Seriously, why doesn't Google help?

I would have directed the video to all app developers on Google, telling them that they are next to be sued, and to stop using the Google Play store as a result, since they all, apparently, are violating the patent. And that's a reason and vested interest in Google to assist.

I completely approve of this.

Oh and by the way this releases May 26th (+14 hours my local time!)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/463720/

Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?

Probably possible on android, but I'm pretty sure that iOS apps can't use the phone functionality like that.

It's a good idea though and I think Apple/Google should integrate it into the os.

Couldn't (shouldn't?) somebody make an android / iOS app that has permissions to force turning on GPS tracking, dials 911 and lets the user talk as normal, and uses text to speech to repeat the lat/long coordinates from the GPS at a low volume every 15-30 seconds or something?

That wouldn't require a technological standard -- from the 911 dispatch perspective, it is all just analog / audio information. It would require people to download/install a 3rd party app, which isn't great since most people don't exactly plan ahead for emergencies like that. But, if it worked well enough and was unobtrusive enough, Google/Apple would probably be well served to adopt it as a standard feature of Android/iOS.

I would have thought there was a fairly simple answer as to why 911 doesn't get location data from smartphones... privacy.

The reason uber, dominos, etc have access to your location is because they have an app on your smartphone that has been explicitly granted access to your location by you. 911 is just a simple phone call and so it can't read the location data.

To do so reliably across cell phones would require development of some kind of emergency location standard that all manufacturers could implement. Technically, it's not that difficult, but getting everyone to agree on a standard?

Not that easy

Not bad, but I wish it was an augmented reality thing, allowing taggers and graffiti artists to digitally tag in real places that could be seen only by those using the app. THAT would be awesome, and might keep some people from painting places they shouldn't.

Thought this would be another half-baked, "Hey you can sort of do this in VR and it's good because ??? because it's VR man!"

This looks like a really well thought-out interface and a real, functioning app. Don't know who will buy it, but kudos to them for the effort.

Having only ~300k people and being almost universally ethnically homogeneous kind of makes it easy to actually make decisions. I mean hell, they have an anti-incest app to check if the person you're dating is related to you.

The full version was recently released on steam, it's pretty fun but doesn't add many gameplay innovations over the demo thing they released for the comp
http://store.steampowered.com/app/322500/

Uber and Lyft wouldn't exist if the Taxi system wasn't horrible beyond belief. Fix the medallion/license issues and they both go out of business. Otherwise, even if both ride sharing companies go out of business, people will still create some type of app to get around the shitty monopoly that is currently in place.

As far as trained professionals with background checks, yeah, a day's worth of training is amazing (sarcasm). Also, most taxi drivers go through a minimal (if any) amount of background checking. For instance, here in Austin, Tx, it was reported that fifty-three drivers who failed background checks to become Uber drivers had been issued chauffeur’s licenses by the City of Austin.

It's one of those rare cases where I think it's fair to say that Apple is offering something that is good value.

$400 if you don't plan to use a lot of apps / load music, movies etc on it, for the 16GB version outright is a pretty good deal. The A9 processor tops many benchmarks against top of the line Android phones. That plus 2GB RAM puts it on par with the 6s/Plus. The resolution is fine for the screen size, since the DPI is above 300.

If you are fine with or prefer a smaller screen and want the iOS app store, it really is a fair deal. Yes, something like the Xiaomi Mi 5 still blows it away on the Android side, but if you exclude Xiaomi, I think it's very competitive with the more mainstream Samsung / LG / Sony competition which will not include a top tier processor at this price range.

The app is called Face Swap Live if I'm not mistaken

What does that?
What app?

Seriously I am an idiot

Most QR reading apps show you the URL or other QR code contents before doing anything with it. They don't just go to the URL automatically unless you tell it to do so (none that I've used anyway). I'm assuming if there were a program for desktop/laptop PCs that reads QR codes, it would behave similarly. Standard QR codes can't really contain anything other than text data, because they are extremely limited in the number of bytes they can represent. Generally, they're used to store a website URL or similar type of thing.

I've never heard of a web-based attack that would automatically infect you. There would be some sort of confirmation or you'd need to run some piece of software manually in order to get infected. JavaScript doesn't have the ability to actually break out of the browser, so there's nothing it could really do at a system level. If it downloaded software, you would need to let it install before there was any risk.

I've heard of screensavers, back in the like, Windows 95/98 days, where if you used it, you could become infected. But that's no different. Screensavers (at least back then) were nothing more than specialized .exe files, so you're just running a program like any other thing.

If you're dumb enough to click a link and then install the software it downloads, then you're not exercising proper basic security principles and you kind of deserve to learn a lesson anyway.