I am developing an application that does some interesting real-time mathematical processing on audio data from an input stream. I wrote it in Java on my Mac, with all the OOP trimmings - the processing stream is fully multithreaded, with each step in the process happening in it's own thread, passing data down a bucket-brigade of storage objects with locks.
So the program involves GUI elements, threading and locking, hardware interfaces (i.e. the microphone port), etc.
After I'd done the core development on my mac, I tried the application on my sister's windows laptop. It worked perfectly, the first time, even the hardware interface to the microphone. We've since seen the same result on a dozen different Windows and Mac machines with widely-varying audio hardware. I haven't tried linux yet because I don't have a desktop linux machine easily available (only servers in the basement), but I expect the experience to be similar.
We are nearly ready to ship this package. When we do, it will ship simultaneously on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS X. And this with ZERO extra effort made to port the code between platforms.
And you're telling me that platform-independence isn't important?
APT magazine will teach the home technology geek how to quickly and easily order pre-assembled electronics via the internet with only a few clicks.
Thus saving, of course, the endless time one would waste building it oneself: gone are the days of endless hours wasted and headaches endured trying to debug your rickety homemade photography kite or videocam image stabilizer.
I wonder what the statistics on his server show. Slashdotted within three minutes of the story posting, and only three comments so far. Must be a new record.
...and how simple digital media creation and transfer is killing the outmoded middleman in the music industry.
And how DVRs are destroying all corporations using the obsolete free-broadcast-with-pushed-advertising model because now people can skip the commercials!...Or not.
How soon do you suppose the Lighthouse Industry Association of America will file suit and begin lobbying the guvmint to legislatively protect their obsolete business model?
apart from using it as a shield against EM interference coming from Earth, there's not all that much to be gained from sticking a radio telescope on the moon.
Yes, well, shielding against the background EM noise of the Earth is in fact the whole point. IIRC it would increase effective range and sensitivity by several orders of magnitude.
Whether that's worth the effort is something we can debate, but you pretty much invalidated your own argument in the first sentence.
Ruins the game's economy? Sorry, it's already broken.
Monsters spawn continuously from an undepleteable source, and they carry gold (currency). This means new currency is being continually minted.
What happens when a government mints new money continuously? Ridiculous inflation and economic collapse.
That is exactly what happens in all of these games. The amount of currency available in-game is always increasing. These games are starting with a broken economy, and that won't change until some game designers take an economics class.
I run a mix of OS X, Linux, and Win2k machines at my home office. I'm familiar with network configs on pretty much everything, and have been putting together mixed networks for over a decade.
But the first time I saw XP was when a friend brought over his shiny new laptop. He wanted to go online, so we just plugged in an ethernet cable, and I went looking for the setting to turn on ethernet and DHCP, nothing more.... and looking...... and looking...
"Set up new internet connection" wizard, asks if i want to set up a home connection or office connection. I don't know, I want a fscking ETHERNET connection with DHCP, but I figure the idiots in Redmond assume all offices have ethernet and all homes have dialup, so I try "office". No joy. I try "home". No joy. Both give me the same options, and are asking whether I have ISDN. (why the... in 2003? ISDN?)
After fully half an hour, I finally realized that the "new internet connection" wizard only does dialup and ISDN, but that it still somehow thinks there's a difference between homes and offices that is relevant. Can't do ethernet through the wizard, and I can't find the control panels.
Of course the owner of the laptop knows bupkus about his shiny new system.
So I started hunting for other ways to configure the network....and hunting......and hunting...
I finally figured it out, but it took me an honest 90 MINUTES to figure out how to unhide the icons in the control panel so that I could actually connect the damn machine. Any other computer would have taken me 30 seconds, tops.
And don't even get me started about all of last year, when my girlfriend had an XP laptop that needed to have a different static IP, plus different wireless network name, at my house and at hers. My powerbook switches between full net configurations in two seconds, straight out of the apple menu, and I can store as many as I like. Every time she brought that laptop to my place, it was a five-minute hassle to hook the f*cker up and switch the IP/DNS/gateway by hand. Every time she went home, it was a ten minute tech support phone call to get it working again.
The incompetence of Microsoft's human interface engineers is completely unreal. Instead of fixing their poorly-organized control panels that were powerful but hard to use and cluttered with unnecessary details, they simply hid them entirely and replaced them with wizards that are completely unable to configure anything for anybody.
There are things I still can't manage with it... like setting up a 2-node network via crossover cable with IP's 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2. I've been doing that on other machines since college. I've tried FOUR times with XP machines, but never succeeded.
