you want to argue definitions of words, not meaning or concepts.
I was arguing both. I was arguing the definition of "addiction" vs. "physical dependence". But let's ignore that. The other point of contention is that you were saying video game addiction isn't a true "addiction" because it's not chemical, but as I explained, it is chemical. That's not semantics, that's biochemistry.
i really don't think we have much of a disagreement
But we do have a disagreement. The definition of addiction is fairly well established in medicine: "uncontrolled compulsive use". What you're describing is physical dependence. The two are entirely separate problems. While physical dependence can result from addiction (and certainly will with certain drugs), addiction does not necessarily follow physical dependence, regardless of the drug involved.
You argued that video game "addiction" isn't an addiction because it's not a "chemical", but as I said, dopamine and endogenous endorphins (which are produced and released in someone with a video game addiction) act the same as morphine (which you agreed with), thus making it a "chemical" with the difference simply being that it's endogenous instead of exogenous. Hence the overlap in the symptoms. The underlying problem is the same. In both cases, it's an addiction to an endorphin analog. In one case it's endogenous endorphins and in the other case it's exogenous morphine, an endorphin analog.
morphine acts directly on the brain's reward system. it is based on CHEMICALS. addictions based on BEHAVIORS act indirectly on the brain's reward system. therefore, you can make someone a morphine addict involuntarily: tie them down and inject them a few times, and their bodies will go through withdrawl and crave morphine, even if they don't even know what they were injected with. they can be addicted to something they don't even know
Actually, this is just plain wrong. You can tie someone down and inject them with morphine to the point where they become physically dependent on it. It doesn't make them an addict. While their body will physically need the drug and will produce withdrawal symptoms without it, they won't necessarily have a compulsive behavior to continue taking morphine.
I can speak to this personally, as I can barely tolerate morphine. I was on it after surgery for over a week. Even if I had developed a physical dependence on it, my behavior would have been to do whatever I could to end taking the morphine as quickly as possible. I took it because it was the better of two evils. The pain was worse than the morphine, but once the balance shifted, I wanted off the morphine. I, like anyone else, can be made dependent on a drug, but only people susceptible to addiction to the drug can become addicts.
Also, dopamine and endorphins act directly on the brain's reward system and they too are based on chemicals. In fact, endorphins are chemically very similar to morphine and act on some of the same opioid receptors as morphine. That's why our bodys contain receptors that morphine can bind to in the first place.
or example: you could take a person with strong willpower and destroy them and make them a chemical dependent by force injecting them. but take that same strong willpower person and put them in front of a computer game or a gambling table and they will recognize the threat to their character, and not become addicted. you can't force someone to play and enjoy a game they don't want to play. you can force someone to be addicted to a chemical
That's if your premise is that addiction is a lack of willpower. Addiction isn't a lack of willpower, though. Addiction is a physiological phenomenon, not a psychological one. One can be an alcoholic and remain sober. Remaining sober is the result of willpower or some other motivational force that is or has become stronger than the addiction. But the underlying addiction remains regardless of the willpower.
Alcoholics aren't alcoholics because they choose to drink a lot. They drink a lot because their minds and bodies create a mechanism by which the alcoholic has a compulsive need/desire to continue drinking beyond what's healthy. It becomes a physical dependence at the point that the body requires continued intake of alcohol to avoid withdrawal effects. Once a person quits and has been sober for more than a few days, it's no longer a physical addiction, but it's a mental addiction for the life of the person.
There's a difference between dependence and addiction. You can force morphine on someone to the point where they develop a dependence on it, but that doesn't make them an addict. To become an addict, they must have the mental compulsion to continue the behavior. This is why, though many kids go through periods where they drink heavily in say, high school and/or college, only a percentage actually go on to become alcoholics. The alcoholics have an uncontrollable compulsion to continue the behavior. It's the same with any drug that stimulates the reward centers of the brain, endogenous or not.
to compulsively play videogames is a habituation, not an addiction
In many ways, video game "addiction" is very much like a drug addiction. The difference is that instead of putting a drug in the body, the body, in susceptible people, is producing the drug itself and video games are simply a trigger for that drug's synthesis in the body. But if someone was shooting up straight dopamine and noradrenaline on a daily basis instead of playing video games, you'd probably call them an addict, wouldn't you? So whether the drug is endogenous or not isn't really a good deciding factor. The fact is that addiction is a physiologic disorder and if your body is producing drugs causing a physiological dependence, then it's an addiction.
That said, the argument the AMA was considering wasn't about whether or not to call it addiction, but whether or not to classify it as its own mental disorder. I tend to lean towards the belief that it should be classified as a mental disorder. Like many other mental disorders, it tends to affect not just the person with the compulsion, but also those close to the person. And people have died from failing to eat because of the compulsion. That certainly sounds like a mental disorder to me.
First of all, the links are screwed up. Good luck finding a good one. If you do find one, you'll see some comments from readers of the blog with regards to the fact that making copies for family members is considered non-infringing. Too bad... I'd certainly like to see the RIAA pressured into going after high profile people that it's not in their interest to pursue.
There are a number of ways that colonizing the galaxy could be done and it wouldn't require technology far beyond where we are now.
Time of flight is only a problem if you're sending living, breathing astronauts. Why not send frozen embryos with artificial wombs that wake on arrival and robot nannys to raise them? I mean, obviously this won't be happening next week, but it's certainly feasible and it's not like freezing an embryo is all that difficult, nor does it require any real energy when you're in the depths of space far away from any stars? You could carry quite a few embryos in the cargo. Nanny robots can't be more than 50-100 years off. Artificial wombs, I would imagine, are pretty doable as well in that period.
A more ambitious plan would be frozen humans, but that also isn't that far off. The toughest trick is to find a way to infuse the cells with something that keeps ice crystals from forming and thus, rupturing the cell membranes, but there's already been some progress there with freezing mice for short periods and reviving them. It would be a lot more expensive to send a whole colony of humans, but if you sent a few dozen along with a genetically diverse groups of embryos to be implanted in the women, they could start a colony as well.
People seem to be hung up on the distances, but this is only a serious problem when you're talking about living, breathing travelers. With travelers frozen, there are no consumables and time is pretty much irrelevant. Assuming each colony can build their own colony ships a few hundred years after arrival, they could continue the expansion from where they are and you get pretty much exponential expansion. At that rate, we could easily colonize the galaxy in a matter of 10-30 million years, which isn't all that long in the grand scheme of things.
I read an article once about how bacteria that could not metabolize lactose were cultured in a lactose-rich liquid. After about 60 generations, some bacteria that could metabolize lactose appeared.
I'm not familiar with the particular research you're talking about, but I suspect this is something different from what the articles is talking about.
