So, wait. You mean we can't reduce a person's $VAR down to a single number? Color me surprised...

Information Technology is not important enough in the eyes of so many higher-ups. Until an unrelated complete campus power outage, our primary data center was situated immediately under the Men's restroom, complete with leaky pipes.

I'll just let that image soak in for a while...

NBC coverage has always sucked, in my opinion, even more so with Mr. Costas at the helm. When we lived in Detroit, my wife and I would watch CBC coverage from Windsor. Absolutely blew away anything from the States. One of the few reasons we miss the Detroit area. That and the regular water main breaks...

Keyboards? No. However, I've heard of entire civilizations being wiped out due to lack of sanitized phones.

According to the Bible, all who are in Heaven will at some point get new bodies. The Bible doesn't really say much of anything about what it's like in Heaven currently, especially as related to the questions you've asked. All of the following is pretty my my own thoughts. So far as I'm aware, nothing contradicts what the Bible says. Those who have better knowledge than me will likely chime in, if anyone's following this thread anymore.

So, here's what I currently believe: once my daughter and father-in-law died, they 'woke up' (for lack of a better phrase) in Heaven with bodies similar to what they had here on Earth. My best guess is that my father-in-law now has a body at least somewhat younger than when he was here, while my daughter has a body older than what she had here (really not certain on her body, though). In both cases, those bodies will be perfectly functioning. But I think there will still be a good age gap between the two. My daughter will be older and able to understand & speak whatever language is used in Heaven. If there were some way I could visit her, and still return to Earth after, I would be able to speak with her in whatever language; God would allow me to understand. I'd probably remember it as English, however. I have know idea what knowledge she would have now.

One final bit. The Bible talks about a new Heaven and a new Earth. These will be created at the end of time. Along with the new Heaven and Earth, I think God will give everyone that is in the current Heaven a completely new body, one which is our 'true' body, if you will. Again, I don't have a lot to go on here, just my best understanding of what the Bible and my own knowledge tell me. There is a book that was fairly recently published called "Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back" which I've read. So far as I can tell nothing in the book really contradicts what the Bible says. It gave me some of the ideas above, though some of the book I'm still trying to reconcile. Perhaps it will give you some hint of what Heaven could be like.

I hope this helps you, or at least answers some of your questions. Feel free to email/respond to this posting with more questions/comments. I'll try to monitor the thread over the next weeks for further postings.

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...