High Fructose Corn Syrup has turned us into a nation too fat for everything from coffins to military service. numerous studies concur this isnt sugar. Links please. And please analyze the language of those studies to see how they are damning HFCS while rendering other sources of fructose-apples, grapes, etc.-- as harmless.

Ah nevermind, no need to bother. You are clearly just one of the neo-luddite brigade. Transfats are of course bad and the health officials responsible for pushing it should be taken to task, but the danger of "processed" foods is nothing compared to the danger posed by the marketing- and luddite-driven pro-"organic" movement.

Quick, I've noticed you've left aspartame off of your list! You'd better put it on there because it causes brain cancer! Wait no, that one was always bullshit. You'd better put it on there because it causes kidney damage! Wait, crap, also bullshit. You'd better put it on there because a recent small-scale preliminary animal study implied it might cause a gut flora alteration resulting in some weight gain! *Whew*, that was a close one. That one isn't conclusively disproven yet, so the organic stevia industry should be safe at least for another year or two.

How does this neoluddite shit keep getting modded up? If you're against sugar then fine, but the anti-HFCS movement is mostly completely fine with table sugar used as a substitute, and it appears that absolutely none of these blowhards are advocating treating the fructose in fruits the same as the fructose in corn.

If you're against HFCS but pro-grape juice (increasingly being used as a sweetener in some products that want to avoid HFCS cooties), you are either a Dr. Oz-loving neo-Luddite moron who needs to turn in his geek card immediately or you are sitting on some earthshaking unpublished scientific studies.

Really? This is really the shit that gets modded up to +5 these days, again and again? Do I even have to spell out what's wrong with it?

On your fructose rantings: your explanation, if true, vilifies almost all fruits just as much as it does HFCS. No doubt you'll come up with some anecdotal, pulled-out-of-your-ass justification for treating HFCS differently, though.

Also, let's just keep completely ignoring the fact that heart disease and stroke are top killers worldwide, even in countries where they have never heard of HFCS.

He didn't say C++ was worthless. He said it would be a pretty bad thing if it was "the best tool" or "the best we can do", and going by the rest of your comment I'm not sure if you'd completely disagree.

Take away its heritage advantages (libraries and compilers-- "it's popular for being popular"), and you are left with what exactly?

Let's see, you have almost-foolproof C compatibility... except most other languages can link to C code. Annnnnd... hmm. I can't really think of anything else. High performance OO maybe, but other languages can do that in more powerful ways (including Objective C).

I wasn't talking about the performance in one single instant in time'; I was talking about using the same piece of proprietary software (remember, this is FREE proprietary, not $$$-proprietary) over the course of several years. Do you have any examples of this working out for you? Because my experience is that free proprietary software does not say free, does not stay updated, does not stay malware-free and/or does not stay usable for very long.

I agree, although unfortunately a good chunk of your post exemplifies this. Corn and "starches" are bad, but fruit is good.... because the fructose in fruit is magically awesome but the fructose in corn is somehow tainted. And everyone knows that white rice is the most fatten of all foods, just ask the 3+ billion asians. Oh, wait.

There is certainly evidence that carbs were pushed way too hard in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the mouths of neo-Atkins/paleo/anti-corn/anti-gluten/anti-aspartame nutjobs should be believed. At the end of the day, it's about too many calories. While it's possible to alter one's metabolism a bit and/or feel fuller by eating different sorts of foods, any argument re: obesity that doesn't mention calories can be safely ignored as faddish nonsense.

We don't know exactly how rare solar flare EMPs are, but we know that they can be bad and we managed to miss another one bad one a few years ago. I would say this should be the primary reason for securing the power grid; resistance to nuclear EMPs is just a desirable side effect.

What are you talking about? This isn't astrology here; this is well-understood science. We have some EMP data from old atmospheric nuclear tests, and if need be we can create low level (non-nuclear) EMPs for further modeling. This is just electrical engineering. Of course we can make sound predictions about whether or not specific types of protection will work

North Korea has nuclear weapons and will soon have the ability to deliver one to the west coast of the USA. What we going to do about it? Mostly nothing, because China will be very annoyed if we invade and we know that Seoul could be utterly destroyed even by conventional weapons if the North Koreans tried.

Despite widespread mockery, nuclear disaster mitigation (yes, including duck and cover) can work, and if we're talking about realistic measures we can take to limit collateral damage I can think of nothing more important than preserving the power grid.

I'm not commenting on the costs involved or where this should be on our national priority list, but it's a sound idea.

