OK, but is that something new, didn't we know that eating too much sugar leads to "diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart problems"?
That's not universally accepted, as evidenced by the discussions in this very story....is the argument that any quantity of sugar is toxic?
That's something that's not 100% clear from his presentation, but my impression is that his claim is that any amount is toxic.
However, I also got the impression there is some kind of superlinear curve (which is definitely not specified, though it seems likely very much super-linear) relating intake to toxicity, and that there are other factors (fiber intake) that serve to lessen the toxicity.
Fine, let me be more specific. I think Lustig's would agree that his assertion is that "excess" consumption of fructose is now near universal in the US. (Perhaps he'd add a disclaimer like "fructose consumption not in concert with fiber".)
True? I dunno. But his arguments are more convincing than the counterarguments I've seen, and I've seen anecdotally (and admittedly basically uncontrolled) similar effects in myself.
In short... Have you ever wondered that it might just be the sheer amount of calories that makes junk food so bad for you???
Lustig takes some pains to both point explicit fingers at fructose, and then explains the metabolic pathways by which it accomplishes its task.
Perhaps you'd care to provide similar detail of studies implicating caloric intake instead of fructose specifically, and then describe the mechanism by which it causes diabetes?
It's that simple... and yet not at all that simple.
Primarily, calories out is affected by metabolism. (I forget if this plays into Lustig's argument; it's been a while since I watched the video, but I think it does.) Slow the metabolism down, and you reduce "calories out", which means that for a fixed intake you'll start gaining weight. Can different foods affect the body in ways that will slow the metabolism? Certainly different foods affect the bodies in different ways; otherwise I challenge you to eat 2000 cal of sugar every day for a month and nothing else. So it's definitely conceivable, or even likely. I'm not a nutritionist, but I can tell you that "calories in - calories out" does jack shit to address that issue.
The other problem is this. Why do people eat so much? In part it's just a habit of eating... there's a bag of chips next to you, so you snack. But part of it is just that it sucks being hungry. If you're hungry, you'll eat. And part of Lustig's argument is that increased sugar (fructose) intake affects your appetite... and surprise surprise, it makes you hungrier.
So "calories in - calories out" is precisely right... and yet pretty much unhelpful at the same time.
Re:Fructose is processed like a toxin, that is tru
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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Don't forget the fiber. The rare times I drink sugar, it is something like orange juice with extra pulp.
Don't think that the extra pulp gets you much fiber... even Tropicana Extra Pulp has 0g fiber listed on their nutrition facts.
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Well put me in the ignorant group because countless research has been spent on this subject... HFCS (55% fructose - 45% glucose) is no worse than sucrose (50% fructose - 50% glucose)... That problem is the sheer amount of calories
And, if Lustig is right, the stuff he talks about (which damns HFCS and sucrose equally).
Also, the only reason they there is slightly more fructose than glucose is simply because they found it tastes sweeter this way. Meaning, HFCS actually has FEWER calories then a similar sweeter that uses sucrose...
If they were sweetened to the same level -- which they aren't. And that doesn't even get to the fact that HFCS is cheap enough that it's in food that would likely not have any sugar otherwise.
I've never heard of people dying or having problems from ingesting a moderate amount of sugar, that's why I don't find this very credible.
So I discovered the video in question a bit over a year ago, and spent some time looking for an analysis, and didn't find one. (Fortunately, another poster in this dicussion posted a link.)
But if you had watched the video, you'd know that Lustig's assertion is that excess sugar consumption is a driver of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart problems -- and if you think these don't kill, you haven't been paying attention.
But instead of asking "should I give IT a login account on a server that is not owned or managed by them?" perhaps you should ask "should I give IT a login account on a server that is on their network?"
It becomes a lot less clear in that formulation, huh?
Yes, but this is the whole reason why they have never previously taxed orders from out-of-state. Not because they didn't want to, but because the Constitution forbade it.
This statement is patently false simply because it is longstanding (decades) in most states that out-of-state purchases are taxed. It's called a use tax.
You can debate the constitutionality of use taxes, but making out-of-state purchases taxable is most decidedly not new. What's new would be the enforcement and collection of said taxes by the sellers.
Even if you just had a flat tax rate so that everyone pays the same percent, you'd still have people who earn more paying more taxes but it would at least be fair because everyone would get to keep the same proportion of their income.
