If you're talking the age of Mesmer, then yes, hypnosis had a somewhat negative history. But in the past few decades it's become much better understood and it's used to good effect in several medical fields.
Go to your favorite book search site and look for hypnosis in pain management. There's a lot of very well researched scientific literature out there. (Also a lot of crap, but that doesn't make the good stuff any less valid.)
A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time studying hypnosis and I brought up the subject with my stepfather, who's been practicing medicine for over fifty years. When I mentioned pain managment, he told me that he'd used hypnosis once to induce an anesthetic state in a patient in order to set a broken leg. I asked him why he didn't use it more often, and he said "Well, it's cheaper and probably safer than anesthesia, but it took me two hours to get him under enough to pop his bone back in." It's a lot faster to just shoot the patient up with lidocaine.
The British government has already shown that it is incabable of resisting the urge to abuse special powers created for the purpose of rooting out terrorism.
Does anyone remember the Guilford Four? Four people - and their families - were thrown into jail with no justification whatsoever.
They've abused these powers before, they'll do it again.
". . . the value needs to be underpinned by some tangible value."
I disagree. Most money in the world today is not related to any tangible commodity. Money is an agreed-upon measure of wealth; it is not a reference to tangibles and has not been in a long, long time.
You refer to the tangible value of an ounce of gold, but that's very misleading. Can you eat gold? Can you use it as fuel?
Gold's value is derived from the fact that it's pretty and relatively rare. Nowadays, we recognize that it's very handy because of its physical properties (conductivity comes to mind), but hundreds of years ago people didn't care about that. Everyone agreed that gold was pretty and rare, and so it became imbued with value.
Money and wealth are entirely social constructs, and ultimately intangible. Money, at least on the scale of modern economies, is all in your head.
Re:I get it, but I don't want it
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Reading Sendmail config files is the visual equivalent of sticking your hand down the garbage disposal. Eek.
I get it, but I don't want it
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
PHP is an abomination. It was very clever and very handy when it was first developed, but there are many much better systems for building web pages available today.
Its object-oriented features are kludgy, its syntax is a throwback to C, and it in a realm where string handling is ubiquitous, it provides you with such great functions as strtok() and strncmp(). I mean come on, haven't we evolved just a bit past using the C standard library for string handling in our freaking web applications?
Personal Home Pages is fine for whipping up a quick data-driven website, but if you want to build a large application it's crap.
Parody is an appropriate tool for social commentary.
And a handy device for sensational journalism. This isn't social commentary, this is the Register jumping Linus for not playing the way they want him to. They (and you) are trying to cast Linus' decison in a bad light because he's not being as gung-ho about their ideals as they want him to be.
As others have already commented here, when Hawking says "observation", he is presuming reliability.
If you're going to bring epistemological questions into the scene, then you've got to take into account the fact that all observations which support a hypothesis must also be questionable.
That way lies madness. Either that, or a great sci-fi plot.
The site's Slashdotted at the moment, so I can't comment on the quality of the acting in the fanflick.
But come on - George Lucas has managed to coax utterly craptacular performances out of good actors and actresses like Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor.
Every time I even think of the scene where Queen Amidala is speaking to the leader of the Naboo amphibians, I just cringe. "Please I ask you no I beg you . . . " Ack.
Hm.... On the one hand, this is one of my all-time favorite graphic novels. I would love it if more people became aware of it. But on the other hand, I just know it's going to get butchered. The Wachowskis had a chance to tell a subtle and ponderous story in The Matrix and they completely blew it.
Who knew there were so many diabetic geeks? I was diagnosed (type 1) when I was 28. One week, out of the blue, my eyesight got so bad that I couldn't read traffic signs. Not retinal damage, thank God - fluid displacement in the lens caused by a two-week blood glucose of around 550.
It can be really hard to put your meter on the table before dinner with your family and friends and put a drop of blood on the strip. I don't mind the pain at all; but you get the feeling that every time you test around other people, you are being judged. If my reading is high, I feel embarassed.
It's hard. But I thank my lucky stars that my family and friends keep on my ass about this disease.
