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Comment Re:E-mail is Preferable, it can be Filtered (Score 2, Funny) 251

i disagree, with postal spam at least if they provide a pre-paid return envelope i have the satisfaction of putting everything they sent me in that envelope, along w/ a few rusty washers (to add weight), and maybe a sunday paper glossy ad or two (more weight, and thickness) and sending it back to them on their dime.

Obligatory bash.org anecdote:

#127039 +(10530)- [X]
[wolf] 1. Save every Free Credit Card Offer you get, Put it in pile A
[wolf] 2. Save every Free Coupon You get, put that in pile B
[wolf] 3. Now open the credit card mail from pile A and find the Business Reply Mail Envelope.
[wolf] 4. Take the coupons from pile B and stuff them in the envelope you hold in your hand.
[wolf] 5. Drop the stuffed to the brim envelopes in your mail and walk away whistling.
[wolf] I have now received two phone calls from the credit card companies telling me that they received a stuffed envelope with coupons rather then my application. They informed me that it they are not pleased that they footed the bill for the crap I sent them. I reply with "It says Business Reply Mail" I'm suggesting coupons to you to ensure that your business is more successful. They promptly hang up on me.
[wolf] Now, I did this for about a month before it got boring, so I got an added idea! I added exactly 33 cents worth of pennies to the envelope so they paid EXTRA due to the weight. I got a call informing me about the money, I said it was a mistake and I demanded my change back. After yelling at the clerk and then to the supervisor they agreed to my demands and cut me a check for the money. I hold in my hand at this very moment a check from GTE Visa for exactly 33 cents.

Comment Re:DS/Wii Integration (Score 1) 61

The Gamecube did this with Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. Unfortunately, the implementation was fairly asinine. You could play the game in single player mode using just a regular game cube controller, but doing multiplayer required you to use Gameboys (Advanced or SP) attached with a proprietary cable as the controllers. Essentially this meant that unless you already had a few gameboys sitting around and had money for the cables ($25 each at the time IIRC, though they've undoubtedly dropped in price since then), multiplayer was a decidedly cost prohibitive endeavor. Another problem was that character levels were not normalized. The enemies you fought came in at the same level as your highest level character, which functionally meant that you either played together as a party, or someone ended up getting left behind. Add in a small but noticeable delay in synching each gameboy with the gamecube, and the experience was more frustrating than fun.

From wikipedia:

The game was noted in IGN for its Phantasy Star Online-like multiplayer cooperative play, but the use of the Game Boy Advance, while innovative, was thought to be detrimental to the gameplay.

Moral of the story: things tend to function much better in theory than they do in practice.

Comment Re:Glad to see.. (Score 1) 1188

So what about tourists taking photos on vacation? Do they have the right to take photos of interesting buildings?

Depends on the Building in question. For instance, night time photos of the Eiffel Tower are under copyright. From Wikipedia:

Images of the tower have long been in the public domain; however, in 2003 SNTE (Société nouvelle d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) installed a new lighting display on the tower. The effect was to put any night-time image of the tower and its lighting display under copyright. As a result, it was no longer legal to publish contemporary photographs of the tower at night without permission in some countries.

Comment Helped me in Entomology class. (Score 1) 205

Had a similar experience back in college. I was playing about 2 hours a day of UT2k4 with instagib activated and fencing (the kind with swords) for 4 hours a week. My reflexes were noticeably faster than my compatriots, and I had a much easier time picking out and recognizing small details. The place that it was most apparent was actually in my entomology class when we had to go out and collect insects. I had an easier time acquiring specimens simply because I noticed them when others didn't. The faster reflexes also helped me catch some of the more evasive ones. So yeah, if ya ever take an entomology class, the videogames do help.

Comment Re:There is a way to beat the HIV virus (Score 2, Informative) 136

I'm not a virologist either, but I have taken classes in the subject (some time ago, so don't take what I say as doctrine or anything). The idea of a competing virus does have some merit. IIRC, research was done on the topic with ex vivo models, but I don't think it ever made its way to animal subject or human trials.

