Allow me to give you another perspective on why the BMI tables, even recently updated, are stupid and need to be deprecated/abolished/destroyed/ignored: They're based on statistical averages, whereas human beings are most certainly not statistically average. Even skin-caliper testing, administered by an experienced person, is more accurate at determining body composition than BMI tables are. Hydrostatic weighing is very accurate, but only if your bone density is either 'statistically average', or you know what your bone density is so the calculations used can compensate. The real 'Gold Standard' is a DEXA scan, which is primarily used for bone densitometry, but is also highly accurate for determining body composition.
I'm not European, I'm American (but we're goddamn fat here so it's still relevant to this discussion). I'm almost 50 years old, consume anywhere from 2500 to 4000 calories a day (depending on the day), and I have 13% bodyfat. How? Speaking of cycling: I've been training and racing road races for the last 5 years, and burning off 1000kcal riding my bike is trivial to me. On the weekly 'long endurance ride' I may burn as much as 3000kcal. The upshot of this: Most people sit on their butts all day for their jobs, and go home at night complaining about 'being tired' and sit some more, in front of the TV, eating excessive amounts of dinner. What's worse is, according to my own non-scientific observations, most people eat too much fat and too much carbohydrate, and not enough protein. This observation is somewhat backed up by another news story (http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/04/29/0338249/you-are-what-youre-tricked-into-eating) that says the American food industry produces processed foods that mimick having protein in them, but are just full of fat and carbs instead, making the problem worse. My personal opinion is that substances like HFCS make the problem worse, because it's so concentrated, and that artificial sweeteners, ironically enough, also contribute to the problem because they encourage people to keep craving sweet things instead of changing their lifestyle/eating habits away from sweetened things. Also, again, in my personal opinion, artificial sweeteners are additionally causing harm to people's health in the long term that isn't being detected yet because it takes years and years for it to happen. Final note on artificial sweeteners: Like me, some people who ingest sucralose become ravenously hungry from it, which can't be a good thing (when it happened to me, I literally couldn't eat enough to make that 'artificial' hunger leave me alone. I can't be the only one that happened to!).
You're all kidding me, right? With all the stupid shit the Human race does to the planet and to themselves? Sure, I 100% believe there's sentient alien life out there, and I'm willing to believe that they have interstellar capabilities. But they see how fucked-up we are as a race, and are making a point of not introducing themselves to us because we act too much like animals. If they're capable of the emotion of embarassment, they're probably embarassed for the Human race because of the dumb shit we do. 50 to 100 years? Ha, try 5000 to 10000 years! If we haven't killed ourselves off by then, then maybe we'll have evolved, biologically and socially, beyond this embarassing stage of our development!
..yeah, unfortunately, this. I harp on Monsanto quite a bit for their rushing inadequately-tested GMO shit to market, but them splicing insect DNA into tomatoes is amateur night/grade school science fair-level compared to what they'll do to life on Earth when they start creating shit from scratch using what is for all intents and purposes alien DNA.
Precisely. You can say "Google is evil" all you want, but are they anywhere near as evil as, say, Comcast? I don't think so. Elric of Melnibone wasn't a Good Guy by any stretch of the imagination, he was a warrior of Chaos, weilding an evil black sword that literally eats the souls of it's victims, but as it turned out he and it were the best weapon against the forces of Chaos; whether Google is evil or not is irrelevant, if they've got the juice (and the money) to give Comcast a run for their money, then more power to 'em, I say.
Just don't take Grimm off the air. I like that show.
Dynamic memory chips have to be 'refreshed' periodically or their contents lose integrity. What you're describing is a closed-loop system where there is a feedback loop that refreshes the original memory, thus maintaining it's integrity over the long term. Of course some degradation is inevitable, but there can be error detection/error correction in a system, from which the integrity of the original memory is restored when it's refreshed. Couldn't some of our cognitive abilities be sufficient for this purpose?
The ISPs are creating a false scarcity in order to try to improve their profits. At the same time they're saving money by refusing to improve capacity. It's time for this bullshit to end.
No no, I'm saying that what I am talking about has nothing to do with cost. In fact I really don't care about it much at all when it comes to something like this; don't sacrifice safety for savings! I'd rather have a simple, foolproof mechanical system rather than something connected to a more complicated system that can fail or that can be hacked. What happens if someone hacks your car's systems so that the steering lock engages as soon as you hit 50mph? Or what happens if someone thinks it's funny to hack your car so the steering lock never disengages at all? Some things should be left as simple as possible so there are as few problems as possible. This whole GM mess has nothing to do with the mechanisms involved as a concept and everything to do with their total mismanagement of the whole situation. Push-to-start is nice and all but I would not be comfortable with a vehicle that doesn't have any sort of manual overrides for things so I can bring the vehicle to a halt anytime I want to regardless of the state of any onboard systems. I know you don't agree with me and that's OK but please don't bother arguing with me because I have my reasons for this and I'm sticking by them.
