The algorithm itself might not change - it might call for an FFT to do some analysis - but the computing hardware will become more powerful, and newer hardware might be able to do a 4096-point FFT where older hardware was limited to a 1024-point FFT. The extra precision could allow the algorithm to work better in a noisier environment.
In case you missed the other Score 5 posts...the FDA has no jurisdiction over compounding pharmacies like the one in Massachusetts. Such pharmacies are under state regulation, not federal.
Also, while we're on the topic of the FDA...don't forget the House Republicans' budget cut FDA funding by $285 million. Kinda hard to have "agents standing in every lab" when you don't have enough money to pay said agents...
Has anyone put up a list of potential suspect clinics anywhere?
My mother received an epidural steroid injection shot, methylprednisolone, about a year ago. While I'm reasonably certain there are no complications (certainly they would have shown up by now), I would feel much more comfortable if I could verify that the clinic which treated my mother was not one that received any drugs from this compounding pharmacy.
When I heard about this on the news, I called her and we went down to ER and got things sorted (tested negative), but the "Contact the patient" step isn't happening for a lot of people.
First, my relative got a bill. I've seen it, it's real.
Many health insurance plans will not pay for emergency room visits if the patient is not admitted. Without further details, I'd say your relative was billed for the unnecessary ER visit.
Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
Shooting someone who is on top of you, beating your head into the ground, would likely result in getting some of that person's blood on you, don't you think?
I wholeheartedly agree. If a machine does something stupid and causes a flash crash, well too bad for whoever owned those machines, let some long-term investors rake in the cash at the stupid machines' expense.
Without the middle class as their market, do you think HDTV could have achieved the economies of scale necessary to bring the cost down to what it is right now? When those TVs were selling for 25k or 50k a pop, was there any HD content...or did HD content suddenly become financially reasonable once there was a big enough group of consumers who could purchase it?
Face it. You can have the best damn business in the world, but if you don't have any customers, you're fucked. End of story.
And without a large, vibrant middle class with disposable income, you will never have economies of scale. And if you don't have economies of scale, your shit will be expensive FOREVER, not just for early adopters.
Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
But wait, there's more!
Imagine the total cost of R&D that it takes for e.g. LG to make a new flat-screen HDTV model. Probably in the millions, let's say $10m to make the math easy. Further, let's say that only the 10 richest people have enough disposable income to purchase these TVs. That means each of those TVs will be at least $1m just for the R&D, probably more for the associated components. With 10 people who have HDTV, do you think the cable company is going to even bother offering HD content? Maybe, if the wealthy are willing to pay thousands of dollars a month in service fees.
Now let's take a look at this example, but with a vibrant middle class that has tons of disposable income. Now let's say a million people have enough income to buy this flat screen TV. That means the R&D costs are amoritzed to $10/TV. And now that there are a million potential customers, the cable company is much more likely to offer HD content.
Without the middle class, you don't have economies of scale. And when you don't have economies of scale, there are a lot of technological innovations that will just not happen because there is no market, and even if there was a market economies of scale would lead to reduced prices. This example is seen all over the place, from the screws that are used to build products, to the plastic molds which enclose those products.
I'm curious. Looking at this page - http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=286 - it seems like felons are in fact allowed to vote in Minnesota, once they have completed incarceration + parole + probation. I wonder if this was taken into consideration when calculating the 1,099 felons who were "all ineligible to vote"?
To give you the brief version: the government did not send guns to Mexican drug lords. All the guns that "walked" across the border were bought by straw purchasers with their own cash from private businesses.
The ATF agents in question (the leader of which is a former Marine who got an award for taking down two violent gangs in Minneapolis) tried to identify the straw purchasers. When they went to prosecutors for an arrest warrant, the prosecutor would say "nope, you don't have enough probable cause" even though one of the guys bought $300,000 worth of guns in six months while on food stamps.
The guns that killed Brian Terry were purchased by a man name Jaime Avila in January 2010. By July 2010, the ATF agents had sent prosecutors the names of 20 straw purchasers, Avila among them. By December 2010, the prosecutors dropped Avila's name from the indictment due to lack of evidence. Later that month, Mr. Terry was murdered. Avila was arrested within 24 hours of Mr. Terry's murder.
