I didn't make it very deep into the web site. I was mainly interested in reviewing the rates for my county. What a surprise that there was a list with all the states's counties together! I was expecting to fill in my zip code possibly or enter the state and county to get a list of available policies. The resulting table was large enough to generate bandwidth problems. One stupid error in design could saturate their network! A good design would be easier on the users, the network and the servers. Now sometimes you have to trade server time and convenience for user time and convenience, but this was apparently not thought through. Surely someone in the government must realize that good design works better than bad design. If a web site is to be used by millions, it obviously needs a good design.
If you're having performance issues, then C++ would offer a more efficient solution. Why jump through all these hoops to boost Java performance? Just use C++ and get twice the performance instantly with Linux. I tend to agree with the AC that the language issue is overblown. With practice programming is about the same level of difficulty with most languages. C++ does a pretty good job at compile time checking, interfaces directly with the system calls and offers nearly all the performance you can get from the computer. (AVX instructions can be done quite well in assembly, but most cloud apps would not benefit from using AVX.)
Unless you have substantial computation or disk I/O, I would expect the bottleneck to be the network. With compute bound apps the OS is irrelevant. Likewise with I/O devices the time spent in system calls is dwarfed by the disk speed.
At least MightyMartian has a name and is not an anonymous coward. It is disappointing to see such silly tirades from someone who is anonymous and probably just enjoying the stupid arguments. Go away or get a life.
I frequently face the same issue. The solution is to drop the price of e-books. I suggest less than 50% of the printed book price. I find it frustrating to see an e-book for $10 when a printed one is $12. I can easily resell or give away the printed book, which makes it a lot more valuable. If the e-book were $6, then perhaps I wouldn't care for the printed copy. Also a printed copy for $4 with shipping is not a big deal versus $6.
My suggestion is to simply buy more RAM. With 16 GB of RAM there are 10 GB for disk cache and 6 GB for everything else. This sounds like it matches Seagate's usage pattern pretty well. It should be cheaper and RAM can be written endlessly, so it should be more reliable. The only downside is it must refill its cache if you reboot. Gamers might opt for 32 GB if they can find a system with that much.
Yes, you are right - we must hope we can trust the supplier. No, I will not read the code, though it is possible and many people around the world have read the Linux code. It seems like a better bet than an OS where you can't read the code. I also have over 20 years of Linux experience with 1 hacking episode about 18 years ago. I was running a BBS system on a fairly early Linux. No harm was done. My suspicion is that some young person read about an exploit and ended up creating a "schlongg" account with root access. It was not fun for me, so I posted a polite message on the BBS asking for whoever it was to give me a break. Apparently I was fortunate. Now I limit outside connections to ssh. I could be paranoid about limiting the ssh connections, but the potential harm is really not that great. I have several other computers in my home with no open ports and only Windows is a problem.
Someone else suggested BSD "for paranoics". That's certainly a good idea. I can't judge whether it is safer than Linux.
I would not trust a commercial operating system to not be loaded with back doors accessible to the NSA. That's not even considering the history of Windows vulnerabilities. If I were in charge of IT for a foreign government, a news agency, a military or any business I would start by banning the use of Windows. With Linux it should be possible to have a computer which can search the Internet and prepare reports with no open ports for external attack. That should be the first step. Following that there needs to be training in human factors vulnerabilities. A computer for work should be a tool, not a toy, and user preference should not be the highest priority. Security should be first. Linux is clearly good enough for business purposes. I can see a value in Windows for gamers, but not for work computers. OS X is less vulnerable than Windows, but can you really be sure that the NSA can't access all OS X systems?
I would expect that hackers might also discover back doors. They would certainly study the instructions in the OS to try to find the holes.
Now I have been assuming that the computer was not running Linux. Perhaps it was. It is possible to screw up with Linux systems.
Fortunately for me, no one wants me to run their IT operation. It would be so painful trying to educate the users.
Maybe I'm a little too paranoid. Luckily not much is at risk on my home computers. I would not wish to do anything interesting to the NSA.
How much trouble could it be for the coders of Slashdot to really limit the length of the initial part of posts to limit the nuisance caused by the person who keeps posting lengthy nonsense? It sounds like an easy fix which should be done immediately.
At 400' shooting down a bird flying with anything but a missile is damn near impossible.
The best portable way would be modified version of something like the XM-25 delayed explosive, grenade launcher. that would be as close to a portable flax cannon as you can get.