Yes, actually, I'm old enough to remember such things as electromechanial tuners on TV sets that were all vacuum tubes.
This doesn't really have anything to do with cost. My issue, if you didn't read the rest of this thread, is safety and security, both of which may be lacking with a keyless ignition.
For what purpose, you ask? Safety. You should always have a way to bring a vehicle to a stop. The handbrake (or 'emergency brake', or as some refer to it, the 'parking brake') is an example that's been around for a long time: A manual, mechanical system, not dependent on any other part of the braking system, that you can use to stop the vehicle when the regular brakes fail. Not anywhere near as effective, but if it means the difference between getting you and the car banged up, and you getting killed outright and having your corpse cut out of the wreckage with a torch, then it's effective enough. Same idea here: Being able to halt the engine (or motor) in an emergency.
So far as I know not all new vehicles have a mechanical linkage from the transmission mode select lever to the transmission itself, just like the throttle pedal isn't directly linked mechanically to anything under the hood, so moving a lever connected to a malfunctioning computerized control system may not do anything. a runaway engine that isn't responding to the throttle control needs to have a way to shut it down, if not for safety reasons then to keep the engine from tearing itself apart if it's stuck at wide-open throttle, and last time I checked there are still mechanical linkages (for safety reasons) between the steering wheel and the front wheels and the brake pedal and the brake master cylinder, so unless your legs don't work you can still stop the car at least with both feet on the brake pedal and/or with the emergency brake (which everyone mistakenly refers to anymore as the 'parking brake').
You should never turn the key off in an emergency unless the car is stationary
I wouldn't want you driving me anywhere, you're not adequately prepared for an emergency situation in a moving vehicle, apparently.
Oh look, someone else being an ass (or just completely lacking in understanding). It's not a 'manual override' if it has to go through the same system you're trying to override manually. Most cars don't have manual transmissions anymore, either. Either quit trolling, or get into the 21st century already.
Gee, that's nice. However even a fully electric vehicle should have a manual override somewhere accessible to the driver, so that in an emergency the motor can be disconnected from it's power source, a safety feature that apparently cars like the Prius doesn't have.
I have a pickup truck with a 5-speed so sure, but most people have cars with automatic transmissions, and aside from pickups it's getting harder and harder to get cars with manual transmissions. When the day comes that the majority of cars are electric there won't even be a transmission anymore.
In any vehicle I've ever seen it disconnects power from the ignition system and fuel pump, shutting down the engine. If it's a diesel then it would shut off power to the fuel pump, same effect.
How do you figure? We've been using them for decades and decades, and they've been improved on. Besides, which do you think is the shorter, shallower learning curve: Learning how to get around an ignition lock embedded in the steering column (without hacking up half the car in the process), or plugging a laptop (or even a purpose-built black-box) into a CANbus connector and pushing a button, then the box starts the car for you? This is what I'm talking about. You mass-produce a black-box car-stealing device that allows any petty criminal to steal a car in less time than an experienced, expert car thief used to be able to after years of experience and training. Don't tell me it won't happen, either.
Here's what I'm thinking: 1. We're trading traditional car-stealing techniques for hacking techniques. 2. Now instead of the otherwise mature, reliable technology of a mechanical ignition lock system, we're going to have to worry about zero-day vulnerabilities in a complex system? 3. Another facet of vehicle security: What about the steering lock mechanism? If it's electrically actuated, then what's the point in even having it? It can theoretically be hacked like the rest of the car. 4. Another approach to hacking your way into stealing a car: Manufacturer 'back doors' into the system? I'm thinking there'd have to be some sort of 'manufacturer access' backdoor built into the system, which once uncovered will just make it easier to steal a car.
I'm sure I'll think of more later on but that's what I've got off the top of my head.
Other than being able to test-drive a game before you buy it, why in the world would you want to do this? The overall quality can't be as good as an actual game console, can it? Otherwise it just sounds to me like yet another way to swindle people out of their money and give them essentially nothing.
Indeed. Too much oxygen in the air can be extremely toxic. Too much water in your body can kill you. Remember Socrates? What did they use to kill him, again? Hemlock? Isn't that a 100% naturally occurring substance? Deadly! Better ban it! Oh, wait..
