Then you've no right to read religious literature, sci-fi, classics, non-fiction, browse slashdot or check your email at the library using public taxes either. If you get to prohibt someone from browsing porn, shouldn't they get to prohibit you from doing your favourite library activity too? Maybe they really don't like the idea of their taxes being used to supply you with access to 'The Satanic Verses' or 'The Communist Manifesto', and would much rather you paid for those activities out of your own pocket and conducted them at home, where children wouldn't be corrupted by your religious or political interests.
I suspect you'd like it a lot less, being told what rights you don't have, than hearing about what rights they do have.
Doesn't someone need to press charges for that to happen? If the government isn't interested in prosecuting them for their invasion of government computers, perhaps someone could call the local police department or FBI and say "Excuse me, but I'd like to report a computer crime; someone cracked my system with a rootkit. I think I know who it was, and I have a copy of the rootkit on CD."
There's more to it than just the DSM IV diagnostic criteria, as I'd hope any decent pdoc would realise. I was diagnosed 12 months ago (I'm now 21), and shortly thereafter slipped into a major depression after finishing my third year at uni, at least partly because my entire life from the age of 4.5 (when I started school) had been pretty hellish in no small part due to living with un-diagnosed asperger's.
You should try it some time - getting bullied every day and not being able to tell anyone because you're non-communicative and chronically depressed, being labeled by teachers as 'stupid', 'lazy' and 'inattentive' because auditory processing problems that you just assume are normal make it nigh-on impossible for you to hear what's being said over the din of the classroom, and being generally ignored and marginalised all around.
You're right that by going strictly by the dx criteria you''ll include perfectly normal people, but a good pdoc will look beyond that towards the things that you need to have read books and journals on the condition to know about (which I have done). Also, saying it's bullshit is a pretty weak position when it can be identified in terms of neurological differences at the level of cellular arrangements in the brain, wide-spread chemical differences that make prescription meds a minefield of atypical reactions (I went psychotic on fluoxetine (prozac) and had severe sedative reactions to lofepramine, venlafaxine (tricyclics) and cetrizine (an anti-histamine)), and I can get high on noodles and cheese from the gluten and casein in them which I incompletely metabolise to glutomorphin and caseomorphin.
If you want some more examples, you'll have to do your own research.
Yeah, because I can go to whatever country I want and expect full citizenship...
I'd be inclined to think of it as a country in it's own right. Sure, it might be small, but is it really all that worse than living on some tiny island? Plenty of people have been doing that through history, but nobody says they're in a prison, even though they may have no chance of leaving.
It'll have it's own domestic economy, import fuel and consumables, export expertise, doubtless police itself, 'tax' wages, if only by keeping them low to balance the cost of running the ship etc. Sounds just like a small-scale version of most countries.
If people really, really want to leave, the land of rapidly diminishing freedom will be just 3.1 miles and an assylum application away.
The human body is far, far, far from perfection. We've gone through some pretty radical changes in the last 5 million years, had our genetic diversity stripped to the bone by near-extinction genetic bottlenecks during glaciations and are generally a rather inbred bunch that survive only through a collection of ad-hock genetic hacks.
Case in point - as a result of the reconfigurations necessary to facilitate bipedalism, the vans deferens tube that links the testes to the urethra in human males is looped around the ureter. I doubt that this is in any way a 'perfect' configuration.
Our immune system has suffered from being a relatively low priority while we've been undergoing the various changes of the past 5 million years. Emu's, which have remained in much the same form (compared with humans) since they first grew feathers and lost their teeth 65+ million years ago, have been able to focus their evolution on developing their immune systems, and now have one of the most advanced immune systems of any terrestrial creature. Sharks have followed a similar path of changing little and reaching a certain plateau of perfection within their niche.
Perhaps in a few gigayears, when humans have, hopefully, collonised the stars and lived in a stable (if diverse on a local scale) environment, we'll see some approximation of perfection in the decendents of homo sapiens. I doubt it'll be a single brand of perfection though, but rather a perfection born of diversity, of organisms adapted to whatever challenges they come to face, from generalists to ultra-specialists. When adaptations approach fundamental limits of physics, it may be appropriate to call it perfection. Right now, we're less 'perfect' than cockroaches.
11 billion years? Terrestrial life has only had 4.3 billion years at most, unless there's a species of bacteria that likes living in magma.
