So now we're not voting for representatives in Parliament, but voting tactically in the hope that MPs will vote over the following four years not according to their manifesto but according to the views of people who didn't vote for them in the previous election?
IOW, you want a democracy where MPs do what will get them votes at the next election, rather than do what they promised?
The result of a minor Party under many voting systems is just to ensure that supporters of that Party get no legislative voice, by reducing the number of votes which might otherwise go to a viable stronger Party.
In this case, everyone who ends up supporting PP instead of LD is strengthening the Lab/Con position on "piracy".
A little re-cap for those who think that being part of a political Party is about pushing a single issue and enjoying the celebrity status which comes with it: no, it isn't. It's about getting seats in Parliament which turn into the voice to debate and the ability to vote yay/nay on laws.
If you want to push a single issue, group up and lobby the Party or Parties most aligned with your views. Also, lobby for electoral reform. But don't improve the welfare of the very Parties you object to by voting for a minor single issue Party. IOW, do what everyone with strong political influence does, from Murdoch to the Unions (feel free to be open and honest about what you're doing, of course).
The authoritarian/self-interested always win because the liberal/idealistic always factionalise. Those who believe they're taking the moral high ground will break away over minor details, while anyone who cares only about number one is prepared to compromise while there's strength in numbers.
So, why don't you take a leaf from the successful and lobby the Liberal Democrats? They're already far closer to you than Lab/Con.
In order to prove that people aren't stupid and easily influenced, you need to show where they are getting information about stuff that allows them to form a balanced opinion.
Whaaat? In order to have a convincing argument for anything,/you/ have to show evidence toward it. You can't start off by assuming that opinions come from people being easily influenced and/or stupid, then require me to show where the common folk are getting all this implied elite info from to confirm they have an informed opinion.
Where is your evidence, for example, that people agree with Fox because they watch Fox, rather than watch Fox because it repeats what they already think? Ditto for the Guardian or the Socialist Worker. Where is your evidence that so many opinions are "right" and "wrong" based on hard facts, rather than depending on arguments derived from the value system one chooses?
Anyway, what great fountain of knowledge and deep understanding of logic does Chomsky have access to which the Joe of today does not?
Try this exercise. Next time some law is proposed which to you sounds ridiculous, and you are screaming with frustration because no-one else seems to be up in arms about it, ask yourself: is it that everyone is too stupid to see what you see, or is it maybe that most people are prepared to take the small risk that this law will hurt them significantly? For in return they enjoy a government which provides them with relative comfort and protection, and endless toys to while away the hours. There's no manufacturing of consent - it's an open deal. Most tend to accept the deal; I tend to reject the deal; Chomsky tries to claim that the deal never existed.
You may be right that it's the better option, although the outcome in Parliament is the same. Indeed, many people will have spent a lot of time deciding to not turn up, and it's a shame that some people with a drum to bang (I'm not saying that you're doing this) group everyone who doesn't vote with the "lazy/ungrateful/etc" labels. It can be fairly intimidating for some to turn up somewhere to spoil an official paper, surrounded by officials - even though the vote itself is technically secret. In various elections I've done all three - a regular vote, a spoilt vote, and consciously not turning up - and the second of these has been quite a challenge.
And don't forget to NOT give your registration card to anyone when you leave the polling station - it's usually a particular Party rep trying to gather information, but whoever it is, they have no business with it.
Constituents who don't register to vote or don't turn up to vote are still making their voice heard by not voting. The right to make known that you think they're all a shower of corrupt bastards is as important as the right to believe otherwise. Such people may still vote, if their opinions change.
Constituents who vote to shore up a secure seat are still making their voice known by confirming that their interest is in the status quo. Such people may still vote otherwise, if their opinions change.
It's wrong to assume that the only people who matter are those who (by some magic are determined) will definitely vote and who will do so in a marginal seat. Indeed, that's an excellent way of/not/ effecting significant change.
Have you ever thought that the "gutter" press simply act as an echo chamber for what their readers are thinking, and that the greatest con is performed by Murdoch on corrupt politicians, who grant him favours for essentially doing nothing at all?
I've already been awarded Troll for expressing my doubts that MS is clear about what problem it's solving (instead just experimenting with a tech and then shoehorning some of it into a low-risk existing product, as is typical for them), but I think it's clear that, aware that they can't just replace one OS kernel with another, their ostensible intention is to begin by offering their new magic as a VM on top of Windows. If Silverlight is their delivery platform, I'll be surprised if they don't get the same receiption as Java applets on the desktop, of course.
