So do you get off on women breast feeding, do you assume most men do even if you do not, or is this yet another case where someone saying "that's stupid" used the least possible amount of intelligence in understanding what was said?
As the other poster said, it's relative. In the massive expansive of things that humans get off on, the majority of it would be considered sexual even by those who aren't personally interested in it. If what gets you off is something nobody else considers to be sexual in nature, then yeah, that's "seriously perverted" even by human male standards.
Yeah, if that was my point, that'd be pretty ironic, since a major theme of the movie is the folly of determinism.
But it's not. My point is that we do (or rather will) have to consider the same ethical questions the movie raises, and it doesn't require genetic manipulation.
I just re-watched the movie a few days ago, and they did not perform any genetic manipulation. They merely screened thousands and thousands of embryos and selected the "best" one. That's part of what's so fascinating about the movie, that the only sci-fi involved is the extremely fast and predictive genetic tests.
Well, and manned missions to Titan, but you get my point.
Whether it's people with genetic changes, or blue hair, or aliens. makes no difference. it's a story about discrimination.
That's absolutely true. I'm just pointing out the same issues are present here. Not with this case directly. But as it becomes cheaper, easier, more reliable, and we can screen for more things. First it only made sense for cases where there was a guarantee of a serious inherited disease. Now it's used for a case where there's a very high risk of a serious disease associated with the gene. Next will be lower risk factors, or diseases with less serious consequences. Past that, we'll have to start making the same hard choices about how we want to proceed that the society of GATTACA had to make before it crystallized into the form in the movie.
Don't get me wrong, there's no way I could say that this particular case is anything but an amazing advance of medicine and a good thing. But that's how tough ethical choices begin, isn't it.
In which case, they were badly deformed and doomed from birth because that "junk" was actually acting as a decoy or buffer or something (I don't think they ever really figured it out) to absorb deformities.
There was an article on/. not so long ago about the discovery that the "junk" DNA, and even proteins attached to the DNA, were responsible for regulating gene expression and what proteins were synthesized by genes.
So it's possible that removing the junk wasn't so much like removing a buffer to mutation as it was actively causing massive mutation.
All that happened was screening. They didn't screw with nature, they just took a peek to see whether the embryo had the gene or not.
That's all they did in GATTACA too. Screen embryos for (un)desirable genetic traits, and pick which one to implant. That's exactly what they did here.
Re:Herbal medicine has limited value
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Except that observation was only made in hindsight, and long before then it was conventional wisdom that scurvy was caused by a lack of acid in the diet, where -any- acid including vinegar and sulphuric acid would do. That's why Lind included all of these things in his trial.
Yeah, except CO2 can continue to build up in the atmosphere, yet when water vapor builds up, eventually there's more than the air can hold, and then it is released in a process known as "precipitation".
And does that "reasonable" guy have data correlating the sun's output with temperature changes? Cus climatologists do, and the data doesn't explain global warming.
I do love it though when someone seriously thinks that climatologists haven't considered things like solar output and water vapor -- when the effect of the latter as a greenhouse gas you only know about because they figured it out. It's just amusing.
Interestingly though acupuncture is not very painful to the patient.
Ah, well, maybe that explains why I'm not getting many repeat customers for my acupuncture treatments either. Oh well, if I'm not getting paid either way, crotch kicks are way more fun.
Re:Herbal medicine has limited value
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But then, once you take an herbal treatment and study, purify and dosify properly it is an herbal treatment no more but what the authors call an Evidence Based Treatment.
In my opinion one of the best outcomes of all the attention 'alternative medicine' has gotten in recent years/decades is that medical science has actually started to look closer at it and evaluate which of it is actually based on something real. For a long time (I'd wager the date was in the 50s when modern manufactured pharmaceuticals looked like they'd solve all the world's problems) doctor's dismissed all of this stuff out of hand. A lot of it deserves to be, but some of it doesn't. After all, in the first ever modern clinical trial where it was established that limes cured scurvy, the original source of the idea was folk wisdom. Of course a lot of other folk wisdom was proven false, but that's the whole point of doing a clinical trial.
So it looks as if acupuncture is an effective painkiller, but not for the reasons stated.
Because once you've had someone stab you with dozens of needles, whatever pain you were experiencing doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
I often do the same thing. When someone complains about a headache, I kick em in the junk, and the headache no longer bothers them. I can't get anyone to pay me for that, though. Maybe if I use some crystals or invoke eastern mysticism somehow I can start getting paid for administering treatment.
Didn't you ever hear British people describe someone as weighing so many stone?
