Amazon has profile pages that are easy enough to find. I personally have caught my university synchronizing their records with information provided only to the FAFSA, and then giving it to a Facebook-style website for alumni. IMHO it's naive to not assume companies synchronize their databases with each other. I agree that it ought to be illegal, but it's widespread enough that I doubt that it is.
Grossly speaking there are three types of criminals: smart and dumb. Dumb criminals won't do the sophisticated attacks. Smart criminals are unlikely to do something as risky/low reward as burglary of some Average Joe's house.
Vanity causes people to post every little detail of their lives with the delusion that someone cares. This form of paranoia is another manifestation of the same... it's the delusion that someone cares enough to carefully examine your digital life because your stuff is somehow worth the trouble.
I was about to mod you as a troll, but thought it'd be better to explain why so you don't assume it's the pro-nuclear zealots conspiring against you.
Last time I looked France even had a 40+ year old tidal hydro power station near Le Havre as well as a wide variety of other power plants. Try harder.
France consumed 447.27 Billion Kilowatt-Hours in 2007, but produced 542.41 Billion Kilowatt-Hours, 430 Billion Kilowatt-Hours were produced by nuclear power plants. They export electricity, but nuclear alone essentially covers their consumption. "France runs on nuclear power" would be an accurate statement.
In that post you provide one fact in one sentence, and it's nit-picky and deceptive. You then proceed to argue as though anyone who reads about the topic or your posts agrees with you. This is in stark contrast to the obvious evidence that the GP has read on the topic (the references provided), and the fact that you have about five people arguing against you.
I read your post because in my reading on the topic I came to the conclusion that nuclear is a great idea that's mostly opposed by antiquated concerns about accidents and waste. But, my curiosity was piqued when I saw an argument about something else, and figured that you might have a good point (i.e. obviously nuclear isn't taking off so maybe there's more validity to counterarguments than I am aware of). But I was sorely disappointed by the lack of references, explanations, or basic consistency or logic. You do sound as though you know enough that you could formulate a good opposing position if you weren't trolling though.
There's also the state of h264 acceleration. Animated subtitles can easly have double digit CPU usage on a Core 2 Duo, and higher resolution/bitrate h264 isn't possible on anything short of a quad core (last time I checked). Anime fansubs tend to encode at higher levels so hardware acceleration is iffy even on windows. Without it there are limitation as to what you can watch, and you have to contend with a lot of fan noise.
I suspect whoever had this idea is forgetting just how taxing fansubs can be. Personally, I dual boot and this is something Windows simply has proven to be better at. (MPC-HC with DXVA, ffdshow, and Haali VS the latest SMPlayer and Intel drivers on Gentoo)
It looks like a lot of others captured the gist of my message, although for some reason I didn't see their comments when I started typing my own. Basically, I'm assuming that crimes have an intrinsic scale of heinousness that is independent of the law. For example, killing a person in cold blood might be a 7, but burning down a preschool after sodomizing everyone inside would likely rank a bit higher.
I do agree that most serious criminals aren't calculating risk/reward though (aka "using logic"). Most, AFAIK, either think they can evade punishment, or aren't thinking of it at all. If they did, death is sufficiently serious to give most everyone pause since it's intrinsically different than "going to prison".
The death penalty does have some extra deterance though. An example might be an impoverished individual who blames his former boss for firing him and "causing" his poverty. Without the death penalty this individual might consider prision an upgrade in quality of life (3 meals a day, no worries about employment). Knowing that he might get the death penalty, though, will likely prevent him from killing his boss since he doesn't want to die himself.
I do the same (I wash my hands after using the restroom, and wipe down my laptop keyboard with alcohol occasionally), am healthy, and agree with you. That said, it's not really a fair comparison between your average slashdotter and a member of the general population. In my case I'm in my 20s so it'd be unusual for me to get very sick in the first place. Second, my exposure risk is minimal: I live alone, don't have any pets, and my social life isn't exciting enough to be a disease vector. There is no reason for me to be very ill regardless of whether I am a germophobe or not.