And setting up filesharing. I can't fileshare between my XP box and any other machine in the house. I have to fscking FTP files to and from my mac with it. My last LAN party: six geeks, six PCs - and we had to distribute level files on burned CDs because we couldn't get sharing to work on more than half the machines, even with all the configs set identically. The machines that couldn't connect to the server? Why... it was the XP machines! Go figure. All the Win2k machines were fine.
Since XP came out, the amount of time I spend supporting friends and relatives has absolutely quadrupled. The patheticness of its' configuration design and unpredictability of its networking code is jaw-droppingly, embarassingly, bad. I mean stinky.
Hang on, I'm starting to get the urge to tell you how I REALLY feel.
So a Microsoft manager is comparing their own products to mind-altering substances? I won't dispute that!
I will dispute that. Most reports from users of mind-altering substances are far more positive than reports from users of Microsoft products, in my experience.
Try these phrases on for size:
"Hey man, that was some great Excel! Got any more?"
"Dammit, that f$cking bud crashed! I lost my whole report, and I have to present tomorrow!"
Point made that Tienamen was a while back. However, if you want to make a counter point about Britain, using an item from five times as long ago and during a global war isn't the most convincing.
Another responder to your post pointed out that many of the same people are still in charge, since Tienamen was only 15 years ago. Likewise, many still remember watching it on TV, including myself. You can't say either of those things about the 1919 incident you cite.
Anyhow, plenty of examples still exist of dictatorial overreaching by the Chinese government (Taiwan, executions, public canings, etc.), though obviously none so spectacular as the tanks.
However, you might be surprised to find that I agree with you about reform in China, in fact I regularly use the ongoing reforms in that country as an example of what happens to totalitarian nations they are engaged and traded with rather than saber-rattled against or invaded: the inflow of trade sparks economic reforms which invariably bring about social change and liberal reforms.
My point to the grandparent was not that China is totally evil, but that he was misunderstanding his own metaphor. he argued that China was not like "the gestapo", because it wasn't observing every citizen all the time and breaking down doors for every minor offense. My point was that 1984 description wasn't accurate for the gestapo, either, who were defined more by their brutal tactics in response to certain "offenses" than some hypothetical micromanaging of everyone's lives down to the last trivial misdemeanor.
For the same reason why Europeans think we're a country of hicks driving around in a pickup with shotguns
From the city, are ya? I'm in Los Angeles now, but all my relatives live in either Texas or Idaho, and not always in the big cities. I know an awful lot of people who do, in fact, drive around in pickups and carry shotguns.
In fact, if you are one of the millions of people who live or work in the country, on a ranch, on a farm, or go hunting, you're describing basic tools of life.
The U.S. still has a lot more "wild" urban acreage per capita than tha majority of European nations. So sure, the whole country isn't toting guns in a pickup at any one point, but enough people are (relative to european nations) that the stereotype may in fact have some merit.
who elected a idiot to office
There's a stereotype with 100% merit. (Well, 51% per-capita)
While it may sound like the Chinese police force operate a Gestapo-like regime but that's far from the truth.
Are we talking about the country that ran over student protestors with tanks, or not? The Gestapo wasn't breaking down every door to oversee every activity, either -- still the vast majority of Germans were "good citizens" with jobs etc. and had no hassle from the police. (Otherwise how would they have managed to fight a war?) The critical difference was that they used brutal tactics for the people they *did* oversee.
Not that I think the "Gestapo" metaphor really is apt for China, but you seem to have a misunderstanding of it.
As if politicians and business leaders have the expertise to make this pronouncement? Right. I'd be interested in what the acedemics have to say (and interested in their qualifications), but the rest of the group? They're just along for the ride.
They're in there because other politicians and business leaders never listen to scientists. The fact that you prefer to listen to the academics makes you a fairly rare bird.
I personally have been using kinesis keyboards for nearly 10 years. At this point, I own nearly their top model, and am regretting not buying the absolute best.
You can program a whole second layer of the kinesis keyboards, activated by the keypad switch. By default, the right half of the 'board becomes a numeric keypad when the switch is active.
You can also program any key with an onboard macro.
I activate the second layer with a footswitch. While it is down, individual keystrokes activate macros: HTML macros on my left hand, C/Java macros on my right.
For example, right hand home row middle finger (K on a qwerty keyboard) types this for me:
for (*;;)
{
}
where the asterisk is the position where my insertion point is left , because I include arrow keys in the macro.
