A better idea would be to make the State driver's license databases accessible over XMLRPC or something.
Myspace sends an XMLRPC verify() request to the state's verification server, with an identification number. I had a state-issued ID number when I was 14 years old; anyone 15+ is very likely to have one via the Learner Driver's License. Anyone who doesn't...well, it's an incentive to go out and get one then, isn't it. Or the school district could verify ages the same way with a student ID (not an SSN).
Some type of system that works ilke Scan DL > Send DL to mainframe > DL returns information on the person.
In order to proffer a DL# to an electronic system, you have to have the physical card in front of you. Nobody in their right mind is going to remember a number that in FL is in the form of $-xxx-yyy-YY-zzz-n after all. The site compares the responses of the xmlrpc query to the provided information, and approves or denies the registration.
Or, to make it even more secure, why not directly send verify(DL#,criteria) and have the function return OK or GO AWAY depending on whether it matches. Do the comparison server-side, so the information stays in the relative security of the Government's systems.
I'm not opposed to positive ID verification...but if they do positively verify IDs, they need to remove the restrictions on who can view who's information. If everyone is legitimate, they have no business hiding the younger people from the general network.
Ultimately, WGA is not about stopping end-user piracy.
It's about stopping institutional piracy, and about stopping shady VARs or low-budget shops like Cheap Guys or other local places from reselling a single copy of Windows over and over again. (I had a set of expensive, invoiced PCs with Windows preloaded onto them, but with no CoAs in the provided media kit from the VAR; that's what they're trying to stop.)
It's so the end user is getting what they're paying for, really.
I own several web presences, all of which I post a variety of personal information on.
My linked web site here, Trendyblog for instance, has my name, picture, and political opinions as well as music tastes stamped all over it.
My personal journal type site, has a variety of personal things posted on it, nothing too risque but it goes into detail about my interpersonal interactions. I also tend to name names in this one, including that of my employer. Most postings on it, however, are set up to be visible to my friends only, for what protection that's worth.
My MySpace is virtually devoid of all content; a half-dozen pictures of me in various places, a paragraph autobiography, and the 8-question demographic survey. And a handful of tame friends who don't have anything else.
For my Facebook, which I have networked to my employer, geographic area, and school, I have around 100+ photographs posted; all of them are configured to be visible to friends only. Not the whole network; not friends-of-friends, just people I've picked out as willing to network with. Of course, this only works if you're picky about who you associate with (as I am, online and in real life) so anyone who clicks "Yes" to any request for anything, and has 900 friends on Facebook, gets very little real protection from this, as opposed to someone like me who only adds people he knows in real life and has talked to in person.
It's not perfect -- I do talk about my work (on Trendyblog, anonymously with all identifying information removed; on my journal, I say names) and I talk about and photodocument my time off -- some of which is "non HR friendly" to say the least. But, I've taken steps to protect myself, and anything that gets through -- well, I probably deserved it, for putting it out there in the first place.
It's a risk I'm knowingly taking, that I might have people I don't want to read it do so. I've weighed it against the risk of not putting it out there at all for my friends, and the risk won.
Microsoft's Product Activation line is an example of what outsourced phone contacts should be like.
I have never once had trouble understanding any of their language, ever -- while it is clear that they are not Americans (British accent with slight lisps in distinctive places makes me think they're probably Indian) but they're very communicative. Either MS hires upper class people, or trains them better, I don't know. But, out of 50+ activation calls, I've never had a problem.
Dell tech support, on the other hand, is aweful. HP tech support has been hit or miss -- I've gotten a woman with a distinctly American name and distinctly Southern accent, and I've gotten Prapeek from Calcutta who I had a lot of difficulty communicating an advanced RA exchange billing authorization to.
I do think that it's a good thing for us to send these jobs to rural areas, though. This will ultimately improve the economy for everyone involved, and lead to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction as well. Granted, I have a harder time understanding some southerners than the MS people, so it's not a perfect solution. But it's a step in the right direction.
