Not only that, but the rest of the world is watching and drawing its own conclusions.
Whilst they head right down the same path.
If you think the EU will somehow be different, think again. All of this is happening in the entire world. Soon the only countries which aren't themselves police states will be the puppets of police states (because they won't have the power to refuse).
This is happening throughout the world because the same people are behind it: the people who run the big multinational corporations and who also conveniently control the mass media. They want fascism because fascism is by definition friendly to big business, and thus to them. They have far more influence, and thus control, over all governments than we ever could. Those governments control all the guns that matter -- their firepower outranks that of the citizens (even the well-armed ones) by many, many thousands to one. And history has shown countless times that those in the military have no reservations whatsoever about turning their guns against the citizenry.
Face it: we've lost. The entire world is descending into darkness and despair, and this time there's no climbing out of it for a really long time (centuries, perhaps even millenia). Police states almost never collapse from within: it almost always takes an outside influence to topple them. That can't happen if the entire world is under the control of police states.
At least the patriots of the American Revolution had a fighting chance of winning, thanks to the technological circumstances of the time. But now, there's no chance at all.
4. "Higher-level" doesn't mean "slow". JIT compilers are getting to the point where it's more efficient to let the compiler or interpreter handle garbage collection than doing it yourself.
"More efficient" in terms of speed, perhaps, but if it's more efficient in terms of speed, it's probably less efficient in terms of space.
Usually, speed and space are traded off. I dare say that a well-written non-garbage-collecting application will have better speed+space performance than a similarly well-written one written in a modern garbage collecting language like Java. The reason is that memory management overhead in a non-garbage-collecting application is usually quite minimal (you simply allocate memory when you need it and free it when you're done -- the overhead of allocating a freeing memory is very small because it's very simple), while it's nontrivial in a garbage-collecting application.
Garbage collection itself is a complex, nontrivial endeavor and is very hard to do efficiently. Even the most efficient implementations require much more computation than simply allocating and freeing memory does. So garbage collecting implementations tend to try to delay garbage collection as long as possible, which means more memory is allocated to the application than it really needs. Space versus speed.
Garbage collection certainly has its merits: it reduces or eliminates an entire class of memory management issues that has plagued programmers from the beginning. But it comes at a price. The price of garbage collection is that your application is almost guaranteed to be less efficient in terms of space+speed than it would be if it were written in a language that didn't have garbage collection overhead. But that assumes, of course, that the application is otherwise well-written. Garbage collection allows the programmer to get away with writing poorer code, since the programmer no longer has to pay the price for failing to properly manage memory.
Such is the nature of progress in the computing world: the computer manages more things as time goes on, but doesn't do so quite as well as code written by someone who is truly skilled and who truly understands the problem and solution space. So software gets more inefficient (in terms of both speed and space) over time. But it does get easier to write, which of course means that the percentage of badly-written software will continue to increase over time as the bar is lowered.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Not only are the distances vast, the times are vast too. Stars live for billions of years. One year in the lifespan of a human is roughly comparable to perhaps 70 million years in the lifespan of a star.
So when someone says "soon" in reference to a prediction of when some stellar event is going to occur, it's likely you'll have to scale up the term by roughly the same amount. "Soon" to a human generally means within/around a day or so, so scaled up to stellar times, that would be within/around 200,000 years.
I expect that by the time this supernova happens, humans will either be unbelievably technologically advanced, or they'll be extinct.
Suppose we have a completely free market, that is one that literally has absolutely no government control over it or the players within it whatsoever.
I'm a businessman, and you're a businessman, and we're in competition with each other.
Suppose that my business is currently doing better than yours is -- I have more sales, etc., and thus am a bigger player in the market. As a result, I have more resources. Now suppose you come out with a product that's better than mine, such that it looks like you will do better than me in the market. And finally, suppose that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to "win".
What prevents me from using my greater resources to simply have you assassinated and to burn your resources to the ground, rather than take the more expensive route of actually trying to compete with you?
Remember, this is a completely unregulated market: the players can do anything they wish in order to "compete".
The reason I support State censorship of all media is the same reason why I support the State in all of its madness: the more they do to harm us, the more the free market will provide means for entrepreneurs to find new ways around the madness.
You mean like it did in Soviet Russia before the collapse of the Soviet system there?
