This should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, not as if Google is trying to squash their speech.
No, this should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, *AND* as if Google is trying to squash their speech. You're right, there is no government intervention, so we're fine as far as 1st Amendment going. We still are left with Google using it's business to discourage free speech. Someone has to pay for it, you're right. But there are many people who can pay for it and letting Google have a free pass just because they have the right to is wrong. Raising the alarm that Google is doing something "evil", boycotting, avoiding Google products, etc, are great examples of free speech, as well.
Of course I can't blame a lot of the teachers. When you are chronically underpaid and have to do ridiculous shameful shit like purchasing resources out of your own pockets for your students, I can understand how some become burned out and disillusioned.
Yep.
Of course, if teachers have to call home, you often times wind up with "perfect child syndrome" where the parent doesn't believe the teacher. They take it up with the principal, and if they're the kind of parent who can donate a new computer or something, suddenly the teacher is just harassing them. Put it in the computer, however...the computer never lies!
When I was in English class, there was no reason for me to have a computer. We did the reading at home and only did discussion in class.
When I was in Math class, we had computers, at least in Calc and DiffE. I spent most of my time making Mathematica animations. Tests were designed so that a) you could do them by hand (no calcs even) and b) putting them into Mathematica generally made them harder, as Mathematica generally didn't solve them in a useful way.
In German, we didn't need computers because we did the readings as a group. Computers would have been a distraction. Possibly, having an iPad like thing and reading in a program that let me take notes on the page itself, would have been ok, but that would have only added up to equivalent with the book. And would have been heavier...
Chemistry we didn't need a computer, as we were doing experiments half the time. Maybe a computer would have been nice when taking notes. I generally took notes on paper in college when I had a computer, though...
Computer class...was f-ing worthless. We learned to type and to use excel, and then we learned to type 3 more times. I made friends with the lab manager. He let us come in on weekends and run HL and CS tournaments.
Biology...same as chemistry.
History...I guess digital textbooks would have been nice, although it was a mix of English (read at home and discuss in class) and lectures. Again, for the most part, it would have just added up to pen+paper+letshopeitworks.
Of course, there wasn't a lot of computer based curriculum. Nowadays, that might be different. Having 2 teachers for parents, I'm gonna go with it might be different, but it isn't better. My mom teaches kindergarten. They require her to use her smartboard during class a certain amount of time, but they don't help pay for any training or anything. There are only a few pre-made courses for it (for kindergarten...), none of which work with the curriculum she is required to teach. Meaning, on her own time, she has to learn a new and proprietary programming environment (again..this is the 2nd brand of smartboards in her school in 5 years). I went to an even better school (with way more money) than the one she teaches at, and they had no idea how to integrate computers (except the math teach, but he was different in a lot of other ways).
Basically, depriving kids of computer literacy is a bad thing. Forcing computers into classes that have not yet fully adapted to them, including the distractions they bring to the kids and the teachers, is probably even worse. You can learn computer literacy at home. Many people can't afford a computer at home, so they can learn it in the library. Or the school can focus on making the computer class *actually worthwhile*. My point is, kids aren't going to be deprived of the ability to learn to use computers, especially not at a school where the choice is 2 computers per child or 1?
Your argument makes sense for kids in 3rd world countries re: the OLPC project. For kids in posh schools in developed countries, the argument is more like depriving a mechanic of one of those super expensive factory provided diagnostic tools and giving him the 3rd party one instead. At poor schools, it's more like having a couple wrenches to share, and one of those diagnostic tools for the kids that have really proved themselves.
It also helps keep WETA and WETA Digital the ILM of today. I can't imagine how much money that brings in and then spends in country (data center people, technologists, animators, craft artisans, etc.) A film getting to say it's effects were done by WETA nowadays is marketing gold like saying ILM 20 years ago, or Ray Harryhausen 50 years ago...
The problem is still with the organization of corporations. The management isn't at fault, because they're just the hired guns doing the will of the owners (stockholders). The stockholders aren't at fault because there's so many of them you could never apportion blame, and they can't know the ins-and-outs of every action taken by the corporation. Basically, no one is to blame (officially...when Target donates 150k to a politician the CEO likes, everyone knows exactly who to go after...but how're you gonna fire him? If more than 50% of the stock is owned by institutional investors who only trade based on price, and he continues to make the price better, you can't get rid of him...)
