Ah, yea. First time seeing this animation, though I do somewhere have the book that goes with said song.

I consider ribbon's as a subset of tabbed toolbar interfaces, which generally follow the Microsoft ribbon guidelines (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc872782.aspx).

By CDC numbers, 96% of the US population has received the pertussis vaccine. The vaccine is '71-85% effective' according to a search engine summary of the pertussis Wikipedia page.

Let us imagine environmentally exposing 1,000 people to the disease: say the chance of acquiring this disease being 10%, 96% of the people are vaccinated, and the vaccine is completely effective 75% of the time (75% effective), completely useless otherwise.

Without the vaccine, a similar 1,000 exposed people would have 100 acquiring and suffering from the disease..

With a 96% vaccination rate, 960 of the 1,000 exposed would have had the vaccine (vs. 40 that have not). 10% acquiring the disease is again 100 people. Of those 100 infections, the breakdown would now be 96 vaccinated vs. 4 non-vaccinated people.
Of 96 vaccinated people, only 75% are effectively vaccinated -> 96 x 0.75 = 72, so the remaining 24 are no better off than not having been vaccinated at all.

This means there are 24 + 4 = 28 total infected and suffering people. 24 vaccinated folks amongst 28 means 85% of infected and suffering people were vaccinated. In comparison though, 72% of those suffering from infections in the 1,000 no-vaccine scenario are prevented in the 96% vaccination scenario (96% x 75%).

This, of course, is meant to be entirely illustrative, but the point should be evident: the expectation is that vaccinated people will be over-represented in samples where the population's vaccination levels are high and the vaccine is less than 100% effective.

How do they know it is rooted? That would be the bigger concern to me.

The iPad has a flush back surface, it slips in the palm... and though light, it is a bit heavy to hold by the edge for typing. Also, it is also slightly too wide for comfortable double-thumb typing when griped from both sides. These points were immediately apparent the first time I picked one up in a store. In general observation, I have yet to see someone one-hand these things "in the wild", it is always propped up on resting on something. At which point, it could be a laptop/netbook, really. I will certainly give you robust, it stands up to my toddler - but I suspect the size factor was driven by the size of readily available screens, it certainly was not ergonomics for the vast majority of the population.

Chromnium is available under one of the repositories (http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/09/googles-chromium-project-ported-to-n900/), works asides for some of the menu's running off screen. The Opera crowd does have Opera Mini available as well (see http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/). The default browser, MicroB, is based on Firefox. Of course, there is a terminal; vnc & ssh are both readily available in the Maemo.org repositories.

...however, take a peek at the N900. The screen is way better than a 3GS, Skype & IM integrate seamlessly, and there is no sleazy attempts to keep you from doing anything with your phone. Meamo 5 may be only, say, 75% done, but it's better than only being able to use 50% of the phone!

This is the typically ideal solution, when there's other hardware around to take advantage of. C-Kermit is also your able-bodied manservant for getting all the settings right for the client.

Unfortunately, some BIOS's have never worked well for setting the BIOS interface at anything other than 115.2 KBaud, at least without an undocumented BIOS update. And guess what you need to to the BIOS update? You guessed it: Windows and boot-time console access. I ran into this problem with some new Linux servers and a vendor who'd never bothered to test their serial-over-IP setup.

Also, simply saying "use a null-modem cable" isn't enough. Remember that many modern machines don't have a serial port, which the original poster mentioned. I've also seen low-end rack servers that didn't, and proving only USB has gotten more common. Setting up a USB-serial or USB->USB console access takes some time as well, and our poster didn't say he had the money for the more sophisticated modern KVM's that do KVM over IP reliably. I've searched before for a toolkit to do KVM over IP from an identically installed computer, but found nothing for handling the video. It's a shame, really, such a device could be very handy for remote operations staff rather than my having to walk them through grub or BIOS options over the phone.

If the lag-compensation in GH works the way I think it does, I'm not sure it would be very effective for FPS games.

There's no way for the game to properly remove the lag between the console and display device. Instead, to account for the fact that you're seeing things on screen a few tens of milliseconds after they actually happen, the game engine compensates by delaying the time window in which it expects to a response (controller input). You won't be too slow on your chords anymore, but the delay between button press and on-screen action is still there.

That sort of delay can really throw off your rythym in a FPS when you're expecting an immediate response to movement / throwing a grenade / firing your gun. In a fast-paced multiplayer scenario, a lot can change in the span of a few video frames (depending on the action and movement of your opponents), whereas gameplay in GH is fairly deterministic.

Modern FPS do use a few tricks to minimize the impact of internet lag - motion prediction, immediate client-side response to many actions (moving, shooting) with no host-side verification, etc - these help in making the game play feel more natural, but latency still has a big impact on gameplay quality.

I'm pretty sure you understand this, but just in case, to clarify, a lobotomy disconnects the frontal lobe, which has nothing to do with the interpretation of pain signals. If a lobotomy worked, it'd be very convenient because it's a comparatively simple procedure (at one point, some were doing it just by jamming an icepick up inside the eye). As far as a total coma-like vegetative state, personally, I'd rather my meat be conscious first. Vegetative food seems a great deal to "Matrixy" for my pallet.

Most cattle are what we call âoefree rangeâ. As I understand it, it is only in the USA where cows are in feedlots to ensure âoeX disease free days before slaughter. Usually cows are just in feedlots for an extremely short time.

At least where I live, keeping cattle in feedlots is extremely expensive. Cattle go directly from the farm to the abattoir.

The freedom is freedom from arrest or detention. You are free to say whatever horrid you want, just as I am free to get a bullhorn and call you a moron. You may get a bigger bullhorn if you wish. We may continue as nauseum barring noise complaints and assuming we are not trespassing. I fully support the ability of the KKK or whoever to march down the road, but they are not guaranteed that I won't show up with a counter-demonstration to drown them out. All the 1st amendment guarantees (a guarantee all to often violated) is that the police or other agents of the government won't come to drag either of us away. If a university invites some xenophobic yahoo to speak and the students jeer him out of the hall that is not censorship, just as it isn't censorship if they don't invite him to speak at all.

What I mean by "having its business stolen" is having someone else market or give away the idea that has cost the firm or individual(s) time and trouble to develop.

Take Robert Kearns, who invented the windshield wiper delay, for example. He came up with the idea of how to solve an annoyance that most of us experience from time to time. He went to the considerable time and expense of developing, perfecting, and patenting his idea, then approached the large auto manufacturers, asking them if they'd like to license his patent. They rebuffed him and proceeded to use his invention to make millions of dollars. It took him decades to get any compensation for his initial R&D. As far as competing on the strength of his products in a "free market", he could hardly have been able to start his own automobile manufacturer so he could sell his invention; would you argue, however, that Detroit was entitled to make money from his idea without compensating him?

Touche, a turn of speech poorly used. Thanks for the correction!

True that. I upgraded to 8gb of RAM for some design work & rendering, and made the big leap to XP 64-bit. Not a cheap path, granted. As best as I can tell, XP wouldn't bring in drivers for the SATA controller from anything except a floppy disk, the process of ripping the ISO, adding the drivers, and reburning was annoying at best. The bonus, however, was taking some time to go through nLite (I believe) and stripping what I don't use out. It was quite zippy afterwards, worth the initial time.