Certainly lots of people have heard of snake-oil. Heck, asperin was also a cure-all.
The difference between stem cells and asperin is that all of your cells were created via stem cells (indirectly or directly) and not asperin.
In theory, you could regenerate most (if not all) of your dead and dying body cells with stem cells because stems cells are basic building blocks of original cell generation. The reason we get sick, old, and die is because cells self replicate until they are beoyond damaged and damaged cells can only replicate damaged cells.
Go back to the starting point and create healthy original cells via stem cell therapy and you've got young and non-damaged cells again.
Calling stems cells a cure all is akin to calling atoms the cure all for reality. It is what we are made out of.
First of all, no other moving objects on the course.
Seeing this is a military application that was intended for desert use, any moving objects would generally move themselves out of the way.
If not, chances are the persons doing this have the intentions to stop and destroy the unmaned vehicle serving the purpose of saving human life on the part of the US Military.
No to mention that the vehicle would auto-report this back to HQ as hostile action and a nearby UAV predator might drop air support to encourage them to move away;)
The problem with believing that physical reality is independent from the mind is that it is neither dependant nor independent.
Do you know that there are not enough nerves in the retina to display 100% of all light rays that enter it? Most of what you see and feel is guestimation by your mind. This doesn't change what a physical objects properties, but you have to keep in mind (no pun intended) that the mind isn't 100% digital like a computer.
You need the mind to perceive reality and you need reality to have a psychical mind.
Secondly, what you perceive does affect the outcome because you are physical doing physical things in the universe. Even passively you are breathing, blinking, heart beating, neurons firing... You are affecting the universe in some way. If you perceive certain results you will even go further and interact with the physical universe such as moving locations or possible destroying the organization or creating organization of matter. You know... Like believing god told you throw a dish across the room and breaking it and then gluing it back together because you realized that was a crazy idea.
Lets go on to the existence part on how and if the mind actually causes physical reality...
Imagine to yourself that you don't exist. Either you were never born or you just spontaneously combusted a few seconds ago. Now answer me this... Does the rest of the universe still exist?
Wait! Wait! You can't answer that yes or no... You know why? Because you do not exist.
Existence is a matter of opinion or rather if you are able to observe something. If you observe it (or its affects). Then it exists. If you do not observe it. Then it does not exist. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist for other people... Just not to you.
I would like to expand saying that if you observe its affects on the physical universe then it exists. Don't forget, you don't have to understand it or its affects on the universe to observe it.
This means everything in the observable universe exist and everything outside does not. However, this is extremely broad. Since all matter emits gravity and various types of emissions of light, reflection of light, and various other properties we can generally assume that reality is not just something we can close our eyes and it goes away.
If we are dead (or just never existed) we aren't around to observe this and the point of whether the universe actually exists is a moot point. We could not simply agree or disagree on the matter.
But if you subscribe to Quantum Immortality then you cannot not exist, because once you cease to exist or have memories, you would instantaneously find yourself as either yourself (or another sentient being) somewhere in the universe with the ability to observe and record memories of your self existing even though this could be a trillion years in the future or in another universe where life is possible.
I think what these Quantum mechanics were trying to explain (or figure out) is what really happens or what causes the universe itself to exist and along the way they realized it had something to do with observation and existence itself (which rather bothered them because they didn't want to get into philosophy). I don't think we'll figure that part out anytime soon.
This is just further proof that we are living in the Matrix. With each and every absurd observation, man is getting closer to the truth that we are the cat in the box.
Ray Kurzweil kind of suggested the same problem in his "Singularity is Near" book as an offtopic musing part of his book. He pointed out about the oddness of the fact that the universe conforms to rules similar to a computer simulation and given the Anthropomorphic Principal that the universe has to be conducive to (human) life in order for us to observe it, the changes are that we could indeed be in a simulation already.
However, to what end would another universe need to simulate ours? He proposes that maybe it is to solve a problem they could not solve in their own. I personally thinkg is that this could be reversing the second law of thermodynamics or preventing the end of their own universe or FTL.
Since you are limited to solving a problem in your own universe with limited matter and time, you could create an infinite (or almost infinite) amounts of mini-universe not tied to your own in a simulation and the root out the universes that do not give good results and mearly wait til one of the universes fails to not exist.
