You do realize the tax brackets are inflation-indexed, right?
Now there's the issue of trusting inflation measures, or not, but inflation does not automatically move people into higher tax brackets. Except for the AMT debacle, of course.
Everything else? For what it's worth, many states treat clothing (below a certain per-item cap) as not subject to sales tax, on the premise that it's a basic need.
(And some states treat alcohol and religious books the same, which just goes to show that on person's basic need is not necessarily another's.)
Yes. There are several different things being discussed in the EcmaScript standards group that would be good to implement, say, but which ones will be close to stable in a month is not clear yet.
> Why oh why is Firefox providing diffs?
The idea is to modify a page via the developer tools, then get a diff between the old and new. It's not targeted at your grandma, but at you 11-year-old son who wants to learn how this web thing works.
Previously, minor version updates from Mozilla (think Firefox 3.5, 3.6) were really no different in scope from major versions. It was sort of random what they got numbered as.
Oh, I agree that in the US the balance tilted too much towards "stuff", not least because China was having issues with all the peasants leaving their farms and was effectively exporting its unemployment. For a while (early-mid 2000s) our economy was doing well enough that we could import it and still do OK, and we got cheap Chinese stuff in the process, which made people happy. Now we're not in a position where we can keep importing unemployment anymore, and neither is anyone else... Though we're still doing it, mostly. We'll see how it works out.
You iPod example gets to the heart of the matter. What we would ideally like to maximize, I hope, is quality of life. Unfortunately, this means different things to different people. For example, there are people who are quite happy if prices are low and couldn't care less whether they have a job (most obviously retirees, who aren't looking for a job to start with). At the other end of the spectrum, there are people whose self-worth and identity are tied up in their jobs.
Typical measures of the standard of living focus on material possessions (size of house, number of cars, ownership of household appliances, etc). By those measures, "Asian countries" (this is much less true of Japan now than it used to be) are purposefully holding down the standard of living to enrich large corporations and as a side-effect increase employment. This measure of the standard of living is what you're calling "consumerism". It's not obvious that this standard of living measure captures "quality of life", but I think most Americans would not be happy with the quality of life of a typical Chinese factory worker... Then again, perhaps there's a meaningful middle ground. Again, the problem is that a number of people are quite happy to maximize their standard of living (as defined above) at the expense of themselves or others having jobs.
Uh... I'm sorry, but it's you who're insane. Reiser's code did not disappear into the void. If you want to use it, you can. Apparently you don't want to; that's clearly your choice. Of course his filesystem is less desirable to use due to lack of an active maintainer and the unsavory associations, but "obliterated"?
Do you apply this to everyone? Let me try some examples of this reasoning.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a power-hungry mass-murderer (which he was, when you think about it, especially the campaign that ended at Waterloo), so any countries whose jurisprudence is based on the Napoleonic Code should immediately ditch that for some other legal system.
Ulysses S. Grant allowed unbridled corruption amongst his cronies during his presidency, and mishandled the economy badly in 1873. So students of military history must not study his campaigns, since they are tainted.
Thomas Edison was an unethical businessman who aimed to gain monopoly power by forcing all competitors out of business and lied to achieve this end. We should stop using incandescent light bulbs, as well as anything based on his work.
Isaac Newton was a nasty person to deal with, who tried to suppress papers by contemporaries, spent most of his time dabbling in alchemy and the occult. We shouldn't teach his theory of mechanics to students, or if we do we certainly shouldn't mention his name in the process.
Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. We shouldn't be teaching children about anything he wrote, since it's tainted by association.
My apologies for leaving out the all-caps and all.
I'm so far pointing out a problem (or more precisely, a mismatch between how the US government actually works and what people are taught in civics class and like to believe). I'm completely at a loss as to plausible solutions, assuming it's even desirable to solve it. Again, we've had a spoils system before and it wasn't pretty. And if the goal is a government that's responsive to the electorate (is that the goal?) then it's not clear to me that "smaller government" accomplishes that in any way.
> but you still insist on talking about joe mccarthy in a positive light.
