Personally I think the biggest problem working towards making search engines useless is junky commercial sites that offer nothing worth my while. Type in a few keywords to find something and end up with a few hundred: (a) dead links (b) rubbishy commercial sites that arent related to what you're looking for (c) home pages that look like exactly what you're looking for - at a glance - but turn out to contain less than a few scraps of useful stuff.
"A world without Van Gogh and Van Morrison would be a much sadder place for "the rest of us" to live in"
So millions of people should endure incredible amounts of pain and suffering just so that a miniscule percentage of those people can produce some nice paintings and some cool songs for us? What an incredibly selfish attitude. Our priorities should lie with eliminating suffering, even if it means a few less paintings and a couple less songs.
Anyway, there is no evidence to suggest that there would be no more "great artists" if we eliminated mental illness. For all we know there might be more of them, since many people with untreated mental illnesses aren't capable of producing anything during their episodes. Van Gogh was one of them - he was incapable of painting while he was having his episodes.
Regarding the question of where the right middle should be, it seems logical to me to define it as follows: If some or other mental problem (whether biological or psychological) is impairing your ability to be functional and/or to be happy, and that problem cannot be solved "just by working it out for yourself", then you should probably fall into the "mentally ill" category.
Essentially, I think it should come down to a persons ability to be (a) happy and (b) functional. If too much re-absorbtion of the neurotransmitter serotonin is physically and biologically preventing a person from being happy or from functioning in society, then they need some external help, and qualify as mentally ill. Similarly, if a person has an inability to form healthy relationships because of deep psychological problems from severe abuse in early childhood, and this is preventing them from being happy or from functioning, then they should qualify.
I don't believe that the "where is the middle" is a difficult question at all.
I also don't believe at all that only maladjusted people are capable of great works. I believe the opposite to be true - that if we elminated mental illness completely today, then far more many "great works" would arise from people. In almost every case of untreated severe mental illness, the person is incapable of producing anything. Van Gogh, for example, was unable to paint at all during his "episodes", it was only between his episodes that he produced all his works. There is no evidence AT ALL to suggest that non-mentally ill people are incapable of producing great works, and I'm sure that many great people were/are *not* mentally ill.
There is also a question of ethics involved: if it was true that eliminating mental illness would mean "no more masterpieces", does that make it OK to leave people untreated, inflicting an incredible amount of pain and suffering on them, just so that society can have "a few masterpieces" that are anyway seldom truly appreciated by the masses? I don't think so. Our priorities should lie with eliminating suffering, even if that meant no more masterpieces. The suffering is not worth it.
I object somewhat to the terms you use to describe mentally ill people. I'm not asking for "political correctness" but rather for a more positive attitude.
There are plenty of mentally ill people around you (that you call "nuts") and most of you don't even realise it - most people keep it secret, for fear of the stigma, for fear of being called "nuts", for fear of having people assume that you're disfunctional and so on.
It is very probable that many of you have direct family members or friends that are mentally ill and you don't know it. The people you work/go to school with may be mentally ill and you don't know it. I know women who kept secret from their husbands for decades the fact that they had clinical depression, and children who have grown up with depression and not once in their lives did their parents even realise it. Your parents, your boy/girlfriends, your siblings etc may be mentally ill and you don't even know it - so consider carefully your notions of what it means to be mentally ill - these aren't people who "are cuckoos" and "belong in a padded cell". Mentally ill does not imply that you are "nuts".
Untreated depression is the number 1 cause of suicide, and in the US suicide suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death, and is well on its way to becoming the 2nd by 2020. We should learn how to deal with mentally ill people in order to save lives and alleviate suffering, in exactly the same way that you learn how to do CPR, the heimlich manouvre etc etc at school. Since mental illness claims far more lives than drowning or choking, I don't understand why society is failing to make this a higher priority.
I'm beginning to suspect that someone has written a script that automatically responds to all slashdot posts with "This is old news". I find it very tiresome to see it on every interesting/. article I read.
"What about developing and Third-World nations, where few will have access to Perfect Baby technologies? You mean if everybody can't have it, nobody should have it? I thought that this was a basic idea of Russian communism in the 20s, but it kinda went out of fashion since then."
