i'm not going to take his opinion on web-related technologies seriously.
Tomboy has nothing to do with web-related technologies. Now that we've cleared THAT up, will you take him seriously?
He's not a saint, but sometimes he gets it right. Mono is one of those times - a lot of us have been saying it's a mistake - even those of us who use the web via multiple browsers!
In people affected by MS, patches of damage called plaques or lesions appear in seemingly random areas of the CNS white matter.
We've all heard about the notorious MS patches screwing up things...
No two people get MS in exactly the same way and the expression of each individual's disease is as unique as their fingerprints. However, the different courses of the disease, both within an individual and within the whole population, principally differ in their timing, location and severity. Underneath similar processes (including demyelination and sometimes other forms of nerve degeneration) are going on.
True - Some get MS pre-installed with their computers, some get it via an upgrade, a friend, bittorrent, but the damage ends up being the same no matter how you got MS.
In general, people with MS can experience partial or complete loss of any function that is controlled by, or passes through, the brain or spinal cord.
Wow - MS can make YOU blue-screen!
"That's sounds terrible - doesn't almost everything go through the brain?"
Well yes, MS can be and often is a very serious disease but almost nobody loses function in all possible areas and some people are affected much worse than others. People with MS can experience any of the following problems either fully or partially - numbness, tingling, pins and needles, muscle weakness, muscle spasms, spasticity, cramps, pain, blindness, blurred or double vision, incontinence, urinary urgency or hesitancy, constipation, slurred speech, loss of sexual function, loss of balance, nausea, disabling fatigue, depression, short term memory problems, other forms of cognitive dysfunction, inability to swallow, inability to control breathing... you name it.
MS makes Open Sores software look positively benign...
"Crikey, it sounds devastating"
Yes, but don't forget that it is usually a slowly progressing disease and few people, if any, experience all the possible symptoms. Three quarters of people with MS don't need to use a wheelchair and those that do find that it gives them greater freedom to do the things they want. Many people will require a cane after a number of years of disease activity. Other people will have only very mild and occasional symptoms. Still others have been found to have had MS as a result of an autopsy even though they never presented with any clinical symptoms during their lives. A minority of people with MS die as an indirect result of the disease in its later stages. The majority of PwMS will lie somewhere between these extremes. Adjustments have to be made, but most people with MS can live fulfilled and active lives.
Fuck that shit!
"Can you catch MS from someone with it?"
Absolutely not. Studies have been done on children adopted into families where one of the parents has MS and they have been found to have the same incidence of the disease as the background population [Sadovnick, Ebers et al, 1999]. Other studies show that the number of husband-wife copresentations is almost exactly what you would expect for a non-contagious disease [Ebers, Sadovnick et al, 2000]. This is worth emphasising - you cannot catch MS from a person with the disease. MS is not contagious nor infectious.
So it's okay to hook your linux or mac to a network with MS present and you won't be affected by the disease. Cool - I'm safe.
"Are their different types of MS?"
Yes, there are four main varieties as defined in an international survey of neurologists [Lubin and Reingold, 1996]. (All the g
lets be intellectually honest here: anyone who doesn't browse the web is completely out of touch with the main thrust of anything and everything computer related in the last 15 years
He still browses the web - he just does it via a method that works:
even if he doesn't have a net connection when he wants to actually view the page (which might be later on in the day at a conference, or in a cafeteria) - the page is in his email, so he can download it now, and then view it later offline with his email program
without downloading all the associated crap that most pages are infested with
while providing him with a permanent copy of the stuff he's interested in
Other people also use other means to "browse" the web that don't involve conventional interactions with a web browser. Programs like JAWS (a screen reader for the blind) and blinux don't meet your metaphor for accesing the web - BFD, get over it.
Also, computing is much more than just the web. For many researchers, email is a LOT more convenient, and more important, than the web ever will be.
If you are a slashdot poster, you could do worse than hop over the pond - no visa, similar culture, etc.
Non-EEC citizens are required to get a work permit (the application fee is 500 euros for 6 months) that binds them to only that employer. Get fired/laid off - out you go asap.
You really think a contract that binds one party to withholding testimony in a criminal case would be considered enforceable?
Never said there was a contract... just that one side paid the other $22 million to satisfy their civil complaint. With $22 million, they found their time better spent spending the money than cooperating in an investigation that any defense could now portray as a successful blackmail attempt.
Prosecutors can serve a subpoena which obliges a witness to testify. Any ideas as to why that didn't happen?
Only a judge has the legal power to compel a witness to testify, and that only if the prosecution first makes the motion. How many judges are going to order an under-age witness to testify about sexual assaults if they don't want to, for whatever reason, or even for no stated reason? Prosecutors know the odds of such a request being granted are somewhere between zero and none, and don't want to piss off judges they work with daily by filing useless motions. If you want more info, why not ask them? Or do your own research?
