Seriously, having been stuck with rackspace email for as long as I have been, I can only expect things to get better. They could hardly get worse.

One of the beneficial side effects of places like Kaiser ( all in one insurance/provider ) is that they can communicate and enforce such policies as "No antibiotics for viral infections", often in spite of well meaning but ultimately clueless parents.

Smaller practices may still prescribe antibiotics for everything from a sniffle to a stubbed toe, but the bigger places are finally getting it. It's one of the few benefits of consolidating our health care as we are.

There are plenty of airlines in general with a mid-range option. For example British Airways has "World Traveller Plus" on its transatlantic routes. Basically, it's an economy seat with A LOT more legroom, plus a plug in for your laptop, plus things like real metal cutlery instead of plastic. The price varies but last time I flew it was about 25% more expensive than plain economy.

I used to use a small laptop with a 12 inch screen. On a transatlantic flight the teenage girl in the seat in front reclined the seat so violently it was pure luck the screen didn't get trapped and broken. The recline mechanism really needs a damper in it to limit the speed at which it can recline (and on transatlantic flights, reclining is pretty necessary).

For domestic flights, easyJet has the best idea - their seats don't recline at all.

Seriously; in light of all the violations of our "privacy" by the government, what "rights" can we humans be said to retain?

Viewed in that light, however, the answer is probably a depressing "Yes".

So they *shouldn't* aggressively pursue profits?

Strange.

Side note: How fast do you suppose Verizon wireless makes 7.4 million? 3 hours? 4?

Thank you; yes, you are describing exactly what we saw, and continue to see. The business name is an amalgam of the owners, but one of the owners is never out at one of our remote locations, and never has been. Never the less, we have multiple bad reviews bad mouthing that provider, talking about treatment that we don't handle at any of our locations.

It's a shady operation, pure and simple. The more people that I can make aware of that, the better.

The obesity epidemic also correlates with the increase in amount of food eaten and the decrease in the amount of exercise taken.

Who claims fructose is a non-digestable sweetner? Fructose is half of what's in normal sugar (sucrose) and is extremely easy to digest. Fructose is the sugar in US non-diet Coke.

Calorie restriction may increase lifespan more than exercise, but exercise will make it more probable that the achieved lifespan has good quality closer to the end. It's no good boosting your lifespan 10 years if it's going to be 10 years of very poor health and low quality of life caused by chronic conditions caused by chronic lack of exercise.

I support a business who has been targeted by yelp, and it's not pleasant. I can't prove anything, but shortly after turning the abusive sales troll down, we started getting negative reviews. Look up the users making the reviews, and it seems they have a history of making negative reviews. What's more, most reviews were factually and demonstrably inaccurate. We couldn't find any of these users in our system, so we knew they weren't customers.

Now sure, they could have been normal trolls out to do what trolls do, but it just seemed too coincidental that they started popping up after we turned down a business relationship with yelp. Meanwhile, our customers' positive reviews would often never show up on yelp due to their algorithm.

The obvious solution to this entire headache is to dissuade family and friends from using yelp, spread the word far and wide that they are dishonest in their policies and that companies can pay for reviews. As "family IT", we have far more authority than yelp could ever hope for.

Just to give you an idea (and why it is move more AND AND AND eat less), I have a hilly bicycle commute. To and from work is 24 miles. Assuming I average 120 watts power output and it takes 50 minutes each way, that's only 720 kilojoules burned exercising (that's only 171 kcal, or about three quarters of a Mars bar).

(Sure I'll burn more than 171kcal in total but most of that will be energy required just to live, which would be burned even if I were sitting at my computer, so the additional energy burned by 24 miles of cycling is only about 171kcal. Even if we add some inefficiency factors to this for energy lost by muscles, it won't work out much more than a Mars bar's worth of calories).

But the real benefit of this exercise is that it's (a) extremely cheap transport and (b) I feel so much better than during an inactive period.

Portion size. I've not been to Japan, but in my native country, portion size is generally less than half of what it is in the USA. We eat a hell of a lot less.

I spend less than an hour on cooking and less than an hour on cleaning up to make a family meal. If it takes you that long to make a healthy meal you're doing it wrong. If I cook just for myself the entire process of cooking and cleaning up is usually under 20 minutes, and the cooking time doesn't require 100% attention (I can often do other things during the heating phase).