It's generally called the expanding earth theory, and there are variations. Mostly, they're a body of theories proposing a combination of accreted mass from space junk and expansion in diameter, for reasons like the molten core expanding through gravity/thermo effects or spontaneous universal matter generation (i.e. the universe is expanding everywhere at once, means more matter).
IANAGeoscientist so I can't rightly scoff these theories down, though the writing on the various sites ranges from reasonably scientific to wide eyed, and their arguments seem occasionally spurious or even dopey (like forgetting that there's more than one way to get a sedimentary rock). I just keep remembering how the people who preceeded Wegener with ideas of plate techtonics were total kooks, and Wegener was ridiculed by many until decades after his death and the mid-oceanic ridges were totally obvious.
The accretion of mass from space debris would need some definitive answers about how much is actually falling. One mainstream source suggested 40million kilos anually, which isn't much (though would add up over 200million years, to 8,000,000,000,000,000 kilos).
When SJobs started at Apple for the second time, the personality cult kicked in and the slavering press wanted to know what kind of computer he used. I think it took years before he gave up his ThinkPad (I guess he must've by now) even while he was crowing about new iBooks. That seriously pissed some fanboys off.
The point is, he is not likely a computer bigot, though he's a great salesman and a design freak. And, he's a simplicity-efficiency oriented boss. Under his watch, you'd better be using the right tool for the Job.
I'm sure they'll develop a good appreciation for their use as an ebook (as explored in this recent discussion). Why boost a bunch of cellulose into space when you can beam it up?
They received 3415 patents in 2003. If MS manages to keep up the "10 patent per day" rate, then of course, IBM will have to turn over the crown. But IBM is an Open Source darling, right?
No surprise that a giant diversified tech company pumps out the patents (legitimate or not). IBM has roughly 40,000 products and services. It's, what, an order of magnitude larger than MS in that respect? Much of that is hardware, with real engineering behind it. Simple math. I think their R&D horizon is something like 50 years, too.
Remember, communism is where people are FORCED to work for the benefit of the greater whole.
Not really, what you're talking about, in consistent nomenclature, would more appropriately be called something like 'state monopoly capitalist socialism.' Communism isn't totalitarianism, at least in theory. I haven't seen any communist societies yet, just variations on socialism that tend towards totalitarianism. Even commie political groups in North America don't seem to get this, they're generally mental toadies to totalitarianism.
Communism is mainly about worker-controlled economics, primarily common ownership of the means of production, not about controlling workers from above. All that other stuff is just propaganda from both sides muddying the waters.
Having the ability to choose where and how you work isn't capitalistic, it's democratic, or at least economic freedom, and it's a condition that doesn't require the accumulation of capital to exist. Different concepts.
Yeah, and shouldn't it really be called a "mophlog"?
That would be especially appropriate for amateur voyeurcams, no?
nano IP -- not grey goo -- is the first threat
on
Diamond Age Approaching?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As with most powerful tech, once this gets under way, the real challenge to our safety and the emancipatory possibilities of the tech will be the ownership structure that's established.
Much of this nanotech will overlap with biosciences patents, as biomechanical structures get emulated, discovered/invented, patented, and deployed in commercially strategic ways. The compensation for use of this tech will be horrendously complicated, and its inclusion in products (or design frameworks) will be subject to all kinds of IP battles. What is good for you and me, society, the biosphere, and the mineral planet, will be secondary to these concerns, since people will be jockeying to be the next B.Gates.
If ever there was a concern about analogies to closed API's and the bugginess produced by these kinds of closed-source strategies, it's here, where the molecular engines can make drastic and disastrous changes, that we need to pay attention to opening things up.
Access is the core issue. I suspect that software to model this stuff is the first place to start. Easy for me to say, I'm not a programmer!
I once found myself alone at 10,000 feet in the Himalaya having to walk down a gorge with a thigh to waist deep river that was trying to get to the ocean in a hurry. That walking staff saved my life several times! After a quarter mile the last escape from the gorge required a pole vault from one rock to another. Not the smartest thing I've ever done, with the exception of the staff.
