My mum told me this rule for estimating back when I were a lad. Make your best guess then double it. Still works to this day.

Yeah, I wondered that. They don't even say if the curvy-brain-mice even lived. :/

Excellent question. I doubt you'll get a good answer because the implication that you are questioning is probably wrong.

Anyone who's worked with chaotic system simulations would be amazed if your answer were any different.

Probably. Humans are born dumb for a whole bunch of reasons that will someday be easily fixed by science. :(

Thanks. When people reply to me, even indirectly, the best ones are with science, because then that gives me something to look up which will actually mean things. Keep up the good work and ty again.

I can sell you one of those...

Perfect. :) The bit I don't get is how "a genetic mutation that causes mammalian neural tissue to expand and fold" disproves "'dumber species will have different genes'? Since, well, it's a gene that's different. Also, conflating folding of the neural tissues with intelligence (rather than simply viewing it as a necessary precursor) sounds like the modern version of "men are more intelligent than women because their brains weigh more."

Actually the Luddites were protesting the introduction of mechanized weaving looms because they were putting weavers out of work. They were more about banning useful tools because they helped people be too effective and so destroyed whole occupations. /comicbookguy

But I digress. The difference between the CCTV situation and your small town situation is that for you, that Monday a few of the guys had heard a few details. Within a couple of weeks it was probably forgotten. In a surveillance society the high-def video footage of that bath would be available to anyone with appropriate security clearance, forever.

The real question is, if Windows is dying, what will I run Firefox on?

Win7 doesn't need a "redeeming feature". Its strongest point is that (as WuphonsReach says, above) it just sits in the background and does its thing. It's good at all of the things and OS has to do, without being in your face.

Great summary!

Reading through your post, I noticed that it parallels the 'even-odd' rule for Windows, while pointing to the reason. Starting from Win95 (which was a complete-ish do over and the first Windows that was actually an OS), the "even" releases are the ones that work on user-facing polish. This includes stability, bug fixes, responsiveness, efficiency. This does not include back-end architecture rewrites, server capability etc. These are the ones with a great reputation.

Notice the "odd" ones are 2K, Vista, Windows 8. These are the ones where major, major stuff happened behind the scenes. The result of this is that fewer resources were devoted to making the user experience really awesome. And that's why they "suck" even though they have significant technical advantages.

It's like cold sore cream. "Symptoms should fade within 7 days". Really? Because they take about that long to heal up regardless of what you do.

February: "Touchscreen notebooks coming whether we want them or not?"
March: "The killer flaw of this notebook is that it has no touchscreen."

You know, every time someone tells me I "don't need" to know or investigate something in that sort of condescending manner, it just serves to convince me that I do indeed need to know it. If 10 minutes cross-checking a diagnosis is enough to confirm or discredit it (within some reasonable level of confidence) then I'm much better off doing that than waiting for the chance that some review at some point in the future will catch the screwup after the harm is done.