Re:How old are vampires and Shakespeare again? ;p
on
White Wolf Sues Sony
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· Score: 1
To anyone familiar w/ WW vampires/werewolves can see immense simulates between the them. Just to point out, I am also familiar w/ other/older vampire myths, and I would point out that WW didn't start a suit when dracula 2000 was released
Yes, I am very much into science fiction, but...
He said sci-fi book fan, watching alian and star wars dosn't count here
That's nice, but you haven't told me why YOU want one. YOU want to pay all that money for one just because it's valued at that price?
buying a rare book(and yes, first editions do become rare) is no diferent than buying one of those props, if anything the book has more value
Go ahead, ask me. And if you see one in a bookstore at that kind of price, I'll bet that if you come back next month, it's still there... and the month after, and the month after...
Now here I do have to agry w/ you, it's highy unlikely that a book of this kind will turn up in hte book store, and if one did, a book store is not the place people would be looking to find colecters items
Actualy, she dose have some of here organic brain left, she used to be human, befor she was agmented for her work
when they say ghost in ghost in the shell, they are refering to the colection of memorys and personality traits that make us who we are, not the hardwhere our mind is running on(be it organic or electronic)
other than that you have it right
again thow, it is one of the best movies out there, definentaly see it
Such anti cyborg adituds are hardly limited to the deaf community. About a year ago I broke my wrist; it was a bad break so a cast wasn't enugh to keep it set proporly. I had to get an exturnal fixator, basicly there was a bunch of metal sticking out of my wrist. Most people eather thougt it was cool or though't it was a good thing, but couldn't look at it w/o turning pale, but some people seemed to think it was wrong somehow, like I wasn't fully human for exsepting the device(I could have cosen to lose the use of that hand) thankfully I only needed this a few months, about as long as a cast, but it was an interesting experence on a side note walking threw town carying a sword draws far less attention...
He stated in his post that the power company would store the energy based on your estements you would need a house thats 500-750 sq ft, so not that big, and even if the solar cells didn't compleatly eliminate the need for genorators it would at least reduce it greatly lastly, most of our energy use is for AC during summer days, just when we get the most energy from the cells...
Well then what is the difference between science, religion and philosophy?
In my opinion all 3 are the same, but for different areas. If you think about it, what dose science explain? Science is all about the physical world, what we see, touch, ext.
OTOH religion is perfectly equipped to explain things of the soul, and one could argue that philosophy is a discipline of our mind. The problem comes when people try to use religion, to explain the physical world.
For each of us the world is created when we are born. things that happened before you were born don't seem as real as thows that happen during your lifetime, even thow you may have no more connection w/ them. In this sense creationism explains how we feel about the world perfectly, it seem like it was put their and only started moving for us. Trying to turn this into a scientific reality is a great way to appear a fool...
Re:Theres no scientific proof for any of this.
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
HOW THE FUCKING HELL IS MANIC DEPRESSION A PERSONALITY TRAIT.
I think this depends on how you define personality. I define it as the collection of mental and emotional states that we call consciences or sentience. Manic depression is a part of a persons personality, one that is discouraged, but it still makes up a part of who they are. If you take away the depression you change who they are, anyone who knows them will notice this. Same is true of ADHD, thow compared to the effects of manic depression ADHD is fairly mild. Just because a certain personality trait is frowned upon by society doesn't mean it is a disease, if love were considered abnormal/undesirably, would it need to be "cured"?
Iâ(TM)m not saying that people w/ manic depression shouldnâ(TM)t get help, take meds, or what not, Iâ(TM)m simply saying that doesn't make it any different from other emotions.
