Most important: muscle memory as I pointed out above is 'stored' - more precicely: hardwired - in the neurons/nerves directly attached to the muscles. Not in the brain.
It's in the brain. They don't really know exactly where muscle memory is stored, but it's in the brain. Most likely in optimized synaptic networks in or around the motor control area, but the specific location and mechanism hasn't been nailed down.
That being said, there's a certain amount of muscle "memory" in the muscles themselves, in the sense that elasticity and power will become optimized for the patterns of motion they perform frequently (i.e. if you perform circular movements calling for short muscle fibers, you'll probably have a harder time with linear movements calling for long muscle fibers), and obviously nerve pathways for those repeated actions will be strengthened. This would reduce the amount of higher level neural effort needed to perform those kinds of movements and the actions would "fire faster". But really, there's not enough neural meat down there to handle the processing necessary for anything substantial enough to call it a "motor skill".
TFA makes the discussion that it's all about a highly efficient foot-motor control area that can operate with minimal external input (i.e little conscious thought), which pretty much describes muscle memory. There's no mention of "special neurons", just regular motor control areas that are wired for efficiency and operate with less noise.
Where someone might conclude that it's different from "muscle memory" is that muscle memory is usually focused on specific motor tasks, while this research is basically saying that entire areas of the brain related to motor skills which have a highly developed muscle memory work more efficiently. Which, I'd think, would be pretty obvious. Developing expert-level muscle memory is in practice about learning entire repertoires of movements, not just a single specific movement, and a consequence of having muscle memory for a large set of similar movements means the brain is wired such that anything resembling those movements will be handled at about the same skill level with about the same amount of conscious thought. If you've spent your entire life practicing all the 50 different ways to kick a ball under all possible conditions (different balls, ground conditions, shoes, lighting, angles, etc) then its unlikely you'll ever need to put any conscious thought into making your feet connect with anything ball-like.
I guess that's a sexier headline than "Expert Soccer Player Has Good Muscle Memory", and it does tie into that recent bit of excitement down in Brazil, but otherwise I'm not seeing anything in the summary that comes as a surprise... Is it that part where they quantify the differences in neural activity between "expert" and "amateur"?
Most of us drone users stay well away from houses.
As I said, I live in the country.
Most ATVers, snowmobilers, boaters, hunters, etc are perfectly respectable people who go out of their way not to bother anyone, and I have no issue with them.
Those other fuckers, however... I have absolutely no doubt that drone technology will become simple and ubiquitous enough that the sort of asshole who enjoys annoying people with expensive toys will inevitably discover and abuse it.
It's possible to connect a controller to an antenna that vastly extends its range. Is your property extensive enough to give you a 2-kilometer perimeter around your house?
I specifically said "the signal range of my house". Stock antennas on a router in the basement. If my network can see the drone, it's going to be pretty close.
The owner will see all this, and might take umbrage at your stealing their drone. Which almost certainly wouldn't be flying over your roof anyhow.
Well, I live in the country. If a wifi-controlled drone gets within signal range of my house, the owner is very likely trespassing and almost certainly snooping on my property in particular.
but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.
Most of the genuine bugs described (versus the braindead design decisions) appear to be related to hardware integration (i.e. the input stack) and/or the carrier part of the experience.
Am I surprised that the hardware integration on a cheap phone might be crap? Nope. Am I surprised that the carrier integration might suck? Nope. Am I surprised that the more a device deviates from the mainstream, the weirder the problems would be? Nope. Is it likely that the experience would actually be *worse* if the vendor had just shipped AOSP? Very.
I bought the LG Optimus not because it was the cheapest or because I didn't expect it to have bugs, but because it was the only offering with a slide-out keyboard, and I've become addicted to the precision of physical keys.
So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question about why this stuff happens is "I want something so badly that I'm a captive market who won't explore decent alternatives (is the built-in slider on a 4" phone really that much better than an S5 bluetooth keyboard case or Swype on a phablet? Really?) and will stick with the phone in spite of it being a piece of shit"?
Honestly, I have to give kudos to LG for gauging how desperate the potential users of this phone would be for a physical keyboard and saving themselves a little cash on testing. It seems to have worked out okay for them.
Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations?
In general, I don't entirely disagree. In this case... I'm not sure how useful the black box would be in the event of a missile strike. I wasn't aware the civilian aircraft had the kind of gear to track a missile, or that the kinds of collision sensors they have would be fast enough to catch it. It's definitely not going to be able to tell who shot the missile or where it came from. Heck, I'd be surprised if the black box could tell the difference betwen a missile strike and a large suitcase bomb in the cargo hold. So unless it actually was an mechanical or aircrew failure (and I highly doubt it), I think the black box is a red herring.
Passwords have been stolen just by listening to keyboard click noises. Why could a typewriter be any different?
A much stronger mechanical action which generates multiple (the keypress itself plus the imprint on paper action) strong and distinct signatures. I'd expect it would be far easier to pick up than even the loudest Model M keyboard...
I'd be curious how much a highly sensitive seismic sensor on the ceiling below the typewriter would pick up, or even on the foundation of the building.
There simply MUST be a clear distinction maintained over where something is located, or country borders don't mean anything.
The question to ask is, is the data stored in another country as easily available to a Microsoft employee in the USA as data stored in the USA would be?
There's a compelling argument, and multi-national corporations in particular make themselves vulnerable to it, that if you ignore borders in your day-to-day operations then you can't exactly point at the border as an insurmountable issue when someone is making you do something you don't want to do.
The recent case where a Canadian court ordered Google to censor results globally is another example of this. People argued that the court only has jurisdiction over google.ca results, but conveniently forgot that google.ca is hosted in the exact same server farm as all Google search services. So where do you draw the line? Surely not where the corporation decides it's convenient in that particular instance.
I keep the following quote pinned in Google Keep to remind myself of what happens when corporate communications becomes completely divorced from reality:
In other words, better execution and innovation through strategy and goal and discipline and engineering coherence.
Um... no. Pure communism is incompatible with the entire concept of "boss", unless you're using "boss" as some kind of shorthand for "what society needs".
It might be interesting, not to mention somewhat obvious, to quantify how much things have changed in the last decade or two given the trend towards never being more than an arms length away from entertainment.
A better question is "which hackers have working days like that"? Why would anyone expect criminals to work 9-to-5 jobs? I'd expect something more along the line of noon-to-hey-let's-go-get-piss-drunk-and-sleep-in-until-noon.
This is true. I'm questioning that said patents are really such an "ace up the sleeve" if someone else is beating you to market with devices that already do what your patents purportedly cover. There's only a limited set of physiological sensors that are going to be useful in headphones and that aren't already in their phones, and LG just nailed the main one. Body temperature would be the next obvious.
IMHO, Apple's ace up its sleeve is the same thing it's always been... to ability to pump out a product that's just plain nicer than anyone elses product. Patents just muddy the water.
But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with 'one or more integrated physiological sensors' designed to help users keep track of their body stats.
You mean like these. Somehow, I have a feeling those patents might not be as useful as someone might think...
I assure you, I mean lazy in a very complimentary way here.;-)
Oh, I understand what you mean. But calling it "lazy" is... well, lazy.
Programmers are generally not lazy people. They're willing to work pretty hard at stuff that matters or that they care about. They just don't like to waste their time, nor do they like to do poor work.
Tedious manual error-prone processes that could be done more efficiently and correctly by making a machine to do it are exactly the sorts of jobs programmers don't like to do.
Granted, not wanting to do a job the way someone expects you to do it or the way it's always been done might *look* lazy...
More useful things have been invented out of an express desire to be lazy than I can even count.
Not so much a "desire to be lazy", but more about pre-empting laziness.
Laziness is like entropy; it's gonna happen.
Tedious manual processes are inherently error-prone. If everyone is conscientious and on-the-ball, things generally work, albeit less efficiently than we'd like. But that's not sustainable in the long term... eventually, people get into a groove and start getting sloppy.
Designing, writing, testing, and rolling out (usually against the inertia of an existing process) a program isn't lazy. It maybe allows the programmer to be lazy later, but in the short term actually a lot more up-front work. It's just a shedload more interesting that the actual work it's replacing, which is usually the main motivation for doing it at all.
