Geez people! What's happened to us all? Why do we think that exercise leads to weight loss? Why should calorie restriction lead to weight loss?
Because in this universe, we obey the law of conservation of energy.
Your "one slice of bread too many" scenario leading to weight gain over the course of years is possible, and depressingly common.
Your "one slice too few" scenario is not going to happen. First of all, if you find yourself short by 100 calories a day, you are going to get hungry more often. This will lead to you eating more, thus making up the shortfall. Second, if you find yourself short by 100 calories a day and _don't_ eat more, your body will automatically take steps to reduce calorie consumption. Basically the only way you are going to waste away by maintaining a slight caloric shortage is if either you deliberately set out to do so (or someone else does so to you), or if there's something wrong with you.
So while the simple equation of Weight gain = calories consumed - calories expended
is true, the complication is that calories expended is a function of calories consumed, and vice versa. Therefore you get nonlinear behavior, including things like "set points".
1) For allergies, Zyrtec. Non-prescription, non-drowsy, and it actually works. For me, anyway, your mileage may vary. Yeah, exercise sucks when you can't breathe.
2) For not being around people, bicycling. Sure, you're outside, but you might as well be alone, unless you specifically seek out a group ride. Inline skating works too, if you have a place to do it (skating solo on the road is likely a bad idea). Jogging and running also work, provided you use headphones, but they're more likely to be painful.
3) If after eliminating those factors you don't find any joy in physical activity, then invest in a nice comfy couch. There's no point in exercise for exercise's sake.
"Social anxiety disorder" is what sneering extraverts and pill-happy shrinks call introversion. Shyness is what introversion was called before everything got medicalized. Agoraphobia is separate; that refers to being afraid to leave the basement for its own sake, not because the world outside has people in it.
Every day (unless the weather is really severe) I walk a fairly brisk 7 miles, occasionally increasing this to 10, 15, or even over 20 miles.
Walking simply does not burn that many calories. Up to a point, walking faster is more efficient than walking slower, so by speeding up you don't burn that many more calories per hour (and may burn less calories per mile).
An 8oz (250ml) glass of fruit juice contains about 150 calories. The 100g of muesli has 348 calories. The berries are mostly water but there's also sugar, so there's some calories there. A medium sized apple is 61 calories, an orange 80, a banana 105. That's at least 805 calories without including dinner, the alcoholic beverages, the skim milk (91 calories per cup), the berries. Vegetables are not non-caloric (despite their unpleasant taste) and whole-wheat pasta has just as many calories as the ordinary sort.
So basically you're probably eating more than you think and burning less.
I have personally written to Adobe complaining about the massive price differences, and Adobe wrote back claiming it was because of localisation costs (translating software plus documentation into 20 languages can be pricey).
BUT, the bastards are lying. The localisation of any piece of major software is now a matter of course. It's planned in right from the very beginning.
That's a non-sequitur. Even if it's planned in from the beginning, it has a significant cost. And Adobe is free to apportion those costs any way they want consistent with generally accepted accounting principles.
Of course, the localization claims get a bit silly when they charge the same in pounds as they do in US dollars. Yeah, those UK English localisation costs are enormous. Not to mention that any relationship between software price and cost of development is more than a bit tenuous in the first place.
Remember those retractable antennas? Well, extending the antenna had no effect on the phone's range whatsoever. In fact, the retractable part was not connected at all.
It doesn't matter whether it was connected or not. It had an effect, thanks to the black magic which is RF. Moving pieces of metal (or even plastic, if they weren't metal) around in a cell phone can't help but have an effect. Granted, it may not have been the effect the users wanted, but it was an effect.
I've written a wifi signal strength meter for an embedded product. During my research, I found it was pretty much standard to base the bumber of bars on the signal to noise ratio, not the raw signal strength.
Not in the least because many common wifi chipsets don't make raw signal strength available to the rest of the system. Cellular modules do, but if you ask a phone maker how the number of bars corresponds to the error rate and signal strength, they won't tell you. Although a bit of experimentation reveals that as long as the error rate is low and the signal is above the noise floor, you get full bars. That's probably marketing.
