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The great fitness band shootout
There’s nothing like an obesity epidemic to remind people that many of us have totally lost touch with what our bodies are doing all day. The disconnect between our conception of fitness and what we're doing to achieve it has grown faster than we can comprehend. We are in a fitness hole, trying to count our way out in calories, steps, pounds, heartbeats per minute, and hours of sleep per night.
The reason fitness devices have enjoyed such popularity is that they automate this tracking. And what they can’t automate, they make fairly easy to log. There's no obvious answer to our sedentary, overeating culture, but fitness bands offer a way toward a little more mindfulness about the ruts we may have fallen into over the course of our daily lives.
But given how trendy fitness dongles, bands, and apps have become, there’s a glut of them out there to sort through. Today we'll take a look at three of the most popular fitness bands: the Jawbone Up ($130), the Fitbit Flex ($100), and the Nike Fuelband ($149). Different interfaces will work for different people, so even if you don’t agree with our pick for the best device, we'll provide enough information to help you make an informed decision. We chose to stick to fitness bands, because they are the most recent evolution of the format. More (and perhaps more discreet) peripherals like the regular Fitbit are still available.
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Should we design programs to randomly kill themselves?
Alexander Yarovoyа так же впадать в депрессию.
This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.
Jimbojw asks:
Should we design death into our programs, processes, and threads at a low level, for the good of the overall system?
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Открыта программа для разработчиков от Thalmic Labs (MYO)
Alexander YarovoyКакая крутая штука. Хочу себе такую.
Немного подробностей
Someone help.
And there’s still so much I’ve left off. Standards (the lack thereof, really) have failed us. There’s money to be made! Tell us what your biggest gripe is on Facebook, or Twitter, or you know, any of the other ten trillion services there are. I need a nap.
На что дети имеют право?
Alexander YarovoyМне нравится эта точка зрения
Давайте сегодня попробуем влезть в шкуру людей, пытающихся принимать правильные решения по поводу обязанностей родителей и прав детей. Чтобы сразу стало понятно, приведу пример: вот выходите вы утречком из дома, а на крыльце курит женщина, у которой ребёнок в рюкзачке спереди пристёгнут. И вот тут надо хорошо прочувствовать, где эмоции, а где холодный рассудок.
С одной стороны:
- пассивное курение, мягко говоря, не очень полезно для всех людей,
- но у ребёнка устойчивость ко многим вредным воздействиям гораздо ниже, чем у взрослого, поэтому выдыхать ему в лицо сигаретный дым — преступление,
- ребёнок не выбирал себе жизнь, в которой он во взрослом состоянии будет иметь проблемы со здоровьем (во всяком случае, едва ли он станет здоровее от регулярного пассивного курения). Он имеет право на здоровое детство.
С другой стороны:
1) Даже о вреде курения не все люди пришли к консенсусу (если бы эта мамаша была согласна с тезисом о вредности сигарет, она бы не курила при ребёнке).
2) Есть много других вопросов, о которых люди тоже не пришли к единому мнению:
- кто-то считает, что нельзя есть мясо, а другие утверждают, что без мяса ребёнок не получит необходимых веществ для развития,
- кто-то убеждён, что нельзя купать ребёнка в тёплой воде (скажем, теплее 37 градусов), а другие называют извергами тех, кто набирает детям прохладные ванны (около 28-30 градусов),
- кто-то уверен, что ставить прививки детям — это однозначное преступление, а другие обзывают антипрививочников убийцами,
- даже за изучение ребёнком букв до двух лет можно получить обвинение в бесчеловеченом обращении и издевательстве, но при этом не менее преступным является сокрытие от детей учебных материалов,
- и так далее.
3) А раз так, то пока надо погасить в себе взрыв негативных эмоций по отношению к этой курящей мамаше. Да, сигареты, скорее всего, ухудшат здоровье этого конкретного ребёнка. Да, курящая мать — плохой пример для растущего организма (хватает других способов подсадить детей на сигареты). Но давайте подумаем, сколько зла можно привнести в мир, если начать жёсткими мерами воздействовать на подобных мамаш! Тут может достаться и тем, кто не привёл ребёнка не прививку, потому что тот слёг с температурой 38 в назначенный день, и тем, кто занимается ранним закаливанием (те ещё изверги и экспериментаторы на детях), и тем, кто старается не пользоваться одноразовыми подгузниками или не даёт антибиотики по каждому чиху, и тем, у кого ребёнок получил синяк при столкновении с дверным косяком... Продолжать можно долго.
