I don't know about the original poster, and i don't have an iPhone myself, but it's not especially infrequent that when i'm in areas with poor reception i won't have any internet access but still have enough of a connection to make phone calls.

I mean cyberterrorism isn't a huge risk, but "real" terrorism is even less of a problem. It's not like anything like the 9/11 attacks could ever happen again. (As so many people have pointed out, it took the passengers of flight 93 less than an hour to figure out how to prevent that kind of attack from being effective.) Short of terrorists actually managing to acquire a nuclear weapon any direct attacks they carry out will probably be pretty small and totally dwarfed by all the more mundane dangers we face in our day to day lives and have learned to live with.

_If_ cyberterrorists managed to bring down a portion of the powergrid it would probably affect more people than a "regular" attack, though since hospitals and such usually have backup power the actual number of deaths might be lower.

Though to be "fair", the cynical part of me suspects that this has nothing to do with people actually getting grip on how little a risk terrorism actually represents currently and does indeed have a lot more to do with fearmongering and a lack of understanding of computer networks in general.

I reluctantly agree with you. As a mild anti-Microsoft fanboy and a lifetime avid gamer i'm pissed that they were able to use monopoly profits from another industry to leverage their way into the video game industry (they poured billions of dollars into the project without the original XBox ever making a profit) but claiming that that division isn't a big success now would be a pretty serious case of denialism.

Apparently a lot of people have forgotten every other definition of hack besides the most popular one? "In modern computing terminology, a kludge (or often a 'hack') is a solution to a problem, doing a task, or fixing a system that is inefficient, inelegant, or even unfathomable, but which nevertheless (more or less) works."

What they did most definitely qualifies as a hack. It's an awkward short term solution to a very particular and non-standard problem. I'm not saying it's not _also_ fraud, but it's definitely a hack.

Yes. When all the cars are automated speed limits can be raised and the cars will travel in convey formation, each car inches away from the one in front of it. Since each car will know what all the other cars are doing (presuming the system is well designed of course) when the first car see something it needs to slow down for it can instantly tell all the other cars in the pack and they will all slow down together, so no need for stopping space inbetween them. So you'll have more cars packed in a smaller volume traveling faster.

Furthermore because of that ability to communicate with each other when there is too much traffic on the freeway all the cars will just slow down a little instead of producing the compression waves that currently cause traffic jams/congestion.

So not quite magic, but it is a neat trick.

Well here's the thing. As a neophyte i got halfway through your post before my brain glazed over and i was going "he wants me to do _what_?"

It sounds like you (and rycamor judging from his posts above) are geeks for whom exercise/nutrition is one of your areas of interest. You want to dive in and figure out everything about it. However for a lot of geeks when we encounter a problem outside our areas of interest we don't want to delve into the subject, we just want a quick hack or script to get us the results we want so we can carry on with our actual areas of interest.

If someone is just interested in losing a little weight and getting in slightly better shape then throwing a paragraph or two at them about how they should completely change their diet and providing a list of a half dozen exercise regimes they should be following to get the most effective results is just going to scare them off. For someone just getting started "don't change what you eat, just eat a little less" and "why don't you spend a couple weeks doing push-ups?" are entirely reasonable suggestions. Maybe when they get done with that they'll feel like something a little more ambitious, but even if not then at least they've accomplished something. I really don't give a damn about diminishing returns or hypertrophy (i'm not even sure what that is, much less if i ought to be concerned about it or not,) if in three or four more weeks i'm actually able to do 100 push-ups i'm going to be really frickin impressed with myself.

Well again, we're looking at two views of the truth, kind of like Newton and Einstein.

First of all, i never said anything about what percentage of calories go towards fat, i said it doesn't matter if the calories spend some time as fat before getting burned (speaking purely from a weight loss perspective.)

