I know it's incorrect, but plurals of acronyms are always weird. Technically, OS should stand for both Operating System and Operating Systems. In actual usage, people tend to make plurals of acronyms exactly as they do with real nouns, that is, adding an S at the end. However, OSs looks weird, and also risks overloading OSS, a valid acronym in its own right.
Therefore, since we already use the pseudo-germanic -en plural for other nouns (boxen), why not OSen?
Windows assumes all users are idiots, including and especially Administrator.
Whether this is an accurate or correct assumption is left as an exercise for the reader.
Unix-style OSen, OTOH, are quite happy to let you shoot off your own foot, ankle, shin, knee, and indeed any body part you care to name, and supply an endless variety of interesting weapons and weaponizable tools to enable you to do so.
Personally I never could get on with Nokia UIs. (Sony) Ericsson was what I started with, and what I stuck with until work gave me a Crackberry.
I have to say, I like it because it Just Works. It has one major task, namely to let me send & receive e-mail, and it succeeds enormously at that.
Beyond that, mine is quite customized: custom theme, third-party apps, all that. The UI does take a moment to learn, and the lack of better Office and PDF viewers does hurt, but basically it's a perfect work phone.
As for the iPhone, I didn't buy one as I don't need a second phone, but I have an iPod Touch, and that is very cool. However, it is not aimed at the same target as the Blackberry. Arguing the merits of one against the other is even more pointless IMHO than Windows vs Mac vs Linux flame-wars.
(In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).
Arrgh! Why do people do this? My employer uses a web conferencing system whose url is like https://company.system.com./ At least half the time, somebody on the call is trying to get at https://www.company.system.com./ I didn't say the www, and I did say the https colon slash slash, but they just add the www anyway, because it's the web, right?
Sure, being a web server in the domain it probably ought to have www prefixed, but that convention seems to have fallen by the wayside. Also, sub-domains never had quite so hard and fast a rule, at least in the application. I do wish they would add a rule so that www. is automatically removed from any requests, though.
Just to put you in the picture, I had in mind a certain two-lane stretch of motorway that I often drive. It is clogged with Eastern European trucks, often in poor state of repair, and all in a tremendous hurry to get wherever they are going. This means that they are constantly trying to overtake each other, and as this is a two-lane motorway, this leaves nowhere for any cars to go but literally "out of the road", that is, into the ditch.
Now, as my car is not a Land Rover, this is not a feasible option, so when I am in the overtaking lane and the truck I am passing decides to pull out, my options are 1) brake, and 2) accelerate. Braking is fine if I am behind the tractor unit or don't have other traffic close behind me, but sometimes that is simply not feasible. At those times I thank the Bavarian gods that I can drop a gear or two, open the throttle, and get out of the way, because the truckers treat lights and horns as fun entertainment for the road.
In fact these articulated rigs fairly regularly leap the centre divider when the driver falls asleep after thirty hours at the wheel, and the consequences tend to the horrific. There is not much one can do about that, but I like to keep my options open for the things that I can affect.
As for speeding not making much difference, you are right there. I used to have a very heavy foot, but now that I have chilled out I can't say I notice a big difference in the overall trip time.
Oh absolutely, I am just waiting for them to come down to a reasonable price/performance ratio. For my usage (lotsandlots of motorway miles), a G-Wiz won't cut it.
If only Tesla were more of a car company and less of a vapourware company...
If I showed up with a suitcase of cash after the attempt had been completed, I would think they would be happy to take my money. Also, by this reasoning any sort of limited-numbers, not-for-public-consumption car (prototypes, racers, etc) are also not cars.
2. You can only drive it at speed on salt flats.
Your point being...?
3. You can't drive it on public roads (driver and pedestrian safety, shooting flames of death, etc).
The same would apply to F1 or NASCAR cars, but those are definitely cars. Ok, maybe not the shooting flames of death part.