Bacterial DNA is a bit different that eukaryotic (animal) DNA. Their genomes are much smaller (as few as 600,000 base pairs vs. about 3 billion for a human). Human DNA is in a very tightly packed linear supercoil structure whereas bacterial DNA is simply coiled and in a spiral. Most the function of a bacterial DNA can be identified.
I suspect the lactose metabolization you're speaking of is actually the transference of plasmid DNA (small coils of DNA separate from the main chromosomal DNA) that encodes lactose metabolization proteins from one bacteria to another. This is a common way for bacteria to transfer functional abilities both within the same family of bacteria and sometimes to other bacteria. For example, a bacteria that's developed penicillin resistance can often transfer that resistance to other bacteria by transferring the plasmid DNA that encodes for the beta-lactamase protein that hydrolyzes beta-lactam rings in penicillin.
Bacterial DNA also doesn't have the same DNA repair abilities that eukaryotic cells have. This means that mutations are more likely survive in bacteria. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the bacteria simply spontaneously acquired the ability to metabolize lactose. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. First of all, lactose is not that much different than glucose and the proteins required to process lactose might simply require minor modifications to existing genes. A colony of bacteria can be HUGE compared to the human population of the Earth. Only one bacterium needs to evolve the ability to metabolize lactose. The others can all die out and that single one can then multiply and parent an entire new colony.
These are part of the reason why bacteria so easily become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. If you take an antibiotic and even a single bacterium has a mutation that confers resistance (which happens fairly frequently), then all the other bacteria exposed will die off and the resistant bacteria will then become the dominant colony.
But this is all completely different than what the article is talking about.
We've known for a while that DNA isn't just genes. For example, there are certain sequences associated with histones, and this has been known for a while (though I don't have the papers to site on me). Histones aren't functional in the same way most proteins are. They're more like DNA "spools" (thanks to wikipedia for this analogy). A human DNA strand is about 1cm long, which obviously is a lot bigger than the nucleus of a cell. So DNA coils up into a very tight structure in multiple layers of coiling. First it coils in spirals, then these spiraled segments bend around histones and then there's an even higher layer of folding that takes place. All of this managed to shrink the actual DNA to a size small enough to fit in the nucleus.
Most parts of DNA are inaccessible in this coiled state. To create proteins form the genes, small segments are either exposed or can be exposed, in such a way that transcription factors can get to the necessary segments.
What's important about this is that the parts of the DNA that code for histone placement don't follow a simple pattern, and it's not a repetitive pattern. That is, it's very hard to go looking through a segment of DNA and identify the sequences associated with histones, though a good deal of light has been shed recently on how this is done. Off of the top of my head, I have no idea how much DNA is involved in this, but it's a significant chunk. About 150 base pairs associated with a histone wrapping and these base pairs wouldn't be used for creating proteins. But the placement of the histone markers is important because it has some effect on what genes can be available for transcription (and thus being used to create proteins).
This kind of functionality is clearly important, but the key research in genes has been in determining the causes of disease because this is clearly one of the more important aspects of having access to genetic information. Genes encode for proteins and creation of malformed proteins or the inability to create certain proteins is the cause of genetic diseases. Many cancers are related to a malformed TP53 gene. This gene encode for a protein call p53. p53 is generally responsible for fixing certain mutations in DNA, if it can, or causing apoptosis (cellular suicide) if it's unable to fix the DNA. So if the TP53 becomes mutated in such a way that it can't produce function p53, cells are unable to repair genetic damage and unable to undergo apoptosis when the repair is unfixable, thus the cells become "immortal."
This is really the more important kind of stuff we need from genetics right now. That's not to say this work isn't important. It is. But the stuff that's going to result in disease cures is the stuff associated with proteins we use and proteins we need to function properly. That's why the research has been so heavily leaning in the direction of identifying genes associated with known proteins.
You should read the advisory. Apparently firewalls aren't generally enough to prevent an attack. I suspect I've actually been the victim of some of these attacks, though I have no idea why and it's possible that it's something else, but I've had "attacks" that appear to be related to the ED2K (eMule/eDonkey) network where I just get flooded with incoming ED2K packets and it quickly hoses my DSL modem, which obviously isn't designed to handle a DDOS attack. My iptables firewall seems to survive longer than the DSL modem. Fortunately, switching off the modem for a few seconds and firing it back up gives me a new address (one of the benefits of dynamic addresses).
I don't know why I'd be attacked. It's possible people are just testing out their botnets or something, but it's happened several times over the past few months. Since it's fairly simple for me to fix the problem (restarting the modem) and it's only happened a few times, I haven't really bothered to dig too deep into it.
whoa, you're just tossing out a bunch of supposition.
Actually, I'm close to graduating with degrees in chemistry and biochemistry. I also work in a lab doing drug development. I have a pretty good handle on chemistry and the chemistry of the elements and particularly with regard to the function of large biological molecules and how they operate and what their requirements are to continue operating.
In addition to what the previous poster said about abundance of carbon in relation to other atoms, you're simply wrong with regards to the chemistry. Silicon and phosphorus atoms are too large (and thus their bonds too unstable) to create large, complex backbone structures. Both have a covalent radius of over 100pm. While one might argue that silicon's valence being the same as carbon makes it a good candidate, silicon doesn't generally participate in pi-bonding and simply doesn't create large, stable, complex molecules, in any environment.
Nitrogen has a tendency to form nitrogen-nitrogen triple bonds that are incredibly stable (which is part of the reason N2 gas makes up 78% of our atmosphere). While nitrogen can create some large molecules in certain solvents, under certain environments, including fairly common solvents like ammonia, these molecules lack the diversity and complexity necessary for life.
Life requires a good solvent. Water is a unique solvent for a number of reasons, making it very compatible with life. These other elements are incompatible with water in large molecules. They have a tendency to react violently with water. Water isn't simply something to dissolve the molecules in. It participates in hydrogen bonding in a way that's crucial for the function of the large molecules of life. There is no known solvent that comes close to being able to do the kinds of things water does. The 3 dimensional hydrogen bonding networks created by water are a crucial part in the function of proteins and DNA. No other known solvent can perform comparable functions with large molecules based on other chemistries. Now you could argue that some, as yet unknown solvent will do it, but keep in mind, it'd have to be a fairly abundant thing in the galaxy and that limits your choices of solvents significantly.
The complex chemistry required for life simply can't be found in elements you propose or, frankly, any others out there. Carbon and water are unique in the ability to do the things they do. It's nice to fantasize about alternate lifeforms based on some other chemistry, but when you sit down and look at it in detail, there is simply no way it can happen.
