0: A robot should harm or allow to come to harm through inaction humanity.
Screwed that up a bit didn't you?:-)
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
and the other laws became subserviant to it.. so first law depended on zeroth, etc..
Anyway, all that happened because the robots (starting with Giskard) learned to read minds, and to see humanity as a whole, more important than any single human. It was sort of a logical extension of the first law.
Eventually it leads to a schism in the robot world, with those who believe in the zeroth law, and those who don't.
Anyway, "The Bicentennial Man" was a damn good book, and to me it looks like the movie will just screw it up. Robin Williams is just the wrong guy to play Andrew. Maybe I'll be proven wrong when I see it, but I doubt it.
Note: I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have read the book at least a hundred times. (along with everything else Asimov)
One of Asimov's robots would have a nervous breakdown if it were in the presence of a human when it died -- Andrew was present for at least two deaths. I'm quibbling here, so I'm not sure if this should count as a violation.
This occurs in the book as well. Andrew is argued into accepting that human mortality is unavoidable, in the long run. He did take a bit of a hit by it but was okay in the long run.
Andrew violated the Third Law when he arranged for his own death. But, the Good Doctor wrote this into the original story, so we can conclude the decision was sufficiently separated from the results that the positronic potentials were below Third-Law threshold.
In the book, Andrew chooses the lesser of the two deaths. The death of his self, or the death of his hopes, apirations, dreams, etc.. I was never sure I bought that argument, exactly, but that at least is true to the story. The big thing in the book was Andrew trying to argue the robot doctor into performing the detremential operation. First Law was weak enough once he proved he was a robot, and second law was re-enforced enough (because Andrew looked human) to make the doctor go through with it.
Think on this for a second though. If God is as incomprehensible and as unique as he says he is then it is possible that he is outside the relm of human logic. Then it doesn't matter what we think or can "prove" we will still be wrong because we can't understand the data needed to make a reasonable judgement.
Well, naturally. More or less by definition, you cannot prove god(or gods, if that's your thing) exists or does not exist. Faith is belief without proof. This is why arguing about it is so pointless. The best you can do is show that the bible (again, if thats your thing) is full is inaccuracies and inconsistancies.
The fact is that god could prove he (she/it) exists. But without that proof from the almighty himself, there's no way to show it.
If you mean Godel's theorem, I don't think we can extend maths that far.
Sure you can!:-) Okay, really I was just trying to raise some entertaining replies with that one. Just trolling for x-tians..
But it works, so if you like to be able to explain everything, you'll have to have some metaphysical explanation.
The problem is that so far nothing really does explain everything, including religion. Religion claims to, but then in the end all it has for you is that "god did it", which of course is not an explanation. Hell, you might as well just say the universe exists because of the great big pokemon in the sky. It's just as good a theory as "god did it". Plus, you know pokemon exists, because these damn kids with their friggin trading cards are EVERYWHERE...
Um, yes, if you read the Bible, you'll find that religion (particularly the Pentateuch) very clearly accounts for the ultimate origin of *everything*. (See the first several chapters of Genesis.)
Read them yourself. There are two conflicting accounts of the creation in the bible. Did man come first? Or were man and woman made together? Who the hell did Cain marry? And how the hell do you have night and day with no light?. Besides, Nothing can explain everything without being everything. Only everything describes everything to the most minute degree of accuracy. If you remove even one particle, then you're no longer describing everything.
IIRC, EBay has expressly forbidden all search engines to index their pages (I think there even was a story on that here on/. some time ago).
Not in any standard acceptable way they haven't.
The standard acceptable way:
META tags to forbid indexing of individual pages(don't think they have these). robots.txt file to forbid by directory (I know they don't have this).
Those are the acceptable, standard ways. There may be more I forget about..
In any case, if they took no action to prevent it (robots.txt would be plenty, since it is a standard), then IMHO they have no right to bitch. They didn't even TRY to stop the system in a standard way. They just went straight to the courts.
I hope that was sarcasm. Otherwise, I'm living on a flat Earth, and relativity and quantum theory are completely wrong.
No, it wasn't sarcasm, but perhaps I should have phrased it better.
What I MEANT to say was that if I see something that directly contradicts a "study", then the study is flat-out wrong. Period. One exception invalidates the theory.
Anyway, that's what I was trying to say, it just didn't come out well.
The whole purpose of these studies is to isolate out the other variables. Everyday observations aren't "science". They're a part of science, in that you use them to form a hypothesis. And then, you do an actual, controlled "study" to see if you're right or not. Admittedly, studies are tougher to analyze than old-fashioned physics experiments, but they're definitely more scientific than "the real-world evidence of my eyes and ears".
