apparently a few manufactures have forgotten why there are raised lines, or raised features on a hood.... well shit.... they are for aiming the car.... who'd of thunk.... oh... and by the way.... Fuck you GM.... some of your recent vehicles respect that the hood is a great place to provide visual indications of lane position!
Long time ago I owed a boat..... 1969 Malibu. One of the cool features of that car once I got the hang of it, is that the hood lines told me where the corners of the car were within a few inches. I knew if I was in the center of the lane by comparing the hood creases to the road markers.... easy peasy. Making that connection took all of about 2 hours of driving....
Today.... not so much... I have driven recent high-end cars that lack those old-school hood marks and are fairly hard to keep in lane without checking the left-outside mirror to check the center-line of the road(!)
WTF?!
Tesla seems to get this but a recent GM vehicle I drove had no 'center-line' marker on the hood. I was hunting the whole time of was driving it trying to figure out what hood feature was giving me feedback.... after 20 minutes I gave up... the left rearview was my best marker.... and that sucked.... I had to keep checking a mirror to make sure I was not over the center-line..... fuck you GM....
The goal is keeping the peace... it is not LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER (LEO)
This is where the role of POLICE and many Sheriff departments have gone off the reservation.
Fire departments have only limited roles in fire prevention.... EMTs do not preemptively save lives by throwing people in jail....
We have allowed the tail to wag the dog as far as policing is concerned.
No blood, no fowl. If someone has not called the cops they should not have a role.
By all means at the time someone calls for police let there be hell, fire and brimstone called forth to protect the public and seek the criminals.
Where there is no victim there is no crime..... The state is a victim only when it loses assets or legal claim to assets. Fuck the crimes where the State suffers no loss....
bullshit. They have a desktop class PC computer in the passenger seat. There is no way you can tell me they do not have the tools to detect a loss of connectivity. WiFi, BlueTooth.... RF whatever.... they are in contact.... loss of streams is reportable, and detectable at the moment that loss occurs. No excuses.
You have a good point there. They are called 'Officers' because they are officers of the court. They have the same status as any lawyer or judge in the court system.
A burglar typically does not have backup on hand... The same holds true for a citizen's arrest. Which is why they are almost unheard of.
('shots fired! Shots fired! Officer down!' 911 Rascal Avenue, cross 33rd Street!' ) No other requirement is needed to rain fatal retribution on a 'resisting' suspect, or to give chase to same.
TL: DR: Burglars cannot do this, and citizens attempting arrest have no access to the resources to do this.
Yes sworn officers need to be surveilled AT ALL TIMES while performing their jobs for OUR safety and THEIR safety.
As a gratefully EX (moved on to better tasks) Dir of Ops of a call center I can assure you every inbound and outbound call is recorded and stored in the call flow. This is in part for CYA, and in part for detecting when a client or customer is engaging in fraud. In the beginning of my term, it also helped catch catch Oracle out when they tried to lie about their service levels on a product that had been licensed from them. No one ever answers a call before the inbound 'Betty' announces to all parties, that the call is being recorded for quality and training purposes. Outbound calls also had a greeting announcement from 'Betty' indicating that calls were recorded. In the Oracle case it was their own call handling system that was used to catch them.
All nice and fine until the horse-riding-archers show up in force to deprive you of your stores and your life. The only reason the Mongols didn't take over Europe is that Genghis Khan failed to produce a suitable heir for the Empire before he died. Even some of the Khans after Genghis managed to make the Norther Europeans sweat blood and tears.
Europeans had no hope of resisting, had the Khans set their sights on invading Europe.
The original painting is not really about the colors, or the image composition. A print only shows the colors. The original painting has texture. It has depth. Masterful paintings are not flat. They are as much topology as they are composition, color, and texture.
Blowing spit into a chunk of wood and brass tends to shorten it's life. I gave up playing brass as a young kid.... because.... brass, spit, and oil is fuxing gross to have to smell every day.
you are mixing apples and oranges. @20KHz is in PCM(8 bit/16 bit/24 bit/ 32bit or more bit) samples per second....
44.1K samples per second @ 16 bits (stereo std CD stream rate) is 1.4112 MEGA BITS per second.
320K MP3 or other formats is in BITS PER SECOND.... that is a 4.41:1 compression ratio... and I seriously doubt anyone can hear the difference between raw 44.1KHz PCM and 320K bps MP3, or visually without at least a dual-channel 100MHz digital scope in front of them.