Your right to free speech does not trump the school's right to protect their computer network, or their legal obligation to provide a "safe" Internet experience for their students.
"he real question comes down to this. If I make a proxy on my own computer,
at my own home, outside of the schools jurisdiction, and if I use my free speech
rights to talk about that proxy with another student, can the school, interrogate,
suspend, and expel me?"
They can't expel you for talking about it. But they can expel you for facilitating insubordination or any number of other things which arise from the use of said resource you've discussed. Just talking about any number of things, while it will quickly land you in the spotlight of some type of law enforcement, is unactionable unless you then go out and do it. And you did.
Bottom line was that you encouraged others to break the rules, followed by them actually breaking the rules using a method that you yourself created.
You weren't being expelled for independant thought; you were expelled because you were breaking the rules. There are enough other methods for reading and accessing the forbidden knowledge, including but not limited to, doing it on the 16 hours of the day you're not in school.
Furthermore, education is compulsory, but public school education is not. There are any number of religious sectarian or private schools you could have gone to. Or you could have homeschooled. But instead, you stirred up trouble and got burned for it.
Don't think I have no idea where you're coming from, either -- I did something very similar, and I got in trouble for it. But unlike you, I didn't make myself out to be some crusader, and I got a warning.
The problem is the fact that I can only have one display accelerated at a time. I purchased a second graphics card with its own accelerator to run my second display, thinking that this would get around the limitation -- but low and behold, on my P4-820 with 2GB of RAM, and an X800 XL + 9250, I still can't watch a DVD and play a DirectX game at the same time in full-motion. Or really do anything.
For a lot of people, the path to better computing is to add monitors -- it allows you to logically partition your work area spatially to a greater degree than just one monitor does. But if you can't do accelerated tasks on both monitors, you effectively only have 1 in a lot of situations.
That just doesn't cut it for me. Software rendering of DVDs, TV, videos, etc. all on my 2ndary display is not acceptable. But there's nothing I can do about it.
This is a groundbreaking piece of research! They discovered that some 60 million Americans might be high in what in psychology is called "openness to experience" (or on some reports, "intelligence").
Imagine that!
This is, at best, derivative crap; at worst, it is dubious science and misleading statistics. Personality research should be handled better than this, especially since we have a precisely defined term for exactly what they are talking about already. We don't need another. "Intellectually curious" trivializes a person's being open to ideas down to a parlor curiosity, not a central trait. And that is not correct.
You know, if you read the wiring diagram for the thing, you can probably override it.
My JVC in-dash DVD came with a "safety interlock" but it indicated plainly in the manual "if you will be sure the screen is out of the view of the driver, simply connect SAFETY to GROUND."
You might have something like that in your current one.
World of Warcraft is utterly repulsive to me, even more than most other similar games.
I will lose all faith in humanity if World of Warcraft becomes even marginally accepted anywhere outside smelly, unwashed nerds basements, dorm rooms, and bachelor pads.
As a former MMORPG player, for many years, words cannot express my loathing for World of Warcraft.
Trouble is, the fact that everyone runs as Administrator was because that was the *only* account back on the shitty operating systems Windows 95 and Windows 98. Newer, modern systems are backwards compatible with the older applications -- which want full access. Many apps just will not work without an administrator login. And, because of this existing bulk of work that couldn't be rewritten, MS went with backwards compatability over security.
That assumption made, developers ran with it, knowing that their applications didn't need to be written to honor pesky ACLs and so forth.
So MS couldn't add it as an add-on. Sure, you can manually configure permissions on different registry keys with the registry editor and a hook monitor application (and some people do) but that's too much work for anyone but a dedicated security freak.
Windows 2000 and XP wouldn't have sold a single copy if they weren't compatible with most of what was already out there.
Interestingly enough, the whole Registry issue would be basically moot and invalid if the Registry didn't exist at all -- apps which get their config from XML or (my preference) INI files in their folders, don't have to worry so much. Trouble being, so many core system settings are stored in the Registry, there'd have to be a "common base" of config files and so forth. An equally big mess, really. Once again, the Registry lets a lot more applications know a lot more about the system they are running on, than config files. Ease of use versus security.