First thing's first: GP is an enormous fuckwit for having no sympathy for someone who hurt no one and is now dead. One should have sympathy for all innocents who have passed away.
That said, at age 12, she shouldn't have been left unattended in front of a computer. At that age, precisely because they are still in their formative years, the computer should be in a family living room to prevent exactly this kind of fiasco from ever happening.
But in regards to who is responsible for her commission of suicide, I think the cases of Dharun Ravi and Lori Drew prove that this man was not responsible for her death. It's sad, and had I personally had the chance I would have tried to talk her out of committing suicide, but the fact is she is responsible for taking her own life. You can try the man for stalking, you can try him for harassment, but you can't try him for murder.
I think more attention needs to be paid to her real-life bullies, though. I would be trying all those little fuckers who assaulted her physically and forced her to change schools. They should pay for their actions and it should be plastered all over the media so the next little fucker who wants to bully someone vulnerable might think twice.
some detainees might be held for military commission proceedings in Illinois while others might be held at Thomson [Correctional Center in Illinois] indefinitely without charge or trial.
Without the GPL, they would have taken this code and added it to their proprietary code bases and we'd never have seen future improvements of it. That's not a good thing, ever.
You would get the same future improvements with or without the GPL.
With the GPL, a corporation will just refuse to use the source outright, leaving you with only the GPL contributors to provide future improvements.
Without the GPL, you still have the contributions that you would have had with the GPL, but now there's at least a chance that the corporation will give back improvements to the code base, if only so they don't need have to fork the source and handle maintenance when the project makes a new release. Even if the corporation didn't contribute back, there is NOTHING stopping the original contributors from continuing development.
Linux has a license (GPL) that states some requirements on what you can and can't do with it, this license is wrote that way so the code will remain free.
Riiight...because if someone uses GPL code in a commercial application, suddenly that GPL code can no longer be used by anyone for free? The source just mysteriously vanishes from the Internet, forever lost to the evil corporation which stole it?
I glanced through the article in question and I must admit to being a bit puzzled. For an article about the "truth", it seems to have missed a few facts.
One of those facts is that two thousand firearms were smuggled into Mexico as a result of the program. Read through the article, you will see no mention of the number of firearms smuggled under the program.
This post is a special response to this particular piece, since the other one got kind of long filled with other quotes. TFA in question actually does in fact say that. In case you didn't see them in the quotes above, I will quote them once again here.
According to two people present, the ATF presented detailed evidence, including the fact that their suspects had purchased almost 2,000 guns, and pushed for indictments.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is in fact TFA in question (sub-heading: "An unusual alliance", first paragraph), stating the very fact that you said it did not mention. Come on, man, you didn't even bother ctrl-f'ing for 2,000 before running your mouth?
For that matter, the article is full of information about how many suspects had been purchasing how many guns by what dates.
By January 2010 the agents had identified 20 suspects who had paid some $350,000 in cash for more than 650 guns.
He wrote to colleagues in February 2010 that the prosecutor seemed "taken aback by some of the facts I informed him about"—by then, the Fast and Furious suspects had purchased 800 guns—"so I am setting up a briefing for him (alone no USAO 'posse') about this case and several other cases I feel he is being misled about."
After examining one suspect's garbage, agents learned he was on food stamps yet had plunked down more than $300,000 for 476 firearms in six months.
Let's review here. You said it's "cut and dry", ATF agents just let criminals walk away with thousands of guns, and made absolutely zero attempt to prevent them from falling into the hands of criminals.
So do you have any evidence at all that the following passages from the Forbes investigation are false? Seems like it should be easy if it was just that "cut and dry", but I see this recurring theme about prosecutors saying these gun sales were legal and that ATF couldn't stop the guns or even arrest the purchasers...
By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney's office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.
[...]
Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.
[...]
By January 2010 the agents had identified 20 suspects who had paid some $350,000 in cash for more than 650 guns. According to Rep. Issa's congressional committee, Group VII had enough evidence to make arrests and close the case then.
This was not the view of federal prosecutors. In a meeting on Jan. 5, 2010, Emory Hurley, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix overseeing the Fast and Furious case, told the agents they lacked probable cause for arrests, according to ATF records.
[...]
