I'm talking about people who eat reasonably, but will never look "fit" by cultural standarads.
Speaking as someone who's been around a bit in other countries, its amazing how much the American definition of "eat reasonably," matches say the Eurpoean definition of "eat like a pig," even though they (as a general rule) get a lot more exercise. I remember going into a little pizza place in Radebeul last year - they had two sizes, the 10cm and 14cm. That's about 13". I got the "large" and ate it all (I was fat a few years ago, now I'm relatively HWP and atheletic). They were actually pretty surprised that I was able to eat it all myself - more so that I wanted to.
Then again, their stores stocked men's pants starting at about a 28" waist, topping out at around 34". I was in Kohl's the other day doing some random gift shopping, saw some cool slacks - trouble was, they didn't have any in my size. I checked it out, and they had (I counted) four pairs of 32" waist pants. That includes jeans. In the whole damn store. Counting every possible leg length. Think about it.
Just because something is "normal," doesn't mean its "healthy."
It was easy for me - and I've lost 80 lbs - but it only became easy when I made the jump from knowing I was "a bit overweight" to deciding, for real, to do something about it.
Your comment about the starvation reflex is fairly accurate, I think, but if you (for example) cut down from 3000 calories to 2500 calories you're not going to trigger it. People want to lose a ton of weight overnight and cut down to almost nothing; yes, they have issues. Dropping 500 calories a day loses you a pound a week. Exercising for 500 calories a day drops another pound a week. Not much per week, but that's 100 lbs a year.
For me, the way I cut down my food intake was primarily by limiting "free" food. I eat out a lot - always have. I stopped eating things like breadsticks and chips, anything that was brought without asking, except as a side once my main course had arrived. I also made a rule for myself that I'd stop eating after my entree was done - that means that for, say, Italian food once the last ravioli is consumed, you're done. No mopping up the sauce with 3 more breadsticks. No more rice and beans after your last bite of enchilada goes down the hatch.
That made an amazing difference, all by itself. For example, one flour tortilla is often 100 calories or more. Breadsticks are even more energy-filled.
The other thing I did is to never deny myself any food. What I would do is think about it in terms of "miles of walking". You burn approximately 100 calories per mile at whatever speed, per 140 lbs of body weight. You want that mini-snickers bar? It will take you two miles to burn it off. Still want it? Go ahead and eat it, but do it with your eyes open to the cost. Chances are, you'll be able to say no a lot more easily once you really understand what the consequences of your actions are.
Re:There's a feedback system. Virus affects it...
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
You know, its funny. There are people like this - honestly like this - they have things like Pradr Willis syndrome and are incredibly rare. They're also unfortunate and tend to die at very young ages.
There are also people like you and me. Heck, I was a chubby kid; I was a fat adult. I was obese, and then some. I enjoyed food and took comfort in the fact that while I was "a bit overweight" at 240+ lbs (I'm 6' tall) I wasn't really any fatter than many of the people around me. Then one day I looked in the mirror and saw that my 38" pants were getting tight, and said, basically, "Hey, I'm fat."
I started to exercise, watched what I ate (a bit), and I've lost almost 80 lbs. I never thought I was obese, but anyone who can lose 80 lbs (without getting down to a "washboard abs" level of body fat, mind you, just a moderately healthy weight) is, by definition, obese. Or was, in my case.
For me, and for many, many other people I've met, its purely about self-control and body image. And its something that they, as I, can do something about. Yes, there are some people with severe medical issues that cause their obesity but if you're reading this and you're fat, chances are really really high that its because you're inactive and like eating, not that you've got some rare disorder. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Pity those who have uncontrollable ilnesses. Don't be an enabler for the vast majority who don't.
I fly all the time, and I encounter very few airlines that ask for ID at the gate. I think that DC did... but I know that (so far this year) Dallas, Austin, Denver, Providence, Logan and Portland don't. Or at least didn't on the flights that I was on.
There's a huge difference between handing your pass to the bored TSA official to scribble on, and handing it (or a different pass) to the ticket official. In fact, in case the TSA screeners were looking for people going to a specific destination, there's nothing stopping you from buying two tickets and using one to get into the airport and another one to get onto a plane. Come to think of it, there's very little stopping you from swapping boarding passes with someone else at most airports, once you're inside.
who says you have the right to travel by horse and buggy, either? What's to stop them from requiring an ID for every form of transportation? No individual form is guaranteed, so therefore there's no guarantee that any form is.
