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Here is a graph of solar cell efficiency showing the different kinds of materials used to make them. The typical solar cell is silicon (blue on the graph) and maxes out at 27.6% efficiency.

I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.

After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.

TRS80's had a reset button but it was recessed and took more of a hardpress than normal keys. See upper right here

I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.

After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.

Seems like a bad design. Macs had a power key for ages on their keyboard, but it pulled up a shutdown prompt instead of killing the whole machine instantly. (You could hold it down for 3 seconds for a force power down, IIRC.) It was also far above the keys and hard to accidentally hit on the machines I remember. This is the one I had on my Performa 5200, and this was the one my old iMac had. (You can see the power key on the latter above the divide between the letter and numeric keypad sections.)

What was the keyboard you used like, and what OS was it for?

I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.

After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.

Seems like a bad design. Macs had a power key for ages on their keyboard, but it pulled up a shutdown prompt instead of killing the whole machine instantly. (You could hold it down for 3 seconds for a force power down, IIRC.) It was also far above the keys and hard to accidentally hit on the machines I remember. This is the one I had on my Performa 5200, and this was the one my old iMac had. (You can see the power key on the latter above the divide between the letter and numeric keypad sections.)

What was the keyboard you used like, and what OS was it for?

While I use My Days to track my wife's cycle, you can have improved accuracy using an LH strip. It's a "pee in a cup, stick strip into pee for three seconds, let dry for five minutes" test.

The beautiful thing is that the LH surge happens very reliably, 24-48 hours before ovulation. (see the third chart in this link and note how narrow the blue peak is compared to the other charts: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Hormones_estradiol%2C_progesterone%2C_LH_and_FSH_during_menstrual_cycle.svg )

I've also read (Amazon reviews, so take with appropriate amounts of salt) that if a woman has polycystic ovarian syndrome, she may not ovulate, even if she menstruates. The LH surge can tell her when she actually ovulates.

Using the LH strip in combination with My Days, you can reliably avoid or become pregnant. After a few cycles, you can tell whether My Days is correctly predicting ovulation (my wife is usually right on or a day late). Since sperm lasts up to five days, and there's some natural variations in the cycle, we generally avoid 8 days before and four days after ovulation is supposed to start. No condoms, no pill, no spermicide, and still no babies, four years running.

The history of the Pledge of Allegience is quite interesting, really:
- For starters, instead of a hand over your heart, originally you were supposed to raise your arm up, like this. They starting changing that in 1941 for some reason.
- In one of the few bits of codified sexism still on the books, men are supposed to remove their hats, unless they are uniformed military personnel, in which case they are supposed to stand at attention and salute.
- The original version just said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag" - they changed that in 1923 to prevent those immigrants from thinking they were supposed to be loyal to their former countries.
- In the 1940's, there was a brief period in which the courts allowed schools to require children to say it, regardless of their religious beliefs. Jehovah's Witnesses in particular had a big problem with that, because they considered it idolatry.
- In 1954, they added "under God", specifically for religious reasons, with its supporters cheering the fact that schoolchildren across America would be proclaiming their monotheism. In 2010, this was upheld because the majority claimed it was of a "ceremonial and patriotic nature".

The history of the Pledge of Allegience is quite interesting, really:
- For starters, instead of a hand over your heart, originally you were supposed to raise your arm up, like this. They starting changing that in 1941 for some reason.
- In one of the few bits of codified sexism still on the books, men are supposed to remove their hats, unless they are uniformed military personnel, in which case they are supposed to stand at attention and salute.
- The original version just said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag" - they changed that in 1923 to prevent those immigrants from thinking they were supposed to be loyal to their former countries.
- In the 1940's, there was a brief period in which the courts allowed schools to require children to say it, regardless of their religious beliefs. Jehovah's Witnesses in particular had a big problem with that, because they considered it idolatry.
- In 1954, they added "under God", specifically for religious reasons, with its supporters cheering the fact that schoolchildren across America would be proclaiming their monotheism. In 2010, this was upheld because the majority claimed it was of a "ceremonial and patriotic nature".

