I haven't read His Dark Materials, but I have read the others.
Calvin and Hobbes I don't take as a great example. Calvin is emotionally unstable, creates a lot of problems for those around him, and doesn't strike me as being particularly much happier than the other characters in the story. Hobbes makes an interesting foil; he's often used to underline the silliness of Calvin's destructive behavior. He's much more mature than Calvin, gets along with others better, and doesn't harbor nearly as much anger. Calvin may be the protagonist, but he's not the hero.
Winnie the Pooh was written for children, so the characters are naturally going to be very childlike. However, I don't see a single life lesson that comes from Pooh which can't be applied in adult life - indeed, Pooh's easygoing attitude is something I see in adults far more often than in children. I don't have kids of my own, but at least in public I often marvel at how strongly they can fixate on small, inconsequential objects, which strikes me as just about the last thing Winnie-the-Pooh would ever do. I'd say that, of all the characters in the Pooh series, Pooh and Christopher Robin represent the attitudes and ways of thinking of children that I've met the least well. Far more often, they remind me of Rabbit or Tigger.
Really, if I had to say anything about Pooh's character, I'd say that he represents the patience and equanimity that are the best qualities of well-mannered adults, and that he was made somewhat dim in an effort to counteract his otherwise overhwelming wisdom in an effort to keep the character entertaining, as well as to make it easier for children to relate to him.
I said "kind of language" and not just "language" because that's what I meant. I realize that the system isn't giving the same results every time they run it.
However, the software they wrote to allow this language to develop will only allow it to develop in certain ways, because we haven't developed unbounded artificial intelligence. (Nor do I know of an example of unbounded natural intelligence - the way humans think is a result of how their brains are constructed.) So these languages will be substantially similar.
For example, the grammar might change, but I doubt the kind of grammar will ever change. I can't imagine that these dogs are using anything more than an iterative one. That is, no part of speech can be defined in terms of itself. Human grammar is recursive. Computer languages are recursive. Mathematical notation uses a recursive grammar. Recursive grammars allow for deep, flexible modes of communication. An iterative grammar, like what I expect these Aibos are doing, can only really generate canned sentence structures that can represent a limited range of ideas. None of them is going to be saying a sentence equivalent to "Look at the ball that the dog on the table is holding."
I wouldn't say it's impossible; a lot of computational linguists have been working on this particular problem for a long time. The Aibo team was pulling from a lot of existing research.
I doubt the kind of language these dogs are using is very similar to any human language. It probably doesn't even have a recursive grammar. Something without that would be a whole lot easier to implement than anything approaching natural language - what they're saying probably resembles a very simple IPC mechanism more than anything else.
Seriously. I think some folks have taken the "desktop" metaphor a wee bit too literally. That or the latest generation of human-computer interface researchers suffer from a profound lack of imagination.
The thing that I don't get about projects like this is that they seem to fail to recognize that "possible in real life" is not the same thing as "desirable in a computer interface." For example, you can pile papers and such in real life. That's great, I can. But the piles get hard to keep track of and are generally disorganized to begin with. Nobody really thinks that a messy desk is a Good Thing. That's why we invented file folders.
Furthermore, there's a whole lot of stuff that our interaction with the world depends on which is absent from computer interfaces and probably will be for a long time. I won't see the point of being able to dog-ear a document in a computer interface until I also have the ability to feel which document is dog-eared with my thumb so I can get to it quickly. If I have to look at all the pages to see which one is dog-eared, then the ability to do that in a computer interface is useless fluff in that it is functionally identical to text at the top of the page - titles, page numbers, etc.
I'll get excited about my computer desktop acting like an actual desk with real physical objects and such when I can use my computer's desktop environment as a place to put a mug of coffee. (Real coffee.)
Microsoft makes assloads of money off of Windows and Office and then strongarms their way into other markets, usually by either taking advantage of their dominance in the OS market or by simply hemmorhaging piles of money into the project.
Google makes assloads of money off of web advertising and uses it to strongarm their way into other markets, usually by either taking advantage of their dominance of the search market or by simply hemmorhaging piles of money into the project.
