Ok, here's the situation. In England, in the late 1980s, very few people believed in creationism. It was about 12%, as I said. About this time, the media was still primarily putting out British content and there was universal dislike for the pulp from overseas that we were getting fed. The only time the press paid any attention to Creationists and the religious right was to abuse them. (Spitting Image did this wonderfully, by the way.) The Archbishop of Cantebury referred to the religious right as the "happy clappy bunch", so even the religious in Britain were not impressed by them.
Over time, the situation has changed. Television and radio satire is at a tiny fraction of their old levels. The media is publishing American news (often cited from right-wing sources) pretty much as though it was local. Criticism and questioning is muted. Schools are borrowing ideas and sometimes staff from American religious colleges. Lack of questioning is becoming endemic. Universities are now funded along American lines, creating massive debts amongst students, and the Student Union is a mere shadow of its former self. British eccentrics are an endangered species. Billy Graham is almost as famous in England as he is in America. At the same time as this, belief in Creationism has skyrocketted. It is impossible to see this as anything other than a take-over by the Bible Belt.
...the numbers in the UK have risen from 12% to 33%, in large part because of American fundamentalism. The numbers do fall, fortunately, as education improves. Nonetheless, the British are deeply concerned that they will simply run out of skilled scientists as a result of a lack of understanding of how data should be collected, analyzed and scrutinized.
Because nothing is perfect for all places and all times. Apes were better suited to their conditions, humans better in theirs. There are still fish in the sea because they are far better swimmers than tortoises. There are still non-flowering trees because they are vastly superior survivors of forest fires.
However, apes are less mobile and are therefore do poorly on savannahs - where humans first appeared. They can't swim, so are less able to spread than the more versatile beings who split from them.
Tortoises exist because fish are really poor at climbing around on land. There are flowering trees because there are plenty of wooded areas where fires are improbable to non-existant.
Evolution is not a replacement scheme, it is a code fork where the fork is optimal for different conditions.
No, I'm referring to this story, which appears to be dated to yesterday - assuming the "monday" talked of was this week's monday. Your link is 6 years older - the date was 2000 - and looks like a completely different study.
I would say that the British - as a whole - are more tolerent of moderate intrusion as the price paid for maintaining a highly inclusive society, but are vastly more hostile to excesses. Some of the protests in the past in England would not - and could not - have occurred in almost any other country.
This works for and against the British. Politicians, knowing that they will receive leniency, are more inclined to abuse power. So there's a vast amount of low-grade abuse. But actual high-grade in-your-face abuse is less common than, say, in America. It happens, but it's not quite as frequent and politicians are less likely to escape the consequences.
That the Lords are beginning to wake up to what is happening is interesting and significant. The Lords, for those not familiar with the British system, have no right to vote for politicians and cannot create bills. However, they CAN veto bills and a select group of Lords (the Law Lords) CAN overturn laws during trials. (Lords are neither elected nor are they capable of electing. As a result, they tend to be politically independent - there isn't much anyone can do to manipulate, control or blackmail them. There's no lever. They do stupid things, sometimes, but they're a superb stabilizing and rationalizing force.)
Because the Lords have a lot of power that politicians cannot control, political parties are forever trying to change the law to control the second house, and/or try to pollute the house by nominating wealthy supporters for lordships. It has undermined the benefits of having an independent group, but not yet completely.
Lords also tend to have a lot of influence in whatever region they are the Lord of - they often, but not always, have money, status and an excellent understanding of theatrics and the media. This doesn't mean they'll always get listened to, but it DOES mean they'll get listened to more than the average person and it DOES mean they tend to be more aware of public sentiment than most MPs.
In recent studies of deuterium in the galaxy, they're finding less than 1/25th of what they're expecting, and almost entirely in the wrong places. They therefore conclude that there must be MORE than what they expect, but in a place/form that is invisible.
Will Hannibal Lector please stop eating the brains of astrophysicists.
Octave is an Open Source program for maths and mathematical graphics. It is comparable to Matlab or Mathematica. It has been out for almost two decades. I wouldn't be surprised if early versions were scrawled on the walls of caves by stone-age cultures. As a result, it has a very strong following, albeit of mathematicians in strange flowing robes. The programming language is a mix of C, LISP and medieval Latin. Having said that, it is very, very good.
Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.
Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).
There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.
He actually managed to get his post to fit into ALL SIX categories. (It's an early post, it's long and only seems to say anything useful, he's showing off his low user ID, etc.)
This proves, however, that the categories are bitmasks and not discrete values.
Berkeley MP or Gnu MP arbritary-length floating-point
Co-processors with truly massive internal registers (I refuse to use less than 80-bit)
Delayed calculation (ie: actually process a calculation at the end, storing the inputs and operators until you absolutely need the value - eliminates intermediate rounding errors and if the value is never needed, you don't waste the clock cycles)
Don't use real numbers - apply a scaler or a transform such that ALL components of any scaled/transformed calculations must be integer, then only transform back for display purposes
The use of transforms for handling numerical calculations is an old trick. It is probably best-known in its use as a very quick way to multiply or divide using logarithms and a slide-rule, prior to the advent of widely-available scientific calculators and computers. Nonetheless, devices based on logarithmic calculations (such as the mechanical CURTA calculator) can wipe the floor with most floating-point maths units - this despite the fact that the CURTA dates back to the mid 1940s.
Hey, the Osbourne was number 8 on my list.:) But, yeah, I missed the other ones you mentioned and a few more. Fortunately, I only got to number 15, so have 10 more to go...
DEC Rainbow (for all the reasons mentioned)
The Hyperion (for all the reasons mentioned)
The UK-101 (it was a truly cool kit system)
Sirius PC (variable-speed drives for higher density, useless but cool)
Jupiter ACE (Forth-based home PC)
Atari ST (First PC with MIDI as standard)
Dragon MSX (First attempt at portable binaries)
Research Machines Nimbus PC (Lots of innovativations, such as decentralized architecture)
Texas Instruments TI-99 (Introduced speech synthesis to home computers)
KIM-1 (A major stepping-stone in hobbyist 6502-based PCs)
...I bet that no matter how much people disagree with my personal picks, more people will at least comprehend why I picked them, unlike the original article's list!
Ok, I have to admit the Apple II was cool for its time. If you plugged in enough cards, it could even fry an egg on the back of the case.
The Commodore PET 3032 was at least as impressive, and even came with bullet-proof steel armour plating.
The ZX-81 was powerful enough to be used in robotics and was one of the smallest computers ever built.
Commodore's Amiga had one of the most amazing colour graphics systems of the time. It even had some support for parallel processing, as you could plug in additional processors in the back.
The BBC Micro Model B had far more sophisticated I/O than any machine of its age (and is rarely equalled to this day) and supported both multiple processors and parallel memory banks in upper memory. Some of the earliest LAN party games were developed for this machine.
Acorn's Archimedes wasn't spectacular, but had a damn good pre-emptive OS and was a very solid machine. Oh, and it also introduced programmers to the notion of RISC, which sparked a revolution in computer design.
The Viglen 386 machines had some cool memory management - unlike most machines of that time, you could use both the mainboard and the extra memory at the same time, so you had an extra megabyte to play with.
Who can forget the Osbourne 1? The machine itself wan't amazing, but DID introduce the concept of mobile computers to the public, which revolutionized how people looked at machines. Greatness can come from altering perceptions.
Many machines could be used for multiple tasks, but the All-In-One was the first to really the first to get it through to people that this was a practical way to use them.
The Apple Macintosh was the machine that truly introduced the world to GUIs, hypertext (hypercard) and action-based (as opposed to command-based) computing.
The Simon, however, has all of the above beat. Designed and mass-marketed in the 1950s, it was the earliest PC ever built - LOOONG before the Altair and long before even the microprocessor.
The Apple G5 was the first well-known 64-bit personal computers (a market AMD and Intel are only now dabbling in)
The Transputer was arguably an entire 32-bit PC on a single chip, when most computers were still 8-bit or 16-bit at best, with support for infinitely scalable parallel processing. In terms of design, it was utterly revolutionary. In terms of its impact on parallel programming, it was phenominal. In terms of Inmos' ability to sell them, it was the greatest disaster to have ever walked the Earth. Mind you, Thorn EMI (who owned Inmos, and were mostly into selling records and music equiptment) didn't help matters.