Near obsolete?
These are still very capable aircraft, with a wide variety of weapon systems.
They exceed the capabilities of all but two or three nations, and we have them in numbers, both on active duty and in reserve.

Don't right them off as obsolete yet.

Atlantic Records, Capitol Records

YOU SUCK

3. Detach shuttle with remote control. 4. Boost into higher orbit with remote control. 5. Send crew back on something Russian.

...I find it hard to believe that all of that is cheaper than just flying the Orbiter home.

Oh yeah, and learn your SpaceGeek. You're not 'detaching the Shuttle.' You're detaching the Orbiter.

This is a Space Shuttle:

http://harvardpolitics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/space-shuttle-discovery1.jpg

This is an Orbiter:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/STS-121-DiscoveryEnhanced.jpg

I suspect that other would-be users of the orbit (and possibly whiny people on the planet's surface) might object; but it would be fascinating to see whether a radiothermal fuel load (which can be a toasty little fellow even on earth) in hard vacuum would end up shedding enough heat by radiation to remain structurally sound, or whether it would get hot enough to become molten or semi-molten and held together largely by surface tension, or whether the vapor pressure of the material at that temperature would be high enough to generate an expanding cloud of zesty vapor.

Terrible plan, of course; but there are a lot of terrible plans that would be fun to watch.

The best way to seal a bottle of wine is this.

I've noticed several such huge leaps in efficiency in solar cells, many claiming as much as 50% increase.
Some are probably impossible to manufacture, others are mutually exclusive, but take as a whole if you combined them all you would think we were asymptotically approaching 100% efficiency.

Yet even the best hover under 45% efficiency.
While that is nothing to sneeze at, commercially available solar cells (as of 2006) and system technology leads (at best) to system efficiencies between 5 and 19%.

Letting nature take its course can be an ugly business.

Here's one, a sad story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/12/ss-america-cruise-adrift_n_2663875.html

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/8_-_AmStar_7.JPG

And the Murmansk (lost during tow to a wrecking yard), now being salvaged:

http://www.afgruppen.com/Removal-of-the-wreck-Murmansk/

first, i was born in 1965...

second, it sure looks like there are a lot of real instruments in this pic...

third, your use of the adverb "perhaps" signaled to me that you wern't at all sure if artist appearing on stage sans "real" instruments (altho i would argue in the 21st century a laptop is the ultimate musical instrument) was happening.

Edgar actually has a laptop with him in that picture! - Talk about going all the way - from pioneers making music with simple waveform generators and lots of patch cables in the early 1970's to the latest in tech! :)

first, i was born in 1965...

second, it sure looks like there are a lot of real instruments in this pic...

third, your use of the adverb "perhaps" signaled to me that you wern't at all sure if artist appearing on stage sans "real" instruments (altho i would argue in the 21st century a laptop is the ultimate musical instrument) was happening.

I want to hear about the medical experiments being performed on prisoners, the serums and electrodes and soft pillows and comfortable chairs

They weren't sure if they found anything, so they released the one photo they thought looked the the most suspicious the public to see if they could help find anything.

How about this guy:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Asbeck

And the austere little hut he calls his home:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remagen,_Schloss_Marienfels.jpg

You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.

I couldn't find anywhere on those links that he was a climate scientist?

Is he among the scientists that all have banded together to support this climate change scam just to get rich?

I don't doubt entrepreneurs can benefit from investing in renewable energy, I applaud it. That still doesn't change or undermine the claims or credibility of the scientists. But the amount of redirection to undermine the science on this is really impressive.

How about this guy:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Asbeck

And the austere little hut he calls his home:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remagen,_Schloss_Marienfels.jpg

You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.

I get mouse pains in my hand and I'm still not 47.