I don't think that's a settled debate. The Parthenon is seeing some fairly major restorations, not a total rebuild but you can see in the photos that new marble is definitely being laid on top of old. It's understandable that people are nostalgic for what they know, but there's also a pretty clear argument for seeing something as it was and as it was intended by those of the culture that created it, as opposed to merely seeing the ruins of a building that was blown-up by barbarians in a relatively paltry and uninteresting battle centuries later. Just think about the implications of your argument here--if an earthquake damages a monument, that damage should be left there to remind us of the earthquake? Should the Elgin marbles be permanently left out of the Parthenon to remind us of their theft? Should the damage to the Mona Lisa not been repaired, so as to remind us of the vandals? I feel the bias here must always be on the side of restoration, provided such restoration does not damage any of the original work.

Of course, some people like ruins for their own sake, including Hilter. So, I mean, I totally understand if you still disagree with me. It just means you're some kind of Nazi.

/Godwin

This may or may not be the attitude of the majority of users going in, but if you are clear upfront about which programs are proprietary and which are open source then people will learn on their own that open source programs are simply more reliable in a future-proof sense. (Much less likely to stagnate without a fork, or to be overhauled with a crappy new interface, or suddenly modified to include malware/crapware features.) It might take them a few years to figure this out, but you can assist in the learning experience by clearly labeling what is and is not open source.

See the examples I give in this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I'm pretty sure these objections are pretty easy to defend against. No compensation for dead or comatose donors, for instance. Ideally you would allow a way around this with a detailed written directive, but if you're so positive that this could be abused then it can be disallowed--there are billions of healthy, mentally sound people walking around with a spare. With a properly regulated incentive system and public education about the relative safety of kidney donation, it seems pretty clear that everyone on the waiting list could be taken care of.

"During the operation we had to remove a kidney, sorry, but thanks that you signed that form that indemnifies us." ==> that's nonsense. They aren't doing that now, are they? They would be sued into oblivion if they tried. And when you amend the law, you can simply stipulate that the donor (alive and conscious and lucid) must be the one who receives the money, and this is not transferable to any third party.

A laughably worthless statement. Legalizing compensation for kidney donation in no way implies that someone who walks into a hospital with a bloody baggie refusing to tell them where the kidney came from must be served. The transplant team would obviously be working on both patients and do an assessment beforehand. This isn't Tor for kidneys; this is just compensation.

If the black market for kidneys really does exist (isn't an urban legend), then increasing the supply of legal kidneys can only shrink the black market, not enlarge it. The demand for kidneys is, in other words, rather inelastic. People don't get addicted to them. They don't grind them up and inject them into a vein for a high. At least, I am assuming they don't.

I'll say it again, the average Ubuntu user might not be tremendously technically proficient but they do tend to understand the difference between proprietary-free and open source-free. Many of them probably don't grasp all of the ramifications of that distinction, but I will say most of them are at least aware that there is a distinction. So, just show it to them and let them decide. It would take up a miniscule amount of screen real estate. Just because you can't imagine people caring doesn't mean none of them will.

The distinction between proprietary and open source is absolutely massive on Windows at the moment. Example: Free proprietary PDF readers (Adobe, Foxit, etc.) are a friggin nightmare, crammed with all kinds of stupid unnecessary features and malware / crapware and then unnecessary functionality changes between releases and perhaps nagware to get a premium version. The solution is simple: install Evince and forget about it. If anything bad ever happens to it (although I doubt there will), it will be forked. I don't have to worry about "creative monetizing" shenanigans and I will never have to waste one minute re-learning anything. Same goes for 7-zip over winzip or winrar, and for VLC player vs. proprietary third party media players, etc. The best advice you can give to anyone looking for a free Windows program for regular use is to try to see if there's an open source project that does what they want.

The situation is generally not quite this dire on Linux at the moment, but this can easily change. The fact is the long-term prospects of any project massively, massively depend on whether or not a for-profit company has total control of it. If it is true that most Ubuntu users don't grasp this, well, the easiest way to educate them is to put a little [Proprietary] stamp on stuff and over the course of 5+ years let them watch as half of their proprietary programs die off or get crapped up, while 90%+ of their [Open Source] stamped programs survive (possibly in forked form.)

Self-described libertarians can say some pretty stupid stuff sometimes, but this isn't one of them. If person to person monetary incentives are allowed (within certain guidelines), then there are more kidneys available period. Structured the right away, this could easily mean more kidneys and shorter waiting lists for poor people as well.

You do the Ubuntu crowd a disservice (and yes, I was a user back in the Hoary Hedgehog days, and these days I find Ubuntu-based Mint to be a fairly handy go-to distro when I want a desktop that just works.) Ubuntu users are not synonymous with the Windows or OS X user.

That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.

This seems like an almost reasonable definition until you encounter the millions of people who seem to insist that golf is a sport. Or bowling.