Last I read, they didn't use the Patriot act to get the records, they just had the state attorney general try to subpoena them from the doctors themselves. Of course, they didn't have a case yet that backed the request, but why let a minor detail like that get in the way...
Other than Joss not having the rights to the show (as mentioned above), I had heard that the episodes were on the order of a $1 mil / each to film and release.
Double-checking, I'm wrong, it's $2 million per episode in production costs for Firefly... That's almost as much as ABC's Lost, and there they have a huge audience and marketing engine behind the show. They only got $38 mil total for the Serenity movie, about $ 3/4 mil short of the public production costs.
In my humble opinion, Joss should be seeking to release an adult-level animated series, similar to WB's Batman, or even an anime-style futuristic romp. The level of detail, varied scenery, and scale of the sets are just too big for production offices these days, and if you can't film it, you can certainly draw it.
The text is apparently included in the HTML file, then Javascript is used to dynamically replace the rendered text blocks with Flash-generated images of the text, rendered w/ anti-alias in the font of the designer's choice.
I would imagine that Google could still index based on the text in the original HTML file; this hack is more like a layer on top of the text rendering for "improved" visualization.
As mentioned, once the text is dynamically replaced by images, it no longer becomes user-selectable, which can only cause headaches for copy/pasting of information.
My opinion can be summed up in two words: Income Stream
We know that Microsoft wants to get into the content distribution business for some time now, to compete with iTunes and Tivo. Their current transport of choice is the "Windows Media Video" (WMV) format, which is optimized for streaming (RealVideo competition) while providing built-in copy protection (Apple M4P competition).
So, you have an untapped market out in Linux world, running their crazy independent browsers, and because of that, you can't guarantee that they'll be able to run all of your (protected) content. I would fathom that the the Linux demographic is largely composed of 20-30 year olds, the same demographic that would be most likely to pay for online content.
So, in order to tap the market, you have to create the content delivery mechanism, and do it in a way they'll all accept. So, now y'all get a new Add-In from Microsoft. Its one step back (not getting Linux to convert to Windows/IE) and two steps forward (more money in the bank).
Some people are saying "It's all economics, they're poor / unemployed so they are fighting against the Man the only way they can", while others are saying "It's all religion, they're all middle-eastern, its what they do".... but those are just the talking points of the far Left and far Right. The issue, as always, is more complicated.
What you have are immigrant population from French colonies in North Africa (who happen to be of middle-eastern and african descent) who have entered France through their weaker immigration laws. The French are traditionally very nationalistic (see their Language boards), and the immigrants were discriminated against and were not assimilated into mainstream cultures. Secondly, the middle-eastern culture itself is very prideful, mainly becase of their religious practices and family customs. The net result was that the immigrants self-segretated themselves into comminities of like-minded peoples.
So, the dominant european ethnics (through prejudice) resisted their assimilation, which had the net result of limiting the earning potential of the middle-eastern ethnics. The immigrants resist learning the French language and culture, and because of French law, are denied representation in their governments. When the government does try to "help" them with social programs, their culture see it as insulting / condescending. The net result of this is a hatred of a government that is constantly trying to patronize them and force them to give up their heritage.
So, these neighborhoods tend to have less governmental police prescence than other suburbs of Paris, which tends to lead to more criminal elements. It had gotten so bad, representatives of the federal government of France were claiming that they would "clean up the scum", which didn't go so well with the locals. In the latest chain of events, there were two youths who were fleeing police, hid in a utility station and accidentally electrocuted themselves. The immigrant cultures see this as police brutality & oppression, something denied by the authorities.
Finally, there are now criminal elemnts in the immigrant culture that are rising up and causing damage around the suburbs, fighting their "battle" against the government for making them the way they are... Yet, these people do not see that a share of that responsibility is theirs.
I dunno, I'm not too keen on the inter-dependence of software and hardware on the Macs... My girlfriend's G5 had a faulty mainboard that reported a bad temperature value for the chip... so the computer put the fans into "emergency mode", and the whole thing sounded like a vacuum cleaner (it was loud enough she was considering getting an isolation box). Kind of sucks when your main music-writing tool drowns out your music. Luckily, the people at the Mac store replaced the mainboard for free, otherwords it would have been about $900 out of pocket.
Of course, I got her to switch part-time to a Windows XP PC, because City of Heroes hasn't come out for OS-X. But I'm just annecdotal evidence.
