Yet the Republican party (especially Bush himself) is running around claiming the economy is "Fundamentally Sound." Sorry, we've heard that song and dance before, Herbert Hoover spouted the same bullshit after Black Thursday, and for the next several years http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5063/.
It is astonishing just how fast Laissez-Faire and deregulation causes unrestrained capitalism to self destruct. We'll have gone from reasonably well-regulated, stable Social democracy with an acceptably egalitarian income distribution in 1970 (Life wasn't perfect, but it arguably better in many ways than it is now), to ground zero triggering of a full blown world economic crisis in less than 40 years.
The comparison with the Nazi's is most apt is one accepts the (in my opinion, very reasonable) proposition that Hitler and the Nazi party didn't cross the line the day Poland was invaded in 1938, or the day the first gas chamber killed its first victim. They crossed the line, much, much earlier, with their concerted campaigns of fear, violence, and destruction of legal and civil rights. Perhaps I should have used Bonito Mussolini as an example instead, as he was arguably a closer match.
There are also degrees of complicity. Why is the average Jane or Joe on the street just as culpable as the Telecom executive who agrees, often eagerly, to aid the illegal actions of administration? Just as there are differing degrees of power involved, so are there different degrees of agency and culpability. Everyone bears some guilt, the leaders of Business and Industry with their greater power and influence bear far more.
Ding Ding! You first paragraph is precise the stuff I meant, although waging aggressive war also applies. Were the Nazis "OK" while they were merely undermining the legislature, and using fear, intimidation, and violence to spread their ideology? Were they "A-OK" right up to the day they invaded Poland?
Sorry, I'm going to have to pull Godwin's law here. I hope that I will articulate why it is justified.
The Bush administration have operated illegally. They have violated the law not just in spirit, but in word. They have pushed warrantless searches and wiretaps. This is not legal. They have advocated, and used, torture in the interrogation of prisoners. This is not legal. They have lied, and used said lies as an excuse to wage aggressive war. This is not legal. They have conspired to hide their actions behind a cloak of shadows, lies, and secrecy. They have refused to disclose the the extent of their actions to the duly elected agents of the People of The United States of America while under oath. This is not Legal.
International Law applies whether one agrees to it or not. As much of the top Nazi brass discovered. The Bush administration have used the same tactics: Brute Force, Fear, and a blatant disregard for law, human rights, and human dignity. Any who aid or abet such actions bears blame. They could have refused. They did not.
No. No Immunity for Traitors. No Immunity for Cowards. No Immunity for those aid the destruction of the rights and liberties of free men.
If there is to be any hope for Freedom, for Democracy, hope for any kind of legacy to leave for future generations, on these things must we stand firm.
Nader is only right to a point. The republican party is owned body and soul by corporations. Almost all of the Democratic party is as well. There are a precious few that are not, and have the voting record to prove it. Unfortunately, none are in my district. We need campaign finance reform so badly there are no words to convey it. Unfortunately, without Proportional representation, the Green party accomplishes absolutely nothing but helping Corporate whores slither into office. I'm feeling rather depressed about the political situation at the moment.
Democracy in the USA has been consumed by cancer. I don't think there is any "saving the body" at this point, for the wounds are deep and many. The Cancer has spread throughout. I don't see the USA going quietly into that good night either, the racking coughs of our demise will cause crisis the world over, most likely.
Sure, that sounds reasonable, but how exactly do you "program" the low level impulses and high level thoughts? An AI would likely be the most complex Comp Sci project ever created. Hunting down the bugs could take a long, long time. Remember, we can't rely on the AI to help us, because it might intentionally hide things. We have to do it the old fashioned way, and any bugs have the potential to yield a passive-aggressive psychotic like HAL from 2001.
It is fairly trivial even now to develop machines with no or minimal programming that can display emergent behaviors as complex as you are describing.
