I still remember the morning I looked on slashdot and saw the original announcement that SCO was filing copyright claims against Linux. It's amazing how long how this has been going on, and how much has changed since then (and not just what's changed in SCO's ever-shifting claims!-- that first morning I seem to remember most of the discussion was speculation on what exactly it was that SCO claimed was stolen from them. Years later and I still don't think we ever really found out). The start of this case was so long ago it was like an entirely different world. This case has been going on longer than the Iraq war. This started so long ago that at the time Slashdot was still known for hating Microsoft rather than salivating over the XBox.
This in mind, while it's wonderful that the system showed SCO wrong in the end, I have trouble seeing this really as a loss for SCO. They managed to continue their claims for a good five years-- a significant fraction of the lifetime of Linux itself-- without ever showing a whit of substance to those claims. SCO will die now that their case is lost, but they might have died years sooner and possibly poorer if not for this lawsuit gambit keeping them on life support. Microsoft managed to fund this through weird proxies without one single bit of consequences for themselves, and unlike SCO they will live on.
Linux has now weathered its first major court challenge, but the media coverage of Linux's successes in this case has never quite matched up in amount to the withering and credulous coverage of the baseless PR accusations of Darl McBride's heyday-- though we won in the end, the case may well be a net PR loss. Meanwhile, I don't think Linux is as viable as a movement as it was at the beginning of this case. This for all I know has nothing to do with the SCO case itself, but it seems like five years ago people still thought Linux on the desktop had a future, now I don't hear anyone talking about that anymore. Five years ago linux seemed to be going places, whereas now Linux's situation seems largely static, little progressed from where it was five years ago. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't really feel good right now thinking about how this entire debacle has gone.
I guess my main response is kudos to PJ of Groklaw for her amazing and tireless journalism throughout this case. I'd be curious to ask PJ what her plans are as to what she's going to do next. In the short term maybe she should write a book about this entire thing.
It should be noted that even if String Theory turns out to be "an abstract exercise in math", that doesn't mean it's useless. String Theory has done a poor job of spurring advancements in physics, but it's been a source of massive advancements in mathematics in its own right, due to the advances in things like topology that have been required to describe string theory's odd equations. Even if these advancements never get used in service of a useful string theory, seemingly useless advancements in mathematics have a way of turning out to be critically useful years after their discovery.
In the meanwhile, the lack of "a" string theory may turn out to be a good thing-- string theory's excessive flexibility might mean that while it's useless by itself, it provides mathematical language that would allow us to formulate early versions of a future theory that describes something closer to reality, as a bootstrap. If string theorists would take the criticisms of the "not even wrong" crowd to heart and start concentrating on results rather than elegance, we might be able to move forward toward this point.
This said, I think the viewpoint that overreliance on string theory is distracting us from other promising ways to proceed should be encouraged. String Theory was a good idea to look into, but after this long without noticeable progress, it is definitely worth looking into alternatives. I think the field of science is large enough that we can explore string theory alternatives while continuing the exploration of string theory itself as a parallel track.
Of course, in order for this to work, the string theory detractors are going to have to actually produce real alternatives and results of their own-- there will come a time soon when criticizing string theory is not enough. Encouraging people (and funding sources) to take a step back and take a different tack of looking at the problem is productive, but blindly attacking the establishment just because it's the establishment is not. And I have to admit some of the attacks on string theory veer into some kind of strange territory sometimes. From the article:
Smolin adds a moral dimension to his plaint, linking string theory to the physics profession's "blatant prejudice" against women and blacks. Pondering the cult of empty mathematical virtuosity, he asks, "How many leading theoretical physicists were once insecure, small, pimply boys who got their revenge besting the jocks (who got the girls) in the one place they could--math class?"
Or do Microsoft (and Microsoft Blog Relations reps like Zonk) simply wish Apple was scared?