I don't think that most diabetics are literally pathological liars. But we have our health on public display much moreso than other people, so we have a lot more opportunities to cover up our failings.
Type I diabetic here; I use an Accu-check and take my insulin from a Humalog pen.
Things I would like in my PDA (Personal Diabetic's Assistant):
no test strips. They are fscking expensive. There has got to be a way to check blood sugar without strips. Non-invasively would be optimal.
a scale. I don't count my carbs like I should, and part of the reason is I have a hard time estimating how many ounces of pasta I've got on my plate. A small portable scale would be nice.
wireless data transfer. IR would be nice, Bluetooth would be better.
mealtime alarm.
running blood glucose monitoring. A lot of other people here have already mentioned the Glucowatch. One of its features was the ability to track your glucose levels and trigger an alarm if you were heading hyper- or hypo-glycemic. I don't want to have to wait for my lips to go numb or my hands to start shaking to know that I need half a can of soda.
some kind of interaction with a glucose pump. If one gizmo can track my blood sugar and communicate that to a pump, that would be almost as good as an artificial pancreas.
as an emergency feature, an audible alarm that could speak instructions to anyone in earshot if I lose consciousness. Most of my co-workers know that I'm diabetic, but not all of them know what to do if I suddenly pass out. (That has never happened, thank God.) But a voice giving nice calm instructions would be really great in case I o.d. on insulin.
And now that I think of it, there was also Whirlwind, a.k.a. The Human Top. His power was basically super-speed, but he also posessed superhuman balance. He used these two powers in conjunction to whirl around really fast, typically while holding onto an opponent or while throwing very sharp things at them.
There was also a member of the Marauders, enemies of the X-Men and the Morlocks, who had the same abilities, but I can't recall his name now. I tried to black out most of those X-Men years.
There was also Slyde, who I think was a fairly short-lived foe of Spider-Man. He didn't have the physical characteristics of Quicksilver, The Whizzer or DC's The Flash, but he wore a costume covered by an almost frictionless polymer that let him achieve super speeds.
Jesus. I could have used those brain cells for calculus notes.
SCO was once a reputable company, yes. It still is - it's called Tarantella.
The current SCO Group came into being when they purchased a bunch of "intellectual property" from the old SCO. That's not exactly the foundation of a reputable company. They didn't put any sweat into UNIX, just marketing. When that didn't make them enough money, they decided to start an extortion campaign.
Likewise, as a user of Linux, protecting yourself from an SCO-law suit could easily be a waste of money. Virtually all of the forms of protection listed in this special report are reasonably priced when you consider the potential harm if you have no protection and are successfully sued by SCO.
Huh? He's saying that all forms of protection listed are both a)reasonably priced and b)could easily be a waste of money.
Um, thwap me with a wet noodle, but that seems contradictory.
Reading the article made my blood heat up because I am so pissed at SCO for what they are doing. But I think the reporter really did do a pretty even-handed job of addressing the indemnification issue alone (in spite of the above paragraph).
It didn't seem to me that he was really addressing whether or not SCO has a case, but the practical business decisions arising from their lawsuit.
In the end of course, SCO does not have a case and will not win any of their pending lawsuits.
You're not giving us a lot to go on here.
How does it violate the Incompleteness Theorem?
The semantic web is not a procedural system; it's a method of encoding information. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is about mathematical systems and their ability to describe certain truth values.
I don't see any immediate connection between the one and the other.
I for one would like to welcome our currency-checking overlords.
Just kidding.
Seriously, I think this is a good thing on the part of the software companies. Trying to incorporate anti-counterfeiting features is bound to be extemely difficult, but I think it is a socially responsible thing for them to do. I'd be very interested to see companies like Adobe and Xerox create open standards for circumventing counterfeiting and forgery attempts. This is a difficult problem to attack, but it would be a great one to solve.
I use a Rotring Core. Awesome fountain pen. It's light, durable, ergonomic and comes with a refillable reservoir so you can use bottled ink.
I buy my ink from Levengers (http://www.levenger.com/). They've got all sorts of analog goodies, but they are a bit pricey. They even had a portable, non-electric typewriter a while back.
