Having said that, my insurance premiums are already a work of creative and greedy minds fiction - I've been driving for twenty-five years and am way safer now than I was when I owned my first sporty car.
Your first sporty car was probably an old first sporty car. My first car was almost as old as I was, and regardless of whether it was a sporty car or not, it had a significantly lower value than my current car, which limited the maximum that insurance would ever have to pay for repairs because they could just write it off and cut you a smaller cheque.
Likely, you were probably on your parents' insurance as well (at least I was for my first car), meaning that in the eyes of the insurance company you weren't the primary driver of the car. I didn't get my *own* insurance until my 3rd car.
And finally, you probably didn't have the same coverage back then that you do now. I know that when I was 17 and paying for my first car, my liability coverage was the minimum required by law, and I had a $1000 deductible on collision and comprehensive in order to minimize the premiums. Today, my liability coverage is 8x what it was back then, and I have a $100 deductible on collision and comprehensive. Those make an enormous difference in my annual premiums.
Also, if you're living in the US, the kind of tort the insurance company would have to pay in the event that you get into an accident is significantly worse than it was 25 years ago, which is probably also a factor.
The only reason we don't hear more about it is because modern planes are (at the risk of grossly oversimplifying) basically flying themselves for much of their journey, so it's not as if they suddenly fall from the sky if someone dozes off for a couple of minutes mid-journey when there's nothing anywhere nearby.
I believe that every part of a commercial flight can now be done by autopilot, and it's just safety regulations that actually require a human pilot on the aircraft.
I also know that they have successfully tested remote flying of an aircraft through takeoff, flight, and landing... they posted about it on Slashdot a few weeks ago. That would also be an option for airlines to reduce the number of pilots required. *most* of a flight is autopilot to begin with, so having somebody there to take the controls for takeoff/landing could mean that a single pilot could handle multiple flights at the same time in this day and age....
And pretty much everywhere in the world other than the US.... Almost everywhere in the world with a democratic system has a multi-party system, and a minority government tends to be the most beneficial for the people (assuming you don't end up with a lame duck situation like the US has right now, though we have non-confidence votes to force an election at that point).
My problem is that once you cross the line from a policy of keeping religion out of the calendar system to one of keeping Christianity out, you are entering questionable territory that I for one would be reluctant to endorse in any way. Even if you frame it as polytheism in, monotheism out, I think that destroys any case that CE/BCE should be adopted on the grounds of avoiding religious bias.
That's a fair point. Ultimately, as long as everybody understands what you're talking about, does it really matter? It makes a bit more sense when talking about the Chinese explorers in the 14th century CE, for example, because they weren't Christian and weren't European, but if you say "AD" I don't really object to it. I understand what's being said. I think in an academic context it's mostly about avoiding Euro-centric thinking, rather than avoiding xian-centric thinking, though the reasoning does still come from the language as described.
You are right about the day names, and even the month names -- January and March at least... the rest come from numerical order. July and August were named after Roman emperors, and were inserted in the middle of the calendar, explaining why September (7th month) is actually the 9th month.;) That said, we don't usually bother to say that the Battle of Hastings occurred on a Tuesday when talking about the event.
Most of the time, the CE/AD thing is left out by ellipsis anyway.:) If I say I was born in 1981, I don't think anybody reading this is going to think I'm almost 4000 years old.
I don't personally like AD because it's claiming adherence to a god I don't like. I prefer CE. I don't pretend it's not using the same date as the start of the era, in fact it's by design so that systems don't need to be updated. Nobody's alive to remember the fiasco when the switch over to the Julian calendar happened, or when the French tried introducing a metric calendar, but it's a pain in the butt that is to be avoided. "CE" is intended to keep the same calendar while removing the fealty to a god that you may not like. Alternative systems have been proposed, and are even in use elsewhere in the world (see the Chinese calendar, for example), but they tend not to gain traction because of the math involved in converting dates. Even the Chinese are still using the Julian calendar for day to day transactions.
