That's fine with us. We'd just as soon you not come.

I like how you gobble up tropes fed to you by your Democratic overlords, and then accuse others of bigotry. It's cute.

Detroit? Deep Red? Detroit has not had a Republican mayor in 50 years. Detroit is your liberal, socialist utopia. Liberals should be flocking there to bask in their success.

Traditionally, typeface designers have considered legibility and aesthetics in their work (in addition to typesetting limitations). Apparently those factors are optional now as well.

OK, these are interesting intellectual exercises. But don't try to sell them as examples of typeface design, because that's a creative discipline that goes beyond mathematical questions of "can it be done?"

That's going to take awhile.

You must feel like a pretty big idiot for buying a gas guzzler cap van then. Why people buy gas inefficient vehicles and then whine about the price of gas is something that I simply cannot fathom.

I watched a little of that Long Way Round show. All I could think was, how lame it is that they did the whole thing with a truck trailing them with supplies and stuff in case they broke down. What a pussy way to ride a motorcycle around the world. Perhaps they should have just put the bikes up on the pickup truck bed and sat on them while being driven around the world. Would have been just about as authentic.

I've gone through this at a few places now. Besides resistance from the users ("we only know how to use Outlook!"), is migrating from Outlook to another solution ranges somewhere between unlikely to impossible. For someone like me, I only have 3 or 4 appointments scheduled, and the other few hundred are meetings I was invited to. :)

You can have the best plan, with the best business reasons, but when a senior executive tells the CEO that he can't switch, you'll frequently find that it will veto the migration.

Here's a real-world example. I was Director of IT for the company. The CEO told me specifically to get rid of Exchange, because the upgrade costs were too high. We were literally a couple weeks from switching. The Director of Sales went to the CEO and demanded that we keep Exchange, or he would walk.

Funny thing about the sales department. He didn't manage to sell anything, and he couldn't retain the customers. The accounting staff ended up doing all the customer retention. That guy cost us more money than he made. IT, on the other hand, brought costs down, and improved the customer experience.

The only thing that sales brought to us were headaches, and very pretty forward looking reports, that pretty much consisted of a graph showing our sales history, and a line going up at a 45 degree angle showing our future revenue. Every few months, he had to update the graph, so it showed our revenue losses, and had a new starting point for his upward line. I don't think he had a grasp of the concept of forecasting.

The real reason is probably a lot simpler: Cost.

Before you break ground on a single-family home in Pleasanton CA, you must cough up in excess of $125,000 (yes, 125 grand) in fees and permits.

I expect said fees and permits are even more expensive in San Francisco proper.

[For comparison, in Los Angeles County a home building permit is $38,000. Here in Montana it's from $50 to $2000 depending where you are.]

I'd say that his revision would have the direct effect of creating a more-effective police state, where the government need never fear The People.

The whole POINT of the 2nd Amendment was that government SHOULD fear The People.

Funny, I've tried MS Office a few times over the years. I usually go back to OpenOffice. If for nothing else, I install OpenOffice when I set up a new computer, since it's too much trouble to find an unused MS license outside of normal business hours. :)

Microsoft is probably counting every OEM that ships with the trial version of Office, and all the bundled licenses, even if they aren't used.

Most companies buy too many licenses, so they can be sure they have enough. So if we buy 50, and use 30, but only 10 use it on any sort of regular basis, MS will still count it as 50.

For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.

The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.

There are enough users who refuse to even try OpenOffice for the word processor. "I can't because...". I've tricked some users into switching, by just giving them shortcuts on their desktop with the MS names instead of the OO names, and changing the default save types to the MS counterpart. When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.

Because most telecommuters are do-nothings, which is why they are just as "effective" at home as they are at work?

I'm only being slightly facetious here. In my experience, home is almost never a place conducive to doing good work, way too many distractions and way too disassociated from the normal work environment and its easy access to communication with co-workers.

I say this having been a telecommuter myself for a time (not by choice, but by circumstance) and finding it demoralizingly difficult to be effective, and seeing the same thing in just about every person I've ever worked with who was a telecommuter.

Sure I've worked with people who still managed to get good work done from home; but in every case, those were the superstars who actually got *more* good work done at work. Working at home took away some of their productivity as it does for everyone else I've known, but they were so good to begin with that it just knocked them down to better-than-average instead of superstar status.

Well that's my opinion anyway.

Don't be silly. They're not the source of every problem, just the vast majority of them.