I note that integrating wifi into a music player is a really pretty good idea. I also note it isn't what Microsoft's done here. All they seem to have done is create a feeble, heavily restrictive music player equivalent of the DS's "pictochat" feature-- which, as any DS owner will tell you, never, ever, ever winds up getting used. If this incredibly limited player-to-player transfer feature is all the Zune has to differentiate itself from the rest of the crowd of mp3 players right now-- and to judge from the lack of even attempted hype over other features, it apparently is-- Microsoft is in big trouble here.
Games: Playstation 3 launch at risk from giant turtles Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 25, @10:00PM from the could-things-get-any-worse dept.
An anonymous reader writes
On top of Sony's other problems, analysts are now predicting that the Playstation 3 launch may be at risk of attack by Gamera, a radioactive turtle from beyond the dawn of time. From the article: "If Gamera the giant firebreathing space turtle lands on their offices, they'll bit in quite a bit of trouble too, and that's about as likely to happen." I don't think there's any question at this point that Sony is doomed.
Sony is going to have a lot of trouble withstanding an attack from Gamera, as not only does he possess great destructive power, but he is also a friend to all children.
I'm not really interested in which party the presence or absence of e-voting would hurt. I am just primarily interested in the voting process being fair. But:
You claim that what we're seeing here is an unpopular incumbent trying to discourage people from voting at all by waiting until the last minute and then trying to raise questions about the voting process.
So why not just do what the Washington Post reporter suggested and the allegedly unpopular governor appears to be now advocating, and switch to paper ballots for the election? Why can't they do this? Why would this be bad for anybody? How would this benefit the incumbent governor over anyone else?
E3. Peter Moore gave an interview where he said he expected most people would be buying a 360 and a Wii (and observed probably that would cost about the same as a PS3). The next day some Sony bigwig (Phil Harrison?) got all huffy and gave an interview in which he said Peter Moore is wrong, and people would be buying a PS3 and a Wii. It was just a media pissing match, but still it was kind of funny. No, I don't have a link.
Where I live, the official that oversees elections is, themselves, elected.
How is the Maryland election commission selected? It may be too late for sanity to prevail in this election, but how much possibility is there that before or during the next major election, some kind of popular challenge could be engineered to replace the Maryland election commission with people who would oppose and remove e-voting systems*?
* To avoid an unnecessary argument, pretend I'm making some kind of distinction between touchscreen and evoting systems here.
This is very good because as far as I can tell from following the Japanese press conference last night and then the American press conference this morning, the Japanese lineup of launch games is going to be way better than the American!
(Has it even been announced yet whether "Wii Play", the game with duck hunt and pong in it, is coming in America at all? That was probably the most interesting piece of information last night, and I don't think the American coverage even mentioned it.)
XFire is a mature service that users know they can get a quality experience from. This is the first good decision I've seen come out of the Sony management in months and months.
These guys are hardcore gamers, that's not the kind of comment you want from guys that have this much clout.
Of course, having read PA for some time, I seem to pretty clearly remember them strongly endorsing the Sega Dreamcast over the Sony PS2, and later strongly endorsing the Sony PSP over the Nintendo DS.
It doesn't seem to have helped in either of those cases.
Gabe and Tycho are an extremely good barometer of what the "average gamer" thinks-- they speak their mind, they aren't afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and they aren't afraid to change their minds when it's appropriate (witness their reversal on the Nintendo DS, or how they went from mocking the XBox relentlessly when it came out to going in on licensing deals with Microsoft by the time the 360 hit). But I'm not sure they're terribly influential since, after all, most of their "clout" comes from their ability to say exactly what everyone else was already wanting to say. In this case they seem to be reflecting public opinion, not shaping it. I think Gabe and Tycho's comments, in that barometer-of-the-public sense, tell us pretty clearly that Sony is botching the PS3 launch and nobody wants to pay the prices Sony is charging. But we all already knew that, so I don't really think that Sony's PR disaster with the PS3 could possibly get any worse because of this.
