Sorry, you're wrong. TFA described a controlled experiment, where the FPS and Myst players didn't choose what to play. They were assigned their game randomly. There are different ways to criticize their conclusions, but yours misses the point.
I have a similar experience. Time Warner has treated me very well. They keep increasing my bandwidth without increasing the price, and recently they got news servers with almost two weeks of article retention! Just to download the headers for that much data takes a long time. I'm scared of moving out of Central New York partly because I don't expect to get an equally competent ISP somewhere else. Verizon has recently installed fiber optics in my neighborhood, but I looked at their offer and scoffed: They will have to do a whole lot better to beat Road Runner!
That sounds right, but then people shouldn't be repeating Einstein's line like it's some insight, when it's on the order of "the axiom we assumed is still something we're assuming."
Just how sure are we that the universe is comprehensible? I don't think Einstein had any right to be sure. Science wasn't finished in the 50's! And suppose we lived in a fundamentally incomprehensible world. Wouldn't the Einsteins of that world, who come up with a clever interpretation of some phenomenon, also wonder at their world's comprehensibility? In fact, I suspect the world appears comprehensible to an ant - but not because they "get it" - only because they lack the imagination to think bigger. And what makes us think our situation isn't parallel?
Yeah, plus as a bonus, Google gets to mine and index all of your company's data for use in Google's future superbrain. My god, their plan might really work!
I think this was a dumb move. Google were already the online advertising giants, and if they wanted to go into banner advertising, they could have done it much better than Doubleclick (targetting, workarounds to blocking, etc.). So what better way to bitchslap Microsoft than to let them buy doubleclick for 3B and introduce a superior competitor that takes away all of Doubleclick's customers? Google could definitely do that for far less than $3B, and another side benefit would be watching MS blow $3B on a dying company!
The only reason why you haven't seen Yahoo start jumping through these sorts of hoops is because it would be a move in a pointless arms race. Spammers have thought of these techniques and more, and they are still losing the war against the user with a good spam blocker (like the one in Gmail). If ad companies raise the ante like you suggest, there are obvious responses, like looking at the image size and maybe headers for telltale signs of slime. Image placement on a page might also give something away. Even if there is a random string in the URL, a simple Bayesian filter would recognize that, provided that Yahoo's legit images don't have this random string in the URL.
I don't think anyone wants to take this step forward in the arms race. Once ad filters get Bayesian, it's only a matter of time that techniques developed for spam filtering will be used to find and refuse to display text ads. Then Capitalism collapses.
That's pretty interesting. The funny thing about doubleclick is just how easy it is to block their content. You don't even need adblock, I think Firefox's native "do not show images from" feature gets everything.
On the opposite extreme are Google ads, which are basically unblockable because they are text. Or at least let me put it this way: you'd need a pretty good and constantly updating AI in order to block text ads, and except as an academic exercise, coding it and maintaining it is not worth anyone's time.
So I'm actually a little mad that Google bought Doubleclick because I was so happy with Doubleclick being blissfully out of sight and out of mind. I worry it won't stay that way for long.
There is a good point in your commment. This is what I take away from it: For any OCR software, there is a capcha that can defeat it. Therefore, the Capcha generator must have an advanced OCR program as a part of it. It will publish a captcha only if its own OCR guesser can't correctly parse that capcha. That would be the best test to ensure that the capcha isn't machine-solveable. Of course, to implement this, you need an excellent OCR guesser, and lo, Google are about to start working on one!
I have no doubt at all that this is coming in the future. Why? Because Google wants to see all data, analyze that data, and catalog it. That's exactly what would happen if you uploaded your scanned document to Google: Sure they would OCR it and do a good job, but they would also save the OCR'ed copy for later data mining.
One awesome application of this: I teach university courses that require term papers. If I could scan and upload the term papers I receive and Google could OCR them and tell me whether they're plagiarized (and of course Google would know; they know all!), I'd be prepared to pay them a bit of money for this. Or, more accurately, my university would be prepared to pay them a decent sum of money on my behalf. Then, they could keep the data from the term papers for the future, to make sure that nobody turns in that same paper in a later semester. Google not only gets money for this, but a whole lot of data to crawl through. Who knows what they would learn if a curious goog starts cleverly mining that data? If they do this, I would really love to work for them and use my 20% "downtime" to code a sentence structure analyzer that could predict a grade based just on syntactic features of the writing. In order to get more data, Google might even offer the OCR + plagiarism detection for free if the instructor agrees to use a Google grading and feedback system, so that Google could correlate each essay with a grade and an explanation of the grade. After tens of thousands of examples, Google might learn how to assign fairly accurate grades on its own (machine agrees with human to almost the same degree that humans agree with each other about what grade is deserved), and after that, who knows, Google might learn how to write B- term papers without any human input!
