Actually, typewriters are very interesting devices. I used to work on IBM Selectrics for the fun of it. I recently pitched my electric typewriters (had to move, and downsized my collection), but kept two old mechanical typewriters. One of the two is a mathematics typewriter, complete with a number of calculus symbols and other nifty glyphs. I had seen that before on the electrics with the daisy wheel or the type ball, but this is the only one I have seen with the symbols actually molded onto the keys and cast onto the type bars. It still works, too, though I had to re-ink the ribbon myself.

U.S. Bank has the loan for my truck. I have no other dealings with them. Just got an email about the Epsilon information being stolen, supposedly only our email address (my wife's, actually). They apparently contract with Epsilon for their email services. This outsourcing of customer management always bothers me. It seems you are never dealing with a single company anymore; any commerce involves spreading your information out to a collective of "responsible" parties, regardless of appearances otherwise. Then, when problems arise, they have a 3rd party to point fingers at. If this had not happened, I probably never would have heard of "Epsilon".

Perhaps they are not meaningful to you. Personally, I pay to keep my telephone number *out* of the white pages, and divulge none of the other information to anyone other than my employer, my bank, some creditors, and a few real-life friends. I don't want *anyone* else to have it. I'm inclined to send nasty-grams to HR when they voluntarily give away my work email address to 'corporate perks' programs and 'employee health' organizations. I get almost zero personal spam but average five a day for my work address.

Facebook still manages to piss me off. I moved a couple of years ago, and made the mistake of giving my real email address to the realtor who was supposed to sell my old house. He ended up sending me an invite to friend him on Facebook. I do not have (or want) a Facebook account, but they now have my email address because of this dufus. Worse, I then started getting spam from Facebook, with these little icons of photos of people I 'might know'. Actually, I did know about 4 out of 5 of them. This indicates two things to me: 1) These people have poked around on Facebook to see if I am there; and 2) Facebook maintains these searches in a damned database. So, whether you 'opt in' to this or not, your associations are tracked and cataloged for their future use. I no longer have that email address. I terminated it last year because it is now useless to me.

For what it is worth, I spent a couple of years where part of my job was doing merges of various targeted mailing lists to make even more targeted mailing lists. At one point, we had a doctor paying us to identify unwed mothers. Most people would be amazed at the information that falls out when you start tying different mailing lists together -- everything from magazine subscription lists, to stores you have purchased things from, to club and organization membership lists. All for sale. All very useful. Want to make a statistically valid guess at someone's gender preference? It isn't difficult, and I expect you will be able to purchase such information on line in the near future (you can probably do so already, but I haven't looked into it).

In summary, it is true that what Facebook is doing is not unique, it is just a new dimension (web of associations between persons) added to already available information (web of associations to organizations). On that point I would agree. I disagree that this is not meaningful. It all depends on how creative you are at cross-referencing. An email-address, in particular, is *very* valuable in this regard -- better than a physical address for some things.

I had originally started reading this article and started to comment, then had to leave for several hours. Came back and finished my comment, which was regarding our decision for "No Baby Talk" with our daughters. Now I see that many others here have made similar choices, so we are not alone, even if it seems that way to us.

You can read that comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2026642&cid=35416946

I would like to reassure others that I so far see no sign that what Lemmy here says is true. Daughter one is 15 years old now, ahead of her peers in school with respect to her age, well adjusted, in all honors classes in a tough school system. She is a successful artist, with some of her artwork on display currently in Washington, D.C., and a talented musician, playing seven instruments and currently a member of three orchestras, one of them at the national level. She isn't currently taking an art class so that she can fit in three years of Japanese and double up on sciences, intending to double up on art classes next year -- this arrangement being the only way to fit things into her schedule. She intends to take C++ programming classes next year if she will be allowed to drop her study hall. She isn't "cognitively engineered" at all. We keep her engaged, and we support her in whatever way we can, but she motivates herself. Her biggest problem is that there isn't enough time to do everything she would like. She has played soccer for ten years, but dropped off the team at her high school this year because it consumed too much time. Many of her friends are just like her.