Strange, that you think the Democrats would support it.
Here you have a bill that would create an exception in the laws that would allow common people (i.e. internet users) to post whatever political opinion they want on the internet while receiving payments for creating said content.
The Republican party has long triumphed free speech with respect to political positions, where "free speech" is synonymous with money spent to advertise their platforms. The current campaign finance laws "restrict free speech" by restricting the amount of money (and where, and when) a political party can spend on their campaigns.
The Democratic party, which has long proclaimed themselves a "party of the little man" and "enemy of the corporations" have a very hard time raising money from said corporations. So, it is in their best interest to restrict the amounts of spending by their competators, to make it "fair".
Adding this exception would allow their chief competator (Republicans) to use their (larger) campaign funds in a media that is fast outstripping traditional forms of media (TV / newspapers) among voting audiences, increasingly so among younger voters (who statistically are more Democrat). So, is it really that strange that the Democrats would oppose it?
Seconded. Because of our (overly-rigid) production processes, not to mention the condescending attitudes that the DBAs have towards the "power users" (engineers w/out DBA certificates), many departments in my company use MS Access rather than go through the 4 month process to get things built in Oracle.
I have Microsoft Access 97 files that I routinely often with 2000 (you get a popup if you wish to convert, if you say no, it opens in read-only mode). My laptop had Access 97 and 2002 both installed, and with trivial registry work, you can add Open methods to open the right file in the correct program (each version, when run, likes to reassign all the.mdb file types to itself). Everything else is directly upgradable, you can copy and paste tables, forms, etc from one version to the other and it will convert automatically.
I'm banking that your IT staff is just retarded. Either that, or Linux advocates who can't be bothered to learn how to use Microsoft apps correctly./flame on
Sorry Mr Niemöller... But I think Google is getting to big for their britches...
First they came for Microsoft and I did not speak out because I was not a user. (they give us "their" answers to our queries) Then they came for the GIS services and I did not speak out because I wanted to know where to find things. (they know where we live, where we shop, our industries, our infrastructure) Then they came for eBay and I did not speak out because I hardly used it. (they tell us what is available to buy, and we pay with their money) Then they came for my data and there was no one left to speak out for me.
No, but plants have been shut down on account of environmentalist pressures. They do not build them in the middle of cities; they build them on a cooling water source (river / lake / etc) about 20 miles from a major city and run transmission lines nearby.
In southeastern pennsylvania, there's an odd dynamic going on... for the 20 years that my family lived near Limerick nuclear station, noone wanted to build near the plant, on account of all the (unfounded) environmentalist panic. Then the area went through a housing boom in the early '00s, and suddenly all this land became very desireable, since its all 5 minutes from the major highway in the area (route 422) which makes it the perfect commuting spot. Next thing you know, $350k houses are popping up left and right, right in the valley of the shadow of de.. I mean, the cooling towers.
Here's a map of every utility owned nuclear plant that has been built in the united states & canada, including the decomissioned ones.
As it looks right now, no, there are no limits. Most of the game appears to be completely customizable, at almost all levels. It will come with a Map Editor, unit data in XML files, a Python scripting engine for custom actions, and an AI SDK (to be released later) for customizing a civ.
I've only looked a little into this, but CivFanatics.com has put together a much more comprehensive FAQ, including a section on customizing Civ 4.
Re:Question on governement types
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you check the Civ4 sites, apparently this is how Civ4 is treating governments, basically you check-box the qualities out of 5 separate lists on how much or how little of certain civic freedoms you wish to endure.
I have long maintained that the mother of invention is not necessity, but in fact laziness.
Why do we have remote controls for our televisions and garage doors? We could very well get out of our chairs and cars, walk the 5 feet, and do it ourselves... but no, we have a machine to do it for us. I could drive down to the library and look up some information, but now I have the internet on a PC in my den to answer my inane questions.
I don't bother driving out sunday morning to buy a paper, or even getting one delivered. Too much work, when I already have the computer to serve it up. Or if I'm real lazy, I could get digital cable, where I just push the "Guide" on the remote control, and it tells me what's playing in the next X hours.
Are these really things we "need" (ala necessity) ? Perhaps, perhaps not. But they are all labor saving devices. I'd draw a conclusion here, but I think I'm just too lazy to finish.