Which is largely beside the point, your baby, at the stage of development you describe is not displaying "intelligence" or even (and I use the term specifically in the Philosophical sense of an entity that displays complex moral reasoning) a person. Humans infants of the newborn to several months stage of development are not even close to displaying personhood. In general, humans show the first signs, which include complex (and by "complex" I mean anything more than just simple imitation and repetition) speech, ability to recognize the self in a mirror, etc at around 2 years.
I'm not saying these things just to ruffle your feathers, but to make a point. If you were to take a newborn infant, provide it with the bare minimum to keep it alive, but not provide it with sufficient nurturing and social stimulation for a decade, the result wouldn't be a person either. It would be a criminally insane animal.
What I am suggesting is that doing the same thing with a purported AI would probably have the same effect. Even if it managed to develop "true" intelligence, which I very much doubt, how could we expect it to be anything other than dangerously insane from our perspective? How is it going to develop the ability to engage in moral reasoning about the rights of other intelligent entities without direct, and extensive interaction with them? Human Beings can't do that, why should we expect AIs to?
In my opinion it is absolutely necessary that an AI develop complex moral reasoning. Hopefully better than much of human history indicates the average human has.
Contrary to what Jane Q. Public said, Those are NOT good points. Contrary to your very mistaken view, all compounds are not equally subject to digestion. You can eat Curare and Snake Venom with relative safety because they are Amino Acid Chains, which are exceptionally easy to denature. Sit them in a glass dissolved in water and they'll denature on their own in a day or two, they are dependent on the reducing environment of the cell to keep them stable. Stick them in the oxidizing, acid environment of the human stomach and they'll decompose in seconds.
However, many compounds are NOT so easy to decompose. Lipids (which, it turns out, most hormones are) are remarkably difficult to digest and are frequently absorbed unchanged by the digestive tract. This group includes fats, cholesterol, and cholesterol's chemical derivatives (which include hormones like estrogen, testosterone and a number of others).
This is why, for example, it is possible for women to take oral estrogen supplements and for various other kinds of steroids to be active when taken orally. Just to clear something up terminology wise, lipids are the general name for non-polar organic compounds. The general class "lipids" includes triglycerides (which are what is generally meant when one talks of "fat"), steroids (which includes cholesterol and it's already mentioned derivatives), and also other general organics like gasoline, butane, etc.
Thus to dismiss steroidal hormones as simply digested away, because there exist compounds that the body can break down with safety in a very efficient way, is at best ignorant, and at worst viciously deceptive.
That you for coming in with sources. I really find it astonishing that suggesting estrogen and synthetic analogs might be having an effect on the people the animals are fed to, even when we're talking about compounds accepted by medical science to be active in humans makes one a "crackpot."
I'm not saying "OMG, MMR causes autism." I'm saying "Dietary sources of estrogen and synthetic estrogen analogs might be responsible for observed lowering of the average age of onset of menarche. This is an area for concern." There is a huge difference in the two claims.
As for what effects it has on males, who knows? It could contribute to all manner of problems. Reduced fertility, obesity, birth defects, a variety of cancers.
In any case, why precisely, should hormone supplements be allowed to be fed to animals for human consumption when it cannot be shown that said hormones will not be active in humans? Of course, I know the answer, its "Money." The same reason we allow the same livestock to be force fed antibiotics, even though we know, from numerous independent studies and from theory, that it will result in increased antibiotic resistance, and that said antibiotics will leak into the water supply, thus spreading the damage further.
Wed and Bedded? Yes. Post Pubescent? No. What that indicates about the relative prevalence of pedophilia in the 16th and 17th century is left to the reader.
And your source doesn't really refute what I said, it just ascribes the trend to a different cause. Rising levels of childhood obesity rather than artificially introduced estrogen and synthetic analogs. I suspect the answer may be that both contribute significantly. I am suspicious of the estrogen fed to livestock because it has been shown to have effects on wildlife (fish and amphibians) as it leaks into the water supply.
