This strikes me as a huuuuuge breach of medical record confidentiality. Where exactly do they plan to legally get enough medical records to mine in the first place?
This is the most promising bit of cybernetics news I have seen in quite a while. I've been hoping that some day within my lifespan artificial senses could be used. Well, now it looks like they can. Maybe they make for low-resolution video, maybe they can be used for information readout. Yeah, it would look weird, but this can give you (for example) a read heads-up display that doesn't interfere with your vision. Or an interface for processing senses from remotely controlled robots. Imagine the fun business users would have being able to "read" their email while driving. The possibilities are endless.
But say you have two black boxes. The first uses Diffie-Hellman to exchange a key for subsequent AES encryption; the second exchanges a one time pad using quantum cryptography. What's the advantage of the second? In a passive attack (snooping alone), the snooper can't break Diffie-Hellman. In an active attack (man-in-the-middle), quantum crypto fails as well: I just put a machine in the middle that acts as A to B and B to A, receive one pad from A and send a completely different one to B, and go on my merry way, transparently reencrypting anything passing through.
You can't perform a man-in-the-middle attack with quantum crypto because the one-time-pads are exchanged in advance. You can't send an OTP with the message, you have to share it in a secure manner at some previous time. In the quantum crypto case, you would create and distribute the entangled particles ahead of time, then use the OTP to send a strong symmetric crypto key and encrypt your normal communication with that.
You can't intercept that one-time-pad key transmission because, if you did, you wouldn't be able to reproduce the OTP to re-encrypt your man-in-the-middle key to be sent to the other party. While quantum crypto doesn't prevent interference, it makes it impossible for the interference to not be noticed. That is its advantage.
I think you underestimate the age of Nirvanna fans. The current "younger" population considers Nirvanna irrelevant. (Which, by the way, I consider good, as I too hate it.)
This is the sort of turnaround that everybody wishes monolithic corporations could make. Well, now AOL / Time Warner is making one. It's pretty easy to recognize that charging people for access to AOL's information services alone is not a viable business model. We constantly make fun of them for it, or at least I did. AOL for Broadband?
AOL's brand has started to really hurt lately. Ma and pa are beginning to dislike them, and so this is AOL doing the best move they can: Cut the crap, scale down the profit drive, and return to services. AOL is still a very valuable brand name, and it can still be salvaged for future use. If they immediately stop aggravating customers and do their best to play nice while Time Warner scales them down, the brand can once again have value.
We always blast away at companies for driving themselves into the ground by refusing to change. And yeah, AOL has been and still is a pretty dark beast in some spots. But despite this, AOL is doing the hardest thing a mega-corporation can do: admit their blunder, and try to change. In addition to mocking their shameful past, some positive, if exasperated, attention should be spent to note this move toward the right direction.
I have to post a disclaimer to ward off the astroturf melters, though. No, I am not an AOL employee. No, I do not own AOL stock. No, I have no personal or professional stake in AOL at all. Yes, I -am- thoroughly intoxicated.
You make a good point, but I think this sort of thing calls for some consideration of circumstances. I (personally) don't consider an animated gif to be a threat, or at the very least, not a threat worth punishing. I understand why the school would act as it did; the potential liability issues are serious. I just think that people need to take this particular instance with a grain of salt. Sending an animated gif with "Kill XYZ" to a hitman is different from setting it to your AIM icon, and I think it should be treated differently.
I -do- have beef with the obsession over security, which caused this issue. I personally believe that danger is an inherent price of freedom, and if you don't pay with danger, you can't get the freedom. That's an entire different rant though.;)
Perhaps I'm just raging against the machine, or perhaps I'm an early twenties old fogie who sees his own past through rose tinted glasses. I can't discount either of those. However, it seems to me that one great sacrifice to the war on terror has been our sense of humor.
I see a lot of comments about how death threats are unacceptable. I see a lot of comments about how free speech is not designed to protect this. I see a lot of people who have obviously forgotten about high school.
To all the people who question this being a joke: Of COURSE it was a joke! Please don't tell me you haven't done pretty much the same thing. I don't like being lied to. This site is a gathering place for people who screw around on computers, and this "threat" is nothing more than a kid screwing around on a computer. Talk of this post columbine world is melodramatic adult scorn for youth culture, which has been through history, and still is, as constant a human behavior pattern as youth culture's intentionally offensive behavior toward scornful adults.
