I have a switch like that in my walk-in closet. On the outside of the closet there is a switch to the light in the closet. on the other side of the wall is another switch that evidently doesn't do anything. Its weird because the switch for a room is normally IN the room.
When I moved in I would constantly flip that switch on the way out of the closet.
I also noticed that for some reason half my cable channels would get horrible noise sometimes.
Eventually I figured out that the switch in the closet is connected to a signal amp in the attic that connects the incoming cable system to a huge yagi in the attic. I dunno if it was broadcasting anything useful, but the cables in the house sure picked up a lot of crap from it.
you'd think in 2003 we would have known better. We have all this technology and something like this happens
As is typical of any large system, its composed of lots of old hardware and some new fancy hardware, too little documentation, lots of people practicing CYA, and its balaced on a knifes edge trying to be stable while spending the absolute least amount of money possible.
Can we agree that awareness requires a [working] brain?
If so, then consciousness must begin sometime between 4 and 6 months of development.
I submit that consciousness also requires at least short term memory, so those subsystems of the brain must be working as well.
The consciousness level of a baby is difficult to judge, because it has not yet learned voluntary control of its output devices, so we have no way to identify the typical signs of consciousness. Most reactions (almost all related to discomfort) are hardwired, so they can't be used as indicators of conciousness.
From my general curiousity of such matters and having raised several children, I'd say they gradually reach basic sentience over about three months after birth. There i don't think there is an exact instant in which the moment before the child is not sentiant, and the moment after he is. Likewise I feel that there are levels of sentience above that which we associate with adult humans.
From an ethical prespective, it is for these reasons that I don't think it is valid to try to determine a beings moral considerability based on our perception of its level of awareness. We must find some other criteria on which to base our decision to grant or deny that which we consider to be 'rights'.
at this stage of the game, squashing the little clump of cells is no different than picking your nose and baking the boogers in the microwave
Your proposition apepars to be 'a zygote is no different than a differientiated cell from a mature organism'. This is false.
A zygote will continue to develop into a human organism (if required support hardware is available), differientiated cells will not (although with some fiddling in a lab they might be coerced into doing so). The zygote may have the same DNA, but just as heart and liver cells act differently, so will a zygote act differently than any already differientiated cell.
I'm not suggesting that a zygot is deserving of the same moral considerability that we give a baby or an adult, just that your propostion is false.
Human beings are worthy of life only if they do not cause me any inconvenience
Thats oversimplified. The guys in front of me at the ATM are inconvenient, but I can't kill them to remove that inconvenience (well, I could if i wore a mask, but thats not the point).
I think the GP is correct to an extent, one should not be required to support another, but to extend this unchecked to children really isn't practical.
if you were able to remove some of my skin cells and keep them alive in a petri dish, I would not consider that a human being. Similarly, if a person believes that you need a functioning brain to be considered a human being, then the zygote floating around it's mother's uterus is, in essence, no different then any other group of cells.
If the criteria for being a person is to have a 'functioning' brain (functioning at what level?), then it would be correct to say that it is not a human.
However, to say that a living skin cell sample in a dish has the same status as a zygote is false.
A zygote is poised to grow, of its own accord, into a functioning being (presuming nutrients continue to be available, etc). Skin cells will simply continue to be skin cells, until they run out of telomers or whatever and die.
If you knew which genetic switches to flip in the skin cells, you might be able to get them to the same stage as a zygote, its basicly the same software after all, but without that intervention, the skin cells have next to no chance of developing into a sentient being.
I tend to analogize it witha computer program that when started simultaniously branches into numerous paths, most of which end in loops that eventually self-terminate, but one of which leads to spawning a new instance of the program. That one path is fundamentally different from the rest.
Replace 'human being' with organism for a better generalization.
Elsewise someone will just drag the issue out on the tangent of 'what is a human being'.
And its not even an issue of 'worthy of life', its more an issue of 'at what point does an adult human become obligated to continue directly supporting the demands of that organism'. Medical technology is continually pushing the boundaries of premature birth survivability, but that just shifts the issue to another location (who pays the bills and does the work to support the organism).