The issue isn't as simple as you make it sound. First-world access to large-scale genetic "improvements" without third-world access to similar would lead to a very sharp increase in the current gap between the haves and have-nots. Every time in society that that gap becomes too great, some form of revolution occurs.. the "haves" would have the benefit of technology but the "have-nots" would have the benefits of numbers. This is an issue that is in everyones best interests to keep in check, don't be so quick to dismiss it out of hand.
Ice Window Manager is pretty good in this regard. Now I just wish app writers for X would take 2 seconds out to actually think about putting in keyboard shortcuts for applications to minimize mouse usage.
"At first sight" or something like that, starring Val Kilmer. Apparently based on a true story, about a guy that lost his sight when he was just a baby (although not quite the same as being blind from birth) but then much later on in life (about 30's I think) gets it back by a new experimental operation. Pretty interesting, the way he reacts at first (total confusion to the new stimuli, being frightened by it), but after a a few weeks his brain starts to learn how to "see". He struggled a lot with many of the "higher-level" aspects of seeing, such as depth perception.. not being able to tell a picture of an object from the object itself, etc.
The brain is pretty adaptable though. I read about some experiments (can't remember the guy's name or website) where he does brain experiments with salamanders, things like adding a new eye and connecting it to the brain.. the brain "rewires" itself to handle the new information.
It's fine and well for intellectual activities to stimulate brain development, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of educating people (especially school kids) if you can't get them *interested* in doing that. If you want to improve education then the question is whether or not you can actually make kids want to use their brains more. Most people I know unfortunately do as much as possible to try do as little thinking as they can possibly get away with, a tendency I find rather disturbing, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that the majority of the media (especially advertising) likes to encourage this mental laziness so that they can rip you off by saying that "scientists prove our washing powder washes whiter" etc etc.. but I'm starting to diverge from the topic.
Surely it wouldn't cost too much to create a monthly (or maybe quaterly, or whatever) mini magazine that contains articles highlighting the latest interesting developments in science, that would get distributed to every school. They may even be taken from (and sponsored by) some of the more mainstream science journals like Discover, Nature etc.
A few possible effects: - teachers are kept up to date - a percentage of teachers may become more interested in their subject (obviously not all, but even 2% would be a lot) - a percentage of pupils may become more interested in the subject (the magazines would be made available to students)
The (a) increased interest by students/teachers and (b) the increased exposure in relevant fields would increase the readership of the magazines that might sponsor something like that, so they would also win - essentially every american school graduate with any interest in Science would have been exposed to such magazines and may continue to buy them once they're working.
You dont have to be an AC to pull anonymous dirty tricks in an online forum; its incredibly easy for anyone at MS or Artx (for example) to just get a small collection of/. logins that have no real identifying information in them, and then happily plunder away with "grass-roots support" lying campaigns, etc. Is there that much difference?
Put on a VR data glove, then do a "walking" type motion with your pointer and middle fingers, doing some gesture recognition to determine when your fingers are "walking".
I bet this qualifies as the absolute stupidest suggestion so far.
My guess is that the OS is any particular abstraction of whatever underlying hardware (or software) is there, as seen by applications. To the user that might be "windows and menus and buttons and stuff", but technically its more like the set of APIs and components that applications make use of.
The key idea of this definition is that the "OS" exposes this abstraction to the applications (eg by making an API available), but an application doesn't expose any APIs or anything of that sort to anything else. You can remove applications, since no other applications depend on them, but remove any of the core components or APIs of the OS and applications will break.
According to that definition, though, any application which exposes some sort of API to anything else (e.g. the GIMP or Netscape, with plug-in models, or a JVM running on anything) is in itself an operating system.
.. to make a computer program that generates music with more emotion than some of the over-produced emotionless (but *technically* good) drivel from bands like boyzone or singers like Celine Dion.
I wonder how caffeine should then theoretically affect depressives. Since biological depression is related to excessive reuptake of serotonin, I would imagine that there should be some sort of effect, although perhaps its either too minimal or too long-term to be noticeable.
Correct. I inherited depression. I won't put my children through that if I have any choice at all. That's not the only "nerve" either, but the rest is personal.
I realise that attempting to "better" people through genetic manipulation is a very touchy issue. However, removing disorders from ones children is not (for example, if you could choose whether or not you wanted your child to be a diabetic, would it be unethical to choose not? Hardly.).
