Slashdot Mirror

Here are some good starting points for the lay reader:

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/01/used-brain-for-sale-one-careful-owner.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/09/protons-linoleic-acid-in-hypothalamus.html
http://www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year3/psy337EatingNeuralFactors/PSY337EatingNeuralFactors.htm#evidenceforceontrolcentresforfeeding

Here are some good starting points for the lay reader:

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/01/used-brain-for-sale-one-careful-owner.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/09/protons-linoleic-acid-in-hypothalamus.html
http://www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year3/psy337EatingNeuralFactors/PSY337EatingNeuralFactors.htm#evidenceforceontrolcentresforfeeding

My personal data is here.

Indeed. I could see something like Google Ngram Viewer being developed for going through this sort of thing for all sorts of interesting purposes, ranging from linguistics research and the etymology of idiomatic sayings to scripting more accurate period dramas. It could also be used to produce something along the lines of Google Trends, letting people see what the media is focusing on at any particular time. Moreover, it would form an interesting contrast if you had a timeline showing the rise and fall of various topics in the media alongside the rise and fall of those same topics in Google Trends, particularly if you broke it up by network, that way you could start to quantify some correlation between an individual network's coverage and a change in the amount of interest demonstrated by the public.

There's all sorts of really neat ideas that could come out of a dataset like this, many that would likely be much, much more creative than the ones I've said here.

> Why the fruits and vegetables?

Start at this review of the literature at Hyperlipid , then follow through to the published journal papers linked in the article.

The summary at the end is..

"So in summary plants produce fructose which is both attractive and damaging to mammals. They protect themselves as best they can with antioxidants.
I don't see any causality between fruit and vegetable consumption and improved health."

Seriously, as a designer myself I can only shake my head when I read stuff like this.

It may be true that "traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users", but what about older users?

Visual metaphores are just easier than text as you can get the information from a quick glance. Who cares if they don't really represent what they are anymore. People seeing the following road-sign know instantly that they are approaching a speed camera but no-one's really used a camera that looked like this with the concertina-front in about 100 years. Just because modern cameras don't look like this anymore doesn't mean we should go out and replace all our road-signs with more accurate ones. That's why the phone icon, the camera icon and the floppy-disk-to-save icon will not go away. Because everyone knows what they mean.

This outfit is dedicated to educating geeks (and everyone else) about one of the greatest threats to their health, safety and property:

http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/

This website will serve to educate the general public on Black people and the Stuff That Black People Don't Like. Black people have many interesting eccentricities, which include disliking a litany of everyday events, places, household objects and other aspects of their everyday life. Black people are an interesting subject matter and this website will chronicle the many problems in life that agitate this group of people.

You mean like this one or perhaps this one? Or maybe this one?

Another Slashdot 'article' full of slant and hyperbole.

My thoughts exactly. None of this is news (or even noteworthy) to anyone following the medical industry. Drug patents are not on just a chemical, but on exact formulations and their use to treat specific diseases in specific ways. Double the strength of each pill and have doctors prescribe one daily rather than two, and it's a new patentable drug. Mix in a practically-irrelevant bit of aspirin and it's a new combination that relieves symptoms and pain!

It's not that Purdue was particularly evil in their marketing of the drug. They're no worse than anybody else. Of course, rather than decry the whole medicine business and its ludicrous inefficiencies and rent-seeking, the author picks one particular scapegoat for today's Two Minutes Hate.

Which is why it's important for you to learn how to grow your own food. Visit you're local farmers market every Saturday, find a small family farm that raises organically grown food. Here is a pretty good blog post on no till gardening

http://twentyfirstcenturyrenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-no-till-gardening.html

Three Laws Safe?

It's not called a "crust" or a "skin", it's called the rind.

Cheeses can have both rinds and crusts. The rind is on the outside, and is intended to be there. Crusts, on the other hand, develop mostly unintentionally, and often on the inside too after a cheese has been cut. An outside crust can be treated, e.g. with brine, to create a rind.

As for skins, yes, some have those too. Jarlsberg, for example, has a sprayed on rubbery skin between the cheese and the protective wax. It is NOT a rind, and not meant for consumption (and neither is the protective wax, although I've seen dolts that eat it).

In addition to these, some moist cheeses like Cabecou and Gamalost develop fur instead. It's a fungal layer which can be quite tasty. Sometimes it's compressed into the cheese again to make part of the rind, like in a Brie.