It was nearly impossible in Arizona to bring a case against a straw purchaser. The federal prosecutors there did not consider the purchase of a huge volume of guns, or their handoff to a third party, sufficient evidence to seize them. A buyer who certified that the guns were for himself, then handed them off minutes later, hadn't necessarily lied and was free to change his mind. Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn't mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.
[...]
prosecutors had determined, Voth says, that the "transfer of firearms" was legal. Agents had no choice but to keep investigating and start a wiretap as quickly as possible to gather evidence of criminal intent.
[...]
The wiretap represented the ATF's best—perhaps only— hope of connecting the gun purchases it had been documenting to orders from the cartels, according to Hurley. In Minneapolis, the prosecutors Voth had worked with had approved wiretap applications within 24 hours. But in Phoenix, days turned into weeks, and Group VII's wiretap application languished with prosecutors in Arizona and Washington, D.C.
[...]
Prosecutors repeatedly rebuffed Voth's requests. After examining one suspect's garbage, agents learned he was on food stamps yet had plunked down more than $300,000 for 476 firearms in six months. Voth asked if the ATF could arrest him for fraudulently accepting public assistance when he was spending such huge sums. Prosecutor Hurley said no. In another instance, a young jobless suspect paid more than $10,000 for a 50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle. According to Voth, Hurley told the agents they lacked proof that he hadn't bought the gun for himself.
Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious suspects— Voth got an e-mail from a colleague there: "Are you all planning to stop some of these guys any time soon? That's a lot of gunsAre you just letting these guns walk?"
Voth responded with barely suppressed rage: "Have I offended you in some way? Because I am very offended by your e-mail. Define walk? Without Probable Cause and concurrence from the USAO [U.S. Attorney's Office] it is highway rob
Here, you have a pretty much cut and dry case. ATF agents allowed roughly two thousand fairly high quality guns to pass to Mexican drug cartels with no attempt made to track those weapons
From what I read it's not really that cut and dry. The officials involved DID want to track the guns and did try, but the bureaucracy did them in.
No, just watching her diet is NOT enough. Her previous diet was balanced, and involved whole grains, fruits, and an hour of exercise every day. She even counted calories to make sure she didn't go over the daily recommended amount. She was lucky to lose a pound a month, if that. Carbohydrate restriction alone has proven to be far more effective, and doubly so in concert with exercise.
Contrary to your recommendation to ignore diets that incorporate a binge day (got any scientific evidence to support this? After all, humans have adapted over thousands of years to annual binge days otherwise known as "feasts")...the binge day is key to the way this diet works, for two primary reasons.
For one, a prolonged low-carb diet puts the body into ketosis, which is really hard on your liver. The weekly binge day prevents her from entering full-blown ketosis.
For two, it gives her something to look forward to. She can eat all the junk she wants one day a week. She practically lives for Saturday. It is perhaps the only reason she has been able to stay true to the diet for a year, because the desire to "cheat" is minimized because of the weekly cheat day.
Her body does not need to save THAT much carbohydrate. People's bodies are not perfect metabolically. They can be overzealous in their desire to store away for an emergency, especially given that in first world countries we don't have food emergencies anymore. This is particularly true given that her family has a history of diabetes and obesity, so the intentional removal of excess carbs is probably a Good Thing for her long-term health.
The point was to stress that this diet was working in the total absence of exercise, not that she doesn't exercise at all anymore. She has been gradually introducing exercise into her routine. Her previous diet included an hour of exercise every day and dietary changes and she was struggling to lose a pound a month.
And your psychoanalysis of "less weight = more health" completely leaves out the fact that being overweight is in fact not healthy either. She's not trying to be some stick figure (yuck!), she wants to be a healthy weight. Her family has a history of diabetes and some of her immediate relatives are obese, so this is a pretty major concern for her.
Over a week, her diet is actually pretty balanced in terms of intake from various sources of energy. The important thing is that almost all processed food has been removed.
She weighs herself once a week, always on the same day, always at the same time. This is not an obsession, like some anorexic. It's a statistical measure. That's why we know the effect that carbs like whole grains and fruits have had on her.
High protein diets make you lose weight because they shake impair metabolism.
Thanks for your concern, but it's not like we haven't done any research. *Prolonged* high protein diets impair metabolism and risk liver damage because the body enters ketosis. That's why there's a weekly carb binge, this prevents the body from entering full-blown ketosis.
