Yep, and that is nothing compared to the quantity of radioactive material released in the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980.
Consider that an estimate of 520 million tons of ash material was released. Then take a colossally conservative estimate of 0.0001% radioactive material and you will still have ~520 tons of radioactive material from one eruption. This just accounts for the solid components, and dosen't even begin to estimate the radioactive gases that were released.
Further consider that the ash was ~10 micron size, small enough to easily ingest into the lungs.
It really makes me laugh when people talk about how bad mankind is to the environment, when eruptions like Mt. St. Helens released more carbon dioxide into the atmospehere in a day or two than humans have created since we started making fire. Not to mention all the nasty sulfur and nitrogen based compounds that went with it. And that was just ONE volcanic eruption. Think about Krakatoa in 1883 or even the constant eruptions that go on all over the world.
Humans will always pale in comparison to nature when it comes to "pollution." Even the life giving Sun bombards the Earth with more dangerous radiation in one hour than that stupid little satellite will ever drop on us.
So go eat some PCBs and take a bath in some radioactive waste coolant water. The whole universe is trying to kill you, might as well not fight it!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Makes you wonder if we have been missing the boat when it comes to the creation of new and more potent toxins.
If c60 in its unadulterated form causes this much damage, imagine what it could do if someone specifically modified it with lead atoms inside, or bonded to a nerve toxin, or some other such nastiness.
I better not tell anyone. Whew! I 'm glad to know that no one will ever think about inventing these things!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
This phenomenon is called Reperfusion Damage, and lot of research is currently done to find way to minimise it (example : using anti-oxidizers).
IIRC, one of the largest factors in re-perfusion damage is the production of glutamic acid.
PCP and dextromethorphan have been known for years to stop/reduce the production of glutamic acid when re-perfusion occurs, and can help reduce the damage of strokes. However, the side effects can be quite drastic. Both are hallucinogenic.
You may know the name dextromethorphan from your cough medicine bottles, if you read them like I do. Taken in large quantities it can cause intense hallucination in a similar manner to PCP.
As a side note, I had friends in high school who used to steal bottles of Robitussin from the drug store and force the stuff down their throats. If they could prevent themselves from explosively regurgitating it they were in for a long lasting, intense, and incapacitatingly psychadelic high. They called it "Doing the robo."
Back on track. I wonder if the problem with developing chemicals to treat re-perfusion damage is that many of them are intensely psychoactive, and the last thing a stroke patient needs to see when they regain consciousness is a big fuzzy pink dragon in overalls eating the nurses.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
1) Study up on just where american troops have been stationed outside the US, how long they have been there, and in what numbers.
2) Study up on why they went there in the first place. Then check out why they have stayed.
3) Imagine the USA withdrawing all their troops and support from those areas now.
4) Imagine what would have happened had we not stationed them there in the first place and maintained a presence there.
It is more than just "involvement" in the second world war, as you put it. It is a continuing effort to sustain countries that are notoriously unstable and susceptible to outiside attacks.
As for our current actions, I am of the feeling that the governemnt has not been completely honest with the American public, however it is not just this administration that has done it, and I don't think it has been dishonest in the same way that everyone else thinks they have been.
In addition, I feel that the political public (those that vote and those that participate in the media machine that tries to influence all the one who do not vote) is so overwhelmingly occupied with attaining special rights and considerations for themselves and their groups that they do not have the time or mental capacity to undrstand the real resons why the USA would want to have a strong military presence in the Middle East.
Even saying the words "Long Term Strategic Planning" would get most people's eyes to glaze over. Stating that the Soviet Union had achieved global dominance through strategic warfare would get you blank stares and you would have people ready to refute you who did not even understand strategic warfare. And if you said that the welfare of the USA depended on breaking the decades long pattern of ignoring strategic warfare, counter-insurgency, and "wet" intelligence work, you would have people lined up around the block to shout you down.
Fortunately, not everyone listens to these voices. Fortunately there are some people who have studied the history of the world through the eyes of the military, and with a view for keeping this country viable.
The most heinous tragedy is that the people who live here are more concerned with whether or not their network television show will be cancelled than whether or not their country will be around in the next 50 years. They revel in their ignorance and are more ready to listen to people from other countries than they are to their conscience.
This may be more of a question than a statement, and I am glad that we have a community to discuss this. Now consider this:
My friend is a distributor for many versions of linux with literally years of Linux/bds/unix/winnt experience on the user and administrator side. He goes and buys a set of dolby 5.1 speakers and then realizes that he has to either go buy a specific sound card, or change his OS, probably both. It takes him a day to get this done, and he finds that because of software (OS) limitations he cannot differentiate the center and rear channels.
My question is this: if it takes someone with his level of experience a day to cobble something together to get his new hardware to work, how can you expect your "average consumer" to ever get their system to work?
If the answer is that Linux/Open source OS will grow to accomodate these things seamlessly, then won't that then make it similar (in some of the bad ways) to Windows?
