But yeah, that's more of a sim than a game, but that's the kind of game I tend to like;-)
I wasn't that impressed by the DS... my son has one, but is always begging to play Angry Birds or something on my HTC Slide instead. Never touched a PSP tho, and not many recent consoles for that matter. I tend to prefer doing the "serious" games on my PC.
Heh, I've almost given up on following the model numbers, and just head directly to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ to get a *general* idea of where a card falls in the grand scheme of things.
I've sort of been toying with the idea of another gaming notebook, but I was kinda disappointed in my last one (Inspiron 7200 with a Geforce 4200 Go)... it seemed great for a couple of years, but still went out of date before its time... Dell never released drivers for anything newer than WinXP, and even under Linux it couldn't do proper compositing. So I was running circles around it with a 2 year older desktop machine. The Inspiron still has a lovely widescreen display, though, wish I could run something modern on it.
Anyway, let me know if you find something cheap / interesting that could maybe keep up with the 8800GT in my aging desktop.
Counterpoint: 10" is not ginormous enough! I still want one of the 5 foot high Android display phones they had at their trade show booths in the early days! Until then, I shall never be, uh... satisfied.
Meh, sick, or just different. We go to family nudist colonies / Russian & Korean saunas so nakedness anxiety is just kinda blase. It bewilders us just as much that people can be so prudish about things, making them up to be more mysterious and emotionally damaging than really necessary to achieve any practical ends. But whatever, it's a cute part of culture.
Yeah, fondling is a bit different, but we'll just lop the TSA in with the doctors and proctologists. If they actually get their rocks off on it, then so much the better for their job satisfaction. My girl's been practicing her karate kick for when she thinks someone's crossing her comfort threshold... could make things entertaining, at least while she's young enough to get away with it.:P
But it's just a cute thing about American culture that we put up with all this... makes it all the more refreshing to travel abroad and see how laid back the rest of the world is.;-)
We like to travel, and when you travel, you submit to the ridiculous customs of the locals, like bowing to their Kings and Buddhas, or doing a Da Vinci in front of the backscatter imaging machines. And then we go home and make fun of them. But in a diplomatic way! Lest Wikileaks gets hold of our confidential cables.
The technology... will improve, with any luck. Someday hopefully people will just walk through a tunnel, and not have to stand in that ridiculous pose with their hands up. And maybe, just maybe they'll start to deploy the more effective behavioral profiling techniques used by the Israelis and US Customs officers. But more likely they'll continue to regulate the procedures to favor the incumbent supplier companies involved.
Anyhow, we do plenty of car trips up and down the east coast. But alas, we're headed to the left coast for a week.
Someday I dream of running some sort of personal air taxi service running between small local civilian airports... so, for me at least, the less desirable the big airports are the better!:-D
I'm pretty happy with my HTC Slide and ConnectBot. I use it with screen, and it's pretty straightforward. The HSDPA on T-mobile's network noticeably cuts down latency when it's active. With the default font it does 80x25 in landscape mode, and stays connected in the background.
My two gripes: it's annoying to get to the some of the special keys such as | and \... have to close the physical keyboard so you can activate the virtual keyboard and navigate through two layers of Num + Alt to display them. But at least it's possible, and aliases and history are your friends.
Second gripe is that the touchpad button is often finicky as a cursor.... but hopefully not a big issue if you use vi or are comfortable with lots of Ctrl-f / Ctrl-b to navigate.
I dunno, I'm pretty damn happy with my HTC Slide. Every once in a while I glance over at one of the high-end ARMv7 phones that could possibly be running Google Earth Mobile or one of the 3D intensive games, but then I go back to happily typing away on my Slide.
Kinda have to sit funny, though, thanks to the bulge of the $300 wad of cash I saved by not going with one of the high-end phones.
My one gripe is that it's still hard to get to the | (vertical bar / pipe) key in ConnectBot... I still have to activate the software keyboard and go through 2 layers of num alt to get to it:-/
I've played with swype and voice recognition briefly, but the inane things I tend to say just makes them frustrated.
16 year old news is news for slashdot... If it's older than slashdot, then at least it might not be a dupe!:-P ( At least I don't remember having read this on slashdot before )
... and thanks to PERL's write-only attribute, you can probably recycle the Advent Calendar next year and hardly be the wiser! Truly the gift that keeps on giving!
