I'm not sure about that, granted this is excel, although Word has it share of fun and games too.

As for torrented music, why bother? The new stuff is mostly indistinguishable crap, and anything that's remotely decent you'd probably already own, or you'll buy that 1 new song/collection every 6 months or so, since it's a drop in the bucket so to speak. Also, music is easier to justify buying, since if you like it, you'll most likely listen to it multiple times. Movies I'll generally only watch once, so a rental model works much better for me. There's a small subset that I'll want to watch more than once, and those I will buy. I'm sure I'm not unique in this approach.

Citations

That was true, until the last 40K years or so. There's some thought that evolution has actually stopped with humans.

Seems like make stem cells young again will extend us past 120. The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells. If you can rejuvenate them, they should be able to slow down aging everywhere else as well.

Android, without the kick in the ass they got from the iphone, probably would have been as wonderfully successful as Windows Phone, given that they were copying the current smartphone operations of the time and had to do a 180 when the iphone came out.

The business world may not have liked the iphone, but the users did, and they did not like Blackberries. The users forced businesses to accept iphones. Sure, there are some areas (government primarily) that had needs that Blackberry fulfilled. but as far as the consumer/general business world went, Blackberry was dead about the time the iPhone 3G was released.

Given Sony's financial issues (not the profitable Sony Pictures, who's had a lot of negative news lately, but Sony proper) and lack of leadership, along with shrinking revenues and major misteps along with totally alienating a large segment of its potential market, it's quite possible that within a couple of years Sony as we know it will cease to exist. Justice will have been served if that happens, IMNSHO.

The "We are not a monopoly" statement was a bonus. The real issue was the patent lawsuits that were ongoing. The 150M and Office on the Mac settled the patent lawsuit issues. Also from wikipedia:

I didn't double check the references, but if true, Apple was already on the rebound sans $150M.

It's like Apple took the world of steam powered cars (BlackBerry, Nokia, Ericsson) and gave us a Porsche/Lexus/BMW at a Toyota Corolla price in one iteration. You'll note that all 3 of those giants have all but disappeared, much like all the steam car companies, and almost as fast, which is remarkable given that those three were already the "winners" of the cell phone market consolidation and had global markets.

FTFY

Seems like "VPN" will solve that problem. Whether it engenders a new problem is a different story.

You know, I actually read your linked retraction. The thing that stood out were the following quotes:

which in no way indicates that he was discredited. The retraction occurred in Nov 2013, the paper was published in 2012. There's also no mention of no one else failing to reproduce the results, which would be difficult to do since the paper was published in 2012, and the test ran 2 years. It sounds more like political and financial pressure than science. True science would run additional studies to support or discredit those published results. Your postings are reek of shill quality, I wonder how you're getting modded up so much.

I tend to agree that we should proceed with GMO very very carefully, and that Monsanto probably should be banned from the field. Why? Because they have shown that they're purely driven by greed and are thus unsuitable stewards for what's going to affect us potentially forever. That's the problem with GMO, it's not a 1 time item.

Nah, BSD will be on the desktop before Linux makes it. Wait, it already has...

No time for TV, just working in data and reading the info they're collecting and imagining what I could do with that data pretty easily. "imagining" might be too strong a word, more like merely asking "what could I glean from this data". The answers would seriously surprise you it appears, and this is why mass surveillance needs to be stopped yesterday. The power to abuse is far too great.

That's easy enough to know, if the town is small enough. By your reasoning, any small town with a maximum of 1 or 2 police officers should be a veritable hotbed of criminal activity.

Sorry, hate to pop your bubble, but I've witnessed this issue first hand. Friend got to a party, some nimrod spilled beer on him, he was driving home to change when he got pulled over for one of those "general checks". Spent the night in jail and had to go through court to get it thrown out. Oh, and police don't have to prove alcohol over the limit, that's just there to help them, not you. You thought breathalyzers were there for you? How cute. If it's the policeman's opinion that you're impaired, off to jail you go. At least he was lucky enough to get it thrown out of court.

You're missing the point that we live in a big data world. All that's needed is for the policeman to scan your license along with the reason for you being pulled over. 5s later the various systems have correlated the data and stated that you're an AA member and thus likely to be drunk - no warning should be given. After all, what good is data if you're not going to use it?

Strongly disagree. The main deterrent is knowing the police are in an area. Otherwise it falls into the category of being anywhere, so why not commit crime x here?

Also incorrect, mass scanning of communications including metadata gives you not only locations of people, but patterns of movement. So every Tu evening at 7pm, you truck over to the YMCA for what appears to be an AA meeting, since there are several convicted and recently released DWI people there. How do we know they're DWI people? Because we know where they sleep every night and have cross-referenced that information against our criminal DB. The sad part? That's the only day you're free to meet John for racquetball. But now, thanks to that inconsequential scanning of communications, when you're pulled over next Sun coming home from Joe's house watching the Superbowl, and having a beer spilled on you, you're now heading for a DWI and prison because you've been tagged. You're innocent? Prove it.