I mean, I agree with the general sentiment that for men to be as free as possible, the State needs to be as small as possible. But there is a difference between "as small as possible" and "nonexistent".
Those with money, power (guns), and influence will always attempt to exert control over those without. Without some way for the population to assert itself, the people with money and power are guaranteed to succeed in their quest: the people won't stand a chance.
The purpose of the government is to protect the rights of the people. No more, no less. Without such an entity, the people have no protector of their rights at all. Without such a protector, the people cannot exercise their rights, because to do so requires that they have more power than those who would control them. When such a protective entity loses its way (as all governments eventually do), the people lose that protection. Both situations are equally bad, because in both situations the people lose their rights at gunpoint. The only difference is who is pointing the gun. Even that difference is subtle.
...because more vulnerabilities will cause more people to consider switching to something like OpenOffice, right?
Yeah right. The vast majority of the people who stick with Office these days are people who won't switch unless the alternative is 100% in every way, shape, and form "compatible" with (which to them means exactly the same as) Office.
Must be nice to be Microsoft, where you don't have to give a shit about your customers...
What about this person? I got pretty fat, but then I woke up to the reality that if I lowered my food intake, my body would do anything it could to make up for the loss, including burning off all that fat I had saved up. That is what fat is there for, after all. I lost 80 lbs without changing my exercise pattern (which was mostly non-existant). The secret is to eat less than you deficate (we're talking mass here). It's common sense.
Then consider yourself lucky. Congratulations, you're in the 5% group that's able to keep the weight off once you lose it. 80 pounds is enough that most people would have put on extra fat cells, and that would have affected their base appetite. You seem to be one of the lucky few for whom that isn't the case, or for whom the increased appetite can somehow be ignored.
Of course, all this assumes that you've been able to maintain the loss for, say, the past 10-15 years. Only then can you really say that it's long-term loss.
I wasn't saying that everyone will have the issues I raised, only the vast, vast majority.
Losing weight temporarily (which is what you've seen) isn't the problem.
Losing weight permanently, such that you never gain it back, is the problem.
The former is what makes most people who don't have a weight problem think it should be easy, because they see others start to exercise and suddenly lose a lot of weight. The latter is what the people who are losing the weight are actually trying to achieve, and it is that which they almost always fail at.
WTF? Where are you getting your information? What's with your defeatest attitutde? What, we're just all supposed to accept the fact that we're all going to become obese (except that "lucky 5%"?).
Reread what I said very carefully. I'm not talking about preventing weight gain, I'm talking about losing weight, which is what the original poster was talking about. They're two different things.
It's much, much easier to prevent weight gain than it is to permanently lose weight that you've previously gained.
Here's the problem: when you gain weight, you gain fat cells. Your fat stores (in particular, your visceral fat stores) act as an organ, and control your hormone balance. Their effect is to increase your appetite, such that you will tend to eat at least enough to maintain your new weight.
You never lose fat cells. Once you gain them, they're with you for life. When you lose weight, you reduce the amount of fat in the cells, but the effect of those cells on your appetite does not diminish. This is why people who lose weight almost always (95%) gain it back with a vengeance, and usually in such a way that they further increase their weight relative to what it was before they attempted weight loss.
My "defeatist attitude" is nothing of the kind. I'm a realist. I adjust my views of the world based on observation, measurement, and experimentation. I know through experience, observation, reading, and talking with others that losing weight permanently is nearly impossible.
I used to believe as you do, that weight loss is merely a matter of a little willpower. If that were so, then permanent weight loss (not to be confused with avoiding weight gain to begin with) would be achieved by much more than the mere 5% of the people who try.
The amount of willpower it takes to actually succeed is herculean. The drive to eat is stronger by far than the drive to have sex. It is that drive that you must pit your willpower against, and you will have to do so hour after hour, day after day, year after year. People who attempt to do this tend to find themselves thinking about food and little else for those hours. As a result, those who succeed in pitting their willpower against their instinct to eat are likely to be less happy as a result, since satisfaction of your instincts (particularly one as persistent as the drive to eat) is a major contributer to your happiness.
People who avoid reality are doomed to be crushed by it. The real world always wins. In this case, it means that if you attempt weight loss, it's highly likely that you'll gain even more after the attempt. This means one thing and one thing only: once you've gained weight, you're much better off attempting to maintain it than attempting to lose it, because the former is much easier to achieve than the latter.