Only if you posit that elected officials having control over the bureaucracy (his goal, really, for a small part of the bureaucracy) is a good thing, _and_ that the ends justify the means in accomplishing this goal.
Put another way, any value judgements happening here are in your head. I'm just saying that the man tried to give elected officials control over the makeup of the State Department bureaucracy. His reasons for doing this were mostly paranoid delusion (mostly, because a small number of those he fingered were in fact communist sympathizers; that was likely true of any big enough group of college-educated Americans at the time; others were Anglophiles, Francophiles, etc; that's all normal). Since there were no normal channels in place for elected officials to exercise such control, what ended up happening has more resemblance to a lynch mob, and for the same reasons (people acting on their passions, outside the bounds of the law).
> hitler built the autobahn but i'm not going to laud him for civil engineering accomplishments
Or his organizational ones? Just one aspect of a person's actions taints everything else about them in your mind? Or put another way, shouldn't Hitler get as much credit for the autobahn as Eisenhower does for the US interstate highway system?
Is this conversation officially Godwin'ed yet?;)
> you're not being responsible if you continue to talk about senator joe mccarthy as anything but a dangerous vile figure
Oh, c'mon. The guy was a slimeball, an alcoholic, and a demogogue as you said. But that doesn't change what he was trying to do. I can't help it if you think it was a good goal that he sullied with his bad means, or if you think anything he tried to do is tainted by its mere association with him. But that's a really black-and-white view of the world that I refuse to partake in.
I mean... maybe I'm missing something. How is saying that McCarthy was vile and dangerous and so we shouldn't talk about him useful? How is describing his goals, not just his means, a problem? We shouldn't _forget_ about his means, because those aren't acceptable. But if his goal was a reasonable one (which I'm not convinced of) and if there were not better means available to achive it (which I _am_ convinced of), should we not be thinking about how better means could be provided?
> From where those people and their values come from?
From certain demographics within the electorate. It's very much not a representative sample in terms of things like education, political leanings, income, personality (note that some of these things correlate with each other, though).
It would be _very_ odd if it were, honestly.
Also, US society is highly nonhomogeneous in terms of values. The bureaucracy is much less so. Again, it would be odd if that were not the case.
I'll agree that a system of governance is a reflection of part of society. Whichever part happens to hold power. That's more or less a tautology, though.;)
I'm not talking about corruption. I'm talking about the fact that the bureaucracy has its own goals (not even necessarily consciously) which have little to do with those of the elected officials nominally in charge of it, much less those of the electorate, and that there's not much that elected officials can do about it.
Yes, indeed. Though at this point you rather have to be to get elected. I mean... Our current president sure did the whole "arousing the emotions and passions" thing that my dictionary uses as the definition of a demagogue, mostly about Change. Our previous president, same thing about an Axis of Evil.
> joe mccarthy is an example of anything except an asshole
Being an asshole is not mutually incompatible with being other things (for example, the guy was also a Senator; this is a common juxtaposition, actually). In this case, he was a crusading asshole, which is why he had the guts to try to do something as daft as taking on the bureaucracy to start with.
In case it wasn't clear, I think McCarthy's methods were unaccetable (even if some of his suspicions were correct). But the point is, there are no acceptable methods that elected officials have today for controlling the bureaucracy. They're in the position of a manager who can't hire and fire employees and who has a small clique of employees who were there before he arrived and will be there after he leaves reporting to him... and controlling all of his access to information, as well as getting to interpret any directions he gives. If they don't do what he tells them to, he has no recourse. That's assuming he even finds out about it, which is doubtful.
Now the problem is that before we had our current setup, the bureaucracy _was_ accountable to elected figures. We called it the spoils system. It was, unfortunately, even worse than what we have now.
No, they're not. Figureheads are elected. The lever pullers are for the most part the career bureaucrats and the lobbyists.
The last time we had an elected official seriously trying to change how the bureaucracy worked his name was Joe McCarthy. No one particularly enjoyed that, so no one has tried since.
Usually the lake is the part whose rendering dominates the render time when rendering the entire Mandelbrot set, because most of the escaping parts escape pretty quickly. And the original post definitely sounded to me like it was talking about the full mandelbrot render.
