tygorius

Anyway, as famed neuroscientist Ted Nelson once put it, "Everything is intertwingled." Just a couple of months ago I read an item about a rodent memory experiment in Helsinki that supported the theory that the reason antianxiety drugs work is that they stimulate neuroplasticity. The results would seem to explain why those drugs could show up in our bloodstreams within hours and yet take weeks for real results to show up -- and it also supports two-pronged approaches to improvement.

One of the things I learned from depression was that one (not "you") could intellectually realize that a stimulus was trivial and yet still have a near-overpowering emotional response. People in such a situation would be well advised to deal with the underlying electochemical issues instead of thinking their depression is merely the result of circumstances and something they can just conquer with more will power.

Seriously, if you have a strong bout of suicidal thoughts in reaction to flippant remarks such at Torvalds's then you need to bring this up to a mental health professional because your current coping mechanism isn't working.

If you're merely tut-tutting with disapproval however I simply disagree. Wanting a world where people never get their feelings hurt is a fruitless quest.

Still, if you're shipping PET computers with a heavy glass CRT display on top, you're presumably not as concerned with weight as you would be with smaller form factors. So this evidence doesn't bear on the article's thesis. Given that the IC controllers introduced the year before the Apple II, the chip vendors would likely have already been sending out sample chips and application notes for some time, although their target engineering applications would be for products where cutting weight was a bigger concern than cost. (Hence Boschert's company having 650 employees in 1977 and having developed products for "satellites and the F-14 fighter aircraft".

I wonder how my college students today have already estimated the total of their purchases when they arrive at the cashier. Such thinking doesn't seem to be part of the culture anymore.

"Among the first users was Mark Twain, who fiddled around with it before putting it aside. Yes, Twain did become the first person to submit a novel in typed form to the publisher, but that wasn't until much later ("Life on the Mississippi,"1883) , and he didn't type it himself... it was a typed copy of his handwritten manuscript."[1]

That manuscript was produced at least 8 years after the first Remington model appeared. Although Clemens was clearly a technophile (and pal of Tesla), he considered the first models to be curiosities rather than immediate replacements for pen or pencil and paper.

[1] http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/firsttw.html

Agreed on the assessment as ridiculous.

I can't remember a SF story where a lack of privacy is considered a good thing for humans. Other species, yes, but in STV even some members of the Borg attempted to create their own private space to maintain a sense of individuality and non-Borg unity.

I once read a thread discussing the topic of Esc replacements and was astounded to learn that some people had reinvented chording: they mapped all the permutations of h,j, and k into Esc replacements and then simply banged all three at the same time to exit!

Of course, when you first begin programming the computer is annoyingly finicky about those small chunks; unlike IMs, picky little details like punctuation, spelling, and syntax demand your attention before you can get experience with the big pictures.

I'm not saying that it's implausible that neuroplasticity effects can be found in the default mode network, just that those with the strongest symptoms might not easily (or ever) get to the "experienced" stage and the implied relief.

You are presuming the terms "never never land" and "just thrashed" refer to a crash, i.e. an abnormal termination. I read them to refer to a program that got bogged down in either unanticipated and extensive computation or abnormally slow I/O. In the context of the story the latter makes perfect sense.

What I suspect is missing from the story is something like Sussman shifting from anticipating a system problem with utilization of system resources to the realization that it was a suboptimal library routine. (That is, a problem with a solution that was the proverbial "simple matter of programming".)

Of course, in hindsight we all have perfect vision...

After watching a couple of scenes with Picard having several PADDs on his desk it occurred to me that I was presupposing that those devices were personal property. But in that future personal property is largely for sentimental items, not utilitarian ones. Also, the PADDs are primarily computer iterfaces.

If you posit that PADDs are as ubiquitous and disposable in the future as Post-It notes and thumb drives are today, the metaphor makes sense. (Indeed, considering the inevitable price drop of consumer electronics, we aren't that far away from iPadish tablet computers reaching that point.)

So Riker picks up a "blank" PADD, his DNA and thumbprint or whatever identifies the device to the network as a Riker interface for the time being. After he's composed his mix tape or status report on the device, it's also resident on the network. And when he hands that PADD to Picard, the recognition of the transfer to Picard serves to automatically track the work flow and acknowledge Picard's acceptance of the report.

It would be more precise to say those are the capabilities of one of the systems that comprise the brain. I think it's a mistake to lump the speed of perception in with the speed of cognition. To put it another way, pointing to the superiority of a gigabit ethernet connection is probably misplaced if it's connected to a microcontroller board running with a 5 MHz clock.

teaching the average person to use a new piece of software is near impossible without utilizing their incredible brain power for visual recognition

This is where I fear GUI enthusiasts often go astray: conflating everyday usage of software with the experience of people learning to use it. It is very useful to examine a light switch when you first encounter it, for example, but people quickly adapt to the common use case of flipping the lights on when entering a room without having to look at the light switch. Or in terms of the original article, most of the usage of a mail program is reading and writing messages -- an area where the advantages of icons, buttons, and menus are debatible.

