Not sure why the above was marked Troll. I find what was said very insightful. In fact we saw the same thing happen at the company where my husband works, though it is still around having survived the dot.com bubble. I suspect that many/.ers have observed similar trends.
During the bubble, where my husband works, money was thrown around quite a bit and though they didn't have a cafeteria often the bosses would take the employees (there were two bosses and six employees) out to the most exclusive restaraunts in the area, more than once inviting employee families including about ten children. Other times they would order in take-out, also from high end places. As the dot.com bubble popped and the company stock dropped lunch became the secretary picking up a buy-your-own lunch at the local Burger King and my husband started brown bagging it.
If these companies have the money to spend on food and a fancy cafeteria then they probably are doing pretty well, though sometimes it is just a front and the spending is out of line.
This may be true. However, when dealing with someone who has recently had a stroke the chances are that things need to be kept pretty simple just as they need to be when dealing with special ed students. If both individuals caring for this woman are rather busy with work and school and are looking for a simple solution, something she can deal with without outside help, then keeping the installation as well as the actually running the game needs to be simple as well.
In my experience, DOS simulators are not simple to install or to run, plus the interface leaves much to be desired, especially in this scenerio.
My kids use Firefox and I agree the online games do work with that, but the point is to have the widest range of well-designed, intuitive, non-crashing activities available.
First, as a teacher and now homeschool mom who attempted to use Linux for over a year I must say that the comment on moving to Linux was uncalled for. I loved it for its stability, but had to give it up due to the lack of quality (appealing and intuitive interface, non-crashing, easy to install, and actually educational in nature) educational games and resources. Good design is especially important when dealing with children, espcially those with special needs (read special ed students), and with adults who need occuptaional/recreational therapy. There is, or was last year, a significant lack of quality educational games that are stable
Aside from that, there are plenty of good games out there, especially ones which are educational (which would prove especially helpful in dealing with stroke as they would help rebuild the pathways and make new ones.)
There are many good educational sites that are free to use and that are very simple to get to, especially if you were to make her homepage a custom designed web portal with links to all the sites and activities you think she will enjoy. I did this for my kids, designing a site for each that has picture links to all their favorite web sites.
Depending on the level and area of damage you should be able to make a portal of links that would suit her needs. If you need a jumping off point with a variety of educational sites you could look through the links on our site: http://www.shamusyoung.com/kidsportal/kidshome.htm l. Feel free to copy and use the source if you like. I would look through the different sites and see what is most likely to work on the areas she needs, i.e. Memory (the game), math games, logic games, etc.
http://www.popcap.com/ games, Real.com, Shockwave, and Yahoo also have some great games that help build problem solving skills, working with the logic/mathmatical part of the brain, even Tetris is good for logic developement. (if you don't mind the occasional spyware, in fact installing http://www.lavasoft.com/ Ad-aware and an anti-virus program like http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1 AVG would be wise prior to any downloads).
If you can get a hold of the old "Doctor Brain" games they are wonderful for this type of situation as they are fun to play (even for adults) and deliberately work on different parts of the brain, i.e. File Sorting to work with memory, etc. The Incredible Machine games and Lemmings are also good for logic and problem solving developement.
It always surprises me how different things look in black and white photography. We are so used to seeing Earth in color that seeing it only in tonal variation is almost shocking. I suspect that some of what looks like cloud would come across very differently in color.
I am looking forward to Steamboy, mostly because I loved "Memories" not because of Akira, which was beautiful but didn't work as a movie. It seemed to my husband and I both that the timing was off and that a lot of it just didn't make sense.
As someone has already mentioned Flash is used extensively on educational websites. I realize that the average geek guy does not find flash extremely useful in daily life unless your into Homestar Runner, but it is incredibly useful in the educational arena, making websites for children much more interactive and useful. (This is my biggest issue with Linux: very few useful, well-designed children's applications.)
I am disappointed to find that Macromedia is taking this route now that they have become a big name. I prefer to download only what I request without having to deal with "extras", spyware or not. I personally won't mind as long as they tell you before hand and give an chance to opt out.
