Following the seizure, there is a short period of time during which cortical electrical activity in the brain ceases and an EEG reading is flat," which sounds an awful lot like a reboot to me.
Oh, so the brain erases everything from its memory, and rebuilds itself from a saved fresh copy of itself? Ridiculous. It does nothing like that at all. The brain isn't a computer (at least not anything like the computer on your desk). It's a neural network. Comparing ECT to a reboot is completely without merit.
Great that you compare it to "rebooting a computer" because we really have very little idea how ECT works. The brain doesn't do anything akin to rebooting, so this analogy is completely worthless. It does permanent changes to the brain and we really have little clue as to what kind of changes. If you want an analogy, maybe "scrambling the hard drive" would be a better one, but even then we really have no clue as to how it works. The fact that it's no longer violent because people are anesthetized when it's done is really beside the point.
The vast majority were using the latest knowledge in an honest effort to help people.
Uh huh. So if I take out part of your brain, while wondering "gee, I wonder if taking out this part will help him" using "the latest knowledge" (almost none) that's OK? Hooking up electrodes to someones brain, but STILL not know what the hell it does or how it works is OK? (ECT isn't exactly viewed as an ethical treatment by everyone). Experimenting on people when you really don't know if it's going to help them (or anyone) and they're not in danger if imminent death is just plain wrong. This is an era where lobotomy for just about any major psychiatric disorder was considered "state of the art". This is a shamefull period for neurology, and if people don't realize that it could easily be repeated in some other discipline.
Around that time, theory was a lot more advanced than practice.
Boy is that an understatement. There was also little in the area of medical ethics. A lot of those doctors should have gone to jail for what they did. This is the same era where insulin shock and electro-shock were standard practices for several mental illnesses. What a sick and sad time.
No neurosurgeon ever suggested surgery as a solution, but based on cases like this, I think I would have declined the offer had it been made. I can't imagine actually having part of my brain removed, and because everyone is different, results like this man's can never be 100% avoided.
The 1950s weren't exactly a proud time for neurology. The lobotomy only lost favor as a "treatment" in the 50s because of the advent of thorazine. The guy that invented the lobotomy actually won the nobel prize for medicine in 1949 for inventing the procedure. The fact that they did what is now considered butchery to this guy shouldn't be surprising, though it is really quite a sad part of the history of medicine in the US.
How long until people start trying to think up ways of using bank-notes to deliver deadly chemical or biological agents to the mass population?
Probbably a harder thing to do than you think. Any chemical agent would have to not break down under heat, light, etc and work as some kind of contact poison since people don't tend to eat currency. Biological agents don't tend to like the dry conditions typcially present on currency, so the virus/bacteria/etc tends to die before it can spread very far. Most infectious diseases don't do very well outside the body.
I actually do like Family Guy, but I don't know if a talk show is going to work for the Stewie character. I'm afraid the Stewie character on Family Guy doesn't really have enough depth on his own. I like Stewie in small doses, but I don't think I'll want to sit through a half hour of him. Space Ghost works because of the other characters on the show, the quirkiness of the show in general, and the length of the segments. Without a supporting cast to carry some of the load, I'm not sure any of this will work.
I wonder, would this have been news if it was a rock core sample?
A million years is actually very young for rock. For comparison, the ordinary everyday rock from Devils Tower in Wyoming varies from between 100-200 million years old. The grand canyon ranges in age from 200 million to 2 billion years old. So I think it's safe to say that someone digging up rock that's merely a million years old wouldn't make the news.
(they would need to open the machine or get past the BIOS password and re-enable USB and then they would need to install the windows XP USB drivers or somehow boot an alternative OS (e.g. a Live CD) that would be able to read whatever sensative data they wanted
And this is something that's particularly difficult? You don't have to even have very specialized knowledge to open up a computer, jumper the BIOS reset jumper, and boot a Live CD to get USB support. An interface jockey can do all of that.
