I agree completely. I neither meant to demean nor elevate the science underlying eugenics, simply to use it as an example of a popular but poorly supported scientific idea.
The perpetual recycling of the Frankenstein story is one of the things I dislike most about the popular media.
Beggin' yer pardon, but perhaps you haven't been keeping up with your journal reading lately. By using the word 'epidemic', I was referring not to the support for this particular hare-brained idea, but to support for all hare-brained ideas in aggregate.
Most people do not read the peer-reviewed scientific literature, so they remain blissfully unaware that this 'epidemic' is taking place.
The literature is now filled with papers that are paid for by special interest groups, corporations and plain old loonies and which contain not a whit of scientific integrity or merit. The popular press has not twigged to this because of widespread 'dumbing-down' - in evidence I offer Scientific American and MIT's Review of Technology.
And you are wrong about me; regardless of the support for it in the scientific community, I would still dismiss this particular foolishness as 'pseudoscientific bullshit'. I am just as unpopular in the scientific community as I am on Slashdot.
While it is difficult to choose from the wealth of references available, here is a link to a particularly egregious example of the kind of paper that constitutes this 'epidemic':
Seizure Alert Dogs
If you want to find your own examples, I offer this simple formula: Search the headlines in the popular press for references to the peer-reviewed literature. The ones printed in the biggest fonts, most prominently displayed, most widely circulated and occupying the most column inches are almost invariably the best examples of what I call 'psudoscientific bullshit'.
The scientific community increasingly depends upon mindless popular support for funding, as does the news media. The result? Uncritical reportage of results designed to capture the largest cheque. I think 'epidemic' is a fair term.
It is not funny because the machine presages one thing with perfect accuracy... the decline of human intelligence.
How can an institution like Princeton be involved in this kind of garbage? Probably because great universities have a history of adopting popular, though ridiculous, positions.
I dusted off some material on the old and politically incorrect doctrine of eugenics the other day, speaking of ridiculous but popular ideas. A hundred years ago, people thought that we were facing a genetic twilight because of medical and social interventions that allowed the weak and deformed to propagate. Half-bake for a couple of decades at 451 degrees fahrenheit. Voila! Hitler.
This egg thing, however, is so far beyond the pale it would make the eugenicists blush. It is so ridiculous that eugenics seems positively well-grounded by comparison. Thus another wholesale crapfest lends credence to an earlier one, both by comparison, and by providing direct confirmation that, for whatever reason, the human brain IS actually turning to mush.
While the investigation of paranormal phenomena is within the realm of respectable science, crowing in the popular press about absurd extrapolations from the results of such science is certainly not.
I don't need an egg to predict this: we're doomed, doomed, doomed if we can't get this epidemic of dumbed-down touchy-feely pseudoscience bullshit under control.
In Ontario, an alarming number of patients can't even find a family doctor. I asked my spouse's family doctor to take on my sister as a patient, since she was already seeing a member of the family and as a favour to me (IAAMD). No way. Practice full. My sister still can't find one.
Ontario just cut funding for essentially all remaining preventive health care: well baby care, eye exams (including Glaucoma screening), Physio and Chiropractic.
The only decent physicians still practicing in this province are either martyrs, masochists or insane. The rest of the good ones went south amid a giant sucking sound a few years ago.
Try waiting 6-9 months for an MRI, 12-18 months for most surgery. Death certificates are cheaper than hospital beds.
(1) A general system for interfacing old laptop LCDs to desktop computers.
(2) A simple spectrometer for the near infra-red with a PC interface & open-source software to detect things like benzene in tap water and PAHs in milk.
(3) A (shielded) solid-state x-ray machine with flouroscopy & CCD detection for examining small parts for structural flaws.
(4) A tunable solid-state laser.
(5) A small inductive or external shunt current measuring system that can be housed in an electrical outlet, and that reports current draw via WiFi or Bluetooth or something, so you can plot the currnt draw versus time for every appliance in your home.
Yeah, right.
Re:The empire was a force for good as well as bad
on
That's Sir Tim to You
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· Score: 1
There was nothing whatsoever good about the British Empire. Intending to do good does not necessarily imply that the outcome shall be good.
The British Empire was built upon principles that were not shared by the subjugated peoples. The notion inherent in the establishment of the empire was that indigenous people could be 'civilized' - by converting them to Christianity, establishing infrastructure for transportation and communications, and setting up a 'fair' system of government. That these seem like good things is based chiefly upon the fact that they are our things. From the perspective of the indigenous people, these were not, and are not, good things.
Take North America for example. There existed a large, thriving and well-organized society of indigenous people before the arrival of Europeans. They were considered sub-human not because they lived in misery, or were poor or had no government, but because they were different. Once the British (and others) were able to de-humanize the indigenous people, all manner of intercession could be justified on the basis that the motive was improvement.
What followed was genocide.