I hate to say it, but they really shoulda just waited a few weeks and done this in iMovie '11 with that trailer creation thing they spent an hour discussing.
That, or like someone said earlier, just contract them out to Futurama... The Simpsons shill for Butterfinger, why can't Futurama for NASA?
Not so much "grant hunting season" as "consultancy hunting season". "The arctic mineral and fossil fuel deposits are about to be accessible...and I know where they all are..."
When I was too young to vote (think 6 years old), my parents would take me to the polling place. They had a special "learning machine" setup that had different names (I guess a default name the company made for demos?) and different colored ballots. Funny enough, I never found those "butterfly ballots" confusing, even though I was 6 and too short to easily see. You just punched the hole that the arrow pointed at (and if you had to use the little poker to slide over form the arrow cause you couldn't see perfect, well, you did). It's seemed pretty simple to me. At 6. I thought it was a clever, efficient use of paper, not to mention no one could tell who you voted for until they ran it through the machines...
Kidding! Don't worry about it, it's much better English than probably most of the people on here can do French. If you care, the only things incorrect are the two "nor"s in your first sentence and the way you conjugate "to build" ("built" being the past tense you want instead of "build" and "builded" as you have). Also, I guess you do need an "s" on the end of "design", as "some" requires a plural noun to go with it and "design" is still singular.
And I'm done being a nit-picking jerk... (I really don't mean any offense, just offering tips!)
When I joined facebook in '04, it actually seemed like they cared about privacy. They had reasonable privacy controls, they made it easy to establish how much privacy you wanted on your profile, and they hadn't started selling ad-space of any kind, nor mentioned what their business model would really be. Unfortunately, by the time they began changing, selling user info etc., *everything* at school ran on facebook. *everything*. You couldn't be involved in student government, either as an official or just as a constituent, without being on facebook. Half the list-servs on campus, any clubs basically, switched over to facebook group messages. Saying you could do without facebook was essentially saying "you can take the entire social aspect of college and remove it. You can move off campus and never speak to any of your friends or be involved in any club or anything." If you had to ask about a party, it was assumed you hadn't been invited deliberately, not because you weren't on facebook. It was even worse when I was in school in England.
Being out of college, I avoid facebook like the plague. I sign in once every month or two. However, I get tagged in photos, websites, messages, etc at least once or twice a week, if not every day. And I can't just cut it off. There's a documentary who's production I've been following who didn't set up a website until a few weeks ago and which hasn't been updated since. It's for sale, but you could only find that out through facebook (I think they did actually update yesterday or something, so now you can get it at their website, I just checked.)
I too value my privacy, and find facebook to be the finest example of everything wrong with capitalism. Unfortunately, because of the power they wield in the sheer number of users, I can't be rid of it even if I decided to give up all those facebook only things (like the documentary) thanks to tagging, etc. I'm idling until either a) facebook does somehting really, really stupid (which I can't even fathom how stupid it would have to be for people to leave) or b) I can start help making diaspora an alternative for my friends and, eventually, all the things I find useful knowing about.
consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
Seriously. Has no one ever heard of encryption? Or just not allowing people to copy personal data onto computers/media not behind at least 1 locked door?
They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things.
I mean, jeez, yeah. The last thing I heard about Google doing was building cars that drive themselves in traffic. That's sooo mid-2000s... Facebing is looking to the future here! Those 500 people that I once knew in HS and college that I haven't talked to in 3+ years and that every time I do I'm reminded of why I don't talk to them (nothing in common, completely antithetical views on most things, too many freaking country-club-kiddies who don't know the difference between Bing and Best Buy)? Those are *definitely* the people who's likes I want showing up first in my search engine results!
Now, to be fair, Microsoft does actually have some pretty sweet research going on. And while most of that research is in things pretty unrelated to search, a lot of Google's research is also pretty unrelated to search. But to say that you're going with Bing over Google because Bing is "incentivized to innovate" sounds like that phrase had it's own paragraph in the contract, right above where the $ was followed by a dozen "0"s.
Hey, gotta pay for the Newark school system somehow, right?
what they do here for pawnshops. Put a four week hold on all payments.
That sucks. Half the point of a pawn shop is "oh shit, I have to pay rent in 2 days but don't get paid for 4!" A short term loan where you get to choose your collateral (and which, if you default on, they're not going to come after your house or whatever).
