Similarly, I had a girlfriend who was deathly afraid of spiders. If we were lying in bed and she spotted a house spider sitting peacefully on the ceiling, across the room, she would not stop freaking out until I had leapt from the bed and found a broomstick or something with which to destroy the poor creature.
I know for a fact that she had never been bitten by a house spider to cause this fear. Why? Because they never, ever bite you. In fact most kinds of spiders do not bite humans. (On a side note, if you ever wake up in the morning with a "spider bite" on some part of your body, get to a doctor -- it might be a staph infection, and they can be very, very nasty.)
The thing is, I wonder if my ex's fear of spiders could be cured by this drug they're talking about? The article says it's good for curing learned fears -- fear in response to some horrible trauma, for example. Those are very real. I once got in an ugly, head-on car collision and it was weeks before I could ride in a car without flinching and squirming in my seat every time I saw headlights. But fear of snakes, or fear of spiders, seem like fears that are so not based in any kind of experiential reality that I feel like they must come from someplace else.
I actually thought this summary sounded really interesting, because it may mean that the MIT researchers have discovered a chemical that performs a similar function to something that appears in nature.
The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that infests mammals, causing the condition known as toxoplasmosis. It has several stages in its life cycle, wherein you find it in different forms of animals. It does infest people, but it doesn't really like it there and unless you're immune-compromised it usually has no ill effects. Its preferred final host organism is a cat, including wildcats and house cats. And in order to get into cats it employs a novel device: First it infests mice.
Researchers did a little experiment. They had some mice run through a little maze, looking for food. One area of the maze they treated with cat urine. Normal mice, when they encountered this part of the maze, would get completely freaked out. From then on they would avoid that part of the maze like the plague. Mice infested with toxoplasmosis, on the other hand, wouldn't seem to notice. In fact, some of them seemed to develop a perverse curiosity about the cat-smelling part of the maze, and would return to it again and again.
The results seemed to be consistent with the idea that toxoplasmosis does something to inhibit fear in mice. So they did some further studies, this time on people. As it turned out, psychological studies seemed to indicate that humans infested with toxoplasmosis, though they may not be "sick," do seem to exhibit more exaggerated behaviors, consistent with the kinds of effects observed in mice. Men tend to become more solitary, aggressive, and rebellious. Women become more overtly friendly and flirtatious.
Generally, scientists agree that it's unlikely that a microscopic organism like Toxoplasma gondii could have some kind of diabolical masterplan behind these behavior changes. It's probably something as simple as releasing a molecule into the bodies of the host organism that does... something. They know not what.
Only, I wonder if the MIT guys have discovered something close.
Reread my post. You're probably not running Media Center on a TV with the rest of your PC running on a monitor and trying to switch back and forth between the two screens. In fact, you're probably running your Media Center PC as a single-use appliance. Right?
MS have also added some more interesting stuff to the scheduler in Vista, which helps with uninterrupted sound or movie playback, so at least some of that stuff is possible without a complete redesign.
Really? Man, tell that to my box running Vista Media Center. Media Center has a helpful (cough) habit of capturing the mouse cursor to the screen running the Media Center app. Hit the Windows key to break out of it and your video playback is interrupted for as much as 20 seconds while Windows struggles to switch screens and render the Start menu. What's more, despite the fact that Vista has been re-engineered to support multiple sound output devices, it is not possible to assign one particular device to Media Center. In other words, you cannot force Media Center to always use your SPDIF output for sound and then use the computer speakers for other apps. You MUST specify SPDIF as the default sound device for the entire OS if you want Media Center to output sound in that way. It's clear that, for as powerful and multi-thread capable as modern hardware may be, Vista Media Center was written with the assumption that your PC will become a single-purpose appliance. It's kinda pathetic.
Attempting to be a little more constructive than some of these other replies... I, too, have no problems uninstalling anything on my Vista system, and I'm running with all patches. But then, I'm also running with UAC disabled. Maybe this is a simple permissions issue? Remember, with Vista you no longer run as an Administrator by default. Perhaps some of these older programs were installed as Administrator -- maybe even under XP -- and the unprivileged user doesn't have permission to run the uninstall script. I know I've run into similar annoyances with Vista often, where even though I AM running as an Admin it tells me I "need permission" to copy or delete files, etc.