As the owner of the Illusion of Prosperity blog (who has been seeing increased traffic from this thread), I waited patiently to see if anyone would make the point you just made. I was not disappointed.

That said, I will say this regarding the perception of prosperity. Many of the best things in life are actually free (or nearly so). That's been true since the creation of dirt of course (and therefore does not diminish your "real cost" argument).

Stagflationary Mark
Illusion of Prosperity

As the owner of the Illusion of Prosperity blog (who has been seeing increased traffic from this thread), I waited patiently to see if anyone would make the point you just made. I was not disappointed.

That said, I will say this regarding the perception of prosperity. Many of the best things in life are actually free (or nearly so). That's been true since the creation of dirt of course (and therefore does not diminish your "real cost" argument).

Stagflationary Mark
Illusion of Prosperity

automatically in the compiler, try several things and pick the one that uses the least memory/processor cycles/OSPF if multithreaded/whatever based on what you want to gain by optimizing code

Oh - you mean like every JVM/CLR in the last I can't remember how long? Like you get in every Android device? Like all the decent JS engines out there?

Now we could discuss the relative efficiencies of interpreted vs bytecode vs compiled vs whatever all day long (hint: it's more variable than it might at first seem), but I have a feeling you'd rather go back out and shout at the kids on your lawn.

Since people don't seem to get parent:

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

Reminds me of an old Bizarro cartoon.

Exactly. I'm wondering if the OP works for Verizon

Yang sangat membahagiakan konsumen pastinya mesin baru Sepeda Motor Bebek Injeksi Kencang dan Irit Jupiter Z1 yang membuat performance-nya meningkat 20 persen karena mengadopsi teknologi motor balap YZ Crankshaft Technology, Low Friction Technology dan Forged Piston. YZ Crankshaft Technology meningkatkan akselerasi dan torsi, sudah digunakan di motor trail Yamaha YZ450F. All New Jupiter Z1 yang diluncurkan Yamaha kian sempurna dengan Low Friction Technology yang memperkecil hambatan tenaga akibat gesekan sehingga tenaga mesin menjadi lebih optimal. Forged Piston yang memiliki daya tahan tinggi dan ringan sehingga mampu menyalurkan tenaga mesin yang besar serta menjadikan motor lebih mudah berakselerasi. Baca selengkapnya: http://go-bisnisonline.blogspot.com/2012/09/sepeda-motor-bebek-injeksi-kencang-dan.html

Yang sangat membahagiakan konsumen pastinya mesin baru Sepeda Motor Bebek Injeksi Kencang dan Irit Jupiter Z1 yang membuat performance-nya meningkat 20 persen karena mengadopsi teknologi motor balap YZ Crankshaft Technology, Low Friction Technology dan Forged Piston. YZ Crankshaft Technology meningkatkan akselerasi dan torsi, sudah digunakan di motor trail Yamaha YZ450F. All New Jupiter Z1 yang diluncurkan Yamaha kian sempurna dengan Low Friction Technology yang memperkecil hambatan tenaga akibat gesekan sehingga tenaga mesin menjadi lebih optimal. Forged Piston yang memiliki daya tahan tinggi dan ringan sehingga mampu menyalurkan tenaga mesin yang besar serta menjadikan motor lebih mudah berakselerasi. Baca selengkapnya: http://go-bisnisonline.blogspot.com/2012/09/sepeda-motor-bebek-injeksi-kencang-dan.html

The double-think which one has to perform to try to understand talk about job creators is mind-boggling to me. I can barely wrap my head around what mental gymnastics I'd have to do to buy into this nonsense. I look out my window and see birds flying around and eating food. They are free and need no one to "create jobs" for them, yet we humans seem to supposedly need heirs like the Koch brothers and others to create jobs for us. There was a poster in during the strikes and near-uprising in 1968 France (one fifth of France's population was on strike, de Gaulle fled the country) that said "Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui", but in this day and age of low VC investment, longer hours, boring work, high unemployment etc., people seem more enslaved to the heirs and their broken system then at any time - at least in the USA anyhow. In other countries they're trying to burn down US embassies as I type.

