Comcast has called, emailed and sent me multiple letters offering me free equipment to support their switch to all digital. I'm a basic cable subscriber who has only been watching the digital HD channels that have always been offered as part of the basic service (not digital). The lowest tier of digital service blocks the channels I get as a plain basic subscriber which is very odd to me but it probably complies with the law you speak of since their lowest tier service doesn't scramble those channels.

Cryptography is a firmware thing, isn't it?

I don't think it really costs more to buy healthy food. Processed foods are usually purchased because it takes less time to cook them, not because they are cheaper. Maybe it's the time that it takes to work two jobs which makes it nearly impossible to make a healthy and cheap meal. Also, while attending college I had very little income and ate nothing but processed foods yet I never strayed outside of my optimal weight range. I was probably younger than you are now which could impact how my body dealt with those fat generating foods

I've also found that produce in particular is very cheap, at least in my town, but we have lots of local farms and people who care about nutrition so that may contribute to the lower prices.

In trying to find the reason for a link between poverty and malnutrition I found this interesting article and thread which makes the case that it's a lack of knowing how to make cheap healthy meals or the time to research and make those meals which really causes malnutrition. There are some exceptions where there simply isn't a cheap source for healthy food but I doubt it applies to that many people.

I do agree that the CPI shopping cart needs to be changed as it contains items which people don't need to survive or be healthy and lacks some that they do. I also do not doubt that your issues in cooking nutritious foods are real but I'm fairly certain that you could find a way to eat healthily while maintaining an acceptable level of tasty food. Doing so might however require an adjustment to what you find acceptable as I know I had to adjust my desires for taste to lower my cholesterol and blood pressure.

How could someone be "impoverished" while having access to too much food?

First world problems...

It would be great if we brought US law into the 21st century. Many laws already link to others by codes so just converting those into html links would help people understand them better.

I know the "paying attention" idea requires refinement. I would be happy with banning all forms of communication and entertainment from being present during the reading of a bill. Actually, we're pretty much defining a classroom here so probably whatever works in school should work in this situation. The esteemed senators might object to being treated like children though :).

The difficulty in deciphering laws is indeed a huge problem and I doubt that many congressmen even understand the laws they pass, at least as a whole bill. Short laws aren't the only solution to this particular problem however. One solution that I've been pondering for a while is what if lawyers used Object Oriented Design principles in writing laws. They could add layers of abstraction until anyone can understand the top layer of a law, just as with OOP (Object Oriented Programming). They could also create a central repository of common legal clauses with easy to understand and reference names so if someone wanted to delve into the bitter details they could just read the name of the common law clause and already know what it means precisely because they've already read it before.

While it's true that adding additional text to a law can introduce ambiguity, I doubt adding strictly clarifying text will do so unless it's added by someone who's less than competent in which case they shouldn't serve another term in office. Unfortunately a democracy doesn't deal with incompetence that well since most of the voters are not intelligent and/or skilled in law enough to be able to judge a congressman's incompetence. The only issue I see with forcing laws to be short is that some laws do in fact need to be long and complicated because what they are dealing with is large and complex, such as: the environment (which you mentioned earlier), aerospace (small mistakes kill people), transportation (mistakes kill people), interstate and international trade (macroeconomics is extremely complicated), etc.

I do like your idea of forcing someone to read each bill before congress and only allow those who were present during the reading to vote on it. It's an excellent incentive for them to write concise bills and to ensure that they have at least read the whole bill; although we'd need some way of monitoring whether congressman are actually paying attention. We could also require each congressman to summarize the bill before voting and if they don't show comprehension of the bill they must abstain. Or maybe require a quiz about randomly selected parts of the bill.

Well I live in one of the safest cities in the US so I really don't have safety problems where I live but the murder rate in my favorite bar hopping city (Portland, OR) is 4 per 100,000. I've spent more time there than in Paris yet have seen no crimes in Portland which makes me think that murder doesn't necessarily correlate with crimes against tourists or near areas of interest for tourists.

Despite my experiences in Paris I would still tend to agree with you that it's a very safe place to live/visit as long as you know which areas to avoid.

I agree that we have over-regulated in certain areas but we have also under-regulated or regulated in the wrong ways in other areas. I used to think that our government makes everything too complicated but after reading some bills which caused public outcry due to ambiguity and finding very precise language in those bills, even in the exact paragraphs people were complaining about, I've come to realize that it really is just that hard to write laws.

Yeah... read some hostel reviews in just the shady parts of Paris (not the ghettos) and you'll see stories of muggings, pick-pocketing and stalking. I also took a hike to Sacré-Cur and felt unsafe passing through a very well maintained park where a bunch of black people were doing drugs in the middle of the day; I do have a natural tendency to distrust black people though due to being from Oregon where black people basically don't exist. I also saw a guy a vandalize a car using an ice-pick just a few blocks from my hotel in a good part of town. I managed to have both of these experiences while being there for just four days.

McDonald's actually changes their menu based on the local cuisine. I had a huge craving for a McMuffin while in Italy and they didn't have any. In fact their breakfast menu consisted of coffee, croissants and some strange items like fried olives and pickles.

The business climate America survived under without regulations was far worse. We cannot forget the industrial revolution era where corporations wantonly destroyed our environment, hired thugs to beat and kill unionizers or destroy competitors's operations. There was also child labor, the 7 day work week, disease due to overcrowding caused by low wages, etc. Greed is a very powerful emotion unfortunately.

I wish there was a simple solution to corruption, such as de-regulation but unfortunately there is no such solution that doesn't come at some great cost.

GS contributed to the economic collapse and benefited immensely from it. They are most definitely not stepping stones. Unfortunately they've corrupted their regulators so much that the US government will never set them straight.

The GOP makes far stronger use of those "leftist" tactics you just mentioned but I agree that the left does in fact participate in censorship and propaganda.

This article says HT increases performance 10-20% on average with a 30-40% observed maximum. That's with a modern HT enabled chip of course, at least I assume so since they are comparing it against a very recent AMD cpu with a similar architectural component. Considering AMD finally implemented something similar to HT after 10 years of competing with it, I doubt ARM will be implementing something similar anytime soon.

I in no way implied or meant to imply that pipelining is unique to Intel. You are absolutely right that ARM has it as well. The point of my post was to show several examples of architectural components that do meaningfully impact CPU performance. I find the idea that ARM could somehow compete with Intel on a performance basis rather naive. Then again, just a few years ago when Intel Atom came out, I didn't think Intel could compete with ARM in power consumption. They proved me wrong, maybe ARM will do the same somehow.

"When you push the performance, the architecture doesn't matter as much, because most of the energy is spent figuring out what to run and when to run it."

I doubt that.

Hyperthreading, an Intel tech, significantly increases speed while not doing the same to power consumption or die size. Another Intel only tech, power boost allows them to run the processor at an unsustainable clock speed for a short period of time. There's also a concept of pipelining that allows multiple instructions from a single thread to run staggered as long as they won't collide in their use of a particular component within the CPU architecture and don't have hard inter-dependencies such as reading the result of the previous operation.

Basically, features specific to a CPU architecture very much impact execution performance and efficiency. I guess you could have been talking strictly about the instruction set but that's only a very small part of a CPU architecture.