Is it possible that a single day pass without more bad news for Sony?
No, it's not possible. Because even if a day passed when nothing bad occured to Sony, The Inquirer and/or Zonk would just make some bad news up and publish that.
Sony dropping clockrates on their product at the last minute would hardly be surprising or out of character-- witness the PSP, whose 333 MHz CPU was quietly underclocked to max out at 222 MHz before release (apparently they just couldn't keep that battery life up?). But do you notice, this Inquirer article offers no source whatsoever? They don't even go to the usual formality of tossing off an "an anonymous source told us...". And I for one am not finding any articles about this clockrate drop anywhere which don't source the Inquirer. Don't you think that's interesting?
You'd think that for an article in which fully half the text is devoted to gramatically questionable ranting about "fanbois" and the author's theories that Sony is attempting to "backstab" him with astroturf "whispering campaigns", the guy could have taken half a sentence to explain where his apparently earth-shattering news about a 50 Mhz clockrate drop came from.
It really sounds to me like they want outside verification, and are willing to pay for it themselves.
Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some. This "jury" thing, on the other hand, is proof they DON'T want outside verification, because the whole thing is clearly designed specifically with the intent of presenting the appearance of allowing outside review of their technology while minimizing or eliminating the chance anyone will actually get a chance to see what it is. Seriously, they're inviting the world to come join a lottery in which the winners get to be told what their invention is after a long dramatic pause of unspecified length while public hype builds? And you think this is a form of public review?
What this "jury" thing actually DOES do is allow them to handpick people to give a dog and pony show to, afterward leave the world still unsure what their supposed invention actually is, and beforehand allow them to generate a gigantic mailing list of people to pitch to later on. The most important element is that "jury" thing allows them to brag-- as they do in a huge box on the front page of their site, as they do in your blockquote-- about the large number of people who have signed up to be on the jury, thus presenting the impression of great public interest in their invention. It's a hype-generating trick, and you have fallen for it hook line and sinker.
And did you not notice this piece of garbage on their website?
During 2005 Steorn embarked on a process of independent validation and approached a wide selection of academic institutions. The vast majority of these institutions refused to even look at the technology, however several did. Those who were prepared to complete testing have all confirmed our claims; however none will publicly go on record.
How can you possibly take seriously someone who writes a paragraph like that? If you look at archive.org you'll see that Steorn didn't even have an active web page in 2005.
Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
Shouldn't THEY let it (the academic verification) take place before they expect us to do anything OTHER than fry them in oil? Seriously, giving these people the time of day makes about as much sense as halting, before you delete your spam, to wonder whether maybe that e-mail really WAS sent by a Nigerian prince. The perpetual motion machine is after all one of the few scams that's been around even longer than the Spanish Prisoner.
Looking around for the source of this disjoint, I find this article:
On Wednesday, George Naccara, security director for the Transportation Security Administration for Massachusetts' airport, had specifically denied she was carrying a screwdriver or any liquids such as Vaseline.
On Thursday, Gail Marcinkiewicz, spokeswoman for the FBI in Boston, confirmed on Thursday that Mayo, a U.S. citizen, was carrying banned items in her carry-on bag, including a screwdriver, an unspecified number of cigarette lighters and matches.
Interesting. Let's see whether they stick to that last story, or if they're saying something different by Friday.
What I see there is a Pakistani woman caught with a water bottle full of "possibly explosive" material. They don't know what the material was yet.
This certainly could be "a terrorist caught with explosives", the conclusion you jump to; given that it was a real possibility, evacuating the airport and investigating further as they have done was of course the appropriate course of action for the time being.
Again, it could be that this woman arrested in West Virginia was part of a real terrorist plot, and it could be that some unhinged lady was inspired by recent media reports about plane bombs to pour lighter fluid in a couple of water bottles and attempt to board a plane. Perhaps there really was a legitimate threat to passenger safety there. I shall be watching the news on this one with interest to find out exactly what happened.
