It's speech. Compelling me to say one thing (password) means they can compel me to say anything, in which case why don't they simply compel me to confess and get it over with - no need for the password.
Or is it "Here's a search warrant, unlock the damn door".
It's not. It's "Here's a search warrant, now tell us the contents of your mind."
If you really want to get finicky then the order can be changed to force him to enter the passcode himself and, under supervision by an oficer of the court, disable it - and he never has to reveal it.
It's not speech, it's a key - a judge has every right to compel you to hand over the key to private property when a duly justified search warrant is issued pursuant to probable cause.
Many things are not one or the other but a mixture of both - the password which you call a key is also my private thoughts. If the key conflicts with my right to private thoughts, which should win? Should we take away private thoughts?
"You must say what the state tells you to say" is something out of a 1984 dystopia. "You must say what the state tells you to say" is thought-crime.
I absolutely agree that backdoors are a terrible idea. But what happened here however was perfectly fine to my mind. The police already had strong evidence linking the suspects to a crime, the evidence was reviewed by a court - and the suspects were only compelled to give up their passcodes after a judge, in a public and open court, determined there was genuine probable cause.
Not terribly professional if you can't differentiate testing the code against testing its functionality and outputs.
Also fucking hopeless if you can't translate "test the code" in a code review context to mean reviewing the code and not the person that wrote it. Do you have a babysitter translating all the user requirements for you, because it sounds like you need one.
If you want to claim to be a professional developer, show some professionalism.
If you want to be considered a professional, well, anything, you need to clearly communicate what you mean. Saying "I said something else but we all know what I meant" is a cop-out non-professionals use. Saying "Yeah, lets test the code" is about as unambiguous as it gets - it means "Test the fucking code".
If you wanted to say "Test the process" then you should have said so.
In any case, why the hell aren't they testing the process? You assume that if the process was tested it would result in data that supports your position. If that were the case, then they should bloody well go ahead and test the process for bias so we wouldn't have people like you saying "If they tested the process for bias then they'd find bias."
I see no reason to make up reasons for why they didn't test their process, then assume that the tests would show a particular result, and use that future result to prove something today. That's why I called Occams razor - there are too many things to assume to support the position that there is bias. You and they think that their process has bias? So go ahead and test it for bias. The simplest explanation for code being rejected during a code review is that the code is crap. Any other conclusion needs to be supported by data. If that data does not exist, assuming that it will both exist in the future AND support your position is stupid.
BTW: You're using an assumed result from a future test to support a position today. Very good professionalism there... Well Done!
Most programmers, software engineers, developers would respond to this by going, "yeah, lets test the code"
Code that is rejected during a code review might very well compile, execute and run just fine anyway. It's pointless testing code that has been rejected from a code review.
Of course, I already knew that because, unlike someone who doesn't know that fact, I am a professional developer.
Most programmers, software engineers, developers would respond to this by going, "yeah, lets test the code"
You don't want to retain shit code, so blind reviews are an easy way to see if your current processes are good or bad, and whether shit code is being accepted from some submitters or good code being rejected from others.
It's a trivial, simple and obvious thing to do, to the extent that going "Occams razor" demonstrates an utter lack of ownership of the collective set of code.
I think I just answered my own question. No, you're not a professional software developer.
Of course I'm a professional software developer - for instance, I know the difference between code reviews and testing, and yet I am replying to someone who has conflated the two.
You appear to believe that any phrase that says "Women are worse at $MENTAL_ACTIVITY" is automatically wrong.
That is correct. My personal experience as the husband of a math professor at Rice University and the father of a young woman who is defending her PhD in mathematics next week, and who represent five generations of women with doctorate degrees in math, physics or biology, has been a compelling experience in the idea that women are somehow mentally inferior to men in any field whatsoever.
That's pretty similar to my own experience with female relatives; see below.
Unless of course, you believe there is some special property of writing code that presents a challenge greater (or different) than that of math, physics or biology.
Serious question, do you think that there is some special property of chess that presents a challenge greater than that of math, physics, biology, etc?