The real world is the beginning of the scientific method. Observation first! Then all the rest, but first _observation_.
I think my point is made: science can never explain the primal causes, can never account for the ultimate origin of anything. To try to claim otherwise is the worst kind of hubris.
Of course, neither can religion. Religion can never explain the primal causes, can never account for the ultimate origin of anything. To try to claim otherwise is the worst kind of hubris. Religion can not even say where god came from, so why believe in it at all? It's obviously wrong.:-)
Of course, that's a joke, but the point is made. Nothing can explain everything, short of everything itself. That last sentence can even be proven, I'll leave it to you to figure out how.:-)
Open-source is now a buzzword to all the PHBs of the world.
However, out of curiosity:
1. E-speak complements device-to-device communication, such as HP's Chai, Sun's Jini and Microsoft®'s UpnP.
E-speak complements XXX. Well? How does it complement it? Details, man!
2. E-speak leverages key collaborative technology-standardization efforts, such as RosettaNet, ontology.net and Microsoft's BizTalk.
Is this even a sentence? E-speak "leverages" XXX... WTF does "leverage" mean anyway? I know leverage when I'm trying to lift something heavy. I know leverage in an engineering sense, but I didn't know it had another meaning.
3. E-speak utilizes open technology standards on the Internet, including XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP and SNMP.
Clue: nearly everything else on the internet also uses XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP, and SNMP.
Hell, my web browser uses at least three of those. Bonus points for you if you know which three. Extra points if you can name a common application that uses 4 or more.
I looked over the tutorial, which had some sample code on implementation.. As far as I can tell, it looks to be a way to connect to someone else without saying where they are or what port to connect on, or pretty much anything at all. They use a lot of business jargon (contacts? WTF?), but essentially, it looks like it's geared towards the PHB mindset.
I can hear the bosses now: "I mean look at all the technology! It must be good! Look! It's even open source! I was reading about that in Windows magazine!"
Sheesh.. I'm sorry, but I stopped liking HP a looooong time ago.
They have helped me and a lot of other people. You can't make a good judgement on weather a treatment works on a sample size of 1. Yes there are bad mental health providers. Yes some people have been on the wrong drugs. And it took my doctor a few time to find the right thing for me to be taking before we hit the right drug.
You're right, a sample size of one is nothing.
However, the first indictations coming out of research centers everywhere are saying that these medications are NOT improving the majority of their patients lives.
I have known a few people who took stuff like this. I'm sorry, but everyone I've ever seen take some form of mental health drug (about 4 people total) just got more fucked up in the head the more they took whatever drug it happened to be that week...
4 out of 4 is still nothing in terms of sample size, but it's on a bit more personal level for me anyway.
Is this why pharmaceuticals spend BILLIONS on research, and labs employing thousands of scientists and doctors? I'm not trying to exonerate the big fat pharmaceutical companies, but after they spend those BILLIONS, they have to make it up somehow. They're not selling sugar pills you know.
I agree, and no, it's not all crap. But I agree with the original poster for the most part. A lot of these drugs are developed with good intentions in mind, but when they're giving them to the wrong people, what the hell are you going to do?
Remember that it's not the drug company who decides who should take the drug, often times. Usually it's some doctor who only knows what little he's read about it. And of course the drug company wants to sell it to everyone they can. They did spend a whole hell of a lot developing it. Everything is not simple in this world, bud.
ADD, the disease, is not a simple matter of bad parenting or bad behavior. If it is, then the stupid doctor is misdiagnosed and/unnecessarily/ prescribed drugs. Drugs should be prescribed when and if they are necessary. The problem is in the diagnosis, NOT the drug. The drug does help the disease, but it is worthless if the kid didn't have ADD in the first place! This is also the fault of parents who think they can just "fix" their children whom they've brought up poorly by giving them pills. This is totally irrelevant to ADD.
Unfortunately, no, it is not irrelevant. The original posters point was that the culture looks as drugs as a "quick fix" solution, when in fact it is nothing of the kind. The real problem is that majority of diagnoses for ADD are wrong/incorrect. And this goes for a lot of mental health disorders as well. The parent/patient just wants a quick fix so they accept it. The doctor wants to make his cash, so be it. The drug company wants to sell their drugs, so be it. The whole damn system is geared towards a quick fix solution, and it's damn hard for the average man to fight against it. So, the average man doesn't try, and pretty soon he's of the same quick fix "better living thru pharmacology" mindset that everyone else is. It's a self perpetuating system and it's just wrong.