But until we do find out exactly what happened, it seems awfully odd in this case to say "reality has intervened" when in fact what you mean is "partly speculative media reports have intervened".
This really is an amazing launch list. Almost the most amazing thing about it isn't even the number of titles, but just the sheer range of the titles that are there. Basically every single console genre except fighting games, from RPGs to FPSes to platformers to sports to "unclassifiable", has one really standout title and one potentially promising title on that list. That's practically unheard of for a launch. I would personally go so far as to say this is the first good console launch since the Super Nintendo.
(It does make me sad of course that Wario Ware won't be making it for launch, but apparently it's coming before Christmas...)
There's one thing about all this that's so odd though it makes me wonder whether or not this list is for real. Is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles really a launch title? That seems almost impossible to believe. How could this game be coming out in just two or three months when we know almost nothing about it?
TransGaming is already working with several PC game publishers to bring forth Cider-vetted games -- Gupta said a half-dozen new titles are already in the works. The company takes the game, optimizes Cider to work with it and then returns the enhanced game to the publisher for further quality assurance (QA).
"We do our own Quality Assurance and testing," Gupta said. "The publisher will do their own QA to give the game their stamp of approval."
In other words, the big and crucial difference between Cider and Cedega: With Cider, somebody actually tests the game to see whether the darn thing works before it ships...
This sounds pretty awesome. I almost wish, though, that they'd just release Cedega itself for OS X. That way we wouldn't have to trust in developers.
The implications of Cedega as a cross-platform product would be really interesting. Like, something I keep wondering is whether, once they've got DX10 support working on Cedega for Linux, Transgaming could release a Windows version that would enable DX10 [Vista] games to run on Windows XP.
a US and European release shouldn't be far behind. Indeed Opera are promising an update on global rollout next week and we'll convey it just as rapidly as we can.
What we are seeing here is the difference between a democratic government like India (which has things like elected officals eventually accountable to their constituents and thus amenable to influence by public pressure; and an independent judiciary with the power to check the elected officials if they violate the citizenry's fundamental rights), and a state like China.
Democracies can be imperfect; democracies like India can make mistakes, or do things (like this Blog censorship program) which are wrong. But at least in a democracy, there is some kind of mechanism in place that can be used to eventually fix the mistakes and correct the wrongs. China has no mechanisms in place to correct the wrongs of those in power. And so you can wait, but the wrongs are not going to just go away.
Not so fast, it goes the other way too. Separateresearch is taking place in the meantime that involves turning donor cells into egg cells-- which would be the counterpart in fertility procedures to the artificial sperm procedure this article is about, and would also hypothetically make possible the conception of a baby with only males donating the biological material.
When a news article about such research cropped up last year, I saw people on the internet worrying about a science-fiction type scenario where the development could lead to a world devoid of women.
If you'll read the article, you'll see (emphasis mine):
"If we understand this we can treat infertility in men."
In the future, men with fertility problems might be able to have their own stem cells harvested using a simple testicular biopsy, matured in the lab and then transplanted back.
They are using embryonic stem cells because of the benefits that embryonic stem cells offer over other stem cells when doing research. It is clear that once they can get the procedure working with embryonic stem cells in mice, the next step will be to get it working with non-embryonic stem cells.
Slashdot Mirror
I still remember the morning I looked on slashdot and saw the original announcement that SCO was filing copyright claims against Linux. It's amazing how long how this has been going on, and how much has changed since then (and not just what's changed in SCO's ever-shifting claims!-- that first morning I seem to remember most of the discussion was speculation on what exactly it was that SCO claimed was stolen from them. Years later and I still don't think we ever really found out). The start of this case was so long ago it was like an entirely different world. This case has been going on longer than the Iraq war. This started so long ago that at the time Slashdot was still known for hating Microsoft rather than salivating over the XBox.