You're looking at it wrong IMO. The goal shouldn't be to tax a fixed percentage of your income in $, it should be to tax a fixed percentage of the worth you place on your money. That way everyone feels the hit equally. You'd basically certainly value the first $20,000 of income way more than the second $20,000, so the second $20,000 needs to be taxed at a higher actual rate in order for it to "feel" the same.
This is why a tax that is progressive in real percentages can still be effectively regressive if it's not progressive enough.
Now, this is, of course, an impossible goal, and would even vary from person to person, but that doesn't mean we should give up and just go "let's tax everyone at the same real rate".
Well, there is a debate that the 16th Amendment was not ratified correctly.
There's also debate that we didn't land on the moon, or that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii. That doesn't mean that the proponents of that view have any leg to stand on or that there isn't oodles of evidence contradicting it.
True, but how many of the Mythbusters results are positive? I haven't really watched in years, but back when I would watch a fair bit, it seemed that almost all were "busted".
The only difference between Amazon and MP3.com at that point is that Amazon collected the first sale revenue.
Not true. For tracks not from Amazon's store, there's another huge difference: the "proof" that you have access to the file in question is the fact that you uploaded the whole thing to Amazon. With My.MP3.com, that wasn't true.
In other words, from the point of view of the client end, Amazon's true deduplication is an implementation detail, and the client wouldn't be able to figure out if it was being used or not. In the case of My.MP3.com, the client end wouldn't work at all if MP3.com had turned off their "deduplication".
For tracks that come directly from Amazon, the "only difference" you mention is pretty big. In the case of My.MP3.com, the "I have legitimate access to this song" proof is relatively weak: you could just borrow a disc from a friend or the library or whatever, and My.MP3.com would then be distributing the tracks to you. For Amazon, they know you bought it -- no question. Short of hacking Amazon's servers, there's absolutely no way for you to get access to something in Amazon's library you didn't buy.
I'm not saying these things will necessarily make the difference, and it's not like it doesn't bring forth new problems (particularly for the users), but I do think it would be a very logical place to draw the line.
I haven't exactly done any surveys to see how true this is, but at least my impression is that pro-/anti-nuclear sentiment cuts relatively independently of where you fall in the traditional green movement. There are plenty of people in the green movement who are pro-nuclear (I put myself in this category), and plenty who are against.
That said, "Kind of retarded to push clean electric cars that are powere by electricity generated from coal burning plants" is a bit of a strawman. First, there is the potential for even coal plant->electric car to be better overall than internal combustion engine. Second, even the anti-nuke people in the green movement aren't pushing for electric cars powered by coal: they're also pushing for other energy sources like solar and wind.
Thanks to g++, I've been coding in C++0x for months
It's great if you can swing it, but at least for me, it'll be a couple years (like I said) before I'd feel comfortable saying "you need a recent version of GCC." And in my case, I'd like cross-platform compatibility (including across compilers) so I need to wait for MSVC on top of that.
E.g. take your use of closures (lambdas): support for the revised closure syntax has been in a release version of GCC for less than a year. Lots of people can't move that fast.
Also note the above line does not parse as valid statement in C++, even though the ++ operator actually does take a dummy int parameter as the right-hand-side to differentiate it from the ++C; prefix increment operator.
My mnemonic for remembering which version of ++ takes the dummy int is that postfix ++ is "ugly" in the sense that you shouldn't use it*, so the postfix ++ operator takes the ugly dummy int.
This doesn't justify the syntax which is admittedly horrid, but maybe it'll help people who have this problem.
* Take "you shouldn't use postfix ++" with a small grain of salt, though I do mostly believe it. With rare exception, I really really dislike increment operators mixed in a larger expression, which means with rare exception they are standing on their own, acting as statements. And in that context, prefix and postfix ++ do the same thing, and you should use prefix for the traditional efficiency arguments.
Declares a new function in the function/method body WTF? (because C lets you do that, for better or worse... )
What I like best about that is the standard's rule "if a statement can be interpreted as a declaration, than it is" rather than making declarations actually look different from statements. That's pretty awesome.
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd like to argue for C++ a bit. I don't completely buy my arguments here, but at the same time, I don't think it's ridiculous to use C++ for some stuff, and for some rare projects, it's a decidedly reasonable choice.
