That's why there are multiple news outlets for people to choose from. It only becomes a real problem when people with power try to selectively curtail some of them.
The problem is most people are completely lousy at filtering nonsense from sense. I mean you have fox news who spent two presidential terms airing uncritical claims that the president is some sort of kenyan homo-communist muslim athiest without even stopping to say "You know, this might actually be crazy nonsense". And since so many people rely on their television sets for information about the outside world, you ended up with literally millions of americans actually believing that. Aaaaand then they vote and here we are, stuck with the most bone-stupid and quite possiblly a bit crazy president in history.
I'm not sure what they lied to the court about? When you admit something, thats sort of the opposite to lying, and fraud requires that you lie about something.
Regardless, this whole thing is about trying to get a payout out of apple. At some point apple is going to offer a big fat old payday to them to give up wth name. That, I suspect, is the end goal.
Bitcoin may well have immanent value, but it has no intrinsic value. Theres no *substance* to the thing. Its just an idea.
I mean, apologies if i sound like a philosophy grad, but I am one, and the idea of "intrinsic value" in a currency annoys the hell out of me. We long ago abandoned the labor theory of value (and possibly are poorer for it, but thats another discussion), but even the current definition of 'value' as utility is a bit nonsensical, if you really think about it. Where does the usefulness come from? What reaction within its molecules sprung for the this usefulness. Nothing, its just an idea. Its a thing we've made up. Money is pretend. And since nobody seems to have come up with with a better thing to pretend about so we can organize resources and labor (Hell even the two bitterly opposing methods of economic organization modernity sprung forth, capitalism and socialism both agree you probably need money) were stuck with this pretend.
Yeah. I found myself in hospital recently due to Anemia via an ambulance and ended up in fairly serious debt as a result. Since I know the anemia thing isnt immediately life threatening (Its something Ive had a long time and I know once the fainting starts I do have a bit of time before it becomes truly dangerous) I would genuinely refuse to do the ambulance again. Ubers are perfect (Cabs too. but ubers half the price, assuming its not surge fee oclock)
Social media platforms like those aren't really any different from ISPs, conceptually. Both are just conduits for getting information from a sender to one or more receivers. ISPs transmit IP packets between computers. Social media platforms transmit ideas in the form of comments and submissions between people.
Hell no. Letting government control social media is fucking retarded, and completely at odds with the internet.
I get that facebook and twitter get manipulated by hostile forces and that theres good reason to suspect we got a shit president partly as a result. But theres better ways to solve this than making "the man" force social media companies to start following government run mandates as to acceptable content mixes
Hillary clinton was absolutely the wrong person. But lets not delude ourselves. She was the candidate for the shitty status quo.
Trumps running a fucking wrecking ball through everything America is supposed to stand for.
And given a choice between guy hellbent on the mad berlesconi of wall street and a supremely boring suit candidate who wont make things better, but wont make it worse either, I'd go the status quo
I dont think it was a great film. But it was a good film, and I had lots fo fun.
The dialoge was a bit hammy, and they could have strupped a good 40 minutes out to really tighten the plot up, but I still had fun and so did my friends.
If the flaming car wreck that was the prequels didnt happen I'd be more critical. But compared to those, this is miles more entertaining and star-wars like, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying themselves
I'm still kinda convinced this is all a big fascinating hoo-hah over nothing. But if we humor the idea for a bit , its perfectly possible to see how "Strange alien metals' could puzzle the science folks.
Lets assume our saucer boys are doing something nifty with relativistic travel, and have a 'warp drive'. Ie something that warp space to abuse the fact that a pocket of space can travel away from another pocket of space faster than light. Now our best guess at how this could works the Alcubierre warp drive. If you have enough "negative mass" matter , a few tonnes say, the maths tell us we could build a device to "propell" a bubble of space around a spaceship to many times the speed of light.
The catch is, and its a humdingrer, we have no idea what "negative mass" matter is. Its unobtanium. we can make minescule amounts of negative energy (and E=MC2 so negative mass fits in somewhere here) in the lab via the cashmir effect, we cant actually use it to do useful work because of the whole conservation of matter/energy thing
But what if our hypothetical space tourists had figured this shit out. What if the "stange alloys" where baffling scientists because the material was showing negative mass or somesuch similar sorts of madness. Or perhaps dense beyond how we normally pack our atoms together. If we're just using our standard periodical table, there ought be nothing here to confuse us. But perhaps this isnt regular chemistry. Perhaps our little green friends have figured out how to make negative matteer be a real thing, and thats why the pesky little space fiends are doing donuts in the carpark.
ooooor its a big load of nonsense. Thats probably more likely
white working class went and voted for Donald Trump
Despite the prevailing wisdom that its poor white hicks that vote for Republicans, the evidence is actually not like that. There's a lot of folks, small business owners, managers and the likes.