Sadly, it doesn't look like perladvent.pm.org bothered to do this (at least at first glance)... will need to write a quick perl script to download and uniq their entries...
Oh, I bet Julian Assange fully expects to be martyred "for the cause" at some point. He probably has some interesting "dead man's switch" set up to do something amusing after he goes... if it could make some point about how the world isn't ready for transparency then so much the better.
If these things don't go through WikiLeaks, they'd just go through something else. Hey, maybe his dead man's switch unleashes some sort of decentralized P2P leak site:P
my aunt always wondered what was so important about the sitting-on-the-jackets part of the drills. Even when she was little, she didn't think the nuclear winter would be that kind of winter. But hey, she was more than ready to shield them with her life for The Cause.
Meh, facebook is just connective tissue; grey matter. I don't really use it all that differently from twitter... actually most of my FB posts come from twitter.
The real content gets posted to Slashdot, LiveJournal, Blogspot, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, etc., sometimes even Buzz. Twitter / FB are just open / closed syndication engines for that content, sort of like a consolidated form of RSS with some extra integration features.
Relevant to the actual subject, StumbleUpon has always provided a much better "Like" button... since it includes a "don't like" button and actually does something useful with the information you provide by giving you more random links that you would probably like based on what you have in common with the other people who liked that link.
Strangely, I have no desire to share this StumbleUpon "like" information with the rest of my IRL friends on FB / twitter, partly because our pr0n tastes can be quite different, but in general I just don't care to share links as a feed. If there's an article someone should read, I send them a directed email. If I find something funny, I might go so far as to post it to our IRC channel.
Come to think of it, I think FB / Twitter might just be some sort of gap filler for people who don't lurk on IRC.
The government also tells you to hide under your desk in the event of a nuclear attack.
The way my dad remembers, it went something like this: "In the event of a nuclear attack, at the sound of the klaxon please line up and proceed to the hallway in an orderly fashion, place your jacket on the floor, sit on your jacket, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye"
Heh, pretty good for you! My wife's #1 pet peeve are people who say "hey, if I fail at professional life, at least I could go be a teacher. As if it were actually some kind of easy.
Most people fail at "classroom management" skills... it's not even something they teach you during the course of your education degree... it's like you either have the ability to walk into a classroom and capture the students' attention authoritatively, and keep them occupied with a well-paced lesson plan enough so they don't fool around, or they chew you up and spit you out.
My wife is a frickin genius at that kind of thing, and now she's coaching other teachers to do it... (rather than just leaving their low-performing students to flounder around). I, on the other hand, did have a brief stint subbing 3rd grade at an inner-city Baltimore Catholic school when I was in college (my stepmother was the principal there), and I'd like to say I was able to hang on for a week or two, but I had to begin resorting to yelling at the kids within a few days, so I didn't last much longer once the novelty of that wore off.:P
Yeah, thanks for the list. I think a lot of his complaints are addressed by Android 2.2 / Froyo / CyanogenMOD, but I think back in April most of those were still valid.
The palm was primarily designed as a PIM device, and it shows. I did like the hardware addressbook / schedule buttons, since you're usually in a hurry when someone starts giving you that information, and it takes time and concentration to navigate through your software icons, even if it means hitting 2-3 buttons instead of 1. The guy who originally designed the Palm supposedly carried around a block of wood and pretended to use it in his daily life when he was imagining how the UI would actually work, and that part shows.
It's actually quite remarkable how easy it is to use. The Android calendar has gotten better, but I still find myself frustrated with a few UI elements... especially trying to find the "New Event" button hidden behind 2 levels of menus, and having to use those silly +/- buttons to set the event time, or having to double-click on the hour / minutes field separately to type in the numbers. It's evident that they still kinda expect you to do most of your data entry from the gmail interface on a PC.
I gave up trying to use the IMAP client, I just use the gmail and yahoo mail apps now.
The new autofocus and stability checker in Android 2.2.1 / CyanogenMOD 6.1 does work much better. But that just came out last month:P Before had to use Camera 360 to get some of that functionality... and it took me a while to sort through all the various camera apps on the mess of the market / appbrain pages to find it.
I am kind of miffed at the inability to record to somewhat standard formats. My wife was using her Android phone to record interviews, and eventually I had to set up some pipeline where I converted the.3gp files to.wav using a command line tool before finally using audacity to do some processing and save as.mp3 . But hopefully more tools will be able to import/export the cellphone formats natively soon.