Google's balance sheet may be solidly positive, but so were Microsoft's and AT&T's when they were younger. It looks to me like Google may be able to reign for a while, maybe even a decade or two, but a business model that depends on a lack of strong competition in at least one market isn't just unproven, it's proven to be fragile.
The Intuit way of life is unraveling and polar bears are facing massive die-offs because the arctic ice is freezing later and breaking up earlier every year.
Species of tree frogs in the carribean are going extinct at an amazing rate as increasing temperatures create a more hospitable environment for parasitic fungi.
Birds' migration patterns are altering by huge amounts - weeks in some cases.
The $#@$@#% thermometer.
Climate model after climate model has shown that natural forces could not cause the climatic changes we've been seeing over the past few decades in the absence of all the greenhouse gases and such that we've been pumping into the atmosphere.
Come to think of it, I'm not aware of a single peer-reviewed paper published in the last two decades that calls into question the idea that humans are accelerating global warming. There's some debate over how much we're affecting it, but even then the vast majority of research agrees that we're a pretty big influence on things and if we're even remotely intelligent beings we should probably stop doing that.
Furthermore, even if what's causing the warming is natural, things are changing so fast and have such a capacity to cause some serious damage to the planet's ecosystems as well as human society that we'd be insane to not do everything in our power to slow the change. (Of course that's assuming we give a damn about our grandchildren.) The science that shows that human industry, agriculture, etc. has a strong influence on the forces that govern climate is pretty rock-solid. Even if you honestly believe we aren't influencing the climate now, we do have the power to influence it. Why wouldn't we want to use it to keep the planet hospitable for our species?
The biggest secret about the "debate on this topic" is that there isn't one.
The first thing to do whenever you see a "scientist" calling global warming into question is to see who signs their paycheck. The second thing to do is to check and see if anything they're saying has been subjected to peer review. "Scientists" can get away with saying a lot of shit when they don't bother to submit to any sort of oversight.
I think that there might be a bit of "time compression" going on in this article. Original games were few and far between 10-20 years ago, too. I certainly remember back in the 8 and 16-bit era when it seemed like every single game put out by anybody for any system ever was a side scroller.
Besides, video gaming's youth is gone. I don't see why it's such a big deal that so many games resemble other games nowadays - it was easy to try new ideas in 1985 when not so many ideas had been tried. I'd like to see the people who whine about lack of originality try to spend some time coming up with a new idea that's good. Maybe folks could try harder, but (1)I seriously doubt that nobody is trying (2)trying to sell a formula that's known to sell is part of business, and it's not going to change. You might as well shake your fist at the sky for raining, it'd be just as useful.
Of course, an article that says, "Gee, it's really hard to come up with novel games" probably wouldn't sell as well as yet another jaded guy bitching about how things were better in the past. (How original.)
Pardon me if I'm being ignorant here, but I thought the only reason vim doesn't normally have all these features is that not as many people write scripts for it. I know vim is just as extensible, so criticizing emacs for having such a large library of plug-ins (or even for including more of them out of the box) strikes me as being rather silly.
Now, if you're wanting to be a badass who uses an old version of vi that doesn't include decent scripting support, that's different. But me, I'm a programmer and I like my syntax highlighting and whatnot.
I really don't. It's never occurred to me. I use XCode's gdb interface, which doubles as an editor. I just make my notes in the actual source as I'm stepping through with the debugger.
Which reminds me; I don't know if other development environments do this, but XCode's "patch" feature is also really killer for figuring out what's going on. If you want to force the execution to go down a certain path, you can always break just before the conditional, comment it out, click patch, and continue without having to restart the debugger session.
In my experience, the bandwidth I get on a wireless network is rarely as good as advertised. There are simply too many things - from appliances generating interference to walls - that degrade signal quality. And my somewhat uninformed understanding is that one computer with a poor signal can degrade network performance for everybody, because they all have to wait longer for that computer to finish transmitting a packet.