US astronomers used their published data (henceforth called 'A') and the Swiss published data (henceforth called 'B'). The Swiss used their published data B and their unpublished data (henceforth called 'C'). So we've tested A+B and B+C. We'll see what the deal is when we can do A+B+C...
This patent was filed February 28, 2007. The only thing this patent seems to add on to what Dodgeball did in ~2000 is that location is that instead of entering a location manually and sending via SMS, the patent has the device uploading GPS location data, and having a single program within which to enter location and status data. Considering GPS wasn't commonly available in 2000, and neither were smartphones that could run programs and had data plans, I don't see how this isn't considered an obvious improvement on a previous invention.
Is there anything to stop corrupt little deals where lawyers tell their clients what they want to hear, so that the client can act on advice of their attorney, and because the attorney doesn't face any penalties, it's all sort of 'legal'?
Well, yes, but you have to prove to another set of attorneys that the original attorney was doing something unethical, but you can't introduce any communications between the attorney and client as evidence and they're very good about throwing in words like "in my opinion" so it's not unethical, it's just "poorly informed". So, no.
As a side note, does anyone else having problems copy/pasting in Slashdot boxes while using Chrome, or is my computer just f*ed?
When I get my credit card stolen, I'll lose a $20 gadget instead of giving the thieves access to my $0.20 bank account or my credit card with fraud protection where I simply click "Report" on any charges that weren't mine (and I have something like a week to report it stolen, so even if I don't notice it immediately I'm still not liable)?
Also, this in no way stops credit card skimmers at ATMs, gas stations, etc., nor RFID readers.
The positive thing I see about this is the ability to program multiple cards into one card. I kinda like that. Even compared to putting it in my cell phone. If it's cold enough out, I'll have my cell phone buried deep and answer with my headphones (either corded or bluetooth), especially since it's a touchscreen and I'll be damned if I'm gonna take my cell phone out *and* take-off my gloves. Having 1 credit card that I could keep in an outer pocket, alone (so as not to be a target), would be nice.
Also, if I'm at a restaurant, I really don't want to hand my waitress my cell phone to take back to the back...
On the other hand, it means you have to have *all* of these parts to infringe on the patent. I can't think of any prior art for the things you picked up, but as long you as you, say, weigh votes based on something other than ticket price (if you weight them at all), then I don't think you'd be infringing.
The only useful parts I can see in this patent are the thing about pre-weighting all choices towards child/adult friendly options based on the time of the showing and allowing people to take a record of the story arc so that they can try re-choosing it at a later showing or at home on DVD. That is, of course, you find the entire idea of choose-your-own-adventure movies useful at all, but that's a whole other discussion...
The crew goes to see "All My Circuits, The Movie", which is a choose your adventure movie controlled by little PDA devices, which seems to cover about half the claims in this patent.
The new things in the patent (to me) are: weighting votes by ticket price, pre-weighting and/or post-rating specific viewings for branches more appropriate for children or adults, and letting you record the choices you made so that if you come back or later by the DVD, you can (try to) make the same choices again. Interesting, not super exciting, and certainly doesn't get in the way of all those open-source choose-your-own-adventure movie projection systems and films coming down the pipeline...
First, as a couple people have said: A cardboard box. Maybe 3 or 4 of different sizes. And some wood blocks.
Second, I'll stop insulting your intelligence and assume you already have that covered. An iPad. I don't have children (I hate them), but my cousin has 1, another on the way, and he's mormon so he's got 2 dozen nephews and nieces. He's also way more tech-savvy than I am, and the iPad serves him great for this. Load it up with educational cartoons (Barney, Sesame Street, Bob the Builder) and 2 or 3 educational games that involve some button mashing, and you're golden. Maybe throw on some soothing music or one of those white-noise generators to help him nap, and just keep it in the diaper bag (do they still wear diapers at 18 months?) and anytime you need a down moment or to distract him or whatever, pull it out, give it to him, and take five. Also, a heavy-, heavy-duty case. Maybe waterproof. Just in case...
...those where life and limb...are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
Slashdot Mirror
This should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, not as if Google is trying to squash their speech.
