Sounds like Fry's. A terrible, terrible place, but great for "geek emergencies" and for browsing the random and sometimes interesting things they stock. And they claim to match *any* internet price, so there's that. Just don't make eye contact with the sales people.
I agree that they exaggerated when they had the Leaf (and what was the other one?), but they did show them asking several different people if they could plug in, and they were denied each time. Theoretically, they could have found an "inn" that would allow them to use an outlet. Or could they have just snuck it out the window (assuming you can even open the windows in said inn), I guess. Seems that their solution of bringing it to the university computer lab was easier, yet utterly ridiculous for a normal traveler.
So, their point was accurate - it's not easy to find someplace to plug in outside of very specific places, and you have to plan your trip assuming that you won't be able to plug in just anywhere. This is not as obvious as it seems at first - you might easily assume, as they pretended to, that you could just plug it in anywhere (a key phrase used in EV marketing) and that people would have no problem with you using their outlets to charge a car.
I think the Nexus One would have been a lot more successful if they had physical stores... I mean I'm still using mine and love it (it's a device you can really get attached to, despite its flaws and that it's outdated) but I've only ever seen one other one in the wild (other than at Maker Faire SF, where dozens of Google employees were using them).
Also, it would have been nice to have someplace to check out and buy the accessories and so on, especially on short notice when necessary.
Despite the fact that you can do everything online these days, there truly is still a major role for retail to play. I would be reluctant to buy a new and unusual computer like the Chromebook without being able to try one myself (as I'm sure people are with Apple products if they haven't used them before), so this will probably be a good strategy for them.
This is actually, essentially, what OK Cupid has turned into. Yes, I'm sure there are a lot of desperate people on there (especially the men), but none of the women I'm matched with seem to be (either from their profiles or if I talk to them or meet them).
I actually joined the site back in 2005, and back then it *did* seem a lot more desperate. I disabled my account for several years, and re-opened it again recently (also I live in a much better area for it - lots of people in Southern California are on it; Western New York, not so much) and it's been a fun distraction from the job search. Met several very nice girls in real life, and had lots of conversations online.
It hasn't brought me to my "one true love", but it hasn't brought me to a bunch of desperate losers, either.
These days, you don't have to be desperate to have trouble finding people to socialize with in real life. Currently, basically my only other options are to approach strangers out in public, which I guess can work but is very difficult (especially if you're shy like me), or to go to bars and clubs (not my scene at all). I don't have a big network of friends here to potentially introduce me to someone they know, I don't work someplace with a lot of people (unemployed), and I'm no longer in school (where as a grad student it wasn't easy to socialize, especially not with cute girls).
As far as I can tell, this is the average situation people on OK Cupid who are actually interested in meeting people are in (at least, the people it matches me with).
Actually, they do have a mechanism to measure the other outcomes. If you remove your account (or just temporarily disable it), they ask you very nicely if you could tell them why - giving examples like "Are you in a relationship now? Are you getting married? Was it someone you met on OK Cupid?"
They really want to know these things, and apparently a lot of people do bother to provide an answer. They used these responses in their analysis to determine what works, the stats were not just based on what got a response (they have done more than one post about this stuff so it may have been in a different one).
You've already gotten replies noting that this isn't true, but I thought I'd add some more...
Being slashdotted or "the slashdot effect" may have been the first, but it has most certainly spread to other sites - especially pale imitators like Digg and Reddit. It's also used elsewhere, such as Boing Boing, where you can say a site was "boinged".
That said, being slashdotted I think is a lot cooler.
Maybe this means we'll actually start getting joke options in the polls again, whether they involve CmdrTaco or Cowboy Neal... or something entirely new and strange.
I think the NG logo actually says "wannabe" more than anything, though depending on where you travel with it I suppose you may be able to pretend that you're a NG photographer:)
I don't think their bags are bad, in fact quite the opposite - a friend has one and it seems quite nice, and she likes it a lot - but yeah, definitely cover or remove the logo.