To analyse for a moment what they're trying to do: 1. Provide an Ocaml implementation; 2. In the style of a LISP machine, get as much as possible at system and app level running above (1).
(1) is ostensibly justified because performance increases today are supposedly about increasing #cores rather than increasing #MHz, while (2) supposedly helps OS performance in the same way as well as improving security.
Now, (1) is being trackled for now by improving the.NET VM, using underlying scheduling primitives of the existing OS. It could be done using any other number of concurrent language implementations.
But is OS performance a bottleneck? Is OS security a problem? Is there some other sort of integration advantage to (2)? As for performance, one would suppose that you're going to get the best out of optimising your system code for the hardware, and when you've done that, you provide the illusion of performance. Is system code really full of unsolved non-embarrassingly parallel problems? Are there locks inherent to(?!) bare metal operating systems which makes them unable to scale beyond a certain point? Or do we have to wait for trivial things because modern desktop operating systems provide no hard real-time style performance guarantees, instead sending off an instruction from layer to layer, pleased that it all works but blind to how long it sometimes takes to open a fucking Explorer window?
As for security, are there so many flaky mass market or enterprise level drivers that fail in ways which would not make the hardware unstable anyway? How often does Windows 2008/7 blue screen? Do I really care if we reach a level where my system hard disk driver can explode but, hey, at least I can continue doing anything which doesn't require the system hard disk? Is there really such a fear about rogue drivers making use of unrestricted DMA on desktop class machines to snoop into privileged memory? We have driver signing, which people click through blindly anyway - why wouldn't they also check the "grant UnrestrictedDMAReadAndWrite privilege", giving them access to functions which indirectly do the same thing?
Which brings me to integration. So we're abstracting CPUs with in a box, clearly... are we caring which box we're on? In the same datacentre, or in a different continent? With no single point of management? Taking account of where the UI is moved around to? Considering where data can be stored, how far it can be moved and how it's best to sync it? Which architecture/class? These are the less tackled engineering problems. Does MS want its solution to be a basis for tackling these further questions? Because you only get so far in the commercial world by saying "here's a tool, maybe you can do something cool with it?" For Midori, if you probe an adherent enough, they'll end up saying something like "Well, it solves Bob's Classical Concurrency Problem!!!!" and all I want to say is, "So do many other things - and who cares anyway?"
Stepping back a bit, as far as using the computer as a day-to-day desktop consumer tool, I want to see 1991 on the desktop again, where I could double click on a folder (on my cooperative multitasking OS) and it would open instantly. I want scheduling algorithms which care about the user who is staring at the machine, and policies which strive to guarantee particular performances. IOW, what Apple does with its iPhone/iPad, but without the kludge of limiting multitasking to a few app
No, you're inventing a problem ("insecure, hard to manage kernels/services") and proposing a solution ("the microkernel!") in the style of Tanenbaum vs Torvalds back in '91. There tends not to be a problem with stable, insecure kernels on modern server platforms.
MS appear to be offering an Ocaml implementation, right? And then want to implement everything system-flavoured under it, in the style of a LISP machine, right?
As always, MS, you're right that there are abstraction improvements which can be made at systems and app level, but as always, MS, you're never clear about what the problem is and what you're offering with your solution.
What do I get with Midori that I didn't get before? What's going to improve, for programmer or user?
Of course it's presented as "praying through ancestors to god; maybe they can intervene on our behalf" in the effort of trying to appear monotheistic.
It's not "in the effort of trying to appear" - it's a very clear distinction recognised by Catholicism. Catholics pray through Mary and the Saints as if asking them to act as their advocates before God. They absolutely do not pray to any dead human. What is more, I'm not sure what Catholic country you hail from (my experience is Spanish and English Catholicism), but there is no praying through relatives.
Other denominations of Christianity are more rigid on this - the Protestant evolution has been away from being able to speak to Mary and the Saints. Other Abrahamic religions are clear (Islam certainly - I don't know much about Judaism) that it is sacriligeous to expect anyone other than God to answer your prayers.
Oh, and at least in my country there's quite popular practice of performing masses for souls which might be suffering in the purgatory.