It's different from how Friday refers to Freya, though... nobody, not even the germannic tribes the name comes from, says or said that Freya is the only goddess out there, or that she held dominion over everything, but when you refer to it as "Anno Domini", you are explicitly saying that it's a year of the Lord, and that all years are such. About the closest to a "lord" you get is Odin, with Wednesday, but even that isn't the same, because Wednesday is one of many days in the week. (and not even the most important, according to most of us... that'd be either Freya or Saturn's day...;))
Why is it that self (and loudly) proclaimed atheists seem to bitch and moan about religion more than the actual religious nutjobs do? Why do you feel the need to inject your personal opinion into a discussion about a completely unrelated subject in a way thats clearly intended to turn the discussion into a flame war?
Why is it you assume I'm an atheist? Just because I don't like the Christian god does not mean that I don't have an existing relationship with some other god or gods, or some other form of spirituality. I don't believe I said one way or the other what my own religious beliefs were, beyond saying that I didn't really like the Christian god.
Your assumption kind of proves my point, btw... half the world's population does not believe in or adhere to the Abrahamic God. You automatically assume that because I'm in that half of the world's population, I must be an atheist. That kind of Christian-centric thinking is exactly why "AD" has fallen into disuse. It may surprise you to discover this, but there are many religions in the world today that either don't have Yahweh as part of their pantheon, or make allowance for his existence as one of many gods to pick and choose from. There's even a few religions where gods exist but are not something to be worshiped or followed. There are billions of people in the world who follow one of these other paths without being an atheist.
The rest of your post is completely irrelevant, actually... considering that at no point have I actually said that I'm an atheist. In fact, I'm not. I'd go into detail about my own beliefs but I don't think I have anything to prove to you that hasn't already been said.
AD = CE. CE expands as Common Era, and is generally more accepted in a global context, because it doesn't reference a god you may not believe in or adhere to. More than half the world's population does not follow an Abrahamic religion. The dates are exactly the same, just a different name.
You did know that AD means "Anno Domini", right? In English, that's "the year of our Lord". If you want to claim adherence to the Christain God, that's fine. You have that right. But don't expect me to pay lip service to a God that, to me, comes off as a petty, cliquish and vindictive sort, according to your own holy books.
Telegraph is probably cheaper than SMS.. !60 cents per message! Canada to US with Telus.
Weird. It's included in the base cost of my plan with Koodo, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telus. Unlimited international texting. And I've had months where I sent over 3000 international texts (not just to the US... to friends/family all over Europe, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa) without seeing it show up on my bill, so I can vouch for it actually being international, and for "unlimited" being at the very least an arbitrarily large number that's beyond what I would consider heavy usage.
You might want to look at this: http://mobility.telus.com/en/ON/mobile_messaging/int_mess.shtml?INTCMP=ILCq4srvesmsg2 $10/mo as an addon gets you unlimited international texting with Telus... considering that all of their current plans currently have unlimited domestic texting already, not a bad deal, I suppose. Perhaps you need to change to a current plan offering? I know a few people who got dinged when Koodo started the unlimited domestic long distance included thing, because they were on a grandfathered plan and didn't change over before they started making LD calls....
That would have been the update to Google Navigate a few months ago that showed traffic congestion, wouldn't it? It didn't used to do that... I've found it quite useful for the most part, on the occasion that I've actually needed to use navigate.
Someone who believes that they could manage that line of business profitably.
If they moved more towards interoperability with Windows as a platform, then they'd be much more profitable, IMO. Steam's heading in that direction with Steambox -- you can buy a game on Steam and it'll play on both your PC and your Steambox, and you can stream/play games from your PC on the TV screen through Steambox's streaming functionality.
If XBox had binary compatibility with Windows, and the ability to play Windows games on your console (through streaming as Steam's doing, or directly), it'd make the platform much more saleable. They really dropped the ball, not integrating it more heavily into the Windows environment when they had the chance.
There's others, that was just the first link when I hit Google for "insulin and inflammation". The short version is that insulin is also involved in the immune response and inflammation, and that the current theory for heart disease (in some quarters) is that it's actually an inflammation-caused disease.
Insulin resistance causes the body to make more insulin, which is why it's associated with heart disease.
