...Have you tried to find a salad dressing that doesn't have HFCS and in insane amount of sodium in it that actually tastes edible? How come I can make my own rather easily that is rather tasty but I can't find a single one at the store?
"Luckily" for me, I find the taste and/or texture of virtually all sauces and dressings disgusting. Finding a healthy salad dressing has never been an issue since I always eat salads plain.:-)
Please, please don't talk about Asperger's as if it is some sort of code word for "smart." Or talk about it like we're persecuted when we're treated no differently than any other somewhat socially inept individual. It doesn't make anything better, and it makes people view everyone with Asperger's as narcissistic and/or whiny. When your view of the world differs from 90+% of humanity, and it's noticeable in day-to-day conversation, you're going to be viewed as different. Be thankful it's being referred to as a syndrome now, not a disorder. Everything is a syndrome nowadays, and as long as they don't insist on "curing" me, they can call it whatever they like.
Not that it matters, but I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist back in the 80s. The diagnosis was interesting, but not particularly relevant to the reasons I visited in the first place. And given that it's hardly disabling and largely untreatable with drugs even if I wanted to (which I don't), your suspicions of the psychiatric profession seem rather off-target.
Autism is a spectrum from mild to severe. "Severe" Asperger's seems to be a less stigmatizing way of describing moderate autistic symptoms. The dividing line isn't clear between the various categories (that's why it's a spectrum), so I suppose the classification will differ somewhat depending on the doctor. The DSM-IV isn't a perfect resource.
That's entirely possible. Nothing in my statement directly implicates BPA, yet I'm skeptical that we can add chemicals to our diets that simulate our own sex hormones without affecting the processes those hormones regulate. Whether these effects are dangerous isn't something I know, but I would like to see rigorous studies done. Unfortunately, with chemicals like BPA, we seem to prefer introducing them to everyone's diet in an uncontrolled fashion before bothering to check if the chemicals are safe.
In this case, MSG also corresponded to high sodium content. And regardless of source, there is information on the negative effects of high sodium. For the beef stock varieties I examined (with constant serving size), the MSG-free variety had 120 mg per serving, the "low sodium" varieties with MSG had 450 mg per serving and the regular varieties 900 mg per serving. Also, the MSG-free product didn't have HFCS, it just had regular corn syrup. Not that I know the differences in health effects; I just guess at what might be healthy based on the few dozen studies I read each year and hope for the best.
And "suffering" from Asperger's syndrome is really odd wording. I've got Asperger's syndrome myself, and while it makes my experience of the world somewhat different, it's no more a cause of suffering than most personality traits. The other problems he has could legitimately be described as a form of suffering; the experience of the world would be qualitatively worse than if you did not have them, but the same does not apply to Asperger's.
Actually, while in no way implicating BPA, in the average age of puberty has been dropping in Western countries for the past 170 years (since the 1840s according to the Wikipedia article). The disparity seems to correlate at least in part, to industrialization; the shift started later in Japan (1945), but progressed more rapidly (dropping by 11 months per decade, instead of 4 months per decade in Europe). In 1840, the average age of first menstruation was 17, in France, 15.3. Nowadays, either age would be considered quite late; typical onset of menstruation is now around age 11.75 worldwide; 12.5 in the U.S.
Clearly, BPA isn't responsible for the entire historical shift (what with BPA containing plastics only becoming common in the last 50 years or so); changes in diet (particularly the reduction in malnourishment levels) and activity levels (hunter gatherer groups tend to have an onset later than their diet would otherwise allow for) are responsible for some of the difference. But the increased exposure to all sorts of hormone mimicking chemicals (such as BPA) was likely responsible for some of the shift as well. The question is whether BPA is unusually damaging, whether it is possible to remove BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals from our products and the environment without affecting us negatively in other ways, etc.
Unlike the realm of medicine, where the scientific method has been applied for to evaluate treatments more and more often in recent decades, the chemical industry remains largely untested and unregulated. People were painting their homes with lead paint and burning leaded gas in their cars and it took decades for studies to make the link to retardation and poor impulse control. For something like BPA, where the negative effects seem to be longer term and less severe than that of lead poisoning, it's not at all surprising that no one has investigated it until recently.
