Both have been featured in countless articles for decades. My money says if and when, they'll probably be announced in the same week, since they've been tied together in the waiting room for so long. I'll believe them when I see them. If I actually see fusion, it'll probably burn my face off, but then at last I'd be able to mumble through the scars "Finally!"
The informal hypothesis is that the universe is a VR sim.
The null hypothesis (H(0)) is that it is not. The alternative hypothesis (H(1)) is that it is.
Now, devise a test and fail to show support for H(0) to a probabilistic certainty of at least 95% and you've got something.
Hell, devise an objective test and you've got something.
Maybe I should become a theoretician. I could make up all kinds of whacky stuff without having to worry about messy stuff like trying to apply empirical principles to it.
The launch crew was working in full summer daylight, temperatures between 20 and 33 F. The telemetry team is in Palestine Texas. Actually the night temperatures there were about the same as Antarctica the last couple days. The researchers, though, are at their respective institutions. No researchers were frozen during the making of TFA.
If the map ever got a glimpse of the terrain, how would it be able to recognize it as the terrain rather than another map? How would we know that it's not "maps all the way down"?
> He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.
Some of the material falling into a black hole escapes as Hawking radiation, and also adds to the mass, spin and and/or or charge of the hole, but there's no evidence these are increased by an amount equal to the infalling matter/energy according to E=MC^2. Disappearance of the time dimension at the event horizon also 'freezes' processing and any information there gets locked up.
Does information processing theory (by itself) provide a mechanism for complete loss of some information?
Even if the hole later 'explodes' and becomes a naked singularity (something I can't hold with) there's no indication that what's already in the singularity can affect what's outside other than by the forces noted above.
The summary doesn't match what the article says, and makes claims that appear nowhere else.
The information "removed" was previously released. What's changed is that it now carries the caveat that it hasn't been peer reviewed. That's where they extract the facts and inject the "not properly vetted" in attempt to use the connotation to make it sound worse.
One of the people in charge of designing and carrying out the project is complaining about the data handling. He's one of the people who created the data. The "what to do with it" is a singularly stoopid statement in this light.
There's more, but it's even more nonsensical. I can't figure out how much of this is intentional poor writing/reporting, how much of it is unintentional poor writing/reporting, and how much of it misdirection hastily written because either something peripheral to the main topic has popped out as significant, or even something totally unrelated has come up and they want you to waste your time on this obsfucational press release.
Something is going on that they're not talking about, because they're doing an awful lot of talking about nothing here, in such a way that you spend a lot of time trying to stop misunderstanding it. It shouldn't be this difficult, and didn't used to be. At the very least they're trying to make an issue out of the article, and sidling away from the content. But they're using unsupported statements for doing so. I don't think the content of the article itself or the implications are what they're concerned about. They'd either come out as say so clearly, or they'd disown it clearly.
> I don't know how it is in other or many states, but in my state (Colorado) employment is considered "at will" of both the employee and the employer. The employer's right to fire any employee for any reason is protected, and wrongful termination doesn't really exist.
Most states are "at will" and wrongful termination still exists. It is when someone is fired for a false reason and the employment records reflect that. Yes, they can fire you for any reason, but they have to say why they did no matter what it is, so future employers can evaluate for themselves whether to hire you. Wrongful termination simply forces them to either reverse the improper firing (figure the odds) or force them to be honest about the circumstances.
In your friend's case, he didn't show up and was fired for not showing up. It doesn't apply. They were being dicks about it, and probably looking for a way to hose him over like this, but the reason given was the reason used. Had they fired him for engaging in sexual harrasment, when in fact he had simply failed to show up for the training, then he'd have had a wrongful termination case. He might have gotten a small cash settlement, such as wages due during the time he was wrongfully unemployed. Other wise all he'd get is his records cleared, which is what it's all about. In some cases they can get the job back, but in most cases, who would want it? You just KNOW they'd be looking for any good reason.
