You are right, the point that we should be focusing upon is that AT&T gave NSA real-time access to communications. I thought from the original press reports that NSA had been given access to some sort of billing database that listed who called whom. But the contents of the document makes clear that the program goes way beyond this.
Glass is actually very strong and elastic in the absence of point defects. Think about the glass in fiberglass or the fibre used in fibre optics. It is only brittle because of microscopic cracks that spread. Water greatly reduces the energy needed to break the chemical bonds in the glass. I'm guessing that the balls are so small that it will not be energetically favorable for the cracks to grow, even if they are wet. (Read about Griffith's theory on fracture mechanics to see why.)
Hydrogen diffuses readly through steel, but not through aluminium. The hydrogen diffusion coefficients of steels are greater than 10-6 cm2.s-1, whereas the hydrogen diffusion coefficients of aluminium alloys are approximately 10-10 cm2.s-1. So don't use steel. (If you have to use steel, put down a layer of copper or aluminium to slow the diffusion.) Hydrogen gas can readily disociate on the metal surface, then you have two protons, which can readily move through the 'Fermi sea' of electons, especially in something as grainy as a steel.
If I voluntarily turn over information to my laywer, I would certainly expect her to make a permanent record of the fact. She is a third party, so by this reasoning, my conversation with her would be expected to be public. The only reason that this would be protected is because there is an historical expection of privacy in this conversation, so that the second paragraph would not apply. My problem is that if I am talking to someone on a parkbench, I do have an expection of privacy. If I'm talking to my wife and someone tries to evesdrop, I will say 'do you mind' and epect them to back off. If they don't back off, I will be genuinely irritated. We now use electronic means for communication (and evesdropping), but we can no longer expect privacy. Each new media has no historical expection of privacy simply because it it new and has no history. We need to be able to form correct analogies between historical communication and the newer electronic media. Is using IM a reasonable analogy to puting a post-in note on a public bulletin board, writing a postcard or is like writting a sealed letter? What is a reasonable expection? It seems to me that our courts are deciding that we must have a very low expectation of privacy, even though it is very clear to me that that is not the expection of most users.
This is Slashdot, so I'm pretty sure that the correct answer is still soap. If we are just ranting, we are on the soap box. Besides, SOAP is the only one that is a web protocol.
Google for 'PETA FBI terrorist' and the first hit is Washington Post article FBI Papers Show Terror Inquiries Into PETA; Other Groups Tracked from last December. While Bin Laden remains at large, the FBI is hot on the trail of animal rights activists. Personally, I'm guessing they just wanted an excuse to legally stalk Pam Anderson, who is well known vegitarian and animal right activist. She is also famous for exersizing her right to bare arms. Not eating meat and worrying about small animals is clearly un-American; if God didn't want us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have invented Iowa (which has more pigs than people).
This is actually interesting... it would make for a fascinating defense. After all, a grown man that is looking for UFOs does have a child-like quality.
This does feel other-worldly to me. You would think that the US would be too embarassed to admit that 'the British loon looking for UFOs' was able to break into a 'valuable' system that lacked passwords. The real prosecution should be of the people in charge of security here in the US. After all, there are people that are actually trying to do harm to the US, its military and its information systems. If the loon looking for aliens can break in, why do we think that a real enemy of the state could not. This has the air of a Monty Python sketch - something where a Scotish seperatist in a kilt keeps showing up in a top secret facility as the security officer assures the Prime Minister that he needn't worry about Nazi spies. The crime isn't that a loon is looking for aliens, it is that supposidly serious people cannot even keep the loon out.
The importance is that it allows organizations, like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to use ODF as a standard format. Users that have MS Office don't need to be retrained in OpenOffice. Handicapped users that depend upon third party tool that works only with MS Office can still generate documents in the approved standard. So, this allows Massachusetts to choose an open standard for their documents without having to dictate a particular implementation. This is a bigger win for ODF advocates than for OpenOffice.org users.
I used to work in Cambridge, and I found that the Healthcare was really quite good. I had a daughter get a finger nearly severed. We wrapped it quickly and took a taxi to Addenbrookes (in the US we would have taken an ambulance at 5X the cost and roughly the same time) and got excellent care. I will admit that we may have been lucky to have gotten a truely excellent surgical team that reattached it so well that you can only see the scar if you look carefully. (I heard later, but did not confirm, that this was the team that Richard Leekey chose for his recovery from his aircraft accident that took both of his legs.)
