It just makes it easier to justify the time, vs doing more mundane, but 'necessary' stuff. (like mowing the lawn or washing the dishes)
It's unfortunate you (and I'm sure many others) feel that way. As an adult, we need time to relax and 'play' every bit as much as kids do. The idea that we should simply stop when we get older, and instead focus strictly on more 'necessary' stuff is just plain silly. The dishes will still be there in an hour. The lawn can be mowed tomorrow. Take a little time off and *play*, people! It's good for you! Maybe if more people did this, we wouldn't hear so much about things like road rage.
I would imagine that a lot of New England is like that, perhapse some points to the west of that, Canada, Alasaka, etc.
Speaking as a citizen of Edmonton Alberta, Canada, our northern-most major city, I can assure you that and decent driver can get by quite happily with a FWD sedan in virtually all weather conditions around here. The only people who own trucks or SUVs and *actually* need them are: farmers and ranchers, or recreational offroaders. And rest assured, they are very much the minority of truck and SUV drivers around these parts.
Not that I expect to dissuade you from the (frankly silly) idea that you need your monstrous gas guzzler. I'm sure you'll find *some* reason to justify your purchase... it's something the human brain excels at.
Well, granted, it was a zoomed out view, so I don't know the true size of the ballots, but I found it surprisingly easy for my eye to follow the wrong arrow and land on the wrong circle. Then again, I'd be exceedingly careful when actually voting. Still, if the tradeoff is between saving space and making the ballot ridiculously easy to use, I'd go for the latter.
Incidentally, there is one problem with using biodiesel in particular, though this really applies to any IC-style engine: particulates, and nitrous and sulphurous oxides. Unlike CO2, these compounds are not recycled, and so there's a net gain in atmospheric concentrations. Moreover, it is these compounds which directly contribute to smog, acid rain, etc.
Butterfly ballots are a perfect example. Each ballot has a hole, each hole has an arrow next to it. Each arrow indicates which names go with that hole. It's no more difficult to understand a butterfly ballot than any other grid of information.
Unfortunately, because of the alternating layout and the arrows switching sides, it could be easy to misread where an arrow is pointing. Honestly, why the hell isn't that a *single* column with arrows? Are they deliberately trying to make things more complicated than is strictly *necessary*?
The parent poster's point was that kids (especially pre-teens) tend to eat what they're in the habit of eating, and will continue that even when away from home, because it tastes familiar and therefore good.
And my point is that that's a baseless assumption which may not actually be true, thanks to peer pressure, advertisements, etc, etc.
Incidentally, I think this assumption is probably true as kids enter adulthood. I just think it's damned naive to think that little Johnny will by a pack of carrots instead of the french fries all his friends are getting just because that's what he's used to at home.
If you eat yourself (or drink yourself, or dope yourself, or sloth yourself, etc) to death, that's a completely preventable situation, and I'm admittedly not very sympathetic to this "plight".
I see you completely missed my point. The guy eating himself to death raises his health risk, and causes *everyone's* insurance premiums to rise. This is the way insurance works. If a large percentage of people in your insurance pool are high risk, but you're not, *you* still pay higher rates to cover their risk.
Second, you ignore the fact that many people without healthcare insurance are in that situation out of choice.
a) this isn't a "fact". This is an opinion. b) it's a non-sequitor. The point is that rates will rise and put healthcare out of reach of people who can currently afford it. It will also, BTW, make it unaffordable for small business, which (as you rightly point out) often (though, less and less, thanks to... rising insurance costs) help cover the healthcare costs for their employees, meaning even *more* people could go without insurance.
Third, insurance rates probably would go up. But the problem with insurance rates is largely the fact that for most people, insurance is an employer-provided benefit.... When people's unhealthy habits hit them in the pocketbook, they'll adjust. And if they don't, they deserve what they get.
Again, you're completely missing the point. This isn't about an unhealthy person paying a higher rate because of their habits. This is about *you* paying a higher rate because of their habits, because the overall risk in the insured group is higher.
Then again, maybe you just don't understand how insurance actually works...
Do you have statistics? References? Facts of any kind? Anything but your own anecdotes and baseless statements rooted in unhealthy paranoia? No?
Well, here, let me help you out. Of course, I expect you'll choose to deny the hard science that's been done which demonstrates that childhood obesity is a) a significant health problem and b) on the rise at an alarming rate, because it doesn't fit your particular world view. But, remember, the difference between you and them is: they have facts on their side. You don't.
