You still have the right to opt out of vaccinations, so that isn't an issue.
Yes, children in the ASD spectrum should generally avoid anything with mercury in it (e.g. thimerosal), since their bodies usually doesn't excrete mercury properly, making the safe exposure levels for them a lot lower than for regular people (who *do* excrete it). If your child doesn't have any ASD spectrum condition, you can do tests for the deficiency that causes this problem. Of course, it'll still be a risk-benefit tradeoff, but I could probably support the notion of not giving it to a kid with diagnosed or suspected ASD spectrum disorders or a family history of such.
However, thimerosal as a *cause* of ASD is on shaky grounds. The only study that I know of which demonstrates a (weak) link is a paradoxical one in Japan, where they switched a combination vaccine to three seperate vaccines in order to theoretically reduce the incidence of ASDs. There was a modest increase in the occurence of *diagnosed* autism, which *might* be linked to an increase in *net* exposure to thimerosal; while taking three seperate vaccines reduces the exposure in a single setting, the susceptible kids would not be excreting it, so the total amount would be higher.
The evidence points to mercury as having detrimental effects on ASD kids, leading to a worsening of their condition and hence an increased likelyhood of diagnosis. It does not seem to have any role at all in causing it in the first place.
In short, if your kid doesn't have any ASD conditions, they should be receiving this vaccine, both to maintain the general immunization level of the population (very high compliance levels are required to get the real benefit of public vaccination: eradication) and to reduce their own chance of dying from a preventable disease. If they *do* have an ASD condition, talk it over with an expert and do the risk-benefit math.. for a boy or an asexual girl, it might not be worth it.
I'm going to RTFA for this, but why is the article just saying "whoa, a turing award recipient didn't have the Y-chromosome", and not saying *what* she got it for? If her work is so noteworthy as to be deserving of the Turing award, isn't it worth a mention on Slashdot? The real story isn't just that a woman got it, for once, but also what she got it for.
Most, if not all, articles where men get some award, the focus tends to be the work they did, not the fact that they have an extra appendage dangling between their legs...
I'd say you can't really "cure" autism spectrum disorders.
You may find a cure for some of the problems associated with it.
But the mental makeup of most people with ASDs is unique, and most wouldn't want to give up who they are to become a new person, even if that person had less difficulties.
Better to die as yourself, than to live as someone else.
Aspies tend toward the stereotypic INTP/INTJ personality, although this is not universal.
This does not mean that INTP/INTJ equates to being a low-grade aspie.
Yes, I subscribe to the neurodiversity point of view, but still see aspies as being sufficiently different, both qualitatively and quantitatively, as to be "a breed apart", whether you frame that in a positive or negative light.
Also, there are a huge number of comorbidities that are typically seen, and the lifetime prevalence of death by suicide is high.
While it is true that the higher incidence of autism spectrum disorders in the children of engineers, as well as a higher prevalence of the disorders in areas like Silicon Valley, this does not fully support your statement.
First off, the higher rate of diagnosis in areas like S.V. does not itself guarantee a higher incidence, as it could be explained by a heightened awareness and more openness in regards to seeking psychiatric help.
Second, the presence of a genetic factor has been strongly suggested, although it is not confined to a single gene. Certain of the observable behaviours and thought patterns are learnable, and will be fostered in a CS setting.
Third, I know a fair number of techs that are certainly geeks that could be construed to have some light degree of such disorders by someone only familiar with the diagnostic criterion. They do not qualify for such diagnosis, and I find them quantitatively and *qualitatively* different from what one observes with autism spectrum disorders.
Fourth, there are observable differences with SPECT imaging, etc. that would show up in controls if this were the case, but they don't.
Noone here has mentioned a really serious case yet.
There is a point where you tip over from "variant normal" to a pathological condition. That point is the onset of diagnosis, and the start of the "scale" of autism spectrum disorders.
The self diagnosed geeks don't get to the start of this scale, usually, and you don't want to know how ugly it gets on the far end of that scale.
You mean to say there are actually non-bitter geeks out there?:P
Anyway.
Get a fucking clue.
The poster is lowid. She's probably been on slashdot for ages longer than you have. Back when it was a place for the "real" geeks. When the articles had content, and meaningful discussion followed.
What, you didn't realize geek girls could have children too?
Actually, while severe forms will be more of an issue than the less severe forms, I think you underestimate the problems faced with less severe forms.
