I bought a Tivo (which we love, btw), and I thought it was so cool that I could copy the shows over to my desktop or laptop and burn them to a DVD. Do you know how many times I've done that? Maybe 3 times total, and only as a favor to a friend who missed a couple episodes of BSG.
Honestly, I can keep 165 or so hours of TV on the Tivo and more than half of that is Tivo suggestions. If I wanted to keep something for a while, I just keep it, but who wants to watch something after they've already watched it once? Seriously, nobody I know has that kind of time on their hands.
At Christmas I sometimes get a purchased DVD as a gift, which is cool only because you get the *extra features*. You won't get that with a DVD recorded movie anyway.
It's no surprise to me that DVD recorders haven't taken off.
OTOH, I would love to see an olympic event with much looser rules. As long as your reasonable human shaped and stand on two upright units thet must me lifted up for movement.
I think it would be more interesting to have an event where you only have to be "human muscle powered". Then let them use whatever prosthetics, mechanisms (e.g. bicycles), steroids, etc. that you want. First over the finish line wins.
I think if we brought this kind of competition out into the open, it would make the technologies better known and we could develop better tests to determine if the non-enhanced athletes were competing fairly.
A stay at home parent likely spends much more than 50 hours per week parenting. Most wouldn't give up parenting either (I'm not saying it makes them happy, but they consider it important). I could imagine a person whose work is quite important might consider it worthy of more than 50 hours per week.
I also know a chef (in training) who cooks all day at work, then cooks for his family. He loves to cook.
What about a carpenter who is building his own garage? He probably spends more than 50 hours each week doing carpentry.
I happen to like automating things. Thankfully that's my job too... The trick is to leave the stuff you DON'T like at the office.
Work isn't important enough to care about it that much. Do your job to the best of your ability and go home. Too many people have it backwards -- worrying about work at day and all night.
That seems to be the attitude of most people I run into outside of work, and I certainly respect their wishes.
However, after the first 5 years of work I had the opportunity to move to a new city and get a new job. I did a bit of goal planning and soul searching and really started asking what I wanted to do with my life. I started making career decisions based on doing more of what I get excited about and less of what I dislike, even though it meant passing up opportunities for promotions and raises.
You know what? It worked. I love my job now, and can't imagine not wanting to go into work in the morning. I have a bad day maybe 1 out of 10 now, rather than 2 out of 3 like before. Of course, I have to be very careful and guarded if someone asks me what I do at work or I'm liable to get overly detailed. Most people only ask out of courtesy. However, on the rare occasion that I connect with guys like me, it can be fun to geek out and talk about work.
So it really depends on your point of view. If you don't find your job fulfilling or it stresses you out, then you need to leave it at work when you go home. On the other hand if your job is as interesting to you as a hobby, why not let the good parts come home with you? I leave the stress (and email) at the office, but I regularly read up on new technologies, etc., at home when I get a chance. There's still lots of time for family and other parts of your life (since having a hobby becomes somewhat redundant).
Hopefully there was a voter receipt printer and the voter could look at the receipt and verify that's who they voted for, then drop that into a box before leaving the polling station, then at least we could do a physical recount if someone contested the vote. Also, we should take 10% of the polling booths at random and do a manual count to check anyway.
Not to sound harsh, but in my Canada songwriters get paid to write songs, not because I have an internet connection. Breweries don't get paid because I have water to my home. (and I might use it to brew beer)
I don't get the analogy between songwriting and beer brewing. With brewing you can make something tangible that can only be used by one person at a time, and thus you can sell it. However, a songwriter can create a song once that can be enjoyed by everyone.
The difficulty is in figuring out how to compensate a writer based on the utility that the song creates. A songwriter who writes songs that nobody likes or listens to should get nothing, but a writer who writes a song that millions of people enjoy is doing something valuable for those people. I can think of a few different schemes that we could try:
- Everyone contributes money to a central account proportional to the amount of music they listen to, and artists/writers, etc. get reimbursed proportionally to how much their work is being listened to. The problem I have with this is privacy and the dangers of having a centralized system. Practically it could work (think of a music club where playing a song is a fraction of a cent and you have access to any song you want to hear next). Personally, this is where I'd like to see the industry move, with appropriate privacy safeguards.
- Artists are free to license their work in whatever form they want (one time use, x number of uses, lifetime usage by one person, lifetime per household, etc.). Ideally there would be just a few standard licenses to make it simple. This fixes the privacy problem, but makes it completely impractical since it becomes worthwhile to make illegal copies of songs. This is close to what we have now.
