You can find a good amount of information online--this is a good place to start--and yeah, a lot of its basic uses doesn't require much math, especially if you're mostly using it to check your dead reckoning work, which is always a good idea. Part of why people developed celestial navigation in the first place, and why it was so important, was because dead reckoning was not reliable enough; every so often you found yourself in places you didn't want to be, including 'Middle of the !@#$ Ocean' and if you were really lucky and had somebody aboard who knew celestial navigation you could at least figure out where to go to reach land before you died horribly.
The thing that ought to amuse all of us is that they believe the GPS is trustworthy. I've spent a road trip getting regular laughs from looking at where the GPS thought I was--it was utterly convinced that it was in a boat or perhaps a submarine. I had no idea my car at the time was so capable!
The worst part of this is that even your average modern GPS unit will do this to you. One of the things I will do when utterly bored is check to see where my phone thinks it is, which hasn't failed yet to be quite entertainingly off. (I'm still trying to figure out where one place it thinks I've been really is because I kind of want to go there, actually...)
Actually, it's virtually impossible to be too poor to afford your own lawyer. The trick is getting a halfway competent one--and I've seen some relatively expensive defense lawyers who...aren't anywhere near as good as even the most indifferent public defender. (If I got stuck with one of them I'd likely ask the judge if I could please have my lawyer required to take his meds because while I think he's hoping to get me off on appeal for having a lousy lawyer, I'd like to be certain that if my lawyer is talking to an invisible giant rabbit that rabbit exists. Especially if said rabbit is supposedly his co-counsel.)
Plus, since these companies have generally taken the position that they are too cool and disruptive for the FDA, it's not unlikely that the data they've collected are also without whatever (probably inadequate but not entirely zero) obstacles that HIPAA-covered records would pose to law enforcement requests.
The fact that they're not HIPAA-covered should, really, be enough reason to not let them handle your sample--not that law enforcement wants access, there's legitimate and sometimes even mutually desirable reasons for that, but that there's nothing keeping them from selling your profile and its contents. They can even make a show of keeping government out--when it uses a warrant instead of paying for access to their records like everybody else.
Regardless of if HIPAA is adequate or not, it's still better than nothing, especially since I don't think anybody's yet managed to get it pinned down firmly if a 'privacy policy' creates a legally binding contract or if it might as well be a used tissue. (If anybody knows otherwise, please do give me a citation, I want to read the case law involved.)
As long as there is a warrant and it is for a single suspect's DNA then it is lawful and I am fine with it.
That is almost useless. If they have a specific suspect, and probable cause, then they can use a warrant to demand a hair or blood sample directly from the suspect. What is far more likely, is that they have the DNA sample, but have no idea who it belongs to. So they give the sample to 23andme, and say "Who matches this?" Then they get back a match, or maybe a partial match of a brother, sister, or cousin. That could narrow the suspects way down.
As I mentioned a bit farther up, we've already caught somebody managing to slip a sample of somebody else's blood--repeatedly, actually, and I've seen camera footage from one of the later attempts to get his blood from him. (They didn't say how they figured out it wasn't his blood, so I can only guess that the 'donor' he chose was obviously not him--the equivalent of a male druggie trying to pass off a pregnant woman's urine as his own.) It's more reliable to go to somebody like 23andme since the odds of that single suspect having sent somebody else's blood or hair to there is lower--or you could use it as a way to confirm that the sample you got personally from the suspect is indeed theirs.
The other issue is that you have to wait to get the fresh sample run, and that can take months--I've heard of a few places being backed up enough that it can be over a year before you see results. That certainly would be a reason to want to see if the person has already had their DNA profiled, though asking and seeing if they offer to grant you permission is worthwhile. Set it up right, and it ought to be in your favor to do so if you're innocent as it gives you a way to clear yourself quickly.
You're more likely to get a warrant for the situation you're talking about when you're trying to ID a J Doe victim, and that's something I'd actually be fine with encouraging, though I'd want more transparency. It'd be as simple as letting me (or, if I'm the one missing and it's been long enough, my next-of-kin) have the ability to arrange to have a copy of my profile added to a database of missing persons & relatives of missing persons, preferably one set up so getting a name only happens once you've gotten a match.
Basically, there's legitimate reasons to want to get to use a profile that's already been done--the concern should be that the fact that the warrants get tossed means that they're almost certainly not using those.
Why not? Isn't a large part of what constitutes criminal law proceedings based on proper procedure being followed? If we don't have procedures we have no more standing than the Salem Witch Trials.
I think the point is that this is more a case of having too many 'gears' in the process already--which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, particularly since I'd be actually okay if my DNA report is being used for certain processes. For example, if what they're trying to do is figure out if J Doe #23 is me, I have no problems--especially if I really am J Doe #23.
I'd certainly like to be notified, however, on the off chance that I'm still alive, and given the opportunity to call the department requesting a copy of my DNA and go "Guys? Reports of my death are highly exaggerated." I'd even put it that way, because how often do you get to make that complaint?
If they're using my DNA because they're trying to ID a relative of mine, I'd rather they ask first--last I knew, it was perfectly acceptable to the courts if I grant the authorities permission, and there's no good reason for me to not agree if we're talking about pretty much any of the legit reasons for them wanting my DNA. (Particularly since if a relative of mine is suspected of being a serial rapist and/or murderer, I'd like them to clear themselves. Or confirm. I'm not terribly picky about which, just let me know if it's safe to let them watch my kids/pets/house.)
Otherwise, it really should fall under the same rules required to obtain any other sort of medical record--there's reasons to prefer to get a copy of an already-run DNA test, but those mostly fall under being able to be relatively sure it's the right person...and the fact it won't take months to get the results back, since the labs really are that backed up. (Yes, somebody's managed to actually get somebody else's blood taken for a DNA test, and even managed to pull it off on camera. It took surprising him with where they drew the sample from to actually get a sample of his blood.)
if it takes seconds to pop the magazine out (and in) then why not pop the magazine out before you put your gun away for the night? just-in-case one night you forget to lock the drawer/gunsafe/whatever and a toddler young enough to need a responsible adult's supervision to keep them safe hurts someone with it? seems like murphy's law to me.
Let me quote myself in reply to your first question:
[...] there's always those douches who thinks that pulling the magazine means it's unloaded.
Odds are that what you're saying is the sort of thing the people who left their guns where their toddlers could get at them thought, which is also why the adults I was around went with the more proactive measure of making sure I knew better in the first place and, if there'd been guns in our house, odds are that they'd have been kept quite outside of my reach, making it entirely beside the point if the thing locked or not.