The battery conspiracy thing is a bit silly. Rechargable battery chemistry follows an S-curve. There's a very short period at the beginning with the battery over the nominal voltage, a long and almost linear middle section, and a short period at the end where the voltage drops quickly. So a naive voltage measurement gives exactly as described in the article -- almost full most of the time with a quick drop at the end. A less naive measurement is very tricky because the voltage in the linear section depends not only on state of charge, but current draw, recent current draw, temperature, the age of the battery being used, etc. The best way to do it accurately is to track a particular battery through its charge cycle and monitor current in and current out. Smart batteries like those in laptops do. I don't think cell phone batteries are smart batteries.
Okay. Let's clear this sucker up. For the last damn time (in my dreams, eh?), your right to free speech in the US is your right to free speech AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT. You do not have the right to libel anyone or anything you want. The Constitution protects your right to make comments about the government, to agitate peacefully for government change, to seek redress, to petition the government, etc.
Robert Bork, is that you?
No, free speech is free speech. It is true that there are exceptions like libel law, but it is not nearly so limited as you say. If a law were to be passed forbidding speaking against Disney, Halliburton, and Blackwater, that would be equally as unconstitutional as a law against speaking out against Bush.
No, libel is hugely different on the internet. Want to draw attention to opposing opinions, launch a libel suit, want to create the impression that you have a hugely inflated opinion of your self worth - launch a libel suit, perversely enough, want the convince people that you have something to hide launch a libel suit and, finally want to convince people that you have more money than sense, launch a libel suit.
If some dickhead with zero reputation is saying bad things about you on the Internet, sure, it's pointless to sue them for libel; in the US you might even have trouble proving damages. But if some dickhead is credibly impersonating you, using your own name and reputation to say false and derogatory things about you, that's a different matter. It would be worth suing to get an injunction if nothing else.
It is a creative expression fixed into a tangible medium that lasts for more than a brief period of time. It is not trivial -- the layout of the board is critical to the mechanics of the game.
And therefore it is a (patentable) functional element and should not be covered by copyright law; that's double-dipping.
However, we've recently seen that RAM holds state well enough to preserve crypto keys thru a power cycle. This has very scary implications: the RAM knows what's happening, and behaves differently (loses data immediately on power-off or remembers it for several seconds) in order to cause the most difficulty for the owner of the machine.
How long have you been using computers? Anyone who has debugged a few nontrivial problems already knows that the computer will behave in order to cause the most difficulty for the user -- gremlins are the usual explanation.
Anyway, I find the "DMA controller writing bad RAM to disk" scenario somewhat unlikely. The drive must have protection against writing while the disk isn't spinning at the right speed (or every "yank the plug while writing" event would result in significant corruption), and the disk is going to start spinning down on power loss long before the DRAM starts losing its memory. Which isn't to say there couldn't be other problems.
I'm not convinced that whole-house protection helps much either. A few years ago, there was some event during a thunderstorm - we never quite figured out what - that fried two TiVo modems, a garage door opener (the circuit board was visibly burned and light bulb shattered), a few Wirsbo hot-water thermostats (not even connected to the mains power, just low-voltage from the boiler), a few Vantage whole-house dimmer modules, an intercom, and a printer.
Common-mode spike. The power line was fine, but your ground got knocked up to a few kilovolts by a nearby strike.
Requiring speech can be a violation of free speech just as preventing it is. For example, if I'm allowed to say that the earth is flat, but in all my material on the subject I'm required to have a enormous red label saying "CRACKPOT", my right to free speech has been inhibited, as I've been forced to undermine my own argument. Video game labeling is a less clear-cut case, but it's unlikely any law which requires judgmental labeling like "this game will turn your children into street hoodlums" is going to pass Constitutional muster.
Let's try abolishing patents instead. Ideally we would want companies to replace the lawyers with engineers afterward, and maybe export the lawyers overseas to prevent them from continuing to be a drain on society.
