You're preaching to the choir, of course, but as someone else pointed out, there are some fence-sitters out there who just need a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately the 'hard core' types, and even more unfortunately, their children, will just have to be thought of as 'evolution in action'.:-/
These people have already made up their minds that vaccinations are causing some sort of harm, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if a fair number of them think there's some sort of government conspiracy involved. Forcing them to sit down and have the science behind vaccines pounded into them is likely to just make them more stubborn about it or more convinced that there's some sort of conspiracy going on.
Well, that certainly would explain getting modded down to neg one all the time whenever you post anything even remotely negative about China. Sad, what a shithole the Internet in general has become..
Not, of course, that I wouldn't like to see many of these things (don't really need Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, etc); I grew up watching original Star Trek, and then all of it's various incarnations (good, bad, and ugly), all the movies (good, bad, and ugly) and I've always read science fiction and fantasy. Federation-style replicators? Transporters? Warp drive? Hell, yeah.:-) But you know what they say about wishes and horses.;-) Imagination is nice, and it's certainly helpful and healthy, but let's face it, we've got lots of real-world problems that have real-world solutions we need to work on. For the short term I'll be happy if they can come up with a practical, scalable fusion reactor that can be used for power generation; having a cheap, clean, abundant power source for the whole planet would solve a metric assload of problems, and it's not science fiction (or science fantasy). Antimatter reactors would be nice, too, but so far they've only been able to create a handful of atoms of the stuff at a time (am I right on that?), and let's face it, the idea of some jerks creating antimatter bombs doesn't make me feel warm-and-fuzzy inside, but it, too would solve lots of problems, even if it would create new ones.
Why stop there? How about Vandal Savage? Fictional character, I know, but we're more-or-less talking fictional things right now anyway (until if-and-when there's such a thing like 'boosterspice', so you can stay young forever -- or at least as long as you can afford the stuff). Been covered in other things I've read over the years, though, yeah. I don't think that immortality would necessarily be a good thing for humans, not as we are socio-politically right now.
Sounds to me like you just didn't bother to read the entire comment and therefore missed the point entirely, but I don't expect much better than that from the average Anonymous Coward.
One of my favorite authors is Larry Niven, and he's covered quite a bit about people who more or less live forever ('boosterspice'), and the effects it has on their personalities and the choices they make. Very often it isn't pretty; some would commit suicide, probably in some spectacular way; some would turn to crime; some would inevitably turn to a neverending quest for power. To be fair about it, some would turn to bettering humankind. But, when you've lived so long that you've managed to conquer and master every single interest you've ever had in your life, what do you do then? 'Idle hands are the Devils playthings' as the saying goes. Imagine someone like Donald Trump, except he never ages, lives forever, is essentially unkillable, and he's getting really, really bored as the centuries roll by; what do you think he's going to do? Don't know about you, friend, but the thought makes my blood run cold.
Neurological science still doesn't even have the foggiest idea how the human brain does all the things that it does, let alone what causes the phenomenon we refer to as 'consciousness'. Personally, I believe most of the problem there is the lack of ability to observe the machine in operation; our instrumentality is sorely lacking. Too bad it's not like a piece of machinery, that you can stop, dismantle, examine all the pieces and see what they do, blueprint the thing, then put it all back together and see it run again; you stop a human brain, it more or less starts turning into useless mush immediately, and there's nothing to see anymore.
Of course I'm not all that certain that at this point in our social evolution as a species, that we should even be trusted with knowing all the secrets of how our brains work; I'd be afraid of the knowledge being misused.
Step into a transport booth and instantly be anywhere in the world
Have Starships that travel many times the speed of light and take you to distant galaxies
Never age, never be hungry, never get a disease
Live in a world without poverty, fear, or war
Discover Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Gods are actually real, you can meet them and sit down and have a drink and talk to them
{insert other utter fantasy here}
..but it's not very likely any of those things will happen.
Hurr, you have no imagination!
On the contrary, I have a huge imagination, it's one of the things that makes me good at what I do -- but I also have a firm grip on reality and know the difference between it and fantasy -- and this guy from Huawei is spinning fantastic-sounding stuff just to get some attention. I rate it's credibility just slightly above things you hear out of North Korea.
Fun to think about such things though. And, you never know.. but I'm not holding my breath, either; I recommend others do the same.
