But if you specifically grant a license to 3M because you don't mind them using the name, you protect your right to sue the corner pharmacy, if you so choose. That was the case here -- there was an agreement in place for this specific use, so there was no risk of genericide, because the term was still protected from general use.
No one is suggesting that you open your business network up. But you might want to setup a separate, Internet-only connection for customers and visitors that does not require authentication. For some businesses this is not an issue, but if you're a coffee shop/etc. it certainly is, and even businesses that just want to provide easy access Internet for clients/vendors/etc. that might be in their office would now be required to identify and authenticate users, which adds a significant amount of hassle for no good reason.
Is there something special about computerized systems that makes them require more testing than mechanical systems? The type of testing is different, but I don't see why I should inherently trust a throttle cable and more than a position sensor, other than old people are afraid of/don't understand computers.
I agree that, fundamentally, insurance requires some people to pay more in premiums than they'll receive in benefits. But you're missing the massive overhead of covering routine expenses, versus the relative low overhead of covering only exceptional expenses. It's that overhead I want to avoid.
I also want to be able to choose my risk tolerance and weigh it against my lifestyle and personal health exposure. Forcing me to pay into a plan that covers routine expenses and that can't be canceled or capped means there's essentially no choice in level of risk, because *everything* is covered -- all I get to choose is my deductible, rather than finding a policy that has different period/lifetime maximums, different covered services, etc., that would be reflected in different price points.
I agree, people get diseases. There's an expected, average level of health care that will be required to treat such diseases and otherwise maintain good health.
But you're apparently still misunderstanding "insurance". Insurance should not cover such expenses.
Insurance should cover the unusual expense of say, being hit by a car, or contracting an particularly difficult-to-treat disease, or contracting significantly more diseases than your peers. But for normal health maintenance and occasional, normal diseases, "insurance" is not possible, because you're not paying for protection against possible risks, you're just setting up a lifelong payment plan for your normal medical expenses.
Instead you could pay that same amount of money into a savings account, and take it back out when you had medical expenses. That would save you the overhead of having to pay someone to manage your payment plan (private or government run, there's a cost to administering the program), and would free up your cash in case you had a more urgent, non-medical need. And you'd be able to buy absolutely whatever care you wanted, because it's your money to spend wherever and however you like. You could also take a portion of that savings and buy actual insurance to cover the case where you incur unusual, unexpected medical expenses where your normal savings are not sufficient. This sort of insurance would be much, much cheaper than the payment-plan "insurance" that most people have, because the insurer wouldn't be guaranteeing a payout to every single participant.
I'm not opposed to letting people setup private or government-run, cost-sharing/payment plans for their medical care. I just don't think I should be forced to pay into one. I am willing to support basic medical care for people who for the purposes of supporting public health (i.e. we don't want sick people spreading disease) and for the purpose of not condemning people who honestly can't afford healthcare to death from treatable accident or disease. And I'm willing to fund that sort of care to support public healthcare.
But "can't afford" is not the same as "willing/unable to budget correctly", and there should be some way to demonstrate that you both can afford and have budgeted for your own health care, without being forced to buy payment-plan "insurance". I'd also be willing to waive my right to publicly-funded healthcare as part of that deal, re-instanting that right only if I make all back payments to the public-funding system (sans my actual medical expenses) so long as there's some way to protect medical savings from bankruptcy proceedings -- I'm willing to take that risk as part of my choice not to pay into a prescribed payment-plan "insurance" system.
Yes, Deep Blue was carefully trained. As opposed to Kasparov, who had never watched anyone else play chess, or studied historical games, or considered the last several centuries of chess theory before meeting Deep Blue.
Likewise Emmy was trained on a whole library of Classical music. As opposed to Mozart, who not only invented Classical music, but also music itself, starting with nothing more than the occasional, disjointed, a-harmonic noises that existed in the world before him.
