> they have no trouble waking you up to make you fix it, but if you suggest an HA/failover? > Sorry, too expensive. We have weighed the risk, and decided it's an acceptable risk.
Yes because they can count on waking you up to fix it.
So seems perhaps the bosses are doing the right thing for the organization. They hired you, you will wake up to fix it, and they don't need to spend on HA/failover.
Now if they hired someone who can't fix it fast, or sleeps really soundly, then they should spend on HA/failover, or hire you instead;).
Cantonese: m4 hou2 juk1 (typically shorted to "moh yook") = don't move (you'll hear/see this used in those Hong Kong cop shows;) ) Mandarin writers would typically use a different bunch of characters to express that (bie dong?). I doubt they'll write "not good (to) move", even though a direct translation would probably be something like that.
There is indeed "written cantonese", but yes a lot of it is similar to written Mandarin.
FWIW, I'm not expert in Cantonese or Mandarin, so you'll probably get better info from someone who knows both well.
The Chinese mainlanders might no longer be as aware of the differences due to the Chinese Government trying to get everyone to standardize on Mandarin (down to making everyone use Mandarin names), but that's not so true elsewhere.
"not", "can not" are "mm" and "bay" in hokkien respectively, but the same word in Mandarin ("bu").
So officially they might be the same, but in practice it's not so simple.
The written language is more like a different language that the non-Mandarin users shoe-horn their spoken languages into when the time comes for writing stuff down:).
Even the Japanese used Chinese characters in the past (and still use some nowadays). And what they wrote/write with it was not always the "One Chinese Written Language".
There's a difference, an assembly language representative of a machine code program doesn't normally execute on the target machine. It has to be "assembled" to the object code before it can be executed.
What these bunch have done is created a program that "massages" (which could include expanding and alteration) source machine code to a new arrangement of _machine_code_ that can execute on the target as is. That new arrangement happens to resemble English text (in a computer format).
It's only an assembler if you're thinking of machine code as the "assembly language" and the "english looking" machine code as the assembled object code.
But that's stretching things a lot. Like saying you've actually been right all along, that is if wrong is right.;)
I think the actual risk isn't that bad. I don't make calls while keeping my phone in my pocket. And the exposure is quite limited even for inbound calls - you don't have the phone active in your pocket for minutes.
It's the holding the phone next to my head for a few minutes (or longer) to talk that worry me more.
Because it is very obvious that the phone transmits a lot more power when it's handling phone conversations, than when it's just idling about in your pocket.
1) the batteries run down much faster. Very much faster. Most phone standby times are measured in days, whereas the talk time is measured in hours. 2) there's more interference (just hold it next to a PC speaker, then compare the interference when it's idle, making a call or sending/receiving a message).
If you're in a habit of leaving your phone in your pocket while talking with a wireless hands-free, then you'd probably be cooking those lower parts ( as opposed to cooking your head).
Of course, if your phone is faulty and running out of juice really fast, then all bets are off...
What I found is virtualbox doesn't allow you to reconnect network interfaces on a running machine to a _different_ network (real or virtual). Vmware allows you to do that. This might not be an issue for your environment.
Also vmware has each machine in all nicely in one directory, whereas virtualbox seems to put stuff in different directories. The vmware way makes it a bit easier to backup and restore machines.
Note: vmware server doesn't sign their drivers so you can't install it easily on certain windows O/Ses. This is not normally an issue if you can run Linux (which I think is a better platform as a vmware server host than windows).
In my uninformed opinion, blades are mainly a way for hardware vendors to extract more money from suckers.
They probably have niche uses. But when you get to the details they're not so great. Yes the HP iLO stuff is cool etc... When it works.
Many of the HP blades don't come with optical drives. You have to mount CD/DVD images via the blade software. Which seemed to only work reliably on IE6 on XP. OK so maybe we should have tried it with more browsers, than IE8, but who has time? Especially see below why you don't have time:
So far I haven't seen any mention in HP documentation that the transfer rate of the mounted CD/DVD image (or folder) between your laptop to the iLO software to a blade that you're trying to install stuff on is a measly 500 kilobytes per second. But that's what we encountered in practice.
