Exactly. And it shows up in the data too. Are we *really* supposed to believe that Gentoo in 2004 was more "popular" than Ubuntu in 2010? That doesn't pass the stink test.
Assuming that fact is true, the only way it can be explained is if each Gentoo user had (for some inexplicable reason...) to do many times the google searches about Gentoo than the average Ubuntu user had to do for theirs.
I don't know how you can justify the idea that google searches are proportional to popularity, unless you are willing to say that an individual person's like of something is proportional to the number of times they google it.
And I'll finish by saying that I'm sure I've googled Gentoo Linux more than I have Ubuntu or Fedora, wheras I've installed the later two on a dozen or more computers, wheras the former on exactly 0.
If you're in the east bay, you might want to stop by the Valley Life Sciences Building (usually abbreviated VLSB) and their Paleontology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus. They have a lot of cool stuff, although for most of it not necessarily from a child's perspective. However, what they *do* have is a full sized assembled T-Rex, which is pretty impressive to see, for curious children of all ages.
This is a little out there (mainly because the guy who called it "inhumane" was the one who was bothered by it), but I'd say it was inhumane to the Colonel. It can't be inhumane to destroy a robot that has no sense of pleasure or pain, hope or fear, but if the Colonel has bonded to the robot and is being forced to participate in its destruction, it could be inhumane to him.
for what it's worth, this definition syncs nicely with my own thinking about this case.
While I tend to be fairly anti-lawsuit with regards to slander/libel issues on the internet, here I end up more in Fuzzy's camp, precisely because wikipedia is a serious (modulo interesting discussions on how trustworthy online wikis can be) online reference. So with that said, to your three criterion.
1. Must be false.
-- Don't think anything needs be said about this.
2. It must have been uttered in *full knowledge of its falsehood*, or in reckless disregard for the truth.
-- Because of the authoritative encyclopedia nature of wikipedia, in my view the bar is rather low here. As opposed to something like an online forum, where "I heard it through the grapevine" would be adequate to disprove "full knowledge of falsehood", given that wikipedia is supposed to be an authoritative encyclopedia, if an editor doesn't have some direct evidence of the facts (I suspect wikipedia requires this as well), to me, they easily meet the criterion of reckless disregard for the truth.
3. Must have been issued with malice.
-- Given wikipedia's nature as an authoritative reference, falsehoods on it are necessarily more serious than if they were printed elsewhere. If someone writes falsehoods about someone in an encyclopedia, what could the reason be besides to get people to think that, and if so, how can that not be malicious?
So in conclusion, I think your definition fits well with this case:
Because wikipedia is an encyclopedia, I think Fuzzy should win if and only if the other person put it in there without any evidence it was true -- he must have had *some* basis in evidence for what he wrote. As far as I am concerned, that is a totally fair standard.
To me, label is different than tag, although I don't see a point in users getting their panties in a twist over the distinction.
A tag is an association of a word (a database key) with data so that you can search on the tag and pull up the data that has been marked.
Currently, this process describes both what the users are doing, say with gmail, and presumably what the software is doing on the back end.
However, I can think of any number of ways the experience can be extended for users, while retaining the same architecture. For instance, consider a shared email system. One might define tags like "Support" and "User feedback", and when emails are applied with by these tags tags, are automatically assigned other tags, such as department or user that should handle the email.
At this point, there isn't such a clear 1-1 relationship between what the user is doing, and the system is doing, making it appropriate that a new word be added. Labels are more abstract, and are what users do; tags are concrete and are how labels are implemented.
By analogy, this quiz is the rough equivelent of having people pick from a group of crack-head prostitutes the one without disease, and when they fail, telling them they know nothing about safe sex.
Safe sex, like safe browsing, ended before the the first question on the test.
There is no safe sex by trying to pick only the disease-free crackhead prostitutes.
There is no safe browsing by trying to pick the free smilies site that won't blow your computer up.
