I have heard circumstances like this multiple times. It really bothers me that we have invented a tax code that is on par with the game "go" as far as its ability to be computerized. There are extremely talented individuals making a living interpreting our tax code. Those same people could be doing something far more useful to society than they are now, but we have created an entire industry that sucks them away from more useful endeavors by cobbling together a tax code that is a mashup of bribes to interest groups, bribes to voters, authoritarian interference with our individual lives, and a glass ceiling protecting the one percent. If any highschool graduate can't just sit down with a calculator and pay the *exact* amount owed, we have done something wrong.

I got down to a healthy weight by counting calories (or so I thought). Much later, I decided I wanted to lose more and see my sixpack, so I divided my caloric intake by 3... and gained 25lbs. I'm now overweight again. That is impossible I thought, thermodynamics works! But I realized I was sleeping almost 12hrs a day, and barely moving the rest of it. It seems fairly clear that at least *my* body can save energy. The military studies that indicate the body will not enter starvation mode until you hit 6% body fat no matter how little you eat only worked that way because the soldiers maintained the same level of daily activity. They were forced to. You have to monitor your calories expended, it can vary. The previous time I had lost weight, I had been doing a lot of weight lifting just before cutting calories, and I think my lost weight was a combination of losing a huge amount of muscle mass, and the high number of calories burned by that resting muscle that I had built. So now I'm off building muscle again and eating the number of calories I would expend if I were the weight I want to be, so that I asymptote down to that weight.

Here I assumed you just had a disconnect between your brain and your keyboard. But with a name like Bob_Who this was all an elaborate set up wasn't it? After all, a lot of planets may have a north, but they don't all point roughly orthogonal to the local star.

It would be easy for your employer, and for schools to simply adjust the time at which people are expected to arrive. If some employers did it and others didn't, or some did it by different amounts or on different dates, it would also thin traffic at rush hour and lunch which could save lives, but cost more in labor for places that are only open at those times. If I were an employer I would have the work day begin after sunrise by the amount of my employees average commute, plus some margin. So your start time is different each day by a minute or two. I would rather have them mix up now and then and be a little late, than wake up in the dark and be groggy for a few hours.

Maintaining and extending software is *always* hard. If abandoning concepts such as minimizing coupling, or hiding data make the design/implementation easier, then do it. Code that tries to adhere to these best practices when the problem space makes it difficult is consistently horrendous to extend and no easier to maintain. Not all problems can be partitioned out into neatly abstracted uncoupled cohesive realms of responsibility. Beauty is code that works well and is easy to extend, not code that is easy to understand. The latter is often impossible despite all our best efforts.

Full disclosure, I mostly write research code now, and my observations are based on over a decade of production coding experience that is probably not representative of normal business/web software.

What about binaural beats (or however you spell that)? I thought they specifically forced the left and right brain to communicate. And would white/pink noise act as an impairment, or just raise the noise floor effectively deleting all the other background noise? On my todo list is to make a completely analog battery powered pink noise generator for isolation purposes.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he is suggesting that progressives (educated scientifically literate liberals) want a philosopher king. Woodrow Wilson could be considered the prototype of such a king. An authoritarian schoolmaster if there ever was one. Willing to trample the rights of the individual to make the correct decision *for* that individual. The fact he was very well educated and probably right quite a large portion of the time doesn't alleviate the effects of removing individual responsibility and freedom upon creative thought.

And the notion that a greedy optimization algorithm like a anarcho-capitalist pure free market is so incredibly elegant that it must work, neglects the nasty inelegant humans that are part of that market and screw everything up. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how elegant it is. I think that is the mysticism the gp was talking about. The faith Ron Paul has placed in elegant ideas often involves handwaving and appeals to common sense, rather than empircal tests. I think that is somewhat unfair as he does cite historical incidents, he just has different interpretations from his detractors. Also doing correctly scaled economic tests that control for all the variables is impossible. Still, he's kinda handwavy even compared to economists.

Does the classic gnome share that problem? Or are you talking gnome 3? You can select either. I like the new gnome 3, but I never used the mouse much and the keyboard shortcuts didn't change. If you are starting from scratch though, you are right, it makes no sense to pick a distro that you would have to customize, if there are others that are configured as you wish. I was simply pointing out that if it is already installed, and you decide you don't like the windowmanager, switching them is trivial, and because people have different preferences, each user can have their own window manager. That is one of my favorite aspects of linux.

Charge cycles are not a lithium ion batteries worst problem. Rather it is age. They lose 20% of their capacity every year in ideal temperatures. In Phoenix the nissan leaf was losing upwards of 50% of its capacity (read range) in the first year due to the heat. Also I wish the batteries weren't so heavy, I like tiny light cars, and the tesla roadster's battery pack was 450kg, the only reason they got the weight down to 2700lbs was all the carbon fiber. ICE + fuel tank still weighs less than electric motor + battery pack. I want an electric car, for the torque and the elegant simplicity, but the battery life is a deal breaker for me until my city has a recycling station for them, and the cost of swapping them once a year is even with the maintenance on an ICE car.

While I like xubuntu, wouldn't it have been easier just to download a new window manager? It is pretty seamless. Ubuntu was the easiest thing to get running on my old macbook pro, but I didn't like unity. It took less than minute to switch to my preference, which I will not state, as it is even less popular than unity. But if you want ice or enlightenment or windowmaker or kde, or classic gnome, they are all immediate options with just a few clicks. That said, I still wish I could get fedora running, but the UEFI for macbooks is not quite standard, and fedora doesn't put up with it last I checked.

Rule followers caused the holocaust!

Also we tend to have higher blood pressure :( It bothers me when people keep talking on their phone, even though I know it shouldn't. And deep down, I wish I was daring enough to continue reading my eBook, even in airplane mode. Also, seriously, why don't people signal when they are changing lanes?

If you are referencing doom, d&d actually came first (1975).

My parents also explained to me that retaliating against a bully would get me in trouble, because the bully's punch caught the corner of a teacher's eye, and the second punch (mine) would occur after the teacher was looking. It happened that way once, but usually the teachers didn't notice either their attack or my retaliation. Teacher's aren't superhuman, they can't be everywhere, and bullies pick their time and place carefully, kids have to handle some of this on their own, even though we wish they didn't.

Not only has mathematical ability been correlated with music, people who don't enjoy music scare me a little. Someone once said that liking at least one song by Nina Simone was a prerequisite for humanity. Shakespeare regularly had his antagonists show an indifference to music. I think he might have been on to something.

I blame the complete lack of tolerance for violence in schools. Ask someone who graduated in the last ten years about the fights they got into at school. Now ask someone 20 or even just 10 years older than that the same question. It was a relatively rapid change where occasional fights were the norm, to being unthinkable. I don't know if it was us applying rules that made sense for schools where kids brought shivs, to schools that didn't have anything more than normal scuffles, or just the general risk aversion society has developed. Parents teaching their children to always walk away from a fight didn't help. In an adult life that makes sense. If someone is violent you get out of there. You will probably never see that person again and it doesn't matter what impression you make. School is a lot more like prison. If your kid walks (or worse runs) away from a bully, he will see that bully again tommorow, now having the left the impression of weakness. My parents taught me it was ok to defend yourself, and I figured out on my own that the best method for deterring a bully is hyperescalation. From k-12 I can count on one hand the number of times it was necessary, but today I would have been expelled. So today we are forced to tell our children to take the beating or to continually run and hide, because of the intelerance of our schools for violence.