There are certain reasonable limits we can put on life, despite what sci-fi writers come up with. For example, silicon based life isn't possible, at least not naturally (man-made or alien-made, maybe). Only carbon is capable of creating complex molecules. Using any scientific basis for the definition of life, life requires a certain degree of complexity. You can create computer chips from silicon that might one day be able to achieve what we'd consider life (through some redefinitions of the word), but computer chips don't spontaneously come about and program themselves.
So, if you assume complex carbon atoms as the basis for life, which is a pretty reasonable assumption, there are limits on temperature that complex molecules can exist at before they decompose. 1000 degrees is WAY above those temperature ranges.
It's very likely that any other life out there is based, fundamentally, on amino acids or variations of the known amino acids. They are pretty easily created under natural conditions that would be common in our galaxy, at least (methane gas, water, and so forth), and they also make good building blocks for more complex molecules.
That's not to say that all life is going to based on DNA or RNA. But it's pretty likely it's going to be based on proteins made of amino acids, however they're encoded. It's not that science lacks imagination to see other possibilities. Many have been investigated, but they have mostly been ruled out because of the lack of being capable of creating the necessary complexity. What we can do is, in a lab, create various conditions one might encounter on other planets, and in a "test tube" (though usually something bigger), try to see what gets naturally produced in those environments. Then you can see if you get the building blocks of complexity.
In the case of Earth, if you reproduce the chemical environment of early Earth in a jar, you get amino acids. Most experiments with other types of environments either produce the same things or produce nothing that can be a building block of complexity. These are simply the natural bounds of chemistry, physics, and biology.
I'd say as a rule, don't allow apps that require a reboot after install or uninstall. That's one of the most annoying things about Windows! Microsoft actually recommends to developers that installers not require a reboot after install or uninstall, but they seem to have a hard time following their own recommendations.
When I got my last Windows box, the first thing I did was go in and uninstall all the junk I didn't want that came pre-installed. It took 5 times longer than necessary because every time I uninstalled something, I had to reboot the machine. Also, I generally have stuff running all the time that I don't like to stop, if I don't have to. Having to reboot the machine is just a huge interruption for me.
Most apps that real people use don't need to be parallel processing. Word processing, e-mail, web browsing, even 95% of spreadsheets. These apps do some stuff in multiple threads, but they're not truly parallel processing so much as performing some operations in background threads. So I think part of it is that the problem needs to be better defined as to what you consider parallel processing. If you mean simply running a thread in the background, that's not a big deal and I do it all the time in my own code.
True parallel processing only needs to come into play with very compute intensive problems. In these cases, parallel processing needs to be taken into consideration in the initial design. Proper design can usually avoid serious problems, but it's also a learned skill, like any other aspect of programming. The mistake is to think that someone who can program should inherently have this skill. People specialize in it. Just like some people specialize in 3D apps or database apps. If you do it enough, it's not that hard. I mean, no harder than any other specialized field, like 3D. It's simply learning a new set of issues to deal with, how to avoid problems related to parallel processing and how to debug those problems when they do appear.
Generally, the biggest problem is coming up with a suitable way to represent a computation in a parallel way. Many compute intensive problems are simply hard or impossible to handle in a parallel way because of dependencies that require some computations to take place before other computations. Some problems, on the other hand, lend themselves quite well to parallel processing.
But the question, "Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?" No. It's not. It's hard, like anything else that requires time and skills to develop, but it's not "too hard" as a field. But as I said, certain problems simply don't lend themselves to parallel processing. In those cases, it's not that parallel processing itself is "too hard," it's simply that the problem isn't one that's necessarily solvable in a parallel way.
Yeah, right, it's dead. What is this crap? So a handful of people have decided not to use e-mail. Allow me to point out that the other 99.9% of people who have it, are using it.
I use snail mail sparingly. In my mind, it's certainly deader than e-mail, but neither is "dead." What a stupid statement to make or question to ask. E-mail isn't going to disappear. God, we can only hope that it improves and, granted, it hasn't improved much. Some sort of certification system to put an end to spam and other unwanted e-mail will be a welcome upgrade, but it's far from dead without it. Spam filters do wonders. Despite a dozen or so spam e-mails a day (my provider does pretty good filtering), with my own spam filtering, maybe 1 a week gets through to where I actually have to look at it.
I couldn't do my job, as I do it, without e-mail. I work from home and have for many years. E-mail and IM are my lifelines to my co-workers. Email is more used today than it was just a year ago and continues to be used more and more every day. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Is to start charging you royalties every time you hear a song. Got the Brady Bunch theme song playing over and over in your head? Pay up buster! Walk by a department store playing Huey Lewis and the News? Get out that credit card!
It's been said over and over again: If you want to end the RIAA, stop listening to the stuff they sell. Frankly, I can't stand the crap they've been putting out for the past 10 years. Most of the music I listen to these days are small bands with freely available music or on indie labels. There's so much great music out there that doesn't have anything to do with the RIAA.
What we really need is a better way for the average person to find out which of these free or indie label bands fall into their area of interests so that they can find music they like without rewarding the RIAA.
how do they know that this didn't come from some comet that happened to have a lot of silica in it? I mean, maybe they know it didn't, but let's say you've got a comet (lots of ice, some of it presumably water ice, and dirt) and it hits Mars and a chunk lands a few hundred feet away and spills silica all over the ground.
I mean, I'm not saying it's not Martian in origin, but it just doesn't seem like there's any question that it's Martian and I'm curious as to why. But of course, they ARE rocket scientists and geologists, so I suspect they've looked into this possibility.
Speech recognition generally comes in two flavors: Command and Dictation. Most voice recognition engines can handle either, but the implementations are very different. Command mode is handled by providing a list of "command" words that are valid at any given point and operates much like a state machine. Dictation is a completely different beast and does a variety of things under the hood to increase accuracy.
"Good enough" is very vague as applied to voice recognition. For command stuff, "good enough" has been here for about 7+ years. Even MS's free engine does a great job at that.
I used Via Voice years ago and it worked pretty well. But here's the thing: Have you ever tried to dictate something? It's definitely a skill. I'm sure some people have a natural ability for it, but I certainly didn't. I tried dictating stuff and it's tough. You hit a pause mid-sentence trying to figure out how you want to phrase something and suddenly there's a period and you're beginning a new sentence. Try dictating several sentences of original material and keeping it going without pauses and "um"s and so forth and you'll see, it's not quite as easy as it seems. I suspect one of the reasons voice recognition hasn't been a hit, is that people don't expect that. They try it for a few days think, "Hell,it's easier just to type," and give up. That's why I don't use it for writing. I can type faster and more accurately than I can dictate. I'm sure if it's something I wanted to work on, I could develop the skill, but my point is, I think that's probably why a lot of people give up on it.