Более того, я прекрасно понимаю, что иногда так бывает, что у меня в холодильнике можно найти испортившиеся продукты. Но это же не значит, что я их собираюсь давать детям! Всякий раз, когда в вас возникает позыв «отобрать и спасти», задайте себе вопрос, во сколько раз вред от подобной инициативы может превысить пользу. Ведь мы не можем сравнить две судьбы ребёнка: с изыманием его из, например, пьющей семьи или с игнорированием этой проблемы. Вполне может быть, что во втором случае он бы получал крупицы так нужной ему любви от частенько пьяных родителей, поэтому смог бы сформироваться, чтобы прожить длинную и счастливую жизнь, чего могло не получиться в варианте с детским домом.
Понимаете? Есть много семей, которые вроде бы должны являться примером для всех, но дети в них почему-то вырастают глубоко несчастными. А бывают семьи, в которых ребёнка с года регулярно поят пивом, приговаривая, что «в пиве есть важные витамины, без которых он больным вырастет», а ребёнок этот вырастает здоровым и счастливым. Иногда на детей орут, иногда их даже бьют, но это не мешает сформироваться сильной личности... А иногда мешает. Мы не знаем. Мы только знаем, что есть много очень полярных примеров, поэтому крайне трудно вывести общее правило, приносящее только пользу. Но при этом очень легко нафантазировать закон, от которого вреда будет больше, чем пользы.
Если нам что-то кажется диким и ужасным, то надо вспомнить про Закон Вебера — Фехнера. Ребёнку это дикое и ужасное может казаться вполне допустимым, потому что он уже привык, а сила воздействия давно не повышалась. А вот столкновение со службой опеки запросто может поломать ему жизнь. Или не поломать. Мы не знаем.
Много букв, но мало мыслей? Я думаю, главное выразить удалось: меня пугают идеи законодательно и жёстко фиксировать детские права. Даже если эта дорога вымощена благими намерениями, нельзя забывать, куда она может привести. Помните, про закон о 0 промилле? И про то, что среди лишившихся прав было около 15% трезвых водителей? Но если без права управлять автомобилем ещё можно как-то прожить, то детям лишиться родителей — это очень сильный удар. И допускать его риск, наверное, можно, но только в совершенно исключительной ситуации.
А как вы относитесь к подобным ограничениям и правам? Что точно недопустимо? За что надо наказывать родителей? А в каких случаях частенько «перегибают палку»? Что бы вы, выходя из подъезда, сказали этой курящей мамаше?
Если вам интересен этот вопрос, то, пожалуйста, поделитесь ссылкой на заметку в Twitter, Google+, Facebook или Вконтакте. Спасибо!
Хорошего дня!
EA продает часы Айзека Кларка из Dead Space 3
Alexander YarovoyЗахотелось часы
EA продает часы, которые Айзек Кларк будет носить в третьей части Dead Space — производит Meister Watches, цена 250 долларов. Выглядят вроде бы неплохо. Под катом больше фото
Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction
Alexander YarovoyПро шелковый путь
An Australian drug dealer has become the first person to be convicted of a Silk Road-related crime, after using the black marketplace to buy a stash of MDMA, amphetamine, marijuana, and cocaine.
People can buy goods from Silk Road only by connecting with the anonymizing Tor network and using Bitcoins. The marketplace has very few restrictions on what people can sell. An August 2012 study by security researchers at Carnegie Mellon University revealed that the Silk Road trades items worth £1.22 million every month.
According to a report in The Age Paul Leslie Howard used Silk Road to buy and import the illicit drugs on 11 different occasions. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers in Melbourne and Sydney examined mail—most of which came from the Netherlands and Germany—destined for his home. They found 46.9 grams of MDMA and 14.5 grams of cocaine. The federal police then raided his house in July 2012 and found digital scales, ziplock bags, AU$2,300 ($2,394) in cash, 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones and a money counter. They also found two working mobile phones, and forensically analyzed more than 20,000 text messages. In among them were incriminating texts such as "I got five grand worth if you want" and "promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week".