What you SHOULD be doing is limiting the access to this data, and auditing who accesses what, when, and how much. When you can't explain why you've copied 10 gigs of the database records and there's been a recent leak, odds are you're going to be at least fired, and maybe even raided by the police in search of evidence. Trying to limit how people take the data out of the building is like putting metal detectors at all the exits as your only means to protect Fort Knox. Once someone can get at the data there's always going to be a way to get it out.
Gold predicts 'at least one publicized major case of unencrypted data loss from a portable device' in the next year, which will result in many companies banning these kinds of devices."
Which will solve exactly nothing. What are you going to do, search everyone as they enter and leave the building? If you want to limit data theft, limit access to huge amount of data in the first place. That eliminates the risk to any new technology to get the data offsite.
Right, you only compared GM to mating wheat to fish. Fess up and admit you're spouting anti-GM talking points instead of a knee jerk response of claiming staw man arguments.
And here lies the central problem with the anti-GM crowd. The FUD they (and you in this story) spread is that GM means inserting "fishiness" in our plants. If you knew a little bit more about biology and genetics you'd know there's no such thing as a fish gene. The argument is a little like saying there's such a thing as "car steel" and putting "car steel" into an airplane makes the airplane tainted because it now has "carr-i-ness" associated with it.
OpenSSL is one of the most widely used pieces of software out their. Why is it still at version 0.9.x? I don't understand why this well proven pieces of software STILL hasn't decided that it's good enough for a 1.0 release. Can somone explain the version number strangeness?
The thing to worry about is geologic drift, so some backup landmarks would be useful.
The continents move on the order of a few centimeters per year. Even if you were frozen for 1000 years (kind of absurd even for the far out idea of cryogenics) that's only 30 meters. They also don't move randomly, so you'd even be able to correct for this small shift. As for gold, it might be useful to think about what other small items might retain high value. May even be ordinary things like stamps, newly minted coins, heirloom seeds
Gold is rare, and always will be rare. It's the most likely thing to retain value over the short and long term. It'd probbably be wise to diversify into some precious metals like platinum and silver. Stamps and coins would be a gamble.
it's far more sensible to keep your wealth tied up in as many diverse things as you can and the best way of doing that is to leave it in a bank or some sort of investment fund.
Dead people can't (and shouldn't be able to) own things. This isn't going to change anytime soon, primarily because dead people also can't vote. The value of gold does flutuate, but it's about the only thing that holds its value over millenia because it's rare.
Assuming for the minute that this will ever work (which currently is likely a crock of shit), why not just buy a bunch of gold, and bury it some random place in the ocean that you've memorized the GPS co-ordinates for? Gold is unlikely to decrease in value very much, so it should hold its value over a few hundred years. If you could somehow do this yourself (anyone you pay to help will likely just come back the next month of after you're dead and take the gold), it seems fairly foolproof.
In California, for example, any "beer" over 3.99% alcohol cannot be referred to as beer, and must be referred to as malt liquor, lager, etc
What a strange law. There'a a LOT of beer that's 4% alcohol or more. Lager has nothing to do with the alcohol content of beer, but with the type of yeast used. What do you call Guiness, which has about 4.2% alcohol by volume, or even Budweiser, which is 5% ABV?
Does anyone know of any other good online auctions?
Pretty much they all suck, with Yahoo sucking the least. The problem is really a chicken and egg problem. To attract buyers you need a lot of items available. But to attract sellers you need a lot of buyers. With both those groups settled on ebay to do auctions it's very hard for another auctioneer to get a foothold, even with cheap or free listing fees. I've looked at yahoo auctions before in the hopes I'd get a better deal because of the smaller amount of buyers, but I can almost never find what I'm looking for on yahoo auctions. Because of this I essentially forget that Yahoo even does auctions.
The real competitors to ebay is still people selling things locally and privately. Craigslist is probbably the biggest competitor to ebay because you can get things the same day, there's no fees to anyone, and there's no shipping as it's all designed for a local city.