Woe be to the company that takes an action against someone for whom they find negative information which was put up by someone else. Such "sociological offices" would be highly unlikely to be able to prove the true source of the posting. IP spoofing is ridiculously easy. Someone who loses their job over such unproven and unprovable data (except by a truly exceptional forensic sysadmin) could have a fine time collecting on a wrongful termination suit, and take the "sociological office" weasels down in the process, and ruining the stock price of of the company by pushing the story onto the media by playing the aggrieved little guy with a little overacting.
To someone even minimally trained in psycops and IP diddling for whom such stuff appears, it should occur that one couple protect themselves from such an action by posting equally off the wall junk, spoofing the IP to hide the fact they posted it themselves, to bait the boneheads trying to make a case. Posting some equally disturbing info about these who're performing the the search would let them know they've been bested in such a way that they dare not continue without outting themselves on the process. One can even make it obvious but unprovable who did it (or had it done for them) without the hyperactive little HR people being able to do anything about it, except perhaps admit they're not good enough at this for the company to use their services, possibly even getting them cut from the salary list.
The best defense if a good offense. The best offense here is to make them publicly shove proof of their own inadequacy up their own ass. A person could have enormous fun and possibly set themselves up for a healthy early retirement. Getting the fsckheads who tried to out you fired would just be icing.
Another scare tactic article by the music industry and others who make money from it.
With respect to hifi equipment (because you can't hear the stuff they're doing on portables):
For roll off (loss of highs and lows) there's the loudness control and/or equalizers. This is necessary because the auditory system has roll off at low volume.
For volume, there's a volume control. Obvious.
For dynamic compression there's dynamic range expanders. An extra piece of equipment, not cheap but not overly costly. But it has the benefit of pushing background noise like tape hiss below the threshold of hearing. DBX noise reduction is based on this. With a little fiddling you can run your line out through a tape deck that has DBX set to "monitor" and get the same reults (at a set level). Pushing the quieter parts to a greater volume causes overall volume increase. This is the gist of TFA. Almost all audio broadcasts and netcasts are compressed, regardless of the original recording. Some psychoacoustic stereo enhancement techniques also do this. And some portables *do* have this. I expect all these are still available, and probably with improvements since then.
That's speaking from experience selling the stuff, and doing live and studio recording, from almost 30 years ago, as well as radio production and broadcast experience from 10 years ago.
For shitty results from recording engineers' wanking, there's don't buy the shit.
So what's Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs and the like selling now? Simply recordings that haven't been fucked with?
Teachers' Guide: "Attention Getting Mechanism". Yes, I actually did/do this in my classes.
Also made the The Best of AIR. I'm more proud of it than I am any of my other research, even the one referenced in 'Thank You For Smoking' ("Why, they've just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's disease!")
But it was my (now replaced) picture in the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, wearing a hot pink tutu, chartreuse fishnet panty hose and black cowboy boots for a concert performance, that made my previous employer rightfully question my sanity. To get back at them for being Googled, I posted the picture on my office door. Yes, I said previous.
You're remembering the Journal of Irreproducible Research, aad you're misremembering the details. The JIR was purchased by Blackwell Scientific. The staff had a hard time reproducing the good results they had working with their previous publisher, and indeed producing anything at all. The staff quit, and formed AIR.
They'll eventually start putting up "persons of interest" wanted for questioning. Some of those persons of interest will be completely innocent and have no knowledge of what the FBI is asking. But the negative publicity will cause them grief and likely loss of employment. And they will then sue the FBI and DoJ and get lots of money.
It's happened before without these signs. The signs will make it more likely as well as more public.
One hopes that the implied accusation of having one's face plastered around the country in this way doesn't result in vigilantes taking action. The results could be far worse and no amount of settlement would make up for it.
> How is this considered Science? Why is this in the science section? Answer: We don't know what science is anymore and think anything technological is scientific.
It's in the science section because technology is applied science; basic inventions require scientific research.
And because the people who do science and/or technology understand that there is no clear boundary but rather they are shades of grey of each other.
At least that's how I see it, as someone who does scientific research and technology development.
But it was mostly because there was no technology section for me to submit it under. What you perceive as a global inability to differentiate that which people don't differentiate according to your assumptions is in fact a function of the arbitrary categorization built into the article submission process.