Keep in mind, your metabolism is going to crash down sometime in the next 3-4 years. You can keep eating the exact same foods as you do now, and you'll suddenly start gaining weight on it.
This is certainly true, which is why physical education is so vitally important for children, despite being woefully neglected, as regular exercise is the only way to avoid this particular trap. Personally, I cycle commute (an hour and a half a day), which gives me the freedom to eat a relatively unrestricted diet without risk of weight gain. The same can't be said for many of my peers.
Ha ha, I'm totally with you! I recently re-discovered my love of the PB&J sandwich... hell, my mouth is watering right now just thinking about it! There's nothing like a nice, fresh multigrain bread (must be nice and soft), crunchy peanut butter, and your favorite jam (in my case, strawberry). But, IMHO, you *must* have the PB on both pieces of bread. Otherwise, the jam soaks into the bread, and that's just no good.;)
Yeah, instead you have insurance programs (since healthcare is otherwise unaffordable to anyone but the very rich), which operate by spreading the risk among the insured group. Now, imagine 50% of your insured group are massively overweight or obese. You're telling me insurance rates won't go up? And now, as rates go up, more and more people can't get insurance, thus increasing the number of people who have no healthcare whatsoever. Brilliant!
And I haven't even touched on the potential effects that obesity has on other aspects of society. Something tells me that having a large obese population is going to have an adverse effect on overall productivity.
In the end you'll find that they will end up looking for similar foods when they are out of the house too.
No, they won't. They'll see what their friends are eating, or that product they saw advertisted during their favourite TV show. Honestly, the idea that children, who are inherently thoughtless and impulsive, will just magically eat healthy because that's all they have at home is, frankly, laughable.
People forget that some kids are not instantly assholes, they all have hissy fits though. If you give them enough wiggle room they'll learn the lessons they need to, but they'll also behave politely and correctly as long as you make sure they know to do this before they become their own person (aka birth to 7-8 year olds).
People also forget that there's an element of nature, here. Some kids, faced with this kind of freedom, flourish. Others turn into obese little bastards. To assume your one sample is representative is, to say the least, oversimplifying the situation.
I'm sorry, it is NOT up to the lunch lady to determine what my kids eat. If I am that concerned about what my children eat at school, I'll make it myself! At one school they attended, this is exactly what I did. "Some parents don't have time for that!", you might say... Bullshit. If you have the time to screw around and have kids, you MAKE THE DAMN TIME to raise them. It's called parenting.
Riight... so if people don't parent exactly the way you do, it's bad parenting?
Here's a hint: this system is a tool. Like v-chips and god knows what else, this is a mechanism which parents may *choose* to use in order to have some control over what their children eat because, guess what, children are impulsive and stupid, not to mention constantly manipulated by advertisements (BTW, what makes you think your kids weren't tossing your lovely packed lunches and buying french fries instead? Oh, right, *your* little carpet monkeys are perfect angels, right?). You don't like it? Great, don't use it. But that doesn't make the *tool* any less useful for those who choose to use it.
Face it, childhood obesity is a *massive* problem in the United States. If this means a bunch of "lazy" parents can prevent obesity in their children, I say *yes please*. Because otherwise, the US is going to be hit with a healthcare crisis in 20 or 30 years the likes of which it has *never* seen before.
The DS firmware has multiple versions, however updating is transparent to the user, and occurs when they fire up a game with the firmware update on it.
Uhh... sorry, but this is *totally* wrong. The DS firmware is different on later hardware revisions, however it is impossible to transparently update the firmware on an existing DS, because the region of the EEPROM containing the firmware checksum can't be written to without shorting the SL1 pad on the board.
The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.
The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.
More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.
Actually, they don't perform remote firmware upgrades because they *can't*. The first 512 bytes or so of the firmware EEPROM simply can't be written to without shorting a pad on the circuit board. Moreover, the checksum for the firmware is located, yup, you guessed it, in the protected region. Thus, it is simply impossible to upgrade the DS firmware without major user intervention.
The weirdest part is that, thus far, I've gotten a -1 Troll and a +1 Informative. In a thread that's clearly -1 Offtopic. Those crazy mods... what *will* they do next?!?
Yeah, but you do realize that you don't knit an afgan, you crochet it. You think that these guys know their technology, but they on't even know their point needles from their hooked ones.