Where are you going to get the electricity for an electric or hydrogen car? Most of the choices reduce to: coal, oil or nuclear. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are perfectly viable power sources, yes we need to build up new infrastructure, and I agree that this new process for oil seems like a good step for now, but the electricity(and by extenuation hydrogen) for the hybrid cars can be produced by clean sources.
the reason clean energy needs to be subsidized right now is because fossil fuels(and a little nuclear) hold a monopoly on the market, the same reason we can't get rid of M$. Maintenance and other associated costs of solar power are far smaller than petroleum or nuclear, and the initial costs are constantly being brought down. One major hurtle w/ solar is that it could initiate a new system of power where every house makes most of the energy they need, taking power away from large corporations. Why is this a problem you ask? Simple, oil companies will(and are) fight this every step of the way
apart from anything else, burning hydrogen doesn't solve the waste disposal issue this plant does!
Now if I under stand this properly, this plant uses biomass, not strait garbage. There is another use for excess biomass that has existed for centuries. Composting can turn otherwise useless biomass into food! amazing as this may sound, you don't need chemical fertilizers to grow food, you can simply let old food/vegetation rot, then plant new food in it. this method gets near 100% efficiency, and doesn't place extra hydrocarbons in the air...
This is an article talking about new technology to convert garbage (literally) into oil...Oil/gas as an energy storage mechanism has proven safe, effective, dense + cheaper than all alternatives
I remember reading about this a wile ago, we could be using it now if we wanted to, but(in the US at lest) oil is only cost effective because the government subsidizes drilling...
Solar power--always 10 years away. Electric cars--batteries always heavy, don't store enough power, and wear out too quickly, not to mention incredibly expensive.
You may have been right about solar power 10 or 15 years ago, but now it is a viable energy source, In the town where I live we have a festival every spring. The festival has a hippy/save the earth theme, and so it is solar powered. a small area(about 20m by 10m) of photoelectric cells power the whole festival(easily 100m by 100m), including a good size stage. Further more the theater where my company performs recently installed solar cells on the roof, now power costs are virtually nil during the summer, and during the winter they are greatly reduced. If all building were required to use solar paneling for their roofs...
It is true that strait electric cars tend to be either small or need to be recharged to often, but hybrids are incredibly efficient, getting 100 miles to the gallon, and often more. If they were hydrogen electric instead of oil electric hybrid then they would produce no pollution...
Oil has served us, at some times even well, but now cleaner cheeper energy sources are viable, it is time to change...
I know your kidding(at least I hope your kidding), but I just have to say, I think the reason tetris doesn't help tracking multiple objects is obvious, in the game you never have to track more than 1(or 2 if you count the next piece), where as in GTA or MoH you have to keep track of many objects all around you, not thus one or 2
"Otherland" by Tad Williams is one of the best books/series Iv read. It's comprised of 4 novels. It's set a little in the future, when direct VR access to the net is such a part of life that a keyboard or a mouse seems impossibly archaic, and many people use neural jacks. It has good characters and the computer part of the world seem to follow consistent laws(unlike a resent movie I could name). Also the plot unfolds in a very intriguing manner, one of the best presented plots around...
Ahh yes, nothing like a clasic. This is comonly considerd the best fiction of all time;)
seriously thow, don't mean to ofend anyone, just kidding around
The Mars books are among the best literature out there, thow anything by Kim Stanley Robinson is good. If you don't think a month is enough time for the 3000+ page series(counting "The Martians") I would recommend either "Antarctica" or "The Years of Rice and Salt", both by Robinson. "Antarctica" is very much like the mars series but only one book, possibly coexisting in the same universe, and "The Years of Rice and Salt" follows several souls threw their reincarnations in an alternate history from the times of the black plague to now.
My OS X box, which I use for web browsing and word processing, crashes about once every three days.
The first things I thought of reading you post is that you ether have bad hardware, or are lying. After thinking about it for a second thow I came up w/ a few other possibilities;
a)you are trying to crash it(It's a real challenge, assuming you limit yourself to the GUI)
b)You might still be running OS X 10.0.x, which was so buggy that it should have been called a beta, but they wanted to release it at macworld...Just upgrade to 10.2.x, problem solved
or, c)You are using some massively buggy software, and don't know how to force quit when the application freezes, so think the OS has crashed when all it needs is a quick command-option-esc
Do you mean that Adobe InDesign crashed or that OS X crashed?
these are diferent things, and application under any OS can crash no matter how stable the OS itself is. Basicly, did you have to restart whole computer, or just re-open your file?
