Last I knew, the GPL was not about whether you could toss in a binary blob with your distribution or make it available for download. Last I knew, that was entirely up to the person or company who wrote that blob, and what their license says, because it's their code. I always understood the GPL to be about, in simple terms, what you do with your source code when you develop a program that relies on someone else's GPL'd program or closed-source blob.
The most prevalent such blobs I can think of are the ATI and nvidia drivers as supplied by their respective companies, so I'll use those as examples. Xorg doesn't depend on the nvidia blob, nor does it depend on the ATI blob, but it can make use of both drivers. Neither company is likely to open their source code for fear of giving away trade secrets or some such thing, no matter how much we bitch about them. I figure the same will hold true for those binary-only wireless drivers I keep seeing mention of. I doubt the company responsible for those is going to open-source them anytime soon.
So, our only option left is to use those binary drivers, whatever they are, so that we don't get left behind the other "supported" OS's, at least until someone manages to duplicate their functionality in an open-source form. In other words, who really gives a shit if Shuttleworth includes binary/non-GPL code in [x|k|ed]ubuntu if the end result is more people being able to use it and being happy with it? Yes there's some risk of one or more of those binary-only drivers being abandoned due to violating the distribution rights granted by those who maintain them, but do you just quit distributing them, and expect the unwashed masses to which Ubuntu is aimed, to know how to go get them direct from the maintainers? How does that make Linux look to one of those users when they see that they can't get the same things they can in Windows or OS X?
Besides, it's not like the inclusion of those blobs is forcing people to stop developing open source alternatives, and it wouldn't be the first time someone's reverse-engineered a driver to produce an open-source alternative, without violating any laws or licenses.
PCs bare of an OS seem to me to be a rapidly vanishing breed.
I'd hardly say that they're a vanishing breed. Rather, it seems to me that they're a *growing* breed, Nevermind the occasional beige-box company offering naked PC's in certain markets for short periods of time (last one I saw was from Dell I think).
Last April, I bought two systems from SMK Superstore, built exactly to my specs, and shipped with no OS (in fact, I opted to not even include hard disks, didn't need new ones yet). I ended up paying some $550 for a socket 939 AMD 64x2 3800+ processor with 1GB RAM on a decent Gigabyte motherboard, with a low-end nV MX4000 card for my husband's box. The second system (mine) cost about $650, due to my getting an nV 6600 from another website to go in it.
Before I bought them, I checked a few key sites (HP, Dell, one or two others) and decided there was no way in hell I was going to pay the prices I was seeing, for a PC that was less than half as fast as what I ended up with.
The only downside on my purchase was that I didn't make a good decision on the heat sinks, so the CPU on mine (the workhorse of the two) tends to overheat and switch the computer off if I run it full-bore for too long (thank you lm-sensors for helping me sort this out!). Big deal, good copper heat sink/fan combos will set me back about $35 each (with a tube of grease) and I'll replace the under-specced ones when I can be bothered to do so.
Just to get back on topic, I can say that while I don't use one, I do like the Mac and I like how OS-X looks (what little I've seen anyway). I can't imagine Apple selling their systems in any other way than as a computer and an OS in a single inseperable package; something just doesn't seem right about the idea of Apple going the way of the beige-box market.
That said, I'd prefer a system whereby local judges were appointed by the state Governor or legislature and subject to a yes / no vote periodically by the voters. A no vote would mean that they were out of office and could not be appointed to another judicial position.
Depending on how you define "local", this is the case in the Tampa Bay area here in Florida (and probably elsewhere too). On this year's ballot were nine or ten entries for choosing judges, of which three specifically asked for a Yes/No response on whether the named judge should keep his or her office. I can't say that it does much good though, given that you don't hear very often whether this or that judge has made a bad rulings. For that matter, we don't hear much about the candidates at all, which makes it hard to decide whether or not any given judge should keep their office, let alone choosing between two or more when it's called for.
Whether or not losing office prevents the former judge from running again or being appointed to another position, I couldn't say, having never seen anything regarding a rule like that.
Quite a few people (in my experience, particularly control theorists, who, by the way, are very clever) say to roboticists, 'why don't you design your robot controllers in a simulation, and then deploy? It's faster'. Of course, they're right in a way, but what happens then is that you tend to miss what Sporns & Lungarella are trying to get at, because in a simulated environment you tend to get reponses only within the boundaries of the programming.
This begs the question: If the limitations of the virtual world are due to the programming of that world, couldn't you instead use a modern RPG as a source of sensory input for the AI to learn from, by putting the AI into the game as a real, live player alongside human players? Since the AI could sit there soaking up input 24/7 from maybe thousands of different personalities over time, for as long as the hardware/software holds out before upgrades are needed, it should be able to learn at a phenominal rate, compared to maybe ten hours a day, five days a week, from just one or two people as you might expect to get in a lab setting.
Granted, an online RPG is probably a piss-poor example of real human interaction, considering that people can and do act stupid sometimes when they're behind the veil of the Internet, and you'd need an interface into the game that simulates a true first-person POV (no text messages, heads-up displays, etc... just pure sight and sound at first), but it would be a start.
This brings to mind another question... Without meaning to sound cold and scientific, and (since I am moderately religious) explicitly excluding religious stuff like having a soul, existance/meaning of G-D, and so on... since most animals start their lives, at the most basic level, as little more than (DNA) programs running uninitialized collections of neural networks that must learn and grow over time... Could not an AI start out with deliberately-reduced cognitive ability and gradually (via the underlying program) increase those abilities as it learns and "grows"? More to the point, if you gave the AI as much input as you'd give a human child, and of the same quality and meaning (love, caring, discipline, instruction, etc), is there anything short of hardware limitations (e.g. storage of memories) stopping that AI from developing self-awareness, sentience, or emotions?
Amazing as it may seem, I actually RTFA, and I can't say I believe the study to be particularly accurate (too wide of an age range, baseline measures taken too recently, too small and too localized of a sample, etc), but that's not why I decided to resond to this. Rather, I'm responding to Kim du Toit's essay (the article YonderWay pointed to). My step-father is the very model of the macho hard-liner type that's seemingly called for in the essay, and he is, by far, NOT the sort of man this world needs more of. I call BULLSHIT on the entire essay, save for one or two positive things (opening doors for a lady is never a bad thing), and almost every man that Toit claims responded to him in agreement.
Toit mentions wanting to take a.45 to his TV every time he sees some particular Cheerios commercial, just because it takes a tone of the father correcting his nutritional mistakes at his wife's suggestion. He then goes on to make nasty remarks about how he sees the gay community as trying to change the overall male population into something more woman-friendly. I couldn't stomach too much more of that essay, and gave up trying to pick out other good examples of his point of view. I believe in free speech, but as far as I'm concerned, you can take that be-a-"real"-man-and-fuck-everyone-else's-feelings attitude - and anything like it - and shove it as far up your ass at it'll go. That attitude has done nothing but hurt people, myself included, and that's where I draw the line on freedom of speech.