Yes you can attach the blade network to another network and install it over the network, but if you can do that, doesn't that make the fancy HP iLO stuff less important? You might as well just get a network KVM right? That KVM will work with Dell/IBM/WhiteBoxServer so you can tell HP to fuck off and die if you want.
Which brings us to the next important point: Fancy Vendor X enclosures will only work with current and near future Vendor X blades. In 3-5 years time they might start charging you a lot more to buy new but obsolete Vendor X blades. Whoopee. What are the odds you can use the latest blades in your old enclosure? So you pay a premium for vendor lock-in and to be screwed in the future.
I doubt Google, etc use blades. And they seem to be able to manage hundreds of thousands of servers. OK so most of the servers might be running the same image/thing... So that makes it easy.
BUT if you are having very different servers do you really want them in a few blade enclosures? Then when you need to service that enclosure you'd be bringing down all the different blades...
I have vmware machines on one server at home. There are still benefits even though it's not a cluster. So it's not that stupid.
It is easier to move the virtual servers to another machine or O/S. This is useful when upgrading or when hardware fails or when growing (move from one real server to two or more real servers). There's no need to reinstall stuff because the drivers are different etc.
You can snapshot virtual machines and then back them up while they are running. Backup and restore is not that hard that way. So even if you have a single point of failure, if you have recent image back ups, you could buy a machine with preinstalled O/S, install vmware, and get back up and running rather quickly.
And when power fails and the UPS runs low on battery, I have a script that suspends all virtual machines then powers the server down. That's more convenient too than setting up lots of UPS agents on multiple machines and hoping they all shutdown in time.
DB performance sucks in a vmware guest though, so where DB/IO performance is important, use "real" stuff. Things may be better with other virtualization tech/software.
But still it's for spying. Everything else being equal, it's harder for something with a 2.5m wingspan to be spotted than something with an 18m wingspan.
The people who think that secrecy matters so much are the ones living in a dream world.
In many of those countries, the secrecy of your vote hardly matters anyway. After all, they've already done most of the voting for you.
You might even get your hands chopped off for just daring to show up to vote.
In places where you can have voter intimidation without the police stepping in (or the police being the culprits), secrecy of your vote is not much of a concern.
And in some countries the voting system is so fast and efficient that everyone knows the results before they vote.
That's the reality.
As for nonintimidation cases - e.g. selling their votes, if someone wants to sell their vote for USD5, so what? Willing buyer, willing seller.
A far bigger problem is gerrymandering. That's what makes buying and selling of votes and other tricks viable - if you can make 1000 votes count more than 100,000 votes, then it's cost effective to buy those 1000 voters. Make 1000 voters happy instead of the other 100,000 voters.
Then there's the postal votes stuff. In many countries it's probably easier to just cheat via the postal votes.
To me there should be public healthcare and it should cover the basic stuff. That just makes things a lot more civilized. What's the point of having a civilization if you can't even fix simple stuff for free. In some poor countries it is customary to provide free water to passing strangers (or other forms of hospitality) - they leave jugs out or stuff like that (no they don't check your ID card to see if you're a citizen). A rich country should be able to do far better than that. Or else it's just stingy and uncivilized.
But there should be a limit to what the other taxpayers should fork out for you. A quota. It may be a high limit or low, that depends on how rich the country is. So once you hit that limit, you're on your own. Maybe other people could be allowed to donate their unused quota to you (subject to regulations and controls so that they don't get conned - there are gullible people around).
Because with the marvels of modern medicine, it doesn't take that much money to fix the basic stuff reasonably well, or even give the best (or near best) advice.
As medical technology improves I forsee the low end getting better and staying affordable, but the high end could hit stratospheric regions. And the latter is the problematic part. Public healthcare cannot and should not commit to providing the best. It will be impossible (unless an asteroid hits us and our best goes back to stone-age crap;) ).
