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.

I want to see a security tool which hijacks the drone control connection, lands it on my roof, and shuts it down so it won't leave.

I can't quite decide if the followup should be "call the police", "hold drone ransom" or "just keep it", but I'm sure I'd think of something.

but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.

Most of the genuine bugs described (versus the braindead design decisions) appear to be related to hardware integration (i.e. the input stack) and/or the carrier part of the experience.

Am I surprised that the hardware integration on a cheap phone might be crap? Nope. Am I surprised that the carrier integration might suck? Nope. Am I surprised that the more a device deviates from the mainstream, the weirder the problems would be? Nope. Is it likely that the experience would actually be *worse* if the vendor had just shipped AOSP? Very.

I bought the LG Optimus not because it was the cheapest or because I didn't expect it to have bugs, but because it was the only offering with a slide-out keyboard, and I've become addicted to the precision of physical keys.

So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question about why this stuff happens is "I want something so badly that I'm a captive market who won't explore decent alternatives (is the built-in slider on a 4" phone really that much better than an S5 bluetooth keyboard case or Swype on a phablet? Really?) and will stick with the phone in spite of it being a piece of shit"?

Honestly, I have to give kudos to LG for gauging how desperate the potential users of this phone would be for a physical keyboard and saving themselves a little cash on testing. It seems to have worked out okay for them.

Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations?

In general, I don't entirely disagree. In this case... I'm not sure how useful the black box would be in the event of a missile strike. I wasn't aware the civilian aircraft had the kind of gear to track a missile, or that the kinds of collision sensors they have would be fast enough to catch it. It's definitely not going to be able to tell who shot the missile or where it came from. Heck, I'd be surprised if the black box could tell the difference betwen a missile strike and a large suitcase bomb in the cargo hold. So unless it actually was an mechanical or aircrew failure (and I highly doubt it), I think the black box is a red herring.

Passwords have been stolen just by listening to keyboard click noises. Why could a typewriter be any different?

A much stronger mechanical action which generates multiple (the keypress itself plus the imprint on paper action) strong and distinct signatures. I'd expect it would be far easier to pick up than even the loudest Model M keyboard...

I'd be curious how much a highly sensitive seismic sensor on the ceiling below the typewriter would pick up, or even on the foundation of the building.

There simply MUST be a clear distinction maintained over where something is located, or country borders don't mean anything.

The question to ask is, is the data stored in another country as easily available to a
Microsoft employee in the USA as data stored in the USA would be?

There's a compelling argument, and multi-national corporations in particular make themselves vulnerable to it, that if you ignore borders in your day-to-day operations then you can't exactly point at the border as an insurmountable issue when someone is making you do something you don't want to do.

The recent case where a Canadian court ordered Google to censor results globally is another example of this. People argued that the court only has jurisdiction over google.ca results, but conveniently forgot that google.ca is hosted in the exact same server farm as all Google search services. So where do you draw the line? Surely not where the corporation decides it's convenient in that particular instance.