Whatever else you might say about it, the British monarchy propagates a system where one person is held to be intrinsically superior to another. This belief is absolutely fundamental to all of the ills that plague humanity, from race discrimination to runaway capitalism. Mr. Berners-Lee would have done better to reject an honour bestowed by such a system, for it is no honour at all: it is complicity in the greatest crime in human history.
It's not FUD or a troll, and the last time I checked I was not a complete moron. People often react that way to radical ideas they do not understand. I recall Galileo receiving a similar reaction.
Fact: the technology for marking, extracting, and replicating genes from almost any organism is well established and straightforward.
Fact: While PCR machines and centrifuges make the task easier, DNA can be extracted with a blender and the fragments sorted with a crude centrifuge.
Fact: Many bacteria take up gene sequences readily under conditions easily achieved in a home lab.
Fact: Selective culturing techniques (such as slant plates) to achieve pure colonies of bacteria are childishly simple, and require no more than the appropriate broth, agar and possibly an indicator medium.
If you want FUD, I can spell out exactly which genes can be extracted from common organisms and placed in which bacteria, but I'll refrain from doing so on the basis that there may be deranged individuals out there who are too stupid to think of this on their own.
In one of the articles it said this guy had a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) machine and a centrifuge. Frankly, this scares the stuffing out of me.
The dark secret is that right now, a smart person could end all life on this planet with some broth, agar, a blender and an electric drill. This fellow had a lot more that that on hand.
His goal was to draw attention to the dangers of commercial genetic modification. He hasn't accomplished that because most of you sheep don't seem to understand that his message was this: GM is dangerous precisely because of its unpredictability. Life adapts, evolves, and mutates. Genes are transferred horizontally and vertically as well.
An unexplained death in an otherwise healthy 40-something woman is strange as hell. When she dies in the vicinity of a PCR machine, a centrifuge and a pile of bacterial cultures and the coroner can't assign a precise cause of death, this is a major cause for concern.
Get this, and get it good: when you start messing with gene sequences (and yes, he WAS doing that) and replicating organisms, ANYTHING can happen, and it cannot necessarily be easily categorized or explained.
It may already be too late, but this should be a wake-up call to freeze all GM experimentation except in Level IV labs.
One way or another, this is probably the index case. Wait. You'll see.
You missed the entire point: that religion and spirituality are invariably pathological. All people therefore who are religious or spiritual are indistinguishable from schizophrenics.
You are correct that schizophrenics make up what may, under certain circumstances, be called their own religion and call it reality. In my book, that only makes them more creative than people who accept someone else's unverifiable view of reality.
In fact, I understand the human condition very well, and I think that Slashdot (and every other forum) is a perfect place to discuss it. Possibly 95% of people would call themselves "spiritual" - you are correct, there is excellent evidence for this. Ninety-five percent is way past what we doctors call an epidemic. A better term would be "pandemic".
During the 1970s, a friend of mine was involved in starting an organization called "Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". He explained his reasoning thus: Our job as physicians is to heal the sick. In the event of nuclear war, we will be unable to function. The consequences outweigh the implications of all other human diseases together. If we do not prevent nuclear war, we will have failed in our primary task as physicians.
Religion and spirituality are not only the root of the threat of nuclear war, they are in themselves much more dangerous than it. It is fine for pre-industrial societies to tolerate widespread irrationalism: all that will happen is a few primitives bonking each other on the head. Give those same irrational primitives nuclear weapons and technology, and they are inevitably going to destroy the planet.
That is why my whole contribution to the health of humankind is dedicated to eradicating religion and spirituality. It's a public health issue. And I suspect we'll find that a rational society is free from the disease of schizophrenia. I suspect that schizophrenia is what happens to a brain when it tries to encompass a belief system that is partially rational and partially irrational simultaneously. Schizophrenic's delusions tend to represent their backgrounds: those raised in Catholic homes tend to have Catholic delusions; those raised with exposure to mass media have delusions based upon that material.
Schizophrenia is what happens when a brain chokes on the crap. Eliminate the crap, you eliminate the disease.
Most computer fans run off the 12V supply. I upgraded and old PII server to a Celeron 1.1GHz to play movies and music in the living room (tualatin system - hacked BIOS). It works great, but noise is much more of an issue than it was in the server room.
I re-soldered the take-offs for the fan power to the 5V leads (red vs. yellow). The machine stays adequately cool with the (3) fans running at the lower voltage, and I can't hear them at all.
On another note, the hard drive was causing a lot of noise during access. I found that there were two reasons for this: one, the drive was very fragmented from having (ahem) large files constantly copied on to it and then deleted, and the NNTP client was contributing significantly to the fragmentation. Here's what I did:
(1) Installed an old 6GB hard drive just for the NNTP message headers.
(2) Defragmented the main HD with O&O and left it resident.
(3) Established a RAM disk for the browser cache while I was at it.
Now the machine runs as near silent as I can imagine, and much faster.
Incidentally, I painted it black (including the drive faces and bay inserts) with Krylon Fusion, "The no-prep superbond paint for plastic". I have never been a fan of painted computer cases, but the Krylon product does a great job without actually doing a proper prep and spraying with an expensive two-part paint.
