One of the main points of a scientific paper is that it's peer reviewed.

A decent paper will probably take around 2 hours to read and 2-12 months to write. As inefficient as this is, it has some desirable properties:

1) It presents information in a somewhat standardized format. After all the gimmicky digital notebooks etc turn to dust and the software which runs them becomes obsolete, the articles will remain.

2) It provides references and allows you to use itself as a starting point to discover more about the subject and the claims.

3) It generally represents an incremental advancement in the field.

Aside from the fact that the article is essentially a Mathematica ad, it is somewhat clear that the author has it written any scientific papers

As a student this also annoyed the heck out of me. After all, you'll never be without a computer when you're the programmer -- whether it's 1995 or 2018.

As a professional programmer I found great value in being able to write "stream of consciousness" code which compiles, runs, and does what I want it to do.

Over the years, I realized that the only way to get my code to work each time is to be able to write and debug it on paper -- and to master the syntax of the language to the level of not needing the compiler.

So now I give exams on paper and have recently taken away the cheat sheets which I used to allow.

That being said, most of my intro programming classes focus on projects, assignments, and actually writing code during class. It is ABSOLUTELY pointless to have a paper only CS class. I also don't take off too many points for syntax and allow my students to define helper functions during exams without writing the bodies of the functions.

You can (very inefficiently) get code to work by trial and error -- and you HAVE to do this when you're learning.

However, if you can't at least provide the basic idea of what you're trying to do on paper, you haven't mastered the language or the content of the class.

This is possibly the most important thing we can do _right now_.

Life has moved online and this particular life is dominated by corporations. This will not change. They have and will continue to concentrate power. The laws have not kept up -- if unchecked, this will allow for a de facto circumvention of any 4th amendment rights you still believe you enjoy.

    1984 is the default unless society consciously decides to have it not be.

Society is busy looking at cat pictures and being trolled by foreign powers.

If we don't do something now, the next generation won't see anything wrong with not having done anything ...

I love the idea -- but I must say that using Mandriva Linux on my laptop (c. 2009) for a year turned me from being a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy to a Windows/MacOS user.

The final straw was trying to build the Arduino IDE from scratch (as there was no package available at the time) took me about 3 days -- including a compiler downgrade, etc. Of course, due to unstable hardware support, I spent 15 minutes each work session trying to connect to whatever network was available.

After all that work, I was able to run this IDE in about 5 minutes by launching the Windows Virtual Machine.

So nowadays I tell people to only go with extremely mainstream Linuxes if they choose to use this OS on their primary machines. I still love Linux on servers, embedded machines, etc.

So I _hope_ this project succeeds -- but they better get some basic stuff right (hardware, ONE working interface to accomplish a given task -- as opposed to 3 kind-of-working interfaces, etc.).

You are correct about the MRI part of things and the need for sophisticated experimental design in which a single task may take two minutes of concentrated motionlessness on the part of the subject.

There is, however, a technology called fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) which works on a similar principle as fMRI (changes in blood oxygenation related to function) which only requires the ability to send and detect light through the skull. This is what I believe they're referring to. fNIRS has better temporal resolution than fMRI but its spatial resolution is way worse. Also, the light can't penetrate as deeply (fMRI can image the entire volume).

While telepathy is far, some of the mentioned things are within the realm of possibility, albeit mostly with cooperating subjects and carefully designed, task specific experiments.

I've seen a LOT of people put in long hours and not succeed.

However I've NEVER seen a 9-to-5'er be successful. Especially if the person is young. Especially if 9-to-5 has become a philosophy.

Certainly don't burn yourself out, in which case you'll be useless to yourself and others. But DO keep in mind that someone else who can handle the 60 hour workweek when you have to check out _will_ probably get ahead of you in that particular job.

If you're young (and I assume you are, since you're asking the question) use the time to put in hours in a job WHICH WILL EXPAND YOUR SKILLSET. If you can help it, get known as someone who's NOT afraid of the work. Even if your employer does not show you loyalty, your reputation among your co-workers may come in handy when looking for your next job -- I've helped several former co-workers find jobs because I knew they would do well.

This is an investment in yourself and in your future. You might not have the same kind of time, motivation, and energy later in life.

Skype is useful for:

1) Multi-way business meetings with video
2) Calling phone numbers in other countries without messing with phone cards, etc.
3) screen sharing.

If you want to make Skype more useful, add desktop sharing/control.

The people I have on my Skype list are NOT people I want to social network with. The birthdays from old business contacts are annoying enough ...

Honestly, this is one of the features which makes me keep using Chrome. Especially "Close tabs to the right" which allows me to drag the tab where I want and get rid of the stuff I just wanted to take a glance at.

I really, REALLY hate the trend towards full-screen, single-page browsing with videos enabled by default. It's beginning to feel a lot like "channel surfing"

One things is clear: The automation will not stop, and in the long run, will lead to less demand for unskilled labor. Perhaps less demand for labor overall. The societal change brought brought on by automation started more than a century ago but is likely to accelerate exponentially (technology is finally getting cheap and widely deploy-able), similar to how the dot com boom happened.

I see this leading to two divergent societal paths, and I see us actually picking a perverse mixture of the two.