BTW, I am aware of plagiarism.org and their plagiarism-detection service which works like the thing that I want Google to do. Of course, if Google enters this market, they will crush all competition immediately, and plausibly, they'll do a better job because their database is just bigger. Also, Google could charge less, because a part of the payment will be access to the data itself. In fact, Google is already looking like it will accept information as payment for many of its services! And why not?
I think another part of that point is to reinforce the dirtyness of coal: It reminds us that all of that Thorium goes out of the smokestack and lands on our yards and heads! I for one am lobbying very strongly for Thorium breeder reactors, Uranium also. I think breeders are the best (though very imperfect) energy solution that we have. And the reason why we need to reach for this solution and implement it on a huge scale is exactly because coal burning is just so catastrophically bad.
I read through the scary, laborious 13-step setup procedure. It doesn't seem necessary. It would be much easier if some kind person who takes the time to do all this would post a disk image that we could just copy directly to the hard drive. Since all the Apple TV's are identical, the data in the disk image could already be from a tweaked and optimized install, hopefully running a good GUI for media playback, VNC, and every single audio and video decoder installed into quicktime.
Is there a torrent like this already available? I think if there were, this hack would suddenly look a whole lot less intimidating.
I'm posting this too far down the thread, and I'm surprised it hasn't been said earlier:
If we encourage migration to an office suite, we cannot get away from lock-in. It should be the sort of thing we will not be switching away from in four years when it's clearly not the best office suite. And nobody who's looked at the issue can seriously think that OOo is going to make any dramatic progress in the next four years. It's a mess of spaghetti code, and the whole monstrosity is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It may work OK now, but modernizing it for the needs of even the near future is not something that anyone can do.
Consider even the issue of startup times: Even Microsoft streamlined the code for fast startup in Office 97. For OOo this would be hopeless. It is hopeless. And it will remain hopeless. This is not the sort of ship we should board.
We'd be much wiser to jump onto something with a future, even if in the present, it is missing one or two features we might like. I personally am rooting for the KDE4 version of KOffice, since it will be so damn portable, progress is incredibly fast (even with a small staff of coders), and the code and plugin system is incredibly clean and future-proof.
I'm sorry if I think this Ask Slashdot question is dumb. There is no way to make a wrong choice! Suppose you pick something random and obscure like Apple's lossless codec, and later find yourself regretting it. With less than 10 clicks, you can recode all your files the yet-unreleased verion of FLAC, APE, or whatever other lossless codec better suits your needs. And you can repeat this as many times as you like! Because the files are lossless, you will never lose any quality. In fact, this is to me the most beautiful thing about lossless music. The fight for the best lossless codec will be volatile, because it's so easy to abandon one method in favor of another.
Right now I standardized on Monkey's Audio, I love how it works. But if the next version of FLAC outperforms APE in terms of size, required power and ease of use, I will just fire up my dbPower Music Converter and batch-convert the APEs. I could have done the same from any codec to any codec. This is why the question sounds to me like "Should I put my computer on my desk or under it?" to which the answer is: Pick a place, and if you don't like it, move it! Don't bother to Ask Slashdot about it!
I don't think this is true, at least from my experience. APE (Monkey's Audio) encoding on "medium" is about twice as fast as FLAC encoding on the default level, and the APE files are considerably smaller to boot. Yes, if you encode APEs on "insane" it will take a lot of CPU power, which is why that's a stupid thing to do.
FLAC is asymmetric, meaning that the files take less calculating to decode than to encode, but it was my impression from tests I've seen long ago that it's about the same as "medium APE" for CPU useage. In any case, it uses far less of my CPU than does decoding an MP3.
Agreed. Maybe I just have too much respect for Google, but it looks to me like they baited Viacom into this. Clearly, Google knows that the future of YouTube is up in the air as long as there isn't a clear precedent-setting case which basically outlines the duties that a website operator has to prevent illegal content from showing up. We knew there was going to be one. The question was only who would sue.
