jrogers65

There are some newer journals which have open access as a central tenet such as PLOS. It's a non-profit and could always use more donations:

http://www.plos.org/

http://www.plos.org/support-us/individual-membership/#make-a...

I believe that there are at least three stances on this issue. One is, as you mentioned, involvement in the current system in a positive sense (steering in the right direction). Another is involvement in the system in a negative sense (destruction of it). The third is abandoning the system and using something else altogether.

The last option has the side effect of bleeding the existing one dry through inaction (within the boundary of the current system). It is similar to a software fork. We have seen many a project where the ones in charge have become rigid enough in their ways that, for all intents and purposes, the cost and probability of convincing them outweighs the cost of detaching from the infrastructure and moving in a new direction. For example, XFree86 and X.Org.

An issue that we face with activism is that the structure in place is supported by individuals with orders of magnitude more wealth and influence than what the activists have access to. This is evident in the case of Mr. Swartz where he was rapidly running out of money to fight his battle in court. We are at a disadvantaged position in that sense.

As such, every [insert your unit of currency] we pay in taxes go towards feeding the policies we so emphatically disagree with. With a nod to The Art Of War, a valid tactic in such a case is to starve your enemy and wage a war of attrition - in other words, reduce their material wealth while increasing our own. The end result is that nobody gets hurt yet they slowly lose their influence and the new guard have the opportunity and resources to build theirs.

Although bitcoin transactions are public, if you cannot correlate a hash to a human then they are essentially anonymous. The 'leaks' can only happen when exchanging bitcoin for traditional currency. Fortunately, there are ways to do this anonymously too. With some care, it is possible to stay hidden in the true sense, even though the currency is exchanging hands in public.

True, anyone who pays taxes has a hand in this. The issue is that deciding not to pay your taxes means that the dogs are set on you. This is not a free society, unfortunately. Perhaps bitcoin will change all of this. I've been contemplating the idea of a shadow economy where people work remotely and anonymously, getting paid in an anonymous currency and completely circumventing the current economic and political systems. Anyone hiring developers for bitcoins?

I meant in the context of someone about to commit suicide and calling a helpline. Send someone over, give them an injection and you've bought a few months of time during which they can recieve therapy. A lot of failed suicide attempts tend to get repeated. It would solve that issue very well.

The most effective immediate suicide prevention available is a surprising one. It's Ketamine. It takes effect very rapidly and the anti-depressant effects persist for months from a single dose. It's a wonder how SSRI's are in wide use when there are far more effective treatments which have been around since the 60's. Marketing and business are to blame for that, I suppose.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/251220.php

There are also some novel NMDA antagonists (same mechanism as Ketamine) in the works, which come with less perception alterations, the names of which escape me, which will change things for the better for a lot of people.

Very interesting way to solve the problem. It works great. Thank you!

A lot of people will get upset if you don't do anything at all too.

My list of problems is about as long and I would love to see them solved. I've researched and thought a great deal about why these problems occur and the root cause of them is invariably humanity itself.

We look at how much food the human race produces and see that there is absolutely no reason why anyone should starve, yet many people do. We have plenty of water yet people die of dehydration. Why is this? Our technology is clearly advanced enough that these problems should not exist. Should we keep working to improve our technology?

My argument is that we should drop what we're doing, take a step back and think about how we got into this mess - that we stop working and consider where we're going and how we are getting there. Why, in a huge corporation, are there some employees earning minimum wage and barely making enough to survive while someone working the exact same hours has two houses and three cars? Why are there people living on the streets in what are apparently first world countries? Why is the inequality gap growing instead of decreasing? Shouldn't all this work be improving the situation?

My contention is that we cannot work ourselves out of this problem. We need to sit down, think and talk. We need to empathise with each other and share. I believe that the solution to the problems that plague people will find their remedy on the social level. That is, information, and access to that information, is the key to resolving them, not working hard to keep the streets clean or developing the newest iPhone or building new houses. Don't get me wrong, those things are important too, but we have the capability to automate a lot of them yet we have not done so. Why are robots not roaming the streets and keeping them spotless? Why are people working for pennies in factories to make our smartphones?