One could make the case that having voluntarily initated a reproductive cycle, the ultimate end of which is likely a being deserving of rights, it doesn't matter if the middle stages of the organism are 'human' or not, starting a reproductive cycle commits one to supporting the organism to the best of ones abilities, until such time as it is self supporting.
That would be bad news for research.
Of course that would be bad if we ever run into an alien species that reproduces asexually, our rules might not apply correctly to them (indicating a flaw in the rules).
The issue at hand is still whether or not a fetus counts as a human,
To be precise, the issue is at what point a collection of cells gains what rights.
Children (a collection of cells) have a clearly defined set of rights that they (if they are in the USA) gain by virtue of surviving 18 years past their birth (voting, smoking, etc). Most rights are given upon birth (or perhaps before, this part is a bit hazy still).
Embryos in a lab dish are different only in that they are less developed. If their development were to advance in the usual way, and the technology were available to allow them to reach full maturity as sentient beings, I doubt many people would suggest that they have no rights (that slippery slope leads right to slavery and organ farms).
The genetic distinction (species membership) is used only because it has always been an easy way to tell 'us' intelligent humans from 'them' (obviously inferior) 'animals'. But as soon as we find or create animals that begin to approach our own intelligence and can communicate without the aid of sign language or symbol boards (we already have great apes that understand spoken english, can follow instructions and reason fairly well, they just can't talk, so joe sixpack sees only a dumb animal) we will loose this easy indicator.
We like to use the word 'human' to identify sentient beings deserving of all rights, but we also call children born without hope of any cognitive function 'human', and give them all the same rights as a fully functioning person. 'Human' has too many meanings and evokes too much emotional baggage to have any place in a discussion of rights.
Obviously if we intend to decide why particular beings deserve subsets of the full set of all rights, we would have to clearly identify all the rights we intend to be able to grant, and the criteria for a being to receive them. Of course we would also have to define exactly what we mean by 'being'. Who and what, exactly, is deserving of moral considerability?
It seems that the legal system pretty much ignores all of this and simply patches the existing system the minimal amount requried to keep people from complaining too much. I suppose a major refactoring to take into account new relationships like these are equavelent to the creation of new governments with new laws.
as someone who has been sitting in a wheelchair for 13 years of his life
Since you are in a position to have an opinion, what do you think of the physical fitness aspects of this?
The most excerise many of us geeks get is walking to and from the car and possibly up the stairs. I see a number of wheelchair-bound people that, judging by their upper body development, get more of a workout moving themselves around than the rest of us.
Obviously the price of this thing is going to prevent very wide use for some time, but if it's successful I can imagine that it has the potential to almost completely take over the powered wheelchair market. If it does, the price point will come down, possibly bringing it down far enough to be a sane purchase for people who otherwise would not get a powered chair.
Is there a potential problem there regarding physical fitness? Even the minimal walking that most people do elevates heart rates enough to maintain some basic (albeit pathetic) fitness levels. Are people who would otherwise be using their upper body to provide locomotive power going to now have to do little more than wiggle their wrist for nearly every sort of movement?
It seems like most powered wheelchairs would not be worth the price for the limited mobility they provide for otherwise healthy people, but this one does stairs, and can raise the user to eye level with up-right folks. Seems that people who haven't really needed a powered chair before might decide they need this one.
In a nutshell, I'm curious if use of a powered chair has more severe physical fitness impact even than a typical persons sedentary lifestyle, and if this will effect people who would otherwise get excersize from daily locomotion.
Really good stereoscopic systems will have the image focus depth and the image triangulation depth at the same "distance", so that your brain doesn't have to do any extra work to perceive the image.
They could solve this pretty easily by providing the lenses as a prescription lens that adjust your focus by the average amount required to change your focus to the correct plane. it would still be a bit off for people like myself who tend to sit over twice the average distance from the screen, but it would certainly be better.
