It is just me, or does this story sound like a question from a discrete maths exam?

In other shock news today the American military-industrial complex suggested that the world become more paranoid and adversarial.

I can't help but wonder why it's always straight, white, rich men who always proclaim the end of privacy? The total lack of empathy that comes with being abjectly devoid of anything approaching discrimination or prejudice is a wonder to behold. :)

I call bullshit.

I've been recently been wiring my drumkit for recording and have been finding that actions that I consciously perform -- flams in particular -- are timed in the 2-10ms range. Hell, 150ms is rolling through four fingers on a surface less than twice a second. Pretty much everyone can do better than that.

Sure, the OP's figures above might apply to single-shot actions, as opposed to repeated or sequential actions, but 150ms is still a damn long time.

Let me google that for you. Or repost the link from a couple of posts back.

Does the use of Zip+4 strike anyone as a little odd? After all, it allows for 1E+09 entities, and the population of the US is only around 3E+08. Sounds like a serial number to me.

Oh? Please show working.

Perhaps some of the point is, for once in the cess-pool that is the modern, utility and mediocrity obsessed tertiary education system, to attempt to provide broad-ranging bases of abstract knowledge to the students who actually want to learn, and are capable of doing so. That way we'll at least get some people who can work at the coal face of knowledge creation as opposed to just another batch of clueless, money-grabbing code monkeys?

The sort of useful you're talking about is concerned with places where all the interesting, hard problems have already been solved. Sounds dull as dishwater if you've got a brain in your head.

Up next, dogs and cats living together.

I wrote a novel during Nanowrimo this year, and I've been using OpenOffice Writer to format the text into a nice looking book layout. I've previously been a Word 2003 user for about five years, and I have to say that I really don't find anything problematic with the transition.

I've got Writer on an Eee 1005HA-V with 2GB of RAM and it seems to load acceptibly quickly, and whilst the interface is a little different to Word 2003, there's nothing particularly missing or broken that I've encountered as yet: some features are actually better (multipage zoom out, for instance). Doing nice looking book layout is about the same level of hassle that it is in Word, and it seems to perform around about as fast for the task. When I run Writer on my quad-core desktop it screams along doubleplusfine.

On the basis of my experience, I'm really left kinda skeptical at the level of bad experience other people report with Writer. I previously tried OO version 2.x and discovered it sucked rather radically, but version 3+ seems a perfectly useable tool. Perhaps when I get to writing a technical document or textbook in Writer, I'll bump into problems, but I just don't see it for now.

I messed around with versions of Word past 2003 a few times in various workplaces, but none of them ever provided any functionality I really needed, and just shuffled the other stuff around in the interface to irritating effect.

Given these thoughts, I think Microsoft should certainly be worried: I'll probably never install Word again.

"I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die."

Wow! Nice stealth misogyny, dude!