Pardon me for asking, but considering our very own planet orbits the sun every 12 months, 23 months on Mars, and something like 130 or 140 for Jupiter, aren't we only starting to scratch the surface in terms of which ones we've seen and which ones just haven't happened to have passed between us and the star since we started looking. On top of that, would an orbit perpendicular to ours be detectible with this technique - as in, if a star had planets but in an orbit that never took them between us and their star - would not these be missed? Or is there some sort of wobble effect they can measure if the planet is big enough?

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Hey Comcast, hope you have someone from your PR dept reading this. Go to hell. Your service sucks. I pay >$100 a month and every single one of your digital channels stutters and gets pixilated, especially during high action parts = useless. Guess what though! I got a Verizon FIOS box in my closet earlier last week. AS soon as they call and tell me I can switch, its /middle finger to you and I hope to NEVER have to deal with your subpar products again. And now I hear you are pulling this crap? Never again Comcast. I'll go with satallite dish before I pay you another penny.

@immakaku
"Kind of off-topic: but I think we're going down a slippery slope when we start screening DNA. It works against the process of evolution. What if there's a new fatal disease that only people with the breast cancer trait are equipped to fight?"

I would respond that the minute humanity developed the printing press and started practicing medicine which sustains people well past their natural point of death, evolution as we know it went out the window. I aggree with your point, but you've LOOONG missed the boat on that one. Any modern medical procedure cheats evolution so by your logic, we should abandon all medicine - again a point I aggree with since overpopulation is responsible for most of the worlds problems - but its not a solution any "sane" society would adopt - short of being faced with extinction as an alternative.

@svendensen
"Personally I don't want some religion to tell me what medical procedures I can/cannot have because they think their holy book would approve/disapprove."
+1 to that buddy

@nasor
"There seems to me to be a difference between "designing" a baby with genetic engineering or some such vs. simply screening a bunch of fertilized eggs and selecting the one you want. But of course, if the media called it "screening" rather than "designing," people wouldn't get nearly as worked up about it - and they know this, so they go with the more provocative language."
A BIG +1 to that.

And finally @Radtastik
You are absolutely right that this will create a class society - that Gattaca movie was nothing short of a prophecy IMO. My counterargument is that if you awnt to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. In other words, should the rights of those unable to afford such procedures be put ahead of human progress? Such technology may be expensive at first, but with use will be come stanard with time. Is it proper to deprive our race of a jump in evolution in terms of physical and mental capabilities just in the name of fairness? And if you answered yes to that question, I would ask you what planet you've been living on... life isn't fair. The universe is hostile. Life feeds on life feeds on life. Evolve or die. So on so forth. Like it or not, cybernetics and genetic engeneering IS the next step of human evolution since natural selection has been so weakened by modern medicine.

The question you SHOULD be asking is, are we going to be at the forefront of this next evolutionary step or are we going to let other nations beat us here as well? If they do, you can kiss our world dominance good-bye for good. Students abroad are already healthier and smarter then anything our public school can produce. Do we give up this advantage as well?

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

"I understand completely why, in the real world, these decisions are made, but if you look at the situation rationally they are not good investments of time/money over the long-term, and they undermine the very reasons for writing software as a web application in the first place."

Not at all because in the long-term, the platform/tech/software doesn't matter. We could be speaking of different 'long-term' so lets say 10 years. In 10 years, your hardware is old, your software is old, and your web/internal apps are no longer as robust as you likely need them to be (unless your business has reached such a late life-cycle stage that there's little else to do but do the same thing and collect cash - aka cash cow).

What I am saying is that a business may develop an internal app or web app which, if the business is serious about innovation and remaining competitive, will develop another, either upgraded or entirely new, system to better service its current needs. In other words, yes, there may be some lock in to it, but its not permanent by any means. No mater which platform you develop for, even if its cross-platform, the life cycle is roughly the same, and you are still going to develop new stuff down the road.

So the REAL alternatives are not quite as you may see them. Theres A) develop for single platform, reducing current and short-term costs drastically, but sacrificing flexibility and (maybe) usable life-cycle. Or B) develop for cross-platform, incurring the costs associated with this, in the name of flexibility and a slightly improved life-cycle. A basic NPV analysis will tell you that the single platform option is the most cost effective, short and long-term.