If you read the forbes article it mentions that a natural way to reduce the "bad" ap2 protein is to lose weight if you are over-weight and maintain a healthy weight.
That's a nice sentiment and all, but even walking across the entire United States isn't enough to lower your weight to normal if you're overweight (it certainly wasn't for Steve Vaught).
You people who aren't overweight and claim that the answer is to "just lose weight and keep it off" had better wake up to reality: the human body is evolved to keep weight on in every way possible (because you never know when you might need that stored energy). Losing weight and keeping it off is a near impossibility for almost everyone who needs to do it. There's a reason over 95% of the people who try to do so fail in the long run.
Reversing weight gain is like reversing gray hair. You will lose, and you will make yourself miserable in the process. Unless you happen to be one of the lucky 5% of the people who have a genetic predisposition that allows you to keep it off relatively easily.
You should exercise anyway, but you won't keep the weight off by doing so: you simply can't burn enough calories to make a real difference, and your appetite will adjust itself upwards in response to your exercise. No, you should exercise in order to keep yourself relatively fit, because there are other health benefits to be had from it.
Some people may think that this may end up being a way to deal with any sort of terminal illness. I don't think it is. And it has nothing to do with the technology.
The real problems are financial and political. Suppose you get yourself "frozen". At that point, are you legally alive or dead? In order to be able to pay for the perhaps hundreds of years you might be in storage, you'll have to have a sizable chunk of change set aside. Your heirs (or, more likely, their descendants) will almost certainly attempt to gain control over it, and so the question of whether or not you're legally alive will have to be answered. I wouldn't put good odds on the ruling coming out in your favor.
But suppose it does. Now the question becomes how you ensure that the organization that freezes you will survive for the amount of time it takes for a cure to your terminal illness to be found. The odds of that happening are not good. How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few.
And on top of that, there's the problem of the political stability of the country the organization in question is based in, not to mention the world at large.
The bottom line is that getting yourself frozen in the face of a terminal illness is a very low-probability shot in the dark. But any chance of survival is better than no chance, so I'd take the risk if it were me.
Don't expect MS to pay all of that fine, btw. They'll probably make the concessions that the EU demands, and have a significant part of it lifted or voided. (What DOES the EU want, anyway?)
No, Microsoft will not make any of the concessions, because to do so would destroy their monopoly. Their monopoly depends on their control over the protocols and file formats they use.
But I do agree with you that they won't pay all of the fine. In fact, I don't think they'll pay any of it.
Microsoft believes themselves to be above all laws except those they make. They will not tolerate anyone telling them what to do. Because of that, they will refuse to pay any significant portion of the fine (they might pay a very small portion of it as a stalling tactic, but they won't pay a cent unless they believe it will help them ultimately win against the EU). Microsoft wants nothing less than complete domination of all technology, and they have the means to achieve that. Now that they've learned how to bribe and extort governments, nothing really stands in their way.
I predict that the EU doesn't have the spine to take this as far as it needs to go. They could do so only if there are numerous people in high positions in the EU who are incorruptible and untouchable. Such people almost certainly do not exist. That means Microsoft will ultimately win.
Or we could try to fix our government before it completely goes to hell and we need a revolution.
Too late. Too late by far.
We lost that ability when all the mass information distribution channels that most people use were taken over by huge corporations.
You think the fact that this net neutrality thing battle is happening now is an accident? It's happening now because the average person is only just now (relatively recently, within the last couple of years) starting to use the internet as a primary source of information. If that had happened sooner, then this battle would have been fought sooner.
As long as Big Business controls the information distribution channels that most people receive their information from, they'll control the government. Well, at least until unauditable voting machines are in place. At that point it won't matter anymore.
Put a human in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out, but put him in a pot of cold water and slowly bring it to a boil and he'll cook?
Humans are (or at least can be) pretty damned stupid. Especially humans who come up with really stupid metaphors like this one. So I think the metaphor works.;-)
And sad to say, Europe is showing it has a helluva lot more balls than the US.
Really? Doesn't look like it from here. Thus far, Europe's done nothing but talk, the equivalent of "Stop! Or I shall say 'stop' again!". Talk is cheap and shows nothing.
