You know, this just can't be that far off. Sex and war drive technology, and all that. Give them time, and I'm sure the adult industry will find a way to drive the costs of this down to levels where it's reasonable for everyone. After all, look what they did for cosmetic surgery. The question is, will people be interested in this for its own sake, or will it have to wait until things reach the point where it's indistinguishable from the real thing? I'm guessing from the preponderance of cartoon porn on the internet that it's just around the corner.
Actually, it was Bryson's sequel that covered most of the evolution of American English. Mother Tongue did cover some of this, of course, but the sequel was pretty much an in-depth study of the evolution of American speech. An interesting read, to say the least.
I have information about all of my various electronic assets and how they should be handled in my will, which has a copy on my computer, a hard copy in my desk, and a hard copy in a safe deposit box. I don't have a whole lot to distribute, except for my life insurance payout, but I have various instructions on where some of my stuff should go, who gets certain books, etc. It's a fairly informal will, but I expect my family will respect my wishes on it, since there aren't multimillion dollar assets to fight over. The copy in my desk is written and signed in my own handwriting, as I understand this is a little more legally binding. It's not a very detailed or complex solution to what to do with the detritus of my life should I drastically change tax status (die), but at 26, I figure an informal solution is pretty good, especially since I have almost no real assets to leave behind.
My ex girlfriend went to high school with Norah Jones. Not that that's relevant, but I find it somewhat interesting whenever she comes up in these type of discussions. My understanding is that she got her first real airplay at the University of North Texas station, which is pretty well known in the jazz scene because of UNT's huge jazz history. (And no, the station's call letters are not KUNT) Then a couple of radio show in the NY area started picking her up, and it kind of exploded from there. I think she's really good, although my ex girlfriend tends to not be impressed. I think they didn't get along too well in high school.:)
I know a few people that would. I would have, a few years ago. Assuming, of course, that it was sort of frontier-y, and not them just dropping me off on the surface without life support systems. In a couple of hundred years, if they've built habitation units and it's the new wild west (wild up?), I think you'll see a few souls adventurous enough to move there. Probably more than a few. There's always a contingent of humans interested in colonizing what seems like an impossible place to live, that's why we have eskimos.
I have seen the police do exactly this, at a concert. Well, it was a joint instead of a bag of crack, but the application remained almost exactly the same. I mentioned that there was something on the ground that looked like an illegal cigarette to him, because he was about three feet away and no way was I going to pick it up, and he said, "I know, we put it there". I was very tempted to ask him how exactly this wasn't entrapment, but I really didn't want to continue the conversation with him lest he turn his attention to the bottle of liquor a friend had smuggled in to the venue in his jacket. I don't know that it's legal, but it doesn't seem to stop them.
I agree with you that the increase of psychiatric drugs being misprescribed, particularly overprescribed to children when said drugs have not even been through proper testing channels to see if children respond differently, is an alarming trend, and something that we should put a stop to. Things like this are very disturbing, and something that is going to come to a head in society.
Being creative and being a "free spirit" are not necessarily the same thing. There are a great many people out there who are very organized, able to prioritize and control their day to day lives to greater and lesser degrees, and still productive. Many authors follow a strict schedule every day, a "daily regimen" if you will, and still produce works of fiction. I know artists and musicians who have refined their lives down to a very mechanistic level of control, and yet still produce works that can be defined as creative. Creativity, in my definition of the term, is someone who expresses themselves through artistic works, be it music, art, theatre, literature, etc. Just because one of the ways a person expresses themself is through varying degrees of control over their life or environment does not seem to negate this. Perhaps we have a different point of view?
