While they're not perfect obviously, there already exist a variety of drugs that some people use for a brain boost.
I've heard reports of amantadine, bupropion, and a whole host of more common stimulants like amphetamine's being used for this. Some people report it makes them feel mentally sharper, along with the expected energy boosts. Others (eg: my psychopharmacology prof) have been dissapointed with amphetamines:P Still, like you said the market clearly exists. C'mon Invisible Hand!... Damn that Adam Smith, he lied to me:(
Oddly enough I've only played in two campaigns featuring a cleric, and I was the cleric in both of them (very reluctantly).
My character could be very powerful, and was OK to roleplay, but... Just not as much fun as I've had with other classes. Everyone else I played with had no interest (or less) in playing one.
We made do just fine. Healing potions, trips back to town to visit a temple/cleric there, wands/etc... Or just treating a stab wound to the belly like it'd be a Bad Thing. I mean, even if you can get healed a few seconds after, do you REALLY want to get stabbed? It'd hurt! Our lack of a handy cleric made us treat fights a bit more warily/respectfully/realistically I think, even the little ones. Sure they're just goblins, and we could take all of them out with ease, but odds are a couple of us are going to get knifed or bit or something. Let's see how we can deal with this...
If we're picking old games, I'll say that Planescape: Torment from 1999 has given me more joy than the games listed above. I like some of the best's picked by those guys, but they just don't have the staying power for me.
Despite the fact that it's visually unimpressive now(and was not really that special then), it has a very compelling story, and fantastic dialogue. I actually cared about many of the characters in the story, and hoped for Good Things to happen to them. And there's some dark stuff too, which I like. Shame that more work wasn't done in the Planescape universe, it's a pretty interesting system.
On the upside, we don't have a single alternative to the Conservative government. A couple other parties can and do get significant numbers of seats. Imagine if Liberterians down there got around 25-35% of the seats in Congress every election, and had a higher proportion of the popular vote. Makes switching from republicrats to them seem more reasonable doesn't it?
I think that word of mouth amongst the truckers(and feedback from management to truckers) would take care of that in time. And the fine money in the meantime would be very nice. Perhaps a referendum amongst the people in the city?
Circle one: (A) Do you want the city to make oodles of money it can spend on New Shinies/Lower Taxes, and for the trucks to stop in a couple months.
(B) The city should just try it's hardest to stop the trucks as soon as possible, money be damned.
You're not the only one. Canadian here, and even with the greatly improved shopping opportunities in the US I still don't go there. I could buy lots of stuff cheap now as a result of our drastically shifted currency values over the past couple years, but it'll need to improve even more before I consider it.
I just don't like the idea of subjecting myself to the whims of the US goverment(made of people), and the US people(who tacitly support the government).
So they've lost your money while travelling to Canada, and my money in shopping and tourism. Anyone care to check how much the US has gotten each year from foreigners visiting, say, over the past 8 years? I don't think that the two of us are alone in our habits, and it'd be interesting to see how big and effect if any such behaviour has caused. Evaluating in USD and in some other currecy like the Euro or CAD would be fun too. Covarying out the change in currency value might show a different story.
Hmm, I've never used cokemachineglow.com before, I'll check it out as soon as I'm done this post =D
While pitchfork has it's issues, it's pretty good. Found out about it(and a fair chunk of my music catalog) from Jeph Jacques's webcomic Questionable Content. He posts reviews of music on a not infrequent basis, and between them, pitchfork and word of mouth I've got a fairly hefty amount of non-RIAA stuff. If you like indie music giving his comic a read is well worth it. Not every(or even most) strips include indie references, but a decent amount of them do. =) And his commentary alongside the comic proper has some good bands.
animesuki is one of the two sites I get most of my anime torrents from. Tokyotosho is the other that I'd heartily suggest. Some torrents are duplicates, but they do carry a fair bit of different stuff too(eg: OSTs on tokyotosho, raws, etc...). And tokyotosho doesn't mind carrying some shows that animesuki wouldn't be willing to.
