I know that it's cliche, but someone has to bring up nietzsche at this point. He kept pointing out that people in "the modern era" were really just carts on a rail, regardless of their social-economic status. Whoever you are, there are things that "are expected of you", which, if you chose to avoid, either make you "weird", or even downright rejected.
It doesn't matter that you have food and shelter. These things don't provide you with real freedom. You're still restrained by society and forced to choose between several pre-determined, "acceptable" paths. If you do anything else, there will be social penalties. His famous collapse at the reigned horse was him weeping for mankind -- we're all shackled and bound, because if we weren't, we'd be too destructive.
We can't change our lives in order to become happy, so the next logical step is to change our brain chemistry. Maybe then we'll be slightly happier broken-in horses.
I'm a fan of DP as well, but when I read the post, my first reaction was -- "so what's new here?". I expected there to be something new relating to DP, maybe a new project or even just a new iteration of an existing project. But there's nothing new -- this is just an interview, and a rather bland one at that.
Honestly, it'd be a better service to post:
"There's this thing called Dangerous Prototypes, at: http://dangerousprototypes.com/. It's cool, you should check it out."
But that's true for so many sites/projects.
Are you into electronics and embedded design? Then check these out:
evilmadscientist.com
ermicro.com/blog/
vk2zay.net/
eevblog.com/
And if you want blogs covering these topics (which link to other sites), check out:
hackedgadgets.com/
hackaday.com/
embedds.com/
And these are just a few URLs I grabbed from my browser history.
The point is that it's not news, it's a resource showcase. And if that's what it is, then why just pick one example?...
How can you be a "democracy" when you deny full status to non-Jews?
Ignorance is far too rampant for me to make a dent, but I'll try:
- Arab population in Israel: 1,271,000 (about 20% of the population)
- 84.9% of Israeli Arabs stated that Israel has a right to exist as an independent state
- 77% would rather live in Israel as Israeli citizens than in any other country in the world
There are 14 arab members of parliament in the Israeli Knesset (out of 120 members total)
Feel free to check the stats here. I'm Israeli and I work with arabs every day, in the tech sector. They send their children to Israeli schools, and vote for parliament like any other citizen. The only major difference is that they don't have to serve in the IDF unless they want to.
I was looking over the comments to see if anyone was aware of this.
You're going to "shun" AMD products because they now have R&D facilities in Israel? If you avoided every product developed in Israel, you'd have almost nothing to "compute" with. It's not just semiconductor companies either -- Microsoft and Google have large setups in Israel as well. Facebook bought Snaptu a few months ago.
The Israeli economy is built around the tech sector.
Oh, and I'm Israeli, so don't forget to post some charming apartheid reply to this comment.
Arduino is just "in" at the moment, which is why this story got picked, as click-bait. Hobbyists have been doing interesting things for years using MCUs (hackedgadgets.com has been around for a while), but the Arduino lowered the barrier to entry considerably.
The one trend that I find odd is that people are sticking with it, rather than using it as what it was originally meant to be -- a jumping board. Once you're comfortable with the platform, you're supposed to "graduate" to at least making custom boards, if not migrating to C (a language in which almost anything you can think of has already been written, so you have a much larger code base to draw from). The boards themselves are comparatively expensive, and really constrain your design choices.
That was added by "thinq_", the actual project has nothing to do with Android. I thought I saw an embedded icon at some point, but I can't find it now (and if there isn't an embedded icon, there should be).
None of those (AFAIK) expose the brain to long durations of stimulus. That's why this is inherently different from chemical treatment -- you can turn it on and of in an instant. With drugs, if you introduce chemicals to the bloodstream you have to wait for them to run their course. Here, it may be that the exact length of electrical exposure may have a drastic effect in the long term.
Also, the terms we're talking about here are an oversimplification. I'm guessing (hoping) that they didn't just try DC current, but also different frequencies and waveforms. Once you get into higher frequencies, you get induced magnetic fields which themselves may generate current elsewhere, not to mention parasitic capacitance which may occur (in fact, it definitely *does* occur, but may not be enough to cause any effects).