This has been so totally disproven. Where were you? Sugar does not cause hyperactivity any more than butter will help a burn wound.
Never heard of the butter one, but I got pretty nutty as a kid when I ate sugar. Of course, I was eating it straight, so maybe that would have something to do with it.
Oh, and a "study" is always secondary to the real-world evidence of your eyes and ears. This is science we're talking about here.
These factors are all irrelevent to the disease of ADD. Do you tell a schizophrenic to move to a better neighborhood? Or a clinically depressed person to get a better education? Or someone with OCD to watch less tv?
No, but I sure as hell wouldn't say, "here's a bunch of drugs for ya, buddy! These'll fix ya right up!" Any treatment should look at the overall situation, not simply one aspect of it.
He would have been better off taking your approach and showing that, as a side effect of the GPLs freeness, one cannot make money off a GPLed program.
No no! I never said THAT.. That's just wrong.
What I said was that it differed from the *traditional* way of making money off of software. If you'll stop reading between the lines, you'll see that's what Tom said too.
I think that a realistic example would lie somewhere in between.
So do I. That's what the end of my post stated.:-)
My thoughts on this are a bit odd, but... DON'T TOUCH TYPE.
I think that this standard 5-finger technique is the cause of a lot of wrist stress related injuries.
Here's why: The only time I have ever experienced serious wrist pain is when playing quake for hours on end, and literally not moving my wrists to any great extent. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse. The slightest mouse movement spins me around (I keep my sensitivity super high), so my wrist doesn't really move a lot.
I am not a touch typist. I learned to type through massive amounts of practice hunt-and-peck.. Just the way you would naturally learn. I also type 50-60 WPM.:-) I simply know where the keys are. It's a memory thing. I've been typing on a computer since I was 7. You learn the keyboard that way. My touch-typist friends think I'm really odd, since my hands are flying all over the place when I type.
I never get wrist pain even after hours upon hours of typing. Why? I think it's because the wrists are never immobile. It's like a form of very light exercise for the hands.
I see these touch typists who type for hours without lifting their hands at all. They don't even move them to think, because they're so used to the position of their wrists on the keyboard. I'm sorry, but that simply can't be healthy for your wrists. The strain you're putting on them in that position is just too severe, over a long period of time...
Anyway, yes, I probably could type faster if I unlearned the way I type, and learned the "correct" way. But hell, I don't need to type so damn fast that I risk my health, yeh?
It seems to be a common misconception that the GPL disallows making a profit on software, and I'm not sure why. Nowhere in the GPL is there language barring people from selling GPLed software. In fact, the GPL states in section 1: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
Actually, Tom's right.
The traditional royalty method says that I sell my software to other people. Boom.
The GPL states that I can sell my software to others, PROVIDED I give them the right to sell it too.
Say I sell 1000 copies of Product A to 1000 people. I get lots of money. Now say I sell 1 copy to Bob, who resells it to 1000 people. He now gets lots of money. I get squat.
Under a traditional license, I take Bob to court and nail his ass to the ground for piracy. Under the GPL, he's free to redistribute the software I made.
So, yeah, Tom's right. It does put a hamper on traditional methods of profit from software.
However, I personally think it's high time the world moved towards service-oriented sales anyway. I like the GPL.
Having a key in your hand doesn't make you a thief, having a crowbar is another story.
There's plenty of legitimate reasons to have crowbar about my person. Suppose I tend to lock my keys in my car, and like to bash in my windows to get them.:-)
By the way, you are not "arrested", you are stopped and questioned, there is nothing illegal about stopping someone to question them about a strange activity.
Maybe not, but if someone stops to question me about my actions, I say "fuck off pig", and go about my business. It's none of yours, or anyone else business what I do, until I break the law. If they have no cause, then they can just back the hell off.
Oh yeah, and for those of you thinking you can have fun, by sounding false alarms. Be ready to get arrested, it is simply like sounding a false alarm that their is a fire, or calling 911 and telling them you have a heart attack.
No, it is not. Triggering a false alarm on this system is just acting like you might commit a crime. There's nothing illegal about that, now is there? If they do try to arrest you for "looking like he might break the law," you could sue the holy shit out of them. False arrest. Illegal prosecution. Something like that.
