Human lag time mostly doesn't matter. The brain compensates for it. For example, when you catch a ball, your brain knows how it needs to correct for the fact that what it sees is what was some time ago, and what it tells the muscles to do won't happen for some time, and it's done this your entire life so it has a pretty good idea exactly how long those delays will be.

Toss in an additional 133 ms, and you've totally fucked it all up. The brain tries to calcuate responses just as it always has, yet the calculations no longer give the correct answers, and so your performance sucks.

With some time, the brain will learn, and your performance will improve, but it will never be as good as it could be, since the brain can only compensate for lag when it is dealing with predictable events. When someone throws a ball to you from 20 feet away, your brain gets a lot of data to work with to predict where your hand needs to be to catch it, but when they throw a ball from only three feet away, the ball hits you before the brain even knows it has been thrown. Increasing the lag time allows it to be thrown from further away and still hit you before you know anything has happened.

That's the problem with lag time in games. If the lag is zero, then the game approximates reality, and the player doesn't perceive any problems. If the lag is too great, then the player must learn to compensate for that lag to accomplish even the simplest time-coordinated task, and even then won't do as well because of lack of experience with that latency. Also, the player can never compensate for the increased reaction time.

I discovered all of this years ago while playing Descent. After installing a patch which allowed different screen resolutions, I discovered that the lower the resolution, the better I could play the game. Playing in 160x100 positively looked like shit, but it ran at 70 frames per second, and so the latency was much better than at 640x480 where it ran at 15 frames per second. It's much easier to hit targets when you get to use the latency information your brain has relied on your entire life rather than the information it has only known for the relatively short time you have played a particular game.

Well, how about my experience as of a few weeks ago.

After playing Warcraft II via DOSBOX for with the kids for many months, I thought it'd sure be nice if there were a similar game I could find, something that would run in a resolution greater than 640x480 and which had a map editor that would run in Linux. (Warcraft II's editor fails to work correctly in Wine.)

So I had a look around Gentoo's Portage directories, to see what games were available. The first few I tried were masked, and so I didn't try them, since it's been my experience that if there isn't an unmasked version, then it's totally disfunctional. Eventually I had to write a Perl script to look through all of the ebuilds and list the ones which weren't masked, since they were so few and far between.

The first game I tried worked for a little while, until it crashed X11, requiring me to reboot my computer.

The second game I tried worked for a little while, until it crashed X11, requiring me to reboot my computer.

The third game I tried worked for a little while, until it crashed X11, requiting me to reboot my computer.

At that point, I decided to just stick with DOSBOX. It's crazy that Linux's best graphics API is DOSBOX.

...but really, that almost isn't X11's fault. If I'm allowed to reference something from years and years ago, I'll reference myself trying to explain to the people of the Open Graphics Project exactly why they're wasting their time: http://www.mail-archive.com/open-graphics@duskglow.com/msg05679.html

Thankfully Linux is moving in the right direction, as some of the problems I point out in that post are slowly being eliminated, for example, video mode setting is being moved into the kernel, allowing X11 to avoid direct hardware access.

However, there's a lot in there that I'd be surprised to see in less than ten years, for example, a stable and well documented kernel ABI for video drivers. I can hear people now saying "but our constant insistace that everything be open source resulted in so-and-so open-sourcing their video drivers recently!" Yes, but just how many fucking years did we have to wait for that to happen, and just how many more are we willing to fuck ourselves over waiting for all of the other video manufacturers to play our game? Wouldn't it be nice to just make shit work for once? ...but I guess the Linux slogan is "One of these days it'll be awesome!"

Given the known correlation between homosexuality in male humans and birth order (men with older brothers are more likely to be homosexual) there is such a stunningly obvious evolutionary reason for it that I can't be bothered to explain it to you.

Well, then, why not explain it to the rest of us?

Well, for one, DOSBOX wouldn't work so well anymore. When you set up for vm86 mode, you allocate things into your own memory space at the addresses you wish them to be at in vm86 mode. It would also affect any attempt to use VESA video drivers since the pointer to the handler of interrupt 0x10 is in page zero.

The sensible thing would be to redefine NULL to be a completely useless pointer (like, -1, for example) rather than choosing what has to be the single most useful number in all of computing. The first address is rather useful since anything might be there, whereas the last address isn't quite so useful since nothing more than a single byte could possibly be there anyway. ...but, if you think we have problems now, just imagine the confusion caused by a NULL that isn't zero.

