And it also is flawed because it only addresses one part of what could be going on.
Using as a metaphor the eyes as a video camera with some "shutter speed" and your memory being an analog tape that records events, all they tested was if the shutter speed of the eyes increases under stress. What they didn't address is if the memory tape gets sped up while recording - making things seem, at least in hindsight, to have taken a long time.
If the shutter speed is the same but the tape goes faster, you would still see just as many numbers as the non-stressed environment but you would remember seeing each number for a longer time. Many of the posts here (and my own experience) indicate that the perceived slow down seems to happen but that the subject does not feel they can act any faster compared to outside events. This would actually support the 2nd idea - that maybe memory-recording neurons are firing faster during the stressful event - but that the senses themselves are not particularly enhanced (at least in a time-wise fashion).
That said, I agree with what you're saying. Simulated life-threatening is different than real life-threatening. It's like the guys saying waterboarding is not torture because they underwent it in training. Well, undergoing it in a controlled situation by guys from "your side" is very different than being in a secret prison, cut off from the world, done by guys who don't mind if they kill you. I also imagine the time perception is different there too.
Re:OB In Soviet Russia
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You joke about Soviet Russia, but when I was a paratrooper - many years ago - there were stories of how the Russians would drop airborne troops by flying very low and dropping them into to snow drifts.
Maybe they just told us that so we wouldn't bitch about how fast we hit the ground WITH parachutes... One thing the army taught me is that someone ALWAYS has it worse.
i'd much rather the surgeon be worrying about keeping me alive while under the knife, not worrying about how many sponges he has used.
Well, it's not like they're worried about the number of sponges used so they can charge your insurance more. The problem is that when a sponge is left in the body, it IS a life threatening situation. If you get sewn up with one in you, it becomes a site for serious infections that can lead pretty quickly to death.
It's also not so hard to imagine one being left in there because you've got this lumpy bloody thing in a body full of lumpy bloody things.
So yes, you want the surgeon focusing on your procedure and keeping you alive while under the knife - but you don't want him leaving things behind that will cause you to die AFTER you're under the knife.
Personally I always thought the Apple II crowd was secretly jealous of the better games, and FAR better sound on a C64.
One guy I knew in college (a C=64 owner) would poke his head in the guy's room who had the Apple ][ and call out, "I get to the be the green car!"*
*(This is really only funny if you know that the Apple ][ only had a green monochrome screen - so all video game items were green).
I think the first computers I ever used were the TRS-80 Model 4's and a TRS 4K color computer, and that followed by the Vic-20. But the first computer I owned was the C=64 - and like many people here, it will always have a special place in my memories. It seemed back then like there wasn't anything you couldn't do with that little computer.
Lying? You've said a couple times that I'm a liar, and you seem to throw that kind of thing around. But you have yet to explain where I have lied. You were the first to mention "moving goalposts" then jumped all over me as if I were the first to mention it. Do you have me confused with someone else or is your schizophrenia medicine not working like it's supposed to?
Driven by the same damnable curiosity that drives people to actually click on 2-girls-1-finger, I went to look at your other posts. And in all honesty, you're a very mean little person. Nearly everything you write is demeaning and insulting. The scary thing is that you're probably let out in public. On the upside, time you spend responding to my posts is time you are not out strangling puppies, kicking cats, and molesting children, so I'm glad to do my part for society.
The real shame of the Reagan administration was how so much funding was cut from mental health programs and in turn, many mentally challenged people were turned out onto the streets where the committed crimes and ended up in the criminal justice system. I'm curious to know your thoughts on this because clearly it has affected you personally.
Going back to the very originality of this thread, maybe you're on parole and used to constant government surveillance - and thus you have no problem with that level of surveillance for the rest of us. Most of the rest of us don't like being watched like that.
And I state, in all truthfulness (so you don't confused), people like you are utterly fascinating; like the ebb and flow of the length of the men's-room line at a Packers game. Totally mesmerizing.
Good lord, you have some kind of infatuation with my post, don't you. It's amazing. I mean seriously, I'm stunned by the fact that you're so obsessed with my writing that you have this uncontrollable desire to keep responding to it - especially the stuff you've already responded to at least once before. How many different logical fallacies will you dredge up and throw at the same post?