I am the wife of one such "pussified" (as Toit puts it) man. My husband has diabetes and many of the usual complications that come with it, one of which is low testosterone (less than half the "normal" amount). You know what? I'm GLAD his attitude is the way it is. If anything, the reduced testosterone level has served to soften the hard shell he says he used to have. He's well aware of my feelings as well as his own, and he's not afraid to show them. He loves me deeper than words can describe, and I love him equally. He loves nature, cares about his and my health, and...well, you get the idea. I don't expect I'd find any of this in the macho type Toit is trying to rally.
The way I figure it, the average Slashdot user is getting close to that time in their lives when they feel the desire to find a mate and maybe start a family. For the group of you folks who fall in line with Toit's attitude, face this fact: After hundreds of years of you men telling us women to shut up and get in line, your type is being phased out, whether you like it or not. The world does not need your crap anymore, nor does it need the sterotypical southern belle attitude some women used to have, either. Rather, all need to move away from the extremes toward some common, middle ground where men AND women can be happy.
[Y]ou'd have to rev your metabolism up to inhuman levels in order to absorb that [2000-3000 calorie meal] without offsetting exercise.
I don't know how you define "inhuman" but, until recently, my body showed a clear metabolic rate of over 4500 calories a day, measured by counting my calorie intake and noting the point when weight started to drop, and without adding any activity to my normal sedentary lifestyle. That metabolic rate slowed when I attempted to move toward a more "healthy" diet. Instead of losing, I gained all the weight back that I had lost during the previous high-metabolism period, plus a bit, and my metabolic rate is now lower than before (~3000 calories a day).
But if [bird-like metabolism] were the case we wouldn't have obesity problems.
In the case of humans, it's been proven more times than I can count, that obesity has many causes. Sure, metabolism plays a role, but it can also be caused by mental strain (depression, eating disorder, stress), sleep apnea in severe cases, some sort of organ dysfunction, certain medications, and most of all, the types of foods we eat. Think of the foods pushed at us today: breads, pasta, fruit juices, salty snacks, and so on. Now consider what's IN those foods - sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors/sweetners, preservatives, occasionally residual hormones and pesticides, and so on. Does anyone honestly believe these things are healthy??
Now, I've already said this once before weeks ago, but since there are already posts spouting off about exercise, and no one heard me last time, let me remind everyone once again:
Using figures I got from a recent seminar I went to on weight loss (which mostly correlate with my previous research), one pound of pure fat equals about 3800 calories. The average 250-pound human body burns at least 2000 calories a day during normal operation, plus some 400 calories per hour doing moderate-to-heavy exercise. Heavier people burn more, but the increase is not linear. Assuming you eat just enough to counter your body's "baseline" metabolic rate, if you wanted to lose just one pound, that means about 9.5 hours doing something relatively difficult like rapid stairclimbing, fast jogging/running, rafting, skiing, relay swimming, etc. Sure you could work off that 9.5 hours' worth over the course of a week, but that still works out to about 81 minutes a day, seven days a week. After a while, your metabolic baseline will rise, sure, but it would only barely make a dent in these numbers.
Now let's extend this. Last I knew, the US government says 2-3 pounds a week is a reasonably safe rate to lose weight. That's 7600 to 11400 calories, which works out to 19 to 28.5 hours a week or 2.7 to 4.1 hours per day, to burn those 2-3 pounds. My body has shown an ability to lose about 6 pounds a week, continuously, when I can afford to stay on a diet that actually works. If I stuck with these traditional figures and the standard philosophy of exercising to lose weight, that translates to 22800 calories, or 57 hours' a week (about 8.1 hours a day) of heavy exercise.
I'm sorry, but no matter how you slice it, that's just not a reasonable amount of exercise for anyone but a trained athlete, not matter how much you weigh. Whatever it is that the chemicals in green tea (and Coke's product) do, metabolism is still the process of turning food and body fat into energy, and if that energy isn't being used, it gets lost as excess body heat and chemicals in your urine (ketones) and stool. Increase the metabolism and something has to be burned, which results in an increase in waste heat and waste chemicals. That is not an opinion, that is a solid fact I had to find out for myself. When I'm losing, I run hotter as my rate of weight loss increases, I sweat more, and I have to drink more water to keep from dehydrating, plain and simple, and without adding any
Mod me troll if you like, I've got the karma to burn.
You know what else they did? In many (most?) cases, they learned English. My husband's parents were Holocaust survivors, and came here to escape all the BS going on in Poland and elsewhere. They both made a commitment to learn English, because they thought that was the right thing to do. Needless to say, my husband and I both have a major gripe lately about all immigrants, illegal or otherwise, not bothering to learn the language of the land. Everywhere we turn, we find people doing whatever it is they do for work, who can't even answer simple questions, many times giving some indication that they don't speak English at all.
It gets worse of course when you call a business and the *first* thing you hear is a recording in some other language (usually Spanish) telling you hit a button for that language.
If you were to move to France, Germany, Italy, or any other country, you'd be expected to learn the language too. Why can't we expect the same thing here, especially of those who are working in the public eye?
I've been a KDE user for a while (now using 3.5.4), and have run into a few things here and there that I think really *do* need an improvement. Off the top of my head:
One of our machines has a TV for it's second head, but the TV is almost always turned off or displaying a movie from our DVD player. Since the TV is never used for anything but movies, KDE should be able to ignore the presence of it entirely when a new window is opened, but still let me drag an already-open window over to it if I want to.
From the point of view of an advanced user, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for the Dock-Apps panel to exist. Why can't I just dock my WM/AS apps into a regular panel instead?
As one other user pointed out, there are a few sluggish spots here and there that shouldn't happen on a fast box like mine (AMD64x2 3800+ with 1GB RAM and Nvidia 6600). These seem to concentrate on Konqueror when it's used for file management.
When the Control Center can't load a settings module, it should display a warning message and tell me what to do to fix the problem, instead of just saying "Loading..." and then returning to the 'main' start screen after a couple of seconds.
Other than these, KDE seems to do pretty well for my husband and I. I've tried several other environments (Gnome, E, Windowmaker, Afterstep, FVWM, XFCE) and KDE just had the best round-up of features for my needs and preferences.
This arguement (as sarcastic as it may be) actually does bug me a bit - people like to complain about not having enough bits per color component when it comes to overall color depth and range, but it seems to me that, for the most part, the problem is NOT in the number of bits you have per color component, but rather the way your display device interprets that data.
I mean, having 16 bits per color component instead of the usual eight shouldn't imply that you have more depth or range. All it means is that you have smaller color steps between raw values. Either way, it's still a measure of 0% to 100% of the color gun's output, whether you have one, eight, sixteen, or thousands of bits per color component.
