Consuming sugar doesn't bother me.

It does bother me. Sugar and high-glycemic carbs trigger hormonal changes which trigger overeating in both animals and humans.

What does bother me is consuming all the preservatives in out food, and all the unnatural sweeteners that are included.

Agreed.

I wonder if high fructose corn syrup, calorie free sweeteners, and to a lesser extend, regular corn syrup....

HFCS is uniquely nasty, even more than sugar and other high-glycemic carbs, because it is absorbed more rapidly, metabolized primarily in the liver (as is the fructose in table sugar, only more slowly), often is contaminated by toxic levels of heavy metals, and also is usually contaminated by enzymes used in its production, which have the lovely side effect of continuing to convert starches in the digestive tract into more fructose, and also damage the intestinal flora which are now known to be a vital part of the immune system.

The "calorie free sweeteners" are almost uniformly awful, although some are more awful than others. Pure stevia is the only one with a reasonable safety record, and even that is usually adulterated with much less safe substances such as maltodextrin, sugar alcohols (which trigger moderate to severe GI distress in many people), or silicon dioxide (sand - supposedly, generally regarded as safe, but known to cause lung cancer if aspirated).

try going 2 weeks without any sugar except for naturally occurring sugars in fruits and the like... you'll get your actual sense of sweetness back

Agreed. I've tried it and it absolutely does work, but, beyond just losing a lot of the "sweet tooth" which is really an addiction, one will generally feel much better as well, and one's appetite also will gradually return to normal (most of us who consume excess sugar do NOT have normal appetites, and never will, short of eliminating sugar and other toxic sweeteners from our diets.)

I would say most Americans' health would benefit more by greatly reducing sugar and HFCS, if not eliminating them outright, than by any other single lifestyle change. But in addition to this, I strongly suggest:

• minimizing trans fats ("partially hydrogenated" anything);
• filtering one's drinking water (carbon filter and/or reverse osmosis);
• avoiding huge excesses of any single food;
• eating a varied, nutrient-dense diet;
• insofar as one can, avoiding pesticides and herbicides (e.g., wash fruit and veggies, try to buy organic or free range when possible, etc.); and
• supplementing carefully. Most of us can't get optimal amounts of vitamins C or D from our diets. Cheap multivitamins are known to do more harm than good, but judicious use of high-quality supplements, tailored to one's specific situation, is something I do, and recommend.

We do all these things, and, although I'm still overweight, I'm losing maybe 1-2 pounds a year, and none of us are hardly ever sick, even when exposed to other kids who are.

So it's perfectly ok with you that thousands of people die in avoidable accidents, and BILLIONS die because they don't have the energy they need to eat, work, stay warm, get the medicines they need, and so forth? Well, fuck you too.

Something like that is part of the federal rules of civil procedure, as well as those of most if not all states. Unfortunately it is up to the judge to enforce and many judges simply won't, unless the prosecution has done something to piss him or her off. Collusion between cops, prosecutors, and judges is very common, as in the end they all work for the same system and have much to gain and little to lose by cooperating.

-1. Offended. :) Seriously, though, your point is noted, and valid, not in every case, but in far too many. Many FLOSS projects, including some I like a lot, suffer from poor, outdated, or no documentation. I am often still willing to use it myself, if I can figure out how. But I'm reluctant to use it to build software for clients, knowing someone else without my familiarity with these projects may have to maintain it. PostgreSQL and (although I dislike it for other reasons) PHP have decent documentation which I believe has contributed to the popularity of both projects. These are a few good examples. There are plenty of bad ones as well. Generally, it is hard to feel good about the quality of a software project, especially if it is a development tool, server, or some other component of a larger software solution, if it suffers from inadequate documentation.

I'm willing to give credit where credit is due, and Microsoft's enterprise products have improved a great deal. Their development tools are great. C# is about as good as I can imagine a compiled language ever becoming. Yet, constant churn is built into the platform. (E.g.: MFC -> VB6 -> WinForms -> WPF -> WinRT; ODBC -> OLE DB -> ADO -> ADO.NET -> EF.) One can't avoid it, due to the need for constant patching. And it is not uncommon for that churn to remove functionality without fully replacing it, or to degrade the user experience, rather than improving it. So I still see the open source alternatives as tending toward lower TCO, even if they require a somewhat larger investment in money and time up front. If you want something yesterday, I don't think the MS stack can be beat. You'll get something decent quickly and for minimal cost. But over time it will rot. It will end up costing more and more and more over time, just to keep it alive. If you want something to last, then build it using FLOSS technologies. More cost up front, maybe even a bit more time, but the potential to be WAY more solid, robust, and future-proof than anything coming from Redmond, even though the latter has improved a lot over the years.

