Quotes

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

via Apple has lost the functional high ground – Marco.org.

Today we’re unwrapping the best holiday gift we could’ve imagined: the first real build of our self-driving vehicle prototype.

via Google Self-Driving Car Project.

I’ve got to be the only husband in America who woke up to that text this morning, right?

Love her!

The Macbook Pro 5,5 is highly compatible with Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. You’ll need to apply some of the adjustments listed below.

School is the price of being young and helpless! Not going to school is the reward of being grown-up, and strong, and powerful. You associate school with weakness and childishness. You associate non-school with strength and adulthood. Every kid knows that he is going to be rewarded for reaching the age of sixteen, or whatever age he’s allowed to get out, he’s going to be rewarded by never having to go to school again, never having to open up another book, never having to learn another fact, never having to think another thought. We teach kids that to be grown up is to be able to be stupid for the rest of your life…We won’t be able to do that anymore. In the 21st century, we’re going to have to think of education not as a task to be completed, but as a process to be continued.

Many users, however, will have to add more memory if they want to run Mac OS X: It requires a minimum of 128 MB of RAM, which is more than Apple included in most of its consumer models until recently. The operating system runs even better with twice as much memory. (Fortunately, RAM is at record low prices, with many vendors now offering 256-MB modules for $50 or less.)

As technological skills become synonymous with literacy, it is imperative that students learn to use emerging real-time technologies for research, experimentation, problem-solving, collaboration and creativity. Tech-savvy teachers are already taking advantage of these very technologies to build their own skills and lesson plans.

Young digital natives are training their brains for technological expertise but are not developing neural networks that modulate the ability to maintain eye contact during a conversation, recognize non-verbal cues, and perceive and convey empathy.

Even with cheap printed books, you can tell that someone proofed every page. With many e-books, they’ve clearly just been run through a converter with no proofing whatsoever.

We realize that removing features and support is not easy, but with this spring cleaning done, we’ve laid the groundwork for more Reader improvements down the line.

We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication.

While I am a Luddite who fears powerful folks sashaying with hubris, I cannot help but wonder:
Which came closer to preventing Dr. Venter from venturing this far?

At that time, Bent Stumpe was an electronics engineer, newly recruited to work on developments for the SPS Central Control room. One of the things his supervisor asked him to build as soon as possible was a device to control a pointer on a screen, also called a tracker ball.

Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that “everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo, affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

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It is far too soon to know the answer.