FTA, he did offer both sets of rats morphine laced water, which the caged rats drank in much larger numbers than the "rat park" rats.
In an experiment called "The Seduction", the researchers put 16 lab rats into Rat Park and kept 16 others in standard cages. Because plain morphine is bitter, and rats have a sweet tooth, the researchers gave both sets of rats morphine-laced water with sugar added, just a little at first, with the sweetness increasing each day. Both rats also had plain tap water to choose from.
The caged rats took to the morphine instantly, even with virtually no sweetener. But no matter how sweet the morphine became, the rats in Rat Park resisted it. They would try it occasionally -- with the females trying it more often than the males -- but invariably they showed a preference for the plain water. By the end of the experiment, the caged rats had consumed 16 times more morphine than the Rat Park rats. It was, writes Alexander, "a statistically significant finding." [11]
Even more significant, he writes, was this: Naloxone is a substance that negates the effects of opioids but spares the sweet taste of the water. When Alexander added Naloxone to the morphine-laced liquid, the Rat Park rats began to drink it. They wanted the sweet water, it seemed, so long as it did not disrupt their normal social behavior.
Pretty much anybody who is in the market for this will have a home theater reciever which has the ability to take multiple input sources. People who aren't enough of an audiophile to care about Dolby 7.1 or whatever to get a reciever probably are not the intended demographic.
At that point, how does this 50% of 9-19 year olds who have seen pornography on the net compare to the amount of people in the same demographic who have actually seen another person of the opposite (preferred?) sex naked in a sexual manner (I.E. not including accidentally walking in on your little sister in the bath, etc. But "playing doctor" with the girl next door definately counts.)
What is also needed is a study to show at what percantage of kids have seen porn at what ages. Hmm... trying to find the answers I ran across this page and it looks like the demographics of people who have looked at porn may match pretty close to the demographic for people who have had sex.
But I suppose what is really needed is a study to find whether access to porn leads to teenagers having more or less sex. I'm of the belief that access to pornography would actually reduce the amount of sex that kids have, due to two reasons. 1)curiosity about what the opposite sex looks like is pretty much gone. You can find high-res closeups of just about any body part you want online. Oftentimes it ain't pretty. 2)coupled with masturbation, a lot of the physical drive to have sex may be reduced (although this latter one is a little dicey... a seperate study would have to be done on this. And the ethics and reliability of performing such a test with teenagers is quite questionable.
You really don't understand the management mentality. They will use it as a "not paying attention to what I am saying" device and try to use it to alter YOUR behavior, rather than their behavior like you intend.
Another hint - a girl's left foot generally points toward whoever she's thinking about (I don't know if this is switched in left handed girls.) Main problem with this hint is that it could also mean that she is creeped out by whoever her foot is pointing at. But at least you can use this to ascertain where her attention is without having to stare her down (and staring someone down to see where their attention is would definately have something like the heisenberg uncertainty principle. If she is paying attention to you, she will probably turn away when she sees you looking. If she isn't paying attention, then you may catch it when you look at her. Looking at foot placement makes it a lot easier.
The drug companies are also unable to properly test one of the most important ingredients in most shamanistic cures: placebo is quite difficult to test against itself.
Sorry, I forgot to include my own view on the issue. I was just saying that I could see where they are coming from. It's just that a lot of the links they have are blown way out of proportion. Most of the protest types I know are extremely reactionary and do not think through the situation entirely before they act.
example: many activists I talked to have said they would be excited to go on a mission to free animals from a testing facility, even without knowing what they were being tested for. This kind of action without thought could easilly lead to the spread of a horrid disease. Most of the animals that are released will die a more painful death than the one they would have in the lab. Toxins, biological agents and whatnot would be spread among natural populations. God forbid one of these animals actually makes it long enough to breed with the native population: genetic knockouts randomly bred to an animal living in the wild would also lead to much suffering. Confiscating the lab animals and then caring for them for the rest of their natural lives, that could be construed as reducing suffering (not that any of these people actually plan that far ahead. But just releasing them into the wild? Not good. And don't let my get into the issue of firebombing research facilities in order to show that humans shouldn't be dominating nature simply because we are more powerful. If people listen to your protest, you simply have shown that might makes right, therefore we should continue testing. If they don't listen to your protest, anybody foghting for animal rights is now labeled as a terrorist. Good job.
