The end result of disabling the pleasure center may be inevitable. At least doing it in the beginning may be a way to get them stop completely and literally save their lives and increase the overall quality from a health standpoint alone. They may become emotionless, but can still live otherwise.
Just my two cents. I'm not a doctor. Just know some very unfortunate recovered drug addicts that have more in common with Vulcans now than humans.
The butch^H^H^H^H^Hsurgery has a 47% success rate.
Meanwhile, there's a 60% risk of observed side-effects, with 51% observed personality change. Usually when the occurrence of side-effects is greater than the success rate, the treatment is considered ineffective and people stop.
Of course, that 60% risk is of observed side-effects, and only the most naive doctor would claim that burning out a whole chunk of brain tissue ever has no side-effects....
That's the real answer, like asking people with anomalous genitalia if they were happy with their gender assignment surgery they had as babies. Overwhelmingly they were not,
Where did you get your figures from? Last time I saw any figures, it claimed that 50% were happy within their assigned gender group, 50% weren't. Perhaps counterintuitively, this means the interventions were utterly valueless from a statistical point of view. (Ie the results would have been just as good if there had been no reassignment.)
But I must be missing something here, because shouldn't the question be:
Is it worth it to cure addiction if you utterly destroy everything that makes life worth living
Exactly. But not only have you destroyed the concept of enjoyment entirely, you've also failed to convert the otherwise-incurable into a productive member of society, because most learning relies on the reward process. If there is no reward, there is no motivation to learn (except where failure causes pain).
How "human" is someone without the nucleus accumbus? Would we recognise ourselves in them, or would their behaviour evoke an uncanny valley response?
Challenge: Tell me why my post is wrong, but banning gus is right.
That's an impossible challenge. If you can't see the difference already, then you are predisposed not to see the difference between the target of a crime and the means of committing a crime.
The cause of theft: people carry items worth stealing!
The cause of rape: ?
Please follow the same logic and see how idiotic it is.
Let's take your logic the other way:
The cause of being kidnapped and executed in drug-lord-controlled areas of foreign countries: visiting drug-lord-controlled areas of foreign countries
Well you're right: it's not the cause, but a contributory factor. I would appreciate being told where these drug-lord-controlled (or guerilla-rebel-held) areas are so that I can avoid them. And if I have to pass through them, I would appreciate advice about how not to get kidnapped for ransom.
Q: Would it be cheaper for every local government to have a space-based hurricane prediction system, or for the federal government to have a single one?
Unfortunately here Vancouver BC you have The Province and Vancouver Sun who are owned but the same company. Most of the stories could be reported on by regular folks while half of the shit on there is sensationalized news.
Sadly, this is something of a self-sustaining death spiral. Newspapers have been struggling for a while to generate the funds for proper journalism, which makes the newspapers commercially less appealling.
Very few TV news broadcasts ever do deep investigative journalism, and as traditional newspapers die off, we're becoming less and less well informed...
Being a news aggregator pay-walls in general is bad news for slashdot.
The only content that slashdot actually has is the comments.
But... but... but... are you trying to say the comments are valueless? Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of comments? Does it run Crysis? In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster of comments runs Crysis on YOU.
Why? For me it's a great way to pretend your rented application-on-a-server is more sophisticated than it is.
Make an app that can run on a wee ARM unit, shove in one or two extras to increase the concurrent user limit and have them back themselves up to two Ethernet-enabled hard-drives. Include an internal mini-router with NAS.
As the components are so cheap, shove a couple of spare units and devise a suitably pseudo-technical "fix" process that switches out a broken unit for the internal spare, making you look good in front of the client!
Now, unless you want to work out the math against a bunch of NASA scientists I would just wait for them to release some more details before jumping to conclusions that this is a worthless plan.
NASA employs some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, and they've run the figures. They have reasons for believing this is useful, and they are the guys with the figures. A bunch of seemingly-obvious statements doesn't trump several hundred doctors of astrophysics with access to incredible supercomputers at their disposal....
Still, you could have given me the benefit of the doubt, or you could have, you know, asked. Instead you jumped straight to the conclusion that I was a moaning scrounger. That's what Mail readers do.
Rome only gave permission to celebrate mass in vulgar[1] languages in the 60s, so the translation is fairly new. Also, as the 1st person plural is used, it is clear that this translation doesn't predate that time: the Latin creed is "credo" -- I believe -- and it was only in the English translation that this became "we" believe. The Gaelic translation comes via the English-speaking bishops.
I don't know who translated it, but while I'm pretty certain it wasn't my first Gaelic teacher (I believe she's a presbyterian and not quite old enough), it would likely have been someone of a similar background, and my teacher passed on the myth that "tha mi a' dèanamh" is both "I'm doing" and "I do", even though she intuitively knows that this is complete nonsense. This sort of conscious rule can infect both teaching and translations.