------ What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
So what could work is to connect the monitoring electrodes farther up the neuron pathway. Then we might be able to get a clean signal and still make the device work for someone with neuron dammage. Unless of course the dammage starts in the spinal column, in which case you would have to implant electrodes in the brain directly. Kind of like the monkeys who can move the dot around the screen by thinking about it when they have electroded implanted in their motor neuron centers.
Even more fun would be had if you could cause the electrodes to transmit electronic pulses into the larynx and surrounding muscles, rather than just monitoring them. Kind of like having a human puppet!
Boss: (pointing to collar on his neck) You see this new device I have here, it will make speech from the signals sent to the muscle neurons when you think about speaking, even if you don't move your mouth.
Me: (Holding a small black box with a big red button) You see this device I have here, it will reverse the polarity of the neural monitors, bypass the flux capacitor, and overload the speech recognition filters.
Boss: What a bunch of nonsense! That's just a cardboard box with some model paint on it!
Me: (presses button)
Boss: (screaming) I'm a MONKEY! I'm a MONKEY! EEEEK! EEEEK!!
------ What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws.
Hear hear...I had the same syntax problems with some early games. I think the Zork series was prety forgiving, but I remember in Kings Quest 1 there was this damnable bowl with the word "fill" written on the bottom. I typed "say fill" with and without quotes, every way I could think of. Turned out that the word "say" was unnecessary, go figure. Pretty lame actually that the game was not coded better.
As for the mapping, I just got really good at memorizing directions and building the maps in my mind. To this day if you were to drop me in front of a pc and load up any of the games I played (Zork games, Bard's tale, Swords of Chaos, Dungeons and dragons, etc.) I could get you from one side of the world to the other from memory. I actually believe that text based adventure games like Zork are directly responsible for my sense of direction.
As for the FPS game thing, I used to think that everyone was cheating in Quake when I first played online. I could not imagine people acquiring a targer and shooting accurately as fast as they do. However, after playing I learned that 1) your eyes and reflexes can be trained to do amazing things, and 2) many poeple are exceptionally predictable, given enough experence, and if you can predict what someone will do, you seem to have uncanny reflexes.
What I have found after years of addictive game play is that playing against other people has supplanted my desire to just be challenged by a game. Playing against a program is now very easy for me. There always seems to be a way to circumvent or milk the game to get what you want without much effort. However, when you play Quake or counter strike against someome or a group of people who are well trained, and take pride in being on top of their ladder, the challenge is really worth it, and there are no easy ways to beat them.
You have to learn, and then force yourself to apply those things that you have learned in order to get better. That is the basic difference between a computer and a person. Once you learn a trick that works agains a computer, it works again, and again, and again. Tricks work once on an alert and accomplished human. Sometimes not even once.
----- What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I find it ironic that the post was modded funny. Not only that, I find it ironic that the article was written as a parody/satire.
I tried to laugh, honestly, but when you get confronted with this:....Four hours of television a day, over the course of a month, adds up to 120 hours. That's five entire days! Why not spend that time living your own life, instead of watching fictional people live theirs?.... it is really hard to laugh.
If you think about it for a minute or two it becomes really sad. There is all this information, all this knowledge at our fingertips, so much that it dwarfs what has been collected in all of recorded history up to now, and we would rather watch a television show peppered with commericals, written and produced by people who have to use laugh tracks to prod the audience in to laughing because the scripts suck.
It really is sickening to think that our society has all the tools to become transcendent, to embody all the high hopes for the future that our ancestors had, and all we do is sit on our hands and suck up whatever will keep us looking at the TV long enough for the advertisers to pump in just one more slogan, one more goofy jingle, or one more psychologist devised, control-group modified, postmodern, morally affected sales pitch.
I would complete this post with some compelling call to action, possibly life changing in its eloquence and power, but my soap opera is about to start.
---- What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I am really tired of people "looking for life on (insert planet/moon name here)." If it can't jump up and say "Howdy!", prance around in a skipmy outfit like that Vulcan chick from Enterprise, or shoot a ray-gun with a tentacled appendage, who cares! Evolution is king, baby: let's not coddle those weak little Martian organisms. If they can't handle the competetion with some strapping Earth-born organisms...fuck em!
Think about how long it takes to terraform a planet. Shouldn't we have started by now? It's past time to seed some plants to eat the carbon dioxide, release some oxygen and let them begin digging the water out of the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere.
Speaking of plants, I wonder if tossing cactus/sensamilla seeds out of a baloon bourne lander would be a good way of finding water. Those plants are pretty hardy, and anywhere the plants start to grow would potentially have water sources near the surface. I bet I could devise some wicked experiments to carry out on Mars with plants that were modified genetically to withstand the harsher conditions.
If only the scientific community would grow some gonads we would have a great decade of science and experimentiton ahead of us.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I heard the NPR story myself, and I must say that Gerta Keller's response to those who say she is wrong (some say so without even seeing the evidence) made me smile with delight.
Paraphrasing, she said that all she wanted was to know what actually happened, and that she was not going to waste time trying to convince people who have already made up their minds. "It's impossible" she said.
Wonderful response to the naysayers. Plus, it shows one of my favorite sides of the scientific community. Specifically, that she is dedicated to the search for the truth rather than kow-towing to the established theories that are sometimes propped up by politics in the scientific community.