Indeed, the visual cortex taking over braille reading is something that occurs in those who are blind from birth, or at least very early in development. I've not heard of such changes happening in older people. If any should occur I'd think they'd be greatly reduced, and less likely to form meaningful/useful networks.
And no, I don't plan on doing any work with such individuals, this is just stuff I picked up from random classes. I plan on working more with older individuals who've suffered from traumatic brain injury, stroke, things like that and are having problems with speech or language. Perhaps some more general cognitive issues too like memory.
Wikipedia has an entry on critical periods that you can read. Check out some of the references if you can.
Vision, hearing, language are the most well known critical periods, but others exist too. It's been rather informative too for medical treatment. When a child was born with cataracts they used to wait for them to age a bit, for easier surgery(anaesthetics and babies don't mix as easily). Then they discovered that their vision was permanently screwed up, as the brain hadn't gotten proper, clean input when they were first learning how to see. Now they surgically fix such issues(lazy eye, cataracts, etc...) much earlier so that the child can receive normal input during their development.
If the product isn't a neccessity of life, then yes, it is a choice.
If there are multiple providers, I choose which to buy from. If there's only one, I can choose to not buy. It might not be an especially desirable situation, but I don't NEED to consume alot of the products that are "Made in China", I just enjoy doing so.
Wake me up when one can't buy any life saving medicines except those made in China. Or maybe all food.
The issue with treating blindness is the occipital lobe of the brain(and other areas) needs appropriate input at certain ages in order to develop typically. If your friends have acquired blindess in adolescence or adulthood, then it would be fairly simple(the preceeding is a lie) to hook up a camera to their optic nerve, much like we do with cochlear implants. The neurons have learned how to deal with visual input earlier, and now are just kicking around relaxing and waiting for input to resume.
But if they've been blind since birth, the cells that would be handling visual data in sighted individuals aren't just sitting around waiting to "see" stuff. They've gotten bored with waiting(read: the critical period has passed) and they're now doing other jobs. One interesting finding has been that blind individuals use their occipital cortex to read braille, and that the activity noted there is functionally, useful activity. They're using the part of the brain that normally deals with vision in order to skillfully read with their fingertips. The brain is amazingly plastic, which can be both good, and bad:/
I know it's somewhat indicative of a tinfoil hat, but that's basically what I and many others do, using NoScript.
If I trust the website enough to run javascript, then I add it to my whitelist. I don't see the need for javascript on most of the pages I go to, and would rather not have my computer running unnecessary code. Seems to my totally uneducated POV that it'd slow my computer down if I have 20 tabs each running javascript stuff, when only 2 of them ACTUALLY need it. My RAM is precious to me. =(
A middle ground such as... I don't know, paying zero dollars? I know it's not losslessly encoded ogg vorbis or flac files delivered to your door with a complimentary pie and a pretty pony, but it's a good middle ground.
Perhaps people just didn't want to overload their servers?
If I had no intention of paying, but wanted a copy, I might have downloaded it off of a torrent just so that their server didn't have to give me the whole thing.
I'm getting it off some random schmucks and contributing *my* bandwidth towards serving their songs up. Seems like a possible explanation to me anyway.
They don't get to add another number to their "people who downloaded from us" but their server costs go down somewhat. I dunno if it's malevolent or kind to do this:P Apparently they were alright with people downloading with no payment, suggesting that it'd be better to just leech off of them rather than torrent it, but it still seems wrong. Don't a sizable number of slashdotters seed (linux distro) torrents after completing, in the hopes that they can give a little bit back to their favourite OS?
Repeat after me:
A prime number is a natural number which only has two divisors; one and itself.
Now divide 000 by 0. What? Buffer overflow? Huh, not a prime then:P
001 isn't a prime number either, as it's only divisible by *one* number. 1.
And honestly I'd rather a low UID, as lower == better (pretend that posting on/. is like playing golf)
I just happen to think that having a prime UID or a product of two primes UID or something like that would be worth a bonus point.