That's all fine, assuming what you say is true and the topics the professor went on about had nothing to do with the class. I do wonder about the specifics you're talking about, and if they were truly irrelevant to the class topic. History is inherently political, and anyone who tells you different is a liar. Does anyone honestly have a "neutral" perspective on the outcome of WWII for instance? Politics permeates history, even in the very things that are considered important in history.
It strikes me that this organzation isn't really trying to address what you're complaining about. They seem more obsessed with "radicalism", whatever that means today. What you're talking about is just bad teaching, and I don't think anyone will try to defend that.
Some of them, especially the triangles (equilateral v/s isosceles) and the X's (perpendicular v/s otherwise) need the ability to think in terms of angles.
That's one way of thinking of it. But in all these examples you don't need to do any geometry, they're all just patterns. The X's example can be rotated in your head to compare them. The triangles can be rotated and reduced in size in your head. This doesn't have anything to do with geometry, but is just pattern matching.
Also, what's the hurry? The longer we wait, the less there will be...orbits will degrade, stuff will burn up.
Not exactly. That's assuming no new junk gets added to orbit, and even then the total mass decreases, not the number of objects. According to the article the number of objects will remain the same until 2055 because of collisions.
The hurry is that these objects pose a problem right now.
That's the idea- we don't need no imagination as long as we can label things as being ridiculous!
The last resort of the impractical. This is a problem we have right now. Maybe in another 100 years we can think of doing all the things you're talking about, but right now the idea of manufacturing space station parts ON the space station from junk is ridiculous. Nasa believies we need to solve the problem soon, not when some pie-in-the-sky idea of recycling space junk in orbit becomes practical.
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Following the seizure, there is a short period of time during which cortical electrical activity in the brain ceases and an EEG reading is flat," which sounds an awful lot like a reboot to me.
Oh, so the brain erases everything from its memory, and rebuilds itself from a saved fresh copy of itself? Ridiculous. It does nothing like that at all. The brain isn't a computer (at least not anything like the computer on your desk). It's a neural network. Comparing ECT to a reboot is completely without merit.
Great that you compare it to "rebooting a computer" because we really have very little idea how ECT works. The brain doesn't do anything akin to rebooting, so this analogy is completely worthless. It does permanent changes to the brain and we really have little clue as to what kind of changes. If you want an analogy, maybe "scrambling the hard drive" would be a better one, but even then we really have no clue as to how it works. The fact that it's no longer violent because people are anesthetized when it's done is really beside the point.
The vast majority were using the latest knowledge in an honest effort to help people.
Uh huh. So if I take out part of your brain, while wondering "gee, I wonder if taking out this part will help him" using "the latest knowledge" (almost none) that's OK? Hooking up electrodes to someones brain, but STILL not know what the hell it does or how it works is OK? (ECT isn't exactly viewed as an ethical treatment by everyone). Experimenting on people when you really don't know if it's going to help them (or anyone) and they're not in danger if imminent death is just plain wrong. This is an era where lobotomy for just about any major psychiatric disorder was considered "state of the art". This is a shamefull period for neurology, and if people don't realize that it could easily be repeated in some other discipline.
Around that time, theory was a lot more advanced than practice.
Boy is that an understatement. There was also little in the area of medical ethics. A lot of those doctors should have gone to jail for what they did. This is the same era where insulin shock and electro-shock were standard practices for several mental illnesses. What a sick and sad time.
No neurosurgeon ever suggested surgery as a solution, but based on cases like this, I think I would have declined the offer had it been made. I can't imagine actually having part of my brain removed, and because everyone is different, results like this man's can never be 100% avoided.
The 1950s weren't exactly a proud time for neurology. The lobotomy only lost favor as a "treatment" in the 50s because of the advent of thorazine. The guy that invented the lobotomy actually won the nobel prize for medicine in 1949 for inventing the procedure. The fact that they did what is now considered butchery to this guy shouldn't be surprising, though it is really quite a sad part of the history of medicine in the US.
