some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research
Psychedelics are dangerous. They are very effective at treating addictions, and modern society is entirely build around all the consumers running on hamster wheels for their next hit. They grant self-awareness, and that just might make the marionette see the strings they dance from. But even more dangerously they might make the puppetmasters realize those same strings also tie the hand that holds them.
I think part of what LSD does is to stimulate the brain in a way that makes more ideas seem like they provide a profound understanding or meaning.
No, what it does is remove the "anttention filter" from your brain. It doesn't cause hallucinations; it's just that there are many possible ways of interpreting your sensory inputs at any given time, and LSD removes the filter that rejects all but the most likely, thus your attention moves between them constantly. But of course physical senses are not the only inputs to your consciousness. You also get a constant analysis from whatever brain structures you've managed to build over your lifetime. These, too, are sent unfiltered to your consciousness on a psychedelic trip, which is why it might "unstuck" you when solving a problem.
It's not that LSD generates profound understanding, it's that it prevents you from tuning yourself out. You always had the ability to follow an idea and see what its implications are, but you were too busy doing whatever to bother, or maybe you simply didn't like them. LSD means you no longer have the ability to not follow them, and since everything is connected to everything else, you can start from almost anything and end up realizing very important (to you) things.
On the bad side, the brain structures responsible for detecting threats are also unfiltered, thus you can end up in a cascade of anxiety-fear-terror ("bad trip"). However, removing the filter also makes you more aware of how your mind works, thus a large dose of LSD might allow you to recognize fear as a simple neural circuit firing, which can be ignored; this kind of self-awareness helps deal with it after the trip ends, too, and would be quite useful for dying patients. It also extends to things like addictions.
I know in college we used to wander around campus and really be taken in by the details of architecture on campus buildings. I can remember being in a small, man-made concrete "amphitheater" and if you stood at the focal point of its shape you would hear a kind of perfect echo. Suddenly mathematics and architecture became unified in some kind of perfect synergy that was quite profound at the time. Later, of course, it was just a kind of ugly, modernist college campus landscape feature that nobody ever used for its theater-like purpose.
This is a good example of what I meant: an ugly piece of architecture still implies numerous things about physics, aesthetics, math, etc. People are simply trained to ignore them all, and dismiss the whole thing as "an ugly piece of architecture". That's more efficient, but also means you are missing almost everything around you - and are going to get a profound insight should you ever stop to look.
How exactly does putting your own life on the line in order to kill people make you more of a monster?
Like I said: if you can afford to treat war as a game where you take unnecessary risks for the sake of honor or sportmanship or whatever, you can afford to not fight it in the first place. It's not risking your life that makes you a monster, it's fighting a war that you can treat as a goddamn sports event that does it.
We're not talking about "good sportsmanship", we're talking about murdering people from the opposite side of the planet.
Like I said: if you have to kill them, not giving them a chance is just common sense. And if you can afford to give them a chance, why are you killing them in the first place? The victims are just as dead, whether you kill them from the other side of the planet or up close and personal.
Throughout human history if you wanted to kill me, you had to expose yourself to the chance that I would kill you instead. I might be out manned and out gunned, but I had at least a slim chance to kill my attacker and exact a measure of vengeance for my fallen comrades. War was a human endeavor.
This kind of romanticising of war doesn't do you any favours.
Today a "soldier" can kill people by the dozens or hundreds, without ever risking anything more than having his weapon platform destroyed. You really think that's going to somehow make him *less* of a monster in the eyes of his victims?
Dunno, but I do know if someone could kill me from the distance but instead gives me a "fighting chance", then whatever reason he had to want me dead in the first place is clearly not really that important to him.
Also, why do you care about what the victims think? Both Nazis and the Japanese Empire - and modern Japan, to an extent - claimed being victims to the bitter end. Does this have some connection to the American justice system's obsession of extorting confessions?
Yeah, sure, drones and airstrikes may be more efficient in terms of friendly lives spent and the corresponding social backlash back home, but from the opposite perspective what sort of man slaughters people without even giving them a chance to fight back?
Anyone who isn't a complete monster? Because fair fight is for sports, and if that's what killing people is for you, then that's what you are.