It's utterly fascinating. Seriously.
I mean, we get the fact that you have a fetish for the government setting up a society of surveillance. Heck, maybe you have a job where you'll get to spy on your fellow citizens. That's all fine, I guess, but most of us don't like the government establishing an omnipresent and permanent record of everything we do. The fact that you don't mind really kind of makes you a freak. Not like a circus freak like the bearded lady or the guy with rubber arms; just kind of a plain vanilla freak like the kid in the 3rd grade who sits in the back of the classroom with one hand down his pants while he eats Elmer's glue with the other. At least if you were the circus freak variety you could get some kind of gainful employment instead of stalking my inane posts here on slashdot.
I suppose I should be flattered that I have my very own internet-stalker-freak. But really, I'm having trouble getting that excited about it. But then again, I'm full of anticipation about what you will come up with next. You've called me a liar and disgustingly childish and transparent. I'm wondering if you'll call me a Nazi next and end up Godwining our lovely discussion.
I'm afraid to ask, but I'm curious to know what do you do when you're not stalking my postings. But it's the same kind of curiosity that drives you to finally click on the two-girls-one-cup video and only when it's too late do you realize it was a bad mistake.
OMG! You just won an internet fight by default! How can anyone manage to compete with your towering intellect and amazing command of the rules of logic.
Ooops! I just went off topic again, LOLZ!
ROFLMAO!!!
(I have never typed that before in my life. I've saved it all these years just for you. You're very quite special.)
Anyway, good job, good luck, and by golly, I hope you have a swell day. No really. And not just swell as in you got stung by a wasp on the penis while masturbating in the woodshed. I mean like swell as in... really nice... like flowers on a spring day (but without the wasp)... really! I mean it! And not like those fake artificial flowers that get all dusty, or those lame dried flowers people put in jars, but real live pretty flowers; like you put in your hair... when you go to San Francisco. But I suppose you could put them in your hair in other cities too. I think.
Just be careful of the wasps... even if they really bite instead of sting.
Easy! You just put a camera to watch the camera...
I wonder if they can just "tag" the rocks like they do with sharks, elephants, walruses, etc. I mean, I know the rocks don't have ears or collars, but there has to be a way.
I think any reasonable person say that the government keeping a permanent and nearly omni-present record of everything a person does is covered both by the OP AND the 4th Amendment.
The only moving of goalposts or deflections from topic (along with adhominems) are from your response.
The linked article doesn't work any more, but it had the same stupid picture in it - with a photoshop sail drawn over a ship. It would be nice if they at least showed a picture of a working prototype and not the same dumb photoshop drawing.
My copy of the Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which pretty well covers your hypothetical.
And what's "unreasonable"? What if those in power deem that whatever they are doing is "reasonable"?
What about "secure in their person"? Sure nothing in there says the government can't look at you. But don't you think that some kind of line is crossed when the government decides to keep a permanent record of everything you've done, everywhere you've gone, and everyone you've talked to?
You have no expectation of privacy in public. Maybe that's why they call it "public". Don't like it? Stay home and close your windows.
I'm just curious. Is there anything that the state could do in "public" where you would finally say, "that's enough"? Apparently continuous, permanent, ever-present surveillance doesn't seem to bother you. How about in order to move from city block to city block you have to stop and present yourself for a full-body search, fingerprint, retinal scan, and DNA sample? Would you still say, "don't like it, just stay home"? I hope you would - and if so, there must be a line somewhere between the two. Where would you draw that line? And does it seem so radical to you that some of us may choose to draw that line closer to protecting privacy and freedom of movement than you might?
recently it was used to locate a mother and child attending a concert to let them know that a transplant donor had been located for the child and to get to the hospital.
