I think we could look at going to Mars much in the same light as the Europeans settling the Americas. Without private interest, it probably wouldn't have happened. And yes, it was very dangerous. It was rather common to not survive the trip over here, it was expensive, and then once you landed you had to figure out how to survive from there.
This was repeated yet again when settling the west (think back to The Oregon Trail, remember how many times you died trying to make it?)
Sorry but Tyson really lacks perspective. And to be honest, all Keynesians do. The Keynesian model fell apart back in the 80's when their model couldn't explain stagflation (the Keynesian model basically said it was impossible) and the "New Keynesian" model doesn't work much better (it flies in the face of the broken window fallacy - Paul Krugman is recommending that the government simulate an alien invasion in order to jumpstart the economy, and he's foolish enough to think it would actually work.)
Suicidal and constantly depressed also describe those people who request amputation of perfectly functioning limbs, and indeed carrying out these amputations results in an improved mental state.
However therapy is also known to work, in both cases.
Right, and you can say the exact same thing about people with anxiety disorders for example. Usually that problem stems from always worrying about things needlessly (what if this, I should have done that) which causes them to be the way they are. They want it to end badly. The only permanent treatment for that is altering ones thought patterns to not think so destructively. Unfortunately that isn't an easy thing to do, and some people are never able to do it.
Circumcision is still mutilation, no matter the circumstances. Breast enlargement...In the end what you're doing is expanding the skin tissue. This happens naturally during e.g. weight gain. There are different forms of breast augmentation though, many of which have approximately zero chance of harming the patient. The ones that do probably shouldn't be done.
Testosterone or Menopausal HRT is intended to turn an unhealthy person into a healthy one by correcting an imbalance. HRT for the purpose you are advocating is taking an already healthy patient and altering their body chemistry.
I don't like to say my opinion is entirely nonmedical though. Yes, I don't have a medical degree. However the extent of my knowledge of microbiology and chemistry while discussing my own medical conditions with doctors (my kidney condition being the biggest one, both the cause and treatment requiring a lot of knowledge of biochemistry to manage proper) has led a few to ask me on well more than one occasion why I am not in the medical field. In fact my cardiologist told me yesterday that I already seem a little more knowledgeable on the matter than other doctors he knows.
Because she (Manning) was presumably born in the USA, her genitals were likely already mutilated at birth.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Is that supposed to be a counterpoint? Yes, that is also mutilation, by definition. I'm quite against circumcision without express consent of the patient as well.
The process of HRT brings one's hormone levels in line with normal female levels, so I don't understand why you think anything is going "out of whack."
You're taking an already healthy person with an already healthy chemical balance and then deliberately changing it. That is what I'd call out of whack. This person's normal body function will now require artificial means to maintain this different state. You know that the military doesn't permit transexuals for medical reasons right? It has nothing to do with politics, it is entirely about fitness.
Yes, you are, because not all trans women undergo bottom surgery. Bottom surgery is a personal choice and not a requirement to live as a woman or get an ID as a woman, although it may be a requirement in certain states in order to amend or change one's birth certificate.
Uh...WHAT? That's exactly what I'm pushing towards. I'm saying surgery isn't the answer, nor should it be.
If you're really as rational as you're trying to present yourself as being
How am I not being rational? Being against performing surgery on a healthy person is not rational? If not, tell me what is rational about denying amputation of a perfectly healthy limb but encouraging mutilation of genitalia?
I'm a bit mystified as to why we do this. Hear me out:
When people ask to have limbs amputated because the person feels that having the limb doesn't make them feel whole (strange how you don't feel whole until part of you is removed?! That and/or because they have a sexual fetish for amputated limbs,) modern medicine denies that request, considers it to be abhorrent, and any medical professional who obliges the request is jailed and/or has their license to practice revoked. The treatment for the above condition is the same as if the person had a mental illness, and the solution is to change thinking patterns rather than surgery.
Yet when they ask to have their genitals mutilated and hormones thrown so far out of whack to the point of permanently handicapping them to a degree, it is viewed as a human right, and in some cases this voluntary surgery must be provided for free by the government, and they are called brave in some circles? Worse is that today there is very little in the way of counseling done, and some half of them end up regretting it after the fact.
Usually they are rather trivial, just most people choose to dismiss alternatives rather than try them.
