htwillie's comments

What took so long?

The answer that's always missing is what hardware can be disabled to prevent the data from being harvested/transmitted/available in the first place?

Kai's Photo Soap and Kai's Power Goo. Or anything by Kai.

Especially the little tools like the texture explorer and fractal generator.

The user interfaces were refreshingly unique.

Perhaps RSS wasn't built for the average user.

Why do you believe what you believe is true? Independant study? Easiest possible explanation? Herd effect? Fear of standing out?

It's rare that you can change another persons mind. But you can try to understand why they believe what they do.

You present vaccinations as an example, with "decades of evidence supporting them." That's far less time than evidence supported a flat earth.

The thing is, some vaccines work pretty well. Others don't. It's complicated by the fact that if they don't work, or if they injure or kill you, you can't get your money back or bring lawsuits against the manufacturers or providers.

And there's no laws or regulations that say vaccines must work. Vaccine makers can literally solubilize dog shit and call it a vaccine. And it will "work" for quite a lot of people. There's billions of dollars counting on the us believing they're effective. That blind faith in vaccines has been waning for quite a while now.

Within the last year, a guy did a writeup on his DIY electrical panel circuit monitoring setup.

It allowed him to very accurately measure power consumption of everything in his house, and he was able to trace a sudden and mysterious rise in his monthly bill to a faulty pool pump.

The Lumber Stretch here: http://www.modestomassagetherapy.com/stretching.html The second one, start off in a Jesus Christ pose, scoot your feet toward your butt while keeping your knees together. Then rotate your lower half as far as you can keeping your knees together like the diagram. Hold it there for a while, 10 seconds or so. Return to center, then rotate the other direction and hold. Do about 10 reps.

The other one is here: http://edgemontchiro.com/twist-and-shout/lumbar-rotation-str... It looks the same at first but is quite different. Begin by laying on your side with knees together and feet as close to your butt as you can, and laying your arms together straight ahead of you. This is the starting "closed" position. Then, keeping your upper arm straight, rotate the upper body and shoulders as far "open" as you can like the lady in the picture. Hold "open for 10 seconds or so, and then close again. Do this about 10x each side.

After 3 decades of once or twice-a-year back injuries (that took a few weeks to heal), in 2015 it didn't ever get better.

MRI revealed bulging discs and herniation causing sciatica (which was a first) which varied from a mild, deep butt-muscle pain; to extreme, radiating all the way down to my ankle and sometimes my right testicle.

NSAID anti-inflamatory drugs didn't do much. I was very lucky to find a Physical Therapist who was said to be "good with backs."

After a few sessions we found a combination of stretches and exercises that provided relief.

Basically, my sciatic nerve was being impinged as it passed between vertebra as it exits my spinal column. The stretches were some specific rotations of upper body relative to lower body, which pretty quickly provided relief any time I needed it.

Then some core strengthening which took a lot longer.

Most important is to prevent re-injury through learning how to lift the right way (or actually more important - how to lift the wrong way so you know not to do it again).

I've spoken with plenty of people who've had surgical repairs. Some worked. Many of them didn't, and those people encouraged me to try every possible thing under the sun before considering surgery. I was prepared to pray, swim, stretch, exercise, acupuncture, yoga, learn ballet, become vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free, Santeria, voodoo - just about anything.

I got lucky.

"...that if someone disagrees with them, the person is just stupid or doesn't know enough."

Believing that smart = right, thus, less smart = less right.

For any given approach, with a circular runway there's exactly one point tangent to the runway to land. Landing short or long isn't an option.

Things are conventional because they tend to work well. And part of working well is being resilient to errors and non-optimal situations.

> I don't see why a human has to do this.

Because a human driving the plane has a vested interest in surviving the landing.

A person who writes buggy landing software, or an operator "piloting" it from the ground can get another job if they fail.

Yeah - make a huge rotating disc of a runway that rotates at a constant speed, so the pilot can stick the landing at whatever radius has an angular velocity equal to groundspeed.

Then slow down the disk enough to allow taxiing toward the center exit drain.

Don't take advice from anyone without skin in the game, for they have no tangible downside to being wrong.

I work with a lot of environmental data coming from disparate sources.

.csv is like the lowest common denominator of data formats.

+1 for the No Agenda podcast, by John C. Dvorak and Adam C. Curry.

They watch the news (so you don't have to!) and each week they de-construct the biggest stories from around the world, revealing the truths behind - and the motivations for - the news that's given to consumers.

The best "tool" available is the No Agenda Podcast.

Hosts Adam and John present national and global issues as portrayed by mass media, and systematically DECONSTRUCT the stories. They not only highlight biases, but explore propagandistic elements and discuss how the media intentionally affects the consumers.

Most importantly, they work to identify the MOTIVATIONS for medias' biases in the first place, and demonstrate for their listeners how to be much more critical, skeptical, and analytical in the way they consume the news.

Listen to a few episodes and you might rethink the need for building a tool at all.

noagenda.com