WBrentWilliams

From a strictly legal point of view: Paper, ink, and a safe. These are kept on your person and/or in your house and require a court order to access against your will. Expanding a bit, there is nothing that stops you from using local encryption to write to archival media. The problem with anything short of paper in a climate controlled system (and even with...) will degrade over time. Humanity has centuries of experience preserving and restoring ink on paper. We have quite a bit less experience salvaging anything else.

I'm going to earn my downvotes today. It was more interesting reading the comments than the article, especially when one of the threads devolved into saying the article is political.

The other entertaining point is the offense at the notion that America is it's entertainment. The fact that some took offense at that is interesting from both a technology standpoint and a startup standpoint. It is an imperfect mirror, reflecting why we do things and why some businesses fail and others succeed, from a certain point of view. In other words, perhaps part of why a given venture gains customers in not just need, but need coupled with entertainment used to market and sell.

It would be interesting if a group of students applied for their applications en mass (say, the entire 2012 admitted class to a University in the US) and performed statistical analysis on the resulting data. I wonder if any great numbers of students would be willing to breach their privacy to allow such a study to be run.

To be fair, the President only works as hard as the votes he can get for his party. That's not over. Obama's job for the next two years is to do what he can to make it a possibility that another Democrat will come after him. That means he will do a lot, but whether or not he will take this specific action is hard to ascertain.

If what the purest form of this bill was trying to do is important to you and you're from the US, keep working for it. I suggest the following:

1) Show up at the primaries. 2) Reform your local laws to allow you to vote in the primaries for both parties. 3) Don't shut up. Keep talking. 4) Keep in mind, at all times, that the fight isn't over once the NSA is squelched. AT&T et. al. still get to keep this information forever. 5) Think about parallels. Encryption isn't good enough, as the same kind of meta-data is generated when you visit an encrypted site. It's not any one activity it's the pattern of all activity that's important and no one is making anyone give up that data, either.

I'd say the fault with HTML/JS/CSS is that the implementation of the rendered (the browser) broke the stack by not being strict in what it emitted. Put another way, a badly formed page should render badly and/or issue errors. For historical reasons, browsers did not and do not. Hence, the reason the browsers are "broken".

This was fun to read. What I saw was someone say that they were panicking because they needed time to understand how all the things that go into learning to be a researcher goes into learning how to be a professional programmer. I'm quite sure his mind will be blown once he realizes that creating things, while incredibly rewarding, is only half the work. The other half is getting someone else to use your widget. Also (bad at math joke), there's an extra 50% involved in getting attribution.

My take? I'm biased because I was educated as a researcher. I can name-drop three famous professors at my alma mater (and yes, I did study under all three), but what really pushed me was getting a job, on campus, writing software to support PhD candidates in another discipline. I quickly made the jump from researcher to practicum precisely because I was trained as a researcher, then applied those skills to understanding what my customers needed.

Seems to me this guy found his own "push". And yet, he's still a researcher.

I was taken more by the lack of historical grounding of the students in the story. Then I remembered two things:

1) The journalist probably didn't have dig hard, but could easily have cherry-picked a fun interaction for story color. 2) Most history is taught as iconoclasm until the college level, leaving most college students with just a vauge idea of how events happened and why.

I think it more important to show that women have always been part of computing and that they, traditionally, did not get the desired work. They got the parts the men did not want. The "lack" of women in Computer Science then becomes a challenge: Can you highlight and surpass the work of the un-sung who came before?

There are many ways of looking at this, most disturbing. I imagine that my own experience working to support PhD candidates and post-docs a decade ago is instructive. The TL-DR: failed start-up.

I went back to school during the post-2001 recession and found myself with a job writing signal processing software to make sense of the data coming off an experimental mass spectrometer. I was offered a job by our lead researcher (a post-doc) upon graduation who saw an opportunity to turn a grant into a private lab. There were some political and University-inspired patent spin-off aspects, too.

The lab was built to create a product that used, but had little to do with, his research. I got a rag mag and a poster session publication credit from the early company efforts to build an in-house mass spectrometry device before he left and returned to being a post-doc (he is now a tenured professor). The people left steering the company ballooned the corporate efforts using off-the-shelf tech to rush a product to market just as the 2008 crash impacted and the targeted customer base (people wanting spa-like boutique medical tests to determine which vitamins they should take) evaporated. I was dismissed in the first wave of the toilet spiral and the company ceased to exist 18 months later.

The point behind my story is that as the pool of post-docs increases, we are more likely to see more adventures like the one I went through. Some of these start-ups will succeed, leading to a survivor-bias feedback loop at the policy level that we need even more STEM students to feed the start-up machine, leading to growth.

I have no doubt that this will, in fact, work as a growth engine. My question is whether this can be made more efficient by providing a few more prestigious fellowships and other funding to keep the most brilliant in the game before they kick off into business.

You are quite correct to be skeptical. See my reply below. That said, a single pattern noticed is only correlation. It is far better to ask three questions: What do we know? How do we know it? What does the shape of what we don't know look like? Hence my call for a match on the wholism side to the reductionist methods on weight management.

You quite correctly diagnosed my ailment and diet. I wasn't (and still am not) wild about being on Infliximab, but it's better than the alternative. I'm also quite thankful for my University position and the very good insurance that comes with it.

First, a snark admission. I read the article and the comments concurrently. I was not disappointed in how quickly the reductionists came out to defend their favorite theory of caloric thermodynamics.

That said, I will provide an personal anecdote for your perusal and make one suggestion. First, the anecdote: I dropped from a weight of 205 - 210 pounds to a weight of 145 pounds over the course of three years. I am back up to 155 pounds. Yes, that last detail is important to my story. I am 5-foot-8-inches, so this is a radical change of BMI. Why did I lose so much weight? A radical change in diet.

I have a medical condition for which I was trying to avoid the most expensive treatments. I moved (not overnight) to a diet that removed virtually all grain-based and tuber-based carbohydrates. My carbohydrates came from fruits and leafy vegetables. No, I do not advise this diet for anyone unless they are trying to avoid the drugs that comes with my condition.

It worked. I went off the over-priced 1890's-era anti-inflammatory medication and stayed it for three years. Then, my symptoms returned.

New doctor, who said nothing about my diet and threw steroids and more anti-inflammatory meds at me. Those did not work. I lost even more weight, down to 135 pounds. I even went off my diet. Yes, it was good to eat bread, potatoes, and rice again.

Finally, I gave in and accepted that I would be on a ludicrously priced biological. Symptoms arrested. Now, back to my old diet. I have ten pounds to lose to get to my target weight.

What I am suggesting is that reductionism works. My diet notebooks shows a slight reduction in calories by removing grain-and-tuber carbs. However, it only takes you so far. There is room for wholism and seeking an understanding of exactly how a given source of nutrients is metabolized.

To give away my age and turn the snark on, I grew out of my "I hate myself and want to die" period. Rainbow t-shirt included.

Not only did I decide it was "OK" to have interests and passion outside of work, I embraced the idea. Recently, I've come around to the other side of the spectrum and have been using my interests to build my professional skills.

There's a point to the electives traditionally opened up in a scholastic schedule. In my opinion, the whole idea was to provide a space to try new things, to follow new interests, and maybe even fail. As has been noted in at least one book and arguments elsewhere, our society as a whole seems to have fallen into an excellence myth. That you must be passionate and succeed at everything you attempt.

I see this as the reflection side of the professional passion movement. "Keep trying, you'll get better" sounds too much like a kid's jingle. To market it, it's presented to adults with a show of hand-stuffing between a split fancy roll with gourmet mustard. Open your eyes, and you realize it's still a hot dog.