I'd like to note that the complaint about racism is, as is traditional, ignoring the fact that Asian and Middle Eastern groups are represented--with the traditional not-so-subtle implication that they're not 'real' minorities--and ignoring the fact that the problem could easily be a lack of people from the underrepresented groups who want to turn up. The social stigma placed on being interested in technical subjects is not limited to white males.

But the more important this is that these kinds of programs can--when done like a sexist/racist farce, which is also traditional--make it worse because it reinforces the stereotypes, and add a generous helping of resentment. Better would be a program that simply views everybody involved as people interested in whatever the technical subject is--and expects everybody to be up to the work & treat everybody else as a person.

And if they do want to actually have projects encouraging, say, Native Americans to code--why not sponsor coding projects whose results will be useful to those communities, to help show those communities why they should value those skills? This would be most efficiently done by actually having the ideas for these projects come out of the community, and favoring sponsorship of those projects where at least some of the coders will need to be members of the community in order to understand what the program needs to do...

Estimating wrong how many calories you're consuming & how many you're burning is why the first phase includes keeping track of it--it helps you make good estimates and gives both you and the doctor useful information. A lot of the things for which obesity may be a symptom of can be treated, if not cured, and the best outcomes tend to come from early detection.

Simply throwing drugs blindly at the problem is not optimal treatment, and it's only going to be worse if it's not even being thrown at the actual problem.

That's what you need to try first, at least. A couple weeks or a month of "eat less move more," keeping track of what you ate & how much you moved, then check to see if it helped. If it did, yay, you're overweight because of your lifestyle! Maybe diet drugs can help, maybe they won't, but either way you definitely will need to adjust your lifestyle.

It didn't work? Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom. Lifestyle might certainly be more painful to try to change, but lower-calorie diets are much easier to live with than ones resulting from, say, food intolerances. (I have to read the labels on all the food I buy, because of this sort of issue; living in a household where certain people can't eat certain things is educational.)

Diet drugs shouldn't be handed out automatically, and I'd prefer that the primary care physician just not hand out the diet drug prescriptions instead of assuming always that obesity is the disease instead of possibly a symptom...especially since insurance companies tend to believe they're excellent diagnosticians, just like an undertrained field technicians believes they know everything there is to know about the system they're sent out to repair.

(The best thing here? If you're lucky enough that your problem is entirely eating more calories than you burn, then you literally don't need to change anything about your diet other than the total number of calories. Eating healthier will lower the risk of malnutrition, but it isn't necessary...)

And users are not part of the ecosystem?

Microsoft's job is to produce an operating system that does not sell the competition--Android tablets, iPads, and Macs. Metro by itself running Metro applications was what sold me on not buying a Win8 machine: my several-year-old Android tablet already did it all, did it better, and did more. I saw no indication of how to get to the desktop--this, in and of itself, is Bad Design. Several of the reviews I've read commented on this particular problem.

The hardware OEMs and developers are simply not going to migrate over if nobody's going to buy it. Look at what's happened to the Microsoft tablets: nobody's buying, nobody's willing to make them 'cept for Microsoft...and it looks like even Microsoft's realizing they're not selling.

I'm not saying that the transition wasn't necessary, I'm saying that the design is bad, nearly unusably so, and it's not old fogies. I'm part of the 'younger generation' you talked about and it was making me miss command line interfaces. (I'm a geek. Of course I can use them; it's very do not want, but I can.)

You're assuming that's the only cost to consider here.

There's quite a few people whose primary sales are at shows, fairs, and the ilk who, if they did go with a dumbphone as you suggest, would lose sales because they would not be able to accept plastic--and many of whom certainly would not be accepting checks, because they can't afford the risk of bad checks. I've been seeing some that have permanent locations going the same route, suggesting that the system is proving to be overall a better choice than the traditional ones.

I also know people who use their smartphone to minimize time they have to spend in the office doing paperwork--or even eliminate the need for an actual office--which makes a difference when what actually brings in the money is field work. (This can be really important when they're in business for themselves or work as a subcontractor.)

The other thing is that, due to certain court decisions, cell companies actually can't charge you extra to use your smartphone as a tethered modem/portable hotspot, at least in the US...which is actually one of the major reasons to have one if it costs you more money to be tethered to a physical office and/or dependent on being able to locate WiFi hotspots while mobile. For me, it's generally been the case that a short response sent quickly has always been better than long sent later--even if the short, quickly-sent response is primarily intended to acknowledge I got the email and the long response will be sent later...

And Windows 8 manages to combine only the worst of both tablets and Windows, like a teacup-sized pony being sold to do the job of both a draft horse and a poodle. It can't actually do the work of the draft horse, and what with being a horse does an unsurprisingly bad job of being a dog.

It may skip a few of the bad things each does, but that isn't enough to keep me from not wanting to have had to pay for an expensive OS that I will be replacing practically immediately.

I routinely read medical research, and it's not really necessary to have read the paper in question because the main reason for me to read it would be to know how to best set up my experiment to 'prove' my theory...and I already know how to do that.

In a small population, any individual's impact on the results is greater; this is why it is important to give the alpha used in the statistical analysis. (Using a small alpha reduces influence of sampling error.) It is something to avoid if at all possible within the constraints of ethics and resources. Medical research tends to have to live with small sample sizes, simply because of the ethics of inducing disease on purpose in humans.