> AND there is no periodicity checking
Which there isn't in the typical simple implementations (and in particular, there isn't in the Google code in question).
> I would have thought someone trying to come off as an expert
I wasn't "trying to come off as an expert"; I was just pointing out a small set of things (not at all exhaustive, nor trying to be, because I am NOT an expert on this topic) that matter for comparing performance of simple Mandelbrot renderers.
> All the interesting areas has little no no lake at all in them.
I think your expertise in rendering the mandelbrot set is making you blind to the fact that most timing tests people do are really simplistic. In particular, people tend to form performance snap judgements based on the default settings of the demo; in this case that's rendering the entire mandelbrot set. I realize that's not what you do, but I'm willing to bet that's what the original poster did....
It really depends on the parameters used. For example, one important parameter for rendering the Mandelbrot set is the iteration count after which you decide that you're not escaping. Doubling this count will more or less double the time it takes to render. Happen to recall what you were using on your 486 for this value?
There are other things you can do wrong in your code to make drawing the Mandelbrot set slow. For example, you can use objects to represent points on the complex plane (instant hit due to the extra costs of property access involved), you can make your complex operations allocate new objects (instant hit for obvious reasons). You can use a slow escape test (e.g. something involving square roots). In this case, using workers, you could spend too much time sending data back and forth a dribble at a time instead of computing a bunch and batch-sending it. Their code is obfuscated enough that I can't tell exactly what they're doing with their worker communication offhand; it looks at first glance like they compute (256/f)^2 points at a time in a worker, where f is the "pixelSize" argument to the worker.
Looking more at their worker code, they seem to not be using objects, seem to be using 1000 iterations as their "does not escape" criterion, and seem to be using "norm squared is at least 10000" as their escape test (which is nuts for mandelbrot, but they're using this function as a general backend for all the fractals involved, and for the Julia sets testing norm squared against 4 won't cut it, whereas it would for the Mandelbrot set). So they're not doing this in the slowest way possible, but neither is the code particularly optimal for computing the mandelbrot set.
Outside the code, there are several things your _browser_ could be doing wrong. You never said what browser you're using, exactly. So for one thing it's not clear whether the browser involved has a functioning jit or whether it's interpreting the JS. It makes a huge difference. You also never said whether your browser supports Web Workers or not; if it does not then you're only using one of your cores, of course.
Hard to say for other Mongols. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_writing_systems the first time Mongolian had an "official" writing system of its own was when Genghis was about 42. And that was because Genghis conquered some neighbors and took a scribe prisoner....
There's no evidence that I can see that Genghis himself was literate. I'd suspect he wasn't. So I'd wager money that he did not use the Roman alphabet.;)
Nowhere, as is usual to deaths that are 1) spread out in time and space and 2) viewed as "natural occurrences" as opposed to "murder".
There are some decent psychological reasons for this. In particular, overreacting to murder (or other actions by small groups of humans) with overwhelming force can provide a deterrent and be useful if you suspect that there are lots more individuals or small groups contemplatingsuch actions. This is the essence of gunboat diplomacy as practiced in the 18th-19th century. First, you make a credible promise that if someone messes with your interests or allows any of their subjects to do so you will shell their city and depose them from power. Then you do this a few times. After that, the local governments and police forces tend to get a lot more alert about enforcing your interests, since suddenly their incentives (staying in power) are aligned with yours.
The key to this sort of strategy, though, is to make sure that you overreact towards the right people and to overreact effectively. For example, if it were US policy that anyone planning or funding a terrorist act, and their immediate family members, would be killed out of hand, there would be a lot less funding of terrorism going around (and a lot fewer living Saudi businessmen and princes). Whether such a policy is ethical or legal is open to debate, of course.
I'm not sure anyone can make a credible argument that the current wars the US is involved in were "effective" in terms of deterrent value. And one would have to do some fast talking to even try to argue that it was "towards the right people". Certainly going off and killing some peasants in Afghanistan in response to rich Saudi guy funding a terrorist attack won't keep any other rich Saudi guys from funding the next one....