You could, however, make a reasonably strong case that your right to liberty extended to using your own energy to move yourself around the country - in other words, riding a bicycle (potentially problematic) or running. You'd be surprised how far you can get on your own two feet - a friend of mine recently completed a 725 mile race across France which, while difficult, was achieved by all sorts of people in 18 calendar days. It can be done. Sure, the US is larger - but that just means there's more scenery to explore.
And yeah, "high fantasy setting" and "sexual orientation" are completely inimical. I've never heard of any porn featuring "hot girl-on-girl action" in a "high fantasy setting".
Most operating systems are pretty good at this these days. Many moons ago when the ~600mhz PIII was top of the line, I found a good deal on some HP Kayaks with dual 300mhz PIIIs instead. They performed amazingly well when doing normal interactive tasks, and had close to the same performance for any batch processing that was parallelized.
Doesn't the quote below indicate that the processor capacity argument overwhelmingly favors the dual G5's?
Well, yes, the quad-core top-of-the-line 2.5ghz G5 is faster than the dual-core consumer-grade 2ghz iMac. This should be expected.
How is the intel iMac mopping up anything when faced with increased parallelism? If anything, shouldn't MacWorld's methodology benefit the new intel iMac's?
Easy - compare it to something other than the quad-core G5. In this example, they're comparing the dual-core intel against the single G5, and a lot of the tests - as implied by MacSpeedZone - probably aren't stressing the CPU enough. If they were to do the same double-encoding test on both systems, it would be interesting to see the results. That's where you'd expect the dual-core intel to start picking up steam.
Only for the dual core. The dual proc, quad core, will be, of course, the MacMacMacMac. Pity the poor fools working on the mini, which will now simply be known as Mac. And no, there never was a MacMacMac - that's an urban legend.
Its referring to tests that don't max out the CPU anyway, and therefore presumably have bottlenecks in some other part of the system. Here's a more rediculous example using the same theory:
Test: Compressing and sending a 16MB file over the network iMac: 83 seconds (cpu usage 23%) quad: 84 seconds (cpu usage 11%)
Wow! The iMac is faster than the quad! Of course, in reality it was working much harder to accomplish the same task (compressing at a bandwidth-limited speed). The articles point - and it is very poorly written, I will agree - is that this kind of test is crap.
The Macworld test used the same theories in the other direction. After all, if you perform a task that takes the old G5 iMac 20 seconds but uses 99% of its CPU, and takes the new intel iMac 19 seconds but only uses 45% of its total CPU power, I think you'd say that the iMac was more than 5% more powerful, right?
Admittedly if all you ever do is one task at a time, you wouldn't notice the difference. Considering that many people like to do multiple tasks - watching the recent keynote in a background window while doing some other work in a foreground window, for example - this is not an inconsequential point.
That brings up the example from the linked MacSpeedZone article:
Even that's a little misleading, since the quad still had spare processor bandwidth. This is why a lot of benchmark tests are designed to test each piece separately, spinning them up to 100%. Of course, real world tests are great as well - but only if your usage actually parallels those tests.
I know that I would never consider a laptop (especially a grossly overpriced laptop) that doesn't have a built in modem. It's not because of snobbery, but because I often have to use a modem to connect to the Net.
Yeah, and when you're hardwired into a phone line, a very small swelling at one end of the wire is such a huge price to pay for connectivity. I mean, c'mon. You already have to supply the wire itself, what's the big deal about chipping in another $10-20 for a USB modem?
Integrating wireless devices into the laptop makes sense. The whole point of being wireless is to be unencumbered by "clutter." Integrating a wired adapter, especially one that few people use, doesn't really add any benefit. I'd say that they could do the same with the Ethernet jack if it wasn't for the fact that USB ethernet adapters are considerably more expensive and less standardized - oh, and the fact that a much larger percentage of the population uses them.
If you connect to the 'net over a modem at home, have you tried the Airport base station with the built in modem? We set this up for some friends of ours and it worked really well, giving them mobility and convenience without requiring broadband.