How long until people start trying to think up ways of using bank-notes to deliver deadly chemical or biological agents to the mass population?
Probbably a harder thing to do than you think. Any chemical agent would have to not break down under heat, light, etc and work as some kind of contact poison since people don't tend to eat currency. Biological agents don't tend to like the dry conditions typcially present on currency, so the virus/bacteria/etc tends to die before it can spread very far. Most infectious diseases don't do very well outside the body.
You say Stewie doesn't have enough depth while simultaneously claiming Space Ghost works, even though HE doens't have enough depth either.
Huh? I think you've missed the point of other characters adding depth to the entire show.
Perhaps you're thinking of the boiling point of sugar? As another poster pointed out, melting sugar is an important part of candy making.
I actually do like Family Guy, but I don't know if a talk show is going to work for the Stewie character. I'm afraid the Stewie character on Family Guy doesn't really have enough depth on his own. I like Stewie in small doses, but I don't think I'll want to sit through a half hour of him. Space Ghost works because of the other characters on the show, the quirkiness of the show in general, and the length of the segments. Without a supporting cast to carry some of the load, I'm not sure any of this will work.
I wonder, would this have been news if it was a rock core sample?
A million years is actually very young for rock. For comparison, the ordinary everyday rock from Devils Tower in Wyoming varies from between 100-200 million years old. The grand canyon ranges in age from 200 million to 2 billion years old. So I think it's safe to say that someone digging up rock that's merely a million years old wouldn't make the news.
(they would need to open the machine or get past the BIOS password and re-enable USB and then they would need to install the windows XP USB drivers or somehow boot an alternative OS (e.g. a Live CD) that would be able to read whatever sensative data they wanted
And this is something that's particularly difficult? You don't have to even have very specialized knowledge to open up a computer, jumper the BIOS reset jumper, and boot a Live CD to get USB support. An interface jockey can do all of that.
What you SHOULD be doing is limiting the access to this data, and auditing who accesses what, when, and how much. When you can't explain why you've copied 10 gigs of the database records and there's been a recent leak, odds are you're going to be at least fired, and maybe even raided by the police in search of evidence. Trying to limit how people take the data out of the building is like putting metal detectors at all the exits as your only means to protect Fort Knox. Once someone can get at the data there's always going to be a way to get it out.
Gold predicts 'at least one publicized major case of unencrypted data loss from a portable device' in the next year, which will result in many companies banning these kinds of devices."
Which will solve exactly nothing. What are you going to do, search everyone as they enter and leave the building? If you want to limit data theft, limit access to huge amount of data in the first place. That eliminates the risk to any new technology to get the data offsite.
Strawman. I wrote no such thing.
Right, you only compared GM to mating wheat to fish. Fess up and admit you're spouting anti-GM talking points instead of a knee jerk response of claiming staw man arguments.
Ever see a fish mating with a wheat plant?
And here lies the central problem with the anti-GM crowd. The FUD they (and you in this story) spread is that GM means inserting "fishiness" in our plants. If you knew a little bit more about biology and genetics you'd know there's no such thing as a fish gene. The argument is a little like saying there's such a thing as "car steel" and putting "car steel" into an airplane makes the airplane tainted because it now has "carr-i-ness" associated with it.
OpenSSL is one of the most widely used pieces of software out their. Why is it still at version 0.9.x? I don't understand why this well proven pieces of software STILL hasn't decided that it's good enough for a 1.0 release. Can somone explain the version number strangeness?
The thing to worry about is geologic drift, so some backup landmarks would be useful.
The continents move on the order of a few centimeters per year. Even if you were frozen for 1000 years (kind of absurd even for the far out idea of cryogenics) that's only 30 meters. They also don't move randomly, so you'd even be able to correct for this small shift.
