My understanding that the difference in quality was generally not visible on consumer-grade televisions of the time. So as a result, it was a more expensive format with tapes that held smaller amounts of content yet gave no visible benefit to the user. This means VHS's win in the consumer marketplace was completely justified.
The difference was visible on high-end monitors like those seen in studios and editing rooms, however, and so it was used in professional editing solutions and remained in use in pro workshops for editing and archival for many years. The two products simply served different needs.
Certainly the meme that "the better product lost" is hogwash. By relevant measures, the correct product "won" each in its appropriate marketplace.
Sony's technology is based on touching your mp3 player to a pad connected to your computer-filling it up with new data
But the pad will have to have a wire to the computer. Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose? I suppose you could have the pad connect to the computer with a longer range technology like W-USB, but then what's the point of the pad in the first place?
I don't believe that we, just by chance, came into existence.
Anyone who has any understanding of evolution knows that "just by chance" is an extremely poor description of evolution. Randomness plays a very, very small role in the evolutionary descent of organisms.
I am a Christian, and like many others, it doesn't matter what you say to me
Can I quote you on that?
That simple fact indicates why your philosophy fails: it is, like all faith, completely resistant to evidence. It doesn't matter what you are shown, explained, or demonstrated: you will perist in a pre-determined pattern of belief. When you decide a belief before hearing arguments, it is philosophically equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and going "wah wah wah I can't hear you". Most religious people won't admit it as you just have.
There are three meanings of theory, and people frequently misunderstand them.
(Theory defitition 1): "supposition" or "hunch". This is the use in the sentence "If my theory is correct, then..." This is the meaning that creationists usually think they are arguing against. But in science, it is never truly correct to use theory in this sense, though even scientists speaking casually often use it like that. The correct word for this in science is "hypothesis".
(Theory definition 2): "a description of a process that explains observed facts". These vary in their degree of supportability, and sometimes, multiple warring theories are supported to different degrees by existing experiment. For example, there are at the moment multiple theories about what process gives matter mass. Examples: The theory that matter is atomic, i.e. not continuously divisible. The theory that natural selection coupled with variation leads to evolution. The theory that particles have mass because of their interaction with the Higgs field.
(Definition 3): "a body of knowledge and understanding that supports much other past and future work"; it describes an entire framework of internally consistent principles, understanding and data. Meanings used in this sense:
* Atomic theory (the understanding of the structure of the atom and it's constituent particles and interactions that underlies all of nuclear science and chemistry)
* Evolutionary theory (the understanding of how organisms and species give rise to one another, and the genetic mechanisms thereof that underlies all of biology)
It's instructive to note that evolutionary theory and atomic theory are approximately equivalent in terms of evidentiary support and use in their fields. Both arose as type-2 definitions around the same time (mid 19th-century), supplanting prior theories (matter is continuous, God created all organisms at one time and they have been unchanged since then). Both have turned into type 3 theories that completely underly the relevant fields (chemistry, biology).
Religious fundies don't understand the difference between these definitions, and they think evolution is a "type 1" theory, more properly called a hypothesis. It is not. Evolution is the entire framework of over a century of biological research. Attempting to understand research in biology while rejection evolution is like attempting to understand chemistry while rejecting the atom. Or attempting to understand higher math while rejecting arithmetic. It's flat-out ludicrous.
One of the cool implications becomes clear if you realize this means our galaxy is the 4th galaxy in a line with these three. To someone standing on a planet in that backmost galaxy, 11B Ly away:
* The one that's the "foreground galaxy" to us would be the inner ring.
* The one that's the "first ring" to us would be the foreground galaxy for them and...
* The Milky Way would appear as the outer ring!
I really can't wait until it's routine to nip out to Luna for a weekend.
Indeed, you probably can't wait for it, because barring some unforseen sudden humongous increase in lifespan, that trip becoming "routine" is highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime.