I guess it's because those mac users aren't very creative
there are 2 reasons for case mods;
First, to add more drives, fans, motherboards, or what have you to your case(and yes I've seen a multi motherboard PC). Mac users want computers that work reliebly and well, not computers that will take up large amounts of our free time getting it to work right(and I call myself a geek) Playing w/ computers this way can be fun, but a functional computer is better...
Second, to make the computer look better, Have you seen apple cases? They are stylish & functional, and how many PC cases open as easily as the G4 tower or apples laptop line?(No, imacs aren't easy to open, but if your goal is to spend time working on computers[see firs point] they you shouldn't mind)
I agree. I realized that the world where Zion lives isn't real as soon as Agent Smith downloaded himself to it at the beginning.
everyone keeps saying Smith downloaded himself(itself?) into Zion, but I didn't see it. Now maybe I missed the seen w/ Smith running thru Zion city, but the only thing I saw related to Smith and the fighters of Zion was when he corrupted their avatar. I wrote a nifty script for use w/ ever quest that lets me take control of anyone avatar that I chose. This dose not mean I down load myself into them, just that I stole their avatar...
You may say that the betrayer picked up from Zion is Smith down loaded into another body, but I don't think so, firstly Smith is no longer playing the machines agenda, secondly, the other machines want Smith dead and so wouldn't spare him when they wipe out Zion.
Obviously the Matrix is a story of subterfuge, but if we assume everything is false then we have no basis for our theorizing
Yeah Neo (and every other human, even Zion) is still trapped inside the matrix. it's possible that Zion and the rest of the "real world" were always inside the matrix, but based on Neo's line "everything different now" at the end of the movie I think that it may be that they were in the real world before, but after Neo choses the left door(after all his predecessor chose the right) the machines kept Neo and the others in a new matrix when they tried to logout. If the right door simply resets the whole simulation, both inside and outside the matrix, maybe the left door starts a whole new simulation, one in which humans think they are truly free. If that's the case, perhaps Neos coma means that he has in fact returned to the real world(losing control of his avatar), while the rest are trapped in the matrix approximation. Another possibility, thow perhaps not a strong one, is that Neo's adventure in the "core" changed the firmware on his cybernetics, allowing him to interface w/ the machines in the real world.
another unrelated idea I had, if humans are used as batteries in the matrix, why allow batteries to die when they could still have years of useful service ahead, instead the machines could make anyone who dies be loaded into an after life program. Assuming the mind cannot be brought back/restarted after it thinks it is dead this could be done right before death, then if the persons avatar in the matrix is revived the person goes back w/ a near death experience, otherwise they continue to work as batteries in the after life...
The underlying issue is that people feel that somehow 'their' particular technological provider is the sole benefactor of whatever un-patent-worthy trend in the industry is going on. We should be glad that this isn't the case, but due to 'interface addiction' we see innovation spreading as somehow threatening.
I can't speak for other mac addicts, but what annoys me isn't the copying, that's normal and even good, to a point, it's how M$ presents itself as an innovator for using ideas pioneered by apple
What, do you think iTunes is visionary? Many people who have actually used it would say so, but apple doesn't claim that it is the first program for organizing and playing mp3's, M$ would in their position
yes apple copies other to, but think of OS X, entirely based on unix, did apple claim that they invented unix? no, they gave credit to the older OS(in fact advertised the fact...)
