I was using sodium levels for all the numbers there. Sorry for using the wrong word in one place.
The numbers do speak for themselves. You will be hard-pressed to ever get under 500mg of sodium in a meal these days. In fact, healthy food is often the worst for having high sodium levels, since they think adding salt makes up for the reduced flavor of the diet food.
>>Why is banning the solution to everything? I don't get it. People love to ban anything with legislation, it's completely illogical.
It's not. It's heavy handed, but not illogical. The food industry has proven to be completely unable to control salt levels in food, with levels skyrocketing in recent years.
I actually found out that for all my eating (relatively) healthy and exercise, I've been developing hypertension. So I tried to go on a low-salt diet. Guess what? Unless you eat nothing but fresh food (yeah, yeah, I know), you will exceed the recommended daily salt level by probably about 3x or so. Every day. For your entire life. Most items you order from fast food restaurants exceed your entire daily recommended maximum, with just one item. And you are getting the burrito with a taco, right?
The way that blood pressure works, you have a certain amount of damage resistance against the temporary hypertension caused by eating a lot of salt. However, if you keep spiking your blood pressure, over time your basal blood pressure will increase and you'll develop permanent pre-hypertension and then hypertension. Which is bad, for a variety of reasons.
Just to humor yourself, the next time you go to a restaurant, ask for the nutritional menu. The recommended level of salt intake is 1000 to 1500mg (1g to 1.5g), though the USDA recommended amount is around 2400 or so. So we'll use 1500mg as a baseline. You're eating three meals a day? Divide 1500 / 3 = 500mg. Now look at the nutritional menu and see what you can order that will add up to 500mg of sodium or less. Have fun with that.
Cornflakes - that's healthy, right? 1100mg in one 30g serving. Bacon - ok, we know that's not good. But cheese is worse! We think fries are bad, but a large order only has 330mg! That "healthy" grilled chicken sandwich, though, has 1690mg of sodium in it! What has more salt, hash browns or a cinnamon roll from McDonalds? (The cinnamon roll has 3x the sodium of a side of hash browns!)
Go to a grocery store, pull any box of cereal, or nearly anything at all edible and not fresh, and you'll see that it's nearly impossible to eat 500mg or less per meal.
I don't agree that banning it outright is the solution (for various reasons), but this IS a public health issue, and one that has gone completely unreported until now. If nothing else, the pressure from this will encourage places to reduce their sodium intake. In the UK, they managed to drop sodium levels to 1/3rd of their previous values - and the food tasted the same.
>>I can recall getting fined about 10 years ago by a cop for not having a drivers license while walking at night (I still wonder about the legality, but apparently it is a city ordinance for dealing with kids and curfews).
I've always found it amusing (and not in a good way) that a card giving you permission to drive an automobile is now needed for permission to walk around on a sidewalk.
Laws like this have been overturned occasionally for being unconstitutional. Homeless rights activists in particular do this kind of work. I looked into it when a security guard gave me shit for not having an ID on campus - when walking back from the pool. It is (or was) illegal in San Diego to not have at least $20 on you at all times. I think that might have been overturned as well, I can't remember.
I think those who see the romance in the term "hacker" would prefer everyone used the term "cracker" for criminal-hackers. Unfortunately the mass media has never gotten this memo, using "hacker" for everyone from script-kiddies to social engineers, yet ironically almost never for the programmers who first coined the phrase for themselves to describe simply great coding... bah.
Uh, no... "crackers" never caught on because the term already has two meanings in our society - saltines, and rednecks. Neither one of which has much to do with hackers (maybe a lot of hackers are white? I dunno) which is why it never found much cognitive traction.
It always amuses me when some pedantic person tries to tell everyone to use the "correct" term: cracker (Who made it correct? ESR? The Hacker Dictionary?), when the term itself is a badly designed one.
During the internet boom days, the San Diego Supercomputer Center ran out of talented computer science people to hire. So I got shackled with a fucking bio major that had done some programming on the side, once or twice. He wasn't my boss, but acted like he was. I got the three-year project finished in three months. He was still trying to get his fucking one-page website for the project done by the end of the summer. I say this by way of background - he was absolutely convinced we had to use XML for absolutely everything, even for data that would only appear on a stream between my own client and server. It was realtime data, and XML would have exploded the size of it immensely. BUT IT WAS XML. So he'd yell at me (literally) that I needed to implement it, so that it would be "portable". (To whom? Why? What was the usage scenario? The data stream was already endian independant.) Fuck, I hated working with people like that.
