Overstimulation is one of the problems I've heard described by people with autism. They end up doing repetitive things to block out the incoming stimuli.

There is one thing that MaaS, VaaS, and GaaS can have that SaaS doesn't. For example, I didn't use to think I would want it, but MaaS is great for someone like me who likes to listen to and explore lot of varieties of music, but can't afford to buy ALL of it (nor would I necessarily want to, and that's the point). Video as a Service (e.g. Video on Demand) works the same way. I'd rather pay a monthly rate and be able to watch or listen to whatever I want. When there is tons of content, it makes sense. Now, I happen to subscribe to Napster, and unfortunately I can't listen to it streaming on my phone because my phone isn't supported, but I don't see why they won't eventually open this kind of feature up to a lot of phone networks once the bandwidth is there.

Just FYI, Microsoft is ranked 7th in profits, though (which is "the bottom line"): http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/performers/companies/profits/

Are space shuttles nature's technology replicated in a crude form on a human scale? What about lasers or Nintendo Wiis?

The closest the tech industry has come to having what I think is truly needed - some form of standardized, nationwide apprenticeships/training programs - has been the certification industry, and the training in that industry seems to be severely wanting in consistency, quality, and price point. What we may need are more widespread actual IT firms, whose jobs are specific-to-IT, i.e. all they do is IT consulting/support/programming for other companies, instead of having this existence of all these IT sub-departments within larger businesses where there is no real conception of how to train IT workers for what they need, or even what to appropriately pay us for the work we do. We need more IT firms around the country willing and capable to hire graduates right out of school and then train us in-house.

Engineering firms, architectural firms, and law firms all do this, and it is a part of all medical school curricula to do training in a real world, hospital setting. Why doesn't IT do this? The only immediate reason I can come up with as to why the IT profession doesn't do something similar is that it is a much younger industry than these other professions and is still working the standards and kinks out.

It actually isn't interesting when solely looking at the fact that people just happen to care about having control over how their OWN personal information is presented. It is obvious that people want to have the freedom to personally control their levels of privacy. When dealing with things that might be considered private, making it voluntary provides for this level of control.

What WOULD be interesting to consider is whether the willingness people have today to provide such information on such kinds of distinctive, large scale, voluntary, social networking mediums analogous to Facebook has translated to traditional areas where personal information is provided and dispersed. A question that can't be answered is how willing people might have been to use Facebook in the past, say 100 or even 50 years ago, as an entire cultural exposure to such things must evolve and mature as the technology develops for such novel mediums to be taken seriously. To an extent, we can even see this effect happening generationally, as you will find many Baby Boomers/Jonesers genuinely perplexed as to why their children like to use Facebook and are willing to provide their information in such a way. From the standpoint of natural disposition, though, I would argue that humans were always going to eventually warm up to the idea of socially networking their info, it just took having a critical level of technological pieces in place.

So, how did you end up finding it?

Unless that was sarcasm, was it really that difficult for people to transition over time to Word and Excel from WordPerfect and VisiCalc? Maybe I'm the exception, but to me, once you have learned how to use one document editor or spreadsheet program, it becomes much easier to adapt to the next one. Sure, menus may be moved around and the syntax may change a bit, but its usually not a big deal.

I would tend to agree with you, but I have a slightly different angle on this that you might consider. I think that there are ways to teach both theory and expose students to the most common practice, by teaching the theory using the most commonly used industry tools, and by giving students some context regarding those tools. If a computing department isn't creative enough to design their courses so as to expose their students to the uses of widely used IDEs such as Visual Studio, while still holding them to the theory they are expected to learn, then I think they are failing in one of their responsibilities as teachers.

Sure, you can have students code everything by hand, use makefiles, compile with gcc, debug on the command line, amd do it all over SSH, but at least make a point to also expose them to the fact that Visual Studio is an overwhelming part of what the job market is going to want them to be familiar with. Advise them that while, as an academic, you have your reasons to think that your way of doing things does the pedagogy more justice, that if they want to actually find a job after they graduate, they would be wise to consider acquiring, say, some MCTS certifications over a summer or two. So, instead of pointing them down a fruitless path in search of a holy grail computing internship where they will be trained on site in the practical (these are few and far between in many areas of the country), simply advise them to seek out obtaining some certifications first, which will make them vastly more marketable when combined with their academic training. You don't have to teach them how to use Visual Studio, but at least summarize for them what it is useful for, and where its place is.

To put it another way, just having an overview of the common industry tools that implement the concepts learned in ones coursework and how one can get trained in them would have been good enough for me. My college of Engineering seemed so determined to completely avoid what might be considered vocational (e.g. anything even in the vicinity of the practical subject matter of, say, the MCTS Visual Studio .NET application and SQL Server certifications), that they didn't even inform us about how the vocational stuff fits into the equation.

