I have a WM5 device, the T-Mobile SDA, which I really praise because it has WiFi. This is one of the new crop of devices really produced by HTC and rebranded by the cell phone companies; another one available in the US is the Cingular 2125. The wireless card means I'm paying $30/month for voice access and getting Internet from my home or school network - why pay for data when you're surrounded by so great a cloud of WiFi (with apologies to the author of Hebrews)?
It's working decently with my Mac. Bluetooth means that file transfer for the most part is manageable; an SD card means that if I need to, I can shut down the phone and transfer large amounts of data reasonably quickly. WM seems to handle most files reasonably (VCFs can import into contacts, etc.) - I was able to move my Address Book over without that many workarounds. I have a native VNC client and a Java SSH client, which work well enough for me. Of course there's no keyboard, but I didn't trust myself to carry the MDA around and not break the sliding screen.
If you happen to have WiFi on campus, consider getting one of these devices. Don't underestimate the ability to keep your items on a central server and access them via your phone.
64 bits is really 2^64 possible keys. 128 bits is 2^128 possible keys. Double-64 bits is, at best, 2*2^64 = 2^65 = 65-bit encryption. (And often is just 64.)
Use a traditional Vigenère cipher (basically a Caesar cipher with words instead) to see what happens. First with a 6-character key:
I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A +G W B U S H G W B U S H G W B U =O D B P W I G X Z Z G Y S Q M U
Then with two 3-character keys:
I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A +T S A T S A T S A T S A T S A T =B Z A O W B T T Y Y G R F M L T +C I A C I A C I A C I A C I A C =D H A Q E B V B Y A O R H U L V
Note that in effect your key is still 3 characters. You can decode this in one pass using TSA + CIA = VAA:
D H A Q E B V B Y A O R H U L V -V I A V I A V I A V I A V I A V =I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A
And as somebody else said, 128 1-bit encryptions is nowhere near one 128-bit encryption.
From the tone of your posts, I'm guessing you're 20-25 and don't have any children of your own. All I mean by this is that your perspective on these things changes as you raise a child.
and it's arrogance to assume that someone who hasn't yet doesn't know anything.
No it isn't. To use an analogy that this site's readership would know, it's like Tanenbaum complaining to Linus about using a monolithic kernel. Sure, Tanenbaum is the most famous theoretical CSist in OS, and sure he did implement his own OS (Minix), but that still doesn't give him a bean of experience in telling Linus what to do. Tanenbaum never aimed for Minix to become as commonly used as Linux is - in fact, the goal of Minix was to perfectly implement theory.
And then there's the Hurd. Followed all the theoretical precepts and guidelines. Got nowhere. Nobody's interested in working on it, and those who are aren't making any progress...but at least it's a microkernel.
It's a problem of things differing in theory and practice, and theoreticians never having practiced. Your points are right in theory, but you forgot to account for emotion (both parent-child and boyfriend-girlfriend) and morality (which ought to be slightly more than logic strictly requires). And there's no way to account for those factors in theory, because they only arise in practice.
Well that explains why you don't feel the irrational protective instinct that every parent feels. I'm nowhere close to having a child either but I do have the sense to listen to the experiences of those who have.
How about you go have a daughter, wait 16 years, and let her be by herself with a guy. Then come back and try to post about how Tommy kissing Jane isn't the end of the world.
Well, your numbers are slighly off (we'd get an order of magnitude more voltage, I think), but voltage is relatively unimportant. You can draw as much current as you like from this system. Even an appreciable number of watts won't really hold back the changing of the Earth's core, will it?
Once we get the current we need, then we can worry about stepping up the voltage as we need, or using the current to drive something non-electrical, or even building devices that use very little voltage and a lot of current. What if we use this current (low voltage) to charge a capacitor, then remove the capacitor and greatly decrease its capacitance (or connect it in parallel with a smaller capacitor)? We'd get a much higher voltage across the plates. Several things can be done with small voltage, so long as sufficient current is there.
The point is that the Earth's magnetic field, in changing, has a potential to do a lot of work, and the core is such a large system that we can do something useful, albeit not quite save the world, with the work it can capably do. (Steorn gave an example of never charging your cell phone and didn't mention anything about solving the peak oil crisis.)
As a similar example whose numbers are easier to manipulate, suppose we decided to draw 1 kW from the Earth's orbit. The Earth masses 6e24 kg and orbits at about 3e4 m/s, giving a kinetic energy of 2.6e33 J. Each year we'd only draw 3.1e10 J -- 23 orders of magnitude less. We would barely affect the orbit of the earth. And suppose we wanted to replace all the energy used by the world - according to the USGS, almost 4e17 BTU/year or 1.2e13 W. That would still give us a comfortable margin of 10 orders of magnitude. The point is that astronomical-scale systems won't significantly be affected if we tap human-scale energy out of them.
