I made it through high school, undergrad, and grad school (civil engineering at Georgia Tech) with nothing more than a TI-35, which I still use occasionally in my job at GT.
All those graphing, formula-storing calculators make you soft.:-)
I happened across a Wii at a Target last week, but I've since visited a lot of Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Toys R Us stores looking for Wii accessories and another unit for a friend (his wife finally found one yesterday after visiting about 15 or 20 stores).
I've seen a number of PS3s. I wouldn't say they're plentiful, but (for example) one evening at the Fayetteville, GA Target, Wal-Mart, TRU, and Best Buy, I saw 6 of the 60 GB units sitting on the shelves. So it appears that the demand for PS3s is close to being met (at least in the Atlanta area), but the demand for Wiis still exceeds the supply.
(I would be curious to know how many of each console have been sold to this point.)
>>My point is that, in a condtion of bumper to bumper traffic, once two lanes of equal speed merge into one, the traffic speed in the remaining lane has no alternative but to double.
I guess I kind of see what you're saying - if you truly had two lanes of truly bumper to bumper traffic merging into one, the speed of the one lane would have to double to create enough space for twice the cars in half the space. That's not the case here, though.
I described a construction zone, with advance signage ("Road construction 2 miles/1 mile/1000 feet" etc.). It wasn't two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic - once we hit the backup, it was pretty much one lane of bumper to bumper traffic, and a number of "aggressive drivers" who figured they could get ahead by zipping farther down the line before merging. In this case, the drivers in the through lane (the lane that isn't closed) keep having to stop or slow down to let people merge (or because people are cutting them off). Once that "turbulence" goes away, the traffic speeds up, and the truckers forced that to happen farther upstream than it would have without their intervention. We had a brief period of increased delay while all the cars merged, and then a nice period of uninterrupted free flow.
Yes, I'm sure I'm a traffic engineer. I'm also sure that I have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm not sure that you do, either.
It's simple: once all the merging was done, all the cars stopped having to slow down or stop to let people merge, and were able to get on with simply driving in a straight line through the construction site. The truckers forced the merging to happen farther upstream, so we were able to reach the nice steady state flow speed for a mile or two before the construction site, rather than at the actual bottleneck (past which there was no merging because there was physically only one lane).
It's neither physics nor psychology, it's traffic flow theory.
>>it seems to be a BMW more than any other model, to me
Hah! Amazing - I just posted a similar observation (before reading your post) somewhere up above.
I have a couple of friends that drive BMWs, and they're fine people (and I'm sure BMWs are fine cars). But I've had YEARS of driving experience, observing the behavior of other people, and for some reason, you DO see a lot more asshole driver behavior from BMW drivers. I don't know why that is, but it happens too much to be coincidence. It's not sports car drivers, or Mercedes (similarly priced German car) drivers, it's BMW drivers specifically (and all models - Z3s, sedans, SUVs...).
I'm a traffic engineer that drives in Atlanta every day. I know ALL about idiot drivers and the bastard behaviors that they drive you to. My biggest pet peeve is what you describe, people who fly up to the front of the queue and attempt to cut in - I'll do everything in my power to prevent those bastards from getting into the line. On the other hand, if somebody turns on their signal to merge ahead of the LAST POSSIBLE INCH OF ROAD, I'll happily slow down and let them in.
Once, driving on I-85 from South Carolina through rural north Georgia, I saw a very striking illustration of how merging SHOULD work. It's a 2-lane interstate, and bridge construction had one lane shut down, and traffic backed up for several miles. Traffic was CRAWLING, in large part due to bastards (an unusually high percentage of BMW drivers, for whatever reason...) running up to the front of the queue. Then something interesting happened - the truckers got organized.
A bunch of truckers pulled into the center of the two lanes, blocking traffic from passing them in either lane. That forced the traffic in the "cells" between trucks to go ahead and merge into a single lane - there was no point staying in two lanes anymore, because you couldn't pass the truck to fly up to the front. What was awesome was that as soon as all the merging was done, traffic sped up a good 10 to 15 MPH. Once everybody got into a single lane, the "turbulence in the flow" that was causing things to really crawl was gone, and everybody got through the bottleneck a lot faster, rather than just the selfish bastards that had to cut into the front of the line.
When/if I get a PS3, it'll be my first HD source, and I'd probably start considering getting an HDTV a little more seriously. I don't have digital cable or satellite and don't really want it, and I can't be bothered to hook up an antenna for over-the-air HDTV, so the benefit of an HDTV is fairly limited for me right now.