One major advantage of getting a disposable camera: weight, about 4oz. The picture quality is indifferent but composition is 90% of the game anyway; on a long bike trip I re-used one of those disposable panoramics, and sold 8 shots to publicatons.
--values roughly translated from metric for you Imperialists;-)
Wow, I love OS X, 6 machines in heavy use without a need for a reinstall ever. When a new machine comes in, it's like this, after the customized OS install:
for creative machines (default apps minus mail, calendar, chat, imovie): * MS Office (hey, it's a campus-wide site license, okay?) * Final Cut Pro & After Effects (kind of a package) * DVD Studio * Macromedia Creative Suite * Photoshop * Audacity * VLC * Toast * RealOne (*sigh) and Windows Media Player (*heavy sigh) * Cleaner (aka media cleaner pro)
for admin: * MS Office * Mail, iCal, AddressBook, Preview, iTunes, iPhoto, Safari default installs * Firefox * Quicksilver (used to be LaunchBar, but prefer QS) * BatChmod * Notes (the notepad... though eventually they force me to install Lotus) * InDesign * Meteorologist * Fetch * BBEdit
for home (incl. all the default apps): * Poisoned;-) * Azureus * Audacity * Fire * Firefox * Photoshop * VLC * Toast * Quicksilver * BBEdit
Of course there are a whole stable of other apps that get eventually installed, but those are the core 10 for each setup. Stable as in lots of choice for our needs, and stable as in what, me worry?
I've reduced our winXX machines down to one win2000 box, which runs Office and the printer, and hosts the iTunes and photo libraries. Weekly de-spyware, regular optimizing, and careful anti-viral, and it doesn't need reinstalling very often! WooTpffff.
Except that those of us who do NOT "share" music are actually free to buy blank CD-Rs at standard prices, without paying a mandatory levy.
Fair enough, and I agree. I was supremely pissed off about the levies at first, since I didn't download music or any other media sharing; then after a couple of years (and broadband access) I just shrugged and started a modest download habit, guilt-free in all respects. Still, the spirit of the copyright system is more user oriented in Canada. Maybe you should consider sharing now and then, or does that go against your heroic rugged american individualism?
Friends still lend me CD's, I still make tapes (or more often rip tracks to HD), and I still purchase as often as I ever did (which is rare, because I have eccentric tastes). It's not about downloading, really, it's about the way in which culture is propagated. Music products are properties; they are also released into the wild, and like it or not become part of the commons. Copyright is (or should be) about dealing with this.
The grandparent poster may in fact be American, but may have omitted their country of origin in a lapsed moment of Canadian chauvinism (perish the thought!). There are lots of canucks (proportionally) on this site, after all.
In Canada it is, in fact, legal and ethically acceptable to download a tune you'd like to hear or borrow a friend's CD and put some tracks on a tape for the car. Legally, as encoded in our copyright laws, and ethically, as culture has a communal element, like it or not. Besides, any time I or my friends shared music with each other (going back to 8-tracks, eh), it resulted in further sales for the artist, since we were engaging in grassroots marketing. Win win.
Now there's a further element: I paid for personal use copying, through levies included in the recording media price when I purchased it. I guess that makes it both ethical and moral, too.
The grandparent's assertion that it is illegal to share is even ambiguous in Canada, and they're still hashing it out: the latest decision is that P2P sharing a la Gnutella is a bit like having a photocopier in a library.
I second that. I once saw the Perseids from Leh, at 12,500ft (3800m.) in the desert between the Karakoram and Himalaya. Boom! Rah! They looked like they were going to hit us, you could see chunks breaking off, and explosions.
Clear air... Go to the desert, and go high, to see the best meteor action.
Hitler had published a foreign policy which included invading the USA, and was building long-range "New York" bombers which could cross the Atlantic and return without refueling. Shipping was under attack. The threat was direct, well-documented, and public.