This is true, and is an adaptation of the fact that they do still "need resurrection", i.e. to ascend from Purgatory. You can pray for their souls, which is quite the reverse of praying to their souls.
there are version of afterlife (limbo-like) which while not really "bad" per se also certainly can't really give you your relatives back...but they certainly aren't winning.
Winning in what sense? Are we talking about modern innovated anything-goes versions of religion, or the bases of religions as they've slowly evolved over millennia?
(3) But that, again, doesn't change it's very often a similar symbolism to experiences from NDEs
NDEs are most likely to happen in Western countries with good medical care (otherwise it'd just be a DE), and pretty much everyone in such a country has the image of the shining brightness of God and passing into the Light of Heaven bashed into their heads at some point early in life. Why wouldn't you in a moment of great fear dream what you're told as a child to expect, even if your later rational faculty rejects it?
But global religious symbolism over the millennia does _not_ match with modern NDEs, and I've yet to see much of an account of NDEs over such a period anyway.
Still, though, the idea that light=comfort and dark=scary may simply be the common ancestor of euphoric NDEs and religious light/dark symbolism. We've built light=good religions for the same reason our NDEs involve light - because light comforts us. Similarly, cats purr when they're happy and purr when they're dying - because purring = comfort. Remaining detail is likely the confounding of cause and effect in modern Western NDE experiences, adding the parochial assumption that all religions have mythologies like today's popular Christianity.
What? You supposedly study religions and missed the prevalence of "good light"/etc., reunification with ancestors, a path and border point (remember, they can have differing forms depending on the culture) imagery?...
(1) "Light is good" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that something so valuable would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. (Sun)light, well, sheds light on things - it gives you warmth, it makes your plants grow, it comforts you by allowing you to see danger, it allows you to substitute knowledge for ignorance.
(2) "I'd like to reunite with my dead ancestors" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that a feeling of loss so strong would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. You're also missing out the heap of mythology which certainly doesn't tell you you'll reunite with all your ancestors - including Christianity.
(3) Between zone A and zone B there is intuitively a border. Every religion/mythology defines the life/death border differently, and some of it has nothing to do with stepping into light - you might have to cross a river, negotiate with dogs, have your body sailed into an ocean so your spirit can be released, be wrapped for preservation - whatever earthly tools and concepts were important to that culture over time would end up being woven into a mythology.
But, hell, if light/comfort/understanding is good, and darkness/scariness/ignorance is bad, why wouldn't you think of your afterlife as bright, and talk of stepping into the light? There's no need to consider NDEs.
The article's hypothesis prompts more questions than it provides answers (which is good). For example, what accounts of NDEs are there prior to a couple of centuries ago, and do they reflect what people/expect/ to happen when they die - i.e. are they uniform across cultures?
Football matches are also popular. And the positive reviews of football way outweigh the negative. Why aren't you at the match like all your friends at school, son?
This doesn't state anything about what happens when you're dead (probably not much), just what happens when you're on the point of death. It doesn't "explain heaven" at all.
All we've discovered here is what cats have known all along: it's comforting to purr when you're dying.
The only reason those fine 2000 acres of land you have aren't taken over within weeks is because the whole damn government is there to threaten anyone who would try. It has nothing to do with "civilisation" respecting "a fence". Hell, there are Western countries which operate rather well but have very lax notions of trespass compared to the US. We're not talking about, say, mindless violence, which is pathological in every species, but a sophisticated philosophical notion of property which goes way beyond the "territory" of high order primates.
The law exists as a pragmatic codification of the common good where elements of "common" are weighted according to the magnitude of your influence.
In a summer's crowd, how hard is it to collect a bit of blood from someone? From 10 people? All you need is something abrasive on your shoes and you can rub against someone "accidentally". For bonus points, pick up some hair from their shirt - it may even have skin flakes on it. If you're somewhere where everyone is in sufficient hurry and where everyone's packed in, like London's rush hour, there's probably too much adrenaline going around for them to notice they've received a very minor cut.
Now imagine how easy it is to collect blood from an acquaintance you wish to frame - a work drinking buddy, say, or a lover!
Frankly, I'm surprised that every single premeditated crime these days doesn't involve some innocent's blood or hair being planted. Do they have an alibi? Perhaps, but if there are enough idiots convinced by DNA, surely those vouching for him must be liars? Hell, if you spend a week or two observing a few people going to and from work and social events every day, you could build up a picture of what times there's likely to be no evidence they're anywhere *else*, couldn't you?
