aethertap

While I'm greatly concerned about honey bees and CCD (I raise bees mostly as an effort to help keep them alive), I don't think it's the apocalypse that it's widely made out to be. Mason bees [1] are phenomenal pollinators, and are easily kept. The site linked below is actually dedicated to getting people to keep mason bees as an insurance policy against increasing honey bee fatalities.

They don't make harvestable honey, so they aren't a 100% replacement for the current model. However, they might be able to fill the gap for commercial pollination. They are also not colony insects in the same sense as honey bees, so it's possible that they might be more resistant to large-scale die-offs.

[1] http://www.crownbees.com/category/bee-basics-crownbees/bees-...

Yeah, that's a good point as well. These days, I tend to stick with stuff that's based on apt on the theory that it hopefully requires less effort on the part of the maintainers to keep it up to date because they can piggyback on the larger community. Not foolproof, but good enough for me. I got tired of the unfriendly (to me) UI changes in straight Ubuntu, so I switched to Lubuntu. So far it's been decent enough. I've been thinking about giving slackware another round though, as I haven't used them for about 10 years and have mostly positive memories of the experience. Maybe on an experimental box.

I like that someone else spent the time trying to figure it out so that I could read about his experiences, then spend only 10 minutes figuring it out. I don't know if that was the purpose at the outset (probably not) but I still find it highly worthwhile.

I am a Linux user that likes to stick with distro defaults for everything that isn't part of my core tool set because it seems like my system is less prone to breaking when updates happen, and because I get more updates that way. It's nice to see others' reviews of those distros so that I can make a better decision without doing all of the legwork, so I say kudos to this guy for doing it. I might try Fuduntu now based on his review, and I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

One thing that I think will change about web development will be the open-source nature of it. Today, the worst thing you typically run into when trying to understand someone's code is minification. Taking LLVM bitcode and transforming it into JS will probably make it extremely difficult to understand the original code because it'll be more like reversing from assembly. The actual structure of the code is altered dramatically by the compilation process.

Personally, I'd love to be able to code in a different language and compile to asm.js for deployment. I think I'll try to maintain the open spirit of the thing though, and publish my original source for those who are curious.

I can see advantages and disadvantages to having closed-source web code, so I'm not sure what the end fallout will be. I hope it's not abused though, as I do like to see others' cleverness on display.

I had to read that twice, slowly, to notice. Good catch!

I wouldn't call it the worst language in existence by any means, but it does have some things I find extremely irritating - lack of a decent module system, overly verbose at times (like when creating anonymous functions), sneaky silent type conversions that still get me from time to time (sorting a list of integers - oops, lexicographical, not numerical ordering).

Having said that, it also has a lot of cool features and I use it every day. Most of the time, I find it a decent enough experience.

Actually I'm not making any assumptions (hence the reason I would like to see the data stacked up together). I don't know what it would look like, but I enjoy exploring ideas like that. I actually do know, in at least two cases, that the doctors aren't pocketing the money (the doctor friends I know are going to be living paycheck to paycheck for several years as they deal with the huge debts they incurred in the process of becoming doctors). The question I'm most interested in exploring with the above data is this: what are the relative costs and barriers to entry for medical professionals in all of these countries? It's my impression (could be profoundly wrong for all I know) that they are exceptionally high in the U.S., and if that is the case, then it would be a contributing factor to the high costs.

There are obviously many other contributing factors, and I'm not proposing solutions here, just curiosity. I think you read more into my query that I meant to convey- I have nothing against doctors, or even against doctors making tons of money. I don't particularly like the disconnect between people and the prices of their medical care that happens as a result of our insurance model and I think that's also a major contributing factor to high prices. As you say, though, I don't really want to go into that here.

I'd be interested to combine these charts with some other data that might be related, such as doctors' student loan and mortgage debt, per capita income, waiting times for various procedures, and maybe even a measure of how many citizens there are per doctor (as a way of determining relative barriers to entry for medical professionals). I don't really have a good sense about how all of those things stack up in other places, but I suspect the U.S. would be an outlier in some of those as well.

This is an interesting concept, but I have two big objections to it (the same objections I actually have to other safety nets as they currently exist). First, I want to mention at the top that I'm not in favor of leaving people out in the cold. I love to help people, and I think anyone who wants help should get it. The problem I have is that money seems to be the default strategy for "help," when it often seems to be counterproductive.