Wait! I have a better idea. Let's just give up C. I think we can all agree that pratically every bug ever has been caused by the fact that it forces programmers to constantly re-invent the wheel, creating their own string and memory management to make up for the fact that what is supplied in the language is barely functional at all. Programs written in langauges with proper string and memory management don't have to worry about null pointers and buffer overflows.

Perl scripts aren't bothered by buffer overflows, whereas the average C program apparently can't so much as accept a password without a buffer overflow. If they could at least do that much they'd limit damage to people with access privleges, but every year or so some important piece of software like SSH has some vulnerability which doesn't even require a proper login. Apparently it's impossible to keep the bugs out of even that small portion of the code that deals with rejecting people without proper credentials, nevermind the rest of the code that does everything else.

Obviously what the world needs is an easier programming language because C is just too fucking difficult.

I didn't use 'NULL' anywhere in the program. I used address '0', which 'NULL' is usually defined as, but strictly speaking, isn't the same thing. Basically what happened was that GCC, upon seeing me use the value in that pointer to access memory, up and decided it couldn't possibly be zero, and used that information for optimizations.

Just because there is a NULL value doesn't mean the compiler should assume that that value is always NULL.

In particular, if you want to use vm86 mode in Linux, for example to use BIOS calls or any other real-mode software which will want to look at the first page of memory, you have to map that memory to that address, which necessarily involves using pointers to address zero.

Here's a simple test program. Compare the output when compiled with "gcc -o test test.c" to the output with "gcc -O2 -o test test.c". I used gcc version 4.3.2 (Gentoo 4.3.2-r3 p1.6, pie-10.1.5)

(Wow, the "preview" is ruining the formatting of this code.)

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>

int main () {

    int fd;

    char *string = " This text was read from a null pointer!\n";
    int length = strlen(string);

    char *pointer; /* Create a simple file... */
    fd = open("random_nonexistant_file", O_CREAT | O_RDWR | O_TRUNC, 0666);
    write(fd, string, length); /* mmap the file to address zero */
    pointer = mmap(0, 4096, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED | MAP_FIXED, fd, 0)
; /* note: gcc optimizer doesn't know that the return value was null */ /* Let's dereference that pointer and write to it! */

    pointer[0] = 42; /* Then we'll display it, but not using printf
    since it refuses to print from null pointers. */

    write(1, pointer, length); /* Also print the pointer value, just to make sure it is null. */

    printf("Pointer address: %d\n", (int) pointer); /* Now let's find out if GCC thinks the pointer could possibly be null... */

    if (pointer == 0) {
        printf("The pointer is null!\n");
    } else {
        printf("The pointer is not null!\n");
    };

};

Either way, the pointer is displayed to be zero, but when you run the unoptomized version, it correctly states that the pointer is null, but the optimized version will tell you that it isn't null. When optimization changes the behavior of a functional program, it is clearly doing the wrong thing.

You're right, EKG isn't complicated at all. I once built a rather simple one that used my computer as a display device. With that approach, I'm sure one could simply be a $100 USB device which works with a PC application and prints a permanent record from there, or just stores it electronically. Certainly that would reduce the per-patient cost to less than $1, plus the cost of those disposable electrodes, which is kind of up there as well. They really should just wash and sterilize reusable electrodes, but since doctors can charge whatever they like since no one asks about costs up-front, it's simply easier to use disposable electrodes and bill them to the patient. I looked into buying some for myself. In the end I just soldered some wires to coins and added some shampoo for conductivity and it worked well enought that I could see all of the details that doctors are interested in.

I do think you're right, that if it were all properly managed, waste due to overuse wouldn't really be a problem. Even though the two times I went to the hospital resulted in $2000 of expenses, nothing much really happened in either visit, and I really don't think it should have been more than $200. Both visits included very little face time with people, old technology like EKG and x-rays, generic medications, and there were a few blood tests, but I assume they were the "add three drops of this, stir, and see if it turns blue" type of test. ...and in both cases I think I would have been out of there with a lot less expense had a doctor simply asked a few more questions and said "this seems like nothing, but I can look into it further if you like," as both visits were more "I don't know what's happening" and less "I think something bad is happening."

I suppose they have to pay for the new hospital one way or another. I always get a kick out of how almost every business I visit is so much more wealthy than I am, like how Wal-Mart is covered with HDTVs that no one watches even though the average Wal-Mart customer cannot afford even one of those TVs. That new hospital, however, it really takes the cake. There are a couple of photos at the bottom of this page: http://www.reidhospital.org/about_reid/brief_history_of_reid/index.html

So, I agree, overuse wouldn't be a problem if it all weren't for the near-total lack of cost-control measures. There really isn't a good reason why anyone shouldn't be able to get an EKG for any minor chest pain they have because it really shouldn't cost that much anyway. I'm sure the machines sit idle most of the time anyway.