Or maybe -- just maybe -- both humans and computers use the experience of their predecessors, mentors, and peers to improve their own performance, making mostly incremental changes with only the occasional flash of brilliance.
The 270-year-old professional portrait artist tells me there is just a difference and photography hasn't made it up yet. He isn't giving up his canvas and I can't really blame him. I guess this isn't the film's fault and it shouldn't affect anything if the subject can be made to hold motionless for several minutes in a brightly-lit setting, but it makes you question if human-driven devices and systems should be abandoned at the current rates.
Presumably a federal judge can (or at least should) only order them to stop doing something if they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Which is actually a good idea, because laptops do not belong in high school.
I agree that computers can be misused in school, just as any other tool can be misused in almost any setting.
But saying "laptops are useless in high school" sounds a lot like someone 50 years older saying "ball-point pens are useless in high school".
Do you have any evidence to suggest that computers are exceedingly difficult to use in a way the benefits high school education (but for some reason do not want to share that evidence)? Are you suggesting that you've done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that, while useful, computers are not worth the price (but then leave out all the relevant details and share only the conclusion of that analysis)? Or are you just some old man whining about how much harder school was when he did it?
This isn't a flaw of biometrics so much as it's a flaw of any dongle-based, single-layer security system.
For example, you have the same problem with a door with the same key issued to 1000 people -- yes it technically can be changed, but it's quite expensive, so in practice it's never done. That leads to people who should no longer have access still having access, and the ability to easily copy the key and use the copy without detection.
The solution is trivial. If you combined a password with a fingerprint there would be a secret bit of information that's easy to change AND a physical bit of security apparatus that's harder to reproduce/copy than a password. This same solution also solves the key problem above. And it's the same solution already used in all sorts of applications where security is actually important.
It's not in use for this timeclock system because the problem they're trying to solve is not a high-security application. They're going from the honor system for clocking in to a single-layer physical-dongle security system, likely in an attempt to raise the barriers for clocking in a co-worker. If they were relying on this system to allow you to make changes to your direct deposit account it would be a problem, but for the stated application I don't see why it's a concern.
Now, you could be concerned about them having your fingerprints on file -- I understand the desire to keep people from collecting information about you. But honestly, unless you wear gloves all day long, they could already have your fingerprints if they wanted them; fingerprints are not secret information in the first place.
Re:You owe taxes if you are a "non-contractor"
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
You don't get to pay taxes at capital gains rates -- dividends are typically taxed as ordinary income. You only get capital gains rates if you generate money by selling part of your business, or somehow incorporate as a foreign corporation before paying dividends.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
Dividends are typically taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains. Mine certainly are, and as I understand it that's the common case.
And you have to be careful to avoid double taxation on dividends; depending on the form of your business you may owe taxes both on the business income generated to pay the dividends and then again on the personal income from receiving the dividends.
Replace "school" with "work-release imprisonment" and you'll understand why it's absurd to lock up high-achieving students for 2 more years. You sure wouldn't say "They've already been in prison for 10 years -- what difference does it make if we let them out now or tack on a couple more years to their sentence?".
It's not like they're doing something useful those last 2 years of school, they're just required by law to attend and to put up with whatever crap gets thrown at them, while forgoing opportunities to make money or continue their education.
And how would moving on to higher eduction, or into the work force, not also allow them to develop social skills and mature? Does socialization stop once you leave high school? Is high school some magical environment that allows "proper" maturation?
? is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv6? Because if there's something that's as functional as greylisting without the limitations I'd be happy to run that instead.
I agree writing password to the disk is bad, but have you ever used CVS/SVN/etc. without stored passwords? You end up typing your password a thousand times a day, which is simply unusable.
So there needs to be *some* way to store passwords, or no one will use the system. On some systems there's a wallet/keychain/etc. available for secure password storage, but on most there is not, and there's certainly not a universal one among Win/Mac/linux/BSD/etc., so you pretty much have to write your own if you intend to publish a multi-platform app.
