mcphilip

I've heard it said that the way to win a debate is to show the opposing position ultimately leads to genocide, nuclear war, or child pornography. It's depressing to witness the government's fear momgering reach its nadir.

As others have mentioned, Stephenson is known for his fiction. However, his nonfiction piece from 1996 for Wired magazine is my personal favorite piece. It recounts his trip around the world investigating undersea fiber-optic cables and speculating on what it all means for the future:

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

My wife has a friend with CRPS here in Austin. She's just recently started a new treatment involving ketamine. She wasn't put under for five days like Justin, but did experience extreme mental disorientation accompanied by a few weeks of pain relief.

Its amazing how she stays positive when the majority of her life is spent alone, in pain, and with no cure in sight.

Watching the promotional video[1] of the iPhone app, the one question that springs to mind is how the blind people know how to orient their phone to the objects shown in the video. For instance, reading the hours a store is open: there is no standard place to put that signage, so how likely is this use case to be applied in real world scenarios?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS-i9rn9nao

Strange to see this (currently) heavily down voted. It's a great summary of the hollowness of the article.

Personal anecdote:

I've worked 5 years in 3 startups, 5 years in 2 large development teams, and my experience has shown that there are, percentage wise, better developers working in startups. This is in Austin, so it may not reflect the valley, but the absolute best programmers I've worked with are trying their hands at startups. There's a sweet spot of people aged 28-35 that are really skilled developers that still have an appetite for risk that are working in startups.

I just wanted to say thank you for writing this up. My sister has Downs Syndrome and is very low functioning. She blossomed into a really happy and loving individual once our family stopped focusing mainly on 'normalizing' her. Thanks for sharing your experience.

I got to experience the opposite side of the equation. I rented a 6 bedroom house in Austin to house my family during my wedding. There was an ominous note left on the fridge where the owner explained that the neighbors are hostile and will call the cops after 10pm if they hear any noise at all. Later in the day when my mom was out playing in the backyard with the grandkids, she got yelled at by the neighbors with warnings of calling the cops later that night.

Honestly I just wanted everything to go smoothly since I was getting married, but man, I felt sleazy housing my family in a hostile environment. And you know what, I can't really blame the neighbors at all. This was my first and last experience with Airbnb. It just felt dirty to be apart of such neighborhood hostilitly.

>That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through.

[...]

>I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.

I agree, and I also like how Adam was realistic in describing the burden of seeing the project through completion as an albatross.

There are several side projects I work on that I've never been able to finish, but I don't feel the psychological burden of them. It's hard to know if that means I'm just not committing hard enough to completing side projects, or I'm appropriately moving on at the right time. Either way, maybe one reason I don't feel like there's much 'artistry' to my output is that I'm not willing to take on that heavy of a burden.

Just food for though. Inspiring stuff. I found the PuzzleSolver program included in the download just as interesting as the game, btw.

>If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, this will probably be a novelty, like Windows Phone, for a while to come.

Agreed. I'm having trouble visualizing how it moves from being novelty to being ubiquitous. I purchased one of the original Kindles back when it was a novelty, but I understand why it became the dominant eInk device since it was a novelty item with little to no competition. For the Fire, it's a novelty with stiff competition from the beginning.

As someone who rarely shops on Amazon and doesn't want a Prime subscription, why would I chose this phone?

Maybe the answer is Amazon doesn't expect this product to take off fast. Maybe it's a much longer term play initially targeted just to those already comfortably engaged in its ecosystem.

free* <online> college... Still, it sounds like a noble effort.

>The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free, with government and university aid.

There's a loosely defined sub genre of incremental games if you enjoy A Dark Room:

http://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games

Most tips I've read about how to trigger LD involve conscious effort throughout the day to check that you are not dreaming. It's weird, but I used to ask myself everytime I flipped a light switch "is this a dream?". It gets your brain in the habit of questioning when you're in a dream state and that can carry over to actual dreams.

I'm not aware of any foolproof method to experience LD, but it was definetly something that I worked hard at and didn't come naturally.

I first read about lucid dreaming 20 years ago when I was twelve. It was treated more as a new age fringe thing back then, but I had a blast experimenting with it. My favorite dreamscape involved a purely abstract state of mind where I could symbolically visualize components of algorithms -- nearly all of my work writing motion detection algorithms that worked in complex outdoor scenarios was refined in my sleep.

That being said, I eventually "gave up" lucid dreaming after 10 years or so. At a gut level it felt like sleep and dreams are best left to the subconscious -- a neural defrag, if you will. Personally I feel much more rested now that I make no effort to remember, much less control, my dreams.

While it's tough to criticize the decision to leave a child in the car for a few minutes -- happened to me all the time as a child -- I'm forever scarred by seeing a dead child pulled out of a car in the office complex next to mine [1]. The dad was bashing his head against a tree trying to knock himself unconscious because he was so overcome with grief. Officers were trying to restrain him when his wife showed up and went completely (understandably) histerical, pounded her fist on the ground and screaming at her husband.

