On the other hand, I very often get PDFs that evince can't print correctly. For example, anything lilypond outputs is full of artifacts when printed in evince, perfect when printed in acroread or viewed in evince...

I only saw it on the German television news, and that means it was pretty fluff-oriented, but the impression I had was that they simply withdrew some of her bone marrow, treated this in a lab, and injected it into the heart muscle.

I don't even know the precise nature of the ailment that was corrected, just that they stressed the difference in price tag to a traditional surgery.

I think your parent had some sarcasm in the last sentence that you missed. Embyronic stem cells need government funding because no sane entrepreneur would waste his money on a treatment that has no chance of working. Or at least that's what I understood.

Unfortunately, I think the real story is that if someone gets embryonic stem cells to work somehow, he will patent the process to make a fortune out of it. The pharmaceutical companies want to get to this holy grail, but don't want to risk their own money on a long shot, so they demand government funding. Whereas the adult stem cells are saving lives today (but not getting the pharmaceutical companies rich). I heard a couple years ago about a German experiment that cured a congenital heart disfunction with donor-supplied stem cells. This cost a total of 200 or 300 euros.

I seem to recall that Microsoft was saying just recently that this Beta would be the only Beta and then (possibly) one release candidate, and then release, because this one was so rock solid. If they hold true to that, then comments about the stability and upgradability of the beta are in fact pretty relevant. If they've backed off of that position and I missed it, I apologize in advance.

And if the window bar is off the screen as well, Alt-Space will get you the window bar menu, allowing you to move it.

Latitude lines are not great circles. Great circles have the same radius as the sphere itself. (Latitude lines are not geodesic on a sphere.)

I was referring specifically to the geometry of the surface of the sphere. There the geodesics ("lines") are great circles. All great circles intersect at two points (which are antipodal). Hence a two-dimensional space with no non-intersecting lines.

Unless the space is curved... In Riemannian geometry, all lines intersect exactly twice, and this is a two-dimensional geometry (the surface of a sphere). So there cannot exist an arbitrary large number of lines without overlapping in a 2-dimensional space with Riemannian geometry.

The point about factors of twelve is that it is very convenient to talk about 1/2 a foot, 1/3 of a foot, 1/4 of a foot and have those come out to "nice" numbers. With base 10, you have 1/2, 1/5, and 1/10 that come out nice, but 1/3 and 1/4 bring you into fractions. Thus, your parent is saying that the base twelve system is "better" for day to day use. Since most of the world has managed the switch, the argument is not decisive, but it does partially explain why it's hard to put the change through.