Anchorage is certainly a significant city. Besides, Edmonton's 1 million people in metric is like, what, 621,371 in non-metric units? At the current exchange rate, we can take off another 16% (so we're down to 521,951); converting from litres to gallons, Edmonton is worth 137,884. At 350,000 people for Anchorage, we're able to conclude that Anchorage is actually 2.54 times bigger than Edmonton.
It's to be expected if you've seen SuperSize Me! eh?
These figures don't include ANY health-care investment - just military vs education - and even then, education spending is way more than military spending. Sources were the UN, Wikipedia, and the CIA factbook.
The US has defended Canada? The last time Canada was invaded, it was by the US!
Nobody's invaded any of the top 5 countries since WW2. What *did* happen was that the US and the USSR decided to have a series of proxy wars. NORAD wasn't about protecting Canada from the Soviets, but about using Canadian bases as advance posts for monitoring the USSR.
The covert deployment of nuclear weapons on Canadian soil didn't enhance Canadian security - it made Canadians targets.
The Star Wars scheme to intercept missiles during their coasting phase meant that Canada, not the US, would have to deal with the detrius of a succesful intercept.
Did you listen when Canada said "Don't go into Iraq"? Noooo... and how much has it cost since? Both in money, and in reputation, and in lives? You didn't enhance your security by invading Iraq - you inflamed your existing enemies, made new ones, weakened key allies, and disgusted others. It was all about oil. And what's the #1 oil consumer in the world? The US military. Eisenhower warned about this sort of stupidity.
Then again, what can you expect from a country that now classifies pocket knifes - even non-spring-loaded ones - as "switchblades" in a further war on its' own citizens rights, and that, rather than jailing the people behind the global frauds that led to the global financial meltdown, gives them "retention bonuses?" That wants to bail out millions of people who committed fraud by filing bogus mortgage documents, while penalizing those who were honest and sat out the bubble. Only in America, where corporate social welfare runs rampant under the guise of capitalism. It's pretty bad when the US is in so many ways more like the old Soviet Union than Russia is. With more people in jail than any other country in the world, can't you at least find some space in one of those jails for the biggest crooks in the worlds' history?
The US wasn't just protecting other countries - it was also protecting its' own interests, and is currently the largest destabilizing influence - both financially and militarily. With the deficit soaring, and set to double again over the next decade, "too big to fail" is fast becoming "too big to save." Unfortunately, you're taking down the rest of the world with you.
There was a time when the US stood for freedom, straight dealing, honesty, fairness, and integrity. Enlightened self-interest instead of greed. Independence rather than "where's my bail-out" entitlement. Opportunity rather than "your papers, citizen." It took George Bush 2 terms to reduce that to tatters. More than 2 centuries of effort undermined, trashed in less than a decade.
Your war in Iraq didn't contribute to world security - and it certainly proved to be a distraction from getting that bin Laden guy. So much for "mission accomplished." then again, it was all about oil and pork-barrel politics, so maybe it really WAS "mission accomplished" - if the mission was to screw over the American people, blatantly burning through the social capital of goodwill and trust that most people had, overall, for the US.
A generation ago, 76% of Americans said that, overall, they trusted their government to do the right thing. Now? Unsurprisingly, 80% of Americans said they now perceive their government as serving powerful special interests rather than the interests of the people as a whole.
If your own people don't trust you, why should anyone else?
As I've said many times, the very first post I made included the caveat "without any more details"...
And it appears that, at 16, she still has the brains and skill set of an infant... this is going to sound cruel, but without any more details, it sounds like a good argument for post-birth abortion. I mean, what's the point? At least "The Strange Case of Benjamin Button" had SOME growth of character.
The article actually is full of mistakes. For example, it claims that only her hair and nails are growing. This is obviously not true. Not only is skin tissue being constantly generated, but so are red blood cells (average red blood cell lifespan - 4 months) and other body constituents. There is no indication that they don't age - to the contrary, her bone age is at least 10 years old.
The article is crap, the "science" behind it is really a combo of pseudo-science and wishful thinking - at a cellular level, she is getting older every day. What we have here is a failure to develop, not a failure to age.
the question is, what stage is her brain at, and did the seizures do any further damage? In other words, is anybody home? The parents' depiction of her as about equivalent to a toddler of between 9 months and 1 year is contradicted by the descriptions in the story of how she reacts to her environment - no attempts at pre-vocalization that should have started between 3 and 6 months, so a more accurate guess, again based only on the article text, would be 0 to 3 months, and that the parents are projecting their wishes, and seeing what isn't really there.
