Just yesterday I was reading someone who was terrified that the AB soap she required to have in her home was going to be banned and she was writing a newspaper doctor to ask what she could use around her house to protect her from the new viruses that were going to come and get her when they heard she had run out.

Let us sit quietly for a moment and remember that there are some real nutcases out in the world who are terrified of ... well everything. They have existed for a couple of hundred years or so and will stay with us unless we let them feed the bugs. Their compromised immune systems might help to weaken the forward momentum of bacterial evolution by providing such easy prey that the bacteria will reverse their evolutionary thrust and become weaker.

It may be our only hope, really.

OO is switching to the Apache license while LO is still GPLv2? did I get that right? but that is the problem, it was a conscious decision by Apache to change the license which will make it difficult to recombine. The longer the separation goes on the more difficult recombination will be I think.

Well fortunately this is happening in New Jersey, not in the USA

It's not the use of tech for evil or good that worries me, that will happen both ways no matter what, but rather the use of tech when it is a waste of time and resources to use it. Clearly in this case the tech was a good thing, but when my son and two of his children fell into and were lost in a flooded stream this winter the recovery of the bodies was not aided by all the tech that was brought in. In fact the tech was a waste of manpower. In the end (and the end was 3 weeks after the accident,) it was the community members who walked the stream in wetsuits that found the bodies.

It's true, it's true; I know you can do that, but then it would take me 15-30 minutes to find out how to do it because the help is .... where is that help thing anyway, oh, yeah, may as well google it and then oh then i have the browser open and the document and how do.... 30 minutes later i have succeeded at changing the font and can now figure out how to get rid of the annoying blank space between paragraphs. Let's see where is that help thing, oh yeah, google it, and then 30 minutes later.

If I had a 100 dollars for the month I spent trying to figure out the interface and how to customize it to my (changing) needs and still get something done on the screen... well I finally just gave in and installed libreoffice which is easy to use and has helpful help and then put the time into customizing my (primary/host) Fedora install so that I would almost never have to use the VM windows 7. That was the best possible use of my time.

Oh, and I run Google drive in all my classes, students love the way I can comment, talk to them and their tutors when we are all on-line and really, really make a difference in their writing. I love that they can run it on whatever computer they are using, even their tablet or phone, and I am using chrome in Fedora, everybody happy, happy.

Oh, and I use libreoffice calc to do everything that I need for a spreadsheet: no, while I was trained as an accountant (for 3 years) back in the 80s, I just do the kind of simple stuff that 95% of the world could (and doesn't ) use it for.

MS Office: a very big waste of money for the majority of the planet. Next to Apple & Adobe products they are a proud #3!

I really like the chromebook idea for a lot of the clueless people who ask me what they should buy. It does everything that they do: email, skype...email, uh surf... uh yeah, all that. So they really don't need more than that. But then I looked at the Samsung chromebook and was so turned off by the machine itself: fugly man, just fugly. If someone made one that cost a little more but actually looked cool, or hot depending on your taste, then I would be pushing them.

No, I don't want or need one in my life, but there are lots of people who could if they just had some kind of physically attractive features to them.

When I moved back to the US we bought a $400 Vizio internet enabled TV, Verizon FIOS internet service and..... that was it. I got a free pentium D computer from work and installed fedora with xmbc, what else do I need?

totally agreed, i rn a 60 GB SSD with two 2TB data disks (one is rsynced to the other so I have an immediate backup of everything all the time). I built the box in 2007 with a core2 and have upped the RAM to 8GB, which helped a little, but that SSD, oooh that made a huge difference

say "duh" as much as you like, but most kids in my son's class go to bed at 11. My son has to take a shower at 8, then read until 9 and then its lights out.

So, he gets awards, straight A's, invites to gifted and talented programs and magnet schools, wins the math bowl, the reading contests, score a level higher in standardized tests, etc.

No, he isn't really a genius, he just gets plenty of sleep and wakes up without an alarm clock because he is ready to wake up. It's 9:50 right now ans in ten minutes I'll go take my shower and go to bed and read myself. By 11, unless the wife and i feel frisky i'm asleep. I wake up about 6 in the morning and decide whether i want more sleep or not and then do what is needed. There are no alarm clocks in the house. We just go to bed at a reasonable time and get up when we are rested.

It's not just me and the son though. I am known at work for being able to focus and get my work done at work: that is to say I don't take any work home, ever.

Those of you who "have to work 12 hours a day" are cheating yourself. Either get a new job or learn to sleep more so that you can focus and get your work done in a reasonable span of time.

