Its hard to get a summer office job if you dont know the major parts of Office, or an equivalent.

Well, there's Dwight Schrute, and Jim Halpert, and Pam Beesly, and...

Wait, those are the major parts of The Office. My bad.

It's not different than a calculator making you a better mathematician versus just helping you along

It won't even help you along. Calculators do arithmetic, not math. Most professional mathmaticians work with pencil and paper, although computerized proofs have become common and they no longer *exclusively* work with pencil and paper. Calculators don't come into it, though. Their work has nothing to do with calculating numerical results.

Until you can point at a device that enters text more efficiently than a keyboard, being able to type will remain an essential skill. You can't do that now, and frankly I don't see anything on the horizon that will. Magical mind-reading device might (or might not) do that, but we can worry about that when we have some.

They already do that--it's called Twitter.

The old joke is, "Half of all spending on advertising is wasted--the problem is that we don't know which half."

The answer is--indeed, must be, as you'll see for yourself if you think about it for a moment--that you're not correctly calculating your return on advertising expenses. If your company gets no revenue if it doesn't spend on advertising, it must follow that the return on advertising in substantial.

The real question is, is it because of the under-25s' age, or because of their generation? If the former, we won't see overall car buying habits change much in the future as the younger buyers move into the buying habits of older buyers. If the latter, we will see those habits change as the older buyers die off.

The argument isn't that old people don't buy cars now, it's that they won't buy cars in the future, because they'll be dead.

A computer doesn't do anything but run the software written for it, so it was natural for the people who controlled the software to become dominant. A car still has to be, y'know, a *car*. It has to perform functions that software is there to enhance, but its purpose is not to run that software.

What about all the people that can ONLY get AOL in their rural areas (the Comcast "go fuck yourself" zones)? It seems strange to think less of them for living in the wrong place.

And AOL service prevents these people from using Google because...? Say what you want, Google usually delivers pretty spare websites. I don't think they'd be much of a problem on dial-up.

Shouldn't that be "h...t...t..p...colon...slash...slash...slash...dot...dot...org"?

Somebody who thinks a photograph is just a record doesn't understand photography at all.

I live in the Washington DC area. Our subway (the Metro) has about half its tracks underground. But the trains still have big ol' windows (really big, in fact--they cover a large part of the sides of the cars), in spite of the fact that for a great deal of the time, there's nothing to see out of them.

I never understood this. What are the passengers doing to do if they see something? Cry?

You tell the flight attendant, who is trained to listen to people who notice stuff like this and bring it to the attention of the pilot, William Shatner notwithstanding.

They can't do anything, and the tower / pilot would already know about it if it was dangerous.

Not necessarily. They aren't superhuman, they don't automatically know everyting. They miss things, from time to time.

Apparently you skipped over the part where the patient was described as "not contagious".