The 'problem' is that in these United States, we want to maintain the fiction that we're civilized beings, and that translates into 'sanitizing' the process of ending the life of a violent criminal by injecting them with 'humane' substances that are lethal yet (allegedly) painless. While I'm not an advocate of bringing back hangings, or Texas' long-standing tradition of Old Sparky (electric chair, if someone actually doesn't know), an expertly-aimed round from a large-caliber rifle right between the eyes will end someone's life quickly and relatively painlessly, especially relatively-speaking in comparison to the pain and suffering some of these 'people' inflicted on their victims. Of course as previously stated that's way too much horror-show stuff for the general public to stomach, which is why we don't do it anymore. The general public just wants violent, death-row inmates to fade away, no screaming, no blood, no horror or discomfort of any kind.. really, execution by lethal injection is designed to be humane for everyone else, with it being humane to the criminal being executed just as a side benefit; it allows everyone left behind afterwards to feel like they're not as bad as the person who was just killed.
All that being said, and if they're so fucking concerned about 'being humane', then I don't know why the hell they don't just give criminals being executed a lethal dose of morphine and be done with it. Will kill them in short order, and they won't feel a damned thing on the way out.
There's still something awesome about the idea of sitting at a Teletype Model 33ASR playing Star Trek. Yes, you'd go through a lot of paper, but it was still fun. Of course what was even more fun was a version of BASIC I had on my 2nd computer, which allowed for INPUT statements that had a timeout feature on them. I was then able to write a version of Star Trek that would have the Klingons be able to attack you if you sat at any command prompt too long. Added an entirely new element to the game, you couldn't just sit there and mull over your options! This was back in the mid 1980's, before the IBM model 5150 came out. It was running on a Poly-88 5-slot S100-bus system with a 4MHz Z80 processor. Fun.
You're being funny, but the fact of the matter is that there are websites out there (aimed at kids for fuck's sake) that literally say "dying is the best thing you can do for the planet Earth!" and I don't think they are being funny when they say it. Of course all the tree-hugging ecological extremists all spout crap about how bad us Humans are for the planet and how we should at least give up our technology and civilized ways and go back to nature, then they get in their Prius and drive home to blog about how bad Humans are for the Earth on their Apple Mac and Twitter on their smartphone.
Well then all I can do is shrug my shoulders in disgust, because we go through all this massive amounts of headache to 'conserve energy' and 'limit our carbon footprint' and all the rest of the Happy Horseshit that goes along with all that, only to get hamstrung yet again because people are stupid with technology. One wonders why he should even bother 'conserving' anything.
Every cellphone I've ever had used a USB jack to charge it, and through the lifetime of the phone I've never broken or worn out the jack. Why can't we just teach people to be more careful with things?
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Allow me to give you another perspective on why the BMI tables, even recently updated, are stupid and need to be deprecated/abolished/destroyed/ignored: They're based on statistical averages, whereas human beings are most certainly not statistically average. Even skin-caliper testing, administered by an experienced person, is more accurate at determining body composition than BMI tables are. Hydrostatic weighing is very accurate, but only if your bone density is either 'statistically average', or you know what your bone density is so the calculations used can compensate. The real 'Gold Standard' is a DEXA scan, which is primarily used for bone densitometry, but is also highly accurate for determining body composition.
I'm not European, I'm American (but we're goddamn fat here so it's still relevant to this discussion). I'm almost 50 years old, consume anywhere from 2500 to 4000 calories a day (depending on the day), and I have 13% bodyfat. How? Speaking of cycling: I've been training and racing road races for the last 5 years, and burning off 1000kcal riding my bike is trivial to me. On the weekly 'long endurance ride' I may burn as much as 3000kcal. The upshot of this: Most people sit on their butts all day for their jobs, and go home at night complaining about 'being tired' and sit some more, in front of the TV, eating excessive amounts of dinner. What's worse is, according to my own non-scientific observations, most people eat too much fat and too much carbohydrate, and not enough protein. This observation is somewhat backed up by another news story (http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/04/29/0338249/you-are-what-youre-tricked-into-eating) that says the American food industry produces processed foods that mimick having protein in them, but are just full of fat and carbs instead, making the problem worse. My personal opinion is that substances like HFCS make the problem worse, because it's so concentrated, and that artificial sweeteners, ironically enough, also contribute to the problem because they encourage people to keep craving sweet things instead of changing their lifestyle/eating habits away from sweetened things. Also, again, in my personal opinion, artificial sweeteners are additionally causing harm to people's health in the long term that isn't being detected yet because it takes years and years for it to happen. Final note on artificial sweeteners: Like me, some people who ingest sucralose become ravenously hungry from it, which can't be a good thing (when it happened to me, I literally couldn't eat enough to make that 'artificial' hunger leave me alone. I can't be the only one that happened to!).