So now on top of writing a version-control system you've got to write a multi-platform secure password storage system that can daemonize and be useful on both CLI and GUI systems, and that either ships with its own encryption libraries or can use the varying libraries available on all the platforms you support.
It can be done, but to suggest it's trivial and inexcusable not to do such a thing is silly. It's a lot of work, and it's hard to do right.
Plus you're ignoring the fact that SVN was designed as a replacement for CVS, and users have generally been okay with CVS storing their passwords on-disk for a long time, so there's little motivation for the developers to re-work that part of the system.
I also think you're exaggerating the risk of having the password for a remote system on your disk. While it's certainly a bad idea and not something I would do, it is secure from direct remote attacks -- an attacker would already need access to your local file system to get the password. Assuming you have a reasonable personal security stance (which you should if you're going to criticize others) the password in you SVN credentials file only lets people access your SVN services; if an attacker only wants to muck with you SVN repo and already has local disk access they could simply sabotage your local repository and wait for you to commit the changes for them, without needing your password at all.
Political laziness, sure. If you ignore the physical reality of geography, long-established rights of land ownership, and the necessity to run actual cables.
I mean, politics certainly have some influence, but it's not the only factor here.
But the lack of interest from Mercury is not something Google can point to. They're not going to publish a story that says "we found nothing interesting about Google's hiring practices", and without such a story there's nothing for Google to link/point/reference/etc. in the future. Even if Google documented the process and publishes its own press releases it's still pretty weak evidence -- the lack of a story does not necessarily mean Google isn't doing anything we might object to, only the Mercury didn't find evidence of anything it thought would sell news/ads.
Who is putting heavy metals into he pipes used for the cooling system in power plants? Couldn't we just stop doing that to avoid the problem you describe? Or is there something about cooling a nuclear plant that makes steal transmute into mercury?
Smaller fork lifts are often electric, yes. But there are a lot of propane powered fork lifts in use indoors too -- it's just hard to store enough electricity for big jobs in a single battery, or find places to put them, and once you go to multiple batteries "refueling" takes forever. Even with single-battery units a battery swap can take much longer than a propane tank change, and requires specialized equipment.
He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?
Used by a large portion of the world is a good point. There's great value in having everyone use the same system. Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.
I could go for the idea of on-site generation, and for now I'll let you gloss over how to make this device small or power it or provide supplies for it, but is this really something you're willing to leave open to wide-area wireless hacking? Wouldn't you rather have a device on your desk that can make injectable antibodies? Or at least limit the wireless to a very short range (say, less than 1 cm) so that hacking is limited to near-contact distances?
A) If boredom leads to a less health lifestyle, and that lifestyle leads to decreased longevity, isn't that just an indirect way to say that boredom decreased longevity? Wouldn't treating boredom still increase longevity?
B) Even if boredom is just a symptom and not cause, isn't this still useful information? Can't we use boredom as a symptom of poor health to diagnose and help people improve their lifestyles and thus their longevity?
C) Have you considered that boredom is perhaps a symptom of a non-lifestyle-related cause of poor health? Maybe people who are more susceptible to disease X are also more susceptible to boredom, or to the perception of boredom?
I know it's cool to say correlation is not causation and pretend that you're smarter than the folks who did the study, but it's really quite petty to dismiss the study offhand simply because it does not conclusively establish causation, particularly in the medical field. How exactly do you propose that we impose boredom on a group of people, because unless you can control the treatment there's really no way to establish causation. But don't let ethics, a lack of practical tools for manipulating mood, or the enormous cost a of a 30-year clinical study take away from your slashdot oneupmanship.
Exercise does not defeat boredom, at least not in the broad strokes you paint. It might help some people, and it certainly has physiological and mental health benefits for most people, but it's absurd to say that exercise prevents or treats boredom as a general rule.
For one thing, if you make exercise an unvarying part of your daily routine it might actually be a part of your boredom, and stopping the excise might help relieve your boredom by virtue of changing your routine.
