If the enterprise uses flash drives more, will we end up replacing more motherboards as well?
I guess so... Until somebody realizes that PCI USB2.0 cards are a lot cheaper than motherboards...
Most of it is Microsoft...
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The large majority of "computer voodoo" is because of Microsoft's buggy crapware...
Back in the DOS days, people were convinced things worked better if they left the power off for long periods of time, before restarting.
Windows got more complex, and had too many of those things to name. Hitting the tower is a popular one. Moving the mouse around while waiting to prevent lock-ups is another very popular one. There are certainly millions of them. Linux, too, has developed a few, because some drivers are iffy, but they make up the tiniest fraction of what you see with Windows zombies (aka. users).
When I'm helping someone with a Windows system (I keep that as rare an event as possible), I still see similar nonsense. Windows XP's setup will allow me to partition hard drives #1 and #2, but WON'T let me format them there, and I have to put them in another system to do that part. Not to mention all the drivers that will just corrupt themselves after working fine for 3 months, if you just LOOK at the system funny. It's no wonder voodoo is so popular with Windows systems (and pre-OSX Macs, to be fair).
. With that said, I have seen some frustrating hardware problems. After 6 months of working without any problem, my always-on Linux system starts crashing every day for 3 days, and then won't start up... Typical crappy power supply (bloated capacitor).
I had a Charter cable modem which would work whenever the tech guys were here (I called them out a dozen times over 2 months), but would fail miserably just moments after they'd step out the door. It took me a while before I realized that the thing would work for amout 5 minutes after it was power-cycled, and only then would it crash. They would never take my word for it, and I had to cancel my service to get rid of that piece of shit.
I've seen a few network cables, which test-out just fine, and work most of the time, but after the machine has been online for a while, it will fail, and need to be rebooted... This is partially Windows voodoo, because the stack is unstable, and can't handle many errors. But mainly, it's because of cables with marginal connections, which work about 95% of the time, enough to pass tests, but cause all sorts of problems in real-world use.
Then there are the occasional network cables with crosstalk, which can be hard to diagnose if you don't have an advanced/expensive meter, and give many of the same symptoms as above.
There was one case where a guy would play music CDs for an hour, before they started skipping. He changed CD-ROM after CD-ROM, before asking for my help. It was pretty obvious when I saw the sheer ammount of lint in his system fans. It would run fine while the system was cool, but the fans not spinning would drive the tempurature up to insane levels shortly, and the CD-ROM was just the first part to show symptoms.
Another Windows one is IE's download dialog... It takes so long before it appears, that when it starts there is already a few KBs downloaded, so it claims a 500KB/sec download rate on a dial-up modem, and only gradually goes down to about 4K, as it's really doing. People think that's accurate, and actually come up with the great idea of stopping and restarting downloads several times every minute, presumably because the server or their ISP will only allow them to download "fast" when the download first starts.
the device appears to be a product from my point of view, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that I'm still calling into a server every day -- a server that is vital to ability of the device to be practical.
Not to encourge people to buy Tivos (I built my own DVR just to avoid such problems/hacks/monitoring), but if/when their server stops working, you can use XMLTV to grab TV listings, and another to reformat them to Tivo format, and then transfer that file to the Tivo, as needed. That's how people in other countries have their Tivos working, although it doesn't give you everything Tivo's listings do.
No guide, but it's not terribly complex once you know where to start.
Start in "linux-$ver/Documentation/video4linux" to find out which drivers suit the card you have. Load the modules by-hand, using whatever params the docs say should work for your card (or trial-and-error, running through all possible combinations of card/tuner parameters). Test with xawtv, tvtime, or mplayer.
If you have a card which uses loop-back audio through the soundcard, use alsamixer to turn-up "Line" and "Captur" devices, and hit space to set both as "Capture". If you don't want to hear sound while recording, mute Line-in.
Use "mencoder" (from MPlayer) to capture from Raw/YUV/analog cards. See the HTML docs for some example command-lines to use. Only important issues are:
- Height must be full (480 NTSC/576 PAL) or exactly half. - TV is 4/3 and pixels aren't square, so you need to do some math if you want to capture at anything other than full resolution. - Digital video ALWAYS needs dimentions that are even multiples of 16 (480, 464, 448, etc).