Remember that when you hear one side of an argument is sounds true and correct, until you hear the other. And primogeniture has no place in the world of Ideas.
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Much of Hollywood's movie production business is being exported to other places due in large part to the freakish business taxation and cost of living of the state of California. The high prices for the sound stages and studios, even the employees wages, are directly related to this. Even other cities in the US like Houston (Texas) have had a dramatic increase in movie production business and shooting because of the lower price.
Seeing this weakness Canada has subsidized the growth and support of the movie industry in a calculated effort to steal business from the overpriced Hollywood studios. Not that this is dirty business, it is just a case of a competetor finding a way to do just-as-good business for a lower price (sometimes called competetion). The fact that they used tax subsidies and rebates just shows that the Canadian government is pretty smart, as well as the Canadian business people who suggested it to them.
As for the creative workers losing out, many of them do, however, many American companies are using Canadian facilities to produce their works. This means that at least some of the Americans keep thir jobs.
Anyways, the great thing I see in outsourcing to reduce costs is that it reduces the threshold to production. By this I mean that some movies that are/were considered to be too expensive to make become reasonable. Considreing all the trouble that Peter Jackson went through trying to get funding for his film, if he had to rely only on Hollywood studios to make them, they probably would never have been made.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Replace "Porn" with "computer/console gamess" and I think you will find that every statement is just as true.
Probably more so, considering that video game companies revenues are outstripping even Hollywood's fantastic profits, and the newest technology is almost always associated with the cutting edge FPS games.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I wandered into a Quake 2 server just last night. It was late and most of the Gamespy WOD servers were deserted. I found one with a nice ping and maybe seven or eight people playing. As soon as I connected and fragged a couple of people I was politely told that the server was hosting a "Ladies Only event--check your penises at the door."
After a little humerous banter about how I would be willing to pop out my downsized guillotine in order to play with them, I left. Before going I noticed that I had played with almost all of them before and had had my ass handed to me on different occasions by each of them. Furthermore, I realized that in the past I had learned quite a bit from these ladies by watching them in the process of said ass handing.
Oddly enough, up until that moment I have never really paid attention to nicknames or claimed or percieved gender when playing online games or even chatting. It is too easy to pretend to be something you are not while hiding behind the anonymity of the interent. That and the image of an old, sweaty, overweight, balding, semi-toothless, naked pervert sitting in front of his jacked up old x386 in a trailer park in the middle of Iowa, passing himself off as an 17 year old girl so he can get his jollies, has kept me from ever taking anyone at their word as to their sex on the net.
I guess because I have been purposefully oblivious to gender I never noticed that women were kept from playing, or kept out of tournaments. I mean if it wasn't for the proximity of the LAN, a quake or CS tournament would be just like sitting at home at your PC, never knowing if someone was a girl or the old perverted Iowan.
Anyways, I was a little disappointed to not be able to play with those ladies last night, and I felt like I was being rejeced because of something I couldn't control. I relly would have liked to stay and at least spectate, but out of respect I left. I guess I got to feel a little of how they feel when they are set apart, restricted, or discriminated against, and I can say that I did not like it at all.
The main thing I would liked to have seen is how they play and compare it to other people(guys). I think that the unique perspective of the female mind is fascinating. Plus, the sado masochist in me likes getting beat on by women!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
"Your argument is that since we don't know everything, we therefore know nothing."
Actually, I am arguing that if mankind increases its knowledge from and infinitesimal amount to an infinitessimal amount plus an arbitrarily small number we shouldn't get all puffed up about what we know.
Furthermore, I am subtly trying to encourage people to remember that once you pidgeonhole a subject under the category of "known" you shut yourself off from seeing it in new and potentially revealing ways. Remeber that much of what is considered "new science" is sparked by accident, or by observing things that were overlooked by past scientists.
Also, using and applying science has not led us closer to any final answers, it has only allowed us to see more clearly that the universe is full of things that we don't understand. The article we are posting under is an example of that.
"It's a technique of, *over time*, increasing our understanding"
This is my personal belief, but I think that as time goes on we will never run out of opportunities for us to increase our understanding. And with that in mind I think it is sophomoric to ever consider a subject closed, explained, or known.
What's the matter oficer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
"My guess is because there is precious little left to explain, as most of our daily life has been easily described by science."
I don't like to post in this kind of language but: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING WHEN YOU POSTED THIS?!?!?!?
All of our scientific explanations are just a glossy finish over a gaping chasm of ignorance.
If we truly understood our surrondings the scientific method would be irrelevant. Experiments would be unnecessary, we would know the outcomes before we started. Since we don't understand we fiddle with this and fiddle with that and observe the workings of the mystic algorythm and try to draw conclusions.
We observe and infer about the very big and the very small and shamefully think ourselves the wiser. How contradictory that we constantly argue about how the world and humanity got here, and we haven't even progressed beyond the abilities of single celled organisms when it comes to organic chemistry. We don't even understand ourselves, physically, "psychologically," or spiritually.
