You might be interested in the following tidbit from the printf(3) manpage on OpenBSD:
Because sprintf() and vsprintf() assume an infinitely long string, callers must be careful not to overflow the actual space; this is often impossible to assure. For safety, programmers should use the snprintf() and asprintf() family of interfaces instead. Unfortunately, the snprintf() interface is not available on older systems and the asprintf() interface is not portable.
It is important never to pass a string with user-supplied data as a for- mat without using `%s'. An attacker can put format specifiers in the string to mangle the stack, leading to a possible security hole. This holds true even if the string has been built ``by hand'' using a function like snprintf(), as the resulting string may still contain user-supplied conversion specifiers for later interpolation by printf().
Be sure to use the proper secure idiom:
snprintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer), "%s", string);
There is no way for printf() to know the size of each argument passed. If positional arguments are used, care must be taken to ensure that all parameters, up to the last positionally specified parameter, are used in the format string. This allows for the format string to be parsed for this information. Failure to do this will mean the code is non-portable and liable to fail.
Symmetrical connections are cool and all, but not very useful for legal purposes (at the moment anyway) unless they also give you a static IP, or IPv6 capability. My static connection to my home computer network is indispensible to me, for work, and for my personal life. I lose the anonymity of dynamic addressing, but this is unimportant to me as I do not do any filesharing.
The number of freshmen pursuing a computer science track has fallen by 70% since 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. Aside from the fact that CS departments were filling up with CS students at a record pace in the 1990's, why is this a bad thing? I personally know a lot of these people who graduated from CS in the 90's. They thought it was going to be easy money, got hit when the dot-com bubble burst, and are now doing different things. These people are my friends, but I have no qualms in saying: they should not have been in CS in the first place. They do not love mathematics, or science, nor do they love to crack a hard problem. To each his own. They are all much happier now, BTW, being lawyers, teachers, adventure guides, and photographers, etc.
"We should first address the appalling lack of ownership of media outlets by women and people of color." Who else here thinks he just said that to deflect people from the real issues? Wouldn't you first have to address the appalling lack of wealthy women and people of color?
There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market. I'm not trying to sell these services or anything, but there are alternatives (for some people), and their customer service is outstanding. I have lots of personal experience with both Speakeasy and Cogent. In both cases, they contact me when there's a problem. Both services give me "heads up" notifications when service on their end might affect me, and they rarely make you wait on the telephone. The only time I've ever waited was while a Speakeasy customer service person put me on hold while he put together a conference call between Covad and Verizon techs (I was trying to have a local loop installed, but Verizon kept botching the thing up).
There is a downside: both are expensive. Not so much for Cogent (well, I'm not paying for that one anyway, work is), but Speakeasy definitely comes at a premium. For the price of my one Speakeasy connection, I could buy one of these "triple-play" packages from one of their competitors. And if my cell service weren't also paid for by my work (I always have to be reachable for work), I would consider it. But in the end, I don't think I would-- it's just not worth it. The last time I lost service, on Christmas eve, I called Speakeasy, and sure enough, someone was there and responded. They tracked it back to the DSLAM (Verizon's DSLAM), and we ended up concluding that getting it fixed was a lost cause until the holiday was over. Sure enough, two days after Christmas, my service was back-- probably whenever the Verizon tech responsible got off his fat arse.
But anyway-- we all know why the "good guys" can't compete. It's because the big telcos have politicians deeply within their pockets. How is Speakeasy going to be cheaper when they have to lease their lines from Verizon for more than Verizon itself charges for the same service? This is why we shelled out billions to the telcos in the 1990's-- they're common carriers. We didn't give them that money to expand their private networks. We gave it to them to expand the national infrastructure. As far as I'm concerned, they're reneging on their contractual obligations to us. And I will not give them a penny if I can help it.
Or would that be grabbitational? I remember repeating the word 'grabbity' in front of my father (a physicist) when I was a kid and watching him get irrationally angry. Ha ha. Grabbity.
I've read that the USPS claims that junk snail mail keeps their operating costs low, so that you only need to shell out $.39 per stamp. I haven't been able to find this claim myself, but it seems plausible. FWIW, I think their expenses might be a little bit lower if they didn't have to deliver so much junk mail.