Then you just need to hassle with LIRC for the remote. If your reciever is plugged-in, and the remote has fresh batteries, yet "mode2" doesn't show any output while you push buttons, assume that version of lirc is buggy (9 out of 10 versions, in my experience) and try a different version. . . Those tips should get you through the commonly unknown and frustrating parts of setting up TV capture. The rest is a bit time consuming, but not very hard. Things like understanding and writing LIRC and LIRCMD config files, selecting the best video encoding options, etc.
the margin for error in cheap mechanical timers can be quite high,
Every analog microwave I've owned had precision down to a second or two, after 10+ minutes. Not to mention all the mechanical clocks and watches I still have that continue to keep time damn well.
And (2) cheap mechanical timers break quite easily in my experience.
And never break, in my experience, so there we are...
And on both counts, digital timers certainly aren't as cheap as these ultra-lowsy mechanical timers you're talking about, so the point is entirely moot.
Remind me to never buy something that can be taken from me...remotely.
I could have told you that years ago. That's the main reason I put together my own DVR about 4 years ago, rather than buying (and hacking) a Tivo or ReplayTV unit.
It has worked out more wonderfully than I could have imagined. The 1 week of taming Linux TV-tuner modules looks so insignificant in hindsight, and is really a one-time thing, as I've set-up DVRs for others in under an hour (each).
No messy, stupid tricks or hacks needed to get my video over to my computer to edit, reencode, and burn it. No posibility of my viewing habits being tracked by anyone. No posibility of being unable to get TV listings in the distant future. No problems installing as many hard drives as I want. No hassling with tech support and Fedex (or buying a whole new system) when the power supply goes out... etc.
All I need is to plug-in any HDTV tuner card, and I'm ready to keep this same box going for the next 100 years, potentially.
the threat to our troops and the Iraqi people was and is external and organized. Is this not so?
For the most part, it is NOT external. They are a small minority, which gets lots of press attention.
As for oganized, it certainly is, but (just to be clear) Iraqi insurgents have no bearing on the subject at hand: Domestic Terrorism, Domestic Evesdropping, Racial Profiling, Curtailing Civil Rights, Commercial Airliners, etc.
What those people did is awful, but I think it is a little different than an organized group with the stated goal of the destruction of the US, democracy, etc, trying to kill as many uninvolved civilians as possible.
Al Qaeda hasn't been a threat around the world, since the invasion of Afganistan. The RECENT attacks have all been individual actors, with no ties, except that they saw what Al Qaeda was doing, and decided to do something vaguely similar.
And those "individuals'" attacks were in no way different than the more recent attacks. They wanted to kill as many people as they could. The difference in their ultimate goals, has absolutely no relevance.
(all data is kept to self except for chasing a real terrorists), I suspect that she would have had less reason to rule this.
That's just complete and utter nonsense. Since when do wiretapping rules depend on whether or not you are "sharing" data? Illegal is illegal is illegal.
Problem: Defend our society from those hell bent on destroying it
Solution: Already Solved. "those hell bent on destroying" America have miniscule power. It's basically a case of an elephant being afraid of a mouse. We have much more to fear from our government's overzealousness, than from terrorists.
It is undeniable that the set of "terrorists" is almost entirely contained in the intersection of "dark skinned" and "muslim".
Yes... "undeniable". "Dark skinned" like Ted Kazinski, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, John Walker Lindh, et al.
If anything, the prohibition against racial profiling is to protect the goverment from itself. They will have complete tunnel-vision if you let them, and the blonde-haired guy with big wires hanging out of his suitcase, will be rushed through security. Just see the Beltway Sniper case for a perfect example.
we don't know which web-cam models can: capture at a decent frame rate (25fps) and resolution;
Sure sucks having to do your own work, and look up product specs, doesn't it?
are supported and easily programmed under GNU/Linux
Since when do you 'program' a webcam? You use the software to tell the camera to grab some pics. No programming required, on your part, where the camera is involved.
Are you SURE you're a 'small company', and not just some random kid who wants/. to tell him which webcam to buy?
There is nothing stopping terrorists from taking out all the people standing around waiting to get through security.
"nothing" == "The Laws of Physics"
Small ammounts of exploives are of great concern only in confined spaces (being pressurized helps, too). In a nice wide open space, as in airport terminals, much of the force of the blast will go upwards and outwards torwards the ceiling, and be harmlessly dissapated over that distance.
