Asshat. This isn't for medical science or anything as noble - it's "hey look what happens when we do this" and fundamentally no different to shooting things for fun. It's irrelevant that the roaches "feel no pain" - it's unethical, full stop.
What the hell? There is a single reason why it's unethical to do that to a human. They feel pain, both physical and mental anguish. If we did not, it would not be unethical to do it to humans. The cockroach does not, so it is not unethical to do it with them.
By all means, lock them up in a glass jar and check out how long they can go without food. Cut out legs. Poke it. Who the fuck cares? It certainly doesn't, why should you?
The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.
Yeah. Maybe 0.4 extra people will statistically get cancer 30 years from now that wouldn't have gotten it anyway. Oh wait, I've contemplated it.
The new, official story - just made public - is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving-face.
So? Buy a phone and whistle past the graveyard...
Did you even read the article you linked to? "Because radiation sensors closest to the plant were knocked out by the March 11, 2011 quake and the tsunami, the utility based its estimate on other monitoring posts and data collected by Japanese government agencies." This isn't some grand conspiracy of people trying to save face, it's about not having information because their sensors were knocked out. They were able to gather more data since.
By the way, even 2.5x the original estimate is really no big deal. Now it will approximate the yearly dose from natural potassium in the body.
Irrelevant. All off those are possibilities, but they are NOT get-out-of-jail-free cards. "I didn't know it was a stolen image" doesn't follow with "so I can keep using it" any more than unknowingly buying a stolen laptop on Craigslist mean you get to keep it if the police find it.
I'm not saying it does. I'm saying you don't take their entire site down. You tell them, "you're infringing on my copyright" and give them the opportunity to either take it down or say, "how much do you want for it?"
Same way that if somebody bought your stolen laptop, you tell them it's a stolen laptop and get it back. You don't put them in jail first until they can prove they were innocent and that, hey, it wasn't your laptop after all. The problem with the DMCA is that it bypasses the court before action (taking the site down) is taken.
Try to imagine the context of the ancient near east culture
I've got no problems accepting that cultures changes, but you can't attack another religion's texts for one thing, and then defend your own when it does the same thing by using that argument. Because your defense applies to them as well.
Women can be free in a society largely influenced by Christianity which tells people not to rape and pillage and to treat women as being full persons.
Not in Lot's time, when he was offering his daughters up to be raped in order to save his guests. I'm not objecting to his defense of his guests, I'm objecting to his solution.
I really have nothing against religious folk. I know plenty of Christians who I know that if they were placed in Lot's situation, they would die defending the guests in their homes. They would most certainly die defending their daughters too. Which is really my point. You don't judge people by their religious texts, you judge them by their actions. Some Christians are bad people, most are great people I'm happy to associate myself with.
You may be an atheist, but my guess is that you are a Christian atheist.
And the next verse: [quote]If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her.[/quote] indicating it's more like marriage than slavery, albeit forced marriage.
This would be ensuring the woman would be taken care of in a society where men earned the wages, and you're ripping bits out of context to suit your point.
And right there you've proven his point. Really? Buying a girl from her father against her wish is ok, as long as you don't resell her? That's like a marriage, because you're stuck with her for eternity, huh?
If you're forcing someone to live with you against their wish, it's slavery. Even if you treat them extremely well besides that, a gilded cage is still a cage.
Except for all the evolution we see happening right before our eyes. Damn super-bugs and their resistance to penicillin...
I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?
That's not science, that's philosophy. What are the chances I'm the only being in the universe, and that everything I think I am, everything I see (including your post), is just my imagination as my super-brain floats in the void? I can't prove anything else exists and I don't hallucinate it all. That doesn't mean I should give that possibility even the slightest thought.
In the absence of certainty, we make all of our decisions according to what is most likely to be true.
n the 40s, simply no one wanted to allow blacks to live anywhere but on the east side of town. Later when such covenants were voided, income disparity kept it that way. And with income disparity comes less time with parents/grandparents at home to help newborns get the jump start they need in education. Now the state closes schools that don't perform well - you guess it, in the "traditionally black" areas - so those kids end up getting bussed around further.
You're absolutely correct, and I agree with you on every single point. But quotas and affirmative action don't fix the problem.
A black kid goes to a substandard school in his neighborhood, and as a result isn't prepared for college. We institute quotas, and he gets in...but he's still ill-prepared for college, so now his grades are below average and his employment prospects suck when compared to his classmates. That's if he even graduates...guess who is more likely to drop out? And if he had to take any loans to pay for for college AND had to drop out? How'd you like to be in that situation?
Is it the kid's fault? No, of course not. He didn't have the opportunities the rest of us had. Do we, as a society, need to fix the problem? Yes, absolutely. However, in this case, fixing the problem means fixing education in low-income neighborhoods and doing a better job preparing these kids for college.
The problem with this argument is you are looking at a ridiculously small group. There are hundreds of thousands of IT workers in the US, filling hundreds of thousands of jobs. With such a large sample size the "default" should be a 50/50 mix of men and women, but it is actually hugely biased one way and that deserves some scrutiny.
Maybe. It should be a 50/50 only if everything is equal, which may be a poor assumption in the first place.