However, 'responsible adult' probably here would include checking the chamber after pulling the magazine, so...
The thing that concerns me here is that the reaction to toddlers firearm accidents is out of proportion to how people are about other, equally-preventable risks, such as the toddler getting at the kitchen knives and household chemicals. Consider how widely something like "One-Year-Old Tries to Drink Oven Cleaner" would be getting splashed on the media if he'd done the equivalent with a firearm--and how the demands for improved safety measures would vary between the two...
why would anyone put away a loaded gun, even in a locked drawer? the tv has trained me to believe that loading a magazine is something that can be achieved really quickly?
That's because TV is trying to kill you. Why are you using it for your gun safety lessons? They're about as accurate about gun safety as they are about how computers work--and there's always those douches who thinks that pulling the magazine means it's unloaded. No, no it does not. Check the chamber after pulling the magazine, or preferably run on the rule I and many others learn as a child: The gun is always loaded. This one goes with "Safeties aren't" and "Never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot."
All of these are accurate, and the first & last I can say with relative certainty I learned as a toddler--and nobody deliberately tried to teach me gun safety, these were basically things that got transmitted like other cultural bits children absorb naturally, a type of meme right down to the wording. This also is why I sometimes just go 'what' at the media, because to me it's nearly on the level of 'knives are sharp' as basic knowledge goes--how confused would you be by somebody who is supposed to be a well-educated adult revealing that they're unaware or have been until now that knives are sharp?
This is also why a lot of these accidents seem weird to me--is it really that hard to teach your children that lethal items are not toys? People seem to be doing pretty well at teaching their kids this when it comes to knives, though if this is simply because the news media views the equivalent knife accidents as non-news then we've...got different problems, actually, because it suggests that the news media thinks guns are some type of magic wand.
Most of those other places where it would be talked about would degenerate into partisan battles. But that will happen on Slashdot too...
There was a time when gun safety was important, and the NRA was a big group that provided gun safety education. Thus always keep the safety on, lock up the gun if you have kids (big or small) in the house, add a trigger lock, etc. But these ideas are discouraged because it scares some people into thinking it's about gun control and the big bad government coming to confiscate them. What was once common sense is now a political action, and the NRA is driving this trend into politicizatoin of guns. People justify this by saying it takes too long to unlock the gun and you won't be able to use it when needed. Holding onto ideals is not much comfort when a toddler is dead though.
I don't know how to break this to you, but you can also use something called 'common sense' and store your gun just like you would any other thing you don't want your toddler getting at, such as household cleaners and pretty much any pill ever. Locking up the gun isn't necessary, keeping it out of your kid's reach until the kid's old enough for basic gun safety and the Guns != Toys talk is. The latter talk should be standard, because a hell of a lot of accidental shootings by adults come about because of that thing.
It should say some rather nasty things about humans that I've known a preteen who I'd sooner trust with a gun than many adults--and historically the only part that which was weird was the latter, because a lot of country kids learned to shoot precisely because it meant they could be more certain about dinner being a thing. Even in some parts of the US now, this isn't that unusual, including the simple fact that if you're in a poor rural family, food stamps don't help.
A lot of the ideas being pushed for gun control are clever, but are kind of too easily recognized as the product of urbanites, and sometimes economically well-off ones at that. They're just not very practical to anybody who is or has been in a situation where 911 Is A Joke is a very accurate song, and/or hunting & dangerous wildlife normal. (I'm not so sure on the urban part, either, given that I live in a megapolis and, well, it turns out that honeybadger don't care: around once every decade or so there's one wandering around in town...)
Except what you are describing is not a primary election. You are describing a general election with some kind of run-off later. That's perfectly fine, but the primaries are specifically to help the parties (and there's nothing saying that the Socialist / Libertarian / Green / etc. parties can't have a primary) figure out who they are running in the general election.
Certainly, this would have a benefit on their viability for displacing one of the traditional two parties, and it might actually help force things towards having somebody ran who 50.1% of those who vote actually wants.
I'm sure the tattoo / piercing shops are all over this, we have seen people that have had "horns" implanted in their scalp.
But I'm sorry, when I need a joint implant or some other othapeadic thing in my body to function, I'm not interested in some home-brew design executed on some 3D printer "god knows where".
RFID implants aside, just about all the other ideas scare the hell out of me. There *will* be a down side, and when your implant goes south, do you plan on taking some random tattoo joint to court to pay for the loss of whatever it is you lose?
These people do not carry malpractice insurence, and it's unlikly they could get it.
Actually, it depends a lot on which tattoo/piercing shop you're talking about--and certainly, if you're just going into a random tattoo joint for anything, you are going to be lucky of you get a responsible professional. (You will know you have because they will go "...No." It's rude to not check into the place before you decide to go get work done--and yeah, a good shop will be happy to tell you about the sanitation protocols they follow.)
Really, the thing you should be worried about is the shady doctor who does procedures in his office that really ought to be done at a hospital--last I checked, these guys have a bigger death toll, especially since it's typically easier to get a bad tattoo/piercing shop shut down than to get a shady doctor out of circulation.
That said, I'd probably very carefully check into the place I had any of this done and its staff--and I'd look for somebody who has an MD and current medical license. (They're not common but do exist.)
Like feminism, the "gay rights" movement doesn't have much room for non-WASPs either. Mr. Granderson, being a gay and a black man, should know what he is talking about. Funny how "progressives" talk the talk, but can't walk the walk.
Hell, I could have told you that. It's not very welcoming if you're in any of the letters of the acronym past LG, either; this is a bit old but still accurate and a bit of work with Google will give you some lovely more recent examples of transphobia and biphobia within the LGBT community, and that's just starting to dig into the nastiness within the community. Sometimes it just shows too much that the 'inclusiveness' is totally for numbers and appearances.
Does using primary/replica or leader/follower really offend you that much?
Backwards compatibility of documentation, and it doesn't offend me as much as I am not okay with the utter indifference/obliviousness being shown for the problems facing somebody having to maintain an old system whose documentation simply isn't going to get changed to use the newspeak terminology and the overall futility of making such changes as a result.
If you really need to switch terminology, save it for when you're starting to have chains that go deeper than two levels and go with, say, primum/secundum/tertium... That way you can do gradual, natural and smooth switch as the older systems (and terminology) falls out of use and that documentation slides into irrelevance. It also has better future compatibility, as it can smoothly expand to additional levels of chaining, since it's just using Latin ordinals. This is probably the strongest reason to give for wanting to switch over--it's just going to be easier to talk about a quartum drive than a slave drive's slave drive's slave. (Yes, they'd be the same thing; which looks like the better way to reference it?)