Sure, make it illegal to intentionally cause panic in a theater, but don't make it illegal to yell "fire" anywhere, otherwise the next thing in line is any other speech that someone believes causes a problem. It's really the causing of the panic that is the problem anyway. No one cares when yelling "fire" is one of the lines in the play, nor would anyone really care as much if the yelling of "fire" simply failed to cause a panic.

There just isn't a legitimate reason to limit the freedom of speech. You can make it illegal to cause panic, you can make it illegal to harass people, but there's just no reason at all to ever limit speech that fails to cause any harm, let alone speech between two consenting adults.

I think the simple test is to ask whether or not anyone could cause the same problem without saying anything. Surely the same panic in a theater can be caused without saying anything. People can certainly harass one another without saying anything. If it can be done without saying anything, then clearly speech isn't the problem, but merely the chosen method.

If pornography is illegal simply because it is "obscene" then we're fucked since you can't argue that no one finds it offensive, but if it's illegal because it is harmful, then there's room to argue that it isn't harmful at all, or at least not harmful enough to matter. (We allow the sale of tobacco, after all.)

It's simply dumb that pornography be limited because some people have declared that it doesn't say anything worthwhile. At the very least, all pornography communicates to people that they're not as alone as they thought, since they're not the only person in the world with a particular interest.

It isn't the default, but you can configure Opera to allow you to close all tabs. When you close the last one, it goes away, and you have no tabs until you create a new one. It's a perfectly logical way to work that I haven't seen any other web browser copy yet.

I've been using Opera for ages, and I find it humorous how everyone gets excited about new browser features when I've had them for quite some time.

I don't recall when Opera first included tabs, but it was ages before any other web browser. It's particularly funny how everyone was excited that Chrome put the tab bar above the address bar, so that the address bar is effectively a part of that tab, when it was that way in Opera since the very beginning and it always annoys the fuck out of me that it doesn't work that way in other web browsers.

Now I hear a lot of stuff about AdBlock and NoScript for Firefox. With Opera you can go to any web site and Right Click->Edit Site Options where you can block any page content you don't like, or disable javascript or java or plugins in general for that web site. There are also easily accessible toggles for javascript/java/plugins under Tools->Quick Preferences. There's no general ad-blocking that I'm aware of, but I haven't looked into it since I always use the winhelp2002 hosts file and so I don't see ads anyway.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

That isn't to say it's without its problems. One annoying as fuck thing about it is that it's far too happy to send clipboard contents to Google. Middle-clicking anywhere in the Opera window takes the clipboard contents and, if they aren't a valid URL, sends them off to Google or some other search engine as a search query. It's a hell of a privacy problem if you ask me. I sent them a bug report about it, suggesting that they change it so that it only does that when you middle-click the new page button or perhaps the tab bar, but I suspect they don't give a fuck.

Which isn't a surprise, no one gives a fuck what I think. I also sent a suggestion that HTTP uploads come with some sort of progress indication, so that users aren't confused into thinking that the page load has failed when five minutes later after clicking "upload" nothing has happened. It makes perfect sense to me. We've had download progress indicators for ages, it's about time we have upload progress indication as well, and having web browsers provide this information is a lot cleaner than the hacks that web sites are forced to use to avoid the confusion of their users.

Come to think of it, I also sent in a bug report about the fact that HTTP uploads fail if the file name contains apostrophes since they aren't properly escaped in the mime content, nor are long file names properly split over multiple lines. Of course, every web browser I could get my hands on suffered from the exact same problems, but Opera's fail was particularly humorous since, instead of uploading the file, it uploaded half a dozen copies of it's "file not found" HTML page that it displays locally when it can't find a local file typed into the URL box. All of the other web browers simply choked and failed to upload anything.

It is a wonderful browser, however. For everything I hate about it I hate a lot more about others. Konqueror is damn-near a winner, though. The only thing that turns me away from it is that, like all KDE applications, it features "single click menus" which means that if you right click, the menu appears before you release the button, so that you can move the mouse over the item you want and select it by releasing the button. For compatibility, you can also just release the button, move the mouse, and click what you want. The problem comes when, in the process of clicking the button and releasing it, you happen to move it just one pixel down and to the right, so that it's now on the fucking menu, and you accidentally select whatever the fuck is first on the menu. I searched for a solution, in particular I expected single click menus to be an accessibility problem for people with poor motor control, but there's no option anywhere in KDE to require two clicks for menus, one to open the menu, and another to select an item. All I could find was a bug report about Konqueror where people with enough bookmarks to fill the screen discovered that clicking the bookmark menu caused it to be drawn under the mouse cursor, so that releasing the button immediately would always accidentally select something. The KDE people just bitched that there's no good way to automatically place things out of the mouse pointer's way and told them all to suck it up. An option for two-click menus would fix that easily.