You don't get to call others "nuts" when you promote LCHF diets which are unproven to be safe and totally unnatural.
I can suggest a few documentaries for you if you like... to begin with, Fat Head... it was still on Netflix last time I checked it, and most of the actual medical sources I could cite are in his bibliography.
Carbs are the energy we use, don't blame others if you eat more than you use up.
Hoo-boy... not that I really wanted to get pulled into this particular argument, but I may as well --- 1 - Carbs are *not* the energy we use... at least, not carbs as presented in foods. Yes, glucose, which is what we actually use, is a complex carbohydrate, but most of the carbs you eat are in a different form. At its most basic, sucrose, but the majority of the carbs you consume are actually fibres and starches. Your body has to expend energy to convert these to the glucose your muscles and organs can actually use, which is the same thing it does to proteins and fats. The difference is that carbs have a much higher glycemic index, meaning that it takes less energy to be converted to glucose, and it happens faster than it does with fats or proteins. 2 - Consuming something with a high glycemic index triggers a sudden increase in blood glucose levels, which triggers insulin. Insulin regulates the glucose level by causing fat cells to start storing energy. 3 - Fats have amino acids and other nutrients in them that carbs don't, and which your body needs to survive.. The reason they tend to be "worse" is because they tend to be much more calorie dense than carbs, but that's not always the case. In short, you can consume more volume of carbs than you can fats in order to get the same number of calories. 4 - Overeating and lack of exercise is the main reason people are overweight, but it's not as simple as a calculation between calories in and calories out. If you take the straight calories in/calories out calculation, you'll find that almost nobody loses weight as quickly as the numbers say they're supposed to, because of many different factors, including the body tricking itself into starvation mode. Sometimes, you will actually lose weight faster by increasing your calorie input, and increasing the amount of exercise you get. 5 - BMI is a bullshit calculation. It was originally intended to track population trends among French farmers, 200 years ago. In the intervening years, nutrition has improved significantly, and with that, peoples' general average weight has gone up. Quite aside from that, something intended to track population trends should *never* be used as a measure of an individual's health. It's possible to be in the "ideal" bracket according to BMI and be extremely unhealthy, and it's possible to be in the "obese" bracket according to BMI, and be in perfect health. 6 - Low carb-high fat was the prevailing wisdom in the 70's, before the US FDA's food guide came out. The above-linked documentary has a very good discussion of how the food guide we know today came about, but in brief, it was a fad diet promoted by a doctor in the 50's. In the 70's when the food guide came out, it was mostly a political decision, and the fad diet was used as justification for a food guide that was mostly intended to promote American grain and corn farmers, who were a very major lobbying body. It's worth noting that fat has certain amino acids in it that don't exist in carbs which the brain requires to function properly, and the doctor who came up with the fad diet in question ended up committing suicide due to depression. That aside, however, the committee in the 70's that came up with the food guide went through hundreds of doctors before they came up with one who would say what they wanted them to say -- most of the doctors at the time thought high carb/low fat was an idiotic idea. 7 - Perhaps the most damning, the current obesity epidemic started just a couple of years after they changed the
Until the Web at large pulls its head out of its collective ass, and gives up on Flash completely in favour of HTML5, you're at a significant disadvantage for certain types of media/content. With Flash support deprecated on Linux, and only getting security updates at this point, it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the only way to view Flash content on that platform, unless Firefox (and other browsers) decides to support Pepper.
Fortunately, Linux isn't included in this particular announcement, but how long until they decide it's a good idea and extend it to Linux and Mac?
The original theory, as promoted by the same health nuts that are trying to get it banned now, is that because your body can't digest it, it was better than consuming actual fat. It came out of the "fat = bad, carbs = good" mentality from the 70's, 80's, and 90's. That mantra was repeated so much that today it's heresy to even suggest that fat is actually good for you, even though carbs, and the associated insulin response, have been linked with increased risk of heart disease.
Hint: "Armed security officers" can also be untrained overpaid mouthbreathers with power trip issues.
Not sure how things go in the states, but in this country, security guards have strict licensing requirements to be allowed to carry a firearm. That still doesn't stop all of the mouthbreathers from getting in, but the overwhelming majority of them are not idiots around here. Of course, we have sane gun control laws, too...