You might want to re-check your facts. To quote, "An Afghan is a blanket, wrap, or shawl of colored wool, knitted or crocheted in geometric shapes.". Look here for just one example of a knitted afghan. Many more can be found with an appropriate Google search.
I won't even get into electronic/touch screen voting machines, which are not used in provincal or federal elections in Canada.
Well, in their defense, voting in the United States is greatly complicated by the fact that:
a) they have 10 times the population of Canada b) they have far more complicated ballots
That second point is particularly nasty. Because they vote for far more officials than we do (judges, scheriffs, etc, etc), their ballots can be quite large. Additionally, they may also have referendums that need to be voted on (this is particularly true in California).
Consequently, any kind of machine assistance seems logical. And voting machines, as a concept, aren't a bad idea at all, and have the potential to be as reliable, if not more so, than a traditional voting system (either the current US systems, or pencil-and-paper, as seen in Canada). The problem is entirely in the implemention (and the broken system which allowed those machines to be built and deployed).
The Electoral College reduces the weight of large states and increases the weight of the small states, which makes it less likely a candidate will try to run up huge numbers in CA, NY, FL, TX, OH, VA and other large states so he/she can ignore the smaller states. Right now, you gain nothing from winning NY with say 70% of the vote vs 50%+1. That helps keep a few large states from dominating the process - the leveling effect limits their impact.
This is bullshit. The only different between what you describe and the current situation is that, rather than focusing on big states, candidates focus on a few swing states with a large number of electoral college votes. Either system ends up excluding states from the process. The difference is that the current situation has states with large populations excluded, which seems pretty backwards, IMHO.
Well I'll be damned, that is really interesting... pity you posted as AC. Maybe I'll start appending a link to this post to every one of my comments...:)
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It just makes it easier to justify the time, vs doing more mundane, but 'necessary' stuff. (like mowing the lawn or washing the dishes)
It's unfortunate you (and I'm sure many others) feel that way. As an adult, we need time to relax and 'play' every bit as much as kids do. The idea that we should simply stop when we get older, and instead focus strictly on more 'necessary' stuff is just plain silly. The dishes will still be there in an hour. The lawn can be mowed tomorrow. Take a little time off and *play*, people! It's good for you! Maybe if more people did this, we wouldn't hear so much about things like road rage.
(later eclipsed by the greatest DVD special edition set of all time--the Alien Quadrilogy box set)
Good god... you were actually willing to spend money on Aliens 3 and Resurrection? *shudder*
One of the positive side-effects of having kids - getting to play with stuff like this with mine. (as well as Legos, etc.)
Why do you need kids to play with this stuff?
I would imagine that a lot of New England is like that, perhapse some points to the west of that, Canada, Alasaka, etc.
Speaking as a citizen of Edmonton Alberta, Canada, our northern-most major city, I can assure you that and decent driver can get by quite happily with a FWD sedan in virtually all weather conditions around here. The only people who own trucks or SUVs and *actually* need them are: farmers and ranchers, or recreational offroaders. And rest assured, they are very much the minority of truck and SUV drivers around these parts.
Not that I expect to dissuade you from the (frankly silly) idea that you need your monstrous gas guzzler. I'm sure you'll find *some* reason to justify your purchase... it's something the human brain excels at.
Well, granted, it was a zoomed out view, so I don't know the true size of the ballots, but I found it surprisingly easy for my eye to follow the wrong arrow and land on the wrong circle. Then again, I'd be exceedingly careful when actually voting. Still, if the tradeoff is between saving space and making the ballot ridiculously easy to use, I'd go for the latter.
Incidentally, there is one problem with using biodiesel in particular, though this really applies to any IC-style engine: particulates, and nitrous and sulphurous oxides. Unlike CO2, these compounds are not recycled, and so there's a net gain in atmospheric concentrations. Moreover, it is these compounds which directly contribute to smog, acid rain, etc.
Butterfly ballots are a perfect example. Each ballot has a hole, each hole has an arrow next to it. Each arrow indicates which names go with that hole. It's no more difficult to understand a butterfly ballot than any other grid of information.
Unfortunately, because of the alternating layout and the arrows switching sides, it could be easy to misread where an arrow is pointing. Honestly, why the hell isn't that a *single* column with arrows? Are they deliberately trying to make things more complicated than is strictly *necessary*?
