That said, I think that anyone over 18 years of age should be able to walk into a store and buy everything from a.38 to a minigun, and all the ammo they can carry, no background check (beyond a driver's license or similar to prove age) required.
Translation: guns should be like cigarettes and alcohol; freely available to those who are legally able to use them.
Additionally, and this is key, if you fuck up when using your gun, and kill or hurt someone, even once, even by accident, there should be huge repercussions against you. I'm talking 10 years jail time for firing a gun on the streets of NYC. Parents would be responsible for their children's behavior, of course.
This means that gun locks and locked gun cases suddenly become very popular (to prevent kids getting their hands on guns), and that gang violence drops off like a rock (10 years is a long time, and mandatory minimum sentencing makes it harder to bribe authorities.
The real reason why I think this would be a good idea is that it allows people to keep their guns, punishes those who use their guns to wreak havoc, and keeps the government in constant fear of the population.
If I'm overlooking some obvious problem with this scheme, feel free to reply.
Western Christian biblical references Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." In the same tradition, Psalm 104:5 says, "the LORD set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place, etc."
The heliocentric scientists were advocating that the earth moved around the sun, rather than the earth remaining stationary and the sun moving around it. I worded that bit poorly in my original post, hopefully I'm being clearer here.
(Disclaimer: I have never read the Bible, I found it tedious and the characters flat and stereotypical when I tried. I am not an expert on this subject, I'm currently taking a history class and we talked a bit about these guys. I have no intention of getting into a flame war about a 500 year old subject that has been discussed to death elsewhere (literally for Bruno, heh, heh, heh), I probably won't respond to this thread again.)
Uncyclopedia (theoretically) features this kind of content. Sadly, there's no Wikipedia page that has this stuff. Even more tragically, there's not yet an Uncyclopedia page for Michael Crichton.
2000 years? I don't think so. It's somewhat hard to pinpoint the beginning of science, but reliance on empirical evidence over "it's so obvious that it must be true" is often credited to Galileo Galilei.
While there were theories that the earth was not the center of the universe 2000+ years ago, they were hardly consensus. Nicolaus Copernicus (~1500) was the first European (that I'm aware of) to give rise to the idea of heliocentrism, and Galileo was later able to disprove the biblical, earth-centric idea (thus giving weight to heliocentrism). Even then, it was pretty much a tiny group of "nut-jobs" contradicting every other scientific mind. The church, at the time, held the majority of educated people, and therefore the majority of scientists were Christian. This led to the occasional conflict of interest: for example Giordano Bruno, who argued in favor of heliocentrism, was burned at the fucking stake in 1600!
So I would say that both of those ideas are some of the first accomplishments of modern science, and that they have been consensus (among the scientific community) for only a few hundred years.
Exposure to the format or not, he's right. I've worked far more than I'd like to with the format, it being required for audio books for the iPod.
It doesn't matter if it's called.aac,.mp4,.m4a, or.m4b; these files are a real bitch to get to play (and if they're called.m4p you might as well head off to TPB). VLC is OK if you play through start to finish, but if you're trying to skim through a book, it's pretty flaky. Winamp is all right at playing AAC, but it's only a small step better than iTunes.
Cross-platform compatibility is a joke, GP is spot on there.
As for the quality claim, I will admit that the quality is pretty good. I wouldn't say better than mp3, but when converting mp3 files @ 64k (standard for audio books) to.m4b @ 64k I cannot hear the difference. Considering I'm going from lossy format to lossy format, I'd say that's pretty good (also, 256k music sounds fine in.aac, but I haven't really done extensive tests on it, I prefer.ogg or FLAC. I am not an audiophile, YMMV, OMGWTFBBQ).
OK, so I actually did something similar for myself just now, and yeah, you're right.
It seemed like the sort of thing that would work in theory, but I can see why it doesn't. Even changing a few pixels in the corner (I made a 10x10 white square) gave drastically different MD5s.
I'm a moron for blindly accepting a +5 post as fact, please mod down my original post.
And someone on a previous Slashdot story pointed out that a good way around this is to reduce the image to a small size (say 255x255 pixels), convert it to black and white, and take an MD5 of the resulting image. This way you have to drastically change the content of the image to foil MD5 checks.
Pretty hard to beat, unless you just encrypt everything.
But there's a couple of problems with the idea of not voting. First, everyone already doesn't. (What is it, less than 60% of people vote? Assuming this translates to 30% of people voting for each candidate, not voting wins by 10%, 40% of the total population opting out). This shows that most people aren't really happy with the current system, but hasn't yet resulted in any serious change.
