Like many geeks, regardless of gender, I'd probably end up in the antisocial category. At least I used to, I'm getting better.;)
And yes, I knew you were joking. If you really had sent me a ring then you'd probably end up labeled "stalker" in my book and you'd never hear from me again.;)...not that I'd just take the jewelry and run. I'd neeever do that... *innocentlook*
If it did occur naturally, baby Jesus' birth would not be a miracle, which would tend to discredit the claim he is the son of God.
Not neccesarily. Some people think the periodic table and how everything on it "works out" is proof of the existence of God. Natural does not automatically cancel out God. If God made the rules of the world, then he can also break them or re-write them. Personally, I believe that God shows himself to us and makes his will known with coincidences, but that's just me.
Even if it did happen "naturally", that's quite a coincidence, and still can be taken as "proof" of God. (Quotation marks because if we really could prove God existed then we probably would never have had so many wars over the subject.;) )
According to the article, one of the interesting things this might lead to is stem cell research. Apparently by using two females instead of one male and one female, working with the resulting stem cells will be less ethically questionable. Not sure why, though...
I said this already, but Saturn (where I bought my car) does not bargain. Buying a car from them is like buying a computer. The price is the price. There may be deals to choose from (like $2000 cash back or 0% APR financing), but there's no bargaining. It made buying a car much easier for me because I didn't have to worry about being swindled out of too much money just because I didn't have the right bargaining tools.
FYI, the car was for my first job (entry level programmer, BTW), which happened to be an hour away from my house. Biking and walking were out (though I would've absolutely loved to be able to bike to work) and public transportation in the area sucks. And while I could have found a used car, you never know what you're buying and I was going to be using the sucker pretty hard (~500mi/week). $200 a month was very affordable for a car that I knew wouldn't have any surprises under the hood, and that loan that's costing me nothing is also helping me build my credit. I could pay off that car loan now if I wanted to, but the fact that my project's been canceled (I was working on the Comanche helicopter that you may have heard about back in February) has been causing me to watch my money very closely in the event that I might not have a job in the near future.
See, when you don't have enough cash to buy a car you sorta need to take out a loan from somebody, and I did the numbers, the 0% loan was cheaper even when I gave up the $2k cash back that was the other option. Saturn doesn't negotiate, so I had no bargaining power to begin with.
One thing I forgot: if you have loans, morgages, or credit card dept that carry intest, you want to pay that off ASAP before investing. (Obviously if you can get 7% per year investing and the intrest on your credit card is 15% it makes sense to pay it off first; but some people don't see this....)
On the other hand, if you can get 7% per year investing but the interest on your college loans is 3.6% or the interest on your car loan is 0% then you might decide to let those loans sit for a little while. In my case with a car loan with absolutely no interest, they basically gave me cash for free, and I'm keeping it as long as they let me.;)
Hey! So you just automatically assume I'm a "young whippersnapper" who doesn't know anything because of one little comment? Everybody's always making assumptions around here and I'm sick of it.
1. If I'm downloading copies of song which I already own on CD, then I'm not infringing, am I? Maybe I'm just too lazy to rip my own disks. I can think of other reasons why I might do that.
I don't recal where I heard it, so I might be wrong, but I think there's some law somewhere that says you do not have the right to change the format of media you own. So if you have a CD and you make a copy of that CD for backup purposes then it's legal. But if you have a CD and you rip it to MP3s, the format has changed and that is not legal. Same if you were to, say, convert your cassettes to CDs or vice versa. Therefore, your argument is a moot point since you're not supposed to rip your own CDs.
Like I said, I don't know if this is true or not. Can any other slashdotters confirm or deny?
I'll bet that over a period of years, a person could learn to use artificial limbs in this way and be just as adept with them as with their natural limbs.
