Slashback: Bugfixed, Attribution, Atkins

Slashback brings you another flurry of updates (below) on the recently reported Mozilla security leak, the Greek gaming ban (you'll never guess), the mega-hour TiVO mod mentioned earlier today, the long-term healthiness of the Atkins Diet, and more. Read on for the details.

Go ahead and get this one out of the way. Seth Scali writes: "The decision last week that ruled the Greek ban on video games as unconstitutional has been overturned, and a new trial has been ordered. Story from TheRegister is here. Don't take your GBA on that trip to Athens just yet ..."

It takes a strong man. Reader edrock200 submitted the story about a TiVO mod which could expand system capacity to more than 1000 hours of recording. The story as shown says that 9thTee is the card's developer; edrock200 corrects this "'The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as 'jafa' on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.'

'It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.'"

Thanks for the clarification!

The Lizard sleeps with one eye open. An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine have updated their article on the recently reported minor security bug in Mozilla [Note Slashdot posting]with the news that a fix has been completed. The bug allowed the webmaster of a site to find out where a user went after their site. The fix means that there are again no known security bugs in Mozilla. Presumably, updates to Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, Galeon, Chimera etc.) will follow."

What about the all-shrimp-and-chili-paste diet? Schlemphfer writes "A few months back, Slashdot featured a NY Times story that talked about the Atkins diet in glowing terms. This week, the Times has published a Jane Brody article raising serious questions about whether Atkins-style diets are dangerous and unsustainable. Brody is one of the most prominent and respected nutrition journalists, so it's worthwhile to read her take on the matter. Brody's article, which cites some important new research, may be an eye-opening read for Slashdot readers who took the plunge with Atkins back in July." (The NYT requires free registration.)

Suddenly everyone is in deadly earnest. Ian Cumming was one of several people to write with evidence of smileys predating the smileys unearthed by Mike Jones of Microsoft Research. He forwarded an informative message from Brian Dear of Birdrock Ventures, which reads in part:

"On the PLATO system, emoticons were much richer -- made using multiple characters displayed on top of each other. It was possible to type, say, a single character, then press SHIFT-space (which moved the cursor exactly one space backwards), then type another character. The second would display on top of the first. You could keep doing this for multiple characters and create many different faces, beer glasses, martini glasses, all kinds of things. And people peppered their emails and notesfile (PLATO's newsgroups) postings with them all the time."

And what is the PLATO system? The short version is this: PLATO was (is) an education-centered computer system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Luckily for you, Dear is writing a book about PLATO. His site is fascinating, and the book promises to be as well. Here is a page showing the richness of PLATO emoticons.

Reader Grant Barrett also writes: "The earliest (not first: you can never precisely say which was first) recorded smiley in print discovered so far was found by etymologist and word researcher Barry Popik who posted this message to the email list of the American Dialect Society. He discusses the yellow smiley face which everyone knows, but this particular smiley is the familiar punctuation-based emoticon. (On a side note, he has uncovered some evidence that Harvey Ball *did not* invent the familiar yellow-faced smiley.)"

That reference puts the typographic smiley all the way back to 1953, and as Barrett mentions, was in print rather than online. He also points out that "ESR's Jargon File cites a 'rival claim by Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, April 12 1979.'"

But there's only one groove per side ... To all those who thought that the optical-scanning method for playing vinyl was an elaborate joke, note that you can download the creator's code if you'd like. This is not the easy way to do things, but is one way.

Comments

Same story you read?

[Otter]

I'm not an Atkins partisan (snacking on carrots right now, in fact), but the NYT article is far less negative than the write-up suggests. It acknowledges it's a very effective way to lose weight, warns that it hasn't been studied comprehensively by independent researchers and that it has been linked to kidney stones, warns that it's low in some vitamins (you can buy them in pill form, you know) and then goes on an accurate but point-missing bit about how Americans aren't gaining weight because of too high a percentage of carbs in their diet.

And closes with Brody saying she thought of it first.

Diets suck

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

I like to call the Atkins diet the "make yourself sick diet" (someone elses quote, can't remember who - some registered dietitian) - If I remember correct, you survive off of ketones instead of glucose, which makes you somewhat ill and accordingly, you lose your appetite, eat less, and lose weight.