BTW, CLI user are using their visual systems as much as GUI users are. CLI users are merely using a more structured format for their visual input.

Yes, so far as we know, the persons who robbed and trashed EJ's home were not employees of AirBnB.

In just about every other respect, however, this has everything to do with AirBnB. Four big points that have struck me:

* From a business perpective, such incidents were inevitable and yet the company seems to have had no crisis management plan in place. That is simply astounding.

* From a consumer perspective, it's worth warning potential users of the service that the company's prior attitude was "Don't worry, no one will steal your grand piano". As EJ points out, if AirBnB's "service" offers no more protection and fewer warnings than a free Craigslist alternative, you may want to reconsider using them.

* Given that some small percentage of renters are intent on breaking through your locked doors and storage cabinets looking for valuables, you might just want to reconsider renting your home out to people you don't personally know and trust. At the very least, a viewing of "Pacific Heights" is in order. (A landlord acquaintence suggested the film be required viewing for anyone who is considering becoming a landlord.) This might not seem AirBnB-relevant at first, but when you consider AirBnB's facile "grand piano" Web page, it seems quite relevant.

* Imagine if EJ had gotten suspicious and decided to check up on the renters herself or asked a friend to do it for her. Scenarios escalating to rape and/or murder are not farfetched. Even if you can ignore the pain and suffering of the victims, imagine what a PR disaster that would have been for AirBnB. (Which brings us back to the first point.)

Given the huge lead that Nokia had in smartphone tech and their current trendline in the smartphone market, I don't think it's premature to at least reserve a burial plot.

And whatever that original plan was, I'd bet the pitch didn't include a PowerPoint slide point along the lines of "Two months after we go public, the president leaves and sales really take off!"

No, it's just clear that the author has a wider understanding of the issue (and more compassion) than you display. It's like criticizing people for only being able to do a couple of pushups when they first visit the gym. The fact that they keep going to the gym and working at building strength is the important part, not how many repetitions they start out with.

Recently deceased Aikido master Koichi Tohei[1] was a sickly child and had to take a year off from high school because he had pleurisy. Being forbidden to exercise, he started improving his character where he could: getting out of bed quickly and bathing by dumping buckets of cold water on himself.[2] He would later wind up leading troops in battle, so he hardly strikes me as a wimp. But since he would later stress that simple beginning exercise in some of his writings, just maybe he and the blogger aren't so "painfully pretentious" as you think.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohei_Koichi

[2] http://www.shinichitohei.com/english/2006/08/ki-breathing--1...

While there is some romantic appeal to the notion of a Galt's Gulch where the special creative people retreat, one should be cautious about the approach of holding your breath until other people's faces turn blue. It leads to dubious hyperbole like the member of the US House of Representatives who insisted that if we didn't extend Disney merchandising rights, we would be depriving society of its next Shakespeare. Ahem.

For a more scholarly discussion of the dubious merits of intellectual property, you can read Bodrin & Levine's book[1] "Against Intellectual Monopoly" -- it's available free on their site and other places.

[1] http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

In either case discounting a conspiracy as impossible isn't silly if there's no evidence of said conspiracy nor even a plausible hypothesis of how such a conspiracy could have worked. The onus of proof is on those proposing a conspiracy, not on everyone else to prove a conspiracy didn't occur.

This conclusion bugged me a bit, in part because I'm old enough to remember when programmers considered laziness to be a virtue. But also because it's not evidence-based. If it were a problem faced by a significant portion of SO readers, I suspect they'd find another way to address it. But if it's a problem only experienced by a couple of readers a year, then spending much time on it would be an "industrious" misuse of resources.

Along those lines, I can't be the only one who was surprised that one of his closing examples was Steve Jobs, the famous Reed College dropout. After all, Jobs has stated the importance of his dropping in to calligraphy classes and how it exposed him to the issues of typography, etc. I don't think I've ever heard Jobs talk about the importance of a visual arts degree from a prestigious university, however.

As for the argument that Microsoft or Apple won't look at applications that don't have degrees, well, yes. But in this forum how often have we read of startups choosing their original teams based on prestigious degrees? If you can make something new and useful, are you really worried about HR liking your resume or are you more concerned with finding ways to make your own company happen?

There's a difference between making the case that someone can do something because you have experience in doing it and making the case that someone can't because you haven't. There are presumably quite a few people who've tried an approach similar to yours, but there aren't that many who have tried Dan's approach... yet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

As his family and advisors reported in the article, this isn't just different from what he's done before, it's different from what most (all?) people have done before.