Why would an unplugged hard drive fail after three years?
When you're talking about using a hard drive for archiving, you load the drive into the machine, back up the data, then pull it out and find a cool, dry place for it to sit and ponder the existence of Foo (or whatever it is hard drives like to think about).
I'm sure you're trying to be fair in your analysis, Mr. Lucas. But are you sure some of this just isn't sour grapes? I mean, you lost a lot of nerd cred, making Greedo shoot first like that.
Yeah, it must be hard watching some vampire-happy upstart steal some of your thunder like that. We understand.
Look, you and the gp poster both make the same mistake. You make it explicitly, he makes it implicitly. Something that isn't theft may still be morally objectionable. For example, we condemn murder without that condemnation hinging on the argument that the murderer is depriving his victim. I object to people driving while talking on their cell phones, without resorting to some convoluted argument about my personal safety being "stolen".
Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is also usually morally wrong. In your hypothetical example, your copyright on your work was infringed by XCorp. You probably contracted with them to deliver the software in exchange for money. So it's probably also breach of contract. If no contract existed, then they're no better off, because they have no right to the software unless you explicitly licensed it.
Your last paragraph doesn't make any sense: There is no copyright on money. Counterfeiting laws don't derive from copyright law; they derive from the government's constitutional authority to print money. More important, money isn't infinitely copyable the way software is. I can't take a dollar bill from you without you losing a dollar bill. I can't print a dollar bill and buy something with it without inflating the rest of the economy by a dollar.
Stealing software is no different than stealing money. You are appropriating somebody elses $value$ against the law. That is stealing.
No, it's copyright infringement.
Imagine two worlds: In the first, I woke up today, put an illegal copy of Adobe Photoshop on my computer, and start using it for some productive purpose. In the second world, I slept through the day. In the first world, the illegal software is helping to create value that would not have existed in the second world. Yes, it's outrageous (and illegal) for the software creator to not get a portion of that value. But the increase in the value of the software wouldn't have existed but for me. So how was anything "appropriated" from the owner of the software?
Actually, if I were a "strict constructionist," I would notice that (according to your distinction between public and private use) there is no mention of private uses at all.
So theoretically, if the gubbmi't takes your house to build a park, it has to pay you fair market value for the property. But if it takes it so that your senator can build his own personal mansion on the property, they don't have to pay you a cent.
So I think I like your new reading better than the old one.
I think the problem there is that cell phones are designed in such a way as to minimize the amount of energy used. If there was one place for a processor that didn't use power when it wasn't actually performing calculations, cell phones would be it.
So to make it happen, consumers would probably have to suffer with shorter battery life or larger batteries. Given how neat everyone thinks it is to have a cell phone which they can lose inside their own ears, I just don't see it happening.
Maybe something that only ran while the phone was on the charger, but fully powered. But at that point it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Note that the chart says that the "100x" test was for single precision calculations. For most scientific applications, it's double precision or nothing. I hear the Cell's double precision capabilities aren't shabby, though.
I was really irked by the conclusion of this paper. Specifically, "Tiedmann (1836) was correct to conclude that intelligence and brain volume are meaningfully related." Now, even if we grant the premise that the current paper is correct in asserting the relationship, how does that mean that Tiedmann was justified in making the connection at the time he did? Imagine that in 1504, some monk had correctly guessed the speed of light because he figured it to be a billion times as fast as his own walking speed. Just because he came to the right conclusion doesn't mean that he was right in coming to that conclusion.
Given the state of the social sciences in the 1830's, I have a hard time believing that Tiedmann's research was anything but a mish-mash of bad techniques, preconceived bias, and probably blatant racism.
While I don't have the qualifications to judge this particular paper, meta-analyses of previous studies are a common and acceptable sort of research. If you can show that he gave too much weight to a badly designed study, or that he is overly-broad in his conclusions, those would be valid lines of criticism. But meta-analysis is not argument ad populum.
