Why in the HELL are critical avionics control systems networked in such a way that they can be accessed remotely by radio? FFS, what were they thinking? They design systems that are hardened against direct lightning strikes, but leave them vulnerable to a remote hack using a device that's probably not much more than a small computer and a glorified walkie talkie connected together. WTF?
On an unrelated note, why is the page I'm typing this on a standalone text entry box without TFS available on it for reference? Is Slashdot Beta rearing its drooling imbecilic ugly head again?
Came here to say this. If Chrome is ever the only browser available, I'll simply do without the Web. Not only do I despise Google's antics, I'm one of the (apparently) small minority that thinks their browser utterly sucks and always has.
Legislate them into purging any such mapped relationships from their databases, legislate them to ban rebuilding those relationship maps.
It must be nice to live in a world where mega-corps actually comply with such legislation, and where we could rely on them to destroy the data they say they've purged instead of secretly backing it up to use when a more favourable legislative climate prevails. Where do I sign up?
Geolocated Wifi SSIDs, geolocated IPs and geolocated cell tower locations make location tracking peanuts for sufficiently large companies.
So make yourself the 'higher-hanging' fruit. I can't do anything about cell tower location data unless I render my phone useless for its primary purpose. But all those people who leave their cellular data and Wi-Fi turned on all the time, (when I use mine only briefly and infrequently as needed), are much easier to track, and give away more detailed data about their location.
As for Facebook, I don't have it on my rooted, firewalled phone. And I don't have an account - never have. I'm sure they have plenty of data about me - but I'm also sure they have a LOT less of mine than they have of most other people's.
Sure. Let's do that. You have never been in management, have you?
Let's say you have four workers. Let's say these employees work in the same department. Let's apply your idea. Here are the rules:
1) Any two employees will never do exactly the same job. You can' just fire the bad ones because then someone else needs to be trained to do that job.
2) Even if everyone is cross-trained to do everyone else's job employees will ALWAYS seek to specialized in order to invoke rule number 1.
3) If you manage to get everyone to document every aspect of their jobs so that everyone is performing the same way, then upper management will always seek to trim extra workers. If you as a manager have four workers doing the same thing AND those workers have vacation days that means you can operate with three workers. Need to justify keeping an employee? Invoke rule number 1.
4) It is in the best interest of every manager to expand his or her group and scope at every opportunity. If you have a $25k budget you need a $30k budget. If you have four workers you need six. You need a bigger budget and more people because... rule number 1.
As a manager, just keeping the budget and the people you have is a struggle. Firing a marginally underperforming worker constitutes insanity. Cross-training for efficiency is a form of suicide. Smart employees know this. Lazy employees know that the bare minimum they need to do is keep people from complaining to their boss's boss and they probably have a job for life.
While these were locked up so that only a very small number of people could see them, their value was effectively zero.
Archives only have value when they can be studied. Lock them away and they are useless.
Not to mention that if they hadn't been locked away, there likely would have been some digital copies of the material. It's truly a shame that the actual artifacts were lost, but the real crime is that the information they contained was also lost - especially when it could have been stored on a device that fits comfortably in one hand.
These virtual field trips are safer and easier to organize than real outings...
Sure! By all means let's insulate kids even more from the natural world, the realities of travel, the navigation of strange places, the social and psychological challenges of membership in large unruly groups, and the opportunity for casual exercise. Let's extend our micromanagement of their lives even farther, make their learning more targeted, and further decrease their independence and autonomy by ensuring that they acquire only approved knowledge in the approved fashion.
Fuck all that! Let kids get dirty and stressed and stretched in the REAL world so they'll have some confidence and imagination and self-direction in the absence of computers and 'superiors' telling them what to do and how to do it.
... find ways of mitigating it or allowing people to bring their laptops without causing an undue or excessive burden for travelers --- even if that means the laptop has to be packed in a special kind of hardened bag and pressurized with an inert gas at the luggage station.
Or, they could just reserve planes only for those carrying laptops, and those passengers sign a risk waiver. Any empty seats on those flights might be occupied by non-laptop-carriers who also sign a waiver. More administrative overhead to be sure, but I suspect there would be very few people who would refuse to take a flight with a cargo hold full of laptops if it meant getting to their destination sooner and/or cheaper.
This strikes me as a tempest in a teapot - either that, or there's some nefarious ulterior motive I haven't yet figured out. The whole thing smells so much like bullshit that at the very least it's spent a lot of time in close proximity to a whole herd of the beasts.
