The actual hypothesis you seem to be advancing is that adoption of Christianity causes people to make a rational decision to wish to extend their life. That hypothesis doesn't seem to agree either with these observations or with what is known generally about the psychology of religion.
plethora of smug, snarky posts like yours on this article.
You should worry about the beam in your eye and the eyes of all Christians; one really can't get any more smug than Christian dogma, and one can't get any more snarky than the Holy Inquisition or claims of blasphemy.
Yes, there is rational fear of death and there is irrational fear of death. Rational fear of death is when you fear preventable deaths from likely causes. Irrational fear of death is when you fear unpreventable deaths, or deaths from highly unlikely causes.
The data is pretty easy to explain based on the hypothesis that religion is motivated by an irrational fear of death; the same irrational fear of death also motivates the desire for excessive medical intervention. The religious are also are much more afraid of violent crime than the rest of the population.
Unfortunately, the paranoid fears of this group is responsible for bad public policy, such as imposing unwanted life extending measures on others, irrational security features, human rights violations in the name of national security, and an irrational and unforgiving "get tough on crime" approach.
Furthermore, if you look at the German statistics, accident rates have been decreasing despite steadily increasing speeds (85th percentile speed is 95mph):
I spent hundreds on a device to be able to listen to my (then) DRM-infested iTunes library. Shitty as the iPod Touch is, it's better than previous iPods.
The "naysayers" aren't saying "where is...", they are saying "other phones already have..."
I bought into the hype. I bought an iPod Touch, and it's a p.o.s. You end up paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars more to Apple and app vendors to get around the limitations of the thing.
I'm glad I didn't go for the iPhone and get stuck with a contract. Now that all my iTunes tracks are MP3, I'm not going to buy another iPod, ever.
I'd like to see Android running on an iPhone-like piece of hardware.
I own an iPod Touch, and I'm not ever going to buy an iPhone or another Touch. The phone software itself is mediocre, but what really kills it for me is iTunes and Apple's un-productivity applications (Address Book, Calendar, and all that other crap).
The fact that it's a democratic republic doesn't stop it from being a republic.
There are no non-democratic republics, just like there are no non-mammalian dogs.
Every republic is a democracy because a republic is a specific form of democracy; namely, it is a representative democracy.
Representative democracies are designed to avoid tyranny of the majority; they stand in opposition to direct democracies, where the people do, in fact, vote directly on issues.
So, far from being an example of tyranny of the majority, the US is an example of a democracy that has always been designed to oppose tyranny of the majority. The US federal government can, should, and does override the will of the majority because that is what it is supposed to do. And it has served us well for more than two centuries, compared to other nations.
You are absolutely right that the US is a republic. And it is intentionally so, because the founding fathers wanted to avoid a "tyranny of the majority". That is why they chose a representative democracy for our federal government; that form of representative democracy is commonly called "a republic".
That's true only if you define "the will of the people" as "the majority among those who voted". I doubt that that was the intent of the term and it certainly isn't how this nation was governed historically.
But even if it was, we now know it doesn't work. The majority of Germans probably wanted to the Jews gotten rid of by any means necessary, but that doesn't make it democratic or right to do so.
Democracy and liberty is not achieved by mob rule or decisions based on instant popularity polls.
The business model is quite proper. It was "let's make this available and see what people do with it". That's why the service is in Google Labs. The usage data itself is the value Google was getting out of it.
The TOS probably prohibit P2P and "excessive usage" (meaning, usage that is many times the median usage) altogether, in which case the ISP could legally actually just terminate the contracts of those people. Throttling is nicer than termination, isn't it? At least the customer gets to decide when/if to terminate if they don't like it.
Now, you may be able to do the math yourself. How much would 70x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 2x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x cost? At what level would your company go out of business? Keep in mind that merely upping the bandwidth wouldn't help: peak users tend to fill all available bandwidth, so after you double your connection, you'll probably have to double again soon.
The best choice is probably to make the policy explicit in the TOS: customers get their first 30G/month at full speed, afterwards, they're throttled to 256kbps (always or when necessary). People should be able to see their current volume on a we page. You save yourself support calls that way compared to quietly throttling users. However, volume caps can be a bitch to implement correctly: you may need more equipment and you're the person implementing the policy.
I had hoped that Symbian would just go away quietly: it's awful to program, and its user interface is even worse. Open sourcing it is just prolonging the agony.
First of all, the patent captures hands, not fingerprints. More importantly, structured light is a standard technique for 3D capture that's in widespread use and has been around for decades. If you want to capture the 3D shape of hands, it's the obvious engineering solution.
I think any technical writer that isn't scared away by the syntax of LaTeX should be able to master "svn update", and "svn commit". And if that's too much, there are plugins for Windows, Mac, and Linux that integrate Subversion with the normal file browser.