Another problem is that you assume voting takes away your right to bitch. I vote, and yet here I am complaining about the system. Vote for the candidate you think would be the best (lesser of two evils), and also make a huge fuss. I'm not talking about on Web 2.0, you need to get connect with people IRL. The elderly, who make up an ungodly proportion of voters, take the letters to the editor section as literal truth, and I know (well, I hope) I've single-handedly destroyed a few political careers with well-written letters. There's other stuff you can do, my state has town meetings, which are fantastic, and theres always rallies and such.
I would suggest, instead of simply not voting, that you write in bunk names ("Cthulhu" or "Mickey Mouse" are favorites). This shows TPTB that you believe in a system, but you don't believe in their choices for candidates.
The point is, it's hard to differentiate between apathy and contempt for the system based on your ideas.
OK, we'll stop with it just as soon as it's true. I messed around with ATI drivers for a 9550 several years ago, and they did indeed work just fine (using suse at the time), but I am currently running a laptop with an X1250 and it does not work.
This is not "some old crap", I bought this laptop 3 months ago. Yes, I am aware that the design of the X1250 is a couple of years old, however, end users are still able to buy it, they get non-working drivers, and therefore, ATI drivers don't even fucking work.
The thing that really pisses me off is that I (naively) assumed that ATI had fixed up their drivers before I bought the laptop. They just opened the specs (amid a whole bunch of Slashvertisements about how they were working with the Linux community), and there's a really big difference between knowing the specs and having a working product. I'm a bit of an AMD fan, but this is just unacceptable.
I will take this rant back if someone actually has a workaround. I'm not scared of command-line fixes or editing xorg.conf, but neither of these work. I'm going to try upgrading to 8.10 this weekend and see if that helps, but I'm not really that hopeful. Again, my machine crashes on resume from standby (unacceptable), and on full-screen resolution changes. It does not do this with the free drivers, so I'm using those despite the performance hit.
Stay the hell away from Toshiba and Acer. Compaq seems to be OK, and I don't have much experience with other brands, but really check your hardware (search Ubuntu forums for every piece you want to be able to use (for example Nvidia 7000M, and make sure there's threads giving easy workarounds to problems).
Read the Newegg (and elsewhere) comments about the laptop, and look for that one inevitable guy who posts exactly how hard it was to get Linux working.
I know you're all joking, but I think it really breaks down to:
2007 - Year of Linux on Desktop: Netbooks offered Linux, and not on the back shelf behind a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard" the way WalMart and Dell did. As a result, they actually sold.
2008 - Year of Linux on Cell Phones: Google Android actually a serious competitor. 'Nuff said.
If you thought that "Year of Linux on Desktop" meant 100% market share, think again. I hope no operating system ever gets there. The next big milestone is going to be "Year in which Linux overtakes other OS" and becomes more widely used than, say, OS X or Windows 12. (BTW, this will not happen any time soon, don't get your hopes up.)
OK, it really depends on what you're doing. Also, a lot of the stuff I do (games) is not dependent on OS at all, but on the drivers.
Vista is so slow as to be utterly useless - it came with my laptop, and after waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up, I reformatted and put Ubuntu on it.
If you're doing processor-heavy work (for example, recoding a DVD), I've yet to find anything faster than an N-lited copy of XP. You can slim down Ubuntu, but I'm not Linux savvy enough to do this yet.
And if you're playing games, the drivers in Ubuntu are so piss-poor that you'll see a 10-20% drop in framerates (this is an Nvidia 7900 GS, benchmarked in Unreal 2004 max settings, same hardware). ATI drivers don't even fucking work, so I can't even compare them to the XP ones on my laptop (if anyone knows how to get an X1250 working in Kubuntu with ATI's proprietary drivers, respond. Machine crashes on resume, games crash on screen resolution change or exit).
So it breaks down like this, in my experience:
Out of the box XP gets it ass handed to it by Ubuntu.
Ubuntu gets beat (slightly) by an N-Lited XP.
Everything beats Vista.
Startup times vary based largely on RAID array type (hard drive speed if you're in a laptop) and processor speed, but always go (slowest to fastest): Vista, Ubuntu, XP, 2000, N-Lited XP. Installing more programs slows this down in XP, but not enough for Ubuntu to beat it.
Also, (this is settings related) torrents seem to run about 25-50 kb/s faster on Ubuntu than they do on Windows. I suspect this is related to half-open TCP/IP connections, but I don't know.