It's a purely mental activity which is dominated by males - sure, there's top female chess players, but the activity is dominated by males. Only 7 of the top 500 players are female.
Do you think there is some special property of Veterinary Science that presents a challenge greater than that of math, physics or biology? That's an activity dominated by females. In fact (percentage wise), there are fewer males in veterinary science than there females in software development.
Anytime the subject of female coders come up, almost no one other than ACs insist females are inferior. My experience of women: 1st wife lawyer, 2nd wife specialist surgeon, 3rd wife practising accountant. One sister holding two PhDs, the other holding one PhD.
You keep insisting that I am making the claim that females are inferior. I am not. I never did. It is easier for you to claim that someone is bigoted because that requires no work on your part. Responding to any actual argument requires intellectual effort. i.e. hard work.
Go on then - call me misogynist again. You've worn the word out anyway.
Rather than invent an elaborate reason for why the code is getting rejected, the simplest explanation encompassing all facts is that the code is crap.
Until there were blind auditions, Occam's Razor would have said, "Women are worse musicians than men".
The phrase "Women/men are worse/better at $MENTAL_ACTIVITY" is not automatically wrong, you know. You appear to believe that any phrase that says "Women are worse at $MENTAL_ACTIVITY" is automatically wrong.
Simple explanations are simple, until they turn out to be wrong. Maybe instead of a simple explanation a simple test should be applied: make the code submissions blind.
I agree, but they haven't done the blind test yet. Until they do, I'll stick with the simplest explanation that accounts for all the evidence - i.e. the 'rejected' code is crap. You seem to believe the alternative that needs elaborate and/or not-yet-existent evidence.
That was my point. It's a plausible sounding theory that isn't actually backed up by the facts, like the others being put forward here.
In what world is the theory "Competent people in a high-demand demographic drop out of the workforce" plausible-sounding? They're in high demand, after all.
It's the opposite. The average and mediocre female engineers drop out
Seriously? Why would they drop out when diversity quotas ensure that there is a high demand for them? The rest of your conclusions depend on this fallacious premise.
so you end up with only the cream of the crop. Male engineers are more likely to stick with it even if they suck, so on average are much less talented. They tend to boast more at interviews too so it's harder to weed out the weak ones.
Back when having women in orchestras was rare, there was a similar belief as to why they weren't given jobs after auditioning. "Maybe they're just not as good as their male counterparts." or, "Women probably just don't have the strength to (blow a trumpet, hold a cello, play percussion)". You would hear, "It takes a lot of stamina and commitment to be a great musician, and women just don't have it."
That was the prevalent belief in the professional music world until orchestras started holding blind auditions. Now women make up more than 50% of professional orchestras.
Occams razor applies. Rather than invent an elaborate reason for why the code is getting rejected, the simplest explanation encompassing all facts is that the code is crap.
Maybe... just *maybe*... the simpler "diversity hires didn't work out too well" explains the situation better than "patriarchy conspiracy theory"
Remember that each "diversity hire" replaced someone who would have been hired solely on merit. It's not unreasonable to expect this outcome, and yes it was even predicted multiple times, on/. whenever the diversity stories came up.
but for something like COBOL you could end up doing it for some years and then the legacy system is shut down and nobody wants to give you anything but a junior non-COBOL position.
You think that a systems migration won't need your legacy skills? You think that you won't pick up the skills for the new system during the migration?
Here's a more likely scenario: you do COBOL for 5 years and learn the entire problem domain that the COBOL system services. When the migration occurs with Java your knowledge will be indispensable, and you'll no doubt learn Java in the two years the migration takes to complete. At the end of the migration, you are still the expert in the problem and have new Java skills to apply your expertise.
It's exceptionally unlikely that the migration from COBOL will be so fast that you won't be able to learn the new implementation technology.
The problem is in using taxation as a tool for revenue. Sure, in practice it works out that way, but taxation is more useful as a tool for steering the economy.
Humans are laughably easy to motivate. Humans respond particularly well to incentives, so the tax implement should be used as an incentive tool.
Taxing wealth holdings and assets instead of income results in fewer people building up any savings. Taxing income instead of assets results in more money being put into capital gains investment assets, etc.
