"are you seriously suggesting that the way to find out which parts of a HUMAN brain to put the electrodes in, is to examine a MONKEY brain?"
Yes. Yes I am. The brain as an organ has evolved incrementally - starting with simple nerve clusters and ganglia in very simple forms of life, then building up to a spinal column, brain stem etc (all just a rudimentary I/O system of stimulus to reaction). They can identify the parts of our brain that also exist in reptiles; the parts for motor control, sensory input, base reactions like fear and etc.
Monkeys are almost identical to us genetically, their brains astoundingly similar to our own. So yes, we can get a very good idea of where to position an electrode by studying the brain of a monkey. Hell, we'd get a rough idea from the brain of a crocodile - motor control won't have changed massively brain-wise since then. But a monkey is that much easier to avoid being eaten by.
As I said, the brain can feel no pain. The skull would be operated on under anaesthetic, and presumably they use the same methods on the monkey as a brain surgeon would on a human to prevent any pain for the part of human surgery when the skull is opened. It's not beyond the wit of man to administer some painkillers...
We couldn't do this straight away on human volunteers because as I said, we would be shooting blind - not even a starting point for where the electrodes should go. I agree it's unfortunate that we have to take these risks on animals first, but it would be far more of an ethical problem if we did it on a human being.
You seem to be here to pursue an agenda of your own against any kind of animal testing. I can sympathise - I think some uses of animal testing (cosmetics springs to mind as an example) are abhorrent and rightly banned (or if they aren't they should be). But this kind of trial just couldn't be done straight away on a human being.
You'd prefer they started out by sticking electrodes into humans with no idea what they were doing?
Of course some experimentation will be needed when they move to human subjects, but a monkey's brain is similar enough to ours that they can get a starting point to experiment around, rather than working blind on a human subject.
One other thing to note, there are no touch/pain receptors within the brain itself - people have brain surgery done while awake so the doctors can keep them talking and know they aren't accidentally removing something important. Once you've got an opening into the skull (which would be done under anaesthetic) you can poke and prod at the brain all you want without the subject feeling a thing.
Oh, and its on the news because its interesting and something of a step forward scientifically. Quit it with the conspiracy theories please.
There's enough grain produced in the world to feed every person on the planet a sufficient number of calories.
Unfortunately, very little of it is produced in the places where people are starving, there's a lot of wastage, and there are people who eat many times more food than they need to.
The solution: Round up obese people and feed them to the third world. Soylent Green for all!
How would P2P ever involve your ISP making use of your CPU time or RAM? I think you're thinking of distributed projects like SETI@Home...
The ISPs could make money from P2P to be sure - either by saving money by helping torrent software connect to other people who are also on their network, or by offering their own (legal + paid for) download services. But appropriating your system resources? That's not P2P.
I think the complaint was that they measured his energy expenditure, and he was using less energy to move at the same speed.
What speed they measured on I don't know, it would be distinctly less of an advantage for an actual race if he can travel incredibly efficiently at slow speeds but his top speed maxes out too low to be competitive in a sprint. Although if that was the case he could compete well in endurance running.
Either way its only a matter of time before we have prosthetics/bionics that can be used to outperform current athletes. We could put together a whole rack of legs, each optimised for different running styles and conditions.
Just to reply to something at the beginning of your comment, "falsifiable" only means that there is a hypothetical way to disprove something, not that such counter-evidence actually exists.
The laws of physics are falsifiable - if we observed things disobeying them then we'd know we need some new laws, or to reformulate the ones we have to include the new evidence.
But "Anyone who practices meditation intensely enough - with proper guidance - can reproduce the experience." is not falsifiable, since however much someone meditates without having the expected experience it can always be claimed they didn't do it properly or do it enough. If you defined how much meditation is needed, or a specific method, then it could be falsified (if someone followed all the instructions and had no such experience).
Heat is the energy making a particle move and vibrate, removing all of it results in an inert particle, not no particle.