Yeah, but I really didn't know how much it was. 14 pounds, apparently. Or according to the WP, specifically 14 Avoirdupois pounds. Which sounds pretty French to me./eyes the British suspiciously.
Hey, at least you get more for your money. Maybe it was an early form of sales promotion - 12% extra free.
Heh. Good point, but really, they should have just called it the "hundredtwelveweight", or even better just called them "boulders". 14 pounds in a stone, 8 stones in a boulder. Sounds good to me!
Not like a US pint, which is more like a generous half to us!
Just keep em comin, I say, and pretty soon the difference in individual units doesn't matter any more.;)
So was I, and I remember the same hysterical "OMGWTF! Micro$oft was involved, clearly everything that happened must have been their fault" bigots crawling out of the woodwork then, blithely ignoring all the other more likely explanations (which would have been perfectly acceptable if, say, Linux was involved) in favour of the one that pandered to their bias.
If you were, you would have remembered the Navy's claim that NT itself crashed due to not properly handling the exception, and that MS' rebuttal was that the application shouldn't have caused the exception in the first place -- not that they did handle it properly.
The application was running in user space (and if it wasn't, then it still wouldn't be the fault of Windows).
You didn't understand a word I said, did you? You have no idea how exception handling works.
Which can be quite seen easily by considering the summarisation of the event without mentioning the OS.
It's a summary. It doesn't even mention the buffer overflow. It's like you're deliberately avoiding information. You didn't even read the Wired article, I doubt you read any of the other articles published at the time, and you just assumed out of deliberate ignorance that it was all anti-MS bigotry.
Or that a user space application crashed a multiuser, memory-protected OS ?
What does Occam's Razor suggest the most likely answer is ?
Your belief that it's ridiculous for a user-space application to crash a "multiuser, memory-protected OS" in general, and Windows NT 4.0 in particular, is adorably naive but also wrong and stupid. Here's a free clue: the safety of the OS from user-space errors is predicated upon the OS itself not having any bugs.
It is trivial to find evidence of buffer overflows and other bugs in the NT kernel, in sections of the kernel either directly (networking stack) or indirectly (exception handlers) called by user code. Such a bug in the kernel can crash the system, almost certainly will if the condition that exercises the bug is triggered. This isn't rocket science, it's merely OS development, but sadly the application of Occam's Razor requires some level of understanding of the subject matter to understand which explanation is truly the simplest. Even knowing nothing about software development, you should have at least paid attention to the existence of the patches Microsoft has issued regularly over the last decade. Occam's Razor says that NT 4.0 was not the pinnacle of impregnable "multiuser, memory-protected OSes" you assume it to be.
Which is fine and dandy (I guess, not sure why dividing by 14 is important), but their crime, sufficient to justify revolution, is not using an arbitrary name like they do for everything else, but rather to use an actual number in the name which is not, in fact, the correct number. That's just evil, sick, and wrong.
Just mentioning UID means you're an idiot and a sad sack of crap. So I thought they were talking about leakage storing high vs low values instead of a read cycle vs not. Oops. I will now commit sepuku for the error.
A typically ignorant end user would probably calling killing X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace 'rebooting', but that wouldn't mean the computer was actually rebooted.
When a computer doing something like that "crashes", end users don't fuck around trying to "restart the application" (assuming they even knew how). It's not their job to troubleshoot the problem, and they almost certainly have no idea how to even begin doing so. They reboot, because that's what they've been told to do.
You might find this hard to believe, but the Navy actually employs engineers on their ships to run their computer systems, and expects them to be able to do more than treat those systems like your cable box at home.
Really ? That's not what the Wikipedia page says. Perhaps you have a more credible source ?
All the wikipedia page says is that the error "brought down all the machines on the network". How are you marshaling that in support of your interpretation of events?
Anyway, I was on the internet when this actually happened and read the news articles about it, both Navy and MS statements.
Most of those aren't around any more, but if you'd be so bold as to read the Wired article that is cited as the source of the incident, you'd see that it was a divide-by-zero that then resulted in a buffer overrun. That buffer overrun would have been in the exception handler, which was probably (not necessarily, but if the designers weren't thinking of divide-by-zero errors, then probably) the default Windows handler. A buffer overflow in the kernel could crash the system and require a hard reboot very easily, though the conditions leading to that overflow could be specific and/or rare.
1. Windows can't handle a divide-by-zero exception in user space, but apparently the only time it has ever been recorded is on the USS Yorktown (or there is a huge conspiracy trying to cover up this basic bug).
Why are you using the present tense here? Did you not glean from the Wikipedia page that this was at minimum an 11-year old version of Windows? A version that was only ever praised for being stable compared to the DOS-based versions of Windows that preceded it. Google for "Windows NT 4.0 buffer overflow" or "NT 4.0 divide by zero bsod" and tell me again about this huge conspiracy.