The tax then should reflect the economic policy of the state. Want more investment? Remove/lower taxes on CG and increase taxes on income. Want more retirement savings? Put CG exceptions for retirement investment vehicles. Want to simulate spending? Lower the sales tax/VAT and reduce the taxes on income. Want more foreign currency? Produce rebate credits for items shipped abroad for sale. Want more local production? Increase customs and excise taxes. Hell, you can do things like "increase the number of engineers", "lower the popularity of religions", "reduce/increase the divorce rate", etc just by manipulating the tax code.
With the correct taxes you can shape your economy almost any way you want it. Unfortunately most societies see taxes as a revenue hammer and not as the scalpel that it is. This means that it is almost always used as a bludgeoning tool to extract money rather than as a sculpting tool to shape the economy.
Because the idea that there are alternate facts and all viewpoints are equally valid needs to die.
Like this one? How about this one? Same facts, yet both MSM and yourself feel that only one of the two facts in the screenshots are "real" and the other is simply "fake". There's more, like for example this one. Or this one
If the ideology you spout:
the idea that there are alternate facts and all viewpoints are equally valid needs to die.
gains any weight, the first viewpoint to get abolished by the average person will be yours.
(Those images, btw, are representative of the group who are pushing very strongly to filter 'fake news'. Beware of what you wish for)
If you making 50K a year and paying $1466 for a studio then your basically putting half of your take home pay towards rent. That is not affordable.
I've been paying 50% in rent since the 1990's, as my late parents have before me since the 1970's. The trick is to save as much of the other 50% as possible.
That's stupid - if you'd put 50% towards buying a house you'd have spent the last few years living 'rent' free.
It's not "an effective fake-news filter", because it would allow things like "It's illegal to read wikileaks" to be viewed while filtering away "Stem illegal immigration" as 'racism'.
It's the Ministry of Truth, not a filter for facts.
>"As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 8/10 are your only choices."
Wow- you will be rightfully modded down to -100 pretty quickly. Apparently you don't know much about the world out there.... the majority of the Internet is run by Linux servers, and has been for many, many years now. Almost all the S&P500 run Linux to various degrees in their IT. You think Linux doesn't support journaled filesystems? SMP? Seriously??? You think An MS-Windows box of ANY sort can do the work of 3 Linux boxes???!!! LOL!
You are either completely clueless or are an MS-shill or both. Not even many self-respecting professional MS-Windows administrators with Linux exposure would agree with anything you said.
Welcome to the internet - the first time I saw that copy-pasta was in 2002.
The biggest time sink at my job is the system that exports CSV files to use in Excel. If you don't select your data and copy into a new Excel spreadsheet, updating the calculations on a 70MB file takes 90 minutes. That's not a problem on a clean Excel spreadsheet.
I'm curious - in a previous story and previous post you said you were a programmer. Why can't you write a program that eats in that CSV file and spits out the numbers and charts you need?
I did that once for a multi-megabyte spreadsheet with millions of rows that took roughly 60 mins on the user's computer in Excel. They ran this perhaps once a day. Exporting that data to CSV takes them a few mins, and my program (written in R, of all things) processed it and spat out the correct matrices (in CSV form) in a matter of minutes.
Most people have no idea how fast their calculations can be done when it is a command-line program reading all millions of numbers from a file straight into RAM. The numbers in your 70MB spreadsheet should easily fit into RAM into a single contiguous memory location. After that it's simply a matter of iterating over the RAM with the correct functions written in native code.
"I have a car, a sportscar, it's 8 years old. Do I want a new car? Hell no! Does my car have a back-up camera?"
FWIW, I just installed a backup camera in my 18 year old Toyota Camry. It's useful because they stopped making cars with adequate rear visibility about four decades ago. But I didn't have to buy a new car with no spare tire and a lot of truly obnoxious electronics in order to get the capability. (The camera was actually a bonus. I really bought the new radio mostly because the old one had no decent way to play mp3s).