This also happens in English: consider teacher/parents insisting on "may I...?" and saying "can I...?" themselves, or "he and I" vs "me and him, or "If I were you"/"If I was you".
[1] In the Latin sense of the word, meaning the languages of the common people.
The bit where I said "full-time"...? I meant full-time as in permanent. If they had only pushed casual jobs at me, fine, but they kept pushing jobs at me that weren't seasonal so I wasn't suitable. Others were in places that you couldn't get to without a car so weren't suitable. I was forced to apply, so I applied. The employers didn't even respond to me... because I wasn't suitable. In my life I've spent 3 months on Jobseekers, and 9 years working full-time, earning a good salary and putting money back into the pot. When I found myself unemployed two years ago, I didn't get any government support because I'd been saving for years.
Now go and save your right-wing ranting for the Daily Mail and the UKIP newsletter.
Not only is it not totalitarian to expect people out of work claiming Job Seekers allowance to be looking for work, it is actually a requirement to receive the benefit.
Yes, looking for work is a requirement. A stupid totalitarian declares formal rules. A clever totalitarian creates a reasonable rule, then adds various dubious caveats. If IDS says that "anyone without a job after signing up to the scheme would be lacking 'imagination,'" then we're talking about the reasonable rule "jobseekers allowance only for those seeking work" backed up with the caveat that "if you're unemployed, it's your own fault," despite the fact that we're in a recession and unemployment is quite high.
He's ignoring that indolence is not the only cause of unemployment.
The article says it's opt-in! It only applies to that web-site too. That's obviously a huge omission to make from the summary.
You've not visited a UK jobcentre recently, I take it. "Opt-in" at the government level is like (to use a corporate analogy) "recommendations" from the board that because "encouraged" at the upper management, "strongly encouraged" by the time it reaches middle management, and "optional, but if you don't do it it won't look good at your next pay review" by the time it reaches the ground-floor grunts. Every two weeks is your "pay review" in the jobcentre and if you think it's wearing having to defend your performance to your boss once a year, try explaining to your case officer that we're in a recession and there's no jobs every two weeks.
Jobcentre policies lead you to apply for jobs you're not qualified for, wasting your own time and the time of several HR departments, just to prove you're "trying". My first experience of claiming unemployment benefit was after graduating, and even though I had a proper graduate job starting 3 months later, they kept pushing adverts for full-time posts in shops and fast-food restaurants at me. In the end I started ignoring them, and they threatened to withdraw my benefits if I didn't pick up my game in the next month. And that job I mentioned? Yeah, that was starting two weeks after that letter....
But is a nuclear bomb truly "violence"? Personally I think it's something a little more chilling -- it's cold and calculated with little of the emotional content of headbutting someone for grabbing your girlfriend's arse....
Perfect length of arm? It's not. I'm not going to do any literature research while I'm sitting in my workplace, but I believe there are repetitive strain injuries linked to masturbation, because it involves abusing several joints....
For some reason, whenever I read that phrase, I always read it to the tune of "The Hustle," by Van McCoy.
You do realise that you've now contaminated half of/. with that thought, right? I'm guessing that was your intention. This will probably go viral and end up infecting us all...!
It's not really a linguistic term at all, it's a subjective judgement.:-) It's not just "historically didn't but does now" -- I say "shouldn't" because everyone says it's due to contact with English, even though it's something that English itself doesn't do. So "shouldn't" in the sense of "there's no logical reason for it either inside the language or between languages".
The big example is linking to the bad charicature of Indian English I highlighted above: I am thinking. In Irish, they still use the "habitual" -- equivalent to "I believe", but in Scottish Gaelic only conservative speakers use "creididh mi" (or more idiomatically "cha chreid mi" -- I don't believe) and increasing numbers of youngsters (and learners) are saying "tha mi a' creidsinn" -- "I am believing".
So you'll see what I mean about their being no good reason for it. Does that make it a bad thing? Is there such a thing as a "bad" language change? In this case I'm tempted to say "yes"....
I was really talking about comparison to a lot of other colonies, which came and went and were fought over a lot. And I was trying to avoid the word "colony" which means something different in Indian English anyway.....
Learning styles have been shown to be irrelevant: see Pashler, H.; McDaniel, M.; Rohrer, D.; Bjork, R. (2008). "Learning styles: Concepts and evidence". Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9: 105–119.
Note that they don't say that learning styles "don't exist", just that whether they exist or not, nobody has been able to demonstrably improve teaching or learning by conscious application of learning styles.
Good teaching is better for everybody, regardless of learning "style".
Slashdot Mirror
The end result of disabling the pleasure center may be inevitable. At least doing it in the beginning may be a way to get them stop completely and literally save their lives and increase the overall quality from a health standpoint alone. They may become emotionless, but can still live otherwise.
