That's because medicine is about science, not speculation.
I have a bone to pick. Explain the treatment of transgenderism. Why is it that hard evidence such as brian scans are discarded in favor of armchair pontifications such as autogynephilia? Why is electroconvulsive therapy being added to the DSM again when it clearly doesn't work in treatment of homosexuality and transgenderism?
I have another bone to pick. Explain routine male genital mutilation. Why is evidence that it is merely a cosmetic operation (if you can call a procedure performed by a nurse without administering at least a local anesthetic a surgery) discarded? Why is there no statistically significant evidence showing that circumcising prevents the propagation of HIV, yet it's touted as a cure for HIV? Why are the inherent risks and complications of removing a body part ignored, and moreover, why is this procedure performed without the victim's consent (sometimes even without the parents' consent)? Why can't I even find a general anatomical drawing of a male with intact genitals?
Ok, last bone to pick. How on earth can you prescribe an SSRI class drug without establishing abnormally low levels of serotonin through some test or another? If my other two complaints above aren't good enough for the moderators, I hope they can at least appreciate that this is ipso facto evidence of speculation in medicine.
Sorry, but the older I get I find more and more that medicine is based on making money in any way possible, not on science.
I'd rather have my browser crash than simply hand over the keys to my entire OS.
Yes, but some pointer somewhere got screwed up, maybe stack smashed, and that's why the OS killed the process. It's just a JMP to the left while someone figures out the correct alignment and you've got an exploit for Firefox now too.
I'm hoping you mean by voting for one of the many parties that isn't either the Republican or Democrat parties? Remember, the Republicans started out as a 3rd party, but I guess back then people didn't think of everything as an eternal battle between good (Whigs, Democrats, us, etc) and evil (Democrats, Whigs, them, etc).
I don't know. I've never studied political "science." Something tells me though that if "3rd" party votes count for say even 10% or 20% (instead of 1%-2%) of votes heads will turn.
Oh what the hell, killing people is more fun than voting intelligently any day. Either way, count me in.
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant.
This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
(Disclaimer: I try to not be an asshole, but I couldn't resist. Moderators: try to keep your knees from jerking. There's no -1, "tl;dr but that other guy's dying and you're a vain, self-centered, mentally ill, delusional pervert.")
I'd be really happy if the medical community would follow up on studies that show the biological basis for transsexualism (such as brain imaging, which was mildly successful at predicting whether a person would be a transsexual or not). I have transsexualism, which, if treated before/at puberty costs approximately $10,000 for a genital surgery (mostly cosmetic, but required by law to get the documents correct) and $1 per day in artificial hormones. I met a fellow geek at a sci-fi/anime convention in Detriot a while back with a similar condition. She didn't even know that brain sex could be measured using existing brain imaging techniques.
I just wanted to point out that it's interesting that insurance will pay $120,000 per year to keep you alive and well, but insurance is completely unwilling to part with one of your monthly payments to give me a normal life as the gender my brain is wired for, thus curing me completely. But no, I'm not dying (although psychologists who believe that transsexualism is a mental illness to be cured with electroshock cost me my family, since I wasn't going to agree to have my brain fried just to prove myself right. My only present neurological issue is being a woman [which i understand is something that affects 50%-51% of the population]; I'd hate to get a few actual neurological problems that would affect my software development work such as long term/short term memory problems that electroshock can cause.)
Now, if there were some real science instead of pseudoscience in the treatment of transsexualism, I could have been diagnosed before puberty, I'd look and sound exactly like a normal girl, to the point where I probably wouldn't even care about "transgender issues" more than remembering to take a pill every morning and get a yearly checkup at an endocrinologist. (Of course, having an almost completely normal female body sans menstruation, there probably wouldn't be transgender issues to worry about as long as one steers clear of feminists and other bigots.)
C'est la vie. Didn't mean to say I've got it worse, quite the opposite really. I've got it pretty good for a transsexual, even. I probably won't be one of the 50% of transsexuals who turns to suicide.