The only "news" here is that the bill was passed -- after the program was implemented. I could access NIH funded work from my office in NIDCD. Anyone could walk in off the street and use the National Library of Medicine's library computers and do the same. Yeah, you had to be in Bethesda to do that, but it was in process in 2002. They started allowing the more directly controlled NIH work to be accessed from off campus in 2004. Since then they've been convincing the journal publishers this was going to happen, like it nor not (they didn't). The bill also specifies the funding, which was already in place because they couldn't test it without funding to pay for the equipment and salaries.
Having all those full articles is great for researchers. It's the right of the taxpayers to have it also. But for them, access to the abstracts is usually sufficient. Medline is too light, and the articles too heavy for general consumption. Access to abstracts has always been possible. I used to read the abstracts from Grateful Med (pre-PubMed)in plain old ASCII text at 1200 baud, from anywhere I happened to be. The front end back then was Gopher.
NIH is not the first government agency to go "open". NASA has already done so (except details of DoD stuff they do). Their storage and access system is far from PubMed convenience. It can take them weeks to find the documents that index the information you're looking for, and tell you where it's stored. Very often in boxes.
Bottom line, this was just a PR action. The work was already done.
> I'm also a bit skittish as I've never imported drugs before. Is it really as simple as adding them to an online shopping cart?
You can, yes. But if you don't have a prescription to show the FDAcops (they even have a SWAT team) via the USPS inspectors, you could get busted. Even with a script they confiscate them sometimes and make you produce the script, and then stall and make you do it again, delaying as long as they can. I've not bought any in few years, so the online places may require a faxed script (unlike the US painkiller sellers who'll let you pay them to get you a script).
Collect all the information you can about them and present it to your GP then for a script.
The original owners were the pharaoh era royalty. The present government does not derive directly from the royal line. Therefore to claim ownership rights on property not rightfully theirs is to deprive the original owners of their ownership.
It's stealing. Lock the bastards up. Call the PIAA (Pyramid Industry Association of Assholes).
The article is about using psychotropics like amphetamines and methylphenidate (Ritalin) to "improve" brain power. In the short term they do. Then they bring on rebound effects like chronic depression. Continuing after that stresses the dopamine system (that these force to work harder) and can bring on Parkinson's. The Alzheimer's drug does the same, but they consider the long term drawbacks to be less than the immediate benefit. Using these drugs for the purpose stated in TFA is called "off-label use". This (mis-)use has been going on since the first stimulants (cocaine among them) became available over a century ago. These are performance enhancers, not true cognitive enhancers. The distinction is important, and there but buried in TFA.
From TFA: > "Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.
The first company to come out with a memory pill (a true cognitive enhancer) was Sandoz of Switzerland. The name is Hydergine. The person who discovered it was Albert Hoffman. If he hadn't also discovered LSD and become (in)famous for that, he'd probably been nominated for a Nobel for Hydergine (and a bucket full of other highly useful drugs of his day). He mentioned he takes Hydergine 4 or 5 times a day -- at his 100th birthday party.
There have been many such drugs (nootropics; noh'-oh-troh''-pics) created since then. All of them are owned by companies that are owned by people not from the U.S. and so no U.S. companies can make profit from them. Thus, the FDA won't approve them, and pretend they don't exist. As evidence I point to recent Nobel recipient Eric Kandel (for his work on the dopamine system) who claimed he'd use his award money to create the first cognitive enhancing drug (nootropic), essentially publicly and purposefully ignoring Hoffman's discovery and the subsequent inventions.
On my way to a PhD in neuroscience, I got a master's in healthcare administration. I learned way too much about the FDA and big pharma to ever be comfortable with them again. The above statement is only one reason for that. An excuse given for not approving it is that it can cause one to become dizzy if they stand up fast. In other words, it's an effective anti-hypertensive -- it lowers blood pressure. That's more a benefit than a drawback, and is more harmless than the "acceptable" side effects from recent drugs being advertised. Hydergine and the other nootropics have far fewer negative side effects than most drugs and virtually no interaction with any other drugs, and have beneficial side effects besides. These are approved in part by the FDA, but only for advanced brain degenerative diseases, where their benefit is fairly negligible and unrecognizable. Use by those without such disease is not approved, and actively discouraged.