The two things I really don't like about the ultimate safety net are these: First, that type of mechanism actually seems to be oppressive (based solely on my own observations, which are limited, but I'll explain below). Second, having the safety net from on high actively discourages people in a community from helping each other directly. Instead, they turn to the authority, saying that the basic wage is good enough, so why should I bother?

The observations I mentioned were over a period of about a year when I lived in a neighborhood that was almost entirely composed of people living on some form of assistance. They were not evil, bad, or leeches, and I'm not going to make that claim. However, as best I could determine, they had found a strategy that was "good enough" that they didn't feel the need to improve their standing in life. In other words, they had elected to live in near-poverty because it was effortless. I knew several of them to varying degrees, and they were intelligent, able people. The effect of the safety net on their lives was extremely negative (in my opinion), even though they would certainly say otherwise. They did not want to be in better circumstances, and given the opportunity to learn a skill that would immediately improve their lives (trade skills like welding, or gardening even), most would refuse. I don't think that is a natural state for people, and it was frustrating for me to see it (especially for the kids involved, who had subsistence living as their primary model).

The other point, about passing off responsibility for helping neighbors, is something I've seen in two flavors. First, and by far the most common, is in the world of conflict resolution. It's typical for one neighbor to call the nuisance abatement or police on another rather than actually go knock on the door to solve a problem. This is because they can offload all of the discomfort of confrontation onto an authority figure. The unfortunate consequence is that it makes the neighbor hate them, and things get worse from there. The other flavor of this problem is when people who do work and pay taxes resent seeing people who don't work but could, who are living "on the dole." The feeling of resentment looking at someone who is, even to a tiny degree, living for free on the fruits of your labors gets in the way of actually wanting to help that person. It gets people thinking in terms of "Why should I help them? They already live for free on my back, and they're not trying to make any changes."

So what would I propose? Like I said, I'm not a fan of the "survival of the fittest" approach, and while many people seem to advocate that I don't think they actually want to see others suffer either. My main objection is that I see money going to causes that I think are directly harmful to the people they're supposed to be helping. What I would like is a way to direct the resources I spend on social support to causes that I think are actually beneficial (free education, skills training, apprenticeships, etc., maybe even with stipends and whatnot). I realize that everybody likely has a different view of what "helpful" means, so what I'd like to see is decentralization of social support into various forms that cater to different people's concepts of what actually works. You can make paying into it compulsory or not, but to me the real problem is that I don't like to see my money going to what ultimately seems to be an oppressive form of "help."

That's exactly where I got hung up as well. If there is a demand for anonymous access tech, I think that the free market will eventually fill that demand (barring interference from the state). I don't think it's wise to entrust the government with limiting its own powers in general. "Strong government will" rarely seems to mean "empowering people to be free and anonymous," at least in my experience.

This is interesting to me from the perspective of being a parent and having high expectations for my children. I think that as a parent it's important to have high expectations, but that there's a tricky line to walk regarding what kind of high expectations to have. I grew up under the expectation of acing everything, and as a result I do feel a lot of what he talks about in the post. However, I'm trying to raise my children with a focus on persistence and confidence even in the face of the unknown. To that end, I'm always trying to find things for them to do that are a bit beyond their ability, but that they can solve with some work.

I've found that it's hard to break the habit of seeing "good" as synonymous with "right the first time" though, even when I know what the result of that attitude has been for me. I'm hoping that I can help my kids by focusing on the idea of learning from failure and improving by working hard, rather than trying to avoid failure. Any other parents out there working on this problem?

If this is real, I hope he keeps a very detailed log of his experiences. Since I doubt very much that we know everything about human nutrition, this could be a valuable data source for finding more gaps in our knowledge.

It would also be interesting to see the effect of this on gut microbes, which are seem to be increasing in importance in the formula of overall health [1,2]. I wish him the best of luck, but it's not something I'll be doing.

[1] http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ismej...

[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815174902.ht...

Just wanted to add two notes: First, I'm relatively new to raising animals, so I'm speaking from a position of some experience, but primarily learning from others' work. Second, sickness in general is rare for animals raised in this manner (long rest rotational mob grazing), so it's not an issue that really crops up very often.

It's a natural question. Sick animals are culled from the herd. They may be either processed or sold to another producer who is willing to medicate, but my program is focused on building resistant genetics. You can look into "South poll cattle" [1] for an example of this type of breeding program. I don't raise cattle at this time, but I will be soon, and I'll be using an aggressive culling system like what was used for that breed with good results. For more information about this methodology, check out the Lasater Philosophy of Cattle Raising [2]. In my case, I try to apply the same basic ideas to sheep (and eventually cattle).

