Settling in a gravity well is just stupid.... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.
Unfortunately, your materials for building aforementioned space stations are going to come either from gravity wells (of which the Moon is a very close and shallow option) or from asteroids in solar orbits. Those NEO asteroids you mention might be the best option, if the advantages of lower delta-V aren't offset by the disadvantages of distance and infrequent "launch" windows, but I wouldn't rule the Moon out entirely.
We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids
More robotic probes to a variety of asteroids would be a good idea, but if we're in this for the long haul, we should be figuring out how to really get into orbit and back. With our current methods, each kilogram of payload just in Low Earth Orbit requires dozens of dollars of rocket fuel to throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars of rocket parts with the assistance of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of support staff. Until we figure out how to bring down those latter two numbers, the question of "where should we send enormous payloads next?" is just fantasizing.
But, you can't sue somebody for infringement unless you've registered the original work. You can register after the infringement and then sue, but you still have to register.
I was about to correct you, but I went to the US Code to find a relevant quote, and holy crap, it looks like you're right! Title 17, Chapter 4, 411:
"Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A (a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title."
The exceptions in 106A appear to be about plagiarism/misrepresentation cases, not about simple "making unlicensed copies".
I thought you registered your copyrights so you'd be eligible for statutory damages and attorneys' fees in a lawsuit. That's in the law, but it's just a reason to register copyright before any infringement begins rather than right before you sue. You learn something new every day. This must be why lawyers charge the big bucks.
The only reason AT&T can even think of trying to squelch "I hate AT&T even though I'm their customer" complaints is because the more reasonable alternative of "I hate AT&T and am now someone else's customer" is often impractical or impossible. And the responsibility for that falls in the lap of government decisions to give AT&T certain rights that are not freely available to would-be competitors.
Discriminating on the basis of expression of disagreable opinions (other than religious) is perfectly legal.
Not with government support for that discrimination, it's not. Freedom of Speech shouldn't just mean that you can't be thrown in jail for speaking your mind; indirect infringements like giving eminent domain rights, government-sanctioned monopolies, etc. to censors ought to apply too. If your business requires drawing lines from point A to point Z whether the owners of points B through Y like it or not, you'd better be prepared to accept a few compromises on what you can do with those lines.
well, they can't even design a power-off button without five years of committees, meetings, and focus groups.
To be fair to Microsoft programmers, they weren't just trying to design a power-off button. They were told to design a power-off button that wouldn't work with Linux, a much harder task.
"We're going to give all our votes to some guy you've never met, who will count them with nobody else watching, and whose answers we will trust completely. You'll never see the original votes again, but if you want a recount he'll be happy to tell you the same numbers twice."
"What! That's outrageous! Why the possibilities for corruption are so..."
For that matter, aren't there any female nerds who'd like also to be appreciated for the technical skills?
Of course there are, but currently their numbers are unfortunately more limited.
Can they auction themselves off to the highest bidder too?
Yes, or to the victor in a no-holds-barred fight to the death if the mood strikes them. Supply and demand are powerful forces. Of course, that demand is often limited to male nerds, so "to the death" might take a while.
I can certainly imagine web developers seeing productivity improvements from using newer than 5 year old hardware, but the only supporting evidence for that proposition given in the grandparent post was a strawman about dual monitor systems at high resolutions (which were cheap and plentiful 5 years ago) and a ridiculous claim that *real* web developers need to "cut corners" if they only have half a gig of RAM, when, as the parent post points out, exactly the opposite is true.
So whereas the latest albums are selling to the market of "people who might like them", twenty year old albums are selling to the smaller and tougher market of "people who might like them but have been turning down the opportunity to buy them for decades". Obviously if the inflation-adjusted price goes up the number of sales will be negligible - if I didn't think an album was worth $15 on the shelves ten years ago or $10 in the used CD stores five years ago, why would I think it's worth $20 online now? If you want to sell old music whose popularity hasn't unexpectedly increased, you'll have to drop the price or increase the quality. Doing the latter can be effective for music old enough to have never been released digitally, but once the public has seen it on CD you're not going to be able to give them much better than that.