This Zika threat is no Amateur Night shit. Zika reads like something from an action-adventure movie, where the evil mastermind weaponizes a virus and releases it into the world to bring about an apocalypse. Transmission via mosquito is just the beginning, it can be transmitted from person to person, and in an adult it's mild enough that anyone who isn't specifically diagnosed with it could easily shrug it off as nothing to worry about. I could see it wrecking an entire generation (or more) if not stopped. Where the games are planned on being held is literally where Zika is the worst and you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world show up and congregate in one place? Madness. Move the goddamned Games to some other country. We don't need to help the Zika virus spread all over the goddamned planet.
..and before some asshat accuses me of it: This ain't about 'brown people' or any such bullshit; if Zika became a pandemic, it would affect all people from all ethnic backgrounds. We'd have microcephaly cases in newborns all over the place, white, black, brown, yellow, or what-have-you. Let's not, OK? Move the damned Olympics!
We might have an 'Advanced Autopilot' feature -- as an expensive option on expensive luxury cars -- but it won't be on all cars, and regardless (as I have said before and will continue to say) you'll still need to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured for operating a motor vehicle, and all vehicles will still be required to have a full set of manual controls for a human operator, and able to take over from the Autopilot at a moments' notice, because where the safety of human beings is concerned, a human being must be the final failsafe system above all automated systems, period. To do otherwise is complete and utter madness. You're not going to be allowed to take a nap while driving anywhere, and you're not going to be able to put your kids into the car and just send it off somewhere.
I think it'll be more like 20 years (or more), not a mere 5 years. It's too complex a task to perfect anytime soon. Might even be more like 50 years. Everyone has a sci-fi idea what 'AI' is, and the reality is that 'AI' doesn't have very much of the 'I' in it, not compared to a human being, not even compared to a dog or a cat. They'll probably reach some level of development then hit a wall; we don't even know how a human brain (or an animal brain for that matter) works yet, and they're trying to duplicate that level of cognition for one of the most complex tasks humans have: driving a car out in the real world. Yeah, no, don't have much faith in that idea.
Did you complain about the so-called telemetry in Vista, 7, or 8?
I'm still running XP at home, because I didn't give enough of a damn to go to all the hassle of upgrading.. and truth be told I didn't know about any 'telemetry' in Win7 anyway, but had I known I would've been pissed about that, too.
Current plans are some flavor of Linux. When I get around to it. There's only one piece of software I have that has only a Windows-only version, and I can get around that easily enough. No way in hell I'll accept any Microsoft OS on any machine I own anymore, if this is the way they're going to conduct themselves.
Stop being such a Microsoft fanboy, it's annoying.
How about removing all the so-called 'telemetry' and other privacy-invading malware bullshit and return control of peoples' computers to the people who own and operate them? Or will not being assholes cut into your profit margin too much?
Who are you kidding? I think the only way you can avoid being monitored, logged, and tracked, is to live like Ted Kaczynski, in a completely off-the-grid cabin in the middle of nowhere, and pay cash for everything -- which these day will get you dragged into a windowless room at some Homeland Security blacksite, being questioned about what terrorist actions you're planning. You can't even count on Tor or a VPN to protect your privacy. The only thing anyone has going for them anymore so far as privacy is concerned, is through obscurity; you learn to hide in plain sight, blend in with the herd, get lost in the noise, never call attention to yourself. I hope, at least. May be too late for that, too.
That's what I imagine is the reason for this. Probably 95% of everyone doesn't need more computing power than a smartphone (yes, I'm pulling that number out of my butt, I have nothing to back it up with), and smartphones now have (relatively speaking) gigantic screens, and they all have multiple processing cores (even if it's not as much porocessing power as a quad-core desktop); how much processing power do you need to play Angry Birds, though, or screw around on Facebook/Instagam/Twitter/whatever, or watch YouTube? These days you have to have some sort of mobile phone anyway, even if you have a landline. Why bother with anything more if you're not going to use it anyway? That's the reasoning I think is being applied here.
Know what advice I give people who really want to lose weight and keep it off? I tell them to take up a competitive endurance sport; you can't train for an endurance sport and get fat(ter), because if you do then you're doing it wrong! I also tell them to start measuring and weighing everything calorically significant, including tracking macronutrients, so not only do they eat an appropriate number of calories daily, but they get a reasonable mix of them instead of too much fat and carbs and not enough protein. I'll also tell them to pay less attention to the scale and more attention to things like hydrostatic weighing and DXA scans to determine their actual body composition, with which you can determine a realistic healthy bodyweight to be at, and work towards it in a consistent, sane manner.