There is value in mininimizing risk where it's found, but to me, safe browsing and downloading FREE SMILIES!!! from some popup window are mutually exclusive activities.
That said, their product does have merit, probably. I just wished it was marketed as what it is:
"You're a dumbass, and are going to do dumbass things. Maybe you need a net."
While the reviewer clearly fawns a bit over the look of the monitor, I disagree in general that the review is that great.
Tom concludes:
The touch-sensitive buttons are not sensitive enough, and if you change adjustments often, they are a problem. And why did Asus have to use the glare-filter technology?... The same monitor without the filter would perform much better.
The selling price, around $400, is far from excessive for a monitor of this quality. The finish is exceptional. It's probably the best-looking monitor available on the market today. And beyond the good looks, the picture is very sharp and the colors are very good in video games. In itself, the PW191 is a good product, but it's obvious that the panel was poorly chosen. It's slower than its competitors, yet doesn't solve the video-noise problems that plague them. We're waiting for the 20" version in the hope that these problems will be taken care of.
So, all in all, not a bad review. But besides the fact they think it looks real cool, it seems like a normal B, B+ monitor.
I skimmed through the appendix from the report on the American Institutes for Research webpage (http://www.air.org/news/default.aspx#pew), and while they don't explicity say what universities, here's what they have to say for themselves:
The NSACS assessment was administered to a nationally representative sample of 1,827 students across eighty 2- and 4-year institutions. The NSACS sample was a two-stage, stratified random sample with the first stage of selection a sample of degree-granting 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions and the second stage of selection a sample of students in their last year of a degree at these institutions. Institutions were selected through a systematic random sampling procedure, with sampling probabilities proportionate to size (PPS). The measure of size was the number of full- and part-time degree-seeking students in either their second year and up (for 2-year institutions) or their fourth year and up (for 4-year institutions), as measured by the 1998-1999 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) dataset. Explicit strata were defined by 2-year/4-year status.
The second stage of selection consisted of a sample of full- and part-time degree-seeking students at 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions who had accumulated enough credits to be eligible to graduate in spring 2003. The sampling design was a stratified systematic random sample. The alphabet as applied to the last and first name of students was used as an implicit stratifying variable.
Well if you like foreigners taking amrican cartooning jobs from hardworking American cartoonists, you'll love this. Yet another example of corporate fat cats taking the bread out of John Q. AmericanCartoonist's mouth, along with mother and baby, by outsourcing his job to some foreign cartoonist. And if Ye Olde Fatte Cats do go ahead with this treasonous plan, they at least could have had the good taste to get rid of Jim Davis. That guy sucks
Money can't buy happiness, true, but I'd rather be unhappy watching my big screen tv on my awesome round-the-world yacht than be unhappy while living in the poorhouse. Some nice courtside basketball tickets and a porche that goes 250mph may not ultimately make me happy, but I wouldn't mind give them a try.
Skilled players (or players using the free mode) can get the katamari up to 900-some meters, and the effect of doing so, sucking up rainbows and clouds (which recent studies as of a year ago show to weigh, individually, more than all the elephants that have ever existed on the planet) and eventually bobbling around, fat and useless, in the middle of the ocean, is a big eye-opener.
That's the sentence you decided you go with? Writing once and not revising isn't writing at all. It's typing.
While I think it's really cool that Google is giving a wink and a nod to alternative browsers, OSS, and the whole shebang, I have to wonder how useful this will be. I admit that it has been a long time since I had google toolbar for IE, but I only ever used it for two things: popup blocking and easy access to a google search. Firefox does those things already. So while I like their probable motivation, I don't know how useful the extra % or two of functionality is going to be.
I think instead of porting the IE stuff to FF, google should use the easy extensibility of FF as a way for easy experimentation and come up with some wild stuff that hasn't been seen yet. Firefox is all early adopters; I think google would have great success on all fronts testing out all their really forward thinking ideas on FF and then porting the stuff that works well to IE. As it is, they are being a little inefficient here.
