In America, it's "use it or lose it" too. Especially with Trademarks.
I think that Cisco rushed the iPhone to market so that they could show that the mark was being used. Every time you file or renew a trademark, you have demonstrate use. If you don't use a trademark, then you can lose the rights to it.
Cisco pushed out the crappy iPhone a couple of weeks ago to solidify their position in terms of owning the iPhone trademark. Apple will probably have to pay them a big chunk of money to get access to the trademark.
Either that, or, as some others have suggested, Apple is just going to change the name to Apple Phone or something in the next couple of months. The official name will be "Apple Phone" but everyone will call it the "iPhone" forever since that is how it was introduced. It will be unofficial, but everyone will know that when you talk about iPhone, you really mean Apple Phone.
Plus... okay, you started reading TFA, but... where the hell did you pull the egomaniac celebrities bit from? They pretty specifically state that this would be for a few hours, only... and they don't even "freeze" them.
I mean, seriously.
OK, the frozen celebrity thing isn't in there. But, as a Bostononian, I can't help but think of poor Ted Williams whenever an article like this comes up.
First of all, there's no way in hell that they'll be testing this technique on humans within a year. We don't even know if the zombie dogs are going to survive another year! TFA claims that there's no damage to the dogs, but we can't know how their total lifespan is effected yet.
Second, if someday this technology is actually usable, I would prefer to see it used for space travel than for reviving egomaniac celebrities. Another good use might be freezing people who need kidney transplants and then defrosting them when the organs become available.
In other news, Hell has not frozen over yet, but it very well may.
According to sources who have so far filed accurate reports on Apple's future hardware plans, the company is feverishly working on a two-button wireless optical mouse that it intends to release.
Apple enthusiasts have longed for an Apple-branded two-button mouse for over a decade, but their requests have gone unanswered. So what has changed? According to sources, 'it's the company."
With Apple now profiting from low-priced consumer electronics as it makes a push to reclaim market share from Windows, a two-button mouse is 'almost an essential,' sources said.
It's unclear when the computer maker plans to introduce the mouse. Insiders warned that anticipation may continue to build for months as the company perfects the product.
Apple has just recently reduced the price of its wired mouse to $29 and its wireless optical mouse to $59. The two-button wireless optical mouse would likely debut at the $69 price point once reserved for the company's current wireless mouse.
That stuff is nasty. Not only is it made from petroleum (America's crack), but it doesn't biodegrade and may leach toxins into the food it holds. Also, if it burns, it releases toxic particulates into the air.
Acer corporation today announced that it has merged with the American Chiropractic Association. Their first joint project is a 16-pound "laptop" that, when carried around in a backpack, should produce revenues for both organizations.
Write the software for free and then earn a lifetime's wages in supporting it.
But, doesn't this provide a bit of an incentive to write opaque and quirky code with poor documentation so that people need your help?? I mean, if you wrote a completely usable and straightforward app, then how are you going to make money?
Doesn't it seem counterproductive to have a system like this where you can be rewarded for shoddy work?
But a neuron is more that a Boolean circuit. Although a neuron seems like a two-state device (its either quiesent or its firing), it is more of an N-state analog device in which the pulse-rate encodes a numerical quantity (probably the equivalent of an 8 to 16 bit floating point number). That is why the dendrite field is like a giant numerical multiply-accumulate.
You're right on-- the change in firing rate relative to the baseline firing rate is very important. Also, there is some reason to think (logically and biologically) that some ensembles of neurons fire synchronously with each other and asynchronously from other ensembles of neurons. By using synchrony of firing, they gain computational power and allow for variable binding, thus allowing more formally logical computations to happen than just autocorrelation our boolean operations.
If I have four neurons, and one represents "red," one represents "green," one represents "square" and one represents "circle," then it is very difficult to tell (based on the sustained activity of the neurons alone) whether they are responding to a red circle and a green square or a red square and a green circle. This is called "the binding problem" and, at least in neural networks, can be solved by distributing the firing patterns of the neurons over time. So, "red" and "circle" fire in synch, then rest while "green" and "square" fire in synch and then rest while "red" and "circle"... etc. Notice that you could even have "red" bound with both "circle" and "square" by being active over two epochs, thus allowing for dynamic binding of variables, etc.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that if we can figure out how some of this temporal synchrony dimension is exploited in the brain, then we should be able to harness that computational power through silicon transistors like the one described in this article and build modules that could replace damaged regions of the brain.
When the iPod was introduced in January of 2002, it was 5Gb and cost $399.
