And if you want to make it exceptionally strong, you combine those techniques. "correct horse battery staple" is strong, "correcT horXe batt6ery st&ple" is heat death of universe-strong and actually not much harder to learn.

At the cost of travelling around with the keys to the kingdom. Imagine you're on vacation and you want to pop into an internet cafe and log into /. because abstinence. Except it has a keylogger/trojan that'll steal your key file and your master password. Now you've compromised your email, online bank, ebay, paypal, steam and all the other passwords that might really matter. Personally I tend to keep three:

1) My mail, because it gets all the password resets.
2) My bank, but it's using two-factor anyway.
3) My "assorted junk" password where I might lose my forum account or whatever that doesn't *really* matter.

I really try not to use the first two on an untrusted device unless I really have to, because afterwards I need to change it. In fact if I know I will need to use it I'll change it on a trusted device up front and restore it later, good memorized passwords are a pain to relearn.

Are you secretly planning to use it as a Dunning-Kruger meter and avoid all that self-rate as 10 out of 10? Because if you think you'll get anything else useful out of it, I want some of what you're smoking...

The problem is that unifying VAT and classifications basically regulating half a tax system without regulating the other half. You can tax income and you can tax consumption and there's pros and cons to both. If we're forced to lower our VAT, the other taxes would probably increase to compensate or the other way around. In addition many of the VAT brackets are made for a specific purpose because the goods are either particularly good or bad for society, like taxing books less (knowledge is good) and tobacco more (very bad for public health).

For example, around here we have about half VAT on food. If we can't keep that exception, prices would rise 10%+ on the spot. So would our taxes, in practice we'd probably funnel that money into agricultural subsidies instead which would make our food cheaper, thus creating an even more heavily protected, subsidized agriculture. And the things we want to punish, just add other taxes instead of VAT, unless the EU wants to regulate all consumption tax. That would be a tough sell, I think.

What products and services end up in what VAT bracket is sometimes controversial, for example here in Norway at the moment there's 0% VAT on buying a physical newspaper and 25% VAT on a digital newspaper, because it doesn't meet the criteria for an exemption. Also eating at a restaurant and takeaway ended up in different brackets, so if you take your burger outside and eat it on the sidewalk it's cheaper than sitting down at McDonald's. We have an exception for culture, they were probably thinking more like theater, opera, concerts but exotic dancers won at court as an "artistic performance".

Not saying it can't happen, but if it does it's a big step on the way towards a "United States of Europe".

Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

You won't know if it's first until it's observed.... and it's not :(

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.

The thing is, you don't really need to all OCD on the calories, just get it ballpark right.

Veggies and fruit? Mostly <50 kcal/100g
Lean food? 100 kcal/100g.
Average food? 200 kcal/100g.
Fatty food? 300 kcal/100g
Sweets? 400 kcal/100g
Snacks? 500 kcal/100g

Oh and beer 200kcal/0.5L... partying is hard on your weight :/ particularly since it makes me hungry for late night supersized junk food too, which is as stupid as it gets. Volume is also a big thing, when I wanted to binge I could make myself 300 grams of pasta, add 400 grams of sausage and pour a glass of 500 ml sauce over it. That's a 3*350 (uncooked, ~100 cooked)+4*200+5*40 = 2000 kcal dish. I knew it was too much, but I guess I just didn't want to know how much. These days I make about 40% of that and it's still a slightly oversized dinner. So I'd say weighing it is the main thing, you can mostly ballpark how healthy it is.

Why do you think almost every sci-fi dystopia has robot guards/goons? Today being rich is a lot about being able to pay poorer people to work for you, tomorrow it's about being able to buy the robots instead. Sure there'll be jobs, routed around by global mega-corporations depending on where labor is the best value for money and most politically and socially stable but the rich will have to deal less and less with the riffraff. The few trusted people you need and the highly skilled workers to keep the automation society going will be well rewarded, keeping the middle class from joining the rest.

I'm not sure how worried I am about an AI, since it could also develop a conscience. I'm more worried about highly sophisticated tools that has no objections to their programming, no matter what you tell them to do. How many Nazis would it take to run a death camp using robots? How many agents do you need if you revive the DDR and feed it all the location, communication, money transfers, social media, facial recognition information and data mine it? All with an unwavering loyalty, massive control span, immense attention to detail and no conscious objectors.

If someone asked people as little as 30 years ago if we'd all be walking around with location tracking devices, nobody would believe you. But we do, because it's practical. I pay most my bills electronically and not in cash, because it's practical. Where and when I drive a toll road is recorded, there's no cash option either you have a chip or they just take your photo and send the bill, most find it practical. I'm guessing any self-driving car will constantly tell where it is so it can get updated road and traffic data, like what Tesla does only a lot less voluntary. Convenience is how privacy will die, why force surveillance down our throats when you can just sugarcoat it a little?

Well, half the TSA agents were seeing the same people as black people wearing gold chains, the other half were seeing white people with blue chains.

My dentist once told me that I obviously have viking blood. (He was right; I'm essentially half Scot and half Russian.) I am also a diabetic. I'm not alone. Roughly a third of Americans at this point are either diabetic or on the road to diabetes. If I ate the kind of carbs this guy eats, I'd have to load up on hundreds of units of insulin, and I'd never lose a pound. That's not speculation, I've tried that sort of diet. (Was a vegetarian for years, and couldn't lose weight on a 1200 Calorie vegetarian diet. And I was ravenously hungry and depressed all the time.)

Instead, the diet that has worked for me (very successfully) has been cutting the carbs. Most of my calories come from meat. I eat 4 or more eggs and bacon for breakfast. I quickly learned, by following my blood sugar meter, that I simply could not tolerate the 200+ grams of carbs that the government recommends. Since making the decision to follow my blood sugar 100% and ignore studies that, at best, present an average of what worked for someone else, I've lost well over 100 lbs. while increasing my lean body mass. My trigclycerides, once over 1000, have plunged. My HDL is high, my LDL is low, and most importantly my last A1c (a measure of blood sugar over time) was normal for a non-diabetic at 4.9%.

I'm glad his diet worked for him. It wouldn't work for me. No doubt, my diet wouldn't work for him. And that's ok. The notion that there's one perfect diet for everyone is virtually idiotic. And, most importantly, it doesn't work. That's not to say that there aren't some useful general principles, some patterns that are more likely to work for you. But at the end of the day it's your health; take the time to figure out what will work for you.

Nothing. The OP was using that instead of the "N" word (Nazis) in an attempt to prevent Godwin-ing the thread.