The worst thing about a system like this is that it will most likely cause innocents to be harrased needlessly. This system is more likely to cause people to be tagged as, in the opinion of the programmers, being people who might commit a crime. Does that mean that these goth kids who walk around will be tagged? I know one hell of a lot of people who, while they are the nicest people in the world, look like they might kill you and drink your blood at any second.:-)
Counterfeit currency is not perceived as a large problem.
I think to a certain extent that's true. Several towns in the country had serious problems even with this minor change in currency. There were reports of people not accepting the new bills because they regarded them as fake, regardless of all the trouble the Treasury went to to say they were real. In any case, the US is now more geared towards a currency change, and can cope with it, I think. Hopefully, the mint will decide to make a better bill sometime.
The way they did the changeover was a bit dumb though. It had to be slow, because of resistance to the new currency. Now that people know how to deal with it, I think that, maybe in 10 years, we can introduce a new currency all at once. Mint stockpiles a whole lot of cash, then floods the market as old bills come in for destruction. You could replace most of the currency in only a few years..
Why go to all this damn trouble? I've never understood US currency, and I live here.
Look at Australia's currency. The bills are mostly plastics. Nearly impossible to crease them through normal usage, tearing is extremely difficult, each one is multi-colored, and each and every single one has a CLEAR plastic window with printing on it that is part of the bill. You aint copying that with standard consumer equipment no matter what the hell you do.
what if I *do* think that religion is necessary for morality?
Well, for starters, you'd be wrong.
You claim that you think it's wrong to murder and all that, and that's all well and good, but if you honestly don't believe in God (which I find very hard to believe) then you've got nobody to answer to, and you don't have any accountability for your actions.
Let's take that one bit at a time, shall we?
I'm an atheist also. A pretty outspoken one as many slashdotters will testify. You say you fnd it hard to believe that a person can not believe in god? Boy are you an idiot then. The majority of the WORLD does not believe in your god, for starters. Christians, as a whole (catholics, baptists, the whole lot), form less than a third of the world population.
Second, you claim that by not believing in an afterlife, or a god, or some such nonsense, I have no reason to have any morals whatsoever. What's your basis for that? I kill a man, I go to jail. Simple. Easy. Or perhaps his friends kill me. There are always consequences. But consequences aside, have you no personal sense of ethics? Do you not know right from wrong unless your god tells you so? If your god told you killing is good, would you do it? After all, he controls right and wrong in your mind, right? If you can't tell the difference between right and wrong, have an ethical position, without a strawman to hold up and say "I know this is wrong because god says so," then you are a sheep. A follower. No mind of your own. Your god is your crutch.
In the final analysis, it is my opinion (note opinion) that belief in and obedience to God is necessary to be truly moral. Without it you can only have a *semblance* of morality, which is not the same thing. Unless you live your life with the understanding that your actions *do* have final consequences, I don't see how true morality can be acheived.
Morals, like ethics, are a personal thing. Everyone has their own sense of morals. However, you are using the term like there is some absolute set of morals that all people should follow, all the time. This is obviously wrong. What may be correct in one circumstance would be hideously wrong in another. What may be wrong for you to do may be right for the person standing beside you to do. Circumstance alters situations. It is wrong to kill, unless it's self defense, or there a war going on, or something else. There's unlimited possiblities, man. Life is not simple.
Just did a search for "line next" (exact phrase), and got quite a bit of "and on the line next we have...", a la talk show introductions.
Oh, I was only searching "Geeks in space," not the whole thing..
Oh, and speaking about the engine... I thought that it might store the transcripts in some sort of phonetic format, and then match your search phrase to it (i.e., "your not hyped" and "journal typed" both match the stored, transcribed phoentics). So I did some searches to match the same sections extracted, and they all seem to match. Conclusion: the transcripts appear to be stored as text, not phonetic symbols.
That's quite a good idea actually. Store it as phonetic symbols, translate the search query into symbols on the fly, then search based on symbol..
Better patent it quick, or put it in the public domain for all to use.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no..
The movie sounds like it's based more on the book than on the short story..
Okay, background info:
The short story, called "The Bicentinial Man" is in "Robot Visions" and a few other of Asimov's robot compilations.
The book, called "The Positronic Man" was made by Asimov and Silverberg and based on the short story, but more fleshed out and longer.
I believe there was a book also called BM by Asimov alone, but he re-vamped it into PM later. I'm not sure of that though.
---
0: A robot should harm or allow to come to harm through inaction humanity.
:-)
Screwed that up a bit didn't you?
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
and the other laws became subserviant to it.. so first law depended on zeroth, etc..
Anyway, all that happened because the robots (starting with Giskard) learned to read minds, and to see humanity as a whole, more important than any single human. It was sort of a logical extension of the first law.