Then, in the summer of 2002, Apple dropped the price of the 5Gb model to $299, made the 10Gb model $399 and introduced a 20 Gb model for $499.
At this point, the iPod was selling like hotcakes even though its average price was $400.
Now they've introduced the smaller, lighter, COLORED (oooh!) 4Gb iPod mini for $50 less than the older 5Gb iPod.
These are going to sell great now, but just wait until Apple drops the price on the iPod mini. I predict that we'll see them at $199 by this summer, and then EVERYONE will have one, including me.
The Australian government today lost several of their surveillance helicopters after their new Mantis prototype mated with them and then bit their heads off.
I agree!! If you make it to SF, you've GOT to go see the exploratoriumhttp://www.exploratorium.com
Lots of hands-on science exhibits from many fields.
~percepto
by having a group of non-video game players play video games for 1 hr. every day for a week. They either played Medal of Honor or Tetris. MoH requires distributed visual attention on multiple targets. Tetris requires concentration on a single piece while you place it. The MoH players showed more improvement in their visual attention skills than the Tetris players, though both showed improvement.
Thus, we can conclude that playing video games is known to improve visual perception skills. This suggests that the superiority of the video game players over the non-video game players is at least partially due to training gained from years of playing video games.
Clearly there also is the selection effect you mentioned-- By my observation, some people definitely are 'turned off by games' because they 'can't track that many objects at once': They're called females. ON AVERAGE, men have better spatial skills than women (it's obviously more complex than that, but I don't want to get derailed). That probably leads males towards games, at least in the beginning, because they can do well at them. From there, the males' visual perception skills are improved even more by many years of video game playing. So, I think there is also evidence that people who are better at video games are more likely to play them.
But, the article clearly showed that BOTH men and women showed improvement in their visuospatial skills after playing Medal of Honor for a week. Regardless of who is attracted to video games in the first place, we can definitively conclude that playing certain kinds of video games improves visual attention for everyone.
They certainly didn't do that for the *thousands* of faulty Airports. They put underrated capacitors in the airports, causing them to stop working.. did apple fix everyone's airport.
I have a 1st Generation Grey AirPort and it stopped working about a year after I got it. I took it down to an Apple store and had them look at it. The guy confirmed that it wasn't working, checked the serial number against a list of affected units, and handed me a refurbished AirPort immediately. No questions asked. That AirPort has been working great ever since.
I've had excellent success with Apple and repairs. If they can do it for free at the Apple Store, they do (like one time when a CD got stuck in my TiBook because I dropped it. BTW, the TiBook took a lickin' and kept on tickin'. Yay Titanium!)
Another time the videocard on my G3 Pismo burned out for some reason. It was under warranty, so I put it in for repair on a Tuesday, and had the thing back in my hands on Thursday afternoon. Apple turned it around in one day with free overnight shipping on either side.
Look, computers break, software has bugs, and people do stupid things (like dropping their laptops). The thing is, how does your computer company handle it? I think Apple has got to be one of the best in the business.
So, I don't know if Apple fixed everyone's AirPort, but I'd bet that they were willing to, if you brought it down to an Apple Store or sent it in.
IN the case of the Matrix, I believe the brothers who's name I won't attemt to spell, simply stumbled upon this formula. Certainly there are similarities and this is what makes it such a compelling story, but as far as I know, they didn't approach the writing of the story as methodically, or in such a calculating way as did George Lucas or the author of the Harry Potter books.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. I think Neo takes the classic hero journey. Just off the top of my head:
First, he gets the "call to adventure": "Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you..."
He meets Trinity (at the club), a messenger from beyond who re-affirms the call.
He rejects the call by getting out of the car on the way to meet Morpheus.
Next, he meets Morpheus and accepts the call (takes the red pill). (It was the red one, right?)
After being rescued from the Matrix, he is in the wild (the real world). Here, the old rules don't apply and he must forge a new identity.
While out in the wild, he discovers new powers. His wise mentor is Morpheus. The trickster is Cypher.
Next, he returns home (by jacking back into the Matrix) and brings uses his newfound powers to help the rest of society.
This is the classic hero cycle of hearing the call, rejecting the call, accepting the call, going into the wild, forging a new identity (with the help of a wise mentor), dealing with a trickster, returning from the wild with newfound knowledge and/or powers.
The same structure was used in Star Wars IV-VI and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which is part of the reason why those two series also resonate with people so much. The hero mythology is a metaphor for life and how to live it.
One of the hypotheses forwarded in the article is that a lack of inhibitory neurotransmitter is allowing crosstalk between brain regions that normally don't interact. So, shape representations (as realized in neural hardware) active color representations (which reside nearby in the brain).
