Why should the majority suffer because of a tiny minority who want to do stuff nobody else does?

There will always be hardware for that minority. It might not be as pretty and polished as the consumer stuff, and you might even have to *gasp* build it yourself, but you'll still be able to get it if you want it.

Did you read the article? They measured how their porpoises have control over the focus.

Dude, they know. They've known for thousands of years.

My point is that there's not much differentiating us from primates besides scale, remember. I mentioned the cortex particularly in relationship to neurogenesis, not in relationship to primates. It is the most striking difference between primate brains and those of other animals. I also didn't say there wasn't any neurogenesis in the cortex. There might be, but it's proving pretty hard to find. If you read your reference 3, you'll see this:

The number of migrating cells in the
Gould et al. study5, calculated from case numbers
8 and 9, and after a single BrdU injection,
is more than 10,000 per day33. Even if only
25% of BrdU-labelled cells were neurons, as
has been estimated more recently34, the resulting
migratory stream would still be large
enough to be readily detected in the frontal
lobeswith any light microscopic method, but
it has never been observed.Moreover, if most
new cells degenerate between 2 and 9 weeks
after their birth34, then many pyknotic neurons
commensurate with the massive cell
death would be expected.This prediction has
never been confirmed.

That's the very paper I was referring to when I said "Indirect hints of neurogenesis in the cortex have been reported, but other methods that should turn them up haven't, so the evidence is contradictory." It might be there, and it might not. If it is, it's difficult to detect, much more so than the known neurogensis in older parts of the brain that is known to exist in a wide variety of species. It's also difficult to understand what role ongoing neurogenesis would have in providing some kind of "spark" for intelligence.

I doubt very much there's a magic bullet for intelligence hiding in the human brain. Your friend said it herself: "there is strong evidence that the human brain is a scaled up primate brain." The principles are the same, but there's more of everything.

I guess I was thinking about "device" in terms of electronics rather than pet rocks. The biggest manufacturer of the magnetic/copper bracelets actually got in trouble for making them out of potentially hazardous industrial waste.

It's not the buttons themselves, it's using them to execute more than one command at once. If you seem to manage to press some key combination with perfect timing all the time.

EVE players get banned for programmable buttons. You really can pick your poison.

Selling people homeopathy wasn't enough, now there are medical devices. That Thync thing looks like pure snake oil. Unless you walk around with it strapped to just the right spot on your head.

I'm pointing out that there is certainly quite a bit of mass hysteria going around. Sometimes that manifests as whackos killing innocent people, as per your definition. Other times it manifests as whackos engaging in multi-year legislative and regulatory exercises.

The OP was talking about cockpit door regulations. I tend to think that's a good idea, but it obviously has a downside; his point isn't unreasonable. Lots of other "legislative and regulatory exercises" are harder to defend: the random stuff airport security comes up with seems to be borne completely of overreaction. Also things like special border zones hundreds of miles from a border, domestic spying to make Orwell blush, decades long wars, that kind of thing.

Idiots killing innocent people and overbearing regulators: different sides, same mass hysteria coin.

I also found this interesting:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...

Yup, no witch hunts at all. http://rt.com/usa/231839-musli...

It's tough for an untrained person to kill another in a confined space without a weapon. It makes noise and takes a while. The rest of the crew would notice.

The Python code

s = ''
for i in range(0,1000000):
    s += str(i)

will be painfully slow too, for multiple reasons. Both Java and Python have ways to do this that aren't dumb.

One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.

Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.

They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.

Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.

Uranium nukes are even worse. They require strip mines to get the uranium, and then a bunch of very special purpose equipment to enrich it. If you think it's hard to hide a nuclear reactor from a spy satellite, try hiding a strip mine!