Eventually it leads to a schism in the robot world, with those who believe in the zeroth law, and those who don't.
Anyway, "The Bicentennial Man" was a damn good book, and to me it looks like the movie will just screw it up. Robin Williams is just the wrong guy to play Andrew. Maybe I'll be proven wrong when I see it, but I doubt it.
---
Note: I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have read the book at least a hundred times. (along with everything else Asimov)
One of Asimov's robots would have a nervous breakdown if it were in the presence of a human when it died -- Andrew was present for at least two deaths. I'm quibbling here, so I'm not sure if this should count as a violation.
This occurs in the book as well. Andrew is argued into accepting that human mortality is unavoidable, in the long run. He did take a bit of a hit by it but was okay in the long run.
Andrew violated the Third Law when he arranged for his own death. But, the Good Doctor wrote this into the original story, so we can conclude the decision was sufficiently separated from the results that the positronic potentials were below Third-Law threshold.
In the book, Andrew chooses the lesser of the two deaths. The death of his self, or the death of his hopes, apirations, dreams, etc.. I was never sure I bought that argument, exactly, but that at least is true to the story. The big thing in the book was Andrew trying to argue the robot doctor into performing the detremential operation. First Law was weak enough once he proved he was a robot, and second law was re-enforced enough (because Andrew looked human) to make the doctor go through with it.
---
Think on this for a second though. If God is as incomprehensible and as unique as he says he is then it is possible that he is outside the relm of human logic. Then it doesn't matter what we think or can "prove" we will still be wrong because we can't understand the data needed to make a reasonable judgement.
Well, naturally. More or less by definition, you cannot prove god(or gods, if that's your thing) exists or does not exist. Faith is belief without proof. This is why arguing about it is so pointless. The best you can do is show that the bible (again, if thats your thing) is full is inaccuracies and inconsistancies.
The fact is that god could prove he (she/it) exists. But without that proof from the almighty himself, there's no way to show it.
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If you mean Godel's theorem, I don't think we can extend maths that far.
:-) Okay, really I was just trying to raise some entertaining replies with that one. Just trolling for x-tians..
Sure you can!
But it works, so if you like to be able to explain everything, you'll have to have some metaphysical explanation.
The problem is that so far nothing really does explain everything, including religion. Religion claims to, but then in the end all it has for you is that "god did it", which of course is not an explanation. Hell, you might as well just say the universe exists because of the great big pokemon in the sky. It's just as good a theory as "god did it". Plus, you know pokemon exists, because these damn kids with their friggin trading cards are EVERYWHERE...
---
I hope this offers some insight.
:-P
Not really, since it's all gibberish.
I'm a rock-hard atheist, but thanks for playing anyway.
---
Um, yes, if you read the Bible, you'll find that religion (particularly the Pentateuch) very clearly accounts for the ultimate origin of *everything*. (See the first several chapters of Genesis.)
Read them yourself. There are two conflicting accounts of the creation in the bible. Did man come first? Or were man and woman made together? Who the hell did Cain marry? And how the hell do you have night and day with no light?. Besides, Nothing can explain everything without being everything. Only everything describes everything to the most minute degree of accuracy. If you remove even one particle, then you're no longer describing everything.
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IIRC, EBay has expressly forbidden all search engines to index their pages (I think there even was a story on that here on /. some time ago).
Not in any standard acceptable way they haven't.
The standard acceptable way:
META tags to forbid indexing of individual pages(don't think they have these).
robots.txt file to forbid by directory (I know they don't have this).
Those are the acceptable, standard ways. There may be more I forget about..
In any case, if they took no action to prevent it (robots.txt would be plenty, since it is a standard), then IMHO they have no right to bitch. They didn't even TRY to stop the system in a standard way. They just went straight to the courts.
Fuck ebay. I'm not buying squat on there anymore.
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The article about this last weekend contained this link to a patent:
Patent!
Looked different, I'll give it that.
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I hope that was sarcasm. Otherwise, I'm living on a flat Earth, and relativity and quantum theory are completely wrong.
No, it wasn't sarcasm, but perhaps I should have phrased it better.
What I MEANT to say was that if I see something that directly contradicts a "study", then the study is flat-out wrong. Period. One exception invalidates the theory.
Anyway, that's what I was trying to say, it just didn't come out well.
The whole purpose of these studies is to isolate out the other variables. Everyday observations aren't "science". They're a part of science, in that you use them to form a hypothesis. And then, you do an actual, controlled "study" to see if you're right or not. Admittedly, studies are tougher to analyze than old-fashioned physics experiments, but they're definitely more scientific than "the real-world evidence of my eyes and ears".
