This could probably be separated into sub-genres (and there are a LOT of them that fall into "Science Fiction") as some are different enough to be hard to compare one to another. That said, a few thoughts:
First: IMDB says that "Inception" and "Star Wars V" are tied for first place, so clearly they win!
Second: A movie I haven't seen mentioned in the forum is Mad Max Fury Road, which probably won more academy awards than all the rest combined, so clearly it wins!
Some good mentions, in Bladerunner, Dune, and Brazil for some older movies... Special mention to the chap above who went with Starship Troopers... slow clap... (perhaps for Fifth Element also) I'd always considered Primer as the #1 time travel movie, however I am reminded that 12 Monkeys is also... Equilibrium was another one that was low budget but very interesting.
I'd say in terms of modern science fiction Moon is pretty hard to beat in terms of quality.
I'd say in terms of simply one of my favorites would be Serenity.
In the thriller category, there is of course Alien and Aliens. However I've probably watched Event Horizon more times than is healthy, and similarly another guilty pleasure is Pandorum. Heck throw in Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick (even if the later is a bit cheesy).
That said the movie I am most looking forward to is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and while many may disqualify that from the conversation because of the whole comic book genre, it has enough science fiction elements in it that I think it more than deserves mention.
(and others Arrival, Contact, Matrix, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Interstellar, The Martian, Children of Men, Gravity, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc...)
In particular I think it interesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger has done so many science fiction movies, though a bit cheesy, and that so has Tom Cruise although I've found his largely forgettable even though usually big movies.
In summary I don't really know, and like a lot of science fiction! I think the best I could do is to say probably the best traditional science fiction movie would be Moon, and probably my favorite would be Serenity.
Indeed. All the "light" hogwash aside, all the proposed benefits are also moot. RAM or memory in general do not consume a great amount of power. Compared to other components, they already consume probably the least amount of power. So should the improvement even be astronomical, in real terms it is moot.
Depending on your device, your consumers of power are going to be your GPU or your CPU, or on something like your phone, your display, by many orders of magnitude over whatever the memory might be using. While memory does generate some heat, again it isn't anything like the above.
So while perhaps it might be interesting, and even a breakthrough in a number of ways, it's impact it terms of power consumption and heat generation in most devices will be very small. Even faster, or thinner, you start running into bottlenecks (i,e. RAM is already one of the fastest parts of your device likely), when you start interacting with actual storage, or having to do scheduling and timing with GPU/CPU etc... Cool that it's Canadian at least, hopefully it pans out.
Actually first card might have been EGA or CGA, don't remember and can't really remember the difference other than they weren't as good... E was Enhanced, forget what the C was (Color probably)... I remember having to mess with the RAM every time I wanted to play a game. It had a hard drive, though I'm sure it was tiny, but I forget what size. Didn't have Windows, ran a DOS shell... Good times.
Also had the TRS-80, thought not sure what model. I do recall my dad bought the expanded memory module which added a significant (at the time) amount of memory, something like 16-64kb range. Never had floppy drives which would have been nice. Had the cassette tape drive, which I recall was horrible and never really worked very well. Briefly had a VIC-20 which I think we borrowed from someone. Was jealous of friends Commodore64 at the time because of all the games available. I'd say my first real "modern" computer was a 286 clone... I remember smiling in hindsight that it had a "Turbo" button on the front (which I had always on), which made it go from something like 3.8Mhz to 4.2Mhz lol! Was monochrome, but first upgrade was to get a VGA card and a 2400 baud modem and the rest is history...
#1 North Korea has the 4th largest military in the world. Larger than Russia. Now while you can discount that by saying that it isn't the most modern, and that much of the technology is old 1960 Russian hand me downs, it by no means has a "relatively weak military". Much of the technology of war hasn't changed all that significantly in terms of what is an effective rifle or what is traditional artillery. Times that by a million or so soldiers and that is no small thing. Sure their motive assets like navy, planes, and armor aren't exactly on par with more modern standards, but again they have more than a significant amount, and if you are talking about a land war, it is still won or lost by boots on the ground, and they have a lot of boots.
#2 Having said that, it is my opinion at least, that should NK step too far out of line it will be their #1 ally, and also #1 on the largest military in the world list that will put the firm hand on NK's shoulder, none other than China. They have more to lose than anyone by NK going rogue, already strategically placed (i.e. they share a border and are not oceans away). The counter point to that is if pushed to defend NK, that would be larger issue. For China, should NK collapse one way or another, their issue would be how to deal with millions upon millions of refugees, never mind the now unemployed million plus military armed with surplus weapons...