As you point out, many people (educated and uneducated alike) do not have a great understanding of the issues at hand and the possible consequences of genetic engineering. As an example, when a gene in a fish that produced an anti-freeze protein was used to produce a frost-resistant crop strain, many people that I know had an immediate reaction along the lines of "eek they're going to produce a half-fish half-plant monster they dont know what they're doing". It is this irrational fear that I'm afraid of - many people advocate the halting of ANY genetic manipulation technology development, and I would hate for my children or grandchildren to have to suffer unnecessarily because of pressure from this group.
On the other hand, it is very unlikely that research will stop in this area, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. What we probably should do is take the research slowly, so that we can learn and understand the potential ramifications of Genetic Eng. But to halt the research and inflict human suffering we could have otherwise prevented simply because of the people who think "oh no half plant half fish monster" would be unforgivable.
"I don't believe this society (or any society in existance right now) is fully prepared to start meddling with genetics"
Lets speak again when YOU either discover you have received a genetic disease from your parents, or are in danger of transferring one to your own children. Then we'll see how you feel about that. It almost sounds like you would attempt to deny genetic solutions to people who are in that situation, which would be horribly selfish.
I seem to remember reading that the patenting of genes was not allowed, or something like that. Anyone back me up on this? "Natural processes" may also not be patented; most DNA strands currently fall under that category anyway.
If I could choose to remove the genetic component of clinical depression (unipolar disorder) from my childrens' DNA someday (when I have kids), you can be damn sure I will. I'm not going to inflict painful genetically related disorders on my own children just because some uneducated zealot somewhere thinks it is more ethical that way. There is anyway a fuzzy line between genetic and symptomatic treatment (pills) of such disorders. You either don't treat a disorder at all, or you treat it with every available technology you have.
I would say the same for more minor ailments, such as ecsema and allergies - such ailments ("imperfections") do NOT "make the man or woman", not by a long shot. They aren't remotely related to what I'm like as a person.
I dont know much about physics, but I wonder if this problem is related to the problem of why its hotter further from the sun than at the surface of the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think the biggest problem working towards making search engines useless is junky commercial sites that offer nothing worth my while. Type in a few keywords to find something and end up with a few hundred:
(a) dead links
(b) rubbishy commercial sites that arent related to what you're looking for
(c) home pages that look like exactly what you're looking for - at a glance - but turn out to contain less than a few scraps of useful stuff.
"A world without Van Gogh and Van Morrison would be a much sadder place for "the rest of us" to live in"
So millions of people should endure incredible amounts of pain and suffering just so that a miniscule percentage of those people can produce some nice paintings and some cool songs for us? What an incredibly selfish attitude. Our priorities should lie with eliminating suffering, even if it means a few less paintings and a couple less songs.
Anyway, there is no evidence to suggest that there would be no more "great artists" if we eliminated mental illness. For all we know there might be more of them, since many people with untreated mental illnesses aren't capable of producing anything during their episodes. Van Gogh was one of them - he was incapable of painting while he was having his episodes.
Regarding the question of where the right middle should be, it seems logical to me to define it as follows: If some or other mental problem (whether biological or psychological) is impairing your ability to be functional and/or to be happy, and that problem cannot be solved "just by working it out for yourself", then you should probably fall into the "mentally ill" category.
Essentially, I think it should come down to a persons ability to be (a) happy and (b) functional. If too much re-absorbtion of the neurotransmitter serotonin is physically and biologically preventing a person from being happy or from functioning in society, then they need some external help, and qualify as mentally ill. Similarly, if a person has an inability to form healthy relationships because of deep psychological problems from severe abuse in early childhood, and this is preventing them from being happy or from functioning, then they should qualify.
I don't believe that the "where is the middle" is a difficult question at all.
I also don't believe at all that only maladjusted people are capable of great works. I believe the opposite to be true - that if we elminated mental illness completely today, then far more many "great works" would arise from people. In almost every case of untreated severe mental illness, the person is incapable of producing anything. Van Gogh, for example, was unable to paint at all during his "episodes", it was only between his episodes that he produced all his works. There is no evidence AT ALL to suggest that non-mentally ill people are incapable of producing great works, and I'm sure that many great people were/are *not* mentally ill.
