I want to be careful here, because the first one I mentioned, phenylpiracetam, is on the dope list for most athletics in most countries currently (though its still legal to purchase and use in other sorts of environments without a prescription), and rightfully so--positively effecting physical stamina profoundly.
As such, it is also not entirely safe. Some nootropics are completely harmless, such as piracetam. But some can cause serious issues at high dosages, like phenylpiracetam and pramiracetam. If you decide you want to see what these substances do to you personally, I cannot stress highly enough doing all the research you possibly can before doing so.
That said, I've had pretty incredible effects myself from three of the `racetams. I use them to work against a short term memory deficit I acquired recovering from an accident some years ago. People whom I know who take any number of nootropics in order to boost what's already naturally there often come away disappointed, though some few find good results.
YMMV in the biggest way on this one. And again, research research research.
I can't in good conscience tell you where you can purchase these things online, because I don't like directing anyone to spend money from inside a public forum that's for an entirely different purpose, but during your research you'll find a number of legitimate places with good reputations. Don't forget to get opinions on that as well.
Yes absolutely, it could be any number of things, including possibly placebo---which, if responsible for nerve and muscle tissue regeneration, would be another thing to research here.
First, I have to say, take the following with a grain of salt, since it's anecdotal:
Most of the research on the 'racetam family of bioactives has been done in Russia, and because of this there are both mistrusts and language barriers to overcome, but in doing so I discovered some pretty massively interesting studies all about specifically myelin sheath issues. So, since these substances are freely available in the US without any kind of prescription (unlike Russia, interestingly), I purchased a few and fed them to my mother, who is in the last couple of stages of post polio syndrome, which among other things (to put it in a nutshell) severely inhibits myelin effectiveness in nerve sheath maintenance. When she started the regimen a year ago, she couldn't walk at all and had great difficulty grasping things with her left hand, and was also in tremdous pain.
Just a week ago she and I walked about six blocks to a restaurant, and then back. She can grasp things in her left hand fairly well at this point, and is in very little pain.
I don't know myelin "helping" nootropics are the holy grail of neurological disorders, but they appear to have helped at least one person tremendously.
We can, and the substances that have been shown to be effective on this have been around for quite a while, the most modern ones being things like phenylpiracetam and pramiracetam, whos alkaloids are a suitable replacement in myelin sheath generation in aging human brains.
I expect this to suddenly be "news" in about five years.
I used to be one, way back in about 1986 or so on my trusty little Commodore 128. Back in those days there were a few pretty incredible bulletin boards that had vast (dozens!) libraries of little tools and wrappers mostly written in bourne...(I think, this was 22 years and 7,000 joints ago, so pardon the fuzziness with some details)
I didn't really know a damn thing about shell scripts or programming (remember when they were different things?) in those days, but I knew how to change permissions on a file and execute it. And I had some vague knowledge of the basics of how computers talked to each other. And I got into all *kinds* of trouble. It was truly bitchin', and I don't regret a thing.
Maybe this whole pill-popping culture could give astronauts a miss on this one, eh? A pilot on lexapro at the helm of a space shuttle on re-entry is almost as disturbing as a president on lexapro at the helm of the executive branch.
It's even worse than that. Not only is it absolutely not understood why it's so common during long periods spent outside earth's atmosphere, but the solution to use "problem solving treatment" paints the understanding of this phenomenon in an even more disturbing light, since "problem solving treatment" has exactly zero conclusive stats behind it. See here:
Disturbing, that is, not only because it probably won't work, its a huge waste of money, and there's nothing sadder than a depressed astronaut, but also because it occurs to me that "science" should be the point of these trips and everything that occurs on them--and it's quite painfully clear that at least in one very important circumstance, science has been abandoned for pop psych.
So...this isn't so much about low level byte order, but instead about the actual method of actual file layout on a disk/plex/partition?
That's not what a file system is!
I was confused, because the state of an actual file when moved from one entirely different filesystem (ntfs, bfs, zfs, jfs, xfs, fat32, ufs, ufs2, etc etc etc) really generally only can possibly change in one sense---that is, from a filesystem that knows all about POSIX style permissions and possibly ACLs, to one that doesn't. That doesn't mean that the file is missing or corrupt, it just means that it may not posses the same level of security on arrival that it did on departure.
