You can get an artificial heart. They even implant it in your body and use a remote battery, so you don't have to be wired up to a machine all day. One dude, Peter Houghton, had the first artificial heart for permanent use. They put it in in 2000, and he lived until 2007.
To answer the other part of your question, the great challenge was just to come up with a pump which was long-lasting enough and reliable enough, while able to pump through a sufficient volume of blood.
Why on earth would she think it was possible to edit word documents in something called "OpenOffice.org"? Now if it was called "Open Office", she might have had a chance...
I think part of the problem is the boneheaded decision to call it 'OpenOffice.org'. In an attempt to make it sound all web-capable and 2.0, it makes regular users think it's a website rather than an office suite.
Australia has much more expensive gas/petrol prices, and cars also cost much more - I think economics is part of what breaks the SUV model there. But also, suburban sprawl is much
I think maybe you need to be modded 'ignorant' yourself. There are plenty of modern computer games with more cognitive depth and educational content than any of the games you listed.
Well, that's not really a good answer since your PC then has to be on all the time, whereas Ulteo doesn't require that. PCs draw 200-500W, so it's not exactly irrelevant if they have to stay on all day long.
Modern windows doesn't suffer from accidental login problems.
I think the grandparent's point was that it would be much better to deliver a patch so that Flipstart's windows installation allows you to login or bring up the task manager using a DIFFERENT KEYSTROKE.
Given the premium on space in an ultra-micro computer, adding a whole new non-standard button is the worst possible solution, when it would not be that hard to remap the hotkey in the keyboard driver.
In all seriousness, who pirates videos by intercepting the signal from the video cable? Maybe back in the days of analogue tape, people used to do this. But now that we have digital discs which are readable on a computer, who would bother? When I think of the enormous expense of the widespread rollout of HDCP, and think that it has basically stopped no piracy whatsoever, it seems incredibly annoying.
Ah, but the penny just dropped for me (sorry, I'm a bit slow). I guess this allows them to sell more TVs.
Yeah I do, of course. I realise that MS software sucks partly because of the monopolistic practices. But I care because the software sucks; as a consumer I care only weakly about the harms to retailers and developers. Many others feel the same way - the evidence is in Apple's legion of loyal fans, who happily ignore Apple's heavy-handed legal practices and questionable business ethics.
I guess what I'm saying is users don't tend to care much about 'evil' business practices, so long as it doesn't have an impact on software quality. Since MS's anticompetitive practices do reduce software quality, we care that they're evil.
There is a long, boring answer to this which involves Microsoft's past and present sales and PR tactics. This is the answer most slashdotters would give.
A more interesting answer is, 'because their software sucks'. If Microsoft's software was better, they would have some fans, and on social websites like this one there wouldn't be such a strong prevailing dislike of them.
Obviously apple also engages in evil business ethics. But because they have fans, they can get away with it a bit more. Microsoft has, as far as I can tell, no fans. I am a long-time PC owners, and I don't give a toss about the monopolistic and unethical behaviour of either company, but I couldn't look you in the eye and say that Microsoft ships really good products. This is why I don't spring to their defense if some Mac or Linux fan calls them 'evil'.
10 years is a good idea, not so much because of the possibility of derivative works, but because it encourages people like Cliff Richard to continue to create new works himself. You are exactly right, a 50-year copyright is counterproductive, because it allows someone who produces a single number-one hit to retire immediately.
I my experience, people who refer to the 'real world' and claim to know 'how the real world works' are in fact completely incapable of defining what 'real' or 'real world' means, and incapable of explaining why we should be talking about this 'real world' rather than some other opposing world.
Mostly we are admonished to talk about the 'real world' when someone feels that we are talking too much about ideas or abstracts. But much of what we know about the 'real world' was discovered through abstract, foundational or theoretical ideas, by people who were no doubt often told that their ideas had no significance in the 'real world'. I have this creeping suspicion that in this usage, 'the real world' often means 'my limited and narrow experience'.
