefuly in the midst of religious/philosophical biases both pro and con the facts will eventually win the day and theories will stand or fall based on the data. One can only hope.
You're wrong. Some of the tests failed, and some succeeded, but to say that because a single test failed it never worked is simply incorrect.
As for the Patriot missle performance in the Gulf War, it is just as incorrect to say they didn't work as to say they did. The truth is, they "sort of" worked. I read the official (non-classified) government study on this when it came out. Here's a summary of their conclusions:
1) Some Scud missiles were successfully intercepted, but the success rate was closer to 50% than the 90% claimed by the military. Some of the Scuds likely broke up on their own because they were modified by Iraq to extend their range using poorly designed modifications.
2) Only half the damage done by a Scud is due to the warhead. The rest is due to kinetic energy, and this is not changed by a successful intercept. Thus a Patriot missile success only cuts the damage in half and alters where it comes down.
3) Since the modified Iraqi Scuds are very inaccurate missiles, altering where it comes down was of little value. The Iraqi Scuds were mostly terrorist devices rather than tactical weapons. They lobbed them at the coalition troops in hopes of causing chaos -- not to neutralize military targets.
Will we ever have a missile defense that can stop close to 100% of any missile fired? Of couse not. However, the technology to shoot down a militarily useful percentage of incoming missiles is indeed possible. To say otherwise is simply not correct.
Richard Dawkings claims that the cost of genome sequencing mimic's Moore's Law -- meaning that it is decreasing exponentially. However, he goes much further than that, claiming that the computing power of a few more decades of Moore's Law will provide the ability to not only analyze millions of genomes collectively, but to manipulate them. Since this can also be easily done for chimpanzees, too, Dawkins has made a bold prediction: that by the middle of this century, the ability to create the "missing link" can, and will, be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but what will they do if the study shows that gaming is good for you? What if gamers develop better reflexes, enhanced problem solving, and lower stress levels?
Would they then recommend gaming for everyone? Provide gaming systems to those who can't afford them?
NOT!
The main point of the article is not that laptops aren't useful, but rather that the type of device used is this case (a large laptop) was not well-suited for the job at hand. In fact, this is only one of multiple major shortcomings the article sites:
1) A large desktop replacement laptop was chosen when a thin and light laptop or PDA would have been a better choice.
2) The PDF files required duplex printing when the office had only single-sided printers.
3) Users weren't adequately trained on how to manage the data files. The original PDF files should have been READ-only, and the users trained on where to save the files they created.
4) No database tool was used. This forced each electronic form to be filled in anew each time instead of pulling up client data that had already been entered before.
The gist of the article is not that laptops aren't useful, but that jumping onto a technology bandwagon without first gathering requirements from the actual users and designing a solution to best meet the user's needs leads to half-assed solutions.
The poor users were essentially forced into using large laptops to do the job they could have done just as well with a notebook and pencil. The article maintains a good solution is possible, but in this case was not achieved.
It will truly be an amazing day when NPR advocates nuclear energy. However, this article doesn't exactly constitute a ringing endorsement. The three articles essentially say this:
1) "Hot" fusion works, but a practical solution is always 20 years away. (However, they then go on to say that the current target date for a workable solution is 2050 -- 44 years from now.)
2) "Cold" fusion is not quite dead yet. A small group of researchers claims fusion is taking place with a mechanism requiring "new physics", but the vast majority of physicists don't take them seriously.
3) Pebble bed reactor technology is progressing in South Africa, but the economics are vastly overstated and there's no disposal solution.
NPR is still a long way from advocating nuclear power.
Fascinating! The Smithsonian article did not address the point of how syphilis got there.
How then did the disease get to the New World before the arrival of the Europeans? By the vikings? When early settlers crossed the Bering Straight? Any other mechanism?
An interesting sidenote on this comes from the Smithsonian magazines's series of articles on the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. One of the tribes they encountered along the way had the practice of "sharing" their wives with guests. Some members of the expedition took advantage of the offer and came down with a bad case of "the pox". According to the editor's footnotes, this was syphilis.
What's interesting about this is that syphilis is not native to the New World, having been brought over by Europeans. Since this was an "undiscovered" tribe, the only conclusion is that the disease had spread across multiple groups of locals, getting out to the west coast before Lewis and Clark.
... if he hits it off the toe and dents the ISS?
Fully Buffered DIMMs won't be in desktop systems from either Intel or AMD, at least not anytime soon. They cost more than standard DDR2 DIMMs and increase the thermal load.
However, they are well suited for servers that require lots of RAM. This is the main advantage of the technology -- allowing increased capacity. FBDs provide higher bandwidth but with increased latency. This means the following:
1) Systems with 1-4 DIMM requirements are better off with standard DDR2. It's cheaper, cooler, and has lower latency. Applications that do a lot of random accesses will actually run faster as long as you don't have to swap to disk very often.