If I am taking a laptop on business all I should need is the laptop, the power cord, and the case to carry it. I don't want to have a section for "exceptions". If I have one of those then I bought the wrong laptop.
Do you carry a phone cord with you? Because, as I'm sure you know, not all hotels provide nicely detachable cables with their phones. If you don't, well, I'm surprised. If you do, simply superglue an RJ11USB adapter onto the end of it. Problem solved.
We had both WiFi and a modem included for about six-odd months. I think if you consider what must be a very low incremental cost to keep the modem in, it seems like it really should still be included. Some people still go to places where WiFi is not yet present, and the external USB modem would be horribly easy to lose.
The incremental financial cost is miniscule. The design and space costs are considerably greater. Besides, you could make the same argument for a whole stack of ports (VGA, S-VHS, FW800, etc) - where do you draw the line? Especially with modems, since USB modems are readily available at pretty much every computer and office supply store (at least in the US, probably most other countries as well) for a nominal replacement fee. For that matter, this move also makes the hardware more international in that you have one less part that changes based on the local environment.
I would say that this started with the modern American religous right. After all, it used to be that science was taught in schools, and religion in churches. Religion tried to pass itself off as science, and failed. But science is, almost by definition, the unwillingness to take anything on faith. Most people who I know, and that runs the gamut from folks who've done missionary work to passionate atheists, to a wide variety of agnostics, have nothing against anyone's individual faith. Just don't try to claim that your beliefs must be "right," or "more right," than others' beliefs. That's when you have to start bringing proofs into the picture.
Oh, get off your high horse. Evolutionism v. Creationism would be much better cast into the "What is Science?" point of view. The theory of evolutionism is scientifically valid in that it can be disproven. This is what makes it a theory. The belief of creationism, or that of ID, cannot be disproven. This makes them beliefs, not scientific theories. The debate, from the "humanist elite" standpoint at least, is whether or not you should teach unprovable beliefs in a science class.
That's good. I'm not aware of any U.S. public school that requires that either. Of course, pledging allegiance to the flag is another matter.
This was more true until 1954 when Congress added "under God" to the pledge, thanks to a campaign by the Knights of Columbus. The original pledge, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," created by a Minister, was expressly not created as a public prayer.
One of the official reasons given for the addition was to separate us from the "godless communists," in the public eye. Joy:
In 1952 the Reverend Dr. George M. Docherty, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, preached in favor of adding "under God" to the Pledge. His point was that a Soviet atheist could easily recite the Pledge without compunction by substituting the "Union of the Soviet Socialist Republicics" for the 'United States".
For that matter, I've also never used the slot for PC cards in my PowerBook. Is the use of these slots common with other owners?
No - and that's why its gone too, replaced with an ExpressCard/34 slot that can theoretically take in a wider variety of expansion opportunities, as they get developed.
The main use for an addon card in this or the previous generation of laptops would have been for one of the permanent mobile phone network cards. I'm sure that ExpressCard versions will be forthcoming, as will ExpressCard FireWire 800 ports for those few people who need them.
Moving the modem external to the main system, and making it optional, just makes sense. Most people I know who travel with their laptops never use them, preferring to drive to a Starbucks (or local equiv.) rather than try to send massive emails over a dialup network.
Thankfully, the two overlap. If people trust google less, the stock price will fall.
Not really. A corporation is responsible, to their shareholders, to maximise profits. Any business that focuses on share price at the expense of business health is doing a disservice to their shareholders. In the long term, sound business management will result in a greater real value which will result in greater market pricing (share price). Almost by definition, making decisions that you would not otherwise make in order to boost share price will hurt your long term viability (otherwise they wouldn't have been decisions that you didn't want to make anyway).
For more, read Buffett and Graham. The latter is beefier, but the former much more approchable.
If that's simple, then won't the ballot also be simple? After all, they will both contain the same number of issues or candidates. This contradicts your point that in the US there are too many issues for it to be simple.
No, because the ballot will contain all possible choices, including but not limited to the one you think you picked. The printout will contain only those choices the system thinks that you selected, making it much much simpler.
