Steve: a lot of your comments in/. are on the money or at least worth a read but "as long as we have a few smart people..." is abjectly elitist and dooms us to a downward spiral...I'm sure some in the whitehouse hold the same view even if they are not aware they are one of the dimwits. and as for "...it doesn't matter how many dumb people you have..." Did you notice our recent election? ...If only 5% of students are really good at math, that is still tens of millions of students and thats more than enough to engineer world class materials and products. The other 95% will get jobs to service others,... I don't think so. Unless you can put that 5% all in one place, they won't have anybody who understands them, or can even STAND them and they won't have anybody to compete with. Don't underestimate comptetitive instinct as a motive to drag the best performance out of people. Having a place, like MIT, doesn't seem to work either:
MIT gets only a fourth of its students from other countries as a matter of policy and could easily take more if grades and test scores were the only criteria for admission. Your spin on foriegn students misses the point: we need them as much as they need us if we are going to remain a country of "the best and the brightest" and keep the old phrase "American know-how" from becoming a joke.
Lets look at your math a bit more closely: get the
census bureau demographic picture for this [or any other ] country. In our case there are only 60 million people old enough to be in school. Suppose they all were in school. Then your 5% number is 3 million, country wide, in all grades who are capable of benefitting from a more strenuous math curriculum. No school system I know can provide tutors for a gifted 5%. Or, viewed another way, only in poorer schools [class size > 20 ]would you be likely to find even one of your worthy student per classroom on average.
NO. Wrong answer, Wrong attitude. The number who could really "get" most math is closer to 50% if it were a family and community value [read the comments about Korea] to do so and the salary and community respect for teachers would attract teachers that "got" math. People are put in classrooms to learn about things. They are put in familys to care about things...but the caring predicts success for the learning.
except that Claude Shannon showed how there is a kind of equivelence betweeen the two, I think a counter [which I haven't time to support in detail just now...you gotta write your own Phd thesis!] is that Evolution is working toward the most efficient representation of INFORMATION. And , as Carl Sagan explained, once evolution takes things to a point where beings can manipulate symbols in their heads, they transfer that ability to machinery and then evolution no longer is confined to nor expresses its results solely in DNA. And then you race toward the singularity! [or self anihilation...we're still working on that]
I could not agree more strongly with your last sentence. YET, I quibble: My view is that we cripple and confuse our thinking once we posit that there are only two categories of human, regardless of what you ascribe to those categories or whether you consider exceptions to those categories wicked or merely nature gone wrong. Well, its a complex topic. And one about which many people are in a state of nervous desperation to hang on to a simple view, often religously based, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. So I could be excused for not wanting to stray into gender issues from a discussion about handedness but FWIW...
We have, based on common experience of there being two basic human physiologies [but that has exceptions too!], a sloppy but nearly universal expectation that there are two kinds of human sexual wiring. I doubt that highly. There are more than just square pegs and square holes! With dozens of genes that go into mental and physical characteristics the combinations are far in excess of two. I have no doubt that male homosexuality, to cite only one example, is largely a genetically determined trait with some post-conception but in-utero influences. The plasticity of the human brain could not account for more than a tiny fraction of those who react homosexually when presented the right stimulus...you can't "cure" genetic traits. Simon Levay did brain autopsies over a decade ago that showed SOME homosexual men had neuroanatomy features more common in women [which, I think, means the answer to one of your questions is a qualified "yes"]. It was over a decade ago that I read a report of a study that found that boys aged 2 to 5 who persisted in playing with dolls [when the other boys were pretending to shoot each other] had much higher chance of maturing with a homosexual orientation. More recently, birth order, number and gender of siblings and family history studies support these conclusions very clearly. Cultural taboo more than anything else keeps these findings from simply being accepted...more people belive in christ AND flying saucers than accept some results of well conducted scientific investigations. [As we say: Go Figure!] Here are
links to
reviews of the literature. A press report of a particular recent finding [not uncontroverial to be sure] Even groups utterly resistant to science admit two categories don't suffice
Some differences [largely cultural?] are funny
I don't know where to stop so I better just stop by saying that I suspect we really are dealing with 4 or maybe 8 categories of human in the dimension of sexuality and that is just among the phyiscally normal humans. The tie-in between orientation and other traits such as handedness, spatial reasoning ability, resistance to stroke, prefence for dolls vs guns as a child and needlework vs motorsports as an adult...etc is probably a PhD thesis just to posit a fruitful categorization scheme, let alone to dig up any of the underlying phyical mechanisms, neuroanatomical characteristics or active genes. Here are 4 categories [of adult] for starters:
I have a boy who made it into college inspite of having the least legible handwriting I have ever seen. in high school the teacher's were distraught over flunking a kid they knew was fairly bright...they urged us to get him a lap top for homework and taking notes. Keyboards are instinctive to him, piano or qwerty.