4. Even if you could drive it on-road, its turning radius is probably a mile!
Why would you want to take the thing on the road?
It looks like your definition of "car" is "a vehicle which can be bought by a member of the public and operated legally on public roads". By that reasoning, Yamaha, Ducati, Aprilia, and Harley-Davidson all make "cars".
Power plants make it a point to be as efficient as possible, whereas cars make almost the inverse point with IC engines.
I *like* efficiency in my internal combustion engine, thankyouverymuch. It means that I get more power to play with. I get power from a two-litre turbodiesel engine that would have been in sports-car territory just a couple of decades ago.
What I don't like are cars that have small engines with no power. It doesn't matter how efficient the thing is, when I'm on the motorway with meth-crazed Bulgarian truckers bearing down on me, I want to have something happen when I put my foot down.
There is a book called "Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream". The author set out with nothing but twenty-five bucks in his pocket, and set himself the goal of getting a job within a year, moving from the homeless shelter into normal accomodation, owning a car, and having some savings. He is a graduate, but chose to work unskilled jobs, just to make it a real example.
What would be interesting would be trying it somewhere that has more of a welfare state than the USA. Here in Europe, the guy who painted my house was an immigrant who was in the process of working himself up from basically owning the clothes he stood up in to owning his own successful business employing several other people, so it can work here too.
There is a saying: "Hard cases make bad law". The idea is that the law should be made for the most common case, and exceptions dealt with as such.
In particular, the economy should be set up in order to function as an economy. Attempts to mess with it will hinder its efficiency as an economy.
My personal plan is to work hard, earn money, save it, use some of it to take care of my parents should they need my help, use some of it to educate the children I plan to have, save some against my own old age, and spend the rest on goods and services, thus sending the wheel around again. I don't plan to aid my parents or educate my children less because the omnipotent benevolent State claims to be doing it for me.
In fact, an argument could be made that I am worse off because of those attempts to provide services for me. My taxes are used to pay for education which is sub-par, so I then need to pay again for my childrens' private education, and pay tax on what I pay. My taxes are also used to fun horrific conditions in hospitals, so if my parents need some sort of assistance once they are no longer working, I will have to pay for private care, and then pay tax on what I pay for that.
Yes, because they're *magic* levitating trains, which don't need electricity made by burning nasssty coal, right?
Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, and you may well have been thinking of Japan's nuclear-powered grid, but I see too much of this sort of thinking. "I'll buy an EV so that I don't burn gas!" Uhhh... yes, you do that.
Ha! the wonderful belief that free market capitalism will solve all the worlds problems and mitigate poverty!
Do you really think that private corporations with no compulsions other than "shareholder value" will consider the good of the poor?
The private corporations don't have to care. That's the point of capitalism. The whole thing is based on the idea that if you have something I want and I have something you want, we negotiate until we find some mutually beneficial exchange which leaves us both better off. The crucial point is that I am only worried about my own well-being.
Do you really think that you and I would be better off if we sent our two things in to some central government committee, which would evaluate how much they were worth, how much we needed them, and how much we deserved, then take a cut to fund the system before handing us our Fair Share? I would much rather deal directly, TYVM.
That many large corporations (such as my employer) make correspondingly large donations to charity is also something to bear in mind, but the point is that it's not required, and the system ensures that there are advantages anyway.
In all fairness, I don't think the host deserves all the blame. They are running scared, since any mention of copyright tends to involve lots of scary lawyers, or at least the threat of them. It's a lot easier for the host to deal with potential copyright violations this way, especially as the chances are that the majority of content flagged in this way is in fact infringing.
Also, Creative Commons licensing is not exactly mainstream, so I can understand why they might not have taken it into account.
That said, a quick conversation with a customer service rep (or manager, if necessary) should be enough to sort this situation out. If not, then my opinion of this host would plummet, because that *is* part of their core business.