How do they know there are any discrepancies if they don't count the paper ballots, anyway?
a) These would be much, much easier to count b) They did count ballots in Ohio, Florida, et cetera. Just not enough of them.
I will grant you that half the nation (roughly) doesn't turn out to vote. If they don't give a f*ck and give up their rights, that sucks but that's their right to do as well. It sucks and I'd love to see 100% turnout.
I like the system - I'm going to say that its Australian, but I could be wrong (and it doesn't much matter and if it does, someone will factcheck to prove me wrong, which is cool) - anyway, part of your duties as a Citizen is to show up to vote. You have to, and if you don't, you're punished in some way (IIRC its a misdemeanor similar to a traffic ticket). You don't have to vote for anyone - you're allowed to show up, get checked in, and leave - but you have to participate and can't just sit on your arse all week.
Not a bad trade off, IMO. I think that one thing this nation could have really used was a bill of responsibilities to go along with the bill of rights.
How do you know that the paper ballot accurately represents the recorded vote?
That's where the whole "counting" thing comes in. You count the paper ballots. You read the recorded total. If they're the same, or within 1-2, you assume that the recorded total was accurate.
Also, you complained earlier about complex paper ballots. If the user has to check their vote against a printout on paper - aren't we back to the "complex paper ballot" problem again?
Not really. The paper ballot that gets printed by the voting machine could be very simple. It would simply have a line for each issue on the slate, and would read: "1) President: Donald Duck./n2) Vice President: Ross Perot/n..." Very easy to read, check, verify, whatever. The voter reads it and if they're unhappy, they feed it back into the machine and it shreds it and lets them recast their votes. Once the voter is happy, they hit "Save," fold the sheet over, and place it into the publicly monitored results box. The paper ballots would be considered the canonical record in the case of any discrepencies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking about people who eat reasonably, but will never look "fit" by cultural standarads.
Speaking as someone who's been around a bit in other countries, its amazing how much the American definition of "eat reasonably," matches say the Eurpoean definition of "eat like a pig," even though they (as a general rule) get a lot more exercise. I remember going into a little pizza place in Radebeul last year - they had two sizes, the 10cm and 14cm. That's about 13". I got the "large" and ate it all (I was fat a few years ago, now I'm relatively HWP and atheletic). They were actually pretty surprised that I was able to eat it all myself - more so that I wanted to.
Then again, their stores stocked men's pants starting at about a 28" waist, topping out at around 34". I was in Kohl's the other day doing some random gift shopping, saw some cool slacks - trouble was, they didn't have any in my size. I checked it out, and they had (I counted) four pairs of 32" waist pants. That includes jeans. In the whole damn store. Counting every possible leg length. Think about it.
Just because something is "normal," doesn't mean its "healthy."
It was easy for me - and I've lost 80 lbs - but it only became easy when I made the jump from knowing I was "a bit overweight" to deciding, for real, to do something about it.
Your comment about the starvation reflex is fairly accurate, I think, but if you (for example) cut down from 3000 calories to 2500 calories you're not going to trigger it. People want to lose a ton of weight overnight and cut down to almost nothing; yes, they have issues. Dropping 500 calories a day loses you a pound a week. Exercising for 500 calories a day drops another pound a week. Not much per week, but that's 100 lbs a year.
For me, the way I cut down my food intake was primarily by limiting "free" food. I eat out a lot - always have. I stopped eating things like breadsticks and chips, anything that was brought without asking, except as a side once my main course had arrived. I also made a rule for myself that I'd stop eating after my entree was done - that means that for, say, Italian food once the last ravioli is consumed, you're done. No mopping up the sauce with 3 more breadsticks. No more rice and beans after your last bite of enchilada goes down the hatch.
That made an amazing difference, all by itself. For example, one flour tortilla is often 100 calories or more. Breadsticks are even more energy-filled.
The other thing I did is to never deny myself any food. What I would do is think about it in terms of "miles of walking". You burn approximately 100 calories per mile at whatever speed, per 140 lbs of body weight. You want that mini-snickers bar? It will take you two miles to burn it off. Still want it? Go ahead and eat it, but do it with your eyes open to the cost. Chances are, you'll be able to say no a lot more easily once you really understand what the consequences of your actions are.