The same could be said about life without parole. What matters is that they reached the endpoint of what the law can do. Having an extra high-end punishment should actually help in that regard. Or at least it would if such extreme criminals were using logic at the time.
Example: a level 5 crime gets you life without parole, a level 7 crime warrants capital punishment. If someone commits a level 6 crime then without the death penalty they'd might as well go to level 10, whereas with the death penalty it'd be in their best interest to leave it at 6.
Speaking of warping science to conform to a belief, why is it that so many people are so eager to believe global warming skeptics?
I figure it's because the AGW non-scientists (and some scientists apparently) exaggerate to the point of dishonesty in the hopes of making people act. The skeptics also lie, but since they mostly just rebut AGW stuff it's less obvious. If one were to believe the bigots of each camp you'd think that the other group didn't have a shred of evidence and was intentionally misleading the public out of private interests.
There's also the sad state of research in this day and age, where statistical errors are abundant and you can't find someone without a conflict of interest. Most studies won't stand up to close scrutiny. If you point out research errors to a layman he'll believe that the researcher is either incompetent or deceptive.
Mobile phones can replace a lot of things, but some will persist because they require a specific form factor. Wristwatches, gaming devices, movie players, and paper won't be going away. A mobile phone may emulate them, and that works in a pinch, but these items have a unique shape that augments their function. For a wristwatch it stays on your wrist, for a gaming device it's gaming controls, for a movie player it's a decently large screen, and paper is paper. A cell phone too has a specific form that is necessary for functionality. Blue tooth headsets might alleviate that need, but you'd still need two devices so why bother?
I used to be irked at how Sci-Fi and Fantasy were generally lumped into a signal category. Nowadays I realize that for the bulk of "Sci-Fi" there's really no difference. There's no science in violating the laws of physics without explanation. In most settings the spaceships and the other cliches lack any plausible technical details, and the story is entirely about the characters rather than the technology. Not that that's bad, it just completely lacks the "Sci" part of "Sci-Fi".
It must depend on the person. I live in a city where we don't even know quite how bad the air quality is (it's being investigated). It is bad enough that certain neighborhoods near the rubber factory have needed to be vacated due to very high cancer rates. That said, I walk past dozens of smokers outside of hospitals and I've learned to hold my breath while I'm within 15 feet of them, plus another 30 if I'm downwind. If you can't smell that you've been desensitized to cigarette smoke specifically. It smells nothing like vehicle exhaust, and I personally find it to be the second most malodorous thing I've smelt (the first is high molar HCl, which smells like pain; number three is a moldy, septic cadaver soaked in formaldehyde).
Plus, with extrinsic hypersensitivity asthma there's a specific allergen involved (or more likely multiple allergens). It doesn't even need to have an odor, and it could easily be present in only cigarette smoke, nor do the health effects (e.g. carcinogen) matter. With intrinsic asthma there could be an attack with about any respiratory insult, it's less specific.
As for second hand smoke in general, I half consider it to be assault. A puff of cigarette smoke will paralyze your respiratory cilia for 30 minutes, and the long term health effects are far worst than getting punched. But I'm biased since I get to learn about/deal with the bad effects of smoking. Did you know that 70% of women who have a child with a birth defect directly attributable to her smoking will continue to smoke for subsequent pregnancies? Facts like that, and my personal distaste for the smell make me very unsympathetic toward the activity. That said, I don't think Apple can not honor the warranty. If it's bad enough to be an OSHA violation then they should just replace the laptop. OTOH, I think they would be absolutely justified in changing the warranty so that it no longer covers tar build-up.
I'd imagine that they're more worried about what happens if you need to do a limited nuclear strike. If your nukes have a 50% failure rate you need to launch ten to ensure a 99.9% chance of destroying the target. Launching ten nukes at once is a lot more likely to start WWIII and chances are that several are going to work and you'll release a lot more radiation than you would with a single 99.9% reliable nuke. Plus, littering the ground with duds means an enemy will likely retrieve and reverse engineer one.