Of course for the vast majority of people who asked, I wouldn't even get halfway through all that before their eyes would glaze over and they'd walk away, sometimes muttering something to the effect of "you're an insane person, no one can do all that". Well, guess I'm insane, then, because that, in the end, is what got me from ~320 pounds with ruined knees and suicidally depressed, to 195-200 pounds and on a bike racing team.
That's why I made an effort to be polite about it.:-) This is Slashdot, after all, and someone just skimming part of a post is more the rule than the exception, after all.;-)
..excuse me friend, but it seems like you stopped reading my comment after the first couple sentences; you're preaching to the choir, so-to-speak, and more or less repeating what I already stated. Since you didn't repeat it, a DXA scan is a much better method of determining body composition than any chart or table. Something I didn't touch on is going to a sports medicine clinic that has equipment for measuring your BMR (basal metabolic rate), so you have a solid idea of how many calories you should be eating if you want to lose excess bodyfat. Sadly the vast majority of people who should be losing excess bodyfat aren't at all interested in doing any of these things, or making the lifestyle changes necessary to facilitate weightloss.
Hello friend, we have something in common: The bloody BMI charts don't represent us. I 6'4" tall and used to weigh well over 300 pounds (about 320 actually, as I recall) and now I'm down to 195-200 pounds and have a ton of muscle on my legs from training in the gym and on my bike for road racing. My bodyfat percentage is documentably between 10 and 15 percent all year 'round, but if you look me up on BMI charts I'm just barely in the 'normal' range. If I had a bunch of upper body muscle too I'd be in the 'overweight' or 'obese' range. BMI charts are crap, they only represent the average, non-trained people, not anyone who deliberately trains for anything that causes them to build muscle. You'd do well to eschew BMI charts entirely, and seek out a doctors' office that has a DXA scan machine, and get proper, accurate body composition analysis data from that; your bodyfat percentage is what's relevant, not the index on some chart that makes a while slew of assumptions about you based on statistical averages.
Great. Now in addition to the chronically obese using the 'muh genetics' excuse, they can use the 'muh hardwired neurology' excuse, too.
Has it not occurred to anyone else that the current obesity epidemic is a relatively new thing, and not something that was a problem decades ago, or hundreds of years ago? That the crap food that we're eating (or that many of you are eating -- some of us don't) is more likely responsible? Seriously, I'd like to slap the shit out of these people who come up with this 'research' that just gives people with weight problems more excuses.
In a world where we have 'for profit' prisons, I kind of start to wonder if the incarcerated are actually becoming the new 'slave' class. Dehumanizing them even further than they already are is just another step in that direction; slaves don't get 'visitors', not any more than food animals on a farm do. There should be more resources and effort put into rehabilitating criminals, but that costs money. Better to put them to work, and do fuck all to make them part of society ever again, eh? It's bullshit. If this is the direction they're taking this, then they may as well just shoot them in the head rather than put them in a cell.. oh, but I forgot for a moment: you can't get your free slave laborers that way! Silly me..
Friend, I'm just into the downhill side of 100, and I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth sticking around. People, in general in the world right now, treat each other like dogshit, and I'm damned sick and tired of seeing it.
I found a picture of the Italian-American professor in question: he has a beard, and don't Islamic terrorists all have beards? And he was making squiggly lines and whatnot on a piece of paper which just has to be that squiggly language terrorists speak, isn't it? So the guy must be a terrrorist, obviously!/sarcasm
The real crimes here are the crimes of blind-fear-driven ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry. Mister Menzio should consider suing the woman in civil court, and asking for damages in the amount of One Public Apology (preferably read at a press conference), his legal fees, plus one dollar.
Seriously, folks, it's bullshit like this that makes me ashamed to be an American.
