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Comment Re:Couldn't they have used an RTG? (Score 1) 132

France operates a number of breeder reactors that could be repurposed possibly. Since the Regan administration (in fact, Regan himself) we've lost the capability to manufacture Plutonium in abundance. Not that there's a lot of use for the stuff but the supply is running low as is it's half life.

Comment Not so fast (Score 1) 405

Before you say such things, you might want to look up the legal morass surrounging mail servers under your direct control and those not. Start with Megaupload and then follow links to the less public ones. There are DAMN good reason to keep your mail server on premises be it home or business, if you don't understand why you might want to educate yourself before giving advice.

                -Charlie

Comment Speaking as a Comcast victim (Score 1) 405

I too am a Comcast victim, business class, and I have a mail server on their static IPs. This has been the case for years and while I have seen occasional blocking during inter-company spats, nothing blaket like you are seeing. It could just be the range you are on or it could be something else. What I am trying to say is that it is not those big three blanket blocking Comcast IPs.

I would see if Comcast can give you another set of statics in another range. That may help.

                    -Charlie

Comment Re:Oh no (Score 1) 297

Sure, but what you're asking is nearly impossible to measure. You'd have to test your poop for each food that you eat. It's not going to be the same for each sort of food exactly because your gut digests different things differently. It's irrelevant because it's impossible to know. If you eat a carrot and excrete 50% of the usable calories, it doesn't mean that the same will hold true for a potato or a porkchop. You can't even really average it out because different foods are going to affect your gut differently.

If you know the UPPER bound of the caloric energy of the food you eat--that is, the calories listed on the box, or the calories calculated from a bomb calorimeter--you can start making calculations from there. You can make good estimates of how much you eat using a scale and the internet. You can make good estimates of how much you burn using a whole bunch of different devices. The empirical, day-to-day measurement is what's going to tell you how you're doing.

For several years, I weighed my food and tracked my exercise for about 3 months in the spring so I could lose weight for the cycling season. I weighed literally everything I ate and kept detailed logs of my exercise. The balance equations were more or less what I expected.

All these things change over time as well. As we get older our metabolisms slow. On a more narrow scale, the more we do one sport, the less energy we burn doing it. I use fewer calories going 50km on my bike than I did when I was a beginner.

In the end, the one quantity that's actually measurable is the food that goes in. All the other things are observations that either validate or refute your hypotheses about your calories-in/calories-out equation. Whether you happen to burn more calories standing still than I do or you simply excrete more usable calories as waste as I do is a meaningless distinction for the question of weight change.

Comment Re:Ya...Right (Score 2) 285

China is already the world's largest producer of renewable energy. (378 GW in 2013.)

And unlike Western nations that govern by consensus, China will turn on a dime if it sees the benefit on it. They shut down the factories and took half the cars off the road so the air would be clear for the Olympics. They can do that any time they want.

The benefit to China is cheap power and complete energy independence. The price of renewable energy is dropping sharply, so they no longer have to turn to coal and oil to fuel economic growth. They're the ones making the solar panels ANYWAY.

I suspect China could meet these goals a lot sooner, honestly. I reckon they were on pace to meet these goals with or without the USA. This is just a way to wring concessions out of the US later. China just wants LEVERAGE.

Comment Re:Oh no (Score 1) 297

It IS about willpower and it IS up to the individual, but I don't think those things are undeserving of sympathy and broader societal support. We make it hard for overweight people to change their diets. Fattening, unhealthy food is cheap. Good food is more expensive. Exercising takes time, we increasingly make sure that people don't have any time outside their jobs. Our jobs are more sedentary than ever before and the bad food is targeted directly at making our brains feel good. Depression goes untreated for years at a time.

The problem is less about food and thermodynamics and our guts. If you want to lose weight, you have to obey thermodynamics. You have to eat less than you burn, and you need to exercise to be healthy. But if we don't give people the opportunity to do those things, then we can't expect them to lose weight consistently.

Comment Re:Oh no (Score 2, Informative) 297

To a certain extent, that's meaningless. Those calories are bound up in a way that you can't use them--which is why they're waste). It may be that there are some usable calories in there if you went back and ingested them again, but obviously there are significantly diminishing returns.

There are a certain number of calories per gram of food. Your body is capable of removing and using somewhere between 0-100% of those calories. Your gut flora pushes you in one direction or another--at the highest end, you can capture nearly 100% of the available food energy from your meals. No matter what, you cannot gain more than 1g of weight from 1g of food. Physics and chemistry being what it is, you probably won't, though.

In the end, there are two things that people need to know if they want to control their weight: how much they're eating, and how much they're burning. Those are the only things you can meaningfully control (there is some evidence that changing your diet significantly can affect the microbiome--it seems pretty imprecise right now). If your gut microbiome is super efficient, you'll need to find ways to eat that don't leave you hungry but also don't give you too many calories.

Comment Re:Uh (Score 5, Informative) 112

Re: Cable Cutting
 
The Amazon FireTV (the full size square, not the HDMI dongle) is a fantastic device for $99 and XBMC has native support for it now. Once you bump the buffer from 20MB to 500MB and remove the bandwidth cap XBMC + Amazon Fire TV is a fantastic device for streaming the largest uncompressed 1080p video. It also handles your standard 100MB-4GB video files without cache modification as well. Also it does stuff like Netflix, Amazon Prime (aka HBO), most Android apps (like BombSquad, a Smash Brothers clone), you can side-load APKs without rooting it etc etc Amazon did a great job with the device and I use it daily instead of owning a cable box.
 
Absolutely zero interest in an Amazon branded phone though. I heard their Fire Tablet or whatever was pretty fantastic for the time but the market has moved on and even the $79 chinese branded tablets are competitive these days for most users.

Comment Re:Another Teledesic? (Score 1) 74

Of note, high efficiency station-keeping engine technology has exploded in recent years, there's at least six cubesat kickstarter projects, mostly in the 2U-3U size which can at least partially get out of LEO on just a tiny, tiny amount of "fuel". Ion/electron propulsion has made huge advances in the last 15 years and is expected to bring the cost and size of communications satellites way, way down.
 
Right now fuel + engines + station keeping makes up 50% or more of a communication's launch mass. With electric propulsion, station keeping will make up less than 10% of the satellite, which in turn means less fuel required to push that mass around.

Comment Burn PHP (Score 1) 217

Not sure if it's the fact that you can host PHP on Godaddy's lowest tier(s) or what, but PHP seems to be the lowest hanging fruit and a lot of "babby's first project"s are written in PHP. I know a few people who avoid PHP projects based on that principle. The average PHP project seems to be dramatically lower in quality compared to similar ones written in Python, Ruby, heck even C#/ASP.

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