My impression of the Futurama situation is that the show wasn't canceled because of lack of money or viewers, but instead because of politics. Apparently Groening got a much better contract this time around, which allowed him not just to keep greater control of the show, but also take home more of the profits from it. Groening, at least, believes that Fox are resentful of that and so have tried to keep the show moderately, but not highly, successful. So they keep stuffing it into timeslots where they know it will be preempted, not advertising it at all, and so on. Keep in mind that despite this screwing the show's ratings were pretty much in line with King of the Hill, a more mainstream show in a better timeslot. I have no idea if this is still the case, but it was back when Fox made the decision not to get any more Futurama episodes.
I don't have a problem with Fox canceling shows that nobody watches. (I don't like it, but hey, it happens.) My problem is that they didn't seem to give Futurama a chance after the first season. It's honestly like they were trying to kill it, and many people close to the situation say that's exactly what was happening.
Oh? Mine's labeled "Made in Mexico," which is hardly any different. Seriously, in the realm of electronics you either buy foreign or you don't buy at all. Is there anyone who still doesn't know this? My father, the most rabid "Made in USA" advocate I know of, long since gave up on trying to buy USA-made tech. It was a combination of resignation (you just can't do it) and recognition (10 or 20 years ago, stuff coming from Asia really was junk; but now it's as good as or better than American stuff). And he's not exactly tech-savvy.
I'm not worried about the ABI compatibility, I'm worried about the reliability of the compiler. gcc has been an extremely dangerous product for some time now. If you run anything more than -O you're in real danger of getting broken code, even on popular architectures and operating systems.
If I were running things over at NetBSD HQ, I'd be much more worried about that than feature-completeness.
The real problem isn't users like the one you describe. Those kinds are a joy, the kind who make me enjoy doing tech support. They listen to you, they follow your instructions, nobody gets frustrated and everything gets wrapped up quickly. The real problem are the computer-illiterate users who think they know what they're doing. They try to skip steps and do things their own way. And when they screw something up, which they always do, they lie about it. So usually I have to think up a completely different way of solving the problem. Since if I say "Try what I told you again" then they have to lie again, which makes them angry. ("What, don't you believe me? I tried it, it won't work. You calling me a liar?") So we have to invent something else that lets us both pretend the guy never lied, and he really did do what I said. Those are the callers I hate. Usually finding out the source of a problem takes half an hour, during which time information is slowly revealed.
ObAnecdote: I worked tech support for my college, and one time I got a call from a girl who said her computer was broken. I asked her what it was doing wrong, and after asking in several different ways I got an answer: it was showing everything in shades of red instead of normal color. First question I asked: "Has the monitor been moved, dropped, jarred, or hit recently?" No, she said, she hadn't even used her computer in a week. I had her check the cables, even had her turn off her lamp (hey, it used to work with one of my old monitors). Nothing. I was escalating her to our onsite service, just making conversation while filling out the forms, when she asked about longer ethernet cables. I asked her why, and she said hers didn't reach any more. I asked what she meant, and she said "Oh, I moved my computer from one side of the room to the other today, and now my ethernet cable doesn't reach." I couldn't say anything for a few minutes. I asked, very slowly, if by any chance she had dropped her monitor during this process, and she readily admitted she had. I told her we couldn't fix that, and she'd have to buy a new monitor. She said ok, that was fine, and she didn't sound upset in the slightest. It was a very confusing call, although the girl was quite nice the entire time. Actually, she made a point of coming down to the computer labs in person and thanking me... I kind of wonder if she had a crush on me or something, though I'd never met her before in my life.
There's definitely a lot of truth in what you say. I don't think anyone is going to rush out and buy a car because they like how it handles in his favorite video game. But it might well get him out to the dealer asking for a test drive. It's basically high-powered advertising (assuming the car is fun to drive in the game). There's a commercial for Saab, I think, where they say that most people who test drive a Saab buy one. So I expect that even if video games do nothing more than pull in extra people for test drives, auto manufacturers will still be really happy.
Oh, and while you certainly can't get a precise feel for the car, assuming the game is accurate you can get a decent idea. Cars all have a special feel, and that's the thing all driving sims try to get right. The good ones, anyway. And to me the feel of a car is the single most important part of it. But then, I've met people who are honestly quite happy driving some rusted old pile of junk because it gets them from point A to point B. Baffling!