With the egos involved this actually is a fairly close analog to international negotiation. IMHO awarding the entire open source movement would be a good idea, perhaps with Torvalds and a few others individually recognized (a la "Al Gore & the IPCC").
Hence why it's newsworthy that someone has created this weapon. Contrary to the title, using it to destroy test targets isn't. The purpose of this weapon, specifically, is to prevent greater destruction by lesser destruction (building and life VS missile). Also, destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin; improvement of the world requires both creating good and destroying the existing bad.
My theory is that users don't realize that "resolution" doesn't mean what they think it means, and programmers fear the added difficulty of DPI independent GUI programming. I would hope that most people realize that adding a blur filter (low DPI screen) to another blur filter (poor eyesight) does not equal sharper images.
Perhaps that's why it can never surpass what an expert can do. Realistically, you can't train it on just freshly stamped coins, nor can you really be 100% certain that a coin that has been circulated is genuine.
It's a common misconception, since agriculture was widely adopted. Basically, high carbohydrate diets promote earlier puberty (i.e. ~12 VS ~22), and farming supports a larger (albeit vitamin deficient) population. So the farmers outbred the hunter-gatherers and forced them from a nomadic lifestyle to being stuck in rather undesirable areas. Beyond natural selection, there's also the issue of motivation. Believe it or not, beer is believed to be a major factor. You can't get enough hops to brew any significant quantity of beer unless you farm.
20 hours per week spent acquiring food is actually a very high estimate, given that modern hunter-gatherers are generally stuck with lands too infertile for agriculture.
Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
Technology did help hunter-gatherers though. Weapons are likely a lot easier than endurance hunting (interesting tidbit: humans are the best daylight distance runners in the animal kingdom), and baskets certainly make gathering a lot easier. It's just that most hunter-gatherers were nomadic (hence nothing long standing), and had little motivation to further reduce their workload. Although the time frame is a bit off, it wouldn't surprise me if the Axial switch in religion reflects the change in workload from hunter/gatherers to farmers. (Pre-Axial religions are mostly explanations of natural phenomena, Post-Axial religions more say that life sucks but there's a heavenly reward.)
There's also the idea that in early human society the men were the hunters and the women the gatherers. Our sexual difference (physically and mentally) aid those roles, although it's difficult to say whether the chicken or the egg came first here. Plus, women generally breast fed their children until about age five, or when she gave birth again. Gathering is generally safer, children can help, and the women could stop to breast feed if necessary, so it's pretty clear why women were the favored child rearers. OTOH, hunter-gather societies only worked ~20 hours a week, so for the rest of the time either parent could help.
I was just about to mention something virtually identical. The benefit to these systems is that you don't have to worry about keeping a data file around, it'll work in virtually any browser, and you can download the conversion website. That way, you can generate the site specific password using your PDA or Smart Phone without typing your master password into a questionably secure computer.
Adherence to a diet is more important than the type of diet as far as weight loss is concerned. It's not like calories from sugar (or protein or whatever) count any more than calories from anything else. "Glycemic index" also hasn't been found to have any effect if that's what you're getting at.
Blood sugar, unless you're diabetic, is rather unexciting. The insulin/glucagon system will keep blood sugar from dropping too low or getting too high. It's actually rather surprising, your body can maintain your blood glucose levels for something like 40 days without eating. Since it's quite adept at making glucose, not eating much sugar isn't going to lead to lower blood sugars levels. (Diabetics have to worry since this system doesn't work as well in them... leading to peaks and dips that are rather dangerous.)
