Maybe we can grow steak this way too.. in large vats.
If you're looking for other meat substitutes, I have this product you might be interested in: It's called Soylent Green. Yeah, the marketing department needs to work on a better name, but hey, it contains everything a growing body needs.;)
This attitude of "I'm not going to maintain my servers because I try to compensate for my tiny penis with a long uptime"
Okay, so the parent poster was CLEARLY flamebait. I think that they do have a point - the grandparent poster running "4 red hat 7.3 DNS servers" and "1 red hat 6 machine that lasted 6 years without an OS related reboot" does seem to be emphasizing uptime over security though. Either you take an hour or two to back up your data, set up redundant services, and upgrade according to your schedule, or someone might force you to update at a "less convinient" time.
commissioned by the software giant from Security Innovation
I'm immediately skeptical - A company called Security Innovation wants you to use Windows? Why? Oh, they want to sell their services to you. Of course.
The wording of this protocol, however, does not prohibit lasers that temporarily dazzle a foe.
That word, "dazzle"... damn, could they have picked a better word?
"Dude, so there I was, driving home the bar, had a few drinks, and I'm driving up to a sobriety checkpoint, when suddenly WHAM! it was like a Pink Floyd show went off in my head! I just hit the brakes, and turned up 'Comfortably Numb' on the CD player...it was dazzling"
Seriously, Ubunutu is one of the reasons GNOME has made so much progress recently with users and now we are back to square one with splitting the userbase. Stupid move. I could care LESS which one they choose, just choose ONE.
I guess your probably don't want to hear about Xubuntu then?
On a more serious note, stop. "Back to square one" and "splitting the userbase"? Give me a break. The underlying parts of K/X/Ubuntu remain the same - they all are using the same kernel, can use the same apps, and all of the programs install with the same "sudo apt-get install" syntax (or YOUR CHOICE of graphical installer). How is that splitting? As long as the "guts" of Ubuntu stay consistent and allow me to do what I want, I'm happy with my 5.10 Gnome desktop with k3b and Amarok installed, or switching to KDE and using Synaptic and Firefox.
Or look at it another way - what happens when things don't work "best" in GNOME? For example: this thread on the Ubuntu forums. In order to get some programs working, such as FreeNX, a remote desktop program, an alternate window manager (XFCE 4 in this case) had to be used. If GNOME was the only option, it wouldn't have worked as easily. Having choices about desktop environments allowed this particular project to work, and allowed other people to try it out, (hopefully) leading to further development of FreeNX (which kicks ass, btw). How is that a bad thing?
I'll just add on the list of "good" banks and mention Washington Mutual. I'm sticking with them, despite a lack of local branches on the East Coast, because they have had good service, and their online banking runs just fine with Firefox.
You can not convince me that youngster are becoming more articulate in their language.
(sacrasm ON) Well, like, clearly, there are, you know, some problems with the language of youth, like communicating their ideas and stuff? (sarcasm OFF)
Seriously, I think that young people have a need to have a more diverse language skill set than most "adults" need to, and therefore don't have the time or ability to master the one or two language skill sets you're looking at.
For example, a young person may have to be familiar or fluent in Instant/Text messaging (and the complicated rules around that written form), the academic writing they do for school, and the "literature" that they read (slang and such things that are pop-culture driven). That's not counting the different spoken styles between friends, parents/authority figures, people in the neighborhood, people at work, etc. I think as you get older, those diverse backgrounds merge a little closer, and more frequently used (academic and work language are perhaps what you're focusing on) become your dominant mode of communication.
Isn't that what we've been hearing for years though anyway? It seems like the government in particular, and to an extent, the greater U.S. culture is progressively getting more focused on violence. Which is troublesome, especially since youth violence is decreasing.
Thank you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, for showing that this is all about the SCHOOL'S CONTROL over what the student's do and say outside of school, rather than the "protection" that they claim they're doing.
If you look at human minds/brains as a wetware machine, then some very odd thinking patterns have been (more or less) shown to be wetware problems (epilepsy etc.) and if that is so, can we cure all kinds of psychosis with a wetware upgrade? How does that affect our views of god, humanity, and disease? What if we can make people smarter than Einstein?
All of those are interesting questions, that require complicated answers... to sum up: "it depends."