Assuming they are properly labeled. Unfortunately, the free market only works in a 100% informed populace that can weigh the costs and benefits of any product and have the option to choose. And the fairy tale land of perfectly informed people hasn't yet been made real. Clearly a failure of the free market and government regulation!
While BPA has alternatives, it's not always 100% clear. Many metal cans and bottles use a plastic lining that happens to contain BPA. Many "glass" products are actually layers of glass and plastic, or just plastic. With no labeling requirements on products composed of mixed materials, I couldn't make informed decisions even if I wanted to.
Finally, not related to BPA (where alternatives exist if you're willing to look hard enough for them), sometimes the free market fails to provide an alternative. I was trying to find beef stock the other day to make Swedish Meatballs. I generally prefer to avoid MSG and corn syrup in my food products. Of the ~8-10 different varieties of beef stock on the shelf at my local supermarket, all but one of them had MSG (and in large quantities) and a majority (forget the exact number) featured corn syrup (and yes, the only one without MSG had corn syrup). I ended up going with the MSG-free variety (the sodium content was roughly 1/8 that of the standard beef stock from any other brand, and 1/4 the sodium in the "low sodium" varieties), but the free market wouldn't let me avoid corn syrup as well. Nor for that matter do I know if the can itself had a lining containing BPA; even if I wanted to avoid BPA I had no way of making that decision.
If that's the case, it shouldn't be published at all. Idle isn't a "dump advertising here" section, it's for quirky and offbeat stuff. Basically, if it would be linked on Fark, it's Idle material.
Not really. Bring along a dozen hypos filled with Depo-Provera and a couple RU-486 pills in case of one of the rare failures and you're in the clear. Depo shots last three months, so you only need 4 per year per crew member.
With an elephant in the cramped rooms you're likely to see on a Mars mission, the last thing on people's minds will be sex. The first thing will be "Oh shit, we're going to be crushed by an elephant," followed by "Man, that elephant stinks." I feel fairly confident that no one will be worrying about how the elephant will handle sex on such a trip.
Clearly we need to raise Orson Wells from the dead to do another broadcast of "War of the Worlds". Cause the only way we're going to Mars is if we need to bomb green people back to the stone age.
I know some editors class too many things that should be Idle as something else, but this seems to be the opposite; a legitimate article that is being filed as Idle. How exactly is this not considered news? It's a new application for existing chemicals that helps deal with terrorism without restricting rights, which is a hell of lot better than most of the anti-terrorism procedures we've been putting into place.
Agreed. I've learned enough JavaScript to do a few things with Greasemonkey (mostly stuff like going straight from an article link on a news site to the print-friendly version without having to go through the non-print-friendly version first), but I've never used JavaScript in a job. My jobs have been mostly C (with a smattering of C++, but mostly C), plus a few years of Java and C#. Perl and Bash are used as the glue when needed. JavaScript just doesn't enter into it.
I'm sure there are a lot of web developers that use it all the time, but contrary to popular belief, web apps have not replaced locally installed applications yet, nor are they likely to for many purposes (e.g. high speed number crunching).
Commercial applications do usually follow. Whether or not you agree with it, military research has led to an enormous number of scientific advances that were initially used by the military but later disseminated more broadly. Jet engines, the Internet, cryptography, GPS, nuclear reactors, etc. Mach 6 might be inefficient overkill for Earth-side transportation, but it may provide a viable means of launching spaceflights one day.
Now now. Will Smith acts in many bad movies (and a few good ones), but he isn't a bad actor in general. Ben Affleck and Keanu Reeves are a totally different story.
Unfortunately, people with principles have a much harder time raising funds. The politicians without principles can easily make up for it by running five times as many ads claiming they have strong principles and their opponent is a fickle traitor. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that uncapped corporate political spending, the least principled have even more advantages. The average payday for the top 25 hedge fund managers last year was over a billion dollars, which is roughly the cost to run a modern presidential campaign. Congressional seats are much cheaper; you could buy and sell half of Congress with that kind of money.