[1] http://www.southpoll.com/History.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Lasater-Philosophy-Cattle-Raising/...

The economics of spam commenting makes sense if it can be done automatically at a massive scale. If only one or a very small number of "humanity tests" exist, then cracking those tests has a high payoff value. Having a huge number of different, ad-hoc authentication schemes would make developing automatic cracks unacceptably expensive for the actual level of benefit achieved by posting the spam comment. Therefore, being a site with a unique CAPTCHA system attacks the core value proposition of spam comments, which strikes the root of the issue.

Another way to look at it is like the entire collection of CAPTCHAs on the Internet is really just one big CAPTCHA library, which tests a subset of "human" abilities. The larger the subset, the more difficult it will be to circumvent. Relying on one or two special abilities makes it easier for a machine to emulate those behaviors and gain access. I hope that clarifies the point I was making.

Or switch to sustainably raised meat (that's the focus on my farm). No medication of any kind, animals live on managed pasture that requires no inputs other than sun, air, and water.

Switching away from meat will certainly help to address the development of resistant microbes, but if you can make a switch instead to meat that was raised with regenerative pasture management practices, you can additionally have a large positive impact on many other environmental factors. Look for terms like "high-density grazing," "holistic grazing," "holistic management," or "management-intensive grazing (MIG)."

This TED talk [1] covers some of the information, for more you can google around for the above terms (sorry I don't have a good link handy). Correctly managing grazing livestock can actually reverse desertification and trap tons of carbon per year per acre in the soil. Of course, doing it wrong can have the opposite effect, so if you go this route it's important to know whether your farmer is running his operation with land restoration in mind.

Conventional vegetable production also comes with a slew of its own problems (breeding of herbicide-resistant weeds [2] being something closely related to the topic at hand). Eating in a way that doesn't cause harm is a tricky thing these days.

[1] - http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world...

[2] - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121002092839.ht...

*edited for formatting

I'd agree partially, but I'd comment that it's also security by diversity. If every site had a unique captcha solution requiring custom software for a defeat, the force multiplier effect of "write once, run everywhere" would be hugely diminished, and it would be much less cost effective to implement various types of spam. So, the particular security strategy here is indeed weak, but I would say that it might actually strike closer to the root of the problem than just making a really hard, but still universally applied, captcha technology.

I was getting ready to go on a rant about how unfortunate it is that so much more money and effort is spent on what you might call aggressive tactics (guns, grenades, gas) versus peaceful resolution tactics (negotiation skills, psychology training, de-escalation techniques). Then I realized that I actually don't know what the relative proportions are. Does anyone know where to find that out?

For anyone looking to learn prolog, I highly recommend the ciao [1] system. It has many features that help both with exploring the language and with solving actual problems. It also supports some additional constraint programming stuff that I think is really cool.

[1] - http://ciao-lang.org/

I like to point out, when faced with that argument, that they are right! We didn't evolve from monkeys, we evolved with them from a common ancestor! That doesn't seem to help though...

I run a small farm, and I've been a professional programmer for about 12 years. I agree with what you say - kids should definitely have the opportunity to learn both. Of my two pursuits above, farming is much newer to me and I've found an amazing amount of skill transfer from the world of programming to the world of farming. Granted, my sheep don't understand when I yell at them in haskell, but the approaches to problem solving, whole-system thinking, and consideration of edge cases I think are enormously beneficial in almost any profession.

I do think that today's kids would benefit not only from knowing a thing or two about how to raise some food (very different from actual "farming") and also from having much more contact with the natural world.

I also think that many kids would benefit from learning the "art" side of programming - the stuff that's fun and interesting, like solving puzzles, appreciation of the hard-to-define idea of elegance, reverse engineering, etc. Nothing else I've learned to do has had quite the impact on my ability to consider many angles in a situation and reason a way to get from one state to another, and at least for me it's been a fun process to learn it all.

My real complaint when anybody says "Everybody should have to learn X," is that I think it should be "Everybody should have a chance to learn X." Coding was the best path for me to learn to think about complex, abstract things and apply that thinking to the real world (including farming). For others, it may not be so.

In that kind of case, I think the ability to market the thing probably ends up being more valuable than the thing itself. There are probably hundreds of other songs or books that would be big winners if they had that kind of marketing skill behind them, but will remain obscure and worthless (at least in terms of income) due to a lack thereof. I think the person that makes a million dollars off of something like that would probably make a million dollars off of nearly anything that isn't terrible.

