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)).

I don't understand why this was modded troll. Health is part of the whole "luck" bit. If luck is the random tapestry of reality, i.e. who your parents are and who they know, the social and economic level into which you are born, and the health and physical qualities you have then the whole "self made man" thing is really a bit of a farce.

Still, whatever hand of cards you are dealt in life the choices you make obviously dramatically impact the final outcome and the point of TFA is that putting 10k hours into something seems to be a requirement to being the top of your game (all else equal).

Regarding health care, I think that, a society that invests in the health and education of its people will achieve more than a "you're on your own" society.