Support doesn't come cheap [...] Any extra hours [...] At the moment Linux technicians don't come as cheap.
Some of the students are naturally curious regarding technology. Let them learn what interesting things can be done with the machines, and have them teach the others. Hire a one or a few of them cheaply to do any formal support if the extra hours are needed.
Also, make it easy for the students to reimage the laptops on their own [i.e. provide a step-by-step guide and a netbootable mini-OS that does just that], so there are fewer requests for the sysadmin to do that. That should also allow curious students to experiment more.
Yes, the vast majority think they are above average drivers.
Exaggerating slightly, everybody think they're above average at everything. An interesting paper is "Unskilled and unaware of it" (http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf), about how one's incompetence prevents one from recognizing it, and you tend to overestimate your level of competence. What I find interesting is that at the top end, people tend to underestimate their (comparative) level of competence.
This is mostly true for skills that are purely mental; when there's a motor component, your incompetence leaks when you, say, drive into the wall despite knowing you shouldn't.
I suggest you take a look at Utnubu (http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu). It's a debian (sub)project to cannibalize all the good parts from Ubuntu. One of their goals is to "Collaborate with Ubuntu: Reduce duplicate effort, join efforts, try to co-maintain packages compatible for Debian and Ubuntu."
What would be gained by doing a carbon copy rather than stealing only the good bits?
Someone else said that Clinton paid off the national debt. Can you explain how you came up with the 60% figure?
Did you for symmetry ask $someone_else how they came up with Clinton paying off the national debt?
I heard on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (a great science podcast, www.theskepticsguide.org) about human psychology that people are willing to believe what they're told, unless it conflicts with something they already believe. Note what doesn't enter into the picture: evidence and logic.
I'm not saying you're wrong in doing what you're doing, I'm just making an interesting observation explicit.
[and if I now believe what I've heard on the SGU based on this evidence, that might very well be confirmation bias happening]
Do you really care what happens after the heat death of the universe? Or when your great-great-grandchildren have all died. Or just whet you are dead?
For really massive RSA keys, we may be talking about these time scales.
Also, if you can decrypt the one-time pad, please show me your algorithm. If you don't know it, here's the brief version: I think of a number, either 0 or 1. Then I flip a coin, with heads=1. You get to look at the coin, and have to tell me which number I'm thinking of.
Your statement is true, but in its current form is not really relevant to your point. You may want to be more specific.
Computer literacy is distinct from networking which in turn is distinct from programming [as has been said]. Don't try to teach them all at the same time, and only teach two at the same time at the areas where the two overlap.
The rest of my post is about teaching programming specifically, not the other two (although it may also be relevant to system administration).
Teaching generative models is crucial. What does that mean? It means teaching the causal connections; for one, between what the code says and what it does, and for two between what one piece of code does and what another piece of code does.
A study observing students without programming experience answer a test about the semantics of the assignment operation; those who create a model of what assignment does and applies it consistently do better in class than those who don't independent of what the model is (and in particular independent of whether it's the correct model). http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
No matter which languages and tools you teach, and no matter which problems you make the students apply their tools to, help them obtain a generative model, and help them help themselves obtain a generative model.
As for which tools to teach them, I would recommend python. It allows you to go straight to the meat of the matter without having much in the "this part is magic, you're not supposed to understand this". Also, it supports the teaching of multiple paradigms. Procedural and OO programming are its strengths, but you can definitely teach the ideas of functional programming in it as well--it already likes doing things with lazy lists (called generators), such as map-filter-reduce.
(There are also other programming paradigms or computational models, such as prolog-style declarative programming, string rewriting systems or cellular automatons; python doesn't lend itself naturally to do those, but it should be simple to write a simple string rewriter; besides, I wouldn't suggest teaching esoteric computation paradigms).
So my vote is Python, How to think like a computer scientist, and a lot of attention to the generative models.