PR is far more important than principles, and a lack of principles can buy a hell of a lot of PR.
We'd need to train users to expect that behavior or we'd derive no benefit from it
It makes for a really shitty user experience. For a banking website people would understand, but for Gmail? Half the people I know keep Gmail open in a tab all the time and switch back and forth; this would drive them batty.
As I noted, this would still require user education (so they recognize that good UI means scammer, which is a really fscked up association), so as long as we're relying on that, we may as well just educate them to always recheck the address bar before providing login details. Same benefit, no needlessly awful user experience, no need to make changes. It won't work either way (if your solution is more educated users, then it's untenable for any product offered to the general public), so we may as well not take away functionality.
I find travel maps in and of themselves to break the immersion in a game. They're necessary in many games, don't get me wrong, but I actually like traveling around by memory, where that bush really is a landmark I use. Fallout 1 & 2 were great, but I wouldn't hold up their random encounter system as the best approach. Personally, I'm a fan of the way the handled it in Fallout 3; the map is available, but if you want to play it with greater immersion, walking everywhere is feasible. They just collapsed the distances between locations and gave you an increased walking speed, so you can travel the map solely by foot, navigating by landmarks if you like.
The enemy to neutral NPC ratio is always going to be a problem in a world like that, but I prefer the inconsistency of the random encounter enemies to the inconsistency of a world with continuously changing geography. I can believe that people move around all the time, but unless you're in a really geologically or meteorologically unstable region, the landscape shouldn't constantly change.
All you're (possibly) missing is that a proper implementation wouldn't use a fixed wait. It would set a timer to make the switch after a window.onblur event, and execute the switch only if the window remains "blurred" the whole time. You don't need to guess at when the user is distracted, you just need to tweak the delay to increase the odds that they forget the contents of the tab. Tabs aren't required; minimizing would work just as well, and possibly even being hidden by other windows (not sure of the exact specs for window.onblur), but the most common case where someone forgets the contents of a tab is when they've got 20+ tabs open. So if it's mostly enabled by multiple tabs, and only likely to work with multiple tabs, it's not unreasonable to identify it with tabbed browsing.
Except that so many websites are JavaScript dependent that temporarily allowing JS from a page is fairly common for all but the most paranoid. Design your malicious site to be unusable without JavaScript, 90% of NoScript users will at least temporarily whitelist it if the content is of sufficient interest; I recommend porn. When they quickly switch tabs so their bosses don't see the porno site, switch to a fake log-in screen.
Yeah, most people will catch it, but you aren't coding for most people. You're coding for dumbasses (or people ignorant of this exploit with little native skepticism), and even among NoScript users, I guarantee a few percent of them forget what they were doing, overlook the address bar, and rationalize the log-in screen by assuming they must have opened it and forgot about it, then remember something they needed to do and enter their log-in details.
To be clear, this isn't manipulating another tab. The sequence of events is:
User opens link to seemingly innocuous but malicious site in Tab 1
User goes to Tab 2 to do some other work (tab 2 is immaterial to this; it would work just as well if they switched to another application long enough to forget what they were doing in the browser)
Malicious site in Tab 1 detects that it is unobserved, and replaces itself with a seemingly legitimate log-in page; this need not require a refresh with appropriately designed CSS and JavaScript, so you won't even see any action in the tab bar if you happen to be looking.
User returns to Tab 1, assumes he opened the log-in screen for some reason and enters user name and password
Now, in a two tab scenario, this sequence of events in unlikely. But for a user with 30 tabs open, there is a non-negligible chance that they forget what was on tab 17, and assume they had some reason to log-in to that site. People are really good at justifying actions that make no sense; just because they don't remember opening the site doesn't mean they won't come up with a reason why they would have. If they aren't aware of this exploit and forgot what was on the tab, they'd have little reason to be suspicious.
Basically, this isn't a Firefox specific exploit. Any tabbed browser that doesn't disable all JavaScript by default will behave this way. NoScript and similar extensions will help, but a clever website designer might design the page to be useless without JavaScript. There are enough websites like that that a sufficiently interested user might whitelist it, if only temporarily, and some small percentage of those users may succumb to the trap.