Open Water also hopes to use advances in neural imaging and brain-machine interfaces to create a system for reading and communicating human thoughts electronically
Feasibility of any such device aside.. I don't for a second believe that this is being worked on to benefit medical science, it's just an attack on pretty much the last place you can have privacy: Your own thoughts. Them, them, FUCK THEM, and their privacy-invading bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
You're preaching to the choir, of course, but as someone else pointed out, there are some fence-sitters out there who just need a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately the 'hard core' types, and even more unfortunately, their children, will just have to be thought of as 'evolution in action'. :-/
These people have already made up their minds that vaccinations are causing some sort of harm, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if a fair number of them think there's some sort of government conspiracy involved. Forcing them to sit down and have the science behind vaccines pounded into them is likely to just make them more stubborn about it or more convinced that there's some sort of conspiracy going on.
Well, that certainly would explain getting modded down to neg one all the time whenever you post anything even remotely negative about China. Sad, what a shithole the Internet in general has become..
Not, of course, that I wouldn't like to see many of these things (don't really need Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, etc); I grew up watching original Star Trek, and then all of it's various incarnations (good, bad, and ugly), all the movies (good, bad, and ugly) and I've always read science fiction and fantasy. Federation-style replicators? Transporters? Warp drive? Hell, yeah. :-) But you know what they say about wishes and horses. ;-) Imagination is nice, and it's certainly helpful and healthy, but let's face it, we've got lots of real-world problems that have real-world solutions we need to work on. For the short term I'll be happy if they can come up with a practical, scalable fusion reactor that can be used for power generation; having a cheap, clean, abundant power source for the whole planet would solve a metric assload of problems, and it's not science fiction (or science fantasy). Antimatter reactors would be nice, too, but so far they've only been able to create a handful of atoms of the stuff at a time (am I right on that?), and let's face it, the idea of some jerks creating antimatter bombs doesn't make me feel warm-and-fuzzy inside, but it, too would solve lots of problems, even if it would create new ones.
J Edgar Hoover or Stalin
Why stop there? How about Vandal Savage? Fictional character, I know, but we're more-or-less talking fictional things right now anyway (until if-and-when there's such a thing like 'boosterspice', so you can stay young forever -- or at least as long as you can afford the stuff). Been covered in other things I've read over the years, though, yeah. I don't think that immortality would necessarily be a good thing for humans, not as we are socio-politically right now.
Sounds to me like you just didn't bother to read the entire comment and therefore missed the point entirely, but I don't expect much better than that from the average Anonymous Coward.
One of my favorite authors is Larry Niven, and he's covered quite a bit about people who more or less live forever ('boosterspice'), and the effects it has on their personalities and the choices they make. Very often it isn't pretty; some would commit suicide, probably in some spectacular way; some would turn to crime; some would inevitably turn to a neverending quest for power. To be fair about it, some would turn to bettering humankind. But, when you've lived so long that you've managed to conquer and master every single interest you've ever had in your life, what do you do then? 'Idle hands are the Devils playthings' as the saying goes. Imagine someone like Donald Trump, except he never ages, lives forever, is essentially unkillable, and he's getting really, really bored as the centuries roll by; what do you think he's going to do? Don't know about you, friend, but the thought makes my blood run cold.
Neurological science still doesn't even have the foggiest idea how the human brain does all the things that it does, let alone what causes the phenomenon we refer to as 'consciousness'. Personally, I believe most of the problem there is the lack of ability to observe the machine in operation; our instrumentality is sorely lacking. Too bad it's not like a piece of machinery, that you can stop, dismantle, examine all the pieces and see what they do, blueprint the thing, then put it all back together and see it run again; you stop a human brain, it more or less starts turning into useless mush immediately, and there's nothing to see anymore.
Of course I'm not all that certain that at this point in our social evolution as a species, that we should even be trusted with knowing all the secrets of how our brains work; I'd be afraid of the knowledge being misused.
..but it's not very likely any of those things will happen.
Hurr, you have no imagination!
On the contrary, I have a huge imagination, it's one of the things that makes me good at what I do -- but I also have a firm grip on reality and know the difference between it and fantasy -- and this guy from Huawei is spinning fantastic-sounding stuff just to get some attention. I rate it's credibility just slightly above things you hear out of North Korea.
Fun to think about such things though. And, you never know.. but I'm not holding my breath, either; I recommend others do the same.