As far as hierarchies go, we already have a standard.
Haha, this is working the nomenclature! Well, I'm glad it doesn't just happen in chemistry. Who was it who said "Science is the study of naming things incorrectly"
Security-ly speaking, when it comes to voting machines, the software itself is a "hard point", meaning that it is actually quite difficult to leverage in such a way as to alter voting results *without suspicion of foul play*--even if it isn't open source.
Strangely in this case, the hardware itself is a soft point. (meaning everything from NVRAM to the touch display) It's trivial to misalign a touch screen on purpose, for example, and it can always be passed off as an error without drawing any meaningful suspicion.
So, while this python idea is of course a good one, it is a mistake to believe that it would actually fix anything on its own.
Actually I have to say come to think of it...that IS the theory...but the practice is somewhat different.
In practice, slashdot readership simply isn't what it was ten years ago, or even five years ago. The fact is it's kind of hard to say what the motivation is behind the "funny" stuff, though to be frank I suspect it's just a bunch of moronic armchair-wannabes subtly parroting what they've heard their engineer-brother say about microsoft products.
I think I can explain this to you. You're advocating development on the Windows Mobile platform, which for any developer who's ever used something other than Microsoft's languages and environments is very, very funny.
Here on slashdot, you'll mostly find developers (when did we stop calling them programmers?) who are experienced in a healthy variety of languages and platforms and can therefore make suggestions with a bit more clarity and objectivity--at least that's the theory.
That may not need to be picked, but as I understood it, a neutrino isn't actually it's own anti-particle, strictly, it's that a neutrino doesn't actually have a known strictly defined antiparticle equivalent. I understand it *looks* like I'm saying the same thing, but I do see a difference, however subtle.
It's been theorized, I think, that the former is true, that it really is it's own antiparticle, based on hypothesized neutrinoless double-beta decay--which, if true, insinuates the former. But this is clearly outside the standard model and is having difficulty gaining popularity, as far as I know, since it hasn't actually been seen yet.
The other I suppose "just so" method of defining a neutrino as its own antiparticle is by working nomenclature--there are four different kinds of neutrinos in this sense; muon, electron, and their two counterparts--anti-neutrinos if you will, which are still technically neutrinos.
I'm not a particle physicist, and I may very well be wrong in many places above. So if there is anyone about who can correct me I would very much appreciate it.
Wow LingNoi, you sure are angry. I'm not in the habit of saying anything at all about what I have or haven't got, because quite frankly it's never been necessary.
But I will of course extend the offer that I always extend in this situation--where some very angry person decides that I demand more from very wealthy people than from normal ones because I've got sour grapes about something or other:
It's pretty easy to find my email address. If you'd like, you may email me and we'll schedule a couple of hours (here in NYC, so if you're not here it will require travel--which I will cover if you cannot) to meet and discuss our differences. I promise it will put to rest any questions about my motivation in this.
In the ten years I've been making this offer, three people have had the bollocks to accept. All three walked away as friends, and I like to think we all learned something.
So, there it is. I will show you exactly what I have, if you want. If not, you may of course do what the rest have done, and simply not respond to this at all.
Alright, now you're just being snarky. Luckily I have five mod points and have reversed my position on using them.
Relevant to my own affinities is a game in which I gain as many points as I possibly can by only posting responses which are engineered specifically to reach 3-5, which isn't terribly difficult if you have three braincells and the ability to read.
Then, I shall use my points always and only for snarky mods, irrelevant to the subject of a response, but relevant to its timbre and its timbre alone.
Troll? I think the moderation around here isn't exactly following the suggested form. You shouldn't mod down a person simply because you don't like what they say.
I mean what if I started doing that to the people who do it to me? (it's not so hard really to pick them out, three points makes a line in my book) I shall not of course. The moderation system is broken and I'll have no part of it, up or down.
But really, for those of you who do choose to moderate, maybe you could take it upon yourselves to try to understand the difference between an opinion that you do not like, and someone who has said something they don't really believe in order to garner a reaction.
You know, it's interesting to see where the intellectual line is here on Slashdot. I don't actually completely believe the post I made that you're responding to, "thePowerOfGrayskull", it was an object reference to an essay by a certain Irish novelist of some renown. I thought it fit in well with the point of what I was responding to with it, and wondered if it would be negatively labeled.