More specifically, when you say "can we cure all kinds of psychosis?" I think that we can help with a good number of them, or at least alleviate the symptoms of many of them by restoring properly functioning brain material to the right places. That's two big "ifs" right there - "properly functioning" and "right places." Since mental illness can both "attack," and is the result of, damage to multiple areas, I imagine that it will be a looooong way off until doctors can get it right on a regular basis. Based on my own experience with the mentally ill - Even if we cure many of their hallucinations and chemical imbalances and memory holes, their own illogical thinking and personal beliefs are going to stick around. (For example, if you believe that you have a government-installed chip in your brain, because the voices in your head told you so, if the voices are "cured," you'll still believe you've got a chip in your head, but now you have some scars to prove it.)
As for increasing intelligence - I don't think that's going to happen, because there are a lot of external factors that scientists really can't control that can play an equal or larger role than simlpy cramming more cells into someones head.:)
Changing views on God is a personal, spiritual matter, (I hope) so I'll leave you to it. I hope that it reduces the stigma of treatment for mental illness, and leads other human beings to do the same.
I'm doing the same thing - except, the thing I'll be doing differently is I'll be handing them out from my neighbor's house, so he'll be the one cleaning egg off his house and riced-up car.
Since I'd really like to know who the CongressCritters are who are supporting this, I found a link off the webpage to a letter of support: pdf here.In case that's slashdotted moementarily, heres the list of representatives
Charles Pickering Edolphus Towns John Shimkus George Radnovich Mike Ferguson Marsha Blackburn Mary Bono Bart Gordon Joe Terry Ed Whitfield Bobby Rush Vito Fossella Elliot L. Engel John B. Shadegg Albert Russell Wynn Michael F. Doyle Charles A. Gonzalez Charles F. Bass John Sullivan Frank Pallone, Jr.
You can look up what disctricts they're from at www.house.gov, and contact them any way you see fit. Let 'em have it!;)
I responded to this already in the post of mine that you did read. For the second time (this time listen)
I see where you were going now - Reread your own opening paragraph of your parent post, that has stirred up the slashdotter hornet's nest. You certainly come across as flamebait by A) minimizing the significance of mental illnesses by making it seem like people choose to have them, and B) comparing mental illnesses to non-illnesses like Catholicism and homosexuality. (After going after religion and sexuality, if you had thrown in race/ethnicity and favorite linux distro, you would have had an all-time flamebait post) All this could have been prevented had you taken a moment to write more clearly and in a more organized way.
Going back to your original post then: Now, let's talk about this blood test. What does it prove? If we could tell who was a Catholic by a blood test, would that mean Catholicism is a mental illness? No, the "anxiety" label is a moral judgment. Anxiety is "bad", so it must be attributable to something physiological; no rational person would think that way, right?
Let's start with defining a mental illness. A mental illness can lead to an abnormal and unhealthy condition of the body and/or mind, and can be severe if left untreated. When someone has an Anxiety disorder, they can have a number of physical and mental symptoms associated with that, that can lead to long term health problems. When someone is Catholic or homosexual, well, there is no telling how physically or mentally health or unhealthy they'll be. Does that answer your question about where correlations between physiology and diseases start and stop?
Perhaps you mean that what is "abnormal and unhealthy" instead of "anxiety" could be a moral judgment, as some aspects of what is and is not healthy can change with the times.
Describing anxiety as a "moral judgment" is just asking for a semantic debate. Yes, a group of learned people (who could be described as "moral") sat down and made a decision about what the "anxiety" label is, and yes, decided it is "bad." That'd be a good place to start with the definition of a mental illness (and hopefully an answer to your hypothetical questions of where mental illness starts, and what is just a correlation between physiology and life).
That doesn't make rudeness, miserliness, and messiness diseases!
But those certainly can be symptomatic of a greater problem.
I mean, no one would respond to a post without reading it!
"Mental illness" is not generally not "illness" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Given the abundance of scientific literature pointing to the genetic, chemical, and physiological causes and sequali of mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, Depression, and Anxiety disorders, both you and whoever modded you up as "insightful" have a lot to learn about. For anxiety disorders, there are measurable differences in the hippocampus and amygdala areas of the brain, and an imbalance of neurotransmitters that can contribute to a persons heightened anxiety. These are, in your words, constraints, that cannot be changed, no matter the person's preference to do so.