As to the question in the article: I think the impact of the computer depends largely on the nature and talents of the child. We are now up to 6 computers, one with two NICs for firewall duties and 5 on ethernet hub behind the firewall...my non-geek artistically inclined son with the perfect penmanship insists on a Mac and churns out well researched history papers...and complains loudly if internet service is disrupted [and yes, IM supports an invisible virtual neighborhood vital to him, unknown to me]. He just got into NYU. An older sister hated computers and suffered when mom and dad, a couple of SW engineers, sent her to computer camp one summer. She wouldn't use a computer for anything until her junior year at UC Berkeley. But she certainly overcame the bad experience. That was years ago but now she's downloading BIOS upgrades for her lap top so she could install Win2K Pro on it. She accepted the computer becasue if you live a mobile life, a computer is the only way you are going to have a permanent address.]
All different as can be and NONE hurt by their experience with computers. A computer is just a video game or mp3 player if thats all you want and there is no household work ethic...or its a great mind appliance and communication tool if the household mantra is "you can suck or you can do your homework...your choice WHEN YOU MOVE OUT"
he's just "whistling past the cemetary" to ignore OSX and the BSDs. If yesterday's/. discussion of the potential of an IBM/Apple alliance were more than talk of rumors, there would definitely be a "final four" with OSX gaining customers and not lacking for longterm funding.
We all have a brain and most of us have two hands so I guess that qualifies all of us to report anecdotal evidence and extrapolate. But chimp research would have to null out the contributions to handedness that might be made by any number of OTHER differences in brain development between humans and the rest of the primates before these scientists, let alone a bunch of/. readers could draw conclusions:.
The timeline of human brain development from birth to adolescence is hardly one of linear increases in all capabilities and is not the same as chimps
the LACK of parity between LH and RH dominant individuals is complex: the numbers are not evenly distributed but that is obscured, as serveral posters reported, by cultural enforcers that mask biologicaly determined behavior. We might even be seeing the reports of apparent intellectual advantages in a few lefties because our culture has beaten the lefthandedness out of a larger subset of the population with only the more gifted and adaptable surviving the brainwashing.
...These areas have a definite correlation to handedness as a right-handed person has a 97% chance of having these speech structures on the left versus the right while in a left-handed person has a 50-50 chance of this (if my neuroanatomy is correct)....[bloodredsun's comment] is particularly interesting since it implies there are yet other dimensions to the asymmetry between LR and RH dominance, these are not distributions of capability that are anatomically just mirror images of each other but distinctly different wiring.
I have not read every comment but so far there is no report of data correlating extent of corpus collosum [CC:the bridge between L and R hemispheres. nearest analog to a computer bus you will find in brain anatomy] to handedness. The CC is [if memory serves] is better developed in women than men ON AVERAGE and women [perhaps as a consequence] have [on average] less rigid specialization of functions to particular brain regions. This is why [on average] women recover more fully from strokes then men do.
someone probably trotted out the stat that lefties have more accidents and I just missed it. Its a whole other debate about whether that is due to strong tendencies to put the saftey/kill-switch/brakes/etc on dangerous equipment where a RH person would expect them or due to other considerations but its not likely to be attributable to language skills...differences between LH and RH persons that don't stem from language either support or don't repute the findings of the article so I guess this one is a point for the sciencists.
Is there any study or known correlation between handedness and [_]dyslexia, [_]ADD or ADHD, [_]Stuttering, [_] other developmental anomalies, e.g. autism?
But, of course, I have my anecdotes too;) My mom reports that she was probably a lefty but growing up in the 30's in a Missouri village where the dogs barked in German and you were either a Luthern or a Methodist, she had that bad habit beaten out of her. One of my boys writes [illegibly] with his left hand but throws [and I mean quite athletcally: he's an ultimate frisby player] righty. and PLEASE, if you can't read or react in an informed and rational way concerning the general fact that there are differences between men and women, please exit the conversation NOW!.
did you note my experience at Rational?