This is irritating. I certainly won't be playing any games that implement this. I'm forced to be male despite being a woman IRL, and they want me to pay for the privelege in-game?! They'd at least better have shemale avatars. I pay good money for my meds.
Incidentally, hysteria is a problem with the uterus, something only woman-born-women (I removed the excessive ys) can contract. Female to male transsexuals undergo a procedure with that root word when they become men.
Do we know anything about female pedophilia? I don't care to look up the links to sexual abuse of children perpetrated by females. You can if you want.
Yes, females are the child-rearers, and males are the sexual destroyers and rapists. If you god-damned straight people want to make progress, then make some progress and change that damn attitude. Females mutilate male gentials without conscience.
Mod me down, I don't care. I have karma to burn, and mod points a-plenty. Why does everyone think females are so great? So good? Why does everyone think pedophiles are only male? They're only human, only/men/, haha, in the sense my dad meant when he explained that all men are created equal included women because women are a subclass of man like man is a subclass of man. Recursive bullshit. Screw it all. I'm gonna drink more vodka. You pretend that females are above this shit. You prented that females have no sexual urges. You pretend that females can't abuse children.
A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover.
The difference is, though, that most people understand this, but don't understand that a software developer isn't going to be much help with your spyware problem.
In my experience when lay people say "IT" they usually mean tech-support and cannot conceive of any other job. Which is why I do not like being called an IT person, since programming is nothing like it.
My pet peeve is when people who know that all I do at work is software development start asking me about hardware and whether computer x is a good deal given computer usage habits y and what a good antivirus package is given that other users will be doing Kazaa and whatnot. Even after two years of saying nothing more usually than "I use linux, so I don't know much about the state-of-the-art of antivirus since I generally don't need to worry about that part of computing, and my hardware at home (sans netbook) is all mostly 5-10 years old," they still ask me just because I'm an "IT guy" and "so smart." Then they call me an asshole behind my back because I couldn't help them. Sheesh.
(Apparently one must have superhuman, genius-level intelligence to do much of anything with computers in these folks' minds, and said superhuman, genius-level intelligence confers omniscient knowledge of all things computer, like it's all some kind of arcane wizardry.)
Fuck!! Why wasn't I provided with the handbook when I started on hormones?! And where are all these hedonistic, sex-crazed parties I'm supposed to be attending?
We called them "yuppies" - would that term be demeaning enough?
But that word doesn't have "sex" in it, and it doesn't sound like the words "homosexual" or "transsexual." As we know, sex is dirty enough, but homosexuals and transsexuals are all disease-ridden, AIDS-infested, sex-crazed, godless, hedonistic, er..., I'm sure there are a few more words I could use along those lines but I haven't had my tea^H^H^Hcoffee yet (of course I'm a real man! tea is for girls!). At any rate, no, "yuppie" wasn't demeaning enough.
Besides, someone who's young and upper class might just be well-connected and a hard worker. Homosexuals, transsexuals, and their newest effiminate (nothing worse than being feminine, a fate worse than death) sexual deviant might be well-connected, but hard-working, even deserving? Pfft. </troll>
First let me preface this rant by saying that the article is mistaking precocious puberty (I think) for brain sex and generally just a lot of rabble-rousing and nonsense. Brain sex (along with sexual orientation) is established in the womb, not when you're a two-year old toddler. Absolute rubbish. Even if we're talking about feminization, there seem to be 3 separate things the article is completely jumbled about: brain sex, primary sex (genitals), and secondary sexual characteristics (e.g. sperm count, gynecomastia, facial hair, voice box resonance). The article also completely ignores that all 3 of those things can sometimes naturally be a mixture of male and female. Shit happens. I also thought that the article was talking about sperm count in toddlers, but maybe I just need to get some coffee already.
That being said, does anyone know if girls could possibly be affected by this as well? Are rates of female to male transsexualism dropping while male to female transsexualism rising?
Moreover, does anyone care? Instead it appears we're so concerned about boys displaying feminine traits as though being feminine is some kind of sickness. It seems we probably wouldn't even care if girls were becoming more masculine, since masculinity is *good* and femininity is *bad* (but a condition of being a weaker female, so we'll allow it in females).