I agree with your comment about math being "hard". That kind of language is ultimately defeatist. Teachers have been saying this for as long as I can remember, and from what I can tell, teachers have been saying this for a long time. Even S. P. Thompson, author of the legendary Calculus Made Easy, compains about this phenomenon in a book he wrote in 1910! As far as I am concerned, the teacher's role is to show you how easy, fun, and cool math can be. I don't mean to sound like a nerd, but, hey, I am, and I really think those things.
Having originally gotten my bachelor's degree in the humanities, I have to say that when I decided to start studying mathematics again, I found that it was difficult. But it turns out that, really, the difficulty was NOT the subject matter. I can't say that more emphatically. It was the culture of math education. I first started by picking up a college precalculus textbook. Although I remembered some pieces here and there, I found the book to be, essentially illegible. Why? Because authors of math books love to give you the formal definitions for things. Until you have some familiarity with the language of mathematics, this is like looking up, say, the German word gesellschaft and finding the German definition. Not very helpful if you don't speak German already.
The most important things I learned from this are:
be persistent
find other sources
One of those other sources was classroom learning. The simple fact is that a good teacher is absolutely the best way to learn mathematics. They've been through the confusion before. They know where you're coming from. This is worth the money. Unfortunately, and here's a caveat, there are some truly horrible mathematics teachers out there. There are a variety of reasons why bad teachers are teaching math, and I won't go into them, but suffice it to say: they are very discouraging. The trick is to go back to the first part I mention above: be persistent. You must always have enough confidence in yourself to say: "I am not the problem."
I see math in two ways: there's the visual approach, and the algorithmic approach. Simply put, if you can draw something simple on a piece of paper, you can do the visual part. If you can play a game of chess, let alone the highly complex and nuanced kinds of computer games that exist today, you can do the algorithmic part. The two pieces work together.
I found the following books very helpful, especially the "How to Ace Calculus" series. Don't be ashamed to buy a book with a title that makes you seem like an idiot. Value rigidity will end your math career-- you really need to admit to yourself that it's OK to ask for help.
Calculus Made Easy, by S.P. Thompson. Some people hate it, some people love it. I suggest going to a bookstore and flipping through it.
How to Ace Calculus, by Adams, Hass, and Thompson. Outstanding book. Only downside is that some topics don't have much depth, e.g., integrating using partial fractions. (But I'm supposed to know this already, right? It's an algebraic technique!)
How to Ace the Rest of Calculus, by Adams, Hass, and Thompson. Not as good as the first one, but I think this is more a reflection of how varied Calc courses after Calc I can be.
Not true! I think that disproves GP's claim that aliens aren't contacting us. They're obviously OK with the gays. Photographic proof, right there!;^)
On a more serious note; University of Maastricht: don't let horny grad students near journalists. Not to mention, there's a big difference between sex with a robot, and marriage with a robot.
Now I'm feeling seriously stupid for posting seriously about this. This is a stupid article. Let's keep the blather stupid, shall we?
You missed one: you don't need a GUI to configure your application. This makes a HUGE difference when the machine is embedded, remote, or otherwise hard to connect a screen to.
Ahh... Free Trade nutjob. And an AC. But I'll respond anyhow.
The *only* alternative to free trade is rape and slavery. This is obviously not true. We currently live in a society where Free Trade does not exist. Can you name one government that does not regulate trade? One could argue that free trade (little "f", little "t") exists on a microeconomic scale, i.e., bartering. But even that is only prima facie free trade. For one, it ignores the bigger economic picture, like how a local economy fits into a regional, or national, or international one. It also ignores the fact that many of the people in such a society are not actually free to choose between trading and not trading. E.g., what farmer has the option of not trading his crops? What information worker has the option of not eating?
Here's an epistemological economic truth 101 lesson for you: You obviously know some philosophy, since you're throwing out bits of Marx and Leviathan. But not enough not to look like an idiot. Putting "epistemological" next to "economic truth" should set off your bullshit detector, especially when you fail to actually define anything. And stop using the word "only". The world is not that simple.
One thing we can say for certain about trade is that it occurs because of an economic imbalance. Someone needs or wants something-- another has it. If one party's value for the thing is high enough, and the other party's value is low enough, party 2 will sell to party 1. The value equation is extremely flexible: people can trade goods for services, services for information, information for power, and so on. Money (which has no significant value in itself) is often the convenient platform that allows exchange between two non-obvious types, like information and goods.