Gratuitous tip: it may or may not apply to your case, but I've found that for me (and a number of my friends) the problem resides in (slightly) cramped muscles compressing nerves indicated here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Nerves_of_the_left_upper_extremity.gif

Specifically, compression of the nervus ulnaris and of the nervus interosseus antebrachii anterior:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulnar_nerve_entrapment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_interosseous_nerve

When I experience discomfort in either of my hands (which I rarely do nowadays and used to very frequently), just massaging my biceps and my triceps right above my elbow on the inside (where the ulnar nerve is) makes it disappear instantly. I believe (2) from bmo's sibling post actually helps preventing your arm muscles from becoming slightly cramped in the first place.

I will add that I have also forced myself to become ambidextrous to the point where I can use my mouse with either my left or right hand without really noticing on which side it is. Also: I use a light mouse and a Logitech K800 keyboard (an amazing keyboard on many fronts).

Statistically, about 1 degree C per century. But that was from previous pollution levels. We've increased since then.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_(NASA).svg

Call it 2 more degrees C by 2100 as a first approximation.

That's enough to change the ice caps, ocean levels, comfortable regions, etc. That alone will cost humanity trillions to mitigate/move/deal with those changes.

But Helicopters do kill people pretty regularly

Travelling within US states has much LESS border controls than within the Schengen Area.

At most the US has slightly less (zero, AFAIK?) checks -- there's nothing left of any border controls (buildings etc) in western and northern Europe. Schengen was only extended eastwards in 2007, so sometimes unmanned buildings remain at large crossings further east.

Here's a typical small border: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schengen_border_Slovakia_1.jpg

"Please put down your weapon! You have 20 seconds to comply!"

Is this a worthy comparison? An alternative remembrance, THX 1138 being interrogated; also, the main focus of its movie's poster.

While that's a plausible hypothesis, that's not at all what happened recently. Bush's science research budget increases focused on medicine, and NIH specifically. NASA's research budget actually shrank under Bush (though their overall budget went up slightly once you factor in the D in R&D).

The whole idea that budget trends can be tied to a Presidential administration is flawed anyway. Much of the science budget cuts under Clinton were done at the behest of a Republican Congress who insisted on balancing the budget (yup, the budget surplus under Cliton's administration was the Republicans' doing, not Clinton's, though Clinton to his credit went along with their budget cuts). Likewise, the Democrats in Congress went along with Bush's science budget increases. The President simply says what he wants; it's up to Congress to make it happen (or not happen). If in addition to the Presidential administration, you include which party controls the House and Senate, most of these party-correlated "patterns" in the budget simply vanish.

Just pick some guys up at the Lowe's parking lot.

So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?

Iconic photos like Mars:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg

Jupiter:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg

Saturn:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg

And the Hubble Deep Field:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg

So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?

Iconic photos like Mars:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg

Jupiter:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg

Saturn:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg

And the Hubble Deep Field:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg

So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?

Iconic photos like Mars:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg

Jupiter:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg

Saturn:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg

And the Hubble Deep Field:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg

So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?

Iconic photos like Mars:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg

Jupiter:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg

Saturn:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg

And the Hubble Deep Field:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg

Right, I mentioned that in my second paragraph.

Though I will admit, googling it and seeing the photo of it was actually an emotional experience. I wonder when the next time a creature lays eyes upon it will be, and what type of creature that might be.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/A11.plaque.jpg

It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music.

That's what you'd think, but it's not. If you go look at the composer's original manuscript, it's a bit of a mess. Courts have decided that the process of interpreting it and cleaning it up for typesetting and publication is creative enough to warrant its own copyright. As a result, pretty much any printed music since the early 1900s on is still under copyright. Music publishers pull many of the same tricks you hear about in printed books - a font with a quirk, an occasional typo or flourish added to fingerprint that particular score as theirs, and which if duplicated exactly can be used to prove it was copied.

IMSLP has a huge repository of sheet music which has gone out of copyright and is thus freely distributable. What's really needed is OCR software for sheet music which can then convert those public domain scores to an electronic format, then do a diff with various sources to remove stuff added by the publishers and reverse-engineer what was written by the original composer. Then you'd have something equivalent to "source code" for the music.