Damn them! How dare they have a phone turned on during a concert! By god and all that is right those signals should have been jammed! I don't care if she has a terminal illness... nobody should be able to interrupt my enjoyment of the Teletubbies Christmas Jam!/sarcasm
The guys who did "Park Wars: The Little Menace" did a great play on this scene:
Qui-Gon: The Force is unusally strong with him, that much is clear. Who was his father? Shmi: (having a flashback where she is in bed with the South Park Saddam, who says, "I love you") there was no father
tiny space fighters work just as well in atmosphere (and never need heat shielding),
You don't need heat shielding to go from being out of the atmosphere into it. You only really need it if you are using the atmosphere to slow you down from an orbital velocity to a re-entry one. These little fighters are just flying around - probably not even really orbiting the planets at all.
That's one of the things that often bothered me in several of the Star Trek episodes. It's not the fact that you're in the atmosphere that heats you up. It's the fact that you are going really really fast and using the atmosphere to slow you down that heats you up.
If we somehow ever make a space elevator, the elevator will not need heat shielding because its descent into the atmosphere would be pretty slow and the friction from the air would not cause much heat to be generated.
It's true that voting is simple process. Rigging a vote, however, is not as simple; and printing ballots does not have as high a profit margin as selling a voting machine.
The reasons for the machines and the reasons for the non-traditional way are: to make more money for friends (and campaign contributors) of politicians and to facilitate getting the desired (and paid for) result from an election.
It has nothing to do with the intelligence or lack thereof in the American voting populace.
NOBODY, repeat NOBODY, NEEDS a cell phone. People just think they do, and many of them are damned selfish about it using them.
Again, you're just like a religious zealot trying to impose on others what you think should be.
To take your argument farther, what do you really need outside of food, water, and air? Nobody NEEDS clothes, cars, houses, kitchen tables, and grocery stores, so by GOD, let's ban them all!
And really, does anyone NEED to live? There's plenty of us, so why do YOU need to have food, water, and air?
Jammers don't block landlines. In an emergency situation in a place of business the staff of the business are perfectly capable of using a landline. Oops, all the nearby land-line phones are actually cordless, and the jammer is broad spectrum. So sad, nobody can call 911 when you choke on your bologna sandwich.
And crap - I live across the street from that restaurant and now my wireless and cell phone don't work during their business hours. Gee thanks.
But, I know there's no talking sense to a religious zealot; and it's probably the same for an anti-cellphone zealot.
It's because people in the US are descended from a bunch of puritanical zealots who just can't stand the thought that others might have entertainment, joy, or pleasure (particularly if it excludes themselves).
They hate someone talking on a cellphone on a public train (even if they're quieter than talking face to face on the train) because being on the train sucks and the person on the phone is "escaping" by talking to someone else. "How dare they not suffer like the rest of us."
They hate someone talking on a phone in a restaurant (no matter how quietly) because maybe that person is talking to someone more interesting than their own boring dinner mates.
It also comes from an anti-rich resentment from when cellphones were only for wealthy people who could avoid them. Of course, nearly everyone can easily afford a cellphone now, just like any religious dogma, the hatred for cellphones as a symbol of the rich has stuck with us.
It really puzzles me. The zealots here are railing against cell phones. They're not railing against boorish behavior. Does it matter if someone is loud in a restaurant on a phone or with the person across from them? If someone is driving erratically, does it matter if it's because they're on the phone, fiddling with the radio, or just a plain bad driver? But somehow, these people have fixated on the cellphone itself.
Finally, Americans are a bunch of people who are generally powerless in their lives and even though they live in one of the richest countries in the world, they feel they've been dealt a bad deal in life. And if they can't be pacified by a Big Mac and the latest episode of Survivor or Let's Make A Deal then they tend to take it out on each other - particularly if the other seems to be having fun or having an escape from reality.
Of course I find it after posting. It was apparently Miniscribe.
From one source: The most famous plan they came up with, by far, was executed in late 1987, and was very simple: Buy a load of bricks, pack them into boxes, then ship them to a fake customer's warehouse and report them as actual sales to cover the shortfall. The company's reputation was tarnished quite a bit once the deception was unveiled in early 1989; shareholders revolted and sued the company, and combined with the industry-wide slump in disk drive sales in the late 1980s, MiniScribe's health never fully recovered.
It seems I read a story once about a harddrive manufacturer that was going bankrupt. In order to fool an audit (to make it look like they had more finished goods than they did), the employees were told to fill boxes empty harddrive boxes with bricks and they loaded their warehouse with those.