I have L-series lenses including the ~$1000 24-105mm f/4L. I sometimes travel with them unprotected - not even with socks - in a jumble at the bottom of a small shoulder bag (I do usually keep them in bags with foam dividers, just not always).
These things are built to last - you'd never be able to tell how much abuse they've taken; they look brand new (and no mechanical issues either). On the other hand, many (though not all) less expensive lenses *do* get very beat-up looking, and fast. But even then, it's worth it to me to have quick access. Yeah I could resell these things for more money later if I kept them pristine, but then, I wouldn't have gotten much use out of them if they were still pristine.
I'm an amateur photographer, and my expensive collection of equipment is uninsured, and I couldn't afford to replace any of it right now. But I don't baby it because I care about the photographs I make, not the equipment.
I don't know what it's like now, but when I tried it (some significant amount of time after it was introduced) Facebook's implementation was awful - namely, it notified the people in your lists that you added them to that list - including informing them what the list was called. As far as I can tell, no one actually uses this feature on facebook.
Google+ has a fundamentally different approach - it essentially forces you to use this feature, and it makes it simple and easy to manage and to be sure that you're sharing each thing only with whom you want to.
I worked at a summer camp in Canada on an island accessible only by boat in a large provincial park. Those of us who drove the boats (normally just anyone who was available over the age of ~20) were certainly staff and probably covered by insurance and so on, but "professional" we were not:) Most (including myself) had little to no training on powerboat operation, for one thing. Of course, since the camp's focus is on canoeing and canoe trips, every staff member was a certified lifeguard and most had wilderness first aid certification (provided by the camp in the beginning of the summer before the kids came).
To be on topic, we did have wires going out to the island - both power and telephone (and thus dialup internet) that went "undersea". Sounds like this guy's island simply sucks; wired connections are not "out of the question" for islands:)
lol, I'm from Buffalo (now live in CA) and I used to have Canadian Tire money lying around in my (dirty, beat-up) old car for a couple years too. I never thought of it as a theft target, but in Buffalo, who knows. Maybe they thought Tim Hortons would accept it. It's worthless anyway because Canadian Tire sucks!
That argument sounds nice but doesn't work in this case, because smartphones are vastly more useful than DVDs or whatever. I - and many other younger people I know - feel fully justified in paying for a smartphone because of everything it can do for us, even though it's exorbitantly expensive unless you're really careful. Yet we would balk at paying full price for a DVD or a CD (even Amazon's prices) because though we may feel the entertainment value is high, we realize that as a practical matter it is essentially without value (unlike groceries, which is necessary for survival).
I *do* actually buy physical media for things that I really love, especially music. I even often buy the vinyl LP of albums I really like instead of the CD, directly from the bands when feasible. I'm going to be listening to the digital copy that I already have anyway. But I also paid Google nearly $600 for an unlocked Nexus One, so I am not a typical young consumer by any stretch:)
Re:the application of force indicates you have fai
on
Review: Green Lantern
·
· Score: 1
So yeah, you would kind of expect that an American hotshot fighter pilot would first think of using a big gun in a fight. Why not?
However, they actually make a pretty strong point in the film when he busts out a huge gun (which I think was twice, once in training and once in a real battle, don't really remember) that guns aren't going to work - and he realizes this pretty quickly, and tries to come up with a better solution to the problem.
I didn't know anything about Green Lantern before seeing the movie (and I didn't see any previews... actually I didn't even know I was going to see the movie) but it seemed obvious from the film that part of the learning process of becoming a Green Lantern is that you have to learn to be imaginative in your solutions to problems, and especially when you're learning, the first things you think of probably won't be right. It wasn't emphasized enough, but this was a pretty big subtext to *all* of the action in the film.
If you've got a scene with a big gun, though (the extent of its use is probably seen in the trailer - it gets tossed aside almost immediately, literally only a couple seconds on screen), may as well throw it in the trailer to attract audiences who like action movies with big guns.