That said, I have already mentioned that I was a lucky one. There was a quick and easy solution to a growing cycle of instability. Before medication, I was rapidly becoming irritable at the slightest little thing, having difficulty sleeping or making even the tiniest decision, and having a crippling depression that prevented me from enjoying even the most rewarding social interactions. In many people's cases, they do not have a (insert booming TV voice here)MENTAL ILLNESS. They merely have problems, like everyone else in modern society. Something they should perhaps seek counseling for, or work out on their own. I mean, basically I agree with everything you're saying, except that studies have shown a strong correlation between "creative" people (artists, musicians, writers, actors, philosophers, etc. My definition, of course) and mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, although a whole host of others are indicated as well. There is not, however, a similar higher incidence of mental illness in studies of the segment of the population that merely have higher IQs. Although there seem to be more incidences of schizophrenia in proportion to the other types of mental illness, it is slight and the numbers of overall mental illness per capita remain the same. I was just arguing semantics, really.
Holy crap, that almost exact same thing happened to a friend of mine! Except it wasn't rat poison, it was sleeping pills! She was also a paranoid schizophrenic, along with (eventually) most of the grandchildren. It's terrible to see a family fall one by one like that, their genes must have been chock full of markers for it.
It is more than possible that genius and insanity are intertwined. What happens if we drug everyone who isn't "normal" and conformant in to a stupor. Will we destroy all our genius and all the great artists by trying to suppress their abnormality so they will sit quietly in class and not be a nuisance to the "normal" people.
I disagree. There has been a strong correlation between creativity and several mental illnesses, but the link between genius of a standard analytical sort and mental illness has yet to be substantiated by statistical analysis. However, that said, I found that none of my creativity was removed by the introduction of atypical antipsychotics into my daily regimen, and while I am obviously a best-case scenario, the only thing that I saw suffer was the number of projects I started. Not the number I finished, mind you, but the number I started.
The disease is hopelessly irrational, and it hijacks the brain completely. In fact, it becomes your brain, in a manner of speaking. How can you use your brain to supress something when it's your brain itself that needs to be supressed?/
This very much mirrors my experience with bipolar disorder. I suspect that they are closely related, on a neurochemical level. I have two friends and one cousin who are schizophrenic, and this describes, in varying degrees, all of them. The problem is that there's nothing that you can do to resist the progression of it because it is a disease of the thought process. And what do you use to fend off bad thoughts? More thoughts. And when it begins to affect them? And so on, and so forth. My deepest sympathies for your family, we still have no idea what happened to my cousin after he disappeared from the institution he was staying at.
Too true. I was recently diagnosed as a bipolar. Hypomanic, fortunately, rather than having full-blown manias, but it was starting to push that direction. I was getting slightly paranoid, starting to be irritable all the time, and suffering from so much muscle tension that I was in constant pain. I thought I was just getting old, and developing arthritis! I was also having subhallucinogenic phenomenon, which I attributed to flashbacks from a brief period of psychedelic use during high school, and a strange "blurring" of thought processes, where unrelated things would start to run together and I would begin seeing connections between things that were extremely tenuous at best. I also had been having severe depression for about five years, in what I believe was an attempt to calm down an ever-increasing mania. If I hadn't gotten treatment when I did, it may have reached a point where I started having full-swing mania and had to be hospitalized. I thank my lucky stars that it never progressed to that point, and that the very first medication I tried worked with no side effects. (Within six hours of taking it, I felt my entire life had changed for the better. "Unprecedented reaction time" was the term that my doctor used.) It was particularly interesting because I had cycled like this all of my life, as far back as I could remember, but it only started getting worse about three years ago, to the point where I definitely knew something was very wrong. As for the story poster, the best advice I can give is that even if a medication and treatment regimen is 100% effective, it takes just as long to get out of the hole as it took you to get in, even after the thing that caused all these bad ideas, habits, and thoughtforms is controlled. The best advice I can give to his friend is to take your medication every day at the exact same time, particularly if it's Risperdal (Risperidone). It makes an amazing difference.
Sadly, there are worse things in Africa than AIDs. There will be no long and healthy lives there for some time from what I see.