The problem isn't actually with women being unable to get IT jobs, at least not more so than with any other male dominated field where there are always a few "lads club" outfits. The problem is that very few women want to enter the field in the first place. Fewer than want to become mathematicians or some kind of scientist. There has to be a reason for that, and it isn't just that "computers are boring and not pink enough".
Maybe, but at that point you need to identify the reason, and then determine if something needs to be done about it or not. Imposing quotas isn't a fix for the problem, if a problem even exists, which isn't a given just because there aren't women in the field.
The way I see it, there are only two problems that require a fix. The first is if women want the jobs, but are not being hired / not being paid what they are worth because of sexism. The second is if the reason women don't want the jobs is because the environment in the workplace is actively hostile toward them, and they don't want to deal with the bullshit. Any other reason, and it's no more worrying than the fact that I didn't choose to be a painter. I don't like to paint. If for some reason everyone of my gender disliked painting, that wouldn't be something that needs fixing, it would be an interesting research subject for scientists to figure out why we're wired differently.
It works both ways too. In the UK we have a massive shortage of male primary school teachers. All sorts of theories have been put forward.
That's actually a good example. Because:
Women have a natural maternal instinct.
If this is true, then nothing needs to be done, and we should just accept that the field will be dominated by women.
Men are worried about being accused of being paedophiles.
If this is true, then something needs to be done to address this particular problem (it fits under the hostile environment category above). Notice that a quota would NOT fix this problem. It would just keep schools scrambling trying to hire any males, and they'll end up hiring inferior male teachers just to meet the quota when more qualified female candidates were available.
It's always a great idea to have your smartphone close to the grill when you are cooking.
Right up until you said that, I thought you were serious, and got actually worried there was a large market for the items in the article among slashdot readers:)
Seriously, being a geek isn't about using electronic gadgets. It's about obsessing over a subject and seeking to become very knowledgeable in it, to a fault. If you're a grilling geek, you're going to be very interested in grilling, and wouldn't want to be distracted by smartphones and wi-fi.
And if you're a gadget geek who is forced to grill, the only thing you want is a gadget that will do the grilling for you, without your intervention.
The DMCA procedure works like what you have said. The so-called-infringing web site just has to say with good faith, it is not infringing and the site goes back up.
That's not what I said, that's what I said is wrong with it. What I'm saying is that it's not supposed to go back up, it's not supposed to come down at all, unless the counter-notice is not received.
All Candice Schwager had to do was in good faith state she is not infringing or take the picture down. Obviously looking at Candice is behaving, she knows she is at fault
I agree, and I'm not trying to defend her. What I'm saying is that the photographer quickly contacted Go Daddy and had them put her sites back up while he negotiated with her. If he was willing to do that, why did the sites come down at all? He doesn't want that, he just wanted to negotiate a settlement and get paid for his work, or get her to take it down, something that could be accomplished easily if she had had a chance to get in touch with him without having her websites being taken down. Once negotiations fail, or if she doesn't reply in a reasonable period, then the site should come down.
I'm not seeing the connection between the two? What are you trying to say?
The paper I cited implies decisions are made before they are conscious. The earlier split-brain study implies you do have the circuity to justify decisions made by another hemisphere (making up, 'I want a coke' instead of simply not understanding why he got up and started walking). The connection would be that it's possible the same circuitry is used to justify other decisions you make, even when you do not have your corpus collosum severed.
This is why you should pain attention to the preview once it pops up. In the sibling post, I meant to say,
Chance is 50%. The fact that they are only accurate to less than 60% doesn't mean much without further statistical analysis. For that analysis, they claim p < 0.05. There's less than 5% chance the results they got is an anomaly, which makes it entirely possible it is an anomaly, but you can't tell that without trying to repeat the experiment. If you know of papers that tried to repeat the experiment and failed, please send me a link, I'm interested.
One thing that was particularly telling is that lot's of very basic information, like the number of participants, is completely absent.
Twelve subjects. That can be clearly determined from figure 2 and figure 9.
Some fun facts about this pile of garbage: their "predictions" are accurate
Chance is 50%. The fact that they are only accurate to less than 60% doesn't mean much without further statistical analysis. For that analysis, they claim p
It made a splash in the popular press, but hasn't held up well at all under scrutiny.
That might well be true. This is not my field at all, but I didn't just go look for an abstract. When this thing made a splash in the media, I did read the actual paper, and it's surprisingly easy to understand. Maybe that does mean it's not a very good paper, if somebody not trained in the field can follow it, I don't know. You appear to be in the field, but two of your complaints imply you haven't read the paper that closely, so I'm no so much defending the paper (I'm not qualified), as pointing out flaws in your analysis. Maybe you can point me to the papers that criticize this one "VERY heavily", and I can learn something that will help me fix my ignorance, instead of just attacking my lack of expertise, which isn't very constructive without some help to fix the problem.
Of course, the biggest point to be made is That paper has absolutely nothing to do with split-brain subjects.
I didn't say it did. The split-brain study was done much earlier. I cited it as evidence of the conclusion, and implied that, given the new evidence, you can look at the earlier study with split-brain studies under a new light. I once again concede I might be wrong, but again, you might want to point me to some literature to help educate me.
The whole situation could have been avoided if the website admin HADN'T STOLEN SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK. Seriously...how the fuck can people here not see that literally dozens of people stole this guys work, knowingly, and then want to put the burden on him to track each of them down, ask them nice to put up or take down, hope they do, "negotiate" something unspecified, lather, rinse, repeat, before he's allowed to use the law specifically intended to protect him in this situation.