You used to be able to go to the federal government's BLS and see inflation-adjusted historical average hourly wages, but they removed that functionality, perhaps because it looked so bad. Here's a fellow who did it back in 2007, with links to the Federal Reserve and BLS data. As you can see, the hourly wage in the US was higher in the early 1970s then it is now. In fact, it was higher for the whole decade of 1968-1978 then it is now. All of this wonderful economic growth and job creation - what has it done for the majority of Americans over the past decades? Absolutely nothing. It all goes to the 1%, the majority of whom inherited it, if you're to believe the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Forbes 400 richest list etc.

Political scientists, historians, astronauts etc. are also pretty much in universal agreement that if communist parties had not come to power in Russia, China, eastern Europe etc. in the 1960s, that there is no way Congress would have ever financed the moon shot. Sputnik and the advancements in science and engineering in the Soviet Union are what loosened the purse strings in the US - the Soviets were winning the Space Race from Sputnik up until the end of 1968 where they were still winning the moon race. By that time the USSR was busy with Poland and Czechoslovakia and the like and Apollo 8 did its moon flyby, the first time the US really pulled ahead in the space race, which was followed by the next important US achievement, Apollo 11. It took the US over a decade to catch up and finally surpass the USSR. Then after a moon flyby and landing, that was pretty much the end of any major space spending. I don't see the point of The Atlantic talking about ancient history - it's not like if the US had any leftover money it would spend it on a project like that, not that it has any spare money.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_s_xK_MMwLjM/S1lrwFb9hmI/AAAAAAAAAQM/WcaUe8l7dGM/s400/googoo.jpg

I sailed around the world ten years ago with two other people on this boat http://www.yachtfiona.com/ (I've been re-posting my journal entries on http://bobanero.blogspot.com./ The Captain/boat owner was a retired engineer, and intimately familiar with all the equipment on the boat. We were constantly dealing with equipment failures of various types, and it seems like every other day he had his soldering iron out fixing something. Offhand, I would say that the most critical electronic equipment was GPS, SSB radio, VHF radio, Iridium Phone, Autopilot, Radar, and Laptop. The Iridium phone was great, we always had a signal with it, even in the most remote parts of the Southern Ocean. We lost the Radar during the time when we needed it most (sailing through icebergs). For all the equipment that you have, be prepared with a plan for when it fails. You definitely need redundant GPS. A chart plotter might be handy when you're coming into a strange port, as long as you have all the correct charts loaded. Of course there is no substitute for paper charts and local knowledge. The SSB radio was valuable for communicating with various ham nets that operate in various parts of the world, where we were able to get valuable local knowledge. I recommend joining the Seven Seas Cruising Association. Their newsletters are packed with incredible information from cruisers all over the world.

I believe I speak for many Americans when I say my comment is "Go away."

I believe, "Om".

Kerry, Bush had similar grades at Yale, Comparing the academic record of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush, John McCain's academic record, Gore's Dubious School Record.

Nonsense. For one, we already know that Obama graduated Sigma Cum Laude. For another, it's slight of hand to pretend talk of known grades is the same thing as demanding the release of college transcripts, which has never been an issue at least in any modern presidential election.

But it is a fair comparison.

It's pathetic teabagger drivel, since everyone knows that Obama was talking about transparency in government. What's really sad, though, is Obama has plenty of actual hypocrisy on his actual promise to ding him for. Vowing to hold health care hearings on CSPAN, then the same backroom deals with literally the same lobbyist that he attacked in 2008. Vowing to protect whistleblowers and then prosecuting more whistleblowers than all past presidents combined. Promising to limit the influence of lobbyists, only to have his staff meet with them at coffee shops to get around the White House visitor log.

But wingers take a winning argument against Obama, and somehow manage to turn it into irrelevant junior high school bullshit. Amazing, really....it's like they've become so addicted to sophistry that they continue to use it when sitting in front of their noses is a valid case to be made....

You mean these here?

Could be...

The author of this book: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b35jEu5ZeLQ/UCmyWXslzEI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/Oc86dmx1xDQ/s220-h/door-crop.jpg

The author of the RFCs: http://blog.neustar.biz/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/peterson-dist-eng.jpg

There's certainly a similarity there.

How did Java codenames go from Merlin to Tiger, Mustang, and Dolphin? They also love to drop the "1." from their version numbers.

