I feel the need to respond to this as a person that would be viewed as 'real religious'. I have had to deal with a similar situation twice in the last few years, once in my own home.

My father-in-law had been fighting a rare form of cancer for 10 years, and finally succumbed to it in January, 2009, after going down hill very fast in the last week or so of his life. As a family we chose to have home hospice come in and take care of him (and us) for the last few days of his life. We could have chosen to fight for him, but we knew it would be pointless and only cause him pain for what little time he had left. Instead he died peacefully in his home, surrounded by his family.

Last year, my wife and I found out that she was pregnant with our second child. At 20 weeks we found out the baby had a rare and fatal form of dwarfism. We could have chosen to go to a hospital with a NICU, so that when our daughter came they'd be able to whisk her away, put her under a heat lamp, put her on a ventilator, and perhaps extend her life for a few hours or days. Again, she would die in the end and we would not have been able to hold her for the whole time. Instead we went to our local hospital, with doctors and nurses who knew what was going on. We were able to hold her and love her for the 15 minutes we had with her while she was still alive.

In both cases, we chose to NOT go through extraordinary means to 'save' our family members. As Christians, we know that both of them were safe and will be in Heaven waiting for us. We miss them both, of course. But as educated, intelligent people, we knew that we couldn't save them here on Earth. We understood the pain they would go through if we tried. We also understood that we would feel pain and loss ourselves once they were no longer here.

I believe that those who choose to do that to their own family have not thought things through, or are in such a state that they are unable to. Or they don't want to deal with the coming pain of loss. Or they are so afraid of death themselves that they can't understand deal with it even in others. Or any number of other things. I don't think this has anything to do with whether somebody is 'religious' or not. It is a human thing.

Please do not assume that all Christians think as your one family branch did. There is a whole spectrum of people in any group. We are all human, and flawed.

Don't know if it's just something I goofed up myself or not, but I have some minor issues with what happens when I log in.

I tend to go right to slashdot.org/search.pl, as I'm generally not fond of the front page. At that point, I'll click on the Log In button, then depending on the phase of the moon, I'll either get a little dialog window that pops up, or I'm bumped to a new Log In page. Either way, I log in, then get dumped to the main page. This same basic thing happens if I go into an article/story and then log in. I still get dumped back to the main /. page.

Why can I not be dumped back to the search.pl or story pages? Better, I think at one time slashdot remembered who I was and logged in automatically for me. That would be nice to have again. Similarly, I bring my laptop back and forth to work, home, and where ever. It'd be nice to not have to re-log from each IP I connect from.

My wife used to work in the Benson Ford Research Center, I used to volunteer there. That operating machine shop is more operational than you might think. Greenfield Village gives you the option to take a ride in an original Model T. These things break down on occasion, and need replacement parts. Well, the BFRC has the original schematics for all of those parts, and generally they machine the needed parts in that shop. How's THAT for cool?

One or two of those Model T's aren't exactly original. They were built recently using those schematics.

The Government gets to restrict our freedom's and buy bigger shiny new toys and has even more reasons to keep printing money until it costs more to print it than its worth.

In a sense (cents?) they've been doing this for years

Or in a valley that is poorly covered by cells. I have a co-worker who can't get anything beyond dial-up because she is too far out of town (2 miles, maybe) and is nowhere near cable. This is in Western Wisconsin, perhaps 30 miles from downtown St. Paul, MN.

Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.

I am the Unix admin at work (mainly Solaris 10, with some REALLY old linux we haven't gotten around to migrating, FC1 and RH 7.2 for those morbidly curious), and I agree, I love those 3 features in Solaris 10. I just wish I had time to really dig in to the dtrace stuff.

One thing I don't recall anyone mentioning as specific to Solaris is services. Basically they are the init scripts with dependencies and self-restarting built in. I've often wondered, does nobody else appreciate/like services? Or, am I showing inexperience and they have equivalents throughout the unix world? When I first heard of them I wondered why unix folks hadn't done something like that years ago.

OK, I'm somewhat worried now. I was going to make a snarky comment on how I can't seem to find the ipconfig command on my Mac, but it *actually* has one! Mac is following Windows?!?

At least I'm still safe with not having on on my Solaris boxen...

I concur. We had VoIP in Michigan, through Wide Open West. I wish they were around here, never had any real complaints with the service. To the UPS comment, I doubly concur. Back in 2005, I was trying to apply for the job I currently have. I needed to fax/email my application up to River Falls, WI. Naturally, the power died. I happened to have a small UPS handy, but the battery was dead. Time to yank the battery out of my Jetta. It was enough to power the laptop, cable modem/VoIP box, and a small switch for quite some time while I finished stuff off and sent it up.

To be fair, I would probably have needed to power all of the above with a land line too, substitute DSL box for cable modem. Still was kinda fun assembling everything, in a geeky kind of way. Made an impression with the HR lady I was working with.

BTW, the job I was applying for was Systems Admin., so the above was one bonus way of showing my troubleshooting skills.

Actually they get their new stories via their Blackberry's.

Their Blackberry's what? Enquiring minds want to know...

My dad had one of these as well. I can't believe the hell that thing went through.

In the mid-late 80's, my brother took it for a spin and crashed it. Dad took his welding torch, cut off the bent fender metal, and drove it home. Without coolant. Only a couple of miles, but still.

Decided to rebuilding the engine while he worked on repairing the Suburban. The thing had an inch or more of oil/crud caked on inside. Cleaned it all up, it ran fine. Some time later, he ended up selling it to an acquaintance, for the engine.

I miss that thing.

Just wow. If I understood the german in one of the related videos correctly, each vehicle (car, truck, etc.) took around a week of work to complete. The various LEDs are all individually functional, for instance turn signals, break lights, and cabin lights. They use fairly simple steering control, just a wire under the road that a magnet attached to the front wheels follows. However, all else is controlled by a central computer sending instructions to the microcontrollers on each vehicle.

More interesting tidbits from the one video: automatic battery recharging for each vehicle, cycling between day and night in various sections, including turning on vehicle and street lights, building fires with smoke that get attended to by fire trucks, a car accident scene complete with police and what looks like the Thing holding up the front of a car.

I swear, the next time I'm in Germany, I have to look this place up. It would do any /.er proud!

...s.....

Unable to translate time zones?

Fine. I did a Google search for time zones. Took the first link it returned http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/
Sorted by country. Berlin, DE is currently at 2:09 AM. New York is currently at 8:09 PM. So, 6 hours difference. Add 6 hours to NY's 04:00, you get 10:00 AM. Or, get your but out there NOW!