So, shouldn't the display device be redesigned to produce a more natural range of colors? My Trinitron monitor does not produce a truely pure black, and never will no matter how many bits per color component I throw at it, because the physical screen is a very dark grey, not pure black (not to mention glare from surrounding objects). Similarly, white is as white as it can get for a CRT I figure, and no matter how many bits I throw at it, it won't get any whiter, because the guns can only output just so much power before they're at their limit.
If a better RGB-based display isn't enough, then maybe we need to add more individual color components, such as near-infrared and near-ultraviolet (but still in the visible spectrum), and tweak red/green/blue to something closer to the eye's true native color sensativity. Sure that would result in more bits per pixel, but you could still do it with eight bits per component. Hell, you could do it with four bits or less per color component if you were pressed for bandwidth or just didn't care how grainy the result would be.
One thing I need to point out - Neilsen doesn't directly alter the programming you see on TV, and in the division I worked in (same as where my husband works now), they don't collect statistics about commercials either. Rather, Neilsen takes the data they receive from the viewers ("respondants"), via either that TV diary or a set-top box, does some number crunching, and then passes the data on to the TV networks.
Furthermore, if you (as the respondant) work for any kind of media-related organization, even a janitor at a radio station, you're automatically excluded from any data gathering - Neilsen is very strict about the potential for biased results.
It's up to the network to decide if stuff like Family Guy stays or goes. As far as demographics and loyalty, I think we can all agree that those things don't truely mean anything to a network exec. About all they care about is the ad revenue, which is derived from the raw number of people watching the tube, and which translates into a number of things like stock prices.
The only things we ever watch on TV, if anything at all, is CSI, Jeopardy, and sometimes Wheel. Otherwise, it's a movie from our collection, or the TV is off. It's plausible that the family who only watches Charmed and the news, really does only watch Charmed and the news.
The problem is not the car companies. The problem is the stupid american people who don't think beofre buying a big gas guzzler. If you don't get at least 30MPG, you are the problem. Why should we people who buy efficient vehicles have to pay extra (from thw lawsuits) for the purchasing habits of idiots?
What about when there aren't any better alternatives? I paid $2000 (via an insurance settlement) for a 1997 Thunderbird (3.8L v6, nothing fancy) in good cosmetic and so-so mechanical shape that gets about 16MPG in the city and maybe 19 or 20 on the highway. It was the best balance between cost, fuel economy, and engine power (about 145 hp and 210 ft lb) we could find at the time, especially given the time constraint we were facing. It has been my experience that fuel economy and power are roughly porportional to the price you pay for the car and inversely related to the age of the car.
Not all of us have $22,175 to plunk down on a Prius or similar hybrid.
So we have to get by with this thing, and now you want to tell my husband and I are a problem? How about the other couple of people here who have suggested *raising* the gas prices? Prices here peaked at $3.15/gal during that first big price hike, followed by about $2.90/gal during this last one, and now sits at about $2.25/gal. While Tampa Bay isn't exactly LA in terms of size, it's still big. Thanks to the way things are arranged in Pinellas county, to get from place to place generally requires us to drive from one end of the county to the other, so the mileage adds up FAST. Since people get really pissy if you leave a car sitting for months at a time without driving it and threaten to have it hauled away, even if it's perfectly road-worthy, we may have to sell the car if the gas prices start going up again, because we simply won't be able to afford to drive it.
Why keep the patents if you're not going to use them? It's just blatent patent hogging.
As much as software patents may be a horrible idea, and as much as people here generally hate Microsoft, maybe this is a *good* step? The company has pledged publicly that they won't actually assert their patent rights... and since these are patents we're talking about, it means that noone else can either.
Maybe it's just the sort of protection that the open source movement needs so that we *can* innovate without having to jump through a bunch of hoops or worry about facing legal action?
It's evident that a lot of people here think the answer is "yes", but maybe the answer is both yes and no?
I grew up more or less without the benefit of a computer, a cell or car phone, PDA, and so on; my family never saw much use for those things. We had a TV, and about all I watched on it was a few hours a day of cartoons. Otherwise I was expected to be outside playing.... by myself usually (other kids in the area were too young to play with, in my parents' opinion).
Then in Dec. 1986 my mom bought me a C64. Looking back, I'd have to say that I was better able to adapt to the world around me after I got that computer. The first thing I learned to do with it was type in programs out of Compute!'s Gazette, sure, but then my mom bought us a 300 baud modem. Next thing we knew, I was chatting on local multi-line BBS's, using message boards (yay Fidonet!), and visiting BBS get-togethers. Most of those I met were years older than me, but I didn't really care. Hell, my mom bought one of those music-activated laser projectors (you know, the ones with speakers and mirrors to deflect the beam) from one of my BBS contacts.
I think the problem lies not with the technology itself, but with the way kids are [self-]taught to use it, combined with the constant barrage of paedophile and other criminal threats. Today, kids sometimes post personal information on some big website where it's left sitting, ignored by the operators but quite visible to the low-lifes out there, but back in the day, Sysop's were generally pretty quick to delete questionable material (at least, in my experience). Plus, until 1989 rolled around and the Game Boy became popular, you couldn't take your video games out of the house anyway.
I don't know what the solution is, but better parenting can surely help. I mean, why DID you buy your kid that PSP? Is there some reason you let them spend 6+ hours a day on their home console or watching TV? Can you give me one good, valid reason why there's a TV and/or console in the kid's bedroom? Do you, as the parent, even know how to use a computer responsibly (meaning keeping it secure and staying away from malicious websites) so that you can teach your kids the same?
I'm sure there are plenty of other similar questions that need to be asked, and of course this isn't directed at the bulk of Slashdot readers, who I am sure are responsible parents (where applicable). It's just that these are the things my parents did with my sister and I, with the exception of my computer in my room (parents felt I was responsible enough to keep it there), and I'd like to think it helped.
In addition to always requiring a valid login, one way that I think would sharply reduce the possibility of a huge backlog of edit proposals would be to simply not allow any edits to be submitted until the most recent one(s) have been, at the discretion of one or more qualified "Final Editors", either manually rejected or manually merged into the article. I realise this could keep the less active people from getting their edits into the system before the more active/influential people do, but it also stops the vandals outright.
It might be better to set the depth of the edit queue to, say, 5 edits per article per day globally, and then set a second limit that applies to individual UIDs; say 3 edits per week per article, per UID. I realize this sounds like the method commonly used to control flooding on an IRC chat, but why couldn't the technique be adapted for use in Wikipedia? That way no matter how many people of a common interest are trying to edit an article, there wouldn't be much chance to vandalize it. I'm working off the idea that, statistically, there will be more people that will provide "good" edits than those who would seek to vandalize, which should, sooner or later, allow the "good" edits to become more visible to the Final Editors.
No matter how this is set up, the Final Editors will be kept pretty busy, and some submitter is going to bitch about these limits anyway, so why not start by setting it to something fairly strict so that the Final Editors don't become overwhealmed, and then adjust the limits as necessary.