It's a very fine line, and I'm not so happy with the way XP security is done, but I understand why they made a lot of the "security vs. X" tradeoffs they did. In a corporate environment, it certainly can be locked down to whatever degree you want via GPOs, but in a home environment it's pretty open (on XP Home anyway, XP Pro is a lot more sane about network stuff by default in my experience.)
(1) Condensation (2) A fridge can't cool fast enough for the PC's power output (they're meant to slowly cool to a very low temperature without much resistance to that cooling -- you'd burn out the compressor and/or end up with a heatbox rather than a fridge if you put a PC in it.)
A freezer might possibly be able to do it, they have higher cooling output, but even that is doubtful.
Winamp, Fubar, and many other players support FLAC and SHN using, if not native decoders, a plugin. The good thing about those extensible players is that you can write an in_format.dll for pretty much anything, and Winamp's core is none the wiser. There's in_flac and so forth, which does the decoding. Basically the only things that won't play FLAC are, if I recall correctly, iTunes and WMP. And a power user with FLAC files probably isn't using one of those.
WAV is basically unused for audio because the other formats were so much more versatile. MP3 won out over WAV because the files are 1/20th the size, and for Joe Idiot, they sound about the same. Hell even for me, at higher bitrates (256kbps+) I can't tell the difference between the CD and the compressed version.
When you say "by compressing waves" I'm not sure if you mean WAV files, or audio waveforms.
For the first, well, we are losing things. Lossy compression tends to throw out different parts of the frequency range to keep it down, in addition to losing dynamic range. MP3, OGG, MP4, all do it differently, but the approximation is close enough that the brain fills in the gaps by what it "thinks" should be there, and you get a mental picture of the original.
If you're talking about audio waveforms, we have the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, which states that "In order to recover all Fourier components of a periodic waveform, it is necessary to sample more than twice as fast as the highest waveform frequency." The highest waveform frequency a human ear can hear is, approximately, 22.05kHz. Most people's hearing peaks out at about 20kHz. This is why digital sampling is done, at the lowest, at 44.1kHz: twice the speed of the highest possible sample we're going to here. Others include 48kHz (sampling up to 24kHz), and then the so-called "high definition" sampling frequencies, at 96kHz and 192kHz respectively. Basically, the ability to create a perfect reconstruction of an analog waveform has been mathematically figured out quite a while ago -- there is some debate as to whether the 44.1 and 48kHz sample rates preserve all harmonics, as you indicated, this is why DVD-Audio is sampled at the much higher rate. For 99.99999% of applications, 44.1kHz and 48kHz sampling are perfect and don't lose any data at all, anyway.
About that encoder -- using a variable bitrate encoder will do just that. It raises the bitrate in places where there are more frequencies and more dynamics, so as not to lose anything, and lowers it where less is needed. Using two-pass VBR encoding (WMA10, and some others) you are effectively doing exactly what you are talking about.
A lot of good points you made -- you're definitely thinking about it. A lot of this research and algorithms are old-hat, though. They're already out there.
Emergents in complex systems (biological or otherwise) are a fairly common thing...it could be that the "soul" is an emergent idea formed by human thought processes. The person's essence, embodied as a concept (which would allow for things like "pouring your soul into your work" in the sense of, it was so central to your personality that you imbued a great deal of your own identity into what you did.)
The finding is interesting because it was replicated on a level far lower than the placebo effect could operate on -- individual immune cells removed from a nervous system to influence them.
So, even controlling for the placebo effect, it still does *something*. It could be that the cells are responding to traces of histimine smaller than the sensors could detect, however.
Re:Putting taxes on your credit card?!?!??!
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Day-to-day for 5 months with no other source of income adds up pretty quickly, even with my living accomodations already taken care of. I'm still paying that off...and I wasn't going on splurges and spending-sprees, either.