How is it that even a three year old can quickly surpass the limits of human knowledge with a single sylable mantra of "why?" Sit down with a monomanicaly inquisitive child sometime, and if you can overcome your frustration you will realize that the basis of that feeling is the irony and embarrasment of a child reminding you that your understanding is an illusion.
In the future, when you start to think that mankind has made some vast and commendable stride in some field just think about a few things. First, think "How much do we truly know about the universe?" Then think, "If we knew everything about the universe, how different would our approach to this current subject be?" Apply this to new knowledge and discoveries, and to old. Meditate on it for awhile and maybe some of the ingrained human arogance will start to fall away.
Sheesh man, even the article we are posting under is lamenting the uncertainty of our macrocosmic understanding. And people think that the "givens" in our realm of knowledge are any differnt? My bet is that EVERYTHING we think we understand is truly vastly different that we currently believe. Fortunately, time and history are on my side in this. If you look at the past timeline, just about everyone has been wrong so far...this is why the ancient Egyptians didn't have micropocessors. If you project the future timeline I think it will be more of the same.
I find it sad that we are permeated by the mystery of our universe and yet we constantly seem to find ways to ignore the utter splendor and mystery of all things.
But hey, who am I, right? Nobody. But, just maybe you can take someone else's word for it...
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates
Have a nice day, and try to remember that we live in an amazing, beautiful, mysterious playground, full of unknowns, unfathomables, and things that man was not meant to know (tm).
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I would rather refer to this age as the "Age of Bullshit."
The word information has the connotation that the content it is referring to has some informative quality. I generally believe that the content of the "information" we see hear and read on a daily basis is actually bullshit.
My problem with the term "Information Age" is that it denys the basic human drive of adulteration. Now by adulteration I don't mean sex with your neighbors wife mind you (thought that is a drive), but the basic human drive to mess with the truth and spin it to show what we want it to show. I guess that comes from the feeling that if we can convince someone else to believe like we do then it somehow lends credence to our beliefs.
Whatever the reason, it is pervasive. Like the parent said, "companies are realizing this and focusing on how to capitalize on this." Remember Nike and their "corporate speech" argument? They wanted to be able to lie with impunity to the public, their shareholders, and their customers. Why? Because it would benefit their bottom line. Talk about trying to capitalize on information!
This illustrates the problem with information as a commodity. If you buy information you have to be sure you aren't buying a lie. It also illustrates the power aspect of information, if you control what people are exposed to you can manipulate their behavior without having to be accountable.
I remember an anecdote I heard a few years ago from an ex-Ford employee. He said their internal motto was "Perception is reality, reality be damned." Another instance where a company has recognised the power of information...all you have to do is control what your customers percieve as the truth and you will reap the benefits.
Ok, so from now on just remember that this is the AGE of BULLSHIT.
I think the ultimate act of directorial competence would be to somehow find a way to make everyone like Jar-Jar in the third movie and then have him die in some tragic yet heroic way.
Oh, and the irony would be just peachy.
Of course, to pull that coup off we are talking about a fantastic display of the talents of a well seasoned director with skill, vision, and insight into the minds of the viewer...
But this is Lucas we are talking about, which means we will probably just have Jar-Jar doing prattfalls and fart noises up until the closing credits. Sad...
My father was crippled by a severe case of polio. He caught the disease when he was only 10 years old. Because of the nerve and muscle tissue dammage he did not walk until highschool, and then only with full braces and crutches. Now that he is getting older, the neurological and muscular symptoms he had when he was 10 years old are resurfacing and he is again confined to a bed, unable to even help himself sit up, or to breathe on his own (he has a respirator connected to a trache).
If this technology was proven and could help my father to walk or to even breathe better on his own I think it would be fantastic. DEspite his condition, my father earned three degrees (chemical engineering, mathematics, computer science). I can only imagine what he could have acomplished without his phisical limitations.
As for being eager for it, I don't presume to know your mind, but I bet you would entertain the idea quite seriously if you were in my father's position.
I can only imagine how someone who is paralyzed would feel if given the ability to move again. I can even see a system that would not only allow someone to transmit motor neuron function from the brain to the muscles, but also to transmit sensory neuron information to the brain from the extremeties. In essence this could be a complete loop that could allow those with spinal cord damage to actually feel again.
I think that this is exactly where technology needs to go in this century. Not only will it allow doctors to overcome some of the most tragic and vexing medical conditions, but I believe that it will result, ultimately, in benefits to people who do not suffer from any type of ailment.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, and that is nothing compared to the quantity of radioactive material released in the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980.
Consider that an estimate of 520 million tons of ash material was released. Then take a colossally conservative estimate of 0.0001% radioactive material and you will still have ~520 tons of radioactive material from one eruption. This just accounts for the solid components, and dosen't even begin to estimate the radioactive gases that were released.
Further consider that the ash was ~10 micron size, small enough to easily ingest into the lungs.
It really makes me laugh when people talk about how bad mankind is to the environment, when eruptions like Mt. St. Helens released more carbon dioxide into the atmospehere in a day or two than humans have created since we started making fire. Not to mention all the nasty sulfur and nitrogen based compounds that went with it. And that was just ONE volcanic eruption. Think about Krakatoa in 1883 or even the constant eruptions that go on all over the world.