Evolution isn't, in itself, a random process. It incorporates randomness, but it also incorporates natural selection, which is like anti-randomness, in the same way that the random walk of an ant is mediated my the feedback from its sensory apparatus. You're right that it's not terribly efficient, but it's running on the ultimate massively-parrallel simulation hardware (the universe), so it gets there in the end.
Evolutionary approaches to technological advancement are likely to incorporate human insight, thus enormously speeding up the process and elimanating odd situations akin to the vertebrate eye, which is inverted (the blood vessels and nerves are in front of the photoreceptors) due to the historical path that vertebrate evolution took.
Of course, there is a tendency for evolutionary design processes to produce designs that are largely incomprehensible to humans (at least without a great deal of effort and reverse engineering), so human insight may be limited to gently guiding the design by carefully tweaking the undelying selection pressures, thus making the design of a new computer chip more akin to growing bonsai than any development process that we're familiar with.
I watched a documentary about the damming of a river in the amazon. No tree felling, animal rescue or anything. There were just a bunch of environmentalists going around in boats to save what primates and other assorted creatures they could from the above-water treetops. It was a long time ago, and late at night, so the details are a bit fuzzy.
The commentator was going on about how the trees would rot, acidify the water, release methane and corrode the turbines, thus shortening the lifespan of the dam. There was also a bit about how the siltation rate was 10X or so what had been anticipated, which was going to render the reservoir useless in 20-50 years IIRC. Sorry for being vague.
Here in Scotland, there's generally negligable siltation, no trees, no large animal life that can't get out of the way itself and the temperature keeps methane production low (thus why all our peat bogs don't decompose faster than they form).
Despite all the advantages to hydro in this country, it still only makes about 10% of our electricity, and I doubt if there's much room for expansion on that. Still, criticising any energy source for not delivering 100% of our needs isn't going to get us anywhere. We have the best wind resource in Europe (40% of European wind potential is in the UK), and are deploying off-shore wind farms to minimise environmental disturbance (we don't want to scare away the tourists).
Most of our current production comes from nuclear, though the plants are gradually being decomissioned. We haven't had very good experiences here with the first generation reactors, and they've proved far more costly than expected.
Hopefully, the new reactor designs will prove to be better value for money. The rest of Europe lacks our renewable resources, so nuclear power will be essential for making up the difference.
Re:Good for AIDS in Africa research.
on
Sim Epidemic
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ah, the humble foreskin. It protects the glans from abrasion in your pants, holds the smegma in for its anti-pathogenic goodness, is full of nerve endings for... stuff, and probably even helps keep those little amazonian fish from swimming up you.
How's it going over there with the quest to surgically banish masturbation? I hear anal sex is becoming really popular in America, on account that circumcised males often can't get enough stimulation from vaginal sex. Not that I've actually looked into it of course. Just one of these things you hear passed about that make sense on the surface.
"Ooops. Did I leave that mantrap there? Terribly sorry about that. Do mind the shark tank on the way out. I'll mail your friends to you once I've fished them out."
Since the data is stored as magnetised dots, and since sufficient heat will demagnetise permanent magentic materials, I'd guess that putting it in a charcoal fire until it glows would do the trick.
There's also software that will repeatedly write over your old data until it's no longer recoverable. I think the UK military here does that so that it can sell old hardware that used to have classified data on it, but I don't know where you'd find it. Of course, burning things is always more fun.
There is a rumour afoot that the plans were destroyed as part of the contract for the shuttle, but I wouldn't put money on it. This article, though, provides a summary of why the Saturn V wouldn't help either.
If we'd kept with large rockets, we'd still have all the infrastructure in place, and the tech would have slowly and continually modernised, but since the shuttle killed them off, it's necessary to start over.
Anyone remember from 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', that Heinlein predicts rocket tech will have evolved into something far simpler that what we have today (or back then even)? His summary of space tech for the next couple of hundered years went something like:
I'm afraid I'm rather ignorant of networking technology in general, since it's not in my field of experience, but I looked up wikipedia on IPv4 and IPv6, and determined that I have the old IPv4.
All of the system software I use is old (98ish old), and largely unpatched. I have no security that I know of save for spybot SAD, which I never have to use since I quit with IE and got rid of the few things that had autoinstalled through it. I have no firewall and no antivirus software.
Looking at the 'Currently running programs' screen yields the following, each of which check out as valid apps that are meant to be there.
