I have no sympathy for this woman. Regardless of the letter of the law, she's out there antagonizing the police, who are presumably trying to do their job. Police get paid crap to do a job that's far more dangerous than the jobs most of us do. I don't always agree 100% with the law or how police go about doing their job. I'm glad someone was filming Rodney King getting the crap beaten out of him. These things must come to light.
On the other hand, an ongoing campaign of harassing the police should not go unchallenged. She's endangering people who already do a dangerous job, and for that alone, she ought to go to jail.Even if this information is already publicly available, she's clearly collecting and organizing it with the intent of harassment.
It's easy to sit around and complain about the cops, up to the point where you get in trouble and the police save your butt. I've been in that position and I'll never forget it. Does that mean I'm always a 100% law-abiding citizen? Of course not. But I never forget that these guys do a dangerous job for a pittance and that I wouldn't be willing to do it myself. So the last thing I think they deserve is to have some jerk adding further danger to their lives.
The problem with the progressive approach is that going to orbit is one price and going past earth orbit throws you into an entirely different price bracket. One's expensive, one's ridiculously expensive. The price is so (I want to say astronomical) high, that it's far cheaper and easier to do a single really big step than it is to take baby-steps getting there.
Here's what I want to know. Has anyone played Facade and figured out how to get Trip out the door and Grace out of her clothes?
I mean, let's be realistic here. The first commercial use of this tech is going to be pioneered by the porn industry and I like it! I can see quite a few people playing that game!
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity doesn't exist. It's a sham. There's absolutely no science to back it up and in studies, participants who claim to have it are unable to distinguish between real electromagnetic devices and fake ones.
My university taught Pascal (granted, this was a while ago, but nobody used Pascal professionally). There were survey classes that covered other languages, but Pascal was the core language of the program. Other students, upon graduating and looking for jobs, would ask, "Why did they teach us this? Nobody is using it."
But the actual language makes no difference. I started off doing PL/I professionally. Then C, then C++, now C#. Technologies change. If you can't adapt right out of college, you're definitely not going to be able to make the transition every few years to whatever the new thing is, so you may as well find another career.
Actually the reason is quite simple: If it takes time to travel, then it takes time to explore everything and thus, the world can be significantly smaller. If you could instantly jump from place to place, then the time to explore the world would be greatly decreased and, to maintain your interest, a great deal more content would be required. Was this really worthy of Slashdot story?
TextRunner gets rid of that manual labor. A user can enter, for example, "kills bacteria," and the engine will come up with of pages that offer the insights that "chlorine kills bacteria" or "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" or "heat kills bacteria"--results called "triples"--and provide ways to preview the text and then visit the Web page that it comes from.
Wow, incredible. Because doing a search of "kills bacteria" with the quotes on Google won't get you those kind of results. Oh wait, yeah it will. In fact, it too will "chlorine kills bacteria" and "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" and "heat kills bacteria". And google also provides a way to preview the text and then visit the web page that it comes from.
Yeah, I know, I know, they just put a bad example in the article, but it's a ridiculously bad example.
Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?
Are you sure about this? Do you think people would be smarter if reading a book on particle physics produced a trigger in the brains' reward system? For most people, it doesn't. But in a simulated brain, the operator is God. The operator decides what rewards the brain and what doesn't.
That's not to say that everyone is capable of being an Einstein, but it is to say that roughly 95% of the population could be more than what they choose to be, and given the proper rewards, they would be.
As a teenager student in college, my achievements were well below average, yet when I returned to college in my 30s, I was achieving a 4.0 while taking a full time course load and working a job full-time. I didn't get more intelligent in the intervening time. It was a simple matter of motivation.
Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?
Because a simulation isn't bound by the laws of physics, the neurons in the simulated brain don't have to be simulated in real time.
Many neuron simulations are quite slow right now. Simulating a single neuron, using certain models, can require minutes or hours to simulate a second of neuron activity.
"Faster than real time" means, for example, that you could simulate 100 seconds of neural activity in a single second of real time.
..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you. I've been studying neuroscience for a while and specifically, neural simulations in software. Our knowledge of the brain is quite advanced. We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.