Hah! I use a '92 Ford Sierra daily to work and back. It doesn't even have a radio. On the plus side, no one wants to steal it, repairs are shockingly cheap (equiv to perhaps 90USD in the last two years for oil/filter/plug changes) and it will probably take me to work and back daily until my eventual retirement. Don't ask me what the mileage is, cause the clock has rolled over anyway, so I stopped noticing.
External electrical influences or seizures absolutely do not create more "complexity," in the same sense as psychedelics; they create dysfunction through disruption, which is very different. And using a ridiculous blanket term like "getting blitzed" shows that you have no understanding whatsoever of the difference between mere intoxication and other types of altered states, such as those produced by psychedelics. This study, while not groundbreaking, is interesting because it has produced more data supporting the notion that psychedelic states are not simply a form of random intoxication, as you suggest, but are indeed indicative of stimulation of certain brain functions.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The conclusion says "In sum, we found increased global neural signal diversity for the psychedelic state induced by KET, PSIL and LSD, suggesting the psychedelic state lies above conscious states such as wakeful rest and REM sleep on a one-dimensional scale defined by neural signal diversity. ".
It's a one-dimensional scale measuring neural signal diversity. Random electric shocks to the brain would result in a higher state on that scale. Actually, random electric shocks to the person (random torture?) would raise the scale too. GP was absolutely spot on that these results mean nothing; higher signal diversity could mean "capable of deeper insight", or it
could
mean "unable to function at all", but the actual study doesn't have any results one way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it speech ?
It's speech. Compelling me to say one thing (password) means they can compel me to say anything, in which case why don't they simply compel me to confess and get it over with - no need for the password.
Or is it "Here's a search warrant, unlock the damn door".
It's not. It's "Here's a search warrant, now tell us the contents of your mind."
If you really want to get finicky then the order can be changed to force him to enter the passcode himself and, under supervision by an oficer of the court, disable it - and he never has to reveal it.
It's not speech, it's a key - a judge has every right to compel you to hand over the key to private property when a duly justified search warrant is issued pursuant to probable cause.
Many things are not one or the other but a mixture of both - the password which you call a key is also my private thoughts. If the key conflicts with my right to private thoughts, which should win? Should we take away private thoughts?
"You must say what the state tells you to say" is something out of a 1984 dystopia. "You must say what the state tells you to say" is thought-crime.
I absolutely agree that backdoors are a terrible idea. But what happened here however was perfectly fine to my mind. The police already had strong evidence linking the suspects to a crime, the evidence was reviewed by a court - and the suspects were only compelled to give up their passcodes after a judge, in a public and open court, determined there was genuine probable cause.
That's exactly how it's SUPPOSED to work.
Compelled speech is evil.
I said 'test the code' as the way to test the fucking process.
Now fuck off and stop sharing your ignorance.
Maybe. Maybe you just don't know the difference.
Not terribly professional if you can't differentiate testing the code against testing its functionality and outputs.
Also fucking hopeless if you can't translate "test the code" in a code review context to mean reviewing the code and not the person that wrote it. Do you have a babysitter translating all the user requirements for you, because it sounds like you need one.
If you want to claim to be a professional developer, show some professionalism.
If you want to be considered a professional, well, anything, you need to clearly communicate what you mean. Saying "I said something else but we all know what I meant" is a cop-out non-professionals use. Saying "Yeah, lets test the code" is about as unambiguous as it gets - it means "Test the fucking code".
If you wanted to say "Test the process" then you should have said so.
In any case, why the hell aren't they testing the process? You assume that if the process was tested it would result in data that supports your position. If that were the case, then they should bloody well go ahead and test the process for bias so we wouldn't have people like you saying "If they tested the process for bias then they'd find bias."
I see no reason to make up reasons for why they didn't test their process, then assume that the tests would show a particular result, and use that future result to prove something today. That's why I called Occams razor - there are too many things to assume to support the position that there is bias. You and they think that their process has bias? So go ahead and test it for bias. The simplest explanation for code being rejected during a code review is that the code is crap. Any other conclusion needs to be supported by data. If that data does not exist, assuming that it will both exist in the future AND support your position is stupid.
BTW: You're using an assumed result from a future test to support a position today. Very good professionalism there... Well Done!