I know the white-shirt-and-tie is a hoary old myth
but until engineers in a place as self-consciously iconoclastic as Apple actually meet a few managers from IBM, they are probably happier with the myth.
you gotta own your own name. I have so many frigging identies the same way as I got to lug
around a pocket full of keys...I go places not
everyone is trusted to go..e.g. my bank account,
my car, my email etc.
Identies are necessary like keys to make sure the entitled party has exclusive access to things that he/she "owns" in whatever sense.
WTF do I own that these 2idi.com people are going to guard for me? They have set up a toll booth in the middle of frigging e-nowhere.net and hope people will still pay.
hey somebody mod parent up! [I blew my mod points earlier this morning.] This is informative and casts a harsh light on all the other posts that are saying that Apple and IBM is like , well apples and oranges.
I don't recall the dates of Steve Job's absence from Apple. Maybe all the Taligent drama played out while Jobs was off conceiving the Next Big Thing. The cultural differences and Mr Job's, uh shall we call it management style, are certainly impediments to a merger. If you think Apple won't be Apple without Jobs, then even a consumated merger will be between IBM and "some PC alternative that lost its magic"...I'm not so sure. Just keep in mind how often and in how many ways IBM has been bested by Microsoft and needs, for business and maybe more emotional reasons, to settle the score. Some readers here may be aware that one reason we all use Windows instead of OS2 was that Microsoft was handed the first-mover advantage at the dawn of the PC era by the fact that IBM was still reeling from a 7-year antitrust battle with the DOJ: IBM was forced to find an indepent company to provide the OS for their new PC...by the time they decided that they could push OS2, it was too late. That still stings. Now DOJ is just finishing up with Microsoft, and the cards are not all dealt yet in europe...an IBM/Apple hardware or software offering would not operate under such a cloud.
The fact that Apple has for the most part strangled its market potential by keeping its hardware platforms proprietary and its systems, therefore, more expensive than the waves of cheap biege boxes that microsoft rode to glory would become an advantage to a company with the manufacturing might of IBM. A lesser partner for Apple would not have the "nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM"-mentality going for them. So the proprietary Mac realm, with nary an alternative platform, has been a huge if self inflicted limitation to Apple's market appeal but the IBM name could erase that deficit if only they bring out a few budget models at the bottom of the market. IBM is already making the CPU and has both the "Cell" processor and some low power consumption techologies that can extend the technical sexiness and superior performace of Apple products for quite a few years without increasing the costs.
Apple [just ask its faithul users and investors] has been on the perpetual verge of gaining more marketshare: they certainly have mindshare exceeding their market penetration. Who would need much convincing that IBM would love to shove Gate's aside? Having shed their PC division [how many of those PC were sold with *nix on them?], what harm could they do themselves by energizing an alternative platform that, with a few impractical exceptions, demands an OS solution that Microsoft can't horn in on? Remember when you last had an idea for an application and had to choose whether to develop it for Mac or for Windows? You went where the money was probably. Users have a more complicated choice with some driven by price, some needing the security of the most stable vendor or the most supported OS and some more interested in the most elegant and powerful user interface. If all of a sudden the Mac is an IBM product, Apple goes from meeting one out of three to two out of
three customer concerns...[and maybe the constant
flow of news about Microsoft security holes will begin to soak in, but most PC users aren't reading that news]. The outcome would certainly NOT be the Mac/Wintel ratio suddenly capsizeing. But when you get your next application idea, the decision that could confront you might be more like: "do I develop for the larger but very crowded market with the platform that is peaked or do I bet on the momentum?" Remember, investors invest in momentum ( their guess about where the herd is headed). Users just want to be in the middle of a herd. As a developer, you have to figure out where your paycheck is coming from: investors or users. Also,
IBM has learned how to digest companies slowly: witness Lotus and Rational...by the time the last sandal-shod Apple engineer has been driven nuts by some east coast guys that wear ties [nobody at Rational was wearing a tie when I interviewed there this spring], IBM will have long since assimilated all the Apple ideas that it can use.
about the internet "changing everything" had
some truth to it. The dot com euphoria got me
into [and just as promptly out of] several jobs
at startups that were funded because even smart
[ok, greedy] people believed absolutely everyone
would be shoping on line, be in constant contact
with all their friends and so on...