But trade does not exist solely in the domain of freedom. Trade has existed for a long time. As you point out yourself, people "freely" trade life for servitude. But how is serfdom Free Trade? And if that's your position, a life that is nasty, brutish, and short and a life filled with the wonders of Free Trade don't sound all that mutually-exclusive to me. Arguing that they are ignores vast swaths of European history.
Take out the word "free", and I might consider your argument, though. Yes, civilization exists because of trade. But not free trade. Free Trade only exists in a vaccuum.
Especially when you consider the fact that it is a bloody encyclopedia, not a porn site (it may amount to the same amount of time-wasted, but still, it would be of consequence to others in the ministry who may genuinely use Wikipedia as a resource). We can't go having well-educated public servants!
Seriously, if they're that concerned about it-- run HTTP to Wikipedia through a proxy. Disable edits. I can see why they would just block it-- this is a knee-jerk reaction and blocking the whole site is fast and easy-- but it's still a stupid thing to do.
Also mouse/rat/cockroach droppings, all of which are more common in the city. As someone who comes from a long line of allergy sufferers and asthmatics, and whose family was until relatively recently, farmers, I have to agree with the GP that studies that indicate that too-clean houses are the cause of allergies/asthma are flawed. I grew up in the countryside, and was outside often, and yet, I have asthma. I picked up an air filter in my twenties and it has made an enormous difference in the quality of my sleep ever since.
My 286 when I was in grade school wasn't designed as a toy, either. But it ended up functioning that way, for me. And it definitely influenced my career path. And grades. I was handing in typed homework (we had a daisywheel printer-- the ultimate!) in grade school because I could-- I wanted an excuse to play with the computer-- and my teachers held this work up as a shining example for others to follow. I can assure you that the content was not very good, but it did look nice.
I also discovered that your newspaper route customers tended to pay a bit more promptly if you tucked a printed bill into their paper, instead of reading the amount off out of your grubby pencil ledger. There was always that one guy who insisted that the slightest smear was actually a PAID mark. Had to learn Lotus 1-2-3 for that trick.
It's hard, and one could argue, irrational, not to be concerned about one's own financial well-being. You don't hear many people saying, "I lost my job, but by golly, free trade will work it all out in the end!"
So while it may be true that free trade is better for the world, in aggregate, it does not change the fact that it is worse for many individuals. Considering that the individual is almost always powerless in the employer-employee relationship, especially in the case of a multinational corporation, I find it hard to have sympathy for the corporation. I won't even get into comparing the expense accounts of the highest-paid employees to the wages of the lowest-paid.
I suspect that human susceptibility to advertisement has some relation to the unconscious drive to have elevated status within your social group. There are clear evolutionary advantages to having a better status-- better mate selection and better chances for survival. Advertisements almost always pitch a product as more than just some widget that helps you with a task-- they pitch them as making your life more comfortable, more popular, and so on. When something is on TV, it seems "important". After all, everyone knows about it. Buying that product (especially wrt being an early adopter) makes you stand out. Advertisers, consciously or not, take advantage of our inability to differentiate between TV-society and real society. I think that this is why young twenty-somethings often find themselves burdened with large amounts of financial debt-- pressures to mate or show social dominance are at their highest then.
Sure. I'm not a nutritionist, but there is plenty of [reputable] information out there if you want more than I provide.
I basically try to stick to the upper limit of the carb end of the food pyramid (or whatever they call it now), since I am physically active. There are three parts to carbohydrate consumption that you need to consider: what kind, how much, and when.
Regarding what kind-- I basically do not consider high-glycemic foods (usually foods high in refined sugars) as even worth consuming. That's not to say that I don't have an occasional desert or piece of candy, but I try to keep to once a week, or less. Soda is simply verboten for me. I don't substitute soda with diet soda either-- unfortunately, aspartame gives me terrific headaches.
Generally, yes, whole grain foods are a good start. Whole wheat breads, whole wheat pasta (which tastes a lot better than it used to). Rice or barley. I avoid white rice. I'll usually go with brown basmati, short grain brown rice, or wild rice. Beans are another great option for complex carbs. They also contain vast quantities of fiber, which you also want to get. I tend not to eat as many beans as I should. I had an unpleasant experience with raw kidney beans not too long ago (they're poisonous-- now I know), and I've been somewhat turned off by the experience. But I'm working them back in, and unlike my father, I appear to be able to digest them without asphyxiating the rest of the household.