If you don't want me to watch it or listen to it, don't make it available on the wires coming into my house. Once it's on my premises, I consider it to be fair game for decoding, cracking, spoofing, or any other means of making use of the signal you freely gave me.
The slippery slope argument is obvious and, I think, valid. For a true escape I need to disengage from the Internet altogether. But then there are those cameras everywhere, and increasingly facial recognition is being used on the images they capture - time to start wearing a disguise and altering my gait. Etcetera, etcetera.
You can get along just fine without it.
There are LOTS of modern conveniences that we can give up - cars, telephones, toasters, electric drills... If your electric drill was spying on you and any drill you purchased did the same, would you go back to the old-fashioned way of drilling holes and driving screws?
Remember what it was like to enjoy things with all of your attention?
You too can really be *done* with work at 5pm, just like your boss.
Actually, I'm pretty much my own boss right now. As for 'all of my attention', the only time my phone compromises that is when I'm making or receiving a call or a text message. Unless I'm using my phone to look up something on the web, (rare), or using it to deal with email, (once a week at most), I have both mobile data and WiFi turned off.
Privacy is still a thing, you just have to want it.
That's like telling a slave that 'freedom is still a thing, you just have to want it'. Shouldn't HAVE to 'want' it - it should be a given unless and until you specifically give it away without being subjected to coercion or extortion.
Consumers have all of the power in the world to affect change... assuming they are sufficiently motivated to get off their assess and stop crying about something they have the power to change.
They only have that power if they organize and act in concert. Individual consumers - and even groups of them that aren't a significant percentage of the whole market - have essentially zero power.
Besides creating overlay networks on top of IP is trivially easy. You could for example run TOR on your mobile or find/create a VPN service you have some reason to trust.
It has never been easier for people all over the world to communicate privately.
That's true, but pretty much irrelevant to the current discussion. My carrier knows who I am, by definition - and he also knows where I am to at least a reasonable degree of accuracy, (even when I have data and WiFi turned off), via cell tower triangulation. When third party commercial entities have access to my location and my patterns of travel without my consent, that's a clear violation of privacy - and short of turning my cell phone off, there's nothing I can do about it.
Holy fuck Batman! I always knew in the back of my mind that kind of thing was possible, but didn't really think about it too hard. Hearing your stories makes the whole 'opt-in for 24/7 surveillance' thing WAY creepier than I've always felt it to be. Thanks for sharing - guess I won't jump on that social networking bandwagon any time soon.
We ARE the product, and short of bloody revolution there's SFA we can do about it. Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost, so I may as well get as much value as I can out of our corporate overlords in return for them raping my privacy.
Back before ATM's and the Internet, banks would run out of cash in times of unexpected demand. And in a disaster situation, people sure as hell aren't making bank deposits. The situation would have been a little better back then than it is now with 'electronic money', but probably not a lot. There still would have been a shortage of the means to exchange 'abstractions of value'.
Arguably, we COULD have it better today, with sufficient backup and redundancy - generators and batteries, radio data links, etc. - but haven't invested enough to make it happen. Then again, given a few massive EMP's, all bets are off.
All very valid points - especially the last one, and especially since I'm currently paying Bell for my Internet service. Guess it's time for me to get off my high horse now...
I'm glad you replied - we need more discussions like this, so people will be consciously aware of the choices they make and the impacts of those choices. If more people are more aware of the corporate dickery that goes on, maybe more of us will find ways to push back against it.
How is learning to code going to help a ditch digger?
Maybe 'Digger' has his or her sights set on some other occupation. Maybe s/he's part of the hacker community, and digging ditches is just how the bills currently get paid. Maybe it's just about broadening horizons and stretching the mind.
Pigeonholing people based on the jobs they hold is shortsighted and lacking in imagination.
No, you're effectively having a penalty withheld in return for accepting basic cable.
It's an important distinction, because what they're engaging in is basically a gentle form of extortion. You accept something you don't want and probably don't want to support, (the advertising ecosystem, which rewards your cableco with more dollars for more subscribers), in return for a lower price on the thing you DO support and want. (It's kind of like "ad impressions" on the Web - they're largely meaningless, but they help lubricate the greater Ponzi scheme that's in force).
Instead, I returned the cable box to save that rental fee.
Any bets on whether or not the stats on people like you are a secret closely guarded by your cable company?