> meanwhile in Russia : nearly 100 traffic deaths A DAY.
Speaking of meaningless statistics, in the US there are over 100 traffic deaths a day.
Meaningless because it's not accounting for population differences, differences in car ownership rates, differences in the kinds of vehicles on the roads, differences in the roads, etc, etc.
So other than "a bunch of people dead every year", it doesn't mean much...
Pretty close to it, yes. Courts in Israel are civil courts, not based on Jewish religious law. Legislation is passed by a civil legislative body, not a religious one. Religions are considered equal before the law. There is no official state religion, and there is freedom of religion and of worship.
There is one weirdness, which is marriage. There is no "civil" marriage in Israel; there are only religious marriage under the auspices of the various religions practiced by the people being married. This can cause problems for non-Orthodox Jews, for interfaith marriages, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel has details.
Also note that in Israel being Jewish is not necessarily a religious matter; it's an ethnic matter. You can be an atheist and still be considered Jewish ethnically.
This can matter for things like military service, where ethnic minorities are generally exempt from the draft (though accepted as volunteers).
In any case, I suppose it depends on your definition of "separation of religion and state". It's not exactly a black-and-white line; there are gradations. Would you say that religion and state are separated in Germany, say?
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize the tax brackets are inflation-indexed, right?
Now there's the issue of trusting inflation measures, or not, but inflation does not automatically move people into higher tax brackets. Except for the AMT debacle, of course.
Everything else? For what it's worth, many states treat clothing (below a certain per-item cap) as not subject to sales tax, on the premise that it's a basic need.
(And some states treat alcohol and religious books the same, which just goes to show that on person's basic need is not necessarily another's.)
And for what it's worth, I agree with you: the MS team has done a good job here. Much like with IE5, in fact...
> Firefox 4 has support for DEP but not ASLR
That's just false. Firefox 4 supports ASLR, as do current 3.6 security updates. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405523 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559133 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567134
If only "someone filed a bug about it" constituted "planning"... ;)
For web browsers, there's also:
4) Is the version I'm on getting security updates?
If not, upgrade ASAP.
> Why the hell are you animating my user interface?
Because users find it less jarring when things move smoothly instead of abruptly. This is why most modern window managers animate things, for example.
> Why is smart search being removed?
Because no one is using it and it's a significant maintenance burden, I would assume.
> What the hell is electrolysis?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=electrolysis+mozilla first hit (multi-process stuff, basically).
> "TBD"? Really?
Yes. There are several different things being discussed in the EcmaScript standards group that would be good to implement, say, but which ones will be close to stable in a month is not clear yet.
> Why oh why is Firefox providing diffs?
The idea is to modify a page via the developer tools, then get a diff between the old and new. It's not targeted at your grandma, but at you 11-year-old son who wants to learn how this web thing works.
They already do that: http://nightly.mozilla.org/
Previously, minor version updates from Mozilla (think Firefox 3.5, 3.6) were really no different in scope from major versions. It was sort of random what they got numbered as.
Oh, I agree that in the US the balance tilted too much towards "stuff", not least because China was having issues with all the peasants leaving their farms and was effectively exporting its unemployment. For a while (early-mid 2000s) our economy was doing well enough that we could import it and still do OK, and we got cheap Chinese stuff in the process, which made people happy. Now we're not in a position where we can keep importing unemployment anymore, and neither is anyone else... Though we're still doing it, mostly. We'll see how it works out.
You iPod example gets to the heart of the matter. What we would ideally like to maximize, I hope, is quality of life. Unfortunately, this means different things to different people. For example, there are people who are quite happy if prices are low and couldn't care less whether they have a job (most obviously retirees, who aren't looking for a job to start with). At the other end of the spectrum, there are people whose self-worth and identity are tied up in their jobs.