The "random" generator in the C64, at least the one you refer to, was an all-digital shift-and-drop-bits algorithm used by the SID chip's three noise generators, and is accessed by reading the "voice 3 oscillator" register while voice 3 is set to produce noise (the audio from this voice can be silenced if desired, without affecting the algorithm). The algorithm cycles periodically and, if memory serves, can be reset manually if desired. There is no analog component to the noise generator algorithm.
A good way to get a nice random number is to take advantage of the inherent randomness of the user - initialize your noise generator to run continuously at a high iteration rate, wait for a keyboard, joystick, or mouse event, and then take as many samples from the noise generator as you need. The amount of time the noise generator was left actively running before the key/joy/mouse event will vary with the user's attention and reaction time, and will essentially randomize the values you get.
blockquote>A "high protein diet" doesn't require eating more meat or dairy.
True, I agree with you there, but you have to admit that meats and certain dairy products (eggs and cheese come to mind) are some of the best sources of protien out there, unless you want to include processed stuff like nutrition bars/drinks. I know you can get it from vegetable sources as well, but I can't say how it compares.
Your post makes it sound like diet and exercise are either/or decisions, when they're really not.
I didn't intend to come across that way, and I know as well as anyone that exercise is important to good muscle tone and form. I was trying to point out a different approach, by putting a proper diet at the head of the weight-loss efforts.
Even in extreme cases, I doubt any nutritionist would sign off on a plan where the patient was intending to lose 5-7 pounds a week.
From what I've been told, for a person my size, 5 to 7 pounds a week is reasonably normal. Furthermore, both doctors seemed to agree that it was safe as long as I didn't take it beyond that. Besides which, assuming you aren't deathly ill or something, isn't there some kind of safeguard built in to keep the body from dropping weight at an unsafe rate, but still allow it to lose at some abritrarily high rate? I assume that's why I lose at such a fast rate, even though I eat almost to excess.
If we follow the reasoning by which you dismiss diet studies which you disagree with, nobody would ever have to believe anything they didn't want to believe. We would truly be entering the age of truthiness.
Well, when you consider that people already do this anyway... I mean, do you seriously believe every study you read just because they're published by the American Heart Association or similar? If that's the case, then I'm sure Microsoft, the sugar industry, the RIAA, and the MPAA would all like to have you on their marketing teams.
Well, I was going to point out the numerous articles linking diets high in animal fats to strokes, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, etc.
<snip>
So, no, I'm not buying this whole "we need to eat more meat" line you're selling.
OK, I was just going to keep my mouth (er, keyboard?) quiet but this one struck a nerve with me. Judging by your description of the article, if you don't buy it, that's fair; I wouldn't either. But maybe you'll buy this:
I'm one of those typical Americans who used to eat a diet high in pasta, bread, rice, sugar, you-name-the-white-substance, and very little meat or fat, variable amounts of fruits and veggies, and plenty of milk and the like. You know, the same diet that was crammed down Americans' throats for the last 30+ years. I balooned to some 440 pounds, most of which happened over the last 10 years or so. Yeah, you read that right, about 200 kg.
I recently sought advice from two doctors (one GP, one endochrinologist), and both said that, basically, the amount of exercise I'd have to do to actually lose any real weight is insane. I confirmed their opinions by looking at various charts online to try to figure out what would burn the most calories the fastest. The highest-end results, for a 200 pound person, ranged anywhere from about 500 calories per hour for high-end relay swimming or similiar (from memory), to 1356 calories per hour climbing stairs (at 120 steps per minute) according a page I just looked at. The data that led to this figure surely is a transcription error, but let's assume it's valid anyway.
Also, let's assume for the moment that you have a normal 2000 calorie per day break-even point. You still have to expend another 3500 calories on top of that just to lose one pound. If you use that 1356-calories-per-hour figure, that works out to over two and a half hours of climbing stairs plus whatever it is you already do all day that keeps you at break-even. If you take the more realistic figure of 500 calories per hour of high-end swimming, that works out to SEVEN HOURS of that exercise per day, on top of your day-long break-even activties.
To lose weight at a nice fast rate of 5-7 pounds a week, for either of those figures, you'd have to do these exercises every single day without a break. I'm sorry, but exercise like that will destroy your heart, probably cause RSI in one or more muscle groups, not to mention killing your knees if they're already bad.
As a response, I went on a low-carb, high-protein diet similar to Atkins and friends. After three days, I got the usual carb-withdrawl symptoms (headaches, dizzy, feeling weak, etc), but that passed by the end of the third day or the middle of the fourth, and from then on I felt pretty good; better than I had in years. Now, this wasn't a drastic change, it was just "noticeable". The amount of calories I consume is, on average, about the same as before.
By the end of the first month, I had lost some 22 pounds (if I hadn't cheated, I'd have lost more like 29 or 30 pounds). I took a one-and-a-half-month break due to our household budget being a bit too tight, and used that time to help a friend move, and we moved our own household also. Lots of back-breaking work and lots of stair-climbing was involved. I went back on the diet this past Saturday morning, still weighing in at 418 pounds. The work probably helped me stay at break-even, but it sure didn't help me continue to lose.
Hm, let's see now.... Should I try to lose weight the hard way by doing heavy work that my body is too unhealthy to do regularly, was not designed to perform, and only kept me at break-even anyway, or the easy way with a proper diet, going about my normal day, and losing about 6 pounds a week... Think I'll stick to the diet
Oh, and as for all those studies you wanted to link to, I call bullshit on the lot of them, and that includes most of the pro-low-carb studies as well. All of us here should that it isn't too ha
What I would like to know is, can this technique be extended one step further? My husband and I would like to have a child some day, but there's one problem.. It's been suggested (outside of Hollywood and certain fake "art" websites) that a male can carry a fetus/baby to term and deliver by C-section. Why not a male-to-female transsexual?
Is that technically possible? Nevermind the idea of growing and/or implanting a uterus, which is still not really practical yet, but just a "simple" abdomnal cavity serving as the womb?
Dude, marriage means one thing, and changing it to mean a new thing is not something I approve.
Care to explain who, in your opinion, has the right to define exactly what "marriage" means?
If you want to take the religious angle, then perhaps G-D had the right, but He never bothered to actually define it, man took that liberty. Just remember that the words in your bible (and in mine) were customarily said to be written by Moses, who proved himself to be as imperfect as any other human (re: the water-from-the-rock incident).
Otherwise, here's what I found just from one quick search of a more or less authoritative non-religious source... According to the American Heritage Dictionary (via dictionary.com; leaving out the parts that don't apply to this discussion):
The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
The state of being married; wedlock.
A common-law marriage.
A union between two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage: a same-sex marriage.
A wedding.
Merriam-Webster agrees with only the first part of the first definition, and says very little about other possible definitions as they apply here. In other words, even the freakin' dictionaries can't settle on what it really means. Furthermore, who really gives a shit what you think about it?