Actually, if you read it carefully jcr was suggesting that the OP should harm himself or self-pleasure himself. Or, perhaps, smuggle his digs through a security checkpoint. The specific interpretation is entirely dependent on that individuals personal lifestyle choices.
Slashdot Mirror
It's in the brain. They don't really know exactly where muscle memory is stored, but it's in the brain. Most likely in optimized synaptic networks in or around the motor control area, but the specific location and mechanism hasn't been nailed down.
That being said, there's a certain amount of muscle "memory" in the muscles themselves, in the sense that elasticity and power will become optimized for the patterns of motion they perform frequently (i.e. if you perform circular movements calling for short muscle fibers, you'll probably have a harder time with linear movements calling for long muscle fibers), and obviously nerve pathways for those repeated actions will be strengthened. This would reduce the amount of higher level neural effort needed to perform those kinds of movements and the actions would "fire faster". But really, there's not enough neural meat down there to handle the processing necessary for anything substantial enough to call it a "motor skill".
TFA makes the discussion that it's all about a highly efficient foot-motor control area that can operate with minimal external input (i.e little conscious thought), which pretty much describes muscle memory. There's no mention of "special neurons", just regular motor control areas that are wired for efficiency and operate with less noise.
Where someone might conclude that it's different from "muscle memory" is that muscle memory is usually focused on specific motor tasks, while this research is basically saying that entire areas of the brain related to motor skills which have a highly developed muscle memory work more efficiently. Which, I'd think, would be pretty obvious. Developing expert-level muscle memory is in practice about learning entire repertoires of movements, not just a single specific movement, and a consequence of having muscle memory for a large set of similar movements means the brain is wired such that anything resembling those movements will be handled at about the same skill level with about the same amount of conscious thought. If you've spent your entire life practicing all the 50 different ways to kick a ball under all possible conditions (different balls, ground conditions, shoes, lighting, angles, etc) then its unlikely you'll ever need to put any conscious thought into making your feet connect with anything ball-like.
I guess that's a sexier headline than "Expert Soccer Player Has Good Muscle Memory", and it does tie into that recent bit of excitement down in Brazil, but otherwise I'm not seeing anything in the summary that comes as a surprise... Is it that part where they quantify the differences in neural activity between "expert" and "amateur"?
As I said, I live in the country.
Most ATVers, snowmobilers, boaters, hunters, etc are perfectly respectable people who go out of their way not to bother anyone, and I have no issue with them.
Those other fuckers, however... I have absolutely no doubt that drone technology will become simple and ubiquitous enough that the sort of asshole who enjoys annoying people with expensive toys will inevitably discover and abuse it.
I specifically said "the signal range of my house". Stock antennas on a router in the basement. If my network can see the drone, it's going to be pretty close.
Well, I live in the country. If a wifi-controlled drone gets within signal range of my house, the owner is very likely trespassing and almost certainly snooping on my property in particular.
I want to see a security tool which hijacks the drone control connection, lands it on my roof, and shuts it down so it won't leave.
I can't quite decide if the followup should be "call the police", "hold drone ransom" or "just keep it", but I'm sure I'd think of something.
Most of the genuine bugs described (versus the braindead design decisions) appear to be related to hardware integration (i.e. the input stack) and/or the carrier part of the experience.
Am I surprised that the hardware integration on a cheap phone might be crap? Nope. Am I surprised that the carrier integration might suck? Nope. Am I surprised that the more a device deviates from the mainstream, the weirder the problems would be? Nope. Is it likely that the experience would actually be *worse* if the vendor had just shipped AOSP? Very.
So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question about why this stuff happens is "I want something so badly that I'm a captive market who won't explore decent alternatives (is the built-in slider on a 4" phone really that much better than an S5 bluetooth keyboard case or Swype on a phablet? Really?) and will stick with the phone in spite of it being a piece of shit"?
Honestly, I have to give kudos to LG for gauging how desperate the potential users of this phone would be for a physical keyboard and saving themselves a little cash on testing. It seems to have worked out okay for them.