If I say "fuck you" to someone, does that mean I want them to be raped?
The whole point of the first amendment is to protect the speech that is distasteful, offensive, and disgusting. No other speech needs protecting.
I saw that wonderful 'Open Source Dress' and was imagining the possibilities of the general public adding and removing patches at will. Presumably it was eventually all Open-not-repetitive. Oh well.
he palace, came urgent trumpet calls, the heavy crunch of hundreds of feet, the clank of metal. It told the Procurator that the Roman infantry was marching out, on his orders, to the execution parade that was to strike terror into the hearts of all thieves and rebels 'Do you hear. Procurator? ' the High
On another note, I want some not_repetitive_mod points. No real reason, I don't need them. I sat here for a minute and tried to think of a way to get some, but all the standard stereotypical jokes have already been made. Then I realized that funny doesn't affect my karma.
Priest quietly repeated his words. ' Surely you are not trying to tell me that all this '-- here the High Priest raised both arms and his dark cowl slipped from his head--' can have been evoked by that miserable thief Bar-Abba?' With the back of his wrist the Procurator wiped his damp, cold forehead, stared at
Bummer. Obviously I need to be insightful, or at least pretend to be. I can do things like observe people observing that anything here can get mod points today and make fun of them for making fun of other people. Unless they do it to me. That would make them a gay pony.
the ground, then frowning skywards he saw that the incandescent ball was nearly overhead, that Caiaphas' shadow had shrunk to almost nothing and he said in a calm, expressionless voice : 'The execution will be at noon. We have enjoyed this conversation, but matters must proceed.' Excusing
See how clever I was? I made that wonderful quasi-insightful post and then put a surprise ending on it by referencing current events to make it funny also. But then if it's funny I don't get k-nonrepetitive. Dammit. At least I set it up so I qualify for both. I need a new angle here....
FUCK YOU MODS! +1 TROLL ALL THE WAY!
himself to the High Priest in a few artificial phrases, he invited him to sit down on a bench in the shade of a magnolia and to wait while he summoned the others necessary for the final short consultation ul q ipsp gp spqtn prpgqq pgplpsp i nt pnqsq f qqquu pqlq oqp ngrj s ns ps fsjnqnonrutsn pspfpqpu t pp lpop p pg tkulu j urumupu fufuutss hrnth rjro rjr ur qnlrp r krl sdjksdfsdfsdlgkj sdflkjsdf lksdjfsdfsdf
Hmm. Lameness filter encountered for too much repetition? Is that an invitation to write like the spam I've been getting recently? I'll be happy to copy and paste some nonsense sentences if that will help.
Almost. What if standard out is a pipe that got closed? What if there's not enough memory to run the basic interpreter? What if it gets a kill signal from the kernel? What if it becomes a zombie process?
As you can see, even the simple 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" isn't bug free. To make bug free software you don't need to catch most errors, you need to catch every possible error.
I question the trust that slashdotters seem to have in this new story. Why should we believe it?
The general police forces have managed to get a new story published on how they can not deal with any sort of semi-modern technology. Why should we believe it?
If I were the police, and I'm sure the police have at least one or two people smarter than me. then I would go to great lengths to get this story published. Why? Not because I can't figure out Firfox, be because I -can- figure out Firefox.
If my suspect thinks that I am too dumb to understand Firfox, then my suspect is far less likely to use powerful encryption. Without the powerful encruption, I -can- read Firefoxes files, and a significant proportion of criminals will think they are safe when they are not.
Hell, I'm not even law enforcement but I still find it obvious how this story is a great advantage for the law enforcement community.
Yes, we DO want to talk about reputation lookup for IPs.
The hurricane is horrible, for sure. It is very tragic that so many people are losing so much. I would pray for them. However, slashdot is NOT the place to discuss a hurricane.
Slashdot is technology news, not general news. If you want to submit a story about the hurricane, and it gets posted, I would gladly "get some priorities" and discuss that instead. Until then, such a discussion is flagrantly off topic.
Just because there's a disaster doesn't mean the rest of the world stands still. Life goes on, and hopefully gets better.