My office was migrating to wireless when I started working there. Some people are using it, but a lot of folks, myself included, won't touch the wireless network. The issue is that we work with a lot of large files that are stored on the server, and as soon as you get more than a couple people using them at the same time everyone's workflow starts slowing down. I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Slashdot posted more articles every day, but as it stands I have better things to do with my workday than watch blue bars and beachballs.
I'm actually a fan of using a debugger to step through code I'm trying to understand. I can let it keep track of the call stack for me and it saves me from having to manually surf around multiple source files to figure out where the next function I need to look at is.
It's not a good way to figure out how every nook and cranny of the code works, but it's great for an initial scan-through to see the overall structure of a module. And if you are at liberty to throw in an embeddable scripting language (I use F-Script) you can poke and prod at anything you want with ease.
Right, using PGP the way it's traditionally done would be no good. But if PGP were built into popular e-mail clients instead of having to be slapped on after the fact with some sort of third-party tool, it wouldn't take nearly so much hand-holding. I don't see any reason why managing PGP keys should be any more complicated than managing an address book, and everyone I know already does that.
Zonk's posting articles, not writing opinion columns. Just because he sees two contradictory articles and thinks both are interesting enough to post on Slashdot doesn't mean he is guilty of doublethink.
They can try, but in the best case, I bet it would work about as well as when everyone tried it with GIF. Of course, that would require Microsoft's replacement to be an open standard, which it doesn't appear to be.
Right, but if this is a clickthrough license,then buying the game isn't the same thing as agreeing to it. IANAL, but I would assume that buying the game for the kid would put me in the same legal position as a courier who delivers a contract..
So all I have to do to get around this is let the neighbor kid (who is too young to enter into any sort of legally binding contract) play all of my games first, right?
With the kind of hardware that's going into these things, whatever OS X-derived OS might have made it onto them would not have been OS X. Some version of Darwin would have been on there. A stripped-down Aqua would probably be there. But I think chances are good that Cocoa would have been pulled out, simply because Objective-C and Cocoa apps take up more memory and CPU resources than equivalent Carbon apps. (I realize that the difference is pretty negligible in most cases, but these $100 laptops are a very constrained environment.) Plenty of other services and technologies on which many (if not most) OS X apps rely nowadays would have been pulled - Spotlight, Core Image, Core Data, maybe even some pretty major stuff like distributed objects and the global notification center, but that's starting to sound a lot less likely to me.
Regardless, this $100 laptop would never be a $100 Mac, simply because the OS that went on it, while related to OS X, would not be able to run all OS X applications, and may not have been able to run many at all.
It's a $30 program that provides a far sight more chance of recovering a stolen laptop than nothing does. I, for one, think it's worth it, even if it would only have a chance of working work 1/10 of the time.
Which I would be willing to wager is a pretty low guess, given the tech-savviness of your average opportunist thief - someone who knows enough about computers to know how to reset the firmware password on a Mac is more than likely going to be tech-savvy enough to be able to get a better job than stealing computers off of tables at coffee shops.
Calm down. This isn't a port of Back Orifice to OS X.
It's a program that you install on your computer ahead of time. Like any other program, this one has access to the hardware in the machine, including the webcame. Like any program you install in your machine, it also has access to the Internet. It phones home at regular intervals, and if home responds that it's been stolen, it then starts collecting this information and saving it.
It's common for people to come down with all sorts of maladies that are really psychosomatic. If you don't believe me, go take a class in basic abnormal psychology with your friends, and see how many of you start noticing symptoms of every mental illness under the sun in each other.
Now I'll admit that delusions of having a serious physical illness are much rarer, but it happens. I know an ER doctor who says he sees it all the time. It's not uncommon for people to even generate some fairly serious symptoms in themseles - for example, the lesions could easily be due to repeated scratching at an area. It's hard to tell how genuine they really are since none of the websites provide any images that give a good view of anything but the hairs.
You mention that the sites claim that the fibers don't come from fabric. I'll grant, some of them definitely don't come from fabric - I noticed at least one picture that looked for all the world like pubes to me. And a picture's worth a thousand words - the people making these sites claim that the fibers don't come from fabric or anything like that. The pictures say that the fibers come from all sorts of different sources - there are all different kinds, colors, thicknesses, textures, etc. of fiber in those pictures; to me the likelihood that they are all being produced by the same pathogen or parasite is exceedingly slim. It's much more likely to me that they come from a multitude of sources, including fiber, and that the people who claim they don't are either confused or lying.