2) Systems that need a lot of RAM (8-32 DIMMs worth) will benefit from FBDs because you can pack in a lot of memory without suffering severe performance penalties. The latency goes up with the number of modules per channel, but the high bandwidth will support many concurrent transactions. It's much faster than swapping out to disk with virtual memory
Bottom line -- FBDs make sense only if your work load needs more RAM than you can fit in a small (1-4) number of slots.
Given that some independent film makers do indeed make amazingly good films with shoe-string budgets, is it possible to make a good movie based on the same video games as the ones Boll used?
Boll claims in the article that the reason his films suck is because the material is so shallow. It would be great if some independent film maker could prove him wrong by making a film that's dramatically better using the same material.
Perhaps this has already been done? Anybody know of some independent filming attempts of the same video games?
Addiction implies the brain has been altered to reinforce the desire to continue use of the addictive stimulant. Powerful addictive substances alter the functioning of the brain and can (at least in some cases) be measured either via chemical imbalance or altered brain scans.
Addictive substances are addictive because they've evolved that way -- they exert some type of control over other creatures (like humans) by stimulating the pleasure centers of the host's brain. It's really a symbiotic (or in some cases, parasitic) relationship between two species. Computers don't fit into this picture.
Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books? What about people who play sports? Or pursue any other hobby for that matter? Just because some people choose to spend a lot of time at the keyboard doesn't mean their brains have been altered to *need* the experience.
Just imagine if they'd found a set of wickets instead of home plate? Then we'd all be in danger from planet Krikkit!
I turn 50 next week. Like many of the other "grey" posters, I've played many different computer games over the years. The original "Adventure" game was my first (remember "xyzzy"?), and I played a lot on an Apple II+ long before the PC came out. BTW, I have to laugh at the poster who thought Wolfenstein 3D was old -- I played the 2D version on my Apple years before the 3D version came out!
Games that I've played recently and enjoyed? H/L I & II, Diable II, and Counterstrike are my favorites. I played Mario Cart with my kids and enjoyed it, but I don't much care for the controllers on game consoles. I hated the feel of racing games on a console as it's just plain awkward trying to stear with a thumb stick. The keyboard and mouse are much easier to control.
What am I looking for? I think I'd enjoy the MMORPG games, but I've avoided them so far because I just don't have the time. (Several other posters have made this comment, and I heartily agree.) When I retire, though, I expect that will change and I'll spend many hours getting my characters promoted.
I used to go to a LAN party with kids half my age and did okay on UT2 and BFI, but never had the time to learn the games that came out since then. (Plus, declining reflexes is a disadvantage.) I might play a RTS game if reaction time isn't critical and strategy plays the dominant role. Turn-based games may be more appealing, though.
Who to play with? I don't mind playing with kids as long as hacks are impossible and there's no way for one obnoxious player to ruin the experience for everyone else. In fact, it might be fun roasting the more obnoxious kids using superior strategy and teamwork with the more honorable players!
I didn't read the original research, and the frustrating thing is that the summary is so awful it's hard to understand. My interpretation of what they're saying is that mutations lead to new recessive genes instead of dominant ones. This means the the first generation of ancestors with the new gene don't display the new characteristics as they would with a new dominat gene. Then, after several generations when the recessive gene is possessed by a sufficiently large number of ancestors, many individuals appear in the same generation with the gene from both parents and thus there's a "sudden" appearance of many individuals with the new trait at the same time.
At least that's what I understand the article to say. It's really pretty vague, so I may just be mis-reading it.
Punctuated equilibrium is different in that it posits many mutations in a relatively short period of time. However, it's still based on new dominant genes appearing in the first generation.
... please RTFA. All the guy is saying is that sudden changes are brought about by environmental stress creating recessive genes, and these bring about rapid changes in a population after the recessives start combining in offspring.
The only feature of classic Darwinism that he's refuting is about a single organism's offspring being the only one with the new trait. Interesting notion, but hardly revolutionary.
The article doesn't say what happened in the 8th century, just that tree rings don't reliably go back any farther. They must be using only specific species of trees, though, because there there are several species of living trees that are much, much older. Do their rings not reflect temperature, too?
The article contains almost no technical data, but it does say there have been been conflicting results:
"In 2003, a team led by researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that it believed the 20th century wasn't the warmest, nor the one with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years.
"But this research has been criticized for its selection of the indicators used to estimate historic temperatures, among other problems."
The article doesn't say what indicators the Harvard-Smithsonian group used, just that they think their indicators are better.
I think what this article is trying to say is that the Battle for the Living Room is what Sony really wants to win, and the PS3 probably won't win it.
Consumers want a command center to stream audio and video, play games, connect to the interenet, etc. from the comfort of their easy chairs. At least we think that's what we want. Many attempts have been made to produce "one ring to rule them all", but no one has yet succeeded. Sony is trying to make the PS3 the hub by cramming in all these features, but the real challenge is not marketing but capability.
Is a solution on the horizon? Apple, are you listening?
... and apparently you didn't hear that the wife of a Republican congressman was escourted out of the room for wearing a "Support the Troops" t-shirt.