Please. You almost had me at the point of agreeing, but "everyone has to celebrate homosexuality"? All you have to do is accept that it's there, nobody forces you into a threesome with Hank and Frank. Poligyny? Who gives a shit, honestly? Nobody forces me to have more than one wife (believe me, I'd fight that claw and tooth!).
And where the fuck do you see any "push to normalize pedophilia"? It's one of the four horsemen of the infocalypse, they won't give that boogeyman up easily, even if terrorism and drugs don't cut it anymore, that scare always makes people fall into line when it comes to online censorship.
Lucky you, I have found those disturbing corners--who sometimes miss that part of the problem isn't as much that we're having a problem accepting it's there as much as Hank and Frank missed that we don't wanna know about their sex lives and it has more to do with the grapefruit than their orientation. Though the thing that ought to be disturbing is that we've got pretty decent proof that if we accept the current favored arguments regarding homosexuality, we kinda have to accept pedophilia because that's...definitely something that seems to be hard-coded.
The interesting thing is that this definitely doesn't make them automatically okay with it; in some countries, where merely being sexually attracted to underage children is criminalized, there's been people seeing help precisely because it turns out that just because something turns you on doesn't mean you're okay with it--it'd be rather like discovering that 'rotting dogs' cause you a raging boner despite you having no desire otherwise to put your penis anywhere near that thing.
The problem is, really, that what's getting normalized is the demand that you actively avoid hurting the privileged minorities' presumed-incredibly-delicate feelings--the 'live and let live' view is being taken as somehow oppressive, and there's the implicit bigotry in saying, for example, that a female programmer is going to be offended by something with the file type of '*.bro'...especially when it's apparently supposed to make things smaller. That's just begging for dick jokes...and it's horribly misogynistic and naive to think women don't tell 'em. (It's also very much an issue of privileged minorities: only people of the 'right' minorities get the special fragile treatment, and it does seem to be a not-transparent attempt to secure their loyalty. If you're in one of the wrong minorities, or are part of the right ones but not OK with the desires the more privileged persons have come up with for you to have, you're SOL.)
I think we've already got several relatively good web compression formats, though honestly I think.bro is a wonderful name for a format intended to make files smaller. (Is she wanting to hold off for an even better tiny dick joke to use it for?)
I disagree - we do have a gender problem. To be acceptable to the social justice sector, males must be emasculated and impotent. I've had recent dealings with some silly cunt who occcupies a "human relations" position. She makes it pretty obvious that she doesn't like men very much, and she especially doesn't like men who speak their minds. If there are any men whom she actually approves of, then they are men who are intimidated by her.
To be fair, she doesn't very much like women who aren't intimidated, either. My boss, a female, has had some rounds with the SJW bitch as well.
That's actually a large part of what the problem here is--a lot of the SJWs seem to embrace a version of feminism that makes people like me wonder if we need to ask if somebody should drag in the fainting couches or find some smelling salts. It never made any sense to me why, exactly, women 'must be' fragile fainting flowers--didn't we leave that behind back in the Victorian era? just like needing a man is supposed to be antique?--nor why one ought to be offended easily or feel oppressed...for no discernible reason than the fact that people out there have penises and happens to not be one of those unfortunates.
I've always thought it was rather nice to have those sensitive, fragile parts tucked into your body like a sensible creature, not hanging out where horrible painful things could so easily happen. (Sledgehammers, cigar cutters, rubber bands...)
If anything, it makes me understand all the better why Black and Latina feminism complains about the feminist movement being so very, very, very WASPy: there is a problem when you talk about the feminine experience and proceed to ignore the experience of any woman who just...doesn't fit.
Undergrads who need work and study for financial aid will not have time to work, study for their current coursework, and take another course through MOOC. Even more so for those that are also trying to do undergraduate research.
That depends on how well the class is set up--I know quite a few students in the situation you're talking about, and the bottom line is that being able to time-shift their classes matters a lot, simply because one's boss may not know how to and/or care to schedule you around the classes you have to be physically present for. (I know one person whose boss this week wanted her at work ten minutes before one class ended--and she had given notice over a month ago of the time she could make it there after class. He was amazed that she didn't manage time travel/teleportation anyway.)
The question is, and should be here, will the costs of the MOOC be lower and covered by financial aid like a traditional course would be?
Back in the "good old days," an educated populace was a source of communal pride. Providing everyone with the opportunity to try (and the opportunity to fail) to better themselves through education used to be a way to reward individual initiative and merit. It's why we have land grant schools and the GI Bill. "State" schools were actually funded by the states; they'd let anyone in; and many of them would fail.
Now, it seems that education has become an individual benefit for which the individual should pay. Nobody wants to pay to educate his neighbor's dumb kid. State support for "public" universities has dried up, and they depend on tuition to keep the lights on.
Back in the "good old days," the degrees offered were skewed in favor of ones which brought some benefit to society on the whole and the actual value of the education you received was overall better. It was safe to presume that the this "neighbor's dumb kid" had to have mastered the basic skills to have graduated high school--now, that's not so much the case and in some cases it would actually have been better to flunk that kid, and ideally done so early enough to minimize the work needed to catch up, as opposed to leaving them to discover that their diploma is worthless.
Odds are that if you raised standards with milestones* at each stop, and focused on encouraging those fields that society benefits from, the amount of state funding will go up--though it might also take also changing the views towards luxurious student facilities. (If nothing else, why not have the cost of having a dorm room always indexed to the local cost of living in similar housing in a similar situation and set up so that a student suffers no financial penalties for opting to go for a cheaper residence not owned by the school?)
They have discovered market forces. Faculty can bring in more money doing research than teaching students. Students who flunk out don't pay tuition, so retention has become a major issue. Keep the customer happy, comfortable, and hopeful. Don't fail them just because they struggle with a few concepts.
Of course, it used to be that success in college was a good indicator of competency. If (almost) anyone can get a degree in exchange for tuition, then the degree loses that value
That last part is part of why the willingness of the public to underwrite it has dropped, though faculty doing research is actually highly desirable to some students--it can help avoid or at least minimize the paradox created when pretty much all the jobs in the field demand you have experience already, and the ones that don't require certs that cannot be gotten without experience.
* These milestones should be viewed and treated as developmental milestones--kids who are borderline cases get offered the option of summer school, and you check to see if there's any particular reason the kid has missed this milestone in case it's a situation where it's not a skill the child can acquire for some reason. (For example, no amount of remedial reading classes will help if the problem is that the kid has pure alexia.) It's like course corrections: the sooner you do something, the less you need to do.
Also, shame on submitter / editor for not including acronym expansion.