I know booking air travel is largely out of the hands of travel agents so a few business activities
are pretty much dominated by internet. But other activities like watching movies are more representative of the reported internet-demanding demographic...and sure enough: the video stores, even chains like Blockbuster, are closing in my area or running nearly constant sales and promotions to compete with the downloads...kinda
unfair to those who still dial up for internet and pay for movies. [did you sell your AOL/timeWarner
stock yet?]
running out of eggs is a theory in some jeopardy...I recall some mouse work that found eggs were still manufactured in adult females...not the case that the female was born with her life time allotment..but you could be right...we are way out on a hypothetical limb anyway.
...their volunteers promote products simply because it makes them feel good....
Slashdot runs on volunteer writers who [except maybe Roland Clique-appeal] don't make a cent and just submit items because it makes them feel good.
Probably not. If you look it up
polyethylene glycol
is a "stabilizer/thickener" and relatively inert. ITs function in spinal injuries is to , in effect, coat the injured nerves in a way that prevents some unhelpful things ["glutamate cascade"? in the case of strokes] that the body does for injured nerve tissue...its effect may almost be mechanical more than biochemical.
living with the consequences of your decisions would be a deterent for me it might keep some people from wasting natural resources but c'mon! We have heard for decades that smoking will kill us, sloppy sex will get us AIDS and running around in SUVs is ruining the environment AND WE STILL DO ALL THOSE THINGS! Throw in things like inner city birthrates for unmarried teenagers who,in this goofy scenario, can remain fertile until they are, lets say 400
years old...get my point? There are some people who live with out a friggin' clue about the consequences of their actions.
sorry. its hard to get'em right. The SCIAM link
was pasted from a googling session. I have my own
digitalsciam account but I know those links can't be passed around. If I try this again, I'll look harder for
links that work for all readers. Trouble is they always work for me, testing is tricky...I need to be someone else!
The user experience that I think atonomic computing is trying to improve is the "I don't think its working" and all that can be done in that respect is that a system be able to fail-over and recover from user errors. [I think there are social issues with trying to enhance the computer's "person experience";]. And users are not the only humans a good system has to tolerate,
some pretty bad things can happen when the system administrators screw up. Clearly autonomic computing is not going to be founded on computing elements that give you a BSOD if you just leave them running too long.
Doris Dennings work cited by other poster might
have been seen as prior art...it was 6 years
ahead of me. the USC facility I mentioned is
on line at http://www.etcenter.org/DCL.asp
but I had an idea like this. When USC and the movie industry started a reasearch consortium two years ago to figure out how to digitally distribute movies to theaters securely, I offered them this suggestion:
embed GPS location data in the encryption key
build [like tighlty integrated and potted] a GPS reciever into the digital theater playback equipment.
scramble the GPS output in some way that is also accounted for in the encryption of the digital movie stream and is unique to the serial number of the playback equipment
if the digital copy of the movie is not being decrypted on a playback unit that is in the right place, all you get is a call from the FBI.
I am leaving out a few details here of course;)
But I never heard back from them...like I said: I am not Woz. This application of location-based encryption does not have the numerous problems many posters have raised concerning location based enabling of functions in a laptop [or any other equipment desinged NOT to have a set location...duh!]. Also, these ideas add cost to anything you apply them to: laptops are commodity items and very cost sensitive but a movie theatre spends gazillions on its [FIXED LOCATION] equipment anyway.
Slashdotters: I can't think of a better bunch of people to share wortless ideas with!
What if we frame it this way:
Lycos did not itself or via its employees directly take this action. they gave the victims of the spammers a way to fight back. The people who have not asked to have their inbox crambed with unwanted, often fraudulent emails have the feckless help of a few antispam laws and not much else except to change addresses often. I am sure the spammer didn't ask for all those pings or whatever the Lycos spammerjammer does...turnabout is fair play.
If the collective ill will wishes of the spammer's countless victims towards these scum were somehow brought to life, there would be smoking craters and body parts, not just a few plugged up servers.
anti spyware is good business: CA just bought up
pest patrol, even though they had a joint marketing
thing going with Zone Alarm. All I am getting
as a result is some additional junk mail from
PP/CA and as reported in/., PP aint that great
anyway.
Be sure to attend
The FTC workshop on P2P networks If you read the adgenda, you would think FTC is trying to convince people that P2P is a threat to consumers. It would make sense to use a spurious issue that pushes congressional hot buttons if you wanted to slap restrictive laws on P2P since protecting copyrights doesn't get out the votes.
Oh, yeah the weather. I bike to work in new england: a very detailed forcast is critical to my saftey so this little victory is a serious win from my perspective. I already paid taxes for this data...be damned if I'll pay twice for it.