Yes, but learning how to move your limbs again is frustrating and depressing, maybe even more so than not having that limb in the first place (note, I am not talking from experience and could be very very wrong). Have you ever tried to wiggle your ears or raise one eyebrow if you've never done it before? It feels impossible to move a muscle you've never controlled before. I know that I can raise my left eyebrow, but for the life of me I can't raise my right (without raising my left as well). Now imagine trying to move an arm you've never moved before. Much much harder. It would be a lot less frustrating for the amputee to have the chip hooked up so that he could move his arm just like he used to, because it's using the same signals.
Plus, there's no guarantee that the brain will ever learn how to send signals to that chip. There's a possibility, yes, but no guarantees. It's a lot more likely that the brain will remember to send signals that it used to send, rather than try and learn new signals.
I have that problem at my work. I know it's not very secure, but I found that changing my other passwords when I'm forced to change one helps me remember. I figure it's certainly more secure than leaving a piece of paper around with a bunch of passwords on it. I just realized the other day that I had forgotten to change the passwords for one of the programs I work with and I can't figure out what it is now....but I guess it doesn't really matter considering my project got canceled and I don't need access to that database anymore...
Lately I've run into the problem of having run out of mutations of the set of passwords I usually use and now I have to think up new ones. I'm always terrified that I'll forget that password the next day, but instead of writing it down anywhere I will write myself something cryptic to remind me of what it was, usually just the capital letter and number that the system requires be included in my password. Put it on a post-it note on my monitor with the rest of my cryptic post-it notes and nobody will realize that "H9" means my password is "slasHd9t".
Eh, I'd feel like that was cheating, but if it was a choice between being paralized for the rest of my life and a pleasure chip I'd probably take the chip, too.;)
But seriously, it's probably not feasable, and even if it were it would probably be regulated. I mean, if everybody just got a pleasure chip installed then life as we know it would probably end because we'd all stay at home all day being "stimulated" until we starved and nothing would get done.;)
We've all seen the movies and read the books about machines in the future, and frankly most of these stories portray robots and AI as terrifying things that humanity will end up battling with for supremicy of the planet. Do you think there are any truths to these stories? Will robots compete with us in the future for jobs and/or living space? Do you ever see robots and humans living side by side as equals, or do you think they will always be subservient machines? Or, even, do you think robots will surpass us one day as the dominant force on the planet?
Other than making the range really really short or using narrowcasting (which, I belive is more difficult), I'm not sure how they could avoid this. I don't know too much about wireless signals, though, so I probably shouldn't talk. Any other slashdotters have theories to contain a wireless signal inside the body?
There is a difference. For one, it's a lot less complicated to "listen" to the brain's outputs and map what does what in a healthy person for use in a person with those connections severed. It's a lot harder to try and listen, so to speak, for the correct signal that the brain will interpret as "yellow". There has been some work in this area, yes, but it's far from perfect. Cochlear implants are being used today to help deaf people hear, but people who were able to hear at one point but later had an implant put in often say that it sounds "tinny" compared to natural hearing.
Then there's the question of if people really experience things in the same way. I mean, anyone can point to the color yellow on a color chart (well, people will full color vision) but how do we know that I actually experience the same thing you do when I see yellow? Now, this is sort of getting into the realm of the metaphysical, but it's something we may need to think about when we start pumping alien signals into people's heads. Wierd and unexpected effects may happen in some people and not in others.
A third thing to think about is how dangerous this is. If you try and move your new artificial limb up and it moves down, even if it moves down very fast and dangerously, you might risk injuring the arm and maybe give youself a few bruises, but no major harm will be done. Pumping signals INTO the brain, however, could have a lot more harmful outcomes. Certain frequencies of light on televisions has been proven to cause sesures, and artificial light signals may cause the same effects. Imagine if something goes wrong and all of a sudden you're experiencing a head-splitting high pitched tone and you didn't know how to stop it?