2. The completely reasonable, rational, and plausible explanations of both the failure and the response to it that have been already given are right.
Yeah or 3. the guy who's only knowledge of the event comes from a single sentence on the WP which doesn't even match the guy's explanation and who defends NT 4.0's exception handling ability by saying to divide by zero in the Calculator app in a current version of Windows has a somewhat shaky grasp on rationality in this circumstance.
Current tends to leak from an "off" that's holding a charge. "That means in a 10-by-10 grid, 10 'offs' would leak enough to look like they were 'on.' With our method, it would take a million 'offs' in a line to look like 'on,'" he said. "So this is big. It allows us to make a much larger array."
Er, I'm don't get that, since if this is going to be memory then you have to account for the fact that it's possible every single bit could be a 1. And current certainly leaks from the higher-voltage 'on' state.
Not that much farther apart, since the article says that the sheets are less than 1nm thick.
The figure he's quoting is a diameter, which would be the 2d dimensions of the sheet on the surface of the silicon they grew it on. It's the 5nm diameter that makes this exciting as a memory technology since that is very dense.
The sheets were roughly 5 nanometers in diameter. Graphene is a form of carbon.
Google tells me that 5 nanometers = 5000 picometers. Is my math off? It seems like there is a factor of 10 between how thick this stuff is and how thick Carbon is.
One is talking about thickness, the other a diameter. The next paragraph of the article it says the sheets are a little under 1nm thick, and 10 C atoms would be around 800pm so that's a little under 1nm. The 5nm diameter would then be the other dimensions, these grown sheets are presumably circular. That dimension is important because that indicates how densely you could pack them on a surface.
That the systems had to be rebooted. If only the application had crashed, and Windows had recovered correctly, only the application would have had to be restarted. The Navy also said that Windows had crashed, and when Microsoft tried to defend themselves by blaming the application for dividing by zero, they did not contradict the Navy's claim that Windows failed to handle it properly.
So that's evidence. Proof may be impossible to come by, but oh well this is the internet and that's better evidence than Windows not crashing due to a divide-by-zero exception when running an application that does not generate divide-by-zero exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
So do you get off on women breast feeding, do you assume most men do even if you do not, or is this yet another case where someone saying "that's stupid" used the least possible amount of intelligence in understanding what was said?
As the other poster said, it's relative. In the massive expansive of things that humans get off on, the majority of it would be considered sexual even by those who aren't personally interested in it. If what gets you off is something nobody else considers to be sexual in nature, then yeah, that's "seriously perverted" even by human male standards.
Yes, and apparently you need to WTFM.
Yeah, if that was my point, that'd be pretty ironic, since a major theme of the movie is the folly of determinism.
But it's not. My point is that we do (or rather will) have to consider the same ethical questions the movie raises, and it doesn't require genetic manipulation.
Parent poster is a robot, do not believe its lies!
They also gave addition features.
I just re-watched the movie a few days ago, and they did not perform any genetic manipulation. They merely screened thousands and thousands of embryos and selected the "best" one. That's part of what's so fascinating about the movie, that the only sci-fi involved is the extremely fast and predictive genetic tests.
Well, and manned missions to Titan, but you get my point.
Whether it's people with genetic changes, or blue hair, or aliens. makes no difference. it's a story about discrimination.
That's absolutely true. I'm just pointing out the same issues are present here. Not with this case directly. But as it becomes cheaper, easier, more reliable, and we can screen for more things. First it only made sense for cases where there was a guarantee of a serious inherited disease. Now it's used for a case where there's a very high risk of a serious disease associated with the gene. Next will be lower risk factors, or diseases with less serious consequences. Past that, we'll have to start making the same hard choices about how we want to proceed that the society of GATTACA had to make before it crystallized into the form in the movie.
Don't get me wrong, there's no way I could say that this particular case is anything but an amazing advance of medicine and a good thing. But that's how tough ethical choices begin, isn't it.
In which case, they were badly deformed and doomed from birth because that "junk" was actually acting as a decoy or buffer or something (I don't think they ever really figured it out) to absorb deformities.
There was an article on /. not so long ago about the discovery that the "junk" DNA, and even proteins attached to the DNA, were responsible for regulating gene expression and what proteins were synthesized by genes.
So it's possible that removing the junk wasn't so much like removing a buffer to mutation as it was actively causing massive mutation.
All that happened was screening. They didn't screw with nature, they just took a peek to see whether the embryo had the gene or not.
