No, microwaves can penetrate the brain with very little trouble at all. It's basically transparent to them, but every now and then a microwave will be absorbed by a molecule and heat it a little.
And then your brain cools itself back down the same way it would if it were a hot day outside.
Obviously it's theoretically possible that a lot of microwave photons could cause a lot of damage by heating the brain to the point where chemical change occurs. Your brain can cool itself quite comfortably if the hotspots don't heat up at a rate any more than 1K per hour - I've never actually heard of anyone checking that this is so, but I would expect that this was part of the initial safety testing when cell phones were first introduced.
(Note that microwaves haven't enough energy to ionise the brain like your gamma or X rays do - they work by heating molecules rather than by ripping the electrons off an atom to change the chemical structure.)
The article mentions intra-cortical communication and the article suggests their findings may apply to the entire cortex, but really, they've only tested the temporal lobe.
My overall reaction is positive. I have ADD, so I'll be strapping my phone to my forehead and talking on my earpiece in the hope that the radiation will go straight to my prefrontal cortex. I'll look silly, but I'm used to that, and there's a slim chance that maybe I'll stop losing my keys.
Yes, we can create anti-gravity stomach holder-uppers, navigate Guild ships through folds in space-time, even create invisible spaceships... but it's meaningless without a good religion and a good sniff of Melange.
Runlevel 5 asked: "what can be used with the information the scientists gain?"
It would certainly explain the fact that there seems to be an upper limit on the rotational frequency of neutron stars (pulsars). Likewise, you can also expect to see gravity waves in the oscillation of large stellar bodies in collision, which might also give insight into gamma ray bursts.
One of the most interesting things we can do with gravity waves is look back beyond the cosmic microwave background and watch the early gravitational shape of the universe, perhaps detect a sort of cosmic gravity wave background. It's something we've never done before, so it's a sort of "let's see what we find when we turn this thing on" experiment - we could find all sorts of things about the shape and evolution of the universe which might in turn make a tremendous difference to the way we interpret earth-bound physics.
There is no danger from gravity waves and no apparent engineering purpose (not even warp drive) because they are astonishingly small - even a 4m long laser can't detect them (yet! - some technological improvements are on the way). This is because gravity is such a weak force that the only detectable gravity waves are caused by extremely massive bodies moving at extremely high speeds; even then, the strongest waves are easily able to dissipate to "nothing" before we would ever notice them. (In numbers, the best gravity wave LIGO could ever expect to see would cause the scientist's beautiful assistant to have her dimensions perpendicular to the wave oscillate at an amplitude of 10^-21m.) So it's not just a matter of understanding and engineering gravity waves, rather of using them to confirm or falsify key elements of our physical and cosmological theories.
Of course, theoretical physics has some interesting and wholly unexpected practical outcomes... Your computer uses quantum mechanical transistors - your webcam uses a quantum mechanical CCD (photoelectric effect) and medical tomography, using astronomical algorithms, continues to save lives.
Nasor said: "One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt...as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability."
That's astonishing! The first physics teacher I ever had, on my first day of university, came in with his apparatus set up and let off a few rockets, just to make sure we were all interested. He then taught us the first unit of first year physics, took an interest in all the struggling students and connected with us, gave us encouragement. There were excellent notes, his explanations were all crystal clear and he made sure we understood every point before moving on. Used to tutor a group or two and regularly came to labs to help out anyone having trouble. No, it wasn't some random grad student: it was a real professor, who is currently head of the department.
All our teachers are like that. Maybe not with the rockets, but there's just no reason why really smart people can't be really good teachers. Our teachers are very accomplished in their various fields - they just also clearly do a bit of professional development to become good teachers. (They even supervise undergraduate research projects in physics teaching so that they can really have an idea of how to improve their specific courses.)