I've spent some time watching my friend's SXRD. He has Dish Network, and HD stuff looks good. DVD looks good. But standard TV ranges from OK to nearly unwatchably bad, when you combine the compression of the satellite feed with the upconversion to 1080p for display. That also dampened my enthusiasm for HDTV.
Your take is pretty much exactly the same as mine. I have a 36" Wega that I'm perfectly happy with. I wouldn't mind having an HDTV (though I don't currently have any HDTV source to drive it with), but after helping a friend select an HDTV (he ended up with a Sony SXRD), I realized that it's just too much of a hassle. All the resolutions, all the different display technologies (each with a complex set of pluses and minuses), and all the related problems and questions - it's ridiculous that buying a TV has gotten this complicated.
What sort of video store bosses were predicting VHS over DVD? Smaller, no rewinding, better picture quality, won't degrade under normal use...yeah, VHS had a chance...
(Aren't PSP movies pretty much dead at this point?)
I wouldn't go so far as to say that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are DOA, but they definitely have some things to overcome. The benefits of DVD over VHS were fairly obvious and easy to take advantage of. The benefits of the new formats (which still look, media-wise, just like a DVD) are a little more esoteric (and mostly of interest to "videophiles"), and require a lot more hardware (expensive player, fancy new TV - and the world of HDTV resolutions and display technologies is still incomprehensible to 75% of the world) to take advantage of.
Haven't noticed any video problems, though I haven't tried to play any games on it or anything. I've done a bit of video capture and DVD encoding, and it was surprisingly OK for that. I did upgrade to 2 GB of RAM (aftermarket), though, so maybe that helps (since the integrated video shares memory).
I don't mind the "funky keyboard" at all - it feels fine when you actually type on it, better than any laptop I've ever used. (Historically, I've always HATED laptops, mostly because of keyboard and touchpad issues, but neither of those things bothers me at all on the MacBook.)
Also haven't had a problem with the glossy screen. I like the look of it, and I've used it outside in the sun, in the office with overhead lighting, at home with lamps, in bed, on the sofa, etc. without any serious glare issues. I wasn't trying to do serious work, so maybe that influences my impression, but it's not nearly the problem that I feared it would be when researching the machine.
It's a little strong to say that the MacBook is a poor substitute for a MacBook Pro. I weighed the pros and cons of both recently, when I was looking for a decent machine for personal travel purposes, and the only thing that I was really concerned about was the integrated video on the MacBook (which hasn't been a noticable problem at all).
If you want a desktop replacement, the Pro is obviously the way to go, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to try to squeeze a desktop replacement into a 12" chassis. For the size and the money, the MacBook's a fine machine.
I'm a long-time Windows user (after initially learning about PCs on Apple II machines among others back in the day), and I recently bought a MacBook because I like Apple's laptop hardware. I haven't missed the right mouse button AT ALL in OS X. The "tap with two fingers to right click" works great. I've never liked touchpads, really, but I find the one on the MacBook to be very usable. I almost never use the actual button, electing instead to tap the pad to click, so (after years of griping about single button Mac mice) it turns out that the single button is a non-issue.
(Also, the "two fingers to scroll" thing is 100% awesome. I love that feature.)
Yeah, we had SGI boxes at work similar to the ones in _Jurassic Park_ back when the movie came out, and we used that file system viewer occasionally (to find core dumps and other large files in strange places when trying to free up space on full hard drives). It ran slow as heck, but it was kind of a fun toy to play around with.
The actual MP3 files don't appear to have been "touched" by the process (the modified dates didn't change), so I don't think it's messing with anything there. Maybe it's storing some information in its database for each file? I'm not really sure, but I'm very curious what it's doing. I'm not sure it's actually working in iTunes 7 for me, but I haven't done exhaustive testing. Still waiting for the 1.2 iPod software update to show up, too...
Yeah, one of the only times I was actually scared by a "thing filling the screen" trick was in, I think, Doom 2. You get to the exit, press the button, and the floor drops down leaving you face to face with an Imp. Scared the crap out of me, because I was conditioned to assume that I was done with the level when I pushed the button, to the extent that I actually flung myself away from the desk in my rolling chair and had to scramble for traction to pull myself back to the keyboard and kill the Imp.
I don't know that I was SCARED per se, but I was greatly creeped out by those little spider things that always jumped out of urns and stuff in Unreal. I hated those things. I remember one level where several of them jumped out at me, and I kind of ran backwards in a panic (in the game) firing wildly at them.