This in mind, while it's wonderful that the system showed SCO wrong in the end, I have trouble seeing this really as a loss for SCO. They managed to continue their claims for a good five years-- a significant fraction of the lifetime of Linux itself-- without ever showing a whit of substance to those claims. SCO will die now that their case is lost, but they might have died years sooner and possibly poorer if not for this lawsuit gambit keeping them on life support. Microsoft managed to fund this through weird proxies without one single bit of consequences for themselves, and unlike SCO they will live on.
Linux has now weathered its first major court challenge, but the media coverage of Linux's successes in this case has never quite matched up in amount to the withering and credulous coverage of the baseless PR accusations of Darl McBride's heyday-- though we won in the end, the case may well be a net PR loss. Meanwhile, I don't think Linux is as viable as a movement as it was at the beginning of this case. This for all I know has nothing to do with the SCO case itself, but it seems like five years ago people still thought Linux on the desktop had a future, now I don't hear anyone talking about that anymore. Five years ago linux seemed to be going places, whereas now Linux's situation seems largely static, little progressed from where it was five years ago. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't really feel good right now thinking about how this entire debacle has gone.
I guess my main response is kudos to PJ of Groklaw for her amazing and tireless journalism throughout this case. I'd be curious to ask PJ what her plans are as to what she's going to do next. In the short term maybe she should write a book about this entire thing.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to hack the phone to work with other providers and/or wifi.
And when I say "how long", I mean, like, "a day, or will it take as long as a week?"
So it isn't even a phone, exactly. It's a PDA.
Newton, you have come back to us!
Can you record audio to the iPhone thingy's hard drive?
So in other words, they're not open sourcing Java.
Is Apple, in fact, scared of the Zune?
Or do Microsoft (and Microsoft Blog Relations reps like Zonk) simply wish Apple was scared?
I note that integrating wifi into a music player is a really pretty good idea. I also note it isn't what Microsoft's done here. All they seem to have done is create a feeble, heavily restrictive music player equivalent of the DS's "pictochat" feature-- which, as any DS owner will tell you, never, ever, ever winds up getting used. If this incredibly limited player-to-player transfer feature is all the Zune has to differentiate itself from the rest of the crowd of mp3 players right now-- and to judge from the lack of even attempted hype over other features, it apparently is-- Microsoft is in big trouble here.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday September 25, @10:00PM
from the could-things-get-any-worse dept.
An anonymous reader writes
Sony is going to have a lot of trouble withstanding an attack from Gamera, as not only does he possess great destructive power, but he is also a friend to all children.
I'm not really interested in which party the presence or absence of e-voting would hurt. I am just primarily interested in the voting process being fair. But:
You claim that what we're seeing here is an unpopular incumbent trying to discourage people from voting at all by waiting until the last minute and then trying to raise questions about the voting process.
So why not just do what the Washington Post reporter suggested and the allegedly unpopular governor appears to be now advocating, and switch to paper ballots for the election? Why can't they do this? Why would this be bad for anybody? How would this benefit the incumbent governor over anyone else?
E3. Peter Moore gave an interview where he said he expected most people would be buying a 360 and a Wii (and observed probably that would cost about the same as a PS3). The next day some Sony bigwig (Phil Harrison?) got all huffy and gave an interview in which he said Peter Moore is wrong, and people would be buying a PS3 and a Wii. It was just a media pissing match, but still it was kind of funny. No, I don't have a link.
Where I live, the official that oversees elections is, themselves, elected.
How is the Maryland election commission selected? It may be too late for sanity to prevail in this election, but how much possibility is there that before or during the next major election, some kind of popular challenge could be engineered to replace the Maryland election commission with people who would oppose and remove e-voting systems*?
* To avoid an unnecessary argument, pretend I'm making some kind of distinction between touchscreen and evoting systems here.
This is very good because as far as I can tell from following the Japanese press conference last night and then the American press conference this morning, the Japanese lineup of launch games is going to be way better than the American!
