Pretty much all starchy carbs (like potatoes) and of course anything grain-based (bread, flour, rice, etc). I'll eat sweet potatoes on occasion (boiled, then mashed up with butter, some heavy cream, salt, pepper), kale, spinach... pretty much any leafy greens are good. Fruits on occasion, I do like apples, try not to eat too many bananas, no grapes or other really sugary fruits. Berries are good. Fruit is really only an occasional thing. Eggs are a staple. Many people avoid dairy, but I like cheese. No milk, but I do use butter and heavy cream. Only good oils, like cocoinut and olive oils. Oh, and butter. Tree nuts are good (but not peanuts). No beans. Tonight I had a big cheeseburger using lettuce leaves as a bun and some pickles. I do also like dark chocolate, 70% cacao or above.

especially when your life and health is at stake. And don't necessarily listen to those that simply subscribe to "traditional wisdom" because it could very well be wrong.

Read "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes (or the work it is based on, Good Calories Bad Calories)
Watch this video by Dr Peter Attia: The limits of scientific evidence and the ethics of dietary guidelines -- 60 years of ambiguity
Read the Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson

I cut out grains, sugar, and most carbs from my diet a year ago and couldn't be happier or healthier now. Don't do it just as a way to lose weight, learn WHY it is healthier and part of our genetic makeup.

They may not be negatively impacting you.... today.
But think about everything you've ever done online or on your phone. Ever. Now think about what that set of data will look like in 10 years.
THAT is the power that Google has. It's the power that Microsoft DREAMS about. I'm not saying that is good or bad, but the fact is we don't KNOW what they will, or can, do with that data.

But I do know that they can do incredible things. They can do incredible good. Look at something like street view on maps. Astounding. And it's only one example. Bottom line for me is, I don't understand why people willingly share all of their personal information. Facebook, Google, etc. There is no privacy anymore unless you really try. Banks track all of your transactions, go into a casino and they monitor your wins/losses to find that sweet spot where you'll keep playing. I am sure that there are many many other things they are doing that we don't know about. But we get complacent because of convenience.

I'm not paranoid, it is the reality of today, and of tomorrow. Google is not bullet-proof, and they could someday be bought by another company, who could then own all of their data. The information age is an incredible one, all of that information is power... and you and I don't own that power.

And then proceed to break extensions with every single release. I haven't gotten some extensions to work for several updates ... fire gestures and/or all-in-one, printedit, download helper. I know they don't purposely break them, but I don't understand why they just stop working and never work again. Is it because I'm on Linux? Not to mention that it has become quite a memory hog and seems to have issues releasing memory and shutting down gracefully. I don't really like any of the alternatives as much, but have really considered dropping FF.

Business huh? You just lost yourself a customer
$$ cha ching .. what's that Homer?
YOU JUST LOST YOURSELF A CUSTOMER MOE!
$$ cha ching... what?.....

It's been a LONNNNG time since I was this age, so maybe these books are a bit beyond middle schoolers.

Greetings Carbon Based Bipeds by Arthur C. Clarke

The Minds I, or Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofsdater (these might be tough to comprehend though)

And not books, but what about issues of Scientific American? I got that magazine for a few years, and it was always very thought provoking.

But part of the problem IS the parents... parents are the ones watching all those damn crime shows / movies / News / and now parents play VIDEO GAMES. You can tell your kids all day long what is right and wrong... but if you sit around and play FPS on a giant screen tv and they see you excited and having fun, they absorb that. So I agree with you.. but parents - and quite frankly our government - are part of our society. Yeah - our government needs to change too. When I say we all need to change I mean ALL. I don't know how exactly, it isn't an easy or quick thing to do. It's a slow process that got us here and it will prob be a slow one to reverse. What kills me is that everyone gets so defensive and doesn't even want to talk about changing. I don't understand what people fear so much about admitting that we all have a responsibility and spend more time trying to pinpoint what everyone ELSE can do about it. Bottom line is our legal and governmental systems can't change it, it has to come from our society in general and if overall we aren't willing to admit there is an issue, it won't change.
You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

I don't *blame* the gaming industry any more than the gun industry or the entertainment industry for these shootings.
If it wasn't an AR-15 it would have been a rifle or shotgun or something else. If there were no guns, obviously shootings wouldn't happen but violence would still exist. But that isn't the world we live in, and we make violence "easy". And before that little switch in your brain flips and you think for a second that I am saying we should ban or take away ANYTHING (guns, video games, movies) then you are 100% wrong. More laws are not the answer and are far from it.

What I think needs to change is our attitudes towards violence. OUR attitude. EVERYONE has a part to play in this, and it has to be voluntary. The NRA needs to get their heads out of their asses and realize that providing access to any type of firearm with no restrictions or checks will make it much easier for everyone to have guns - and that includes people who really shouldn't have them. (and yes, I know that determining WHO that is would be nearly impossible). But we have to try. Movies/TV/Entertainment companies (including video gaming industry) needs to understand that they DO glorify violence. We are inundated with violence, from FPS games to movies to TV shows. I don't watch any of them, but there are entire series of TV shows around horribly violent acts (CSI, etc). If you can step back for a second and look at it all holistically - it is very saddening.