They did The Witcher and provided a massive content upgrade free (and the original game was 70+ hours long (good, quality hours) compared to Mass Effect's 12 fun hours + 20 hours of meaningless grind), and they're now doing Good Old Games, completely without DRM.
Qualifies them for Blizzard-level status in my opinion.
I don't exactly see a lot of companies spending cash to fund VLC, and it's far in a way the best media player ever (most of the commits are made by a handful of developers who appear to work in their spare time, although IIRC the project has received some funding from universities).
Also, often what we see is companies opening an unprofitable product so that the community can contribute to it - that's what Sun did with OO.o and Java (I realize that Sun still employs many of the key developers, but how do you expect OS to exist at the enterprise level without companies contributing to it?).
And then there's companies who have found a way to make it profitable to develop (well, support, really) OSS. Look at Red Hat for one example. Are they funding the Linux kernel, or is it funding them?
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who is doing the funding, because we get software we can hack around with.
There's lots of examples of little (excellent) projects that survive without corporate funding. The components of KDE/Gnome, are a pretty good example of "hobbiest level" software from volunteers coming together to make a package that's suitable for the enterprise. See the Python IDE's, KTorrent, Kate, hell, really most of these get little support from the parent environment.
The point of this little rant is that it's pretty hard to determine one way or another if OS can succeed at the enterprise level, because if a company uses a product, they're expected to "give back" to that product. In practice, this translates into either developers, cash flow, or an angry open source community (coughtivocough).
Yeah, but the interface is clumsy (pretty, but still clumsy) and there doesn't seem to be any way to read comments on the torrents. The ability to sort by seeders is nice.
But, what I really want is a way to sort by seeders AND 4 or 5 star ratings AND filter by category AND quickly view tags (dupe, spam, nuked, wrong category, etc) on a torrent. No site lets me do this, but Demonoid comes pretty close with filters.
Decentralization is a pretty good idea, but it's certainly a long way from being ready for prime time - things may change, and there do seem to be sort boxes for heart (which I assume is rating) and magnifying glass looking at a person's neck (which might be comments, but doesn't seem to do anything anyway).
I was hoping this could become a great way to find legal inde mp3s (people rate and comment, I filter by good rating and read comments then download, but it doesn't look like it's going to replace Demonoid without a pretty large critical mass of people.
Hmmm, I can't find the statistics right now, but for stroke victims, the amount you tell them they will get better makes much more difference than any administration of drugs.
The placebo effect on brain development/neurogenesis/related is huge. IIRC the research I read was comparing "you will get perfect again", both with and without some drug (Valium?) to "you might get better, but you won't be as good as before" with and without the drug.
No one ever got completely perfect again, but people who were told that they would fared better. These were reproduced a couple of times, and MRIs showed significant (yes, statistically significant) neurogenesis difference, although not by a wide margin.
Note: I'm now completely offtopic, talking about loss of blood supply and permanent brain damage while TFA is talking about myelination.
I'm trying to track down the actual paper right now (not the hack reporting job) so I may be talking out my ass, but what the researchers observed is demylenation. This makes your neurons conduct signals slower, yes, but it probably provides crucial regulation and may even be critical to consciousness (mylenation of the cerebellum is one of the big evolutionary divides that separates great apes from other species).
If you want the extreme case, talk to someone with MS. My aunt died of it a few years back, and it was not pretty.
When we say demylenation, we're not talking about just the same answer but slower, we're talking about entirely reduced functionality.
those processes by which animals obtain and retain information about their social environments, and use that information to make behavioral decisions
From Kamil, A. C. 1987. A synthetic approach to the study of
animal intelligence. Nebr. Symp. Motiv. 7, 257-308.
There. I just defined intelligence for you. Now, if you wanted to say that these guys designed a poor experiment to test for it go right ahead (someone above me said it perfectly).
I'd also like to get a citation for your claim that people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect. The case that's usually cited is this dude, but if you read the Wiki article you see that he was pretty messed up by the whole experience. You also see "significant hunks" of brain damage in stroke victims, and my understanding is that the brain simply routes around (by building new synapses) this now-dead region; the process of rerouting takes about 3 months, and people are never the same afterward (you can get close, but never 100%).
Our understanding right now is that the entire brain is used for something, and if you lobotomize part of the brain, you're going to lose whatever that part did.
but they appear to have helped at least one person
I'm not dissing you or your mother, but that could have been the placebo effect. Without a control group, we'll never know. I'm happy for you in any case, and I would say that if nothing else we need more research here.
