Answer: this person doesn't know.

My aunt was a deaf-mute (That's what she called herself. I have no idea if the term is pejorative) Her husband, my uncle, was blind. So she would sign things that he couldn't see, and he would yell at her and she couldn't hear them.

Made for a great marriage.

(Joking aside, it was really interesting to watch them communicate. He would hold her hands while she "spoke" Then she would hold his hands -- so he knew she was there -- while he spoke back to her. Worked very well, actually. They had two beautiful kids that grew up to become advocates and workers in the hearing and sight-impaired communities)

It was an amazing family. As I recall, both had jobs outside the home. Both were avid readers, writers, and participated in several civic organizations. I used to love visiting them as a kid.

This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases?

Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror.

Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site.

I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.

There are tons of people who have bios like this, especially in San Francisco. You quickly come to realize that most of the people who have done 50 million different "impressive" things in a short period of time are either dilettantes who seek the most recognition for the least work investment, or people who have one or two serious interests, and a strong ability to promote all of their other minor achievements.

(Protip: my vanity meter goes off the scale when the self-promoter is a woman who prominently features her amateur modeling portfolio on a personal website, or intermixes pictures of herself in a bikini in otherwise unrelated content.)

I think the thing to learn here is that noise level for self-promotion is set pretty high. If you think you're bragging too much about an accomplishment...well, you probably aren't. ;-)

There's nothing in the commercial, actually, that depicts ordinary, routine phone calls. They're intimate conversations between people with deep relationships to each other, who are separated and cannot be together – sometimes at critical, god-I-wish-I-had-a-teleporter moments.

If you've felt the kind of deep longing that sort of separation can cause, you'll immediately understand what Apple is selling here. A lifeline to the ones you love.

Believe me, at those moments there's not a chance you'd rather just be on IM.

> Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to.

Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it's very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes depicted in movies and sitcoms?

As a Chinese, now I can think in languages (dual thinking in Mandarin and English), but in the school days I have developed a totally different, alternative way of thinking process.

All Indo-European languages have alphabet to represent syllables, but Chinese is not a language (Mandarin, Cantonese are languages), it's a distinctively unique writing system. Why unique? Its logograms/logographs are not directly linked with phonemes but linked with the meaning itself.

When I do thinking and reasoning, I recall a concept by the word's exact character shape and structure, then match with the picture of book pages I memorized, identify the corresponding semantics and then organize my result. This is way faster than thinking in languages like a background voice speaking in my head.

Elementary education in China has a technique called 默读, which means read without speaking, after we learned this, later we were taught to get rid of "read" altogether. We only scan the picture of one book page, and cache it as a static picture, then a question is raised about a particular word appeared in that page. We are demanded to recite the context out. This is called memorize-before-comprehend. After decades of training and harsh tests like this, we were totally used to treat thinking as pattern extracting from lines of sentences.

This is why Chinese find English grammar funny, a noun is a noun, it should be a static notation of things, easily recognizable universally, why the hell do people invent stuff like plural form to make obstacles for recognizing?

Human voices spectrum are way smaller than visual spectrum. And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?

Update 1: Anther reason why Chinese are soooooo obsessed with calligraphy. If some idea is really important we write it in an unforgettable, various artful way so the pattern extracting is even faster. And the calligraphy details contains rich hints and link to related ideas.

Update 2: Found out deaf people also have problems with English grammar, similar to the common mistakes Chinese makes http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgasc/_/c0mmn2l

Does this mean we can finally abandon the idea that Google's mission is "to organize the world's information"?

Sounds more like banal, run-of-the-mill inspirational speech (not that I have anything against that)