It seems that one of the defining features of a patent troll is that they like to sit on a patent until a large, profitable, and well-established industry has built up around a technology that could be construed to fall under the patent's domain. At that point, they make their move for fame and profit.

Would it be reasonable to require "due diligence" on the part of the patent holder in order for a patent to be considered valid? In other words, if they have shown no interest in protecting their intellectual property in the face of long-standing and widely known "violations," it seems that a situation could apply that would work in a way analogous to the idea of piercing the corporate veil. Patent holders who have sat idly by as the violations of their patents (pending or otherwise) have gained notoriety and fame have demonstrated a lack of desire to pursue the technology, and are obviously just using it as a get rich quick scheme.

The idea here would be that, in this case, Personal Audio would have had to protect the rights to their setup as soon as it became reasonably evident that violations could be occurring (maybe the birth of iTunes or something). That would have been many years ago, before podcasting became popular. At that point, there's little profit in a lawsuit other than actually stopping someone from stealing an idea, so it's not so much of a bank account booster.

This just occurred to me, so I apologize if it's been discussed and demolished before -- it does seem that it would help to prevent this sort of surprise attack from happening without harming actual legitimate patent holders (they will pursue their rights early and often regardless of this idea being implemented).

Could you post some links to this? I haven't seen it and would be interested to read more.

I'm no economist, so take this with appropriate skepticism:

I think the issue is that there probably isn't a "true" inflation. The main contention seems to be between those who use inflation as a measure of cost of living, and those who use it as a measure of policy-driven change in the value of money. Both views have their uses. Personally, I prefer the growth in money supply view because it seems to be less susceptible to manipulation by an agenda. The basket of goods is by necessity a small sample of the total cost of living, and I think that the main complaint lodged against it is that the goods are chosen and changed over time in order to portray a picture that's better than it would otherwise be. shadowstats.com has more information on how the CPI changes with selections in the basket of goods.

Using the money supply as the definition of inflation gets closer to the viewpoint I care about, which is trying to get a sense of how policy is changing the value of my savings and income. I like to look at a simple ratio of money supply growth to GDP growth for some idea of how policy is changing the value of money, but this too is fraught with danger because it ignores important things like technical innovation, changing resource bases, and money velocity. So, I think it's a matter of personal preference and probably the best policy is to look at it from as many angles as possible if it's something that's important for your decision making.

These kinds of solutions scare me because of their short-sightedness. I haven't seen any comforting explanations of how these reflective particles leave the atmosphere and where they end up such that their effects can be stopped. Solar energy has been and will continue to be the only actual source of energy on our planet. All other resources are finite and will eventually be depleted, many within our lifetimes or those of our children if reserve estimates are accurate. If our strategy for using finite energy resources is to block out the energy from our only infinite (at least millions of years worth) energy source, it would seem that we are shooting our grand children in order to have a bigger party today. Once the prices of oil and fissile materials get high enough, we'll be facepalming at a global scale when we have to rely on solar-derived power (biomass,PV,wind,etc) to fill the gap. Even if there are no unintended consequences (which I do NOT believe is the case), the intended consequence of reducing the total solar energy input to the planet seems like a simple case of short-term fix, long term problem.

I'll have to check some of the primary sources on that, but it seems true (and obvious) from an intuitive perspective. This would go a long way toward explaining my relatively recent progression toward a zombie-like mental state...

You make some good points, but I think it's important to make a distinction between the management of behavior by fiat and the management of behavior by response to improper actions. The examples you give for restricted behaviors are clearly valid, but they don't imply that I should not be allowed to own a stereo or TV on the chance that I might crank it to 11 or throw it out the window. I think that the issue at stake here is more closely related to the opposite case, where we would be disallowed from owning those things for fear of future misbehavior.

In my opinion, there is a profound difference between limiting a person's behavior by eliminating their ability to decide versus limiting it by responding to transgressions. The logic of limiting ability to decide ends with a gilded cage, which is something I'd prefer to avoid.

I usually prefer silence if I can get it, but failing that I listen to pandora stations based either on Bach or Mumford and Sons.

If this is true for this particular implementation, it may not necessarily doom the concept. You could switch to a standard key generation algorithm such as pbkdf2, which is supported in sjcl and is thus available anywhere that can run javascript.