The real world is the beginning of the scientific method. Observation first! Then all the rest, but first _observation_.
---
I think my point is made: science can never explain the primal causes, can never account for the ultimate origin of anything. To try to claim otherwise is the worst kind of hubris.
:-)
:-)
Of course, neither can religion. Religion can never explain the primal causes, can never account for the ultimate origin of anything. To try to claim otherwise is the worst kind of hubris. Religion can not even say where god came from, so why believe in it at all? It's obviously wrong.
Of course, that's a joke, but the point is made. Nothing can explain everything, short of everything itself. That last sentence can even be proven, I'll leave it to you to figure out how.
---
This means any ISP can sue spammers that use their services on the same basis.
WOOHOO!
It's a small win, but it is a win indeed.
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Open-source is now a buzzword to all the PHBs of the world.
However, out of curiosity:
1. E-speak complements device-to-device communication, such as HP's Chai, Sun's Jini and Microsoft®'s UpnP.
E-speak complements XXX. Well? How does it complement it? Details, man!
2. E-speak leverages key collaborative technology-standardization efforts, such as RosettaNet, ontology.net and Microsoft's BizTalk.
Is this even a sentence? E-speak "leverages" XXX... WTF does "leverage" mean anyway? I know leverage when I'm trying to lift something heavy. I know leverage in an engineering sense, but I didn't know it had another meaning.
3. E-speak utilizes open technology standards on the Internet, including XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP and SNMP.
Clue: nearly everything else on the internet also uses XML, LDAP, HTTP, WAP, SSL, SLP, and SNMP.
Hell, my web browser uses at least three of those. Bonus points for you if you know which three. Extra points if you can name a common application that uses 4 or more.
---
I think the majority of /.'ers want to know:
What the hell does it do?
I looked over the tutorial, which had some sample code on implementation.. As far as I can tell, it looks to be a way to connect to someone else without saying where they are or what port to connect on, or pretty much anything at all. They use a lot of business jargon (contacts? WTF?), but essentially, it looks like it's geared towards the PHB mindset.
I can hear the bosses now: "I mean look at all the technology! It must be good! Look! It's even open source! I was reading about that in Windows magazine!"
Sheesh.. I'm sorry, but I stopped liking HP a looooong time ago.
---
They have helped me and a lot of other people. You can't make a good judgement on weather a treatment works on a sample size of 1. Yes there are bad mental health providers. Yes some people have been on the wrong drugs. And it took my doctor a few time to find the right thing for me to be taking before we hit the right drug.
You're right, a sample size of one is nothing.
However, the first indictations coming out of research centers everywhere are saying that these medications are NOT improving the majority of their patients lives.
I have known a few people who took stuff like this. I'm sorry, but everyone I've ever seen take some form of mental health drug (about 4 people total) just got more fucked up in the head the more they took whatever drug it happened to be that week...
4 out of 4 is still nothing in terms of sample size, but it's on a bit more personal level for me anyway.
---
Is this why pharmaceuticals spend BILLIONS on research, and labs employing thousands of scientists and doctors? I'm not trying to exonerate the big fat pharmaceutical companies, but after they spend those BILLIONS, they have to make it up somehow. They're not selling sugar pills you know.
/unnecessarily/ prescribed drugs. Drugs should be prescribed when and if they are necessary. The problem is in the diagnosis, NOT the drug. The drug does help the disease, but it is worthless if the kid didn't have ADD in the first place! This is also the fault of parents who think they can just "fix" their children whom they've brought up poorly by giving them pills. This is totally irrelevant to ADD.
I agree, and no, it's not all crap. But I agree with the original poster for the most part. A lot of these drugs are developed with good intentions in mind, but when they're giving them to the wrong people, what the hell are you going to do?
Remember that it's not the drug company who decides who should take the drug, often times. Usually it's some doctor who only knows what little he's read about it. And of course the drug company wants to sell it to everyone they can. They did spend a whole hell of a lot developing it. Everything is not simple in this world, bud.
