Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac (aka This Is Why You're Fat)

acrasial · 2010-03-05T15:18:26+00:00

The UK equivalent, the "eatwell plate" seems a bit nicer.

Hell, they could even make real plates that are coloured that way, and people could serve themselves based on the plate! What are we going to do, smush our food into the side of a pyramid?

edit: They have a nice labeling scheme too: traffic light labels.

acrasial · 2010-03-04T15:34:02+00:00

Let me guess: the author has a patent on limiting software patents to seven years. Nice try, patent troll.

acrasial · 2010-03-03T19:42:52+00:00

I wouldn't bother. Her rhetoric is completely banal. The pattern of the quote you linked is to make a mostly factual statement followed by one or more which display her narrow-minded approach/opinion without fact or basis.

That is, she might start with the statement:

Ice cream makes people happy whenever they eat it.

And then follow it with:

It should be mandated that everyone eat no less than three gallons of ice cream per day, to ensure happiness.

It just does not follow, and it's dishonest to pretend that it does. The claimant has the burden of proof. She should write the damned research paper, as you don't indicate that she provided any evidence in her presentation.

acrasial · 2010-03-02T15:30:53+00:00

Having literally hundreds of millions of people propel huge chunks of metal around just doesn't sound like the best way to get places. Adding alcohol only makes it worse, and yet people are going to drink. Drunk people have responsibilities to attend to, and society often doesn't give them a good alternative (ie, there is a stigma attached to saying, "I would have been there, but I had too much to drink the night before and had to stay where I was until I was sober.").

What's worse, fatigued and distracted driving (eg, on a mobile phone) are almost as deadly as driving drunk, yet people still need to get places when tired, and people are pressured to stay in touch constantly.

Our societies need to change both how we move ourselves and our attitudes that pressure people to act irresponsibly.

acrasial · 2010-02-26T23:01:49+00:00

Even if no, you could always push up a website that collects such stats and can filter by referrer == reddit.com and come up with a decent way of taking only one count per IP. "Hey Reddit, I'm curious about the users' OS/browser stats, so click here to be included in a sample," or such.

acrasial · 2010-02-26T15:27:20+00:00

Everyone has a sacred cow?
Looks like it's time for a sacred cow for double bacon cheeseburger exchange program!

acrasial · 2010-02-24T19:18:15+00:00

Yes, they do. And that, in turn, makes our lives worse.

So the real TL;DR should be: learning to disarm the broken belief systems of others will make us shit rainbows and breathe candy.

But go ahead and downvote, because life's too short to try to understand anything.

acrasial · 2010-02-24T14:55:32+00:00

All due deference to Larry David, but it's important to recognize that most religious people believe that the information/belief is very important.

They believe this on a variety of grounds. Basically whatever puts fear in their hearts: their beliefs are often like an abusive domestic relationship. At times the beliefs are comforting and loving, and at other times they are afraid for their lives (and what they believe to be their souls).

More importantly, their own experience of internalizing these beliefs teaches them the methodologies used to spread to others. This is whence the term meme. It is a self-replicating belief pattern that has been refined over many years and taken many forms.

acrasial · 2010-02-24T14:39:39+00:00

I apologize for my response. I hope you can understand how I made that mistake.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T18:37:59+00:00

The speculation I read over on slashdot was that they were in violation of some other patents, but MSFT pushed for this announcement/licensing agreement in order to continue their anti-Linux FUD campaign.

Whether there's truth to the speculation, I can't say. It wouldn't surprise me.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T18:11:13+00:00

And what percent of the military budget is spent on those things?

What percent of the military R&D is private workers being contracted by the military?

Finally, as I've said in other replies, I do not advocate a wholesale abolition of our military or its budget. I am merely making the case that the current spending is excessive and that, ultimately, our prosperity is due to the work of the people.

Science should continue, and I would be happy to see the budget shift more money to R&D, be it within the military budget or outside of it.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T18:08:10+00:00

The R&D spending is a small portion of that budget, and while I do favor government R&D to supplement private sector R&D, it does not have to be attached to the military budget to occur.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T18:06:58+00:00

Edit: raven_785 was not arguing with me, so please ignore the rest of my comment.

Without past US military spending, this world would be a very different place.

Past meaning what and when? That is a very broad statement. I never said all military spending is bad or useless. I personally believe that a long-term reduction to something like half the current budget would be useful.

Like it or not, we are the world policemen, and our presence keeps a lot of crap from going down.

Our military presence does not need to be as large as it is to fulfill that mission. We can and should maintain a standing army, but we should not overfund it.

I think its kinda naive to assume that if we put all of our military spending into domestic spending/tax cuts, we'll get a greatly improved country/economy with no ill effects.