- The totally immoral Canadian gov't idea is to charge you money based on the blank media you purchase, ignoring the fact that non-music data can and does get stored to that media, and it's a bad correlation to who is actually listening to more illegally copied music.
Commercial airliners can now land completely automatically. I would think that's a good first step towards driverless cars.
Also, your car control system could actually have advance warning of certain obstacles ahead of time and slow down sooner than a human could. Of course, if something goes wrong, you grab the wheel and take control, just like with cruise control.
Problems I could see... 1) You're reading the paper and bump the wheel, and it thinks you're taking control and stops steering. 2) It doesn't detect a big pothole. 3) It DOES detect a small pothole and swerves violently to avoid it. 4) Drivers go to sleep, then system deactivates itself for some reason.
I certainly think the public should have the rights to record anything that they can see or hear from their own perspective. That would place a reasonable limit on planting secret surveillance devices in other peoples' homes, etc. It also makes sense to others... if you are in a position where other people can hear or see you, then you should not be surprised when that person testifies against you for actions you do during that time frame.
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens.
This seems quite counter-intuitive. Look at all countries on the Earth and compare two variables: birth rate vs. energy consumption. I think you'll find that population growth has little need for energy, as long as you can produce enough food. Food is all solar powered, and we keep improving food production technologies. When food stops keeping up with population growth, the population will stop growing. I would assume at that point that condoms and vasectomies will be cheaper than food.
Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
I think you're confusing civilization, population, and brute force work. I think a future energy shortage will only affect things that take more energy: transportation, commuting, living and working in the more extreme temperature environments on Earth. As energy prices rise, you'll see the growth of energy efficient activities like working from home, telepresence, a shift in population to more temperate areas, etc. People adapt. Society adapts. Civilization adapts.
A couple years ago I went on a camping trip for a week and had to fly there. My father and I flew out of Detroit to Salt Lake City, and among the stuff we packed in our checked luggage for the camping trip was an air mattress and battery operated inflater (quite common in any camping equipment store). On the way out, there was a note in the bag saying the luggage had been searched, and we noticed the batteries had been removed from the inflater... not a big deal, as I'm sure they show up looking odd on an X-ray.
On the way back home, though, there was another note from the TSA, and the inflater was just gone. They didn't remove the batteries and put it back, or anything, it was just stolen.
I looked into submitting a claim for the lost item, and discovered that the form I would have to submit was the same form you used to make a wrongful death claim. Nice. I decided it wasn't worth my effort to try and get reimbursed for a $25 or so item.
Readers Digest did a little unscientific poll recently to figure out who were the most and least honest people in the world. They did this by dropping cell phones in odd places, then calling them so people would find the phone, and seeing how many people would return it. I found it quite interesting that the least honest group was security guards. Of course, this is practically the same demographic as TSA agents, so I guess it's no surprise that some of them are looting peoples' luggage.
I'm don't think this has anything to do with privacy. If I take my car to the garage, I take all the valuables out first, and if there was a list of members of my local overthrow-the-government club in there I'd remove that first too. I do assume that my vehicle is going to be seen inside and out at the garage. I assume that a contractor I hire is going to see the inside of my house, so I'd better hire someone I trust or lock up / securely hide what I don't want them to see. By inviting them in, I have to assume that they will look around (as long as they don't take or break anything).
Likewise, someone locks me in the trunk of a car, and I'm banging on the inside of the trunk and some passer-by hears me and they DON'T call the police, I'd be pretty pissed off at them. Likewise if some idiot was sexually abusing kids at his house and I happen to overhear, you can be damn sure I'll call the police, and if I was absolutely sure of what was going on (recognized the kid, etc.), and thought I could take him, I'd go knock down his door and rescue the kid. You have the option to turn your head and walk away, but you are morally justified to intervene if someone is being hurt/abused, etc.
Now, the REAL issue isn't privacy, it's whether or not they should be taking the word of the guys at the computer repair shop at face value. It's too easy in my mind for someone to plant evidence like that on a client's computer just because they wanted to pull a nasty prank or didn't like the guy. I think the cops should have been called, but I would challenge the evidence to make sure the guy wasn't being convicted ONLY on that evidence alone. I'd want to see the cops get a warrant and pull the IP logs from the ISP to see if he'd visited sites that offer or cater to that kind of material. I think the pictures on his computer is enough to get a warrant to look further into it, but I don't think it's enough to convict him completely. THAT's what the issue should be here.
