SoftwareMaven

I've been listening to Alastair Reynolds Blue Remembered Earth and On the Steel Breeze. The notion of ubiquitous surveillance is an underlying concept, affecting how characters can behave as the plot moves forward. While it is an underlying concept, I'd love pointers to books where this concept is taken head-on.

So far, I don't see how we can avoid ending up with a "surveilled world", though it scares me to death (we don't have the benevolent AI overseer to watch it). With the progress of technology coupled with ubiquity of networks, it is going to be hard to avoid.

You can't choose what cases will set precedence, and, once set, it is very difficult to "unset".

Our agriculture techniques are going to destroy the planet if something significant doesn't change, any quickly. The Savory Institute[1] has been doing interesting things as well, but is it all going to end up too little, too late?

1. http://www.savoryinstitute.com

I'm not sure I agree with your hypothetical archeologist's assessment. We haven't seen any kind of real drop in the amount of garbage being produced[1] (it's barely leveled off in the last decade, and that doesn't include commercial waste). Sure, the kind of garbage is changing, but that happened in the past as well (from bronze garbage to iron garbage), and it indicated a change in technology, not a failure of the civilization. And an indicated change in technology is the pointer our future archeologist will need to start looking for something else.

1. http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/

I'm trying to understand why you brought Leviathan Wakes into this. One of the authors of The Expanse is GMMR's assistant, as I understand it, but I'm not clear how either GMMR would affect The Expanse or how The Expanse would affect Game of Thrones.

I ask as a fan of The Expanse who has not jumped into GoT, and who wouldn't like to see The Expanse side-tracked because of it. Is there some piece of this relationship I'm not seeing, or is Ty Franck more involved in GoT writing than I would have expected?

In law, intention matters. Capable of being modified to do so and marketed to do so are very different in the eyes of the law.

Please don't. I realize this was said tongue-in-cheek, but the ramifications of using local encryption without understanding it are large. You have to be willing to take on key management, or you risk losing every bit of data or being just as insecure as you would have been without encryption (with a slower computer as an added bonus).

Unfortunately, it takes at least a little buy-in from the user to make encryption work. We need better tools, for sure, but that final piece of holding the key needs to be taught and the responsibility accepted.

Nobody has something that would fulfill your caveat, with the possible exception of a few larger countries. If you are the named target of the NSA, they will find a way into your communications.

This war really has little to do with find the way into a named person's communications; it has much more to do with finding the names of people whose communications they want to see.

For that, iMessage is devastating (assuming it is implemented and behaves as marketed, a pretty big assumption).

Yes, but it needs to be done very carefully. As soon as your app is draining my battery or running my fans inappropriately, your app is gone. The key word, of course, is inappropriately. This puts caps on how much you can use, but it is still an essentially free resource.

But at the time you modify it, the other file may not be modified. And, when your merge partner modifies it, she may be on an 18 flight to the South Pole with no internet access.

Now, sure, you can say "well, God can get around that", but, unfortunately, there are real constraints that cannot be gotten around. Good design is how you deal with those constraints.

Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.

I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.

This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.

I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.

1. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-p... [closed as off topic]

That's...interesting. I have a second monitor running Photoshop, and images from the second monitor (perhaps just from Photoshop) are being mapped onto the model of El Capitan, making the visual completely broken. This occurs in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (using OS X, if it's not clear).

This does not fill me with warm and fuzzy feelings. :)

The best camera is the one you have with you. Sure, my Canon DSLR takes nearly infinitely better pictures than my iPhone, but it's the iPhone that takes most of the pictures because it's the one in my pocket.

You are right, of course, that printing from a phone camera is futile, but printing from a P&S is much the same unless you've purchased something at the top of the line.

Find a local farmer whose meat handling you trust to reduce the likelihood of contamination.

Otherwise, get a steak, wipe it with an ammonia solution, rinse it, and grind it up yourself. The E.Coli, if it exists, is going to be on the outside of the steak; the ammonia wash will kill the vast majority of it, and you get the benefit of fresher hamburger.

Alternatively, freeze your steak by dipping it in liquid nitrogen. A normal freezer isn't sufficient to kill E.Coli, but a liquid nitrogen dip will do the job. :)

That removing the cookie resets the captcha is hardly evidence only the cookie is being used as evidence. They were humans using the captcha and Google recognized it. I would imagine a few bot requests would be allowed to follow a human solution since you've raised the "I'm a human" value pretty high, but that value would decrease on every request.

I think drift in this case has a connotation of being aimless and directionless (eg being adrift). However, I don't think the article is blaming NASA. Any organization would be adrift after having the kind of success NASA did, then getting presidential grandstanding followed by congressional micromanagement for decades.

The real villains in this story are Congress and the President.

And this would be bad why? Snark aside, the federal government is out of control with no accountability. I don't even know how they could be held accountable.