Please, BLENDER 3D is better than this crap! All you need is the blender starter kit BGhelper , (something that needs to be better advertised) thanks Solar Lune. Its in a decent scripting language (python) it has a 3d world editor where everything stays put! All this for beginners, if you want more, you can learn about shaders, extend it in python OR C++, AND it's open source! GPLv2 (licence arguments aside) but your games can be any licence unlike tourque (pre open source) OR Unity. Besides, its like saying, "but Star office is open source," the DAY it goes open source

Dividends are still paid regularly. See chart here. As late as 2009, over 70% of the companies in the S&P 500 pay dividends. Interesting, that chart indicates that the tax rate of dividends has an affect on how many companies pay dividends.

A lot of the stocks of interest to /. don't pay dividends. Tech companies have been notoriously bad payers as they prefer to reinvest their money into growth, but some of the old guard pay divs, such as Intel and even MS.

If you have special software it might even be less error prone and faster than paper.

You can make ipads water resistant too:
http://brentsgeekyramblings.blogspot.com/2012/02/liquipel-ipad-test.html
And phones of course:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243827/hzo_nanotechnology_seal_keeps_smartphones_from_drowning.html

But if someone sits/steps on it...

It doesn't mean shit if everything is historical. Yes, yes, you tweaked it until it modeled history accurately. Of course, that's a good first step. However that could just mean you made a model that generates a line in the right shape, rather than actually models anything useful. You have to wait and see how it does at predicting reality before you go and claim it is useful.

What you describe is called overfitting. Models that are overfit do a great job of explaining every data point that was used to create the model, but they are completely worthless for prediction purposes. Here is a decent graphical example of overfitting.

...who used LeakID services to crawl Hotfile links and file baseless copyright infringement notices en masse.

The blog says LeakID is using bots to crawl Hotfile links. Wouldn't their copyright search algorithms be easily defeated by packing files into password protected RAR files before uploading them to a file hosting site?

On passwords, I liked Jeff Atwood's article, `You're Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly'.

For Personally Identifiable Information (PII), I liked Brian Danger Graham's article, `What's in a name database?'.

Here in the real world, there is no evidence that this study is funded by corporate interests

Oh, really? What is the "Food Security Institute," and who funds it? Doesn't it have a nice, Orwellian, name? The answer is: FSI employs the shills^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hscientists who wrote this propaganda piece, and it is funded by Cargill, Monsanto, and many other villains who have an interest in spreading this disinformation.

You're right. This is science. Science does not factor into the equation, otherwise you'd be asking why you should beleive that a natural pesticide is somehow better than a synthetic one.

Because evolution, dummy. If natural pesticides were harmful to us, they would taste bad to us. Fifty years of synthetic pesticide is not enough time for us to evolve a negative reaction to their taste.

You are a dummy and a sheepie. But at least you are a smug, anonymous, sheepie. Say "Baaaa!" sheepie.

Academic records have been a hot button issue for the last few presidential cycles? Kerry, Bush had similar grades at Yale, Comparing the academic record of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush, John McCain's academic record, Gore's Dubious School Record. I personally am not asking, I really don't care to be honest. But it is a fair comparison. Neither candidate is required to provide any such documentation, precedent or not. If you feel you have not been given enough info about a candidate, then vote for the other guy.

They have Obama's college transcripts and passport as examples. If he can keep those secret, surely Romney's tax returns can be kept under wraps too.

I suppose you could see it that way, if you were dumber than pond scum and more dishonest than Baghdad Bob.

Because you know perfectly well that Obama was talking about transparency in government, and his college transcripts have fuck-all to do with that. Rather than hitting Obama on his actual hypocrisy over what he was actually talking about - like promising to hold health care hearings on CSPAN and then literally making the same deals behind closed doors with the same lobbyists he attacked during the campaign - you guys have to peddle some false equivalency drivel. But hey, that's what happens when the only honest, reality-based criticism of Obama comes from the left.

As for Romney's tax returns, that ship sailed when he demanded to see the tax returns of his possible running mates so he could vet them.

He should apply to Verizon.

Distripedia - http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2009/11/distripedia.html is always available to anyone who gives up on another pedia's page.

http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity."

Many become deficient in Omega-3s, Iodine, and B12. Of course, when a meat eater dies at 65 of a heart attack, we commonly blamd the the "genes". When a Vegan dies for whatever reason, we blame the "diet". In reality, it is an interactio of diet, lifestyle, and genes. As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us "weak links", but whether they get pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle.