Eating 875 g of sugar above what you need will generally cause you to gain a pound of body fat. The same is true of eating 875 g of protein or 389 g of fat. The only concern is that while there aren't really any essential sugars, cutting out an entire macronutrient class is unhealthy. Balanced diets are best, but anything you'll stick to will work. If low carbohydrates works for you, great. Just try to transition to something a little healthier eventually.
Several animal and bacteria use magnetic fields to navigate or orient themselves. There are several proposed mechanisms, such as the magnetite crystals in the brain or a light + magnetism reaction in photoreceptors. Early humans were nomadic so it's at least plausible that one of these mechanisms were used to navigate.
OTOH, detecting magnetic fields would be an interesting ability on its own, and there's a lot of pseudoscience associated with it. But, AFAIK, nobody has been able to demonstrate it outside of a few non-repeatable studies (e.g. a magnet on the nose screwing up grad students' sense of direction, or cows and other mammals preferring North-South orientations.)
The average American TV viewer watches 5 hours of TV per day. I'd say even >9 hours isn't "unreasonable" for an adult, it's more "depressing" and "wasteful". Either way, a family could easily watch 10 or 15 hours of programming between them.
Something I've noticed is that intelligence isn't a quantity, but is instead how you process information. That process might be good at Task A, but terrible at Task B.
An example would be medical students. Basically, to get to that level you have to have to be skilled in the life sciences. Physics, though, is something most find nearly impossible. I never grasped how someone found the Krebs cycle easier than F=ma, but whatever.
This continues beyond school, because I've got one professor that has made several grade-school level math references in her lectures, all of which were fundamentally wrong. (E.g. an answer spread of 13%, 16%, 29%, 20%, 22% elicits a "Well, most of you got this one right so we don't need to discuss it".)
Another example would be the clichéd geek that's socially retarded. It is my suspicion that the phenomenon where some people's brains shut down when using a computer is another manifestation of this concept.
You forgot to mention that speed limits could probably be doubled and traffic jams would be nearly nonexistent. Unfortunately, I'm doubtful that this'll happen since too many people are terrified of flying partially due to lack of control, and because people tend to be arrogant enough to think that they can drive better than a computer can. Others just aren't comfortable with the idea of mostly autonomous machines that lack a human override. (If a human override exists idiots will use it to "not miss" a turn that's impossible to do legally and incredibly dangerous.)
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon has profile pages that are easy enough to find. I personally have caught my university synchronizing their records with information provided only to the FAFSA, and then giving it to a Facebook-style website for alumni. IMHO it's naive to not assume companies synchronize their databases with each other. I agree that it ought to be illegal, but it's widespread enough that I doubt that it is.
Grossly speaking there are three types of criminals: smart and dumb. Dumb criminals won't do the sophisticated attacks. Smart criminals are unlikely to do something as risky/low reward as burglary of some Average Joe's house.
Vanity causes people to post every little detail of their lives with the delusion that someone cares. This form of paranoia is another manifestation of the same... it's the delusion that someone cares enough to carefully examine your digital life because your stuff is somehow worth the trouble.
Interesting, I was under the impression that using false names with banks, on line merchants, and government services wasn't legal.
Last time I looked France even had a 40+ year old tidal hydro power station near Le Havre as well as a wide variety of other power plants. Try harder.
France consumed 447.27 Billion Kilowatt-Hours in 2007, but produced 542.41 Billion Kilowatt-Hours, 430 Billion Kilowatt-Hours were produced by nuclear power plants. They export electricity, but nuclear alone essentially covers their consumption. "France runs on nuclear power" would be an accurate statement.
In that post you provide one fact in one sentence, and it's nit-picky and deceptive. You then proceed to argue as though anyone who reads about the topic or your posts agrees with you. This is in stark contrast to the obvious evidence that the GP has read on the topic (the references provided), and the fact that you have about five people arguing against you.