And frameworks have just exploded that problem out like a bowel full of diarrhea over the entire industry. People think they know something (Frameworks are great!) and will stomp their tiny little feet until they get their way.
>>The "whiz-bang" algorithms are all in the libraries already. So why reinvent the wheel? And if they aren't, it's not usually your job to put them in.
I agree, to a certain extent. Why bother writing your own custom super-duper triple-hashed hash table inside of Java? Just use their built in hash tables, and your code will automagically work. I'd probably fire someone who tried to reinvent the wheel there... most of the time the built in hash tables will work faster and with (a lot) less bugs.
That said, if you don't understand how hash tables work at all, then you get Daily WTF fodder material. I've seen some really stupid shit done with hash tables, like trying to alphabetize it after every insert, which were obviously written by people that had no knowledge at all of what was happening inside of the black box.
So I'll stick by how UCSD teaches computer science - you write something once, yourself, and then from then on you try to use library function. Sorting algorithms, Data structures, etc.
>>Is this a medical concern, or are you trying to improve speed?
I hope its not a medical concern. Touch typing causes carpal tunnel, it doesn't cure it.
I am like the OP - I used to be a hunt and pecker (now I type by touch) and get around 90WPM on a couple online tests (give or take, the online tests vary a bit). I only use my index and ring fingers to type (thumb for the space bar) and so I end up using bigger muscles to type and don't overextend any of my small tendons to type. I once tried to teach myself touch typing, saw immediately how it would fuck up my tendons, and never went back.
Biomechanically speaking, it's not good to overextend a finger (like for an O) over and over. Much better to move the hand instead and keep the fingers in a power position.
Besides, 90WPM is plenty fast. That's faster than almost everybody, so I don't know what the OP is complaining about.
>>Now compare this to the reputation that Fry's or Tiger Direct had (don't know if either has improved). Would they get the benefit of the doubt this way?
Frys returns a lot of stuff to its stock without testing it. But they're always good about taking stuff back that doesn't work, so I prefer to do business with them over Best Buy, who will refuse to return purchases given half an excuse: "You've returned too many" - oh, I guess I won't be buying tech stuff for my company from you any more.
>>Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better.
Not me. I uninstalled TF2 with only 20 hours or so into it.
I still have the original Team Fortress installed (the one that Classic Team Fortress was based on), which is still superior to both.
>>NOBODY keeps game servers up for the entire lifetime of fans using the product.
Indeed. And sometimes you just shutdown your Madden servers after a year, so as to make your customers buy the new version of Madden!
Customer Service? Why, what's that?
The lack of dedicated servers was why I decided not to buy CoD:MW2... I still play Quakeworld after all these years, and that's only possible because fans keep servers running and a community together. You can't even play half the old online games for the PS3 any more, even if you wanted to, since the servers are no longer running.
>>While the public might be a good detective, it certainly is a bad judge.
Indeed. The whole Chinabounder fiasco is a good example of how witch hunts can go bad.
Essentially, Chinaboundder (an English guy) kept a blog about the Chinese women he slept with (all of age, consensual, etc.) A Chinese professor called out a witch hunt on him (I guess what the OP is calling a flesh search engine) and he had to go into hiding.
Because in China, you see, you don't talk about the women you sleep with. It's perfectly fine to have a mistress. You just don't talk about it.
Direct observation trumps correlation. When I'm trying to give a workshop to improve teachers' technical skills in the educational world, and the union blocks it, that's a direct hit to their ability to teach.
>>You say North Carolina made teachers unions illegal, let's see how North Carolina's schools are
Correlation is not causation.
And I speak from a more pragmatic point of view (as someone who works with hundreds of teachers every year) - teachers unions are almost entirely counterproductive to the process of education.
>>Actually efficiency/weatherizing has the fastest payback between doing nothing, installing alternative/renewable energy, and efficiency/weatherizing.
If it's a good deal, then people will do it themselves, and we don't need to drop billions into Obama's campaign donors pockets.