Thanks for the idea, say hello to the free market. it's not a free market if I can't run out at night and burn my competitors office building to the ground, hey, anything to increase my profit margin
we had to open up the macs and zap the pram to get them to boot
if your opening them up to reset the pram your obviously doing something wrong, on the mac you hold down command-option-p-r at boot to reset the pram, if you hold it down thru 3 boots then switch to command-option-o-f you get the firmware interface(like BIOS)
I would bet that all the last 2 G4's need is to reset the power manager
it is true that there power supplies have been a bit defective in the G4 towers, that's why you can trade yours in
Size(Physical) is one of the most important features if you cary your mp3 player around w/ you...
another plus for the ipod is it's durability. Trust me on this one, doesn't matter how much bigger(gb) the drive is, if it go's crunch the first time you it on a 10 ft whipper it's worthless
I was one of the innocent children growing up, so I see this topic in a slightly different light. By now I'm as corrupted as the rest of you, but when I was young I would never have thought of these things. The only real difference I can track between my childhood and the childhood's of most others is that my family didn't have a TV when I was growing up, so I was never influenced by the presumed sex and violence found there. I agree w/ you that we are born "knowing" about sex, but "in the wild" I don't think you would think about it so much before puberty.
I assume by contextual menus you mean that little menu next to the curser that has options like open or create archive?
OS X has native multi button support, including scroll wheel and 3rd button, and in classic most companies make an extension for their mouse that lets you add multi button functionality to the finder
To address the original question thow, I also find the scroll wheel to be clunky, useful, but clunky. I however found the Kensington wireless studio mouse which has a 3rd middle button and a touch sensitive scroll pad(something like a mini track pad). It eliminates the chunkiness of a scroll wheel, but leaves the functionality intact. Their wired version features the same button layout, if you don't like the freedom of wireless.
Looking at different posts there seem to be allot of educational sites listed, along w/ the obvious jokes. It's useful to have specific links, but I would advise that you teach kids to google for info. I have a younger brother who is currently 11, and booth he and I are glad I taught him how to use googles different features(he because he can find stuff easily, me because he doesn't come to me for help now)
as for specific links I remember finding this one for world mythology(remember thow, some myths may be questionable for young kids). It's a fairly comprehensive encyclopedia for myths and legends
Slashdot Mirror
To anyone familiar w/ WW vampires/werewolves can see immense simulates between the them. Just to point out, I am also familiar w/ other/older vampire myths, and I would point out that WW didn't start a suit when dracula 2000 was released
Yes, I am very much into science fiction, but...
He said sci-fi book fan, watching alian and star wars dosn't count here
That's nice, but you haven't told me why YOU want one. YOU want to pay all that money for one just because it's valued at that price?
buying a rare book(and yes, first editions do become rare) is no diferent than buying one of those props, if anything the book has more value
Go ahead, ask me. And if you see one in a bookstore at that kind of price, I'll bet that if you come back next month, it's still there... and the month after, and the month after...
Now here I do have to agry w/ you, it's highy unlikely that a book of this kind will turn up in hte book store, and if one did, a book store is not the place people would be looking to find colecters items
Actualy, she dose have some of here organic brain left, she used to be human, befor she was agmented for her work when they say ghost in ghost in the shell, they are refering to the colection of memorys and personality traits that make us who we are, not the hardwhere our mind is running on(be it organic or electronic) other than that you have it right again thow, it is one of the best movies out there, definentaly see it
Such anti cyborg adituds are hardly limited to the deaf community. About a year ago I broke my wrist; it was a bad break so a cast wasn't enugh to keep it set proporly. I had to get an exturnal fixator, basicly there was a bunch of metal sticking out of my wrist. Most people eather thougt it was cool or though't it was a good thing, but couldn't look at it w/o turning pale, but some people seemed to think it was wrong somehow, like I wasn't fully human for exsepting the device(I could have cosen to lose the use of that hand)
thankfully I only needed this a few months, about as long as a cast, but it was an interesting experence
on a side note walking threw town carying a sword draws far less attention...
He stated in his post that the power company would store the energy
based on your estements you would need a house thats 500-750 sq ft, so not that big, and even if the solar cells didn't compleatly eliminate the need for genorators it would at least reduce it greatly
lastly, most of our energy use is for AC during summer days, just when we get the most energy from the cells...