Yeah, I hate it when they use acronyms like CPU, RAM, SSD, and other jargon without expansion. I can't understand why they would expect this crowd to know what these terms mean.
I tend to think the style rule I was taught for scientific papers is good overall here: Unless it's an utterly standard acronym used within the (sub)field you're in, one that anybody (including undergrads) who can be expected to be reading the paper will know the meaning of already, always expand it on first use in the paper. MOOC is not one that's standard, and probably won't be unless they become so utterly common that it's safe to assume that anybody here below a certain age has taken at least one MOOC and it's a safe bet that those above that age have at least considered them, possibly as a way to manage ongoing education.
Hm, some of it went awry between preview and submitting, so: A lot of what your brain does is an emergent function of a network of neurons together doing Something (we're not sure what) and so the result of turning a neuron on or off would be a lot of various, not obviously related things going wrong, which admittedly would tell us what that given neuron does.
...A lot of neuroscience could be summed up as "Let's push this button and see what happens," okay? Except we can't justify pushing it ourselves--horrifically bad cases of epilepsy aside--so we just kinda wait for somebody to push it by accident, so to speak.
'Electroceuticals' is a fancy name for what I was talking about, and there's not many uses for it that DARPA could have because some of this is really hilarious--as far as I know, nobody managed quite the 'turn a neuron on and off' feat, and while certainly you might be able to do this in theory the more likely outcome is a fried neuron, and I've been around the bleeding edge here. Not only that, but you'd probably be able to snag a Nobel prize in medicine simply by developing a way to identify which neuron does what--not for figuring out how to turn it on and off, merely figuring out which one you might wish to do that to.
Worse, there's a hella lot of evidence that a lot of what your brain does is an emergent function of a network of neurons together doing Something (
That's how we figure out what any given part of the brain does, actually: We find somebody who has a defective one and look at what they can't do.
Basically? There's not a damn lot DARPA could do, unless they really are going to offer to trade info for treating seizure disorders or the like--and this is a very good idea, for social engineering reasons. Not to mention that to somebody who suffers from some of these conditions, such as migraines, you could very easily get undying loyalty from just by curing them...
And okay, yes, there's a few things that might look from a really long distance away to somebody with horrible eyesight like a useful weapon or torture technique, but we can do a lot of that a lot more practically and cheaply...though precisely why you'd want to try interrogating somebody who has induced schizophrenia (cheapest+easiest method: give them meth) is beyond me.
I'm pretty sure nobody wants to attempt trying to turn something like "Millennium hand and shrimp" into useful intel.
(There is a reason why I said that the labels don't mean much in this old computer system you're stuck maintaining: they don't. Not even your buttons have labels that are useful--imagine if one of the salescritters had 'helpfully' gone through with a labeler and you've got a rough idea just how useful they are. They do tend to tell you where, but once again, it's total accident if its name has anything to cue you to the function.)
The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that
It's not the policy that does that. It's people friending their real-life friends, family and coworkers that makes them civil. They don't want to be seen as keyboard warriors, bullies and social misfits when real-life people are watching. Facebook wants you to friend people you know in real life, and not form yet another anonymous forum for arguing and trolling.
Then wouldn't it actually more important that I be able to use the name they'd know me under, regardless of if it's my legal one? Never mind that FB has gone after people who did exactly that.
But, and this is more to the point, I said we had no proof and you've not presented me with it. You gave me what would be an excellent thing to put in as a proposed mechanism for such a policy working, if I was asking for the funding to get the proof, but it isn't proof and it actually suggests that FB's policy is wrong in a different way because they define 'real name' as your legal name*--when in fact it should be the name you use most regularly.
It also means you might want to consider checking the reasons/. actually has anonymous posting enabled, and consider how comfortable somebody who is trying to not be found in alternate situations online or offline by that same assortment of social misfits. Do you really want somebody who has taken it into their head that you're the lizard alien overlords' supreme ruler after running across you online to be able to easily get your physical address?
* By legal name here we mean birth name unless you've gotten it changed--in quite a few places, a professional name used regularly is also considered a legal name, but the documents FB wants would not use those names. But this is assuming FB even bothers enforcing this policy evenly, which they aren't, and that really only adds to the ease with which it can be abused and the odds that it will be abused. An inverted policy--a certain threshold of human-verified strikes causing you to have to use your real name--might actually work better, since it'd allow people who behave to have pseudonymity and the people who'd be motivated to behave by the current policy are going to be motivated to behave by that one, too.
This isn't even particularly cutting-edge tech... I'm going to try to keep this relatively simple, so analogies are not precisely right, but close enough for this...
Think of the brain as a computer that has to stay on, always. It's also a bit of an old system, and as a result the system's developed a bit of personality & the people who knew why some of its design is the way it is have not only moved on but are so long gone nobody's too sure how to contact them. This is also the only way to find out why certain parts of the design are weird the way they are--there might have been documentation, but it's going to be faster to just recreate it...
Electroshock is, basically, a brute force reset of the system. We don't know (quite) why it works, but it does. It isn't really ideal, since generally you only want to restart a single service, so to speak, but trying to figure out how to manage that would require the aforementioned documentation. Certainly, the fact that some of the server clusters have names vaguely associated with what they do is pure luck--no, seriously, a lot of the brain's anatomy was named with no reference to what it actually does, and this makes memorizing neuroanatomy along with what the parts are known to do what hell.
We have already through FDA approval a few methods (since '97, maybe earlier) that use some of this to help people, though, which are a bit less brute-force and get you the benefits without the side effects--or, in some cases, substitute for blown neurocircuitry like with Parkinson's Disease. That we can do this at all, we know from electroshock--which in a modified form is still in use, and horrifically enough is still the best treatment we've got for certain forms of depression.
Anyway, deep-brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation are both pretty good for depression--and there's some promise that they'll help with seizure disorders and migraines (which might be a kind of seizure disorder anyway).
Really, the question I have is exactly what DARPA is trying to do. Are we going for a new era where interrogation is done by improving significantly the lives of interrogation subjects? That would...actually be really effective, and the information more reliable than you'd get from torture.
If any employer required you to have a facebook account and wouldn't hire you without one it's discrimination. Such a case would almost certainly become high profile.
If you can't be bothered to fight it, just create an account and never log in.