The amount of technology, fuel, and other costs required for a trip to the Moon is really not on the same scale as the other kinds of travel we talk about. "Routine" will not happen until the average person in a first-world economy is a multibillionaire in today's dollars.
That's fucking brilliant, and so true. Except that I've seen "make it work in IE" take up to 80% of the time in some of my projects. No exaggeration.
These are usually the ones that want both W3C compliance AND compatibility back to IE 5.0. Particularly if the designers then hand me stuff that can't be easily implemented without partial transparency.
IE is a fucking nightmare. Seriously. It has retarded the development of the web by several years at minimum.
The Chernobyl accident happened because the Soviet engineers who designed and ran the plant were idiots.
Good thing, then, that idiots have entirely died out. Since there are no more idiots left on the Earth, we can be 100% confident that such accidents will never happen again.
I had the addresses corresponding to the screen background color and the screen border background color memorized, so I'd go to department stores that had a machine on display and write:
It's out. Soma is the US trade name for the muscle relaxant Carisoprodol. It's a particularly nice and powerful muscle relaxant/sedative. My mom and sister (both of whom have chronic back/neck and muscular pain) absolutely swear by it.
I personally think it took great chutzpah by the manufacturer to use that name.:)
This would be nice if it were true. It's true in theory, but in practice it hasn't been true in a long time because of the way the commerce clause (Article 1, Section 3, Clause 3) has been interpreted:
The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
Basically, the concept of "interstate commerce" has been interpreted increasingly broadly and in a way that is, honestly, not entirely without merit. In theory, the federal government was supposed to regulate trade only between the states... business conducted entirely within a state was intended to be outside the purview of the Congress. However, fast forward two centuries and trade is much more rapid, widespread, integrated and long-distance than before. Essentially all trade either crosses state lines (or national borders!) or has a direct impact on trade that does through competition. You may buy that can of paint at a hardware store in your town, but the paint was almost certainly manufactured in another state from of chemicals processed in three more after being originally mined in six others and three foreign nations. The same goes for the metals in the can and the paper and ink in the label. The modern industrial world has very little in common with that of the 1780's, such that the concept of truly intrastate commerce is effectively meaningless today.
As a result, all trade is "intrastate" and Congress has the power to regulate it.
Your issues with privacy involve the buying and selling of music and other media, communication over lines and networks that you pay for, etc. One way or another, it's all part of "commerce" these days. So while in principle all of your rights not enumerated are protected, in practice the power of commercial regulation gives the government power over essentially everything not explicitly enumerated by a right, because all activities can be seen as part of commerce.
I'm not saying I like that, I'm saying that's how it is.
Though there are good outcomes of it, as well. The commerce clause (in combination with the general welfare clause) also gives the government power to do things like set standards for healthy food, safe medicines, and low pollution that businesses almost certainly wouldn't see to themselves, or would do so more slowly.
And I like.OEU -- same keys as ESDF, but in Dvorak.
I type on a Kinesis contoured keyboard, in Dvorak key layout. The kinesis is wicked sick for FPS gaming; aside from the ergonomics that minimize finger traverse distances, having six keys around the left thumb makes for a lot of bindable actions.
True. But Sudoku is *really* finite. A comparatively simple algorithm will guarantee that you find the solution in about 15-20 minutes without computer help, once you learn it. I find it astonishing that people find sudoku interesting after the first few days. Once you work out how to solve them, you know how to solve all of them and it's just not interesting any more.
I don't know about Tomorrow's World, but I know that Nate Lewis has been doing this for at least ten years, because I remember seeing presentations about it my first year of grad school, way back when (1997). At one point he and other Caltech people even spun off a company, Cyrano Systems, to market the thing. And *that* was at least six years ago.
Reading TFA, I didn't see any info in the article that was different from what I saw presented a decade ago. I'm sure they've improved the e-nose a ton in those ten years, but TFA sure didn't give any specifics, it just treated the e-nose as a new idea. Which it isn't.