When things get really advanced, a billionaire might find even his budget stretched - "You want us to grow new limbs for you? Sure, we'll start growing a batch of a 1000 now, and we'll pick the best of the ones that pass QA (due to tech limitations, not all limbs grown will be viable), it'll only cost you USD200 million. What? Do we look like a charity to you? This is bleeding edge technology you know."
Whereas robotic limbs might start getting cheaper and better.
So if you're on public healthcare, and lose a limb, maybe with your quota of healthcare you can only afford some low-end or mid range robotic limb with basic touch feedback.
The quota won't be enough to pay for the Olympic class ones - sorry you can't have those 6 million dollar fuel cell powered robot legs that allow you to beat Usain Bolt's record, yes they are very good. No you don't have enough in your quota to pay for that. Yes Public Healthcare "sucks", too bad. And you're certainly not going to get those regen tank limbs - those are for the billionaires.
Yes life is unfair. But it can be civilized. Having people go bankrupt (and possibly die) just because they get sick when it could be fixed if everyone else chips in just a bit, is uncivilized. But it's also uncivilized to expect everyone to spend millions to keep you alive. So sorry, you're not going to get the best possible all the time.
A cancer patient might be rather sick, but make an extra effort for special events.
What next? They're going to cancel insurance for cancer patients if they look like they're better?
An insurance agent is unlikely to be an authoritative expert on medical matters (or in the rarefied field of "psychiatric diagnosis via facebook photos") - they may know some stuff (just like I do), but when it comes to a court case or other legal stuff it should not be their call to make. If the insurance company has doubts they should insist that the policy holder be examined by a certified expert in the relevant field. After all, it's not unusual that you have to go for a medical examination when you sign up for certain sorts of insurance. They don't just leave it to an insurance agent to say "hmm she looks ok to me".
Too bad if her case is genuine she'll likely be too depressed to sue them (unless she can afford her meds and is still taking them).
Heck I'm having problems with ATI on a Windows 7 (64 bit) notebook PC.
Sometimes when I scroll the text isn't cleared correctly- so there are two repeated lines of the same text... Maybe I should try a driver update... But what are the odds it'll make things better instead of making things worse? The fact that the current driver I'm using is crap, doesn't give me much confidence in the newer drivers... So I'll have to wait till I have a whole spare day free...
The last time I had this problem with Nvidia was years ago when I was using suse 9.1 and the OSS drivers, and switching to the Nvidia binary drivers that the purists complain about fixed it.
So even if ATI's performance is better, I'll stick to Nvidia for my stuff (the notebook PC belongs to my employer). I believe Nvidia's multimonitor stuff works better too.
It's a shame ATI's hardware is let down by their software.
Another thing - ATI's eyefinity crap is halfbaked -(some unpaid volunteer is fixing it for them -making games look correct with it and doing a better job of it).
And eyefinity is generally a stupid idea- who wants their taskbar spread across 3 screens? Who really wants their computer/OS to think that 3 screens are one huge seamless screeen, as long as there are clearly visible "seams" between the screens in real life? Only a few people can afford screens that are physically seamlessly joined together.
Hmm, you didn't go for the obvious: "in Southeast Asian countries, where cleanup is all but ignored by local government, and it practically costs you an arm or a leg to dispose of mines".
Actually the placebo effect is scientifically proven to work well for "fixing" all sorts of problems on a significant proportion of humans. Even better than drugs in some cases (popular real painkillers cannot be used on burn victims if they also have breathing difficulties).
So it is logical that even if God (or gods) doesn't exist, groups that believe in a God who can and will help them, will have at least one advantage over groups that don't.
Because that group's members would be better able to take advantage of the placebo effect - no need for a physical "sugar pill", and someone _else_ to administer it. For example: a badly injured member in severe pain, might pray and obtain pain relief, and then be able to extend his usefulness to the group.