Absolutely this guy is entitled to privacy, and freedom, and a fair trial, but that has to be weighed against the rights of the abused. If this guy had pictures of his pot plants or some pirated movies or evidence of some other *victimless* crime, then I'd buy the privacy argument, but not in this case.
Feeding 100 mW sensor and getting a 50 nW signal back with 25 mW of induced ground radar or cell telephone signal on top is the problem. It swamps the signal. In extreme cases such as a close lightning strike, the induced power could be enough to create a spark. The optical is for noise rejection and less for fire safety.
This makes a lot more sense. We already have industrial protocols like SERCOS for closed loop motion control that are based on fiber, specifically for high data rate and noise immunity. Having done some work on locomotives years ago where there is no reliable ground to use for shielding and it's a very noisy environment, electrically, we talked back then about using fiber for communications. The problems we ran into were cost and installation complexity (you'd have to retrain all the electricians on how to run fiber). We needed something simple and cost effective.
Power is still power. Whether you're pumping 100 mW of electricity or light into a fuel tank, I don't see a difference.
We already have intrisically safe electrical technology for such things. As long as you limit the power so that there isn't enough to create an ignition source, you're golden.
Personally I'd prefer new sensor technology that allows sensing the desired quantity with either less power or from a safe distance, like ultrasonic level sensors and such.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
Pick up a copy of "The Design of Everyday Things" - written by someone who reviewed the causes of the Three Mile Island accident. Accidents can happen. I'm definitely pro-nuclear-power at the moment, but we still need to take the safety extremely seriously. Keep the pressure on that industry; we can't afford any accidents.
It is a death trap and its not just lorries, its tourists who are getting from the west country to bristol. Its a great shortcut between two major roads, but it was not designed for the amount of traffic that gps sends through. They have seen MAJOR increases in traffic since gps became popular.
This sounds like a civil engineering problem to me. The GPS is functioning perfectly - finding the shortest route. What if you were on a motorcycle? You wouldn't want it to send you 20 km out of your way. Sounds like the route should be improved.
Actually, when I was in Germany, the GPS in the Audi rental car was making adjustments to the route based on local traffic information (received wirelessly, obviously). We don't have such a system in North America, but if this is the case all over Europe, why not "fix" the problem by permanently marking this road as closed? All GPS's would then route around it automatically.
What you really need is a digital storage oscilloscope. They're in the $10k+ range for a good standalone unit, but you can find reasonable ones that attach to a PC, such as the BitScope.
...and if you happen to show up as a high terrorist risk because your name matches someone else's or you recently received a phone call from a business acquaintance in the middle east, then they whisk you off to a foreign country, remove all trace that you even attempted to enter, and you get tortured until you tell them what they want to hear.
Here's what I don't get - most of us grew up around people who smoked (including yourself apparently), and yet even with these role models who smoked, most of us don't because we learn all about how bad tobacco is. Yet somehow, if a child sees a muppet with a prop pipe, they're suddenly going to get a craving for tobacco? I don't think so.
It's teenagers who start smoking, and it's usually because of social pressures, not because they saw a TV character with a pipe in its mouth 10 years ago.
Kids are curious. Better to explain tobacco, drugs, and alcohol to them yourself because they're going to find out anyway, either from you or from their friends. It's your choice.
The only MMO I played that wasn't like this was Planetside, and it wasn't an MMORPG - it was an MMOFPS. It was fun nearly 90% of the time. It had an experience system, but a brand new character could still beat a veteran any day - because there was skill.
I think the grind you're talking about is due to the RPG genre. It comes from D&D. You have to build a character, and it takes time. The fun is in the imagination. When you play WoW, you're not relying on your own imagination - you're expecting the game to provide the excitement for you, but the model is still D&D... they provide rules, you provide the story. If you're not willing to imagine a story that your character is living, then why play?
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A muscle powered machine gun... I'd like to see your design for that!
I bought a Tivo (which we love, btw), and I thought it was so cool that I could copy the shows over to my desktop or laptop and burn them to a DVD. Do you know how many times I've done that? Maybe 3 times total, and only as a favor to a friend who missed a couple episodes of BSG.