For example, I subscribe to t-mobile for about a third the price of my neighbor who is on verizon, and we both use our phones in the same places. But he's too afraid to try t-mobile because he hears about their coverage not being as good. Whatever.
Yeah I'm still trying to figure out here - what war crimes did Manning uncover?
The closest thing I could think of was the original wikileaks claim to fame, the collateral murder video, which wasn't murder at all. You could clearly see men carrying weapons before they were hit. Really that whole thing just showed what poor character Julian Assange actually is.
People like Snowden deserve respect, Assange is nothing but an attention whore who will fabricate a story just to get himself media attention - collateral murder was exactly that, he even later admitted that he deliberately wanted to manipulate public opinion in his favor.
Personally I say fuck Assange, and I hope he gets whatever is coming to him. As for Manning, I think he is receiving a just sentence. As he said, he didn't even bother to look at what he was releasing. The guy who turned him in even realized this, and stated that it is why he did it.
Didn't they happen? Take out the billiard rooms, dance floors, and bridle paths, and you end up with a jumbo jet. In fact, it not only duplicates the speed of railroads, it goes much faster, and it isn't on a rail.
Is that really the case? I'm atheist myself, but I observe all the time how if you say something negative about islam, you'll get attacked by the PC police, but if you say something negative about christianity you get cheers. Case in point, the people on The View walked out on Bill O'Reilly when he made a rather mild comment about Islam, and Juan Williams being fired from NPR for doing something similar. Yet nobody ever got slammed in the media for shit talking the bible belt, let alone fired.
I'm not an O'Reilly fan nor do I really care for Juan Williams, but so far Islam is the only religion that has committed acts of mass terror, yet the liberal media is constantly at its defense.
Personally I'm neither a fan of christianity nor islam, but I'm tired of islam being treated like an ethnic minority that is in constant need of apologetics, especially given how barbaric islam is.
I just started school at Northern Arizona University, and between the pell grant and the university grant, I got paid $1,250. Yes, the school literally cut me a check for $1,250 just for attending their institution and filling out FAFSA online. The school keeps bugging me with emails telling me that I have not yet accepted the loan (which would have cut me a check for another $5,000 or so) and I have no plans of accepting it - I simply don't need it.
Go on craigslist and find a room for $400 a month (as of this writing, there are about 30 listed in my area at that price range right now, some even cheaper) get a part time job that pays $200 a week (easy), sign up for food stamps and your food is completely covered and you've got an extra $400 a month to spend on whatever the hell you want.
There, school without debt. In fact, you can easily save money while going to school; that's exactly what I do.
I don't buy this notion that you have to go into heavy debt just to attend school. The idea that people are doing this just boggles my mind - I can't figure out for the life of me why anybody would do so. The only explanation I can find is that they are paying out-of-state tuition rates and/or living on university grounds, and going to bars and clubs every night of the week.
College isn't "Animal House", you aren't supposed to party through it. You're supposed to learn and leave, the partying comes if/when you start making money. Going into debt is just plain stupid and doesn't need to happen. I'm living proof of that. I have zero sympathy for anybody who complains about their student debt - they had dreams about being a smart college educated person, but they deliberately chose to dump the "smart" part from it.
Personally I recommend most people stay away from University in fact, and just stick to trade schools (yes, you probably will make more money with what you learn from trade school than what you'll learn from a university - only do university if you have a specific need.) See my signature for why.
The people who are in my program are all the same by the way - we laugh at people who take the loans, and talk to each other about how much we've gotten paid for going to school (most of my money I have saved up has come from other academic related scholarships - and I don't expect everybody to have the same GPA I do, however the plan I outlined above will work for ANYBODY.)
Actually the mess was a result of unions bureaucratizing the business, not capitalists. Under that system they had, if you had a freight truck only half full of bread and you also had several pallets of twinkies that needed to go to the same store, tough shit you had to put them on a different truck. One union had to do the breads, the other union did the sweets. Bread workers weren't allowed to handle sweets, which was a union rule.
There were all kinds of rules like that which made hostess operate extremely inefficiently, all of them union imposed. It finally came to a head when the teamsters demanded more rules and money than they already had, and the management finally said "Look, we just can't afford this anymore. We're broke. If you keep asking for this our one and only option is to close shop." The union leadership called the bluff, and as a result all of the employees lost their jobs and an American icon was destroyed, which the union leadership hailed as a victory because they stood their ground, meanwhile they go home and eat their dinner paid for on the backs of the workers via union dues from other companies.