Typical measures of the standard of living focus on material possessions (size of house, number of cars, ownership of household appliances, etc). By those measures, "Asian countries" (this is much less true of Japan now than it used to be) are purposefully holding down the standard of living to enrich large corporations and as a side-effect increase employment. This measure of the standard of living is what you're calling "consumerism". It's not obvious that this standard of living measure captures "quality of life", but I think most Americans would not be happy with the quality of life of a typical Chinese factory worker... Then again, perhaps there's a meaningful middle ground. Again, the problem is that a number of people are quite happy to maximize their standard of living (as defined above) at the expense of themselves or others having jobs.
Uh... I'm sorry, but it's you who're insane. Reiser's code did not disappear into the void. If you want to use it, you can. Apparently you don't want to; that's clearly your choice. Of course his filesystem is less desirable to use due to lack of an active maintainer and the unsavory associations, but "obliterated"?
Do you apply this to everyone? Let me try some examples of this reasoning.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a power-hungry mass-murderer (which he was, when you think about it, especially the campaign that ended at Waterloo), so any countries whose jurisprudence is based on the Napoleonic Code should immediately ditch that for some other legal system.
Ulysses S. Grant allowed unbridled corruption amongst his cronies during his presidency, and mishandled the economy badly in 1873. So students of military history must not study his campaigns, since they are tainted.
Thomas Edison was an unethical businessman who aimed to gain monopoly power by forcing all competitors out of business and lied to achieve this end. We should stop using incandescent light bulbs, as well as anything based on his work.
Isaac Newton was a nasty person to deal with, who tried to suppress papers by contemporaries, spent most of his time dabbling in alchemy and the occult. We shouldn't teach his theory of mechanics to students, or if we do we certainly shouldn't mention his name in the process.
Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. We shouldn't be teaching children about anything he wrote, since it's tainted by association.
My apologies for leaving out the all-caps and all.
> yes, small government, cut the dead wood
Uh... Did I say anything like that?
I'm so far pointing out a problem (or more precisely, a mismatch between how the US government actually works and what people are taught in civics class and like to believe). I'm completely at a loss as to plausible solutions, assuming it's even desirable to solve it. Again, we've had a spoils system before and it wasn't pretty. And if the goal is a government that's responsive to the electorate (is that the goal?) then it's not clear to me that "smaller government" accomplishes that in any way.
> but you still insist on talking about joe mccarthy in a positive light.
Only if you posit that elected officials having control over the bureaucracy (his goal, really, for a small part of the bureaucracy) is a good thing, _and_ that the ends justify the means in accomplishing this goal.
Put another way, any value judgements happening here are in your head. I'm just saying that the man tried to give elected officials control over the makeup of the State Department bureaucracy. His reasons for doing this were mostly paranoid delusion (mostly, because a small number of those he fingered were in fact communist sympathizers; that was likely true of any big enough group of college-educated Americans at the time; others were Anglophiles, Francophiles, etc; that's all normal). Since there were no normal channels in place for elected officials to exercise such control, what ended up happening has more resemblance to a lynch mob, and for the same reasons (people acting on their passions, outside the bounds of the law).
> hitler built the autobahn but i'm not going to laud him for civil engineering accomplishments
Or his organizational ones? Just one aspect of a person's actions taints everything else about them in your mind? Or put another way, shouldn't Hitler get as much credit for the autobahn as Eisenhower does for the US interstate highway system?
Is this conversation officially Godwin'ed yet? ;)
> you're not being responsible if you continue to talk about senator joe mccarthy as anything but a dangerous vile figure
Oh, c'mon. The guy was a slimeball, an alcoholic, and a demogogue as you said. But that doesn't change what he was trying to do. I can't help it if you think it was a good goal that he sullied with his bad means, or if you think anything he tried to do is tainted by its mere association with him. But that's a really black-and-white view of the world that I refuse to partake in.
I mean... maybe I'm missing something. How is saying that McCarthy was vile and dangerous and so we shouldn't talk about him useful? How is describing his goals, not just his means, a problem? We shouldn't _forget_ about his means, because those aren't acceptable. But if his goal was a reasonable one (which I'm not convinced of) and if there were not better means available to achive it (which I _am_ convinced of), should we not be thinking about how better means could be provided?
