It probably will be if it turns out to be useful, but I doubt processing power will be a significant factor in the idea's commercial success or failure. The desktop video card is the supercomputer of a decade ago, albeit without the memory, disk space and air-conditioning bill. My $150 card maxes out at a teraflop. There are demos on the net of 3D modelling (with sound) running on a cell phone using Nvidia's APX2500 chip, android + java. Developers can develop stuff on their desktop video card and drop it straight into an android phone built around the chip.
Newton's primary insight is the gravitational field, ie: two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the combined masses and the distance between them. That he invented calculus to prove it and wrote it all down in his "Principia" is why he is remembered. A photon is neither a hammer , nor an atom. Photons did not have mass so they were believed to be unaffected by gravity. Einstein came along and said mass and energy are two forms of the same thing and a photon would be affected by gravity. The experiment in TFA allowed the universe to make the final call.
Trivia: Newton's Principa contains only two explicit assumptions, one of them was the assumption that "time is constant".
Einstein was a (mono-cranium) Tasmanian, his theory of roll and rock has been well documented. The drummer in Genesis had been accused of robbing a train and fled the UK, he went to the most remote place on the planet he could think of (Oz) and witnessed Einstein giving a lecture about the theory of "roll and rock. You will notice 'Bert had, by this time, renamed his theory to the more familiar "rock and roll" which is what Ronald Biggs heard and took with him to Genesis - (BTW, that black haired beauty with big brown eyes in the lecture video is a young Marie Curie).
Bono was instrumental in pusuading Clinton to clamp down on IRA funding coming from Boston, which eventually lead to the downfall of the IRA and the start of the peace process. Bono (and Geldof) also managed to get the crippling cold war debt that was foisted onto Africa written off the books, a clean slate for billions of impovrished people. When you start accomplishing selfless good deeds of that magnitude maybe people will listen to you too.
Agree. It's just giving "prefered supplier" status to OSS rather than a specific company, large IT firms get similar preferential treatment because of the "nobody gets sacked for picking IBM" factor. This is why it is important to be seen as a "teir 1" provider, you don't have to look for government tenders you automatically get an invite. Someone still has to integrate all the "free" software bits into a system, IT firms will still be hired to do that and they won't miss out on a penny, they just get a "uses OSS" box to tick in the tender, however the less competent firms won't like it because it means the grip of vendor lock-in is just that little bit looser. Conceptually no different than putting "may contain nuts" on something edible.
It affects the albedo a bit, but mostly it's an interesting mystery because you'd expect it to shrink in a warmer climate.
Counter intuitive yes, but it ceased being a mystery decades ago (largely due to climate models that would run on a retail video card these days), if anything this paper is a refinement in the details of the accepted explanation - hint fresh water freezes at a slightly higher temp than salt water. Also the sea ice has always completely melted in the Antarctic summer and its dark in winter, so Albedo is not (currently) as important down south as it is up north.
It's up at #10 because the physics of collapsing ice sheets is not well understood and thus difficult to model. Deniers depend on conflating sea ice, land ice, ice shelves, ice bergs, permafrost, ice volume, ice coverage, north pole, and south pole. Someone who is not deliberately trying to mis-inform the reader will also attempt the be clear about which particular "ice metric" they are talking about ( which brings us full circle to the main point of your post:).
Indeed, this post most likely bounced off an Arthur C Clarke satellite on it's way to the US. The singularity idea suffers from the same problem as Lovelock's Gaia idea, it gets adopted, expanded and contorted by spiritualism. "Gaia" is just the original name for "the biosphere". Likewise the "singularity" is just a label for a hypothetical point in time when AI becomes "more intelligent" than its creator.
Science is nothing if not explicit, giving something a name is the first step in understanding (and controlling) it, language is intimately connected to human intelligence, the name tags a concept/thing, which in turn allows the human imagination to play with it, this is why quantum mechanics can only really be "understood" by those who can understand the maths, there is no everyday metaphor for the mind to grasp. Infinity and nothing really don't fit in the human mind but we just have to look up for an example of infinity so we have symbols for them where they occur in nature. If your mind cannot package it's own concepts into a word or short phrase it will not spread very well as a "meme", for example try telling someone about the periodic table without using a noun to identify the table itself.