The equivalent finger on my left hand, combined with the footswitch, types:
<a href="*"></a>
I use shift-footswitch-key to indicate "bracket the current selection with this tag", i.e. "cut, type tag pair, cursor back to the middle, paste".
I can barely describe how many keystrokes this system saves me; I almost never have to reach for punctuation and symbol keys when programming. Having the macros in hardware means they continue to work when I switch between Mac, linux, and windows via a KVM switch. It means I can use them equivalently whether I'm in bbedit or using emacs on a client's webserver over SSH.
Since the punctuation is taken care of by macros, I can use the dvorak layout to speed up all my regular typing of words and letters; switching to Dvorak allowed me to learn touchtyping for real (and the Kinesis forces it, because you can't really see the keys well enough to hunt and peck; they're hidden by your hands, and because the shape of the keyboard makes it very hard to hit the keys with the wrong finger.)
The kinesis cured my RSI in college, and has made me infinitely more productive since then. I bang out code as quickly as I can think it, rarely if ever reaching for awkward punctuation keys.
I only wish I'd bought the top model, because I run out of macro memory regularly.
Why people would be willing to pay $1500 for a new computer every two or three years for "speed", but not be willing to shell out a $300 for a keyboard that will increase their productivity while reducing injuries, and will last for five or six years, is beyond me.
Your keyboard, pointing device, and monitors are your user interfaces. They are the parts that can make or break you; compared to their effect on your computing experience, the difference between a four-year-old celeron and an opteron or PPC G5 is pitiful. I am doing development, design, writing, or websurfing fourteen hours a day, every day.
Besides, you can keep your keyboard and monitors between systems: they a long term investment.
Normally, I don't bother correcting other people's grammar or spelling. When somebody else is obnoxious enough to do so, though, then makes four errors in two sentences, I just can't help myself.
Spell "grammar" correctly.
"Stream-of-consciousness" should be hyphenated, as shown here.
"Poorly-written" should also be hyphenated.
"Grammar as horrific as this" is a more accurate construction than "grammar this horrific". Or, consider: "... do most of them contain such horrific grammar?"
As I said, I would have left you alone, but you had the gall to be criticizing others, and it put me in touch with my inner evil editor.
I have no doubt, however, that someone will find errors in my own post.
Indeed, and the lack of sterilization procedures coupled with the re-use of bandages after a patient had died. They efficiently transmitted infection from patient to patient.
Except that God doesn't even remotely meet the scientific definition of "theory", and so the sticker wouldn't be remotely correct, even if we did hand out Bibles in science classse.
I think you mean "hypothesis"; to become a scientific theory, a hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable and then successfully predict the results of a great number of careful experiments and/or observations. Examples of theories include gravity, the atomic structure of matter, and electromagnetic wave propagation, all of which have stood up to numerous tests and observations.
The existence of god has only a single book translated many times, and is not testable. Sorry - even to those who believe, god does not qualify as "theory" in the scientific sense.
I'll be the one screaming "medic!" at the top of my lungs. Modern medicine may just be a theory but I reckon it's statistically a better bet than relying on His strength.
And you'd be absolutely right. In the current conflict in Iraq, the death rate from battle wounds is only 1.6%, whereas in vietnam it was 3.68%, more than twice as high. The army, at least, attributes this huge increase in survivability to modern medical technology and improved practice.
looked at as a ratio of wounded (but survived) to killed, the current ratio is 7.6:1. Going backwards in time, counting only U.S. soldiers: Vietnam: 2.6:1 WWII: 1.7:1 WWI: 1.8:1 US Civil War: 0.74:1
In other words, a trend consistently shows more people surviving war wounds as time goes on.
Meanwhile, the evidence is not that there has been a massive (factor of twenty) increase in religiosity in the United States since the Civil war. Certainly, available data show that people self-identifying as Christian have decreased significantly between 1990 and 2004.
So the evidence would seem to indicate, unless God has consistently increased his tendency to save the lives of wounded soldiers despite no significant increase in their faith, that improvements in medical technology are in fact a good bet for saving your life when you're lying bleeding on the battlefield.
Slashdot Mirror
I am developing an application that does some interesting real-time mathematical processing on audio data from an input stream. I wrote it in Java on my Mac, with all the OOP trimmings - the processing stream is fully multithreaded, with each step in the process happening in it's own thread, passing data down a bucket-brigade of storage objects with locks.
So the program involves GUI elements, threading and locking, hardware interfaces (i.e. the microphone port), etc.
