It's pretty obvious what the left-handed advantage is when you have sports where lefties can compete directly against other lefties. In my own sport of fencing, lefties enjoy disproportionate success (close to 50% of world champions are left handed), and they are widely regarded as difficult opponents. But pit two lefties against each other and you will often get a shitshow of awkward, hesitant, and poorly-executed techniques, despite the fact that the tactical situation is identical to right-vs-right, the most common and well-understood scenario in the sport.

The reason is easy to understand - everyone, regardless of handedness, gets 85% of their practice against right-handers. Lefties are, quite simply, weird, even to other lefties. We don't get enough practice with them, we don't get the time to develop highly-trained "favourite moves" with them, and we don't ever enjoy the comfort and ease of familiarity. Our cognitive load is increased, and our reaction time is slower.

Unless you're lucky enough to have a left-handed coach, or a disproportionate number of lefties in your club to practice with. Or you simply stick with the sport long enough that the 15% of lefties you meet eventually adds up to a lot of experience.

I have two of the Pagewide printers at work, and one at home (after watching the first one at work for a year, and needing to replace our ~16-year-old LaserJet 4000). They are very fast (although not as fast as some color copier/printers), fairly cheap, and seem to hold up reasonably well (so far; they came out about four years ago). Print quality is also quite good on decent paperâ"I spent quite a while evaluating that before deciding to keep it. And the color was better (truer to onscreen) than our color LaserJet. The only thing I find disappointing about them is that they only do letter/legal size paper. I'd really like one that could do tabloid with the same technology (but the only option there seems to be color lasers that are no faster than the 15+-year-old one we have, or the aforementioned copier/printers).

Apple began work on the Newton in 1987, so he's going to have to better than a 1992 napkin sketch, methinks.

It seems to me that this test predicts mortality primarily because heart disease is currently the #1 cause of death in America. So if you measure cardiovascular health, statistically you're also going to be successful in predicting mortality. But my excellent heart health doesn't seem likely to stop me from dying of cancer or ALS or any of those other things. All it says is that heart disease won't kill me early. And maybe that, since the others develop more slowly, I'll live a few years longer before dying in some other way.

"Boys don't count?" What a crock. Of course boys count. So do African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, women, autism-spectrum people, and pretty much every other identifiable subgroup you can think of. Here's a clue: no subgroup has more innate ability for CS than any other. Unless your chosen subgroup is "people who have innate ability for CS."

Every time the gender imbalance in CS comes up on Slashdot, we see the same phenomenon: a huge phalanx of men jumps out and tries to defend their ignorant biases. Actually, it's kind of generous of you folks: by loudly proclaiming your prejudices, you make it easy for savvy employers to avoid you. Because frankly, one hugely skilled guy who pisses off ten talented women just isn't worth having around.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the two people (both men, BTW) who taught the first Harvey Mudd course for students with experience. (See TFA if that isn't meaningful to you.) We weren't the first to figure it out (that credit goes to CMU) but we were the first to do it in a compelling intro course (I don't get credit for that either--write me privately if you're dying for details of how I fell into it). But I'm currently the only one who teaches that course to experienced students. The whole idea was originally developed by two amazing men (not me) and one brilliant woman (not Maria Klawe, BTW; she'll tell you that herself because she wasn't even at Mudd at the time). So let's not pretend that anti-male bias was a factor.

But what has been found based on *science* (oh, that) is that some groups of people, women included, are easily intimidated by show-offs. Which, if you haven't caught on, includes most of the noisiest Slashdot crowd. By and large, these are people who are fascinated with computers and don't have the social skills to see that some of their questions and opinions are irrelevant to whatever discussion is going at the moment. So they blurt out their questions, and the intimidated ones think (this really happens) "Maybe if I don't know the multiply cycle times of the latest Intel chip then I can't do CS." And then we lose those people even though they're incredibly gifted. (BTW, this example was taken from a class this week--and the person who announced multiply cycle times was wrong. Which is often the case in these situations, but they still intimidate others because they make their statements with such confidence. But I politely pointed out that the information was irrelevant, giving the rest of the students a chance to concentrate on the material that actually matters. I can only hope that the message gets across.)

The data is incontrovertible. Gently shutting down the show-offs (most of whom aren't even trying to show off; they're just eager and socially inept) doesn't discourage them in the least. But it keeps them from discouraging others. The result is more total people majoring in CS, and a far wider variety of ideas. All benefit, no loss.

If you feel threatened by that, I suggest that maybe *you're* the intimidated one. And I encourage you to try to develop your self-confidence by taking pride in your own strengths, rather than dissing complete strangers.

It says that Nissan is debating the idea of better battery options. Well, that's great, there, Nissan. My guess is that the folks at Tesla aren't debating these things so much as always working on it. This is what separates the old companies from the new.

I remember reading in _Big Blues_ how IBM mainframes were throttled when first installed. That way, a tech could be sent into the locked room with the golden screwdriver and magically upgrade things to incredible speed. The customers didn't know that they had been using hobbled systems and were happily impressed that the thing was now so much faster. Sounds like the same trick AT&T is trying to pull.

Our local Syracuse paper was bought up by the same folks who are running the Times-Picayune into the ground. We used to have two daily papers (certainly don't need that now), but are left with a non-daily paper that is primarily AP wire and NY Times stories.

What I would like is to see Syracuse University buy the paper, use the press to print a daily for both the university and the city (keeping with the Town & Gown movement). The paper could be the Journalism department and also be an outlet for the business department. It seems a win-win. I wonder what the downsides are.

As the linked article points out, that $15 billion is a simple correlation based on diabetes alone.

When cost savings are almost erased by one disease, maybe someone hasn't thought through the unintended consequences.

I can't replicate it either. The YouTube video claims I double-tap the home button but the second tap is slightly longer? By the end of the first tap it's already bringing me back to the lock screen, i.e. by the time I'm pressing down for the second tap, I'm already being taken back to the lock screen. iPhone 5, updated last night to 7.0 (11A465).

In the 1990s, maybe. And that's because Microsoft commoditized the hardware, thereby transferring the PC industry profits to themselves as the only company left in the stack that could still charge a significant margin. Apple lost that war, was forced to switch to the hardware platform that Microsoft commoditized, and now that things are pretty much even on that score, now it's Microsoft that is too expensive for what you get.

Back in the 70's when Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan, it flopped because nobody wanted to be seen with a cassette player on their belt and dorky headphones on their ears. So Sony hired a bunch of professional models to parade around the Tokyo business district wearing Walkmans. ("Walkmen"?) Pretty soon the public associated headphones with sexy people, and the rest is history.

Google should do the same. Manipulating popular taste is possible.

I use BT to distribute large files from the SNIA IOTTA Trace Repository (http://iotta.snia.org/). Although there are typically no swarms, BT is still useful for a number of reasons, including in particular the ability to manage large collections of related files and the ability to deal with intermittent connections.

Unfortunately, many of my users work at sites that block BT, forcing them to revert to a horrible HTTP option.

And no, rsync isn't a solution for our situation.

As to what is needed, the primary thing is better tracker and seeder daemons. I use opentracker, which is OK but hardly perfect. I seed with deluge because it's one of the few seeders that can be run as a daemon (almost all BT clients expect you to dedicate a GUI window to them or they stop running--imagine what running a Web service would be like if you had to have a GUI for every instance of Apache).