The parent poster's point was that kids (especially pre-teens) tend to eat what they're in the habit of eating, and will continue that even when away from home, because it tastes familiar and therefore good.
And my point is that that's a baseless assumption which may not actually be true, thanks to peer pressure, advertisements, etc, etc.
Incidentally, I think this assumption is probably true as kids enter adulthood. I just think it's damned naive to think that little Johnny will by a pack of carrots instead of the french fries all his friends are getting just because that's what he's used to at home.
AFAIK, every ER in America is legally obliged to help you if you need emergency care.
... When people's unhealthy habits hit them in the pocketbook, they'll adjust. And if they don't, they deserve what they get.
Which is why many hospitals are simply shutting down their ERs. Yay capitalism!
If you eat yourself (or drink yourself, or dope yourself, or sloth yourself, etc) to death, that's a completely preventable situation, and I'm admittedly not very sympathetic to this "plight".
I see you completely missed my point. The guy eating himself to death raises his health risk, and causes *everyone's* insurance premiums to rise. This is the way insurance works. If a large percentage of people in your insurance pool are high risk, but you're not, *you* still pay higher rates to cover their risk.
Second, you ignore the fact that many people without healthcare insurance are in that situation out of choice.
a) this isn't a "fact". This is an opinion. b) it's a non-sequitor. The point is that rates will rise and put healthcare out of reach of people who can currently afford it. It will also, BTW, make it unaffordable for small business, which (as you rightly point out) often (though, less and less, thanks to... rising insurance costs) help cover the healthcare costs for their employees, meaning even *more* people could go without insurance.
Third, insurance rates probably would go up. But the problem with insurance rates is largely the fact that for most people, insurance is an employer-provided benefit.
Again, you're completely missing the point. This isn't about an unhealthy person paying a higher rate because of their habits. This is about *you* paying a higher rate because of their habits, because the overall risk in the insured group is higher.
Then again, maybe you just don't understand how insurance actually works...
There is no obesity problem.
Do you have statistics? References? Facts of any kind? Anything but your own anecdotes and baseless statements rooted in unhealthy paranoia? No?
Well, here, let me help you out. Of course, I expect you'll choose to deny the hard science that's been done which demonstrates that childhood obesity is a) a significant health problem and b) on the rise at an alarming rate, because it doesn't fit your particular world view. But, remember, the difference between you and them is: they have facts on their side. You don't.
Keep in mind, your metabolism is going to crash down sometime in the next 3-4 years. You can keep eating the exact same foods as you do now, and you'll suddenly start gaining weight on it.
This is certainly true, which is why physical education is so vitally important for children, despite being woefully neglected, as regular exercise is the only way to avoid this particular trap. Personally, I cycle commute (an hour and a half a day), which gives me the freedom to eat a relatively unrestricted diet without risk of weight gain. The same can't be said for many of my peers.
Ha ha, I'm totally with you! I recently re-discovered my love of the PB&J sandwich... hell, my mouth is watering right now just thinking about it! There's nothing like a nice, fresh multigrain bread (must be nice and soft), crunchy peanut butter, and your favorite jam (in my case, strawberry). But, IMHO, you *must* have the PB on both pieces of bread. Otherwise, the jam soaks into the bread, and that's just no good. ;)
Yeah, instead you have insurance programs (since healthcare is otherwise unaffordable to anyone but the very rich), which operate by spreading the risk among the insured group. Now, imagine 50% of your insured group are massively overweight or obese. You're telling me insurance rates won't go up? And now, as rates go up, more and more people can't get insurance, thus increasing the number of people who have no healthcare whatsoever. Brilliant!
And I haven't even touched on the potential effects that obesity has on other aspects of society. Something tells me that having a large obese population is going to have an adverse effect on overall productivity.
In the end you'll find that they will end up looking for similar foods when they are out of the house too.
No, they won't. They'll see what their friends are eating, or that product they saw advertisted during their favourite TV show. Honestly, the idea that children, who are inherently thoughtless and impulsive, will just magically eat healthy because that's all they have at home is, frankly, laughable.
People forget that some kids are not instantly assholes, they all have hissy fits though. If you give them enough wiggle room they'll learn the lessons they need to, but they'll also behave politely and correctly as long as you make sure they know to do this before they become their own person (aka birth to 7-8 year olds).