Well, this isn't some well-known commercial software that has been pirated. You don't know that the person didn't get it from another website which claimed the image was under a different license. Or hell, the person could even have paid somebody else that had copied that picture and included it on a batch of stock images they had no rights to. Basically, you can't assume that the person knows they are infringing copyright.
Once again, not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that for any civil disagreement, if you show up in front of a judge without first having tried to negotiate and resolve the conflict amicably, the judge is going to be very angry at you, and tell you go try to negotiate first. And copyright infringement at the level we're talking about is most definitely a civil case.
Re:Dijkstra said it best
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
I can see the point, but that also applies to humans. There's a whole lot of research going on to determine exactly what it means for us to "think." A lot of it implies that maybe what we take for granted as our reasoning process to make decisions might just be justification for decisions that are already made. Take this experiment, which I've first read in The Believing Brain, and found it also described in this site when I googled for it.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”.
Basically, what I'm saying is that if all you want is an intelligent machine, making it think exactly like us is not what you want to do. If you want to transport people under water, you want a submarine, not a machine that can swim. However, researchers do build machines that emulate the way humans walk, or how insects glide through water. That helps us understand the mechanics of that process. Similarly, in trying to make machines that think as we do, we might understand more about ourselves.
Being a semi-pro photographer myself (and facing the same problem), I find the woman in the original article ludicrous. There's a lot of problems with trying to share your photos with the world (under copyright) and people using them w/o permission. I know my own photos are being used (and quite often abused) all over the place. The photos aren't very pleasing to look at if they have watermarks all over them obscuring detail:( Not that I don't freely allow many non-profits (including zoos) to use my photos all over the world and that I have certainly been paid for legal use of some few.
The woman is paranoid, and the photographer was within his rights. Know that I'm not arguing that point. That said, this is a clear example of the problems with the DMCA. Had the photographer contacted the website admin and requested the picture be taken down or permissions be negotiated before submitting a formal takedown, this whole situation may have been avoided (depending on just how crazy the woman is).
I understand that Go Daddy is the one who goes overboard and just shuts down every single website (including the ones not hosting the picture) from the owner until the situation is resolved. But considering that they're required to take immediate action, that is probably the most cost-effective way of doing things.
Honestly, the entire concept of immediate take-down is flawed. What should happen once you submit a DMCA request is that the person violating gets notified, and has a chance to take down / negotiate for permission / respond with a counter-notice before the website is taken down. If a counter-notice is file, the content does not get taken down, and whether infringement exists is decided by the courts. If they do not respond in a reasonable period, then the provider can remove access to the content, but not before. After all, if the counter-notice is valid, any amount of time the site was down would be unjust.
I'm no lawyer, but I would assume the woman actually has a case against Go Daddy (not the photographer), for taking down the non-infringing sites. Especially if she really did suffer financial damages.
It is very tedious to focus on a single person while they are talking.
Behind statements like this is generally the belief that you are far more interesting and intelligent than the person talking to you.
Grow up. You are not a precious snowflake, you live in the real world and have to deal with other people like the rest of us.
It's not like that at all. In fact, you should take your own advice and stop interpreting what people say in such a way that diminishes them and makes you appear superior.
Draining of energy when interacting with others means exactly that. I love running. When I don't run, I miss it. I love hanging out with people, and if I don't, I miss it. However, the longer I run, the more tired I get, and I'm required to stop running. The first few hours hanging out and talking with people are fun for me, but if it goes on too long, or if there are just too many people at the same time, I start getting tired. I need to get the hell out. It becomes difficult to focus, where before it was pleasant. This doesn't happen when interacting online, because I'm not focusing on them exclusively.
It's not a statement about the other person at all, it's just that, for us introverts, we can only take so much interaction before we need some alone time to recharge and relax.
There are established indicators for depression in psychology, others for introversion and what-have-you.
Unfortunately these indicators sometimes overlap. I did deal with light depression a while back and visited a psychologist. As I described what I was feeling, she said something to the effect of, "The DSM-IV lists 4 symptoms for clinical depression, and you gave me textbook descriptions of 3 of them" (the numbers may be wrong, I remember there was just one symptom I didn't describe, I've never had suicidal thoughts).
She wasn't wrong. At the time, I was legitimately dealing with depression, and it was affecting my life. I started just randomly not showing up to work, because I didn't see the point of getting out of bed in the morning. I stopped going out with friends (and limited my online interaction with them too, although I'm not going to argue everyone does this, I understand it's anecdotal). I pretty much just wanted to sleep, and did manage to sleep a good 16 hours a day often. The depression came about after I lost a grandmother who was very close to me, and I had been lucky enough to not have had any experience with death in all of my childhood. I didn't really learn to deal with grief.
Eventually, I did grieve, I dealt with it, and I went back to being myself. The psychiatrist insisted that, although I had shown tremendous signs of improvement, my low levels of socialization were still indicative of depression. I know what you're thinking: maybe I was / am still dealing with depression, and the problem is that I've been doing the misdiagnosing and calling it introversion instead. Thing is, I'm actually a very happy person. And I like interacting with people. The difference is that I need to recharge with some alone time after the interaction.