The Palm backup was more trivial... you plug it into your computer and sync with the palm tool or JPilot and it's done, and you can restore everything to a fresh device. I've been using the Titanium backup tool under Android to save everything to SD, but then my SD card died and I pretty much ended up losing everything and having to reinstall most of my apps onto a new SD card, at least all the ones that I had done the "move to SD" to.
I don't know why he threw the last point in, his Nexus One actually had an FM tuner, but only newer versions of CM could actually use it.
Datebk5 was actually included with the Palm TX, you only need to buy it to use with older Palm devices.
My own gripe with my HTC Slide is the puny 100MB available for apps, so I'm always uninstalling stuff I want just to install new things, even after manually moving all the data I could to SD. Next time I flash an new CM, I'll try to do the CustomMTD partitioning to reallocate that extra 100MB or so that not used by/system to/apps data. But it feels so weird jacking about with this kind of thing when it wasn't even an issue on the Palm, where you could just install apps on both the device and the SD card with wild abandon.
Palm users are just bitter after having a steady upgrade path for years, and then being forced to wait *years* while watching iPhone, WebOS, N900, Android etc. kind of flounder around with the basic PIM stuff. Sure, maybe there *could* be apps that make the experience better. But there aren't yet, and you wouldn't really want to use a third-party app / data format for PIM, since there's a lot of cross-app integrat
(eventually he ended up somewhat satisfied with one of the newer iPod touches... I'll probably go the other way and install Debian on my phone) The Linux Installer app didn't complete successfully on my device, but hopefully I'll have better luck following the ARM debootstrap procedure from: http://www.android-devs.com/?p=152
Hmm, the only way to make sure everyone knows that a backup process is a) necessary and b) actually functional is to schedule a "business continuity" exercise and perform a simulated disk failure.
Get approval and buy-in from those higher-ups first, if you want to keep your job, though:-P It probably also helps if you keep a stack of dead drives on your desk with a skull and crossbones on top of them to drive home the fact that those things do indeed have an MTBF.
Hmm, I'm actually afraid to say I'll pass. Been pretty happy with the 25/15 service. My WRT54Gv4 router just barely keeps up with that as it is, and only then because I updated from HyperWRT to Tomato. (HyperWRT couldn't push past 20Mbps on my hardware)
Would rather spend money on additional mobile bandwidth for the wife, or maybe even the car:-P T-Mobile's HSDPA on an HTC slide runs pretty sweet at 1Mbps with much lower latency than the 3G connections. Still waiting for a decent Android tablet (or even a phone with a large screen) for the car, though.
Heh, my wife got in trouble for sending home a similar "unauthorized memo", saying that if they felt the gang violence at school was too dangerous, they should stay home.
This was after several kids got knives and guns pulled on them by the library... and somewhat after some gangstas pulled a fire alarm to distract administration while they had a little gangwar to beat up some kids behind the school. She went to the administration first, a few days later the security guy gives the kids a self-defense seminar explaining that common objects like keys and pencils could be used to fend off attackers. That's when she and another teacher decided to send a note home. They both got disciplined for insubordination:-P Thanks to the teachers' union, though, she eventually got it taken off her permanent record...
Don't really see them scaling up all that well, though:P
Actually there's some book on the physics of flight that argues that for sufficiently long distances, air cargo on the scale of the 747 is actually the cheapest / most efficient way to deliver just about anything with a higher price / weight ratio than coal.... had some interesting comparisons to road and rail as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually looking forward to the Android port of X-Plane coming out:
http://x-plane.com/index_mobile.html
But yeah, that's more of a sim than a game, but that's the kind of game I tend to like ;-)
I wasn't that impressed by the DS... my son has one, but is always begging to play Angry Birds or something on my HTC Slide instead.
Never touched a PSP tho, and not many recent consoles for that matter. I tend to prefer doing the "serious" games on my PC.
Heh, I've almost given up on following the model numbers, and just head directly to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ to get a *general* idea of where a card falls in the grand scheme of things.
I've sort of been toying with the idea of another gaming notebook, but I was kinda disappointed in my last one (Inspiron 7200 with a Geforce 4200 Go)... it seemed great for a couple of years, but still went out of date before its time... Dell never released drivers for anything newer than WinXP, and even under Linux it couldn't do proper compositing. So I was running circles around it with a 2 year older desktop machine. The Inspiron still has a lovely widescreen display, though, wish I could run something modern on it.
