While this may mean nothing to your argument (which I don't understand), it mischaracterizes Einstein's work to say he "makes some new observations." Einstein's key work was based on thought experiments - on visualizations - not observations. These led him to postulate a symmetry, an invariance in the speed of light. He was in a long tradition in both math and physics of exploring an intuition of symmetry, and then finding real-world evidence to fit after, not before, working out a system based on that intuition.
Good popular books on this are Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth and A. Zee's classic Fearful Symmetry, giving the accounts from math and physics respectively.
The story largely goes: if you invent a symmetrical system - even just the abstract mathematics of one - sooner or later there's a high likelihood of it being discovered that some aspect of nature can be very well modeled by the symmetrical system you've invented. How far this works is open to dispute. Currently the string theorists are working hard to make up stuff that fits observation, while the loop quantum gravity theorists are betting on continuing to make progress on the model of Einstein-type application of intuitions regarding symmetries. If the string theory people are right, the run of luck with symmetries has reached its limit. But if the loop quantum gravity people are right, then the symmetry between human mathematical invention and natural discovery may continue to be fruitfully delved into for many centuries to come.
In the 1960s, when America was enjoying successful capitalism unequaled since, top executives made about 35 times as much as line workers. Now, as our dollar sinks along with our position in the world, top executives make over 350 times as much as their line workers.
The last time income distribution was as skewed to the richest 1/10th of 1% as it is now was at the beginning of the Great Depression. Because capitalism failed then, we got all these socialist New Deal programs foisted on us. The hard-core Marxists want capitalism to fail again like that. It's precisely when they can get more of their programs in place. So, as a great fan of capitalism, I have to say our current repeat of the mistake made in the 1920s seems less than brillaint.
I don't get the keyboard size complaint. I'm 6'6", with hands sized to match. I can type on the Eee as easily as on the normal-sized Happy Hacking keyboard on my workstation. And that's touch typing, fast.
It's only when I go to my Zaurus clamshell that my typing slows to the two-fingered kind. Getting used to typing on the Eee is like getting used to a neck on an unfamiliar guitar. For the first ten minutes the new geometry interferes with coordination. After that, the fingers adjust so that the difference is transparent.
"All the technology-driven people I encounter are really interested in the business side of an enterprise," says Healy. "They actually go into IT because they want to be entrepreneurial, not because they they're especially technical."
Certainly fits with what I see: 20ish kids who come in mixing MBA-style buzzwords with techie-style buzzwords and not really understanding either. The article recommends keeping them from being bored by fast-tracking them to management. Won't that make for some corporate brilliance!?
I've been to parties in years past with young derivatives traders oh-so-impressed that they were of the generation that had removed all risk from our financial markets. Surely kids who have gotten tech degrees and jobs, but basically find tech boring and so mostly want the thrill (and money!) of a fast track to upper management can make the rest of our industries just as brilliant as it's turned out the financial sector is. Oh yeah. Let's bet the economy of the 2010's on this batch of clowns.
Cogent is being idiots. Cogent provides fat fiber pipes for a number of crucial players in the New York City-based financial industry - players who are engaged in daily data exchange over the Net. Yes, there's most often a backup connection from another provider. But the automation around this stuff generally is based on logic like "if Cogent line down, switch outgoing traffic to Brand X line and advertise IPs on Brand X on DNS in place of Cogent IPs." Since the Cogent line is up and generally working in this instance, the failover won't be triggered. There will be a lot of support people woken up in the small hours to troubleshoot why some Scandinavian bank or brokerage has failed to pick up or deliver their daily data feed. Most will have no good clue that Cogent itself have purposely broken things, and may spend hours troubleshooting systems on both ends that have nothing wrong with them. Congent's gonna have some pissed off major clients when they figure out who screwed them on this.
The problem is the phpBB developers just don't much care. I say this as someone using it for years now. Just a few months ago I found some dangerous file permissions in it, reported those, and got brushed aside with a response like "If it were an important security issue the core developers would have already taken care of it."