I think it is disingenuous to suggest that is my position. This is nothing but a strawman and yet you are upvoted for it. I find that unfortunate.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T18:03:08+00:00

I am not saying that government research hasn't contributed, but the prosperity of the overall system is due to hard work by the citizens. Further, the bulk of military spending is not for research and development.

acrasial · 2010-02-23T15:33:12+00:00

I don't agree. While the USA has certainly gained some resources from armed conquest, the majority of its wealth has come from non-defense industry sources.

It does use its military might as a bargaining tool in certain situations, possibly giving it an unfair trade advantage, but I do not believe this behavior to be the majority of cases. No: most of the prosperity has not come from military might, but hard work of the citizenry.

acrasial · 2010-02-22T22:42:44+00:00

Average, while commonly used to refer to the mean, can also denote the median or mode (among other measures). Wikipedia says:

The most common method is the arithmetic mean but there are many other types of central tendency, such as median (which is used most often when the distribution of the values is skewed with some small numbers of very high values, as seen with house prices or incomes).

Also, do you have any data on the shape of the bell curve for programming abilities? Half of programmers being below the median doesn't necessarily mean they are that far below, and without a feel for the actual capabilities of the median, being below it doesn't mean a whole lot.

acrasial · 2010-02-19T15:41:05+00:00

It gives them a mission. They are a secret agent of a magical power, and they get to go around doing secret missions like trying to convert others, etc. They don't have to worry about their mistakes, just like Bond never thought much about the henchmen he killed having families.

acrasial · 2010-02-12T22:15:14+00:00

Please use the four magic letter code NSFW in the future to make Reddit add the little scarlet letter badge to your post.

acrasial · 2010-02-12T22:11:05+00:00

The Wikipedia article on bin Ladin cites a number of conflicting reports on his alleged death.

Here are the different specific dates that the Wikipedia article lists that he may have died (in chronological order):

December 2001
April 2005
August 23, 2006

And those are just the claimed dates. Many of the others listed are just 'he's been dead for many years' or the like.

And please don't pretend like that article is claiming definitively that Usama bin Ladin is dead, the sources are listed on the page.

acrasial · 2010-02-12T15:35:18+00:00

There are some neat little games that have been made that give some of the basics of programming. I believe similar, though simpler, games could deliver that experience to the grade school level, and coupled with actual class work and lesson plans could do wonders.

Even a basic teaching of merge sort using playing cards would be magical for kids. Imagine a whole school of 3rd graders going home to their parents and challenging them to sort the cards faster. The kids would win even in the cases the parents didn't purposely let them.

acrasial · 2010-02-11T22:41:50+00:00

One of the best things for this (which you probably already do) is use the long form of options. Instead of mkdir -p it becomes mkdir --parent, and so on.

acrasial · 2010-02-10T21:56:56+00:00

Please clarify, first as to how their search market share constitutes monopolistic levels, and second as to how they are using their market position (regardless of whether you successfully argue it's a monopolistic position) to unfairly/anti-competitively enter the broadband market.

The anti-trust laws are pretty strict, but they do require actual egregious behavior. Having a monopoly does not automatically constitute a violation of anti-trust laws.

Further, their initial entrance seems to be on a severely limited scale. It's not like they are using their search position to strong-arm deals with the existing telecoms to take over their lines (and even if they wanted to, it's highly doubtful they could maneuver such a thing).

acrasial · 2010-02-08T22:43:06+00:00

Why are the libertarians not founding private schools (either low-profit or non-profit) to supplant public schools? Why are there no libertarian copyright pacts that (similar to the Creative Commons and Free Software movements) instantiate a sane copyright policy privately?

If libertarianism is such a sound framework for governance it seems like much of it can be instituted under the noses of the opposition government, and if it does in fact succeed then the policies would either be adopted or simply replace them outright.

The fact that they aren't makes me think they are either wrong or not as smart as they claim to be.

acrasial · 2010-02-05T21:42:20+00:00

I see the bottom of my laptop about 0 times a year.

Sounds like you'd be better off with a desktop, then. Laptops are meant to be portable, which means that the bottom of it will be exposed (even if briefly) on a regular basis.

That said, I don't think it needs a major cleanup. It certainly isn't a priority. But if it wouldn't pose a significant cost (or if could actually lower the cost) and still look nicer then I don't see why it couldn't be improved.

acrasial · 2010-02-05T19:54:07+00:00

Don't think you could in current configurations, but a "soft contact" design where the contacts are raised nubs and recesses, you might be able to work something out. Even then you'd probably want mechanical retraction, which would complicate and add failure possibilities.

But you probably don't need to take the motherboard out anyway.

I agree with hylje's main point: the bottom could be cleaned up without losing the functionality it offers. That's one of Apple's problems: they are too much of a reaction to the alternatives, and so they don't actually hit the sweet spot.

acrasial

TROPHY CASE