Then you advise people to back away from the actual studies, and go "meet a few people". This seems to demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the concept of "statistical correlation". If I do a well-designed, double-blind study showing that medicine X reduces the likelihood of heart attacks more than medicine Y, you can't disprove the claim by showing that your uncle Bill took X and still died of a heart attack, while uncle Fred took Y and did fine.
The correlations he's throwing about (.30) are important, but there is still a lot of room for other factors to come into play.
I've read enough of the study to think there is a good chance it's wrong. But your criticisms seem invalid.
Actually, Gould's book wasn't that good. He frequently misrepresented the people he was criticizing. He heaped particular scorn on Arthur Jensen, who responded to the criticisms.
I especially remember a passage where Gould tries to make Jensen look like an idiot. In one of his books, Jensen makes a rather straightforward claim: that some critters are smarter than others. But when Gould gets through with it, it sounds very much as though Jensen believes that humans evolved from dogs.
I'm all in favor of looking for preconceptions and biases in the current understanding of science. But as I remember Gould's book, it amounted to little more than trying to smear modern researchers by linking them to the blatant racists who did the earliest work in the study of human intelligence.
Gould did little to disprove the correlation between brain size and intelligence. Sure, he went over the early (1800's era) studies with a fine-toothed comb to show their pitiful accuracy. But he didn't deal with more recent attempts to measure the correlation.
For the sake of making my own biases clear, I do believe that IQ tests do a passable job of measuring something. Also, my hat size is 7 5/8. Bow before me!
Salt Lake has a place called "Brewvies" that does basically the same thing. The atmosphere is fun, you can order food and beer, etc. I think they only have two theaters, and it's not first release. But I've enjoyed the times I've been there.
I guess every city has someplace like this. Every one worth mentioning, at least. Sorry, Duluth.
I've always thought that DVDs need to have an optional "Full Theater Experience" soundtrack, which is the regular soundtrack interspersed with such movie theater classics as "The girl who keeps trying to direct the characters", "The phlegm guy", "The harried family that brought their children aged 2-7 to watch an R-rated horror film", and "pair of snickering teenagers who crack jokes that only they find funny".
"Moron with laser pointer" might be more difficult to implement, but his presence is absolutely necessary.
Through the miracles of technology, we can finally give home theater viewers the full theater experience they've so long demanded.
1) There is clearly a demand for movies at home, and many people find it inconvenient and expensive to go to the theater.
2) Downloading is the most convenient way to get first-release movies at home. Rental places and DVD-by-mail systems don't get movies for months after release.
So I think the 5% figure is partly a result of rentals, but more a result of people not having the tech savvy and equipment to obtain recent movies, or to get them working on their prod-buttock home theater instead of their wimpy computer.
Well put. I think we're basically agreeing with each other. But how to fix it? Bounties don't seem to work, and things like interface guidelines don't seem to get followed.
Technically, I don't know that moving the people on the 253 browser projects over to ALSA and telling them to "make sound work" would solve the sound problem, even if such a reorganization were possible in the cat-herding world of OSS. Disparate skillsets, disparate interests. So the "we" to whom we should address ALSA complaints is the ALSA development team, not "every person who ever contributed to an OSS project".
The same sort of criticisms could be offered toward JWZ himself. For example, his Gronk software was written because, rather than try and help the usability of an already-existing MP3 jukebox, he went out and wrote his own. What's wrong with using MySQL for an app like that? He says it's overkill, but I don't see how it could seriously impact user experience once it's installed.
So we could have had a jukebox program with all the polish JWZ could bring to it, but instead we've got Gronk, a program where adding a new CD requires a few minutes of deep thought by the computer. I don't think it's a valid criticism, though, because his time is his to do with as he will. I don't like to see duplicated effort, but it's the nature of OSS: People work on what interests them.
Harping on usability is good. Thinking of the authors of software as interchangeable is unrealistic.
Re:Stallman = Socialist
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.
On November 5 the medical journal The Lancet published a meta-analysis of the available studies on the safety of rofecoxib (Jüni et al., 2004). The authors concluded that, owing to the known cardiovascular risk, rofecoxib should have been withdrawn several years earlier.
I really don't think the pharmaceutical industry has grounds for getting indignant when someone questions their ethics.
