You want the FDA to get anal retentive on your medications, fine.
Is that where these little pills are coming from?
Just realize those expensive drugs are going to get a little more expensive and sick people who are poor might not be able to afford them anymore.
And since pharma companies spend twice as much on advertising as they do on research, it would mean fewer TV commercials to inform "guys like me, with eeee-deee", about the latest penis pills available. I'll have to turn off my spam filters to save my marriage!
Honestly I've heard of worse things being found in food than this.
When I was in fourth grade eating lunch in the cafeteria one day I saw a kid blow his nose into another kid's sandwich when he wasn't looking. Ever since then I've been eating dog kibble and saving $$$.
Yeah, a few hundred million years here, a few hundred million there, and soon you're talking about a seriously long time. But if you look at that timeline, an animal with the brains required for technology would have been wildly improbable more than 200 million years ago ago. The Cambrian explosion was 500 million years ago, but for a long time after that there weren't really any good brains to work with yet- just reptilian and amphibian structures. The neocortex evolved very recently, and here we are. I don't think we'll be the last animals to have conversations like this one. Animals have been getting smarter and smarter in general.
everything has always said 3 to 5 billion years.
That's from the Sun's point of view. While it's true that we do have 3 billion years until the oceans are completely boiled away, and 5 billion before the actual red giant phase, in only 1 billion years the solar output will be 10% greater than today's and the Earth will experience a runaway greenhouse effect that will raise its temperature by 50-100 degrees, making it resemble Venus.
Yes, "Hadean Earth pretty much lasted until then", give or take a billion years or so, pretty much.
Keep in mind that multicellular life has only existed for the past 200 million years, so these aren't exactly coffee breaks we're talking about. We already knew that ice can cover most of the earth within a few millenia, and as we are quickly finding out, it can disappear even faster than that if you put in a little effort. Ice reflects light, cooling off the earth, and water absorbs light, warming it, so both extremes are stable. This pleasant assortment of varied climates isn't necessarily inevitable or stable at all. According to the iceball-earth theory, the thing that eventually stopped it was volcanic activity, which put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The Earth probably has about another billion years of useful life left before the sun has its midlife crisis, so this party is "almost over" so to speak. But we're talking about time scales that render irrelevant little things like global warming and human-triggered melting of the poles- minor events that have consequences for only a few million years. We're releasing carbon that was buried during the swampy Carboniferous era, which was only a few hundred million years ago- practically last week. Once we're gone, the carbon is going to condense on the ground in the form of plant matter, get buried again over millions of years as before, and someone will dig it up again, and burn it in one of the great cycles of life.
With a billion years left, the Earth probably has time for about three or four more infestations of technological species like us, species that communicate, make tools, and burn things. We probably will just happen to have been the first in a series. Not much of our crap will remain, but just imagine what the impact on human culture would have been if we kept digging up stuff previously buried by a former technological species. I wish I could be around when it eventually happens, to see whether we'll be reviled, worshiped, or ignored.
What a load of racist asinine BS. Where do you think all these people are going to end up? In Iran? In China? In India? No. All of them will become US citizens and valuable ones at that.
Who even cares "where they end up"? If we're lucky they'll stick around, but you shouldn't blithely assume people will always want to keep coming here and staying here because the U.S. is so great. I just think it's funny to see everyone bashing India, China, and especially Iran at the same time I'm depending on immigrants from those exact countries for my paycheck.
This is exactly how the US has been building herself for the last century and a bit and you are very likely an import as well. What are you? Polish (OK, technically American)?
Italian, English, Spanish, French, Polish, Irish, German, Scottish, Cherokee, and Nicaraguan- just like you.
I have a sweet job at a small biotech startup in Silicon Valley. I was born in Philadelphia and I'm as white as white guys come. So who else works at this company?
The CEO, the CFO, and one of our principal investors are all from Iran. The CTO, the DBA, and my supervisor are from India. (The CTO is writing a tech book for a well-known publisher; I expect it will be reviewed here in a few months.) The principal database curator, the statistician, and three people on the dev team are Chinese nationals. The product manager is from the former Soviet Union; so is one of the UI devs and our street-smart IT guy. The head of tech support is Indian (OK, technically Canadian); she manages an offshore team of scientists in South America who import data into the system all day. We also just hired two additional Indian employees whom I haven't really met yet.