Granted, being a male to female transsexual does suck, and if there's something causing it we should take time to understand what's happening and how to prevent it. However, if humans at large are causing male to female transsexualism, then doesn't society owe it to male to female transsexuals to help them integrate as women, e.g. by improving their access to hormone replacement and forcing insurance companies to cover genital surgery?
Oh, I forgot, femininity is what's wrong here, not the fact that they're normal women psychologically who just happened to be male for some reason. We must destroy the disease of femininity!
*sigh*. Maybe the most telling thing will be when this post gets modded into oblivion.
If the articles are true, does anyone have an answer for a male affected by the problem? We sure as hell don't know how to change brain sex. Does that mean we'll just keep calling them fags and perverts and sick in the head and parading them on Jerry Springer and electrocuting them? Will we at least give these transgendered males a chance at having a little self-worth? I'm looking at feminists like Janice Raymond as much as I'm looking at Jerry Springer here.
Of course I'm talking about it as though transsexualism is something completely new, caused by these chemicals. Humanity has had female to male and male to female transsexualism long before it even knew what a petrochemical was. For some reason though we view the female to male transsexual as ascention, a natural course of moving from weakness to strength whereas the male to female transsexual is a deception, a shameful mockery.
I guess that's pretty clever actually. How do you get a conservative on board to get serious about the environment? Play on his misogyny. Why else would he care about something feminine like "mother earth" unless the environment might prevent him from having a strong son.
We have root kits that embed themselves into alternate data streams, utilize virtualization, employ self-encryption and password protection and randomize what would otherwise be easy-to-detect signatures etc.. Some root kits can *only* be reliably detected if they are actually *running* because they conceal themselves using these techniques. *Even then*, it requires a competent utility with things like stealth detection which look specifically for that behavior of concealing/unconcealing itself.
Uhm, excuse me, call me ignorant, but when the system is powered off it's all bits on the drive. As another commentor replied to you, there has to be an unencrypted bootloader or loading program somewhere. This isn't magick. This is mathematics. It's very, very complicated mathematics, but it's still a machine. We like to anthropomorphize viruses like some bad episode of Reboot, but the computer is a machine that does what's it's told to do.
Attempting to clean a machine while it's operational is completely stupid, but maybe not as stupid as the virus-writer who writes a virus that can be cleaned while the system is operational. That's probably your only saving grace.
As a result, some of these viruses don't show up in Safe Mode either...
It's called a rootkit. If I modify core utilities like Task Manager to show you what I want you to see, why would safe mode make a difference? Whatever, it's all the Matrix. We've got programs running all over the place. It's completely unpredictable! Let's just anthropomorphize it until we forget it's numbers. Does that make you feel like a warrior? Is it all so much more exciting when we look at it like a round of D&D instead of math?
Gaming uses a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of a broadband pipe. Beyond 1mbps, all broadband is giving you is low latency. There's no reason Halo 3 should be taking up much more bandwidth than say Quake 1, even if you have 32 players.
Exactly. I had a roommate who loved to bitch about his lag in WoW to me. WoW only uses about 5k of bandwidth, around the same amount as a 56k modem (granted back in the day I was lucky to connect at over 28.8, but I digress). For some reason he had a hard time believing that his lag wasn't just WoW being a crappy game, even when presented with 50 ms pings to Google. I suppose that's addiction for you.
It's a fascinatingly complex process. Seriously, read up a bit on Wikipedia and perhaps take a few foreign languages. There are many, many points of failure. I think it's interesting to consider Orwell's argument about language in 1984. When thinking of Orwell, I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to be exposed to as many languages as I have. The more languages I learn, even if only a few words and concepts, the more modes of thinking I open myself up to. A new language to me can sometimes introduce a whole new viewpoint on the world, simply through the specific connotations and denotations. Usually denotations are easy to translate, however connotations can pose such of a problem that sometimes we prefer to just outright borrow a word from another language to express precisely our meaning. Language can evoke all 5 senses.