Then they will go about examining why that universe was able to overcome 2nd law of thermo-dynamics, heat death, or the big crunch... Which will most likley also have found out FTL.
This is just speculation because we may never know... Ray just joked that maybe life is really about some hacker in another universe trying to figure out Pi to the n'th number.
Seriously, I don't get what the rage is about blogs. Why would I? Why would someone else's boring day suddenly be interesting because they wrote about it.
Because in the blogs I read that someone else is a girl, has larger tits than you, and they post pictures of them...
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history?
Hello Dave, would you like to see home made videos of my previous owner and his 70 year old wife? Let me show you all his browser history of old love sites he would browse. What are you doing Dave?! Why are you trying to format my hard drive!
Yeah, great idea. Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots. Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots, i.e. McJobs.
Actually you couldn't be more wrong. Most customer service skills are outsourced to foreign countries as it is. Replacing those jobs wouldn't affect our market that much. (trust me... my old call center with an unnamed major ISP layed everyone off right after I quit and outsourced to India... I do still tech support over the phone, but if I got replaced with a robot it wouldn't bother me that much since most of the people that are in CS or TS phone support hate their jobs anyways and spend most of the day browsing monster.com at work)
Secondly, a Robot would put up with shit that human would not. Screaming... Cursing... All that stuff that customers do without retorting or walking off the job. Hell it would have an "American accent" and have better english skills than you or I.
However the trick is to fool the customer into believing the person is an uber happy person willing to give them their proverbial first born which means the thing will have to pass a turing test......which means not any time soon.
Correct, I think the problem with analogies is they cannot be applied from physical realm to idea realm without having infinite amounts of exceptions to whatever you were having an analogy about.
Mostly because information does not behave in the same respect as the physical world. Does murder and lack of DRM have anything in common? Can you really make an equation between to two actions and use murder of a white guy to justify the inherit wrongness of copyright violations.
As much as I could reverse it and absurdly declare that DRM as an analogy to hate laws passed by a racist government oppressing everyone regardless of race...
Although I broke my rule a few posts down but I was using an anology of a real world situation vs a real world situation.
Sure, just like if someone does not lock up their valuables you're free to take all you want.
In reality, if your insurance company finds out you didn't lock your doors or take precautions against theft, they won't write you a check for your loss.
If I could break a rule here about analogies, if I make a juicy delicious steak and and put it out on my table and I leave my door open and my neighbors dog comes in and eats it... Who can I blame for my lost steak?
I could blame the dog, but that is what dogs do... They eat meat, just like a theif steals things. I can't teach the dog not to eat my food because it isn't my dog. I can beat it myself, or call my neighbor and have him punish it, or I can go the extreme and call the pound and have it dragged away.
However I'm still out of a steak because I didn't have my door closed. It doesn't make the dog right, but obviously it benefits you to suck it up and protect yourself and stop using "other people aren't supposed do bad things" as an exscuse to not put forth the effort of protecting yourself.
Guess what? You don't have control over other people when they do bad things. You do have control over yourself and how much of those bad things will affect you. Understanding that will go a long way.
Does the existence of hate crime laws means I am free to kill other white guys?
If someone kills white guy, does it make it ok to pass hate laws discriminating against all non-white races? Even if they were innocent and possibly the white guy was killed by another white guy?
It wouldn't be that hard considering G4 is showing reruns of The Manshow, whatever the hell that street racing show is, and showing Star Trek:TNG (Don't get me wrong... I like Star Trek as much as the next guy, but the last guys who played it were Spike TV and I don't find reruns of James Bond 24/7 all that entertaining).
I will give them the benefit of the doubt because Xplay, Attack of the Show, and that Anime thing (Barbwired Biscuit) are fairly entertaining... But I miss the days of TechTV.
On the other side, MTV's quality programing leaves nothing to be desired except for the strong desire to turn the damn TV off and throw it out the window.
I was really bothered when I found out over the holidays couch potatoing that MTV2 isn't showing that many videos anymore but reruns of Jack Ass and Bam. WTF?