You could argue that this was emergency care, so that there counldn't be any delays. I had another daugher that needed tubes in her ears. We did have a wait of a couple of months, but this was largely because the probem started before we were in England, so getting the doctors to get the notes of the previous (French) doctors took a while. In short, I was quite pleased with the health care that I recieved in the UK. The really good health care was in France, but that is another story. So, go ahead and repete the stories about long waits. Just don't think that your apocrophal accounts will sway the minds of people with first hand experience.
Vista is getting out the door late, and I'll bet that most of the reason is that they have to get backward compatablity with all of the software that came before. It seems to me that An OS/X-like operating system (a clean kernel and network stack with a lovely, deeply integrated GUI) could run XP virtual machines whenever you needed to run a 'legacy' application. This would allow Microsoft (or Apple, or the OS community) to code an efficient OS and still be able to have all of the arcane hooks (e.g., duplicates of all the undocumented crap within Windows that becomes essential to some legacy application that had to use the undocumented 'feature' to avoid some other buggy API call that didn't quite work either) that are needed by the vast installed user base.
So, you have an agile, 'open-source' like environment for rapid operating system development and you have the virtual machines that can be frozen at some point in history when the legacy application was supported.
Luckily, Microsoft moves so slowly that I would bet that either Linux or a BSD like OS/X will be able to implement this first. This could be a future where the open-source model of development is the prefered environment. Elephants are imposing and dangerous, but they can't swim with Penguins (or Puffy the blowfish).
Am I the only one that thought it might be fun to have a 'workstation' that included a built in recumbent exercise cycle. If I'm not tied to a computer, I like to be doing something physical when I think. One time, I was trying to figure out how to do a contour integral while walking around campus. The scary part was that no idea how I got to the other side of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston - not something you should try to cross without paying attention. I honestly think I could focus on my computer better if my body could go into autopilot with a moderate level of exercise to actually keep the oxygenated blood flowing freely. I know that this is really off topic, but if Negroponte can really get a PC down to 2 Watts, you wouldn't even need to break a sweat while pedalling the crank.
As many posters have noted, NPR get only 2% of its funding from government sources. As for the lack of competition, I simply don't know what you are talking about. They are competing with all sorts of options for my time. I can watch any number of news broadcasts, read newspapers and magazines (for free if I drop by the library). IMO, the News Hours is the finest broadcast news available.
I would also like to point out that competition in a market is only one of several ways in which people make collective decisions. (There are command hierarchies and 'gift economies', for example) Most economic models of markets make assumptions about the markets being free and with each member of the market having reasonable (if not perfect) access to information. I submit that is is quite rational to have organizations, especially non-government organizations like NPR and PBS, that provide information outside of a 'market'. When access to information is 'marketed' you often end up with all sorts of market perversions like insider trading.
Finally, a jab at Air America seems out of place. Air America is privately funded and is in a free market. It is enjoying its First Amendment rights just like Rush Limbaugh does. Free markets don't belong to the right. All the faults in the world are not do to a lack of market forces - there are other ways to organize human activity that are frequently more effective than a free market. Markets have a place, but they are not the only mechanism for cooperation.
In 1958, two engineers at Cambridge designed large rubberized boats, called dracones, to carry fluids in water. By making these multisectioned, they can actually be quite tough. This design has been used in many parts of the globe for decades. If the fabric cover is damged, only the contents of one section can be lost. Inflatable life rafts use the same principle. I would assume that a helium filled airship would use this principle as well. It will not be designed like a ballon so that failure will 'pop' the shell and it will not be designed so that a single failure will destroy the airship. Of course, it can still be shot down, but that is the main reason to make it unmanned.
Wikipedia has a few articles that might interest you. Please look at Stack Smashing Protection to learn about canaries and tools such as ProPolice. ProPolice is part of gcc, so you can build practially any open source OS with this protection today. (This makes buffer overflows much more difficult, if not impossible.) It should not surprise any Slashdot reader to learn that OpenBSD uses this by default. OpenBSD also adds W^X protection to each page. It is ironic that you reference Intel on a no execution bit. If you read some of the developer comments from the OpenBSD team, it is pretty clear that AMD 's 64-bit processors and all RISC processors have better implementations of the no-execute bit than does Intel. It is doubly ironic that you mention Microsoft for Data Execution Prevention, since this sure seems like they are trying to appear to be the inovator of this technique. This is pretty typical for MS, and it explains why many people seem to believe that MS inovates and free software copies. The reality, in this case and many others, is often the opposite.