I'm going to get my head bit off this, but hear me out. One of Karl Marx's best observations is that people are basically self-interested. That isnt unique to him, most economists prior and after agreeing with him on that. What his big insight is, however, is that people form ideologies to justify or self explain their relationship to capital, or more loosely, wealth. Rich people are attracted to ideologies like Libertarianism or neo-conservatism. Poorer folks are more likely to be attracted to more socialist or even communist in extreme cases, ideologies. Conservatism and its spiral eyed crazy distant-cousin Fascism are the ideologies of the middle class. Those who think they are better than the poor folk, dont want the poor folk costing them tax, but still ultimately are just working for the man themselves. You dont have to agree with marxism, to see he made a pretty good observation there.
Racism , sociologists argue, formed as a sort of pact between the white working class and the ruling caste in society. We'll give you better pay, and we wont give any of your jobs to those black folks, if you promise not to do anything buck crazy like joining the Commies or voting out the rich guys. It provided a way to essentially tame that self-interested streak in the working class by giving them something to be resentful of that isnt their fat rich bosses. Now none of this is some grand conspiracy. Its an emergent phenomena of millions and millions of people acrting on what they believe is their own self interest.
Trump though. I half suspect the 50% of the population where having a bit of a granddad moment with that one
Dude. Get some Thorazine, your mother is probably worried by now.
If you poked your head outside your little self contained info bubble you might actually learn the only people that care about âoesjwsâ are sjw opponents. The sane folks are not particularly concerned about millennial tumblr users forming a vast spooky conspiracy to take over the world SOMEHOw.
Concerns over gambling happen to come from all across the political spectrum, but traditionally from the Christian Right (and shock horror look at where most of the political pressure to censor games has come from. Yup, the Christian Right). And now those motherfuckers have you marching lock step along with them waving the boring old culture war and freaking out about language that have been preoccupations of the Christian Right weâ(TM)ll longer than my grey beards been collecting dust for.
Psychologically adding a physical task to the gamble is likely to make it worse. Part of the addiction of pokie machines is the physical action of pulling the leaver and the discontinuous rush of occasionally winning. It creates a cause->pleasure loop in the brain we respond to like good Pavlovian dogs. Any âoeskill testâ requirement is going to be screwed with until the perfect addiction response is obtained (probably automated by A/B testing and maybe some machine learning). These people are in the business of hacking our brains
Yeah I think itâ(TM)s a different phenomena. I still get a lottery ticket every now and then , even though I know the odds of a victory are so low as to barely warrant consideration. Iâ(TM)m not sure about the US , here in west Australia the lottery commission puts all its profits into charity groups , feeding poor folk, environmental cleanup projects and so on. I think itâ(TM)s a pretty good knowing my $2 goes into that , along with a bit of get-rich fantasy , well THOSE odds are pretty good
Thatâ(TM)s all good and fine , but these games target people with poor impulse control and cognitive defects that make them succeptible. The industry calls them âoewhalesâ. Unless weâ(TM)ve truly gone down the dark route of encouraging exploitation itâ(TM)s perfectly valid to police this.
The problem is the base library is not the same. It SHOULD in theory be as simple as swapping out the NIB files , like you can do when writing cross platform between iphones and ipads. But the core libraries are just not the same. Definatly *similar* but not the same. Some of this is just a logical difference between resource constrained arm devices, and desktops which are full blown intel beasts, and some of its from the fact they straight up reimplemented most of the user land.
Without Malaria and HIV, they'd have even more population growth and more poverty.
Africa doesnt have a population problem. Theres enough resources to feed everyone very well. In fact all the evidence points to population growth correlating positively with economic growth (Well by definition really, more actors in an economy means more producers and more consumers). Thats why immigration actually lowers unemployment. Its not immediately intuitive, but it makes sense when you remember mouths to feed=jobs. Or to put it another way, the United states has a huge population, far more than any african country, yet its the most prosperous country in history.