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
You know, its funny. There are people like this - honestly like this - they have things like Pradr Willis syndrome and are incredibly rare. They're also unfortunate and tend to die at very young ages.
There are also people like you and me. Heck, I was a chubby kid; I was a fat adult. I was obese, and then some. I enjoyed food and took comfort in the fact that while I was "a bit overweight" at 240+ lbs (I'm 6' tall) I wasn't really any fatter than many of the people around me. Then one day I looked in the mirror and saw that my 38" pants were getting tight, and said, basically, "Hey, I'm fat."
I started to exercise, watched what I ate (a bit), and I've lost almost 80 lbs. I never thought I was obese, but anyone who can lose 80 lbs (without getting down to a "washboard abs" level of body fat, mind you, just a moderately healthy weight) is, by definition, obese. Or was, in my case.
For me, and for many, many other people I've met, its purely about self-control and body image. And its something that they, as I, can do something about. Yes, there are some people with severe medical issues that cause their obesity but if you're reading this and you're fat, chances are really really high that its because you're inactive and like eating, not that you've got some rare disorder. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Pity those who have uncontrollable ilnesses. Don't be an enabler for the vast majority who don't.
I fly all the time, and I encounter very few airlines that ask for ID at the gate. I think that DC did... but I know that (so far this year) Dallas, Austin, Denver, Providence, Logan and Portland don't. Or at least didn't on the flights that I was on.
There's a huge difference between handing your pass to the bored TSA official to scribble on, and handing it (or a different pass) to the ticket official. In fact, in case the TSA screeners were looking for people going to a specific destination, there's nothing stopping you from buying two tickets and using one to get into the airport and another one to get onto a plane. Come to think of it, there's very little stopping you from swapping boarding passes with someone else at most airports, once you're inside.
who says you have the right to travel by horse and buggy, either? What's to stop them from requiring an ID for every form of transportation? No individual form is guaranteed, so therefore there's no guarantee that any form is.
You could, however, make a reasonably strong case that your right to liberty extended to using your own energy to move yourself around the country - in other words, riding a bicycle (potentially problematic) or running. You'd be surprised how far you can get on your own two feet - a friend of mine recently completed a 725 mile race across France which, while difficult, was achieved by all sorts of people in 18 calendar days. It can be done. Sure, the US is larger - but that just means there's more scenery to explore.
And yeah, "high fantasy setting" and "sexual orientation" are completely inimical. I've never heard of any porn featuring "hot girl-on-girl action" in a "high fantasy setting".
:)
Stay away from Xena fan-fiction then
Most operating systems are pretty good at this these days. Many moons ago when the ~600mhz PIII was top of the line, I found a good deal on some HP Kayaks with dual 300mhz PIIIs instead. They performed amazingly well when doing normal interactive tasks, and had close to the same performance for any batch processing that was parallelized.
Doesn't the quote below indicate that the processor capacity argument overwhelmingly favors the dual G5's?
Well, yes, the quad-core top-of-the-line 2.5ghz G5 is faster than the dual-core consumer-grade 2ghz iMac. This should be expected.
How is the intel iMac mopping up anything when faced with increased parallelism? If anything, shouldn't MacWorld's methodology benefit the new intel iMac's?
Easy - compare it to something other than the quad-core G5. In this example, they're comparing the dual-core intel against the single G5, and a lot of the tests - as implied by MacSpeedZone - probably aren't stressing the CPU enough. If they were to do the same double-encoding test on both systems, it would be interesting to see the results. That's where you'd expect the dual-core intel to start picking up steam.
Only for the dual core. The dual proc, quad core, will be, of course, the MacMacMacMac. Pity the poor fools working on the mini, which will now simply be known as Mac. And no, there never was a MacMacMac - that's an urban legend.
Its referring to tests that don't max out the CPU anyway, and therefore presumably have bottlenecks in some other part of the system. Here's a more rediculous example using the same theory:
Test: Compressing and sending a 16MB file over the network
iMac: 83 seconds (cpu usage 23%)
quad: 84 seconds (cpu usage 11%)
Wow! The iMac is faster than the quad! Of course, in reality it was working much harder to accomplish the same task (compressing at a bandwidth-limited speed). The articles point - and it is very poorly written, I will agree - is that this kind of test is crap.