I buy the detergent that's not made out of animals that were tortured, beaten and killed, and prefer a detergent that isn't full of preservatives or detergents that are going to mess up the water table. "Earth Choice" for most household cleaning, and I wash my hair in "Alchemy" shampoos, because they're really gentle and smell great. I generally use Nature's Organics hand soap liquidy stuff, and Bathox for bubble baths.
I pay for it, too!
All products are not equally good if you do not mindlessly consume, but actually use your head when picking up a bottle or carton off the shelf.
In Australia and USA you can be arrested, charged and convicted of theoretical study of encryption mathematics without being a legitimate mathematician. In other words, you can't practice mathematics without a "license" (presumably you get legitimacy by having a good job somewhere). In Australia, there was a high-profile case of a student who set off alarms by borrowing Arab-terrorism books from the library and having an Arabic surname. It turned out he was a pacifist doing a thesis on how to stop terrorism, and the case was quietly dropped. There's also a guy whose case is being heard at the moment. He looked into obtaining certain perfectly legal substances and then also obtained some perfectly legal aerial photos of a defence installation - it turns out that he was one of those guys who "looks things up on the Internet" for the family, and the photos were for a family member who was going to do some architectural work, the chemicals were for some unrelated perfecly legal thing he was doing for himself.
So don't take too much of an interest in ungoodthinkful matters if you don't want to draw attention to yourself!
The problem is that some particle physicists and cosmologists are using M-theory to extend the Big Bang so it integrates with the fundamental forces. You end up getting a superstring-singularity that has a past, or a bunch of membranes banging into each other... there's nothing sacred about 'Deity said "bang" and there was a unified and extremely dense energy field' in the most sophisticated Origin of the Universe models.
Dude, my brother and I had HOURS of fun, running around playing Captain Planet and Gaia. I still (at 22) like to put on my fur hat, resurrect my "Linka" accent and play superhero.
Hooray! Now there seems a real chance that one day doctors will be able to graft one of those whatsits onto the prefrontal thingey and cure my attention something something disorder!
Prejudice maybe. It's entirely possible that my hometown had a secret society of farmers who sat around discussing science, literature and philosophy instead of getting drunk and fighting with the nearest person. But I always had to deal with the retarded peasants. Perhaps places with organic farmers, clever business farmers and hobby farmers have a higher average education/intelligence/etc. than people who farm cotton and rice in arid zones, farm animals on limited space, and stuff up their soil by spraying poisonous chemicals all over wheat, grapes and apples.
Ditto for the history teachers, but with less fighting. Actually, they're alright, just interested in different things.
I like to add nonsense statistics to my random guesses from time to time in order to give them an air of legitimacy. I'm glad that it was appreciated. Just let me know if you need more, because I've got plenty more where that come from and it's about 80% successful on teenagers.
You're right to just draw the line and make it clear what's usually acceptable. After all, as you say, it's not an ethics course.
Still, it would be interesting to see a discussion of computer/hacker ethics - anyone can artificially construct a grey area where hacking without permission saves lives, or examine the legal theory that establishes where the line will be drawn, or talk about why privacy and security are important. And because it's a microcosm of the larger universe of ethics, it would be a genuinely useful subject from which graduates could abstract in their later ethical dilemmas.
The funny thing is that MS is in a position that firefox et al are not: ability to offer a couple of bucks to each kid outside the company who finds a bug and submits a fix. Which apart from the money, the kid could put on their resume at graduation. Imagine MS open-sourcing for "developers only", overlooking a few college students taking a copy for their own use, and continuing to charge the f*** out of businesses. Let's be glad they don't read/.!
This is no surprise to me. ANU teaches a course in science journalism on the understanding that more people would like to read about science than sports in the newspaper, if only someone knew how to write about science. With so many interesting new discoveries and new technologies, it's interesting to find out what is going on. Not everyone thinks the science news is the most important news to read, but I've never met anyone who wasn't at least interested to know about the most glamourous or practical news items.