I honestly think that voice recognition in command mode could be really useful at speeding things up, if software were designed to take advantage of it. But it's not easy to add it as an afterthought and it adds significant work, even if it's done with forethought. It's a chicken and the egg thing. If a lot of software supported it, I think people would see a gain in productivity using whatever software they use daily. I don't mean just using voice recognition, but in combination with a mouse and keyboard. For example: "Execute Browser. google dot com. flying burrito brothers. google search". Saying that would be a pretty fast way of opening your web browser, typing "google.com" and then typing "flying burrito brothers" and then clicking the "Google Search" button. Replace "Google Search" with hitting the enter key and even faster.
But as I said, it's a chicken and the egg thing. Software doesn't support it because there's no demand and there's no demand because people haven't really experienced software that supports it.
Another issue (and I'm sure this has been mentioned by others), is background noise. I like to listen to music or watch TV while I work. Those don't mix well with voice recognition, at least not at the volumes I listen to them. Until voice recognition can get around that and recognize my voice amidst background noise and do it accurately AND software out there generally supports it, it's not going to go mainstream.
I went through the same thing as well after 15 years in the field. About 5 years ago, I decided I wanted a career change. It took me 4 years to decide what I wanted to do (and I strongly urge you not to rush into something like this, unless it's just a job change). For me, I finally decided, a little over a year ago, that I wanted to go into medicine. I did a lot of research into what was required (the last doctor in my family was back in the 1800s, so it's not something I knew much about through family members). The main thing holding me back was my pretty pathetic grades (below a 2.5) from when I was an undergraduate before. In retrospect, it was fortunate that I dropped out short of getting my degree (in computer science).
I've returned to school part-time and I'm majoring in chemistry and biochemistry. It's enough credits that it's giving me a chance to bring my overall GPA up (I've been pulled a 4.0 over 23 credits in the past year). I'm also working part-time in one of the professor's labs developing drugs for cancer treatment.
I'm not saying this is what you should do. Like I said, I took 4 years to come to a decision. I thought about a lot of possibilities. And I'm not entirely sure I'm going to go to med school. Organic chemistry and biochemistry have turned out to be far more enjoyable than I expected. Working in the lab doing cancer research was something I didn't expect to be able to do as an undergrad. It's been very fulfilling and I'm starting to think research may be where I can best apply myself. So now I'm trying to decide between doing a PhD or doing an MD and PhD together. Either way, I'm pretty sure that cancer research is what I want to do. It's definitely challenging work and I suspect it will remain challenging for the remainder of my life.
But the best advice I can offer is to take your time and look around. Try to imagine yourself doing different things for the rest of your life. Maybe take some classes in things that interest you and see if there's something that just really grabs you. That might make the decision for you.
God forbid different people have different reasons for doing something? Let's just put everyone in a box and label them bored.
I have my own reasons for contributing to OSS and different reasons for contributing to WikiBooks. Neither of them has much to do with boredom. Besides this stuff (though, my contributions to wikibooks has been a little slow lately) I have a full-time job as a software engineer, take 16 hours a week of classes pursuing two degrees, and work about 8-15 hours a week as a research assistant in one of the labs. I don't really have time to be bored, but thanks for labeling me.
Having been, unfortunately, a former user of Kaiser-Permanente's services, I can say with confidence that their problems span way beyond software problems. 7 years ago, I was misdiagnosed with asthma by 3 Kaiser doctors. A 4th finally agreed that I didn't have asthma (and I don't). My actual problem was panic attacks caused by excessive adrenaline production, which no Kaiser doctor was able to determine. I had to go outside of Kaiser to find a doctor competent enough to determine the actual problem and treat me appropriately (with beta-blockers for the adrenaline instead of mind-numbing drugs like Paxil and Valium).
Add to this the reports of KP dumping homeless patients on the streets. There was the kidney transplant scandal. The patient information becoming available online scandal. And all of this in just the past 2 years. Kaiser is clearly flawed from top to bottom. They are the poster-child for real health care reform in this country.
Yes and no. Roughly half of all cancers are related to a defect in a protein called p53. There are various p53 defects that can cause cancer and very different cancers can result depending on which cells have which defects. But, for example, if a way were found to introduce wild-type (non-mutated) p53 DNA into these cells via gene therapy, then you'd have a single cure for roughly half of all cancers.
There are similarities in many cancers in how they operate and often, a single drug can be effective against multiple sorts of cancers because of these similarities. I'm actually working on a drug now that appears to be effective in certain types of breast cancer as well as melanoma. melanoma is, in many ways, very different from any kind of breast cancer. But melanoma also has some similarities in how it operates and we may yet discover that it's effective against other types of cancer.
While it's unlikely that a single drug will be found that's effective against ALL kinds of cancer, I don't think it's entirely incorrect, especially for an article meant for the lay person, to describe a drug as an "effective cancer treatment" vs. listing each individual type of cancer that the drug is useful against. It's not a journal article. If you want to know the specific types of cancers involved, then go look up the journal articles.
A few years ago I made the mistake of buying an Epson Stylus CX 4600. I've been an Epson fan for a long time. I had the old FX80, MX80, and MX100 dot matrix printers (back when dot matrix and daisy wheel were the options). I then bought an Epson ActionLaser that was a fantastic printer and served me well for years.
The CX4600, however was a scam in a box.
I don't know how many inkjet printers do this, but here's how it works:
1> You can only print when both black and white as well as color cartridges are in the printer. In other words, even if you only want to print in black and white, you must have color.
2> The cartridges have the timeout period where they stop working and it's not very long.
3> At some point Epson modified the cartridges such that they stopped working with this particular printer model. Many people were victims of this change. At this point, I got fed up and post a rant on my web site which actually got a lot "me too" comments.
Epson finally relented to the pressure and agreed to replace peoples' printers (though I was an early caller and when I called, they denied there was a problem with the cartridges).
I went out and bought a laserjet and have never looked back. I rarely need color and laser is just so incredibly cheap in comparison. In the year and a half since I posted my rant, I've gone through one toner cartridge (where I was going through an entire set of ink cartridges at about $70 total replacement) every month or so. Need to print photos? Go to WalMart. Need a printer at home, get a laser and save yourself a lot of headaches, money, and aggravation. That's my opinion.
If I had my choice, I'd still be using 2000. I had to upgrade because of my work. When I get a new machine, if I'm still in the software business, I suspect I'll switch to ReactOS if it'll support everything I need. I assume that by the time I need a new machine, ReactOS will be in beta, at least and that'll be good enough for me. I have no intention of inflicting Vista on myself.
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you want to argue definitions of words, not meaning or concepts.