Don't use deadly force unless the other option is even worse, and if it's worse, don't risk it by giving your target a change. If you have some personal issues you need to solve through "honorable" bloodshed, go play Counter-Strike or paintball or something. Don't take that shit out on real people with real bullets, and if you do, don't think that letting them shoot back makes you any less of a murderer.
Maybe people need to realize that when you are in public, no amount of legislation is going to change how trivial snapping a picture is.
Growing marijuana is trivial, far more so than setting up giant license plate databases, but that hasn't stopped the state from trying to stomp the practice out. That pot growers go to jail yet stalkers walk free reflects society's ethics, not physical reality. And that reflection looks more and more like East Germany every day.
Re:Lousy coders will be lousy coders
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
"Coders" like you want a language to protect you from being stupid because you are stupid. It is your kind that insists everything be made child proof because you are a child yourself.
Coding is a bit like driving: everyone is better than average and doesn't need safety features, but amazingly enough, those features still save lives. Now, of course you don't ever make mistakes, but mere mortals do, so programming languages that come with mandatory training wheels are a sad necessity to limit the havoc.
Taking into account Murphy's law is neither childish nor stupid, it's just good engineering. Name-calling, however, is both. You're exactly the kind of "l33t h4x0r c0d3r" who'll end up coding the next Mt.Gox.
Re:Too Little, Too Late & MtGox
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
In PHP this is now solved with parameterized queries.
It's solved everywhere with parameterized queries, but we still get SQL injection attacks since people insist on passing parameters inline. At this point I'm convinced that SQL drivers for scripting languages should simply disallow sending SQL queries as strings and instead have an API to build parse trees programmatically. But of course some laserbrain would insist on adding "parseSQLtext" function...
Re:"hello" == 0 is TRUE
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
For example, if a > c and b > c, it's not always the case that a + b > c. Or a * b > c.
Why would anyone ever assume the latter? It's not true for anything but natural numbers (0.5 > 0.3, 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25 < 0.3).
Re:Wake me they fix namespaces
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 1
Wake me when they decide to not care if it breaks existing php implementations and do some real clean up on the language.
Every time you break existing applications, you create systms that are stuck with old and buggy versions. That's bad enough normally, but is a terrible idea in a language meant for writing Internet-facing apps. Dealing with detritus is preferable to burning down the house to get rid of it.
Seriously, if you come here to talk about how this isn't a fundamental bitcoin problem, you deserve to have your noise smacked with newspaper like a dog.
It isn't. It's a problem with people setting up websites to act as banks, and other people trusting them with their money. Pointing this up does not "deserve" violence.
The only 'benefit' bitcoin has is that its unregulated and not as well watched by the government...
The benefit of Bitcoin is that it can be securely transferred between people over the Internet without involving third parties, such as banks or credit card companies.
I'm sorry, its easy for someone to setup an exchange and let someone else steal the coins from the 'hot wallet', whatever the fuck that is.
Perhaps you should Google it? Or were you attempting to impress us with your ignorance of all things Bitcoin?
THIS WHAT WE'VE BEEN TELLING YOUR STUPID DUMB ASSES ABOUT, NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP, ITS A SHITTY IDEA.
All caps does not give your argument any extra impacts. It simply makes you seem like a moron.
Bitcoin has done so, time after time again, in a market where "cutthroat competition" isn't metaphorical. It works fine. What it currently lacks is price stability, so it could be adopted by various Internet-based legtimitate retail shops like Steam and GoG.
In the European family of nations, it really does seem like Russia is the drunk uncle who likes to abuse his wife and kids and gets mad when they try to move out and go to a shelter.
You can convert it to energy though. Which he didn't do. Ergo the only weapons of mass destruction are atomic bombs.
Incorrect. Any release of energy means converting mass to energy. The only thing that makes nuclear reactions special is that the energy released is so great that the corresponding mass loss becomes easily measurable.
Some countries never change. But at least they act as efficient evangelists for Nato.
Both Ukraine and Georgia issues are started by blatant cases of cultural imperialism.
No, they were started by Putin trying to build a third Russian Empire on the ruins of Soviet Union. At this point the hope for Russia, the region and perhaps the world is that old age does its job before he can cause irreparable damage.