To harm numbers of people in open spaces, you need serious ammounts of explosives. Suicide bombers who detonate a themselves in crowded shopping malls in Israel, more often than not, only kill a couple people. They have much better odds in more confined areas, such as inside buses, trains, and certainly airplanes.
You should really be FAR more concerned about crowded places, which don't have the numbers of security personelle that airports have. Crowded public places, like the DMV or post office, are far more likely targets.
I can't use my microwave oven in near dark because the stupid thing's start button is indistinguishable from the power level button.
Better question: WHY THE HELL ARE MICROWAVES DIGITAL? What part of "close the door and turn the dial" was so hard for people to understand, and how did typing in digits help? Microwaves aren't phones.
Was it the extra precision? People need to be sure they are microwaving their sandwich for exactly 2 minutes and 45 seconds, and ABSOLUTELY NOT 2 minutes and 46 seconds?
Are there a lot of people out there with only one finger, who find it faster and easier to type in 1-0-0-0-Start rather than turning the dial a quarter turn to "10m"?
What in the world makes people believe replacing analog with digital is the answer to absolutely everything?
AOL submitted receipts reflecting large purchases by Hawke of gold and platinum bars, Graham said.
The part I'm missing is what evidence AOL has, that led them to the conclusion that it's in his parents' yard... As opposed to ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH that it could be.
In other news, AOL's head lawyer is Cartman, and he wants your "Jew gold".
I'm tired how all GUI development is now centered around the GPU, and more eye-candy.
The useful features from OS X that people find useful, like a visual cue as to where a window is being iconified to, can and have been done in much faster/simpler ways. For as long as I can remember, Afterstep has drawn an outline of windows being iconofied, and quickly shows the outline spiraling down to, and shrinking into the icon.
Why is the rest of the GUI stagnating? Keyboard shortcuts are extremely primitive at best. Using TAB to navigate between fields is a rather nonsensical way to do things, particularly since you don't know if TAB is going to take you to the field to the left, right, up, down, etc. With something like Symbian, to get to the field below, you just hit the down arrow, and you're there.
Browsers are even worse. They are beyond horrible when trying to use keyboard navigation. The notable exception is Links (similar to lynx), and yet nobody is adapting those highly intuitive and powerful keyboard navigation features to other browsers.
Having to scroll side-to-side while reading a webpage is absolutely the worst interface design ever concieved. Web pages aren't giant images or PDFs, after all. I was telling people, 10 years ago, that browsers needed to ignore any HTML code (and wrap/resize images) that forced the page to become wider than the browser window... And I was REALLY ranting on the subject about 4 years ago, when it was driving me crazy on my 240x320 PDA. Yet, it was only about a year ago that Opera figured it out, and included that feature, and still none of the other web browsers have even picked-up on that important improvement.
You can make my browser window as transparent and warped as you want, but it's not going to fix any of the REAL problems people have.
The WMV3/VC-1 specification is formal and out there and is going to be used on Bluray/HD-DVD. They aren't likely to break compatibility willy nilly, not in the video profiles people care about anyway.
Microsoft doesn't "break compatibility" at all... They just decide to release a NEW version (ie. WMV10) when the old version becomes easy to use on non-Windows systems.
People who need VC-1 will continue to use it, while the public at large will get the next version pushed to them, and start using it, because it''s there.
Oh, right, I was thrown back six or seven years by seeing the name Slackware and the list of specs.
Right. Sure does suck, doesn't it, that there is a Linux distro out there that is extremely stable, and doesn't just jump to the latest version of everything without testing?
All Linux distros should just be random collections of the latest packages, leaving the users to figure out why nothing works...
The people that are saying "It's only one guy" are completely off the mark. Slackware is the most stable distro I've come across, no matter how many maintainers are involved.
Not to mention it's the only distro I've seen that includes full headers with every single package (no extra configuration, no hunting -dev packages down, no need to compile from source programs you've already installed binary packages from, etc). It has a fully working and effectively bug-free development environment, which you probably can't say of any other distros.
I know the attration to shinny new distros, and all their hype. But use them for a few months, and think of all the hassles and work-arounds you put into it, and ask yourself which of those features is worth an OS environment you continually have to tweak to get basic stuff working.
But what do I know, I've only had Slackware up and running on my DVR machine for about 3 years now, with not one problem to speak of, even across several changes of TV tuners, sound cards, video cards, etc. I've never even needed to recompile the kernel.
whereas when you seperate a Christian from God you get a rational thinking being.
