I don't know if this is an attempt to get modded as "Funny" when it's not funny at all or if you are serious, so I'll assume the later. There are compatibility reasons for using .doc format. .doc format is old and well supported by non-Microsoft products like LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc. Where I work we save a lot of internal documents in .doc format simply because we don't need any features that .docx has and we don't want to force people needlessly to have to upgrade to Office 2010 just to read our docs when, again, they're pretty simple and don't need any of the new features that .docx supports. Additionally, my company in the past didn't have the fastest record of upgrading versions of Office and it got really frustrating to have a few people in the office saving docs in .docx when the majority of people in the office were on an older version of Office that didn't understand .docx and thus couldn't read their docs.

Your comments about Pat Tilman in particular are just typical conspiracy theory bs. They may be true I guess, but I think it makes more sense to believe that he will killed by incompetence than and that was covered up than to believe that he was killed to shut him up. Noam Chomsky is not "one of our nation's most respected public intellectuals". Few Americans have heard of him. He has little to no influence on anything today. He was a famous critic of the Vietnam War, but that was so long ago that if you believe that he still has major influence then you probably also believe the same about Ralph Nader. Both Nader and Chomsky have long been American historical footnotes. I'm sure that if Tilman was unhappy with the realities of his service that it would have attracted some attention, but Chomsky is simply not important enough to murder a guy deliberately to prevent him from meeting Chomsky.

While Tilman served, if the military/government feared him becoming an anti-war activist it was relatively easy to keep him occupied in Afghanistan, even if at a desk job, and deny him a chance to return home for a while. From what I've read about Tilman and his family after his death, I can't say I'm super impressed with any of them. Tilman seemed to act first and think second. He served as an enlisted man. Not an officer, but an enlisted man. He had a college degree so I have to question the decision to willingly bypass officer candidates school. Some of that may have been because his brother, who joined with him, wasn't a college graduate. I don't know. But off hand it doesn't strike me as the greatest decision ever to bypass OCS. Keep in mind too that losing a loved one during military service causes some surviving family members to behave in strange ways. Cindy Sheehan reacted negatively to her son's death and in my opinion mostly in an irrational way. I can certainly understand that when it seems that Tilman's death was covered up, and it does seem to be covered up, that his family would just assume the worst possible scenario as likely.

In many or probably most cases, the companies doing the layoffs are simply cutting headcount as a fast way to get a short term improvement in the company's bottom line and thus cause the stock price to go up or at least stay where it is. Cisco and IBM are both notorious for playing this game. IBM simply moves the job to a cheaper foreign country where they have an office and Cisco just hires new H1-B visa workers at a much lower price than the American citizens they laid off.

A guy I went to high school with is one of my Facebook friends. He and I worked in the same organization years ago on a job and I have no problems being Facebook friends with him as we live in different cities now and work at different jobs. He's pretty much become what they call a "wing nut" on the right wing side of American politics. A few years ago he posted an article that was complete baloney and I posted a link to a Snopes article refuting his article. He in turn posted a link to an article claiming that the Snopes article was a lie and that everything on the Snopes site was suspect and promoting a "liberal agenda". So now the US political right is ready when you try to rebuke them to claim that your rebuke is in fact the lie and turn it into a "he said, she said" kind of debate where people just believe whatever closest fits their preconceived notions. So no, while you hope that a reasonable person might look at the Snopes article you link to, in reality the liars are already ready to claim that Snopes is the real liar and only they are telling the truth.

Perhaps you would best be served to not believe everything you hear on right wing talk radio.

Silver is as risky as investing in gold, despite what you heard Rush, Sean, Glenn or some other right wing talk guy tell you. If you get in at the right time you can make big money, but the problem is that when those markets correct, the destroy your savings. If you bought silver at its high in 2011 right now you'd be roughly down 40% and that is a huge loss.