If you need an example of real-world python, I'd suggest the official bittorrent client (it'd also give you a good excuse to talk about networking if you feel like it).
Also, try to take something the students already know how to do and show how they are following an algorithm; make them implement the algorithm. Math should be rich with examples (gaussian elimination, computing derivatives or simplifying expressions), but the examples may also be a bit on the boring side.
Ever bought a toaster outside of the US. You'll burn you hand the first time you use it. Not in America.
You forgot the irony tag. Or you've only ever been to the US and South Africa. Not wanting to enter into a pissing contest, but my experiences living in Denmark and having been to Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Estonia suggests that the number one observable difference between countries is the language with the second being currency.
I've seen small notes on electronics here in Denmark stating that the equipment complies with FCC rules on interference (I think they're numbered fifteen and two).
General Multiparty Computation protocols can be secured against strictly less than one third of the players being corrupted; corrupted here means that it deviates from the protocol, for instance by telling its secret to some other player because it in practice is under the control of the other player.
The simple version of how to handle it is that whenever someone deviates from the protocol, the honest parties reassemble the secret key and compute a new secret sharing; that is, everyone gets a fresh chunk of private key.
It should not be difficult to combine chunks into the secret key, and then reshare it with a new sharing structure; that is, when $NEMESIS takes over $LACKEYS, you don't give chunks to the lackeys, and can still require a the same fraction of the remaining fewer players to agree in order to sign.
But there is a political game to be played as well; what happens when everybody consolidates into Oceania vs. Eurasia and so forth. I'm not a political major, so I don't have any recommendations I can back up with anything but what every lay person knows.
That being said, distribute power as much as possible. When ever a player drops from the game, have the remaining players appoint a temporary replacement. If you need to invest ultimate authority in a single entity, invest as little as possible, and try to restrict its authority to matters of procedure rather than dealing with the subject matter. That still lets the ultimate authority nominate (and then who cares about what the voters choose), but it's a problem that has 192 different ongoing solutions; I'm an optimist, so I'll arbitrarily say that the risk of this going to pot is slim.
How would this impact simple host creation and DNS transfers though?
If the root is handled well, not at all. All that happens at the root zone is the creation and deletion of TLDs. Anything sub-TLD is handled by the entity(ies) responsible for their respective TLDs (such as Verisign, DK-Hostmaster or what have you).
If Verisign is the steward of both the root (in whole or in part) and the.com zone, they may be able to play tricks on us, but I'm not sure what those tricks are. Also, bear in mind that what we're (most likely) talking about isn't that you won't get a name, it's just that you'd get a name that does the same as names do today, no more no less.
Here's the ten kilofoot view: each participant p_{1..n} gets a piece of the key. If least t of them (for some 2 <= t <= n) cooperate, they can produce a signature on the input message.
It is widely held that separation of power into legislative, executive and judiciary is a good thing. Here, the roles would be symmetric, but you still get the benefit of no one body of people (or single person) being in control.
Here's an interesting thought: include some of the root server operators in the decision. I haven't done the formal proof, but my understanding is that it'd be simple to create weighted threshold schemes, such that if ten of the $n roots all agree, that counts as one "vote" in the usgov-icann-verisign calculation [just apply some general secure Multiparty Computation protocol to the computation of RSA-signing with Shamir secret shares of the private key]. And, as your child poster says, you may want to include the UN. Not being a citizen of 192 sovereign nations, I don't like the idea of any one nation having a disproportionately large influence over critical infrastructure, should we come to rely on a signed root zone [note: we don't now, because it isn't; that may be useful to put this issue into its proper perspective, or not...].
But no matter who the eligible parties are, I don't think any one of them should be in exclusive control. Use a threshold signing scheme to distribute the power.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
Suppose there are three candidates, A, B and C. Your payoff for the candidates are A=+10, B=-1, C=-1000. If you vote for B or C, your candidate wins [and you get their respective payoffs]. If you vote for A, then C wins. Your options are -1 or -1000. Clearly the best one is -1.