Quarantined connections are a very, very good thing. Corporate networks already do this -- there is, if I recall, a Cisco client which enforces router rules based on the security software installed on the PC. Windows RRAS can enforce a quarantine network based on whether or not the connecting machines are patched up-to-date. Captive portal software allows only authenticated users to connect to the greater network -- same with VPN tunnels.
All of these things work in a very good, and non-censoring way: they require the user connecting to the network, to take certain "safe computing" steps. Requiring virus/spyware protection is overkill (I for one have never run spyware or virus protection, and have only had one spyware infection that required a reformat and two viruses -- in 11 years of being connected to networks unprotected. All of those infections were 3+ years ago.) but requiring that computer users, say, don't broadcast worm packets and don't have unpatched security holes, is a very good thing.
It's one thing for the ISP to shut off people for downloading certain types of content, it's another if the user is abusing the network resources. Similar to, a phone company won't cut your line for calling people they might not agree with the opinions of -- but if you, say, wardial your entire neighborhood on a daily basis, they have some recourse against you.
Overall, the ISP restricting access to its network to people who aren't infected and are secure, is only a good thing -- on every possible front. And, from the stand point that Windows updates generally are denied to people using pirate copies, it will reduce software piracy rates as well. There's no excuse for people to still be broadcasting the Sasser worm, other than the fact that it isn't worth their time to fix it. This will make it worth their time, to no longer be a deliberate nuisance to everyone else.
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I get SMS spam already, I have no idea how they got my 10digit@vzw.com SMTP-to-SMS redirect address.
About 2 or 3 a day...been going on for years. There's nothing I can do about it, so I've been told from Verizon -- I just have to pay for it.
A better idea would be to make the State driver's license databases accessible over XMLRPC or something.
Myspace sends an XMLRPC verify() request to the state's verification server, with an identification number. I had a state-issued ID number when I was 14 years old; anyone 15+ is very likely to have one via the Learner Driver's License. Anyone who doesn't...well, it's an incentive to go out and get one then, isn't it. Or the school district could verify ages the same way with a student ID (not an SSN).
Some type of system that works ilke Scan DL > Send DL to mainframe > DL returns information on the person.
In order to proffer a DL# to an electronic system, you have to have the physical card in front of you. Nobody in their right mind is going to remember a number that in FL is in the form of $-xxx-yyy-YY-zzz-n after all. The site compares the responses of the xmlrpc query to the provided information, and approves or denies the registration.
Or, to make it even more secure, why not directly send verify(DL#,criteria) and have the function return OK or GO AWAY depending on whether it matches. Do the comparison server-side, so the information stays in the relative security of the Government's systems.
I'm not opposed to positive ID verification...but if they do positively verify IDs, they need to remove the restrictions on who can view who's information. If everyone is legitimate, they have no business hiding the younger people from the general network.
Ultimately, WGA is not about stopping end-user piracy.
It's about stopping institutional piracy, and about stopping shady VARs or low-budget shops like Cheap Guys or other local places from reselling a single copy of Windows over and over again. (I had a set of expensive, invoiced PCs with Windows preloaded onto them, but with no CoAs in the provided media kit from the VAR; that's what they're trying to stop.)
It's so the end user is getting what they're paying for, really.
I own several web presences, all of which I post a variety of personal information on.
My linked web site here, Trendyblog for instance, has my name, picture, and political opinions as well as music tastes stamped all over it.
My personal journal type site, has a variety of personal things posted on it, nothing too risque but it goes into detail about my interpersonal interactions. I also tend to name names in this one, including that of my employer. Most postings on it, however, are set up to be visible to my friends only, for what protection that's worth.
My MySpace is virtually devoid of all content; a half-dozen pictures of me in various places, a paragraph autobiography, and the 8-question demographic survey. And a handful of tame friends who don't have anything else.
For my Facebook, which I have networked to my employer, geographic area, and school, I have around 100+ photographs posted; all of them are configured to be visible to friends only. Not the whole network; not friends-of-friends, just people I've picked out as willing to network with. Of course, this only works if you're picky about who you associate with (as I am, online and in real life) so anyone who clicks "Yes" to any request for anything, and has 900 friends on Facebook, gets very little real protection from this, as opposed to someone like me who only adds people he knows in real life and has talked to in person.