And I believe its a part of the laws of thermodynamics that absolute zero is unobtainable... its self evident if you think about it - however cold you make something, it's always going to be gaining a little heat from its surroundings, unless those surroundings are colder than it is. Colder than absolute zero cannot happen, therefore anything that approaches it will reach a point above zero where it can't be cooled any further.
How about you go to the zoo and watch how the monkeys act naturally all day, and do a report on how we should be acting. Or look in an aquarium at the natural creatures and tell us how we should be acting, and emulate it yourself.
Monkeys in a monkey enclosure and fish in an aquarium are hardly animals in their natural habitat.
For one thing any fish in a tank will be specifically separated from any type of fish they prey on to prevent them eating each other (because if you put together a nice mix of colourful fish, and 2 piranhas, pretty soon you'd just have 2 piranhas... maybe some baby piranhas, but that's beside the point.
Monkeys aren't vegetarian either, they'll eat insects and grubs, and small animals when they can get them. Chimpanzees have been observed hunting down and killing smaller monkeys for food and even small scale "war" between rival troops of chimps.
Re-assess your view of natural, there's a lot more blood in nature than you suggest.
I suspect the intended metric was actually Life Expectancy, not Mortality Rate.
However, since a lot of (probably most) vegetarians are people who made a choice during their lives, most likely after reaching adulthood, to become a vegetarian, their life expectancy would be expected to be higher than the population as a whole. It's the same for any group of adults, once you get over the hump of Infant Mortality you can probably expect to live to a decent age.
There could also be other factors in there... vegetarians I would guess are likely to pay more attention to their health in general, so there could be a correlation between vegetarianism and longevity, but nothing to prove causation.
What do you honestly think the chances of them letting you use one subscription on multiple computers is?
Going by present form it'll be one subscription per computer and not easily transferable.
Re:Isn't the whole idea of a standard
on
ISO Releases OOXML FAQ
·
· Score: 2, Informative
nothing but Office 2007 can open it
There is a "compatibility pack" for Office '03. Haven't had the opportunity to test whether it works with all the features but it does allow you to open.docx without Office '07
Creating things that die out of their own accord is less of a problem than creating things that refuse to die, ie. drought/pest/climate resistant strains. If something engineered to be unable to reproduce escapes into the wild... well it lives then dies then its gone.
If something engineered to grow in all soils under all conditions and in spite of all obstacles escapes then it could quickly dominate every available niche, become a weed, crowd out everything else and fill all the good growing land. If a strain of corn were to do this, we'd suddenly find ourselves with a rather boring diet. If a strain of cotton took over, we'd be fucked.
The plants engineered to not reproduce are intended to create a repeating market for their seeds - they're only good for one season so next year Monsanto get paid all over again. This is pretty damn evil, but only really dangerous on a wider scale if we were to turn over all our agriculture to such crops. I guess the point is that the super-resistant plants can compete with nature on their own terms, unable-to-reproduce versions can only compete if we allow them to.
Dogs' noses are so good that they can't afford to find certain smells distasteful in the way we do - if they did it'd soon be absolutely unbearable for them anywhere near something icky.
Our noses kinda make the decision about whether something is good/bad, for a dog any smell is just information. Like how our eyes just give us info about colours/shapes - we wouldn't recoil from a blue triangle in the way we do from sour milk.
I suspect the smells dogs like are just the strongest smells or the ones with the most useful information to impart, which would explain the ass-sniffing and rolling in fox crap.
So what... no more customising at all in the "Home" section? If they're only doing custom orders for Large businesses then the rest of us are all getting screwed.
The Dimension line is the only one of those 3 that I've heard of. Looking at Dell's site, the Optiplex is only available in the business sections, and Poweredge is servers. Again, home users getting shut out it seems.
My cynical side is reading the 3rd point as "we will sell you antivirus software you don't want, just bend over and accept it.
Last point... oh, great, charge us more for the one thing that sets you apart from the competition, great strategy there Dell. Really, I applaud whichever bright spark decided they needed to cut costs by not doing the thing that makes them worth giving money to.