Well then what is the difference between science, religion and philosophy?
In my opinion all 3 are the same, but for different areas. If you think about it, what dose science explain? Science is all about the physical world, what we see, touch, ext.
OTOH religion is perfectly equipped to explain things of the soul, and one could argue that philosophy is a discipline of our mind. The problem comes when people try to use religion, to explain the physical world.
For each of us the world is created when we are born. things that happened before you were born don't seem as real as thows that happen during your lifetime, even thow you may have no more connection w/ them. In this sense creationism explains how we feel about the world perfectly, it seem like it was put their and only started moving for us. Trying to turn this into a scientific reality is a great way to appear a fool...
HOW THE FUCKING HELL IS MANIC DEPRESSION A PERSONALITY TRAIT.
I think this depends on how you define personality. I define it as the collection of mental and emotional states that we call consciences or sentience. Manic depression is a part of a persons personality, one that is discouraged, but it still makes up a part of who they are. If you take away the depression you change who they are, anyone who knows them will notice this. Same is true of ADHD, thow compared to the effects of manic depression ADHD is fairly mild. Just because a certain personality trait is frowned upon by society doesn't mean it is a disease, if love were considered abnormal/undesirably, would it need to be "cured"?
Iâ(TM)m not saying that people w/ manic depression shouldnâ(TM)t get help, take meds, or what not, Iâ(TM)m simply saying that doesn't make it any different from other emotions.
Where are you going to get the electricity for an electric or hydrogen car? Most of the choices reduce to: coal, oil or nuclear.
Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are perfectly viable power sources, yes we need to build up new infrastructure, and I agree that this new process for oil seems like a good step for now, but the electricity(and by extenuation hydrogen) for the hybrid cars can be produced by clean sources.
the reason clean energy needs to be subsidized right now is because fossil fuels(and a little nuclear) hold a monopoly on the market, the same reason we can't get rid of M$. Maintenance and other associated costs of solar power are far smaller than petroleum or nuclear, and the initial costs are constantly being brought down. One major hurtle w/ solar is that it could initiate a new system of power where every house makes most of the energy they need, taking power away from large corporations. Why is this a problem you ask? Simple, oil companies will(and are) fight this every step of the way
apart from anything else, burning hydrogen doesn't solve the waste disposal issue this plant does!
Now if I under stand this properly, this plant uses biomass, not strait garbage. There is another use for excess biomass that has existed for centuries. Composting can turn otherwise useless biomass into food! amazing as this may sound, you don't need chemical fertilizers to grow food, you can simply let old food/vegetation rot, then plant new food in it. this method gets near 100% efficiency, and doesn't place extra hydrocarbons in the air...
This is an article talking about new technology to convert garbage (literally) into oil...Oil/gas as an energy storage mechanism has proven safe, effective, dense + cheaper than all alternatives
I remember reading about this a wile ago, we could be using it now if we wanted to, but(in the US at lest) oil is only cost effective because the government subsidizes drilling...
Solar power--always 10 years away. Electric cars--batteries always heavy, don't store enough power, and wear out too quickly, not to mention incredibly expensive.
You may have been right about solar power 10 or 15 years ago, but now it is a viable energy source, In the town where I live we have a festival every spring. The festival has a hippy/save the earth theme, and so it is solar powered. a small area(about 20m by 10m) of photoelectric cells power the whole festival(easily 100m by 100m), including a good size stage. Further more the theater where my company performs recently installed solar cells on the roof, now power costs are virtually nil during the summer, and during the winter they are greatly reduced. If all building were required to use solar paneling for their roofs...
It is true that strait electric cars tend to be either small or need to be recharged to often, but hybrids are incredibly efficient, getting 100 miles to the gallon, and often more. If they were hydrogen electric instead of oil electric hybrid then they would produce no pollution...
