Belief - "My dog is my best friend. My dog loves me!"

Reality - "You live alone with your dog. Your dog will be eating your remains 8 hours after you drop dead."

About 5 minutes after this is implemented, the protocols will be cracked. About 5 minutes later some prankster will be broadcasting the "kill" signal to every car in Paris from a lunchbox portable radio from the top of the Eiffel tower.

There is a levy on blank CDs. (I can't remember the last time I bought a spindle of CDs). It used to be about 30 cents a disk, which is insane considering bulk CD-R cost about 25 cents. At least they didn't go full retard and charge for MP3 players. At the time the levy was introduced, MP3 players were about 128 to 256 MB capacity and I can recall fees of $5 to $10 on MP3 players (based on 5 cents/Megabyte) being considered. The music industry would love to collect $800 on a 16GB ipod nano.

It is even worse than that with religious folk. All sorts of people will go into "Cognitive Dissonance" mode when their strongly held beliefs are challenged and some will refuse to change their beliefs no matter what evidence is presented. With religious people you get this plus also they are convinced that it is their faith (how strongly they cling to their beliefs - no matter what) that determines their reward in the afterlife. There is no point in attempting logical or evidence based discussions with someone like that.

Yes we do. How else could we type Mötörhead.

If your knees are hosed do something that doesn't aggravate them. Swim, ride a bike, paddle a canoe, do whatever it is that you can do. Otherwise, yes, you are just making excuses.

The medieval Christians had their list of the 7 Deadly Sins (Sins that may lead you to eternal damnation). Fat people are the living embodiment of 3 of them - Sloth, Greed and Gluttony. We look down on fat people because they offend our sensibilities at some deep, almost unconscious level, that we have as a bone deep part of our culture. (Not saying it's right, just saying why.)

Tell Him - No Foam please.

If transport trucks had to pay for their true share of the cost of road maintenance (based on your weight^4 calculation) you would see a massive shift of freight off the roads and onto rail. Trucks have been getting a free ride for far too long.

"sheer force of capital" - nice, I will have to steal that and use it sometime.

1. the guy selling the bike got his money 59 seconds sooner, is this not a benefit? 2. Anybody who wants can buy the premium service. That means there may be multiple people competing for the $100 spread between the buyer and seller. In your scenario, they have all posted adds selling a bike for $599, but only one can buy the bike for $500, and the rest have to buy the next highest priced bike if someone accepts their ad. Some of them may not make any money or may lose money on the transaction. Therefore, in order to prevent this, the next time they will offer a bit more than $500 to the seller, to make it more likely that their buy offer is accepted.The trade still happens more quickly, the seller gets more money, and the HFT guy gets a smaller profit. Over many trades, the competition reduces the HFT traders profit, while still speeding up the rate that bikes are bought and sold.

Maybe I fail at reading, but how do you get a negative expected value. If I guess the answer to a question I have a .25 chance of scoring 1 point and a .75 chance of scoring -.25 points. Add it up and I get an expected outcome of 0.25x1 +0.75x(-.25)= 0.0625 points per question.

A fed bear is a dead bear!

If memory serves, back in the day Radio Shack used to sell a $20 "Video Image Stabilizer" that was marketed as a way to clean up "home videos", but was understood by everyone to be a quick easy macrovision filter.

In high school a very smart student can get honours marks with minimal effort. In high school an average student can get honours marks by working very hard.

In engineering school a very smart student needs to also work very hard just to get by. If you are diligent about doing all the problem assignments, hand in all the labs, study efficiently (in a small group really worked for me), be very strategic about obtaining all possible marks, you can do reasonably well. In engineering school an average student can't get by on hard work, because the workload is too high, and will likely fail.