codev

Connections is very similar to Only Connect’s third round:

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-new-york-times-just-invente...

If you're in the UK there are lots of Mutual Aid societies that have set up to help neighbours who are self isolating. You can see the directory here - https://covidmutualaid.org/

I'm in one of these in Shacklewell and it's great to see people helping each other on small scale with shopping, prescriptions and friendly phone calls and chats.

It's interesting that most of them are using WhatsApp or Facebook groups. They're not really tools that are suited to this kind of thing but they're the easiest and most available thing we've got.

Such a strange stance. To point out the hypocrisy visible to 99.2% of the world's population.

The law in the US is the CAN-SPAM act in 2003. It requires email to have unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of the email and to take people off the list within 10 days of a request. There are similar laws, many of them stricter, in different jurisdictions.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

I walked it this year and found http://www.shikokuhenrotrail.com/ is a great site for information, particularly about the individual temples. It has a forum as well where you can ask questions.

It took me 50 days but I did 20 extra temples and had a few diversions (some intentional, some not).

You can find my contact details on my journal http://wasaking.com/introduction/

Marc

I walked it this year as well, about 20 days before you it seems. I've started reading your journal, it's great. I found a picture of a woman who gave me a mikan and told me "when you are hot, it will exist" on Day 5, she was lovely.

It was one of the best things I've ever done.

Returning to the real world, work was a bit of a struggle. The charity and spirit of giving and receiving was incredible.

http://wasaking.com/ for my diary

Great. It's a nice project, nice demo as well.

I realised when I was living in Japan recently how much I miss the UK postcode system. When I'm in the UK I can give anyone a short alphanumeric string and they can find me. A global coordinate system like this is really useful. I hope you can get some traction with it.

My current location is 5308 AFRAID ANUS. Might be best to exclude ANUS from the word list.

I spent six months travelling and working remotely recently, in Japan, Taiwan and Australia. I only had a carry on suitcase and I never missed anything.

I'm now back in London and after two weeks I have bought at least three small suitcases worth of new things. It's amazing how quickly things pile up. Once I had the space I started accumulating possessions. I go into shops and come out with things I didn't know I needed.

In the UK I'd always been told you had to give a reference, usually by phone, and couldn't say anything negative but would just say "she worked here" if the employee wasn't very good.

One day at a small company I worked for the phone rang and a fellow developer answered. He said "the CEO's in a meeting right now, can I help?... Oh Andrew? He was terrible, couldn't code his way out of a cardboard box and he was really hard to get on with. I couldn't stand him personally... Ok, you're welcome, bye". My mouth was on the floor, I'm pretty sure Andrew didn't get that job.

They're cousins, they were both at Cambridge. Simon is a world renowned expert on autism, Sasha on comedy.

This article on a site I manage provides a great overview of sleep hygiene and other behavioural changes needed for good sleep http://en.hdbuzz.net/120

It applies to anyone, not just Huntington's disease patients. The article is a humanised version of an article from a special edition of Experimental Neurology on sleep disorders: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00144886/243/su...

Bullshit

Read the main paper cited in the article by Alexander at Texas A&M in 2002. It says: female MONKEYS prefer COOKING POTS.

Then if you aren't debilitated by laughing read the methods, it's a total piece of shit yet is quoted again and again because it agrees with people's prejudices.

Beta blockers really helped me when I started consulting and started having to pitch to a room full of people. I was very nervous and used to go red, get shaky and my voice would be unsteady. I went to the doctor and got some and they really helped.

I stopped taking them after about a year and have now found that I get much better feedback and higher likelihood of having bids accepted without! I think it's something to do with passion coming across a bit more without them.

I must say they really helped to start and helped me get the experience of pitching without feeling too out of control. It might also be that I get better feedback without them now as I've had more pitching experience but I do feel the adrenaline flutter you get if you don't take beta blockers is useful - as long as it isn't overwhelming.

Ugh, I would have hoped by now we'd be moving to the US implementing privacy laws. Instead it seems like we're moving in the opposite direction. Corporations are learning how to spend money in the EU to stop pro-consumer legislation as effectively as they do in the house and senate. So we're stuck with out of date legislation.

I just hope that this is Google being desperate and trying to use PR to stop the new data protection guidelines because their lobbying efforts are faltering.

Right but BMW/Daimler/et al's company models are not based around the kind of massive 'moonshot' R&D that is needed to enter this market with a full self-driving car.

They do a lot of R&D but in a very structured way that produces the consistent results their shareholders ask for. The market might be disrupted but until that happens convincingly they will do everything they can to prevent it while adopting the low hanging fruits of automatic parking etc.

They might consider licensing the technology from Google or buying startups working on the tech but even then they might just bury the startups to delay their main business model being disrupted. I think it's going to take disruption from outside the main car manufacturers - in the same way it took Tesla entering the electric car market to shake it up.

Zopiclone can be habit forming and has an associated increase risk of road traffic accidents like most hypnotics - wikipedia is a good start for the risks.

I think melatonin is a better drug for correcting problems with sleep cycles which can include jet lag, changes in season and the like but there's plenty you can do help your sleep quality without drugs.

Here's a great article (about Huntington's disease but applies to everyone - it really helped me) based on a published paper in Experimental Neurology:

http://en.hdbuzz.net/120

That link shows some automated content brought in from healthnotes/aisle7 which is a Portland, Oregon based company. If you search Amazon UK for melatonin you'll find lots of supplement that are described as 'melatonin-like' but don't contain any active ingredients.