The Macworld test used the same theories in the other direction. After all, if you perform a task that takes the old G5 iMac 20 seconds but uses 99% of its CPU, and takes the new intel iMac 19 seconds but only uses 45% of its total CPU power, I think you'd say that the iMac was more than 5% more powerful, right?
Admittedly if all you ever do is one task at a time, you wouldn't notice the difference. Considering that many people like to do multiple tasks - watching the recent keynote in a background window while doing some other work in a foreground window, for example - this is not an inconsequential point.
That brings up the example from the linked MacSpeedZone article:
Encoding one QuickTime movie:
intel dual core iMac: 97.02 seconds (87% CPU)
g5 quad core powermac: 84.85 seconds (42% CPU)
advantage g5: 14% faster
Encoding two QuickTime movies:
intel dual core iMac: 176.60 seconds (100% CPU)
g5 quad core powermac: 86.25 seconds (87% CPU)
advantage g5: 105% faster
Even that's a little misleading, since the quad still had spare processor bandwidth. This is why a lot of benchmark tests are designed to test each piece separately, spinning them up to 100%. Of course, real world tests are great as well - but only if your usage actually parallels those tests.
I'd guess one or more of two reasons:
1) USB modems are available in many more places than DVI-VGA dongles
2) An order of magnitude more people use VGA monitors than use modems
When VGA monitors start coming with DVI adapters, instead of the other way 'round, they'll probably stop.
I know that I would never consider a laptop (especially a grossly overpriced laptop) that doesn't have a built in modem. It's not because of snobbery, but because I often have to use a modem to connect to the Net.
Yeah, and when you're hardwired into a phone line, a very small swelling at one end of the wire is such a huge price to pay for connectivity. I mean, c'mon. You already have to supply the wire itself, what's the big deal about chipping in another $10-20 for a USB modem?
Integrating wireless devices into the laptop makes sense. The whole point of being wireless is to be unencumbered by "clutter." Integrating a wired adapter, especially one that few people use, doesn't really add any benefit. I'd say that they could do the same with the Ethernet jack if it wasn't for the fact that USB ethernet adapters are considerably more expensive and less standardized - oh, and the fact that a much larger percentage of the population uses them.
If you connect to the 'net over a modem at home, have you tried the Airport base station with the built in modem? We set this up for some friends of ours and it worked really well, giving them mobility and convenience without requiring broadband.
That was supposed to be:
RJ11 <--> USB
Le sigh. Then again, that's what I get for not previewing.
If I am taking a laptop on business all I should need is the laptop, the power cord, and the case to carry it. I don't want to have a section for "exceptions". If I have one of those then I bought the wrong laptop.
Do you carry a phone cord with you? Because, as I'm sure you know, not all hotels provide nicely detachable cables with their phones. If you don't, well, I'm surprised. If you do, simply superglue an RJ11USB adapter onto the end of it. Problem solved.
We had both WiFi and a modem included for about six-odd months. I think if you consider what must be a very low incremental cost to keep the modem in, it seems like it really should still be included. Some people still go to places where WiFi is not yet present, and the external USB modem would be horribly easy to lose.
The incremental financial cost is miniscule. The design and space costs are considerably greater. Besides, you could make the same argument for a whole stack of ports (VGA, S-VHS, FW800, etc) - where do you draw the line? Especially with modems, since USB modems are readily available at pretty much every computer and office supply store (at least in the US, probably most other countries as well) for a nominal replacement fee. For that matter, this move also makes the hardware more international in that you have one less part that changes based on the local environment.
I would say that this started with the modern American religous right. After all, it used to be that science was taught in schools, and religion in churches. Religion tried to pass itself off as science, and failed. But science is, almost by definition, the unwillingness to take anything on faith. Most people who I know, and that runs the gamut from folks who've done missionary work to passionate atheists, to a wide variety of agnostics, have nothing against anyone's individual faith. Just don't try to claim that your beliefs must be "right," or "more right," than others' beliefs. That's when you have to start bringing proofs into the picture.