...until the day you can download anything, at anytime, regardless of size or what else your network is doing instantaneously or at least faster than 150 miliseconds (the time it takes for the human mind to recognize something) after you click the download button.
Until then... It needs to improve.
Otherwise we are wasting our lives on time that need not be wasted.
If we're gonna have big brother, why not make it accurate?
I have always thought one of the downsides to having Big Brother was that if you monitor every single detail of everyone single life then you just end up not seeing anything important because it is physically impossible for a small group of person to keep track of it all.
And then you get to the problem of keeping track of the people keeping track to ensure they aren't doing anything wrong...
Of course if you record every bit of detail and say well X crime happened on X date on X location lets see where X person was.
On the upside, if you were innocent then you'll have the proof of technology on yourside saying "hey look at my car it was on the other side of town the whole time..."
On the downside, a less than truthful government could mearly make up the figures and say in court "We have proof that via Galieo that his car was in the general area of the suspected crime that has not been commited but was with the others we are trying on conspiracy to commit high treason!" and the poor sap replies "But I don't even own a car!" and the government lawyer replies "Lies... I would like to present bill of sale dated a few months ago of the accused's car! Be careful of the wet ink your honor!"
Actually, I would counter that most singularity-esque technologies are already in labs or on timetables to be released into mass productionvery shortly, but you never hear about them because the companies producing them don't need to make press releases that tout their technologies will be feasible in 20 years.
Take for example instant boot computers via flash memory... Either 2006 or 2007 and will be one of the more revolutionary developments of the PC since maybe the 56K modem or 3d graphics card, but you don't see Intel press releases even mentioning a big hub bub about it because those companies don't need VC investors.
So when someone does say "X technology will be ready in 20 years" they really mean is "we'd like enough venture capital to last us for 20 years".
I'm not that interested in the browser but some of the middleware code to emulate windows calls on the Mac might be interesting to play with...
There are none. IE for the Mac was built from scratch not using a single line of IE Windows code by a different team of developers who most likley didn't have any formal communication with the IE for windows team.
Apparently, whoever modded you flamebait never had to use IE for the mac. It is a horrid wretched peice of software that should die like the rotting beast of Golgamathea that it is.
It is like a program with all the problems and stability issues of IE 5 (sans Active X because there is not Active X for the mac) with none of its benefits that you would get on a PC version. Hell... Most of the pages rendered nothing like their windows counterpart. The program was made from scratch using a totally different team not related to the IE team for the PC.
As soon as a better alternative came out (Safari) I dumped IE.
May it burn in hell and let us not metion it ever again.
Not for me. Patents are scummy ways of avoiding competition. In my non-existant "utopia" I would never accept them -- don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
On the downside, Americans will have patented all possible ideas in the next few years and engage in useless lawsuits that will cripple the economy and allow China, India, Japan, and the EU to surpass us in the invention field.
On the upside everything will be public domain 17 years after that and there won't be anything left to patent.
CEO Take 2: "The panel gives Jack Thompson the floor... (oh good grief)" Jack Thompson: "I'd like to start of on how horrible all of you peo..." Yakuza_1: "Revere the Emperor!" Yakuza_2: "Expel the barbarian!" *Guards appear out of the woodwork and drag Jack screaming and kicking down the aisle* Yakuza_3: "Bonzai!" *beats the restrained Jack with a bamboo stick*
How about a company that sets up shop in a tax free state, like NH, to accept the deliveries of on-line purchases where the buyer can come and pick it up. Kind of like a mailboxes etc. Oh wait....
Better yet, just setup a distribution center in Canada and ship items claiming they are gifts.
There is no reason that customers of say, Amazon.com, should be mostly exempted from paying sales tax while customers of bestbuy.com or compusa.com have to do so for the exact same items.
Unless you live in driving distance of Deleware...
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly lots of people have heard of snake-oil. Heck, asperin was also a cure-all.
The difference between stem cells and asperin is that all of your cells were created via stem cells (indirectly or directly) and not asperin.
In theory, you could regenerate most (if not all) of your dead and dying body cells with stem cells because stems cells are basic building blocks of original cell generation. The reason we get sick, old, and die is because cells self replicate until they are beoyond damaged and damaged cells can only replicate damaged cells.