As for an absolute rule regarding overall number of calories, well there is one. It's called the law of conservation of energy. The sum of all the inputs has to equal the sum of all the outputs. If you're using more energy that you're getting it generally doesn't matter if some of the incoming calories get turned to fat, in the grand scheme of things they're not going to stay that way for long. Believing that everything has to stay balanced is only an over-simplification if you also believe that you blindly trust the numbers written on nutrition labels and exercise websites instead of taking them as general guidelines.

Again of course the difficulty is in measuring all the inputs and outputs. I suspect that the inputs are _probably_ pretty constant for everyone. At least except in for weird genetic cases i'm reasonably certain that if person A and person B both eat 100 Calories of food X then they're both going to gain 100 Calories. The big difference is in the output. Depending on your metabolism you're going to do different things with those calories at different levels of efficiency. So maybe person A can do 100 push-ups with those calories while person B can do 200 push-ups. That's great for person B in times of famine, not so great if they're trying to lose weight.

A wise geek will know that their weight is balanced by the laws of thermodynamics but they will also know that they don't know the exact efficiency at which their own body runs. (At least not without a lot more analysis and testing than most of us want to deal with.) What you're suggesting is varying the kinds of inputs to try and reduce the efficiency of the body, but it's equally valid to accept whatever efficiency your body is currently at and try to balance the incoming and outgoing calories.

Of course none of those changes take place in a vacuum. As you said reducing the efficiency of your system by changing your diet resulted in you consuming more calories, likewise someone who just reduces the number of calories they eat without changing the contents of their diet and increases their exercise level will probably also change their efficiency. (Downwards if they're building more muscle mass and making their metabolism more active, upwards if they're not consuming enough calories and their metabolism goes into starvation mode.) So with both methods it's important to pay attention to the changes in your body and adapt accordingly.

In short your body isn't a computer crunching calorie bits, it's a car burning calorie fuel. Depending on genetics and current diet you may be a super efficient compact or a gas-guzzling muscle car, but there are still rules about how much gas going in results in how much work going out. (Wow, for once a car analogy is actually perfectly appropriate!)

Well you're right, but so am i. In the grand scheme of things if you could measure _exactly_ how many calories you use every day and _exactly_ how many calories you absorb from the food you eat, you could constantly adjust the later to be slightly smaller than the former, and the laws of thermodynamics require that you lose weight. Whether the calories spend some time as fat first or not, you can't produce energy out of nothing.

Of course the complication is that everyone has a different metabolism, and any change to your diet is going to alter your metabolism. And that change will be different for every person, maybe in a small way and maybe in a big way.

On the other hand if you keep your diet the same but reduce the total amount of calories by a large enough amount (subtracting equally from all the kinds of food you eat) then you will lose weight... eventually. Probably not in the fastest possible manner, but it will happen. Likewise if you keep your diet exactly the same but increase your activity level by a large enough amount then you will lose weight... eventually.

Now ideally if you could figure out exactly what your own metabolism is like you could design the perfect diet that would produce the maximum reduction in fat and the maximum increase in muscle over the shortest period of time with the smallest decrease in calories. However that would require a huge amount of medical knowledge (some of which probably doesn't even exist yet) and accumulating an assload of biometric data about yourself. In other words, it would only be possible for the kind of "serious health freaks or competitive athletes who have the time and need to micromanage their eating, sleeping, and physical activities, and later analyzing all of the accumulated data" that most of us seem to agree aren't very common.

So overall a reasonable plan of decreasing the total calories you consume by a moderate amount and increasing your activity level by a moderate amount seems like perfectly sound plan from a thermodynamic standpoint.

(Oh, and you're right, constantly snacking on small amount of high carb foods all day doesn't sound very appealing, but neither does giving up all grains. Especially since i don't suffer from the problems with heartburn and excessive mucus that seem to bother you.)

I agree, i'm interested in the science, but i'm not willing to put the effort into micromanaging my entire life and and analyzing everything in detail.