This Zika threat is no Amateur Night shit. Zika reads like something from an action-adventure movie, where the evil mastermind weaponizes a virus and releases it into the world to bring about an apocalypse. Transmission via mosquito is just the beginning, it can be transmitted from person to person, and in an adult it's mild enough that anyone who isn't specifically diagnosed with it could easily shrug it off as nothing to worry about. I could see it wrecking an entire generation (or more) if not stopped. Where the games are planned on being held is literally where Zika is the worst and you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world show up and congregate in one place? Madness. Move the goddamned Games to some other country. We don't need to help the Zika virus spread all over the goddamned planet.
..and before some asshat accuses me of it: This ain't about 'brown people' or any such bullshit; if Zika became a pandemic, it would affect all people from all ethnic backgrounds. We'd have microcephaly cases in newborns all over the place, white, black, brown, yellow, or what-have-you. Let's not, OK? Move the damned Olympics!
We might have an 'Advanced Autopilot' feature -- as an expensive option on expensive luxury cars -- but it won't be on all cars, and regardless (as I have said before and will continue to say) you'll still need to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured for operating a motor vehicle, and all vehicles will still be required to have a full set of manual controls for a human operator, and able to take over from the Autopilot at a moments' notice, because where the safety of human beings is concerned, a human being must be the final failsafe system above all automated systems, period. To do otherwise is complete and utter madness. You're not going to be allowed to take a nap while driving anywhere, and you're not going to be able to put your kids into the car and just send it off somewhere.
I think it'll be more like 20 years (or more), not a mere 5 years. It's too complex a task to perfect anytime soon. Might even be more like 50 years. Everyone has a sci-fi idea what 'AI' is, and the reality is that 'AI' doesn't have very much of the 'I' in it, not compared to a human being, not even compared to a dog or a cat. They'll probably reach some level of development then hit a wall; we don't even know how a human brain (or an animal brain for that matter) works yet, and they're trying to duplicate that level of cognition for one of the most complex tasks humans have: driving a car out in the real world. Yeah, no, don't have much faith in that idea.
Did you complain about the so-called telemetry in Vista, 7, or 8?
I'm still running XP at home, because I didn't give enough of a damn to go to all the hassle of upgrading.. and truth be told I didn't know about any 'telemetry' in Win7 anyway, but had I known I would've been pissed about that, too.
Current plans are some flavor of Linux. When I get around to it. There's only one piece of software I have that has only a Windows-only version, and I can get around that easily enough. No way in hell I'll accept any Microsoft OS on any machine I own anymore, if this is the way they're going to conduct themselves.
Stop being such a Microsoft fanboy, it's annoying.
How about removing all the so-called 'telemetry' and other privacy-invading malware bullshit and return control of peoples' computers to the people who own and operate them? Or will not being assholes cut into your profit margin too much?
Who are you kidding? I think the only way you can avoid being monitored, logged, and tracked, is to live like Ted Kaczynski, in a completely off-the-grid cabin in the middle of nowhere, and pay cash for everything -- which these day will get you dragged into a windowless room at some Homeland Security blacksite, being questioned about what terrorist actions you're planning. You can't even count on Tor or a VPN to protect your privacy. The only thing anyone has going for them anymore so far as privacy is concerned, is through obscurity; you learn to hide in plain sight, blend in with the herd, get lost in the noise, never call attention to yourself. I hope, at least. May be too late for that, too.
That's what I imagine is the reason for this. Probably 95% of everyone doesn't need more computing power than a smartphone (yes, I'm pulling that number out of my butt, I have nothing to back it up with), and smartphones now have (relatively speaking) gigantic screens, and they all have multiple processing cores (even if it's not as much porocessing power as a quad-core desktop); how much processing power do you need to play Angry Birds, though, or screw around on Facebook/Instagam/Twitter/whatever, or watch YouTube? These days you have to have some sort of mobile phone anyway, even if you have a landline. Why bother with anything more if you're not going to use it anyway? That's the reasoning I think is being applied here.
I thought this was 2016, not 1996.
When was the last time you bought a newspaper? Answer my poll question
Know what advice I give people who really want to lose weight and keep it off? I tell them to take up a competitive endurance sport; you can't train for an endurance sport and get fat(ter), because if you do then you're doing it wrong! I also tell them to start measuring and weighing everything calorically significant, including tracking macronutrients, so not only do they eat an appropriate number of calories daily, but they get a reasonable mix of them instead of too much fat and carbs and not enough protein. I'll also tell them to pay less attention to the scale and more attention to things like hydrostatic weighing and DXA scans to determine their actual body composition, with which you can determine a realistic healthy bodyweight to be at, and work towards it in a consistent, sane manner.