The problem in africa is a combination of colonial hangovers, dependence on the global north, poor education, and poor healthcare.
It happened here in Western Australia with the Mining Boom. Trillions of dollars of metals where pulled out of the ground in the north west and miners where getting $150K+ (And by plus, one guy I know, a metalurgist, was pulling about $300K, although in some respects the man was responsible for turning a $1mil a month pilot mine into a $10 mil a week full mine, so he certainly earned it). The end result was it sent properties through the roof. Whereas 15 years ago, houses costing more than a million made the front page of the paper, by the end of the boom it wasnt that far from the median in the richer suburbs. Hell $300K would barely get you a 1 bedroom flat in the arse end of shitsville, and the rents went up accordingly. Worst of all, in many northern towns rents where going up to well about $1K a week for a bedroom, and in many of those towns there was high unemployment because the mining companies would fly in their own staff, buy up all the real estate and fill *all* of the rentals with fly-in-fly-out miners, which had a horrific effect on the local aboriginal populations which would never get offered jobs and then where unable to find accomodation leading to rural homelessness and basic social meltdown. It was fucked
And then the bom just ended. The chinese discovered you could hire africans to mine metal for $2 an hour and not have to worry about environmental regulations if you just wanted to dump a half million tonnes of cyanide into the ground water.
So now the rents are SORT of better, but I suspect we're in for the sort of crash that struck the US 15 years ago which in many respects was caused by people paying far more for their houses than they can afford. Mortgages are certainly starting to crack as people who thought the good times would last forever suddenly realise they only have skills for manual labor and packing boxes at kmart dont quite pay the same as driving a forklift in kalgoorlie. So they either sell off, and get far less than they paid, rent it out for less than it'll take to pay the mortgage, or leave it empty and hope for the best. Theres a lot of empty houses right now, and a lot of homeless folk.
But fortunately my rents now back down to $300 a week, dramatically less than it used to be. So thats good.
Was going to make a cheap swipe against utilitarianism, but this is dead right. Bang for buck, theres little more important than trying to solve malaria. It, along with HIV has put such a massive strain of Africa , that even putting aside shitty dictators and corruption, its hard to see how Africa can get out of its poverty without solving Malaria and HIV. These two diseases put huge sections of the adult population in bed sick (And trust me, Malaria is no joke) instead of working, and thats *terrible* for keeping people fed and housed. HIV is a hard one, although it CAN be neutralized with good meds, but Malaria is straight up preventable, and yet its ignored
People are kind of easy to convince. Hell I remember once sitting with a friend watching some lights in the air do some really crazy shit out in a backyard of a friends once.
It wasn't untill later on I realised, both me and my friend where really really high. All I got proof of , was that my universith years where kinda fun.
But honestly, for a while there, I was pretty spooked.
No, I'm quite aware that stimulants are being added to all our foods which putting undo stress on your cardiovascular system, the most popular being sugar and caffeine. When people begin living long enough that the primary cause of death is suddenly getting cancer throughout their body, that's when we've hit the limit for (unmodified) humans.
Theres no evidence at all that "stimulants iin all our food" has anything to do with higher rates of cardiac arrest globally. There is PLENTY of evidence that longer lifespans are, however.
Just look at all the accurate claims about what would happen by today. I've been hearing this crap since the 70s. They always make extreme claims that will happen just far enough over the horizon to be unassailable, but require immediate action...but the threat never materializes.
I am comparing actual data to their dire predictions made 20 years ago and calling them on their shit. And, I will be the denier
What predictions? That there will be increased temperature and more erratic weather? Check, that happened. That there would be meltoffs in the north and south poles? Check, that happened. That there would be increases in methane output from permafrost? Check that happened. That Cyclone and Tornado activity would increase? Check that happened.
A few years ago we had a run of straight 40c+ days lasting nearly a month in my home town. Thats never happened before. Over on the east coast of australia , every goddamn year we've had flooding events for nearly a decade now, and its running havock on the economy.
Its easy to put your fingers in your ears and try and nitpick predictions from 20 years ago at a time when modelling was in its infancy, whilst pretending the evidence in front of your very own eyes does not count somehow.
But that doesn't make you "scientific" or "skeptical". It makes you a gullible fools who falls for manipulative conspiracy theories.