Personally I'm not a fan of the singularity idea, I think "smarter than a human" is a vague and largely irrelevant way to measure intelligence in an AI system, it's only useful in that we can compare the different behaviour of the two systems to learn more about both.
The linguists are correct in that the reason humans are the smartest thing raping the planet is the sophistication of our language. About 50-60Kya we acquired the ability to tell stories using words and pictures, more importantly the stories could be recombined to form new stories and handed down the generations (education) - the ability was clearly a beneficial mutation since it spread through the global population like a dose of the flu and we immediately jumped to the top spot in the food chain, the number of "stories" we have (and have forgotten) in the last 50kyrs continues to grow exponentially without limit ( homo-singularity already happened? ).
Computers are pretty good at "understanding" stories these days, systems exist that can write a pretty good HS book report on a random novel* in less than a second and of course IBM's Watson has demonstrated computers can do better at the open ended domain of general knowledge than the best humans. These systems are wonderful tools that are a product of the recent (last century) explosive growth in human stories, they are a tool for creating more stories, faster, much like a space telescope is a tool for rapidly generating pictures that inform our current stories about the cosmos.
Which gets back to the reason why I'm not a fan of the singularity - To me, "something smarter than a human" implies a level of conceptual abstraction above story telling, if we knew what that was it introduces a tautology into the singularity story - ie: we would already be "smarter than a human".
*Novel - computers are no so good a children's stories - any linguist can explain why.
I recall a survey of (non-trivial) corporate spreadsheets in the mid-90's, it went something like 95% had a maths bug, in 80% of cases the bug made the sheet useless, 50% of the spreadsheets were used to make (incorrect) financial decisions. The reason why corporations coffers don't evaporate is that they use thousands of them so the +/-ve affect on the money buffer has a central limit of zero. It's a much more precarious situation if you using a single homespun spreadsheet to run a corner store
A NNet is basically trying to fit a curve, the problem of "overfitting" manifests itself as two almost identical data points being separated because the curve has contorted itself to fit one data point, So yes, a video input would likely help. The really interesting bit is that it seems all NNets make the same mis-classification, even when trained with different data. What these guys are saying is "that's odd", I think mathematicians will go nuts trying to explain this and it will probably will lead to AI insights.
The AI system in an autonomous car is much more than a Boltzmann machine running on a video card. The problem for man or machine when driving a car is that it's "life" depends on predicting the future, the problem is that neither man or machine can can confirm their calculation before the future happens. If the universe fails to co-operate with their prediction it's too late. What's important from a public safety POV is who gets it right more often, if cars killing people was totally unacceptable we wouldn't allow cars in the first place.
"Sure it's possible that computers may one day be as smart as humans, but who wants a computer that remembers the words to the Flintstones jingle and forgets to pay the rent?"
I seem to recall that when I was at HS in the 70's, astronomers were claiming it was physically impossible to ever detect an exoplanet but they were confident that they existed. The reason they thought it was impossible was because of atmospheric distortion, "wobble mirrors" had not been invented. The author has a reasonable point but I think Asimov has a much better one based on the same observation that widely held scientific beliefs are often shown to be wrong by future generations. I agree with Asimov that we have the basic mechanics of the universe correct.
I have been interested in astronomy since primary school, back in the 60's the astronomy books in the adult section of the local library were still speculating about canals on Mars and tropical jungles on Venus, black holes were widely viewed as a "mathematical curiosity". Our knowledge about the universe has exploded like no other time in history, Hubble happy snaps are posted on the walls of libraries and the home encyclopedia has been replaced by the home computer. If I want to take an astronomy course from the best universities on the planet I can simply fire up youtube and start watching the lectures, less than a decade ago that was not possible, just finding the right text books was a challenge.
Scientific knowledge has experienced exponential growth in the last half century, I feel privileged to have been born at a time where I can witness scientific discovery unfolding before my eyes on a regular basis. Communication technology is undeniably the major driver of that growth and I'm proud of the small role I've played building that technology.
but it is the lesser of two evils when compared to a healthy person.