Personally, I'm fascinated by language, written and spoken. There are words I learned in Germany that I still use today even though I'm no longer anywhere near fluent (use it or lose it). For example, in English we have a "shortcut," but I can't readily think of the opposite unless I use the German word "Umweg." Another example: as I was looking at art in a story today I came across some Japanese characters (because we know that hanging up symbols you have no idea about is so cool), I noticed that the kanji for woman was one of the radicals in a kanji that was translated as "tranquility." It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman." I could go on like this. Suffice to say, language is perhaps the single tool we use to define our consciousness has humans.
I'd further pontificate that unless we were to create an AI for whom language is as prevasive as in the human mind, chasing strong AI will always result in failure.
It seemed to me that HAL-9000's actions were more an attempt to simultaneously fulfill its orders and its purpose, e.g. if there were no people from whom to withhold information, it would not be withholding the information. I don't remember that HAL-9000 saw the human crew as a threat. I could be wrong, though. I recently watched the movie again, but it's been a while since I've read the book.
the push to use electronic voting systems to deal with the problems of manual methods, can be summed in two words: hanging chad.
I can't stand this false dilemma. I rather prefer a certain optical scanner method. There are several pairs of triangles, one pair for each candidate. You take a black, permanent marker (not a No. 2 pencil, mind you) and connect the pair of triangles next to the candidate you want. It doesn't get simpler. The optical scanner provides a real-time tally, and the votes are trivially recounted.
Now, granted, there will always be people who screw it up. If you figured out how to solve PEBKAC, let me know.
You, I, and the lasers are inside the three-space being acted upon by the gravitational wave. How the hell are we supposed to measure this phenomenon from the "inside?"
Same way we'd measure the surface of a sphere changing if we were on the surface of the sphere. Just add an extra dimension.
GPS will almost completely replace maps and mapreading skills, as it is easier, safer, and more convenient. It completely reproduces the map's functionality and adds indispensable features like traffic updates and never getting lost.
Last time I tried to use one, I got lost. I had scroll around on its map to figure out where I was and a SANE way of getting where I wanted to be. I think I'll stick to paper maps, which actually help me get acquainted with where I'm going so I can concentrate on traffic more, thanks.
That, and back when I used to listen to talk shows TomTom's male-bashing commercials pretty much turned me off to their brand. But go ahead and mod me down. I'm sure I'm just being oversensitive or something.
This rocks, though. My laptop stutters when I have Pidgin, Firefox and Thunderbird running at the same time; I hope that I will see a much smoother X performance with this next version.
Not to troll, but I had a similar experience that I fixed by uninstalling Firefox in favor of Midori, although it looks like I may be giving this Uzbl thing mentioned in another article a spin shortly. I'm not sure whether there's legitimacy to the Firefox devs' complaints about X, but I don't really care if there are browsers out there that don't bring my whole system to a halt to load a webpage.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because medicine is about science, not speculation.
I have a bone to pick. Explain the treatment of transgenderism. Why is it that hard evidence such as brian scans are discarded in favor of armchair pontifications such as autogynephilia? Why is electroconvulsive therapy being added to the DSM again when it clearly doesn't work in treatment of homosexuality and transgenderism?
I have another bone to pick. Explain routine male genital mutilation. Why is evidence that it is merely a cosmetic operation (if you can call a procedure performed by a nurse without administering at least a local anesthetic a surgery) discarded? Why is there no statistically significant evidence showing that circumcising prevents the propagation of HIV, yet it's touted as a cure for HIV? Why are the inherent risks and complications of removing a body part ignored, and moreover, why is this procedure performed without the victim's consent (sometimes even without the parents' consent)? Why can't I even find a general anatomical drawing of a male with intact genitals?
Ok, last bone to pick. How on earth can you prescribe an SSRI class drug without establishing abnormally low levels of serotonin through some test or another? If my other two complaints above aren't good enough for the moderators, I hope they can at least appreciate that this is ipso facto evidence of speculation in medicine.
