When did Slashdot become home to stupid FUD* spewing dweebs with little or no common sense? The subtitle is "News for Nerds," which would suggest somebody who submits something might have half a clue about what they are talking about (leaving the plebs to pontificate on logical and scientific fallacy or imagine a Beowulf cluster of hot grits ).

I want my Slashdot with nerds filter enabled.

And yes it is an excellent idea, because it gives the CDC a living "test tube" of the actual active Ebola virus, not a sample of infected blood collected, and shipped on ice. Making it ideal for study, and possibly detection of any variant (i.e. mutation) that had not been notice before. Of course, this will likely cost the American doctor his/her life, but such is the risk of fighting an viral outbreak, and the real-world beyond web forums and politicians rambling.

* FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

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Careful. While you can use Wikipedia as a meta-index to find references, you can only cite those 3rd-party references if and only if you actually obtain a copy and view the content yourself.

Otherwise you are merely shifting from hoping that the content to Wikipedia is accurate, complete, etc. to hoping that the citations are both a) Real, and b) the Wikipedia content that cites the 3rd-party source, is accurate in its portrayal of the cited work's content.

For example, I could cite the Gutenberg bible (or pick your favorite "lost" historic title found only in the Vatican library) as the reference for the existence of aliens on Earth, and given the rarity and inaccessibility of such a reference, very few, if any Wikipedians have access to counter such citation. And that Douglas Adams ripped off "42" and "the meaning life, the universe, and everything" from Al-Khwarizmi's Hisab al-jabr wÃ(TM)al-muqabala, Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala. Not necessarily true, but hard to disprove.

I hear the cultural assimilation process went pretty well until he tried the salmiakki. That experience turned out to be the impetus for the "burning oil platform" memo.

I pray, when they die, the ghost of MLK spends eternity bitch-slapping the both of them day in and day out.

I'm pretty sure they're going to a different place than MLK.

If you see a statement in a Wikipedia article that you are thinking of repeating or relying on for something, look first to see: does it cite a source?

The problem being that Wikipedia's been around long enough that (like in this case), it's entirely possible to point to a source which got its original erroneous information from Wikipedia.

Which leads to a much harder secondary problem: how to determine/rank the quality of Wikipedia sources.

should I have to throw away a $300 paid for phone that still works, electrically (at least)?

Well, there *is* an unofficial CM11 port. It sounds like the limited memory and storage was a bit of a deal-breaker for everyone trying to support the Nexus One (even the alternate ROMs) until KitKat came along with its reduced resource needs. I suspect installing the Google Play Services stuff to get the app scanning might be asking a bit much.

But yeah, generally speaking I don't disagree with your premise. The Nexus series, of all devices, would be something I'd expect Google to go above and beyond to keep working. I can sorta understand OEM's dropping their flagships pretty much as soon as the conveyors on the production lines stop spinning (and fuck-you-very-much HTC), but I'd hope that platform champion number one could do a little better than that.

In the dark days of computing history before AJAX was even conceived and Mad Men were still crazies, "in-memory databases" meant that the database INDEX was in RAM (ideally if you DB admin was worth their salary), but then people wanted to pretend their were the next Google, famous for their massive search index in the pentabytes of storage, so hipsters started the NoSQL fad to be awkward like middle-aged men in skinny jeans as a vain attempt to self-proclaim their importance.

Now Oracle is making money by selling RDBM to organizations that spent more money and time on hookers and coke than doing real IT management. The Old is New, yet again.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat.

Anyone who buys solutions deserved to be parted with their money.

Perhaps you mean something different with the term 'muscle memory' then?

Hmm. Yes.

I'm talking about it from a cognition perspective, which I think is also termed "motor learning". You're using a definition which describes my second point, which is that (in a nutshell) the body undergoes a physical change which adapts it to better performing those rehearsed movements.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure it's meaningful to talk about those separately, though. If you repeat a physical task often enough to change the body at a physical level, you're almost certainly going to rewire the brain to repeat that task efficiently as well.

Most important: muscle memory as I pointed out above is 'stored' - more precicely: hardwired - in the neurons/nerves directly attached to the muscles. Not in the brain.

It's in the brain. They don't really know exactly where muscle memory is stored, but it's in the brain. Most likely in optimized synaptic networks in or around the motor control area, but the specific location and mechanism hasn't been nailed down.

That being said, there's a certain amount of muscle "memory" in the muscles themselves, in the sense that elasticity and power will become optimized for the patterns of motion they perform frequently (i.e. if you perform circular movements calling for short muscle fibers, you'll probably have a harder time with linear movements calling for long muscle fibers), and obviously nerve pathways for those repeated actions will be strengthened. This would reduce the amount of higher level neural effort needed to perform those kinds of movements and the actions would "fire faster". But really, there's not enough neural meat down there to handle the processing necessary for anything substantial enough to call it a "motor skill".

TFA makes the discussion that it's all about a highly efficient foot-motor control area that can operate with minimal external input (i.e little conscious thought), which pretty much describes muscle memory. There's no mention of "special neurons", just regular motor control areas that are wired for efficiency and operate with less noise.

Where someone might conclude that it's different from "muscle memory" is that muscle memory is usually focused on specific motor tasks, while this research is basically saying that entire areas of the brain related to motor skills which have a highly developed muscle memory work more efficiently. Which, I'd think, would be pretty obvious. Developing expert-level muscle memory is in practice about learning entire repertoires of movements, not just a single specific movement, and a consequence of having muscle memory for a large set of similar movements means the brain is wired such that anything resembling those movements will be handled at about the same skill level with about the same amount of conscious thought. If you've spent your entire life practicing all the 50 different ways to kick a ball under all possible conditions (different balls, ground conditions, shoes, lighting, angles, etc) then its unlikely you'll ever need to put any conscious thought into making your feet connect with anything ball-like.

I guess that's a sexier headline than "Expert Soccer Player Has Good Muscle Memory", and it does tie into that recent bit of excitement down in Brazil, but otherwise I'm not seeing anything in the summary that comes as a surprise... Is it that part where they quantify the differences in neural activity between "expert" and "amateur"?

Most of us drone users stay well away from houses.

As I said, I live in the country.

Most ATVers, snowmobilers, boaters, hunters, etc are perfectly respectable people who go out of their way not to bother anyone, and I have no issue with them.

Those other fuckers, however... I have absolutely no doubt that drone technology will become simple and ubiquitous enough that the sort of asshole who enjoys annoying people with expensive toys will inevitably discover and abuse it.

It's possible to connect a controller to an antenna that vastly extends its range. Is your property extensive enough to give you a 2-kilometer perimeter around your house?

I specifically said "the signal range of my house". Stock antennas on a router in the basement. If my network can see the drone, it's going to be pretty close.

The owner will see all this, and might take umbrage at your stealing their drone. Which almost certainly wouldn't be flying over your roof anyhow.

Well, I live in the country. If a wifi-controlled drone gets within signal range of my house, the owner is very likely trespassing and almost certainly snooping on my property in particular.