The best diet is one that you can stick to. I have lost ten pounds over 8 weeks without ever feeling hungry or giving up junk food. I did it by following the food guide, walking/cycling, and lifting weights.
Keep in mind, this is a net of ten pounds lost - I have gained muscle mass.

To anyone that wishes to lose weight or just eat healthy, check out the book "The American Dietetic Association's Complete Food and Nutrition Guide" - it dispels a lot of common myths (ie/ you must increase protein consumption to build muscle but not carbohydrate consumption) and is very informative.

If you just want the basics, check out Food Guide Canada or The USDA Food Pyramid for more info.

There are alternatives to these as well. I don't have any links handy, but there are pyramids for a Meditaranian (sp?) and vegetarian diets as well. A lot of vegetarians are actually in terrible health because they don't eat enough protein or are missing vitamins - if you wish to give up animal products, do make sure you read up on a healthy vegetarian diet!

A really good website is also at Ask a Dietitian - lots of good questions answered there. (Check out the icon if you bookmark it - a little penguin :)

Lastly, if you are interested in weightlifting, do it right! Use an abbreviated routine (no more than three lifting days per week) and stay away from the muscle comics and expensive supplements. I personally will eat an energy bar if I'm on the go, but wasting money on Myoplex is pointless when a chicken sandwich will work just as well.
Check out the misc.fitness.weights faq or the iron page at stumptuous.com for some good tips.

This article on Atkins is just wrong.

[drinkypoo]

Does it help people lose weight? Of course it does. If you cannot eat bread, bagels, cake, cookies, ice cream, candy, crackers, muffins, sugary soft drinks, pasta, rice, most fruits and many vegetables, you will almost certainly consume fewer calories. Any diet will result in weight loss if it eliminates calories that previously were overconsumed.

I eat just as much on the atkins diet as I did before it, if not more. Now instead of consuming calories from carbohydrates, I get them from fat and protein. Fat is much denser in calories than carbohydrates are, unless you're talking about pure sugar.

And hey, what the hell does this paragraph say?

But in a major report last week, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies emphasized the importance of balance of nutrients, with carbohydrates -- starches and sugars -- making up 45 percent to and 65 percent of daily calories and fats, 20 percent to 35 percent. The panel of 21 scientists also urged Americans to keep as low as possible their consumption of saturated fats, the foods Dr. Atkins recommends as his diet's main components.

"...with carbohydrates -- starches and sugars -- making up 45 percent to and 65 percent of daily calories and fats, 20 percent to 35 percent." Nice ringrish there, sister. I've tried and tried to decipher what this is supposed to say. Does this mean that carbs make up 45 to 65 percent of your ideal diet, and fats should be 20 to 35 percent? Why the spurious "and"? For that matter, the first occurence of "percent" is unnecessary.

That's not an inaccuracy of fact, it's just an occurrect of stupidity.

One question I'd like to see answered is how long anyone can stay on such a scheme and what happens when you start adding back some of the wholesome foods limited or forbidden on this diet, like sweet corn, grapes, watermelons, potatoes, carrots, beets or oatmeal.

The answer: Forever. Some people have been on this diet all their lives, healthily. It's used to control seizures. Do some research before you write an article for the New York Times.

Second, what makes you say those foods are so wholesome? Sweet corn is laden with sugar, hence the sweetness. Watermelons are little more than water and sugar. Potatoes are a ton of ready carbs, they're white starch; All of those carbs hit your bloodstream at the same time and get turned into glucose very rapidly.

What is surprising is that after three decades of simmering and soaring popularity, the Atkins diet has yet to be tested for long-term safety and effectiveness.

What's surprising is that people in countries who ate this way in the first place didn't convince you. A dramatically better article (and not coincidentally one I agree with), What if it's all been a big fat lie? (Also in the NYT, free reg. req. etc) points out that people in Italy and the Carribean who ate a lot of starch (classically) tended towards obesity, and other people (who generally ate meat and veggies) did not. Seems simple to me. Being fat is unhealthy.

Dr. Abby Block, nutritionist at the foundation, said studies of the Atkins diet lasting six months to a year and extensive clinical experience, have shown consistent improvements in blood lipids and glucose levels, suggesting that the diet can improve health despite its high levels of saturated fats and cholesterol, long associated with heart disease risks.

Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers, as well as accumulating evidence that diets rich in fruits and vegetables and moderate in protein and fat can prevent diseases like high blood pressure, prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

"high levels of saturated fats and cholesterol, long associated with heart disease risks."? Let's talk about how high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol became associated with heart disease risks. As per the NYT article I cite above, the last time the government spent our money studying fat, they spend several hundred million dollars trying to prove a link between fat/cholesterol intake and heart disease. They managed to prove only that treating cholesterol with drugs lowered the risk of heart failure. THAT'S IT. From that we got the food pyramid, which puts carbohydrates at the base. Eating tons of ready carbs means your insulin level spikes, and that's hard on the pancreas. And any time insulin levels are above a certain point, you store unused carbohydrates as FAT. You don't have to eat any fat whatsoever to get fat, which I think we all agree is unhealthy.

So in other words, the US government is the last group I'd trust to do a study like that. Last time they tried to prove a link between cholesterol and heart disease, they pushed a bunch of carbs on us and may very well be responsible for early onset diabetes and the american obesity epidemic.

The Atkins diet is shy on several vital nutrients, including the B vitamins and vitamins A, C and D, antioxidants that slow the effects of aging, and calcium. And, a diet rich in animal protein can draw calcium from the bones, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and hip fractures.

Wow, it sure is a good thing that "they" invented vitamin supplements. Otherwise that might be a real problem, eh?

When nutrition experts began urging Americans to cut back on fats, many filled in by eating more carbohydrates -- a lot more than anyone recommended. Food producers jumped on the bandwagon to produce low-fat snacks and desserts, and Americans went hog wild, eating as much of them as they wanted.

You know, that's what we were told to do. The government as much as told us that it was fat that made you fat, and we responded by eating carbs. Anything with "low fat" on it sold like, er, hotcakes. Which are made out of refined flour, which is the same as sugar once you have digested it.

Dr. Denke concurred: "No matter what anyone tells you, it's calories that count. Carefully controlled metabolic studies show that it doesn't matter where extra calories come from. Eat more calories than you expend and you'll gain weight."

This is horseshit too. While you are in ketosis, you do not store fat. When you have unburned fat, you remove it from your body by an ancient process known today (medically) as a bowel movement. You don't gain it as weight.

Hence the Atkins diet makes it completely unimportant to count your calories, except to make sure you have enough. As long as you don't eat carbs, your insulin level stays low, which means you don't leave the state of ketosis. Ketosis also has benefits to health, including slowing the rate of lean muscle loss. Furthermore, as I alluded to above, the reduced glucose levels inhibit stroke activity, and the reduced load on the pancreas dramatically reduces the risk of diabetes.

Mankind did not evolve to eat carbohydrates in any significant quantity. We grew up eating meat, vegetable-type plants which are not generally high in carbs (Except from fiber, which is indigestible), and limited quantities of carbohydrates.

I want to know which cracker and chip company commissioned this FUD.

uhh, check again

[Trepidity]

The current version of Mozilla in Unstable is 1.1-1. See the package page. It's been there for a week now.

If you'd like the packages faster, to get the maintainer's "not quite ready to check into Unstable" mozilla packages (which are still quite stable, just haven't gone through as much testing), add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://pandora.debian.org/~kitame/mozilla/ ./

1.1's been available from there for at least two weeks now.

gaming ban in greece and courts

[Lalakis]

The decision last week that ruled the Greek ban on video games as unconstitutional has been overturned, and a new trial has been ordered.

Well, that is not accurate. The decision of the court hasn't been overturned! The case will just move to the appeals court and we will see what happens there.
The only court in Greece which is allowed a final decision on a subject, which can't be overturned by someone else, is the supreme court. So, until the case comes to the supreme court, it isn't closed.

There's no way that can be good for you

[jcsehak]

That's like 20 lbs a month. IANANutritionalist, but I hear that losing more than 10 lbs a month is too much of a shock to your system.

Think about it--you can just stop eating and lose 41 lbs in a couple weeks. It doesn't make it healthy. You should really see your doctor and make sure everything's going okay.

w.r.t. Atkins Diet (long)

[TitaniumFox]

One interesting thing to note about dietary issues in general is the evolution of man vs. the evolution of our diet.

For a moment, toss out everything any diet "expert" has ever told you. Toss out the USDA's damn pyramid. Look at biology. Add up these few, relatively simple facts.