It might be possible to hear artifacts in 320Kbps MP3 (or other lossy formats) but only for completely synthetic signals that would have to be specifically designed to show the losses in the compression format.
Laying hands on a musical instrument and playing it for an hour is as much a kinesthetic experience as an auditory experience.
As others above have noted. It is entirely expected and not particularly difficult for an experienced, professional, instrumentalist to be able to identify an instrument from the combination of sound AND feel. Even if they cannot name it reliably. They know if what they are experiencing is better or worse relative to some internal standard.... probably their own favorite instrument....
Now a can of worms has been opened. Asking a subject who is capable of identifying an instrument maker based on the combination of sound AND feel which instrument they liked the best does not tell you anything about the overall quality of the instrument.
It doesn't tell you how well an instrument behaves as it wears. It does not tell you how well it behaves after it travels. It does not tell you how well it behaves when it is subjected to an unexpected change in ambient temperature, or humidity during a performance. after the strings are replaced, after it is cleaned..... after it is dropped.... or otherwise mechanically stressed....
String instruments are fickle beasts, and have a lot of subtle traits that experienced players can detect, even if they cannot reliably tell you who made the instrument. I am sure if they were asked to tell you in each case if the instrument was made by the same or a different maker, the results would have been much more consistent, and more useful.
Do you realize that USB 3.0 has 3 power profiles... up to 20V, and that the host and slave have a mechanism for negotiating the both the voltage and current requirements up to 100W (20V @ 5A)
I suspect that these phone charging systems will be using the 20V@5A profile to provide 3.7V@25A to the battery. (DO NOT touch this iDevice during charge! This iDevice will notify you when it is safe to touch it again. [OK] [[CANCEL]])
So it can be charged in 30 seconds, but you cannot touch it for 10 minutes:)
I suppose you could use it to reheat your coffee while it is charging.
The hopping sequence is not very hard to track. It is not using a very good PRNG. A broad-band 2.4GHz SDF and a little bit of channel monitoring is all that is needed to determine the hopping sequence and then predict it. Once you have a hop prediction it is easy to either jam it or take control of the receiver. In fact, if one already has one of these radio systems, it would not take very long to map out all possible seeds for the sequencer. Then it just takes monitoring a few channels in the band until you see enough of the sequence to guess the seed.
That being said; I don't think that is what happened in TFA. I am fairly confident that the operator screwed up and is attempting to deflect responsibility.
UAV/RC aircraft need to be using far better authentication and semi-autonomous recovery when used in areas where public safety is a critical issue. Consumer/hobby grade RC systems are simply not safe enough.
Isn't the universe mostly void? We seem to forget that most of the universe is a rather low density system.... and it has some really strange properties where local observations and theories do not match global observations and theories. Why don't galactic rotational rates match the observable mass in a galaxy? We call this dark matter.... what it really is: WTF?!?! matter! Where the Fuck is the matter?! Same here with matter/anti-matter balance. We have a theoretical result that does not match our observational data.... We really do not understand the universe. We only have one nearly non-functional probe that has left the solar system.... We have a long way to go before we will have anything resembling meaningful measurement of the galactic medium, and if anything, we have learned that photons do not tell us enough about the observable universe to resolve our questions.
The steering lock? Not an issue in this case (presumably the lock doesn't come on with the key still in the ignition, like ALL steering locks).
I can assure you that quite a few early steering-lock systems could be engaged by turning the key past OFF into LOCK. Some did have a safety; the lock barrel had a collar that had to pushed down before the ignition could move into the LOCK position. A badly worn ignition would easily slip into LOCK without any noticeable resistance.
It would not be an issue for any car built after the early-80's. LOCK required that PARK be engaged, push key in before turning to LOCK, AND key removed. On manual trannys ACC/AUX is between LOCK and OFF; Key has to be pushed in to select LOCK, and LOCK will not engage until key is removed.
The vacuum assist unit stores enough vacuum for more than two or three braking events.* Each event will get progressively less assist. Power steering goes away instantly, but in most cases the difference is not critical above 10 MPH. Even a mildly experienced driver will feel the loss of assist and compensate. Below 5 MPH loss of assist can be crippling. Make sure you do not need to steer at low speeds if you lose the assist, unless you have very good upper body strength.