Here's a good analogy. I like to run. For roughly 5 years or so, my routine involves running 3 times a week. Two of those times, I run 3 miles, on Saturdays, I ran 4 miles. When I skip running, I miss it, and I want to do it again. However, if I tried running past the 4 miles I'm used to, I'll be tired, and I'll enjoy it less. I could manage to run 5 miles. If I absolutely decided it was necessary for me to run 6 miles, I could do it right now, but my pace would suffer significantly for that last mile. I would, in fact, hate that last mile.
Same thing happens to me in dealing with people. I love to get together with my friends and hanging out for a few hours. If there are too many people, I start enjoying it less. If it lasts too long, I started hating it, and I want to just leave. The other day, I was hosting an all-day event at my place, and I was having a blast for most of it. I expected everyone to get tired and clear out by 8pm or so, but there were still there at 11pm. By that point, people would start talking to me, and I would put on a happy face, but all the while I'd be thinking, "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY. FUCKING GO HOME!"
The psychiatrist couldn't tell the difference between me just not having the energy for more social interaction and still being depressed. She kept pushing me to just try to get out more, and until I made the realization myself that I was fine, I kept trying to do so, and as a result was just in a bad mood more often than not, because I wasn't getting my necessary alone time. Once I realized this was going on, I stopped getting therapy, and went back to having a normal, happy life.
She wasn't a bad psychiatrist. The thing is, I really was depressed in the beginning, and because some of the symptoms overlap with normal introvert behavior, it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. However, what you absolutely can't do is assume that when people are doing more online interactions than real-life interactions, they are "starved for human interaction." Maybe that's the case, but it's not necessarily so.
I think you're talking about introversion, while the article is about depression.
You're the third person to point this out. I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that's precisely the point I'm trying to make. I apologize for not being clear enough. Here's the explanation of my post:
The thread starts with "WTF do the non-depressed do with the internet?" All the stuff that has been described appears to be perfectly normal behavior. It continues when another pointer points out that not only is it normal behavior, but they're pinpointing very social online behavior, which is typically not something people are depressed seek out. The person I originally responded to tried to say, "oh, but it is...you're depressed because you feel alone, but you really crave ANY type of human interaction, so you overdo it on the internet."
My answer was intended to point out that no, I'm not depressed when I engage in those activities, and I don't feel alone. I'm merely an introvert. As an introvert I've had many people confuse this with depression and unhappiness, and I fear the people doing this study might be falling into the same trap.
coping mechanism. When your brain is telling you you're all alone, you do everything you can to feel some sort of human connection.
No. Goddamnit, no.
Look, you extroverted people have no understanding of us, more introverted guys. I understand most people really can't stand to be alone, and start wanting to climb the walls when forced to do that. Not everyone shares these feelings. We prefer interaction online because we want to attenuate the human connection. Being around people for too long drains me. Talking to someone online is manageable, because the person on the other side isn't taking up the entirety of my attention, and I'm free to do other things WHILE interacting. I get a message, and I get to ignore it for a minute while I'm reading an article, then getting around to respond it, then go back to reading the article.
One-on-one people interactions completely monopolize your time, and for that reason is very draining to introverts. You can't just tune out the person for a bit without being extremely rude. When I was in college, my roommate was another introvert. We sometimes, I shit you not, type to each other over instant messaging through our computers while IN THE SAME ROOM.
Totally, just saying the problem out loud leads you to view the problem from a different perspective. 50% of the time you've got the answer before you're halfway through explaining the problem.
I definitely agree with you, but I don't think that's the same phenomenon that is described in the article.
Usually when I find the answer in the process of explaining to somebody else, it's because I already have the answer, but can't see that I've misapplied it. When looking at my work, my brain sees what should be on the screen, not what actually is on the screen. I skip steps because I've done them so often that I already know what the result should be. Then I try to explain it to somebody else, and the mind is forced to pull away from the tunnel vision. You stop thinking about what you have or haven't done, and start thinking about, "given this guy's knowledge, how do I explain the steps I should take in order to solve it?" At which point, once you get to the step you weren't paying much attention to, you immediately realize that you missed it.
Same reason pilots have actual checklists they're supposed to go through for the pre-flight check, before takeoff, etc. You do it enough times, you end up skipping a step. You have it written there in front of you, and you avoid that problem.
The situation described in the article is a little different. You're not thinking about the original problem at all anymore, but the solution just pops in your mind. Just the other day I was in a car with a friend, and couldn't think of the name of an actor. I spent maybe 5 minutes trying to remember, and then gave up, and changed the subject. 20 minutes later, after I hadn't given the thing any thought whatsoever, we arrived where we were going, and the name just popped in my head.
There's a weird background processing thing that goes on when you stop thinking about stuff.
Actually, if you become a citizen of another country, the US considers that an automatic renouncement of citizenship even if the new country doesn't require such.
Bullshit. Look inside your passport under the Dual Citizenship session. The US is perfectly fine with it. They merely recommend against it, because they say it would hamper your ability to request help from the American Consulate if you are a citizen of the country you are seeking help to fight against.
Slashdot Mirror
Asshat. This isn't for medical science or anything as noble - it's "hey look what happens when we do this" and fundamentally no different to shooting things for fun. It's irrelevant that the roaches "feel no pain" - it's unethical, full stop.