The article has it twice correctly as Caltech and once as Cal Tech (up near the top).
Bugs me too, dude, but I think this is a battle we are going to lose, long term. Even the City of Pasadena has roadsigns pointing to campus that spell it as two words.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure I can think of a single example [of armed revolution] that's really worked out well -- and the ascending scale of horror represented by the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution show how easily they can work out badly.
True. However, in some cases government replacement can be accomplished through force of social pressure without recourse to armed conflict. You should look up the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Most of the USA forgot about the man after the Bosnia conflict, though he was still the dictator of Serbia when we left. But afterwards, he was removed by a popular revolution, basically orchestrated by a group of students who coordinated immense popular opposition to the government.
Otpor! (Resistance!) flooded the streets in protest and demanded he step down entirely so they could hold elections. They managed to do it with such overwhelming force of numbers that conflict was simply not an option: you can't order the army to shoot everyone and send them home when the whole damn country is in the street.
Milosevic, one of the last of the 20th century's string of nasty/immoral/brutal dictators, stepped down without a single shot being fired. So there is a possibility for nonviolent change to become a more common option in the 21st century.
As the climate changes, somewhere upwards of a billion coastal dwellers will be displaced. If melting arctic ice shuts down the gulf stream, the temperature decrease could reduce the productivity of farmland in Europe and North America by 75% or more.
Changes in the balance of resources can trigger the biggest wars of them all. How many wars has the world already fought over oil, food, water, or salt? (yes, salt, look it up).
Add to that the fact that the world will know in advance who is primarily responsible for the CO2 emissions that f*cked up their countries (1st world nations, most notably the US), and will be looking for someone to blame. If you think the world hates the US now, just wait until many great cities are underwater and half a billion have died, and they can point to a single nation for having emitted 40% of world's historical output of greenhouse gasses and having refused every treaty to try to reduce them. Al Qaeda will have a lot of friends.
Climate change may not be causing wars *now*, but many people believe it will likely lead to the worst worldwide wars in history. The biggest difference one can make to any war is to prevent it in the first place, and Gore is working as hard on that front as anyone is. He absolutely deserves the peace prize.
This headband using IR radar would probably be much more socially acceptable and less discomfort-inducing than walking around clicking your tongue incessantly.
Fair enough. But getting past the things you learned as a child can be very difficult even as an adult. Even as an atheist son of Catholic parents, you could argue that I still believe what my parents taught me. Because me dad was a scientist, physician, and a reader of science fiction, and those things affected his daily life far more than his religion. Mom and Dad gave me books about science and books that used critical thinking processes starting when I was four or five. That rubbed off on me early, and gave me the tools to become a critical thinker and analyst, which is how I eventually became an atheist.
For people whose parents didn't give them those tools and whose family life was much more deeply imbued with religion... I have a hard time blaming them for not breaking free.
To me, the word "gullible" just doesn't quite have the right flavor to describe people who simply carry their childhood indoctrination into adulthood, but I won't continue to quibble it.
I'd say it's the right word for people who buy into new absurdities in adulthood though. I certainly know a few like that.
Susceptibility to superstitious concepts has more to do with gullibility than it does intelligence,
Susceptibility to superstitious concepts has the MOST to do with upbringing and indoctrination. "Gullibility" is an unkind word, because all children are credulous. Credulity is a biological necessity, as it turns out.
Children are adapted (evolutionarily programmed, you might say) to believe their parents and elders. This is an important survival trait in a species that passes information socially. Because they implicitly believe their parents, children don't need trial and error to learn important survival information like "avoid that toxic plant!". Other species use instinct, and we do too, but we deal with too much information and flexibility for instinct to be sufficient - language and vertical information transfer between generations adds greatly to our ability to survive.