Then what's my incentive to actually let the customer survive the trip, if their life insurance is paid to me upon their death?
Oh, I see, you meant to say that the trip-providing company becomes the underwriter for their insurance policy... which, upon your death, would have the safe net result as your survivors suing the bejeezus out of their company.
The only problem is you have not explained where their operating capital comes from, because actually running a trip to orbit and back isn't peanuts... If you're not going to charge the actual customers for the cost of the trip, then who really is going to pay? Getting the government to subsidize it only works if you have a lobby already in place... As we can see with sub-orbital flights (our airline system), even flying "for beans" with a subsidy doesn't pay the costs if you can't get the cost of operations down.
So, from a legal sense, that makes it heresay... after all, its "we heard from you, who heard from your fiance, who heard from their professor, who heard from the industry" that it is all or nothing when it comes to stem cells.
Which, of course, goes against there heresay that I read on the internet that privately funded stem cell research is still 100% ok.
The World of Warcraft forums only contain paying users.
Slashdot is a site that they can use to connect to a large pool of gamers, where a decent percentage may not yet play the game.
This exercise in getting in touch with the Slashdot community could be seen by the cynical as just another marketing / advertising excercise.
Connect with a market of tech-saavy gamers who may not be playing your game, who have concerns about the administration and gameplay of the MMORPG. Send out a small contingent of developers who'll talk the sweet talk about how all their desires are coming in the next content issue, while brushing aside how you apply heavy-handed changes in the name of balance. You get free front page advertising on a high traffic server like Slashdot, and maybe a few hundred more subscribers... not a bad deal.
Actually, utility companies are experimenting with paying you not to consume energy... go and look up "active load management". Why does this work? Because for those few hours a year, the price of electricity spikes up to $400/MW, and its cheaper to pay a few industrial customers to reduce output so the market price can drop back to the $80s/MW. (Market prices are cleared based on demand)
30 years later, we're finally getting around to economic drivers to conserve energy, laissez-faire style..
But explain to me the significance of daylight savings time. I mean really.
In the pre-electricity "modern" era, families that stayed up after dark would light their homes with candles and oil lamps, which could get quite expensive... The idea was proposed by Benjamin Franklin (known for his strong work ethic), that if the clocks were moved earlier towards the dawn in the summer, then there would be plenty of daylight in the evening after work, and thus countless candles and barrels of oil could be saved.
Extrapolating that to today, there is still a chronological swing to the usage of energy... in the bulk power industry, this is called a "load curve", and basically follows a sine wave... there's a valley in usage over the early morning period when everyone is asleep, and as people wake up, the load increases in the "morning ramp", reaches its peak in the afternoon, and drops off in the late evening as people head to sleep.
Now, moving the clocks to line up with the daylight periods would shift the energy usage one hour earlier in the day. In the morning in the summer, the sun is already up, so you're not going to save much electricity. However, by shifting the evening clocks forward, it removes some of the "lighting" time in the evening, which lowers load on the system, allows the generators that match load to drop their output lower earlier, they burn less fuel, and the economy as a whole saves money on imported fuel.
Let me fix it for you... I guess it's a matter of who you can contactif something goes wrong.
If I'm Tommy.com, I don't want to have to keep a linux C programmer on site just to debug an application that odds are they didn't even contribute to... Their hope for getting a repair is to (1) explain their problem publicly on a message board, (2) hope that someone out there reads their issue and (3) can provide a fix... meanwhile every minute their site is down is a potential lost sale.
Besides, a company like Tommy isn't going to program their own site anyway, they're going to contract out the design, lease out the hardware, and keep a few humans on site for tech support to take the CDs out of the trays when they do their backups. Everything else HAS to run itself.
It doesn't matter what you're running, it's how you keep it running... and Microsoft has the market on their side. There is a whole industry of 3rd party support for their products, providing a financial incentive for programmers to learn MS's systems and keep them running.
Linux needs to catch up by providing that level of support... They need the whole infrastructure, from low-cost training centers, to hotlines to get in touch with programmers, design suites and GUIs.... its going to be a while yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I hear monday nights are now free...
Last I read, they didn't use the Patriot act to get the records, they just had the state attorney general try to subpoena them from the doctors themselves. Of course, they didn't have a case yet that backed the request, but why let a minor detail like that get in the way...