I'd say you have some sort of problem with over-stressing your headphones, but more likely is that you've just been unlucky:)
Here's my counter-anecdote:
I have Grado SR-60's that I bought in 2004 or so. I use them all the time, and have traveled all over the place with them, including moving cross-country (twice) and air travel etc. etc. They are a little beat up in appearance, but they still work and sound fantastic. They sell replacement foam covers for the earpieces, but while mine definitely aren't fresh-looking, they're still perfectly fine - and I do often have the problem you describe with sweat etc. causing excessive wear on things.
Next, I've also got Etymotic ER-6 earbuds. Similar price of $60 or so. They sound fantastic, and came with several different ear pieces to ensure a good fit. They feel fragile in the hand at first, but have held up wonderfully. I've had them since 2006 or so, traveled all over the world with them, used them while biking (not actually a good idea since they seal off outside noise) and running etc. I also often fall asleep with them, and they get wrenched and pulled at when I roll around. Still running fine. Again, they sell replacement ear pieces, but they're easy to clean (soak in H2SO4) to be essentially good as new.
My point is... quality headphones do exist. I used to always end up with the problem you have, with wires going bad, when I didn't choose my headphones carefully. Since getting the good stuff, it just hasn't been a problem. It's the same as with most things... yeah you can spend $200 over five years for the shitty Apple earbuds, or you can pay $60-100 for something that will both sound ten times better, and last several times longer at least. But with audio products, you don't always get what you pay for - sometimes you get a lot less than what you paid if you're not careful.
If you use a decent pair of earbuds, you can hear the difference *better* than on most other speakers or headphones - I use etymotic ER-6 earbuds with my phone (nexus one, with mediocre sound output quality) and I can always roughly tell how each track was recorded. Those aren't that expensive, either. Neither are my Grado SR-60 headphones I use at home, with which I can also tell how music was encoded if there's not much background noise.
However, I know what you mean about the difference being accentuated on cheap gear. It's pretty bad sometimes:)
I'm guessing they were planning on doing a bunch more Dalek stories... as you say, they definitely set things up for it (though nothing leading to anything specific), and they redesigned how they look.
Problem is that the redesigned Daleks look really stupid... like shitty appliances from Sharper Image or Brookstone, from a decade ago. I get that that's probably the same way they were designed originally, based on shitty appliances, but the appliances in the 60's were apparently a lot cooler looking:)
So, realizing they screwed up with the Dalek redesign, they decide to not have any shows about them for a while... leaving plenty of time for the new Daleks to disappear from time and the original ones to reappear. This can all be explained with a quick hand-wavey timey-wimey explanation like they usually do when things get complicated.
I'm pretty young - 24 - and I played the original when it came out, and have been loosely following the development of DNF since it was announced. Actually, I played the original sidescrollers too - they were on one of those CDs you could get for $5 or so full of shareware games, which for a kid meant entertainment for *months*:)
I don't play a lot of games anymore, but I'm certainly in the target market for game companies. I was perhaps a bit of an oddball for my age (almost everyone else I knew was into SNES and the later consoles rather than computer games) but I would not be surprised if a fair number of people my age remember the original. If nothing else they'll at least have heard about it a few times over the years, considering how much of a joke it's been on the internet:)
I'm not sure I'll buy it right away (I don't have a gaming computer at the moment, and my PS3 is at my parents' house at the other side of the country) but I'll certainly be playing DNF at some point, even if it gets bad reviews. It's basically irresistible. I'm sure the developers and producers know this, and are counting on that factor to produce a lot of their initial sales.
Thunderbolt is cool, but (assuming it takes off) it won't be in wide use for at least a year or two, so that's not really a huge selling point for something you're buying right now.
However, the reason *I* chose a macbook pro the last time I needed a new laptop (previous was a Thinkpad) was the quality of the build, the screen, the keyboard (which I now prefer even over the Thinkpad keyboard, as good as those are), the trackpad, the well-designed power adapter, etc. There are other nice machines out there, but IMHO nobody brings the quality of all the different parts together so well.