Last thing I discovered: come to work before everyone else and work hard the first two hours of the day. Then, when the rest of the office drags in make sure you have new stuff to give people that you did in the morning. Make it clear that you did a buttload of work while they were asleep. Then, when 5 comes pack your stuff and walk out the door. No one will say anything, you will have whatever they need on their desk the next morning. Works for me anyway.

Hear Hear! After living in the rest of the world where 2 cars produce the same pollution as one American car and those 2 cars are usually filled with 2-5 people, I returned to the US.

The cars here are ginormous! I mean really, really big. And then I hear things from co-workers like, "I have to have a big SUV because people keep hitting me!" (from someone who has had 3 minor accidents in three months). Traveling through Atlanta this week I had my son with me and we were driving in the HOV2+ lane, almost alone. I had him looking to see if there were any cars not in HOV who could be, and no, they all had one single person in their ginormousness.

Having driven cars, trucks (6-18 wheels) motorcycles, scooters and bicycles most of my life I am sick and tired of American stupidity on this topic. We need smaller cars that are safer, not stupid dinosaurs that are not safer, but give retarded and untaught consumers the visual impression of formidable safety (as in "I am such a mean son-of-a-bitch that if you hit me I will hit you back harder"). It is time to end the insanity that is American car design.

And finally: comfort. Ten years ago I had a 23 year old Nissan Sunny in Thailand and would, with biannual regularity, drive the whole family of wife and three kids from Chiang Mai to Koh Chang: a fifteen hour drive. The Sunny is the same size as a Tercel and we are all big Dutch/American people/children. The kids still talk about how much fun those rides were, how we listened to "The Hitchhiker's guide", "Moon over Morocco" and rode through "Amazing Thailand." Never will you hear any complaint about discomfort, because we were having a good time together. Jeez people, get a clue.

i'm good with suing the bullet manufacturers, it's not like they didn't know that some percentage of their bullets would be used to kill/maim/injure people.

HMMMM, I wonder what that percentage is?

the difference between 60 and 75 is HUGE in gas mileage. If I travel for 4 hours at 60 in my hybrid I will average about 48 MPG. If I travel 4 hours in the same hybrid at 75 I'll be getting about 38 MPG. I did just this test. It is 4 hours to my daughter's house on old state highways where the speed limit is 60. Awesome mileage. I went 10 hours by interstate to my son's house last Thursday and was lucky to hold it at 38, it slipped down to 37.8 on the ride back.

Not to mention the main reasn I would be righteously pissed about this is that wifi compared to my 75GB download speed over Verizon wifi is a joke. They still are providing only very limited speed over the wifi routers they gave me: and then told my wife that she should put everything over wifi because it was so much easier. I didn't.

having lived in a number of other countries, and had experiences much more radical than what this politician will describe in public, I have to agree with his basic idea "I would have shut off a very good experience for myself," even if he doesn't have the science background himself to parse out what was actually going on.

Many years ago I went along with a Thai/Chinese friend who had a fieldhand who the family thought was "possessed." We traveled (in her Mercedes) through the Thai jungle and scrubland in northern Thailand until we crosses a hanging wooden bridge that was the entrance to a bustling village. (yeah, we drove across it, it is Thailand and you do shit like that, or did, with the tourist invasion in the last 20 years its no fun any more there) We went to the temple where there was supposed to be a monk who was especially holy, and especially skilled at chasing out demons, having successfully driven demons out of a number of people.

After making a suitable "offering" to the temple, and waiting for the monk to work his way through the simple problems of the other people who came for advice or other ...needs (the couple ahead of us wanted to get married, but the husband to be had been given a special amulet by a previous girlfriend and the wife to be wanted to be assured that there had been and was no evil intention carried by the amulet which might damage their marriage. The monk studied it carefully (with his glasses on, for quite a few minutes) and then said a short charm, blessing, whatever over it and gave it back to them with his blessing on their marriage. That kind of stuff.

When he got to us he escorted the fieldhand back into a room in back and examined him. He returned in a half-hour or so and told us that he was not possessed at all but was mentally ill and needed to see a psychiatrist for his problems. The family insisted that the exorcism be performed anyway, just to be on the safe side. He agreed, but told them again it was a waste of time. He performed the ritual (it was cool, but not the focus of this story) and nothing happened, we went home and he went to a shrink at my friend's expense.

Notice that the monk had no need to put on a show, he had the care and support of his village. He understood their needs and how to achieve spiritual health for an extremely superstitious people. While we can laugh and point fingers, this man relieves fear and suffering among thousands of people every day just by existing and caring for them. Is that worse, stupid, terrible, or otherwise a bad thing when it is the people who need this? And, yes, they all are educated and have studied science, but science does not relieve their fear, he does.

So, carp away, that is the real world for most of the 7 billion: to relieve their fear, it was money well spent.

you obviously have no children ... and probably little opportunity for them as well