Doom 3 never really scared me with the monsters jumping out at me, but there was one level late in the game where you were in a hall and there was some sort of female (or child) whispering indistinctly, and a set of bloody footprints began to appear down the hall. I was playing late at night at home by myself, and that creeped me out so bad that I had to quit playing for the evening.
If you figure the number counts all of the little bridges over small creeks and railroads and whatnot, it doesn't seem so strange. You don't always even notice that you're crossing a bridge when there's no interchange and no major river or road running beneath the interstate.
After doing a ton of research on this topic, my friend ended up getting the 60" Sony SXRD (LCoS), currently $3300 at Fry's, $3400 when he bought it a few months back. Good picture and viewing angle, no wobulation (unlike the DLP sets), the only real ding against it was that it didn't accept a 1080p signal on any input. (Everything gets upconverted to 1080p.)
The set looks great for HD stuff, but he's got Dish Network, and non-HD stuff is nearly unwatchable between the upconversion and the giant compression artifacts.
The original poster really should be asking the AVS Forum and not Slashdot about this...
It generally has to be pretty clean water, too, at least from what I've observed. We put bottles of filtered water in the fridge here at work all the time, and it supercools - if you're careful, you can drink some nice, below 32F water, but if you shake it up or bump the bottle too much, the water will crystalize into an icy slush. Pretty neat trick. Unfiltered water just seems to freeze solid in the freezer, though.
Agreed. I rented it and played through nearly all of it with a friend (got a bit bogged down on the extraterrestrial levels, IIRC). Lots of fun, combining some minor puzzle solving with blowing stuff up with a giant robot. I'd love to play it again.
JRjr
Back around 1993 or so, when I was in school working on my civil engineering degree, I had a project that involved, in part, designing a concrete structure for an elevated transit line. My project partner and I decided to take a field trip out to the Brookhaven MARTA station in Atlanta, which has a transit line elevated on a concrete structure, just to see if our design was feasible in a ballpark kind of way.
It was night, and we were in a grassy area beside the parking lot, looking through the fence at the rail line and sketching a few details, and the MARTA police came out to see what we were doing. We assured him that we were engineering students (my scale and scientific calculator seemed to be sufficient proof) and he just told us to finish up and move along. So I guess this sort of thing isn't particularly new.
Post-9/11, we were shooting some video for a project here at work and needed some footage of a water treatment facility. We sent out a couple of co-ops to an Atlanta water treatment facility with a public road running through the middle of it, and they set up the camera (a big, professional camera) to record a bit, but the cops came out and chased them off.
Well, I RTFA, and that short piece didn't sound like they were necessarily blaming the game for making him a killer; rather, his obsession with gaming led to conflict with his wife (she "intruded on his gaming time" or something like that) and he conspired with a friend to kill her.
At this point, having a cell phone is not just a matter of convenience for the owner, it's a matter of consideration for the owner's friends (assuming he has any). It's much easier to meet up with people, much more convenient to know when to expect an arriving friend, etc. when all parties involved have cell phones.
My girlfriend refused to have one for the longest time, and I got really tired of waiting on her to meet me for dinner with no way to find out where she was or why she was late, really tired of trying to give her directions from random gas station pay phones to places, etc.
It's entirely possible to have and use a cell phone and not be a jerk about it, but I firmly believe that obstinately refusing to have one is just rude.
Disagree. Futurama wasn't consistently funnier than the Simpsons in their prime, but it was close. Futurama was much better than the Simpsons episodes that were airing concurrently, though, by a longshot.
Indeed. I'd also add Over the Rhine, the Violet Burning, the Choir, Vigilantes of Love, the Echoing Green, and a host of other bands kind of on the fringes of "Christian rock" that are making great music, Christian content or no.
>>We've found that a minimum of 10x optical zoom is nice. Photos are much nicer when the subject fills the frame.
It's very difficult to find a 10x optical zoom in a compact digital camera (the sort that's suitable for carrying around in a pocket or around your wrist). Yeah, it's nice to have as much optical zoom as you can get, but above 3x or so, you start trading off the overall size of the camera with the amount of zoom you're getting.
I've been rather impressed with the performance of my Canon S70, which has a 28-100mm range (the wide end, while subject to a bit of distortion, has been VERY nice for scenery shots and getting photos of buildings and things without having to cross the street) and a 3.6x optical zoom in a relatively compact package.
Slashdot Mirror
I made it through high school, undergrad, and grad school (civil engineering at Georgia Tech) with nothing more than a TI-35, which I still use occasionally in my job at GT.