And then there are three white guys including me- AFAIK the only U.S. citizens. Maybe a few others are too (I've never really thought about it). Half of the people where I work came from a company that was originally started by another white guy. He lost faith in the future of the United States a few years ago, sold his business to a Fortune 500 corporation here (which promptly mismanaged it into oblivion), and took something like 10 or 20 million dollars back home to Australia.
I read threads like this one, I watch the news, and I listen to all the bloviating over Iran, over India and China, and it all just seems surreal to me. I wonder what the future holds for this place.
Something which makes the US a nicer partner for India is that English is a fairly widely understood language in India, whereas neither Russian nor Mandarin are. Beats me how much of a factor that would be, though.
Probably not much of one. There are already more people in China who can speak English than there are in the U.S.
By 2025 China will have more English speakers than the entire rest of the world.
More and more it becomes evident that religious teachings are being used to push racism, censorship, other forms of hatred and oppressing those who have beliefs against societal norms.
This has always been evident. What's new is this (probably short-lived) idea that these are bad things to want. People think anything is OK if it's part of God's plan.
This may be a stretch, but after Microsoft Vista, I think the business community could be losing confidence in Microsoft's future. They might fear that if they use MS products, they could lose support and there would be no one left to assume liability.
It was actually measured at 140, but since that was a few years ago I usually throw 20-30 points on top for inflation. I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Americans have several submarines specializing in cutting optical internet cables running under sea. Maybe this was another one of those botched missions.
It was just Cheney briefly cutting the line so he could insert a fiber optic splitter and listen to the terrorists.
I have problems with memory, because I have intractable epilepsy with a cluster of seizures every few weeks. Nobody knows what causes them; it's not an aneurysm or anything like that, because MRI, PET, and CAT images all look normal. My neurologist said I was apparently born with a "wiring abnormality", which actually sounds kind of cool. So I get a chance every few weeks to experience recovery from severe brain trauma, of varying degrees, with no permanent physical injury. It severely impairs memory and recall, but after you go through it a couple hundred times you remember enough to get a pretty good perspective of what recovery from brain trauma is like. And you can pick up a couple of insights about how brains work and what you experience when your brain has to reconstruct its state from scratch after a hard reset.
First of all, one thing I've realized about being stupid is that it's hard to recognize your own stupidity. (Which you might guess.) A seizure can trigger an IQ drop of 80-90 points and it takes a good part of a week for it to drift back up to 160 or 170 or whatever it is. I sometimes think it's over and that I have all my wits back, but then three days later I have to rewrite all the shitty code I've been writing for the past few days. It's generally well formed, looks OK, and is easy to read, but it somehow lacks direction and it turns out to do nothing useful.
Short term memory is consolidated into long term memory through some pipeline that involves several days of processing. If it gets disrupted by an episode of brain trauma, the result is retrograde amnesia: memories formed during the previous few days are damaged and dim. Stuff learned then will usually have to be relearned. There is no hard edge to it; there are memories right up to the point of failure- but they get dimmer and dimmer up to the day of the seizure, which is just a fog of blurry memories. I can actually teach people things that just a few days later they'll have to teach back to me.
The most terrifying times are when short term memory doesn't work at all, when things go in one ear and out the other. That always produces mind-numbing terror that never stops; you're perpetually surprised by it. I can tolerate it once in a while, since it's brief and not permanent, but if I ever get diagnosed with Alzheimers or a degenerative dementia I'll make sure there's a gun in the house. My grandmother is like this now and she is always scared whenever I see her. She doesn't recognize any of us anymore. This was a really proud woman most of her life, a little snooty even, and now she doesn't even know where the toilet is in her house.
Occasionally a seizure can produce a fugue, where you wander around in a daze, totally incoherent. This happened to an epileptic friend of mine just last month- she was walking around Salt Lake City in a fugue, underdressed in 7 degree weather at 3 AM when the cops found her. When this happens, it's not always obvious what's wrong. I usually just think I'm looking for something. What, I can't remember, but it doesn't occur to me to think about it. It's easy to get lost, and I've found myself in some pretty weird places. One time (back when I had a car) I got lost driving home from work in a fugue. I didn't hit anybody or run any lights, just like my code looks OK and compiles, but the longer it takes to do something, the more likely it is to get screwed up.