Now we have our answer, and it's not the worst thing for Google, since they voluntarily removed Viacom content before the suit was filed. Also, the fact that the two companies were in negotiations can be used against Viacom, and the $1B that they're asking for is so arbitrary as to make it clear that they have no real idea how much YouTube damages them (or helps them). Google lawyers have a fighting chance, maybe. Of course, media companies own many politicians including presidents, who appoint judges, so the deck might be stacked against Google.
Being a college instructor, I think about this sort of thing all the time: If there were an interactive multimedia project to capture the content of a college course onto a DVD, and I could help with this in some way, I most certainly would.
What I'm picturing is this: Some benefactor, perhaps a national government somewhere, pays a group of programmers, artists and professors to produce an open source college course on (say) mechanics. On the DVD is an interactive textbook with hyperlinks for people who need further explanation, but there's also video of a series of lectures and demonstrations. Then there is an interactive element that simulates (albeit abstractly) the common lab experiments that are embedded in a 3D virtual environment and really responds to students' input. Finally, there would be many pactice problems that the program could grade and explain immediately. Step by step. Bayesian algorithms could diagnose students' problems and try to correct them.
We have the technology and the brainpower to do all this now, and if we did it, the education one would get from a disk like this would be better than today's typical online course. The point of it would be, of course, that this would be a supplement in a real course where you have access to a professor to ask questions, and hopefully even get some experience in a real lab. But I have no doubt that a well-designed inteactive DVD like this would by itself do an excellent job in teaching you the material. And once it was made, it would only need occasional updates. After all, mechanics doesn't change that much. Of course, interactive applications constantly get better, so these could be improved on each year, and any physics professor in the world could submit exercises. There would even be a mechanism for profs to merge in their own exercises and make a custom DVD just for their students, so long as they abided by the open source license.
But most importantly, owning this DVD would cost students $0.20, the cost of the media. They wouldn't have to wait until college to start learning from it. They wouldn't need to be near a university. They could go at their own pace. They could localize the material to their native language. If they don't have internet at home, they could ask their library to burn the DVD for them and pay them $1 for the media and labor. If they did have the internet, they could discuss the problems together on a volunteer-moderated discussion forum. That sounds to me like a whole lot of education for the price of one well-designed DVD. It's absolutely crucial that this be open source. Sure these things would sell, but then they'd just be one textbook among others. Only if they were arbitrarily tradable, burnable and alterable would they become the gold standard, and then volunteers would make them awesome. That's not to say that whoever made them would have to be poor. There could be some sort of a foundation that might sell extra services, provide paid support ot universities, etc. This thing might not need public funding at all, just a big initial investment. (Of course it wouldn't be just one course...). And don't underestimate the willingness of competent volunteers to help with this. I can tell you I work my ass off to publish journal articles for the benefit of my fellow researchers, and I get paid nothing (except prestige). I've also reviewed articles for journals. Again, I got paid nothing for this. In academics, high-level volunteer work is par for the course. I think it would be a pretty desireable line on a vita that you were invited by the responsible foundation to serve as an editor and review contributions for the (say) interactive history of WWI DVD course. If this were as big as I'm sure it would be, top profs would be fighting to volunteer, including me (though I'm no top prof).
So because I can picture very easily this sort of thing, and I don't see it happening, I think that open source is failing in education. What's succeeding right now are agressive book publishers that keep pimping glossy desk copies of their textbooks without telling me that for a crappy b/w paperback, my students will pay $90. That's seriously fucked up. Education is crying out for open source!
Re:how much more black could this be?
on
The Blackest Material
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Apparently they only thought it couldn't get more black. Now it seems somebody has learned how to turn the black up to 11. I smell a new album... (and the glove).
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If MS was going to go nuclear on Apple, they should have done it when Apple was defenceless. At this point, the worm has turned. Clearly, MS and Apple have a deal in which MS agrees to keep developing Office, and Apple agrees to not compete with it or encourage any competition.
But I wonder seriously which party is crossing their fingers in hopes the other doesn't back out of this deal. Clearly, it used to be Apple. But I suspect that many people on the MS campus worry that Steve Jobs & co might make a son-of-iWork that's so good that OSX users won't miss Microsoft. But of course, if MS went nuclear, you just know that Apple would port their office suite to Windows and viral-market the shit out of it. Maybe they'd collaborate with Google so that the whole suite would have an internet back-end.
