That's a silly question though, if you take one tree ring from one location then it's local. If you take a hundred from a hundred different locations on the earth then it becomes global.

Don't tease everybody, its the middle of the week still!

I agree with you completely. Steam is an example of a DRM scheme though that actually provides other benefits rather than just breaking perfectly good software. Personally I don't use it but I know a whole lot of people that do.

You are assuming people are smart. Most are not and will forward emails either to their own personal email or straight to another company. This is all moot though since they can intercept all SSL communications and get your password as you enter it on any website. Security is really hard. Not all businesses have the resources to do that either as it takes installing a root certificate authority and modifying each workstation to try it first.

Okay, then MySQL should go away since PostgreSQL was here first and did it right from the start.

If you look at the development of MySQL over the years its been a long waiting game of features that should be prevalent in any proper DBMS system but the lead developers openly admit they were not database guys when they started out so it's not really any wonder that the product was lacking from the very beginning and still shows its weakness today.

So the benefit is that you have a good product that you can rely on and it happens to be free. For MySQL you have a mediocre product with broad deployment because it relied so heavily on programmers to do in the application what normal databases handle for the programmer. This usually makes programmers happy as they think they know data management. So with MySQL a programmer must also know how best to handle data management, with PostgreSQL you have proper data management built right in. The database server does work rather than just being a storage repository with the MySQL approach.

You appear to be talking about a Windows Vista issue. I mix Ubuntu and Windows 7 all over the place without any problems out of the gate.

I do this at home and here at work.

BeOS was MacOS done right, it was perfection, or at least the closest thing to date in 1999ish. R5 was pretty damned impressive too.

I'm not sure how you could make that argument about JFK. The whole country has shifted starkly to the right. This leaves people that used to be in the middle looking like extremists on the left. I might add, the very same people since there have definitely been a lot of politicians that have made careers out of it.

I'm quite aware of that, it says something about where modern conservatism has gone today.

The problem is that people are arguing about the wrong things. Instead of arguing about global warming we should be arguing about how to mitigate the effects. Crazy weather is a common byproduct of global warming and it has huge economic effects here and now. Think about the money the state of FL invests every year to keep their beaches from receding. Raise that water a few more inches and see how much harder it gets.

I have every faith that 300 years from now we'll still be around, how many people had to die to get us there is a huge looming question. If we continue to bury our heads in the sand about the issue then we'll ultimately cause more harm. Will good come of it afterwards? Absolutely, once things are destroyed we have a tendancy to build them back up and build them better. It's a heavy price to pay when we could invest in technology now instead of going to war and end up with workable solutions to move forward with. Instead we'll continue to fund the military industrial complex along with the healthcare debacle that everyone refuses to actually deal with as well.

Where do you get your information from? Child labor was extremely common and still is today in other countries without such strict labor laws.

For my grandfather it wasn't an option, he stopped going to school when both of his parents died during the flu pandemic of the late 20s. He dropped out after third grade and spent the rest of his years working. When he turned 18 the war was brewing, he signed up and then toiled in the same paper mill when he got back. He probably spent 50 years of his life working at that mill.

The whole labor movement was a movement for a reason, it wasn't just children being taken advantage of, that's why you saw the formation of unions at the same time. Lassez Faire capitalism only works to an extent, then you end up with rivers literally on fire and the public good is no longer being served. This isn't a liberal or conservative approach, Republicans created the EPA afterall.

There is more to productivity of the company than just your productivity to consider. You and I are alike that we do our best work at night or later in the day. If you are not around for people that have their ideas during the day then you will miss out on getting potentially valuable information.

Personally, I don't think anyone should telecommute 100% of the time, they should at the most make it 50/50 so that you can get input from other stake holders. If all of your stakeholders are night owls then you can consider adjusting as necessary. This is rarely the case in my experience though.

Given that I am involved in software that automates dull business proccesses I can tell you that getting input from the end users is critical, if they are working during the day then you should too. When people work remotely there is a detachment that occurs on a social level which prevents other people from being as open as they would be in person. There is also the issue of less technical people that use an application than need to show you what they want in person.

Policies are tricky business, they are supposed to be blanket, but they probably shouldn't be draconian either.

While philosophically I feel you should be right, there is ample real life evidence to show that industry often doesn't have ways of dealing with the health risks associated with harsh chemicals. Take IBM for example, fabricating chips is an extremely toxic substance and extremely fragile, dust in the wrong place at the wrong time can destroy a whole production run. So IBM built bunny suits to protect the chips from human hair and dust but neglected protecting the humans from the harsh chemicals and what you got was a class action lawsuit down the road and a lot of health problems.

Theoretically this is why you would have the EPA and OSHA to be your guardians. An average person does not have access to all the information they need to decide on whether their job is safe, federal standards at least try to force companies up to a minimum level.

There are lots of recent examples of the industry failing to protect anything but the bottom line, look at almost every oil spill to date, look at almost every mine collapse, look at the harmful effects of fracking. It gets worse when you start talking about water departments not meeting federal guidelines on chlorine content and getting slapped with thousands of dollars in fines which is only seen as a cost of doing business because the cost of fixing the problem is a few orders of magnitude more expensive.

You are mixing two situations here. Evolution does not attempt to explain where we began, it only explains the mechanisms that drive us currently. We have seen evolution in action many times and will continue to see it changing wild life including plant life, right on down to influenza which keeps mutating every year. We see it everywhere, evolution is happening and has been happening. Where we started is a completely different discussion and as you state, we cannot know with absolute certainty the answer there.

The fossil record would seem to indicate that the evolution we see today probably drove the changes necessary but there is nothing saying that God couldn't have set it all in motion or that aliens didn't drink some nasty water and disintegrate into a river. There are lots of theories on where we came from but evolution is more than just a theory but it depends on your context as to whether you should refer to it as such.

I use LO everyday, like I said, you can't just print and expect the output to be correct, you are absolutely right that I have to save to a PDF first and then I can rely on the output, this is an unnecessary step and illustrates why a lot of people stay with MS Office.

I also don't begrudge anyone that shy's away from Office over its licensing enforcement, that's a perfectly valid criticism. Ribbon can be customized though so I would suggest you just modify it so the features you want accessible are accessible and then you get to live a life where you don't have to complain so bitterly.