And then it's dangerous in the more mundane sense of interrrupting your actual sensations. What if you were driving and you accidentally tripped your email program. Suddenly all you can see is your email. Ideally, we'd like to implement a system similar to how we daydream or think of things normally, where we can obviously tell the difference between reality and non-reality, even when we superimpose one image on another. But I don't think we have even the faintest idea how to do that. Just pumping signals to the existing connections to our eyes, for example, would probably hyjack our vision completely. And simply bombarding our brains with random electrical signals wouldn't really work, even if it weren't terribly dangerous. The brain doesn't always recognize new connections like that. Even some deaf children who have a cochlear implant never learn to hear. Their brain just doesn't know how to interpret that data. In order for something like that to work, you'd need to implant a child at a very young age and hope the brain learns to interpret those signals correctly.
So, basically, there are tons more issues to deal with when sending info to the brain, rather than getting data from it. It's gonna be a while longer before you can read email with your eyes closed.
*dials cellphone, notices person next to her gets up and starts dancing*
"Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't know you were a parapalegic! I must've pressed the 'take control of nearest parapalegic' button instead of the 'call' button. My bad. Nice moves, though."
Right. It will probably be an experience similar to learning to use your limbs as a baby, although I imagine eventually they will make it simpler by having the arm try and learn what the user wants it to do ("no, no, I wanted to raise my shoulder" *punches buttons* "that's better").
I'd think if you were completely paralized you'd jump (well, not literally, of course) to have this implanted. Even if it didn't allow you control of your limbs, anything to feel like you had some sort of influence on the outside world, even if it's just controlling the mouse on a computer, would be a big plus to any quadrepalegic, IMO.
I mean, imagine it... not being able to move any of your arms or legs ever again. Being bedridden for the rest of your life doesn't sound like a very pleasant experience to me. I think if I were in that position and there was a high risk of death to using this chip then I'd still give it a shot.
You could if their was more AI involved in the walking than the instructions coming from your brain. Of course, we have trouble making robots walk already, and this would be a similar problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many geeks, regardless of gender, I'd probably end up in the antisocial category. At least I used to, I'm getting better. ;)
;) ...not that I'd just take the jewelry and run. I'd neeever do that... *innocentlook*
And yes, I knew you were joking. If you really had sent me a ring then you'd probably end up labeled "stalker" in my book and you'd never hear from me again.
Damnit, people STILL can't tell? Maybe if I part my hair on this side...
*rolls eyes* Yes, we do exist.
;)
And if you can figure out how to email me a ring, then we'll talk about it.
Sometimes it goes the other way, too. I once had a guy do this to me. ;)
--female geek
If it did occur naturally, baby Jesus' birth would not be a miracle, which would tend to discredit the claim he is the son of God.
Not neccesarily. Some people think the periodic table and how everything on it "works out" is proof of the existence of God. Natural does not automatically cancel out God. If God made the rules of the world, then he can also break them or re-write them. Personally, I believe that God shows himself to us and makes his will known with coincidences, but that's just me.
Even if it did happen "naturally", that's quite a coincidence, and still can be taken as "proof" of God. (Quotation marks because if we really could prove God existed then we probably would never have had so many wars over the subject. ;) )
According to the article, one of the interesting things this might lead to is stem cell research. Apparently by using two females instead of one male and one female, working with the resulting stem cells will be less ethically questionable. Not sure why, though...
I'm assuming you meant no Y chromosome.
XX are female
XY are male
YY never lives (don't ask me how it would happen besides artificially)
So does this mean we men have no use anymore?
Besides killing spiders and hooking up the VCR you mean?
ERNT! Wrong. I do both of those already. Better find something else you guys are good for, quick! ;)
(For those of you who didn't figure it out, I'm a woman.)
I said this already, but Saturn (where I bought my car) does not bargain. Buying a car from them is like buying a computer. The price is the price. There may be deals to choose from (like $2000 cash back or 0% APR financing), but there's no bargaining. It made buying a car much easier for me because I didn't have to worry about being swindled out of too much money just because I didn't have the right bargaining tools.