I read your post because in my reading on the topic I came to the conclusion that nuclear is a great idea that's mostly opposed by antiquated concerns about accidents and waste. But, my curiosity was piqued when I saw an argument about something else, and figured that you might have a good point (i.e. obviously nuclear isn't taking off so maybe there's more validity to counterarguments than I am aware of). But I was sorely disappointed by the lack of references, explanations, or basic consistency or logic. You do sound as though you know enough that you could formulate a good opposing position if you weren't trolling though.
There's also the state of h264 acceleration. Animated subtitles can easly have double digit CPU usage on a Core 2 Duo, and higher resolution/bitrate h264 isn't possible on anything short of a quad core (last time I checked). Anime fansubs tend to encode at higher levels so hardware acceleration is iffy even on windows. Without it there are limitation as to what you can watch, and you have to contend with a lot of fan noise.
I suspect whoever had this idea is forgetting just how taxing fansubs can be. Personally, I dual boot and this is something Windows simply has proven to be better at. (MPC-HC with DXVA, ffdshow, and Haali VS the latest SMPlayer and Intel drivers on Gentoo)
It looks like a lot of others captured the gist of my message, although for some reason I didn't see their comments when I started typing my own. Basically, I'm assuming that crimes have an intrinsic scale of heinousness that is independent of the law. For example, killing a person in cold blood might be a 7, but burning down a preschool after sodomizing everyone inside would likely rank a bit higher.
I do agree that most serious criminals aren't calculating risk/reward though (aka "using logic"). Most, AFAIK, either think they can evade punishment, or aren't thinking of it at all. If they did, death is sufficiently serious to give most everyone pause since it's intrinsically different than "going to prison".
The death penalty does have some extra deterance though. An example might be an impoverished individual who blames his former boss for firing him and "causing" his poverty. Without the death penalty this individual might consider prision an upgrade in quality of life (3 meals a day, no worries about employment). Knowing that he might get the death penalty, though, will likely prevent him from killing his boss since he doesn't want to die himself.
I do the same (I wash my hands after using the restroom, and wipe down my laptop keyboard with alcohol occasionally), am healthy, and agree with you. That said, it's not really a fair comparison between your average slashdotter and a member of the general population. In my case I'm in my 20s so it'd be unusual for me to get very sick in the first place. Second, my exposure risk is minimal: I live alone, don't have any pets, and my social life isn't exciting enough to be a disease vector. There is no reason for me to be very ill regardless of whether I am a germophobe or not.
The same could be said about life without parole. What matters is that they reached the endpoint of what the law can do. Having an extra high-end punishment should actually help in that regard. Or at least it would if such extreme criminals were using logic at the time.
Example: a level 5 crime gets you life without parole, a level 7 crime warrants capital punishment. If someone commits a level 6 crime then without the death penalty they'd might as well go to level 10, whereas with the death penalty it'd be in their best interest to leave it at 6.
Speaking of warping science to conform to a belief, why is it that so many people are so eager to believe global warming skeptics?
I figure it's because the AGW non-scientists (and some scientists apparently) exaggerate to the point of dishonesty in the hopes of making people act. The skeptics also lie, but since they mostly just rebut AGW stuff it's less obvious. If one were to believe the bigots of each camp you'd think that the other group didn't have a shred of evidence and was intentionally misleading the public out of private interests.
There's also the sad state of research in this day and age, where statistical errors are abundant and you can't find someone without a conflict of interest. Most studies won't stand up to close scrutiny. If you point out research errors to a layman he'll believe that the researcher is either incompetent or deceptive.
Mobile phones can replace a lot of things, but some will persist because they require a specific form factor. Wristwatches, gaming devices, movie players, and paper won't be going away. A mobile phone may emulate them, and that works in a pinch, but these items have a unique shape that augments their function. For a wristwatch it stays on your wrist, for a gaming device it's gaming controls, for a movie player it's a decently large screen, and paper is paper. A cell phone too has a specific form that is necessary for functionality. Blue tooth headsets might alleviate that need, but you'd still need two devices so why bother?