That's what you get for electing people to run your government who think government is a bad thing.
Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were written by people who thought that government was at best a necessary evil; if government was never a bad thing, why would we want so many checks and balances and limited powers and explicit restrictions to try to reign it in?
No, who we elected were an assortment of people who think that religious government is a good thing, that interventionist imperialist government is a good thing, that government police and military powers should be unchecked, and that government spending is wonderful as long as it's paid for by growing debts instead of taxes.
The fact that a few of them lied and claimed to be in favor of "small government" doesn't mean that small government is a bad thing, just that they are bad representatives.
I hate to break it to you, but the US government has sovereignty over its citizens and that means it can do whatever it wants (up to an including killing them) without a "howdy hay" from anyone. Read up on Plato and Socrates before you post things you don't understand. The Constitution was vetted by men who believed in a social contract and in the idea of sovereignty.
The Constitution was vetted by men who had just violently overthrown their sovereign King, and who believed that it was their right and responsibility to do so again to any other government who attempted to infringe on their rights. The Constitution itself was written as a limited list of powers (which do not include "killing them without a howdy hay") granted to the government, and was then augmented by another list of rights (which do include the right to due process in criminal proceedings) to make it redundantly clear what the constituted government is not allowed to do.
when it says things about Habeas Corpus such as, "which the Republican Congress revoked", it's not a fact, it's just what the type of article it is explicitly states: an opinion. Further, we don't have a Republican Congress anymore, so I'm not sure how that is even meaningful.
Let me explain: "revoked" is a verb which has been conjugated in the past tense. And, as you might guess from context, the particular time in the past being referred to was when we had a Republican congress.
I guess I'm supposed to assume that even a Democratic Congress doesn't want to "restore Habeas Corpus"?
Only if your news source is too biased. The scandal of "Democrats won't let us have an up or down vote!" has vanished in favor of headlines like Fox News' "lawmakers vote 52-47 to reject plan to bring home troops by early next year." The way those things translate now is not "52 people voted against the plan" but "47 people voted against cloture that would have allowed a vote on the plan".
In this particular vote, the closest thing to a Democrat who voted to allow a filibuster was the newly-Independent Lieberman. The other votes preventing cloture all came from Republicans, and the half dozen Republicans who wanted a vote weren't enough for the required 3/5ths majority.
The Military Commissions Act does not apply to US citizens, permanent residents, or persons with a valid legal status within the United States.
The MCA applies to "aliens", defined simply by: "The term `alien' means a person who is not a citizen of the United States." It's amusing that you think human rights only apply to US citizens and not those (subhuman?) foreigners, but don't ascribe this view to the authors of the Constitution. Even if you're unwilling to apply to the words of the Constitution their literal meanings, surely the Declaration of Independence should supply a little important context. The rights of "all men" to be free from any would-be King Georges are universal.
That right, bond-holding suckers, we'll be paying back your 9 trillion dollars, just as soon as the dollar is worth so little that we can afford to do so. Crisis averted!
I'm pretty ignorant of finance and law, but is there any reason whatsoever for the stockholders not to sue the board into destitution at this point?
You may think you're ignorant, but you're obviously head and shoulders above the people whose reasoning you're questioning. For all we know, the smartest current SCO stockholders might already have tried to call lawyers and file lawsuits, only to find themselves unable to figure out how to work the telephone.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning - if you find the mouse easier to move from side to side, wouldn't that mean you *want* a vertical menu? Typical mouse motion is from image to menu and back, and a vertical menu is most conveniently located at the side of your screen (requiring horizontal mouse movement), whereas a horizontal menu is most conveniently located at the top or bottom of your screen (requiring vertical mouse movement).
