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Comment Re:Wrong wrong wrong... (Score 0) 196

By making it very obvious which end is dangerous. The fact that executables cannot effectively be sandboxed is a major limitation of the Unix based operating system. All the OS does is protect users from each other. We need to move to a model where the user is protected from code he hasn't written.

Comment Re:scare tactics (Score 2, Insightful) 96

So what you are saying is that because people realize that they had nothing to do with their intelligence and therefore the benefits that accrue to them from it are in some sense not deserved, they should be reeducated? Or that in a world where half a billion people starved a few years in the midst of record harvests, to say that this is wrong can only come from ignorance? Should the children of ex-Nazis not have felt guilty about living in a society run by the same people as in the 1930's and 1940's? The idea that any kind of feeling for ones fellow man is the result of ignorance, that the highest expression of man's potential is greed and gluttony should strike us as a failure to know what the highest pleasures are and as an acute failure of the moral sense.

Comment Re:Brave New World (Score 1) 334

Except that drugs are not created to treat "problem children". And what do you mean by "problem children"? Are we talking about children who want to go to school but happen to be Afghan girls? Children who, due to lack of regular attention and interest by parents act out to get their attention? Children who are shunted from relative to relative when their parents can't pay the rent or feed all of them, and so suffer from attachment issues? Psychological disorders have causes which are known. The way to control problem children is to avoid making children problems.

Comment Re:Information outside of your expertise is danger (Score 0) 334

I'm sorry, but medication does nothing for mental illness. The idea that using a drug like Alprazolam to control the symptoms of a phobia is better then using therapy to permanently eliminate the phobia with no chemical dependency is simply wrong. Xanax has a place: controlling an occasional phobia that probably isn't worth the cost of psychotherapy to eliminate. But use it regularly and you are physically dependent on it. The whole idea of mental disease processes is in many cases also fundamentally questionable, given the way that mental diseases are by definition deviations from accepted behavior. Psychologists should be solving what the patient thinks are problems, not what the people around them are thinking are problems. (within boundaries: clearly a suicidal individual should be helped, and if that takes Prozac to accomplish as a bridge, then that's fine) The difficult case is schizophrenia: easy to find, but the patient doesn't think they have a problem. Solution: deal with the issues that they have, like being unable to work. But then you look at things like bogus diagnoses of bipolar disorder in normal teenagers and wonder who the hell forgot that unless the patient says they have a problem, they probably don't.

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