What the hell? There is a single reason why it's unethical to do that to a human. They feel pain, both physical and mental anguish. If we did not, it would not be unethical to do it to humans. The cockroach does not, so it is not unethical to do it with them.
By all means, lock them up in a glass jar and check out how long they can go without food. Cut out legs. Poke it. Who the fuck cares? It certainly doesn't, why should you?
The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.
Yeah. Maybe 0.4 extra people will statistically get cancer 30 years from now that wouldn't have gotten it anyway. Oh wait, I've contemplated it.
The new, official story - just made public - is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving-face.
So? Buy a phone and whistle past the graveyard...
Did you even read the article you linked to? "Because radiation sensors closest to the plant were knocked out by the March 11, 2011 quake and the tsunami, the utility based its estimate on other monitoring posts and data collected by Japanese government agencies." This isn't some grand conspiracy of people trying to save face, it's about not having information because their sensors were knocked out. They were able to gather more data since.
By the way, even 2.5x the original estimate is really no big deal. Now it will approximate the yearly dose from natural potassium in the body.
Irrelevant. All off those are possibilities, but they are NOT get-out-of-jail-free cards. "I didn't know it was a stolen image" doesn't follow with "so I can keep using it" any more than unknowingly buying a stolen laptop on Craigslist mean you get to keep it if the police find it.
I'm not saying it does. I'm saying you don't take their entire site down. You tell them, "you're infringing on my copyright" and give them the opportunity to either take it down or say, "how much do you want for it?"
Same way that if somebody bought your stolen laptop, you tell them it's a stolen laptop and get it back. You don't put them in jail first until they can prove they were innocent and that, hey, it wasn't your laptop after all. The problem with the DMCA is that it bypasses the court before action (taking the site down) is taken.
Try to imagine the context of the ancient near east culture
I've got no problems accepting that cultures changes, but you can't attack another religion's texts for one thing, and then defend your own when it does the same thing by using that argument. Because your defense applies to them as well.
Women can be free in a society largely influenced by Christianity which tells people not to rape and pillage and to treat women as being full persons.
Not in Lot's time, when he was offering his daughters up to be raped in order to save his guests. I'm not objecting to his defense of his guests, I'm objecting to his solution.
I really have nothing against religious folk. I know plenty of Christians who I know that if they were placed in Lot's situation, they would die defending the guests in their homes. They would most certainly die defending their daughters too. Which is really my point. You don't judge people by their religious texts, you judge them by their actions. Some Christians are bad people, most are great people I'm happy to associate myself with.
You may be an atheist, but my guess is that you are a Christian atheist.
I don't understand what that means.
And the next verse:
[quote]If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her.[/quote]
indicating it's more like marriage than slavery, albeit forced marriage.
This would be ensuring the woman would be taken care of in a society where men earned the wages, and you're ripping bits out of context to suit your point.
And right there you've proven his point. Really? Buying a girl from her father against her wish is ok, as long as you don't resell her? That's like a marriage, because you're stuck with her for eternity, huh?
If you're forcing someone to live with you against their wish, it's slavery. Even if you treat them extremely well besides that, a gilded cage is still a cage.
It's *all* circumstantial.
Except for all the evolution we see happening right before our eyes. Damn super-bugs and their resistance to penicillin...
I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?
That's not science, that's philosophy. What are the chances I'm the only being in the universe, and that everything I think I am, everything I see (including your post), is just my imagination as my super-brain floats in the void? I can't prove anything else exists and I don't hallucinate it all. That doesn't mean I should give that possibility even the slightest thought.
In the absence of certainty, we make all of our decisions according to what is most likely to be true.
n the 40s, simply no one wanted to allow blacks to live anywhere but on the east side of town. Later when such covenants were voided, income disparity kept it that way. And with income disparity comes less time with parents/grandparents at home to help newborns get the jump start they need in education. Now the state closes schools that don't perform well - you guess it, in the "traditionally black" areas - so those kids end up getting bussed around further.
You're absolutely correct, and I agree with you on every single point. But quotas and affirmative action don't fix the problem.
A black kid goes to a substandard school in his neighborhood, and as a result isn't prepared for college. We institute quotas, and he gets in...but he's still ill-prepared for college, so now his grades are below average and his employment prospects suck when compared to his classmates. That's if he even graduates...guess who is more likely to drop out? And if he had to take any loans to pay for for college AND had to drop out? How'd you like to be in that situation?
Is it the kid's fault? No, of course not. He didn't have the opportunities the rest of us had. Do we, as a society, need to fix the problem? Yes, absolutely. However, in this case, fixing the problem means fixing education in low-income neighborhoods and doing a better job preparing these kids for college.
The problem with this argument is you are looking at a ridiculously small group. There are hundreds of thousands of IT workers in the US, filling hundreds of thousands of jobs. With such a large sample size the "default" should be a 50/50 mix of men and women, but it is actually hugely biased one way and that deserves some scrutiny.
Maybe. It should be a 50/50 only if everything is equal, which may be a poor assumption in the first place.
The problem isn't actually with women being unable to get IT jobs, at least not more so than with any other male dominated field where there are always a few "lads club" outfits. The problem is that very few women want to enter the field in the first place. Fewer than want to become mathematicians or some kind of scientist. There has to be a reason for that, and it isn't just that "computers are boring and not pink enough".
