Is the social interaction enabled by religion:

It would be really interesting to make an additional study to compare that against a group of people that are not religious but that have a simmilar level of social interaction.

9/11 for a quick and easy start.

Wait, are you saying we're all inundated by radiation from nuclear fusion? How can we stop this atrocity! We must protect ourselves from the radiation of that nuclear fusion - think of the children!

Apple won't do that - they'd rather you buy an iPhone than use an iPad or iPod to act as a phone. They are in the business of selling hardware, their software and services exist to sell new hardware - not expand the capability of old units.

However, there IS a way to do what you ask - Skype. I use it (along with Google Voice), my Skype number ($5/month) is my main business number. It will ring me at my computer and my cell phone, wherever I am connected to the Internet. For example, I'm in China right now, but I do have a China Mobile account with data - and I get calls from the US on my Skype number whilst out and about in town. I also have voice mail, for the relatively few times I am not connected (or when I am not available). Yes, it costs $5/month to have that phone number, but I have unlimited incoming call minutes - and it's always live, around the world.

Well, yeah, it can be pretty common for US companies to overlook Mexico sometimes...

Well, "set a thief to catch a thief."

One of the reasons for the dysfunction we have in Washington is that all the rules that are supposed to protect the public interest have become so complicated that they actually promote crony capitalism. You need someone who knows how to hack the system to catch people hacking the system.

I'll do my best, though you probably will refuse to undertake the first part of the exercise: thrust your mind back to December 22, 2005, the day before the patent application was filed, and block out everything you've seen since that date.

To unlock their phones, people do things like entering a code or holding down a physical key, because almost everyone's phone has physical keys. Others have flip phones and merely open their phone to wake it up. There are a few phones out there with resistive touch screens like the Palm line... they too use physical sleep/wake switches.

In a somewhat related field, Micron has had a patent application published for unlocking computers by moving the mouse in a geometric shape, such as a line, square, or triangle. They also talk about doing it for touch screens, like those on kiosks or point of sale terminals.

So, say you want to come up with a new, intuitive way to unlock a phone? What do you invent?

Now, I'm sure you jumped up and yelled "slide to unlock!" But is that really true, if it's really 2005 and you've never heard of that?

Plus, say you did implement a slide to unlock feature... would it be like Micron's or Neonode's: draw a geometric shape on a screen with no indication of success or failure or other response until the figure is complete? Why, that increases security, since an intruder wouldn't know that they failed as soon as they deviate from the required line! That seems like a great idea, right?

Back in 2005, no one had thought of having a dynamic image following the user's finger as they drew a line to unlock the phone. No one wrote anything about it, made a prototype, or even apparently mentioned it in passing.

Now jump forward one year, to December 2006... There are still no capacitive touch screen phones on the market. Slide keyboard phones are really popular and, of course, unlock when you physically slide out the keyboard. There are still plenty of flip phones. Palm has a great color smart phone that you unlock with a button on the top (it also doubles as the IR port). How come no one has implemented a slide-to-unlock system if it had been obvious for a full year?

Now jump forward another year. Apple's iPhone is released to great fanfare and includes a slide-to-unlock system. It's the only one on the market that does - which makes you wonder if it's really been obvious for two whole years?

Jump another 18 months. It's now fall 2008 and Samsung comes out with its first modern smartphone. And it implements slide to unlock. In fact, everyone who has put out a smart phone after the iPhone is using slide to unlock systems, including even Palm, who had smart phones before the iPhone that didn't use it. If it had been obvious for almost four years, why hadn't anyone else done it before the iPhone? Was the iPhone the inspiration for everyone? And therefore, can you really say that, years before the iPhone, it was obvious?

If an idea is relatively trivial to implement, but no one ever even had the inkling of a thought to doing it, is it obvious? Or is it one of those simple, beautiful ideas that change an industry once some inventive person first creates it?

Fact: South Ossetian paramilitaries have carried out a genocide of Georgians after 08.08.08, while Russian "peacekeepers" stationed in the region looked the other way. Not any different from Kosovo, really, except for a higher body count from victors' justice.

Now go suck Vova's khuy.

I'm Russian. I just happen to not be blind to the history of my own country.

Dealers try to mystify and generally complicate the process of buying a car by offering to arrange financing, making you a trade-in "deal" and obfuscating the true cost of the car. Fortunately you can get a detailed break down of the dealer's costs (including factory to dealer incentives) from Consumer Reports. Then you arrange financing elsewhere (or pay cash), sell your existing car yourself, decide on how much markup you'll pay, and resolve not to buy any additional services or warranties through the dealer. If you do those things you won't be walking into the dealership like a lamb to slaughter. They might as well try to fuck the Rock of Gibraltar. Some of them will try, but you just walk out the door and find a dealership that will sell you a car on your terms.

The last car I bought I walked into the dealer; the salesman saw I had the printouts and said, "I'm not stupid. How much are you going to pay?" I named a price 5% over the dealer's true cost. I could have opened with 3%, but I appreciated not having to go through the whole ridiculous ritual. It was a reasonable offer and the salesman immediately accepted. Half an hour later we finished up the paperwork; I dropped off a cashier's check the following day and drove my car off the day after that. It was all low-key and civilized, and by executing the deal quickly the dealership earned a fair paycheck for a couple hours of work.

This is the way buying a car should be: you tell the dealer which model you want, hand over a check and drive off. Letting the dealer do anything else "for you" is asking to be screwed over. Despite what the salesman claims, there is nothing the dealer can do to make your life simpler, except maybe fetching your plates from the motor vehicle registry. Do everything else yourself, including determining the price you'll pay for the car.

Yes, Stalin himself was a Georgian. That did not prevent him from turning the USSR into a Russian nation-empire.

Genocide did happen, it just happened to be a genocide of Georgians by Ossetians, rather than the other way around.

The new Ukrainian government did not try to pull anything like that, it didn't even threaten or gave any hint of such. That's why Russian claims that occupation of Crimea is to "protect the local population" are so obviously full of BS - protect from whom?

Circa Lenin, it was true - that guy was an aggressive anti-nationalist.

But then, something happened.

"I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place, the Russian people. I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people, but also because it possesses a clear mind, a staunch character, and patience."
- Joseph Stalin

Imagine you have a website called "AllahIsFalse.com". Now, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and many other Muslim countries may very well block that domain; however, with a wonderful UN-controlled Internet, some international bureaucrats sitting in New York can now decide that your website is actually a hate-site, and thus turn you off around the entire world. Since, after all, some people in some other countries - who have bureaucrats sitting in New York - don't like what you have, and we want to all get along...

Saudi Arabia is nothing. Think Russia and China.