This could be a crazy pandora's box of hurt for Microsoft. I think that if gloves come off, Apple can do more damage to MS than vice versa. Another thing they could do: leak out an OSX-86 that runs well on normal PCs. It wouldn't be perfect, I'm sure there would be driver issues with some hardware, but if the standard pirates of the world start passing around OSX, who would be left to care about Vista? Not enough people to keep the giant Microsoft beast fed.
I for one would be happy to see the gloves come off. Any deals that prevent competition usually hurt the customers, and the OSX Office deal definitely does.
Right, and my point was that American caucasians like you and me are genetically identical to Europeans, so whatever explains the differences in the religiosity between Europe and the USA, genetics/evolution is not it.
I think this is great fodder for atheism. Now atheists finally have an explanation of why so many pleople can't get talked out of their religion, no matter how little actual sense the religion itself makes. Their rational faculty is genetically hobbled! This wouldn't be the only case where irrational beliefs seem to be hard-wired into us. First of all, there are certain optical issusions, where we "see" something that isn't there. But there are also "logical" illusions like the Gambler's Fallacy. The fact that it's so prevelent (more than religion!) and so clearly irrational is surely a sign that it's hard-coded in us genetically.
If religion starts getting treated as just another hard-coded human irrationality, I have a feeling it will start losing its lustre among a growing group of people.
This is laughable. In Japan and Scandinavia, only a tiny proportion of people believe in a personal deity. Has evolution passed them by? Once again, it pains me to remind Slashdotters that the USA isn't the whole world.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, you're wrong. TFA described a controlled experiment, where the FPS and Myst players didn't choose what to play. They were assigned their game randomly. There are different ways to criticize their conclusions, but yours misses the point.
I have a similar experience. Time Warner has treated me very well. They keep increasing my bandwidth without increasing the price, and recently they got news servers with almost two weeks of article retention! Just to download the headers for that much data takes a long time. I'm scared of moving out of Central New York partly because I don't expect to get an equally competent ISP somewhere else. Verizon has recently installed fiber optics in my neighborhood, but I looked at their offer and scoffed: They will have to do a whole lot better to beat Road Runner!
That sounds right, but then people shouldn't be repeating Einstein's line like it's some insight, when it's on the order of "the axiom we assumed is still something we're assuming."
Just how sure are we that the universe is comprehensible? I don't think Einstein had any right to be sure. Science wasn't finished in the 50's! And suppose we lived in a fundamentally incomprehensible world. Wouldn't the Einsteins of that world, who come up with a clever interpretation of some phenomenon, also wonder at their world's comprehensibility? In fact, I suspect the world appears comprehensible to an ant - but not because they "get it" - only because they lack the imagination to think bigger. And what makes us think our situation isn't parallel?
Yeah, ok, people don't live there now. Give it 20 years. Have you seen Al Gore's movie? It won't be cold there forever, you know!
Yeah, plus as a bonus, Google gets to mine and index all of your company's data for use in Google's future superbrain. My god, their plan might really work!
I think this was a dumb move. Google were already the online advertising giants, and if they wanted to go into banner advertising, they could have done it much better than Doubleclick (targetting, workarounds to blocking, etc.). So what better way to bitchslap Microsoft than to let them buy doubleclick for 3B and introduce a superior competitor that takes away all of Doubleclick's customers? Google could definitely do that for far less than $3B, and another side benefit would be watching MS blow $3B on a dying company!
I don't think anyone wants to take this step forward in the arms race. Once ad filters get Bayesian, it's only a matter of time that techniques developed for spam filtering will be used to find and refuse to display text ads. Then Capitalism collapses.
On the opposite extreme are Google ads, which are basically unblockable because they are text. Or at least let me put it this way: you'd need a pretty good and constantly updating AI in order to block text ads, and except as an academic exercise, coding it and maintaining it is not worth anyone's time.
So I'm actually a little mad that Google bought Doubleclick because I was so happy with Doubleclick being blissfully out of sight and out of mind. I worry it won't stay that way for long.