Also, note that you ARE paying for your basic service. The payment is invisibly built into other markets, where prices are set higher in order to fund advertising. Your cable provider has oh-so-kindly given you a choice between paying, and paying twice. That's not the same as "not paying for basic service", and not even close to "being paid to have basic cable".
It's all a shell game - but then again, pretty much our whole economy is. BTW, it's a similar deal with almost all 'customer loyalty' programs. In return for surrendering your personal data, you supposedly 'pay less' by spending the fruits of your loyalty, i.e. 'rewards'. (Interesting word that - we reward children and dogs for doing what we want, in other words for submitting to manipulation). Those who submit, still pay - both in data and in higher prices to offset the 'discounts' - while people like me, who are more careful about our privacy, pay even more money to fund the discounts that others enjoy. Some people think I'm crazy or stupid. I still think I'm making the better, freer, more moral choice. I think if we ALL made that kind of choice and told corporate manipulators and sleight-of-hand artists to fuck off, the world would be a better place. YMMV, but it's something you might want to think about the next time you look at your 'internet' bill.
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
I don't think Obama broke any laws. He simply did his best to get an important and necessary job done, in the face of opposition from the reality-challenged knuckle-draggers who think that shouting bullshit loud enough and long enough turns it into truth. In this case, that meant getting creative with the legislative framework. I'm sure he would like to have put his initiative on a more solid footing; but his opposition cared more about tearing him down than about exercising actual leadership, so he had little choice.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
Ummm, that would be a follower you just described. POTUS is supposed to be a leader; you know, the person who sees what others don't yet see, and makes decisions, (even unpopular ones), based on logic, evidence, and science, for the long-term good of all concerned.
It's hard to turn notifications off and put the phone away, but people gotta start making the effort.
Advantages of being old, contrarian, and largely self-employed - I never turned notifications on in the first place. Unless it's a (fairly rare) phone call or an (even rarer) text message, I don't receive notifications. I collect and check email when I want to - none of that 'push' shit to put my attention under someone else's control. I don't do social media; but even if I did, I wouldn't receive notifications very often, because both data and WiFi are turned off until I explicitly require them to look something up or to check mail. I can see that it may be difficult to 'unplug' - but it sure as hell was easy to not plug in in the first place.
This often gets framed as a technological issue, but it's really a sociological and psychological one. People need to re-learn that their true self-worth isn't contingent on being available and attentive to everyone and his dog on a 24/7 basis. They also need to learn that somebody else's unavailability is simply that - it isn't rejection.
It would be nice if the consumers had higher expectations of companies like AOL and Facebook.
It would be nice if consumers hadn't been schooled and otherwise propagandized over the past hundred years or so into uncritical, knee-jerk acceptance of corporate philosophies, political power, and cultural dominance.
Now they can have AI's looking after the babies, leaving the parents free to clear the planet, make Miscavige richer, and be all-round better Elronner zombies.
I am a Thinkpad junkie. My personal laptop is a Thinkpad, and I use the trackpoint exclusively. I have the trackpad turned off. Annoys anyone else who tries to use it.
Amen brother! I'm typing this on a T420s. Dell has, (or had), some computers with trackpoints, but the buttons sucked. IBM / Lenovo seem to be the only ones who can do a trackpoint right. I've even done CAD, (schematics and PCB's), using a trackpoint. It's not as comfortable as using a mouse, but it's something I wouldn't even attempt on one of those annoying trackpads. Which, BTW, is turned off on my computer as well, because otherwise I get nuisance cursor movement when using the trackpoint. Thinkpads rock!
I lived across the street from a young girl - I'll call her 'Sandra' - who had grown into her mid-to-late teens when I moved away. She had been born without a corpus callosum, and her parents were warned that she would never be anything approaching normal, and might not even live.
Apparently her parents did something right, or she herself possessed some kind of will or magic that got her beyond the difficulty. Other people who had kids born with the same lack would ask Sandra's parents for advice and support. Sandra was always a bit quirky, and when she was younger I always had the sense that she wasn't quite normal, even before I knew her history. But she was sweet and funny, she made pretty much normal progress in school, and she grew into a lovely young woman who didn't wasn't out of place among her peers in any significant way.
So I'm not surprised at these new findings. The human brain seems to be very good at routing around damage in ways that we don't yet understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Why in the HELL are critical avionics control systems networked in such a way that they can be accessed remotely by radio? FFS, what were they thinking? They design systems that are hardened against direct lightning strikes, but leave them vulnerable to a remote hack using a device that's probably not much more than a small computer and a glorified walkie talkie connected together. WTF?