Finally - and I think this is the most questionable claim of all - I just can't believe that not a single doctor would be researching such a unique disease if it were genuine. This thing seems to have popped into existence some time within the past decade or two, which should be gathering enough attention as it is. On top of that, it's so incredibly novel that it would have to be a siren song for the curiosity of any self-respecting scientist in the field. If it were genuine.
But there's not talk of a lot of research. Instead there's talk of every single doctor brushing off every single person who develops these symptoms. That story follows a pattern that I've heard repeated alongside every single conspiracy theory I've heard since I was a little baby child. It's to the point that whenever I hear it, my skepticism level automatically increases 1,000%.
Medical science may have a long way to go, but I can't believe that that many doctors would all have agreed that, really, they aren't interested in advancing the field any more.
Give me some real documetnation of this disease that isn't a Wikipedia article that appeared out of nowhere a mere three months ago, and I'll start feeling a bit more credulous. Until then, I'm going to think these people are delusional.
And, quite honestly, I would like to turn your claim that I'm trying to stigmatize these people around. Speaking as a person who has spent time in a mental hospital and been through a whole assload of psychological treatment, I don't think there's anything wrong with assuming that these people might be delusional. Instead, I think there's something wrong with being so caught up inthe stigmatization of mental illness that you'd be that offended by the idea that some folks might have it. That's what's really mean. If they really have this disease, great. If, like I think they are, they're delusional, limiting their access to the treatment they deserve because we're too afraid to acknowledge the illness they have would be a terrible and unfortunate triumph of ego over compassion.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read His Dark Materials, but I have read the others.
Calvin and Hobbes I don't take as a great example. Calvin is emotionally unstable, creates a lot of problems for those around him, and doesn't strike me as being particularly much happier than the other characters in the story. Hobbes makes an interesting foil; he's often used to underline the silliness of Calvin's destructive behavior. He's much more mature than Calvin, gets along with others better, and doesn't harbor nearly as much anger. Calvin may be the protagonist, but he's not the hero.
Winnie the Pooh was written for children, so the characters are naturally going to be very childlike. However, I don't see a single life lesson that comes from Pooh which can't be applied in adult life - indeed, Pooh's easygoing attitude is something I see in adults far more often than in children. I don't have kids of my own, but at least in public I often marvel at how strongly they can fixate on small, inconsequential objects, which strikes me as just about the last thing Winnie-the-Pooh would ever do. I'd say that, of all the characters in the Pooh series, Pooh and Christopher Robin represent the attitudes and ways of thinking of children that I've met the least well. Far more often, they remind me of Rabbit or Tigger.
Really, if I had to say anything about Pooh's character, I'd say that he represents the patience and equanimity that are the best qualities of well-mannered adults, and that he was made somewhat dim in an effort to counteract his otherwise overhwelming wisdom in an effort to keep the character entertaining, as well as to make it easier for children to relate to him.
I said "kind of language" and not just "language" because that's what I meant. I realize that the system isn't giving the same results every time they run it.
However, the software they wrote to allow this language to develop will only allow it to develop in certain ways, because we haven't developed unbounded artificial intelligence. (Nor do I know of an example of unbounded natural intelligence - the way humans think is a result of how their brains are constructed.) So these languages will be substantially similar.
For example, the grammar might change, but I doubt the kind of grammar will ever change. I can't imagine that these dogs are using anything more than an iterative one. That is, no part of speech can be defined in terms of itself. Human grammar is recursive. Computer languages are recursive. Mathematical notation uses a recursive grammar. Recursive grammars allow for deep, flexible modes of communication. An iterative grammar, like what I expect these Aibos are doing, can only really generate canned sentence structures that can represent a limited range of ideas. None of them is going to be saying a sentence equivalent to "Look at the ball that the dog on the table is holding."