My other concern is that this may make my job harder when it comes to cleaning up other people's computers. Its bad enough trying to convince people that they shouldn't go downloading every free screensaver they like but to have to explain to them where even more random bits of software come from, sigh.
In the end I don't hold it against Macromedia, they do have the right to make their money somewhere (yes, I realize that the prices for the developement software is pretty high.) I just wish they would be more straight forward about things, advertising it on their site like Download.com does instead of just bundling it with their software.
At one time morality was both predicted by the media, and upheld by the media. The masses would not tolerate it otherwise. This has naturally declined as with all things. Both the media and the masses have been sliding down the moral slope over the years. This has happened both in the secularly and religiously, not to mention within public education.
Media has given up moral responsibility in the name of "art" and "freedom of speech", forgeting that "freedom of speech" holds responsibility for that speech, i.e. my right to punch you in the nose stops at your nose.
Government does not have the right to dictate morality, other than where it preserves the basic rights of a people, say the right not to be murdered, the right not to have your things stolen, the right to speak freely, the right to religious freedom.
The problem is that gradually U.S. (and other) government has begun dictating morality, using legislation to falsly create a moral structure within our culture, often a moral standing very different than the one of the people.
If more people, including game developers, writers, and major media, would take a moral stand, not with an agenda but rather a basic morality as shown in our constitution, we would find that our culture would move the line of morality gradually up to a more tolerable level, without the need of more laws and legislation.
Ninth grade girls are not women. Ninth grade girls are exactly that, 9th grade girls, who, in general, think in terms of popularity.
Speaking as a once 9th grade girl who is now quite grown up, girls in the public school system do care very much about what others think, even if they say they don't. On the other hand, being considered "geeky", say by ones husband and his friends, who think it's "cool", is quite another.
Some women may still care what others think of their career, just like some men. But some girls grow up to find that hanging out with geeks is pretty cool.
Aside from that if, regardless of gender, a person is not interested in a feild of study than trying to convice them to go into that field by dispelling myths (are they myths?) about the social aspect seems kind of silly.
My dad had a similar problem with his PC's, both at home and at work (he is computer coordinator for a school district and had to uninstall SP2 from half the machines) though I believe this was when SP2 first came out and that the issues may have been fixed later.
Also, XP is known to break various laptop's WIFI, more often than not Netgear. In my case it broke my laptop connection completely. I had to reinstall a previous version of XP and carefully install only the "safe" updates (one site listed the specific file to avoid which did work which of course I can no longer find).
All the forums I checked out had lists of people complaining of lack of WIFI connectivity with SP2.
different points of interest. The biggest issue with translating any story from one medium to another is that what is "really cool" in one is just goofy or boring in another. In the Lord of the Rings books there were many places where the party was just traveling. Tolkien used that time to describe the changing landscape, the fear and uncertainty they were feeling, and their comradery. If this had been done in the same way in the movie (which can show in a few seconds several pages of description) it would have been boring. This is part of the reason Douglas Adams naturally adjusted his story to suit each media it was translated into.
When big movie companies get involved in making a game based on their movie, they insist that the game stay close to the story. You end up with behaviors that are similar to the movie but aren't a lot of fun in a game and a lot of direct from the movie cut scenes, all of which are buggy because of the push to get it released in time.
It is funny that it has taken movie companies so long to get this.
First, in reference to those who don't get blogging: It is finally a way for all of us would-be writers and journalists to express our humble opinions in a place where they might actually be read. It is a diverse community without the usualy limits and editing done when something is written within major media.
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
After reading the LawMeme article, I understood this to be mostly focusing on how cooporate electronic information would be handled, though if it is applied to corp info then it will likely later be applied to personal info. It does seem that it would open up more than a few loop holes that would allow big corporations to get away with things while the common user would not, for example a large company could easily decide to copy all possibly incriminating back-ups to a less accessable media, but how many home userts are going to deliberately store their info on a something "less accessable".