I was arguing both. I was arguing the definition of "addiction" vs. "physical dependence". But let's ignore that. The other point of contention is that you were saying video game addiction isn't a true "addiction" because it's not chemical, but as I explained, it is chemical. That's not semantics, that's biochemistry.
i really don't think we have much of a disagreement
But we do have a disagreement. The definition of addiction is fairly well established in medicine: "uncontrolled compulsive use". What you're describing is physical dependence. The two are entirely separate problems. While physical dependence can result from addiction (and certainly will with certain drugs), addiction does not necessarily follow physical dependence, regardless of the drug involved.
You argued that video game "addiction" isn't an addiction because it's not a "chemical", but as I said, dopamine and endogenous endorphins (which are produced and released in someone with a video game addiction) act the same as morphine (which you agreed with), thus making it a "chemical" with the difference simply being that it's endogenous instead of exogenous. Hence the overlap in the symptoms. The underlying problem is the same. In both cases, it's an addiction to an endorphin analog. In one case it's endogenous endorphins and in the other case it's exogenous morphine, an endorphin analog.
morphine acts directly on the brain's reward system. it is based on CHEMICALS. addictions based on BEHAVIORS act indirectly on the brain's reward system. therefore, you can make someone a morphine addict involuntarily: tie them down and inject them a few times, and their bodies will go through withdrawl and crave morphine, even if they don't even know what they were injected with. they can be addicted to something they don't even know
Actually, this is just plain wrong. You can tie someone down and inject them with morphine to the point where they become physically dependent on it. It doesn't make them an addict. While their body will physically need the drug and will produce withdrawal symptoms without it, they won't necessarily have a compulsive behavior to continue taking morphine.
I can speak to this personally, as I can barely tolerate morphine. I was on it after surgery for over a week. Even if I had developed a physical dependence on it, my behavior would have been to do whatever I could to end taking the morphine as quickly as possible. I took it because it was the better of two evils. The pain was worse than the morphine, but once the balance shifted, I wanted off the morphine. I, like anyone else, can be made dependent on a drug, but only people susceptible to addiction to the drug can become addicts.
Also, dopamine and endorphins act directly on the brain's reward system and they too are based on chemicals. In fact, endorphins are chemically very similar to morphine and act on some of the same opioid receptors as morphine. That's why our bodys contain receptors that morphine can bind to in the first place.
or example: you could take a person with strong willpower and destroy them and make them a chemical dependent by force injecting them. but take that same strong willpower person and put them in front of a computer game or a gambling table and they will recognize the threat to their character, and not become addicted. you can't force someone to play and enjoy a game they don't want to play. you can force someone to be addicted to a chemical
That's if your premise is that addiction is a lack of willpower. Addiction isn't a lack of willpower, though. Addiction is a physiological phenomenon, not a psychological one. One can be an alcoholic and remain sober. Remaining sober is the result of willpower or some other motivational force that is or has become stronger than the addiction. But the underlying addiction remains regardless of the willpower.
Alcoholics aren't alcoholics because they choose to drink a lot. They drink a lot because their minds and bodies create a mechanism by which the alcoholic has a compulsive need/desire to continue drinking beyond what's healthy. It becomes a physical dependence at the point that the body requires continued intake of alcohol to avoid withdrawal effects. Once a person quits and has been sober for more than a few days, it's no longer a physical addiction, but it's a mental addiction for the life of the person.
There's a difference between dependence and addiction. You can force morphine on someone to the point where they develop a dependence on it, but that doesn't make them an addict. To become an addict, they must have the mental compulsion to continue the behavior. This is why, though many kids go through periods where they drink heavily in say, high school and/or college, only a percentage actually go on to become alcoholics. The alcoholics have an uncontrollable compulsion to continue the behavior. It's the same with any drug that stimulates the reward centers of the brain, endogenous or not.
to compulsively play videogames is a habituation, not an addiction
In many ways, video game "addiction" is very much like a drug addiction. The difference is that instead of putting a drug in the body, the body, in susceptible people, is producing the drug itself and video games are simply a trigger for that drug's synthesis in the body. But if someone was shooting up straight dopamine and noradrenaline on a daily basis instead of playing video games, you'd probably call them an addict, wouldn't you? So whether the drug is endogenous or not isn't really a good deciding factor. The fact is that addiction is a physiologic disorder and if your body is producing drugs causing a physiological dependence, then it's an addiction.
That said, the argument the AMA was considering wasn't about whether or not to call it addiction, but whether or not to classify it as its own mental disorder. I tend to lean towards the belief that it should be classified as a mental disorder. Like many other mental disorders, it tends to affect not just the person with the compulsion, but also those close to the person. And people have died from failing to eat because of the compulsion. That certainly sounds like a mental disorder to me.
how you can improve Windows XP to mimic and even surpass Vista
I think you have that backwards. You don't have to do anything to get XP to "surpass" Vista. It retroactively surpassed it when Vista was released.
First of all, the links are screwed up. Good luck finding a good one. If you do find one, you'll see some comments from readers of the blog with regards to the fact that making copies for family members is considered non-infringing. Too bad... I'd certainly like to see the RIAA pressured into going after high profile people that it's not in their interest to pursue.
There are a number of ways that colonizing the galaxy could be done and it wouldn't require technology far beyond where we are now.
Time of flight is only a problem if you're sending living, breathing astronauts. Why not send frozen embryos with artificial wombs that wake on arrival and robot nannys to raise them? I mean, obviously this won't be happening next week, but it's certainly feasible and it's not like freezing an embryo is all that difficult, nor does it require any real energy when you're in the depths of space far away from any stars? You could carry quite a few embryos in the cargo. Nanny robots can't be more than 50-100 years off. Artificial wombs, I would imagine, are pretty doable as well in that period.
A more ambitious plan would be frozen humans, but that also isn't that far off. The toughest trick is to find a way to infuse the cells with something that keeps ice crystals from forming and thus, rupturing the cell membranes, but there's already been some progress there with freezing mice for short periods and reviving them. It would be a lot more expensive to send a whole colony of humans, but if you sent a few dozen along with a genetically diverse groups of embryos to be implanted in the women, they could start a colony as well.
People seem to be hung up on the distances, but this is only a serious problem when you're talking about living, breathing travelers. With travelers frozen, there are no consumables and time is pretty much irrelevant. Assuming each colony can build their own colony ships a few hundred years after arrival, they could continue the expansion from where they are and you get pretty much exponential expansion. At that rate, we could easily colonize the galaxy in a matter of 10-30 million years, which isn't all that long in the grand scheme of things.
I read an article once about how bacteria that could not metabolize lactose were cultured in a lactose-rich liquid. After about 60 generations, some bacteria that could metabolize lactose appeared.