This is an old story that has been revamped by sensational and probably unethical journalism.
ITER is a proof-of-concept research project that is not expected to reach break-even, let alone produce any usable energy for 25-50 years. It may not even be possible to achieve ignition (a self-sustaining plasma fusion reaction) with ITER technology.
Canada has had an ITER team since the early 1990s. The plan was to put the project out near Oshawa and bring in some research dollars, but it was a bit of a lame horse politically. Our elected representatives were too busy lining their pockets , so Canada is apparently out for the running as a site for the ITER project.
I have a friend who believes that beings with special powers are all around us. Some are good and will help us, and some are bad and want to hurt us. These beings are invisible and they are directed by a very powerful entity that is generally good but allows bad things to happen. To some extent, they control us, and they can make things happen, but not routinely. She believes that we can communicate with the overall controlling entity or with the invisible beings by just thinking, since these beings can read our thoughts, but sometimes it helps to speak out loud to them for some unaccountable reason.
She also believes that this special controlling entity is one being but also at the same time three beings. At some point, each of the three beings that are actually one may have taken human form, for one purpose or another. One of the three is supposed to have raped a woman once and left her pregnant. Another is supposed to have been tortured horribly and killed, and this is supposed to have served some very important purpose. The third part of this controlling being is supposed to have entered either every person, or alternately every person that believes in one or both of the others. She is not very clear on this.
She believes that this being (or these beings) created us and everything else, and that they take a special interest in our progress. Occasionally, they make magical things happen, mostly having to do with liquids and fish for some reason, though apparently bread is also involved at times.
She thinks that after we die we will go to live with these beings in a wonderful, magical place, and that what happens to us depends upon whether we believe in something for which there is no tangible evidence, or whether we do "good" things (though the exact nature of "good" is not entirely clear) or prhaps both. She thinks that dead people will come up out of the ground and walk, and that this will happen fairly soon.
Apparently, many people share her views. So many, in fact, that they form a significant enough block to vote to keep this whole business out of the DSM IV, and even to start wars in which people who believe in slightly different magical beings are hacked horribly to death.
The name she gives the people who share her beliefs is "christian", after the one of the magical beings who was hideously butchered for some reason.
If I could stop the screaming inside my head long enough, I might be able to use my M.D. to figure out the difference between a "christian" and a "schizophrenic".
Please, you awful bloody monsters, stop this hideous, widespread, pathological thinking before you destroy this planet and everything on it with your insanity.
The still photos were taken from a much higher quality video. The stuff we're seeing is edited for television, and whomever edited probably knows nothing about aerodynamics and may therefore have cut out all the interesting bits.
When I said "convincing" I meant that it didn't appear to be an obvious fraud. The reason I posted this was in hopes that some Slashdot reader would have a link to the real video, or else would point out some mundane explanation for the incident.
I am a sceptic. The Internet is great for debunking, but it only works if a lot of eyes see the evidence. Well-documented UFO incidents most likely represent a rare presentation of something common, or a common presentation of something rare. Anyone who wants me to believe the latter had better present me with the raw data in veery high resolution.
Anyone charging a fee for such evidence automatically gets written off in my book as having a secondary gain motive, so it had better be freely available!
Come to think of it, shouldn't all information be like that?
Slashdot seems to be now the only media outlet not covering the UFO story coming out of Mexico. I submitted it yesterday, and it was rejected. I'm not trying to slip this through the back door, but come on, even Wired and Fark have this now. I'd really like to know what Slashdotters think about this.
The interesting thing is that the Mexican plane was a drug interdiction aircraft with advanced radar and forward-looking infrared. It was designed precisely for the task of finding, intercepting and identifying unidentified aircraft, and it sounds like the data was handled in a way that would meet legal evidentiary standards (for obvious reasons: it was designed to convict drug smugglers).
Maybe the Vatican missed a fourth option: they're already here.
This is exactly what happened in Toronto a few years ago with a similar promotion involving milk cartons wired with a piezo speaker and some electronics to make the carton "moo" when opened. Someone got one of these and presumably had no idea that a mooing carton indicated a winner, so they left it on a table in a cafeteria with the speaker wires partially pulled out.
The clean-up staff, apparently also not keen followers of popular culture, saw a milk carton with wires and electronics inside it, and they called the bomb squad, who efficiently blew the carton to blazes.
"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
- Martin Niemoller
Don't be ridiculous. Voting is a form of "bread and circuses". Voting matters not, because the people with the money buy every election (even in Canada).
If you vote, you are a moron. All you are doing is proving that you have been sucked in by a system of economic slavery that is trying to convince you that you have a measure of autonomy. You do not, unless you are one of the most privilged few percent.
The only way you can vote is by non-compliance. Download your copyrighted materials, don't support large corporations with your dollars and don't believe anything the government tells you.
