Britain was involved in the settlement and creation of modern-day Israel. Israelis and Palestinians often kill each other. It's not a real connection but I think this is what he's going for.
How do you define "often"? The total death toll of the israeli-palestinian conflict since the beginning of the first intefada in 1987 is about 8000 people. That's less than 365 per year (8000/22). (This figure includes both civilian and military casualties on both sides). There are about 10 million people living in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. So the death toll from the conflict is 3.65 deaths per 100000 people per year. In the United States, the death toll from car accidents is 14.7 death per 100000 people per year. Maybe that's "often" but I just wanted to put it in perspective.
If you wanted to pick a conflict that the British were involved with a high death toll, the israeli-palestinian conflict is a pretty poor choice.
You are correct that we can't extract a significant amount of the wind energy. But wind flow is pretty tricky, and even if farms wouldn't affect flow in the upper atmosphere, they could affect flow where we care about it. at the earth's surface.
I have the same concerns about wind energy. There is some evidence that it can effect local ecology.
Solar energy on the other hand, isn't used very efficiently. In fact, in much of the world shade structures that converted solar energy to electricity would provide a double service: cool via shading while using unwanted radiative energy.
The only way that using solar could effect climate is if we significantly changed the albedo by placing dark solar panels in a place that was very reflective. However, other than the polar ice caps most of the earth's surface absorbs the solar energy, so we really would not affect climate by "taking out" the solar energy.
I think we should actually launch solar concentrators into orbit. Basically huge inflatable lenses that float in space and beam concentrated solar power down to heat some salt to drive a turbine. We'd just have to make sure that planes didn't fly through the beam.
Yes, our species is more than DNA. That is obvious. What is not obvious is that we should confuse the process of Darwinian evolution with cultural evolution. They are both fascinating and worthy of discussion and study. It is even worth thinking about ways in which they are similar. But I think it is also worthwhile to understand the distinctions and that models of one need not apply to the other.
When I was a young whipper snapper in the 70's-80's. I'd buy an album and copy it to tape for my car. If asked by a friend for a copy, I'd take a blank cassette tape and make a copy in my cassette recorder with the high speed dub feature.
I don't ever recall the cops ever asking me if I got pulled over for speeding or something..."BTW son, Do you have a license for all those home recorded cassette tapes back there."
Really? You can't tell the difference between sharing amongst a group of friends (or even friends of friends) and one person buying it , posting it online for thousand or hundreds of thousands of people to access?
I'm don't think that the RIAA is handling things in the right way. They are a bunch of scumbags. The answer to this is to make media cheap and easy enough to access legally, that most people wouldn't bother stealing. But, the internet has fundamentally changed access to media in a way that makes the "making tape copies" precedent irrelevant.
I think the personal information example makes a clear point. In the old days anyone could have, with great effort, gotten hold of a white pages for any city and tried to find someone's address and phone info. Or for a few hundred dollars hired a PI to get info.
Now, you can get address, phone or even reverse phone info instantly and for $5 you can find out everything about a person without leaving home. I think that's a qualitative different, not just a quantitive difference. But legal theory has a hard time with that concept.
The "normal" definition of dualism is that there is a physical universe and a metaphysical universe. Science is a method to understand the physical universe, but cannot tell us much about the metaphysical one. If consciousness is metaphysical then neuroscientists, like me, are not going to be much good at figuring it out.
I think many people confuse physical with deterministic. There are many physical systems that are non-deterministic and I would argue that the brain is one of them. We don't yet know the source of non-determinism in the brain. But there are generally two classes of non-mutually exclusive theories.
1) There is intrinsic noise in the brain. The human brain is kept at a balmy 37ËsC which provides for plenty of Brownian noise. (I could expand on this at length.. but i have a flight to catch soon)
2) There is a neural circuit that acts essentially as a roulette wheel in our brain. Why, you might ask, would you have a casino in your head? Because in a competitive world predictability = death. (See this). This was more or less, the insight that John Nash had when he came up with the Nash Equilibrium, a critical contribution to game theory .
And a quick comment on the question of who are we but our memories? It turns out that we have different kinds of memories that are stored in different parts of our brains. Some of these memories would more normally be called beliefs or strategies but are formed in a very similar way as "normal" episodic memories (like what you had for breakfast). When someone starts to lose their memories of what they had for breakfast (or whether they live, etc) we call it amnesia, and we can often still see remnants of the person (they might have the same moral compass) and they still know how gravity works, etc. When the more basic belief and rule memories start to go, we often use a different word, "dementia", to imply that the person is not acting like themselves, but rather a demented version of themselves.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
So you think they watch how things are going in windows and then when the shit hits the fan they run over to the QNX machine?