Daughter two (7 now) shows every sign that she's heading along the same route.

I agree with the observation that reinforcing behaviors are deliberate. My wife and I discussed exactly how to handle these issues on an ongoing basis. It was also my habit to spend a lot of time with both daughters, walking around and observing things, pointing out, explaining, and reading every street sign or anything else that presented an opportunity. Language is incredibly important. Beyond this is the part where I disagree -- "short sentences" are *not* obvious. I actually have clear memories of learning to speak and read, and I *hated* it when people spoke down to me. So I did not do that with my daughters. No baby talk. Use complete sentences. Use the correct word, even if it is not common vocabulary, etc. Of course, if my kids had not been capable of learning from this I am sure I would have reverted to tradition, but that did not happen. Both began speaking very early, and learned rapidly.

I don't recall specifics around 18 months, but I do know that my older daughter was reading well before she turned 3, because we read together every night and I would write the date that she first read a book on her own inside the front cover. I remember the exact book that convinced me that this wasn't just a good memory: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679832696/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3878470371&ref=pd_sl_17n0twlwjr_e#reader_0679832696 (P.J. FunnyBunny Camps Out). She read that out loud to me about 3 months before her third birthday, without any help from me, and without anyone having read it to her first. After a year of preschool at age 3, we were convinced that a second year of it would be a waste of time, especially when she would recognize misspellings on paperwork the administrator was sending home to parents. We found a private kindergarten that would take her if she passed an interview and made it through a class (this while she was still 3, in order to register for the fall classes that would start a few weeks before she turned 4). During her class time, she took to walking around the class to help the other kids with their work, including writing names for those kids that did not know how to write their own yet. I remember the kindergarten teacher being shocked that she had correctly spelled "Christopher" for one of those kids.

Daughter two has always been a little more difficult to assess. I can't tell you when she learned to read. Before she was 3, she confirmed with me that she had read the phrases on two signs in a parking lot correctly, after we took her to get glasses to correct for her "lazy eye". This was in the parking lot of the optometrist, when I was putting her into the car seat while her mother was still inside paying the bill. I believe she was just validating that her glasses were working properly. After that, she refused to perform -- would not even read the same signs to her mother. I would read to her every night just like I had with her sister, but she refused to ever read for me. I was convinced that she understood how to do it, she just did not want to. When she went to preschool, we would hear gushing reports from her teachers about how well she read, but never got any demonstration of it at home. Likewise it went, on up through the other grades. She is in second grade now, and I am still reading to her every night and she still refuses to read out loud for me, except when it is a homework assignment. My wife helps out with the school, doing math and reading assessments, and daughter two is in the "advanced readers" group. My wife says she is so far ahead of the other "advanced readers" that it is like night and day. She does read voraciously on her own now, having just completed several of the Harry Potter novels. I had recently read a few of the "Illustrated Classics" versions of some of Jack London's books to her, including White Fang and Call of the Wild. Tonight she told me she doesn't like the simplified language, and asked me if she could read the "real books". I pointed her to my collection of Jack London in our family library, and also the Jules Verne, since she is interested in that too. I believe she's about on pace with where I was at, at that age. I distinctly remember checking White Fang out from the school library when I was in second grade, loving it, then reading everything I could by Jack London from the public library, including my favorite, "The Sea Wolf".

I do think this is one area that is really difficult to research meaningfully. I think a child's brain is so amazingly good at learning that a whole variety of techniques will be successful, and that differences come down to individual preferences on the part of the child as much as anything else. There are far too many uncontrolled and uncontrollable variables involved to draw any absolute conclusions.