I'm not familiar with the particular research you're talking about, but I suspect this is something different from what the articles is talking about.
Bacterial DNA is a bit different that eukaryotic (animal) DNA. Their genomes are much smaller (as few as 600,000 base pairs vs. about 3 billion for a human). Human DNA is in a very tightly packed linear supercoil structure whereas bacterial DNA is simply coiled and in a spiral. Most the function of a bacterial DNA can be identified.
I suspect the lactose metabolization you're speaking of is actually the transference of plasmid DNA (small coils of DNA separate from the main chromosomal DNA) that encodes lactose metabolization proteins from one bacteria to another. This is a common way for bacteria to transfer functional abilities both within the same family of bacteria and sometimes to other bacteria. For example, a bacteria that's developed penicillin resistance can often transfer that resistance to other bacteria by transferring the plasmid DNA that encodes for the beta-lactamase protein that hydrolyzes beta-lactam rings in penicillin.
Bacterial DNA also doesn't have the same DNA repair abilities that eukaryotic cells have. This means that mutations are more likely survive in bacteria. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the bacteria simply spontaneously acquired the ability to metabolize lactose. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. First of all, lactose is not that much different than glucose and the proteins required to process lactose might simply require minor modifications to existing genes. A colony of bacteria can be HUGE compared to the human population of the Earth. Only one bacterium needs to evolve the ability to metabolize lactose. The others can all die out and that single one can then multiply and parent an entire new colony.
These are part of the reason why bacteria so easily become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. If you take an antibiotic and even a single bacterium has a mutation that confers resistance (which happens fairly frequently), then all the other bacteria exposed will die off and the resistant bacteria will then become the dominant colony.
But this is all completely different than what the article is talking about.
We've known for a while that DNA isn't just genes. For example, there are certain sequences associated with histones, and this has been known for a while (though I don't have the papers to site on me). Histones aren't functional in the same way most proteins are. They're more like DNA "spools" (thanks to wikipedia for this analogy). A human DNA strand is about 1cm long, which obviously is a lot bigger than the nucleus of a cell. So DNA coils up into a very tight structure in multiple layers of coiling. First it coils in spirals, then these spiraled segments bend around histones and then there's an even higher layer of folding that takes place. All of this managed to shrink the actual DNA to a size small enough to fit in the nucleus.
Most parts of DNA are inaccessible in this coiled state. To create proteins form the genes, small segments are either exposed or can be exposed, in such a way that transcription factors can get to the necessary segments.
What's important about this is that the parts of the DNA that code for histone placement don't follow a simple pattern, and it's not a repetitive pattern. That is, it's very hard to go looking through a segment of DNA and identify the sequences associated with histones, though a good deal of light has been shed recently on how this is done. Off of the top of my head, I have no idea how much DNA is involved in this, but it's a significant chunk. About 150 base pairs associated with a histone wrapping and these base pairs wouldn't be used for creating proteins. But the placement of the histone markers is important because it has some effect on what genes can be available for transcription (and thus being used to create proteins).
This kind of functionality is clearly important, but the key research in genes has been in determining the causes of disease because this is clearly one of the more important aspects of having access to genetic information. Genes encode for proteins and creation of malformed proteins or the inability to create certain proteins is the cause of genetic diseases. Many cancers are related to a malformed TP53 gene. This gene encode for a protein call p53. p53 is generally responsible for fixing certain mutations in DNA, if it can, or causing apoptosis (cellular suicide) if it's unable to fix the DNA. So if the TP53 becomes mutated in such a way that it can't produce function p53, cells are unable to repair genetic damage and unable to undergo apoptosis when the repair is unfixable, thus the cells become "immortal."
This is really the more important kind of stuff we need from genetics right now. That's not to say this work isn't important. It is. But the stuff that's going to result in disease cures is the stuff associated with proteins we use and proteins we need to function properly. That's why the research has been so heavily leaning in the direction of identifying genes associated with known proteins.
most decent sysadmins filter P2P traffic.
You should read the advisory. Apparently firewalls aren't generally enough to prevent an attack. I suspect I've actually been the victim of some of these attacks, though I have no idea why and it's possible that it's something else, but I've had "attacks" that appear to be related to the ED2K (eMule/eDonkey) network where I just get flooded with incoming ED2K packets and it quickly hoses my DSL modem, which obviously isn't designed to handle a DDOS attack. My iptables firewall seems to survive longer than the DSL modem. Fortunately, switching off the modem for a few seconds and firing it back up gives me a new address (one of the benefits of dynamic addresses).
I don't know why I'd be attacked. It's possible people are just testing out their botnets or something, but it's happened several times over the past few months. Since it's fairly simple for me to fix the problem (restarting the modem) and it's only happened a few times, I haven't really bothered to dig too deep into it.
whoa, you're just tossing out a bunch of supposition.
Actually, I'm close to graduating with degrees in chemistry and biochemistry. I also work in a lab doing drug development. I have a pretty good handle on chemistry and the chemistry of the elements and particularly with regard to the function of large biological molecules and how they operate and what their requirements are to continue operating.
In addition to what the previous poster said about abundance of carbon in relation to other atoms, you're simply wrong with regards to the chemistry. Silicon and phosphorus atoms are too large (and thus their bonds too unstable) to create large, complex backbone structures. Both have a covalent radius of over 100pm. While one might argue that silicon's valence being the same as carbon makes it a good candidate, silicon doesn't generally participate in pi-bonding and simply doesn't create large, stable, complex molecules, in any environment.
Nitrogen has a tendency to form nitrogen-nitrogen triple bonds that are incredibly stable (which is part of the reason N2 gas makes up 78% of our atmosphere). While nitrogen can create some large molecules in certain solvents, under certain environments, including fairly common solvents like ammonia, these molecules lack the diversity and complexity necessary for life.
Life requires a good solvent. Water is a unique solvent for a number of reasons, making it very compatible with life. These other elements are incompatible with water in large molecules. They have a tendency to react violently with water. Water isn't simply something to dissolve the molecules in. It participates in hydrogen bonding in a way that's crucial for the function of the large molecules of life. There is no known solvent that comes close to being able to do the kinds of things water does. The 3 dimensional hydrogen bonding networks created by water are a crucial part in the function of proteins and DNA. No other known solvent can perform comparable functions with large molecules based on other chemistries. Now you could argue that some, as yet unknown solvent will do it, but keep in mind, it'd have to be a fairly abundant thing in the galaxy and that limits your choices of solvents significantly.
The complex chemistry required for life simply can't be found in elements you propose or, frankly, any others out there. Carbon and water are unique in the ability to do the things they do. It's nice to fantasize about alternate lifeforms based on some other chemistry, but when you sit down and look at it in detail, there is simply no way it can happen.