We need a new term for someone who eats a lot of vegetables and other high-nutrient foods and avoids junk foods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term "Nutritarian" for that, but it is not in widespread use. And as he says, eating lots of vegetables and a little meat is much healthier than a diet that is full of refined grains and processed sugar.

Thanks for your insightful post, including the humor and insights into psychology and health. :-)

On finding balance, see stuff on "the pleasure trap", which can make balance hard to achieve sometimes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Humans were not adapted to a world full of refined sugar, refined starch, salt everywhere, easy-to-get fats, and so on. Our natural inclinations are geared to a world where such are rare and we have to work physically at a moderate level every day to get something to eat.

Yet the modern food industry profits from just giving us what our genes say we should have as much of as we can because it is historically rare. But now that is is not rare, it is literally destroying our health. And pleading for individual self-control goes against our genetically-based survival strategies to eat the richest food first. Thus in industrialized countries, we now almost all suffer from the "diseases of kings" from the past cause by such a diet -- diabetes, gout, heart disease, stroke, dementia, etc... And even autism in the case of people (especially pregnant women) who no longer need to go outdoors in the sunshine for many hours every day.

And sadly, on extremes and addiction:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. ... Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ..."

Maybe we need to find healthy addictions before the unhealthy ones find us?

Much like Laffer curve, it has a peak somewhere between strong and weak.

It depends on what you are trying to optimize.

With overly weak regulation, you pretty much inevitably end up with large companies monopolizing whole markets and becoming nearly impossible to unseat without direct interference - mid-to-late 19th century USA is a classic example of that.

Actually it isn't. The monopolies of that time tended to be temporary things, unless they had government backing. Even Standard Oil, which is considered the most famous example of a monopoly, was getting its lunch eaten by the time it was broken up (it had rapidly lost market share in the years leading to its breakup).

And a lot of those markets didn't have monopolies. One hears about the monopolies in rail or oil, but not in groceries, ocean-based shipping, or mail order retail, because there weren't any in those.

The point here is that there's a lot of ranting about the evils of low regulation, but when are we going to hear about the evils of too much regulation?

For example, there's an insane amount of legislative law and regulation being added each year in the US. It's probably at the point that a reasonable person could not read all the law and regulation, simply because that person couldn't actually keep up with the creation of new law and regulation.

If the rate at which new regulation is added continues to increase, then it won't be long until industries become impossible to regulate simply because neither the industry nor the regulators can understand, much less comply with, the law and regulation that has been created.

Also, it's worth remembering who can be providing the regulation. It's a fairly common assumption that only governments regulate. But private markets can and do provide their own regulation.

How exactly would that work?

Why not look at real world examples like the stock markets. For example, the NYSE has listing standards that have to be met in order to be listed as a stock on the NYSE.

For example, a requirement of being listed on the NYSE is that one follows commonly accepted procedures for releasing "material information", that is, things that are thought likely to change the price of the stock.

Here is the official Google blog announcing the Nexus S. It was announced on December 6, 2010. It wasn't available for sale in the U.S. until December 16. Even assuming you ran out and bought one the day it shipped, you still haven't owned it for three years. Not even two, in fact.

There are twelve references cited on that page. There are thousands more cited in Dr. Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live". Why do people (myself included in the past) have such a hard time accepting there is any connection between what they eat and their health? If you fed a monkey only sugar water for years and it went crazy and its fur started falling out, would you say the way to bring it back to health is to give it prescription drugs along with the sugar water?

Evan vegan diets can be messed up with too much refined sugar and refined starch, btw:
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Dr. Fuhrman: Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity.
    The second serious error of the vegan community is the heavy use of fake meat and cheese analogues usually made from soy and almost always high in salt. Besides the lack of nutrients and high levels of acrylamides in these highly processed foods, with continuation of the high salt diet hemorrhagic strokes are even more likely in a vegan than in a person on a heart-disease promoting diet rich in animal products. Consuming salted foods should not be taken lightly; it is a killer.
    The third error common in the vegan community is the lack of concern for individual differences which may heighten nutritional requirements in some individuals, especially the elderly, which make it advisable to supplement when appropriate with Vitamin D, B12, Taurine, DHA, or iodine, for example, to assure that no one develops a medical condition as a result of sub-optimal nutritional intake. To better assure nutritional completeness I recommend to my patients my vegan multi Gentle Care Formula and my vegan DHA Purity, and then if not getting regular sunshine to also add a Vitamin D supplement. Many vegans think supplementing with B12 is enough to guarantee nutritional excellence for most people. Long-term nutritional deficiencies are not harmless. Omnivores develop deficiencies, too, and blood tests can be used to ascertain if deficiencies exist."