It was, obviously, and thus a line is drawn. In the future I shall try very hard to be much more blatant with my points and never assume that any moderator on Slashdot has enough interest in literature or philosophy (sadly, this is all too common among people in general) to have consumed something close to a healthy diet of them.
No, the problem is with people like you who refuse to entertain the idea that your own selfishness and greed is influenced heavily by wealthy people in the public eye.
Poetically, your defense of them has the same root as any defense of ridiculously wealthy people allowing their silly purchases of toys to be publicized. You either are one of them currently, or you want to be one.
I cannot think of a more pointless thing to pursue.
I was thinking the same thing, as im sure many people are. With the economy in the toilet, the political landscape ablaze, unemployment jumping, terrible gas prices and millions wondering if their 401K plans haven't been an enormous waste of time and money, Larry and Sergey have shown unquestionably that they are utterly out of touch.
I don't mind saying that it's offensive enough to me to pull out of the Google cloud completely. They could be doing incredibly helpful things with their billions, and instead they just buy toys.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, google execs.
I would have found the game much more exciting if we could not manipulate the creature directly, but only subtly change its environment--weather, altitude, seasons, geography, "background life", etc, and then let a set of brilliant algorithms (obviously by design in the game) based heavily in evolution theory guide the changes to the creature itself.
But I understand that my taste in simulation is hardly mainstream.
Look, I really couldn't give a fart if EA wants to make ID games, or even games that look like ID games, or even games that spawn this kind of discussion on slashdot. What I do mind, however, is that Spore was marketed as a thing that it clearly is not. The word "evolution" became a buzzword to sell the thing, and that tricked a lot of people into thinking that it actually exists in the game. It quite plainly does not, which is very disappointing for a lot of is, and *could possibly* indicate some dishonesty on EA's part--which in itself may not have been for the sole purpose of selling more games. It's something to at least consider, whether or not you're going to press the "tinfoil hat" case.
And by the way, you're still doing that whining thing that you're accusing everyone else of. Try to stop being so combative about this whole thing---the point is dialog.
I managed to get through your response despite its combativeness.
I'd like to school you on "science" and "science fiction", because you've made an error in your assessment, a fairly major one.
There's a difference in literary terms between "hard science fiction" and "soft science fiction". Star Trek falls under the category of "hard science fiction", as does almost everything by Isaac Asimov. Hard science fiction is science fiction that is as heavily based in science FACT as is possible. While Star Trek may be a little "softer" than Foundation, it still falls squarely in the genre of "hard science fiction" and deserves to be treated as such.
That said, "soft science fiction" is just as valuble in literary terms--its simply a slightly different genre. Soft science fiction includes authors like Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Ubik) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine). Soft science fiction sacrifices scientific fact for much weightier raw speculation, and generally uses this speculation to spawn plots and plot devices. _Dune_ is an excellent example of soft science fiction in this manner.
All of THAT said, the game is neither soft nor hard science fiction, it's just intelligent design masquerading as fun (and not very well at that). The reason that it's very important to understand this is that currently a very small number of very, very loud people are actually getting laws passed in the United States (and elsewhere) which are rooted firmly in the ethic of "ID". This is horrifying to me and all free-thinking people, and must be stopped at once. Shining a very clear light on suspicions of ID prattle in video games (and elsewhere) is important to start a dialog about it.
But you're not taking part of a dialog. In your assessment of some of our arguments as "blah blah bla whine whine whine", you yourself have become the biggest whiner of all.
Only too true. Evolution, strictly (and even not so strictly) speaking does not exist in the game. Yes, it is possible to go through "versions" of a creature, but there is no motivation whatsoever--and in fact it makes the game harder, if you alter your beast with its environment in mind.
It feels as you're playing it that it *wants* you to assume intelligent design. You're "designing" it, aren't you? And your designs are utterly unscientific and impractical, though terribly cute. And there's no explanation for why this is anywhere. Summed, it really is very much like any modern religious creation theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Reporting a security hole is not noble, it's stupid.