After I'd done the core development on my mac, I tried the application on my sister's windows laptop. It worked perfectly, the first time, even the hardware interface to the microphone. We've since seen the same result on a dozen different Windows and Mac machines with widely-varying audio hardware. I haven't tried linux yet because I don't have a desktop linux machine easily available (only servers in the basement), but I expect the experience to be similar.
We are nearly ready to ship this package. When we do, it will ship simultaneously on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS X. And this with ZERO extra effort made to port the code between platforms.
And you're telling me that platform-independence isn't important?
APT magazine will teach the home technology geek how to quickly and easily order pre-assembled electronics via the internet with only a few clicks.
Thus saving, of course, the endless time one would waste building it oneself: gone are the days of endless hours wasted and headaches endured trying to debug your rickety homemade photography kite or videocam image stabilizer.
I wonder what the statistics on his server show. Slashdotted within three minutes of the story posting, and only three comments so far. Must be a new record.
...and how simple digital media creation and transfer is killing the outmoded middleman in the music industry.
...Or not.
And how DVRs are destroying all corporations using the obsolete free-broadcast-with-pushed-advertising model because now people can skip the commercials!
How soon do you suppose the Lighthouse Industry Association of America will file suit and begin lobbying the guvmint to legislatively protect their obsolete business model?
apart from using it as a shield against EM interference coming from Earth, there's not all that much to be gained from sticking a radio telescope on the moon.
Yes, well, shielding against the background EM noise of the Earth is in fact the whole point. IIRC it would increase effective range and sensitivity by several orders of magnitude.
Whether that's worth the effort is something we can debate, but you pretty much invalidated your own argument in the first sentence.
It ruins the game economy which
Ruins the game's economy? Sorry, it's already broken.
Monsters spawn continuously from an undepleteable source, and they carry gold (currency). This means new currency is being continually minted.
What happens when a government mints new money continuously? Ridiculous inflation and economic collapse.
That is exactly what happens in all of these games. The amount of currency available in-game is always increasing. These games are starting with a broken economy, and that won't change until some game designers take an economics class.
I run a mix of OS X, Linux, and Win2k machines at my home office. I'm familiar with network configs on pretty much everything, and have been putting together mixed networks for over a decade.
... and looking ... ... and looking ...
...and hunting... ...and hunting...
... like setting up a 2-node network via crossover cable with IP's 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2. I've been doing that on other machines since college. I've tried FOUR times with XP machines, but never succeeded.
... it was the XP machines! Go figure. All the Win2k machines were fine.
But the first time I saw XP was when a friend brought over his shiny new laptop. He wanted to go online, so we just plugged in an ethernet cable, and I went looking for the setting to turn on ethernet and DHCP, nothing more.
"Set up new internet connection" wizard, asks if i want to set up a home connection or office connection. I don't know, I want a fscking ETHERNET connection with DHCP, but I figure the idiots in Redmond assume all offices have ethernet and all homes have dialup, so I try "office". No joy. I try "home". No joy. Both give me the same options, and are asking whether I have ISDN. (why the... in 2003? ISDN?)
After fully half an hour, I finally realized that the "new internet connection" wizard only does dialup and ISDN, but that it still somehow thinks there's a difference between homes and offices that is relevant. Can't do ethernet through the wizard, and I can't find the control panels.
Of course the owner of the laptop knows bupkus about his shiny new system.
So I started hunting for other ways to configure the network.
I finally figured it out, but it took me an honest 90 MINUTES to figure out how to unhide the icons in the control panel so that I could actually connect the damn machine. Any other computer would have taken me 30 seconds, tops.
And don't even get me started about all of last year, when my girlfriend had an XP laptop that needed to have a different static IP, plus different wireless network name, at my house and at hers. My powerbook switches between full net configurations in two seconds, straight out of the apple menu, and I can store as many as I like. Every time she brought that laptop to my place, it was a five-minute hassle to hook the f*cker up and switch the IP/DNS/gateway by hand. Every time she went home, it was a ten minute tech support phone call to get it working again.
The incompetence of Microsoft's human interface engineers is completely unreal. Instead of fixing their poorly-organized control panels that were powerful but hard to use and cluttered with unnecessary details, they simply hid them entirely and replaced them with wizards that are completely unable to configure anything for anybody.