ALSO, it's possible for crosstalk between nearby brain regions that might represent more abstract notions or ideas. So random ideas that don't normally "go together" get simultaneously activated at the same time.
With one chemical interaction (the release of inhibition between nearby cortical regions by blocking a neurotransmitter), you get both perceptual and conceptual crosstalk.
Sound like LSD or mushrooms to anyone?
One of the effects of these drugs may be a release of neural inhibition, which manifests itself in several different areas of the brain, and hence at several levels of the things the brain does-- perception and cognition. Brain regions that don't normally "fire" together because of inhibition suddenly start becoming coactivated (Hey, man, I can SEE the notes flying off Jerry's fingers!).
By shaking up the stereotypical neurocognitive dynamics that one typically engages in, LSD may not only cause the "cool dude" visual illusions, but also the deep and meaningful connections between ideas and expereniences that people find mystical.
Where neurology studies the actual chemical reactions and neural activity, cognitive science studies how the "hardware" works to achieve our thought processes.
You *almost* got it. Cog Sci approaches the mind as an information processing device and seeks to understand the algorithms (mental representations and processes) operating on the incoming data. Thus, Cog Sci is the study of the mind as software not "hardware".
This is why babies can't see, even though the optics work.
Actually, newborn babies can do more sophisticated visual processing than you might think. In the first day of life, they have a preference for looking at faces over other stimuli. Plus, if you put two TV screens up with people talking on both and a speaker in the middle that's playing a soundtrack of one of the people but not the other, babies prefer to look at the TV screen that matches the sound. Thus, babies are wired to perform some fairly sophisticated cross-modal perceptual processing from the beginning.
Not to say that babies can see THAT well-- the mylenation of neurons (kinda like insulation on an electrical wire) in the brain isn't finished until years after birth, which limits the conductivity of neural signals and therefore the babies' perceptual and motor repertoire.
The perceptual system comes pre-wired for some basic things, and then self-organizes the rest based on the statistics of visual input from natural scenes. For instance, they've raised kittens in environments with nothing but vertical stripes, and after a while, they lose the ability to perceive horizontal stripes. (Sick experiments, but informative.)
The record labels get $.65 of the $.99 for each track. Apple pockets the other $.34.
Also, whole albums are just $9.99. Since most albums are more than 10 songs, that's a lower cost per track on average. So, quitcher bitchin.
And to all of the college students who say they're too poor to actually pay for music-- How about skipping that Domino's Pizza tonight and spending that $10 on something more permanent than clogged arteries.
How about including an iTunes Plug-In that shows videos of the songs as the same time you're playing it? Or photos of the band with the slow Ken Burns zoom effect? Customized techno visual effects?
Why is fun to buy CDs, or especially vinyl? The album art. The visual feeling of the band to go with the music. Let's bring this concept to the 21st century.
Sure, it makes sense to be able to get a couple of specific songs from an album if that's what you want. $.99 for this seems reasonable.
But how about adding value to the album as a whole and make it worth $14.
Slashdot Mirror
In America, it's "use it or lose it" too. Especially with Trademarks.
I think that Cisco rushed the iPhone to market so that they could show that the mark was being used. Every time you file or renew a trademark, you have demonstrate use. If you don't use a trademark, then you can lose the rights to it.
Cisco pushed out the crappy iPhone a couple of weeks ago to solidify their position in terms of owning the iPhone trademark. Apple will probably have to pay them a big chunk of money to get access to the trademark.
Either that, or, as some others have suggested, Apple is just going to change the name to Apple Phone or something in the next couple of months. The official name will be "Apple Phone" but everyone will call it the "iPhone" forever since that is how it was introduced. It will be unofficial, but everyone will know that when you talk about iPhone, you really mean Apple Phone.
Actually, what Steve said was that he owned 1 share of APPL so that he could get the yearly stock report.
I mean, seriously.
OK, the frozen celebrity thing isn't in there. But, as a Bostononian, I can't help but think of poor Ted Williams whenever an article like this comes up.
Second, if someday this technology is actually usable, I would prefer to see it used for space travel than for reviving egomaniac celebrities. Another good use might be freezing people who need kidney transplants and then defrosting them when the organs become available.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=951
-- From the Link --
A Two-Button Apple Mouse
In other news, Hell has not frozen over yet, but it very well may.
According to sources who have so far filed accurate reports on Apple's future hardware plans, the company is feverishly working on a two-button wireless optical mouse that it intends to release.