C++ sits in an area that is reasonably unique amongst languages. It is very performant (unlike Scheme, Ruby, and Python), but it also has an ability to support very rich abstractions (unlike Java and C). What other language doesn't not give you closures, but yet gives you enough syntax to make an approximation that is even as close as, say, boost::lambda? There's no reference counting provided by the C++ runtime, but it gives you enough tools that you can build your own reference counting.
There are very few languages that can claim both the speed and flexibility of C++. The only one that would be familiar to most programmers is D -- and the tool support there is not exactly stellar. About the only other languages I would say has characteristics comparable to those are Common Lisp and Haskell.
As a final point, I find it interesting that you put C into your list. If you said "I want you to do this project, and you can pick between Java and C++" or "between Python and C++" I'd have to ask for more details first, and think about it. I think I disagree with a lot of people on this point, but if you gave said "you have the choice between C and C++", I'd pick C++ in an instant with almost no qualifications. Yes, C is simpler than C++ -- but I don't think it's worth it. RAII alone is enough of a killer feature to mean that I will likely never choose plain C for any project where I have any freedom in the matter.
If C++ is cancer to C's something, that something is also cancer. Or maybe AIDS.
I have a love-hate relationship with C++, but one thing that I more-on-less don't waver on is the fact that I would much rather write in C++ than in C for... basically anything.
They aren't obselete yet. There's probably another year or two before you can expect the latest version of MSVC to have support for most of the features (and that's if they even get it into the next version!), and a couple years after that (depending on your taste) before you are likely to be able to reasonably demand "you must use a compiler that supports C++0x."
The situation in GCC-land is better because they've been more on-the-ball with releasing support for the new features, but even they have a way to go yet (4.6, released yesterday, just added support for 3 new features including nullptr), and you don't have to go too far back before there's basically no support.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, but is that something new, didn't we know that eating too much sugar leads to "diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart problems"?
That's not universally accepted, as evidenced by the discussions in this very story. ...is the argument that any quantity of sugar is toxic?
That's something that's not 100% clear from his presentation, but my impression is that his claim is that any amount is toxic.
However, I also got the impression there is some kind of superlinear curve (which is definitely not specified, though it seems likely very much super-linear) relating intake to toxicity, and that there are other factors (fiber intake) that serve to lessen the toxicity.
Fine, let me be more specific. I think Lustig's would agree that his assertion is that "excess" consumption of fructose is now near universal in the US. (Perhaps he'd add a disclaimer like "fructose consumption not in concert with fiber".)
True? I dunno. But his arguments are more convincing than the counterarguments I've seen, and I've seen anecdotally (and admittedly basically uncontrolled) similar effects in myself.
In short... Have you ever wondered that it might just be the sheer amount of calories that makes junk food so bad for you???
Lustig takes some pains to both point explicit fingers at fructose, and then explains the metabolic pathways by which it accomplishes its task.
Perhaps you'd care to provide similar detail of studies implicating caloric intake instead of fructose specifically, and then describe the mechanism by which it causes diabetes?
Calories in > calories out == fat bastards.
It's that simple... and yet not at all that simple.
Primarily, calories out is affected by metabolism. (I forget if this plays into Lustig's argument; it's been a while since I watched the video, but I think it does.) Slow the metabolism down, and you reduce "calories out", which means that for a fixed intake you'll start gaining weight. Can different foods affect the body in ways that will slow the metabolism? Certainly different foods affect the bodies in different ways; otherwise I challenge you to eat 2000 cal of sugar every day for a month and nothing else. So it's definitely conceivable, or even likely. I'm not a nutritionist, but I can tell you that "calories in - calories out" does jack shit to address that issue.
The other problem is this. Why do people eat so much? In part it's just a habit of eating... there's a bag of chips next to you, so you snack. But part of it is just that it sucks being hungry. If you're hungry, you'll eat. And part of Lustig's argument is that increased sugar (fructose) intake affects your appetite... and surprise surprise, it makes you hungrier.
So "calories in - calories out" is precisely right... and yet pretty much unhelpful at the same time.
Don't forget the fiber. The rare times I drink sugar, it is something like orange juice with extra pulp.
Don't think that the extra pulp gets you much fiber... even Tropicana Extra Pulp has 0g fiber listed on their nutrition facts.
According to Lustig, yes.