All that aside, the USA was a neo-colonial power in 1942, with holdings scattered around the globe. I'm glad people think that the USA should just defend its home turf, but its history is one of invasion and expansion since confederation, so home turf is a noble but ambiguous term (e.g. Hawaii and the protectorates). The German National Socialists were also being supported (through business agreements, but it amounts to support), until well into USA's engagement in the Euro theatre, with industrial shipments of all kinds. While there was a heroic quality to American involvement in the European theatre, there was also a great deal of self-interest.
I would have hoped that the explicit doctrine of global reach and pre-emptive invasions of strategic nations combined with despotic domestic powers (the ability to disappear people without recourse or liability, vast powers of spying on citizens, a huge prison population, random spot-checks for ID papers, executions, etc.) would wake the citizenry up. I guess I underestimated the patriotism machine, and no-one at the mainstream level is asking the really hard questions about the 9/11 sequence of events (such as the air traffic / air force / secret service response). Education doesn't seem to make much difference in this respect, and American engagements overseas are still seen as heroic, despite Vietnam.
Yeah, especially when you see just how knee-jerk america's educated technorati are about differing opinions, and refuse to try and get what he's on about. Not that I agree with him, I'm just embarrased by the high level of irony when this kind of statement gets made. It's not just here on/. that ad hominem dismissals are made without substance, ensued by proud flag waving. *sigh*
Actually, the media cartels are mostly using Avid (on both Mac and Windows), not Apple's FCP.
Many are now using both: FCP is a great front end for roughing things out in DV quick, dirty and cheap, and then sending the EDL's over to Avids etc. (Automatic Duck translation software required as intermediary). So it has its place in the high-end workflow for now, too. Just don't try to edit multicamera shoots this way without some major brain wiggles.
Sorry, but I really don't see what Photoshop has to do with Avid, and even less what it has to do with video color correction.
Guess you never have to incorporate stills into your project. Doing anything reality based (docum, journalism, etc.) generally involves slates and stills at some point, sometimes quite often. It's a crucial part of the workflow, and a major consideration when designing a studio setup.
I've seen demos of FCP and can't see what makes it so superior, but since I haven't used it I don't claim anything about it as others seem prone to. I doubt you've ever seen Premiere Pro or Vegas 4.
I haven't used P.Pro, but v5.5's poor firewire support and synch problems over 2min. clips were a show-stopper, and all 8 Win.xx licenses went on the shelf while we moved to a competitor (EditDV, but that's another gripe session).
I'd used Premiere since v.2.0 at that time, and my fondness dissipated rapidly when I had to train new users. Looks like the interface has been improved considerably, but I'm guessing the legacy stuff is still a pain. And did they ever fix that synch problem with long clips?
FCP is well-priced if you factor in LiveType, Soundtrack, Cinema Tools, and the new colour correction and audio capabilities, combined with its overall reliability and usability. I'm sure Premiere is equivalent in most respects. Now, if Apple could only make FCP's file management capabilities somewhat more mature, and make a settings interface that doesn't suck donkey gonads, I'd be happy.
Regarding Avid's free offering: caveat emptor, it's worth what you pay for it. It's just a way of introducing you to Avid dependency, and it has neither the ease of iMovie or the power of FCExpress. I'm using Avid Xpress Pro these days, and it has some major advantages over FCP (interface, if that's your bag, file management, integration with major Avid stations, colour correction is even better), but it has some disadvantages too (proprietary file formats, Avid despises and milks its customers, etc.). Best part of not using Premiere: we get to use Macs for all the other work, too.
it was the only one in the $500-$1000 price range.
Not so; for a brief time (OS 9), Mac users had reason to get excited about EditDV, which was originally a Radius product but jumped companies like a mad rabbit then wound up being renamed and smothered as Cinestream by discreet*.
As EditDV, it was faster, sleeker, and as capable as Premiere, without the synch problems. FinalCut killed it, too, we think, with help from media100 and discreet's mismanagement.
These stigmas were not present to the degree they are today in the 50's and 60's.
Oh, I dunno, it isn't that simple.