The AMULET is another system-on-a-chip, but is also totally asynchronous - an amazing achievement for a modern CPU, never mind a SoC. A variant, called the OCCULET (which runs Occam) is freely downloadable.
Gateway PCs. The design was crap, the reliability was questionable, the cowprint was sad, but it seriously kicked ass on price for a long time. Mind you, at one point they used convicts to build them. Gateway's contribution was to kill the overinflated prices and overinflated egos. That was an impressive achievement by any standard.
...Inaccurate and incomplete 3rd grade science!:) Meteors can be particles of just about anything, and given that these are from the debris trail of a comet (Swift-Tuttle), they very probably are. It should also be noted that the distinction between meteors and meteorites is one of particle size, not composition, and since this is 3rd grade science it should be added that meteors are the smaller of the two.
As noted, there is a full moon for this year's storm, so there's not a whole lot to see. Since the comet takes 150 years to complete an orbit, it would also seem to follow that there must be less debris in successive years until the comet sweeps by again, so you've missed all the really good showers until 2126 anyway. (Those with 500 year diaries may want to make a note of the date.)
Though I wouldn't entirely agree with your assessment that generalists can't achieve much, or that specialists have greater insights. I find that being a generalist is what gives me the great clarity and insight I do have, as I look at any problem from so many different angles.
I do agree that there are exceptions. I would also also that generalists who do have great clarity and insight tend to do so precisely because they can see the problem from many angles. The ancient Greeks were particularly noted for following this approach, mixing arts, philosophy and science to amazing effect. Later on, the technique became popular again, producing the astonishing works of Leonardo Da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton. In more modern times, Von Neumann and Alan Turing used the same process to turn biology, mathematics and electronics into an entirely new and revolutionary field - computing.
So, whilst I have my doubts that you will find many new brain surgery techniques being developed by generalists (although I'm sure it has happened* and will happen again), generalists have contributed an astonishingly high number of pioneers, innovators and inspired geniuses in virtually every field in existance.
*There is plenty of evidence of neolithic brain surgery, and no evidence whatsoever of specialist medical schools of that period. It would therefore seem more likely than not that the techniques practiced were developed by generalists. So at least one brain surgery technique in history was not developed by specialists. The survival rate seems to have been very respectable, too.
I can say with some confidence, then, that you are in most excellent company. I would hazard to guess, though, that although where such an approach works, it works in ways that are truly amazing, that it would not work nearly so well for a lot of people, and that in the typical case, specialists will progress further in a narrow field than a generalist will over a wide range of fields.
(I'll add one escape clause, though: a lot of modern education is based on specialties, and a lot of modern education really sucks. It is entirely possible that modern education produces an illusion of specialists progressing further, where a more "classical" educational system might actually produce a greater number of generalists who could beat the pants off any specialist the modern system can produce.)
Which vendors are doing more to improve their security?
Well, I can say for certain that Microsoft are doing more than Gemini is doing for GEMSOS. But that's only because GEMSOS has been proven free of security flaws, so there's really not much to improve.
(Neither is NASA's tape problem, but that's another issue.)
Here, the cure is the same as the malady it is supposed to be curing. Yeah, yeah, I know, sometimes you have to do things you don't like, but that's really not the issue. The issue is not whether X, Y or Z is necessary, the issue is whether X, Y or Z is substantially different from what they are remedies for.
If you wage a war to prevent a war, you still have a war. The war you attempted to prevent may now not take place, but since it has been substituted for something that is essentially identical, that isn't much of an achievement.
The biggest problem is when you don't, in fact, prevent whatever it is - or even causes it when it would probably never have occured on its own. Then everyone gets to suffer twice, quite needlessly. See World Wars I and II for details.
The current instability in Russia, and quite possibly the two Chechen wars as well, are likely a byproduct of Western countries depriving Gorbechev of the aid he needed to stabilize things after Glastnost. Ronald Reagan and George Bush I denied that aid on political grounds. True, we'll never know what would have happened if a concerted effort had been made at that time to bring Russia to a healthier economic condition. Things might have ended up worse. However, by waging a political war to prevent that "might be", conditions deteriorated to the point where actual wars were fought and actual people died.