This is ancient but you didn't get to hear about it here because my submissions are uninteresting. The story I submitted:
2004.11.01: Robot ears for urban violence
Technology Review's
Prototype column reports an improved acoustic recognizer intended to function as ears for the police in bad neighborhoods. "Software developed by Ted Berger, director of the University of Southern California Center for Neural Engineering, can be trained to recognize and distinguish sounds that are indicators of a security breach or a safety hazard, such as a gunshot..." Though Berger's innovations lower the rate of "false positives",
other countries have already developed and deployed
such systems for defense purposes. The grunts in Iraq could sure use one of these. If you invert the math for the acoustic beam-forming, you get a nifty intelligent buildings kind of application.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve: a lot of your comments in /. are on the money or at least worth a read but "as long as we have a few smart people..." is abjectly elitist and dooms us to a downward spiral...I'm sure some in the whitehouse hold the same view even if they are not aware they are one of the dimwits. and as for "...it doesn't matter how many dumb people you have..." Did you notice our recent election?
...If only 5% of students are really good at math, that is still tens of millions of students and thats more than enough to engineer world class materials and products. The other 95% will get jobs to service others,...
I don't think so. Unless you can put that 5% all in one place, they won't have anybody who understands them, or can even STAND them and they won't have anybody to compete with. Don't underestimate comptetitive instinct as a motive to drag the best performance out of people. Having a place, like MIT, doesn't seem to work either: MIT gets only a fourth of its students from other countries as a matter of policy and could easily take more if grades and test scores were the only criteria for admission. Your spin on foriegn students misses the point: we need them as much as they need us if we are going to remain a country of "the best and the brightest" and keep the old phrase "American know-how" from becoming a joke.
Lets look at your math a bit more closely:
get the census bureau demographic picture for this [or any other ] country. In our case there are only 60 million people old enough to be in school. Suppose they all were in school. Then your 5% number is 3 million, country wide, in all grades who are capable of benefitting from a more strenuous math curriculum. No school system I know can provide tutors for a gifted 5%. Or, viewed another way, only in poorer schools [class size > 20 ]would you be likely to find even one of your worthy student per classroom on average.
NO. Wrong answer, Wrong attitude. The number who could really "get" most math is closer to 50% if it were a family and community value [read the comments about Korea] to do so and the salary and community respect for teachers would attract teachers that "got" math. People are put in classrooms to learn about things. They are put in familys to care about things...but the caring predicts success for the learning.
except that Claude Shannon showed how there is a kind of equivelence betweeen the two, I think a counter [which I haven't time to support in detail just now...you gotta write your own Phd thesis!] is that Evolution is working toward the most efficient representation of INFORMATION. And , as Carl Sagan explained, once evolution takes things to a point where beings can manipulate symbols in their heads, they transfer that ability to machinery and then evolution no longer is confined to nor expresses its results solely in DNA. And then you race toward the singularity! [or self anihilation...we're still working on that]
We have, based on common experience of there being two basic human physiologies [but that has exceptions too!], a sloppy but nearly universal expectation that there are two kinds of human sexual wiring. I doubt that highly. There are more than just square pegs and square holes! With dozens of genes that go into mental and physical characteristics the combinations are far in excess of two. I have no doubt that male homosexuality, to cite only one example, is largely a genetically determined trait with some post-conception but in-utero influences. The plasticity of the human brain could not account for more than a tiny fraction of those who react homosexually when presented the right stimulus...you can't "cure" genetic traits. Simon Levay did brain autopsies over a decade ago that showed SOME homosexual men had neuroanatomy features more common in women [which, I think, means the answer to one of your questions is a qualified "yes"]. It was over a decade ago that I read a report of a study that found that boys aged 2 to 5 who persisted in playing with dolls [when the other boys were pretending to shoot each other] had much higher chance of maturing with a homosexual orientation. More recently, birth order, number and gender of siblings and family history studies support these conclusions very clearly. Cultural taboo more than anything else keeps these findings from simply being accepted...more people belive in christ AND flying saucers than accept some results of well conducted scientific investigations. [As we say: Go Figure!] Here are links to reviews of the literature.