A bit off topic but even though i don't love the DRM of iTunes, i prefer 128 bit AAC over 320 mp3. I don't need better sound quality than 128 bit AAC, all my devices play AAC, and I don't want to waste the space on my iPhone or iPod with larger music files.
I thought we had 11 senses...
Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!
As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.
So how many senses do we have?
You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch,smell, and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).
We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.
The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".
There are validhistorical reasons why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank of human experience?
I appreciate your position. I may have overstated somethings. I am providing external references for your (and others) perusal.
We don't know with any confidence that we are poisoning the earth. We know that we are having effects on it but we simply don't know if any or all of those effects are poisonous.
Really? When the recommended allowance of some fish is ZERO servings, i think it is pretty clear that we have poisoned the waters. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694
As for giving out children asthma, I have never seen a causation study blaming pollution for the cause of asthma.
It is probably because you haven't looked. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674285
From the abstract: "...In asthmatics, epidemiological studies generally show a positive correlation between the particulate fraction of air pollution and increased morbidity, although roles for other co-pollutants (for example, ozone) are implicated as well. Direct experimentation using air pollutants, especially particles, to investigate their effects on humans or on animal models of asthma provides corroboration of the epidemiology and has begun to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved...."
Am I a "religious" environmentalist? Maybe. I don't really know what that means. And when i mentioned destruction/mutation of species, I should have been clear, that i also don't really care about the species pre se... during the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event about 3/4 of species were extinguished. I just mentioned it as evidence of the poisoning of the earth.
I am not worried about the earth. The earth will be fine. Long after humans are gone, the Earth will still be around. I am only an environmentalist because I want to preserve the current beauty of the planet for future generations of humans.
yes, climatology is complicated. It is a non-linear dynamical system
The warming of the planet (which is agreed upon - the only controversy is whether this is a natural cycle or man-made) is just putting more energy into this system. When you add energy to a dynamical system 2 things can happen.
1) You can stay in the same regime, but increase the variance in the oscillations. In layman's term, we will have the same kind of weather but it will fluctuate more than we are used to, storms might be a bit more severe, we'll have hot days and then cold days, etc.
2) The other possibility is that we shift to a new regime. In other words, we cross some energy barrier and move into a landscape that is totally new for humans. For example, a world without polar icecaps. A hot earth. If this happens... well, things will be interesting. probably not in a good way.
I can say with some confidence that no one knows what will happen. But it is unequivocal that we are poisoning the earth. Pollution is destroying our food and water supply. It is giving our children asthma. It's wiping out some species and mutating others. This is something we can see happening now and yet, we still can't get people to change their behavior. what is it going to take to get people to realize that our current lifestyle is not sustainable?
I had similar experiences all through out my comp sci degree. I would figure out the solutions and proofs on my exams from first principles, and it wasn't always the same as the one 'in the book'. Thus, the TAs doing the grading would not recognize my answer as the 'answer' and take away points. But every time i took it to the prof, they would regrade and give me full marks.
The point is, some TA or Prof failing to take the time to understand your answer isn't an indictment of an entire field.
i don't know how things work at your school, but in my experience universities require all NICs to have their MAC addresses registered before joining the network. As such, you will be tied to the mac address of the USB NIC where ever you leave it.
This device might save some power but it doesn't help avoid the RIAA on any but the most open networks.
" the software allows an attacker to increase their user privileges to system level, the highest possible level. The software can also able remove a user's password, giving an attacker access to all of their files. Afterwards, VBootkit 2.0 restores the original password, ensuring that the attack will go undetected."
So this is basically great if you want to break into your girlfriends laptop to check her email?
Can someone knowledgeable explain why this is news?
While I certainly plan to boycott amazon in response to this repressive and insane policy change, a more immediate form of protest (and a way to get press) could be to short-sell the stock.
Can someone do the math? If we started an online movement to short the stock at a specific time and date, how many stock would each of us have to short in order to actually drive the stock down?
more like:
1. Drink excessive amounts of liquor
2. Too drunk to fuck
3. Fewer people on the planet
4. ???
5. Profit?
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
He loves not being connected to the movies based on his work because it makes him look 'cool' I guess. Which is nice, because he gets to get MORE publicity. For the movie and for not associating himself with it. I'm sure that drives sales of everything with his name on it up, and he laughs all the way to the bank.
You clearly know nothing about Alan Moore. Or economics.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a fuel tax. last time i checked it takes fuel to drive. more miles = more fuel. This is a massive waste of money.