Maybe, but at that point you need to identify the reason, and then determine if something needs to be done about it or not. Imposing quotas isn't a fix for the problem, if a problem even exists, which isn't a given just because there aren't women in the field.
The way I see it, there are only two problems that require a fix. The first is if women want the jobs, but are not being hired / not being paid what they are worth because of sexism. The second is if the reason women don't want the jobs is because the environment in the workplace is actively hostile toward them, and they don't want to deal with the bullshit. Any other reason, and it's no more worrying than the fact that I didn't choose to be a painter. I don't like to paint. If for some reason everyone of my gender disliked painting, that wouldn't be something that needs fixing, it would be an interesting research subject for scientists to figure out why we're wired differently.
It works both ways too. In the UK we have a massive shortage of male primary school teachers. All sorts of theories have been put forward.
That's actually a good example. Because:
Women have a natural maternal instinct.
If this is true, then nothing needs to be done, and we should just accept that the field will be dominated by women.
Men are worried about being accused of being paedophiles.
If this is true, then something needs to be done to address this particular problem (it fits under the hostile environment category above). Notice that a quota would NOT fix this problem. It would just keep schools scrambling trying to hire any males, and they'll end up hiring inferior male teachers just to meet the quota when more qualified female candidates were available.
It's always a great idea to have your smartphone close to the grill when you are cooking.
Right up until you said that, I thought you were serious, and got actually worried there was a large market for the items in the article among slashdot readers :)
Seriously, being a geek isn't about using electronic gadgets. It's about obsessing over a subject and seeking to become very knowledgeable in it, to a fault. If you're a grilling geek, you're going to be very interested in grilling, and wouldn't want to be distracted by smartphones and wi-fi.
And if you're a gadget geek who is forced to grill, the only thing you want is a gadget that will do the grilling for you, without your intervention.
The DMCA procedure works like what you have said. The so-called-infringing web site just has to say with good faith, it is not infringing and the site goes back up.
That's not what I said, that's what I said is wrong with it. What I'm saying is that it's not supposed to go back up, it's not supposed to come down at all, unless the counter-notice is not received.
All Candice Schwager had to do was in good faith state she is not infringing or take the picture down. Obviously looking at Candice is behaving, she knows she is at fault
I agree, and I'm not trying to defend her. What I'm saying is that the photographer quickly contacted Go Daddy and had them put her sites back up while he negotiated with her. If he was willing to do that, why did the sites come down at all? He doesn't want that, he just wanted to negotiate a settlement and get paid for his work, or get her to take it down, something that could be accomplished easily if she had had a chance to get in touch with him without having her websites being taken down. Once negotiations fail, or if she doesn't reply in a reasonable period, then the site should come down.
I'm not seeing the connection between the two? What are you trying to say?
The paper I cited implies decisions are made before they are conscious. The earlier split-brain study implies you do have the circuity to justify decisions made by another hemisphere (making up, 'I want a coke' instead of simply not understanding why he got up and started walking). The connection would be that it's possible the same circuitry is used to justify other decisions you make, even when you do not have your corpus collosum severed.
This is why you should pain attention to the preview once it pops up. In the sibling post, I meant to say,
Chance is 50%. The fact that they are only accurate to less than 60% doesn't mean much without further statistical analysis. For that analysis, they claim p < 0.05. There's less than 5% chance the results they got is an anomaly, which makes it entirely possible it is an anomaly, but you can't tell that without trying to repeat the experiment. If you know of papers that tried to repeat the experiment and failed, please send me a link, I'm interested.
One thing that was particularly telling is that lot's of very basic information, like the number of participants, is completely absent.
Twelve subjects. That can be clearly determined from figure 2 and figure 9.
Some fun facts about this pile of garbage: their "predictions" are accurate
Chance is 50%. The fact that they are only accurate to less than 60% doesn't mean much without further statistical analysis. For that analysis, they claim p
It made a splash in the popular press, but hasn't held up well at all under scrutiny.
That might well be true. This is not my field at all, but I didn't just go look for an abstract. When this thing made a splash in the media, I did read the actual paper, and it's surprisingly easy to understand. Maybe that does mean it's not a very good paper, if somebody not trained in the field can follow it, I don't know. You appear to be in the field, but two of your complaints imply you haven't read the paper that closely, so I'm no so much defending the paper (I'm not qualified), as pointing out flaws in your analysis. Maybe you can point me to the papers that criticize this one "VERY heavily", and I can learn something that will help me fix my ignorance, instead of just attacking my lack of expertise, which isn't very constructive without some help to fix the problem.
Of course, the biggest point to be made is That paper has absolutely nothing to do with split-brain subjects.
I didn't say it did. The split-brain study was done much earlier. I cited it as evidence of the conclusion, and implied that, given the new evidence, you can look at the earlier study with split-brain studies under a new light. I once again concede I might be wrong, but again, you might want to point me to some literature to help educate me.
Yeah, split-brain != split mind
Put down the pop-sci books and go check out the actual research. That particular conclusion isn't supported by the evidence at all.
Ok. Does Nature count?
The past generations were already ruined, thanks to Elvis and his gyrating hips.