Humans will always pale in comparison to nature when it comes to "pollution." Even the life giving Sun bombards the Earth with more dangerous radiation in one hour than that stupid little satellite will ever drop on us.
So go eat some PCBs and take a bath in some radioactive waste coolant water. The whole universe is trying to kill you, might as well not fight it!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Makes you wonder if we have been missing the boat when it comes to the creation of new and more potent toxins.
If c60 in its unadulterated form causes this much damage, imagine what it could do if someone specifically modified it with lead atoms inside, or bonded to a nerve toxin, or some other such nastiness.
I better not tell anyone. Whew! I 'm glad to know that no one will ever think about inventing these things!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
This phenomenon is called Reperfusion Damage, and lot of research is currently done to find way to minimise it (example : using anti-oxidizers).
IIRC, one of the largest factors in re-perfusion damage is the production of glutamic acid.
PCP and dextromethorphan have been known for years to stop/reduce the production of glutamic acid when re-perfusion occurs, and can help reduce the damage of strokes. However, the side effects can be quite drastic. Both are hallucinogenic.
You may know the name dextromethorphan from your cough medicine bottles, if you read them like I do. Taken in large quantities it can cause intense hallucination in a similar manner to PCP.
As a side note, I had friends in high school who used to steal bottles of Robitussin from the drug store and force the stuff down their throats. If they could prevent themselves from explosively regurgitating it they were in for a long lasting, intense, and incapacitatingly psychadelic high. They called it "Doing the robo."
Back on track. I wonder if the problem with developing chemicals to treat re-perfusion damage is that many of them are intensely psychoactive, and the last thing a stroke patient needs to see when they regain consciousness is a big fuzzy pink dragon in overalls eating the nurses.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
They should make the design symetrical and design the surrounding parts so that it dosen't matter which way you put it in.
Or better yet, "should have"...as in past tense.
-------
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Here is an interesting excercise for you.
1) Study up on just where american troops have been stationed outside the US, how long they have been there, and in what numbers.
2) Study up on why they went there in the first place. Then check out why they have stayed.
3) Imagine the USA withdrawing all their troops and support from those areas now.
4) Imagine what would have happened had we not stationed them there in the first place and maintained a presence there.
It is more than just "involvement" in the second world war, as you put it. It is a continuing effort to sustain countries that are notoriously unstable and susceptible to outiside attacks.
As for our current actions, I am of the feeling that the governemnt has not been completely honest with the American public, however it is not just this administration that has done it, and I don't think it has been dishonest in the same way that everyone else thinks they have been.
In addition, I feel that the political public (those that vote and those that participate in the media machine that tries to influence all the one who do not vote) is so overwhelmingly occupied with attaining special rights and considerations for themselves and their groups that they do not have the time or mental capacity to undrstand the real resons why the USA would want to have a strong military presence in the Middle East.
Even saying the words "Long Term Strategic Planning" would get most people's eyes to glaze over. Stating that the Soviet Union had achieved global dominance through strategic warfare would get you blank stares and you would have people ready to refute you who did not even understand strategic warfare. And if you said that the welfare of the USA depended on breaking the decades long pattern of ignoring strategic warfare, counter-insurgency, and "wet" intelligence work, you would have people lined up around the block to shout you down.
Fortunately, not everyone listens to these voices. Fortunately there are some people who have studied the history of the world through the eyes of the military, and with a view for keeping this country viable.
The most heinous tragedy is that the people who live here are more concerned with whether or not their network television show will be cancelled than whether or not their country will be around in the next 50 years. They revel in their ignorance and are more ready to listen to people from other countries than they are to their conscience.
This may be more of a question than a statement, and I am glad that we have a community to discuss this. Now consider this:
My friend is a distributor for many versions of linux with literally years of Linux/bds/unix/winnt experience on the user and administrator side. He goes and buys a set of dolby 5.1 speakers and then realizes that he has to either go buy a specific sound card, or change his OS, probably both. It takes him a day to get this done, and he finds that because of software (OS) limitations he cannot differentiate the center and rear channels.
My question is this: if it takes someone with his level of experience a day to cobble something together to get his new hardware to work, how can you expect your "average consumer" to ever get their system to work?
If the answer is that Linux/Open source OS will grow to accomodate these things seamlessly, then won't that then make it similar (in some of the bad ways) to Windows?
------
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
So what could work is to connect the monitoring electrodes farther up the neuron pathway.
Then we might be able to get a clean signal and still make the device work for someone with neuron dammage. Unless of course the dammage starts in the spinal column, in which case you would have to implant electrodes in the brain directly. Kind of like the monkeys who can move the dot around the screen by thinking about it when they have electroded implanted in their motor neuron centers.
Even more fun would be had if you could cause the electrodes to transmit electronic pulses into the larynx and surrounding muscles, rather than just monitoring them. Kind of like having a human puppet!
