I think I understand what they're trying to demonstrate, but the experiment is structured in a way that's not obvious. It starts from the idea that some people who have hallucinations of "ghosts" and other such things have damage in their brain, in an area that coordinates different sensations to determine cause. So it's like, if you were to flick yourself in the leg, you would feel one hand flicking, hear a brief "thud" noise from the impact, and feel an impact on your leg, and there's a part of your brain that would somehow collect all those things and go, "These were all the same event. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to be concerned about."

So when they're synchronizing the motion that people are making to the motion of the robot, they're allowing that part of the brain to function normally. The test subject pokes their finger forward, and they get poked in the back. Their brain goes, "Oh, you did this to yourself somehow. Nothing to worry about."

But when they have the robot act on a delay, they're simulating what it would be like if that part of your brain was damaged. You're still in control of the robot, and so you're still poking yourself, but because it's on a delay, that part of your brain that coordinates those things goes, "Whoa, you did *not* do that. Something else is going on here." It's not that they literally believe there's a ghost poking them, but the point is that the experience is disturbing.

And because it is disturbing in a way that's similar to "ghost" or "alien" experiences that people have when that part of their brain is damaged, these researchers think that it explains what's going on with those experiences/hallucinations. The brain is failing to coordinate sensations, and so the brain is attributing experiences of motion/sensation to an alien force of some kind. ("alien force" not necessarily meaning space-aliens, but just "foreign to oneself")

I think this sort of thinking misses what has made Apple successful over the years. Techies keep worrying about whether a device beats another in terms of functionality, and meanwhile Apple focuses on usability. Yes, having a full desktop OS running on a tablet allows you to do more, but Windows 8 is a mess of an OS. Yes, Windows 8.1 improves the mess a bit, but it's still a mess.

At least, that's been my experience. Using Windows 8 on a desktop, I'm thinking, "Well it would be pretty good if they got rid of all this touch-interface crap. It's confusing and useless." Using Windows 8 on a tablet, I'm thinking, "The tablet UI could use a little work because it's a little too confusing. It's great that I can run desktop stuff, but for that stuff, I'd probably be better off with a laptop." Using an iPad? I'm probably not thinking much about the features and interface, because it's pretty clear what the device is, what it does, and how to use it.

I know I'm kind of picking this apart unnecessarily, but you say, "Has anyone seen any solution for this that actually works, or is this the Holy Grail of all IT?" Why would it be one or the other, and why would this possibly be the Holy Grail of all IT?

So now you're turning this into an argument about the particulars of the "bad things" he did. I'd like to point out that, in general, the people who are bringing this up are pro-Gates people saying (and I'm going to exaggerate to make a point), "Gee, look at how wonderful and amazing a person Bill Gates is. He's perfect and wonderful and lovely, and is the ideal human being. Not fair criticizing him! No fair saying anything bad or bringing up his past! We shouldn't even talk about what he did int he past because it's irrelevant, and also what he did in the past was not actually bad."

Not that last part at the end there is important. I don't really want to get into an argument about what he did in the past, but my point is that you are opening that door, which is important and meaningful for this other conversation we're having-- whether it's fair to bring up his past.

The thing is, in bringing up his past, you're belying the idea that his past has nothing to do with his present good deeds. You're presenting an implied argument that his present good deeds make him so immune to criticism-- not just to the point where we're supposed to ignore his past bad deeds, but so much so that we're supposed to revise history and pretend his bad deeds were actually totally fine. Any possible sins in his past can be summed up, "He only failed to be perfect, which is hardly a sin, and he's perfect now, so let's overlook that."

Right about now, you think I'm going too far and reading too far into things, but you misunderstand. I'm not saying this is your actual logical position on the argument, but I'm trying to verbalize the emotional/social position that's implied in your pseudo-logical argument. You're saying, "All he did was produce an inferior operating system," when, unless you're completely ignorant to the historical facts, that's not 'all he did'. But from your standpoint, we should all whitewash his past in order to sanctify him now.

And frankly, I think that's what he intends.

And I want to comment on this, also, and say that I don't think it's unreasonable. If you're going to praise a man for donating millions of dollars to charitable causes, then it's fair game to criticize him for how he got those millions of dollars.

Now we could argue about whether "that bad thing" he did 15 years ago was actually bad. I don't want to argue about that right now. But if without having done "that bad thing" he wouldn't have the millions of dollars to give to charity, then it's relevant to the conversation.

Gates is doing some good things with some of his money. You can take a minute to point that out, and we're free to use that minute however we see fit. I'm not looking to get into an argument about whether Gates is wonderful or terrible, but sorry, no, you don't get to tell all the rest of us that we have to worship the guy. Because ultimately we get to make up our own minds, and the fact that he has given some portion of his enormous money to charity does not make him immune to criticism.