Well, I'll stop writing now. I could easily talk about cars all day. I'll just say that if you want to test drive a car to redline, you should check out BMW's website, in particular the "Drive to Find the Cure" events. It's for a good cause, and you get a BMW all your own for about 15 miles. It's a near-religious experience for sportscar fans.
Another cool thing about that pic is how the lights "spiderweb." This is especially obvious east-west across Russia. See the crooked line of light that traces its way across to the Pacific? My geography's not so great, so I don't know if there's an obvious reason for it; but it seems more likely there's just a major railroad or highway or something there, and richer cities developed alongside it.
Check out eastern Europe (or maybe it's western Russia, like I said, my geography's not so great). There's like this really bright point and then almost a spiderweb of light stretching out from it.
Oh yeah! And in North America, I mean way north, up almost to the north pole... there are lights up there! Who lives up there and has a big enough population to be visible from space?
Open source Kerberos clients still work just fine with Windows. So what's the problem?
As for the rest, you obviously just dislike Microsoft. That's fine, I dislike them too. But by inventing nonsensical reasons to dislike them, you're doing exactly the same thing MS is to Linux. For example: We are discussing standards compliance and feature completeness in Windows. What do a programming language, bugs, widgets, a different operating system, viruses, and their business practices have to do with either of those? If you want to talk about those points, that's fine, but please don't pretend it's in reply to anything I said.
Don't FUD back at Microsoft, even though it's trendy on Slashdot. MS creates and implements a very large number of standards. They are on practically every technology standardization committee. They also include the most popular services - basically everything a normal person would want, probably more - and don't cripple them. The IIS you get with Win2k Pro is exactly the same as the one you get with Win2k AS, it's just licensed for fewer connections. (And you can just turn the slider up or down anyway. It's strictly an honor system, at least in 2K.)
The objective of any government-run entity is reelection for politicians. For some politicians, their reelection may depend on the effectiveness of the entity; for others, it may depend on the low cost of the entity; and for still others, it may depend on the destruction of the entity. The second that entity becomes politically expendable, it's gone. So I actually think it's pretty closely analagous to a privatized entity. The only difference is in how the entity is bought and policed. If it's government-run, you buy it with your vote. If it's corporation-run, you buy it with your dollars. This is why we see such similar behavior from both politicians and CEOs, since they are both basically after the same thing.
Also, you seem to be ignoring the existence of non-profit or charitable organizations. You are definitely ignoring quasi-private institutions, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Amtrak, the US Postal Service, and probably about a million I'm not thinking of. The first two are actually bad examples for me because they're horribly crooked, but that's because of incompetent bungling on the part of their overseers rather than a fundamental flaw in the philosophy. Or, in computer terms, an issue of implementation rather than design.
Ditching my karma bonus so our continued discussion falls below more filters.
Yeah, I was a Debian user and tried Gentoo when it first came out. I'd used FreeBSD, so I knew and loved the ports library, so I was excited about Gentoo. Unfortunately, the initial releases seemed broken in several severe ways. Half the software in Portage wouldn't compile at all, and I didn't really feel like digging into the source to find out why. I'm not some idiot newbie, I'm a computer programmer and have been using Unix for nearly 10 years. I just wanted the install to work, and it wouldn't, no matter what I tried.
Anyway, obviously Gentoo has improved since then, but this is a concern of their Portage system (developers accidentally breaking parts of it, and if those parts happen to be gcc, look out!). It happens in FreeBSD every now and then, but it's not as big a deal there since the BSDs use actual releases: the ports are all tested against a specific release and verified to compile, then the ports library is frozen until the next release comes out (which will be tested similarly). So here's a question buried in this rambling anecdote: does Gentoo provide a way of getting "stable" ports, or is the entire OS like the "unstable" branch of Debian?
I'm afraid I don't see the significance of the distinction. Governments aren't magical special entities. They aren't inherently superior or inferior, utility-wise, to private corporations.
Let me describe a scenario to see if I understand you correctly. Normally the government runs welfare, top to bottom. Let's say a private corporation takes over. It runs everything now, about as efficiently and about as fairly. So from the perspective of someone on welfare, there is no difference. Are you saying that the government-run entity would be better, simply by virtue of being part of the government? That's how I understand you. If so, why would the government-run entity be better? And why would you feel worse about paying a private corporation the same amount of money for the same service?
