I sense confirmation bias. Doesn't make it true or not true.

Hard to know what is true: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269

Personally my health noticeably deteriorates when I don't include some dead animal in my diet. It might be possible to substitute insects but is raising and killing a bunch of insects less morally objectionable to raising and killing chickens, rabbits or cows? If so, why?

Either way your "general consensus" is debatable at best and delusional at worst.

No no!! You have it all wrong. As I've posted before every person sequesters almost a kilo of carbon in their body. In fact (and this works in favor of the American propensity to obesity) the fatter you are the more carbon you are sequestering.

So the right plan is:

1. Have lots of babies
2. Feed them really well
3. When people die bury them in a desert where they will dry out without rotting so the water can be recycled leaving the carbon still sequestered.
4. Enjoy your newly created global cooling.

  BTW I made up the "about one kilo" part and I'm too lazy to google for a better estimate.

"Fear the Libertarians! If they get their way, the government will leave you alone! Oh, the Horror!"

I'm all for you and me being left alone, it is the leaving alone of companies such as BP that worries me. Any ideology looks good until you bring in all the dirty details of reality.

It is 100% true that planned economies are unworkable. It is also true that there is a deep running issue with free market capitalism. If you honestly believe that most or all poverty in the US can be root caused to lack of effort or capability on the behalf to the afflicted then stop reading this comment now. You are yourself burdened with a very difficult to cure affliction and there is little to no point in engaging in conversation with you.

If you have been around for a while and you have been paying attention you might be starting to wonder if there is something more deeply wrong. There is. It was root caused along with a likely very good solution over 100 years ago.

Free market economies in conjunction with democracy still have great potential as a cornerstone to a free and great world. However with private control of natural resources (land, oil, water etc.) the system will always devolve to, well, what we have now. Economic crap.

By the way, some folks may have riled at the natural resources sentence above, possibly imagining that it implied government control or ownership of those resources. Nothing could be further from the truth. Government control and ownership is *not* needed and is not necessary to solve this problem. The rest I leave as an exercise for anyone interested.

Maybe there is a middle road? Reasonable sanitation (ya know, soap up the groin, armpits and feet when showering and all that) but cut out the obsessive stuff. At work we have little things that you can use to spray your hands with antibacterial solution at the exit from stairwells. People take antibiotics "just in case", and so forth.

Maybe less really is more sometimes. I.e. there probably is such a thing as being too clean. No need to swing to the other extreme.

Garbage collection is now so good that heap memory allocation intensive programs will likely run slightly faster--in addition to vastly safer--in java than C.

I sure wish my day to day experiences with java based software supported your statement.

Wine is the elf binary part. The rest is libraries. The issue I see with DVDFab is it costs $$. Some of us don't have much of that stuff these days.

Uh, 300 watts an hour? Watts are a unit of power. It is "300 watts". I guess you could say that the energy consumption will be 300 watt-hrs per hour. We pay 0.06 $/kWhr here in AZ last time I checked. That means it will cost you roughly 0.3 * 0.06 * 24 = 0.43 $/day to run or about $160 per year.

Well said. Ask it another way: What innovative *recent* invention would likely be kept secret were it not protected by patents? I.e. if we eliminated patents what would we lose as a society? I have two probably patentable ideas that as far as I'm concerned will go with me to the grave. If I publish them I get nothing and if I patent them I will spend thousands of dollars with only a smidgen of a chance of financial gain. The system fails most individual inventors.

There are some ideas that might work to fix the system. I like the idea that if your patent is challenged and you lose then you can get your fees back from the patent office. Anything that keeps the patent office honest would likely help.

Which one? I heard horror stories on both...

Unfortunately, the placebo effect doesn't work on most intelligent people, especially those always asking questions. Once you begin to question the effectiveness of a placebo, it nullifies any effect it might have.

Do you have links to any studies that back this up? I'd be very interested if so.

Have either of you Avoidant Personality Disorder sufferers looked into or tried "Constructive Living"? It is based on Morita and Naikan Japanese therapies and seems to really help some people. I've found just listening to the tapes insightful and useful although I don't (that I know of) suffer from any serious disorders (although I been told that my excessive use of parens (a bad habit from writing too much scheme) is really annoying (perhaps someone can coin a creative name for that)).