Boss: (pointing to collar on his neck) You see this new device I have here, it will make speech from the signals sent to the muscle neurons when you think about speaking, even if you don't move your mouth.
Me: (Holding a small black box with a big red button) You see this device I have here, it will reverse the polarity of the neural monitors, bypass the flux capacitor, and overload the speech recognition filters.
Boss: What a bunch of nonsense! That's just a cardboard box with some model paint on it!
Me: (presses button)
Boss: (screaming) I'm a MONKEY! I'm a MONKEY! EEEEK! EEEEK!!
------
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws.
Hear hear...I had the same syntax problems with some early games. I think the Zork series was prety forgiving, but I remember in Kings Quest 1 there was this damnable bowl with the word "fill" written on the bottom. I typed "say fill" with and without quotes, every way I could think of. Turned out that the word "say" was unnecessary, go figure. Pretty lame actually that the game was not coded better.
As for the mapping, I just got really good at memorizing directions and building the maps in my mind. To this day if you were to drop me in front of a pc and load up any of the games I played (Zork games, Bard's tale, Swords of Chaos, Dungeons and dragons, etc.) I could get you from one side of the world to the other from memory. I actually believe that text based adventure games like Zork are directly responsible for my sense of direction.
As for the FPS game thing, I used to think that everyone was cheating in Quake when I first played online. I could not imagine people acquiring a targer and shooting accurately as fast as they do. However, after playing I learned that 1) your eyes and reflexes can be trained to do amazing things, and 2) many poeple are exceptionally predictable, given enough experence, and if you can predict what someone will do, you seem to have uncanny reflexes.
What I have found after years of addictive game play is that playing against other people has supplanted my desire to just be challenged by a game. Playing against a program is now very easy for me. There always seems to be a way to circumvent or milk the game to get what you want without much effort. However, when you play Quake or counter strike against someome or a group of people who are well trained, and take pride in being on top of their ladder, the challenge is really worth it, and there are no easy ways to beat them.
You have to learn, and then force yourself to apply those things that you have learned in order to get better. That is the basic difference between a computer and a person. Once you learn a trick that works agains a computer, it works again, and again, and again. Tricks work once on an alert and accomplished human. Sometimes not even once.
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What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I find it ironic that the post was modded funny. Not only that, I find it ironic that the article was written as a parody/satire.
I tried to laugh, honestly, but when you get confronted with this:....Four hours of television a day, over the course of a month, adds up to 120 hours. That's five entire days! Why not spend that time living your own life, instead of watching fictional people live theirs?.... it is really hard to laugh.
If you think about it for a minute or two it becomes really sad. There is all this information, all this knowledge at our fingertips, so much that it dwarfs what has been collected in all of recorded history up to now, and we would rather watch a television show peppered with commericals, written and produced by people who have to use laugh tracks to prod the audience in to laughing because the scripts suck.
It really is sickening to think that our society has all the tools to become transcendent, to embody all the high hopes for the future that our ancestors had, and all we do is sit on our hands and suck up whatever will keep us looking at the TV long enough for the advertisers to pump in just one more slogan, one more goofy jingle, or one more psychologist devised, control-group modified, postmodern, morally affected sales pitch.
I would complete this post with some compelling call to action, possibly life changing in its eloquence and power, but my soap opera is about to start.
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What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Dude, you know waaaay to much about cannabis.
By the way, what are you doing Saturday night?
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I am really tired of people "looking for life on (insert planet/moon name here)." If it can't jump up and say "Howdy!", prance around in a skipmy outfit like that Vulcan chick from Enterprise, or shoot a ray-gun with a tentacled appendage, who cares! Evolution is king, baby: let's not coddle those weak little Martian organisms. If they can't handle the competetion with some strapping Earth-born organisms...fuck em!
Think about how long it takes to terraform a planet. Shouldn't we have started by now? It's past time to seed some plants to eat the carbon dioxide, release some oxygen and let them begin digging the water out of the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere.
Speaking of plants, I wonder if tossing cactus/sensamilla seeds out of a baloon bourne lander would be a good way of finding water. Those plants are pretty hardy, and anywhere the plants start to grow would potentially have water sources near the surface. I bet I could devise some wicked experiments to carry out on Mars with plants that were modified genetically to withstand the harsher conditions.
If only the scientific community would grow some gonads we would have a great decade of science and experimentiton ahead of us.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
"While we're still on the subject, what about using a roulette wheel to decide? "
I am sure that Pete Rose would LOVE your idea.
I heard the NPR story myself, and I must say that Gerta Keller's response to those who say she is wrong (some say so without even seeing the evidence) made me smile with delight.
Paraphrasing, she said that all she wanted was to know what actually happened, and that she was not going to waste time trying to convince people who have already made up their minds. "It's impossible" she said.
Wonderful response to the naysayers. Plus, it shows one of my favorite sides of the scientific community. Specifically, that she is dedicated to the search for the truth rather than kow-towing to the established theories that are sometimes propped up by politics in the scientific community.
Remember that when you hear one side of an argument is sounds true and correct, until you hear the other. And primogeniture has no place in the world of Ideas.