If Google is putting this information online for all to use in research, how is that a bad thing?
It's a bad thing... let me rephrase that... It's a process which has potentially negative consequences to some, because the people who are using these cures in a traditional manner do not have access to a computer with internet access. They do not have access to the resources of a genetics lab. They simply do not have the ability to utilize this information. Some company researching the topic may use information they gathered from google to patent a compound, and then later may force the natives using the compound (as they extract it from the plant) to cease and decist, the pharmcorps cadre of lawyers and jackbooted thugs being more influential than that of the natives.
This scenario may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but it has happened before (well, without the searching google part. The pharmcorps generally asked native shamans about cures, extracted the active compounds and learned to synthsize them, then took action against the shamans who showed them the cure for "violating the IP of the company." And google could in deed make it easier for companies to look for people violating their IP: simply do a search on the reverse transcriptase encoded DNA sequence of every single chemical you have a patent on. That search could tell you what organism makes said compound. Find someone using that compound from that natural source rather than your factories, then BLAMMO... patent suit.
Now, while "biopiracy" (man, that word just annoys me, sorry.) is indeed an evil (or at least supremely greedy) act, I don't think it's fair to equate Google to them. Even if their product could be used in part of the process. At that point why not link Microsoft, because the labs are probably running Windows on the machines the researchers searched from? What about the power company for supplying the electricity to power the machines that the search was made with? No, the Google product was created with the intent of helping people, not stifling third world peoples.
I have a patent on a process by which molecules make copies of themselves, using their own structure as a template. Various complicated helper chemicals are used, and the bluprints for creating them is also encoded in the original molecule. I call this process "life." We will provide a service by which our jack-booted thugs will confiscate said patented process from any persons found to be not paying the full royalties. Thank you, and get the door.
I can see the logic behind the people that handed out the award. Google sort of automates part of the process of finding useful genes in the huge database. By doing this, they indeed allow some companies access to information that could lead to a patent based on this genetic information. Where the argument has any teeth at all is the fact that putting this info online does nothing for the native people from whom the information was originally taken. Most of these people 1)have no computer or internet access 2)even if they did wouldn't have the equipment or training to be able to do anything with the raw genetic data and 3)wouldn't have the legal pull or capital required to actually patent the information.
And yes, "biopiracy" is actually a real problem. Basically, researchers come in to fairly indigenous areas and ask the shamans/etc about local plants used in traditional remedies. They then bring these back and analyze them to find which, if any, of the compounds are effecting the cure. The company they work for then takes out a patent on the compound, figures out a method to mass produce it, run through standard FDA tests then start selling the chenical in little pills. The problem comes when the company turns around and sues the natives for violating their patents by using the compound in their traditional remedies... even though the natives have been doing this for generations and generations (3rd world lawyers aren't all that up on their IP law, and often the drug corps are more powerful than the country the natives reside in.) So, these people are now left without a cure for some disease or ailment, and have nowhere near enough money to pay for the pills that contain the compound they used to be able to get for free from the forest or swamp.
Why would the drug corps do something so blatantly evil? It's not that they want these people to go without treatment, it's that they don't want people who are already buying their products to switch to the natural form. If the plant/fungus/whatever is already well known and easilly grown in large parts of the area, then the drug corps take different measures to reduce access: drug laws. Marijuana and Opium do have some medical uses, but growing the plants in your backyard does not give the drug corps money, so the government will not and does not recognize those uses. So it becomes illegal to grow marijuana in your backyard. Even more insidious, poppy flowers are perfectly legal to grow unless it can be proven that you know how to make a drug out of them (I'll ruin it for you all: split open a seed pod, boil in water, drink. Not as labor intensive as americans have been led to believe. Also, it can be done just as effectively with any variety of poppy: the idea that certain opium poppies which only grow in particular climates such as afghanistan are a red herring thown out to prevent people from figuring out how to make their own drugs, whether recreational or pharmaceutical.)
I had a couple friends who worked at Wal-Mart and learned a way to game the system a little on pay raises. Take any emergency department transfers: they often offered a not totally insignificat raise to someone willing to switch to a department or shift where a couple people had just quit from. If they were really horrible hours, well you just worked it long enough to get switched to something else (with another pay raise.)