The good news is that due to the 1989 AIDS drug law, one can import from overseas 90 days worth at a time of any drug approved there for the on-label use. The bad news is that the USPS will try to confiscate any drugs coming from outside the US -- even those allowed by the 1989 AIDS law. This is due to pressure from the FDA, the corporate welfare office for big pharma.
I myself took Hydergine and Nootropil for 2 years, instead of the levodopa prescribed for Parkinson's. After that I no longer needed the levodopa (and still don't, a decade later), which itself has a rebound effect, causing permanent and progressive degeneration of motor control. If it weren't for these nootropics I probably would never have been able to finish my PhD. They cost me about $150 per 90 days, sent from Portugal. I consider that to be the best value for money spent in my entire life.
> "But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
The college students will graduate, get jobs, get mortgages and run up other debts, and struggle with the debt load vs. their wages. And they will change their attitude towards ownership and such, just as generations before them have.
Trust me, I know. I've watched 90something percent of my fellow hippie-era friends and acquaintances become right wing conservatives. If they'll do it, generations less committed to their own hubris are all the more likely to.
Absolute zero has a definition based on the behavior of particles and their interaction. It is that they have no vibrations, and that they're completely coupled.
Absolute hot should have a similar definition as a target. As an opposite to absolute zero, it would be that particles cannot be made to vibrate more, and that they are completely uncoupled. Uncoupling requires they not interact with each other, which means they don't "feel" the 4 forces, even after those have unified, supposedly at the Plank temperature. If they still feel the unified forces at 10^32 K, the uncoupling from the unified forces (Force? U-force?) may be greater than the Plank temperature.
Finding a way to measure something that's completely uncoupled without coupling a measurement device to it is going to be a trick, in the real sense. Measuring absolute zero is a trick of taking things very near 0 K and using lasers to control their vibration such that they appear to be closer to 0 K. And in one case I seem to recall to be less than 0 K, evidence that's it's truly a trick. I don't recall anyone getting anything to behave exactly like 0 K except as being in a range around it which the measuring device was unable to resolve well enough to prove the behavior as having absolutely no vibration.
What could possibly possess someone "In an age of identity theft and other confidentiality concerns" to have a drive replaced and leave sensitive information on it?
Drawing a parallel to mechanics offering parts back doesn't apply. If a mechanic changes disk pads, they might offer them. If a mechanic changes a motor, they damn skippy don't offer the old one. If Apple changed just the platter, they could offer that, but that's not how drives are changed. The entire drive mechanism and electronics is changed.
Even IF Apple (or anyone) offered the old drive back, the information has already passed through their hands, and so should be considered compromised. I can't see how that should be considered anyone's fault but the owner's.
The wife reminds me that quantums, being able to traverse the multiverse(s?) must therefore be able to travel any direction in time. Therefore Robert Hooke may have gotten the idea from Pratchett. Given that more people have read Discworld books than have read Hooke's works, and that any of them may emit idea quantums, she is most likely correct.
But due to quantum (those pesky quantums get into everything) there are particles of ideas zipping around the multiverse(s?) just waiting for a properly receptive mind to collide with, transferring the thought into it from Some Place Else. It is therefore likely that PTerry got zapped by more than one such idea quantums (quite possibly a virtual cosmic shower of them) from The Disc, in this case one emitted from the mind of Robert Dearheart.*
The High Energy Magic division of U.U. is currently hard at work researching a way to make peoples' minds less resistant to idea quantums. Unfortunately, being based on magic rather than technology (as is the Clacks), it is unlikely this will ever work on minds on our planet, where it's needed far more than on the Disc.
* The same probably happened to Robert Hooke. The ass toot reader should examine the history, especially the year of Hooke's presentation to the Royal Society, and see that "17th century" is in fact accurate. Hooke didn't have it built, but he was the first (on this planet) to present the concept.
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They've ascended.
"God, root, what is difference?" -- Pitr, 'User Friendly'
Both have been featured in countless articles for decades. My money says if and when, they'll probably be announced in the same week, since they've been tied together in the waiting room for so long. I'll believe them when I see them. If I actually see fusion, it'll probably burn my face off, but then at last I'd be able to mumble through the scars "Finally!"