Im not surprised, the whole thing seems a bit too "Dr Evil" for it to be real.
My guess is that there might have been some sort of contaminant or environmental factor thats caused a neurological disorder. There are all sorts of brain injuries that can cause ringing sensations.
Shit, for all we know the whole building came down with a particularly nasty stain of Toxoplasmosis from the embassys house cat.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is most people are completely lousy at filtering nonsense from sense. I mean you have fox news who spent two presidential terms airing uncritical claims that the president is some sort of kenyan homo-communist muslim athiest without even stopping to say "You know, this might actually be crazy nonsense". And since so many people rely on their television sets for information about the outside world, you ended up with literally millions of americans actually believing that. Aaaaand then they vote and here we are, stuck with the most bone-stupid and quite possiblly a bit crazy president in history.
I'm not sure what they lied to the court about? When you admit something, thats sort of the opposite to lying, and fraud requires that you lie about something.
Regardless, this whole thing is about trying to get a payout out of apple. At some point apple is going to offer a big fat old payday to them to give up wth name. That, I suspect, is the end goal.
Bitcoin may well have immanent value, but it has no intrinsic value. Theres no *substance* to the thing. Its just an idea.
I mean, apologies if i sound like a philosophy grad, but I am one, and the idea of "intrinsic value" in a currency annoys the hell out of me. We long ago abandoned the labor theory of value (and possibly are poorer for it, but thats another discussion), but even the current definition of 'value' as utility is a bit nonsensical, if you really think about it. Where does the usefulness come from? What reaction within its molecules sprung for the this usefulness. Nothing, its just an idea. Its a thing we've made up. Money is pretend. And since nobody seems to have come up with with a better thing to pretend about so we can organize resources and labor (Hell even the two bitterly opposing methods of economic organization modernity sprung forth, capitalism and socialism both agree you probably need money) were stuck with this pretend.
So government control over private media?
Yeah. I found myself in hospital recently due to Anemia via an ambulance and ended up in fairly serious debt as a result. Since I know the anemia thing isnt immediately life threatening (Its something Ive had a long time and I know once the fainting starts I do have a bit of time before it becomes truly dangerous) I would genuinely refuse to do the ambulance again. Ubers are perfect (Cabs too. but ubers half the price, assuming its not surge fee oclock)
"It seemed like a good idea at the time"
Hell no. Letting government control social media is fucking retarded, and completely at odds with the internet.
I get that facebook and twitter get manipulated by hostile forces and that theres good reason to suspect we got a shit president partly as a result. But theres better ways to solve this than making "the man" force social media companies to start following government run mandates as to acceptable content mixes
Hillary clinton was absolutely the wrong person. But lets not delude ourselves. She was the candidate for the shitty status quo.
Trumps running a fucking wrecking ball through everything America is supposed to stand for.
And given a choice between guy hellbent on the mad berlesconi of wall street and a supremely boring suit candidate who wont make things better, but wont make it worse either, I'd go the status quo
I dont think it was a great film. But it was a good film, and I had lots fo fun.
The dialoge was a bit hammy, and they could have strupped a good 40 minutes out to really tighten the plot up, but I still had fun and so did my friends.
If the flaming car wreck that was the prequels didnt happen I'd be more critical. But compared to those, this is miles more entertaining and star-wars like, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying themselves
I'm still kinda convinced this is all a big fascinating hoo-hah over nothing. But if we humor the idea for a bit , its perfectly possible to see how "Strange alien metals' could puzzle the science folks.
Lets assume our saucer boys are doing something nifty with relativistic travel, and have a 'warp drive'. Ie something that warp space to abuse the fact that a pocket of space can travel away from another pocket of space faster than light. Now our best guess at how this could works the Alcubierre warp drive. If you have enough "negative mass" matter , a few tonnes say, the maths tell us we could build a device to "propell" a bubble of space around a spaceship to many times the speed of light.
The catch is, and its a humdingrer, we have no idea what "negative mass" matter is. Its unobtanium. we can make minescule amounts of negative energy (and E=MC2 so negative mass fits in somewhere here) in the lab via the cashmir effect, we cant actually use it to do useful work because of the whole conservation of matter/energy thing
But what if our hypothetical space tourists had figured this shit out. What if the "stange alloys" where baffling scientists because the material was showing negative mass or somesuch similar sorts of madness. Or perhaps dense beyond how we normally pack our atoms together. If we're just using our standard periodical table, there ought be nothing here to confuse us. But perhaps this isnt regular chemistry. Perhaps our little green friends have figured out how to make negative matteer be a real thing, and thats why the pesky little space fiends are doing donuts in the carpark.
ooooor its a big load of nonsense. Thats probably more likely
Despite the prevailing wisdom that its poor white hicks that vote for Republicans, the evidence is actually not like that. There's a lot of folks, small business owners, managers and the likes.