That's all they did in GATTACA too. Screen embryos for (un)desirable genetic traits, and pick which one to implant. That's exactly what they did here.
Except that observation was only made in hindsight, and long before then it was conventional wisdom that scurvy was caused by a lack of acid in the diet, where -any- acid including vinegar and sulphuric acid would do. That's why Lind included all of these things in his trial.
Yeah, except CO2 can continue to build up in the atmosphere, yet when water vapor builds up, eventually there's more than the air can hold, and then it is released in a process known as "precipitation".
And does that "reasonable" guy have data correlating the sun's output with temperature changes? Cus climatologists do, and the data doesn't explain global warming.
I do love it though when someone seriously thinks that climatologists haven't considered things like solar output and water vapor -- when the effect of the latter as a greenhouse gas you only know about because they figured it out. It's just amusing.
And let me tell ya', Sammy don't like cable.
I can sympathize with the poor bastard, he's probably a Time Warner customer too.
Interestingly though acupuncture is not very painful to the patient.
Ah, well, maybe that explains why I'm not getting many repeat customers for my acupuncture treatments either. Oh well, if I'm not getting paid either way, crotch kicks are way more fun.
But then, once you take an herbal treatment and study, purify and dosify properly it is an herbal treatment no more but what the authors call an Evidence Based Treatment.
In my opinion one of the best outcomes of all the attention 'alternative medicine' has gotten in recent years/decades is that medical science has actually started to look closer at it and evaluate which of it is actually based on something real. For a long time (I'd wager the date was in the 50s when modern manufactured pharmaceuticals looked like they'd solve all the world's problems) doctor's dismissed all of this stuff out of hand. A lot of it deserves to be, but some of it doesn't. After all, in the first ever modern clinical trial where it was established that limes cured scurvy, the original source of the idea was folk wisdom. Of course a lot of other folk wisdom was proven false, but that's the whole point of doing a clinical trial.
So it looks as if acupuncture is an effective painkiller, but not for the reasons stated.
Because once you've had someone stab you with dozens of needles, whatever pain you were experiencing doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
I often do the same thing. When someone complains about a headache, I kick em in the junk, and the headache no longer bothers them. I can't get anyone to pay me for that, though. Maybe if I use some crystals or invoke eastern mysticism somehow I can start getting paid for administering treatment.
Didn't you ever hear British people describe someone as weighing so many stone?
Yeah, but I really didn't know how much it was. 14 pounds, apparently. Or according to the WP, specifically 14 Avoirdupois pounds. Which sounds pretty French to me. /eyes the British suspiciously.
Hey, at least you get more for your money. Maybe it was an early form of sales promotion - 12% extra free.
Heh. Good point, but really, they should have just called it the "hundredtwelveweight", or even better just called them "boulders". 14 pounds in a stone, 8 stones in a boulder. Sounds good to me!
Not like a US pint, which is more like a generous half to us!
Just keep em comin, I say, and pretty soon the difference in individual units doesn't matter any more. ;)
So was I, and I remember the same hysterical "OMGWTF! Micro$oft was involved, clearly everything that happened must have been their fault" bigots crawling out of the woodwork then, blithely ignoring all the other more likely explanations (which would have been perfectly acceptable if, say, Linux was involved) in favour of the one that pandered to their bias.
If you were, you would have remembered the Navy's claim that NT itself crashed due to not properly handling the exception, and that MS' rebuttal was that the application shouldn't have caused the exception in the first place -- not that they did handle it properly.
The application was running in user space (and if it wasn't, then it still wouldn't be the fault of Windows).
You didn't understand a word I said, did you? You have no idea how exception handling works.
Which can be quite seen easily by considering the summarisation of the event without mentioning the OS.
It's a summary. It doesn't even mention the buffer overflow. It's like you're deliberately avoiding information. You didn't even read the Wired article, I doubt you read any of the other articles published at the time, and you just assumed out of deliberate ignorance that it was all anti-MS bigotry.
Or that a user space application crashed a multiuser, memory-protected OS ?
What does Occam's Razor suggest the most likely answer is ?
Your belief that it's ridiculous for a user-space application to crash a "multiuser, memory-protected OS" in general, and Windows NT 4.0 in particular, is adorably naive but also wrong and stupid. Here's a free clue: the safety of the OS from user-space errors is predicated upon the OS itself not having any bugs.
