That customer is lost anyway as you can't treat her right, no matter what you do...

But to come back to technical issues, your example is flawed, because

• You don't need unlimited internet access for sending/receiving eMail.

• Private network access is not required at work, therefore you don't even need access to any freemailers.

• There's the concept of intranet. You don't need to intermingle intra- and internet. Set up two networks with very, very, very strict passing rules, if, for whatever reason, you need to access them from each other.

A regular 25 gallons of diesel would get you to about 750 miles?

Excuse me? That's 95l of Diesel for about 1200km.

Even my 11 year old VW Golf IV TDI (1.9l engine w/ 90 metric HP/66kW) does 950km (590 miles) on *half* of those 95l/25gal and on a real everyday commuting mix, not some fake test course.

And I'm not quite known for my defensive driving, so I like to go fast wherever and whenever possible. The same car and engine can be driven 1200km (750 miles) on a single tank of 55l (14.5gal) if driven fuel-optimized rather than fun-optimized.

A CD is a data carrier on which the audio data is typically stored in way less corrupted way than the Generation MP3 is used to consume.

Maybe my ears differ just enough from the average physical model, but listening to MP3 for longer time makes me dizzy -- and I see no point in buying artificially crippled audio.

I had always wondered how to resolve conservation of light's angular momentum during destructive interference of collinear laser pulses consisting of ph[o]tons of the same "handedness."

Bingo, Sir.

Never been up to 185mph, only 165mph (BMW M350i). It definitely brings your pulse up to speed, although the biggest problem is not wind but other drivers. Especially those who think that the world ends around 90mph and any vehicle accelerates as slowly as theirs.

But what truly amazed me was that according to the board computer it only used 13.5l/100km (abt. 17.5mpg). That is almost reasonable -- especially when compared to e.g. what my Olds Ninety-eight Regency swallowed during my US time... Without even going anyware remotely up to 3-digit speeds.

Admittedly, when watching the video, one notices that going from 100km/h to 200km/h takes 17 seconds, whereas 200km/h to 300km/h over a minute (probably about 10km in length). The entire 9 minutes of the video cover about 40km in range, i.e. an average speed of 266km/h.

Still, compared to the Bugatti's 1001hp that very Audi S8 is significantly underpowered (although the Bugatti might not make full use of them in terms of acceleration, AFAIK the gearbox won't stand that).

No, it's not the use of the environment variable. It's the use of non-standard packages -- and the will to throw them wherever you like them. If they are placed in a standard directory, e.g. ~/.TeX/ or /usr/share/textmf/tex/latex/ [*] then you don't even need to fiddle around with the environment variable.

Still, you would need s/o to install that very fancy package you liked to use.

[*] Or, you're a nice guy and copy the used style files into the respective working directory which then gets archived, compressed, and sent to the collaborator. That would be the Word approach, clobbering everything into one container, saving a few hassles but eventually leading to different versions of the same style file hidden in the respective document directories.

Anything that changes TEXPATH would inherently make your documents work only on your system.

I see you didn't grok the concept of environment variables.

If *I* prefer to put my stuff in ~/.TeX/ and *you* prefer to put it in c:\misc\texpckgs\, then we can exchange compileable documents *because* we are individually able to adjust TEXPATH to our needs. All you need to tell me (or vice versa) is which standard and non-standard packages are required. It's then up to me (or you) to install them where they can be found and/or update TEXPATH to do so.

As for Dreamweaver to LaTeX: They're both used to layout documents,

Same goes for a gazillion of other tools. Still, there's a difference between tools which put the layouts entirely into your hands, and tools, which have built-in printer/layouter intelligence.

That said, I definitely wouldn't use LaTeX for typesetting fancy magazines or flyers, as many required graphical elements (floating text/pictures being one of them...) are not easily accessible -- and dealing with pictures still is a major pain in the neck.

They also demonstrated the silliest thing about it, or any 200+ MPH car... It takes quite a while to get to those speeds. You may get 0-60 in 3 seconds, but the acceleration drops off rather rapidly. About the only place you can get a car like that up to speed *is* a test track with an enormous straight.

That's not even remotely true. You know, in Germany we *do* have cars on the road that do 260 to 320kph (abt. 160 to 200mph), although usually they get (electronically) limited to 250kph (155mph), and if you want to get an impression how an average car performs on a German autobahn at up to 320kph, have a look at this one:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1063940552930517285&ei=9L9RSqn2NZOY2AKKp6GTCA&q=audi+lpg+vmax

Sure, there's 45mph missing. But then, this is a (chiptuned) stock car, an unhappy 4.2l Audi A8 which fell into the wrong hands, which does *not* offer 1001hp.

I can't send a LaTeX document to someone else and expect them to be able to edit it and read it, even if they have LaTeX installed.

Then you are using some quite non-standard style files which are not part of the basic texlive installation, nor the full one. If you are using publisher-specific style files (IEEE, ACM, Springer LNCS, GI LNI, and whatnot...), then of course the recipient needs to have them installed to compile your work.

This, however, is most likely the case if you do collaborative work. Otherwise you wouldn't send source, but the compiled PDF.

Unfortunately any program able to handle everyone's different styles for document printing is probably going to be too specialized for everyone to have.

No idea what you are trying to say here. LaTeX will search any style file in dedicated directories. Ever tried updating $TEXPATH?

LaTeX shows that print layouts are a difficult problem. Even on webpages (screen display), to get really good layouts we rely on scripts, styles and templates from other sources, in most cases these are too numerous to make distribution of the document via e-mail trivial. Plus, we use specialized software (e.g. Dreamweaver).

Unfortunately there's no good solution that I know of for this. Simply throwing text and images into a document does not make it readable, and there's no software that can simply take the jumble and make it readable, it takes a human touch to produce a good layout.

Well, there's a reason why there's something like layouters and printers (the people, not the machine). It takes at least experience to design both, eye-friendly *and* appropriate, layouts. Web and printed media is full of examples where someone thought "hey, that program's wizard should do" -- or where they designed everything in Word and Powerpoint, violating each and every rule of proper design.

Care to explain how Dreamweaver relates to LaTeX?

That it takes *knowledge* and *talent* to come up with a pleasant layout is no problem of LaTeX, although for the average joe it is *easier* to cough up a pleasantly-looking document (assuming that he uses a standard design template and not some bogged-up "let's make it look as ugly as it can be" like the ACM style) than with e.g. Word. Kerning, microspacing, orphans, widows, hyphenization, LaTeX will take care of that cause it was *designed* to adhere to such printing rules.