This is true and well known to the police, and scientists as well. Alcohol inhibits glutamate (excitatory neural) receptors in the brain, so the more you drink the more your brain's activities are depressed. So the more drunk you get, the more impaired your mental functions become, and the less motor control you have. Pot has virtually no effect on glutamate receptors in the brain. It acts on endocanabinoid receptors which are in a whole different class. They are involved in other functions, including hunger sensations, pain sensations, and memory. There is some speculation that this system may be involved in clearing old memories, perhaps to make room for new ones. So ironically, pot would probably be better than alcohol for people in bars drinking and trying to forget bad memories.But pot does not impair driving abilities, and tends to make drivers more cautious. Testing for pot in drivers should not result in a fine, or license suspension, it should result in a "have a nice day" response from the officer as he hands you your license back.

"Sports" like boxing and football will never be safe because they involve repeated blows to the head. Single blows are bad enough if they are of high force, but research has shown that repeated blows to the head, even moderate ones, are more than additive. The window of vulnerability has been found to be between 3 and 5 days, meaning that you need to avoid any additional impacts for that long after you have an initial impact. Because boxing and football involve hitting the head repeatedly over the course of a single day, it is apparent why football players and boxers have the worst cases of post traumatic encephalopathy (PTE). The only way to prevent this is to stop after the first blow to the head, which would make both of these "sports" unplayable by human beings. If you want to help out with this problem, invent robots that can engage in these activities. They too will sustain damage over time, but unlike human brains, they will be repairable. They also won't file lawsuits.

So far that hasn't happened on my system, even with settings pretty much maxed out. But I do get big lag whenever I am being pursued and I turn a corner and leave the ghost image behind indicating the last place I was seen. It is at least a half second delay. Try setting everything to max, and then turn one thing down at a time and see if there is one specific setting that is causing the issue.

come on, admit it, you haven't even played the game. You probably haven't even seen it on anyone else's computer. Take a look at the PC version and tell me you've seen that much stuff on the screen at once with that much view distance and all the lighting effects. I said the game was buggy, but I have had more issues with Borderlands the presequal so far.

Sorry, a typo. It is the GTX 780... I added a zero

I've put in a few hours of gameplay with it (PC version), and the game definitely has some bugs, but on a decent gaming computer it is the most ambitious game in terms of graphic content on the screen that I have ever seen. The number of rendered objects is crazy, and the number of NPC on the screen at once is astounding. Sure a few NPC pop in and out (before the patch) and some people go through the floor. But that happens in Borderlands the PreSequal just as much if not more, and it is a much less demanding and ambitious game. Ubisoft fucked up with the launch, and should have tested it on older hardware. But it is hard to believe they can get that much stuff on the screen with the lighting effects they have, and still have it run at all. It is not the buggiest game I have ever bought, but it does have the most graphical content by far, and the frame rates are very playable. (Intel i7 3.3 GHz with 12 GB ram and Geforce 7800 GTX)

We lose power all the time, sometimes for days. We put in a whole house generator and transfer switch, and hooked them to a sizable underground LPG tank. It was an investment, but it was worth it. The setup has saved our butts many times, including the dead of winter. Our power never goes out for more than a minute now, as we wait for the transfer switch to change us over to generator power. At 20KW, it powers everything as long as we don't go crazy turning everything on.

Imitating free will with a machine deciding which way to move based on programming isn't free will in the sense that animals and people have free will. You have to be alive and conscious to have a "will". When you make a conscious robot, then you can start talking about free will in machines.

"It's certainly capable of acting as if it is aware - and taken to an extreme, that's about all I can really say about other people" You would make Descarte proud.

Actually, it is about consciousness. Neuroscientists can define it, but they can't explain it. Brains apparently are consciousness generators, and we really don't understand how that happens based on brain circuitry, neurochemistry and physiology. Clearly, it has something to do with being "alive", and since computers aren't alive they aren't conscious.

As a practicing neuroscientist I couldn't agree more with Dr. Noe. It is obvious to the extreme that computers don't think, and aren't aware of anything. An amoeba is aware of its surroundings because it is alive. When we all figure out what alive actually means, then we will understand more fully why computers can't think, and why they aren't aware of anything.

Only 9 comments in, and the ever present, always anticipated, anonymous coward, Amnesty International bashing shows up.

Let's just hope the patches fix the major issues and improve frame rates. I have all settings on high, and I am not getting any hesitations. I'll run FRAPS and get some frame rate numbers, my guess is they are in the 30-35 fps range, which is acceptable for so much stuff on the screen at one time. You have to admit that no other games have that many detailed NPC on the screen at once (Black Flag did not have nearly this many).

Yes, the game has plenty of bugs, and those can get frustrating when you hide behind rather than climb a wall because the commands are the same. But it is also true that with Direct X 11 (Windows 7) and the GeForce 780 on a 6 core Intel i7 (3.3 GHz) the frame rates are very playable and the game is beautiful to look at, and fun to play. Yes, it has pretty steep system requirements, but they should be able to fix a lot of the problems for less robust hardware with patches and lowered NPC counts. Ubisoft should have delayed the game a few weeks while they finished patching some of the issues, but then they would have been criticized for not meeting their release date.

If you want to emulate a brain with chips, you have a major obstacle to overcome; the fact that chips don't change dramatically over time as they acquire experience with the world through a coordinated set of sensory-motor systems. You would not just need the 50 or so high-level processors that are dedicated to specific tasks, linked together very specifically, you would also need the entire system to be able to rewire itself at both microscopic and macroscopic levels based on experience. Without living organisms intrinsic ability to remake the system in real time at multiple levels of structural organization, chips will always just be chips trying to imitate the brain. They will need to be able to learn and grow, just like brains, or they will always be cheap imitations.