I once had to drive a Mid-size 70's pontiac out from a location deep in the Santa Cruz mountains after it had suffered a serious cooling system failure. (serious hose crack) This was accomplished as follows: 1) allowing the vehicle to cool down to ambient. (we had just arrived at our destination when the cooling system failure was discovered. So this was easy... we will deal with the issue when we are ready to leave...) 2) carefully duct-tape cracked hose. 3) refill cooling system. 4a) Run engine ONLY when power is required to overcome gravity/rolling friction. 4b) Use engine braking. (lower gears in automatic transmission) 4c) Avoid hard acceleration. 4d) Anticipate increased braking and steering effort. 4e) Use downhills to increase speed before shutting off engine. 4f) Encourage following vehicles to pass as quickly as possible (hazard-lights, pulling to right, hand signals) 4g) Be very careful to turn the ignition key no further than OFF, and turn it back to RUN/ON. (this is to keep the fuel system pressurized)
End result was the engine never even got close to over-heating during this limp-home effort. Since the cooling system never got significantly pressurized, or heated, the duct-tape retained a very good seal.
It took a lot more effort to convince the owner of the car (my GF at the time) and the other passengers that this approach would work. None of them were particularly car savvy.
The whole point of Incorporation LLP, and LLC are to put a firewall between company assets and personal assets. Very specific conditions have to be met before 'the corporate Veil' can be 'pierced.' Trust me, no one would take any significant business venture on if there was not a limitation of liability. Now then, that being said; deliberately sweeping a dangerous defect (like the one described in the TFS) under the rug should be a criminal matter, and the people who acted to make it happen should be facing charges. Limited liability should not protect bad actors.
I am struggling to understand why this is even an argument on/. There must be too many web-code-monkies on/. now. Properties of Materials used to be part of the geek 101 course requirements.... Toughness, hardness and strength are taught in high school chemistry.... WTF,/.?
The whole point of having a car that comes out of a collision looking like a crumpled beer can is to reduce the v that the meat-monkey experiences inside the can.
I don't know about Cook & Ives shuck and jive, since the passing of Jobs... But I'm pretty sure the iOS crypto flaws are lower risk than ANYTHING those gangsters make at Samsung. I won't let them land an icebox in my house!
Did you actually drill down into the details? It IS a backdoor, but It IS NOT a hardware back door.
It is an IPC protocol between the baseband processor and the application processor. The baseband processor can make IPC request for the application processor to modify its FLASH file system. It is a generic service. I am guessing (as are the people who found the backdoor) it was used for development/debugging and got left behind. Stupid oversight for sure. There is nothing sneaky about it at all, and the backdoor has no special privileges beyond libc-bog-std file system calls. The rest of the IPC command table reads about like you'd expect for a protocol between the app processor and the baseband.
All this shows is that Samsung is just as stupid about security as everyone else.
^^ this. Anti-depressant is a misnomer. They are more like an emotional damping element.... a shock absorber for your mind.
At one point in my life I was living in Seattle and did not know that drinking the tap water there is a REALLY BAD IDEA....
Look up Manganese poisoning.... Though I have never seen a study that says so, I think Seattle's high suicide rate might be explained not by weather and SADS, but by chronic Manganese poisoning.
I saw a doctor about some mild depressive episodes I was experiencing and got diagnosed with (after a few tests: "Are you drinking tap water? yup you guessed it...) Manganese poisoning.
The treatment was filter the tap water, or better yet don't drink it at all. Also, a prescription for Zoloft. "Take this for 8 weeks while you detox and at the end you'll be back to 'normal'." After the Zoloft kicked in full tilt two weeks later, my emotional range flat lined. Nothing was fun, nothing was interesting, nothing was... depressing.... angering... sad... everything was... nothing. Someone could have spit in my face and shouted abuse at me and gotten a blank, unconcerned look from me... it would have gone right over my head. I was empty; zombified. I was just alive. Fucking-potted-plant-alive. Not even potted-petunia-oh-shit-not-again-alive.
After another week on the Zoloft I dimly realized that it was going cause me to walk in front of a speeding Metro bus before the 'script was exhausted. I stopped taking it, and drifted back to sad, sleepy, weepy Eyore for the rest of my detox. That was a relief. I could feel shit again.... Yay! Shit!
Don't get me wrong... I believe that psychotropics can help people 'normalize' when they have extreme emotional/mental health issues. However, they are depressing drugs.
I was working for M$ at the time so maybe that was exacerbating the situation... set and setting... all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Replaying to myself:
apparently a few manufactures have forgotten why there are raised lines, or raised features on a hood.... well shit.... they are for aiming the car.... who'd of thunk.... oh... and by the way.... Fuck you GM.... some of your recent vehicles respect that the hood is a great place to provide visual indications of lane position!