Yes, it's mostly the high-functioning types that participate online, among other things because they have the necessary faculties.
However, I'd suspect the main reason why they don't talk a lot about it, is that it's really painful stuff, and really private. I don't know about you, but I don't generally like to discuss stuff that even thinking about will bring me to tears.
And, finally, the others there *know* what the problems are like. People prefer to communicate in a positive, gainful manner, rather than spending all their time on discussing what the shitty stuff is like. That way lies nothing but despair.
My gf is an aspie, and I too find it fairly offensive the way some people think their "autistic" traits even rank compared to the fullblown thing.
A lot of these people are just typical INTP/INTJ-type neurotypicals.
Inconsolable screaming fits because the bus gets rescheduled or has a flat tire, tearing yourself up (physically, not metaphorically) over a holiday not following the exact pattern it should, etc.. I suspect a lot of these self-diagnosed "aspies" would write off a lot of real aspies as "plain insane" if they saw them on a bad day, and would certainly not cope with actually living with one, let alone trying to help them cope.
I've spent the past 8 years trying to impart coping skills, as well as acting as a buffer for the trauma of everyday life.
In this time, I've seen amazing progress, some of which I would never have thought possible. But to a person who haven't seen her in the past, there's no way they'll have *any* idea the amount of literally blood, sweat and tears that both of us have put into getting this far.
Hint: the stress of dealing with the issues for a few weeks (while I was ill) was sufficient to give one person an infarct, along with what is known as a brief reactive psychosis..
There's a distinct difference between the normal oddities of geekdom and the frequently pathological ones in PDD disorders like autism.
The four things you pointed out are pretty secondary to the core symptoms, and based on what you say, you have some ability to cope with them.
It would appear to me that you have no idea of the amount of coping skills many autistic people needs just to make it through the day. It has nothing to do with "comfortable".
Quite a number of these compounds are probably effective.
But then there's the question of safety, short-term and long-term, effective administration, cost effective production, etc..
And then there's the extensive clinical trials that have to be conducted, approval processes, etc., as well as the patent issues.
It takes years for something to go from discovery to clinical trials, and then years more to go from trials to availability. Business as usual, and much of it for a good reason.
There's probably a few effective, safe drugs in the pipeline that *will* materialize, but it may take years to decades before they are available.
And cost may still prevent this from being interesting. I mean, if you have a treatment resistant bacterial infection, it *is* possible to extract the bacteria, sequence them, and engineer a bacteriophage that is then injected into your bloodstream. This kills the infection. But it isn't generally done, as it costs too much. ISTR this is being offered in Russia, but at some pretty extreme prices, since it's all time-and-resource-intensive manual work in the lab.
If you can pay to have a medical research facility at your disposal, working on curing you, chances are they will be able to deal with a lot of things that would ordinarily have been incurable or even untreatable. But it isn't cost effective, and they don't make as much money from it as they would from developing generic treatments for the masses, so it just isn't done very often.
As a morally deficient citizen, I'd love to see this happen, as I can get my own chip removed, and extract yours after killing you. That way, I just wave my hand, and poof, I have purchased my products on your account, without having to obtain your PIN or anything, and you won't be closing it any time soon.
Of course, I'd keep my own chip around, just in case I'd like to wear my own (old) identity for a while. Or maybe just obtain a rewritable chip. In fact, I might go so far as to use your money to purchase what I need to clone a ton of these, so I have a few to choose from and don't have to go around killing *more* people (and hence increasing the duration of potential jail time: of course your murder was second degree, or even self defense, I can plan this for a while, you know. Money enough to warrant that.)
As a US-hating terrorist, I'd of course set up improvised explosive devices in various places you and other tourists would be likely to visit, or if your armed forces become a hassle, I might use directional antennae for this, so I could shape the charge to deal with those pesky armored cars, without great risk to my own civiliam population.
Apart from that, there's also the social hygiene aspect. You may have nothing to fear right now.. and I'm not saying you do. However, is it really the brightest idea to leave a mechanism in place that is virtually *ideal* for arresting citizens under unjust laws (e.g. preventative arrests, or hint-hint copyright infringement). Said mechanism is also ideal for tracking political dissidents or other undesireables *if* you should ever end up with a fascist regime or a dictator or such.