For this to work, you'd ideally want a virus which used the same antigen for cellular entry (gp120, CD40 ligand); this keeps your virus to the same cells that are susceptible to HIV, limiting your spread within the organism. As for an anti-HIV payload, you'd probably want to try siRNA transcripts targeted against HIV's Reverse Transcriptase or coat proteins. It would be fairly trivial to engineer your own virus to avoid the siRNAs. Select your upstream promoters very carefully and you can control the spread of your engineered virus to some extent.

What you end up getting is a way to regulate how much HIV spreads within the organism. This *would not* prevent infection with HIV, but it theoretically *could* prevent AIDS. Making it work really depends on the specificity of the siRNAs and the choice of promoters/regulatory elements in your virus' design (antibody-activated promoters are a good idea).

But like I said, it's been a while since my virology and recombinant DNA tech classes, so I'm sure there's plenty of necessary details that I'm leaving out.

Comment Re:What happens when modified sampes go out (Score 1) 124

The chance of it surviving in the wild is a fairly remote possibility. All the extra genes and modified genes create an extra metabolic payload that puts this strain at a disadvantage compared to the wild strains. It is possible that the sugars liberated by these extra enzymes may be enough to overcome the difference, but it's unlikely. Additionally, (and I haven't RTFA) normally when genes are modified/added to an organism, the vector that carries them also carries the genetic switch to turn certain genes on and off. For instance, it may only produce the worrisome enzyme when in the presence of a certain antibiotic like ampicillin. In wild conditions such a trigger would be absent, and the enzymes wouldn't be produced anyway. Furthermore, most bacteria used in bioreactors only thrive within a certain temperature range. Since these ones appear to be derived from a wild strain in the Chesapeake bay, this may not be the case, but it really depends on the genetic tinkering that was done (mostly if the genes were taken and put into a new host strain or if the original host is still used).

Aside from that, it comes down to what I vaguely recall from my ecology classes; the rule of 10%. Basically (again, going from memory here, so I may be totally off), if you take a species and put it in a new environment, there's a 10% chance it will survive. Of those that survive, there's a 10% chance that a breeding population will become established. 10% of the breeding populations will become problematic. All in all, I'm not really worried.

Comment Re:Lack of foresight much? (Score 1) 596

Can the monitor you're working on right now even display a 12MP image(4000x3000)? Sure there will be higher and higher pixel counts available, but at some point they're simply superfluous outside of specialist niches.

Rather than a computer analogy, here's a car one. The speed your car travels is highly dependent on external factors. Legal issues aside, there aren't many circumstances in a typical daily commute that really warrant speeds in excess of 100mph. Road conditions and the need for safety start to impose diminishing returns on increases in speed. So why do you go after a car with an LS9 (6.2L supercharged V8) under the hood when a B16 (common 4 cylinder Honda engine) is more than sufficient for 99% of your needs?

Right now, 12MP is more than sufficient for a typical consumer - in fact, it's arguably excessive already. Their displays can't handle images at that resolution, storage media and inbox space fill up too quickly, and all that excess resolution is mostly noise anyway (joe average doesn't understand iso settings). Granted, niche areas exist where higher resolutions are necessary (in the analogy they'd be drag racers), but diminishing returns set in at some point and the typical consumer will be much better served by something simpler.

Comment Re:Energy Independence (Score 2, Interesting) 438

Momofuku Ando, the guy who invented ramen noodles thought something similar: "Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat."

The problem is, as you provide for peoples' needs, they start to bicker about pettier and pettier things. For instance, look at the violence that breaks out between fans of opposing sport teams.

Comment Re:Authenticity (Score 1) 437

Are photographers real artists? An artist with a brush creates real art; a photographer merely finds it lying around.

