Lots of good comments under here. I thought I would add a point or two.

Browse the internet for lists of home many calories your exercise is burning. You may be very surprised at how few calories you are burning (how efficient your body is!!) Running buns 80-120 calories per mile, but most people are around 100 calories or less (the faster you go the more you burn). If you are running 10 minute miles (6 minute kilometers) and you run for 20-30 minutes, you are burning at most 300 calories. About 1 doughnut per day.

If you are obese, that means you have historically been gaining weight. As you gain weight, your resting metabolism increases (it costs to maintain higher weight level). So it is entirely possible that you have been eating an extra 300 calories (a doughnut) above your ideal diet. If you think honestly about it, do you think it is possible that you have been eating more than a doughnut a day above your ideal diet? And if you are running 20-30 minutes a day (or something equivalent), I have found that the activity makes me hungry. It is tempting to reward ourselves with a small snack (like a doughnut).

In other words, it is very easy to actually increase your weight even if you are exercising moderately hard.

The good news is that a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So if you want to lose 50 pounds in a year (one a week), that's only cutting back 2 or 3 doughnuts a day (after you have gotten to a place where you aren't increasing any more). And if you are running 20-30 minutes a day, as you lose weight it will get easier and easier. It will get more and more fun.

But usually you have to tackle diet *with* exercise to see real weight loss.

One word of warning: You will see people who claim to lose 20 pounds a week or something like that. I like to keep an open mind, but 20 pounds of fat is 70,000 calories. That's 10,000 calories a day. If their resting metabolism is 2000 calories a day and if they eat nothing, they still have to burn 8000 more calories. I guess they run 80 miles a day too.

Yes. It is quite easy to evaluate reasonable claims for weight loss...

You are seriously over complicating this. Just weight yourself every day and keep track of the calories you eat and the exercise you do outside of your normal activities. Nutrition information can be found on the USDA's website. If you eat packaged food, you can look it up on the package. Buy a small postage scale and weigh everything you eat. Yes, it means avoiding eating in a restaurant for a while (unless they can give you that information).

Keep track of how much exercise you do outside of your daily activities. Once you realize that running a mile burns about 100 calories (a ridiculously small amount in relation to effort), you will realize that your daily activities don't really burn that much energy and will average out to a fairly consistent level. I normally burn 1800 calories in a day if I don't do any outside activity. I'm 44 and not so big, so it's a lot lower than a younger guy. Weighing myself every day and keeping track of my input gives me this information. I only did it for a month or so. After that I pretty much know by looking at stuff approximately how many calories I'm eating.

Calorie guides for virtually any activity you want to mention are on the internet. Again, even burning 100 calories is a fairly significant effort, so small inaccuracies will average out.

The major disconnect most people have is that they see a relatively small item like a muffin and think that it can't make that much difference if they eat it. But it's something like 500 calories and to burn that they have to run 4 or 5 miles. If they eat that muffin every day, their weight increases until the energy required to maintain the added weight evens out (guessing something like 20 pounds). So that muffin represents either running 4 miles a day, or carrying 20 extra pounds. Usually ditching the muffin is the easiest option, which is why dieting works to lose weight initially. (Apart from muffins, the other biggest offender that I've run into is salad dressing -- you think you are being healthy until you realize that you just added 350 calories of salad dressing to your 40 calorie salad, and you would have done a lot better eating a hamburger).

Well, I can commiserate with you on the feeling of skiing. Not my cup of tea.

But I think the OP is actually right. You know, I love running. But even if I'm running 6 days a week, the first 3 weeks after a long layoff are not fun for me. In fact, most of the time I hate it. Then, suddenly (and seemingly magically) it becomes fun. I can't really describe what the difference is, but one day I start feeling my body moving. Everything is effortless; I can go faster or slower and it doesn't hurt my body. I start to think, "How fast can I really go?" and I start to push myself. I get out of breath and my muscles get tired, but not like it is in the first 3 weeks. It doesn't actually hurt.

I've trained with a lot of people and taught others how to run. Some people never took to it (fair enough). But there is a difference in attitude with the people who take to it and those who don't. The people who never end up enjoying it never push themselves. Sometimes it seems like they are afraid of hurting themselves. Sometimes it seems that they just don't give a shit. But they never test their limits and so it's never fun.

I also took a couple of skiing lessons like you did. I've done a lot of cross country skiing, so I'm relatively adept on skis, but downhill is something different. I got relatively proficient, but I never got good enough to push myself. I never once thought, "Where is my limit?". I think that's why I never became interested in it.

On the other hand, I practiced karate for 10 years and pushed myself very hard. I never actually enjoyed it. I remember people getting incredibly psyched to go to a karate camp where they would practice for a week at a time. I hated the thought of it. But lately I've been getting into cycling and often long for the weekends where I can ride for hours and hours on end without interruption -- despite (even because of???) the pain my body endures.

It is true that certain sports "click" with certain people. Others don't. But identifying as I do with your description of skiing, I can't help thinking that you are taking it all too superficially. You won't get an emotional payoff until you invest an emotional risk. It doesn't have to be financial (skiing is expensive, for instance). But you have to push yourself beyond what you think you can do. There has to be doubt in your mind and you have to triumph over it.

Sorry... I'm being clumsy with my words. I don't know if you will understand what I mean, but I hope it will give you a different perspective.