The whole situation could have been avoided if the website admin HADN'T STOLEN SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK. Seriously...how the fuck can people here not see that literally dozens of people stole this guys work, knowingly, and then want to put the burden on him to track each of them down, ask them nice to put up or take down, hope they do, "negotiate" something unspecified, lather, rinse, repeat, before he's allowed to use the law specifically intended to protect him in this situation.
Well, this isn't some well-known commercial software that has been pirated. You don't know that the person didn't get it from another website which claimed the image was under a different license. Or hell, the person could even have paid somebody else that had copied that picture and included it on a batch of stock images they had no rights to. Basically, you can't assume that the person knows they are infringing copyright.
Once again, not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that for any civil disagreement, if you show up in front of a judge without first having tried to negotiate and resolve the conflict amicably, the judge is going to be very angry at you, and tell you go try to negotiate first. And copyright infringement at the level we're talking about is most definitely a civil case.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
I can see the point, but that also applies to humans. There's a whole lot of research going on to determine exactly what it means for us to "think." A lot of it implies that maybe what we take for granted as our reasoning process to make decisions might just be justification for decisions that are already made. Take this experiment, which I've first read in The Believing Brain, and found it also described in this site when I googled for it.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”.
Basically, what I'm saying is that if all you want is an intelligent machine, making it think exactly like us is not what you want to do. If you want to transport people under water, you want a submarine, not a machine that can swim. However, researchers do build machines that emulate the way humans walk, or how insects glide through water. That helps us understand the mechanics of that process. Similarly, in trying to make machines that think as we do, we might understand more about ourselves.
Being a semi-pro photographer myself (and facing the same problem), I find the woman in the original article ludicrous.
There's a lot of problems with trying to share your photos with the world (under copyright) and people using them w/o permission. I know my own photos are being used (and quite often abused) all over the place.
The photos aren't very pleasing to look at if they have watermarks all over them obscuring detail:(
Not that I don't freely allow many non-profits (including zoos) to use my photos all over the world and that I have certainly been paid for legal use of some few.
The woman is paranoid, and the photographer was within his rights. Know that I'm not arguing that point. That said, this is a clear example of the problems with the DMCA. Had the photographer contacted the website admin and requested the picture be taken down or permissions be negotiated before submitting a formal takedown, this whole situation may have been avoided (depending on just how crazy the woman is).
I understand that Go Daddy is the one who goes overboard and just shuts down every single website (including the ones not hosting the picture) from the owner until the situation is resolved. But considering that they're required to take immediate action, that is probably the most cost-effective way of doing things.
Honestly, the entire concept of immediate take-down is flawed. What should happen once you submit a DMCA request is that the person violating gets notified, and has a chance to take down / negotiate for permission / respond with a counter-notice before the website is taken down. If a counter-notice is file, the content does not get taken down, and whether infringement exists is decided by the courts. If they do not respond in a reasonable period, then the provider can remove access to the content, but not before. After all, if the counter-notice is valid, any amount of time the site was down would be unjust.
I'm no lawyer, but I would assume the woman actually has a case against Go Daddy (not the photographer), for taking down the non-infringing sites. Especially if she really did suffer financial damages.
It is very tedious to focus on a single person while they are talking.
Behind statements like this is generally the belief that you are far more interesting and intelligent than the person talking to you.
Grow up. You are not a precious snowflake, you live in the real world and have to deal with other people like the rest of us.
It's not like that at all. In fact, you should take your own advice and stop interpreting what people say in such a way that diminishes them and makes you appear superior.
Draining of energy when interacting with others means exactly that. I love running. When I don't run, I miss it. I love hanging out with people, and if I don't, I miss it. However, the longer I run, the more tired I get, and I'm required to stop running. The first few hours hanging out and talking with people are fun for me, but if it goes on too long, or if there are just too many people at the same time, I start getting tired. I need to get the hell out. It becomes difficult to focus, where before it was pleasant. This doesn't happen when interacting online, because I'm not focusing on them exclusively.
It's not a statement about the other person at all, it's just that, for us introverts, we can only take so much interaction before we need some alone time to recharge and relax.
There are established indicators for depression in psychology, others for introversion and what-have-you.
Unfortunately these indicators sometimes overlap. I did deal with light depression a while back and visited a psychologist. As I described what I was feeling, she said something to the effect of, "The DSM-IV lists 4 symptoms for clinical depression, and you gave me textbook descriptions of 3 of them" (the numbers may be wrong, I remember there was just one symptom I didn't describe, I've never had suicidal thoughts).
She wasn't wrong. At the time, I was legitimately dealing with depression, and it was affecting my life. I started just randomly not showing up to work, because I didn't see the point of getting out of bed in the morning. I stopped going out with friends (and limited my online interaction with them too, although I'm not going to argue everyone does this, I understand it's anecdotal). I pretty much just wanted to sleep, and did manage to sleep a good 16 hours a day often. The depression came about after I lost a grandmother who was very close to me, and I had been lucky enough to not have had any experience with death in all of my childhood. I didn't really learn to deal with grief.
Eventually, I did grieve, I dealt with it, and I went back to being myself. The psychiatrist insisted that, although I had shown tremendous signs of improvement, my low levels of socialization were still indicative of depression. I know what you're thinking: maybe I was / am still dealing with depression, and the problem is that I've been doing the misdiagnosing and calling it introversion instead. Thing is, I'm actually a very happy person. And I like interacting with people. The difference is that I need to recharge with some alone time after the interaction.