To further defend Google, it's not completely clear that good business ethics means pulling your business activity out of every country whose government seems oppressive, corrupt or unjust. Ultimately, if Microsoft pulls their standard products out of China it creates a huge compatibility problem for people who want to work with Chinese colleagues internationally. And since the Chinese government currently gets 0% of MS and Google revenue, it hurts the citizens and not the government.
Even when the government of a country starts insisting that you run your company in ways that you aren't comfortable with (like censoring your search results, for example) it's not clear that the ethical choice is to withdraw from that country.
To me, the clarity which many slashdotters seem to carry on this issue is nothing more than U.S. style one-eyed 'ethics-iness'. The US administration monitors and censors telecommunications. I doubt anyone here thinks that motorola, nokia and samsung should pull their business operations out of the USA.
It is easy to forget that Google offers a particularly beneficial (and I would say necessary) product. Even if it is censored. It is much more beneficial to the citizens than the government.
Sure, but I'm just trying to say that in general, there isn't always enough information for a correct translation, and translation doesn't always completely preserve information. So you should expect back-translations of short no-context sentences to come out completely wrong, whether a computer or a person performs the translation.
The French example you give is a good example of why it fails.
French is gendered, so if a table dies, you go 'she died', not 'it dies'.
When you back-translate this to English, it would be wrong to translate 'elle est morte' to 'she's dead', since this out-of-context sentence in French could easily refer to a table. In english, we call tables 'it', so the translator goes for 'it died' on the basis that 'elle est morte' is more likely to be referring to a neuter-gendered noun.
Machine translation (in fact, ANY translation) can never succeed in the absence of context, for exactly this kind of reason - a sentence might be necessarily ambiguous in one language, but necessarily specific in another.
"But seriously, does this shock anyone? If I'm getting the milk for free how is the cow gonna get paid?"
That's the thing - the cow DOESN'T get paid, even when you pay for the milk. Only the farmer gets paid. In this sense, your milk-farming metaphor is a perfect fit for the music industry. Except that farmers at least gives the cows some grass to eat, and the cow doesn't haven't to take a part-time job as a waiter to cover its milk-making equipment, rent and food.
What I want to know is, how are we going to swing it so that the cow finally gets paid?
You don't have a constitution in any meaningful sense of the word, anymore.
You have a bunch of laws which were once drawn up under a constitution; these laws will stand just until the executive branch decides to change them. And you have no recourse in case the executive branch decides to make laws which are unfair, immoral or inhumane.
In the vast majority of stem cell therapies, you don't inject the embryonic cells. You use the embryonic cells to derive tissue stem cells, like liver cells, and you inject those.
There are already a large number of successful transplants of these kinds of cells.
You may ask, why not just harvest adult stem cells? Well, ideally you need 'autologous' cells - cells grown from your own lines - so that the transplant won't be rejected. Adult stem cells just don't exist in your body for every tissue type. For example, there are a few stem cells in your brain, but it would be very hard to get at them. The solution is to treat embryonic cells so that they differentiate into brand new neural progenitor cells, and inject those.
The more differentiated a cell is, the less likely it is to form a tumour.
So one value of totipotent cells (or 'totempotent' as you wrongly put it) is that you can derive non-totipotent cells from them which are otherwise unavailable.
The moral of the story: don't get your scientific information from the church!
I'm not 'pro-abortion' in the sense that I think that it is good when someone has an abortion. I think it is (mildly) bad when someone has an abortion. But I think that having a baby when you don't want to can be (very) bad, and so I think a pregnant woman should be the one to decide whether or not it would be worse for her to have a baby than an abortion.
'Pro-abortion' would just be wildly inaccurate to describe my view. So would 'anti-abortion'. It's hardly a 'cheery PC euphemism' if I describe my view as 'pro choice'. I would be just as happy to be described as 'anti-forced-birth', or 'anti-unwanted-babies', except these options takes longer to type and is more difficult to say.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get an artificial heart. They even implant it in your body and use a remote battery, so you don't have to be wired up to a machine all day. One dude, Peter Houghton, had the first artificial heart for permanent use. They put it in in 2000, and he lived until 2007. To answer the other part of your question, the great challenge was just to come up with a pump which was long-lasting enough and reliable enough, while able to pump through a sufficient volume of blood.
