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Comment Re:Saw a Chipmunk Up In the Mountains (Score 1) 387

I think smarter dogs, who check for oncoming vehicles before venturing onto a road, will survive more. You can notice this behaviour in a few dogs in places that have large numbers of strays.

It would be interesting to note how quickly this could result into an increase in the average intelligence of dogs (heh heh). Of course, not all dogs live near highways. This roadkill risk has arisen only in the last 100 years.

Comment Re:Masking tape (Score 1) 478

I predict a roaring market for Guy Fawkes masks. By the way, will the 'patent pending technology' be able to distinguish between a person and his/her reflection in a mirror or another pane of glass?

On a not completely unrelated note, I would love to find that studios created movies and shows that would never get released because 'there would be unauthorised watching'.

Comment How to convince people without alienating them? (Score 1) 1142

I had been skeptical since childhood about the idea of a god that demanded worship and rituals, of an omnipotent being that created other imperfect beings who were supposed to strive towards perfection, and about various other mumbo-jumbos that afflicts my birth religion. I expressed my doubts, including about the origin of god, to people I trusted, but I all I got as reply was some sincere sophistry.

I kept on swinging between skepticism, moderate spirituality and hard belief, but I forced myself to take a hard thought after the Indonesian tsunami. I still had my questions, and your book The God Delusion helped me finally answer them. I am very glad that I don't have to believe in a god any longer, or suffer from the guilt of not being 'religious enough', and I am thankful that you existed within my lifetime.

However, I run into some dilemmas: how do I convince my wife that there really is no point in believing in a god? She keeps on running back to her security blanket, even though she understands the nature of the universe. How do I teach my children to be free of dogmas and have the courage to ask questions and think for themselves? All that I do right now is to assert that there is no god, but I understand that this is as fundamentalist a position as asserting that my flavour of god is the only true one. And lastly, how do I teach my children to have a healthy opinion of the religious, even those that are born in the wrong religion, and not turn them into bigots?

Can you help me address these questions?

Comment Re:Thanks Apple (Score 1) 553

Apple was the first company to put a serious effort in the category 'full touch screen smartphone with a 500+ Mhz processor'. There were smartphones before the iPhone and there were full touchscreen phones before the iPhone. Many of these phones had copy+paste and (hold for) context menu functionalities. The world was going crazy after Blackberry phones then, and Apple changed the trend, but a large part of this had to do with the app ecosystem, because till then, you had to rely on either paltry offerings from the manufacturers' websites, or on dubious software (that worked well on one phone and horribly on another) from third parties.

So really, a larger and multitouch screen, a 3D GPU, an accelerometer, and a very good app store - these were the 'revolutionary new' things it introduced. Good, it set a trend and showed others how to create a really extensible smartphone.

Comment Why not? (Score 1) 299

As long as they are species that have gone extinct in the last couple of centuries, even 500 years, they could be introduced if their original habitat has not undergone complete destruction. I'm thinking of the Indian Cheetah, the Dodo, the Elephant bird etc. - species that have suffered only because of humans.

Of course, these creatures might need tightly protected sanctuaries and might only exist to serve man's ego and curiosity, but if we can breed dogs, horses, cattle and cultivate various plants into differing forms, why not this?

Comment Re:how much per phone is 1 billion? (Score 1) 506

If you bought specific products from a company that was blackmailed by, or made a sweetheart deal with Apple for patent licenses, you have added to the earnings that are asserted to justify the $700 bn market cap. Just like I realised after buying an HTC Android that I had paid my money to Microsoft.

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