I appreciated the heads-ups about this in this thread. I have been a Fastmail customer for years, and didn't realize they were subject to Australian law. It's very relevant to me, and even though the laws haven't passed yet, major privacy organizations seem concerned enough. It's not easy to change e-mail providers, most people pay a year or more in advance, so it's good to be aware of these important issues. It also could give the company a chance to reassure customers, but I must say that "If the laws change such that we need to say anything different in our privacy policy, then we will definitely make a public statement about those changes" is not the reassurance I was looking for. I have come to expect good tech companies to vehementely oppose laws like this, actively fight against them, organize protests or at least publicly support the opposition (as in the anti SOPA/PIPA efforts in the US), etc. Not just say "We will update our privacy policy if necessary".
I don't know about foreclosure data, but I also wouldn't look at just that, because regulations are different in other countries. I live in the Netherlands and a lot of people now (about 30%) have a mortgage that is worth more than the house. That is not a huge problem as long as they are able to pay the mortgage each month and do not have a pressing reason to move, do not get divorced, etc. but if they do need/want to move they end up with a debt for the difference of the value of the house and the mortgage (In this country, you cannot just walk away from your house and debt, you always remain responsible for the debt).
I think the fact that 30% of all houses here are "underwater" is a better sign of a housing bubble than the amount of foreclosures because at least where I live in many cases banks prefer not to foreclose but put the house on the regular market and hope to sell it for a reasonable prices.
Is it safe to change my password now? All I read in the article is how much they are investigating this. How do I know the hackers don't still have access and are now actively monitoring password changes potentially getting more info?
I am concerned that there is nothing about this on the eBay front page and that I have not received an email from eBay about this
I wonder if this means the dutch auction site 'Marktplaats' also had its data copied. PayPal is apparently in the clear (not that I would ever use them again), but I do have a Marktplaats account and that's an ebay subsidiary. (they got bought out after ebay realized they were not going to be able to out-compete them).
Mel Siff died in 2003. "Established wisdom" at that time did not recommend a low-fat diet at all. He apparently wrote in one of his books that "nutritional scientists" recommend a diet of 10% fat, but that was never the recommendation of major health organizations or "conventional wisdom". The IOM recommended in 2002 20-35% of calories from fat, for example. In 1990 the recommendation was 30% or less.
Interestingly, I cannot recall anyone by the name of Glassman ever staying in the Siff household or studying me in the laboratory to examine my eating habits, so I am intrigued to know where he found this inside information. The abbreviated tale of my cardiac rehab programme
(http://www.worldfitness.org/drmelsiff.html) certainly said nothing about my specific breakdown of macronutrients in my diet.
Had he read a little more carefully what I wrote, he would have noticed that my diet comprises something like 50-60% lipids (no fried foods, no transfats, no animal fat, plenty of fish) and under 30% carbohydrates (no refined carbs) and hasn't deviated much from that sort of balance for many years - I have never been a lover of high carb diets and have eaten little or no sugar
(other than about 1-2 tablespoons of honey or a few servings of fruit a day). Where on earth does he obtain that nonsense from about my diet?
So, he says there he ate about 50-60% fat. It's strange though that he says "no animal fat" but plenty of fish, which is of course animal fat.
I have learned in this thread that it isn't, but the parent has a good point: in the European country that I live in the name is not recognized at all. Potential employers will not know the value of the education and might assume it is just a degree farm.
I read Scientific American Mind and I actually wish it were a PDF. Instead, it's an app, with content that I can hide and show and some additional features like the odd video. It's pretty, but it's a shame that it is completely tied to my iPad and the articles aren't shareable with anyone, or saveable.
Those studies are usually not very good. They often fail to recognize that people who are on a low-sodium diet are very sick, for example (just like those studies that say that a low BMI is very dangerous but fail to control for the fact that very ill people are thin). I just think it would be really strange if humans had such a high need for salt, because until a few hundred years ago people did not add salt to their diet, getting only the naturally occurring sodium from food, and people did just fine.
It looks like I had my high end off, it was actually > 7000mg / day.
> Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.
In general, I would advice to not get your health advice from the NY Times. This is a response from Harvard's Nutritionsource: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2013/05/17/the-n... who calls it "highly misleading".
Nutrition research is difficult, like I said, population studies often fail to account for the fact that in western countries practically the only people who are on a very low sodium diet are people who are already very sick.
Link?
Studies about salt are notoriously difficult, because hardly anyone actually adheres to a truly low-salt diet, so you get the equivalent of a study that tries to discern whether smoking 1.5 pack of cigarettes (which takes lots of restrain) is any better than 2.
Personally, it took 2 months for my blood pressure to start coming down on a high-vegetable low-sodium diet, and I notice that many people already think they are not salt-sensitive if it doesn't work in 2 days. I'm still astonished when I take my blood pressure and it is 115/70 or so. It used to be consistently 150/90.
During the Mars-500 experiment they ran a low-salt-diet test.
They found that the body cycle for salt is more complicated that thought before and "It is not only worthwhile reducing the amount of salt added to food for those who are ill - even the blood pressure in healthy individuals such as the Mars500 test subjects was reduced." [1]
It's not very rare at all. It's rare if you compare it to grains, and while quinoa is not a grain, it is usually used instead of a grain. Many beans (e.g. white and black) and vegetables have a complete amino acid profile.
Even potatoes have a complete animo acid profile. Not in the most optimal ratio, but 10 potatoes/day gets you enough of all the essential amino acids. In fact you can live exclusively on potatoes if you add in a source of Vitamin A (like carrots).
I agree that you don't always know when you purchase something what you're going to use it for. I got the 16GB iPad and never ever expected to run out of storage space. I didn't know about all the great games you could play on it, and how that (together with ebooks and other stuff) really adds up. If someone had asked me what I'd use it for back then, I would have answered "web browsing and reading ebooks". That changed in the first couple of months though. In hindsight I really wish I had at least 32GB.
A similar thing goes for the laptop/desktop example given above. I recently bought a laptop for my parents and the salesperson tried to talk them out of it as well, because they weren't going to travel with it. I think a laptop (with an external screen if it is used a lot) is so much more useful for most people than a desktop, simply because of it's portability inside their home, even without any travel. Now they can sit next to their partner instead of in the separate computer room upstairs. Or (if there was no computer room upstairs) they can put it in the closet when they're done and don't have a big computer taking up space in the living room all the time. And it's way easier to take it with me on public transport if there's something wrong with it. I really felt that the "are you planning on taking it with you while traveling" is the wrong question when it comes to deciding between desktop and laptop, especially for most people when the extra power that a desktop gives is totally insignificant for word processing and web browsing. A laptop (not a top of the line one) was definitely the best option for my parents, and I'm glad I was there so that the salesperson did not succeed in talking them out of that with the best of intentions.