It's a somewhat simplified model of reality, but it applies well enough to give some insight. If you want to add depth, you might say that A wins with some very small base probability, and your vote for A doesn't change it that much; the end result would be that a two-party system is a highly stable equilibrium. And that, unless you like sock puppets that can fit on one pair of hands, is why the USA needs election reform:)
So, we have quantum computers with quantum networks doing quantum cryptography. What's next, buying music with quantum DRM, i.e. the song is both there and not there until the sound card observes it?;)
In addition, it was also recently demonstrated that regardless of the encryption algorithm used, it's possible to get a silhouette of high contrast encrypted images.
That was for four-color bitmaps, not 2^32-color compressed images (i.e. jpegs). And it depended on seeing the volume at two different points in time, with a white image exactly at the spot were the four-color bitmap would be placed later (or was located earlier).
A real international force (unlike the UN) should be able to enforce sanctions against nations who do nothing to crack down on massive piracy. Allowing pirated DVDs to be sold on the street is not acceptable.
National Sovereignty. If my country decides not to have copyright laws, that's none of your country's business. I hear that the US didn't exactly recognize foreign copyrights from the get-go.
"But we need the export market". No you don't. There's plenty of music and movies in danish. Not really a widely spoken language; what's our export market again? And we're a nation of ~5.5M people [yay, on the top 108 of highly populated countries]. Imagine all the problems the bigger countries aren't going to have.
But intelligence isn't, otherwise we'd be able to produce environments that turned every child into a genius (note here that I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region).
You're taking what I said and running too far with it. I said to some degree
I think the figures are that heredity accounts for 75% of the variance in intelligence, environment 25%. My source is Introductory Psychology from MIT OCW; the lecturer, Wolfe, also stated that intelligence can on the individual level be increased by environmental changes (i.e. make the kid play chess or solve rubik's cube; teach them some thinking skills).
I remember the bottom line being that changes are not dramatic (you change your IQ score by single digit figures), and only last as long as the environmental change is kept in place. At no time did I (nor Wolfe) claim that we can turn everybody into Archimedes or Da Vinci, and it doesn't follow that if we can make small changes then we can also make huge changes.
Also, if you want to pick nits, pretend I said "intelligence is influenced by environment" instead of IQ, because that's what I really meant.
"Also, our collective cognitive skill (as measured by IQ) is steadily increasing."
IQ tests only measure the ability to pass IQ tests. There is a correlation between that ability and intelligence, but it's nothing more than a correlation, so an increased IQ in a population over time could just as easily be due to changes in the tests themselves as changes in those being tested.
As I recall from The Skeptics' Guide, intelligence tests are calibrated every so often to keep the bell curve centered at 100 with a variance of 15, exactly to compensate for increasing intelligence; the increase in IQ score is with this change controlled for, ISTR.
An interesting thing to study would be whether the correlates of IQ change according to the increased intelligence. Among the positive correlates are lifetime expectancy, education attainment and income; among the negative ones are divorce rates, incarceration risk and long-term dependency on welfare.
However, I bet that's going to be difficult. Among the confounds would be: better health care and medicine, changing financing of the education system and the cycling of the economy through good and bad times, and I don't really see how you'd realiably control for those.
"There was a time where the life expectancy was my current age"
There was a time when _average_ life expectancy was your current age, because average life expectancy is calculated on figures that include infant mortality, which was (and still is in some parts of the world) around 90% for much of our history. Those who survived to the age of twelve years did however live just as long as people do today.
When you say _average_ life expectancy, I think what you mean life expectancy not conditioned on reaching the age of twelve; life expectancy is the expected value of a stochastic variable, so in some sense it's already an average.
I remember from history class that as late as some point in historic time (i.e. within the last ~10K years), you could count on being dead by 40. I was talking prehistoric time; I figured the talk about Homo Ergaster gave it away. Are you claiming that at no point in prehistoric time we would be parents by age 14 and dead by age 25?