(Cause providing the best search engine, the best free email, and google maps is nowhere near good enough, dammitl. Those lazy bastards aren't taking over the world quickly enough)
"No, of course I didn't waste the time of memorizing all 83K digits, I just worked out Ramanujan's equation in my head."
Ramanujan's Series
This equation would probably be your best shot of calculating pi on the fly. I've heard that each new term in the series gets 4 or 5 new signigicant digits for your approximation of pi (the more famous euler series can take 100 terms to add one siginficant digit onto your approximation). This means you will still need to caculate probably at least 20000 terms in the series. Even with the crazy savants in the world, you clearly aren't going to be able to work that out in your head. By the time you stopped, you would be having to keep 2 83000 digit numbers in your head at one time while adding them together, AND while plugging new values around i=83000 into that formula. That would be most impressive.
I just installed Suse 9.1 on a friend's laptop and it blew me away with how easy it was. I am a not an expert in hardware or in installing linux by any means, so I was really glad when it worked fine right out of the box. The only thing that took any time was getting wireless to work, for which I used ndiswrapper. Even there, 99% of the difficulty was due to my really basic knowledge of networking and stuff like that. And that was for the cheapest laptop my friend could find. Sound, video, everything worked great with the autodetect. So I don't know about any other distros, but my experience with Suse was really good. My 2 cents.
Ok, I spent a couple minutes looking at her paper, and it doesn't seem that ridiculous to my way of thinking. She took the data from 37 previous studies, comprising 1530 samples, and came up with a correlation coeficient of.29. If I remember statistics, that means that roughy 8.5% of the "intelligence soup" is head size. It doesn't in any way guarentee that if your head is larger, you will be a genius, nor that if your head is smaller, you'll be dumb. It just says it's somewhat correlated.
On a side note(one for which I'll probably get blasted), evolutionary biologists use brain cc's as a measure of the evolution of intelligence. Biologists have established that as brain sizes grew, apes got smarter. To their minds, brain size is correlated to intelligence. So to any of the people who are reflexively dismissing this study, is there any reason, other than political, why you think that brain size would correlate with intelligence for 2.5 million years and then would just stop a few thousand years ago? Really, I'm curious.
Apparently the BBC can report on this new model, but they can't seem to say where these papers are being published or what scientists are working on it or at which universities this research is taking place. Michio Kaku posited this might be the case in his book Hyperspace (excellent book) and to my mind, this is on the same level. It is defenitly some interesting stuff to talk about after burning a J, but it hardly rises to the level of scientific model. The Standard Model is a model; this is just fluff, albeit somewhat interesting fluff.
Assuming that the *AA hasn't authorized these companies to repackage and redistribute a crime, as I suspect, the *AA would be wise to make use of this development. Currently, their program of suing everyone doesn't seem to be doing as well as it might; massivly suing teenagers and college students for a crime most regard as reletively victimless is tough going. However, it would appear that these spyware companies are engaging in piracy, and even better, for the sole purpose of making money. I would imagine a really big lawsuit against them would have tremendous popular support, revitalizing the *AA's efforts. A greedy spyware company makes a far better target than poor college kids.
modulo spurious spelling errors
That is a brilliant expresion and you, sir, should be awarded a prize of some sort. I am totally stealing your expression, and I'll be sure to cite you if it ever makes it into print. That will be all.
The best part of it is that the Hayward fault that runs under UC Berkeley is the most likely fault to be the source of the next major quake in N.Cal. While I was there(class of '03), seismologists estimated that there was a 30% chance the next big one in N.Cal would come from that fault, although I think that percentange may have been downgraded since. That fault runs right through the middle of the football stadium, so when they built it, they had to put in expansion joints in the stadium so that the stadium would be ok(the west side is moving north and the east side is moving south). If you go to the stadium and check it out, you'll see that the fault has caused the 2 halves of the stadium to shift probably 24 inches from each other. They also have to flatten out the turf every so often, because the fault causes the field to lose its flatness. If you go to the stadium towards the end of the season, you can usually see where the fault runs on the field. It's well worth checking out one day. Go Bears!