Either way, they could accomodate everyone by fixing the unnecessary limits on resizing that window. For a menu with 29 1x1 buttons, 2 2x2 buttons, and 3 ~1.2x1 words, sizes of anywhere from 2x22 to 23x2 should be possible, but because Gimp won't wrap the text menu or fit the separate sections horizontally, the best you can get out of it is from 4x11 to 15x5.
I'm not too attached to any UI decision, just as long as they don't cave to the biggest complaint I hear about Gimp - the use of multiple windows. If they want to make a non-default MDI option for people who are used to that, fine, but it's about time that Windows fixed their window manager UI (including solid, standard multiple-desktop support) and stopped encouraging application developers to reinvent base functionality.
To send a ship to Mars in a week, Thrust should be roughly 10m/s^2 times the ship's weight, which we'll say is only ten metric tons. (Because we're getting there in a week, we can pack light... pack light, get it? I slay me.) That gives us 10^5 Newtons of thrust.
Exhaust Velocity is the speed of light, or about 3*10^8 m/s.
So our power consumption is 3*10^13 Watts.
By comparison, the USA is currently consuming less than 1*10^13 Watts on average.
In other words, if think you think it costs too much to refuel an RV now...
It's not completely implausible to use light to propel a spacecraft, but either that propulsion will be ridiculously slow (e.g. solar sails, laser sails, or the "precisely tweak your satellite's orbit a tiny bit" applications mentioned in the article), or it's going to require ridiculous "cheap antimatter" amounts of energy.
How my "fantasy land" involves links to major news stories that directly contradict everything you say, and your "reality" involves hypothetical arguments based on premises that even you admit aren't true?
And if rudeness is what it takes, I apologize, but it's worth it.
Unfortunately, your ignorance is still showing. For years ISPs have been blocking and banning their users' legal applications (usually starting with "server applications" as the thin end of the wedge, with P2P applications currently on the chopping block), and blocking based on content isn't off limits either. What do you think SBC is threatening to do if Google and friends don't pay up, anyway? Send them a nasty letter?
Not because you claim to have never heard the most basic facts of the discussion you're entering, but because for some reason you feel the need to attack the helpful people trying to educate you.
Half of Net Neutrality is precisely the "strawman" you deride: I pay my ISP for high speed internet access, owners of the computers I access pay their ISPs for very high speed internet access, those ISPs negotiate peering agreements with each other... but some ISPs hope to get away with double-billing everyone by fraudulently advertising "high speed internet access" but only providing their customers with "high speed access to those servers whose owners have also directly paid us money".
now we are going to trade explosive gasoline for explosive capacitors
Actually, there's no such thing as explosive gasoline. There is such a thing as an explosive gasoline vapor plus oxygen mixture, but as you pointed out, such a problem lends itself to safe redesigns. Just make it hard for your gasoline to vaporize, for vapors to gradually accumulate, to mix with air, etc.
There is such a thing as explosive capacitors, and to trigger them all you need is a low resistance path to conduct current between high voltage and low. I'm not sure how much redesigning here can help. Doesn't getting high energy density out of a capacitor involve putting the high voltage and low voltage parts as close together as possible?
It shouldn't be. These companies are advertising access to the internet, there are decades old standards that describe how the internet is supposed to work, and "dropping packets because an router owner might not like the contents" isn't in any of the RFCs. There's a reason why Prodigy, AOL, MSN, Compuserve, and all the old proprietary networks had to become ISPs or become bankrupt, and that's because consumers demanded unrestricted networks. Giving us restricted networks but just calling them "internet access" is fraud.
If they're easy to find, why did you provide a link that's 9 years out of date instead? Those particular graphs from 1998 show roughly 22 upward and 14 downward trends in oil production as of 1998, and they predict roughly 28 downward and 9 upward trends by 2007. I'm not totally dismissing Peak Oil, but I'd like to know how the predictions for 2006-2007 played out before I decide how much weight to give the predictions for 2016-2017.
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,
"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."
I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.
Slashdot Mirror
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. ... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.