Well, let me start out by saying that I agree with you. I think this is a dumb idea, because not all college students pirate music. Hell, not all college students even have computers. I would say that most of the students at my college pirated only a few songs - most of them were sufficiently computer-illiterate that they preferred to keep their music on CDs. So yeah, they're still breaking the law, but any fee greater than $1 a month is going to penalize those students unfairly.
But the problem is that the world is full of situations where a majority of people pay for the actions of a very small minority. Taxes would, of course, be the ultimate example. Your tax dollars pay for the military, which you may or may not support. There's no way to opt out of it, even if you are morally opposed to all violence. More controversially, your tax dollars pay for welfare, social security, and Medicare (or is it Medicaid? I forget which). If you refuse to pay your taxes you go to jail, even if you are profoundly opposed to all three of those programs.
So it's basically the same deal here. For the right of a small minority of college students to pay much less money for music, a majority of college students pay much more. It follows a long and well-respected tradition, and while I am opposed to it (the same way I am not a fan of taxes as a rule) it's the obvious next step.
It really is a huge upgrade. It changes the fundamental strategy for marines from "Don't let the aliens get 2 hives" to "Capture as many resource nodes as possible." One consequence of this is that it eliminates two of the most successful - and most hated - NS 1.04 strats, the jp/hmg rush and the 2-hive lockdown. Both strats may be effective at times, but as complete strats they are gone.
I guess the big changes don't really leap out at you as much as new guns would, but trust me, they are there. I think the moment when it really hit me was when I realized the aliens had 3 hives and I wasn't worried. We went on to win that game.
They are working on, or possibly already have, a way to power nuclear plants using existing waste. (This includes waste from nuke plants, plus decommissioned nuclear warheads, all sorts of sources.) The resulting waste, while still radioactive, is much less energetic and so less dangerous. The article where I read about this was actually proposing it as a way of dealing with weapons-grade nuclear materials and keeping them from falling into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, etc.
A "safe way to speed up the nuclear decomposition" it's not, but it is a better way of dealing with waste than simply burying it in a mountain somewhere. Plus a bunch of added bonuses, not least of which would be extending the lives and usefulness of our nuclear reactors.
Do you think the glass is going to float over to the bar, fill itself, float back to your table, and then proceed to empty itself into your mouth (which it presumably has ways of opening)? I don't think we need an RFID for your glass, if so.
You might also want to check out the Leadtek A300TD (pictures are unfortunately not working). It's a GF FX with a different cooling design. Basically they wrapped the entire video card in an aluminum box, then stuck two angled fans in the housing. I read all the FX reviews like everyone else and got nervous about the fan noise, but I can't hear this card at all over my power supply fan. (I was actually worried that the fans might not be working, but the card stays a relatively cool 62C. The cutoff is 140C.)
Anyway, I have no idea why it works so well, but it definitely does. It's something to consider instead of passive cooling, and it's almost certainly more efficient too.
In other words, you want to make organ donating opt-out instead of opt-in. I hope you realize how stupid this is, since, as with spam, the overwhelming majority of people are going to want to opt out. Besides, if you change the default, there will be thousands of people who unwittingly become organ donors against their wishes. No matter how much you advertise the change, it will happen.
No, the solution here isn't to trick people into becoming organ donors (which is what you're suggesting). The solution is to educate people better about the organ donor program. If people, properly educated, still decide they don't want to participate, well, then maybe you need to start rethinking your strategy. Sometimes when everyone's against you it's because they're stupid, but sometimes it's because you're stupid.
The intent with "fuzzy" rules is to use common sense to fill in the blanks, as the DoJ lawyers implied. This gives the law the flexibility to apply in cases where a normal person would think it should, and not apply in cases where it shouldn't. The advantage is that the law has the flexibility to adapt to new circumstances, which can be either a change in society's opinions (effectively nullification) or a recognition of a new problem or solution. It's also easier to remember a set of "fuzzy" laws, since a single law can cover a much wider group of behavior. Not only that, when you explicitly list things people may or may not do, you always run into people who try to skirt the limits of legality; the people who do things which may be technically legal, but obviously are not intended to be. So either you have to let that person go, which seems wrong, or lock him up despite not breaking any laws, which also seems wrong. (Hopefully the law would get changed, but no matter how good you make a narrow law, this sort of thing is always going to happen.)
Obviously you need some compromise, or we would just have one law stating "Don't do bad things, or else." But I think this sort of fuzzy law should be encouraged, since it allows the 12 people who sit in juries to apply the law as they see fit, not the way the politicians think. Of course, this is based on my assumption that 12 average Joes and Janes are going to be more reasonable than 12 average congresscritters, which may be flawed. But...