You're all kidding me, right?
With all the stupid shit the Human race does to the planet and to themselves? Sure, I 100% believe there's sentient alien life out there, and I'm willing to believe that they have interstellar capabilities. But they see how fucked-up we are as a race, and are making a point of not introducing themselves to us because we act too much like animals. If they're capable of the emotion of embarassment, they're probably embarassed for the Human race because of the dumb shit we do. 50 to 100 years? Ha, try 5000 to 10000 years! If we haven't killed ourselves off by then, then maybe we'll have evolved, biologically and socially, beyond this embarassing stage of our development!
..yeah, unfortunately, this.
I harp on Monsanto quite a bit for their rushing inadequately-tested GMO shit to market, but them splicing insect DNA into tomatoes is amateur night/grade school science fair-level compared to what they'll do to life on Earth when they start creating shit from scratch using what is for all intents and purposes alien DNA.
Precisely.
You can say "Google is evil" all you want, but are they anywhere near as evil as, say, Comcast? I don't think so. Elric of Melnibone wasn't a Good Guy by any stretch of the imagination, he was a warrior of Chaos, weilding an evil black sword that literally eats the souls of it's victims, but as it turned out he and it were the best weapon against the forces of Chaos; whether Google is evil or not is irrelevant, if they've got the juice (and the money) to give Comcast a run for their money, then more power to 'em, I say.
Just don't take Grimm off the air. I like that show.
Dynamic memory chips have to be 'refreshed' periodically or their contents lose integrity. What you're describing is a closed-loop system where there is a feedback loop that refreshes the original memory, thus maintaining it's integrity over the long term. Of course some degradation is inevitable, but there can be error detection/error correction in a system, from which the integrity of the original memory is restored when it's refreshed. Couldn't some of our cognitive abilities be sufficient for this purpose?
The ISPs are creating a false scarcity in order to try to improve their profits. At the same time they're saving money by refusing to improve capacity. It's time for this bullshit to end.
No no, I'm saying that what I am talking about has nothing to do with cost. In fact I really don't care about it much at all when it comes to something like this; don't sacrifice safety for savings! I'd rather have a simple, foolproof mechanical system rather than something connected to a more complicated system that can fail or that can be hacked. What happens if someone hacks your car's systems so that the steering lock engages as soon as you hit 50mph? Or what happens if someone thinks it's funny to hack your car so the steering lock never disengages at all? Some things should be left as simple as possible so there are as few problems as possible. This whole GM mess has nothing to do with the mechanisms involved as a concept and everything to do with their total mismanagement of the whole situation. Push-to-start is nice and all but I would not be comfortable with a vehicle that doesn't have any sort of manual overrides for things so I can bring the vehicle to a halt anytime I want to regardless of the state of any onboard systems. I know you don't agree with me and that's OK but please don't bother arguing with me because I have my reasons for this and I'm sticking by them.
Yes, actually, I'm old enough to remember such things as electromechanial tuners on TV sets that were all vacuum tubes.
This doesn't really have anything to do with cost.
My issue, if you didn't read the rest of this thread, is safety and security, both of which may be lacking with a keyless ignition.
For what purpose, you ask? Safety. You should always have a way to bring a vehicle to a stop. The handbrake (or 'emergency brake', or as some refer to it, the 'parking brake') is an example that's been around for a long time: A manual, mechanical system, not dependent on any other part of the braking system, that you can use to stop the vehicle when the regular brakes fail. Not anywhere near as effective, but if it means the difference between getting you and the car banged up, and you getting killed outright and having your corpse cut out of the wreckage with a torch, then it's effective enough. Same idea here: Being able to halt the engine (or motor) in an emergency.
You should never turn the key off in an emergency unless the car is stationary
I wouldn't want you driving me anywhere, you're not adequately prepared for an emergency situation in a moving vehicle, apparently.
Oh look, someone else being an ass (or just completely lacking in understanding).
It's not a 'manual override' if it has to go through the same system you're trying to override manually.
Most cars don't have manual transmissions anymore, either.
Either quit trolling, or get into the 21st century already.
Gee, that's nice. However even a fully electric vehicle should have a manual override somewhere accessible to the driver, so that in an emergency the motor can be disconnected from it's power source, a safety feature that apparently cars like the Prius doesn't have.
Don't be an ass.
I have a pickup truck with a 5-speed so sure, but most people have cars with automatic transmissions, and aside from pickups it's getting harder and harder to get cars with manual transmissions. When the day comes that the majority of cars are electric there won't even be a transmission anymore.
In any vehicle I've ever seen it disconnects power from the ignition system and fuel pump, shutting down the engine. If it's a diesel then it would shut off power to the fuel pump, same effect.
