I've tried Office 2010 on Wine. It won't even install.

The Sith approach for handling TSA personnel would be: (choose one option)

A. Force choke
B. Force lightning
C. Lightsaber through the face

Face it, the Sith have it much better. If you're a Sith, you get to wear black, you get a badass red lightsaber, chicks want you, and you don't have to take shit from anyone.

I've grown absolutely disgusted with big business AND the government. These executives are already rich from their salaries/company perks, so why even do something like this in the first place? They don't need the money... what can they buy with it that they already can't afford? I don't understand...is it just a penis-measuring game where executives are looking to make more money than the rest? Libertarianism once appealed to me, but I've seen more and more that people can't be trusted to do the right thing. The existence of a true free market depends on the major players not being a bunch of sociopaths. Giving more power to the government isn't the answer either because their agenda doesn't usually match up with mine. It's a problem with no solution.

Meanwhile, lots of ordinary people can barely afford to get by these days. If I were in charge of a company and earning several million a year, I would sacrifice my personal income for the year and give it to the people working for me instead. They need it more. If you need millions rolling in each year to maintain your lifestyle, you're doing something wrong.

So long as my mind is intact, fully functional and I have a decent means to communicate with the outside world? I would.

Are you sure? It's easy to feel that way now, but visualize yourself in that situation. Even if you were able to communicate and had your mental state preserved, there is no guarantee that you would be able to enjoy life or do much of anything. What would someone in that state do to pass the time? After several years of being trapped in a useless husk of a body and spending your days staring at the ceiling, would you still want to live? The real horror would be that you would have centuries of that to look forward to and that all your days will be mostly the same. Would people still come to see you after your friends and family passed on, assuming they didn't get the treatment?

I'd rather live a normal lifespan and then die surrounded by friends and loved ones. Having my consciousness cease to exist would be a better alternative to that sort of immortality. I'm 28, in good health, and I'm already weary of this world. I stay here because I have people who care about me and there are things I want to do in life, but when my time comes I will go without complaint or regret. Seneca taught that being able to face and accept inevitable death without fear is a sign of strength and wisdom. Quality, not quantity of life is what matters.

Having a steady supply of stem cells is only part of the solution, it's a matter of efficiency. Will the stem cells be able to repair organs and tissues faster than they are becoming damaged? If not, the subject will die when something critical fails. Also, DNA only becomes more and more degraded over time. This will ultimately cause some sort of terminal cancer in the subject. Until there's a 100% effective cure for cancer, this would never work.

Also, this sort of immortality would be more of a curse than a blessing even if it were possible to pull it off. Who would want to live in a broken-down, aged body forever, kept alive only by a steady stream of stem cells? Is this world such a nice place that you would want to stay here forever, even if it means existing like that? I wouldn't do it even if I had the option. Death would be preferable. The stem cells wouldn't give someone who is 250 years old the same body they had at 18...they would probably be trapped in a bed in a severely debilitated state. The worst type of immortality is one that brings no pleasure.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org Writer has usually been good at handling traditional .doc files. (OO got much better when early 2.x versions came out) I'm usually able to share these documents with Word users and make changes without any major issues.

Docx is a whole different story. I recently opened a moderately complicated docx in OO Writer. This document had one of those auto-generated table of contents that corresponded to section headings, several embedded pictures, a few tables, and lots of lists. While Writer would let me see what was in the document, the editing capability was completely shot to hell. Lists were broken, the table of contents was a read-only object that Writer wouldn't (or couldn't) let me change, style/formatting was glitchy in general, and track changes was broken. Converting that document to another format just made things worse. Don't even think of using OO/LO with Docx files unless the only thing you have to do is read them.

I've used Java when I need to write a quick-and-dirty program on short notice, but for serious projects I've never considered using Java because

1. It depends on the interpreter/runtime.
2. No native code (unless you count GCJ, but I've never been able to make that compile anything written in the last few years)
3. Java doesn't give you access to much system-level stuff
4. Terrible OS X support
5. Java is still slower than native code for CPU-intensive functions


If you want WORA, Qt with C++ is a better way to go. I've been able to compile Qt projects on any OS without changing a thing and I'm in the process of porting my old Java stuff to Qt.

The problem is that the christians (ESPECIALLY evangelicals) don't want tolerance, they want to control everything. They have a huge majority in the USA and yet they still claim persecution every time someone stands up to them. The fundies have this bizarre chip on their shoulders where they think the world is evil and everyone else is out to get them because of their faith.

Full disclosure: I'm an ex-christian so I know how it is on both sides of the issue. There are lots of us out there.

If they can last decades without growing tin whiskers or having the capacitors fail the next time it's used is a different story. Up until earlier this month, I was using an old CRT had thad faithfully served me daily these last 10 years. All of a sudden, there was a loud POP and the TV shut off. When I tried to turn it on again, there was only a loud sparking noise and no picture so I unplugged it real fast. I'm guessing a capacitor blew. All I can do is guess since there's no way in hell I'm opening up a CRT... too dangerous.

Try Clementine. It's a bit rough around the edges but it looks like the old Amarok 1.4.