I used to be irked at how Sci-Fi and Fantasy were generally lumped into a signal category. Nowadays I realize that for the bulk of "Sci-Fi" there's really no difference. There's no science in violating the laws of physics without explanation. In most settings the spaceships and the other cliches lack any plausible technical details, and the story is entirely about the characters rather than the technology. Not that that's bad, it just completely lacks the "Sci" part of "Sci-Fi".
It must depend on the person. I live in a city where we don't even know quite how bad the air quality is (it's being investigated). It is bad enough that certain neighborhoods near the rubber factory have needed to be vacated due to very high cancer rates. That said, I walk past dozens of smokers outside of hospitals and I've learned to hold my breath while I'm within 15 feet of them, plus another 30 if I'm downwind. If you can't smell that you've been desensitized to cigarette smoke specifically. It smells nothing like vehicle exhaust, and I personally find it to be the second most malodorous thing I've smelt (the first is high molar HCl, which smells like pain; number three is a moldy, septic cadaver soaked in formaldehyde).
Plus, with extrinsic hypersensitivity asthma there's a specific allergen involved (or more likely multiple allergens). It doesn't even need to have an odor, and it could easily be present in only cigarette smoke, nor do the health effects (e.g. carcinogen) matter. With intrinsic asthma there could be an attack with about any respiratory insult, it's less specific.
As for second hand smoke in general, I half consider it to be assault. A puff of cigarette smoke will paralyze your respiratory cilia for 30 minutes, and the long term health effects are far worst than getting punched. But I'm biased since I get to learn about/deal with the bad effects of smoking. Did you know that 70% of women who have a child with a birth defect directly attributable to her smoking will continue to smoke for subsequent pregnancies? Facts like that, and my personal distaste for the smell make me very unsympathetic toward the activity. That said, I don't think Apple can not honor the warranty. If it's bad enough to be an OSHA violation then they should just replace the laptop. OTOH, I think they would be absolutely justified in changing the warranty so that it no longer covers tar build-up.
I'd imagine that they're more worried about what happens if you need to do a limited nuclear strike. If your nukes have a 50% failure rate you need to launch ten to ensure a 99.9% chance of destroying the target. Launching ten nukes at once is a lot more likely to start WWIII and chances are that several are going to work and you'll release a lot more radiation than you would with a single 99.9% reliable nuke. Plus, littering the ground with duds means an enemy will likely retrieve and reverse engineer one.
With the egos involved this actually is a fairly close analog to international negotiation. IMHO awarding the entire open source movement would be a good idea, perhaps with Torvalds and a few others individually recognized (a la "Al Gore & the IPCC").
Hence why it's newsworthy that someone has created this weapon. Contrary to the title, using it to destroy test targets isn't. The purpose of this weapon, specifically, is to prevent greater destruction by lesser destruction (building and life VS missile). Also, destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin; improvement of the world requires both creating good and destroying the existing bad.
My theory is that users don't realize that "resolution" doesn't mean what they think it means, and programmers fear the added difficulty of DPI independent GUI programming. I would hope that most people realize that adding a blur filter (low DPI screen) to another blur filter (poor eyesight) does not equal sharper images.
Perhaps that's why it can never surpass what an expert can do. Realistically, you can't train it on just freshly stamped coins, nor can you really be 100% certain that a coin that has been circulated is genuine.
20 hours per week spent acquiring food is actually a very high estimate, given that modern hunter-gatherers are generally stuck with lands too infertile for agriculture.
Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
From "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" by Jarad Diamond in Discover Magazine (1987).
Technology did help hunter-gatherers though. Weapons are likely a lot easier than endurance hunting (interesting tidbit: humans are the best daylight distance runners in the animal kingdom), and baskets certainly make gathering a lot easier. It's just that most hunter-gatherers were nomadic (hence nothing long standing), and had little motivation to further reduce their workload. Although the time frame is a bit off, it wouldn't surprise me if the Axial switch in religion reflects the change in workload from hunter/gatherers to farmers. (Pre-Axial religions are mostly explanations of natural phenomena, Post-Axial religions more say that life sucks but there's a heavenly reward.)