I'm American, so my opinion on this matter does count. We live in what is generally considered to be a free society. There is no legal requirement to vote. That's part of what being in a free society means. If you choose not to vote for any reason, good or bad, you have the right to do so. Frankly, a lot of governments that have no freedom at all require mandatory voting. Yes, I know that Australia does too. That is their problem, not ours. I vote regularly but I feel very strongly that anybody who doesn't want to vote should have that right too. That just makes my vote more valuable.

The fact that some news or weather channel is low quality doesn't mean that TV in general is all going downhill. Actually, this is quite possibly another Golden Age for TV. Quality hasn't been higher for years. You now have more high quality shows than you can possibly watch. Among recent shows with very high quality are: Breaking Bad, Sons Of Anarchy, Game Of Thrones, House Of Cards (from Netflix, but let's count it as TV), Downton Abbey, The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family and others. There are actually too many good one hour shows right now. There are a lot of shows I'd love to watch but I can't find the time, so I don't even start to watch them. Besides that list I've got quite a few shows that I really like a lot that are on network TV, but while I like them a lot, I think few would consider them to be truly great. If the folks you know only like the news and not much else, then sure, dump TV. But the quality is there. That doesn't mean that everything is great, but there are plenty of really good shows out there that deserve the accolades they get. Keep in mind though some networks like TLC live off reality TV and yeah, everything they have is pretty much low quality garbage for sure, but there are plenty of serious TV channels out there. Even SyFy is planning a multi-episode sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and 2010 stories and it sounds promising, with Ridley Scott attached as producer.

I wonder who is attacking the Finns, and who would have reason to? Russia has been menacing Finland and its neighbors in the Baltics with incursions by aircraft and submarines. There is concern that Russia may turn on Finland after Ukraine. The Baltic states and other targets of Russia have suffered similar attacks coming from Russia.

Russia has a complicated history with Finland. It conquered it in the early 1800s and until the time of the last tsar, it was granted a very high degree of autonomy within Russia. Use of the Finnish language was encouraged and I get the impression that the Finns were sort of left to run their own internal affairs. The Russian Revolution came and with the end of the tsars, Finland was technically left without a leader, so they declared independence. Lenin seemed to have bigger fish to fry than worrying about Finland, so Finnish independence was accepted by Russia. Stalin invaded in WWII and then Germany came to kick the Russians out. After first welcoming the Nazis as liberators, the Finns turned against them and Russia eventually re-invaded in 1944. At one point the Finns were fighting both the Russians and the Nazis and Finland cut a deal with Stalin where they surrendered a huge tract of land in the east to Russia in exchange for peace. Finland served a useful place for the USSR after WWII as it offered the Soviets a close by nation where they could hold meetings with the West.

I'm not sure that a lot of Russians truly believe that Finland belongs to Russia as the peace treaty that Stalin brokered pretty much surrendered everybody who had any real tie to Russia. I think there are a couple of possible explanations for this, if it is Russia. One is that Russia is trying desperately to intimidate nearby countries into not joining NATO without realizing that all they are doing is making the strongest case ever that if they don't join, they'll be invaded sooner or later. Another is that one of the problems you have in the post-USSR countries (with the exceptions of the 3 Baltic States) is that communism taught people to anticipate the needs/wishes of the guy in charge, often with disastrous consequences. This wouldn't be the first time that some numbskull took it on himself to stir the pot because he thought that the guy in charge would be pleased.

That's not how I understand it, based on the translation of the cockpit recording. The captain was allowed to take a break whenever he wanted and unfortunately he chose the time right before the plane entered a storm that led to the air speed tubes freezing over. I wouldn't call it "scheduled" as that sort of implies something like "At exactly 3 hours into the flight the captain will take a break" when the timing of the break was up to him. In fact, many were shocked at how early he took his break as usually the captain takes a break much later in the flight. But they didn't know for a while that he was apparently flying on only 1 hour of sleep as he had sleeping problems in his hotel, so that must have made him want to take his break early.