More to the point, I'd wager that the type of people who know damn well that they copy DVDs all the time might also be the kind of people who, when asked if they would like to install software on their computers that monitors everything they do, would say "no, thank you."
Give me plain old IMAP and POP3 support, which will give you off-the-shelf support with pretty much every e-mail server on the planet.
Uhhhh... OK, done. You do know you don't need a BlackBerry server to use a BlackBerry, right? When you sign up for a BlackBerry service plan you pick one or the other -- "enterprise connectivity" through BlackBerry's server package, or an Internet service that will poll POP or IMAP accounts (open or SSL) and deliver the mail to your handheld. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server just gives you added features, such as calendar sync. Another option is to set up your POP or IMAP servers to forward copies of incoming mail directly to your BlackBerry's individual email address. The advantage of this method is that you can use any spam filtering software you want on the server side and the mail gets delivered to the device virtually instantaneously.
Someday the tech pundits will learn that ease of use trumps features.
Tell that to the kids I see every day on the subway. No MMS, limited SMS? Forget about it. And I've actually seen people using their phones like boom boxes by cycling through their custom ringtones.
Fair enough, the iPhone is so expensive that these people won't be buying it anyway. Its feature set suits the 30-something demographic that can afford it. But still, my BlackBerry Pearl does everything I want and more, and a friend of mine got one for free after a rebate.
Yes, and the only reason we're talking about it is because the summary is a dumb, Google-whoring troll.
For other types of Web sites, on the other hand, this sounds like a good thing. Judging a content site by page hits is just stupid. And yet that's the metric that everybody's using. What it means is that you have all the so-called news sites scrambling to stuff their pages with crap. They push the story about the world's ugliest dog more than the latest story about corruption in the Bush administration, because they know that "viral" stories generate hits. Meanwhile, every story has to be accompanied by a "slide show" of images... click, click, click. Stories that would have been trimmed by the editor in print run full length, spread across three pages... click, click. Less and less attention is paid to the content that matters and the Web slowly melts into crap.
Hmmm, so it acts sort of the same but seems to be completely rewritten. Wanna bet it was a patent issue? Maybe Yahoo actually had to buy MusicMatch just to code the features it wanted.
Oh hey, don't get me wrong. I'll be laughing at the funerals of every one of these bastards. Lots of my friends are in bands, and lots of them -- despite the fact that they write their own material, and presumably should be the biggest beneficiaries of these sorts of actions -- are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect that The Music Industry is dying off while we watch.
In other words, your boss could save the company about fifty bucks a day in lost productivity if he made sure you didn't turn off your computer when you went home at night.
The way I understand it, there's a concept of compulsory licensing in the music industry. If you want to perform a cover of another artist's song, the other artist can't stop you from doing that (imagine you're Slayer and you want to cover a song written by Oral Roberts). But you do have to pay the original artist; I believe the agreed-upon fee is a set percentage of the profits of your recording.
For venues that allow live music, which might "give public performances" (i.e. play out loud) any number of songs, the way they work it is that ASCAP/BMI offers a program where the venue can play a flat fee that allows them to play unlimited songs.
For radio stations it's a little different... if you worked at your college radio station, you might recall that radio DJs are required to keep meticulous records of all the songs they play. The flat-fee approach for bars and restaurants allows them to avoid this recordkeeping.
Most bars actually don't complain about this, because for them the fee really is actually fairly reasonable. People come to bars to get drunk, order more beers and shots than they originally planned, plug quarters into the juke box and the pool table, and the bar owner is happy. Few people buy more than two lattes at a coffee shop, on the other hand.
It sounds to me like the coffee shop owners aren't getting "shaken down" any more than any other business (like a bar or restaurant) is. What they seem to be saying is that, unlike bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, they can't afford it.
The 80 character width design was set up for a reason.
Yes, but I guarantee it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the formatting demands of book publishing. For one thing, book publishers also have enough sense to use proportionally-spaced fonts, and they often use full justification on their text, which throws the whole concept of character/line width out the window.