The problem is, once money gets involved, important questions of life and death, health and harm, take a back seat to financial decisions. These companies often hide research that would undermine the public perception of a product's safety, attack independent research as "junk science", and go to unconscionable lengths to keep their products from being pulled from the market.
I reject the notion that the profit motive is the best way to organize this sort of medical research. The reasons are twofold. First, it organizes it in such a way that we end up putting too many resources towards the ills of bored rich people (Viagra, for example) at the expense of the life-threatening diseases of those who cannot afford to pay back research costs (malaria, etc). Second, the various companies engaged in the research have every motivation to put the resulting product out, but what is their motivation for publishing the knowledge gained from researching it? Far better that they keep their results quiet, for fear that a competitor might take the knowledge, grasp some unseen implications of it, and beat them in the creation of some other product.
In fact, it would probably be better for everyone if knowledge was shared openly. It would certainly speed up the pace of research. That's what Stallman is getting at. The cloak-and-dagger science practiced by Big Pharma seems very inefficient to me.
Most important, the traits you describe are common to both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. But the effect they're trying to undersand occurs only within the former group.
I also have a hard time with the idea that mate selection alone would lead to such a profound effect in this one instance, when there are plenty of other societies where intelligence, literacy, and debate were prized.
The authors of the paper have their own reasons for dismissing your theory. But it's up to you to read it and decide if you agree with their reasoning.
I always find it interesting when people use "sir" as shorthand for "you pompous asshole". I've done it myself a few times.
I think that the views I have expressed are very much representative of the scientific mainstream. Genetics is primarily due to genetic factors. Your views, on the other hand, are backed by nothing but testimonials from a few confused Tony Robbins fans. And possibly the Scientologists, but hell, they'll believe anything.
I'm convinced that wishing yourself smarter is about as effective as wishing the sky bluer: The world just doesn't work that way. I also think that I have a lot of studies backing me up in this belief.
First point: Your impressions of the relative intelligence of Irish-Americans vs. other American whites isn't the sort of scientific evidence that can be mustered against a paper. You know the old saying, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". In order to back yourself up, you would have to do a study where the IQ of Tay-Sachs carriers were compared to the population at large. Chances are, if this study gets famous enough, such a study will be done.
It's not just about Tay-Sachs. According to the paper, there are several highly debilitating genetic disorders that all occur in the target population, and all affect the same chemical pathways. Now, if four or five unrelated genetic disorders were more prevalent in one population, it would be easy to chalk it up to chance. But the fact that they're all acting on the same set of proteins (sphingolipids) leads us to the inevitable conclusion that it's not due to chance. Therefore, the presence of the genes for these disorders must confer some benefit that increases the bearer's genetic success.
These facts are considered pretty well settled among evolutionary anthropologists. The question now revolves around what benefit was actually conferred. It's unlikely to be resistance to disease (as with sickle-celled anemia) because the Ashkenazi Jews were exposed to the same diseases as the rest of the population. So these authors are looking at how they were treated by society.
The Jews in Europe weren't allowed to own land, but their religious practices suited them for jobs that required reading and writing. Further, they were highly encouraged to take banking jobs, which were critical to society despite the Church forbidding its members from practicing "usury". Finally, the Jews were forbidden from intermarrying with Christians, which allowed the two populations to diverge by sharply curtailing interbreeding.
It may turn out to be a "just so story" that has no basis in fact. But it's a damned clever hypothesis, and seems plausible on the surface. It certainly doesn't deserve an immediate, eye-rolling dismissal from someone who isn't qualified to pass judgment.
Note: According to Wikipedia, Irish-Americans have about half as many (1/50) Tay-Sachs carriers as Ashkenazi Jews (1/27). That rate is still four times that of the population at large, but do be more careful summarizing your sources.
The paper itself notes that there have been plenty of other groups with histories of persecution, and that persecution alone doesn't account for the effects. So that's exactly what they're not saying.