Also at 400' you have to be able to spot the thing. Drones that size are all but a small dot in a very big sky. Made of wood, fiberglass, and carbon they have next to nothing for radar return.
Good point. They could also be painted a non-reflective blue, making a blue dot on a mostly blue sky. It would be hard to use a missile against an invisible drone.
If they're truly wanting to make the thing "look" like a bird, they need to model a bird's flying style. Predators move around an area and search; if these just stay in the same spot or even evenly patrol an area it's going to stand out.
They also need to flap the wings to look like a bird. After a few seconds of viewing a soaring bird, lots of criminals will now shoot it down just to be sure.
Well, not exactly like now. We need to step up space exploration. We have competent people with a plan to send crews to Mars for 2 year missions. We can do it inside a decade. We don't have to wait for space-based factories to build better ships, though we should start trying that too. Likewise we aren't doing real well with climate change. People like to disagree about climate change, but there are some real problems we can solve which I think would solve climate change without real harm. In my first post I mentioned trying to terraform our deserts. We could do this as a research project first and see how well it can work. Maybe we could transform the whole Sahara and change the weather pattern there as a result. Such results need to be possible here if we are to have any hope of achieving similar results on Mars.
I would favor research projects in both areas. I also like the idea of space tourism. It's a shame it's too expensive for me to go, but maybe eventually we would figure out a cheaper way to escape our gravity. I would hope that people could get excited about space exploration and get it done. We went to the moon when we barely could and now we are so timid.
I would welcome a dual track solution. Why can't we fund space exploration and colonization while taking better care of the Earth? Fixing our deserts would be far cheaper than terraforming Mars and is more obviously possible. That doesn't mean that we can't do both. I am quite interested in what we might discover on Mars and really hope we can colonize other planets. On the other hand I think we can make some reversible changes on Earth to try to improve our climate and that experience might help us with Mars. I suggest reversible changes in case we make a wrong move. I have heard of people suggesting a large number of satellites to shade the Earth. That would be hard to reverse and seems rather stupid to me. Irrigating the Sahara can be ended in a hurry if we determine that we must have huge deserts.
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet consuming their resources and polluting them into lifeless rocks until a coalition of alien species has to band together to eliminate the threat humanity represents to the galaxy.
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
Well stated. I would like to add that we should learn to terraform Earth before advancing to another planet. My guess is that it would be about 1 million times easier to turn the Sahara Desert into productive farmland than to terraform Mars. All the ingredients are readily available. The only problem is the water needs salt removed, but there is ample sunlight for desalination. If we did this I predict that we could convert and enormous quantity of atmospheric carbon into biospheric carbon. The growing plants would suck the carbon out of the air and later the carbon could become part of the newly created soil. This process can be hastened by allowing grazing animals to eat the grass. The manure is much more readily added to soil than vegetation allowed to decompose above the ground. There was a Ted talk by Allan Savory which presents a similar solution for recovering the soils of the world's grasslands.
There is also an enormous opportunity in our oceans. There are 5 huge "deserts" in our oceans where the water is low in oxygen and nutrients. By adding nutrients to the water we could revive the life of our oceans. Once again we would be converting atmospheric carbon into biospheric carbon.
So I suggest that the people who suggest migrating to Mars: practice on Earth first. When we restore Earth into a garden, then perhaps we will have learned how to manage a planet and maybe how to terraform a barren planet.
Star Trek has already answered that question. The mother ship is built in space and never leaves space. This changes a lot of structural requrements. It needs to be able to survive micro-meteorite impacts and the stress of whatever accelaration is involved. There would need to be shuttle craft to land on Mars. Initially these might be fairly crude like the lunar landers. With time we would develop better reusable shuttle craft.
Building a mother ship in space would require the development of a lot of systems in space. It might require off-world mining to avoid the huge cost of moving materials into space. I predict that I won't live long enough for that advanced a technology to develop, but I expect that people will make it to Mars during the next 30 years. Maybe I'll see some nice pictures on youtube.
I think you are basically correct. Amazon can claim that all sales were from Bermuda (or anywhere else) which doesn't have to follow US laws. I suppose we will off-shore everything except Americans.
I got a Mac Mini about 6 months ago to work on software for OS X which also runs on Linux and Windows. My software uses Qt and I figured that I would try using OS X as my main computer and connect to Linux and Windows using ssh, vnc and/or rdesktop. I gave OS X about 6 weeks and it was OK for many things. I did not find myself relieved that things "just worked" on OS X. Instead I found that quite a few programs I used under Linux were difficult to get to work on OS X. I had troubles with kile and ksudoku. I had problems using X applications over ssh to Linux. Apparently OS X supports the connection for about an hour or so. Overall I found it mildly frustrating compared to Linux, through better than Windows.