Not fair. They went through a bad patch but they rebounded pretty quickly, I thought. It's still a witty, inventive show. I'd say the main problem with the most recent episodes hasn't been the jokes, visual and otherwise -- they're still funny -- but the plots have become over-labored and fanboyish, with the writers constantly using whatever excuse they can to bring this or that character back into the show. It was better when the universe wasn't so established, when things would still come out of left field that weren't exactly "the Simpsons way of doing it."
Still, I far prefer it to shows like The Family Guy, for example, which can be funny but overall is just too nasty and negative for me. The Simpsons is a sitcom about a family, in the style of the Brady Bunch or the Cosby Show. Admittedly it can be a hell of a lot more surreal than those shows, and that's what makes it great, but it's not really trying to push the boundaries. You can't hate on a show just because it was the most groundbreaking show on TV 20 years ago and it's not now.
Exactly. They would only become significant if you actually tried to blow up the reactor. Why should kiddie porn be any different?
With kiddie porn, somebody already blew up the reactor. By consuming the product those people produce, you are encouraging them. You're essentially an accomplice.
Oh and if they had child porn - we'd call the police.
And me, I think this is fair./.ers always bring up the old "waaah, won't someone think of the children." But it doesn't even have to be child porn. Years ago, a friend and I spent a couple weekends driving around taking photos of roadkill. We wanted to do a sort of art project with pictures of dead animals. We dropped the roll off at the local drug store and when we came back to pick up our snaps, "Hey, could you wait here a minute?" A few minutes later, there were the cops. You see, the guys at the photo booth thought we might have actually been driving around and running down all these animals, on purpose -- something that had never even actually occurred to us. But you know what? Once they explained to us what their problem was, I totally had no problem with them detaining us for however long it took to get to the bottom of it. Cuz you know, it really would have been pretty messed up if we had been going around town, slaughtering animals for an art project. Kind of like if one of your customers was beating off to child abuse.
While computer repair regulations don't exist like, say, auto repair regulations do, at the time I wondered if it would become compulsory for a computer repair shop to search and disclose child porn and similar because won't someone please think of the children.
I get what you're saying. It would suck if the job description for "computer repair tech" included "FBI snitch" and that, just by taking the job, you had to accept that part of the gig.
But then again, I really don't like child pornography. I think it's criminal.
I'll tell you something else I don't like: Violent crime. I bet you don't like it either. So look at it this way. Say you're walking down the street, and there's a woman walking along, and out of nowhere this guy jumps off his front porch, runs down in front of the woman and socks her in the face, breaking her jaw. He does this right in front of you. There's blood and teeth everywhere. Then he runs away.
Let's say for the sake of argument that when all this happened you were on your way to your job as a computer repair tech. Should it be "compulsory" for you to do something about this violent crime you just saw?
A lot of people might say no. I can think of plenty of reasons why you might not want to get involved. But I dunno... if you had a cell phone in your pocket, wouldn't you maybe think about at least calling the cops? Even if you had no intention of sticking around? Isn't it kind of "compulsory" for us all to do that sort of thing, because that's what allows us to live in a civil society?
You seem to be leaning toward the side that says "so he had some child porn, no big deal, none of my business." I say it is kind of a big deal. It's a crime and it's not a victimless one. Maybe it is compulsory that we do something about it -- no matter who we are.
This may be unpopular, but how can numbers possibly be a significant enough threat to land one in prison? (A digital image file is a very large number.)
So if the cops find on my computer the plans to make a very large bomb, the receipts from the Web sites where I bought bomb-making materials, and a PDF of the floor plan of my local nuclear reactor, those "very large numbers" wouldn't be significant either?
The reason your view is "unpopular" is because most people don't support and condone child abuse. People who masturbate to it, however -- whether or not they created the "very large numbers" in question -- do.
The problem with films like fight club is that people watch them, people agree with them, people think "wow, that's so true, I really should be more like that and challenge the system"
You had me up to this point. Then I realized that you really do think that "Fight Club" was a true and insightful movie, and not just frivolous entertainment for angry young middle-class white males.
So this Apple partnership has had a positive outcome for all AT&T customers, but it also highlights their network was artificially crippled up until yesterday.