To be fair, the number of cover versions of songs that I like as much as or better than the original is pretty short... that's mostly because of nostalgia than anything else. I do agree that cover songs have artistic merit, and every now and then the cover is *way* better than the original.
Or if you prefer a more serious example... Though the distinction between that and the original is less stark... part of what makes that particular performance special is that it's actually a duet with the original artist....
Would you prefer the committee to sing their own songs or the average singer composing their own songs?
I don't see much advantage in having the composer and the singer being the same person. I care about the final product.
Since the advent of autotune, most pop acts are not chosen for their ability to sing, they're chosen for their ability to look pretty. There aren't a lot of singer/songwriters in *that* genre, but once you get out of it, you'll find the majority of the *really* good stuff is performed by the same person or people who wrote it: performances are more visceral when the performer has an emotional connection with what they're playing.
So you can have your fake plastic people performing fake plastic songs. Personally, I'll avoid the pop music genre, and stick with artists who actually deserve the name.
It seems even more likely that until the thing actually works and the power requirements are met, the laser could be used to paint the target for other stand-off weapons.
Haven't they been doing that for years, though? I would have thought that a targetting laser would have been part of the standard arsenal on any drone for years by now, because they're capable of carrying laser-guided missiles.
If armed drones are used domestically against civilians, kill the drone operator's and their superior's families & children as well in the most horrid & excruciating ways possible. Ideally, kill the families/children right in front of said domestic armed-drone operators & superiors before they die, and then publicly release videos of their horrific deaths as a disincentive for future domestic armed-drone use against civilians.
That's a good way to make a martyr and galvanize their resolve, actually.... not a very good deterrent, in the same way that capital punishment and 3 strikes laws actually increase the risk of crime because a person on their third strike has nothing to lose.
Modern Progressivism & Liberalism: Ideas so good they must be mandatory to function.
So... the above was your idea of progressivism and liberalism?
I find that a grasp of Unix, awk, sed, bash scripting, and python goes a long way. People in Finance and HR complain about the tasks they do taking 3 days... and I look at them messing with data, spend 10 minutes writing an Awk script, run their data through it, and hand it back. This applies all over the place: my minor programming ability (I am not a programmer) enables me to bypass a lot of work.
You really shouldn't have needed to do that... Yes, awk was the tool you chose to use to manipulate the data, but whichever tool the finance/HR people were using should have had the necessary functions as well. That's not a question of them needing to learn programming, that's a question of them not having bothered to learn the tools they're using for their job.
You do *not* need to learn how to code to use computers. Yes, I have the advantage in that I was exposed to computers/programming when I was 4 years old, but my older brother couldn't be bothered with any of that crap, and he's perfectly capable of using computers to complete his job as well. The amount of coding I do on a day to day basis is nearly zero.
It will adversely affect the virtual machine I use to watch Netflix. That's about it... I have a legal license for XP and run it in a VM. I no longer have a valid license for 7, and would not touch 8 with a 10-foot pole, even if you paid me to do it. But I still need something modern to support Windows XP, because that's how I access Netflix from my desktop PC.
Admittedly, with the number of devices I have with native Netflix clients (tablet, phone, smart TV, game consoles, etc.), that will become less of a problem, but I do still find time/reason to watch it on the desktop, and the Linux-native attempts do not work very well in my experience.
Actually, can answer the second question quite easily -- When they were filming the original film, they hadn't decided that Jabba would be a giant space slug yet, and used a human stand-in. The idea was that when they decided what he'd be, they could edit the alien in during post production.
They included a copy of the original footage on a LucasArts bundle CD of the early LA StarWars games that I picked up some time around 1997, or so... along with film interview with Lucas explaining it. I still have the CD somewhere, probably in storage at my parents' place.
Slashdot Mirror
Having said that, my insurance premiums are already a work of creative and greedy minds fiction - I've been driving for twenty-five years and am way safer now than I was when I owned my first sporty car.