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Much of Hollywood's movie production business is being exported to other places due in large part to the freakish business taxation and cost of living of the state of California. The high prices for the sound stages and studios, even the employees wages, are directly related to this. Even other cities in the US like Houston (Texas) have had a dramatic increase in movie production business and shooting because of the lower price.
Seeing this weakness Canada has subsidized the growth and support of the movie industry in a calculated effort to steal business from the overpriced Hollywood studios. Not that this is dirty business, it is just a case of a competetor finding a way to do just-as-good business for a lower price (sometimes called competetion). The fact that they used tax subsidies and rebates just shows that the Canadian government is pretty smart, as well as the Canadian business people who suggested it to them.
As for the creative workers losing out, many of them do, however, many American companies are using Canadian facilities to produce their works. This means that at least some of the Americans keep thir jobs.
Anyways, the great thing I see in outsourcing to reduce costs is that it reduces the threshold to production. By this I mean that some movies that are/were considered to be too expensive to make become reasonable. Considreing all the trouble that Peter Jackson went through trying to get funding for his film, if he had to rely only on Hollywood studios to make them, they probably would never have been made.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Replace "Porn" with "computer/console gamess" and I think you will find that every statement is just as true.
Probably more so, considering that video game companies revenues are outstripping even Hollywood's fantastic profits, and the newest technology is almost always associated with the cutting edge FPS games.
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I wandered into a Quake 2 server just last night. It was late and most of the Gamespy WOD servers were deserted. I found one with a nice ping and maybe seven or eight people playing. As soon as I connected and fragged a couple of people I was politely told that the server was hosting a "Ladies Only event--check your penises at the door."
After a little humerous banter about how I would be willing to pop out my downsized guillotine in order to play with them, I left. Before going I noticed that I had played with almost all of them before and had had my ass handed to me on different occasions by each of them. Furthermore, I realized that in the past I had learned quite a bit from these ladies by watching them in the process of said ass handing.
Oddly enough, up until that moment I have never really paid attention to nicknames or claimed or percieved gender when playing online games or even chatting. It is too easy to pretend to be something you are not while hiding behind the anonymity of the interent. That and the image of an old, sweaty, overweight, balding, semi-toothless, naked pervert sitting in front of his jacked up old x386 in a trailer park in the middle of Iowa, passing himself off as an 17 year old girl so he can get his jollies, has kept me from ever taking anyone at their word as to their sex on the net.
I guess because I have been purposefully oblivious to gender I never noticed that women were kept from playing, or kept out of tournaments. I mean if it wasn't for the proximity of the LAN, a quake or CS tournament would be just like sitting at home at your PC, never knowing if someone was a girl or the old perverted Iowan.
Anyways, I was a little disappointed to not be able to play with those ladies last night, and I felt like I was being rejeced because of something I couldn't control. I relly would have liked to stay and at least spectate, but out of respect I left. I guess I got to feel a little of how they feel when they are set apart, restricted, or discriminated against, and I can say that I did not like it at all.
The main thing I would liked to have seen is how they play and compare it to other people(guys). I think that the unique perspective of the female mind is fascinating. Plus, the sado masochist in me likes getting beat on by women!
What is the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
"Your argument is that since we don't know everything, we therefore know nothing."
Actually, I am arguing that if mankind increases its knowledge from and infinitesimal amount to an infinitessimal amount plus an arbitrarily small number we shouldn't get all puffed up about what we know.
Furthermore, I am subtly trying to encourage people to remember that once you pidgeonhole a subject under the category of "known" you shut yourself off from seeing it in new and potentially revealing ways. Remeber that much of what is considered "new science" is sparked by accident, or by observing things that were overlooked by past scientists.
Also, using and applying science has not led us closer to any final answers, it has only allowed us to see more clearly that the universe is full of things that we don't understand. The article we are posting under is an example of that.
"It's a technique of, *over time*, increasing our understanding"
This is my personal belief, but I think that as time goes on we will never run out of opportunities for us to increase our understanding. And with that in mind I think it is sophomoric to ever consider a subject closed, explained, or known.
What's the matter oficer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
"My guess is because there is precious little left to explain, as most of our daily life has been easily described by science."
I don't like to post in this kind of language but: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING WHEN YOU POSTED THIS?!?!?!?
All of our scientific explanations are just a glossy finish over a gaping chasm of ignorance.
If we truly understood our surrondings the scientific method would be irrelevant. Experiments would be unnecessary, we would know the outcomes before we started. Since we don't understand we fiddle with this and fiddle with that and observe the workings of the mystic algorythm and try to draw conclusions.
We observe and infer about the very big and the very small and shamefully think ourselves the wiser. How contradictory that we constantly argue about how the world and humanity got here, and we haven't even progressed beyond the abilities of single celled organisms when it comes to organic chemistry. We don't even understand ourselves, physically, "psychologically," or spiritually.
How is it that even a three year old can quickly surpass the limits of human knowledge with a single sylable mantra of "why?" Sit down with a monomanicaly inquisitive child sometime, and if you can overcome your frustration you will realize that the basis of that feeling is the irony and embarrasment of a child reminding you that your understanding is an illusion.