"We are getting older" [discussion about age ratios I don't quite see the intention of]
No matter our life expectancy, my point really was that we become parents at a (much) later age than what was the case in our past. How long we live after that is pretty much orthogonal to the discussion. My point about life expectancy was simply that back in those days, I wouldn'
By and large, I agree, but there's a bit of subtlety hiding in the bushes. Let's say what wikipedia says about usability:
Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.
For the most part, I'm willing to take on face value the claim that Apple stuff "Just Works".
However, Apple suffers from a nasty case of Vertical Market Syndrome, whereby they try to lock you in to their platform (or the platform of their partners).
Do you want to use their music purchasing application to buy some music, then play it back with mplayer/winamp/...? Apple actively prevents you from making the most obvious use a music purchasing application: to purchase music that you can listen to on your terms.
Do you want to use a non-apple mail client on your fancy iphone? No way. Do you want to use an iphone with ${!AT&T}? No way [or rather, you're forced to sign up for AT&T services whether you want them or not, AIUI].
There are plenty of things that would be easy to do had Apple not worked so hard to prevent people from doing it. I consider that the opposite of usability.
Slashdot Mirror
Support doesn't come cheap [...] Any extra hours [...] At the moment Linux technicians don't come as cheap.
Some of the students are naturally curious regarding technology. Let them learn what interesting things can be done with the machines, and have them teach the others. Hire a one or a few of them cheaply to do any formal support if the extra hours are needed.
Also, make it easy for the students to reimage the laptops on their own [i.e. provide a step-by-step guide and a netbootable mini-OS that does just that], so there are fewer requests for the sysadmin to do that. That should also allow curious students to experiment more.
Yes, the vast majority think they are above average drivers.
Exaggerating slightly, everybody think they're above average at everything. An interesting paper is "Unskilled and unaware of it" (http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf), about how one's incompetence prevents one from recognizing it, and you tend to overestimate your level of competence. What I find interesting is that at the top end, people tend to underestimate their (comparative) level of competence.
This is mostly true for skills that are purely mental; when there's a motor component, your incompetence leaks when you, say, drive into the wall despite knowing you shouldn't.
As we all know, Qantas never crashed. Def-definitely never crashed.
He'll take you all the way to the ninth circle over it.
And there will be hell to pay!
Is really annoying.
Why don't they just fork from Ubuntu?
I suggest you take a look at Utnubu (http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu). It's a debian (sub)project to cannibalize all the good parts from Ubuntu. One of their goals is to "Collaborate with Ubuntu: Reduce duplicate effort, join efforts, try to co-maintain packages compatible for Debian and Ubuntu."
What would be gained by doing a carbon copy rather than stealing only the good bits?
And useful for a variety of things beyond just saving dough on the desktop end.
Save too much dough, though, and you end up with a result that feels half-baked ;)
-- Jonas K
> Clinton left us with a debt of about 60% of GDP
Someone else said that Clinton paid off the national debt. Can you explain how you came up with the 60% figure?
Did you for symmetry ask $someone_else how they came up with Clinton paying off the national debt?
I heard on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (a great science podcast, www.theskepticsguide.org) about human psychology that people are willing to believe what they're told, unless it conflicts with something they already believe. Note what doesn't enter into the picture: evidence and logic.
I'm not saying you're wrong in doing what you're doing, I'm just making an interesting observation explicit.
[and if I now believe what I've heard on the SGU based on this evidence, that might very well be confirmation bias happening]
given time, *anything* can be decrypted.
Do you really care what happens after the heat death of the universe? Or when your great-great-grandchildren have all died. Or just whet you are dead?
For really massive RSA keys, we may be talking about these time scales.
Also, if you can decrypt the one-time pad, please show me your algorithm. If you don't know it, here's the brief version: I think of a number, either 0 or 1. Then I flip a coin, with heads=1. You get to look at the coin, and have to tell me which number I'm thinking of.