The group may have disadvantages too depending on the overall belief system, but there could also be other advantages.
For example, if the belief system encourages members to be more prone to beneficial out-of-character behaviours then that group could have better survival fitness. It doesn't have to be 100%, just a statistically significant bias may be good enough over generations.
Lastly, atheists are not immune to delusions and irrationality. After all many of them like to quote: "But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." which is clearly incorrect[1].
That delusion may give those atheists a feeling of superiority, which might provide some advantages I guess. But are they going to find it as easy to "self administer" the placebo effect?
[1] Communism isn't a religion, and there was the infamous "stanford prison experiment". And if one considers Communism/"I Was Following Orders" a religion you could consider any belief system or ideology as a religion. On the other hand, if the conclusion is "most people aren't good", and they mainly just conform or follow orders, then a suitable belief system would be useful for improving the statistics right?
That's why I find it really funny how some people can think that voting doesn't work (voters can't influence Governments to do the right thing), but at the same time think that people can vote with their wallets (influence companies to do the right thing)...
Voting doesn't work if there are too many stupid/ignorant voters. Whether it's voting with wallets or with ballot boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
> The ideal backup system is invisible.
That already exists according to the Many-Worlds-Interpretation Quantum Physicists.
> That doesn't work in the world we live in.
That's the big problem though - when "stuff happens" the backup is in other worlds.
> they have no trouble waking you up to make you fix it, but if you suggest an HA/failover?
;).
> Sorry, too expensive. We have weighed the risk, and decided it's an acceptable risk.
Yes because they can count on waking you up to fix it.
So seems perhaps the bosses are doing the right thing for the organization. They hired you, you will wake up to fix it, and they don't need to spend on HA/failover.
Now if they hired someone who can't fix it fast, or sleeps really soundly, then they should spend on HA/failover, or hire you instead
Oh yah see also these compound cantonese words:
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/?full=true
For example:
Cantonese: m4 hou2 juk1 (typically shorted to "moh yook") = don't move (you'll hear/see this used in those Hong Kong cop shows ;) )
Mandarin writers would typically use a different bunch of characters to express that (bie dong?). I doubt they'll write "not good (to) move", even though a direct translation would probably be something like that.
There is indeed "written cantonese", but yes a lot of it is similar to written Mandarin.
FWIW, I'm not expert in Cantonese or Mandarin, so you'll probably get better info from someone who knows both well.
There's written Cantonese that's not the same as written Mandarin.
See: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/
And that word is common in Cantonese.
The Chinese mainlanders might no longer be as aware of the differences due to the Chinese Government trying to get everyone to standardize on Mandarin (down to making everyone use Mandarin names), but that's not so true elsewhere.
As for Taiwan, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoy_dialect#Negative_particles
e.g.
"Bo" in Amoy/Hokkien (one syllable) can be two words in Mandarin- "mei yo", or one ("bu") depending on the situation.
"not", "can not" are "mm" and "bay" in hokkien respectively, but the same word in Mandarin ("bu").
So officially they might be the same, but in practice it's not so simple.
The written language is more like a different language that the non-Mandarin users shoe-horn their spoken languages into when the time comes for writing stuff down :).
Even the Japanese used Chinese characters in the past (and still use some nowadays). And what they wrote/write with it was not always the "One Chinese Written Language".
I think the joke doesn't translate very well.
As he did say, you probably have to be Swedish (and a teenager) to really get it.
There's a difference, an assembly language representative of a machine code program doesn't normally execute on the target machine. It has to be "assembled" to the object code before it can be executed.
;)
What these bunch have done is created a program that "massages" (which could include expanding and alteration) source machine code to a new arrangement of _machine_code_ that can execute on the target as is. That new arrangement happens to resemble English text (in a computer format).
It's only an assembler if you're thinking of machine code as the "assembly language" and the "english looking" machine code as the assembled object code.