In the future, when you start to think that mankind has made some vast and commendable stride in some field just think about a few things. First, think "How much do we truly know about the universe?" Then think, "If we knew everything about the universe, how different would our approach to this current subject be?" Apply this to new knowledge and discoveries, and to old. Meditate on it for awhile and maybe some of the ingrained human arogance will start to fall away.
Sheesh man, even the article we are posting under is lamenting the uncertainty of our macrocosmic understanding. And people think that the "givens" in our realm of knowledge are any differnt? My bet is that EVERYTHING we think we understand is truly vastly different that we currently believe. Fortunately, time and history are on my side in this. If you look at the past timeline, just about everyone has been wrong so far...this is why the ancient Egyptians didn't have micropocessors. If you project the future timeline I think it will be more of the same.
I find it sad that we are permeated by the mystery of our universe and yet we constantly seem to find ways to ignore the utter splendor and mystery of all things.
But hey, who am I, right? Nobody. But, just maybe you can take someone else's word for it...
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Socrates
Have a nice day, and try to remember that we live in an amazing, beautiful, mysterious playground, full of unknowns, unfathomables, and things that man was not meant to know (tm).
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
Another oldie and goodie...
A guy looking for chicks in a bar apporaches a stunning blonde. They make smalltalk while they drink and he finally propositions her.
She says to him, "Look, you're cute and all, but I NEED "12 to be satisfied."
And I said to her, "Great! I get to screw you four times then!"
Hmmm...Did I say I? I meant HIM...He said that...err...umm yeah.
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly earth laws!
"By keeping their underlings ignorant, they can look better in the eyes of upper management"
In my field we call this the "Mushroom" style of managment.
Another way to say it is: "keep them in the dark and feed them shit."
Let's hope to God that they didn't put this new nano-scope in the same room as the server.
The '8 jets of flame that are shooting out of the drives right now could dammage it.
What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!
I would rather refer to this age as the "Age of Bullshit."
The word information has the connotation that the content it is referring to has some informative quality. I generally believe that the content of the "information" we see hear and read on a daily basis is actually bullshit.
My problem with the term "Information Age" is that it denys the basic human drive of adulteration. Now by adulteration I don't mean sex with your neighbors wife mind you (thought that is a drive), but the basic human drive to mess with the truth and spin it to show what we want it to show. I guess that comes from the feeling that if we can convince someone else to believe like we do then it somehow lends credence to our beliefs.
Whatever the reason, it is pervasive. Like the parent said, "companies are realizing this and focusing on how to capitalize on this." Remember Nike and their "corporate speech" argument? They wanted to be able to lie with impunity to the public, their shareholders, and their customers. Why? Because it would benefit their bottom line. Talk about trying to capitalize on information!
This illustrates the problem with information as a commodity. If you buy information you have to be sure you aren't buying a lie. It also illustrates the power aspect of information, if you control what people are exposed to you can manipulate their behavior without having to be accountable.
I remember an anecdote I heard a few years ago from an ex-Ford employee. He said their internal motto was "Perception is reality, reality be damned." Another instance where a company has recognised the power of information...all you have to do is control what your customers percieve as the truth and you will reap the benefits.
Ok, so from now on just remember that this is the AGE of BULLSHIT.
Ok, who else was scared to death to click on the petetion link, wondering if someone had posted a redirect to a mirror of the original goatse.cx?
I think the ultimate act of directorial competence would be to somehow find a way to make everyone like Jar-Jar in the third movie and then have him die in some tragic yet heroic way.
Oh, and the irony would be just peachy.
Of course, to pull that coup off we are talking about a fantastic display of the talents of a well seasoned director with skill, vision, and insight into the minds of the viewer...
But this is Lucas we are talking about, which means we will probably just have Jar-Jar doing prattfalls and fart noises up until the closing credits. Sad...
My father was crippled by a severe case of polio. He caught the disease when he was only 10 years old. Because of the nerve and muscle tissue dammage he did not walk until highschool, and then only with full braces and crutches. Now that he is getting older, the neurological and muscular symptoms he had when he was 10 years old are resurfacing and he is again confined to a bed, unable to even help himself sit up, or to breathe on his own (he has a respirator connected to a trache).
If this technology was proven and could help my father to walk or to even breathe better on his own I think it would be fantastic. DEspite his condition, my father earned three degrees (chemical engineering, mathematics, computer science). I can only imagine what he could have acomplished without his phisical limitations.
As for being eager for it, I don't presume to know your mind, but I bet you would entertain the idea quite seriously if you were in my father's position.
I can only imagine how someone who is paralyzed would feel if given the ability to move again. I can even see a system that would not only allow someone to transmit motor neuron function from the brain to the muscles, but also to transmit sensory neuron information to the brain from the extremeties. In essence this could be a complete loop that could allow those with spinal cord damage to actually feel again.
I think that this is exactly where technology needs to go in this century. Not only will it allow doctors to overcome some of the most tragic and vexing medical conditions, but I believe that it will result, ultimately, in benefits to people who do not suffer from any type of ailment.