Look at hollywood style entertainment, and the popularity of TV shows with technically adept or even fixated heroes (i.e. geeks): the Trek franchise and imitators, CSI, etc.; most of the top earning films have been science fiction. Computers (well, dotcom money) have given nerds a status that the slide rule and thick glasses never could.
Look to the school system and its paradigms for the root problems here. One of the primary paradigms to overturn is the one that assumes that learning is a school activity, best led by professionals.
Whatever happened to the theory (IANAP) that the universe, at least as described by our limited understanding of dimensions, was shaped like a toroid? I seem to recall this as a popular (as in popular science) theory a decade ago.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the study also conjectured that the ready availability of unlocked rifles and a 'pry my gun from my cold dead hands' cultural thread influenced the likelihood of going postal at school. Guess that's just common sense, thinking back on my experiences.
Aren't "bible-belt" communities going to be more likely to ostracise and condemn those who don't fit into their own (fairly narrow) pattern of social behaviour? Aren't they, whether well-meaningly or maliciously, going to make life worse for those who, as they go through an extremely difficult stage in anybody's life, find themselves as outsiders? Aren't these religious groups and communities actually the real "pressure cooker" that create the environment in which these events can occur?
Maybe these fine, upstanding religious groups are so eager to blame computer games because it stops the finger of blame pointing where it really should... at themselves.
Aye matey! Well said. There was a study I heard about on the radio recently (how's that for credibility?) that suggested the school gun rampages we've been hearing about happened predominantly in smaller communities with high levels of intolerance for difference. I've 'done time' living in bible belt communities and the mental homogeneity gives me the creeps, it's no wonder people crack.
Another huge issue in small-town and rural middle america and canada: sexual abuse, particularly incest, is much more of a problem than people realize, as these homogenized communities are also very good at secrets. Now where did I put my [virtual] M16?
"overpriced apple crap" --hey I know it's a troll but it's also a persistent meme, equivalent to bovine feces.
Used to be that apple subjected powerbook lids to something like 10,000 open-close stress tests, as well as keyboard poundings, hot-cold and humid chambers, etc. before they got to market. It really showed with a few models, particularly the early '030 processer models and the clamshell (toiletseat) iBooks--they held up like ruggedized products. My experiences with those models corroborate all the anecdotes of cars driving over them, dropping, flinging, spilling, smashing, burning etc. stories, with them still working away (yeah I'm hard on laptops--I think owning powerbooks made me that way).
I've got an iBook with more than a few bounces in it left--nearly 4 years old now, runs Panther (10.3), gets used for nearly everything including A/V editing and virtualPC (slow at that one, 366MHz G3), and gets rebooted about once a month. Not my favourite machine but I have to use it everyday alongside various others and it doesn't hiccup; with happy multitasking and media/office tools it's as productive as any of our newer machines. It was definitely not overpriced.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAGeoscientist so I can't rightly scoff these theories down, though the writing on the various sites ranges from reasonably scientific to wide eyed, and their arguments seem occasionally spurious or even dopey (like forgetting that there's more than one way to get a sedimentary rock). I just keep remembering how the people who preceeded Wegener with ideas of plate techtonics were total kooks, and Wegener was ridiculed by many until decades after his death and the mid-oceanic ridges were totally obvious.
The accretion of mass from space debris would need some definitive answers about how much is actually falling. One mainstream source suggested 40million kilos anually, which isn't much (though would add up over 200million years, to 8,000,000,000,000,000 kilos).
I'm not convinced, but it is interesting.
When SJobs started at Apple for the second time, the personality cult kicked in and the slavering press wanted to know what kind of computer he used. I think it took years before he gave up his ThinkPad (I guess he must've by now) even while he was crowing about new iBooks. That seriously pissed some fanboys off.
The point is, he is not likely a computer bigot, though he's a great salesman and a design freak. And, he's a simplicity-efficiency oriented boss. Under his watch, you'd better be using the right tool for the Job.
