(I meant "many of the benefits they tout", and left out that urine sodium levels also dropped by a full 2/3, further implying that the original diets were quite unhealthy in general. I can only hope the actual paper ends with a "More research is needed" line, since all the abstract has to conclude with is "It can be concluded that vegan diet had beneficial effects")

The only study (one study) quoted from that Timecubey article of yours is in

BMC Complement Altern Med 2001

I don't have access to the study (unless I brain farted and couldn't find the free access link) and the hell if I'm paying money to get a paper from a third-rate journal, but I can tell you what I can find from the abstract.

The study was conducted on 32 people; 15 were switched to a vegan diet, and 18 were kept on their preexisting omnivorous diet. The groups differed from one-another at the beginning of the study in terms of pain and urine sodium, which is a significant red flag considering that many of they tout are directly related to one or the other. There is no comparison to other diets. There is no comparison to healthier omnivorous diets. The abstract states that many of the patients in the study were overweight, implying that the preexisting diets in many cases may have been unhealthy in general and that generally improving the quality of the diets may have been more important than the fact the new diet was vegan.

And hell, that's just what I got from the abstract. At best this is one of those "more research is required" papers, it's certainly not enough to suggest that such a radical dietary switch is a reasonable treatment plan. Moreover, it's so oddly specific in switching from an omnivorous over to a raw vegan diet, and being published in an alt-med journal, that it sounds like it was intended to be (as the article you quoted did) treated as more than it is. And the alt-med crowd (pretends to) wonder why people call them pseudoscientists.

Yeah, levels so low we can't detect an effect, let alone any of the original substance at all.

What's more, multiple people apparently modded him up, and multiple people have modded the call-out posts (including the parent) down. Just lovely.

I use LibreOffice and I don't normally have to exchange MS Office files with others either. That doesn't mean I think Google Docs on Android is an Office replacement. It's not equivalent feature-wise, and last time I used the Android app it was even more limited, slow, and clunky than the web app. I do use Google Docs for some collaborative documents, I don't think it's useless, but it's not MS Office.

That's nice, but I wasn't really talking about cloud solutions. Sometimes, you know, I don't want to use the cloud, or put my files on the cloud. Maybe I just want to directly transfer a file. Maybe I want to transfer a file that I didn't know I'd want to transfer and didn't stick in my cloud-synced folder. Google Drive is fine on my tablet, but then I don't use my tablet for actual work. I tend to use a combination of Google Drive and SMB on my laptop.

I haven't played with that extensively, but it looks like integration with Android is still non-existent and relies on third party apps that seem kind of limited. With any of those apps, can I do print previews, enable duplex printing, print from a range, switch between coloured/monochrome, and do all of that quickly, with a large-screen formatted interface (as in, no constant jumping around between screens)? Are any of them FOSS or is there any other reason I should trust them with my documents?

Yeah, that's why I mentioned it as a potential plus for the Surface. You can program on an Ultrabook if need-be.

That's a pretty big exception. Have you ever tried to use the available office suites for Android? No comparison whatsoever with MS Office.

An Android tablet just wouldn't be my first choice for work. Transferring files to a computer and back? There are GUI file browsers that do that, but they're all pretty clunky (and though I haven't tried it, I assume even clunkier with keyboard/mouse). Printing isn't straight-forward. Coding? Hah. And keyboard/mouse support within apps is all over the map. I can get work done if I connect to my PC with my tablet using an RDP app or something, but then I'm not really doing the work on the tablet itself, and that's obviously only available if I have a decent Internet connection available.

If Windows 8/the Surface can deliver, it would essentially act like an Ultrabook (light and with good battery life, but completely capable as a low-spec laptop) when you need it to, and a tablet (light, high battery-life, touchscreen, instant-on gratification, etc.) when you need it to do that. The Transformer promises to do that, but nice hardware is nothing without the software to back it up.

It's hard to say, but the Recent and Trending sections don't seem to work (the same things stay in there for weeks), the scoring needs some sort of adjustment to kick incumbents out more quickly. Beyond that, even just adding to and highlighting new Editor's Choice apps more often really couldn't hurt.

I haven't really spent much time with Apple's store, so I've no idea how it compares.

One thing I've noticed, which may or may not be affecting how little Android app developers are getting for their apps, is that the Google Play store is useless for discovering new apps. Totally useless. They display ads for a small number of high-profile apps, most of which would get a bunch of purchases regardless, and they rarely cycle those ads out. There's "Editor's Choice" apps, but those are the same high-profile apps and again are rarely added to. Otherwise, the only methods of discovery are looking at the top lists (which rarely change), or searching.

Most of the apps I have installed I had to discover elsewhere, including some terrific games (even terrific free games, which you'd think cheap Android users would really go for) which only have on the order of 1000 or so downloads at most, making them totally invisible as far as a user browsing the store is concerned.

No, it's not comparable with the Kindle Fire. A spec comparison is here.

Spec-wise, it looks like it's closer to the Nook Color (not the Nook Tablet), which is $170. However, it has a lower-resolution screen (800x480 compared to 1024x600), no 802.11n, and a resistive touchscreen instead of capacitive. You can get the exact same specs in an even cheaper Chinese tablet; I wouldn't be shocked if these are based on one of those, but rebranded and with Christian-themed software preinstalled.

That's a very clever strategy. It's posing questions that let you talk a lot, and that typically lead the conversation down a very predictable, scriptable path. Whenever it can't parse something, it poses a somewhat generic response and tries to lead the conversation back into predictable territory.

Where do you live?
X
How have you found X?
Y
Oh, that's nice. What's your profession?
Z
How have you liked doing Z?
A
Interesting, I've always wondered if Z was A.

As they've always been, chat bots are smoke and mirrors. The thing this uses better than others seems to be scripted conversations. It has a "talk about their profession" script built-in, and it's got memory within that script so it holds a little bit of context. Take it off the rails and it crashes pretty badly, though.

Uh, I'm a "gamer", I use the key all the time when I'm doing desktop work, and I never hit it accidentally in-game. How can you even do that? Does your keyboard have really tiny ctrl and alt keys?

That's not better at all. Wind's prepaid plan is a flat $0.20 per minute on Wind's network, on Rogers' network, and anywhere in the United States. The same rate applies for roaming on Rogers on the monthly plans.

He doesn't say? That's bullshit. He explains why each is an issue. Let me paraphrase:

- Nye's experiment involved a long cylinder, with a thin lid on top, an infrared source above the lid, and a thermometer on the bottom

- Watts' experiment involved a smaller jar (reduced amount of gas and a greater surface area absorbing energy from the IR source directly; increases the ratio of heating effect from the IR source directly compared to the effect from trapped heat by the GHG) with an infrared source above, a thick lid on top (absorbing some of the IR from the source, partially negating its effect over that of ambient heating), a large object in the jar (even further reducing the amount of gas in the jar, reducing its contribution to the jar's heating), and the thermometer on the object rather than on the bottom of the jar (placing it closer to the IR source, meaning that temperature contributions to the thermometer will be dominated by the IR source's direct heading, with trapped heat due to the GHG making a much diminished contribution)

- Nye asserts, therefore, that Watts' modified apparatus shrunk the contribution of heating to the thermometer by the GHG to a level where it was below the error level of the thermometer being used to measure it.

Relevant SMBC strip

Americans can hear it. I was flabbergasted the first time an American (a Californian, whose accent I couldn't tell apart from my own) recognized I was Canadian just from speaking to me; then I realized I'd just said "about". I have a pretty standard west/central Canadian accent.