News for Nerds is news for nerds, not news for the south.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE THAT MUCH CAFFEINE!
on
Death by Coffee?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Back in my younger, experimentalist phase, I tried taking a lot of caffeine pills. I had 13, which is about 20 or 30 cups of coffee. It was an overdose.
For about an hour I had a huge, ever-increasing buzz. Then it became difficult to walk. Then I started to throw up. I was vomiting for about 10 hours straight.
Unless you want to go through the same hell that I did, lay off the massive coffee dose.
There has not been ONE single Linux virus that has propagted in the wild: given the huge nubmer of viruses out there I would have thought someone* would have written and released one for Linux just to show it can be done.
Sorry buddy, but you are wrong. I was a crappy admin (back in my run-as-root-at-all-times days) and didn't patch a bind for an exploit in the redhat package. I got a worm which overwrote every copy of "index.html" with an infection notice, then which proceeded to scan for other hosts. It was the lion worm that got me.
Of course, it was my fault, for running an unpatched system. But I also have the perspective of the common user here: I did not know that a patch had been released
Fancy graphing calculators are of no use, whatsoever, for cheating in the classroom.
I just (yesterday) graduated high school, as the math/computer whiz of my class. I have an uber-cool TI-89, which has functions beyond my wildest imaginations. And, until I know the concepts, they are utterly useless.
My TI-89 has the ability to do symbolic manipulation. It will do differentiation for me. Guess what? Until I was taught, by doing it by hand, what differentiation actually was, I had no idea what the calculator function did. I gave it an equation, it spat out something pretty, and I oogled over it, but it meant nothing.
Yes, once I learned what and how differentiation worked, I could stop doing it by hand and use my calculator instead. Am I to be punished for efficient use of time? A TI-89 is a great many times faster than a pencil.
As I said above, though, I am the math whiz. I got my first TI calculator in 6th grade, and explored them in and out. Even I, until I was taught the concepts, never knew the hidden potentials. Consider, then, Joe Average.
No, I'm not just making this up. Everyone, everyone, in my math class aside from me, had no idea how to use the calculator. Face it, slashdot is a techie crowd, and we bond with computing devices. Joe Average presses the buttons he has memorized, and if it doesn't work, has no idea. Joe then does it with pencil and paper.
Joe Average doesn't give two shits about the calculator. Built in functionality? LOL. Functionality isn't functionality unless you know both that it is there, and how to use it. I am the only person I have ever met who actually reads the manuals for my calculators; Joe Average only finds out about its abilities from their math teacher. Their math teacher doesn't tell them until they've had how to do it, by hand, driven into their skull with a sledge hammer.
Teachers control the calculators, people. Teachers control them, through ignorance. The average student remains in the dark about what their calculator can do, because the thing is incomprehensible to them. Could your grandmother teach herself how to program PERL? Would she?
The only other source of information on calculator potential is other students, who are frankly just as ignorant as their peers. Even those who are in advanced classes do not understand what goes on, and do not share what they know. To understand a calculator is utterly dorky, trust me. To teach your friends is worse, because you must bang the methods into their skulls by rote, thus also banging by rote your new social status.
Calculators are no threat to educational mathematics, because the education system does not tell you how to use them until they are no longer an advantage. Those few that learn on their own already understand the concepts.
I'm going to admit that I like to see pornography of women (girls, you may call them) who are under the age of 18. Being 17 myself, is this unbelieveable? Is it wrong?
What if I were one year older? Fact is, teenage girls make me horny. Of course they do, too; It's in my genes. I'm willing to pay money to see a picture of someone I can plausibly imagine, for the purposes of masturbation, to be a minor. I would prefer it be a computer generated image, because I'm a sensitive human being, and I dislike the idea of anybody getting abused.
I don't dislike the idea of a 3D rendering machine.
The vast majority of people who are involved in what is called child pornography (rarely children; almost invariably 16 or older) are not about to go rape someone. We are reasonable humans, not some uncaring evil sex machines. If I like to get off on pictures of someone who's biology is younger than you like, why should you stop me, if nobody is harmed?
Like I said, we would like to use computer generated images. I find child abuse ghastly. I also find teenagers sexy.