It is trivial to find evidence of buffer overflows and other bugs in the NT kernel, in sections of the kernel either directly (networking stack) or indirectly (exception handlers) called by user code. Such a bug in the kernel can crash the system, almost certainly will if the condition that exercises the bug is triggered. This isn't rocket science, it's merely OS development, but sadly the application of Occam's Razor requires some level of understanding of the subject matter to understand which explanation is truly the simplest. Even knowing nothing about software development, you should have at least paid attention to the existence of the patches Microsoft has issued regularly over the last decade. Occam's Razor says that NT 4.0 was not the pinnacle of impregnable "multiuser, memory-protected OSes" you assume it to be.
Which is fine and dandy (I guess, not sure why dividing by 14 is important), but their crime, sufficient to justify revolution, is not using an arbitrary name like they do for everything else, but rather to use an actual number in the name which is not, in fact, the correct number. That's just evil, sick, and wrong.
Whatever you say, I have no idea, I suck at chemistry. All I know is the article says it's 10 atoms thick. :)
Just mentioning UID means you're an idiot and a sad sack of crap. So I thought they were talking about leakage storing high vs low values instead of a read cycle vs not. Oops. I will now commit sepuku for the error.
There are 10 atoms, so that's 800pm, which is close to 1nm yeah. :)
Which, uh, you figured out to much greater accuracy than I know how to in another post. Hehe.
A typically ignorant end user would probably calling killing X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace 'rebooting', but that wouldn't mean the computer was actually rebooted.
When a computer doing something like that "crashes", end users don't fuck around trying to "restart the application" (assuming they even knew how). It's not their job to troubleshoot the problem, and they almost certainly have no idea how to even begin doing so. They reboot, because that's what they've been told to do.
You might find this hard to believe, but the Navy actually employs engineers on their ships to run their computer systems, and expects them to be able to do more than treat those systems like your cable box at home.
Really ? That's not what the Wikipedia page says. Perhaps you have a more credible source ?
All the wikipedia page says is that the error "brought down all the machines on the network". How are you marshaling that in support of your interpretation of events?
Anyway, I was on the internet when this actually happened and read the news articles about it, both Navy and MS statements.
Most of those aren't around any more, but if you'd be so bold as to read the Wired article that is cited as the source of the incident, you'd see that it was a divide-by-zero that then resulted in a buffer overrun. That buffer overrun would have been in the exception handler, which was probably (not necessarily, but if the designers weren't thinking of divide-by-zero errors, then probably) the default Windows handler. A buffer overflow in the kernel could crash the system and require a hard reboot very easily, though the conditions leading to that overflow could be specific and/or rare.
1. Windows can't handle a divide-by-zero exception in user space, but apparently the only time it has ever been recorded is on the USS Yorktown (or there is a huge conspiracy trying to cover up this basic bug).
Why are you using the present tense here? Did you not glean from the Wikipedia page that this was at minimum an 11-year old version of Windows? A version that was only ever praised for being stable compared to the DOS-based versions of Windows that preceded it. Google for "Windows NT 4.0 buffer overflow" or "NT 4.0 divide by zero bsod" and tell me again about this huge conspiracy.
2. The completely reasonable, rational, and plausible explanations of both the failure and the response to it that have been already given are right.
Yeah or 3. the guy who's only knowledge of the event comes from a single sentence on the WP which doesn't even match the guy's explanation and who defends NT 4.0's exception handling ability by saying to divide by zero in the Calculator app in a current version of Windows has a somewhat shaky grasp on rationality in this circumstance.
Er, I'm don't get that, since if this is going to be memory then you have to account for the fact that it's possible every single bit could be a 1. And current certainly leaks from the higher-voltage 'on' state.
Not that much farther apart, since the article says that the sheets are less than 1nm thick.
The figure he's quoting is a diameter, which would be the 2d dimensions of the sheet on the surface of the silicon they grew it on. It's the 5nm diameter that makes this exciting as a memory technology since that is very dense.
Google tells me that 5 nanometers = 5000 picometers. Is my math off? It seems like there is a factor of 10 between how thick this stuff is and how thick Carbon is.
One is talking about thickness, the other a diameter. The next paragraph of the article it says the sheets are a little under 1nm thick, and 10 C atoms would be around 800pm so that's a little under 1nm. The 5nm diameter would then be the other dimensions, these grown sheets are presumably circular. That dimension is important because that indicates how densely you could pack them on a surface.
That the systems had to be rebooted. If only the application had crashed, and Windows had recovered correctly, only the application would have had to be restarted. The Navy also said that Windows had crashed, and when Microsoft tried to defend themselves by blaming the application for dividing by zero, they did not contradict the Navy's claim that Windows failed to handle it properly.
So that's evidence. Proof may be impossible to come by, but oh well this is the internet and that's better evidence than Windows not crashing due to a divide-by-zero exception when running an application that does not generate divide-by-zero exceptions.
Of course, he's one of the Micronuts!