No, this should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, *AND* as if Google is trying to squash their speech. You're right, there is no government intervention, so we're fine as far as 1st Amendment going. We still are left with Google using it's business to discourage free speech. Someone has to pay for it, you're right. But there are many people who can pay for it and letting Google have a free pass just because they have the right to is wrong. Raising the alarm that Google is doing something "evil", boycotting, avoiding Google products, etc, are great examples of free speech, as well.
Of course I can't blame a lot of the teachers. When you are chronically underpaid and have to do ridiculous shameful shit like purchasing resources out of your own pockets for your students, I can understand how some become burned out and disillusioned.
Yep.
Of course, if teachers have to call home, you often times wind up with "perfect child syndrome" where the parent doesn't believe the teacher. They take it up with the principal, and if they're the kind of parent who can donate a new computer or something, suddenly the teacher is just harassing them. Put it in the computer, however...the computer never lies!
Blowjobs on the way to school? Best. Security. Fail. EVER!
When I was in English class, there was no reason for me to have a computer. We did the reading at home and only did discussion in class.
When I was in Math class, we had computers, at least in Calc and DiffE. I spent most of my time making Mathematica animations. Tests were designed so that a) you could do them by hand (no calcs even) and b) putting them into Mathematica generally made them harder, as Mathematica generally didn't solve them in a useful way.
In German, we didn't need computers because we did the readings as a group. Computers would have been a distraction. Possibly, having an iPad like thing and reading in a program that let me take notes on the page itself, would have been ok, but that would have only added up to equivalent with the book. And would have been heavier...
Chemistry we didn't need a computer, as we were doing experiments half the time. Maybe a computer would have been nice when taking notes. I generally took notes on paper in college when I had a computer, though...
Computer class...was f-ing worthless. We learned to type and to use excel, and then we learned to type 3 more times. I made friends with the lab manager. He let us come in on weekends and run HL and CS tournaments.
Biology...same as chemistry.
History...I guess digital textbooks would have been nice, although it was a mix of English (read at home and discuss in class) and lectures. Again, for the most part, it would have just added up to pen+paper+letshopeitworks.
Of course, there wasn't a lot of computer based curriculum. Nowadays, that might be different. Having 2 teachers for parents, I'm gonna go with it might be different, but it isn't better. My mom teaches kindergarten. They require her to use her smartboard during class a certain amount of time, but they don't help pay for any training or anything. There are only a few pre-made courses for it (for kindergarten...), none of which work with the curriculum she is required to teach. Meaning, on her own time, she has to learn a new and proprietary programming environment (again..this is the 2nd brand of smartboards in her school in 5 years). I went to an even better school (with way more money) than the one she teaches at, and they had no idea how to integrate computers (except the math teach, but he was different in a lot of other ways).
Basically, depriving kids of computer literacy is a bad thing. Forcing computers into classes that have not yet fully adapted to them, including the distractions they bring to the kids and the teachers, is probably even worse. You can learn computer literacy at home. Many people can't afford a computer at home, so they can learn it in the library. Or the school can focus on making the computer class *actually worthwhile*. My point is, kids aren't going to be deprived of the ability to learn to use computers, especially not at a school where the choice is 2 computers per child or 1?
Your argument makes sense for kids in 3rd world countries re: the OLPC project. For kids in posh schools in developed countries, the argument is more like depriving a mechanic of one of those super expensive factory provided diagnostic tools and giving him the 3rd party one instead. At poor schools, it's more like having a couple wrenches to share, and one of those diagnostic tools for the kids that have really proved themselves.
It also helps keep WETA and WETA Digital the ILM of today. I can't imagine how much money that brings in and then spends in country (data center people, technologists, animators, craft artisans, etc.) A film getting to say it's effects were done by WETA nowadays is marketing gold like saying ILM 20 years ago, or Ray Harryhausen 50 years ago...
That's the point I was going to make.
The problem is still with the organization of corporations. The management isn't at fault, because they're just the hired guns doing the will of the owners (stockholders). The stockholders aren't at fault because there's so many of them you could never apportion blame, and they can't know the ins-and-outs of every action taken by the corporation. Basically, no one is to blame (officially...when Target donates 150k to a politician the CEO likes, everyone knows exactly who to go after...but how're you gonna fire him? If more than 50% of the stock is owned by institutional investors who only trade based on price, and he continues to make the price better, you can't get rid of him...)
I hate to say it, but they really shoulda just waited a few weeks and done this in iMovie '11 with that trailer creation thing they spent an hour discussing.
