If everyone in the country (we'll say just the citizens for now but it should eventually extend to all citizens of the world) were given enough resources (cash, aid, whatever) *by default* to take care of food, shelter, clothing, health care, all the basics *required to live*, then this sort of thing would be far less attractive. (this would mean doing away with most/all specific programs, minimum wage, etc., and replacing it with a basic income that all citizens get in one form or another, guaranteed to be enough to live on wherever you happen to be living, leaving people free to pay more sensible amounts, and opening the way for more socially-oriented work to happen (volunteer work, large work projects that don't pay but get something done for your town/city/county/state/etc., etc. -- people *want* to make their world nicer, and will if they aren't constantly afraid of dying of starvation/exposure/etc.)

This gets the [federal/state] government out of the business of specific social projects (save perhaps a single-payer nationalized healthcare system, those seem to work a lot better and kill off the stupid amounts the insurance companies get for no real reason) -- local governments would probably be *more* likely under this system to spend money on social projects as well since workers come a good bit cheaper, etc., b/c instead the progressive income tax goes to pay for everyone's basic needs under this sort of system), of course nobody wants to implement this at the higher levels because they're all afraid of losing all that power they've amassed, but it needs to happen. Too much centralized power kills a system, this has happened in every society where it happens, the fat cats of all stripes steal from everyone else in various "legal" ways and then set up all sorts of scarecrows to distract the citizen, or to convince them they can have a piece of the pie too if they just work themselves half to death in the process, when most of them lucked into it by accident of birth. I also propose significant inheritance tax, progressively graduated like income tax is, so small inheritances aren't a big deal but 100B worth would have something like a 50% tax or more, this should help defuse the whole fat cat system, especially if this tax is strictly to go to paying the basic income for the nation

Hopefully needless to say, the basic income, coming from the government as it is, is not to be taxed, otherwise again we're implementing a poor tax, which is one of the stupidest ideas ever economically, right up there with non-luxury sales taxes. (luxury item taxes are different, and could even just be done as a progressively graduated thing, i.e. you buy something for $500M and you have to pay some serious tax, but for $500 is likely untaxed.)

</rant>

I presume you haven't been looking at the far more efficient processors currently being developed then? (and no I don't mean the Atom, though its quite a breakthrough *for Intel*)

ARM has continued in active development over the years, and consistently provides a far better performance/watt ratio, and gets even better when rebuilt internally clockless. Multiple ARM cores are showing up in everything now, at the moment we're just talking same-die dual-core but it is likely to continue on up past that just as it is with x86, with similar performance gains (and linear or better power consumption/core as well).

I'm also fairly certain there are other cores out there I haven't even heard of that are likely to blow away the two major leaders at some point (x86 and ARM) -- and yes, there are two major implementors of x86 but they seem to run about even on the performance/watt (I haven't done the math, I don't know who's currently leading, but they're about the same).

This would be why I like WebOS devices, they are already open, you don't have to do anything to run whatever you like on them that Palm/HP doesn't endorse. Even when obtained through Verizon, the Pre Plus's OS is still completely open to me, I'm even running a custom kernel, and the extent of what that means is if it causes problems (running a custom kernel) Palm isn't responsible, aside from that, they don't really care.

Great idea - "I don't like this, let's BAN IT" -- somehow I think there's a failure in logic here.

There is a big difference between arithmetic and mathematics. Algebra, calculus, etc. do not require any significant ability to do rote arithmetic, they are logical symbolic manipulation systems. I've personally never gotten the hang of rote arithmetic despite a lot of people trying (ok, sure, I understand *how* arithmetic works, but that's not what I'm talking about), but despite this, I went on to do quite well in algebra and calculus courses, and still feel fairly capable in those subjects. Arithmetic is something for machines to do, it requires no higher function really, no great insight. Describing the system of arithmetic is a more complex thing of course, but learning/remembering that 7*13 is 91 is not exactly all that important in the real world, especially if you've learned *how* to work it out, given pen&paper. Once people can be shown to understand what arithmetic means, its kinda silly to require them to not use tools.

On the other hand, I'm iffy as to computational solvers, the symbolic manipulation systems as found in devices like the ti-92, again I think they should only be introduced once the basics are *understood*, and I think a decent test could still be designed that they would be little use for. Same with things like formula cards, especially for the things that it is rather silly to expect every student to re-derive every time. Using the card on the test will show whether they actually understand the logical system underneath it, and will serve as good practice with the formulas. Of course formula cards and formula teaching is a double-edged sword, my sister struggled seriously with algebra because she was taught in an approach that did not explain *why* anything worked, just that you used a given formula for a given class of problems, which teaches you nothing.

It is clear from the few posts on Fring's website that what they mean when they say Skype has blocked them is not that they implemented a technical measure to stop Fring from connecting but that they (likely through a C&D or something) threatened Fring that they would take legal action if they did not remove the functionality. So it is pretty clear that Skype did in fact block Fring, just through the legal system rather than by denying connectivity directly.