This is a definite problem. Our detection technologies are getting damn good. We can reliably detect single molecules in a lot of cases. So how do we deal with that? Sure it sounds good to say 0 parts per trillion of cyanide in drinking water, but what does it mean to accomplish it?
And all of this is muddying the water (har har) and distracting us from other, possibly more pressing concerns like hormones and antibiotic content of industrially produced food. You make a bloody good point, and its something I've worried about for a good while, worried about it because there are peer reviewed studies indicating that it is real, and the effects it has are definitely detectable. Even anecdotally, its starting to concern many (very poorly educated) people in my community when they observe that their 10 and 12 year old daughters are in the advanced stages of puberty. That's becoming the norm, when a century ago it would have been all but unheard of. Even as an anecdotal observation, its causing a significant number of concerned parents.
I wish we had a political candidate who was talking about these things. He or She would be buried by Corporate Agriculture for even mentioning it, but just the mention would bring it to the fore of the political consciousness. I think there are vast areas where such concerns and pledges would poll very well, and that gets politician's attention.
There may be no cure for Asthma, but it may be possible to prevent it by people being properly exposed to sufficient levels of bacteria and other pollution during childhood. There exists a distinct possibility that your Asthma was caused by you NOT having enough smokers around to inoculate you against it. There exists a theory that Asthma, like other autoimmune diseases is caused by excessive cleanliness and environmental sterility, leading to the body over reacting when it does encounter anything like a pathogen. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy, which suggests asthma may be treated and lessened in severity by exposure to pathogenic worm species.
First, "psychosomatic" is not the same as "not real."
Seriously though, How do these people survive to adulthood? A cigarette smoker at 10ft just isn't that high a level of pollution, in Parts Per Million of contaminates. There's plenty of normal, everyday situations that are much worse. Being on any city street in the USA (Or hell, anywhere there's a plant blooming, and thus spreading pollen into the air) ought to cause an acute respiratory crisis leading to immediate death.
Also, some casual reading on the subject suggests that what you took to be a flippant and insensitive remark may actually be correct. There does exist a nontrivial body of evidence linking asthma to increased cleanliness, and excessive sterilization of people's environment. So it in fact does make sense to suggest that by humoring asthmatics by removing the things that trigger their condition, we're helping them to make said condition worse. Specifically, I refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis, an article that includes citations from a variety of medical journals.
Sometimes it pays off to pursue anecdotal observations with real study. The fact that asthma rates in the developed world soar, as Cigarette smoking becomes increasing stigmatized, removed and encapsulated needs some study.
Not impressed. Much as someone who can't swim should stay the fuck out of the pool, someone with asthma should stay out of the "Smoker Friendly" Lounge, Bar, and restaurant. I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that much of that sensitivity is psychosomatic from being excessively humored on this issue. I can't imagine anyone who really had such a level of sensitivity surviving childhood.
Actually, I do. I openly mock people who complain in public spaces about smokers. I agree, they're ignorant jackasses. And I do all this while NOT smoking, however, smokers are often more interesting to be around. Especially if they're smoking quality Cigars or Pipe tobacco.
God, I'm getting so tired of the Whiny anti-smoking bitching. Especially outside. Get the fuck over it. These two points really piss me off. You don't like someone smoking near you outside? Move your lazy ass! And two, unless you are operating the only bar in town, you should abso-fucking-lutely have the right to make it a smoking establishment. Anybody who doesn't like it can go somewhere else.
I don't even smoke, and that is not the point. I fervently believe people should have the right to smoke. It is 100% a personal liberty issue. Now, as for how it can be marketed and sold, I'm up for debate. I'd be fine with it being restricted to small scale growing for personal consumption, like marijuana is often produced in Medical Marijuana states, or Canada (Note that these places don't restrict it that way, its just most commonly produced that way.)