That may be true on a statistical level however I personally know 4 people (plus their immediate family members) who lives were turned upside down by a combination of Zoloft (anti-stress) mixed with regular, but not excessive, alcohol consumption (anti-inhibitor). One of them (a 60yr old male with no police record) ended up in jail for attacking some cops, another (40yo male) was arrested and thrown into the local lock-up for threatening neighbours and the police who turned up to investigate.
The problem (from this layman's POV) is that unintentional abuse is easy and GP's hand out behaviour modifying pills like jelly beans. Humans needs some stress to function in a human society, take away the bodily symptoms of stress (adrenalin rush, etc) and you have basically removed the person "social filter". Lying, cheating, etc, no longer makes their heart beat a little faster so their brain is left wondering what "everybody else's" problem is, and why are they are suddenly being "picked on" by everybody. Whatever selfish bullshit pops into their head (ie: old fashioned "temptation") is simply acted upon without guilt. In other words a human's "moral compass" does not (and cannot) operate normally without stress. OTOH, I have known (or known of) many more than 4 people where such drugs have worked as advertised but mostly because their loved ones were on watch for behaviour changes and they read the warnings about mixing them with alcohol.
Stress is normal, panic attacks are not. There's a huge difference between the two that is quite often ignored by GP's in a ten minute consultation. Chronic panic attacks can almost always be traced back to a traumatic experience or more commonly an abusive and erratic parent.
Disclaimer: My ex-wife was treated with zoloft in the late 90's for life long panic attacks brought about by her soiciopathic (and incestuoes) father, she was the proverbial "swan" - plenty of social graces but peddling like crazy under the water. She was on the pills for about 3yrs, the change in personality did not happen overnight, it was subtle and gradual, or at least it was too subtle for me to connect it with the pills. However I can tell people from experience that when it gets to the point where your partner of 20yrs starts lying to your face like a chocolate drenched two year old, blaming the pills that were prescribed a year ago is not the first reaction. Our first grandchild was born about 5yrs ago, the ex threw away the pills and cut down on the wine, she has since apologised profusely to our kids and myself for her behaviour and gone back to being a swan. Thing is, once a family has been broken it tends to stay broken, given a 10-15yr of "water under the bridge" we all have the capacity to forgive the most egregious transgressions in a loved one, but very few of us have the amnesic ability to simply forget a "life changing" experience such as a "bitter" family break up , to paraphrase "Drops of Jupiter" - the return of a life long friend from the "soul vacation" of mental desperation is as good as it ever gets.
The following advice for treating stress/depression comes from personal hindsight, seek professional help if you need medical foresight.
1. Visit a GP to get a referral to a qualified psychologist.
2. DO NOT fill a prescription from the GP without first consulting the qualified psychologist you acquired in step 1.
3. DO NOT mix mind altering recreational drugs such as alcohol or weed with mind altering prescription drugs.
4. RTFM.
5. If everyone seems to be treating you like an arsehole, then it's a safe bet you're behaving like one.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
Mouse click in a dos box suspends output allowing you to srcoll up/down, hit enter to resume.You have to be quick if you're using the default buffer size.
Re:Never used this keystroke
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
Same here, I still use the old MS "standard". IIRC MS added CtrlC, CtrlV, etc, because they were trying to "embrace and extend" WordStar.
Handing yourself into the cops after deliberately breaking the law is commonly called "having a conscience", it's not bewildering at all to someone who has one.That he thought industrial sabotage was justifiable in the first place is what I find bewildering. Thinking he would get away with it implies a lack of intelligence. Still, it happens everyday in every industry, not really newsworthy, more of a "human interest" story. The "interest" part is thatt we have all thought about doing something like this but our own conscience prevents us from putting those thoughts into action. The fear of getting caught is called guilt, it's an normal, healthy stress reaction that happens when you ignore your own conscience.
BTW: This is why people should be careful with anti-stress medication (especially if they like a couple of beers after work), it can remove the physical stress reaction (adrenaline rush) and turn an otherwise normal person into an unstressed arsehole, your body stops telling you to listen to your conscience, unfiltered thoughts become words and actions.
"bypass inflammation responses?"...and you will be dead in less than a week. The natural nanobots (cells) that make up a human body have been in an arms race with even smaller nanobots we call viruses for 3-4 billion years, the theoretical "grey goo catastrophe" happened a long time ago, we call it the "biosphere" and we are in every sense of the word part of it, the water in your blood today may be falling from the sky tomorrow. Life is not a "thing", it's a mind boggling system of tiny things that blankets the Earth and extends at least 5km above and below the surface.