Honestly, I can keep 165 or so hours of TV on the Tivo and more than half of that is Tivo suggestions. If I wanted to keep something for a while, I just keep it, but who wants to watch something after they've already watched it once? Seriously, nobody I know has that kind of time on their hands.
At Christmas I sometimes get a purchased DVD as a gift, which is cool only because you get the *extra features*. You won't get that with a DVD recorded movie anyway.
It's no surprise to me that DVD recorders haven't taken off.
OTOH, I would love to see an olympic event with much looser rules. As long as your reasonable human shaped and stand on two upright units thet must me lifted up for movement.
I think it would be more interesting to have an event where you only have to be "human muscle powered". Then let them use whatever prosthetics, mechanisms (e.g. bicycles), steroids, etc. that you want. First over the finish line wins.
I think if we brought this kind of competition out into the open, it would make the technologies better known and we could develop better tests to determine if the non-enhanced athletes were competing fairly.
Dolly wasn't the first animal to be cloned, she was the first mammal to be cloned.
A stay at home parent likely spends much more than 50 hours per week parenting. Most wouldn't give up parenting either (I'm not saying it makes them happy, but they consider it important). I could imagine a person whose work is quite important might consider it worthy of more than 50 hours per week.
I also know a chef (in training) who cooks all day at work, then cooks for his family. He loves to cook.
What about a carpenter who is building his own garage? He probably spends more than 50 hours each week doing carpentry.
I happen to like automating things. Thankfully that's my job too... The trick is to leave the stuff you DON'T like at the office.
Work isn't important enough to care about it that much. Do your job to the best of your ability and go home. Too many people have it backwards -- worrying about work at day and all night.
That seems to be the attitude of most people I run into outside of work, and I certainly respect their wishes.
However, after the first 5 years of work I had the opportunity to move to a new city and get a new job. I did a bit of goal planning and soul searching and really started asking what I wanted to do with my life. I started making career decisions based on doing more of what I get excited about and less of what I dislike, even though it meant passing up opportunities for promotions and raises.
You know what? It worked. I love my job now, and can't imagine not wanting to go into work in the morning. I have a bad day maybe 1 out of 10 now, rather than 2 out of 3 like before. Of course, I have to be very careful and guarded if someone asks me what I do at work or I'm liable to get overly detailed. Most people only ask out of courtesy. However, on the rare occasion that I connect with guys like me, it can be fun to geek out and talk about work.
So it really depends on your point of view. If you don't find your job fulfilling or it stresses you out, then you need to leave it at work when you go home. On the other hand if your job is as interesting to you as a hobby, why not let the good parts come home with you? I leave the stress (and email) at the office, but I regularly read up on new technologies, etc., at home when I get a chance. There's still lots of time for family and other parts of your life (since having a hobby becomes somewhat redundant).
It's "ContainsKey", not "ContaintsKey". And you're missing a closing bracket, same line.
BTW, the PrintOnPaper() routine that's buried in the printer driver source code is: Hopefully there was a voter receipt printer and the voter could look at the receipt and verify that's who they voted for, then drop that into a box before leaving the polling station, then at least we could do a physical recount if someone contested the vote. Also, we should take 10% of the polling booths at random and do a manual count to check anyway.
Not to sound harsh, but in my Canada songwriters get paid to write songs, not because I have an internet connection. Breweries don't get paid because I have water to my home. (and I might use it to brew beer)
I don't get the analogy between songwriting and beer brewing. With brewing you can make something tangible that can only be used by one person at a time, and thus you can sell it. However, a songwriter can create a song once that can be enjoyed by everyone.
The difficulty is in figuring out how to compensate a writer based on the utility that the song creates. A songwriter who writes songs that nobody likes or listens to should get nothing, but a writer who writes a song that millions of people enjoy is doing something valuable for those people. I can think of a few different schemes that we could try:
- Everyone contributes money to a central account proportional to the amount of music they listen to, and artists/writers, etc. get reimbursed proportionally to how much their work is being listened to. The problem I have with this is privacy and the dangers of having a centralized system. Practically it could work (think of a music club where playing a song is a fraction of a cent and you have access to any song you want to hear next). Personally, this is where I'd like to see the industry move, with appropriate privacy safeguards.
- Artists are free to license their work in whatever form they want (one time use, x number of uses, lifetime usage by one person, lifetime per household, etc.). Ideally there would be just a few standard licenses to make it simple. This fixes the privacy problem, but makes it completely impractical since it becomes worthwhile to make illegal copies of songs. This is close to what we have now.