FYI, the car was for my first job (entry level programmer, BTW), which happened to be an hour away from my house. Biking and walking were out (though I would've absolutely loved to be able to bike to work) and public transportation in the area sucks. And while I could have found a used car, you never know what you're buying and I was going to be using the sucker pretty hard (~500mi/week). $200 a month was very affordable for a car that I knew wouldn't have any surprises under the hood, and that loan that's costing me nothing is also helping me build my credit. I could pay off that car loan now if I wanted to, but the fact that my project's been canceled (I was working on the Comanche helicopter that you may have heard about back in February) has been causing me to watch my money very closely in the event that I might not have a job in the near future.
See, when you don't have enough cash to buy a car you sorta need to take out a loan from somebody, and I did the numbers, the 0% loan was cheaper even when I gave up the $2k cash back that was the other option. Saturn doesn't negotiate, so I had no bargaining power to begin with.
One thing I forgot: if you have loans, morgages, or credit card dept that carry intest, you want to pay that off ASAP before investing. (Obviously if you can get 7% per year investing and the intrest on your credit card is 15% it makes sense to pay it off first; but some people don't see this....)
On the other hand, if you can get 7% per year investing but the interest on your college loans is 3.6% or the interest on your car loan is 0% then you might decide to let those loans sit for a little while. In my case with a car loan with absolutely no interest, they basically gave me cash for free, and I'm keeping it as long as they let me. ;)
Hey! So you just automatically assume I'm a "young whippersnapper" who doesn't know anything because of one little comment? Everybody's always making assumptions around here and I'm sick of it.
...BTW, what's an LP?
;)
1. If I'm downloading copies of song which I already own on CD, then I'm not infringing, am I? Maybe I'm just too lazy to rip my own disks. I can think of other reasons why I might do that.
I don't recal where I heard it, so I might be wrong, but I think there's some law somewhere that says you do not have the right to change the format of media you own. So if you have a CD and you make a copy of that CD for backup purposes then it's legal. But if you have a CD and you rip it to MP3s, the format has changed and that is not legal. Same if you were to, say, convert your cassettes to CDs or vice versa. Therefore, your argument is a moot point since you're not supposed to rip your own CDs.
Like I said, I don't know if this is true or not. Can any other slashdotters confirm or deny?
I'll bet that over a period of years, a person could learn to use artificial limbs in this way and be just as adept with them as with their natural limbs.
Yes, but learning how to move your limbs again is frustrating and depressing, maybe even more so than not having that limb in the first place (note, I am not talking from experience and could be very very wrong). Have you ever tried to wiggle your ears or raise one eyebrow if you've never done it before? It feels impossible to move a muscle you've never controlled before. I know that I can raise my left eyebrow, but for the life of me I can't raise my right (without raising my left as well). Now imagine trying to move an arm you've never moved before. Much much harder. It would be a lot less frustrating for the amputee to have the chip hooked up so that he could move his arm just like he used to, because it's using the same signals.Plus, there's no guarantee that the brain will ever learn how to send signals to that chip. There's a possibility, yes, but no guarantees. It's a lot more likely that the brain will remember to send signals that it used to send, rather than try and learn new signals.
I have that problem at my work. I know it's not very secure, but I found that changing my other passwords when I'm forced to change one helps me remember. I figure it's certainly more secure than leaving a piece of paper around with a bunch of passwords on it. I just realized the other day that I had forgotten to change the passwords for one of the programs I work with and I can't figure out what it is now. ...but I guess it doesn't really matter considering my project got canceled and I don't need access to that database anymore...
Lately I've run into the problem of having run out of mutations of the set of passwords I usually use and now I have to think up new ones. I'm always terrified that I'll forget that password the next day, but instead of writing it down anywhere I will write myself something cryptic to remind me of what it was, usually just the capital letter and number that the system requires be included in my password. Put it on a post-it note on my monitor with the rest of my cryptic post-it notes and nobody will realize that "H9" means my password is "slasHd9t".
Eh, I'd feel like that was cheating, but if it was a choice between being paralized for the rest of my life and a pleasure chip I'd probably take the chip, too. ;)
;)
But seriously, it's probably not feasable, and even if it were it would probably be regulated. I mean, if everybody just got a pleasure chip installed then life as we know it would probably end because we'd all stay at home all day being "stimulated" until we starved and nothing would get done.