A little later I tried Windows as the main machine using vnc to connect to Linux and OS X. This was marginally smoother than using OS X as my main system, but after a few months of trying alternatives I am back to using Linux as my main system using vnc to connect to OS X and Windows.
Now I certainly don't care if Miguel likes OS X better. Whatever works best for him should be his choice. OS X could have been totally Linux friendly if Apple wanted to be more cooperative. If they had, I might have been a convert. As is, it is not nearly as easy to get software to work on OS X as Ubuntu.
If the asteroid is a pile of rubble, then it would seem to be a collection of objects at similar but different distances. This would seem to induce a different gravitational pull on the parts of the asteriod. Could this pull it apart? It would seem likely over the months or years of time spent pulling on the rubble that it would separate into multiple objects resulting in a slower version of the problem from pushing the asteroid. I can imagine that spinning asteroids would require either gravitational pulling or explosions. I think we need a variety of tricks to cope with asteroids and we need to study these objects before deciding the appropriate plan. If we are too slow in discovering a threat, then explosions might be the only choice. We are currently not prepared with any actual equipment to repel any asteroids. We should get busy and start working on smaller objects to work on the technology. Maybe clearing out the debris around Earth would be a good place to start.
Academics are evaluated during the tenure process by committees composed of people from multiple disciplines. This means that there would need to be an agreement throughout a university to accept open access journals, in order to match the tenure demands of the institution. Furthermore many academics transfer to different institutions during their career, so for personal reasons many would choose to target widely accepted journals to maintain job flexibility. The only reasonable course is for these journals to evolve prestige based on quality of published research which will take time. It's not easy to replace this outmoded model with a superior model due to inertia for a variety of reasons.
One real possibility would be for the prestigious journals to move to being online-only. This would reduce their operating cost significantly which could result in lower fees for publications and subscriptions.
Having been a successful programmer for 35 years, I would discount the value of touch typing. It has been my experience that thinking is far more important than typing skills. Fast typing helps, but I think your son would find this boring. Taking whatever beginning programming course is handy will help. Well, I would dodge Cobol, Fortran and Perl. Perl is relevant but pretty ugly. Java, C, C++, Python, or Visual Basic would all be fun and useful. Just be sure that the course is for beginners.
I had a good friend who did a lot of useful programming. He was full of creative ideas which made up for his lack of programming style. I recall one piece of Fortran code which used the "3 pronged if" which bracnched to 1 of 3 lines based on an integer being negative, 0 or positive like:
if (n) 1,2,3
1 i = i -5
goto 10
2 do something for 0
goto to 20
3 do something else
Anyway he had a section of about 15 lines with 10 labels and about 8 to 10 of these if's. Most of them had 3 different labels for the places to branch to. He said that he hated to waste a branch on an if.
He took a Pascal class and the teacher told him all the code for a program could be on one line since the input was free-format. So he wrote 1 line Pascal programs.
Needless to say he was proud of his code. In this case I think his value was obvious and the best strategy was to leave him to his ways. I tried to show him a few style issues like indenting code and using the better forms of if. Unfortunately there was no while loop in Fortran at that time, so some goto's were definitely required to implement loops which didn't use simple counting for control. Today's languages generally offer nice structures, but if my friend were still alive he would probably still be using Fortran 77 and 3 pronged ifs.
Hang in there. I have a bit of the type 2 myself. I lost about 30 pounds fairly quickly. It's tough giving up so many great foods. I highly recommend stevia as a sugar substitute. I use the white powder refined form. I also eat barley instead of rice. I eat Ezekiel bread. I have found that barley and Ezekiel bread don't affect the blood sugar much. Lately I have been a little off the wagon, probably because I miss the carbs. I have been eating small amounts of carb treats, but my stupid body wants a lot of it....
Well, fyngyrz, you should feel proud to be doing well. If you have strength, stamina and flexibility, you are doing great. I would guess that your blood pressure is normal and you are non-diabetic. If so, then a little fat is a superficial thing. Health is what matters. It is unfortunate that you need to watch your diet so carefully, but it is well worth it.