Shipping them overseas would be an act of war. How about a compromise... we ship them halfway.
(yeah, yeah, I know, dumping toxic waste in the ocean is frowned upon. But be reasonable, the half life of a boatload of lawyers can't be more than a few days... the toxicity will be gone in a month)
If there was ever a semi-mindless task that brings home the bacon, integration is it.
Make this work with that and that work with this.
You've been lucky. After the "*does it*", the usual response from the ones who want it done is "But I wanted this, this, and that". Where "this, this, and that" are requirements which were never brought up before and which are completely beyond the capabilities of the products you were integrating.
They are trying to discredit him on the basis of mis-representative claims of reproduction and authorship, rather then refuting his work experimentally, as is proper science.
Uhh, they have refuted his work experimentally, or at least failed to reproduce it despite trying. While I agree that one of the claims sustained against him was petty (adding a student's name to a paper when the student didn't do the work), the other claim -- that his work was independently reproduced when it in fact was not -- goes right to the heart of the issue.
I am sure a few small regions can benefit, but can this really put a dent in US energy demands?
Doesn't affect demand at all. But could it make up a significant fraction of supply? Sure... but not as much as fossil sources. The US is currently in a position where most of the good locations for wind generation are completely untapped. So for the next few years or decades, wind energy could make up an increasing percentage of US supply. But after you run out of good sites, you run into diminishing returns, where you have to spend more and more for less and less energy generated. And, given that demand will continue to increase, after that, wind's percentage of supply will have to decrease.
There's also the issue of the unreliability of the wind; one unfortunate weather system parked over the mid-section of the country could wreak havoc with wind-generated power; I don't know how common such an occurrence is.
I don't think having no air conditioning for one evening is a big deal. If it's a big deal for you, don't sign up for the discounted electricity.
It IS a big deal for me, particularly when that evening is the hottest of the year. And it will become a big deal for others, once they go through their first or second heat wave with no A/C for several nights. I don't have a problem with these programs, except that I suspect green-minded politicians will want to force people to enter into them, especially after a few incidents like I described cause people to leave the program.
don't think you should be able to use blind searches of a DNA database as evidence, because it's too easy to get false positives. It's only useful evidence against someone you've already found by other means, or as a way to generate leads.
A blind search of a DNA database is evidence, but it's much weaker evidence. If we assume the FBIs 1-in-113 billion number is true and uniform over the population, the chance of finding a match for a random DNA sample which is not already in the 6-million-member database is a little better than 1 in 20,000. Those odd are large but not staggering.
In a database of fewer than 30,000 profiles, 32 pairs matched at nine or more loci. Three of those pairs were "perfect" matches, identical at 13 out of 13 loci.
Running the birthday problem "backwards":
In a database of 30,000 profiles, 3 matches would be expected if the number of distinct "birthdays" was about 150 million, not 113 billion. That certainly does not support the FBIs claim. And a 9-loci match between people picked at random would happen 1 in 14 million times.
Your writeup has touched on some of the biggest problems with superinsulation. #1 is cost, but beyond that, the small windows you require are generally not what people (particularly people who can afford it) want. Sealing the house that well is going to make it feel stuffy, even with your planned air intake. And it's likely to result in mold/mildew problems in humid areas. Maintenance is going to be an issue as well; thermal expansion and contraction of the home's exterior will tend to re-open those cracks you painstakingly sealed.
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Your 5-hour commute is your major problem; the lack of exercise is secondary.
Because in this universe, we obey the law of conservation of energy.
Your "one slice of bread too many" scenario leading to weight gain over the course of years is possible, and depressingly common.
Your "one slice too few" scenario is not going to happen. First of all, if you find yourself short by 100 calories a day, you are going to get hungry more often. This will lead to you eating more, thus making up the shortfall. Second, if you find yourself short by 100 calories a day and _don't_ eat more, your body will automatically take steps to reduce calorie consumption. Basically the only way you are going to waste away by maintaining a slight caloric shortage is if either you deliberately set out to do so (or someone else does so to you), or if there's something wrong with you.