If we look at the current instabilities, it is in populations that have been neglected, where poverty is high, life expectency is low, purpose and meaning are seldom to be found. It would seem obvious to me that smashing property and killing wildly is not going to improve things in such a climate, but this has been the typical response. As responses go, it is flat-out guaranteed to be counter-productive.
There's an interesting article in The Guardian (sorry, Teh Grauniad) newspaper where an anti-terror expert claims that 95% of terrorists are acting on secular or political grievances. (Notice the word "grievance". It's important.) The implication of the Palestinian situation, the Russian situation and the Middle East situation is obvious - if we created a tolerable society where we can, and avoided creating an intolerable one otherwise, 95% of the problem would go away on its own, leaving a paltry 5% for the super-paranoid police and intelligence organizations to fret over.
(I'm not sure I would trust them with much more than 1/20th of their current workload, anyway.)
The obvious answer would be for Microsoft to define a well-known API for security software, where the entry-point for that set of functions is damn-near impervious. (A simple example - require that all software using such an API be digitally signed by a trusted vendor and counter-signed by the registered owner of the software. In a corporate setting, this would mean that patches would need to be signed off on by the IT department. In the home setting, users would have to specifically state that they approve that level of access for the software.)
Certificates of trust already exist in Windows. They're used by web browsers. It would be trivial to use the code that is already present to check for a valid certificate. The second layer of protection - requiring the user/IT department to countersign the patch - would make transparent breakins much harder. Not impossible, but definitely much harder.
Of course, this is all pointless these days, anyway. All a rootkit writer has to do is develop a mini hypervisor or hijack one already in use. For zombies, viruses, etc, you'd then have the externally-visible interfaces in the OS and everything else concealed outside. BIOS viruses could also be quite lethal, as they too would bypass this protection. Far too low a level for the OS to detect. These days, with graphics processors essentially being parallel CPUs, I'm surprised nobody has put a virus on the graphics card. If the PCI is multi-mastered (not uncommon on higher-end machines), then the card could control all the other devices without going through the OS at all, giving a virus that could inhabit that space ABSOLUTE power over the machine.
Seriously, dead is about the only real stopping point. I like to use the logic of following a recipe. If you can learn new recipies, then you are learning new logical flows and new structures to obtain a new result. If you can do that, then you can learn new logical flows and new structures in any field that your mind is suited for to obtain a new result. In the end, learning is learning, application is application. If you can do both, you can do both.
I limit the above to what your mind is suited for for a reason. Not everyone has a mind that handles abstracts well. Not everyone has a mind that can produce chains of logical deductions at the drop of a hat. Not everyone has a hat. This does not mean such people are incapable of doing what is difficult for them. People overcome such difficulties all the time, although it takes effort. Sometimes, however, it does take more effort than can be put in and then it really is impossible for that person. The only case that can be proved as learnable at any time is the effortless case, because then you can provably always put in more effort than needed.
There is a sort-of exception - transferrable skills. Where a skill is valid in multiple fields, you do not need to learn it again if switching between those fields. In some cases, two fields that are distinguished by society are, at a more fundamental level, the same. By understanding one such field and the mappings between that and what you wish to switch to, you automatically know the target field - at least to the degree that they overlap. You can, in the extreme case of having 100% overlap, switch freely between ALL fields that overlap in such a way, even if you have not formally learned the others.
(Mathematically speaking, this is saying that if set A maps onto set B in a 1:1 relationship, AND that you know both set A and the mapping function, you can derive set B. You do not need to be told it as a distinct thing.)
Switching to a new subject that (a) fits in your mind, given the way your particular brain is laid out, and (b) has enough overlap that you can transfer skills and knowledge, will always be something a person can do. It's often worth doing, in fact, to keep the mind flexible and alert. A lot of modern research suggests that a bored brain is far more likely to deteriorate than an active one.
Switching to a new subject that (a) your brain is ill-suited to, and (b) has no connection with anything you've already done, learned, discovered or practiced, will always be extremely hard and tiring, and may be too hard and too tiring to be achieved.
Those with a strong breadth of knowledge (eg: classical education) are more likely to be able to transfer skills than those with a strong specialist knowledge. Generalists (people who know a fair amount about a lot of things) may not be able to always do as much, but will have a far better selection of skills they can choose from to transfer over. Specialists (people who know everything about nothing) will have very few transferrable skills and no real idea on how to transfer those things that could be.