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Robohand: How cheap 3D printers built a replacement hand for a five-year old boy
Alexander YarovoyЭто мне кажется очень крутым
Not too long ago, Liam had no fingers on his right hand. The South African five-year old was born with Amniotic Band Syndrome, which causes amputation of digits before birth. But since November, Liam has been using a series of prosthetic hands designed by two men living on opposite sides of the planet, using open source software and 3D-printing technology.
Now, those two men—Ivan Owen in Bellingham, Washington and Richard Van As in South Africa—have published the design for Robohand, the mechanical hand prosthesis, on MakerBot's Thingiverse site as a digital file that can be used to produce its parts in a 3D printer. They've intentionally made the design public domain in the hopes that others around the world who don't have access to expensive commercial prosthetics (which can cost tens of thousands of dollars) can benefit from it.
The project began with a mechanical hand Owen made for a science fiction convention in 2011. He works for a school supply business during the day, but he also works from home creating special effects. When a video of Owen demonstrating the oversized hand went viral, it got the attention of Van As, who had lost most of four fingers on his right hand in a woodworking accident. Van As had been told that prosthetic fingers, such as the X-Finger, would cost him at least $10,000 per finger replaced, so he set about in his workshop trying to design his own.
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Domestic cats are destroying the planet
Alexander YarovoyЯ всегда это знал
When the girl you like takes too long to respond [Comic]
[Source: Jhall Comics]
No related posts.
Debugger
Alexander Yarovoyмне очень нравится эта мысль
Plastic sword detects WiFi-enabled orcs
For a few years now, [Jomegat] has been thinking about Sting, the sword wielded by [Bilbo Baggins] and later [Frodo] in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Sting glows blue whenever an orc is near. Assuming the Elvish magic created by Tolkien is in reality highly advanced Elvish technology, [Jomegat] figured out a way to make his plastic Sting detect WiFi-enabled orcs.
Since The Hobbit was released, toy stores have been flooded with related merchandise that included a wonderful toy version of everyone’s favorite orc killing weapon. The only problem was how to add orc sensors to this plastic Sting. [Jomegat] assumed all orcs carry a cell phone, and being the low creatures they are, would always have their WiFi turned on. [Jomegat] found a very inexpensive WiFi detector key chain that would sense these phone-carrying orcs and light up to alert our warrior to imminent danger.
After acquiring the materials crafted from Elvish magic technology, [Jomegat] opened up the plastic hilt of Sting and installed the WiFi detector. Now, whenever Sting senses the preferred wireless connection of the orc, the blade glows a bright blue.
[Jomegat] was eaten by a grue shortly after completing this project.
Filed under: led hacks
Asking the security team for a firewall exception
Alexander YarovoyЭто я не нарадуюсь, что теперь можно шарить и лайкать посты из ленты trending.
Submitted by Damon
Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password
Alexander YarovoyIn your face grammarnazies!
When it comes to long phrases used to defeat recent advances in password cracking, bigger isn't necessarily better, particularly when the phrases adhere to grammatical rules.
A team of Ph.D. and grad students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that targets passcodes with a minimum number of 16 characters and built it into the freely available John the Ripper cracking program. The result: it was much more efficient at cracking passphrases such as "abiggerbetter password" or "thecommunistfairy" because they followed commonly used grammatical rules—in this case, ordering parts of speech in the sequence "determiner, adjective, noun." When tested against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, the grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when the passcodes had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team’s algorithm.
The approach is significant because it comes as security experts are revising password policies to combat the growing sophistication of modern cracking techniques which make the average password weaker than ever before. A key strategy in making passwords more resilient is to use phrases that result in longer passcodes. Still, passphrases must remain memorable to the end user, so people often pick phrases or sentences. It turns out that grammatical structures dramatically narrow the possible combinations and sequences of words crackers must guess. One surprising outcome of the research is that the passphrase "Th3r3 can only b3 #1!" (with spaces removed) is one order of magnitude weaker than "Hammered asinine requirements" even though it contains more words. Better still is "My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!" because it requires significantly more tries to correctly guess.
