Ah, sorry. I misinterpreted your question as to whether it was actually utilized or not, not as to how well it was utilized.

In that sense, there's a substantial genetic contribution (although not complete) and a substantial extremely-early environmental contribution (although also not complete, though more easily influenced, i.e. through First 5 type programs) to general intelligence via brain linkages.

Technically, the plasticity of the brain substantially decreases after childhood, but it never quite disappears - otherwise we wouldn't have memories of any events after puberty ends. However, what this means is that it becomes much more difficult to increase one's brainpower after a certain point in life. Thus if you draw the line for "theoretical maximum intelligence", well... anyone who wasn't raised on Suzuki and flashcards since birth probably would never reach their theoretical maximum intelligence.

It is however possible to train oneself to substantially increase one's intelligence in many aspects: recall/recognition (memory palaces and suchlike), working memory (the dual n-back task, IIRC - there may be others, but those are proprietary and generally marketed as ADHD training therapies), as well as reasoning (solving puzzles and brainteasers and doing proofs and chess problems etc.) So if you're just looking for a substantial increase, rather than Theoretical Maximum Intelligence (TMI? Eh, maybe I should pick a different acronym) it can and probably should be done.

The problem is most obvious in childhood, though. It's frighteningly easy to raise a child's intelligence with a complete disregard for their mental health. Similarly, children who grow up in areas that simply don't value intelligence don't bother with learning, so they end up less "book smart" (although it's arguable whether "street smart" is a complementary or competing form of intelligence).

A similar problem is that of what's valued versus what actually gets taught - for example, the US educational system is supposed to raise creative and competent adults, but it's becoming increasingly clear that it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it raises people who a) know how to navigate complex, age-segregated social situations to the exclusion of all other social situations and b) can memorize information for just long enough so that it survives to be spit back out onto a multiple choice test the next morning. That's how the incentives are aligned, so that's how the children develop.

But I digress.

You can find more of this kind of speculation here. I think about brains too much.

Maybe you should read "Metagame" by Sam Landstrom. It's a story about a world that has been turned into just such a system. The characters are meh, but the world's deliciously detailed.

The entire thing about most people only using 10% of their brain is a complete fabrication. The number is significantly higher than that.

For what it's worth, I'm told higher intelligence is linked with more efficient linkage networks / maps within the brain, not necessarily actual usage. Average Joe's neurons get to take the slow path, whereas someone who is reading this statement is more likely to have a much more efficient Network.

Now all we need to do is invent a brain scan that sorts by neural efficiency rather than neural effort, and then we can just kill off the rest of the population to prevent Idiocracy from ever taking place. [/joke]

You should work in a call center, then.

If that's your issue, you need to swap in a British-English dictionary in your spellchecker. I've linked the FF extension; Google will turn up similar tools for other browsers as necessary.

A choice of Google keywords: Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint.

Knock yourself out. Or at least rush at the Mint guys and make sure they don't get rid of synaptic as well.

Probably OT (thus why no karma bonus), but yeah, Aspergirls is pretty good.

Ever heard of a credit union? It's curious how much service changes when you remove shareholders from the equation...

That's because those percentages stack.

Personally I would recommend Bandcamp (I'm a customer, not a shill, before you ask), if you don't have the resources to roll-your-own (it's free upfront, no setup or subscription, but takes 15% off all sales).

Actually, some of us are trying to push Bandcamp to move payment processing in house rather than use Paypal, considering Paypal fees, reputation, and all that jazz. Not sure if they will, but it is a thing that I would like.

My junior high school rented out a corner of the field to have a cell tower planted squarely in it. Every inch of the school had excellent reception, and the kids used to dare each other to touch the fence around the tower.

Somehow I doubt it would be politically correct to do this today, but they're getting thousands of dollars from it a month so nobody on the board is going to complain...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Multiple, blatant logical and factual errors aside, this guy is effective at conveying the spirit of what's happening here. Ignore the utopia at the end, please (it's a structure that lends itself to being manipulated by demagogues), but the general premise of it is sound and compelling enough to be used despite the obvious errors.

I personally am studying for a field of work that will lead to my being replaced by a small shell script^W^W^W^W an AI algorithm within the next few decades, once AIs get convincing natural language processing algorithms. Which is fine with me, provided that someone takes care of the "we will all be on welfare at the end of this" problem.

I don't think anyone's taking care of that problem yet.

Y'know, I was thinking of setting bitcoin payment up for my own stuff, since it seems to be readily convertible from hard currency. The only problem being, I'd have to do transactions and send download links manually. Oh well. For a very low-volume service, that should be fine, but higher-volume... well...

Not that it ought to matter unless I ever get more than, say, ten a day, which is beyond how many downloads I usually get in a week as it is.

But maybe that's a subject for an Ask Slashdot post and not a buried comment thread.

http://vinuxproject.org/

I can't vouch for it, since I don't use it myself, but it exists.

There's a short story called "Harrison Bergeron" by, if I recall correctly, Kurt Vonnegut, that... explores that concept of creating an "equal society". To the extremes of enforcing ADHD in everyone by ear-radios that interrupt thoughts in those of higher intelligence, and strapping massive bags of steel shot to those below a certain weight, and putting glasses on those who have perfect vision so that nobody has perfect vision.

Needless to say, it's. Rather dystopic.

The site uses a silly little javascriptlet to make that number come down from 100%; with scripts on it goes down to 12.0%. Which seems slightly more reasonable, as a number.