My fiancee is on a low-carb, medium-fat, high-protein diet, with once-a-week high-carb binge days. Under this diet and literally zero exercise, she has managed to lose an average of about 1-2 pounds per week, consistently for several months.
After nearly a year of this diet, it got kinda old. So she tried to be responsible, added some fruit and whole grains and milk to her diet, basically moved to medium-everything. Still avoided processed grains like white bread. Suddenly she started to gain nearly a pound a day. After almost two weeks switched back to the low-carb, high-protein version and lost the weight almost as fast as she gained it
It's been interesting to watch, but I think I'm beginning to see that humans just aren't meant to consume large amounts of carbs 24/7/365.24, and our bodies don't know what to do with it all.
It's likely true that good fracking sites would be located in earthquake prone areas. However, what if you can show that the average number of earthquakes has gone up after fracking as compared to before?
18% of Philly voters not having ID still seems high to me.
That's state-issued ID that hasn't expired, mind you. Many of them probably have other forms of ID that are acceptable in terms of welfare (lol...I see what you did there) or booze. Not everyone drinks or smokes. If you're married, you probably have a joint account, so you might not need ID if your spouse has it. Or you could be one of the 8% of Americans who manage finances without a bank account. Maybe you're elderly and have no need for a driver's license since you don't drive anymore, so you let it expire without renewal. There are a lot of reasons, who are you to question why someone doesn't need ID?
The expiration date is easily explained by wanting people to actually be current PA residents. [...] It does make it harder, but then, they're also offering free ids to compensate.
First, those free IDs didn't exist until just a few weeks ago. They ameliorate the problem, but it's still troublesome to get to PennDOT to get one, especially if you have no car, you live in a rural area without mass transportation, and/or you live in one of those counties without a PennDOT station.
Second, just because your ID hasn't expired yet doesn't mean you're a current PA resident. You could move the day after you renew your license and your license won't expire for four years. The college IDs that do have expiration dates can be eight years in the future (gotta account for those grad students).
There are other ways to prove that you are a current resident if that's your concern, such as a utility bill, which is perhaps the "gold standard"...and yet you can't use a utility bill to prove residency when going to vote. Besides, in order to use an expired ID to vote where you aren't a current resident, you would have to be registered to vote in two or more counties (unless your goal was only to vote exactly once, where you used to live...is this really a problem?) Why can't the system we currently have detect this dual registration? I remain unconvinced that this "current resident" theory is the reasoning behind the expiration date requirement.
As for "ignoring" the other instances of voter fraud, why do you suggest I'm doing that? [...] I could go on, but you get the point that I am against all the various forms of voter fraud, don't you?
I'll take your word for it that you're against all voter fraud. I have no problem at all with your other approaches for attacking voter fraud, because they don't risk disenfranchising large swaths of the community under the pretext of "protecting the integrity of our elections". Something really stinks when the number of legitimate votes that could be suppressed exceeds the number of illegitimate votes that could possibly be prevented by multiple orders of magnitude, don't you agree?
Now why do you want to go after the least documented, most risky, least effective form of fraud *first*, with voter ID laws? Wouldn't it make sense to triage and prioritize the task of preventing voter fraud by going for the most documented, least risky, most effective forms of fraud first?
Slashdot Mirror
"Algorithms" aren't going to change
The algorithm itself might not change - it might call for an FFT to do some analysis - but the computing hardware will become more powerful, and newer hardware might be able to do a 4096-point FFT where older hardware was limited to a 1024-point FFT. The extra precision could allow the algorithm to work better in a noisier environment.
Unless there's a switching power supply in the device.
In case you missed the other Score 5 posts...the FDA has no jurisdiction over compounding pharmacies like the one in Massachusetts. Such pharmacies are under state regulation, not federal.
Also, while we're on the topic of the FDA...don't forget the House Republicans' budget cut FDA funding by $285 million. Kinda hard to have "agents standing in every lab" when you don't have enough money to pay said agents...
Has anyone put up a list of potential suspect clinics anywhere?
My mother received an epidural steroid injection shot, methylprednisolone, about a year ago. While I'm reasonably certain there are no complications (certainly they would have shown up by now), I would feel much more comfortable if I could verify that the clinic which treated my mother was not one that received any drugs from this compounding pharmacy.