Your statement is true, but in its current form is not really relevant to your point. You may want to be more specific.
Computer literacy is distinct from networking which in turn is distinct from programming [as has been said]. Don't try to teach them all at the same time, and only teach two at the same time at the areas where the two overlap.
The rest of my post is about teaching programming specifically, not the other two (although it may also be relevant to system administration).
Teaching generative models is crucial. What does that mean? It means teaching the causal connections; for one, between what the code says and what it does, and for two between what one piece of code does and what another piece of code does.
Three interesting reads:
No matter which languages and tools you teach, and no matter which problems you make the students apply their tools to, help them obtain a generative model, and help them help themselves obtain a generative model.
As for which tools to teach them, I would recommend python. It allows you to go straight to the meat of the matter without having much in the "this part is magic, you're not supposed to understand this". Also, it supports the teaching of multiple paradigms. Procedural and OO programming are its strengths, but you can definitely teach the ideas of functional programming in it as well--it already likes doing things with lazy lists (called generators), such as map-filter-reduce.
There's also a good book, How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, freely available at
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/html/. Be sure to also look in its parent directories.
(There are also other programming paradigms or computational models, such as prolog-style declarative programming, string rewriting systems or cellular automatons; python doesn't lend itself naturally to do those, but it should be simple to write a simple string rewriter; besides, I wouldn't suggest teaching esoteric computation paradigms).
So my vote is Python, How to think like a computer scientist, and a lot of attention to the generative models.
If you need an example of real-world python, I'd suggest the official bittorrent client (it'd also give you a good excuse to talk about networking if you feel like it).
Also, try to take something the students already know how to do and show how they are following an algorithm; make them implement the algorithm. Math should be rich with examples (gaussian elimination, computing derivatives or simplifying expressions), but the examples may also be a bit on the boring side.
Horse shit. Walmart spends more on toilet paper for their in-store restrooms in a month than a lawsuit over this would have cost them.
Also, the lawsuit has bad PR implications, but that pales in comparison to the panic that would ensue if there was no toilet paper.
Ever bought a toaster outside of the US. You'll burn you hand the first time you use it. Not in America.
You forgot the irony tag. Or you've only ever been to the US and South Africa. Not wanting to enter into a pissing contest, but my experiences living in Denmark and having been to Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Estonia suggests that the number one observable difference between countries is the language with the second being currency.
I've seen small notes on electronics here in Denmark stating that the equipment complies with FCC rules on interference (I think they're numbered fifteen and two).
Also, consider Liebeck v. McDonalds (the Hot Coffee lawsuit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Liebeck). People get burned on the stupidest things, even in the US.
Your point is interesting, but I think you're a tad too quick to generalize :)
2009: the year of quantum computation and communication on the desktop!
General Multiparty Computation protocols can be secured against strictly less than one third of the players being corrupted; corrupted here means that it deviates from the protocol, for instance by telling its secret to some other player because it in practice is under the control of the other player.
The simple version of how to handle it is that whenever someone deviates from the protocol, the honest parties reassemble the secret key and compute a new secret sharing; that is, everyone gets a fresh chunk of private key.
It should not be difficult to combine chunks into the secret key, and then reshare it with a new sharing structure; that is, when $NEMESIS takes over $LACKEYS, you don't give chunks to the lackeys, and can still require a the same fraction of the remaining fewer players to agree in order to sign.
But there is a political game to be played as well; what happens when everybody consolidates into Oceania vs. Eurasia and so forth. I'm not a political major, so I don't have any recommendations I can back up with anything but what every lay person knows.
That being said, distribute power as much as possible. When ever a player drops from the game, have the remaining players appoint a temporary replacement. If you need to invest ultimate authority in a single entity, invest as little as possible, and try to restrict its authority to matters of procedure rather than dealing with the subject matter. That still lets the ultimate authority nominate (and then who cares about what the voters choose), but it's a problem that has 192 different ongoing solutions; I'm an optimist, so I'll arbitrarily say that the risk of this going to pot is slim.