Not at all. Irrational people will continue to believe what they always have, and continue to be irrational, whether or not religon is involed. It just gets popularly scapgoated, by people who have some ax to grind in the first place.
What I'd really like is asymetric cores... something like a really power efficient simple 1Mhz core, but when needed, a more powerful 2Mhz core steps in...
And what I'd really like is CPUs that are infinitely fast, and use less than 1mW of power...
It's a shame ideas have to be POSSIBLE (unlike yours) to be worth anything...
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Ineffecient!?!? That Beetle is compressing ~8Petabytes to the gallon...
I guess so... Until somebody realizes that PCI USB2.0 cards are a lot cheaper than motherboards...
The large majority of "computer voodoo" is because of Microsoft's buggy crapware...
Back in the DOS days, people were convinced things worked better if they left the power off for long periods of time, before restarting.
Windows got more complex, and had too many of those things to name. Hitting the tower is a popular one. Moving the mouse around while waiting to prevent lock-ups is another very popular one. There are certainly millions of them. Linux, too, has developed a few, because some drivers are iffy, but they make up the tiniest fraction of what you see with Windows zombies (aka. users).
When I'm helping someone with a Windows system (I keep that as rare an event as possible), I still see similar nonsense. Windows XP's setup will allow me to partition hard drives #1 and #2, but WON'T let me format them there, and I have to put them in another system to do that part. Not to mention all the drivers that will just corrupt themselves after working fine for 3 months, if you just LOOK at the system funny. It's no wonder voodoo is so popular with Windows systems (and pre-OSX Macs, to be fair).
.
With that said, I have seen some frustrating hardware problems. After 6 months of working without any problem, my always-on Linux system starts crashing every day for 3 days, and then won't start up... Typical crappy power supply (bloated capacitor).
I had a Charter cable modem which would work whenever the tech guys were here (I called them out a dozen times over 2 months), but would fail miserably just moments after they'd step out the door. It took me a while before I realized that the thing would work for amout 5 minutes after it was power-cycled, and only then would it crash. They would never take my word for it, and I had to cancel my service to get rid of that piece of shit.
I've seen a few network cables, which test-out just fine, and work most of the time, but after the machine has been online for a while, it will fail, and need to be rebooted... This is partially Windows voodoo, because the stack is unstable, and can't handle many errors. But mainly, it's because of cables with marginal connections, which work about 95% of the time, enough to pass tests, but cause all sorts of problems in real-world use.
Then there are the occasional network cables with crosstalk, which can be hard to diagnose if you don't have an advanced/expensive meter, and give many of the same symptoms as above.
There was one case where a guy would play music CDs for an hour, before they started skipping. He changed CD-ROM after CD-ROM, before asking for my help. It was pretty obvious when I saw the sheer ammount of lint in his system fans. It would run fine while the system was cool, but the fans not spinning would drive the tempurature up to insane levels shortly, and the CD-ROM was just the first part to show symptoms.
Another Windows one is IE's download dialog... It takes so long before it appears, that when it starts there is already a few KBs downloaded, so it claims a 500KB/sec download rate on a dial-up modem, and only gradually goes down to about 4K, as it's really doing. People think that's accurate, and actually come up with the great idea of stopping and restarting downloads several times every minute, presumably because the server or their ISP will only allow them to download "fast" when the download first starts.
God I hate Microsoft...
Not to encourge people to buy Tivos (I built my own DVR just to avoid such problems/hacks/monitoring), but if/when their server stops working, you can use XMLTV to grab TV listings, and another to reformat them to Tivo format, and then transfer that file to the Tivo, as needed. That's how people in other countries have their Tivos working, although it doesn't give you everything Tivo's listings do.
No guide, but it's not terribly complex once you know where to start.
Start in "linux-$ver/Documentation/video4linux" to find out which drivers suit the card you have. Load the modules by-hand, using whatever params the docs say should work for your card (or trial-and-error, running through all possible combinations of card/tuner parameters). Test with xawtv, tvtime, or mplayer.
If you have a card which uses loop-back audio through the soundcard, use alsamixer to turn-up "Line" and "Captur" devices, and hit space to set both as "Capture". If you don't want to hear sound while recording, mute Line-in.