They aren't known for impressive quality, so how they expect cutting down on the customisability to help I do not know. The only reason I'd consider Dell over any other make is that I get some choice over what goes inside. A desktop I can build my self, but laptops... not so much.
Well, that's somewhat reassuring - I have 3 drives, but they have at least one drive space on either side and a fan blowing air into the case directly over/between them. Ought to be nice and cool.
Never had a failure myself. I thought a portable drive had gone bad once but it turned out to be the USB lead... a bit annoying, but I got a bigger one to replace it, meaning I now have more space, which is good.
Please learn English.. you hurt my eyes
The word ADVERTS abbreviates to AD, not ADD.
ADD is (depending on context) either an arithmetic function or an excuse to give kids pills, I doubt Google is engaging in a scheme involving either one of the above.
We can slow down time already, by moving really fast. The difficult bit is moving backwards or forwards in a discrete step.
I suppose you could use relativistic speed to go forward in time - shoot off around the place for a year, come back and find more time has passed than you had to sit through, but it's not quite time travel as envisioned by sci-fi.
I look at it this way, I have a reasonable PC sat under the desk, does all the normal tasks plus some moderate gaming. To push that up to the level of a top-class games machine I'd need to get myself an expensive graphics card.
To get a separate games machine, I'd need to get myself an expensive games console... which is more or less the same cost to me (depending on exactly which card and which console I hypothetically go for)
But upgrading the PC still has the advantage because I'd rather just have the one box that does everything, it means less clutter (especially with all the peripheral devices you get around a games console) and it means that I don't have to bugger about to go from being on the internet to playing a game or back again.
Other points to the PC's advantage is that you don't have to worry about which type of PC to get or miss out on certain games because they only come out on one brand of PC, you can build your own and it'll be just as good (or better) than one you buy, and the thing's upgradeable as far as your budget stretches instead of having to buy a whole new box of tricks every few years (and at that point worry about whether your old games will be supported properly by the new device)
Sooner or later graphics that are completely indistinguishable from real life will be available on low-end hardware, then they'll have to start competing by making good games instead of just pretty games.
Slashdot Mirror
"are you seriously suggesting that the way to find out which parts of a HUMAN brain to put the electrodes in, is to examine a MONKEY brain?"
Yes. Yes I am. The brain as an organ has evolved incrementally - starting with simple nerve clusters and ganglia in very simple forms of life, then building up to a spinal column, brain stem etc (all just a rudimentary I/O system of stimulus to reaction). They can identify the parts of our brain that also exist in reptiles; the parts for motor control, sensory input, base reactions like fear and etc.
Monkeys are almost identical to us genetically, their brains astoundingly similar to our own. So yes, we can get a very good idea of where to position an electrode by studying the brain of a monkey. Hell, we'd get a rough idea from the brain of a crocodile - motor control won't have changed massively brain-wise since then. But a monkey is that much easier to avoid being eaten by.
As I said, the brain can feel no pain. The skull would be operated on under anaesthetic, and presumably they use the same methods on the monkey as a brain surgeon would on a human to prevent any pain for the part of human surgery when the skull is opened. It's not beyond the wit of man to administer some painkillers...
We couldn't do this straight away on human volunteers because as I said, we would be shooting blind - not even a starting point for where the electrodes should go. I agree it's unfortunate that we have to take these risks on animals first, but it would be far more of an ethical problem if we did it on a human being.
You seem to be here to pursue an agenda of your own against any kind of animal testing. I can sympathise - I think some uses of animal testing (cosmetics springs to mind as an example) are abhorrent and rightly banned (or if they aren't they should be). But this kind of trial just couldn't be done straight away on a human being.
You'd prefer they started out by sticking electrodes into humans with no idea what they were doing?
Of course some experimentation will be needed when they move to human subjects, but a monkey's brain is similar enough to ours that they can get a starting point to experiment around, rather than working blind on a human subject.