This is much like a person with a genetic heart condition - they have a measurable physiological difference, that results in changes in the blood chemistry, and one day, their heart will fail. To over-simplify the scenario, lets say that the person can reduce the severity and dangerousness of their heart condition by taking meds, and changing behavior (getting exercise, and changing the diet a little). Does this mean that if they follow through with the diet/exercise/medication regimen, that they don't have a heart condition? Of course not.
Same thing with anxiety disorders (and many mental illnesses) - you treat it the same way, sometimes with medication, changing behaviors, therapy, etc. A person may have a preference for not undergoing treatment - and if you put a gun to their head and said "change," they might temporarily adapt their behavior, or they might not; just the same as if you put the gun to the head of someone with the heart condition. They may change their behavior, they might not ("But I like my french fries and sitcoms and lying on my couch all day") , but in either case, getting them to change their thoughts and behaviors around their illness doesn't change the fact that the illness exists and is there.
And just to cover all the bases here, if treatment doesn't change the underlying illness, what good is it? Well, treatment for psychological disorders leads to a higher quality of life for those with the problems at a lesser cost to themselves and society. Hopefully, the blood test will be useful in an emergency room or hospital setting; this still leaves plenty of room for the aforementioned field of psychology, who tend to diagnose these problems more accurately, less invasively, and at a lower cost (given things like $0.50 for an aspirin at a hospital).
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! you're right. I find that with each waking moment advertising is getting more invasive and more offensive.
:)
...well then, why don't you stop visiting porn sites on the Internet, with all the pop-ups and spam ads and go...
Oh! My bad. "waking" moment. I thought you said... uh, nevermind.
when faced with M-16 toting guys can't avoid an "uncontrollable tremor" in their voice.
Gentlemen, I have a one-word solution to your problems:
Ativan.
Be cool, relaxed and fear nothing as you walk calmly through the airport. (Even if you're strapped with explosives)
Maybe we can grow steak this way too .. in large vats.
;)
If you're looking for other meat substitutes, I have this product you might be interested in: It's called Soylent Green. Yeah, the marketing department needs to work on a better name, but hey, it contains everything a growing body needs.
This attitude of "I'm not going to maintain my servers because I try to compensate for my tiny penis with a long uptime"
Okay, so the parent poster was CLEARLY flamebait. I think that they do have a point - the grandparent poster running "4 red hat 7.3 DNS servers" and "1 red hat 6 machine that lasted 6 years without an OS related reboot" does seem to be emphasizing uptime over security though. Either you take an hour or two to back up your data, set up redundant services, and upgrade according to your schedule, or someone might force you to update at a "less convinient" time.
commissioned by the software giant from Security Innovation
I'm immediately skeptical - A company called Security Innovation wants you to use Windows? Why? Oh, they want to sell their services to you. Of course.
The government can't suck up to both parties forever
I believe you underestimate the federal government.
I believe I speak for all the cows when I say, "Mooo?"
The wording of this protocol, however, does not prohibit lasers that temporarily dazzle a foe.
That word, "dazzle"... damn, could they have picked a better word?
"Dude, so there I was, driving home the bar, had a few drinks, and I'm driving up to a sobriety checkpoint, when suddenly WHAM! it was like a Pink Floyd show went off in my head! I just hit the brakes, and turned up 'Comfortably Numb' on the CD player...it was dazzling"
Heh, in that case, let me help by linking to a refresher course in Intelligent Design.
Seriously, Ubunutu is one of the reasons GNOME has made so much progress recently with users and now we are back to square one with splitting the userbase. Stupid move. I could care LESS which one they choose, just choose ONE.
I guess your probably don't want to hear about Xubuntu then?
On a more serious note, stop. "Back to square one" and "splitting the userbase"? Give me a break. The underlying parts of K/X/Ubuntu remain the same - they all are using the same kernel, can use the same apps, and all of the programs install with the same "sudo apt-get install" syntax (or YOUR CHOICE of graphical installer). How is that splitting? As long as the "guts" of Ubuntu stay consistent and allow me to do what I want, I'm happy with my 5.10 Gnome desktop with k3b and Amarok installed, or switching to KDE and using Synaptic and Firefox.