True enough, in some ways, but one step at a time, man, one step at a time. We can't solve every problem in the world at once, the trick is to solve them one at a time, or in parallel when possible.:)
Didn't similar things happen in the 60's, when they found cures for a lot of diseases? I remember reading that the combination of the pill and antibiotic treatment for almost all of the fatal STD's combined to produce the "Free Love" movement, in some ways. Of course, Free Love was a collossal failure, but I'll bet it was an interesting thing to stumble across, judging by the few modern polyamory types I've met.
Antibiotics are controlled, just not very. Anything that requires a prescription, including my flouride toothpaste from the dentist, is technically controlled, isn't it? I mean, I know there are schedule I,II,III,IV,etc, but if you can't buy it over the counter, it's controlled. At least, that's my understanding. Am I off base here? That being said, there are huge differences between my flouride toothpaste and something like, say, sublingual morphine.
We're talking more about things like cloning a heart, or a lung, or a kidney, rather than cloning an entire person. At least that's the impression I get from the direction modern cloning is trying to take. Frankly, if a lab-grown heart has sentience, I'd be really interested in finding out how. I don't think very many cloning advocates are thinking seriously about having complete copies of humans sitting in tanks somewhere, waiting to have individual organs harvested. That's generally agreed to be a horrible idea, I think. Personally, I'm waiting for the cloned lungs. Too many gravity bong hits back during my high school and college days have really caught up to me in later life.
Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think that's the problem - there's not even enough known to *have* very many ideas about the country one way or another. The biggest thing is that most of what we (Americans) see of Egypt is from documetaries about archaeological digs. All sand and ruins, and that one really old guy with no teeth that they always end up interviewing in every documentary set in that part of the world. (At least it seems like the same old guy, I suppose there could be more than one...):) Most Americans think desert, camels, pyramids, history, and poverty. They don't really know how to differentiate between Egypt and any of the other surrounding countries except for the pyramids and historical stuff. I don't know the population statistics, main religion, type of government, etc. Appalling, I know, but we don't have our international reputation for being ignorant of other countries for no reason. I suspect you will find the Europeans better informed than I, however. Any European or Canadian Slashdotters want to provide him with some good suggestions?
I didn't find your answers abrasive at all, in the context of the questions. There was a language gap there, and that makes it harder to phrase things in a more delicate manner. Your answers were not offensive, just translated. And besides, some of the questions did indeed have strong misconceptions about Egypt. I, for one, know almost nothing about Egypt, except that a friend of mine once went to college with Dodi Al Fayed's cousin, and that they have a real problem with people stealing archaeological artifacts from there. I'm going to do more research on it now, however, because this article got me interested.
This is actually pretty helpful. It's not good for every group I'm a part of, but there are a lot of them that can be served by this. Thanks a lot for this resource!
Same thing - USENET will always have a few dedicated souls, or at least for the forseeable future, but unless it somehow takes off, it is- for the time being-a niche. Don't get me wrong, I *like* BSD, and I *like* USENET, but we can all admit that as of right now, they're not anywhere near a majority. I don't think that very many people use Deja/Google that didn't already know about USENET from other sources, but I could very well be wrong. In any event, if you move it to a side page, the old guard will still be there, and they're the ones who will be there for a long time to come. Spam killed most of the.alt groups ages ago for me, but I guess I should really go check out the moderated.rec groups, I'd bet there's still some pretty good discussion there. In fact, I think I'll go do that now.
How big is the Deja/Google archive, anyway? Does anyone know? How much does it grow yearly?
How soon will it be until portable devices will be able to store a complete Usenet archive?
That'd be neat! I want one! My own piece of internet history on a keychain!
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this just can't be that far off. Sex and war drive technology, and all that. Give them time, and I'm sure the adult industry will find a way to drive the costs of this down to levels where it's reasonable for everyone. After all, look what they did for cosmetic surgery. The question is, will people be interested in this for its own sake, or will it have to wait until things reach the point where it's indistinguishable from the real thing? I'm guessing from the preponderance of cartoon porn on the internet that it's just around the corner.
