I've decided to work on my weight recently, and I've been doing calorie counting and splitting my eating across 6 meals at 2.5-3 hour intervals.

You can find lots of estimators online for maintenance calorie levels. A scale costs all of $20, and it is very useful for baking as well.

I don't weigh everything I put into my mouth now, but for a few days I did - nothing at all but water or diet soda went into my mouth weight getting weighed and converted to protein/ fat/ carb/ calorie counts. Now I do this only when I encounter new foods that I anticipate eating often that I'm not familiar with.

My observation - my eyes were SERIOUSLY out of calibration on the typical American diet. Now I'm eating maintenance-20%, and honestly I don't really feel hungry. I certainly don't ever feel stuffed, but it really hasn't been hard to stick to. I've also been exercising.

Most of us here are reasonably OCD, and I've found that an OCD approach to dieting seemed to fit better than anything I've tried in the past. Now I don't need to weigh stuff most of the time, I've been losing weight steadily, and I feel like this is something I could maintain indefinitely without hardship. Sure, only having one cookie for the occasional desert isn't psychologically satisfying, but I don't go around with hunger pains either.

If you have no idea how many calories you're eating, I'd suggest finding out.

Judging inter-societal conflict and history through the same morality used to describe individual behavior makes for great righteous indignation, but poor history.

Human history is a story of cultural migrations full of bloodshed. Every piece of land owned by a society was taken from another society. The Americas were full of warrior tribes and ethos... who were they fighting before the white man arrived? Cortes' invasion was successful because he started an uprising against the last warlike conqueror. Europe was invaded by (at various times) by the Persians, Moors, Goths, Celts, Romans, Mongols, and Turks. Egypt was conquered by the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

The European empires are just the most recent technologically and culturally advanced civilization to use that advancement for expansion. You may call it evil, but it is no less evil than any other successful culture.

As for applying that logic to individual actions regarding your neighbors, well that's a whole different lecture on social contracts, and the difference between norms within a societal group and with other societies.

Though the short life expectancy of CDs appears to have been greatly exaggerated, they do have a finite lifespan while music in a more transient form can happily be saved from one hermetically sealed hard disk to the next. Either way, all the CRC checks in the world can't guarantee immortality of any data.

Speaking of transient... I've lived most of my teens going from one place to the next, often losing or giving away my possessions in the process. Those quaint, physical goods meant bullshit to me sleeping in an alley or at so-and-so's couch for the week.

What did comfort me was recovering collections of music from friends I shared with since the days of Napster, an impossibility if relying solely on CDs, regardless of the legality.

I'm an immaterial girl living in an immaterial world. Well, except for my recent journey into my PS3 and buying up used games for it. At least Blu-rays are a little sturdier than DVDs and CDs.

Because nobody except rabid people on either side is confused or affected by the so-called bias of linking to that site to get an AP story (which is accurate and not-so-biased, barring the fact that EVERYONE's biased), perhaps? LOL.

Yes, but Tolkien left a large gap in there that could be filled in with a story pretty easily.

When we leave "The Hobbit", Bilbo Baggins is still a young Hobbit in his 50s, flush with treasure. When we start "Lord of the Rings", he's 111 (a ripe old age only attained by liberal use of The One Ring) and his nephew Frodo takes over. There are a lot of good stories about what uses he put the Ring to, if nothing else. Frodo might deserve a bit of a back-story. I'm sure Sauron and Saruman weren't sitting around watching HBO and eating fried food. Gollum, for all that he was in a cave, had to have done something interesting during that period after losing the Ring to Bilbo.

Tolkien didn't see any grand adventures in there to write about, but that doesn't mean a 60-year gap in the action can't contain any interesting stuff.

I love "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings". I truly do. But I finally accepted Jackson's LoTR as a different story from J.R.R. Tolkien's work. No less a masterpiece for all that, but a slightly different story. I expect "The Hobbit" to be the same, and in that context I'm perfectly OK with Jackson et al filling in some blanks that Tolkien himself left.

It's like Abram's reboot of "Star Trek" - based on, but different. Except without all the lens flare.

Have you used The Missing Sync? It knows where your iTunes Library is, and it knows your playlists as you have set them up in iTunes itself.

You just select the playlists you want to sync from within the sync app itself, in much the same way you do for the iPod. Even the icons are the same.

The only difference is that the window that you put the checkboxes in (with your playlists, read right off the iTunes DB by the app automatically) is not inside the iTunes window itself. The sync experience itself is *practically* identical.