Really, I'd probably be a Konqueror fan if it weren't for the single-click menu problem, but like I said, no one cares what I think, so I haven't even tried to convince the developers to change it. I just use Opera.

Anyway, as for doing away with annoying web pages in browsers that lack the ability to close the last tab, I like to keep a bookmark to a blank page handy. You have to remember to use the bookmark rather than simply close the tab, but at least it's possible that way, and it's less annoying than having to open a new tab to close the old one.

That's interesting. I looked into both. The Vermont movement seems somewhat misguided. There are plenty of good reasons to seperate from the union, but the ones they state aren't all that convincing, and some of them are just enviromental nonsense and libertarian pornography. Still beats Texas, however, whose web page appears to be a sort of blog with no useful content whatsoever. No introduction, no index of content, just a bunch of seemingly only vaguely relevent blog entries.

The Vermont site linked to an article about a poll that shows that 20% of people in every state are in favor of their home state seperating from the union, or, well they were last year, but I can't imagine the number is any lower now. Once this CO2 law takes effect and no one can afford to heat their homes, I suspect it won't be long before that number reaches the 2/3 majority Vermont is looking for.

It really needs to happen. I can't recall the last time congress passed a useful law, save a few the current administration created to undo the damage from the last. ...and really, I'm not sure what it possibly could do that states can't do for themselves just as well. The euro is proof that independant nations can share common currency. Canada is proof that a passport isn't required to travel between different countries. As for disaster relief, countries help eachother out all the time. The only thing I can think of that we would lose is the money they create out of thin air when the money they're taking from the citizens of the states isn't sufficient, and it isn't as if we don't need to put an end to that anyway.

I'm going to have to do some research into why the original colonies felt the need to create a federal government in the first place. All I can recall is something about providing for the general welfare. I sure hope they didn't form a union with no idea what its purpose should be.

Well, let's see...

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The only part of that that sounds like a real reason is "provide for the common defence." The rest just sounds like a bunch of happy words.

So far the only insight I can find is in Wikipedia's article about the articles of confederation, which lists a few vague reasons for why the constitution was written to replace the articles of confederation. Apparently the states were fighting with eachother because one state would do something another state didn't like, and so they consequently decided they needed some way for the majority to tell the minority what to do.

Comically enough, I would have said that's all the federal government is good for. Do you want a certain law in another state, but the people of that state don't want it? Just get the other states together and say "we want this law, and there's more of us than there are of you, so what we want matters more than what the people who actually live in your state want." It works even if it's your home state that doesn't want the law. Just go tell on them to the federal government and they'll take care of it for you.

I think we can do without that.

Actually, that's exactly what I would most like to see happen. (It could fit in a 30 second video too.) I just can't imagine our politicians discovering that that is the best thing to do, let alone implementing it without fucking it up for their own personal agendas. The republicans will complain that it's anti-business and doesn't allow people to choose their own coverage and the democrats will be upset that it doesn't do anything to protect the enviroment. (It seems like that is the only thing that democrats can motivate themselves about anymore.)

There's room for debate about what should be covered and how costs will be controlled, but when it comes to whether or not it should be automatic coverage for everyone paid from general taxes, it's just completely obvious that it should be. Everyone wants coverage, so we wouldn't be forcing anyone to pay for something they don't want, and insurance is about people with equal risk agreeing to pay eachother's bills, and if everyone has insurance from conception, then everyone starts with the same risk, and so paying everything directly from taxes makes sense. The only thing there is to debate is how to decide how much to pay for particular services, since we'd have to account for the fact that we're removing what little influence the free market had to begin with, but it's clear that total coverage for everyone is the best way to go.

I don't usually agree with libertarians, but since I can't really imagine our politicians seeing the light, I just think that something really simple they might be able to do without fucking it up is to make the cost of healthcare more transparent to people so that the free market can have some room to work. The current method of "we'll help you now without talking about money and in a month we'll send you a bill for whatever we decide to charge you" isn't the way to inexpensive health care. Like I said before with the $300 oral surgery example: You can get a good price if you look around for it right now. Just imagine how that would change if requiring everyone to mention costs up-front caused everyone to compare prices.