One final point. Elections. If diebold had a political agenda, they could certainly collect RFID information along with the vote, allowing further subversion of your "democracy". And there is a minor matter of people deciding "convenient" elections would be better, and politicians that may "give in" to what they'd love to have: the means to track voters.
Even if you generate these at an enormous rate, you'll still end up gobbling up a few protons a year. Heat death of the universe will be an issue before those micro black holes are. Remember that black holes' anomalous effects at close range are due to the *density* of the matter, while the long-range effects are based on their total mass. As for the former, "close range" for a micro black hole is such that one would most likely pass through the earth without a single particle coming within range on the way. As to the latter, the total mass of a micro black hole is so insignificant as to have no meaningful impact on *anything*.
Interestingly, there are some theories that have proposed that a micro black hole might behave as a fundamental particle, since it would be completely described by its spin, charge and mass, one even going so far as to suggest electrons might *be* black holes.
Not quite correct. There have been countersanctions. Effective ones.
As I recall, there was an instance a little while ago where the US wanted to implement a toll or something on a particular kind of import from Europe, as a kind of protectionism.
So, WTO basically said "we can't really do anything about this, but you're free to implement sanctions in response".
Then the EU looked at the election charts, identified the states where the election might tip the other way, found what their main exports were (steel, I think), and threatened to implement an import ban on these goods. Something which would cost a whole bunch of people their jobs in the affected areas, quite possibly leading to Bush losing the reelection.
Not all places have as bad statistics in this regard as the one where you live:)
My reasoning is, if they're going to kill you, it'll be a lot less hassle for them to kill you first and then remove your finger afterwards. Especially considering they may have the element of surprise before you know their intent, which they will lose once they've asked for the finger or hand.
If they try to kill you up front, you try to get away / defend yourself, as appropriate to the situation. Same thing if they try afterwards; the amputation may even make this easier (if your survival instinct kicks in), as losing a finger will prompt an endorphin-adrenalin rush and losing a hand gives you two very sharp exposed bones that will easily penetrate the human body (at the cost of additional damage to the stump). Plus, more importantly, you're a lot less likely to hold back, consciously or subconsciously.
If they don't try to kill you at first, give them what they want, but keep an eye open in case they change their mind about killing you. Of course, if you *have* an opening to shut them down without aggravating the risk to yourself, by all means do so.
As a general rule, the assailant who is willing to do this will have more experience in combat than the average Joe/Jane, making it (IMHO) poor advice for the general, untrained population to engage them in combat before/unless there is an apparent, high risk of a lethal outcome even when complying. This is one of the reasons I try to keep my self-defence skills up-to-date: to improve the odds of survival if things should go badly in an encounter.
There is a mental step between chopping someone's hand or finger off and killing them that should not be underestimated, although I agree that it may be more likely that they'll kill you first.
Of course, if they start out by trying to kill you, the reasonable response is to stop them from doing so. Permanently, and by any means available.
Considering how regular people all over the world want to reduce the burden of proof every time something happens that infuriates them, it is not out of human character for Frith to want to do this. Part of the role of governments, particularly their legal systems, is to elevate themselves to a rational standard, rather than allowing the irrationality of the masses to "regulate" society.
People just want to find someone to blame when something goes wrong, and will seize on the first candidate that comes along, so that they can go back to "normal" and ignore the problem.
There is no drive for justice, no need for careful thought, and certainly no regard for truth.
If you've never had any big hassles in your life, your threshold for considering something a crisis will be lower than for people who have had hassles.
This is a recurring problem with serious illness (physical and/or mental), in that it's easy to feel like you're on a different planet than the people you're talking to who have been luckier (so far). Kind of the same thing as coming back from a war. You can't relate. People are experiencing their definition of a crisis over something like missing out on their vacation due to not getting their bonus that year, and you just disconnect.
When you've had several congestive heart failures in a short period of time (physical illness example), been physically stopped from taking your own life to end your pain (mental illness example) or tried to find a way to carry a wounded friend back to the base and a slim chance of recovery without dropping his/her guts on the way (war example), these comparatively little things don't seem to matter as much, and you have problems dealing with people, e.g. effectively reduced empathy with their situation.
Similarly, when you've been picking up body parts of family members (natural disaster example) or eating another human being (famine example), quite a number of things that other people consider problems, or even crises, seem like a positive situation, although not perfect (nothing here is).