The problem is that this scheme might work now, but it is not very future proof. How would you avoid the issue of Participant A borging participants B through T, thereby owning enough pieces of the key to do whatever they want, no matter what Participants U through Z have to say?
This might happen with private organizations (companies get bought) or with states (Russia takes over Georgia's piece of the key, just going on what's in the news).
I think ICANN is still the least bad choice. Somebody has to be the ultimate arbiter, and at least ICANN's fights so far have been confined to ICANN. It has not become a bargaining chip in bigger fights, which would be almost guaranteed with organizations such as the UN.
One argument is that the lack of transparency was a response to over-regulation in the banking sector. I work for a company which provides software services to help companies with compliance. Banks and other financial organizations queue up to spend millions of dollars on our stuff, because the alternative is spending tens of millions at some body-rental place to get people to do it by hand, or facing fines of hundreds of millions and up.
This means that there is lots of incentive to minimize the activities that are covered by regulations, and invent new forms of trading which are not. The problem is, of course, that nobody really understands these new forms, especially when all of the players have large incentives to distort the data in the first place.
I just hope the problem stays mainly confined to the stock market, and doesn't migrate beyond that into the "real" economy.
I also have an iPod Touch, and I can't say I agree with you.
Text input? Took a while to get used to, and I still prefer the BlackBerry's keyboard, but the iPod is still plenty usable.
Screen rotation? Works great for me. I wish some apps supported it that don't, but where it works, it works fine.
Touch gestures? Again, everything I do seems to work OK.
App crashes? I have had Safari quit on me, but only after long-ish intensive (multi-tab) browsing sessions, which is hardly typical for a mobile device, so I can live with that. It's the only app that has crashed on me.
The Mail interface? Looks fine to me. Given the screen size, I can't see obvious ways of making it better.
No document viewer. Ok, I'll let you have this one. A PDF viewer would be good, and a DOC viewer would be perfect. This one may even be Apple's own fault, as both these formats are a bit more than pure text.
Off-line support? I have no idea what you mean. The thing plays music offline, so I'm happy. I don't expect to browse the web offline, I can read my mail offline, and if I positively want to save some pages to read offline, I use Instapaper.
Sync with multiple machines? True, this annoys me, but this is a feature with no benefit to Apple and lots of downside as it becomes seen as a piracy-enabling feature. This may be something Apple had to give to the record companies.
Sync in half an hour? You, my friend, need USB 2.
Look, I'm not a fan-boy, but I'm also not going to go all frothy at the mouth because Apple had the gall to sell me a device that looks good, works great at its core task, but can't play OGG files or some such. It's a compromise, but one I can deal with. The iPod is good enough at everything it does to make a compelling package.
End users don't care about specs, but they do care about functionality.
Features like downloading and syncing over the air, updating podcasts, shopping at multiple music stores, place shifting, better E-mail clients, and laptop Internet access matter even to non-geeks, and Apple is preventing a lot of that from happening.
I count myself as a geek, and I don't care about most of those features. Over-the-air sync would be nice, but I can see why it was not Apple's top priority.
The iPod just works, and that's all there is to it. Apple got it right, and all the other vendors are left playing catch-up with ugly, difficult to use devices. All they can do is target some of the niches that Apple bypassed during their drive to corner all of the rest of the market, such as greater openness, but the numbers say that consumers don't really care.
As for Android, we shall see whether the Google brand can beat the iPod + some phone features combo that Apple offers in the iPhone. I can see it going either way.
[A]ny idiot who expects other people to speak their language is not going to be appreciated. If you are Spanish and use English to speak to Dutch guys in Amsterdam you are fine. But if you are American and expect them to speak in English, not so fine.
Another point is that people who are used to foreigners not knowing their language are extra-special-double-appreciative if you make any effort at all with the local language - say, enough to order another beer and say thank you.
This works in the office as well - even if all you can say in the local language at first is "good morning" and "lunch time", it shows that you are not an entirely worthless human being.