Britain was involved in the settlement and creation of modern-day Israel. Israelis and Palestinians often kill each other. It's not a real connection but I think this is what he's going for.
How do you define "often"? The total death toll of the israeli-palestinian conflict since the beginning of the first intefada in 1987 is about 8000 people. That's less than 365 per year (8000/22). (This figure includes both civilian and military casualties on both sides). There are about 10 million people living in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. So the death toll from the conflict is 3.65 deaths per 100000 people per year. In the United States, the death toll from car accidents is 14.7 death per 100000 people per year. Maybe that's "often" but I just wanted to put it in perspective.
If you wanted to pick a conflict that the British were involved with a high death toll, the israeli-palestinian conflict is a pretty poor choice.
don't forget Vonnegut. He's funny, sad, insightful, and silly all at the same time.
i thought the same thing. i saw ".....venus, wet...... " and i jizzed in my pants
You are correct that we can't extract a significant amount of the wind energy. But wind flow is pretty tricky, and even if farms wouldn't affect flow in the upper atmosphere, they could affect flow where we care about it. at the earth's surface.
I would say that this is still an open question.
I have the same concerns about wind energy. There is some evidence that it can effect local ecology.
Solar energy on the other hand, isn't used very efficiently. In fact, in much of the world shade structures that converted solar energy to electricity would provide a double service: cool via shading while using unwanted radiative energy.
The only way that using solar could effect climate is if we significantly changed the albedo by placing dark solar panels in a place that was very reflective. However, other than the polar ice caps most of the earth's surface absorbs the solar energy, so we really would not affect climate by "taking out" the solar energy.
I think we should actually launch solar concentrators into orbit. Basically huge inflatable lenses that float in space and beam concentrated solar power down to heat some salt to drive a turbine. We'd just have to make sure that planes didn't fly through the beam.
Yes, our species is more than DNA. That is obvious. What is not obvious is that we should confuse the process of Darwinian evolution with cultural evolution. They are both fascinating and worthy of discussion and study. It is even worth thinking about ways in which they are similar. But I think it is also worthwhile to understand the distinctions and that models of one need not apply to the other.
Back in my day (I'm 48)....
When I was a young whipper snapper in the 70's-80's. I'd buy an album and copy it to tape for my car. If asked by a friend for a copy, I'd take a blank cassette tape and make a copy in my cassette recorder with the high speed dub feature.
I don't ever recall the cops ever asking me if I got pulled over for speeding or something..."BTW son, Do you have a license for all those home recorded cassette tapes back there."
Really? You can't tell the difference between sharing amongst a group of friends (or even friends of friends) and one person buying it , posting it online for thousand or hundreds of thousands of people to access?
I'm don't think that the RIAA is handling things in the right way. They are a bunch of scumbags. The answer to this is to make media cheap and easy enough to access legally, that most people wouldn't bother stealing. But, the internet has fundamentally changed access to media in a way that makes the "making tape copies" precedent irrelevant.
I think the personal information example makes a clear point. In the old days anyone could have, with great effort, gotten hold of a white pages for any city and tried to find someone's address and phone info. Or for a few hundred dollars hired a PI to get info.
Now, you can get address, phone or even reverse phone info instantly and for $5 you can find out everything about a person without leaving home. I think that's a qualitative different, not just a quantitive difference. But legal theory has a hard time with that concept.
I think many people confuse physical with deterministic. There are many physical systems that are non-deterministic and I would argue that the brain is one of them. We don't yet know the source of non-determinism in the brain. But there are generally two classes of non-mutually exclusive theories.
1) There is intrinsic noise in the brain. The human brain is kept at a balmy 37ËsC which provides for plenty of Brownian noise. (I could expand on this at length.. but i have a flight to catch soon)
2) There is a neural circuit that acts essentially as a roulette wheel in our brain. Why, you might ask, would you have a casino in your head? Because in a competitive world predictability = death. (See this). This was more or less, the insight that John Nash had when he came up with the Nash Equilibrium, a critical contribution to game theory .
And a quick comment on the question of who are we but our memories? It turns out that we have different kinds of memories that are stored in different parts of our brains. Some of these memories would more normally be called beliefs or strategies but are formed in a very similar way as "normal" episodic memories (like what you had for breakfast). When someone starts to lose their memories of what they had for breakfast (or whether they live, etc) we call it amnesia, and we can often still see remnants of the person (they might have the same moral compass) and they still know how gravity works, etc. When the more basic belief and rule memories start to go, we often use a different word, "dementia", to imply that the person is not acting like themselves, but rather a demented version of themselves.