If in fact there IS "nobody home", this wouldn't be the "culling of a human being" - while it would be human, it wouldn't be a being, just human tissue... so no harm, no foul. Of course, if there IS evidence (which is sorely lacking if you go solely by the article) that "somebody's home", then of course it's a different situation.
Unfortunately, too many people have swallowed the bumkum in the story and are saying stupidities like "maybe she'll live to be 400 to 800 years old" or "maybe she holds the key to immortality", rather than taking the time to see what's obvious with 2 minutes of critical thought - that her body IS aging, just not developing or maturing. They confuse form and function.
Then they accept at face value the mothers' statements that she's mentally the equivalent of a one-year-old toddler, even though, if she were even a 9-month-old toddler, she'd clearly be alarmingly retarded in her mental development.
Maybe I should have responded by saying "I'm not God - I just play one on slashdot!" It's not like most responses to date show much evidence of thinking it through to the logical consequences, or question any of the many contradictions in what scant information we've been given... just knee-jerk reactions.
Do you remember what life was like when you were a month old?
Yes.
If you really did remember what life was like when you were a month old, you would have been, like most babies, full to overflowing of shit. Guess not much has changed in the interim.
The poster discounted Anchorage as a city he said it only "comes close" to being a major city - Anchorage has a population of well over a quarter-million people in the city itself. It's not "close" to being a major city - it's a major city by any sane definition, and qualifies as a city in EVERY country that makes a distinction between cities and towns.
Here's the actual text (i>(emphasis added):
The only place further north that comes close to being a major city would be Anchorage at 350k, but that's obviously much further north and off the beaten path, as it were.
BTW, Prince George, BC, (pop 63k) qualifies as a city in most countries, including Canada, and is further north.
"
Iceland does have limited military forces with the Coast Guard and Crisis Response Unit. Iceland maintains a well trained Coast Guard, National Police forces, Air Defence system as well as a voluntary expeditionary peacekeeping force. These services perform many of the operations Iceland's NATO allies relegate to their standing armies.
Iceland holds the annual NATO exercises entitled Northern Viking; the most recent exercises were held in 2008[7], as well as the EOD exercise "Northern Challenge". In 1997 Iceland hosted its first Partnership for Peace (PfP) exercise, "Cooperative Safeguard," which is the only multilateral PfP exercise so far in which Russia has participated. Another major PfP exercise was hosted in 2000.
Iceland has also contributed ICRU peacekeepers to SFOR, KFOR and ISAF.
The Government of Iceland contributes financially to NATO's international overhead costs and recently has taken a more active role in NATO deliberations and planning. Iceland hosted the NATO Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Reykjavík in June 1987.
The Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) (or Íslenska friðargæslan which in English means "The Icelandic Peacekeeping Guard") is an expeditionary peacekeeping force maintained by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
The Unit is manned by various personnel from Iceland's other services, armed or not, including the National Police, Coast Guard, Emergency Services and Health-care system. Because of the military nature of most of the ICRU's assignments, all of its members receive basic infantry combat training. This training has often been conducted by the Norwegian Army, but the Coast Guard and the Special forces are also assigned to train the ICRU.
"
Do you remember what life was like when you were a month old? Before you developed the capability to retain, attach meaning to, and otherwise organize memories and experiences?
Before she'd be able to talk about "all the things that she's had to put up with", she'd have to develop those capabilities. In other words, it ain't gonna happen before "a doctor might figure out how to unlock the processes of development".
I know it's a long shot, but, maybe her telling us about her unique experience would provide us with clues to the more difficult questions about certain of the so-called soft sciences?
It's an impossibility. It's like trying to use a tape recorder that hasn't been assembled, with no batteries included, and no recording medium. the capability isn't there, any more than it is with anyone who functions at the level of a 0-to-3-month old (the article has claims from the mother that she functions like a "toddler between 9 months and 1 year", but Brooke's lack of any ability to mimic speech says this is just wishful thinking - and even then, you wouldn't get anything useful).
You know what I meant, don't be deliberately obtuse. Edmonton has a million people... most people would agree that that's a "city". The only place further north that comes close to being a major city would be Anchorage at 350k, but that's obviously much further north and off the beaten path, as it were.
Dont' be silly. According to your pseudo-definition of a city being least 1 million people, that would mean that in 1950, there were only 83 cities on the whole planet. And only 12 in 1900. and even today, only 411 in the whole world. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx
In Sweden and Denmark, a village of 200 people is counted as an "urban" population but it takes a city of 30,000 in Japan. Most other countries fall somewhere in between. Australia and Canada use 1000, Israel and France use 2000 and the United States and Mexico call a town of 2500 residents urban.