So why are the numbers so low? Maybe because the people who are most interested in science might not be very bookish, prefer to get their news from the telly and might not even have a computer. The person who most liked to talk about science news to me as a teenager was my school's bus driver and part-time gardener. Many farmers are illiterate and innumerate and resent other people using their brains while they toil like peasants, but generally they love technology even if they hate pure science. The people who are least interested are office workers, public servants and history teachers, whose work is less tangible and feel less connection to science and tech - but they are more likely to be the ones able to seek out internet news sources on their internet appliances.
Obviously this is just generalisation of my own personal experience, and probably very harsh, but I think it's valid to maybe 70% - I think it explains a lot of those numbers.
It also occurs to me that you need a certain density of people with a particular interest, otherwise the message doesn't get through that certain websites and communities exist or what jargon to use in order to find them. I didn't find slashdot or even google until I got to university because there was no starting point in the countryside. We got told the "best way" to search, "most respected" websites, etc. at high school, and that was all we had. And since I was the only "odd one out" I had nobody to compare notes with, except maybe my dad, and he lived in a different town 150km away. At that time, the 2nd most popular internet search was music, so I found some wonderful new cultural influences from mp3.com (back when it was relatively free and indie) which was easy, but it was really hard to learn about computers and technology on the internet - I didn't even know what to look for and unless it's related to something I have learnt, I still don't.
Slightly tangential, but in an academic situation, it's also considered very naughty to resubmit work created for previous assessment for the same reason that it's naughty to use open source software libraries. The assignment is supposed to be created specifically for the situation, and using available work, even if it's not plagiarism, is not the same as creating new work. In my faculty's policy it's clearly stated that we're not to submit work from old assignments without explicit permission from the dean, and the statement we sign on our coversheets states that we have not submitted the work before.
Another good reason to have software compare all incoming assignments to everything on record.
But of course, in a school and in a legal battle, it's one thing to have a computer tell you that two pieces of work are similar, and another to make assumptions as to why. I mean, if one has a particular goal, then there is often an obvious approach and even a correct way to implement that approach. Teachers must get tired of marking the same assignment over and over (even humanities teachers!), and it must be incredibly difficult for a judge to decide whether a bit of software was copied or created in a similar way.
How come with all this cuteness you guys still aren't celebrating the cutest thing of all, Hello Kitty?
Is the pink going to go away when April Fools Day wears off in all time zones? Because I'm really enjoying this pink. It's so much better than that silly green was!
It was Beverley that got trapped in the warp bubble. Wesley warped her into it, and the Traveller had to get her out.
The inevitable conclusion: the Traveller has been playing tricks on the ESA scientists. Or else, Q has been playing around with the gravitational constant again.
It doesn't matter what the device is, it's just such a relief that finally I've got access to SOME sort of device that can act as a neural "prosthesis" to overcome my total lack of organization. It used to require serious organization just to get all the devices to work together, so there might be a benefit, but it was totally offset by the cost.
Now I have a phone that I love with a passion. Hooray for smartphones!
I love my Nokia N70. I want to marry it and have its babies.
I can dial up for weather reports. Being dressed uncomfortably is a thing of the past! This is great, but it's got an FM radio built in, so I can usually get a weather report every half hour on ABC News Radio instead. (Note that Newsradio bothers everyone in my family, so just putting the radio on is not always an option.)
I can use it during school or anywhere for internet, so I never have to be without information. Of course, not every website is well laid-out for a mobile device, but this is the next big thing.
It can receive email appointments from my email account, so that I don't have to get to a computer to receive an invitation to a meeting, date or whatever, and also it can automatically reject any appointment that clashes with a lecture or tutorial. This is SOOOOOOO convenient! Who wants to spend time on all that administrative stuff? Who can keep track of it anyway?? Not me!
With a press of a button I can decide whether to divert calls to voicemail or an answering service. So during lectures I can receive messages as sms (so I can receive them without lifting a phone to my ear and I know if something urgent comes in), but out and about, I get them as voice (and can keep my eyes and hands free while I take them in).
