Worth mentioning, also, that although the Federal Reserve earns a profit, nearly 100 percent of those profits are turned over to the Federal Treasury. The Fed makes money for the U.S. government.
If spending and an increase in economic activity were indicative of economic strength, then nations with hyper-inflated currencies are among the strongest in the world, because those people spend all of their income the very same day they get paid.
And if not spending were indicative of economic strength, then nations where everyone lives in caves and there is no industry would be among the strongest in the world, because everyone's money would just sit in the bank.
Power is increased through accumulation (saving), which is reserved not for itself, but for the sake of future spending and investing
So spending now is bad, and what you really want to do is spend later? I'm not sure I see the distinction.
I dare you to go to you favourite shop, and buy a suit for an ounce of gold.
A friend of mine runs a store that sells fancy bicycles, and a guy tried to do just that. He actually had the gold coins on his person. Really, though, it seemed like he was less interested in buying a bike than in haranguing shop owners about the evils of fiat currency, etc., etc. This may be why a lot of folks assume that people who are obsessed with the gold standard are loonies.
Because it is so expensive it is only adapted when there is really no alternative.
The paradox here is that something like 50 percent of all gold that isn't used for money or investments is used for jewelery and other decorative purposes, all of which are completely unnecessary. There are also plenty of alternative shiny things that could be used to make jewelery, but people choose gold anyway. So whatever demand there may be for it in industrial applications is offset by the completely irrational demand for it in other applications. In my book that makes it a lousy commodity market to be in, unless you're there to exploit bubbles.
To illustrate, titanium is also used in medical applications because it has some properties similar to gold, and it's probably useful in far more medical applications than gold is, yet gold is currently 1,224 times more expensive than titanium.
Getting it from seawater is an idea that I've heard mentioned a few times
From what I've heard about this, scientists estimated that seawater contained a certain amount of gold, someone invented a means of getting that gold out of the seawater, but the amount of gold they found was many times less than the estimate, so they scrapped the project. The result could mean one of two things: Either the process didn't work as well as it needed to, or the original estimate of the amount of gold in seawater was wrong. If the first was true, then I guess yes, maybe one day we will come up with an economically-viable way to get gold from seawater. If the second was true, then we won't.
NoSQL is write once, never update but read often. SQL is read, write update all the time.
And yet most MySQL installations (Web apps, anyway) are: read all the time; write some; update seldom. That's why MySQL became a popular database for Web apps -- it was faster for that model than Oracle (on the same hardware). SQL or the relational model wasn't the problem. The implementation was the problem.
I'm sure there are some cases where NoSQL is absolutely game-changing -- but those cases seem rare, and where they have occurred, the companies that really need NoSQL seem to be the ones who invented it (as you might expect). But "Google uses it so I should" is a poor argument; you are not Google, no matter what your VP of sales likes to think.
E.g. when you have to write giga bytes per second to the DB you are out of luck with any of our days RDBSs.
I suppose that's true, but can you really process gigabytes of data per second? Maybe this is a case for data warehousing, and you don't even use a traditional database to capture the data. Er, wait -- maybe I just gave a case for using NoSQL. But in this case, NoSQL isn't a replacement for a RDBMS, it's an adjunct to one, so I guess all I'm really saying is that it gets tiresome to read discussions of NoSQL this, NoSQL that, when most folks seem to have a poor understanding of the dimensions of their own problem spaces and they've chosen a tool before they've figured out how they'll use it.
In a way, it's kind of nice. Oracle will have to ensure RHEL compatibility of kSplice, whereas out-of-the-box it appears the only normally supported options are Ubuntu or Fedora.
In the announcement Oracle says flat-out that it does not plan to support RHEL. It may be that any changes Oracle makes will probably work fine with RHEL because of the (ahem) similarity between Oracle's distro and Red Hat's, but RHEL customers do not pay Red Hat to distribute a version of Linux with patches that are supposed to work because Oracle says so. Red Hat will still have to do all its usual testing and integration on anything that goes into RHEL, and it will also be on the hook to provide support to its enterprise customers, so whatever Oracle does to the source code saves Red Hat pretty much nothing.