Anyone in law enforcement can comment on the sophistication of the average criminal? Are you worried that there's too much reliance on particular forensic evidence which can be planted?
Actually, ignoring the blatant trolls (who seem to have been quite successful on you), most of the people not showering praise on the iPad are simply commenting that it's not for them / explaining its problems / offering alternative solutions. The idea that people don't buy Apple because they "can't afford the device, and are jealous of those who can" is far more a reflection of your approach to life than anything.
It's just a tool, and it has no place in my toolkit. Just as the iMac I've recently sold wasn't good enough for me. It wasn't awful, but it didn't offer any advantage over the more powerful, cheap, configurable and supported Windows 7 box + Linux VM I've replaced it with. Thus passes the glory of the screwdriver.
And how I am supposed to address the Welsh Institute of Wood looking like a twit ? I look like somebody from Llanelli !
Says the guy with the Welsh in-joke in his sig;-).
No, the problem with the Welsh is they refuse to let go of their bloody... best answer wins $1.40 via Paypal, judge's decision is final, no correspondence will be entered into, nemo custodet ipsos custodes, etc.
Sorry - it's possible with your surname that you're French rather than native English, so I should have used clearer language. English sometimes uses "you" for "one", where French might use "on". Let me phrase this more like a Frenchman might:
When one's crappy software is "pirated", one is not being deprived of the amount the market is willing to pay for one's software.
Although, on second thoughts, you may be being deliberately obtrusive by concentrating on a point of language. The argument plainly refers to software in general, not one crappy project you're so keen on promoting. Could you provide a counterpoint to the argument?
Nevertheless
I'm not selling anything.
Oh yes you are. You hope to be paid in reputation and patches, hopefully guaranteed by choosing a GPL style licence rather than public domain. The GPL operates in the free(ish) market with risks, obligations and rewards, just like any other.
Slashdot Mirror
So now we're not voting for representatives in Parliament, but voting tactically in the hope that MPs will vote over the following four years not according to their manifesto but according to the views of people who didn't vote for them in the previous election?
IOW, you want a democracy where MPs do what will get them votes at the next election, rather than do what they promised?
The result of a minor Party under many voting systems is just to ensure that supporters of that Party get no legislative voice, by reducing the number of votes which might otherwise go to a viable stronger Party.
In this case, everyone who ends up supporting PP instead of LD is strengthening the Lab/Con position on "piracy".
A little re-cap for those who think that being part of a political Party is about pushing a single issue and enjoying the celebrity status which comes with it: no, it isn't. It's about getting seats in Parliament which turn into the voice to debate and the ability to vote yay/nay on laws.
If you want to push a single issue, group up and lobby the Party or Parties most aligned with your views. Also, lobby for electoral reform. But don't improve the welfare of the very Parties you object to by voting for a minor single issue Party. IOW, do what everyone with strong political influence does, from Murdoch to the Unions (feel free to be open and honest about what you're doing, of course).
The authoritarian/self-interested always win because the liberal/idealistic always factionalise. Those who believe they're taking the moral high ground will break away over minor details, while anyone who cares only about number one is prepared to compromise while there's strength in numbers.
So, why don't you take a leaf from the successful and lobby the Liberal Democrats? They're already far closer to you than Lab/Con.
In order to prove that people aren't stupid and easily influenced, you need to show where they are getting information about stuff that allows them to form a balanced opinion.
Whaaat? In order to have a convincing argument for anything, /you/ have to show evidence toward it. You can't start off by assuming that opinions come from people being easily influenced and/or stupid, then require me to show where the common folk are getting all this implied elite info from to confirm they have an informed opinion.
Where is your evidence, for example, that people agree with Fox because they watch Fox, rather than watch Fox because it repeats what they already think? Ditto for the Guardian or the Socialist Worker. Where is your evidence that so many opinions are "right" and "wrong" based on hard facts, rather than depending on arguments derived from the value system one chooses?
Anyway, what great fountain of knowledge and deep understanding of logic does Chomsky have access to which the Joe of today does not?
Try this exercise. Next time some law is proposed which to you sounds ridiculous, and you are screaming with frustration because no-one else seems to be up in arms about it, ask yourself: is it that everyone is too stupid to see what you see, or is it maybe that most people are prepared to take the small risk that this law will hurt them significantly? For in return they enjoy a government which provides them with relative comfort and protection, and endless toys to while away the hours. There's no manufacturing of consent - it's an open deal. Most tend to accept the deal; I tend to reject the deal; Chomsky tries to claim that the deal never existed.
