That screams to me that there are two separate groups, each with their own agenda. That happens pretty frequently in large companies/organizations - though it's more fun for most people to describe it as some tactic on the part of MS. Maybe it really is a plot (maybe, they really are all out to get us...), but I prefer to apply Hanlon's Razor...

I frequently hear the "print-to-pdf" feature touted as a major advantageous feature of Ooo - but with the wide availability of pdf 'printer' programs I don't see this as a feature at all. A separately installed pdf-printer program is available to all other programs (print to pdf from esoteric scientific program, notepad, browser, whatever) instead of tying the feature into Ooo itself. In fact, this seems contrary to the mentality of most programming (and by extension, to the open source movement) logics - aren't we supposed to want a single copy of code that can be called by any program, rather than code living in a walled garden that is replicated in each program?

(This post is less of a reply to the OP - but it seemed like a logical place to make the point. Also, I'm speaking of Win-family OS'es wrt the printer programs - I know the other OS's have similar functionality either as a program or built-in. Man, I hate that I feel the need to put disclaimers to head off the rush of "Blah can already do that!!11!" comments...)

The only story here is that people are selling small works instead of big ones. And that fits the overall model we've seen in the last 15 years online. Buy a single instead of a CD. Buy a single key to replace one on a broken laptop keyboard (instead of a replacement.)

Well, now they're selling individual lesson plans, instead of an entire book of them.

Proof of these lesson plans available as books: http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Science-Success-Lesson-Grades/dp/1933531355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258372050&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=science+lesson+plans&x=0&y=0

And these are only ones new enough to be on Amazon. I'm not in my office and don't feel like tunneling there to search WorldCat, but publishing lesson plans isn't new at all, and quite arguably is part of the scholarship of teaching.

I'll feed the troll in the name of science.

Am I sure (is there a possibility I've misses a subtle effect and later testing may uncover it)? No, I'm not willing to say there's no possibility that ultra-subtle effects could be at play.

Am I sure (as in, does this reach the level of scientific fact, and is it well enough supported by evidence that it can be built upon)? Yes, I'm that sure.

Remember that a proton in the atmosphere of Neptune interacts with an electron here on Earth at a weak level - but it's safe to say that your CD player will still work just fine. Might we discover someday that the electron in your CD player had some subtle coupling with an electron on Neptune, causing the photodiode to fry? Sure, but I doubt you'll be rushing to buy $100 anti-coupling shields for your electronics. (OTOH, if you're in the market, I'm selling anti-coupling shrouds for personal electronics for only $87 plus shipping this week - email me and we'll set up the fund transfer.)

Yep - remember, even a pulse has a time width, and it's pretty easy to get to high powers (in wattage) if the power is compressed in a small-enough time and. W = J / s Deposit 100 mJ in a ns-ps time window, you'll get some shocking-looking numbers. Then toss that energy into a heat capacity equation, and you'll find that while blackbodies absorbing the light will have a big temperature jump right away, once that heat energy has partitioned into the rest of the material it's pretty easy for the temp change to be negligible (realigning the outcome to our everyday expectations.)

Last time I checked (in my lab yesterday afternoon) most lasers don't take much energy to run at all. My Nd:YAG pulsed laser is pretty beefy (Class IV, back of the envelope calc puts the intensity at 100 MW/pulse) runs on 110/120/220 V wall power, 50/60 Hz, and only pulls 10 amps. That's my big laser... then there's my two laser pointers that are run by AAA's or the little watch batteries, and have powered times in the hours range. Looking on the Coherent website (first one I came to) I see CO2 lasers with a "marking" application that use 12A power average (from a DC power supply). So, the power requirements are certainly no worse than that of the labeling machine that has to apply the stickers, and given the higher speeds possible for laser printing vs mechanical printing the throughput might make them far more efficient.

A CO2 laser has a wavelength of 10600 nm (i.e. pretty deep into the infrared). I'm not seeing any specific reactions or chemical absorbers in the literature on a quick check, nor would I expect to - a single photon of 10600 nm light contains far too little energy to break any bonds. Instead, when the photon is absorbed it makes the molecule vibrate a little, and the kinetic energy is transferred to the surrounding water (or other) molecules as heat energy. This is where the misconception stems from that IR = heat; heat results when the photon of IR light is absorbed, but a photon is a photon is a photon... Basically, the color change is going to be a burn pattern, so there's nothing to fear from it over and above any concern you'd have for cooked fruits (e.g. pie filling).