Apple enthusiasts have longed for an Apple-branded two-button mouse for over a decade, but their requests have gone unanswered. So what has changed? According to sources, 'it's the company."
With Apple now profiting from low-priced consumer electronics as it makes a push to reclaim market share from Windows, a two-button mouse is 'almost an essential,' sources said.
It's unclear when the computer maker plans to introduce the mouse. Insiders warned that anticipation may continue to build for months as the company perfects the product.
Apple has just recently reduced the price of its wired mouse to $29 and its wireless optical mouse to $59. The two-button wireless optical mouse would likely debut at the $69 price point once reserved for the company's current wireless mouse.
"Jaws will drop," said one insider.
That stuff is nasty. Not only is it made from petroleum (America's crack), but it doesn't biodegrade and may leach toxins into the food it holds. Also, if it burns, it releases toxic particulates into the air.
But, doesn't this provide a bit of an incentive to write opaque and quirky code with poor documentation so that people need your help?? I mean, if you wrote a completely usable and straightforward app, then how are you going to make money?
Doesn't it seem counterproductive to have a system like this where you can be rewarded for shoddy work?
~percepto
You're right on-- the change in firing rate relative to the baseline firing rate is very important. Also, there is some reason to think (logically and biologically) that some ensembles of neurons fire synchronously with each other and asynchronously from other ensembles of neurons. By using synchrony of firing, they gain computational power and allow for variable binding, thus allowing more formally logical computations to happen than just autocorrelation our boolean operations.
If I have four neurons, and one represents "red," one represents "green," one represents "square" and one represents "circle," then it is very difficult to tell (based on the sustained activity of the neurons alone) whether they are responding to a red circle and a green square or a red square and a green circle. This is called "the binding problem" and, at least in neural networks, can be solved by distributing the firing patterns of the neurons over time. So, "red" and "circle" fire in synch, then rest while "green" and "square" fire in synch and then rest while "red" and "circle"... etc. Notice that you could even have "red" bound with both "circle" and "square" by being active over two epochs, thus allowing for dynamic binding of variables, etc.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that if we can figure out how some of this temporal synchrony dimension is exploited in the brain, then we should be able to harness that computational power through silicon transistors like the one described in this article and build modules that could replace damaged regions of the brain.
How many women do you know who DON'T have a cell phone?
If so, I want one!
Then, in the summer of 2002, Apple dropped the price of the 5Gb model to $299, made the 10Gb model $399 and introduced a 20 Gb model for $499.
At this point, the iPod was selling like hotcakes even though its average price was $400.
Now they've introduced the smaller, lighter, COLORED (oooh!) 4Gb iPod mini for $50 less than the older 5Gb iPod.
These are going to sell great now, but just wait until Apple drops the price on the iPod mini. I predict that we'll see them at $199 by this summer, and then EVERYONE will have one, including me.
I agree!! If you make it to SF, you've GOT to go see the exploratoriumhttp://www.exploratorium.com Lots of hands-on science exhibits from many fields. ~percepto
Thus, we can conclude that playing video games is known to improve visual perception skills. This suggests that the superiority of the video game players over the non-video game players is at least partially due to training gained from years of playing video games.
Clearly there also is the selection effect you mentioned-- By my observation, some people definitely are 'turned off by games' because they 'can't track that many objects at once': They're called females. ON AVERAGE, men have better spatial skills than women (it's obviously more complex than that, but I don't want to get derailed). That probably leads males towards games, at least in the beginning, because they can do well at them. From there, the males' visual perception skills are improved even more by many years of video game playing. So, I think there is also evidence that people who are better at video games are more likely to play them.
But, the article clearly showed that BOTH men and women showed improvement in their visuospatial skills after playing Medal of Honor for a week. Regardless of who is attracted to video games in the first place, we can definitively conclude that playing certain kinds of video games improves visual attention for everyone.
~percepto
)
Your LISP is rusty, eh?
=0) ~percepto
I have a 1st Generation Grey AirPort and it stopped working about a year after I got it. I took it down to an Apple store and had them look at it. The guy confirmed that it wasn't working, checked the serial number against a list of affected units, and handed me a refurbished AirPort immediately. No questions asked. That AirPort has been working great ever since.
I've had excellent success with Apple and repairs. If they can do it for free at the Apple Store, they do (like one time when a CD got stuck in my TiBook because I dropped it. BTW, the TiBook took a lickin' and kept on tickin'. Yay Titanium!)