I wish I could remember who it was but "hard disk brick bankrupt" in google doesn't come back with anything helpful. Quantum is the name that comes to mind, though.
This smacks of the same great scientific thinking as "Decrease in Pirates Cause Global Warming."
I disagree. It's difficult to make a chain of reasoning that connects the number of pirates to global warming.
However, suppose you start with:
"Youths who ingest lead from the environment tend to have brain damage that leads to criminal-like behavior later in life."
Then if you have:
"Levels of lead in the environment have decreased in the last 30 years and part of that decline is due to the change from leaded to unleaded gas."
Then you can reasonably consider the possibility that IF lead in the environment can lead to some criminal behavior AND IF lead in the environment has decreased THEN crime rates might also go down.
Once you have that then you can ask all kinds of interesting questions like: What kinds of crimes tend to be committed by such lead-damaged people? Are these the crimes the types of crimes that decreased over this same period? Is that lead persistent in the body and can it be measured in the population of criminals? (Could we exhume bodies from prison penitentiaries to see how lead levels have changed in their bodies?) Do we see less decrease in crime in areas where leaded gas is still used? Or do the crime patterns change when leaded gas was abandoned at a later time? Are there other factors that tend to cause people to commit those kinds of crimes? Did they also decrease over the same time period? With the same patterns in different areas?
And again with the Simpsons and violent crime rates, it's difficult to come up with a plausible chain of causality. But if you came up with one, you should also be come up with ways to test it.
Correlation's an important first step in learning about things. These people have found a correlation between two things that could quite possibly be related. It's a great first step (or looking at the referenced literature, a later step), but clearly there is more work to be done. And that's what science is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
That's awesome! It's no wonder the 3rd week was so easy!
I just forwarded that to several of my veteran paratrooper friends. "If the shoe fits", or maybe I should say, "If the reserve chute fits"...
Thanks!
And it also is flawed because it only addresses one part of what could be going on.
Using as a metaphor the eyes as a video camera with some "shutter speed" and your memory being an analog tape that records events, all they tested was if the shutter speed of the eyes increases under stress. What they didn't address is if the memory tape gets sped up while recording - making things seem, at least in hindsight, to have taken a long time.
If the shutter speed is the same but the tape goes faster, you would still see just as many numbers as the non-stressed environment but you would remember seeing each number for a longer time. Many of the posts here (and my own experience) indicate that the perceived slow down seems to happen but that the subject does not feel they can act any faster compared to outside events. This would actually support the 2nd idea - that maybe memory-recording neurons are firing faster during the stressful event - but that the senses themselves are not particularly enhanced (at least in a time-wise fashion).
That said, I agree with what you're saying. Simulated life-threatening is different than real life-threatening. It's like the guys saying waterboarding is not torture because they underwent it in training. Well, undergoing it in a controlled situation by guys from "your side" is very different than being in a secret prison, cut off from the world, done by guys who don't mind if they kill you. I also imagine the time perception is different there too.
You joke about Soviet Russia, but when I was a paratrooper - many years ago - there were stories of how the Russians would drop airborne troops by flying very low and dropping them into to snow drifts.
Maybe they just told us that so we wouldn't bitch about how fast we hit the ground WITH parachutes... One thing the army taught me is that someone ALWAYS has it worse.
i'd much rather the surgeon be worrying about keeping me alive while under the knife, not worrying about how many sponges he has used.
Well, it's not like they're worried about the number of sponges used so they can charge your insurance more. The problem is that when a sponge is left in the body, it IS a life threatening situation. If you get sewn up with one in you, it becomes a site for serious infections that can lead pretty quickly to death.
It's also not so hard to imagine one being left in there because you've got this lumpy bloody thing in a body full of lumpy bloody things.
So yes, you want the surgeon focusing on your procedure and keeping you alive while under the knife - but you don't want him leaving things behind that will cause you to die AFTER you're under the knife.
Personally I always thought the Apple II crowd was secretly jealous of the better games, and FAR better sound on a C64.