For decades now it has been an accepted trade-off that the filesystem can hold back disk writes and do them later,
Yes, with a delay of, 100ms. Not with a delay of 100s. Holding back writes for that long greatly increases the risk of data loss and it is the wrong thing to do.
For decades now it has been an accepted trade-off that the filesystem can hold back disk writes and do them later, giving better disk performance at the expense of losing data if there is a crash.
Holding back writes that long isn't going to improve performance much, but it is a huge risk. Trading a few percent in benchmark gains for a much higher risk of data loss is a bad idea.
This sucks, but it's the Unix way
You can't just take some semantics and arbitrarily stretch it beyond reason. There are lots of guarantees that UNIX doesn't make that you would be annoyed if they changed. For example, there is no guarantee that UNIX outputs characters to your screen without a delay (in fact, there is a little delay). It would be much more efficient if it just buffered all output for 60s before actually sending it to your screen, wouldn't it?
"It's a consequence of not writing software properly."
When I write a file, I expect it to be stored quickly and reliably. Any operating system that doesn't do that is faulty. It's nice if an operating system manages to get a bit of extra performance through some clever caching, but that is secondary.
The question isn't whether the brain is "developed" or "alive" in some general sense, the question is whether it is capable of supporting conscious thought. There is a continuous transition there, but that doesn't mean science can't give definitive answers, like that there is no "person" or consciousness during the first trimester.
If computer gaming is dangerous, just imagine how dangerous the life of a politician must be: sitting around all day in meetings, eating bad food, often smoking, etc.
I think we need to outlaw politics and throw into jail anybody who tries to spread it.
Your grandma is dead because her brain is dead. The brain is necessary (but not sufficient) for a human being to exist, and it defines what a human being is.
Zygotes and embryos don't have human brains either, which is why they are not human beings either. Until they get a developed human brain, they are no different from a kidney or liver.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual hypothesis you seem to be advancing is that adoption of Christianity causes people to make a rational decision to wish to extend their life. That hypothesis doesn't seem to agree either with these observations or with what is known generally about the psychology of religion.
plethora of smug, snarky posts like yours on this article.
You should worry about the beam in your eye and the eyes of all Christians; one really can't get any more smug than Christian dogma, and one can't get any more snarky than the Holy Inquisition or claims of blasphemy.
Yes, there is rational fear of death and there is irrational fear of death. Rational fear of death is when you fear preventable deaths from likely causes. Irrational fear of death is when you fear unpreventable deaths, or deaths from highly unlikely causes.
The data is pretty easy to explain based on the hypothesis that religion is motivated by an irrational fear of death; the same irrational fear of death also motivates the desire for excessive medical intervention. The religious are also are much more afraid of violent crime than the rest of the population.
Unfortunately, the paranoid fears of this group is responsible for bad public policy, such as imposing unwanted life extending measures on others, irrational security features, human rights violations in the name of national security, and an irrational and unforgiving "get tough on crime" approach.
Greedy, arrogant writer sues greedy, arrogant corporation.
Just look at fatal accident rates for 100,000,000 vehicle miles: it's been steadily decreasing since 1920, by at least an order of magnitude.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b6/UsFatalAutoAccidentRates.png
Furthermore, if you look at the German statistics, accident rates have been decreasing despite steadily increasing speeds (85th percentile speed is 95mph):
http://www.abd.org.uk/images/mway_sl3~.gif
So: new technologies are making us safer and let us travel at higher speeds. Sorry, but this isn't even a glass-half-empty situation.
I spent hundreds on a device to be able to listen to my (then) DRM-infested iTunes library. Shitty as the iPod Touch is, it's better than previous iPods.
No more Apple for me.
The "naysayers" aren't saying "where is...", they are saying "other phones already have..."
I bought into the hype. I bought an iPod Touch, and it's a p.o.s. You end up paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars more to Apple and app vendors to get around the limitations of the thing.
I'm glad I didn't go for the iPhone and get stuck with a contract. Now that all my iTunes tracks are MP3, I'm not going to buy another iPod, ever.
I'd like to see Android running on an iPhone-like piece of hardware.
I own an iPod Touch, and I'm not ever going to buy an iPhone or another Touch. The phone software itself is mediocre, but what really kills it for me is iTunes and Apple's un-productivity applications (Address Book, Calendar, and all that other crap).
The fact that it's a democratic republic doesn't stop it from being a republic.
There are no non-democratic republics, just like there are no non-mammalian dogs.
Every republic is a democracy because a republic is a specific form of democracy; namely, it is a representative democracy.
Representative democracies are designed to avoid tyranny of the majority; they stand in opposition to direct democracies, where the people do, in fact, vote directly on issues.