Unfortunately, your materials for building aforementioned space stations are going to come either from gravity wells (of which the Moon is a very close and shallow option) or from asteroids in solar orbits. Those NEO asteroids you mention might be the best option, if the advantages of lower delta-V aren't offset by the disadvantages of distance and infrequent "launch" windows, but I wouldn't rule the Moon out entirely.
We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids
More robotic probes to a variety of asteroids would be a good idea, but if we're in this for the long haul, we should be figuring out how to really get into orbit and back. With our current methods, each kilogram of payload just in Low Earth Orbit requires dozens of dollars of rocket fuel to throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars of rocket parts with the assistance of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of support staff. Until we figure out how to bring down those latter two numbers, the question of "where should we send enormous payloads next?" is just fantasizing.
But, you can't sue somebody for infringement unless you've registered the original work. You can register after the infringement and then sue, but you still have to register.
I was about to correct you, but I went to the US Code to find a relevant quote, and holy crap, it looks like you're right! Title 17, Chapter 4, 411:
"Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A (a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title."
The exceptions in 106A appear to be about plagiarism/misrepresentation cases, not about simple "making unlicensed copies".
I thought you registered your copyrights so you'd be eligible for statutory damages and attorneys' fees in a lawsuit. That's in the law, but it's just a reason to register copyright before any infringement begins rather than right before you sue. You learn something new every day. This must be why lawyers charge the big bucks.
The only reason AT&T can even think of trying to squelch "I hate AT&T even though I'm their customer" complaints is because the more reasonable alternative of "I hate AT&T and am now someone else's customer" is often impractical or impossible. And the responsibility for that falls in the lap of government decisions to give AT&T certain rights that are not freely available to would-be competitors.
Discriminating on the basis of expression of disagreable opinions (other than religious) is perfectly legal.
Not with government support for that discrimination, it's not. Freedom of Speech shouldn't just mean that you can't be thrown in jail for speaking your mind; indirect infringements like giving eminent domain rights, government-sanctioned monopolies, etc. to censors ought to apply too. If your business requires drawing lines from point A to point Z whether the owners of points B through Y like it or not, you'd better be prepared to accept a few compromises on what you can do with those lines.
well, they can't even design a power-off button without five years of committees, meetings, and focus groups.
To be fair to Microsoft programmers, they weren't just trying to design a power-off button. They were told to design a power-off button that wouldn't work with Linux, a much harder task.
"We're going to give all our votes to some guy you've never met, who will count them with nobody else watching, and whose answers we will trust completely. You'll never see the original votes again, but if you want a recount he'll be happy to tell you the same numbers twice."
"What! That's outrageous! Why the possibilities for corruption are so..."
"The guy will use a computer."
"Oh, well, that's okay then."
For that matter, aren't there any female nerds who'd like also to be appreciated for the technical skills?
Of course there are, but currently their numbers are unfortunately more limited.
Can they auction themselves off to the highest bidder too?
Yes, or to the victor in a no-holds-barred fight to the death if the mood strikes them. Supply and demand are powerful forces. Of course, that demand is often limited to male nerds, so "to the death" might take a while.
I can certainly imagine web developers seeing productivity improvements from using newer than 5 year old hardware, but the only supporting evidence for that proposition given in the grandparent post was a strawman about dual monitor systems at high resolutions (which were cheap and plentiful 5 years ago) and a ridiculous claim that *real* web developers need to "cut corners" if they only have half a gig of RAM, when, as the parent post points out, exactly the opposite is true.
So whereas the latest albums are selling to the market of "people who might like them", twenty year old albums are selling to the smaller and tougher market of "people who might like them but have been turning down the opportunity to buy them for decades". Obviously if the inflation-adjusted price goes up the number of sales will be negligible - if I didn't think an album was worth $15 on the shelves ten years ago or $10 in the used CD stores five years ago, why would I think it's worth $20 online now? If you want to sell old music whose popularity hasn't unexpectedly increased, you'll have to drop the price or increase the quality. Doing the latter can be effective for music old enough to have never been released digitally, but once the public has seen it on CD you're not going to be able to give them much better than that.