One path may be a near-Utopian end to drudgery, where production is mostly automated, and people can have whatever they want without spending effort. This, however, requires a re-imagining of the predominant economic systems. We might end up in a Start-Trek like post-scarcity world, but the path going there would require either Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Subsistence (everyone is guaranteed food, housing, healthcare and basic goods -- they work for the rest), or some form of neo-socialism. The problem is that some people (you will see this in rich kids) take well to living a life of leisure, and may even become extremely productive in other types of endeavors (art, music, etc.). Other people _really_ don't take well to idleness and become either suicidally depressed or create trouble for themselves and society (once again, another group of rich kids).

The second, and unfortunately more likely, path is that everyone who is not directly involved in exploiting automation will be squeezed out of the labor market. The only people making money will be the ones driving the automation -- with few people to buy what is produced. You will, of course, see a market created for "artisanal labor" where the rich hipsters buy hand-made goods and eat at non-automated restaurants But this will not be enough to create a labor market. This scenario is likely to lead to resource wars, repression by the rich, and genocides.

Whether out of idleness or desperation, both scenarios are likely to bring religious/political fanaticism fueled by a desperate search for purpose/food in a dangerously idle/desperate world. In either scenario, some people may end up rejecting this new world order and moving to intentional agrarian communes -- but not enough of them to matter.

The elephant in the room of this extrapolation is that most (if not all) economic activity relies on exploiting natural resources -- which (whether you are a global warming skeptic or not) are dwindling. Automated exploitation of resources is NOT going to help things. Imagine what will happen if EVERYONE in the world is able to reach American levels of consumption thanks to the ease of production. Even if you are not an environmentalist, you should still fear the awesome resource conflicts this will cause.

If we want to remain in a livable world, we may need to take a _very sober_ look at what kind of society we want to have in 50 (or even 20) years. I'm not even talking about achieving anyone's idea of Utopia -- it will take SERIOUS WORK to maintain a world which is as livable as it right now. I do not think any of the previously tried -isms is the answer. Finding what _may_ be the answer will itself be work.

... only after having the company agree to a regular audit of its backup systems, and ensuring automated redundant backups of crucial data...

That's a good point, but the thermite need not apply extreme heat to the entire device -- just the flash memory chip. A strip of magnesium with oxidizer might also do the job -- both could be adjusted so that the user sees just a bit of smoke coming out of the phone, without personal injury. See section 3.1.2 in this document about the relation of temperature to data retention.

Shorting out the battery through a coil around the memory chip is likely to make it hot but not necessarily hot enough to truly erase the information (I may be mistaken -- I haven't done the calculations), You might even explode the battery and still keep the information. This also would not necessarily produce the electromagnetic pulse you're thinking of. Even if it did, EMP is unlikely to destroy the contents of flash memory. (Note that I am talking about actually destroying the information stored on the chip. Destroying the small gold wires on the package which connect the chip to the rest of the circuit is easier -- but an entity with enough resources can still recover the information).

Here is another writeup on the effects of temperature and storage time on flash memory (it seems baking the chip at 125 C for 10 hours will still not necessarily erase everything on it). You will need much higher temperatures than you would get with a polymerization reaction to destroy memory in span of several seconds. Both thermite and magnesium can produce thousands of degrees Celsius, which any data stored in flash memory is unlikely to survive.

The real problem is buying a phone or a SIM that's not registered in your name. Since most governments archive the communications anyway, destroying the device accomplishes nothing except to give you away.

Now to destroy the device in a visible way may have some value, but wouldn't it be more reliable to simply put some thermite around the memory modules so as to destroy the memristors beyond recovery without having the phone expand into an ugly wad of polymer?

Also, no thank you.

And I say this as a person who finds FB quite useful in real life.

"You forgot to check in at the conference yesterday." "I see that you did not 'like' my presentation. Might I remind you that this is a condition of employment?" "I TOLD you not to respond to John's project update with department specific information."

Having witnessed several commit comment wars, I can't see this going anywhere good...

We were better than our parents, who couldn't fix the flashing 12:00 on the VCR. Our cohort (plus those within 10 years of our age range) went from dealing with BASIC on Apple II, ZX Spectrum, QuickBasic, etc., DOS, earlier versions of UNIX, all the Windows-es, etc. all the way to the abomination that is Windows 8.

To play Doom, I had to download 6 ZIP files over a 2400 baud modem for a week, unpack everything, and learn how to hack the Config.sys file on my 4 MB DOS machine to free up just the right amount of the right type of memory.

When I bought my first scanner, it took 2 days of resolving IRQ conflicts by flipping DIP switches whose meanings I did not understand at the time to make sure it didn't conflict with my sound card.

Mice required their own drivers.

The current generation is just as smart as we are, if not more so. But they always had UIs that made sense. They did not live through an entire 2 decade long information technology revolution. It shouldn't come as a surprise that they are surprised by alien (and to them, non-sensical and inconsistent) interfaces developed for a captive audience.

Add to this that enterprise software is always purchased during golf games by people who will never use it, and you have a world in which our skills of adapting to horrible and inconsistent interfaces are still useful.

I will now press Alt-H to disconnect :)

While the idea of using an algorithm to sentence a human being is bone-chilling, you might be able to justify this as a "formula" for sentencing -- which, of course, merits its own debate.

What is unconscionable about this is the fact that it's a SECRET algorithm. As in closed source. Essentially a secret law.

This has no place in democracy.

(Also, any algorithm which ingests statistical and demographic data is bound to come up with unpalatable and/or spurious demographic correlations (since there is a causal link between poverty and crime and a historic link between race and poverty) which I wold rather have society refrain from codifying -- in law or in actual computer code).