If you have access to a bakery, eating whole grain bread gets a lot more pleasant. The prepackaged crap bread at the store is really an awful analog to fresh bread. Or, for a few bucks, pick up a bread machine. Spend 5 minutes at night dumping a few things into the mixer, and when you wake up in the morning, you have fresh bread! It was one of the best purchases I ever made, and if I had been smart about it, I would have looked at a yard sale first. Those things are everywhere.
As for how much, portion control is a big thing for Americans typically, and I also find myself forgetting to control how much I eat. If you eat high-fiber foods, which are filling, this is less of an issue. Also, as a side note-- with the exception of animal fats and trans-fats, fats are good for you. Keep them in your diet. They help satiate you, and the end result is that you tend to consume fewer calories. The only way to know the answer to the 'how much' question for sure is to calculate your daily calorie expenditure and then attempt to fill your calorie quota. But honestly, I don't think about this part too much.
The 'when' part is also important: carbohydrates provide quick energy to your body, the simplest carbs being the quickest to deliver energy. When do you need the most energy? In the morning. You wake up in a calorie deficit, having sustained your metabolic functions throughout the night without eating. If you are active, this is even more so, as your body has been busy not just running itself, but converting carbohydrates into glycogen and storing it in your muscle tissue. So if you eat carbs in the morning, your body will put them into immediate use. If you eat carbs in the evening, when you are less active, the remainder of unused carbs are stored as fat. For that reason, I eat more carbs in the morning. There is one exception to this: if I am carbo-loading for a race, I basically try to max-out my carb consumption during all waking hours (generally, you body can move 25g of glucose/hour into your bloodstream-- that's about 1 Clif Bar per hour). The kinds of carbs I have in the morning are: fruit, yogurt (which tends to be loaded with sugar), whole grain cereal.
High-glycemic foods are bad on many levels, but the main thing is that your body's insulin response is the main defense against large amounts of sugar in your bloodstream. I could go into details, but I won't-- Suffice it to say, diabetes, which is essentially where your insulin response is disrupted, is awful in the extreme. Talk to a
There is one good thing that comes out of this: collaboration between BSD and Linux developers on wireless drivers. The licensing issue was bound to happen sooner or later on some piece of code. It's good that it happened early on in a project and with only bruised egos to show for it.
Wireless support in OpenBSD is outstanding. You can use ifconfig to manage your wireless devices just like you can for wired interfaces. I don't know a whole lot about OpenHAL, but if it works the way wireless does in OpenBSD, common libraries are simply reused so that developers can get new drivers up and running quickly. This will be a good thing for Linux, and the additional attention will improve wireless support for both platforms.
For a long time, I was a tea-drinker. I love coffee, but it made me feel terrible. There was the initial huge buzz, tons of productivity, and then WHAM, I felt almost like I should be seeing a doctor for clinical depression. I was actually starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me, physiologically. Then, as I started watching my diet more closely, removing refined sugars and so on, I started feeling better and better. I revisited coffee, but in "pure black" form, because a friend insisted that I was missing out on all of the flavor of "real coffee". While this was true, there was a more important effect for me: I didn't get that low from a blood sugar crash anymore. It makes sense that I didn't feel this way when I was drinking tea, because I didn't add sugar. You can eat carbs-- in fact, for someone like me (an ultradistance runner in my spare time), I eat LOTS of carbs. But very few of them are simple sugars. I make an exception for beer-- maltose isn't quite that simple;^)
On another note, this research sounds amazing. Their next step should be to check if the epidemiological data matches up with their hypothesis. I suspect that the correlation between certain activities and Alzheimers and those same activities and diabetes should be similar.
I will have to record and show you my brother's impersonation of Wilford Brimley doing the diabetes commercial. When he says 'diabeatis', I just lose my shit. Yeah, I'm going to hell.
I had a Toughbook CF-W2. Since it was a consumerized version of their actually-tough Toughbooks, I don't know how well my experience reflects on the rest of them. My company gave me the option of getting one of the really rugged ones, but that seemed kind of silly, not to mention, heavy.
Anyway, the CF-W2 was very pleasant, lightweight, portable. Seemed to withstand a fair amount of abuse from me except for little plastic caps over the hinges-- those were smashed pretty quickly.