There is an ideal point, however. Overgeneralizing means a person knows next to nothing about absolutely everything, which is absolutely useless.
As a person gets older, their mind is not so maleable. It's harder to learn new things. If many of your skills transfer, that's not a problem, as you never need to learn anything new, you merely apply what you already know in new ways, which is a whole different thing. This means generalists are valuable for their entire life, as they can set their mind to anything. However, they probably won't discover anything new, or do anything radical, as they won't have the in-depth perceptions necessary to gain the insights required for revolutionary thinking. As such, generalizing can be very boring.
Specialists focus on a much narrower range of things, have far greater insights,
Slashdot Mirror
If it can't outrace the tortoise, it's doomed, and the tortoise will use quantum physics to cheat.
Ok, here's the situation. In England, in the late 1980s, very few people believed in creationism. It was about 12%, as I said. About this time, the media was still primarily putting out British content and there was universal dislike for the pulp from overseas that we were getting fed. The only time the press paid any attention to Creationists and the religious right was to abuse them. (Spitting Image did this wonderfully, by the way.) The Archbishop of Cantebury referred to the religious right as the "happy clappy bunch", so even the religious in Britain were not impressed by them.
Over time, the situation has changed. Television and radio satire is at a tiny fraction of their old levels. The media is publishing American news (often cited from right-wing sources) pretty much as though it was local. Criticism and questioning is muted. Schools are borrowing ideas and sometimes staff from American religious colleges. Lack of questioning is becoming endemic. Universities are now funded along American lines, creating massive debts amongst students, and the Student Union is a mere shadow of its former self. British eccentrics are an endangered species. Billy Graham is almost as famous in England as he is in America. At the same time as this, belief in Creationism has skyrocketted. It is impossible to see this as anything other than a take-over by the Bible Belt.
...is Buddhism, that claims that reality is merely a construct built from logic.
...the numbers in the UK have risen from 12% to 33%, in large part because of American fundamentalism. The numbers do fall, fortunately, as education improves. Nonetheless, the British are deeply concerned that they will simply run out of skilled scientists as a result of a lack of understanding of how data should be collected, analyzed and scrutinized.
However, apes are less mobile and are therefore do poorly on savannahs - where humans first appeared. They can't swim, so are less able to spread than the more versatile beings who split from them.
Tortoises exist because fish are really poor at climbing around on land. There are flowering trees because there are plenty of wooded areas where fires are improbable to non-existant.
Evolution is not a replacement scheme, it is a code fork where the fork is optimal for different conditions.
No, I'm referring to this story, which appears to be dated to yesterday - assuming the "monday" talked of was this week's monday. Your link is 6 years older - the date was 2000 - and looks like a completely different study.
Don't blame me, I merely read this stuff. :)
This works for and against the British. Politicians, knowing that they will receive leniency, are more inclined to abuse power. So there's a vast amount of low-grade abuse. But actual high-grade in-your-face abuse is less common than, say, in America. It happens, but it's not quite as frequent and politicians are less likely to escape the consequences.
That the Lords are beginning to wake up to what is happening is interesting and significant. The Lords, for those not familiar with the British system, have no right to vote for politicians and cannot create bills. However, they CAN veto bills and a select group of Lords (the Law Lords) CAN overturn laws during trials. (Lords are neither elected nor are they capable of electing. As a result, they tend to be politically independent - there isn't much anyone can do to manipulate, control or blackmail them. There's no lever. They do stupid things, sometimes, but they're a superb stabilizing and rationalizing force.)
Because the Lords have a lot of power that politicians cannot control, political parties are forever trying to change the law to control the second house, and/or try to pollute the house by nominating wealthy supporters for lordships. It has undermined the benefits of having an independent group, but not yet completely.
Lords also tend to have a lot of influence in whatever region they are the Lord of - they often, but not always, have money, status and an excellent understanding of theatrics and the media. This doesn't mean they'll always get listened to, but it DOES mean they'll get listened to more than the average person and it DOES mean they tend to be more aware of public sentiment than most MPs.
Will Hannibal Lector please stop eating the brains of astrophysicists.
...but she told me I was being silly and to stop looking over her whiskers when she's writing code for IPv8.