I can record my own ringtone. I know this seems a bit gimmicky, but I like that my ringtone is totally subtle and totally unique.
I can hook it up to a wireless keyboard. Who wants to lug about a laptop computer to write on? Do you know you can get laser-projected wireless keyboards now? They're about the size of a chocolate bar or another very small phone, instead of a huge device bulging in one's handbag.
Plus it has a videophone AND a very good camera in the back. And it syncs to my computer (actually, I haven't done that yet, but I know it CAN be done). As a parent, I NEED a camera, voice recorder, etc handy!
And the to-do list!
If you get one good programme, get a good to-do list, with all sorts of ways to arrange and display the to-dos.
And the other add-on I haven't mentioned is the bluetooth headset. You don't have a big range, so you need your phone in your pocket (good reason to swap to khakis from jeans) but you can do things without getting the wire caught up.
This is the first time I've had my whole life in a device. I didn't think it was going to be possible. I thought I was going to have to become a gargoyle with devices all over me. Phone, PDA, etc. But it only comes with a small MMC - you have to offload at the end of each day or get a really big one. It doesn't have a wearable screen, but with voice commands, you can keep your hands and eyes free almost all of the time!
(I predict voice interaction to be the next really big thing with computers. Think about Star Trek. If they want to look at info, they go to a screen, but they spend a lot of the episode, just barking commands to the computer which responds with a sounded acknowlegement. Hands AND eyes free!)
It's not unreasonable to change your name for work. Many women use their maiden name for work and their married name socially. This is popular with people who are famous and don't want their children to be conspicuously associated with them. I've also known people who change their strange name while they're at university so that all their professional papers reflect the career they want to have, and they are free to use the original name informally if they wish.
There's been talk about being careful with use of screen names, which is appropriate. In the end, you're going to have some sort of online presence, through real-world stuff that you're involved in, so it's up to you to decide what you associate with your social name, what you associate with your professional name, etc. Separation helps that process, by confining all your professional references into a particular sphere.
But you just can't expect things you do in public to be private, even if you use a nickname. Even if you use an internet screen name, determined people can figure out who you are. This happened recently to an Australian barrister who wrote a political blog under a screen name so that his blog would not be the first thing potential clients noticed about him. Now his private politics are public, but although it's a bit left-wing and informally written, at least he never had a big public rant or tantrum on his blog or anywhere else.
That's pretty funny. Many people have their ADD picked up when they start struggling in their undergrad studies after getting all As in high school.
You must have found a way to "reroute" around your ADD. I've read about a woman who couldn't "understand" her courses but could easily "memorise" them. My method is to sit in the front and output everything that goes in. I take notes like the kids in Brave New World and then I go home and almost write a new textbook on the subject, by the time the semester is finished!
I worked the helldesk for a while and had no problem at all with the cubicle environment from hell. They were basically semi-cubes arranged by putting the desks in a rectangle, with mini-dividers between so we could work without staring at the other person, and shared by about 4 people. I got to be right next to the aisle, with no divider in front and people wandering up and down all the time, and I was in the cube with the IT support computers which had people coming and going all day. And we were right next to the kitchenette, which had an automatic espresso machine in it. Plus, it was a public service office, so all the badly dressed blokes were always flirting with me by shouting across the room or by email. I used to just sit there and do my work while another member of the team would stick up "please close the door when you're making coffee" signs and grouch at everyone who made any noise. But I NEED stimulation, and I guess my grouchy friend was the opposite.
Is there room in there for a Reverend Mother of Shininess? To develop shiny new materials and find exciting new ways of making computers glimmer and gleam. Because if there's an opening, it might be time to spray a bit more glitter and frost on the ol' resume...
Slashdot Mirror
No, microwaves can penetrate the brain with very little trouble at all. It's basically transparent to them, but every now and then a microwave will be absorbed by a molecule and heat it a little.
And then your brain cools itself back down the same way it would if it were a hot day outside.