I bought it in September 2009 (shortly after a refresh), yet if I clean off the surface it looks and operates like new. No squeeky plastic bits coming loose (I got those on the Thinkpad within a few months) or other signs of low-quality construction. Whatever the "apple tax" was in my case, compared to a comparable (spec-wise) machine from another manufacturer, was more than worth it to me for the sheer quality. Also, I was coming from linux (and still use it on the Thinkpad and other machines) but I really do like OS X.
YMMV of course, and I understand people not buying Apple on ideological grounds (or whatever) - I don't have and won't buy any other Apple product, have an Android phone, etc. so I'm no fanboy but when it comes down to it I don't think the macbook pros have any equal in the current market.
Yes, but wertigon's trying to point out that the way history is *actually taught* in K-12 schools in the US is ridiculous - there is a huge emphasis on memorizing things, such as names and especially dates. You're correct that the sequence of events and so in is incredibly important to understanding history. Students do get that (some do anyway), but they get that by getting the dates hammered into them rather than being made to understand how things were sequenced out and why.
I remember test questions in high school that amounted to knowing the precise year (and sometimes day and month) something happened. Nothing about the event or why it was important or what it led to, just the date. As wertigon points out, do students really need to know if the civil war started in 1859, or 1862? I'm quite familiar with civil war history, but I couldn't tell you any of the relevant dates (such as the year it started). Those details don't ultimately matter until you get into college-level deeper analysis of things, and even then it doesn't really matter that much in most cases.
Especially at the K-12 level it's much more useful to just teach that the civil war happened in the mid-1800's, and to put it into context with the major things that happened in the US and the world before and after it. The curriculum doesn't put things into the proper historical context, and doesn't get into how periods of history connected and how one thing leads to another (except in really obvious cases like the assassination of the archduke that led to WWI, which I guarantee every US student could tell you, but is useless information compared to the things they could be teaching). It's mostly just dates! Really! We're not making this up...
That's fine for many people, but a lot of people in developing countries get all of their internet from internet cafes. The appeal of Skype in that context is that every internet cafe computer has it and it's essentially guaranteed to work, even the video chat, with anyone in the world you want to talk to. Skype is *huge* in developing countries, because it's ubiquitous and it really does "just work".
Watching Doctor Who on BBC America is incredibly annoying anyway... at each commercial break they put in "behind the scenes" stuff from the very episode that you're watching. It makes it quite difficult to follow what's actually happening in the show (especially with the ridiculously convoluted storyline in the first two episodes of this season). Plus, there are *tons* of commercials, in addition to the behind the scenes stuff! I watched the first episode of this season there (having downloaded all previous seasons of the 2005-onward series) and almost turned it off in disgust. Needless to say the second and third episodes were downloaded. I do applaud them for airing it on the same day as in the UK; other shows like Top Gear are delayed for as much as a week.
In the UK they apparently show the behind the scenes stuff as a separate program that is about as long as the actual episode, and includes more interviews with the cast and so on... but they show it *after* the actual show airs, on another station (this information is based on the voiceover from the end credits in downloaded Doctor Who episodes announcing the behind the scenes Doctor Who Confidential show coming up next on BBC 3).
Interesting picture, thanks for the link. Many cities in less-developed parts of the world (including in Thailand/SE Asia in general which is what I'm personally familiar with) look almost like that today. And in most of those places, in the cities anyway you can get unrestricted, fast broadband for a fraction of what our crappy service in the US costs. Do we want our cities to look like that? No, but hey, it works...
Over time, as in NYC those places will move this kind of infrastructure behind walls and underground. In the mean time, they've got better connectivity than us, and chances are when they move underground everything will be upgraded to the latest and greatest. In that same time, I foresee the situation in the US only getting worse.
Herearethree photos I took in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, illustrating my point. In Bangkok they've even got a special crew with special poles designed to lift up low-lying power lines for when things with high clearance need to pass underneath (you can see this in the third photo).