Another thing I find interesting, is that, when I have discussions with people regarding this idea about Object Orientation as a failed development strategy. I generally don't have people say, "What? You're discounting an entire development paradigm? You are obviously an idiot who knows nothing about software development!" Even when talking about this in person with people I know are more educated about Comp Sci than I am, they mull over my points and generally and acknowledge that I do seem to be on to something. Whether they'll agree or not, they're unable to just dismiss the argument out of hand.
Which, when I consider that I'm attacking something that is a major institution in Software Development today, really makes me wonder. When I pointed out to a friend (a recent comp sci graduate), that Object Oriented languages are frequently very ill suited to describing many types of problems; He considered this, and agreed that he frequently spends quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to express something in OO terms. This is as much an indictment of Comp. Sci education today as anything else, however.
So you acknowledge that the last 10 years of development have bought precious little.
Nothing about wikis was impossible in 1995, it was simply the idea that was revolutionary. But the technical requirements for implementing that idea are honestly quite limited. I want to point out that youtube video is a really piss poor solution to the problem, its just easy (Mostly because it is a big company providing free webhosting for bandwidth intensive material). While ease of use is important, the fact that flash is a horrible method for embedding video that carries with it an enormous penalty in speed is pretty big failure.
Is it really possible that OS cruft and memory management have robbed us of (or delayed) the transformative computing revolution? Yes, I think so. And your defense of Object Orientation carries with it the assumption that its proponents always tout, and that I regard as quite dubious: Code Reuse. The reality of code reuse is mostly APIs, and they don't fundamentally rely on OO in any case. In fact, many of the most widely used open APIs are in languages that don't even support OO directly: OpenGL, SDL, etc are all in C. The other assumption, that compiler tech would get so good that it would be able to automagically optimize away all the OO cruft into fast, efficient code has never materialized either. Other features, like automatic memory management carry a huge performance penalty compared to a well written program in C. All of the "modern" language features have simply failed, point blank, to enable the kinds of software we want, and have carried a heavy price namely requiring orders of magnitude faster hardware to accomplish the exact same things we were doing 10 years ago.
The other effect is your applications would do 1/5 as much, and there'd be 1/5 the choices.
That's the argument, but I don't buy it. As you even acknowledge, in many cases those choices are just fluff anyway, so why bother? What exactly do you do with your computer that didn't 8 years ago? What capabilities has all that additional cruft enabled?
Personally, I think the time has come for an old idea to return. We need to see the resurgence of low power, fixed (or mostly fixed) spec machines ala the Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
Force Development to return to "the bad old days" of using lower level, incredibly more efficient languages. Object Orientation has not just cost us in speed and memory usage, its nigh impossible to multi-thread as well. Turns out we need to turn back and dust off Procedural techniques to make use of new hardware. A return to ISO C, or possibly a new derivative with more advanced support for multithreading (but which would fundamentally work the same way). Object orientation is high level cruft to be discarded, and that means Python, C++, C#, Java, and a host of others get tossed out the window. Good Riddance.
Do I really need to point out some rather ridiculous assumptions you're making? Not every hermit is a suicide bomber/revolutionary. Not even close. Hell, there are plenty of non-violent Buddhist monks. Sure, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thich_Quang_Duc set himself on fire, but he did it for very clear reasons (In protest of the violent oppression of Buddhists by the American backed South Vietnamese government), and (this is important) He didn't hurt anybody else. There's a world of difference, in my opinion, between a suicide bomber who kills a bus load of school children, and Thich Quang Duc's action.
Further, I think it is likely that there are a great number of people who could make it through a 3-5+ year trip and remain sane (whatever that means, for my purposes, just substitute "not a violent psychopath"). They're not going to be stuck in a sensory deprivation tank that long. They're going to have stuff to do. I would also imagine they'd be allowed to bring as much music as they wanted (in digital form), and movies/video as well. They'd have the communication equivalent of e-mail with video and voice. I really don't think it sounds that bad. I'd go in a heartbeat.