Why on earth would she think it was possible to edit word documents in something called "OpenOffice.org"? Now if it was called "Open Office", she might have had a chance...
I think part of the problem is the boneheaded decision to call it 'OpenOffice.org'. In an attempt to make it sound all web-capable and 2.0, it makes regular users think it's a website rather than an office suite.
... much less pronounced in Australia, I was going to say. Stupid broken preview feature.
Australia has much more expensive gas/petrol prices, and cars also cost much more - I think economics is part of what breaks the SUV model there. But also, suburban sprawl is much
Can't you get SimCity for linux, at least? I know they have it on OLPCs.
I think maybe you need to be modded 'ignorant' yourself. There are plenty of modern computer games with more cognitive depth and educational content than any of the games you listed.
Ironically, EA now owns the only online versions of scrabble, after pursuing all unlicensed versions through legal channels. Seriously.
Well, that's not really a good answer since your PC then has to be on all the time, whereas Ulteo doesn't require that. PCs draw 200-500W, so it's not exactly irrelevant if they have to stay on all day long.
Modern windows doesn't suffer from accidental login problems.
I think the grandparent's point was that it would be much better to deliver a patch so that Flipstart's windows installation allows you to login or bring up the task manager using a DIFFERENT KEYSTROKE.
Given the premium on space in an ultra-micro computer, adding a whole new non-standard button is the worst possible solution, when it would not be that hard to remap the hotkey in the keyboard driver.
In all seriousness, who pirates videos by intercepting the signal from the video cable? Maybe back in the days of analogue tape, people used to do this. But now that we have digital discs which are readable on a computer, who would bother? When I think of the enormous expense of the widespread rollout of HDCP, and think that it has basically stopped no piracy whatsoever, it seems incredibly annoying.
Ah, but the penny just dropped for me (sorry, I'm a bit slow). I guess this allows them to sell more TVs.
Yeah I do, of course. I realise that MS software sucks partly because of the monopolistic practices. But I care because the software sucks; as a consumer I care only weakly about the harms to retailers and developers. Many others feel the same way - the evidence is in Apple's legion of loyal fans, who happily ignore Apple's heavy-handed legal practices and questionable business ethics.
I guess what I'm saying is users don't tend to care much about 'evil' business practices, so long as it doesn't have an impact on software quality. Since MS's anticompetitive practices do reduce software quality, we care that they're evil.
There is a long, boring answer to this which involves Microsoft's past and present sales and PR tactics. This is the answer most slashdotters would give.
A more interesting answer is, 'because their software sucks'. If Microsoft's software was better, they would have some fans, and on social websites like this one there wouldn't be such a strong prevailing dislike of them.
Obviously apple also engages in evil business ethics. But because they have fans, they can get away with it a bit more. Microsoft has, as far as I can tell, no fans. I am a long-time PC owners, and I don't give a toss about the monopolistic and unethical behaviour of either company, but I couldn't look you in the eye and say that Microsoft ships really good products. This is why I don't spring to their defense if some Mac or Linux fan calls them 'evil'.
10 years is a good idea, not so much because of the possibility of derivative works, but because it encourages people like Cliff Richard to continue to create new works himself. You are exactly right, a 50-year copyright is counterproductive, because it allows someone who produces a single number-one hit to retire immediately.
What kind of nerd are you, if you are holding onto any portable gadget for more than two years?
I my experience, people who refer to the 'real world' and claim to know 'how the real world works' are in fact completely incapable of defining what 'real' or 'real world' means, and incapable of explaining why we should be talking about this 'real world' rather than some other opposing world.
Mostly we are admonished to talk about the 'real world' when someone feels that we are talking too much about ideas or abstracts. But much of what we know about the 'real world' was discovered through abstract, foundational or theoretical ideas, by people who were no doubt often told that their ideas had no significance in the 'real world'. I have this creeping suspicion that in this usage, 'the real world' often means 'my limited and narrow experience'.