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Fry's. A terrible, terrible place, but great for "geek emergencies" and for browsing the random and sometimes interesting things they stock. And they claim to match *any* internet price, so there's that. Just don't make eye contact with the sales people.
I agree that they exaggerated when they had the Leaf (and what was the other one?), but they did show them asking several different people if they could plug in, and they were denied each time. Theoretically, they could have found an "inn" that would allow them to use an outlet. Or could they have just snuck it out the window (assuming you can even open the windows in said inn), I guess. Seems that their solution of bringing it to the university computer lab was easier, yet utterly ridiculous for a normal traveler.
So, their point was accurate - it's not easy to find someplace to plug in outside of very specific places, and you have to plan your trip assuming that you won't be able to plug in just anywhere. This is not as obvious as it seems at first - you might easily assume, as they pretended to, that you could just plug it in anywhere (a key phrase used in EV marketing) and that people would have no problem with you using their outlets to charge a car.
I think the Nexus One would have been a lot more successful if they had physical stores... I mean I'm still using mine and love it (it's a device you can really get attached to, despite its flaws and that it's outdated) but I've only ever seen one other one in the wild (other than at Maker Faire SF, where dozens of Google employees were using them).
Also, it would have been nice to have someplace to check out and buy the accessories and so on, especially on short notice when necessary.
Despite the fact that you can do everything online these days, there truly is still a major role for retail to play. I would be reluctant to buy a new and unusual computer like the Chromebook without being able to try one myself (as I'm sure people are with Apple products if they haven't used them before), so this will probably be a good strategy for them.
This is actually, essentially, what OK Cupid has turned into. Yes, I'm sure there are a lot of desperate people on there (especially the men), but none of the women I'm matched with seem to be (either from their profiles or if I talk to them or meet them).
I actually joined the site back in 2005, and back then it *did* seem a lot more desperate. I disabled my account for several years, and re-opened it again recently (also I live in a much better area for it - lots of people in Southern California are on it; Western New York, not so much) and it's been a fun distraction from the job search. Met several very nice girls in real life, and had lots of conversations online.
It hasn't brought me to my "one true love", but it hasn't brought me to a bunch of desperate losers, either.
These days, you don't have to be desperate to have trouble finding people to socialize with in real life. Currently, basically my only other options are to approach strangers out in public, which I guess can work but is very difficult (especially if you're shy like me), or to go to bars and clubs (not my scene at all). I don't have a big network of friends here to potentially introduce me to someone they know, I don't work someplace with a lot of people (unemployed), and I'm no longer in school (where as a grad student it wasn't easy to socialize, especially not with cute girls).
As far as I can tell, this is the average situation people on OK Cupid who are actually interested in meeting people are in (at least, the people it matches me with).
Actually, they do have a mechanism to measure the other outcomes. If you remove your account (or just temporarily disable it), they ask you very nicely if you could tell them why - giving examples like "Are you in a relationship now? Are you getting married? Was it someone you met on OK Cupid?"
They really want to know these things, and apparently a lot of people do bother to provide an answer. They used these responses in their analysis to determine what works, the stats were not just based on what got a response (they have done more than one post about this stuff so it may have been in a different one).
You've already gotten replies noting that this isn't true, but I thought I'd add some more...
Being slashdotted or "the slashdot effect" may have been the first, but it has most certainly spread to other sites - especially pale imitators like Digg and Reddit. It's also used elsewhere, such as Boing Boing, where you can say a site was "boinged".
That said, being slashdotted I think is a lot cooler.
Maybe this means we'll actually start getting joke options in the polls again, whether they involve CmdrTaco or Cowboy Neal... or something entirely new and strange.
I think the NG logo actually says "wannabe" more than anything, though depending on where you travel with it I suppose you may be able to pretend that you're a NG photographer :)
I don't think their bags are bad, in fact quite the opposite - a friend has one and it seems quite nice, and she likes it a lot - but yeah, definitely cover or remove the logo.