Long time ago I owed a boat..... 1969 Malibu. One of the cool features of that car once I got the hang of it, is that the hood lines told me where the corners of the car were within a few inches. I knew if I was in the center of the lane by comparing the hood creases to the road markers.... easy peasy. Making that connection took all of about 2 hours of driving....
Today.... not so much... I have driven recent high-end cars that lack those old-school hood marks and are fairly hard to keep in lane without checking the left-outside mirror to check the center-line of the road(!)
WTF?!
Tesla seems to get this but a recent GM vehicle I drove had no 'center-line' marker on the hood. I was hunting the whole time of was driving it trying to figure out what hood feature was giving me feedback.... after 20 minutes I gave up... the left rearview was my best marker.... and that sucked.... I had to keep checking a mirror to make sure I was not over the center-line..... fuck you GM....
That word means 'Peace Officer'
The goal is keeping the peace... it is not LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER (LEO)
This is where the role of POLICE and many Sheriff departments have gone off the reservation.
Fire departments have only limited roles in fire prevention.... EMTs do not preemptively save lives by throwing people in jail....
We have allowed the tail to wag the dog as far as policing is concerned.
No blood, no fowl. If someone has not called the cops they should not have a role.
By all means at the time someone calls for police let there be hell, fire and brimstone called forth to protect the public and seek the criminals.
Where there is no victim there is no crime..... The state is a victim only when it loses assets or legal claim to assets. Fuck the crimes where the State suffers no loss....
bullshit. They have a desktop class PC computer in the passenger seat. There is no way you can tell me they do not have the tools to detect a loss of connectivity. WiFi, BlueTooth.... RF whatever.... they are in contact.... loss of streams is reportable, and detectable at the moment that loss occurs. No excuses.
You have a good point there. They are called 'Officers' because they are officers of the court. They have the same status as any lawyer or judge in the court system.
A burglar typically does not have backup on hand... The same holds true for a citizen's arrest. Which is why they are almost unheard of.
('shots fired! Shots fired! Officer down!' 911 Rascal Avenue, cross 33rd Street!' ) No other requirement is needed to rain fatal retribution on a 'resisting' suspect, or to give chase to same.
TL: DR: Burglars cannot do this, and citizens attempting arrest have no access to the resources to do this.
Yes sworn officers need to be surveilled AT ALL TIMES while performing their jobs for OUR safety and THEIR safety.
As a gratefully EX (moved on to better tasks) Dir of Ops of a call center I can assure you every inbound and outbound call is recorded and stored in the call flow. This is in part for CYA, and in part for detecting when a client or customer is engaging in fraud. In the beginning of my term, it also helped catch catch Oracle out when they tried to lie about their service levels on a product that had been licensed from them. No one ever answers a call before the inbound 'Betty' announces to all parties, that the call is being recorded for quality and training purposes. Outbound calls also had a greeting announcement from 'Betty' indicating that calls were recorded.
In the Oracle case it was their own call handling system that was used to catch them.
All nice and fine until the horse-riding-archers show up in force to deprive you of your stores and your life. The only reason the Mongols didn't take over Europe is that Genghis Khan failed to produce a suitable heir for the Empire before he died. Even some of the Khans after Genghis managed to make the Norther Europeans sweat blood and tears.
Europeans had no hope of resisting, had the Khans set their sights on invading Europe.
Yes they died from high velocity lead poisoning in some cases.
^^^ THIS
The original painting is not really about the colors, or the image composition. A print only shows the colors. The original painting has texture. It has depth. Masterful paintings are not flat. They are as much topology as they are composition, color, and texture.
Blowing spit into a chunk of wood and brass tends to shorten it's life. I gave up playing brass as a young kid.... because.... brass, spit, and oil is fuxing gross to have to smell every day.
you are mixing apples and oranges. @20KHz is in PCM(8 bit/16 bit/24 bit/ 32bit or more bit) samples per second....
44.1K samples per second @ 16 bits (stereo std CD stream rate) is 1.4112 MEGA BITS per second.
320K MP3 or other formats is in BITS PER SECOND.... that is a 4.41:1 compression ratio... and I seriously doubt anyone can hear the difference between raw 44.1KHz PCM and 320K bps MP3, or visually without at least a dual-channel 100MHz digital scope in front of them.
It might be possible to hear artifacts in 320Kbps MP3 (or other lossy formats) but only for completely synthetic signals that would have to be specifically designed to show the losses in the compression format.