Conflated them by suggesting a simple teat of your code review process?
What are you frightened of here?
You didn't suggest testing the process, you said:
Most programmers, software engineers, developers would respond to this by going, "yeah, lets test the code"
Code that is rejected during a code review might very well compile, execute and run just fine anyway. It's pointless testing code that has been rejected from a code review.
Of course, I already knew that because, unlike someone who doesn't know that fact, I am a professional developer.
Are you a programmer?
Most programmers, software engineers, developers would respond to this by going, "yeah, lets test the code"
You don't want to retain shit code, so blind reviews are an easy way to see if your current processes are good or bad, and whether shit code is being accepted from some submitters or good code being rejected from others.
It's a trivial, simple and obvious thing to do, to the extent that going "Occams razor" demonstrates an utter lack of ownership of the collective set of code.
I think I just answered my own question. No, you're not a professional software developer.
Of course I'm a professional software developer - for instance, I know the difference between code reviews and testing, and yet I am replying to someone who has conflated the two.
That is correct. My personal experience as the husband of a math professor at Rice University and the father of a young woman who is defending her PhD in mathematics next week, and who represent five generations of women with doctorate degrees in math, physics or biology, has been a compelling experience in the idea that women are somehow mentally inferior to men in any field whatsoever.
That's pretty similar to my own experience with female relatives; see below.
Unless of course, you believe there is some special property of writing code that presents a challenge greater (or different) than that of math, physics or biology.
Serious question, do you think that there is some special property of chess that presents a challenge greater than that of math, physics, biology, etc?
It's a purely mental activity which is dominated by males - sure, there's top female chess players, but the activity is dominated by males. Only 7 of the top 500 players are female.
Do you think there is some special property of Veterinary Science that presents a challenge greater than that of math, physics or biology? That's an activity dominated by females. In fact (percentage wise), there are fewer males in veterinary science than there females in software development.
Anytime the subject of female coders come up, almost no one other than ACs insist females are inferior. My experience of women: 1st wife lawyer, 2nd wife specialist surgeon, 3rd wife practising accountant. One sister holding two PhDs, the other holding one PhD.
You keep insisting that I am making the claim that females are inferior. I am not. I never did. It is easier for you to claim that someone is bigoted because that requires no work on your part. Responding to any actual argument requires intellectual effort. i.e. hard work.
Go on then - call me misogynist again. You've worn the word out anyway.
Until there were blind auditions, Occam's Razor would have said, "Women are worse musicians than men".
The phrase "Women/men are worse/better at $MENTAL_ACTIVITY" is not automatically wrong, you know. You appear to believe that any phrase that says "Women are worse at $MENTAL_ACTIVITY" is automatically wrong.
Simple explanations are simple, until they turn out to be wrong. Maybe instead of a simple explanation a simple test should be applied: make the code submissions blind.
I agree, but they haven't done the blind test yet. Until they do, I'll stick with the simplest explanation that accounts for all the evidence - i.e. the 'rejected' code is crap. You seem to believe the alternative that needs elaborate and/or not-yet-existent evidence.
That was my point. It's a plausible sounding theory that isn't actually backed up by the facts, like the others being put forward here.
In what world is the theory "Competent people in a high-demand demographic drop out of the workforce" plausible-sounding? They're in high demand, after all.
It's the opposite. The average and mediocre female engineers drop out
Seriously? Why would they drop out when diversity quotas ensure that there is a high demand for them? The rest of your conclusions depend on this fallacious premise.
so you end up with only the cream of the crop. Male engineers are more likely to stick with it even if they suck, so on average are much less talented. They tend to boast more at interviews too so it's harder to weed out the weak ones.
See how this works?
Back when having women in orchestras was rare, there was a similar belief as to why they weren't given jobs after auditioning. "Maybe they're just not as good as their male counterparts." or, "Women probably just don't have the strength to (blow a trumpet, hold a cello, play percussion)". You would hear, "It takes a lot of stamina and commitment to be a great musician, and women just don't have it."
That was the prevalent belief in the professional music world until orchestras started holding blind auditions. Now women make up more than 50% of professional orchestras.