I also think you'd find a more than a few people who would find exercise itself boring, whether it's part of a routine or not. Riding an elliptical for 2 hours a day can be mind-numbingly dull; not that there aren't more interesting methods for exercise, but use of an elliptical is definitely a form of exercise, and not a terribly exciting activity for most people.
You're also missing the possibility the boredom is a symptom of already poor health -- it's possible that self-reported boredom is the result of some other factor (lifestyle or otherwise) that results in lower longevity, rather than being the cause of lower longevity. Or that boredom, as a self-reported mental state, might reflect knowledge of a lower-than-average lifespan based on genetic, economic, social, or other factors. Or that the link found in this one study is ephemeral and does not reflect a general link between boredom and longevity at all.
First, there's often a potential of 100+kV across your body. Just try rubbing your socks on the carpet some time. It's not really a big deal.
Second, the electric chair uses AC power. Edison used that as selling point for DC power. And it's a terribly ineffective way to kill people. In practice it works by putting so much power into a person that they cannot dissipate it -- essentially cooking them -- not because of any lower-power electric effects. You might make people lose muscle control or even consciousness with low-power applications of electricity, but it typically doesn't kill people unless you happen to stop their heart for a sufficiently long period. Heck, we regularly electrocute people's brains as an accepted, effective form of psychologically treatment.
Third, microwaves ovens, like the electric chair, work by applying energy faster than the target can dissipate that energy back into the environment. If you set your oven to 150 degrees, how long would it take to cook a turkey to 165? Your oven would cycle on and off, emitting energy into the environment surrounding the turkey, for as long as you let it run. But it seems unlikely that the turkey would ever exceed 150 degrees, because it loses heat to the environment faster than it's absorbing heat from the oven's heating element. The same process occurs with low-power microwaves.
Finally, you should take a look at how much radiation you absorb from the sun every time you walk outside. It's not a 100mW transmission from a battery-powered device -- it's orders of magnitude more powerful, even at ground level, and it's being happening for the entirety of human history.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you specifically grant a license to 3M because you don't mind them using the name, you protect your right to sue the corner pharmacy, if you so choose. That was the case here -- there was an agreement in place for this specific use, so there was no risk of genericide, because the term was still protected from general use.
No one is suggesting that you open your business network up. But you might want to setup a separate, Internet-only connection for customers and visitors that does not require authentication. For some businesses this is not an issue, but if you're a coffee shop/etc. it certainly is, and even businesses that just want to provide easy access Internet for clients/vendors/etc. that might be in their office would now be required to identify and authenticate users, which adds a significant amount of hassle for no good reason.
Is there something special about computerized systems that makes them require more testing than mechanical systems? The type of testing is different, but I don't see why I should inherently trust a throttle cable and more than a position sensor, other than old people are afraid of/don't understand computers.
I agree that, fundamentally, insurance requires some people to pay more in premiums than they'll receive in benefits. But you're missing the massive overhead of covering routine expenses, versus the relative low overhead of covering only exceptional expenses. It's that overhead I want to avoid.
I also want to be able to choose my risk tolerance and weigh it against my lifestyle and personal health exposure. Forcing me to pay into a plan that covers routine expenses and that can't be canceled or capped means there's essentially no choice in level of risk, because *everything* is covered -- all I get to choose is my deductible, rather than finding a policy that has different period/lifetime maximums, different covered services, etc., that would be reflected in different price points.
I agree, people get diseases. There's an expected, average level of health care that will be required to treat such diseases and otherwise maintain good health.
But you're apparently still misunderstanding "insurance". Insurance should not cover such expenses.
Insurance should cover the unusual expense of say, being hit by a car, or contracting an particularly difficult-to-treat disease, or contracting significantly more diseases than your peers. But for normal health maintenance and occasional, normal diseases, "insurance" is not possible, because you're not paying for protection against possible risks, you're just setting up a lifelong payment plan for your normal medical expenses.