- The totally immoral Canadian gov't idea is to charge you money based on the blank media you purchase, ignoring the fact that non-music data can and does get stored to that media, and it's a bad correlation to who is actually listening to more illegally copied music.
Commercial airliners can now land completely automatically. I would think that's a good first step towards driverless cars.
Also, your car control system could actually have advance warning of certain obstacles ahead of time and slow down sooner than a human could. Of course, if something goes wrong, you grab the wheel and take control, just like with cruise control.
Problems I could see...
1) You're reading the paper and bump the wheel, and it thinks you're taking control and stops steering.
2) It doesn't detect a big pothole.
3) It DOES detect a small pothole and swerves violently to avoid it.
4) Drivers go to sleep, then system deactivates itself for some reason.
I certainly think the public should have the rights to record anything that they can see or hear from their own perspective. That would place a reasonable limit on planting secret surveillance devices in other peoples' homes, etc. It also makes sense to others... if you are in a position where other people can hear or see you, then you should not be surprised when that person testifies against you for actions you do during that time frame.
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens.
This seems quite counter-intuitive. Look at all countries on the Earth and compare two variables: birth rate vs. energy consumption. I think you'll find that population growth has little need for energy, as long as you can produce enough food. Food is all solar powered, and we keep improving food production technologies. When food stops keeping up with population growth, the population will stop growing. I would assume at that point that condoms and vasectomies will be cheaper than food.
Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
I think you're confusing civilization, population, and brute force work. I think a future energy shortage will only affect things that take more energy: transportation, commuting, living and working in the more extreme temperature environments on Earth. As energy prices rise, you'll see the growth of energy efficient activities like working from home, telepresence, a shift in population to more temperate areas, etc. People adapt. Society adapts. Civilization adapts.
A couple years ago I went on a camping trip for a week and had to fly there. My father and I flew out of Detroit to Salt Lake City, and among the stuff we packed in our checked luggage for the camping trip was an air mattress and battery operated inflater (quite common in any camping equipment store). On the way out, there was a note in the bag saying the luggage had been searched, and we noticed the batteries had been removed from the inflater... not a big deal, as I'm sure they show up looking odd on an X-ray.
On the way back home, though, there was another note from the TSA, and the inflater was just gone. They didn't remove the batteries and put it back, or anything, it was just stolen.
I looked into submitting a claim for the lost item, and discovered that the form I would have to submit was the same form you used to make a wrongful death claim. Nice. I decided it wasn't worth my effort to try and get reimbursed for a $25 or so item.
Readers Digest did a little unscientific poll recently to figure out who were the most and least honest people in the world. They did this by dropping cell phones in odd places, then calling them so people would find the phone, and seeing how many people would return it. I found it quite interesting that the least honest group was security guards. Of course, this is practically the same demographic as TSA agents, so I guess it's no surprise that some of them are looting peoples' luggage.
Assuming each robot only touches one wire at a time, I don't see how it could "short circuit" anything.
I'm don't think this has anything to do with privacy. If I take my car to the garage, I take all the valuables out first, and if there was a list of members of my local overthrow-the-government club in there I'd remove that first too. I do assume that my vehicle is going to be seen inside and out at the garage. I assume that a contractor I hire is going to see the inside of my house, so I'd better hire someone I trust or lock up / securely hide what I don't want them to see. By inviting them in, I have to assume that they will look around (as long as they don't take or break anything).
Likewise, someone locks me in the trunk of a car, and I'm banging on the inside of the trunk and some passer-by hears me and they DON'T call the police, I'd be pretty pissed off at them. Likewise if some idiot was sexually abusing kids at his house and I happen to overhear, you can be damn sure I'll call the police, and if I was absolutely sure of what was going on (recognized the kid, etc.), and thought I could take him, I'd go knock down his door and rescue the kid. You have the option to turn your head and walk away, but you are morally justified to intervene if someone is being hurt/abused, etc.
Now, the REAL issue isn't privacy, it's whether or not they should be taking the word of the guys at the computer repair shop at face value. It's too easy in my mind for someone to plant evidence like that on a client's computer just because they wanted to pull a nasty prank or didn't like the guy. I think the cops should have been called, but I would challenge the evidence to make sure the guy wasn't being convicted ONLY on that evidence alone. I'd want to see the cops get a warrant and pull the IP logs from the ISP to see if he'd visited sites that offer or cater to that kind of material. I think the pictures on his computer is enough to get a warrant to look further into it, but I don't think it's enough to convict him completely. THAT's what the issue should be here.