In conjunction with my earlier post, I would imagine this also connects with changes in neurotransmission as one gets older, specifically it seems that dopaminergic neurotransmission slowly declines, and I would suspect so does serotonergic transmission, though I have not seen enough serious studies to determine exactly what is going on. I also would imagine that the changes that happen to any given individual are quite variable, based on similar genetic and experiential/environmental variations that produce the initial differences in learning patterns (which if they are too far outside of certain bounds are considered learning disabilities, such as autism (though this one has significant other involvement), add-i, add-h, etc.)

I think it likely depends significantly on the person in question. People have very different modes of learning, determined by a number of things, likely all traceable back to differences in their serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmission, as well as some structural things connected with early life influence.

I am very much against workplaces trying to get their employees not to browse the web. Just as I am against things such as drug testing. If an employee is being unproductive, it should be pretty damn obvious to their manager and something should/would be done about it; if not, then there should be no problem. How is this not obvious?

As I mentioned earlier, only corporations that seriously do not care about their employee's productivity do such blocking. (or those that have been convinced by filter software companies that somehow such filtering improves productivity). Of course there are a few employees that might spend too much time doing these things if they are available, but those employees, one would hope, would get let go for failing to meet their expectations anyway (and would almost certainly find other ways to not do their work if you take any given thing away). People are simply not capable of 100% output 100% of the time, *especially* in skilled fields, and without anything to turn to to relax, end up being far less productive.

I have to take some issue with all of this.

*note - the following reply is written from a USA-centric point of view, as I am not as familiar with labor laws in other countries

As far as I know, employers contract with their employees for specific work, and I cannot fathom how, if this work is completed to expectation, employers think they can get away with restricting any (legal, sensible) activity, especially something as benign as surfing the web (okay perhaps there's malware issues, but just don't let idiots use windows then). Employers act as though they own those who work for them, having managed, starting sometime in the 80s, to defang any serious labor protections. This is even worse in new[ish] fields such as software development, network administration, IT, etc., as these fields don't benefit from any pre-existing institutions the way many other fields do. It makes little sense to expect someone to be putting out 100% for the entire time they are at work, *especially* in a skilled field where significant creative tasks are required, again such as software development, etc. I admittedly cannot point directly to any studies at this moment, but I am absolutely certain that those workplaces that treat employees as slaves get far worse productivity than those who abandon the simplistic 'chain of command' model and instead work to support their employees in the tasks they hired them to do.

when your means are barely enough to support yourself despite plenty of skill just because there's no work to be had, investments take on a whole new reality. Not picking on anyone in particular in this thread, but wanted to just kinda put out there that honestly, its pretty clear a lot of people around here have forgotten or never learned what it is really like to be poor, not secure in a job for whatever reason (in my case a combination of until recently not-properly-treated mental illness and lack of any college degree, despite plenty of experience and in fact work history, its a buyer's market for software engineers and sysadmins). I really wish there was some way people could really be taught what it's like...what it's like to really realize just the value of that $20 so many so idly spend on lunch in the valley (hey, I should know, I was a silly valley yuppie for a year or so before I came to my senses / my life got....interesting). The further down the income scale you go, the more your cost of living itself dominates, taking up a pretty damn large percentage. I'm lucky if I have a few spare dollars to go around, surviving for the moment on unemployment and supporting the three other wonderful people I live with somehow on like $20k/year in the outskirts of Sacramento. Yeah, I'm sure there are things I could have done differently in the past, that's true of everyone, but the thing is, we are where we are right now, and things are a mess right now. There's no work to be had in my field, hell, no unskilled work to be had up here even that I can find, not that I'd take it since I'd make way less than UI and that would put my family in serious trouble :/ -- we're trying here, the four of us (we're kinda one of those weirdo families) but its pretty damn hard.

err.....wow....ok this rant actually belongs somewhere else, but I'll post it here and x-post to lj or something...sorry to those I'm replying to, this is more just something that apparently I needed to rant about.

I wish it was more open for the average individual to do research into the internal reality of the human experience, and how to improve it overall, fields such as psycho/neuropharmacology, general research into alternative societal structures that may lead to fuller happier lives, etc. Research into how we can all actually learn to deal with being stuck on this planet together without killing each other, and perhaps someday with actually turning to our neighbor in need and helping just because, knowing at the very least we may someday need it ourselves.

The brain does more than just lose cells. Day to day transmission is incredibly noisy, with spurious signaling, suppressive and active signals that are actually quite chaotic, and yet underneath all this in a weird twist of things, transmission appears to be digital, just with absurd amounts of error correction built in.

I'm pretty sure these artifacts are actually a result not of the display itself but whatever connector elements are used to actually drive the oled pixels, as they can appear and disappear, and are forming one pixel wide lines, suggesting problems with the horizontal and vertical electrodes that are undoubtedly laid across the display in a grid (one layer H, one layer V, display between), and specifically, problems with whatever method they are using to essentially glue/solder/otherwise make connection at the junctions between the electrodes and the display elements, as well as with resistances changing in the electrodes themselves along their lengths. the fact that a line can start and stop somewhere within the display suggests to me the electrodes are driven from both edges and what's going on is the center is being electrically isolated from the rest by a pair of locations of high resistance.