I don't have a religious bone in my body but what goes on inside of it does give me a strong feeling of "religious awe". Note also that I'm not saying what you propose is impossible (the HIV virus can already do it), just that we are a long way from understanding the beautifully complex engineering involved in walking and chewing gum at the same time. The best we can do at the moment is hijack weapons developed by viruses, AFAIK (not much) we can't even create a virus from scratch.
So what you are saying is that American's believe a pound of financial devastation after the fact is preferable to an ounce of regulatory prevention before the fact? I don't think that's really how it works, I'm pretty sure engineers are legally held to account for due diligence issues in the US under criminal laws (such as manslaughter), just as they are in the rest of the western world. If it can be shown the company directors ordered their engineers to ignore due diligence matters then they are in even deeper legal shit than the engineers who (illegally) complied with the order.
Nothing tortures everyday terminology more than a marketing department. "Organic" is an abbreviation of "organic chemistry", ie: something made from chemicals containing the element carbon (such as crude oil, bacon, carrots, etc). In other words the set of all chemicals includes the set of all organic chemicals. It's little wonder people are confused about the terminology when they have had "organic=good, chemical=bad" shoved down their throat for the last 30-40yrs by people selling everything from condoms to cauliflowers. Even if (as TFA intended) you interpret "organic" to be an abbreviation of "organic food", ie: food grown without man made fertilizer or (pest/herb)isides, how does one grow organic shampoo and what does it taste like?
When you sit down and think about the definition of the word organic that I was taught in 1970's HS, the organic chemistry happening inside internal combustion engines and coal fired generators is by far the greatest health threat to the greatest number of people in the modern world.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably will be if it turns out to be useful, but I doubt processing power will be a significant factor in the idea's commercial success or failure. The desktop video card is the supercomputer of a decade ago, albeit without the memory, disk space and air-conditioning bill. My $150 card maxes out at a teraflop. There are demos on the net of 3D modelling (with sound) running on a cell phone using Nvidia's APX2500 chip, android + java. Developers can develop stuff on their desktop video card and drop it straight into an android phone built around the chip.
You win the internet - quote TFA - "tests show it could deliver dramatic potential gains in many use cases" (my emph.)
Newton's primary insight is the gravitational field, ie: two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the combined masses and the distance between them. That he invented calculus to prove it and wrote it all down in his "Principia" is why he is remembered. A photon is neither a hammer , nor an atom. Photons did not have mass so they were believed to be unaffected by gravity. Einstein came along and said mass and energy are two forms of the same thing and a photon would be affected by gravity. The experiment in TFA allowed the universe to make the final call.
Trivia: Newton's Principa contains only two explicit assumptions, one of them was the assumption that "time is constant".
Einstein was a (mono-cranium) Tasmanian, his theory of roll and rock has been well documented. The drummer in Genesis had been accused of robbing a train and fled the UK, he went to the most remote place on the planet he could think of (Oz) and witnessed Einstein giving a lecture about the theory of "roll and rock. You will notice 'Bert had, by this time, renamed his theory to the more familiar "rock and roll" which is what Ronald Biggs heard and took with him to Genesis - (BTW, that black haired beauty with big brown eyes in the lecture video is a young Marie Curie).
Bono was instrumental in pusuading Clinton to clamp down on IRA funding coming from Boston, which eventually lead to the downfall of the IRA and the start of the peace process. Bono (and Geldof) also managed to get the crippling cold war debt that was foisted onto Africa written off the books, a clean slate for billions of impovrished people. When you start accomplishing selfless good deeds of that magnitude maybe people will listen to you too.
Unless there's some shadowy "Open Source Developer" organization that I've never heard about.
Turn out the lights, I think he's on to us...
Agree. It's just giving "prefered supplier" status to OSS rather than a specific company, large IT firms get similar preferential treatment because of the "nobody gets sacked for picking IBM" factor. This is why it is important to be seen as a "teir 1" provider, you don't have to look for government tenders you automatically get an invite. Someone still has to integrate all the "free" software bits into a system, IT firms will still be hired to do that and they won't miss out on a penny, they just get a "uses OSS" box to tick in the tender, however the less competent firms won't like it because it means the grip of vendor lock-in is just that little bit looser. Conceptually no different than putting "may contain nuts" on something edible.
