Milk has a huge amount of lactose in it - i.e. sugar, i.e. carbs.

Then your argument has no usefulness to it. If you simply assert calories in minus calories out equals calories gained, you don't say anything that's useful to anyone. That's because calories out appears to be impossible to measure in its current state. It appears that bacterial fauna is a significant player in what makes up calories out, that's the point of this article.

Congratulations, you didn't read the article. As you see, you are not the only thing digesting what goes in your mouth. It's entirely possible that said skinny person could consume 3500 calories, have their gut fauna convert 1700 of it into undigestible (by human) chemicals, and end up with a resulting actual digested intake of 1800 calories.

This is the point - you can not simply measure the number of calories that go into your mouth, you have to measure how many actually end up in the blood stream.

It may not be quite that simple.

1) After killing off the gut bacteria, the chemical balance of the gut may still favour those same bacteria re-growing
2) It may be that the presence of certain bacteria is what's necessary to lose weight (e.g. maybe there's bacteria that eat substantial amounts of your calorific intake and convert it to something undigestible), and it turns out that in this case the introduced bacteria out-competed these useful weight loss bacteria.

Actually no, overweight is the optimum. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

People who are overweight are 0.94 times as likely to die as people who have normal weight. People who are slightly obese are 0.95 times as likely to die as people who have normal weight. People who are very obese are 1.29 and 1.41 times as likely to die as normal weight. Basically - being really heavy is very bad. Being a little on the chubby side is not.

The benefit is that there are many people who can not for one (legitimate, medical) reason or another receive the vaccine. By having a large proportion of the population vaccinated you stop the disease spreading and you protect even those who can not be vaccinated.

Basically, you do harm to others by not vaccinating (by allowing them to contract deadly diseases).

Uhhh, HPV is the cause of huge numbers of deaths each year. A quick google reveals that cervical cancer rates are 2.3 per 100,000 women per year, aka 3500 deaths a year in the US alone. HPV is the root cause of over 90% of those cancers.

The reason that it's reasonable for the government to mandate what shots your child gets is because your choice does not affect only your child. It affects every child out there that for some reason can not be vaccinated.

Dualling and duelling are different things. Dualling is making something have a dual (a pair). Duelling is shooting someone at dawn.

That's been flat out denied multiple times. The TV show creators have repeatedly stated that part of the contract terms for doing the show are that he produces a series a year, and that they know how it ends already.

Basically, whether he's dead or not, and whether the books are written or not, you'll know the end in 3 years.

What makes you think that ATMs in europe aren't embedded in a small concrete building?

Note - that small concrete building usually has a door in the back of it so that a guy can come along, open it, and then fill up the ATM with cash. That again, is the weak point that the explosion will blow out.

No, no it's not. Europe too had legacy finance systems. We overhauled them - making us first adopters. The difference is not that you were first adopters (you weren't), it's that we actually spent some money to improve things.

Yep, I've never met a really good programmer who didn't use every tool he could exploit to find his bugs. Every one of them that I ever met had a strong leaning towards strongly typed languages, because they could exploit the type checker to find their bugs. They had a strong leaning towards testing, because they could exploit it to find their bugs. They had a strong leaning towards running profiling tools for memory, leaks, performance etc because they could exploit them to show were their code was really bad.

As far as I'm concerned - lesson 1 is to use every tool you possibly can to prop yourself up - get the computer to make you into a good programmer.

Hint - if you think that you're the best coder in the world, and that everyone around you is only outputting a bunch of shitty buggy crap, it's probably time for you to do a bunch of introspection.

It's a well known phenomenon that experts will tend to play down how good they are (because they realise what they don't know), while non-experts will tend to play up how good they are. The fact that you're claiming to be god's gift to man kind, and that everyone else seems to be doing something different is a good indication that you may well be in the latter category.

Don't get me wrong - you may actually be god's gift to man kind, and/or you may be amongst a bunch of incompetent monkeys, but that's not the likely scenario.

Increasing the minimum wage rather than the EITC has the benefit that more money is paid in taxes, not less. The result, not only are you able to help those who do have a minimum wage job (who by the way, typically are poor, and it's ridiculous to assert otherwise), but you're also able to help those who have found themselves out of work. That, and rebuild the completely fucked highways, pay firemen, stop the sewers leaking, ...