One problem with this whole study:
Laying hands on a musical instrument and playing it for an hour is as much a kinesthetic experience as an auditory experience.
As others above have noted. It is entirely expected and not particularly difficult for an experienced, professional, instrumentalist to be able to identify an instrument from the combination of sound AND feel. Even if they cannot name it reliably. They know if what they are experiencing is better or worse relative to some internal standard.... probably their own favorite instrument....
Now a can of worms has been opened. Asking a subject who is capable of identifying an instrument maker based on the combination of sound AND feel which instrument they liked the best does not tell you anything about the overall quality of the instrument.
It doesn't tell you how well an instrument behaves as it wears. It does not tell you how well it behaves after it travels. It does not tell you how well it behaves when it is subjected to an unexpected change in ambient temperature, or humidity during a performance. after the strings are replaced, after it is cleaned..... after it is dropped.... or otherwise mechanically stressed....
String instruments are fickle beasts, and have a lot of subtle traits that experienced players can detect, even if they cannot reliably tell you who made the instrument. I am sure if they were asked to tell you in each case if the instrument was made by the same or a different maker, the results would have been much more consistent, and more useful.
Do you realize that USB 3.0 has 3 power profiles... up to 20V, and that the host and slave have a mechanism for negotiating the both the voltage and current requirements up to 100W (20V @ 5A)
I suspect that these phone charging systems will be using the 20V@5A profile to provide 3.7V@25A to the battery.
(DO NOT touch this iDevice during charge! This iDevice will notify you when it is safe to touch it again. [OK] [[CANCEL]])
So it can be charged in 30 seconds, but you cannot touch it for 10 minutes :)
I suppose you could use it to reheat your coffee while it is charging.
The hopping sequence is not very hard to track. It is not using a very good PRNG. A broad-band 2.4GHz SDF and a little bit of channel monitoring is all that is needed to determine the hopping sequence and then predict it. Once you have a hop prediction it is easy to either jam it or take control of the receiver. In fact, if one already has one of these radio systems, it would not take very long to map out all possible seeds for the sequencer. Then it just takes monitoring a few channels in the band until you see enough of the sequence to guess the seed.
That being said; I don't think that is what happened in TFA. I am fairly confident that the operator screwed up and is attempting to deflect responsibility.
UAV/RC aircraft need to be using far better authentication and semi-autonomous recovery when used in areas where public safety is a critical issue. Consumer/hobby grade RC systems are simply not safe enough.
Isn't the universe mostly void? We seem to forget that most of the universe is a rather low density system.... and it has some really strange properties where local observations and theories do not match global observations and theories. Why don't galactic rotational rates match the observable mass in a galaxy? We call this dark matter.... what it really is: WTF?!?! matter! Where the Fuck is the matter?! Same here with matter/anti-matter balance. We have a theoretical result that does not match our observational data.... We really do not understand the universe. We only have one nearly non-functional probe that has left the solar system.... We have a long way to go before we will have anything resembling meaningful measurement of the galactic medium, and if anything, we have learned that photons do not tell us enough about the observable universe to resolve our questions.
The steering lock? Not an issue in this case (presumably the lock doesn't come on with the key still in the ignition, like ALL steering locks).
I can assure you that quite a few early steering-lock systems could be engaged by turning the key past OFF into LOCK. Some did have a safety; the lock barrel had a collar that had to pushed down before the ignition could move into the LOCK position. A badly worn ignition would easily slip into LOCK without any noticeable resistance.
It would not be an issue for any car built after the early-80's. LOCK required that PARK be engaged, push key in before turning to LOCK, AND key removed. On manual trannys ACC/AUX is between LOCK and OFF; Key has to be pushed in to select LOCK, and LOCK will not engage until key is removed.
* oops forgot the *
* assuming that the vacuum assist unit, and its input line/check-valve are not leaking.
The vacuum assist unit stores enough vacuum for more than two or three braking events.* Each event will get progressively less assist.
Power steering goes away instantly, but in most cases the difference is not critical above 10 MPH. Even a mildly experienced driver will feel the loss of assist and compensate. Below 5 MPH loss of assist can be crippling. Make sure you do not need to steer at low speeds if you lose the assist, unless you have very good upper body strength.
I once had to drive a Mid-size 70's pontiac out from a location deep in the Santa Cruz mountains after it had suffered a serious cooling system failure. (serious hose crack)
This was accomplished as follows:
1) allowing the vehicle to cool down to ambient. (we had just arrived at our destination when the cooling system failure was discovered. So this was easy... we will deal with the issue when we are ready to leave...)
