As a researcher, I write a lot of long documents. If you were really writing long documents and saving time were really what mattered to you, you would be using LaTeX. Seriously, LaTeX effectively automates

• citations and bibliography
• tables of contents (don't even try to say that Office does this. The feature exists but it does not work right.)
• indexes
• reformatting the document quickly (MLA to Chicago? change one line. Journal to Book? change one line. different font, but only for text and not headlines? change two lines)

If, on the other hand, all you do is write little five page or less memos or letters, Office is clearly superior to LaTeX. But then, you would really need to convince me that MS Office saves you any time whatsoever over OpenOffice or KOffice.

Unless, of course, your argument is that Office is faster because you know it already, which really is not valid for the rest of us.

But the ammunition will be different. When you see a truck, you hit it with High Explosive (HE) or heavy machine gun fire. If you see a tank, you hit it with Kinetic Energy (KE) or High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds.

There is good reason for this. If you hit a tank with something that just explodes and rains shrapnel, the hit will just bounce off, maybe destroying the optics but that is about it. You have to pierce the armor, which you do by hitting it with something very heavy and slender (such as a rod of depleted uranium) traveling at high speed that focuses a bunch of energy on one point. The heat from the collision and spalling from the armor itself then destroys whatever is behind the armor.

This does not work for a truck. If you hit it with a KE round, the round will just sail right through it. If there is nothing vital (the driver, engine, fuel lines, etc) where the KE round happens to pass, then the truck will just keep rolling. That is why you hit it with HE or MG fire. The many small bits of metal from an exploding HE round have a much higher chance of hitting something vital than the single big chunk from a KE round.

As far as a tank is concerned, you usually only get one or two shots at it before it or its buddies start returning fire. If you hit it with the wrong ammunition, he is going to kill you.

It should be noted that the inverse is also true. Making vehicles such as a truck look highly armored increases their survivability in certain situations because AT rounds are rarer than lighter ammunition and an infantry squad with a machine gun is not going attack a tank.

No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.

The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.

No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.

Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.

It is from HL Mencken, The American Mercury, April, 1924. The sentiment goes back at least to JJ Rouseau.

Here is a great quote from the article:

Either the journalist is a product of the LA school system or the LA school system mandates that teachers show up late.

More to the point, however, is that this is actually not such a bad system, no matter what populist journalists wishing to stir up anti-(government|teacher's union) sentiment says. As somebody with managerial experience in the federal government, I can attest that establishing a pattern of misconduct is a very effective way to get people fired. However, it requires that administrators keep their paperwork in order. There has to be a written record in place establishing that the misconduct actually happened. This requirement is a good thing in government positions because it keeps people from getting fired for political reasons and thus helps prevent nepotism and cronyism. The horror stories that you hear about the impossibility of firing bad employees always come from inept administrators who could not be bothered to properly manage their personnel and want to blame the system for their failings.

That depends who you ask. The functionalists would say yes, the realists would say no and the constructivists would say sort of. Theorists of multi-level governance would say that the whole concept of a sovereign state is over and done with but most of us have yet to realise it.

Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget.

Please. It is a government. It can just print money if it wants to. As painful as the resulting inflation would be, that would be preferable to damaging the reputation of the rule of law on the continent.

I think you misspelled "believers free economies"

I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and Mandrake since 9.1. Mandriva's implementation of KDE (3 and 4) is one of the best around. It is certainly better than Kubuntu. If you want an easy but reliable desktop Linux based on KDE, Mandriva is the way to go. Mandriva has better gtk integration, better update notification, and better a better configuration center than any other kde implementation that I have seen.

Also, Mandriva's fonts are the best I have seen in Linux. I don't know why everybody else does not do whatever it is that they do, but they are smooth as silk.

$next_in_line = preg_replace('/you/', 'me', $next_in_line);

Or does pregger have another meaning?

No. We can only hope...

Have you ever tried to walk 72 miles in a day? Even back in my infantry days I would have called you nuts.

One mile every 20 minutes (one km every 12 min for most of you) is actually quite brisk, and pretty fatiguing over 2 or 3 hours, let alone 24. Factor in time to eat, drink, change socks, cover blisters, relieve your self, etc, and you are looking at having to run-walk to keep that kind of pace.

While actual athletes may be able to do more, I would put the absolute limit for a fit person at around 40 miles in 24 hours if the person must carry nothing, the weather is neither too hot nor too cold and the person is very motivated. A fit person could comfortably walk around 18 miles in a day, and 12 miles per day at a sustained rate.

For the overwhelming majority of humanity (with the possible exceptions of Kenyans...) 72 miles in a 24 hour period is simply not possible.

In the case at hand, the site is 27 kilometers (a little more than 18 miles) from the Vatican.

No, he is asking people to do what they have not done in the history of capitalism: ignore what something costs.

Value in this context is just synonym for cost-benefit analysis, which is a concept people are already quite familiar with even if they do not always apply it. The reason Microsoft wants OSS vendors to change their vocabulary is that they are aware that they have lost the cost-benefit fight under the old vocabulary and they want OSS marketeers to help them re-open the same debate under new terms.

The longer you can keep people redefining their premises, the longer you can hinder actual comparison and continue to market software with the good will that Jerry Seinfeld can sell you.

I believe that you misspelled "strawman" a couple of times. Let me fix that:

Yhey do a better job than the other channels in at least having someone there to provide strawman opposition.Their bias is very evident because they provide the strawman right there.