thras

And by listing negative effects, you can also make bad things sound bad.

Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way.

"if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?"

No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.

e) 5-10 big name publishers threatened Amazon over Macmillan, and they had to choose between backing down or facing a publisher revolt.

It's not just the forefoot striking (also, Vibram != barefoot, call them minimal, if anything). When you run barefoot, you don't do anything stupid with your feet, like subjecting them to lots of impact, because it hurts!

Master/servant? I prefer the pusher/user metaphor myself.

The Vibram KSO doesn't do a good job of keeping your feet warm in the cold and wet. I mostly run barefoot on dirt trails, but pull the KSO's out of my pocket when I hit really bad terrain. Cold is the one thing that stops me.

I'm moving to the Bay Area myself in a couple of weeks, and was kind of hoping that that was the solution to the cold weather problem. I am a little worried about finding good quality dirt trails.

From the Engadget leaked photos, it looks like it has both cellular connectivity and a front video camera. Video calling, here we come.

Still, the more I find out about the device, the less interested I am. It looks like it's just going to be a huge iPhone. Fun, but not useful. And while I miss almost nothing about my previous smartphones before the iPhone, I do miss the ability to be able to install whatever I wanted. Locked devices foster an entirely different application ecosystem -- one that's not super useful for programmers, I find.

The problem is that there is a hell of a lot of general purpose software out there already that's never going to be worth the effort to port to a single device.

The iPhone has some nice apps, but runs nothing important to me in my professional life. And if the new tablet isn't going to be a useful work tool, why would I want it?

iPhone-based OS. I wonder if everything will have to go through an App-store? Annoying if so.

Here's a helpful tool for figuring out Sun's strategy on any given day: http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.media/sunstr...

Uh, yeah. That's somewhat obvious. How else would I have gained the weight? Magic?

Now comes the million dollar question: Why was I so hungry that I ate 470,000 extra calories? Could carbohydrate driving insulin driving fat explain it?

Homeostasis in the human body doesn't just fail without a reason.

The weight gain lasted from when I was 170 pounds until I was 305. I had to stop running when I hit 240 or so.

At 305, I was still 30 pounds under my max...but something tells me it wasn't water weight.

Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther.

Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.

No no. I just eat a lot of meat, eggs, and cheese. I average 2-3 pounds of rib-eye per day, 6-9 eggs, and 3-6 ounces of cheese.

Googling for calorie information...good god, that's 2900-4500 calories a day. And I'm only 5'10". No modified fast for me. Lost 65 pounds in the last year. Not an amazing result. On the other hand, an amazing result -- on a 3000-4000 calorie diet.

It did work. I lost the weight.

Pay attention to fiber? The research in support of that suggestion is execrable (pun intended).

I did try the 500-1000 calorie deficit for a number of months. My weight loss was on the order of 5-10 pounds, and I was hungry the entire time. And then I gained the weight back and more when I wasn't able to carry through. People simply do not lose large amounts of weight on small deficits. It's bizarre. According to the trash bin theory of body fat it should work. It doesn't. Almost like the trash bin theory is wrong...

The carb free living is sustainable and healthy. If you aren't going to read Taubes, then at least read Victor Steffansson. He's a bit more fun.

I've actually never heard of hyperuricemia being caused by carbohydrate restriction. Nobody seems to list it in the standard "drink your Coke, low-carb kills" list of warnings, either.

Anyway, here's Taubes on Gout: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/10/05/gout/

No tiredness for me. There's the "induction flu" that people on Atkins get, and I felt that for the first few weeks. Apparently it's caused by sodium depletion (carbohydrates cause you to retain a lot of water/salt). Drinking non-sodium-reduced beef broth every day for that month will cure you. Wish I had known. I just toughed it out.

As far as my energy levels nowadays...pretty much boundless. I'm ravenously hungry when I don't eat. But I'm told that's how it's supposed to work. When I was fat, I was hungry around the clock, even after eating.

You will lose weight on calorie restriction as long as you go low enough. Though I've been fat my entire life, after college, I was 150 pounds overweight. I lost the extra weight by eating 900 calories a day for a year and a half or so.