Oh, get off your high horse. Evolutionism v. Creationism would be much better cast into the "What is Science?" point of view. The theory of evolutionism is scientifically valid in that it can be disproven. This is what makes it a theory. The belief of creationism, or that of ID, cannot be disproven. This makes them beliefs, not scientific theories. The debate, from the "humanist elite" standpoint at least, is whether or not you should teach unprovable beliefs in a science class.
So technically we are under the rule of a religious monarchy, but in practice we are a modern democratic secular country.
:)
There you have it, the UK is just a backwards version of the US.
Er, hmm, wait a second...
And for the record, I'm a UK born US resident - and personally I feel that the UK is far more secular than the US.
This was more true until 1954 when Congress added "under God" to the pledge, thanks to a campaign by the Knights of Columbus. The original pledge, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," created by a Minister, was expressly not created as a public prayer.
One of the official reasons given for the addition was to separate us from the "godless communists," in the public eye. Joy:
So, there you have it.
For that matter, I've also never used the slot for PC cards in my PowerBook. Is the use of these slots common with other owners?
No - and that's why its gone too, replaced with an ExpressCard/34 slot that can theoretically take in a wider variety of expansion opportunities, as they get developed.
The main use for an addon card in this or the previous generation of laptops would have been for one of the permanent mobile phone network cards. I'm sure that ExpressCard versions will be forthcoming, as will ExpressCard FireWire 800 ports for those few people who need them.
Moving the modem external to the main system, and making it optional, just makes sense. Most people I know who travel with their laptops never use them, preferring to drive to a Starbucks (or local equiv.) rather than try to send massive emails over a dialup network.
Thankfully, the two overlap. If people trust google less, the stock price will fall.
Not really. A corporation is responsible, to their shareholders, to maximise profits. Any business that focuses on share price at the expense of business health is doing a disservice to their shareholders. In the long term, sound business management will result in a greater real value which will result in greater market pricing (share price). Almost by definition, making decisions that you would not otherwise make in order to boost share price will hurt your long term viability (otherwise they wouldn't have been decisions that you didn't want to make anyway).
For more, read Buffett and Graham. The latter is beefier, but the former much more approchable.
If that's simple, then won't the ballot also be simple? After all, they will both contain the same number of issues or candidates. This contradicts your point that in the US there are too many issues for it to be simple.
No, because the ballot will contain all possible choices, including but not limited to the one you think you picked. The printout will contain only those choices the system thinks that you selected, making it much much simpler.
How do they know there are any discrepancies if they don't count the paper ballots, anyway?
a) These would be much, much easier to count
b) They did count ballots in Ohio, Florida, et cetera. Just not enough of them.
I will grant you that half the nation (roughly) doesn't turn out to vote. If they don't give a f*ck and give up their rights, that sucks but that's their right to do as well. It sucks and I'd love to see 100% turnout.
I like the system - I'm going to say that its Australian, but I could be wrong (and it doesn't much matter and if it does, someone will factcheck to prove me wrong, which is cool) - anyway, part of your duties as a Citizen is to show up to vote. You have to, and if you don't, you're punished in some way (IIRC its a misdemeanor similar to a traffic ticket). You don't have to vote for anyone - you're allowed to show up, get checked in, and leave - but you have to participate and can't just sit on your arse all week.
Not a bad trade off, IMO. I think that one thing this nation could have really used was a bill of responsibilities to go along with the bill of rights.
How do you know that the paper ballot accurately represents the recorded vote?
/n2) Vice President: Ross Perot/n..." Very easy to read, check, verify, whatever. The voter reads it and if they're unhappy, they feed it back into the machine and it shreds it and lets them recast their votes. Once the voter is happy, they hit "Save," fold the sheet over, and place it into the publicly monitored results box. The paper ballots would be considered the canonical record in the case of any discrepencies.
That's where the whole "counting" thing comes in. You count the paper ballots. You read the recorded total. If they're the same, or within 1-2, you assume that the recorded total was accurate.
Also, you complained earlier about complex paper ballots. If the user has to check their vote against a printout on paper - aren't we back to the "complex paper ballot" problem again?
Not really. The paper ballot that gets printed by the voting machine could be very simple. It would simply have a line for each issue on the slate, and would read: "1) President: Donald Duck.