I don't know if this is just something that happened at that particular Wal-Mart, or it could be possible that they were just flat out making stories up. But those raises do come with a risk: you make a nice juicy target come layoff time. But by then you should have looked around to see who else is hiring anyways.
ame with brains... you can "stimulate" them to gain some effect... It is MUCH harder to stimulate certain cells to get a very specific effect.(edited for brevity)
From the very little I understand about the state of cybernetics, creating neural interfaces is not about making a device that can be implanted into the brain/nervous system/etc and work right out of the box. It takes a little bit of training on both ends: the machinery learns some basic communication with the neurons by learning the patterns of neural firing for a given desired action/thought/whatever. The big thing though is that the brain is a very plastic organ, and the brain reorganizes itself to better communicate with the interface, either taking information in or sending information out. It would be similar to the state of fairly old voice recognition technology, where the computer had to be trained on individual words, but the operator also had to learn speech patterns that would be recognized by the computer.
While it may seem to be completely prior art BS, there are some elements that need to be addressed specifically because it is prior art. The main thing I noticed that the patent covers is a method to modify your browser specifically so that it displays affiliated ads when it is connected to Google's hotspots, and then to NOT show those ads when it is connected to someone else's hotspot. That is a big concern, as simply installing software that displays ads at all times regardless of which internet provider is being used would likely be more evil than serving ads only when connected to Google's hotspots. Not to mention one of those would piss of customers very quickly, while most people would agree that ads is just the cost of getting the "free" wi-fi.
That depends. If an average person wears the logos they have to pay a big premium. If a person who makes a lot of money wears the logos, THEY get paid to display it. Sounds perfectly fair to me.
Most of the cost of getting a patent is searching the existing documents to determine if the idea you implemented has already been patented. Once that is done actually getting the patent is quite trivial. And defensive patents can be argued as less of an evil than not getting them. If google gets hit by a submarine patent, there is a good chance they can pore through their patent library and find something the other guy is violating. Then they can threaten countersuit, or have the other party just give up the lawsuit because of the PR and financial emberrasment it will become. Not having the defensive portfolio could open google up to so much attack from other patent holders that A)they must resort to using more evil tactics in other business arenas to remain solvent or B)they go out of business, and their market niche then gets replaced by some other company, presumably one that already holds a near monopoly in the field (Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL?) so you get a tiny bit of the Devil You Know or the Devil You Don't Know.
I think Google is just growing up and realizing that "Do No Evil" is not strictly possible, but it does for the most part seem to be the goal they are striving for.
I personally just put viruses firmly in the "gray area between living and not living" because those are arbitrary distinctions: nature always finds a way to find exceptions to the niches that man creates. Not to say that our classifications are pointless, we just have to realize that there are always going to be things in that gray area. This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?" What is the exact point where two diverging groups are no longer the same species? All questions that have legal ramifications which essentially require a precise definition in order to make decisions as impartial as possible, but some things will straddle the line no matter how precise you try to make your definitions.
Well, this guy did go a step beyond simply threatening to kill people. He attempted to arrange the murder. What gets me is that he was stupid enough to try and do it over the phone from prison.
Capsaicin is an oil, so therefore not water soluble. Drinking water will do very little to remove it from your tongue. Capsaicin will, however, mix in with the fats of the foods you eat and probably stick to the starches in the rice or bread and get removed from the tongue that way.
Invalid comparison. In China, the law states that certain things must be censored. In the USA, the law states that people and organizations have a certain expectance of privacy, and that search and seizure can not be done without a court ordered warrant and evidence of a crime. Guess what... this falls under search and seizure. There was no warrant, therefore the demand was illegal.
Honestly, this sounds like they take the addictive game play and soup it up with the addictive nature of an MMO. There seemed to be a large emphasis on 1)unlocking new tech and 2)the ability to explore user created content.
Slashdot Mirror
Haxorz? Must be hte Haxorz! Oh... crap. We're getting this stuff a day early. Not again.
FTA, he did offer both sets of rats morphine laced water, which the caged rats drank in much larger numbers than the "rat park" rats.