This[1] is a good place for high level, but it won't help you individually. Sodium only has the ability to impact blood pressure by 2-3mmHg diastolic and 5mmHg systolic, so limiting its of very little value for most[2].

My own personal experience reducing my creeping blood pressure came not from curing salt but from curing carbs. When carbs are reduced, the kidneys begin functioning better, reducing fluid in the blood which reduces blood pressure far more successfully than curing salt. This is just one of the many positive metabolic effects of low carb, high fat diets that are very well documented in scientific literature (others include normalized blood sugars, reduced inflammation, reduced liver and visceral fat, improved blood lipids, weight regulation and improved insulin sensitivity).

1. http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Sodium-Intake-in-Populations...

2. Individuals vary. This is not medical advice. See a physician. Yada yada.

The flavor of my steaks shot up once I learned to put more salt on. In general, once I learned the reality of salt (eg there is no reason to limit consumption), my cooking got much better.

I'm dubious about searing it twice; it's something I've never seen mentioned in the reading I've done on slow, temperature-controled cooking. It seems like it would just dry out the edges, making them leathery; however, I'm willing to be educated otherwise in the effort to make a great steak.

Not a chance. To check my email in the past, I would have had to find a desktop. Now, I pull out my phone. No matter how slow the connection is, it's still going to be orders of magnitude faster than a desktop in many situations.

We've gotten so accustomed to having ubiquitous access, people have forgotten it wasn't always there.

Perhaps not quite what the OP had in mind, but I found the papers that affected my life the most were not in my chosen profession.

Comparison of the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN Diets for Change in Weight and Related Risk Factors Among Overweight Premenopausal Women[1] and Low-carbohydrate nutrition and metabolism[2]. After spending most of my life obese, even after having bariatric surgery to "correct" it, I found I had to dive into the science on my own to see past the charlatans and the demagogues. These two papers lit the way for me.

1. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=205916

2. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/2/276.full

Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs.

SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"

Nina's is different. Campbell's was trying to prove what you should eat; Teicholz' followed the history of the science to see where it went. The difference is subtle, but significant. Based on what I've seen and read of Campbell, I think he would expect his work to be the last word on nutrition; I think Teicholz would see hers as a beginning.

I recognize my own bias here, though. I think there are serious flaws in the China Study where Campbell reached beyond where the science illuminated. Teicholz isn't trying to prove a conjecture in the same way, so she isn't forced to do that (I think Robert Ludtig and David Perlmutter both did the same thing, so it's not just a function of vegetarian or not).

Edit: I say read them both and decide for yourself. Don't accept either of their conclusions, but follow the science they reference and evaluate it for yourself.

You are very close to CSS media queries there. Perhaps there is a solution in media queries.

Nutrition studies will often use people as their own controls because of the significant variability between people. Nobody is willing to fund nutrition research with "perfect" studies, so researchers do what they can (especially when they are known to have hypotheses counter to the orthodox view).

On their books, I think that would be a ridiculous thing to reject people's findings for. Almost every academic has written a book at some time. Instead, we need to recognize the possibility of a bias inherent in every researcher and look to the study design, execution, and conclusions to see if they hold. Phinney and Volek are in a different class when it comes to their books and their ideas than is, say, Robert Lustig.

I would take that bet. Phinney and Volek have a long history of doing pretty good science. I haven't seen any of their work directly contradicted over Phinney's 35+ year career[0]. Also, there is scant evidence that this is actually showing a different result than other studies. The diet-heart hypothesis never had good, controlled studies[1] to back it up; we are just now seeing the good science testing it, and it's not holding up well.

I will agree that nutrition science has been, and, in many cases, continues to be, lacking. It is getting better, though. We are moving past epidemiology being the be-all-end-all and starting to see well controlled trials asking interesting questions. Unfortunately, those are really expensive and hard to do.

0. I could be wrong here; I've read a lot but not everything. Still, they've had enough detractors that I'm sure people would have trumpeted it.

1. Lots of epidemiological studies, but causation shouldn't have ever been inferred from them. Unlike with smoking, risk factors were never 20x, more like 1.2x.

Unfortunately, it's probably not too much of a stretch to think metabolically disordered people may outnumber those who aren't, if not now, then soon. But, realistically, it was probably necessary to target sick people to get the grant.

And now we may have gotten worse: instead of trans fats (really bad!), we now get highly oxidized poly-unsaturated fats as restaurants have moved to seed oils for frying, which don't handle the temperatures nor the time in use very well. Oxidized fats do nasty things in the body, perhaps worse than trans fats.

Bring back the stable saturated fats like coconut oil, palm oil (if sustainably produced), lard and tallow.

Unless you esat a lot, then your body makes relatively little. I love the way our bodies manage cholesterol, including dumping it into the intestines and recycling it if necessary. It's a beautiful example of how well our bodies regulate themselves when fed and tested well. My body has told me it needs 236mg/dL of total cholesterol right now. You couldn't pay me to mess with that.