Now, admittedly, there are wackos out there who run around fingering 3 year olds. I'm sorry, but they WILL do this, porn or no. Obsession, though, is not limited to pedophilia, or caused by it. Anybody unstable enough to be upset in the manner you describe is unstable enough to be upset by anything.
Should your picture of your kid making a sand castle at the beach be illegal, because Joe Shmoe jacks off to it? It must be helping child pornography, and Save The Children!
When people say they can't "hear themselves think," I don't know what to make of it. Does anyone else find that they don't think in any language?
Absolutely. My thoughts are not in language at all, but not in pictures either.
I am a math genious (not a spelling one ^_^), and also very much a philosopher of the mind. I recognize that my thought processes are extremely different from most people's, and so what I say may only apply to me, but it's still worth saying.
I think in [thought-symbols]. Not language. I have no "voice" in my head, unless I deliverately choose to, because expressing my thoughts in English is not only slower, but often near (or truly) impossible. What can be processed as a single [thought-symbol] in my mind can often take pages of text to express.
I suppose the best way to describe my thought processes is to compare them analogic to intuition. When people have an "intuition" about something, they just "know" the right answer, but can't express how or why in words. To a mind that has grown accustomed to thinking solely in words, this "intuition" thought-process is inexplicable and incomprehensible. For me, my thoughts are like an evolution of intuition. They aren't worded, or imaged, or sounded, or smelled or anything sensory. My thoughts are like a constant stream of pure intuition, as much as language is like a constant stream of grunting.
So yeah, hearing people say "I can't hear myself think" seems kinda silly to me, because it's largely inapplicable. [thought-symbols] are extremely efficient, and require very little brain-bandwidth, so my thoughts, while fast, are exceptional in their parallel-ness as well. By being massively parallel, outside distractions may be able to slow down my thoughts, but never fully disrupt them.
Eh, I suppose, in the name of on-topic-ness, I hereby disagree with the article. It was interesting, mind you, but drawing conclusions for "how people think" is pretty silly, when the only people who end up changing the world anything are the people who aren't the mean.
Slashdot Mirror
This strikes me as a huuuuuge breach of medical record confidentiality. Where exactly do they plan to legally get enough medical records to mine in the first place?
This is the most promising bit of cybernetics news I have seen in quite a while. I've been hoping that some day within my lifespan artificial senses could be used. Well, now it looks like they can. Maybe they make for low-resolution video, maybe they can be used for information readout. Yeah, it would look weird, but this can give you (for example) a read heads-up display that doesn't interfere with your vision. Or an interface for processing senses from remotely controlled robots. Imagine the fun business users would have being able to "read" their email while driving. The possibilities are endless.
You can't perform a man-in-the-middle attack with quantum crypto because the one-time-pads are exchanged in advance. You can't send an OTP with the message, you have to share it in a secure manner at some previous time. In the quantum crypto case, you would create and distribute the entangled particles ahead of time, then use the OTP to send a strong symmetric crypto key and encrypt your normal communication with that.
You can't intercept that one-time-pad key transmission because, if you did, you wouldn't be able to reproduce the OTP to re-encrypt your man-in-the-middle key to be sent to the other party. While quantum crypto doesn't prevent interference, it makes it impossible for the interference to not be noticed. That is its advantage.
I think you underestimate the age of Nirvanna fans. The current "younger" population considers Nirvanna irrelevant. (Which, by the way, I consider good, as I too hate it.)
Where can I learn more?
This is the sort of turnaround that everybody wishes monolithic corporations could make. Well, now AOL / Time Warner is making one. It's pretty easy to recognize that charging people for access to AOL's information services alone is not a viable business model. We constantly make fun of them for it, or at least I did. AOL for Broadband?
AOL's brand has started to really hurt lately. Ma and pa are beginning to dislike them, and so this is AOL doing the best move they can: Cut the crap, scale down the profit drive, and return to services. AOL is still a very valuable brand name, and it can still be salvaged for future use. If they immediately stop aggravating customers and do their best to play nice while Time Warner scales them down, the brand can once again have value.
We always blast away at companies for driving themselves into the ground by refusing to change. And yeah, AOL has been and still is a pretty dark beast in some spots. But despite this, AOL is doing the hardest thing a mega-corporation can do: admit their blunder, and try to change. In addition to mocking their shameful past, some positive, if exasperated, attention should be spent to note this move toward the right direction.