I lived in Germany for a year and a bit with bunch of English people. Our employer was paying for German lessons for us, during work hours no less, but still many of them learned no more than "das, bitte!" (that, please!), coordinate with a pointing finger. This did not go down well with our hosts, who simply ignored them and froze them out. Come to think of it, by the end the only people in the German lessons were a Turk, a Canadian, and me... All the Englanders were moaning about how nobody would talk to them!
If these were bad events, there would be obvious correlation to major extinction events. There simply isn't, and people have looked really hard (because it would be interesting if there was).
That is not exactly correct, because what is being posited is technological impact. 780k years ago there weren't any artificial electromagnetic fields around to be disrupted.
That is not to say that I am convinced there would be large impacts on devices which rely on electromagnetism, as the switch would be slow enough and diffuse enough that they would probably fall below most devices' noise thresholds. However, anything that did affect such devices would have major consequences these days, purely because we are reliant on our EM-based technology working. I think we can safely rule out birds falling out of the sky, but some effect on EM-devices is more probable.
Oh yeah, Visio is the one MS program that I haven't found a reasonable substitute for. I was only talking about the sort of "funny" attachments users want from their personal e-mail.
Strange - my home machine runs OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and I can only remember one PPT that did not open right the first time in OOo. DOCs all come up fine, so much that when I need to do a lot of word processing I do it on the desktop with the nice keyboard and then transfer the file to the work lapdog. Never had any trouble, even with big multi-author documents with all sorts of highlighting and versioning.
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I know it's incorrect, but plurals of acronyms are always weird. Technically, OS should stand for both Operating System and Operating Systems. In actual usage, people tend to make plurals of acronyms exactly as they do with real nouns, that is, adding an S at the end. However, OSs looks weird, and also risks overloading OSS, a valid acronym in its own right.
Therefore, since we already use the pseudo-germanic -en plural for other nouns (boxen), why not OSen?
Windows assumes all users are idiots, including and especially Administrator.
Whether this is an accurate or correct assumption is left as an exercise for the reader.
Unix-style OSen, OTOH, are quite happy to let you shoot off your own foot, ankle, shin, knee, and indeed any body part you care to name, and supply an endless variety of interesting weapons and weaponizable tools to enable you to do so.
Personally I never could get on with Nokia UIs. (Sony) Ericsson was what I started with, and what I stuck with until work gave me a Crackberry.
I have to say, I like it because it Just Works. It has one major task, namely to let me send & receive e-mail, and it succeeds enormously at that.
Beyond that, mine is quite customized: custom theme, third-party apps, all that. The UI does take a moment to learn, and the lack of better Office and PDF viewers does hurt, but basically it's a perfect work phone.
As for the iPhone, I didn't buy one as I don't need a second phone, but I have an iPod Touch, and that is very cool. However, it is not aimed at the same target as the Blackberry. Arguing the merits of one against the other is even more pointless IMHO than Windows vs Mac vs Linux flame-wars.
(In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).
Arrgh! Why do people do this? My employer uses a web conferencing system whose url is like https://company.system.com./ At least half the time, somebody on the call is trying to get at https://www.company.system.com./ I didn't say the www, and I did say the https colon slash slash, but they just add the www anyway, because it's the web, right?
Sure, being a web server in the domain it probably ought to have www prefixed, but that convention seems to have fallen by the wayside. Also, sub-domains never had quite so hard and fast a rule, at least in the application. I do wish they would add a rule so that www. is automatically removed from any requests, though.
You had plant juice? In my day we had to cut off our own limbs to paint with blood on the cave walls, and then walk home, uphill, in the snow.
Young 'uns these days, don't know how good they've got it.
An ex-boss liked to point out that "assume" makes an ASS out of U and ME.