There is really no good reason why basic health care needs to be unaffordable without insurace. Sure, some things have to be expensive -- someone has to pay for that $1 million MRI machine -- but a lot of basic things are only expensive due to lack of competition.

Like the pharmacy that charges $10 for generic prescriptions regardless of which drug and pill count. Why charge less than $10 when insurance isn't going to care since the patient has a $10 co-pay anyway, and people will be so happy that it is only $10 they won't even consider the fact that they might be getting a dollar's worth of pills. When Wal-Mart shook things up by advertising their $4 prescriptions, Meijer decided to compete with that by offering certain very inexpensive prescriptions free of charge. One of my friends got one of those because his doctor told him that what he was getting was free at Meijer. It's amazing what a little competition can do.

My own personal experience, actually. Like I was saying with the story about my visits to the E.R.:

The first time I went, I was expecting $300 or so (a figure a friend once mentioned about someone else's ER visit). If they would have told me right then that they'd rack up $1200 over several hours of doing very little, I would have just sat in the waiting room for a while to see what happens, being content to be near the hospital in case things took a turn for the worse, since the chest pain I was there for had only lasted a few minutes and was over with long before I got to the hospital anyway.

It turns out my suspicion that nothing was really wrong was correct, and the doctors couldn't even guess as to what might have caused the pain. ...and in fact, after receiving that bill, I decided if I ever went back I should do that by default, but the next time I had government coverage, so I just let them admit me, and yet again, it turns out I didn't need much of anything they gave me and some time in the waiting room would have likely yielded the same results.

I was having difficulty breathing, and really suspected that my whole problem was hyperventelation, and once they stuck the blood oxygen sensor on my finger and it said my blood oxygen was fine (though they didn't bother to say anything, I only know because I looked at it), I just tried to calm down and breathe less, even though I felt worse for doing so, and after a while everything was fine. The doctor said it was probably just anxiety, but it wasn't until after spending $800 of government money on an EKG, x-rays and blood tests.

All I really wanted when I went in there was for my blood oxygen level to be checked, and if it'd been my responsibility to pay, and if medical providers actually knew what anything costs, I'd've simply asked how much to use their finger sensor for a minute and given them a few dollars. Even short of that, if the doctor would have seen me before all of the expensive tests and said something like "well, this looks a lot like hyperventalation, so let's try slowing your breathing first, and if that doesn't work then we can take a chest x-ray for $200 and perform an EKG for $150 and do some blood tests for another $150" then, well, you can't tell me that most people in the same situation wouldn't be incredibly motivated to try the inexpensive solution before moving on to anything else. If you don't have to pay for anything, there's no motivation to not just try everything simultaneously, and despite all of it being on the government's bill, that hospital apparently wasn't concerned at all with how much anything cost or figuring out whether or not any of it was really necessary. So why do you believe doctors won't perform unnecessary services? Perhaps some won't, but others just don't care. They're people, after all.

...maybe we can smash the 90s idea that eating dietary fat makes you fat. I'm tired of arguing with people that fat is not inherently bad for you any more than carbs are inherently bad for you...

Well, I have a fun anecdote for you.

A month ago I thought exactly the same thing that you do: just because you're eating fat doesn't mean it sticks to you. ...and, actually, that's still true. It's more complicated than that.

Months ago I came across this news item:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/cp-adr122908.php

I read the article that the scientists wrote in Cell Metabolism (it was actually free at the time, but not anymore), which was nice and scientific and all. They took some mice, fed them a high fat diet, waited for them to become obese, then did some tests to determine if the cellular stress they suspected of causing obesity had occured. Then they gave the mice some drugs to reduce this cellular stress and, like magic, they began eating less and exercising more and lost a lot of weight, all of their own free will. (Naturally they used a lot of control groups, but I'm just summarizing.) It was nice to see that real scientists were working on the weight loss problem, given that the weight loss industry is all about pointless bullshit.

Anyway, after tiring of eating mostly oatmeal cream pies, I switched to a diet of ice cream for about a week, at which point I randomly weighed myself and found that I weighed 260 pounds, which was up from the rather steady 250-255 I had seen for the past year. I was sick of ice cream by that point anyway, so I went to the store and picked up some Stouffers heat-it-in-a-pan meals, for no reason other than that they looked good.

While cooking the stuff, I noticed the fat content was really low. Eating an entire bag was only 25% of the recommended fat intake. This made me start thinking about that study those scientists did, and how, while they seemed to carefully consider all sorts of variables, something they seemingly assumed to be an absolute truth was that the path to obesity was a high-fat diet. In fact it seemed to be their theory that the high fat diet causes some sort of stress in the leptin-sensing cells in the brain, causing the brain to believe the body has less fat than it actually does.