There's been a neural prosthetic for at least 6 years already. Granted, it acts more as a DSP than a real hippocampus, but still, it's a major feat and it won't be long until a more faithful reproduction of the hippocampus can be done.
While there are still details about how various neural circuits are connected, this information will be figured out in the next 10 years. neuroscience research won't be the bottleneck for sentient AI, however. Computer tech will be. The brain contains tens to hundreds of trillions of synapses (synapses are really the "processing element" of the brain, more so than the neurons which number only in tens of billions). It's a massive amount of data. But 10-20 years from now, very feasible.
So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing. Add to that the fact that you can tweak the brains to make them better at math or other subjects and that you have complete control over their reward system (doing research could give them a heroin-like reward), and you're going to have super brains.
Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.
I don't really see anything wrong with this, as long as the drugs aren't over-used to the point where health is compromised.
I took Ritalin for a while. It was effective for a number of months and really helped me to focus, but it did cost me a great deal in terms of creativity, which is something I depend on more than I realized before taking Ritalin.
Eventually the Ritalin stopped working and my choice was between raising the dose (and probably having to boost my blood pressure meds concurrently), or quit. I chose to quit since I was missing my creativity.
While I understand the concern of doctors from the "if it ain't broke" camp, most doctor are happy enough to start throwing Paxil, Prozac and other SSRIs at people at the first hint of anxiety or depression, without even a hint of trying to address the real problem (whatever is causing the anxiety or depression). Why should they be so skittish about giving drugs to make people focus better and otherwise improve the quality of their lives?
I just saw Monsters vs. Aliens over the weekend with my fiancee's nephew, which granted, is animated, but in 3D. I was blown away by the quality of the 3D. It's definitely not the red and green glasses 3D!
My one complaint about the glasses is that, sitting on the side of the theatre, I was getting glare from the lights slightly behind me in the aisle. But otherwise, the image was fantastic and very immersive.
This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade.
It's called free will. That, combined with stupidity, can lead to all sorts of hard to fathom decisions that people make all the time.
I'm sorry, but if peoples' decisions were so easily predictable, the future would be largely known and advertisers would need to be experts in advanced math. Because free will and stupidity exist, they don't.
Personally, I don't care what language other programmers use. That's their personal choice. If I were to go into a field where 95% of the documentation and information was in a certain language, I would feel it necessary to learn that language. But that would be my choice because being good at what I do is important to me.
You can be a good programmer without learning English, but you're certainly limiting your ability to acquire knowledge about programming, if you don't learn it.
Lots of physcists and chemists learned German back when it was the predominant language of published papers. It's simply a matter of practicality.
Can you imagine a car manufacturer throwing out a line like that? "Our new car builds on 1960s tech to make it safer." Boy, that inspires me with all kinds of confidence.
Oh please! IBM is doing the Open Source community a favor by not opening the source to some of this crapware. Lotus Notes: One of the few e-mail systems in the world that can't reliably receive or deliver e-mail. Rational ClearCase: Source Control that barely works. Trust me, you don't want to infect the rest of the world with code from some of these products...
I don't really get this. They keep talking about, for example, replacing motor neurons in people with spinal injuries. This seems VERY pie in the sky to me, and here's why: A single motor neuron may be over a meter in length, running form your spine to an extremity. First of all, you need to get that new neuron to synapse with an existing neuron that's mapped to the location where you're going to run the neuron. I suppose there's probably some way to induce the synapsing, but I imagine it's a very hit or miss proposition. Not to mention, the nerves in the spinal cord aren't exactly labeled. You can probe the individual neurons and see where they map in an fMRI, I suppose. And exact mapping isn't necessary since the brain can remap regions fairly readily (for example, if you lose a finger, the are of the motor areas of the brain mapped to that finger tends to get remapped to the adjacent fingers).
But then you now have to run this neuron from the spinal cord to wherever it's supposed to go. And there are a lot of neurons that this has to be done with. I would imagine the extent of the surgery involved in running new neurons from your spine to your legs, in such a way as to make your legs fully functional again, would simply be prohibitive.
I could very well be wrong, but this has always seemed like a pipe dream to me.