I see. So if I buy something from the government, and later another administration decides that they charged me too little, *then* they're allowed to force me to rent it to others?
WTF? If an elected government passes a law forcing you to rent something, and it violates no Constitutional amendment, then yes. Whether the charge was too much or too little is plainly irrelevant. There is no Constitutional amendment that says you don't have to rent things to people. Comcast isn't being forced to quarter soldiers.
The only downside, if you can even call it one, is that large cable companies might not be inclined to buy public assets even if they see fire sale prices when their lobbyists seize control of the government. There is no compelling public interest in preventing this at all.
Google's engineers have written a special toolkit that can discriminate stupid subpoenas and discovery requests from those that have merit. Once the script determines that a given subpoena is frivolous, an automated response is sent back to the plaintiff using a standard template that combines legal terms with curse words and fills in important fields like names, dates, URLs, and docket numbers.
You can download the toolkit from Google yourself (Apache license). Do a search for friv.ol.ous.js.
Red light exists, but "redness" is a part of your own subjective experience. There's no point arguing with a blind man about aspects of your subjective experience.
I mean, I can see red things myself, but from my perspective, I have no way of knowing whether or not you do in the same way. I cannot prove that anyone but myself subjectively sees the pretty colors that I see. I can't really prove (to anyone but myself) that any of you experiences reality in a similar way at all.
I believe you do, but that belief is not based on fact- it's based on a theory that I came up with, to explain the actions of other people. And as we all know, a theory is not a fact.
What are you talking about? 95% of the people reading that blog still think it's legit.
Yeah but how many people read that blog in the first place? If even 1% of the people who are familiar with OLPC at all hear that an Intel employee is the one secretly behind a well-known blog criticizing it, the PR hit would overwhelm any gain for Intel even if 100% of the actual blog readers remained ignorant.
Any reason why you guys didn't report the consultant to management?
The management was really bad at this place. They failed to negotiate correctly with a guy who did their stupid Flash demo (this was around 1999), so he only had to provide them with a binary. Once their phone number changed they had to make another deal with him and he was able to negotiate from a position of strength.
If you buy two GPS units, you can make plug them in and make a device that can determine its own orientation like a compass.
You can buy two camera units and make a stereoscopic camera. If you include the accelerometer, you'd get enough information to create 3D object files by swiping the camera across a scene.
I hope they make a module containing its own CPU that you could stack up on the base to arbitrary heights and build a massively parallel computer. This is like my plan to build a RAID controller out of the dozen 2GB USB sticks that I was going to get from Amazon for $2 each. (Unfortunately they realized their price was wrong and they canceled my order on me, in violation of federal law.)
I once worked for a guy who had to maintain some code that a consultant had written several months before. (Ironically this was at a place that handled medical records.) He stumbled across a logic bomb in the consultant's code that hadn't gone off yet. I forget the details but he said it was some sort of obfuscated routine that used a number of inputs, including the timestamp, to produce its outputs, and the timestamp was a legitimate input needed by the routine for real reasons. It was being manipulated with some goofy number in some way to cause an overflow on a certain date, which was still several months away.
So he figures, oh, it's a logic bomb, and not being terribly intrigued by it enough to study it, he just kicked up the number to push the deadline back by a century and left it at that.
Three or four days after the bomb was set to go off, they got a phone call from the guy asking if they had any work for him.
I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored.
As opposed to the punishments given out for possession of marijuana. At least there, the damage is irreversible. Once that doob is burned up, you can't smoke it anymore!
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You want the FDA to get anal retentive on your medications, fine.
Is that where these little pills are coming from?
Just realize those expensive drugs are going to get a little more expensive and sick people who are poor might not be able to afford them anymore.
And since pharma companies spend twice as much on advertising as they do on research, it would mean fewer TV commercials to inform "guys like me, with eeee-deee", about the latest penis pills available. I'll have to turn off my spam filters to save my marriage!