Seriously tho, The camera is a tool, just as photoshop and gimp are tools. Some artists know how to use a tool well, others don't. People who know and appreciate art are quickly able to separate the real artists from the filter-happy pretenders. Just as the real audiophiles will quickly be able to distinguish between a great musical performance and over-compressed auto-tuned garbage.

Comment Re:Telomeres (Score 2, Insightful) 67

I'm not a biologist, but wouldn't this shorten your life span?

I remember reading about Telomeres and how they shorten as you age (and this is why you age).

Would this accelerated growth/generation cause these to shorten at a more rapid pace?

Short answer: probably not. Telomere shortening does occur, and it does limit the number of divisions that certain cells can undergo. However, as I understand it, it's not the primary cause of aging symptoms. In fact, the lengthening of telomeres is associated with many kinds of cancer - not eternal youth. One gene that may be at least partially responsible for aging is Klotho. Experiments have been done in mice doing both knockdown expression and upregulation of the gene. Also, this is the gene that was making Snake age prematurely in MGS4.

Comment Re:Maybe I am just lucky.... (Score 3, Interesting) 688

Do what half of my graduating cohort is doing: go back to school for a PhD. You'll have all of your federal loans put back in forbearance and your living expenses covered by a stipend. It's not the glamorous high-paying job you dreamed about, but it'll give you a safe haven while this financial storm blows over. Better yet, you'll be even more competitive for jobs, and able to demand a higher salary a few years from now (in theory at least).

Comment Re:I wouldn't hold my breath (Score 5, Insightful) 1367

But you don't speak about the abyss of drug addiction, the income-sapping expense, the parents of kids that forget parenting while doing drugs, the accidents on the freeway, the madness of things like meth addiction and its incredible debilitating affects on the body.

all of which can also be said of legal drugs such as alcohol.

Comment Re:Question (Score 2, Interesting) 216

What we know is that Media Sentry used very shaky methods to insinuate that some people committed copyright infringement. Then they used this incredibly shaky evidence to cajole the courts into doing their work for them. This is wrong. Very wrong.

While I completely agree that their methods are abhorrent, I'm left wondering what legal means the RIAA had of pursuing their case. The fact is that wanton copyright infringement is occurring. As copyright holders, the RIAA does in fact have the right to go after the infringers. Their methods under the guise of Media Sentry are obviously less than ideal (both morally and legally), so what *should* they have done? Getting a PI license is obvious, but the evidence gained this way is still shaky. Getting warrants for each and every individual infringer? Probably, but as I understand it, the evidence necessary to justify a warrant needs to be a little more significant than just a name attached to an IP address. I suppose they could pay ISPs to monitor their traffic and get the same results they did with Media Sentry, but can ISPs legally monitor their own traffic that way (and report the results to a third party)?

I'm not trying to be an RIAA apologist. I'm just wondering if there's any course of action they could taken whereby their IP was protected and they weren't demonized by all of us.

Comment Re:Just what we needed.. (Score 2, Insightful) 256

Agreed. It irks me to no end when people do this while driving.
 
  In fact, I deal with it daily on my commute home. There's a section of road where the two lanes merge into one, with the right lane ending. I cannot count the number of times that I've seen someone rushing along in the right lane trying to get as far ahead as they can before they're *forced* to merge (by which I mean they try and force the people in the left lane to let them in).
 
There are *plenty* of signs warning that the right lane ends, merge left. They're just under the delusion that somehow they don't have to merge until the very lsat possible moment; and furthermore, that it's the *responsibility* of those patient saints in the left lane to *let* them cut in.
 
I make a point of not letting them cut in front of me. I'm legally entitled to the area of space my vehicle ocupies (plus a buffer zone in front and behind sufficiently large to prevent fender benders no less). Yet these cheats are *demanding* (with screams and threatening gestures at times) that I *sacrifice my rights* for their momentary convenience.
 
  Perhaps I'm over-reacting, but to Hell with them.
 
  And yeah, I'll be leaving work in a few minutes, and I'm really not looking forward to the drive home.

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