This article works so well considering that it follows immediatly after Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office. I wonder what this author (excellent article, btw) would make of the data from that other "IT Analysis" paper?
I'm usually pretty thick skinned when it comes to getting mad about worthless stories on slashdot, this is too much.
This story has exactly the same value (scientific and otherwise) as a story entitled "one guy thinks OO might be faster than Office" or even "kid says father is the strongest dad in the world". ITEM! Coming to a conclusion and then performing some nonsense experement you pulled out of your ass and finally marveling at your genius after your experement pads your conclusion just wastes everyone's time, including the author. Even more so since I'm sure anyone with 60 seconds could probably find a real side by side comparison online somewhere.
But on a side note, if this guy thinks the problem is Office, and not his box, when his fairly modern computer takes 30+ seconds to load Office, he probably has a very bright future ahead of him selling whatever it is he's smoking.
I saw someone else mentioned TODO list. It's free and doesn't have much advanced functionality, but it my all time favorite program of its type and have to say I imagine it works perfectly for 95% of features. For anyone looking for a todo list type program, or if you are looking for something a lot simpler and more functional, lots of people will back me up on this...
I didn't RTA, but my initial impression is that since cell phone frequencies(and the whole set of human frequency emissions at any given time) don't cover anywhere near 100% of the frequencies that SETI does/could expect a signal might be found in, so no one should expect them to have close to a meaningful impact on SETI's chances of finding something. Human generated EM signals don't take up close to 100% of the available EM room at any given time. Both physical restrictions along with strong government regulation of cell phone/radio/television signals currently stop that from happening. Since SETI is only searches about 1% of the available sky available, even if airpanes take out a whopping 50% of the frequencies available to search in (a highly dubious proposion), they will, at a worse case scenario, be searching all of 2% of the sky. They aren't going to run out of places to look for a signal. A million bucks to start a new Seti@Home will help them 100x more than this will really hurt them.
Yeah, and George Bush TOTALLY lost the election in 2004 because I don't know one single person who voted for him; everyone I know voted for Kerry. Therefore Kerry must have won, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. And it shows up in the data too. Are we *really* supposed to believe that Gentoo in 2004 was more "popular" than Ubuntu in 2010? That doesn't pass the stink test.
Assuming that fact is true, the only way it can be explained is if each Gentoo user had (for some inexplicable reason...) to do many times the google searches about Gentoo than the average Ubuntu user had to do for theirs.
I don't know how you can justify the idea that google searches are proportional to popularity, unless you are willing to say that an individual person's like of something is proportional to the number of times they google it.
And I'll finish by saying that I'm sure I've googled Gentoo Linux more than I have Ubuntu or Fedora, wheras I've installed the later two on a dozen or more computers, wheras the former on exactly 0.
If you're in the east bay, you might want to stop by the Valley Life Sciences Building (usually abbreviated VLSB) and their Paleontology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus. They have a lot of cool stuff, although for most of it not necessarily from a child's perspective. However, what they *do* have is a full sized assembled T-Rex, which is pretty impressive to see, for curious children of all ages.
This is a little out there (mainly because the guy who called it "inhumane" was the one who was bothered by it), but I'd say it was inhumane to the Colonel. It can't be inhumane to destroy a robot that has no sense of pleasure or pain, hope or fear, but if the Colonel has bonded to the robot and is being forced to participate in its destruction, it could be inhumane to him.