Ah, but will the 2/3 digit UID be prime? That'd add a bit more value to it for me. I suppose a UID like 380 would be nice enough, but I'd probably prefer one like 389(even with its *slightly* lower "stupid low UID pissing match thread" winning potential)
Really, with incomplete information about the number I can't make an informed decision on how much money to try and waste.
That is, that the other parties have very large amount of influence in how the parliament works during minority governments. Hint: check out what the current parliament is, and what the previous one was like, and another in my lifetime(1979).
Even during majority goverments, the voting of the minority parties can matter a great deal. Not every vote gets 100% support by every member of the governing party. So the governing party needs the help of the others(eg: the NDP/Liberal coalition of sorts during the previous parliament)
That is, the other parties matter(hence why millions of people vote for them).
That's roughly what I was trying to say anyway. *shrug*
Turns out that Ontario wont be getting MMP. You can read about the results on the CBC website.
Here's the meat of it:
At noon Thursday, with more than 99 per cent of polls counted, the proposal had the support of 36.8 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, 63.2 per cent of voters cast their ballots in favour of the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system.
Only five ridings, all of them in Toronto, showed a majority supporting MMP.
The MMP proposal required 60 per cent support to become the new electoral system. As well, it had to win a majority in 64 ridings.
A citizens assembly was appointed by the previous Liberal government to study the issue. It recommended MMP to replace FPTP, which has been in place in Ontario for 215 years. As a supporter of MMP, let me say "Yay for democracy =\"
eh, my province(Ontario) and my country (Canada) has had a first past the post electoral system. Surprisingly enough, there are four different "major" parties in parliment(Liberal/Conservative/NDP/Bloc) and numerous minor parties(Green, etc...) that get a chunk of the vote too.
The Bloc would need a truly bizarre balance of seats among the other parties in order to become the government, but have served as our Opposition party before. It's unlikely for the NDP to become a governing party in the foreseeable future, but they get significant numbers of seats.
Last night Ontario had a referendum on switching from first past the post to mixed member proportional voting, don't think the results are in from that yet. FPP has some pretty serious issues, but that in and of itself doesn't preclude 3rd parties and alternative viewpoints. There's something ELSE going on that has contributed to that culture of "there's only two, mutually contradictory viewpoints on any issue, and these conveniently arrange themselves such that you'll find all of your policies in one of the parties, and none in the other, such that a compromise party(A from Demos, B from Republicans, C from Demos) is ridiculous" view that the US seems to have.
I don't disagree that FPP tends to foster that sort of thinking/voting, but it's not sufficient. What are the other factors that led to a 2 party system in the states, while multiple parties can exist elsewhere?
We took on the anti-pornography movement, which had dominated the feminist conversation about sex: As we saw it, the claim that "pornography is violence against women" was code for the neo-Victorian idea that men want sex and women endure it. [1]
Women can enjoy sex just as much as men can. It's fantastical to think I know, but it's true! Even if a camera is pointed at them. For a small % of women(and men) the thought of it being seen by hundreds of thousands/millions of people actually makes the sex even hotter and more fun.
Feminist on slashdot: How many actual women are on slashdot? I happen to know some guys who identify as feminists. And there are some women on/. It just happens to be easier to hide one's gender online if you don't want to be constantly harrassed with "Tits or GTFO!"
Some of us happen to have no problem with porn, so long as it's done between adults who gave informed consent, and viewed by adults who want to look at/watch/read it. Much (most?) porn appears would be degrading to me, were I to be one of the actors, but I'm not. I don't get to choose to tell someone "Don't do that, I'd be disgusted at the idea of doing it" There are plenty of jobs that are distateful to me, but I don't see that as a reason to artificially make it hard to get those jobs via legal measures.
And also, porn is degrading to women? What about gay porn? Trust me, there's PLENTY of it and the only people getting degraded in those are guys:P So in Ohio hetero porn == bad, but gay porn is alright?
Huh, I wouldn't have guessed that. Learn something new every day.