There are certain reasonable limits we can put on life, despite what sci-fi writers come up with. For example, silicon based life isn't possible, at least not naturally (man-made or alien-made, maybe). Only carbon is capable of creating complex molecules. Using any scientific basis for the definition of life, life requires a certain degree of complexity. You can create computer chips from silicon that might one day be able to achieve what we'd consider life (through some redefinitions of the word), but computer chips don't spontaneously come about and program themselves.
So, if you assume complex carbon atoms as the basis for life, which is a pretty reasonable assumption, there are limits on temperature that complex molecules can exist at before they decompose. 1000 degrees is WAY above those temperature ranges.
It's very likely that any other life out there is based, fundamentally, on amino acids or variations of the known amino acids. They are pretty easily created under natural conditions that would be common in our galaxy, at least (methane gas, water, and so forth), and they also make good building blocks for more complex molecules.
That's not to say that all life is going to based on DNA or RNA. But it's pretty likely it's going to be based on proteins made of amino acids, however they're encoded. It's not that science lacks imagination to see other possibilities. Many have been investigated, but they have mostly been ruled out because of the lack of being capable of creating the necessary complexity. What we can do is, in a lab, create various conditions one might encounter on other planets, and in a "test tube" (though usually something bigger), try to see what gets naturally produced in those environments. Then you can see if you get the building blocks of complexity.
In the case of Earth, if you reproduce the chemical environment of early Earth in a jar, you get amino acids. Most experiments with other types of environments either produce the same things or produce nothing that can be a building block of complexity. These are simply the natural bounds of chemistry, physics, and biology.
I'd say as a rule, don't allow apps that require a reboot after install or uninstall. That's one of the most annoying things about Windows! Microsoft actually recommends to developers that installers not require a reboot after install or uninstall, but they seem to have a hard time following their own recommendations.
When I got my last Windows box, the first thing I did was go in and uninstall all the junk I didn't want that came pre-installed. It took 5 times longer than necessary because every time I uninstalled something, I had to reboot the machine. Also, I generally have stuff running all the time that I don't like to stop, if I don't have to. Having to reboot the machine is just a huge interruption for me.
Most apps that real people use don't need to be parallel processing. Word processing, e-mail, web browsing, even 95% of spreadsheets. These apps do some stuff in multiple threads, but they're not truly parallel processing so much as performing some operations in background threads. So I think part of it is that the problem needs to be better defined as to what you consider parallel processing. If you mean simply running a thread in the background, that's not a big deal and I do it all the time in my own code.
True parallel processing only needs to come into play with very compute intensive problems. In these cases, parallel processing needs to be taken into consideration in the initial design. Proper design can usually avoid serious problems, but it's also a learned skill, like any other aspect of programming. The mistake is to think that someone who can program should inherently have this skill. People specialize in it. Just like some people specialize in 3D apps or database apps. If you do it enough, it's not that hard. I mean, no harder than any other specialized field, like 3D. It's simply learning a new set of issues to deal with, how to avoid problems related to parallel processing and how to debug those problems when they do appear.
Generally, the biggest problem is coming up with a suitable way to represent a computation in a parallel way. Many compute intensive problems are simply hard or impossible to handle in a parallel way because of dependencies that require some computations to take place before other computations. Some problems, on the other hand, lend themselves quite well to parallel processing.
But the question, "Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?" No. It's not. It's hard, like anything else that requires time and skills to develop, but it's not "too hard" as a field. But as I said, certain problems simply don't lend themselves to parallel processing. In those cases, it's not that parallel processing itself is "too hard," it's simply that the problem isn't one that's necessarily solvable in a parallel way.
Yeah, right, it's dead. What is this crap? So a handful of people have decided not to use e-mail. Allow me to point out that the other 99.9% of people who have it, are using it.
I use snail mail sparingly. In my mind, it's certainly deader than e-mail, but neither is "dead." What a stupid statement to make or question to ask. E-mail isn't going to disappear. God, we can only hope that it improves and, granted, it hasn't improved much. Some sort of certification system to put an end to spam and other unwanted e-mail will be a welcome upgrade, but it's far from dead without it. Spam filters do wonders. Despite a dozen or so spam e-mails a day (my provider does pretty good filtering), with my own spam filtering, maybe 1 a week gets through to where I actually have to look at it.
I couldn't do my job, as I do it, without e-mail. I work from home and have for many years. E-mail and IM are my lifelines to my co-workers. Email is more used today than it was just a year ago and continues to be used more and more every day. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Is to start charging you royalties every time you hear a song. Got the Brady Bunch theme song playing over and over in your head? Pay up buster! Walk by a department store playing Huey Lewis and the News? Get out that credit card!
It's been said over and over again: If you want to end the RIAA, stop listening to the stuff they sell. Frankly, I can't stand the crap they've been putting out for the past 10 years. Most of the music I listen to these days are small bands with freely available music or on indie labels. There's so much great music out there that doesn't have anything to do with the RIAA.
What we really need is a better way for the average person to find out which of these free or indie label bands fall into their area of interests so that they can find music they like without rewarding the RIAA.
how do they know that this didn't come from some comet that happened to have a lot of silica in it? I mean, maybe they know it didn't, but let's say you've got a comet (lots of ice, some of it presumably water ice, and dirt) and it hits Mars and a chunk lands a few hundred feet away and spills silica all over the ground.
I mean, I'm not saying it's not Martian in origin, but it just doesn't seem like there's any question that it's Martian and I'm curious as to why. But of course, they ARE rocket scientists and geologists, so I suspect they've looked into this possibility.
Speech recognition generally comes in two flavors: Command and Dictation. Most voice recognition engines can handle either, but the implementations are very different. Command mode is handled by providing a list of "command" words that are valid at any given point and operates much like a state machine. Dictation is a completely different beast and does a variety of things under the hood to increase accuracy.
"Good enough" is very vague as applied to voice recognition. For command stuff, "good enough" has been here for about 7+ years. Even MS's free engine does a great job at that.
I used Via Voice years ago and it worked pretty well. But here's the thing: Have you ever tried to dictate something? It's definitely a skill. I'm sure some people have a natural ability for it, but I certainly didn't. I tried dictating stuff and it's tough. You hit a pause mid-sentence trying to figure out how you want to phrase something and suddenly there's a period and you're beginning a new sentence. Try dictating several sentences of original material and keeping it going without pauses and "um"s and so forth and you'll see, it's not quite as easy as it seems. I suspect one of the reasons voice recognition hasn't been a hit, is that people don't expect that. They try it for a few days think, "Hell,it's easier just to type," and give up. That's why I don't use it for writing. I can type faster and more accurately than I can dictate. I'm sure if it's something I wanted to work on, I could develop the skill, but my point is, I think that's probably why a lot of people give up on it.