Bravo, ESR.
comparator is a perfect tool to cut SCO's legs out from under it. But it will also be very useful to people like:
Professors
Publishers
Newspaper Editors
Librarians
Everyday Coders
Statisticians
Lawmakers
Anyone who's got a vested interest in knowing whether or not they are looking at an original work can benefit from this tool, or derivative works of it. With a bit of front-end processing, this can help professors and editors spot plagarism, librarians spot duplication in their collections, and coders areas of redundancy.
Thanks, Mr. Raymond. I'll be compiling this tonight...
Yeah, but in Revelations, John says that 666 is the number of a man, not a date.
And it's the number of the Beast, not Satan. The Beast is a man, Satan is the divine Adversary.
Slashdot Mirror
The theory that Jesus had progeny figures in Foucault's Pendulum by Eco, too. Not sure if it predates HBHG or not.
If you're talking the age of Mesmer, then yes, hypnosis had a somewhat negative history. But in the past few decades it's become much better understood and it's used to good effect in several medical fields.
Go to your favorite book search site and look for hypnosis in pain management. There's a lot of very well researched scientific literature out there. (Also a lot of crap, but that doesn't make the good stuff any less valid.)
A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time studying hypnosis and I brought up the subject with my stepfather, who's been practicing medicine for over fifty years. When I mentioned pain managment, he told me that he'd used hypnosis once to induce an anesthetic state in a patient in order to set a broken leg. I asked him why he didn't use it more often, and he said "Well, it's cheaper and probably safer than anesthesia, but it took me two hours to get him under enough to pop his bone back in." It's a lot faster to just shoot the patient up with lidocaine.
...not.
The British government has already shown that it is incabable of resisting the urge to abuse special powers created for the purpose of rooting out terrorism.
Does anyone remember the Guilford Four? Four people - and their families - were thrown into jail with no justification whatsoever.
They've abused these powers before, they'll do it again.
". . . the value needs to be underpinned by some tangible value."
I disagree. Most money in the world today is not related to any tangible commodity. Money is an agreed-upon measure of wealth; it is not a reference to tangibles and has not been in a long, long time.
You refer to the tangible value of an ounce of gold, but that's very misleading. Can you eat gold? Can you use it as fuel?
Gold's value is derived from the fact that it's pretty and relatively rare. Nowadays, we recognize that it's very handy because of its physical properties (conductivity comes to mind), but hundreds of years ago people didn't care about that. Everyone agreed that gold was pretty and rare, and so it became imbued with value.
Money and wealth are entirely social constructs, and ultimately intangible. Money, at least on the scale of modern economies, is all in your head.
Reading Sendmail config files is the visual equivalent of sticking your hand down the garbage disposal.
Eek.
PHP is an abomination.
It was very clever and very handy when it was first developed, but there are many much better systems for building web pages available today.
Its object-oriented features are kludgy, its syntax is a throwback to C, and it in a realm where string handling is ubiquitous, it provides you with such great functions as strtok() and strncmp(). I mean come on, haven't we evolved just a bit past using the C standard library for string handling in our freaking web applications?
Personal Home Pages is fine for whipping up a quick data-driven website, but if you want to build a large application it's crap.
And a handy device for sensational journalism. This isn't social commentary, this is the Register jumping Linus for not playing the way they want him to. They (and you) are trying to cast Linus' decison in a bad light because he's not being as gung-ho about their ideals as they want him to be.
This is a non-issue.
As others have already commented here, when Hawking says "observation", he is presuming reliability.
If you're going to bring epistemological questions into the scene, then you've got to take into account the fact that all observations which support a hypothesis must also be questionable.
That way lies madness. Either that, or a great sci-fi plot.
The site's Slashdotted at the moment, so I can't comment on the quality of the acting in the fanflick.
But come on - George Lucas has managed to coax utterly craptacular performances out of good actors and actresses like Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor.
Every time I even think of the scene where Queen Amidala is speaking to the leader of the Naboo amphibians, I just cringe. "Please I ask you no I beg you . . . " Ack.
Hm....
On the one hand, this is one of my all-time favorite graphic novels. I would love it if more people became aware of it.