A geeky friend of mine recently pointed me at the One Hundred Push-Ups program. It appeals to me because it's a webpage, it doesn't require anything complicated in the way of equipment or anything like that, it presents a simple and easy to understand plan with lots of numbers, and it takes place over a specific time period. You follow the plan, and the numbers keep going up till you reach your goal. (Assuming you manage to stick through to the end.) It might take more than six weeks if you have to take some do-overs, but it's definitely a finite period of time at the end of which you should see some definite improvement, something that really appeals to me. (I'm just starting week four myself right now.)

Another site i've used in the past is Calories Per Hour, particularly the BMR and RMR calculator. You can use it in conjunction with an exercise program, or just for setting up a diet plan. There's lots of numbers and math, which appeal to me as a geek, but at the end you have a nice simple number or two which tell you how much you can eat every day if you don't want to gain weight, and how much you can eat every day if you want to lose weight in a methodical and long term manner.

Of course on that note there's also The Hacker's Diet, which similarly takes the fairly straightforward approach that losing weight = consuming less calories than you burn.

You can argue a long time about paleo diet vs atkins diet vs south beach(?) or whatever other fad diet you've heard of, but in the end weight is just a matter of calories in vs calories out. If you want to lose weight you can reduce the calories going in or increase the calories going out. Certainly adjusting the kind of food you eat can make you healthier in other ways, but controlling the number of calories you eat is the first step. And if you start paying attention to the number of calories you eat you'll quickly discover that the healthier you eat the more you get to eat. Even just making the same food at home that you would have gotten at a fast food restaurant will save you a lot of calories than you can then spend on a snack or something. So instead of feeling like you _have_ to eat healthy to fit some particular diet you've decided to subject yourself to, you feel like you're getting rewarded for eating healthy.

The way to build a community is to clearly express what it is that _you_ want out of the game and then attract other people who want the same thing. Do listen to any comments they might have of course because they might come up with something that inspires you, but as long as you're clear up front about what kind of game you're making you're not beholden to them to make any changes you don't want.

Minecraft didn't start out as a poll of "what do you guys want to see in a game?" Notch built the type of game he wanted to make and was lucky enough to build a huge community around it.

Of course there's always the chance that your ideas just won't appeal to enough people to build a self-supporting community, but given how large and diverse the gaming population is it would have to be a pretty extreme case for no one else to like it.

"Any mouse neurodevelopmental geneticists in the audience?"

Squeak! Squeak squeak squeak squeakums. Squeak squeak squeaker squeak!

"Tasmanian Liberal candidate for Bass, Andrew Nikolic"

So who do the Liberals have running for lead singer, guitar and drums?

I wish i was evolved enough to have points to mod you up with.

Ur doin it rong. You're supposed to set up the joke _before_ stopping your post in the middle of a sentence.

For example:

I don't care if they update the UI, as long as they also fix all the memory bloat and the crash problem that keeps happening whenever i tr[NO CARRIER].

Ahhh, so instead of an actual study you want me to go find an episode of a show that is intended at least partially for entertainment, produced by people who from past indications seem to be pro-big business libertarians with an axe to grind on certain subjects.

Since i have neither the time nor the inclination to do so, i checked wikipedia instead. It claims:

So there's no evidence so far that it's more harmful. Sure they grow the stuff in shit, but that's pretty easy to clean off. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers seem to be a bit harder to eliminate completely once you've introduced them to the system. ("Natural" doesn't necessarily mean "healthier", but in a case like this it does mean it's a known quantity that we've had a few tens of thousands of years of experience dealing with.) And duh, no one ever claimed it was as efficient when measured solely on a yield per acre basis. So your claims seem to be one half unsubstantiated and one half straw man.

And as for the claim about taste by the grandparent poster, the next section on wikipedia seems to indicate that there's no evidence that "organic" food tastes any worse than industrial food. (Though i'm quite willing to believe that it doesn't taste particularly better in general either, but that's not the point from my perspective.)