Also the note at the bottom of the article, asking that techies request that the date for public comments be extended, was up yesterday so posting this today may not be helpful.
Generally speaking I am against GMO's especially as they do tend to cross-breed with non-GMO's and if they are a strong enough breed will take over like GMO corn has done ( http://ohioline.osu.edu/agf-fact/0153.html).
I can see how this could be useful and why, especially in dealing with areas of high-selenium concentrations. And am sure that if it comes into use it will some company , vitamin or otherwise, will find a use for it.
FYI Selenium is a " micromineral needed in the diet on a daily basis, but only in very small amounts (50 milligrams or less). The other microminerals that all humans must get from food are arsenic, boron, cobalt, copper, chromium, fluorine, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, and zinc.
In the case of selenium, the amount needed from food is actually measured in micrograms, and ranges from 20-70 micrograms. (A microgram is one thousandth of a milligram, and in one ounce, there are about 30 million micrograms.)
While the nutritional value of all plant food depends on the soil in which it was grown, the selenium content of plants seems particularly sensitive to soil concentrations. For this reason, most of the early research on selenium focused on diseases in sheep, cattle, turkeys, and pigs which involved low soil concentrations of selenium and insufficient amounts of selenium in the forage plants eaten by these animals."
Hmm, I disagree, though it certainly depends on the person.
My husband, a dyslexic special ed student that no one could get to work, is now the lead programmer at his company. He is a completely self-taught c++ programmer and web designer, and has also written a cyber-punk novel, and developed many game mods and levels. All because he got a hold of his friends Atari and started messing with it when he was a kid.
I too have LD and the only only reason I can spell is because I got sick of my writing being spellchecked constantly. Constantly having to fix "their" and numerous other tricky words gradually weeded them out of my brain and replaced them with the correct spelling.
A social life is important but learning to use the technology around us is also very important, and often is exactly what an LD student needs, as LD isn't necessarilly a disability but rather a different way of seeing the world.
As a special education teacher, a home schooling mother with two learning-disabled children, and l/d adult married to another l/d adult, may I say that frankly there is not enough information to go on.
Every LD child (and LD adult) is different, every one of us has different needs and different learning styles. Does he learn better by hearing something, by seeing it, or by touch. In most cases the best bet is to mix all three.
Video games are an excellent resource for this and best bet is to find something he will actually do and then stick with it. Games that require basic reading and simple math skills are very helpful. (We found several Gamecube games work well for this as most do not "speak". Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing are good examples.)
The best relatively cheap learning software we have found, that is at least tolerable for adults (not too cutesy) are the http://www.helpme2learn.com/ "Help Me 2 Learn" programs. My husband and I have both used the Spanish software for ourselves and found it one of the few that eaither of us could really learn from. My kids love all the other software and we have found that the style it is taught works for all 3 children, who each have very different learning styles.
May I suggest checking out some home schooling websites, you will find many resources for a variety of learning disabilities and types.
the Lost Mind of Dr. Brain, as well as the others in the series. I have used therse in the Special Ed. classroom and kids of all age and literacy levels love playing them (including my huisband and myself.:) Pandora's Box is a great puzzle based game. Also the Math Blaster and Reading Blaster games.
If you have internet access on location, which I doubt, the Big Idea website (www.bigidea.com) has some great educational Flash games that are highly addictive and teach physics etc. - Spaced Penguin and Ship Lander are great on this site.
Snowcrash actually inspired several other 3d chat as well including Black Sun. Niel Stephenson doesn't seem to mind.:)
Worlds Chat was released in 1994 a year later they sold the technology for Activeworlds to Circle of Fire Studios, which has changed names to Activeworlds.com. Activeworlds.com is still using this technology although far advanced from its humble beginnings. Not sure what effect such a patent will have,
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure why the above was marked Troll. I find what was said very insightful. In fact we saw the same thing happen at the company where my husband works, though it is still around having survived the dot.com bubble. I suspect that many /.ers have observed similar trends.