That's what you get for electing people to run your government who think government is a bad thing.
Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were written by people who thought that government was at best a necessary evil; if government was never a bad thing, why would we want so many checks and balances and limited powers and explicit restrictions to try to reign it in?
No, who we elected were an assortment of people who think that religious government is a good thing, that interventionist imperialist government is a good thing, that government police and military powers should be unchecked, and that government spending is wonderful as long as it's paid for by growing debts instead of taxes.
The fact that a few of them lied and claimed to be in favor of "small government" doesn't mean that small government is a bad thing, just that they are bad representatives.
I hate to break it to you, but the US government has sovereignty over its citizens and that means it can do whatever it wants (up to an including killing them) without a "howdy hay" from anyone. Read up on Plato and Socrates before you post things you don't understand. The Constitution was vetted by men who believed in a social contract and in the idea of sovereignty.
The Constitution was vetted by men who had just violently overthrown their sovereign King, and who believed that it was their right and responsibility to do so again to any other government who attempted to infringe on their rights. The Constitution itself was written as a limited list of powers (which do not include "killing them without a howdy hay") granted to the government, and was then augmented by another list of rights (which do include the right to due process in criminal proceedings) to make it redundantly clear what the constituted government is not allowed to do.
when it says things about Habeas Corpus such as, "which the Republican Congress revoked", it's not a fact, it's just what the type of article it is explicitly states: an opinion. Further, we don't have a Republican Congress anymore, so I'm not sure how that is even meaningful.
Let me explain: "revoked" is a verb which has been conjugated in the past tense. And, as you might guess from context, the particular time in the past being referred to was when we had a Republican congress.
I guess I'm supposed to assume that even a Democratic Congress doesn't want to "restore Habeas Corpus"?
Only if your news source is too biased. The scandal of "Democrats won't let us have an up or down vote!" has vanished in favor of headlines like Fox News' "lawmakers vote 52-47 to reject plan to bring home troops by early next year." The way those things translate now is not "52 people voted against the plan" but "47 people voted against cloture that would have allowed a vote on the plan".
In this particular vote, the closest thing to a Democrat who voted to allow a filibuster was the newly-Independent Lieberman. The other votes preventing cloture all came from Republicans, and the half dozen Republicans who wanted a vote weren't enough for the required 3/5ths majority.
The Military Commissions Act does not apply to US citizens, permanent residents, or persons with a valid legal status within the United States.
The MCA applies to "aliens", defined simply by: "The term `alien' means a person who is not a citizen of the United States." It's amusing that you think human rights only apply to US citizens and not those (subhuman?) foreigners, but don't ascribe this view to the authors of the Constitution. Even if you're unwilling to apply to the words of the Constitution their literal meanings, surely the Declaration of Independence should supply a little important context. The rights of "all men" to be free from any would-be King Georges are universal.
That right, bond-holding suckers, we'll be paying back your 9 trillion dollars, just as soon as the dollar is worth so little that we can afford to do so. Crisis averted!
I'm pretty ignorant of finance and law, but is there any reason whatsoever for the stockholders not to sue the board into destitution at this point?
You may think you're ignorant, but you're obviously head and shoulders above the people whose reasoning you're questioning. For all we know, the smartest current SCO stockholders might already have tried to call lawyers and file lawsuits, only to find themselves unable to figure out how to work the telephone.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning - if you find the mouse easier to move from side to side, wouldn't that mean you *want* a vertical menu? Typical mouse motion is from image to menu and back, and a vertical menu is most conveniently located at the side of your screen (requiring horizontal mouse movement), whereas a horizontal menu is most conveniently located at the top or bottom of your screen (requiring vertical mouse movement).
Either way, they could accomodate everyone by fixing the unnecessary limits on resizing that window. For a menu with 29 1x1 buttons, 2 2x2 buttons, and 3 ~1.2x1 words, sizes of anywhere from 2x22 to 23x2 should be possible, but because Gimp won't wrap the text menu or fit the separate sections horizontally, the best you can get out of it is from 4x11 to 15x5.