While being over weight can certainly make it worse, it isn't necessary at all. Genetics plays a big role. Some people have a neurological disorder called "Central Sleep Apnea," in this disorder, the brain just *stops* sending the signals to keep you breathing. It doesn't matter if you're 90lbs soaking wet, that's still going to be a problem. Other people have structural abnormalities in their nasal passages and/or windpipe, which can make it harder to breathe.
So yes, there are many ways in which non-overweight people can still have sleep disorders. I'd say talk to your GP and asks if he thinks a sleep study might be appropriate.
Amusingly, it really doesn't take that much expertise to diagnose the more severe ones. If you've got an SO, or sleep in a small dorm room with a roommate, and they complain that you snore loudly, or worse, that you stop breathing at night, the odds approach certainty that you've got an Apnea related condition.
Unless you can show that there is no trickery in your technology, it shouldn't be held admissible in a court of law. Precisely. In the true technical legal sense, such evidence is hearsay. Thus it is a priori inadmissible, unless you can demonstrate to a judge, on an item by item basis why it should be admissible. Can't do that, or you're afraid to? Too bad. It is exactly the same thing as trying to get "Expert Testimony" admitted, when you won't demonstrate what the expert's credentials are, and what relevance it has to the case. In such an event, an expert's testimony is inadmissible as well.
This argument is really just claiming that the same rigorous standards of evidence should be applied to technology as well.
Absolutely! Hell, anyone who has chronic feelings of fatigue should ask their Doctor to have a sleep study done. If you are actually getting 7-8 hours of sleep (or more, many people with undiagnosed sleep apnea chronically oversleep), and you still experience fatigue, odds are you've got a diagnosable sleep disorder. And, unlike depression, the treatments are quite straightforward, and are very effective.
I don't have anything to do with any on the companies. I'm just a patient. For the longest time, I had chronic fatigue, I just felt exhausted all the time. Unless something forced me awake, I would easily sleep 12-14 hours a day. My Doctor thought it was just symptoms of depression, but eventually he suggested having a sleep study done. It turns out I had undiagnosed , severe sleep apnea, that probably manifested in highschool (I had horrible problems getting up to go school, and was late all the time). This means that I stop breathing in my sleep, over 30 times an hour. I've been using a CPAP machine for the last few years since then, and it makes an enormous difference in quality of life.
This isn't the only disorder they can find, there are many others. They hook you up to an Electro-encephalogram and other stuff to monitor you, and the results can be extremely informative to your doctor for making recommendations.
Slashdot Mirror
It is astonishing just how fast Laissez-Faire and deregulation causes unrestrained capitalism to self destruct. We'll have gone from reasonably well-regulated, stable Social democracy with an acceptably egalitarian income distribution in 1970 (Life wasn't perfect, but it arguably better in many ways than it is now), to ground zero triggering of a full blown world economic crisis in less than 40 years.
There are also degrees of complicity. Why is the average Jane or Joe on the street just as culpable as the Telecom executive who agrees, often eagerly, to aid the illegal actions of administration? Just as there are differing degrees of power involved, so are there different degrees of agency and culpability. Everyone bears some guilt, the leaders of Business and Industry with their greater power and influence bear far more.
Ding Ding! You first paragraph is precise the stuff I meant, although waging aggressive war also applies. Were the Nazis "OK" while they were merely undermining the legislature, and using fear, intimidation, and violence to spread their ideology? Were they "A-OK" right up to the day they invaded Poland?
The Bush administration have operated illegally. They have violated the law not just in spirit, but in word. They have pushed warrantless searches and wiretaps. This is not legal. They have advocated, and used, torture in the interrogation of prisoners. This is not legal. They have lied, and used said lies as an excuse to wage aggressive war. This is not legal. They have conspired to hide their actions behind a cloak of shadows, lies, and secrecy. They have refused to disclose the the extent of their actions to the duly elected agents of the People of The United States of America while under oath. This is not Legal. International Law applies whether one agrees to it or not. As much of the top Nazi brass discovered. The Bush administration have used the same tactics: Brute Force, Fear, and a blatant disregard for law, human rights, and human dignity. Any who aid or abet such actions bears blame. They could have refused. They did not.