The informal hypothesis is that the universe is a VR sim.
The null hypothesis (H(0)) is that it is not.
The alternative hypothesis (H(1)) is that it is.
Now, devise a test and fail to show support for H(0) to a probabilistic certainty of at least 95% and you've got something.
Hell, devise an objective test and you've got something.
Maybe I should become a theoretician. I could make up all kinds of whacky stuff without having to worry about messy stuff like trying to apply empirical principles to it.
The launch crew was working in full summer daylight, temperatures between 20 and 33 F.
The telemetry team is in Palestine Texas. Actually the night temperatures there were about the same as Antarctica the last couple days. The researchers, though, are at their respective institutions. No researchers were frozen during the making of TFA.
If the map ever got a glimpse of the terrain, how would it be able to recognize it as the terrain rather than another map? How would we know that it's not "maps all the way down"?
Any PI who engages in (or has engaged in on their behalf) computer forensics should have a certification or degree in that field.
Considering the boneheads who manage to obtain the former, there will be damn few who get the latter, and the whole thing falls apart
> He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.
Some of the material falling into a black hole escapes as Hawking radiation, and also adds to the mass, spin and and/or or charge of the hole, but there's no evidence these are increased by an amount equal to the infalling matter/energy according to E=MC^2. Disappearance of the time dimension at the event horizon also 'freezes' processing and any information there gets locked up.
Does information processing theory (by itself) provide a mechanism for complete loss of some information?
Even if the hole later 'explodes' and becomes a naked singularity (something I can't hold with) there's no indication that what's already in the singularity can affect what's outside other than by the forces noted above.
The summary doesn't match what the article says, and makes claims that appear nowhere else.
The information "removed" was previously released. What's changed is that it now carries the caveat that it hasn't been peer reviewed. That's where they extract the facts and inject the "not properly vetted" in attempt to use the connotation to make it sound worse.
One of the people in charge of designing and carrying out the project is complaining about the data handling. He's one of the people who created the data. The "what to do with it" is a singularly stoopid statement in this light.
There's more, but it's even more nonsensical. I can't figure out how much of this is intentional poor writing/reporting, how much of it is unintentional poor writing/reporting, and how much of it misdirection hastily written because either something peripheral to the main topic has popped out as significant, or even something totally unrelated has come up and they want you to waste your time on this obsfucational press release.
Something is going on that they're not talking about, because they're doing an awful lot of talking about nothing here, in such a way that you spend a lot of time trying to stop misunderstanding it. It shouldn't be this difficult, and didn't used to be. At the very least they're trying to make an issue out of the article, and sidling away from the content. But they're using unsupported statements for doing so. I don't think the content of the article itself or the implications are what they're concerned about. They'd either come out as say so clearly, or they'd disown it clearly.
> I don't know how it is in other or many states, but in my state (Colorado) employment is considered "at will" of both the employee and the employer. The employer's right to fire any employee for any reason is protected, and wrongful termination doesn't really exist.
Most states are "at will" and wrongful termination still exists. It is when someone is fired for a false reason and the employment records reflect that. Yes, they can fire you for any reason, but they have to say why they did no matter what it is, so future employers can evaluate for themselves whether to hire you. Wrongful termination simply forces them to either reverse the improper firing (figure the odds) or force them to be honest about the circumstances.
In your friend's case, he didn't show up and was fired for not showing up. It doesn't apply. They were being dicks about it, and probably looking for a way to hose him over like this, but the reason given was the reason used. Had they fired him for engaging in sexual harrasment, when in fact he had simply failed to show up for the training, then he'd have had a wrongful termination case. He might have gotten a small cash settlement, such as wages due during the time he was wrongfully unemployed. Other wise all he'd get is his records cleared, which is what it's all about. In some cases they can get the job back, but in most cases, who would want it? You just KNOW they'd be looking for any good reason.