Not necessarily. It could have been a months-long, major infrastructure upgrade and they only turned the key yesterday.
This seems to be a popular opinion, but why? I mean... yeah, I don't really care for his current stuff that much either. But why not? He's certainly no less talented than he was when he wrote "Purple Rain." The music doesn't sound drastically different than his older stuff, yet it's somehow not as appealing. Where did he take a wrong turn?
(He does seem to be into guitar-wank a little more than modern audiences prefer...)
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Yes, that's what makes it so gruesome on Vista. But it did something similar on XP, too.
Similarly, I had a girlfriend who was deathly afraid of spiders. If we were lying in bed and she spotted a house spider sitting peacefully on the ceiling, across the room, she would not stop freaking out until I had leapt from the bed and found a broomstick or something with which to destroy the poor creature.
I know for a fact that she had never been bitten by a house spider to cause this fear. Why? Because they never, ever bite you. In fact most kinds of spiders do not bite humans. (On a side note, if you ever wake up in the morning with a "spider bite" on some part of your body, get to a doctor -- it might be a staph infection, and they can be very, very nasty.)
The thing is, I wonder if my ex's fear of spiders could be cured by this drug they're talking about? The article says it's good for curing learned fears -- fear in response to some horrible trauma, for example. Those are very real. I once got in an ugly, head-on car collision and it was weeks before I could ride in a car without flinching and squirming in my seat every time I saw headlights. But fear of snakes, or fear of spiders, seem like fears that are so not based in any kind of experiential reality that I feel like they must come from someplace else.
I actually thought this summary sounded really interesting, because it may mean that the MIT researchers have discovered a chemical that performs a similar function to something that appears in nature.
... something. They know not what.
The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that infests mammals, causing the condition known as toxoplasmosis. It has several stages in its life cycle, wherein you find it in different forms of animals. It does infest people, but it doesn't really like it there and unless you're immune-compromised it usually has no ill effects. Its preferred final host organism is a cat, including wildcats and house cats. And in order to get into cats it employs a novel device: First it infests mice.
Researchers did a little experiment. They had some mice run through a little maze, looking for food. One area of the maze they treated with cat urine. Normal mice, when they encountered this part of the maze, would get completely freaked out. From then on they would avoid that part of the maze like the plague. Mice infested with toxoplasmosis, on the other hand, wouldn't seem to notice. In fact, some of them seemed to develop a perverse curiosity about the cat-smelling part of the maze, and would return to it again and again.
The results seemed to be consistent with the idea that toxoplasmosis does something to inhibit fear in mice. So they did some further studies, this time on people. As it turned out, psychological studies seemed to indicate that humans infested with toxoplasmosis, though they may not be "sick," do seem to exhibit more exaggerated behaviors, consistent with the kinds of effects observed in mice. Men tend to become more solitary, aggressive, and rebellious. Women become more overtly friendly and flirtatious.
Generally, scientists agree that it's unlikely that a microscopic organism like Toxoplasma gondii could have some kind of diabolical masterplan behind these behavior changes. It's probably something as simple as releasing a molecule into the bodies of the host organism that does
Only, I wonder if the MIT guys have discovered something close.
Reread my post. You're probably not running Media Center on a TV with the rest of your PC running on a monitor and trying to switch back and forth between the two screens. In fact, you're probably running your Media Center PC as a single-use appliance. Right?
Really? Man, tell that to my box running Vista Media Center. Media Center has a helpful (cough) habit of capturing the mouse cursor to the screen running the Media Center app. Hit the Windows key to break out of it and your video playback is interrupted for as much as 20 seconds while Windows struggles to switch screens and render the Start menu. What's more, despite the fact that Vista has been re-engineered to support multiple sound output devices, it is not possible to assign one particular device to Media Center. In other words, you cannot force Media Center to always use your SPDIF output for sound and then use the computer speakers for other apps. You MUST specify SPDIF as the default sound device for the entire OS if you want Media Center to output sound in that way. It's clear that, for as powerful and multi-thread capable as modern hardware may be, Vista Media Center was written with the assumption that your PC will become a single-purpose appliance. It's kinda pathetic.