In public school, the teachers told us that if we didn't like the way things were done we could run for office. They lied. They neglected to mention that you cannot run for office successfully unless you have tens of millions of dollars or are willing to compromise your principles enough to ally with one of the political parties feeding at the public trough.
My gay lover and I are getting married! In addition to alcohol, we're serving pot at the reception! The entertainment is downloaded music and movies! If anyone gets sick, we'll take 'em to emerg for free medical care! And we're only 19!
Yay Canada!
There is a principle that I usually try to adhere to: Never wrestle with a pig, because you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. I'm apparently in a funny mood, since I'm breaking my usual habits. Maybe it has something to do with it being the first anniversary of the beginning of America's war of aggression in Iraq.
As a matter of fact, I have presented many ideas anonymously over the course of my lifetime. This was for several reasons:
(1) I felt that they were sufficiently beneficial to humankind that they should be pursued independent of anyone's claim over them on the basis of desired prestige or expectation of financial benefit.
(2) I wanted people to evaluate them on their own merit, without falling into the fallacial trap of "appeal to authority". In many cases, who the idea came from might outweigh the intrinsic merit of the idea.
(3) I have often been too afraid to voice some of my ideas publicly, since people like you would invariably attack me, and that would create controversy that would reflect negatively upon my position. This is sad and I admit that I suck, but I am human and I experience fear.
Scientific papers are another matter; the peer review system is constructed in such a way that one cannot normally submit papers anonymously. If, however, you are accusing me of using my own name for self-aggrandizement, I can assure you that was not my motive.
I am not aware of making generalizations about groups. I am referring specifically to a subset of Americans who pursue wealth above all else, consume out of proportion to the rest of the world, and continue to employ people from outside the USA for menial tasks at substandard wages. And to the Intel corporation that, last time I checked, was in the sole business of making a profit. Furthermore, I am referring to a very small group of children who have been influenced by that corporation and its principles. Children who cannot be expected to see the danger in starting out their scientific careers filing patents and focusing on applied research while calling it science. If you can get a patent upon it, it is not science: it is applied science, commonly called technology.
If these children, as you say wish to "protect their work from companies that would otherwise use it unethically", then instead of filing a patent, perhaps they should go to an anti-globalization rally, instead of propagating a system that is broken. But I doubt that is the case. I suspect that, since the prize is sponsored by Intel, they have the notion that patenting something is good, or else they haven't really thought about it. Children adopt the attitudes of their respected elders very easily. That is why corporations should not be allowed access to children.
Please try to understand that this is not an anti-patent rant, merely a rant against the concept of protecting "intellectual property" in the field of science. There may be excellent reasons to patent a manufacturing process or a specific implementation of a scientific discovery, commensurate with the level of effort invested in developing it, but scientific pursuits should be free from such concerns. It is duplicitous of Intel to foster any other attitude. At least, if it is called science.
I may be bitter; I am confronted constantly by people like you whose first response to any idea is, "hush, you should patent that; don't tell anybody". I am bitter about the decline of intellectual freedom and the corporatization of science. I am bitter that only applied science gets proper funding in most parts of the world, and I am bitter that the quality of corporate-funded science is so poor.
I am definitely unsuccessful. I have convinced almost nobody that science should be pursued for its own sake, and that our survival as a species may depend upon it.
I am certainly self-righteous. One needs to be amid the din of the dumbed-down soap-box nonsense roaring out of the lower forty-eight that gets passed off as science.
I am not going to get into a pissing contest with you, but I have more advanced qualifications and degrees than most people. I have had a reasonably successful career in science, and it is a subject near and dear to my heart.
I will not sit quiet when I see the fundamental principles of science (openness of information, discovery for its own sake, intellectual curiosity) perverted by a rotten American corporation like Intel and foisted on unsuspecting children.
These kids are being taught (a) that science is no good without practical application and (b) that they have to protect their so-called "intellectual property" with patents.
Even if this represents reality in the "New American Century", isn't it a little early to be indoctrinating them into the rat-race?
And my post is not a troll. It is an opinion. A strong one, yes, but sometimes strong opinions are necessary to point out the serious problems with something that otherwise looks about as controversial as flag-waving and apple pie.
I've done a fair bit of moderating on Slashdot, and I think moderation is necessary in order to filter out the crap, but now I see that it is being used to limit freedom of speech when someone presents ideas with which you Yanks are uncomfortable. I'm not going to continue to moderate, because I believe that it is being abused. I had a sense that my post would be modded down, so I thought, "let's try it".
Finally: these are the children of the American Dream. It is a sick dream, and it needs to end. Teaching children to patent their scientific endeavours is an atrocity, and modding me down won't make it otherwise.
Quite a few of them have patents pending for their work. Now that's starting kids off right!
Get an idea and keep it to yourself, so you can make a lot of money, kids. Then you can afford the house with six bathrooms and the fucking SUV. Then you can bring some more Haitians and Venezuelans into your fat, rich suburban American neighborhoods to mow your lawn and cook your food.