You may be right that it's the better option, although the outcome in Parliament is the same. Indeed, many people will have spent a lot of time deciding to not turn up, and it's a shame that some people with a drum to bang (I'm not saying that you're doing this) group everyone who doesn't vote with the "lazy/ungrateful/etc" labels. It can be fairly intimidating for some to turn up somewhere to spoil an official paper, surrounded by officials - even though the vote itself is technically secret. In various elections I've done all three - a regular vote, a spoilt vote, and consciously not turning up - and the second of these has been quite a challenge.
And don't forget to NOT give your registration card to anyone when you leave the polling station - it's usually a particular Party rep trying to gather information, but whoever it is, they have no business with it.
Constituents who don't register to vote or don't turn up to vote are still making their voice heard by not voting. The right to make known that you think they're all a shower of corrupt bastards is as important as the right to believe otherwise. Such people may still vote, if their opinions change.
Constituents who vote to shore up a secure seat are still making their voice known by confirming that their interest is in the status quo. Such people may still vote otherwise, if their opinions change.
It's wrong to assume that the only people who matter are those who (by some magic are determined) will definitely vote and who will do so in a marginal seat. Indeed, that's an excellent way of /not/ effecting significant change.
Then your problem, like Chomsky's, may be that you assume that everyone is stupid and easily influenced except you. Could you be wrong about this?
Have you ever thought that the "gutter" press simply act as an echo chamber for what their readers are thinking, and that the greatest con is performed by Murdoch on corrupt politicians, who grant him favours for essentially doing nothing at all?
I've already been awarded Troll for expressing my doubts that MS is clear about what problem it's solving (instead just experimenting with a tech and then shoehorning some of it into a low-risk existing product, as is typical for them), but I think it's clear that, aware that they can't just replace one OS kernel with another, their ostensible intention is to begin by offering their new magic as a VM on top of Windows. If Silverlight is their delivery platform, I'll be surprised if they don't get the same receiption as Java applets on the desktop, of course.
To analyse for a moment what they're trying to do:
1. Provide an Ocaml implementation;
2. In the style of a LISP machine, get as much as possible at system and app level running above (1).
(1) is ostensibly justified because performance increases today are supposedly about increasing #cores rather than increasing #MHz, while (2) supposedly helps OS performance in the same way as well as improving security.
Now, (1) is being trackled for now by improving the .NET VM, using underlying scheduling primitives of the existing OS. It could be done using any other number of concurrent language implementations.
But is OS performance a bottleneck? Is OS security a problem? Is there some other sort of integration advantage to (2)? As for performance, one would suppose that you're going to get the best out of optimising your system code for the hardware, and when you've done that, you provide the illusion of performance. Is system code really full of unsolved non-embarrassingly parallel problems? Are there locks inherent to(?!) bare metal operating systems which makes them unable to scale beyond a certain point? Or do we have to wait for trivial things because modern desktop operating systems provide no hard real-time style performance guarantees, instead sending off an instruction from layer to layer, pleased that it all works but blind to how long it sometimes takes to open a fucking Explorer window?
As for security, are there so many flaky mass market or enterprise level drivers that fail in ways which would not make the hardware unstable anyway? How often does Windows 2008/7 blue screen? Do I really care if we reach a level where my system hard disk driver can explode but, hey, at least I can continue doing anything which doesn't require the system hard disk? Is there really such a fear about rogue drivers making use of unrestricted DMA on desktop class machines to snoop into privileged memory? We have driver signing, which people click through blindly anyway - why wouldn't they also check the "grant UnrestrictedDMAReadAndWrite privilege", giving them access to functions which indirectly do the same thing?
Which brings me to integration. So we're abstracting CPUs with in a box, clearly... are we caring which box we're on? In the same datacentre, or in a different continent? With no single point of management? Taking account of where the UI is moved around to? Considering where data can be stored, how far it can be moved and how it's best to sync it? Which architecture/class? These are the less tackled engineering problems. Does MS want its solution to be a basis for tackling these further questions? Because you only get so far in the commercial world by saying "here's a tool, maybe you can do something cool with it?" For Midori, if you probe an adherent enough, they'll end up saying something like "Well, it solves Bob's Classical Concurrency Problem!!!!" and all I want to say is, "So do many other things - and who cares anyway?"