Then I had a hard disk go bad. Being the tech-person I am, I decided to replace it myself. Just a regular laptop HDD job, nothing special right? Well, the CF-W2 doesn't seem to be designed to be taken apart. The hard disk is *buried* inside the machine. Later, I also decided to swap out the wireless card (Intel Pro, yuck!) with something that had better BSD support (Ralink), and I discovered that was nontrivial as well. Because one of the BNC connectors was in a slightly different place, I didn't have enough slack. Ok, get another antenna wire, but then... it seemed like all of the problems were recursive in that manner. I think I spent two evenings on that particular repair.
I have disassembled dozens of Thinkpad T40-series machines at work for repair. Maintenance is a breeze. Hard disks, especially so. I love how you just twist a screw and the whole thing slides out. T60-series machines follow in that vein.
Like the article submitter, China's behavior disturbs me deeply, and the fact that we subsidize this behavior indirectly, even more so. But from a technical standpoint, Lenovo's stuff is still the best. Someday I hope to be able to put together a laptop in the same way that I put together my desktop PC, but I suspect that's a ways off, if ever.
I sat there on 9/11, watching the news and crying. Crying for the innocent people who were murdered, yes, but also crying for the end of freedom.
Maybe I'm naive, but I call BS. On the evening of 9/11, my girlfriend and I sat and discussed the day's events with sadness and confusion. I remember her asking me, "Do you think we'll go to war?", and I clearly remember my response was "With whom?" How can you "go to war" against terrorists? Well, I was proven wrong. You can go to war against a terrorist organization: by exaggerating the enemy's size, by prosecuting any link, tenuous or not, and by outright fabrication. We've now seen all of this. And one of the reasons why we are still angry today is because: most of us didn't see this coming.
I think differently about our government now. Maybe I was on the cusp of it anyway-- I was studying law, and I found the results of the 2000 election to be deeply disturbing. But this event changed the opinions of a lot of people, because for many of us, it was such an obvious use of deceit, and nearly every politican in the game at the time used it to their advantage.
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Symmetrical connections are cool and all, but not very useful for legal purposes (at the moment anyway) unless they also give you a static IP, or IPv6 capability. My static connection to my home computer network is indispensible to me, for work, and for my personal life. I lose the anonymity of dynamic addressing, but this is unimportant to me as I do not do any filesharing.
I always thought it was "Fool me once, shame on-- shame on you. Fool me-- you can't get fooled again." No?
He watches a lot of porn. Octopus.
I'm with you on that. Of course, we're talking about the same me, here: me.
There is a downside: both are expensive. Not so much for Cogent (well, I'm not paying for that one anyway, work is), but Speakeasy definitely comes at a premium. For the price of my one Speakeasy connection, I could buy one of these "triple-play" packages from one of their competitors. And if my cell service weren't also paid for by my work (I always have to be reachable for work), I would consider it. But in the end, I don't think I would-- it's just not worth it. The last time I lost service, on Christmas eve, I called Speakeasy, and sure enough, someone was there and responded. They tracked it back to the DSLAM (Verizon's DSLAM), and we ended up concluding that getting it fixed was a lost cause until the holiday was over. Sure enough, two days after Christmas, my service was back-- probably whenever the Verizon tech responsible got off his fat arse.
But anyway-- we all know why the "good guys" can't compete. It's because the big telcos have politicians deeply within their pockets. How is Speakeasy going to be cheaper when they have to lease their lines from Verizon for more than Verizon itself charges for the same service? This is why we shelled out billions to the telcos in the 1990's-- they're common carriers. We didn't give them that money to expand their private networks. We gave it to them to expand the national infrastructure. As far as I'm concerned, they're reneging on their contractual obligations to us. And I will not give them a penny if I can help it.
Or would that be grabbitational? I remember repeating the word 'grabbity' in front of my father (a physicist) when I was a kid and watching him get irrationally angry. Ha ha. Grabbity.
I've read that the USPS claims that junk snail mail keeps their operating costs low, so that you only need to shell out $.39 per stamp. I haven't been able to find this claim myself, but it seems plausible. FWIW, I think their expenses might be a little bit lower if they didn't have to deliver so much junk mail.