When I heard about this on the news, I called her and we went down to ER and got things sorted (tested negative), but the "Contact the patient" step isn't happening for a lot of people.
First, my relative got a bill. I've seen it, it's real.
Many health insurance plans will not pay for emergency room visits if the patient is not admitted. Without further details, I'd say your relative was billed for the unnecessary ER visit.
Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
Shooting someone who is on top of you, beating your head into the ground, would likely result in getting some of that person's blood on you, don't you think?
I wholeheartedly agree. If a machine does something stupid and causes a flash crash, well too bad for whoever owned those machines, let some long-term investors rake in the cash at the stupid machines' expense.
Without the middle class as their market, do you think HDTV could have achieved the economies of scale necessary to bring the cost down to what it is right now? When those TVs were selling for 25k or 50k a pop, was there any HD content...or did HD content suddenly become financially reasonable once there was a big enough group of consumers who could purchase it?
Face it. You can have the best damn business in the world, but if you don't have any customers, you're fucked. End of story.
And without a large, vibrant middle class with disposable income, you will never have economies of scale. And if you don't have economies of scale, your shit will be expensive FOREVER, not just for early adopters.
Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
But wait, there's more!
Imagine the total cost of R&D that it takes for e.g. LG to make a new flat-screen HDTV model. Probably in the millions, let's say $10m to make the math easy. Further, let's say that only the 10 richest people have enough disposable income to purchase these TVs. That means each of those TVs will be at least $1m just for the R&D, probably more for the associated components. With 10 people who have HDTV, do you think the cable company is going to even bother offering HD content? Maybe, if the wealthy are willing to pay thousands of dollars a month in service fees.
Now let's take a look at this example, but with a vibrant middle class that has tons of disposable income. Now let's say a million people have enough income to buy this flat screen TV. That means the R&D costs are amoritzed to $10/TV. And now that there are a million potential customers, the cable company is much more likely to offer HD content.
Without the middle class, you don't have economies of scale. And when you don't have economies of scale, there are a lot of technological innovations that will just not happen because there is no market, and even if there was a market economies of scale would lead to reduced prices. This example is seen all over the place, from the screws that are used to build products, to the plastic molds which enclose those products.
I'm curious. Looking at this page - http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=286 - it seems like felons are in fact allowed to vote in Minnesota, once they have completed incarceration + parole + probation. I wonder if this was taken into consideration when calculating the 1,099 felons who were "all ineligible to vote"?
to sending guns to mexican drug lords (operation Gunwalker)
Perhaps you should read this investigate journalism.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
To give you the brief version: the government did not send guns to Mexican drug lords. All the guns that "walked" across the border were bought by straw purchasers with their own cash from private businesses.
The ATF agents in question (the leader of which is a former Marine who got an award for taking down two violent gangs in Minneapolis) tried to identify the straw purchasers. When they went to prosecutors for an arrest warrant, the prosecutor would say "nope, you don't have enough probable cause" even though one of the guys bought $300,000 worth of guns in six months while on food stamps.
The guns that killed Brian Terry were purchased by a man name Jaime Avila in January 2010. By July 2010, the ATF agents had sent prosecutors the names of 20 straw purchasers, Avila among them. By December 2010, the prosecutors dropped Avila's name from the indictment due to lack of evidence. Later that month, Mr. Terry was murdered. Avila was arrested within 24 hours of Mr. Terry's murder.
First thing's first: GP is an enormous fuckwit for having no sympathy for someone who hurt no one and is now dead. One should have sympathy for all innocents who have passed away.
That said, at age 12, she shouldn't have been left unattended in front of a computer. At that age, precisely because they are still in their formative years, the computer should be in a family living room to prevent exactly this kind of fiasco from ever happening.
But in regards to who is responsible for her commission of suicide, I think the cases of Dharun Ravi and Lori Drew prove that this man was not responsible for her death. It's sad, and had I personally had the chance I would have tried to talk her out of committing suicide, but the fact is she is responsible for taking her own life. You can try the man for stalking, you can try him for harassment, but you can't try him for murder.
I think more attention needs to be paid to her real-life bullies, though. I would be trying all those little fuckers who assaulted her physically and forced her to change schools. They should pay for their actions and it should be plastered all over the media so the next little fucker who wants to bully someone vulnerable might think twice.