No. No Immunity for Traitors. No Immunity for Cowards. No Immunity for those aid the destruction of the rights and liberties of free men.
If there is to be any hope for Freedom, for Democracy, hope for any kind of legacy to leave for future generations, on these things must we stand firm.
Democracy in the USA has been consumed by cancer. I don't think there is any "saving the body" at this point, for the wounds are deep and many. The Cancer has spread throughout. I don't see the USA going quietly into that good night either, the racking coughs of our demise will cause crisis the world over, most likely.
Sure, that sounds reasonable, but how exactly do you "program" the low level impulses and high level thoughts? An AI would likely be the most complex Comp Sci project ever created. Hunting down the bugs could take a long, long time. Remember, we can't rely on the AI to help us, because it might intentionally hide things. We have to do it the old fashioned way, and any bugs have the potential to yield a passive-aggressive psychotic like HAL from 2001.
Wolves might work well, if only they were 2 meters tall at the shoulder and about 4 meters long.
It is fairly trivial even now to develop machines with no or minimal programming that can display emergent behaviors as complex as you are describing.
Which is largely beside the point, your baby, at the stage of development you describe is not displaying "intelligence" or even (and I use the term specifically in the Philosophical sense of an entity that displays complex moral reasoning) a person. Humans infants of the newborn to several months stage of development are not even close to displaying personhood. In general, humans show the first signs, which include complex (and by "complex" I mean anything more than just simple imitation and repetition) speech, ability to recognize the self in a mirror, etc at around 2 years.
I'm not saying these things just to ruffle your feathers, but to make a point. If you were to take a newborn infant, provide it with the bare minimum to keep it alive, but not provide it with sufficient nurturing and social stimulation for a decade, the result wouldn't be a person either. It would be a criminally insane animal.
What I am suggesting is that doing the same thing with a purported AI would probably have the same effect. Even if it managed to develop "true" intelligence, which I very much doubt, how could we expect it to be anything other than dangerously insane from our perspective? How is it going to develop the ability to engage in moral reasoning about the rights of other intelligent entities without direct, and extensive interaction with them? Human Beings can't do that, why should we expect AIs to?
In my opinion it is absolutely necessary that an AI develop complex moral reasoning. Hopefully better than much of human history indicates the average human has.
However, many compounds are NOT so easy to decompose. Lipids (which, it turns out, most hormones are) are remarkably difficult to digest and are frequently absorbed unchanged by the digestive tract. This group includes fats, cholesterol, and cholesterol's chemical derivatives (which include hormones like estrogen, testosterone and a number of others).
This is why, for example, it is possible for women to take oral estrogen supplements and for various other kinds of steroids to be active when taken orally. Just to clear something up terminology wise, lipids are the general name for non-polar organic compounds. The general class "lipids" includes triglycerides (which are what is generally meant when one talks of "fat"), steroids (which includes cholesterol and it's already mentioned derivatives), and also other general organics like gasoline, butane, etc.
Thus to dismiss steroidal hormones as simply digested away, because there exist compounds that the body can break down with safety in a very efficient way, is at best ignorant, and at worst viciously deceptive.
I'm not saying "OMG, MMR causes autism." I'm saying "Dietary sources of estrogen and synthetic estrogen analogs might be responsible for observed lowering of the average age of onset of menarche. This is an area for concern." There is a huge difference in the two claims.
As for what effects it has on males, who knows? It could contribute to all manner of problems. Reduced fertility, obesity, birth defects, a variety of cancers.
In any case, why precisely, should hormone supplements be allowed to be fed to animals for human consumption when it cannot be shown that said hormones will not be active in humans? Of course, I know the answer, its "Money." The same reason we allow the same livestock to be force fed antibiotics, even though we know, from numerous independent studies and from theory, that it will result in increased antibiotic resistance, and that said antibiotics will leak into the water supply, thus spreading the damage further.