I certainly hope that we learn a way to cope well with Syndrome X.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't make it very deep into the web site. I was mainly interested in reviewing the rates for my county. What a surprise that there was a list with all the states's counties together! I was expecting to fill in my zip code possibly or enter the state and county to get a list of available policies. The resulting table was large enough to generate bandwidth problems. One stupid error in design could saturate their network! A good design would be easier on the users, the network and the servers. Now sometimes you have to trade server time and convenience for user time and convenience, but this was apparently not thought through. Surely someone in the government must realize that good design works better than bad design. If a web site is to be used by millions, it obviously needs a good design.
If you're having performance issues, then C++ would offer a more efficient solution. Why jump through all these hoops to boost Java performance? Just use C++ and get twice the performance instantly with Linux. I tend to agree with the AC that the language issue is overblown. With practice programming is about the same level of difficulty with most languages. C++ does a pretty good job at compile time checking, interfaces directly with the system calls and offers nearly all the performance you can get from the computer. (AVX instructions can be done quite well in assembly, but most cloud apps would not benefit from using AVX.)
Unless you have substantial computation or disk I/O, I would expect the bottleneck to be the network. With compute bound apps the OS is irrelevant. Likewise with I/O devices the time spent in system calls is dwarfed by the disk speed.
At least MightyMartian has a name and is not an anonymous coward. It is disappointing to see such silly tirades from someone who is anonymous and probably just enjoying the stupid arguments. Go away or get a life.
I frequently face the same issue. The solution is to drop the price of e-books. I suggest less than 50% of the printed book price. I find it frustrating to see an e-book for $10 when a printed one is $12. I can easily resell or give away the printed book, which makes it a lot more valuable. If the e-book were $6, then perhaps I wouldn't care for the printed copy. Also a printed copy for $4 with shipping is not a big deal versus $6.
My suggestion is to simply buy more RAM. With 16 GB of RAM there are 10 GB for disk cache and 6 GB for everything else. This sounds like it matches Seagate's usage pattern pretty well. It should be cheaper and RAM can be written endlessly, so it should be more reliable. The only downside is it must refill its cache if you reboot. Gamers might opt for 32 GB if they can find a system with that much.
Yes, you are right - we must hope we can trust the supplier. No, I will not read the code, though it is possible and many people around the world have read the Linux code. It seems like a better bet than an OS where you can't read the code. I also have over 20 years of Linux experience with 1 hacking episode about 18 years ago. I was running a BBS system on a fairly early Linux. No harm was done. My suspicion is that some young person read about an exploit and ended up creating a "schlongg" account with root access. It was not fun for me, so I posted a polite message on the BBS asking for whoever it was to give me a break. Apparently I was fortunate. Now I limit outside connections to ssh. I could be paranoid about limiting the ssh connections, but the potential harm is really not that great. I have several other computers in my home with no open ports and only Windows is a problem. Someone else suggested BSD "for paranoics". That's certainly a good idea. I can't judge whether it is safer than Linux.
I would not trust a commercial operating system to not be loaded with back doors accessible to the NSA. That's not even considering the history of Windows vulnerabilities. If I were in charge of IT for a foreign government, a news agency, a military or any business I would start by banning the use of Windows. With Linux it should be possible to have a computer which can search the Internet and prepare reports with no open ports for external attack. That should be the first step. Following that there needs to be training in human factors vulnerabilities. A computer for work should be a tool, not a toy, and user preference should not be the highest priority. Security should be first. Linux is clearly good enough for business purposes. I can see a value in Windows for gamers, but not for work computers. OS X is less vulnerable than Windows, but can you really be sure that the NSA can't access all OS X systems?
I would expect that hackers might also discover back doors. They would certainly study the instructions in the OS to try to find the holes.
Now I have been assuming that the computer was not running Linux. Perhaps it was. It is possible to screw up with Linux systems.
Fortunately for me, no one wants me to run their IT operation. It would be so painful trying to educate the users.
Maybe I'm a little too paranoid. Luckily not much is at risk on my home computers. I would not wish to do anything interesting to the NSA.
It looks like it's $335 for 10 micrograms... http://www.rndsystems.com/product_results.aspx?m=1508
How much trouble could it be for the coders of Slashdot to really limit the length of the initial part of posts to limit the nuisance caused by the person who keeps posting lengthy nonsense? It sounds like an easy fix which should be done immediately.
At 400' shooting down a bird flying with anything but a missile is damn near impossible.
The best portable way would be modified version of something like the XM-25 delayed explosive, grenade launcher. that would be as close to a portable flax cannon as you can get.
Also at 400' you have to be able to spot the thing. Drones that size are all but a small dot in a very big sky. Made of wood, fiberglass, and carbon they have next to nothing for radar return.
