Uh, we haven't really had bins in the UK at train stations...well, *ever* since just after I was born. That was an IRA thing rather than the bombing in the Tubes thing, and has been around since the very early 90s. Oddly, they actually started putting bins back on platforms only a few years ago. I guess they realised that unlike the IRA, modern terrorists don't care about blowing themselves up along with their targets.
While in beta, it worked. The release candidates worked. The final versions worked. Tabs and middle click CHANGED what the internet was to me. Java control, add-ons, everything -- Thank you Firefox! Sorry, but I feel the need to point out that Opera included tabs in the early/mid-90s, almost a decade before Firefox was released finally, and most features that FF users point out as being brilliant are ones which I've taken for granted since about 2000 when I started regularly using Opera. Yes, back then I had to deal with adverts, which after about an hour of use I managed to completely blank out (so much so that when they finally got *rid* of the adverts, it seemed very odd not having a block of what I considered blank space above the page...), but it's got all the features I need in a web browser (without me having to install several dozen extensions to make it do what I want...) and doesn't use up all my ram with only a few pages open for a couple of hours. Right now I have about 90 tabs open. Yes, I suck, and I tend to use tabs rather than bookmarking pages, but that's fine because Opera copes with my abuse. I have 1gb of ram, and I can quite happily run Opera with all these tabs open, alongside WoW, gtalk (which really *does* eat up ram and I wish I knew why...), ventrilo, foobar2k or vlc, etc etc etc... I use FF to check webpages in, and after a couple of tabs it just slows down to a halt, even without half the stuff I mentioned running.
That's exactly the approach I use for our WoW guild's forum. We had so many spam posts, so I implemented kitten auth but changed the pictures, so instead of saying "click on the kittens" it asks you to click on the druid (they're all in bear/cat/aquatic/travel form) or click on the gnomes, trolls, nelves, etc etc etc. I've not had a single spam post since!
I think TV is overly blamed tbh (oh noes, a tla!), a lot of kids still read books, and those who'd rather watch TV should probably have their parents spoken to. Even if the kid doesn't enjoy books there're other options...my parents bought my brother Monkey Island 1 and 2 because he really just didn't like reading, but liked playing computer games, and you kinda have to read in order to play the games!
Wrt (eep, another!) education I'm just approaching the end of my first year at University, so I've pretty much just come out of secondary school (high school for you Americans;) ), and I didn't get taught *anything* about grammar in English, and only very little about spelling. Literally nothing. Take, for example, the "English language" GCSE. You'd think it'd contain, say, language, right? No, it's practically the exact same as the English literature GCSE. In fact, I actually have *no* idea what the difference was supposed to be, half our coursework counted towards both and the exams were similar, just one was on a set text we'd already read, and the other was on a newspaper article we'd not seen before. In fact, spelling, punctuation, and grammar hardly counted towards anything in coursework or exam for either GCSE.
Then again, I'd've thought that it'd be a little better over there in the US, I was part of a trial of the SAT over here and the English part of that was what I wish English tests were like over here. They actually tested language skills (ie, which word should replace the underlined, which word in this sentence is incorrect, which word is defined by this sentence etc.).
Ah well, I'll continue to do my bit by correcting people on irc and pissing them off.;) Pedantry is fun, there's the incentive to learn English!
PS. I do apologise for my overuse of commas...perhaps had I been taught how to use them there would be fewer in my post? Who knows.;)
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Uh, we haven't really had bins in the UK at train stations...well, *ever* since just after I was born. That was an IRA thing rather than the bombing in the Tubes thing, and has been around since the very early 90s. Oddly, they actually started putting bins back on platforms only a few years ago. I guess they realised that unlike the IRA, modern terrorists don't care about blowing themselves up along with their targets.
That's exactly the approach I use for our WoW guild's forum. We had so many spam posts, so I implemented kitten auth but changed the pictures, so instead of saying "click on the kittens" it asks you to click on the druid (they're all in bear/cat/aquatic/travel form) or click on the gnomes, trolls, nelves, etc etc etc. I've not had a single spam post since!
I think TV is overly blamed tbh (oh noes, a tla!), a lot of kids still read books, and those who'd rather watch TV should probably have their parents spoken to. Even if the kid doesn't enjoy books there're other options...my parents bought my brother Monkey Island 1 and 2 because he really just didn't like reading, but liked playing computer games, and you kinda have to read in order to play the games! Wrt (eep, another!) education I'm just approaching the end of my first year at University, so I've pretty much just come out of secondary school (high school for you Americans ;) ), and I didn't get taught *anything* about grammar in English, and only very little about spelling. Literally nothing. Take, for example, the "English language" GCSE. You'd think it'd contain, say, language, right? No, it's practically the exact same as the English literature GCSE. In fact, I actually have *no* idea what the difference was supposed to be, half our coursework counted towards both and the exams were similar, just one was on a set text we'd already read, and the other was on a newspaper article we'd not seen before. In fact, spelling, punctuation, and grammar hardly counted towards anything in coursework or exam for either GCSE.
Then again, I'd've thought that it'd be a little better over there in the US, I was part of a trial of the SAT over here and the English part of that was what I wish English tests were like over here. They actually tested language skills (ie, which word should replace the underlined, which word in this sentence is incorrect, which word is defined by this sentence etc.).
Ah well, I'll continue to do my bit by correcting people on irc and pissing them off. ;) Pedantry is fun, there's the incentive to learn English!
PS. I do apologise for my overuse of commas...perhaps had I been taught how to use them there would be fewer in my post? Who knows. ;)