I'm completely lost as to why it's a good idea making: if (a << 1) mean anything but to check if anything but the highest bit is set, or a[0] mean anything different than *a.
a[0] means the first element of a, which is some sort of arrayish container. *a means what a points to. The only reason you expected them to be the same is that in C, arrays were implemented as a pointer and the elements that follow that pointer in memory. An array and a pointer have nothing to do with each other in theory. (In C, you can also use 0[a], because x[y] is defined as *(x+y). In C++, there's actually a meaning to each side.)
C++ is best handled when you quit thinking about "how" and look at "what". It's got encapsulation and stuff, after all: the operation [] implies nothing more than element access. I can have some crazy object mersenne such that mersenne[20] goes on the Internet and finds the 20th Mersenne prime. What exactly would you expect *mersenne to reference? The web page where it finds all this? (And don't say this should be a function, because this makes more logical sense as an array/container - a list of items - than a function - something that does something. The fact that it goes to the Internet is an implementation detail.)
And yes, there's a practical use for this. You can overload the indexing operator on an array to take a coordinate as the index. Then you can define coordinate addition (or if you're feeling technical, coordinate + direction addition). This lets you do convenient things such as map[location + NORTH]. Imagine looping over the 8 directions in C - you'd have to have int dir[8][2] and call map[x+dir[i][0]][y+dir[i][1]]. Much less elegant.
Overloading is really designed for when you know the types. I'm sure Stroustrop could reasonably have used += and -= for the string insertion and extraction, if you have a problem with the shift operators. But imagine what you get when you call stdout << "hello" in C. It takes the value of stdout and left-shifts it by the address of "hello" - what you'd expect if you're conversant in C, but it is the silliest thing ever for that command to do.
I can't figure out exactly how to control deallocation order when calling destructors during stack unwinds, and I can't figure out how to control allocation order before main().
Why? Your allocations and deallocations aren't idempotent and independent? And why, exactly, are you making global objects that interact before main() starts?
I'm still unclear why we need four different casts, and I'm still unclear why it's a good idea to have two functions with the same name and data types (save the const or signed keywords, which aren't really supposed to modify the data type)- lest the evil C++ genies make my code call the wrong one.
You shouldn't really use casts, if you're programming in pure C++. You use inheritance and operator int() to manage that. So long as your cast is reasonable (and not, say, to or from a void*), it will handle it automatically. The four casts are syntactic salt, so you know when you're going againsts the grain. C++ is supposed to be a different paradigm than C, where you leave type handling and overloading resolution to the compiler. Now it was designed as "C with classes" so it would use the same syntax - which is kind of silly, I'd admit. But if you can wrap your head around C++ as a different language from C, I think you'll understand it better.
It's believed to be due to an upcoming polar switch (North and South switch polarities).
Hey. HEY! That's it!
Or if this isn't Steorn's method, it'd certainly do an interesting job. Not sure how much useful energy it would get us, but it would work.
How do we induce electric current? With a changing magnetic field. What's the Earth's magnetic field doing? Changing.
Technically it still obeys the laws of thermodynamics: the movement within the Earth's core is doing the work. It's the same as waving wires in the air and extracting a little current thence, but we don't have to do the work of changing the magnetic flux. And yes, it's a very small amount of energy, but it would work.
back to music how happy do you think beethoven would be to know that his epic works have been reduced to a mobile phone ringtone? and how good an understanding of his work do you get from only listening to that ringtone?
How happy do think Francisco Tarrega would be to hear that the end of the 2nd phrase of Gran Vals - and only those 13 notes - is well known today?
Why are screen magnifiers a part of an office suite anyway?
Screen magnifiers shouldn't be. Windows (XP, probably 2K also) has a built-in magnifier tool that works on any displayed graphics, whatever program it is. (I suppose it might not work with DirectX and video overlays, but that's beside the point.)
Windows also has a screen reader, which I suspect is the problem. OOo's UI needs to be designed to accomodate a screen reader, so that text in dialogs appears to the user as text in dialogs instead of a random bitmap, so that controls have a logical tab order (instead of order the programmer chose). Nothing important can be hidden in graphics. And so forth. Although screen readers will handle applications without accessibility in mind, they may not do so well.
Try using a screen reader on Solitaire for example. You'll probably get it to read the menus, and tell you when you're about to choose "Deal" or "Undo". You won't get it to read the cards. Solitaire (assuming for argument we want it to be accessible) should have hidden static-text controls on the cards, treat each card as a separate button or other standard UI control, have a keyboard shortcut for deal and then transfer focus onto the dealt card, etc.