But when it melts server after server, it is surely changing insurance quotes
I am going to create a search engine called glappershnoodlifrica, which will index only projects with utterly stupid names.
Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.
Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).
There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.
I feel sorry for the guys who develop a search engine capable of answering such a search string correctly.
This proves, however, that the categories are bitmasks and not discrete values.
The use of transforms for handling numerical calculations is an old trick. It is probably best-known in its use as a very quick way to multiply or divide using logarithms and a slide-rule, prior to the advent of widely-available scientific calculators and computers. Nonetheless, devices based on logarithmic calculations (such as the mechanical CURTA calculator) can wipe the floor with most floating-point maths units - this despite the fact that the CURTA dates back to the mid 1940s.
As noted, there is a full moon for this year's storm, so there's not a whole lot to see. Since the comet takes 150 years to complete an orbit, it would also seem to follow that there must be less debris in successive years until the comet sweeps by again, so you've missed all the really good showers until 2126 anyway. (Those with 500 year diaries may want to make a note of the date.)
I do agree that there are exceptions. I would also also that generalists who do have great clarity and insight tend to do so precisely because they can see the problem from many angles. The ancient Greeks were particularly noted for following this approach, mixing arts, philosophy and science to amazing effect. Later on, the technique became popular again, producing the astonishing works of Leonardo Da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton. In more modern times, Von Neumann and Alan Turing used the same process to turn biology, mathematics and electronics into an entirely new and revolutionary field - computing.
So, whilst I have my doubts that you will find many new brain surgery techniques being developed by generalists (although I'm sure it has happened* and will happen again), generalists have contributed an astonishingly high number of pioneers, innovators and inspired geniuses in virtually every field in existance.
*There is plenty of evidence of neolithic brain surgery, and no evidence whatsoever of specialist medical schools of that period. It would therefore seem more likely than not that the techniques practiced were developed by generalists. So at least one brain surgery technique in history was not developed by specialists. The survival rate seems to have been very respectable, too.
I can say with some confidence, then, that you are in most excellent company. I would hazard to guess, though, that although where such an approach works, it works in ways that are truly amazing, that it would not work nearly so well for a lot of people, and that in the typical case, specialists will progress further in a narrow field than a generalist will over a wide range of fields.
(I'll add one escape clause, though: a lot of modern education is based on specialties, and a lot of modern education really sucks. It is entirely possible that modern education produces an illusion of specialists progressing further, where a more "classical" educational system might actually produce a greater number of generalists who could beat the pants off any specialist the modern system can produce.)
Well, I can say for certain that Microsoft are doing more than Gemini is doing for GEMSOS. But that's only because GEMSOS has been proven free of security flaws, so there's really not much to improve.
At the very least, they should be using Port 465 (SMTP over SSL/TLS). It's no wonder they feel insecure, using plain-test. Honestly!
Here, the cure is the same as the malady it is supposed to be curing. Yeah, yeah, I know, sometimes you have to do things you don't like, but that's really not the issue. The issue is not whether X, Y or Z is necessary, the issue is whether X, Y or Z is substantially different from what they are remedies for.
If you wage a war to prevent a war, you still have a war. The war you attempted to prevent may now not take place, but since it has been substituted for something that is essentially identical, that isn't much of an achievement.
The biggest problem is when you don't, in fact, prevent whatever it is - or even causes it when it would probably never have occured on its own. Then everyone gets to suffer twice, quite needlessly. See World Wars I and II for details.
The current instability in Russia, and quite possibly the two Chechen wars as well, are likely a byproduct of Western countries depriving Gorbechev of the aid he needed to stabilize things after Glastnost. Ronald Reagan and George Bush I denied that aid on political grounds. True, we'll never know what would have happened if a concerted effort had been made at that time to bring Russia to a healthier economic condition. Things might have ended up worse. However, by waging a political war to prevent that "might be", conditions deteriorated to the point where actual wars were fought and actual people died.
If we look at the current instabilities, it is in populations that have been neglected, where poverty is high, life expectency is low, purpose and meaning are seldom to be found. It would seem obvious to me that smashing property and killing wildly is not going to improve things in such a climate, but this has been the typical response. As responses go, it is flat-out guaranteed to be counter-productive.