But on the other hand, I just know it's going to get butchered. The Wachowskis had a chance to tell a subtle and ponderous story in The Matrix and they completely blew it.
Who knew there were so many diabetic geeks?
I was diagnosed (type 1) when I was 28. One week, out of the blue, my eyesight got so bad that I couldn't read traffic signs. Not retinal damage, thank God - fluid displacement in the lens caused by a two-week blood glucose of around 550.
It can be really hard to put your meter on the table before dinner with your family and friends and put a drop of blood on the strip. I don't mind the pain at all; but you get the feeling that every time you test around other people, you are being judged. If my reading is high, I feel embarassed.
It's hard. But I thank my lucky stars that my family and friends keep on my ass about this disease.
I don't think that most diabetics are literally pathological liars. But we have our health on public display much moreso than other people, so we have a lot more opportunities to cover up our failings.
Things I would like in my PDA (Personal Diabetic's Assistant):
And now that I think of it, there was also Whirlwind, a.k.a. The Human Top. His power was basically super-speed, but he also posessed superhuman balance. He used these two powers in conjunction to whirl around really fast, typically while holding onto an opponent or while throwing very sharp things at them.
There was also a member of the Marauders, enemies of the X-Men and the Morlocks, who had the same abilities, but I can't recall his name now. I tried to black out most of those X-Men years.
There was also Slyde, who I think was a fairly short-lived foe of Spider-Man. He didn't have the physical characteristics of Quicksilver, The Whizzer or DC's The Flash, but he wore a costume covered by an almost frictionless polymer that let him achieve super speeds.
Jesus. I could have used those brain cells for calculus notes.
SCO was once a reputable company, yes. It still is - it's called Tarantella.
The current SCO Group came into being when they purchased a bunch of "intellectual property" from the old SCO. That's not exactly the foundation of a reputable company. They didn't put any sweat into UNIX, just marketing. When that didn't make them enough money, they decided to start an extortion campaign.
Huh? He's saying that all forms of protection listed are both a)reasonably priced and b)could easily be a waste of money.
Um, thwap me with a wet noodle, but that seems contradictory.
Reading the article made my blood heat up because I am so pissed at SCO for what they are doing. But I think the reporter really did do a pretty even-handed job of addressing the indemnification issue alone (in spite of the above paragraph).
It didn't seem to me that he was really addressing whether or not SCO has a case, but the practical business decisions arising from their lawsuit.
In the end of course, SCO does not have a case and will not win any of their pending lawsuits.
The semantic web is not a procedural system; it's a method of encoding information. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is about mathematical systems and their ability to describe certain truth values.
I don't see any immediate connection between the one and the other.
I for one would like to welcome our currency-checking overlords.
Just kidding.
Seriously, I think this is a good thing on the part of the software companies. Trying to incorporate anti-counterfeiting features is bound to be extemely difficult, but I think it is a socially responsible thing for them to do. I'd be very interested to see companies like Adobe and Xerox create open standards for circumventing counterfeiting and forgery attempts. This is a difficult problem to attack, but it would be a great one to solve.
I use a Rotring Core. Awesome fountain pen. It's light, durable, ergonomic and comes with a refillable reservoir so you can use bottled ink.
I buy my ink from Levengers (http://www.levenger.com/). They've got all sorts of analog goodies, but they are a bit pricey. They even had a portable, non-electric typewriter a while back.
- Professors
- Publishers
- Newspaper Editors
- Librarians
- Everyday Coders
- Statisticians
- Lawmakers
Anyone who's got a vested interest in knowing whether or not they are looking at an original work can benefit from this tool, or derivative works of it. With a bit of front-end processing, this can help professors and editors spot plagarism, librarians spot duplication in their collections, and coders areas of redundancy. Thanks, Mr. Raymond. I'll be compiling this tonight...Bill Gates did help write a BASIC compiler in the early days. But IIRC, he bought DOS from Digital Research.
And by the time VB was written, I doubt Gates did any coding himself except for fun.
Also-
"It shall end in fire."
Yeah, but in Revelations, John says that 666 is the number of a man, not a date. And it's the number of the Beast, not Satan. The Beast is a man, Satan is the divine Adversary.