Slashdot Mirror
While they're not perfect obviously, there already exist a variety of drugs that some people use for a brain boost.
:P Still, like you said the market clearly exists. C'mon Invisible Hand! ... Damn that Adam Smith, he lied to me :(
I've heard reports of amantadine, bupropion, and a whole host of more common stimulants like amphetamine's being used for this. Some people report it makes them feel mentally sharper, along with the expected energy boosts.
Others (eg: my psychopharmacology prof) have been dissapointed with amphetamines
Oddly enough I've only played in two campaigns featuring a cleric, and I was the cleric in both of them (very reluctantly).
My character could be very powerful, and was OK to roleplay, but... Just not as much fun as I've had with other classes. Everyone else I played with had no interest (or less) in playing one.
We made do just fine. Healing potions, trips back to town to visit a temple/cleric there, wands/etc... Or just treating a stab wound to the belly like it'd be a Bad Thing.
I mean, even if you can get healed a few seconds after, do you REALLY want to get stabbed? It'd hurt! Our lack of a handy cleric made us treat fights a bit more warily/respectfully/realistically I think, even the little ones. Sure they're just goblins, and we could take all of them out with ease, but odds are a couple of us are going to get knifed or bit or something. Let's see how we can deal with this...
If we're picking old games, I'll say that Planescape: Torment from 1999 has given me more joy than the games listed above. I like some of the best's picked by those guys, but they just don't have the staying power for me.
Despite the fact that it's visually unimpressive now(and was not really that special then), it has a very compelling story, and fantastic dialogue. I actually cared about many of the characters in the story, and hoped for Good Things to happen to them. And there's some dark stuff too, which I like. Shame that more work wasn't done in the Planescape universe, it's a pretty interesting system.
On the upside, we don't have a single alternative to the Conservative government. A couple other parties can and do get significant numbers of seats. Imagine if Liberterians down there got around 25-35% of the seats in Congress every election, and had a higher proportion of the popular vote. Makes switching from republicrats to them seem more reasonable doesn't it?
I think that word of mouth amongst the truckers(and feedback from management to truckers) would take care of that in time. And the fine money in the meantime would be very nice. Perhaps a referendum amongst the people in the city?
Circle one:
(A) Do you want the city to make oodles of money it can spend on New Shinies/Lower Taxes, and for the trucks to stop in a couple months.
(B) The city should just try it's hardest to stop the trucks as soon as possible, money be damned.
You're not the only one. Canadian here, and even with the greatly improved shopping opportunities in the US I still don't go there. I could buy lots of stuff cheap now as a result of our drastically shifted currency values over the past couple years, but it'll need to improve even more before I consider it.
I just don't like the idea of subjecting myself to the whims of the US goverment(made of people), and the US people(who tacitly support the government).
So they've lost your money while travelling to Canada, and my money in shopping and tourism. Anyone care to check how much the US has gotten each year from foreigners visiting, say, over the past 8 years? I don't think that the two of us are alone in our habits, and it'd be interesting to see how big and effect if any such behaviour has caused. Evaluating in USD and in some other currecy like the Euro or CAD would be fun too. Covarying out the change in currency value might show a different story.
Hmm, I've never used cokemachineglow.com before, I'll check it out as soon as I'm done this post =D
While pitchfork has it's issues, it's pretty good. Found out about it(and a fair chunk of my music catalog) from Jeph Jacques's webcomic Questionable Content. He posts reviews of music on a not infrequent basis, and between them, pitchfork and word of mouth I've got a fairly hefty amount of non-RIAA stuff. If you like indie music giving his comic a read is well worth it. Not every(or even most) strips include indie references, but a decent amount of them do. =) And his commentary alongside the comic proper has some good bands.
Finally, Resident Advisor can sometime have some good stuff.
animesuki is one of the two sites I get most of my anime torrents from. Tokyotosho is the other that I'd heartily suggest. Some torrents are duplicates, but they do carry a fair bit of different stuff too(eg: OSTs on tokyotosho, raws, etc...). And tokyotosho doesn't mind carrying some shows that animesuki wouldn't be willing to.