Go back to the starting point and create healthy original cells via stem cell therapy and you've got young and non-damaged cells again.
Calling stems cells a cure all is akin to calling atoms the cure all for reality. It is what we are made out of.
Would a robot controlled car try to straddle a squirrel running across the road like I do?
Yeah, but only to get a better shot with its mounted machine gun.
First of all, no other moving objects on the course.
;)
Seeing this is a military application that was intended for desert use, any moving objects would generally move themselves out of the way.
If not, chances are the persons doing this have the intentions to stop and destroy the unmaned vehicle serving the purpose of saving human life on the part of the US Military.
No to mention that the vehicle would auto-report this back to HQ as hostile action and a nearby UAV predator might drop air support to encourage them to move away
The problem with believing that physical reality is independent from the mind is that it is neither dependant nor independent.
Do you know that there are not enough nerves in the retina to display 100% of all light rays that enter it? Most of what you see and feel is guestimation by your mind. This doesn't change what a physical objects properties, but you have to keep in mind (no pun intended) that the mind isn't 100% digital like a computer.
You need the mind to perceive reality and you need reality to have a psychical mind.
Secondly, what you perceive does affect the outcome because you are physical doing physical things in the universe. Even passively you are breathing, blinking, heart beating, neurons firing... You are affecting the universe in some way. If you perceive certain results you will even go further and interact with the physical universe such as moving locations or possible destroying the organization or creating organization of matter. You know... Like believing god told you throw a dish across the room and breaking it and then gluing it back together because you realized that was a crazy idea.
Lets go on to the existence part on how and if the mind actually causes physical reality...
Imagine to yourself that you don't exist. Either you were never born or you just spontaneously combusted a few seconds ago. Now answer me this... Does the rest of the universe still exist?
Wait! Wait! You can't answer that yes or no... You know why? Because you do not exist.
Existence is a matter of opinion or rather if you are able to observe something. If you observe it (or its affects). Then it exists. If you do not observe it. Then it does not exist. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist for other people... Just not to you.
I would like to expand saying that if you observe its affects on the physical universe then it exists. Don't forget, you don't have to understand it or its affects on the universe to observe it.
This means everything in the observable universe exist and everything outside does not. However, this is extremely broad. Since all matter emits gravity and various types of emissions of light, reflection of light, and various other properties we can generally assume that reality is not just something we can close our eyes and it goes away.
If we are dead (or just never existed) we aren't around to observe this and the point of whether the universe actually exists is a moot point. We could not simply agree or disagree on the matter.
But if you subscribe to Quantum Immortality then you cannot not exist, because once you cease to exist or have memories, you would instantaneously find yourself as either yourself (or another sentient being) somewhere in the universe with the ability to observe and record memories of your self existing even though this could be a trillion years in the future or in another universe where life is possible.
I think what these Quantum mechanics were trying to explain (or figure out) is what really happens or what causes the universe itself to exist and along the way they realized it had something to do with observation and existence itself (which rather bothered them because they didn't want to get into philosophy). I don't think we'll figure that part out anytime soon.
See my sig.
This is just further proof that we are living in the Matrix. With each and every absurd observation, man is getting closer to the truth that we are the cat in the box.
Ray Kurzweil kind of suggested the same problem in his "Singularity is Near" book as an offtopic musing part of his book. He pointed out about the oddness of the fact that the universe conforms to rules similar to a computer simulation and given the Anthropomorphic Principal that the universe has to be conducive to (human) life in order for us to observe it, the changes are that we could indeed be in a simulation already.
However, to what end would another universe need to simulate ours? He proposes that maybe it is to solve a problem they could not solve in their own. I personally thinkg is that this could be reversing the second law of thermodynamics or preventing the end of their own universe or FTL.
Since you are limited to solving a problem in your own universe with limited matter and time, you could create an infinite (or almost infinite) amounts of mini-universe not tied to your own in a simulation and the root out the universes that do not give good results and mearly wait til one of the universes fails to not exist.
Then they will go about examining why that universe was able to overcome 2nd law of thermo-dynamics, heat death, or the big crunch... Which will most likley also have found out FTL.
This is just speculation because we may never know... Ray just joked that maybe life is really about some hacker in another universe trying to figure out Pi to the n'th number.
