Comment Re:order of magnitude (Score 1) 217
Ironically, your example was off by an order of magnitude. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years or 4e15m away.
I read this article back in December in Time which said that had you redirected your lottery spending to stocks over the 10 years ending December 2010, your annualized return would have amounted to -1.54%, according to Standard & Poor's.
If you still had 98.46% of your money at the end of 10 years you would be significantly ahead of where you'd be if you'd been putting the money in a lottery.
I think the comment from the story is telling: "'Protofeathers aren't known from any modern, existing groups of birds and therefore the most obvious interpretation is that they belong to dinosaurs,' said University of Alberta professor, Alexander P. Wolfe."
Considering the age of most fossil finds in Alberta, that isn't as crazy as you think.
I'm pretty sure most schools have rules prohibiting students from being taught by their own relatives for most core classes to avoid favortism. When I was in school, kids of teachers were always in someone else's class for the grade their parent taught.
When I was in grade 7 my class was taught English by my mother and math by the father of one of my classmates.
They are refusing to sell American's stock because they will violate US regulations by concealing the financial documents. Do you know why they want to conceal the financials? Because they are very very scary and indicate how little money the company actually makes.
Or maybe they make lots of money and don't want it made public just how they are doing that. I bet 500 million users' personal info could be worth a lot of money to a lot of companys.
You mean "how many infant boys have their genitals mutilated to prevent them from ever having pleasurable sex?"
No, American boys have their genitals mutilated because of a myth that cutting off the foreskin somehow prevents infections, when the purpose of the foreskin is to prevent infections. That cutting off the foreskin reduces the pleasure gained from sex is just a side effect. http://www.homiegfunk.com/RIC2.htm
Seriously, do you think is new? Did you hunt? Help a cow deliver a calf? Helping build the house? Make bread? Fix your own car and fully understand it, not clip in a new chip? Build your own radio?
The difference is that our parents didn't purposefully not teach these things; we just didn't learn them because we didn't have too.
Yes, but a lot of them first heard about the iPad from someone who was a Apple fan, or got caught in the hype that surrounds any new Apple release (largely driven by Apple fans). I bet very few of them just happened to stumble into a Best Buy, never having heard of Apple, and gravitated immediately to the iPad--with no one pitching it to them.
This has been my experience. Most of the people I know who own iPads have them because an Apple loyalist talked them into one. A perfect example would be my mom's boyfriend. He wanted a way to read books electronically (so he could adjust the font). His son, an Apple loyalist, told him to get a iPad. I pointed out that since he didn't want it for anything other than reading he should just get as e-reader. He went to Best Buy for an e-reader and walked out with an iPad. So he paid more than double for the hardware, plus is paying monthly for mobile data connection he doesn't use, but is happy as a clam because he can read books.
I think this practice is pretty despicable unless they make it obvious which profiles were autogenerated. If they don't do that then it could spoil the trust in a lot of relationships if someone finds out their partner is on a dating site (best friend: hey I googled your gf's name for uh.. research.. never mind, and I saw she's totally got a live account on a dating site!).
I think you have stumbled on what the entire point of this service would be - denyability. If say half the profiles on the site are auto generated and half are people cheating on their spouses, then the cheaters don't have to worry nearly so much about getting caught; they can always claim that they never used the site, their profile was just auto generated. Sure it would make it a little hard to hook up with a real person, but for some this would probably be worth it.
Happiness is twin floppies.