Sorry, but the older I get I find more and more that medicine is based on making money in any way possible, not on science.
I'd rather have my browser crash than simply hand over the keys to my entire OS.
Yes, but some pointer somewhere got screwed up, maybe stack smashed, and that's why the OS killed the process. It's just a JMP to the left while someone figures out the correct alignment and you've got an exploit for Firefox now too.
Time to fight the 2nd Independence war in 2012.
I'm hoping you mean by voting for one of the many parties that isn't either the Republican or Democrat parties? Remember, the Republicans started out as a 3rd party, but I guess back then people didn't think of everything as an eternal battle between good (Whigs, Democrats, us, etc) and evil (Democrats, Whigs, them, etc).
I don't know. I've never studied political "science." Something tells me though that if "3rd" party votes count for say even 10% or 20% (instead of 1%-2%) of votes heads will turn.
Oh what the hell, killing people is more fun than voting intelligently any day. Either way, count me in.
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant. This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
(Disclaimer: I try to not be an asshole, but I couldn't resist. Moderators: try to keep your knees from jerking. There's no -1, "tl;dr but that other guy's dying and you're a vain, self-centered, mentally ill, delusional pervert.")
I'd be really happy if the medical community would follow up on studies that show the biological basis for transsexualism (such as brain imaging, which was mildly successful at predicting whether a person would be a transsexual or not). I have transsexualism, which, if treated before/at puberty costs approximately $10,000 for a genital surgery (mostly cosmetic, but required by law to get the documents correct) and $1 per day in artificial hormones. I met a fellow geek at a sci-fi/anime convention in Detriot a while back with a similar condition. She didn't even know that brain sex could be measured using existing brain imaging techniques.
I just wanted to point out that it's interesting that insurance will pay $120,000 per year to keep you alive and well, but insurance is completely unwilling to part with one of your monthly payments to give me a normal life as the gender my brain is wired for, thus curing me completely. But no, I'm not dying (although psychologists who believe that transsexualism is a mental illness to be cured with electroshock cost me my family, since I wasn't going to agree to have my brain fried just to prove myself right. My only present neurological issue is being a woman [which i understand is something that affects 50%-51% of the population]; I'd hate to get a few actual neurological problems that would affect my software development work such as long term/short term memory problems that electroshock can cause.)
Now, if there were some real science instead of pseudoscience in the treatment of transsexualism, I could have been diagnosed before puberty, I'd look and sound exactly like a normal girl, to the point where I probably wouldn't even care about "transgender issues" more than remembering to take a pill every morning and get a yearly checkup at an endocrinologist. (Of course, having an almost completely normal female body sans menstruation, there probably wouldn't be transgender issues to worry about as long as one steers clear of feminists and other bigots.)
C'est la vie. Didn't mean to say I've got it worse, quite the opposite really. I've got it pretty good for a transsexual, even. I probably won't be one of the 50% of transsexuals who turns to suicide.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<reply-container guid="b8373d86-7ec8-47df-9978-38f6c52cd6a9" transfer-encoding="US-ASCII">
<reply guid="f350c906-2a54-4597-bad8-30da6a68f827">
<recipient-list guid="605ccf1a-4a4b-4f17-a9f4-a6dde6ffb7d6">
<recipient-descriptor guid="714a4edb-902a-4337-9aa6-933b45712ab0">
<name encoding="US-ASCII" guid="a81da860-9a46-4417-a6f2-028d05b95108">
sakdoctor
</name encoding="US-ASCII">
<uid guid="adb1ed5f-ef51-4fc3-9a72-76bd69fe480a">
1087155
</uid>
</recipient-descriptor>
</recipient-list>
<reply-content guid="0f71eeb7-2d20-4b71-891d-bff87f35a99f">
<body guid="8ee53a3b-b705-4117-a000-64f20674d9af">
<body-text encoding="US-ASCII" guid="3e48f58f-207b-49a9-b227-f4b390a9b247">
You call that XML"
</body-text>
<body>
</reply-content>
</reply>
</reply-container>
This is irritating. I certainly won't be playing any games that implement this. I'm forced to be male despite being a woman IRL, and they want me to pay for the privelege in-game?! They'd at least better have shemale avatars. I pay good money for my meds.