One might argue that the logical conclusion of this patent is one of the following:
a) The patent is void. Boring conclusion. b) One can successfully patent other parts of the human biology and demand to be compensated for other people being alive. Or even patent stuff that only occurs in people without a certain disability, and use it as a kind of disabilities-group tax. Either way, too absurd to stand up in court, otherwise I'll patent the interaction of these systems:P c) The patent is valid, but does not apply to biological mechanisms.
The last one is kind of interesting, as it would make it possible to patent means by which some new biological mechanism could be introduced into an organism, but maybe not possible to enforce patents on other things when they are integrated in such a way.
The net difference in caloric intake is probably negligible. A lot of energy gets burnt on stand-by anyway, and the question is more one of whether the wasted energy of your movement is heating of the fabric etc or electricity.
10.000 times more efficient == 10.000 times less inefficiency.
If you start out with an 80% effective process, you have 20% inefficiency. Reduce that by four orders of magnitude, and you have 0.002% inefficiency, for a net total of 19.998% increase in efficiency.
Solar cells are directly comparable, as they absorb energy that would otherwise have heated the surface they would have struck, converting it into electricity.
Nuclear reactors free energy by breaking up atoms in a self-sustaining way and converting the heat to electricity through turbines, the latter process being directly comparable.
You're just converting one form of energy into another. Whether its original source is the food you eat or your corpse compressed to oil just doesn't matter. These convert some of the energy in your bending and shuffling of the material into a more useful form, rather than letting it dissipate.
If someone's actually willing to chop of your finger or hand, are you really going to give them a hassle about it?
I mean, come on, what do you think your subjective evaluation of their willingness to go further would be in that situation?
Especially given how they're not likely to be stupid enough to try something like that without a weapon to threaten you with, or multiple assailants at the same time. Just consider the fact that they're going to have to bring something to actually get it off with. At the very least a knife or a pair of pliers. The former will cut or stab, the latter will stab or bludgeon. And at this point, they thus have a weapon out either way, and you don't: otherwise, they wouldn't be discussing the amputation, now, would they?
Slashdot Mirror
You still have the right to opt out of vaccinations, so that isn't an issue.
Yes, children in the ASD spectrum should generally avoid anything with mercury in it (e.g. thimerosal), since their bodies usually doesn't excrete mercury properly, making the safe exposure levels for them a lot lower than for regular people (who *do* excrete it). If your child doesn't have any ASD spectrum condition, you can do tests for the deficiency that causes this problem. Of course, it'll still be a risk-benefit tradeoff, but I could probably support the notion of not giving it to a kid with diagnosed or suspected ASD spectrum disorders or a family history of such.
However, thimerosal as a *cause* of ASD is on shaky grounds. The only study that I know of which demonstrates a (weak) link is a paradoxical one in Japan, where they switched a combination vaccine to three seperate vaccines in order to theoretically reduce the incidence of ASDs. There was a modest increase in the occurence of *diagnosed* autism, which *might* be linked to an increase in *net* exposure to thimerosal; while taking three seperate vaccines reduces the exposure in a single setting, the susceptible kids would not be excreting it, so the total amount would be higher.
The evidence points to mercury as having detrimental effects on ASD kids, leading to a worsening of their condition and hence an increased likelyhood of diagnosis. It does not seem to have any role at all in causing it in the first place.
In short, if your kid doesn't have any ASD conditions, they should be receiving this vaccine, both to maintain the general immunization level of the population (very high compliance levels are required to get the real benefit of public vaccination: eradication) and to reduce their own chance of dying from a preventable disease. If they *do* have an ASD condition, talk it over with an expert and do the risk-benefit math.. for a boy or an asexual girl, it might not be worth it.
I'm going to RTFA for this, but why is the article just saying "whoa, a turing award recipient didn't have the Y-chromosome", and not saying *what* she got it for? If her work is so noteworthy as to be deserving of the Turing award, isn't it worth a mention on Slashdot? The real story isn't just that a woman got it, for once, but also what she got it for.
Most, if not all, articles where men get some award, the focus tends to be the work they did, not the fact that they have an extra appendage dangling between their legs...
I'd say you can't really "cure" autism spectrum disorders.
You may find a cure for some of the problems associated with it.
But the mental makeup of most people with ASDs is unique, and most wouldn't want to give up who they are to become a new person, even if that person had less difficulties.
Better to die as yourself, than to live as someone else.
Aspies tend toward the stereotypic INTP/INTJ personality, although this is not universal.