One of the nice things I noticed, was the scheduling would be a lot different for summer school (probably due to less scheduling, and more rooms available).
As mentioned in an earlier post, at least at the university I attended, there seemed to be a trend that all science courses were in the morning, while the arts would be later in the day...:(
However not so in the summer (probably because the profs didn't even want to), which was a nice change to have an afternoon computer science class. etc...
I passed one of my harder (at least for me) computer science classes in the summer I like to think because it was more relaxed, later in the day, smaller class size, etc...
"News at 11." - Not sure if that was intentional or not lol!:p
Also learning occurs much better if you show up I've found (and or can stay awake if you do).
My first year of university I had a Math Stats 150 course that started at 8am. The material is pretty dry to begin with, and to top it off the professor would give Farris Bueller a run for his money (Bueller... Bueller....). At any rate my dorm neighbor and I had an agreement if I woke up I would get him up, and vice versa. The end result was that neither of us made the class. Eventually be both dropped the course, and I needed to take it over again (pre-req).
On top of that, one thing I found irritating was that at least at my University the general trend seemed to be that the more sciency the course the earlier the class was, and they more artsy the later it was, which seemed profoundly unfair to me (I don't think I had a single math class that wasn't early). Particularly considering that your probably need to be more on your edge for something as exacting as hard science VS something that is more wishy washy.
"tipped off to a possible problem in July, when their computer network support team got an alert that a computer "exceeded a daily internet usage threshold."
Might want to run a black light over that room, then maybe bleach...
I think a lot of those values might be a bit suspect.
#1 Apparently Greece has high taxes, but do people pay them? Anyway with everything that has happened there in the last couple of years perhaps that is why they are higher, or perhaps reporting just isn't very good.
#2) This is basically saying that the US pays MORE income tax than Canada. As someone who pays Canadian taxes, I find that very hard to believe.
#3) It said parents in Canada pay on average 12% income tax (a 19% difference)? While not a parent, I do know some, and I find that very hard to believe also. Should that be the case I should probably start making some babies.
As someone that has to deal with legacy systems all the time this made me chuckle a little bit.
Oft times these systems are neglected for decades in favor of the flavor of the day technology, which typically fizzles and dies. While these systems plod along doing the job, picking up more than a few quirks from having the business rules change every other year and constantly re-designing a system that was meant to do one thing many decades ago. Yet never actually replace because it is not only too expensive to do so, but almost inconceivable due to the above mentioned fact that no one really knows how it does what it does anymore.
I've seen my share of really weird design choices where I was like "They probably did this crazy thing to get around that crazy bit" sort of logic.
I did COBOL in University. While I would agree that it has the *potential* to be one of the easiest to understand languages if used properly, like any programming language can be done badly by poor choices. There are probably some really good ones out there were they were forced to use good naming conventions, but there are probably others where perhaps it predated good technique. I will say from my own experience I found it rather easy for the simple things we did, and that if one used proper naming it basically commented itself almost.
That said, COBOL is also a pretty verbose language, more less meaning that while fast processing, could be a real chore to read through all the lines of code whereas a more modern language might have been more succinct.
While a slippery slope I'd question, or at least be a bit critical of those stats. I say this because I believe in certain cases the actual reporting to which those stats get built from are going to be highly influenced by how easy it might be for the victim to come forward and report the rape in the first place. The three countries you list, I suspect would likely have many challenges to the reporting I think.
While I wouldn't call it something I miss, more of an observation: I found that computer games rarely just "worked". You had to in many cases reconfigure your system each time specifically for the game you were trying to play. Adjusting memory settings, and trying eek out whatever you could from your hardware to play Curse of the Azure Bonds or whatever. This usually involved things like boot disks, and making batch files. I recall building a shell specific to running a number of different batch file configurations for various games. Bottom line, having to do all that sort of BS is what got me into computers in the first place, and ultimately led to my education, and career. Never mind all the BBS type stuff prior to any really access to the "internet". Today everything more less just works, I'm not sure what would inspire kids today.
Though I recall one funny instance, where I bought a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 (I think it was 4), and my 286 didn't have a CD-ROM at that point, so I had to search around a bit to find a copy that had the 3.5in floppies... Only to find that there was a good reason, in that it involved installing it from 30 or 40 floppy disks... I remember that was a PITA! Heh, Just had a memory of the Red Baron which was super fun also...