How would this impact simple host creation and DNS transfers though?
If the root is handled well, not at all. All that happens at the root zone is the creation and deletion of TLDs. Anything sub-TLD is handled by the entity(ies) responsible for their respective TLDs (such as Verisign, DK-Hostmaster or what have you).
If Verisign is the steward of both the root (in whole or in part) and the .com zone, they may be able to play tricks on us, but I'm not sure what those tricks are. Also, bear in mind that what we're (most likely) talking about isn't that you won't get a name, it's just that you'd get a name that does the same as names do today, no more no less.
How about using a threshold signing scheme?
Here's the ten kilofoot view: each participant p_{1..n} gets a piece of the key. If least t of them (for some 2 <= t <= n) cooperate, they can produce a signature on the input message.
It is widely held that separation of power into legislative, executive and judiciary is a good thing. Here, the roles would be symmetric, but you still get the benefit of no one body of people (or single person) being in control.
Here's an interesting thought: include some of the root server operators in the decision. I haven't done the formal proof, but my understanding is that it'd be simple to create weighted threshold schemes, such that if ten of the $n roots all agree, that counts as one "vote" in the usgov-icann-verisign calculation [just apply some general secure Multiparty Computation protocol to the computation of RSA-signing with Shamir secret shares of the private key]. And, as your child poster says, you may want to include the UN. Not being a citizen of 192 sovereign nations, I don't like the idea of any one nation having a disproportionately large influence over critical infrastructure, should we come to rely on a signed root zone [note: we don't now, because it isn't; that may be useful to put this issue into its proper perspective, or not...].
But no matter who the eligible parties are, I don't think any one of them should be in exclusive control. Use a threshold signing scheme to distribute the power.
Sig reply (sorry for being OT)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
Suppose there are three candidates, A, B and C. Your payoff for the candidates are A=+10, B=-1, C=-1000. If you vote for B or C, your candidate wins [and you get their respective payoffs]. If you vote for A, then C wins. Your options are -1 or -1000. Clearly the best one is -1.
It's a somewhat simplified model of reality, but it applies well enough to give some insight. If you want to add depth, you might say that A wins with some very small base probability, and your vote for A doesn't change it that much; the end result would be that a two-party system is a highly stable equilibrium. And that, unless you like sock puppets that can fit on one pair of hands, is why the USA needs election reform :)
So, we have quantum computers with quantum networks doing quantum cryptography. What's next, buying music with quantum DRM, i.e. the song is both there and not there until the sound card observes it? ;)
Wanted: Schrödinger's Cat. Dead and alive.
In addition, it was also recently demonstrated that regardless of the encryption algorithm used, it's possible to get a silhouette of high contrast encrypted images.
That was for four-color bitmaps, not 2^32-color compressed images (i.e. jpegs). And it depended on seeing the volume at two different points in time, with a white image exactly at the spot were the four-color bitmap would be placed later (or was located earlier).
This scenario will not happen to the querent.
A real international force (unlike the UN) should be able to enforce sanctions against nations who do nothing to crack down on massive piracy. Allowing pirated DVDs to be sold on the street is not acceptable.
National Sovereignty. If my country decides not to have copyright laws, that's none of your country's business. I hear that the US didn't exactly recognize foreign copyrights from the get-go.
"But we need the export market". No you don't. There's plenty of music and movies in danish. Not really a widely spoken language; what's our export market again? And we're a nation of ~5.5M people [yay, on the top 108 of highly populated countries]. Imagine all the problems the bigger countries aren't going to have.
Beauty by committee.
If one doesn't believe that our finding markers of (relative) fertility beautiful is due to evolutionary pressures, this might be... wait for it...
Intelligent Design by Comittee.