The truly sad thing is that it's saber-rattling like this that keeps Russia from assuming the place its size, population and natural resources would otherwise entitle it to. No one wants to deal with people who renege on their deals and send in the military the second they get - or manufacture - an excuse. Why do you think Ukrainians hated the very thought of "closer ties" - also known as chains - with Russia enough to revolt?
All former soviet republic countries are ruled by former soviet statesmen who want to justify their positions by encouraging local nationalism.
Obviously uniquely shared by thousands of fellow students.
...In a country of 300 million people.
Maybe everyone should be going to schools like that.
Maybe everyone should do the responsible thing and simply not go to college if they can't afford it without debt. Surely the genius of free market will figure out how to run a modern economy with population not educated beyond high school level. The rest of the world can watch and learn from the inevitable success, thus refuting the socialist notion of state-subsidized higher education once and for all.
Its a biochemical reaction. We've decided to name that reaction 'love.'
Nitpick: "love" is an abstract concept. It's internal representation in human brains is a biochemical reaction. But so is math's, and saying "addition is a biochemical reaction" would be misleading at best.
Do you think that the class that controls wealth controls only monetary wealth? They own the land, too! They own the resources, too!
Which are worth less and less units of currency as its value rises. Better sell them ASAP to any sucker who's buying, before your peers will.
They're not going to indulge you, plucky upstart, with the chance to knock them from their perch; that would be stupid of them.[...]Ultimately, you end up with a massive, destitute underclass that eventually snaps, revolts, and slaughters the hoarding class.
So which one is it? Are the one percent fiendishy cunning tyrants with iron self-control and enough mutual trust to overcome the tragedy of commons between themselves, or are they short-sighted idiots? Because you're kinda arguing for both here.
There's historical context for this. It's called the landed gentry. In olden times, they controlled the vast majority of wealth in their societies, and despite the occasional fall from grace or meteoric rise, the landed gentry was quite stable, and landed families could maintain themselves over centuries.
Nowadays, when agriculture is no longer the primary producer of wealth, we have dropped the requirement to own land. But modern society still has its aristocracy, and suffers from their predations.
You have no legal guarantee of privacy, no. However, up to recently you had de facto expectation of privacy: you were just a face in the crowd, and tracking you required considerable effort. When that face can and will be constantly recorded and automatically recognized, that privacy is gone. Of course people are going to be upset about that, and since the law does not protect them, they'll be doing it themselves.
To clarify: it's not that you can be seen or even photographed that's the problem, it's that in the Information Age all your movements can be Googled at a later date. Add to that the need to impress an employer to earn a living, and you have the makings of a dystopia East Germany would had been envious of.
You can't attack the owner of said camera, or take the camera away.
As this story shows, yes you can, and lots of people will. And while I can't advocate violence, I certainly understand the desire to be left alone.
And it's the way it should be.
As technology advances, the implications of things change. Failure to consider those changed implications results in strife, which will force the issue. Why not skip that part and jump right into rethinking social norms, before someone gets seriously hurt?
i see the older generation from my birth country eating all kinds of crap i rarely touch and they are all on all kinds of prescription drugs to control high blood pressure and lots of other problems. meanwhile my wife and i take care of ourselves and people think we look 10 years younger
You look 10 years younger than your parents? Holy shit, that's some miracle diet you're on!
When medical science advances so that with enough money we could keep someone alive indefinitely. Then the question is, is it worth it?
Probably.
Most medicines are cheap to manufacture; it's the initial research that costs money, which gets passed on to consumers through patents. Machines cost some, but are getting cheaper and better as technology marches on. That leaves doctor time as the main cost, but advancing automation should eliminate most of checkups.
There aren't that many seriously ill people around, so it's probably better to eat the costs than start putting up death panels and deal with not only the moral issues but all the fallout from seriously pissed off people who's loved onces got the short stick.
Slashdot Mirror
Psychedelics are dangerous. They are very effective at treating addictions, and modern society is entirely build around all the consumers running on hamster wheels for their next hit. They grant self-awareness, and that just might make the marionette see the strings they dance from. But even more dangerously they might make the puppetmasters realize those same strings also tie the hand that holds them.