Anyway, let me know if you find something cheap / interesting that could maybe keep up with the 8800GT in my aging desktop.
I think we're just trying to pass a hint to China that they really want to bring it down for their next intercept test. ;-)
Without mistakes there isn't perfection.
Counterpoint: Without mistakes there is perfection.
Yet both statements are perfectly true. Thanks for gracing us with this little logic bomb... I shall now explode in a poof of logical inconsistency.
Counterpoint: 10" is not ginormous enough! I still want one of the 5 foot high Android display phones they had at their trade show booths in the early days! Until then, I shall never be, uh... satisfied.
Meh, sick, or just different. We go to family nudist colonies / Russian & Korean saunas so nakedness anxiety is just kinda blase. It bewilders us just as much that people can be so prudish about things, making them up to be more mysterious and emotionally damaging than really necessary to achieve any practical ends. But whatever, it's a cute part of culture.
Yeah, fondling is a bit different, but we'll just lop the TSA in with the doctors and proctologists. If they actually get their rocks off on it, then so much the better for their job satisfaction. My girl's been practicing her karate kick for when she thinks someone's crossing her comfort threshold... could make things entertaining, at least while she's young enough to get away with it. :P
But it's just a cute thing about American culture that we put up with all this... makes it all the more refreshing to travel abroad and see how laid back the rest of the world is. ;-)
We like to travel, and when you travel, you submit to the ridiculous customs of the locals, like bowing to their Kings and Buddhas, or doing a Da Vinci in front of the backscatter imaging machines. And then we go home and make fun of them. But in a diplomatic way! Lest Wikileaks gets hold of our confidential cables.
The technology... will improve, with any luck. Someday hopefully people will just walk through a tunnel, and not have to stand in that ridiculous pose with their hands up. And maybe, just maybe they'll start to deploy the more effective behavioral profiling techniques used by the Israelis and US Customs officers. But more likely they'll continue to regulate the procedures to favor the incumbent supplier companies involved.
Anyhow, we do plenty of car trips up and down the east coast. But alas, we're headed to the left coast for a week.
Someday I dream of running some sort of personal air taxi service running between small local civilian airports... so, for me at least, the less desirable the big airports are the better! :-D
I'm pretty happy with my HTC Slide and ConnectBot. I use it with screen, and it's pretty straightforward. The HSDPA on T-mobile's network noticeably cuts down latency when it's active. With the default font it does 80x25 in landscape mode, and stays connected in the background.
My two gripes: it's annoying to get to the some of the special keys such as | and \ ... have to close the physical keyboard so you can activate the virtual keyboard and navigate through two layers of Num + Alt to display them. But at least it's possible, and aliases and history are your friends.
Second gripe is that the touchpad button is often finicky as a cursor.... but hopefully not a big issue if you use vi or are comfortable with lots of Ctrl-f / Ctrl-b to navigate.
I dunno, I'm pretty damn happy with my HTC Slide. Every once in a while I glance over at one of the high-end ARMv7 phones that could possibly be running Google Earth Mobile or one of the 3D intensive games, but then I go back to happily typing away on my Slide.
Kinda have to sit funny, though, thanks to the bulge of the $300 wad of cash I saved by not going with one of the high-end phones.
My one gripe is that it's still hard to get to the | (vertical bar / pipe) key in ConnectBot... I still have to activate the software keyboard and go through 2 layers of num alt to get to it :-/
I've played with swype and voice recognition briefly, but the inane things I tend to say just makes them frustrated.
Without an SD card, where will you stick it in? Up your S?
I would really like to be more outraged on this topic. But the propects of fondling and pornography are just too titilating to me. Damn prudes :-P
Then again, I haven't actually flown all that recently. Maybe my opinion will change after I fly cross country with the kids later this month.
Heh, awesome...
16 year old news is news for slashdot... If it's older than slashdot, then at least it might not be a dupe! :-P
( At least I don't remember having read this on slashdot before )
... and thanks to PERL's write-only attribute, you can probably recycle the Advent Calendar next year and hardly be the wiser! Truly the gift that keeps on giving!
Sadly, it doesn't look like perladvent.pm.org bothered to do this (at least at first glance)... will need to write a quick perl script to download and uniq their entries...