Step in the WayBack Machine(tm) and look at much more simple times. The human body and its metabolism is geared towards periods of relative "feast" and "famine." Seeing as the primary use for fats is fatty acid precursors, the sources of energy are protein and carbohydrates. Carbs are really effecient foods, but are usually scavenged. (fruits, berries, tubers, etc.) Sources of protein are usually hunted.

The way the body's metabolism flips between a glucose-centric pathway to a ketone-centric pathway makes perfect sense. In times of feast (abundant carbohydrates), use the carbs, storing everything away that is in excess. In times of famine, catabolize the fats into their building blocks and get energy from them (while looking for more berries.)

Homo sapiens and its relatives have existed for thousands of years on this metabolic model. Evolution would have it that it is the most successful model for the given environment. Things stay pretty matched while things follow the format of:
Humans hunt the tiger.
Humans catch the tiger.
Tiger eats a human.
Humans go look for smaller tigers and potatoes.
(ie. food chain struggle, varied diet)

Fast forward to today: Humans hunt McDonalds. A Big Mac gives little struggle (unless you try to fit the entire thing in your mouth at once).

Our food has evolved into a carbohydrate-rich diet because that's what the USDA said was good for us. On that note, carbohydrates are also the cheapest form of food, so when the Gub'ment is handing out subsidized food to everyone (public schools, hospitals, army bases, FBI cafeterias, etc), it would make sense to hand out carbohydrates. Abundant, cheap, energy-rich? C'mon. It makes perfect economic sense. But it doesn't follow nature. Nature would have us eat fewer carbohydrates and more protein, like our ancestors did.

The Atkins diet is simply putting things back into a biological perspective. Most criticisims of the diet focus too much on the induction part of it. Getting the person with a fistfull of twinkies back on the proper metabolic path is an awesome feat of biochemistry and cell biology, but it happens when you go low/no carbs. No one, including Dr. Atkins, says that the induction part of the diet is The Proper Diet.

One need only look at the effect of morbid obesity on life span to say that any negative effects of the induction phase of the diet are minute in comparison to the effects of hauling an extra 100 lbs of fat. Perspective is needed. It's like worrying about whether your 8-character root password has suffecient random characters in it, when you're running the La735t 57@ck 0v3rflo\/\/ on your apache server.

Finally, why rely on other people to digest all of this information (even me) and put their own (perhaps political) spin on it?

For those who wish to delve into the more archane, I suggest you go to NCBI and do some literature searches on the ketogenic diet. You'll see that there are some positive neurobiological and hormonal impacts that it has.

National Center for Biotechnology Information (Medline)

Search for some of these keywords (each line together):
ketosis ketogenic
ketosis epilepsy
ketosis protein sparing

TiFox

I'd agree but personal experience shows otherwise

[itwerx]

I'm a card-carrying geek from way back but I will admit, here in front of Dog and everybody online that I have never been even slightly geek-like in one critical sense.
To wit, I have always been in fantastic shape.
I ski, hike, dance and practice various forms of martial arts and I watch what I eat - voila' - physical perfection!
But a couple of years ago I gained a couple extra pounds over the holiday season and couldn't lose it!!
I mean yeah, I'm a little older now but wtf? I wasn't eating any different that I could see, exercised the same etc.
Now don't get me wrong, ten pounds is no big deal. I'd laugh my ass off if somebody were obsessing over that, but after all these years of martial arts and dance I can feel a difference as little as 5 pounds and damn it, I wanted it gone!
So I ate less and worked out harder.
To no avail.
To tell you the truth it's been driving me nuts until I happened to talk to my mother and the conversation turned to my grandmother who was diagnosed w/diabetes awhile back.
Her doctor put her on an "experimental diet" and she lost about 30# and all indicators of diabetes disappeared!! She's been on it for a couple of years now and is in great shape. I should tell you my grandmother has been fat since she was a teen and has never lost more than about 15 pounds and it's always come back as soon as she blinked. So her losing 30 and keeping it off is a minor miracle!
Turns out that diet was Atkins (and yes, you do eat carbs, read the damn book!).
So I laughed and figured what the heck, I'd try it. I've only been on it for about 3 weeks so far but I've lost 5 of the pounds that wouldn't go away and I have an energy level I haven't had for years (like, um, since not too long before I gained those 10 pounds, actually).
So don't knock it 'till you try it!
Fat boy... :)