No, what it does is remove the "anttention filter" from your brain. It doesn't cause hallucinations; it's just that there are many possible ways of interpreting your sensory inputs at any given time, and LSD removes the filter that rejects all but the most likely, thus your attention moves between them constantly. But of course physical senses are not the only inputs to your consciousness. You also get a constant analysis from whatever brain structures you've managed to build over your lifetime. These, too, are sent unfiltered to your consciousness on a psychedelic trip, which is why it might "unstuck" you when solving a problem.
It's not that LSD generates profound understanding, it's that it prevents you from tuning yourself out. You always had the ability to follow an idea and see what its implications are, but you were too busy doing whatever to bother, or maybe you simply didn't like them. LSD means you no longer have the ability to not follow them, and since everything is connected to everything else, you can start from almost anything and end up realizing very important (to you) things.
On the bad side, the brain structures responsible for detecting threats are also unfiltered, thus you can end up in a cascade of anxiety-fear-terror ("bad trip"). However, removing the filter also makes you more aware of how your mind works, thus a large dose of LSD might allow you to recognize fear as a simple neural circuit firing, which can be ignored; this kind of self-awareness helps deal with it after the trip ends, too, and would be quite useful for dying patients. It also extends to things like addictions.
This is a good example of what I meant: an ugly piece of architecture still implies numerous things about physics, aesthetics, math, etc. People are simply trained to ignore them all, and dismiss the whole thing as "an ugly piece of architecture". That's more efficient, but also means you are missing almost everything around you - and are going to get a profound insight should you ever stop to look.
Like I said: if you can afford to treat war as a game where you take unnecessary risks for the sake of honor or sportmanship or whatever, you can afford to not fight it in the first place. It's not risking your life that makes you a monster, it's fighting a war that you can treat as a goddamn sports event that does it.
Like I said: if you have to kill them, not giving them a chance is just common sense. And if you can afford to give them a chance, why are you killing them in the first place? The victims are just as dead, whether you kill them from the other side of the planet or up close and personal.
This kind of romanticising of war doesn't do you any favours.
Dunno, but I do know if someone could kill me from the distance but instead gives me a "fighting chance", then whatever reason he had to want me dead in the first place is clearly not really that important to him.
Also, why do you care about what the victims think? Both Nazis and the Japanese Empire - and modern Japan, to an extent - claimed being victims to the bitter end. Does this have some connection to the American justice system's obsession of extorting confessions?
Yes. The rest of us just dread to face a world without you.
Anyone who isn't a complete monster? Because fair fight is for sports, and if that's what killing people is for you, then that's what you are.
Don't use deadly force unless the other option is even worse, and if it's worse, don't risk it by giving your target a change. If you have some personal issues you need to solve through "honorable" bloodshed, go play Counter-Strike or paintball or something. Don't take that shit out on real people with real bullets, and if you do, don't think that letting them shoot back makes you any less of a murderer.
"Human beings are worthless; only property matters" seems to be a pretty accurate summary of conservative mindset.
According to Wikipedia, Sun is larger than 85% of stars in the Milky Way.
Growing marijuana is trivial, far more so than setting up giant license plate databases, but that hasn't stopped the state from trying to stomp the practice out. That pot growers go to jail yet stalkers walk free reflects society's ethics, not physical reality. And that reflection looks more and more like East Germany every day.
Coding is a bit like driving: everyone is better than average and doesn't need safety features, but amazingly enough, those features still save lives. Now, of course you don't ever make mistakes, but mere mortals do, so programming languages that come with mandatory training wheels are a sad necessity to limit the havoc.
Taking into account Murphy's law is neither childish nor stupid, it's just good engineering. Name-calling, however, is both. You're exactly the kind of "l33t h4x0r c0d3r" who'll end up coding the next Mt.Gox.
It's solved everywhere with parameterized queries, but we still get SQL injection attacks since people insist on passing parameters inline. At this point I'm convinced that SQL drivers for scripting languages should simply disallow sending SQL queries as strings and instead have an API to build parse trees programmatically. But of course some laserbrain would insist on adding "parseSQLtext" function...
Why would anyone ever assume the latter? It's not true for anything but natural numbers (0.5 > 0.3, 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25 < 0.3).