Einstein showed a talent for math and science from a young age. His difficulties as a young student were less severe than commonly assumed, and had more to do with personality conflicts and the soul-killing dullness of German education in that era. He most certainly should not be cited as an example of "dumb kid makes himself smart by trying really really hard".
I'm not saying that it's right or effective to shove kids onto whatever career track they seem cut out for at the age of five, but your example is dead wrong. Further, I think it's absurd and unfair to overinflate kids' expectations of their futures with platitudes about "Einstein was bad at math at your age," or "Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team". Even if both statements completely capture the young situation of two people who went on to excel in their respective fields (they don't), giving kids an expectation of similar performance is nothing but an unnecessary burden.
Sorry, but intelligence cannot be achieved through hard work. Genetics plays a huge role, and environment at a young age plays a smaller but important one. But neither of these factors are the result of conscious decisions by the developing mind.
The brain isn't a muscle. It doesn't even work well as an analogy, let alone as a statement of fact. Try thinking of it more as a chunk of sculptor's clay. Some people's brains are very malleable, and change easily to accomodate new tasks. Other brains are harder to work into a useful shape, and require more training. Once set in that shape, it requires an extraordinary effort to retrain it into another shape. A few people are completely solid, and no amount of coaxing or educating can prepare their minds for any but the simplest task.
Yes, you can push yourself above and beyond what one would expect from someone with your brain chemistry, simply by working hard. But there are limits to that, and there is evidence that work ethic itself has a strong genetic component. So if two people are performing the same task at the same level of competence, and one is able to do it because of her mix of intelligence and laziness, while the other can do it because his lower intelligence is compensated for by a stronger work ethic, it would seem that both are performing the way their genes dictate.
You and I could not match the intellectual feats of Einstein by sheer force of will, any more than we could chisel a beautiful marble sculpture using a toothpick as a chisel. No amount of effort can compensate for not having the right materials.
Finally, if a message of genetic fatalism is somehow demeaning, what of it? We don't discern truth from falsehood by deciding which statements make us feel better about ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would an unplugged hard drive fail after three years?
When you're talking about using a hard drive for archiving, you load the drive into the machine, back up the data, then pull it out and find a cool, dry place for it to sit and ponder the existence of Foo (or whatever it is hard drives like to think about).
I'm sure you're trying to be fair in your analysis, Mr. Lucas. But are you sure some of this just isn't sour grapes? I mean, you lost a lot of nerd cred, making Greedo shoot first like that.
Yeah, it must be hard watching some vampire-happy upstart steal some of your thunder like that. We understand.
Look, you and the gp poster both make the same mistake. You make it explicitly, he makes it implicitly. Something that isn't theft may still be morally objectionable. For example, we condemn murder without that condemnation hinging on the argument that the murderer is depriving his victim. I object to people driving while talking on their cell phones, without resorting to some convoluted argument about my personal safety being "stolen".
Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is also usually morally wrong. In your hypothetical example, your copyright on your work was infringed by XCorp. You probably contracted with them to deliver the software in exchange for money. So it's probably also breach of contract. If no contract existed, then they're no better off, because they have no right to the software unless you explicitly licensed it.
Your last paragraph doesn't make any sense: There is no copyright on money. Counterfeiting laws don't derive from copyright law; they derive from the government's constitutional authority to print money. More important, money isn't infinitely copyable the way software is. I can't take a dollar bill from you without you losing a dollar bill. I can't print a dollar bill and buy something with it without inflating the rest of the economy by a dollar.
No, it's copyright infringement.
Imagine two worlds: In the first, I woke up today, put an illegal copy of Adobe Photoshop on my computer, and start using it for some productive purpose. In the second world, I slept through the day. In the first world, the illegal software is helping to create value that would not have existed in the second world. Yes, it's outrageous (and illegal) for the software creator to not get a portion of that value. But the increase in the value of the software wouldn't have existed but for me. So how was anything "appropriated" from the owner of the software?
Actually, if I were a "strict constructionist," I would notice that (according to your distinction between public and private use) there is no mention of private uses at all.
So theoretically, if the gubbmi't takes your house to build a park, it has to pay you fair market value for the property. But if it takes it so that your senator can build his own personal mansion on the property, they don't have to pay you a cent.