(Has it even been announced yet whether "Wii Play", the game with duck hunt and pong in it, is coming in America at all? That was probably the most interesting piece of information last night, and I don't think the American coverage even mentioned it.)
XFire is a mature service that users know they can get a quality experience from. This is the first good decision I've seen come out of the Sony management in months and months.
These guys are hardcore gamers, that's not the kind of comment you want from guys that have this much clout.
Of course, having read PA for some time, I seem to pretty clearly remember them strongly endorsing the Sega Dreamcast over the Sony PS2, and later strongly endorsing the Sony PSP over the Nintendo DS.
It doesn't seem to have helped in either of those cases.
Gabe and Tycho are an extremely good barometer of what the "average gamer" thinks-- they speak their mind, they aren't afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and they aren't afraid to change their minds when it's appropriate (witness their reversal on the Nintendo DS, or how they went from mocking the XBox relentlessly when it came out to going in on licensing deals with Microsoft by the time the 360 hit). But I'm not sure they're terribly influential since, after all, most of their "clout" comes from their ability to say exactly what everyone else was already wanting to say. In this case they seem to be reflecting public opinion, not shaping it. I think Gabe and Tycho's comments, in that barometer-of-the-public sense, tell us pretty clearly that Sony is botching the PS3 launch and nobody wants to pay the prices Sony is charging. But we all already knew that, so I don't really think that Sony's PR disaster with the PS3 could possibly get any worse because of this.
Is it possible that a single day pass without more bad news for Sony?
No, it's not possible. Because even if a day passed when nothing bad occured to Sony, The Inquirer and/or Zonk would just make some bad news up and publish that.
Sony dropping clockrates on their product at the last minute would hardly be surprising or out of character-- witness the PSP, whose 333 MHz CPU was quietly underclocked to max out at 222 MHz before release (apparently they just couldn't keep that battery life up?). But do you notice, this Inquirer article offers no source whatsoever? They don't even go to the usual formality of tossing off an "an anonymous source told us...". And I for one am not finding any articles about this clockrate drop anywhere which don't source the Inquirer. Don't you think that's interesting?
You'd think that for an article in which fully half the text is devoted to gramatically questionable ranting about "fanbois" and the author's theories that Sony is attempting to "backstab" him with astroturf "whispering campaigns", the guy could have taken half a sentence to explain where his apparently earth-shattering news about a 50 Mhz clockrate drop came from.
Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some. This "jury" thing, on the other hand, is proof they DON'T want outside verification, because the whole thing is clearly designed specifically with the intent of presenting the appearance of allowing outside review of their technology while minimizing or eliminating the chance anyone will actually get a chance to see what it is. Seriously, they're inviting the world to come join a lottery in which the winners get to be told what their invention is after a long dramatic pause of unspecified length while public hype builds? And you think this is a form of public review?
What this "jury" thing actually DOES do is allow them to handpick people to give a dog and pony show to, afterward leave the world still unsure what their supposed invention actually is, and beforehand allow them to generate a gigantic mailing list of people to pitch to later on. The most important element is that "jury" thing allows them to brag-- as they do in a huge box on the front page of their site, as they do in your blockquote-- about the large number of people who have signed up to be on the jury, thus presenting the impression of great public interest in their invention. It's a hype-generating trick, and you have fallen for it hook line and sinker.
And did you not notice this piece of garbage on their website?
How can you possibly take seriously someone who writes a paragraph like that? If you look at archive.org you'll see that Steorn didn't even have an active web page in 2005.
Shouldn't we let that take place before we fry them in oil?
Shouldn't THEY let it (the academic verification) take place before they expect us to do anything OTHER than fry them in oil? Seriously, giving these people the time of day makes about as much sense as halting, before you delete your spam, to wonder whether maybe that e-mail really WAS sent by a Nigerian prince. The perpetual motion machine is after all one of the few scams that's been around even longer than the Spanish Prisoner.