Didn't you pay attention in Rosie's English class? She taught us to not split our infinitives like that.
Or were you too busy telling her about your invention of that stupid "word processor" program that never amounted to anything? Bah! Who ever heard of using a computing-machine to process words!
Once again, it is "slowly to get rid of the generics", or "to get slowly rid of the generics".
Ghost actually creates an entry in the partition table that points to the space occupied by the VIRTPART file. The "recovered" partition is created by the user to point to the unpartitioned space between the second entry in the partition table and the physical end of the drive.
The presence of a second partiton that overlaps the first partition but ends before the physical end of the drive makes it *look* like there is unused space on the drive when, in fact, there isn't.
BTW, the reason you have to have a system on the drive, in case anyone hasn't figured it out, is that Ghost generally does not need a reboot to copy a non-system partition.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I could ever live knowing that all of my memories are going to go down the drain and not even realize it.
But they are! It is called death. Death is really just like "quick Alzheimers".
All your memories are going to go down the drain and you won't realize it. Or are you one of the delusionals that believes otherwise?
I agree completely. I neither meant to demean nor elevate the science underlying eugenics, simply to use it as an example of a popular but poorly supported scientific idea.
The perpetual recycling of the Frankenstein story is one of the things I dislike most about the popular media.
Most people do not read the peer-reviewed scientific literature, so they remain blissfully unaware that this 'epidemic' is taking place.
The literature is now filled with papers that are paid for by special interest groups, corporations and plain old loonies and which contain not a whit of scientific integrity or merit. The popular press has not twigged to this because of widespread 'dumbing-down' - in evidence I offer Scientific American and MIT's Review of Technology.
And you are wrong about me; regardless of the support for it in the scientific community, I would still dismiss this particular foolishness as 'pseudoscientific bullshit'. I am just as unpopular in the scientific community as I am on Slashdot.
While it is difficult to choose from the wealth of references available, here is a link to a particularly egregious example of the kind of paper that constitutes this 'epidemic': Seizure Alert Dogs
If you want to find your own examples, I offer this simple formula: Search the headlines in the popular press for references to the peer-reviewed literature. The ones printed in the biggest fonts, most prominently displayed, most widely circulated and occupying the most column inches are almost invariably the best examples of what I call 'psudoscientific bullshit'.
The scientific community increasingly depends upon mindless popular support for funding, as does the news media. The result? Uncritical reportage of results designed to capture the largest cheque. I think 'epidemic' is a fair term.
How can an institution like Princeton be involved in this kind of garbage? Probably because great universities have a history of adopting popular, though ridiculous, positions.
I dusted off some material on the old and politically incorrect doctrine of eugenics the other day, speaking of ridiculous but popular ideas. A hundred years ago, people thought that we were facing a genetic twilight because of medical and social interventions that allowed the weak and deformed to propagate. Half-bake for a couple of decades at 451 degrees fahrenheit. Voila! Hitler.
This egg thing, however, is so far beyond the pale it would make the eugenicists blush. It is so ridiculous that eugenics seems positively well-grounded by comparison. Thus another wholesale crapfest lends credence to an earlier one, both by comparison, and by providing direct confirmation that, for whatever reason, the human brain IS actually turning to mush.
While the investigation of paranormal phenomena is within the realm of respectable science, crowing in the popular press about absurd extrapolations from the results of such science is certainly not.
I don't need an egg to predict this: we're doomed, doomed, doomed if we can't get this epidemic of dumbed-down touchy-feely pseudoscience bullshit under control.
Thank you, Dr. Baltar.
In Ontario, an alarming number of patients can't even find a family doctor. I asked my spouse's family doctor to take on my sister as a patient, since she was already seeing a member of the family and as a favour to me (IAAMD). No way. Practice full. My sister still can't find one.
Ontario just cut funding for essentially all remaining preventive health care: well baby care, eye exams (including Glaucoma screening), Physio and Chiropractic.
The only decent physicians still practicing in this province are either martyrs, masochists or insane. The rest of the good ones went south amid a giant sucking sound a few years ago.
Try waiting 6-9 months for an MRI, 12-18 months for most surgery. Death certificates are cheaper than hospital beds.
Do NOT come to Canada. Run screaming FROM Canada.
In summary: Ha Ha feckin' Ha!
(2) A simple spectrometer for the near infra-red with a PC interface & open-source software to detect things like benzene in tap water and PAHs in milk.
(3) A (shielded) solid-state x-ray machine with flouroscopy & CCD detection for examining small parts for structural flaws.
(4) A tunable solid-state laser.
(5) A small inductive or external shunt current measuring system that can be housed in an electrical outlet, and that reports current draw via WiFi or Bluetooth or something, so you can plot the currnt draw versus time for every appliance in your home.
Yeah, right.
The British Empire was built upon principles that were not shared by the subjugated peoples. The notion inherent in the establishment of the empire was that indigenous people could be 'civilized' - by converting them to Christianity, establishing infrastructure for transportation and communications, and setting up a 'fair' system of government. That these seem like good things is based chiefly upon the fact that they are our things. From the perspective of the indigenous people, these were not, and are not, good things.