So, far from being an example of tyranny of the majority, the US is an example of a democracy that has always been designed to oppose tyranny of the majority. The US federal government can, should, and does override the will of the majority because that is what it is supposed to do. And it has served us well for more than two centuries, compared to other nations.
You are absolutely right that the US is a republic. And it is intentionally so, because the founding fathers wanted to avoid a "tyranny of the majority". That is why they chose a representative democracy for our federal government; that form of representative democracy is commonly called "a republic".
That's true only if you define "the will of the people" as "the majority among those who voted". I doubt that that was the intent of the term and it certainly isn't how this nation was governed historically.
But even if it was, we now know it doesn't work. The majority of Germans probably wanted to the Jews gotten rid of by any means necessary, but that doesn't make it democratic or right to do so.
Democracy and liberty is not achieved by mob rule or decisions based on instant popularity polls.
The business model is quite proper. It was "let's make this available and see what people do with it". That's why the service is in Google Labs. The usage data itself is the value Google was getting out of it.
The TOS probably prohibit P2P and "excessive usage" (meaning, usage that is many times the median usage) altogether, in which case the ISP could legally actually just terminate the contracts of those people. Throttling is nicer than termination, isn't it? At least the customer gets to decide when/if to terminate if they don't like it.
Now, you may be able to do the math yourself. How much would 70x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 2x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x cost? At what level would your company go out of business? Keep in mind that merely upping the bandwidth wouldn't help: peak users tend to fill all available bandwidth, so after you double your connection, you'll probably have to double again soon.
The best choice is probably to make the policy explicit in the TOS: customers get their first 30G/month at full speed, afterwards, they're throttled to 256kbps (always or when necessary). People should be able to see their current volume on a we page. You save yourself support calls that way compared to quietly throttling users. However, volume caps can be a bitch to implement correctly: you may need more equipment and you're the person implementing the policy.
I had hoped that Symbian would just go away quietly: it's awful to program, and its user interface is even worse. Open sourcing it is just prolonging the agony.
First of all, the patent captures hands, not fingerprints. More importantly, structured light is a standard technique for 3D capture that's in widespread use and has been around for decades. If you want to capture the 3D shape of hands, it's the obvious engineering solution.
What's to prevent everything that's metallic in the area from moving around it, inducing current in it, and converting it into useless thermal energy?
Sort of the same thing that keeps your disk and your fridge magnets working.
I think any technical writer that isn't scared away by the syntax of LaTeX should be able to master "svn update", and "svn commit". And if that's too much, there are plugins for Windows, Mac, and Linux that integrate Subversion with the normal file browser.
Linux reinvents windows registry? Who knows what they will come up with next.
I think it's the influx of Windows refugees that brings over all these lousy ideas.
For decades now it has been an accepted trade-off that the filesystem can hold back disk writes and do them later,
Yes, with a delay of, 100ms. Not with a delay of 100s. Holding back writes for that long greatly increases the risk of data loss and it is the wrong thing to do.
For decades now it has been an accepted trade-off that the filesystem can hold back disk writes and do them later, giving better disk performance at the expense of losing data if there is a crash.
Holding back writes that long isn't going to improve performance much, but it is a huge risk. Trading a few percent in benchmark gains for a much higher risk of data loss is a bad idea.
This sucks, but it's the Unix way
You can't just take some semantics and arbitrarily stretch it beyond reason. There are lots of guarantees that UNIX doesn't make that you would be annoyed if they changed. For example, there is no guarantee that UNIX outputs characters to your screen without a delay (in fact, there is a little delay). It would be much more efficient if it just buffered all output for 60s before actually sending it to your screen, wouldn't it?
"It's a consequence of not writing software properly."
When I write a file, I expect it to be stored quickly and reliably. Any operating system that doesn't do that is faulty. It's nice if an operating system manages to get a bit of extra performance through some clever caching, but that is secondary.
The reviewers didn't do their homework; this technique has been around for decades.
The question isn't whether the brain is "developed" or "alive" in some general sense, the question is whether it is capable of supporting conscious thought. There is a continuous transition there, but that doesn't mean science can't give definitive answers, like that there is no "person" or consciousness during the first trimester.
If computer gaming is dangerous, just imagine how dangerous the life of a politician must be: sitting around all day in meetings, eating bad food, often smoking, etc.
I think we need to outlaw politics and throw into jail anybody who tries to spread it.
Yeah, like people never accidentally share secret documents from their desktop machines.
Your grandma is dead because her brain is dead. The brain is necessary (but not sufficient) for a human being to exist, and it defines what a human being is.
Zygotes and embryos don't have human brains either, which is why they are not human beings either. Until they get a developed human brain, they are no different from a kidney or liver.