Or look at it another way - what happens when things don't work "best" in GNOME? For example: this thread on the Ubuntu forums. In order to get some programs working, such as FreeNX, a remote desktop program, an alternate window manager (XFCE 4 in this case) had to be used. If GNOME was the only option, it wouldn't have worked as easily. Having choices about desktop environments allowed this particular project to work, and allowed other people to try it out, (hopefully) leading to further development of FreeNX (which kicks ass, btw). How is that a bad thing?
The radio star was re-incarnated through a podcast. =P
Didn't you get the memo^H^H^H^H email^H^H^H^H^H Instant Message?
I'll just add on the list of "good" banks and mention Washington Mutual. I'm sticking with them, despite a lack of local branches on the East Coast, because they have had good service, and their online banking runs just fine with Firefox.
You can not convince me that youngster are becoming more articulate in their language.
(sacrasm ON) Well, like, clearly, there are, you know, some problems with the language of youth, like communicating their ideas and stuff? (sarcasm OFF)
Seriously, I think that young people have a need to have a more diverse language skill set than most "adults" need to, and therefore don't have the time or ability to master the one or two language skill sets you're looking at.
For example, a young person may have to be familiar or fluent in Instant/Text messaging (and the complicated rules around that written form), the academic writing they do for school, and the "literature" that they read (slang and such things that are pop-culture driven). That's not counting the different spoken styles between friends, parents/authority figures, people in the neighborhood, people at work, etc. I think as you get older, those diverse backgrounds merge a little closer, and more frequently used (academic and work language are perhaps what you're focusing on) become your dominant mode of communication.
What's next? America's War on Violence.
Isn't that what we've been hearing for years though anyway? It seems like the government in particular, and to an extent, the greater U.S. culture is progressively getting more focused on violence. Which is troublesome, especially since youth violence is decreasing.
Thank you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, for showing that this is all about the SCHOOL'S CONTROL over what the student's do and say outside of school, rather than the "protection" that they claim they're doing.
If you look at human minds/brains as a wetware machine, then some very odd thinking patterns have been (more or less) shown to be wetware problems (epilepsy etc.) and if that is so, can we cure all kinds of psychosis with a wetware upgrade? How does that affect our views of god, humanity, and disease? What if we can make people smarter than Einstein?
:)
All of those are interesting questions, that require complicated answers... to sum up: "it depends."
More specifically, when you say "can we cure all kinds of psychosis?" I think that we can help with a good number of them, or at least alleviate the symptoms of many of them by restoring properly functioning brain material to the right places. That's two big "ifs" right there - "properly functioning" and "right places." Since mental illness can both "attack," and is the result of, damage to multiple areas, I imagine that it will be a looooong way off until doctors can get it right on a regular basis. Based on my own experience with the mentally ill - Even if we cure many of their hallucinations and chemical imbalances and memory holes, their own illogical thinking and personal beliefs are going to stick around. (For example, if you believe that you have a government-installed chip in your brain, because the voices in your head told you so, if the voices are "cured," you'll still believe you've got a chip in your head, but now you have some scars to prove it.)
As for increasing intelligence - I don't think that's going to happen, because there are a lot of external factors that scientists really can't control that can play an equal or larger role than simlpy cramming more cells into someones head.
Changing views on God is a personal, spiritual matter, (I hope) so I'll leave you to it. I hope that it reduces the stigma of treatment for mental illness, and leads other human beings to do the same.
I'm doing the same thing - except, the thing I'll be doing differently is I'll be handing them out from my neighbor's house, so he'll be the one cleaning egg off his house and riced-up car.
Mwahaha!
Keychains! Lots and Lots of keychains!
Bring on the down-mods, fundies. I'll still mock you fools to my grave!
:)
I'm adding you to my friends list just for that.
he only reason I haven't released this is that people would probably laugh at the scripting. But hey... it works.
One of my favorite sayings: "If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid."
Release the scripts, and let someone else write a more "clean" one if they don't like it.
Since I'd really like to know who the CongressCritters are who are supporting this, I found a link off the webpage to a letter of support: pdf here.In case that's slashdotted moementarily, heres the list of representatives
;)
Charles Pickering
Edolphus Towns
John Shimkus
George Radnovich
Mike Ferguson
Marsha Blackburn
Mary Bono
Bart Gordon
Joe Terry
Ed Whitfield
Bobby Rush
Vito Fossella
Elliot L. Engel
John B. Shadegg
Albert Russell Wynn
Michael F. Doyle
Charles A. Gonzalez
Charles F. Bass
John Sullivan
Frank Pallone, Jr.