Actually, it was Bryson's sequel that covered most of the evolution of American English. Mother Tongue did cover some of this, of course, but the sequel was pretty much an in-depth study of the evolution of American speech. An interesting read, to say the least.
I have information about all of my various electronic assets and how they should be handled in my will, which has a copy on my computer, a hard copy in my desk, and a hard copy in a safe deposit box. I don't have a whole lot to distribute, except for my life insurance payout, but I have various instructions on where some of my stuff should go, who gets certain books, etc. It's a fairly informal will, but I expect my family will respect my wishes on it, since there aren't multimillion dollar assets to fight over. The copy in my desk is written and signed in my own handwriting, as I understand this is a little more legally binding. It's not a very detailed or complex solution to what to do with the detritus of my life should I drastically change tax status (die), but at 26, I figure an informal solution is pretty good, especially since I have almost no real assets to leave behind.
Of course, in my state (not California) you can only have sex missionary style.
I think that recent supreme court decisions about homosexuality in Texas invalidate this as well.
My ex girlfriend went to high school with Norah Jones. Not that that's relevant, but I find it somewhat interesting whenever she comes up in these type of discussions. My understanding is that she got her first real airplay at the University of North Texas station, which is pretty well known in the jazz scene because of UNT's huge jazz history. (And no, the station's call letters are not KUNT) Then a couple of radio show in the NY area started picking her up, and it kind of exploded from there. I think she's really good, although my ex girlfriend tends to not be impressed. I think they didn't get along too well in high school. :)
I know a few people that would. I would have, a few years ago. Assuming, of course, that it was sort of frontier-y, and not them just dropping me off on the surface without life support systems. In a couple of hundred years, if they've built habitation units and it's the new wild west (wild up?), I think you'll see a few souls adventurous enough to move there. Probably more than a few. There's always a contingent of humans interested in colonizing what seems like an impossible place to live, that's why we have eskimos.
I have seen the police do exactly this, at a concert. Well, it was a joint instead of a bag of crack, but the application remained almost exactly the same. I mentioned that there was something on the ground that looked like an illegal cigarette to him, because he was about three feet away and no way was I going to pick it up, and he said, "I know, we put it there". I was very tempted to ask him how exactly this wasn't entrapment, but I really didn't want to continue the conversation with him lest he turn his attention to the bottle of liquor a friend had smuggled in to the venue in his jacket. I don't know that it's legal, but it doesn't seem to stop them.
I agree with you that the increase of psychiatric drugs being misprescribed, particularly overprescribed to children when said drugs have not even been through proper testing channels to see if children respond differently, is an alarming trend, and something that we should put a stop to. Things like this are very disturbing, and something that is going to come to a head in society.
Being creative and being a "free spirit" are not necessarily the same thing. There are a great many people out there who are very organized, able to prioritize and control their day to day lives to greater and lesser degrees, and still productive. Many authors follow a strict schedule every day, a "daily regimen" if you will, and still produce works of fiction. I know artists and musicians who have refined their lives down to a very mechanistic level of control, and yet still produce works that can be defined as creative. Creativity, in my definition of the term, is someone who expresses themselves through artistic works, be it music, art, theatre, literature, etc. Just because one of the ways a person expresses themself is through varying degrees of control over their life or environment does not seem to negate this. Perhaps we have a different point of view?
That said, I have already mentioned that I was a lucky one. There was a quick and easy solution to a growing cycle of instability. Before medication, I was rapidly becoming irritable at the slightest little thing, having difficulty sleeping or making even the tiniest decision, and having a crippling depression that prevented me from enjoying even the most rewarding social interactions. In many people's cases, they do not have a (insert booming TV voice here)MENTAL ILLNESS. They merely have problems, like everyone else in modern society. Something they should perhaps seek counseling for, or work out on their own. I mean, basically I agree with everything you're saying, except that studies have shown a strong correlation between "creative" people (artists, musicians, writers, actors, philosophers, etc. My definition, of course) and mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, although a whole host of others are indicated as well. There is not, however, a similar higher incidence of mental illness in studies of the segment of the population that merely have higher IQs. Although there seem to be more incidences of schizophrenia in proportion to the other types of mental illness, it is slight and the numbers of overall mental illness per capita remain the same. I was just arguing semantics, really.
