The article mentions taxing orange juice as a drink but it would be exempt if it were classified a fruit. This got me thinking... This unified system is looking real bad and here's why:
I live in MA and work in CT. In those two states there are 5% and 6% sales taxes respectively, but in both of them, all food (non-restaraunt/meals) is exempt, and all clothing items under a certain $ amount (I forget the amount, but it's like individual items over $100 or something) are exempt.
I'm wondering how the new unified system will handle those kind of things, or are they saying that states that adopt this agreement will change their policies.
I'm bothered by the idea that this "remote tax grab" would mean that items essential to living (ie. basic food and clothing) that have traditionally been exempt from taxation in some states would lose that exemption. I traditionally lean Right in my political opinions, but this strikes me as a rather regressive tax policy.
At the company where I'm network admin, we have mostly Win2K and WinXP boxes and Win2K and Solaris servers.
We've got a good firewall, and I try to keep up with the patches in a reasonable timeframe. Not one of our users systems or our servers was infected with Blaster or Sobig.
With that being said, our email is outsourced to another company (Don't even ask, I've been bitching about that to the upper management until I'm blue in the face) well, that other company got MAULED by both Blaster and Sobig. We went most of the week with virtually unusable email and there was nothing I could do about it. (I did however, get a good quota of "I told you so's" with regard to our lame-ass email provider)
So while it's true that we don't have any users with MACs or Linux, if we did, they would have been just as put out as everyone else.
I'm not getting up on WinSoapBox2k3, but I feel the blame lies with the Virus/Worm authors, and with those who run without firewalls and without keeping their systems patched and up to date.
Even back on 9/11/01, My biggest fear was not "Oh God, they could get me or someone I care about" (yes, that crossed the back of my mind when they were still not sure if there were still more hijacked planes in the air) but that of "Our government is goig to WAY over-react to this and do some incredibly damaging things to our rights and freedoms under the illusion that they need to "Do Something"
Today, I really don't want to fly anywhere... not because I'm worried about hijackings, but because I'm very reluctant to have to spend 2 hours going through security screenings that are more about putting on an appearance of security; because they want people to feel they are "Doing Something"; than about acutally stopping real terrorists.
AlQueda got a lot of milage out of those attacks. One event, one (combined) terrorist incident and 2 years later, our government has held people as "enemy combatants", made taking a flight of less than 2000 miles take longer in the airport than in the air, and given us "total information awareness" and the PATRIOT act.
I submit to you that our own government is (inadvertantly) supporting fear and terror. I haven't been worried about directly being the victim of a terrorist attack, but I DO worry about my rights to privacy, freedom, and the presumption of innocense until proven guilty./rant
Re:The power cell itself just cured diabetes and m
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Those are both great ideas, but I would wager that you would have a big problem with heat. The obvious side-effect of burning that much glucose is that you would be dumping a LOT of heat into your bloodstream/body.
So, you've got a good start there, but we need some heat-pipes or endothermic reaction to keep you trading diabetes or extra calories for continual fever.
I suppose that it depends on whether you're walking out for good, or just as a work stoppage to show them you're important. I'll assume from the title, you're talking the former.
The problem with the latter is that if the company really is in trouble, you'll be putting the nails in its coffin.
In this job market, I would personally not be too excited about the prospect of a job hunt. I've got friends who have been actively looking for over 6 months - it's kinda rough.
Another thing to consider is that some might just decide to let you all walk, and feign some form of loyalty to the company... it's a win-win for them. If the company survives, their "loyalty" will be rewarded, and if it crashes and burns, they will be eligible to collect unemployment while those who quit will not.
I own two ReplayTVs - older model 3000 units. These are dinosaurs in the PVR world - they use a 56K modem to dial up for their program listings and only have a 30 second skip button. No auto-skip, and they can't even share with each other.
As far as I can tell, the older units like mine are pretty much at the end of their software cycle -the only updates will be program guide info and new phone numbers at this point.
A friend of mine owns some of the new units (4000's I think) and they're pretty cool - the commercial skip and the sharing/playing from room-to-room are features that I've drooled over more than once. I would have gone out and replaced my current units with some like hers, but she mentioned about how they keep updating the software with "improvements" that only seem to get buggier and buggier as they go. She worries that the next round of "improvements" will turn the commercial skip and sharing off, or might change the way guaranteed vs non-guaranteed recording will be handled.