The only kind of life that isn't carbon based is going to HAVE to be created by something that was carbon based, somewhere up the chain. It's not going to happen spontaneously like carbon-based life, unless it happens somewhere where the laws of physics and chemistry are drastically different.
It's very simple: You need water and you need carbon. First of all, for life, you need complexity. For the kind of life we're familiar with, this complexity comes in the form of DNA, RNA, proteins, carbohydrates and other macromolecules that life uses. All of these require water as the solvent again, for reasons based on chemistry (hydrogen bonding, van der waals forces, and ionic bonds, etc, all of which play crucial roles in protein function and no other suitable, naturally occurring solvent will do the job and, to my knowledge, there's no artificially developed solvent yet that can do the job either.)
The macromolecules of life MUST be carbon-based because no other element can operate as a backbone for such complex and large molecules. You can make large molecules based on other backbones, but they are repetitive structures lacking complexity that life requires. As these structures get more complex, they tend to lose their stability.
Organic and inorganic chemists have tried all sorts of bizarre stuff in bizarre circumstances. Using high pressures, high heats, low pressures, low heats. If there was anything else that could function like carbon, I'm pretty sure we would have found it.
On the other hand, throw a few basic organic and inorganic materials together in a jar and add some heat and electricity, and you start producing some of the basic building blocks of life. It's easily reproducible.
Non-carbon life is a pipe dream created by sci-fi authors and it should remain in the realm of sci-fi.
It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles.
It may not explode when you hit it, and I'm not genius with electricity, but can't capacitors discharge their energy pretty quickly? Wouldn't 52kWh discharged through a pile of metal with people trapped inside be somewhat less than safe?
[i]The visual cortex is one of the more understood areas of the brain, and decoding V1/V2 is low-hanging fruit.[/i]
Low-hanging fruit? I agree, it's fairly well understood, but given the pre-processing that happens in the retinal ganglion cells, and the kind of data that actually ends up getting to V1 (after being relayed from the LGN), I'm surprised an actual image can be reconstructed from the information. After all, the RGCs tend to pass on things like movement, edges, contrast and color, but it's not even remotely pixel by pixel type data, which is precisely the informaiton that gets passed on to V1.
Since it's coming from an fMRI, there's no way the image can be very detailed. I suspect it will be very low resolution.
Apparently new facial recognition software being employed by the state fails to function when the face is distorted by something as innocuous as smiling.
So what should the educated criminal take from this? Remember to smile when committing your crimes and they'll never catch you with the facial recognition code!
Phantom limb syndrome is a common problem for amputees, where pain or discomfort is felt in the limb that no longer exists.
One of the treatments for phantom limb syndrome involves using a mirror to make reflect you existing limb in such a way that it looks like you have both limbs. The person then performs certain actions such that it appears that the limb is restored and operating. Though one of the limbs doesn't exist, your brain is still wired as if it can move the limb. Once you actually view the missing limb performing these actions, the pain goes away.
Seems to me that this experiment isn't much different than replacing a phantom limb with a mirror.
As long as the senate can still filibuster, nothing too crazy will get through. If a party ever got 60 senators though, God help us!
Normally, I might agree with you, but a lot of those Republicans are coming up for election in 2010, and most of them are actually smart enough to read the writing on the wall. Filibustering every issue will not bode well for their chances for re-election, and they know it. I think Obama is going to be able to get a lot more done than some people think.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, it's been since Windows 1.x that I've seen a GUI that looked like it was written in assembly. How retro.
I have no sympathy for this woman. Regardless of the letter of the law, she's out there antagonizing the police, who are presumably trying to do their job. Police get paid crap to do a job that's far more dangerous than the jobs most of us do. I don't always agree 100% with the law or how police go about doing their job. I'm glad someone was filming Rodney King getting the crap beaten out of him. These things must come to light.
On the other hand, an ongoing campaign of harassing the police should not go unchallenged. She's endangering people who already do a dangerous job, and for that alone, she ought to go to jail.Even if this information is already publicly available, she's clearly collecting and organizing it with the intent of harassment.
