I know it sounds vain but it does also have practical applications for people with muscular deficiencies owing to immobility. From what I've gathered, no one really knows what happens, precisely, to cause muscles to "grow". Sure, there's a hundred different theories tossed around on body building forums, but a lot of sounds more like pseudo-biological nonsense rather than real science. There's precious little experiment in the field and my lay understanding is that it is because the only method of looking at muscles is biopsy.

That's not true today, the Moto G and to a lesser extent the Moto E are fine phones, and not everybody is so silly as to waste money on "free" phones with inflated monthly costs. And because the Moto G is such a good phone the competition seems to be upping their game as there were quite a few non-hobbled sub $200 (off contract) phones announced at this years E3.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

Spy satellites aren't offensive, they're intelligence assets and good intelligence about equal opponents leads to more peace and calm, not more war. The Cuban missile crisis is a good example of this in action.

If there's a war with another superpower it's all over anyways because any general who see his realtime intelligence assets quickly going away is going to assume it's part of a preemptive strike plan and so will recommend we launch. That's why the idea of blinding the enemy is so dangerous, in a MAD scenario the only thing keeping the peace is the ability to verify that your enemy is not trying to perform a first strike.

Not to mention it's $200 more expensive than the Dell Venue 8 Pro, it's not a Surface competitor so it needs to be targeted at the price range of the Venue and the 7-8" Android tablets, not at the ipad mini.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

Wait, you completely misunderstand, the USER can lock the device using the find my iphone feature, when they return the property it cannot be reused until they enter their icloud account password after a device reset. This isn't about IT's ability to lock the device, that exists for any Activesync device, this is about a piece of company property being tied to a users icloud account at the hardware level.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

Of those only music is something I normally repeat, I own a few hundred albums and I've listened to most of them many, many times despite having a Pandora subscription. Pandora is background noise/going to sleep noise for me, the act of listening to an album is a completely different experience. Then again I'm a self identifying non-stupid audiophile (better looking lamp cord is find for me, no moster cables in my system, but I did spend $2,100 on high quality speakers) so my enjoyment derived from music and my habits of consuming it are probably fairly atypical =)