Of course, since this is nothing more than your basic cross-eyed viewing, one could dispense with the polarizers and just provide the refocusing lenses with adjustable blinders that cover about half of the outside field of view of each eye. This blocks the side images, but makes turning the head an issue. of course that is kind of an issue regardless since it makes the virtual image slide around in a distracting way, and so tends to be avoided anyway (the virtual image only moves across the visual field about half as fast as you would expect).
Actually they already do sometimes check creatine levels in urine tests. If the level is out of wack they ask to retest because they suspect the test subject of consuming large amounts of water to dilute the samples.
Of course its far from foolproof, a vegan weightlifter taking creatine and drinking the recomended 8 to 12 glasses of water a day in addition to protine supliments and cranberry juice would probably have way wacky levels.
I have some granite I broke off of some bolders (which was much harder to do than I had expected), so I'm sure its not that. The grain of this stuff is much finer, and overall a dark gray.
I'll have to dig it out and take some pictures. I've been meaning to see if I can figure out what it is, now is as good a time as any.
The crystal layer is not quartz-like now that I think about it, its too fagile/flexible, and it flakes off in layers.
Hey, seeing as you know a bit about rocks, maybe you can help me identify an interesting thing I found long ago.
A road near where I lived was being redone, and one day while walking by it, I encountered what looked like a rusty softball, spherical, but with some flaking layers. I picked it up and was suprised to find it weighed a couple of pounds. Thinking it was just a bit of rusted metal I pitched it into a wall, where it broke in two along a plane of some clear quartz-looking crystal that intersects the sphere. The inside looks (iirc) kind of speckled and greyish-blue (its been awhile since I had it out, this is from memory).
I have no idea what it is, but it was cool enough to be a great addition to my rock collection. Any idea what it is?
Re:Tell that to your fiancee... :0)
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
I let my girlfriend pick her engagement ring. She chose a sub-100 gold ring with a tiny diamond. Said she'd rather spend money on something useful or fun.
So I bought her a wedding ring (simple gold, also under 100).:)
So, if you had a non infringing file up, and they sent you a C&D, would it be appropriate to send them back a very strongly worded letter telling them to go do nasty things to their lawyers and that you refuse to remove the file (making no mention that the contents of the file are not infringing)?
If you managed to piss them off enough to spend some more resources actually persuing the matter, you could have some fun consuming some of their resources without risking anything.
In the US we have some stupid laws about trade secrets that make it illegal to reveal information that a company deems a 'trade secret'. So if they were to accidentally email you their super-secret process for turning lead into gold, it would be illegal for you to reveal it.
By trying to keep it secret instead of patenting it they get some legal protections. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the details.
Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different than entering my search term, identifying the topics that I don't want to see, then excluding them and searching again? I do this frequenly with google, like if I am searching for 'mushrooms', but I'm not interested in tripping, I can add '-magic -psilocybe' or '+morel' or whatever.
Does this do some kind of bayesian-like filtering on the pages to get me a better match than I'm likely to come up with by using keywords?
The ratio of public CP to regular pron (still images and video) on freenet is already very high relative to the rest of the net. And that does not include any private networks that may exist on freenet (networks where only trusted/paying members are given the keys to archives). These archives could contain any amount of illegal material and no one but the people with the keys would know about it.
i'm in the same boat exactly. there are plenty of things i love about linux, but spending an eternity fucking around with fonts, printing, samba, drivers and video codecs just to do the basic, normal things a computer should do exceeds my patience these days.
Exactly my position too. I got so fed up with screwing around with RedHat that I just nuked the drives on all three of my machines and installed W2k. Now it does most of what I want, and when it doesn't do what I want, there isn't the option of spending a week of evenings fucking with it trying to figure out how to make it do it, it just doesn't do that, end of story. I get much more done now.
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I have a switch like that in my walk-in closet. On the outside of the closet there is a switch to the light in the closet. on the other side of the wall is another switch that evidently doesn't do anything. Its weird because the switch for a room is normally IN the room.
When I moved in I would constantly flip that switch on the way out of the closet.
I also noticed that for some reason half my cable channels would get horrible noise sometimes.