I think that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show said it well when they said we have to change our attitude and culture around guns. They likened it to smoking. The message has to change, the overall general attitude towards things. Think about these trials that occur, like the Jodi Arias trial. It was a horrible murder, but let's be honest - in this country and world it happens a lot. But there are shows that are dedicated to follow the trial, to examine it, to discuss it in such desensitizing detail that it is sickening. I really don't get the whole obsession that people have with violence. It's why I quit watching the local news. Over time, I think that it really starts to alter your way of thinking about the world. If any of you have kids, especially boys, then there are nerf guns and foam swords and killing this and that, good guys vs bad guys... again, nothing new. But that can't be our only message that they see, and it is harder and harder to shield them from that. My own kids had to go through a "shooter" drill at school, and that is how they learned about the Newtown shootings. They are in K and 2nd grade!

What I would really like to see is the video gaming industry to take some kind of responsibility for this - not because they are at fault, but because it is the right thing to do. And not by slapping ratings on games, or limiting sales to minors, or anything like that. But by really taking an internal look at what they are producing and self-regulate it. They have the power to influence through what they do, and I think the message being sent is a very harmful one.

That sounds horrible. You are starving yourself, and your body will hate it. Although it is not just about weight loss, I've lost about 13 lbs in 3 months by eating high-quality fat, meat, nuts/seed, vegetables, and cheese. Low-carb - no grains, no sugar. Here's the thing - your body doesn't need carbs in the massive quantities people eat them in. All it does is train your body to live off of glucose as a by-product of insulin production. Not to mention that the way you are eating is not how humans have been eating for 99.99% of the time we've been around. Fat is over twice as dense as an energy source, and fat does NOT make you fat. If you cut out grains, your body will operate off of fat as an energy source. Even if you skip meals, you aren't ravenously hungry because your body can process the fat in your body and use it as energy. You can't do this now, because you are dependent on carbs.

Don't kill yourself - read "Good Calories Bad Calories" or "Why We Get Fat" (a kind of layman's version of GCBC by Gary Taubes.
Then read The Primal Blueprint. It will change your life.

Look at the history of mankind and what we ate in order to evolve to this point. As is pointed out in the documentary "in search of the perfect human diet" if you started at the goal line of a football field and if that was the "dawn of man", and walked all the way to the other goal line, the span of time that we have been eating grains and sugars in large quantities would take up the last 1/2". For 2.5 million years our ancestors were meat-eating primates. The time we have been eating grains (10-20k years ago) is but a blink of an eye. Our bodies evolved eating high-fat diets, so all this low-fat high-carb stuff is literally killing us.

I've been doing a lot of reading on dietary topics, and it is quite amazing how many opinions about our dietary needs are based on nothing but opinion or the opinions of other people. Even the scientific results can be mis-interpreted or looked at in so many ways that you can seemingly show whatever you want from these studies.
There's a ton of stuff out there, like the book "Good Calories Bad Calories" that covers it in depth, but watch this video by Dr Peter Attia. I think it sums it up pretty well. The limits of scientific evidence and the ethics of dietary guidelines -- 60 years of ambiguity

I've been following the Primal Blueprint lifestyle for a few months, and the effects have been pretty amazing.

Two quotes that I try to remember, and wished that everyone else would remember as well...

Believe those who are seeking the truth ; doubt those who find it.

The second is in my signature...

I think "worse" is debatable... a trillion dollar / hundreds-of-thousands-lives-lost nonsense occupation of Iraq, Guantanamo (which he didn't close), and failing economy is hard to fix. Did he fix the economy? Well, not really. Do we know that he prevented another depression? No. Is this something that CAN be fixed in a couple of years? Probably not. Was it something that was created in only a couple of years? Probably not.

While that is not a good situation, it is a far far cry from the Iraq war. I agree with that Bush did with Afganistan. Iraq? No explanation, no reason has ever come close to justifying it. There will always likely be military actions that will be questionable. They know things we will never know, and will have to make the most difficult decisions. Look at the big picture, and who had a positive message and who tried (and succeeded) to keep us afraid with a "war on terror".

Sadly, the president can't fix the system that he's elected into, so as much as people want to complain about president A or B, the entire system is fucked, and even if someone wanted to un-fuck it there is no easy or simple way to do that.

Funny, in your response you didn't say what that reason was. Wikipedia is not the be-all-end-all of information, but I didn't see a reason listed there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War. And wouldn't you think that if you are going to overthrow a country, and not even declare war, and kill thousands upon thousands of your own people - let alone many many others around the world, and spend well over a trillion dollars, that there would have to be a pretty good reason? And that everyone would know what that reason was?

I'm not going to say that we will ever know the reasons behind all of our military actions, there's lots of things that go on that we don't know or probably need to know. Those are big decisions even if one person dies. This President has to make those calls, so will the next one... and all the ones before them. Bush had to deal with 9/11, and he went after them in Afganistan. He set the course for catching Bin Laden, which ended up happening in the Obama administration. To many, that was what needed to happen.

I'm not saying Obama's administration hasn't done this. But let's not just tell part of the story here... from the link you provided "George W. Bush vastly-accelerated the drone strikes the final year of his presidency. A list of the high-ranking victims of the drones was provided to Pakistan in 2009.[22] Obama has broadened these attacks to include targets seeking to destabilize Pakistani civilian government and the attacks of 14 and 16 February 2009 were against training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud"

Look - military stuff happens, CIA stuff happens, etc etc. I don't think that we fully understand it all or that we are in a position to analyze these things. Obama said that he would close Guantanamo (which, he inherited). It's still open. I honestly think that the President learns things when they get in office that not too many people know. That can certainly change their atitude on things. We don't know what he knows.

HOWEVER - you have to consider the scale of the military actions they've undertaken. Do I really need to point to the wiki article that shows the Iraq war and the number of deaths? There has never even been a reasonable explanation for that one, at least not one that would authorize it. Vendettas don't count.