And if that platform is Windows/IE, then you don't even need to worry. Everyone uses it and the platform isn't going away. Use the OS license for 10 years or so, then refresh. In the meantime, you've got 10 years of solid, static platform that is bound to be supported by MS. The basic limitation of any app is how long it remains sufficient to do what it was designed to do, not whether its cross-platform or not. The discussion then should not be about what platform to develop FOR, but how to develop in such a way as to make the app robust and upgradeable enough so that you don't need to completely redevelop something when the time comes.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

"There ARE games for Linux: Wine works surprisingly well, but there should be an automatic way of getting the needed libraries for any particular app"

Yea, and England has beaches, but who wants to see them?

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

You are very much correct. THe large corps DO have large in-house apps for managing their money. I never said that they did, which you keep saying that I did. What i DID say was that Office, and specifically Access and Excel (the rest is fluff), allows them to A) analyze large amounts of data by directly integrating Office with aforementioned in-house applications 2) communicate and secure this data across the intranet, allowing each dept that needs to touch/alter/view the data have at it with ease 3) automate the before processes to derive some sort of outputs and 4) either aggregate those outputs for management review or 5) use the outputs to enter new data back into the in-house apps, automatically. In other words, Office is a tool for collaboration and automation of data handling. NOT managing money. CERTAINLY not advanced statistics or financial model designs - though it is very capable of handling simple every-day statistics and financial models. I wouldn't use it conduct a risk analysis, but I routinely use it to analyze the entire bond market universe worth of Bloomberg market data for price/rate changes and calculate their potential impacts on my firms holdings. In fact, that feature alone - Anyware RealTime is the name - (Bloomberg terminal integration plug-in) is an Open Office killer. You just can't compete with the business tools that Office has. It has nothing to do with formula functions and only slightly to do with scripting capabilities. Open Office does indeed allow rather extensive programming since it can incorporate not just Basic, but java as well. Wonderful for IT apps, but overkill for non-IT applications. VBA was specifically designed to make every day tasks done with the suite easy and automatic, saving much much time. The fact that you think keeping accounting records in "ledgers" was the one thing that held back the degradation of our financial institutions shows YOUR blissful ignorance of the situation. I've already addressed where you should be laying the blame. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. I will point you once again to http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/. What you are arguing is a point I actually agree with. Some progress shouldn't be shared because people who don't understand it fully can still use it to harm others, sometimes MANY others. It all started with the printing press and this unrestricted sharing of knowlege with people who didn't develop or deserve it it has led to all of societies problems today. But, it is nothing we can ever do anything about, so while you can make snide remarks about MS causing the world to collapse, recognize it for the easy forum target that it is, not actual reality.

And what, exactly, does it explain? If you are implying that MS office has anything to do with our current economic situation, then there's little hope I have for educating you, but here goes anyway. Instead of FUD, try reading:
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/finance/wall-streets-army-quants-controls-mind-money/
And lets not forget all of YOU people, who for years spent frivolously, lived outside your means, got loans when you shouldn't have, and then blamed everyone for giving you the bad loan in the first place. Its just like malware and viruses - most of them spread because people are idiots, yet you immedietly try to lay the blame on MS for having an unsecured OS. F that. Its the sheeple that are to blame, the software just makes it easier to hurt yourself, doesn't do it for you.
Lol, in fact an old lyric just came to my mind typing this: "They say music can alter moods, and talk to you. But can it load a gun for you and cock it too?" Think about it.

"Of course, that doesn't really help those who have already developed a signficant amount of code for VBA, and don't want to have to rewrite it." You've hit the nail on the head there. It isn't that they don't want to. It's that it doesn't make any sense. I mean look at the financial details of the situation. An MS Office license is maybe $100-$200. That's less then the DAILY salary of someone who is being paid to automate any process with it. The cost of the software package is negligible next to the invested costs of having your people actually create something with it. That money has already been spent. Spending it again, for businesses, would be simply unjustified. It would be like making the same investments twice. Oh except you gotta retrain all of your IT to develop in Open Office, and then re-integrate it with all of your subsystems, and then retrain your employees to use it. No company in their right mind is going to do this.

