Fixed that for you. :-)

I consider myself a Christian, and I agree with you.

I wish there were a way to highlight to people that there is a massive difference between the common implementations of "religion", and what I believe Christianity to be.

I believe God is righteously pissed off with most of what people do under the banner of religion. I hope people take note that just because someone has "In God We Trust" printed on their money, or have a chaplain say prayers before their pilots go and bomb strategic targets in countries that happen to have access to oil, doesn't mean that God agrees with their actions.

Of course this is just my opinion. And I would refuse to vote for any legislation that dictates that anyone has to agree with me.

Shame, I eventually succumbed to watching the third one when it was on free to air - in my opinion, a much more well put together movie than the first two, it was as though they realised it was make or break and they had to get it right. In some ways the third one "fixed" the first two for me. I remembered enough detail from the first two woeful movies for me to understand the plot points behind the third one. I have only ever watched the first two once and intend it to stay that way, if it were the only thing on TV I'd probably watch the third one over again because it wasn't so bad. If you get a chance to watch it I'd recommend it because it does round out the story.

Yes I realise saying a movie is worth watching because it wasn't as woeful as the previous ones isn't really a great way to sell it to anyone - but you've done the hard work wading through the first ones already...

I think the idea of relying on any one communication medium is dumb, and preventing one because it doesn't suit certain scenarios is silly unless there are major disadvantages to it overall.

Your post and the GP post(s) show good examples of when different methods work well/not well. Cc:ing your boss on an e-mail that they really should see is a good idea - sometimes Cc:ing a manager is a good way of letting the person you're e-mailing know that a particular person in authority is aware of the issue.

Inexperienced project managers Cc:ing a bunch of people on the project team just because they think the content is really important, so that most of the recipients can sigh, roll their eyes and delete it without reading it, is dumb. (and typical in my workplace... sigh).

A 5 minute meeting with a group of people with "ok" verbal language skills is better than 50 confusing e-mails a day from the same people who never lerned to spel.

- Sometimes e-mail is best.
- Sometimes meetings are best
- Sometimes phone calls are best
- Sometimes IM is best
- Sometimes no communication at all is best!

Judging which communication method is best for your audience is almost an art form.

In my opinion (which must be right because I'm about to post it on the internet), a CEO with such a biased personal experience, who doesn't use internal e-mail is probably not a good person to be deciding what situations should/should not rely on internal e-mail. And in a very diverse company this idea is probably a great and a terrible idea at the same time - depending on what each employee/team does.

I'm an Australian - I don't believe that isn't how it works - it is a confusing name. It is called the "family tax benefit" and it is a tax reduction, but I believe you get the payments even if your income is zero, and you probably get it (or a reduced amount) even if you are living off government benefits (welfare). The family tax benefit is available in the form of cash payments to families every fortnight, or families can choose to take it as a lump sum each year too. There are different parts to it - Part A, B and C - and you get part/all depending on your family circumstances - if you earn too much you don't get it at all, if you have a disabled child you get extra, etc.

So you wouldn't want the freedom of choice if you were in that same situation?

I'm not sure the toddler analogy works - it would be more like leaving a teenage boy in a room full of porn - someone rebellious but capable of understanding higher concepts - and something more tempting than sweets.

Also note that the punishment was made clear in advance, not sprung on them later. And even when the punishment was put in place, they weren't just zapped out of existence, they were still given more ways of redeeming themselves.

I interpreted "smaller businesses" to mean not the kind of company that has large dollar contracts worth worrying about to the level you're suggesting?

I agree with you that no organisation with a decent cashflow/income (that would have data worthy of serious protection) is going to swap out their infrastructure every 6 months to save a small amount of money like that. I interpreted his example as a thought exercise, not a real life situation - this is the kind of IaaS project that would be done by an organisation currently storing their most recent "server" data shared off a $79 USB drive connected to the receptionist's PC...

I like the thinking behind the example - it's a business case option, balancing risk versus reward. I can imagine a large organisation having used their internal dev team to leverage Wave since its release to meet a specific business need, who may now have saved themselves millions compared to deployment of a full commercial product. Now they'd have to scramble to build a replacement or find something else - if the savings had been large enough it might have been worth it.

Only very small shops, or massively large organisations, would contemplate something like this (and only the small shops would actually do it!).

After all of that, they show you two cards - one of which is from the first deck, and 80 percent of people manage to chose which of the cards was from the first deck even though they aren't confident that they know the answer.

I want to know if the incorrect of the two cards is from the second deck, or a completely new card.

And if it's a totally new card, then it would be a totally new face, so I don't get how this study replicating this trick with people's faces is such a big deal unless they use face pictures that were all very similar. If you quickly showed me two sets of faces, then showed me two images where one was from the original sets, and the other face shot was a new image I had not already seen, I'd feel a little confident that I could pick out the one that was newly introduced.

To me that means the trick with cards and the 80% getting the right answer at the end is more of a big deal than the one with faces because the cards are more like each other, and we're better tuned to deal with facial recognition than with something as basic as a playing card. (I have no data to back up this claim other than it feels intuitive that we're tuned to recognise people, but this is slashdot so I don't mind posting with zero proof on hand). ;-)

If the original trick is that the participants are shown two final images, one from the first set and one from the second, and they correctly select the image from the first group 80% of the time, then this is pretty cool no matter what images you use.

It's good, and bad, depending on the context.

My son is 7, and his diagnosis (at 2 years old) was PDD-NOS, not Aspergers exactly but he is certainly on the spectrum.

I feel bad sometimes when I see that he isn't interacting with other kids in the way they would expect him to, he pretty much weirds them out. On the flip side, my nieces and nephews (who are in a similar age range) are going through all sorts of mess right now, trying to fit in with their social group, not dealing well with not being accepted or liked.

I love the fact that most of that peer pressure BS will go straight over my son's head, he doesn't give a shit if someone likes him or not, and doesn't feel pressured to conform (even when it's me, telling him to clean his teeth...sigh).

Sometimes the weaknesses are also strengths.

You can't guarantee that unless you only send a single person... especially if you send an international/mixed gender crew - or a married couple!

I could have killed myself instead of watching that, and it might have been a more productive use of my time.

Not a horrible suggestion for some situations, but the space just doesn't work for me... it looks like two different numbers, especially if you're writing a list of numbers next each other - do you use comma then?

50 006.49, 14 032.45, 200 154 209.45,

Did I miss a comma and one of the numbers is also missing the .00, did I miss a decimal point somewhere and the decimal is more precise, or is the last number just really large?

Not in favor of the comma separators in large numbers, it is not universally understood, so don't do it.

50006.49 14032.45 200154209.45

I think this number sequence would be interpreted correctly in most places, most people (even people who normally use decimal commas) would understand what the decimal point represents here.

What are you going to do? Get a bald headed guy with a British accent to play him? I got news for you
pal, baldness will be cured in the 23rd century!

Your argument is absolutely spot on - just wanted to mention that 1 cubic metre of water is 1000 litres and weighs exactly 1000 kilograms (one metric ton)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram_per_cubic_metre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_ton

FYI - for all you imperial measurement lovers out there, a metric ton is 2204.62262 pounds... awesome.

I'm not so sure about the whole "wizards" thing, or at least I can imagine a non-IT person rolling their eyes at me if I said that to them - but I like the pharmacist analogy - I'm out of mod points so the only compliment I can pay you is that I might plagarise from you at some stage.