Attempting to be a little more constructive than some of these other replies ... I, too, have no problems uninstalling anything on my Vista system, and I'm running with all patches. But then, I'm also running with UAC disabled. Maybe this is a simple permissions issue? Remember, with Vista you no longer run as an Administrator by default. Perhaps some of these older programs were installed as Administrator -- maybe even under XP -- and the unprivileged user doesn't have permission to run the uninstall script. I know I've run into similar annoyances with Vista often, where even though I AM running as an Admin it tells me I "need permission" to copy or delete files, etc.
More to the point, I'd wager that the type of people who know damn well that they copy DVDs all the time might also be the kind of people who, when asked if they would like to install software on their computers that monitors everything they do, would say "no, thank you."
Uhhhh... OK, done. You do know you don't need a BlackBerry server to use a BlackBerry, right? When you sign up for a BlackBerry service plan you pick one or the other -- "enterprise connectivity" through BlackBerry's server package, or an Internet service that will poll POP or IMAP accounts (open or SSL) and deliver the mail to your handheld. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server just gives you added features, such as calendar sync. Another option is to set up your POP or IMAP servers to forward copies of incoming mail directly to your BlackBerry's individual email address. The advantage of this method is that you can use any spam filtering software you want on the server side and the mail gets delivered to the device virtually instantaneously.
Tell that to the kids I see every day on the subway. No MMS, limited SMS? Forget about it. And I've actually seen people using their phones like boom boxes by cycling through their custom ringtones.
Fair enough, the iPhone is so expensive that these people won't be buying it anyway. Its feature set suits the 30-something demographic that can afford it. But still, my BlackBerry Pearl does everything I want and more, and a friend of mine got one for free after a rebate.
Yes, and the only reason we're talking about it is because the summary is a dumb, Google-whoring troll.
... click, click, click. Stories that would have been trimmed by the editor in print run full length, spread across three pages ... click, click. Less and less attention is paid to the content that matters and the Web slowly melts into crap.
For other types of Web sites, on the other hand, this sounds like a good thing. Judging a content site by page hits is just stupid. And yet that's the metric that everybody's using. What it means is that you have all the so-called news sites scrambling to stuff their pages with crap. They push the story about the world's ugliest dog more than the latest story about corruption in the Bush administration, because they know that "viral" stories generate hits. Meanwhile, every story has to be accompanied by a "slide show" of images
Wait ... you're saying MySQL and Oracle only run on x86? What rock have you crawled out from under?
Oh come now. Any poshibul bemefuh?
Hmmm, so it acts sort of the same but seems to be completely rewritten. Wanna bet it was a patent issue? Maybe Yahoo actually had to buy MusicMatch just to code the features it wanted.
Oh hey, don't get me wrong. I'll be laughing at the funerals of every one of these bastards. Lots of my friends are in bands, and lots of them -- despite the fact that they write their own material, and presumably should be the biggest beneficiaries of these sorts of actions -- are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect that The Music Industry is dying off while we watch.
In other words, your boss could save the company about fifty bucks a day in lost productivity if he made sure you didn't turn off your computer when you went home at night.
The way I understand it, there's a concept of compulsory licensing in the music industry. If you want to perform a cover of another artist's song, the other artist can't stop you from doing that (imagine you're Slayer and you want to cover a song written by Oral Roberts). But you do have to pay the original artist; I believe the agreed-upon fee is a set percentage of the profits of your recording.
... if you worked at your college radio station, you might recall that radio DJs are required to keep meticulous records of all the songs they play. The flat-fee approach for bars and restaurants allows them to avoid this recordkeeping.
For venues that allow live music, which might "give public performances" (i.e. play out loud) any number of songs, the way they work it is that ASCAP/BMI offers a program where the venue can play a flat fee that allows them to play unlimited songs.
For radio stations it's a little different
Most bars actually don't complain about this, because for them the fee really is actually fairly reasonable. People come to bars to get drunk, order more beers and shots than they originally planned, plug quarters into the juke box and the pool table, and the bar owner is happy. Few people buy more than two lattes at a coffee shop, on the other hand.
It sounds to me like the coffee shop owners aren't getting "shaken down" any more than any other business (like a bar or restaurant) is. What they seem to be saying is that, unlike bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, they can't afford it.