Hence the multiverse issue...
Seriously, I don't get what the rage is about blogs. Why would I? Why would someone else's boring day suddenly be interesting because they wrote about it.
Because in the blogs I read that someone else is a girl, has larger tits than you, and they post pictures of them...
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history?
Hello Dave, would you like to see home made videos of my previous owner and his 70 year old wife? Let me show you all his browser history of old love sites he would browse. What are you doing Dave?! Why are you trying to format my hard drive!
Yeah, great idea. Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots. Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots, i.e. McJobs.
...which means not any time soon.
Actually you couldn't be more wrong. Most customer service skills are outsourced to foreign countries as it is. Replacing those jobs wouldn't affect our market that much. (trust me... my old call center with an unnamed major ISP layed everyone off right after I quit and outsourced to India... I do still tech support over the phone, but if I got replaced with a robot it wouldn't bother me that much since most of the people that are in CS or TS phone support hate their jobs anyways and spend most of the day browsing monster.com at work)
Secondly, a Robot would put up with shit that human would not. Screaming... Cursing... All that stuff that customers do without retorting or walking off the job. Hell it would have an "American accent" and have better english skills than you or I.
However the trick is to fool the customer into believing the person is an uber happy person willing to give them their proverbial first born which means the thing will have to pass a turing test...
And that will probably mean the Chinese, who will take up the slack by manufacturing systems without TPM
I knew I should have taken Mandarin in college.
So you were trying to make a paradoy analogy.
Correct, I think the problem with analogies is they cannot be applied from physical realm to idea realm without having infinite amounts of exceptions to whatever you were having an analogy about.
Mostly because information does not behave in the same respect as the physical world. Does murder and lack of DRM have anything in common? Can you really make an equation between to two actions and use murder of a white guy to justify the inherit wrongness of copyright violations.
As much as I could reverse it and absurdly declare that DRM as an analogy to hate laws passed by a racist government oppressing everyone regardless of race...
Although I broke my rule a few posts down but I was using an anology of a real world situation vs a real world situation.
Sure, just like if someone does not lock up their valuables you're free to take all you want.
In reality, if your insurance company finds out you didn't lock your doors or take precautions against theft, they won't write you a check for your loss.
If I could break a rule here about analogies, if I make a juicy delicious steak and and put it out on my table and I leave my door open and my neighbors dog comes in and eats it... Who can I blame for my lost steak?
I could blame the dog, but that is what dogs do... They eat meat, just like a theif steals things. I can't teach the dog not to eat my food because it isn't my dog. I can beat it myself, or call my neighbor and have him punish it, or I can go the extreme and call the pound and have it dragged away.
However I'm still out of a steak because I didn't have my door closed. It doesn't make the dog right, but obviously it benefits you to suck it up and protect yourself and stop using "other people aren't supposed do bad things" as an exscuse to not put forth the effort of protecting yourself.
Guess what? You don't have control over other people when they do bad things. You do have control over yourself and how much of those bad things will affect you. Understanding that will go a long way.
Does the existence of hate crime laws means I am free to kill other white guys?
If someone kills white guy, does it make it ok to pass hate laws discriminating against all non-white races? Even if they were innocent and possibly the white guy was killed by another white guy?
In theory this is how DRM works.
Everyone is assumed to be a criminal.
MTV Making Better Gaming TV Than G4TV?
It wouldn't be that hard considering G4 is showing reruns of The Manshow, whatever the hell that street racing show is, and showing Star Trek:TNG (Don't get me wrong... I like Star Trek as much as the next guy, but the last guys who played it were Spike TV and I don't find reruns of James Bond 24/7 all that entertaining).
I will give them the benefit of the doubt because Xplay, Attack of the Show, and that Anime thing (Barbwired Biscuit) are fairly entertaining... But I miss the days of TechTV.
On the other side, MTV's quality programing leaves nothing to be desired except for the strong desire to turn the damn TV off and throw it out the window.
I was really bothered when I found out over the holidays couch potatoing that MTV2 isn't showing that many videos anymore but reruns of Jack Ass and Bam. WTF?
Do people not watch music videos anymore?