Fscking idiots. I still use it. But I've done extensive custom patching to make it (relatively) safe. The project maintainers just can't be bothered to listen to criticism and get smarter. Musta been born with the genius light on in their skulls.
The costs are ridiculous? Yeah, at 1.5 GHz you're getting a slow CPU. Yet for a lot of server uses that's far more than enough, as well as for most of what normal citizens do with their machines if they aren't gamers or video editors. The cost of power isn't "mindless eco-babble," it goes directly to the bottom line, whether corporate or household. On the corporate side there are two routes: consolidate onto virtual machines (which AMD chips handle quite well), or go for power-efficient individual boxes (which VIA chips handle quite well). Sure, Intel plays in both of these spaces. But the price of an AMD-equivalent Intel CPU is roughly double across much of the range; and the power efficiency of the VIA chips (or ARM, for that matter)... well, is Intel there yet? The reports don't say that it is.
When someone commits theft on this level, why not kill him? In some states we have "three strikes, you're out" laws, with a lifetime in jail for the third crime. This guy committed literally millions of crimes. To keep things in proportion, he should be killed. That's presuming he's guilty beyond reasonable doubt, of course.
Now, you could say the "three strikes" thing is three convictions, not three crimes. But there's nothing to stop the prosecutors from prosecuting each crime singly. Get to the third conviction, jail him for life; get to the Xth, kill him. Simple. Fair. Proportional.
With a number of originally-for-Linux apps having been ported to OS X, without apparently calling for any overwhelming expense, why should Adobe's stuff, all of which runs on OS X, take much effort to port to Linux?
I'm sure it's not something done for free, but expensive? On the scale of what Adobe pays for office coffee each day?
$267 seems like a lot for a VIA mainboard, when one with the same CPU goes for as little as $60 shipped. The one they're featuring has better video outputs, but is that feature alone worth $207? And the board they're featuring only accepts a gig of RAM, while $60 and $70 VIA boards take 2 gigs.
Seems to me like affordability is a big part of going green. First, it means that you can get enough people to do it for all those percentage savings to add up. Second, and more importantly, almost everything you can do to make the extra money to blow on more expensive hardware involves its own externalities - often involving energy use, and greenhouse and other pollution. If you can lessen your economic activity, while getting equivalent value in goods at lower cost, both you and the environment are better off. The only loss is to somebody else who could have made more money off of you. I have a personal ethical commitment to the health of our ecosystem; but should I have an ethical commitment to boosting the GDP by needlessly spending too much?
Not all smoke is bad. Wood smoke is high in antioxidants. Also, in the US in recent years, the only woodstoves legal for sale are EPA certified, with much lower particulate output than older stoves and fireplaces.
Most often when I've set up date fields in databases, I've used the YYYYMMDD format (e.g. 20080115, YYMMDDHHMMSS of course is also an option). The simple regex to construct it and read it is barely more code than translating in and out of Unix timestamps, and there's the great advantage that the dates are human-readable in the tables, and ad hoc queries are easily constructed. So I should be good until the year 10,000. Am I the only one? It's always seemed the obvious best way to do it.
If it were sold as a Ford brand calendar, and if Ford sells calendars, then Ford has to enforce the ownership of its mark in the category of calendars. But if Ford is loyal to its core business, its car business, and if the calendar isn't marketed as "Ford brand," then Ford certainly doesn't lose its "Ford" trademark for cars, and doesn't even lose the Ford trademark for calendars. Ford need do nothing.
Write this one up to stupid lawyers who don't know jack about marketing and good will. Good will, by the way, is treated as a very real thing, a dollar-denominated asset, in business. Ford should hire other lawyers to sue these lawyers for the loss they have caused the corporation.
I've been using Gentoo on production servers (and my desktop) since the first year it was out. It used to be a very solid project. It still has much better documentation than, say, Ubuntu. Originally the speed of the custom-compiled stuff was important to me, because of lower-end hardware of the time I had in use - which it did well on (once compiled, of course). The other main virtue, compared to Red Hat or Debian or Slackware of the time, was that it was easier to keep an up-to-date server running without having to do a fresh OS install every year or two.