It's not perfect -- I do talk about my work (on Trendyblog, anonymously with all identifying information removed; on my journal, I say names) and I talk about and photodocument my time off -- some of which is "non HR friendly" to say the least. But, I've taken steps to protect myself, and anything that gets through -- well, I probably deserved it, for putting it out there in the first place.
It's a risk I'm knowingly taking, that I might have people I don't want to read it do so. I've weighed it against the risk of not putting it out there at all for my friends, and the risk won.
Activation calls on behalf of customers.
'nuff said.
Microsoft's Product Activation line is an example of what outsourced phone contacts should be like.
I have never once had trouble understanding any of their language, ever -- while it is clear that they are not Americans (British accent with slight lisps in distinctive places makes me think they're probably Indian) but they're very communicative. Either MS hires upper class people, or trains them better, I don't know. But, out of 50+ activation calls, I've never had a problem.
Dell tech support, on the other hand, is aweful. HP tech support has been hit or miss -- I've gotten a woman with a distinctly American name and distinctly Southern accent, and I've gotten Prapeek from Calcutta who I had a lot of difficulty communicating an advanced RA exchange billing authorization to.
I do think that it's a good thing for us to send these jobs to rural areas, though. This will ultimately improve the economy for everyone involved, and lead to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction as well. Granted, I have a harder time understanding some southerners than the MS people, so it's not a perfect solution. But it's a step in the right direction.
protocol overhead, probably.
at higher speeds, TCP/IP just doesn't scale so well.
You deserved to be expelled.
Your right to free speech does not trump the school's right to protect their computer network, or their legal obligation to provide a "safe" Internet experience for their students.
"he real question comes down to this. If I make a proxy on my own computer,
at my own home, outside of the schools jurisdiction, and if I use my free speech
rights to talk about that proxy with another student, can the school, interrogate,
suspend, and expel me?"
They can't expel you for talking about it. But they can expel you for facilitating insubordination or any number of other things which arise from the use of said resource you've discussed. Just talking about any number of things, while it will quickly land you in the spotlight of some type of law enforcement, is unactionable unless you then go out and do it. And you did.
Bottom line was that you encouraged others to break the rules, followed by them actually breaking the rules using a method that you yourself created.
You weren't being expelled for independant thought; you were expelled because you were breaking the rules. There are enough other methods for reading and accessing the forbidden knowledge, including but not limited to, doing it on the 16 hours of the day you're not in school.
Furthermore, education is compulsory, but public school education is not. There are any number of religious sectarian or private schools you could have gone to. Or you could have homeschooled. But instead, you stirred up trouble and got burned for it.
Don't think I have no idea where you're coming from, either -- I did something very similar, and I got in trouble for it. But unlike you, I didn't make myself out to be some crusader, and I got a warning.
The problem isn't with the display size.
The problem is the fact that I can only have one display accelerated at a time. I purchased a second graphics card with its own accelerator to run my second display, thinking that this would get around the limitation -- but low and behold, on my P4-820 with 2GB of RAM, and an X800 XL + 9250, I still can't watch a DVD and play a DirectX game at the same time in full-motion. Or really do anything.
For a lot of people, the path to better computing is to add monitors -- it allows you to logically partition your work area spatially to a greater degree than just one monitor does. But if you can't do accelerated tasks on both monitors, you effectively only have 1 in a lot of situations.
That just doesn't cut it for me. Software rendering of DVDs, TV, videos, etc. all on my 2ndary display is not acceptable. But there's nothing I can do about it.
I am still waiting for my EyeTap.
This is a groundbreaking piece of research! They discovered that some 60 million Americans might be high in what in psychology is called "openness to experience" (or on some reports, "intelligence").
Imagine that!
This is, at best, derivative crap; at worst, it is dubious science and misleading statistics. Personality research should be handled better than this, especially since we have a precisely defined term for exactly what they are talking about already. We don't need another. "Intellectually curious" trivializes a person's being open to ideas down to a parlor curiosity, not a central trait. And that is not correct.