Every time you break existing applications, you create systms that are stuck with old and buggy versions. That's bad enough normally, but is a terrible idea in a language meant for writing Internet-facing apps. Dealing with detritus is preferable to burning down the house to get rid of it.
Just out of curiosity: how does a pair of abstract concepts conceive a child?
It isn't. It's a problem with people setting up websites to act as banks, and other people trusting them with their money. Pointing this up does not "deserve" violence.
The benefit of Bitcoin is that it can be securely transferred between people over the Internet without involving third parties, such as banks or credit card companies.
Perhaps you should Google it? Or were you attempting to impress us with your ignorance of all things Bitcoin?
All caps does not give your argument any extra impacts. It simply makes you seem like a moron.
Bitcoin has done so, time after time again, in a market where "cutthroat competition" isn't metaphorical. It works fine. What it currently lacks is price stability, so it could be adopted by various Internet-based legtimitate retail shops like Steam and GoG.
http://satwcomic.com/the-boogeyman-comes-at-night.
And yeah, that's all too accurate. Except the boogeyman has nukes.
Incorrect. Any release of energy means converting mass to energy. The only thing that makes nuclear reactions special is that the energy released is so great that the corresponding mass loss becomes easily measurable.
That's probably safest. Wouldn't want to accidentally eat polonium.
Of course there was. And Winter War was started by the shelling of Mainila.
Some countries never change. But at least they act as efficient evangelists for Nato.
No, they were started by Putin trying to build a third Russian Empire on the ruins of Soviet Union. At this point the hope for Russia, the region and perhaps the world is that old age does its job before he can cause irreparable damage.
The truly sad thing is that it's saber-rattling like this that keeps Russia from assuming the place its size, population and natural resources would otherwise entitle it to. No one wants to deal with people who renege on their deals and send in the military the second they get - or manufacture - an excuse. Why do you think Ukrainians hated the very thought of "closer ties" - also known as chains - with Russia enough to revolt?
And Russia is the worst of the lot.
...In a country of 300 million people.
Maybe everyone should do the responsible thing and simply not go to college if they can't afford it without debt. Surely the genius of free market will figure out how to run a modern economy with population not educated beyond high school level. The rest of the world can watch and learn from the inevitable success, thus refuting the socialist notion of state-subsidized higher education once and for all.
It's a business, markets almost exclusively to young and inexperienced, and has arranged for them to easily borrow lots and lots and lots of money.
Businessmen are greedy, bureaucrats are stupid, and kids get caught in the middle.
Which are worth less and less units of currency as its value rises. Better sell them ASAP to any sucker who's buying, before your peers will.
So which one is it? Are the one percent fiendishy cunning tyrants with iron self-control and enough mutual trust to overcome the tragedy of commons between themselves, or are they short-sighted idiots? Because you're kinda arguing for both here.
Nowadays, when agriculture is no longer the primary producer of wealth, we have dropped the requirement to own land. But modern society still has its aristocracy, and suffers from their predations.
You have no legal guarantee of privacy, no. However, up to recently you had de facto expectation of privacy: you were just a face in the crowd, and tracking you required considerable effort. When that face can and will be constantly recorded and automatically recognized, that privacy is gone. Of course people are going to be upset about that, and since the law does not protect them, they'll be doing it themselves.
To clarify: it's not that you can be seen or even photographed that's the problem, it's that in the Information Age all your movements can be Googled at a later date. Add to that the need to impress an employer to earn a living, and you have the makings of a dystopia East Germany would had been envious of.
As this story shows, yes you can, and lots of people will. And while I can't advocate violence, I certainly understand the desire to be left alone.
As technology advances, the implications of things change. Failure to consider those changed implications results in strife, which will force the issue. Why not skip that part and jump right into rethinking social norms, before someone gets seriously hurt?
You look 10 years younger than your parents? Holy shit, that's some miracle diet you're on!
Probably.
Most medicines are cheap to manufacture; it's the initial research that costs money, which gets passed on to consumers through patents. Machines cost some, but are getting cheaper and better as technology marches on. That leaves doctor time as the main cost, but advancing automation should eliminate most of checkups.
There aren't that many seriously ill people around, so it's probably better to eat the costs than start putting up death panels and deal with not only the moral issues but all the fallout from seriously pissed off people who's loved onces got the short stick.