>>Banning unions, which runs afoul of the First Amendment's freedom to assemble, protest, and seek redress, will not improve education.
>>Really? Did you also subtract the subsidies coal and nuclear power get? Yes, they both get subsidized as well.
Yep. I've done the research on the costs of all power sources, with and without subsidies.
>>If I were President of the USA I'd veto all subsidies and let a freer market pick winners and losers.
Fair enough. But if I was Obama (i.e. a radical progressive), then I'd toss a billion dollars at this if the science is good. Would do more than all the money spent on the weatherizing boondoggle.
>>About the only way to fight the unions is by allowing school choice with charter and private schools getting matching funding.
Nah. Right to Work states like North Carolina (IIRC) made unionizing in critical sectors outright illegal. So no police unions, firefighter unions, and, yeah, teacher unions. Now getting this to pass in CA is another matter entirely. Arnold tried to break the power of unions back in... 2005? and failed, causing him to backpedal pretty substantially.
Holy balls. If this article is spot on, they've doubled the efficiency of the current technology (which converts at about 40%) AND done it in such a way that the stuff is cheaper to manufacture AND made it flexible. This is the sort of thing that can have a real (and probably positive) impact on the world we know. Amazing. The only remaining question (I didn't see anything about it in TFA) is how durable this stuff is compared to the current panels.
Currently, without subsidies, Solar PV is roughly 20x-100x more expensive than coal or nuclear power. If it is indeed twice as efficient and costs 10% of the current costs to fabricate, then solar might finally become cost competitive.
If I was Obama, I'd toss a billion or so at this scientist and see if he couldn't get mass production of it up and running.
I mean, as long as we're spending billionS keeping teachers temporarily employed (because their states can't afford them right now), right?
Slashdot Mirror
I was using sodium levels for all the numbers there. Sorry for using the wrong word in one place.
The numbers do speak for themselves. You will be hard-pressed to ever get under 500mg of sodium in a meal these days. In fact, healthy food is often the worst for having high sodium levels, since they think adding salt makes up for the reduced flavor of the diet food.
>>Why is banning the solution to everything? I don't get it. People love to ban anything with legislation, it's completely illogical.
It's not. It's heavy handed, but not illogical. The food industry has proven to be completely unable to control salt levels in food, with levels skyrocketing in recent years.
I actually found out that for all my eating (relatively) healthy and exercise, I've been developing hypertension. So I tried to go on a low-salt diet. Guess what? Unless you eat nothing but fresh food (yeah, yeah, I know), you will exceed the recommended daily salt level by probably about 3x or so. Every day. For your entire life. Most items you order from fast food restaurants exceed your entire daily recommended maximum, with just one item. And you are getting the burrito with a taco, right?
The way that blood pressure works, you have a certain amount of damage resistance against the temporary hypertension caused by eating a lot of salt. However, if you keep spiking your blood pressure, over time your basal blood pressure will increase and you'll develop permanent pre-hypertension and then hypertension. Which is bad, for a variety of reasons.
Just to humor yourself, the next time you go to a restaurant, ask for the nutritional menu. The recommended level of salt intake is 1000 to 1500mg (1g to 1.5g), though the USDA recommended amount is around 2400 or so. So we'll use 1500mg as a baseline. You're eating three meals a day? Divide 1500 / 3 = 500mg. Now look at the nutritional menu and see what you can order that will add up to 500mg of sodium or less. Have fun with that.
Cornflakes - that's healthy, right? 1100mg in one 30g serving.
Bacon - ok, we know that's not good. But cheese is worse!
We think fries are bad, but a large order only has 330mg! That "healthy" grilled chicken sandwich, though, has 1690mg of sodium in it!
What has more salt, hash browns or a cinnamon roll from McDonalds? (The cinnamon roll has 3x the sodium of a side of hash browns!)
Go to a grocery store, pull any box of cereal, or nearly anything at all edible and not fresh, and you'll see that it's nearly impossible to eat 500mg or less per meal.
I don't agree that banning it outright is the solution (for various reasons), but this IS a public health issue, and one that has gone completely unreported until now. If nothing else, the pressure from this will encourage places to reduce their sodium intake. In the UK, they managed to drop sodium levels to 1/3rd of their previous values - and the food tasted the same.
Yeah, I bought them for the modular cables. But two X-Connects popping their caps in a row... enough for me.