I have to post a disclaimer to ward off the astroturf melters, though. No, I am not an AOL employee. No, I do not own AOL stock. No, I have no personal or professional stake in AOL at all. Yes, I -am- thoroughly intoxicated.
May I quote this comment in signatures? Along the lines of:
"If I had a dollar for every 'iPod killer', I'd have enough money to buy a newer iPod."
--ptomblin
? I'll be happy to change the citation to your choosing if you let me.
You make a good point, but I think this sort of thing calls for some consideration of circumstances. I (personally) don't consider an animated gif to be a threat, or at the very least, not a threat worth punishing. I understand why the school would act as it did; the potential liability issues are serious. I just think that people need to take this particular instance with a grain of salt. Sending an animated gif with "Kill XYZ" to a hitman is different from setting it to your AIM icon, and I think it should be treated differently.
;)
I -do- have beef with the obsession over security, which caused this issue. I personally believe that danger is an inherent price of freedom, and if you don't pay with danger, you can't get the freedom. That's an entire different rant though.
Perhaps I'm just raging against the machine, or perhaps I'm an early twenties old fogie who sees his own past through rose tinted glasses. I can't discount either of those. However, it seems to me that one great sacrifice to the war on terror has been our sense of humor.
I see a lot of comments about how death threats are unacceptable. I see a lot of comments about how free speech is not designed to protect this. I see a lot of people who have obviously forgotten about high school.
To all the people who question this being a joke: Of COURSE it was a joke! Please don't tell me you haven't done pretty much the same thing. I don't like being lied to. This site is a gathering place for people who screw around on computers, and this "threat" is nothing more than a kid screwing around on a computer. Talk of this post columbine world is melodramatic adult scorn for youth culture, which has been through history, and still is, as constant a human behavior pattern as youth culture's intentionally offensive behavior toward scornful adults.
If I say "fuck you" to someone, does that mean I want them to be raped?
The whole point of the first amendment is to protect the speech that is distasteful, offensive, and disgusting. No other speech needs protecting.
I saw that wonderful 'Open Source Dress' and was imagining the possibilities of the general public adding and removing patches at will. Presumably it was eventually all Open-not-repetitive. Oh well.
...
he palace, came urgent trumpet calls, the heavy crunch of hundreds of feet, the clank of metal. It told the Procurator that the Roman infantry was marching out, on his orders, to the execution parade that was to strike terror into the hearts of all thieves and rebels 'Do you hear. Procurator? ' the High
On another note, I want some not_repetitive_mod points. No real reason, I don't need them. I sat here for a minute and tried to think of a way to get some, but all the standard stereotypical jokes have already been made. Then I realized that funny doesn't affect my karma.
Priest quietly repeated his words. ' Surely you are not trying to tell me that all this '-- here the High Priest raised both arms and his dark cowl slipped from his head--' can have been evoked by that miserable thief Bar-Abba?' With the back of his wrist the Procurator wiped his damp, cold forehead, stared at
Bummer. Obviously I need to be insightful, or at least pretend to be. I can do things like observe people observing that anything here can get mod points today and make fun of them for making fun of other people. Unless they do it to me. That would make them a gay pony.
the ground, then frowning skywards he saw that the incandescent ball was nearly overhead, that Caiaphas' shadow had shrunk to almost nothing and he said in a calm, expressionless voice : 'The execution will be at noon. We have enjoyed this conversation, but matters must proceed.' Excusing
See how clever I was? I made that wonderful quasi-insightful post and then put a surprise ending on it by referencing current events to make it funny also. But then if it's funny I don't get k-nonrepetitive. Dammit. At least I set it up so I qualify for both. I need a new angle here.
FUCK YOU MODS! +1 TROLL ALL THE WAY!
himself to the High Priest in a few artificial phrases, he invited him to sit down on a bench in the shade of a magnolia and to wait while he summoned the others necessary for the final short consultation ul q ipsp gp spqtn prpgqq pgplpsp i nt pnqsq f qqquu pqlq oqp ngrj s ns ps fsjnqnonrutsn pspfpqpu t pp lpop p pg tkulu j urumupu fufuutss hrnth rjro rjr ur qnlrp r krl sdjksdfsdfsdlgkj sdflkjsdf lksdjfsdfsdf
Hmm. Lameness filter encountered for too much repetition? Is that an invitation to write like the spam I've been getting recently? I'll be happy to copy and paste some nonsense sentences if that will help.
