qplex

the ethical and monetary cost of a rodent suffering or dying due to unwanted effects of a drug candidate is judged to be lower than similar suffering in a human.

Thank you for the insightful comment, I'll cite the part that is relevant, since my (very serious) point was indeed that by this logic a more "advanced" being than us would have (by our own morals) the right to conduct medical experiments on us humans, because we are capable of feeling less pain.

Sorry for my hazy morning scribbles. I meant real as in how this property often is employed to mold our reality or behavior. Indeed the information has more copies - or links (as a better analogy for brain structure). I should have made it more clear that I don't use repetition to "program myself" or change habits, but to affirm thought. I am familiar with the concept since it's actively in use everywhere from religious mantras to marketing.

Generally life can be seen as a copy mechanism for DNA. The logic of it is (drumroll) to make more copies. I'm not sure about artificiality, but mentioning that reminds me that we are already capable of simulating neural nets that very much correspond to some (simple) real organisms.

In any case, I agree that our brain is structured over time and old "animal" areas of the brain appear sometime to have a firm hold over the cortex . Deeply ingrained habits have indeed 'deep pathways', and of course they're not only localized single neurons that can be flip-flopped.

Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain structurally change, or rather to correspond to thought. The software/hardware analogy is useful but I want to add thar the human brain is really not just a programmable computer, but much more.

In my humble opinion it's not that bright to think of animals as an utilitarian resource for the human race to plunder, or to consider their monetary value as any sort of a yardstick.

Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.

Clickbait title.

Advice to change it to reflect that Helium is just a marketing term for some new instruction set they have .

In addition to affirming what I want by repetition, I try to generate logical ammunition for an argument: to think in depth how and why something is bad for me.

It's very interesting how just repeating something makes it more "real".

Anyone reading or creating PDFs to begin with should ask why even bother with such a static and outdated format that was made for when it was common to print out documents on paper to read them.

Biggest internet thing of the past decade is the smartphone and anything related.

If it's financial rock bottom as in that you need to make ends meet, to sustain yourself and your family, it's mostly the environment that dictates what can be done. If the situation seems absolute, as in that no suitable jobs are available, securing land and growing food yourself etc. can go a long way.

Emotional rock bottom: probably goes in hand with the former. Anyway, don't blame yourself. I dunno who made the call and on what grounds they made it. That kind of stuff eats you, especially if you don't know.

In any case I urge you to keep going and wish you all the best. Much to wonder, and live for.

Beside the heavy-ness, I've found the site unusable with mobile browsers because it constantly nags you in various different ways to "try out" their app.

Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all.

Indeed configuring Wine to run something can involve a lot from installing different depedencies to .dll overrides. Different configs for different applications are also a bit painful.

But other than this, Wine is great.

While this is about the best size for a phone, I want to point out that making a device for the user and maximizing corporate profit seem to be incompatible goals.

Smartphones are no exception in this - the vendors are mostly interested in making not-the-best phone that'll only last a couple of years so that they can then sell you another one and profit.

The current mainstream approach of western medicine does not follow this - eg. there is little evidence that anti-depression drugs actually cure depression, and the side-effects are horrible. Yet the pharma industry profits greatly by selling snake oil that just makes people more sick.

Cannabis extracts like charas - hash that is made from the resin have been around for thousands of years, and are way more potent than "narcotic skunk mutants".

It was most likely the flowers of a female plant (that contain the seed) that were thrown on the rocks.

Also, hemp == cannabis.

While raw cannabis has some % of THC and CDB (among other compounds) it is the processed stuff like hashish or oils that really hold the crown for potency. This stuff has been around for a long time, much longer than the westernized commercial strains.

How are the geodesic domes supposed to help in comparison to regular greenhouses?

Commercial orchids and greenhouses already grow vanilla and plenty of other stuff in automated hydroponic and aeroponic systems

I fail to see what is so special about this.

To completely stop doing tech professionally, or to ignore everything, to build up thick skin, and say "it's up to other people how my inventions are used."

I'm curious to what you think is the fundamental nature of science and engineering. Is science only intellectual curiosity just for the sake of it?

I think standardizing init to systemd across distributions has some benefits for everyone.

SysV certainly wasn't and isn't the smooth experience either and took some time to grasp.

It's kind of funny how systemd breaks often when old farts (like us) tinker with something in a way we shouldnt.

for a long time was content that I barely managed to remember the new syntax for starting and stopping services when the distributions I used switched to systemd.

I've felt the same way, but then again I'm not really missing SysV runlevels either.

Generally I don't find myself tinkering with init systems too often, and a simple list of commands to run on startup in-order suffices for most of my needs.

randomize its MAC address before searching for WiFi access points

Indeed, things like start order and depedencies can be completely broken on systemd. Many problems arise from incompatibilities with legacy systems and interfaces.

I had a big headache last time I had to configure systemd to wait for dhcp before running other stuff because the systemd targets for networking were not working - part of the problem was a legacy interface for network configuration.

I agree that one can learn many things in life, and that there is some level of basic knowledge and skill that's very healthy for everyone to have.

One of the cornerstones of modern society is however specialization; there simply isn't enough time to learn everything.

I'm not sure how plumbing charts on the scales. Probably it's just something people usually avoid if they can find someone else to do it.

Has anyone had positive experiences with systemd? Success stories because of feature x?

I've pretty grim personal opinion of it, based on similiar experiences as this story. I'd rather just use a simpler approach (another init) that _works_, and doesnt involve hours of debugging. I've never had any troubles with sysv-style init for example.

I run Debian on my 32-bit netbook.

Currently Debian offers installers for amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x.

"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.

Sorry about that. It wasn't the point, as SARS is caused by many different strains of the same type of virus.

The first outbreak of SARS-CoV was identified in Foshan, Guangdong, China, in November 2002.

Thats almost 20 years ago.

Also Swine Infulenza does not originate from Mexico.

Just trying to find the silver lining here.

Oh, we could pretty much save the planet and live happily ever after if we could keep it like this.

Only to find some rock barreling down on us some day, but ah... I digress.

The only thing that has prevented riots and general instability of governments is mass bailouts

Yes. This is more to the point that the current economical doctrine is very much misguided.

What I was of course talking about is how positive the situation is for the biosphere.

It's way more grim if the biosphere can not support us anymore. The fact that human political systems cause mass death, poverty and suffering is not news.

factually incorrect

It's not. SARS is from China.

not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere

essentially a game of chance

It's 100% preventable. Just cut contact with wildlife that spreads these viruses.

I'm only correcting the fallacy of praising any goverment that fails to address the root causes of these problems.