Interesting. Let's see whether they stick to that last story, or if they're saying something different by Friday.
What I see there is a Pakistani woman caught with a water bottle full of "possibly explosive" material. They don't know what the material was yet.
This certainly could be "a terrorist caught with explosives", the conclusion you jump to; given that it was a real possibility, evacuating the airport and investigating further as they have done was of course the appropriate course of action for the time being.
But it also seems possible this is a false alarm, similar to this morning when a bomb sniffing dog detected a suspicious container that turned out to be full of completely ordinary rags, or the day before when an "unruly passenger" was widely reported to have "Vaseline, a screw driver, matches and a note referencing al-Qaeda" and then it turned out she had nothing of the kind and was just having some kind of nervous breakdown and peeing in the plane aisles (?), or a couple days before that when three men of Arabic descent were arrested with a bunch of cell phones on suspicion they were going to blow up a bridge but then turned out only to be buying cell phones to resell in Dallas at a profit.
Again, it could be that this woman arrested in West Virginia was part of a real terrorist plot, and it could be that some unhinged lady was inspired by recent media reports about plane bombs to pour lighter fluid in a couple of water bottles and attempt to board a plane. Perhaps there really was a legitimate threat to passenger safety there. I shall be watching the news on this one with interest to find out exactly what happened.
But until we do find out exactly what happened, it seems awfully odd in this case to say "reality has intervened" when in fact what you mean is "partly speculative media reports have intervened".
This really is an amazing launch list. Almost the most amazing thing about it isn't even the number of titles, but just the sheer range of the titles that are there. Basically every single console genre except fighting games, from RPGs to FPSes to platformers to sports to "unclassifiable", has one really standout title and one potentially promising title on that list. That's practically unheard of for a launch. I would personally go so far as to say this is the first good console launch since the Super Nintendo.
(It does make me sad of course that Wario Ware won't be making it for launch, but apparently it's coming before Christmas...)
There's one thing about all this that's so odd though it makes me wonder whether or not this list is for real. Is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles really a launch title? That seems almost impossible to believe. How could this game be coming out in just two or three months when we know almost nothing about it?
This sounds pretty awesome. I almost wish, though, that they'd just release Cedega itself for OS X. That way we wouldn't have to trust in developers.
The implications of Cedega as a cross-platform product would be really interesting. Like, something I keep wondering is whether, once they've got DX10 support working on Cedega for Linux, Transgaming could release a Windows version that would enable DX10 [Vista] games to run on Windows XP.
Awesome.
What we are seeing here is the difference between a democratic government like India (which has things like elected officals eventually accountable to their constituents and thus amenable to influence by public pressure; and an independent judiciary with the power to check the elected officials if they violate the citizenry's fundamental rights), and a state like China.
Democracies can be imperfect; democracies like India can make mistakes, or do things (like this Blog censorship program) which are wrong. But at least in a democracy, there is some kind of mechanism in place that can be used to eventually fix the mistakes and correct the wrongs. China has no mechanisms in place to correct the wrongs of those in power. And so you can wait, but the wrongs are not going to just go away.
Why not just buy the Street Fighter Collection for 10 bucks at Toys R Us?
Because the XBox 360's "partial" backward compatibility feature doesn't support it.
Gotcha!
Not so fast, it goes the other way too. Separate research is taking place in the meantime that involves turning donor cells into egg cells-- which would be the counterpart in fertility procedures to the artificial sperm procedure this article is about, and would also hypothetically make possible the conception of a baby with only males donating the biological material.
When a news article about such research cropped up last year, I saw people on the internet worrying about a science-fiction type scenario where the development could lead to a world devoid of women.
People get really paranoid about science...
They are using embryonic stem cells because of the benefits that embryonic stem cells offer over other stem cells when doing research. It is clear that once they can get the procedure working with embryonic stem cells in mice, the next step will be to get it working with non-embryonic stem cells.