There's an interesting article in The Guardian (sorry, Teh Grauniad) newspaper where an anti-terror expert claims that 95% of terrorists are acting on secular or political grievances. (Notice the word "grievance". It's important.) The implication of the Palestinian situation, the Russian situation and the Middle East situation is obvious - if we created a tolerable society where we can, and avoided creating an intolerable one otherwise, 95% of the problem would go away on its own, leaving a paltry 5% for the super-paranoid police and intelligence organizations to fret over.
(I'm not sure I would trust them with much more than 1/20th of their current workload, anyway.)
Certificates of trust already exist in Windows. They're used by web browsers. It would be trivial to use the code that is already present to check for a valid certificate. The second layer of protection - requiring the user/IT department to countersign the patch - would make transparent breakins much harder. Not impossible, but definitely much harder.
Of course, this is all pointless these days, anyway. All a rootkit writer has to do is develop a mini hypervisor or hijack one already in use. For zombies, viruses, etc, you'd then have the externally-visible interfaces in the OS and everything else concealed outside. BIOS viruses could also be quite lethal, as they too would bypass this protection. Far too low a level for the OS to detect. These days, with graphics processors essentially being parallel CPUs, I'm surprised nobody has put a virus on the graphics card. If the PCI is multi-mastered (not uncommon on higher-end machines), then the card could control all the other devices without going through the OS at all, giving a virus that could inhabit that space ABSOLUTE power over the machine.
Seriously, dead is about the only real stopping point. I like to use the logic of following a recipe. If you can learn new recipies, then you are learning new logical flows and new structures to obtain a new result. If you can do that, then you can learn new logical flows and new structures in any field that your mind is suited for to obtain a new result. In the end, learning is learning, application is application. If you can do both, you can do both.
I limit the above to what your mind is suited for for a reason. Not everyone has a mind that handles abstracts well. Not everyone has a mind that can produce chains of logical deductions at the drop of a hat. Not everyone has a hat. This does not mean such people are incapable of doing what is difficult for them. People overcome such difficulties all the time, although it takes effort. Sometimes, however, it does take more effort than can be put in and then it really is impossible for that person. The only case that can be proved as learnable at any time is the effortless case, because then you can provably always put in more effort than needed.
There is a sort-of exception - transferrable skills. Where a skill is valid in multiple fields, you do not need to learn it again if switching between those fields. In some cases, two fields that are distinguished by society are, at a more fundamental level, the same. By understanding one such field and the mappings between that and what you wish to switch to, you automatically know the target field - at least to the degree that they overlap. You can, in the extreme case of having 100% overlap, switch freely between ALL fields that overlap in such a way, even if you have not formally learned the others.
(Mathematically speaking, this is saying that if set A maps onto set B in a 1:1 relationship, AND that you know both set A and the mapping function, you can derive set B. You do not need to be told it as a distinct thing.)
Switching to a new subject that (a) fits in your mind, given the way your particular brain is laid out, and (b) has enough overlap that you can transfer skills and knowledge, will always be something a person can do. It's often worth doing, in fact, to keep the mind flexible and alert. A lot of modern research suggests that a bored brain is far more likely to deteriorate than an active one.
Switching to a new subject that (a) your brain is ill-suited to, and (b) has no connection with anything you've already done, learned, discovered or practiced, will always be extremely hard and tiring, and may be too hard and too tiring to be achieved.
Those with a strong breadth of knowledge (eg: classical education) are more likely to be able to transfer skills than those with a strong specialist knowledge. Generalists (people who know a fair amount about a lot of things) may not be able to always do as much, but will have a far better selection of skills they can choose from to transfer over. Specialists (people who know everything about nothing) will have very few transferrable skills and no real idea on how to transfer those things that could be.
There is an ideal point, however. Overgeneralizing means a person knows next to nothing about absolutely everything, which is absolutely useless.
As a person gets older, their mind is not so maleable. It's harder to learn new things. If many of your skills transfer, that's not a problem, as you never need to learn anything new, you merely apply what you already know in new ways, which is a whole different thing. This means generalists are valuable for their entire life, as they can set their mind to anything. However, they probably won't discover anything new, or do anything radical, as they won't have the in-depth perceptions necessary to gain the insights required for revolutionary thinking. As such, generalizing can be very boring.
Specialists focus on a much narrower range of things, have far greater insights,