VERY interesting reply.
Some thoughts:
"IQ is influenced by environment to some degree"
But intelligence isn't, otherwise we'd be able to produce environments that turned every child into a genius (note here that I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region).
You're taking what I said and running too far with it. I said to some degree
I think the figures are that heredity accounts for 75% of the variance in intelligence, environment 25%. My source is Introductory Psychology from MIT OCW; the lecturer, Wolfe, also stated that intelligence can on the individual level be increased by environmental changes (i.e. make the kid play chess or solve rubik's cube; teach them some thinking skills).
I remember the bottom line being that changes are not dramatic (you change your IQ score by single digit figures), and only last as long as the environmental change is kept in place. At no time did I (nor Wolfe) claim that we can turn everybody into Archimedes or Da Vinci, and it doesn't follow that if we can make small changes then we can also make huge changes.
Also, if you want to pick nits, pretend I said "intelligence is influenced by environment" instead of IQ, because that's what I really meant.
"Also, our collective cognitive skill (as measured by IQ) is steadily increasing."
IQ tests only measure the ability to pass IQ tests. There is a correlation between that ability and intelligence, but it's nothing more than a correlation, so an increased IQ in a population over time could just as easily be due to changes in the tests themselves as changes in those being tested.
As I recall from The Skeptics' Guide, intelligence tests are calibrated every so often to keep the bell curve centered at 100 with a variance of 15, exactly to compensate for increasing intelligence; the increase in IQ score is with this change controlled for, ISTR.
An interesting thing to study would be whether the correlates of IQ change according to the increased intelligence. Among the positive correlates are lifetime expectancy, education attainment and income; among the negative ones are divorce rates, incarceration risk and long-term dependency on welfare.
However, I bet that's going to be difficult. Among the confounds would be: better health care and medicine, changing financing of the education system and the cycling of the economy through good and bad times, and I don't really see how you'd realiably control for those.
"There was a time where the life expectancy was my current age"
There was a time when _average_ life expectancy was your current age, because average life expectancy is calculated on figures that include infant mortality, which was (and still is in some parts of the world) around 90% for much of our history. Those who survived to the age of twelve years did however live just as long as people do today.
When you say _average_ life expectancy, I think what you mean life expectancy not conditioned on reaching the age of twelve; life expectancy is the expected value of a stochastic variable, so in some sense it's already an average.
I remember from history class that as late as some point in historic time (i.e. within the last ~10K years), you could count on being dead by 40. I was talking prehistoric time; I figured the talk about Homo Ergaster gave it away. Are you claiming that at no point in prehistoric time we would be parents by age 14 and dead by age 25?
"We are getting older"
[discussion about age ratios I don't quite see the intention of]
No matter our life expectancy, my point really was that we become parents at a (much) later age than what was the case in our past. How long we live after that is pretty much orthogonal to the discussion. My point about life expectancy was simply that back in those days, I wouldn'
Qantas never crashed.
frobbing the usability right up to eleven.
By and large, I agree, but there's a bit of subtlety hiding in the bushes. Let's say what wikipedia says about usability:
Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.
For the most part, I'm willing to take on face value the claim that Apple stuff "Just Works".
However, Apple suffers from a nasty case of Vertical Market Syndrome, whereby they try to lock you in to their platform (or the platform of their partners).
Do you want to use their music purchasing application to buy some music, then play it back with mplayer/winamp/...? Apple actively prevents you from making the most obvious use a music purchasing application: to purchase music that you can listen to on your terms.
Do you want to use a non-apple mail client on your fancy iphone? No way. Do you want to use an iphone with ${!AT&T}? No way [or rather, you're forced to sign up for AT&T services whether you want them or not, AIUI].
There are plenty of things that would be easy to do had Apple not worked so hard to prevent people from doing it. I consider that the opposite of usability.
Another reason to never go outside. Ever.
As if Day Star Death Rays wasn't enough...