Ugh, I got sick of BVs selection a long time ago. If you're not in the valley, the burgers tend to sit around and get freezer burned.

Our local drive through serves Chez Gourmet patties (out of Wilsonville, iirc), which are much much much better. Not as good as Impossible/Beyond, but at least I can eat them without chipping a tooth.

Seriously though, hoping this isn't an April Fools' thing....

I've lost over 45 pounds and kept it off for over three years so far. And best of all, I didn't do it by starving myself.

I've considered myself overweight for most of my adult and childhood life. Oddly enough, I had always been fairly athletic, and exercised regularly throughout my life. I had strong willpower. But I just couldn't seem to keep weight off.

I lost my weight by signing up for weight watchers online. Weight watchers online is a program that allows you to conveniently keep track of the food you eat. All of it. I don't think weight watchers is magic; instead, I think the process of making eating a deliberate and measured action is what helped me. I like numbers. I can do numbers.

What I found by recording everything I ate is that a small number of foods accounted for a large amount of calories. Beef, fries, bread, snacks. I've largely eliminated these foods from my diet. It's not that I can't eat them, I just don't feel that the value is high enough for the calories to eat them a lot. I was able to decrease the number of calories I ate without starving myself by eating smart. The other benefit of recording food is that there are some replacement foods that are significantly healthier. For me, I started snacking more on pretzels, which I found a lot more filling, but contained less calories than many of the other snacks I ate.

After about a year, I stopped using weight watchers. I had internalized most of the good behaviors, and no longer needed to record everything I ate. I continued to lose weight, slowly but steadily. Eventually I stopped at a healthy weight, and I feel great. Over time, even though I was never starving myself, I started eating higher calorie foods and exercising more regularly to offset it. On that note, for burning calories, exercising longer and with lower intensity is better than short, intense workouts. I like to use the elliptical; I can exercise for 90 minutes without killing myself, and burn over 1000 calories. I've found that playing video games at the same time really distracts me from the act of exercising, and even makes it enjoyable.

If you're skeptical, and think you know enough about dieting to not record everything, think again. There are simply too many surprises. Go to your favorite restuarant's website and look at the nutrition information. I used to go to Chili's quite often. I haven't been there for a long time. I don't know how they cook their food, but it's insanely high in calories. Even seemingly safe foods like salad can be high in calories depending on the dressing. The opposite is true as well. Some fast food, like KFC, can be very low in calories (although probably bad for other reasons). Over time, you'll learn what fills you up and doesn't have a ton of calories. If you just start "eating less" without any data, you'll still be eating the same inefficient foods, and you'll probably gain your weight back after you can't take it anymore.

Take a look at this list of practice or permanent CTFs. The root of the site also has a great archive of past CTFs, and other useful stuff.

The beta was released in 1989. 25 years ago.

Which makes a perfect farce of the notion that many eyes make all bugs shallow.

1) We don't know when the bug was introduced, although it's clear that it was quite some time ago.

2) I defy you to name any version of any reasonably complex software that is guaranteed to be free of exploitable bugs. It's been shown by people much smarter than me that it's mathmatically impossible to do so. (Just one example thread discussing the problem.)

The difference is that with OSS, they all will eventually get found and fixed. The same can't be said of closed source software.

Nokia had some issues but was still profitable as Tomi Ahonen clearly documents in this long post. tl;dr? A couple of short quotes and links to graphs:

This is how bad it was under previous CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Nokia had seen revenues decline from its peak in 2008. Nokia had seen profits decline severely from its peak also in 2008. Nokia had reported its first quarterly loss (although the full year was still profitable) - that loss was driven by Nokia's troubled Networking division, not its handsets units which were both highly profitable. ...

So to be clear, Nokia had reported one QUARTER of a loss, but in annual terms, Nokia was a profitable company. Its big revenue growth had turned into decline but that decline was actually halted around the time the Nokia Board decided to seek a replacement to Kallasvuo, and Nokia revenues had returned to growth by the time Elop joined Nokia.