This does not mean that INTP/INTJ equates to being a low-grade aspie.
Yes, I subscribe to the neurodiversity point of view, but still see aspies as being sufficiently different, both qualitatively and quantitatively, as to be "a breed apart", whether you frame that in a positive or negative light.
Also, there are a huge number of comorbidities that are typically seen, and the lifetime prevalence of death by suicide is high.
While it is true that the higher incidence of autism spectrum disorders in the children of engineers, as well as a higher prevalence of the disorders in areas like Silicon Valley, this does not fully support your statement.
First off, the higher rate of diagnosis in areas like S.V. does not itself guarantee a higher incidence, as it could be explained by a heightened awareness and more openness in regards to seeking psychiatric help.
Second, the presence of a genetic factor has been strongly suggested, although it is not confined to a single gene. Certain of the observable behaviours and thought patterns are learnable, and will be fostered in a CS setting.
Third, I know a fair number of techs that are certainly geeks that could be construed to have some light degree of such disorders by someone only familiar with the diagnostic criterion. They do not qualify for such diagnosis, and I find them quantitatively and *qualitatively* different from what one observes with autism spectrum disorders.
Fourth, there are observable differences with SPECT imaging, etc. that would show up in controls if this were the case, but they don't.
Noone here has mentioned a really serious case yet.
There is a point where you tip over from "variant normal" to a pathological condition. That point is the onset of diagnosis, and the start of the "scale" of autism spectrum disorders.
The self diagnosed geeks don't get to the start of this scale, usually, and you don't want to know how ugly it gets on the far end of that scale.
You mean to say there are actually non-bitter geeks out there? :P
Anyway.
Get a fucking clue.
The poster is lowid. She's probably been on slashdot for ages longer than you have. Back when it was a place for the "real" geeks. When the articles had content, and meaningful discussion followed.
What, you didn't realize geek girls could have children too?
Actually, while severe forms will be more of an issue than the less severe forms, I think you underestimate the problems faced with less severe forms.
Yes, it's mostly the high-functioning types that participate online, among other things because they have the necessary faculties.
However, I'd suspect the main reason why they don't talk a lot about it, is that it's really painful stuff, and really private. I don't know about you, but I don't generally like to discuss stuff that even thinking about will bring me to tears.
And, finally, the others there *know* what the problems are like. People prefer to communicate in a positive, gainful manner, rather than spending all their time on discussing what the shitty stuff is like. That way lies nothing but despair.
Kudos. Well put.
My gf is an aspie, and I too find it fairly offensive the way some people think their "autistic" traits even rank compared to the fullblown thing.
A lot of these people are just typical INTP/INTJ-type neurotypicals.
Inconsolable screaming fits because the bus gets rescheduled or has a flat tire, tearing yourself up (physically, not metaphorically) over a holiday not following the exact pattern it should, etc.. I suspect a lot of these self-diagnosed "aspies" would write off a lot of real aspies as "plain insane" if they saw them on a bad day, and would certainly not cope with actually living with one, let alone trying to help them cope.
I've spent the past 8 years trying to impart coping skills, as well as acting as a buffer for the trauma of everyday life.
In this time, I've seen amazing progress, some of which I would never have thought possible. But to a person who haven't seen her in the past, there's no way they'll have *any* idea the amount of literally blood, sweat and tears that both of us have put into getting this far.
Hint: the stress of dealing with the issues for a few weeks (while I was ill) was sufficient to give one person an infarct, along with what is known as a brief reactive psychosis..
There's a distinct difference between the normal oddities of geekdom and the frequently pathological ones in PDD disorders like autism.
The four things you pointed out are pretty secondary to the core symptoms, and based on what you say, you have some ability to cope with them.
It would appear to me that you have no idea of the amount of coping skills many autistic people needs just to make it through the day. It has nothing to do with "comfortable".
Quite a number of these compounds are probably effective.
But then there's the question of safety, short-term and long-term, effective administration, cost effective production, etc..
And then there's the extensive clinical trials that have to be conducted, approval processes, etc., as well as the patent issues.
It takes years for something to go from discovery to clinical trials, and then years more to go from trials to availability. Business as usual, and much of it for a good reason.
There's probably a few effective, safe drugs in the pipeline that *will* materialize, but it may take years to decades before they are available.