'Those people who do not have a FB account' are not a protected class under employment discrimination law, so I'd expect that the case would probably be tossed out by the judge in seconds because, well, it's perfectly legal to discriminate against somebody for such reasons, just like an employer can refuse to hire you for such petty reasons as your hair or eye color.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, but I do know what my rights are--and, in this case, aren't--and how to check.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find a good amount of information online--this is a good place to start--and yeah, a lot of its basic uses doesn't require much math, especially if you're mostly using it to check your dead reckoning work, which is always a good idea. Part of why people developed celestial navigation in the first place, and why it was so important, was because dead reckoning was not reliable enough; every so often you found yourself in places you didn't want to be, including 'Middle of the !@#$ Ocean' and if you were really lucky and had somebody aboard who knew celestial navigation you could at least figure out where to go to reach land before you died horribly.
The thing that ought to amuse all of us is that they believe the GPS is trustworthy. I've spent a road trip getting regular laughs from looking at where the GPS thought I was--it was utterly convinced that it was in a boat or perhaps a submarine. I had no idea my car at the time was so capable!
The worst part of this is that even your average modern GPS unit will do this to you. One of the things I will do when utterly bored is check to see where my phone thinks it is, which hasn't failed yet to be quite entertainingly off. (I'm still trying to figure out where one place it thinks I've been really is because I kind of want to go there, actually...)
Actually, it's virtually impossible to be too poor to afford your own lawyer. The trick is getting a halfway competent one--and I've seen some relatively expensive defense lawyers who...aren't anywhere near as good as even the most indifferent public defender. (If I got stuck with one of them I'd likely ask the judge if I could please have my lawyer required to take his meds because while I think he's hoping to get me off on appeal for having a lousy lawyer, I'd like to be certain that if my lawyer is talking to an invisible giant rabbit that rabbit exists. Especially if said rabbit is supposedly his co-counsel.)
Plus, since these companies have generally taken the position that they are too cool and disruptive for the FDA, it's not unlikely that the data they've collected are also without whatever (probably inadequate but not entirely zero) obstacles that HIPAA-covered records would pose to law enforcement requests.
The fact that they're not HIPAA-covered should, really, be enough reason to not let them handle your sample--not that law enforcement wants access, there's legitimate and sometimes even mutually desirable reasons for that, but that there's nothing keeping them from selling your profile and its contents. They can even make a show of keeping government out--when it uses a warrant instead of paying for access to their records like everybody else.
Regardless of if HIPAA is adequate or not, it's still better than nothing, especially since I don't think anybody's yet managed to get it pinned down firmly if a 'privacy policy' creates a legally binding contract or if it might as well be a used tissue. (If anybody knows otherwise, please do give me a citation, I want to read the case law involved.)
As long as there is a warrant and it is for a single suspect's DNA then it is lawful and I am fine with it.
That is almost useless. If they have a specific suspect, and probable cause, then they can use a warrant to demand a hair or blood sample directly from the suspect. What is far more likely, is that they have the DNA sample, but have no idea who it belongs to. So they give the sample to 23andme, and say "Who matches this?" Then they get back a match, or maybe a partial match of a brother, sister, or cousin. That could narrow the suspects way down.
As I mentioned a bit farther up, we've already caught somebody managing to slip a sample of somebody else's blood--repeatedly, actually, and I've seen camera footage from one of the later attempts to get his blood from him. (They didn't say how they figured out it wasn't his blood, so I can only guess that the 'donor' he chose was obviously not him--the equivalent of a male druggie trying to pass off a pregnant woman's urine as his own.) It's more reliable to go to somebody like 23andme since the odds of that single suspect having sent somebody else's blood or hair to there is lower--or you could use it as a way to confirm that the sample you got personally from the suspect is indeed theirs.
The other issue is that you have to wait to get the fresh sample run, and that can take months--I've heard of a few places being backed up enough that it can be over a year before you see results. That certainly would be a reason to want to see if the person has already had their DNA profiled, though asking and seeing if they offer to grant you permission is worthwhile. Set it up right, and it ought to be in your favor to do so if you're innocent as it gives you a way to clear yourself quickly.
You're more likely to get a warrant for the situation you're talking about when you're trying to ID a J Doe victim, and that's something I'd actually be fine with encouraging, though I'd want more transparency. It'd be as simple as letting me (or, if I'm the one missing and it's been long enough, my next-of-kin) have the ability to arrange to have a copy of my profile added to a database of missing persons & relatives of missing persons, preferably one set up so getting a name only happens once you've gotten a match.
Basically, there's legitimate reasons to want to get to use a profile that's already been done--the concern should be that the fact that the warrants get tossed means that they're almost certainly not using those.
Why not? Isn't a large part of what constitutes criminal law proceedings based on proper procedure being followed? If we don't have procedures we have no more standing than the Salem Witch Trials.
I think the point is that this is more a case of having too many 'gears' in the process already--which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, particularly since I'd be actually okay if my DNA report is being used for certain processes. For example, if what they're trying to do is figure out if J Doe #23 is me, I have no problems--especially if I really am J Doe #23.
I'd certainly like to be notified, however, on the off chance that I'm still alive, and given the opportunity to call the department requesting a copy of my DNA and go "Guys? Reports of my death are highly exaggerated." I'd even put it that way, because how often do you get to make that complaint?
If they're using my DNA because they're trying to ID a relative of mine, I'd rather they ask first--last I knew, it was perfectly acceptable to the courts if I grant the authorities permission, and there's no good reason for me to not agree if we're talking about pretty much any of the legit reasons for them wanting my DNA. (Particularly since if a relative of mine is suspected of being a serial rapist and/or murderer, I'd like them to clear themselves. Or confirm. I'm not terribly picky about which, just let me know if it's safe to let them watch my kids/pets/house.)
Otherwise, it really should fall under the same rules required to obtain any other sort of medical record--there's reasons to prefer to get a copy of an already-run DNA test, but those mostly fall under being able to be relatively sure it's the right person...and the fact it won't take months to get the results back, since the labs really are that backed up. (Yes, somebody's managed to actually get somebody else's blood taken for a DNA test, and even managed to pull it off on camera. It took surprising him with where they drew the sample from to actually get a sample of his blood.)
if it takes seconds to pop the magazine out (and in) then why not pop the magazine out before you put your gun away for the night? just-in-case one night you forget to lock the drawer/gunsafe/whatever and a toddler young enough to need a responsible adult's supervision to keep them safe hurts someone with it? seems like murphy's law to me.
Let me quote myself in reply to your first question:
[...] there's always those douches who thinks that pulling the magazine means it's unloaded.
Odds are that what you're saying is the sort of thing the people who left their guns where their toddlers could get at them thought, which is also why the adults I was around went with the more proactive measure of making sure I knew better in the first place and, if there'd been guns in our house, odds are that they'd have been kept quite outside of my reach, making it entirely beside the point if the thing locked or not.
However, 'responsible adult' probably here would include checking the chamber after pulling the magazine, so...
