I don't know exactly what you do, but if you have any files for download you can put them up in ODT and PDF format, and then have a link which says "These files are available in PDF format and ODT format. Many computers have software which can read PDF files; if yours does not, you can download it from Adobe (throw in a link). ODT files can be opened using many programs which are also available for free, including AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and which can be downloaded from here. All of these programs can be used in Microsoft Windows, Apple's OS X, Linux, and BSD.

Another thing you might do is have a "compatibility page", in which you have FAQ-type stuff of the form "Q: If I want to send you an electronic file, what format should I use? A: We use OpenOffice.org, which can read files in many formats, including the standard ODT format as well as things such as Microsoft Word format."

Dunno if any of that helps you or not.

t's just that your particular value system only permits one possible answer, but not everyone shares that system precisely. Disagree if you must, but at the very least you have to agree that in Germany, the german people should be allowed to make their laws as they see fit.

How far does "make their laws" go? Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed an actor, someone in the public eye. What if there's a biography of that actor published in 1995 or so? Does the publisher have recall and destroy every copy? Do libraries have to destroy it? What about newspaper archives? Would you have to go to all the microfilm copies and change them? Maybe their victim was famous enough to have an entry in a printed encyclopedia; would copies of those have to be destroyed?

If Mr Werlé and Mr Lauber don't like notoriety, maybe they should have murdered somebody obscure. Or, and I know this is extreme, maybe they shouldn't have murdered anybody at all.

And, of course, they shouldn't have tripped the Streisand Effect; at this rate there's going to be a TV-movie about them and they'll end up in the IMDB and have their own Wikipedia pages.

He doesn't have to try, but just think of all the billable hours that go with filing suits in a foreign country. In this way, a lawyer's like a bookie: whether you win or lose, he makes money.

To claim something is impossible when someone else has said it is means you are the smartest person on the planet.

Oh, rubbish. I never said it was physically impossible; I said getting all the materials would cost too much. It won't happen, ever, because they'll never get enough people who want to pay for it. If they ever do build it, I'll be happy to admit I was wrong.

Look, I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're not winning a debate (nobody is still reading this but us), and I'm totally unimpressed by your mischaracterization of what I wrote. Who are you posting for, exactly?

As long as we're talking about "reading again", you might review the statement you quoted originally: "Unless Congress passes a law stating that nobody else in the USA can have any concrete until the Houston Dome is finished, the only way to lock up the entire supply is to outbid everybody else put together." Nothing you have said contradicts that statement, in either your first reply or the second.

As for stretching the time out to 20 years, that would make no practical difference (it's not like they can lock up half the supply of concrete in any easy way), and doesn't change my overall point.

So, if we're talking about someone who's as stupid as rock, you flaming on about nits which make no practical difference, and failing to dispute the truth of the statement you actually quoted, pretty well settles it for me.

Do you honestly believe that you can get the taxpayers of Houston to spend 20 years paying to stockpile concrete for such a project?

This isn't like a bridge, which costs a lot of money but can be finished in a few years and then used for decades afterwards. You can issue a government bond to pay for construction, and then pay off the bonds with tolls over the bridge. A dome over Houston, per your suggestion, would take 20 years before you even started. And unless you plan to charge a toll for everybody who goes in or comes out, the only way to pay for it is with tax money.

If my property taxes went up that much for a project that wouldn't even be started for 20 years, I would move away and not pay it. Any businesses operating in Houston would almost certainly leave the city if their costs would go up so much. Companies are expected to file quarterly reports on how the company is doing. They can't afford to blow cash for 20 years on something that doesn't help the bottom line. If you don't pay property taxes, maybe the problem doesn't seem so immediate to you. But you would pay, anyhow. If the supermarket where you shop finds itself owing an extra $5million a year in property tax, where do you think they'll get the extra $100K per week? They'll get it by jacking up the prices they charge their customers.

Sci-fi ideas make great fiction, but in world where you have limited budgets, and where there are no replicators so anything you build costs actual money, we're never going to have a dome over Houston. The concrete we're talking about is $86billion just for the cement, saying nothing about the aggregate, rebar, capital costs for equipment (we have to dig the circular trench), fuel costs, or labor. If we figure the total cost of the foundation ring is 10 times the cost of the cement, we get $860billion. Divided equally by the 2.2million people in Houston, that's ~$400K each; for a family of 4, it works out to $1.6million. Spread out over 20 years, that works out to $80k per year in extra property taxes for a family of 4. Does your household budget have room in it for spending an extra $80k in taxes every year?

Actually, you missed the bit from the Discovery Channel episode which made it clear the Houston Dome would never happen: they said that the foundation ring would require so much concrete it would be equal to the entire production of all US concrete plants for 10 full years. So before you can even start on the dome part, you have to sink billions of dollars into the project for 10 years; enough billions that you outbid everybody else in the entire country who wants some concrete. Unless Congress passes a law stating that nobody else in the USA can have any concrete until the Houston Dome is finished, the only way to lock up the entire supply is to outbid everybody else put together.

If I lived in Houston, and somebody said "your tax rates are going up 1000% for the next 10 years, so that 25 years from now maybe you can live under a dome if you still live here", I'm moving somewhere else. And since 99% of the country does not live in Houston, the political will to say "everybody else has to give up all construction jobs for the next 10 years" isn't going to be found in Congress.

It opens with a little panorama of the sites I go to most often. I like it.

I'm willing to go for more than just one option when you go: it seems to me that the two obvious hardware things are (1) close laptop (sleep), and (2) hit button (turn off). So the menu should give you those two choices, along with "restart" and "log out". Still, that's only 4 menu items. And I see no reason at all to include a software shutdown button which looks like the physical shutdown button on the laptop. Even if we want "lock" on the menu, I don't see why it needs a button either.

Apple's detractors consider the company to be a bunch of control freaks, which is true, but that's exactly why their user interfaces are so consistent and usability is so high. Their mania for controlling every aspect of the user's experience has an upside and a downside. That the company that's so driven for consistency on the App Store also has a consistent website should hardly be astonishing.

As for Microsoft's website, the company's main product has a number of different interfaces for different things, when there's no sensible reason for it to be different (Office uses the Ribbon, but Internet Explorer doesn't, to take one example). That the company whose main product has a number of different and confusing elements has a similar website is also not astonishing. A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest and think about the implications for their website.

Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*

Somewhere I read (so we know it MUST be true) that the studio nixed the original Matrix followup, and so they had to take one movie's worth of material and stretch it out to two.

I can't find a link for it now, but given what JMS wrote about studio interference with Babylon 5, it doesn't seem hard to believe.

[W]e already have the ability to abolish most, if not all life on the planet with nuclear weaponry.

"I'm going to grant your greatest wish... I'm going to show you a world without sin."

It is deeply depressing that from amongst a list of alternatives whose achievements are up there in the realms of magic/fantasy, the one thing that humans are capable of right now is seen in the poll results as by far the least possible.

Not enough people want it, and many other people actively oppose it.