Other than the hilarity and the lulz of it all, one could argue that the hacker did them a favor by highlighting a flaw in their security in a fairly harmless way which will now be fixed to prevent it from happening again. Though unlikely, should such flaws be taken advantage of in a more nefarious way they could be used to deactivate during an actual attack or otherwise mess with the system for criminal intent.
Ah Tradwars, good times! I also had a handy 2400 baud modem, I recall racing home from school to get my turns in for the day. It basically prompted the 2nd phone line after Mom would pick up the phone and no carrier me, causing much yelling... Kinda surprised a MM internet version re-boot was never developed, seems like one of the more fantastically popular games in hindsight.
I think possibly one assumption people are making is that it had to be "Assad" OR "the Rebels".
This is a civil war that has been raging for 6 years. Also you have a Dictator who is in power due to his control of the military and Russian support. Perhaps Assad doesn't have the control he once had over his military, perhaps he doesn't have the Russian political support he once had. There could be other internal political agendas as work here outside US/Russia and Assad/Rebels. Remember this is a pretty fractured country. Perhaps someone in Assad's military decided it was time for some political change. Perhaps the Russia support is waning, or the war isn't going so well and required some show of force.
Who knows. I doubt it was all the conspiracy theory of US/Rebel false flag bs being thrown around on Slashdot. Heck could be some grunt at the airfield loading the wrong payloads, or running out of conventional bombs they decided to breakout the perfectly good chemical ones just sitting there doing nothing. Anyway assuming that Assad ordered it done intentionally is also assuming he has complete control over his military which may not be the case.
Anyway the fact that the US targeted the airfield was probably the best response, seeing as that was where the chemical weapons seemingly come from. 60 cruise missiles seems a bit overkill, but then again this was primarily about sending a message to Assad, physical damage was a secondary spin-off. This was also a not so subtle message to Russia, and a more nuanced one to the UN (and their inability to take any action).
While I am kind of curious how digital files of any complexity can be converted into a QR Code, even a really big one, I am also kinda curious if anyone will know WTF a QR Code is in 10 or 20 years.
I guess it must be some sort of Microfiche hybrid. In looking at options for large scale digital document storage and archives it became clear that old microfiche has held up pretty well over the test of time and is still the defacto standard in many cases.
This web comic (while a older one) is my favorite description of how that fight would go, even given Bats detective smarts and preparation time with gadgets etc...
I said the same thing about the Star Wars prequels, particularly for the older Anakin Skywalker. I didn`t think the actor deserved all the flack he got. Sure, I didn`t think he did a fantastic job, however you could have taken a much better and more accomplished actor, and unless they really went off script, would still have to read the same stupid lines... No matter how good the delivery if the writing sucks, it sucks.
We're currently looking into a number of CRM type platforms (we haven't landed on a single one yet, though both Salesforce and Dynamics are in the mix) to try an consolidate and replace a number of legacy systems, mostly from a cost, consistency, and interoperability standpoint. Our business isn't sales. However two points; One as you mention with a bit of creativity it can be applied to anything really to a less or greater degree depending on what you are doing, and Two is that it doesn't mean you cannot do custom work on top of it, only that you need to try and minimize it (because that is the advantage of the CRM, and probably more importantly each time they release a new version of said CRM may break whatever it is your custom crap did).
An example I thought about would be tracking and invoicing Royalties collected from a mining operation. So while it isn't selling "Widgets", you could create a product of "1 Tonne of Aggregate" or whatever the commodity is assigning it the accepted value (say 0.75$), so when the mining client reports in the extraction of 315,600 tonnes of material (ideally directly into the CRM), it can automatically calculate the Royalty bill of 236,700$ and sent it off. Doing this with all clients, storing the data, and being able to run metrics on it over years, would be great. Could contain the client information with all the mine specifications etc... Anyway it just takes a bit of imagination and thinking outside of the box to apply a CRM to something other then "I'm a store, and I sell things to customers" model.
Outside of his many academic accomplishments, him simply being alive gives a lot of people hope probably.
Most people that get diagnosed with ALS are dead within 2-4 years, many times because it is hard to diagnose or is miss-diagnosed. Also it is incurable, and impacts different people differently. Hawking was diagnosed as a relatively young man, and is still around 40+ years later, now talking about going to space.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I've just solved Climate Change. Apparently all we have to do is sue it into oblivion, that'll do the trick!
This could probably be separated into sub-genres (and there are a LOT of them that fall into "Science Fiction") as some are different enough to be hard to compare one to another. That said, a few thoughts:
First:
IMDB says that "Inception" and "Star Wars V" are tied for first place, so clearly they win!