But over the last year especially Gentoo has gone into steep decline. Upgrades of major stuff come with "upgrade guides" that leave out major things that commonly get broken. The Gentoo bugzilla is manned by kids who compete to close bugs while insulting the intelligence of anyone who'd dare file them. Older libraries which take little space and conflict with nothing are removed without choice or warning when newer packages are installed, and it's just tough if your production server has stuff installed doing useful work that depends on those libraries. Meanwhile the Ubuntu project has worked very hard to become the most-safely-upgradeable Linux (I'd imagine Red Hat must have improved too; but I hate rpms too much to want to try it again). And hardware is so fast now that for standard server stuff there's much less to gain from customized compilation.
For those who say that Gentoo is fine if you just keep a spare system to test upgrades on first, that's bull. Stuff will break on nearly-identical servers that are just slightly different in their versions - that is, going from 1.17 to 1.19 on a app may break, while going from 1.17 to 1.18 to 1.19 works fine. And the breakage can show up tangentially, not just where you'd most expect it. So you'd have to keep a test server for each production server, and very carefully keep it just one step ahead in sync. Plus you'd need to keep it under some sort of dummy load, since some breakage only becomes apparent in production, not in idle use. The real solution there would be for Gentoo to start being responsive to its bugzilla reports again, immediately fixing any breakage caused by new packages so that instead of letting hundreds or thousands of people trip over the same stone, the paths are kept free and clear.
If Robbins comes back, Gentoo could shine again. If he doesn't, it's about over.
Yeah, those are the poll workers. Now consider what they do when the expert from the private firm running the vote tabulators comes in to "update" the software. They can really tell if that worker does something fishy, right? Right?
The machines in question, as I understand it, are not touch screen, but rather Diebold tabulators into which are fed paper ballots (which somewhat resemble SAT sheets - fill-in-the-bubble things). At least that's how it works across the river here in Vermont. So there are paper ballots which can be hand counted. These tabulators are famously hackable. I don't know who has authority to require a hand recount in NH.
I'll vote for the first presidential candidate who specifically cites this as behavior that should result in dissolution of Sears Holdings - the loss of its status as a corporate "person" and the sale of its assets to fund future government enforcement against such blatant abuses of basic American and human rights by other corporations. Perhaps current laws won't allow justice in this case, but it wouldn't take long to change that. This is behavior that clearly calls for (1) jail time for the top executives - 10 year minimum, and (2) the end-of-life of the corporation committing the atrocity.
First off, Sears isn't Sears anymore. Sears was bought by Kmart after Kmart was bought by what became Sears Holdings, which is controlled by hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, who apparently is incompetent:
In the period ended November 3, the company earned a sickening $2 million (1 cent per share). That's far below the $196 million ($1.27 per share) it earned in the same period last year. It's also 49 cents below what analysts had been expecting.
That's right, under his management profits went down over 99%. I've been to his stores, and the merchandising is awful. There's certain stuff I'd rather buy from Sears and/or Kmart than Wal-Mart, Home Depot or whoever, but the stocking and selection is so haphazard now that, except for the Sears appliances, the only thing you can count on finding is bizarre junk on sale.
And now with this story, maybe it's time to stop even trying. (I had a minor loyalty to Kmart because I'm originally from their part of the country; and to Sears because the Craftsman guarantee policy is good.)
Sure, the hypothesis would make sense for some dreams. My wife regularly has threatening dreams - about situations in grade school and trying to find her (long dead now) mother. So her mind is preparing her for repeating grade school, for losing the mother long lost? On the other hand, I remember dreams most every night, and while they might be interpreted sometimes as prep for something, the ones with any serious threat or strong negative emotion of any sort are so rare that I often feel guilty, awakening from a night time's pleasant entertainments, to hear my wife complain about the latest installment of her grade school and looking for her mother anxiety dramas.
Jaron's notion of the hazards of "premature collapse of mystery" as a serious error in conception has great potential, IMHO. Of course, he's the guy who invented "virtual reality" as a marketing term. He introduced some quite useful critiques to the emerging field of consciousness studies before becoming disgusted with the overall attitudes there and leaving. And his musical skills are considerable.