Oh, I bet Julian Assange fully expects to be martyred "for the cause" at some point. He probably has some interesting "dead man's switch" set up to do something amusing after he goes... if it could make some point about how the world isn't ready for transparency then so much the better.
If these things don't go through WikiLeaks, they'd just go through something else. Hey, maybe his dead man's switch unleashes some sort of decentralized P2P leak site :P
... Don't forget the jackets...
my aunt always wondered what was so important about the sitting-on-the-jackets part of the drills. Even when she was little, she didn't think the nuclear winter would be that kind of winter. But hey, she was more than ready to shield them with her life for The Cause.
Meh, facebook is just connective tissue; grey matter. I don't really use it all that differently from twitter... actually most of my FB posts come from twitter.
The real content gets posted to Slashdot, LiveJournal, Blogspot, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, etc., sometimes even Buzz. Twitter / FB are just open / closed syndication engines for that content, sort of like a consolidated form of RSS with some extra integration features.
Relevant to the actual subject, StumbleUpon has always provided a much better "Like" button... since it includes a "don't like" button and actually does something useful with the information you provide by giving you more random links that you would probably like based on what you have in common with the other people who liked that link.
Strangely, I have no desire to share this StumbleUpon "like" information with the rest of my IRL friends on FB / twitter, partly because our pr0n tastes can be quite different, but in general I just don't care to share links as a feed. If there's an article someone should read, I send them a directed email. If I find something funny, I might go so far as to post it to our IRC channel.
Come to think of it, I think FB / Twitter might just be some sort of gap filler for people who don't lurk on IRC.
The government also tells you to hide under your desk in the event of a nuclear attack.
The way my dad remembers, it went something like this: "In the event of a nuclear attack, at the sound of the klaxon please line up and proceed to the hallway in an orderly fashion, place your jacket on the floor, sit on your jacket, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye"
Hey, most passengers have destinations too. And law enforcement can give the drivers citations for any passengers not wearing their safety belts.
All I'm really trying to do is help take this not-that-great-of-a-car-analogy as far as it can go before it sputters out in a cloud of hydrocarbons :P
Um, it would probably be more like how everyone wants everyone else to use public transit.
How many people actually produce vs. consume on the internet anyway? Most people are just passengers.
Heh, pretty good for you! My wife's #1 pet peeve are people who say "hey, if I fail at professional life, at least I could go be a teacher. As if it were actually some kind of easy.
Most people fail at "classroom management" skills... it's not even something they teach you during the course of your education degree... it's like you either have the ability to walk into a classroom and capture the students' attention authoritatively, and keep them occupied with a well-paced lesson plan enough so they don't fool around, or they chew you up and spit you out.
My wife is a frickin genius at that kind of thing, and now she's coaching other teachers to do it... (rather than just leaving their low-performing students to flounder around). I, on the other hand, did have a brief stint subbing 3rd grade at an inner-city Baltimore Catholic school when I was in college (my stepmother was the principal there), and I'd like to say I was able to hang on for a week or two, but I had to begin resorting to yelling at the kids within a few days, so I didn't last much longer once the novelty of that wore off. :P
Yeah, thanks for the list. I think a lot of his complaints are addressed by Android 2.2 / Froyo / CyanogenMOD, but I think back in April most of those were still valid.
The palm was primarily designed as a PIM device, and it shows. I did like the hardware addressbook / schedule buttons, since you're usually in a hurry when someone starts giving you that information, and it takes time and concentration to navigate through your software icons, even if it means hitting 2-3 buttons instead of 1. The guy who originally designed the Palm supposedly carried around a block of wood and pretended to use it in his daily life when he was imagining how the UI would actually work, and that part shows.
Anyway, play with some of the PIM apps in the PalmOS simulator sometime...
http://www.accessdevnet.com/docs/palm_os_garnet_simulator54/Simulator_Using.html
It's actually quite remarkable how easy it is to use. The Android calendar has gotten better, but I still find myself frustrated with a few UI elements... especially trying to find the "New Event" button hidden behind 2 levels of menus, and having to use those silly +/- buttons to set the event time, or having to double-click on the hour / minutes field separately to type in the numbers. It's evident that they still kinda expect you to do most of your data entry from the gmail interface on a PC.
I gave up trying to use the IMAP client, I just use the gmail and yahoo mail apps now.