This was an experiment on rats. A large number of rats could have been used, unless this study's purpose was actually more in the lines of what engineering calls a 'proof of concept,' done to test a method and published to lay the groundwork for the large-scale study. ("Hey, look, this works, can we do it bigger?") This is not the case.

More importantly, a line of rats known for good health certainly ought to have been selected if for some reason they could not use a large population. The effects of breed choice are less important when there are a large number of subjects, because the large number will compensate for sampling error as well. If you are limited to a small sample, the effects of sampling bias upon external validity--the ability to generalize results to the population--become more significant, and can even result in it being scientifically worthless.

These flaws do not, of course, mean it was intentionally deceptive or misrepresenting anything. It is not necessarily malice to choose a small sample size from a population already prone to the disease you are studying. It is, however, certainly a bad experimental design with significant systemic error if your goal is to honestly test "X causes Y Disease."

Actually, autism is not purely genetic: it is a condition with multiple causes, lumped together for diagnostic purposes since often there is no way to be certain which particular cause or combination of causes is involved in any given case & tradition within the field of psychology.

If God exists, however, He is quite a fan of irony as it turns out that there is a very easy thing you can do to prevent autism: get your MMR vaccine--in utero exposure to Rubella can cause autism. (Depeche Mode's thesis has a lot going for it.)

That's half of the lesson: the other half is that it is unfortunately repeatedly necessary career advice, many people failing to grasp the difference between formal and informal language & behavior before reaching adulthood.

It is, unfortunately, too often necessary to remind people of this, and the real question is if Gen Y will deal with the fact that this is a long-term and rather ubiquitous memo.

I am rather certain I would be hurt, badly, by the person close to me who has been, if I walked on eggshells around her. I pay attention, and she knows I can recognize a panic attack even when it is not the dramatic shit Hollywood thinks all panic attacks are as both of us tend towards distinctly quieter ones.

The padded white room at the asylum will come with professional aid--people who are licensed psychologists trained in how to treat mental disorders, who can provide you expert & trained help. If somebody is really such a wreck that they need other people to work around their weaknesses, they need that level of treatment.

Mental illness deserves to be taken seriously, and that includes treating severe trauma disorders as being just as deserving much and & in as much need of focused, professional care as such things as advanced cancers.

The feminist/social justice activist usage is, as far as I can tell from sightings in the wild, "Anything that we think might be offensive."

Actual trauma triggers can be highly eclectic, ideosyncratic, and individualistic, and thus are not really something that can necessarily be predicted. (Smells, sounds, and sights that somehow recall the trauma are well-known categories, and really should give you a good hint.) Having them hit is not a pleasant experience, but neither is having somebody blithely assume that they already know yours & infantilizing you by making a show of avoiding what they presume are yours. (It is particularly bad when they are not only wrong but also horribly incapable of recognizing actual panic attack. Protip: They're not always dramatic.)

In some ways it's probably actually best if the claims are being used knowingly for censorship purposes; if it is in earnest, it comes off as rather like saying you understand how deprived a kid whose parents forgot to feed & clothe them was, because your parents got you the roan pony instead of the black pony you had your heart set on.

The fact that it is actually being used to suppress discussion of risk management--ways to lessen your chances of being assaulted, among other things--does seem to be getting ignored, and crossover of hackers who have focused on social engineering would probably be very beneficial. (Let's see, people who study why J Random specifically got victimized instead of some other random, and people who focus on practical manipulation of psychology...) It would be sufficient to ensure any actual rape survivor is able to choose not attend the talk. The fact is that they did invite Violet Blue--whom a brief check on reveals would be at least likely to choose such issues--and if the Ada Initiative had problems they ought to have voiced them beforehand, perhaps after the SanFran BSides where this talk was originally given.

There's the issue of how the child, if an actual existent child is depicted in the pornography, feels.

If it's a kid who doesn't exist anywhere--we're talking animated or otherwise virtual depictions as opposed to live-action video or photography--then there's evidence that can haunt the victim. This is why some murder victims' families have requested that the particularly graphic images not be widely distributed...and why there's occasionally issues caused by the victim, once older, wishing to not have the evidence existing outside of the proper hands.

In journals and the like, unless it's an especially famous case, the identity of the victim will be cloaked: Little Alice Smith will become A.S. or even Female Child A. Releasing the victim's identity is a violation of ethics when the victim is under the age of majority because, legally, minors cannot give their consent...to having their names shared. (This is also why most places you cannot be in pornography until you're 18: you may be able to legally consent to the sex acts but not the rest!)

However, this still makes the actual laws overall bad ideas. Making accounts of child abuse illegal to possess means that you are basically condemning any abused children & those abused as children from being unable to be treated--because you're making illegal the journals and reference works used by those in the health professions to identify & treat the victims!

You're also going to cause problems for those studying, for example, what the sexual fantasies of pedophiles are; how exactly would you go about figuring out the common threads in what a group of people wanks to without examining the wank material?

Wide distribution of iffy materials that contain sufficient identifying information to track down the victim should definitely be discouraged, but making it an offense is overkill. Just encourage hosting sites to have a procedure they will actually follow through with for requesting the removal of such materials.

I'd rather make my announcements via somewhere more reputable than Wikipedia, anyway.