When I was in Uni my senior year, I had a "Sociological Problems" class. On the first day, doing introductions one of the questions we were asked was "if we were a terrorist, what would we attack in the US to try and strike fear into the most people?" The rationale was to see what we thought was most emblematic of the US and what we would be the most shocked and horrified to see attacked.
Everyone except for me said they'd attack either the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Build, or the Lincoln Memorial. Mostly the Statue of Liberty.
I said I'd launch a coordinated car bomb attack at random points around Kansas City, probably on a Thursday morning. Of course, this caused everyone to freak out. But that just proved me point -- if everyone's expecting the Statue of Liberty to get hit, then no one is going to be surprised when it happens, unless they were there when it went down.
My answer was the only one that got an emotional response out of the class, because my target was the only one that would have had people believe "if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere!"
In Australia, it'd be the difference between the Sydney Opera House and some podunk burg in Tasmania.
If you don't really understand terrorists, how can you hope to defeat them, either militarily or rendering their tactics ineffective through rising above? You can't. Good for this teacher, of course most of the kids probably came up with the same, lame-ass plans that never would have actually terrorized anyone, just like my classmates did.
Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on being a researcher in the field and you probably do know more than me about it. I work in infosec, not medicine or research. I'm just saying that, for me, taking melatonin supplements and trying to stay away from staring at light sources such as computers, helps me sleep, keeps me more focused and lets me actually have fun once in a while, as opposed to being an exasperated crazy person like I am when I don't take the supplements. It really wouldn't surprise me at all if prolonged exposure to unantural light sources aimed directly at the eyes would hamper proper brain development in very young children and alter their ability to properly deal with sensory input as they get older.
If I had blamed my problems on WiFi, I wouldn't have been able to find research from the NIH to back me up. How am I anti-science? We sent men to the moon using slide rules; saying that I think that our current culture, influenced by a level of technology we haven't had in the past, where we are now constantly bombarded by sensory input, put off of natural sleep cycles, and generally messed with is likely to have unforseen consequences. A lot of the strange syndromes and whatnot that people are reporting today may very well be related. They may not be, but in good scientific fashion, further research is needed.
Science is awesome. Constant needless distractions, disruptions and lack of sleep are not awesome. They are very not awesome.
Yeah, I guess I just invented the whole RGB thing and the fact that blue light is mixed in with the output in CRTs and LCDs. This isn't a crackpot theory: not once did I mention how George Bush was involved.
The problem as I see it, is the constantly being surrounded by light from various sources. Computers and other electronic devices just happen to be the most prevalent of those which encourage you to sit very close to them and stare directly at their light source (the display).
When the sky is blue, its because its day time. When its not, its night time. Know what people are supposed to do at night, sleep? Melatonin helps you sleep, but its production is inhibited by blue light, like when its day time. Artificial blue light tricks your brain into thinkings its still day time, so you don't produce sufficient quantities of melatonin at the right point in the day to enter into a natural sleep cycle. The effects of sleep deprivation are pretty rough, otherwise it wouldn't be used as an "enhanced interrogation technique"
I read the article on the New York Times yesterday, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately in general, and I've come across some pretty interesting stuff. For instance, its pretty obvious that computers give off a lot of blue light. Apparently someone decided that blue LEDs meant high tech and so devices get fitted with them all over the place. Blue light in particular is linked to suppression of melatonin(source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11487664). Particularly low levels of melatonin have been observed in patients with various degrees of ASD, including slashdot's favourite asperger's (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17505466).
So, my contention is that the "rise in autism" that seems to be so prevalent these days is probably a result of children basically being deprived of proper darkness, being surrounded by light from computers, tv, video games, etc. I've started taking melatonin supplements as since I got back into IT work about two years ago and spending much more time on computers, I've been sleeping a lot less and feeling generally less sociable. My memory has gotten shot, etc. Could just be that I'm getting older, but I'm only 26... I'm not that old. When I get a break away from computers, take some time out to sleep, and get outside in the woods then I can generally shake the effects off in a day or so, but when I was a kid the world wasn't nearly as surrounded by computer technology in all its myriad of forms as it is today, where kids are basically handed a DS right out of the womb. I didn't see a gameboy until I was about 7 or 8, and it had a monochrome screen with no backlight.