Oil has served us, at some times even well, but now cleaner cheeper energy sources are viable, it is time to change...
I know your kidding(at least I hope your kidding), but I just have to say, I think the reason tetris doesn't help tracking multiple objects is obvious, in the game you never have to track more than 1(or 2 if you count the next piece), where as in GTA or MoH you have to keep track of many objects all around you, not thus one or 2
"Otherland" by Tad Williams is one of the best books/series Iv read. It's comprised of 4 novels. It's set a little in the future, when direct VR access to the net is such a part of life that a keyboard or a mouse seems impossibly archaic, and many people use neural jacks. It has good characters and the computer part of the world seem to follow consistent laws(unlike a resent movie I could name). Also the plot unfolds in a very intriguing manner, one of the best presented plots around...
Ahh yes, nothing like a clasic. This is comonly considerd the best fiction of all time ;)
seriously thow, don't mean to ofend anyone, just kidding around
The Mars books are among the best literature out there, thow anything by Kim Stanley Robinson is good. If you don't think a month is enough time for the 3000+ page series(counting "The Martians") I would recommend either "Antarctica" or "The Years of Rice and Salt", both by Robinson. "Antarctica" is very much like the mars series but only one book, possibly coexisting in the same universe, and "The Years of Rice and Salt" follows several souls threw their reincarnations in an alternate history from the times of the black plague to now.
My OS X box, which I use for web browsing and word processing, crashes about once every three days.
The first things I thought of reading you post is that you ether have bad hardware, or are lying. After thinking about it for a second thow I came up w/ a few other possibilities;
a)you are trying to crash it(It's a real challenge, assuming you limit yourself to the GUI)
b)You might still be running OS X 10.0.x, which was so buggy that it should have been called a beta, but they wanted to release it at macworld...Just upgrade to 10.2.x, problem solved
or, c)You are using some massively buggy software, and don't know how to force quit when the application freezes, so think the OS has crashed when all it needs is a quick command-option-esc
Do you mean that Adobe InDesign crashed or that OS X crashed?
these are diferent things, and application under any OS can crash no matter how stable the OS itself is. Basicly, did you have to restart whole computer, or just re-open your file?
I guess it's because those mac users aren't very creative
there are 2 reasons for case mods;
First, to add more drives, fans, motherboards, or what have you to your case(and yes I've seen a multi motherboard PC). Mac users want computers that work reliebly and well, not computers that will take up large amounts of our free time getting it to work right(and I call myself a geek) Playing w/ computers this way can be fun, but a functional computer is better...
Second, to make the computer look better, Have you seen apple cases? They are stylish & functional, and how many PC cases open as easily as the G4 tower or apples laptop line?(No, imacs aren't easy to open, but if your goal is to spend time working on computers[see firs point] they you shouldn't mind)
I agree. I realized that the world where Zion lives isn't real as soon as Agent Smith downloaded himself to it at the beginning.
everyone keeps saying Smith downloaded himself(itself?) into Zion, but I didn't see it. Now maybe I missed the seen w/ Smith running thru Zion city, but the only thing I saw related to Smith and the fighters of Zion was when he corrupted their avatar. I wrote a nifty script for use w/ ever quest that lets me take control of anyone avatar that I chose. This dose not mean I down load myself into them, just that I stole their avatar...
You may say that the betrayer picked up from Zion is Smith down loaded into another body, but I don't think so, firstly Smith is no longer playing the machines agenda, secondly, the other machines want Smith dead and so wouldn't spare him when they wipe out Zion.