:-)
All those graphing, formula-storing calculators make you soft.
JRjr
I happened across a Wii at a Target last week, but I've since visited a lot of Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Toys R Us stores looking for Wii accessories and another unit for a friend (his wife finally found one yesterday after visiting about 15 or 20 stores).
I've seen a number of PS3s. I wouldn't say they're plentiful, but (for example) one evening at the Fayetteville, GA Target, Wal-Mart, TRU, and Best Buy, I saw 6 of the 60 GB units sitting on the shelves. So it appears that the demand for PS3s is close to being met (at least in the Atlanta area), but the demand for Wiis still exceeds the supply.
(I would be curious to know how many of each console have been sold to this point.)
JRjr
>>My point is that, in a condtion of bumper to bumper traffic, once two lanes of equal speed merge into one, the traffic speed in the remaining lane has no alternative but to double.
I guess I kind of see what you're saying - if you truly had two lanes of truly bumper to bumper traffic merging into one, the speed of the one lane would have to double to create enough space for twice the cars in half the space. That's not the case here, though.
I described a construction zone, with advance signage ("Road construction 2 miles/1 mile/1000 feet" etc.). It wasn't two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic - once we hit the backup, it was pretty much one lane of bumper to bumper traffic, and a number of "aggressive drivers" who figured they could get ahead by zipping farther down the line before merging. In this case, the drivers in the through lane (the lane that isn't closed) keep having to stop or slow down to let people merge (or because people are cutting them off). Once that "turbulence" goes away, the traffic speeds up, and the truckers forced that to happen farther upstream than it would have without their intervention. We had a brief period of increased delay while all the cars merged, and then a nice period of uninterrupted free flow.
JRjr
Yes, I'm sure I'm a traffic engineer. I'm also sure that I have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm not sure that you do, either.
It's simple: once all the merging was done, all the cars stopped having to slow down or stop to let people merge, and were able to get on with simply driving in a straight line through the construction site. The truckers forced the merging to happen farther upstream, so we were able to reach the nice steady state flow speed for a mile or two before the construction site, rather than at the actual bottleneck (past which there was no merging because there was physically only one lane).
It's neither physics nor psychology, it's traffic flow theory.
JRjr
>>it seems to be a BMW more than any other model, to me
Hah! Amazing - I just posted a similar observation (before reading your post) somewhere up above.
I have a couple of friends that drive BMWs, and they're fine people (and I'm sure BMWs are fine cars). But I've had YEARS of driving experience, observing the behavior of other people, and for some reason, you DO see a lot more asshole driver behavior from BMW drivers. I don't know why that is, but it happens too much to be coincidence. It's not sports car drivers, or Mercedes (similarly priced German car) drivers, it's BMW drivers specifically (and all models - Z3s, sedans, SUVs...).
JRjr
I'm a traffic engineer that drives in Atlanta every day. I know ALL about idiot drivers and the bastard behaviors that they drive you to. My biggest pet peeve is what you describe, people who fly up to the front of the queue and attempt to cut in - I'll do everything in my power to prevent those bastards from getting into the line. On the other hand, if somebody turns on their signal to merge ahead of the LAST POSSIBLE INCH OF ROAD, I'll happily slow down and let them in.
Once, driving on I-85 from South Carolina through rural north Georgia, I saw a very striking illustration of how merging SHOULD work. It's a 2-lane interstate, and bridge construction had one lane shut down, and traffic backed up for several miles. Traffic was CRAWLING, in large part due to bastards (an unusually high percentage of BMW drivers, for whatever reason...) running up to the front of the queue. Then something interesting happened - the truckers got organized.
A bunch of truckers pulled into the center of the two lanes, blocking traffic from passing them in either lane. That forced the traffic in the "cells" between trucks to go ahead and merge into a single lane - there was no point staying in two lanes anymore, because you couldn't pass the truck to fly up to the front. What was awesome was that as soon as all the merging was done, traffic sped up a good 10 to 15 MPH. Once everybody got into a single lane, the "turbulence in the flow" that was causing things to really crawl was gone, and everybody got through the bottleneck a lot faster, rather than just the selfish bastards that had to cut into the front of the line.
JRjr
When/if I get a PS3, it'll be my first HD source, and I'd probably start considering getting an HDTV a little more seriously. I don't have digital cable or satellite and don't really want it, and I can't be bothered to hook up an antenna for over-the-air HDTV, so the benefit of an HDTV is fairly limited for me right now.