And your source doesn't really refute what I said, it just ascribes the trend to a different cause. Rising levels of childhood obesity rather than artificially introduced estrogen and synthetic analogs. I suspect the answer may be that both contribute significantly. I am suspicious of the estrogen fed to livestock because it has been shown to have effects on wildlife (fish and amphibians) as it leaks into the water supply.
And all of this is muddying the water (har har) and distracting us from other, possibly more pressing concerns like hormones and antibiotic content of industrially produced food. You make a bloody good point, and its something I've worried about for a good while, worried about it because there are peer reviewed studies indicating that it is real, and the effects it has are definitely detectable. Even anecdotally, its starting to concern many (very poorly educated) people in my community when they observe that their 10 and 12 year old daughters are in the advanced stages of puberty. That's becoming the norm, when a century ago it would have been all but unheard of. Even as an anecdotal observation, its causing a significant number of concerned parents.
I wish we had a political candidate who was talking about these things. He or She would be buried by Corporate Agriculture for even mentioning it, but just the mention would bring it to the fore of the political consciousness. I think there are vast areas where such concerns and pledges would poll very well, and that gets politician's attention.
There may be no cure for Asthma, but it may be possible to prevent it by people being properly exposed to sufficient levels of bacteria and other pollution during childhood. There exists a distinct possibility that your Asthma was caused by you NOT having enough smokers around to inoculate you against it. There exists a theory that Asthma, like other autoimmune diseases is caused by excessive cleanliness and environmental sterility, leading to the body over reacting when it does encounter anything like a pathogen. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy, which suggests asthma may be treated and lessened in severity by exposure to pathogenic worm species.
Seriously though, How do these people survive to adulthood? A cigarette smoker at 10ft just isn't that high a level of pollution, in Parts Per Million of contaminates. There's plenty of normal, everyday situations that are much worse. Being on any city street in the USA (Or hell, anywhere there's a plant blooming, and thus spreading pollen into the air) ought to cause an acute respiratory crisis leading to immediate death.
Also, some casual reading on the subject suggests that what you took to be a flippant and insensitive remark may actually be correct. There does exist a nontrivial body of evidence linking asthma to increased cleanliness, and excessive sterilization of people's environment. So it in fact does make sense to suggest that by humoring asthmatics by removing the things that trigger their condition, we're helping them to make said condition worse. Specifically, I refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis, an article that includes citations from a variety of medical journals.
Sometimes it pays off to pursue anecdotal observations with real study. The fact that asthma rates in the developed world soar, as Cigarette smoking becomes increasing stigmatized, removed and encapsulated needs some study.
Not impressed. Much as someone who can't swim should stay the fuck out of the pool, someone with asthma should stay out of the "Smoker Friendly" Lounge, Bar, and restaurant. I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that much of that sensitivity is psychosomatic from being excessively humored on this issue. I can't imagine anyone who really had such a level of sensitivity surviving childhood.
Actually, I do. I openly mock people who complain in public spaces about smokers. I agree, they're ignorant jackasses. And I do all this while NOT smoking, however, smokers are often more interesting to be around. Especially if they're smoking quality Cigars or Pipe tobacco.
You're complaining about having to walk past someone who is smoking? What the fuck? Get a life!
I don't even smoke, and that is not the point. I fervently believe people should have the right to smoke. It is 100% a personal liberty issue. Now, as for how it can be marketed and sold, I'm up for debate. I'd be fine with it being restricted to small scale growing for personal consumption, like marijuana is often produced in Medical Marijuana states, or Canada (Note that these places don't restrict it that way, its just most commonly produced that way.)
Which, when I consider that I'm attacking something that is a major institution in Software Development today, really makes me wonder. When I pointed out to a friend (a recent comp sci graduate), that Object Oriented languages are frequently very ill suited to describing many types of problems; He considered this, and agreed that he frequently spends quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to express something in OO terms. This is as much an indictment of Comp. Sci education today as anything else, however.