Interesting article. This drug "reboots" the immune system, allowing myelin sheathes to reform. I'm waiting to see if these results can be duplicated; if so this stuff might actually be the holy grail you speak of.
Don't forget that this is the same company that made The Witcher (you know, the ones that released free patches with 5000+ better translated lines of voice acting, and several hours of new quests). I've never seen a company that took such good care of paying customers (not even Newegg).
I shall not explain my partisan stupidity, good sir troll, for I do not drink the kool-aid of the Democrats either. I blame Clinton for fucking up politics as we know them through the Soft Money Loophole. Clinton was (more or less) justified at bombing countries, because he had actual proof that they were bad (others on this thread have given links, so I'm not going to cite this claim).
I truly believe that we will be doomed under Obama, but to a lesser extent than if we elect McCain (the current poll has a nice little flame war about this).
I am an independent, and have written in Cthulhu in pretty much every major election. However, I do tend to lean pretty left in local matters (I voted for a socialist), because republicans try to lower taxes and institute computerized voting and democrats/independents seem to try to fix our failing infrastructure without raising taxes above inflation rates (this is the local level, where I'm on a first name basis with both candidates. YMMV.)
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That said, I think that anyone over 18 years of age should be able to walk into a store and buy everything from a .38 to a minigun, and all the ammo they can carry, no background check (beyond a driver's license or similar to prove age) required.
Translation: guns should be like cigarettes and alcohol; freely available to those who are legally able to use them.
Additionally, and this is key, if you fuck up when using your gun, and kill or hurt someone, even once, even by accident, there should be huge repercussions against you. I'm talking 10 years jail time for firing a gun on the streets of NYC. Parents would be responsible for their children's behavior, of course.
This means that gun locks and locked gun cases suddenly become very popular (to prevent kids getting their hands on guns), and that gang violence drops off like a rock (10 years is a long time, and mandatory minimum sentencing makes it harder to bribe authorities.
The real reason why I think this would be a good idea is that it allows people to keep their guns, punishes those who use their guns to wreak havoc, and keeps the government in constant fear of the population.
If I'm overlooking some obvious problem with this scheme, feel free to reply.
However, that does not disprove my point.
Quoth the Wikipedia
The heliocentric scientists were advocating that the earth moved around the sun, rather than the earth remaining stationary and the sun moving around it. I worded that bit poorly in my original post, hopefully I'm being clearer here.
(Disclaimer: I have never read the Bible, I found it tedious and the characters flat and stereotypical when I tried. I am not an expert on this subject, I'm currently taking a history class and we talked a bit about these guys. I have no intention of getting into a flame war about a 500 year old subject that has been discussed to death elsewhere (literally for Bruno, heh, heh, heh), I probably won't respond to this thread again.)
Uncyclopedia (theoretically) features this kind of content. Sadly, there's no Wikipedia page that has this stuff. Even more tragically, there's not yet an Uncyclopedia page for Michael Crichton.
While there were theories that the earth was not the center of the universe 2000+ years ago, they were hardly consensus. Nicolaus Copernicus (~1500) was the first European (that I'm aware of) to give rise to the idea of heliocentrism, and Galileo was later able to disprove the biblical, earth-centric idea (thus giving weight to heliocentrism). Even then, it was pretty much a tiny group of "nut-jobs" contradicting every other scientific mind. The church, at the time, held the majority of educated people, and therefore the majority of scientists were Christian. This led to the occasional conflict of interest: for example Giordano Bruno, who argued in favor of heliocentrism, was burned at the fucking stake in 1600!
So I would say that both of those ideas are some of the first accomplishments of modern science, and that they have been consensus (among the scientific community) for only a few hundred years.
It doesn't matter if it's called .aac, .mp4, .m4a, or .m4b; these files are a real bitch to get to play (and if they're called .m4p you might as well head off to TPB). VLC is OK if you play through start to finish, but if you're trying to skim through a book, it's pretty flaky. Winamp is all right at playing AAC, but it's only a small step better than iTunes.
Cross-platform compatibility is a joke, GP is spot on there.
As for the quality claim, I will admit that the quality is pretty good. I wouldn't say better than mp3, but when converting mp3 files @ 64k (standard for audio books) to .m4b @ 64k I cannot hear the difference. Considering I'm going from lossy format to lossy format, I'd say that's pretty good (also, 256k music sounds fine in .aac, but I haven't really done extensive tests on it, I prefer .ogg or FLAC. I am not an audiophile, YMMV, OMGWTFBBQ).