I've spent some time watching my friend's SXRD. He has Dish Network, and HD stuff looks good. DVD looks good. But standard TV ranges from OK to nearly unwatchably bad, when you combine the compression of the satellite feed with the upconversion to 1080p for display. That also dampened my enthusiasm for HDTV.
JRjr
Your take is pretty much exactly the same as mine. I have a 36" Wega that I'm perfectly happy with. I wouldn't mind having an HDTV (though I don't currently have any HDTV source to drive it with), but after helping a friend select an HDTV (he ended up with a Sony SXRD), I realized that it's just too much of a hassle. All the resolutions, all the different display technologies (each with a complex set of pluses and minuses), and all the related problems and questions - it's ridiculous that buying a TV has gotten this complicated.
JRjr
What sort of video store bosses were predicting VHS over DVD? Smaller, no rewinding, better picture quality, won't degrade under normal use...yeah, VHS had a chance...
(Aren't PSP movies pretty much dead at this point?)
I wouldn't go so far as to say that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are DOA, but they definitely have some things to overcome. The benefits of DVD over VHS were fairly obvious and easy to take advantage of. The benefits of the new formats (which still look, media-wise, just like a DVD) are a little more esoteric (and mostly of interest to "videophiles"), and require a lot more hardware (expensive player, fancy new TV - and the world of HDTV resolutions and display technologies is still incomprehensible to 75% of the world) to take advantage of.
JRjr
Haven't noticed any video problems, though I haven't tried to play any games on it or anything. I've done a bit of video capture and DVD encoding, and it was surprisingly OK for that. I did upgrade to 2 GB of RAM (aftermarket), though, so maybe that helps (since the integrated video shares memory).
I don't mind the "funky keyboard" at all - it feels fine when you actually type on it, better than any laptop I've ever used. (Historically, I've always HATED laptops, mostly because of keyboard and touchpad issues, but neither of those things bothers me at all on the MacBook.)
Also haven't had a problem with the glossy screen. I like the look of it, and I've used it outside in the sun, in the office with overhead lighting, at home with lamps, in bed, on the sofa, etc. without any serious glare issues. I wasn't trying to do serious work, so maybe that influences my impression, but it's not nearly the problem that I feared it would be when researching the machine.
JRjr
It's a little strong to say that the MacBook is a poor substitute for a MacBook Pro. I weighed the pros and cons of both recently, when I was looking for a decent machine for personal travel purposes, and the only thing that I was really concerned about was the integrated video on the MacBook (which hasn't been a noticable problem at all).
If you want a desktop replacement, the Pro is obviously the way to go, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to try to squeeze a desktop replacement into a 12" chassis. For the size and the money, the MacBook's a fine machine.
JRjr
I'm a long-time Windows user (after initially learning about PCs on Apple II machines among others back in the day), and I recently bought a MacBook because I like Apple's laptop hardware. I haven't missed the right mouse button AT ALL in OS X. The "tap with two fingers to right click" works great. I've never liked touchpads, really, but I find the one on the MacBook to be very usable. I almost never use the actual button, electing instead to tap the pad to click, so (after years of griping about single button Mac mice) it turns out that the single button is a non-issue.
(Also, the "two fingers to scroll" thing is 100% awesome. I love that feature.)
JRjr
Yeah, we had SGI boxes at work similar to the ones in _Jurassic Park_ back when the movie came out, and we used that file system viewer occasionally (to find core dumps and other large files in strange places when trying to free up space on full hard drives). It ran slow as heck, but it was kind of a fun toy to play around with.
JRjr
The actual MP3 files don't appear to have been "touched" by the process (the modified dates didn't change), so I don't think it's messing with anything there. Maybe it's storing some information in its database for each file? I'm not really sure, but I'm very curious what it's doing. I'm not sure it's actually working in iTunes 7 for me, but I haven't done exhaustive testing. Still waiting for the 1.2 iPod software update to show up, too...
JRjr
Yeah, one of the only times I was actually scared by a "thing filling the screen" trick was in, I think, Doom 2. You get to the exit, press the button, and the floor drops down leaving you face to face with an Imp. Scared the crap out of me, because I was conditioned to assume that I was done with the level when I pushed the button, to the extent that I actually flung myself away from the desk in my rolling chair and had to scramble for traction to pull myself back to the keyboard and kill the Imp.
I don't know that I was SCARED per se, but I was greatly creeped out by those little spider things that always jumped out of urns and stuff in Unreal. I hated those things. I remember one level where several of them jumped out at me, and I kind of ran backwards in a panic (in the game) firing wildly at them.