That said, in craftsmanship old tools and techniques are often best. when I add to my century-old house, I prefer to use updated versions of century-old construction patterns and techniques, not just for continuity, but because they result in better construction than the way houses - even the more "innovative" ones - are slapped together now. And it's the same way with *nix. Updated versions of decades-old tools and design patterns build something not only more compatible, but in many dimensions actually better, than some freshly-invented blue-sky bag of tricks. The geodesic dome was brilliant and novel, yet obviously in retrospect not the way to go. The jury's still out on the VR stuff Jaron's fame is based on - which was something quite beyond the illustrated multi-player versions of Adventure that's all that's seen real success to date.
Still, Jaron wants art from software, whereas most here, like me, appreciate it more as a craft - closer to fine carpentry than abstract painting.
Yup. And even for the long-time Linux desktop user, the Eee is seductively useful. I've no use for full-sized laptops, which are big and heavy enough that I still end up sitting as if at a desktop. The Eee, by contrast, handles like a paperback book, which allows getting much more comfortable - a comfort that for many uses makes up for the loss of a large desktop screen. I'd been using a Zaurus clamshell (pocket sized) for a couple of years for note taking and remote sysadmin in a pinch. But it wasn't quite enough for full use. The Eee, though, has a screen just large enough (with very good color and brightness) and a keyboard that, while small, a well-over-6-foot guy like finds just fine for touch typing. Plus, when you want to use standard *nix utilities, the Linux versions (most Debian stuff installs fine on this) are far better featured than those that come with OS X. This is a brilliant product, and would be at twice the price.
One of their runners up is evidence that memory and imagination use the same parts of the brain. This counts as insight? Remember being in another room somewhere. Now imagine being in that same room. Notice that remembering and imagining are very much the same experience? It would be news if neuroscience discovered there were two very separate things there. But it's news when neuroscience "discovers" that they're both pretty much the same use of mind?
Wake me when neuroscience gets to the point of describing things that poets and painters haven't known for centuries. How can the science-educated be so illiterate about their own minds that the imaginative commonality of memory and foresight could come as any surprise to either the researchers here, or the editors of this somewhat consequential magazine?
For one, I can't picture production capacity catching up with demand enough to lower prices to that level for at least a decade, and even that would take a trenemdous expansion rate.
That's a sad measure of your imagination. Historically, when major new wonderful stuff has caught on there's been a tremendous expansion rate. Look at the railroads. Look at Internet backbone. Look at Dutch friggin tulips. What Nanosolar is doing is ramping up very fast. They have a technology whose production scales up well. They've hired executives with great track records at premier corporations. There are billions of dollars available from venture capitalists, and from Google, both of whom have other major investments whose future completely depends on our solving the energy production problem. They can't afford to fail; and they can afford to win. There's almost no risk of this getting underbuilt; all the risk is on its getting overbuilt, like railroads, backbone or tulips. Even so, the world wins. We're still using our railroads (if not every spur line), we're catching up with backbone capacity, and Holland's still full of tulip fields come spring.
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While this may mean nothing to your argument (which I don't understand), it mischaracterizes Einstein's work to say he "makes some new observations." Einstein's key work was based on thought experiments - on visualizations - not observations. These led him to postulate a symmetry, an invariance in the speed of light. He was in a long tradition in both math and physics of exploring an intuition of symmetry, and then finding real-world evidence to fit after, not before, working out a system based on that intuition.
Good popular books on this are Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth and A. Zee's classic Fearful Symmetry, giving the accounts from math and physics respectively.
The story largely goes: if you invent a symmetrical system - even just the abstract mathematics of one - sooner or later there's a high likelihood of it being discovered that some aspect of nature can be very well modeled by the symmetrical system you've invented. How far this works is open to dispute. Currently the string theorists are working hard to make up stuff that fits observation, while the loop quantum gravity theorists are betting on continuing to make progress on the model of Einstein-type application of intuitions regarding symmetries. If the string theory people are right, the run of luck with symmetries has reached its limit. But if the loop quantum gravity people are right, then the symmetry between human mathematical invention and natural discovery may continue to be fruitfully delved into for many centuries to come.