I have L-series lenses including the ~$1000 24-105mm f/4L. I sometimes travel with them unprotected - not even with socks - in a jumble at the bottom of a small shoulder bag (I do usually keep them in bags with foam dividers, just not always).
These things are built to last - you'd never be able to tell how much abuse they've taken; they look brand new (and no mechanical issues either). On the other hand, many (though not all) less expensive lenses *do* get very beat-up looking, and fast. But even then, it's worth it to me to have quick access. Yeah I could resell these things for more money later if I kept them pristine, but then, I wouldn't have gotten much use out of them if they were still pristine.
I'm an amateur photographer, and my expensive collection of equipment is uninsured, and I couldn't afford to replace any of it right now. But I don't baby it because I care about the photographs I make, not the equipment.
I don't know what it's like now, but when I tried it (some significant amount of time after it was introduced) Facebook's implementation was awful - namely, it notified the people in your lists that you added them to that list - including informing them what the list was called. As far as I can tell, no one actually uses this feature on facebook.
Google+ has a fundamentally different approach - it essentially forces you to use this feature, and it makes it simple and easy to manage and to be sure that you're sharing each thing only with whom you want to.
Just in case you didn't already know, yours is by far the best one on there ;)
I worked at a summer camp in Canada on an island accessible only by boat in a large provincial park. Those of us who drove the boats (normally just anyone who was available over the age of ~20) were certainly staff and probably covered by insurance and so on, but "professional" we were not :) Most (including myself) had little to no training on powerboat operation, for one thing. Of course, since the camp's focus is on canoeing and canoe trips, every staff member was a certified lifeguard and most had wilderness first aid certification (provided by the camp in the beginning of the summer before the kids came).
To be on topic, we did have wires going out to the island - both power and telephone (and thus dialup internet) that went "undersea". Sounds like this guy's island simply sucks; wired connections are not "out of the question" for islands :)
lol, I'm from Buffalo (now live in CA) and I used to have Canadian Tire money lying around in my (dirty, beat-up) old car for a couple years too. I never thought of it as a theft target, but in Buffalo, who knows. Maybe they thought Tim Hortons would accept it. It's worthless anyway because Canadian Tire sucks!
That argument sounds nice but doesn't work in this case, because smartphones are vastly more useful than DVDs or whatever. I - and many other younger people I know - feel fully justified in paying for a smartphone because of everything it can do for us, even though it's exorbitantly expensive unless you're really careful. Yet we would balk at paying full price for a DVD or a CD (even Amazon's prices) because though we may feel the entertainment value is high, we realize that as a practical matter it is essentially without value (unlike groceries, which is necessary for survival).
I *do* actually buy physical media for things that I really love, especially music. I even often buy the vinyl LP of albums I really like instead of the CD, directly from the bands when feasible. I'm going to be listening to the digital copy that I already have anyway. But I also paid Google nearly $600 for an unlocked Nexus One, so I am not a typical young consumer by any stretch :)
So yeah, you would kind of expect that an American hotshot fighter pilot would first think of using a big gun in a fight. Why not?
However, they actually make a pretty strong point in the film when he busts out a huge gun (which I think was twice, once in training and once in a real battle, don't really remember) that guns aren't going to work - and he realizes this pretty quickly, and tries to come up with a better solution to the problem.
I didn't know anything about Green Lantern before seeing the movie (and I didn't see any previews... actually I didn't even know I was going to see the movie) but it seemed obvious from the film that part of the learning process of becoming a Green Lantern is that you have to learn to be imaginative in your solutions to problems, and especially when you're learning, the first things you think of probably won't be right. It wasn't emphasized enough, but this was a pretty big subtext to *all* of the action in the film.
If you've got a scene with a big gun, though (the extent of its use is probably seen in the trailer - it gets tossed aside almost immediately, literally only a couple seconds on screen), may as well throw it in the trailer to attract audiences who like action movies with big guns.