During the bubble, where my husband works, money was thrown around quite a bit and though they didn't have a cafeteria often the bosses would take the employees (there were two bosses and six employees) out to the most exclusive restaraunts in the area, more than once inviting employee families including about ten children. Other times they would order in take-out, also from high end places. As the dot.com bubble popped and the company stock dropped lunch became the secretary picking up a buy-your-own lunch at the local Burger King and my husband started brown bagging it.
If these companies have the money to spend on food and a fancy cafeteria then they probably are doing pretty well, though sometimes it is just a front and the spending is out of line.
This may be true. However, when dealing with someone who has recently had a stroke the chances are that things need to be kept pretty simple just as they need to be when dealing with special ed students. If both individuals caring for this woman are rather busy with work and school and are looking for a simple solution, something she can deal with without outside help, then keeping the installation as well as the actually running the game needs to be simple as well.
In my experience, DOS simulators are not simple to install or to run, plus the interface leaves much to be desired, especially in this scenerio.
My kids use Firefox and I agree the online games do work with that, but the point is to have the widest range of well-designed, intuitive, non-crashing activities available.
First, as a teacher and now homeschool mom who attempted to use Linux for over a year I must say that the comment on moving to Linux was uncalled for. I loved it for its stability, but had to give it up due to the lack of quality (appealing and intuitive interface, non-crashing, easy to install, and actually educational in nature) educational games and resources. Good design is especially important when dealing with children, espcially those with special needs (read special ed students), and with adults who need occuptaional/recreational therapy. There is, or was last year, a significant lack of quality educational games that are stable
m l. Feel free to copy and use the source if you like. I would look through the different sites and see what is most likely to work on the areas she needs, i.e. Memory (the game), math games, logic games, etc.
Aside from that, there are plenty of good games out there, especially ones which are educational (which would prove especially helpful in dealing with stroke as they would help rebuild the pathways and make new ones.)
There are many good educational sites that are free to use and that are very simple to get to, especially if you were to make her homepage a custom designed web portal with links to all the sites and activities you think she will enjoy. I did this for my kids, designing a site for each that has picture links to all their favorite web sites.
Depending on the level and area of damage you should be able to make a portal of links that would suit her needs. If you need a jumping off point with a variety of educational sites you could look through the links on our site: http://www.shamusyoung.com/kidsportal/kidshome.ht
http://www.popcap.com/ games, Real.com, Shockwave, and Yahoo also have some great games that help build problem solving skills, working with the logic/mathmatical part of the brain, even Tetris is good for logic developement. (if you don't mind the occasional spyware, in fact installing http://www.lavasoft.com/ Ad-aware and an anti-virus program like http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1 AVG would be wise prior to any downloads).
If you can get a hold of the old "Doctor Brain" games they are wonderful for this type of situation as they are fun to play (even for adults) and deliberately work on different parts of the brain, i.e. File Sorting to work with memory, etc. The Incredible Machine games and Lemmings are also good for logic and problem solving developement.
Opera has had this for months now, with no adds and with an excellent little search attatched.http://portal.opera.com/
It always surprises me how different things look in black and white photography. We are so used to seeing Earth in color that seeing it only in tonal variation is almost shocking. I suspect that some of what looks like cloud would come across very differently in color.
How stunningly beautiful these shots are.
I was wondering if anyone else picked up on that.
I am looking forward to Steamboy, mostly because I loved "Memories" not because of Akira, which was beautiful but didn't work as a movie. It seemed to my husband and I both that the timing was off and that a lot of it just didn't make sense.
As someone has already mentioned Flash is used extensively on educational websites. I realize that the average geek guy does not find flash extremely useful in daily life unless your into Homestar Runner, but it is incredibly useful in the educational arena, making websites for children much more interactive and useful. (This is my biggest issue with Linux: very few useful, well-designed children's applications.)
I am disappointed to find that Macromedia is taking this route now that they have become a big name. I prefer to download only what I request without having to deal with "extras", spyware or not. I personally won't mind as long as they tell you before hand and give an chance to opt out.