..but they are not in any way reliable
How do you figure? We've been using them for decades and decades, and they've been improved on. Besides, which do you think is the shorter, shallower learning curve: Learning how to get around an ignition lock embedded in the steering column (without hacking up half the car in the process), or plugging a laptop (or even a purpose-built black-box) into a CANbus connector and pushing a button, then the box starts the car for you? This is what I'm talking about. You mass-produce a black-box car-stealing device that allows any petty criminal to steal a car in less time than an experienced, expert car thief used to be able to after years of experience and training. Don't tell me it won't happen, either.
You raise and excellent point. There must be a manual override to shut down the engine (and perhaps disengage the transmission) in an emergency.
Here's what I'm thinking:
1. We're trading traditional car-stealing techniques for hacking techniques.
2. Now instead of the otherwise mature, reliable technology of a mechanical ignition lock system, we're going to have to worry about zero-day vulnerabilities in a complex system?
3. Another facet of vehicle security: What about the steering lock mechanism? If it's electrically actuated, then what's the point in even having it? It can theoretically be hacked like the rest of the car.
4. Another approach to hacking your way into stealing a car: Manufacturer 'back doors' into the system? I'm thinking there'd have to be some sort of 'manufacturer access' backdoor built into the system, which once uncovered will just make it easier to steal a car.
I'm sure I'll think of more later on but that's what I've got off the top of my head.
Other than being able to test-drive a game before you buy it, why in the world would you want to do this? The overall quality can't be as good as an actual game console, can it? Otherwise it just sounds to me like yet another way to swindle people out of their money and give them essentially nothing.
Indeed.
Too much oxygen in the air can be extremely toxic.
Too much water in your body can kill you.
Remember Socrates? What did they use to kill him, again? Hemlock? Isn't that a 100% naturally occurring substance? Deadly! Better ban it! Oh, wait..
The 'problem' is that in these United States, we want to maintain the fiction that we're civilized beings, and that translates into 'sanitizing' the process of ending the life of a violent criminal by injecting them with 'humane' substances that are lethal yet (allegedly) painless. While I'm not an advocate of bringing back hangings, or Texas' long-standing tradition of Old Sparky (electric chair, if someone actually doesn't know), an expertly-aimed round from a large-caliber rifle right between the eyes will end someone's life quickly and relatively painlessly, especially relatively-speaking in comparison to the pain and suffering some of these 'people' inflicted on their victims. Of course as previously stated that's way too much horror-show stuff for the general public to stomach, which is why we don't do it anymore. The general public just wants violent, death-row inmates to fade away, no screaming, no blood, no horror or discomfort of any kind.. really, execution by lethal injection is designed to be humane for everyone else, with it being humane to the criminal being executed just as a side benefit; it allows everyone left behind afterwards to feel like they're not as bad as the person who was just killed.
All that being said, and if they're so fucking concerned about 'being humane', then I don't know why the hell they don't just give criminals being executed a lethal dose of morphine and be done with it. Will kill them in short order, and they won't feel a damned thing on the way out.
There's still something awesome about the idea of sitting at a Teletype Model 33ASR playing Star Trek. Yes, you'd go through a lot of paper, but it was still fun. Of course what was even more fun was a version of BASIC I had on my 2nd computer, which allowed for INPUT statements that had a timeout feature on them. I was then able to write a version of Star Trek that would have the Klingons be able to attack you if you sat at any command prompt too long. Added an entirely new element to the game, you couldn't just sit there and mull over your options! This was back in the mid 1980's, before the IBM model 5150 came out. It was running on a Poly-88 5-slot S100-bus system with a 4MHz Z80 processor. Fun.
You're being funny, but the fact of the matter is that there are websites out there (aimed at kids for fuck's sake) that literally say "dying is the best thing you can do for the planet Earth!" and I don't think they are being funny when they say it. Of course all the tree-hugging ecological extremists all spout crap about how bad us Humans are for the planet and how we should at least give up our technology and civilized ways and go back to nature, then they get in their Prius and drive home to blog about how bad Humans are for the Earth on their Apple Mac and Twitter on their smartphone.
Well then all I can do is shrug my shoulders in disgust, because we go through all this massive amounts of headache to 'conserve energy' and 'limit our carbon footprint' and all the rest of the Happy Horseshit that goes along with all that, only to get hamstrung yet again because people are stupid with technology. One wonders why he should even bother 'conserving' anything.
Every cellphone I've ever had used a USB jack to charge it, and through the lifetime of the phone I've never broken or worn out the jack. Why can't we just teach people to be more careful with things?