The reason these steps were taken was in an attempt to bring dignity to the office of the President. This is a good thing, regardless of one's political leanings. If you want examples of Thought Police in action, a better place to look would be in the speech codes on college campuses.
Did you see The Daily Show broadcast on Tuesday? Jon Stewart made a joke about Buddhists and then wondered if he would be surrounded by protesters shouting him down with the sound of many one-hands clapping.
Longevity notwithstanding, it's still fascinating to see how much people are willing to pay for their avatars. I suppose it's really not any differant than people paying large sums for physical non-essentials such as trendy art or fashionable clothing, but it's interesting that people are willing to pay to spruce up their virtual characters just like they do themselves.
In fact, the biggest threat a virtual designer has is not if the business will dry up, but just the opposite -- that it will become so big that they'll be squeezed out. When the potential profit reaches a sufficiently high level, the companies that make these games are going to step in and take over. This happens in the real world, too, so perhaps this won't come as too much of a surprise.
This just reinforces what we all already knew -- that virtual reality is getting ever closer to the real thing!
This is perhaps the most elegant summary of the Newton's limitations I ever read:
Q: What's 2 + 2?
A: Farm
The pipeline is the key, and Jobs said this explicitly in the original x86 announcement. In the third quarter of this year, Intel will debut the Merom CPU. It's dual-core, 64-bit, faster than Yonah (the current Intel Mac CPU) at the same clock speed, and consumes even less power. It's performance/watt will be significantly better than anything on the market, including anything IBM or AMD has to offer.
Furthermore, Intel has a 45nm design in the works called "Penryn" that will tape out this year and go into production 2H07. This roadmap is why Apple is going Intel.
The really annoying thing about cablecards is that they were supposed to break the cable company's monopoly on set-top boxes. But as the article says, the existing 1.0 cablecard spec sucks so badly it makes the cable company's STB the only viable option for almost all users. With a cablecard inserted in your TV, you must live with these limitations:
1) No interactive menu.
2) No pay-per-view.
3) No DVR. (No HD DVR at all, and even SD recording requires that you route the TV outputs into your recording device and back in through an unused input. This is both ugly and inconvenient.)
Meanwhile, the cable company can rent you a box that does all of these things, including HD recording. The crappy cablecard 1.0 spec guarantees there will be no competition. Essentially, the intention of opening the STB market up to competion has been completely circumvented.
Although the article points out that things will get better in 2008, the cable companies will still be in control since they'll own the software you must run to decrypt the signal. It might be possible to use your (OEM-only) PC of choice with your (certified Trusted Computing) software of choice, but the content providers will still be calling the shots.
What's ironic about this is that when the Big Bang Theory first became popular, the biggest objections to it came not from religious conservatives, but from liberal scientists. The theory was (at least partially) consistent with the Genesis account of a creation event, and that was philosophically unacceptable. The Steady-State Theory was put forth to refute the notion that the universe has a beginning and to eliminate the possibility that God had anything to do with it.
Isn't it odd that the current generation of fundamentalists now oppose the Big Bang? Hopefuly in the midst of religious/philosophical biases both pro and con the facts will eventually win the day and theories will stand or fall based on the data. One can only hope.
You're wrong. Some of the tests failed, and some succeeded, but to say that because a single test failed it never worked is simply incorrect.
As for the Patriot missle performance in the Gulf War, it is just as incorrect to say they didn't work as to say they did. The truth is, they "sort of" worked. I read the official (non-classified) government study on this when it came out. Here's a summary of their conclusions:
1) Some Scud missiles were successfully intercepted, but the success rate was closer to 50% than the 90% claimed by the military. Some of the Scuds likely broke up on their own because they were modified by Iraq to extend their range using poorly designed modifications.
2) Only half the damage done by a Scud is due to the warhead. The rest is due to kinetic energy, and this is not changed by a successful intercept. Thus a Patriot missile success only cuts the damage in half and alters where it comes down.
3) Since the modified Iraqi Scuds are very inaccurate missiles, altering where it comes down was of little value. The Iraqi Scuds were mostly terrorist devices rather than tactical weapons. They lobbed them at the coalition troops in hopes of causing chaos -- not to neutralize military targets.
Will we ever have a missile defense that can stop close to 100% of any missile fired? Of couse not. However, the technology to shoot down a militarily useful percentage of incoming missiles is indeed possible. To say otherwise is simply not correct.
Aha! Now we know why all those senseless postings on slashdot are there for! Government propaganda designed to confuse us!
...
Oh, wait! You don't think they're real
Richard Dawkings claims that the cost of genome sequencing mimic's Moore's Law -- meaning that it is decreasing exponentially. However, he goes much further than that, claiming that the computing power of a few more decades of Moore's Law will provide the ability to not only analyze millions of genomes collectively, but to manipulate them. Since this can also be easily done for chimpanzees, too, Dawkins has made a bold prediction: that by the middle of this century, the ability to create the "missing link" can, and will, be done.
Jurassic park, anyone?