The thing that concerns me here is that the reaction to toddlers firearm accidents is out of proportion to how people are about other, equally-preventable risks, such as the toddler getting at the kitchen knives and household chemicals. Consider how widely something like "One-Year-Old Tries to Drink Oven Cleaner" would be getting splashed on the media if he'd done the equivalent with a firearm--and how the demands for improved safety measures would vary between the two...
why would anyone put away a loaded gun, even in a locked drawer? the tv has trained me to believe that loading a magazine is something that can be achieved really quickly?
That's because TV is trying to kill you. Why are you using it for your gun safety lessons? They're about as accurate about gun safety as they are about how computers work--and there's always those douches who thinks that pulling the magazine means it's unloaded. No, no it does not. Check the chamber after pulling the magazine, or preferably run on the rule I and many others learn as a child: The gun is always loaded. This one goes with "Safeties aren't" and "Never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot."
All of these are accurate, and the first & last I can say with relative certainty I learned as a toddler--and nobody deliberately tried to teach me gun safety, these were basically things that got transmitted like other cultural bits children absorb naturally, a type of meme right down to the wording. This also is why I sometimes just go 'what' at the media, because to me it's nearly on the level of 'knives are sharp' as basic knowledge goes--how confused would you be by somebody who is supposed to be a well-educated adult revealing that they're unaware or have been until now that knives are sharp?
This is also why a lot of these accidents seem weird to me--is it really that hard to teach your children that lethal items are not toys? People seem to be doing pretty well at teaching their kids this when it comes to knives, though if this is simply because the news media views the equivalent knife accidents as non-news then we've...got different problems, actually, because it suggests that the news media thinks guns are some type of magic wand.
Most of those other places where it would be talked about would degenerate into partisan battles. But that will happen on Slashdot too...
There was a time when gun safety was important, and the NRA was a big group that provided gun safety education. Thus always keep the safety on, lock up the gun if you have kids (big or small) in the house, add a trigger lock, etc. But these ideas are discouraged because it scares some people into thinking it's about gun control and the big bad government coming to confiscate them. What was once common sense is now a political action, and the NRA is driving this trend into politicizatoin of guns. People justify this by saying it takes too long to unlock the gun and you won't be able to use it when needed. Holding onto ideals is not much comfort when a toddler is dead though.
I don't know how to break this to you, but you can also use something called 'common sense' and store your gun just like you would any other thing you don't want your toddler getting at, such as household cleaners and pretty much any pill ever. Locking up the gun isn't necessary, keeping it out of your kid's reach until the kid's old enough for basic gun safety and the Guns != Toys talk is. The latter talk should be standard, because a hell of a lot of accidental shootings by adults come about because of that thing.
It should say some rather nasty things about humans that I've known a preteen who I'd sooner trust with a gun than many adults--and historically the only part that which was weird was the latter, because a lot of country kids learned to shoot precisely because it meant they could be more certain about dinner being a thing. Even in some parts of the US now, this isn't that unusual, including the simple fact that if you're in a poor rural family, food stamps don't help.
A lot of the ideas being pushed for gun control are clever, but are kind of too easily recognized as the product of urbanites, and sometimes economically well-off ones at that. They're just not very practical to anybody who is or has been in a situation where 911 Is A Joke is a very accurate song, and/or hunting & dangerous wildlife normal. (I'm not so sure on the urban part, either, given that I live in a megapolis and, well, it turns out that honeybadger don't care: around once every decade or so there's one wandering around in town...)
Except what you are describing is not a primary election. You are describing a general election with some kind of run-off later. That's perfectly fine, but the primaries are specifically to help the parties (and there's nothing saying that the Socialist / Libertarian / Green / etc. parties can't have a primary) figure out who they are running in the general election.
Certainly, this would have a benefit on their viability for displacing one of the traditional two parties, and it might actually help force things towards having somebody ran who 50.1% of those who vote actually wants.
I've got an insulted witch looking over my shoulder.
I'm sure the tattoo / piercing shops are all over this, we have seen people that have had "horns" implanted in their scalp.
But I'm sorry, when I need a joint implant or some other othapeadic thing in my body to function, I'm not interested in some home-brew design executed on some 3D printer "god knows where".
RFID implants aside, just about all the other ideas scare the hell out of me. There *will* be a down side, and when your implant goes south, do you plan on taking some random tattoo joint to court to pay for the loss of whatever it is you lose?
These people do not carry malpractice insurence, and it's unlikly they could get it.
Actually, it depends a lot on which tattoo/piercing shop you're talking about--and certainly, if you're just going into a random tattoo joint for anything, you are going to be lucky of you get a responsible professional. (You will know you have because they will go "...No." It's rude to not check into the place before you decide to go get work done--and yeah, a good shop will be happy to tell you about the sanitation protocols they follow.)
Really, the thing you should be worried about is the shady doctor who does procedures in his office that really ought to be done at a hospital--last I checked, these guys have a bigger death toll, especially since it's typically easier to get a bad tattoo/piercing shop shut down than to get a shady doctor out of circulation.
That said, I'd probably very carefully check into the place I had any of this done and its staff--and I'd look for somebody who has an MD and current medical license. (They're not common but do exist.)
Like feminism, the "gay rights" movement doesn't have much room for non-WASPs either. Mr. Granderson, being a gay and a black man, should know what he is talking about. Funny how "progressives" talk the talk, but can't walk the walk.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/PO...
Hell, I could have told you that. It's not very welcoming if you're in any of the letters of the acronym past LG, either; this is a bit old but still accurate and a bit of work with Google will give you some lovely more recent examples of transphobia and biphobia within the LGBT community, and that's just starting to dig into the nastiness within the community. Sometimes it just shows too much that the 'inclusiveness' is totally for numbers and appearances.
Does using primary/replica or leader/follower really offend you that much?
Backwards compatibility of documentation, and it doesn't offend me as much as I am not okay with the utter indifference/obliviousness being shown for the problems facing somebody having to maintain an old system whose documentation simply isn't going to get changed to use the newspeak terminology and the overall futility of making such changes as a result.
If you really need to switch terminology, save it for when you're starting to have chains that go deeper than two levels and go with, say, primum/secundum/tertium... That way you can do gradual, natural and smooth switch as the older systems (and terminology) falls out of use and that documentation slides into irrelevance. It also has better future compatibility, as it can smoothly expand to additional levels of chaining, since it's just using Latin ordinals. This is probably the strongest reason to give for wanting to switch over--it's just going to be easier to talk about a quartum drive than a slave drive's slave drive's slave. (Yes, they'd be the same thing; which looks like the better way to reference it?)