Sorry to sound dense, but I never seem to get infected by anything and don't understand why everyone else has such a problem. I'm running win 98SE on a cable line, and I got rid of my ancient anti-virus software ages ago because it was annoying. I used to get bothered with autoinstallers when using IE, but that's not a problem now with mozilla.
Indeed, the only time I've ever been infected with something is when I was trying to figure out parralel port networking and set C:/ to filesharing (not realising that I was online). Even then, it was easy enough to clean out the intruder with spyware software and manual deletion.
Are Scottish IP's immune to attack? Are my Built In Vunerability Features TM corrupted? Is my system secretly crawling with stuff that is completely undetectable? Have I got a mutant OS that I should reverse engineer and sell for millions?
For people like me, who have lots of great ideas (you'll just have to trust me on that one), but no training in how to make them a reality and somewhat of a phobia about going out and dealing with real people, this could be a really great thing, like wheelchair ramps or tin openers that're easy to use (the latter is still to be invented methinks).
The accessibility of this system could potentially cause a huge increase in innovation as people who previously were intimidated and/or didn't know where to begin can now see how everything works and deal with it in a straight-forward format. It may be similar to the explosion of low-medium income individuals actively involved in share trading since that system was simplified by the internet and the costs pushed down. It might hurt the more technologically backwards machine-shops, but it'll take a long time for established businesses to move their custom elsewhere, so everyone will have time to adapt to the new competitive topography. That said, if any do go under, they probably weren't worth keeping (please don't flame me if you work in or own a struggling machine shop).
I wonder if I could design and order a custom machine shop, then start my own online machine shop business.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you've no right to read religious literature, sci-fi, classics, non-fiction, browse slashdot or check your email at the library using public taxes either. If you get to prohibt someone from browsing porn, shouldn't they get to prohibit you from doing your favourite library activity too? Maybe they really don't like the idea of their taxes being used to supply you with access to 'The Satanic Verses' or 'The Communist Manifesto', and would much rather you paid for those activities out of your own pocket and conducted them at home, where children wouldn't be corrupted by your religious or political interests.
I suspect you'd like it a lot less, being told what rights you don't have, than hearing about what rights they do have.
Doesn't someone need to press charges for that to happen? If the government isn't interested in prosecuting them for their invasion of government computers, perhaps someone could call the local police department or FBI and say "Excuse me, but I'd like to report a computer crime; someone cracked my system with a rootkit. I think I know who it was, and I have a copy of the rootkit on CD."
There's more to it than just the DSM IV diagnostic criteria, as I'd hope any decent pdoc would realise. I was diagnosed 12 months ago (I'm now 21), and shortly thereafter slipped into a major depression after finishing my third year at uni, at least partly because my entire life from the age of 4.5 (when I started school) had been pretty hellish in no small part due to living with un-diagnosed asperger's.
You should try it some time - getting bullied every day and not being able to tell anyone because you're non-communicative and chronically depressed, being labeled by teachers as 'stupid', 'lazy' and 'inattentive' because auditory processing problems that you just assume are normal make it nigh-on impossible for you to hear what's being said over the din of the classroom, and being generally ignored and marginalised all around.
You're right that by going strictly by the dx criteria you''ll include perfectly normal people, but a good pdoc will look beyond that towards the things that you need to have read books and journals on the condition to know about (which I have done). Also, saying it's bullshit is a pretty weak position when it can be identified in terms of neurological differences at the level of cellular arrangements in the brain, wide-spread chemical differences that make prescription meds a minefield of atypical reactions (I went psychotic on fluoxetine (prozac) and had severe sedative reactions to lofepramine, venlafaxine (tricyclics) and cetrizine (an anti-histamine)), and I can get high on noodles and cheese from the gluten and casein in them which I incompletely metabolise to glutomorphin and caseomorphin.
If you want some more examples, you'll have to do your own research.
http://www.isn.net/~jypsy/AuSpin/peter1.htm
Yeah, because I can go to whatever country I want and expect full citizenship... I'd be inclined to think of it as a country in it's own right. Sure, it might be small, but is it really all that worse than living on some tiny island? Plenty of people have been doing that through history, but nobody says they're in a prison, even though they may have no chance of leaving. It'll have it's own domestic economy, import fuel and consumables, export expertise, doubtless police itself, 'tax' wages, if only by keeping them low to balance the cost of running the ship etc. Sounds just like a small-scale version of most countries. If people really, really want to leave, the land of rapidly diminishing freedom will be just 3.1 miles and an assylum application away.