And no, I don't mean a break from work. I mean a break from computers. It's not just being at work -- when I'm at work, its light outside anyway. I mean no laptop, no fancy phone, no nothing. Go away for a few days and leave that stuff behind, because if I'm just at home on the weekend and spend a lot of time plugged up, then I don't feel any better for not having been at work.
The way kids are today, with all their gadgets and gizmos can't possibly be any better for their brains than it is for their bodies, not playing outside nearly as much as they used to.
Stories like this match up pretty well with my own anecdotal evidence, not that it means much, but when I find NIH studies that seem to point to much more extreme versions of what I've seen, even in myself. Like I said, the effects on an adult are likely to be temporary, but our brains had time to mature before being mushed up.
I'm sorry, but I genuinely believe that 90% of Web 2.0 has made the Internet a WORSE place. If YouTube went away, that'd be just fine with me. Frankly, we could use a cut down in the signal-to-noise ratio.
If the wall was labeled a "public art space" and people were encouraged to do graffiti on it, then maybe? Youtube and RapidShare encourage people to post content then basically look away until someone complains about it.
"You're wrong. People who agree with me are enlightened beings. Everyone else is a brainwashed sap and the poor suckers can't even tell!" -- most people throughout history, no matter their point of view.
Typically, I thought it was teachers bugging the Swedish "schoolgrils'" lock rooms or something. At least, that's what all those "feminist sexual exploration" films made it seem like...
I found slashdot on a link from CmdrTaco's home page (which doesn't appear to have been updated since about that time frame) while looking for the download link for ePlus, which was this sort of dock widgetty thing for Enlightenment dr0.14. The world was a much smaller place back then, I guess... there was more "community" to the community and you couldn't really help but run into the same set of people. 'Nets full of strangers with pictures taken at angles helping hid the fact that if not for that hoodie, their fat would be out all over the place.
This account has a 5-digit ID. I've had it since around 1999 and I believe it was the second one that I created, though I can't remember the password to the first one. That said, I just 26 in June and was under 15 when I joined Slashdot. Then again, I'm not exactly typical.
Well, seen in the context of Microsoft's other commercials and marketing campaigns, this is arguably the least terrible. Its almost actually kind of good. I didn't vividly remember how terribly Win95 was, I might actually be kind of inclined to want to buy it. Its much less lame than the Win7 commercials, and its 88 windows better!
Rob Whittman, the Rep from 1st District has a couple of advanced degrees related to environmental science (but he's a Republican... what's up with that?), not like the bitch he replaced (also an R) who was a college drop out with a real estate license who could barely string two sentences together. I've met him numerous times. I'd hardly say he's simple-minded. We actually got rid of the worst, most stupid Reps in the last election here (no more Thelma Drake from 2nd District!!)
The same logic that allowed the allies to try and execute Nazi officers after WWII under ex post facto "war crimes" rules which hadn't existed in the first place, when they were following orders from superiors in keeping with official government policy (thus, the holocaust was "lawful" in Germany and occupied territories)? Not to Godwin the thread or anything, but the situation is one of guaranteeing a morally correct outcome even if technically what your doing is violating the spirit and letter of your legal system. Like reverse jury nullification.
Siemens has offices in Virginia, at least in Newport News, maybe other places. Not sure what they do there, I just figured they were contracting at places like the Northrop-Grumman shipyard, Jefferson Lab, and NASA-Langley that we have around. Regardless of the merits of claims of "lawfulness," I suspect that as Siemens has a presence here that they might be liable for violating sanctions the US has in place against Iran. Expect them to lose some contracts here, if nothing else.