What the? This is soooo not repetitive.
Almost. What if standard out is a pipe that got closed? What if there's not enough memory to run the basic interpreter? What if it gets a kill signal from the kernel? What if it becomes a zombie process?
As you can see, even the simple 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" isn't bug free. To make bug free software you don't need to catch most errors, you need to catch every possible error.
I question the trust that slashdotters seem to have in this new story. Why should we believe it?
The general police forces have managed to get a new story published on how they can not deal with any sort of semi-modern technology. Why should we believe it?
If I were the police, and I'm sure the police have at least one or two people smarter than me. then I would go to great lengths to get this story published. Why? Not because I can't figure out Firfox, be because I -can- figure out Firefox.
If my suspect thinks that I am too dumb to understand Firfox, then my suspect is far less likely to use powerful encryption. Without the powerful encruption, I -can- read Firefoxes files, and a significant proportion of criminals will think they are safe when they are not.
Hell, I'm not even law enforcement but I still find it obvious how this story is a great advantage for the law enforcement community.
Yes, we DO want to talk about reputation lookup for IPs.
The hurricane is horrible, for sure. It is very tragic that so many people are losing so much. I would pray for them. However, slashdot is NOT the place to discuss a hurricane.
Slashdot is technology news, not general news. If you want to submit a story about the hurricane, and it gets posted, I would gladly "get some priorities" and discuss that instead. Until then, such a discussion is flagrantly off topic.
Just because there's a disaster doesn't mean the rest of the world stands still. Life goes on, and hopefully gets better.
News for Nerds is news for nerds, not news for the south.
Weren't the masses just complaining that Freenet was too anonymous? This is -exactly- what Freenet is for.
that you have an excellent sig. Ocaml rocks. :)
Back in my younger, experimentalist phase, I tried taking a lot of caffeine pills. I had 13, which is about 20 or 30 cups of coffee. It was an overdose.
For about an hour I had a huge, ever-increasing buzz. Then it became difficult to walk. Then I started to throw up. I was vomiting for about 10 hours straight.
Unless you want to go through the same hell that I did, lay off the massive coffee dose.
Of course, it was my fault, for running an unpatched system. But I also have the perspective of the common user here: I did not know that a patch had been released
Apple has done the amazing, once again: Somehow they made a geek toy sexy.
rm -rf ./-p
that should do the trick
1) Release open source software
2) Sell iMac which it runs on
3) PROFIT!
Actually, having one mouse button is a blessing.
And no, I'm not insane. It's not that the Apple mouse is missing buttons, but that the buttons it is missing are not needed.
It takes a few hours to get used to the Apple mouse, and the general layout of things. Once you do, though, it's joyous.
There's only one mouse button because you only need one mouse button to do things is OSX, and you can do pretty damn much anything you want.
It radically shifted my views on useability, interface design, etc, almost like an epiphany.
And yes, I am a big bad old shell user, perl hacker, Hacker Dude (TM), so I'm not just some unwashed heathen from the WinTel world.
got me a new AIM profile... Thanks for a hilarious translation!
Fancy graphing calculators are of no use, whatsoever, for cheating in the classroom.
I just (yesterday) graduated high school, as the math/computer whiz of my class. I have an uber-cool TI-89, which has functions beyond my wildest imaginations. And, until I know the concepts, they are utterly useless.
My TI-89 has the ability to do symbolic manipulation. It will do differentiation for me. Guess what? Until I was taught, by doing it by hand, what differentiation actually was, I had no idea what the calculator function did. I gave it an equation, it spat out something pretty, and I oogled over it, but it meant nothing.
Yes, once I learned what and how differentiation worked, I could stop doing it by hand and use my calculator instead. Am I to be punished for efficient use of time? A TI-89 is a great many times faster than a pencil.
As I said above, though, I am the math whiz. I got my first TI calculator in 6th grade, and explored them in and out. Even I, until I was taught the concepts, never knew the hidden potentials. Consider, then, Joe Average.