Second:
A movie I haven't seen mentioned in the forum is Mad Max Fury Road, which probably won more academy awards than all the rest combined, so clearly it wins!
Some good mentions, in Bladerunner, Dune, and Brazil for some older movies...
Special mention to the chap above who went with Starship Troopers... slow clap... (perhaps for Fifth Element also)
I'd always considered Primer as the #1 time travel movie, however I am reminded that 12 Monkeys is also...
Equilibrium was another one that was low budget but very interesting.
I'd say in terms of modern science fiction Moon is pretty hard to beat in terms of quality.
I'd say in terms of simply one of my favorites would be Serenity.
In the thriller category, there is of course Alien and Aliens. However I've probably watched Event Horizon more times than is healthy, and similarly another guilty pleasure is Pandorum. Heck throw in Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick (even if the later is a bit cheesy).
That said the movie I am most looking forward to is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and while many may disqualify that from the conversation because of the whole comic book genre, it has enough science fiction elements in it that I think it more than deserves mention.
(and others Arrival, Contact, Matrix, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Interstellar, The Martian, Children of Men, Gravity, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc...)
In particular I think it interesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger has done so many science fiction movies, though a bit cheesy, and that so has Tom Cruise although I've found his largely forgettable even though usually big movies.
In summary I don't really know, and like a lot of science fiction! I think the best I could do is to say probably the best traditional science fiction movie would be Moon, and probably my favorite would be Serenity.
Indeed. All the "light" hogwash aside, all the proposed benefits are also moot. RAM or memory in general do not consume a great amount of power. Compared to other components, they already consume probably the least amount of power. So should the improvement even be astronomical, in real terms it is moot.
Depending on your device, your consumers of power are going to be your GPU or your CPU, or on something like your phone, your display, by many orders of magnitude over whatever the memory might be using. While memory does generate some heat, again it isn't anything like the above.
So while perhaps it might be interesting, and even a breakthrough in a number of ways, it's impact it terms of power consumption and heat generation in most devices will be very small. Even faster, or thinner, you start running into bottlenecks (i,e. RAM is already one of the fastest parts of your device likely), when you start interacting with actual storage, or having to do scheduling and timing with GPU/CPU etc... Cool that it's Canadian at least, hopefully it pans out.
Actually first card might have been EGA or CGA, don't remember and can't really remember the difference other than they weren't as good... E was Enhanced, forget what the C was (Color probably)... I remember having to mess with the RAM every time I wanted to play a game. It had a hard drive, though I'm sure it was tiny, but I forget what size. Didn't have Windows, ran a DOS shell... Good times.
Also had the TRS-80, thought not sure what model. I do recall my dad bought the expanded memory module which added a significant (at the time) amount of memory, something like 16-64kb range. Never had floppy drives which would have been nice. Had the cassette tape drive, which I recall was horrible and never really worked very well. Briefly had a VIC-20 which I think we borrowed from someone. Was jealous of friends Commodore64 at the time because of all the games available. I'd say my first real "modern" computer was a 286 clone... I remember smiling in hindsight that it had a "Turbo" button on the front (which I had always on), which made it go from something like 3.8Mhz to 4.2Mhz lol! Was monochrome, but first upgrade was to get a VGA card and a 2400 baud modem and the rest is history...
Um no.
#1 North Korea has the 4th largest military in the world. Larger than Russia. Now while you can discount that by saying that it isn't the most modern, and that much of the technology is old 1960 Russian hand me downs, it by no means has a "relatively weak military". Much of the technology of war hasn't changed all that significantly in terms of what is an effective rifle or what is traditional artillery. Times that by a million or so soldiers and that is no small thing. Sure their motive assets like navy, planes, and armor aren't exactly on par with more modern standards, but again they have more than a significant amount, and if you are talking about a land war, it is still won or lost by boots on the ground, and they have a lot of boots.
#2 Having said that, it is my opinion at least, that should NK step too far out of line it will be their #1 ally, and also #1 on the largest military in the world list that will put the firm hand on NK's shoulder, none other than China. They have more to lose than anyone by NK going rogue, already strategically placed (i.e. they share a border and are not oceans away). The counter point to that is if pushed to defend NK, that would be larger issue. For China, should NK collapse one way or another, their issue would be how to deal with millions upon millions of refugees, never mind the now unemployed million plus military armed with surplus weapons...
One of the nice things I noticed, was the scheduling would be a lot different for summer school (probably due to less scheduling, and more rooms available).