Fuck, don't pigeonhole people in your lil' prejudiced categories just because they disagree with you on one issue.
I suggest you practice what you preach, since you are clearly and in no uncertain way trying to pigeonhole all nonstandard marriages into the same narrow religious definition (which sounds awefully Christian-based to me).
P.S. Couldn't care less about the sanctity of marriage or any of that...
Ok then, so what specifically DO you care about?
I'll give you a personal example of why I care (and why I bothered to reply). I'm pre-operative transsexual, and married to a man. Technically, that makes us a same-sex couple until I get the surgery.
Do he and I being married somehow damage your marriage? How? Did I call the court and demand they revoke your license? Did I come over to your house and demand you end your marriage? Am I trying to redefine what your marriage means to you and your spouse? Let's see...no, no effect, no, no, and no.
... it's been one thing since it has existed, and changing it is not a move.
In your opinion maybe. Excluding religious reasons, marriage has always been man-and-woman for just one reason: How else do you expect the ruling majority of the society to behave but to specifically marry man to woman? Just because it's been some certain way for centuries doesn't mean it's being done entirely right. I mean, hell, we have a 70% divorce rate in the USA alone, and you're worried about supposedly redefining marriage?
Ancient greeks weren't opposed to homosexuality, but they had the same meaning for marriage that we have now.
Who gives a shit what the ancient Greeks considered to be "normal"? Last time I looked, most of us here lived in 21st century CE America (which in and of itself isn't much to speak of these days), not 10th century BCE Greece.
A thousand years ago, we thought the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it... of course we know better now.
A hundred years ago, we had no concept of transmitting moving pictures and sounds by wireless. Nowadays, the television is as commonplace as a pair of socks.
Around ten years ago, we thought homosexuality and transsexualism were psychological/mental problems, now we're starting to realize that it's biological/physical and determined some time before birth.
One year ago, we thought it impossible fuse a prostethic device to the bone a
Aside from the fact that many people don't know what a hard drive is, how many of the less educated crowd do you know of who actually understand how to properly destroy the data on a hard disk? Granted, the guy in the article knows what a hard drive is, but for all we know, he may see it as a little black (or silver) box akin to how some people treat their entire computer as a black box.
We can't be sure that, for example, he knows anything about the standard rule of wiping the drive several times with random data.
Assume the man knows precisely what a hard disk is, and knows how to wipe it... how can we be sure he had the *ability* to wipe the hard drive at all? Most computers are shipped with one disk, and if that fails, you probably can't boot... if you can't boot, how can you run a cleaning program?
Sure, you could use someone else's computer to clean the drive off, but how many people do you know who would let you hook up some random hard disk to their computer so that you can wipe it?
Slashdot Mirror
The most prevalent such blobs I can think of are the ATI and nvidia drivers as supplied by their respective companies, so I'll use those as examples. Xorg doesn't depend on the nvidia blob, nor does it depend on the ATI blob, but it can make use of both drivers. Neither company is likely to open their source code for fear of giving away trade secrets or some such thing, no matter how much we bitch about them. I figure the same will hold true for those binary-only wireless drivers I keep seeing mention of. I doubt the company responsible for those is going to open-source them anytime soon.
So, our only option left is to use those binary drivers, whatever they are, so that we don't get left behind the other "supported" OS's, at least until someone manages to duplicate their functionality in an open-source form. In other words, who really gives a shit if Shuttleworth includes binary/non-GPL code in [x|k|ed]ubuntu if the end result is more people being able to use it and being happy with it? Yes there's some risk of one or more of those binary-only drivers being abandoned due to violating the distribution rights granted by those who maintain them, but do you just quit distributing them, and expect the unwashed masses to which Ubuntu is aimed, to know how to go get them direct from the maintainers? How does that make Linux look to one of those users when they see that they can't get the same things they can in Windows or OS X?
Besides, it's not like the inclusion of those blobs is forcing people to stop developing open source alternatives, and it wouldn't be the first time someone's reverse-engineered a driver to produce an open-source alternative, without violating any laws or licenses.
BB&T is another bank who's website that seems to work fine with Opera, and presumeably firefox as well.
Jeez people, not a single comment and it's already slashdotted...give the rest of us a chance!
I'd hardly say that they're a vanishing breed. Rather, it seems to me that they're a *growing* breed, Nevermind the occasional beige-box company offering naked PC's in certain markets for short periods of time (last one I saw was from Dell I think).
Last April, I bought two systems from SMK Superstore, built exactly to my specs, and shipped with no OS (in fact, I opted to not even include hard disks, didn't need new ones yet). I ended up paying some $550 for a socket 939 AMD 64x2 3800+ processor with 1GB RAM on a decent Gigabyte motherboard, with a low-end nV MX4000 card for my husband's box. The second system (mine) cost about $650, due to my getting an nV 6600 from another website to go in it.
Before I bought them, I checked a few key sites (HP, Dell, one or two others) and decided there was no way in hell I was going to pay the prices I was seeing, for a PC that was less than half as fast as what I ended up with.
The only downside on my purchase was that I didn't make a good decision on the heat sinks, so the CPU on mine (the workhorse of the two) tends to overheat and switch the computer off if I run it full-bore for too long (thank you lm-sensors for helping me sort this out!). Big deal, good copper heat sink/fan combos will set me back about $35 each (with a tube of grease) and I'll replace the under-specced ones when I can be bothered to do so.
Just to get back on topic, I can say that while I don't use one, I do like the Mac and I like how OS-X looks (what little I've seen anyway). I can't imagine Apple selling their systems in any other way than as a computer and an OS in a single inseperable package; something just doesn't seem right about the idea of Apple going the way of the beige-box market.
Depending on how you define "local", this is the case in the Tampa Bay area here in Florida (and probably elsewhere too). On this year's ballot were nine or ten entries for choosing judges, of which three specifically asked for a Yes/No response on whether the named judge should keep his or her office. I can't say that it does much good though, given that you don't hear very often whether this or that judge has made a bad rulings. For that matter, we don't hear much about the candidates at all, which makes it hard to decide whether or not any given judge should keep their office, let alone choosing between two or more when it's called for.
Whether or not losing office prevents the former judge from running again or being appointed to another position, I couldn't say, having never seen anything regarding a rule like that.
This begs the question: If the limitations of the virtual world are due to the programming of that world, couldn't you instead use a modern RPG as a source of sensory input for the AI to learn from, by putting the AI into the game as a real, live player alongside human players? Since the AI could sit there soaking up input 24/7 from maybe thousands of different personalities over time, for as long as the hardware/software holds out before upgrades are needed, it should be able to learn at a phenominal rate, compared to maybe ten hours a day, five days a week, from just one or two people as you might expect to get in a lab setting.