There is also a question of ethics involved: if it was true that eliminating mental illness would mean "no more masterpieces", does that make it OK to leave people untreated, inflicting an incredible amount of pain and suffering on them, just so that society can have "a few masterpieces" that are anyway seldom truly appreciated by the masses? I don't think so. Our priorities should lie with eliminating suffering, even if that meant no more masterpieces. The suffering is not worth it.
I object somewhat to the terms you use to describe mentally ill people. I'm not asking for "political correctness" but rather for a more positive attitude.
..
There are plenty of mentally ill people around you (that you call "nuts") and most of you don't even realise it - most people keep it secret, for fear of the stigma, for fear of being called "nuts", for fear of having people assume that you're disfunctional and so on.
It is very probable that many of you have direct family members or friends that are mentally ill and you don't know it. The people you work/go to school with may be mentally ill and you don't know it. I know women who kept secret from their husbands for decades the fact that they had clinical depression, and children who have grown up with depression and not once in their lives did their parents even realise it. Your parents, your boy/girlfriends, your siblings etc may be mentally ill and you don't even know it - so consider carefully your notions of what it means to be mentally ill - these aren't people who "are cuckoos" and "belong in a padded cell". Mentally ill does not imply that you are "nuts".
Untreated depression is the number 1 cause of suicide, and in the US suicide suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death, and is well on its way to becoming the 2nd by 2020. We should learn how to deal with mentally ill people in order to save lives and alleviate suffering, in exactly the same way that you learn how to do CPR, the heimlich manouvre etc etc at school. Since mental illness claims far more lives than drowning or choking, I don't understand why society is failing to make this a higher priority.
Just my rant for the day
I'm beginning to suspect that someone has written a script that automatically responds to all slashdot posts with "This is old news". I find it very tiresome to see it on every interesting /. article I read.
"What about developing and Third-World nations, where few will have access to Perfect Baby technologies? You mean if everybody can't have it, nobody should have it? I thought that this was a basic idea of Russian communism in the 20s, but it kinda went out of fashion since then."
The issue isn't as simple as you make it sound. First-world access to large-scale genetic "improvements" without third-world access to similar would lead to a very sharp increase in the current gap between the haves and have-nots. Every time in society that that gap becomes too great, some form of revolution occurs .. the "haves" would have the benefit of technology but the "have-nots" would have the benefits of numbers. This is an issue that is in everyones best interests to keep in check, don't be so quick to dismiss it out of hand.
Ice Window Manager is pretty good in this regard. Now I just wish app writers for X would take 2 seconds out to actually think about putting in keyboard shortcuts for applications to minimize mouse usage.
"At first sight" or something like that, starring Val Kilmer. Apparently based on a true story, about a guy that lost his sight when he was just a baby (although not quite the same as being blind from birth) but then much later on in life (about 30's I think) gets it back by a new experimental operation. Pretty interesting, the way he reacts at first (total confusion to the new stimuli, being frightened by it), but after a a few weeks his brain starts to learn how to "see". He struggled a lot with many of the "higher-level" aspects of seeing, such as depth perception .. not being able to tell a picture of an object from the object itself, etc.
.. the brain "rewires" itself to handle the new information.
The brain is pretty adaptable though. I read about some experiments (can't remember the guy's name or website) where he does brain experiments with salamanders, things like adding a new eye and connecting it to the brain
It's fine and well for intellectual activities to stimulate brain development, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of educating people (especially school kids) if you can't get them *interested* in doing that. If you want to improve education then the question is whether or not you can actually make kids want to use their brains more. Most people I know unfortunately do as much as possible to try do as little thinking as they can possibly get away with, a tendency I find rather disturbing, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that the majority of the media (especially advertising) likes to encourage this mental laziness so that they can rip you off by saying that "scientists prove our washing powder washes whiter" etc etc
Surely it wouldn't cost too much to create a monthly (or maybe quaterly, or whatever) mini magazine that contains articles highlighting the latest interesting developments in science, that would get distributed to every school. They may even be taken from (and sponsored by) some of the more mainstream science journals like Discover, Nature etc.
A few possible effects:
- teachers are kept up to date
- a percentage of teachers may become more interested in their subject (obviously not all, but even 2% would be a lot)
- a percentage of pupils may become more interested in the subject (the magazines would be made available to students)
The (a) increased interest by students/teachers and (b) the increased exposure in relevant fields would increase the readership of the magazines that might sponsor something like that, so they would also win - essentially every american school graduate with any interest in Science would have been exposed to such magazines and may continue to buy them once they're working.