I'm going to get my head bit off this, but hear me out. One of Karl Marx's best observations is that people are basically self-interested. That isnt unique to him, most economists prior and after agreeing with him on that. What his big insight is, however, is that people form ideologies to justify or self explain their relationship to capital, or more loosely, wealth. Rich people are attracted to ideologies like Libertarianism or neo-conservatism. Poorer folks are more likely to be attracted to more socialist or even communist in extreme cases, ideologies. Conservatism and its spiral eyed crazy distant-cousin Fascism are the ideologies of the middle class. Those who think they are better than the poor folk, dont want the poor folk costing them tax, but still ultimately are just working for the man themselves. You dont have to agree with marxism, to see he made a pretty good observation there.
Racism , sociologists argue, formed as a sort of pact between the white working class and the ruling caste in society. We'll give you better pay, and we wont give any of your jobs to those black folks, if you promise not to do anything buck crazy like joining the Commies or voting out the rich guys. It provided a way to essentially tame that self-interested streak in the working class by giving them something to be resentful of that isnt their fat rich bosses. Now none of this is some grand conspiracy. Its an emergent phenomena of millions and millions of people acrting on what they believe is their own self interest.
Trump though. I half suspect the 50% of the population where having a bit of a granddad moment with that one
Dude. Get some Thorazine, your mother is probably worried by now.
If you poked your head outside your little self contained info bubble you might actually learn the only people that care about âoesjwsâ are sjw opponents. The sane folks are not particularly concerned about millennial tumblr users forming a vast spooky conspiracy to take over the world SOMEHOw.
Concerns over gambling happen to come from all across the political spectrum, but traditionally from the Christian Right (and shock horror look at where most of the political pressure to censor games has come from. Yup, the Christian Right). And now those motherfuckers have you marching lock step along with them waving the boring old culture war and freaking out about language that have been preoccupations of the Christian Right weâ(TM)ll longer than my grey beards been collecting dust for.
Have some fucking perspective
Psychologically adding a physical task to the gamble is likely to make it worse. Part of the addiction of pokie machines is the physical action of pulling the leaver and the discontinuous rush of occasionally winning. It creates a cause->pleasure loop in the brain we respond to like good Pavlovian dogs. Any âoeskill testâ requirement is going to be screwed with until the perfect addiction response is obtained (probably automated by A/B testing and maybe some machine learning). These people are in the business of hacking our brains
Yeah I think itâ(TM)s a different phenomena. I still get a lottery ticket every now and then , even though I know the odds of a victory are so low as to barely warrant consideration. Iâ(TM)m not sure about the US , here in west Australia the lottery commission puts all its profits into charity groups , feeding poor folk, environmental cleanup projects and so on. I think itâ(TM)s a pretty good knowing my $2 goes into that , along with a bit of get-rich fantasy , well THOSE odds are pretty good
Thatâ(TM)s all good and fine , but these games target people with poor impulse control and cognitive defects that make them succeptible. The industry calls them âoewhalesâ. Unless weâ(TM)ve truly gone down the dark route of encouraging exploitation itâ(TM)s perfectly valid to police this.
The problem is the base library is not the same. It SHOULD in theory be as simple as swapping out the NIB files , like you can do when writing cross platform between iphones and ipads. But the core libraries are just not the same. Definatly *similar* but not the same. Some of this is just a logical difference between resource constrained arm devices, and desktops which are full blown intel beasts, and some of its from the fact they straight up reimplemented most of the user land.
Africa doesnt have a population problem. Theres enough resources to feed everyone very well. In fact all the evidence points to population growth correlating positively with economic growth (Well by definition really, more actors in an economy means more producers and more consumers). Thats why immigration actually lowers unemployment. Its not immediately intuitive, but it makes sense when you remember mouths to feed=jobs. Or to put it another way, the United states has a huge population, far more than any african country, yet its the most prosperous country in history.