As for gold, it might be useful to think about what other small items might retain high value. May even be ordinary things like stamps, newly minted coins, heirloom seeds
Gold is rare, and always will be rare. It's the most likely thing to retain value over the short and long term. It'd probbably be wise to diversify into some precious metals like platinum and silver. Stamps and coins would be a gamble.
it's far more sensible to keep your wealth tied up in as many diverse things as you can and the best way of doing that is to leave it in a bank or some sort of investment fund.
Dead people can't (and shouldn't be able to) own things. This isn't going to change anytime soon, primarily because dead people also can't vote. The value of gold does flutuate, but it's about the only thing that holds its value over millenia because it's rare.
Assuming for the minute that this will ever work (which currently is likely a crock of shit), why not just buy a bunch of gold, and bury it some random place in the ocean that you've memorized the GPS co-ordinates for? Gold is unlikely to decrease in value very much, so it should hold its value over a few hundred years. If you could somehow do this yourself (anyone you pay to help will likely just come back the next month of after you're dead and take the gold), it seems fairly foolproof.
They could be referring to an acidic taste, not the pH of wine. As to how an electrode can reduce this taste, I have no idea.
In California, for example, any "beer" over 3.99% alcohol cannot be referred to as beer, and must be referred to as malt liquor, lager, etc
What a strange law. There'a a LOT of beer that's 4% alcohol or more. Lager has nothing to do with the alcohol content of beer, but with the type of yeast used. What do you call Guiness, which has about 4.2% alcohol by volume, or even Budweiser, which is 5% ABV?
Does anyone know of any other good online auctions?
Pretty much they all suck, with Yahoo sucking the least. The problem is really a chicken and egg problem. To attract buyers you need a lot of items available. But to attract sellers you need a lot of buyers. With both those groups settled on ebay to do auctions it's very hard for another auctioneer to get a foothold, even with cheap or free listing fees. I've looked at yahoo auctions before in the hopes I'd get a better deal because of the smaller amount of buyers, but I can almost never find what I'm looking for on yahoo auctions. Because of this I essentially forget that Yahoo even does auctions.
The real competitors to ebay is still people selling things locally and privately. Craigslist is probbably the biggest competitor to ebay because you can get things the same day, there's no fees to anyone, and there's no shipping as it's all designed for a local city.
That's all fine, assuming what you say is true and the topics the professor went on about had nothing to do with the class. I do wonder about the specifics you're talking about, and if they were truly irrelevant to the class topic. History is inherently political, and anyone who tells you different is a liar. Does anyone honestly have a "neutral" perspective on the outcome of WWII for instance? Politics permeates history, even in the very things that are considered important in history.
It strikes me that this organzation isn't really trying to address what you're complaining about. They seem more obsessed with "radicalism", whatever that means today. What you're talking about is just bad teaching, and I don't think anyone will try to defend that.
Some of them, especially the triangles (equilateral v/s isosceles) and the X's (perpendicular v/s otherwise) need the ability to think in terms of angles.
That's one way of thinking of it. But in all these examples you don't need to do any geometry, they're all just patterns. The X's example can be rotated in your head to compare them. The triangles can be rotated and reduced in size in your head. This doesn't have anything to do with geometry, but is just pattern matching.
That's funny- because a large portion of the current international space station is made from recycled junk right now.
No, it isn't. There was talk of doing that, but nothing more than talk. See http://www.permanent.com/p-extank.htm
Also, what's the hurry? The longer we wait, the less there will be...orbits will degrade, stuff will burn up.
Not exactly. That's assuming no new junk gets added to orbit, and even then the total mass decreases, not the number of objects. According to the article the number of objects will remain the same until 2055 because of collisions.
The hurry is that these objects pose a problem right now.
That's the idea- we don't need no imagination as long as we can label things as being ridiculous!
The last resort of the impractical. This is a problem we have right now. Maybe in another 100 years we can think of doing all the things you're talking about, but right now the idea of manufacturing space station parts ON the space station from junk is ridiculous. Nasa believies we need to solve the problem soon, not when some pie-in-the-sky idea of recycling space junk in orbit becomes practical.