Just another attempt by to regulate and/or control the internet, I can just bet that he has a shiny Powerpoint presentation all prepped about how suited MS would be to manage the corporate planning and data management.

About as subtle as Vlad and the Count soliciting for charitable donations :

"to de Blood bank... I mean Red Cross, yes. No, you don't hawe to come in, ve vill be ower.. , Ve Vill send an agent by right avay! Oh yes it is wery conwenient for you, Ve know exactly vhere you are, I mean, ve hawe your address yes. Thank you for agreeing to be ovr wicte.. heh donor!"

Right down to the 'mvahaha!' and the obligatory Thunder and Lightning.

The goal at any large corporation is to leverage their market position, ...

The problem here is Microsoft spent too much time trying to leverage their market position when they should have spent more of that time improving their quality. They seem to be of the opinion that quality doesn't matter if you have sufficient market share to squash the competition without it. The problem with that idea, is it's a short-term solution, eventually the quality problems will come back to bite you.

And "leveraging your market position," is a monopolization tactic, essentially a form of cheating that when it becomes the predominant corporate culture, undermines the ability to compete in markets where their market position is not so strong. It's a poor substitute for a better product.

That has no bearing on comparing logout/login vs. staying logged in. Yes, the very very first handshake can be bad (there are methods to mitigate, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion), but once you establish that trust, logging out does not break it.

the article doesn't mention what concentrations the bacteria are found in because they are not in concentrations enough to do any harm to anyone but folks with limited to non-existent immune systems (of the boy in the plastic bubble type that is) who aren't going to be just running down to the Sev for a Big Gulp anyway. We live in a world of germs, our immune systems don't work if we aren't exposed to them regularly. If your immune system has nothing to attack, it will, just hanging out with all the rest of your inner workings, get bored and start looking for things to do It likes to fix things! "that *is* what it is there for after all! Why should it lay around doing nothing!" and it will go around fixing things regardless of their current working order. (kinda like those guys who, you will leave in the morning with them at the breakfast table with a coffee, and you will come home and they will have decided that the wall needed to be taken out, and part of the roof, because it was too dark in the kitchen, so the plumbing had to be re-routed through the neighbour's upper bedroom, and it turns out that the wall was a retaining wall, and you are renting. even if there was a perfectly good window blind they could have opened, directly to the left of the table,

*That* kind of fixing.

It is not surprising that the amount of auto-immune disorders have risen since we have become so 'germ-fearful', with anti-biotic this and antiseptic that, we only end up giving our immune systems an excuse for 'fixing' our own bodies, and end up killing of the least harmful germs, clearing the way for novel, more insidious, or double and triple resistant bacteria.

a few harmless bugs are good for the system.

depends where you are. Check out the used computer warehouses in your area, they are sure to find one in the back that is gathering dust. All you need is an adapter, which they should also have. If you have trouble finding one give me a shout, I have about 3 in my dead tech closet with the commodore 64 ;).

-m

I'm not sure about you, but at that low a refresh my eyes would walk right out of their sockets and donate themselves to science in protest.

Which, in foresight (heh) would be proceeding the rest of the body by only a few hours if I was lucky enough. By dying horribly in one of the following ways: flattened by a Hydrogen powered bus for wandering into traffic, skating right off the skytrain platform and falling the 60 meters or so to my doom or rolling onto the train right-of-way and becoming instant mincemeat. All because I was checking my daytimer and was too airbrained to realize where I was roller-blading.(obtuse old telus ad reference, I *hated* that ad.)

-m

It never fails to amaze me just how much hubris the human race can muster up on its own behalf.

The thing is, if you want to take an actual look at the history of the earth's geological age, and say, use a year as an analogy for how long its been around compared to us, we don't show up till around 5 seconds to midnight December 31. --thank you David Attenborough for that image--

Life on earth will continue blithely on without us. The earth will sweep us off its back as surely as a water-buffalo swats a gnat, with about as much notice, and future palaeontologists will look back at the 'human' era as one of the many branches that was doomed to fail and become extinct .... something just a wee bit more successful than the Neanderthal.

And we thought the dinosaurs were a failure. Take a look at how long they lasted in geological time compared to us so far. I think they win.

Claws down.

The article in Wired seems to be a 'dumbed down for public consumption' version of an article that appeared in Scientific American in August 2007. The original was authored by Dr Susana Martinez-Conde and Dr Stephen L Macknik, and referred to a study they had completed in 2006. There is a preview available here:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=windows-on-the-mind

unfortunately one would have to pay for the whole article as they are a subscription magazine. But the proof is in the preview, and if anyone should want more, I would encourage them to go to their local library and find the magazine there. The article in Scientific American is much more educational.