I honestly think that voice recognition in command mode could be really useful at speeding things up, if software were designed to take advantage of it. But it's not easy to add it as an afterthought and it adds significant work, even if it's done with forethought. It's a chicken and the egg thing. If a lot of software supported it, I think people would see a gain in productivity using whatever software they use daily. I don't mean just using voice recognition, but in combination with a mouse and keyboard. For example: "Execute Browser. google dot com. flying burrito brothers. google search". Saying that would be a pretty fast way of opening your web browser, typing "google.com" and then typing "flying burrito brothers" and then clicking the "Google Search" button. Replace "Google Search" with hitting the enter key and even faster.
But as I said, it's a chicken and the egg thing. Software doesn't support it because there's no demand and there's no demand because people haven't really experienced software that supports it.
Another issue (and I'm sure this has been mentioned by others), is background noise. I like to listen to music or watch TV while I work. Those don't mix well with voice recognition, at least not at the volumes I listen to them. Until voice recognition can get around that and recognize my voice amidst background noise and do it accurately AND software out there generally supports it, it's not going to go mainstream.
I went through the same thing as well after 15 years in the field. About 5 years ago, I decided I wanted a career change. It took me 4 years to decide what I wanted to do (and I strongly urge you not to rush into something like this, unless it's just a job change). For me, I finally decided, a little over a year ago, that I wanted to go into medicine. I did a lot of research into what was required (the last doctor in my family was back in the 1800s, so it's not something I knew much about through family members). The main thing holding me back was my pretty pathetic grades (below a 2.5) from when I was an undergraduate before. In retrospect, it was fortunate that I dropped out short of getting my degree (in computer science).
I've returned to school part-time and I'm majoring in chemistry and biochemistry. It's enough credits that it's giving me a chance to bring my overall GPA up (I've been pulled a 4.0 over 23 credits in the past year). I'm also working part-time in one of the professor's labs developing drugs for cancer treatment.
I'm not saying this is what you should do. Like I said, I took 4 years to come to a decision. I thought about a lot of possibilities. And I'm not entirely sure I'm going to go to med school. Organic chemistry and biochemistry have turned out to be far more enjoyable than I expected. Working in the lab doing cancer research was something I didn't expect to be able to do as an undergrad. It's been very fulfilling and I'm starting to think research may be where I can best apply myself. So now I'm trying to decide between doing a PhD or doing an MD and PhD together. Either way, I'm pretty sure that cancer research is what I want to do. It's definitely challenging work and I suspect it will remain challenging for the remainder of my life.
But the best advice I can offer is to take your time and look around. Try to imagine yourself doing different things for the rest of your life. Maybe take some classes in things that interest you and see if there's something that just really grabs you. That might make the decision for you.
God forbid different people have different reasons for doing something? Let's just put everyone in a box and label them bored.
I have my own reasons for contributing to OSS and different reasons for contributing to WikiBooks. Neither of them has much to do with boredom. Besides this stuff (though, my contributions to wikibooks has been a little slow lately) I have a full-time job as a software engineer, take 16 hours a week of classes pursuing two degrees, and work about 8-15 hours a week as a research assistant in one of the labs. I don't really have time to be bored, but thanks for labeling me.
Having been, unfortunately, a former user of Kaiser-Permanente's services, I can say with confidence that their problems span way beyond software problems. 7 years ago, I was misdiagnosed with asthma by 3 Kaiser doctors. A 4th finally agreed that I didn't have asthma (and I don't). My actual problem was panic attacks caused by excessive adrenaline production, which no Kaiser doctor was able to determine. I had to go outside of Kaiser to find a doctor competent enough to determine the actual problem and treat me appropriately (with beta-blockers for the adrenaline instead of mind-numbing drugs like Paxil and Valium).
Add to this the reports of KP dumping homeless patients on the streets. There was the kidney transplant scandal. The patient information becoming available online scandal. And all of this in just the past 2 years. Kaiser is clearly flawed from top to bottom. They are the poster-child for real health care reform in this country.
Yes and no. Roughly half of all cancers are related to a defect in a protein called p53. There are various p53 defects that can cause cancer and very different cancers can result depending on which cells have which defects. But, for example, if a way were found to introduce wild-type (non-mutated) p53 DNA into these cells via gene therapy, then you'd have a single cure for roughly half of all cancers.
There are similarities in many cancers in how they operate and often, a single drug can be effective against multiple sorts of cancers because of these similarities. I'm actually working on a drug now that appears to be effective in certain types of breast cancer as well as melanoma. melanoma is, in many ways, very different from any kind of breast cancer. But melanoma also has some similarities in how it operates and we may yet discover that it's effective against other types of cancer.
While it's unlikely that a single drug will be found that's effective against ALL kinds of cancer, I don't think it's entirely incorrect, especially for an article meant for the lay person, to describe a drug as an "effective cancer treatment" vs. listing each individual type of cancer that the drug is useful against. It's not a journal article. If you want to know the specific types of cancers involved, then go look up the journal articles.
A few years ago I made the mistake of buying an Epson Stylus CX 4600. I've been an Epson fan for a long time. I had the old FX80, MX80, and MX100 dot matrix printers (back when dot matrix and daisy wheel were the options). I then bought an Epson ActionLaser that was a fantastic printer and served me well for years.
The CX4600, however was a scam in a box.
I don't know how many inkjet printers do this, but here's how it works:
1> You can only print when both black and white as well as color cartridges are in the printer. In other words, even if you only want to print in black and white, you must have color.
2> The cartridges have the timeout period where they stop working and it's not very long.
3> At some point Epson modified the cartridges such that they stopped working with this particular printer model. Many people were victims of this change. At this point, I got fed up and post a rant on my web site which actually got a lot "me too" comments.
Epson finally relented to the pressure and agreed to replace peoples' printers (though I was an early caller and when I called, they denied there was a problem with the cartridges).
I went out and bought a laserjet and have never looked back. I rarely need color and laser is just so incredibly cheap in comparison. In the year and a half since I posted my rant, I've gone through one toner cartridge (where I was going through an entire set of ink cartridges at about $70 total replacement) every month or so. Need to print photos? Go to WalMart. Need a printer at home, get a laser and save yourself a lot of headaches, money, and aggravation. That's my opinion.
If I had my choice, I'd still be using 2000. I had to upgrade because of my work. When I get a new machine, if I'm still in the software business, I suspect I'll switch to ReactOS if it'll support everything I need. I assume that by the time I need a new machine, ReactOS will be in beta, at least and that'll be good enough for me. I have no intention of inflicting Vista on myself.