That, or like someone said earlier, just contract them out to Futurama... The Simpsons shill for Butterfinger, why can't Futurama for NASA?
Not so much "grant hunting season" as "consultancy hunting season". "The arctic mineral and fossil fuel deposits are about to be accessible...and I know where they all are..."
/jk
When I was too young to vote (think 6 years old), my parents would take me to the polling place. They had a special "learning machine" setup that had different names (I guess a default name the company made for demos?) and different colored ballots. Funny enough, I never found those "butterfly ballots" confusing, even though I was 6 and too short to easily see. You just punched the hole that the arrow pointed at (and if you had to use the little poker to slide over form the arrow cause you couldn't see perfect, well, you did). It's seemed pretty simple to me. At 6. I thought it was a clever, efficient use of paper, not to mention no one could tell who you voted for until they ran it through the machines...
NO! BURN IN HELL FOR'NER!
Kidding! Don't worry about it, it's much better English than probably most of the people on here can do French. If you care, the only things incorrect are the two "nor"s in your first sentence and the way you conjugate "to build" ("built" being the past tense you want instead of "build" and "builded" as you have). Also, I guess you do need an "s" on the end of "design", as "some" requires a plural noun to go with it and "design" is still singular.
And I'm done being a nit-picking jerk... (I really don't mean any offense, just offering tips!)
When I joined facebook in '04, it actually seemed like they cared about privacy. They had reasonable privacy controls, they made it easy to establish how much privacy you wanted on your profile, and they hadn't started selling ad-space of any kind, nor mentioned what their business model would really be. Unfortunately, by the time they began changing, selling user info etc., *everything* at school ran on facebook. *everything*. You couldn't be involved in student government, either as an official or just as a constituent, without being on facebook. Half the list-servs on campus, any clubs basically, switched over to facebook group messages. Saying you could do without facebook was essentially saying "you can take the entire social aspect of college and remove it. You can move off campus and never speak to any of your friends or be involved in any club or anything." If you had to ask about a party, it was assumed you hadn't been invited deliberately, not because you weren't on facebook. It was even worse when I was in school in England.
Being out of college, I avoid facebook like the plague. I sign in once every month or two. However, I get tagged in photos, websites, messages, etc at least once or twice a week, if not every day. And I can't just cut it off. There's a documentary who's production I've been following who didn't set up a website until a few weeks ago and which hasn't been updated since. It's for sale, but you could only find that out through facebook (I think they did actually update yesterday or something, so now you can get it at their website, I just checked.)
I too value my privacy, and find facebook to be the finest example of everything wrong with capitalism. Unfortunately, because of the power they wield in the sheer number of users, I can't be rid of it even if I decided to give up all those facebook only things (like the documentary) thanks to tagging, etc. I'm idling until either a) facebook does somehting really, really stupid (which I can't even fathom how stupid it would have to be for people to leave) or b) I can start help making diaspora an alternative for my friends and, eventually, all the things I find useful knowing about.
They'd have a little sticker over the optics that says "Don't laser people."
consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
To Rice U.: http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14734
Seriously. Has no one ever heard of encryption? Or just not allowing people to copy personal data onto computers/media not behind at least 1 locked door?
They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things.
I mean, jeez, yeah. The last thing I heard about Google doing was building cars that drive themselves in traffic. That's sooo mid-2000s... Facebing is looking to the future here! Those 500 people that I once knew in HS and college that I haven't talked to in 3+ years and that every time I do I'm reminded of why I don't talk to them (nothing in common, completely antithetical views on most things, too many freaking country-club-kiddies who don't know the difference between Bing and Best Buy)? Those are *definitely* the people who's likes I want showing up first in my search engine results!
Now, to be fair, Microsoft does actually have some pretty sweet research going on. And while most of that research is in things pretty unrelated to search, a lot of Google's research is also pretty unrelated to search. But to say that you're going with Bing over Google because Bing is "incentivized to innovate" sounds like that phrase had it's own paragraph in the contract, right above where the $ was followed by a dozen "0"s.
Hey, gotta pay for the Newark school system somehow, right?
what they do here for pawnshops. Put a four week hold on all payments.
That sucks. Half the point of a pawn shop is "oh shit, I have to pay rent in 2 days but don't get paid for 4!" A short term loan where you get to choose your collateral (and which, if you default on, they're not going to come after your house or whatever).