It's easy to sit around and complain about the cops, up to the point where you get in trouble and the police save your butt. I've been in that position and I'll never forget it. Does that mean I'm always a 100% law-abiding citizen? Of course not. But I never forget that these guys do a dangerous job for a pittance and that I wouldn't be willing to do it myself. So the last thing I think they deserve is to have some jerk adding further danger to their lives.
The problem with the progressive approach is that going to orbit is one price and going past earth orbit throws you into an entirely different price bracket. One's expensive, one's ridiculously expensive. The price is so (I want to say astronomical) high, that it's far cheaper and easier to do a single really big step than it is to take baby-steps getting there.
Here's what I want to know. Has anyone played Facade and figured out how to get Trip out the door and Grace out of her clothes?
I mean, let's be realistic here. The first commercial use of this tech is going to be pioneered by the porn industry and I like it! I can see quite a few people playing that game!
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity doesn't exist. It's a sham. There's absolutely no science to back it up and in studies, participants who claim to have it are unable to distinguish between real electromagnetic devices and fake ones.
My university taught Pascal (granted, this was a while ago, but nobody used Pascal professionally). There were survey classes that covered other languages, but Pascal was the core language of the program. Other students, upon graduating and looking for jobs, would ask, "Why did they teach us this? Nobody is using it."
But the actual language makes no difference. I started off doing PL/I professionally. Then C, then C++, now C#. Technologies change. If you can't adapt right out of college, you're definitely not going to be able to make the transition every few years to whatever the new thing is, so you may as well find another career.
Actually the reason is quite simple: If it takes time to travel, then it takes time to explore everything and thus, the world can be significantly smaller. If you could instantly jump from place to place, then the time to explore the world would be greatly decreased and, to maintain your interest, a great deal more content would be required. Was this really worthy of Slashdot story?
TextRunner gets rid of that manual labor. A user can enter, for example, "kills bacteria," and the engine will come up with of pages that offer the insights that "chlorine kills bacteria" or "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" or "heat kills bacteria"--results called "triples"--and provide ways to preview the text and then visit the Web page that it comes from.
Wow, incredible. Because doing a search of "kills bacteria" with the quotes on Google won't get you those kind of results. Oh wait, yeah it will. In fact, it too will "chlorine kills bacteria" and "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" and "heat kills bacteria". And google also provides a way to preview the text and then visit the web page that it comes from.
Yeah, I know, I know, they just put a bad example in the article, but it's a ridiculously bad example.
Then too, its useless to create average brain level AIs, even if they think really fast, even if there is a large group. All you'll get is myspace pages, but faster. Telling an average bus full of average people to think real hard, for a real long time, will not earn a nobel prize, any more than telling a bus full of women to make a baby in only two weeks will work. Clearly, giving high school drop outs a bunch of meth to make them "faster" doesn't make them much smarter. Clearly, placing a homeless person in a library doesn't make them smart. Without cultural support science doesn't happen, and is the culture of one AI computer more like a university or more like an inner city?
Are you sure about this? Do you think people would be smarter if reading a book on particle physics produced a trigger in the brains' reward system? For most people, it doesn't. But in a simulated brain, the operator is God. The operator decides what rewards the brain and what doesn't.
That's not to say that everyone is capable of being an Einstein, but it is to say that roughly 95% of the population could be more than what they choose to be, and given the proper rewards, they would be.
As a teenager student in college, my achievements were well below average, yet when I returned to college in my 30s, I was achieving a 4.0 while taking a full time course load and working a job full-time. I didn't get more intelligent in the intervening time. It was a simple matter of motivation.
Pardon me... what the hell is "faster than real time"? Does that mean it comes up with the answers before you ask the question?
Because a simulation isn't bound by the laws of physics, the neurons in the simulated brain don't have to be simulated in real time.
Many neuron simulations are quite slow right now. Simulating a single neuron, using certain models, can require minutes or hours to simulate a second of neuron activity.
"Faster than real time" means, for example, that you could simulate 100 seconds of neural activity in a single second of real time.
..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you. I've been studying neuroscience for a while and specifically, neural simulations in software. Our knowledge of the brain is quite advanced. We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.