Other than Joss not having the rights to the show (as mentioned above), I had heard that the episodes were on the order of a $1 mil / each to film and release.
Double-checking, I'm wrong, it's $2 million per episode in production costs for Firefly... That's almost as much as ABC's Lost, and there they have a huge audience and marketing engine behind the show. They only got $38 mil total for the Serenity movie, about $ 3/4 mil short of the public production costs.
In my humble opinion, Joss should be seeking to release an adult-level animated series, similar to WB's Batman, or even an anime-style futuristic romp. The level of detail, varied scenery, and scale of the sets are just too big for production offices these days, and if you can't film it, you can certainly draw it.
The text is apparently included in the HTML file, then Javascript is used to dynamically replace the rendered text blocks with Flash-generated images of the text, rendered w/ anti-alias in the font of the designer's choice.
I would imagine that Google could still index based on the text in the original HTML file; this hack is more like a layer on top of the text rendering for "improved" visualization.
As mentioned, once the text is dynamically replaced by images, it no longer becomes user-selectable, which can only cause headaches for copy/pasting of information.
My opinion can be summed up in two words: Income Stream
We know that Microsoft wants to get into the content distribution business for some time now, to compete with iTunes and Tivo. Their current transport of choice is the "Windows Media Video" (WMV) format, which is optimized for streaming (RealVideo competition) while providing built-in copy protection (Apple M4P competition).
So, you have an untapped market out in Linux world, running their crazy independent browsers, and because of that, you can't guarantee that they'll be able to run all of your (protected) content. I would fathom that the the Linux demographic is largely composed of 20-30 year olds, the same demographic that would be most likely to pay for online content.
So, in order to tap the market, you have to create the content delivery mechanism, and do it in a way they'll all accept. So, now y'all get a new Add-In from Microsoft. Its one step back (not getting Linux to convert to Windows/IE) and two steps forward (more money in the bank).
Some people are saying "It's all economics, they're poor / unemployed so they are fighting against the Man the only way they can", while others are saying "It's all religion, they're all middle-eastern, its what they do".... but those are just the talking points of the far Left and far Right. The issue, as always, is more complicated.
What you have are immigrant population from French colonies in North Africa (who happen to be of middle-eastern and african descent) who have entered France through their weaker immigration laws. The French are traditionally very nationalistic (see their Language boards), and the immigrants were discriminated against and were not assimilated into mainstream cultures. Secondly, the middle-eastern culture itself is very prideful, mainly becase of their religious practices and family customs. The net result was that the immigrants self-segretated themselves into comminities of like-minded peoples.
So, the dominant european ethnics (through prejudice) resisted their assimilation, which had the net result of limiting the earning potential of the middle-eastern ethnics. The immigrants resist learning the French language and culture, and because of French law, are denied representation in their governments. When the government does try to "help" them with social programs, their culture see it as insulting / condescending. The net result of this is a hatred of a government that is constantly trying to patronize them and force them to give up their heritage.
So, these neighborhoods tend to have less governmental police prescence than other suburbs of Paris, which tends to lead to more criminal elements. It had gotten so bad, representatives of the federal government of France were claiming that they would "clean up the scum", which didn't go so well with the locals. In the latest chain of events, there were two youths who were fleeing police, hid in a utility station and accidentally electrocuted themselves. The immigrant cultures see this as police brutality & oppression, something denied by the authorities.
Finally, there are now criminal elemnts in the immigrant culture that are rising up and causing damage around the suburbs, fighting their "battle" against the government for making them the way they are... Yet, these people do not see that a share of that responsibility is theirs.
I dunno, I'm not too keen on the inter-dependence of software and hardware on the Macs... My girlfriend's G5 had a faulty mainboard that reported a bad temperature value for the chip... so the computer put the fans into "emergency mode", and the whole thing sounded like a vacuum cleaner (it was loud enough she was considering getting an isolation box). Kind of sucks when your main music-writing tool drowns out your music. Luckily, the people at the Mac store replaced the mainboard for free, otherwords it would have been about $900 out of pocket.
Of course, I got her to switch part-time to a Windows XP PC, because City of Heroes hasn't come out for OS-X. But I'm just annecdotal evidence.
Strange, that you think the Democrats would support it.
Here you have a bill that would create an exception in the laws that would allow common people (i.e. internet users) to post whatever political opinion they want on the internet while receiving payments for creating said content.