In an experiment called "The Seduction", the researchers put 16 lab rats into Rat Park and kept 16 others in standard cages. Because plain morphine is bitter, and rats have a sweet tooth, the researchers gave both sets of rats morphine-laced water with sugar added, just a little at first, with the sweetness increasing each day. Both rats also had plain tap water to choose from.
The caged rats took to the morphine instantly, even with virtually no sweetener. But no matter how sweet the morphine became, the rats in Rat Park resisted it. They would try it occasionally -- with the females trying it more often than the males -- but invariably they showed a preference for the plain water. By the end of the experiment, the caged rats had consumed 16 times more morphine than the Rat Park rats. It was, writes Alexander, "a statistically significant finding." [11]
Even more significant, he writes, was this: Naloxone is a substance that negates the effects of opioids but spares the sweet taste of the water. When Alexander added Naloxone to the morphine-laced liquid, the Rat Park rats began to drink it. They wanted the sweet water, it seemed, so long as it did not disrupt their normal social behavior.
Pretty much anybody who is in the market for this will have a home theater reciever which has the ability to take multiple input sources. People who aren't enough of an audiophile to care about Dolby 7.1 or whatever to get a reciever probably are not the intended demographic.
At that point, how does this 50% of 9-19 year olds who have seen pornography on the net compare to the amount of people in the same demographic who have actually seen another person of the opposite (preferred?) sex naked in a sexual manner (I.E. not including accidentally walking in on your little sister in the bath, etc. But "playing doctor" with the girl next door definately counts.)
What is also needed is a study to show at what percantage of kids have seen porn at what ages. Hmm... trying to find the answers I ran across this page and it looks like the demographics of people who have looked at porn may match pretty close to the demographic for people who have had sex.
But I suppose what is really needed is a study to find whether access to porn leads to teenagers having more or less sex. I'm of the belief that access to pornography would actually reduce the amount of sex that kids have, due to two reasons. 1)curiosity about what the opposite sex looks like is pretty much gone. You can find high-res closeups of just about any body part you want online. Oftentimes it ain't pretty. 2)coupled with masturbation, a lot of the physical drive to have sex may be reduced (although this latter one is a little dicey... a seperate study would have to be done on this. And the ethics and reliability of performing such a test with teenagers is quite questionable.
There are things that are genuinely physically addictive like hard drugs
I wouldn't be so sure about even that one.
You really don't understand the management mentality. They will use it as a "not paying attention to what I am saying" device and try to use it to alter YOUR behavior, rather than their behavior like you intend.
Another hint - a girl's left foot generally points toward whoever she's thinking about (I don't know if this is switched in left handed girls.) Main problem with this hint is that it could also mean that she is creeped out by whoever her foot is pointing at. But at least you can use this to ascertain where her attention is without having to stare her down (and staring someone down to see where their attention is would definately have something like the heisenberg uncertainty principle. If she is paying attention to you, she will probably turn away when she sees you looking. If she isn't paying attention, then you may catch it when you look at her. Looking at foot placement makes it a lot easier.
The drug companies are also unable to properly test one of the most important ingredients in most shamanistic cures: placebo is quite difficult to test against itself.
Sorry, I forgot to include my own view on the issue. I was just saying that I could see where they are coming from. It's just that a lot of the links they have are blown way out of proportion. Most of the protest types I know are extremely reactionary and do not think through the situation entirely before they act.
example: many activists I talked to have said they would be excited to go on a mission to free animals from a testing facility, even without knowing what they were being tested for. This kind of action without thought could easilly lead to the spread of a horrid disease. Most of the animals that are released will die a more painful death than the one they would have in the lab. Toxins, biological agents and whatnot would be spread among natural populations. God forbid one of these animals actually makes it long enough to breed with the native population: genetic knockouts randomly bred to an animal living in the wild would also lead to much suffering. Confiscating the lab animals and then caring for them for the rest of their natural lives, that could be construed as reducing suffering (not that any of these people actually plan that far ahead. But just releasing them into the wild? Not good. And don't let my get into the issue of firebombing research facilities in order to show that humans shouldn't be dominating nature simply because we are more powerful. If people listen to your protest, you simply have shown that might makes right, therefore we should continue testing. If they don't listen to your protest, anybody foghting for animal rights is now labeled as a terrorist. Good job.