It seemed like the sort of thing that would work in theory, but I can see why it doesn't. Even changing a few pixels in the corner (I made a 10x10 white square) gave drastically different MD5s.
I'm a moron for blindly accepting a +5 post as fact, please mod down my original post.
Pretty hard to beat, unless you just encrypt everything.
But there's a couple of problems with the idea of not voting. First, everyone already doesn't. (What is it, less than 60% of people vote? Assuming this translates to 30% of people voting for each candidate, not voting wins by 10%, 40% of the total population opting out). This shows that most people aren't really happy with the current system, but hasn't yet resulted in any serious change.
Another problem is that you assume voting takes away your right to bitch. I vote, and yet here I am complaining about the system. Vote for the candidate you think would be the best (lesser of two evils), and also make a huge fuss. I'm not talking about on Web 2.0, you need to get connect with people IRL. The elderly, who make up an ungodly proportion of voters, take the letters to the editor section as literal truth, and I know (well, I hope) I've single-handedly destroyed a few political careers with well-written letters. There's other stuff you can do, my state has town meetings, which are fantastic, and theres always rallies and such.
I would suggest, instead of simply not voting, that you write in bunk names ("Cthulhu" or "Mickey Mouse" are favorites). This shows TPTB that you believe in a system, but you don't believe in their choices for candidates.
The point is, it's hard to differentiate between apathy and contempt for the system based on your ideas.
This may have been what I saw. Doesn't change my benchmarks, though, and I never booted Vista a second time.
This is not "some old crap", I bought this laptop 3 months ago. Yes, I am aware that the design of the X1250 is a couple of years old, however, end users are still able to buy it, they get non-working drivers, and therefore, ATI drivers don't even fucking work.
The thing that really pisses me off is that I (naively) assumed that ATI had fixed up their drivers before I bought the laptop. They just opened the specs (amid a whole bunch of Slashvertisements about how they were working with the Linux community), and there's a really big difference between knowing the specs and having a working product. I'm a bit of an AMD fan, but this is just unacceptable.
I will take this rant back if someone actually has a workaround. I'm not scared of command-line fixes or editing xorg.conf, but neither of these work. I'm going to try upgrading to 8.10 this weekend and see if that helps, but I'm not really that hopeful. Again, my machine crashes on resume from standby (unacceptable), and on full-screen resolution changes. It does not do this with the free drivers, so I'm using those despite the performance hit.
Read the Newegg (and elsewhere) comments about the laptop, and look for that one inevitable guy who posts exactly how hard it was to get Linux working.
2007 - Year of Linux on Desktop: Netbooks offered Linux, and not on the back shelf behind a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard" the way WalMart and Dell did. As a result, they actually sold.
2008 - Year of Linux on Cell Phones: Google Android actually a serious competitor. 'Nuff said.
If you thought that "Year of Linux on Desktop" meant 100% market share, think again. I hope no operating system ever gets there. The next big milestone is going to be "Year in which Linux overtakes other OS" and becomes more widely used than, say, OS X or Windows 12. (BTW, this will not happen any time soon, don't get your hopes up.)
Vista is so slow as to be utterly useless - it came with my laptop, and after waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up, I reformatted and put Ubuntu on it.
If you're doing processor-heavy work (for example, recoding a DVD), I've yet to find anything faster than an N-lited copy of XP. You can slim down Ubuntu, but I'm not Linux savvy enough to do this yet.
And if you're playing games, the drivers in Ubuntu are so piss-poor that you'll see a 10-20% drop in framerates (this is an Nvidia 7900 GS, benchmarked in Unreal 2004 max settings, same hardware). ATI drivers don't even fucking work, so I can't even compare them to the XP ones on my laptop (if anyone knows how to get an X1250 working in Kubuntu with ATI's proprietary drivers, respond. Machine crashes on resume, games crash on screen resolution change or exit).
So it breaks down like this, in my experience:
Out of the box XP gets it ass handed to it by Ubuntu.
Ubuntu gets beat (slightly) by an N-Lited XP.
Everything beats Vista.
Startup times vary based largely on RAID array type (hard drive speed if you're in a laptop) and processor speed, but always go (slowest to fastest): Vista, Ubuntu, XP, 2000, N-Lited XP. Installing more programs slows this down in XP, but not enough for Ubuntu to beat it.