Manipulating people into sleeping with you is a nasty, horrible thing to do
The women here expect you to do this and won't go on a 2nd date if you don't.
split pane views for side-by-side work
Bah. It's called Ion. I used it for about a year once. It's a very good WM.
Now get off my lawn. All of you. Git.
The word you should look up is hysteria.
Incidentally, hysteria is a problem with the uterus, something only woman-born-women (I removed the excessive ys) can contract. Female to male transsexuals undergo a procedure with that root word when they become men.
Do we know anything about female pedophilia? I don't care to look up the links to sexual abuse of children perpetrated by females. You can if you want.
Yes, females are the child-rearers, and males are the sexual destroyers and rapists. If you god-damned straight people want to make progress, then make some progress and change that damn attitude. Females mutilate male gentials without conscience.
Mod me down, I don't care. I have karma to burn, and mod points a-plenty. Why does everyone think females are so great? So good? Why does everyone think pedophiles are only male? They're only human, only /men/, haha, in the sense my dad meant when he explained that all men are created equal included women because women are a subclass of man like man is a subclass of man. Recursive bullshit. Screw it all. I'm gonna drink more vodka. You pretend that females are above this shit. You prented that females have no sexual urges. You pretend that females can't abuse children.
A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover.
The difference is, though, that most people understand this, but don't understand that a software developer isn't going to be much help with your spyware problem.
In my experience when lay people say "IT" they usually mean tech-support and cannot conceive of any other job. Which is why I do not like being called an IT person, since programming is nothing like it.
My pet peeve is when people who know that all I do at work is software development start asking me about hardware and whether computer x is a good deal given computer usage habits y and what a good antivirus package is given that other users will be doing Kazaa and whatnot. Even after two years of saying nothing more usually than "I use linux, so I don't know much about the state-of-the-art of antivirus since I generally don't need to worry about that part of computing, and my hardware at home (sans netbook) is all mostly 5-10 years old," they still ask me just because I'm an "IT guy" and "so smart." Then they call me an asshole behind my back because I couldn't help them. Sheesh.
(Apparently one must have superhuman, genius-level intelligence to do much of anything with computers in these folks' minds, and said superhuman, genius-level intelligence confers omniscient knowledge of all things computer, like it's all some kind of arcane wizardry.)
Fuck!! Why wasn't I provided with the handbook when I started on hormones?! And where are all these hedonistic, sex-crazed parties I'm supposed to be attending?
I know lol!
We called them "yuppies" - would that term be demeaning enough?
But that word doesn't have "sex" in it, and it doesn't sound like the words "homosexual" or "transsexual." As we know, sex is dirty enough, but homosexuals and transsexuals are all disease-ridden, AIDS-infested, sex-crazed, godless, hedonistic, er..., I'm sure there are a few more words I could use along those lines but I haven't had my tea^H^H^Hcoffee yet (of course I'm a real man! tea is for girls!). At any rate, no, "yuppie" wasn't demeaning enough.
Besides, someone who's young and upper class might just be well-connected and a hard worker. Homosexuals, transsexuals, and their newest effiminate (nothing worse than being feminine, a fate worse than death) sexual deviant might be well-connected, but hard-working, even deserving? Pfft. </troll>
Cheers
First let me preface this rant by saying that the article is mistaking precocious puberty (I think) for brain sex and generally just a lot of rabble-rousing and nonsense. Brain sex (along with sexual orientation) is established in the womb, not when you're a two-year old toddler. Absolute rubbish. Even if we're talking about feminization, there seem to be 3 separate things the article is completely jumbled about: brain sex, primary sex (genitals), and secondary sexual characteristics (e.g. sperm count, gynecomastia, facial hair, voice box resonance). The article also completely ignores that all 3 of those things can sometimes naturally be a mixture of male and female. Shit happens. I also thought that the article was talking about sperm count in toddlers, but maybe I just need to get some coffee already.