Think back on how many things you believe because a parent or teacher, or even an authoritative book, told you as a child. I'm constantly realizing things I "know" are not at all scientific, they're merely something I was told when I was still credulous and impressionable. Now that I am a critically thinking adult, I have to reevaluate those beliefs one by one as I discover them.
The side effect of childhood credulity is that people tend to believe what their parents do, or failing that, their elders and peers. Unnecessary/untrue/extra beliefs about the supernatural don't generally cause a fitness decrease: whereas not believing your parents about the poisonous plant will kill you, believing that Zeus is responsible for lightning bolts doesn't kill you. So we err on the side of being too credulous, and the more-or-less harmless beliefs accumulate over centuries. In fact, within societies that persecute or kill heretics and apostates (as many have), being credulous about the supernatural can be an important survival mechanism!
This is a pretty strong reinforcement mechanism. Some people break away, but in truth the universal best predictor of belief is parental belief. And often with those who do break away you'll find that their parents were lip-service religious more than deep believers.
When the rubber hits the road, religion ultimately has to retreat from explanations where science has achieved better/more supportable ones. It's painful, because our credulity for doctrine runs deep. But given time, it happens. It has long since happened for the weather (Zeus does not throw lightning bolts, electrostatic buildup in the clouds produces them) and for the structure of the universe (the Earth is not the center of things). For most of us, the age of the universe and the origin of species has left the religious purview as well, while a few holdouts entrench and struggle to cling to their sinking ship of explanation.
Mostly, religion has now retreated to "matters of the spirit", but this will also eventually fall as understanding of the human brain, body, psychology, and mind become more complete. The evidence is growing progressively compelling that the entirety of human consciousness and behavior can be explained as functions of our brain and body. No mysterious, undetectable "spirit" is necessary for us to be us.
You know what also helps stop terror plots? Turning a country into a giant maximum security prison.
Precisely. Totalitarian and fascist dictators don't subjugate their populations because it's fun, after all. They do it because it is (or they believe it to be) effective in achieving their goals.
Effectiveness alone is insufficient argument for a policy - that leads directly to the kind of "leadership" and policy that, say, Saddam Hussein employed. And IIRC, we generally thought of him as a bad guy.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding that the difference in quality was generally not visible on consumer-grade televisions of the time. So as a result, it was a more expensive format with tapes that held smaller amounts of content yet gave no visible benefit to the user. This means VHS's win in the consumer marketplace was completely justified.
The difference was visible on high-end monitors like those seen in studios and editing rooms, however, and so it was used in professional editing solutions and remained in use in pro workshops for editing and archival for many years. The two products simply served different needs.
Certainly the meme that "the better product lost" is hogwash. By relevant measures, the correct product "won" each in its appropriate marketplace.
But the pad will have to have a wire to the computer. Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose? I suppose you could have the pad connect to the computer with a longer range technology like W-USB, but then what's the point of the pad in the first place?
I don't believe that we, just by chance, came into existence.
Anyone who has any understanding of evolution knows that "just by chance" is an extremely poor description of evolution. Randomness plays a very, very small role in the evolutionary descent of organisms.
I am a Christian, and like many others, it doesn't matter what you say to me
Can I quote you on that?
That simple fact indicates why your philosophy fails: it is, like all faith, completely resistant to evidence. It doesn't matter what you are shown, explained, or demonstrated: you will perist in a pre-determined pattern of belief. When you decide a belief before hearing arguments, it is philosophically equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and going "wah wah wah I can't hear you". Most religious people won't admit it as you just have.
There are three meanings of theory, and people frequently misunderstand them.
..." This is the meaning that creationists usually think they are arguing against.
(Theory defitition 1): "supposition" or "hunch". This is the use in the sentence "If my theory is correct, then
But in science, it is never truly correct to use theory in this sense, though even scientists speaking casually often use it like that. The correct word for this in science is "hypothesis".