We've all seen the movies and read the books about machines in the future, and frankly most of these stories portray robots and AI as terrifying things that humanity will end up battling with for supremicy of the planet. Do you think there are any truths to these stories? Will robots compete with us in the future for jobs and/or living space? Do you ever see robots and humans living side by side as equals, or do you think they will always be subservient machines? Or, even, do you think robots will surpass us one day as the dominant force on the planet?
That was supposed to be a joke. :P
Other than making the range really really short or using narrowcasting (which, I belive is more difficult), I'm not sure how they could avoid this. I don't know too much about wireless signals, though, so I probably shouldn't talk. Any other slashdotters have theories to contain a wireless signal inside the body?
There is a difference. For one, it's a lot less complicated to "listen" to the brain's outputs and map what does what in a healthy person for use in a person with those connections severed. It's a lot harder to try and listen, so to speak, for the correct signal that the brain will interpret as "yellow". There has been some work in this area, yes, but it's far from perfect. Cochlear implants are being used today to help deaf people hear, but people who were able to hear at one point but later had an implant put in often say that it sounds "tinny" compared to natural hearing.
Then there's the question of if people really experience things in the same way. I mean, anyone can point to the color yellow on a color chart (well, people will full color vision) but how do we know that I actually experience the same thing you do when I see yellow? Now, this is sort of getting into the realm of the metaphysical, but it's something we may need to think about when we start pumping alien signals into people's heads. Wierd and unexpected effects may happen in some people and not in others.
A third thing to think about is how dangerous this is. If you try and move your new artificial limb up and it moves down, even if it moves down very fast and dangerously, you might risk injuring the arm and maybe give youself a few bruises, but no major harm will be done. Pumping signals INTO the brain, however, could have a lot more harmful outcomes. Certain frequencies of light on televisions has been proven to cause sesures, and artificial light signals may cause the same effects. Imagine if something goes wrong and all of a sudden you're experiencing a head-splitting high pitched tone and you didn't know how to stop it?
And then it's dangerous in the more mundane sense of interrrupting your actual sensations. What if you were driving and you accidentally tripped your email program. Suddenly all you can see is your email. Ideally, we'd like to implement a system similar to how we daydream or think of things normally, where we can obviously tell the difference between reality and non-reality, even when we superimpose one image on another. But I don't think we have even the faintest idea how to do that. Just pumping signals to the existing connections to our eyes, for example, would probably hyjack our vision completely. And simply bombarding our brains with random electrical signals wouldn't really work, even if it weren't terribly dangerous. The brain doesn't always recognize new connections like that. Even some deaf children who have a cochlear implant never learn to hear. Their brain just doesn't know how to interpret that data. In order for something like that to work, you'd need to implant a child at a very young age and hope the brain learns to interpret those signals correctly.
So, basically, there are tons more issues to deal with when sending info to the brain, rather than getting data from it. It's gonna be a while longer before you can read email with your eyes closed.
*dials cellphone, notices person next to her gets up and starts dancing*
"Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't know you were a parapalegic! I must've pressed the 'take control of nearest parapalegic' button instead of the 'call' button. My bad. Nice moves, though."
Right. It will probably be an experience similar to learning to use your limbs as a baby, although I imagine eventually they will make it simpler by having the arm try and learn what the user wants it to do ("no, no, I wanted to raise my shoulder" *punches buttons* "that's better").
I'd think if you were completely paralized you'd jump (well, not literally, of course) to have this implanted. Even if it didn't allow you control of your limbs, anything to feel like you had some sort of influence on the outside world, even if it's just controlling the mouse on a computer, would be a big plus to any quadrepalegic, IMO.
I mean, imagine it... not being able to move any of your arms or legs ever again. Being bedridden for the rest of your life doesn't sound like a very pleasant experience to me. I think if I were in that position and there was a high risk of death to using this chip then I'd still give it a shot.
You could if their was more AI involved in the walking than the instructions coming from your brain. Of course, we have trouble making robots walk already, and this would be a similar problem.