It affects the albedo a bit, but mostly it's an interesting mystery because you'd expect it to shrink in a warmer climate.
Counter intuitive yes, but it ceased being a mystery decades ago (largely due to climate models that would run on a retail video card these days), if anything this paper is a refinement in the details of the accepted explanation - hint fresh water freezes at a slightly higher temp than salt water. Also the sea ice has always completely melted in the Antarctic summer and its dark in winter, so Albedo is not (currently) as important down south as it is up north.
:).
As for the denier angle - this topic is currently ranked #10 on the climate myth list.
It's up at #10 because the physics of collapsing ice sheets is not well understood and thus difficult to model. Deniers depend on conflating sea ice, land ice, ice shelves, ice bergs, permafrost, ice volume, ice coverage, north pole, and south pole. Someone who is not deliberately trying to mis-inform the reader will also attempt the be clear about which particular "ice metric" they are talking about ( which brings us full circle to the main point of your post
Indeed, this post most likely bounced off an Arthur C Clarke satellite on it's way to the US. The singularity idea suffers from the same problem as Lovelock's Gaia idea, it gets adopted, expanded and contorted by spiritualism. "Gaia" is just the original name for "the biosphere". Likewise the "singularity" is just a label for a hypothetical point in time when AI becomes "more intelligent" than its creator.
Science is nothing if not explicit, giving something a name is the first step in understanding (and controlling) it, language is intimately connected to human intelligence, the name tags a concept/thing, which in turn allows the human imagination to play with it, this is why quantum mechanics can only really be "understood" by those who can understand the maths, there is no everyday metaphor for the mind to grasp. Infinity and nothing really don't fit in the human mind but we just have to look up for an example of infinity so we have symbols for them where they occur in nature. If your mind cannot package it's own concepts into a word or short phrase it will not spread very well as a "meme", for example try telling someone about the periodic table without using a noun to identify the table itself.
Personally I'm not a fan of the singularity idea, I think "smarter than a human" is a vague and largely irrelevant way to measure intelligence in an AI system, it's only useful in that we can compare the different behaviour of the two systems to learn more about both.
The linguists are correct in that the reason humans are the smartest thing raping the planet is the sophistication of our language. About 50-60Kya we acquired the ability to tell stories using words and pictures, more importantly the stories could be recombined to form new stories and handed down the generations (education) - the ability was clearly a beneficial mutation since it spread through the global population like a dose of the flu and we immediately jumped to the top spot in the food chain, the number of "stories" we have (and have forgotten) in the last 50kyrs continues to grow exponentially without limit ( homo-singularity already happened? ).
Computers are pretty good at "understanding" stories these days, systems exist that can write a pretty good HS book report on a random novel* in less than a second and of course IBM's Watson has demonstrated computers can do better at the open ended domain of general knowledge than the best humans. These systems are wonderful tools that are a product of the recent (last century) explosive growth in human stories, they are a tool for creating more stories, faster, much like a space telescope is a tool for rapidly generating pictures that inform our current stories about the cosmos.
Which gets back to the reason why I'm not a fan of the singularity - To me, "something smarter than a human" implies a level of conceptual abstraction above story telling, if we knew what that was it introduces a tautology into the singularity story - ie: we would already be "smarter than a human".
*Novel - computers are no so good a children's stories - any linguist can explain why.
Death by Snu-Snu!
I recall a survey of (non-trivial) corporate spreadsheets in the mid-90's, it went something like 95% had a maths bug, in 80% of cases the bug made the sheet useless, 50% of the spreadsheets were used to make (incorrect) financial decisions. The reason why corporations coffers don't evaporate is that they use thousands of them so the +/-ve affect on the money buffer has a central limit of zero. It's a much more precarious situation if you using a single homespun spreadsheet to run a corner store
A NNet is basically trying to fit a curve, the problem of "overfitting" manifests itself as two almost identical data points being separated because the curve has contorted itself to fit one data point, So yes, a video input would likely help. The really interesting bit is that it seems all NNets make the same mis-classification, even when trained with different data. What these guys are saying is "that's odd", I think mathematicians will go nuts trying to explain this and it will probably will lead to AI insights.