(Theory definition 2): "a description of a process that explains observed facts". These vary in their degree of supportability, and sometimes, multiple warring theories are supported to different degrees by existing experiment. For example, there are at the moment multiple theories about what process gives matter mass. Examples: The theory that matter is atomic, i.e. not continuously divisible. The theory that natural selection coupled with variation leads to evolution. The theory that particles have mass because of their interaction with the Higgs field.
(Definition 3): "a body of knowledge and understanding that supports much other past and future work"; it describes an entire framework of internally consistent principles, understanding and data. Meanings used in this sense:
* Atomic theory (the understanding of the structure of the atom and it's constituent particles and interactions that underlies all of nuclear science and chemistry)
* Evolutionary theory (the understanding of how organisms and species give rise to one another, and the genetic mechanisms thereof that underlies all of biology)
It's instructive to note that evolutionary theory and atomic theory are approximately equivalent in terms of evidentiary support and use in their fields. Both arose as type-2 definitions around the same time (mid 19th-century), supplanting prior theories (matter is continuous, God created all organisms at one time and they have been unchanged since then). Both have turned into type 3 theories that completely underly the relevant fields (chemistry, biology).
Religious fundies don't understand the difference between these definitions, and they think evolution is a "type 1" theory, more properly called a hypothesis. It is not. Evolution is the entire framework of over a century of biological research. Attempting to understand research in biology while rejection evolution is like attempting to understand chemistry while rejecting the atom. Or attempting to understand higher math while rejecting arithmetic. It's flat-out ludicrous.
God put those endogenous retroviruses into our genomes to test our faith!
Because Iowa has the first primary.
Also, because of the general state of politics over the Farm Bill, which is a fscking disaster beyond what I could really describe in this space.
One of the cool implications becomes clear if you realize this means our galaxy is the 4th galaxy in a line with these three. To someone standing on a planet in that backmost galaxy, 11B Ly away: ...
* The one that's the "foreground galaxy" to us would be the inner ring.
* The one that's the "first ring" to us would be the foreground galaxy for them and
* The Milky Way would appear as the outer ring!
You must be new here.
I really can't wait until it's routine to nip out to Luna for a weekend.
Indeed, you probably can't wait for it, because barring some unforseen sudden humongous increase in lifespan, that trip becoming "routine" is highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime.
The amount of technology, fuel, and other costs required for a trip to the Moon is really not on the same scale as the other kinds of travel we talk about. "Routine" will not happen until the average person in a first-world economy is a multibillionaire in today's dollars.
That's fucking brilliant, and so true. Except that I've seen "make it work in IE" take up to 80% of the time in some of my projects. No exaggeration.
These are usually the ones that want both W3C compliance AND compatibility back to IE 5.0. Particularly if the designers then hand me stuff that can't be easily implemented without partial transparency.
IE is a fucking nightmare. Seriously. It has retarded the development of the web by several years at minimum.
The Chernobyl accident happened because the Soviet engineers who designed and ran the plant were idiots.
Good thing, then, that idiots have entirely died out. Since there are no more idiots left on the Earth, we can be 100% confident that such accidents will never happen again.
I had the addresses corresponding to the screen background color and the screen border background color memorized, so I'd go to department stores that had a machine on display and write:
10 print "Major system malfunction"
20 poke random, (screen color)
30 poke random, (border color)
40 goto 10
Type run, and walk away. Fairly harmless to the machine, but looked like an acid trip.
It's out. Soma is the US trade name for the muscle relaxant Carisoprodol. It's a particularly nice and powerful muscle relaxant/sedative. My mom and sister (both of whom have chronic back/neck and muscular pain) absolutely swear by it.
I personally think it took great chutzpah by the manufacturer to use that name.
Basically, the concept of "interstate commerce" has been interpreted increasingly broadly and in a way that is, honestly, not entirely without merit. In theory, the federal government was supposed to regulate trade only between the states
As a result, all trade is "intrastate" and Congress has the power to regulate it.