Just to put you in the picture, I had in mind a certain two-lane stretch of motorway that I often drive. It is clogged with Eastern European trucks, often in poor state of repair, and all in a tremendous hurry to get wherever they are going. This means that they are constantly trying to overtake each other, and as this is a two-lane motorway, this leaves nowhere for any cars to go but literally "out of the road", that is, into the ditch.
Now, as my car is not a Land Rover, this is not a feasible option, so when I am in the overtaking lane and the truck I am passing decides to pull out, my options are 1) brake, and 2) accelerate. Braking is fine if I am behind the tractor unit or don't have other traffic close behind me, but sometimes that is simply not feasible. At those times I thank the Bavarian gods that I can drop a gear or two, open the throttle, and get out of the way, because the truckers treat lights and horns as fun entertainment for the road.
In fact these articulated rigs fairly regularly leap the centre divider when the driver falls asleep after thirty hours at the wheel, and the consequences tend to the horrific. There is not much one can do about that, but I like to keep my options open for the things that I can affect.
As for speeding not making much difference, you are right there. I used to have a very heavy foot, but now that I have chilled out I can't say I notice a big difference in the overall trip time.
You don't know me, and yet you feel justified in making all manner of claims about me. I wonder what that says about *your* anatomy.
Oh absolutely, I am just waiting for them to come down to a reasonable price/performance ratio. For my usage (lotsandlots of motorway miles), a G-Wiz won't cut it.
If only Tesla were more of a car company and less of a vapourware company...
1. You can't (and won't ever be able to) buy one.
If I showed up with a suitcase of cash after the attempt had been completed, I would think they would be happy to take my money. Also, by this reasoning any sort of limited-numbers, not-for-public-consumption car (prototypes, racers, etc) are also not cars.
2. You can only drive it at speed on salt flats.
Your point being...?
3. You can't drive it on public roads (driver and pedestrian safety, shooting flames of death, etc).
The same would apply to F1 or NASCAR cars, but those are definitely cars. Ok, maybe not the shooting flames of death part.
4. Even if you could drive it on-road, its turning radius is probably a mile!
Why would you want to take the thing on the road?
It looks like your definition of "car" is "a vehicle which can be bought by a member of the public and operated legally on public roads". By that reasoning, Yamaha, Ducati, Aprilia, and Harley-Davidson all make "cars".
Power plants make it a point to be as efficient as possible, whereas cars make almost the inverse point with IC engines.
I *like* efficiency in my internal combustion engine, thankyouverymuch. It means that I get more power to play with. I get power from a two-litre turbodiesel engine that would have been in sports-car territory just a couple of decades ago.
What I don't like are cars that have small engines with no power. It doesn't matter how efficient the thing is, when I'm on the motorway with meth-crazed Bulgarian truckers bearing down on me, I want to have something happen when I put my foot down.
There is a book called "Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream". The author set out with nothing but twenty-five bucks in his pocket, and set himself the goal of getting a job within a year, moving from the homeless shelter into normal accomodation, owning a car, and having some savings. He is a graduate, but chose to work unskilled jobs, just to make it a real example.
What would be interesting would be trying it somewhere that has more of a welfare state than the USA. Here in Europe, the guy who painted my house was an immigrant who was in the process of working himself up from basically owning the clothes he stood up in to owning his own successful business employing several other people, so it can work here too.
There is a saying: "Hard cases make bad law". The idea is that the law should be made for the most common case, and exceptions dealt with as such.
In particular, the economy should be set up in order to function as an economy. Attempts to mess with it will hinder its efficiency as an economy.
My personal plan is to work hard, earn money, save it, use some of it to take care of my parents should they need my help, use some of it to educate the children I plan to have, save some against my own old age, and spend the rest on goods and services, thus sending the wheel around again. I don't plan to aid my parents or educate my children less because the omnipotent benevolent State claims to be doing it for me.