Having originally gotten my bachelor's degree in the humanities, I have to say that when I decided to start studying mathematics again, I found that it was difficult. But it turns out that, really, the difficulty was NOT the subject matter. I can't say that more emphatically. It was the culture of math education. I first started by picking up a college precalculus textbook. Although I remembered some pieces here and there, I found the book to be, essentially illegible. Why? Because authors of math books love to give you the formal definitions for things. Until you have some familiarity with the language of mathematics, this is like looking up, say, the German word gesellschaft and finding the German definition. Not very helpful if you don't speak German already.
The most important things I learned from this are:
One of those other sources was classroom learning. The simple fact is that a good teacher is absolutely the best way to learn mathematics. They've been through the confusion before. They know where you're coming from. This is worth the money. Unfortunately, and here's a caveat, there are some truly horrible mathematics teachers out there. There are a variety of reasons why bad teachers are teaching math, and I won't go into them, but suffice it to say: they are very discouraging. The trick is to go back to the first part I mention above: be persistent. You must always have enough confidence in yourself to say: "I am not the problem."
I see math in two ways: there's the visual approach, and the algorithmic approach. Simply put, if you can draw something simple on a piece of paper, you can do the visual part. If you can play a game of chess, let alone the highly complex and nuanced kinds of computer games that exist today, you can do the algorithmic part. The two pieces work together.
I found the following books very helpful, especially the "How to Ace Calculus" series. Don't be ashamed to buy a book with a title that makes you seem like an idiot. Value rigidity will end your math career-- you really need to admit to yourself that it's OK to ask for help.
Not true! I think that disproves GP's claim that aliens aren't contacting us. They're obviously OK with the gays. Photographic proof, right there! ;^)
On a more serious note; University of Maastricht: don't let horny grad students near journalists. Not to mention, there's a big difference between sex with a robot, and marriage with a robot.
Now I'm feeling seriously stupid for posting seriously about this. This is a stupid article. Let's keep the blather stupid, shall we?
You missed one: you don't need a GUI to configure your application. This makes a HUGE difference when the machine is embedded, remote, or otherwise hard to connect a screen to.
One thing we can say for certain about trade is that it occurs because of an economic imbalance. Someone needs or wants something-- another has it. If one party's value for the thing is high enough, and the other party's value is low enough, party 2 will sell to party 1. The value equation is extremely flexible: people can trade goods for services, services for information, information for power, and so on. Money (which has no significant value in itself) is often the convenient platform that allows exchange between two non-obvious types, like information and goods.
But trade does not exist solely in the domain of freedom. Trade has existed for a long time. As you point out yourself, people "freely" trade life for servitude. But how is serfdom Free Trade? And if that's your position, a life that is nasty, brutish, and short and a life filled with the wonders of Free Trade don't sound all that mutually-exclusive to me. Arguing that they are ignores vast swaths of European history.
Take out the word "free", and I might consider your argument, though. Yes, civilization exists because of trade. But not free trade. Free Trade only exists in a vaccuum.
Seriously, if they're that concerned about it-- run HTTP to Wikipedia through a proxy. Disable edits. I can see why they would just block it-- this is a knee-jerk reaction and blocking the whole site is fast and easy-- but it's still a stupid thing to do.
Also mouse/rat/cockroach droppings, all of which are more common in the city. As someone who comes from a long line of allergy sufferers and asthmatics, and whose family was until relatively recently, farmers, I have to agree with the GP that studies that indicate that too-clean houses are the cause of allergies/asthma are flawed. I grew up in the countryside, and was outside often, and yet, I have asthma. I picked up an air filter in my twenties and it has made an enormous difference in the quality of my sleep ever since.
My 286 when I was in grade school wasn't designed as a toy, either. But it ended up functioning that way, for me. And it definitely influenced my career path. And grades. I was handing in typed homework (we had a daisywheel printer-- the ultimate!) in grade school because I could-- I wanted an excuse to play with the computer-- and my teachers held this work up as a shining example for others to follow. I can assure you that the content was not very good, but it did look nice.
I also discovered that your newspaper route customers tended to pay a bit more promptly if you tucked a printed bill into their paper, instead of reading the amount off out of your grubby pencil ledger. There was always that one guy who insisted that the slightest smear was actually a PAID mark. Had to learn Lotus 1-2-3 for that trick.