I'll believe Europe has more balls when it starts actually fining Microsoft a hell of a lot more than the pocket change fine they're threatening Microsoft with right now. And yes, it is pocket change. How do you justify a $1B "loss" to shareholders? Easy: "Either we pay the fine and keep our monopoly, or we don't pay and lose it. We make a shitload more than $1B a year by being a monopoly. You can work out the rest for yourself".
The Supreme Court will rule in such a way that the ruling does absolutely nothing to help with the mess that is now patents. They will claim that it's a problem for Congress.
There's precedent for this, namely the Eldred case, in which they basically ruled against Eldred on the same basis.
You can't count on the Supreme Court to rule well (that is, on the side of the People) on anything anymore.
And you know what? There aren't really any more or less "abuses" than there ever have been; there are just much easier ways to spread the word. That's what makes people believe we're heading down the primrose path to a fascist state and all this other crap.
Yeah. Shit like the passage of the USAPATRIOT act, Guantanamo Bay, etc. (in other words, effectively permanent changes in the direction towards police statehood) has absolutely nothing to do with it.
In other words, what you're saying is that once the guys in power lose control over the military, it's over. Yes, I agree.
As long as the military is willing to work for the guys in power, a revolution will never succeed. Since, in this case, the guys in power have all the money, I see little reason to believe that the U.S. military will side with the guys who want real freedom.
Name me one revolution in the last 50 years against a government with a modern, well-equipped military where the revolutionaries didn't either convert said military to their side or get major outside military help. Bet you can't.
The American Revolution worked back in the 1700s when the average civilian's firepower was at least within a factor of two or three of the average soldier's. Back then, how many people you had on your side mattered. But today the disparity is on the order of thousands to millions to one (depending on what weapons you want to count) against the civilian. A civilian uprising simply can't win against that kind of firepower, because today it doesn't matter how many people you have on your side -- what matters is how big your guns are. And big guns are expensive. So expensive that only governments can afford them. Which by definition means the civilians won't have them. Which means the civilians can't win an armed conflict (a.k.a. violent revolution) against a well-armed government unless the well-armed government suddenly isn't so well-armed.
Is that so? Got any evidence to back it up? I'm not talking about evidence surrounding bills that the politician could realistically go either way on, I'm talking about bills that the politician is getting paid a lot of money to pass.
I bet you won't be able to find a shred of evidence backing your assertion up, at least for the bills that really matter.
I thought you Americans had a neat system specifically designed for making laws to limit government power, whereby a law could be passed which needed more than a mere majority to overturn, making it more resilient to power shifts. It's called the Constitution.
Where have you been? The Constitution hasn't mattered for the past 20 years. Even the supreme law of the land (the Constitution) has only as much power as those who actually control the guns (and thus are charged with enforcing the law) are willing to give it. And these days, the government, which includes the military, only pretends to uphold it. Even that is changing: the government is getting bolder by the year. Soon, they'll dispense with the Constitution entirely, because at that point nobody will be able to do anything about it. We're already very, very close to that point.
To paraphrase Gandhi, "535 Congressmen and assorted CEOs cannot control 280 million Americans if those Americans refuse to cooperate."
They can if they have control over a modern military with a few hundred thousand troops and lots of big guns.
And don't give me that bullshit about how the military won't be willing to fire on its own civilians. Thousands of years of history have shown otherwise, and there's no reason at all to believe that the U.S. military is so special that it's an exception.
Politicians salaries capped at the AVERAGE income of their consitituents. This way, its in their best interests to make sure that people have decent jobs, with decent incomes. Also, when a recession hits, they'll also feel some of the pain, instead of being insulated from it.
No, they'll just get their money through more "discreet" channels. And then they'll be beholden to the guys with the most cash, just as they are right now.
If you really want to fix this, you make the politician's compensation a single lump sum, to be collected at the end of his first term, that's so large that he'll be set for life, with one condition: he has to survive at least one term. Then you just do something to make it easy for the electorate to throw the guy out of office before his term is up, to give him a ton of incentive to make the electorate happy for at least one term.
Do that and everyone who is eligible will have a huge incentive to run, which means you'll see a whole pile of fresh blood competing for the position. Furthermore, the incumbent won't have much incentive to remain an incumbent unless he truly enjoys the job, because he's already got his payout at the end of his first term.