When a patch is measured in the tens of MB, you can bet that it addressed multiple issues. It is was only addressing one issue, like an typical patch for an open source project, it would be a diff file that measures no more than a few kB.
If the image is a jpeg format, then no. If the file is a WMF file with a JPG extension, then I think the answer is Yes. Firefox 1.5 will ask you if you want to view the WMF file (at which point you had better say 'No'). With IE and Firefox 1.0, my understanding is that the wmf file (regardless of its extension) will be automatically viewed and this is enough to get your Windows PC infected.
In HTML, you can consider the data in the head to be 'metadata'. See the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The data in the head is 'invisible' to a web surfer (save for the title), but quite useful for the upcoming 'Semantic Web' and even for filtering on Google. However, since statisitically speaking, there are more people that lie than correclty use this metadata, it doesn't seem that it helps your PageRank with Google to have accurate metadata. In any case, this sort of data will not corrupt the rest of the file, e.g. the 'body' if the html.
I don't agree with the views of intelligent designer, but I tried to reproduce their arguements. I agree that much of their argument is due to the lack of imagination as to how other physical systems might be able to give rise to 'life'. The argument that this is simply the Anthropic Principle is useful, but it is not definitive in the way that the agreement between QED and measurement is. The Anthropic Prinicple has always struck me as valid for a philosphy of science, but is not itself scientific. Again, my personal belief is in Evolution and a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, all governed by natural law and without the intervention of a deity. I don't have a quarrel with the 'second sort' of intelligent design folks, but I have a huge quarrel with the Young Earth Creationists.
I was trying to understand ID, and I think there are two very different groups that are claiming this term.
The first is just a new name for Young Earth Creationists (YEC). These are the people that insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis' Creation and Flood stories. They attack Evolution for every perceived weakness. This is the 'God in the Gaps' idea. I think that this is an awful view of God, since every discovery becomes an attack on God. This view make every honest investigator a villain. This is the same nonsense that make Galileo a threat to the Catholic Church during the Renaisance. The Catholic Church, and the mainstream Protestant Churches have learn and they are not making this issue a source of division between themselves and science. The YEC crowd is still holding to this view, so they are in constant combat with science.
The second sort of ID advocate says something like
OK, I see that a Big Bang occured. but do you really believe that its something like a zero-point energy perterbation of an empty nonthingness? OK, I see that the Universe was formed by a cooling Big Bang. Hey, look at this. If I change the strength of the weak nuclear force by a tiny fraction, I don't see how a stable nucleus with Z>4 could possibly form for more than a few nanoseconds. Wow, if I change any of the fundimatal physics constants, the Universe would either by chaos or booring. What are the odds that we have the right set of constants to allow for a dynamic, but relatively stable universe? OK, I see that life managed to evolve on Earth over a few billions years. But is is really reasonable that all the forces of the universe were so brillaintly tuned that we could form something like life, which is an exquisite balance of stability and dymamism. You may buy this, but to me the exquisite set of rules that our universe obeys looks like it was set up to create us. To me, this looks like evidence for the hand of God.
This second sort of ID should not be threatening to 'mainstream' science, since every wonderful scientific discovery is just more evidence of God's brillance. This is not 'God in the Cracks', this is 'God behind the Science'. I view this sort of ID as a 'philosophy of science,' largely becuase I don't quite see how they can make a testable hypothesis. As the parent post notes, there is room for Truth that is not scientific.
This sort of ID can also embrace Genesis as a metaphor. In fact, is should be no surprise that many see the Big Bang as evidence for a Creator. This sort of ID should actually be quite threatening to the YEC, since it denies the literal intepretation of Genesis.
Of course, in many Christian traditions, it is considered blastphemy to call the Bible perfect. The Bible is the inspired Word of God as interpreted by a long series of impefect humans. So, insisting on Biblical inerancy should properly be attacked on both scientific and religous grounds. If you take this view, imagine yourself as a late Stone Age scribe. God chooses you to recieve the story of creation and evolution. You don't know calculus, so you have to get the simplified version. You also don't have much use for numbers larger than a thousand, so the explanation of the time scales doesn't mean much to you. So we'll go with 'a day is as a thousand years in the eyes of God' and just compress 'ages' into 'days'. I actually think that the Genesis Creation story (up to the stuff about Eve anyhow) is a halfway decent summary of the history of the universe in a few sentences.