Well put me in the ignorant group because countless research has been spent on this subject... HFCS (55% fructose - 45% glucose) is no worse than sucrose (50% fructose - 50% glucose)... That problem is the sheer amount of calories
And, if Lustig is right, the stuff he talks about (which damns HFCS and sucrose equally).
Also, the only reason they there is slightly more fructose than glucose is simply because they found it tastes sweeter this way. Meaning, HFCS actually has FEWER calories then a similar sweeter that uses sucrose...
If they were sweetened to the same level -- which they aren't. And that doesn't even get to the fact that HFCS is cheap enough that it's in food that would likely not have any sugar otherwise.
I've never heard of people dying or having problems from ingesting a moderate amount of sugar, that's why I don't find this very credible.
So I discovered the video in question a bit over a year ago, and spent some time looking for an analysis, and didn't find one. (Fortunately, another poster in this dicussion posted a link.)
But if you had watched the video, you'd know that Lustig's assertion is that excess sugar consumption is a driver of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart problems -- and if you think these don't kill, you haven't been paying attention.
But instead of asking "should I give IT a login account on a server that is not owned or managed by them?" perhaps you should ask "should I give IT a login account on a server that is on their network?"
It becomes a lot less clear in that formulation, huh?
Aside from the fact that they're both frequently included in digital purchases..
While I have purchased admittedly little, and only from the Amazon MP3 store, I've only gotten the cover image.
neither of those is music...
By that reckoning, neither one offers any advantage over the other because you get the music no matter which one you choose.
Physical music still has one advantage over digital: quality. Apart from that, digital wins in every other way...
Liner notes/artwork.
Better give out free players too.
How many people out there wouldn't have the equipment to play those 7" promos if they were given one?
Yes, but this is the whole reason why they have never previously taxed orders from out-of-state. Not because they didn't want to, but because the Constitution forbade it.
This statement is patently false simply because it is longstanding (decades) in most states that out-of-state purchases are taxed. It's called a use tax.
You can debate the constitutionality of use taxes, but making out-of-state purchases taxable is most decidedly not new. What's new would be the enforcement and collection of said taxes by the sellers.
Even if you just had a flat tax rate so that everyone pays the same percent, you'd still have people who earn more paying more taxes but it would at least be fair because everyone would get to keep the same proportion of their income.
You're looking at it wrong IMO. The goal shouldn't be to tax a fixed percentage of your income in $, it should be to tax a fixed percentage of the worth you place on your money. That way everyone feels the hit equally. You'd basically certainly value the first $20,000 of income way more than the second $20,000, so the second $20,000 needs to be taxed at a higher actual rate in order for it to "feel" the same.
This is why a tax that is progressive in real percentages can still be effectively regressive if it's not progressive enough.
Now, this is, of course, an impossible goal, and would even vary from person to person, but that doesn't mean we should give up and just go "let's tax everyone at the same real rate".
Well, there is a debate that the 16th Amendment was not ratified correctly.
There's also debate that we didn't land on the moon, or that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii. That doesn't mean that the proponents of that view have any leg to stand on or that there isn't oodles of evidence contradicting it.
Which column holds the address to send the tax form? which column fills out those tax forms for you?
True, but how many of the Mythbusters results are positive? I haven't really watched in years, but back when I would watch a fair bit, it seemed that almost all were "busted".
- Copying music in the CPU to the cache
- Copying music in the cache to RAM
The cache? The cache? You have at least two caches, sir, and perhaps three. Don't be skipping out on your licencing payments.
-The RIAA
The only difference between Amazon and MP3.com at that point is that Amazon collected the first sale revenue.
Not true. For tracks not from Amazon's store, there's another huge difference: the "proof" that you have access to the file in question is the fact that you uploaded the whole thing to Amazon. With My.MP3.com, that wasn't true.
In other words, from the point of view of the client end, Amazon's true deduplication is an implementation detail, and the client wouldn't be able to figure out if it was being used or not. In the case of My.MP3.com, the client end wouldn't work at all if MP3.com had turned off their "deduplication".
For tracks that come directly from Amazon, the "only difference" you mention is pretty big. In the case of My.MP3.com, the "I have legitimate access to this song" proof is relatively weak: you could just borrow a disc from a friend or the library or whatever, and My.MP3.com would then be distributing the tracks to you. For Amazon, they know you bought it -- no question. Short of hacking Amazon's servers, there's absolutely no way for you to get access to something in Amazon's library you didn't buy.