There's been a neural prosthetic for at least 6 years already. Granted, it acts more as a DSP than a real hippocampus, but still, it's a major feat and it won't be long until a more faithful reproduction of the hippocampus can be done.
While there are still details about how various neural circuits are connected, this information will be figured out in the next 10 years. neuroscience research won't be the bottleneck for sentient AI, however. Computer tech will be. The brain contains tens to hundreds of trillions of synapses (synapses are really the "processing element" of the brain, more so than the neurons which number only in tens of billions). It's a massive amount of data. But 10-20 years from now, very feasible.
So, here's how computers get massively smarter than us really fast. 10-20 years AFTER the first sentient AIs are created, we'll have sentient AIs that can operate at tens to hundreds of times faster than real time. Now, imagine you create a group of "research brains" that all work together at hundreds of times real time. So in a year, for example, this group of "research brains" can do the thinking that would require a group of humans to spend at least a few hundred years doing. Add to that the fact that you can tweak the brains to make them better at math or other subjects and that you have complete control over their reward system (doing research could give them a heroin-like reward), and you're going to have super brains.
Once you accept the fact that sentient AI is inevitable, the next step, of super-intelligent AIs, is just as inevitable.
I don't really see anything wrong with this, as long as the drugs aren't over-used to the point where health is compromised.
I took Ritalin for a while. It was effective for a number of months and really helped me to focus, but it did cost me a great deal in terms of creativity, which is something I depend on more than I realized before taking Ritalin.
Eventually the Ritalin stopped working and my choice was between raising the dose (and probably having to boost my blood pressure meds concurrently), or quit. I chose to quit since I was missing my creativity.
While I understand the concern of doctors from the "if it ain't broke" camp, most doctor are happy enough to start throwing Paxil, Prozac and other SSRIs at people at the first hint of anxiety or depression, without even a hint of trying to address the real problem (whatever is causing the anxiety or depression). Why should they be so skittish about giving drugs to make people focus better and otherwise improve the quality of their lives?
I just saw Monsters vs. Aliens over the weekend with my fiancee's nephew, which granted, is animated, but in 3D. I was blown away by the quality of the 3D. It's definitely not the red and green glasses 3D!
My one complaint about the glasses is that, sitting on the side of the theatre, I was getting glare from the lights slightly behind me in the aisle. But otherwise, the image was fantastic and very immersive.
my Republican elephant and Democratic donkey hybrids...
This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade.
It's called free will. That, combined with stupidity, can lead to all sorts of hard to fathom decisions that people make all the time.
I'm sorry, but if peoples' decisions were so easily predictable, the future would be largely known and advertisers would need to be experts in advanced math. Because free will and stupidity exist, they don't.
Personally, I don't care what language other programmers use. That's their personal choice. If I were to go into a field where 95% of the documentation and information was in a certain language, I would feel it necessary to learn that language. But that would be my choice because being good at what I do is important to me.
You can be a good programmer without learning English, but you're certainly limiting your ability to acquire knowledge about programming, if you don't learn it.
Lots of physcists and chemists learned German back when it was the predominant language of published papers. It's simply a matter of practicality.
... builds on 1960s technology to make it safer.
Can you imagine a car manufacturer throwing out a line like that? "Our new car builds on 1960s tech to make it safer." Boy, that inspires me with all kinds of confidence.
IBM has tons of closed source products:
Websphere
DB2
Rational
Lotus Notes
etc.....
Give me a break!
Oh please! IBM is doing the Open Source community a favor by not opening the source to some of this crapware. Lotus Notes: One of the few e-mail systems in the world that can't reliably receive or deliver e-mail. Rational ClearCase: Source Control that barely works. Trust me, you don't want to infect the rest of the world with code from some of these products...