He was applying for basically a tier1 support position at a place where I was a system administrator and lived quite happily never knowing PHP... although all these kids younger than me thought I was a "n00b" despite the fact I had been programming systems-level C code at a Department of Energy lab when some of them hadn't even started high school. Most had never used a compiled language. I was the only non-manager with a whole college degree while I was there! But now I'm safe and snug in an all-FreeBSD shop that values my Perl skills and pays me way more money for doing much less work.
But the point is, he was hardly ever going to have to actually use PHP anyway, and I gave him a short-list of php.ini issues that covered 90% of the problems I saw customers make. He had years of experience using FreeBSD and Linux because I made him, and we met in junior high school in a programming competition. He'd worked support before, including a stint in a call center for a major credit card provider with offices in Richmond. But no, no PHP so pffft. Frankly, I blame the arrogance of the Web 2.0 generation.
Quit thinking like an academic and start thinking like a business... "on-the-job training" is a cost sink hole, because they don't want to pay enough or provide good enough benefits to keep people around long enough to make any investment in training worth it. So they want schools to do it, but the schools have this funny notion about how they're supposed to teach people who to learn and think, not how to work with technology X, because they know technology X is going to be obsolete in a few years anyway.
The HR people who don't know what they're talking about, look at a check list and can't think about how a skill in one thing might translate (odd, because they're philosophy degrees prepared them to ask big, important questions right out of school... like "do you want fries with that?" before they "translated" their skill set in to HR... hrm...). Case in point, this hosting company I used to work at got real corporate about the time I left, and actually got some HR people and whatnot. A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?
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When I was in Uni my senior year, I had a "Sociological Problems" class. On the first day, doing introductions one of the questions we were asked was "if we were a terrorist, what would we attack in the US to try and strike fear into the most people?" The rationale was to see what we thought was most emblematic of the US and what we would be the most shocked and horrified to see attacked.
Everyone except for me said they'd attack either the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Build, or the Lincoln Memorial. Mostly the Statue of Liberty.
I said I'd launch a coordinated car bomb attack at random points around Kansas City, probably on a Thursday morning. Of course, this caused everyone to freak out. But that just proved me point -- if everyone's expecting the Statue of Liberty to get hit, then no one is going to be surprised when it happens, unless they were there when it went down.
My answer was the only one that got an emotional response out of the class, because my target was the only one that would have had people believe "if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere!"
In Australia, it'd be the difference between the Sydney Opera House and some podunk burg in Tasmania.
If you don't really understand terrorists, how can you hope to defeat them, either militarily or rendering their tactics ineffective through rising above? You can't. Good for this teacher, of course most of the kids probably came up with the same, lame-ass plans that never would have actually terrorized anyone, just like my classmates did.
Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on being a researcher in the field and you probably do know more than me about it. I work in infosec, not medicine or research. I'm just saying that, for me, taking melatonin supplements and trying to stay away from staring at light sources such as computers, helps me sleep, keeps me more focused and lets me actually have fun once in a while, as opposed to being an exasperated crazy person like I am when I don't take the supplements. It really wouldn't surprise me at all if prolonged exposure to unantural light sources aimed directly at the eyes would hamper proper brain development in very young children and alter their ability to properly deal with sensory input as they get older.
If I had blamed my problems on WiFi, I wouldn't have been able to find research from the NIH to back me up. How am I anti-science? We sent men to the moon using slide rules; saying that I think that our current culture, influenced by a level of technology we haven't had in the past, where we are now constantly bombarded by sensory input, put off of natural sleep cycles, and generally messed with is likely to have unforseen consequences. A lot of the strange syndromes and whatnot that people are reporting today may very well be related. They may not be, but in good scientific fashion, further research is needed.
Science is awesome. Constant needless distractions, disruptions and lack of sleep are not awesome. They are very not awesome.
