*** GROAN ALERT *** GROAN ALERT *** GROAN ALERT *** GROAN ALERT ***

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, "THAT'S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job."

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

They moused.

They faxed.

They e-mailed.

They e-mailed with attachments .

They downloaded.

They did spreadsheets!

They wrote reports.

They created labels and cards.

They created charts and graphs.

They did some genealogy reports

They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with Heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off..

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

Jesus just sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming:

"It's gone! It's all GONE! "I lost everything when the power went out!"

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate.

"Wait!" he screamed. "That's not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don't have any?"

God just shrugged and said,

JESUS SAVES

I don't understand the opposition, either.

I could try to explain it, but frankly, I wouldn't give it a shred of credibility, because I think all the arguments against it are based on ideological dogma. Specifically: "free markets always provide better solutions to problems than government."

I'd agree with that, if it weren't for the "always" bit.

Objective looks around the world show national health care plans can be made to work, and that on balance, most seem to work better than our "let the free market handle it" approach.

Not-so-objective looks like mine, start with me being angry that our culture demands that someone must be making a profit at all times, even when we're talking about dealing with the sick and injured. Further, our culture demands that we say "that's okay" if the companies increase their profits by compromising care.

The best phrase I've heard for describing the state of medical insurance companies in America is "murder by spreadsheet."

Someone had that in mind when they made this commercial.

Poor linux. I've been using linux for a number of years now and am really impressed with what it can do. It's largest flaw is that it is free. You heard me. If it's free, people assume it's not as "valuable" as an OS you usually have to pay hundreds for.

As far as games go, there are a lot of great commercial and free games that are ported to linux (not through wine). One great example is NeverWinter Nights and it's sequel. For a a list of games that run on linux, check http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php?license=free .

And for video editing? The problem here is not the linux shell. The problem here is that the commercial grade programs for video editing are not written in or ported to linux. Because linux has less overhead resources than Mac's or Windows (configured properly of course), video editing could be as much or more effective on linux than the other operating systems. It's also worth mentioning that many 3D rendering farms (the masses of computers that render animations for studios like Pixar) often run linux.

Excel Spreadsheets? Really? openoffice.org people. Even on windows, as good as MS Office and $200 less.

Conclusion:
Use linux. It's very good and everything you've been assuming about linux is probably wrong. With the addition of Wine, linux can be very effective for gaming and there is almost no function that can be preformed in Windows or Mac OS that cannot be performed in linux. I dare you to at least try it.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php <-- these are OS's that run right off the CD.

"I don't really like games" -- proprietary game designers don't like linux, but I play tremulous all the time. and half-life engines apparently runs fine under wine.
edit movies : many professional grade movie edit/render packages run on unix, some are even free(as in speech) or have free derivatives.
excel spreadsheets: ??? I only have 3 apps that do this.

I think the tux, the fact that he is pale, the ridicule, and that he crashes the other two, are funny commentaries, but since ubuntu, the "only servers" claims are no longer true. Linux personified would not take that crap.

real further "progress"?
On one hand, I agree with what you said. A society going for happiness, pleasure, and just working all the time, is completely pointless. These people working on their spreadsheets, and reading gossip magazines, what is the fucking point?
But on the other hand, what is the fucking point of anything else? Do you want people to sit around and worship? And be spiritual? People are doing exactly what they should do, which is go for their own selfish goals. It's fucking pointless, but so is everything else.

This looks good, but I don't have time to watch it at work. I have to get back to my spreadsheets. They're turning red.

Dag, not really so. I'm looking at a spreadsheet right now. Two things are involved. One, HCPB counties are the smaller ones. Diebold counted are the larger one. There is some overlap in medium sized polls.

There was a slight upward trend for larger counties voting stronger for Clinton. The main thing that put Hillary over the top was the two largest counties, Manchester and Nashua were 45% Hillary, 30% Obama, and they make up 17% of the total votes. Now it is not out of the question that the machines in those two counties were hacked, and that would make more sense then even risking monkeying with smaller counties. It is very easy and relatively cheap in NH to get a hand recount (that is honest). So, it is very unlikely that anyone would risk it here (unless they have plans and ability to switch the ballots). It wouldn't be worth getting caught stealing here, why not save it for general election of the millions of precincts that no one does pay attention to.

Thank you. We'll see how it goes.

My screen name hasn't made it yet to the spreadsheet yet. I put the link in my description as instructed.