Honestly I've heard of worse things being found in food than this.
When I was in fourth grade eating lunch in the cafeteria one day I saw a kid blow his nose into another kid's sandwich when he wasn't looking. Ever since then I've been eating dog kibble and saving $$$.
You might want to check your facts.
Yeah, a few hundred million years here, a few hundred million there, and soon you're talking about a seriously long time. But if you look at that timeline, an animal with the brains required for technology would have been wildly improbable more than 200 million years ago ago. The Cambrian explosion was 500 million years ago, but for a long time after that there weren't really any good brains to work with yet- just reptilian and amphibian structures. The neocortex evolved very recently, and here we are. I don't think we'll be the last animals to have conversations like this one. Animals have been getting smarter and smarter in general.
everything has always said 3 to 5 billion years.
That's from the Sun's point of view. While it's true that we do have 3 billion years until the oceans are completely boiled away, and 5 billion before the actual red giant phase, in only 1 billion years the solar output will be 10% greater than today's and the Earth will experience a runaway greenhouse effect that will raise its temperature by 50-100 degrees, making it resemble Venus.
Yes, "Hadean Earth pretty much lasted until then", give or take a billion years or so, pretty much.
Keep in mind that multicellular life has only existed for the past 200 million years, so these aren't exactly coffee breaks we're talking about. We already knew that ice can cover most of the earth within a few millenia, and as we are quickly finding out, it can disappear even faster than that if you put in a little effort. Ice reflects light, cooling off the earth, and water absorbs light, warming it, so both extremes are stable. This pleasant assortment of varied climates isn't necessarily inevitable or stable at all. According to the iceball-earth theory, the thing that eventually stopped it was volcanic activity, which put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The Earth probably has about another billion years of useful life left before the sun has its midlife crisis, so this party is "almost over" so to speak. But we're talking about time scales that render irrelevant little things like global warming and human-triggered melting of the poles- minor events that have consequences for only a few million years. We're releasing carbon that was buried during the swampy Carboniferous era, which was only a few hundred million years ago- practically last week. Once we're gone, the carbon is going to condense on the ground in the form of plant matter, get buried again over millions of years as before, and someone will dig it up again, and burn it in one of the great cycles of life.
With a billion years left, the Earth probably has time for about three or four more infestations of technological species like us, species that communicate, make tools, and burn things. We probably will just happen to have been the first in a series. Not much of our crap will remain, but just imagine what the impact on human culture would have been if we kept digging up stuff previously buried by a former technological species. I wish I could be around when it eventually happens, to see whether we'll be reviled, worshiped, or ignored.
What a load of racist asinine BS. Where do you think all these people are going to end up? In Iran? In China? In India? No. All of them will become US citizens and valuable ones at that.
Who even cares "where they end up"? If we're lucky they'll stick around, but you shouldn't blithely assume people will always want to keep coming here and staying here because the U.S. is so great. I just think it's funny to see everyone bashing India, China, and especially Iran at the same time I'm depending on immigrants from those exact countries for my paycheck.
This is exactly how the US has been building herself for the last century and a bit and you are very likely an import as well. What are you? Polish (OK, technically American)?
Italian, English, Spanish, French, Polish, Irish, German, Scottish, Cherokee, and Nicaraguan- just like you.
I have a sweet job at a small biotech startup in Silicon Valley. I was born in Philadelphia and I'm as white as white guys come. So who else works at this company?
The CEO, the CFO, and one of our principal investors are all from Iran. The CTO, the DBA, and my supervisor are from India. (The CTO is writing a tech book for a well-known publisher; I expect it will be reviewed here in a few months.) The principal database curator, the statistician, and three people on the dev team are Chinese nationals. The product manager is from the former Soviet Union; so is one of the UI devs and our street-smart IT guy. The head of tech support is Indian (OK, technically Canadian); she manages an offshore team of scientists in South America who import data into the system all day. We also just hired two additional Indian employees whom I haven't really met yet.