One guy I knew in college (a C=64 owner) would poke his head in the guy's room who had the Apple ][ and call out, "I get to the be the green car!"*
*(This is really only funny if you know that the Apple ][ only had a green monochrome screen - so all video game items were green).
I think the first computers I ever used were the TRS-80 Model 4's and a TRS 4K color computer, and that followed by the Vic-20. But the first computer I owned was the C=64 - and like many people here, it will always have a special place in my memories. It seemed back then like there wasn't anything you couldn't do with that little computer.
Yah, you need two random arguments to poke. And what does it do? It does something different every time you run it.
Is there NOTHING that Microsoft hasn't copied? Vista makes so much more sense to me now.
Lying? You've said a couple times that I'm a liar, and you seem to throw that kind of thing around. But you have yet to explain where I have lied. You were the first to mention "moving goalposts" then jumped all over me as if I were the first to mention it. Do you have me confused with someone else or is your schizophrenia medicine not working like it's supposed to?
Driven by the same damnable curiosity that drives people to actually click on 2-girls-1-finger, I went to look at your other posts. And in all honesty, you're a very mean little person. Nearly everything you write is demeaning and insulting. The scary thing is that you're probably let out in public. On the upside, time you spend responding to my posts is time you are not out strangling puppies, kicking cats, and molesting children, so I'm glad to do my part for society.
The real shame of the Reagan administration was how so much funding was cut from mental health programs and in turn, many mentally challenged people were turned out onto the streets where the committed crimes and ended up in the criminal justice system. I'm curious to know your thoughts on this because clearly it has affected you personally.
Going back to the very originality of this thread, maybe you're on parole and used to constant government surveillance - and thus you have no problem with that level of surveillance for the rest of us. Most of the rest of us don't like being watched like that.
And I state, in all truthfulness (so you don't confused), people like you are utterly fascinating; like the ebb and flow of the length of the men's-room line at a Packers game. Totally mesmerizing.
Good lord, you have some kind of infatuation with my post, don't you. It's amazing. I mean seriously, I'm stunned by the fact that you're so obsessed with my writing that you have this uncontrollable desire to keep responding to it - especially the stuff you've already responded to at least once before. How many different logical fallacies will you dredge up and throw at the same post?
It's utterly fascinating. Seriously.
I mean, we get the fact that you have a fetish for the government setting up a society of surveillance. Heck, maybe you have a job where you'll get to spy on your fellow citizens. That's all fine, I guess, but most of us don't like the government establishing an omnipresent and permanent record of everything we do. The fact that you don't mind really kind of makes you a freak. Not like a circus freak like the bearded lady or the guy with rubber arms; just kind of a plain vanilla freak like the kid in the 3rd grade who sits in the back of the classroom with one hand down his pants while he eats Elmer's glue with the other. At least if you were the circus freak variety you could get some kind of gainful employment instead of stalking my inane posts here on slashdot.
I suppose I should be flattered that I have my very own internet-stalker-freak. But really, I'm having trouble getting that excited about it. But then again, I'm full of anticipation about what you will come up with next. You've called me a liar and disgustingly childish and transparent. I'm wondering if you'll call me a Nazi next and end up Godwining our lovely discussion.
I'm afraid to ask, but I'm curious to know what do you do when you're not stalking my postings. But it's the same kind of curiosity that drives you to finally click on the two-girls-one-cup video and only when it's too late do you realize it was a bad mistake.
Good grief. People like you amaze me.
OMG! You just won an internet fight by default! How can anyone manage to compete with your towering intellect and amazing command of the rules of logic.
Ooops! I just went off topic again, LOLZ!
ROFLMAO!!!
(I have never typed that before in my life. I've saved it all these years just for you. You're very quite special.)
Anyway, good job, good luck, and by golly, I hope you have a swell day. No really. And not just swell as in you got stung by a wasp on the penis while masturbating in the woodshed. I mean like swell as in... really nice... like flowers on a spring day (but without the wasp)... really! I mean it! And not like those fake artificial flowers that get all dusty, or those lame dried flowers people put in jars, but real live pretty flowers; like you put in your hair... when you go to San Francisco. But I suppose you could put them in your hair in other cities too. I think.
Just be careful of the wasps... even if they really bite instead of sting.