>>Buy ULTRA or Corsair (if you can't afford a ULTRA).
I had two ULTRA's blow up on me the first time they powered on. No thanks, won't be buying from them again.
I've had good experience with Thermaltake and Antec PSUs.
>>I can recall getting fined about 10 years ago by a cop for not having a drivers license while walking at night (I still wonder about the legality, but apparently it is a city ordinance for dealing with kids and curfews).
I've always found it amusing (and not in a good way) that a card giving you permission to drive an automobile is now needed for permission to walk around on a sidewalk.
Laws like this have been overturned occasionally for being unconstitutional. Homeless rights activists in particular do this kind of work. I looked into it when a security guard gave me shit for not having an ID on campus - when walking back from the pool. It is (or was) illegal in San Diego to not have at least $20 on you at all times. I think that might have been overturned as well, I can't remember.
>>In other news today, Sarah Palin admits that she used to have sneak over the border into Canada to use their health care system
Lots of Americans do this. When you offer free health care, usage goes up.
Uh, no... "crackers" never caught on because the term already has two meanings in our society - saltines, and rednecks. Neither one of which has much to do with hackers (maybe a lot of hackers are white? I dunno) which is why it never found much cognitive traction.
It always amuses me when some pedantic person tries to tell everyone to use the "correct" term: cracker (Who made it correct? ESR? The Hacker Dictionary?), when the term itself is a badly designed one.
Black Hat is a much better term.
Excellent post, dude, and very depressing.
During the internet boom days, the San Diego Supercomputer Center ran out of talented computer science people to hire. So I got shackled with a fucking bio major that had done some programming on the side, once or twice. He wasn't my boss, but acted like he was. I got the three-year project finished in three months. He was still trying to get his fucking one-page website for the project done by the end of the summer. I say this by way of background - he was absolutely convinced we had to use XML for absolutely everything, even for data that would only appear on a stream between my own client and server. It was realtime data, and XML would have exploded the size of it immensely. BUT IT WAS XML. So he'd yell at me (literally) that I needed to implement it, so that it would be "portable". (To whom? Why? What was the usage scenario? The data stream was already endian independant.) Fuck, I hated working with people like that.
And frameworks have just exploded that problem out like a bowel full of diarrhea over the entire industry. People think they know something (Frameworks are great!) and will stomp their tiny little feet until they get their way.
>>The "whiz-bang" algorithms are all in the libraries already. So why reinvent the wheel? And if they aren't, it's not usually your job to put them in.
I agree, to a certain extent. Why bother writing your own custom super-duper triple-hashed hash table inside of Java? Just use their built in hash tables, and your code will automagically work. I'd probably fire someone who tried to reinvent the wheel there... most of the time the built in hash tables will work faster and with (a lot) less bugs.
That said, if you don't understand how hash tables work at all, then you get Daily WTF fodder material. I've seen some really stupid shit done with hash tables, like trying to alphabetize it after every insert, which were obviously written by people that had no knowledge at all of what was happening inside of the black box.
So I'll stick by how UCSD teaches computer science - you write something once, yourself, and then from then on you try to use library function. Sorting algorithms, Data structures, etc.
>>Is this a medical concern, or are you trying to improve speed?
I hope its not a medical concern. Touch typing causes carpal tunnel, it doesn't cure it.
I am like the OP - I used to be a hunt and pecker (now I type by touch) and get around 90WPM on a couple online tests (give or take, the online tests vary a bit). I only use my index and ring fingers to type (thumb for the space bar) and so I end up using bigger muscles to type and don't overextend any of my small tendons to type. I once tried to teach myself touch typing, saw immediately how it would fuck up my tendons, and never went back.
Biomechanically speaking, it's not good to overextend a finger (like for an O) over and over. Much better to move the hand instead and keep the fingers in a power position.
Besides, 90WPM is plenty fast. That's faster than almost everybody, so I don't know what the OP is complaining about.
Article tag: goodenough
>>Now compare this to the reputation that Fry's or Tiger Direct had (don't know if either has improved). Would they get the benefit of the doubt this way?
Frys returns a lot of stuff to its stock without testing it. But they're always good about taking stuff back that doesn't work, so I prefer to do business with them over Best Buy, who will refuse to return purchases given half an excuse: "You've returned too many" - oh, I guess I won't be buying tech stuff for my company from you any more.