Use "mencoder" (from MPlayer) to capture from Raw/YUV/analog cards. See the HTML docs for some example command-lines to use. Only important issues are:
- Height must be full (480 NTSC/576 PAL) or exactly half.
- TV is 4/3 and pixels aren't square, so you need to do some math if you want to capture at anything other than full resolution.
- Digital video ALWAYS needs dimentions that are even multiples of 16 (480, 464, 448, etc).
Then you just need to hassle with LIRC for the remote. If your reciever is plugged-in, and the remote has fresh batteries, yet "mode2" doesn't show any output while you push buttons, assume that version of lirc is buggy (9 out of 10 versions, in my experience) and try a different version.
.
.
Those tips should get you through the commonly unknown and frustrating parts of setting up TV capture. The rest is a bit time consuming, but not very hard. Things like understanding and writing LIRC and LIRCMD config files, selecting the best video encoding options, etc.
Every analog microwave I've owned had precision down to a second or two, after 10+ minutes. Not to mention all the mechanical clocks and watches I still have that continue to keep time damn well.
And never break, in my experience, so there we are...
And on both counts, digital timers certainly aren't as cheap as these ultra-lowsy mechanical timers you're talking about, so the point is entirely moot.
I could have told you that years ago. That's the main reason I put together my own DVR about 4 years ago, rather than buying (and hacking) a Tivo or ReplayTV unit.
It has worked out more wonderfully than I could have imagined. The 1 week of taming Linux TV-tuner modules looks so insignificant in hindsight, and is really a one-time thing, as I've set-up DVRs for others in under an hour (each).
No messy, stupid tricks or hacks needed to get my video over to my computer to edit, reencode, and burn it. No posibility of my viewing habits being tracked by anyone. No posibility of being unable to get TV listings in the distant future. No problems installing as many hard drives as I want. No hassling with tech support and Fedex (or buying a whole new system) when the power supply goes out... etc.
All I need is to plug-in any HDTV tuner card, and I'm ready to keep this same box going for the next 100 years, potentially.
For the most part, it is NOT external. They are a small minority, which gets lots of press attention.
As for oganized, it certainly is, but (just to be clear) Iraqi insurgents have no bearing on the subject at hand: Domestic Terrorism, Domestic Evesdropping, Racial Profiling, Curtailing Civil Rights, Commercial Airliners, etc.
Al Qaeda hasn't been a threat around the world, since the invasion of Afganistan. The RECENT attacks have all been individual actors, with no ties, except that they saw what Al Qaeda was doing, and decided to do something vaguely similar.
And those "individuals'" attacks were in no way different than the more recent attacks. They wanted to kill as many people as they could. The difference in their ultimate goals, has absolutely no relevance.
That's just complete and utter nonsense. Since when do wiretapping rules depend on whether or not you are "sharing" data? Illegal is illegal is illegal.
Privacy is VERY explicitly listed in The Bill of Rights, and anyone who says otherwise has little or no understanding of it.
Privacy is nothing more than people being: "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches"
Solution: Already Solved. "those hell bent on destroying" America have miniscule power. It's basically a case of an elephant being afraid of a mouse. We have much more to fear from our government's overzealousness, than from terrorists.
Yes... "undeniable". "Dark skinned" like Ted Kazinski, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, John Walker Lindh, et al.
If anything, the prohibition against racial profiling is to protect the goverment from itself. They will have complete tunnel-vision if you let them, and the blonde-haired guy with big wires hanging out of his suitcase, will be rushed through security. Just see the Beltway Sniper case for a perfect example.
New slogan: "It's not FUD, it's 'The Register'"
Sure sucks having to do your own work, and look up product specs, doesn't it?
Since when do you 'program' a webcam? You use the software to tell the camera to grab some pics. No programming required, on your part, where the camera is involved.
Are you SURE you're a 'small company', and not just some random kid who wants
"nothing" == "The Laws of Physics"
Small ammounts of exploives are of great concern only in confined spaces (being pressurized helps, too). In a nice wide open space, as in airport terminals, much of the force of the blast will go upwards and outwards torwards the ceiling, and be harmlessly dissapated over that distance.
To harm numbers of people in open spaces, you need serious ammounts of explosives. Suicide bombers who detonate a themselves in crowded shopping malls in Israel, more often than not, only kill a couple people. They have much better odds in more confined areas, such as inside buses, trains, and certainly airplanes.