In FL, I call *FHP and get the Highway Patrol to come to the scene.
Or, I find the Sherrif's Office non-emergency number, and call that.
You know, if you read the wiring diagram for the thing, you can probably override it.
My JVC in-dash DVD came with a "safety interlock" but it indicated plainly in the manual "if you will be sure the screen is out of the view of the driver, simply connect SAFETY to GROUND."
You might have something like that in your current one.
Why not a Staff of Hippocrates?
That's the official symbol of the *medical profession*, I'm sure most people are at least cursorily aware of it's meaning.
White lunchboxes with said staff on them could be first-aid kits just as well as white lunchboxes with a red cross.
Dear god, please, no.
World of Warcraft is utterly repulsive to me, even more than most other similar games.
I will lose all faith in humanity if World of Warcraft becomes even marginally accepted anywhere outside smelly, unwashed nerds basements, dorm rooms, and bachelor pads.
As a former MMORPG player, for many years, words cannot express my loathing for World of Warcraft.
Trouble is, the fact that everyone runs as Administrator was because that was the *only* account back on the shitty operating systems Windows 95 and Windows 98. Newer, modern systems are backwards compatible with the older applications -- which want full access. Many apps just will not work without an administrator login. And, because of this existing bulk of work that couldn't be rewritten, MS went with backwards compatability over security.
That assumption made, developers ran with it, knowing that their applications didn't need to be written to honor pesky ACLs and so forth.
So MS couldn't add it as an add-on. Sure, you can manually configure permissions on different registry keys with the registry editor and a hook monitor application (and some people do) but that's too much work for anyone but a dedicated security freak.
Windows 2000 and XP wouldn't have sold a single copy if they weren't compatible with most of what was already out there.
Interestingly enough, the whole Registry issue would be basically moot and invalid if the Registry didn't exist at all -- apps which get their config from XML or (my preference) INI files in their folders, don't have to worry so much. Trouble being, so many core system settings are stored in the Registry, there'd have to be a "common base" of config files and so forth. An equally big mess, really. Once again, the Registry lets a lot more applications know a lot more about the system they are running on, than config files. Ease of use versus security.
It's a very fine line, and I'm not so happy with the way XP security is done, but I understand why they made a lot of the "security vs. X" tradeoffs they did. In a corporate environment, it certainly can be locked down to whatever degree you want via GPOs, but in a home environment it's pretty open (on XP Home anyway, XP Pro is a lot more sane about network stuff by default in my experience.)
(1) Condensation
(2) A fridge can't cool fast enough for the PC's power output (they're meant to slowly cool to a very low temperature without much resistance to that cooling -- you'd burn out the compressor and/or end up with a heatbox rather than a fridge if you put a PC in it.)
A freezer might possibly be able to do it, they have higher cooling output, but even that is doubtful.
Winamp, Fubar, and many other players support FLAC and SHN using, if not native decoders, a plugin. The good thing about those extensible players is that you can write an in_format.dll for pretty much anything, and Winamp's core is none the wiser. There's in_flac and so forth, which does the decoding. Basically the only things that won't play FLAC are, if I recall correctly, iTunes and WMP. And a power user with FLAC files probably isn't using one of those.
WAV is basically unused for audio because the other formats were so much more versatile. MP3 won out over WAV because the files are 1/20th the size, and for Joe Idiot, they sound about the same. Hell even for me, at higher bitrates (256kbps+) I can't tell the difference between the CD and the compressed version.
When you say "by compressing waves" I'm not sure if you mean WAV files, or audio waveforms.
For the first, well, we are losing things. Lossy compression tends to throw out different parts of the frequency range to keep it down, in addition to losing dynamic range. MP3, OGG, MP4, all do it differently, but the approximation is close enough that the brain fills in the gaps by what it "thinks" should be there, and you get a mental picture of the original.