One other thing to note, there are no touch/pain receptors within the brain itself - people have brain surgery done while awake so the doctors can keep them talking and know they aren't accidentally removing something important. Once you've got an opening into the skull (which would be done under anaesthetic) you can poke and prod at the brain all you want without the subject feeling a thing.
Oh, and its on the news because its interesting and something of a step forward scientifically. Quit it with the conspiracy theories please.
Damn those movie theatres! Infringing on our right to a giant bucket of fried chicken while we watch a movie!
It's virtually censorship... they're preventing my free expression of chicken-eating. I demand chickeny freedom!
There's enough grain produced in the world to feed every person on the planet a sufficient number of calories.
Unfortunately, very little of it is produced in the places where people are starving, there's a lot of wastage, and there are people who eat many times more food than they need to.
The solution: Round up obese people and feed them to the third world. Soylent Green for all!
How would P2P ever involve your ISP making use of your CPU time or RAM? I think you're thinking of distributed projects like SETI@Home...
The ISPs could make money from P2P to be sure - either by saving money by helping torrent software connect to other people who are also on their network, or by offering their own (legal + paid for) download services. But appropriating your system resources? That's not P2P.
If 2 = 0 and -2 = 0 then 2 = -2 and 4 = 0 ...
or -4 = 0
so 4 = -4 and 8 = 0
I think the complaint was that they measured his energy expenditure, and he was using less energy to move at the same speed.
What speed they measured on I don't know, it would be distinctly less of an advantage for an actual race if he can travel incredibly efficiently at slow speeds but his top speed maxes out too low to be competitive in a sprint. Although if that was the case he could compete well in endurance running.
Either way its only a matter of time before we have prosthetics/bionics that can be used to outperform current athletes. We could put together a whole rack of legs, each optimised for different running styles and conditions.
Just to reply to something at the beginning of your comment, "falsifiable" only means that there is a hypothetical way to disprove something, not that such counter-evidence actually exists.
The laws of physics are falsifiable - if we observed things disobeying them then we'd know we need some new laws, or to reformulate the ones we have to include the new evidence.
But "Anyone who practices meditation intensely enough - with proper guidance - can reproduce the experience." is not falsifiable, since however much someone meditates without having the expected experience it can always be claimed they didn't do it properly or do it enough. If you defined how much meditation is needed, or a specific method, then it could be falsified (if someone followed all the instructions and had no such experience).
Am I the only one who felt like reminding him that 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address?
192.168.1.1 would probably be your router...
Heat is the energy making a particle move and vibrate, removing all of it results in an inert particle, not no particle.
And I believe its a part of the laws of thermodynamics that absolute zero is unobtainable... its self evident if you think about it - however cold you make something, it's always going to be gaining a little heat from its surroundings, unless those surroundings are colder than it is. Colder than absolute zero cannot happen, therefore anything that approaches it will reach a point above zero where it can't be cooled any further.
I suspect the intended metric was actually Life Expectancy, not Mortality Rate.
However, since a lot of (probably most) vegetarians are people who made a choice during their lives, most likely after reaching adulthood, to become a vegetarian, their life expectancy would be expected to be higher than the population as a whole. It's the same for any group of adults, once you get over the hump of Infant Mortality you can probably expect to live to a decent age.
There could also be other factors in there... vegetarians I would guess are likely to pay more attention to their health in general, so there could be a correlation between vegetarianism and longevity, but nothing to prove causation.
I think the point there is to make it distinctive rather than to scare off a tech-illiterate thief.
What do you honestly think the chances of them letting you use one subscription on multiple computers is?
Going by present form it'll be one subscription per computer and not easily transferable.
Creating things that die out of their own accord is less of a problem than creating things that refuse to die, ie. drought/pest/climate resistant strains. If something engineered to be unable to reproduce escapes into the wild... well it lives then dies then its gone.