Your first sporty car was probably an old first sporty car. My first car was almost as old as I was, and regardless of whether it was a sporty car or not, it had a significantly lower value than my current car, which limited the maximum that insurance would ever have to pay for repairs because they could just write it off and cut you a smaller cheque.
Likely, you were probably on your parents' insurance as well (at least I was for my first car), meaning that in the eyes of the insurance company you weren't the primary driver of the car. I didn't get my *own* insurance until my 3rd car.
And finally, you probably didn't have the same coverage back then that you do now. I know that when I was 17 and paying for my first car, my liability coverage was the minimum required by law, and I had a $1000 deductible on collision and comprehensive in order to minimize the premiums. Today, my liability coverage is 8x what it was back then, and I have a $100 deductible on collision and comprehensive. Those make an enormous difference in my annual premiums.
Also, if you're living in the US, the kind of tort the insurance company would have to pay in the event that you get into an accident is significantly worse than it was 25 years ago, which is probably also a factor.
The only reason we don't hear more about it is because modern planes are (at the risk of grossly oversimplifying) basically flying themselves for much of their journey, so it's not as if they suddenly fall from the sky if someone dozes off for a couple of minutes mid-journey when there's nothing anywhere nearby.
I believe that every part of a commercial flight can now be done by autopilot, and it's just safety regulations that actually require a human pilot on the aircraft.
I also know that they have successfully tested remote flying of an aircraft through takeoff, flight, and landing... they posted about it on Slashdot a few weeks ago. That would also be an option for airlines to reduce the number of pilots required. *most* of a flight is autopilot to begin with, so having somebody there to take the controls for takeoff/landing could mean that a single pilot could handle multiple flights at the same time in this day and age....
And pretty much everywhere in the world other than the US.... Almost everywhere in the world with a democratic system has a multi-party system, and a minority government tends to be the most beneficial for the people (assuming you don't end up with a lame duck situation like the US has right now, though we have non-confidence votes to force an election at that point).
Clearly they're on to our plan to invade the US and reclaim Maine and the Alaska panhandle....
Yes yes... mileage yadda yadda. How long until Top Gear wraps it around a tree?
My problem is that once you cross the line from a policy of keeping religion out of the calendar system to one of keeping Christianity out, you are entering questionable territory that I for one would be reluctant to endorse in any way. Even if you frame it as polytheism in, monotheism out, I think that destroys any case that CE/BCE should be adopted on the grounds of avoiding religious bias.
That's a fair point. Ultimately, as long as everybody understands what you're talking about, does it really matter? It makes a bit more sense when talking about the Chinese explorers in the 14th century CE, for example, because they weren't Christian and weren't European, but if you say "AD" I don't really object to it. I understand what's being said. I think in an academic context it's mostly about avoiding Euro-centric thinking, rather than avoiding xian-centric thinking, though the reasoning does still come from the language as described.
You are right about the day names, and even the month names -- January and March at least... the rest come from numerical order. July and August were named after Roman emperors, and were inserted in the middle of the calendar, explaining why September (7th month) is actually the 9th month. ;) That said, we don't usually bother to say that the Battle of Hastings occurred on a Tuesday when talking about the event.
Most of the time, the CE/AD thing is left out by ellipsis anyway. :) If I say I was born in 1981, I don't think anybody reading this is going to think I'm almost 4000 years old.
I'm not a purely secular person. :)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4428969&cid=45383921
I don't personally like AD because it's claiming adherence to a god I don't like. I prefer CE. I don't pretend it's not using the same date as the start of the era, in fact it's by design so that systems don't need to be updated. Nobody's alive to remember the fiasco when the switch over to the Julian calendar happened, or when the French tried introducing a metric calendar, but it's a pain in the butt that is to be avoided. "CE" is intended to keep the same calendar while removing the fealty to a god that you may not like. Alternative systems have been proposed, and are even in use elsewhere in the world (see the Chinese calendar, for example), but they tend not to gain traction because of the math involved in converting dates. Even the Chinese are still using the Julian calendar for day to day transactions.