The Missing Sync enables much more than just "capable of syncing" - the experience is smooth and relatively seamless. All you have over the iPod is the fact that you need this app running instead of just using iTunes to do it all for you. The iTunes sync features are superfluous when you are using it since it replicates everything iTunes does.

I'm not being disingenuous here - I am in no way attempting to hide the fact that the app doesn't create a totally integrated experience - it clearly does not, but for the user there is very little difference.

Again, you can drop the hostility. I'm not interested in ad hominem attacks. I have not been hostile to you. Please act your age.

That's very expensive.

It's quite cheap to put up some warning signs, perhaps not have fences/hedges too close to the road, and expect drivers to drive at a sensible speed.

Doesn't it also include a half-hour scene of Bilbo sitting around smoking a pipe as he ages 60 years?

Disclaimer: I'm not a PHP or Ruby programmer. I come from the land of Java and Python.

@posts = Post.where(:status => 'public').order('created DESC')

$records = $this->_model->blogs->fetchAll(array('status = ?' => 'public'), 'created DESC');

Assuming these would be returned from a framework library, or I can't readily access the source and this is just part of documentation.

The first example is fairly readable, concise and sensible. Knowing a little about how Ruby handles things as objects, I "get it" and am comfortable with what @posts would probably contain. I'm fairly certain @posts is a plural set/object of more Post objects, which represents a row in a database, where status is public, then ordered descending. I can probably iterate through it. As an outsider, I could read this, lookup the column names for the row and almost immediately start using it.

Knowing some of the problems with PHP and its community, I can make no assumptions about what $records will really be unless I know the author's style or am already familiar with the codebase. Ignoring your writeup justification for shortening, I can't guess what _model is, I don't know what blogs really represents, and I'm uncertain why fetchAll needs an array object passed as a parameter, I have to mentally replace the question mark with "public", then assume the second parameter is an order-by parameter since I see the DESC. Before I would be ready and comfortable to use $records in a meaningful way, I'd have to dump it to the screen or use a debugger, plus lookup the syntax for fetchAll, and I'd really want to know what _model and blog actually represented since you're now magically assuming the blog object links to a table somehow. I do not know if blog is iterable or if it's rows it has grabbed are even accessible. $records may be the result of some manipulation it performs on the query result. I just don't know, and that makes me uncomfortable.

So while you've reduced character quantity to near comparable levels, you've not matched readability or understanding. You've merely condensed complex code into short complex code. Honestly, I think it's a philosophy difference between PHP and Ruby. Ruby the language strives for the principle of least surprises, and if the programmers utilizing it adhere to that, I can grasp their code pretty quickly. PHP is a grab-bag; you can make no assumptions, which is both a strength and a weakness.

Granted, PHP can still be used successfully to start and run a business, but as a programmer with no professional experience in either language, I'm gravitated towards the Ruby example.

This site doesn't instill a whole lot of confidence in the government's plan for national broadband. First the site has difficulty loading, it took a few minutes before I got in. So I try the test and Firefox locks up. Eventually I get an unresponsive script warning.

Q: What's the difference between a $50 brand-name pill and a $2 "fake"?
A: $48.

I'm sorry, I don't have references, but someone was explaining to me that the parts and construction for the LHC are excessively shoddy. He mentioned the size of the magnets and, I believe, mentioned that they weren't really tested before being put in place. His beef was that the whole thing is basically just a huge money sinkhole and may not ever produce the kinds of results it promises.

You're half right.

I'd be trivial porting Steam to Linux.

But every single DirectX engine would have to be ported to OpenGL, which is not trivial. Source supporting OpenGL in the future is good news!

"What these people real need is a stable government and economic growth", and population control.

Economic growth and stable governments providing strong social safety nets are population control. Not of the mandatory, authoritarian kind, but there the one thing that has consistently led to declining family sizes in human history, because they are the things that stop people from investing in creating children as a form of old-age support.

Yes. How will they know how what adverts to show? By tracking web usage, surveys, game usage metrics and other info they get by spying on you.
Also it'll probably add delays while the ads are downloaded.

They won't track anything more than game usage because the game can't access anything else, on my PC. And they can *already* be tracking game usage. Of course, if I know it is, I won't buy it. And if it's an SP game, I'll just block it at firewall level.

As for delays in game loading, that's the kind of stuff that I can easily find out after reading a couple of reviews. Buying a game without doing so first is stupid anyway.

As I said, if it's unobtrusive and doesn't shut then game down if it can't download the ads, fine by me.