> From where those people and their values come from?
From certain demographics within the electorate. It's very much not a representative sample in terms of things like education, political leanings, income, personality (note that some of these things correlate with each other, though).
It would be _very_ odd if it were, honestly.
Also, US society is highly nonhomogeneous in terms of values. The bureaucracy is much less so. Again, it would be odd if that were not the case.
I'll agree that a system of governance is a reflection of part of society. Whichever part happens to hold power. That's more or less a tautology, though. ;)
Who said anything about corruption?
I'm not talking about corruption. I'm talking about the fact that the bureaucracy has its own goals (not even necessarily consciously) which have little to do with those of the elected officials nominally in charge of it, much less those of the electorate, and that there's not much that elected officials can do about it.
> the smearmongering communist witch hunter?
Yep. That guy.
> a very dangerous demagogue
Yes, indeed. Though at this point you rather have to be to get elected. I mean... Our current president sure did the whole "arousing the emotions and passions" thing that my dictionary uses as the definition of a demagogue, mostly about Change. Our previous president, same thing about an Axis of Evil.
> joe mccarthy is an example of anything except an asshole
Being an asshole is not mutually incompatible with being other things (for example, the guy was also a Senator; this is a common juxtaposition, actually). In this case, he was a crusading asshole, which is why he had the guts to try to do something as daft as taking on the bureaucracy to start with.
In case it wasn't clear, I think McCarthy's methods were unaccetable (even if some of his suspicions were correct). But the point is, there are no acceptable methods that elected officials have today for controlling the bureaucracy. They're in the position of a manager who can't hire and fire employees and who has a small clique of employees who were there before he arrived and will be there after he leaves reporting to him... and controlling all of his access to information, as well as getting to interpret any directions he gives. If they don't do what he tells them to, he has no recourse. That's assuming he even finds out about it, which is doubtful.
Now the problem is that before we had our current setup, the bureaucracy _was_ accountable to elected figures. We called it the spoils system. It was, unfortunately, even worse than what we have now.
> In the US, the lever pullers are elected.
No, they're not. Figureheads are elected. The lever pullers are for the most part the career bureaucrats and the lobbyists.
The last time we had an elected official seriously trying to change how the bureaucracy worked his name was Joe McCarthy. No one particularly enjoyed that, so no one has tried since.
> umm, no.. UNLESS the entire render is lake.
Usually the lake is the part whose rendering dominates the render time when rendering the entire Mandelbrot set, because most of the escaping parts escape pretty quickly. And the original post definitely sounded to me like it was talking about the full mandelbrot render.
> AND there is no periodicity checking
Which there isn't in the typical simple implementations (and in particular, there isn't in the Google code in question).
> I would have thought someone trying to come off as an expert
I wasn't "trying to come off as an expert"; I was just pointing out a small set of things (not at all exhaustive, nor trying to be, because I am NOT an expert on this topic) that matter for comparing performance of simple Mandelbrot renderers.
> All the interesting areas has little no no lake at all in them.
I think your expertise in rendering the mandelbrot set is making you blind to the fact that most timing tests people do are really simplistic. In particular, people tend to form performance snap judgements based on the default settings of the demo; in this case that's rendering the entire mandelbrot set. I realize that's not what you do, but I'm willing to bet that's what the original poster did....
It really depends on the parameters used. For example, one important parameter for rendering the Mandelbrot set is the iteration count after which you decide that you're not escaping. Doubling this count will more or less double the time it takes to render. Happen to recall what you were using on your 486 for this value?
There are other things you can do wrong in your code to make drawing the Mandelbrot set slow. For example, you can use objects to represent points on the complex plane (instant hit due to the extra costs of property access involved), you can make your complex operations allocate new objects (instant hit for obvious reasons). You can use a slow escape test (e.g. something involving square roots). In this case, using workers, you could spend too much time sending data back and forth a dribble at a time instead of computing a bunch and batch-sending it. Their code is obfuscated enough that I can't tell exactly what they're doing with their worker communication offhand; it looks at first glance like they compute (256/f)^2 points at a time in a worker, where f is the "pixelSize" argument to the worker.