And then there are three white guys including me- AFAIK the only U.S. citizens. Maybe a few others are too (I've never really thought about it). Half of the people where I work came from a company that was originally started by another white guy. He lost faith in the future of the United States a few years ago, sold his business to a Fortune 500 corporation here (which promptly mismanaged it into oblivion), and took something like 10 or 20 million dollars back home to Australia.
I read threads like this one, I watch the news, and I listen to all the bloviating over Iran, over India and China, and it all just seems surreal to me. I wonder what the future holds for this place.
Something which makes the US a nicer partner for India is that English is a fairly widely understood language in India, whereas neither Russian nor Mandarin are. Beats me how much of a factor that would be, though.
Probably not much of one. There are already more people in China who can speak English than there are in the U.S.
By 2025 China will have more English speakers than the entire rest of the world.
More and more it becomes evident that religious teachings are being used to push racism, censorship, other forms of hatred and oppressing those who have beliefs against societal norms.
This has always been evident. What's new is this (probably short-lived) idea that these are bad things to want. People think anything is OK if it's part of God's plan.
Last time I travelled through the US, I had to throw out 50ml of cough syrup.
They didn't force you to drink it?
This may be a stretch, but after Microsoft Vista, I think the business community could be losing confidence in Microsoft's future. They might fear that if they use MS products, they could lose support and there would be no one left to assume liability.
It was actually measured at 140, but since that was a few years ago I usually throw 20-30 points on top for inflation. I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Americans have several submarines specializing in cutting optical internet cables running under sea. Maybe this was another one of those botched missions.
It was just Cheney briefly cutting the line so he could insert a fiber optic splitter and listen to the terrorists.
I have problems with memory, because I have intractable epilepsy with a cluster of seizures every few weeks. Nobody knows what causes them; it's not an aneurysm or anything like that, because MRI, PET, and CAT images all look normal. My neurologist said I was apparently born with a "wiring abnormality", which actually sounds kind of cool. So I get a chance every few weeks to experience recovery from severe brain trauma, of varying degrees, with no permanent physical injury. It severely impairs memory and recall, but after you go through it a couple hundred times you remember enough to get a pretty good perspective of what recovery from brain trauma is like. And you can pick up a couple of insights about how brains work and what you experience when your brain has to reconstruct its state from scratch after a hard reset.
First of all, one thing I've realized about being stupid is that it's hard to recognize your own stupidity. (Which you might guess.) A seizure can trigger an IQ drop of 80-90 points and it takes a good part of a week for it to drift back up to 160 or 170 or whatever it is. I sometimes think it's over and that I have all my wits back, but then three days later I have to rewrite all the shitty code I've been writing for the past few days. It's generally well formed, looks OK, and is easy to read, but it somehow lacks direction and it turns out to do nothing useful.
Short term memory is consolidated into long term memory through some pipeline that involves several days of processing. If it gets disrupted by an episode of brain trauma, the result is retrograde amnesia: memories formed during the previous few days are damaged and dim. Stuff learned then will usually have to be relearned. There is no hard edge to it; there are memories right up to the point of failure- but they get dimmer and dimmer up to the day of the seizure, which is just a fog of blurry memories. I can actually teach people things that just a few days later they'll have to teach back to me.
The most terrifying times are when short term memory doesn't work at all, when things go in one ear and out the other. That always produces mind-numbing terror that never stops; you're perpetually surprised by it. I can tolerate it once in a while, since it's brief and not permanent, but if I ever get diagnosed with Alzheimers or a degenerative dementia I'll make sure there's a gun in the house. My grandmother is like this now and she is always scared whenever I see her. She doesn't recognize any of us anymore. This was a really proud woman most of her life, a little snooty even, and now she doesn't even know where the toilet is in her house.
Occasionally a seizure can produce a fugue, where you wander around in a daze, totally incoherent. This happened to an epileptic friend of mine just last month- she was walking around Salt Lake City in a fugue, underdressed in 7 degree weather at 3 AM when the cops found her. When this happens, it's not always obvious what's wrong. I usually just think I'm looking for something. What, I can't remember, but it doesn't occur to me to think about it. It's easy to get lost, and I've found myself in some pretty weird places. One time (back when I had a car) I got lost driving home from work in a fugue. I didn't hit anybody or run any lights, just like my code looks OK and compiles, but the longer it takes to do something, the more likely it is to get screwed up.
having the sex drive of a frozen burrito.