That being said, does anyone know if girls could possibly be affected by this as well? Are rates of female to male transsexualism dropping while male to female transsexualism rising?
Moreover, does anyone care? Instead it appears we're so concerned about boys displaying feminine traits as though being feminine is some kind of sickness. It seems we probably wouldn't even care if girls were becoming more masculine, since masculinity is *good* and femininity is *bad* (but a condition of being a weaker female, so we'll allow it in females).
Granted, being a male to female transsexual does suck, and if there's something causing it we should take time to understand what's happening and how to prevent it. However, if humans at large are causing male to female transsexualism, then doesn't society owe it to male to female transsexuals to help them integrate as women, e.g. by improving their access to hormone replacement and forcing insurance companies to cover genital surgery?
Oh, I forgot, femininity is what's wrong here, not the fact that they're normal women psychologically who just happened to be male for some reason. We must destroy the disease of femininity!
*sigh*. Maybe the most telling thing will be when this post gets modded into oblivion.
If the articles are true, does anyone have an answer for a male affected by the problem? We sure as hell don't know how to change brain sex. Does that mean we'll just keep calling them fags and perverts and sick in the head and parading them on Jerry Springer and electrocuting them? Will we at least give these transgendered males a chance at having a little self-worth? I'm looking at feminists like Janice Raymond as much as I'm looking at Jerry Springer here.
Of course I'm talking about it as though transsexualism is something completely new, caused by these chemicals. Humanity has had female to male and male to female transsexualism long before it even knew what a petrochemical was. For some reason though we view the female to male transsexual as ascention, a natural course of moving from weakness to strength whereas the male to female transsexual is a deception, a shameful mockery.
I guess that's pretty clever actually. How do you get a conservative on board to get serious about the environment? Play on his misogyny. Why else would he care about something feminine like "mother earth" unless the environment might prevent him from having a strong son.
We have root kits that embed themselves into alternate data streams, utilize virtualization, employ self-encryption and password protection and randomize what would otherwise be easy-to-detect signatures etc.. Some root kits can *only* be reliably detected if they are actually *running* because they conceal themselves using these techniques. *Even then*, it requires a competent utility with things like stealth detection which look specifically for that behavior of concealing/unconcealing itself.
Uhm, excuse me, call me ignorant, but when the system is powered off it's all bits on the drive. As another commentor replied to you, there has to be an unencrypted bootloader or loading program somewhere. This isn't magick. This is mathematics. It's very, very complicated mathematics, but it's still a machine. We like to anthropomorphize viruses like some bad episode of Reboot, but the computer is a machine that does what's it's told to do.
Attempting to clean a machine while it's operational is completely stupid, but maybe not as stupid as the virus-writer who writes a virus that can be cleaned while the system is operational. That's probably your only saving grace.
As a result, some of these viruses don't show up in Safe Mode either...
It's called a rootkit. If I modify core utilities like Task Manager to show you what I want you to see, why would safe mode make a difference? Whatever, it's all the Matrix. We've got programs running all over the place. It's completely unpredictable! Let's just anthropomorphize it until we forget it's numbers. Does that make you feel like a warrior? Is it all so much more exciting when we look at it like a round of D&D instead of math?
Gaming uses a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of a broadband pipe. Beyond 1mbps, all broadband is giving you is low latency. There's no reason Halo 3 should be taking up much more bandwidth than say Quake 1, even if you have 32 players.
Exactly. I had a roommate who loved to bitch about his lag in WoW to me. WoW only uses about 5k of bandwidth, around the same amount as a 56k modem (granted back in the day I was lucky to connect at over 28.8, but I digress). For some reason he had a hard time believing that his lag wasn't just WoW being a crappy game, even when presented with 50 ms pings to Google. I suppose that's addiction for you.
How do humans do it?