Please. You almost had me at the point of agreeing, but "everyone has to celebrate homosexuality"? All you have to do is accept that it's there, nobody forces you into a threesome with Hank and Frank. Poligyny? Who gives a shit, honestly? Nobody forces me to have more than one wife (believe me, I'd fight that claw and tooth!).
And where the fuck do you see any "push to normalize pedophilia"? It's one of the four horsemen of the infocalypse, they won't give that boogeyman up easily, even if terrorism and drugs don't cut it anymore, that scare always makes people fall into line when it comes to online censorship.
Lucky you, I have found those disturbing corners--who sometimes miss that part of the problem isn't as much that we're having a problem accepting it's there as much as Hank and Frank missed that we don't wanna know about their sex lives and it has more to do with the grapefruit than their orientation. Though the thing that ought to be disturbing is that we've got pretty decent proof that if we accept the current favored arguments regarding homosexuality, we kinda have to accept pedophilia because that's...definitely something that seems to be hard-coded.
The interesting thing is that this definitely doesn't make them automatically okay with it; in some countries, where merely being sexually attracted to underage children is criminalized, there's been people seeing help precisely because it turns out that just because something turns you on doesn't mean you're okay with it--it'd be rather like discovering that 'rotting dogs' cause you a raging boner despite you having no desire otherwise to put your penis anywhere near that thing.
The problem is, really, that what's getting normalized is the demand that you actively avoid hurting the privileged minorities' presumed-incredibly-delicate feelings--the 'live and let live' view is being taken as somehow oppressive, and there's the implicit bigotry in saying, for example, that a female programmer is going to be offended by something with the file type of '*.bro'...especially when it's apparently supposed to make things smaller. That's just begging for dick jokes...and it's horribly misogynistic and naive to think women don't tell 'em. (It's also very much an issue of privileged minorities: only people of the 'right' minorities get the special fragile treatment, and it does seem to be a not-transparent attempt to secure their loyalty. If you're in one of the wrong minorities, or are part of the right ones but not OK with the desires the more privileged persons have come up with for you to have, you're SOL.)
I think we've already got several relatively good web compression formats, though honestly I think .bro is a wonderful name for a format intended to make files smaller. (Is she wanting to hold off for an even better tiny dick joke to use it for?)
I disagree - we do have a gender problem. To be acceptable to the social justice sector, males must be emasculated and impotent. I've had recent dealings with some silly cunt who occcupies a "human relations" position. She makes it pretty obvious that she doesn't like men very much, and she especially doesn't like men who speak their minds. If there are any men whom she actually approves of, then they are men who are intimidated by her.
To be fair, she doesn't very much like women who aren't intimidated, either. My boss, a female, has had some rounds with the SJW bitch as well.
That's actually a large part of what the problem here is--a lot of the SJWs seem to embrace a version of feminism that makes people like me wonder if we need to ask if somebody should drag in the fainting couches or find some smelling salts. It never made any sense to me why, exactly, women 'must be' fragile fainting flowers--didn't we leave that behind back in the Victorian era? just like needing a man is supposed to be antique?--nor why one ought to be offended easily or feel oppressed...for no discernible reason than the fact that people out there have penises and happens to not be one of those unfortunates.
I've always thought it was rather nice to have those sensitive, fragile parts tucked into your body like a sensible creature, not hanging out where horrible painful things could so easily happen. (Sledgehammers, cigar cutters, rubber bands...)
If anything, it makes me understand all the better why Black and Latina feminism complains about the feminist movement being so very, very, very WASPy: there is a problem when you talk about the feminine experience and proceed to ignore the experience of any woman who just...doesn't fit.
Undergrads who need work and study for financial aid will not have time to work, study for their current coursework, and take another course through MOOC. Even more so for those that are also trying to do undergraduate research.
That depends on how well the class is set up--I know quite a few students in the situation you're talking about, and the bottom line is that being able to time-shift their classes matters a lot, simply because one's boss may not know how to and/or care to schedule you around the classes you have to be physically present for. (I know one person whose boss this week wanted her at work ten minutes before one class ended--and she had given notice over a month ago of the time she could make it there after class. He was amazed that she didn't manage time travel/teleportation anyway.)
The question is, and should be here, will the costs of the MOOC be lower and covered by financial aid like a traditional course would be?
Back in the "good old days," an educated populace was a source of communal pride. Providing everyone with the opportunity to try (and the opportunity to fail) to better themselves through education used to be a way to reward individual initiative and merit. It's why we have land grant schools and the GI Bill. "State" schools were actually funded by the states; they'd let anyone in; and many of them would fail.
Now, it seems that education has become an individual benefit for which the individual should pay. Nobody wants to pay to educate his neighbor's dumb kid. State support for "public" universities has dried up, and they depend on tuition to keep the lights on.
Back in the "good old days," the degrees offered were skewed in favor of ones which brought some benefit to society on the whole and the actual value of the education you received was overall better. It was safe to presume that the this "neighbor's dumb kid" had to have mastered the basic skills to have graduated high school--now, that's not so much the case and in some cases it would actually have been better to flunk that kid, and ideally done so early enough to minimize the work needed to catch up, as opposed to leaving them to discover that their diploma is worthless.
Odds are that if you raised standards with milestones* at each stop, and focused on encouraging those fields that society benefits from, the amount of state funding will go up--though it might also take also changing the views towards luxurious student facilities. (If nothing else, why not have the cost of having a dorm room always indexed to the local cost of living in similar housing in a similar situation and set up so that a student suffers no financial penalties for opting to go for a cheaper residence not owned by the school?)
They have discovered market forces. Faculty can bring in more money doing research than teaching students. Students who flunk out don't pay tuition, so retention has become a major issue. Keep the customer happy, comfortable, and hopeful. Don't fail them just because they struggle with a few concepts.
Of course, it used to be that success in college was a good indicator of competency. If (almost) anyone can get a degree in exchange for tuition, then the degree loses that value
That last part is part of why the willingness of the public to underwrite it has dropped, though faculty doing research is actually highly desirable to some students--it can help avoid or at least minimize the paradox created when pretty much all the jobs in the field demand you have experience already, and the ones that don't require certs that cannot be gotten without experience.
* These milestones should be viewed and treated as developmental milestones--kids who are borderline cases get offered the option of summer school, and you check to see if there's any particular reason the kid has missed this milestone in case it's a situation where it's not a skill the child can acquire for some reason. (For example, no amount of remedial reading classes will help if the problem is that the kid has pure alexia.) It's like course corrections: the sooner you do something, the less you need to do.
Also, shame on submitter / editor for not including acronym expansion.