As mentioned in an earlier post, at least at the university I attended, there seemed to be a trend that all science courses were in the morning, while the arts would be later in the day... :(
However not so in the summer (probably because the profs didn't even want to), which was a nice change to have an afternoon computer science class. etc...
I passed one of my harder (at least for me) computer science classes in the summer I like to think because it was more relaxed, later in the day, smaller class size, etc...
"News at 11." - Not sure if that was intentional or not lol! :p
Also learning occurs much better if you show up I've found (and or can stay awake if you do).
My first year of university I had a Math Stats 150 course that started at 8am. The material is pretty dry to begin with, and to top it off the professor would give Farris Bueller a run for his money (Bueller... Bueller....). At any rate my dorm neighbor and I had an agreement if I woke up I would get him up, and vice versa. The end result was that neither of us made the class. Eventually be both dropped the course, and I needed to take it over again (pre-req).
On top of that, one thing I found irritating was that at least at my University the general trend seemed to be that the more sciency the course the earlier the class was, and they more artsy the later it was, which seemed profoundly unfair to me (I don't think I had a single math class that wasn't early). Particularly considering that your probably need to be more on your edge for something as exacting as hard science VS something that is more wishy washy.
"tipped off to a possible problem in July, when their computer network support team got an alert that a computer "exceeded a daily internet usage threshold."
Might want to run a black light over that room, then maybe bleach...
I think a lot of those values might be a bit suspect.
#1 Apparently Greece has high taxes, but do people pay them? Anyway with everything that has happened there in the last couple of years perhaps that is why they are higher, or perhaps reporting just isn't very good.
#2) This is basically saying that the US pays MORE income tax than Canada. As someone who pays Canadian taxes, I find that very hard to believe.
#3) It said parents in Canada pay on average 12% income tax (a 19% difference)? While not a parent, I do know some, and I find that very hard to believe also. Should that be the case I should probably start making some babies.
As someone that has to deal with legacy systems all the time this made me chuckle a little bit.
Oft times these systems are neglected for decades in favor of the flavor of the day technology, which typically fizzles and dies. While these systems plod along doing the job, picking up more than a few quirks from having the business rules change every other year and constantly re-designing a system that was meant to do one thing many decades ago. Yet never actually replace because it is not only too expensive to do so, but almost inconceivable due to the above mentioned fact that no one really knows how it does what it does anymore.
I've seen my share of really weird design choices where I was like "They probably did this crazy thing to get around that crazy bit" sort of logic.
I did COBOL in University. While I would agree that it has the *potential* to be one of the easiest to understand languages if used properly, like any programming language can be done badly by poor choices. There are probably some really good ones out there were they were forced to use good naming conventions, but there are probably others where perhaps it predated good technique. I will say from my own experience I found it rather easy for the simple things we did, and that if one used proper naming it basically commented itself almost.
That said, COBOL is also a pretty verbose language, more less meaning that while fast processing, could be a real chore to read through all the lines of code whereas a more modern language might have been more succinct.
While a slippery slope I'd question, or at least be a bit critical of those stats. I say this because I believe in certain cases the actual reporting to which those stats get built from are going to be highly influenced by how easy it might be for the victim to come forward and report the rape in the first place. The three countries you list, I suspect would likely have many challenges to the reporting I think.
While I wouldn't call it something I miss, more of an observation:
I found that computer games rarely just "worked". You had to in many cases reconfigure your system each time specifically for the game you were trying to play. Adjusting memory settings, and trying eek out whatever you could from your hardware to play Curse of the Azure Bonds or whatever. This usually involved things like boot disks, and making batch files. I recall building a shell specific to running a number of different batch file configurations for various games. Bottom line, having to do all that sort of BS is what got me into computers in the first place, and ultimately led to my education, and career. Never mind all the BBS type stuff prior to any really access to the "internet". Today everything more less just works, I'm not sure what would inspire kids today.
Though I recall one funny instance, where I bought a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 (I think it was 4), and my 286 didn't have a CD-ROM at that point, so I had to search around a bit to find a copy that had the 3.5in floppies... Only to find that there was a good reason, in that it involved installing it from 30 or 40 floppy disks... I remember that was a PITA! Heh, Just had a memory of the Red Baron which was super fun also...
Other than the hilarity and the lulz of it all, one could argue that the hacker did them a favor by highlighting a flaw in their security in a fairly harmless way which will now be fixed to prevent it from happening again. Though unlikely, should such flaws be taken advantage of in a more nefarious way they could be used to deactivate during an actual attack or otherwise mess with the system for criminal intent.