Obviously it's theoretically possible that a lot of microwave photons could cause a lot of damage by heating the brain to the point where chemical change occurs. Your brain can cool itself quite comfortably if the hotspots don't heat up at a rate any more than 1K per hour - I've never actually heard of anyone checking that this is so, but I would expect that this was part of the initial safety testing when cell phones were first introduced.
(Note that microwaves haven't enough energy to ionise the brain like your gamma or X rays do - they work by heating molecules rather than by ripping the electrons off an atom to change the chemical structure.)
The article mentions intra-cortical communication and the article suggests their findings may apply to the entire cortex, but really, they've only tested the temporal lobe.
My overall reaction is positive. I have ADD, so I'll be strapping my phone to my forehead and talking on my earpiece in the hope that the radiation will go straight to my prefrontal cortex. I'll look silly, but I'm used to that, and there's a slim chance that maybe I'll stop losing my keys.
Yes, we can create anti-gravity stomach holder-uppers, navigate Guild ships through folds in space-time, even create invisible spaceships... but it's meaningless without a good religion and a good sniff of Melange.
Runlevel 5 asked: "what can be used with the information the scientists gain?"
It would certainly explain the fact that there seems to be an upper limit on the rotational frequency of neutron stars (pulsars). Likewise, you can also expect to see gravity waves in the oscillation of large stellar bodies in collision, which might also give insight into gamma ray bursts.
One of the most interesting things we can do with gravity waves is look back beyond the cosmic microwave background and watch the early gravitational shape of the universe, perhaps detect a sort of cosmic gravity wave background. It's something we've never done before, so it's a sort of "let's see what we find when we turn this thing on" experiment - we could find all sorts of things about the shape and evolution of the universe which might in turn make a tremendous difference to the way we interpret earth-bound physics.
There is no danger from gravity waves and no apparent engineering purpose (not even warp drive) because they are astonishingly small - even a 4m long laser can't detect them (yet! - some technological improvements are on the way). This is because gravity is such a weak force that the only detectable gravity waves are caused by extremely massive bodies moving at extremely high speeds; even then, the strongest waves are easily able to dissipate to "nothing" before we would ever notice them. (In numbers, the best gravity wave LIGO could ever expect to see would cause the scientist's beautiful assistant to have her dimensions perpendicular to the wave oscillate at an amplitude of 10^-21m.) So it's not just a matter of understanding and engineering gravity waves, rather of using them to confirm or falsify key elements of our physical and cosmological theories.
Of course, theoretical physics has some interesting and wholly unexpected practical outcomes... Your computer uses quantum mechanical transistors - your webcam uses a quantum mechanical CCD (photoelectric effect) and medical tomography, using astronomical algorithms, continues to save lives.
Nasor said:
"One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt...as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability."
That's astonishing! The first physics teacher I ever had, on my first day of university, came in with his apparatus set up and let off a few rockets, just to make sure we were all interested. He then taught us the first unit of first year physics, took an interest in all the struggling students and connected with us, gave us encouragement. There were excellent notes, his explanations were all crystal clear and he made sure we understood every point before moving on. Used to tutor a group or two and regularly came to labs to help out anyone having trouble. No, it wasn't some random grad student: it was a real professor, who is currently head of the department.
All our teachers are like that. Maybe not with the rockets, but there's just no reason why really smart people can't be really good teachers. Our teachers are very accomplished in their various fields - they just also clearly do a bit of professional development to become good teachers. (They even supervise undergraduate research projects in physics teaching so that they can really have an idea of how to improve their specific courses.)
I buy the detergent that's not made out of animals that were tortured, beaten and killed, and prefer a detergent that isn't full of preservatives or detergents that are going to mess up the water table. "Earth Choice" for most household cleaning, and I wash my hair in "Alchemy" shampoos, because they're really gentle and smell great. I generally use Nature's Organics hand soap liquidy stuff, and Bathox for bubble baths.