In New Zealand, according to Statistics New Zealand (the government statistics agency), "A city [...] must have a minimum population of 50,000
Brazilian law defines a "city" (cidade) as the urban seat of a municipality and establishes no difference between cities and towns; all it takes for an urban area to be legally called a "city" is to be the seat of a municipality, and some of them are semi-rural settlements with a very small population.
In Canada the granting of city status is handled by the individual provinces and territories, so that the definitions and criteria vary widely across the country. In British Columbia and Saskatchewan towns can become cities after they reach a population of 5,000 people, but in Alberta and Ontario the requirement is 10,000. Nova Scotia has abolished the title of city altogether, In Quebec, there is no legal distinction between a city and a town
There is a formal definition of city in China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.
Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants
Venezuela's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants.
The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (big city).
Italy: There is no population limit for a city
Norway: The status of "city" is granted by the local authorities if a request for city status has been made and the area has a population of at least 5000
There has traditionally been no formal distinction betw
And on that last one... c'mon, brain in a jar? My proposal would likely involve cutting into the skull to create room, actually.
Aw, gross - the only way that would be ethical would be if there isn't "anyone home" in the first place, in which case, why bother? It's no better than the "brain in a jar" scenario, which is also unethical under the same set of presuppositions.
What we have here is someone who is in fact aging, but not developing, and people aren't making the distinction. Her skeleton looks to be at least the same as a 10-year-old, which, considering the failed development, and the lack of stress from normal development, means that it's aging at its' normal rate. There's no "miracle cure" here, just a genetic flaw that prevented the development process (but not the aging process) from continuing.
Edmonton, Alberta would be the northernmost city in North America, and it's at the same latitude as Liverpool.
Bullshit. There are plenty of Canadian and American cities further north... heck, there are whole states and provinces and territories... Alaska, Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, Labrador...
Here - go to Environment Canada and look at the f'ing map - see all those cities north of Edmonton?
PCs == Lego; Macs == Barbies; Linux == a pile of I-beams and a box of nuts and bolts.
You had a deprived childhood if you don't know the term "Erector Set" and have to resort to "a pile of I-beams and a box of nuts and bolts". THOSE were fantastic toys.
Or his corporate spyware will flag as porn anything matching the regular expression/erect*/i;
Or he's behind the Great Firewall of China, and they come after anyone who posts about "democracy or free erections":-)
A report released early May by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) states that Ireland is expected to go through the sharpest economic contraction of any industrialised country since the 1930s. The ESRI's spring quarterly commentary predicts that Ireland's gross domestic product (GDP) will fall 9.2 percent this year.
The report continues, "Ireland's economy will contract by around 14 percent over the three years 2008 to 2010. By historic and international standards this is a truly dramatic development."
It continues: "Prior to this, the largest decline for an industrialised country since the 1930s had been in Finland, where real gross domestic product declined by 11 percent between 1990 and 1993."
The 9.2 percent figure for 2009 doubles the scale of contraction predicted only three months ago in the institute's previous quarterly commentary, where a contraction of 4.6 percent was anticipated. Even the figure of 14 percent over three years assumes a "moderation of the pace of decline" and a "bottoming out" in the latter part of the year.
Unemployment is expected to continue rising. The ESRI predicts unemployment will average 292,000 over 2009, or 13.2 percent, and by 2010 will peak at around 366,000, or 16.8 percent of the workforce.
Wages are expected to fall by 3 percent on average, while the impact of recent budget changes is expected to reduce average household incomes by around 4 percent.
The ESRI also predicts annual net emigration from Ireland, historically an escape from appalling conditions that was sharply reversed over the last two decades, to reach 30,000 between 2009 and 2010.
Emmigrate to Ireland? Sounds like the drunk driving the wrong way down a one-way street who, when asked where he thought he was going, replied "I don't know, but I must be late. Everyone's already coming back."
it doesn't appear that the girl cannot learn (if that were the case, she wouldn't have preferences
Lab rats, mice, and bees (heck, even flatworms) all demonstrate preferences. None of them would be considered "persons", and in the case of bees and flatworms, the "preferences" are purely instinctive and reactive.
The noises she generates, according to the description given in the article, are more along the lines of what you would expect from a newborn than a toddler, which indicates that the interpretation by the parents is flawed - a projection of what they wish were true.
She hasn't stopped aging - her bones are at least the same age as a 10-year-olds. Maybe not being subject to the stresses of exercise from a normal life makes them appear to be younger than they really are? People who are in space or bedridden for long periods of time leach calcium from their bones quite rapidly. Why should we expect her bones to be normal?
What we have is a failure to develop. We can see that in studies of insects, where one set of genes responsible for gross development doesn't activate (homeobox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox), and the insect then doesn't develop into an adult, or one or more body segments fails to mature. Rather than being a "cure for aging", it's a disaster for the subject. Her "miracle" is probably the same thing. There's no reason to believe aging has stopped - just development. The fact that her bones have aged much more than her physical development indicates that she is in fact aging, and probably at a normal rate.