Ah Tradwars, good times! I also had a handy 2400 baud modem, I recall racing home from school to get my turns in for the day. It basically prompted the 2nd phone line after Mom would pick up the phone and no carrier me, causing much yelling... Kinda surprised a MM internet version re-boot was never developed, seems like one of the more fantastically popular games in hindsight.
I think possibly one assumption people are making is that it had to be "Assad" OR "the Rebels".
This is a civil war that has been raging for 6 years. Also you have a Dictator who is in power due to his control of the military and Russian support. Perhaps Assad doesn't have the control he once had over his military, perhaps he doesn't have the Russian political support he once had. There could be other internal political agendas as work here outside US/Russia and Assad/Rebels. Remember this is a pretty fractured country. Perhaps someone in Assad's military decided it was time for some political change. Perhaps the Russia support is waning, or the war isn't going so well and required some show of force.
Who knows. I doubt it was all the conspiracy theory of US/Rebel false flag bs being thrown around on Slashdot. Heck could be some grunt at the airfield loading the wrong payloads, or running out of conventional bombs they decided to breakout the perfectly good chemical ones just sitting there doing nothing. Anyway assuming that Assad ordered it done intentionally is also assuming he has complete control over his military which may not be the case.
Anyway the fact that the US targeted the airfield was probably the best response, seeing as that was where the chemical weapons seemingly come from. 60 cruise missiles seems a bit overkill, but then again this was primarily about sending a message to Assad, physical damage was a secondary spin-off. This was also a not so subtle message to Russia, and a more nuanced one to the UN (and their inability to take any action).
where I've already been 21 times before... Not quite Star Trek ;p
Considering that the conservation of angular momentum is more of a *balance* of attraction, it is quite literally the opposite.
While I am kind of curious how digital files of any complexity can be converted into a QR Code, even a really big one, I am also kinda curious if anyone will know WTF a QR Code is in 10 or 20 years.
I guess it must be some sort of Microfiche hybrid. In looking at options for large scale digital document storage and archives it became clear that old microfiche has held up pretty well over the test of time and is still the defacto standard in many cases.
I say we go with Mentats and Microfiches...
Well it has swung the other way as well where people were being accused of being communist and getting blacklisted etc...
Basically people don't like other people who don't agree with them I guess.
My fav: "inconsistent with our project's goals"... Uh, your software project has sexual goals?
This web comic (while a older one) is my favorite description of how that fight would go, even given Bats detective smarts and preparation time with gadgets etc...
http://biggercheese.com/index....
I said the same thing about the Star Wars prequels, particularly for the older Anakin Skywalker. I didn`t think the actor deserved all the flack he got. Sure, I didn`t think he did a fantastic job, however you could have taken a much better and more accomplished actor, and unless they really went off script, would still have to read the same stupid lines... No matter how good the delivery if the writing sucks, it sucks.
We're currently looking into a number of CRM type platforms (we haven't landed on a single one yet, though both Salesforce and Dynamics are in the mix) to try an consolidate and replace a number of legacy systems, mostly from a cost, consistency, and interoperability standpoint. Our business isn't sales. However two points; One as you mention with a bit of creativity it can be applied to anything really to a less or greater degree depending on what you are doing, and Two is that it doesn't mean you cannot do custom work on top of it, only that you need to try and minimize it (because that is the advantage of the CRM, and probably more importantly each time they release a new version of said CRM may break whatever it is your custom crap did).
An example I thought about would be tracking and invoicing Royalties collected from a mining operation. So while it isn't selling "Widgets", you could create a product of "1 Tonne of Aggregate" or whatever the commodity is assigning it the accepted value (say 0.75$), so when the mining client reports in the extraction of 315,600 tonnes of material (ideally directly into the CRM), it can automatically calculate the Royalty bill of 236,700$ and sent it off. Doing this with all clients, storing the data, and being able to run metrics on it over years, would be great. Could contain the client information with all the mine specifications etc... Anyway it just takes a bit of imagination and thinking outside of the box to apply a CRM to something other then "I'm a store, and I sell things to customers" model.
Outside of his many academic accomplishments, him simply being alive gives a lot of people hope probably.
Most people that get diagnosed with ALS are dead within 2-4 years, many times because it is hard to diagnose or is miss-diagnosed. Also it is incurable, and impacts different people differently. Hawking was diagnosed as a relatively young man, and is still around 40+ years later, now talking about going to space.