In fact, an argument could be made that I am worse off because of those attempts to provide services for me. My taxes are used to pay for education which is sub-par, so I then need to pay again for my childrens' private education, and pay tax on what I pay. My taxes are also used to fun horrific conditions in hospitals, so if my parents need some sort of assistance once they are no longer working, I will have to pay for private care, and then pay tax on what I pay for that.
Yes, because they're *magic* levitating trains, which don't need electricity made by burning nasssty coal, right?
Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, and you may well have been thinking of Japan's nuclear-powered grid, but I see too much of this sort of thinking. "I'll buy an EV so that I don't burn gas!" Uhhh... yes, you do that.
I look forward to the hammer and sickle receiving the same treatment, or for that matter the hammer and compass, since we are discussing Germany.
Tumbleweeds...
Ha! the wonderful belief that free market capitalism will solve all the worlds problems and mitigate poverty!
Do you really think that private corporations with no compulsions other than "shareholder value" will consider the good of the poor?
The private corporations don't have to care. That's the point of capitalism. The whole thing is based on the idea that if you have something I want and I have something you want, we negotiate until we find some mutually beneficial exchange which leaves us both better off. The crucial point is that I am only worried about my own well-being.
Do you really think that you and I would be better off if we sent our two things in to some central government committee, which would evaluate how much they were worth, how much we needed them, and how much we deserved, then take a cut to fund the system before handing us our Fair Share? I would much rather deal directly, TYVM.
That many large corporations (such as my employer) make correspondingly large donations to charity is also something to bear in mind, but the point is that it's not required, and the system ensures that there are advantages anyway.
The problems that we are seeing now are due to some misguided attempts to mess with the workings of the system. It's complex, with all sorts of feedback, and most of its failure modes are quite spectacularly nasty for those affected. I just hope They can reboot it in time: http://newsbiscuit.com/article/world-leader-agree-rescue-plan-turn-all-the-computers-off-and-then-turn-them-back-on-again-382
In all fairness, I don't think the host deserves all the blame. They are running scared, since any mention of copyright tends to involve lots of scary lawyers, or at least the threat of them. It's a lot easier for the host to deal with potential copyright violations this way, especially as the chances are that the majority of content flagged in this way is in fact infringing.
Also, Creative Commons licensing is not exactly mainstream, so I can understand why they might not have taken it into account.
That said, a quick conversation with a customer service rep (or manager, if necessary) should be enough to sort this situation out. If not, then my opinion of this host would plummet, because that *is* part of their core business.
The problem is that this scheme might work now, but it is not very future proof. How would you avoid the issue of Participant A borging participants B through T, thereby owning enough pieces of the key to do whatever they want, no matter what Participants U through Z have to say?
This might happen with private organizations (companies get bought) or with states (Russia takes over Georgia's piece of the key, just going on what's in the news).
I think ICANN is still the least bad choice. Somebody has to be the ultimate arbiter, and at least ICANN's fights so far have been confined to ICANN. It has not become a bargaining chip in bigger fights, which would be almost guaranteed with organizations such as the UN.
One argument is that the lack of transparency was a response to over-regulation in the banking sector. I work for a company which provides software services to help companies with compliance. Banks and other financial organizations queue up to spend millions of dollars on our stuff, because the alternative is spending tens of millions at some body-rental place to get people to do it by hand, or facing fines of hundreds of millions and up.
This means that there is lots of incentive to minimize the activities that are covered by regulations, and invent new forms of trading which are not. The problem is, of course, that nobody really understands these new forms, especially when all of the players have large incentives to distort the data in the first place.
I just hope the problem stays mainly confined to the stock market, and doesn't migrate beyond that into the "real" economy.
I also have an iPod Touch, and I can't say I agree with you.
Text input? Took a while to get used to, and I still prefer the BlackBerry's keyboard, but the iPod is still plenty usable.
Screen rotation? Works great for me. I wish some apps supported it that don't, but where it works, it works fine.
Touch gestures? Again, everything I do seems to work OK.