Eventually I figured out that the switch in the closet is connected to a signal amp in the attic that connects the incoming cable system to a huge yagi in the attic. I dunno if it was broadcasting anything useful, but the cables in the house sure picked up a lot of crap from it.
you'd think in 2003 we would have known better. We have all this technology and something like this happens
As is typical of any large system, its composed of lots of old hardware and some new fancy hardware, too little documentation, lots of people practicing CYA, and its balaced on a knifes edge trying to be stable while spending the absolute least amount of money possible.
Can we agree that awareness requires a [working] brain?
If so, then consciousness must begin sometime between 4 and 6 months of development.
I submit that consciousness also requires at least short term memory, so those subsystems of the brain must be working as well.
The consciousness level of a baby is difficult to judge, because it has not yet learned voluntary control of its output devices, so we have no way to identify the typical signs of consciousness. Most reactions (almost all related to discomfort) are hardwired, so they can't be used as indicators of conciousness.
From my general curiousity of such matters and having raised several children, I'd say they gradually reach basic sentience over about three months after birth. There i don't think there is an exact instant in which the moment before the child is not sentiant, and the moment after he is. Likewise I feel that there are levels of sentience above that which we associate with adult humans.
From an ethical prespective, it is for these reasons that I don't think it is valid to try to determine a beings moral considerability based on our perception of its level of awareness. We must find some other criteria on which to base our decision to grant or deny that which we consider to be 'rights'.
Truely facinating, I had not yet run across that information.
If you move the cells around at very early stages, does it screw up the construction of the body?
at this stage of the game, squashing the little clump of cells is no different than picking your nose and baking the boogers in the microwave
Your proposition apepars to be 'a zygote is no different than a differientiated cell from a mature organism'. This is false.
A zygote will continue to develop into a human organism (if required support hardware is available), differientiated cells will not (although with some fiddling in a lab they might be coerced into doing so). The zygote may have the same DNA, but just as heart and liver cells act differently, so will a zygote act differently than any already differientiated cell.
I'm not suggesting that a zygot is deserving of the same moral considerability that we give a baby or an adult, just that your propostion is false.
Human beings are worthy of life only if they do not cause me any inconvenience
Thats oversimplified. The guys in front of me at the ATM are inconvenient, but I can't kill them to remove that inconvenience (well, I could if i wore a mask, but thats not the point).
I think the GP is correct to an extent, one should not be required to support another, but to extend this unchecked to children really isn't practical.
if you were able to remove some of my skin cells and keep them alive in a petri dish, I would not consider that a human being. Similarly, if a person believes that you need a functioning brain to be considered a human being, then the zygote floating around it's mother's uterus is, in essence, no different then any other group of cells.
If the criteria for being a person is to have a 'functioning' brain (functioning at what level?), then it would be correct to say that it is not a human.
However, to say that a living skin cell sample in a dish has the same status as a zygote is false.
A zygote is poised to grow, of its own accord, into a functioning being (presuming nutrients continue to be available, etc). Skin cells will simply continue to be skin cells, until they run out of telomers or whatever and die.
If you knew which genetic switches to flip in the skin cells, you might be able to get them to the same stage as a zygote, its basicly the same software after all, but without that intervention, the skin cells have next to no chance of developing into a sentient being.
I tend to analogize it witha computer program that when started simultaniously branches into numerous paths, most of which end in loops that eventually self-terminate, but one of which leads to spawning a new instance of the program. That one path is fundamentally different from the rest.
Replace 'human being' with organism for a better generalization.
Elsewise someone will just drag the issue out on the tangent of 'what is a human being'.
And its not even an issue of 'worthy of life', its more an issue of 'at what point does an adult human become obligated to continue directly supporting the demands of that organism'. Medical technology is continually pushing the boundaries of premature birth survivability, but that just shifts the issue to another location (who pays the bills and does the work to support the organism).
One could make the case that having voluntarily initated a reproductive cycle, the ultimate end of which is likely a being deserving of rights, it doesn't matter if the middle stages of the organism are 'human' or not, starting a reproductive cycle commits one to supporting the organism to the best of ones abilities, until such time as it is self supporting.