Eating meat poses at least six big problems:
* the environmental impact & resource usage
* e-coli from manure runoff contaminating vegetables
* the cruelty of factory farming
* meat has few plant-based phytonutrients your body needs to work well and resists cancer (though it can have some essential nutrients like omega-3s if it is a high quality meat, which is rare these days).
* animals typically eaten in the USA are fed non-organic grain with various pesticides on it and other toxins, the animals then concentrate those toxins in their fat which they eat 10X grain to make per calorie, so when you eat typical US meat product, you are getting potentially up to 100X the exposure to pesticides than a vegan eating organic veggies.
* When you cook meat, you usually produce cancer causing acrylamides.

So, with standard meat, you both get more exposure to cancer-causing compounds and you get less phytonutrients to fight cancer. Plus you undermine our collective future environmentally and morally. So, in the long term, that all undermines your health. None-the-less, Fuhrman is not a total extremist on such things -- he says as long as 90% of you calories are from what he recommends, you will get most of the benefits.

I didn't realize until now that the link wasn't posted. Give credit to where credit is due.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/07/no-evolution-in-korea.html

From my blog:

http://madsoftware.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-confession.html

I have a confession to make. Forgive me. Wait, don't forgive me. I'm completely unapologetic. I am a programmer, and I don't write comments. I just needed to get that off my chest.

I don't believe in comments.

I have been writing a lot of fairly complex code lately. And all the while, the voices of dead Computer Science professors have been speaking to me. They repeat the mantra of good code commenting. I feel guilt, like when I go to church. Or when I don't make my bed in the morning. Of course, not one of them is able to give me any good suggestion of what a good set of comments is. They just tell me what isn't a good comment. So does that mean that anything else is a good comment? Like lots of swear words in the code. That's probably more useful than real comments, because they make me laugh and keep me from falling asleep at the keyboard.

Good comments, I'm told, are not just a rehash of what is already in the code. Well, if it isn't already in the code, then it isn't much use to the program is it? I don't believe in comments. I think they are mostly a waste of time. Maybe not for you, but for me they just make my life difficult. I have to make a context switch to English in order to write them. That takes time and just serves to confuse me.

Whenever I write English, I take the audience of my writing into account. Who is the audience for my comments? Some moron with a basic C++ book on his desk? Or the great man himself, Bjarne Stroustrup? Bjarne is pretty smart and will probably be able to figure out my code just fine without me, or my comments. Because he speaks C++. I speak C++ too, so that's how I like to communicate with computers and other people who speak the same language.

So I don't write comments. I'm one of those people who likes to use good variable names, good function names, and good file names. When I look at others' comments, I don't usually trust them, because they often don't make any sense. Or they are just plain wrong. That's just awesome. Like the time I first starting programming and I spent two days wondering why the second member of a pair of ints (pair) was always zero, even though the comments said it should contain some valuable piece of information. Actually, it was the first member, not the second one, which I finally figured out by actually looking at the damn code. Wonder of wonders, the code actually told me what the code did. Amazing.

I think that instead of comments we should put quotes of great authors at the top of all our code. That way, when people read our code, they will think that our code is profound, because we quote the greats of our time like, Dostoevsky, Helen Keller, or Dave Barry. And the best thing would be to just randomly pick those quotes so that when people try to make some connection between the code and the quote, they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out. Then they'll feel stupid, but won't want to admit it and we can fun of them when they can't explain the connection. And we won't have had to be smart at all, because all those people that we referred to are smart.

Have I even written comments? Of course, I slap all my comments in the headers, when I don't feel like writing documentation. Or when the function name is getting too long. Or when some fellow programmer makes me feel guilty for not following the religion of comments. What is the point of writing commments if the function name tells the whole story? Take vector for example, the size() function returns, guess what, the size of the vector. I know what you're thinking, that is completely non-intuitive. It's got to be commented. Look, if the function name can't tell you what the function does, then maybe you should change the function name. And if your function name gets too long, then maybe your function is doing too much.