There is a good point in your commment. This is what I take away from it: For any OCR software, there is a capcha that can defeat it. Therefore, the Capcha generator must have an advanced OCR program as a part of it. It will publish a captcha only if its own OCR guesser can't correctly parse that capcha. That would be the best test to ensure that the capcha isn't machine-solveable. Of course, to implement this, you need an excellent OCR guesser, and lo, Google are about to start working on one!
One awesome application of this: I teach university courses that require term papers. If I could scan and upload the term papers I receive and Google could OCR them and tell me whether they're plagiarized (and of course Google would know; they know all!), I'd be prepared to pay them a bit of money for this. Or, more accurately, my university would be prepared to pay them a decent sum of money on my behalf. Then, they could keep the data from the term papers for the future, to make sure that nobody turns in that same paper in a later semester. Google not only gets money for this, but a whole lot of data to crawl through. Who knows what they would learn if a curious goog starts cleverly mining that data? If they do this, I would really love to work for them and use my 20% "downtime" to code a sentence structure analyzer that could predict a grade based just on syntactic features of the writing. In order to get more data, Google might even offer the OCR + plagiarism detection for free if the instructor agrees to use a Google grading and feedback system, so that Google could correlate each essay with a grade and an explanation of the grade. After tens of thousands of examples, Google might learn how to assign fairly accurate grades on its own (machine agrees with human to almost the same degree that humans agree with each other about what grade is deserved), and after that, who knows, Google might learn how to write B- term papers without any human input!
BTW, I am aware of plagiarism.org and their plagiarism-detection service which works like the thing that I want Google to do. Of course, if Google enters this market, they will crush all competition immediately, and plausibly, they'll do a better job because their database is just bigger. Also, Google could charge less, because a part of the payment will be access to the data itself. In fact, Google is already looking like it will accept information as payment for many of its services! And why not?
I think another part of that point is to reinforce the dirtyness of coal: It reminds us that all of that Thorium goes out of the smokestack and lands on our yards and heads! I for one am lobbying very strongly for Thorium breeder reactors, Uranium also. I think breeders are the best (though very imperfect) energy solution that we have. And the reason why we need to reach for this solution and implement it on a huge scale is exactly because coal burning is just so catastrophically bad.
Is there a torrent like this already available? I think if there were, this hack would suddenly look a whole lot less intimidating.
If we encourage migration to an office suite, we cannot get away from lock-in. It should be the sort of thing we will not be switching away from in four years when it's clearly not the best office suite. And nobody who's looked at the issue can seriously think that OOo is going to make any dramatic progress in the next four years. It's a mess of spaghetti code, and the whole monstrosity is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It may work OK now, but modernizing it for the needs of even the near future is not something that anyone can do.
Consider even the issue of startup times: Even Microsoft streamlined the code for fast startup in Office 97. For OOo this would be hopeless. It is hopeless. And it will remain hopeless. This is not the sort of ship we should board.
We'd be much wiser to jump onto something with a future, even if in the present, it is missing one or two features we might like. I personally am rooting for the KDE4 version of KOffice, since it will be so damn portable, progress is incredibly fast (even with a small staff of coders), and the code and plugin system is incredibly clean and future-proof.
Right now I standardized on Monkey's Audio, I love how it works. But if the next version of FLAC outperforms APE in terms of size, required power and ease of use, I will just fire up my dbPower Music Converter and batch-convert the APEs. I could have done the same from any codec to any codec. This is why the question sounds to me like "Should I put my computer on my desk or under it?" to which the answer is: Pick a place, and if you don't like it, move it! Don't bother to Ask Slashdot about it!
FLAC is asymmetric, meaning that the files take less calculating to decode than to encode, but it was my impression from tests I've seen long ago that it's about the same as "medium APE" for CPU useage. In any case, it uses far less of my CPU than does decoding an MP3.
Now we have our answer, and it's not the worst thing for Google, since they voluntarily removed Viacom content before the suit was filed. Also, the fact that the two companies were in negotiations can be used against Viacom, and the $1B that they're asking for is so arbitrary as to make it clear that they have no real idea how much YouTube damages them (or helps them). Google lawyers have a fighting chance, maybe. Of course, media companies own many politicians including presidents, who appoint judges, so the deck might be stacked against Google.
Aww, six seconds? But I want porn now!