That would be bad news for research.
Of course that would be bad if we ever run into an alien species that reproduces asexually, our rules might not apply correctly to them (indicating a flaw in the rules).
It also falls down in the case of conjoined twins. If I kill my conjoined twin, am I guilty of murder, or is it just self-mutilation?
The issue at hand is still whether or not a fetus counts as a human,
To be precise, the issue is at what point a collection of cells gains what rights.
Children (a collection of cells) have a clearly defined set of rights that they (if they are in the USA) gain by virtue of surviving 18 years past their birth (voting, smoking, etc). Most rights are given upon birth (or perhaps before, this part is a bit hazy still).
Embryos in a lab dish are different only in that they are less developed. If their development were to advance in the usual way, and the technology were available to allow them to reach full maturity as sentient beings, I doubt many people would suggest that they have no rights (that slippery slope leads right to slavery and organ farms).
The genetic distinction (species membership) is used only because it has always been an easy way to tell 'us' intelligent humans from 'them' (obviously inferior) 'animals'. But as soon as we find or create animals that begin to approach our own intelligence and can communicate without the aid of sign language or symbol boards (we already have great apes that understand spoken english, can follow instructions and reason fairly well, they just can't talk, so joe sixpack sees only a dumb animal) we will loose this easy indicator.
We like to use the word 'human' to identify sentient beings deserving of all rights, but we also call children born without hope of any cognitive function 'human', and give them all the same rights as a fully functioning person. 'Human' has too many meanings and evokes too much emotional baggage to have any place in a discussion of rights.
Obviously if we intend to decide why particular beings deserve subsets of the full set of all rights, we would have to clearly identify all the rights we intend to be able to grant, and the criteria for a being to receive them. Of course we would also have to define exactly what we mean by 'being'. Who and what, exactly, is deserving of moral considerability?
It seems that the legal system pretty much ignores all of this and simply patches the existing system the minimal amount requried to keep people from complaining too much. I suppose a major refactoring to take into account new relationships like these are equavelent to the creation of new governments with new laws.
as someone who has been sitting in a wheelchair for 13 years of his life
Since you are in a position to have an opinion, what do you think of the physical fitness aspects of this?
The most excerise many of us geeks get is walking to and from the car and possibly up the stairs. I see a number of wheelchair-bound people that, judging by their upper body development, get more of a workout moving themselves around than the rest of us.
Obviously the price of this thing is going to prevent very wide use for some time, but if it's successful I can imagine that it has the potential to almost completely take over the powered wheelchair market. If it does, the price point will come down, possibly bringing it down far enough to be a sane purchase for people who otherwise would not get a powered chair.
Is there a potential problem there regarding physical fitness? Even the minimal walking that most people do elevates heart rates enough to maintain some basic (albeit pathetic) fitness levels. Are people who would otherwise be using their upper body to provide locomotive power going to now have to do little more than wiggle their wrist for nearly every sort of movement?
It seems like most powered wheelchairs would not be worth the price for the limited mobility they provide for otherwise healthy people, but this one does stairs, and can raise the user to eye level with up-right folks. Seems that people who haven't really needed a powered chair before might decide they need this one.
In a nutshell, I'm curious if use of a powered chair has more severe physical fitness impact even than a typical persons sedentary lifestyle, and if this will effect people who would otherwise get excersize from daily locomotion.
Really good stereoscopic systems will have the image focus depth and the image triangulation depth at the same "distance", so that your brain doesn't have to do any extra work to perceive the image.
They could solve this pretty easily by providing the lenses as a prescription lens that adjust your focus by the average amount required to change your focus to the correct plane. it would still be a bit off for people like myself who tend to sit over twice the average distance from the screen, but it would certainly be better.
Of course, since this is nothing more than your basic cross-eyed viewing, one could dispense with the polarizers and just provide the refocusing lenses with adjustable blinders that cover about half of the outside field of view of each eye. This blocks the side images, but makes turning the head an issue. of course that is kind of an issue regardless since it makes the virtual image slide around in a distracting way, and so tends to be avoided anyway (the virtual image only moves across the visual field about half as fast as you would expect).