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The clouds are alive as microbes fly unfriendly skies
Alexander YarovoyМне нравится идея живых облаков
On a lazy summer day, you might look for animal shapes in the clouds, but you know they’re not real. There’s nothing alive up there but the occasional flock of airline passengers, right? Well, if you’ve ever had a microbiologist friend remark that a cloud reminded them of a bacterium, they were more right than you might have realized.
In turns out that microbes commonly hitch a breezy ride into the clouds. And while some organisms are simply biding their time, awaiting a return to familiar terra firma, others are actively going about their business despite their unorthodox surroundings. That’s no small feat considering the conditions—it’s extremely cold, UV radiation is intense, and the tiny droplets of water they often find themselves inside are acidic and chemically caustic.
Yet experiments have shown that bacteria appear to be active. And that might be important for more than just the microbes themselves. Lots of chemistry goes on in that cloud water that modifies the way clouds form and behave.
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Have your cake and then squirt it out of your body with new stomach pump
Alexander YarovoyС дыркой в желудке худеть станет проще простого.
Dean Kamen has been responsible for a whole slew of inventions, some beneficial and some less so. The latest creation with his name on it, described in a patent application filed on January 3 of this year, falls more into the "less so" category.
The patent application, titled "APPARATUS FOR TREATING OBESITY BY EXTRACTING FOOD," describes a device and method for sticking a tube into a person's stomach and allowing them to eat whatever they want, and then to eject the masticated but undigested food into a convenient toilet. The idea is to reduce the amount of calories your body absorbs by yanking the food out of your stomach, after you've enjoyed eating it but before it makes its way into your digestive tract.
Enlarge USTPOLest you think that the contents of your stomach are safe and the invention exists only on paper, a company called Aspire Bariatrics already offers the system in Europe, proudly proclaiming, "The AspireAssist Aspiration Therapy System received CE mark approval in December 2011 to market in the European Union, and is now commercially available in selected regions in Europe and beyond." The company's website notes that the device and procedure aren't yet approved for use in the USA; that (and the FDA) are presumably the reasoning behind filing the patent.
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How Things Work
Actually. Maybe I should write that book. Or at least make a comic out of a few and post it on the internet. Maybe I’ll get a few views. -Ray
TweetWatch this: Microsoft's Illumiroom demo breaks past the limitation of TV frames
Alexander YarovoyИнтересно выглядит
At Samsung's CES keynote today, Microsoft showed a video of Illumiroom, a technology that the company says will "expand interaction to any surface in your home." In other words, it projects imagery beyond your TV screen for a more immersive gaming experience. Bullets fly out of the display, an in-game fire makes it look like your living room is going up in flames, and a first-person shooter plays out on an entire wall.
It works by mapping the room with Kinect to create interactive illusions in real-time; this is something we'd love to see for ourselves, but unfortunately Microsoft won't show it off fully until April. In the meantime, watch this video to get a glimpse of where Microsoft sees the living room going.
#258
Alexander Yarovoyлюблю шутки про цыпленка, переходящего дорогу
#258
Choose Your Superpower
In case you missed it, last week we announce our new store! Hopefully this is just the start. We’re going to try to add lots of other good stuff regularly! Thanks for all the support and encouragement! Also, feel free to continue letting us know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see added in the shop.
TweetSupreme Court to rule on patentability of human genes
Alexander YarovoyСкоро всех нас будут штрафовать за незаконное копирование вирусов клетками организма во время простуды.
The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will consider a legal challenge to a patent on a breast cancer gene held by the firm Myriad Genetics. The case could have broad implications for the future of medical diagnostic techniques.
In March, the Supreme Court ordered an appeals court to reconsider a 2011 decision holding that genetic material could be patented once it has been "isolated" from the human body. At the time, the Supreme Court had just rejected patents on medical diagnostic techniques, and the high court wanted the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to re-consider its previous ruling in light of this new precedent.
In August, the Federal Circuit, which is responsible for hearing all patent law appeals, decided to stick with its previous ruling. It once again concluded that DNA sequences could be patented once they had been isolated from the human body. Now the Supreme Court will have a chance to check the Federal Circuit's work.
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Laundry Cycle
Alexander YarovoyЭтот комикс про меня