As a gamer, you should be more concerned about latency than speed-- at least, if you play "twitch" games (read: FPS games), as opposed to MMORPGs.
You mean MMORPGs like Star Wars Galaxies? Oh wait...
...until the day you can download anything, at anytime, regardless of size or what else your network is doing instantaneously or at least faster than 150 miliseconds (the time it takes for the human mind to recognize something) after you click the download button.
Until then... It needs to improve.
Otherwise we are wasting our lives on time that need not be wasted.
If we're gonna have big brother, why not make it accurate?
I have always thought one of the downsides to having Big Brother was that if you monitor every single detail of everyone single life then you just end up not seeing anything important because it is physically impossible for a small group of person to keep track of it all.
And then you get to the problem of keeping track of the people keeping track to ensure they aren't doing anything wrong...
Of course if you record every bit of detail and say well X crime happened on X date on X location lets see where X person was.
On the upside, if you were innocent then you'll have the proof of technology on yourside saying "hey look at my car it was on the other side of town the whole time..."
On the downside, a less than truthful government could mearly make up the figures and say in court "We have proof that via Galieo that his car was in the general area of the suspected crime that has not been commited but was with the others we are trying on conspiracy to commit high treason!" and the poor sap replies "But I don't even own a car!" and the government lawyer replies "Lies... I would like to present bill of sale dated a few months ago of the accused's car! Be careful of the wet ink your honor!"
Actually, I would counter that most singularity-esque technologies are already in labs or on timetables to be released into mass productionvery shortly, but you never hear about them because the companies producing them don't need to make press releases that tout their technologies will be feasible in 20 years.
Take for example instant boot computers via flash memory... Either 2006 or 2007 and will be one of the more revolutionary developments of the PC since maybe the 56K modem or 3d graphics card, but you don't see Intel press releases even mentioning a big hub bub about it because those companies don't need VC investors.
So when someone does say "X technology will be ready in 20 years" they really mean is "we'd like enough venture capital to last us for 20 years".
I'm not that interested in the browser but some of the middleware code to emulate windows calls on the Mac might be interesting to play with...
There are none. IE for the Mac was built from scratch not using a single line of IE Windows code by a different team of developers who most likley didn't have any formal communication with the IE for windows team.
Apparently, whoever modded you flamebait never had to use IE for the mac. It is a horrid wretched peice of software that should die like the rotting beast of Golgamathea that it is.
It is like a program with all the problems and stability issues of IE 5 (sans Active X because there is not Active X for the mac) with none of its benefits that you would get on a PC version. Hell... Most of the pages rendered nothing like their windows counterpart. The program was made from scratch using a totally different team not related to the IE team for the PC.
As soon as a better alternative came out (Safari) I dumped IE.
May it burn in hell and let us not metion it ever again.
Not for me. Patents are scummy ways of avoiding competition. In my non-existant "utopia" I would never accept them -- don't invent if you can't compete with what you invent. Someone else will come out with the same idea soon enough.
On the downside, Americans will have patented all possible ideas in the next few years and engage in useless lawsuits that will cripple the economy and allow China, India, Japan, and the EU to surpass us in the invention field.
On the upside everything will be public domain 17 years after that and there won't be anything left to patent.
CEO Take 2: "The panel gives Jack Thompson the floor... (oh good grief)"
Jack Thompson: "I'd like to start of on how horrible all of you peo..."
Yakuza_1: "Revere the Emperor!"
Yakuza_2: "Expel the barbarian!"
*Guards appear out of the woodwork and drag Jack screaming and kicking down the aisle*
Yakuza_3: "Bonzai!" *beats the restrained Jack with a bamboo stick*
How about a company that sets up shop in a tax free state, like NH, to accept the deliveries of on-line purchases where the buyer can come and pick it up. Kind of like a mailboxes etc. Oh wait....
Better yet, just setup a distribution center in Canada and ship items claiming they are gifts.
Or Mexico for that matter...
There is no reason that customers of say, Amazon.com, should be mostly exempted from paying sales tax while customers of bestbuy.com or compusa.com have to do so for the exact same items.
Unless you live in driving distance of Deleware...
OH SNAP!
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9085910/
Then again I may have to ask why are the most sunny places and tropical the most poor?