I have an older Acer Aspire One that came with Windows 7 and it's been a great little computer (especially after putting Linux on it).

I've thought about a Chromebook, but I wonder about how they've replaced the caps-lock with a search button. Does that button act like a caps-lock when the machine doesn't have Chrome installed?

I guess I'm thinking of scientific theories. You can't prove that the theory of relativity is true, but only fail to disprove it given the existing data.

I'm guessing now...
I think the theory, "there is a Loch Ness Monster" is not a valid scientific theory because as you demonstrated, it's not falsifiable.

To make it a scientific theory, you'd need to invert it and make the theory, "there is no Loch Ness Monster". This is falsifiable, for the same reason you demonstrated.

Isn't the only thing you actually can do in science? Disprove or fail to disprove, but there is no prove.

You might look into lowering her overall carbohydrate intake, not just the sugar and candy.

I've been cycling vigorously for nearly an hour every day for the last 2 years and actually gained more weight. Until 3 months ago - when I went on a low-carb diet. With that simple change, I've lost more than 30 pounds. I don't restrict calories and eat whenever I'm hungry - I've just gotten rid of all the things like bread, potatoes, rice, etc.

What motivated me for this was a talk about the hormones around appetite and fat regulation. Insulin is the hormone that regulates fat. The more insulin, the more your fat cells store energy. The macronutrient that causes a rise in insulin is carbohydrates. On top of that ghrellin is one of the hormones that regulates how hungry you feel. Insulin suppresses the it, so you feel less full and hungrier.

I've changed my diet to be "low carb/high fat", and it's working great and I feel great. We've been sold a lie over the last 30 years that "fat is bad, fat makes you fat" - It's my belief that all the carbohydrates that replace the fat in "low fat" food is what's making so many of us fat.

So looking at the typical food your wife is eating, try dropping the toast, and the sandwiches, and even those Pepsis (and the potatoes, rice, and pasta that are probably staples of your "reasonable dinner"). Replace them with things like cheese, green veggies, meats, and a little fresh fruit. If she's hungry, it's fine to snack - just not on carb-based foods, so again, cheeses, nuts, veggies, etc.

It's mostly the fats in the foods that help you feel full and not want to eat. And frankly, that's the key. Our strongest instinct is to eat because if we don't, we die. We only only have a limited amount of will-power (read thes studies by Daniel Kahneman). Traditional "eat less" dieting is about trying to exert your limited will against an unlimited instinct to survive - and that's why people lose that fight. In the complex system that is the human metabolism, the key is to find the leverage points and manipulate them - and in this case, it's the hormones. "Don't be hungry" was some advice I read. So eat things that get you feeling full.

I'm not following a specific diet plan other than "as few carbs as possible, especially processed ones - and eat whenever I'm hungry". But you could look to the Southbeach diet as an example of a low-carb diet that might be helpful for you.

The problem with that is you'll end up in a situation where people unwilling to participate in the actual killing of someone will get excluded from the juries. Worse, you may end up with juries with people actually looking forward to getting to pull the trigger and get that head shot. Worse yet, because of this skew in jury composition, you'll probably get more convictions, even when the defendant didn't commit the crime.

Can you recommend some ways to do this?

Except there's a solid causal mechanism in play here. Whales are known to have particularly sensitive sound-receiving organs that also also known to be sensitive to extremely loud sounds like explosions and sonar. And it just so happens that someone was using a highly focused sonar in the time and space these whales turned up dead.

By your logic, a guy going into an auditorium and shooting a bunch of bullets isn't necessarily the cause of all the people found dead there with bullet-holes in them. There's just not a cause and effect relationship... sure, it's a plausible explanation, but that's far from being 'cause and effect'.

Even if democracies are somewhat common for many countries, if people in a country overthrow a dictatorship and establish a democracy, is it not a revolution?

I'm not sure that simply because some other group has a thing that another group getting something like that can't still be revolutionary.

For the military logistics planners, this will certainly dramatically change how they do their work and what they're capable of doing.

One of the coolest examples of machine learning was the TD-Gammon program done by Tesauro at IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon). What makes it remarkable is that while Tesauro wasn't a particularly good Backgammon player, he managed to develop this program that "learned" how to be a great Backgammon player - in fact, it learned strategies that no human players had ever tried before, "TD-Gammon's exclusive training through self-play (rather than tutelage) enabled it to explore strategies that humans previously hadn't considered or had ruled out erroneously. Its success with unorthodox strategies had a significant impact on the backgammon community." So here we have an example of a program exceeding the capabilities of not only its programmer, but most "expert" players as well.

"Good composition" for the most part can be described by a set of rules that could be explicitly programmed, or even better, that a computer could most certainly "learn". It wouldn't take much from there to put the robot in a location with its own camera and let it find its own point of view and composition to paint from.

At that point, would you allow for the robot to be called the artist? Especially if it's able to learn as it goes and "improve"?

When dealing with most visual art, you're restricted to viewing the end product. If I go to the Louvre or the MOMA, I can look at the finished products but cannot see the process by which they were created. These paintings, for the most part, are "art", based solely on their end-state; and the fact that they are in a museum of art.

So what happens when you have a painting made by a machine put up in a gallery next to a painting done by a human being, and you can't tell which is which? A "Turing Test" of sorts. What if you hook the viewers up to an FMRI and see that both paintings generate an equivalent emotional response in the viewer?

If the machine-made painting is "not art" because it was made by a machine, what does that mean for human-made painting? Is it no longer art because it was indistinguishable from something that we've determined is non-art?

At that point, what is the definition of "art"? And the criteria for determining what is and is not art?

Do you remember that guy who had paint forced up his rectum as an enema, and then he stood over a canvas as is sprayed back out? This was considered art (by the artistic community). If that meets the standard for "art" then I'm willing to give a robot (and its creators and programmers) the benefit of the doubt.

I have an Acer AO756, which has nearly identical specs as the C7, except it came with Windows 7 and not Chrome (and was therefore more expensive). However it was easy to just install whatever Linux on it I want.

Does the C7 not allow you to do that? Just wipe the drive (or install a different one) and put whatever you want?

The statement I heard on the news was that they did not allow government have backdoor access to their servers.

But that doesn't say anything about the traffic heading to and from those servers. Think about the name "PRISM" and how it refracts a single ray of light into several. If the network traffic coming into their servers were "refracted" to multiple destinations (say, the originally intended server as well as a government collection site), then technically, the government is not using a backdoor to access the server.

O'Reilley publishing offers $4.95 "ebook upgrade" for any of their physical books you have. And those ebooks are offered in a variety of non-DRM formats.

They probably don't have a lot of the books you read, but it's good to see at least one publisher with a reasonable model.

So we need a TSA to monitor the TSA?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I've tried Fedora a few times but always end up back with either Ubuntu or Mint.

Those things you mention are frustrating but what stopped me cold the last time was the installer. I've been installing Linux off and on for 15 years and even I was left wondering "what the heck is going on here?". I hope they fix that. I can't take the distro seriously when an advanced user can't even feel safe/certain about the install process.