I was waiting for someone to interpret it that way. What I meant was that they didn't know what the underlying mechanism was when it was first discovered. Just like they've just now hooked up people to 2mA and observed the effect, but at the moment, they won't be able to tell you why it has that effect.
I was thinking more along the lines of a function-generator. The amount of current isn't the only factor here -- there's also frequency and waveform to take into account. And what about polarity? Also, how to do pick where to pass the current through? We should probably ask this guy.
Another analogy is passing current through frog legs. You can see the effect, and deduce that there's a correlation between the current and the resulting motion, but it doesn't mean you know why or what the underlying mechanism is.
If anything, this seems quite hazardous. Our bodies are designed (ahem -- naturally selected) to defend themselves from much of what's found in nature, which probably doesn't include running even very small amounts of current through our brains. The fact that the brain is encased in a solid shell in mammals should give an idea of how vulnerable it really is. This experiment bypasses that defense and introduces stimuli that you almost certainly won't find in nature. We already know that introducing a tiny amount of arsenic into the bloodstream will kill most (almost all) living things, so we're weary of chemical experimentation, but we haven't been messing around with the brain long enough to know what the effects of electrical stimulation will be.
It could induce brain cancer for all we know. I personally wouldn't go volunteering for this type of experimentation.
Except that Vista is extremely close to Win7 in terms of infrastructure. Win7 is basically a polished, non-glacial-speed Vista. Even MS admits that (or at least they did a few months after Win7 was out). So you've got one of the worst windows releases in the history of the company, and now people who've paid for it get left behind because *now* MS decides to be backwards-compatible?
It's like screwing people who've paid for Vista all over again -- "look, we gave you a break with IE9, but let's face it, that PC deserves a better OS than that piece of crap... Here, we'll make IE10 a Win7-and-up and really drive home how stupid you were for buying that OS... From US".
I think the reason this is cropping up in different places around the world is that everyone thinks they have an idea of how to "solve the problem" (whichever internet/connectivity-related problem it may be). Now just add ignorance to the mix, and you're got weird regulations. This isn't any form of "malice", it's just non-technical people trying to paw at a laser pointer -- they don't understand the mechanism. The rehabilitation centers for MMORPG addicts in China, South Korea, and Japan, take a more enlightened approach, as long as it's in moderation.
If people become addicted to a drug, and you can cut the supply, it's very tempting to do so. It doesn't matter that this drug may have medical benefits or legitimate uses -- the ones who use it harmfully "ruin it" for the rest of us. This metaphor also works for P2P technology, if you think about it.
I'm waiting for the "What do you think of the redesign?" poll. There are multiple scenarios in which/. simply became unusable.
Oh, and by all means mod me down too. If nobody criticizes, nothing will change.
Recreational Mathematics is a form of masochism. It's no different then those guys that whip their own backs or who go to those clubs where everyone wears black leather. It's sick and twisted, but there's nothing we can do about it, since they're technically only hurting themselves.
Either that, and/or they just don't use the Slashdot. They designed the page without considering the behavior pattern of the users (which should be relatively easy to observe with all the stats being collected). For example -- minimalistic on Slashdot is good, but this amount of white space makes it very annoying to use on anything but very large screens. I hope they add options to personalize the design in the future -- this is like looking at a mostly empty whiteboard with tiny text (and I know I can press Ctrl++, but the text size is fine, I just want less white borders/spacing/padding around it).
When you start loading the page with comments, it gradually becomes slower until it's really eating into the CPU usage. Just scrolling up and down at a reasonable pace gets both of the cores on this machine to 90% (Core2Duo at 2.4GHz), both on Chrome (9.0.597.83 beta) and Firefox (3.6.13). I'm not sure if this is avoidable with this structure and this many nested divs on a page, but a very large Wikipedia article is much faster (since, obviously, the divs there aren't nested, and there are never *this* many).
Slashdot Mirror
I know that it's cliche, but someone has to bring up nietzsche at this point. He kept pointing out that people in "the modern era" were really just carts on a rail, regardless of their social-economic status. Whoever you are, there are things that "are expected of you", which, if you chose to avoid, either make you "weird", or even downright rejected.