But that's stretching things a lot. Like saying you've actually been right all along, that is if wrong is right.
I think the actual risk isn't that bad. I don't make calls while keeping my phone in my pocket. And the exposure is quite limited even for inbound calls - you don't have the phone active in your pocket for minutes.
It's the holding the phone next to my head for a few minutes (or longer) to talk that worry me more.
Because it is very obvious that the phone transmits a lot more power when it's handling phone conversations, than when it's just idling about in your pocket.
1) the batteries run down much faster. Very much faster. Most phone standby times are measured in days, whereas the talk time is measured in hours.
2) there's more interference (just hold it next to a PC speaker, then compare the interference when it's idle, making a call or sending/receiving a message).
If you're in a habit of leaving your phone in your pocket while talking with a wireless hands-free, then you'd probably be cooking those lower parts ( as opposed to cooking your head).
Of course, if your phone is faulty and running out of juice really fast, then all bets are off...
Isn't vmware server free?
What I found is virtualbox doesn't allow you to reconnect network interfaces on a running machine to a _different_ network (real or virtual). Vmware allows you to do that. This might not be an issue for your environment.
Also vmware has each machine in all nicely in one directory, whereas virtualbox seems to put stuff in different directories. The vmware way makes it a bit easier to backup and restore machines.
Note: vmware server doesn't sign their drivers so you can't install it easily on certain windows O/Ses. This is not normally an issue if you can run Linux (which I think is a better platform as a vmware server host than windows).
In my uninformed opinion, blades are mainly a way for hardware vendors to extract more money from suckers.
They probably have niche uses. But when you get to the details they're not so great. Yes the HP iLO stuff is cool etc... When it works.
Many of the HP blades don't come with optical drives. You have to mount CD/DVD images via the blade software. Which seemed to only work reliably on IE6 on XP. OK so maybe we should have tried it with more browsers, than IE8, but who has time? Especially see below why you don't have time:
So far I haven't seen any mention in HP documentation that the transfer rate of the mounted CD/DVD image (or folder) between your laptop to the iLO software to a blade that you're trying to install stuff on is a measly 500 kilobytes per second. But that's what we encountered in practice.
Yes you can attach the blade network to another network and install it over the network, but if you can do that, doesn't that make the fancy HP iLO stuff less important? You might as well just get a network KVM right? That KVM will work with Dell/IBM/WhiteBoxServer so you can tell HP to fuck off and die if you want.
Which brings us to the next important point: Fancy Vendor X enclosures will only work with current and near future Vendor X blades. In 3-5 years time they might start charging you a lot more to buy new but obsolete Vendor X blades. Whoopee. What are the odds you can use the latest blades in your old enclosure? So you pay a premium for vendor lock-in and to be screwed in the future.
I doubt Google, etc use blades. And they seem to be able to manage hundreds of thousands of servers. OK so most of the servers might be running the same image/thing... So that makes it easy.
BUT if you are having very different servers do you really want them in a few blade enclosures? Then when you need to service that enclosure you'd be bringing down all the different blades...
I have vmware machines on one server at home. There are still benefits even though it's not a cluster. So it's not that stupid.
It is easier to move the virtual servers to another machine or O/S. This is useful when upgrading or when hardware fails or when growing (move from one real server to two or more real servers). There's no need to reinstall stuff because the drivers are different etc.
You can snapshot virtual machines and then back them up while they are running. Backup and restore is not that hard that way. So even if you have a single point of failure, if you have recent image back ups, you could buy a machine with preinstalled O/S, install vmware, and get back up and running rather quickly.
And when power fails and the UPS runs low on battery, I have a script that suspends all virtual machines then powers the server down. That's more convenient too than setting up lots of UPS agents on multiple machines and hoping they all shutdown in time.
DB performance sucks in a vmware guest though, so where DB/IO performance is important, use "real" stuff. Things may be better with other virtualization tech/software.
Would your first cellphone be using a different tech from current phones?