It's different from how Friday refers to Freya, though... nobody, not even the germannic tribes the name comes from, says or said that Freya is the only goddess out there, or that she held dominion over everything, but when you refer to it as "Anno Domini", you are explicitly saying that it's a year of the Lord, and that all years are such. About the closest to a "lord" you get is Odin, with Wednesday, but even that isn't the same, because Wednesday is one of many days in the week. (and not even the most important, according to most of us... that'd be either Freya or Saturn's day... ;))
Why is it that self (and loudly) proclaimed atheists seem to bitch and moan about religion more than the actual religious nutjobs do? Why do you feel the need to inject your personal opinion into a discussion about a completely unrelated subject in a way thats clearly intended to turn the discussion into a flame war?
Why is it you assume I'm an atheist? Just because I don't like the Christian god does not mean that I don't have an existing relationship with some other god or gods, or some other form of spirituality. I don't believe I said one way or the other what my own religious beliefs were, beyond saying that I didn't really like the Christian god.
Your assumption kind of proves my point, btw... half the world's population does not believe in or adhere to the Abrahamic God. You automatically assume that because I'm in that half of the world's population, I must be an atheist. That kind of Christian-centric thinking is exactly why "AD" has fallen into disuse. It may surprise you to discover this, but there are many religions in the world today that either don't have Yahweh as part of their pantheon, or make allowance for his existence as one of many gods to pick and choose from. There's even a few religions where gods exist but are not something to be worshiped or followed. There are billions of people in the world who follow one of these other paths without being an atheist.
The rest of your post is completely irrelevant, actually... considering that at no point have I actually said that I'm an atheist. In fact, I'm not. I'd go into detail about my own beliefs but I don't think I have anything to prove to you that hasn't already been said.
AD = CE. CE expands as Common Era, and is generally more accepted in a global context, because it doesn't reference a god you may not believe in or adhere to. More than half the world's population does not follow an Abrahamic religion. The dates are exactly the same, just a different name.
You did know that AD means "Anno Domini", right? In English, that's "the year of our Lord". If you want to claim adherence to the Christain God, that's fine. You have that right. But don't expect me to pay lip service to a God that, to me, comes off as a petty, cliquish and vindictive sort, according to your own holy books.
Telegraph is probably cheaper than SMS.. !60 cents per message! Canada to US with Telus.
Weird. It's included in the base cost of my plan with Koodo, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telus. Unlimited international texting. And I've had months where I sent over 3000 international texts (not just to the US... to friends/family all over Europe, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa) without seeing it show up on my bill, so I can vouch for it actually being international, and for "unlimited" being at the very least an arbitrarily large number that's beyond what I would consider heavy usage.
You might want to look at this: http://mobility.telus.com/en/ON/mobile_messaging/int_mess.shtml?INTCMP=ILCq4srvesmsg2
$10/mo as an addon gets you unlimited international texting with Telus... considering that all of their current plans currently have unlimited domestic texting already, not a bad deal, I suppose. Perhaps you need to change to a current plan offering? I know a few people who got dinged when Koodo started the unlimited domestic long distance included thing, because they were on a grandfathered plan and didn't change over before they started making LD calls....
That would have been the update to Google Navigate a few months ago that showed traffic congestion, wouldn't it? It didn't used to do that... I've found it quite useful for the most part, on the occasion that I've actually needed to use navigate.
Someone who believes that they could manage that line of business profitably.
If they moved more towards interoperability with Windows as a platform, then they'd be much more profitable, IMO. Steam's heading in that direction with Steambox -- you can buy a game on Steam and it'll play on both your PC and your Steambox, and you can stream/play games from your PC on the TV screen through Steambox's streaming functionality.
If XBox had binary compatibility with Windows, and the ability to play Windows games on your console (through streaming as Steam's doing, or directly), it'd make the platform much more saleable. They really dropped the ball, not integrating it more heavily into the Windows environment when they had the chance.
http://medicine.buffalo.edu/news_and_events/news.host.html/content/shared/smbs/news/2013/06/inflammation-insulin-2581.detail.html
There's others, that was just the first link when I hit Google for "insulin and inflammation". The short version is that insulin is also involved in the immune response and inflammation, and that the current theory for heart disease (in some quarters) is that it's actually an inflammation-caused disease.