On an unrelated note, why is the page I'm typing this on a standalone text entry box without TFS available on it for reference? Is Slashdot Beta rearing its drooling imbecilic ugly head again?
Came here to say this. If Chrome is ever the only browser available, I'll simply do without the Web. Not only do I despise Google's antics, I'm one of the (apparently) small minority that thinks their browser utterly sucks and always has.
Legislate them into purging any such mapped relationships from their databases, legislate them to ban rebuilding those relationship maps.
It must be nice to live in a world where mega-corps actually comply with such legislation, and where we could rely on them to destroy the data they say they've purged instead of secretly backing it up to use when a more favourable legislative climate prevails. Where do I sign up?
Geolocated Wifi SSIDs, geolocated IPs and geolocated cell tower locations make location tracking peanuts for sufficiently large companies.
So make yourself the 'higher-hanging' fruit. I can't do anything about cell tower location data unless I render my phone useless for its primary purpose. But all those people who leave their cellular data and Wi-Fi turned on all the time, (when I use mine only briefly and infrequently as needed), are much easier to track, and give away more detailed data about their location.
As for Facebook, I don't have it on my rooted, firewalled phone. And I don't have an account - never have. I'm sure they have plenty of data about me - but I'm also sure they have a LOT less of mine than they have of most other people's.
Mod parent up!
Sure. Let's do that. You have never been in management, have you?
Let's say you have four workers. Let's say these employees work in the same department. Let's apply your idea. Here are the rules:
1) Any two employees will never do exactly the same job. You can' just fire the bad ones because then someone else needs to be trained to do that job. 2) Even if everyone is cross-trained to do everyone else's job employees will ALWAYS seek to specialized in order to invoke rule number 1. 3) If you manage to get everyone to document every aspect of their jobs so that everyone is performing the same way, then upper management will always seek to trim extra workers. If you as a manager have four workers doing the same thing AND those workers have vacation days that means you can operate with three workers. Need to justify keeping an employee? Invoke rule number 1. 4) It is in the best interest of every manager to expand his or her group and scope at every opportunity. If you have a $25k budget you need a $30k budget. If you have four workers you need six. You need a bigger budget and more people because... rule number 1.
As a manager, just keeping the budget and the people you have is a struggle. Firing a marginally underperforming worker constitutes insanity. Cross-training for efficiency is a form of suicide. Smart employees know this. Lazy employees know that the bare minimum they need to do is keep people from complaining to their boss's boss and they probably have a job for life.
While these were locked up so that only a very small number of people could see them, their value was effectively zero.
Archives only have value when they can be studied. Lock them away and they are useless.
Not to mention that if they hadn't been locked away, there likely would have been some digital copies of the material. It's truly a shame that the actual artifacts were lost, but the real crime is that the information they contained was also lost - especially when it could have been stored on a device that fits comfortably in one hand.
These virtual field trips are safer and easier to organize than real outings...
Sure! By all means let's insulate kids even more from the natural world, the realities of travel, the navigation of strange places, the social and psychological challenges of membership in large unruly groups, and the opportunity for casual exercise. Let's extend our micromanagement of their lives even farther, make their learning more targeted, and further decrease their independence and autonomy by ensuring that they acquire only approved knowledge in the approved fashion.
Fuck all that! Let kids get dirty and stressed and stretched in the REAL world so they'll have some confidence and imagination and self-direction in the absence of computers and 'superiors' telling them what to do and how to do it.
... find ways of mitigating it or allowing people to bring their laptops without causing an undue or excessive burden for travelers --- even if that means the laptop has to be packed in a special kind of hardened bag and pressurized with an inert gas at the luggage station.
Or, they could just reserve planes only for those carrying laptops, and those passengers sign a risk waiver. Any empty seats on those flights might be occupied by non-laptop-carriers who also sign a waiver. More administrative overhead to be sure, but I suspect there would be very few people who would refuse to take a flight with a cargo hold full of laptops if it meant getting to their destination sooner and/or cheaper.
This strikes me as a tempest in a teapot - either that, or there's some nefarious ulterior motive I haven't yet figured out. The whole thing smells so much like bullshit that at the very least it's spent a lot of time in close proximity to a whole herd of the beasts.