Just an idea.
You dont have to be an AC to pull anonymous dirty tricks in an online forum; its incredibly easy for anyone at MS or Artx (for example) to just get a small collection of /. logins that have no real identifying information in them, and then happily plunder away with "grass-roots support" lying campaigns, etc. Is there that much difference?
Put on a VR data glove, then do a "walking" type motion with your pointer and middle fingers, doing some gesture recognition to determine when your fingers are "walking".
I bet this qualifies as the absolute stupidest suggestion so far.
My guess is that the OS is any particular abstraction of whatever underlying hardware (or software) is there, as seen by applications. To the user that might be "windows and menus and buttons and stuff", but technically its more like the set of APIs and components that applications make use of.
The key idea of this definition is that the "OS" exposes this abstraction to the applications (eg by making an API available), but an application doesn't expose any APIs or anything of that sort to anything else. You can remove applications, since no other applications depend on them, but remove any of the core components or APIs of the OS and applications will break.
According to that definition, though, any application which exposes some sort of API to anything else (e.g. the GIMP or Netscape, with plug-in models, or a JVM running on anything) is in itself an operating system.
.. to make a computer program that generates music with more emotion than some of the over-produced emotionless (but *technically* good) drivel from bands like boyzone or singers like Celine Dion.
I wonder how caffeine should then theoretically affect depressives. Since biological depression is related to excessive reuptake of serotonin, I would imagine that there should be some sort of effect, although perhaps its either too minimal or too long-term to be noticeable.
"Seems like a nerve has been hit"
Correct. I inherited depression. I won't put my children through that if I have any choice at all. That's not the only "nerve" either, but the rest is personal.
I realise that attempting to "better" people through genetic manipulation is a very touchy issue. However, removing disorders from ones children is not (for example, if you could choose whether or not you wanted your child to be a diabetic, would it be unethical to choose not? Hardly.).
As you point out, many people (educated and uneducated alike) do not have a great understanding of the issues at hand and the possible consequences of genetic engineering. As an example, when a gene in a fish that produced an anti-freeze protein was used to produce a frost-resistant crop strain, many people that I know had an immediate reaction along the lines of "eek they're going to produce a half-fish half-plant monster they dont know what they're doing". It is this irrational fear that I'm afraid of - many people advocate the halting of ANY genetic manipulation technology development, and I would hate for my children or grandchildren to have to suffer unnecessarily because of pressure from this group.
On the other hand, it is very unlikely that research will stop in this area, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. What we probably should do is take the research slowly, so that we can learn and understand the potential ramifications of Genetic Eng. But to halt the research and inflict human suffering we could have otherwise prevented simply because of the people who think "oh no half plant half fish monster" would be unforgivable.
"I don't believe this society (or any society in existance right now) is fully prepared to start meddling with genetics"
Lets speak again when YOU either discover you have received a genetic disease from your parents, or are in danger of transferring one to your own children. Then we'll see how you feel about that. It almost sounds like you would attempt to deny genetic solutions to people who are in that situation, which would be horribly selfish.
I seem to remember reading that the patenting of genes was not allowed, or something like that. Anyone back me up on this? "Natural processes" may also not be patented; most DNA strands currently fall under that category anyway.
If I could choose to remove the genetic component of clinical depression (unipolar disorder) from my childrens' DNA someday (when I have kids), you can be damn sure I will. I'm not going to inflict painful genetically related disorders on my own children just because some uneducated zealot somewhere thinks it is more ethical that way. There is anyway a fuzzy line between genetic and symptomatic treatment (pills) of such disorders. You either don't treat a disorder at all, or you treat it with every available technology you have.
I would say the same for more minor ailments, such as ecsema and allergies - such ailments ("imperfections") do NOT "make the man or woman", not by a long shot. They aren't remotely related to what I'm like as a person.
So why is a candles flame hotter at the top then?
The speed of software halves every 18 months
/. sig)
(I think I read that in a
'science provides proofs without answers; religion provides answers without proofs'
I dont know much about physics, but I wonder if this problem is related to the problem of why its hotter further from the sun than at the surface of the sun.
By golly you're right .. I tried "ads.doubleclick.net" and when it failed I thought I was in the clear for *.doubleclick.net ..