Yeah, I guess I just invented the whole RGB thing and the fact that blue light is mixed in with the output in CRTs and LCDs. This isn't a crackpot theory: not once did I mention how George Bush was involved.
The problem as I see it, is the constantly being surrounded by light from various sources. Computers and other electronic devices just happen to be the most prevalent of those which encourage you to sit very close to them and stare directly at their light source (the display).
When the sky is blue, its because its day time. When its not, its night time. Know what people are supposed to do at night, sleep? Melatonin helps you sleep, but its production is inhibited by blue light, like when its day time. Artificial blue light tricks your brain into thinkings its still day time, so you don't produce sufficient quantities of melatonin at the right point in the day to enter into a natural sleep cycle. The effects of sleep deprivation are pretty rough, otherwise it wouldn't be used as an "enhanced interrogation technique"
I read the article on the New York Times yesterday, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately in general, and I've come across some pretty interesting stuff. For instance, its pretty obvious that computers give off a lot of blue light. Apparently someone decided that blue LEDs meant high tech and so devices get fitted with them all over the place. Blue light in particular is linked to suppression of melatonin(source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11487664). Particularly low levels of melatonin have been observed in patients with various degrees of ASD, including slashdot's favourite asperger's (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17505466).
So, my contention is that the "rise in autism" that seems to be so prevalent these days is probably a result of children basically being deprived of proper darkness, being surrounded by light from computers, tv, video games, etc. I've started taking melatonin supplements as since I got back into IT work about two years ago and spending much more time on computers, I've been sleeping a lot less and feeling generally less sociable. My memory has gotten shot, etc. Could just be that I'm getting older, but I'm only 26... I'm not that old. When I get a break away from computers, take some time out to sleep, and get outside in the woods then I can generally shake the effects off in a day or so, but when I was a kid the world wasn't nearly as surrounded by computer technology in all its myriad of forms as it is today, where kids are basically handed a DS right out of the womb. I didn't see a gameboy until I was about 7 or 8, and it had a monochrome screen with no backlight.
And no, I don't mean a break from work. I mean a break from computers. It's not just being at work -- when I'm at work, its light outside anyway. I mean no laptop, no fancy phone, no nothing. Go away for a few days and leave that stuff behind, because if I'm just at home on the weekend and spend a lot of time plugged up, then I don't feel any better for not having been at work.
The way kids are today, with all their gadgets and gizmos can't possibly be any better for their brains than it is for their bodies, not playing outside nearly as much as they used to.
Stories like this match up pretty well with my own anecdotal evidence, not that it means much, but when I find NIH studies that seem to point to much more extreme versions of what I've seen, even in myself. Like I said, the effects on an adult are likely to be temporary, but our brains had time to mature before being mushed up.
Can't you just hire someone to sit on top of the Prius and crack some coconuts together?
What if they have a heart attack, die, don't land on the horn, and are speeding out of control in electric silence?
I thought the answer is 'go after the deepest pockets and just hope the settle out of court'?
I'm sorry, but I genuinely believe that 90% of Web 2.0 has made the Internet a WORSE place. If YouTube went away, that'd be just fine with me. Frankly, we could use a cut down in the signal-to-noise ratio.
If the wall was labeled a "public art space" and people were encouraged to do graffiti on it, then maybe? Youtube and RapidShare encourage people to post content then basically look away until someone complains about it.
Watch "Porkey's" or other, similar films where peeping is an integral plot device.
"You're wrong. People who agree with me are enlightened beings. Everyone else is a brainwashed sap and the poor suckers can't even tell!" -- most people throughout history, no matter their point of view.
Typically, I thought it was teachers bugging the Swedish "schoolgrils'" lock rooms or something. At least, that's what all those "feminist sexual exploration" films made it seem like...