I don't know the man personally, but I don't see why doing something good should remove anyone's right to have some level of "hate" for the man. Setting aside the particular example of Mr. Gates, does it seem fair to say,"[Person X] has done a good thing. Therefore, nobody can dislike him or object to anything else he does!"

I'm not sure why the those things should be connected, or how you can be so sure that Jobs "never gave a dime to charity". There's been at least a couple reports that Jobs did give money to charity, but didn't publicize the fact because he was very private.

But again, what does that have to do with anything? I'm sure there fans of Apple who are not huge fans of Jobs personally. I'm sure there are people who admire Jobs who also admire Gates. I'm sure there are Windows users who hate Gates.

Ok, I'll do this. I'm annoyed at Microsoft because they still haven't included support for non-Microsoft file-systems. Microsoft sucks!

Now what? Have I offended you by criticizing the company connected to The Great Gates?

t seems to me that if you're going to give a company a de facto monopoly of both television distribution and Internet, it would be a fair trade-off to require that they provide a very basic level of service to poor people for free. We can quibble over the details, but for example, providing the over-the-air channels and a 1mbps symmetrical connection seems fair.

These companies don't like to admit it, but they're providing exclusive access to public infrastructure. I think they should be counting their lucky stars that they're not as regulated as other utilities.

I'd want to have the option, but for the default behavior to be that it stays down. I feel like unfortunately, unless you've lived a charmed life where you only have to work with software that's high quality, you will probably run across some server running some piece of crap software that can be a bit crashy. Yes, I've run across software like that on Linux servers too. And personally, ideally, I like to have the easy ability to control what happens when something crashes. Should the server ignore the whole thing and keep chugging along? Should it attempt a restart? Should it wait 10 minutes, and then attempt a restart? If the attempted restart fails, should it make a second attempt? At what point should it notify me?

I like when I can have control over that kind of thing, if possible, and I'd like to have that control be easy and reliable.

Well no, he's right. It's just a tautology-- reliable servers don't crash. It's kind of like, "No daughter of mine is going to get pregnant out of wedlock!" I can say that as long as I'm willing to disown any that get pregnant out of wedlock. If she gets pregnant, then she's no longer my daughter.

So reliable servers don't just crash, but unfortunately a large percentage of the servers out there that, for one reason or another, aren't 100% reliable. I sure wish I had software that would work well on those.

I agree with this part of your post, at least, and have been making the same argument for years. If the companies providing the infrastructure were not making money from selling content, and were only serving as "dumb pipes", then their business incentive would be in pushing customers toward higher-bandwidth (and therefore more expensive) connections. In that business model, companies that can provide content to saturate slow connections become very important, and so it seems likely that they would be falling all over themselves to provide a better connection to Netflix.

Instead, the Infrastructure providers have no incentive to increase content availability, because any piece of available content becomes competition for the content that they are trying to sell. That's a bad system. Unless you have an effective regulatory system, the ISPs will find ways to push towards a walled garden AOL-style internet, charging for access outside of the walled garden.

However, I don't think this is an example of "net neutrality" missing the mark. Net neutrality is a concept, and divorcing infrastructure providers from content providers is one way in which net neutrality could be promoted.

Still, honestly, this is the problem that I'd rather have. For me, I'd rather have the danger of the administrator of the computer making a stupid decision than to be forced into a walled garden.

And I'm not saying this as some kind of advocate of anything. I just control thousands of computers professionally, and I'm willing to take responsibility for which repository I connect to, rather than having to choose from only Microsoft-approved repositories.

Good to know. So I take it you're somewhat responsible for this? I love you then. As a systems/network admin, this has long been on my wishlist.

I wouldn't mind running my own repo for Windows patches, as long as there are tools to make it easy, including some way of automating pulling patches into my repo.

As far as integration with WSUS, I wouldn't mind seeing WSUS replaced/melded into a single solution, but I'm less interested in maintaining two different update solutions that plug into each other. Especially not if they have different behaviors and interfaces. Not that you asked, but I'd definitely prefer a single solution that can hold arbitrary 3rd party software, doesn't expect to be part of a larger Windows network security context (can easily be configured as a stand-alone server in "the cloud"), and is easily controllable on the client via powershell. Easy GUI tools for setting it up and maintaining the repo would be a bonus, but not vital.

I look forward to seeing what this turns into.

I really respect this move from Microsoft. It's something they should have done a while ago, but better late than never. It has the potential to make administration much easier. They should also maintain their own repo of patches as an optional replacement for Windows Update.