What I'm picturing is this: Some benefactor, perhaps a national government somewhere, pays a group of programmers, artists and professors to produce an open source college course on (say) mechanics. On the DVD is an interactive textbook with hyperlinks for people who need further explanation, but there's also video of a series of lectures and demonstrations. Then there is an interactive element that simulates (albeit abstractly) the common lab experiments that are embedded in a 3D virtual environment and really responds to students' input. Finally, there would be many pactice problems that the program could grade and explain immediately. Step by step. Bayesian algorithms could diagnose students' problems and try to correct them.
We have the technology and the brainpower to do all this now, and if we did it, the education one would get from a disk like this would be better than today's typical online course. The point of it would be, of course, that this would be a supplement in a real course where you have access to a professor to ask questions, and hopefully even get some experience in a real lab. But I have no doubt that a well-designed inteactive DVD like this would by itself do an excellent job in teaching you the material. And once it was made, it would only need occasional updates. After all, mechanics doesn't change that much. Of course, interactive applications constantly get better, so these could be improved on each year, and any physics professor in the world could submit exercises. There would even be a mechanism for profs to merge in their own exercises and make a custom DVD just for their students, so long as they abided by the open source license.
But most importantly, owning this DVD would cost students $0.20, the cost of the media. They wouldn't have to wait until college to start learning from it. They wouldn't need to be near a university. They could go at their own pace. They could localize the material to their native language. If they don't have internet at home, they could ask their library to burn the DVD for them and pay them $1 for the media and labor. If they did have the internet, they could discuss the problems together on a volunteer-moderated discussion forum. That sounds to me like a whole lot of education for the price of one well-designed DVD. It's absolutely crucial that this be open source. Sure these things would sell, but then they'd just be one textbook among others. Only if they were arbitrarily tradable, burnable and alterable would they become the gold standard, and then volunteers would make them awesome. That's not to say that whoever made them would have to be poor. There could be some sort of a foundation that might sell extra services, provide paid support ot universities, etc. This thing might not need public funding at all, just a big initial investment. (Of course it wouldn't be just one course...). And don't underestimate the willingness of competent volunteers to help with this. I can tell you I work my ass off to publish journal articles for the benefit of my fellow researchers, and I get paid nothing (except prestige). I've also reviewed articles for journals. Again, I got paid nothing for this. In academics, high-level volunteer work is par for the course. I think it would be a pretty desireable line on a vita that you were invited by the responsible foundation to serve as an editor and review contributions for the (say) interactive history of WWI DVD course. If this were as big as I'm sure it would be, top profs would be fighting to volunteer, including me (though I'm no top prof).
So because I can picture very easily this sort of thing, and I don't see it happening, I think that open source is failing in education. What's succeeding right now are agressive book publishers that keep pimping glossy desk copies of their textbooks without telling me that for a crappy b/w paperback, my students will pay $90. That's seriously fucked up. Education is crying out for open source!
Apparently they only thought it couldn't get more black. Now it seems somebody has learned how to turn the black up to 11. I smell a new album... (and the glove).
But I wonder seriously which party is crossing their fingers in hopes the other doesn't back out of this deal. Clearly, it used to be Apple. But I suspect that many people on the MS campus worry that Steve Jobs & co might make a son-of-iWork that's so good that OSX users won't miss Microsoft. But of course, if MS went nuclear, you just know that Apple would port their office suite to Windows and viral-market the shit out of it. Maybe they'd collaborate with Google so that the whole suite would have an internet back-end.
This could be a crazy pandora's box of hurt for Microsoft. I think that if gloves come off, Apple can do more damage to MS than vice versa. Another thing they could do: leak out an OSX-86 that runs well on normal PCs. It wouldn't be perfect, I'm sure there would be driver issues with some hardware, but if the standard pirates of the world start passing around OSX, who would be left to care about Vista? Not enough people to keep the giant Microsoft beast fed.
I for one would be happy to see the gloves come off. Any deals that prevent competition usually hurt the customers, and the OSX Office deal definitely does.
Right, and my point was that American caucasians like you and me are genetically identical to Europeans, so whatever explains the differences in the religiosity between Europe and the USA, genetics/evolution is not it.
Are you suggesting that evolution has passed us by?
If religion starts getting treated as just another hard-coded human irrationality, I have a feeling it will start losing its lustre among a growing group of people.
This is laughable. In Japan and Scandinavia, only a tiny proportion of people believe in a personal deity. Has evolution passed them by? Once again, it pains me to remind Slashdotters that the USA isn't the whole world.