Take North America for example. There existed a large, thriving and well-organized society of indigenous people before the arrival of Europeans. They were considered sub-human not because they lived in misery, or were poor or had no government, but because they were different. Once the British (and others) were able to de-humanize the indigenous people, all manner of intercession could be justified on the basis that the motive was improvement.
What followed was genocide.
Whatever else you might say about it, the British monarchy propagates a system where one person is held to be intrinsically superior to another. This belief is absolutely fundamental to all of the ills that plague humanity, from race discrimination to runaway capitalism. Mr. Berners-Lee would have done better to reject an honour bestowed by such a system, for it is no honour at all: it is complicity in the greatest crime in human history.
Fact: the technology for marking, extracting, and replicating genes from almost any organism is well established and straightforward.
Fact: While PCR machines and centrifuges make the task easier, DNA can be extracted with a blender and the fragments sorted with a crude centrifuge.
Fact: Many bacteria take up gene sequences readily under conditions easily achieved in a home lab.
Fact: Selective culturing techniques (such as slant plates) to achieve pure colonies of bacteria are childishly simple, and require no more than the appropriate broth, agar and possibly an indicator medium.
If you want FUD, I can spell out exactly which genes can be extracted from common organisms and placed in which bacteria, but I'll refrain from doing so on the basis that there may be deranged individuals out there who are too stupid to think of this on their own.
The dark secret is that right now, a smart person could end all life on this planet with some broth, agar, a blender and an electric drill. This fellow had a lot more that that on hand.
His goal was to draw attention to the dangers of commercial genetic modification. He hasn't accomplished that because most of you sheep don't seem to understand that his message was this: GM is dangerous precisely because of its unpredictability. Life adapts, evolves, and mutates. Genes are transferred horizontally and vertically as well.
An unexplained death in an otherwise healthy 40-something woman is strange as hell. When she dies in the vicinity of a PCR machine, a centrifuge and a pile of bacterial cultures and the coroner can't assign a precise cause of death, this is a major cause for concern.
Get this, and get it good: when you start messing with gene sequences (and yes, he WAS doing that) and replicating organisms, ANYTHING can happen, and it cannot necessarily be easily categorized or explained.
It may already be too late, but this should be a wake-up call to freeze all GM experimentation except in Level IV labs.
One way or another, this is probably the index case. Wait. You'll see.
You are correct that schizophrenics make up what may, under certain circumstances, be called their own religion and call it reality. In my book, that only makes them more creative than people who accept someone else's unverifiable view of reality.
In fact, I understand the human condition very well, and I think that Slashdot (and every other forum) is a perfect place to discuss it. Possibly 95% of people would call themselves "spiritual" - you are correct, there is excellent evidence for this. Ninety-five percent is way past what we doctors call an epidemic. A better term would be "pandemic".
During the 1970s, a friend of mine was involved in starting an organization called "Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". He explained his reasoning thus: Our job as physicians is to heal the sick. In the event of nuclear war, we will be unable to function. The consequences outweigh the implications of all other human diseases together. If we do not prevent nuclear war, we will have failed in our primary task as physicians.
Religion and spirituality are not only the root of the threat of nuclear war, they are in themselves much more dangerous than it. It is fine for pre-industrial societies to tolerate widespread irrationalism: all that will happen is a few primitives bonking each other on the head. Give those same irrational primitives nuclear weapons and technology, and they are inevitably going to destroy the planet.
That is why my whole contribution to the health of humankind is dedicated to eradicating religion and spirituality. It's a public health issue. And I suspect we'll find that a rational society is free from the disease of schizophrenia. I suspect that schizophrenia is what happens to a brain when it tries to encompass a belief system that is partially rational and partially irrational simultaneously. Schizophrenic's delusions tend to represent their backgrounds: those raised in Catholic homes tend to have Catholic delusions; those raised with exposure to mass media have delusions based upon that material.
Schizophrenia is what happens when a brain chokes on the crap. Eliminate the crap, you eliminate the disease.
Daina
I re-soldered the take-offs for the fan power to the 5V leads (red vs. yellow). The machine stays adequately cool with the (3) fans running at the lower voltage, and I can't hear them at all.
On another note, the hard drive was causing a lot of noise during access. I found that there were two reasons for this: one, the drive was very fragmented from having (ahem) large files constantly copied on to it and then deleted, and the NNTP client was contributing significantly to the fragmentation. Here's what I did:
(1) Installed an old 6GB hard drive just for the NNTP message headers.
(2) Defragmented the main HD with O&O and left it resident.
(3) Established a RAM disk for the browser cache while I was at it.
Now the machine runs as near silent as I can imagine, and much faster.
Incidentally, I painted it black (including the drive faces and bay inserts) with Krylon Fusion, "The no-prep superbond paint for plastic". I have never been a fan of painted computer cases, but the Krylon product does a great job without actually doing a proper prep and spraying with an expensive two-part paint.