Also, Oracle could easily make its own fork of K-Splice right now and release it exclusively under a proprietary license, because it just became the copyright holder. There's nothing that precludes a copyright holder from making a derivative work based on its own GPL code and releasing it under a different license. If Oracle did change the license, any old versions of K-Splice would still be available under the GPL, but Oracle would be free to distribute any future versions as binary-only modules.
The really shitty thing is that Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in the same sense that CentOS is. Oracle has already been distributing a version of Linux that gives back nothing to the company that does most of the hard work to make it enterprise-ready. Now it's adding new components to Oracle Enterprise Linux in such a way as to tell the rest of the community it can't have them anymore. If Red Hat wants to fork K-Splice, that's possible under the license, but again Red Hat will have to do all of the work, and Oracle will contribute nothing.
They took the books out which was their primary drawing point to make more room for selling the profitable stuff, and removed the factor on keeping people in the store, thus less came in and looked around creating a downward spiral.
It wasn't just that. Until recently there was a Barnes and Noble in one of the high-tourist-traffic areas of San Francisco. I can say uncategorically that this was The Worst Bookstore I Have Ever Seen. Within a couple minutes of walking through the front door, I thought to myself, "Well, I can see I won't be buying anything here." The store was huge, but it was a ramshackle mess. The books in the front of the store were cheap gift-book crap that nobody would want to buy. The shelves had all been rummaged. Employees lurched around listlessly, as if they didn't have any work to do (when clearly they did). You wouldn't have asked a question of anybody; not expecting a helpful answer, anyway. It was absolutely no surprise to me when this store went out of business.
There were more Borders stores in San Francisco than Barnes and Noble, but I was never particularly impressed by them, either. There's something weird about a bookstore that's setup like a Toys 'R' Us, where it's designed primarily to accommodate as much foot traffic as possible from people who are otherwise shopping at Old Navy. I feel uncomfortable when I walk into a bookstore and the highlighted new releases are the latest childcare book by Jenny McCarthy and a bunch of Star Wars novels. I like seeing magazines at a bookstore, too, but which magazines are highlighted matters -- when the magazine rack looks like the same thing you'd see at Rite Aid, the message I get is that this bookstore is setup mainly to convince men to kill time there while their wives are shopping for shoes. And, as many other posters have mentioned, most of the stock at Borders was not discounted in any way. There's something about grabbing a book from an overcrowded, poorly-organized shelf and bringing it up to a row of cash registers so the clerk can scan the barcode on the sticker on the back that just feels kind of soulless.
I guess, in a nutshell, nothing about the atmosphere of a Borders made it feel like a real bookstore to me. No doubt the big DVD section and the off-brand Starbuck's didn't much help. But the book selection. the pricing, and even the lighting and store layout have always been turn-offs for me.
But still, there is the one person I know who's password is PI, to the 27th decimal, Most PW systems don't let you have that many, and when they don't, she uses something ridiculously easy, "because it already isn't secured".
Is any password that you can look up in a book (or generate using an algorithm) really all that secure? How long would it take a dictionary attack based on the digits of pi to reach the 27th digit of pi?
Sunday: Had a problem with a website I like to access that has nothing to do with this hardware, but I felt like blaming it anyway. Kind of like kicking the dog when the local corporate owned sports team loses a game.
It has everything to do with the hardware if the only way to access POP mail on this specific hardware is to set it up to work with Gmail (or some other Webmail service). Real-world users may have to confront this issue.
Monday: I'm the only person in america who prints stuff at home instead of forwarding it to work and I also pretend I only have access to exactly one computer, this one
You may find you have not yet met everyone in America. I print stuff at home, and I would even if I didn't have a home office. I also have more than one computer. I have a networked printer that lets me print wirelessly from any device with the correct drivers, which are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (yes, from the manufacturer). There are no drivers available for the Chromebook. Instead I have to use Google Cloud Print, which means leaving some other computer running as a print spooler for my (already-networked) printer. That's dumb. You also lose all of your controls for the printer when you print that way -- you can't set print quality options or anything like that. If you print often, the Chromebook is lame, period.