For example, I didn't even learn how to program a GUI at all from my coursework, but what was worse, I didn't even know where to start to learn the most common way of doing it. For my senior project, instead of being able to focus my time on the most important part of it, which was the design aspect and the actual algorithms involved, I had to waste tons of time just seeking out how one would best go about writing a GUI application in practice. I had never used C#, nor had I even been told in clear terms how it differed from C and C++, so I assumed I should just stick with C++, which overcomplicated things once I found out I needed to learn C++/CLI, and then finally determining that C# was the vastly superior choice for the libraries I needed to use.

In conclusion, if I had simply been taught along the way what the most commonly used languages and APIs in the industry are and what they are used for, next, that one of Microsoft's high level graphical APIs is called Windows Forms, and, finally, that there are MCTS certification texts out there that specifically document how to use this event-driven API, I would have known to seek out those types of certifications over my summers, long before my senior project, and even longer still before my current fruitless job search, wherein everyone wants me to have the practical certifications before they'll even consider hiring me. Sure, certifications aren't as conceptually difficult as theory, but they just as well take time and money to be trained in them, and when you are a college graduate needing to find a job to start paying back your loans, being all theory and little practice, it isn't helpful to then find out then that you are going to have to spend even more time and money that you didn't plan for to get all these certifications, before you will even be considered for a respectable job!

My question for you is: What is it about your religious beliefs that makes them more ideally capable of stumbling upon the answers to such "questions which lie outside of the observable, empirical world" than any other person's religious beliefs or way of thought? How might you verify that your religious beliefs are, demonstrably, more ideally capable of tackling such questions than any other beliefs? Why might a person have any rational need to color his reasoning with a particular religious way of thinking which is said to only apply to unobservable and non-empirical things, when that person only can live and interact with an observable, empirical world? Also, how do you find such types of questions regarding unobservable things worth trying to religiously answer at all, if what these questions inquire about are by definition inaccessible to us?

You said that "as a Christian this means seeking out a spiritual framework of meaning and purpose for my life that goes beyond just a physical existence." I have come to understand that religion does not have a monopoly on such spiritual matters. The depth of such spiritual feelings you have learned to associate with specifically your religion are experienced just as strongly and deeply by those of different religions, and by those who are atheists. One book which I recommend to you that I think does an excellent job of articulating what is the human experience of spirituality from what is religion and the supernatural, and does it without the need for a higher power, is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, by Andre Comte-Sponville.

This is off topic, but I don't know any other way to get you this message. I just found and read your post about Non-24 hour sleep wake disorder from about a year ago (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=493820&cid=22804888) and noticed that you seem to know what you are talking about. Are you a member of the niteowl mailing list? (http://lists.circadiandisorders.org/listinfo.cgi/niteowl-circadiandisorders.org)

I ask because everything you mentioned in your post we have discussed there in detail and you seem to be describing it accurately. You mentioned that you have been able to treat your disorder with melatonin and light therapy. That's something I haven't heard much of: successful treatment stories. It would be interesting to know exactly how you are using them, because there are individuals on the niteowl list who have DSPS or N24 and have tried melatonin and light therapy and haven't been successful. Maybe you could describe the doses and timing that you use which has helped you to treat your disorder?

Not only that, but recent research has demonstrated that lithium itself is one of the few substances that have an effect on the circadian rhythm, and this could be why it helps people with bipolar disorder and other psychological disorders. What people with common sense have been saying for ages, scientists may actually be starting to demonstrate in their research: that sleep deprivation and sleep disorders can make you go crazy if you suffer from them for long enough!

Speaking of logical concepts like "correlation does not necessarily imply causation", well, consider this. There happens to be a higher incidence of sleep disorders in people with psychological disorders. Doctors have traditionally assumed that this was because their patients' psychological problems were keeping them up at night. Well, what if for some of these patients, it is the other way around? What if a number of them have some kind of underlying neurological sleep disorder, and it is their sleep deprivation due to this sleep disorder that is causing their psychological symptoms?

Here's a link to an overview of info on the lithium/circadian rhythm connection: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/05/lithium_circadian_clocks_and_b_2.php

Remember, humans are the only animals who volunteer for sleep deprivation.

Yeah, I've looked at those statistics in the past, and know that overall Canada has less debt than the U.S. per capita. That's not what I am talking about. I'm not talking about total debt per person. What I'm talking about is government health care debt per person in Canada. My interest is whether or not it is even possible to pay for health care for every American citizen, without going into debt and without having a lot higher taxes.

...and/or it could mean that Canada is going into more debt for health care than the United States. I don't know how much deficit spending on health care Canada is doing, if at all, but supposedly many European countries with universal health care are doing it a lot.