I pay for it, too!
All products are not equally good if you do not mindlessly consume, but actually use your head when picking up a bottle or carton off the shelf.
In Australia and USA you can be arrested, charged and convicted of theoretical study of encryption mathematics without being a legitimate mathematician. In other words, you can't practice mathematics without a "license" (presumably you get legitimacy by having a good job somewhere). In Australia, there was a high-profile case of a student who set off alarms by borrowing Arab-terrorism books from the library and having an Arabic surname. It turned out he was a pacifist doing a thesis on how to stop terrorism, and the case was quietly dropped. There's also a guy whose case is being heard at the moment. He looked into obtaining certain perfectly legal substances and then also obtained some perfectly legal aerial photos of a defence installation - it turns out that he was one of those guys who "looks things up on the Internet" for the family, and the photos were for a family member who was going to do some architectural work, the chemicals were for some unrelated perfecly legal thing he was doing for himself.
So don't take too much of an interest in ungoodthinkful matters if you don't want to draw attention to yourself!
The problem is that some particle physicists and cosmologists are using M-theory to extend the Big Bang so it integrates with the fundamental forces. You end up getting a superstring-singularity that has a past, or a bunch of membranes banging into each other... there's nothing sacred about 'Deity said "bang" and there was a unified and extremely dense energy field' in the most sophisticated Origin of the Universe models.
Dude, my brother and I had HOURS of fun, running around playing Captain Planet and Gaia. I still (at 22) like to put on my fur hat, resurrect my "Linka" accent and play superhero.
Why?
Cos saving our planet is the thing to do!
Hooray! Now there seems a real chance that one day doctors will be able to graft one of those whatsits onto the prefrontal thingey and cure my attention something something disorder!
Resistance is futile!
Prejudice maybe. It's entirely possible that my hometown had a secret society of farmers who sat around discussing science, literature and philosophy instead of getting drunk and fighting with the nearest person. But I always had to deal with the retarded peasants. Perhaps places with organic farmers, clever business farmers and hobby farmers have a higher average education/intelligence/etc. than people who farm cotton and rice in arid zones, farm animals on limited space, and stuff up their soil by spraying poisonous chemicals all over wheat, grapes and apples.
Ditto for the history teachers, but with less fighting. Actually, they're alright, just interested in different things.
Thankyou Moofie.
I like to add nonsense statistics to my random guesses from time to time in order to give them an air of legitimacy. I'm glad that it was appreciated. Just let me know if you need more, because I've got plenty more where that come from and it's about 80% successful on teenagers.
xx
Rocket
You're right to just draw the line and make it clear what's usually acceptable. After all, as you say, it's not an ethics course.
Still, it would be interesting to see a discussion of computer/hacker ethics - anyone can artificially construct a grey area where hacking without permission saves lives, or examine the legal theory that establishes where the line will be drawn, or talk about why privacy and security are important. And because it's a microcosm of the larger universe of ethics, it would be a genuinely useful subject from which graduates could abstract in their later ethical dilemmas.
The funny thing is that MS is in a position that firefox et al are not: ability to offer a couple of bucks to each kid outside the company who finds a bug and submits a fix. Which apart from the money, the kid could put on their resume at graduation. Imagine MS open-sourcing for "developers only", overlooking a few college students taking a copy for their own use, and continuing to charge the f*** out of businesses. Let's be glad they don't read /.!
This is no surprise to me. ANU teaches a course in science journalism on the understanding that more people would like to read about science than sports in the newspaper, if only someone knew how to write about science. With so many interesting new discoveries and new technologies, it's interesting to find out what is going on. Not everyone thinks the science news is the most important news to read, but I've never met anyone who wasn't at least interested to know about the most glamourous or practical news items.