In the 1960s, when America was enjoying successful capitalism unequaled since, top executives made about 35 times as much as line workers. Now, as our dollar sinks along with our position in the world, top executives make over 350 times as much as their line workers.
The last time income distribution was as skewed to the richest 1/10th of 1% as it is now was at the beginning of the Great Depression. Because capitalism failed then, we got all these socialist New Deal programs foisted on us. The hard-core Marxists want capitalism to fail again like that. It's precisely when they can get more of their programs in place. So, as a great fan of capitalism, I have to say our current repeat of the mistake made in the 1920s seems less than brillaint.
I don't get the keyboard size complaint. I'm 6'6", with hands sized to match. I can type on the Eee as easily as on the normal-sized Happy Hacking keyboard on my workstation. And that's touch typing, fast.
It's only when I go to my Zaurus clamshell that my typing slows to the two-fingered kind. Getting used to typing on the Eee is like getting used to a neck on an unfamiliar guitar. For the first ten minutes the new geometry interferes with coordination. After that, the fingers adjust so that the difference is transparent.
I've been to parties in years past with young derivatives traders oh-so-impressed that they were of the generation that had removed all risk from our financial markets. Surely kids who have gotten tech degrees and jobs, but basically find tech boring and so mostly want the thrill (and money!) of a fast track to upper management can make the rest of our industries just as brilliant as it's turned out the financial sector is. Oh yeah. Let's bet the economy of the 2010's on this batch of clowns.
Cogent is being idiots. Cogent provides fat fiber pipes for a number of crucial players in the New York City-based financial industry - players who are engaged in daily data exchange over the Net. Yes, there's most often a backup connection from another provider. But the automation around this stuff generally is based on logic like "if Cogent line down, switch outgoing traffic to Brand X line and advertise IPs on Brand X on DNS in place of Cogent IPs." Since the Cogent line is up and generally working in this instance, the failover won't be triggered. There will be a lot of support people woken up in the small hours to troubleshoot why some Scandinavian bank or brokerage has failed to pick up or deliver their daily data feed. Most will have no good clue that Cogent itself have purposely broken things, and may spend hours troubleshooting systems on both ends that have nothing wrong with them. Congent's gonna have some pissed off major clients when they figure out who screwed them on this.
The problem is the phpBB developers just don't much care. I say this as someone using it for years now. Just a few months ago I found some dangerous file permissions in it, reported those, and got brushed aside with a response like "If it were an important security issue the core developers would have already taken care of it."
Fscking idiots. I still use it. But I've done extensive custom patching to make it (relatively) safe. The project maintainers just can't be bothered to listen to criticism and get smarter. Musta been born with the genius light on in their skulls.
The costs are ridiculous? Yeah, at 1.5 GHz you're getting a slow CPU. Yet for a lot of server uses that's far more than enough, as well as for most of what normal citizens do with their machines if they aren't gamers or video editors. The cost of power isn't "mindless eco-babble," it goes directly to the bottom line, whether corporate or household. On the corporate side there are two routes: consolidate onto virtual machines (which AMD chips handle quite well), or go for power-efficient individual boxes (which VIA chips handle quite well). Sure, Intel plays in both of these spaces. But the price of an AMD-equivalent Intel CPU is roughly double across much of the range; and the power efficiency of the VIA chips (or ARM, for that matter) ... well, is Intel there yet? The reports don't say that it is.
When someone commits theft on this level, why not kill him? In some states we have "three strikes, you're out" laws, with a lifetime in jail for the third crime. This guy committed literally millions of crimes. To keep things in proportion, he should be killed. That's presuming he's guilty beyond reasonable doubt, of course.
Now, you could say the "three strikes" thing is three convictions, not three crimes. But there's nothing to stop the prosecutors from prosecuting each crime singly. Get to the third conviction, jail him for life; get to the Xth, kill him. Simple. Fair. Proportional.