There's also the idea that in early human society the men were the hunters and the women the gatherers. Our sexual difference (physically and mentally) aid those roles, although it's difficult to say whether the chicken or the egg came first here. Plus, women generally breast fed their children until about age five, or when she gave birth again. Gathering is generally safer, children can help, and the women could stop to breast feed if necessary, so it's pretty clear why women were the favored child rearers. OTOH, hunter-gather societies only worked ~20 hours a week, so for the rest of the time either parent could help.
I was just about to mention something virtually identical. The benefit to these systems is that you don't have to worry about keeping a data file around, it'll work in virtually any browser, and you can download the conversion website. That way, you can generate the site specific password using your PDA or Smart Phone without typing your master password into a questionably secure computer.
Adherence to a diet is more important than the type of diet as far as weight loss is concerned. It's not like calories from sugar (or protein or whatever) count any more than calories from anything else. "Glycemic index" also hasn't been found to have any effect if that's what you're getting at.
Blood sugar, unless you're diabetic, is rather unexciting. The insulin/glucagon system will keep blood sugar from dropping too low or getting too high. It's actually rather surprising, your body can maintain your blood glucose levels for something like 40 days without eating. Since it's quite adept at making glucose, not eating much sugar isn't going to lead to lower blood sugars levels. (Diabetics have to worry since this system doesn't work as well in them... leading to peaks and dips that are rather dangerous.)
Eating 875 g of sugar above what you need will generally cause you to gain a pound of body fat. The same is true of eating 875 g of protein or 389 g of fat. The only concern is that while there aren't really any essential sugars, cutting out an entire macronutrient class is unhealthy. Balanced diets are best, but anything you'll stick to will work. If low carbohydrates works for you, great. Just try to transition to something a little healthier eventually.
Several animal and bacteria use magnetic fields to navigate or orient themselves. There are several proposed mechanisms, such as the magnetite crystals in the brain or a light + magnetism reaction in photoreceptors. Early humans were nomadic so it's at least plausible that one of these mechanisms were used to navigate.
OTOH, detecting magnetic fields would be an interesting ability on its own, and there's a lot of pseudoscience associated with it. But, AFAIK, nobody has been able to demonstrate it outside of a few non-repeatable studies (e.g. a magnet on the nose screwing up grad students' sense of direction, or cows and other mammals preferring North-South orientations.)
The average American TV viewer watches 5 hours of TV per day. I'd say even >9 hours isn't "unreasonable" for an adult, it's more "depressing" and "wasteful". Either way, a family could easily watch 10 or 15 hours of programming between them.
Something I've noticed is that intelligence isn't a quantity, but is instead how you process information. That process might be good at Task A, but terrible at Task B.
An example would be medical students. Basically, to get to that level you have to have to be skilled in the life sciences. Physics, though, is something most find nearly impossible. I never grasped how someone found the Krebs cycle easier than F=ma, but whatever.
This continues beyond school, because I've got one professor that has made several grade-school level math references in her lectures, all of which were fundamentally wrong. (E.g. an answer spread of 13%, 16%, 29%, 20%, 22% elicits a "Well, most of you got this one right so we don't need to discuss it".)
Another example would be the clichéd geek that's socially retarded. It is my suspicion that the phenomenon where some people's brains shut down when using a computer is another manifestation of this concept.
You forgot to mention that speed limits could probably be doubled and traffic jams would be nearly nonexistent. Unfortunately, I'm doubtful that this'll happen since too many people are terrified of flying partially due to lack of control, and because people tend to be arrogant enough to think that they can drive better than a computer can. Others just aren't comfortable with the idea of mostly autonomous machines that lack a human override. (If a human override exists idiots will use it to "not miss" a turn that's impossible to do legally and incredibly dangerous.)