Stepping back a bit, as far as using the computer as a day-to-day desktop consumer tool, I want to see 1991 on the desktop again, where I could double click on a folder (on my cooperative multitasking OS) and it would open instantly. I want scheduling algorithms which care about the user who is staring at the machine, and policies which strive to guarantee particular performances. IOW, what Apple does with its iPhone/iPad, but without the kludge of limiting multitasking to a few app
What are you talking about? EISA is a bus; EFI is firmware.
No, you're inventing a problem ("insecure, hard to manage kernels/services") and proposing a solution ("the microkernel!") in the style of Tanenbaum vs Torvalds back in '91. There tends not to be a problem with stable, insecure kernels on modern server platforms.
MS appear to be offering an Ocaml implementation, right? And then want to implement everything system-flavoured under it, in the style of a LISP machine, right?
As always, MS, you're right that there are abstraction improvements which can be made at systems and app level, but as always, MS, you're never clear about what the problem is and what you're offering with your solution.
What do I get with Midori that I didn't get before? What's going to improve, for programmer or user?
Of course it's presented as "praying through ancestors to god; maybe they can intervene on our behalf" in the effort of trying to appear monotheistic.
It's not "in the effort of trying to appear" - it's a very clear distinction recognised by Catholicism. Catholics pray through Mary and the Saints as if asking them to act as their advocates before God. They absolutely do not pray to any dead human. What is more, I'm not sure what Catholic country you hail from (my experience is Spanish and English Catholicism), but there is no praying through relatives.
Other denominations of Christianity are more rigid on this - the Protestant evolution has been away from being able to speak to Mary and the Saints. Other Abrahamic religions are clear (Islam certainly - I don't know much about Judaism) that it is sacriligeous to expect anyone other than God to answer your prayers.
Oh, and at least in my country there's quite popular practice of performing masses for souls which might be suffering in the purgatory.
This is true, and is an adaptation of the fact that they do still "need resurrection", i.e. to ascend from Purgatory. You can pray for their souls, which is quite the reverse of praying to their souls.
And the dead are watching us, can hear our prayers and help us out
Which major sects of Christianity teach or have taught this?
there are version of afterlife (limbo-like) which while not really "bad" per se also certainly can't really give you your relatives back...but they certainly aren't winning.
Winning in what sense? Are we talking about modern innovated anything-goes versions of religion, or the bases of religions as they've slowly evolved over millennia?
(3) But that, again, doesn't change it's very often a similar symbolism to experiences from NDEs
NDEs are most likely to happen in Western countries with good medical care (otherwise it'd just be a DE), and pretty much everyone in such a country has the image of the shining brightness of God and passing into the Light of Heaven bashed into their heads at some point early in life. Why wouldn't you in a moment of great fear dream what you're told as a child to expect, even if your later rational faculty rejects it?
But global religious symbolism over the millennia does _not_ match with modern NDEs, and I've yet to see much of an account of NDEs over such a period anyway.
Still, though, the idea that light=comfort and dark=scary may simply be the common ancestor of euphoric NDEs and religious light/dark symbolism. We've built light=good religions for the same reason our NDEs involve light - because light comforts us. Similarly, cats purr when they're happy and purr when they're dying - because purring = comfort. Remaining detail is likely the confounding of cause and effect in modern Western NDE experiences, adding the parochial assumption that all religions have mythologies like today's popular Christianity.
What? You supposedly study religions and missed the prevalence of "good light"/etc., reunification with ancestors, a path and border point (remember, they can have differing forms depending on the culture) imagery?...
(1) "Light is good" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that something so valuable would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. (Sun)light, well, sheds light on things - it gives you warmth, it makes your plants grow, it comforts you by allowing you to see danger, it allows you to substitute knowledge for ignorance.
(2) "I'd like to reunite with my dead ancestors" needs no religion to explain. But it's clear that a feeling of loss so strong would attain religious significance, without the need to consider NDEs. You're also missing out the heap of mythology which certainly doesn't tell you you'll reunite with all your ancestors - including Christianity.
(3) Between zone A and zone B there is intuitively a border. Every religion/mythology defines the life/death border differently, and some of it has nothing to do with stepping into light - you might have to cross a river, negotiate with dogs, have your body sailed into an ocean so your spirit can be released, be wrapped for preservation - whatever earthly tools and concepts were important to that culture over time would end up being woven into a mythology.