If she's the cure, then in this case the cure is worse than the disease.
And it appears that, at 16, she still has the brains and skill set of an infant... this is going to sound cruel, but without any more details, it sounds like a good argument for post-birth abortion. I mean, what's the point? At least "The Strange Case of Benjamin Button" had SOME growth of character.
No final judgment from me vis. this article - my very first post in it makes that quite clear. Unfortunately, most people have made a knee-jerk reaction and just skipped over the "without any more details" caveat. The article is a poor source of information, and what information there is is inconsistent. For example, the article claims Brooke has a mental development of between 9 months and one year, without any backing, and yet, the content makes it clear that her verbal skills are absent - her mental development, based on that, is more of an infant between 0 and three months than a "9 to 12-month toddler". Add in brain damage (apparent from the seizures) and there's a serious question as to whether we're dealing with purely instinctive automatism, and whether there even exists the capacity for, at some future date, a sense of self-awareness to appear.
Two quick conclusions:
The article itself sucks. We need more information than what is provided in the article, and it has to be of better quality;
We need to be able to better separate the question of "what is a self-aware being" from the physical container, or we'll make bad decisions, both in the case of human beings, and of other sentient creatures (both living and emergent).
My take on the latter one is relatively simple: if "Elvis has left the building" or "Elvis never entered the building in the first place" (ie: the lights are on but nobody's home), then we're not talking about a being, but a husk, an empty shell, with no worth beyond what can be harvested for organs and raw materials. By contrast, if there IS somebody home, then the form or shape of the container shouldn't matter - whether it's human, or whale, dolphin or alien, or living in cyberspace.
Unfortunately, people can confuse form and substance - see the Terry Shiavo case as one example.
Slashdot Mirror
Tomboy has nothing to do with web-related technologies. Now that we've cleared THAT up, will you take him seriously?
He's not a saint, but sometimes he gets it right. Mono is one of those times - a lot of us have been saying it's a mistake - even those of us who use the web via multiple browsers!
We've all heard about the notorious MS patches screwing up things ...
True - Some get MS pre-installed with their computers, some get it via an upgrade, a friend, bittorrent, but the damage ends up being the same no matter how you got MS.
Wow - MS can make YOU blue-screen!
MS makes Open Sores software look positively benign ...
Fuck that shit!
So it's okay to hook your linux or mac to a network with MS present and you won't be affected by the disease. Cool - I'm safe.
He still browses the web - he just does it via a method that works:
Other people also use other means to "browse" the web that don't involve conventional interactions with a web browser. Programs like JAWS (a screen reader for the blind) and blinux don't meet your metaphor for accesing the web - BFD, get over it.
Also, computing is much more than just the web. For many researchers, email is a LOT more convenient, and more important, than the web ever will be.
Non-EEC citizens are required to get a work permit (the application fee is 500 euros for 6 months) that binds them to only that employer. Get fired/laid off - out you go asap.
Never said there was a contract ... just that one side paid the other $22 million to satisfy their civil complaint. With $22 million, they found their time better spent spending the money than cooperating in an investigation that any defense could now portray as a successful blackmail attempt.
Only a judge has the legal power to compel a witness to testify, and that only if the prosecution first makes the motion. How many judges are going to order an under-age witness to testify about sexual assaults if they don't want to, for whatever reason, or even for no stated reason? Prosecutors know the odds of such a request being granted are somewhere between zero and none, and don't want to piss off judges they work with daily by filing useless motions. If you want more info, why not ask them? Or do your own research?
"I also take issue with your granting human rights on the basis of self-awareness."
I don't limit those rights to humans.
BTW - I'm not God - I just play one on slashdot :-)
Why don't they fix slashcode so it accepts a larger set of html entities? the degree symbol, the ™ and © html entities, the pound and yen symbols ... it can't be THAT much work ...
It's to be expected if you've seen SuperSize Me! eh?
These figures don't include ANY health-care investment - just military vs education - and even then, education spending is way more than military spending. Sources were the UN, Wikipedia, and the CIA factbook.
"The seat is inflatable, the dashboard is inflatable, and the internal structure and carrying racks are inflatable"
A blue screen you just reboot. Replace "Blue Screen of Death" with "I have a flat".
Mind you, many slashdotters already have experience with inflatable racks via their blow-up "girlfriends."
The US has defended Canada? The last time Canada was invaded, it was by the US!
Nobody's invaded any of the top 5 countries since WW2. What *did* happen was that the US and the USSR decided to have a series of proxy wars. NORAD wasn't about protecting Canada from the Soviets, but about using Canadian bases as advance posts for monitoring the USSR.