After (vicariously) going through the ups and downs of buggy updates and worries about what they will break this week, I decided that as nice as all those new features might be, the ReplayTV people are too likely to mess stuff up.
I've decided that I'll do whatever I can to keep my two "dinosaurs" running as long as possible. I love the possibilities the new technology could bring, but the skittishness of the ReplayTV people (this isn't the first time there's been talk about commercial skip being removed) makes me uncomfortable about slapping a large sum of cash down on the counter at my local A/V store.
If I were to upgrade, it would be to get the very features the new management wants to delete. No thanks.
As for efficiency improvement of the personal computer although processing speed and capacity increase et cetera it is very extreme bewilderingly combination without going well, you must exchange periodically as a part and the consumables which cannot use, also the part comes coming out.
The case (the frame) size to be largest even in various parts, because the majority of the single item cases for the manufacturer make personal computer and the original user does with the metal and the resin make, it deals with and the ê when becoming, is not pay and/or you throw away feeling to throw away, the ê it is not and/or with is not the notion that where you say to be many, probably will be?
When of environmental problem is thought, abandoning, the êÜñ, difficult this kind of ones is unreasonable as a actuality, being joint with the BOXMASTER, it developed this cardboard PC box from the thought of processing and it is not to increase the à leprosy rubbish, you liking to use the material whose burden is little as naturally as possible in the personal computer, whether one ones several dozen years using long ideal.
It does not paint the wrapping and it does the warmth which the material has that way. For example if the child pasted the seal and/or scribbled mono it becomes original with very that and whether also attachment furthermore becomes deep, the êÜñ.
Becoming the canvas of the good work, finishing role, as a PC case without throwing away,, if there is a kind of thing taking if it is delightful truly, is.
I turned my javascript on (I browse with it off nowadays because of all of the popups/pop-unders) and tried that site - my popup killer worked great - score another one for netcaptor (www.netcaptor.com)
My mom lives about a 5 hour drive away, but she comes up to visit every 2 or 3 months. I have her fairly well trained to bring her wintel box minus all the peripheral stuff. So every time she visits, I give her system a quick checkup/tuneup. If it needs something, I go out to CompUSA with her and we pick it up. She's always enjoyed shopping so very much while I tend to avoid it, so it's a nice mother-daughter bonding thing. For the most part, the frantic weekly support calls have dried up.
In the article, they mention that geothermal heat could be causing the ice to melt... This dredges up some foggy memories: I seem to recall having heard that Mars no longer had any active volcanism, and that mantle may have solidified (a lack a magnetic field being a strong indicator of this)
I'm not a geologist (or exogeologist for that matter) and so I'm not claiming any special knowledge here, but it keeps bugging the back of my mind - Any insights?
On one hand, there are a lot of folks who have very strong opinions about the fact that the data should be separated from presentation... If Office 2003 were to strip the MS-apps-specific formatting (which is probably NOT very standards-friendly), but leave the style markings (heading, paragraph, footnote, etc...) then really, they would be providing a semi-structured document that conformed to XML standards.
As a web application developer/web author, there have been many times when I have been given MS Word docs and Excel spreadsheets as content for our web site... In the past, I have resorted to copying the whole page directly onto a text editor (thereby scrubbing all formatting information) and then using HTML markup to make the document look much like the Word original, but without having to deal with that rather poor HTML output the Word and Excel's Save as HTML features produced. If I could have a semi-structured document, it would have been easier to write some macros to parse the XML structure to automate some of the rough formatting (hooks for stylesheets or somesuch).
On the other hand, it seems to me that is might be in Microsoft's best business interest (the selfish ones) to make darn sure that it's not possible for OpenOffice fully interoperate with MS Office documents. I don't think they would be very smart (current business model-wise) if their new products (which will rapidly become de-facto business standards) helped to enable Open Office standards to take away their marketshare.
In the final analysis, I probably wouldn't worry too much until there's a critical mass of people using it. By then, a bunch of folks will have figured out what CAN be done with whatever format MS ended up with. At that point, Office 2003's XML format will probably make it possible for people to do something they couldn't do before or at least, to do something easily that once was more trouble that it was worth.
I honestly don't know about which is more inflamible: Hydrogen or Gasonlie though I immagine the you may be right... There may be lots of hydrocarbon chains in each molecule of gas, but there is more matter going to waste in every gallon than in the equivilent amount of Hydrogen - less waste, better energy conversion rate.