Absolutely this guy is entitled to privacy, and freedom, and a fair trial, but that has to be weighed against the rights of the abused. If this guy had pictures of his pot plants or some pirated movies or evidence of some other *victimless* crime, then I'd buy the privacy argument, but not in this case.
Feeding 100 mW sensor and getting a 50 nW signal back with 25 mW of induced ground radar or cell telephone signal on top is the problem. It swamps the signal. In extreme cases such as a close lightning strike, the induced power could be enough to create a spark. The optical is for noise rejection and less for fire safety.
This makes a lot more sense. We already have industrial protocols like SERCOS for closed loop motion control that are based on fiber, specifically for high data rate and noise immunity. Having done some work on locomotives years ago where there is no reliable ground to use for shielding and it's a very noisy environment, electrically, we talked back then about using fiber for communications. The problems we ran into were cost and installation complexity (you'd have to retrain all the electricians on how to run fiber). We needed something simple and cost effective.
Power is still power. Whether you're pumping 100 mW of electricity or light into a fuel tank, I don't see a difference.
We already have intrisically safe electrical technology for such things. As long as you limit the power so that there isn't enough to create an ignition source, you're golden.
Personally I'd prefer new sensor technology that allows sensing the desired quantity with either less power or from a safe distance, like ultrasonic level sensors and such.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
Pick up a copy of "The Design of Everyday Things" - written by someone who reviewed the causes of the Three Mile Island accident. Accidents can happen. I'm definitely pro-nuclear-power at the moment, but we still need to take the safety extremely seriously. Keep the pressure on that industry; we can't afford any accidents.
Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.
Do you think it would open any faster if the same document was compressed down to 10K?
I think the point you're trying to make is that the reader's footprint is too large.
It is a death trap and its not just lorries, its tourists who are getting from the west country to bristol. Its a great shortcut between two major roads, but it was not designed for the amount of traffic that gps sends through. They have seen MAJOR increases in traffic since gps became popular.
This sounds like a civil engineering problem to me. The GPS is functioning perfectly - finding the shortest route. What if you were on a motorcycle? You wouldn't want it to send you 20 km out of your way. Sounds like the route should be improved.
Actually, when I was in Germany, the GPS in the Audi rental car was making adjustments to the route based on local traffic information (received wirelessly, obviously). We don't have such a system in North America, but if this is the case all over Europe, why not "fix" the problem by permanently marking this road as closed? All GPS's would then route around it automatically.
What you really need is a digital storage oscilloscope. They're in the $10k+ range for a good standalone unit, but you can find reasonable ones that attach to a PC, such as the BitScope.
...and if you happen to show up as a high terrorist risk because your name matches someone else's or you recently received a phone call from a business acquaintance in the middle east, then they whisk you off to a foreign country, remove all trace that you even attempted to enter, and you get tortured until you tell them what they want to hear.
Sounds like the collapse of the US to me.
Here's what I don't get - most of us grew up around people who smoked (including yourself apparently), and yet even with these role models who smoked, most of us don't because we learn all about how bad tobacco is. Yet somehow, if a child sees a muppet with a prop pipe, they're suddenly going to get a craving for tobacco? I don't think so.
It's teenagers who start smoking, and it's usually because of social pressures, not because they saw a TV character with a pipe in its mouth 10 years ago.
Kids are curious. Better to explain tobacco, drugs, and alcohol to them yourself because they're going to find out anyway, either from you or from their friends. It's your choice.
The only MMO I played that wasn't like this was Planetside, and it wasn't an MMORPG - it was an MMOFPS. It was fun nearly 90% of the time. It had an experience system, but a brand new character could still beat a veteran any day - because there was skill.
I think the grind you're talking about is due to the RPG genre. It comes from D&D. You have to build a character, and it takes time. The fun is in the imagination. When you play WoW, you're not relying on your own imagination - you're expecting the game to provide the excitement for you, but the model is still D&D... they provide rules, you provide the story. If you're not willing to imagine a story that your character is living, then why play?
Here's an archive of the Google holiday logos: http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html
Notice that Independence Day is in there. You realize that's an American holiday, right? Right? Sheesh.
Why do they always seem to put the damn optimists in charge of budget and project schedule?
:)
Because management likes their projections better than ours...