A little, nasty nuclear war and if we've developed effective missile defenses? Go easy on the fantasy, chief.

First of all, you're implying that Russia wouldn't have effective missile defense. Considering that current Chinese technology (especially military) is based on Russian design it's highly unlikely. Second, practical, meaningful anti-ballistic missile defense is most probably impossible.

But the most important thing, unless the Chinese people's bodies and their infrastructure are resistant to several thousand degrees of temperature, radiation and mechanical shock produced by thermonuclear weapons, they would NOT survive a nuclear attack Russia is capable of in any meaningful way. Amount of cannon fodder is irrelevant. If anything it would make China more vulnerable -- imagine 1 billion people in chaos after total nuclear devastation. Are you even aware what Russia (or the US) is able to unleash on a potential attacker if they see they have no other choice. Many countries are "nuclear forces" but Russia and US are in a completely different league. Sure, Russia would be in serious shit too, but in that situation they would be the ones that have nothing to lose.

And it's not like Russia isn't planning for such scenarios. Since the 50's or 60's they have a whole bunch of launchers dedicated just for China.

TL;DR: the Chinese government is not that stupid.

Doesn't happen to me that often, but when it does it's quite annoying -- you have to stand there wasting your time (and saying "I'm in a hurry" doesn't help) sometimes as much as five minutes while the cop is writing down your personal data checking them against the police records. I've figured out they have a daily quota of how much ID checks each patrolling cop has to make. Sometimes the cops are annoyed by this too, which leads to comical situations like asking if you have been convicted of something before, and if the answer is "yes" they won't check your ID because then the procedure takes even longer.

I'm not a US citizen and I don't live in the US. I live in a European country where national ID, issued by the ministry of interior, i.e. police, has "always" existed, and it's considered normal (as is the case with many other European or other states in the world). I always considered people in UK, US and other states without a national ID card to be privileged in this regard.

Why on earth would the government need to have my fingerprints, photo or residence on a file in a central database? To fight crime? It seems to me that states without this kind of record are managing just fine with capturing criminals. There is simply no legitimate (from the freedom perspective) reason for these kind of records to exist.

There are many situations (some not so far-fetched) where this can be abused by the state. In "democracies" you may not feel immediately any consequences, but good luck when your democratic government decides it will not cooperate with your "freedoms" anymore. Weimar Republic was also a democracy, look how well that worked out.

If you value administrative convenience over denying the government one more opportunity for potential abuse, I think you should give China or Russia a try (out of many other possible choices). There, the government has easy access to all your administrative information, and will usually not bother you if you are a good citizen.

Not quite. EU passports are required to have machine readable data (I'm not sure how it's called, it's that three lines of characters at the bottom of the first page) to be able to enter US without a visa. The old ones without that (I'm not sure if anyone even has them anymore) are fine too, you just need to be issued a visa at a US embassy or consulate.

That said, EU is phasing in newer, shiny biometric passports (photo, fingerprint... varies from country to country) with RFID. *makes a tinfoil passport wrapper*

Well, yes it's 150 on "our" scale. Which makes this article even more dumb. In what decade of the 20th century are these "neuroscientists" living in?

IQ scale was originally (in 1905) designed to measure children's' intelligence like so: ("mental age" [months] / calendar age [months]) x 100. It is called the Binet-Simon scale, and it's still used to measure cognitive development of preschool children.

Now, apart from obvious problem of defining what exactly is this "mental age" and what kind of cognitive tasks are appropriate for any given calendar age, there is a problem with applying IQ logic to adults. Cognitive development most likely peaks at the age of 14 -- 15 (that is when we stop developing new cognitive abilities, although further improvement is possible through learning and optimisation). But of course, calendar age keeps on going up. So how can you then apply IQ scale to adults? You can't, and it's well known in psychometrics. And even when dealing with children IQ is a statistically defective score. Long story short -- even if it sound intuitively good to measure intelligence in IQ, such a "score" actually means absolutely nothing.

Serious (psychometrically speaking) intelligence (or more precisely, cognitive abilities) tests use deviation scores which are percentile and standard deviation based scores. And, more importantly, they usually give different scores for different abilities (spacial, verbal, etc.). These tests explicitly acknowledge the fact that it is meaningless to compare scores obtained from different populations and scales are standardised for any given demographic population.

The irony with this objective (actually absolute) vs. relative scale debate here is that IQ was designed to be an absolute measurement of intelligence, that was it's whole purpose! But yeah, when it was realised how dumb that was they started to warp it in "standardisation" and made it look like a relative measure, but that's just putting lipstick on a pig.

Nowadays, IQ is mostly used by MENSA types to show how fucking smart Madonna is, or, as we see, "neuroscientists" claiming to have discovered extinct uber-geek monkeys.