Good, maintainable programs are easy to understand not because they hav

So basically, she did not commit and was not accused of committing any federal crime. But she may have violated a state law. And because the US DOJ and FBI did not illegally and unconstitutionally insert themselves into a state matter, it is proper to accuse them and the president of 'not wanting justice'.

Well, two points. One, the US DOJ and FBI *regularly* insert themselves into state matters, damn the constitutionality of it. Look no further than a comparison of the treatment of Sue Schmitz and Sarah Palin, based on the flimsy excuses that there might have been federal funds involved and the federal postal service might have been used--the former an interesting point because Alaska has a net funding from the federal government (ie, the state as a whole gets more federal funds than federal taxes its citizens pays in) and the latter interesting because I presume Yahoo being an out-of-state business would inherently grant interstate commerce consideration. Of course, that's the tip of the iceberg of federal involvement on a questionable basis, and both Republican and Democrat administrations have shown a willingness to interfere in state business (Terri Schiavo comes to mind), even if it's just a bully pulpit position. That leads to point two, even if the US DOJ and FBI had zero constitutionality to do anything from a legal perspective, the President of the US could certainly speak up and against seeming graft, corruption, nepotism, or whatever other bad behavior is observed, especially in a would-be VP.

On the other hand, we have someone who did violate a federal law and was properly investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the DOJ, and that is another example of 'not serving justice'.

How many people are properly investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the DOJ over hacking one or more email account? Again, the point isn't that the hacker did something illegal--they certainly did and it was justifiably in itself to prosecute them. It's that it's "not serving justice" when the FBI is so very selective on investigating criminals and the DOJ is very selective on enforcing the laws. It seems more about "setting an example". You can hack into thousands of email accounts or post millions of passwords, and the FBI either can't (which seems hard, but not impossible, to believe) or won't put in the effort to track and seek prosecuting those responsible successfully, except with rare exception. Now, perhaps I'm wrong and the FBI's abilities are really so woefully incapable of tracking most such breaches, either because the hackers involved are wise enough to take the necessary steps to be saved from prosecution or because the FBI simply lacks the funds/expertise over something which they'll likely take a report on but leave it as rather low priority realizing that without a good, hot lead it's not likely worth the effort--ie, it's just unlikely to lead to a successful prosecution. Or maybe the FBI really does a stellar job at investigation and the DOJ is the one who is unwilling or incapable of a successful prosecution--either for a lack of prestige or that the evidence is seen as too weak, even though it's the best detective work anyone could reasonable do. There doesn't seem to be much sign of that, though, especially when it comes to politics as a general point. Then again, that could just be that politicians are really good at covering their tracks. :/

Then again, it could be the general point that I clearly have biases. And one my main biases is the idea that most people have an agenda. And I presume the agenda of the FBI and DOJ is to seek justice of a sort but their focus tends to be on things they feel threaten the social order of things. Ie, they'll certain go out of their way to try to track criminals when there's a good bit of social unrest about the harm they're causing (the whole PSN

Or they actually back up the cloud to tape:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-restoring-lost-gmail-data-from-tape-backups-2011031/

if biometrics are used to back up the assertion of the username ...

Biometrics is intended to replace the username, not "back it up".

... in a supplied username/password combo (in 2-factor authentication) ...

Username/password combinations are NOT 2-factor authentication. 2-factor authentication is more along the line of the OP's first two examples of something you have plus something you know. For instance, my gmail account is secured using Google's 2-factor implementation and my smartphone:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

... they feel a little more like authentication than identification to me.

Hopefully this is no longer the case.

To put that in perspective, light in a vacuum travels around 20 nm in 67 attoseconds, so the width of the pulse is about the same as the width of the smallest virus or about 1/350th the 7um diameter of a human blood cell.

We need an Internet Bill of Rights to outline our goals around privacy for citizen infrastructure. Then we can move these projects forward. It needs to cover email, chat, social networking, voice, Skype/video... Please read my first draft and provide feedback: http://matthol.blogspot.com/ Also I don't like that Diaspora requires servers. I email, chat, social network, video calls etc should be P2P based on each person having a PGP key. And let's be clear that if we want to have the true democracies that we all deserve around the world, we need secure and private evoting which also depends on this same infrastructure. Let's get this thing done!