+1: Eager gullibility. :-)
for what it's worth, this definition syncs nicely with my own thinking about this case. While I tend to be fairly anti-lawsuit with regards to slander/libel issues on the internet, here I end up more in Fuzzy's camp, precisely because wikipedia is a serious (modulo interesting discussions on how trustworthy online wikis can be) online reference. So with that said, to your three criterion. 1. Must be false. -- Don't think anything needs be said about this. 2. It must have been uttered in *full knowledge of its falsehood*, or in reckless disregard for the truth. -- Because of the authoritative encyclopedia nature of wikipedia, in my view the bar is rather low here. As opposed to something like an online forum, where "I heard it through the grapevine" would be adequate to disprove "full knowledge of falsehood", given that wikipedia is supposed to be an authoritative encyclopedia, if an editor doesn't have some direct evidence of the facts (I suspect wikipedia requires this as well), to me, they easily meet the criterion of reckless disregard for the truth. 3. Must have been issued with malice. -- Given wikipedia's nature as an authoritative reference, falsehoods on it are necessarily more serious than if they were printed elsewhere. If someone writes falsehoods about someone in an encyclopedia, what could the reason be besides to get people to think that, and if so, how can that not be malicious? So in conclusion, I think your definition fits well with this case: Because wikipedia is an encyclopedia, I think Fuzzy should win if and only if the other person put it in there without any evidence it was true -- he must have had *some* basis in evidence for what he wrote. As far as I am concerned, that is a totally fair standard.
To me, label is different than tag, although I don't see a point in users getting their panties in a twist over the distinction. A tag is an association of a word (a database key) with data so that you can search on the tag and pull up the data that has been marked. Currently, this process describes both what the users are doing, say with gmail, and presumably what the software is doing on the back end. However, I can think of any number of ways the experience can be extended for users, while retaining the same architecture. For instance, consider a shared email system. One might define tags like "Support" and "User feedback", and when emails are applied with by these tags tags, are automatically assigned other tags, such as department or user that should handle the email. At this point, there isn't such a clear 1-1 relationship between what the user is doing, and the system is doing, making it appropriate that a new word be added. Labels are more abstract, and are what users do; tags are concrete and are how labels are implemented.
By analogy, this quiz is the rough equivelent of having people pick from a group of crack-head prostitutes the one without disease, and when they fail, telling them they know nothing about safe sex. Safe sex, like safe browsing, ended before the the first question on the test. There is no safe sex by trying to pick only the disease-free crackhead prostitutes. There is no safe browsing by trying to pick the free smilies site that won't blow your computer up. There is value in mininimizing risk where it's found, but to me, safe browsing and downloading FREE SMILIES!!! from some popup window are mutually exclusive activities. That said, their product does have merit, probably. I just wished it was marketed as what it is: "You're a dumbass, and are going to do dumbass things. Maybe you need a net."
While the reviewer clearly fawns a bit over the look of the monitor, I disagree in general that the review is that great. Tom concludes:
... The same monitor without the filter would perform much better.
The selling price, around $400, is far from excessive for a monitor of this quality. The finish is exceptional. It's probably the best-looking monitor available on the market today. And beyond the good looks, the picture is very sharp and the colors are very good in video games. In itself, the PW191 is a good product, but it's obvious that the panel was poorly chosen. It's slower than its competitors, yet doesn't solve the video-noise problems that plague them. We're waiting for the 20" version in the hope that these problems will be taken care of.
The touch-sensitive buttons are not sensitive enough, and if you change adjustments often, they are a problem. And why did Asus have to use the glare-filter technology?
So, all in all, not a bad review. But besides the fact they think it looks real cool, it seems like a normal B, B+ monitor.
I skimmed through the appendix from the report on the American Institutes for Research webpage (http://www.air.org/news/default.aspx#pew), and while they don't explicity say what universities, here's what they have to say for themselves:
The NSACS assessment was administered to a nationally representative sample of 1,827 students across eighty 2- and 4-year institutions. The NSACS sample was a two-stage, stratified random sample with the first stage of selection a sample of degree-granting 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions and the second stage of selection a sample of students in their last year of a degree at these institutions. Institutions were selected through a systematic random sampling procedure, with sampling probabilities proportionate to size (PPS). The measure of size was the number of full- and part-time degree-seeking students in either their second year and up (for 2-year institutions) or their fourth year and up (for 4-year institutions), as measured by the 1998-1999 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) dataset. Explicit strata were defined by 2-year/4-year status.
