Serious companies are aware of vendor lock-in and prefer to implement mission-critical calculations in a vendor agnostic way. Do the scripting in something like python, R or whatever suits you, drop the results in a database, and use excel to access that database. It's easier to maintain, simplifies version control and is vendor agnostic.

(The whole topic also highly depends on your commercial niche, the country, your customers etc. Personally I rarely get MS documents at all (only from universities sometimes), it's mostly Open Office anyway.)

This is what a tablet looked like in 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TC1100-1.JPG

It's flat (in 2004 standards), rectangular, with uniformly rounded corners, with bezels of about equal width, with the front completely made of hardened glass. There even is a HP Logo on the same place where the button on the ipad is (admittedly with a different function, but visually quite similar). I own one of those. They really look similar.

I can only see two differences: The color of the bezel and the absence of those leds.

6 years later, Apple somehow "invents" that design. It's magic!

This is what people are upset about. Either Apple _really_ innovates, then ok, fine, let them have that design patent and sue all the copycats. Or Apple has to accept the fact that tablets with a glass front all look similar (which is what they did, they basically went with the tc1000 and made the bezel black!). You can't have both.

Nope, "climate change" was a spin introduced by Frank Luntz (a Republican "political consultant"), to make global warming sound nicer.

Exactly. Anarchism subsumes a pretty wide political spectrum [1]. For those inclined to read more: John Zerzan's assay Future Primitive appears to me as the most widely cited publication. Wikipedia also has a nice introduction in the article anarcho-primitivism.

[1] = Still personally I would not include primitivism, simply because they archive the stateless society by abolishing society as a whole. With that reasoning killing the whole population is anarchist, too, because without population there is no society and therefore no state...

Me too. So let's call all of them cosmonauts from now on, as that notation clearly was the first in use (applied to Juri Gagarin).

If by bone loss you mean osteoporosis, then there are a few additional factors:

• - genetics seem to play a role
• - higher intake of phosphor than calcium
• - lack of exercise (push ups and the like, stuff that stimulates muscle growth)

If your point of China and India lacking this problem is true, than I would assume the culprit is the lack of exercise as the jobs move from physically demanding things farming etc. to cubicle and assembly line jobs (which of course still is demanding, but in a different sense).

I take your population density argument and give you norway: 80mbit for about 60 Euros a month :)

(Norway has one third of the population density of the US).

System On a Chip - the embedded equivalent of cpu, gpu, nortbridge, southbridge etc. combined in one package.

The GDP does not measure wealth, but income. Sure, China and maybe India have a higher GDP for 2 years now IIRC, but they are still quite poor in comparison, i.e. the amount of stuff _saved_ over the years is still much lower.

The amount of wealth per capita available right now is probably more important for a decision from Google than potential wealth in 15 or 20 years.

Germany is the third richest country in the world.

AFAIK the problem mostly isn't the size of the jaw but the position of the teeth: They more often than not come out diagonally, and thus pushing out the other teeth while growing. You can see that under x rays while they are still completely inside the jaw bone.

The "people actually going to elections" part ist not to be underestimated - in the states of former eastern Germany voter turnout is hovering at about 50%, sometimes even lower. So 80% of the voting people are actually 40% of the people giving their vote - and therefore the minority :)

I also doubt that people want the "communist dictatorship" back, what they probably do want are things like not having to fear about their economic future, no fear of not being able to afford healthcare for their kids, not being discriminated as a woman, being able to sleep without worries about their idiot boss, not having to work their asses off for an oligarchy of multi millionaires etc. I assume they would be pretty happy to archive that without the dictatorship part.
To put it differently: people voting for the center-right parties (Greens, SPD, CDU) sure as hell are not happy with "capitalist democracy" along with the accompanying ills like the economic crisis, dwindling retirement pensions etc.

It sure is easy to write off the fond memories of people from Eastern Germany as results of brainwashing. But first, the same argument works for western Germany, too, and second do platitudes like this seldom help to get nearer to the true nature of things.

Actually, the U.S. income hasn't really increased for forty years now. That's the main reason for the high number of mortgages (which led to the ongoing crisis) - a phenomenon not observable in wide parts of Europe.

AFAIK those two do not correlate. Do you have some source for that?

That certainly makes sense. OTOH, a good educational system alone may not be enough, as participation in the higher levels of that system usually involves quite a bit of money - even when access is formally free of charge. Es an example, my wife (with a working class background) certainly would not have been able go to university without financial support through the welfare system.

One probably needs both a high quality and formally open educational system _and_ the financial means to support people to access those institutions. This seems to be supported by the fact that U.S. spending on tertiary education is pretty high, while still not producing said vertical social mobility.

Well, the higher vertical mobility in Europe is an observable (and observed) fact. If you don't think the welfare system is the cause of this, them I am open for your alternative suggestion.