I've encountered a few really annoying newsgroup trolls over the years, people that only showed up in order to stir up crap for no good reason. Those types invariably seem to think that they're anonymous because they use an assumed name and some Yahoo/AOL/Google address they acquired for that particular purpose. Although it cost me dearly in hours and eyestrain, I've hunted a couple of those people down, identified them, then posted all of the steps necessary to connect the dots back to the newsgroups they were making asses of themselves on, with information detailed enough to derive their home telephone numbers, names, place of employment, and even more sensitive personal information (in one case, if someone chose to read between the lines). In both cases, that was the end of it -- no more troll. I did this the first time after having had a discussion with a friend, who suggested that this was the best way he had found to deal with astroturfers. I believe he was right (thanks Alex). For casual trolls, I still think it is advisable to simply ignore them -- for people that are seriously asinine, a little vigilantism can be effective.

Unlike some, I have no appreciation for "the Art of Trolling". Appreciating a skillful trolling is no more worthwhile than appreciating fine sewage-making. They add essentially the same benefit to society -- in fact, the sewage might be the greater contribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet

Meh. Someone my Dad was friends with when I was growing up had memory that was near enough to photographic to convince me. He could watch a train go by and then recite off the colors of each car and read off the signage of everything from his memory, dictating it back to you. My brother is a train geek, and tested this a few times by picking a train car at random, then asking the guy to describe, say, "the 37th car" after the train had gone by. You could also hand him a book, and let him flip through the pages, then have him 'read' a particular page from memory. This guy did not consider his ability to be an asset -- quite the opposite. He insisted that his head was constantly full of "noise" from random rememberings, and that he could not forget things that he really would much rather not remember. He wasn't especially successful, either. IIRC, he was a coal miner.

It isn't difficult to learn, or to teach, at least to the younger generation. Even my 7-year-old knows the difference between, 'To:', 'CC:', and 'BCC:'. She even complained to her second-grade teacher about putting everyone in the 'To:' field, because now everyone has her address, which she was told to keep private. He's learned his lesson. My 15-year-old's soccer coach is another story, though. The concept seems too difficult for him. He's at least learned to distribute those nasty .docx files with a PDF as well, though.

I taught my wife and daughters: Use the 'To:' field for the primary people you are corresponding with, and might expect a response from. Use 'CC:' for those that might also need the information but probably don't need to act on it in any way. Use 'BCC:' for large distributions or any email where not all of the parties will know each other and you don't have permission to share their contact information with other people (a good example is sharing a joke with a bunch of people in your address book). My oldest daughter also uses it to keep me informed when her online conversations wander into the territory of "stuff Dad had better know about."

Mine comes well after yours, and I was going to guess 1997 for myself. My oldest daughter was about 2 at the time, I seem to recall.

I have copies of many of my favorite anime either as fan subs or Korean-made English dubs, and some just in the original Japanese with no English at all, but bought the U.S. releases as soon as they were available. Sometimes that was ten years after my initial purchase. But I do currently own a "legitimate" copy of everything. I actually like some of the subs better -- they sometimes dumb down the English dialog to fit the mouth movements better. A (good) sub gives you the audio cues for emotion from the original actors, along with a more accurate representation of the meaning.

I've only seen one of the episodes in which they attempted to set a boat on fire with a solar reflector. They did manage to make a lot of smoke, but no flame. There were a few obvious things that might have worked against the effort simply because they were *not* made from "ancient materials". The boat itself was wooden, but painted. Ancient boats would almost certainly have been coated entirely in pitch. They didn't nail things together then, they actually drilled holes through the planks and tied them together with cords, then coated the entire works in pitch to seal out water and to prevent rot (we use paint mostly for the latter purpose). If you've ever played with a lens and asphalt as a kid, you know it is relatively easy to set it on fire, compared to other materials. I used to take a dab of hot tar and put it on the side of an empty soda can, which made it then easy to heat that spot enough to punch a hole in the can and/or set the paint on fire.

In other words, I don't think it is unreasonable to propose that they are missing some important variable.

It is now, it wasn't then. This was immediately after the 3GS came out.

I had not thought of that distinction before, but your observation seems about right. Interesting. Thanks, AC.

...posted a comment and it did not appear. Slashcode 3.0 appears to be broken.

...and there's still no first post? I can't believe *everyone* is reading the article!