I believe that answering these questions and doing something about them will go a lot further than turning up to a 9-5 every day. It's all very good having an engine that can produce a thousand horsepower but if the steering wheel is not used to aim the car in the right direction, it will crash. The engine is already good enough - the direction seems to be terribly wrong.

Could you make these available for download, by any chance?

It's patently ridiculous to spend even half your life working, yet alone from 18 to 65 (or whatever the retirement age is now). Why have we automated so many things yet work the same hours? There is no virtue in work what-so-ever. It is a means to an end and nothing more. If I could have robots grow my food, manufacture my appliances and create entertainment for me then I would spend all my life enjoying it and not give that a second thought.

This 'cult of work' needs to go. We're not here to use our hands to modify the structure of matter and energy, we're here to figure out why we're here, enjoy and love each other and have a good time.

> It's so easy to compromise, or cover up. I see it all the time in software dev. For every dev who cares enough to pursue an issue diligently to its root cause there are a dozen other devs who are perfectly willing to patch up symptoms of deeper problems or jump to faulty conclusions without bothering to seriously understand what's going on. Everyone wants the quick fix. They want the pain (the bugs, tickets, pages, scrutiny, etc.) to stop.

There's a word for these types of people - 'liabilities'.

I would argue that it's completely irrational precisely because it gives you license to dream. It gives you a feeling of satisfaction, that you've taken a chance which could really change your life.

The problem is that it won't and that the satisfaction will relax you and reduce the probability of taking real action to improve your life. If you want life changes then you must reduce, not increase comfort. Make yourself as uncomfortable as possible and you will have a real reason to go out there and do what you need to. Gamble, drink, socialise or dream your life away and you will be stuck in a rut.

The point is that we must shape our lives such that rewards come from actions which are beneficial in the true sense. Being rewarded for stupidity will only encourage more stupidity.

The cheapest and easiest way I've found for the lunch problem is making it in the office. Buy a loaf of bread, some cup-a-soup, ham, cheese, pickle, whatever you fancy and then make fresh sandwiches every lunch. Takes five minutes and saves a fair bit of money.

Simple solution is to self-host it.

There being a lot of rich retirees there who don't have this problem does not indicate that McAfee is wrong either. Given the rampant corruption, perhaps they are paying their protection money while McAfee opted out.

I, for one, think that he's telling the truth. Belize is a very corrupt country and I'd take McAfee's word over theirs any day of the week.

http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=15542

> "Belize's corruption perceptions index is off the charts - literally!"

Same problem for last year's corruption perceptions index:

http://www.plustvbelize.com/Featured/NewsDetails/tabid/63/Ar...

> Observers say Belize is not disclosing the necessary information for it to be ranked.

This is a huge red flag, since, as the article says, Belize would actually stand to benefit from releasing their data:

> Experts say that if Belize provides that information, it stands to benefit in various ways, by showing the rest of the world that it is serious about tackling corruption.

How are the access times compared to a traditional setup? I imagine that it's not too bad as google has some serious hardware behind their effort.

Modafinil has too many side effects to be considered nootropic. It is a cognitive enhancer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Side_effects

I did not advocate staying away from them but using them sporadically as opposed to regularly:

> Stay away from the above, unless taken very occasionally

The problem is that these studies are narrow and only look at a handful of the aspects of consumption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_caffeine

> Short term side effects such as headache, nausea, and anxiety have been shown as symptoms of mild caffeine consumption.

When assessing the health impact of a drug, it is important to look at the whole picture.

Amp is indeed neurotoxic, though the exact effect is a little nuanced and dose-dependent.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15019431

> In addition to the social, cultural and indirect medical complications of amphetamine analog abuse, this class of drugs is also known to have the potential to damage brain monoaminergic cells directly.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606768

> In early studies, high doses of amphetamine, comparable to amounts used by addicts, were shown to damage dopaminergic pathways. More recent studies, using therapeutic regimens, appear contradictory. One paradigm shows significant decreases in striatal dopamine and transporter density after oral administration of "therapeutic" doses in primates. Another shows morphological evidence of "trophic" dendritic growth in the brains of adult and juvenile rats given systemic injections mimicking "therapeutic" treatment. Imaging studies of ADHD-diagnosed individuals show an increase in striatal dopamine transporter availability that may be reduced by methylphenidate treatment.

