I bought my cell phone in April 2006 and it's still running strong. I've dropped it dozens of times and even lost it once in a NYC taxi. (The driver mailed it back.) I've replaced the battery twice but that's it.

I guess we now know the answer to Do Businesses Really Need to Hire CS Majors?"

I can't download the full PDF of the study, but there are at least 2 things missing from the description in the news.

First, their results are based on a verbal report of what a person says he/she would do in a situation. This is completely different from what a person might actually do in real life.

Second, they haven't shown that the effect is specific to violent intent. Maybe the brain stimulation also reduces their (reported) desire to do anything active, like exercise, or eat cake, or go scuba diving. The prefrontal cortex has many functions.

Before you claim that a particular part of the brain is "for" any particular purpose, you have to pass a high bar.

I was on the tech job market recently and here are the responses I received from 14 job applications.

The bad:

- Submit application, and they never responded: 6
- Submit application, then 3 months of silence, then a form-letter rejection: 1
- On-site interview, then 3 weeks of silence, not responding to any of my emails, then a rejection: 1
- A 2-month interview process, including two rounds of on-site interviews, and finally they said, "We decided not to fill the position after all": 1

The good:

- Submit application, then a quick rejection: 3
- Phone screen, then quick rejection: 1
- Job offers: 2

As a developer, I "get it" that writing code to roll up VMs, firewalls, and so on results in repeatable software. But honestly, it's boring. I hate writing code to create Amazon EC2 instances on the fly, etc. I wish I had an Ops staff to handle these tasks.

This story says nothing special about YouTube. In any group of a billion people (i.e., YouTube users), some of them are going to be crazy, or violent, or both.

I miss Usenet: a single place where you could find communities centered on tens of thousands of topics. If I had a question on house painting, or progressive rock, or chip design, or whatever, there was usually a well-populated newsgroup for it, and it wasn't hard to find. Today, we have Stack Exchange, but its selection of topics is minimal compared to Usenet's. Or we can search the web for sites of interest, but in my experience, many of the communities centered on these sites are tiny and unresponsive. Usenet was a one-stop shop with tens of thousands of communities.

Yes, Usenet also had trolls and idiots and (eventually) spam. But that was IMHO a small price to pay for how well it worked. I made so many friends and learned so much on Usenet.

>Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not
>consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to
>present to the world.

FYI, that is only a hypothesis, not a universal truth, and there's plenty of evidence against (and debate about) so-called microexpressions and "unconscious emotion." For example, if you place electrodes on people's faces and measure actual muscle movements during emotion, there's tremendous variety, not uniformity. There's also lots of evidence that emotional expressions in the face are neither universal nor innate.

See the recent TED Talk by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett for a friendly overview.

Bravo! True wisdom.

Cool, thanks for the follow-up!

I am the submitter of this story, and the details are correct. Here is the timeline of events as I experienced them.

1. I phoned Fidelity. A recording informed me that my rep would discuss MyVoice with me.
2. I spoke with the rep and conducted my financial business. MyVoice was not mentioned yet.
3. At the end of the call, the rep said to me, "We've enrolled you in a wonderful new security feature called MyVoice," and proceeded to describe it. She said that Fidelity had sampled my voice during the call to create a voiceprint. (Note that I was NOT asked first.)
4. I asked, "Can I opt out?" The rep was audibly surprised at my request, and said, "Yes, you can." So I opted out.

Some time later, I called back to check that my account still requires a password. It does. So the opt-out was successful.

Pick up some used Squeezebox devices on eBay. Their music server is open source, runs on Mac OS, and is compatible with iTunes. The devices sync beautifully. More info.

Pattern classification, as used in this study, is not neural mind-reading. Here's a good article by a neuroscientist that explains how it actually works -- and its limitations -- in plain English.

Pattern Classification Explained

I'm 54 and split my time between coding, managing a team of developers, and providing mentorship to younger devs regarding technical and non-technical (soft skills) situations. Lots of mentorship -- just because someone can code doesn't mean they know how to navigate a company and work relationships.

Leadership positions don't have to be management.There's also technical leadership (thought leader), architecture, etc.