"the data collection hasn't seemed to stop any terrorist attack at all": And you know this how?

"75% of Americans disagree that their government is trustworthy all or most of the time, yet they view most departments favourably? That makes little sense..." Welcome to Simpson's Paradox. Simpson's Paradox may not make intuitive sense, but it makes mathematical sense. (I don't know whether these survey results are an instance of Simpson's Paradox, but it seems quite possible.)

Or perhaps the rest of us are more realistic than you. We know there are bad guys out there who don't like the US and would like nothing better than to see it lose its power, or for some of them cease to exist. Perhaps you see this as paranoia; the rest of us see it as realism.

Simpson's Paradox

Y'all beat me to the post. Well, if anyone wants to know more, there's a description (with plot spoiler) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Where I work, the most requested feature for Powerpoint is Track changes (like Word has had for years). I realize the form factor is a bit different, but it should be possible.

I was replying to the comment that asked why I didn't mouse over the ribbon to explore commands. As for "help", it seems to have gotten much more nebulous than it used to be. I suppose I could google what I want, but that sort of demonstrates how inscrutable the ribbon is; I never had to google to figure out where Word's menu commands were.

Agreed, I virtually never guess from the icon what it will do. I liken them to hieroglyphs. And there's a reason that we went 1500 years without being able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics--in fact, until we found an alphabetic representation of what the hieroglyphics meant. Likewise, with the ribbon I have to look at the label, which is written in alphabetic characters. Since I (and most other people I know) have to read the label anyway, why not do away with the useless hieroglyphs, and give us a ribbon with just the labels? Labels could be nested hierarchically, and...well, you get the picture.

I did that, I didn't find what I was looking for. (Lots of stuff I have no use for, though: Mailings? How 1980s!)

I can't find features in the ribbon that I used to use when there were menus, and I could more effectively explore the command space. So if anything, I use fewer features, and less effectively, with the ribbon. I count myself blessed when I get home and can use LibreOffice.

"The rest of the message can only be guessed at."

Well, I'll guess. It's 42.

I don't know whether empathy was a precise concept--maybe some psychologist tried to define it, but IANAPs.

Sometimes it seems like my dog, and maybe my cat, have empathy. But I would never think of them as having a theory of my mind. I realize I may be anthropomorphizing, but I think the picture--whether or not it's true--provides some insight into what the difference would be between empathy and theory of mind. The fact that we can distinguish them, however, does not of course mean that the distinction is useful in reality; that's an empirical--not definitional--question.

Spying on another country does not constitute an attack; bringing down its systems would be an attack. Like bringing down a company's computer systems would be an attack. (Spying on US companies by network infiltration has been going on for decades, including defense contractors; to my knowledge, while that spying was frowned on, it hasn't been labeled an attack.)

It's also the case that North Korea is technically still at war with South Korea, which is an ally of ours. And it has attacked boats in international waters. And it has nukes, which it has threatened to use on other countries, including Japan (another US ally) and the US. And it has rockets capable of achieving orbit, which could in principle be used to deliver those nukes. I don't say that any of these are plausible imminent threats, but it would be foolish of the US not to use all means it can--short of attacks--to keep track of the reality behind the threats.

Whereas Sony is an entertainment company.

What are you smoking?

"...they must have forgotten the user-testing." Actually, I think they used the same testers that tested certain operating system "up"grades. And yes, that does test users. Severely.