Designate certain bills as "government confidence" votes. If the bill (budgets are good for this) isn't passed, the government falls, and a new election is held.
Nice, except for one problem: no bill would be thusly designated, because none of the politicians would be stupid enough to do so. Hmm...unless you make such designation of at least one bill a prerequisite for the politician to get his big payout at the end of his term...
The problem is that legislators work for only the people that vote for them, not the other way around.
You wish.
No, legislators work for only the people who made their election possible. That's not the voters, the voters are just pawns who must choose from the choices presented to them. No, the legislators work for the corporations, particularly the ones who control the media, because he who controls information controls everything.
There is no solution to this short of violent revolution, and violent revolution simply cannot work against a modern, well-equipped military. That means it simply won't succeed even if a reasonable number of people are stupid enough to band together and try it -- it'll only get them and their families killed, which will work nicely towards removing the tendency to revolt from the human gene pool.
It's time to face reality, folks: we've lost, and lost for good. All we're doing now is slowing the slide into darkness and despair, and not even slowing it by much.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst they head right down the same path.
If you think the EU will somehow be different, think again. All of this is happening in the entire world. Soon the only countries which aren't themselves police states will be the puppets of police states (because they won't have the power to refuse).
This is happening throughout the world because the same people are behind it: the people who run the big multinational corporations and who also conveniently control the mass media. They want fascism because fascism is by definition friendly to big business, and thus to them. They have far more influence, and thus control, over all governments than we ever could. Those governments control all the guns that matter -- their firepower outranks that of the citizens (even the well-armed ones) by many, many thousands to one. And history has shown countless times that those in the military have no reservations whatsoever about turning their guns against the citizenry.
Face it: we've lost. The entire world is descending into darkness and despair, and this time there's no climbing out of it for a really long time (centuries, perhaps even millenia). Police states almost never collapse from within: it almost always takes an outside influence to topple them. That can't happen if the entire world is under the control of police states.
At least the patriots of the American Revolution had a fighting chance of winning, thanks to the technological circumstances of the time. But now, there's no chance at all.
"More efficient" in terms of speed, perhaps, but if it's more efficient in terms of speed, it's probably less efficient in terms of space.
Usually, speed and space are traded off. I dare say that a well-written non-garbage-collecting application will have better speed+space performance than a similarly well-written one written in a modern garbage collecting language like Java. The reason is that memory management overhead in a non-garbage-collecting application is usually quite minimal (you simply allocate memory when you need it and free it when you're done -- the overhead of allocating a freeing memory is very small because it's very simple), while it's nontrivial in a garbage-collecting application.
Garbage collection itself is a complex, nontrivial endeavor and is very hard to do efficiently. Even the most efficient implementations require much more computation than simply allocating and freeing memory does. So garbage collecting implementations tend to try to delay garbage collection as long as possible, which means more memory is allocated to the application than it really needs. Space versus speed.
Garbage collection certainly has its merits: it reduces or eliminates an entire class of memory management issues that has plagued programmers from the beginning. But it comes at a price. The price of garbage collection is that your application is almost guaranteed to be less efficient in terms of space+speed than it would be if it were written in a language that didn't have garbage collection overhead. But that assumes, of course, that the application is otherwise well-written. Garbage collection allows the programmer to get away with writing poorer code, since the programmer no longer has to pay the price for failing to properly manage memory.
Such is the nature of progress in the computing world: the computer manages more things as time goes on, but doesn't do so quite as well as code written by someone who is truly skilled and who truly understands the problem and solution space. So software gets more inefficient (in terms of both speed and space) over time. But it does get easier to write, which of course means that the percentage of badly-written software will continue to increase over time as the bar is lowered.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Not only are the distances vast, the times are vast too. Stars live for billions of years. One year in the lifespan of a human is roughly comparable to perhaps 70 million years in the lifespan of a star.
So when someone says "soon" in reference to a prediction of when some stellar event is going to occur, it's likely you'll have to scale up the term by roughly the same amount. "Soon" to a human generally means within/around a day or so, so scaled up to stellar times, that would be within/around 200,000 years.
I expect that by the time this supernova happens, humans will either be unbelievably technologically advanced, or they'll be extinct.
Suppose we have a completely free market, that is one that literally has absolutely no government control over it or the players within it whatsoever.