App crashes? I have had Safari quit on me, but only after long-ish intensive (multi-tab) browsing sessions, which is hardly typical for a mobile device, so I can live with that. It's the only app that has crashed on me.
The Mail interface? Looks fine to me. Given the screen size, I can't see obvious ways of making it better.
No document viewer. Ok, I'll let you have this one. A PDF viewer would be good, and a DOC viewer would be perfect. This one may even be Apple's own fault, as both these formats are a bit more than pure text.
Off-line support? I have no idea what you mean. The thing plays music offline, so I'm happy. I don't expect to browse the web offline, I can read my mail offline, and if I positively want to save some pages to read offline, I use Instapaper.
Sync with multiple machines? True, this annoys me, but this is a feature with no benefit to Apple and lots of downside as it becomes seen as a piracy-enabling feature. This may be something Apple had to give to the record companies.
Sync in half an hour? You, my friend, need USB 2.
Look, I'm not a fan-boy, but I'm also not going to go all frothy at the mouth because Apple had the gall to sell me a device that looks good, works great at its core task, but can't play OGG files or some such. It's a compromise, but one I can deal with. The iPod is good enough at everything it does to make a compelling package.
End users don't care about specs, but they do care about functionality.
Features like downloading and syncing over the air, updating podcasts, shopping at multiple music stores, place shifting, better E-mail clients, and laptop Internet access matter even to non-geeks, and Apple is preventing a lot of that from happening.
I count myself as a geek, and I don't care about most of those features. Over-the-air sync would be nice, but I can see why it was not Apple's top priority.
The iPod just works, and that's all there is to it. Apple got it right, and all the other vendors are left playing catch-up with ugly, difficult to use devices. All they can do is target some of the niches that Apple bypassed during their drive to corner all of the rest of the market, such as greater openness, but the numbers say that consumers don't really care.
As for Android, we shall see whether the Google brand can beat the iPod + some phone features combo that Apple offers in the iPhone. I can see it going either way.
[A]ny idiot who expects other people to speak their language is not going to be appreciated. If you are Spanish and use English to speak to Dutch guys in Amsterdam you are fine. But if you are American and expect them to speak in English, not so fine.
Another point is that people who are used to foreigners not knowing their language are extra-special-double-appreciative if you make any effort at all with the local language - say, enough to order another beer and say thank you.
This works in the office as well - even if all you can say in the local language at first is "good morning" and "lunch time", it shows that you are not an entirely worthless human being.
I lived in Germany for a year and a bit with bunch of English people. Our employer was paying for German lessons for us, during work hours no less, but still many of them learned no more than "das, bitte!" (that, please!), coordinate with a pointing finger. This did not go down well with our hosts, who simply ignored them and froze them out. Come to think of it, by the end the only people in the German lessons were a Turk, a Canadian, and me... All the Englanders were moaning about how nobody would talk to them!
If these were bad events, there would be obvious correlation to major extinction events. There simply isn't, and people have looked really hard (because it would be interesting if there was).
That is not exactly correct, because what is being posited is technological impact. 780k years ago there weren't any artificial electromagnetic fields around to be disrupted.
That is not to say that I am convinced there would be large impacts on devices which rely on electromagnetism, as the switch would be slow enough and diffuse enough that they would probably fall below most devices' noise thresholds. However, anything that did affect such devices would have major consequences these days, purely because we are reliant on our EM-based technology working. I think we can safely rule out birds falling out of the sky, but some effect on EM-devices is more probable.
Oh yeah, Visio is the one MS program that I haven't found a reasonable substitute for. I was only talking about the sort of "funny" attachments users want from their personal e-mail.
Strange - my home machine runs OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and I can only remember one PPT that did not open right the first time in OOo. DOCs all come up fine, so much that when I need to do a lot of word processing I do it on the desktop with the nice keyboard and then transfer the file to the work lapdog. Never had any trouble, even with big multi-author documents with all sorts of highlighting and versioning.