It's a fascinatingly complex process. Seriously, read up a bit on Wikipedia and perhaps take a few foreign languages. There are many, many points of failure. I think it's interesting to consider Orwell's argument about language in 1984. When thinking of Orwell, I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to be exposed to as many languages as I have. The more languages I learn, even if only a few words and concepts, the more modes of thinking I open myself up to. A new language to me can sometimes introduce a whole new viewpoint on the world, simply through the specific connotations and denotations. Usually denotations are easy to translate, however connotations can pose such of a problem that sometimes we prefer to just outright borrow a word from another language to express precisely our meaning. Language can evoke all 5 senses.
Personally, I'm fascinated by language, written and spoken. There are words I learned in Germany that I still use today even though I'm no longer anywhere near fluent (use it or lose it). For example, in English we have a "shortcut," but I can't readily think of the opposite unless I use the German word "Umweg." Another example: as I was looking at art in a story today I came across some Japanese characters (because we know that hanging up symbols you have no idea about is so cool), I noticed that the kanji for woman was one of the radicals in a kanji that was translated as "tranquility." It made me wonder who, thousands of years ago, thought about the concept of tranquility and decided that the lower radical should be the symbol for "woman." I could go on like this. Suffice to say, language is perhaps the single tool we use to define our consciousness has humans.
I'd further pontificate that unless we were to create an AI for whom language is as prevasive as in the human mind, chasing strong AI will always result in failure.
It seemed to me that HAL-9000's actions were more an attempt to simultaneously fulfill its orders and its purpose, e.g. if there were no people from whom to withhold information, it would not be withholding the information. I don't remember that HAL-9000 saw the human crew as a threat. I could be wrong, though. I recently watched the movie again, but it's been a while since I've read the book.
the push to use electronic voting systems to deal with the problems of manual methods, can be summed in two words: hanging chad.
I can't stand this false dilemma. I rather prefer a certain optical scanner method. There are several pairs of triangles, one pair for each candidate. You take a black, permanent marker (not a No. 2 pencil, mind you) and connect the pair of triangles next to the candidate you want. It doesn't get simpler. The optical scanner provides a real-time tally, and the votes are trivially recounted.
Now, granted, there will always be people who screw it up. If you figured out how to solve PEBKAC, let me know.
You, I, and the lasers are inside the three-space being acted upon by the gravitational wave. How the hell are we supposed to measure this phenomenon from the "inside?"
Same way we'd measure the surface of a sphere changing if we were on the surface of the sphere. Just add an extra dimension.
They can filter out annoying people! Can I get one of those for real life?
NO.
GPS will almost completely replace maps and mapreading skills, as it is easier, safer, and more convenient. It completely reproduces the map's functionality and adds indispensable features like traffic updates and never getting lost.
Last time I tried to use one, I got lost. I had scroll around on its map to figure out where I was and a SANE way of getting where I wanted to be. I think I'll stick to paper maps, which actually help me get acquainted with where I'm going so I can concentrate on traffic more, thanks.
That, and back when I used to listen to talk shows TomTom's male-bashing commercials pretty much turned me off to their brand. But go ahead and mod me down. I'm sure I'm just being oversensitive or something.
First of all, the use of "sic" was wrong, even to the point that it was placed in brackets rather than parenthesis.
"The term sic is most often used in quoted material (usually in square brackets, and sometimes italicized)" —Wiktionary
It doesn't belong.
This is correct, though. I spent a few seconds scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of grammatical construction the gp was going for.
ARG A PREPOSITION AT THE END OF MY SENTENCE *melts*. (It's funny, laugh.)
This rocks, though. My laptop stutters when I have Pidgin, Firefox and Thunderbird running at the same time; I hope that I will see a much smoother X performance with this next version.
Not to troll, but I had a similar experience that I fixed by uninstalling Firefox in favor of Midori, although it looks like I may be giving this Uzbl thing mentioned in another article a spin shortly. I'm not sure whether there's legitimacy to the Firefox devs' complaints about X, but I don't really care if there are browsers out there that don't bring my whole system to a halt to load a webpage.