Of course, the thing about Hydrogen is that it does tend to rise very fast when it burns - if the tanks were in a more intelligent place (say the trunk) and if that place had some kind of lid that was designed to get out of the way in a hurry, most of the energy of any catastrophic fuel escape/fire could be directed upwards and away from the vehicle. (Unless of course, it just explodes wholesale) After all, there would probably be NO Oxygen in the Hydrogen pressure tank, so it's not like it's going to burn until it mixes with the air.
Okay - I'm done rambling... what was the question? *grin*
I really get the feeling that phone companies don't actually want anything to do with DSL. A friend mentioned that Phone Companies tend to like virtual circuits so they impose the totally unnecessarry and (at least in the beginning) buggy-as-hell PPP Over Ethernet instead of just running it as a bridge.
I've helped a few folks get their DSL connections running and in every case, the phone companies have managed to seriously screw something up.
I had one guy ask them to put it on the line he used for modem and fax, (cuz the wiring for that was already in his office), but when I got to his house they had put it on the wrong line - I had to rearrange a bunch of his inside wiring to get things set the way he wanted it.
Another time, the Phone Co had not bothered to test the person's line to make sure it didn't have any bridging or repeaters in it. (I'm not an expert on DSL, but I understand that the line needs to be clear of repeaters and other active components or the DSL doesn't work right) it took a couple weeks after their supposed "on" date to get an appointment to have a tech clear the line.
My own experience was one of frustration as the installer (this was early on - back when they wouldn't LET you do your own install) refused to proceed when he saw I was running NT4.0 instead of Win 9x.
Wow, it sounds like you work for the same people I do.
At heart, I'm a PHP/Perl and.sh kind of person. Since I am a webmaster for a company whose sole product is a web application, one would assume I'm allowed to use the right tool for the job - nope - we've got a "Chief Scientist" (I kid you not, that's his title) who is in all probability, a good programmer. However, his "religious" attitudes in favor of "enterprise coffee pots" (I WILL have to remember to use that one on him) and his total disdain for scripting languages mean that anything he is trying to do, I could have done 10 times faster on cheaper hardware.
He once actually told me that he was an "engineer" and that people who code assembler or script languages (or really, anything not Java) were NOT engineers. I countered with something my best friend (a former DEC programmer of formidable skill) told me:
"An engineer is someone who has the skills and knowledge to work with the parties involved to implement a REAL-WORLD solution that works best given the particular requirements, time and budget of the task at hand"
I get my little satisfactions on my job from the knowledge that I have written the glue that binds his "enterprise coffeepots" together using Perl and Bourne Shell scripts, and that it would infuriate him if he realized just how much his precious utterly depended on such "unworthy" procedural tools.
I was sort fo hoping against hope that MS would be moving further toward XML and therefore allowing greater standardization (I know it's a pipe dream, but one's gotta have hope)
In order for Redmond to add rights management, it kind of implies that they will have to lock down their documents. After all, what good would it do to make a Word document only readable by some certain person or group only to have anyone with a text editor or even a web browser be able to open it?
So, they will have to encrypt everything - and each time you go to open an Excel spreadsheet or WOrd doc, the program will have to "phone home" to Microsoft with your PASSPORT account?
There are many products where oil-based and water-based things need to be mixed together and where it would be a bad thing if they separated. You have probably seen the phrase "such-and-such used as an emulsifier" (sp?) on the ingredients of some food-products.
Real-world example of wanting something to stay mixed: Paint
Have you ever opened a can of paint that's been sitting around in your basememt or garage for a few years? Some of the resinous compounds separate from the base materials the same way that the Olive Oil in your blender will eventually rise to the top again once you turn it off. Paint is more viscous and is not simply oil and water, but the same forces are in play.
The end result is that there is certainly commercial need for things to stay mixed together over longer times.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions taxing orange juice as a drink but it would be exempt if it were classified a fruit. This got me thinking... This unified system is looking real bad and here's why:
I live in MA and work in CT. In those two states there are 5% and 6% sales taxes respectively, but in both of them, all food (non-restaraunt/meals) is exempt, and all clothing items under a certain $ amount (I forget the amount, but it's like individual items over $100 or something) are exempt.
I'm wondering how the new unified system will handle those kind of things, or are they saying that states that adopt this agreement will change their policies.
I'm bothered by the idea that this "remote tax grab" would mean that items essential to living (ie. basic food and clothing) that have traditionally been exempt from taxation in some states would lose that exemption. I traditionally lean Right in my political opinions, but this strikes me as a rather regressive tax policy.