ITER is a proof-of-concept research project that is not expected to reach break-even, let alone produce any usable energy for 25-50 years. It may not even be possible to achieve ignition (a self-sustaining plasma fusion reaction) with ITER technology.
Canada has had an ITER team since the early 1990s. The plan was to put the project out near Oshawa and bring in some research dollars, but it was a bit of a lame horse politically. Our elected representatives were too busy lining their pockets , so Canada is apparently out for the running as a site for the ITER project.
She also believes that this special controlling entity is one being but also at the same time three beings. At some point, each of the three beings that are actually one may have taken human form, for one purpose or another. One of the three is supposed to have raped a woman once and left her pregnant. Another is supposed to have been tortured horribly and killed, and this is supposed to have served some very important purpose. The third part of this controlling being is supposed to have entered either every person, or alternately every person that believes in one or both of the others. She is not very clear on this.
She believes that this being (or these beings) created us and everything else, and that they take a special interest in our progress. Occasionally, they make magical things happen, mostly having to do with liquids and fish for some reason, though apparently bread is also involved at times.
She thinks that after we die we will go to live with these beings in a wonderful, magical place, and that what happens to us depends upon whether we believe in something for which there is no tangible evidence, or whether we do "good" things (though the exact nature of "good" is not entirely clear) or prhaps both. She thinks that dead people will come up out of the ground and walk, and that this will happen fairly soon.
Apparently, many people share her views. So many, in fact, that they form a significant enough block to vote to keep this whole business out of the DSM IV, and even to start wars in which people who believe in slightly different magical beings are hacked horribly to death.
The name she gives the people who share her beliefs is "christian", after the one of the magical beings who was hideously butchered for some reason.
If I could stop the screaming inside my head long enough, I might be able to use my M.D. to figure out the difference between a "christian" and a "schizophrenic".
Please, you awful bloody monsters, stop this hideous, widespread, pathological thinking before you destroy this planet and everything on it with your insanity.
Oops, too late.
Daina
The still photos were taken from a much higher quality video. The stuff we're seeing is edited for television, and whomever edited probably knows nothing about aerodynamics and may therefore have cut out all the interesting bits.
When I said "convincing" I meant that it didn't appear to be an obvious fraud. The reason I posted this was in hopes that some Slashdot reader would have a link to the real video, or else would point out some mundane explanation for the incident.
I am a sceptic. The Internet is great for debunking, but it only works if a lot of eyes see the evidence. Well-documented UFO incidents most likely represent a rare presentation of something common, or a common presentation of something rare. Anyone who wants me to believe the latter had better present me with the raw data in veery high resolution.
Anyone charging a fee for such evidence automatically gets written off in my book as having a secondary gain motive, so it had better be freely available!
Come to think of it, shouldn't all information be like that?
Daina
See the video. Check out Wired.
The video looks pretty convincing, and according to AP and Reuters, the Mexican military is standing behind the story.
The detailed information is at Rense.
The interesting thing is that the Mexican plane was a drug interdiction aircraft with advanced radar and forward-looking infrared. It was designed precisely for the task of finding, intercepting and identifying unidentified aircraft, and it sounds like the data was handled in a way that would meet legal evidentiary standards (for obvious reasons: it was designed to convict drug smugglers).
Maybe the Vatican missed a fourth option: they're already here.
This is exactly what happened in Toronto a few years ago with a similar promotion involving milk cartons wired with a piezo speaker and some electronics to make the carton "moo" when opened. Someone got one of these and presumably had no idea that a mooing carton indicated a winner, so they left it on a table in a cafeteria with the speaker wires partially pulled out.
The clean-up staff, apparently also not keen followers of popular culture, saw a milk carton with wires and electronics inside it, and they called the bomb squad, who efficiently blew the carton to blazes.
Here's a link for Snopes and the other skeptics:
"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoller
If you vote, you are a moron. All you are doing is proving that you have been sucked in by a system of economic slavery that is trying to convince you that you have a measure of autonomy. You do not, unless you are one of the most privilged few percent.
The only way you can vote is by non-compliance. Download your copyrighted materials, don't support large corporations with your dollars and don't believe anything the government tells you.
In public school, the teachers told us that if we didn't like the way things were done we could run for office. They lied. They neglected to mention that you cannot run for office successfully unless you have tens of millions of dollars or are willing to compromise your principles enough to ally with one of the political parties feeding at the public trough.
Current trends shall make criminals of us all.
My gay lover and I are getting married! In addition to alcohol, we're serving pot at the reception! The entertainment is downloaded music and movies! If anyone gets sick, we'll take 'em to emerg for free medical care! And we're only 19! Yay Canada!
As a matter of fact, I have presented many ideas anonymously over the course of my lifetime. This was for several reasons:
(1) I felt that they were sufficiently beneficial to humankind that they should be pursued independent of anyone's claim over them on the basis of desired prestige or expectation of financial benefit.