At my normal healthy weight, I was starving. And weak as a kitten. I took up running, and stopped watching my diet. I literally could not keep up the willpower necessary to continue a 3000 calorie diet, even though 900 had been doable for so long. Despite running for an hour a day, I immediately started gaining 10-15 pounds a month.

So I was convinced that it was all about calories. I was fat because I ate too much. Why my body was so hellbent on eating 4000-5000 calories a day, I didn't know. I seemed to have a lot more willpower than anyone else I knew. It was sort of confusing. Then about a year ago, I read Taubes' book.

What if the human body is actually sort of complicated? What if hormonal regulation controls fat? What if the "trash bin" theory of body fat is actually a humongous oversimplification or just wrong? What if, after getting to a "healthy" weight by starving fat, muscle, and vital tissue, I wasn't healthy at all? What if it had also made me malnourished (hence the amazing hunger at my "healthy" weight)?

Anyway, I cut the carbohydrates out of my diet last December. I made zero effort at calorie restriction. In fact, I ate a lot. I made very little effort to exercise more. After a year of this, I'm almost 100 pounds under my max weight. I recently started running again, for fun, not weight loss, and am up to 2-3 miles a day.

And I am stronger than I've ever been in my life. Eating steak every day is probably more expensive than building the same muscle mass with steroids, but I'm pretty happy. I wasn't expecting it. It's good being a carnivore.

Well-written comments are generally helpful. And the people who write well-written comments generally understand the concept of brevity.

Badly-written comments are worse than no comments at all.

Badly-named variables and functions are worst than that even.

Maybe things have changed since 1985. This article found that 33% of all marriages were inbred in Bangalore, Mysore, and Karnataka: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2803361

Also, according to the article I just linked, "The highest rates of inbreeding were observed in the Hindu community among whom there was a notable preference for uncle-niece marriages."

Just noticed this on our installation. Y2K+10...

No it hasn't. This is 2 events in an expected background of 0.8. According to reports it's a 1.5 sigma event. Noise.

This can be dismissed until they get to 3-5 sigma.

These seem to be up on archive.org through 2008. The rest are available through Google Reader.

Child predators can attack your family through Google real time search? Moronic. Flagged.

So stupid. We don't worry about this with dangerous chemicals, and those don't have a half-life. They'll stay deadly forever.

There is no need to treat nuclear waste massively differently than other kinds of waste. There are some special considerations, but it's not so dangerous as to require the vast storage expenditures being talked about.

This problem is endemic in the whole nuclear industry. People don't make rational risk/cost assessments when it comes to nuclear power. They don't even make irrational risk/cost assessments. The locals where I live are deadly afraid of a local air force base's small reactor. But nary a worry about the actual nuclear weapons they have that could (potentially) devastate the entire area.

Couldn't newspapers do this before? I don't see why Google needs to be involved so that a newspaper can show a registration page when a user goes to their article (from Google) more than 5 times. They could implement this with or without Google.

You mean "root exploit" not "root vulnerability." The second term is again mistaken, although it gets used a lot.

Did you even read the exploit code? He's figured out a way to overwrite LD_PRELOAD environment variable for anything SUID. That means that you get to tell the binary to load libraries other than what it planned on loading. And hence run arbitrary code.

This has nothing to do with "localhost." If you'd like to give examples of people using "localhost vulnerability" in the past, go right ahead and link to them.

I'm willing to take your bet.

He has claimed that "localhost vulnerability" was the term used on the OpenBSD list in the 1990s. Why don't you try to find it there: http://emailthreads.org/list/openbsd-security-announce.en.ht...

Huh? Sorry, but to quote the advisory:

A short time ago a "local root" exploit was posted to the full-disclosure mailing list;

You don't know what you're talking about. This exploit appears to give local users root privileges, making it a local root exploit exactly as the security advisory states.

The phrase "localhost vulnerability" remains meaningless techno-babble. Localhost refers to a network address and this exploit appears to have nothing to do with that.

"Localhost vulnerability" is a meaningless term. It's called a local root exploit.

EDIT: Since I got modded down for saying this, try to Google for it. There are less than 300 hits for "localhost vulnerability," with this article leading the charge. It's simply a mistake by someone who doesn't know the terminology.

The author has stated that his account was disabled. Some info:

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/what-happened-to-mangans-bl...

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/google-censorship-rears-its...

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/where-did-dennis-mangans-...