"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" - Larry Niven (I believe it was published in his collection called "N-Space"
http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html
At the company where I'm network admin, we have mostly Win2K and WinXP boxes and Win2K and Solaris servers.
We've got a good firewall, and I try to keep up with the patches in a reasonable timeframe. Not one of our users systems or our servers was infected with Blaster or Sobig.
With that being said, our email is outsourced to another company (Don't even ask, I've been bitching about that to the upper management until I'm blue in the face) well, that other company got MAULED by both Blaster and Sobig. We went most of the week with virtually unusable email and there was nothing I could do about it. (I did however, get a good quota of "I told you so's" with regard to our lame-ass email provider)
So while it's true that we don't have any users with MACs or Linux, if we did, they would have been just as put out as everyone else.
I'm not getting up on WinSoapBox2k3, but I feel the blame lies with the Virus/Worm authors, and with those who run without firewalls and without keeping their systems patched and up to date.
Even back on 9/11/01, My biggest fear was not "Oh God, they could get me or someone I care about" (yes, that crossed the back of my mind when they were still not sure if there were still more hijacked planes in the air) but that of "Our government is goig to WAY over-react to this and do some incredibly damaging things to our rights and freedoms under the illusion that they need to "Do Something"
/rant
Today, I really don't want to fly anywhere... not because I'm worried about hijackings, but because I'm very reluctant to have to spend 2 hours going through security screenings that are more about putting on an appearance of security; because they want people to feel they are "Doing Something"; than about acutally stopping real terrorists.
AlQueda got a lot of milage out of those attacks. One event, one (combined) terrorist incident and 2 years later, our government has held people as "enemy combatants", made taking a flight of less than 2000 miles take longer in the airport than in the air, and given us "total information awareness" and the PATRIOT act.
I submit to you that our own government is (inadvertantly) supporting fear and terror. I haven't been worried about directly being the victim of a terrorist attack, but I DO worry about my rights to privacy, freedom, and the presumption of innocense until proven guilty.
Those are both great ideas, but I would wager that you would have a big problem with heat. The obvious side-effect of burning that much glucose is that you would be dumping a LOT of heat into your bloodstream/body.
So, you've got a good start there, but we need some heat-pipes or endothermic reaction to keep you trading diabetes or extra calories for continual fever.
I dunno.
I suppose you can ask Dmitry
I suppose that it depends on whether you're walking out for good, or just as a work stoppage to show them you're important. I'll assume from the title, you're talking the former.
The problem with the latter is that if the company really is in trouble, you'll be putting the nails in its coffin.
In this job market, I would personally not be too excited about the prospect of a job hunt. I've got friends who have been actively looking for over 6 months - it's kinda rough.
Another thing to consider is that some might just decide to let you all walk, and feign some form of loyalty to the company... it's a win-win for them. If the company survives, their "loyalty" will be rewarded, and if it crashes and burns, they will be eligible to collect unemployment while those who quit will not.
(just some random thoughts)
I own two ReplayTVs - older model 3000 units. These are dinosaurs in the PVR world - they use a 56K modem to dial up for their program listings and only have a 30 second skip button. No auto-skip, and they can't even share with each other.
As far as I can tell, the older units like mine are pretty much at the end of their software cycle -the only updates will be program guide info and new phone numbers at this point.
A friend of mine owns some of the new units (4000's I think) and they're pretty cool - the commercial skip and the sharing/playing from room-to-room are features that I've drooled over more than once. I would have gone out and replaced my current units with some like hers, but she mentioned about how they keep updating the software with "improvements" that only seem to get buggier and buggier as they go. She worries that the next round of "improvements" will turn the commercial skip and sharing off, or might change the way guaranteed vs non-guaranteed recording will be handled.
After (vicariously) going through the ups and downs of buggy updates and worries about what they will break this week, I decided that as nice as all those new features might be, the ReplayTV people are too likely to mess stuff up.
I've decided that I'll do whatever I can to keep my two "dinosaurs" running as long as possible. I love the possibilities the new technology could bring, but the skittishness of the ReplayTV people (this isn't the first time there's been talk about commercial skip being removed) makes me uncomfortable about slapping a large sum of cash down on the counter at my local A/V store.
If I were to upgrade, it would be to get the very features the new management wants to delete. No thanks.
I'm probably going to regret this, but...