It doesn't matter that you have food and shelter. These things don't provide you with real freedom. You're still restrained by society and forced to choose between several pre-determined, "acceptable" paths. If you do anything else, there will be social penalties. His famous collapse at the reigned horse was him weeping for mankind -- we're all shackled and bound, because if we weren't, we'd be too destructive.
We can't change our lives in order to become happy, so the next logical step is to change our brain chemistry. Maybe then we'll be slightly happier broken-in horses.
I'm a fan of DP as well, but when I read the post, my first reaction was -- "so what's new here?". I expected there to be something new relating to DP, maybe a new project or even just a new iteration of an existing project. But there's nothing new -- this is just an interview, and a rather bland one at that.
Honestly, it'd be a better service to post:
"There's this thing called Dangerous Prototypes, at: http://dangerousprototypes.com/. It's cool, you should check it out."
But that's true for so many sites/projects.
Are you into electronics and embedded design? Then check these out:
evilmadscientist.com
ermicro.com/blog/
vk2zay.net/
eevblog.com/
And if you want blogs covering these topics (which link to other sites), check out:
hackedgadgets.com/
hackaday.com/
embedds.com/
And these are just a few URLs I grabbed from my browser history.
The point is that it's not news, it's a resource showcase. And if that's what it is, then why just pick one example?...
How can you be a "democracy" when you deny full status to non-Jews?
Ignorance is far too rampant for me to make a dent, but I'll try:
- Arab population in Israel: 1,271,000 (about 20% of the population)
- 84.9% of Israeli Arabs stated that Israel has a right to exist as an independent state
- 77% would rather live in Israel as Israeli citizens than in any other country in the world
There are 14 arab members of parliament in the Israeli Knesset (out of 120 members total)
Feel free to check the stats here. I'm Israeli and I work with arabs every day, in the tech sector. They send their children to Israeli schools, and vote for parliament like any other citizen. The only major difference is that they don't have to serve in the IDF unless they want to.
I was looking over the comments to see if anyone was aware of this.
You're going to "shun" AMD products because they now have R&D facilities in Israel? If you avoided every product developed in Israel, you'd have almost nothing to "compute" with. It's not just semiconductor companies either -- Microsoft and Google have large setups in Israel as well. Facebook bought Snaptu a few months ago.
The Israeli economy is built around the tech sector.
Oh, and I'm Israeli, so don't forget to post some charming apartheid reply to this comment.
Arduino is just "in" at the moment, which is why this story got picked, as click-bait. Hobbyists have been doing interesting things for years using MCUs (hackedgadgets.com has been around for a while), but the Arduino lowered the barrier to entry considerably.
The one trend that I find odd is that people are sticking with it, rather than using it as what it was originally meant to be -- a jumping board. Once you're comfortable with the platform, you're supposed to "graduate" to at least making custom boards, if not migrating to C (a language in which almost anything you can think of has already been written, so you have a much larger code base to draw from). The boards themselves are comparatively expensive, and really constrain your design choices.
That was added by "thinq_", the actual project has nothing to do with Android. I thought I saw an embedded icon at some point, but I can't find it now (and if there isn't an embedded icon, there should be).
Why is there an Android icon on this story? Because they needed to pick an icon and "Android" and "Arduino" were close enough?...
None of those (AFAIK) expose the brain to long durations of stimulus. That's why this is inherently different from chemical treatment -- you can turn it on and of in an instant. With drugs, if you introduce chemicals to the bloodstream you have to wait for them to run their course. Here, it may be that the exact length of electrical exposure may have a drastic effect in the long term.
Also, the terms we're talking about here are an oversimplification. I'm guessing (hoping) that they didn't just try DC current, but also different frequencies and waveforms. Once you get into higher frequencies, you get induced magnetic fields which themselves may generate current elsewhere, not to mention parasitic capacitance which may occur (in fact, it definitely *does* occur, but may not be enough to cause any effects).
I was waiting for someone to interpret it that way. What I meant was that they didn't know what the underlying mechanism was when it was first discovered. Just like they've just now hooked up people to 2mA and observed the effect, but at the moment, they won't be able to tell you why it has that effect.
What if he's bipolar?
Look into trepanning. It lets the brain breath.