Instead you could pay that same amount of money into a savings account, and take it back out when you had medical expenses. That would save you the overhead of having to pay someone to manage your payment plan (private or government run, there's a cost to administering the program), and would free up your cash in case you had a more urgent, non-medical need. And you'd be able to buy absolutely whatever care you wanted, because it's your money to spend wherever and however you like. You could also take a portion of that savings and buy actual insurance to cover the case where you incur unusual, unexpected medical expenses where your normal savings are not sufficient. This sort of insurance would be much, much cheaper than the payment-plan "insurance" that most people have, because the insurer wouldn't be guaranteeing a payout to every single participant.
I'm not opposed to letting people setup private or government-run, cost-sharing/payment plans for their medical care. I just don't think I should be forced to pay into one. I am willing to support basic medical care for people who for the purposes of supporting public health (i.e. we don't want sick people spreading disease) and for the purpose of not condemning people who honestly can't afford healthcare to death from treatable accident or disease. And I'm willing to fund that sort of care to support public healthcare.
But "can't afford" is not the same as "willing/unable to budget correctly", and there should be some way to demonstrate that you both can afford and have budgeted for your own health care, without being forced to buy payment-plan "insurance". I'd also be willing to waive my right to publicly-funded healthcare as part of that deal, re-instanting that right only if I make all back payments to the public-funding system (sans my actual medical expenses) so long as there's some way to protect medical savings from bankruptcy proceedings -- I'm willing to take that risk as part of my choice not to pay into a prescribed payment-plan "insurance" system.
Yes, Deep Blue was carefully trained. As opposed to Kasparov, who had never watched anyone else play chess, or studied historical games, or considered the last several centuries of chess theory before meeting Deep Blue.
Likewise Emmy was trained on a whole library of Classical music. As opposed to Mozart, who not only invented Classical music, but also music itself, starting with nothing more than the occasional, disjointed, a-harmonic noises that existed in the world before him.
Or maybe -- just maybe -- both humans and computers use the experience of their predecessors, mentors, and peers to improve their own performance, making mostly incremental changes with only the occasional flash of brilliance.
The 270-year-old professional portrait artist tells me there is just a difference and photography hasn't made it up yet. He isn't giving up his canvas and I can't really blame him. I guess this isn't the film's fault and it shouldn't affect anything if the subject can be made to hold motionless for several minutes in a brightly-lit setting, but it makes you question if human-driven devices and systems should be abandoned at the current rates.
Presumably a federal judge can (or at least should) only order them to stop doing something if they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Which is actually a good idea, because laptops do not belong in high school.
I agree that computers can be misused in school, just as any other tool can be misused in almost any setting.
But saying "laptops are useless in high school" sounds a lot like someone 50 years older saying "ball-point pens are useless in high school".
Do you have any evidence to suggest that computers are exceedingly difficult to use in a way the benefits high school education (but for some reason do not want to share that evidence)? Are you suggesting that you've done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that, while useful, computers are not worth the price (but then leave out all the relevant details and share only the conclusion of that analysis)? Or are you just some old man whining about how much harder school was when he did it?
This isn't a flaw of biometrics so much as it's a flaw of any dongle-based, single-layer security system.
For example, you have the same problem with a door with the same key issued to 1000 people -- yes it technically can be changed, but it's quite expensive, so in practice it's never done. That leads to people who should no longer have access still having access, and the ability to easily copy the key and use the copy without detection.
The solution is trivial. If you combined a password with a fingerprint there would be a secret bit of information that's easy to change AND a physical bit of security apparatus that's harder to reproduce/copy than a password. This same solution also solves the key problem above. And it's the same solution already used in all sorts of applications where security is actually important.
It's not in use for this timeclock system because the problem they're trying to solve is not a high-security application. They're going from the honor system for clocking in to a single-layer physical-dongle security system, likely in an attempt to raise the barriers for clocking in a co-worker. If they were relying on this system to allow you to make changes to your direct deposit account it would be a problem, but for the stated application I don't see why it's a concern.