Just my two cents. I'm not a doctor. Just know some very unfortunate recovered drug addicts that have more in common with Vulcans now than humans.
The butch^H^H^H^H^Hsurgery has a 47% success rate.
Meanwhile, there's a 60% risk of observed side-effects, with 51% observed personality change. Usually when the occurrence of side-effects is greater than the success rate, the treatment is considered ineffective and people stop.
Of course, that 60% risk is of observed side-effects, and only the most naive doctor would claim that burning out a whole chunk of brain tissue ever has no side-effects....
That's the real answer, like asking people with anomalous genitalia if they were happy with their gender assignment surgery they had as babies. Overwhelmingly they were not,
Where did you get your figures from? Last time I saw any figures, it claimed that 50% were happy within their assigned gender group, 50% weren't. Perhaps counterintuitively, this means the interventions were utterly valueless from a statistical point of view. (Ie the results would have been just as good if there had been no reassignment.)
But I must be missing something here, because shouldn't the question be: Is it worth it to cure addiction if you utterly destroy everything that makes life worth living
Exactly. But not only have you destroyed the concept of enjoyment entirely, you've also failed to convert the otherwise-incurable into a productive member of society, because most learning relies on the reward process. If there is no reward, there is no motivation to learn (except where failure causes pain).
How "human" is someone without the nucleus accumbus? Would we recognise ourselves in them, or would their behaviour evoke an uncanny valley response?
Challenge: Tell me why my post is wrong, but banning gus is right.
That's an impossible challenge. If you can't see the difference already, then you are predisposed not to see the difference between the target of a crime and the means of committing a crime.
The cause of theft: people carry items worth stealing! The cause of rape: ?
Please follow the same logic and see how idiotic it is.
Let's take your logic the other way:
The cause of being kidnapped and executed in drug-lord-controlled areas of foreign countries: visiting drug-lord-controlled areas of foreign countries
Well you're right: it's not the cause, but a contributory factor. I would appreciate being told where these drug-lord-controlled (or guerilla-rebel-held) areas are so that I can avoid them. And if I have to pass through them, I would appreciate advice about how not to get kidnapped for ransom.
Q: Would it be cheaper for every local government to have a space-based hurricane prediction system, or for the federal government to have a single one?
Unfortunately here Vancouver BC you have The Province and Vancouver Sun who are owned but the same company. Most of the stories could be reported on by regular folks while half of the shit on there is sensationalized news.
Sadly, this is something of a self-sustaining death spiral. Newspapers have been struggling for a while to generate the funds for proper journalism, which makes the newspapers commercially less appealling.
Very few TV news broadcasts ever do deep investigative journalism, and as traditional newspapers die off, we're becoming less and less well informed...
Being a news aggregator pay-walls in general is bad news for slashdot.
The only content that slashdot actually has is the comments.
But... but... but... are you trying to say the comments are valueless? Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of comments? Does it run Crysis? In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster of comments runs Crysis on YOU.
See? Valuable, original IP!
His association of "Chinese" with "viruses" was rather narrow-minded and not empirically supported.
Why? For me it's a great way to pretend your rented application-on-a-server is more sophisticated than it is.
Make an app that can run on a wee ARM unit, shove in one or two extras to increase the concurrent user limit and have them back themselves up to two Ethernet-enabled hard-drives. Include an internal mini-router with NAS.
As the components are so cheap, shove a couple of spare units and devise a suitably pseudo-technical "fix" process that switches out a broken unit for the internal spare, making you look good in front of the client!
I refer you to the GP's statement:
Now, unless you want to work out the math against a bunch of NASA scientists I would just wait for them to release some more details before jumping to conclusions that this is a worthless plan.
NASA employs some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, and they've run the figures. They have reasons for believing this is useful, and they are the guys with the figures. A bunch of seemingly-obvious statements doesn't trump several hundred doctors of astrophysics with access to incredible supercomputers at their disposal....
Still, you could have given me the benefit of the doubt, or you could have, you know, asked. Instead you jumped straight to the conclusion that I was a moaning scrounger. That's what Mail readers do.
...whereas the Irish version starts "Creidim in aon Dia amháin." I believe, habitual tense.
Rome only gave permission to celebrate mass in vulgar[1] languages in the 60s, so the translation is fairly new. Also, as the 1st person plural is used, it is clear that this translation doesn't predate that time: the Latin creed is "credo" -- I believe -- and it was only in the English translation that this became "we" believe. The Gaelic translation comes via the English-speaking bishops.
I don't know who translated it, but while I'm pretty certain it wasn't my first Gaelic teacher (I believe she's a presbyterian and not quite old enough), it would likely have been someone of a similar background, and my teacher passed on the myth that "tha mi a' dèanamh" is both "I'm doing" and "I do", even though she intuitively knows that this is complete nonsense. This sort of conscious rule can infect both teaching and translations.