The human body is far, far, far from perfection. We've gone through some pretty radical changes in the last 5 million years, had our genetic diversity stripped to the bone by near-extinction genetic bottlenecks during glaciations and are generally a rather inbred bunch that survive only through a collection of ad-hock genetic hacks.
P ages/S/Sexual_Reproduction.html
Case in point - as a result of the reconfigurations necessary to facilitate bipedalism, the vans deferens tube that links the testes to the urethra in human males is looped around the ureter. I doubt that this is in any way a 'perfect' configuration.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Biology
Our immune system has suffered from being a relatively low priority while we've been undergoing the various changes of the past 5 million years. Emu's, which have remained in much the same form (compared with humans) since they first grew feathers and lost their teeth 65+ million years ago, have been able to focus their evolution on developing their immune systems, and now have one of the most advanced immune systems of any terrestrial creature. Sharks have followed a similar path of changing little and reaching a certain plateau of perfection within their niche.
Perhaps in a few gigayears, when humans have, hopefully, collonised the stars and lived in a stable (if diverse on a local scale) environment, we'll see some approximation of perfection in the decendents of homo sapiens. I doubt it'll be a single brand of perfection though, but rather a perfection born of diversity, of organisms adapted to whatever challenges they come to face, from generalists to ultra-specialists. When adaptations approach fundamental limits of physics, it may be appropriate to call it perfection. Right now, we're less 'perfect' than cockroaches.
11 billion years? Terrestrial life has only had 4.3 billion years at most, unless there's a species of bacteria that likes living in magma.
Evolution isn't, in itself, a random process. It incorporates randomness, but it also incorporates natural selection, which is like anti-randomness, in the same way that the random walk of an ant is mediated my the feedback from its sensory apparatus. You're right that it's not terribly efficient, but it's running on the ultimate massively-parrallel simulation hardware (the universe), so it gets there in the end.
Evolutionary approaches to technological advancement are likely to incorporate human insight, thus enormously speeding up the process and elimanating odd situations akin to the vertebrate eye, which is inverted (the blood vessels and nerves are in front of the photoreceptors) due to the historical path that vertebrate evolution took.
Of course, there is a tendency for evolutionary design processes to produce designs that are largely incomprehensible to humans (at least without a great deal of effort and reverse engineering), so human insight may be limited to gently guiding the design by carefully tweaking the undelying selection pressures, thus making the design of a new computer chip more akin to growing bonsai than any development process that we're familiar with.
I watched a documentary about the damming of a river in the amazon. No tree felling, animal rescue or anything. There were just a bunch of environmentalists going around in boats to save what primates and other assorted creatures they could from the above-water treetops. It was a long time ago, and late at night, so the details are a bit fuzzy.
The commentator was going on about how the trees would rot, acidify the water, release methane and corrode the turbines, thus shortening the lifespan of the dam. There was also a bit about how the siltation rate was 10X or so what had been anticipated, which was going to render the reservoir useless in 20-50 years IIRC. Sorry for being vague.
Here in Scotland, there's generally negligable siltation, no trees, no large animal life that can't get out of the way itself and the temperature keeps methane production low (thus why all our peat bogs don't decompose faster than they form).
Despite all the advantages to hydro in this country, it still only makes about 10% of our electricity, and I doubt if there's much room for expansion on that. Still, criticising any energy source for not delivering 100% of our needs isn't going to get us anywhere. We have the best wind resource in Europe (40% of European wind potential is in the UK), and are deploying off-shore wind farms to minimise environmental disturbance (we don't want to scare away the tourists).
http://www.iesd.dmu.ac.uk/wind_energy/sustainable_ dev/wcwind.html
Most of our current production comes from nuclear, though the plants are gradually being decomissioned. We haven't had very good experiences here with the first generation reactors, and they've proved far more costly than expected.
http://www.bopcris.ac.uk/bopall/ref20494.html
Hopefully, the new reactor designs will prove to be better value for money. The rest of Europe lacks our renewable resources, so nuclear power will be essential for making up the difference.
Ah, the humble foreskin. It protects the glans from abrasion in your pants, holds the smegma in for its anti-pathogenic goodness, is full of nerve endings for... stuff, and probably even helps keep those little amazonian fish from swimming up you. How's it going over there with the quest to surgically banish masturbation? I hear anal sex is becoming really popular in America, on account that circumcised males often can't get enough stimulation from vaginal sex. Not that I've actually looked into it of course. Just one of these things you hear passed about that make sense on the surface.