The google car has driven itself over 300,000 miles with 0 at-fault incidents. This includes streets like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Sanfran_61_bg_032605.jpg as well as around Lake Tahoe. This technology is meant for all conditions.

The 40-50% income tax is misleading: Tax rates vs. effective tax rates.

Also, no tuition at most German universities. Studying isn't free, of course: Getting a room is the student's responsibility and there is a 200-300EUR fee per semester which is split among several organizations which help students with many things (meals and dorms (not free but very affordable), legal counsel, etc.) and usually also includes free access to public transport.

The 40-50% income tax is misleading: Tax rates vs. effective tax rates.

Also, no tuition at most German universities. Studying isn't free, of course: Getting a room is the student's responsibility and there is a 200-300EUR fee per semester which is split among several organizations which help students with many things (meals and dorms (not free but very affordable), legal counsel, etc.) and usually also includes free access to public transport.

No they don't, that's ridiculous. You see them on TV all the time, and sometimes even in person if you go looking for them.

In case you misunderstood, here's a photo of their meeting building.

Spain voted right because the country was broke ...

Not really, actually Spain's debt was lower then Germany's with respect to the GDP. The problem on the debt side was that an European agreement says that you may not increase your debt by more then 3% in a year, and Spain couldn't keep below (Germany also broke that rule various times, but before this "crises"* started), so Germany forced Spain to spend less and of course cuts were made where it hurts the majority of the people.

When the elections came, those that would have elected PSOE didn't vote or voted for smaller parties because they stopped trusting the PSOE (with good reason). Since the voters of the right voted what they always vote and as a result of a voting system that somehow favours established parties, the PP got absolute majority in the parliament even though they got just 45% of the votes. To understand what I mean, just compare the number of votes with the number of seats the parties got. For instance: IU-LV, 1.6Mio votes, 11 seats, CiU, 1.0 Mio votes, 16 sites, PP 10.9 Mio votes, 186 seats.

Finally, the PP broke every promise they made before the election (not that this surprises me at all, personally I think voting doesn't change anything)

* I wrote "crisis" because as things go this looks more like a big fraud designed to move wealth from the poor an the so-called middle class to the rich.

Seriously? There is a 0.4 C spike from 1910 to 1940, compared to 0.6 C from 1970 to 2000, and you think that the extra 0.2 C is sufficient evidence of runaway anthropogenic global warming, given a non-anthropogenic spike 2/3 as large in the only two samples of spikes we have in the moderately reliable instrumental record e.g. here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png?

Note well that I am not claiming that the latter spike is or isn't natural. I'm asserting that the instrumental record is sufficient evidence of natural climate spikes at least as large as 0.13C/decade sustained over at least three decades because there is one of them present in that record. Indeed, the actual record -- woefully inadequate as it is -- suggests that spikes like this are common, that the climate often fluctuates and/or rises on average by 0.13 C per decade, for decade-long intervals. That is evident even in the noise. The noise is important, because of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for non-equilibrium thermodynamical systems (that is, it is relevant to the problem). It suggests that the relaxation rates apparent in the noise should indeed be characteristic of the response to changes in the drivers. I'd say that this is obviously very likely true in the instrumental graph above, and furthermore that the record strongly suggests that there are natural drivers with long (multidecadal) lifetimes that make nearly discrete changes in the "equilibrium" set point of the system.

It is early to conclude things (not that that ever stops anyone who wants to make egregious claims for the second of the two spikes being almost entirely anthropogenic while ignoring the first:-) but it is by no means clear that the latter spike is continuing at anything like its peak rate, and we frankly lack the data to be able to determine if that peak rate is normal for precisely the reasons you state above -- outside of the instrumental record the error bars grow and the coarse grained intervals to which a given average temperature is assigned grow faster, to where we really cannot make very strong statements concerning the scale of natural fluctuations based on the actual instrumental data at our disposal beyond the obvious one -- with two clearly visible spikes with very similar slopes plus fluctuation-dissipation, it is at least even odds that spikes like the one in the latter half of the twentieth century are commonplace over any given interval of 1000 years or more. Seriously.

rgb

Well, I did see that they shook hands over the agreement.