I'd say you have some sort of problem with over-stressing your headphones, but more likely is that you've just been unlucky :)
Here's my counter-anecdote:
I have Grado SR-60's that I bought in 2004 or so. I use them all the time, and have traveled all over the place with them, including moving cross-country (twice) and air travel etc. etc. They are a little beat up in appearance, but they still work and sound fantastic. They sell replacement foam covers for the earpieces, but while mine definitely aren't fresh-looking, they're still perfectly fine - and I do often have the problem you describe with sweat etc. causing excessive wear on things.
Next, I've also got Etymotic ER-6 earbuds. Similar price of $60 or so. They sound fantastic, and came with several different ear pieces to ensure a good fit. They feel fragile in the hand at first, but have held up wonderfully. I've had them since 2006 or so, traveled all over the world with them, used them while biking (not actually a good idea since they seal off outside noise) and running etc. I also often fall asleep with them, and they get wrenched and pulled at when I roll around. Still running fine. Again, they sell replacement ear pieces, but they're easy to clean (soak in H2SO4) to be essentially good as new.
My point is... quality headphones do exist. I used to always end up with the problem you have, with wires going bad, when I didn't choose my headphones carefully. Since getting the good stuff, it just hasn't been a problem. It's the same as with most things... yeah you can spend $200 over five years for the shitty Apple earbuds, or you can pay $60-100 for something that will both sound ten times better, and last several times longer at least. But with audio products, you don't always get what you pay for - sometimes you get a lot less than what you paid if you're not careful.
If you use a decent pair of earbuds, you can hear the difference *better* than on most other speakers or headphones - I use etymotic ER-6 earbuds with my phone (nexus one, with mediocre sound output quality) and I can always roughly tell how each track was recorded. Those aren't that expensive, either. Neither are my Grado SR-60 headphones I use at home, with which I can also tell how music was encoded if there's not much background noise.
However, I know what you mean about the difference being accentuated on cheap gear. It's pretty bad sometimes :)
I'm guessing they were planning on doing a bunch more Dalek stories... as you say, they definitely set things up for it (though nothing leading to anything specific), and they redesigned how they look.
Problem is that the redesigned Daleks look really stupid... like shitty appliances from Sharper Image or Brookstone, from a decade ago. I get that that's probably the same way they were designed originally, based on shitty appliances, but the appliances in the 60's were apparently a lot cooler looking :)
So, realizing they screwed up with the Dalek redesign, they decide to not have any shows about them for a while... leaving plenty of time for the new Daleks to disappear from time and the original ones to reappear. This can all be explained with a quick hand-wavey timey-wimey explanation like they usually do when things get complicated.
I'm pretty young - 24 - and I played the original when it came out, and have been loosely following the development of DNF since it was announced. Actually, I played the original sidescrollers too - they were on one of those CDs you could get for $5 or so full of shareware games, which for a kid meant entertainment for *months* :)
I don't play a lot of games anymore, but I'm certainly in the target market for game companies. I was perhaps a bit of an oddball for my age (almost everyone else I knew was into SNES and the later consoles rather than computer games) but I would not be surprised if a fair number of people my age remember the original. If nothing else they'll at least have heard about it a few times over the years, considering how much of a joke it's been on the internet :)
I'm not sure I'll buy it right away (I don't have a gaming computer at the moment, and my PS3 is at my parents' house at the other side of the country) but I'll certainly be playing DNF at some point, even if it gets bad reviews. It's basically irresistible. I'm sure the developers and producers know this, and are counting on that factor to produce a lot of their initial sales.
Thunderbolt is cool, but (assuming it takes off) it won't be in wide use for at least a year or two, so that's not really a huge selling point for something you're buying right now.
However, the reason *I* chose a macbook pro the last time I needed a new laptop (previous was a Thinkpad) was the quality of the build, the screen, the keyboard (which I now prefer even over the Thinkpad keyboard, as good as those are), the trackpad, the well-designed power adapter, etc. There are other nice machines out there, but IMHO nobody brings the quality of all the different parts together so well.