Someone has never worked in a corporate park, so let me tell you how things work. Major financial institution gets massive transmission from multiple vendors every day that must be entered into the major financial institution's tracking systems. All is done with proprietary software and has nothing to do with any office application. But when it comes to extracting and dealing with this massive amounts of data on an every day basis, performing yield and variance calculations, performing large-scale data scrubbing (10s of thousands of securities), variable rates, prices, and that doesn't even BEGIN to enumerate all the pieces of data that must be shared across a network thousands of computers large, analyzed by individuals in multiple departments, reported on, transmitted, and then integrated back into proprietary systems tied to the corporate mainframe. When Open Office can do this, then you can come back and talk to me. And this is just one example. The automation capabilities of VBA MAKE the financial industry work. Without it we'd be in the stone ages in terms of the time it takes to do certain tasks - as in, non competitive and out of business stone age... What many people here fail to realize is that very few organizations out there do 'pure' statistics or 'pure' data-basing. They may exist, but they are dwarfed when compared to all the soft inter-mediate companies that need to move and analyze large amounts of data, daily, timely, and across large networks. Open Office isn't even considered an option. It simply cannot integrate with various proprietary systems and enable collaboration like MS Office can. And I'm talking about Office 2003 too, as businesses haven't even migrated to Office 07 on a large scale yet, and that is even more powerful in terms of collaboration. Office is not a professional development platform, I hope you realize. No one is talking about writing major pieces of software. What we ARE talking about is efficiencies that save companies billions annually. Until Open Office can do the same, it is irrelevant in the business world. At home or at school however, like I said, its a perfect solution.

But still useless for any professional setting or high-level business education. Staistical and financial plug-ins are vastly inferior to MS Office. No VBA for business applications. These two alone make a hobby app for basic home uses, nothing game changing and certainly still not a real competitor to MS Office. That's not even mentioning the online collaboration tools of MS Office as well as Live Workspace. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Just my prediction, going by all other Apple products, this Console will likely fetch a PS3 like price, will have, at best, Wii like capabilities, with the addition of iTunes/iPod integration. Considering my PC is hooked up to the same entertainment center as my Wii, a big YAWN from my end. I'm sure there's a casual gaming market out there that they can try to leech off, but honestly, I'd invest about zero dollars into this. Lets not forget that Apple is a company that has very basic at best gaming experience on their PCs, let alone their hand-helds - as opposed to Nintendo that has been game oriented for what 20 years now? More even? Good luck to apple and all. I will never get any mp3 player other then the iPod, but I would not touch their PCs/laptops with a 10 foot pole. Will keep an open mind about a console to give it a fair chance, but honestly, at this point, what the market needs is a PS3/Wii hybrid - computing/graphical power of a PS3 with the user-friendliness and fun/party factor of the Wii would destroy all competition. If Apple can do this, I'm sold. But as I've said, historically at least, Apple uses sub-par hardware which ultimately results in sub-par performance. If its priced high, it better have the graphical processing power of the PS3 or better and full HD output. But prove me wrong, Apple. I'd love to see real competition to the PS3 to force the prices down some, so I can actually justify purchasing one. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Online voting, but in regular voting locations. How to do it? Simple - well not so much so, but considering the importance, I wouldn't mind my taxes going to pay for something like this. Anyway, create a closed network, completely separate from the internet. Have voting machines run together on this nationwide network. Only polling machines and electoral officials should have access to this network. Any machines on the network can never be connected to the internet. Done. One man, one vote. Time to retire the whole electoral vote system. Good for 18th century. Terrible for today. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Levitating a ball by concentrating? This article is a bit behind. Please refer to: http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/ocz_peripherals/nia-neural_impulse_actuator And for an earlier poster, no these things will never work straight out the box (not for years anyway), because just like teaching your brain to control your muscles, teaching your brain to control the computer is also a long learning process. It requires mental states and processes that, in some cases, are completely foreign to our brains. Prothetics are a little different because the brain already knows how to control an arm, so by teaching the computer exactly what signal to expect for any given motion, when you get into things like controling additional "appendages" beyond your regular biological nerves, you are, in effect, teaching your brain to use a whole brand new appandage. Now, some of these are very simple - such as the levitating ball if you concentrate trick. It will simply read the brain-wave intensity and if strong enough, the ball will rise. But when you start getting into things even as simple as the OCZ NIA above, where only 3 different brain-waves or "fingers" they call them are picked up by the device, the task for your brain is signifiantly increased. Its never as easy as just WANTing to move forward - the brain wave associated with controling the device has nothing to do with your desire to move forward - at least not right away. Only with long long practice and calibration does your brain adapt and learn and able to actually control a device. Its almost impossible to explain in words the state of mind required for something like this to work. The closest I can come is - for those who have ever practiced mediation or a martial art - the empty zen state one can sometimes achieve with these practices. Thinking nothing, blank. You then throw yourself into the game and watch as your character moves around completely randomly, or so it would seem at first. After a few hours, you begin to see that the motion isn't entirely random. And after many many more hours the subconsious connection between a certain state of mind and the resulting action on the computer screen begins to solidify. You practice long enough, and controling the machine WILL be as easy as walking or lifting your arm - you never even have to think about it - just WANT to do it. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