Granted, an online RPG is probably a piss-poor example of real human interaction, considering that people can and do act stupid sometimes when they're behind the veil of the Internet, and you'd need an interface into the game that simulates a true first-person POV (no text messages, heads-up displays, etc... just pure sight and sound at first), but it would be a start.
This brings to mind another question... Without meaning to sound cold and scientific, and (since I am moderately religious) explicitly excluding religious stuff like having a soul, existance/meaning of G-D, and so on... since most animals start their lives, at the most basic level, as little more than (DNA) programs running uninitialized collections of neural networks that must learn and grow over time... Could not an AI start out with deliberately-reduced cognitive ability and gradually (via the underlying program) increase those abilities as it learns and "grows"? More to the point, if you gave the AI as much input as you'd give a human child, and of the same quality and meaning (love, caring, discipline, instruction, etc), is there anything short of hardware limitations (e.g. storage of memories) stopping that AI from developing self-awareness, sentience, or emotions?
Toit mentions wanting to take a
I am the wife of one such "pussified" (as Toit puts it) man. My husband has diabetes and many of the usual complications that come with it, one of which is low testosterone (less than half the "normal" amount). You know what? I'm GLAD his attitude is the way it is. If anything, the reduced testosterone level has served to soften the hard shell he says he used to have. He's well aware of my feelings as well as his own, and he's not afraid to show them. He loves me deeper than words can describe, and I love him equally. He loves nature, cares about his and my health, and...well, you get the idea. I don't expect I'd find any of this in the macho type Toit is trying to rally.
The way I figure it, the average Slashdot user is getting close to that time in their lives when they feel the desire to find a mate and maybe start a family. For the group of you folks who fall in line with Toit's attitude, face this fact: After hundreds of years of you men telling us women to shut up and get in line, your type is being phased out, whether you like it or not. The world does not need your crap anymore, nor does it need the sterotypical southern belle attitude some women used to have, either. Rather, all need to move away from the extremes toward some common, middle ground where men AND women can be happy.
I don't know how you define "inhuman" but, until recently, my body showed a clear metabolic rate of over 4500 calories a day, measured by counting my calorie intake and noting the point when weight started to drop, and without adding any activity to my normal sedentary lifestyle. That metabolic rate slowed when I attempted to move toward a more "healthy" diet. Instead of losing, I gained all the weight back that I had lost during the previous high-metabolism period, plus a bit, and my metabolic rate is now lower than before (~3000 calories a day).
In the case of humans, it's been proven more times than I can count, that obesity has many causes. Sure, metabolism plays a role, but it can also be caused by mental strain (depression, eating disorder, stress), sleep apnea in severe cases, some sort of organ dysfunction, certain medications, and most of all, the types of foods we eat. Think of the foods pushed at us today: breads, pasta, fruit juices, salty snacks, and so on. Now consider what's IN those foods - sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors/sweetners, preservatives, occasionally residual hormones and pesticides, and so on. Does anyone honestly believe these things are healthy??
Now, I've already said this once before weeks ago, but since there are already posts spouting off about exercise, and no one heard me last time, let me remind everyone once again:
Using figures I got from a recent seminar I went to on weight loss (which mostly correlate with my previous research), one pound of pure fat equals about 3800 calories. The average 250-pound human body burns at least 2000 calories a day during normal operation, plus some 400 calories per hour doing moderate-to-heavy exercise. Heavier people burn more, but the increase is not linear. Assuming you eat just enough to counter your body's "baseline" metabolic rate, if you wanted to lose just one pound, that means about 9.5 hours doing something relatively difficult like rapid stairclimbing, fast jogging/running, rafting, skiing, relay swimming, etc. Sure you could work off that 9.5 hours' worth over the course of a week, but that still works out to about 81 minutes a day, seven days a week. After a while, your metabolic baseline will rise, sure, but it would only barely make a dent in these numbers.
Now let's extend this. Last I knew, the US government says 2-3 pounds a week is a reasonably safe rate to lose weight. That's 7600 to 11400 calories, which works out to 19 to 28.5 hours a week or 2.7 to 4.1 hours per day, to burn those 2-3 pounds. My body has shown an ability to lose about 6 pounds a week, continuously, when I can afford to stay on a diet that actually works. If I stuck with these traditional figures and the standard philosophy of exercising to lose weight, that translates to 22800 calories, or 57 hours' a week (about 8.1 hours a day) of heavy exercise.
I'm sorry, but no matter how you slice it, that's just not a reasonable amount of exercise for anyone but a trained athlete, not matter how much you weigh. Whatever it is that the chemicals in green tea (and Coke's product) do, metabolism is still the process of turning food and body fat into energy, and if that energy isn't being used, it gets lost as excess body heat and chemicals in your urine (ketones) and stool. Increase the metabolism and something has to be burned, which results in an increase in waste heat and waste chemicals. That is not an opinion, that is a solid fact I had to find out for myself. When I'm losing, I run hotter as my rate of weight loss increases, I sweat more, and I have to drink more water to keep from dehydrating, plain and simple, and without adding any
You know what else they did? In many (most?) cases, they learned English. My husband's parents were Holocaust survivors, and came here to escape all the BS going on in Poland and elsewhere. They both made a commitment to learn English, because they thought that was the right thing to do. Needless to say, my husband and I both have a major gripe lately about all immigrants, illegal or otherwise, not bothering to learn the language of the land. Everywhere we turn, we find people doing whatever it is they do for work, who can't even answer simple questions, many times giving some indication that they don't speak English at all.
It gets worse of course when you call a business and the *first* thing you hear is a recording in some other language (usually Spanish) telling you hit a button for that language.
If you were to move to France, Germany, Italy, or any other country, you'd be expected to learn the language too. Why can't we expect the same thing here, especially of those who are working in the public eye?
Someone needs to add a mod item to the system - (+1, Eerily Insightful)
- One of our machines has a TV for it's second head, but the TV is almost always turned off or displaying a movie from our DVD player. Since the TV is never used for anything but movies, KDE should be able to ignore the presence of it entirely when a new window is opened, but still let me drag an already-open window over to it if I want to.
- From the point of view of an advanced user, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for the Dock-Apps panel to exist. Why can't I just dock my WM/AS apps into a regular panel instead?
- As one other user pointed out, there are a few sluggish spots here and there that shouldn't happen on a fast box like mine (AMD64x2 3800+ with 1GB RAM and Nvidia 6600). These seem to concentrate on Konqueror when it's used for file management.
- When the Control Center can't load a settings module, it should display a warning message and tell me what to do to fix the problem, instead of just saying "Loading..." and then returning to the 'main' start screen after a couple of seconds.
Other than these, KDE seems to do pretty well for my husband and I. I've tried several other environments (Gnome, E, Windowmaker, Afterstep, FVWM, XFCE) and KDE just had the best round-up of features for my needs and preferences.So let them hire a million-editor army. What's stopping Wikipedia from protecting whatever pages they see fit, from further edits?