No, I'm not just making this up. Everyone, everyone, in my math class aside from me, had no idea how to use the calculator. Face it, slashdot is a techie crowd, and we bond with computing devices. Joe Average presses the buttons he has memorized, and if it doesn't work, has no idea. Joe then does it with pencil and paper.
Joe Average doesn't give two shits about the calculator. Built in functionality? LOL. Functionality isn't functionality unless you know both that it is there, and how to use it. I am the only person I have ever met who actually reads the manuals for my calculators; Joe Average only finds out about its abilities from their math teacher. Their math teacher doesn't tell them until they've had how to do it, by hand, driven into their skull with a sledge hammer.
Teachers control the calculators, people. Teachers control them, through ignorance. The average student remains in the dark about what their calculator can do, because the thing is incomprehensible to them. Could your grandmother teach herself how to program PERL? Would she?
The only other source of information on calculator potential is other students, who are frankly just as ignorant as their peers. Even those who are in advanced classes do not understand what goes on, and do not share what they know. To understand a calculator is utterly dorky, trust me. To teach your friends is worse, because you must bang the methods into their skulls by rote, thus also banging by rote your new social status.
Calculators are no threat to educational mathematics, because the education system does not tell you how to use them until they are no longer an advantage. Those few that learn on their own already understand the concepts.
For a fresh point of view...
I'm going to admit that I like to see pornography of women (girls, you may call them) who are under the age of 18. Being 17 myself, is this unbelieveable? Is it wrong?
What if I were one year older? Fact is, teenage girls make me horny. Of course they do, too; It's in my genes. I'm willing to pay money to see a picture of someone I can plausibly imagine, for the purposes of masturbation, to be a minor. I would prefer it be a computer generated image, because I'm a sensitive human being, and I dislike the idea of anybody getting abused.
I don't dislike the idea of a 3D rendering machine.
The vast majority of people who are involved in what is called child pornography (rarely children; almost invariably 16 or older) are not about to go rape someone. We are reasonable humans, not some uncaring evil sex machines. If I like to get off on pictures of someone who's biology is younger than you like, why should you stop me, if nobody is harmed?
Like I said, we would like to use computer generated images. I find child abuse ghastly. I also find teenagers sexy.
Now, admittedly, there are wackos out there who run around fingering 3 year olds. I'm sorry, but they WILL do this, porn or no. Obsession, though, is not limited to pedophilia, or caused by it. Anybody unstable enough to be upset in the manner you describe is unstable enough to be upset by anything.
Should your picture of your kid making a sand castle at the beach be illegal, because Joe Shmoe jacks off to it? It must be helping child pornography, and Save The Children!
Absolutely. My thoughts are not in language at all, but not in pictures either.
I am a math genious (not a spelling one ^_^), and also very much a philosopher of the mind. I recognize that my thought processes are extremely different from most people's, and so what I say may only apply to me, but it's still worth saying.
I think in [thought-symbols]. Not language. I have no "voice" in my head, unless I deliverately choose to, because expressing my thoughts in English is not only slower, but often near (or truly) impossible. What can be processed as a single [thought-symbol] in my mind can often take pages of text to express.
I suppose the best way to describe my thought processes is to compare them analogic to intuition. When people have an "intuition" about something, they just "know" the right answer, but can't express how or why in words. To a mind that has grown accustomed to thinking solely in words, this "intuition" thought-process is inexplicable and incomprehensible. For me, my thoughts are like an evolution of intuition. They aren't worded, or imaged, or sounded, or smelled or anything sensory. My thoughts are like a constant stream of pure intuition, as much as language is like a constant stream of grunting.
So yeah, hearing people say "I can't hear myself think" seems kinda silly to me, because it's largely inapplicable. [thought-symbols] are extremely efficient, and require very little brain-bandwidth, so my thoughts, while fast, are exceptional in their parallel-ness as well. By being massively parallel, outside distractions may be able to slow down my thoughts, but never fully disrupt them.
Eh, I suppose, in the name of on-topic-ness, I hereby disagree with the article. It was interesting, mind you, but drawing conclusions for "how people think" is pretty silly, when the only people who end up changing the world anything are the people who aren't the mean.