The second stage of selection consisted of a sample of full- and part-time degree-seeking students at 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions who had accumulated enough credits to be eligible to graduate in spring 2003. The sampling design was a stratified systematic random sample. The alphabet as applied to the last and first name of students was used as an implicit stratifying variable.
Well if you like foreigners taking amrican cartooning jobs from hardworking American cartoonists, you'll love this. Yet another example of corporate fat cats taking the bread out of John Q. AmericanCartoonist's mouth, along with mother and baby, by outsourcing his job to some foreign cartoonist. And if Ye Olde Fatte Cats do go ahead with this treasonous plan, they at least could have had the good taste to get rid of Jim Davis. That guy sucks
Money can't buy happiness, true, but I'd rather be unhappy watching my big screen tv on my awesome round-the-world yacht than be unhappy while living in the poorhouse. Some nice courtside basketball tickets and a porche that goes 250mph may not ultimately make me happy, but I wouldn't mind give them a try.
That's the sentence you decided you go with? Writing once and not revising isn't writing at all. It's typing.
I think instead of porting the IE stuff to FF, google should use the easy extensibility of FF as a way for easy experimentation and come up with some wild stuff that hasn't been seen yet. Firefox is all early adopters; I think google would have great success on all fronts testing out all their really forward thinking ideas on FF and then porting the stuff that works well to IE. As it is, they are being a little inefficient here.
(Cause providing the best search engine, the best free email, and google maps is nowhere near good enough, dammitl. Those lazy bastards aren't taking over the world quickly enough)
"No, of course I didn't waste the time of memorizing all 83K digits, I just worked out Ramanujan's equation in my head."
Ramanujan's Series
This equation would probably be your best shot of calculating pi on the fly. I've heard that each new term in the series gets 4 or 5 new signigicant digits for your approximation of pi (the more famous euler series can take 100 terms to add one siginficant digit onto your approximation). This means you will still need to caculate probably at least 20000 terms in the series. Even with the crazy savants in the world, you clearly aren't going to be able to work that out in your head. By the time you stopped, you would be having to keep 2 83000 digit numbers in your head at one time while adding them together, AND while plugging new values around i=83000 into that formula. That would be most impressive.
I just installed Suse 9.1 on a friend's laptop and it blew me away with how easy it was. I am a not an expert in hardware or in installing linux by any means, so I was really glad when it worked fine right out of the box. The only thing that took any time was getting wireless to work, for which I used ndiswrapper. Even there, 99% of the difficulty was due to my really basic knowledge of networking and stuff like that. And that was for the cheapest laptop my friend could find. Sound, video, everything worked great with the autodetect. So I don't know about any other distros, but my experience with Suse was really good. My 2 cents.
Ok, I spent a couple minutes looking at her paper, and it doesn't seem that ridiculous to my way of thinking. She took the data from 37 previous studies, comprising 1530 samples, and came up with a correlation coeficient of .29. If I remember statistics, that means that roughy 8.5% of the "intelligence soup" is head size. It doesn't in any way guarentee that if your head is larger, you will be a genius, nor that if your head is smaller, you'll be dumb. It just says it's somewhat correlated.
On a side note(one for which I'll probably get blasted), evolutionary biologists use brain cc's as a measure of the evolution of intelligence. Biologists have established that as brain sizes grew, apes got smarter. To their minds, brain size is correlated to intelligence. So to any of the people who are reflexively dismissing this study, is there any reason, other than political, why you think that brain size would correlate with intelligence for 2.5 million years and then would just stop a few thousand years ago? Really, I'm curious.