The covert deployment of nuclear weapons on Canadian soil didn't enhance Canadian security - it made Canadians targets.
The Star Wars scheme to intercept missiles during their coasting phase meant that Canada, not the US, would have to deal with the detrius of a succesful intercept.
Did you listen when Canada said "Don't go into Iraq"? Noooo ... and how much has it cost since? Both in money, and in reputation, and in lives? You didn't enhance your security by invading Iraq - you inflamed your existing enemies, made new ones, weakened key allies, and disgusted others. It was all about oil. And what's the #1 oil consumer in the world? The US military. Eisenhower warned about this sort of stupidity.
Then again, what can you expect from a country that now classifies pocket knifes - even non-spring-loaded ones - as "switchblades" in a further war on its' own citizens rights, and that, rather than jailing the people behind the global frauds that led to the global financial meltdown, gives them "retention bonuses?" That wants to bail out millions of people who committed fraud by filing bogus mortgage documents, while penalizing those who were honest and sat out the bubble. Only in America, where corporate social welfare runs rampant under the guise of capitalism. It's pretty bad when the US is in so many ways more like the old Soviet Union than Russia is. With more people in jail than any other country in the world, can't you at least find some space in one of those jails for the biggest crooks in the worlds' history?
The US wasn't just protecting other countries - it was also protecting its' own interests, and is currently the largest destabilizing influence - both financially and militarily. With the deficit soaring, and set to double again over the next decade, "too big to fail" is fast becoming "too big to save." Unfortunately, you're taking down the rest of the world with you.
There was a time when the US stood for freedom, straight dealing, honesty, fairness, and integrity. Enlightened self-interest instead of greed. Independence rather than "where's my bail-out" entitlement. Opportunity rather than "your papers, citizen." It took George Bush 2 terms to reduce that to tatters. More than 2 centuries of effort undermined, trashed in less than a decade.
Your war in Iraq didn't contribute to world security - and it certainly proved to be a distraction from getting that bin Laden guy. So much for "mission accomplished." then again, it was all about oil and pork-barrel politics, so maybe it really WAS "mission accomplished" - if the mission was to screw over the American people, blatantly burning through the social capital of goodwill and trust that most people had, overall, for the US.
A generation ago, 76% of Americans said that, overall, they trusted their government to do the right thing. Now? Unsurprisingly, 80% of Americans said they now perceive their government as serving powerful special interests rather than the interests of the people as a whole.
If your own people don't trust you, why should anyone else?
The article actually is full of mistakes. For example, it claims that only her hair and nails are growing. This is obviously not true. Not only is skin tissue being constantly generated, but so are red blood cells (average red blood cell lifespan - 4 months) and other body constituents. There is no indication that they don't age - to the contrary, her bone age is at least 10 years old.
The article is crap, the "science" behind it is really a combo of pseudo-science and wishful thinking - at a cellular level, she is getting older every day. What we have here is a failure to develop, not a failure to age.
the question is, what stage is her brain at, and did the seizures do any further damage? In other words, is anybody home? The parents' depiction of her as about equivalent to a toddler of between 9 months and 1 year is contradicted by the descriptions in the story of how she reacts to her environment - no attempts at pre-vocalization that should have started between 3 and 6 months, so a more accurate guess, again based only on the article text, would be 0 to 3 months, and that the parents are projecting their wishes, and seeing what isn't really there.
If in fact there IS "nobody home", this wouldn't be the "culling of a human being" - while it would be human, it wouldn't be a being, just human tissue ... so no harm, no foul. Of course, if there IS evidence (which is sorely lacking if you go solely by the article) that "somebody's home", then of course it's a different situation.
Unfortunately, too many people have swallowed the bumkum in the story and are saying stupidities like "maybe she'll live to be 400 to 800 years old" or "maybe she holds the key to immortality", rather than taking the time to see what's obvious with 2 minutes of critical thought - that her body IS aging, just not developing or maturing. They confuse form and function.
Then they accept at face value the mothers' statements that she's mentally the equivalent of a one-year-old toddler, even though, if she were even a 9-month-old toddler, she'd clearly be alarmingly retarded in her mental development.
Maybe I should have responded by saying "I'm not God - I just play one on slashdot!" It's not like most responses to date show much evidence of thinking it through to the logical consequences, or question any of the many contradictions in what scant information we've been given ... just knee-jerk reactions.
If you really did remember what life was like when you were a month old, you would have been, like most babies, full to overflowing of shit. Guess not much has changed in the interim.
The poster discounted Anchorage as a city he said it only "comes close" to being a major city - Anchorage has a population of well over a quarter-million people in the city itself. It's not "close" to being a major city - it's a major city by any sane definition, and qualifies as a city in EVERY country that makes a distinction between cities and towns.