Woe be to the company that takes an action against someone for whom they find negative information which was put up by someone else. Such "sociological offices" would be highly unlikely to be able to prove the true source of the posting. IP spoofing is ridiculously easy. Someone who loses their job over such unproven and unprovable data (except by a truly exceptional forensic sysadmin) could have a fine time collecting on a wrongful termination suit, and take the "sociological office" weasels down in the process, and ruining the stock price of of the company by pushing the story onto the media by playing the aggrieved little guy with a little overacting.
To someone even minimally trained in psycops and IP diddling for whom such stuff appears, it should occur that one couple protect themselves from such an action by posting equally off the wall junk, spoofing the IP to hide the fact they posted it themselves, to bait the boneheads trying to make a case. Posting some equally disturbing info about these who're performing the the search would let them know they've been bested in such a way that they dare not continue without outting themselves on the process. One can even make it obvious but unprovable who did it (or had it done for them) without the hyperactive little HR people being able to do anything about it, except perhaps admit they're not good enough at this for the company to use their services, possibly even getting them cut from the salary list.
The best defense if a good offense. The best offense here is to make them publicly shove proof of their own inadequacy up their own ass. A person could have enormous fun and possibly set themselves up for a healthy early retirement. Getting the fsckheads who tried to out you fired would just be icing.
Another scare tactic article by the music industry and others who make money from it.
With respect to hifi equipment (because you can't hear the stuff they're doing on portables):
For roll off (loss of highs and lows) there's the loudness control and/or equalizers.
This is necessary because the auditory system has roll off at low volume.
For volume, there's a volume control.
Obvious.
For dynamic compression there's dynamic range expanders.
An extra piece of equipment, not cheap but not overly costly. But it has the benefit of pushing background noise like tape hiss below the threshold of hearing. DBX noise reduction is based on this. With a little fiddling you can run your line out through a tape deck that has DBX set to "monitor" and get the same reults (at a set level). Pushing the quieter parts to a greater volume causes overall volume increase. This is the gist of TFA. Almost all audio broadcasts and netcasts are compressed, regardless of the original recording. Some psychoacoustic stereo enhancement techniques also do this. And some portables *do* have this. I expect all these are still available, and probably with improvements since then.
That's speaking from experience selling the stuff, and doing live and studio recording, from almost 30 years ago, as well as radio production and broadcast experience from 10 years ago.
For shitty results from recording engineers' wanking, there's don't buy the shit.
So what's Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs and the like selling now? Simply recordings that haven't been fucked with?
kalirion (728907) sez:
"You mean Journal of Irreproducible Results."
Of course I do. I was published in that too, so I misremember it accurately.
Read what I mean, not what I write. Oh, you already did.
Teachers' Guide: "Attention Getting Mechanism". Yes, I actually did/do this in my classes.
Also made the The Best of AIR. I'm more proud of it than I am any of my other research, even the one referenced in 'Thank You For Smoking' ("Why, they've just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's disease!")
But it was my (now replaced) picture in the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, wearing a hot pink tutu, chartreuse fishnet panty hose and black cowboy boots for a concert performance, that made my previous employer rightfully question my sanity. To get back at them for being Googled, I posted the picture on my office door. Yes, I said previous.
You're remembering the Journal of Irreproducible Research, aad you're misremembering the details.
The JIR was purchased by Blackwell Scientific. The staff had a hard time reproducing the good results they had working with their previous publisher, and indeed producing anything at all. The staff quit, and formed AIR.
They'll eventually start putting up "persons of interest" wanted for questioning.
Some of those persons of interest will be completely innocent and have no knowledge of what the FBI is asking. But the negative publicity will cause them grief and likely loss of employment. And they will then sue the FBI and DoJ and get lots of money.
It's happened before without these signs. The signs will make it more likely as well as more public.
One hopes that the implied accusation of having one's face plastered around the country in this way doesn't result in vigilantes taking action. The results could be far worse and no amount of settlement would make up for it.
> How is this considered Science? Why is this in the science section? Answer: We don't know what science is anymore and think anything technological is scientific.
It's in the science section because technology is applied science; basic inventions require scientific research.
And because the people who do science and/or technology understand that there is no clear boundary but rather they are shades of grey of each other.
At least that's how I see it, as someone who does scientific research and technology development.