Oops. Responded to this after the page had been unrefreshed for a while, so I didn't see the previous reply. As I noted, you're wrong on the law, but you're right on the practical approach; being right doesn't mean you won't have to spend a ton of money on lawyers to prove you're right.
Slashdot Mirror
...Have you tried to find a salad dressing that doesn't have HFCS and in insane amount of sodium in it that actually tastes edible? How come I can make my own rather easily that is rather tasty but I can't find a single one at the store?
"Luckily" for me, I find the taste and/or texture of virtually all sauces and dressings disgusting. Finding a healthy salad dressing has never been an issue since I always eat salads plain. :-)
Please, please don't talk about Asperger's as if it is some sort of code word for "smart." Or talk about it like we're persecuted when we're treated no differently than any other somewhat socially inept individual. It doesn't make anything better, and it makes people view everyone with Asperger's as narcissistic and/or whiny. When your view of the world differs from 90+% of humanity, and it's noticeable in day-to-day conversation, you're going to be viewed as different. Be thankful it's being referred to as a syndrome now, not a disorder. Everything is a syndrome nowadays, and as long as they don't insist on "curing" me, they can call it whatever they like.
Not that it matters, but I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist back in the 80s. The diagnosis was interesting, but not particularly relevant to the reasons I visited in the first place. And given that it's hardly disabling and largely untreatable with drugs even if I wanted to (which I don't), your suspicions of the psychiatric profession seem rather off-target.
Autism is a spectrum from mild to severe. "Severe" Asperger's seems to be a less stigmatizing way of describing moderate autistic symptoms. The dividing line isn't clear between the various categories (that's why it's a spectrum), so I suppose the classification will differ somewhat depending on the doctor. The DSM-IV isn't a perfect resource.
That's entirely possible. Nothing in my statement directly implicates BPA, yet I'm skeptical that we can add chemicals to our diets that simulate our own sex hormones without affecting the processes those hormones regulate. Whether these effects are dangerous isn't something I know, but I would like to see rigorous studies done. Unfortunately, with chemicals like BPA, we seem to prefer introducing them to everyone's diet in an uncontrolled fashion before bothering to check if the chemicals are safe.
In this case, MSG also corresponded to high sodium content. And regardless of source, there is information on the negative effects of high sodium. For the beef stock varieties I examined (with constant serving size), the MSG-free variety had 120 mg per serving, the "low sodium" varieties with MSG had 450 mg per serving and the regular varieties 900 mg per serving. Also, the MSG-free product didn't have HFCS, it just had regular corn syrup. Not that I know the differences in health effects; I just guess at what might be healthy based on the few dozen studies I read each year and hope for the best.
And "suffering" from Asperger's syndrome is really odd wording. I've got Asperger's syndrome myself, and while it makes my experience of the world somewhat different, it's no more a cause of suffering than most personality traits. The other problems he has could legitimately be described as a form of suffering; the experience of the world would be qualitatively worse than if you did not have them, but the same does not apply to Asperger's.
Actually, while in no way implicating BPA, in the average age of puberty has been dropping in Western countries for the past 170 years (since the 1840s according to the Wikipedia article). The disparity seems to correlate at least in part, to industrialization; the shift started later in Japan (1945), but progressed more rapidly (dropping by 11 months per decade, instead of 4 months per decade in Europe). In 1840, the average age of first menstruation was 17, in France, 15.3. Nowadays, either age would be considered quite late; typical onset of menstruation is now around age 11.75 worldwide; 12.5 in the U.S.
Clearly, BPA isn't responsible for the entire historical shift (what with BPA containing plastics only becoming common in the last 50 years or so); changes in diet (particularly the reduction in malnourishment levels) and activity levels (hunter gatherer groups tend to have an onset later than their diet would otherwise allow for) are responsible for some of the difference. But the increased exposure to all sorts of hormone mimicking chemicals (such as BPA) was likely responsible for some of the shift as well. The question is whether BPA is unusually damaging, whether it is possible to remove BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals from our products and the environment without affecting us negatively in other ways, etc.