And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Miguel after all he has been through!

He never received a degree, he was dissed by Microsoft. He founded at least two fucked-up projects, his hero turned out to be ***gulp*** a user, a cheater, and now he's going through a license change battle. All you people care about is ***ew, ugh*** freedom and not making money off of software. HE'S A HUMAN!

What you don't realize is that Miguel is making you all so much more interoperable and all you do is write a bunch of crap about him.

He hasn't blogged how awesome Microsoft is in days. His project was called Gnome for a reason because all you people want is GNU GNU GNU GNU GNU!! LEAVE HIM ALONE...

You're lucky he even coded for you BASTARDS! LEAVE MIGUEL ALONE! ... Please.

***wipes tears***

Richard Stallman talked about freedom and said software should be free no matter what. ***gulp*** Speaking of freedom, when is it freedom-loving to publicly bash (no pun intended) someone who is going through a hard time. LEAVE MIGUEL ALOHONE! PUHlehase...

Leave Miguel de Icaza alone right NOW! I mean it! Anyone who has a problem with him, you deal with Balmer, because he's not well right now.

***cries a river*** ***gulp***

Leave him alone...

Good question. A thing that is well known in neurophysiology and neuropsychology is that forgetting is (almost) as important as learning (and remembering). Optimal forgetting is behaviorally beneficial (without forgetting, and thus making room for new associations you would soon be stuck with very rigid behavioral patterns). It is thought that one of the main functions of sleep is to erase some of associations made through the day. There is a saying in neurophysiology/psychology: the problem is not how to remember and learn but how to forget.

Obviously, the only way to know for sure what effect these functionally local enhancements might have globally is to have good long term studies, not just on organisms like mice but on humans.

:)

What makes you think the developers don't care at all about perception of their work?

A leaked build can be one of the daily builds. As such, it can have some pretty major bugs in it, if the last few commits didn't play well together, or one was just fscked up - in fact, such a build might as well just crash on startup. When it gets leaked with that stuff, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, writes a witty blog post along the lines of, "Microsoft is nearing RC, and yet the product is full of major bugs; apparently, the release is totally rushed by management. Remember Vista?". Next day, it ends up on Slashdot front page as a story titled "New Microsoft software released with major flaws".

And then you get IM'd by a friend who sends you a link to that, and have to explain what actually happened.

So, yeah, I do care.

Imagine the sheer joy of writing /. post that exalts the virtues of Win7, lambasts Apple, pokes fun at Google, and has a well-hidden pun on Linux, and getting it modded to "+5, Insightful" - because it really is that well-written.

It's as rare as you think it is, but it does happen.

~

There one reason against the Mac Mini, and it's from a purely economic point of view from what the guys says he wants. The Mac Mini is so much more expensive than an Asus Pundit or something similar then you would need to keep the thing running for several years before you saw any payback. That's certainly overkill for a small home server.

What exactly are you proposing "government" do about it. Even if the U.S. "government" did something about it that leaves about a hundred other countries where it can originate. Its kind of sad when people want the nanny state to solve all their problems for them. Like I said Google solved the problem so there is no reason any other big email service can't, and if you are an admin running your own email server and you can't solve it then that is probably the most compelling argument I've heard for moving your email to the cloud.

How many non technical people know the difference between 64 and 32-bit CPU's? Not a whole lot, if any. For those people, it's a bit daunting when their Linux friend/son/granddaughter/whatever tells them it'd be a great choice and the first thing they see is "Which download? 32 or 64?". Just put the .ISO with both 32-bit and 64-bit with a script that tests if the CPU is 64-bit capable at boot time. Or how about those people that don't know if their Mac has Intel or PPC chipset? Same thing, script at boot time to determine. If it's just two architectures the overhead could be well worth it.

A bit on a sensationalistic side, as people working in the field of quantitative and experimental psycholinguistics have been working on measuring various aspects of language for some time now.

The real problem in this field is not measuring itself, but getting good material to make measures on and a proper theoretical framework (i.e. you need to figure out what kind of quantity is relevant).

It is now possible to predict reaction times on certain grammar forms with ~99% precision based on frequency of those forms in language (I'm to lazy to give links, google it if you are interested, the research was mostly done by Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). The problem was finding a relevant way of grounding grammar into information theory framework—once that was solved mathematics was trivial.

The value of the Harvard research is that it is probably the first to give some exact measurments on phenomena that has been, so far, only qualitatively noted in the historical perspective of language development. Good work.

It is also another validation of the idea that frequency (amount of information) of a given linguistic entity is the property that is the most relevant (maybe even the only relevant) for the way our brain processes language.