So I think I like your new reading better than the old one.
Wow. Somebody from the Disney Internet Group really needs to take a Mouseketeer pill. C'mon, Mickey. He was being funny.
Private enterprise never misunderestimates the demand for a product?
I think the problem there is that cell phones are designed in such a way as to minimize the amount of energy used. If there was one place for a processor that didn't use power when it wasn't actually performing calculations, cell phones would be it.
So to make it happen, consumers would probably have to suffer with shorter battery life or larger batteries. Given how neat everyone thinks it is to have a cell phone which they can lose inside their own ears, I just don't see it happening.
Maybe something that only ran while the phone was on the charger, but fully powered. But at that point it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Note that the chart says that the "100x" test was for single precision calculations. For most scientific applications, it's double precision or nothing. I hear the Cell's double precision capabilities aren't shabby, though.
I was really irked by the conclusion of this paper. Specifically, "Tiedmann (1836) was correct to conclude that intelligence and brain volume are meaningfully related." Now, even if we grant the premise that the current paper is correct in asserting the relationship, how does that mean that Tiedmann was justified in making the connection at the time he did? Imagine that in 1504, some monk had correctly guessed the speed of light because he figured it to be a billion times as fast as his own walking speed. Just because he came to the right conclusion doesn't mean that he was right in coming to that conclusion.
Given the state of the social sciences in the 1830's, I have a hard time believing that Tiedmann's research was anything but a mish-mash of bad techniques, preconceived bias, and probably blatant racism.
While I don't have the qualifications to judge this particular paper,
meta-analyses of previous studies are a common and acceptable sort of research. If you can show that he gave too much weight to a badly designed study, or that he is overly-broad in his conclusions, those would be valid lines of criticism. But meta-analysis is not argument ad populum.
Then you advise people to back away from the actual studies, and go "meet a few people". This seems to demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the concept of "statistical correlation". If I do a well-designed, double-blind study showing that medicine X reduces the likelihood of heart attacks more than medicine Y, you can't disprove the claim by showing that your uncle Bill took X and still died of a heart attack, while uncle Fred took Y and did fine.
The correlations he's throwing about (.30) are important, but there is still a lot of room for other factors to come into play.
I've read enough of the study to think there is a good chance it's wrong. But your criticisms seem invalid.
Actually, Gould's book wasn't that good. He frequently misrepresented the people he was criticizing. He heaped particular scorn on Arthur Jensen, who responded to the criticisms.
I especially remember a passage where Gould tries to make Jensen look like an idiot. In one of his books, Jensen makes a rather straightforward claim: that some critters are smarter than others. But when Gould gets through with it, it sounds very much as though Jensen believes that humans evolved from dogs.
I'm all in favor of looking for preconceptions and biases in the current understanding of science. But as I remember Gould's book, it amounted to little more than trying to smear modern researchers by linking them to the blatant racists who did the earliest work in the study of human intelligence.
Gould did little to disprove the correlation between brain size and intelligence. Sure, he went over the early (1800's era) studies with a fine-toothed comb to show their pitiful accuracy. But he didn't deal with more recent attempts to measure the correlation.
For the sake of making my own biases clear, I do believe that IQ tests do a passable job of measuring something. Also, my hat size is 7 5/8. Bow before me!
Salt Lake has a place called "Brewvies" that does basically the same thing. The atmosphere is fun, you can order food and beer, etc. I think they only have two theaters, and it's not first release. But I've enjoyed the times I've been there.
I guess every city has someplace like this. Every one worth mentioning, at least. Sorry, Duluth.
I've always thought that DVDs need to have an optional "Full Theater Experience" soundtrack, which is the regular soundtrack interspersed with such movie theater classics as "The girl who keeps trying to direct the characters", "The phlegm guy", "The harried family that brought their children aged 2-7 to watch an R-rated horror film", and "pair of snickering teenagers who crack jokes that only they find funny".
"Moron with laser pointer" might be more difficult to implement, but his presence is absolutely necessary.