I remember the first ones were rather huge and they used a different range of frequencies.
That's true.
But still it's for spying. Everything else being equal, it's harder for something with a 2.5m wingspan to be spotted than something with an 18m wingspan.
The people who think that secrecy matters so much are the ones living in a dream world.
In many of those countries, the secrecy of your vote hardly matters anyway. After all, they've already done most of the voting for you.
You might even get your hands chopped off for just daring to show up to vote.
In places where you can have voter intimidation without the police stepping in (or the police being the culprits), secrecy of your vote is not much of a concern.
And in some countries the voting system is so fast and efficient that everyone knows the results before they vote.
That's the reality.
As for nonintimidation cases - e.g. selling their votes, if someone wants to sell their vote for USD5, so what? Willing buyer, willing seller.
A far bigger problem is gerrymandering. That's what makes buying and selling of votes and other tricks viable - if you can make 1000 votes count more than 100,000 votes, then it's cost effective to buy those 1000 voters. Make 1000 voters happy instead of the other 100,000 voters.
Then there's the postal votes stuff. In many countries it's probably easier to just cheat via the postal votes.
To me there should be public healthcare and it should cover the basic stuff. That just makes things a lot more civilized. What's the point of having a civilization if you can't even fix simple stuff for free. In some poor countries it is customary to provide free water to passing strangers (or other forms of hospitality) - they leave jugs out or stuff like that (no they don't check your ID card to see if you're a citizen). A rich country should be able to do far better than that. Or else it's just stingy and uncivilized.
;) ).
But there should be a limit to what the other taxpayers should fork out for you. A quota. It may be a high limit or low, that depends on how rich the country is. So once you hit that limit, you're on your own. Maybe other people could be allowed to donate their unused quota to you (subject to regulations and controls so that they don't get conned - there are gullible people around).
Because with the marvels of modern medicine, it doesn't take that much money to fix the basic stuff reasonably well, or even give the best (or near best) advice.
As medical technology improves I forsee the low end getting better and staying affordable, but the high end could hit stratospheric regions. And the latter is the problematic part. Public healthcare cannot and should not commit to providing the best. It will be impossible (unless an asteroid hits us and our best goes back to stone-age crap
When things get really advanced, a billionaire might find even his budget stretched - "You want us to grow new limbs for you? Sure, we'll start growing a batch of a 1000 now, and we'll pick the best of the ones that pass QA (due to tech limitations, not all limbs grown will be viable), it'll only cost you USD200 million. What? Do we look like a charity to you? This is bleeding edge technology you know."
Whereas robotic limbs might start getting cheaper and better.
So if you're on public healthcare, and lose a limb, maybe with your quota of healthcare you can only afford some low-end or mid range robotic limb with basic touch feedback.
The quota won't be enough to pay for the Olympic class ones - sorry you can't have those 6 million dollar fuel cell powered robot legs that allow you to beat Usain Bolt's record, yes they are very good. No you don't have enough in your quota to pay for that. Yes Public Healthcare "sucks", too bad. And you're certainly not going to get those regen tank limbs - those are for the billionaires.
Yes life is unfair. But it can be civilized. Having people go bankrupt (and possibly die) just because they get sick when it could be fixed if everyone else chips in just a bit, is uncivilized. But it's also uncivilized to expect everyone to spend millions to keep you alive. So sorry, you're not going to get the best possible all the time.
Yeah.
A cancer patient might be rather sick, but make an extra effort for special events.
What next? They're going to cancel insurance for cancer patients if they look like they're better?
An insurance agent is unlikely to be an authoritative expert on medical matters (or in the rarefied field of "psychiatric diagnosis via facebook photos") - they may know some stuff (just like I do), but when it comes to a court case or other legal stuff it should not be their call to make. If the insurance company has doubts they should insist that the policy holder be examined by a certified expert in the relevant field. After all, it's not unusual that you have to go for a medical examination when you sign up for certain sorts of insurance. They don't just leave it to an insurance agent to say "hmm she looks ok to me".