If you're talking about audio waveforms, we have the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, which states that "In order to recover all Fourier components of a periodic waveform, it is necessary to sample more than twice as fast as the highest waveform frequency." The highest waveform frequency a human ear can hear is, approximately, 22.05kHz. Most people's hearing peaks out at about 20kHz. This is why digital sampling is done, at the lowest, at 44.1kHz: twice the speed of the highest possible sample we're going to here. Others include 48kHz (sampling up to 24kHz), and then the so-called "high definition" sampling frequencies, at 96kHz and 192kHz respectively. Basically, the ability to create a perfect reconstruction of an analog waveform has been mathematically figured out quite a while ago -- there is some debate as to whether the 44.1 and 48kHz sample rates preserve all harmonics, as you indicated, this is why DVD-Audio is sampled at the much higher rate. For 99.99999% of applications, 44.1kHz and 48kHz sampling are perfect and don't lose any data at all, anyway.
About that encoder -- using a variable bitrate encoder will do just that. It raises the bitrate in places where there are more frequencies and more dynamics, so as not to lose anything, and lowers it where less is needed. Using two-pass VBR encoding (WMA10, and some others) you are effectively doing exactly what you are talking about.
A lot of good points you made -- you're definitely thinking about it. A lot of this research and algorithms are old-hat, though. They're already out there.
WAV is ineffecient...there are plenty of lossless algorithms out there which offer 30-60% space savings to WAV.
FLAC being the first to come to mind. Also, --alt-preset-insane is pretty damn close, anyway.
No sense in using WAV if you can get bitperfect reproductions in a smaller format. That'd make that 160GB drive hold about 300 CDs.
Emergents in complex systems (biological or otherwise) are a fairly common thing...it could be that the "soul" is an emergent idea formed by human thought processes. The person's essence, embodied as a concept (which would allow for things like "pouring your soul into your work" in the sense of, it was so central to your personality that you imbued a great deal of your own identity into what you did.)
The finding is interesting because it was replicated on a level far lower than the placebo effect could operate on -- individual immune cells removed from a nervous system to influence them.
So, even controlling for the placebo effect, it still does *something*. It could be that the cells are responding to traces of histimine smaller than the sensors could detect, however.
We need more Eyetaps (http://www.eyetap.org/)
I'd wear that around in public, borg-like or not.
Day-to-day for 5 months with no other source of income adds up pretty quickly, even with my living accomodations already taken care of. I'm still paying that off...and I wasn't going on splurges and spending-sprees, either.
Not proud of it, but that's life.
I'd say that you, sir, are right on the money.
Failing to account for known base-rate information in comparisons, is a heuristic which leads us to make mistakes a lot of times.
Quarantined connections are a very, very good thing. Corporate networks already do this -- there is, if I recall, a Cisco client which enforces router rules based on the security software installed on the PC. Windows RRAS can enforce a quarantine network based on whether or not the connecting machines are patched up-to-date. Captive portal software allows only authenticated users to connect to the greater network -- same with VPN tunnels.
All of these things work in a very good, and non-censoring way: they require the user connecting to the network, to take certain "safe computing" steps. Requiring virus/spyware protection is overkill (I for one have never run spyware or virus protection, and have only had one spyware infection that required a reformat and two viruses -- in 11 years of being connected to networks unprotected. All of those infections were 3+ years ago.) but requiring that computer users, say, don't broadcast worm packets and don't have unpatched security holes, is a very good thing.
It's one thing for the ISP to shut off people for downloading certain types of content, it's another if the user is abusing the network resources. Similar to, a phone company won't cut your line for calling people they might not agree with the opinions of -- but if you, say, wardial your entire neighborhood on a daily basis, they have some recourse against you.
Overall, the ISP restricting access to its network to people who aren't infected and are secure, is only a good thing -- on every possible front. And, from the stand point that Windows updates generally are denied to people using pirate copies, it will reduce software piracy rates as well. There's no excuse for people to still be broadcasting the Sasser worm, other than the fact that it isn't worth their time to fix it. This will make it worth their time, to no longer be a deliberate nuisance to everyone else.