Now without union involvement they can actually run a business.
And what talent did it lose exactly? They're still the same ol' twinkies they've always been.
Why would you support unions so vehemently by the way? They are the ones pricing Americans out of jobs in exactly the manner I described above.
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Actually the corporation that pays the highest US taxes (both effective tax rate and total taxes paid) also happens to be the ones that Democrats hate the most: Wal-Mart.
Apple pays more total tax dollars, but that goes to other countries during transfer pricing, not the US. And no, it isn't other corporations combined - Exxon for example pays more than twice as much in total taxes than Apple does with Chevron coming in second place, and Apple third.
Wal-Mart doesn't have the luxury of transfer pricing, so as long as they're as large as they are, they'll always be paying very high taxes. And as you said, the US tax rates are unreasonable as hell, which is why everybody goes out of their way to avoid them.
Or perhaps it's just oversaturated. Wifi doesn't have unlimited bandwidth you know. After enough people find out that they can stop paying for their regular ISP and just hop on a free wifi you'll start to run into problems.
Or perhaps we ought to just take email back to the drawing board. Something I've pondered is an "email 2" where encryption is required. In addition, to kill email spam, any server that sends out email could be required to have a DNS record identifying it as an established SMTP server, and all POP3/IMAP servers only trust them instead of just accepting emails from any IP address that probably belongs to grandma's compromised PC. Of course, reverse arpa addresses are considered invalid.
Webmail providers could do something akin to mega.co.nz style vault access, and only the user's password could decrypt the messages they receive. Something to the effect of having the user store the RSA keys on a key fob (or otherwise just keeping them local) and when they log in they decrypt the messages, and then re-encrypt using their vault key and store them on the server.
Email 2 addresses could be identified by adding say a greater than sign after the @, indicating to the software stack that only secure transmission is permitted, say email2user@>domain.com
That should also take care of your NSA problem, though companies like google would never be on board since they can't keyword match ads to messages.
Not that I'm being hopeful or unhopeful (I'm not interested in this project - I'm happy with my smartphone already) it's actually quite common for massive amounts of money to come in at the start of a crowdsourcing project, and then after a big initial rush things slow to a trickle until you get near the end. Will they reach their goal? Who knows, but slowing down like this at this point in time is normal, (and I assume expected) successful projects and failed projects alike.
The only alternative to this that I see is for a central ID system which independently verifies you are an actual person. Trouble is this has some rather severe implications for privacy, in addition to being a central point of failure.
In either case, spam isn't going away anytime soon now that spambots are operating out of the Tor network.
The prey is certainly aware when it dies, just some predators make that awareness shorter than others.
I think the shortest time period would be like if you passed a stop sign, and halfway into the intersection you catch a glimpse as somebody else blows right past it and straight into you, followed by approximately 15 seconds of slowly fading to black, with or without struggling. That split second of fear would be the minimum that the prey feels IMHO, with an endorphin and/or adrenaline spike potentially canceling out the rest.
I think it would be exceptionally rare for an instant kill that lacks the feeling that I just described. At least in nature anyways; farm kills almost always involve a captive bolt pistol which truly is an instant kill (animal knocked unconscious immediately and the brain matter swells and crushes itself.)
All of those PETA videos about cows being tortured are just propaganda material - doing things those ways tends to make things more difficult and labor intensive. In fact, PETA abuses animals in its care much worse than any slaughterhouse. To be honest, I'm shocked people actually give them money.
I had that game for the commodore 64...I never could figure out how you were supposed to win it. Every time I got into fights with the Indians it was on accident (you just touch one and they pop) and they all start doing their little chanting noise faster and faster until all of your men are dead and then gg. Never knew you could actually win against them.
Nobody ever claimed 640k was enough for everybody by the way. It's actually an urban myth that Bill Gates said it - he never did, if anything he was pushing for the opposite during that time period.
Slashdot Mirror
Commercial businesses need more than just "potential" profit
Uh...wut? Since when has the risk of not making a profit ever stopped anybody from trying anyways?
Sorry but that one statement - which isn't even remotely true - just set the rest of your post up for fail.
I think we could look at going to Mars much in the same light as the Europeans settling the Americas. Without private interest, it probably wouldn't have happened. And yes, it was very dangerous. It was rather common to not survive the trip over here, it was expensive, and then once you landed you had to figure out how to survive from there.
