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Unfortunately, buying in bulk isn't going to be an option for many single people with lower incomes and not much refrigerator/storage space... (maybe with the exception of beans and rice, which can be stored relatively compactly and for a long time without refrigeration).

Another thing that works against people with lower incomes is that much of the nutrious food is more expensive than the less nutritious food.

Bread is a prime example. The cheapest bread is highly processed white bread. The more nutrious whole, multi-grain breads are usually two or three times as expensive as the cheap crap.

Same with organic, cage- and cruelty-free produce vs the pesticide-ridden crap.

  - Cyanide is "natural".
  - Hemlock is "natural".
  - Mercury is "natural".
  - Cobra venom is "natural".

If the study showed that incredibly "fit" people who smoked occasionally and had a sightly elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" (what is that, exactly?) than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be one thing.

If the study showed that slightly "fit" people who smoked heavily and had an extremely elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be something else.

The same could be asked of the fitness vs obesity results. How fit and how obese?

Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated? Or do they conflict with the results of other studies?

Most people seem only too happy to give these corporations information about their interests, their friends, their preferences, etc.

Users think they're getting all these great services for free, but in fact the cost of these services is information about yourself, information that will be collected, sold, correlated, aggregated, and used in ways most people now can not even imagine.

There needs to be more awareness and discussion of the implications.

Unfortunately, that's not true.

From http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851

"When you hear that the GPL is viral and can force proprietary code to become GPL... you'll know that isn't true.

If you steal GPL code... a forced release under the GPL can't be imposed on you.

You do have a choice under the GPL license: you can stop using the stolen code and write your own, or you can decide you'd rather release under the GPL. But the choice is yours. If you say, I choose neither, then the court can impose an injunction to stop you from further distribution, but it won't order your code released under the GPL."

Also, you might want to open any issue of High Times. They advertise a million hemp and pot-related products, many of which could just as well be advertising pot itself.

http://www.manyhands.com/articles/story.cfm?id_no=6010024200...

For example, "products labeled 'Made With Organic Ingredients', which contain at least 70 percent organic ingredients, but can contain up to 30 percent non-organic ingredients"

Now, if he'd been asked this in private, with no consequences for refusal and if he still let them fly with him, then I'd be impressed with his generosity.

As it is, what he did was just a prudent public relations decision.

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Does-Not-Lie-Defense/dp/1594...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n2IVF9a2IA

and here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCEYxs7kWmQ

Or look at the end of segregation. Again, to large percentage of the US population at the time it seemed not only that segregation was the way things were, but that it was the way it was meant to be (with much more irrational and passionate attitudes against desegregation than even the anti-drug hysteria we have in the US today), and very few would have expected it to end so soon. And yet all of a sudden there was a mass movement that resulted in desegregation within a decade (though a good argument could be made that the process still isn't complete today).

It is easy enough to find many other examples of fast, radical change throughout history. Just look at the history of any number of revolutions or fights for independence (though, of course, some are take much longer, like the Irish and Palestinian quest for independence).

The point is that history has a way of changing radically, and very quickly. Just because the goal may seem far off today doesn't mean that it will remain so. History is being made as we speak.

This will no doubt stress the contemporary HPC software model which was developed in a time when 512 cores was a large number."

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pa...

Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...

Look, when you've got a large enough library of third-party contributions, some portion of them will be broken. And the more libraries people use to build their own libraries, the more dependencies there'll be.

Let me know when some other languages manage to solve these problems, or when the upstart languages actually get enough third party libraries for them to have to start facing this problem themselves.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby&...

Python and Ruby aren't nearly as popular as Perl. CPAN, Perl's repository of libraries, is gigantic, having most everything you can think of already in it; which makes writing new programs much, much easier.

As much as Ruby and Python fanboys love to beat up on Perl, their favorite languages have their uglyness and their own faults (which you'll rarely hear them mention). However, their propaganda really has worked on a lot of people that really don't know any better. So my impression is that a lot of the newer stuff is being written for Ruby and Python. So it would probably pay to learn them for that, if nothing else. But I would definitely think twice before choosing them instead of Perl.

In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.