Excel does not treat 1900 as a leap year. Excel's epoch, though, is December 30th, 1899 instead of the 31st to be compatible with 1-2-3 for all dates from March 1st, 1900 onward, allowing for 1-2-3's bug. Excel and Word, and all other Microsoft products that use VBA as a macro language, use the OLE Automation date format that works just fine on all dates from January 1, year 100 to December 31st 9999. Dates are treated as a double with the integer part being days and fractions being the fraction of a day. Negative numbers give the dates before the epoch. The only weird thing is the date of the epoch, which causes things such the Time function to return the time on December 30th 1899, if you retrieve the date portion.

This was a failure in marketing, not technology. When this came out, it took me a while to differentiate the products because of the first word in the name being the same. I finally figured out to just drop the word "Expression" and concentrate on the second word. I think it was a huge mistake trying to use the term to group a disparate set of products. They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc. and then packaged them as "Microsoft Designer Suite". Blend is actually pretty cool.

What if through some (magical) combination of hardware and software, after say two months, if you didn't log in, the contents became completely irretrievable? Then if you were arrested, you only had to hold out for two months before they would have to release you. Contempt of court means that they can only hold you while you can possibly give them what they need. If it is impossible for you to comply, which would be true after two months, they have to charge you with something else (obstruction of justice?) or release you.

Only a completely de-normalized flat-file database would need anything like that number of columns. That would mean many duplicate pieces of information, and a complete maintenance nightmare. The only purpose I can see is to have views of existing normalized data for fast searching, but that would be read-only data.

This is a feature in need of an application and I can see very few applications.

Some monolith facts:

1. The monolith can be any size, but the proportions are 1:4:9. It's actually infinitely dimensional, so the next three are 16,25,36. Notice the pattern?
2. The monolith is found on the moon in the crater Tycho. Tycho is the one with all the streaks coming from it on any picture of a full moon; like arrows pointing at the crater saying "find monolith here".
3. When the sun hits the monolith for the first time in the 4 million years since the apes were impregnated with the idea of the use of tools, it sends a message to the rebroadcast station near Jupiter (Saturn in the book) saying this planet has sufficiently advanced to be able to reach their moon, check them out!

Does that give me a an Erdos number?

The primary problem with foldit is that it can't be just a game. Since it is trying to simulate science, the game designers can't simplify features to increase playability. So when player frustration sets in due to the complexity, there is no simpler version or cheat mode. You are competing against nature, and nature is a bitch.

This causes many people to give up on foldit after a short while, because it takes time to learn what gains points. What is cool about the game is that many of the best players know relatively little about biology. It's a game that anyone can play, it's just hard to do well at it. If you like logic puzzles, crosswords, soduku, chess, or Go, you will probably like foldit.

In 1994, Bill Gates gave an interview to Playboy. He stated then that he was going to give away his money. In it he says:

PLAYBOY: Does your net worth of multi-billions, despite the fact that it's mostly in stock and the value varies daily, boggle your mind?

GATES: It's a ridiculous number. But remember, 95 percent of it I'm just going to give away. [Smiles] Don't tell people to write me letters. I'm saving that for when I'm in my 50s. It's a lot to give away and it's going to take time.

PLAYBOY: Where will you donate it?

GATES: To charitable things, scientific things. I don't believe in burdening any children I might have with that. They'll have enough. They'll be comfortable.

http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesint5.htm

I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter , he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.

Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hard problem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.

The best way to describe Lost is in the words of one of its main actors, Terry O'Quinn. He called it The Mysterious Gilligan's Island of Dr. Moreau. (An allusion to The Mysterious Island, Gilligan's Island, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.) Flashbacks and flashforwards in story telling is not new. The Mahabharata and Arabian Nights used it.

All CC numbers have a particular pattern, and there is even a check digit. Why doesn't Google provide a global filter in their search index so that any keyword that matches a credit card number is not indexed? And pages with CC numbers not cached, or blanked in the cache?

Sites such as bulletin boards frequently get somebody being stupid and posting their credit card number. The mods fix it, but the Google spider gets there first.