Your issues with privacy involve the buying and selling of music and other media, communication over lines and networks that you pay for, etc. One way or another, it's all part of "commerce" these days. So while in principle all of your rights not enumerated are protected, in practice the power of commercial regulation gives the government power over essentially everything not explicitly enumerated by a right, because all activities can be seen as part of commerce.
I'm not saying I like that, I'm saying that's how it is.
Though there are good outcomes of it, as well. The commerce clause (in combination with the general welfare clause) also gives the government power to do things like set standards for healthy food, safe medicines, and low pollution that businesses almost certainly wouldn't see to themselves, or would do so more slowly.
And I like .OEU -- same keys as ESDF, but in Dvorak.
I type on a Kinesis contoured keyboard, in Dvorak key layout. The kinesis is wicked sick for FPS gaming; aside from the ergonomics that minimize finger traverse distances, having six keys around the left thumb makes for a lot of bindable actions.
True. But Sudoku is *really* finite. A comparatively simple algorithm will guarantee that you find the solution in about 15-20 minutes without computer help, once you learn it. I find it astonishing that people find sudoku interesting after the first few days. Once you work out how to solve them, you know how to solve all of them and it's just not interesting any more.
I don't know about Tomorrow's World, but I know that Nate Lewis has been doing this for at least ten years, because I remember seeing presentations about it my first year of grad school, way back when (1997). At one point he and other Caltech people even spun off a company, Cyrano Systems, to market the thing. And *that* was at least six years ago.
Reading TFA, I didn't see any info in the article that was different from what I saw presented a decade ago. I'm sure they've improved the e-nose a ton in those ten years, but TFA sure didn't give any specifics, it just treated the e-nose as a new idea. Which it isn't.
The article has it twice correctly as Caltech and once as Cal Tech (up near the top).
Bugs me too, dude, but I think this is a battle we are going to lose, long term. Even the City of Pasadena has roadsigns pointing to campus that spell it as two words.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure I can think of a single example [of armed revolution] that's really worked out well -- and the ascending scale of horror represented by the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution show how easily they can work out badly.
True. However, in some cases government replacement can be accomplished through force of social pressure without recourse to armed conflict. You should look up the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Most of the USA forgot about the man after the Bosnia conflict, though he was still the dictator of Serbia when we left. But afterwards, he was removed by a popular revolution, basically orchestrated by a group of students who coordinated immense popular opposition to the government.
Otpor! (Resistance!) flooded the streets in protest and demanded he step down entirely so they could hold elections. They managed to do it with such overwhelming force of numbers that conflict was simply not an option: you can't order the army to shoot everyone and send them home when the whole damn country is in the street.
Milosevic, one of the last of the 20th century's string of nasty/immoral/brutal dictators, stepped down without a single shot being fired. So there is a possibility for nonviolent change to become a more common option in the 21st century.
As the climate changes, somewhere upwards of a billion coastal dwellers will be displaced. If melting arctic ice shuts down the gulf stream, the temperature decrease could reduce the productivity of farmland in Europe and North America by 75% or more.
Changes in the balance of resources can trigger the biggest wars of them all. How many wars has the world already fought over oil, food, water, or salt? (yes, salt, look it up).
Add to that the fact that the world will know in advance who is primarily responsible for the CO2 emissions that f*cked up their countries (1st world nations, most notably the US), and will be looking for someone to blame. If you think the world hates the US now, just wait until many great cities are underwater and half a billion have died, and they can point to a single nation for having emitted 40% of world's historical output of greenhouse gasses and having refused every treaty to try to reduce them. Al Qaeda will have a lot of friends.
Climate change may not be causing wars *now*, but many people believe it will likely lead to the worst worldwide wars in history. The biggest difference one can make to any war is to prevent it in the first place, and Gore is working as hard on that front as anyone is. He absolutely deserves the peace prize.
Don't worry. I'm sure they'll find a way to bloat the startup to make it slow again.