I got there right when the story posted and have Mirrored it
OMG! the translation is hilarious:
As for efficiency improvement of the personal computer although processing speed and capacity increase et cetera it is very extreme bewilderingly combination without going well, you must exchange periodically as a part and the consumables which cannot use, also the part comes coming out.
The case (the frame) size to be largest even in various parts, because the majority of the single item cases for the manufacturer make personal computer and the original user does with the metal and the resin make, it deals with and the ê when becoming, is not pay and/or you throw away feeling to throw away, the ê it is not and/or with is not the notion that where you say to be many, probably will be?
When of environmental problem is thought, abandoning, the êÜñ, difficult this kind of ones is unreasonable as a actuality, being joint with the BOXMASTER, it developed this cardboard PC box from the thought of processing and it is not to increase the à leprosy rubbish, you liking to use the material whose burden is little as naturally as possible in the personal computer, whether one ones several dozen years using long ideal.
It does not paint the wrapping and it does the warmth which the material has that way. For example if the child pasted the seal and/or scribbled mono it becomes original with very that and whether also attachment furthermore becomes deep, the êÜñ. Becoming the canvas of the good work, finishing role, as a PC case without throwing away,, if there is a kind of thing taking if it is delightful truly, is.
oops - that was dumb of me - I forgot to use "extrans" - and was too lazy to use preview - DOH!
hmmm - didn't work on my Win2K with IE 6, but if I make a foo.htm file on my local system with just the single line:
<input type>
it crashes.
<img src> <p align> etc...
does nothing
I haven't been able to find anything else that has the same effect. Maybe it's only the type attribute on inputs for my particular combination.
hmmm - didn't work on my Win2K with IE 6, but if I make a foo.htm file on my local system with just the single line:
it crashes.
does nothing
I haven't been able to find anything else that has the same effect. Maybe it's only the type attribute on inputs for my particular combination.
I turned my javascript on (I browse with it off nowadays because of all of the popups/pop-unders) and tried that site - my popup killer worked great - score another one for netcaptor (www.netcaptor.com)
My mom lives about a 5 hour drive away, but she comes up to visit every 2 or 3 months. I have her fairly well trained to bring her wintel box minus all the peripheral stuff. So every time she visits, I give her system a quick checkup/tuneup. If it needs something, I go out to CompUSA with her and we pick it up. She's always enjoyed shopping so very much while I tend to avoid it, so it's a nice mother-daughter bonding thing. For the most part, the frantic weekly support calls have dried up.
Thanks... I knew there would be someone out there on /. to set me straight on the details. After all, IANAG.
*grin*
In the article, they mention that geothermal heat could be causing the ice to melt... This dredges up some foggy memories: I seem to recall having heard that Mars no longer had any active volcanism, and that mantle may have solidified (a lack a magnetic field being a strong indicator of this)
I'm not a geologist (or exogeologist for that matter) and so I'm not claiming any special knowledge here, but it keeps bugging the back of my mind - Any insights?
Sounds like the best of both worlds to me... thanks.
I'm sort of of two minds on this -
On one hand, there are a lot of folks who have very strong opinions about the fact that the data should be separated from presentation... If Office 2003 were to strip the MS-apps-specific formatting (which is probably NOT very standards-friendly), but leave the style markings (heading, paragraph, footnote, etc...) then really, they would be providing a semi-structured document that conformed to XML standards.
As a web application developer/web author, there have been many times when I have been given MS Word docs and Excel spreadsheets as content for our web site... In the past, I have resorted to copying the whole page directly onto a text editor (thereby scrubbing all formatting information) and then using HTML markup to make the document look much like the Word original, but without having to deal with that rather poor HTML output the Word and Excel's Save as HTML features produced. If I could have a semi-structured document, it would have been easier to write some macros to parse the XML structure to automate some of the rough formatting (hooks for stylesheets or somesuch).
On the other hand, it seems to me that is might be in Microsoft's best business interest (the selfish ones) to make darn sure that it's not possible for OpenOffice fully interoperate with MS Office documents. I don't think they would be very smart (current business model-wise) if their new products (which will rapidly become de-facto business standards) helped to enable Open Office standards to take away their marketshare.
In the final analysis, I probably wouldn't worry too much until there's a critical mass of people using it. By then, a bunch of folks will have figured out what CAN be done with whatever format MS ended up with. At that point, Office 2003's XML format will probably make it possible for people to do something they couldn't do before or at least, to do something easily that once was more trouble that it was worth.