Actually they already do sometimes check creatine levels in urine tests. If the level is out of wack they ask to retest because they suspect the test subject of consuming large amounts of water to dilute the samples.
Of course its far from foolproof, a vegan weightlifter taking creatine and drinking the recomended 8 to 12 glasses of water a day in addition to protine supliments and cranberry juice would probably have way wacky levels.
I have some granite I broke off of some bolders (which was much harder to do than I had expected), so I'm sure its not that. The grain of this stuff is much finer, and overall a dark gray.
I'll have to dig it out and take some pictures. I've been meaning to see if I can figure out what it is, now is as good a time as any.
The crystal layer is not quartz-like now that I think about it, its too fagile/flexible, and it flakes off in layers.
no one is doing such things
Acutally they are, its called thermal depolymerization, and we had an article about it not long ago.
The temperatures and pressures involved are not particularly high.
Hey, seeing as you know a bit about rocks, maybe you can help me identify an interesting thing I found long ago.
A road near where I lived was being redone, and one day while walking by it, I encountered what looked like a rusty softball, spherical, but with some flaking layers. I picked it up and was suprised to find it weighed a couple of pounds. Thinking it was just a bit of rusted metal I pitched it into a wall, where it broke in two along a plane of some clear quartz-looking crystal that intersects the sphere. The inside looks (iirc) kind of speckled and greyish-blue (its been awhile since I had it out, this is from memory).
I have no idea what it is, but it was cool enough to be a great addition to my rock collection. Any idea what it is?
I let my girlfriend pick her engagement ring. She chose a sub-100 gold ring with a tiny diamond. Said she'd rather spend money on something useful or fun.
:)
So I bought her a wedding ring (simple gold, also under 100).
So, if you had a non infringing file up, and they sent you a C&D, would it be appropriate to send them back a very strongly worded letter telling them to go do nasty things to their lawyers and that you refuse to remove the file (making no mention that the contents of the file are not infringing)?
If you managed to piss them off enough to spend some more resources actually persuing the matter, you could have some fun consuming some of their resources without risking anything.
you can't prove a negative. This is one of the fundamentals of science
Isn't that more of an epistemological fundamental?
(I don't care really, I just like to say 'epistemological' )
In the US we have some stupid laws about trade secrets that make it illegal to reveal information that a company deems a 'trade secret'. So if they were to accidentally email you their super-secret process for turning lead into gold, it would be illegal for you to reveal it.
By trying to keep it secret instead of patenting it they get some legal protections. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the details.
Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different than entering my search term, identifying the topics that I don't want to see, then excluding them and searching again? I do this frequenly with google, like if I am searching for 'mushrooms', but I'm not interested in tripping, I can add '-magic -psilocybe' or '+morel' or whatever.
Does this do some kind of bayesian-like filtering on the pages to get me a better match than I'm likely to come up with by using keywords?
The ratio of public CP to regular pron (still images and video) on freenet is already very high relative to the rest of the net. And that does not include any private networks that may exist on freenet (networks where only trusted/paying members are given the keys to archives). These archives could contain any amount of illegal material and no one but the people with the keys would know about it.
Finally, do you really think that there is a 'wrong button' out there that will dl large numbers of images on to your machine?
Yes, its the icon in my startup group labeled 'Freenet'.
i'm in the same boat exactly. there are plenty of things i love about linux, but spending an eternity fucking around with fonts, printing, samba, drivers and video codecs just to do the basic, normal things a computer should do exceeds my patience these days.
Exactly my position too. I got so fed up with screwing around with RedHat that I just nuked the drives on all three of my machines and installed W2k. Now it does most of what I want, and when it doesn't do what I want, there isn't the option of spending a week of evenings fucking with it trying to figure out how to make it do it, it just doesn't do that, end of story. I get much more done now.
Money doesn't grow on trees big guy. You can't pay to have everyone do everything for you sometimes
True, but if you spend a bit of time you can sometimes help motivate other people to help get some major annoyances fixed. (see my sig)