My other concern is that this may make my job harder when it comes to cleaning up other people's computers. Its bad enough trying to convince people that they shouldn't go downloading every free screensaver they like but to have to explain to them where even more random bits of software come from, sigh.
In the end I don't hold it against Macromedia, they do have the right to make their money somewhere (yes, I realize that the prices for the developement software is pretty high.) I just wish they would be more straight forward about things, advertising it on their site like Download.com does instead of just bundling it with their software.
At one time morality was both predicted by the media, and upheld by the media. The masses would not tolerate it otherwise. This has naturally declined as with all things. Both the media and the masses have been sliding down the moral slope over the years. This has happened both in the secularly and religiously, not to mention within public education.
Media has given up moral responsibility in the name of "art" and "freedom of speech", forgeting that "freedom of speech" holds responsibility for that speech, i.e. my right to punch you in the nose stops at your nose.
Government does not have the right to dictate morality, other than where it preserves the basic rights of a people, say the right not to be murdered, the right not to have your things stolen, the right to speak freely, the right to religious freedom.
The problem is that gradually U.S. (and other) government has begun dictating morality, using legislation to falsly create a moral structure within our culture, often a moral standing very different than the one of the people.
If more people, including game developers, writers, and major media, would take a moral stand, not with an agenda but rather a basic morality as shown in our constitution, we would find that our culture would move the line of morality gradually up to a more tolerable level, without the need of more laws and legislation.
Ninth grade girls are not women. Ninth grade girls are exactly that, 9th grade girls, who, in general, think in terms of popularity.
Speaking as a once 9th grade girl who is now quite grown up, girls in the public school system do care very much about what others think, even if they say they don't. On the other hand, being considered "geeky", say by ones husband and his friends, who think it's "cool", is quite another.
Some women may still care what others think of their career, just like some men. But some girls grow up to find that hanging out with geeks is pretty cool.
Aside from that if, regardless of gender, a person is not interested in a feild of study than trying to convice them to go into that field by dispelling myths (are they myths?) about the social aspect seems kind of silly.
My dad had a similar problem with his PC's, both at home and at work (he is computer coordinator for a school district and had to uninstall SP2 from half the machines) though I believe this was when SP2 first came out and that the issues may have been fixed later.
Also, XP is known to break various laptop's WIFI, more often than not Netgear. In my case it broke my laptop connection completely. I had to reinstall a previous version of XP and carefully install only the "safe" updates (one site listed the specific file to avoid which did work which of course I can no longer find).
All the forums I checked out had lists of people complaining of lack of WIFI connectivity with SP2.
different points of interest. The biggest issue with translating any story from one medium to another is that what is "really cool" in one is just goofy or boring in another. In the Lord of the Rings books there were many places where the party was just traveling. Tolkien used that time to describe the changing landscape, the fear and uncertainty they were feeling, and their comradery. If this had been done in the same way in the movie (which can show in a few seconds several pages of description) it would have been boring. This is part of the reason Douglas Adams naturally adjusted his story to suit each media it was translated into.
When big movie companies get involved in making a game based on their movie, they insist that the game stay close to the story. You end up with behaviors that are similar to the movie but aren't a lot of fun in a game and a lot of direct from the movie cut scenes, all of which are buggy because of the push to get it released in time.
It is funny that it has taken movie companies so long to get this.
First, in reference to those who don't get blogging: It is finally a way for all of us would-be writers and journalists to express our humble opinions in a place where they might actually be read. It is a diverse community without the usualy limits and editing done when something is written within major media.
Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.
That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.
After reading the LawMeme article, I understood this to be mostly focusing on how cooporate electronic information would be handled, though if it is applied to corp info then it will likely later be applied to personal info. It does seem that it would open up more than a few loop holes that would allow big corporations to get away with things while the common user would not, for example a large company could easily decide to copy all possibly incriminating back-ups to a less accessable media, but how many home userts are going to deliberately store their info on a something "less accessable".