US astronomers used their published data (henceforth called 'A') and the Swiss published data (henceforth called 'B'). The Swiss used their published data B and their unpublished data (henceforth called 'C'). So we've tested A+B and B+C. We'll see what the deal is when we can do A+B+C...
This patent was filed February 28, 2007. The only thing this patent seems to add on to what Dodgeball did in ~2000 is that location is that instead of entering a location manually and sending via SMS, the patent has the device uploading GPS location data, and having a single program within which to enter location and status data. Considering GPS wasn't commonly available in 2000, and neither were smartphones that could run programs and had data plans, I don't see how this isn't considered an obvious improvement on a previous invention.
Is there anything to stop corrupt little deals where lawyers tell their clients what they want to hear, so that the client can act on advice of their attorney, and because the attorney doesn't face any penalties, it's all sort of 'legal'?
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo#Legal_opinions
Well, yes, but you have to prove to another set of attorneys that the original attorney was doing something unethical, but you can't introduce any communications between the attorney and client as evidence and they're very good about throwing in words like "in my opinion" so it's not unethical, it's just "poorly informed". So, no.
As a side note, does anyone else having problems copy/pasting in Slashdot boxes while using Chrome, or is my computer just f*ed?
When I get my credit card stolen, I'll lose a $20 gadget instead of giving the thieves access to my $0.20 bank account or my credit card with fraud protection where I simply click "Report" on any charges that weren't mine (and I have something like a week to report it stolen, so even if I don't notice it immediately I'm still not liable)?
Also, this in no way stops credit card skimmers at ATMs, gas stations, etc., nor RFID readers.
The positive thing I see about this is the ability to program multiple cards into one card. I kinda like that. Even compared to putting it in my cell phone. If it's cold enough out, I'll have my cell phone buried deep and answer with my headphones (either corded or bluetooth), especially since it's a touchscreen and I'll be damned if I'm gonna take my cell phone out *and* take-off my gloves. Having 1 credit card that I could keep in an outer pocket, alone (so as not to be a target), would be nice.
Also, if I'm at a restaurant, I really don't want to hand my waitress my cell phone to take back to the back...
On the other hand, it means you have to have *all* of these parts to infringe on the patent. I can't think of any prior art for the things you picked up, but as long you as you, say, weigh votes based on something other than ticket price (if you weight them at all), then I don't think you'd be infringing.
The only useful parts I can see in this patent are the thing about pre-weighting all choices towards child/adult friendly options based on the time of the showing and allowing people to take a record of the story arc so that they can try re-choosing it at a later showing or at home on DVD. That is, of course, you find the entire idea of choose-your-own-adventure movies useful at all, but that's a whole other discussion...
For the less Futurama inclined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Bender
The crew goes to see "All My Circuits, The Movie", which is a choose your adventure movie controlled by little PDA devices, which seems to cover about half the claims in this patent.
The new things in the patent (to me) are: weighting votes by ticket price, pre-weighting and/or post-rating specific viewings for branches more appropriate for children or adults, and letting you record the choices you made so that if you come back or later by the DVD, you can (try to) make the same choices again. Interesting, not super exciting, and certainly doesn't get in the way of all those open-source choose-your-own-adventure movie projection systems and films coming down the pipeline...
First, as a couple people have said: A cardboard box. Maybe 3 or 4 of different sizes. And some wood blocks.
Second, I'll stop insulting your intelligence and assume you already have that covered. An iPad. I don't have children (I hate them), but my cousin has 1, another on the way, and he's mormon so he's got 2 dozen nephews and nieces. He's also way more tech-savvy than I am, and the iPad serves him great for this. Load it up with educational cartoons (Barney, Sesame Street, Bob the Builder) and 2 or 3 educational games that involve some button mashing, and you're golden. Maybe throw on some soothing music or one of those white-noise generators to help him nap, and just keep it in the diaper bag (do they still wear diapers at 18 months?) and anytime you need a down moment or to distract him or whatever, pull it out, give it to him, and take five. Also, a heavy-, heavy-duty case. Maybe waterproof. Just in case...
...those where life and limb...are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
mmmm...huuumaan steeeaaak...
(the only reason any businessman from the civilized world would even be caught dead in Saudi Arabia).
But...they have gold-bar vending machines!