I don't really get this. They keep talking about, for example, replacing motor neurons in people with spinal injuries. This seems VERY pie in the sky to me, and here's why: A single motor neuron may be over a meter in length, running form your spine to an extremity. First of all, you need to get that new neuron to synapse with an existing neuron that's mapped to the location where you're going to run the neuron. I suppose there's probably some way to induce the synapsing, but I imagine it's a very hit or miss proposition. Not to mention, the nerves in the spinal cord aren't exactly labeled. You can probe the individual neurons and see where they map in an fMRI, I suppose. And exact mapping isn't necessary since the brain can remap regions fairly readily (for example, if you lose a finger, the are of the motor areas of the brain mapped to that finger tends to get remapped to the adjacent fingers).
But then you now have to run this neuron from the spinal cord to wherever it's supposed to go. And there are a lot of neurons that this has to be done with. I would imagine the extent of the surgery involved in running new neurons from your spine to your legs, in such a way as to make your legs fully functional again, would simply be prohibitive.
I could very well be wrong, but this has always seemed like a pipe dream to me.
The only kind of life that isn't carbon based is going to HAVE to be created by something that was carbon based, somewhere up the chain. It's not going to happen spontaneously like carbon-based life, unless it happens somewhere where the laws of physics and chemistry are drastically different.
It's very simple: You need water and you need carbon. First of all, for life, you need complexity. For the kind of life we're familiar with, this complexity comes in the form of DNA, RNA, proteins, carbohydrates and other macromolecules that life uses. All of these require water as the solvent again, for reasons based on chemistry (hydrogen bonding, van der waals forces, and ionic bonds, etc, all of which play crucial roles in protein function and no other suitable, naturally occurring solvent will do the job and, to my knowledge, there's no artificially developed solvent yet that can do the job either.)
The macromolecules of life MUST be carbon-based because no other element can operate as a backbone for such complex and large molecules. You can make large molecules based on other backbones, but they are repetitive structures lacking complexity that life requires. As these structures get more complex, they tend to lose their stability.
Organic and inorganic chemists have tried all sorts of bizarre stuff in bizarre circumstances. Using high pressures, high heats, low pressures, low heats. If there was anything else that could function like carbon, I'm pretty sure we would have found it.
On the other hand, throw a few basic organic and inorganic materials together in a jar and add some heat and electricity, and you start producing some of the basic building blocks of life. It's easily reproducible.
Non-carbon life is a pipe dream created by sci-fi authors and it should remain in the realm of sci-fi.
It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles.
It may not explode when you hit it, and I'm not genius with electricity, but can't capacitors discharge their energy pretty quickly? Wouldn't 52kWh discharged through a pile of metal with people trapped inside be somewhat less than safe?
[i]The visual cortex is one of the more understood areas of the brain, and decoding V1/V2 is low-hanging fruit.[/i]
Low-hanging fruit? I agree, it's fairly well understood, but given the pre-processing that happens in the retinal ganglion cells, and the kind of data that actually ends up getting to V1 (after being relayed from the LGN), I'm surprised an actual image can be reconstructed from the information. After all, the RGCs tend to pass on things like movement, edges, contrast and color, but it's not even remotely pixel by pixel type data, which is precisely the informaiton that gets passed on to V1.
Since it's coming from an fMRI, there's no way the image can be very detailed. I suspect it will be very low resolution.
Apparently new facial recognition software being employed by the state fails to function when the face is distorted by something as innocuous as smiling.
So what should the educated criminal take from this? Remember to smile when committing your crimes and they'll never catch you with the facial recognition code!
The mind can easily be tricked.
Phantom limb syndrome is a common problem for amputees, where pain or discomfort is felt in the limb that no longer exists.
One of the treatments for phantom limb syndrome involves using a mirror to make reflect you existing limb in such a way that it looks like you have both limbs. The person then performs certain actions such that it appears that the limb is restored and operating. Though one of the limbs doesn't exist, your brain is still wired as if it can move the limb. Once you actually view the missing limb performing these actions, the pain goes away.
Seems to me that this experiment isn't much different than replacing a phantom limb with a mirror.
As long as the senate can still filibuster, nothing too crazy will get through. If a party ever got 60 senators though, God help us!
Normally, I might agree with you, but a lot of those Republicans are coming up for election in 2010, and most of them are actually smart enough to read the writing on the wall. Filibustering every issue will not bode well for their chances for re-election, and they know it. I think Obama is going to be able to get a lot more done than some people think.