I wouldn't say it's impossible; a lot of computational linguists have been working on this particular problem for a long time. The Aibo team was pulling from a lot of existing research.
I doubt the kind of language these dogs are using is very similar to any human language. It probably doesn't even have a recursive grammar. Something without that would be a whole lot easier to implement than anything approaching natural language - what they're saying probably resembles a very simple IPC mechanism more than anything else.
Seriously. I think some folks have taken the "desktop" metaphor a wee bit too literally. That or the latest generation of human-computer interface researchers suffer from a profound lack of imagination.
The thing that I don't get about projects like this is that they seem to fail to recognize that "possible in real life" is not the same thing as "desirable in a computer interface." For example, you can pile papers and such in real life. That's great, I can. But the piles get hard to keep track of and are generally disorganized to begin with. Nobody really thinks that a messy desk is a Good Thing. That's why we invented file folders.
Furthermore, there's a whole lot of stuff that our interaction with the world depends on which is absent from computer interfaces and probably will be for a long time. I won't see the point of being able to dog-ear a document in a computer interface until I also have the ability to feel which document is dog-eared with my thumb so I can get to it quickly. If I have to look at all the pages to see which one is dog-eared, then the ability to do that in a computer interface is useless fluff in that it is functionally identical to text at the top of the page - titles, page numbers, etc.
I'll get excited about my computer desktop acting like an actual desk with real physical objects and such when I can use my computer's desktop environment as a place to put a mug of coffee. (Real coffee.)
Microsoft makes assloads of money off of Windows and Office and then strongarms their way into other markets, usually by either taking advantage of their dominance in the OS market or by simply hemmorhaging piles of money into the project.
Google makes assloads of money off of web advertising and uses it to strongarm their way into other markets, usually by either taking advantage of their dominance of the search market or by simply hemmorhaging piles of money into the project.
Google's balance sheet may be solidly positive, but so were Microsoft's and AT&T's when they were younger. It looks to me like Google may be able to reign for a while, maybe even a decade or two, but a business model that depends on a lack of strong competition in at least one market isn't just unproven, it's proven to be fragile.
The Intuit way of life is unraveling and polar bears are facing massive die-offs because the arctic ice is freezing later and breaking up earlier every year.
Species of tree frogs in the carribean are going extinct at an amazing rate as increasing temperatures create a more hospitable environment for parasitic fungi.
Birds' migration patterns are altering by huge amounts - weeks in some cases.
The $#@$@#% thermometer.
Climate model after climate model has shown that natural forces could not cause the climatic changes we've been seeing over the past few decades in the absence of all the greenhouse gases and such that we've been pumping into the atmosphere.
Come to think of it, I'm not aware of a single peer-reviewed paper published in the last two decades that calls into question the idea that humans are accelerating global warming. There's some debate over how much we're affecting it, but even then the vast majority of research agrees that we're a pretty big influence on things and if we're even remotely intelligent beings we should probably stop doing that.
Furthermore, even if what's causing the warming is natural, things are changing so fast and have such a capacity to cause some serious damage to the planet's ecosystems as well as human society that we'd be insane to not do everything in our power to slow the change. (Of course that's assuming we give a damn about our grandchildren.) The science that shows that human industry, agriculture, etc. has a strong influence on the forces that govern climate is pretty rock-solid. Even if you honestly believe we aren't influencing the climate now, we do have the power to influence it. Why wouldn't we want to use it to keep the planet hospitable for our species?
The biggest secret about the "debate on this topic" is that there isn't one.
The first thing to do whenever you see a "scientist" calling global warming into question is to see who signs their paycheck. The second thing to do is to check and see if anything they're saying has been subjected to peer review. "Scientists" can get away with saying a lot of shit when they don't bother to submit to any sort of oversight.
Katamari Damacy, Uplink, Darwinia, Spore looks interesting. . .
I think that there might be a bit of "time compression" going on in this article. Original games were few and far between 10-20 years ago, too. I certainly remember back in the 8 and 16-bit era when it seemed like every single game put out by anybody for any system ever was a side scroller.