Let me repeat. Nokia did NOT have a problem in its handsets business. Its issues were in its Networking business line.

Now the graphs:

Nokia profits by business line Note: Elop took over Sept. 21, 2010.

Which company had the strongest handset business?

Which company saw their handset business tank and when?

Smartphone marketshare

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Yep, those damn plutocrats sure did their best that the rest of us would never have a leg up. /sarcasm

I suggest that you take some time to read the Federalist Papers. I think you'll discover things aren't quite as black and white as you believe.

Not necessarily, or if it does, it'll take a very long time. Remember, the US states' cultures were all mostly from Britain, and everyone spoke English with a few exceptions (like the Pennsylvania Dutch). Early on, there were settlements by the French, Dutch, Spanish, etc, but the British settlers pushed everyone out (the French only survived in Quebec, which isn't part of the US).

Wow, this is sooo wrong. Just about the only commonality that the U.S. population started out with was that we are all, every single one (including American Indians and Eskimos), immigrants from somewhere else. The U.S. has seen waves of immigration from all over the world.

As a personal example, I'll cite my great-grandfather. He helped settle Chisholm, a small town in northern Minnesota in the first decade of the last century. He was a Serbian peasant whose family had spent about 250 years in Croatia but still considered themselves Serb, not Croatian. Still used the Cyrillic alphabet attended the Serbian Orthodox services at somebody's house rather than attend the local Catholic church. Then he gets to the U.S. and everything changed for him.

His new neighbors were Welsh, Italian, Jewish, Slovenian, Russian, German, Norwegian, Finnish, and FSM knows what else. All of those families were founded by peasants right off the boat who had come to work in the iron mines or in the logging industry.

The Welsh were coal miners who got jobs as mine foremen because they were typically the only ones underground who spoke English, which in turn meant that they were the only ones who could talk to the mine management. The rest just showed up at the mine for their shift and got by with a lot of hand waving.

Eventually, they all learned English, took night classes to earn their citizenships, made sure their kids were brought up speaking English, and generally became members of the American culture. But every last one of those families is still fiercely proud of their own distinct heritage and celebrates their differences as well as our shared commonalities.

In the past several decades, Minnesota has seen large influxes of Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, Afghani, and a couple of other refugee groups. We've even got Mexicans who have chosen to settle here instead of following the crops. Those families have all followed similar paths. We've got a huge Cinco de Mayo celebration in the state capital every year.

(As an aside, why on earth are so many people from the tropics so happy to move to the nation's icebox? :-D)

(As another aside, the far right's screaming about illegal immigration is one of the dumber things that I've ever seen in my life. After all, compared to the Indians and Eskimos we're all newbies.)

The point to remember is that America has never really been a melting pot. We're more of a stew, where each new immigrant population adds its own distinctive flavor.

When I look at the history of Europe since about 1970, I see the same thing happening. It's slower because the national boundaries tend to contain each distinctive national flavor, but trust me. There is already far more commonality across Europe today than there was 40 years ago. It may be hard to see from the inside, but it's there.

The last Battlefield game that I bought was BF 2. How about you?

Yes, they can be both. They can be incompetent buffoons in the sense of not realizing that their stupid empty ideology based on religious indoctrination is a mental trap that pushes them beyond stupid, yet be very good at manipulating things to accomplish their childish goal of armageddon and rapture. Or, they can be total slaves to their corporate masters with no sense of morals or ethics of their own, and yet be very good at carrying out the goals of their masters.

I discovered the world of 3D printers when I was looking for interesting projects to build with Arduino, as I'm starting to learn electronics to augment my coding skills. I could have started with a programmable LED cube, but when I discovered the RepRap project I was immediately hooked. Not only could I learn a lot of useful skills and get soldering practice, but at completion I'd have a machine I could use to build custom cases, buttons, and any other custom parts I might need for future projects!