This was repeated yet again when settling the west (think back to The Oregon Trail, remember how many times you died trying to make it?)
Sorry but Tyson really lacks perspective. And to be honest, all Keynesians do. The Keynesian model fell apart back in the 80's when their model couldn't explain stagflation (the Keynesian model basically said it was impossible) and the "New Keynesian" model doesn't work much better (it flies in the face of the broken window fallacy - Paul Krugman is recommending that the government simulate an alien invasion in order to jumpstart the economy, and he's foolish enough to think it would actually work.)
Suicidal and constantly depressed also describe those people who request amputation of perfectly functioning limbs, and indeed carrying out these amputations results in an improved mental state.
However therapy is also known to work, in both cases.
Right, and you can say the exact same thing about people with anxiety disorders for example. Usually that problem stems from always worrying about things needlessly (what if this, I should have done that) which causes them to be the way they are. They want it to end badly. The only permanent treatment for that is altering ones thought patterns to not think so destructively. Unfortunately that isn't an easy thing to do, and some people are never able to do it.
Circumcision is still mutilation, no matter the circumstances. Breast enlargement...In the end what you're doing is expanding the skin tissue. This happens naturally during e.g. weight gain. There are different forms of breast augmentation though, many of which have approximately zero chance of harming the patient. The ones that do probably shouldn't be done.
Testosterone or Menopausal HRT is intended to turn an unhealthy person into a healthy one by correcting an imbalance. HRT for the purpose you are advocating is taking an already healthy patient and altering their body chemistry.
I don't like to say my opinion is entirely nonmedical though. Yes, I don't have a medical degree. However the extent of my knowledge of microbiology and chemistry while discussing my own medical conditions with doctors (my kidney condition being the biggest one, both the cause and treatment requiring a lot of knowledge of biochemistry to manage proper) has led a few to ask me on well more than one occasion why I am not in the medical field. In fact my cardiologist told me yesterday that I already seem a little more knowledgeable on the matter than other doctors he knows.
Because she (Manning) was presumably born in the USA, her genitals were likely already mutilated at birth.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Is that supposed to be a counterpoint? Yes, that is also mutilation, by definition. I'm quite against circumcision without express consent of the patient as well.
The process of HRT brings one's hormone levels in line with normal female levels, so I don't understand why you think anything is going "out of whack."
You're taking an already healthy person with an already healthy chemical balance and then deliberately changing it. That is what I'd call out of whack. This person's normal body function will now require artificial means to maintain this different state. You know that the military doesn't permit transexuals for medical reasons right? It has nothing to do with politics, it is entirely about fitness.
Yes, you are, because not all trans women undergo bottom surgery. Bottom surgery is a personal choice and not a requirement to live as a woman or get an ID as a woman, although it may be a requirement in certain states in order to amend or change one's birth certificate.
Uh...WHAT? That's exactly what I'm pushing towards. I'm saying surgery isn't the answer, nor should it be.
If you're really as rational as you're trying to present yourself as being
How am I not being rational? Being against performing surgery on a healthy person is not rational? If not, tell me what is rational about denying amputation of a perfectly healthy limb but encouraging mutilation of genitalia?
I'm a bit mystified as to why we do this. Hear me out:
When people ask to have limbs amputated because the person feels that having the limb doesn't make them feel whole (strange how you don't feel whole until part of you is removed?! That and/or because they have a sexual fetish for amputated limbs,) modern medicine denies that request, considers it to be abhorrent, and any medical professional who obliges the request is jailed and/or has their license to practice revoked. The treatment for the above condition is the same as if the person had a mental illness, and the solution is to change thinking patterns rather than surgery.
http://drmarkgriffiths.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/whats-your-crutch-the-bizarre-world-of-amputee-fetishes/
Yet when they ask to have their genitals mutilated and hormones thrown so far out of whack to the point of permanently handicapping them to a degree, it is viewed as a human right, and in some cases this voluntary surgery must be provided for free by the government, and they are called brave in some circles? Worse is that today there is very little in the way of counseling done, and some half of them end up regretting it after the fact.
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Want-To-Reverse-Sex-Reassignment-Surgery/1608417
I'm not taking issue with transsexualism BTW, I'm taking issue with the idea that surgery is the answer.
Usually they are rather trivial, just most people choose to dismiss alternatives rather than try them.