As soon as resources are available, developers find a way to use them to just within the patience threshhold of the user.
This headband using IR radar would probably be much more socially acceptable and less discomfort-inducing than walking around clicking your tongue incessantly.
Fair enough. But getting past the things you learned as a child can be very difficult even as an adult. Even as an atheist son of Catholic parents, you could argue that I still believe what my parents taught me. Because me dad was a scientist, physician, and a reader of science fiction, and those things affected his daily life far more than his religion. Mom and Dad gave me books about science and books that used critical thinking processes starting when I was four or five. That rubbed off on me early, and gave me the tools to become a critical thinker and analyst, which is how I eventually became an atheist.
... I have a hard time blaming them for not breaking free.
For people whose parents didn't give them those tools and whose family life was much more deeply imbued with religion
To me, the word "gullible" just doesn't quite have the right flavor to describe people who simply carry their childhood indoctrination into adulthood, but I won't continue to quibble it.
I'd say it's the right word for people who buy into new absurdities in adulthood though. I certainly know a few like that.
Susceptibility to superstitious concepts has more to do with gullibility than it does intelligence,
Susceptibility to superstitious concepts has the MOST to do with upbringing and indoctrination. "Gullibility" is an unkind word, because all children are credulous. Credulity is a biological necessity, as it turns out.
Children are adapted (evolutionarily programmed, you might say) to believe their parents and elders. This is an important survival trait in a species that passes information socially. Because they implicitly believe their parents, children don't need trial and error to learn important survival information like "avoid that toxic plant!". Other species use instinct, and we do too, but we deal with too much information and flexibility for instinct to be sufficient - language and vertical information transfer between generations adds greatly to our ability to survive.
Think back on how many things you believe because a parent or teacher, or even an authoritative book, told you as a child. I'm constantly realizing things I "know" are not at all scientific, they're merely something I was told when I was still credulous and impressionable. Now that I am a critically thinking adult, I have to reevaluate those beliefs one by one as I discover them.
The side effect of childhood credulity is that people tend to believe what their parents do, or failing that, their elders and peers. Unnecessary/untrue/extra beliefs about the supernatural don't generally cause a fitness decrease: whereas not believing your parents about the poisonous plant will kill you, believing that Zeus is responsible for lightning bolts doesn't kill you. So we err on the side of being too credulous, and the more-or-less harmless beliefs accumulate over centuries. In fact, within societies that persecute or kill heretics and apostates (as many have), being credulous about the supernatural can be an important survival mechanism!
This is a pretty strong reinforcement mechanism. Some people break away, but in truth the universal best predictor of belief is parental belief. And often with those who do break away you'll find that their parents were lip-service religious more than deep believers.
When the rubber hits the road, religion ultimately has to retreat from explanations where science has achieved better/more supportable ones. It's painful, because our credulity for doctrine runs deep. But given time, it happens. It has long since happened for the weather (Zeus does not throw lightning bolts, electrostatic buildup in the clouds produces them) and for the structure of the universe (the Earth is not the center of things). For most of us, the age of the universe and the origin of species has left the religious purview as well, while a few holdouts entrench and struggle to cling to their sinking ship of explanation.
Mostly, religion has now retreated to "matters of the spirit", but this will also eventually fall as understanding of the human brain, body, psychology, and mind become more complete. The evidence is growing progressively compelling that the entirety of human consciousness and behavior can be explained as functions of our brain and body. No mysterious, undetectable "spirit" is necessary for us to be us.
You know what also helps stop terror plots? Turning a country into a giant maximum security prison.
Precisely. Totalitarian and fascist dictators don't subjugate their populations because it's fun, after all. They do it because it is (or they believe it to be) effective in achieving their goals.
Effectiveness alone is insufficient argument for a policy - that leads directly to the kind of "leadership" and policy that, say, Saddam Hussein employed. And IIRC, we generally thought of him as a bad guy.