It's hard, and one could argue, irrational, not to be concerned about one's own financial well-being. You don't hear many people saying, "I lost my job, but by golly, free trade will work it all out in the end!"
So while it may be true that free trade is better for the world, in aggregate, it does not change the fact that it is worse for many individuals. Considering that the individual is almost always powerless in the employer-employee relationship, especially in the case of a multinational corporation, I find it hard to have sympathy for the corporation. I won't even get into comparing the expense accounts of the highest-paid employees to the wages of the lowest-paid.
I suspect that human susceptibility to advertisement has some relation to the unconscious drive to have elevated status within your social group. There are clear evolutionary advantages to having a better status-- better mate selection and better chances for survival. Advertisements almost always pitch a product as more than just some widget that helps you with a task-- they pitch them as making your life more comfortable, more popular, and so on. When something is on TV, it seems "important". After all, everyone knows about it. Buying that product (especially wrt being an early adopter) makes you stand out. Advertisers, consciously or not, take advantage of our inability to differentiate between TV-society and real society. I think that this is why young twenty-somethings often find themselves burdened with large amounts of financial debt-- pressures to mate or show social dominance are at their highest then.
Sure. I'm not a nutritionist, but there is plenty of [reputable] information out there if you want more than I provide.
I basically try to stick to the upper limit of the carb end of the food pyramid (or whatever they call it now), since I am physically active. There are three parts to carbohydrate consumption that you need to consider: what kind, how much, and when.
Regarding what kind-- I basically do not consider high-glycemic foods (usually foods high in refined sugars) as even worth consuming. That's not to say that I don't have an occasional desert or piece of candy, but I try to keep to once a week, or less. Soda is simply verboten for me. I don't substitute soda with diet soda either-- unfortunately, aspartame gives me terrific headaches.
Generally, yes, whole grain foods are a good start. Whole wheat breads, whole wheat pasta (which tastes a lot better than it used to). Rice or barley. I avoid white rice. I'll usually go with brown basmati, short grain brown rice, or wild rice. Beans are another great option for complex carbs. They also contain vast quantities of fiber, which you also want to get. I tend not to eat as many beans as I should. I had an unpleasant experience with raw kidney beans not too long ago (they're poisonous-- now I know), and I've been somewhat turned off by the experience. But I'm working them back in, and unlike my father, I appear to be able to digest them without asphyxiating the rest of the household.
If you have access to a bakery, eating whole grain bread gets a lot more pleasant. The prepackaged crap bread at the store is really an awful analog to fresh bread. Or, for a few bucks, pick up a bread machine. Spend 5 minutes at night dumping a few things into the mixer, and when you wake up in the morning, you have fresh bread! It was one of the best purchases I ever made, and if I had been smart about it, I would have looked at a yard sale first. Those things are everywhere.
As for how much, portion control is a big thing for Americans typically, and I also find myself forgetting to control how much I eat. If you eat high-fiber foods, which are filling, this is less of an issue. Also, as a side note-- with the exception of animal fats and trans-fats, fats are good for you. Keep them in your diet. They help satiate you, and the end result is that you tend to consume fewer calories. The only way to know the answer to the 'how much' question for sure is to calculate your daily calorie expenditure and then attempt to fill your calorie quota. But honestly, I don't think about this part too much.
The 'when' part is also important: carbohydrates provide quick energy to your body, the simplest carbs being the quickest to deliver energy. When do you need the most energy? In the morning. You wake up in a calorie deficit, having sustained your metabolic functions throughout the night without eating. If you are active, this is even more so, as your body has been busy not just running itself, but converting carbohydrates into glycogen and storing it in your muscle tissue. So if you eat carbs in the morning, your body will put them into immediate use. If you eat carbs in the evening, when you are less active, the remainder of unused carbs are stored as fat. For that reason, I eat more carbs in the morning. There is one exception to this: if I am carbo-loading for a race, I basically try to max-out my carb consumption during all waking hours (generally, you body can move 25g of glucose/hour into your bloodstream-- that's about 1 Clif Bar per hour). The kinds of carbs I have in the morning are: fruit, yogurt (which tends to be loaded with sugar), whole grain cereal.