You mean I need to be vomiting, cumming and having explosive diarrhea to have sex? No thanks.
I'm sure there's a Japanese word for what you describe, but I'm not about to go look it up.
Smart thinking.
Especially since you might invoke rule 34 of the internet.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
So you think they watch how things are going in windows and then when the shit hits the fan they run over to the QNX machine?
That frightens me.
Is that so wrong?
But you just have to build hundreds of years of market data and human history into the current state. Then you are markov again. ;)
I thought we had 11 senses... Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!
As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.
So how many senses do we have?
You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch,smell, and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).
We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.
The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".
There are valid historical reasons why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank of human experience?
and yes, IAAN (i am a neuroscientist).
We don't know with any confidence that we are poisoning the earth. We know that we are having effects on it but we simply don't know if any or all of those effects are poisonous.
Really? When the recommended allowance of some fish is ZERO servings, i think it is pretty clear that we have poisoned the waters. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694
Beluga whales are toxic waste
As for giving out children asthma, I have never seen a causation study blaming pollution for the cause of asthma.
It is probably because you haven't looked.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674285
From the abstract: "...In asthmatics, epidemiological studies generally show a positive correlation between the particulate fraction of air pollution and increased morbidity, although roles for other co-pollutants (for example, ozone) are implicated as well. Direct experimentation using air pollutants, especially particles, to investigate their effects on humans or on animal models of asthma provides corroboration of the epidemiology and has begun to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved...."
Am I a "religious" environmentalist? Maybe. I don't really know what that means. And when i mentioned destruction/mutation of species, I should have been clear, that i also don't really care about the species pre se ... during the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event about 3/4 of species were extinguished. I just mentioned it as evidence of the poisoning of the earth.
I am not worried about the earth. The earth will be fine. Long after humans are gone, the Earth will still be around. I am only an environmentalist because I want to preserve the current beauty of the planet for future generations of humans.
The warming of the planet (which is agreed upon - the only controversy is whether this is a natural cycle or man-made) is just putting more energy into this system. When you add energy to a dynamical system 2 things can happen.
1) You can stay in the same regime, but increase the variance in the oscillations. In layman's term, we will have the same kind of weather but it will fluctuate more than we are used to, storms might be a bit more severe, we'll have hot days and then cold days, etc.
2) The other possibility is that we shift to a new regime. In other words, we cross some energy barrier and move into a landscape that is totally new for humans. For example, a world without polar icecaps. A hot earth. If this happens... well, things will be interesting. probably not in a good way.
I can say with some confidence that no one knows what will happen. But it is unequivocal that we are poisoning the earth. Pollution is destroying our food and water supply. It is giving our children asthma. It's wiping out some species and mutating others. This is something we can see happening now and yet, we still can't get people to change their behavior. what is it going to take to get people to realize that our current lifestyle is not sustainable?
I had similar experiences all through out my comp sci degree. I would figure out the solutions and proofs on my exams from first principles, and it wasn't always the same as the one 'in the book'. Thus, the TAs doing the grading would not recognize my answer as the 'answer' and take away points. But every time i took it to the prof, they would regrade and give me full marks.
The point is, some TA or Prof failing to take the time to understand your answer isn't an indictment of an entire field.
the title was "computer lab", which made me think university.
Actually, guessing at the lifestyle of many ./ers i would say heart-disease and type-2 diabetes are bigger risks.
i don't know how things work at your school, but in my experience universities require all NICs to have their MAC addresses registered before joining the network. As such, you will be tied to the mac address of the USB NIC where ever you leave it.
This device might save some power but it doesn't help avoid the RIAA on any but the most open networks.
" the software allows an attacker to increase their user privileges to system level, the highest possible level. The software can also able remove a user's password, giving an attacker access to all of their files. Afterwards, VBootkit 2.0 restores the original password, ensuring that the attack will go undetected."
So this is basically great if you want to break into your girlfriends laptop to check her email?
Can someone knowledgeable explain why this is news?
Can someone do the math? If we started an online movement to short the stock at a specific time and date, how many stock would each of us have to short in order to actually drive the stock down?
more like:
1. Drink excessive amounts of liquor
2. Too drunk to fuck
3. Fewer people on the planet
4. ???
5. Profit?
He loves not being connected to the movies based on his work because it makes him look 'cool' I guess. Which is nice, because he gets to get MORE publicity. For the movie and for not associating himself with it. I'm sure that drives sales of everything with his name on it up, and he laughs all the way to the bank.
You clearly know nothing about Alan Moore. Or economics.