But it was mostly because there was no technology section for me to submit it under. What you perceive as a global inability to differentiate that which people don't differentiate according to your assumptions is in fact a function of the arbitrary categorization built into the article submission process.
The only "news" here is that the bill was passed -- after the program was implemented. I could access NIH funded work from my office in NIDCD. Anyone could walk in off the street and use the National Library of Medicine's library computers and do the same. Yeah, you had to be in Bethesda to do that, but it was in process in 2002. They started allowing the more directly controlled NIH work to be accessed from off campus in 2004. Since then they've been convincing the journal publishers this was going to happen, like it nor not (they didn't). The bill also specifies the funding, which was already in place because they couldn't test it without funding to pay for the equipment and salaries.
Having all those full articles is great for researchers. It's the right of the taxpayers to have it also. But for them, access to the abstracts is usually sufficient. Medline is too light, and the articles too heavy for general consumption. Access to abstracts has always been possible. I used to read the abstracts from Grateful Med (pre-PubMed)in plain old ASCII text at 1200 baud, from anywhere I happened to be. The front end back then was Gopher.
NIH is not the first government agency to go "open". NASA has already done so (except details of DoD stuff they do). Their storage and access system is far from PubMed convenience. It can take them weeks to find the documents that index the information you're looking for, and tell you where it's stored. Very often in boxes.
Bottom line, this was just a PR action. The work was already done.
> I'm also a bit skittish as I've never imported drugs before. Is it really as simple as adding them to an online shopping cart?
You can, yes. But if you don't have a prescription to show the FDAcops (they even have a SWAT team) via the USPS inspectors, you could get busted. Even with a script they confiscate them sometimes and make you produce the script, and then stall and make you do it again, delaying as long as they can. I've not bought any in few years, so the online places may require a faxed script (unlike the US painkiller sellers who'll let you pay them to get you a script).
Collect all the information you can about them and present it to your GP then for a script.
The original owners were the pharaoh era royalty. The present government does not derive directly from the royal line. Therefore to claim ownership rights on property not rightfully theirs is to deprive the original owners of their ownership.
It's stealing. Lock the bastards up. Call the PIAA (Pyramid Industry Association of Assholes).
The article is about using psychotropics like amphetamines and methylphenidate (Ritalin) to "improve" brain power. In the short term they do. Then they bring on rebound effects like chronic depression. Continuing after that stresses the dopamine system (that these force to work harder) and can bring on Parkinson's. The Alzheimer's drug does the same, but they consider the long term drawbacks to be less than the immediate benefit. Using these drugs for the purpose stated in TFA is called "off-label use". This (mis-)use has been going on since the first stimulants (cocaine among them) became available over a century ago. These are performance enhancers, not true cognitive enhancers. The distinction is important, and there but buried in TFA.
From TFA:
> "Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.
The first company to come out with a memory pill (a true cognitive enhancer) was Sandoz of Switzerland. The name is Hydergine. The person who discovered it was Albert Hoffman. If he hadn't also discovered LSD and become (in)famous for that, he'd probably been nominated for a Nobel for Hydergine (and a bucket full of other highly useful drugs of his day). He mentioned he takes Hydergine 4 or 5 times a day -- at his 100th birthday party.
There have been many such drugs (nootropics; noh'-oh-troh''-pics) created since then. All of them are owned by companies that are owned by people not from the U.S. and so no U.S. companies can make profit from them. Thus, the FDA won't approve them, and pretend they don't exist. As evidence I point to recent Nobel recipient Eric Kandel (for his work on the dopamine system) who claimed he'd use his award money to create the first cognitive enhancing drug (nootropic), essentially publicly and purposefully ignoring Hoffman's discovery and the subsequent inventions.
On my way to a PhD in neuroscience, I got a master's in healthcare administration. I learned way too much about the FDA and big pharma to ever be comfortable with them again. The above statement is only one reason for that. An excuse given for not approving it is that it can cause one to become dizzy if they stand up fast. In other words, it's an effective anti-hypertensive -- it lowers blood pressure. That's more a benefit than a drawback, and is more harmless than the "acceptable" side effects from recent drugs being advertised. Hydergine and the other nootropics have far fewer negative side effects than most drugs and virtually no interaction with any other drugs, and have beneficial side effects besides. These are approved in part by the FDA, but only for advanced brain degenerative diseases, where their benefit is fairly negligible and unrecognizable. Use by those without such disease is not approved, and actively discouraged.