Yes, but I guarantee it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the formatting demands of book publishing. For one thing, book publishers also have enough sense to use proportionally-spaced fonts, and they often use full justification on their text, which throws the whole concept of character/line width out the window.
Not fair. They went through a bad patch but they rebounded pretty quickly, I thought. It's still a witty, inventive show. I'd say the main problem with the most recent episodes hasn't been the jokes, visual and otherwise -- they're still funny -- but the plots have become over-labored and fanboyish, with the writers constantly using whatever excuse they can to bring this or that character back into the show. It was better when the universe wasn't so established, when things would still come out of left field that weren't exactly "the Simpsons way of doing it."
Still, I far prefer it to shows like The Family Guy, for example, which can be funny but overall is just too nasty and negative for me. The Simpsons is a sitcom about a family, in the style of the Brady Bunch or the Cosby Show. Admittedly it can be a hell of a lot more surreal than those shows, and that's what makes it great, but it's not really trying to push the boundaries. You can't hate on a show just because it was the most groundbreaking show on TV 20 years ago and it's not now.
With kiddie porn, somebody already blew up the reactor. By consuming the product those people produce, you are encouraging them. You're essentially an accomplice.
And me, I think this is fair. /.ers always bring up the old "waaah, won't someone think of the children." But it doesn't even have to be child porn. Years ago, a friend and I spent a couple weekends driving around taking photos of roadkill. We wanted to do a sort of art project with pictures of dead animals. We dropped the roll off at the local drug store and when we came back to pick up our snaps, "Hey, could you wait here a minute?" A few minutes later, there were the cops. You see, the guys at the photo booth thought we might have actually been driving around and running down all these animals, on purpose -- something that had never even actually occurred to us. But you know what? Once they explained to us what their problem was, I totally had no problem with them detaining us for however long it took to get to the bottom of it. Cuz you know, it really would have been pretty messed up if we had been going around town, slaughtering animals for an art project. Kind of like if one of your customers was beating off to child abuse.
I get what you're saying. It would suck if the job description for "computer repair tech" included "FBI snitch" and that, just by taking the job, you had to accept that part of the gig.
But then again, I really don't like child pornography. I think it's criminal.
I'll tell you something else I don't like: Violent crime. I bet you don't like it either. So look at it this way. Say you're walking down the street, and there's a woman walking along, and out of nowhere this guy jumps off his front porch, runs down in front of the woman and socks her in the face, breaking her jaw. He does this right in front of you. There's blood and teeth everywhere. Then he runs away.
Let's say for the sake of argument that when all this happened you were on your way to your job as a computer repair tech. Should it be "compulsory" for you to do something about this violent crime you just saw?
A lot of people might say no. I can think of plenty of reasons why you might not want to get involved. But I dunno... if you had a cell phone in your pocket, wouldn't you maybe think about at least calling the cops? Even if you had no intention of sticking around? Isn't it kind of "compulsory" for us all to do that sort of thing, because that's what allows us to live in a civil society?
You seem to be leaning toward the side that says "so he had some child porn, no big deal, none of my business." I say it is kind of a big deal. It's a crime and it's not a victimless one. Maybe it is compulsory that we do something about it -- no matter who we are.
So if the cops find on my computer the plans to make a very large bomb, the receipts from the Web sites where I bought bomb-making materials, and a PDF of the floor plan of my local nuclear reactor, those "very large numbers" wouldn't be significant either?
The reason your view is "unpopular" is because most people don't support and condone child abuse. People who masturbate to it, however -- whether or not they created the "very large numbers" in question -- do.
You had me up to this point. Then I realized that you really do think that "Fight Club" was a true and insightful movie, and not just frivolous entertainment for angry young middle-class white males.
Not necessarily. It could have been a months-long, major infrastructure upgrade and they only turned the key yesterday.
This seems to be a popular opinion, but why? I mean ... yeah, I don't really care for his current stuff that much either. But why not? He's certainly no less talented than he was when he wrote "Purple Rain." The music doesn't sound drastically different than his older stuff, yet it's somehow not as appealing. Where did he take a wrong turn?
(He does seem to be into guitar-wank a little more than modern audiences prefer...)