So while the simple equation of
Weight gain = calories consumed - calories expended
is true, the complication is that calories expended is a function of calories consumed, and vice versa. Therefore you get nonlinear behavior, including things like "set points".
1) For allergies, Zyrtec. Non-prescription, non-drowsy, and it actually works. For me, anyway, your mileage may vary. Yeah, exercise sucks when you can't breathe.
2) For not being around people, bicycling. Sure, you're outside, but you might as well be alone, unless you specifically seek out a group ride. Inline skating works too, if you have a place to do it (skating solo on the road is likely a bad idea). Jogging and running also work, provided you use headphones, but they're more likely to be painful.
3) If after eliminating those factors you don't find any joy in physical activity, then invest in a nice comfy couch. There's no point in exercise for exercise's sake.
"Social anxiety disorder" is what sneering extraverts and pill-happy shrinks call introversion. Shyness is what introversion was called before everything got medicalized. Agoraphobia is separate; that refers to being afraid to leave the basement for its own sake, not because the world outside has people in it.
Walking simply does not burn that many calories. Up to a point, walking faster is more efficient than walking slower, so by speeding up you don't burn that many more calories per hour (and may burn less calories per mile).
An 8oz (250ml) glass of fruit juice contains about 150 calories. The 100g of muesli has 348 calories. The berries are mostly water but there's also sugar, so there's some calories there. A medium sized apple is 61 calories, an orange 80, a banana 105. That's at least 805 calories without including dinner, the alcoholic beverages, the skim milk (91 calories per cup), the berries. Vegetables are not non-caloric (despite their unpleasant taste) and whole-wheat pasta has just as many calories as the ordinary sort.
So basically you're probably eating more than you think and burning less.
That's a non-sequitur. Even if it's planned in from the beginning, it has a significant cost. And Adobe is free to apportion those costs any way they want consistent with generally accepted accounting principles.
Of course, the localization claims get a bit silly when they charge the same in pounds as they do in US dollars. Yeah, those UK English localisation costs are enormous. Not to mention that any relationship between software price and cost of development is more than a bit tenuous in the first place.
It doesn't matter whether it was connected or not. It had an effect, thanks to the black magic which is RF. Moving pieces of metal (or even plastic, if they weren't metal) around in a cell phone can't help but have an effect. Granted, it may not have been the effect the users wanted, but it was an effect.
Not in the least because many common wifi chipsets don't make raw signal strength available to the rest of the system. Cellular modules do, but if you ask a phone maker how the number of bars corresponds to the error rate and signal strength, they won't tell you. Although a bit of experimentation reveals that as long as the error rate is low and the signal is above the noise floor, you get full bars. That's probably marketing.
The battery conspiracy thing is a bit silly. Rechargable battery chemistry follows an S-curve. There's a very short period at the beginning with the battery over the nominal voltage, a long and almost linear middle section, and a short period at the end where the voltage drops quickly. So a naive voltage measurement gives exactly as described in the article -- almost full most of the time with a quick drop at the end. A less naive measurement is very tricky because the voltage in the linear section depends not only on state of charge, but current draw, recent current draw, temperature, the age of the battery being used, etc. The best way to do it accurately is to track a particular battery through its charge cycle and monitor current in and current out. Smart batteries like those in laptops do. I don't think cell phone batteries are smart batteries.
Robert Bork, is that you?
No, free speech is free speech. It is true that there are exceptions like libel law, but it is not nearly so limited as you say. If a law were to be passed forbidding speaking against Disney, Halliburton, and Blackwater, that would be equally as unconstitutional as a law against speaking out against Bush.
If some dickhead with zero reputation is saying bad things about you on the Internet, sure, it's pointless to sue them for libel; in the US you might even have trouble proving damages. But if some dickhead is credibly impersonating you, using your own name and reputation to say false and derogatory things about you, that's a different matter. It would be worth suing to get an injunction if nothing else.
And therefore it is a (patentable) functional element and should not be covered by copyright law; that's double-dipping.