So why are the numbers so low? Maybe because the people who are most interested in science might not be very bookish, prefer to get their news from the telly and might not even have a computer. The person who most liked to talk about science news to me as a teenager was my school's bus driver and part-time gardener. Many farmers are illiterate and innumerate and resent other people using their brains while they toil like peasants, but generally they love technology even if they hate pure science. The people who are least interested are office workers, public servants and history teachers, whose work is less tangible and feel less connection to science and tech - but they are more likely to be the ones able to seek out internet news sources on their internet appliances.
Obviously this is just generalisation of my own personal experience, and probably very harsh, but I think it's valid to maybe 70% - I think it explains a lot of those numbers.
It also occurs to me that you need a certain density of people with a particular interest, otherwise the message doesn't get through that certain websites and communities exist or what jargon to use in order to find them. I didn't find slashdot or even google until I got to university because there was no starting point in the countryside. We got told the "best way" to search, "most respected" websites, etc. at high school, and that was all we had. And since I was the only "odd one out" I had nobody to compare notes with, except maybe my dad, and he lived in a different town 150km away. At that time, the 2nd most popular internet search was music, so I found some wonderful new cultural influences from mp3.com (back when it was relatively free and indie) which was easy, but it was really hard to learn about computers and technology on the internet - I didn't even know what to look for and unless it's related to something I have learnt, I still don't.
Slightly tangential, but in an academic situation, it's also considered very naughty to resubmit work created for previous assessment for the same reason that it's naughty to use open source software libraries. The assignment is supposed to be created specifically for the situation, and using available work, even if it's not plagiarism, is not the same as creating new work. In my faculty's policy it's clearly stated that we're not to submit work from old assignments without explicit permission from the dean, and the statement we sign on our coversheets states that we have not submitted the work before.
Another good reason to have software compare all incoming assignments to everything on record.
But of course, in a school and in a legal battle, it's one thing to have a computer tell you that two pieces of work are similar, and another to make assumptions as to why. I mean, if one has a particular goal, then there is often an obvious approach and even a correct way to implement that approach. Teachers must get tired of marking the same assignment over and over (even humanities teachers!), and it must be incredibly difficult for a judge to decide whether a bit of software was copied or created in a similar way.
I'm reminded of the story Green Patches by Asimov. Is this stage one of a very frightening change to life on Earth?
How come with all this cuteness you guys still aren't celebrating the cutest thing of all, Hello Kitty?
Is the pink going to go away when April Fools Day wears off in all time zones? Because I'm really enjoying this pink. It's so much better than that silly green was!
I hate barbie.
It was Beverley that got trapped in the warp bubble. Wesley warped her into it, and the Traveller had to get her out.
The inevitable conclusion: the Traveller has been playing tricks on the ESA scientists. Or else, Q has been playing around with the gravitational constant again.
I do it for the love!
It doesn't matter what the device is, it's just such a relief that finally I've got access to SOME sort of device that can act as a neural "prosthesis" to overcome my total lack of organization. It used to require serious organization just to get all the devices to work together, so there might be a benefit, but it was totally offset by the cost.
Now I have a phone that I love with a passion. Hooray for smartphones!
I love my Nokia N70. I want to marry it and have its babies.
I can dial up for weather reports. Being dressed uncomfortably is a thing of the past! This is great, but it's got an FM radio built in, so I can usually get a weather report every half hour on ABC News Radio instead. (Note that Newsradio bothers everyone in my family, so just putting the radio on is not always an option.)
I can use it during school or anywhere for internet, so I never have to be without information. Of course, not every website is well laid-out for a mobile device, but this is the next big thing.
It can receive email appointments from my email account, so that I don't have to get to a computer to receive an invitation to a meeting, date or whatever, and also it can automatically reject any appointment that clashes with a lecture or tutorial. This is SOOOOOOO convenient! Who wants to spend time on all that administrative stuff? Who can keep track of it anyway?? Not me!
With a press of a button I can decide whether to divert calls to voicemail or an answering service. So during lectures I can receive messages as sms (so I can receive them without lifting a phone to my ear and I know if something urgent comes in), but out and about, I get them as voice (and can keep my eyes and hands free while I take them in).