2) carefully duct-tape cracked hose.
3) refill cooling system.
4a) Run engine ONLY when power is required to overcome gravity/rolling friction.
4b) Use engine braking. (lower gears in automatic transmission)
4c) Avoid hard acceleration.
4d) Anticipate increased braking and steering effort.
4e) Use downhills to increase speed before shutting off engine.
4f) Encourage following vehicles to pass as quickly as possible (hazard-lights, pulling to right, hand signals)
4g) Be very careful to turn the ignition key no further than OFF, and turn it back to RUN/ON. (this is to keep the fuel system pressurized)
End result was the engine never even got close to over-heating during this limp-home effort. Since the cooling system never got significantly pressurized, or heated, the duct-tape retained a very good seal.
It took a lot more effort to convince the owner of the car (my GF at the time) and the other passengers that this approach would work. None of them were particularly car savvy.
The whole point of Incorporation LLP, and LLC are to put a firewall between company assets and personal assets. Very specific conditions have to be met before 'the corporate Veil' can be 'pierced.' Trust me, no one would take any significant business venture on if there was not a limitation of liability. Now then, that being said; deliberately sweeping a dangerous defect (like the one described in the TFS) under the rug should be a criminal matter, and the people who acted to make it happen should be facing charges. Limited liability should not protect bad actors.
I am struggling to understand why this is even an argument on /. There must be too many web-code-monkies on /. now. Properties of Materials used to be part of the geek 101 course requirements.... Toughness, hardness and strength are taught in high school chemistry.... WTF, /.?
^^ this
The whole point of having a car that comes out of a collision looking like a crumpled beer can is to reduce the v that the meat-monkey experiences inside the can.
Not so long ago crashing into tree(s) at 80+ MPH was a fatality for the occupants of the vehicle. I think Tesla is already way ahead of the curve.
What?! :-)
You mean proven "hardware backdoor" Samsung?
I don't know about Cook & Ives shuck and jive, since the passing of Jobs... But I'm pretty sure the iOS crypto flaws are lower risk than ANYTHING those gangsters make at Samsung. I won't let them land an icebox in my house!
Did you actually drill down into the details? It IS a backdoor, but It IS NOT a hardware back door.
It is an IPC protocol between the baseband processor and the application processor. The baseband processor can make IPC request for the application processor to modify its FLASH file system. It is a generic service. I am guessing (as are the people who found the backdoor) it was used for development/debugging and got left behind. Stupid oversight for sure. There is nothing sneaky about it at all, and the backdoor has no special privileges beyond libc-bog-std file system calls. The rest of the IPC command table reads about like you'd expect for a protocol between the app processor and the baseband.
All this shows is that Samsung is just as stupid about security as everyone else.
^^ this. Anti-depressant is a misnomer. They are more like an emotional damping element.... a shock absorber for your mind.
At one point in my life I was living in Seattle and did not know that drinking the tap water there is a REALLY BAD IDEA....
Look up Manganese poisoning.... Though I have never seen a study that says so, I think Seattle's high suicide rate might be explained not by weather and SADS, but by chronic Manganese poisoning.
I saw a doctor about some mild depressive episodes I was experiencing and got diagnosed with (after a few tests: "Are you drinking tap water? yup you guessed it...) Manganese poisoning.
The treatment was filter the tap water, or better yet don't drink it at all. Also, a prescription for Zoloft. "Take this for 8 weeks while you detox and at the end you'll be back to 'normal'." After the Zoloft kicked in full tilt two weeks later, my emotional range flat lined. Nothing was fun, nothing was interesting, nothing was ... depressing.... angering... sad... everything was ... nothing. Someone could have spit in my face and shouted abuse at me and gotten a blank, unconcerned look from me... it would have gone right over my head. I was empty; zombified. I was just alive. Fucking-potted-plant-alive. Not even potted-petunia-oh-shit-not-again-alive.
After another week on the Zoloft I dimly realized that it was going cause me to walk in front of a speeding Metro bus before the 'script was exhausted. I stopped taking it, and drifted back to sad, sleepy, weepy Eyore for the rest of my detox. That was a relief. I could feel shit again.... Yay! Shit!
Don't get me wrong... I believe that psychotropics can help people 'normalize' when they have extreme emotional/mental health issues. However, they are depressing drugs.
I was working for M$ at the time so maybe that was exacerbating the situation... set and setting... all that.