How about Molly Maguire consequences?

The only two thing the people who run the USA truly fear are homegrown terrorism, which is a long-standing American tradition, and failing re-election. With the eradication of auditable voting, the latter's well on it's way to being solved - voting machines will just award the win to the pre-selected candidate.

To forestall traditional American grass-roots terrorism (the Green Mountain Boys, the Mollies, the Klan, the Panthers, the Weathermen, and the Bonus Army all come to mind) they've worked very hard to build up the image of terrorism as a threat to everyday Americans - when it's really only a significant threat to the one percent. Terrorism kills fewer ordinary Americans than whisky, car accidents, or bathtub falls; but whenever the rich and powerful get out of hand (like they are now) their risk level starts to grow.

Things will probably get MUCH worse before they get better.

Amazing how much older and fatter he looks than the 2009 photo he probably uploaded to wikipedia himself. But something wrong with his face, the wrinkles are way too deep. Drugs or what?

I'm not sure you understand what .NET is. There is nothing in Visual Studio every that doesn't need to be compiled. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Overview_of_the_Common_Language_Infrastructure.svg
In particular if you want to see what parts of the runtime are there: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj207212(v=vs.105).aspx

And of course it needs to be packaged for Metro. Win8RT doesn't have the Win32 libraries that desktop mode applications depend on. As for you starting from the ground up, as an end user. Yes this is about developers who can easily port (i.e. very much like what Apple offered in your analogy).

I don't personally have much in the way of legacy apps that I need to run, and maybe I'm normal and that's why MS marketing made the decision that they did. But I've definitely heard people grumble about how corporate un-friendly it is

Windows 8 isn't really about business. Microsoft spent the last decade on corporate. They are focusing now on home / small business. And that market doesn't have much in terms of 15 year old software they need to run. Today's brand new WinRT machines using an emulator are substantially slower than an old WinXP box. It just isn't worth it.

As for ARM eventually being fast enough. Maybe by 2017 or so it would be fast enough to run 2001 applications Windows XP application. OK assume that's true. Then in theory if Microsoft so chooses they can toss an emulator on and run Windows XP in some sort of virtual mode on Windows10RT or whatever. That's an easy enough feature to add. But I don't really see the point. I have a Surface Pro. I have the speed to run desktop applications and they still kinda suck. The point of a touch screen laptop is to be able to use the touchscreen. If I wanted a keyboard / mouse application I'd be running it on a more traditional laptop.

There's an active program for that, which has had some success, particularly in attracting student editors from countries that are lacking in Wikipedia editors compared to the US and Western Europe.

They do have to be written in an encyclopedia-like way, though, with proper references, a neutral overview, relatively broad view of the subject, etc. Occasionally students will paste in an essay not originally written as an encyclopedia article, and those are often poorer fits. The most common problem with a pre-written essay of that sort is that they start with a thesis statement that focuses on a specific view of the subject, and then support it with an argument; but a Wikipedia article should typically be both broader and less argumentative, and not organized as an argument for a thesis.

Except you have lots of jaggy sawtooth peaks where there are NO glaciers and U shaped valleys where there are glaciers.

As for mountains eroding at a millimeter per, I'd like to know how they calculated that. If they simply measure the sediment in melt water and extrapolate that to cubit meters of rock and spread it over the entire watershed they would find that glaciated areas drop a lot more sediment than non-glaciated areas.

On the other hand if they are doing actual height measurements, how do they arrive at that level of precision, or explain the fact that there is no visible or measurable sign of millimeter depth erosion on the tops of mountains?

Those who do not know history, are doomed to repeat it.

Everybody nowadays tries to imitate the InfoBox, known from Lotus WordPro, but nobody quite achieves it.