I'm not too attached to any UI decision, just as long as they don't cave to the biggest complaint I hear about Gimp - the use of multiple windows. If they want to make a non-default MDI option for people who are used to that, fine, but it's about time that Windows fixed their window manager UI (including solid, standard multiple-desktop support) and stopped encouraging application developers to reinvent base functionality.
To send a ship to Mars in a week, Thrust should be roughly 10m/s^2 times the ship's weight, which we'll say is only ten metric tons. (Because we're getting there in a week, we can pack light... pack light, get it? I slay me.) That gives us 10^5 Newtons of thrust.
Exhaust Velocity is the speed of light, or about 3*10^8 m/s.
So our power consumption is 3*10^13 Watts.
By comparison, the USA is currently consuming less than 1*10^13 Watts on average.
In other words, if think you think it costs too much to refuel an RV now...
It's not completely implausible to use light to propel a spacecraft, but either that propulsion will be ridiculously slow (e.g. solar sails, laser sails, or the "precisely tweak your satellite's orbit a tiny bit" applications mentioned in the article), or it's going to require ridiculous "cheap antimatter" amounts of energy.
cpsJust vbDont vbOutsource ppYour nCode prepTo cntryHungary.
How my "fantasy land" involves links to major news stories that directly contradict everything you say, and your "reality" involves hypothetical arguments based on premises that even you admit aren't true?
And if rudeness is what it takes, I apologize, but it's worth it.
Unfortunately, your ignorance is still showing. For years ISPs have been blocking and banning their users' legal applications (usually starting with "server applications" as the thin end of the wedge, with P2P applications currently on the chopping block), and blocking based on content isn't off limits either. What do you think SBC is threatening to do if Google and friends don't pay up, anyway? Send them a nasty letter?
Not because you claim to have never heard the most basic facts of the discussion you're entering, but because for some reason you feel the need to attack the helpful people trying to educate you.
Half of Net Neutrality is precisely the "strawman" you deride: I pay my ISP for high speed internet access, owners of the computers I access pay their ISPs for very high speed internet access, those ISPs negotiate peering agreements with each other... but some ISPs hope to get away with double-billing everyone by fraudulently advertising "high speed internet access" but only providing their customers with "high speed access to those servers whose owners have also directly paid us money".
now we are going to trade explosive gasoline for explosive capacitors
Actually, there's no such thing as explosive gasoline. There is such a thing as an explosive gasoline vapor plus oxygen mixture, but as you pointed out, such a problem lends itself to safe redesigns. Just make it hard for your gasoline to vaporize, for vapors to gradually accumulate, to mix with air, etc.
There is such a thing as explosive capacitors, and to trigger them all you need is a low resistance path to conduct current between high voltage and low. I'm not sure how much redesigning here can help. Doesn't getting high energy density out of a capacitor involve putting the high voltage and low voltage parts as close together as possible?
It shouldn't be. These companies are advertising access to the internet, there are decades old standards that describe how the internet is supposed to work, and "dropping packets because an router owner might not like the contents" isn't in any of the RFCs. There's a reason why Prodigy, AOL, MSN, Compuserve, and all the old proprietary networks had to become ISPs or become bankrupt, and that's because consumers demanded unrestricted networks. Giving us restricted networks but just calling them "internet access" is fraud.
These numbers on this are easy to find.
If they're easy to find, why did you provide a link that's 9 years out of date instead? Those particular graphs from 1998 show roughly 22 upward and 14 downward trends in oil production as of 1998, and they predict roughly 28 downward and 9 upward trends by 2007. I'm not totally dismissing Peak Oil, but I'd like to know how the predictions for 2006-2007 played out before I decide how much weight to give the predictions for 2016-2017.
Hippocraticy then is closer to a government by horses, but still kind of off from that.
Could it mean "a government by horses' asses"? Because I think I've actually seen a few of those...
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,
"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."
I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.