Also, (this is settings related) torrents seem to run about 25-50 kb/s faster on Ubuntu than they do on Windows. I suspect this is related to half-open TCP/IP connections, but I don't know.
Feel free to correct me if your mileage varies.
They did The Witcher and provided a massive content upgrade free (and the original game was 70+ hours long (good, quality hours) compared to Mass Effect's 12 fun hours + 20 hours of meaningless grind), and they're now doing Good Old Games, completely without DRM.
Qualifies them for Blizzard-level status in my opinion.
They do? Shit, when did this happen?
Also, often what we see is companies opening an unprofitable product so that the community can contribute to it - that's what Sun did with OO.o and Java (I realize that Sun still employs many of the key developers, but how do you expect OS to exist at the enterprise level without companies contributing to it?).
And then there's companies who have found a way to make it profitable to develop (well, support, really) OSS. Look at Red Hat for one example. Are they funding the Linux kernel, or is it funding them?
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who is doing the funding, because we get software we can hack around with.
There's lots of examples of little (excellent) projects that survive without corporate funding. The components of KDE/Gnome, are a pretty good example of "hobbiest level" software from volunteers coming together to make a package that's suitable for the enterprise. See the Python IDE's, KTorrent, Kate, hell, really most of these get little support from the parent environment.
The point of this little rant is that it's pretty hard to determine one way or another if OS can succeed at the enterprise level, because if a company uses a product, they're expected to "give back" to that product. In practice, this translates into either developers, cash flow, or an angry open source community (coughtivocough).
;)
But, what I really want is a way to sort by seeders AND 4 or 5 star ratings AND filter by category AND quickly view tags (dupe, spam, nuked, wrong category, etc) on a torrent. No site lets me do this, but Demonoid comes pretty close with filters.
Decentralization is a pretty good idea, but it's certainly a long way from being ready for prime time - things may change, and there do seem to be sort boxes for heart (which I assume is rating) and magnifying glass looking at a person's neck (which might be comments, but doesn't seem to do anything anyway).
I was hoping this could become a great way to find legal inde mp3s (people rate and comment, I filter by good rating and read comments then download, but it doesn't look like it's going to replace Demonoid without a pretty large critical mass of people.
The education system is waaaaay ahead of you, buddy.
The placebo effect on brain development/neurogenesis/related is huge. IIRC the research I read was comparing "you will get perfect again", both with and without some drug (Valium?) to "you might get better, but you won't be as good as before" with and without the drug.
No one ever got completely perfect again, but people who were told that they would fared better. These were reproduced a couple of times, and MRIs showed significant (yes, statistically significant) neurogenesis difference, although not by a wide margin.
Note: I'm now completely offtopic, talking about loss of blood supply and permanent brain damage while TFA is talking about myelination.
If you want the extreme case, talk to someone with MS. My aunt died of it a few years back, and it was not pretty.
When we say demylenation, we're not talking about just the same answer but slower, we're talking about entirely reduced functionality.
From Kamil, A. C. 1987. A synthetic approach to the study of animal intelligence. Nebr. Symp. Motiv. 7, 257-308.
There. I just defined intelligence for you. Now, if you wanted to say that these guys designed a poor experiment to test for it go right ahead (someone above me said it perfectly).
I'd also like to get a citation for your claim that people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect. The case that's usually cited is this dude, but if you read the Wiki article you see that he was pretty messed up by the whole experience.
You also see "significant hunks" of brain damage in stroke victims, and my understanding is that the brain simply routes around (by building new synapses) this now-dead region; the process of rerouting takes about 3 months, and people are never the same afterward (you can get close, but never 100%).
Our understanding right now is that the entire brain is used for something, and if you lobotomize part of the brain, you're going to lose whatever that part did.
I'm not dissing you or your mother, but that could have been the placebo effect. Without a control group, we'll never know. I'm happy for you in any case, and I would say that if nothing else we need more research here.
Interesting article. This drug "reboots" the immune system, allowing myelin sheathes to reform. I'm waiting to see if these results can be duplicated; if so this stuff might actually be the holy grail you speak of.
Totally worth supporting!
I truly believe that we will be doomed under Obama, but to a lesser extent than if we elect McCain (the current poll has a nice little flame war about this).
I am an independent, and have written in Cthulhu in pretty much every major election. However, I do tend to lean pretty left in local matters (I voted for a socialist), because republicans try to lower taxes and institute computerized voting and democrats/independents seem to try to fix our failing infrastructure without raising taxes above inflation rates (this is the local level, where I'm on a first name basis with both candidates. YMMV.)