The Republican party has long triumphed free speech with respect to political positions, where "free speech" is synonymous with money spent to advertise their platforms. The current campaign finance laws "restrict free speech" by restricting the amount of money (and where, and when) a political party can spend on their campaigns.
The Democratic party, which has long proclaimed themselves a "party of the little man" and "enemy of the corporations" have a very hard time raising money from said corporations. So, it is in their best interest to restrict the amounts of spending by their competators, to make it "fair".
Adding this exception would allow their chief competator (Republicans) to use their (larger) campaign funds in a media that is fast outstripping traditional forms of media (TV / newspapers) among voting audiences, increasingly so among younger voters (who statistically are more Democrat). So, is it really that strange that the Democrats would oppose it?
Seconded. Because of our (overly-rigid) production processes, not to mention the condescending attitudes that the DBAs have towards the "power users" (engineers w/out DBA certificates), many departments in my company use MS Access rather than go through the 4 month process to get things built in Oracle.
.mdb file types to itself). Everything else is directly upgradable, you can copy and paste tables, forms, etc from one version to the other and it will convert automatically.
/flame on
I have Microsoft Access 97 files that I routinely often with 2000 (you get a popup if you wish to convert, if you say no, it opens in read-only mode). My laptop had Access 97 and 2002 both installed, and with trivial registry work, you can add Open methods to open the right file in the correct program (each version, when run, likes to reassign all the
I'm banking that your IT staff is just retarded. Either that, or Linux advocates who can't be bothered to learn how to use Microsoft apps correctly.
Sorry Mr Niemöller... But I think Google is getting to big for their britches...
First they came for Microsoft
and I did not speak out
because I was not a user.
(they give us "their" answers to our queries)
Then they came for the GIS services
and I did not speak out
because I wanted to know where to find things.
(they know where we live, where we shop, our industries, our infrastructure)
Then they came for eBay
and I did not speak out
because I hardly used it.
(they tell us what is available to buy, and we pay with their money)
Then they came for my data
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
No, but plants have been shut down on account of environmentalist pressures. They do not build them in the middle of cities; they build them on a cooling water source (river / lake / etc) about 20 miles from a major city and run transmission lines nearby.
In southeastern pennsylvania, there's an odd dynamic going on... for the 20 years that my family lived near Limerick nuclear station, noone wanted to build near the plant, on account of all the (unfounded) environmentalist panic. Then the area went through a housing boom in the early '00s, and suddenly all this land became very desireable, since its all 5 minutes from the major highway in the area (route 422) which makes it the perfect commuting spot. Next thing you know, $350k houses are popping up left and right, right in the valley of the shadow of de.. I mean, the cooling towers.
Here's a map of every utility owned nuclear plant that has been built in the united states & canada, including the decomissioned ones.
Enjoy.
Marge: I think Bart and Lisa are feeling a little upset right now. Isn't there something you'd like to say?
Homer: There sure is. Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
-- "Burns' Heir"
As it looks right now, no, there are no limits. Most of the game appears to be completely customizable, at almost all levels. It will come with a Map Editor, unit data in XML files, a Python scripting engine for custom actions, and an AI SDK (to be released later) for customizing a civ.
I've only looked a little into this, but CivFanatics.com has put together a much more comprehensive FAQ, including a section on customizing Civ 4.
If you check the Civ4 sites, apparently this is how Civ4 is treating governments, basically you check-box the qualities out of 5 separate lists on how much or how little of certain civic freedoms you wish to endure.
I have long maintained that the mother of invention is not necessity, but in fact laziness.
Why do we have remote controls for our televisions and garage doors? We could very well get out of our chairs and cars, walk the 5 feet, and do it ourselves... but no, we have a machine to do it for us. I could drive down to the library and look up some information, but now I have the internet on a PC in my den to answer my inane questions.
I don't bother driving out sunday morning to buy a paper, or even getting one delivered. Too much work, when I already have the computer to serve it up. Or if I'm real lazy, I could get digital cable, where I just push the "Guide" on the remote control, and it tells me what's playing in the next X hours.
Are these really things we "need" (ala necessity) ? Perhaps, perhaps not. But they are all labor saving devices. I'd draw a conclusion here, but I think I'm just too lazy to finish.
safe -> same
So much for proofing
Then what's my incentive to actually let the customer survive the trip, if their life insurance is paid to me upon their death?