There are things I still can't manage with it
And setting up filesharing. I can't fileshare between my XP box and any other machine in the house. I have to fscking FTP files to and from my mac with it. My last LAN party: six geeks, six PCs - and we had to distribute level files on burned CDs because we couldn't get sharing to work on more than half the machines, even with all the configs set identically. The machines that couldn't connect to the server? Why
Since XP came out, the amount of time I spend supporting friends and relatives has absolutely quadrupled. The patheticness of its' configuration design and unpredictability of its networking code is jaw-droppingly, embarassingly, bad. I mean stinky.
Hang on, I'm starting to get the urge to tell you how I REALLY feel.
So a Microsoft manager is comparing their own products to mind-altering substances? I won't dispute that!
I will dispute that. Most reports from users of mind-altering substances are far more positive than reports from users of Microsoft products, in my experience.
Try these phrases on for size:
"Hey man, that was some great Excel! Got any more?"
"Dammit, that f$cking bud crashed! I lost my whole report, and I have to present tomorrow!"
See? Doesn't work.
Point made that Tienamen was a while back. However, if you want to make a counter point about Britain, using an item from five times as long ago and during a global war isn't the most convincing.
Another responder to your post pointed out that many of the same people are still in charge, since Tienamen was only 15 years ago. Likewise, many still remember watching it on TV, including myself. You can't say either of those things about the 1919 incident you cite.
Anyhow, plenty of examples still exist of dictatorial overreaching by the Chinese government (Taiwan, executions, public canings, etc.), though obviously none so spectacular as the tanks.
However, you might be surprised to find that I agree with you about reform in China, in fact I regularly use the ongoing reforms in that country as an example of what happens to totalitarian nations they are engaged and traded with rather than saber-rattled against or invaded: the inflow of trade sparks economic reforms which invariably bring about social change and liberal reforms.
My point to the grandparent was not that China is totally evil, but that he was misunderstanding his own metaphor. he argued that China was not like "the gestapo", because it wasn't observing every citizen all the time and breaking down doors for every minor offense. My point was that 1984 description wasn't accurate for the gestapo, either, who were defined more by their brutal tactics in response to certain "offenses" than some hypothetical micromanaging of everyone's lives down to the last trivial misdemeanor.
For the same reason why Europeans think we're a country of hicks driving around in a pickup with shotguns
From the city, are ya? I'm in Los Angeles now, but all my relatives live in either Texas or Idaho, and not always in the big cities. I know an awful lot of people who do, in fact, drive around in pickups and carry shotguns.
In fact, if you are one of the millions of people who live or work in the country, on a ranch, on a farm, or go hunting, you're describing basic tools of life.
The U.S. still has a lot more "wild" urban acreage per capita than tha majority of European nations. So sure, the whole country isn't toting guns in a pickup at any one point, but enough people are (relative to european nations) that the stereotype may in fact have some merit.
who elected a idiot to office
There's a stereotype with 100% merit. (Well, 51% per-capita)
While it may sound like the Chinese police force operate a Gestapo-like regime but that's far from the truth.
Are we talking about the country that ran over student protestors with tanks, or not? The Gestapo wasn't breaking down every door to oversee every activity, either -- still the vast majority of Germans were "good citizens" with jobs etc. and had no hassle from the police. (Otherwise how would they have managed to fight a war?) The critical difference was that they used brutal tactics for the people they *did* oversee.
Not that I think the "Gestapo" metaphor really is apt for China, but you seem to have a misunderstanding of it.
Every history class shows you ancient figurines and cave paintings of "fertility symbols". What exactly did you *think* you were looking at?
the world ended in the 1100s and the 1500s when the temperatures were that high before, so this is just academic.
I'm sure the Mayan civilzation, which died at least partly from drought during that time, would find your jibe hilarious.
As if politicians and business leaders have the expertise to make this pronouncement? Right. I'd be interested in what the acedemics have to say (and interested in their qualifications), but the rest of the group? They're just along for the ride.
They're in there because other politicians and business leaders never listen to scientists. The fact that you prefer to listen to the academics makes you a fairly rare bird.
You can program a whole second layer of the kinesis keyboards, activated by the keypad switch. By default, the right half of the 'board becomes a numeric keypad when the switch is active.
You can also program any key with an onboard macro.
I activate the second layer with a footswitch. While it is down, individual keystrokes activate macros: HTML macros on my left hand, C/Java macros on my right.
For example, right hand home row middle finger (K on a qwerty keyboard) types this for me:where the asterisk is the position where my insertion point is left , because I include arrow keys in the macro.
The equivalent finger on my left hand, combined with the footswitch, types:I use shift-footswitch-key to indicate "bracket the current selection with this tag", i.e. "cut, type tag pair, cursor back to the middle, paste".