You should really be FAR more concerned about crowded places, which don't have the numbers of security personelle that airports have. Crowded public places, like the DMV or post office, are far more likely targets.
Better question: WHY THE HELL ARE MICROWAVES DIGITAL? What part of "close the door and turn the dial" was so hard for people to understand, and how did typing in digits help? Microwaves aren't phones.
Was it the extra precision? People need to be sure they are microwaving their sandwich for exactly 2 minutes and 45 seconds, and ABSOLUTELY NOT 2 minutes and 46 seconds?
Are there a lot of people out there with only one finger, who find it faster and easier to type in 1-0-0-0-Start rather than turning the dial a quarter turn to "10m"?
What in the world makes people believe replacing analog with digital is the answer to absolutely everything?
The part I'm missing is what evidence AOL has, that led them to the conclusion that it's in his parents' yard... As opposed to ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH that it could be.
In other news, AOL's head lawyer is Cartman, and he wants your "Jew gold".
I'm tired how all GUI development is now centered around the GPU, and more eye-candy.
The useful features from OS X that people find useful, like a visual cue as to where a window is being iconified to, can and have been done in much faster/simpler ways. For as long as I can remember, Afterstep has drawn an outline of windows being iconofied, and quickly shows the outline spiraling down to, and shrinking into the icon.
Why is the rest of the GUI stagnating? Keyboard shortcuts are extremely primitive at best. Using TAB to navigate between fields is a rather nonsensical way to do things, particularly since you don't know if TAB is going to take you to the field to the left, right, up, down, etc. With something like Symbian, to get to the field below, you just hit the down arrow, and you're there.
Browsers are even worse. They are beyond horrible when trying to use keyboard navigation. The notable exception is Links (similar to lynx), and yet nobody is adapting those highly intuitive and powerful keyboard navigation features to other browsers.
Having to scroll side-to-side while reading a webpage is absolutely the worst interface design ever concieved. Web pages aren't giant images or PDFs, after all. I was telling people, 10 years ago, that browsers needed to ignore any HTML code (and wrap/resize images) that forced the page to become wider than the browser window... And I was REALLY ranting on the subject about 4 years ago, when it was driving me crazy on my 240x320 PDA. Yet, it was only about a year ago that Opera figured it out, and included that feature, and still none of the other web browsers have even picked-up on that important improvement.
You can make my browser window as transparent and warped as you want, but it's not going to fix any of the REAL problems people have.
Microsoft doesn't "break compatibility" at all... They just decide to release a NEW version (ie. WMV10) when the old version becomes easy to use on non-Windows systems.
People who need VC-1 will continue to use it, while the public at large will get the next version pushed to them, and start using it, because it''s there.
Who said ffmpeg/libavcodec is illegal?
Right. Sure does suck, doesn't it, that there is a Linux distro out there that is extremely stable, and doesn't just jump to the latest version of everything without testing?
All Linux distros should just be random collections of the latest packages, leaving the users to figure out why nothing works...
The people that are saying "It's only one guy" are completely off the mark. Slackware is the most stable distro I've come across, no matter how many maintainers are involved.
Not to mention it's the only distro I've seen that includes full headers with every single package (no extra configuration, no hunting -dev packages down, no need to compile from source programs you've already installed binary packages from, etc). It has a fully working and effectively bug-free development environment, which you probably can't say of any other distros.
I know the attration to shinny new distros, and all their hype. But use them for a few months, and think of all the hassles and work-arounds you put into it, and ask yourself which of those features is worth an OS environment you continually have to tweak to get basic stuff working.
But what do I know, I've only had Slackware up and running on my DVR machine for about 3 years now, with not one problem to speak of, even across several changes of TV tuners, sound cards, video cards, etc. I've never even needed to recompile the kernel.
Not at all. Irrational people will continue to believe what they always have, and continue to be irrational, whether or not religon is involed. It just gets popularly scapgoated, by people who have some ax to grind in the first place.
And what I'd really like is CPUs that are infinitely fast, and use less than 1mW of power...
It's a shame ideas have to be POSSIBLE (unlike yours) to be worth anything...
I did in fact hear the story directly from him (the source). It was probably over a decade ago now, so I've forgotten many of the specific details.
But don't let that stop you from trolling.
You're the second person now, who has misread "scope" as barrel.