I bought it in September 2009 (shortly after a refresh), yet if I clean off the surface it looks and operates like new. No squeeky plastic bits coming loose (I got those on the Thinkpad within a few months) or other signs of low-quality construction. Whatever the "apple tax" was in my case, compared to a comparable (spec-wise) machine from another manufacturer, was more than worth it to me for the sheer quality. Also, I was coming from linux (and still use it on the Thinkpad and other machines) but I really do like OS X.
YMMV of course, and I understand people not buying Apple on ideological grounds (or whatever) - I don't have and won't buy any other Apple product, have an Android phone, etc. so I'm no fanboy but when it comes down to it I don't think the macbook pros have any equal in the current market.
Yes, but wertigon's trying to point out that the way history is *actually taught* in K-12 schools in the US is ridiculous - there is a huge emphasis on memorizing things, such as names and especially dates. You're correct that the sequence of events and so in is incredibly important to understanding history. Students do get that (some do anyway), but they get that by getting the dates hammered into them rather than being made to understand how things were sequenced out and why.
I remember test questions in high school that amounted to knowing the precise year (and sometimes day and month) something happened. Nothing about the event or why it was important or what it led to, just the date. As wertigon points out, do students really need to know if the civil war started in 1859, or 1862? I'm quite familiar with civil war history, but I couldn't tell you any of the relevant dates (such as the year it started). Those details don't ultimately matter until you get into college-level deeper analysis of things, and even then it doesn't really matter that much in most cases.
Especially at the K-12 level it's much more useful to just teach that the civil war happened in the mid-1800's, and to put it into context with the major things that happened in the US and the world before and after it. The curriculum doesn't put things into the proper historical context, and doesn't get into how periods of history connected and how one thing leads to another (except in really obvious cases like the assassination of the archduke that led to WWI, which I guarantee every US student could tell you, but is useless information compared to the things they could be teaching). It's mostly just dates! Really! We're not making this up...
That's fine for many people, but a lot of people in developing countries get all of their internet from internet cafes. The appeal of Skype in that context is that every internet cafe computer has it and it's essentially guaranteed to work, even the video chat, with anyone in the world you want to talk to. Skype is *huge* in developing countries, because it's ubiquitous and it really does "just work".
Watching Doctor Who on BBC America is incredibly annoying anyway... at each commercial break they put in "behind the scenes" stuff from the very episode that you're watching. It makes it quite difficult to follow what's actually happening in the show (especially with the ridiculously convoluted storyline in the first two episodes of this season). Plus, there are *tons* of commercials, in addition to the behind the scenes stuff! I watched the first episode of this season there (having downloaded all previous seasons of the 2005-onward series) and almost turned it off in disgust. Needless to say the second and third episodes were downloaded. I do applaud them for airing it on the same day as in the UK; other shows like Top Gear are delayed for as much as a week.
In the UK they apparently show the behind the scenes stuff as a separate program that is about as long as the actual episode, and includes more interviews with the cast and so on... but they show it *after* the actual show airs, on another station (this information is based on the voiceover from the end credits in downloaded Doctor Who episodes announcing the behind the scenes Doctor Who Confidential show coming up next on BBC 3).
Interesting picture, thanks for the link. Many cities in less-developed parts of the world (including in Thailand/SE Asia in general which is what I'm personally familiar with) look almost like that today. And in most of those places, in the cities anyway you can get unrestricted, fast broadband for a fraction of what our crappy service in the US costs. Do we want our cities to look like that? No, but hey, it works...
Over time, as in NYC those places will move this kind of infrastructure behind walls and underground. In the mean time, they've got better connectivity than us, and chances are when they move underground everything will be upgraded to the latest and greatest. In that same time, I foresee the situation in the US only getting worse.
Here are three photos I took in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, illustrating my point. In Bangkok they've even got a special crew with special poles designed to lift up low-lying power lines for when things with high clearance need to pass underneath (you can see this in the third photo).
You know, when it comes to testing... you have to do more and more to reach that payoff...