Here's the actual text (i>(emphasis added):
BTW, Prince George, BC, (pop 63k) qualifies as a city in most countries, including Canada, and is further north.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Iceland
" Iceland does have limited military forces with the Coast Guard and Crisis Response Unit. Iceland maintains a well trained Coast Guard, National Police forces, Air Defence system as well as a voluntary expeditionary peacekeeping force. These services perform many of the operations Iceland's NATO allies relegate to their standing armies.
Iceland holds the annual NATO exercises entitled Northern Viking; the most recent exercises were held in 2008[7], as well as the EOD exercise "Northern Challenge". In 1997 Iceland hosted its first Partnership for Peace (PfP) exercise, "Cooperative Safeguard," which is the only multilateral PfP exercise so far in which Russia has participated. Another major PfP exercise was hosted in 2000.
Iceland has also contributed ICRU peacekeepers to SFOR, KFOR and ISAF.
The Government of Iceland contributes financially to NATO's international overhead costs and recently has taken a more active role in NATO deliberations and planning. Iceland hosted the NATO Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Reykjavík in June 1987.
The Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) (or Íslenska friðargæslan which in English means "The Icelandic Peacekeeping Guard") is an expeditionary peacekeeping force maintained by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
The Unit is manned by various personnel from Iceland's other services, armed or not, including the National Police, Coast Guard, Emergency Services and Health-care system. Because of the military nature of most of the ICRU's assignments, all of its members receive basic infantry combat training. This training has often been conducted by the Norwegian Army, but the Coast Guard and the Special forces are also assigned to train the ICRU. "
There's more ... just follow the linky ...
Do you remember what life was like when you were a month old? Before you developed the capability to retain, attach meaning to, and otherwise organize memories and experiences?
Before she'd be able to talk about "all the things that she's had to put up with", she'd have to develop those capabilities. In other words, it ain't gonna happen before "a doctor might figure out how to unlock the processes of development".
It's an impossibility. It's like trying to use a tape recorder that hasn't been assembled, with no batteries included, and no recording medium. the capability isn't there, any more than it is with anyone who functions at the level of a 0-to-3-month old (the article has claims from the mother that she functions like a "toddler between 9 months and 1 year", but Brooke's lack of any ability to mimic speech says this is just wishful thinking - and even then, you wouldn't get anything useful).
Dont' be silly. According to your pseudo-definition of a city being least 1 million people, that would mean that in 1950, there were only 83 cities on the whole planet. And only 12 in 1900. and even today, only 411 in the whole world. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx
Your definition would mean that the US currently has only 9 cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population.
I think most of the world would disagree with your definition of a city. Here's a definition for you http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcitytown.htm
Here's the definition of an "urban area" http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa060997.htm. Notice how it varies depending on locale.
Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City#The_difference_between_towns_and_cities - note that NO country uses 1,000,000 as the definition of a city. Many have no formal definition, others vary from as small as 5 people (US) up.
In New Zealand, according to Statistics New Zealand (the government statistics agency), "A city [...] must have a minimum population of 50,000
Brazilian law defines a "city" (cidade) as the urban seat of a municipality and establishes no difference between cities and towns; all it takes for an urban area to be legally called a "city" is to be the seat of a municipality, and some of them are semi-rural settlements with a very small population.
In Canada the granting of city status is handled by the individual provinces and territories, so that the definitions and criteria vary widely across the country. In British Columbia and Saskatchewan towns can become cities after they reach a population of 5,000 people, but in Alberta and Ontario the requirement is 10,000. Nova Scotia has abolished the title of city altogether, In Quebec, there is no legal distinction between a city and a town
There is a formal definition of city in China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.
Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants
Venezuela's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants.
The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (big city).
Italy: There is no population limit for a city
Norway: The status of "city" is granted by the local authorities if a request for city status has been made and the area has a population of at least 5000
There has traditionally been no formal distinction betw
Aw, gross - the only way that would be ethical would be if there isn't "anyone home" in the first place, in which case, why bother? It's no better than the "brain in a jar" scenario, which is also unethical under the same set of presuppositions.
What we have here is someone who is in fact aging, but not developing, and people aren't making the distinction. Her skeleton looks to be at least the same as a 10-year-old, which, considering the failed development, and the lack of stress from normal development, means that it's aging at its' normal rate. There's no "miracle cure" here, just a genetic flaw that prevented the development process (but not the aging process) from continuing.
This isn't a cure - it's a disease.
Maybe they *LIKE* warm beer and compliant sheep ... (something to do with a predilection or fondness of the English for virgin wool, IIRC).
Bullshit. There are plenty of Canadian and American cities further north ... heck, there are whole states and provinces and territories ... Alaska, Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, Labrador ...
Here - go to Environment Canada and look at the f'ing map - see all those cities north of Edmonton?