I want to be careful here, because the first one I mentioned, phenylpiracetam, is on the dope list for most athletics in most countries currently (though its still legal to purchase and use in other sorts of environments without a prescription), and rightfully so--positively effecting physical stamina profoundly.
As such, it is also not entirely safe. Some nootropics are completely harmless, such as piracetam. But some can cause serious issues at high dosages, like phenylpiracetam and pramiracetam. If you decide you want to see what these substances do to you personally, I cannot stress highly enough doing all the research you possibly can before doing so.
That said, I've had pretty incredible effects myself from three of the `racetams. I use them to work against a short term memory deficit I acquired recovering from an accident some years ago. People whom I know who take any number of nootropics in order to boost what's already naturally there often come away disappointed, though some few find good results.
YMMV in the biggest way on this one. And again, research research research.
I can't in good conscience tell you where you can purchase these things online, because I don't like directing anyone to spend money from inside a public forum that's for an entirely different purpose, but during your research you'll find a number of legitimate places with good reputations. Don't forget to get opinions on that as well.
Yes absolutely, it could be any number of things, including possibly placebo---which, if responsible for nerve and muscle tissue regeneration, would be another thing to research here.
First, I have to say, take the following with a grain of salt, since it's anecdotal:
Most of the research on the 'racetam family of bioactives has been done in Russia, and because of this there are both mistrusts and language barriers to overcome, but in doing so I discovered some pretty massively interesting studies all about specifically myelin sheath issues. So, since these substances are freely available in the US without any kind of prescription (unlike Russia, interestingly), I purchased a few and fed them to my mother, who is in the last couple of stages of post polio syndrome, which among other things (to put it in a nutshell) severely inhibits myelin effectiveness in nerve sheath maintenance. When she started the regimen a year ago, she couldn't walk at all and had great difficulty grasping things with her left hand, and was also in tremdous pain.
Just a week ago she and I walked about six blocks to a restaurant, and then back. She can grasp things in her left hand fairly well at this point, and is in very little pain.
I don't know myelin "helping" nootropics are the holy grail of neurological disorders, but they appear to have helped at least one person tremendously.
We can, and the substances that have been shown to be effective on this have been around for quite a while, the most modern ones being things like phenylpiracetam and pramiracetam, whos alkaloids are a suitable replacement in myelin sheath generation in aging human brains.
I expect this to suddenly be "news" in about five years.
I used to be one, way back in about 1986 or so on my trusty little Commodore 128. Back in those days there were a few pretty incredible bulletin boards that had vast (dozens!) libraries of little tools and wrappers mostly written in bourne...(I think, this was 22 years and 7,000 joints ago, so pardon the fuzziness with some details)
I didn't really know a damn thing about shell scripts or programming (remember when they were different things?) in those days, but I knew how to change permissions on a file and execute it. And I had some vague knowledge of the basics of how computers talked to each other. And I got into all *kinds* of trouble. It was truly bitchin', and I don't regret a thing.
Maybe this whole pill-popping culture could give astronauts a miss on this one, eh? A pilot on lexapro at the helm of a space shuttle on re-entry is almost as disturbing as a president on lexapro at the helm of the executive branch.
It's even worse than that. Not only is it absolutely not understood why it's so common during long periods spent outside earth's atmosphere, but the solution to use "problem solving treatment" paints the understanding of this phenomenon in an even more disturbing light, since "problem solving treatment" has exactly zero conclusive stats behind it. See here:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7245/1340/a
Disturbing, that is, not only because it probably won't work, its a huge waste of money, and there's nothing sadder than a depressed astronaut, but also because it occurs to me that "science" should be the point of these trips and everything that occurs on them--and it's quite painfully clear that at least in one very important circumstance, science has been abandoned for pop psych.
Whoops, forgot about ntfs/cifs permissions and stuff. I promise I didn't do it on purpose, though I'm not altogether upset that I did.
So...this isn't so much about low level byte order, but instead about the actual method of actual file layout on a disk/plex/partition?
That's not what a file system is!
I was confused, because the state of an actual file when moved from one entirely different filesystem (ntfs, bfs, zfs, jfs, xfs, fat32, ufs, ufs2, etc etc etc) really generally only can possibly change in one sense---that is, from a filesystem that knows all about POSIX style permissions and possibly ACLs, to one that doesn't. That doesn't mean that the file is missing or corrupt, it just means that it may not posses the same level of security on arrival that it did on departure.