Don't forget contributions from corrupt, mob-controlled unions. All our reps would be coated head-to-foot in stickers then. Or are you one of those people who labors under the pathetic delusion that unions are interested in and represent the rights of workers?
Except that HL2 doesn't work fine on ATI. Read the article. All it says is that ATI probably can develop a workaround in their drivers, whereas NVIDIA almost certainly can't. It remains to be seen how much of an authority whoever is claiming this is. I'll wait for official word from ATI and NVIDIA before worrying.
Well, it's normal to get depressed when something bad happens to you (friend or family member dies, you fail a class, that sort of thing). Obviously it's not fun, but most people can endure occasional depression without serious problems.
The type of depression that's really serious is the kind that doesn't go away. Normally you get depressed for a reason, and after a while you start to feel better. People who are depressed, as a medical condition, never feel better. They may have moments - hours or days - where they feel fine, but even the smallest thing can send them back into depression. These are the people who really need to be on Prozac or similar drugs to function, as opposed to the ones who use Prozac to get through difficult times.
I'm not making light of "transient" depression, by the way. It feels exactly the same as the other kind, which is pretty awful. But if you're depressed because your grandmother died and take a week off from work, you're not likely to end up in an asylum. Whereas if you've been depressed for the past 10 years and can't hold a job because of it, you are.
The problem here is, as always, politics. The US is a big backer of GM crops, and we use them already. The EU's (I use "EU" here basically to mean both the EU and the UK) policies on GM foods amount to a boycott of US food exports: all their FUD (I'm sorry, that's what it is when you say "We don't know what effect this might have, but it could be catastrophic," by definition) ensures that EU customers will never buy anything marked as GM or GM-derived. In other words, because you have to mark as GM anything that even could have come into contact with GM crops - this is 99.9% of American crops - nobody in the EU will buy any food exports from the US. (Obviously this is an oversimplification. Europeans will still buy Cheetos or whatever. Just not wheat.) So European farmers, who would normally be driven out of business in a free market economy, get to stay alive.
This is a serious issue, because the anti-GM types dominate most of the world organizations, like the UN. The regulations all restrict our ability to provide food not just to those who would have it anyway (e.g. Europeans), but also to those who desperately need it and can't get it via any other means (e.g. Africans). Is GM a cure for world hunger? Maybe some day, but not now. It is, however, an important step on the road to the solution, and burying our heads in the sand isn't going to help.
All this said, there obviously are legitimate concerns about GM foods, and so I think it's good that we're seeing more and more studies on their safety and effects. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that the EU is more concerned about its own economic well-being and not about any potential consequences of widespread GM adoption. Even if the price is prolonging starvation all over the world.
Check for a gym near where you work. It gives you a place to run where you won't get hit by cars or rained on, and more importantly, you can take a quick shower there when you're done. 30 or 45 minutes of legitimate exercise a day will be enough to get you into pretty good shape, and if you cut down on your calories (less beer, less food) you will start losing weight too. Of course, every minute you exercise during your lunch hour is a minute you won't be eating, so it will help there too. You will also find that the exercise will help wake you up and keep you alert through the 7th-inning stretch of your workday. That was what I found at college, anyway, where I did my workout right before lunch (which I had late to avoid the crush). It served me well: I made it all the way through college without gaining beer weight, despite consuming truly heroic amounts of the stuff.
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I don't have a problem with Fox canceling shows that nobody watches. (I don't like it, but hey, it happens.) My problem is that they didn't seem to give Futurama a chance after the first season. It's honestly like they were trying to kill it, and many people close to the situation say that's exactly what was happening.
Oh? Mine's labeled "Made in Mexico," which is hardly any different. Seriously, in the realm of electronics you either buy foreign or you don't buy at all. Is there anyone who still doesn't know this? My father, the most rabid "Made in USA" advocate I know of, long since gave up on trying to buy USA-made tech. It was a combination of resignation (you just can't do it) and recognition (10 or 20 years ago, stuff coming from Asia really was junk; but now it's as good as or better than American stuff). And he's not exactly tech-savvy.
If I were running things over at NetBSD HQ, I'd be much more worried about that than feature-completeness.