And cost may still prevent this from being interesting. I mean, if you have a treatment resistant bacterial infection, it *is* possible to extract the bacteria, sequence them, and engineer a bacteriophage that is then injected into your bloodstream. This kills the infection. But it isn't generally done, as it costs too much. ISTR this is being offered in Russia, but at some pretty extreme prices, since it's all time-and-resource-intensive manual work in the lab.
If you can pay to have a medical research facility at your disposal, working on curing you, chances are they will be able to deal with a lot of things that would ordinarily have been incurable or even untreatable. But it isn't cost effective, and they don't make as much money from it as they would from developing generic treatments for the masses, so it just isn't done very often.
I'll take the bait.
As a morally deficient citizen, I'd love to see this happen, as I can get my own chip removed, and extract yours after killing you. That way, I just wave my hand, and poof, I have purchased my products on your account, without having to obtain your PIN or anything, and you won't be closing it any time soon.
Of course, I'd keep my own chip around, just in case I'd like to wear my own (old) identity for a while. Or maybe just obtain a rewritable chip. In fact, I might go so far as to use your money to purchase what I need to clone a ton of these, so I have a few to choose from and don't have to go around killing *more* people (and hence increasing the duration of potential jail time: of course your murder was second degree, or even self defense, I can plan this for a while, you know. Money enough to warrant that.)
As a US-hating terrorist, I'd of course set up improvised explosive devices in various places you and other tourists would be likely to visit, or if your armed forces become a hassle, I might use directional antennae for this, so I could shape the charge to deal with those pesky armored cars, without great risk to my own civiliam population.
Apart from that, there's also the social hygiene aspect. You may have nothing to fear right now.. and I'm not saying you do. However, is it really the brightest idea to leave a mechanism in place that is virtually *ideal* for arresting citizens under unjust laws (e.g. preventative arrests, or hint-hint copyright infringement). Said mechanism is also ideal for tracking political dissidents or other undesireables *if* you should ever end up with a fascist regime or a dictator or such.
One final point. Elections. If diebold had a political agenda, they could certainly collect RFID information along with the vote, allowing further subversion of your "democracy". And there is a minor matter of people deciding "convenient" elections would be better, and politicians that may "give in" to what they'd love to have: the means to track voters.
Even if you generate these at an enormous rate, you'll still end up gobbling up a few protons a year. Heat death of the universe will be an issue before those micro black holes are. Remember that black holes' anomalous effects at close range are due to the *density* of the matter, while the long-range effects are based on their total mass. As for the former, "close range" for a micro black hole is such that one would most likely pass through the earth without a single particle coming within range on the way. As to the latter, the total mass of a micro black hole is so insignificant as to have no meaningful impact on *anything*.
Interestingly, there are some theories that have proposed that a micro black hole might behave as a fundamental particle, since it would be completely described by its spin, charge and mass, one even going so far as to suggest electrons might *be* black holes.
Not quite correct. There have been countersanctions. Effective ones.
As I recall, there was an instance a little while ago where the US wanted to implement a toll or something on a particular kind of import from Europe, as a kind of protectionism.
So, WTO basically said "we can't really do anything about this, but you're free to implement sanctions in response".
Then the EU looked at the election charts, identified the states where the election might tip the other way, found what their main exports were (steel, I think), and threatened to implement an import ban on these goods. Something which would cost a whole bunch of people their jobs in the affected areas, quite possibly leading to Bush losing the reelection.
The toll was promptly lifed.
Hehe. If you're going to do that, you might as well go for intimidation :)
;)
Slice your wrists and give them the old "are you ready to die, punk" routine, or something
Not all places have as bad statistics in this regard as the one where you live :)
My reasoning is, if they're going to kill you, it'll be a lot less hassle for them to kill you first and then remove your finger afterwards. Especially considering they may have the element of surprise before you know their intent, which they will lose once they've asked for the finger or hand.
If they try to kill you up front, you try to get away / defend yourself, as appropriate to the situation. Same thing if they try afterwards; the amputation may even make this easier (if your survival instinct kicks in), as losing a finger will prompt an endorphin-adrenalin rush and losing a hand gives you two very sharp exposed bones that will easily penetrate the human body (at the cost of additional damage to the stump). Plus, more importantly, you're a lot less likely to hold back, consciously or subconsciously.
If they don't try to kill you at first, give them what they want, but keep an eye open in case they change their mind about killing you. Of course, if you *have* an opening to shut them down without aggravating the risk to yourself, by all means do so.