No surprise that a giant diversified tech company pumps out the patents (legitimate or not). IBM has roughly 40,000 products and services. It's, what, an order of magnitude larger than MS in that respect? Much of that is hardware, with real engineering behind it. Simple math. I think their R&D horizon is something like 50 years, too.
BTW, it's 10/week, in TFA.
Not really, what you're talking about, in consistent nomenclature, would more appropriately be called something like 'state monopoly capitalist socialism.' Communism isn't totalitarianism, at least in theory. I haven't seen any communist societies yet, just variations on socialism that tend towards totalitarianism. Even commie political groups in North America don't seem to get this, they're generally mental toadies to totalitarianism.
Communism is mainly about worker-controlled economics, primarily common ownership of the means of production, not about controlling workers from above. All that other stuff is just propaganda from both sides muddying the waters.
Having the ability to choose where and how you work isn't capitalistic, it's democratic, or at least economic freedom, and it's a condition that doesn't require the accumulation of capital to exist. Different concepts.
Just trying to minimize the FUD.
Yeah, and shouldn't it really be called a "mophlog"?
That would be especially appropriate for amateur voyeurcams, no?
Much of this nanotech will overlap with biosciences patents, as biomechanical structures get emulated, discovered/invented, patented, and deployed in commercially strategic ways. The compensation for use of this tech will be horrendously complicated, and its inclusion in products (or design frameworks) will be subject to all kinds of IP battles. What is good for you and me, society, the biosphere, and the mineral planet, will be secondary to these concerns, since people will be jockeying to be the next B.Gates.
If ever there was a concern about analogies to closed API's and the bugginess produced by these kinds of closed-source strategies, it's here, where the molecular engines can make drastic and disastrous changes, that we need to pay attention to opening things up.
Access is the core issue. I suspect that software to model this stuff is the first place to start. Easy for me to say, I'm not a programmer!
I once found myself alone at 10,000 feet in the Himalaya having to walk down a gorge with a thigh to waist deep river that was trying to get to the ocean in a hurry. That walking staff saved my life several times! After a quarter mile the last escape from the gorge required a pole vault from one rock to another. Not the smartest thing I've ever done, with the exception of the staff.
;-)
One major advantage of getting a disposable camera: weight, about 4oz. The picture quality is indifferent but composition is 90% of the game anyway; on a long bike trip I re-used one of those disposable panoramics, and sold 8 shots to publicatons.
--values roughly translated from metric for you Imperialists
Wow, I love OS X, 6 machines in heavy use without a need for a reinstall ever. When a new machine comes in, it's like this, after the customized OS install:
;-)
for creative machines (default apps minus mail, calendar, chat, imovie):
* MS Office (hey, it's a campus-wide site license, okay?)
* Final Cut Pro & After Effects (kind of a package)
* DVD Studio
* Macromedia Creative Suite
* Photoshop
* Audacity
* VLC
* Toast
* RealOne (*sigh) and Windows Media Player (*heavy sigh)
* Cleaner (aka media cleaner pro)
for admin:
* MS Office
* Mail, iCal, AddressBook, Preview, iTunes, iPhoto, Safari default installs
* Firefox
* Quicksilver (used to be LaunchBar, but prefer QS)
* BatChmod
* Notes (the notepad... though eventually they force me to install Lotus)
* InDesign
* Meteorologist
* Fetch
* BBEdit
for home (incl. all the default apps):
* Poisoned
* Azureus
* Audacity
* Fire
* Firefox
* Photoshop
* VLC
* Toast
* Quicksilver
* BBEdit
Of course there are a whole stable of other apps that get eventually installed, but those are the core 10 for each setup. Stable as in lots of choice for our needs, and stable as in what, me worry?
I've reduced our winXX machines down to one win2000 box, which runs Office and the printer, and hosts the iTunes and photo libraries. Weekly de-spyware, regular optimizing, and careful anti-viral, and it doesn't need reinstalling very often! WooTpffff.
They're developing a culture of fear, and so enhancing the already powerful authoritarian streak in american society.
