Don't make the mistake of lumping all "religious"/believing people into one basket...

There are plenty of "religious" people who have nothing more than a habit, or label, or form, of belief. I know nothing about the first set of people referenced by the parent, but I can assure you they are not representative of the believing people I know.

When my wife's aunt, a believing Christian, was dying of old age, the aunt was upset because it was taking so long and she wanted to move on. We were all rejoicing when she passed.

When my grandfather, a believing Christian, was dying with an event that left him with no reasonable chance of recovery, the right amount of pain control eased his passing. We were sad not to have him with us, but glad for him. When Grandma followed him a year later, we were glad for her.

I don't believe in making people suffer when they are bound for some place they want to go.

Regardless of your belief set, I think we can agree that it's not good to make people suffer because we have trouble letting go of them.

I absolutely agree that tires make a huge difference, and I've always tried to buy the best traction all-weather tire I could.

I've found the Michelin HydroEdge to be a great tire for holding the road in dry and wet conditions. But they proved to be absolutely the worst tire I've ever used for snowy conditions. When I lived in the north, we'd switch from summer tires to snow tires when the first snow was forecast, but living here, where we may have snow on the ground for just a few days a year, it just doesn't make sense. The postal carriers put snow chains on their cars when it snows, but most folks just stay home until the roads are passable again.

The fun thing about Ozark roads is they're not straight or level, not for very long. Since we moved here 8 years ago, we've discovered that even the best 80K mile tire only lasts us 20K miles. It's totally fun to buy a brand new set of tires for each car EVERY YEAR. But I guess that's the price we pay for living someplace really peaceful (well, except for that blasted regional airport they built 3 miles from me two years ago). At least the wildlife doesn't seem to mind that much.

Certainly; we're in total agreement. I was merely responding to another poster who said that the south does not know how to deal RATIONALLY with significant amounts of snow.

It's rational to not purchase and maintain equipment that would get very little use, just as it is rational for the upper eastern seaboard to generally not worry about hurricanes.

Now, I live about 600 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, so it would be rational for me not to worry about hurricanes. Nevertheless, we had the remains of a major gulf hurricane come through here about 5-6 years ago. Even though it had reduced to tropical storm intensity, it caused a significant amount of damage. When I built my house, I insisted on using hurricane clips for the roof, and metal straps from the foundation to the first floor walls and between floors of the house, not because I expected that to protect us from a tornado (it won't) but to protect us from the periodic high winds we get here. I've lived here 8 years now, and we've had 70+MPH straight line winds on numerous occasions.

The hurricane clips were cheap insurance.

I live in a rural area in the Ozarks of Arkansas. It is true that a very small amount of snow (to my upper midwest born/raised sensibilities) brings school to a crashing halt here. But it's not because people do not know how to deal rationally with snow. It's because there are no snow plows, no deicer, and, most importantly, no pavement.

When nearly every road has a significant slope and gravel only if you're very very fortunate, roads become nearly impassible with even a small amount of snow. At only two inches of snow, my neighbors (all of them) are unable to make it up the hill to the highway. When the school buses can not reach the students, and less than 10% of the students are in a position to get to school otherwise, there is just no point in holding school. So...my kids get far more snow days than they want. They've lost their Spring Break the last two years because of snow days...

BTW, did you know that the Honda Odyssey becomes a total sled with only two inches of snow? I've watched our Odyssey, parked on a relatively level spot on the driveway, decide to just slide of the drive SIDEWAYS, down the hill, and into the ditch. Then it's, "wait for the snow to melt" before working to get it unstuck.

There are many people who need background music to concentrate. In her case, she is blocking out distracting noise from her coworkers. Yes, she plays it softly enough that she is still able to hear the phone ring. She always picks up after the first ring.

When I was in college, I had a little 12in black&white TV on my desk playing MTV whenever I was studying. Now, I have a private office, and I keep it absolutely quiet (well, except for the hum of servers and the whoosh of the supplemental AC unit).

Everyone has different requirements for concentration.

How is it appropriate to redefine terms after agreement to a contract? Verizon understood the physics of wireless, and chose to offer an unlimited data plan, with the promise of access to media-rich applications, despite the fact that the available radio bandwidth could not sustain the traffic load as customer load increased, at least not without a significant investment in new towers and microcells.

Verizon, of their own free will, marketed an unlimited data plan. My wife accepted their offer. What other considerations are there? It's not like my wife is doing anything contrary to her contract, her Verizon-generated contract...

Interesting perspective.

She owns an MP3 player; she has an iPod Touch. However, listening 8 hours per day while she works spreadsheets, she gets tired of listening to the same set of music over and over; hence Pandora. Since she listens to the music with a nice set of earphones, the sound quality is exactly equivalent to what she would get with an MP3 player, so quality is not an issue.

