I was not suggesting paying the church for everything. I was rather suggesting having contributions to the government be voluntary also. Of course, as has been pointed out, people tend to like their church but not their government, but one might also hope it would lead to the government having to be nice/unobtrusive/manifestly helpful enough to convince people to pay them. It says something that governments feel the need to threaten force to get enough funding.

Why would the byte order mark be at the end of the balloon instead of at the beginning?

On the one hand, churches do not force their members to tithe at gunpoint (at least, none in America of which I know). On the other hand, many seem to be doing just fine with their funding being completely from voluntary sources, even when some people make use of their resources without paying tithes. Makes you wonder whether the IRS is needed at all.

I have programs I wrote when I was 7 (at the latest, that is just the last file modification time). Nobody taught me logic beforehand. You internalize logic by playing with it. My dad just gave me a programming book (Getting Started with COLOR BASIC, for the TRS-80), & a while later (a year, a few years, I do not remember) I was to the point where he could no longer help me (despite done some programming in college). I also feel that a significant portion of my worldview has been influenced by learning about programming & computer hardware from an early age.

Even if you do not understand a specific mechanical or electronic device (or even biological mechanism), understanding the general principles of automation helps tremendously both with fixing things when they are broken & not getting taken for a ride by snake-oil salespeople. I wonder what effect teaching most kids programming might have more generally in life, beyond just interacting with computers. It might even help teach kids how to learn new things, rather than just learning what they are explicitly taught (although granted, that might require some pretty good educators).

The relevant number when worrying about non-adversarial hash collisions is the square root of the number of outputs (assuming they are close enough to uniformly distributed), due to the birthday paradox. So in the case of CRC32, more than ~2^16 files makes a collision likely (well, 2^16 gives about 39%), & with 2^22, the probability is nearly indistinguishable from 1 (it being over 99.9% for only 2^18 files).

I (apparently) never get hungry (for as far back as I can remember). I essentially just eat when it is time, & sometimes I accidentally eat too much or too little (or forget to eat at all). It would be great to have a pill/packet with the right amount of nutrition already measured out (plus some flavoring in just the right amount to make it taste good but not encourage overeating, & of course have different pills have different flavors) for most of the time so I could just take N a day (not necessarily 3, as the pill might have timed release, or else taking smaller doses more often might be better). & of course nothing stops one from still having the occasional traditional meal, e.g. when eating out with someone else.

If you take the holographic principle into account, it will eventually fill up if it is of finite size. Or do you have a pocket universe?

That way you could tell if someone copied it so you could sue them, of course.

Well, there are projects to make touchscreens with raised buttons & such for better feedback. If it had good enough resolution (quite possibly not with current prototypes) you could even output braille, & then the same phone (not necessarily the same apps) could be used by sighted & blind people alike.

I have SMS disabled (due to the extra cost, since most people I contact use Facebook or E-mail anyway). Incoming texts appear to be dropped silently without notifying the sender.

Doctor Who & the Curse of the Fatal Death

I suspect the word "marijuana" has a much higher probability in most people's minds, even among Slashdot readers, than "Majorana." Most people simply have not thought about it enough to make conditioning on "particle" sufficient to change this. Although after this article it should change for many Slashdot readers.

Playing games on my DSi using just the 2 built-in speakers but with "surround" mode (something similar to binaural, I presume, given there are only 2 speakers) enabled occasionally leaves me looking around for some noise behind me. Either my auditory cortex is easier to fool than most, or their method works even without headphones (or both).

I raytraced a simple scene once where I solved the rendering equation analytically (to see if it was practical), & the result was badly out of focus because I had neglected to include a lens (I did not expect it to be that realistic). Better raytracing does in fact produce non-perfectly-focused images, even with approximate solutions (although it is possible that said improvements to raytracing have different technical names than "raytracing").

2 that come to mind are the SCP wiki & some groups of entries on Everything2