>>Few people have the time/materials to make such elaborate fakes to save ~$500.
For five hundred bucks, a lot of people would be willing to fake their own deaths.
>>Also, there is no option to return the game because it was taken out of the shrinkwrap before you bought it. Is that even legal?
They put a little paper tab on it to indicate that it's been unopened. I've returned games to gamestop before.
>>Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better.
Not me. I uninstalled TF2 with only 20 hours or so into it.
I still have the original Team Fortress installed (the one that Classic Team Fortress was based on), which is still superior to both.
>>NOBODY keeps game servers up for the entire lifetime of fans using the product.
Indeed. And sometimes you just shutdown your Madden servers after a year, so as to make your customers buy the new version of Madden!
Customer Service? Why, what's that?
The lack of dedicated servers was why I decided not to buy CoD:MW2... I still play Quakeworld after all these years, and that's only possible because fans keep servers running and a community together. You can't even play half the old online games for the PS3 any more, even if you wanted to, since the servers are no longer running.
>>While the public might be a good detective, it certainly is a bad judge.
Indeed. The whole Chinabounder fiasco is a good example of how witch hunts can go bad.
Essentially, Chinaboundder (an English guy) kept a blog about the Chinese women he slept with (all of age, consensual, etc.) A Chinese professor called out a witch hunt on him (I guess what the OP is calling a flesh search engine) and he had to go into hiding.
Because in China, you see, you don't talk about the women you sleep with. It's perfectly fine to have a mistress. You just don't talk about it.
>>As you say "Correlation is not causation."
Direct observation trumps correlation. When I'm trying to give a workshop to improve teachers' technical skills in the educational world, and the union blocks it, that's a direct hit to their ability to teach.
>>You say North Carolina made teachers unions illegal, let's see how North Carolina's schools are
Correlation is not causation.
And I speak from a more pragmatic point of view (as someone who works with hundreds of teachers every year) - teachers unions are almost entirely counterproductive to the process of education.
>>I'm sold! I'll go check the local Uwajimaya (Asian superstore) for some of this. I don't even remember Soju being in liquor stores.
The only downside, though, is that you're drinking soju.
>>As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Well, they said they'd have a fix within 24 hours, and here we are!
I actually laughed when I read that yesterday, since I knew exactly what their fix would be: doing nothing.
>>Actually efficiency/weatherizing has the fastest payback between doing nothing, installing alternative/renewable energy, and efficiency/weatherizing.
If it's a good deal, then people will do it themselves, and we don't need to drop billions into Obama's campaign donors pockets.
>>Banning unions, which runs afoul of the First Amendment's freedom to assemble, protest, and seek redress, will not improve education.
You'd be surprised, actually.
>>So, how "should" we feel about this?
Well, I for one trust that the government will only use their secret DNA database in an ethical and prudent fashion.
>>Really? Did you also subtract the subsidies coal and nuclear power get? Yes, they both get subsidized as well.
Yep. I've done the research on the costs of all power sources, with and without subsidies.
>>If I were President of the USA I'd veto all subsidies and let a freer market pick winners and losers.
Fair enough. But if I was Obama (i.e. a radical progressive), then I'd toss a billion dollars at this if the science is good. Would do more than all the money spent on the weatherizing boondoggle.
>>About the only way to fight the unions is by allowing school choice with charter and private schools getting matching funding.
Nah. Right to Work states like North Carolina (IIRC) made unionizing in critical sectors outright illegal. So no police unions, firefighter unions, and, yeah, teacher unions. Now getting this to pass in CA is another matter entirely. Arnold tried to break the power of unions back in... 2005? and failed, causing him to backpedal pretty substantially.
I don't know about cell phone towers, but the Cold War era microwave relay towers could kill birds if they got close enough
Currently, without subsidies, Solar PV is roughly 20x-100x more expensive than coal or nuclear power. If it is indeed twice as efficient and costs 10% of the current costs to fabricate, then solar might finally become cost competitive.
If I was Obama, I'd toss a billion or so at this scientist and see if he couldn't get mass production of it up and running.
I mean, as long as we're spending billionS keeping teachers temporarily employed (because their states can't afford them right now), right?