To further defend Google, it's not completely clear that good business ethics means pulling your business activity out of every country whose government seems oppressive, corrupt or unjust. Ultimately, if Microsoft pulls their standard products out of China it creates a huge compatibility problem for people who want to work with Chinese colleagues internationally. And since the Chinese government currently gets 0% of MS and Google revenue, it hurts the citizens and not the government.
Even when the government of a country starts insisting that you run your company in ways that you aren't comfortable with (like censoring your search results, for example) it's not clear that the ethical choice is to withdraw from that country.
To me, the clarity which many slashdotters seem to carry on this issue is nothing more than U.S. style one-eyed 'ethics-iness'. The US administration monitors and censors telecommunications. I doubt anyone here thinks that motorola, nokia and samsung should pull their business operations out of the USA.
It is easy to forget that Google offers a particularly beneficial (and I would say necessary) product. Even if it is censored. It is much more beneficial to the citizens than the government.
Sure, but I'm just trying to say that in general, there isn't always enough information for a correct translation, and translation doesn't always completely preserve information. So you should expect back-translations of short no-context sentences to come out completely wrong, whether a computer or a person performs the translation.
The French example you give is a good example of why it fails.
French is gendered, so if a table dies, you go 'she died', not 'it dies'.
When you back-translate this to English, it would be wrong to translate 'elle est morte' to 'she's dead', since this out-of-context sentence in French could easily refer to a table. In english, we call tables 'it', so the translator goes for 'it died' on the basis that 'elle est morte' is more likely to be referring to a neuter-gendered noun.
Machine translation (in fact, ANY translation) can never succeed in the absence of context, for exactly this kind of reason - a sentence might be necessarily ambiguous in one language, but necessarily specific in another.
That's the thing - the cow DOESN'T get paid, even when you pay for the milk. Only the farmer gets paid. In this sense, your milk-farming metaphor is a perfect fit for the music industry. Except that farmers at least gives the cows some grass to eat, and the cow doesn't haven't to take a part-time job as a waiter to cover its milk-making equipment, rent and food.
What I want to know is, how are we going to swing it so that the cow finally gets paid?
I hope it DOES seriously hurt the music biz. As in, fatally. Maybe then the musicians could make a buck.
You don't have a constitution in any meaningful sense of the word, anymore.
You have a bunch of laws which were once drawn up under a constitution; these laws will stand just until the executive branch decides to change them. And you have no recourse in case the executive branch decides to make laws which are unfair, immoral or inhumane.
The internet is super-critical to my job - philosophy. If the internet went down for a day, I would have to go to the LIBRARY!
Another thing I forgot to mention:
In the vast majority of stem cell therapies, you don't inject the embryonic cells. You use the embryonic cells to derive tissue stem cells, like liver cells, and you inject those.
There are already a large number of successful transplants of these kinds of cells.
You may ask, why not just harvest adult stem cells? Well, ideally you need 'autologous' cells - cells grown from your own lines - so that the transplant won't be rejected. Adult stem cells just don't exist in your body for every tissue type. For example, there are a few stem cells in your brain, but it would be very hard to get at them. The solution is to treat embryonic cells so that they differentiate into brand new neural progenitor cells, and inject those.
The more differentiated a cell is, the less likely it is to form a tumour.
So one value of totipotent cells (or 'totempotent' as you wrongly put it) is that you can derive non-totipotent cells from them which are otherwise unavailable.
The moral of the story: don't get your scientific information from the church!
I'm not 'pro-abortion' in the sense that I think that it is good when someone has an abortion. I think it is (mildly) bad when someone has an abortion. But I think that having a baby when you don't want to can be (very) bad, and so I think a pregnant woman should be the one to decide whether or not it would be worse for her to have a baby than an abortion.
'Pro-abortion' would just be wildly inaccurate to describe my view. So would 'anti-abortion'. It's hardly a 'cheery PC euphemism' if I describe my view as 'pro choice'. I would be just as happy to be described as 'anti-forced-birth', or 'anti-unwanted-babies', except these options takes longer to type and is more difficult to say.