Thinking about it, if it were true that high fat diets cause obesity, it would be the simplest experiment to confirm it. Get some mice, feed one group a high-fat diet, the other a low-fat diet, let both groups eat as much as they like, and see what happens. Surely if it weren't true, scientists researching obesity would know.

This all got me thinking: Assuming I'm overweight because I've eaten high fat foods and reduced the leptin sensitivity in my brain, would eating a low fat diet allow that leptin sensitivity to restore itself? Since I had a week's worth of Stouffers meals anyway, I decided to find out.

I'd tried low-calorie diets before, but they never went anywhere. As I tell people all the time: Hunger is regulated by the brain. If you're not eating what it wants you to, you'll spend all day thinking about food. Despite popular belief, overweight people don't eat for the joy of it. I was eating only oatmeal pies because I simply couldn't convince myself to eat anything else, and I really didn't like the oatmeal pies all that much either. It was just that whenever hunger became uningnorable, it was easy to eat one and get back to whatever I was doing.

Even though the Stouffers meals were fewer calories than I was used to, I initially started out with just two bags a day, which is only 1500 calories or so, and yet I didn't really feel any need to eat more than that. I expected that after a day or two my brain would wise up to the fact that the same volume of food was now fewer calories, and cause me to want to eat more, but it didn't happen. I was sort of hungry, but it was the kind of hunger where if I turned on the T.V. I'd forget about it. Mostly my stomach just felt kind of empty, and I wasn't all that compelled to care that it was.

Any time I had tried dieting before the hunger was something I couldn't stop thinking about, which naturally meant the diet didn't go anywhere. No one can torture themselves for months on end, and I wasn't about to try again. My plan was that if I'm less hungry, then hooray, otherwise, just eat whatever I want to.

After a week I found myself looking at the amount of food I was preparing for each meal and being slightly overwhelmed about how much I expected myself to eat. I began cooking half a bag at a time, which is actually the recommended serving size. I've never been able to make due with the recommended serving size of anything.

It's been almost a month now, and I've lost 25 pounds so far. If you would have asked me a month ago, I would have told you that losing that much weight in a month is impossible. I would have also said that you couldn't even do half of that without feeling as if you were starving for a month. I still eat when I'm hungry, I just avoid the fat. (Which is actually kind of hard to do, since pratically anything with significant calorie content has a lot of fat, and if you're not going to consume calories, then what's the point of eating? Even foods advertised as low-fat usually have as much fat as the law allows for foods labeled as such.) Seemingly as a result, I'm not as hungry as I used to be.

So it kind of seems like consuming fat does cause obesity, just in an indirect manner that I never would have considered before. The idea that fat makes you fat just because it is fat is absurd, and I always assumed that was the logic behind low-fat diets. Apparently there's a lot more to it than that, even if no one yet knows why the consumption of fat disturbes the leptin sensitivity of the brain.

Assuming one might convince people to care about the tenth amendment, it wouldn't be long before the 28th amendment was passed. They all ignore the tenth amendment on a regular basis, so I can't imagine anything but bipartisan support for repealing it, aside from having to put into words that they are repealing a portion of the bill of rights.

That's kind of the whole idea behind the idea that you have to support other people's rights even when you do not agree with them because if you don't then you'll eventually lose yours. Sure, violating a basic principle in just a few specific cases may not be the end of the world, but eventually there's a point at which a majority of people have an interest in one of those violations, at which point you'll never again see widespread support for that principle since too many people are enjoying its violation.

So, yes, that 20 to 30 seconds will get you absolutely nowhere. Congress has no interest in supporting the tenth amendment, the states have no interest in forcing them to do so, and the people don't care because, given a chance to draft a new constitution, few people would bother with renewing the tenth amendment anyway.

In fact, there's a fun thing Obama can do. Start an online discussion, google moderator style, about what the bill of rights should say if it were to be rewritten. I guarantee you that the tenth amendment would be replaced with "a man shalt not lie with another man" and the ninth would probably be replaced with something to protect the rights of Mother Earth. In fact, I'd be surprised if any of the current amendments, aside from a less ambiguous version of the right to bear arms, managed to make it onto the list. Everyone would be so concerned with what new laws they want that they wouldn't bother to preserve what we already have. ...and basically, that's our whole problem.