Fair enough, and I agree. I was supremely pissed off about the levies at first, since I didn't download music or any other media sharing; then after a couple of years (and broadband access) I just shrugged and started a modest download habit, guilt-free in all respects. Still, the spirit of the copyright system is more user oriented in Canada. Maybe you should consider sharing now and then, or does that go against your heroic rugged american individualism?
Friends still lend me CD's, I still make tapes (or more often rip tracks to HD), and I still purchase as often as I ever did (which is rare, because I have eccentric tastes). It's not about downloading, really, it's about the way in which culture is propagated. Music products are properties; they are also released into the wild, and like it or not become part of the commons. Copyright is (or should be) about dealing with this.
The grandparent poster may in fact be American, but may have omitted their country of origin in a lapsed moment of Canadian chauvinism (perish the thought!). There are lots of canucks (proportionally) on this site, after all.
:-P
In Canada it is, in fact, legal and ethically acceptable to download a tune you'd like to hear or borrow a friend's CD and put some tracks on a tape for the car. Legally, as encoded in our copyright laws, and ethically, as culture has a communal element, like it or not. Besides, any time I or my friends shared music with each other (going back to 8-tracks, eh), it resulted in further sales for the artist, since we were engaging in grassroots marketing. Win win.
Now there's a further element: I paid for personal use copying, through levies included in the recording media price when I purchased it. I guess that makes it both ethical and moral, too.
The grandparent's assertion that it is illegal to share is even ambiguous in Canada, and they're still hashing it out: the latest decision is that P2P sharing a la Gnutella is a bit like having a photocopier in a library.
Too bad about that Land of the Free thing, eh?
Clear air... Go to the desert, and go high, to see the best meteor action.
Hitler had published a foreign policy which included invading the USA, and was building long-range "New York" bombers which could cross the Atlantic and return without refueling. Shipping was under attack. The threat was direct, well-documented, and public.
All that aside, the USA was a neo-colonial power in 1942, with holdings scattered around the globe. I'm glad people think that the USA should just defend its home turf, but its history is one of invasion and expansion since confederation, so home turf is a noble but ambiguous term (e.g. Hawaii and the protectorates). The German National Socialists were also being supported (through business agreements, but it amounts to support), until well into USA's engagement in the Euro theatre, with industrial shipments of all kinds. While there was a heroic quality to American involvement in the European theatre, there was also a great deal of self-interest.
I would have hoped that the explicit doctrine of global reach and pre-emptive invasions of strategic nations combined with despotic domestic powers (the ability to disappear people without recourse or liability, vast powers of spying on citizens, a huge prison population, random spot-checks for ID papers, executions, etc.) would wake the citizenry up. I guess I underestimated the patriotism machine, and no-one at the mainstream level is asking the really hard questions about the 9/11 sequence of events (such as the air traffic / air force / secret service response). Education doesn't seem to make much difference in this respect, and American engagements overseas are still seen as heroic, despite Vietnam.
Yeah, especially when you see just how knee-jerk america's educated technorati are about differing opinions, and refuse to try and get what he's on about. Not that I agree with him, I'm just embarrased by the high level of irony when this kind of statement gets made. It's not just here on /. that ad hominem dismissals are made without substance, ensued by proud flag waving. *sigh*
Many are now using both: FCP is a great front end for roughing things out in DV quick, dirty and cheap, and then sending the EDL's over to Avids etc. (Automatic Duck translation software required as intermediary). So it has its place in the high-end workflow for now, too. Just don't try to edit multicamera shoots this way without some major brain wiggles.
Guess you never have to incorporate stills into your project. Doing anything reality based (docum, journalism, etc.) generally involves slates and stills at some point, sometimes quite often. It's a crucial part of the workflow, and a major consideration when designing a studio setup.
I haven't used P.Pro, but v5.5's poor firewire support and synch problems over 2min. clips were a show-stopper, and all 8 Win.xx licenses went on the shelf while we moved to a competitor (EditDV, but that's another gripe session).