With a number of originally-for-Linux apps having been ported to OS X, without apparently calling for any overwhelming expense, why should Adobe's stuff, all of which runs on OS X, take much effort to port to Linux?
I'm sure it's not something done for free, but expensive? On the scale of what Adobe pays for office coffee each day?
$267 seems like a lot for a VIA mainboard, when one with the same CPU goes for as little as $60 shipped. The one they're featuring has better video outputs, but is that feature alone worth $207? And the board they're featuring only accepts a gig of RAM, while $60 and $70 VIA boards take 2 gigs.
Seems to me like affordability is a big part of going green. First, it means that you can get enough people to do it for all those percentage savings to add up. Second, and more importantly, almost everything you can do to make the extra money to blow on more expensive hardware involves its own externalities - often involving energy use, and greenhouse and other pollution. If you can lessen your economic activity, while getting equivalent value in goods at lower cost, both you and the environment are better off. The only loss is to somebody else who could have made more money off of you. I have a personal ethical commitment to the health of our ecosystem; but should I have an ethical commitment to boosting the GDP by needlessly spending too much?
Strange thing is, common law no longer applies in Britain. Still does in the US.
Most often when I've set up date fields in databases, I've used the YYYYMMDD format (e.g. 20080115, YYMMDDHHMMSS of course is also an option). The simple regex to construct it and read it is barely more code than translating in and out of Unix timestamps, and there's the great advantage that the dates are human-readable in the tables, and ad hoc queries are easily constructed. So I should be good until the year 10,000. Am I the only one? It's always seemed the obvious best way to do it.
If it were sold as a Ford brand calendar, and if Ford sells calendars, then Ford has to enforce the ownership of its mark in the category of calendars. But if Ford is loyal to its core business, its car business, and if the calendar isn't marketed as "Ford brand," then Ford certainly doesn't lose its "Ford" trademark for cars, and doesn't even lose the Ford trademark for calendars. Ford need do nothing.
Write this one up to stupid lawyers who don't know jack about marketing and good will. Good will, by the way, is treated as a very real thing, a dollar-denominated asset, in business. Ford should hire other lawyers to sue these lawyers for the loss they have caused the corporation.
I've been using Gentoo on production servers (and my desktop) since the first year it was out. It used to be a very solid project. It still has much better documentation than, say, Ubuntu. Originally the speed of the custom-compiled stuff was important to me, because of lower-end hardware of the time I had in use - which it did well on (once compiled, of course). The other main virtue, compared to Red Hat or Debian or Slackware of the time, was that it was easier to keep an up-to-date server running without having to do a fresh OS install every year or two.
But over the last year especially Gentoo has gone into steep decline. Upgrades of major stuff come with "upgrade guides" that leave out major things that commonly get broken. The Gentoo bugzilla is manned by kids who compete to close bugs while insulting the intelligence of anyone who'd dare file them. Older libraries which take little space and conflict with nothing are removed without choice or warning when newer packages are installed, and it's just tough if your production server has stuff installed doing useful work that depends on those libraries. Meanwhile the Ubuntu project has worked very hard to become the most-safely-upgradeable Linux (I'd imagine Red Hat must have improved too; but I hate rpms too much to want to try it again). And hardware is so fast now that for standard server stuff there's much less to gain from customized compilation.
For those who say that Gentoo is fine if you just keep a spare system to test upgrades on first, that's bull. Stuff will break on nearly-identical servers that are just slightly different in their versions - that is, going from 1.17 to 1.19 on a app may break, while going from 1.17 to 1.18 to 1.19 works fine. And the breakage can show up tangentially, not just where you'd most expect it. So you'd have to keep a test server for each production server, and very carefully keep it just one step ahead in sync. Plus you'd need to keep it under some sort of dummy load, since some breakage only becomes apparent in production, not in idle use. The real solution there would be for Gentoo to start being responsive to its bugzilla reports again, immediately fixing any breakage caused by new packages so that instead of letting hundreds or thousands of people trip over the same stone, the paths are kept free and clear.
If Robbins comes back, Gentoo could shine again. If he doesn't, it's about over.