But, hell, if light/comfort/understanding is good, and darkness/scariness/ignorance is bad, why wouldn't you think of your afterlife as bright, and talk of stepping into the light? There's no need to consider NDEs.
The article's hypothesis prompts more questions than it provides answers (which is good). For example, what accounts of NDEs are there prior to a couple of centuries ago, and do they reflect what people /expect/ to happen when they die - i.e. are they uniform across cultures?
Football matches are also popular. And the positive reviews of football way outweigh the negative. Why aren't you at the match like all your friends at school, son?
This doesn't state anything about what happens when you're dead (probably not much), just what happens when you're on the point of death. It doesn't "explain heaven" at all.
All we've discovered here is what cats have known all along: it's comforting to purr when you're dying.
The only reason those fine 2000 acres of land you have aren't taken over within weeks is because the whole damn government is there to threaten anyone who would try. It has nothing to do with "civilisation" respecting "a fence". Hell, there are Western countries which operate rather well but have very lax notions of trespass compared to the US. We're not talking about, say, mindless violence, which is pathological in every species, but a sophisticated philosophical notion of property which goes way beyond the "territory" of high order primates.
The law exists as a pragmatic codification of the common good where elements of "common" are weighted according to the magnitude of your influence.
In a summer's crowd, how hard is it to collect a bit of blood from someone? From 10 people? All you need is something abrasive on your shoes and you can rub against someone "accidentally". For bonus points, pick up some hair from their shirt - it may even have skin flakes on it. If you're somewhere where everyone is in sufficient hurry and where everyone's packed in, like London's rush hour, there's probably too much adrenaline going around for them to notice they've received a very minor cut.
Now imagine how easy it is to collect blood from an acquaintance you wish to frame - a work drinking buddy, say, or a lover!
Frankly, I'm surprised that every single premeditated crime these days doesn't involve some innocent's blood or hair being planted. Do they have an alibi? Perhaps, but if there are enough idiots convinced by DNA, surely those vouching for him must be liars? Hell, if you spend a week or two observing a few people going to and from work and social events every day, you could build up a picture of what times there's likely to be no evidence they're anywhere *else*, couldn't you?
Anyone in law enforcement can comment on the sophistication of the average criminal? Are you worried that there's too much reliance on particular forensic evidence which can be planted?
Actually, ignoring the blatant trolls (who seem to have been quite successful on you), most of the people not showering praise on the iPad are simply commenting that it's not for them / explaining its problems / offering alternative solutions. The idea that people don't buy Apple because they "can't afford the device, and are jealous of those who can" is far more a reflection of your approach to life than anything.
It's just a tool, and it has no place in my toolkit. Just as the iMac I've recently sold wasn't good enough for me. It wasn't awful, but it didn't offer any advantage over the more powerful, cheap, configurable and supported Windows 7 box + Linux VM I've replaced it with. Thus passes the glory of the screwdriver.
As much as I want to see guilty people get punished
Sigh; why?
Dancing around like a monkey, signing "Need a new one?" on a MacBook, gift matching charity donations and other over-$1M relief effort payments, a history of amusing self-deprecating videos by executives... oh yeah, and that little $33.5 billion Foundation which is essentially Gates' MS money ploughed into a vaccination on every desktop.
Yup, corporations comprise humourless bastards - except Google!
And how I am supposed to address the Welsh Institute of Wood looking like a twit ? I look like somebody from Llanelli !
Says the guy with the Welsh in-joke in his sig ;-).
No, the problem with the Welsh is they refuse to let go of their bloody... best answer wins $1.40 via Paypal, judge's decision is final, no correspondence will be entered into, nemo custodet ipsos custodes, etc.
Sorry - it's possible with your surname that you're French rather than native English, so I should have used clearer language. English sometimes uses "you" for "one", where French might use "on". Let me phrase this more like a Frenchman might:
When one's crappy software is "pirated", one is not being deprived of the amount the market is willing to pay for one's software.
Although, on second thoughts, you may be being deliberately obtrusive by concentrating on a point of language. The argument plainly refers to software in general, not one crappy project you're so keen on promoting. Could you provide a counterpoint to the argument?
Nevertheless
Oh yes you are. You hope to be paid in reputation and patches, hopefully guaranteed by choosing a GPL style licence rather than public domain. The GPL operates in the free(ish) market with risks, obligations and rewards, just like any other.