Insulin resistance causes the body to make more insulin, which is why it's associated with heart disease.
You don't get to call others "nuts" when you promote LCHF diets which are unproven to be safe and totally unnatural.
I can suggest a few documentaries for you if you like... to begin with, Fat Head... it was still on Netflix last time I checked it, and most of the actual medical sources I could cite are in his bibliography.
Carbs are the energy we use, don't blame others if you eat more than you use up.
Hoo-boy... not that I really wanted to get pulled into this particular argument, but I may as well ---
1 - Carbs are *not* the energy we use... at least, not carbs as presented in foods. Yes, glucose, which is what we actually use, is a complex carbohydrate, but most of the carbs you eat are in a different form. At its most basic, sucrose, but the majority of the carbs you consume are actually fibres and starches. Your body has to expend energy to convert these to the glucose your muscles and organs can actually use, which is the same thing it does to proteins and fats. The difference is that carbs have a much higher glycemic index, meaning that it takes less energy to be converted to glucose, and it happens faster than it does with fats or proteins.
2 - Consuming something with a high glycemic index triggers a sudden increase in blood glucose levels, which triggers insulin. Insulin regulates the glucose level by causing fat cells to start storing energy.
3 - Fats have amino acids and other nutrients in them that carbs don't, and which your body needs to survive.. The reason they tend to be "worse" is because they tend to be much more calorie dense than carbs, but that's not always the case. In short, you can consume more volume of carbs than you can fats in order to get the same number of calories.
4 - Overeating and lack of exercise is the main reason people are overweight, but it's not as simple as a calculation between calories in and calories out. If you take the straight calories in/calories out calculation, you'll find that almost nobody loses weight as quickly as the numbers say they're supposed to, because of many different factors, including the body tricking itself into starvation mode. Sometimes, you will actually lose weight faster by increasing your calorie input, and increasing the amount of exercise you get.
5 - BMI is a bullshit calculation. It was originally intended to track population trends among French farmers, 200 years ago. In the intervening years, nutrition has improved significantly, and with that, peoples' general average weight has gone up. Quite aside from that, something intended to track population trends should *never* be used as a measure of an individual's health. It's possible to be in the "ideal" bracket according to BMI and be extremely unhealthy, and it's possible to be in the "obese" bracket according to BMI, and be in perfect health.
6 - Low carb-high fat was the prevailing wisdom in the 70's, before the US FDA's food guide came out. The above-linked documentary has a very good discussion of how the food guide we know today came about, but in brief, it was a fad diet promoted by a doctor in the 50's. In the 70's when the food guide came out, it was mostly a political decision, and the fad diet was used as justification for a food guide that was mostly intended to promote American grain and corn farmers, who were a very major lobbying body. It's worth noting that fat has certain amino acids in it that don't exist in carbs which the brain requires to function properly, and the doctor who came up with the fad diet in question ended up committing suicide due to depression. That aside, however, the committee in the 70's that came up with the food guide went through hundreds of doctors before they came up with one who would say what they wanted them to say -- most of the doctors at the time thought high carb/low fat was an idiotic idea.
7 - Perhaps the most damning, the current obesity epidemic started just a couple of years after they changed the
How's Pepper support on Firefox coming?
Until the Web at large pulls its head out of its collective ass, and gives up on Flash completely in favour of HTML5, you're at a significant disadvantage for certain types of media/content. With Flash support deprecated on Linux, and only getting security updates at this point, it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the only way to view Flash content on that platform, unless Firefox (and other browsers) decides to support Pepper.
Fortunately, Linux isn't included in this particular announcement, but how long until they decide it's a good idea and extend it to Linux and Mac?
The original theory, as promoted by the same health nuts that are trying to get it banned now, is that because your body can't digest it, it was better than consuming actual fat. It came out of the "fat = bad, carbs = good" mentality from the 70's, 80's, and 90's. That mantra was repeated so much that today it's heresy to even suggest that fat is actually good for you, even though carbs, and the associated insulin response, have been linked with increased risk of heart disease.