We're a species that has just recently evolved the ability to create large societies and so we're not very good at it. We can just barely understand how to make it work. By random chance, some of us are better at it than others, but the majority suck at it, and so a simple majority in favor of the wrong idea isn't difficult to come by. We might be better off if any law whatsoever required 90% approval to pass.

It sounds to me like the administration is looking for raw material they can put into commercials to run in districts that oppose Obama's plans.

Particularly with the 20-30 second requirement. Who can say anything other than "great plan, Mr. President" in just 20 to 30 seconds? I'd love to add my two cents, but I don't think I could squeeze it into less than a few minutes. Well, let's see...

"This healthcare plan sucks."

Well, that was easier than I expected. I had a lot more to say, but when I write, I try to write things so that the audience can understand what I am saying, and sometimes you know you just can't say anything.

I think we'd be a lot better off to pass a law that medical providers must present the cost of any service or treatment in advance. Any time I ask for prices in advance, I find great deals, like the oral surgery I once needed. I got an x-ray, some time with the doctor when he discussed what he was going to do, then the actual surgery on another day which involved at least 30 minutes of work by the doctor and a couple of assistants, plus some pain drugs, and a follow-up appointment a week later just to make sure it was healing correctly. Total cost: $300

Compare that to some lab work I had done recently which I didn't check the price of because the government was paying for it. (I would have simply not bothered otherwise, which isn't to say it wasn't a real problem, just that long-term chronic fatigue isn't something anyone can afford to investigate without insurance.) I had some blood drawn for some tests, a chest x-ray, and an EKG. Some time later I got a letter in the mail indicating that the government paid $1200 for those services. I was only there for ten minutes. X-rays are just photographic film and an x-ray tube, and an EKG isn't that complex either, both technologies have been around at least a hundred years. ...but the real kicker was that they charged $50 for a venipuncture.

Insurance is just a band-aid. The problem is that people spend without knowing how much, because they accept medical services without asking about the cost, assuming the intake person in the E.R. can even give you any answers. Insurance puts the costs up-front, and to keep premuims low, insurance companies force doctors to not waste so much money, but they also allow people to seek medical care when they really don't need it since it won't cost very much and they've already paid for it anyway, and that raises the costs back to what they would have been anyway. The end result is that your monthy premium costs more than oral surgery and it doesn't even come with a dental plan.

Despite my intense hatred for libertarians, I really think this is one issue where the free market can do a lot of good, if only the rules are changed so that the free market has some means by which to affect people's decisions. Passing a law that requires people to buy insurance only gives them a half-ass solution that was already available to them anyway, and it removes the solution of simply buying insurance for extreme situations and using the "shop around for a lower price" solution for more common needs, which is always going to be cheaper than buying insurance for everything.

As for Obama's fucked up idea of requiring insruance to cover pre-existing conditions, how about we do something sane like require insurance to cover post-existing conditions? If I get cancer while I have medical insurance, it will pay for my treatments, but only as long as I continue to pay the premiums. Imagine if homeowners insurance worked that way. One day your house burns down, which causes you to miss a few days of work, so your boss fires you because he's a prick, and now you can no longer pay your homeowner's insurance. Well, too bad, now they're no longer going to pay the contractors rebuilding your house.

It's retarded. Any illness that occurs when someone has coverage should be covered, no matter how long the treatments take. Insurance companies want it both ways, both the illness and treatment must occur while covered. It makes sense that only one should be required, but where Obama got the idea that the treatment should be the one required to occur during the coverage period, I have no idea.

Yes, that won't fit in a 30 second video. As I recall, the earlier google-moderated text discussions also had character limit too small to post anything really meaningful.

His modus operandi became evident when he ignored the highly voted Internet town hall topic of legalizing marijuana.

I would have ignored that too. It's popularly was likely the result of an incredibly poor moderation system and a narrow age range of the moderators. There was a time I would have been all for legalization of marajuana myself. That was before I noticed it had turned a lot of my friends into uninteresting people who can't do anything besides seek out more weed and never want to go outside because it's always either too hot, too cold, too bright, or too dark. I still can't say I think it should be entirely illegal, since there are some people who simply can't do anything with their lives anyway, and we might as well let them enjoy their miserable lives, but I definately wouldn't like to see it available to anyone under 21. ...or, well, fuck, you know they'll buy it for minors, so fuck it, no one can have any.

Anyway, that moderation system really sucked hard.