If Google is putting this information online for all to use in research, how is that a bad thing?
It's a bad thing... let me rephrase that... It's a process which has potentially negative consequences to some, because the people who are using these cures in a traditional manner do not have access to a computer with internet access. They do not have access to the resources of a genetics lab. They simply do not have the ability to utilize this information. Some company researching the topic may use information they gathered from google to patent a compound, and then later may force the natives using the compound (as they extract it from the plant) to cease and decist, the pharmcorps cadre of lawyers and jackbooted thugs being more influential than that of the natives.
This scenario may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but it has happened before (well, without the searching google part. The pharmcorps generally asked native shamans about cures, extracted the active compounds and learned to synthsize them, then took action against the shamans who showed them the cure for "violating the IP of the company." And google could in deed make it easier for companies to look for people violating their IP: simply do a search on the reverse transcriptase encoded DNA sequence of every single chemical you have a patent on. That search could tell you what organism makes said compound. Find someone using that compound from that natural source rather than your factories, then BLAMMO... patent suit.
Now, while "biopiracy" (man, that word just annoys me, sorry.) is indeed an evil (or at least supremely greedy) act, I don't think it's fair to equate Google to them. Even if their product could be used in part of the process. At that point why not link Microsoft, because the labs are probably running Windows on the machines the researchers searched from? What about the power company for supplying the electricity to power the machines that the search was made with? No, the Google product was created with the intent of helping people, not stifling third world peoples.
I have a patent on a process by which molecules make copies of themselves, using their own structure as a template. Various complicated helper chemicals are used, and the bluprints for creating them is also encoded in the original molecule. I call this process "life." We will provide a service by which our jack-booted thugs will confiscate said patented process from any persons found to be not paying the full royalties. Thank you, and get the door.
I can see the logic behind the people that handed out the award. Google sort of automates part of the process of finding useful genes in the huge database. By doing this, they indeed allow some companies access to information that could lead to a patent based on this genetic information. Where the argument has any teeth at all is the fact that putting this info online does nothing for the native people from whom the information was originally taken. Most of these people 1)have no computer or internet access 2)even if they did wouldn't have the equipment or training to be able to do anything with the raw genetic data and 3)wouldn't have the legal pull or capital required to actually patent the information.
And yes, "biopiracy" is actually a real problem. Basically, researchers come in to fairly indigenous areas and ask the shamans/etc about local plants used in traditional remedies. They then bring these back and analyze them to find which, if any, of the compounds are effecting the cure. The company they work for then takes out a patent on the compound, figures out a method to mass produce it, run through standard FDA tests then start selling the chenical in little pills. The problem comes when the company turns around and sues the natives for violating their patents by using the compound in their traditional remedies... even though the natives have been doing this for generations and generations (3rd world lawyers aren't all that up on their IP law, and often the drug corps are more powerful than the country the natives reside in.) So, these people are now left without a cure for some disease or ailment, and have nowhere near enough money to pay for the pills that contain the compound they used to be able to get for free from the forest or swamp.
Why would the drug corps do something so blatantly evil? It's not that they want these people to go without treatment, it's that they don't want people who are already buying their products to switch to the natural form. If the plant/fungus/whatever is already well known and easilly grown in large parts of the area, then the drug corps take different measures to reduce access: drug laws. Marijuana and Opium do have some medical uses, but growing the plants in your backyard does not give the drug corps money, so the government will not and does not recognize those uses. So it becomes illegal to grow marijuana in your backyard. Even more insidious, poppy flowers are perfectly legal to grow unless it can be proven that you know how to make a drug out of them (I'll ruin it for you all: split open a seed pod, boil in water, drink. Not as labor intensive as americans have been led to believe. Also, it can be done just as effectively with any variety of poppy: the idea that certain opium poppies which only grow in particular climates such as afghanistan are a red herring thown out to prevent people from figuring out how to make their own drugs, whether recreational or pharmaceutical.)
I had a couple friends who worked at Wal-Mart and learned a way to game the system a little on pay raises. Take any emergency department transfers: they often offered a not totally insignificat raise to someone willing to switch to a department or shift where a couple people had just quit from. If they were really horrible hours, well you just worked it long enough to get switched to something else (with another pay raise.)