If something engineered to grow in all soils under all conditions and in spite of all obstacles escapes then it could quickly dominate every available niche, become a weed, crowd out everything else and fill all the good growing land. If a strain of corn were to do this, we'd suddenly find ourselves with a rather boring diet. If a strain of cotton took over, we'd be fucked.
The plants engineered to not reproduce are intended to create a repeating market for their seeds - they're only good for one season so next year Monsanto get paid all over again. This is pretty damn evil, but only really dangerous on a wider scale if we were to turn over all our agriculture to such crops. I guess the point is that the super-resistant plants can compete with nature on their own terms, unable-to-reproduce versions can only compete if we allow them to.
Dogs' noses are so good that they can't afford to find certain smells distasteful in the way we do - if they did it'd soon be absolutely unbearable for them anywhere near something icky.
Our noses kinda make the decision about whether something is good/bad, for a dog any smell is just information. Like how our eyes just give us info about colours/shapes - we wouldn't recoil from a blue triangle in the way we do from sour milk.
I suspect the smells dogs like are just the strongest smells or the ones with the most useful information to impart, which would explain the ass-sniffing and rolling in fox crap.
I put line breaks in that. I don't know where they went.
So what... no more customising at all in the "Home" section? If they're only doing custom orders for Large businesses then the rest of us are all getting screwed. The Dimension line is the only one of those 3 that I've heard of. Looking at Dell's site, the Optiplex is only available in the business sections, and Poweredge is servers. Again, home users getting shut out it seems. My cynical side is reading the 3rd point as "we will sell you antivirus software you don't want, just bend over and accept it. Last point... oh, great, charge us more for the one thing that sets you apart from the competition, great strategy there Dell. Really, I applaud whichever bright spark decided they needed to cut costs by not doing the thing that makes them worth giving money to. They aren't known for impressive quality, so how they expect cutting down on the customisability to help I do not know. The only reason I'd consider Dell over any other make is that I get some choice over what goes inside. A desktop I can build my self, but laptops... not so much.
Well, that's somewhat reassuring - I have 3 drives, but they have at least one drive space on either side and a fan blowing air into the case directly over/between them. Ought to be nice and cool.
Never had a failure myself. I thought a portable drive had gone bad once but it turned out to be the USB lead... a bit annoying, but I got a bigger one to replace it, meaning I now have more space, which is good.
Please learn English.. you hurt my eyes The word ADVERTS abbreviates to AD, not ADD. ADD is (depending on context) either an arithmetic function or an excuse to give kids pills, I doubt Google is engaging in a scheme involving either one of the above.
We can slow down time already, by moving really fast. The difficult bit is moving backwards or forwards in a discrete step. I suppose you could use relativistic speed to go forward in time - shoot off around the place for a year, come back and find more time has passed than you had to sit through, but it's not quite time travel as envisioned by sci-fi.
I look at it this way, I have a reasonable PC sat under the desk, does all the normal tasks plus some moderate gaming. To push that up to the level of a top-class games machine I'd need to get myself an expensive graphics card. To get a separate games machine, I'd need to get myself an expensive games console... which is more or less the same cost to me (depending on exactly which card and which console I hypothetically go for) But upgrading the PC still has the advantage because I'd rather just have the one box that does everything, it means less clutter (especially with all the peripheral devices you get around a games console) and it means that I don't have to bugger about to go from being on the internet to playing a game or back again. Other points to the PC's advantage is that you don't have to worry about which type of PC to get or miss out on certain games because they only come out on one brand of PC, you can build your own and it'll be just as good (or better) than one you buy, and the thing's upgradeable as far as your budget stretches instead of having to buy a whole new box of tricks every few years (and at that point worry about whether your old games will be supported properly by the new device)
Not exactly a major world religion, but... http://churchoflotu.wordpress.com/ (LOTU = Laws Of The Universe)
Sooner or later graphics that are completely indistinguishable from real life will be available on low-end hardware, then they'll have to start competing by making good games instead of just pretty games.