19.35 - You are in your parents basement. It's very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
'up'
19.40 - You are in your parents hall. You hear voices to the east.
'east'
19.45 - The room is full of people. You are likely to catch the plague.
'mingle'
19.50 - Your aunt kisses you.
'use handkerchief'
19.55 - You feel dizzy
'South'
20.00 - You are in the kitchen. You have caught the plague. You feel very hot.
'South'
20.05 - You are in the garden. You are dead.
"Hut, hut, hut, hut!"
Splash, splash, splash...
Snap!
"Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!"
"Ooops. Did I leave that mantrap there? Terribly sorry about that. Do mind the shark tank on the way out. I'll mail your friends to you once I've fished them out."
Since the data is stored as magnetised dots, and since sufficient heat will demagnetise permanent magentic materials, I'd guess that putting it in a charcoal fire until it glows would do the trick.
There's also software that will repeatedly write over your old data until it's no longer recoverable. I think the UK military here does that so that it can sell old hardware that used to have classified data on it, but I don't know where you'd find it. Of course, burning things is always more fun.
...though either of these theories may be apocryphal, or a least highly innacurate.
There is a rumour afoot that the plans were destroyed as part of the contract for the shuttle, but I wouldn't put money on it. This article, though, provides a summary of why the Saturn V wouldn't help either.
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five _000313.html
If we'd kept with large rockets, we'd still have all the infrastructure in place, and the tech would have slowly and continually modernised, but since the shuttle killed them off, it's necessary to start over.
Ah yes. I remeber now. It was the one with freeze-dried space-cat thingies.
Anyone remember from 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', that Heinlein predicts rocket tech will have evolved into something far simpler that what we have today (or back then even)? His summary of space tech for the next couple of hundered years went something like:
1. Exceedingly basic and unreliable.
2. Exceedingly complex and expensive.
3. Basic, reliable and cheap.
I wonder when no.3 will arrive...http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byte serv.prl/~ota/disk1/1989/8904/8904.PDF
All of the system software I use is old (98ish old), and largely unpatched. I have no security that I know of save for spybot SAD, which I never have to use since I quit with IE and got rid of the few things that had autoinstalled through it. I have no firewall and no antivirus software.
Looking at the 'Currently running programs' screen yields the following, each of which check out as valid apps that are meant to be there.
Kernel32.dll MSGSRV32.EXE Mprexe.exe MMTASK.TSK Explorer.exe Systray.exe Starter.exe Rnaapp.exe Tapisrv.exe Wmiexe.exe Internat.exe Msnmsgr.exe Ddhelp.exe Mozilla.exe Mplayerc.exe Msimn.exe Pstores.exe Winword.exe Spool32.exe Msinfo32.exe
Mabye the 'immunise' feature on spybot SAD has something to do with it? I'm running on BT Broadband, if that means anything.
Please let me know if you want more specs. I'm curious as to what's going on.
Ps. I'm also invincible with 98FE, and don't have a habit of installing patches unless something won't work without them.
Indeed, the only time I've ever been infected with something is when I was trying to figure out parralel port networking and set C:/ to filesharing (not realising that I was online). Even then, it was easy enough to clean out the intruder with spyware software and manual deletion.
Are Scottish IP's immune to attack? Are my Built In Vunerability Features TM corrupted? Is my system secretly crawling with stuff that is completely undetectable? Have I got a mutant OS that I should reverse engineer and sell for millions?
For people like me, who have lots of great ideas (you'll just have to trust me on that one), but no training in how to make them a reality and somewhat of a phobia about going out and dealing with real people, this could be a really great thing, like wheelchair ramps or tin openers that're easy to use (the latter is still to be invented methinks). The accessibility of this system could potentially cause a huge increase in innovation as people who previously were intimidated and/or didn't know where to begin can now see how everything works and deal with it in a straight-forward format. It may be similar to the explosion of low-medium income individuals actively involved in share trading since that system was simplified by the internet and the costs pushed down. It might hurt the more technologically backwards machine-shops, but it'll take a long time for established businesses to move their custom elsewhere, so everyone will have time to adapt to the new competitive topography. That said, if any do go under, they probably weren't worth keeping (please don't flame me if you work in or own a struggling machine shop). I wonder if I could design and order a custom machine shop, then start my own online machine shop business.