The new autofocus and stability checker in Android 2.2.1 / CyanogenMOD 6.1 does work much better. But that just came out last month :P Before had to use Camera 360 to get some of that functionality... and it took me a while to sort through all the various camera apps on the mess of the market / appbrain pages to find it.
I am kind of miffed at the inability to record to somewhat standard formats. My wife was using her Android phone to record interviews, and eventually I had to set up some pipeline where I converted the .3gp files to .wav using a command line tool before finally using audacity to do some processing and save as .mp3 . But hopefully more tools will be able to import/export the cellphone formats natively soon.
The Palm backup was more trivial... you plug it into your computer and sync with the palm tool or JPilot and it's done, and you can restore everything to a fresh device. I've been using the Titanium backup tool under Android to save everything to SD, but then my SD card died and I pretty much ended up losing everything and having to reinstall most of my apps onto a new SD card, at least all the ones that I had done the "move to SD" to.
I don't know why he threw the last point in, his Nexus One actually had an FM tuner, but only newer versions of CM could actually use it.
Datebk5 was actually included with the Palm TX, you only need to buy it to use with older Palm devices.
My own gripe with my HTC Slide is the puny 100MB available for apps, so I'm always uninstalling stuff I want just to install new things, even after manually moving all the data I could to SD. Next time I flash an new CM, I'll try to do the /system to /apps data. But it feels so weird jacking about with this kind of thing when it wasn't even an issue on the Palm, where you could just install apps on both the device and the SD card with wild abandon.
CustomMTD partitioning to reallocate that extra 100MB or so that not used by
Palm users are just bitter after having a steady upgrade path for years, and then being forced to wait *years* while watching iPhone, WebOS, N900, Android etc. kind of flounder around with the basic PIM stuff. Sure, maybe there *could* be apps that make the experience better. But there aren't yet, and you wouldn't really want to use a third-party app / data format for PIM, since there's a lot of cross-app integrat
I'm fairly happy with my HTC Slide running CyanogenMOD.
But it still hasn't replaced my PalmTX
Um, here's some other guy's blog entry who articulated it much better than I could:
http://jaredrobinson.com/blog/rewinding-from-immature-android-to-mature-palmos/
(eventually he ended up somewhat satisfied with one of the newer iPod touches... I'll probably go the other way and install Debian on my phone)
The Linux Installer app didn't complete successfully on my device, but hopefully I'll have better luck following the ARM debootstrap procedure from:
http://www.android-devs.com/?p=152
Hmm, the only way to make sure everyone knows that a backup process is a) necessary and b) actually functional is to schedule a "business continuity" exercise and perform a simulated disk failure.
Get approval and buy-in from those higher-ups first, if you want to keep your job, though :-P It probably also helps if you keep a stack of dead drives on your desk with a skull and crossbones on top of them to drive home the fact that those things do indeed have an MTBF.
Hmm, I'm actually afraid to say I'll pass. Been pretty happy with the 25/15 service. My WRT54Gv4 router just barely keeps up with that as it is, and only then because I updated from HyperWRT to Tomato. (HyperWRT couldn't push past 20Mbps on my hardware)
Would rather spend money on additional mobile bandwidth for the wife, or maybe even the car :-P T-Mobile's HSDPA on an HTC slide runs pretty sweet at 1Mbps with much lower latency than the 3G connections. Still waiting for a decent Android tablet (or even a phone with a large screen) for the car, though.
Heh, my wife got in trouble for sending home a similar "unauthorized memo", saying that if they felt the gang violence at school was too dangerous, they should stay home.
This was after several kids got knives and guns pulled on them by the library... and somewhat after some gangstas pulled a fire alarm to distract administration while they had a little gangwar to beat up some kids behind the school. She went to the administration first, a few days later the security guy gives the kids a self-defense seminar explaining that common objects like keys and pencils could be used to fend off attackers. That's when she and another teacher decided to send a note home. They both got disciplined for insubordination :-P Thanks to the teachers' union, though, she eventually got it taken off her permanent record...
Heh, I worked on one of these as a college project:
http://www.google.com/images?q=wingsail
Don't really see them scaling up all that well, though :P
Actually there's some book on the physics of flight that argues that for sufficiently long distances, air cargo on the scale of the 747 is actually the cheapest / most efficient way to deliver just about anything with a higher price / weight ratio than coal.... had some interesting comparisons to road and rail as well.