ADD, the disease, is not a simple matter of bad parenting or bad behavior. If it is, then the stupid doctor is misdiagnosed and
Unfortunately, no, it is not irrelevant. The original posters point was that the culture looks as drugs as a "quick fix" solution, when in fact it is nothing of the kind. The real problem is that majority of diagnoses for ADD are wrong/incorrect. And this goes for a lot of mental health disorders as well. The parent/patient just wants a quick fix so they accept it. The doctor wants to make his cash, so be it. The drug company wants to sell their drugs, so be it. The whole damn system is geared towards a quick fix solution, and it's damn hard for the average man to fight against it. So, the average man doesn't try, and pretty soon he's of the same quick fix "better living thru pharmacology" mindset that everyone else is. It's a self perpetuating system and it's just wrong.
This has been so totally disproven. Where were you? Sugar does not cause hyperactivity any more than butter will help a burn wound.
Never heard of the butter one, but I got pretty nutty as a kid when I ate sugar. Of course, I was eating it straight, so maybe that would have something to do with it.
Oh, and a "study" is always secondary to the real-world evidence of your eyes and ears. This is science we're talking about here.
These factors are all irrelevent to the disease of ADD. Do you tell a schizophrenic to move to a better neighborhood? Or a clinically depressed person to get a better education? Or someone with OCD to watch less tv?
No, but I sure as hell wouldn't say, "here's a bunch of drugs for ya, buddy! These'll fix ya right up!" Any treatment should look at the overall situation, not simply one aspect of it.
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He would have been better off taking your approach and showing that, as a side effect of the GPLs freeness, one cannot make money off a GPLed program.
:-)
No no! I never said THAT.. That's just wrong.
What I said was that it differed from the *traditional* way of making money off of software. If you'll stop reading between the lines, you'll see that's what Tom said too.
I think that a realistic example would lie somewhere in between.
So do I. That's what the end of my post stated.
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My thoughts on this are a bit odd, but... DON'T TOUCH TYPE.
:-) I simply know where the keys are. It's a memory thing. I've been typing on a computer since I was 7. You learn the keyboard that way. My touch-typist friends think I'm really odd, since my hands are flying all over the place when I type.
I think that this standard 5-finger technique is the cause of a lot of wrist stress related injuries.
Here's why:
The only time I have ever experienced serious wrist pain is when playing quake for hours on end, and literally not moving my wrists to any great extent. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse. The slightest mouse movement spins me around (I keep my sensitivity super high), so my wrist doesn't really move a lot.
I am not a touch typist. I learned to type through massive amounts of practice hunt-and-peck.. Just the way you would naturally learn. I also type 50-60 WPM.
I never get wrist pain even after hours upon hours of typing. Why? I think it's because the wrists are never immobile. It's like a form of very light exercise for the hands.
I see these touch typists who type for hours without lifting their hands at all. They don't even move them to think, because they're so used to the position of their wrists on the keyboard. I'm sorry, but that simply can't be healthy for your wrists. The strain you're putting on them in that position is just too severe, over a long period of time...
Anyway, yes, I probably could type faster if I unlearned the way I type, and learned the "correct" way. But hell, I don't need to type so damn fast that I risk my health, yeh?
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It seems to be a common misconception that the GPL disallows making a profit on software, and I'm not sure why. Nowhere in the GPL is there language barring people from selling GPLed software. In fact, the GPL states in section 1:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
Actually, Tom's right.
The traditional royalty method says that I sell my software to other people. Boom.
The GPL states that I can sell my software to others, PROVIDED I give them the right to sell it too.
Say I sell 1000 copies of Product A to 1000 people. I get lots of money. Now say I sell 1 copy to Bob, who resells it to 1000 people. He now gets lots of money. I get squat.
Under a traditional license, I take Bob to court and nail his ass to the ground for piracy. Under the GPL, he's free to redistribute the software I made.
So, yeah, Tom's right. It does put a hamper on traditional methods of profit from software.
However, I personally think it's high time the world moved towards service-oriented sales anyway. I like the GPL.
Oh well.
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does anybody have a clue to how these new "SR" motors are supposed to work?
SR Motor = Switched Reluctance motor
Let's see here..
Quick search found this site:
http://www.vtt.fi/aut/kau/results/srm/
There's even a few GIF animations to show how it works.
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Having a key in your hand doesn't make you a thief, having a crowbar is another story.
:-)
:-)
There's plenty of legitimate reasons to have crowbar about my person. Suppose I tend to lock my keys in my car, and like to bash in my windows to get them.
By the way, you are not "arrested", you are stopped and questioned, there is nothing illegal about stopping someone to question them about a strange activity.
Maybe not, but if someone stops to question me about my actions, I say "fuck off pig", and go about my business. It's none of yours, or anyone else business what I do, until I break the law. If they have no cause, then they can just back the hell off.
