I always thought the swearing and yelling in Chinese was a realistic outcome as the world becomes more meshed. It looks like it may come sooner than later.

I felt a bit guilty after the last post. I did work for UPS, and I did learn those phrases. And while I saw my fair share of kicked in, mangled, or shredded packages (some of them at my hand), I never saw it done deliberately. You have a lot of work to do in a short time and things get treated rough. Things that say "this side up" or "fragile" just get handled more as a result of the instructions and thus they will be more prone to error on statistics alone. If you care about your stuff, pack it well and then the company doesn't really matter.

I worked for the aforementioned shipping company. I unloaded trucks. Here I learned that Fragile is a French word, meaning, "to drop kick". Also, the phrase, "UPS, where the Q Stands for Quality". There's no Q in UPS you say??? EXACTLY! Of course I still use them...

I spent some time in Kazakhstan during early winter. They had turned on the steam powered heat for the city and the only thing to regulate it in the apartment I was in was opening the windows to the sub zero outside. So it was either 110 (near the radiators) or 30 below (near the windows). Comfort was half your body freezing and the other half sweating. I'm sure other places heat the same way, but it was interesting to experience.

While I do think complexity does lose most people, I think syncopation is a requisite in any popular music. Even a simple song like Every Breath You Take by the Police uses syncopation when you consider the vocal rhythm over the music. It may be basic syncopation, but the only music that seems to be strictly 'downbeat' is disco.

What is odd to me especially is that symphonic music like Mozart, etc are widely regarded as excellent music while using a variety of tempos and rhythms. Yet in the majority of popular music it is eschewed or only marginally considered.

And while I may not want music that zags when at a club, when I am enjoying music for pure enjoyment I want to feel a push and pull that can only come with complexity. Undoubtedly I am in the minority but this is an area I really have a hard time understanding others perspective. Of course, I am one of your nerds at the Rush concerts.

Math rock that I listen to (Don Caballero, Dysrhythmia) seems to focus on odd time & intricacy which is why I like it. But most people don't. They want the same G-C-D chord progression that a billion pop songs have had for years. Most people just want what they've heard before. But I think why music by a computer really upsets people is the potential loss of soul it has. Music has always been the most abstract art as it is not meant to represent anything but itself. But it is art, and something that moves many deeply. Reducing it to equations, even though that is the reality of it, is just too foreign for a lot of people. Maybe this will lead us to our own Butlerian Jihad?

What about FedEx or DHL? Are you just a big fan of the color brown?

Surely you mean vi...
FLAME ON!

I think the April 1 code that has been so brilliantly discovered may simply be nothing more than a ruse, but as you say, on April 1 it will be tough to tell. And I HATE having mod points on this day of the calendar!

XP, Vista, Gnome (unsure KDE / Mac) have all had fast user switching for a while so that you can log in a second user without disturbing any of the previously logged in users things. It uses more RAM, but works great in my experience with none of the issues you state.

At my company (not that huge), our preference from the Admin side was Debian on Linux servers (apt dependency handling/updating beats rpm hands down to me) but we were forced to Novell or Red Hat so there would be someone to call & blame if there was issues. Ubuntu was brand new when this decision was made and so not really considered from the VPs. So for production systems its RHEL, for our admin stuff (not considered 'mission critical') it's Debian, and I run Ubuntu on my laptop.