Unlike the realm of medicine, where the scientific method has been applied for to evaluate treatments more and more often in recent decades, the chemical industry remains largely untested and unregulated. People were painting their homes with lead paint and burning leaded gas in their cars and it took decades for studies to make the link to retardation and poor impulse control. For something like BPA, where the negative effects seem to be longer term and less severe than that of lead poisoning, it's not at all surprising that no one has investigated it until recently.
Assuming they are properly labeled. Unfortunately, the free market only works in a 100% informed populace that can weigh the costs and benefits of any product and have the option to choose. And the fairy tale land of perfectly informed people hasn't yet been made real. Clearly a failure of the free market and government regulation!
While BPA has alternatives, it's not always 100% clear. Many metal cans and bottles use a plastic lining that happens to contain BPA. Many "glass" products are actually layers of glass and plastic, or just plastic. With no labeling requirements on products composed of mixed materials, I couldn't make informed decisions even if I wanted to.
Finally, not related to BPA (where alternatives exist if you're willing to look hard enough for them), sometimes the free market fails to provide an alternative. I was trying to find beef stock the other day to make Swedish Meatballs. I generally prefer to avoid MSG and corn syrup in my food products. Of the ~8-10 different varieties of beef stock on the shelf at my local supermarket, all but one of them had MSG (and in large quantities) and a majority (forget the exact number) featured corn syrup (and yes, the only one without MSG had corn syrup). I ended up going with the MSG-free variety (the sodium content was roughly 1/8 that of the standard beef stock from any other brand, and 1/4 the sodium in the "low sodium" varieties), but the free market wouldn't let me avoid corn syrup as well. Nor for that matter do I know if the can itself had a lining containing BPA; even if I wanted to avoid BPA I had no way of making that decision.
If that's the case, it shouldn't be published at all. Idle isn't a "dump advertising here" section, it's for quirky and offbeat stuff. Basically, if it would be linked on Fark, it's Idle material.
Not really. Bring along a dozen hypos filled with Depo-Provera and a couple RU-486 pills in case of one of the rare failures and you're in the clear. Depo shots last three months, so you only need 4 per year per crew member.
With an elephant in the cramped rooms you're likely to see on a Mars mission, the last thing on people's minds will be sex. The first thing will be "Oh shit, we're going to be crushed by an elephant," followed by "Man, that elephant stinks." I feel fairly confident that no one will be worrying about how the elephant will handle sex on such a trip.
Clearly we need to raise Orson Wells from the dead to do another broadcast of "War of the Worlds". Cause the only way we're going to Mars is if we need to bomb green people back to the stone age.
I know some editors class too many things that should be Idle as something else, but this seems to be the opposite; a legitimate article that is being filed as Idle. How exactly is this not considered news? It's a new application for existing chemicals that helps deal with terrorism without restricting rights, which is a hell of lot better than most of the anti-terrorism procedures we've been putting into place.
Agreed. I've learned enough JavaScript to do a few things with Greasemonkey (mostly stuff like going straight from an article link on a news site to the print-friendly version without having to go through the non-print-friendly version first), but I've never used JavaScript in a job. My jobs have been mostly C (with a smattering of C++, but mostly C), plus a few years of Java and C#. Perl and Bash are used as the glue when needed. JavaScript just doesn't enter into it.
I'm sure there are a lot of web developers that use it all the time, but contrary to popular belief, web apps have not replaced locally installed applications yet, nor are they likely to for many purposes (e.g. high speed number crunching).
Commercial applications do usually follow. Whether or not you agree with it, military research has led to an enormous number of scientific advances that were initially used by the military but later disseminated more broadly. Jet engines, the Internet, cryptography, GPS, nuclear reactors, etc. Mach 6 might be inefficient overkill for Earth-side transportation, but it may provide a viable means of launching spaceflights one day.
Now now. Will Smith acts in many bad movies (and a few good ones), but he isn't a bad actor in general. Ben Affleck and Keanu Reeves are a totally different story.