A press report of a particular recent finding [not uncontroverial to be sure]
Even groups utterly resistant to science admit two categories don't suffice
Some differences [largely cultural?] are funny
I don't know where to stop so I better just stop by saying that I suspect we really are dealing with 4 or maybe 8 categories of human in the dimension of sexuality and that is just among the phyiscally normal humans. The tie-in between orientation and other traits such as handedness, spatial reasoning ability, resistance to stroke, prefence for dolls vs guns as a child and needlework vs motorsports as an adult...etc is probably a PhD thesis just to posit a fruitful categorization scheme, let alone to dig up any of the underlying phyical mechanisms, neuroanatomical characteristics or active genes. Here are 4 categories [of adult] for starters:
I have a boy who made it into college inspite of having the least legible handwriting I have ever seen. in high school the teacher's were distraught over flunking a kid they knew was fairly bright...they urged us to get him a lap top for homework and taking notes. Keyboards are instinctive to him, piano or qwerty.
As to the question in the article: I think the impact of the computer depends largely on the nature and talents of the child. We are now up to 6 computers, one with two NICs for firewall duties and 5 on ethernet hub behind the firewall...my non-geek artistically inclined son with the perfect penmanship insists on a Mac and churns out well researched history papers...and complains loudly if internet service is disrupted [and yes, IM supports an invisible virtual neighborhood vital to him, unknown to me]. He just got into NYU. An older sister hated computers and suffered when mom and dad, a couple of SW engineers, sent her to computer camp one summer. She wouldn't use a computer for anything until her junior year at UC Berkeley. But she certainly overcame the bad experience. That was years ago but now she's downloading BIOS upgrades for her lap top so she could install Win2K Pro on it. She accepted the computer becasue if you live a mobile life, a computer is the only way you are going to have a permanent address.]
All different as can be and NONE hurt by their experience with computers. A computer is just a video game or mp3 player if thats all you want and there is no household work ethic...or its a great mind appliance and communication tool if the household mantra is "you can suck or you can do your homework...your choice WHEN YOU MOVE OUT"
he's just "whistling past the cemetary" to ignore OSX and the BSDs. If yesterday's /. discussion of the potential of an IBM/Apple alliance were more than talk of rumors, there would definitely be a "final four" with OSX gaining customers and not lacking for longterm funding.
But chimp research would have to null out the contributions to handedness that might be made by any number of OTHER differences in brain development between humans and the rest of the primates before these scientists, let alone a bunch of
- The timeline of human brain development from birth to adolescence is hardly one of linear increases in all capabilities and is not the same as chimps
- the LACK of parity between LH and RH dominant individuals is complex: the numbers are not evenly distributed but that is obscured, as serveral posters reported, by cultural enforcers that mask biologicaly determined behavior. We might even be seeing the reports of apparent intellectual advantages in a few lefties because our culture has beaten the lefthandedness out of a larger subset of the population with only the more gifted and adaptable surviving the brainwashing.
...These areas have a definite correlation to handedness as a right-handed person has a 97% chance of having these speech structures on the left versus the right while in a left-handed person has a 50-50 chance of this (if my neuroanatomy is correct)....[bloodredsun's comment] is particularly interesting since it implies there are yet other dimensions to the asymmetry between LR and RH dominance, these are not distributions of capability that are anatomically just mirror images of each other but distinctly different wiring.- I have not read every comment but so far there is no report of data correlating extent of corpus collosum [CC:the bridge between L and R hemispheres. nearest analog to a computer bus you will find in brain anatomy] to handedness. The CC is [if memory serves] is better developed in women than men ON AVERAGE and women [perhaps as a consequence] have [on average] less rigid specialization of functions to particular brain regions. This is why [on average] women recover more fully from strokes then men do.
- someone probably trotted out the stat that lefties have more accidents and I just missed it. Its a whole other debate about whether that is due to strong tendencies to put the saftey/kill-switch/brakes/etc on dangerous equipment where a RH person would expect them or due to other considerations but its not likely to be attributable to language skills...differences between LH and RH persons that don't stem from language either support or don't repute the findings of the article so I guess this one is a point for the sciencists.
- Is there any study or known correlation between handedness and [_]dyslexia, [_]ADD or ADHD, [_]Stuttering, [_] other developmental anomalies, e.g. autism?
But, of course, I have my anecdotes too;)My mom reports that she was probably a lefty but growing up in the 30's in a Missouri village where the dogs barked in German and you were either a Luthern or a Methodist, she had that bad habit beaten out of her. One of my boys writes [illegibly] with his left hand but throws [and I mean quite athletcally: he's an ultimate frisby player] righty.
and PLEASE, if you can't read or react in an informed and rational way concerning the general fact that there are differences between men and women, please exit the conversation NOW!.
did you note my experience at Rational? I know the white-shirt-and-tie is a hoary old myth but until engineers in a place as self-consciously iconoclastic as Apple actually meet a few managers from IBM, they are probably happier with the myth.
you gotta own your own name. I have so many frigging identies the same way as I got to lug around a pocket full of keys...I go places not everyone is trusted to go..e.g. my bank account, my car, my email etc.