In case anyone hasn't figured this out, I really want to see the Young Earth Creationists squirm. I think that they have an immature theology and they are boorishly trying to force their immaturity on the rest of us.
Just think how Newton feels (and all the other physicsts that have worked at Cambridge, Oxford and the other fine Universities of the United Kingdom for that matter) when his homeland fails to comprehend conservation of energy. Heck, even most Slashdotters seem to be figuring this out.
Please look at the OpenOpenOffice project The plug in is already under way, at least if you have network access or are willing to install OpenOpenOffice locally. OpenOffice can already read & write Microsoft formats, so it makes sense to leverage this in the OpenOpenOffice solution. Of course, this doesn't help if Microsoft decides to sue OpeOffice for implementing MS Office Open XML, but that would result in a seperate firestorm of criticism for Microsoft, espeically overseas. The OpenOpenOffice solution is simple (as in elegant, not as in brain dead) & should be done long before January 2007. A cottage industry for OpenOffice is already underway.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, the point that we should be focusing upon is that AT&T gave NSA real-time access to communications. I thought from the original press reports that NSA had been given access to some sort of billing database that listed who called whom. But the contents of the document makes clear that the program goes way beyond this.
Glass is actually very strong and elastic in the absence of point defects. Think about the glass in fiberglass or the fibre used in fibre optics. It is only brittle because of microscopic cracks that spread. Water greatly reduces the energy needed to break the chemical bonds in the glass. I'm guessing that the balls are so small that it will not be energetically favorable for the cracks to grow, even if they are wet. (Read about Griffith's theory on fracture mechanics to see why.)
Hydrogen diffuses readly through steel, but not through aluminium. The hydrogen diffusion coefficients of steels are greater than 10-6 cm2.s-1, whereas the hydrogen diffusion coefficients of aluminium alloys are approximately 10-10 cm2.s-1. So don't use steel. (If you have to use steel, put down a layer of copper or aluminium to slow the diffusion.) Hydrogen gas can readily disociate on the metal surface, then you have two protons, which can readily move through the 'Fermi sea' of electons, especially in something as grainy as a steel.
If I voluntarily turn over information to my laywer, I would certainly expect her to make a permanent record of the fact. She is a third party, so by this reasoning, my conversation with her would be expected to be public. The only reason that this would be protected is because there is an historical expection of privacy in this conversation, so that the second paragraph would not apply. My problem is that if I am talking to someone on a parkbench, I do have an expection of privacy. If I'm talking to my wife and someone tries to evesdrop, I will say 'do you mind' and epect them to back off. If they don't back off, I will be genuinely irritated. We now use electronic means for communication (and evesdropping), but we can no longer expect privacy. Each new media has no historical expection of privacy simply because it it new and has no history. We need to be able to form correct analogies between historical communication and the newer electronic media. Is using IM a reasonable analogy to puting a post-in note on a public bulletin board, writing a postcard or is like writting a sealed letter? What is a reasonable expection? It seems to me that our courts are deciding that we must have a very low expectation of privacy, even though it is very clear to me that that is not the expection of most users.
This is Slashdot, so I'm pretty sure that the correct answer is still soap. If we are just ranting, we are on the soap box. Besides, SOAP is the only one that is a web protocol.
Google for 'PETA FBI terrorist' and the first hit is Washington Post article FBI Papers Show Terror Inquiries Into PETA; Other Groups Tracked from last December. While Bin Laden remains at large, the FBI is hot on the trail of animal rights activists. Personally, I'm guessing they just wanted an excuse to legally stalk Pam Anderson, who is well known vegitarian and animal right activist. She is also famous for exersizing her right to bare arms. Not eating meat and worrying about small animals is clearly un-American; if God didn't want us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have invented Iowa (which has more pigs than people).
This is actually interesting ... it would make for a fascinating defense. After all, a grown man that is looking for UFOs does have a child-like quality.
This does feel other-worldly to me. You would think that the US would be too embarassed to admit that 'the British loon looking for UFOs' was able to break into a 'valuable' system that lacked passwords. The real prosecution should be of the people in charge of security here in the US. After all, there are people that are actually trying to do harm to the US, its military and its information systems. If the loon looking for aliens can break in, why do we think that a real enemy of the state could not. This has the air of a Monty Python sketch - something where a Scotish seperatist in a kilt keeps showing up in a top secret facility as the security officer assures the Prime Minister that he needn't worry about Nazi spies. The crime isn't that a loon is looking for aliens, it is that supposidly serious people cannot even keep the loon out.