The cockpit recording seems to indicate the senior co-pilot not helping as much as you might think. He did help some, but it seemed clear that he kept deferring in judgement to the guy flying the plane, which was a fatal mistake in hindsight. And by the time the captain arrived, which was too late to salvage the situation, the recording makes clear that nobody knew what exactly was going on and it was only with about 30 seconds to go before the crash that the captain and senior co-pilot realized what the junior co-pilot was actually doing at the controls.

The whole thing was shockingly preventable. There was a long series of small decisions that were made where none of them alone was enough to have caused the accident but every one of them played a role in it. If even one of those decisions had been different, such as the captain taking a break later, the senior not the junior co-pilot being left to fly the plane (this is up to debate though) or the crew simply trying to avoid the weather as the other planes in the area had been doing, they'd have probably survived.

Some aviation experts are speculating that the rapid expansion of budget airlines in Asia has led to training shortages and if this ends up being a similar accident to AF447 where an improperly trained pilot inadvertently puts the plane into a stall, all I can say is that this wasn't supposed to happen again. After AF447 the airlines were supposed to train specifically to prevent that kind of thing from happening again.

That's overly simplistic and as such maybe as much wrong as right. China is stuck with North Korea because of the shared border. The Russian Republic, which also shares a border with North Korea and also assisted it somewhat covertly during the Korean War, stopped sending financial support early in Yeltsin's presidency, leaving China fully responsible in this game of musical chairs. China doesn't like the fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons for a variety of reasons. But the truth is that China fears a united pro-US Korea even more, so they grudgingly but willingly pay to prop up the regime. North Korea does actually have a lot of rare earths and China is currently using it's financial support as leverage to extract these materials at cut rate prices, so there is some financial incentive for China to continue to support the regime. China really doesn't provide much useful in the ongoing war of words between North Korea and its perpetual enemies of the US, South Korea, and Japan. China doesn't have as much leverage as those 3 think, but again China rarely uses any leverage at all because it wants North Korea to survive and is afraid if it pushes too hard, North Korea will collapse and the border region will be flooded with refugees. Keep in mind that while North Korea does often infuriate China and at some level at the top they do think that eventually the North Korean regime will collapse on its own, they want to push that date out as far as possible. China paid a very dear price to support their "brothers" in North Korea in the war. China is estimated on the low end to have had at least 100,000 of their soldiers killed in action in the war. One of Mao's sons was killed, probably deliberately, by a UN bombing raid while he was serving in the war. And Taiwan was lost, perhaps permanently, as a direct result of China not having the resources to invade them and the US finally seeing some value in propping up Chiang Kai Shek and sending enough of a deterrent force to the area to save Taiwan. So China feels stuck to support North Korea if for no other reason than to justify the very high price already paid.

Russia also fits the bill, although I'm not surprised that you didn't know that. Russia still has reasonably friendly relations with North Korea and shares a small border with it where North Korean "guest workers" (really slave labor) do logging and perhaps some other manual work on the Russian side for little pay and without any choice in the matter. Putin just recently said he was looking to improve relations between the two countries. North Korea spent years playing its patrons the Soviet Union and China off each other. The USSR and China had strained relations for many years and North Korea leaned towards whichever side at the time it could get more money out of. The Soviet Union gave them their first nuclear reactor and the training necessary that put them, if unintentionally, on the path to getting nuclear weapons. Boris Yeltsin had the good sense a long time ago to stop all payments to North Korea, basically saying "Too bad. So sad." They've never been resumed. So he left China holding the bag for being 100% responsible for financially propping up the regime. Kim Jong-Un's father was actually born in Russia, although official reports in North Korea deny this. And his grandfather was a Russian military officer during the 2nd World War and became the eventual dictator of North Korea because Russia's first choice for the job turned it down and grandpa Kim seemed loyal enough to the Soviet Union to be a really good back up choice. So while Russian-North Korean ties don't get much press, Russia gets all of the benefits, whatever they are, of being "friends" with North Korea without any of the costs that China got stuck with.