Also the note at the bottom of the article, asking that techies request that the date for public comments be extended, was up yesterday so posting this today may not be helpful.
I can see how this could be useful and why, especially in dealing with areas of high-selenium concentrations. And am sure that if it comes into use it will some company , vitamin or otherwise, will find a use for it.
FYI Selenium is a " micromineral needed in the diet on a daily basis, but only in very small amounts (50 milligrams or less). The other microminerals that all humans must get from food are arsenic, boron, cobalt, copper, chromium, fluorine, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, and zinc.
In the case of selenium, the amount needed from food is actually measured in micrograms, and ranges from 20-70 micrograms. (A microgram is one thousandth of a milligram, and in one ounce, there are about 30 million micrograms.)
While the nutritional value of all plant food depends on the soil in which it was grown, the selenium content of plants seems particularly sensitive to soil concentrations. For this reason, most of the early research on selenium focused on diseases in sheep, cattle, turkeys, and pigs which involved low soil concentrations of selenium and insufficient amounts of selenium in the forage plants eaten by these animals."
~As stated on the Worlds Best Foods website:& dbid=95
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient
Hmm, I disagree, though it certainly depends on the person.
My husband, a dyslexic special ed student that no one could get to work, is now the lead programmer at his company. He is a completely self-taught c++ programmer and web designer, and has also written a cyber-punk novel, and developed many game mods and levels. All because he got a hold of his friends Atari and started messing with it when he was a kid.
I too have LD and the only only reason I can spell is because I got sick of my writing being spellchecked constantly. Constantly having to fix "their" and numerous other tricky words gradually weeded them out of my brain and replaced them with the correct spelling.
A social life is important but learning to use the technology around us is also very important, and often is exactly what an LD student needs, as LD isn't necessarilly a disability but rather a different way of seeing the world.
As a special education teacher, a home schooling mother with two learning-disabled children, and l/d adult married to another l/d adult, may I say that frankly there is not enough information to go on.
l essonview_en.htm, http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/jeather/maths/dicti onary.html, http://teachers.teach-nology.com/.
Every LD child (and LD adult) is different, every one of us has different needs and different learning styles. Does he learn better by hearing something, by seeing it, or by touch. In most cases the best bet is to mix all three.
Video games are an excellent resource for this and best bet is to find something he will actually do and then stick with it. Games that require basic reading and simple math skills are very helpful. (We found several Gamecube games work well for this as most do not "speak". Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing are good examples.)
I have found that there are a wide variety of free games on-line that aren't to "childish" but are helpful in reinforcing skills being worked on. A few are http://www.dositey.com/, http://www.internet4classrooms.com/index.htm, http://www.literacycenter.net/literacycenter_net/
The best relatively cheap learning software we have found, that is at least tolerable for adults (not too cutesy) are the http://www.helpme2learn.com/ "Help Me 2 Learn" programs. My husband and I have both used the Spanish software for ourselves and found it one of the few that eaither of us could really learn from. My kids love all the other software and we have found that the style it is taught works for all 3 children, who each have very different learning styles.
May I suggest checking out some home schooling websites, you will find many resources for a variety of learning disabilities and types.
the Lost Mind of Dr. Brain, as well as the others in the series. I have used therse in the Special Ed. classroom and kids of all age and literacy levels love playing them (including my huisband and myself.:) Pandora's Box is a great puzzle based game. Also the Math Blaster and Reading Blaster games.
If you have internet access on location, which I doubt, the Big Idea website (www.bigidea.com) has some great educational Flash games that are highly addictive and teach physics etc. - Spaced Penguin and Ship Lander are great on this site.
Snowcrash actually inspired several other 3d chat as well including Black Sun. Niel Stephenson doesn't seem to mind. :)
Worlds Chat was released in 1994 a year later they sold the technology for Activeworlds to Circle of Fire Studios, which has changed names to Activeworlds.com. Activeworlds.com is still using this technology although far advanced from its humble beginnings. Not sure what effect such a patent will have,