I don't know if this is just something that happened at that particular Wal-Mart, or it could be possible that they were just flat out making stories up. But those raises do come with a risk: you make a nice juicy target come layoff time. But by then you should have looked around to see who else is hiring anyways.
ame with brains... you can "stimulate" them to gain some effect... It is MUCH harder to stimulate certain cells to get a very specific effect.(edited for brevity)
From the very little I understand about the state of cybernetics, creating neural interfaces is not about making a device that can be implanted into the brain/nervous system/etc and work right out of the box. It takes a little bit of training on both ends: the machinery learns some basic communication with the neurons by learning the patterns of neural firing for a given desired action/thought/whatever. The big thing though is that the brain is a very plastic organ, and the brain reorganizes itself to better communicate with the interface, either taking information in or sending information out. It would be similar to the state of fairly old voice recognition technology, where the computer had to be trained on individual words, but the operator also had to learn speech patterns that would be recognized by the computer.
While it may seem to be completely prior art BS, there are some elements that need to be addressed specifically because it is prior art. The main thing I noticed that the patent covers is a method to modify your browser specifically so that it displays affiliated ads when it is connected to Google's hotspots, and then to NOT show those ads when it is connected to someone else's hotspot. That is a big concern, as simply installing software that displays ads at all times regardless of which internet provider is being used would likely be more evil than serving ads only when connected to Google's hotspots. Not to mention one of those would piss of customers very quickly, while most people would agree that ads is just the cost of getting the "free" wi-fi.
That depends. If an average person wears the logos they have to pay a big premium. If a person who makes a lot of money wears the logos, THEY get paid to display it. Sounds perfectly fair to me.
Most of the cost of getting a patent is searching the existing documents to determine if the idea you implemented has already been patented. Once that is done actually getting the patent is quite trivial. And defensive patents can be argued as less of an evil than not getting them. If google gets hit by a submarine patent, there is a good chance they can pore through their patent library and find something the other guy is violating. Then they can threaten countersuit, or have the other party just give up the lawsuit because of the PR and financial emberrasment it will become. Not having the defensive portfolio could open google up to so much attack from other patent holders that A)they must resort to using more evil tactics in other business arenas to remain solvent or B)they go out of business, and their market niche then gets replaced by some other company, presumably one that already holds a near monopoly in the field (Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL?) so you get a tiny bit of the Devil You Know or the Devil You Don't Know.
I think Google is just growing up and realizing that "Do No Evil" is not strictly possible, but it does for the most part seem to be the goal they are striving for.
I personally just put viruses firmly in the "gray area between living and not living" because those are arbitrary distinctions: nature always finds a way to find exceptions to the niches that man creates. Not to say that our classifications are pointless, we just have to realize that there are always going to be things in that gray area. This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?" What is the exact point where two diverging groups are no longer the same species? All questions that have legal ramifications which essentially require a precise definition in order to make decisions as impartial as possible, but some things will straddle the line no matter how precise you try to make your definitions.
TFA put the satellite at $750,000. A lot of money, but not an insane amount as compared to the cost of actually putting the rocket up.
Well, this guy did go a step beyond simply threatening to kill people. He attempted to arrange the murder. What gets me is that he was stupid enough to try and do it over the phone from prison.
Forget that... I want the cap.
True, true. For vanilla ice cream the complex flavors of a good chipotle work a lot better. And no, I'm not kidding. Chili powder is good too.
Capsaicin is an oil, so therefore not water soluble. Drinking water will do very little to remove it from your tongue. Capsaicin will, however, mix in with the fats of the foods you eat and probably stick to the starches in the rice or bread and get removed from the tongue that way.
Invalid comparison. In China, the law states that certain things must be censored. In the USA, the law states that people and organizations have a certain expectance of privacy, and that search and seizure can not be done without a court ordered warrant and evidence of a crime. Guess what... this falls under search and seizure. There was no warrant, therefore the demand was illegal.
Honestly, this sounds like they take the addictive game play and soup it up with the addictive nature of an MMO. There seemed to be a large emphasis on 1)unlocking new tech and 2)the ability to explore user created content.