As far as hierarchies go, we already have a standard.
What does any of it have to do with a better file system?
Haha, this is working the nomenclature! Well, I'm glad it doesn't just happen in chemistry. Who was it who said "Science is the study of naming things incorrectly"
Security-ly speaking, when it comes to voting machines, the software itself is a "hard point", meaning that it is actually quite difficult to leverage in such a way as to alter voting results *without suspicion of foul play*--even if it isn't open source.
Strangely in this case, the hardware itself is a soft point. (meaning everything from NVRAM to the touch display) It's trivial to misalign a touch screen on purpose, for example, and it can always be passed off as an error without drawing any meaningful suspicion.
So, while this python idea is of course a good one, it is a mistake to believe that it would actually fix anything on its own.
Actually I have to say come to think of it...that IS the theory...but the practice is somewhat different.
In practice, slashdot readership simply isn't what it was ten years ago, or even five years ago. The fact is it's kind of hard to say what the motivation is behind the "funny" stuff, though to be frank I suspect it's just a bunch of moronic armchair-wannabes subtly parroting what they've heard their engineer-brother say about microsoft products.
Eh, so be it I suppose.
I think I can explain this to you. You're advocating development on the Windows Mobile platform, which for any developer who's ever used something other than Microsoft's languages and environments is very, very funny.
Here on slashdot, you'll mostly find developers (when did we stop calling them programmers?) who are experienced in a healthy variety of languages and platforms and can therefore make suggestions with a bit more clarity and objectivity--at least that's the theory.
That may not need to be picked, but as I understood it, a neutrino isn't actually it's own anti-particle, strictly, it's that a neutrino doesn't actually have a known strictly defined antiparticle equivalent. I understand it *looks* like I'm saying the same thing, but I do see a difference, however subtle.
It's been theorized, I think, that the former is true, that it really is it's own antiparticle, based on hypothesized neutrinoless double-beta decay--which, if true, insinuates the former. But this is clearly outside the standard model and is having difficulty gaining popularity, as far as I know, since it hasn't actually been seen yet.
The other I suppose "just so" method of defining a neutrino as its own antiparticle is by working nomenclature--there are four different kinds of neutrinos in this sense; muon, electron, and their two counterparts--anti-neutrinos if you will, which are still technically neutrinos.
I'm not a particle physicist, and I may very well be wrong in many places above. So if there is anyone about who can correct me I would very much appreciate it.
Wow LingNoi, you sure are angry. I'm not in the habit of saying anything at all about what I have or haven't got, because quite frankly it's never been necessary.
But I will of course extend the offer that I always extend in this situation--where some very angry person decides that I demand more from very wealthy people than from normal ones because I've got sour grapes about something or other:
It's pretty easy to find my email address. If you'd like, you may email me and we'll schedule a couple of hours (here in NYC, so if you're not here it will require travel--which I will cover if you cannot) to meet and discuss our differences. I promise it will put to rest any questions about my motivation in this.
In the ten years I've been making this offer, three people have had the bollocks to accept. All three walked away as friends, and I like to think we all learned something.
So, there it is. I will show you exactly what I have, if you want. If not, you may of course do what the rest have done, and simply not respond to this at all.
Alright, now you're just being snarky. Luckily I have five mod points and have reversed my position on using them.
Relevant to my own affinities is a game in which I gain as many points as I possibly can by only posting responses which are engineered specifically to reach 3-5, which isn't terribly difficult if you have three braincells and the ability to read.
Then, I shall use my points always and only for snarky mods, irrelevant to the subject of a response, but relevant to its timbre and its timbre alone.
I'll bet I get good at it.
Troll? I think the moderation around here isn't exactly following the suggested form. You shouldn't mod down a person simply because you don't like what they say.
I mean what if I started doing that to the people who do it to me? (it's not so hard really to pick them out, three points makes a line in my book) I shall not of course. The moderation system is broken and I'll have no part of it, up or down.
But really, for those of you who do choose to moderate, maybe you could take it upon yourselves to try to understand the difference between an opinion that you do not like, and someone who has said something they don't really believe in order to garner a reaction.