But a frozen burrito is stiff, hard, and meaty. And look at the shape.
I see. So if I buy something from the government, and later another administration decides that they charged me too little, *then* they're allowed to force me to rent it to others?
WTF? If an elected government passes a law forcing you to rent something, and it violates no Constitutional amendment, then yes. Whether the charge was too much or too little is plainly irrelevant. There is no Constitutional amendment that says you don't have to rent things to people. Comcast isn't being forced to quarter soldiers.
The only downside, if you can even call it one, is that large cable companies might not be inclined to buy public assets even if they see fire sale prices when their lobbyists seize control of the government. There is no compelling public interest in preventing this at all.
Yeah but if I don't make idle threats they won't fire their manager.
I downloaded and paid for In Rainbows. I'm going to sell my U2 CDs online. Screw U2.
Google's engineers have written a special toolkit that can discriminate stupid subpoenas and discovery requests from those that have merit. Once the script determines that a given subpoena is frivolous, an automated response is sent back to the plaintiff using a standard template that combines legal terms with curse words and fills in important fields like names, dates, URLs, and docket numbers.
You can download the toolkit from Google yourself (Apache license). Do a search for friv.ol.ous.js.
Red light exists, but "redness" is a part of your own subjective experience. There's no point arguing with a blind man about aspects of your subjective experience.
I mean, I can see red things myself, but from my perspective, I have no way of knowing whether or not you do in the same way. I cannot prove that anyone but myself subjectively sees the pretty colors that I see. I can't really prove (to anyone but myself) that any of you experiences reality in a similar way at all.
I believe you do, but that belief is not based on fact- it's based on a theory that I came up with, to explain the actions of other people. And as we all know, a theory is not a fact.
For all those who lament the Bush administration, this shit should scare the hell out of you!
Why do I even care what my heartbeat sounds like when they're already listening in on my phone calls?
What are you talking about? 95% of the people reading that blog still think it's legit.
Yeah but how many people read that blog in the first place? If even 1% of the people who are familiar with OLPC at all hear that an Intel employee is the one secretly behind a well-known blog criticizing it, the PR hit would overwhelm any gain for Intel even if 100% of the actual blog readers remained ignorant.
Please, from now on, could these articles have references to reliable news sources instead of some joe blow blog?
But we have to link to stupid blogs. Reliable news sources went extinct some years ago. They were apparently not fit for survival.
Any reason why you guys didn't report the consultant to management?
The management was really bad at this place. They failed to negotiate correctly with a guy who did their stupid Flash demo (this was around 1999), so he only had to provide them with a binary. Once their phone number changed they had to make another deal with him and he was able to negotiate from a position of strength.
If you buy two GPS units, you can make plug them in and make a device that can determine its own orientation like a compass.
You can buy two camera units and make a stereoscopic camera. If you include the accelerometer, you'd get enough information to create 3D object files by swiping the camera across a scene.
I hope they make a module containing its own CPU that you could stack up on the base to arbitrary heights and build a massively parallel computer. This is like my plan to build a RAID controller out of the dozen 2GB USB sticks that I was going to get from Amazon for $2 each. (Unfortunately they realized their price was wrong and they canceled my order on me, in violation of federal law.)
I once worked for a guy who had to maintain some code that a consultant had written several months before. (Ironically this was at a place that handled medical records.) He stumbled across a logic bomb in the consultant's code that hadn't gone off yet. I forget the details but he said it was some sort of obfuscated routine that used a number of inputs, including the timestamp, to produce its outputs, and the timestamp was a legitimate input needed by the routine for real reasons. It was being manipulated with some goofy number in some way to cause an overflow on a certain date, which was still several months away.
So he figures, oh, it's a logic bomb, and not being terribly intrigued by it enough to study it, he just kicked up the number to push the deadline back by a century and left it at that.
Three or four days after the bomb was set to go off, they got a phone call from the guy asking if they had any work for him.
I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored.
As opposed to the punishments given out for possession of marijuana. At least there, the damage is irreversible. Once that doob is burned up, you can't smoke it anymore!