Doom 3 never really scared me with the monsters jumping out at me, but there was one level late in the game where you were in a hall and there was some sort of female (or child) whispering indistinctly, and a set of bloody footprints began to appear down the hall. I was playing late at night at home by myself, and that creeped me out so bad that I had to quit playing for the evening.
JRjr
If you figure the number counts all of the little bridges over small creeks and railroads and whatnot, it doesn't seem so strange. You don't always even notice that you're crossing a bridge when there's no interchange and no major river or road running beneath the interstate.
JRjr
After doing a ton of research on this topic, my friend ended up getting the 60" Sony SXRD (LCoS), currently $3300 at Fry's, $3400 when he bought it a few months back. Good picture and viewing angle, no wobulation (unlike the DLP sets), the only real ding against it was that it didn't accept a 1080p signal on any input. (Everything gets upconverted to 1080p.)
The set looks great for HD stuff, but he's got Dish Network, and non-HD stuff is nearly unwatchable between the upconversion and the giant compression artifacts.
The original poster really should be asking the AVS Forum and not Slashdot about this...
JRjr
It generally has to be pretty clean water, too, at least from what I've observed. We put bottles of filtered water in the fridge here at work all the time, and it supercools - if you're careful, you can drink some nice, below 32F water, but if you shake it up or bump the bottle too much, the water will crystalize into an icy slush. Pretty neat trick. Unfiltered water just seems to freeze solid in the freezer, though.
JRjr
Agreed. I rented it and played through nearly all of it with a friend (got a bit bogged down on the extraterrestrial levels, IIRC). Lots of fun, combining some minor puzzle solving with blowing stuff up with a giant robot. I'd love to play it again. JRjr
Back around 1993 or so, when I was in school working on my civil engineering degree, I had a project that involved, in part, designing a concrete structure for an elevated transit line. My project partner and I decided to take a field trip out to the Brookhaven MARTA station in Atlanta, which has a transit line elevated on a concrete structure, just to see if our design was feasible in a ballpark kind of way.
It was night, and we were in a grassy area beside the parking lot, looking through the fence at the rail line and sketching a few details, and the MARTA police came out to see what we were doing. We assured him that we were engineering students (my scale and scientific calculator seemed to be sufficient proof) and he just told us to finish up and move along. So I guess this sort of thing isn't particularly new.
Post-9/11, we were shooting some video for a project here at work and needed some footage of a water treatment facility. We sent out a couple of co-ops to an Atlanta water treatment facility with a public road running through the middle of it, and they set up the camera (a big, professional camera) to record a bit, but the cops came out and chased them off.
JRjr
Well, I RTFA, and that short piece didn't sound like they were necessarily blaming the game for making him a killer; rather, his obsession with gaming led to conflict with his wife (she "intruded on his gaming time" or something like that) and he conspired with a friend to kill her.
JRjr
At this point, having a cell phone is not just a matter of convenience for the owner, it's a matter of consideration for the owner's friends (assuming he has any). It's much easier to meet up with people, much more convenient to know when to expect an arriving friend, etc. when all parties involved have cell phones.
My girlfriend refused to have one for the longest time, and I got really tired of waiting on her to meet me for dinner with no way to find out where she was or why she was late, really tired of trying to give her directions from random gas station pay phones to places, etc.
It's entirely possible to have and use a cell phone and not be a jerk about it, but I firmly believe that obstinately refusing to have one is just rude.
JRjr
Disagree. Futurama wasn't consistently funnier than the Simpsons in their prime, but it was close. Futurama was much better than the Simpsons episodes that were airing concurrently, though, by a longshot.
JRjr
Indeed. I'd also add Over the Rhine, the Violet Burning, the Choir, Vigilantes of Love, the Echoing Green, and a host of other bands kind of on the fringes of "Christian rock" that are making great music, Christian content or no.
JRjr
>>We've found that a minimum of 10x optical zoom is nice. Photos are much nicer when the subject fills the frame.
It's very difficult to find a 10x optical zoom in a compact digital camera (the sort that's suitable for carrying around in a pocket or around your wrist). Yeah, it's nice to have as much optical zoom as you can get, but above 3x or so, you start trading off the overall size of the camera with the amount of zoom you're getting.
I've been rather impressed with the performance of my Canon S70, which has a 28-100mm range (the wide end, while subject to a bit of distortion, has been VERY nice for scenery shots and getting photos of buildings and things without having to cross the street) and a 3.6x optical zoom in a relatively compact package.
JRjr