You can look up what disctricts they're from at www.house.gov, and contact them any way you see fit. Let 'em have it!
I responded to this already in the post of mine that you did read. For the second time (this time listen)
I see where you were going now - Reread your own opening paragraph of your parent post, that has stirred up the slashdotter hornet's nest. You certainly come across as flamebait by A) minimizing the significance of mental illnesses by making it seem like people choose to have them, and B) comparing mental illnesses to non-illnesses like Catholicism and homosexuality. (After going after religion and sexuality, if you had thrown in race/ethnicity and favorite linux distro, you would have had an all-time flamebait post) All this could have been prevented had you taken a moment to write more clearly and in a more organized way.
Going back to your original post then:
Now, let's talk about this blood test. What does it prove? If we could tell who was a Catholic by a blood test, would that mean Catholicism is a mental illness? No, the "anxiety" label is a moral judgment. Anxiety is "bad", so it must be attributable to something physiological; no rational person would think that way, right?
Let's start with defining a mental illness. A mental illness can lead to an abnormal and unhealthy condition of the body and/or mind, and can be severe if left untreated. When someone has an Anxiety disorder, they can have a number of physical and mental symptoms associated with that, that can lead to long term health problems. When someone is Catholic or homosexual, well, there is no telling how physically or mentally health or unhealthy they'll be. Does that answer your question about where correlations between physiology and diseases start and stop?
Perhaps you mean that what is "abnormal and unhealthy" instead of "anxiety" could be a moral judgment, as some aspects of what is and is not healthy can change with the times. Describing anxiety as a "moral judgment" is just asking for a semantic debate. Yes, a group of learned people (who could be described as "moral") sat down and made a decision about what the "anxiety" label is, and yes, decided it is "bad." That'd be a good place to start with the definition of a mental illness (and hopefully an answer to your hypothetical questions of where mental illness starts, and what is just a correlation between physiology and life). That doesn't make rudeness, miserliness, and messiness diseases!
But those certainly can be symptomatic of a greater problem.
I mean, no one would respond to a post without reading it!
You must be new around here.
Hooray for someone who understands the concept. =)
"Mental illness" is not generally not "illness" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Given the abundance of scientific literature pointing to the genetic, chemical, and physiological causes and sequali of mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, Depression, and Anxiety disorders, both you and whoever modded you up as "insightful" have a lot to learn about. For anxiety disorders, there are measurable differences in the hippocampus and amygdala areas of the brain, and an imbalance of neurotransmitters that can contribute to a persons heightened anxiety. These are, in your words, constraints, that cannot be changed, no matter the person's preference to do so.
This is much like a person with a genetic heart condition - they have a measurable physiological difference, that results in changes in the blood chemistry, and one day, their heart will fail. To over-simplify the scenario, lets say that the person can reduce the severity and dangerousness of their heart condition by taking meds, and changing behavior (getting exercise, and changing the diet a little). Does this mean that if they follow through with the diet/exercise/medication regimen, that they don't have a heart condition? Of course not.
Same thing with anxiety disorders (and many mental illnesses) - you treat it the same way, sometimes with medication, changing behaviors, therapy, etc. A person may have a preference for not undergoing treatment - and if you put a gun to their head and said "change," they might temporarily adapt their behavior, or they might not; just the same as if you put the gun to the head of someone with the heart condition. They may change their behavior, they might not ("But I like my french fries and sitcoms and lying on my couch all day") , but in either case, getting them to change their thoughts and behaviors around their illness doesn't change the fact that the illness exists and is there.
And just to cover all the bases here, if treatment doesn't change the underlying illness, what good is it? Well, treatment for psychological disorders leads to a higher quality of life for those with the problems at a lesser cost to themselves and society. Hopefully, the blood test will be useful in an emergency room or hospital setting; this still leaves plenty of room for the aforementioned field of psychology, who tend to diagnose these problems more accurately, less invasively, and at a lower cost (given things like $0.50 for an aspirin at a hospital).
I wonder how many man-years it would take to listen to all the music and video that could be indexed.
Probably a lot longer than you think.
"Goddammit, I can't watch or listen to any more of this crap! I'm going out for a cup of coffee and a smoke."