The problem in africa is a combination of colonial hangovers, dependence on the global north, poor education, and poor healthcare.
It happened here in Western Australia with the Mining Boom. Trillions of dollars of metals where pulled out of the ground in the north west and miners where getting $150K+ (And by plus, one guy I know, a metalurgist, was pulling about $300K, although in some respects the man was responsible for turning a $1mil a month pilot mine into a $10 mil a week full mine, so he certainly earned it). The end result was it sent properties through the roof. Whereas 15 years ago, houses costing more than a million made the front page of the paper, by the end of the boom it wasnt that far from the median in the richer suburbs. Hell $300K would barely get you a 1 bedroom flat in the arse end of shitsville, and the rents went up accordingly. Worst of all, in many northern towns rents where going up to well about $1K a week for a bedroom, and in many of those towns there was high unemployment because the mining companies would fly in their own staff, buy up all the real estate and fill *all* of the rentals with fly-in-fly-out miners, which had a horrific effect on the local aboriginal populations which would never get offered jobs and then where unable to find accomodation leading to rural homelessness and basic social meltdown. It was fucked
And then the bom just ended. The chinese discovered you could hire africans to mine metal for $2 an hour and not have to worry about environmental regulations if you just wanted to dump a half million tonnes of cyanide into the ground water.
So now the rents are SORT of better, but I suspect we're in for the sort of crash that struck the US 15 years ago which in many respects was caused by people paying far more for their houses than they can afford. Mortgages are certainly starting to crack as people who thought the good times would last forever suddenly realise they only have skills for manual labor and packing boxes at kmart dont quite pay the same as driving a forklift in kalgoorlie. So they either sell off, and get far less than they paid, rent it out for less than it'll take to pay the mortgage, or leave it empty and hope for the best. Theres a lot of empty houses right now, and a lot of homeless folk.
But fortunately my rents now back down to $300 a week, dramatically less than it used to be. So thats good.
Was going to make a cheap swipe against utilitarianism, but this is dead right. Bang for buck, theres little more important than trying to solve malaria. It, along with HIV has put such a massive strain of Africa , that even putting aside shitty dictators and corruption, its hard to see how Africa can get out of its poverty without solving Malaria and HIV. These two diseases put huge sections of the adult population in bed sick (And trust me, Malaria is no joke) instead of working, and thats *terrible* for keeping people fed and housed. HIV is a hard one, although it CAN be neutralized with good meds, but Malaria is straight up preventable, and yet its ignored
If you reject pineapple on Pizza, I would argue your device is not becoming more human, rather, its turning into a monster.
People are kind of easy to convince. Hell I remember once sitting with a friend watching some lights in the air do some really crazy shit out in a backyard of a friends once.
It wasn't untill later on I realised, both me and my friend where really really high. All I got proof of , was that my universith years where kinda fun.
But honestly, for a while there, I was pretty spooked.
Ah yes, a big ol' ball of gaffer tape and bash scripts. The cure to complexity.
I'm still yet to have someone give me a legitimately non hysterical reason why "systemd bad" other than "its different"
Theres no evidence at all that "stimulants iin all our food" has anything to do with higher rates of cardiac arrest globally. There is PLENTY of evidence that longer lifespans are, however.
Doubly so for cancers.
What predictions? That there will be increased temperature and more erratic weather? Check, that happened.
That there would be meltoffs in the north and south poles? Check, that happened.
That there would be increases in methane output from permafrost? Check that happened.
That Cyclone and Tornado activity would increase? Check that happened.
A few years ago we had a run of straight 40c+ days lasting nearly a month in my home town. Thats never happened before. Over on the east coast of australia , every goddamn year we've had flooding events for nearly a decade now, and its running havock on the economy.
Its easy to put your fingers in your ears and try and nitpick predictions from 20 years ago at a time when modelling was in its infancy, whilst pretending the evidence in front of your very own eyes does not count somehow.
But that doesn't make you "scientific" or "skeptical". It makes you a gullible fools who falls for manipulative conspiracy theories.
Im not surprised, the whole thing seems a bit too "Dr Evil" for it to be real.
My guess is that there might have been some sort of contaminant or environmental factor thats caused a neurological disorder. There are all sorts of brain injuries that can cause ringing sensations.
Shit, for all we know the whole building came down with a particularly nasty stain of Toxoplasmosis from the embassys house cat.