That's worth something...
I honestly don't know about which is more inflamible: Hydrogen or Gasonlie though I immagine the you may be right... There may be lots of hydrocarbon chains in each molecule of gas, but there is more matter going to waste in every gallon than in the equivilent amount of Hydrogen - less waste, better energy conversion rate.
Of course, the thing about Hydrogen is that it does tend to rise very fast when it burns - if the tanks were in a more intelligent place (say the trunk) and if that place had some kind of lid that was designed to get out of the way in a hurry, most of the energy of any catastrophic fuel escape/fire could be directed upwards and away from the vehicle. (Unless of course, it just explodes wholesale) After all, there would probably be NO Oxygen in the Hydrogen pressure tank, so it's not like it's going to burn until it mixes with the air.
Okay - I'm done rambling... what was the question? *grin*
Ford Model U... I wonder if they meant it to mean UGLY? *grin*
Seriously though, I've always been a sucker for "suicide doors", but those images make the back seat look VERY small and uncomfortable.
I really get the feeling that phone companies don't actually want anything to do with DSL. A friend mentioned that Phone Companies tend to like virtual circuits so they impose the totally unnecessarry and (at least in the beginning) buggy-as-hell PPP Over Ethernet instead of just running it as a bridge.
I've helped a few folks get their DSL connections running and in every case, the phone companies have managed to seriously screw something up.
I had one guy ask them to put it on the line he used for modem and fax, (cuz the wiring for that was already in his office), but when I got to his house they had put it on the wrong line - I had to rearrange a bunch of his inside wiring to get things set the way he wanted it.
Another time, the Phone Co had not bothered to test the person's line to make sure it didn't have any bridging or repeaters in it. (I'm not an expert on DSL, but I understand that the line needs to be clear of repeaters and other active components or the DSL doesn't work right) it took a couple weeks after their supposed "on" date to get an appointment to have a tech clear the line.
My own experience was one of frustration as the installer (this was early on - back when they wouldn't LET you do your own install) refused to proceed when he saw I was running NT4.0 instead of Win 9x.
I think that is googol
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol
Wow, it sounds like you work for the same people I do.
.sh kind of person. Since I am a webmaster for a company whose sole product is a web application, one would assume I'm allowed to use the right tool for the job - nope - we've got a "Chief Scientist" (I kid you not, that's his title) who is in all probability, a good programmer. However, his "religious" attitudes in favor of "enterprise coffee pots" (I WILL have to remember to use that one on him) and his total disdain for scripting languages mean that anything he is trying to do, I could have done 10 times faster on cheaper hardware.
At heart, I'm a PHP/Perl and
He once actually told me that he was an "engineer" and that people who code assembler or script languages (or really, anything not Java) were NOT engineers. I countered with something my best friend (a former DEC programmer of formidable skill) told me:
"An engineer is someone who has the skills and knowledge to work with the parties involved to implement a REAL-WORLD solution that works best given the particular requirements, time and budget of the task at hand"
I get my little satisfactions on my job from the knowledge that I have written the glue that binds his "enterprise coffeepots" together using Perl and Bourne Shell scripts, and that it would infuriate him if he realized just how much his precious utterly depended on such "unworthy" procedural tools.
I was sort fo hoping against hope that MS would be moving further toward XML and therefore allowing greater standardization (I know it's a pipe dream, but one's gotta have hope)
In order for Redmond to add rights management, it kind of implies that they will have to lock down their documents. After all, what good would it do to make a Word document only readable by some certain person or group only to have anyone with a text editor or even a web browser be able to open it?
So, they will have to encrypt everything - and each time you go to open an Excel spreadsheet or WOrd doc, the program will have to "phone home" to Microsoft with your PASSPORT account?
*sigh*
There are many products where oil-based and water-based things need to be mixed together and where it would be a bad thing if they separated. You have probably seen the phrase "such-and-such used as an emulsifier" (sp?) on the ingredients of some food-products.
Real-world example of wanting something to stay mixed: Paint
Have you ever opened a can of paint that's been sitting around in your basememt or garage for a few years? Some of the resinous compounds separate from the base materials the same way that the Olive Oil in your blender will eventually rise to the top again once you turn it off. Paint is more viscous and is not simply oil and water, but the same forces are in play.
The end result is that there is certainly commercial need for things to stay mixed together over longer times.