You do realize, I hope, that cars with automatic transmissions (a) dominate within the U.S., and (b) do not have clutches?

My condition does come with a mild upside that some people might find valuable (although I see the downside as far worse). I don't really see much upside to being blind or deaf. But some deaf people, apparently, do. I may not understand, but, so long as no one's rights are being violated, they are free to believe or think or act as they please.

Perhaps the sporadically striking fast food workers who were previously thought to be powerless can set an example for us.

They are powerless. No amount of bullying or legislation can force someone to pay $15 per hour to someone who adds less than $15 per hour to the profitability of the business. Any employer forced to do so will employ fewer people, raise prices, or go out of business.

My wife is from the Balkans. I understand that language is a focus around which cultures tend to be built. However, for that very reason, I think it useful to learn multiple languages. The Macedonian who can speak both Macedonian and Albanian, or the American who can speak both English and Spanish, will be able to communicate with, and benefit and benefit from, both cultures.

Because I am mildly autistic (fka Asperger's) I can do a handful of things brilliantly, such as software development. Yet, it is still a handicap, and if there were some way I could become "normal" in this area, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I would very gladly give up the benefits of being good at a few things, in exchange for being able to learn how to be a friend, or to read people's emotions, or to know how to rejoice with someone who is happy or comfort someone who is sad. Or even to be able to talk to someone without inadvertently upsetting, disappointing, and hurting him or her on a regular basis. While my handicap may be mild compared to others', and while it may even be a part of God's plan for my life, I'm not going to pretend that it isn't a handicap, or that it doesn't hurt, or that it is better to be a rude, socially insensitive jerk than not to.

It mirrors ghetto (NOT Black) culture. Not all Black people subscribe to the idea that victimhood is superior to empowerment, although, unfortunately, many of their self-appointed "leaders" do. And you will find plenty of the same attitude among underachieving members of the white and other minority communities as well.

Many mobile apps use functionality not easily available in HTML5. Is there some reason one could not write a native app to serve as a front end to this functionality, and then communicate with it within HTML5 via WebSocket or some similar mechanism?

Sorry, but I was doing software development 10 years ago, at which point XP was already several years old, and there were DEFINITELY alternatives to the Microsoft technology stack for rich client development (including but not limited to Qt, Wx, GTK, Python, PostgreSQL, Java, and, very shortly afterward, Mono) and a lot of what we really needed to be future-proof was already being deployed as a Web application on Java servers. All of those alternatives are better, more mature and more mainstream now, but they certainly did exist in 2004.

Now, I knew that XP would not be around forever, because Vista hadn't been, 2000 hadn't been, ME hadn't been, 98 hadn't been, 95 hadn't been, 3.1 hadn't been, and so on and so forth. Win 7/8/8.1 won't be either. I was constrained by my employer's insistence . . . contrary to my own recommendations . . . to develop rich-client software using the Microsoft tool stack almost exclusively. So I did. But I also did what I could, as a conscientious employee, to minimize and isolate dependencies on specific OS and software versions, and to protect the source code (even though our SCC deployments were in their infancy at that time), so there would always be a clear and relatively inexpensive upgrade path.

There certainly were people back then still making IE6-only "Web apps" infested with ActiveX crud. There were still people using VB6 even though it was already known it would not be supported indefinitely and .NET was already in production. There were people who did not make future-proof decisions. And many of them built software that was marginally cheaper to build, or got deployed marginally sooner. But none of that rot lasted. It all died slow, painful, and expensive deaths. The stuff that was built to last, whether by me, or anyone else, generally did. So I'm not buying the excuse of "no better option existed 10 years ago." Many better options did.

Chile actually has, overall, one of the better economies in Latin America and the Southern Hemisphere, although much of the development and wealth are concentrated in the central part of the country (Santiago and Valparaiso). I would assume that like almost every other part of the world, Android is much more dominant than iOS devices, which sell well only in the U.S. and a handful of other countries.

The principle I think you are trying to describe here is called comparative advantage and is fundamental to any understanding of economics. That people do not understand it, is why the powerful (politicians and those who own them) are able to manipulate the public into doing what serves the interests of the powerful rather than their own.