Obviously the Matrix is a story of subterfuge, but if we assume everything is false then we have no basis for our theorizing
Yeah Neo (and every other human, even Zion) is still trapped inside the matrix.
it's possible that Zion and the rest of the "real world" were always inside the matrix, but based on Neo's line "everything different now" at the end of the movie I think that it may be that they were in the real world before, but after Neo choses the left door(after all his predecessor chose the right) the machines kept Neo and the others in a new matrix when they tried to logout. If the right door simply resets the whole simulation, both inside and outside the matrix, maybe the left door starts a whole new simulation, one in which humans think they are truly free. If that's the case, perhaps Neos coma means that he has in fact returned to the real world(losing control of his avatar), while the rest are trapped in the matrix approximation. Another possibility, thow perhaps not a strong one, is that Neo's adventure in the "core" changed the firmware on his cybernetics, allowing him to interface w/ the machines in the real world.
another unrelated idea I had, if humans are used as batteries in the matrix, why allow batteries to die when they could still have years of useful service ahead, instead the machines could make anyone who dies be loaded into an after life program. Assuming the mind cannot be brought back/restarted after it thinks it is dead this could be done right before death, then if the persons avatar in the matrix is revived the person goes back w/ a near death experience, otherwise they continue to work as batteries in the after life...
The underlying issue is that people feel that somehow 'their' particular technological provider is the sole benefactor of whatever un-patent-worthy trend in the industry is going on. We should be glad that this isn't the case, but due to 'interface addiction' we see innovation spreading as somehow threatening.
I can't speak for other mac addicts, but what annoys me isn't the copying, that's normal and even good, to a point, it's how M$ presents itself as an innovator for using ideas pioneered by apple
What, do you think iTunes is visionary?
Many people who have actually used it would say so, but apple doesn't claim that it is the first program for organizing and playing mp3's, M$ would in their position
yes apple copies other to, but think of OS X, entirely based on unix, did apple claim that they invented unix? no, they gave credit to the older OS(in fact advertised the fact...)
Thanks for the idea, say hello to the free market.
it's not a free market if I can't run out at night and burn my competitors office building to the ground, hey, anything to increase my profit margin
we had to open up the macs and zap the pram to get them to boot
if your opening them up to reset the pram your obviously doing something wrong, on the mac you hold down command-option-p-r at boot to reset the pram, if you hold it down thru 3 boots then switch to command-option-o-f you get the firmware interface(like BIOS)
I would bet that all the last 2 G4's need is to reset the power manager
it is true that there power supplies have been a bit defective in the G4 towers, that's why you can trade yours in
Size(Physical) is one of the most important features if you cary your mp3 player around w/ you...
another plus for the ipod is it's durability. Trust me on this one, doesn't matter how much bigger(gb) the drive is, if it go's crunch the first time you it on a 10 ft whipper it's worthless
I was one of the innocent children growing up, so I see this topic in a slightly different light. By now I'm as corrupted as the rest of you, but when I was young I would never have thought of these things. The only real difference I can track between my childhood and the childhood's of most others is that my family didn't have a TV when I was growing up, so I was never influenced by the presumed sex and violence found there. I agree w/ you that we are born "knowing" about sex, but "in the wild" I don't think you would think about it so much before puberty.
The internet used to be like that, then I found /.
I assume by contextual menus you mean that little menu next to the curser that has options like open or create archive?
OS X has native multi button support, including scroll wheel and 3rd button, and in classic most companies make an extension for their mouse that lets you add multi button functionality to the finder
To address the original question thow, I also find the scroll wheel to be clunky, useful, but clunky. I however found the Kensington wireless studio mouse which has a 3rd middle button and a touch sensitive scroll pad(something like a mini track pad). It eliminates the chunkiness of a scroll wheel, but leaves the functionality intact. Their wired version features the same button layout, if you don't like the freedom of wireless.
Looking at different posts there seem to be allot of educational sites listed, along w/ the obvious jokes. It's useful to have specific links, but I would advise that you teach kids to google for info. I have a younger brother who is currently 11, and booth he and I are glad I taught him how to use googles different features(he because he can find stuff easily, me because he doesn't come to me for help now)
as for specific links I remember finding this one for world mythology(remember thow, some myths may be questionable for young kids). It's a fairly comprehensive encyclopedia for myths and legends