Apparently the BBC can report on this new model, but they can't seem to say where these papers are being published or what scientists are working on it or at which universities this research is taking place. Michio Kaku posited this might be the case in his book Hyperspace (excellent book) and to my mind, this is on the same level. It is defenitly some interesting stuff to talk about after burning a J, but it hardly rises to the level of scientific model. The Standard Model is a model; this is just fluff, albeit somewhat interesting fluff.
Assuming that the *AA hasn't authorized these companies to repackage and redistribute a crime, as I suspect, the *AA would be wise to make use of this development. Currently, their program of suing everyone doesn't seem to be doing as well as it might; massivly suing teenagers and college students for a crime most regard as reletively victimless is tough going. However, it would appear that these spyware companies are engaging in piracy, and even better, for the sole purpose of making money. I would imagine a really big lawsuit against them would have tremendous popular support, revitalizing the *AA's efforts. A greedy spyware company makes a far better target than poor college kids.
modulo spurious spelling errors That is a brilliant expresion and you, sir, should be awarded a prize of some sort. I am totally stealing your expression, and I'll be sure to cite you if it ever makes it into print. That will be all.
The best part of it is that the Hayward fault that runs under UC Berkeley is the most likely fault to be the source of the next major quake in N.Cal. While I was there(class of '03), seismologists estimated that there was a 30% chance the next big one in N.Cal would come from that fault, although I think that percentange may have been downgraded since. That fault runs right through the middle of the football stadium, so when they built it, they had to put in expansion joints in the stadium so that the stadium would be ok(the west side is moving north and the east side is moving south). If you go to the stadium and check it out, you'll see that the fault has caused the 2 halves of the stadium to shift probably 24 inches from each other. They also have to flatten out the turf every so often, because the fault causes the field to lose its flatness. If you go to the stadium towards the end of the season, you can usually see where the fault runs on the field. It's well worth checking out one day. Go Bears!
This article works so well considering that it follows immediatly after Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office. I wonder what this author (excellent article, btw) would make of the data from that other "IT Analysis" paper?
I'm usually pretty thick skinned when it comes to getting mad about worthless stories on slashdot, this is too much. This story has exactly the same value (scientific and otherwise) as a story entitled "one guy thinks OO might be faster than Office" or even "kid says father is the strongest dad in the world". ITEM! Coming to a conclusion and then performing some nonsense experement you pulled out of your ass and finally marveling at your genius after your experement pads your conclusion just wastes everyone's time, including the author. Even more so since I'm sure anyone with 60 seconds could probably find a real side by side comparison online somewhere. But on a side note, if this guy thinks the problem is Office, and not his box, when his fairly modern computer takes 30+ seconds to load Office, he probably has a very bright future ahead of him selling whatever it is he's smoking.
I saw someone else mentioned TODO list. It's free and doesn't have much advanced functionality, but it my all time favorite program of its type and have to say I imagine it works perfectly for 95% of features. For anyone looking for a todo list type program, or if you are looking for something a lot simpler and more functional, lots of people will back me up on this...
http://www.abstractspoon.com/tdl_resources.html
http://www.codeproject.com/tools/ToDoList2.asp
I didn't RTA, but my initial impression is that since cell phone frequencies(and the whole set of human frequency emissions at any given time) don't cover anywhere near 100% of the frequencies that SETI does/could expect a signal might be found in, so no one should expect them to have close to a meaningful impact on SETI's chances of finding something. Human generated EM signals don't take up close to 100% of the available EM room at any given time. Both physical restrictions along with strong government regulation of cell phone/radio/television signals currently stop that from happening. Since SETI is only searches about 1% of the available sky available, even if airpanes take out a whopping 50% of the frequencies available to search in (a highly dubious proposion), they will, at a worse case scenario, be searching all of 2% of the sky. They aren't going to run out of places to look for a signal. A million bucks to start a new Seti@Home will help them 100x more than this will really hurt them.
Yeah, and George Bush TOTALLY lost the election in 2004 because I don't know one single person who voted for him; everyone I know voted for Kerry. Therefore Kerry must have won, right?