Another time the videocard on my G3 Pismo burned out for some reason. It was under warranty, so I put it in for repair on a Tuesday, and had the thing back in my hands on Thursday afternoon. Apple turned it around in one day with free overnight shipping on either side.
Look, computers break, software has bugs, and people do stupid things (like dropping their laptops). The thing is, how does your computer company handle it? I think Apple has got to be one of the best in the business.
So, I don't know if Apple fixed everyone's AirPort, but I'd bet that they were willing to, if you brought it down to an Apple Store or sent it in.
---------------
Sigaliscious.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. I think Neo takes the classic hero journey. Just off the top of my head:
First, he gets the "call to adventure": "Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you..."
He meets Trinity (at the club), a messenger from beyond who re-affirms the call.
He rejects the call by getting out of the car on the way to meet Morpheus.
Next, he meets Morpheus and accepts the call (takes the red pill). (It was the red one, right?)
After being rescued from the Matrix, he is in the wild (the real world). Here, the old rules don't apply and he must forge a new identity.
While out in the wild, he discovers new powers. His wise mentor is Morpheus. The trickster is Cypher.
Next, he returns home (by jacking back into the Matrix) and brings uses his newfound powers to help the rest of society.
This is the classic hero cycle of hearing the call, rejecting the call, accepting the call, going into the wild, forging a new identity (with the help of a wise mentor), dealing with a trickster, returning from the wild with newfound knowledge and/or powers.
The same structure was used in Star Wars IV-VI and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which is part of the reason why those two series also resonate with people so much. The hero mythology is a metaphor for life and how to live it.
~percepto
------------------"You only have to realize the truth."
"What truth?"
"There is no sig."
ALSO, it's possible for crosstalk between nearby brain regions that might represent more abstract notions or ideas. So random ideas that don't normally "go together" get simultaneously activated at the same time.
With one chemical interaction (the release of inhibition between nearby cortical regions by blocking a neurotransmitter), you get both perceptual and conceptual crosstalk.
Sound like LSD or mushrooms to anyone?
One of the effects of these drugs may be a release of neural inhibition, which manifests itself in several different areas of the brain, and hence at several levels of the things the brain does-- perception and cognition. Brain regions that don't normally "fire" together because of inhibition suddenly start becoming coactivated (Hey, man, I can SEE the notes flying off Jerry's fingers!).
By shaking up the stereotypical neurocognitive dynamics that one typically engages in, LSD may not only cause the "cool dude" visual illusions, but also the deep and meaningful connections between ideas and expereniences that people find mystical.
You *almost* got it. Cog Sci approaches the mind as an information processing device and seeks to understand the algorithms (mental representations and processes) operating on the incoming data. Thus, Cog Sci is the study of the mind as software not "hardware".
This is why babies can't see, even though the optics work.
Actually, newborn babies can do more sophisticated visual processing than you might think. In the first day of life, they have a preference for looking at faces over other stimuli. Plus, if you put two TV screens up with people talking on both and a speaker in the middle that's playing a soundtrack of one of the people but not the other, babies prefer to look at the TV screen that matches the sound. Thus, babies are wired to perform some fairly sophisticated cross-modal perceptual processing from the beginning.
Not to say that babies can see THAT well-- the mylenation of neurons (kinda like insulation on an electrical wire) in the brain isn't finished until years after birth, which limits the conductivity of neural signals and therefore the babies' perceptual and motor repertoire.
The perceptual system comes pre-wired for some basic things, and then self-organizes the rest based on the statistics of visual input from natural scenes. For instance, they've raised kittens in environments with nothing but vertical stripes, and after a while, they lose the ability to perceive horizontal stripes. (Sick experiments, but informative.)
Here, kitty kitty...
----------
Hey, buddy-- Can you spare a sig?
The record labels get $.65 of the $.99 for each track. Apple pockets the other $.34.
Also, whole albums are just $9.99. Since most albums are more than 10 songs, that's a lower cost per track on average. So, quitcher bitchin.
And to all of the college students who say they're too poor to actually pay for music-- How about skipping that Domino's Pizza tonight and spending that $10 on something more permanent than clogged arteries.
iTunes could do so much more!!
How about including an iTunes Plug-In that shows videos of the songs as the same time you're playing it? Or photos of the band with the slow Ken Burns zoom effect? Customized techno visual effects?
Why is fun to buy CDs, or especially vinyl? The album art. The visual feeling of the band to go with the music. Let's bring this concept to the 21st century.
Sure, it makes sense to be able to get a couple of specific songs from an album if that's what you want. $.99 for this seems reasonable.
But how about adding value to the album as a whole and make it worth $14.
Just a thought.