Holy crap, that almost exact same thing happened to a friend of mine! Except it wasn't rat poison, it was sleeping pills! She was also a paranoid schizophrenic, along with (eventually) most of the grandchildren. It's terrible to see a family fall one by one like that, their genes must have been chock full of markers for it.
And that is why we preview posts. D'oh! I knew I should have checked it first. Sorry for the italics, folks.
It is more than possible that genius and insanity are intertwined. What happens if we drug everyone who isn't "normal" and conformant in to a stupor. Will we destroy all our genius and all the great artists by trying to suppress their abnormality so they will sit quietly in class and not be a nuisance to the "normal" people.
I disagree. There has been a strong correlation between creativity and several mental illnesses, but the link between genius of a standard analytical sort and mental illness has yet to be substantiated by statistical analysis. However, that said, I found that none of my creativity was removed by the introduction of atypical antipsychotics into my daily regimen, and while I am obviously a best-case scenario, the only thing that I saw suffer was the number of projects I started. Not the number I finished, mind you, but the number I started.
The disease is hopelessly irrational, and it hijacks the brain completely. In fact, it becomes your brain, in a manner of speaking. How can you use your brain to supress something when it's your brain itself that needs to be supressed?/
This very much mirrors my experience with bipolar disorder. I suspect that they are closely related, on a neurochemical level. I have two friends and one cousin who are schizophrenic, and this describes, in varying degrees, all of them. The problem is that there's nothing that you can do to resist the progression of it because it is a disease of the thought process. And what do you use to fend off bad thoughts? More thoughts. And when it begins to affect them? And so on, and so forth. My deepest sympathies for your family, we still have no idea what happened to my cousin after he disappeared from the institution he was staying at.
Too true. I was recently diagnosed as a bipolar. Hypomanic, fortunately, rather than having full-blown manias, but it was starting to push that direction. I was getting slightly paranoid, starting to be irritable all the time, and suffering from so much muscle tension that I was in constant pain. I thought I was just getting old, and developing arthritis! I was also having subhallucinogenic phenomenon, which I attributed to flashbacks from a brief period of psychedelic use during high school, and a strange "blurring" of thought processes, where unrelated things would start to run together and I would begin seeing connections between things that were extremely tenuous at best. I also had been having severe depression for about five years, in what I believe was an attempt to calm down an ever-increasing mania. If I hadn't gotten treatment when I did, it may have reached a point where I started having full-swing mania and had to be hospitalized. I thank my lucky stars that it never progressed to that point, and that the very first medication I tried worked with no side effects. (Within six hours of taking it, I felt my entire life had changed for the better. "Unprecedented reaction time" was the term that my doctor used.) It was particularly interesting because I had cycled like this all of my life, as far back as I could remember, but it only started getting worse about three years ago, to the point where I definitely knew something was very wrong. As for the story poster, the best advice I can give is that even if a medication and treatment regimen is 100% effective, it takes just as long to get out of the hole as it took you to get in, even after the thing that caused all these bad ideas, habits, and thoughtforms is controlled. The best advice I can give to his friend is to take your medication every day at the exact same time, particularly if it's Risperdal (Risperidone). It makes an amazing difference.
Sadly, there are worse things in Africa than AIDs. There will be no long and healthy lives there for some time from what I see.
:)
True enough, in some ways, but one step at a time, man, one step at a time. We can't solve every problem in the world at once, the trick is to solve them one at a time, or in parallel when possible.