Well, considering that the vote in Florida decided the 2000 US presidential election and could have been a major factor in the other elections since then, pandering to the voters did have some value. I heard rumblings that Bill Clinton wanted to resume normal relations with Cuba towards the end of his presidency, but he feared that doing so would throw the state to the Republican candidate and might decide the election. At the time, the majority of Cubans voted Republican but some did vote Democrat. The majority of Cubans at the time were also vehemently opposed to normalizing relations, so to give Gore a chance so he could retain some decent minority of the Cuban vote in Florida, Clinton let the idea die quietly without much of the public knowing it was ever under consideration. As an American, I can tell you that outside of the Cuban community there's been not a lot of support for the embargo and restricted travel to Cuba for years and many of us resent national policy being dictated by such a tiny minority of people in one state, way out of proportion of their true significance to the nation.

Cuban voters no longer matter in Florida, thankfully. The old ones just vote Republican no matter what for the most part. They're never going to change. The younger Cuban generation no longer cares about the embargo and are more willing to vote Democratic. Plus, the number of Puerto Ricans in Florida has swelled in recent years and they do mostly vote Democratic, so long standing old people Cuban Republican votes have been neutralized. Florida will no longer be lost or won by a stance on this issue as the people who do care have lost their significance. What finally made it practical was the lessening of the voting power of the old school Cubans and the willingness of some Republicans to reconsider the idea because of lost business reasons.

Just last week I looked on Amazon for an old CD that's now out of print. It's an old classical music CD not rare or of particular interest outside of fans of the artist. In fact, you can rather easily find it available in MP3 or AAC formats on Amazon, iTunes, and a few other places. One seller only wanted 1 cent for a used copy with about 2 to 3 dollars for shipping. Sometimes people will sell old CDs, DVDs or books that have little collectable value for 1 cent just to make it up a little on shipping charges because Amazon ranks the copies by lowest price first in the Marketplace without counting the shipping cost. So while you could charge $2.01 for it and offer free shipping and make just as much as charging 1 cent and 2 dollars shipping, the 1 cent offer will go to the top of the list and the $2.01 offer in my example would be listed after anyone with a lower cost for the item, even if the item+shipping cost was much larger. You could sell it for 1 cent and charge $4 for shipping and get listed earlier than a $2.01 charge with free shipping.

Your comments are pretty astute. As someone who has actually spent a lot of time in the past decade in Ukraine, and mostly in the Russian speaking parts where the people may see themselves with a strong Russian identity, I have some insight into this. Basically living in the Soviet Union just ruined these people to an extent that it may take many decades or even centuries to fix. The amount of dishonesty and ethical shortcuts required to get by in such a system is something we in the West are just not used to. And even today in the parts of the old USSR that are not in the EU, which is 12 of the 15 former Soviet republics, corruption is just a normal way of life. All this stuff has led to a situation where the people don't really plan long term. In general they are "carpe diem" types to an extreme, often an illogical extreme. As an example, if you were to offer the average Russian a choice between giving them 1000 US dollars today, no strings attached, or giving them 10000 US dollars in 6 months, no strings attached, they'll take the 1000 now. Their mentality is that they may be dead in 6 months or you may be dead in 6 months and unable to give it to them or something unforeseen may happen in the future, so they are really short term planners in the extreme. Putin seems to plan a bit more long term than on average, but I am pretty sure that his plans are far more short-sighted than such planning would be in the West or even China where their culture encourages a very long term view of things. The obvious problem of this is that when things don't go as you expect, you don't really have a plan for that, so I expect he'll double down on the anti-western sentiment and the non-obvious repression like making bloggers identify themselves and saying they need to keep posts clean as a cover for monitoring for subversive posts against the government.

This is Slashdot, so I'm hoping it's Quatloos.