That would be covered under the second half of my phrase.

I read 4 medical journals a week. I read all the food studies. I just read the walnuts study in New England Journal of Medicine. I remember when they were going back and forth on tofu. There's very little solid evidence that eating one type of food over another will make you healthy. Most of it is inferences based on weak studies. And when they try to repeat the studies, they get different results. Not because the doctors are stupid, but because it's very difficult to figure out what's going on. Even the low-fat diet may have been a mistake. Once you have lower overall weight, the specific components of diet don't make much difference. They make a small difference, but not that much.

There are some very good K-12 public schools in the US.

Maybe half the (unionized) public schools in New York City are up to international standards. Parents fight to get their kids in. You'd be crazy to throw those schools out the window.

The other half are in low-income neighborhoods, where the kids have real problems. The good parents are the ones who work two jobs and aren't home to help their kids with their homework.

Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education for the GWH Bush administration and the Clinton administration. She believed all that stuff -- until she looked at the data.

Ravitch said that the one factor that affected standardized test scores more than anything else was family income.

When you fire teachers because their students did badly on high-stakes testing, you're punishing teachers for teaching low-income students. And that's what Obama's Race to the Top, which Gates supported, is doing.

The only way to bring those low-income kids up is to make them middle-income. You can't solve problems by throwing money at them, but you can cause a lot of problems by reducing people to poverty. (And destroying unions is one of the best ways of reducing people to poverty.)

The NAEP, which runs the best-designed standardized tests, compared charter schools with public schools. They found that charter schools overall did worse than public schools. Yet Obama and Gates want to throw public schools out the window and replace them with non-union charter schools.

Read that article by Ravitch that I linked to. She explains it all -- supported by solid evidence, unlike Obama and Gates.

If you believe in testing, and you want to change the schools, look around the world for the students that test best -- usually Finland. They have a public school system with unionized teachers.

Finland is also the country with the greatest economic equality and mobility in the world. They've eliminated poverty, with government handouts when necessary.

THe 6502 was an amazing processor. the Apple II was also a 6502. Unlike it's near contemporaries, the 8086 and Z-80 (and 6800), the instruction set was reduced. It had only 2 data registers (A,B) and two 8 bit address registers ( X Y) and fewer complicated ways to branch. Instead it effectively memory mapped the registers by using instructions like, offset Y by A, treat that as an address and get the byte at that location. Because it could do all that in one clock cycle, This effectively gave it 256 memory mapped registers. It also didn't have separate input lines for perifprials, and instead memory mapped those.

Nearly every instruction took a microsecond. Thus while the clock rate was 1 Mhz, it was much faster than a 4 Mhz 8080 series chip since those could take multiple cycles to do one instruction. Few memory chips (mainly static memory) could keep pace with that clock rate so the memory would inject wait states that further slowed the instruction time. The 6502's leisurley microsecond time was well matched to meory speeds. Moreover, on the 6502 only half the clock cycle was used for the memory fetch. This left the other half free for other things to access memory on a regular basis.

The regularity of that free memory access period was super important. it meant you could do two things. First you could backside the video memory access onto that period. On the 8080s using main memory you could often see gltiches on video displays that would happens when the video access was overridden by the CPU access at irregular clock cycles. As a result most 8080 series based video systems used dedicated video card like a CGA or EGA. Hence we had all these ugly character based graphics with slow video access by I/O in the Intel computer world. In the 6502 world, we had main memory mapped graphics. This is why the C64/Amiga/Apple were so much better at games.

This regular clock rate on the main meory had a wonderful side effect. It meant you could use Dynamic memory which was faster, cheaper, denser, and MUCH MUCH lower power than static memory. With the irregular access rates of the 8080 refreshing a page of dynamic memory requird all sorts tricky circuitry that trried to opportunistically find bus idle times to increment the dynamic refresh address, occasionally having to halt the CPU to do an emergency refresh cycle before the millisecond window of memory lifetime expired. As a result, the 8080 seris computers like Cromenco, Imsai, altair and Northstar all had whopper power supplies and big boxes to supply the cooling and current the static memory needed.