I mean, having 16 bits per color component instead of the usual eight shouldn't imply that you have more depth or range. All it means is that you have smaller color steps between raw values. Either way, it's still a measure of 0% to 100% of the color gun's output, whether you have one, eight, sixteen, or thousands of bits per color component.
So, shouldn't the display device be redesigned to produce a more natural range of colors? My Trinitron monitor does not produce a truely pure black, and never will no matter how many bits per color component I throw at it, because the physical screen is a very dark grey, not pure black (not to mention glare from surrounding objects). Similarly, white is as white as it can get for a CRT I figure, and no matter how many bits I throw at it, it won't get any whiter, because the guns can only output just so much power before they're at their limit.
If a better RGB-based display isn't enough, then maybe we need to add more individual color components, such as near-infrared and near-ultraviolet (but still in the visible spectrum), and tweak red/green/blue to something closer to the eye's true native color sensativity. Sure that would result in more bits per pixel, but you could still do it with eight bits per component. Hell, you could do it with four bits or less per color component if you were pressed for bandwidth or just didn't care how grainy the result would be.
Furthermore, if you (as the respondant) work for any kind of media-related organization, even a janitor at a radio station, you're automatically excluded from any data gathering - Neilsen is very strict about the potential for biased results.
It's up to the network to decide if stuff like Family Guy stays or goes. As far as demographics and loyalty, I think we can all agree that those things don't truely mean anything to a network exec. About all they care about is the ad revenue, which is derived from the raw number of people watching the tube, and which translates into a number of things like stock prices.
The only things we ever watch on TV, if anything at all, is CSI, Jeopardy, and sometimes Wheel. Otherwise, it's a movie from our collection, or the TV is off. It's plausible that the family who only watches Charmed and the news, really does only watch Charmed and the news.
Ok then, if that's impressive, how about this: I am a girl, married (just over 5 months), and I actually post here!
What about when there aren't any better alternatives? I paid $2000 (via an insurance settlement) for a 1997 Thunderbird (3.8L v6, nothing fancy) in good cosmetic and so-so mechanical shape that gets about 16MPG in the city and maybe 19 or 20 on the highway. It was the best balance between cost, fuel economy, and engine power (about 145 hp and 210 ft lb) we could find at the time, especially given the time constraint we were facing. It has been my experience that fuel economy and power are roughly porportional to the price you pay for the car and inversely related to the age of the car.
Not all of us have $22,175 to plunk down on a Prius or similar hybrid.
So we have to get by with this thing, and now you want to tell my husband and I are a problem? How about the other couple of people here who have suggested *raising* the gas prices? Prices here peaked at $3.15/gal during that first big price hike, followed by about $2.90/gal during this last one, and now sits at about $2.25/gal. While Tampa Bay isn't exactly LA in terms of size, it's still big. Thanks to the way things are arranged in Pinellas county, to get from place to place generally requires us to drive from one end of the county to the other, so the mileage adds up FAST. Since people get really pissy if you leave a car sitting for months at a time without driving it and threaten to have it hauled away, even if it's perfectly road-worthy, we may have to sell the car if the gas prices start going up again, because we simply won't be able to afford to drive it.
As much as software patents may be a horrible idea, and as much as people here generally hate Microsoft, maybe this is a *good* step? The company has pledged publicly that they won't actually assert their patent rights... and since these are patents we're talking about, it means that noone else can either.
Maybe it's just the sort of protection that the open source movement needs so that we *can* innovate without having to jump through a bunch of hoops or worry about facing legal action?
I grew up more or less without the benefit of a computer, a cell or car phone, PDA, and so on; my family never saw much use for those things. We had a TV, and about all I watched on it was a few hours a day of cartoons. Otherwise I was expected to be outside playing.... by myself usually (other kids in the area were too young to play with, in my parents' opinion).
Then in Dec. 1986 my mom bought me a C64. Looking back, I'd have to say that I was better able to adapt to the world around me after I got that computer. The first thing I learned to do with it was type in programs out of Compute!'s Gazette, sure, but then my mom bought us a 300 baud modem. Next thing we knew, I was chatting on local multi-line BBS's, using message boards (yay Fidonet!), and visiting BBS get-togethers. Most of those I met were years older than me, but I didn't really care. Hell, my mom bought one of those music-activated laser projectors (you know, the ones with speakers and mirrors to deflect the beam) from one of my BBS contacts.
I think the problem lies not with the technology itself, but with the way kids are [self-]taught to use it, combined with the constant barrage of paedophile and other criminal threats. Today, kids sometimes post personal information on some big website where it's left sitting, ignored by the operators but quite visible to the low-lifes out there, but back in the day, Sysop's were generally pretty quick to delete questionable material (at least, in my experience). Plus, until 1989 rolled around and the Game Boy became popular, you couldn't take your video games out of the house anyway.
I don't know what the solution is, but better parenting can surely help. I mean, why DID you buy your kid that PSP? Is there some reason you let them spend 6+ hours a day on their home console or watching TV? Can you give me one good, valid reason why there's a TV and/or console in the kid's bedroom? Do you, as the parent, even know how to use a computer responsibly (meaning keeping it secure and staying away from malicious websites) so that you can teach your kids the same?
I'm sure there are plenty of other similar questions that need to be asked, and of course this isn't directed at the bulk of Slashdot readers, who I am sure are responsible parents (where applicable). It's just that these are the things my parents did with my sister and I, with the exception of my computer in my room (parents felt I was responsible enough to keep it there), and I'd like to think it helped.
It might be better to set the depth of the edit queue to, say, 5 edits per article per day globally, and then set a second limit that applies to individual UIDs; say 3 edits per week per article, per UID. I realize this sounds like the method commonly used to control flooding on an IRC chat, but why couldn't the technique be adapted for use in Wikipedia? That way no matter how many people of a common interest are trying to edit an article, there wouldn't be much chance to vandalize it. I'm working off the idea that, statistically, there will be more people that will provide "good" edits than those who would seek to vandalize, which should, sooner or later, allow the "good" edits to become more visible to the Final Editors.
No matter how this is set up, the Final Editors will be kept pretty busy, and some submitter is going to bitch about these limits anyway, so why not start by setting it to something fairly strict so that the Final Editors don't become overwhealmed, and then adjust the limits as necessary.
A good way to get a nice random number is to take advantage of the inherent randomness of the user - initialize your noise generator to run continuously at a high iteration rate, wait for a keyboard, joystick, or mouse event, and then take as many samples from the noise generator as you need. The amount of time the noise generator was left actively running before the key/joy/mouse event will vary with the user's attention and reaction time, and will essentially randomize the values you get.
True, I agree with you there, but you have to admit that meats and certain dairy products (eggs and cheese come to mind) are some of the best sources of protien out there, unless you want to include processed stuff like nutrition bars/drinks. I know you can get it from vegetable sources as well, but I can't say how it compares.