Occams razor applies. Rather than invent an elaborate reason for why the code is getting rejected, the simplest explanation encompassing all facts is that the code is crap.
Maybe... just *maybe*... the simpler "diversity hires didn't work out too well" explains the situation better than "patriarchy conspiracy theory"
Remember that each "diversity hire" replaced someone who would have been hired solely on merit. It's not unreasonable to expect this outcome, and yes it was even predicted multiple times, on /. whenever the diversity stories came up.
>Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?
Girls tell us they are interested but face barriers that boys don't. Some of us want to help them.
No, they don't. OTOH, lots of politically motivated girls are saying that *OTHER* girls are interested.
but for something like COBOL you could end up doing it for some years and then the legacy system is shut down and nobody wants to give you anything but a junior non-COBOL position.
You think that a systems migration won't need your legacy skills? You think that you won't pick up the skills for the new system during the migration?
Here's a more likely scenario: you do COBOL for 5 years and learn the entire problem domain that the COBOL system services. When the migration occurs with Java your knowledge will be indispensable, and you'll no doubt learn Java in the two years the migration takes to complete. At the end of the migration, you are still the expert in the problem and have new Java skills to apply your expertise.
It's exceptionally unlikely that the migration from COBOL will be so fast that you won't be able to learn the new implementation technology.
How can I make [the large margin on the right] go away?
Install Stylebot for Chrome/Chromium, or whatever the equivalent extension is for your browser, and add this CSS override to negate the custom margin:
div#comments.a2commentwrap { margin-right: auto; }
Thanks, that worked well. There's still a hovering sheet on the top right with my username on it, but I can live with that.
The problem is in using taxation as a tool for revenue. Sure, in practice it works out that way, but taxation is more useful as a tool for steering the economy.
Humans are laughably easy to motivate. Humans respond particularly well to incentives, so the tax implement should be used as an incentive tool.
Taxing wealth holdings and assets instead of income results in fewer people building up any savings. Taxing income instead of assets results in more money being put into capital gains investment assets, etc.
The tax then should reflect the economic policy of the state. Want more investment? Remove/lower taxes on CG and increase taxes on income. Want more retirement savings? Put CG exceptions for retirement investment vehicles. Want to simulate spending? Lower the sales tax/VAT and reduce the taxes on income. Want more foreign currency? Produce rebate credits for items shipped abroad for sale. Want more local production? Increase customs and excise taxes. Hell, you can do things like "increase the number of engineers", "lower the popularity of religions", "reduce/increase the divorce rate", etc just by manipulating the tax code.
With the correct taxes you can shape your economy almost any way you want it. Unfortunately most societies see taxes as a revenue hammer and not as the scalpel that it is. This means that it is almost always used as a bludgeoning tool to extract money rather than as a sculpting tool to shape the economy.
Because the idea that there are alternate facts and all viewpoints are equally valid needs to die.
Like this one? How about this one? Same facts, yet both MSM and yourself feel that only one of the two facts in the screenshots are "real" and the other is simply "fake". There's more, like for example this one. Or this one
If the ideology you spout:
the idea that there are alternate facts and all viewpoints are equally valid needs to die.
gains any weight, the first viewpoint to get abolished by the average person will be yours.
(Those images, btw, are representative of the group who are pushing very strongly to filter 'fake news'. Beware of what you wish for)
If you making 50K a year and paying $1466 for a studio then your basically putting half of your take home pay towards rent. That is not affordable.
I've been paying 50% in rent since the 1990's, as my late parents have before me since the 1970's. The trick is to save as much of the other 50% as possible.
That's stupid - if you'd put 50% towards buying a house you'd have spent the last few years living 'rent' free.
It's not "an effective fake-news filter", because it would allow things like "It's illegal to read wikileaks" to be viewed while filtering away "Stem illegal immigration" as 'racism'.
It's the Ministry of Truth, not a filter for facts.
Why is there a large margin of white space on the right? How can I make this go away?
>"As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 8/10 are your only choices."