The importance is that it allows organizations, like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to use ODF as a standard format. Users that have MS Office don't need to be retrained in OpenOffice. Handicapped users that depend upon third party tool that works only with MS Office can still generate documents in the approved standard. So, this allows Massachusetts to choose an open standard for their documents without having to dictate a particular implementation. This is a bigger win for ODF advocates than for OpenOffice.org users.
and ... I thought RTFM was the 'universal' Slashdot comment.
You could argue that this was emergency care, so that there counldn't be any delays. I had another daugher that needed tubes in her ears. We did have a wait of a couple of months, but this was largely because the probem started before we were in England, so getting the doctors to get the notes of the previous (French) doctors took a while. In short, I was quite pleased with the health care that I recieved in the UK. The really good health care was in France, but that is another story. So, go ahead and repete the stories about long waits. Just don't think that your apocrophal accounts will sway the minds of people with first hand experience.
So, you have an agile, 'open-source' like environment for rapid operating system development and you have the virtual machines that can be frozen at some point in history when the legacy application was supported.
Luckily, Microsoft moves so slowly that I would bet that either Linux or a BSD like OS/X will be able to implement this first. This could be a future where the open-source model of development is the prefered environment. Elephants are imposing and dangerous, but they can't swim with Penguins (or Puffy the blowfish).
Am I the only one that thought it might be fun to have a 'workstation' that included a built in recumbent exercise cycle. If I'm not tied to a computer, I like to be doing something physical when I think. One time, I was trying to figure out how to do a contour integral while walking around campus. The scary part was that no idea how I got to the other side of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston - not something you should try to cross without paying attention. I honestly think I could focus on my computer better if my body could go into autopilot with a moderate level of exercise to actually keep the oxygenated blood flowing freely. I know that this is really off topic, but if Negroponte can really get a PC down to 2 Watts, you wouldn't even need to break a sweat while pedalling the crank.
I would also like to point out that competition in a market is only one of several ways in which people make collective decisions. (There are command hierarchies and 'gift economies', for example) Most economic models of markets make assumptions about the markets being free and with each member of the market having reasonable (if not perfect) access to information. I submit that is is quite rational to have organizations, especially non-government organizations like NPR and PBS, that provide information outside of a 'market'. When access to information is 'marketed' you often end up with all sorts of market perversions like insider trading.
Finally, a jab at Air America seems out of place. Air America is privately funded and is in a free market. It is enjoying its First Amendment rights just like Rush Limbaugh does. Free markets don't belong to the right. All the faults in the world are not do to a lack of market forces - there are other ways to organize human activity that are frequently more effective than a free market. Markets have a place, but they are not the only mechanism for cooperation.
That would be Active ex-developers, ex-developers, ex-developers. (and the action had better be dodge or duck)
In 1958, two engineers at Cambridge designed large rubberized boats, called dracones, to carry fluids in water. By making these multisectioned, they can actually be quite tough. This design has been used in many parts of the globe for decades. If the fabric cover is damged, only the contents of one section can be lost. Inflatable life rafts use the same principle. I would assume that a helium filled airship would use this principle as well. It will not be designed like a ballon so that failure will 'pop' the shell and it will not be designed so that a single failure will destroy the airship. Of course, it can still be shot down, but that is the main reason to make it unmanned.
But they are not the real Dr. Seuss, they are just a POZEr.
Wikipedia has a few articles that might interest you. Please look at Stack Smashing Protection to learn about canaries and tools such as ProPolice. ProPolice is part of gcc, so you can build practially any open source OS with this protection today. (This makes buffer overflows much more difficult, if not impossible.) It should not surprise any Slashdot reader to learn that OpenBSD uses this by default. OpenBSD also adds W^X protection to each page. It is ironic that you reference Intel on a no execution bit. If you read some of the developer comments from the OpenBSD team, it is pretty clear that AMD 's 64-bit processors and all RISC processors have better implementations of the no-execute bit than does Intel. It is doubly ironic that you mention Microsoft for Data Execution Prevention, since this sure seems like they are trying to appear to be the inovator of this technique. This is pretty typical for MS, and it explains why many people seem to believe that MS inovates and free software copies. The reality, in this case and many others, is often the opposite.