Easy! You just put a camera to watch the camera...
I wonder if they can just "tag" the rocks like they do with sharks, elephants, walruses, etc. I mean, I know the rocks don't have ears or collars, but there has to be a way.
I think any reasonable person say that the government keeping a permanent and nearly omni-present record of everything a person does is covered both by the OP AND the 4th Amendment.
The only moving of goalposts or deflections from topic (along with adhominems) are from your response.
Whatever.
You really mean that we read this over a year ago right here on slashdot:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/08/1735227
The linked article doesn't work any more, but it had the same stupid picture in it - with a photoshop sail drawn over a ship. It would be nice if they at least showed a picture of a working prototype and not the same dumb photoshop drawing.
My copy of the Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which pretty well covers your hypothetical.
And what's "unreasonable"? What if those in power deem that whatever they are doing is "reasonable"?
What about "secure in their person"? Sure nothing in there says the government can't look at you. But don't you think that some kind of line is crossed when the government decides to keep a permanent record of everything you've done, everywhere you've gone, and everyone you've talked to?
You have no expectation of privacy in public. Maybe that's why they call it "public". Don't like it? Stay home and close your windows.
I'm just curious. Is there anything that the state could do in "public" where you would finally say, "that's enough"? Apparently continuous, permanent, ever-present surveillance doesn't seem to bother you. How about in order to move from city block to city block you have to stop and present yourself for a full-body search, fingerprint, retinal scan, and DNA sample? Would you still say, "don't like it, just stay home"? I hope you would - and if so, there must be a line somewhere between the two. Where would you draw that line? And does it seem so radical to you that some of us may choose to draw that line closer to protecting privacy and freedom of movement than you might?
recently it was used to locate a mother and child attending a concert to let them know that a transplant donor had been located for the child and to get to the hospital.
/sarcasm
Damn them! How dare they have a phone turned on during a concert! By god and all that is right those signals should have been jammed! I don't care if she has a terminal illness... nobody should be able to interrupt my enjoyment of the Teletubbies Christmas Jam!
The guys who did "Park Wars: The Little Menace" did a great play on this scene:
Qui-Gon: The Force is unusally strong with him, that much is clear. Who was his father?
Shmi: (having a flashback where she is in bed with the South Park Saddam, who says, "I love you") there was no father
tiny space fighters work just as well in atmosphere (and never need heat shielding),
You don't need heat shielding to go from being out of the atmosphere into it. You only really need it if you are using the atmosphere to slow you down from an orbital velocity to a re-entry one. These little fighters are just flying around - probably not even really orbiting the planets at all.
That's one of the things that often bothered me in several of the Star Trek episodes. It's not the fact that you're in the atmosphere that heats you up. It's the fact that you are going really really fast and using the atmosphere to slow you down that heats you up.
If we somehow ever make a space elevator, the elevator will not need heat shielding because its descent into the atmosphere would be pretty slow and the friction from the air would not cause much heat to be generated.
The answer to your question is in your post.
It's true that voting is simple process. Rigging a vote, however, is not as simple; and printing ballots does not have as high a profit margin as selling a voting machine.
The reasons for the machines and the reasons for the non-traditional way are: to make more money for friends (and campaign contributors) of politicians and to facilitate getting the desired (and paid for) result from an election.
It has nothing to do with the intelligence or lack thereof in the American voting populace.
NOBODY, repeat NOBODY, NEEDS a cell phone. People just think they do, and many of them are damned selfish about it using them.
Again, you're just like a religious zealot trying to impose on others what you think should be.
To take your argument farther, what do you really need outside of food, water, and air? Nobody NEEDS clothes, cars, houses, kitchen tables, and grocery stores, so by GOD, let's ban them all!
And really, does anyone NEED to live? There's plenty of us, so why do YOU need to have food, water, and air?
Jammers don't block landlines. In an emergency situation in a place of business the staff of the business are perfectly capable of using a landline.
Oops, all the nearby land-line phones are actually cordless, and the jammer is broad spectrum. So sad, nobody can call 911 when you choke on your bologna sandwich.
And crap - I live across the street from that restaurant and now my wireless and cell phone don't work during their business hours. Gee thanks.
