I was reading this rather interesting
article on
www.cnn.com, about the new Playstation portable. It was written by a reporter in London, so I was intrigued by several different points.
1) Directly from the article "several dozen people queued in front of HMV and Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street". If that was written by a American reporter, I think the wording would have been Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, wouldn't it? I liked the British tendency to make every little location sound like a country.
2) The second item was toward the end of the article, and it made me think of the major shift in mainstream culture. "The updated firmware makes the software hacks useless -- at least until enthusiasts find a new way in." Now, I might point out that 5 years ago someone who made software hacks, which pretty clearly violate the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of everything, wouldn't be called an enthusiast but a hacker. But the world has so changed that in the middle of MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) suing and threatening websites because they promote downloading of copywrited music and movies, the cost of blank DVD's from Best Buy is down to about $17 for a spindle of 50. And those are really good quality, and let me tell you, 75 to 90 percent of people purchasing quantities as large as those are downloading files. I have never done it, but I would imagine that a Ghost backup of your drive doesn't take 50 DVD's. And it you have a camcorder that burns right on to DVD's you have to work long and hard to fill up 50 discs. DVD-burners, CD-burners (which from a data storage standpoint are practically obsolete, except for burning music), and blank media are so cheap it is practically an accepted practice to make common use out of information that is available online. Even in PC World magazine, they frequently report on major downloading sites being taken down, and the court battles over P2P (peer-to-peer) software.
I am not condoning that behavior, but I must say there are some pretty heavily mixed messages about what is acceptable, even though it is against the law. Like when you pass by a police car shooting radar, if you are only doing five miles per hour over the speed limit, you know that you are ok, even though you are breaking the law. And I wasn't planning on spending this much space typing about this issue either, it just hit me.
In conclusion, I must say that I don't download, and no one else should (depending on the content, it is probably illegal), based on the confusion that I have written here, but I would totally understand if someone else was as confused as I was.
Something off topic, wouldn't it be interesting if sleep was the problem that so many people are suffering from. One of the times that my mind was wondering, I was thinking about how when we sleep, and enter REM stage, our brains actually disconnect certain functions from the rest of our body. If it didn't, when we dream that we are moving an arm, we would actually move our arm. When we talk in our dream, we would actually talk with our real mouths. The signals of dreaming moving an arm, are generated the same as when I reach for my coffee, but they are interrupted before it can reach the spine. I think the term is called dream-paralysis.
I was thinking that wouldn't it be interesting if a whole host of disorders could be traced back to a malfunction in the way or time that the brain dreams, or induces dream-paralysis. I have had times that I have woke myself up from a dream because I was speaking or moving as if in the dream. But who says that sometimes that could be a little more of a disorder. The brain is a tricky organ, we know much more about it then 10 or 15 years ago, but we still know so little. What if certain types of psychosis, or delusional states were simply instances in which the brain can't differentiate between REM-sleep and being awake? So in a sense certain parts of your brain and body are behaving as if asleep and dreaming random, strange thoughts. But other parts of your mind were operating as if you are awake, and are just trying to make sense of the chaos that it is receiving. In another example, less plausible but more of a thought experiment, what if were able to trigger the dream-paralysis when it would be useful? I'm thinking about mostly surgical applications, so that local anesthesia could be used, much safer, but there would be no risk of the patient flinching or being lucid for the procedure.
I am sure that as my subconscious percolates on the topic, I will come up with more. I just think sleep disorders need not be limited to sleep apnea, or insomnia. A little imagination!