As a general rule, the assailant who is willing to do this will have more experience in combat than the average Joe/Jane, making it (IMHO) poor advice for the general, untrained population to engage them in combat before/unless there is an apparent, high risk of a lethal outcome even when complying. This is one of the reasons I try to keep my self-defence skills up-to-date: to improve the odds of survival if things should go badly in an encounter.
There is a mental step between chopping someone's hand or finger off and killing them that should not be underestimated, although I agree that it may be more likely that they'll kill you first.
Of course, if they start out by trying to kill you, the reasonable response is to stop them from doing so. Permanently, and by any means available.
Kidnapping, sure thing.
It is, in every way, in your best interests to stop them, og go down trying to do so.
Considering how regular people all over the world want to reduce the burden of proof every time something happens that infuriates them, it is not out of human character for Frith to want to do this. Part of the role of governments, particularly their legal systems, is to elevate themselves to a rational standard, rather than allowing the irrationality of the masses to "regulate" society.
People just want to find someone to blame when something goes wrong, and will seize on the first candidate that comes along, so that they can go back to "normal" and ignore the problem.
There is no drive for justice, no need for careful thought, and certainly no regard for truth.
"Crisis" is a relative term.
If you've never had any big hassles in your life, your threshold for considering something a crisis will be lower than for people who have had hassles.
This is a recurring problem with serious illness (physical and/or mental), in that it's easy to feel like you're on a different planet than the people you're talking to who have been luckier (so far). Kind of the same thing as coming back from a war. You can't relate. People are experiencing their definition of a crisis over something like missing out on their vacation due to not getting their bonus that year, and you just disconnect.
When you've had several congestive heart failures in a short period of time (physical illness example), been physically stopped from taking your own life to end your pain (mental illness example) or tried to find a way to carry a wounded friend back to the base and a slim chance of recovery without dropping his/her guts on the way (war example), these comparatively little things don't seem to matter as much, and you have problems dealing with people, e.g. effectively reduced empathy with their situation.
Similarly, when you've been picking up body parts of family members (natural disaster example) or eating another human being (famine example), quite a number of things that other people consider problems, or even crises, seem like a positive situation, although not perfect (nothing here is).
Actually kind of interesting.
:P
One might argue that the logical conclusion of this patent is one of the following:
a) The patent is void. Boring conclusion.
b) One can successfully patent other parts of the human biology and demand to be compensated for other people being alive. Or even patent stuff that only occurs in people without a certain disability, and use it as a kind of disabilities-group tax. Either way, too absurd to stand up in court, otherwise I'll patent the interaction of these systems
c) The patent is valid, but does not apply to biological mechanisms.
The last one is kind of interesting, as it would make it possible to patent means by which some new biological mechanism could be introduced into an organism, but maybe not possible to enforce patents on other things when they are integrated in such a way.
The net difference in caloric intake is probably negligible. A lot of energy gets burnt on stand-by anyway, and the question is more one of whether the wasted energy of your movement is heating of the fabric etc or electricity.
10.000 times more efficient == 10.000 times less inefficiency.
If you start out with an 80% effective process, you have 20% inefficiency. Reduce that by four orders of magnitude, and you have 0.002% inefficiency, for a net total of 19.998% increase in efficiency.
It's all the same..
Solar cells are directly comparable, as they absorb energy that would otherwise have heated the surface they would have struck, converting it into electricity.
Nuclear reactors free energy by breaking up atoms in a self-sustaining way and converting the heat to electricity through turbines, the latter process being directly comparable.
You're just converting one form of energy into another. Whether its original source is the food you eat or your corpse compressed to oil just doesn't matter. These convert some of the energy in your bending and shuffling of the material into a more useful form, rather than letting it dissipate.
If someone's actually willing to chop of your finger or hand, are you really going to give them a hassle about it?
I mean, come on, what do you think your subjective evaluation of their willingness to go further would be in that situation?
Especially given how they're not likely to be stupid enough to try something like that without a weapon to threaten you with, or multiple assailants at the same time. Just consider the fact that they're going to have to bring something to actually get it off with. At the very least a knife or a pair of pliers. The former will cut or stab, the latter will stab or bludgeon. And at this point, they thus have a weapon out either way, and you don't: otherwise, they wouldn't be discussing the amputation, now, would they?