Just browsing through them two deep, it looks like it's most commonly only a pair of tagged vloggers who respond. Any idea how many people have participated in this thus far?

[...]

Wow, looks like there've been hundreds of people tagged.

so did he unlock the excel spreadsheet or what???

LOL, reminds me of that old saying - how to look busy when your boss walks past at work...

"..if your boss if walking past your desk and you need to look busy, just pick up some papers from your drawer, and flip through them whilest swearing under your breath, then put them back in the drawer" LOL

_Hacking in movies, its always either a HAL10000 super computer with 9 monitors, and 3D displays, or a glorified ticker tape machine...

Dont forget, you can store your excel spreadsheets on your XBOX and access them by playing PoP...

This angries up my blood! Hulk smash crappy TV-show. Why did I never get spreadsheets when playing prince of persia 2, seems like a logical upgrade. More fun, anyway.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I think you hit it squarely Mink. We want it to be fun and the best Internet filter for online video. I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive - and in fact - one fuels the other.

Having gone through a few updates and iterations of VideoSift, I understand now that people are averse to change. Whenever we undergo a big update I always get emails and PMs: "don't do it", "you'll kill VideoSift" etc, etc.

I also know that people don't like change because they are used to doing things in a certain pattern. For example, we used to have all of the host tiles in the sidebar of the submit page. One Sifter used that page as a jumping off point to hunt for videos- jumping to Liveleak, Vimeo etc. When we removed that sidebar, the pattern was broken - and the Sifter couldn't jump from the Sift submit page to find new stuff. (we've put it back now).

So, we know that little changes can cause big annoyances because we don't use the Sift like anyone else does. All we can do in those cases is listen and try and make it easier.

We don't want to change for change sake. We are as passionate about VideoSift as anyone - and we would never knowingly do something that would make VideoSift less fun, or a bad video filter.

This doesn't preclude mistakes. We have made some - and we're not so stubborn that we wouldn't backtrack and kill something if it didn't work.

For this particular feature, we're thinking it through- trying to understand the ups and downs and whether it would make VideoSift more fun and a better video filter.

We have stuff that we share and discuss, mock-up pages, spreadsheets and other docos that we use to try and put it all together. We're not just making shit up. (well maybe a little). But we also canvas the community *early* because- for the change averse human- surprises are usually not happy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle/

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials -- a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair's phony invoicing. "It was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, hands down," says Grayson. "But it's also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime."

But even being the clumsiest war profit­eers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles -- and this is where the story of America's reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair -- it actually tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers hoping to recover the stolen money. The administration argued that Custer Battles could not be found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government because the CPA was not part of the U.S. government. When the lawsuit went forward despite the administration's objections, Custer and Battles mounted a defense that recalled Nuremberg and Lt. Calley, arguing that they could not be guilty of theft since it was done with the government's approval.

lol the "other guy" is a marxist isn't he?

paintings cannot express ideas as well as words? errr... ok! last time i checked, a picture was worth a thousand words.

I think that big record companies would LOVE to sell more music (i mean, make more profit) and wouldn't give a fuck what style it was, but in their ignorance/apathy/stupidity they churn out crap and put DRM on it. From my experience, the people working in record companies are pretty clueless, they flap about with their office renovations and their expense accounts and the company is so big it can't keep track of whose fault the whole mess is.

The root of the problem is that music is not a commodity, and is certainly now not protectable, but they try and sell it as such. There was that whole debate about 15 tracks on iTunes costing more than a CD, as if music should be sold by weight, like cheese. And the whole mp3 subscription thing hasn't really taken off has it? So music isn't even a service to be piped into your hard drive. That kills the magic. How do you make magic if you are talking about spreadsheets all the time?

Fetishism and rarity of (unduplicable) vinyl... that was what built the music industry. They're still trying to play the same game.

In reply to your comment:
“It's pretty obvious and more general than that. There's often a tradeoff between producing the best work and producing the most financially successful work. TV stations dumb down their programming to reach a larger audience. Cereal companies spend more money on package graphics and advertising than they spend on their actual product. Distributors of digital media use DRM that makes their product far less useful. The best writers, musicians, and artists produce whatever they want to produce without mitigation by finances or popular opinion. Most great thinkers in history were hated by many of their contemporaries, from Socrates to Dawkins.

Art rarely had much use value anyway because paintings cannot express ideas as well as words. The voiceover narrator is spouting a lot of Marxist Newspeak bullshit, but the other guy is interesting.”