Besides, video gaming's youth is gone. I don't see why it's such a big deal that so many games resemble other games nowadays - it was easy to try new ideas in 1985 when not so many ideas had been tried. I'd like to see the people who whine about lack of originality try to spend some time coming up with a new idea that's good. Maybe folks could try harder, but (1)I seriously doubt that nobody is trying (2)trying to sell a formula that's known to sell is part of business, and it's not going to change. You might as well shake your fist at the sky for raining, it'd be just as useful.
Of course, an article that says, "Gee, it's really hard to come up with novel games" probably wouldn't sell as well as yet another jaded guy bitching about how things were better in the past. (How original.)
I wonder why they neglected to include governments that use 'inappropriate violence' in the bill.
Pardon me if I'm being ignorant here, but I thought the only reason vim doesn't normally have all these features is that not as many people write scripts for it. I know vim is just as extensible, so criticizing emacs for having such a large library of plug-ins (or even for including more of them out of the box) strikes me as being rather silly.
Now, if you're wanting to be a badass who uses an old version of vi that doesn't include decent scripting support, that's different. But me, I'm a programmer and I like my syntax highlighting and whatnot.
And get of my lawn!
Real programmers know that forgetting even a single byte in any stream of data can turn it into gibberish or worse.
I really don't. It's never occurred to me. I use XCode's gdb interface, which doubles as an editor. I just make my notes in the actual source as I'm stepping through with the debugger.
Which reminds me; I don't know if other development environments do this, but XCode's "patch" feature is also really killer for figuring out what's going on. If you want to force the execution to go down a certain path, you can always break just before the conditional, comment it out, click patch, and continue without having to restart the debugger session.
In my experience, the bandwidth I get on a wireless network is rarely as good as advertised. There are simply too many things - from appliances generating interference to walls - that degrade signal quality. And my somewhat uninformed understanding is that one computer with a poor signal can degrade network performance for everybody, because they all have to wait longer for that computer to finish transmitting a packet.
My office was migrating to wireless when I started working there. Some people are using it, but a lot of folks, myself included, won't touch the wireless network. The issue is that we work with a lot of large files that are stored on the server, and as soon as you get more than a couple people using them at the same time everyone's workflow starts slowing down. I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Slashdot posted more articles every day, but as it stands I have better things to do with my workday than watch blue bars and beachballs.
I'm actually a fan of using a debugger to step through code I'm trying to understand. I can let it keep track of the call stack for me and it saves me from having to manually surf around multiple source files to figure out where the next function I need to look at is.
It's not a good way to figure out how every nook and cranny of the code works, but it's great for an initial scan-through to see the overall structure of a module. And if you are at liberty to throw in an embeddable scripting language (I use F-Script) you can poke and prod at anything you want with ease.
Right, using PGP the way it's traditionally done would be no good. But if PGP were built into popular e-mail clients instead of having to be slapped on after the fact with some sort of third-party tool, it wouldn't take nearly so much hand-holding. I don't see any reason why managing PGP keys should be any more complicated than managing an address book, and everyone I know already does that.
Zonk's posting articles, not writing opinion columns. Just because he sees two contradictory articles and thinks both are interesting enough to post on Slashdot doesn't mean he is guilty of doublethink.
Doublethink is the same person holding two contradictory opinions.
When two or more people hold contradictory opinions, that's just disagreement.
They can try, but in the best case, I bet it would work about as well as when everyone tried it with GIF. Of course, that would require Microsoft's replacement to be an open standard, which it doesn't appear to be.
Right, but if this is a clickthrough license,then buying the game isn't the same thing as agreeing to it. IANAL, but I would assume that buying the game for the kid would put me in the same legal position as a courier who delivers a contract..
But has kids accepting clickthrough or shrinkwrap licenses ever been tested in court? I didn't think it had.
So all I have to do to get around this is let the neighbor kid (who is too young to enter into any sort of legally binding contract) play all of my games first, right?