I can't fathom how one could begin to process and move on from such an incident.

So while I don't think it should be illegal to leave a child in the car, personally that's a line I'll not cross with my kids.

[1]http://www.khou.com/news/Baby-left-in-hot-truck-dies-in-Aust...

I choose to use nonrational (not irrational or rational, necessarily, but indeterminate) thoughts like "My life has purpose" as sources of motivation since it shortcuts the process of extracting meaning from theories that take a great deal of time to research and internalize.

I am not a rigorous accountant of truth in my worldview. I choose a worldview that works for me since I don't have the time or energy to truly consider all options.

I only found lectures especially useless after the shift to PowerPoint slide dumps. I still think back fondly on the days where English/History/Calculus/etc professors would write on the chalkboard while lecturing. Something about the act of writing made each point seem more important and easier to recall

Yes, imdb is a pretty poor source of data. From my research, a combination of the well organized freebase film database[1] (~19mm facts) with details filled in from imdb is a better approach. However, processing data from freebase is not trivial and requires a decent amount of time investment to grok.

[1]https://www.freebase.com/film

I absolutely agree with you. Medical progress depends on sharing information between service providers and those researches, etc that can produce actionable results from such data.

I'm trying to give the (necessary) counterpoint: small scale stewards or medical data (often) tend to take an approach of handling patient data centered on cutting costs. Having worked in both the financial and medical industries, I can attest firsthand how there is a (frighteningly widespread) disregard for privacy information.

From 4 years working leading teams in an electronic medical software shop, I urge consumers to not assume that vendors will be good stewards of personal data. forget the boilerplate and assurance that data will only be used in an anonymous way.

1. Never admit to social drinking or smoking. It goes on your permanent record, even at just a mom and pop style clinic with paper records.

2. Above all, never admit to recreational use of marijuana. Maybe that's an obvious statement in some parts of the world, but living in Austin, it's eye-opening to see how minor drug use is something to be proud of.

To preemptively address concerns about HIPAA laws, etc, being adequate protection and that this comment is pure paranoia, two things:

1. Snowden. Enough said.

2. I'm personally aware of a massive DB of client data solely given to the QA department for purposes of debugging a particularly nasty bug mysteriously vanishing from the lockdown where it was supposedly safely stored. There are insiders keenly aware of how profitable it is to acquire and sell medical data...

In summary, you can no longer assume confidentially between health providers/monitors and patient interactions, to the detriment of all involved.

EDIT:

In order to provide some actionable information instead of just warnings:

When I left the industry 6 years ago, it was still binding for a patient to explicitly say that certain information must be kept confidential and not shared with any party besides the physician handling the interaction. By all means, if you have experience with 10 years of using crank, it's highly relevant to provide that info to your HC provider. You just may want to get assurances that the information will be kept strictly confidential. Good luck -- the doctors and staff legitimately want to help; it's just the data miners that want to extract much profit from you as possible.

Whatever they used they deserve big credit for making it a great experience even on iOS. I was very surprised how well this worked on the iPhone.

Thanks for this. I am not up to date on what is considered privacy information, apparently.

I read this as GoDaddy releasing her email address only. In theory, isn't an email address only personally identifiable if the address owner has done some action linking it to a real world identity? I assume that's the argument GoDaddy would make.

However, it should have been made abundantly clear to someone reporting spam that their email address may be disclosed to the accused party.

Was the article changed since you read it? The first three paragraphs make it clear that this is an attempted reconstruction of events and clarifications/corrections/ are requested.

>Ever since the "Heartbleed" flaw in encryption protocol OpenSSL was made public on April 7 in the US there have been various questions about who knew what and when.

>Fairfax Media has spoken to various people and groups involved and has compiled the below timeline.

>If you have further information or corrections - especially information about what occurred prior to March 21 at Google - please email the author: bgrubb@fairfaxmedia.com.au. Click here for his PGP key.

Once you're a front runner in a given market sector, it's often more efficient to buy up smaller companies to gain valuable intellectual property and future revenue streams than it is to rely solely on inhouse R&D. These types of acquisition sprees are extremely common, especially with companies like Google that are flush with cash.

Drug culture reference:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)

FTA:

>Step 3: Think locally and globally--all at once

>[...]

Completely delusional futurist zealotry attempting to solve all problems at once, from what I gather.

Absolutely explosive if proven true, should be interesting to follow this story.

Reading about this disorder reminds me of my sister. She has Down's Syndrome and is one of my favorite people in the world. She has basically the same strengths and weaknesses as WS -- open and friendly when not anxious, but unable to determine when it is appropriate to trust someone. It's been a blessing having her in my life. She's the linchpin of our family in many ways. I'd probably be more of a black sheep in my family's eyes if it wasn't for always being so excited to see me regardless of conflicting religious beliefs with my family, etc.

The brain is an amazing instrument and it's fascinating (and scary) how it can be wired so differently in edge cases, but deep down, no matter the abnormality, there's a "soul" waiting to connect if you can meet them on their terms.

Good catch. My reading comprehension isn't up to par today, apparently.