Yeah, those are the poll workers. Now consider what they do when the expert from the private firm running the vote tabulators comes in to "update" the software. They can really tell if that worker does something fishy, right? Right?
The machines in question, as I understand it, are not touch screen, but rather Diebold tabulators into which are fed paper ballots (which somewhat resemble SAT sheets - fill-in-the-bubble things). At least that's how it works across the river here in Vermont. So there are paper ballots which can be hand counted. These tabulators are famously hackable. I don't know who has authority to require a hand recount in NH.
I'll vote for the first presidential candidate who specifically cites this as behavior that should result in dissolution of Sears Holdings - the loss of its status as a corporate "person" and the sale of its assets to fund future government enforcement against such blatant abuses of basic American and human rights by other corporations. Perhaps current laws won't allow justice in this case, but it wouldn't take long to change that. This is behavior that clearly calls for (1) jail time for the top executives - 10 year minimum, and (2) the end-of-life of the corporation committing the atrocity.
And now with this story, maybe it's time to stop even trying. (I had a minor loyalty to Kmart because I'm originally from their part of the country; and to Sears because the Craftsman guarantee policy is good.)
Sure, the hypothesis would make sense for some dreams. My wife regularly has threatening dreams - about situations in grade school and trying to find her (long dead now) mother. So her mind is preparing her for repeating grade school, for losing the mother long lost? On the other hand, I remember dreams most every night, and while they might be interpreted sometimes as prep for something, the ones with any serious threat or strong negative emotion of any sort are so rare that I often feel guilty, awakening from a night time's pleasant entertainments, to hear my wife complain about the latest installment of her grade school and looking for her mother anxiety dramas.
Jaron's notion of the hazards of "premature collapse of mystery" as a serious error in conception has great potential, IMHO. Of course, he's the guy who invented "virtual reality" as a marketing term. He introduced some quite useful critiques to the emerging field of consciousness studies before becoming disgusted with the overall attitudes there and leaving. And his musical skills are considerable.
That said, in craftsmanship old tools and techniques are often best. when I add to my century-old house, I prefer to use updated versions of century-old construction patterns and techniques, not just for continuity, but because they result in better construction than the way houses - even the more "innovative" ones - are slapped together now. And it's the same way with *nix. Updated versions of decades-old tools and design patterns build something not only more compatible, but in many dimensions actually better, than some freshly-invented blue-sky bag of tricks. The geodesic dome was brilliant and novel, yet obviously in retrospect not the way to go. The jury's still out on the VR stuff Jaron's fame is based on - which was something quite beyond the illustrated multi-player versions of Adventure that's all that's seen real success to date.
Still, Jaron wants art from software, whereas most here, like me, appreciate it more as a craft - closer to fine carpentry than abstract painting.
Yup. And even for the long-time Linux desktop user, the Eee is seductively useful. I've no use for full-sized laptops, which are big and heavy enough that I still end up sitting as if at a desktop. The Eee, by contrast, handles like a paperback book, which allows getting much more comfortable - a comfort that for many uses makes up for the loss of a large desktop screen. I'd been using a Zaurus clamshell (pocket sized) for a couple of years for note taking and remote sysadmin in a pinch. But it wasn't quite enough for full use. The Eee, though, has a screen just large enough (with very good color and brightness) and a keyboard that, while small, a well-over-6-foot guy like finds just fine for touch typing. Plus, when you want to use standard *nix utilities, the Linux versions (most Debian stuff installs fine on this) are far better featured than those that come with OS X. This is a brilliant product, and would be at twice the price.
One of their runners up is evidence that memory and imagination use the same parts of the brain. This counts as insight? Remember being in another room somewhere. Now imagine being in that same room. Notice that remembering and imagining are very much the same experience? It would be news if neuroscience discovered there were two very separate things there. But it's news when neuroscience "discovers" that they're both pretty much the same use of mind?
Wake me when neuroscience gets to the point of describing things that poets and painters haven't known for centuries. How can the science-educated be so illiterate about their own minds that the imaginative commonality of memory and foresight could come as any surprise to either the researchers here, or the editors of this somewhat consequential magazine?