Too bad if her case is genuine she'll likely be too depressed to sue them (unless she can afford her meds and is still taking them).
Hmm looks like the 0.5 got rounded down.
The bed and dust mites might be different from the ones your body were used to...
It could be fleas - but normally dog fleas just bite humans around the ankle areas.
I know. But of course I'm not going to tell you.
:)
Otherwise those places will have the unnatural disaster of "too many people"...
Heck I'm having problems with ATI on a Windows 7 (64 bit) notebook PC.
Sometimes when I scroll the text isn't cleared correctly- so there are two repeated lines of the same text... Maybe I should try a driver update... But what are the odds it'll make things better instead of making things worse? The fact that the current driver I'm using is crap, doesn't give me much confidence in the newer drivers... So I'll have to wait till I have a whole spare day free...
The last time I had this problem with Nvidia was years ago when I was using suse 9.1 and the OSS drivers, and switching to the Nvidia binary drivers that the purists complain about fixed it.
So even if ATI's performance is better, I'll stick to Nvidia for my stuff (the notebook PC belongs to my employer). I believe Nvidia's multimonitor stuff works better too.
It's a shame ATI's hardware is let down by their software.
Another thing - ATI's eyefinity crap is halfbaked -(some unpaid volunteer is fixing it for them -making games look correct with it and doing a better job of it).
And eyefinity is generally a stupid idea- who wants their taskbar spread across 3 screens? Who really wants their computer/OS to think that 3 screens are one huge seamless screeen, as long as there are clearly visible "seams" between the screens in real life? Only a few people can afford screens that are physically seamlessly joined together.
Yep. Energy does not tell even part of the story. Sliding a very sharp knife into a human body doesn't have to take that much energy.
Hmm, you didn't go for the obvious: "in Southeast Asian countries, where cleanup is all but ignored by local government, and it practically costs you an arm or a leg to dispose of mines".
> there is no rational in believing in any God,
Actually the placebo effect is scientifically proven to work well for "fixing" all sorts of problems on a significant proportion of humans. Even better than drugs in some cases (popular real painkillers cannot be used on burn victims if they also have breathing difficulties).
So it is logical that even if God (or gods) doesn't exist, groups that believe in a God who can and will help them, will have at least one advantage over groups that don't.
Because that group's members would be better able to take advantage of the placebo effect - no need for a physical "sugar pill", and someone _else_ to administer it. For example: a badly injured member in severe pain, might pray and obtain pain relief, and then be able to extend his usefulness to the group.
The group may have disadvantages too depending on the overall belief system, but there could also be other advantages.
For example, if the belief system encourages members to be more prone to beneficial out-of-character behaviours then that group could have better survival fitness. It doesn't have to be 100%, just a statistically significant bias may be good enough over generations.
Lastly, atheists are not immune to delusions and irrationality. After all many of them like to quote: "But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." which is clearly incorrect[1].
That delusion may give those atheists a feeling of superiority, which might provide some advantages I guess. But are they going to find it as easy to "self administer" the placebo effect?
[1] Communism isn't a religion, and there was the infamous "stanford prison experiment". And if one considers Communism/"I Was Following Orders" a religion you could consider any belief system or ideology as a religion. On the other hand, if the conclusion is "most people aren't good", and they mainly just conform or follow orders, then a suitable belief system would be useful for improving the statistics right?
> Nice genes...
They're just a pair of old hand-me-downs from dad and mom.
There's also the "Amen Break":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
1969 - quite an eventful year. 747, Concorde, first man on the moon, first message over the ARPANET, and the release of the "Amen Break" :).
Exactly.
That's why I find it really funny how some people can think that voting doesn't work (voters can't influence Governments to do the right thing), but at the same time think that people can vote with their wallets (influence companies to do the right thing)...
Voting doesn't work if there are too many stupid/ignorant voters. Whether it's voting with wallets or with ballot boxes.