I did a lot of up-front research comparing the commercial offerings to a growing plethora of open source designs. It seemed clear that I would probably save money and gain more valuable experience by self-sourcing parts and building a RepRap myself, so it was really just a matter of choosing a design. I finally settled on the Prusa i3 Mendel for several reasons, foremost being the large (20cm^3) build area, low cost, and elegant design.

The sourcing and acquisition of parts took me about a month, and I made some noob mistakes, such as buying unsuitable stepper motors and the wrong RP parts for my chosen i3 variant (single plate). I also needed to buy tools and supplies, such as a soldering kit, a grinder to cut metal rods, a glass cutter, nuts and bolts, Kapton tape, blue painter's tape, acetone, etc. My main sources were SeeMeCNC, eBay, and McMaster-Carr. I overspent a bit up front, but I was able to recoup most of that overage in reselling my surplus. Today I have much more savvy (and now I can print my own parts) so I could easily build a sister to this printer for under $500.

I did learn a lot in the process of building this machine, and I've learned a lot in the process of enhancing and upgrading it since. The printer certainly hasn't "paid for itself" even a year later, but that doesn't matter to me. I did this project to educate myself and get hands-on experience, and compared to the cost of a college semester it's been a total bargain. Not only am I now familiar with Arduino programming (and have contributed code to Marlin firmware - you're welcome), but I've gotten pretty good making things in OpenSCAD, gotten to know a great group of geeks at the Seattle Metrix:Create Space, delved into Blender 3D, and gotten to know electrical current and the smell of burning components... None of which I would have gained just buying an off-the-shelf Cube3D.

The progress of low-cost 3D printing has really been accelerating lately. Some of the most vexing problems (such as bed leveling) are being solved, better extruders are being made, the slicing software is smarter and faster, and the quality of parts designs is constantly improving. I've got a half a grocery bag filled with failed prints and imperfect prototypes after a year of messing around with this machine, but I've gotten really good at calibration at this point, so very few prints fail now. You do still need to watch prints carefully, and that goes for the commercial machines as well, but generally speaking the reliability of newer machines is much better than their predecessors.

As for how useful a 3D printer is to any individual, that will depend on the intensity of their interest. I took the time to learn OpenSCAD, but not everyone will feel inclined to do so. I've made some useful items, such as the "hanger" part to repair some Sony headphones, a light cover, a slick sign for my workshop door, some iPad sound deflectors, cases and covers for various things, and of course upgrades for the RepRap itself. I've made several sets of printer parts and sold them on eBay, so the printer is slowly paying for itself. I help others with their 3D printer builds, sharing the experience I've gained in my first year, and that's a lot of fun. I think it's a great tool for hobbyists and professionals alike, especially those with engineering skills, and I can anticipate a time, not too far in the future, where 3D printers will be as ubiquitous as home computers.

The Ultimaker software is outstanding. I don't have an Ultimaker machine, but I still prefer to use Cura to slice my models because it does such a great job of arranging extrusion into one long continuous line. The latest version (14.03) finally added an option to lift the Z axis when retracting or moving across perimeters, which is helpful for those parts with overhangs that rise as they cool and obstruct the nozzle.

I'm pretty sure there's a hack on Thingiverse so you can use standard filament spools with a Cube. Check the RepRap forums also.

After all religion is the patent troll of human experience.

While it may be counterintuitive, my experience has been that using engine braking is generally more forgiving than the traditional brakes. For me, it's a lot easier to manage the friction coefficient with the engine than the brakes because braking force tends to be much more binary in nature. When slippery conditions exist, you're either on the brake pedal or you're not (although ABS helps here).

In fact, one reason that I really like a manual transmission is that manipulating the clutch and engine RPMs in combination with the transmission goes a long way toward getting just the right balance to slow down without losing traction. Newer computerized automatic trannies and engines do the same thing. So far, though, I haven't found a combination in a mass produced vehicle that does a very good job of it. Maybe we'll see some additional improvement in this space in the future.