Now, you could be concerned about them having your fingerprints on file -- I understand the desire to keep people from collecting information about you. But honestly, unless you wear gloves all day long, they could already have your fingerprints if they wanted them; fingerprints are not secret information in the first place.
You don't get to pay taxes at capital gains rates -- dividends are typically taxed as ordinary income. You only get capital gains rates if you generate money by selling part of your business, or somehow incorporate as a foreign corporation before paying dividends.
Dividends are typically taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains. Mine certainly are, and as I understand it that's the common case.
And you have to be careful to avoid double taxation on dividends; depending on the form of your business you may owe taxes both on the business income generated to pay the dividends and then again on the personal income from receiving the dividends.
Replace "school" with "work-release imprisonment" and you'll understand why it's absurd to lock up high-achieving students for 2 more years. You sure wouldn't say "They've already been in prison for 10 years -- what difference does it make if we let them out now or tack on a couple more years to their sentence?".
It's not like they're doing something useful those last 2 years of school, they're just required by law to attend and to put up with whatever crap gets thrown at them, while forgoing opportunities to make money or continue their education.
And how would moving on to higher eduction, or into the work force, not also allow them to develop social skills and mature? Does socialization stop once you leave high school? Is high school some magical environment that allows "proper" maturation?
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
? is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv6? Because if there's something that's as functional as greylisting without the limitations I'd be happy to run that instead.
I agree writing password to the disk is bad, but have you ever used CVS/SVN/etc. without stored passwords? You end up typing your password a thousand times a day, which is simply unusable.
So there needs to be *some* way to store passwords, or no one will use the system. On some systems there's a wallet/keychain/etc. available for secure password storage, but on most there is not, and there's certainly not a universal one among Win/Mac/linux/BSD/etc., so you pretty much have to write your own if you intend to publish a multi-platform app.
So now on top of writing a version-control system you've got to write a multi-platform secure password storage system that can daemonize and be useful on both CLI and GUI systems, and that either ships with its own encryption libraries or can use the varying libraries available on all the platforms you support.
It can be done, but to suggest it's trivial and inexcusable not to do such a thing is silly. It's a lot of work, and it's hard to do right.
Plus you're ignoring the fact that SVN was designed as a replacement for CVS, and users have generally been okay with CVS storing their passwords on-disk for a long time, so there's little motivation for the developers to re-work that part of the system.
I also think you're exaggerating the risk of having the password for a remote system on your disk. While it's certainly a bad idea and not something I would do, it is secure from direct remote attacks -- an attacker would already need access to your local file system to get the password. Assuming you have a reasonable personal security stance (which you should if you're going to criticize others) the password in you SVN credentials file only lets people access your SVN services; if an attacker only wants to muck with you SVN repo and already has local disk access they could simply sabotage your local repository and wait for you to commit the changes for them, without needing your password at all.
Political laziness, sure. If you ignore the physical reality of geography, long-established rights of land ownership, and the necessity to run actual cables.
I mean, politics certainly have some influence, but it's not the only factor here.
Racism != nationalism
But the lack of interest from Mercury is not something Google can point to. They're not going to publish a story that says "we found nothing interesting about Google's hiring practices", and without such a story there's nothing for Google to link/point/reference/etc. in the future. Even if Google documented the process and publishes its own press releases it's still pretty weak evidence -- the lack of a story does not necessarily mean Google isn't doing anything we might object to, only the Mercury didn't find evidence of anything it thought would sell news/ads.
Who is putting heavy metals into he pipes used for the cooling system in power plants? Couldn't we just stop doing that to avoid the problem you describe? Or is there something about cooling a nuclear plant that makes steal transmute into mercury?
Smaller fork lifts are often electric, yes. But there are a lot of propane powered fork lifts in use indoors too -- it's just hard to store enough electricity for big jobs in a single battery, or find places to put them, and once you go to multiple batteries "refueling" takes forever. Even with single-battery units a battery swap can take much longer than a propane tank change, and requires specialized equipment.