I understand the physics of bandwidth. However, Verizon sold an unlimited data plan, and advertised it as offering audio and video. If they are not going to give her what they sold her, they had better stop charging her $100/month for the privilege.

My wife purchased her Droid Incredible from Verizon last summer. She is totally thrilled with it and her unlimited data plan. With it, she is able to look up facts and answer questions where ever she is. It has proven to be a real assist.

She uses it to listen to Pandora while she is at work. Her employer allows 0 bandwidth for personal uses, so she spends the entire 8 hours per day listening to Pandora on 3G.

At 128Kbps, 8hours/day * 22 days per month works out to 10GB/month, and that is just listening to music, not watching any video or doing any web browsing.

2GB/month is totally inadequate for anything but browser lookups. It is not sufficient for any of the media-rich apps for which Verizon advertised the device.

When I was a child, I loved books (still do). Consumed the local public library in every town we moved to.

One of the most important book giving experiences I had in my life happened when I was in 2nd/3rd grade. My father ran a fast food restaurant, and some high schooler had dumped his science textbooks in the trashcan. My dad fetched them out and brought them home to me. One was physics (which led me to degrees in physics) and the other was chemistry (which was also a wonderful eye opener, and a great source of practical recipes for fun things like nitroglycerin; a friend of mine had an older brother who was a military chemist who liked to keep chemicals in the shed, so we actually got to make nitro).

Other great gifts I received were: microscope kit, telescope (but once again, the books were more important), Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics experimenters kit.

Also great fun: wood burning kit (art), leather working kit (art), model rocketry kit (loved designing and launching own designs...learned lots about aerodynamics)

Frisbee --- spent many many hours for days on end in summer playing Frisbee with a similarly inclined friend.

The game of Risk --- spent days on a single game.

Oh, that Chemistry book? When I got to high school and actually took chemistry, we had the same book, just a newer edition. Even though this was only 1979, the publisher had already removed the recipe for nitroglycerin from the textbook. I brought in my copy to show how it USED to be. :)

:) Yep, At 47, in the software development world I guess I qualify as an "older guy". :)

That's what I've always enjoyed about my computer path; my first job out of college was writing distributed processing applications (there were plenty of ways to implement object-oriented design without an object-oriented language, but yes, we jumped on them when they came along), and I'm still writing multi-core and multi-node distributed processing applications, writing multi-media services, digital signal processing, etc. It's great fun! :)

I've always been puzzled about the focus on languages. A language is just a tool or a palette. The important thing is being able to design software in a clear and efficient manner. Languages can typically be picked up in a very short period of time. I understand that the people who only understand buzzwords are blindly seeking a particular match, but if they were smart, they would look instead for a person who was a skilled designer of software, rather than a person who knew a particular language.

In my career so far (I'm sure that many others have a much broader list), I've had to write software in: assembler (IBM mainframe, 6052, 8085, Z-80, 8051, Z-8, 68K, X86), BASIC, FORTH, FORTRAN (4, 66, 77), RATFOR, lisp, C, C++, PASCAL, PROTEL, perl, tcl, python. Java I've written a couple of example programs in, but have never written in it professionally. But I presume it is no harder to become proficient at than all the others. ADA is a good language; people are starting to realize the value of the rigorous protections it applies. But yeah, we were writing ADA code back in 1995, and it didn't seem widespread outside the military at the time.

I take it you've never been to Arkansas, then...

I moved to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas (from Dallas, Texas) about 7 years ago...lovely area, genuinely kind people...

My father used to be facilities supervisor for a large banking chain, and he told me about the incidents where elderly customers did damage to bank branches because of unintended acceleration. One woman hit the wrong pedal as she was attempting to park in front of the bank, floored her large american-made car through the front of the building, through the teller counter, through the wall behind the teller counter into the employee break room, pushing the refrigerator through the back wall of the building...she kept the tires spinning, melting through the tile floor, until a bank employee opened the driver door, reached in and turned off the engine.

She then hopped out and, since she was at her desired destination, tried to make her deposit.

My dad had quite a laugh over the mess he had to get fixed. He was glad no one was hurt, of course.

You lie to your children? Interesting. We never have. No, we never pretended that Santa Claus came down the chimney and left Christmas gifts; the kids knew that Mom and Dad gave the gifts. We really enjoy the season, and enjoyed watching all the Christmas animated specials, but it was always just fun pretend. You might think that I somehow deprived my children of some magic of childhood, but they never did have to suffer the sudden realization that all the adults around them had been lying to them and laughing at them. Consequently, my children trust me absolutely, and we have a great relationship. I have children 19/17/15/14, and they are an absolute delight to be around.