I'm a businessman, and you're a businessman, and we're in competition with each other.
Suppose that my business is currently doing better than yours is -- I have more sales, etc., and thus am a bigger player in the market. As a result, I have more resources. Now suppose you come out with a product that's better than mine, such that it looks like you will do better than me in the market. And finally, suppose that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to "win".
What prevents me from using my greater resources to simply have you assassinated and to burn your resources to the ground, rather than take the more expensive route of actually trying to compete with you?
Remember, this is a completely unregulated market: the players can do anything they wish in order to "compete".
You mean like it did in Soviet Russia before the collapse of the Soviet system there?
I mean, I agree with the general sentiment that for men to be as free as possible, the State needs to be as small as possible. But there is a difference between "as small as possible" and "nonexistent".
Those with money, power (guns), and influence will always attempt to exert control over those without. Without some way for the population to assert itself, the people with money and power are guaranteed to succeed in their quest: the people won't stand a chance.
The purpose of the government is to protect the rights of the people. No more, no less. Without such an entity, the people have no protector of their rights at all. Without such a protector, the people cannot exercise their rights, because to do so requires that they have more power than those who would control them. When such a protective entity loses its way (as all governments eventually do), the people lose that protection. Both situations are equally bad, because in both situations the people lose their rights at gunpoint. The only difference is who is pointing the gun. Even that difference is subtle.
Yeah right. The vast majority of the people who stick with Office these days are people who won't switch unless the alternative is 100% in every way, shape, and form "compatible" with (which to them means exactly the same as) Office.
Must be nice to be Microsoft, where you don't have to give a shit about your customers...
Then consider yourself lucky. Congratulations, you're in the 5% group that's able to keep the weight off once you lose it. 80 pounds is enough that most people would have put on extra fat cells, and that would have affected their base appetite. You seem to be one of the lucky few for whom that isn't the case, or for whom the increased appetite can somehow be ignored.
Of course, all this assumes that you've been able to maintain the loss for, say, the past 10-15 years. Only then can you really say that it's long-term loss.
I wasn't saying that everyone will have the issues I raised, only the vast, vast majority.
Losing weight temporarily (which is what you've seen) isn't the problem.
Losing weight permanently, such that you never gain it back, is the problem.
The former is what makes most people who don't have a weight problem think it should be easy, because they see others start to exercise and suddenly lose a lot of weight. The latter is what the people who are losing the weight are actually trying to achieve, and it is that which they almost always fail at.
Reread what I said very carefully. I'm not talking about preventing weight gain, I'm talking about losing weight, which is what the original poster was talking about. They're two different things.
It's much, much easier to prevent weight gain than it is to permanently lose weight that you've previously gained.
Here's the problem: when you gain weight, you gain fat cells. Your fat stores (in particular, your visceral fat stores) act as an organ, and control your hormone balance. Their effect is to increase your appetite, such that you will tend to eat at least enough to maintain your new weight.
You never lose fat cells. Once you gain them, they're with you for life. When you lose weight, you reduce the amount of fat in the cells, but the effect of those cells on your appetite does not diminish. This is why people who lose weight almost always (95%) gain it back with a vengeance, and usually in such a way that they further increase their weight relative to what it was before they attempted weight loss.
My "defeatist attitude" is nothing of the kind. I'm a realist. I adjust my views of the world based on observation, measurement, and experimentation. I know through experience, observation, reading, and talking with others that losing weight permanently is nearly impossible.
I used to believe as you do, that weight loss is merely a matter of a little willpower. If that were so, then permanent weight loss (not to be confused with avoiding weight gain to begin with) would be achieved by much more than the mere 5% of the people who try.
The amount of willpower it takes to actually succeed is herculean. The drive to eat is stronger by far than the drive to have sex. It is that drive that you must pit your willpower against, and you will have to do so hour after hour, day after day, year after year. People who attempt to do this tend to find themselves thinking about food and little else for those hours. As a result, those who succeed in pitting their willpower against their instinct to eat are likely to be less happy as a result, since satisfaction of your instincts (particularly one as persistent as the drive to eat) is a major contributer to your happiness.