He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?
Used by a large portion of the world is a good point. There's great value in having everyone use the same system. Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.
I could go for the idea of on-site generation, and for now I'll let you gloss over how to make this device small or power it or provide supplies for it, but is this really something you're willing to leave open to wide-area wireless hacking? Wouldn't you rather have a device on your desk that can make injectable antibodies? Or at least limit the wireless to a very short range (say, less than 1 cm) so that hacking is limited to near-contact distances?
A) If boredom leads to a less health lifestyle, and that lifestyle leads to decreased longevity, isn't that just an indirect way to say that boredom decreased longevity? Wouldn't treating boredom still increase longevity?
B) Even if boredom is just a symptom and not cause, isn't this still useful information? Can't we use boredom as a symptom of poor health to diagnose and help people improve their lifestyles and thus their longevity?
C) Have you considered that boredom is perhaps a symptom of a non-lifestyle-related cause of poor health? Maybe people who are more susceptible to disease X are also more susceptible to boredom, or to the perception of boredom?
I know it's cool to say correlation is not causation and pretend that you're smarter than the folks who did the study, but it's really quite petty to dismiss the study offhand simply because it does not conclusively establish causation, particularly in the medical field. How exactly do you propose that we impose boredom on a group of people, because unless you can control the treatment there's really no way to establish causation. But don't let ethics, a lack of practical tools for manipulating mood, or the enormous cost a of a 30-year clinical study take away from your slashdot oneupmanship.
Exercise does not defeat boredom, at least not in the broad strokes you paint. It might help some people, and it certainly has physiological and mental health benefits for most people, but it's absurd to say that exercise prevents or treats boredom as a general rule.
For one thing, if you make exercise an unvarying part of your daily routine it might actually be a part of your boredom, and stopping the excise might help relieve your boredom by virtue of changing your routine.
I also think you'd find a more than a few people who would find exercise itself boring, whether it's part of a routine or not. Riding an elliptical for 2 hours a day can be mind-numbingly dull; not that there aren't more interesting methods for exercise, but use of an elliptical is definitely a form of exercise, and not a terribly exciting activity for most people.
You're also missing the possibility the boredom is a symptom of already poor health -- it's possible that self-reported boredom is the result of some other factor (lifestyle or otherwise) that results in lower longevity, rather than being the cause of lower longevity. Or that boredom, as a self-reported mental state, might reflect knowledge of a lower-than-average lifespan based on genetic, economic, social, or other factors. Or that the link found in this one study is ephemeral and does not reflect a general link between boredom and longevity at all.
First, there's often a potential of 100+kV across your body. Just try rubbing your socks on the carpet some time. It's not really a big deal.
Second, the electric chair uses AC power. Edison used that as selling point for DC power. And it's a terribly ineffective way to kill people. In practice it works by putting so much power into a person that they cannot dissipate it -- essentially cooking them -- not because of any lower-power electric effects. You might make people lose muscle control or even consciousness with low-power applications of electricity, but it typically doesn't kill people unless you happen to stop their heart for a sufficiently long period. Heck, we regularly electrocute people's brains as an accepted, effective form of psychologically treatment.
Third, microwaves ovens, like the electric chair, work by applying energy faster than the target can dissipate that energy back into the environment. If you set your oven to 150 degrees, how long would it take to cook a turkey to 165? Your oven would cycle on and off, emitting energy into the environment surrounding the turkey, for as long as you let it run. But it seems unlikely that the turkey would ever exceed 150 degrees, because it loses heat to the environment faster than it's absorbing heat from the oven's heating element. The same process occurs with low-power microwaves.
Finally, you should take a look at how much radiation you absorb from the sun every time you walk outside. It's not a 100mW transmission from a battery-powered device -- it's orders of magnitude more powerful, even at ground level, and it's being happening for the entirety of human history.