Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people with religion == Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people without religion.

Religion is almost never the driving factor. In the absence of religion, such people would have found other means and justifications to perpetrate their evil. There are many such examples in history.

Unfortunately, the castigation of religion often reveals a hatred of religion more than a hatred of the evil acts.

Having seen the actual warranty return rates on HDDs when I was working at an HDD company not too long ago, I can tell you that average ARR annual return rates (which are about 2x the actual AFR failure rates) may be somewhere around 5%, but that includes the worst as well as the best models. External drives are often floor-swept models that have higher failure rates, but the best models have ARR rates less than 1%, with actual failure rates less than that.

One other consideration for critical data is the variability in the time-to-failure distribution. With RAID configurations, low variability leads to an increased probability of data loss during rebuild. HDDs tend to have higher variability due to their mechanical nature.

This idea that the family of Chinese languages suffers in adoption due to inherent characteristics is not supported by a reasoned analysis of the current situation. While it may be true that 400 million Chinese don't speak Mandarin, practically 100% of the country speaks some form of the Chinese language. Each of those dialects possess all of the supposed stumbling blocks to learning. If those characteristics (e.g., lack of a phonetic alphabet, lack of word delimiters) were truly hampering learning, how did nearly 100% of the country learn such a difficult language? The answer is that these challenges are only daunting for those unfamiliar with the language.

Other languages possess other characteristics that make learning challenging, but these language are not scrutinized in a similar manner because at least in this forum, the viewpoint is still overwhelmingly American/European. Many European languages include grammatical constructs (e.g., verb conjugation and tenses and case inflection) that are challenging not only for Chinese to learn but even for Americans. Many of these constructs are redundant and could be omitted to simplify the language, but children in these country find ways to learn these languages. Some languages are phonetic, but English is a quasi-phonetic language that is difficult to learn because it is somewhat phonetic but includes many rules and even more exceptions. The difficulty of an English-language spelling bee is testament to the difficulty of the quasi-phonetic nature of English and the accompanying challenges to learning.

I suppose autonomous drones could be viewed as landmines that happen to move and make decisions about their targets. So, if banning landmines makes sense, maybe so would banning autonomous drones.

Another way to look at this is that Apple has always historically pursued maximum profits and market share but adopted different strategies in light of the practicalities of specific markets. As an underdog in the PC market, quality was a differentiator to attract whatever market share was possible, realizing that being a dominant volume seller was not possible. As the dominant vendor in the smartphone space but with eroding market share, Apple is decreasing quality and cost to maintain market share and profit (although not margins). I think this is the more accurate portrayal of Apple, since I doubt they would be willing to blindly sacrifice profit in the name of quality or aesthetics.

bytes instead of bits
bytes instead of bits per second
throughput instead of bandwidth
emigration instead of migration

"Interestingly, there's a small percentage of people (around 15% or so) for whom talking on a cell phone has no measurable effect on their driving. These are people with the ability to interrupt the conversation flow, saying "just a minute" or simply ignoring the conversation altogether during a crisis."

In other words, the abilities of the driver are significant. Because these types of academic studies ignore the range of driver abilities and the very significant impact of inexperience and stupidity as well as the impact of wisdom, experience, and trained reflexes, these studies do not reflect reality.

Driver experience is important in accident avoidance when talking about cell phones and just about every activity in a car. Changing radio stations or even looking at the speedometer or side mirror at the wrong time could be disastrous, but experienced drivers know when not to do these activities. It is not the activities per se that are dangerous but the coupling with inexperience.

Moreover, these academic studies have not been validated. This is similar to medical studies that show a reduction in blood cholesterol but no impact on longevity. Until the link to accidents and mortality in real-world situations is shown, the results are unconvincing. Yet, the press and the lemmings who believe the press pass around the conclusions as gospel.

The other way to look at this situation is that now Microsoft is the sole cell phone OS vendor who does not compete in the phone manufacturing sector. So, the four big Asian Android phone makers might see Microsoft as the only OS alternative that won't be a direct competitor. This is a huge issue. In the 90's AT&T broke up into a carrier service and an equipment manufacturer for this reason. The Android phone makers should be worried. And, depending on your take on their "united" statements of support this morning, they are either totally not worried or totally worried. IMO, the highly scripted wording and timing reminds me of forced confessions from arrested suspects who have no practical alternative.

I don't doubt the negative effect of keyboards on Chinese character proficiency. The resulting lack of handwriting practice understandably has **some** effect on the ability to reconstruct exact character strokes.

However, this is exactly the same negative effect that causes a drop in English spelling proficiency. It's not that Americans can't read, but spelling without the aid of a spell-check is markedly worse than for previous generations. If you think Chinese children are starting to forget some Chinese characters, consider the state of spelling for American kids! And, this problem with English spelling is an architectural flaw with the language. In contrast to many other European languages, English is only pseudo-phonetic.

The important point is that neither English nor Chinese are broken to the point that they need to be scrapped or re-architected.

"If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it."

It may take a lifetime for non-native Chinese speakers to learn Chinese as a second language, but rest assured that native Chinese children pick up the language fairly quickly. But, of course, the difficulty encountered by non-native speakers in learning a foreign language is a horrible indication of the intrinsic desirability of a particular language. For example, consider the English language. It is an alphabetic language, but pronunciation is only loosely phonetic, or rather, the phonetic system has so many complex rules and exceptions that render it extremely challenging, unless, of course, you happen to be a native speaker and have the complex rules and exceptions pounded into your head through a lifetime of learning. And, that's not even considering the relatively complex grammar rules, much of which is unnecessary, e.g., why is there a need for different cases and conjugations? Shouldn't most Indo-European languages be scrapped in favor of Chinese due to the use inefficient grammars, which make it difficult for non-native adult speakers to learn the language?

For the most part, any language is relatively easy to learn as a first language for a child.

But there is one very important way that power and data networks are similar: the provisioning of equipment must consider the maximum permitted peak load, even if that level is rarely reached. This is why the power company encourages its customers to conserve power during peak hours. It's certainly not because it doesn't want to sell more power but rather that it doesn't want to provision the equipment to support that extra demand.

Similarly, the wireless ISP is worried about having to install extra equipment to handle peak usage. And, by the way, this equipment we're talking about is local cell stations, which means that the overprovisioning problem is greatly enlarged because each station must be provisioned for the anticipated peak usage at that station.

As users, we see the value in high-bandwidth applications, such as video. And, it's certainly true that as these applications improve, more people will be attracted toward their use, and the number of such applications will potentially explode, especially if there is no mechanism for the voluntary restriction of usage by the user.

The real question is whether users are willing to pay the true cost of unlimited data plans, given the realities of overprovisioning requirements. Of course, the alternative question is whether users are willing to accept occasional bandwidth degradation that might occur due to the underprovisioning of local cell stations. Either we need to pay for ubiquitous quality of service or accept the degradation that we now sometimes experience. The real complaint is that we want the QoS without paying its full cost.

Hmm, sort of ironic that a comment about bias that is ostensibly based solely on religious affiliation would actually be a much better example of prejudicial bias. Unfortunately, such hypocritical blindness is all too common.