(2) I wanted people to evaluate them on their own merit, without falling into the fallacial trap of "appeal to authority". In many cases, who the idea came from might outweigh the intrinsic merit of the idea.
(3) I have often been too afraid to voice some of my ideas publicly, since people like you would invariably attack me, and that would create controversy that would reflect negatively upon my position. This is sad and I admit that I suck, but I am human and I experience fear.
Scientific papers are another matter; the peer review system is constructed in such a way that one cannot normally submit papers anonymously. If, however, you are accusing me of using my own name for self-aggrandizement, I can assure you that was not my motive.
I am not aware of making generalizations about groups. I am referring specifically to a subset of Americans who pursue wealth above all else, consume out of proportion to the rest of the world, and continue to employ people from outside the USA for menial tasks at substandard wages. And to the Intel corporation that, last time I checked, was in the sole business of making a profit. Furthermore, I am referring to a very small group of children who have been influenced by that corporation and its principles. Children who cannot be expected to see the danger in starting out their scientific careers filing patents and focusing on applied research while calling it science. If you can get a patent upon it, it is not science: it is applied science, commonly called technology.
If these children, as you say wish to "protect their work from companies that would otherwise use it unethically", then instead of filing a patent, perhaps they should go to an anti-globalization rally, instead of propagating a system that is broken. But I doubt that is the case. I suspect that, since the prize is sponsored by Intel, they have the notion that patenting something is good, or else they haven't really thought about it. Children adopt the attitudes of their respected elders very easily. That is why corporations should not be allowed access to children.
Please try to understand that this is not an anti-patent rant, merely a rant against the concept of protecting "intellectual property" in the field of science. There may be excellent reasons to patent a manufacturing process or a specific implementation of a scientific discovery, commensurate with the level of effort invested in developing it, but scientific pursuits should be free from such concerns. It is duplicitous of Intel to foster any other attitude. At least, if it is called science.
I may be bitter; I am confronted constantly by people like you whose first response to any idea is, "hush, you should patent that; don't tell anybody". I am bitter about the decline of intellectual freedom and the corporatization of science. I am bitter that only applied science gets proper funding in most parts of the world, and I am bitter that the quality of corporate-funded science is so poor.
I am definitely unsuccessful. I have convinced almost nobody that science should be pursued for its own sake, and that our survival as a species may depend upon it.
I am certainly self-righteous. One needs to be amid the din of the dumbed-down soap-box nonsense roaring out of the lower forty-eight that gets passed off as science.
But silent I shall no longer be!
I am not going to get into a pissing contest with you, but I have more advanced qualifications and degrees than most people. I have had a reasonably successful career in science, and it is a subject near and dear to my heart.
I will not sit quiet when I see the fundamental principles of science (openness of information, discovery for its own sake, intellectual curiosity) perverted by a rotten American corporation like Intel and foisted on unsuspecting children.
These kids are being taught (a) that science is no good without practical application and (b) that they have to protect their so-called "intellectual property" with patents.
Even if this represents reality in the "New American Century", isn't it a little early to be indoctrinating them into the rat-race?
And my post is not a troll. It is an opinion. A strong one, yes, but sometimes strong opinions are necessary to point out the serious problems with something that otherwise looks about as controversial as flag-waving and apple pie.
I've done a fair bit of moderating on Slashdot, and I think moderation is necessary in order to filter out the crap, but now I see that it is being used to limit freedom of speech when someone presents ideas with which you Yanks are uncomfortable. I'm not going to continue to moderate, because I believe that it is being abused. I had a sense that my post would be modded down, so I thought, "let's try it".
Finally: these are the children of the American Dream. It is a sick dream, and it needs to end. Teaching children to patent their scientific endeavours is an atrocity, and modding me down won't make it otherwise.
Get an idea and keep it to yourself, so you can make a lot of money, kids. Then you can afford the house with six bathrooms and the fucking SUV. Then you can bring some more Haitians and Venezuelans into your fat, rich suburban American neighborhoods to mow your lawn and cook your food.
This is not science. This is a bloody obscenity.
Didn't you pay attention in Rosie's English class? She taught us to not split our infinitives like that.
Or were you too busy telling her about your invention of that stupid "word processor" program that never amounted to anything? Bah! Who ever heard of using a computing-machine to process words!
Once again, it is "slowly to get rid of the generics", or "to get slowly rid of the generics".
I blame that bloody Star Trek!
Ghost actually creates an entry in the partition table that points to the space occupied by the VIRTPART file. The "recovered" partition is created by the user to point to the unpartitioned space between the second entry in the partition table and the physical end of the drive.
The presence of a second partiton that overlaps the first partition but ends before the physical end of the drive makes it *look* like there is unused space on the drive when, in fact, there isn't.
BTW, the reason you have to have a system on the drive, in case anyone hasn't figured it out, is that Ghost generally does not need a reboot to copy a non-system partition.