If you don't want me to watch it or listen to it, don't make it available on the wires coming into my house. Once it's on my premises, I consider it to be fair game for decoding, cracking, spoofing, or any other means of making use of the signal you freely gave me.
Can it be rooted? Can the baked-in spyware be shut down?
Escape is simple. Don't use a mobile phone.
The slippery slope argument is obvious and, I think, valid. For a true escape I need to disengage from the Internet altogether. But then there are those cameras everywhere, and increasingly facial recognition is being used on the images they capture - time to start wearing a disguise and altering my gait. Etcetera, etcetera.
You can get along just fine without it.
There are LOTS of modern conveniences that we can give up - cars, telephones, toasters, electric drills... If your electric drill was spying on you and any drill you purchased did the same, would you go back to the old-fashioned way of drilling holes and driving screws?
Remember what it was like to enjoy things with all of your attention?
You too can really be *done* with work at 5pm, just like your boss.
Actually, I'm pretty much my own boss right now. As for 'all of my attention', the only time my phone compromises that is when I'm making or receiving a call or a text message. Unless I'm using my phone to look up something on the web, (rare), or using it to deal with email, (once a week at most), I have both mobile data and WiFi turned off.
Privacy is still a thing, you just have to want it.
That's like telling a slave that 'freedom is still a thing, you just have to want it'. Shouldn't HAVE to 'want' it - it should be a given unless and until you specifically give it away without being subjected to coercion or extortion.
Consumers have all of the power in the world to affect change... assuming they are sufficiently motivated to get off their assess and stop crying about something they have the power to change.
They only have that power if they organize and act in concert. Individual consumers - and even groups of them that aren't a significant percentage of the whole market - have essentially zero power.
Besides creating overlay networks on top of IP is trivially easy. You could for example run TOR on your mobile or find/create a VPN service you have some reason to trust.
It has never been easier for people all over the world to communicate privately.
That's true, but pretty much irrelevant to the current discussion. My carrier knows who I am, by definition - and he also knows where I am to at least a reasonable degree of accuracy, (even when I have data and WiFi turned off), via cell tower triangulation. When third party commercial entities have access to my location and my patterns of travel without my consent, that's a clear violation of privacy - and short of turning my cell phone off, there's nothing I can do about it.
Holy fuck Batman! I always knew in the back of my mind that kind of thing was possible, but didn't really think about it too hard. Hearing your stories makes the whole 'opt-in for 24/7 surveillance' thing WAY creepier than I've always felt it to be. Thanks for sharing - guess I won't jump on that social networking bandwagon any time soon.
We ARE the product, and short of bloody revolution there's SFA we can do about it. Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost, so I may as well get as much value as I can out of our corporate overlords in return for them raping my privacy.
Back before ATM's and the Internet, banks would run out of cash in times of unexpected demand. And in a disaster situation, people sure as hell aren't making bank deposits. The situation would have been a little better back then than it is now with 'electronic money', but probably not a lot. There still would have been a shortage of the means to exchange 'abstractions of value'.
Arguably, we COULD have it better today, with sufficient backup and redundancy - generators and batteries, radio data links, etc. - but haven't invested enough to make it happen. Then again, given a few massive EMP's, all bets are off.
All very valid points - especially the last one, and especially since I'm currently paying Bell for my Internet service. Guess it's time for me to get off my high horse now...
I'm glad you replied - we need more discussions like this, so people will be consciously aware of the choices they make and the impacts of those choices. If more people are more aware of the corporate dickery that goes on, maybe more of us will find ways to push back against it.
How is learning to code going to help a ditch digger?
Maybe 'Digger' has his or her sights set on some other occupation. Maybe s/he's part of the hacker community, and digging ditches is just how the bills currently get paid. Maybe it's just about broadening horizons and stretching the mind.
Pigeonholing people based on the jobs they hold is shortsighted and lacking in imagination.
I'm effectively being paid to have basic cable.
No, you're effectively having a penalty withheld in return for accepting basic cable.
It's an important distinction, because what they're engaging in is basically a gentle form of extortion. You accept something you don't want and probably don't want to support, (the advertising ecosystem, which rewards your cableco with more dollars for more subscribers), in return for a lower price on the thing you DO support and want. (It's kind of like "ad impressions" on the Web - they're largely meaningless, but they help lubricate the greater Ponzi scheme that's in force).
Instead, I returned the cable box to save that rental fee.