In general, I don't entirely disagree. In this case... I'm not sure how useful the black box would be in the event of a missile strike. I wasn't aware the civilian aircraft had the kind of gear to track a missile, or that the kinds of collision sensors they have would be fast enough to catch it. It's definitely not going to be able to tell who shot the missile or where it came from. Heck, I'd be surprised if the black box could tell the difference betwen a missile strike and a large suitcase bomb in the cargo hold. So unless it actually was an mechanical or aircrew failure (and I highly doubt it), I think the black box is a red herring.
A much stronger mechanical action which generates multiple (the keypress itself plus the imprint on paper action) strong and distinct signatures. I'd expect it would be far easier to pick up than even the loudest Model M keyboard...
I'd be curious how much a highly sensitive seismic sensor on the ceiling below the typewriter would pick up, or even on the foundation of the building.
The question to ask is, is the data stored in another country as easily available to a
Microsoft employee in the USA as data stored in the USA would be?
There's a compelling argument, and multi-national corporations in particular make themselves vulnerable to it, that if you ignore borders in your day-to-day operations then you can't exactly point at the border as an insurmountable issue when someone is making you do something you don't want to do.
The recent case where a Canadian court ordered Google to censor results globally is another example of this. People argued that the court only has jurisdiction over google.ca results, but conveniently forgot that google.ca is hosted in the exact same server farm as all Google search services. So where do you draw the line? Surely not where the corporation decides it's convenient in that particular instance.
First posted?
Of course, they do have to work a lot harder to avoid someone just eavedropping on the keypresses...
I keep the following quote pinned in Google Keep to remind myself of what happens when corporate communications becomes completely divorced from reality:
From the previous Microsoft CEO. Nice to see that Ballmer's ghostwriters are still with the company.
Um... no. Pure communism is incompatible with the entire concept of "boss", unless you're using "boss" as some kind of shorthand for "what society needs".
Theoretical communism doesn't have a "boss".
Real communism, as practiced by real people, has an entire class of people who are "the boss".
It might be interesting, not to mention somewhat obvious, to quantify how much things have changed in the last decade or two given the trend towards never being more than an arms length away from entertainment.
A better question is "which hackers have working days like that"? Why would anyone expect criminals to work 9-to-5 jobs? I'd expect something more along the line of noon-to-hey-let's-go-get-piss-drunk-and-sleep-in-until-noon.
This is true. I'm questioning that said patents are really such an "ace up the sleeve" if someone else is beating you to market with devices that already do what your patents purportedly cover. There's only a limited set of physiological sensors that are going to be useful in headphones and that aren't already in their phones, and LG just nailed the main one. Body temperature would be the next obvious.
IMHO, Apple's ace up its sleeve is the same thing it's always been... to ability to pump out a product that's just plain nicer than anyone elses product. Patents just muddy the water.
You mean like these. Somehow, I have a feeling those patents might not be as useful as someone might think...
It is for me too, after I type "apt-get purge nano".
Oh, I understand what you mean. But calling it "lazy" is... well, lazy.
Programmers are generally not lazy people. They're willing to work pretty hard at stuff that matters or that they care about. They just don't like to waste their time, nor do they like to do poor work.
Tedious manual error-prone processes that could be done more efficiently and correctly by making a machine to do it are exactly the sorts of jobs programmers don't like to do.
Granted, not wanting to do a job the way someone expects you to do it or the way it's always been done might *look* lazy...
Not so much a "desire to be lazy", but more about pre-empting laziness.
Laziness is like entropy; it's gonna happen.
Tedious manual processes are inherently error-prone. If everyone is conscientious and on-the-ball, things generally work, albeit less efficiently than we'd like. But that's not sustainable in the long term... eventually, people get into a groove and start getting sloppy.
Designing, writing, testing, and rolling out (usually against the inertia of an existing process) a program isn't lazy. It maybe allows the programmer to be lazy later, but in the short term actually a lot more up-front work. It's just a shedload more interesting that the actual work it's replacing, which is usually the main motivation for doing it at all.
Actually, if you read it carefully jcr was suggesting that the OP should harm himself or self-pleasure himself. Or, perhaps, smuggle his digs through a security checkpoint. The specific interpretation is entirely dependent on that individuals personal lifestyle choices.