Hint: "Armed security officers" can also be untrained overpaid mouthbreathers with power trip issues.
Not sure how things go in the states, but in this country, security guards have strict licensing requirements to be allowed to carry a firearm. That still doesn't stop all of the mouthbreathers from getting in, but the overwhelming majority of them are not idiots around here. Of course, we have sane gun control laws, too...
To be fair, the number of cover versions of songs that I like as much as or better than the original is pretty short... that's mostly because of nostalgia than anything else. I do agree that cover songs have artistic merit, and every now and then the cover is *way* better than the original.
Or if you prefer a more serious example... Though the distinction between that and the original is less stark... part of what makes that particular performance special is that it's actually a duet with the original artist....
Since music was involved, would that make him a smooth criminal?
Would you prefer the committee to sing their own songs or the average singer composing their own songs?
I don't see much advantage in having the composer and the singer being the same person. I care about the final product.
Since the advent of autotune, most pop acts are not chosen for their ability to sing, they're chosen for their ability to look pretty. There aren't a lot of singer/songwriters in *that* genre, but once you get out of it, you'll find the majority of the *really* good stuff is performed by the same person or people who wrote it: performances are more visceral when the performer has an emotional connection with what they're playing.
So you can have your fake plastic people performing fake plastic songs. Personally, I'll avoid the pop music genre, and stick with artists who actually deserve the name.
It seems even more likely that until the thing actually works and the power requirements are met, the laser could be used to paint the target for other stand-off weapons.
Haven't they been doing that for years, though? I would have thought that a targetting laser would have been part of the standard arsenal on any drone for years by now, because they're capable of carrying laser-guided missiles.
If armed drones are used domestically against civilians, kill the drone operator's and their superior's families & children as well in the most horrid & excruciating ways possible. Ideally, kill the families/children right in front of said domestic armed-drone operators & superiors before they die, and then publicly release videos of their horrific deaths as a disincentive for future domestic armed-drone use against civilians.
That's a good way to make a martyr and galvanize their resolve, actually.... not a very good deterrent, in the same way that capital punishment and 3 strikes laws actually increase the risk of crime because a person on their third strike has nothing to lose.
Modern Progressivism & Liberalism: Ideas so good they must be mandatory to function.
So... the above was your idea of progressivism and liberalism?
I find that a grasp of Unix, awk, sed, bash scripting, and python goes a long way. People in Finance and HR complain about the tasks they do taking 3 days... and I look at them messing with data, spend 10 minutes writing an Awk script, run their data through it, and hand it back. This applies all over the place: my minor programming ability (I am not a programmer) enables me to bypass a lot of work.
You really shouldn't have needed to do that... Yes, awk was the tool you chose to use to manipulate the data, but whichever tool the finance/HR people were using should have had the necessary functions as well. That's not a question of them needing to learn programming, that's a question of them not having bothered to learn the tools they're using for their job.
You do *not* need to learn how to code to use computers. Yes, I have the advantage in that I was exposed to computers/programming when I was 4 years old, but my older brother couldn't be bothered with any of that crap, and he's perfectly capable of using computers to complete his job as well. The amount of coding I do on a day to day basis is nearly zero.
It will adversely affect the virtual machine I use to watch Netflix. That's about it... I have a legal license for XP and run it in a VM. I no longer have a valid license for 7, and would not touch 8 with a 10-foot pole, even if you paid me to do it. But I still need something modern to support Windows XP, because that's how I access Netflix from my desktop PC.
Admittedly, with the number of devices I have with native Netflix clients (tablet, phone, smart TV, game consoles, etc.), that will become less of a problem, but I do still find time/reason to watch it on the desktop, and the Linux-native attempts do not work very well in my experience.
Actually, can answer the second question quite easily -- When they were filming the original film, they hadn't decided that Jabba would be a giant space slug yet, and used a human stand-in. The idea was that when they decided what he'd be, they could edit the alien in during post production.
They included a copy of the original footage on a LucasArts bundle CD of the early LA StarWars games that I picked up some time around 1997, or so... along with film interview with Lucas explaining it. I still have the CD somewhere, probably in storage at my parents' place.