People who avoid reality are doomed to be crushed by it. The real world always wins. In this case, it means that if you attempt weight loss, it's highly likely that you'll gain even more after the attempt. This means one thing and one thing only: once you've gained weight, you're much better off attempting to maintain it than attempting to lose it, because the former is much easier to achieve than the latter.
That's a nice sentiment and all, but even walking across the entire United States isn't enough to lower your weight to normal if you're overweight (it certainly wasn't for Steve Vaught).
You people who aren't overweight and claim that the answer is to "just lose weight and keep it off" had better wake up to reality: the human body is evolved to keep weight on in every way possible (because you never know when you might need that stored energy). Losing weight and keeping it off is a near impossibility for almost everyone who needs to do it. There's a reason over 95% of the people who try to do so fail in the long run.
Reversing weight gain is like reversing gray hair. You will lose, and you will make yourself miserable in the process. Unless you happen to be one of the lucky 5% of the people who have a genetic predisposition that allows you to keep it off relatively easily.
You should exercise anyway, but you won't keep the weight off by doing so: you simply can't burn enough calories to make a real difference, and your appetite will adjust itself upwards in response to your exercise. No, you should exercise in order to keep yourself relatively fit, because there are other health benefits to be had from it.
Some people may think that this may end up being a way to deal with any sort of terminal illness. I don't think it is. And it has nothing to do with the technology.
The real problems are financial and political. Suppose you get yourself "frozen". At that point, are you legally alive or dead? In order to be able to pay for the perhaps hundreds of years you might be in storage, you'll have to have a sizable chunk of change set aside. Your heirs (or, more likely, their descendants) will almost certainly attempt to gain control over it, and so the question of whether or not you're legally alive will have to be answered. I wouldn't put good odds on the ruling coming out in your favor.
But suppose it does. Now the question becomes how you ensure that the organization that freezes you will survive for the amount of time it takes for a cure to your terminal illness to be found. The odds of that happening are not good. How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few.
And on top of that, there's the problem of the political stability of the country the organization in question is based in, not to mention the world at large.
The bottom line is that getting yourself frozen in the face of a terminal illness is a very low-probability shot in the dark. But any chance of survival is better than no chance, so I'd take the risk if it were me.
You mean VMWare is truly a virtual machine on OS X?
*sound of crickets*
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
No, Microsoft will not make any of the concessions, because to do so would destroy their monopoly. Their monopoly depends on their control over the protocols and file formats they use.
But I do agree with you that they won't pay all of the fine. In fact, I don't think they'll pay any of it.
Microsoft believes themselves to be above all laws except those they make. They will not tolerate anyone telling them what to do. Because of that, they will refuse to pay any significant portion of the fine (they might pay a very small portion of it as a stalling tactic, but they won't pay a cent unless they believe it will help them ultimately win against the EU). Microsoft wants nothing less than complete domination of all technology, and they have the means to achieve that. Now that they've learned how to bribe and extort governments, nothing really stands in their way.
I predict that the EU doesn't have the spine to take this as far as it needs to go. They could do so only if there are numerous people in high positions in the EU who are incorruptible and untouchable. Such people almost certainly do not exist. That means Microsoft will ultimately win.
Too late. Too late by far.
We lost that ability when all the mass information distribution channels that most people use were taken over by huge corporations.
You think the fact that this net neutrality thing battle is happening now is an accident? It's happening now because the average person is only just now (relatively recently, within the last couple of years) starting to use the internet as a primary source of information. If that had happened sooner, then this battle would have been fought sooner.
As long as Big Business controls the information distribution channels that most people receive their information from, they'll control the government. Well, at least until unauditable voting machines are in place. At that point it won't matter anymore.
Put a human in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out, but put him in a pot of cold water and slowly bring it to a boil and he'll cook?
Humans are (or at least can be) pretty damned stupid. Especially humans who come up with really stupid metaphors like this one. So I think the metaphor works. ;-)
Really? Doesn't look like it from here. Thus far, Europe's done nothing but talk, the equivalent of "Stop! Or I shall say 'stop' again!". Talk is cheap and shows nothing.
I'll believe Europe has more balls when it starts actually fining Microsoft a hell of a lot more than the pocket change fine they're threatening Microsoft with right now. And yes, it is pocket change. How do you justify a $1B "loss" to shareholders? Easy: "Either we pay the fine and keep our monopoly, or we don't pay and lose it. We make a shitload more than $1B a year by being a monopoly. You can work out the rest for yourself".