The stretching FAQ is a very good resource: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/docs/rec/stretching/

Stretching while your muscles are cold is a very bad idea. One of the things that confuses people is how crazily flexible your body is when you are young. You can usually do just about any stupid ass thing and you will not get seriously injured. But as you get older, you lose it. Warm up is essential. Stretching before exercise (before you are warm) is an invitation to injury.

But extrapolating from that to assume that stretching is a bad idea is wrong. Flexibility is extremely useful. If you don't move your body through it's full range of motion, you will gradually lose the ability to do so. Then you are not only at risk of injury during exercise, but also in every day life. Because the loss of flexibility is so gradual, many people don't realize it. But before you know it, it's gone and then you lose your ability to move.

Stretching isn't something you chuck in at the beginning of a workout. It is part of a workout (or even the workout itself). You have to treat it seriously and understand how to do it properly. Just like anything else.

Reading the article I get the impression that this guy would like emacs org mode. Very similar ideas. The added bit is that he wants to embed other files in the document. And to top it all off instead of using a file as an outline, he wants to use a file system. That way you don't have to embed anything. It's just a normal file.

In spite of myself, I think it's a brilliant idea. I'm not sure why he thinks Microsoft will understand it. This is a Un*x idea through and through. Use the file as the lowest level metaphor in the system. Build tools that allow you to operate efficiently on files. I don't think it would be very difficult to implement. And I don't think it has anything to do with tablets. It's just a good idea period.

You really need to read the source code. It's a very well designed system. Some parts are even inspired.

Validation of the block chain is intentionally costly. The intent is to make the cost of forging higher than the cost of participating. It succeeds brilliantly at this point.

From an economics point of view, it stumbles. But the technical design aspect is quite well done.

If you're very careful, you can make it difficult to trace you, but there are a lot of clues in the way that the algorithm works that can point to which bitcoin addresses are owned by the same people. The biggest one is that transactions are always composed of a group of other transactions with the difference refunded to a new bitcoin address owned by the original owner. So If I want to send 100 bitcoins to someone and I have 3 transactions totalling 25, 80 and 15 bitcoins coming into various addresses, I will send all three transactions in a single outgoing transaction and receive a refund for 20 bitcoins in a new incoming transaction to a new address. But this transaction gives a very high probability that all these addresses are owned by the same person.

Because all of the transactions in bitcoin are made public to everyone, it is possible to analyse the transactions to find addresses that are likely linked. The only way you could avoid this is to make sure that you manually split up your transactions to match the amounts you have in each address and request a different receiving address from the person you are sending bitcoins to for each. But even then, you would have to spread those transactions out over a period of time (ideally over several blocks) because if the receivers addresses are determined to belong to a single person, you can assume that bitcoins suddenly appearing in those addresses in a short period of time are probably from the same person.

There are actually some papers discussing tracing techniques and several are actually linked to the Bitcoin website. The website itself warns that Bitcoin is *not* anonymous. It is demonstratably much less anonymous than paper cash.

Well, I think it can be more simply summed up as "act skillfully so as to avoid [bad] consequences". I put the "bad" in brackets because AFAICT (and I'm not an expert) there isn't really a distinction between good and bad consequences.

However, to say that "Buddhism is X" is really a misnomer. The dogma that we are used to seeing in most other religions doesn't really exist. While there are a set of principles, the rest is kind of deliberately left unstated. I once asked someone what I could read to understand Buddhism better and he directed me to a list of several hundred books all with different opinions.

My only real point here is that while I agree it is wrong to say that Buddhism worships life, it is true that there are Buddists who worship life and consider it an essential part of Buddhism.

Is it just me or does the fact that two separate entities develop the same thing, using the same technique, at roughly the same time mean that the thing is probably obvious and unpatentable?

Get rid of first to file. Just deny the patent to both parties when that happens.

I think the OP is incorrect with the way they stated issue. Free software has potential advantages for customers in many ways. This is especially true for enterprise customers who do not get locked into a single vendor. They can even make modifications themselves if they have development resources. The ability to redistribute freely also lets small customers ride on the coat-tails of large customers in a way that doesn't necessarily hurt the big customer.

From an open source perspective, open source and free software development can be done essentially as large joint ventures with low barriers to entry. This allows the cost of development to be spread across a number of different entities. It also allows entities with dissimilar interests to benefit from each others work while specializing on their own. They end up with a much more comprehensive solution than they could practically manage individually.

There are very few (if any???) advantages to a customer for choosing proprietary software, though there are some advantages to the developer in the ability to lock in their customers and lock out competition with an aim towards a monopoly.

My opinion of why proprietary desktop solutions are ubuquitus while free software destop solutions are rare is that proprietary vendors (both Microsoft and Apple) do a very good job of exploiting the advantages of their business model. In the cases of Microsoft and Apple, they also successfully lobby various governments to make laws that make their advantages easier to maintain. On the other hand, free software vendors do a poor job of exploiting their advantages. We *do* see some good organizations (Apache is an excellent example and there is a reason why they have dominated for a long time). But in terms the desktop, there are very few companies who have figured out how to sell custom development to enterprise cutomers and leverage that development into securing new customers. It happens on the server side, but the desktop has been lagging.

My personal belief is that, barring making it illegal through ridiculous paten law, etc, free and open source software advantages can outcompete proprietary advantages. The main reason is that the advantages to proprietary methods is largely abusive to the customer. If faced with a viable alternatives which comes without the abuse they will choose that (Free software is a consumer protection movement after all). But unlike the OP, I don't believe it will happen automatically. We still need cluefull corporations who know how to build pure-play free software companies. Right now those are rare. Hopefully they will become more common.