Yep. Mathias Duarte is the single reason I went Android over iOS when coming from webOS. He is slowly but surely "webOS-ifying" Android. Taking the very best UI elements from webOS and merging them slowly into Anrdroid. Expect to see the software button lessen and lessen and more Gesture based UI elements to come in. Eventually even the card metaphor may make a comeback. Full and Proper multitasking FTW!

There isn't any filtration going on. Converters and Oxidizers do just what their names imply. They slow down exhaust gasses and trap heat, thus improving the burn cycle and making the final exhaust "cleaner".

Basically they just ensure that as much of the fuel as possible is fully oxidized and that the vehicle isn't pumping out tons of unburned gas or diesel vapor.

Although they can and do clog, but that's from carbon deposits and/or fuel contamination, not from normal use.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but isn't that rather the point of an internal combustion engine? Gasoline mixed with air under pressure ignited by a spark combusts so violently that it pushes the compression cylinder back? Is that not the definition of a small detonation?

If the explosive force is that powerful, then using less gasoline one should be able to balance out the forces at work at get the desired effect without destroying the engine. It's not the detonation that's bad, it's the amount of kinetic energy released by it.

Depends on the HFCS you are talking about.

According to the USDA, HFCS consists of 24% water, and the rest sugars. The most widely used varieties of high-fructose corn syrup are: HFCS 55 (mostly used in soft drinks), approximately 55% fructose and 42% glucose; and HFCS 42 (used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods), approximately 42% fructose and 53% glucose.[5][6] HFCS-90, approximately 90% fructose and 10% glucose, is used in small quantities for specialty applications, but primarily is used to blend with HFCS 42 to make HFCS 55.[7]

And while they are "sugars" in the chemical sense, none of them are "Sugar" (IE: Cane Sugar), which is sucrose. And this is the critical difference.

Sugar is a needed and necessary nutrient for our bodies. But, much like anything else, the poison is in the dose. For example, our bodies are mostly made up of water. Good old H2O, necessary for all life on Earth. But drink too much water in too short an amount of time and you can die from electrolyte imbalance. By and large it's the dose, not the substance that is poisonous.

Our bodies were designed to take in small amounts of natural sugars from fruits and vegetables. Large amounts of sugars will, as you said, be converted to fat. and can make you lethargic and ill-feeling.

Ironically, (at least in the US) Most soft drinks and other "sugary" foods don't actually have any sugar in them. Instead they use a far more dangerous substance, High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS.

HFCS is a cheap (due to corn subsidies) easy to transport, slow to spoil, and highly soluble in water, making it an ideal sugar substitute for much of the food industry. The downside is that HFCS in any significant amount causes the human body to react in some very adverse ways. HFCS causes thirst, liver damage, diabetes and as has been recently discovered by researchers at Princeton University causes extreme weight gain and obesity far in excess of what simple sugar can do. In particular, HFCS causes weight gain in the belly and torso. HFCS also causes significant increases in the amount of triglycerides in the bloodstream, a major factor in heart disease, the number one killer of adults in the US.

So it's good that you are cutting out the soft drinks and other "sugary" things, but unless you live somewhere that doesn't use HFCS (South America, parts of Europe, China) make sure you are blaming the right thing. otherwise, i think your diet change is a sound one. Lots of fresh meats, fresh vegetables, small amounts of fruit and grains and an absolute minimum of "sweet snacks". (This is basically the "maintenance" portion of the Atkins diet, btw.)

Also, if you live in the US, be sure to join a group lobbying for the repeal of corn subsidies of all kinds. It's the subsidies that make HFCS so cheap. eliminate them, and the food industry will go back to using much more benign sugar.

Yep. Typical Leftist behavior;

When you lose in the arena of ideas, use the courts to FORCE your will upon an unwilling populace.

AGW is a failed ideology. Despite the slavish devotion from many /. members, it's religious tenets have been proven false over and over. Now, in it's dying gasps, it uses brainwashed children and the courts to try and gain a last-minute victory over reality.

This will fail, as have all their other arguments. Reality is the greatest argument against leftist ideology, including the AGW religion.

(Yes, I know I'll get modded "Flamebait" and "Troll" by the scions of AGW that hole up on /. That's fine. All they do by modding me down is prove how weak their own position is.)

What you're saying is that overplanning will never work. Central planning can and will work, provided that central planning only designates targets, and leaves the method to the market to work out

And you have just demonstrated the primary logical fallacy that Central planners always exhibit and that the prior poster was specifically addressing.

Any system of central planning is inevitably doomed to fail simply due to the nature of central planning. That is to say; It never remains merely a framework within which the people can exercise the free market, but always becomes a self-perpetuating system of ever increasing restrictions and attempts to control the free market, until it becomes so overwhelming that it collapses the economy and/or starts a political and/or military revolution.

The reason for this is simple; Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so the the Free Market nature of mankind abhors a control. The Free Market naturally routes around restrictions, regulations and controls to do what it wants. This causes the central planners to attempt more regulations and controls, which immediately prompts more routing around by the Free Market, and on and on and on until the control system is a massive, onerous monstrosity that is crushing the people it is supposed to serve under its weight and destroying the economy of the country that has implemented it.

Central planning cannot and will not ever work. It's like trying to keep a pocket of vacuum floating unrestrained in the middle of an atmosphere. Impossible to do, yet some people keep insisting that they can do it.

It's the same for us. I started ripping DVDs of my kids' shows about 8 years ago as I didn't want them trashing the originals. Now I don't even bother ripping them as all the shows they want to watch are on netflix. We just fire up the Wii and away they go.

Most of what's on the home server video-wise are my personal collection of stuff. (Mythbusters episodes, various Anime that I downloaded before you could get them in the States, other random stuff, etc.) My wife is the only one who even uses the DVD player anymore and even then just to watch the occasional classic movie DVD that Netflix doesn't have available in it's streaming library.

I've also discovered Crunchyroll for Android (yes, I know I'm very late to that party.) and have been streaming Anime on that. We still buy DVDs (no blueray) but just for the sake of having them as part of a collection. I have a few that are several years old and still in the shrinkwrap.

All in all, we are slowly swapping over to all streaming and downloads. There's just no reason save for collecting to keep buying and using DVDs.

Well, that guy or not, you are (sadly) correct. China has far too much economic influence in the world for any nation (even my much beloved USA) to stand up to them.

The Norks, on the other hand, hold no such distinction. The only reason they haven't been stomped into the ground yet is both their proximity to China (China doesn't want a war in it's back yard and all the Nork refugees that would come with it) and the fact that they really are that unimportant in the world.

Of course, should they actually get a viable nuke missile program off the ground AND the USA gets a president with some backbone (Unlike the current "teleprompter-in-chief") then something might be done about it. Maybe. At the rate China is divesting itself of US Bonds, the US won't owe them much debt fairly soon, and will be more free to act.

The next several years should be "interesting" to say the least.

Actually, I've often wondered why the very powerful onboard computer systems of large commercial and military vessels do NOT have some kind of fallback system. Perhaps they do and we simply don't know about it? (How many Sailors are there on /.?)

I would think that a system that calculates position based on both the relative motion of the vessel combined with observable star and land positions (using motion, wind, light and radar sensors) would be an excellent fallback system. Not as accurate as GPS, but much more difficult to mess with technologically.

I like Yvanhoe's "synthetic star" system as well, although that might have the same issues as GPS. Unless one was using reflected visible light via mirrors on the satellites. but then, one would have to think about issues of blocking visible actual stars with giant sunlight reflecting mirrors. I can't imagine the astronomical community around the globe liking you very much if you start washing out the universe with local sunlight reflection.