I didn't intend to come across that way, and I know as well as anyone that exercise is important to good muscle tone and form. I was trying to point out a different approach, by putting a proper diet at the head of the weight-loss efforts.
From what I've been told, for a person my size, 5 to 7 pounds a week is reasonably normal. Furthermore, both doctors seemed to agree that it was safe as long as I didn't take it beyond that. Besides which, assuming you aren't deathly ill or something, isn't there some kind of safeguard built in to keep the body from dropping weight at an unsafe rate, but still allow it to lose at some abritrarily high rate? I assume that's why I lose at such a fast rate, even though I eat almost to excess.
Well, when you consider that people already do this anyway... I mean, do you seriously believe every study you read just because they're published by the American Heart Association or similar? If that's the case, then I'm sure Microsoft, the sugar industry, the RIAA, and the MPAA would all like to have you on their marketing teams.
OK, I was just going to keep my mouth (er, keyboard?) quiet but this one struck a nerve with me. Judging by your description of the article, if you don't buy it, that's fair; I wouldn't either. But maybe you'll buy this:
I'm one of those typical Americans who used to eat a diet high in pasta, bread, rice, sugar, you-name-the-white-substance, and very little meat or fat, variable amounts of fruits and veggies, and plenty of milk and the like. You know, the same diet that was crammed down Americans' throats for the last 30+ years. I balooned to some 440 pounds, most of which happened over the last 10 years or so. Yeah, you read that right, about 200 kg.
I recently sought advice from two doctors (one GP, one endochrinologist), and both said that, basically, the amount of exercise I'd have to do to actually lose any real weight is insane. I confirmed their opinions by looking at various charts online to try to figure out what would burn the most calories the fastest. The highest-end results, for a 200 pound person, ranged anywhere from about 500 calories per hour for high-end relay swimming or similiar (from memory), to 1356 calories per hour climbing stairs (at 120 steps per minute) according a page I just looked at. The data that led to this figure surely is a transcription error, but let's assume it's valid anyway.
Also, let's assume for the moment that you have a normal 2000 calorie per day break-even point. You still have to expend another 3500 calories on top of that just to lose one pound. If you use that 1356-calories-per-hour figure, that works out to over two and a half hours of climbing stairs plus whatever it is you already do all day that keeps you at break-even. If you take the more realistic figure of 500 calories per hour of high-end swimming, that works out to SEVEN HOURS of that exercise per day, on top of your day-long break-even activties.
To lose weight at a nice fast rate of 5-7 pounds a week, for either of those figures, you'd have to do these exercises every single day without a break. I'm sorry, but exercise like that will destroy your heart, probably cause RSI in one or more muscle groups, not to mention killing your knees if they're already bad.
As a response, I went on a low-carb, high-protein diet similar to Atkins and friends. After three days, I got the usual carb-withdrawl symptoms (headaches, dizzy, feeling weak, etc), but that passed by the end of the third day or the middle of the fourth, and from then on I felt pretty good; better than I had in years. Now, this wasn't a drastic change, it was just "noticeable". The amount of calories I consume is, on average, about the same as before.
By the end of the first month, I had lost some 22 pounds (if I hadn't cheated, I'd have lost more like 29 or 30 pounds). I took a one-and-a-half-month break due to our household budget being a bit too tight, and used that time to help a friend move, and we moved our own household also. Lots of back-breaking work and lots of stair-climbing was involved. I went back on the diet this past Saturday morning, still weighing in at 418 pounds. The work probably helped me stay at break-even, but it sure didn't help me continue to lose.
Hm, let's see now.... Should I try to lose weight the hard way by doing heavy work that my body is too unhealthy to do regularly, was not designed to perform, and only kept me at break-even anyway, or the easy way with a proper diet, going about my normal day, and losing about 6 pounds a week... Think I'll stick to the diet
Oh, and as for all those studies you wanted to link to, I call bullshit on the lot of them, and that includes most of the pro-low-carb studies as well. All of us here should that it isn't too ha
Is that technically possible? Nevermind the idea of growing and/or implanting a uterus, which is still not really practical yet, but just a "simple" abdomnal cavity serving as the womb?
Care to explain who, in your opinion, has the right to define exactly what "marriage" means?
If you want to take the religious angle, then perhaps G-D had the right, but He never bothered to actually define it, man took that liberty. Just remember that the words in your bible (and in mine) were customarily said to be written by Moses, who proved himself to be as imperfect as any other human (re: the water-from-the-rock incident).
Otherwise, here's what I found just from one quick search of a more or less authoritative non-religious source... According to the American Heritage Dictionary (via dictionary.com; leaving out the parts that don't apply to this discussion):
Merriam-Webster agrees with only the first part of the first definition, and says very little about other possible definitions as they apply here. In other words, even the freakin' dictionaries can't settle on what it really means. Furthermore, who really gives a shit what you think about it?
I suggest you practice what you preach, since you are clearly and in no uncertain way trying to pigeonhole all nonstandard marriages into the same narrow religious definition (which sounds awefully Christian-based to me).
Ok then, so what specifically DO you care about?
I'll give you a personal example of why I care (and why I bothered to reply). I'm pre-operative transsexual, and married to a man. Technically, that makes us a same-sex couple until I get the surgery.
Do he and I being married somehow damage your marriage? How? Did I call the court and demand they revoke your license? Did I come over to your house and demand you end your marriage? Am I trying to redefine what your marriage means to you and your spouse? Let's see...no, no effect, no, no, and no.
In your opinion maybe. Excluding religious reasons, marriage has always been man-and-woman for just one reason: How else do you expect the ruling majority of the society to behave but to specifically marry man to woman? Just because it's been some certain way for centuries doesn't mean it's being done entirely right. I mean, hell, we have a 70% divorce rate in the USA alone, and you're worried about supposedly redefining marriage?
Who gives a shit what the ancient Greeks considered to be "normal"? Last time I looked, most of us here lived in 21st century CE America (which in and of itself isn't much to speak of these days), not 10th century BCE Greece.
A thousand years ago, we thought the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it... of course we know better now.
A hundred years ago, we had no concept of transmitting moving pictures and sounds by wireless. Nowadays, the television is as commonplace as a pair of socks.
Around ten years ago, we thought homosexuality and transsexualism were psychological/mental problems, now we're starting to realize that it's biological/physical and determined some time before birth.
One year ago, we thought it impossible fuse a prostethic device to the bone a
We can't be sure that, for example, he knows anything about the standard rule of wiping the drive several times with random data.
Assume the man knows precisely what a hard disk is, and knows how to wipe it... how can we be sure he had the *ability* to wipe the hard drive at all? Most computers are shipped with one disk, and if that fails, you probably can't boot... if you can't boot, how can you run a cleaning program?
Sure, you could use someone else's computer to clean the drive off, but how many people do you know who would let you hook up some random hard disk to their computer so that you can wipe it?