Identies are necessary like keys to make sure the entitled party has exclusive access to things that he/she "owns" in whatever sense.
WTF do I own that these 2idi.com people are going to guard for me? They have set up a toll booth in the middle of frigging e-nowhere.net and hope people will still pay.
hey somebody mod parent up! [I blew my mod points earlier this morning.] This is informative and casts a harsh light on all the other posts that are saying that Apple and IBM is like , well apples and oranges.
I don't recall the dates of Steve Job's absence from Apple. Maybe all the Taligent drama played out while Jobs was off conceiving the Next Big Thing. The cultural differences and Mr Job's, uh shall we call it management style, are certainly impediments to a merger. If you think Apple won't be Apple without Jobs, then even a consumated merger will be between IBM and "some PC alternative that lost its magic"...I'm not so sure.
Just keep in mind how often and in how many ways IBM has been bested by Microsoft and needs, for business and maybe more emotional reasons, to settle the score. Some readers here may be aware that one reason we all use Windows instead of OS2 was that Microsoft was handed the first-mover advantage at the dawn of the PC era by the fact that IBM was still reeling from a 7-year antitrust battle with the DOJ: IBM was forced to find an indepent company to provide the OS for their new PC...by the time they decided that they could push OS2, it was too late. That still stings. Now DOJ is just finishing up with Microsoft, and the cards are not all dealt yet in europe...an IBM/Apple hardware or software offering would not operate under such a cloud.
The fact that Apple has for the most part strangled its market potential by keeping its hardware platforms proprietary and its systems, therefore, more expensive than the waves of cheap biege boxes that microsoft rode to glory would become an advantage to a company with the manufacturing might of IBM. A lesser partner for Apple would not have the "nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM"-mentality going for them. So the proprietary Mac realm, with nary an alternative platform, has been a huge if self inflicted limitation to Apple's market appeal but the IBM name could erase that deficit if only they bring out a few budget models at the bottom of the market. IBM is already making the CPU and has both the "Cell" processor and some low power consumption techologies that can extend the technical sexiness and superior performace of Apple products for quite a few years without increasing the costs. Apple [just ask its faithul users and investors] has been on the perpetual verge of gaining more marketshare: they certainly have mindshare exceeding their market penetration. Who would need much convincing that IBM would love to shove Gate's aside? Having shed their PC division [how many of those PC were sold with *nix on them?], what harm could they do themselves by energizing an alternative platform that, with a few impractical exceptions, demands an OS solution that Microsoft can't horn in on? Remember when you last had an idea for an application and had to choose whether to develop it for Mac or for Windows? You went where the money was probably. Users have a more complicated choice with some driven by price, some needing the security of the most stable vendor or the most supported OS and some more interested in the most elegant and powerful user interface. If all of a sudden the Mac is an IBM product, Apple goes from meeting one out of three to two out of three customer concerns...[and maybe the constant flow of news about Microsoft security holes will begin to soak in, but most PC users aren't reading that news]. The outcome would certainly NOT be the Mac/Wintel ratio suddenly capsizeing. But when you get your next application idea, the decision that could confront you might be more like: "do I develop for the larger but very crowded market with the platform that is peaked or do I bet on the momentum?" Remember, investors invest in momentum ( their guess about where the herd is headed). Users just want to be in the middle of a herd. As a developer, you have to figure out where your paycheck is coming from: investors or users.
Also, IBM has learned how to digest companies slowly: witness Lotus and Rational...by the time the last sandal-shod Apple engineer has been driven nuts by some east coast guys that wear ties [nobody at Rational was wearing a tie when I interviewed there this spring], IBM will have long since assimilated all the Apple ideas that it can use.
about the internet "changing everything" had some truth to it. The dot com euphoria got me into [and just as promptly out of] several jobs at startups that were funded because even smart [ok, greedy] people believed absolutely everyone would be shoping on line, be in constant contact with all their friends and so on...