People also forget that there's an element of nature, here. Some kids, faced with this kind of freedom, flourish. Others turn into obese little bastards. To assume your one sample is representative is, to say the least, oversimplifying the situation.
I'm sorry, it is NOT up to the lunch lady to determine what my kids eat. If I am that concerned about what my children eat at school, I'll make it myself! At one school they attended, this is exactly what I did. "Some parents don't have time for that!", you might say... Bullshit. If you have the time to screw around and have kids, you MAKE THE DAMN TIME to raise them. It's called parenting.
Riight... so if people don't parent exactly the way you do, it's bad parenting?
Here's a hint: this system is a tool. Like v-chips and god knows what else, this is a mechanism which parents may *choose* to use in order to have some control over what their children eat because, guess what, children are impulsive and stupid, not to mention constantly manipulated by advertisements (BTW, what makes you think your kids weren't tossing your lovely packed lunches and buying french fries instead? Oh, right, *your* little carpet monkeys are perfect angels, right?). You don't like it? Great, don't use it. But that doesn't make the *tool* any less useful for those who choose to use it.
Face it, childhood obesity is a *massive* problem in the United States. If this means a bunch of "lazy" parents can prevent obesity in their children, I say *yes please*. Because otherwise, the US is going to be hit with a healthcare crisis in 20 or 30 years the likes of which it has *never* seen before.
But... but... democracy != socialism! Socialism == communism! And communism == teh evil!!11oneone
The DS firmware has multiple versions, however updating is transparent to the user, and occurs when they fire up a game with the firmware update on it.
Uhh... sorry, but this is *totally* wrong. The DS firmware is different on later hardware revisions, however it is impossible to transparently update the firmware on an existing DS, because the region of the EEPROM containing the firmware checksum can't be written to without shorting the SL1 pad on the board.
The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.
The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.
More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.
Actually, they don't perform remote firmware upgrades because they *can't*. The first 512 bytes or so of the firmware EEPROM simply can't be written to without shorting a pad on the circuit board. Moreover, the checksum for the firmware is located, yup, you guessed it, in the protected region. Thus, it is simply impossible to upgrade the DS firmware without major user intervention.
The weirdest part is that, thus far, I've gotten a -1 Troll and a +1 Informative. In a thread that's clearly -1 Offtopic. Those crazy mods... what *will* they do next?!?
Yeah, but you do realize that you don't knit an afgan, you crochet it. You think that these guys know their technology, but they on't even know their point needles from their hooked ones.
You might want to re-check your facts. To quote, "An Afghan is a blanket, wrap, or shawl of colored wool, knitted or crocheted in geometric shapes.". Look here for just one example of a knitted afghan. Many more can be found with an appropriate Google search.
I won't even get into electronic/touch screen voting machines, which are not used in provincal or federal elections in Canada.
Well, in their defense, voting in the United States is greatly complicated by the fact that:
a) they have 10 times the population of Canada
b) they have far more complicated ballots
That second point is particularly nasty. Because they vote for far more officials than we do (judges, scheriffs, etc, etc), their ballots can be quite large. Additionally, they may also have referendums that need to be voted on (this is particularly true in California).
Consequently, any kind of machine assistance seems logical. And voting machines, as a concept, aren't a bad idea at all, and have the potential to be as reliable, if not more so, than a traditional voting system (either the current US systems, or pencil-and-paper, as seen in Canada). The problem is entirely in the implemention (and the broken system which allowed those machines to be built and deployed).
You will never see a presidential candidate in a state other than NY, CA, TX, and FL.
As opposed to today, when you never seem them outside swings states like NH, PA, OH, and FL. Yes, that's *so* much better.
The Electoral College reduces the weight of large states and increases the weight of the small states, which makes it less likely a candidate will try to run up huge numbers in CA, NY, FL, TX, OH, VA and other large states so he/she can ignore the smaller states. Right now, you gain nothing from winning NY with say 70% of the vote vs 50%+1. That helps keep a few large states from dominating the process - the leveling effect limits their impact.
This is bullshit. The only different between what you describe and the current situation is that, rather than focusing on big states, candidates focus on a few swing states with a large number of electoral college votes. Either system ends up excluding states from the process. The difference is that the current situation has states with large populations excluded, which seems pretty backwards, IMHO.
Well I'll be damned, that is really interesting... pity you posted as AC. Maybe I'll start appending a link to this post to every one of my comments... :)