For example, I subscribe to t-mobile for about a third the price of my neighbor who is on verizon, and we both use our phones in the same places. But he's too afraid to try t-mobile because he hears about their coverage not being as good. Whatever.
Yeah I'm still trying to figure out here - what war crimes did Manning uncover?
The closest thing I could think of was the original wikileaks claim to fame, the collateral murder video, which wasn't murder at all. You could clearly see men carrying weapons before they were hit. Really that whole thing just showed what poor character Julian Assange actually is.
People like Snowden deserve respect, Assange is nothing but an attention whore who will fabricate a story just to get himself media attention - collateral murder was exactly that, he even later admitted that he deliberately wanted to manipulate public opinion in his favor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike#WikiLeaks.27_rationale_for_their_title_of_the_footage
Personally I say fuck Assange, and I hope he gets whatever is coming to him. As for Manning, I think he is receiving a just sentence. As he said, he didn't even bother to look at what he was releasing. The guy who turned him in even realized this, and stated that it is why he did it.
Didn't they happen? Take out the billiard rooms, dance floors, and bridle paths, and you end up with a jumbo jet. In fact, it not only duplicates the speed of railroads, it goes much faster, and it isn't on a rail.
Is that really the case? I'm atheist myself, but I observe all the time how if you say something negative about islam, you'll get attacked by the PC police, but if you say something negative about christianity you get cheers. Case in point, the people on The View walked out on Bill O'Reilly when he made a rather mild comment about Islam, and Juan Williams being fired from NPR for doing something similar. Yet nobody ever got slammed in the media for shit talking the bible belt, let alone fired.
I'm not an O'Reilly fan nor do I really care for Juan Williams, but so far Islam is the only religion that has committed acts of mass terror, yet the liberal media is constantly at its defense.
Personally I'm neither a fan of christianity nor islam, but I'm tired of islam being treated like an ethnic minority that is in constant need of apologetics, especially given how barbaric islam is.
I just started school at Northern Arizona University, and between the pell grant and the university grant, I got paid $1,250. Yes, the school literally cut me a check for $1,250 just for attending their institution and filling out FAFSA online. The school keeps bugging me with emails telling me that I have not yet accepted the loan (which would have cut me a check for another $5,000 or so) and I have no plans of accepting it - I simply don't need it.
Go on craigslist and find a room for $400 a month (as of this writing, there are about 30 listed in my area at that price range right now, some even cheaper) get a part time job that pays $200 a week (easy), sign up for food stamps and your food is completely covered and you've got an extra $400 a month to spend on whatever the hell you want.
There, school without debt. In fact, you can easily save money while going to school; that's exactly what I do.
I don't buy this notion that you have to go into heavy debt just to attend school. The idea that people are doing this just boggles my mind - I can't figure out for the life of me why anybody would do so. The only explanation I can find is that they are paying out-of-state tuition rates and/or living on university grounds, and going to bars and clubs every night of the week.
College isn't "Animal House", you aren't supposed to party through it. You're supposed to learn and leave, the partying comes if/when you start making money. Going into debt is just plain stupid and doesn't need to happen. I'm living proof of that. I have zero sympathy for anybody who complains about their student debt - they had dreams about being a smart college educated person, but they deliberately chose to dump the "smart" part from it.
Personally I recommend most people stay away from University in fact, and just stick to trade schools (yes, you probably will make more money with what you learn from trade school than what you'll learn from a university - only do university if you have a specific need.) See my signature for why.
The people who are in my program are all the same by the way - we laugh at people who take the loans, and talk to each other about how much we've gotten paid for going to school (most of my money I have saved up has come from other academic related scholarships - and I don't expect everybody to have the same GPA I do, however the plan I outlined above will work for ANYBODY.)
Google 'sickbeard', make sure to grab the tpb edition.
Actually the mess was a result of unions bureaucratizing the business, not capitalists. Under that system they had, if you had a freight truck only half full of bread and you also had several pallets of twinkies that needed to go to the same store, tough shit you had to put them on a different truck. One union had to do the breads, the other union did the sweets. Bread workers weren't allowed to handle sweets, which was a union rule.
There were all kinds of rules like that which made hostess operate extremely inefficiently, all of them union imposed. It finally came to a head when the teamsters demanded more rules and money than they already had, and the management finally said "Look, we just can't afford this anymore. We're broke. If you keep asking for this our one and only option is to close shop." The union leadership called the bluff, and as a result all of the employees lost their jobs and an American icon was destroyed, which the union leadership hailed as a victory because they stood their ground, meanwhile they go home and eat their dinner paid for on the backs of the workers via union dues from other companies.