I buy it when I'm in the US which is fine for me as I take it for jet lag but I know GPs (family doctors) I talk to are often confused to learn they can prescribe melatonin and will often prescribe much more powerful and, in my opinion, dangerous hypnotics. I think that's probably because there's no patent on melatonin so not much marketing push to inform GPs of its uses - though I believe there's a patented slow release version of melatonin that might get a bit of marketing behind it.

With the known NSA backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG then many people within the NSA must have access to the backdoor constants (even if they don't directly realise it and have access to them within an application).

If Edward Snowden was willing to give up his salary and liberty for what he thought was the moral thing to do then I think it's reasonable to assume there must be many more people within the NSA who are willing to leak secrets for money or loyalty to nation states, corporations or terrorist groups.

Some of those people will have given the Dual_EC_DRBG constants or applications that will crack cryptosystems using that PRNG to 'bad' actors.

The Guardian is pretty progressive in style terms. I think there's an increasing tendency to write it as internet and they're closer to the cutting edge than a more conservative (style-wise) newspaper like the NYT. Here are their capitalisation rules:

http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/c#id-3043710

Of course there are back doors, like the well known NSAKEY one [1] in Windows. Apple also seem to have backdoors into encryption on both Mac and iOS [2].

If you want your data to be reasonably secure against someone who casually steals it then they're fine but if you want to be secure against government employees, or even well connected corporations, then Apple & Microsoft solutions are not very useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57583843-38/apple-deluged-...

Sortition has a lot going for it and certainly encourages participation far beyond our current democratic engagement. I'd like to see it start to appear on a small scale, beyond Juries, in modern democratic states.

There's an interesting EconTalk discussing the Ancient Greek economy where Russ Roberts asks his guest: "We certainly romanticize Greece as this great democracy; but it wasn't much like the United States, tell us about it"

But after Josiah Ober describes Athenian democracy it ends up sounding like what we call modern democracy is a very poor imitation.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/08/ober_on_the_anc.htm...

Google Apps for Nonprofits page states it's only available in the US:

https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1614602?hl=en&t...

If you could ask someone involved in that charity how they got free Google Apps I'd appreciate it as I work for a number of charities and the costs of Google Apps are a significant admin overhead. I've tried calling the sales people and they say it's coming soon but they've been saying that for over 5 years now.

I had a similar situation where I switched a 50 person charity to Google Apps. They had a 30 day trial period and during that time the CEO's credit card was stolen and replaced. I changed the information but the Apps interface said 'No valid payment information stored' so I called their support and they assured me the new card was stored and everything would be fine.

Surprise, surprise on the day the account totally shut down. I called in a panic and after a lot of fiddling about (and reassuring me that they had recorded that I thought there might be a problem) they got it back up with everyone's mail after almost a whole day of downtime.

To add insult to injury Google don't run a charity program in the UK despite the non-profit laws being a lot stricter than the US and it being easy to validate a charity - so they're paying full rate for Google Apps for Business.

A lot of the early programmers were women all the way back to Lovelace [1]. People seem to have thought of the hardware as masculine and the software as secretarial and therefore feminine. Then when it turned out there was money it men took over programming.

People seem very bad at recognising cultural programming, friends tell me their 3 year old boy just prefers train sets and their girl prefers to pretend to cook without recognising the millions of cultural signals they've received by that point. Actually cooking is another good example - look at the top chefs and how male skewed they are. A lot of it is about telling boys it's ok to be aggressive and acquisitive while telling girls it's better to stay in the background and adopt a supporting role.

[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...

> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data

That's great and much better than some of the other tech companies who silently hand it over.

However Google doesn't oppose collecting the data, it doesn't seem to worry about the implications of that for oppressive regimes or future radical laws enacted after the next big terrorist attack. Are there real objections within the company to the real name policy? Is it addressed by management?

Demanding better government is, of course, important. I spend a lot of time and money doing it - working with citizen lobbying groups, contacting my representatives and attending meetings. But you can't demand better government and ignore how one of the biggest corporate collectors of personal data is acting, and changing.

"A single unified beautiful product" - linked to your real identity (to set a positive tone "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter") - and one that doesn't interoperate with other products because they're "milking off of just one company for their own benefit".

That seems to be the core of Google these days and it's very different from the company many Googlers joined.

> There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA

It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.

Google has a very deliberate policy of building a comprehensive record of searches, websites visited, comments, articles, private documents written, people collaborated with and communications - all linked to your real name and phone number. It doesn't matter that employees wouldn't tolerate giving it out, sooner or later some governments will pass laws giving them access to the data. The fact that Google is building the records is enough.

Google employees already object - look at Vint Cerf's confusion when asked about the real names policy.

To paraphrase Chris Morris: But who's to say a government with an authoritarian streak in a time of national crisis will pass a law giving the secret services access to those records?

Tried it with a few more accounts - if you try to use it with a regular gmail account it says "Authentication error: Google+ is required".

It's a little off that Larry Page was complaining about Microsoft not using open standards but then they go and introduce a totally new closed system within their closed social network.

I still use Trillian on iOS for Google Talk and it works fine.

I'm getting "Hangouts has not been enabled for your account". I'm guessing this is because my work account has Google+ disabled. So are you going to have to be on Google+ to use their messaging product now? Will they shut off Google Talk for regular gmail users?