The AI system in an autonomous car is much more than a Boltzmann machine running on a video card. The problem for man or machine when driving a car is that it's "life" depends on predicting the future, the problem is that neither man or machine can can confirm their calculation before the future happens. If the universe fails to co-operate with their prediction it's too late. What's important from a public safety POV is who gets it right more often, if cars killing people was totally unacceptable we wouldn't allow cars in the first place.
"Sure it's possible that computers may one day be as smart as humans, but who wants a computer that remembers the words to the Flintstones jingle and forgets to pay the rent?"
I seem to recall that when I was at HS in the 70's, astronomers were claiming it was physically impossible to ever detect an exoplanet but they were confident that they existed. The reason they thought it was impossible was because of atmospheric distortion, "wobble mirrors" had not been invented. The author has a reasonable point but I think Asimov has a much better one based on the same observation that widely held scientific beliefs are often shown to be wrong by future generations. I agree with Asimov that we have the basic mechanics of the universe correct.
I have been interested in astronomy since primary school, back in the 60's the astronomy books in the adult section of the local library were still speculating about canals on Mars and tropical jungles on Venus, black holes were widely viewed as a "mathematical curiosity". Our knowledge about the universe has exploded like no other time in history, Hubble happy snaps are posted on the walls of libraries and the home encyclopedia has been replaced by the home computer. If I want to take an astronomy course from the best universities on the planet I can simply fire up youtube and start watching the lectures, less than a decade ago that was not possible, just finding the right text books was a challenge.
Scientific knowledge has experienced exponential growth in the last half century, I feel privileged to have been born at a time where I can witness scientific discovery unfolding before my eyes on a regular basis. Communication technology is undeniably the major driver of that growth and I'm proud of the small role I've played building that technology.
but it is the lesser of two evils when compared to a healthy person.
That may be true on a statistical level however I personally know 4 people (plus their immediate family members) who lives were turned upside down by a combination of Zoloft (anti-stress) mixed with regular, but not excessive, alcohol consumption (anti-inhibitor). One of them (a 60yr old male with no police record) ended up in jail for attacking some cops, another (40yo male) was arrested and thrown into the local lock-up for threatening neighbours and the police who turned up to investigate.
The problem (from this layman's POV) is that unintentional abuse is easy and GP's hand out behaviour modifying pills like jelly beans. Humans needs some stress to function in a human society, take away the bodily symptoms of stress (adrenalin rush, etc) and you have basically removed the person "social filter". Lying, cheating, etc, no longer makes their heart beat a little faster so their brain is left wondering what "everybody else's" problem is, and why are they are suddenly being "picked on" by everybody. Whatever selfish bullshit pops into their head (ie: old fashioned "temptation") is simply acted upon without guilt. In other words a human's "moral compass" does not (and cannot) operate normally without stress. OTOH, I have known (or known of) many more than 4 people where such drugs have worked as advertised but mostly because their loved ones were on watch for behaviour changes and they read the warnings about mixing them with alcohol.
Stress is normal, panic attacks are not. There's a huge difference between the two that is quite often ignored by GP's in a ten minute consultation. Chronic panic attacks can almost always be traced back to a traumatic experience or more commonly an abusive and erratic parent.
Disclaimer: My ex-wife was treated with zoloft in the late 90's for life long panic attacks brought about by her soiciopathic (and incestuoes) father, she was the proverbial "swan" - plenty of social graces but peddling like crazy under the water. She was on the pills for about 3yrs, the change in personality did not happen overnight, it was subtle and gradual, or at least it was too subtle for me to connect it with the pills. However I can tell people from experience that when it gets to the point where your partner of 20yrs starts lying to your face like a chocolate drenched two year old, blaming the pills that were prescribed a year ago is not the first reaction. Our first grandchild was born about 5yrs ago, the ex threw away the pills and cut down on the wine, she has since apologised profusely to our kids and myself for her behaviour and gone back to being a swan. Thing is, once a family has been broken it tends to stay broken, given a 10-15yr of "water under the bridge" we all have the capacity to forgive the most egregious transgressions in a loved one, but very few of us have the amnesic ability to simply forget a "life changing" experience such as a "bitter" family break up , to paraphrase "Drops of Jupiter" - the return of a life long friend from the "soul vacation" of mental desperation is as good as it ever gets.