I'm not saying these things will necessarily make the difference, and it's not like it doesn't bring forth new problems (particularly for the users), but I do think it would be a very logical place to draw the line.
I haven't exactly done any surveys to see how true this is, but at least my impression is that pro-/anti-nuclear sentiment cuts relatively independently of where you fall in the traditional green movement. There are plenty of people in the green movement who are pro-nuclear (I put myself in this category), and plenty who are against.
That said, "Kind of retarded to push clean electric cars that are powere by electricity generated from coal burning plants" is a bit of a strawman. First, there is the potential for even coal plant->electric car to be better overall than internal combustion engine. Second, even the anti-nuke people in the green movement aren't pushing for electric cars powered by coal: they're also pushing for other energy sources like solar and wind.
Thanks to g++, I've been coding in C++0x for months
It's great if you can swing it, but at least for me, it'll be a couple years (like I said) before I'd feel comfortable saying "you need a recent version of GCC." And in my case, I'd like cross-platform compatibility (including across compilers) so I need to wait for MSVC on top of that.
E.g. take your use of closures (lambdas): support for the revised closure syntax has been in a release version of GCC for less than a year. Lots of people can't move that fast.
Also note the above line does not parse as valid statement in C++, even though the ++ operator actually does take a dummy int parameter as the right-hand-side to differentiate it from the ++C; prefix increment operator.
My mnemonic for remembering which version of ++ takes the dummy int is that postfix ++ is "ugly" in the sense that you shouldn't use it*, so the postfix ++ operator takes the ugly dummy int.
This doesn't justify the syntax which is admittedly horrid, but maybe it'll help people who have this problem.
* Take "you shouldn't use postfix ++" with a small grain of salt, though I do mostly believe it. With rare exception, I really really dislike increment operators mixed in a larger expression, which means with rare exception they are standing on their own, acting as statements. And in that context, prefix and postfix ++ do the same thing, and you should use prefix for the traditional efficiency arguments.
Declares a new function in the function/method body WTF? (because C lets you do that, for better or worse... )
What I like best about that is the standard's rule "if a statement can be interpreted as a declaration, than it is" rather than making declarations actually look different from statements. That's pretty awesome.
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd like to argue for C++ a bit. I don't completely buy my arguments here, but at the same time, I don't think it's ridiculous to use C++ for some stuff, and for some rare projects, it's a decidedly reasonable choice.
C++ sits in an area that is reasonably unique amongst languages. It is very performant (unlike Scheme, Ruby, and Python), but it also has an ability to support very rich abstractions (unlike Java and C). What other language doesn't not give you closures, but yet gives you enough syntax to make an approximation that is even as close as, say, boost::lambda? There's no reference counting provided by the C++ runtime, but it gives you enough tools that you can build your own reference counting.
There are very few languages that can claim both the speed and flexibility of C++. The only one that would be familiar to most programmers is D -- and the tool support there is not exactly stellar. About the only other languages I would say has characteristics comparable to those are Common Lisp and Haskell.
As a final point, I find it interesting that you put C into your list. If you said "I want you to do this project, and you can pick between Java and C++" or "between Python and C++" I'd have to ask for more details first, and think about it. I think I disagree with a lot of people on this point, but if you gave said "you have the choice between C and C++", I'd pick C++ in an instant with almost no qualifications. Yes, C is simpler than C++ -- but I don't think it's worth it. RAII alone is enough of a killer feature to mean that I will likely never choose plain C for any project where I have any freedom in the matter.
If C++ is cancer to C's something, that something is also cancer. Or maybe AIDS.
I have a love-hate relationship with C++, but one thing that I more-on-less don't waver on is the fact that I would much rather write in C++ than in C for... basically anything.
They aren't obselete yet. There's probably another year or two before you can expect the latest version of MSVC to have support for most of the features (and that's if they even get it into the next version!), and a couple years after that (depending on your taste) before you are likely to be able to reasonably demand "you must use a compiler that supports C++0x."
The situation in GCC-land is better because they've been more on-the-ball with releasing support for the new features, but even they have a way to go yet (4.6, released yesterday, just added support for 3 new features including nullptr), and you don't have to go too far back before there's basically no support.