I found slashdot on a link from CmdrTaco's home page (which doesn't appear to have been updated since about that time frame) while looking for the download link for ePlus, which was this sort of dock widgetty thing for Enlightenment dr0.14. The world was a much smaller place back then, I guess... there was more "community" to the community and you couldn't really help but run into the same set of people. 'Nets full of strangers with pictures taken at angles helping hid the fact that if not for that hoodie, their fat would be out all over the place.
This account has a 5-digit ID. I've had it since around 1999 and I believe it was the second one that I created, though I can't remember the password to the first one. That said, I just 26 in June and was under 15 when I joined Slashdot. Then again, I'm not exactly typical.
You're right... its anti-white racism against the white engineers and companies from pretty damned white countries. stop the white hate!
Well, seen in the context of Microsoft's other commercials and marketing campaigns, this is arguably the least terrible. Its almost actually kind of good. I didn't vividly remember how terribly Win95 was, I might actually be kind of inclined to want to buy it. Its much less lame than the Win7 commercials, and its 88 windows better!
Well, wouldn't calling Ahmedinijhad a Muslim who's going to destroy Iran just be stating basic facts? ;-)
Rob Whittman, the Rep from 1st District has a couple of advanced degrees related to environmental science (but he's a Republican... what's up with that?), not like the bitch he replaced (also an R) who was a college drop out with a real estate license who could barely string two sentences together. I've met him numerous times. I'd hardly say he's simple-minded. We actually got rid of the worst, most stupid Reps in the last election here (no more Thelma Drake from 2nd District!!)
The same logic that allowed the allies to try and execute Nazi officers after WWII under ex post facto "war crimes" rules which hadn't existed in the first place, when they were following orders from superiors in keeping with official government policy (thus, the holocaust was "lawful" in Germany and occupied territories)? Not to Godwin the thread or anything, but the situation is one of guaranteeing a morally correct outcome even if technically what your doing is violating the spirit and letter of your legal system. Like reverse jury nullification.
Siemens has offices in Virginia, at least in Newport News, maybe other places. Not sure what they do there, I just figured they were contracting at places like the Northrop-Grumman shipyard, Jefferson Lab, and NASA-Langley that we have around. Regardless of the merits of claims of "lawfulness," I suspect that as Siemens has a presence here that they might be liable for violating sanctions the US has in place against Iran. Expect them to lose some contracts here, if nothing else.
And the invasive brain surgery and mind control.... Wait, I guess we're just waiting for the invasive brain surgery parts
He was applying for basically a tier1 support position at a place where I was a system administrator and lived quite happily never knowing PHP... although all these kids younger than me thought I was a "n00b" despite the fact I had been programming systems-level C code at a Department of Energy lab when some of them hadn't even started high school. Most had never used a compiled language. I was the only non-manager with a whole college degree while I was there! But now I'm safe and snug in an all-FreeBSD shop that values my Perl skills and pays me way more money for doing much less work.
But the point is, he was hardly ever going to have to actually use PHP anyway, and I gave him a short-list of php.ini issues that covered 90% of the problems I saw customers make. He had years of experience using FreeBSD and Linux because I made him, and we met in junior high school in a programming competition. He'd worked support before, including a stint in a call center for a major credit card provider with offices in Richmond. But no, no PHP so pffft. Frankly, I blame the arrogance of the Web 2.0 generation.
Quit thinking like an academic and start thinking like a business... "on-the-job training" is a cost sink hole, because they don't want to pay enough or provide good enough benefits to keep people around long enough to make any investment in training worth it. So they want schools to do it, but the schools have this funny notion about how they're supposed to teach people who to learn and think, not how to work with technology X, because they know technology X is going to be obsolete in a few years anyway.
The HR people who don't know what they're talking about, look at a check list and can't think about how a skill in one thing might translate (odd, because they're philosophy degrees prepared them to ask big, important questions right out of school... like "do you want fries with that?" before they "translated" their skill set in to HR... hrm...). Case in point, this hosting company I used to work at got real corporate about the time I left, and actually got some HR people and whatnot. A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?