So the C64s and Apples were much nicer machines. However they had a reputation of being gaming machines. At the time that didn't mean "high end" like it does now. It mean toys. the Big Iron micros were perceived as bussiness machines.

Oddly that was exactly backwards. But until Visicalc, the bussiness software tended to be written for the 8080 series.

I think it was this memory mapping style rather than formal I/O lines to dedicated cards for periphrials (keyboard decoders, video, etc..) that lead apple to strive for replacing chips with software. they software decoed the serial lines (rather than using USART chips) they soft sectored the floppy drives rather than using dedicated controller chips, etc... And that was what lead to making the macintosh possible: less hardware to fit in the box, lower cost chip count, lower power more efficient power supplies.

Eventually however the megahertz myth made the PCs seem like more powerful machines than the 68000 and powerPC.

Joel Fuhrman has published popular books himself, but he hasn't published much in the scientific literature, and he makes outlandish claims which show that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/your-disease-your-fault/

He claimed in 2002 that he could cure autoimmune disease on a water-only fast. Since he hasn't won the Nobel prize yet, it doesn't look like anything came of it.

Association isn't causation. People have been comparing Chinese diets to Western diets and other factors for 30 years trying to figure out what's responsible for the differences in disease. They haven't found much. If Fuhrman had found something, he'd be publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which publish stuff like that all the time.

...by sending a NSA --er, NASA drone to spy on them.

Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.

...And then blows around and winds up in another ideal environment, eh? Or just wait for the water to return. Are you purposefully unaware that we're reviving ancient bacteria that were trapped in salt formations by just adding some nutrient rich water?

You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.

Now you're done for.

Pointing that out is more likely to get you jailed than blowing someone/thing up.

Most terrorists have more and better schooling than US high school students.

Including all the banal comments!

It's correct to scoff at folks who are scared of Terrorists. You're insinuating that terrorists are nothing to sneeze at, but The Flu Kills Six Times more people EVERY YEAR than a 9/11 attack. Cars and Cheeseburgers kill FOUR HUNDRED TIMES more people than a 9/11 scale attack. You're OK with pissing away taxes to have government agents protect us from WOW playing terrorists? Come the fuck on, man. You sound fucking hysterical and moronic to boot. Do you want to ask permission from a TSA agent before you're allowed to dial the phone? Do you want a DHS employee riding with you in your car, and tossing out your French fries to "protect" you? No. It's been over a decade since 9/11... The cost of our freedom and privacy spent by the NSA is far too much just to "protect" us from something that's one 4000th of the threat encountered on a trip to McDonalds.

So fucking what if in-game currency is used to to channel funds. The threat is fucking pathetic compared to even the greater threat of falling down in the bathtub.

Everyone that chooses to use their products or communicate with someone who does.

Most of the folk at the NSA are not intelligent. They are worse than script kiddies: The NSA "Cyber Warriors" are tech savvy desk jockeys following a fucking flow chart. They purchase exploits from the black market, like any other thugs. They use an automated deployment system that along with the flow chart assess risk and dictates what exploit to deploy and when to stop for fear of being discovered.

If they all got fired, they'll wind up in middle management somewhere. That's the NSA: A "Cyber Army" of Moronic Middle Men. The few that helped design the equivalent of a web interface for Metasploit and ESCHELON / Carnivore will wind up developing websites and database backends. Ooo, I'm so scared.

Lol, that's like saying we shouldn't worry about flooding because it is always raining somewhere on the planet.

Environmentalism is about not disturbing the balance. The rivers that run into the sea have been doing so for millenia and they didn't just spring up overnight either. They have estuaries with well established ecologies. Rapid and massive change is always destructive.

Emulation is perfectly legal. If you own a copy of the game, you are permitted to format shift it for the purposes of compatibility. From the US Copyright Act Section 117:

(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or