The key points everybody gets wrong:
- It wasn't like a dialog box to set something. It was a editable *state* display. That means undo was unnecessary. Really. If you clicked something, just click it again. Or pick the old checkbox again.
- It allowed you to pick and edit *all* levels of document hierarchy that the cursor currently was in. Paragraph inside a table inside a paragraph inside a frame inside a section inside the document? Just pick the context you want to edit with the drop-down box in the title bar of the box. (Where it says "Page layout" in the screenshot.)
- It was deeply built around *inheriting* style classes! Everything you changed, relative to the current style class, was marked with a little red dot. The last tab was the style class tab, where you could pick a class for the current context, and where you could create your own class, inheriting everything but the changes (red dots) from the parent class. Or undo changes and go back to the class. So even if you changed many things, undo was unnecessary.
- It was keyboard-based! Even though it didn't look like it. No matter where you were, Alt-Enter, and you had the InfoBox open, and ready to edit. Because there's nothing worse in a TEXT EDITING program, than to constantly having to switch to the mouse.

It was pretty damn close to perfect, and nothing since even comes close. (The Ribbon interface is the opposite of coming close. ;)

The only things one could have improved, were
1. allowing keyboard shortcuts, maybe even VI-like, but with the shortcuts ALWAYS being displayed next to the mouse-clickable option.
2. Putting the panels underneath each other and into a sidebar. But you have to understand, that back then, 1024x768 was a BIG resolution. We started out with 640x480! Try resizing your browser window to that right now! ... Yeah... A sidebar simply was not an option.
3. Yeah, text instead of icons... or my favorite option... both... that would have been good too, but again: screen space simply didnâ(TM)t allow it. Otherwise you just end up with menus again. Which are great, but only if you can't display it all right away.

So... whoever brings this beauty of a UI concept, in all its glory, back on my screen, is who gets my money. Big time.

I doubt most mathematicians really understand the Pythagorean Theorem. You get so used to theories and their application that you fool yourself into thinking you know them. Take manual long division or multiplication for example. We understand how to line up the numbers and perform the operations but prove to me that it works or *why* it works!

I disagree. Some math concepts are deep, but not Pythagoras. Probably the top 5% of high school graduates understand it, and the only reason the majority of the other 95% don't is that they haven't really tried enough. You really can't understand this animated GIF?

You're talking about mathematicians, who have decided that they will be devoted working with math more than any other field, and you think they don't understand? I can't imagine a single mathematician who can't understand Pythagoras.

And long division -- you don't understand why the numbers line up? How it works? I certainly look down on you for not understanding at this moment, but even then I bet if you thought about it for a bit, you'd understand. It's the decimal system -- meaning that the four digits ABCD represent Ax1000 + Bx100 + Cx10 + D -- and the distributive property of multiplication/division over addition/subtraction.

I can't imagine anyone STARTING to learn to become a mathematician without understanding long division (yes, I mean really grasping it, not just how to write the numbers), much less having become a mathematician.

Empires don't die, they morph into something else. The Roman Empire became the Catholic Church. And the British empire is stronger than ever. The US is its muscle, little more. The 'threat' from China/Russia is being dealt with, by destabilizing the areas it is trying to invest in, like Africa and the middle east. For instance new discoveries of oil in Canada and Australia mean the middle east has outlived its usefulness as far as we are concerned, but we can't just leave all those resources to the competition.

Orwell's map is, by far, the most accurate one ever drawn. It is not fictional in any way.

I'd say a better example would be this guy, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, in a picture you should all recognize.

Besides this incident, Loan was known as a non-corrupt officer that advocated for hospitals, had 5 kids, ran a pizza shop after the war, etc...

However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away.

You mean like these...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Canadian_rural_mailboxes.jpg

Canada's had them for decades. Although those are from the 70s... new ones look more like this:

http://www.rcmpveteransvancouver.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_0206_edited-1.jpg

I'm having a really hard time working up the level of apparent outrage you have over this.