Now without union involvement they can actually run a business.
And what talent did it lose exactly? They're still the same ol' twinkies they've always been.
Why would you support unions so vehemently by the way? They are the ones pricing Americans out of jobs in exactly the manner I described above.
Actually not quite. Google the words "transfer pricing".
How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Actually the corporation that pays the highest US taxes (both effective tax rate and total taxes paid) also happens to be the ones that Democrats hate the most: Wal-Mart.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.top_5_tax_bills/
Apple pays more total tax dollars, but that goes to other countries during transfer pricing, not the US. And no, it isn't other corporations combined - Exxon for example pays more than twice as much in total taxes than Apple does with Chevron coming in second place, and Apple third.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/03/17/companies-paying-highest-income-taxes/1991313/
Wal-Mart doesn't have the luxury of transfer pricing, so as long as they're as large as they are, they'll always be paying very high taxes. And as you said, the US tax rates are unreasonable as hell, which is why everybody goes out of their way to avoid them.
Or perhaps it's just oversaturated. Wifi doesn't have unlimited bandwidth you know. After enough people find out that they can stop paying for their regular ISP and just hop on a free wifi you'll start to run into problems.
Or perhaps we ought to just take email back to the drawing board. Something I've pondered is an "email 2" where encryption is required. In addition, to kill email spam, any server that sends out email could be required to have a DNS record identifying it as an established SMTP server, and all POP3/IMAP servers only trust them instead of just accepting emails from any IP address that probably belongs to grandma's compromised PC. Of course, reverse arpa addresses are considered invalid.
Webmail providers could do something akin to mega.co.nz style vault access, and only the user's password could decrypt the messages they receive. Something to the effect of having the user store the RSA keys on a key fob (or otherwise just keeping them local) and when they log in they decrypt the messages, and then re-encrypt using their vault key and store them on the server.
Email 2 addresses could be identified by adding say a greater than sign after the @, indicating to the software stack that only secure transmission is permitted, say email2user@>domain.com
That should also take care of your NSA problem, though companies like google would never be on board since they can't keyword match ads to messages.
Not that I'm being hopeful or unhopeful (I'm not interested in this project - I'm happy with my smartphone already) it's actually quite common for massive amounts of money to come in at the start of a crowdsourcing project, and then after a big initial rush things slow to a trickle until you get near the end. Will they reach their goal? Who knows, but slowing down like this at this point in time is normal, (and I assume expected) successful projects and failed projects alike.
The only alternative to this that I see is for a central ID system which independently verifies you are an actual person. Trouble is this has some rather severe implications for privacy, in addition to being a central point of failure.
In either case, spam isn't going away anytime soon now that spambots are operating out of the Tor network.
The prey is certainly aware when it dies, just some predators make that awareness shorter than others.
I think the shortest time period would be like if you passed a stop sign, and halfway into the intersection you catch a glimpse as somebody else blows right past it and straight into you, followed by approximately 15 seconds of slowly fading to black, with or without struggling. That split second of fear would be the minimum that the prey feels IMHO, with an endorphin and/or adrenaline spike potentially canceling out the rest.
I think it would be exceptionally rare for an instant kill that lacks the feeling that I just described. At least in nature anyways; farm kills almost always involve a captive bolt pistol which truly is an instant kill (animal knocked unconscious immediately and the brain matter swells and crushes itself.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr00arV2XIw
All of those PETA videos about cows being tortured are just propaganda material - doing things those ways tends to make things more difficult and labor intensive. In fact, PETA abuses animals in its care much worse than any slaughterhouse. To be honest, I'm shocked people actually give them money.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html
I had that game for the commodore 64...I never could figure out how you were supposed to win it. Every time I got into fights with the Indians it was on accident (you just touch one and they pop) and they all start doing their little chanting noise faster and faster until all of your men are dead and then gg. Never knew you could actually win against them.
I never knew we intended to push the Iraqis out of Iraq and onto reservations. Same with Somali's and Syrians. Do go on.
Nobody ever claimed 640k was enough for everybody by the way. It's actually an urban myth that Bill Gates said it - he never did, if anything he was pushing for the opposite during that time period.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_