This also happens in English: consider teacher/parents insisting on "may I...?" and saying "can I...?" themselves, or "he and I" vs "me and him, or "If I were you"/"If I was you".
[1] In the Latin sense of the word, meaning the languages of the common people.
The bit where I said "full-time"...? I meant full-time as in permanent. If they had only pushed casual jobs at me, fine, but they kept pushing jobs at me that weren't seasonal so I wasn't suitable. Others were in places that you couldn't get to without a car so weren't suitable. I was forced to apply, so I applied. The employers didn't even respond to me... because I wasn't suitable. In my life I've spent 3 months on Jobseekers, and 9 years working full-time, earning a good salary and putting money back into the pot. When I found myself unemployed two years ago, I didn't get any government support because I'd been saving for years.
Now go and save your right-wing ranting for the Daily Mail and the UKIP newsletter.
Not only is it not totalitarian to expect people out of work claiming Job Seekers allowance to be looking for work, it is actually a requirement to receive the benefit.
Yes, looking for work is a requirement. A stupid totalitarian declares formal rules. A clever totalitarian creates a reasonable rule, then adds various dubious caveats. If IDS says that "anyone without a job after signing up to the scheme would be lacking 'imagination,'" then we're talking about the reasonable rule "jobseekers allowance only for those seeking work" backed up with the caveat that "if you're unemployed, it's your own fault," despite the fact that we're in a recession and unemployment is quite high.
He's ignoring that indolence is not the only cause of unemployment.
The article says it's opt-in! It only applies to that web-site too. That's obviously a huge omission to make from the summary.
You've not visited a UK jobcentre recently, I take it. "Opt-in" at the government level is like (to use a corporate analogy) "recommendations" from the board that because "encouraged" at the upper management, "strongly encouraged" by the time it reaches middle management, and "optional, but if you don't do it it won't look good at your next pay review" by the time it reaches the ground-floor grunts. Every two weeks is your "pay review" in the jobcentre and if you think it's wearing having to defend your performance to your boss once a year, try explaining to your case officer that we're in a recession and there's no jobs every two weeks.
Jobcentre policies lead you to apply for jobs you're not qualified for, wasting your own time and the time of several HR departments, just to prove you're "trying". My first experience of claiming unemployment benefit was after graduating, and even though I had a proper graduate job starting 3 months later, they kept pushing adverts for full-time posts in shops and fast-food restaurants at me. In the end I started ignoring them, and they threatened to withdraw my benefits if I didn't pick up my game in the next month. And that job I mentioned? Yeah, that was starting two weeks after that letter....
But is a nuclear bomb truly "violence"? Personally I think it's something a little more chilling -- it's cold and calculated with little of the emotional content of headbutting someone for grabbing your girlfriend's arse....
That's a bit circular... we can adapt our hands to any task that we adapt to fit our hands....
Perfect length of arm? It's not. I'm not going to do any literature research while I'm sitting in my workplace, but I believe there are repetitive strain injuries linked to masturbation, because it involves abusing several joints....
There isn't anything to suggest that reproductive fitness (the thing that drives evolution) has anything to do with punching out competitors.
You've never watched stags or bulls in mating season then....
I'm constantly delighted by "do the needful."
For some reason, whenever I read that phrase, I always read it to the tune of "The Hustle," by Van McCoy.
You do realise that you've now contaminated half of /. with that thought, right? I'm guessing that was your intention. This will probably go viral and end up infecting us all...!
It's not really a linguistic term at all, it's a subjective judgement. :-) It's not just "historically didn't but does now" -- I say "shouldn't" because everyone says it's due to contact with English, even though it's something that English itself doesn't do. So "shouldn't" in the sense of "there's no logical reason for it either inside the language or between languages".
The big example is linking to the bad charicature of Indian English I highlighted above: I am thinking. In Irish, they still use the "habitual" -- equivalent to "I believe", but in Scottish Gaelic only conservative speakers use "creididh mi" (or more idiomatically "cha chreid mi" -- I don't believe) and increasing numbers of youngsters (and learners) are saying "tha mi a' creidsinn" -- "I am believing".
So you'll see what I mean about their being no good reason for it. Does that make it a bad thing? Is there such a thing as a "bad" language change? In this case I'm tempted to say "yes"....
I was really talking about comparison to a lot of other colonies, which came and went and were fought over a lot. And I was trying to avoid the word "colony" which means something different in Indian English anyway.....
Learning styles have been shown to be irrelevant: see Pashler, H.; McDaniel, M.; Rohrer, D.; Bjork, R. (2008). "Learning styles: Concepts and evidence". Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9: 105–119.
Note that they don't say that learning styles "don't exist", just that whether they exist or not, nobody has been able to demonstrably improve teaching or learning by conscious application of learning styles.
Good teaching is better for everybody, regardless of learning "style".