When people went to the site, it gave them the most popular suggestions to moderate first, asking a question like "do you agree with this comment?" The result was that the first suggestions posted, regardless of what they were, were the first to receive moderation, and since the bar of approval was set low, they mostly received positive moderation. The moderation sorting was partially based on the absolute number of approvals, rather than just percentage of approval, and so these first comments remained the first comments even if their overall percentage of approval became somewhat less than comments with fewer total approvals. The result was that people came to the site, mostly voted yes on the already most popular items, and eventually left after reading 20 or so. Comments made after the first 15 minutes the site was open had little chance of being read by anyone, let alone being voted to the top, since even if 9 people out of 10 happened to like it, that didn't rank it above the 800 people out of 1000 who liked one of the first comments.

To find what people really cared about, comments presented for moderation should have been chosen at random. Every comment would receive votes that way. People also should have been able to vote only on comments they were randomly presented so that no one could post a link to one in a message forum of particular interests, thereby misrepresenting its overall popularity. The moderation question should have been something like "is this one of the ten most important issues that Barack Obama needs to address?" People can agree that a lot of ideas are good, but we can't do everything, and in particular, the plan was only to consider the top ten comments anyway, and so asking that any random good idea be approved, rather than only the best and most important, was entirely inappropriate. Finally, the ranking should have been based purely on percentage of approval, since assuming a random sampling, the specific number of approvals is irrelevant, and they should all be about the same anyway, so long as they're smart enough to keep the voting open for some time after the comment period is closed.

However, apparently just to look web-savy, Obama likes to do everything with existing tools, regardless of how much they suck. Why do it correctly when you can just use Google Moderator instead? If the administration really cares what people think, they can certainly find better ways to collect that information. I'm sure there's a competent programmer somewhere who can put together a public comment and voting system that produces useful results. Hell, I would think that pulling random people off the street would yield more accurate results. ...and since when do we care what people think anyway? Shouldn't we do what's best? Sure, the majority of people hate the idea of homosexuals enjoying marriage, but this country was founded on the idea that the government doesn't have the right to do every damn thing a simple majority of people happen to ask for. So nevermind what people want. What's the best way to solve the healthcare crisis? Do we require everyone to buy private insurance, or might it be better to simply make it easier for the free market to do its thing by putting an end to the pratice of allowing people to provide services without first providing an estimate of the cost of those services? Resturants provide menus with prices. Repair men provide estimates.

Car repair...that's something else. There's a place in town that makes all kinds of money on people who show up and get repairs without asking for estimates from other mechanics. It's only illegal to charge for more hours of work than were actually performed. There's no law against having a ridiculous hourly rate. Some people do compare estimates and have their repairs done elsewhere, but that's not a problem since they still make a lot of money on people who don't know any better. It's really sad, and it'd be even worse if people were in the habit of not asking for any estimate at all, but instead just having the repairs done and receiving the bill later. Then they wouldn't even have to have an affordable hourly rate. Just cleverly ask for name of employer when accepting the car, make sure not to bill more than $3000, then when they can't pay, take them to small claims court and have it deducted from their pay check.

Kind of remindes me of a hospital, actually. You know that's why they ask for the name of your employer, right? From the very beginning they plan on having to take you to court to receive payment, yet they still don't bother to provide any sort of estimate so that you can realize you're about to spend more than you can afford. It almost sounds like a scam, doesn't it? I'm sure they don't intend it as a scam, but it says a lot that our country has a major problem with people going into debt as the result of a process that looks a lot like a scam.

What would fast food cost if prices never appeared on menus and all the cashier had to say was "I don't know, I just put your order in the computer and it doesn't print out the bill until after you've finished your meal." At that point they are free to charge whatever they want since you no longer have a choice. So what's the solution? Should we requiring people to buy fast food insurance or make sure people take note of the price before it's too late to back out of the transaction? Which option is more likely to result in less expensive fast food that every american can afford?

Oh, wait, it doesn't matter if they can afford it, we'll just make them buy it anyway. Problem solved. ...and fuck Slashdot. First it complains of an invalid session key, probably because I spent longer writing this post than they expect anyone to spend writing a post. So I copy and paste into a new form. Now it's bitching that I've tried to post only 15 seconds after clicking "reply." Fuck programmers who think they're smarter than me. "Ooh, this douche is trying to post with an invalid session key." "Ooh, look, now he's trying to paste something entirely irrelevant into a discussion. I can tell because there's no way he wrote a meaningful comment that quickly. I'm so smart!"

Sure, with ALSA you do have device files, but you pretty much have to use alsalib to use them AFAIK.

Yes. I could use OSS just fine via assembly language, but ALSA was impossible due to the fact that assemblers don't accept the C header files necessary to use the ALSA API. Essentially, ALSA is a C-only API, which sucks if your favorite language isn't a derivative of C.