Sweet, the radios I planted in the wilderness tuned to Rush Limbaugh have succeeded in creating the first wolf-Republican hybrid!

Now if I can just the the ostriches to pay attention to the Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel and Obama speeches, my dream of Wild Kingdom: DC edition will be near completion.

That's assuming a specific type of machine thought. You're assuming that all machines taking the Turing Test are algorithmic constructs, which IMHO is a very bold (and incorrect) assumption. There is every possibility that a machine complex enough to exhibit consciousness could have learned English through a scheme like self-organizing maps, thus you would end up in a situation where spelling is not assured at all, and you could even find some words that have been mis-defined because of a limited training dataset.

Don't draw conclusions about future techs based on what you know of the current standard way of doing things, it's the best way to miss the boat.

This is the part of the issue I have a real problem with. I don't like the idea that the U.S. Army is at the mercy of a private entity's marketing strategy. I want rugged long term support for my nation's military. This could be easily achieved with either an in-house or open source based solution. Relying on the release schedule of one specific private entity just to keep functioning seems to be the very definition of folly. I cannot see any reason why SELinux isn't the standard installation for military PCs. It's open, it'll be maintained as long as the Army maintains interest in it, and it's as secure as a fully functional machine gets (IMHO)...

But I digress, this isn't about what they COULD do, this is about what they ARE doing; the U.S. Army is putting itself in a compromising situation under a multinational entity. I cannot fathom how this can be justified, let alone swept aside with corporate mumbo-jumbo about "getting things done". It's the "getting things done" department of any business that releases shoddy products to meet artificial deadlines, only after the "do it right" department has had time to look things over for awhile does the product get stable (if it ever does). This isn't acceptable for something like the military where you need your product to work right, the first time, every time, for as long as it needs to.

I tried to give those books a fair shot, but I've almost ruined myself for fantasy fiction by playing so many good (story-wise) D&D games over the years. Likewise with the horror genre due to my many (and a few very long/detailed) World of Darkness games.

Being involved in creating stories of epic quests with world-shattering results, involving plots where prophesy is heavily intertwined with the fates of powerful and magic-armed characters in both subtle and gross ways dampens the excitement of seeing it told again, albeit slightly differently. Not having a strong personal interest in a character's performance (like the kind a player develops for a character s/he's played for years) makes everything a bit less exciting.

I'd guess the fact that I've had a part in telling stories involving Nephandi, Black Spiral Dancers and Umbral horrors taken directly from nightmares blunts the impact of most scary movies and books, as I've already "dealt" with that fictional scenario before (or something similar). Jerky monsters crawling out of a TV is child's play compared to the atrocities a "family" raised K'llasshaa Nephandus will experience before their 5th birthday, especially if the patron spirit of that band takes an interest in the child. Playing a character from THAT point of view can do more to inspire nightmares than any fictional retelling from someone else's imagination.

I guess the point of it all is, RPGs seem to have taken most of the luster out of certain types of fiction for me, so I wasn't able to finish them (the Wheel of Time books) up, I think I read the first 5 and part of 6. It just seemed kind of, I dunno, limp to me I guess.

Ah yes, another person who thinks that someone saying any public figure not having the best intentions of God, the universe and puppies in mind is somehow the very same type of person to grab the hem of your coat as you pass, begging you to look up and see the lizards coming out of the giant eye of the pyramid or something.

People who blow off any thought of a public figure with power abusing that power are fools, not serious. History is chock full of small groups of people doing things against public interest for their own benefit. Now that we're in an age of instantaneous secure communication, all of the sudden nothing like that is going on and thinking that it might is grounds to have you mental health examined, or at least derision?

No wonder middle class is dying, it's too easily led away from noticing the people who are killing it, and all it takes is some mindless drivel and a snide remark, usually about tinfoil clothing...

They way you describe it it really sounds like the DMCA can be used to create an Evil Bit standard backed by the full power of legislature...

Michael Chertoff as The Necromancer would be great...

It's a time-travel movie, they can just keep writing timeline changes until people won't pay to see them anymore.

Then you are too scared to live in a free land.

Or they could ask the proper author (I don't know who owns the copyright on that particular portion of OOo) for a license to do so. I betcha that someone interested enough in OOo's future to write a save/load algorithm for it would let Microsoft use it (in part or in whole) for Office. Complete compatibility between the two program suites would work heavily in OOo's favor, for reasons that seem obvious (to me) and that I won't go into to avoid creating a tl;dr situation.

Maybe if someone out there knows anyone (or is on) the OOo team drops the idea of a public offer to give Microsoft a special license to their already working code, some traction could be gained, or at least some light could be shed on the willingness of Microsoft to rectify the situation. I hope they are honestly willing to achieve cross-compatibility, but my guess is that that is likely too optimistic.

And he looks like he might have some of that "book learnin". Get the rope, we can't have no dang smart-mouthed lefties around here making things uncomfortable with them thar "ideas". Muh daddy told me people who think different need killin.

That's what GP was referring to as 'Hungarian notation'.

You're not supposed to call it a conspiracy if it's decided in a boardroom. You call it rational political leveraging to maximize profit potential.

Duh.

It was in that one episode of CSI:NY...