Indeed, the visual cortex taking over braille reading is something that occurs in those who are blind from birth, or at least very early in development. I've not heard of such changes happening in older people. If any should occur I'd think they'd be greatly reduced, and less likely to form meaningful/useful networks.
And no, I don't plan on doing any work with such individuals, this is just stuff I picked up from random classes. I plan on working more with older individuals who've suffered from traumatic brain injury, stroke, things like that and are having problems with speech or language. Perhaps some more general cognitive issues too like memory.
Wikipedia has an entry on critical periods that you can read. Check out some of the references if you can.
Vision, hearing, language are the most well known critical periods, but others exist too. It's been rather informative too for medical treatment. When a child was born with cataracts they used to wait for them to age a bit, for easier surgery(anaesthetics and babies don't mix as easily). Then they discovered that their vision was permanently screwed up, as the brain hadn't gotten proper, clean input when they were first learning how to see. Now they surgically fix such issues(lazy eye, cataracts, etc...) much earlier so that the child can receive normal input during their development.
If the product isn't a neccessity of life, then yes, it is a choice.
If there are multiple providers, I choose which to buy from. If there's only one, I can choose to not buy.
It might not be an especially desirable situation, but I don't NEED to consume alot of the products that are "Made in China", I just enjoy doing so.
Wake me up when one can't buy any life saving medicines except those made in China. Or maybe all food.
IAANS(I am a neuropsychology student)
:/
The issue with treating blindness is the occipital lobe of the brain(and other areas) needs appropriate input at certain ages in order to develop typically. If your friends have acquired blindess in adolescence or adulthood, then it would be fairly simple(the preceeding is a lie) to hook up a camera to their optic nerve, much like we do with cochlear implants. The neurons have learned how to deal with visual input earlier, and now are just kicking around relaxing and waiting for input to resume.
But if they've been blind since birth, the cells that would be handling visual data in sighted individuals aren't just sitting around waiting to "see" stuff. They've gotten bored with waiting(read: the critical period has passed) and they're now doing other jobs. One interesting finding has been that blind individuals use their occipital cortex to read braille, and that the activity noted there is functionally, useful activity. They're using the part of the brain that normally deals with vision in order to skillfully read with their fingertips. The brain is amazingly plastic, which can be both good, and bad
I know it's somewhat indicative of a tinfoil hat, but that's basically what I and many others do, using NoScript.
If I trust the website enough to run javascript, then I add it to my whitelist. I don't see the need for javascript on most of the pages I go to, and would rather not have my computer running unnecessary code. Seems to my totally uneducated POV that it'd slow my computer down if I have 20 tabs each running javascript stuff, when only 2 of them ACTUALLY need it. My RAM is precious to me. =(
A middle ground such as ... I don't know, paying zero dollars?
I know it's not losslessly encoded ogg vorbis or flac files delivered to your door with a complimentary pie and a pretty pony, but it's a good middle ground.
Perhaps people just didn't want to overload their servers?
:P Apparently they were alright with people downloading with no payment, suggesting that it'd be better to just leech off of them rather than torrent it, but it still seems wrong. Don't a sizable number of slashdotters seed (linux distro) torrents after completing, in the hopes that they can give a little bit back to their favourite OS?
If I had no intention of paying, but wanted a copy, I might have downloaded it off of a torrent just so that their server didn't have to give me the whole thing.
I'm getting it off some random schmucks and contributing *my* bandwidth towards serving their songs up. Seems like a possible explanation to me anyway.
They don't get to add another number to their "people who downloaded from us" but their server costs go down somewhat.
I dunno if it's malevolent or kind to do this
Repeat after me: :P
/. is like playing golf)
I just happen to think that having a prime UID or a product of two primes UID or something like that would be worth a bonus point.
A prime number is a natural number which only has two divisors; one and itself.
Now divide 000 by 0. What? Buffer overflow? Huh, not a prime then
001 isn't a prime number either, as it's only divisible by *one* number. 1.