Good point. They could also be painted a non-reflective blue, making a blue dot on a mostly blue sky. It would be hard to use a missile against an invisible drone.
If they're truly wanting to make the thing "look" like a bird, they need to model a bird's flying style. Predators move around an area and search; if these just stay in the same spot or even evenly patrol an area it's going to stand out.
They also need to flap the wings to look like a bird. After a few seconds of viewing a soaring bird, lots of criminals will now shoot it down just to be sure.
Well, not exactly like now. We need to step up space exploration. We have competent people with a plan to send crews to Mars for 2 year missions. We can do it inside a decade. We don't have to wait for space-based factories to build better ships, though we should start trying that too. Likewise we aren't doing real well with climate change. People like to disagree about climate change, but there are some real problems we can solve which I think would solve climate change without real harm. In my first post I mentioned trying to terraform our deserts. We could do this as a research project first and see how well it can work. Maybe we could transform the whole Sahara and change the weather pattern there as a result. Such results need to be possible here if we are to have any hope of achieving similar results on Mars.
I would favor research projects in both areas. I also like the idea of space tourism. It's a shame it's too expensive for me to go, but maybe eventually we would figure out a cheaper way to escape our gravity. I would hope that people could get excited about space exploration and get it done. We went to the moon when we barely could and now we are so timid.
I would welcome a dual track solution. Why can't we fund space exploration and colonization while taking better care of the Earth? Fixing our deserts would be far cheaper than terraforming Mars and is more obviously possible. That doesn't mean that we can't do both. I am quite interested in what we might discover on Mars and really hope we can colonize other planets. On the other hand I think we can make some reversible changes on Earth to try to improve our climate and that experience might help us with Mars. I suggest reversible changes in case we make a wrong move. I have heard of people suggesting a large number of satellites to shade the Earth. That would be hard to reverse and seems rather stupid to me. Irrigating the Sahara can be ended in a hurry if we determine that we must have huge deserts.
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet consuming their resources and polluting them into lifeless rocks until a coalition of alien species has to band together to eliminate the threat humanity represents to the galaxy.
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
Well stated. I would like to add that we should learn to terraform Earth before advancing to another planet. My guess is that it would be about 1 million times easier to turn the Sahara Desert into productive farmland than to terraform Mars. All the ingredients are readily available. The only problem is the water needs salt removed, but there is ample sunlight for desalination. If we did this I predict that we could convert and enormous quantity of atmospheric carbon into biospheric carbon. The growing plants would suck the carbon out of the air and later the carbon could become part of the newly created soil. This process can be hastened by allowing grazing animals to eat the grass. The manure is much more readily added to soil than vegetation allowed to decompose above the ground. There was a Ted talk by Allan Savory which presents a similar solution for recovering the soils of the world's grasslands.
There is also an enormous opportunity in our oceans. There are 5 huge "deserts" in our oceans where the water is low in oxygen and nutrients. By adding nutrients to the water we could revive the life of our oceans. Once again we would be converting atmospheric carbon into biospheric carbon.
So I suggest that the people who suggest migrating to Mars: practice on Earth first. When we restore Earth into a garden, then perhaps we will have learned how to manage a planet and maybe how to terraform a barren planet.
Star Trek has already answered that question. The mother ship is built in space and never leaves space. This changes a lot of structural requrements. It needs to be able to survive micro-meteorite impacts and the stress of whatever accelaration is involved. There would need to be shuttle craft to land on Mars. Initially these might be fairly crude like the lunar landers. With time we would develop better reusable shuttle craft.
Building a mother ship in space would require the development of a lot of systems in space. It might require off-world mining to avoid the huge cost of moving materials into space. I predict that I won't live long enough for that advanced a technology to develop, but I expect that people will make it to Mars during the next 30 years. Maybe I'll see some nice pictures on youtube.
I think you are basically correct. Amazon can claim that all sales were from Bermuda (or anywhere else) which doesn't have to follow US laws. I suppose we will off-shore everything except Americans.
I got a Mac Mini about 6 months ago to work on software for OS X which also runs on Linux and Windows. My software uses Qt and I figured that I would try using OS X as my main computer and connect to Linux and Windows using ssh, vnc and/or rdesktop. I gave OS X about 6 weeks and it was OK for many things. I did not find myself relieved that things "just worked" on OS X. Instead I found that quite a few programs I used under Linux were difficult to get to work on OS X. I had troubles with kile and ksudoku. I had problems using X applications over ssh to Linux. Apparently OS X supports the connection for about an hour or so. Overall I found it mildly frustrating compared to Linux, through better than Windows.