When a patch is measured in the tens of MB, you can bet that it addressed multiple issues. It is was only addressing one issue, like an typical patch for an open source project, it would be a diff file that measures no more than a few kB.
If the image is a jpeg format, then no. If the file is a WMF file with a JPG extension, then I think the answer is Yes. Firefox 1.5 will ask you if you want to view the WMF file (at which point you had better say 'No'). With IE and Firefox 1.0, my understanding is that the wmf file (regardless of its extension) will be automatically viewed and this is enough to get your Windows PC infected.
In HTML, you can consider the data in the head to be 'metadata'. See the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The data in the head is 'invisible' to a web surfer (save for the title), but quite useful for the upcoming 'Semantic Web' and even for filtering on Google. However, since statisitically speaking, there are more people that lie than correclty use this metadata, it doesn't seem that it helps your PageRank with Google to have accurate metadata. In any case, this sort of data will not corrupt the rest of the file, e.g. the 'body' if the html.
I don't agree with the views of intelligent designer, but I tried to reproduce their arguements. I agree that much of their argument is due to the lack of imagination as to how other physical systems might be able to give rise to 'life'. The argument that this is simply the Anthropic Principle is useful, but it is not definitive in the way that the agreement between QED and measurement is. The Anthropic Prinicple has always struck me as valid for a philosphy of science, but is not itself scientific. Again, my personal belief is in Evolution and a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, all governed by natural law and without the intervention of a deity. I don't have a quarrel with the 'second sort' of intelligent design folks, but I have a huge quarrel with the Young Earth Creationists.
The first is just a new name for Young Earth Creationists (YEC). These are the people that insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis' Creation and Flood stories. They attack Evolution for every perceived weakness. This is the 'God in the Gaps' idea. I think that this is an awful view of God, since every discovery becomes an attack on God. This view make every honest investigator a villain. This is the same nonsense that make Galileo a threat to the Catholic Church during the Renaisance. The Catholic Church, and the mainstream Protestant Churches have learn and they are not making this issue a source of division between themselves and science. The YEC crowd is still holding to this view, so they are in constant combat with science.
The second sort of ID advocate says something like
This second sort of ID should not be threatening to 'mainstream' science, since every wonderful scientific discovery is just more evidence of God's brillance. This is not 'God in the Cracks', this is 'God behind the Science'. I view this sort of ID as a 'philosophy of science,' largely becuase I don't quite see how they can make a testable hypothesis. As the parent post notes, there is room for Truth that is not scientific.
This sort of ID can also embrace Genesis as a metaphor. In fact, is should be no surprise that many see the Big Bang as evidence for a Creator. This sort of ID should actually be quite threatening to the YEC, since it denies the literal intepretation of Genesis.
Of course, in many Christian traditions, it is considered blastphemy to call the Bible perfect. The Bible is the inspired Word of God as interpreted by a long series of impefect humans. So, insisting on Biblical inerancy should properly be attacked on both scientific and religous grounds. If you take this view, imagine yourself as a late Stone Age scribe. God chooses you to recieve the story of creation and evolution. You don't know calculus, so you have to get the simplified version. You also don't have much use for numbers larger than a thousand, so the explanation of the time scales doesn't mean much to you. So we'll go with 'a day is as a thousand years in the eyes of God' and just compress 'ages' into 'days'. I actually think that the Genesis Creation story (up to the stuff about Eve anyhow) is a halfway decent summary of the history of the universe in a few sentences.
In case anyone hasn't figured this out, I really want to see the Young Earth Creationists squirm. I think that they have an immature theology and they are boorishly trying to force their immaturity on the rest of us.
Just think how Newton feels (and all the other physicsts that have worked at Cambridge, Oxford and the other fine Universities of the United Kingdom for that matter) when his homeland fails to comprehend conservation of energy. Heck, even most Slashdotters seem to be figuring this out.
Please look at the OpenOpenOffice project The plug in is already under way, at least if you have network access or are willing to install OpenOpenOffice locally. OpenOffice can already read & write Microsoft formats, so it makes sense to leverage this in the OpenOpenOffice solution. Of course, this doesn't help if Microsoft decides to sue OpeOffice for implementing MS Office Open XML, but that would result in a seperate firestorm of criticism for Microsoft, espeically overseas. The OpenOpenOffice solution is simple (as in elegant, not as in brain dead) & should be done long before January 2007. A cottage industry for OpenOffice is already underway.