ObAnecdote: I worked tech support for my college, and one time I got a call from a girl who said her computer was broken. I asked her what it was doing wrong, and after asking in several different ways I got an answer: it was showing everything in shades of red instead of normal color. First question I asked: "Has the monitor been moved, dropped, jarred, or hit recently?" No, she said, she hadn't even used her computer in a week. I had her check the cables, even had her turn off her lamp (hey, it used to work with one of my old monitors). Nothing. I was escalating her to our onsite service, just making conversation while filling out the forms, when she asked about longer ethernet cables. I asked her why, and she said hers didn't reach any more. I asked what she meant, and she said "Oh, I moved my computer from one side of the room to the other today, and now my ethernet cable doesn't reach." I couldn't say anything for a few minutes. I asked, very slowly, if by any chance she had dropped her monitor during this process, and she readily admitted she had. I told her we couldn't fix that, and she'd have to buy a new monitor. She said ok, that was fine, and she didn't sound upset in the slightest. It was a very confusing call, although the girl was quite nice the entire time. Actually, she made a point of coming down to the computer labs in person and thanking me... I kind of wonder if she had a crush on me or something, though I'd never met her before in my life.
Oh, and while you certainly can't get a precise feel for the car, assuming the game is accurate you can get a decent idea. Cars all have a special feel, and that's the thing all driving sims try to get right. The good ones, anyway. And to me the feel of a car is the single most important part of it. But then, I've met people who are honestly quite happy driving some rusted old pile of junk because it gets them from point A to point B. Baffling!
Well, I'll stop writing now. I could easily talk about cars all day. I'll just say that if you want to test drive a car to redline, you should check out BMW's website, in particular the "Drive to Find the Cure" events. It's for a good cause, and you get a BMW all your own for about 15 miles. It's a near-religious experience for sportscar fans.
Check out eastern Europe (or maybe it's western Russia, like I said, my geography's not so great). There's like this really bright point and then almost a spiderweb of light stretching out from it.
Oh yeah! And in North America, I mean way north, up almost to the north pole... there are lights up there! Who lives up there and has a big enough population to be visible from space?
As for the rest, you obviously just dislike Microsoft. That's fine, I dislike them too. But by inventing nonsensical reasons to dislike them, you're doing exactly the same thing MS is to Linux. For example: We are discussing standards compliance and feature completeness in Windows. What do a programming language, bugs, widgets, a different operating system, viruses, and their business practices have to do with either of those? If you want to talk about those points, that's fine, but please don't pretend it's in reply to anything I said.
Don't FUD back at Microsoft, even though it's trendy on Slashdot. MS creates and implements a very large number of standards. They are on practically every technology standardization committee. They also include the most popular services - basically everything a normal person would want, probably more - and don't cripple them. The IIS you get with Win2k Pro is exactly the same as the one you get with Win2k AS, it's just licensed for fewer connections. (And you can just turn the slider up or down anyway. It's strictly an honor system, at least in 2K.)
Oh, and "time" is a concept internal to universes. I don't think it's possible for one universe to be temporally or causally related to another.
Also, you seem to be ignoring the existence of non-profit or charitable organizations. You are definitely ignoring quasi-private institutions, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Amtrak, the US Postal Service, and probably about a million I'm not thinking of. The first two are actually bad examples for me because they're horribly crooked, but that's because of incompetent bungling on the part of their overseers rather than a fundamental flaw in the philosophy. Or, in computer terms, an issue of implementation rather than design.
Ditching my karma bonus so our continued discussion falls below more filters.
Anyway, obviously Gentoo has improved since then, but this is a concern of their Portage system (developers accidentally breaking parts of it, and if those parts happen to be gcc, look out!). It happens in FreeBSD every now and then, but it's not as big a deal there since the BSDs use actual releases: the ports are all tested against a specific release and verified to compile, then the ports library is frozen until the next release comes out (which will be tested similarly). So here's a question buried in this rambling anecdote: does Gentoo provide a way of getting "stable" ports, or is the entire OS like the "unstable" branch of Debian?
Let me describe a scenario to see if I understand you correctly. Normally the government runs welfare, top to bottom. Let's say a private corporation takes over. It runs everything now, about as efficiently and about as fairly. So from the perspective of someone on welfare, there is no difference. Are you saying that the government-run entity would be better, simply by virtue of being part of the government? That's how I understand you. If so, why would the government-run entity be better? And why would you feel worse about paying a private corporation the same amount of money for the same service?