Oh yeah, and for those of you thinking you can have fun, by sounding false alarms. Be ready to get arrested, it is simply like sounding a false alarm that their is a fire, or calling 911 and telling them you have a heart attack.
No, it is not. Triggering a false alarm on this system is just acting like you might commit a crime. There's nothing illegal about that, now is there? If they do try to arrest you for "looking like he might break the law," you could sue the holy shit out of them. False arrest. Illegal prosecution. Something like that.
The worst thing about a system like this is that it will most likely cause innocents to be harrased needlessly. This system is more likely to cause people to be tagged as, in the opinion of the programmers, being people who might commit a crime. Does that mean that these goth kids who walk around will be tagged? I know one hell of a lot of people who, while they are the nicest people in the world, look like they might kill you and drink your blood at any second.
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Counterfeit currency is not perceived as a large problem.
I think to a certain extent that's true. Several towns in the country had serious problems even with this minor change in currency. There were reports of people not accepting the new bills because they regarded them as fake, regardless of all the trouble the Treasury went to to say they were real. In any case, the US is now more geared towards a currency change, and can cope with it, I think. Hopefully, the mint will decide to make a better bill sometime.
The way they did the changeover was a bit dumb though. It had to be slow, because of resistance to the new currency. Now that people know how to deal with it, I think that, maybe in 10 years, we can introduce a new currency all at once. Mint stockpiles a whole lot of cash, then floods the market as old bills come in for destruction. You could replace most of the currency in only a few years..
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Why go to all this damn trouble? I've never understood US currency, and I live here.
Look at Australia's currency. The bills are mostly plastics. Nearly impossible to crease them through normal usage, tearing is extremely difficult, each one is multi-colored, and each and every single one has a CLEAR plastic window with printing on it that is part of the bill. You aint copying that with standard consumer equipment no matter what the hell you do.
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I'll probably regret taking this bait
:-)
Me too, but I can never let these things go.
what if I *do* think that religion is necessary for morality?
Well, for starters, you'd be wrong.
You claim that you think it's wrong to murder and all that, and that's all well and good, but if you honestly don't believe in God (which I find very hard to believe) then you've got nobody to answer to, and you don't have any accountability for your actions.
Let's take that one bit at a time, shall we?
I'm an atheist also. A pretty outspoken one as many slashdotters will testify. You say you fnd it hard to believe that a person can not believe in god? Boy are you an idiot then. The majority of the WORLD does not believe in your god, for starters. Christians, as a whole (catholics, baptists, the whole lot), form less than a third of the world population.
Second, you claim that by not believing in an afterlife, or a god, or some such nonsense, I have no reason to have any morals whatsoever. What's your basis for that? I kill a man, I go to jail. Simple. Easy. Or perhaps his friends kill me. There are always consequences. But consequences aside, have you no personal sense of ethics? Do you not know right from wrong unless your god tells you so? If your god told you killing is good, would you do it? After all, he controls right and wrong in your mind, right?
If you can't tell the difference between right and wrong, have an ethical position, without a strawman to hold up and say "I know this is wrong because god says so," then you are a sheep. A follower. No mind of your own. Your god is your crutch.
In the final analysis, it is my opinion (note opinion) that belief in and obedience to God is necessary to be truly moral. Without it you can only have a *semblance* of morality, which is not the same thing. Unless you live your life with the understanding that your actions *do* have final consequences, I don't see how true morality can be acheived.
Morals, like ethics, are a personal thing. Everyone has their own sense of morals. However, you are using the term like there is some absolute set of morals that all people should follow, all the time. This is obviously wrong. What may be correct in one circumstance would be hideously wrong in another. What may be wrong for you to do may be right for the person standing beside you to do. Circumstance alters situations. It is wrong to kill, unless it's self defense, or there a war going on, or something else. There's unlimited possiblities, man. Life is not simple.
Just my opinion. This is off topic anyway.
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Just did a search for "line next" (exact phrase), and got quite a bit of "and on the line next we have...", a la talk show introductions.
:-)
Oh, I was only searching "Geeks in space," not the whole thing..
Oh, and speaking about the engine... I thought that it might store the transcripts in some sort of phonetic format, and then match your search phrase to it (i.e., "your not hyped" and "journal typed" both match the stored, transcribed phoentics). So I did some searches to match the same sections extracted, and they all seem to match. Conclusion: the transcripts appear to be stored as text, not phonetic symbols.
That's quite a good idea actually. Store it as phonetic symbols, translate the search query into symbols on the fly, then search based on symbol..
Better patent it quick, or put it in the public domain for all to use.
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