Tuesday: I hate all touchpads made in the last decade and this has a touchpad therefore I hate it.
That's not what he said. He said the Chromebook's touchpad is lame, and he's right. It's big, but fidgety. It's multi-touch, but it doesn't support any kind of gestures beyond clicking and scrolling.
Wednesday: To do something complicated, I had to use google to look something up.
I think he points out succinctly how poorly designed the Chromebook UI is. If you have to go on Google to find out some obscure Ctrl-sequence to do something, because there's no manual and no online help to point you in the right direction (you even have to Google the hotkey to bring up the list of hotkeys), then the device is not intuitive and casual users -- probably the only kind of users this type of device will ever have -- will have problems with it.
Thursday: I found a single missing MIME type. A legit complaint.
It's not a missing MIME type. The Chromebook file browser can't browse files. The only file types it understands, that I can see, are JPEG, PNG, MP3, MP4, and OGG. AVI is not supported. Neither is DOC, PPT, XLS, or the OOXML equivalents. Even ZIP files don't work. Pretty much every single file type you might save on the Chromebook's drive shows up as a simple grey icon, and double-clicking it achieves nothing but a message telling you the file type is unknown.
Friday: I know this is a netbook for online work, so I'm gonna trash it for not doing local stuff very well.
Really? And here I thought he was complaining that it wouldn't work with Dropbox, which is an online service. He's also right about the local file handling. Are you really telling me you don't ever expect a coworker to hand you a USB drive with a few files on it? With the Chromebook, you won't be able to do anything with those files until you upload them to Google Docs, and if they're in a Zip file on the USB drive, you're going to have to find another computer or ask someone to open it for you.
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text
So kind of like how your wife doesn't listen to a thing you say, throws out straw-man arguments, and keeps repeating them over and over when there's nothing else to disagree with, you're gonna do the same thing your wife does?
I'll see your "I encounter the word quite frequently" and raise you an "I've been a professional writer and editor of American English for twelve years."
1) Michael Lee Whateverhisnamewas could be from the UK - localization is a very common thing (in this case, ad could be translated to advert).
It's possible, but it doesn't seem very likely. It's not like the difference between "ad' and "advert" would impact business in any significant way, so it seems more likely that Facebook, an American company, would send out emails written in American English.
If he was from Brazil, presumably Facebook coud send a notice in Spanish, not American English.
Presumably it could, but it wouldn't, because Brazilians speak Portuguese. I point it out not to make fun of you, but to illustrate that you don't seem to be particularly attuned to the subtleties of language.
2) That could be a canned statement already vetted by the powers that be at Facebook pr.
Again, to my original point, why would Facebook PR vet a canned statement that was written in British English?
Show me the email, that's what I'm saying. Otherwise this whole story sounds like hearsay.
'Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.'"
Facebook is an American company. Since when did any American ever use the term "advert"? Seriously, Americans do not say this. The shortened form of "advertisement" in the U.S. is "ad," not "advert." Any claim otherwise makes me want to see the actual text of the original email, if one did indeed exist. Furthermore, companies do not let random employees write emails about corporate policy and send them out without having them reviewed and vetted for language. This sounds like someone (from the UK) is using the press to hype up his own business at Facebook's expense.
That a virus jumped from some animal to human is a non-news, but that a specific virus jumping from a particular animal to people is, it seems, a notable scientific news.
My own take on it is... only sort of. It's not so strange that a virus might jump from a specific animal to people. It's more strange that a specific virus might jump from an animal to people. But again, not really. I rate this story as scientifically interesting, but panic-worthy? Not in the slightest. Interesting biology observed, noted... that is all.
Your argument for why people should stick with using MSOffice is that MSOffice 2010 lets you keep doing things the way you are used to doing them?
No, it was my counter-argument to the argument that Google Docs (or Emacs) gives everybody everything they need out of a word processor, "so who would ever need more?"
I use Office 2010. It lets me get my work done. Switching to something else would take me many weeks to readjust. Why bother?
We don't really understand the biology of virus jumping species, do we? Other than the few documented cases of some viruses, that is - i.e., this virus x has done it before.