Of course for the vast majority of people who asked, I wouldn't even get halfway through all that before their eyes would glaze over and they'd walk away, sometimes muttering something to the effect of "you're an insane person, no one can do all that". Well, guess I'm insane, then, because that, in the end, is what got me from ~320 pounds with ruined knees and suicidally depressed, to 195-200 pounds and on a bike racing team.
That's why I made an effort to be polite about it. :-) This is Slashdot, after all, and someone just skimming part of a post is more the rule than the exception, after all. ;-)
..excuse me friend, but it seems like you stopped reading my comment after the first couple sentences; you're preaching to the choir, so-to-speak, and more or less repeating what I already stated. Since you didn't repeat it, a DXA scan is a much better method of determining body composition than any chart or table. Something I didn't touch on is going to a sports medicine clinic that has equipment for measuring your BMR (basal metabolic rate), so you have a solid idea of how many calories you should be eating if you want to lose excess bodyfat. Sadly the vast majority of people who should be losing excess bodyfat aren't at all interested in doing any of these things, or making the lifestyle changes necessary to facilitate weightloss.
Hello friend, we have something in common: The bloody BMI charts don't represent us. I 6'4" tall and used to weigh well over 300 pounds (about 320 actually, as I recall) and now I'm down to 195-200 pounds and have a ton of muscle on my legs from training in the gym and on my bike for road racing. My bodyfat percentage is documentably between 10 and 15 percent all year 'round, but if you look me up on BMI charts I'm just barely in the 'normal' range. If I had a bunch of upper body muscle too I'd be in the 'overweight' or 'obese' range. BMI charts are crap, they only represent the average, non-trained people, not anyone who deliberately trains for anything that causes them to build muscle. You'd do well to eschew BMI charts entirely, and seek out a doctors' office that has a DXA scan machine, and get proper, accurate body composition analysis data from that; your bodyfat percentage is what's relevant, not the index on some chart that makes a while slew of assumptions about you based on statistical averages.
Great. Now in addition to the chronically obese using the 'muh genetics' excuse, they can use the 'muh hardwired neurology' excuse, too.
Has it not occurred to anyone else that the current obesity epidemic is a relatively new thing, and not something that was a problem decades ago, or hundreds of years ago? That the crap food that we're eating (or that many of you are eating -- some of us don't) is more likely responsible? Seriously, I'd like to slap the shit out of these people who come up with this 'research' that just gives people with weight problems more excuses.
In a world where we have 'for profit' prisons, I kind of start to wonder if the incarcerated are actually becoming the new 'slave' class. Dehumanizing them even further than they already are is just another step in that direction; slaves don't get 'visitors', not any more than food animals on a farm do. There should be more resources and effort put into rehabilitating criminals, but that costs money. Better to put them to work, and do fuck all to make them part of society ever again, eh? It's bullshit. If this is the direction they're taking this, then they may as well just shoot them in the head rather than put them in a cell.. oh, but I forgot for a moment: you can't get your free slave laborers that way! Silly me..
Friend, I'm just into the downhill side of 100, and I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth sticking around. People, in general in the world right now, treat each other like dogshit, and I'm damned sick and tired of seeing it.
Better catch him before he makes it to the Well World's interior and performs a full Reset of the Universe.
..on second thought, let's help him instead, I think the Universe could use a Reset.
I found a picture of the Italian-American professor in question: he has a beard, and don't Islamic terrorists all have beards? And he was making squiggly lines and whatnot on a piece of paper which just has to be that squiggly language terrorists speak, isn't it? So the guy must be a terrrorist, obviously! /sarcasm
The real crimes here are the crimes of blind-fear-driven ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry. Mister Menzio should consider suing the woman in civil court, and asking for damages in the amount of One Public Apology (preferably read at a press conference), his legal fees, plus one dollar.
Seriously, folks, it's bullshit like this that makes me ashamed to be an American.
Open Water also hopes to use advances in neural imaging and brain-machine interfaces to create a system for reading and communicating human thoughts electronically
Feasibility of any such device aside.. I don't for a second believe that this is being worked on to benefit medical science, it's just an attack on pretty much the last place you can have privacy: Your own thoughts. Them, them, FUCK THEM, and their privacy-invading bullshit.