High-glycemic foods are bad on many levels, but the main thing is that your body's insulin response is the main defense against large amounts of sugar in your bloodstream. I could go into details, but I won't-- Suffice it to say, diabetes, which is essentially where your insulin response is disrupted, is awful in the extreme. Talk to a
There is one good thing that comes out of this: collaboration between BSD and Linux developers on wireless drivers. The licensing issue was bound to happen sooner or later on some piece of code. It's good that it happened early on in a project and with only bruised egos to show for it.
Wireless support in OpenBSD is outstanding. You can use ifconfig to manage your wireless devices just like you can for wired interfaces. I don't know a whole lot about OpenHAL, but if it works the way wireless does in OpenBSD, common libraries are simply reused so that developers can get new drivers up and running quickly. This will be a good thing for Linux, and the additional attention will improve wireless support for both platforms.
Finally coffee is not a bad thing.
;^)
For a long time, I was a tea-drinker. I love coffee, but it made me feel terrible. There was the initial huge buzz, tons of productivity, and then WHAM, I felt almost like I should be seeing a doctor for clinical depression. I was actually starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me, physiologically. Then, as I started watching my diet more closely, removing refined sugars and so on, I started feeling better and better. I revisited coffee, but in "pure black" form, because a friend insisted that I was missing out on all of the flavor of "real coffee". While this was true, there was a more important effect for me: I didn't get that low from a blood sugar crash anymore. It makes sense that I didn't feel this way when I was drinking tea, because I didn't add sugar. You can eat carbs-- in fact, for someone like me (an ultradistance runner in my spare time), I eat LOTS of carbs. But very few of them are simple sugars. I make an exception for beer-- maltose isn't quite that simple
On another note, this research sounds amazing. Their next step should be to check if the epidemiological data matches up with their hypothesis. I suspect that the correlation between certain activities and Alzheimers and those same activities and diabetes should be similar.
I will have to record and show you my brother's impersonation of Wilford Brimley doing the diabetes commercial. When he says 'diabeatis', I just lose my shit. Yeah, I'm going to hell.
I had a Toughbook CF-W2. Since it was a consumerized version of their actually-tough Toughbooks, I don't know how well my experience reflects on the rest of them. My company gave me the option of getting one of the really rugged ones, but that seemed kind of silly, not to mention, heavy.
Anyway, the CF-W2 was very pleasant, lightweight, portable. Seemed to withstand a fair amount of abuse from me except for little plastic caps over the hinges-- those were smashed pretty quickly.
Then I had a hard disk go bad. Being the tech-person I am, I decided to replace it myself. Just a regular laptop HDD job, nothing special right? Well, the CF-W2 doesn't seem to be designed to be taken apart. The hard disk is *buried* inside the machine. Later, I also decided to swap out the wireless card (Intel Pro, yuck!) with something that had better BSD support (Ralink), and I discovered that was nontrivial as well. Because one of the BNC connectors was in a slightly different place, I didn't have enough slack. Ok, get another antenna wire, but then... it seemed like all of the problems were recursive in that manner. I think I spent two evenings on that particular repair.
I have disassembled dozens of Thinkpad T40-series machines at work for repair. Maintenance is a breeze. Hard disks, especially so. I love how you just twist a screw and the whole thing slides out. T60-series machines follow in that vein.
Like the article submitter, China's behavior disturbs me deeply, and the fact that we subsidize this behavior indirectly, even more so. But from a technical standpoint, Lenovo's stuff is still the best. Someday I hope to be able to put together a laptop in the same way that I put together my desktop PC, but I suspect that's a ways off, if ever.
I sat there on 9/11, watching the news and crying. Crying for the innocent people who were murdered, yes, but also crying for the end of freedom.
Maybe I'm naive, but I call BS. On the evening of 9/11, my girlfriend and I sat and discussed the day's events with sadness and confusion. I remember her asking me, "Do you think we'll go to war?", and I clearly remember my response was "With whom?" How can you "go to war" against terrorists? Well, I was proven wrong. You can go to war against a terrorist organization: by exaggerating the enemy's size, by prosecuting any link, tenuous or not, and by outright fabrication. We've now seen all of this. And one of the reasons why we are still angry today is because: most of us didn't see this coming.
I think differently about our government now. Maybe I was on the cusp of it anyway-- I was studying law, and I found the results of the 2000 election to be deeply disturbing. But this event changed the opinions of a lot of people, because for many of us, it was such an obvious use of deceit, and nearly every politican in the game at the time used it to their advantage.