Wow- you will be rightfully modded down to -100 pretty quickly. Apparently you don't know much about the world out there.... the majority of the Internet is run by Linux servers, and has been for many, many years now. Almost all the S&P500 run Linux to various degrees in their IT. You think Linux doesn't support journaled filesystems? SMP? Seriously??? You think An MS-Windows box of ANY sort can do the work of 3 Linux boxes???!!! LOL!
You are either completely clueless or are an MS-shill or both. Not even many self-respecting professional MS-Windows administrators with Linux exposure would agree with anything you said.
Welcome to the internet - the first time I saw that copy-pasta was in 2002.
The biggest time sink at my job is the system that exports CSV files to use in Excel. If you don't select your data and copy into a new Excel spreadsheet, updating the calculations on a 70MB file takes 90 minutes. That's not a problem on a clean Excel spreadsheet.
I'm curious - in a previous story and previous post you said you were a programmer. Why can't you write a program that eats in that CSV file and spits out the numbers and charts you need?
I did that once for a multi-megabyte spreadsheet with millions of rows that took roughly 60 mins on the user's computer in Excel. They ran this perhaps once a day. Exporting that data to CSV takes them a few mins, and my program (written in R, of all things) processed it and spat out the correct matrices (in CSV form) in a matter of minutes.
Most people have no idea how fast their calculations can be done when it is a command-line program reading all millions of numbers from a file straight into RAM. The numbers in your 70MB spreadsheet should easily fit into RAM into a single contiguous memory location. After that it's simply a matter of iterating over the RAM with the correct functions written in native code.
Excel? 70MB? Golly Gee whiz, what could the problem be here? Nothing for it, we'll just need to get you a faster computer ...
It's a $3,000 17" Dell laptop. Throwing more money at the problem isn't going to help.
Woosh
"I have a car, a sportscar, it's 8 years old. Do I want a new car? Hell no! Does my car have a back-up camera?"
FWIW, I just installed a backup camera in my 18 year old Toyota Camry. It's useful because they stopped making cars with adequate rear visibility about four decades ago. But I didn't have to buy a new car with no spare tire and a lot of truly obnoxious electronics in order to get the capability. (The camera was actually a bonus. I really bought the new radio mostly because the old one had no decent way to play mp3s).
Hah! I use a '92 Ford Sierra daily to work and back. It doesn't even have a radio. On the plus side, no one wants to steal it, repairs are shockingly cheap (equiv to perhaps 90USD in the last two years for oil/filter/plug changes) and it will probably take me to work and back daily until my eventual retirement. Don't ask me what the mileage is, cause the clock has rolled over anyway, so I stopped noticing.
Talk to people who've practiced meditation for years. "Super awake" is a way to describe it, but it doesn't quite do it justice.
"Super awake" does not accurately describe meditation; "Self-delusion', on the other hand, does.
I'm always a bit amused when someone feels they have the authority to tell someone else that they are not experiencing what they are experiencing.
Whatever floats your boat. I'm always amused by people who feel that their spiritual and religious experiences are objective.
External electrical influences or seizures absolutely do not create more "complexity," in the same sense as psychedelics; they create dysfunction through disruption, which is very different. And using a ridiculous blanket term like "getting blitzed" shows that you have no understanding whatsoever of the difference between mere intoxication and other types of altered states, such as those produced by psychedelics. This study, while not groundbreaking, is interesting because it has produced more data supporting the notion that psychedelic states are not simply a form of random intoxication, as you suggest, but are indeed indicative of stimulation of certain brain functions.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The conclusion says "In sum, we found increased global neural signal diversity for the psychedelic state induced by KET, PSIL and LSD, suggesting the psychedelic state lies above conscious states such as wakeful rest and REM sleep on a one-dimensional scale defined by neural signal diversity. ".
It's a one-dimensional scale measuring neural signal diversity. Random electric shocks to the brain would result in a higher state on that scale. Actually, random electric shocks to the person (random torture?) would raise the scale too. GP was absolutely spot on that these results mean nothing; higher signal diversity could mean "capable of deeper insight", or it
could
mean "unable to function at all", but the actual study doesn't have any results one way or another.