Looking more at their worker code, they seem to not be using objects, seem to be using 1000 iterations as their "does not escape" criterion, and seem to be using "norm squared is at least 10000" as their escape test (which is nuts for mandelbrot, but they're using this function as a general backend for all the fractals involved, and for the Julia sets testing norm squared against 4 won't cut it, whereas it would for the Mandelbrot set). So they're not doing this in the slowest way possible, but neither is the code particularly optimal for computing the mandelbrot set.
Outside the code, there are several things your _browser_ could be doing wrong. You never said what browser you're using, exactly. So for one thing it's not clear whether the browser involved has a functioning jit or whether it's interpreting the JS. It makes a huge difference. You also never said whether your browser supports Web Workers or not; if it does not then you're only using one of your cores, of course.
The post I was replying to says "Mother" pretty clearly (with the capital letter).
Hard to say for other Mongols. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_writing_systems the first time Mongolian had an "official" writing system of its own was when Genghis was about 42. And that was because Genghis conquered some neighbors and took a scribe prisoner....
There's no evidence that I can see that Genghis himself was literate. I'd suspect he wasn't. So I'd wager money that he did not use the Roman alphabet. ;)
Nowhere, as is usual to deaths that are 1) spread out in time and space and 2) viewed as "natural occurrences" as opposed to "murder".
There are some decent psychological reasons for this. In particular, overreacting to murder (or other actions by small groups of humans) with overwhelming force can provide a deterrent and be useful if you suspect that there are lots more individuals or small groups contemplatingsuch actions. This is the essence of gunboat diplomacy as practiced in the 18th-19th century. First, you make a credible promise that if someone messes with your interests or allows any of their subjects to do so you will shell their city and depose them from power. Then you do this a few times. After that, the local governments and police forces tend to get a lot more alert about enforcing your interests, since suddenly their incentives (staying in power) are aligned with yours.
The key to this sort of strategy, though, is to make sure that you overreact towards the right people and to overreact effectively. For example, if it were US policy that anyone planning or funding a terrorist act, and their immediate family members, would be killed out of hand, there would be a lot less funding of terrorism going around (and a lot fewer living Saudi businessmen and princes). Whether such a policy is ethical or legal is open to debate, of course.
I'm not sure anyone can make a credible argument that the current wars the US is involved in were "effective" in terms of deterrent value. And one would have to do some fast talking to even try to argue that it was "towards the right people". Certainly going off and killing some peasants in Afghanistan in response to rich Saudi guy funding a terrorist attack won't keep any other rich Saudi guys from funding the next one....
> meanwhile in Russia : nearly 100 traffic deaths A DAY.
Speaking of meaningless statistics, in the US there are over 100 traffic deaths a day.
Meaningless because it's not accounting for population differences, differences in car ownership rates, differences in the kinds of vehicles on the roads, differences in the roads, etc, etc.
So other than "a bunch of people dead every year", it doesn't mean much...
Pretty close to it, yes. Courts in Israel are civil courts, not based on Jewish religious law. Legislation is passed by a civil legislative body, not a religious one. Religions are considered equal before the law. There is no official state religion, and there is freedom of religion and of worship.
There is one weirdness, which is marriage. There is no "civil" marriage in Israel; there are only religious marriage under the auspices of the various religions practiced by the people being married. This can cause problems for non-Orthodox Jews, for interfaith marriages, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel has details.
Also note that in Israel being Jewish is not necessarily a religious matter; it's an ethnic matter. You can be an atheist and still be considered Jewish ethnically.
This can matter for things like military service, where ethnic minorities are generally exempt from the draft (though accepted as volunteers).
In any case, I suppose it depends on your definition of "separation of religion and state". It's not exactly a black-and-white line; there are gradations. Would you say that religion and state are separated in Germany, say?
Or maybe it's just that twitter and facebook are soul-sucking wastes of time? Not to mention the privacy issues with facebook.
I'm guessing I'm far closer to your age than your mother's, and I certainly refuse to use facebook (though I've considered twitter once or twice).