With the kind of hardware that's going into these things, whatever OS X-derived OS might have made it onto them would not have been OS X. Some version of Darwin would have been on there. A stripped-down Aqua would probably be there. But I think chances are good that Cocoa would have been pulled out, simply because Objective-C and Cocoa apps take up more memory and CPU resources than equivalent Carbon apps. (I realize that the difference is pretty negligible in most cases, but these $100 laptops are a very constrained environment.) Plenty of other services and technologies on which many (if not most) OS X apps rely nowadays would have been pulled - Spotlight, Core Image, Core Data, maybe even some pretty major stuff like distributed objects and the global notification center, but that's starting to sound a lot less likely to me.
Regardless, this $100 laptop would never be a $100 Mac, simply because the OS that went on it, while related to OS X, would not be able to run all OS X applications, and may not have been able to run many at all.
Good loord, youre one heck of a pessimist.
It's a $30 program that provides a far sight more chance of recovering a stolen laptop than nothing does. I, for one, think it's worth it, even if it would only have a chance of working work 1/10 of the time.
Which I would be willing to wager is a pretty low guess, given the tech-savviness of your average opportunist thief - someone who knows enough about computers to know how to reset the firmware password on a Mac is more than likely going to be tech-savvy enough to be able to get a better job than stealing computers off of tables at coffee shops.
Calm down. This isn't a port of Back Orifice to OS X.
It's a program that you install on your computer ahead of time. Like any other program, this one has access to the hardware in the machine, including the webcame. Like any program you install in your machine, it also has access to the Internet. It phones home at regular intervals, and if home responds that it's been stolen, it then starts collecting this information and saving it.
Occam's razor.
It's common for people to come down with all sorts of maladies that are really psychosomatic. If you don't believe me, go take a class in basic abnormal psychology with your friends, and see how many of you start noticing symptoms of every mental illness under the sun in each other.
Now I'll admit that delusions of having a serious physical illness are much rarer, but it happens. I know an ER doctor who says he sees it all the time. It's not uncommon for people to even generate some fairly serious symptoms in themseles - for example, the lesions could easily be due to repeated scratching at an area. It's hard to tell how genuine they really are since none of the websites provide any images that give a good view of anything but the hairs.
You mention that the sites claim that the fibers don't come from fabric. I'll grant, some of them definitely don't come from fabric - I noticed at least one picture that looked for all the world like pubes to me. And a picture's worth a thousand words - the people making these sites claim that the fibers don't come from fabric or anything like that. The pictures say that the fibers come from all sorts of different sources - there are all different kinds, colors, thicknesses, textures, etc. of fiber in those pictures; to me the likelihood that they are all being produced by the same pathogen or parasite is exceedingly slim. It's much more likely to me that they come from a multitude of sources, including fiber, and that the people who claim they don't are either confused or lying.
Finally - and I think this is the most questionable claim of all - I just can't believe that not a single doctor would be researching such a unique disease if it were genuine. This thing seems to have popped into existence some time within the past decade or two, which should be gathering enough attention as it is. On top of that, it's so incredibly novel that it would have to be a siren song for the curiosity of any self-respecting scientist in the field. If it were genuine.
But there's not talk of a lot of research. Instead there's talk of every single doctor brushing off every single person who develops these symptoms. That story follows a pattern that I've heard repeated alongside every single conspiracy theory I've heard since I was a little baby child. It's to the point that whenever I hear it, my skepticism level automatically increases 1,000%.
Medical science may have a long way to go, but I can't believe that that many doctors would all have agreed that, really, they aren't interested in advancing the field any more.
Give me some real documetnation of this disease that isn't a Wikipedia article that appeared out of nowhere a mere three months ago, and I'll start feeling a bit more credulous. Until then, I'm going to think these people are delusional.
And, quite honestly, I would like to turn your claim that I'm trying to stigmatize these people around. Speaking as a person who has spent time in a mental hospital and been through a whole assload of psychological treatment, I don't think there's anything wrong with assuming that these people might be delusional. Instead, I think there's something wrong with being so caught up inthe stigmatization of mental illness that you'd be that offended by the idea that some folks might have it. That's what's really mean. If they really have this disease, great. If, like I think they are, they're delusional, limiting their access to the treatment they deserve because we're too afraid to acknowledge the illness they have would be a terrible and unfortunate triumph of ego over compassion.