Yeah, I hate it when they use acronyms like CPU, RAM, SSD, and other jargon without expansion. I can't understand why they would expect this crowd to know what these terms mean.
I tend to think the style rule I was taught for scientific papers is good overall here: Unless it's an utterly standard acronym used within the (sub)field you're in, one that anybody (including undergrads) who can be expected to be reading the paper will know the meaning of already, always expand it on first use in the paper. MOOC is not one that's standard, and probably won't be unless they become so utterly common that it's safe to assume that anybody here below a certain age has taken at least one MOOC and it's a safe bet that those above that age have at least considered them, possibly as a way to manage ongoing education.
Hm, some of it went awry between preview and submitting, so: A lot of what your brain does is an emergent function of a network of neurons together doing Something (we're not sure what) and so the result of turning a neuron on or off would be a lot of various, not obviously related things going wrong, which admittedly would tell us what that given neuron does.
...A lot of neuroscience could be summed up as "Let's push this button and see what happens," okay? Except we can't justify pushing it ourselves--horrifically bad cases of epilepsy aside--so we just kinda wait for somebody to push it by accident, so to speak.
'Electroceuticals' is a fancy name for what I was talking about, and there's not many uses for it that DARPA could have because some of this is really hilarious--as far as I know, nobody managed quite the 'turn a neuron on and off' feat, and while certainly you might be able to do this in theory the more likely outcome is a fried neuron, and I've been around the bleeding edge here. Not only that, but you'd probably be able to snag a Nobel prize in medicine simply by developing a way to identify which neuron does what--not for figuring out how to turn it on and off, merely figuring out which one you might wish to do that to.
Worse, there's a hella lot of evidence that a lot of what your brain does is an emergent function of a network of neurons together doing Something (
That's how we figure out what any given part of the brain does, actually: We find somebody who has a defective one and look at what they can't do.
Basically? There's not a damn lot DARPA could do, unless they really are going to offer to trade info for treating seizure disorders or the like--and this is a very good idea, for social engineering reasons. Not to mention that to somebody who suffers from some of these conditions, such as migraines, you could very easily get undying loyalty from just by curing them...
And okay, yes, there's a few things that might look from a really long distance away to somebody with horrible eyesight like a useful weapon or torture technique, but we can do a lot of that a lot more practically and cheaply...though precisely why you'd want to try interrogating somebody who has induced schizophrenia (cheapest+easiest method: give them meth) is beyond me.
I'm pretty sure nobody wants to attempt trying to turn something like "Millennium hand and shrimp" into useful intel.
(There is a reason why I said that the labels don't mean much in this old computer system you're stuck maintaining: they don't. Not even your buttons have labels that are useful--imagine if one of the salescritters had 'helpfully' gone through with a labeler and you've got a rough idea just how useful they are. They do tend to tell you where, but once again, it's total accident if its name has anything to cue you to the function.)
The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that
It's not the policy that does that. It's people friending their real-life friends, family and coworkers that makes them civil. They don't want to be seen as keyboard warriors, bullies and social misfits when real-life people are watching. Facebook wants you to friend people you know in real life, and not form yet another anonymous forum for arguing and trolling.
Then wouldn't it actually more important that I be able to use the name they'd know me under, regardless of if it's my legal one? Never mind that FB has gone after people who did exactly that.
But, and this is more to the point, I said we had no proof and you've not presented me with it. You gave me what would be an excellent thing to put in as a proposed mechanism for such a policy working, if I was asking for the funding to get the proof, but it isn't proof and it actually suggests that FB's policy is wrong in a different way because they define 'real name' as your legal name*--when in fact it should be the name you use most regularly.
It also means you might want to consider checking the reasons /. actually has anonymous posting enabled, and consider how comfortable somebody who is trying to not be found in alternate situations online or offline by that same assortment of social misfits. Do you really want somebody who has taken it into their head that you're the lizard alien overlords' supreme ruler after running across you online to be able to easily get your physical address?
* By legal name here we mean birth name unless you've gotten it changed--in quite a few places, a professional name used regularly is also considered a legal name, but the documents FB wants would not use those names. But this is assuming FB even bothers enforcing this policy evenly, which they aren't, and that really only adds to the ease with which it can be abused and the odds that it will be abused. An inverted policy--a certain threshold of human-verified strikes causing you to have to use your real name--might actually work better, since it'd allow people who behave to have pseudonymity and the people who'd be motivated to behave by the current policy are going to be motivated to behave by that one, too.
This isn't even particularly cutting-edge tech... I'm going to try to keep this relatively simple, so analogies are not precisely right, but close enough for this...
Think of the brain as a computer that has to stay on, always. It's also a bit of an old system, and as a result the system's developed a bit of personality & the people who knew why some of its design is the way it is have not only moved on but are so long gone nobody's too sure how to contact them. This is also the only way to find out why certain parts of the design are weird the way they are--there might have been documentation, but it's going to be faster to just recreate it...
Electroshock is, basically, a brute force reset of the system. We don't know (quite) why it works, but it does. It isn't really ideal, since generally you only want to restart a single service, so to speak, but trying to figure out how to manage that would require the aforementioned documentation. Certainly, the fact that some of the server clusters have names vaguely associated with what they do is pure luck--no, seriously, a lot of the brain's anatomy was named with no reference to what it actually does, and this makes memorizing neuroanatomy along with what the parts are known to do what hell.
We have already through FDA approval a few methods (since '97, maybe earlier) that use some of this to help people, though, which are a bit less brute-force and get you the benefits without the side effects--or, in some cases, substitute for blown neurocircuitry like with Parkinson's Disease. That we can do this at all, we know from electroshock--which in a modified form is still in use, and horrifically enough is still the best treatment we've got for certain forms of depression.
Anyway, deep-brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation are both pretty good for depression--and there's some promise that they'll help with seizure disorders and migraines (which might be a kind of seizure disorder anyway).
Really, the question I have is exactly what DARPA is trying to do. Are we going for a new era where interrogation is done by improving significantly the lives of interrogation subjects? That would...actually be really effective, and the information more reliable than you'd get from torture.
If any employer required you to have a facebook account and wouldn't hire you without one it's discrimination. Such a case would almost certainly become high profile.
If you can't be bothered to fight it, just create an account and never log in.
'Those people who do not have a FB account' are not a protected class under employment discrimination law, so I'd expect that the case would probably be tossed out by the judge in seconds because, well, it's perfectly legal to discriminate against somebody for such reasons, just like an employer can refuse to hire you for such petty reasons as your hair or eye color.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, but I do know what my rights are--and, in this case, aren't--and how to check.