I'd used Premiere since v.2.0 at that time, and my fondness dissipated rapidly when I had to train new users. Looks like the interface has been improved considerably, but I'm guessing the legacy stuff is still a pain. And did they ever fix that synch problem with long clips?
FCP is well-priced if you factor in LiveType, Soundtrack, Cinema Tools, and the new colour correction and audio capabilities, combined with its overall reliability and usability. I'm sure Premiere is equivalent in most respects. Now, if Apple could only make FCP's file management capabilities somewhat more mature, and make a settings interface that doesn't suck donkey gonads, I'd be happy.
Regarding Avid's free offering: caveat emptor, it's worth what you pay for it. It's just a way of introducing you to Avid dependency, and it has neither the ease of iMovie or the power of FCExpress. I'm using Avid Xpress Pro these days, and it has some major advantages over FCP (interface, if that's your bag, file management, integration with major Avid stations, colour correction is even better), but it has some disadvantages too (proprietary file formats, Avid despises and milks its customers, etc.). Best part of not using Premiere: we get to use Macs for all the other work, too.
Just goes to point out the ongoing convergence of artistry and geekery.
I'm a little bit artist, a little bit geek, and alot in demand because there aren't enough with both around here.
Not so; for a brief time (OS 9), Mac users had reason to get excited about EditDV, which was originally a Radius product but jumped companies like a mad rabbit then wound up being renamed and smothered as Cinestream by discreet*.
As EditDV, it was faster, sleeker, and as capable as Premiere, without the synch problems. FinalCut killed it, too, we think, with help from media100 and discreet's mismanagement.
Oh, I dunno, it isn't that simple.
Look at hollywood style entertainment, and the popularity of TV shows with technically adept or even fixated heroes (i.e. geeks): the Trek franchise and imitators, CSI, etc.; most of the top earning films have been science fiction. Computers (well, dotcom money) have given nerds a status that the slide rule and thick glasses never could.
Look to the school system and its paradigms for the root problems here. One of the primary paradigms to overturn is the one that assumes that learning is a school activity, best led by professionals.
Whatever happened to the theory (IANAP) that the universe, at least as described by our limited understanding of dimensions, was shaped like a toroid? I seem to recall this as a popular (as in popular science) theory a decade ago.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the study also conjectured that the ready availability of unlocked rifles and a 'pry my gun from my cold dead hands' cultural thread influenced the likelihood of going postal at school. Guess that's just common sense, thinking back on my experiences.
Aye matey! Well said. There was a study I heard about on the radio recently (how's that for credibility?) that suggested the school gun rampages we've been hearing about happened predominantly in smaller communities with high levels of intolerance for difference. I've 'done time' living in bible belt communities and the mental homogeneity gives me the creeps, it's no wonder people crack.
Another huge issue in small-town and rural middle america and canada: sexual abuse, particularly incest, is much more of a problem than people realize, as these homogenized communities are also very good at secrets. Now where did I put my [virtual] M16?
Don't worry, be happy.
"overpriced apple crap" --hey I know it's a troll but it's also a persistent meme, equivalent to bovine feces.
Used to be that apple subjected powerbook lids to something like 10,000 open-close stress tests, as well as keyboard poundings, hot-cold and humid chambers, etc. before they got to market. It really showed with a few models, particularly the early '030 processer models and the clamshell (toiletseat) iBooks--they held up like ruggedized products. My experiences with those models corroborate all the anecdotes of cars driving over them, dropping, flinging, spilling, smashing, burning etc. stories, with them still working away (yeah I'm hard on laptops--I think owning powerbooks made me that way).
I've got an iBook with more than a few bounces in it left--nearly 4 years old now, runs Panther (10.3), gets used for nearly everything including A/V editing and virtualPC (slow at that one, 366MHz G3), and gets rebooted about once a month. Not my favourite machine but I have to use it everyday alongside various others and it doesn't hiccup; with happy multitasking and media/office tools it's as productive as any of our newer machines. It was definitely not overpriced.