I think your first line there is a little bit off. Allow me to fix that for ya.
Obama: I want to close Gitmo, and transfer all of Gitmo's defining human rights violations to a new facility in Illinois.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/creating-gitmo-north-alarming-step-says-aclu
some detainees might be held for military commission proceedings in Illinois while others might be held at Thomson [Correctional Center in Illinois] indefinitely without charge or trial.
Without the GPL, they would have taken this code and added it to their proprietary code bases and we'd never have seen future improvements of it. That's not a good thing, ever.
You would get the same future improvements with or without the GPL.
With the GPL, a corporation will just refuse to use the source outright, leaving you with only the GPL contributors to provide future improvements.
Without the GPL, you still have the contributions that you would have had with the GPL, but now there's at least a chance that the corporation will give back improvements to the code base, if only so they don't need have to fork the source and handle maintenance when the project makes a new release. Even if the corporation didn't contribute back, there is NOTHING stopping the original contributors from continuing development.
Linux has a license (GPL) that states some requirements on what you can and can't do with it, this license is wrote that way so the code will remain free.
Riiight...because if someone uses GPL code in a commercial application, suddenly that GPL code can no longer be used by anyone for free? The source just mysteriously vanishes from the Internet, forever lost to the evil corporation which stole it?
I glanced through the article in question and I must admit to being a bit puzzled. For an article about the "truth", it seems to have missed a few facts.
One of those facts is that two thousand firearms were smuggled into Mexico as a result of the program. Read through the article, you will see no mention of the number of firearms smuggled under the program.
This post is a special response to this particular piece, since the other one got kind of long filled with other quotes. TFA in question actually does in fact say that. In case you didn't see them in the quotes above, I will quote them once again here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is in fact TFA in question (sub-heading: "An unusual alliance", first paragraph), stating the very fact that you said it did not mention. Come on, man, you didn't even bother ctrl-f'ing for 2,000 before running your mouth?
For that matter, the article is full of information about how many suspects had been purchasing how many guns by what dates.
Let's review here. You said it's "cut and dry", ATF agents just let criminals walk away with thousands of guns, and made absolutely zero attempt to prevent them from falling into the hands of criminals.
So do you have any evidence at all that the following passages from the Forbes investigation are false? Seems like it should be easy if it was just that "cut and dry", but I see this recurring theme about prosecutors saying these gun sales were legal and that ATF couldn't stop the guns or even arrest the purchasers...
Here, you have a pretty much cut and dry case. ATF agents allowed roughly two thousand fairly high quality guns to pass to Mexican drug cartels with no attempt made to track those weapons
From what I read it's not really that cut and dry. The officials involved DID want to track the guns and did try, but the bureaucracy did them in.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
Did the contract you signed to purchase the car explicitly say you have the right to resell the car and all of its components?
Does any contract even matter after I have paid off the car completely?
No, just watching her diet is NOT enough. Her previous diet was balanced, and involved whole grains, fruits, and an hour of exercise every day. She even counted calories to make sure she didn't go over the daily recommended amount. She was lucky to lose a pound a month, if that. Carbohydrate restriction alone has proven to be far more effective, and doubly so in concert with exercise.
Contrary to your recommendation to ignore diets that incorporate a binge day (got any scientific evidence to support this? After all, humans have adapted over thousands of years to annual binge days otherwise known as "feasts")...the binge day is key to the way this diet works, for two primary reasons.
For one, a prolonged low-carb diet puts the body into ketosis, which is really hard on your liver. The weekly binge day prevents her from entering full-blown ketosis.
For two, it gives her something to look forward to. She can eat all the junk she wants one day a week. She practically lives for Saturday. It is perhaps the only reason she has been able to stay true to the diet for a year, because the desire to "cheat" is minimized because of the weekly cheat day.
Her body does not need to save THAT much carbohydrate. People's bodies are not perfect metabolically. They can be overzealous in their desire to store away for an emergency, especially given that in first world countries we don't have food emergencies anymore. This is particularly true given that her family has a history of diabetes and obesity, so the intentional removal of excess carbs is probably a Good Thing for her long-term health.
