We've just been through the process too, in California.
We both signed a contract to say what should happen to leftover frozen embryos in various situations, including if we were to break up. We chose to donate them for research in all cases. Other options included donating them to other couples, or having them destroyed.
I'd assumed this sort of contract was standard practice, if only to protect the embryo storage company from this sort of dispute, let alone the patients. Apparently not.
What is interesting now is that we understand these grey-area things well enough ALMOST to be able to simulate them, or to build them from scratch.
Are these simulations/clones as alive as what we copied them from?
Strategy is a requirement too far for me. It implies purpose, will, consciousness and then you're in deep water. Some things just work and some just don't, or we wouldn't have so many extinctions.
Not only hard drives. Many electronic devices will have problems in thinner air because their cooling systems are less effective, and we all know how much notebooks rely on active cooling...
At least one device I own (my projection TV) has a high altitude setting to adjust for this: it dims the lamp and runs the fans more aggressively. (Although I'm not sure why it can't sense when the normal cooling isn't working and adjust accordingly).
Graphics and sound cards work well because they are almost purely output devices: mostly, you throw stuff at them and forget about it. Physics and AI are another matter entirely: very tightly coupled to game code. Round-trip latency even on a fast bus like PCI-E will kill you on such fine-grained calculations.
Reports I've heard of PhysX's performance bear this out: up to an order of magnitude SLOWER than CPU-based Havok when performing real-world (OK, real-game) physics. I don't expect this device to do any better for AI.
... just another drop in the ocean of the PS3's bad publicity.
The practical problem is that with the launch titles finalling soon, the developers, who have only had the final hardware specs for a few weeks themselves, are now having to put extra effort to optimization - effort that they'd much rather spend on other things.
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We've just been through the process too, in California.
We both signed a contract to say what should happen to leftover frozen embryos in various situations, including if we were to break up. We chose to donate them for research in all cases. Other options included donating them to other couples, or having them destroyed.
I'd assumed this sort of contract was standard practice, if only to protect the embryo storage company from this sort of dispute, let alone the patients. Apparently not.
If they're using a standard CD key format then no guessing is needed. The final digit is a checksum of the others.
Otherwise it would be possible to hide it with a screenshot and some wallpaper shoppery.
What is interesting now is that we understand these grey-area things well enough ALMOST to be able to simulate them, or to build them from scratch.
Are these simulations/clones as alive as what we copied them from?
Strategy is a requirement too far for me. It implies purpose, will, consciousness and then you're in deep water. Some things just work and some just don't, or we wouldn't have so many extinctions.
I suppose the Malaria parasite is not alive either.
Not only hard drives. Many electronic devices will have problems in thinner air because their cooling systems are less effective, and we all know how much notebooks rely on active cooling... At least one device I own (my projection TV) has a high altitude setting to adjust for this: it dims the lamp and runs the fans more aggressively. (Although I'm not sure why it can't sense when the normal cooling isn't working and adjust accordingly).
Graphics and sound cards work well because they are almost purely output devices: mostly, you throw stuff at them and forget about it. Physics and AI are another matter entirely: very tightly coupled to game code. Round-trip latency even on a fast bus like PCI-E will kill you on such fine-grained calculations. Reports I've heard of PhysX's performance bear this out: up to an order of magnitude SLOWER than CPU-based Havok when performing real-world (OK, real-game) physics. I don't expect this device to do any better for AI.
... just another drop in the ocean of the PS3's bad publicity. The practical problem is that with the launch titles finalling soon, the developers, who have only had the final hardware specs for a few weeks themselves, are now having to put extra effort to optimization - effort that they'd much rather spend on other things.
MediUM! "Music industry legal specialist" indeed...