The following advice for treating stress/depression comes from personal hindsight, seek professional help if you need medical foresight.
1. Visit a GP to get a referral to a qualified psychologist.
2. DO NOT fill a prescription from the GP without first consulting the qualified psychologist you acquired in step 1.
3. DO NOT mix mind altering recreational drugs such as alcohol or weed with mind altering prescription drugs.
4. RTFM.
5. If everyone seems to be treating you like an arsehole, then it's a safe bet you're behaving like one.
Mouse click in a dos box suspends output allowing you to srcoll up/down, hit enter to resume.You have to be quick if you're using the default buffer size.
Same here, I still use the old MS "standard". IIRC MS added CtrlC, CtrlV, etc, because they were trying to "embrace and extend" WordStar.
Sextant + compass doesn't really fit the description "system".
Handing yourself into the cops after deliberately breaking the law is commonly called "having a conscience", it's not bewildering at all to someone who has one.That he thought industrial sabotage was justifiable in the first place is what I find bewildering. Thinking he would get away with it implies a lack of intelligence. Still, it happens everyday in every industry, not really newsworthy, more of a "human interest" story. The "interest" part is thatt we have all thought about doing something like this but our own conscience prevents us from putting those thoughts into action. The fear of getting caught is called guilt, it's an normal, healthy stress reaction that happens when you ignore your own conscience.
BTW: This is why people should be careful with anti-stress medication (especially if they like a couple of beers after work), it can remove the physical stress reaction (adrenaline rush) and turn an otherwise normal person into an unstressed arsehole, your body stops telling you to listen to your conscience, unfiltered thoughts become words and actions.
Because humans are herd animals,
Nope, humans are pack animals, you more or less said so yourself by mentioning tribes, teams, etc.
I didn't know it had a name....no one really has claimed this field
Interesting, to me this implies that whoever christened it is also attempting to claim it.
"bypass inflammation responses?"...and you will be dead in less than a week. The natural nanobots (cells) that make up a human body have been in an arms race with even smaller nanobots we call viruses for 3-4 billion years, the theoretical "grey goo catastrophe" happened a long time ago, we call it the "biosphere" and we are in every sense of the word part of it, the water in your blood today may be falling from the sky tomorrow. Life is not a "thing", it's a mind boggling system of tiny things that blankets the Earth and extends at least 5km above and below the surface.
I don't have a religious bone in my body but what goes on inside of it does give me a strong feeling of "religious awe". Note also that I'm not saying what you propose is impossible (the HIV virus can already do it), just that we are a long way from understanding the beautifully complex engineering involved in walking and chewing gum at the same time. The best we can do at the moment is hijack weapons developed by viruses, AFAIK (not much) we can't even create a virus from scratch.
So what you are saying is that American's believe a pound of financial devastation after the fact is preferable to an ounce of regulatory prevention before the fact? I don't think that's really how it works, I'm pretty sure engineers are legally held to account for due diligence issues in the US under criminal laws (such as manslaughter), just as they are in the rest of the western world. If it can be shown the company directors ordered their engineers to ignore due diligence matters then they are in even deeper legal shit than the engineers who (illegally) complied with the order.
Nothing tortures everyday terminology more than a marketing department. "Organic" is an abbreviation of "organic chemistry", ie: something made from chemicals containing the element carbon (such as crude oil, bacon, carrots, etc). In other words the set of all chemicals includes the set of all organic chemicals. It's little wonder people are confused about the terminology when they have had "organic=good, chemical=bad" shoved down their throat for the last 30-40yrs by people selling everything from condoms to cauliflowers. Even if (as TFA intended) you interpret "organic" to be an abbreviation of "organic food", ie: food grown without man made fertilizer or (pest/herb)isides, how does one grow organic shampoo and what does it taste like?
When you sit down and think about the definition of the word organic that I was taught in 1970's HS, the organic chemistry happening inside internal combustion engines and coal fired generators is by far the greatest health threat to the greatest number of people in the modern world.
You sig tells me you're a genuine skeptic. :)