Here's a good analogy. I like to run. For roughly 5 years or so, my routine involves running 3 times a week. Two of those times, I run 3 miles, on Saturdays, I ran 4 miles. When I skip running, I miss it, and I want to do it again. However, if I tried running past the 4 miles I'm used to, I'll be tired, and I'll enjoy it less. I could manage to run 5 miles. If I absolutely decided it was necessary for me to run 6 miles, I could do it right now, but my pace would suffer significantly for that last mile. I would, in fact, hate that last mile.
Same thing happens to me in dealing with people. I love to get together with my friends and hanging out for a few hours. If there are too many people, I start enjoying it less. If it lasts too long, I started hating it, and I want to just leave. The other day, I was hosting an all-day event at my place, and I was having a blast for most of it. I expected everyone to get tired and clear out by 8pm or so, but there were still there at 11pm. By that point, people would start talking to me, and I would put on a happy face, but all the while I'd be thinking, "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY. FUCKING GO HOME!"
The psychiatrist couldn't tell the difference between me just not having the energy for more social interaction and still being depressed. She kept pushing me to just try to get out more, and until I made the realization myself that I was fine, I kept trying to do so, and as a result was just in a bad mood more often than not, because I wasn't getting my necessary alone time. Once I realized this was going on, I stopped getting therapy, and went back to having a normal, happy life.
She wasn't a bad psychiatrist. The thing is, I really was depressed in the beginning, and because some of the symptoms overlap with normal introvert behavior, it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. However, what you absolutely can't do is assume that when people are doing more online interactions than real-life interactions, they are "starved for human interaction." Maybe that's the case, but it's not necessarily so.
I think you're talking about introversion, while the article is about depression.
You're the third person to point this out. I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that's precisely the point I'm trying to make. I apologize for not being clear enough. Here's the explanation of my post:
The thread starts with "WTF do the non-depressed do with the internet?" All the stuff that has been described appears to be perfectly normal behavior. It continues when another pointer points out that not only is it normal behavior, but they're pinpointing very social online behavior, which is typically not something people are depressed seek out. The person I originally responded to tried to say, "oh, but it is...you're depressed because you feel alone, but you really crave ANY type of human interaction, so you overdo it on the internet."
My answer was intended to point out that no, I'm not depressed when I engage in those activities, and I don't feel alone. I'm merely an introvert. As an introvert I've had many people confuse this with depression and unhappiness, and I fear the people doing this study might be falling into the same trap.
coping mechanism. When your brain is telling you you're all alone, you do everything you can to feel some sort of human connection.
No. Goddamnit, no.
Look, you extroverted people have no understanding of us, more introverted guys. I understand most people really can't stand to be alone, and start wanting to climb the walls when forced to do that. Not everyone shares these feelings. We prefer interaction online because we want to attenuate the human connection. Being around people for too long drains me. Talking to someone online is manageable, because the person on the other side isn't taking up the entirety of my attention, and I'm free to do other things WHILE interacting. I get a message, and I get to ignore it for a minute while I'm reading an article, then getting around to respond it, then go back to reading the article.
One-on-one people interactions completely monopolize your time, and for that reason is very draining to introverts. You can't just tune out the person for a bit without being extremely rude. When I was in college, my roommate was another introvert. We sometimes, I shit you not, type to each other over instant messaging through our computers while IN THE SAME ROOM.
Why should the next man she marries be required to pay for children that are not his offspring?
Because when you marry someone with children, you assume responsibility for the children?
If you're not willing to do that, don't marry someone that already has children and custody of them.
Totally, just saying the problem out loud leads you to view the problem from a different perspective. 50% of the time you've got the answer before you're halfway through explaining the problem.
I definitely agree with you, but I don't think that's the same phenomenon that is described in the article.
Usually when I find the answer in the process of explaining to somebody else, it's because I already have the answer, but can't see that I've misapplied it. When looking at my work, my brain sees what should be on the screen, not what actually is on the screen. I skip steps because I've done them so often that I already know what the result should be. Then I try to explain it to somebody else, and the mind is forced to pull away from the tunnel vision. You stop thinking about what you have or haven't done, and start thinking about, "given this guy's knowledge, how do I explain the steps I should take in order to solve it?" At which point, once you get to the step you weren't paying much attention to, you immediately realize that you missed it.
Same reason pilots have actual checklists they're supposed to go through for the pre-flight check, before takeoff, etc. You do it enough times, you end up skipping a step. You have it written there in front of you, and you avoid that problem.
The situation described in the article is a little different. You're not thinking about the original problem at all anymore, but the solution just pops in your mind. Just the other day I was in a car with a friend, and couldn't think of the name of an actor. I spent maybe 5 minutes trying to remember, and then gave up, and changed the subject. 20 minutes later, after I hadn't given the thing any thought whatsoever, we arrived where we were going, and the name just popped in my head.
There's a weird background processing thing that goes on when you stop thinking about stuff.
Actually, if you become a citizen of another country, the US considers that an automatic renouncement of citizenship even if the new country doesn't require such.
Bullshit. Look inside your passport under the Dual Citizenship session. The US is perfectly fine with it. They merely recommend against it, because they say it would hamper your ability to request help from the American Consulate if you are a citizen of the country you are seeking help to fight against.