Oh, I see, you meant to say that the trip-providing company becomes the underwriter for their insurance policy... which, upon your death, would have the safe net result as your survivors suing the bejeezus out of their company.
The only problem is you have not explained where their operating capital comes from, because actually running a trip to orbit and back isn't peanuts... If you're not going to charge the actual customers for the cost of the trip, then who really is going to pay? Getting the government to subsidize it only works if you have a lobby already in place... As we can see with sub-orbital flights (our airline system), even flying "for beans" with a subsidy doesn't pay the costs if you can't get the cost of operations down.
So, from a legal sense, that makes it heresay... after all, its "we heard from you, who heard from your fiance, who heard from their professor, who heard from the industry" that it is all or nothing when it comes to stem cells.
Which, of course, goes against there heresay that I read on the internet that privately funded stem cell research is still 100% ok.
The World of Warcraft forums only contain paying users.
Slashdot is a site that they can use to connect to a large pool of gamers, where a decent percentage may not yet play the game.
This exercise in getting in touch with the Slashdot community could be seen by the cynical as just another marketing / advertising excercise.
Connect with a market of tech-saavy gamers who may not be playing your game, who have concerns about the administration and gameplay of the MMORPG. Send out a small contingent of developers who'll talk the sweet talk about how all their desires are coming in the next content issue, while brushing aside how you apply heavy-handed changes in the name of balance. You get free front page advertising on a high traffic server like Slashdot, and maybe a few hundred more subscribers... not a bad deal.
Actually, utility companies are experimenting with paying you not to consume energy... go and look up "active load management". Why does this work? Because for those few hours a year, the price of electricity spikes up to $400/MW, and its cheaper to pay a few industrial customers to reduce output so the market price can drop back to the $80s/MW. (Market prices are cleared based on demand)
30 years later, we're finally getting around to economic drivers to conserve energy, laissez-faire style..
But explain to me the significance of daylight savings time. I mean really.
... The idea was proposed by Benjamin Franklin (known for his strong work ethic), that if the clocks were moved earlier towards the dawn in the summer, then there would be plenty of daylight in the evening after work, and thus countless candles and barrels of oil could be saved.
In the pre-electricity "modern" era, families that stayed up after dark would light their homes with candles and oil lamps, which could get quite expensive
Extrapolating that to today, there is still a chronological swing to the usage of energy... in the bulk power industry, this is called a "load curve", and basically follows a sine wave... there's a valley in usage over the early morning period when everyone is asleep, and as people wake up, the load increases in the "morning ramp", reaches its peak in the afternoon, and drops off in the late evening as people head to sleep.
Now, moving the clocks to line up with the daylight periods would shift the energy usage one hour earlier in the day. In the morning in the summer, the sun is already up, so you're not going to save much electricity. However, by shifting the evening clocks forward, it removes some of the "lighting" time in the evening, which lowers load on the system, allows the generators that match load to drop their output lower earlier, they burn less fuel, and the economy as a whole saves money on imported fuel.
Let me fix it for you... I guess it's a matter of who you can contact if something goes wrong.
.... its going to be a while yet.
If I'm Tommy.com, I don't want to have to keep a linux C programmer on site just to debug an application that odds are they didn't even contribute to... Their hope for getting a repair is to (1) explain their problem publicly on a message board, (2) hope that someone out there reads their issue and (3) can provide a fix... meanwhile every minute their site is down is a potential lost sale.
Besides, a company like Tommy isn't going to program their own site anyway, they're going to contract out the design, lease out the hardware, and keep a few humans on site for tech support to take the CDs out of the trays when they do their backups. Everything else HAS to run itself.
It doesn't matter what you're running, it's how you keep it running... and Microsoft has the market on their side. There is a whole industry of 3rd party support for their products, providing a financial incentive for programmers to learn MS's systems and keep them running.
Linux needs to catch up by providing that level of support... They need the whole infrastructure, from low-cost training centers, to hotlines to get in touch with programmers, design suites and GUIs
Correllation does imply causation, but correllation is not causation.
Any geek worth their salt knows what happens to tin foil in the microwave...
Actually, neurons have more states than just "on" and "off". They exist in the analog world, so they can reach a continuous range of values.
So saying that, neurons are more like dimmer switches...