And honestly I'd rather a low UID, as lower == better (pretend that posting on
Ah, but will the 2/3 digit UID be prime? That'd add a bit more value to it for me. I suppose a UID like 380 would be nice enough, but I'd probably prefer one like 389(even with its *slightly* lower "stupid low UID pissing match thread" winning potential)
Really, with incomplete information about the number I can't make an informed decision on how much money to try and waste.
That is, that the other parties have very large amount of influence in how the parliament works during minority governments.
Hint: check out what the current parliament is, and what the previous one was like, and another in my lifetime(1979).
Even during majority goverments, the voting of the minority parties can matter a great deal. Not every vote gets 100% support by every member of the governing party. So the governing party needs the help of the others(eg: the NDP/Liberal coalition of sorts during the previous parliament)
That is, the other parties matter(hence why millions of people vote for them).
That's roughly what I was trying to say anyway. *shrug*
Here's the meat of it:
At noon Thursday, with more than 99 per cent of polls counted, the proposal had the support of 36.8 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, 63.2 per cent of voters cast their ballots in favour of the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system.
Only five ridings, all of them in Toronto, showed a majority supporting MMP.
The MMP proposal required 60 per cent support to become the new electoral system. As well, it had to win a majority in 64 ridings.
A citizens assembly was appointed by the previous Liberal government to study the issue. It recommended MMP to replace FPTP, which has been in place in Ontario for 215 years. As a supporter of MMP, let me say "Yay for democracy =\"
eh, my province(Ontario) and my country (Canada) has had a first past the post electoral system. Surprisingly enough, there are four different "major" parties in parliment(Liberal/Conservative/NDP/Bloc) and numerous minor parties(Green, etc...) that get a chunk of the vote too.
The Bloc would need a truly bizarre balance of seats among the other parties in order to become the government, but have served as our Opposition party before. It's unlikely for the NDP to become a governing party in the foreseeable future, but they get significant numbers of seats.
Last night Ontario had a referendum on switching from first past the post to mixed member proportional voting, don't think the results are in from that yet. FPP has some pretty serious issues, but that in and of itself doesn't preclude 3rd parties and alternative viewpoints. There's something ELSE going on that has contributed to that culture of "there's only two, mutually contradictory viewpoints on any issue, and these conveniently arrange themselves such that you'll find all of your policies in one of the parties, and none in the other, such that a compromise party(A from Demos, B from Republicans, C from Demos) is ridiculous" view that the US seems to have.
I don't disagree that FPP tends to foster that sort of thinking/voting, but it's not sufficient. What are the other factors that led to a 2 party system in the states, while multiple parties can exist elsewhere?
You can find out (more than you wanted) what the deal with slash here
Hint: It has something to do with codes like Kirk/Spock or Harry/Draco
For the lazy it's just to the "southwest" of the IRC isles, southeast of wikipedia. Easier to see in the blown up version of the strip here
Women can enjoy sex just as much as men can. It's fantastical to think I know, but it's true! Even if a camera is pointed at them. For a small % of women(and men) the thought of it being seen by hundreds of thousands/millions of people actually makes the sex even hotter and more fun.
It just happens to be easier to hide one's gender online if you don't want to be constantly harrassed with "Tits or GTFO!"
Some of us happen to have no problem with porn, so long as it's done between adults who gave informed consent, and viewed by adults who want to look at/watch/read it. Much (most?) porn appears would be degrading to me, were I to be one of the actors, but I'm not. I don't get to choose to tell someone "Don't do that, I'd be disgusted at the idea of doing it" There are plenty of jobs that are distateful to me, but I don't see that as a reason to artificially make it hard to get those jobs via legal measures.
:P
And also, porn is degrading to women? What about gay porn? Trust me, there's PLENTY of it and the only people getting degraded in those are guys
So in Ohio hetero porn == bad, but gay porn is alright?
Huh, I wouldn't have guessed that. Learn something new every day.