1.5 years ago. I finally got my molecular dynamics package to run properly, but after messing with it I never did get the sound or advanced buttons working. Yes, I know there are ways, but it still required fiddling... It's better than messing with IRQ's and stuff, but it's still fiddling.

Getting the sound card, network card, and multibutton trackball working on my Linux machine took plenty of finagling too. Just sayin', neither this cast iron pot nor kettle are LeCresuet red - they look black to me...

Almost identical in nature? You mean because there is a eink screen over a color touch screen? They look nothing alike to me.
http://www.springdesign.com/resource/jsp/products/Products.jsp
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/
I think the screen size and button placement on the Alex looks fairly awkward. Adding an advanced but power-intensive feature that's usually turned off onto something that's more efficient but more limited is a pretty standard design approach. And until this gets some full investigation (journalistic or legalistic, either is fine) we're putting the cart before the horse in passing judgment. For all we know, Spring Design really is a troll-like company, whose idea of "working closely with B&N" is having a meeting once with the company who decided not to license their stuff. Who knows yet?

I hit it with java/js disabled - it shows the first line and demand you turn it back on to see the rest... ...but you can select down past that in the frame that it's hiding and paste into Notepad. Immediately afterward, I realized that there was an ad to the right of it that was scrolling the same lyrics anyway. So, one obnoxious site managed to fix another one - guess two wrongs sometimes DO make a right!

It seems to me that the issue lies in whether the data pieces are on the cloud, or if just the programs are. If I lose the ability to edit a Word document from Office-For-Cloud but I have the file stored locally, I grumble that 'the idiots who run the thing' broke the program, and wait for the 'smart guy white knights' to come fix it for them. But in this case I'm holding those bits (exclusively, or a copy) so I know the data are safe. Nuke the server from orbit, for all I care - I'm annoyed that I lost the ability to continue working, but I've only lost time (bad enough, I know...) Downtime length and frequency becomes the only factors to my unhappiness

If the whole thing is on the cloud without a user-held copy, my SuperImportantLifeWork.doc can turn into vapor if the worst case happens. Now, we add a new factor - what files I lost, and what's involved in regenerating them. This is the predominate factor in my user unhappiness - phone numbers are hard enough to pull together again for many of us, but when we expand that to everything else on the phones (or extrapolate to what may eventually be on-cloud - pictures, documents, schedules, patient data, etc.) these losses become more catastrophic.

In the end, we usually hear about the same set of factors being important for 'good' backups - different physical hardware, offsite, different power system, geographically-separate, etc., in something like that order (depending on data, usage, etc.) These companies really need to make sure that the user has the opportunity to implement these factors by maintaining a complete (or optionally partial) copy of the data local-to-user.

Nope - IR is a photon (i.e. an energy packet). This energy matches the vibrational energy levels of a molecule, so when it's absorbed it results in the same motions that we call heat. Heat can bleed in all directions, while light can only go in straight lines. Next time you're at a campfire/bonfire, hold up a hand and put your face in the shadow - you'll notice that you feel a small amount of heat on your face, but that overall it's much colder-feeling since you're not absorbing those IR photons.

I suspect the difference isn't in the hardware - it lies in the recording process. Modern music has greater 'production values' than historic recordings did.

Note - I use the phrase 'production values' in a completely value-neutral sense. Some would argue that today's music is over-engineered. Others might say that this is the difference between camcorders and IMAX recordings. Either way, no one is going to confuse highly-engineered video as being from a camcorder unless they take drastic steps to make it look that way. I'd say the same is true for music.

Also, the production goals are different in the two eras. In the 60's-early 80's (yes, I know there's a ton of exceptions....) the aim was more to give you the feeling of being there. Today, the aim is to give you an immersive experience (for lack of a more value-neutral term), and much has been written about the differences in the frequency balance between these eras. And that alone would mean that modern digitally recorded music wouldn't sound live played on speakers.

I'd love to see the control experiment where a pure analog recording (i.e. from soundboard to recorder) was done with a digital shunt (i.e. both get the same board settings, dB's vs frequency, etc.) for an acoustic set. My prediction is your upstairs neighbor wouldn't know the difference between analog and digital in this scenario, since my view is that the biggest difference is an era-dependent outlook on how the recording system is set up.

By "confirmed the feature last night", did you mean:

"confirmed their intention to include an interesting feature, which in all likelihood will be dropped in the last quarter before release because other issues critical to the fundamental infrastructure of the OS have been discovered and will require 110% of effort in order to result in an acceptable basic release?"

I've been trying to learn Spanish lately - my corpspeak is seeming pretty fluent.