Through the miracles of technology, we can finally give home theater viewers the full theater experience they've so long demanded.
I think the shock comes from the following:
:)
1) There is clearly a demand for movies at home, and many people find it inconvenient and expensive to go to the theater.
2) Downloading is the most convenient way to get first-release movies at home. Rental places and DVD-by-mail systems don't get movies for months after release.
So I think the 5% figure is partly a result of rentals, but more a result of people not having the tech savvy and equipment to obtain recent movies, or to get them working on their prod-buttock home theater instead of their wimpy computer.
Education, people. Focus on education.
Are the laptops really faster? Or do they just have a faster clock speed?
Laptops have always struck me as being noticeably slower than their desktop counterparts, even when the spec sheets are the same.
Well put. I think we're basically agreeing with each other. But how to fix it? Bounties don't seem to work, and things like interface guidelines don't seem to get followed.
:)
Suggestions? Anyone? Anyone at all.
Sigh.
Technically, I don't know that moving the people on the 253 browser projects over to ALSA and telling them to "make sound work" would solve the sound problem, even if such a reorganization were possible in the cat-herding world of OSS. Disparate skillsets, disparate interests. So the "we" to whom we should address ALSA complaints is the ALSA development team, not "every person who ever contributed to an OSS project".
The same sort of criticisms could be offered toward JWZ himself. For example, his Gronk software was written because, rather than try and help the usability of an already-existing MP3 jukebox, he went out and wrote his own. What's wrong with using MySQL for an app like that? He says it's overkill, but I don't see how it could seriously impact user experience once it's installed.
So we could have had a jukebox program with all the polish JWZ could bring to it, but instead we've got Gronk, a program where adding a new CD requires a few minutes of deep thought by the computer. I don't think it's a valid criticism, though, because his time is his to do with as he will. I don't like to see duplicated effort, but it's the nature of OSS: People work on what interests them.
Harping on usability is good. Thinking of the authors of software as interchangeable is unrealistic.
I really don't think the pharmaceutical industry has grounds for getting indignant when someone questions their ethics.
The problem is, once money gets involved, important questions of life and death, health and harm, take a back seat to financial decisions. These companies often hide research that would undermine the public perception of a product's safety, attack independent research as "junk science", and go to unconscionable lengths to keep their products from being pulled from the market.
I reject the notion that the profit motive is the best way to organize this sort of medical research. The reasons are twofold. First, it organizes it in such a way that we end up putting too many resources towards the ills of bored rich people (Viagra, for example) at the expense of the life-threatening diseases of those who cannot afford to pay back research costs (malaria, etc). Second, the various companies engaged in the research have every motivation to put the resulting product out, but what is their motivation for publishing the knowledge gained from researching it? Far better that they keep their results quiet, for fear that a competitor might take the knowledge, grasp some unseen implications of it, and beat them in the creation of some other product.
In fact, it would probably be better for everyone if knowledge was shared openly. It would certainly speed up the pace of research. That's what Stallman is getting at. The cloak-and-dagger science practiced by Big Pharma seems very inefficient to me.
Simpler, yes. But likely wrong.
Most important, the traits you describe are common to both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. But the effect they're trying to undersand occurs only within the former group.
I also have a hard time with the idea that mate selection alone would lead to such a profound effect in this one instance, when there are plenty of other societies where intelligence, literacy, and debate were prized.
The authors of the paper have their own reasons for dismissing your theory. But it's up to you to read it and decide if you agree with their reasoning.
I always find it interesting when people use "sir" as shorthand for "you pompous asshole". I've done it myself a few times.
I think that the views I have expressed are very much representative of the scientific mainstream. Genetics is primarily due to genetic factors. Your views, on the other hand, are backed by nothing but testimonials from a few confused Tony Robbins fans. And possibly the Scientologists, but hell, they'll believe anything.
I'm convinced that wishing yourself smarter is about as effective as wishing the sky bluer: The world just doesn't work that way. I also think that I have a lot of studies backing me up in this belief.
If I'm understanding the paper, conscious selection has nothing to do with their hypothesis. What do you mean by conscious selection?