Pretty much every virus we know of has an animal where it usually lives (called a "reservoir"). For example, pretty much all flu viruses are thought to originate with birds, though pigs can also get the flu. Jumping species is not unusual; in fact it's generally considered the mechanism by which humans get viruses. They don't come out of nowhere, they come (originally) from animals, though sometimes they later adapt to where humans are the natural reservoir.
Bullocks. Push people on what features they actually use. Most people really do use the roughly the same 20%. The vast majority of people I've talked with and seen what they do, Office 97 is just fine.
Says the guy with a vested interest in agreeing with his own opinion.
I don't want to use Office 97. If I wanted that, I might as well use OpenOffice (because that's the version it resembles). I want to use Office 2010. I like the ribbon UI and I like many of the other improvements they've made since then.
I also have various workflows that I have built into Office that I find indispensable. I have an Excel template that I use for invoicing that has not been compatible with any other office suite I've tried, including OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, and Microsoft's own Office Web Apps. I have a couple VBA macros assigned to hotkeys that make the things I have to do in Word much easier, and I haven't had much luck porting those either. There are other ways that I used Office features that you may consider idiosyncratic, but now that I'm accustomed to working that way, I am reluctant to give them up. I definitely have my own 20%.
Sorry to disagree with you, though. You clearly had yourself convinced; it must just be me.
But Android phones don't use ActiveSync. They come with software that connects to Google Apps, out of the box. You register with your Google account, activate synchronization, and it all happens from there. You don't need an ActiveSync to connect to Google Apps (including Gmail and its address book) and you don't need a BES. In that sense, Google Apps (or the complementary Android software) is a substitute for those products.
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Worth mentioning, also, that although the Federal Reserve earns a profit, nearly 100 percent of those profits are turned over to the Federal Treasury. The Fed makes money for the U.S. government.
If spending and an increase in economic activity were indicative of economic strength, then nations with hyper-inflated currencies are among the strongest in the world, because those people spend all of their income the very same day they get paid.
And if not spending were indicative of economic strength, then nations where everyone lives in caves and there is no industry would be among the strongest in the world, because everyone's money would just sit in the bank.
Power is increased through accumulation (saving), which is reserved not for itself, but for the sake of future spending and investing
So spending now is bad, and what you really want to do is spend later? I'm not sure I see the distinction.
I dare you to go to you favourite shop, and buy a suit for an ounce of gold.
A friend of mine runs a store that sells fancy bicycles, and a guy tried to do just that. He actually had the gold coins on his person. Really, though, it seemed like he was less interested in buying a bike than in haranguing shop owners about the evils of fiat currency, etc., etc. This may be why a lot of folks assume that people who are obsessed with the gold standard are loonies.
Because it is so expensive it is only adapted when there is really no alternative.
The paradox here is that something like 50 percent of all gold that isn't used for money or investments is used for jewelery and other decorative purposes, all of which are completely unnecessary. There are also plenty of alternative shiny things that could be used to make jewelery, but people choose gold anyway. So whatever demand there may be for it in industrial applications is offset by the completely irrational demand for it in other applications. In my book that makes it a lousy commodity market to be in, unless you're there to exploit bubbles.
To illustrate, titanium is also used in medical applications because it has some properties similar to gold, and it's probably useful in far more medical applications than gold is, yet gold is currently 1,224 times more expensive than titanium.
Getting it from seawater is an idea that I've heard mentioned a few times
From what I've heard about this, scientists estimated that seawater contained a certain amount of gold, someone invented a means of getting that gold out of the seawater, but the amount of gold they found was many times less than the estimate, so they scrapped the project. The result could mean one of two things: Either the process didn't work as well as it needed to, or the original estimate of the amount of gold in seawater was wrong. If the first was true, then I guess yes, maybe one day we will come up with an economically-viable way to get gold from seawater. If the second was true, then we won't.
The thing with a false dilemma is that it doesn't afford you the possibility of having morals.
FTFY.
NoSQL is write once, never update but read often. SQL is read, write update all the time.
And yet most MySQL installations (Web apps, anyway) are: read all the time; write some; update seldom. That's why MySQL became a popular database for Web apps -- it was faster for that model than Oracle (on the same hardware). SQL or the relational model wasn't the problem. The implementation was the problem.