The point was to stress that this diet was working in the total absence of exercise, not that she doesn't exercise at all anymore. She has been gradually introducing exercise into her routine. Her previous diet included an hour of exercise every day and dietary changes and she was struggling to lose a pound a month.
And your psychoanalysis of "less weight = more health" completely leaves out the fact that being overweight is in fact not healthy either. She's not trying to be some stick figure (yuck!), she wants to be a healthy weight. Her family has a history of diabetes and some of her immediate relatives are obese, so this is a pretty major concern for her.
Over a week, her diet is actually pretty balanced in terms of intake from various sources of energy. The important thing is that almost all processed food has been removed.
She weighs herself once a week, always on the same day, always at the same time. This is not an obsession, like some anorexic. It's a statistical measure. That's why we know the effect that carbs like whole grains and fruits have had on her.
High protein diets make you lose weight because they shake impair metabolism.
Thanks for your concern, but it's not like we haven't done any research. *Prolonged* high protein diets impair metabolism and risk liver damage because the body enters ketosis. That's why there's a weekly carb binge, this prevents the body from entering full-blown ketosis.
My fiancee is on a low-carb, medium-fat, high-protein diet, with once-a-week high-carb binge days. Under this diet and literally zero exercise, she has managed to lose an average of about 1-2 pounds per week, consistently for several months.
After nearly a year of this diet, it got kinda old. So she tried to be responsible, added some fruit and whole grains and milk to her diet, basically moved to medium-everything. Still avoided processed grains like white bread. Suddenly she started to gain nearly a pound a day. After almost two weeks switched back to the low-carb, high-protein version and lost the weight almost as fast as she gained it
It's been interesting to watch, but I think I'm beginning to see that humans just aren't meant to consume large amounts of carbs 24/7/365.24, and our bodies don't know what to do with it all.
It's likely true that good fracking sites would be located in earthquake prone areas. However, what if you can show that the average number of earthquakes has gone up after fracking as compared to before?
18% of Philly voters not having ID still seems high to me.
That's state-issued ID that hasn't expired, mind you. Many of them probably have other forms of ID that are acceptable in terms of welfare (lol...I see what you did there) or booze. Not everyone drinks or smokes. If you're married, you probably have a joint account, so you might not need ID if your spouse has it. Or you could be one of the 8% of Americans who manage finances without a bank account. Maybe you're elderly and have no need for a driver's license since you don't drive anymore, so you let it expire without renewal. There are a lot of reasons, who are you to question why someone doesn't need ID?
The expiration date is easily explained by wanting people to actually be current PA residents. [...] It does make it harder, but then, they're also offering free ids to compensate.
First, those free IDs didn't exist until just a few weeks ago. They ameliorate the problem, but it's still troublesome to get to PennDOT to get one, especially if you have no car, you live in a rural area without mass transportation, and/or you live in one of those counties without a PennDOT station.
Second, just because your ID hasn't expired yet doesn't mean you're a current PA resident. You could move the day after you renew your license and your license won't expire for four years. The college IDs that do have expiration dates can be eight years in the future (gotta account for those grad students).
There are other ways to prove that you are a current resident if that's your concern, such as a utility bill, which is perhaps the "gold standard"...and yet you can't use a utility bill to prove residency when going to vote. Besides, in order to use an expired ID to vote where you aren't a current resident, you would have to be registered to vote in two or more counties (unless your goal was only to vote exactly once, where you used to live...is this really a problem?) Why can't the system we currently have detect this dual registration? I remain unconvinced that this "current resident" theory is the reasoning behind the expiration date requirement.
As for "ignoring" the other instances of voter fraud, why do you suggest I'm doing that? [...] I could go on, but you get the point that I am against all the various forms of voter fraud, don't you?
I'll take your word for it that you're against all voter fraud. I have no problem at all with your other approaches for attacking voter fraud, because they don't risk disenfranchising large swaths of the community under the pretext of "protecting the integrity of our elections". Something really stinks when the number of legitimate votes that could be suppressed exceeds the number of illegitimate votes that could possibly be prevented by multiple orders of magnitude, don't you agree?
Now why do you want to go after the least documented, most risky, least effective form of fraud *first*, with voter ID laws? Wouldn't it make sense to triage and prioritize the task of preventing voter fraud by going for the most documented, least risky, most effective forms of fraud first?