Didn't similar things happen in the 60's, when they found cures for a lot of diseases? I remember reading that the combination of the pill and antibiotic treatment for almost all of the fatal STD's combined to produce the "Free Love" movement, in some ways. Of course, Free Love was a collossal failure, but I'll bet it was an interesting thing to stumble across, judging by the few modern polyamory types I've met.
Okay, that one was pretty good. I've had that song stuck in my head all morning, and you just found a topical way to put it in a comment.
Antibiotics are controlled, just not very. Anything that requires a prescription, including my flouride toothpaste from the dentist, is technically controlled, isn't it? I mean, I know there are schedule I,II,III,IV,etc, but if you can't buy it over the counter, it's controlled. At least, that's my understanding. Am I off base here? That being said, there are huge differences between my flouride toothpaste and something like, say, sublingual morphine.
I don't think whales fly all that well, at least not according to Douglas Adams.
:)
"I wonder if it will be my friend?" ***SPLAT***
We're talking more about things like cloning a heart, or a lung, or a kidney, rather than cloning an entire person. At least that's the impression I get from the direction modern cloning is trying to take. Frankly, if a lab-grown heart has sentience, I'd be really interested in finding out how. I don't think very many cloning advocates are thinking seriously about having complete copies of humans sitting in tanks somewhere, waiting to have individual organs harvested. That's generally agreed to be a horrible idea, I think. Personally, I'm waiting for the cloned lungs. Too many gravity bong hits back during my high school and college days have really caught up to me in later life.
Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think that's the problem - there's not even enough known to *have* very many ideas about the country one way or another. The biggest thing is that most of what we (Americans) see of Egypt is from documetaries about archaeological digs. All sand and ruins, and that one really old guy with no teeth that they always end up interviewing in every documentary set in that part of the world. (At least it seems like the same old guy, I suppose there could be more than one...) :) Most Americans think desert, camels, pyramids, history, and poverty. They don't really know how to differentiate between Egypt and any of the other surrounding countries except for the pyramids and historical stuff. I don't know the population statistics, main religion, type of government, etc. Appalling, I know, but we don't have our international reputation for being ignorant of other countries for no reason. I suspect you will find the Europeans better informed than I, however. Any European or Canadian Slashdotters want to provide him with some good suggestions?
I didn't find your answers abrasive at all, in the context of the questions. There was a language gap there, and that makes it harder to phrase things in a more delicate manner. Your answers were not offensive, just translated. And besides, some of the questions did indeed have strong misconceptions about Egypt. I, for one, know almost nothing about Egypt, except that a friend of mine once went to college with Dodi Al Fayed's cousin, and that they have a real problem with people stealing archaeological artifacts from there. I'm going to do more research on it now, however, because this article got me interested.
This is actually pretty helpful. It's not good for every group I'm a part of, but there are a lot of them that can be served by this. Thanks a lot for this resource!
It's a mine sweeper. I'm sure there's a joke here somewhere..
I know I'm going to karma hell for this joke, but....
In Soviet Russia(socialist Sweden?), Minesweeper runs Windows!
Same thing - USENET will always have a few dedicated souls, or at least for the forseeable future, but unless it somehow takes off, it is- for the time being-a niche. Don't get me wrong, I *like* BSD, and I *like* USENET, but we can all admit that as of right now, they're not anywhere near a majority. I don't think that very many people use Deja/Google that didn't already know about USENET from other sources, but I could very well be wrong. In any event, if you move it to a side page, the old guard will still be there, and they're the ones who will be there for a long time to come. Spam killed most of the .alt groups ages ago for me, but I guess I should really go check out the moderated .rec groups, I'd bet there's still some pretty good discussion there. In fact, I think I'll go do that now.
How big is the Deja/Google archive, anyway? Does anyone know? How much does it grow yearly? How soon will it be until portable devices will be able to store a complete Usenet archive?
That'd be neat! I want one! My own piece of internet history on a keychain!