I did not claim that caffeine and modafinil are neurotoxic, just amphetamine.

Amphetamine neurotoxicity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphetamine

>The increase of cytosolic dopamine appears to trigger neurotoxicity, as dopamine readily auto-oxidizes, so that amphetamine or methamphetamine's increase in cytosolic dopamine can lead to oxidative stress in the cytosol that in turn promotes autophagy-related degradation of dopamine axons and dendrites

NMDA antagonists such as magnesium (as mentioned by rms), zinc, DXM, MK-801, Memantine and Ketamine can reduce/prevent tolerance as well as nerotoxicity.

http://www.acnp.org/g4/gn401000166/ch162.htm

> Methamphetamine toxicity is inhibited by a variety of drug treatments, including: ... 3) NMDA receptor antagonists

http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/f30/evidence-for-n...

Combine with L-Theanine (increases GABA activity), Lemon Balm (slows down GABA breakdown) and L-Tryptophan (good for social anxiety).

A few of these are not nootropics but cognitive enhancers. Difference being that nootropics are extremely non-toxic or neuroprotective. Another way to put it is that nootropics are a subset of cognitive enhancers (safe cognitive enhancers, basically).

The following are not nootropics:

* Modafinil and Armodafinil

* Adderall (Amphetamine)

* Caffeine

* Kratom

* Nicotine (this is a border case, in my opinion)

* Selegiline

Stay away from the above, unless taken very occasionally, if you value your health. Drugs like these rapidly build tolerance and become a liability in the long run. If you insist on using stimulants such as amphetamine, learn about how to reduce tolerance with things such as NMDA antagonists and take things to prevent neurotoxicity.

He should also get on with trying Noopept - it's one of the best nootropics of recent times.

From experience, anybody who is a programmer or does similarly demanding intellectual work will stand to benefit from learning about and using nootropics. They're not a silver bullet but quite a few of them are most certainly effective.

>I work on a lot of projects where my clients use Google Drive to update copy leaving me to then either update a CMS or some flat JSON/XML/YAML files. I could risk allowing my clients to update flat files but if I had £1 for every time a JSON/XML/YAML file didn't validate, well, I'd have about £38.

The rational solution is to do what everyone has been doing since the dawn of the web, which is to provide an admin interface, no?

This whole thing, to me, looks like a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." At the same time, it's a novel and creative approach which gives it a cool factor.

It's also possible to do it in person, from what I gather. Definitely less than ideal but anonymity is almost guaranteed.

>Google already has goldmine of info about us; knows where we are, interests, friends, reads our mails before we do. What if it understands?

I do not think that I am alone when I say "please, for the love of god, don't let this happen."

You exchange your bitcoins for traditional currency using an exchange then pay by cash.

You can even buy bitcoins with cash - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4616/how-can-one-...

Meaning that no transaction ever touches anything related to your identity.

Now let's not go too far with this hypothetical computer-aided gambling scenario. Everyone knows that Bash keeps a history of commands and that our pasty friend simply needs to press the up arrow followed by return after the first roll of the digital die.

I think that there is a middle ground to be found in this aspect of development. On the one hand, you don't want to overengineer your code. On the other hand, requirements will change.

Based on this, I personally design object models to be easily extensible. The guidelines are simply best practices (separation of concerns, methods which only do one thing, minimising side effects as much as possible). Nonetheless, I agree that the minimum should be used given that things which should be abstracted have been abstracted.

For example, I was implementing reports recently. Overengineering is coming up with a complex reporting engine which managers can use to create anything they want. Underengineering is writing each report from scratch. The golden middle, in this case, was a lightweight framework where you extend a base class, specify the query and you're done. Everything else is automagically taken care of. So one need not worry about fetching the actual results, displaying them, sorting them, adding the report to the menu, etc.