You know, it's interesting to see where the intellectual line is here on Slashdot. I don't actually completely believe the post I made that you're responding to, "thePowerOfGrayskull", it was an object reference to an essay by a certain Irish novelist of some renown. I thought it fit in well with the point of what I was responding to with it, and wondered if it would be negatively labeled.
It was, obviously, and thus a line is drawn. In the future I shall try very hard to be much more blatant with my points and never assume that any moderator on Slashdot has enough interest in literature or philosophy (sadly, this is all too common among people in general) to have consumed something close to a healthy diet of them.
No, the problem is with people like you who refuse to entertain the idea that your own selfishness and greed is influenced heavily by wealthy people in the public eye.
Poetically, your defense of them has the same root as any defense of ridiculously wealthy people allowing their silly purchases of toys to be publicized. You either are one of them currently, or you want to be one.
I cannot think of a more pointless thing to pursue.
I was thinking the same thing, as im sure many people are. With the economy in the toilet, the political landscape ablaze, unemployment jumping, terrible gas prices and millions wondering if their 401K plans haven't been an enormous waste of time and money, Larry and Sergey have shown unquestionably that they are utterly out of touch.
I don't mind saying that it's offensive enough to me to pull out of the Google cloud completely. They could be doing incredibly helpful things with their billions, and instead they just buy toys.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, google execs.
I would have found the game much more exciting if we could not manipulate the creature directly, but only subtly change its environment--weather, altitude, seasons, geography, "background life", etc, and then let a set of brilliant algorithms (obviously by design in the game) based heavily in evolution theory guide the changes to the creature itself.
But I understand that my taste in simulation is hardly mainstream.
Look, I really couldn't give a fart if EA wants to make ID games, or even games that look like ID games, or even games that spawn this kind of discussion on slashdot. What I do mind, however, is that Spore was marketed as a thing that it clearly is not. The word "evolution" became a buzzword to sell the thing, and that tricked a lot of people into thinking that it actually exists in the game. It quite plainly does not, which is very disappointing for a lot of is, and *could possibly* indicate some dishonesty on EA's part--which in itself may not have been for the sole purpose of selling more games. It's something to at least consider, whether or not you're going to press the "tinfoil hat" case.
And by the way, you're still doing that whining thing that you're accusing everyone else of. Try to stop being so combative about this whole thing---the point is dialog.
I managed to get through your response despite its combativeness.
I'd like to school you on "science" and "science fiction", because you've made an error in your assessment, a fairly major one.
There's a difference in literary terms between "hard science fiction" and "soft science fiction". Star Trek falls under the category of "hard science fiction", as does almost everything by Isaac Asimov. Hard science fiction is science fiction that is as heavily based in science FACT as is possible. While Star Trek may be a little "softer" than Foundation, it still falls squarely in the genre of "hard science fiction" and deserves to be treated as such.
That said, "soft science fiction" is just as valuble in literary terms--its simply a slightly different genre. Soft science fiction includes authors like Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Ubik) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine). Soft science fiction sacrifices scientific fact for much weightier raw speculation, and generally uses this speculation to spawn plots and plot devices. _Dune_ is an excellent example of soft science fiction in this manner.
All of THAT said, the game is neither soft nor hard science fiction, it's just intelligent design masquerading as fun (and not very well at that). The reason that it's very important to understand this is that currently a very small number of very, very loud people are actually getting laws passed in the United States (and elsewhere) which are rooted firmly in the ethic of "ID". This is horrifying to me and all free-thinking people, and must be stopped at once. Shining a very clear light on suspicions of ID prattle in video games (and elsewhere) is important to start a dialog about it.
But you're not taking part of a dialog. In your assessment of some of our arguments as "blah blah bla whine whine whine", you yourself have become the biggest whiner of all.
But thanks for the irony.
Only too true. Evolution, strictly (and even not so strictly) speaking does not exist in the game. Yes, it is possible to go through "versions" of a creature, but there is no motivation whatsoever--and in fact it makes the game harder, if you alter your beast with its environment in mind.
It feels as you're playing it that it *wants* you to assume intelligent design. You're "designing" it, aren't you? And your designs are utterly unscientific and impractical, though terribly cute. And there's no explanation for why this is anywhere. Summed, it really is very much like any modern religious creation theory.