First point: Your impressions of the relative intelligence of Irish-Americans vs. other American whites isn't the sort of scientific evidence that can be mustered against a paper. You know the old saying, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". In order to back yourself up, you would have to do a study where the IQ of Tay-Sachs carriers were compared to the population at large. Chances are, if this study gets famous enough, such a study will be done.
It's not just about Tay-Sachs. According to the paper, there are several highly debilitating genetic disorders that all occur in the target population, and all affect the same chemical pathways. Now, if four or five unrelated genetic disorders were more prevalent in one population, it would be easy to chalk it up to chance. But the fact that they're all acting on the same set of proteins (sphingolipids) leads us to the inevitable conclusion that it's not due to chance. Therefore, the presence of the genes for these disorders must confer some benefit that increases the bearer's genetic success.
These facts are considered pretty well settled among evolutionary anthropologists. The question now revolves around what benefit was actually conferred. It's unlikely to be resistance to disease (as with sickle-celled anemia) because the Ashkenazi Jews were exposed to the same diseases as the rest of the population. So these authors are looking at how they were treated by society.
The Jews in Europe weren't allowed to own land, but their religious practices suited them for jobs that required reading and writing. Further, they were highly encouraged to take banking jobs, which were critical to society despite the Church forbidding its members from practicing "usury". Finally, the Jews were forbidden from intermarrying with Christians, which allowed the two populations to diverge by sharply curtailing interbreeding.
It may turn out to be a "just so story" that has no basis in fact. But it's a damned clever hypothesis, and seems plausible on the surface. It certainly doesn't deserve an immediate, eye-rolling dismissal from someone who isn't qualified to pass judgment.
Note: According to Wikipedia, Irish-Americans have about half as many (1/50) Tay-Sachs carriers as Ashkenazi Jews (1/27). That rate is still four times that of the population at large, but do be more careful summarizing your sources.
The paper itself notes that there have been plenty of other groups with histories of persecution, and that persecution alone doesn't account for the effects. So that's exactly what they're not saying.
Einstein showed a talent for math and science from a young age. His difficulties as a young student were less severe than commonly assumed, and had more to do with personality conflicts and the soul-killing dullness of German education in that era. He most certainly should not be cited as an example of "dumb kid makes himself smart by trying really really hard".
I'm not saying that it's right or effective to shove kids onto whatever career track they seem cut out for at the age of five, but your example is dead wrong. Further, I think it's absurd and unfair to overinflate kids' expectations of their futures with platitudes about "Einstein was bad at math at your age," or "Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team". Even if both statements completely capture the young situation of two people who went on to excel in their respective fields (they don't), giving kids an expectation of similar performance is nothing but an unnecessary burden.
Sorry, but intelligence cannot be achieved through hard work. Genetics plays a huge role, and environment at a young age plays a smaller but important one. But neither of these factors are the result of conscious decisions by the developing mind.
The brain isn't a muscle. It doesn't even work well as an analogy, let alone as a statement of fact. Try thinking of it more as a chunk of sculptor's clay. Some people's brains are very malleable, and change easily to accomodate new tasks. Other brains are harder to work into a useful shape, and require more training. Once set in that shape, it requires an extraordinary effort to retrain it into another shape. A few people are completely solid, and no amount of coaxing or educating can prepare their minds for any but the simplest task.
Yes, you can push yourself above and beyond what one would expect from someone with your brain chemistry, simply by working hard. But there are limits to that, and there is evidence that work ethic itself has a strong genetic component. So if two people are performing the same task at the same level of competence, and one is able to do it because of her mix of intelligence and laziness, while the other can do it because his lower intelligence is compensated for by a stronger work ethic, it would seem that both are performing the way their genes dictate.
You and I could not match the intellectual feats of Einstein by sheer force of will, any more than we could chisel a beautiful marble sculpture using a toothpick as a chisel. No amount of effort can compensate for not having the right materials.
Finally, if a message of genetic fatalism is somehow demeaning, what of it? We don't discern truth from falsehood by deciding which statements make us feel better about ourselves.