Nothing about wikis was impossible in 1995, it was simply the idea that was revolutionary. But the technical requirements for implementing that idea are honestly quite limited. I want to point out that youtube video is a really piss poor solution to the problem, its just easy (Mostly because it is a big company providing free webhosting for bandwidth intensive material). While ease of use is important, the fact that flash is a horrible method for embedding video that carries with it an enormous penalty in speed is pretty big failure.
Is it really possible that OS cruft and memory management have robbed us of (or delayed) the transformative computing revolution? Yes, I think so. And your defense of Object Orientation carries with it the assumption that its proponents always tout, and that I regard as quite dubious: Code Reuse. The reality of code reuse is mostly APIs, and they don't fundamentally rely on OO in any case. In fact, many of the most widely used open APIs are in languages that don't even support OO directly: OpenGL, SDL, etc are all in C. The other assumption, that compiler tech would get so good that it would be able to automagically optimize away all the OO cruft into fast, efficient code has never materialized either. Other features, like automatic memory management carry a huge performance penalty compared to a well written program in C. All of the "modern" language features have simply failed, point blank, to enable the kinds of software we want, and have carried a heavy price namely requiring orders of magnitude faster hardware to accomplish the exact same things we were doing 10 years ago.That's the argument, but I don't buy it. As you even acknowledge, in many cases those choices are just fluff anyway, so why bother? What exactly do you do with your computer that didn't 8 years ago? What capabilities has all that additional cruft enabled?
Personally, I think the time has come for an old idea to return. We need to see the resurgence of low power, fixed (or mostly fixed) spec machines ala the Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
Force Development to return to "the bad old days" of using lower level, incredibly more efficient languages. Object Orientation has not just cost us in speed and memory usage, its nigh impossible to multi-thread as well. Turns out we need to turn back and dust off Procedural techniques to make use of new hardware. A return to ISO C, or possibly a new derivative with more advanced support for multithreading (but which would fundamentally work the same way). Object orientation is high level cruft to be discarded, and that means Python, C++, C#, Java, and a host of others get tossed out the window. Good Riddance.
Further, I think it is likely that there are a great number of people who could make it through a 3-5+ year trip and remain sane (whatever that means, for my purposes, just substitute "not a violent psychopath"). They're not going to be stuck in a sensory deprivation tank that long. They're going to have stuff to do. I would also imagine they'd be allowed to bring as much music as they wanted (in digital form), and movies/video as well. They'd have the communication equivalent of e-mail with video and voice. I really don't think it sounds that bad. I'd go in a heartbeat.
So yes, there are many ways in which non-overweight people can still have sleep disorders. I'd say talk to your GP and asks if he thinks a sleep study might be appropriate.
Amusingly, it really doesn't take that much expertise to diagnose the more severe ones. If you've got an SO, or sleep in a small dorm room with a roommate, and they complain that you snore loudly, or worse, that you stop breathing at night, the odds approach certainty that you've got an Apnea related condition.
This argument is really just claiming that the same rigorous standards of evidence should be applied to technology as well.
I don't have anything to do with any on the companies. I'm just a patient. For the longest time, I had chronic fatigue, I just felt exhausted all the time. Unless something forced me awake, I would easily sleep 12-14 hours a day. My Doctor thought it was just symptoms of depression, but eventually he suggested having a sleep study done. It turns out I had undiagnosed , severe sleep apnea, that probably manifested in highschool (I had horrible problems getting up to go school, and was late all the time). This means that I stop breathing in my sleep, over 30 times an hour. I've been using a CPAP machine for the last few years since then, and it makes an enormous difference in quality of life.
This isn't the only disorder they can find, there are many others. They hook you up to an Electro-encephalogram and other stuff to monitor you, and the results can be extremely informative to your doctor for making recommendations.