I'm sure there are some cases where NoSQL is absolutely game-changing -- but those cases seem rare, and where they have occurred, the companies that really need NoSQL seem to be the ones who invented it (as you might expect). But "Google uses it so I should" is a poor argument; you are not Google, no matter what your VP of sales likes to think.
E.g. when you have to write giga bytes per second to the DB you are out of luck with any of our days RDBSs.
I suppose that's true, but can you really process gigabytes of data per second? Maybe this is a case for data warehousing, and you don't even use a traditional database to capture the data. Er, wait -- maybe I just gave a case for using NoSQL. But in this case, NoSQL isn't a replacement for a RDBMS, it's an adjunct to one, so I guess all I'm really saying is that it gets tiresome to read discussions of NoSQL this, NoSQL that, when most folks seem to have a poor understanding of the dimensions of their own problem spaces and they've chosen a tool before they've figured out how they'll use it.
In a way, it's kind of nice. Oracle will have to ensure RHEL compatibility of kSplice, whereas out-of-the-box it appears the only normally supported options are Ubuntu or Fedora.
In the announcement Oracle says flat-out that it does not plan to support RHEL. It may be that any changes Oracle makes will probably work fine with RHEL because of the (ahem) similarity between Oracle's distro and Red Hat's, but RHEL customers do not pay Red Hat to distribute a version of Linux with patches that are supposed to work because Oracle says so. Red Hat will still have to do all its usual testing and integration on anything that goes into RHEL, and it will also be on the hook to provide support to its enterprise customers, so whatever Oracle does to the source code saves Red Hat pretty much nothing.
Also, Oracle could easily make its own fork of K-Splice right now and release it exclusively under a proprietary license, because it just became the copyright holder. There's nothing that precludes a copyright holder from making a derivative work based on its own GPL code and releasing it under a different license. If Oracle did change the license, any old versions of K-Splice would still be available under the GPL, but Oracle would be free to distribute any future versions as binary-only modules.
RedHat, please fork ksplice today.
The really shitty thing is that Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in the same sense that CentOS is. Oracle has already been distributing a version of Linux that gives back nothing to the company that does most of the hard work to make it enterprise-ready. Now it's adding new components to Oracle Enterprise Linux in such a way as to tell the rest of the community it can't have them anymore. If Red Hat wants to fork K-Splice, that's possible under the license, but again Red Hat will have to do all of the work, and Oracle will contribute nothing.
With Wolfram? I can see the HTML5 export happening once adoption takes off.
Of course, by that time Wolfram will have invented HTML5 himself using cellular automata.
I won't bore you with all of the details but briefly put SQL databases and tables are too restrictive for our work.
Care to make a case for that?
Perhaps your work is too chaotic and disorganized for SQL tables?
(BTW, C. J. Date would take issue with anyone who thinks "tables" are part of the relational model, but I digress...)
They took the books out which was their primary drawing point to make more room for selling the profitable stuff, and removed the factor on keeping people in the store, thus less came in and looked around creating a downward spiral.
It wasn't just that. Until recently there was a Barnes and Noble in one of the high-tourist-traffic areas of San Francisco. I can say uncategorically that this was The Worst Bookstore I Have Ever Seen. Within a couple minutes of walking through the front door, I thought to myself, "Well, I can see I won't be buying anything here." The store was huge, but it was a ramshackle mess. The books in the front of the store were cheap gift-book crap that nobody would want to buy. The shelves had all been rummaged. Employees lurched around listlessly, as if they didn't have any work to do (when clearly they did). You wouldn't have asked a question of anybody; not expecting a helpful answer, anyway. It was absolutely no surprise to me when this store went out of business.