The Supreme Court will rule in such a way that the ruling does absolutely nothing to help with the mess that is now patents. They will claim that it's a problem for Congress.
There's precedent for this, namely the Eldred case, in which they basically ruled against Eldred on the same basis.
You can't count on the Supreme Court to rule well (that is, on the side of the People) on anything anymore.
Sigh.
Yeah. Shit like the passage of the USAPATRIOT act, Guantanamo Bay, etc. (in other words, effectively permanent changes in the direction towards police statehood) has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right?
In other words, what you're saying is that once the guys in power lose control over the military, it's over. Yes, I agree.
As long as the military is willing to work for the guys in power, a revolution will never succeed. Since, in this case, the guys in power have all the money, I see little reason to believe that the U.S. military will side with the guys who want real freedom.
Name me one revolution in the last 50 years against a government with a modern, well-equipped military where the revolutionaries didn't either convert said military to their side or get major outside military help. Bet you can't.
The American Revolution worked back in the 1700s when the average civilian's firepower was at least within a factor of two or three of the average soldier's. Back then, how many people you had on your side mattered. But today the disparity is on the order of thousands to millions to one (depending on what weapons you want to count) against the civilian. A civilian uprising simply can't win against that kind of firepower, because today it doesn't matter how many people you have on your side -- what matters is how big your guns are. And big guns are expensive. So expensive that only governments can afford them. Which by definition means the civilians won't have them. Which means the civilians can't win an armed conflict (a.k.a. violent revolution) against a well-armed government unless the well-armed government suddenly isn't so well-armed.
Thanks for making my point for me.
Is that so? Got any evidence to back it up? I'm not talking about evidence surrounding bills that the politician could realistically go either way on, I'm talking about bills that the politician is getting paid a lot of money to pass.
I bet you won't be able to find a shred of evidence backing your assertion up, at least for the bills that really matter.
You mean like the CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) of 1998 was struck down? Or how about like how the DMCA was?
You have far too much faith in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court isn't going to do shit about any of this.
Where have you been? The Constitution hasn't mattered for the past 20 years. Even the supreme law of the land (the Constitution) has only as much power as those who actually control the guns (and thus are charged with enforcing the law) are willing to give it. And these days, the government, which includes the military, only pretends to uphold it. Even that is changing: the government is getting bolder by the year. Soon, they'll dispense with the Constitution entirely, because at that point nobody will be able to do anything about it. We're already very, very close to that point.
They can if they have control over a modern military with a few hundred thousand troops and lots of big guns.
And don't give me that bullshit about how the military won't be willing to fire on its own civilians. Thousands of years of history have shown otherwise, and there's no reason at all to believe that the U.S. military is so special that it's an exception.
No, they'll just get their money through more "discreet" channels. And then they'll be beholden to the guys with the most cash, just as they are right now.
If you really want to fix this, you make the politician's compensation a single lump sum, to be collected at the end of his first term, that's so large that he'll be set for life, with one condition: he has to survive at least one term. Then you just do something to make it easy for the electorate to throw the guy out of office before his term is up, to give him a ton of incentive to make the electorate happy for at least one term.
Do that and everyone who is eligible will have a huge incentive to run, which means you'll see a whole pile of fresh blood competing for the position. Furthermore, the incumbent won't have much incentive to remain an incumbent unless he truly enjoys the job, because he's already got his payout at the end of his first term.
Nice, except for one problem: no bill would be thusly designated, because none of the politicians would be stupid enough to do so. Hmm...unless you make such designation of at least one bill a prerequisite for the politician to get his big payout at the end of his term...
You wish.
No, legislators work for only the people who made their election possible. That's not the voters, the voters are just pawns who must choose from the choices presented to them. No, the legislators work for the corporations, particularly the ones who control the media, because he who controls information controls everything.
There is no solution to this short of violent revolution, and violent revolution simply cannot work against a modern, well-equipped military. That means it simply won't succeed even if a reasonable number of people are stupid enough to band together and try it -- it'll only get them and their families killed, which will work nicely towards removing the tendency to revolt from the human gene pool.
It's time to face reality, folks: we've lost, and lost for good. All we're doing now is slowing the slide into darkness and despair, and not even slowing it by much.