I know booking air travel is largely out of the hands of travel agents so a few business activities are pretty much dominated by internet. But other activities like watching movies are more representative of the reported internet-demanding demographic...and sure enough: the video stores, even chains like Blockbuster, are closing in my area or running nearly constant sales and promotions to compete with the downloads...kinda unfair to those who still dial up for internet and pay for movies. [did you sell your AOL/timeWarner stock yet?]
running out of eggs is a theory in some jeopardy...I recall some mouse work that found eggs were still manufactured in adult females...not the case that the female was born with her life time allotment..but you could be right...we are way out on a hypothetical limb anyway.
...their volunteers promote products simply because it makes them feel good....
Slashdot runs on volunteer writers who [except maybe Roland Clique-appeal] don't make a cent and just submit items because it makes them feel good.
Probably not. If you look it up polyethylene glycol is a "stabilizer/thickener" and relatively inert. ITs function in spinal injuries is to , in effect, coat the injured nerves in a way that prevents some unhelpful things ["glutamate cascade"? in the case of strokes] that the body does for injured nerve tissue...its effect may almost be mechanical more than biochemical.
living with the consequences of your decisions would be a deterent for me it might keep some people from wasting natural resources but c'mon! We have heard for decades that smoking will kill us, sloppy sex will get us AIDS and running around in SUVs is ruining the environment AND WE STILL DO ALL THOSE THINGS! Throw in things like inner city birthrates for unmarried teenagers who,in this goofy scenario, can remain fertile until they are, lets say 400 years old...get my point? There are some people who live with out a friggin' clue about the consequences of their actions.
sorry. its hard to get'em right. The SCIAM link was pasted from a googling session. I have my own digitalsciam account but I know those links can't be passed around. If I try this again, I'll look harder for links that work for all readers. Trouble is they always work for me, testing is tricky...I need to be someone else!
The user experience that I think atonomic computing is trying to improve is the "I don't think its working" and all that can be done in that respect is that a system be able to fail-over and recover from user errors. [I think there are social issues with trying to enhance the computer's "person experience";]. And users are not the only humans a good system has to tolerate, some pretty bad things can happen when the system administrators screw up. Clearly autonomic computing is not going to be founded on computing elements that give you a BSOD if you just leave them running too long.
Doris Dennings work cited by other poster might have been seen as prior art...it was 6 years ahead of me. the USC facility I mentioned is on line at http://www.etcenter.org/DCL.asp
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embed GPS location data in the encryption key
- build [like tighlty integrated and potted] a GPS reciever into the digital theater playback equipment.
- scramble the GPS output in some way that is also accounted for in the encryption of the digital movie stream and is unique to the serial number of the playback equipment
- if the digital copy of the movie is not being decrypted on a playback unit that is in the right place, all you get is a call from the FBI.
I am leaving out a few details here of courseBut I never heard back from them...like I said: I am not Woz. This application of location-based encryption does not have the numerous problems many posters have raised concerning location based enabling of functions in a laptop [or any other equipment desinged NOT to have a set location...duh!]. Also, these ideas add cost to anything you apply them to: laptops are commodity items and very cost sensitive but a movie theatre spends gazillions on its [FIXED LOCATION] equipment anyway.
Slashdotters: I can't think of a better bunch of people to share wortless ideas with!
What if we frame it this way:
Lycos did not itself or via its employees directly take this action. they gave the victims of the spammers a way to fight back. The people who have not asked to have their inbox crambed with unwanted, often fraudulent emails have the feckless help of a few antispam laws and not much else except to change addresses often. I am sure the spammer didn't ask for all those pings or whatever the Lycos spammerjammer does...turnabout is fair play.
If the collective ill will wishes of the spammer's countless victims towards these scum were somehow brought to life, there would be smoking craters and body parts, not just a few plugged up servers.
for bittorrent would prevent this: attack on BitTorrent servers
anti spyware is good business: CA just bought up pest patrol, even though they had a joint marketing thing going with Zone Alarm. All I am getting as a result is some additional junk mail from PP/CA and as reported in /., PP aint that great
anyway.
Be sure to attend The FTC workshop on P2P networks If you read the adgenda, you would think FTC is trying to convince people that P2P is a threat to consumers. It would make sense to use a spurious issue that pushes congressional hot buttons if you wanted to slap restrictive laws on P2P since protecting copyrights doesn't get out the votes.
Oh, yeah the weather. I bike to work in new england: a very detailed forcast is critical to my saftey so this little victory is a serious win from my perspective. I already paid taxes for this data...be damned if I'll pay twice for it.