A little later I tried Windows as the main machine using vnc to connect to Linux and OS X. This was marginally smoother than using OS X as my main system, but after a few months of trying alternatives I am back to using Linux as my main system using vnc to connect to OS X and Windows.
Now I certainly don't care if Miguel likes OS X better. Whatever works best for him should be his choice. OS X could have been totally Linux friendly if Apple wanted to be more cooperative. If they had, I might have been a convert. As is, it is not nearly as easy to get software to work on OS X as Ubuntu.
If the asteroid is a pile of rubble, then it would seem to be a collection of objects at similar but different distances. This would seem to induce a different gravitational pull on the parts of the asteriod. Could this pull it apart? It would seem likely over the months or years of time spent pulling on the rubble that it would separate into multiple objects resulting in a slower version of the problem from pushing the asteroid. I can imagine that spinning asteroids would require either gravitational pulling or explosions. I think we need a variety of tricks to cope with asteroids and we need to study these objects before deciding the appropriate plan. If we are too slow in discovering a threat, then explosions might be the only choice. We are currently not prepared with any actual equipment to repel any asteroids. We should get busy and start working on smaller objects to work on the technology. Maybe clearing out the debris around Earth would be a good place to start.
Academics are evaluated during the tenure process by committees composed of people from multiple disciplines. This means that there would need to be an agreement throughout a university to accept open access journals, in order to match the tenure demands of the institution. Furthermore many academics transfer to different institutions during their career, so for personal reasons many would choose to target widely accepted journals to maintain job flexibility. The only reasonable course is for these journals to evolve prestige based on quality of published research which will take time. It's not easy to replace this outmoded model with a superior model due to inertia for a variety of reasons.
One real possibility would be for the prestigious journals to move to being online-only. This would reduce their operating cost significantly which could result in lower fees for publications and subscriptions.
Having been a successful programmer for 35 years, I would discount the value of touch typing. It has been my experience that thinking is far more important than typing skills. Fast typing helps, but I think your son would find this boring. Taking whatever beginning programming course is handy will help. Well, I would dodge Cobol, Fortran and Perl. Perl is relevant but pretty ugly. Java, C, C++, Python, or Visual Basic would all be fun and useful. Just be sure that the course is for beginners.
Why didn't they write a little Fortran, Cobol and D to round the number of languages to an even twenty?
I had a good friend who did a lot of useful programming. He was full of creative ideas which made up for his lack of programming style. I recall one piece of Fortran code which used the "3 pronged if" which bracnched to 1 of 3 lines based on an integer being negative, 0 or positive like:
if (n) 1,2,3
1 i = i -5
goto 10
2 do something for 0
goto to 20
3 do something else
Anyway he had a section of about 15 lines with 10 labels and about 8 to 10 of these if's. Most of them had 3 different labels for the places to branch to. He said that he hated to waste a branch on an if.
He took a Pascal class and the teacher told him all the code for a program could be on one line since the input was free-format. So he wrote 1 line Pascal programs.
Needless to say he was proud of his code. In this case I think his value was obvious and the best strategy was to leave him to his ways. I tried to show him a few style issues like indenting code and using the better forms of if. Unfortunately there was no while loop in Fortran at that time, so some goto's were definitely required to implement loops which didn't use simple counting for control. Today's languages generally offer nice structures, but if my friend were still alive he would probably still be using Fortran 77 and 3 pronged ifs.
Indeed 58 degrees is what is published in the report. It seems likely that the Libyan report was in integer Celsius degrees.
Hang in there. I have a bit of the type 2 myself. I lost about 30 pounds fairly quickly. It's tough giving up so many great foods. I highly recommend stevia as a sugar substitute. I use the white powder refined form. I also eat barley instead of rice. I eat Ezekiel bread. I have found that barley and Ezekiel bread don't affect the blood sugar much. Lately I have been a little off the wagon, probably because I miss the carbs. I have been eating small amounts of carb treats, but my stupid body wants a lot of it....
Good luck
Well, fyngyrz, you should feel proud to be doing well. If you have strength, stamina and flexibility, you are doing great. I would guess that your blood pressure is normal and you are non-diabetic. If so, then a little fat is a superficial thing. Health is what matters. It is unfortunate that you need to watch your diet so carefully, but it is well worth it.
I certainly hope that we learn a way to cope well with Syndrome X.