The good news is that due to the 1989 AIDS drug law, one can import from overseas 90 days worth at a time of any drug approved there for the on-label use. The bad news is that the USPS will try to confiscate any drugs coming from outside the US -- even those allowed by the 1989 AIDS law. This is due to pressure from the FDA, the corporate welfare office for big pharma.
I myself took Hydergine and Nootropil for 2 years, instead of the levodopa prescribed for Parkinson's. After that I no longer needed the levodopa (and still don't, a decade later), which itself has a rebound effect, causing permanent and progressive degeneration of motor control. If it weren't for these nootropics I probably would never have been able to finish my PhD. They cost me about $150 per 90 days, sent from Portugal. I consider that to be the best value for money spent in my entire life.
> "But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
The college students will graduate, get jobs, get mortgages and run up other debts, and struggle with the debt load vs. their wages. And they will change their attitude towards ownership and such, just as generations before them have.
Trust me, I know. I've watched 90something percent of my fellow hippie-era friends and acquaintances become right wing conservatives. If they'll do it, generations less committed to their own hubris are all the more likely to.
Absolute zero has a definition based on the behavior of particles and their interaction.
It is that they have no vibrations, and that they're completely coupled.
Absolute hot should have a similar definition as a target.
As an opposite to absolute zero, it would be that particles cannot be made to vibrate more, and that they are completely uncoupled. Uncoupling requires they not interact with each other, which means they don't "feel" the 4 forces, even after those have unified, supposedly at the Plank temperature. If they still feel the unified forces at 10^32 K, the uncoupling from the unified forces (Force? U-force?) may be greater than the Plank temperature.
Finding a way to measure something that's completely uncoupled without coupling a measurement device to it is going to be a trick, in the real sense. Measuring absolute zero is a trick of taking things very near 0 K and using lasers to control their vibration such that they appear to be closer to 0 K. And in one case I seem to recall to be less than 0 K, evidence that's it's truly a trick. I don't recall anyone getting anything to behave exactly like 0 K except as being in a range around it which the measuring device was unable to resolve well enough to prove the behavior as having absolutely no vibration.
What could possibly possess someone "In an age of identity theft and other confidentiality concerns" to have a drive replaced and leave sensitive information on it?
Drawing a parallel to mechanics offering parts back doesn't apply.
If a mechanic changes disk pads, they might offer them.
If a mechanic changes a motor, they damn skippy don't offer the old one.
If Apple changed just the platter, they could offer that, but that's not how drives are changed. The entire drive mechanism and electronics is changed.
Even IF Apple (or anyone) offered the old drive back, the information has already passed through their hands, and so should be considered compromised. I can't see how that should be considered anyone's fault but the owner's.
The wife reminds me that quantums, being able to traverse the multiverse(s?) must therefore be able to travel any direction in time. Therefore Robert Hooke may have gotten the idea from Pratchett. Given that more people have read Discworld books than have read Hooke's works, and that any of them may emit idea quantums, she is most likely correct.
> Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks
But due to quantum (those pesky quantums get into everything) there are particles of ideas zipping around the multiverse(s?) just waiting for a properly receptive mind to collide with, transferring the thought into it from Some Place Else. It is therefore likely that PTerry got zapped by more than one such idea quantums (quite possibly a virtual cosmic shower of them) from The Disc, in this case one emitted from the mind of Robert Dearheart.*
The High Energy Magic division of U.U. is currently hard at work researching a way to make peoples' minds less resistant to idea quantums. Unfortunately, being based on magic rather than technology (as is the Clacks), it is unlikely this will ever work on minds on our planet, where it's needed far more than on the Disc.
* The same probably happened to Robert Hooke. The ass toot reader should examine the history, especially the year of Hooke's presentation to the Royal Society, and see that "17th century" is in fact accurate. Hooke didn't have it built, but he was the first (on this planet) to present the concept.