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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (604725)	3/22/2011 8:00:56 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1576945

>> top technology, Ten, you Bay Area types will never have tech like we do in Central Arkansas. You're decades behind. We've got high-speed Internet, thanks to the Obama stimulus plan. No dialup for me! I mean, actual twisted pair to the home. (While the world is moving to wireless, the O-Man brings us copper).

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (604725)	3/22/2011 10:57:14 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1576945

Try again Ted. I love it here in America. It's still the greatest country in the world. Whose arguing that point? Why do you come up with strawmen when you are backed into a corner? And I also love it here in California. Still the Golden state with the best food and wine, top technology, great cultural diversity, and cool arts and music. That's something the utopians will never choke off despite their pipe dreams. Well you know what.....you push your red state ideology while enjoying the benefits of a blue state. Why am I not surprised you don't see the hypocrisy. Since you're the one who hates America so much, when are you going to move out? You are the one claiming American exceptionalism......I am trying to figure out what exactly you mean.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (604725)	3/23/2011 8:19:55 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576945

Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says By Jason Palmer bbc.co.uk Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries. The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part. One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages. At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another. "The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona. "It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility. "For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not." Some of the census data the team used date from the 19th century Dr Wiener continued: "In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%." The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious" category. They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction. However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a "network structure" more representative of the one at work in the world. "Obviously we don't really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society," he said. However, he told BBC News that he thought it was "a suggestive result". "It's interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going. "Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out."