But the problem is that the world is full of situations where a majority of people pay for the actions of a very small minority. Taxes would, of course, be the ultimate example. Your tax dollars pay for the military, which you may or may not support. There's no way to opt out of it, even if you are morally opposed to all violence. More controversially, your tax dollars pay for welfare, social security, and Medicare (or is it Medicaid? I forget which). If you refuse to pay your taxes you go to jail, even if you are profoundly opposed to all three of those programs.
So it's basically the same deal here. For the right of a small minority of college students to pay much less money for music, a majority of college students pay much more. It follows a long and well-respected tradition, and while I am opposed to it (the same way I am not a fan of taxes as a rule) it's the obvious next step.
I guess the big changes don't really leap out at you as much as new guns would, but trust me, they are there. I think the moment when it really hit me was when I realized the aliens had 3 hives and I wasn't worried. We went on to win that game.
A "safe way to speed up the nuclear decomposition" it's not, but it is a better way of dealing with waste than simply burying it in a mountain somewhere. Plus a bunch of added bonuses, not least of which would be extending the lives and usefulness of our nuclear reactors.
Do you think the glass is going to float over to the bar, fill itself, float back to your table, and then proceed to empty itself into your mouth (which it presumably has ways of opening)? I don't think we need an RFID for your glass, if so.
Anyway, I have no idea why it works so well, but it definitely does. It's something to consider instead of passive cooling, and it's almost certainly more efficient too.
No, the solution here isn't to trick people into becoming organ donors (which is what you're suggesting). The solution is to educate people better about the organ donor program. If people, properly educated, still decide they don't want to participate, well, then maybe you need to start rethinking your strategy. Sometimes when everyone's against you it's because they're stupid, but sometimes it's because you're stupid.
Obviously you need some compromise, or we would just have one law stating "Don't do bad things, or else." But I think this sort of fuzzy law should be encouraged, since it allows the 12 people who sit in juries to apply the law as they see fit, not the way the politicians think. Of course, this is based on my assumption that 12 average Joes and Janes are going to be more reasonable than 12 average congresscritters, which may be flawed. But...
Don't forget contributions from corrupt, mob-controlled unions. All our reps would be coated head-to-foot in stickers then. Or are you one of those people who labors under the pathetic delusion that unions are interested in and represent the rights of workers?
Except that HL2 doesn't work fine on ATI. Read the article. All it says is that ATI probably can develop a workaround in their drivers, whereas NVIDIA almost certainly can't. It remains to be seen how much of an authority whoever is claiming this is. I'll wait for official word from ATI and NVIDIA before worrying.
No, but I do remember him from the self-improvement video Get Confident, Stupid!
The type of depression that's really serious is the kind that doesn't go away. Normally you get depressed for a reason, and after a while you start to feel better. People who are depressed, as a medical condition, never feel better. They may have moments - hours or days - where they feel fine, but even the smallest thing can send them back into depression. These are the people who really need to be on Prozac or similar drugs to function, as opposed to the ones who use Prozac to get through difficult times.
I'm not making light of "transient" depression, by the way. It feels exactly the same as the other kind, which is pretty awful. But if you're depressed because your grandmother died and take a week off from work, you're not likely to end up in an asylum. Whereas if you've been depressed for the past 10 years and can't hold a job because of it, you are.
This is a serious issue, because the anti-GM types dominate most of the world organizations, like the UN. The regulations all restrict our ability to provide food not just to those who would have it anyway (e.g. Europeans), but also to those who desperately need it and can't get it via any other means (e.g. Africans). Is GM a cure for world hunger? Maybe some day, but not now. It is, however, an important step on the road to the solution, and burying our heads in the sand isn't going to help.
All this said, there obviously are legitimate concerns about GM foods, and so I think it's good that we're seeing more and more studies on their safety and effects. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that the EU is more concerned about its own economic well-being and not about any potential consequences of widespread GM adoption. Even if the price is prolonging starvation all over the world.
Check for a gym near where you work. It gives you a place to run where you won't get hit by cars or rained on, and more importantly, you can take a quick shower there when you're done. 30 or 45 minutes of legitimate exercise a day will be enough to get you into pretty good shape, and if you cut down on your calories (less beer, less food) you will start losing weight too. Of course, every minute you exercise during your lunch hour is a minute you won't be eating, so it will help there too. You will also find that the exercise will help wake you up and keep you alert through the 7th-inning stretch of your workday. That was what I found at college, anyway, where I did my workout right before lunch (which I had late to avoid the crush). It served me well: I made it all the way through college without gaining beer weight, despite consuming truly heroic amounts of the stuff.