I can barely describe how many keystrokes this system saves me; I almost never have to reach for punctuation and symbol keys when programming. Having the macros in hardware means they continue to work when I switch between Mac, linux, and windows via a KVM switch. It means I can use them equivalently whether I'm in bbedit or using emacs on a client's webserver over SSH.
Since the punctuation is taken care of by macros, I can use the dvorak layout to speed up all my regular typing of words and letters; switching to Dvorak allowed me to learn touchtyping for real (and the Kinesis forces it, because you can't really see the keys well enough to hunt and peck; they're hidden by your hands, and because the shape of the keyboard makes it very hard to hit the keys with the wrong finger.)
The kinesis cured my RSI in college, and has made me infinitely more productive since then. I bang out code as quickly as I can think it, rarely if ever reaching for awkward punctuation keys.
I only wish I'd bought the top model, because I run out of macro memory regularly.
Why people would be willing to pay $1500 for a new computer every two or three years for "speed", but not be willing to shell out a $300 for a keyboard that will increase their productivity while reducing injuries, and will last for five or six years, is beyond me.
Your keyboard, pointing device, and monitors are your user interfaces. They are the parts that can make or break you; compared to their effect on your computing experience, the difference between a four-year-old celeron and an opteron or PPC G5 is pitiful. I am doing development, design, writing, or websurfing fourteen hours a day, every day.
Besides, you can keep your keyboard and monitors between systems: they a long term investment.
As I said, I would have left you alone, but you had the gall to be criticizing others, and it put me in touch with my inner evil editor.
I have no doubt, however, that someone will find errors in my own post.
I know that Beowulf is a cluster of Linux servers, but what is a Grendel?
A cluster of Windows servers, it would have to be, wouldn't it?
And my Ph.D. thesis is due on Monday the 24th.
It feels an awful lot like giving birth. (I'm guessing)
So everyone can relax and get one with the analysis...
Good point, Zen science is the best kind. Less stressful.
Now, if only I could really become one with my thesis and finish writing the damn thing...
No rule to make target 'o'reilly'. Stop.
You didn't include enough falafel.
> Then read up on bayonettes and the .84 miniball.
Indeed, and the lack of sterilization procedures coupled with the re-use of bandages after a patient had died. They efficiently transmitted infection from patient to patient.
No vaccines, no antibiotics, no germ theory.
I thought it went to the tune of "Hmm hmm hmm hmm" by the Crash Test Dummies?!?!
Except that God doesn't even remotely meet the scientific definition of "theory", and so the sticker wouldn't be remotely correct, even if we did hand out Bibles in science classse.
I think you mean "hypothesis"; to become a scientific theory, a hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable and then successfully predict the results of a great number of careful experiments and/or observations. Examples of theories include gravity, the atomic structure of matter, and electromagnetic wave propagation, all of which have stood up to numerous tests and observations.
The existence of god has only a single book translated many times, and is not testable. Sorry - even to those who believe, god does not qualify as "theory" in the scientific sense.
I'll be the one screaming "medic!" at the top of my lungs. Modern medicine may just be a theory but I reckon it's statistically a better bet than relying on His strength.
And you'd be absolutely right. In the current conflict in Iraq, the death rate from battle wounds is only 1.6%, whereas in vietnam it was 3.68%, more than twice as high. The army, at least, attributes this huge increase in survivability to modern medical technology and improved practice.
looked at as a ratio of wounded (but survived) to killed, the current ratio is 7.6:1. Going backwards in time, counting only U.S. soldiers:
Vietnam: 2.6:1
WWII: 1.7:1
WWI: 1.8:1
US Civil War: 0.74:1
In other words, a trend consistently shows more people surviving war wounds as time goes on.
Meanwhile, the evidence is not that there has been a massive (factor of twenty) increase in religiosity in the United States since the Civil war. Certainly, available data show that people self-identifying as Christian have decreased significantly between 1990 and 2004.
So the evidence would seem to indicate, unless God has consistently increased his tendency to save the lives of wounded soldiers despite no significant increase in their faith, that improvements in medical technology are in fact a good bet for saving your life when you're lying bleeding on the battlefield.
Good call, mike260.
2) correct, it seems.
Since his server was slashdotted before there were even five comments posted, it would seem this strategy was ill-advised.
with all the natural disasters happening, i cannot think of a good reason why the world wouldn't end the day after tomorrow.
Because M$ will release a bug-free, easy to use operating system with reasonable licensing three days from now.