Any bets on whether or not the stats on people like you are a secret closely guarded by your cable company?
Also, note that you ARE paying for your basic service. The payment is invisibly built into other markets, where prices are set higher in order to fund advertising. Your cable provider has oh-so-kindly given you a choice between paying, and paying twice. That's not the same as "not paying for basic service", and not even close to "being paid to have basic cable".
It's all a shell game - but then again, pretty much our whole economy is. BTW, it's a similar deal with almost all 'customer loyalty' programs. In return for surrendering your personal data, you supposedly 'pay less' by spending the fruits of your loyalty, i.e. 'rewards'. (Interesting word that - we reward children and dogs for doing what we want, in other words for submitting to manipulation). Those who submit, still pay - both in data and in higher prices to offset the 'discounts' - while people like me, who are more careful about our privacy, pay even more money to fund the discounts that others enjoy. Some people think I'm crazy or stupid. I still think I'm making the better, freer, more moral choice. I think if we ALL made that kind of choice and told corporate manipulators and sleight-of-hand artists to fuck off, the world would be a better place. YMMV, but it's something you might want to think about the next time you look at your 'internet' bill.
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
I don't think Obama broke any laws. He simply did his best to get an important and necessary job done, in the face of opposition from the reality-challenged knuckle-draggers who think that shouting bullshit loud enough and long enough turns it into truth. In this case, that meant getting creative with the legislative framework. I'm sure he would like to have put his initiative on a more solid footing; but his opposition cared more about tearing him down than about exercising actual leadership, so he had little choice.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
Ummm, that would be a follower you just described. POTUS is supposed to be a leader; you know, the person who sees what others don't yet see, and makes decisions, (even unpopular ones), based on logic, evidence, and science, for the long-term good of all concerned.
It's hard to turn notifications off and put the phone away, but people gotta start making the effort.
Advantages of being old, contrarian, and largely self-employed - I never turned notifications on in the first place. Unless it's a (fairly rare) phone call or an (even rarer) text message, I don't receive notifications. I collect and check email when I want to - none of that 'push' shit to put my attention under someone else's control. I don't do social media; but even if I did, I wouldn't receive notifications very often, because both data and WiFi are turned off until I explicitly require them to look something up or to check mail. I can see that it may be difficult to 'unplug' - but it sure as hell was easy to not plug in in the first place.
This often gets framed as a technological issue, but it's really a sociological and psychological one. People need to re-learn that their true self-worth isn't contingent on being available and attentive to everyone and his dog on a 24/7 basis. They also need to learn that somebody else's unavailability is simply that - it isn't rejection.
It would be nice if the consumers had higher expectations of companies like AOL and Facebook.
It would be nice if consumers hadn't been schooled and otherwise propagandized over the past hundred years or so into uncritical, knee-jerk acceptance of corporate philosophies, political power, and cultural dominance.
Now they can have AI's looking after the babies, leaving the parents free to clear the planet, make Miscavige richer, and be all-round better Elronner zombies.
I am a Thinkpad junkie. My personal laptop is a Thinkpad, and I use the trackpoint exclusively. I have the trackpad turned off. Annoys anyone else who tries to use it.
Amen brother! I'm typing this on a T420s. Dell has, (or had), some computers with trackpoints, but the buttons sucked. IBM / Lenovo seem to be the only ones who can do a trackpoint right. I've even done CAD, (schematics and PCB's), using a trackpoint. It's not as comfortable as using a mouse, but it's something I wouldn't even attempt on one of those annoying trackpads. Which, BTW, is turned off on my computer as well, because otherwise I get nuisance cursor movement when using the trackpoint. Thinkpads rock!
I lived across the street from a young girl - I'll call her 'Sandra' - who had grown into her mid-to-late teens when I moved away. She had been born without a corpus callosum, and her parents were warned that she would never be anything approaching normal, and might not even live.
Apparently her parents did something right, or she herself possessed some kind of will or magic that got her beyond the difficulty. Other people who had kids born with the same lack would ask Sandra's parents for advice and support. Sandra was always a bit quirky, and when she was younger I always had the sense that she wasn't quite normal, even before I knew her history. But she was sweet and funny, she made pretty much normal progress in school, and she grew into a lovely young woman who didn't wasn't out of place among her peers in any significant way.
So I'm not surprised at these new findings. The human brain seems to be very good at routing around damage in ways that we don't yet understand.
and not the electric chair instead.