Levitating a ball by concentrating? This article is a bit behind. Please refer to:

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/ocz_peripherals/nia-neural_impulse_actuator

And for an earlier poster, no these things will never work straight out the box (not for years anyway), because just like teaching your brain to control your muscles, teaching your brain to control the computer is also a long learning process. It requires mental states and processes that, in some cases, are completely foreign to our brains. Prothetics are a little different because the brain already knows how to control an arm, so by teaching the computer exactly what signal to expect for any given motion, when you get into things like controling additional "appendages" beyond your regular biological nerves, you are, in effect, teaching your brain to use a whole brand new appandage. Now, some of these are very simple - such as the levitating ball if you concentrate trick. It will simply read the brain-wave intensity and if strong enough, the ball will rise. But when you start getting into things even as simple as the OCZ NIA above, where only 3 different brain-waves or "fingers" they call them are picked up by the device, the task for your brain is signifiantly increased. Its never as easy as just WANTing to move forward - the brain wave associated with controling the device has nothing to do with your desire to move forward - at least not right away. Only with long long practice and calibration does your brain adapt and learn and able to actually control a device. Its almost impossible to explain in words the state of mind required for something like this to work. The closest I can come is - for those who have ever practiced mediation or a martial art - the empty zen state one can sometimes achieve with these practices. Thinking nothing, blank. You then throw yourself into the game and watch as your character moves around completely randomly, or so it would seem at first. After a few hours, you begin to see that the motion isn't entirely random. And after many many more hours the subconsious connection between a certain state of mind and the resulting action on the computer screen begins to solidify. You practice long enough, and controling the machine WILL be as easy as walking or lifting your arm - you never even have to think about it - just WANT to do it.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

For the uninitiated, perhaps someone should explain. These statistics are absolutely meaningless because they do not akgnowlege at all how large corps with sophistacted intranets update their software. Step 1: Exploratory research. Studies are requested, reviewed, or conducted to determine increase in productivity/cost reductions/other benefits of upgrading. At the same time, increase/decrease in costs is considered. Finally the actual investment cost of switching enters ethe mix. A final number is compile. If gain from benefits significantly greater the loss from detriments, we move on to round 2. Step 2: the test environment. So managment said OK, lets update. The entire corp will not see the results of this decision for anywhere from weeks to months, depending on size of the organization. Test environments are set up with the new software and mission critical jobs are performed in the test environment for, you guessed it, testing. Lets assume that no major flaws are discovered and workarounds/solutions are implemented for those issues that do arise. Moving on. Step 3: partial rollout. Some machines in the intranet get the software upgrade. Commence another test phase. Assuming that regular employees can continue to do regular work, after even more weeks or months, the rollout finally reaches the entire intranet. As you can see, much money is spent even BEFORE the software leaves the test labs. Why would ANY corp even consider cutting edge software at release when they know for a fact, there will be zero day flaws, as happens with any sophisticated software designed by anyone, anywhere, ever. This isn't the biggest issue however. Its the fact that these bugs will be getting fixes, which would require further intranet testing before those FIXES are pushed to employees machines. Not to mention introductory prices are always far too high. It only makes sense to A) wait for bug fixes to be worked out and to come down in quantity/period of time and B) wait for introductory prices to deflate. Doing this VASTly reduces costs, and any successful corporation will always be cost conscious. So, as was said in the first few posts, this is not news by any definition of the word, the statistics quotes are completely irrelevant and altered to make it seem anti-MS. Mission acomplished I suppose. We aren't buying it. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."