How long have you been using computers? Anyone who has debugged a few nontrivial problems already knows that the computer will behave in order to cause the most difficulty for the user -- gremlins are the usual explanation.
Anyway, I find the "DMA controller writing bad RAM to disk" scenario somewhat unlikely. The drive must have protection against writing while the disk isn't spinning at the right speed (or every "yank the plug while writing" event would result in significant corruption), and the disk is going to start spinning down on power loss long before the DRAM starts losing its memory. Which isn't to say there couldn't be other problems.
Common-mode spike. The power line was fine, but your ground got knocked up to a few kilovolts by a nearby strike.
Requiring speech can be a violation of free speech just as preventing it is. For example, if I'm allowed to say that the earth is flat, but in all my material on the subject I'm required to have a enormous red label saying "CRACKPOT", my right to free speech has been inhibited, as I've been forced to undermine my own argument. Video game labeling is a less clear-cut case, but it's unlikely any law which requires judgmental labeling like "this game will turn your children into street hoodlums" is going to pass Constitutional muster.
Claim 58 is especially amusing. It's a claim on a database of arrays of name/value pairs. Yeah, no one's ever done that one before.
Shipping them overseas would be an act of war. How about a compromise... we ship them halfway.
(yeah, yeah, I know, dumping toxic waste in the ocean is frowned upon. But be reasonable, the half life of a boatload of lawyers can't be more than a few days... the toxicity will be gone in a month)
You've been lucky. After the "*does it*", the usual response from the ones who want it done is "But I wanted this, this, and that". Where "this, this, and that" are requirements which were never brought up before and which are completely beyond the capabilities of the products you were integrating.
Exactly why we need to mine and burn them NOW! Save the earth, burn the clathrates!
Uhh, they have refuted his work experimentally, or at least failed to reproduce it despite trying. While I agree that one of the claims sustained against him was petty (adding a student's name to a paper when the student didn't do the work), the other claim -- that his work was independently reproduced when it in fact was not -- goes right to the heart of the issue.
Doesn't affect demand at all. But could it make up a significant fraction of supply? Sure... but not as much as fossil sources. The US is currently in a position where most of the good locations for wind generation are completely untapped. So for the next few years or decades, wind energy could make up an increasing percentage of US supply. But after you run out of good sites, you run into diminishing returns, where you have to spend more and more for less and less energy generated. And, given that demand will continue to increase, after that, wind's percentage of supply will have to decrease.
There's also the issue of the unreliability of the wind; one unfortunate weather system parked over the mid-section of the country could wreak havoc with wind-generated power; I don't know how common such an occurrence is.
It IS a big deal for me, particularly when that evening is the hottest of the year. And it will become a big deal for others, once they go through their first or second heat wave with no A/C for several nights. I don't have a problem with these programs, except that I suspect green-minded politicians will want to force people to enter into them, especially after a few incidents like I described cause people to leave the program.
A blind search of a DNA database is evidence, but it's much weaker evidence. If we assume the FBIs 1-in-113 billion number is true and uniform over the population, the chance of finding a match for a random DNA sample which is not already in the 6-million-member database is a little better than 1 in 20,000. Those odd are large but not staggering.
Running the birthday problem "backwards":
In a database of 30,000 profiles, 3 matches would be expected if the number of distinct "birthdays" was about 150 million, not 113 billion. That certainly does not support the FBIs claim. And a 9-loci match between people picked at random would happen 1 in 14 million times.
Drop "international", and I'd be willing to bet that's true for countries where the local NSA-equivalent hasn't been caught at it as well as the US.
Your writeup has touched on some of the biggest problems with superinsulation. #1 is cost, but beyond that, the small windows you require are generally not what people (particularly people who can afford it) want. Sealing the house that well is going to make it feel stuffy, even with your planned air intake. And it's likely to result in mold/mildew problems in humid areas. Maintenance is going to be an issue as well; thermal expansion and contraction of the home's exterior will tend to re-open those cracks you painstakingly sealed.