There were more Borders stores in San Francisco than Barnes and Noble, but I was never particularly impressed by them, either. There's something weird about a bookstore that's setup like a Toys 'R' Us, where it's designed primarily to accommodate as much foot traffic as possible from people who are otherwise shopping at Old Navy. I feel uncomfortable when I walk into a bookstore and the highlighted new releases are the latest childcare book by Jenny McCarthy and a bunch of Star Wars novels. I like seeing magazines at a bookstore, too, but which magazines are highlighted matters -- when the magazine rack looks like the same thing you'd see at Rite Aid, the message I get is that this bookstore is setup mainly to convince men to kill time there while their wives are shopping for shoes. And, as many other posters have mentioned, most of the stock at Borders was not discounted in any way. There's something about grabbing a book from an overcrowded, poorly-organized shelf and bringing it up to a row of cash registers so the clerk can scan the barcode on the sticker on the back that just feels kind of soulless.
I guess, in a nutshell, nothing about the atmosphere of a Borders made it feel like a real bookstore to me. No doubt the big DVD section and the off-brand Starbuck's didn't much help. But the book selection. the pricing, and even the lighting and store layout have always been turn-offs for me.
US Banks don't do it?
Bank of America certainly offers it as a free option (and I use it).
But still, there is the one person I know who's password is PI, to the 27th decimal, Most PW systems don't let you have that many, and when they don't, she uses something ridiculously easy, "because it already isn't secured".
Is any password that you can look up in a book (or generate using an algorithm) really all that secure? How long would it take a dictionary attack based on the digits of pi to reach the 27th digit of pi?
"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun."
Sunday: Had a problem with a website I like to access that has nothing to do with this hardware, but I felt like blaming it anyway. Kind of like kicking the dog when the local corporate owned sports team loses a game.
It has everything to do with the hardware if the only way to access POP mail on this specific hardware is to set it up to work with Gmail (or some other Webmail service). Real-world users may have to confront this issue.
Monday: I'm the only person in america who prints stuff at home instead of forwarding it to work and I also pretend I only have access to exactly one computer, this one
You may find you have not yet met everyone in America. I print stuff at home, and I would even if I didn't have a home office. I also have more than one computer. I have a networked printer that lets me print wirelessly from any device with the correct drivers, which are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (yes, from the manufacturer). There are no drivers available for the Chromebook. Instead I have to use Google Cloud Print, which means leaving some other computer running as a print spooler for my (already-networked) printer. That's dumb. You also lose all of your controls for the printer when you print that way -- you can't set print quality options or anything like that. If you print often, the Chromebook is lame, period.
Tuesday: I hate all touchpads made in the last decade and this has a touchpad therefore I hate it.
That's not what he said. He said the Chromebook's touchpad is lame, and he's right. It's big, but fidgety. It's multi-touch, but it doesn't support any kind of gestures beyond clicking and scrolling.
Wednesday: To do something complicated, I had to use google to look something up.
I think he points out succinctly how poorly designed the Chromebook UI is. If you have to go on Google to find out some obscure Ctrl-sequence to do something, because there's no manual and no online help to point you in the right direction (you even have to Google the hotkey to bring up the list of hotkeys), then the device is not intuitive and casual users -- probably the only kind of users this type of device will ever have -- will have problems with it.
Thursday: I found a single missing MIME type. A legit complaint.
It's not a missing MIME type. The Chromebook file browser can't browse files. The only file types it understands, that I can see, are JPEG, PNG, MP3, MP4, and OGG. AVI is not supported. Neither is DOC, PPT, XLS, or the OOXML equivalents. Even ZIP files don't work. Pretty much every single file type you might save on the Chromebook's drive shows up as a simple grey icon, and double-clicking it achieves nothing but a message telling you the file type is unknown.
Friday: I know this is a netbook for online work, so I'm gonna trash it for not doing local stuff very well.
Really? And here I thought he was complaining that it wouldn't work with Dropbox, which is an online service. He's also right about the local file handling. Are you really telling me you don't ever expect a coworker to hand you a USB drive with a few files on it? With the Chromebook, you won't be able to do anything with those files until you upload them to Google Docs, and if they're in a Zip file on the USB drive, you're going to have to find another computer or ask someone to open it for you.
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text
So kind of like how your wife doesn't listen to a thing you say, throws out straw-man arguments, and keeps repeating them over and over when there's nothing else to disagree with, you're gonna do the same thing your wife does?
I'll see your "I encounter the word quite frequently" and raise you an "I've been a professional writer and editor of American English for twelve years."
