Did you look at the link?

It's a *fucking* *screenshot* from Fox News. I realize that Media Matters is from the "other side" but please do us the favor of actually clicking on the link before engaging the mouth. It will make you look a lot less stupid in the future.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here. The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey and promoted relentlessly by Fox News- it was never intended to be grass roots. Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.

Ah, yes, the next defense- "BMI is crap. I'm a heavy-framed bodybuilder with 4% body fat and a BMI of 30"

Once again, there are a few people out there like this- I've even known some. The *vast* majority of obese people do not fall under this category, and pretending that BMI is junk because of a few outliers is just a way to wish away the fact that we're fat. Folks with BMI over 30? They're almost certainly fat. Sorry, it's just the truth- as a population we're nowhere athletic enough to fall into the (very well understood) pool of folks with a lot of lean muscle mass, and I've never heard of a doctor telling a highly fit person to drop weight because their BMI was technically overweight. It's not even all that prevalent among athletes- I have relatives and coworkers who compete seriously in triathalons and while I don't know their BMI I'd be blown away if any of them was over 20. I have a lot of college student athletes in my classes and with the exception of a few wrestlers and a football player or two they aren't going to be over 25. As I mentioned, my BMI edged up over 30. I was a fat fuck. My BMI right now is 25.2, and frankly I'm still overweight. I come about as close as you can get to "normal" height and frame, and BMI works just fine for me, and most folks.

Yes, there are a few folks out there with serious health issues that make it very difficult to maintain a healthy weight.

But we're even more in denial thinking they are a significant number of the obese. They aren't- they're convenient excuses. I can think back to my wife's roommate in college who was morbidly obese, even though she ate healthy meals and exercised by biking around campus. She explained to everyone that she had glandular problems that caused the weight gain. Those same glandular problems also apparently caused her to eat cans of frosting late at night when she was depressed or stressed. (Yes, you read that correctly)

My metabolism has changed over the years- I was rail thin through college no matter what I ate. After 25 years of post-college life eating the same food, I was pushing the obese range- my body's burn rate has slowed even though I exercise quite a bit. So I stopped eating so much crap last year. Metabolism change or no, I'm down 35 pounds and a hair away from "healthy" BMI. It might be harder to lose weight with a crap metabolism, but it's hardly impossible.

In all seriousness, this (and other insurance fraud) won't be an issue. The cars are instrumented to the gills, and I'm sure in the case of any accident they can dump the data to show that what the person is claiming is impossible.

My personal feeling is that insurance rates are going to drive the adoption of self driving cars. Once the insurance companies realize that they have a lower error rate than humans (never tired, drunk, distracted, etc) and that they can tell who was at fault in an accident (almost certainly the other guy) you'll see serious incentives to keep cars in auto-drive.

The *really* interesting bit? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring money into Open Textbook projects.

This makes sense in my opinion- the total cost for writing a series of 100 and 200 level texts to cover pretty much the entire curriculum is peanuts for something the size of the Gates Foundation, but it could really have a massive impact on the costs of education- check out how much books are vs. tuition at many community colleges.

AdWords. I'm unaware of any prior system that did automatic auctions for specific search terms. As far as Google's success, AdWords was equally as important as search, since it's the financial basis for the entire company. If you read some of the early history of Google their original sales methods were human centric, slow and no better than anyone else. AdWords started the flood of cash.

In ten years? My guess is that the date was ~3 years ago- Obama's really ramped up the drone program and unless you restrict "bomb" to something free falling rather than a Maverick or Hellfire the number of drone strikes vastly outnumbers manned bomber runs.

Analog is "better" quality in this case. In the case of recording music using amplified instruments, you don't want perfect sound reproduction. You want the distortion from the amps, you want the reverb from the space, you want the oddities of the tape. Those things are critical to create the proper sound.

If you want to discuss sound reproduction later, yes, analog is a stupid idea compared to (good enough) digital, but there's a reason why guitarists still use tube amps.

Bah- neophyte. I ran Doom the other day in a DOS emulator under Linux running in VirtualBox under Windows which was running on my Mac in Parallels.

Yes, it ran- it was even playable. Next up I'm going to run VICE on the DOS machine and see if I can play Bard's Tale on a C64. I loved that game...