But, I know there's no talking sense to a religious zealot; and it's probably the same for an anti-cellphone zealot.
I do wonder what the fuss is all about.
It's because people in the US are descended from a bunch of puritanical zealots who just can't stand the thought that others might have entertainment, joy, or pleasure (particularly if it excludes themselves).
They hate someone talking on a cellphone on a public train (even if they're quieter than talking face to face on the train) because being on the train sucks and the person on the phone is "escaping" by talking to someone else. "How dare they not suffer like the rest of us."
They hate someone talking on a phone in a restaurant (no matter how quietly) because maybe that person is talking to someone more interesting than their own boring dinner mates.
It also comes from an anti-rich resentment from when cellphones were only for wealthy people who could avoid them. Of course, nearly everyone can easily afford a cellphone now, just like any religious dogma, the hatred for cellphones as a symbol of the rich has stuck with us.
It really puzzles me. The zealots here are railing against cell phones. They're not railing against boorish behavior. Does it matter if someone is loud in a restaurant on a phone or with the person across from them? If someone is driving erratically, does it matter if it's because they're on the phone, fiddling with the radio, or just a plain bad driver? But somehow, these people have fixated on the cellphone itself.
Finally, Americans are a bunch of people who are generally powerless in their lives and even though they live in one of the richest countries in the world, they feel they've been dealt a bad deal in life. And if they can't be pacified by a Big Mac and the latest episode of Survivor or Let's Make A Deal then they tend to take it out on each other - particularly if the other seems to be having fun or having an escape from reality.
Bravo!
Of course I find it after posting. It was apparently Miniscribe.
From one source:
The most famous plan they came up with, by far, was executed in late 1987, and was very simple: Buy a load of bricks, pack them into boxes, then ship them to a fake customer's warehouse and report them as actual sales to cover the shortfall. The company's reputation was tarnished quite a bit once the deception was unveiled in early 1989; shareholders revolted and sued the company, and combined with the industry-wide slump in disk drive sales in the late 1980s, MiniScribe's health never fully recovered.
The case even made it to the supreme court:
http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/1996/w961430w.txt
It seems I read a story once about a harddrive manufacturer that was going bankrupt. In order to fool an audit (to make it look like they had more finished goods than they did), the employees were told to fill boxes empty harddrive boxes with bricks and they loaded their warehouse with those.
I wish I could remember who it was but "hard disk brick bankrupt" in google doesn't come back with anything helpful. Quantum is the name that comes to mind, though.
I don't wanna sound like a queer or nothin', but I think Depeche Mode is a sweet band!
This smacks of the same great scientific thinking as "Decrease in Pirates Cause Global Warming."
I disagree. It's difficult to make a chain of reasoning that connects the number of pirates to global warming.
However, suppose you start with:
"Youths who ingest lead from the environment tend to have brain damage that leads to criminal-like behavior later in life."
Then if you have:
"Levels of lead in the environment have decreased in the last 30 years and part of that decline is due to the change from leaded to unleaded gas."
Then you can reasonably consider the possibility that IF lead in the environment can lead to some criminal behavior AND IF lead in the environment has decreased THEN crime rates might also go down.
Once you have that then you can ask all kinds of interesting questions like:
What kinds of crimes tend to be committed by such lead-damaged people?
Are these the crimes the types of crimes that decreased over this same period?
Is that lead persistent in the body and can it be measured in the population of criminals?
(Could we exhume bodies from prison penitentiaries to see how lead levels have changed in their bodies?)
Do we see less decrease in crime in areas where leaded gas is still used? Or do the crime patterns change when leaded gas was abandoned at a later time?
Are there other factors that tend to cause people to commit those kinds of crimes?
Did they also decrease over the same time period? With the same patterns in different areas?
And again with the Simpsons and violent crime rates, it's difficult to come up with a plausible chain of causality. But if you came up with one, you should also be come up with ways to test it.
Correlation's an important first step in learning about things. These people have found a correlation between two things that could quite possibly be related. It's a great first step (or looking at the referenced literature, a later step), but clearly there is more work to be done. And that's what science is all about.