Unfortunately, people with principles have a much harder time raising funds. The politicians without principles can easily make up for it by running five times as many ads claiming they have strong principles and their opponent is a fickle traitor. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that uncapped corporate political spending, the least principled have even more advantages. The average payday for the top 25 hedge fund managers last year was over a billion dollars, which is roughly the cost to run a modern presidential campaign. Congressional seats are much cheaper; you could buy and sell half of Congress with that kind of money.
PR is far more important than principles, and a lack of principles can buy a hell of a lot of PR.
As I noted, this would still require user education (so they recognize that good UI means scammer, which is a really fscked up association), so as long as we're relying on that, we may as well just educate them to always recheck the address bar before providing login details. Same benefit, no needlessly awful user experience, no need to make changes. It won't work either way (if your solution is more educated users, then it's untenable for any product offered to the general public), so we may as well not take away functionality.
I find travel maps in and of themselves to break the immersion in a game. They're necessary in many games, don't get me wrong, but I actually like traveling around by memory, where that bush really is a landmark I use. Fallout 1 & 2 were great, but I wouldn't hold up their random encounter system as the best approach. Personally, I'm a fan of the way the handled it in Fallout 3; the map is available, but if you want to play it with greater immersion, walking everywhere is feasible. They just collapsed the distances between locations and gave you an increased walking speed, so you can travel the map solely by foot, navigating by landmarks if you like.
The enemy to neutral NPC ratio is always going to be a problem in a world like that, but I prefer the inconsistency of the random encounter enemies to the inconsistency of a world with continuously changing geography. I can believe that people move around all the time, but unless you're in a really geologically or meteorologically unstable region, the landscape shouldn't constantly change.
All you're (possibly) missing is that a proper implementation wouldn't use a fixed wait. It would set a timer to make the switch after a window.onblur event, and execute the switch only if the window remains "blurred" the whole time. You don't need to guess at when the user is distracted, you just need to tweak the delay to increase the odds that they forget the contents of the tab. Tabs aren't required; minimizing would work just as well, and possibly even being hidden by other windows (not sure of the exact specs for window.onblur), but the most common case where someone forgets the contents of a tab is when they've got 20+ tabs open. So if it's mostly enabled by multiple tabs, and only likely to work with multiple tabs, it's not unreasonable to identify it with tabbed browsing.
Or you're so used to occasional websites that are completely unusable without JavaScript that you are willing to temporarily whitelist them.
Except that so many websites are JavaScript dependent that temporarily allowing JS from a page is fairly common for all but the most paranoid. Design your malicious site to be unusable without JavaScript, 90% of NoScript users will at least temporarily whitelist it if the content is of sufficient interest; I recommend porn. When they quickly switch tabs so their bosses don't see the porno site, switch to a fake log-in screen.
Yeah, most people will catch it, but you aren't coding for most people. You're coding for dumbasses (or people ignorant of this exploit with little native skepticism), and even among NoScript users, I guarantee a few percent of them forget what they were doing, overlook the address bar, and rationalize the log-in screen by assuming they must have opened it and forgot about it, then remember something they needed to do and enter their log-in details.
Now, in a two tab scenario, this sequence of events in unlikely. But for a user with 30 tabs open, there is a non-negligible chance that they forget what was on tab 17, and assume they had some reason to log-in to that site. People are really good at justifying actions that make no sense; just because they don't remember opening the site doesn't mean they won't come up with a reason why they would have. If they aren't aware of this exploit and forgot what was on the tab, they'd have little reason to be suspicious.
Basically, this isn't a Firefox specific exploit. Any tabbed browser that doesn't disable all JavaScript by default will behave this way. NoScript and similar extensions will help, but a clever website designer might design the page to be useless without JavaScript. There are enough websites like that that a sufficiently interested user might whitelist it, if only temporarily, and some small percentage of those users may succumb to the trap.
Oops. Responded to this after the page had been unrefreshed for a while, so I didn't see the previous reply. As I noted, you're wrong on the law, but you're right on the practical approach; being right doesn't mean you won't have to spend a ton of money on lawyers to prove you're right.