<buzzkill>the helium balloon has mass, therefore weight. It also happens to have a lesser density than the surrounding medium; placed into a hydrogen atmosphere or a vacuum, it would definitely rest on the self-checkout's scale.</buzzkill>

You've just got to know what to look for and, if at all possible, make some of these things for yourself. If the study's findings that HFCS supresses the satiety trigger, then paying a little more for the (generally higher-quality) non-HFCS versions of products might cause you to eat less and break even on your food bill. When it comes down to it, you're doing the right thing- read the labels and know what you are putting into yourself.

I'll have to admit that the first thought that came to mind- besides the fact that the product will have a heavily oxidized flavor- is that this seems like quite a bit of a fire hazard. Smoke a cigarette while you uncork a bottle of oxygenated spirits and you'll quickly become engulfed in flames from a store-bought molotov cocktail...

I would actually stop doing business with any artist that used that system- for two reasons:
1) I refuse to give my name and identity just to see a concert, and
2) The system assumes that it is wrong to resell tickets.

Ignoring any thoughts about reselling tickets at higher than face value (for which there should be no issues), there is absolutely nothing wrong about reselling tickets below face value. This sledge-hammer approach reeks of disrespect for the concert-goers ("Who cares about the fans who might have bought a ticket from a friend or received it as a gift, we're gonna get those $#&@! scalpers!")

Right on- except that in my town the cops will make you move along if you dare to open your case when you play...

For music, sounding better != perfect reproduction of the source material. (they are related, but not the same thing). As an example: at certain times, a guitar which is clipping its amplifier, causing huge amounts of distortion, sounds better then a faithful reproduction of the unamplified output of the instrument. And so it is with vinyl. The waveform output of my turntable will have less dynamic range and more harmonic distortion than the output of the same music from CD, DVD, or, even, an mp3 file. When properly pressed, however, and played on a quality turntable with a good needle, the vinyl album, imho, delivers a much more pleasing listening experience.

This happens all the time- you might know it better as the phrase: "It works on my machine!"

I, for one, have not listened to commercial radio or watched commercial news programs (save for the occasional television-in-a-restaurant scenario) in the 6 years since I discovered NPR, to which I now listed exclusively. I can also say, without reservation, that I've purchased more albums from artists I've discovered from NPR than from artists discovered from commercial radio in the 6 years before that.

Commercial radio is dead to me.

I would actually posit that leaky fixtures waste more water than pre-running of showers. This is really a waste because the repair of a leaky faucet is an inexpensive, quick operation. Even with the ridiculously-expensive replacement parts sold by faucet makers (~$2 for a seal kit which contains about $0.04 worth of materials and $0.10 of packaging), it is still a worthwhile operation. Unfortunately, however, no one in this society wants to believe that anything can be manually repaired anymore.

As for metal shower heads being affected less, I think that it has much to do with the high percentage of copper in the allows used to make plumbing fixtures. Copper and it's common alloys are naturally anti-microbial (http://www.copper.org/antimicrobial/). They will also last longer than plastic fixtures.

Not that it will change anything, or mean anything for that matter, but someone had to do the math:

(~1.5 gpm show heads) * (1 minute pre-run) * (1 shower/day) * (228,000,000 adults) / (648,000 gallons / pool) = more than 351 Olympic-sized swimming pools per year! http://homerepair.about.com/od/plumbingrepair/ss/tankless_hwh_7.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Cubic_capacity_olympic_size_swimming_pool


does it all mean anything? I don't know...

001100010010011110100001101101110011...

The data corruption rate is hardly zero for STROM. Go to any museum and look at all of the stone tablets which are either cracked apart or eroded (i.e., corrupted memory). One must then also consider all of the tablets, accidently cracked in antiquity, whose existence we will never know (corrupted MBR, perhaps?). And then there are also tablets written in defunct languages for whom a suitable 'reader' has yet to be found....

I posit that the record will actually be pretty easy to play in 20 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Current_status

Thanks in large part to the sterility of digital recordings and the popularity of 'vintage technology' among audiophiles and DJs, the 'record' has a lot in its favor- simplicity of the playback mechanism, for one. (heck, how much different from a record is a CD? It's just a record with much smaller grooves, quantized data, and an optical stylus).

The genetic propensity is a giant part of this; anyone who's ever complained about a friend who eats and eats and never gains weight has seen this in action.

The human body evolved to want to eat lots of carbohydrates when they were available plentiful- at the end of the natural growing season- so that there would be stored fat available for the leaner winter months. We've managed to completely disrupt this mechanism by having carbohydrates available year round. What's even worse, then, is that many of the carbohydrate-rich foods that are readily available are those with the least nutritive content. Both blueberries and potatoes are nutritionally labeled as 'carbohydrates'. Take 100 calories of each; which one has less nutrition and far less cost?

Fast food is an addiction; I was addicted to it for a couple of years myself. These 'evil' corporations (and I use that term purposefully, as I'll show) employ food scientists to manipulate the marketing and packaging of fast food to make us crave it more and more; McDonalds is probably the worst offender. For example: ever notice the size of the straws at McDonalds? they're wider than most everywhere else. The food itself is also designed to make you want to eat more and more of it. This is just like tobacco companies adding nicotine to cigarettes, except that fast food companies are using salt rather than psychoactive drugs.

Another big point that tends to get overlooked is consumption of water. Natural, raw foods are very high in water content. Processed foods are very low in water, plus are generally high in salt which increases need for water. Without enough water, your body will physically not be able to metabolize stored fat. It is generally said that most feelings of hunger are actually signs of dehydration. Satiate your thirst (or, actually, hunger) with a diuretic such as soda, water, or coffee and you'll just need more water.

Of course exercise won't make you lose weight; physical activity is important for other reasons. These reasons, such as maintenance of skeleto-muscular and cardio-vascular strength, are important for all people, regardless of obesity status. The human body is designed to work and when physical work is removed from our environment, it is natural to see that our body suffers.

I would ditch my landline in a heartbeat. Scratch that, no, I would drop every AT&T service I have. Us apartment residents, however, have painfully few choices- in most cases, just one- for telecommunications providers. My particular apartment building doesn't offer any internet or telephone provider except AT&T. Of course, there's no way for me to opt out of a land line if I want a wired internet connection. In essence, then, my $30/month DSL line, for which I have no alternatives, costs me $53 and I never see any benefit from having the land line.

I suspect that the number of landline accounts would drop significantly if telephone companies would allow DSL without a telephone account.