Dude, your comment is propaganda horse shit. Here are the top 5 in the HDI index:
Iceland- #1 - Military $26 Million, Education $219 million (amounts converted from Kronas)
Norway - #2 - Military $6 Billion, Education $19 Billion.
Canada - #3 Military $18 Billion, Education, $68 Billion.
Australia - #4 - Military - $3 Billion, Education, $40 Billion
Ireland - #5 - Military - $1.3 billion, education $10 Billion
Similar story for health care ...
Or his corporate spyware will flag as porn anything matching the regular expression /erect*/i;
Or he's behind the Great Firewall of China, and they come after anyone who posts about "democracy or free erections" :-)
Ireland is broke. Companies (and people) are abandoning it en masse. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/irel-m06.shtml Ireland: Unemployment expected to reach 17 percent
By Steve James
6 May 2009
A report released early May by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) states that Ireland is expected to go through the sharpest economic contraction of any industrialised country since the 1930s. The ESRI's spring quarterly commentary predicts that Ireland's gross domestic product (GDP) will fall 9.2 percent this year.
The report continues, "Ireland's economy will contract by around 14 percent over the three years 2008 to 2010. By historic and international standards this is a truly dramatic development."
It continues: "Prior to this, the largest decline for an industrialised country since the 1930s had been in Finland, where real gross domestic product declined by 11 percent between 1990 and 1993."
The 9.2 percent figure for 2009 doubles the scale of contraction predicted only three months ago in the institute's previous quarterly commentary, where a contraction of 4.6 percent was anticipated. Even the figure of 14 percent over three years assumes a "moderation of the pace of decline" and a "bottoming out" in the latter part of the year.
Unemployment is expected to continue rising. The ESRI predicts unemployment will average 292,000 over 2009, or 13.2 percent, and by 2010 will peak at around 366,000, or 16.8 percent of the workforce.
Wages are expected to fall by 3 percent on average, while the impact of recent budget changes is expected to reduce average household incomes by around 4 percent.
The ESRI also predicts annual net emigration from Ireland, historically an escape from appalling conditions that was sharply reversed over the last two decades, to reach 30,000 between 2009 and 2010. Emmigrate to Ireland? Sounds like the drunk driving the wrong way down a one-way street who, when asked where he thought he was going, replied "I don't know, but I must be late. Everyone's already coming back."
Lab rats, mice, and bees (heck, even flatworms) all demonstrate preferences. None of them would be considered "persons", and in the case of bees and flatworms, the "preferences" are purely instinctive and reactive.
The noises she generates, according to the description given in the article, are more along the lines of what you would expect from a newborn than a toddler, which indicates that the interpretation by the parents is flawed - a projection of what they wish were true.
She hasn't stopped aging - her bones are at least the same age as a 10-year-olds. Maybe not being subject to the stresses of exercise from a normal life makes them appear to be younger than they really are? People who are in space or bedridden for long periods of time leach calcium from their bones quite rapidly. Why should we expect her bones to be normal?
What we have is a failure to develop. We can see that in studies of insects, where one set of genes responsible for gross development doesn't activate (homeobox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox), and the insect then doesn't develop into an adult, or one or more body segments fails to mature. Rather than being a "cure for aging", it's a disaster for the subject. Her "miracle" is probably the same thing. There's no reason to believe aging has stopped - just development. The fact that her bones have aged much more than her physical development indicates that she is in fact aging, and probably at a normal rate.
If she's the cure, then in this case the cure is worse than the disease.
Here, let me help you: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1283193&cid=28482293 Fully quoted below (emphasis added)
No final judgment from me vis. this article - my very first post in it makes that quite clear. Unfortunately, most people have made a knee-jerk reaction and just skipped over the "without any more details" caveat. The article is a poor source of information, and what information there is is inconsistent. For example, the article claims Brooke has a mental development of between 9 months and one year, without any backing, and yet, the content makes it clear that her verbal skills are absent - her mental development, based on that, is more of an infant between 0 and three months than a "9 to 12-month toddler". Add in brain damage (apparent from the seizures) and there's a serious question as to whether we're dealing with purely instinctive automatism, and whether there even exists the capacity for, at some future date, a sense of self-awareness to appear.
Two quick conclusions:
My take on the latter one is relatively simple: if "Elvis has left the building" or "Elvis never entered the building in the first place" (ie: the lights are on but nobody's home), then we're not talking about a being, but a husk, an empty shell, with no worth beyond what can be harvested for organs and raw materials. By contrast, if there IS somebody home, then the form or shape of the container shouldn't matter - whether it's human, or whale, dolphin or alien, or living in cyberspace.
Unfortunately, people can confuse form and substance - see the Terry Shiavo case as one example.