1) Michael Lee Whateverhisnamewas could be from the UK - localization is a very common thing (in this case, ad could be translated to advert).
It's possible, but it doesn't seem very likely. It's not like the difference between "ad' and "advert" would impact business in any significant way, so it seems more likely that Facebook, an American company, would send out emails written in American English.
If he was from Brazil, presumably Facebook coud send a notice in Spanish, not American English.
Presumably it could, but it wouldn't, because Brazilians speak Portuguese. I point it out not to make fun of you, but to illustrate that you don't seem to be particularly attuned to the subtleties of language.
2) That could be a canned statement already vetted by the powers that be at Facebook pr.
Again, to my original point, why would Facebook PR vet a canned statement that was written in British English?
Show me the email, that's what I'm saying. Otherwise this whole story sounds like hearsay.
'Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.'"
Facebook is an American company. Since when did any American ever use the term "advert"? Seriously, Americans do not say this. The shortened form of "advertisement" in the U.S. is "ad," not "advert." Any claim otherwise makes me want to see the actual text of the original email, if one did indeed exist. Furthermore, companies do not let random employees write emails about corporate policy and send them out without having them reviewed and vetted for language. This sounds like someone (from the UK) is using the press to hype up his own business at Facebook's expense.
That a virus jumped from some animal to human is a non-news, but that a specific virus jumping from a particular animal to people is, it seems, a notable scientific news.
My own take on it is... only sort of. It's not so strange that a virus might jump from a specific animal to people. It's more strange that a specific virus might jump from an animal to people. But again, not really. I rate this story as scientifically interesting, but panic-worthy? Not in the slightest. Interesting biology observed, noted... that is all.
Your argument for why people should stick with using MSOffice is that MSOffice 2010 lets you keep doing things the way you are used to doing them?
No, it was my counter-argument to the argument that Google Docs (or Emacs) gives everybody everything they need out of a word processor, "so who would ever need more?"
I use Office 2010. It lets me get my work done. Switching to something else would take me many weeks to readjust. Why bother?
You what! 2010 is cr*p, the ribbon takes up too much screen space
So double click on it and minimize it. Screen space... saved!
and requires too many clicks to get simple (for me) things done.
So use the key commands, like a normal person. Unless you don't really know what it is you want to do.
We don't really understand the biology of virus jumping species, do we? Other than the few documented cases of some viruses, that is - i.e., this virus x has done it before.
Pretty much every virus we know of has an animal where it usually lives (called a "reservoir"). For example, pretty much all flu viruses are thought to originate with birds, though pigs can also get the flu. Jumping species is not unusual; in fact it's generally considered the mechanism by which humans get viruses. They don't come out of nowhere, they come (originally) from animals, though sometimes they later adapt to where humans are the natural reservoir.
Bullocks. Push people on what features they actually use. Most people really do use the roughly the same 20%. The vast majority of people I've talked with and seen what they do, Office 97 is just fine.
Says the guy with a vested interest in agreeing with his own opinion.
I don't want to use Office 97. If I wanted that, I might as well use OpenOffice (because that's the version it resembles). I want to use Office 2010. I like the ribbon UI and I like many of the other improvements they've made since then.
I also have various workflows that I have built into Office that I find indispensable. I have an Excel template that I use for invoicing that has not been compatible with any other office suite I've tried, including OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, and Microsoft's own Office Web Apps. I have a couple VBA macros assigned to hotkeys that make the things I have to do in Word much easier, and I haven't had much luck porting those either. There are other ways that I used Office features that you may consider idiosyncratic, but now that I'm accustomed to working that way, I am reluctant to give them up. I definitely have my own 20%.
Sorry to disagree with you, though. You clearly had yourself convinced; it must just be me.
ActiveSync is equivalent to BES.
But Android phones don't use ActiveSync. They come with software that connects to Google Apps, out of the box. You register with your Google account, activate synchronization, and it all happens from there. You don't need an ActiveSync to connect to Google Apps (including Gmail and its address book) and you don't need a BES. In that sense, Google Apps (or the complementary Android software) is a substitute for those products.