I was thinking more along the lines of a function-generator. The amount of current isn't the only factor here -- there's also frequency and waveform to take into account. And what about polarity? Also, how to do pick where to pass the current through? We should probably ask this guy.
Another analogy is passing current through frog legs. You can see the effect, and deduce that there's a correlation between the current and the resulting motion, but it doesn't mean you know why or what the underlying mechanism is.
If anything, this seems quite hazardous. Our bodies are designed (ahem -- naturally selected) to defend themselves from much of what's found in nature, which probably doesn't include running even very small amounts of current through our brains. The fact that the brain is encased in a solid shell in mammals should give an idea of how vulnerable it really is. This experiment bypasses that defense and introduces stimuli that you almost certainly won't find in nature. We already know that introducing a tiny amount of arsenic into the bloodstream will kill most (almost all) living things, so we're weary of chemical experimentation, but we haven't been messing around with the brain long enough to know what the effects of electrical stimulation will be.
It could induce brain cancer for all we know. I personally wouldn't go volunteering for this type of experimentation.
Erm.... I meant to write "NON-backwards-compatible" up there.
"Developers" x 4
Except that Vista is extremely close to Win7 in terms of infrastructure. Win7 is basically a polished, non-glacial-speed Vista. Even MS admits that (or at least they did a few months after Win7 was out). So you've got one of the worst windows releases in the history of the company, and now people who've paid for it get left behind because *now* MS decides to be backwards-compatible?
It's like screwing people who've paid for Vista all over again -- "look, we gave you a break with IE9, but let's face it, that PC deserves a better OS than that piece of crap... Here, we'll make IE10 a Win7-and-up and really drive home how stupid you were for buying that OS... From US".
When you use /. in "Strict" mode, you don't even get a link to the article...
I think the reason this is cropping up in different places around the world is that everyone thinks they have an idea of how to "solve the problem" (whichever internet/connectivity-related problem it may be). Now just add ignorance to the mix, and you're got weird regulations. This isn't any form of "malice", it's just non-technical people trying to paw at a laser pointer -- they don't understand the mechanism. The rehabilitation centers for MMORPG addicts in China, South Korea, and Japan, take a more enlightened approach, as long as it's in moderation.
If people become addicted to a drug, and you can cut the supply, it's very tempting to do so. It doesn't matter that this drug may have medical benefits or legitimate uses -- the ones who use it harmfully "ruin it" for the rest of us. This metaphor also works for P2P technology, if you think about it.
I'm waiting for the "What do you think of the redesign?" poll. There are multiple scenarios in which /. simply became unusable.
Oh, and by all means mod me down too. If nobody criticizes, nothing will change.
Recreational Mathematics is a form of masochism. It's no different then those guys that whip their own backs or who go to those clubs where everyone wears black leather. It's sick and twisted, but there's nothing we can do about it, since they're technically only hurting themselves.
Someone's going to say it, so it might as well be me: It's turtles all the way down!
Oh, and I was going to use Italic instead of bold text, but the <i> doesn't seem to work in the new design... or maybe it's just me.
It was no ordinary turtle. It is called a dragon turtle which is huge in size with a dragon head
Well there's a fat bald guy riding this one, so I can't read what its shell says. Damn it, there's always a fat guy in the way.
Either that, and/or they just don't use the Slashdot. They designed the page without considering the behavior pattern of the users (which should be relatively easy to observe with all the stats being collected). For example -- minimalistic on Slashdot is good, but this amount of white space makes it very annoying to use on anything but very large screens. I hope they add options to personalize the design in the future -- this is like looking at a mostly empty whiteboard with tiny text (and I know I can press Ctrl++, but the text size is fine, I just want less white borders/spacing/padding around it).
Browsers, keyboards, compliance, whatever... THIS is Slashdot.
When you start loading the page with comments, it gradually becomes slower until it's really eating into the CPU usage. Just scrolling up and down at a reasonable pace gets both of the cores on this machine to 90% (Core2Duo at 2.4GHz), both on Chrome (9.0.597.83 beta) and Firefox (3.6.13). I'm not sure if this is avoidable with this structure and this many nested divs on a page, but a very large Wikipedia article is much faster (since, obviously, the divs there aren't nested, and there are never *this* many).