I can record my own ringtone. I know this seems a bit gimmicky, but I like that my ringtone is totally subtle and totally unique.
I can hook it up to a wireless keyboard. Who wants to lug about a laptop computer to write on? Do you know you can get laser-projected wireless keyboards now? They're about the size of a chocolate bar or another very small phone, instead of a huge device bulging in one's handbag.
Plus it has a videophone AND a very good camera in the back. And it syncs to my computer (actually, I haven't done that yet, but I know it CAN be done). As a parent, I NEED a camera, voice recorder, etc handy!
And the to-do list!
If you get one good programme, get a good to-do list, with all sorts of ways to arrange and display the to-dos.
And the other add-on I haven't mentioned is the bluetooth headset. You don't have a big range, so you need your phone in your pocket (good reason to swap to khakis from jeans) but you can do things without getting the wire caught up.
This is the first time I've had my whole life in a device. I didn't think it was going to be possible. I thought I was going to have to become a gargoyle with devices all over me. Phone, PDA, etc. But it only comes with a small MMC - you have to offload at the end of each day or get a really big one. It doesn't have a wearable screen, but with voice commands, you can keep your hands and eyes free almost all of the time!
(I predict voice interaction to be the next really big thing with computers. Think about Star Trek. If they want to look at info, they go to a screen, but they spend a lot of the episode, just barking commands to the computer which responds with a sounded acknowlegement. Hands AND eyes free!)
I love my phone!
It's not unreasonable to change your name for work. Many women use their maiden name for work and their married name socially. This is popular with people who are famous and don't want their children to be conspicuously associated with them. I've also known people who change their strange name while they're at university so that all their professional papers reflect the career they want to have, and they are free to use the original name informally if they wish.
There's been talk about being careful with use of screen names, which is appropriate. In the end, you're going to have some sort of online presence, through real-world stuff that you're involved in, so it's up to you to decide what you associate with your social name, what you associate with your professional name, etc. Separation helps that process, by confining all your professional references into a particular sphere.
But you just can't expect things you do in public to be private, even if you use a nickname. Even if you use an internet screen name, determined people can figure out who you are. This happened recently to an Australian barrister who wrote a political blog under a screen name so that his blog would not be the first thing potential clients noticed about him. Now his private politics are public, but although it's a bit left-wing and informally written, at least he never had a big public rant or tantrum on his blog or anywhere else.
Turmeric also prevents prostate cancer, especially when combined with cauliflower. Curry, anyone?
That's pretty funny. Many people have their ADD picked up when they start struggling in their undergrad studies after getting all As in high school.
You must have found a way to "reroute" around your ADD. I've read about a woman who couldn't "understand" her courses but could easily "memorise" them. My method is to sit in the front and output everything that goes in. I take notes like the kids in Brave New World and then I go home and almost write a new textbook on the subject, by the time the semester is finished!
I worked the helldesk for a while and had no problem at all with the cubicle environment from hell. They were basically semi-cubes arranged by putting the desks in a rectangle, with mini-dividers between so we could work without staring at the other person, and shared by about 4 people. I got to be right next to the aisle, with no divider in front and people wandering up and down all the time, and I was in the cube with the IT support computers which had people coming and going all day. And we were right next to the kitchenette, which had an automatic espresso machine in it. Plus, it was a public service office, so all the badly dressed blokes were always flirting with me by shouting across the room or by email. I used to just sit there and do my work while another member of the team would stick up "please close the door when you're making coffee" signs and grouch at everyone who made any noise. But I NEED stimulation, and I guess my grouchy friend was the opposite.
But I've had HUGE problems studying!
Is there room in there for a Reverend Mother of Shininess? To develop shiny new materials and find exciting new ways of making computers glimmer and gleam. Because if there's an opening, it might be time to spray a bit more glitter and frost on the ol' resume...