This is the same matter as gracefully-degrading CSS. Although some programs will happily convert all your text to images, and many will do a formidable job of arranging everything in tables, it doesn't impress a disabled user one bit unless the underlying structure is that of a reasonable page (headings, paragraphs, real A HREF links, etc.) and all the fanciness is controlled by CSS. This is what Massachusetts is worried about: whether OOo gracefully degrades to a screen reader.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
Couldn't he jumper some pins on the PS/2 port to make the computer think there were a keyboard plugged in?
Or at least build a splitter with some 50c RadioShack PS/2 plugs, wires, and a single keyboard?
Why exactly is the command called "sync", then? I had the idea that fwrite or whatever buffered a write, and sync would ensure that write is done. What does fwrite really do then - buffer a buffered write, so the first sync got around to buffering the write itself?
Think they understood the VBS? Now I know that you didn't directly throw that VB at them, but still.
Explain that your computers connect to the work network and log in, and you noticed that there was a computer trying to "hack in" from another town. Your security people found that the computer was your own computer, one that had been reported stolen.
Cell phones do not work in high altitudes. This is a proven, scientific fact.
Where is your proof? Cell phones work fine. Just recently I was part of a group that went to the summit of an 8,000-ft mountain near Denver, and my friend got 4 bars from Cingular. (I'm on T-Mobile so I didn't get a signal, but oh well.) There's your scientific disproof.
Or perhaps you mean cell phones do not work in moving aircraft. That's a different matter, and the towers will cope with the call but they won't like it. (See the other discussions in the thread.)
"Let's roll!" (yeah, right - who actually believes that's what you say before you go to die).
What he said, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, was "Roll it." Meaning, of course, that they had a heavy food cart or something that they were using as a battering ram to get into the cockpit, because one of the terrorists was holding the door closed or blocking the way or whatever. So Mr. Beamer gave the order to roll that cart. That is a very reasonable thing to say at that moment.
Due to a game of telephone (no pun intended) between Mr. Beamer, the cell towers that as discussed elsewhere on this thread weren't designed to handle the calls, the GTE Airfone operator, Mrs. Beamer, the reporters, and the media, "Roll it" got transmuted to "Let's roll," which is far more amenable as a sound bite.
the mean sea level, which is far more a product of the Earths gravity and dependant sea water pressure/density.
Actually it's a function of how much water is there on the Earth and how deep are the ocean beds. Water is essentially incompressible so density won't change. You could replace Earth with a plaster-of-Paris cast of its surface, and you'd have the same sea level.
(Except for two minor things. First, you'd need enough gravity to hold the water there, but past that point gravity essentially doesn't matter. Second, you'd need enough gravity to hold a sufficient atmosphere, otherwise the vapor pressure of water would cause some bad effects, but again, once you have enough gravity, you're fine.)
You're correct as far as stating that Wal-Mart serves the Bible belt and doesn't want the perception that they sell the Devil's games (or the Devil's videos or whatever media). However, that's due more to the general culture in these areas than any direct church influence. Around here there's simply not as much demand for violent or explicit video games. No pastor is going to directly condemn Bully; he'd have only marginally more success than those who tried to condemn Harry Potter (some tried, but I can't remember anyone seriously believing those pastors).
Most decent church-going people are not going to be interested in any of these media that Wal-Mart refuses to stock - or if they are, they don't want such a well-known place as Wal-Mart stocking these items and giving them to half the community. The Church itself has about as much influence as Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead: so long as it preaches what the congregation thinks is appropriate to preach, it has (vacuous) influence. People have left and will leave congregations en masse because of a single sermon.
Of course Albert Einstein would probably be in the library, but it's worth making sure there's a good biography that explains his struggles as a child, his annus mirabilis, how his Nobel was for the photoelectric effect, what E=mc^2 and relativity really are, how he was invited to be PM of Israel, etc.
I suppose it's entirely appropriate for 5th and 6th graders to know there was indeed a real Nicholas Flamel.
Another fascinating biography is that of Thomas Midgley, the poor soul who came up with three ideas that seemed brilliant at the time: leaded fuels, CFCs, and a system of ropes and pulleys in his bed that strangled him.
And what middle-schooler would not appreciate the toilet humor in the life of Tycho Brahe, so concerned for court etiquette that he let his bladder clog and kill him?
And if you had a baby shower inside the Trojan horse to celebrate a stereotypical nerd couple's baby, you'd have Greeks bearing bare Greeks and gift bears for the Greek born to reeking geek Greeks...borne by a Greek-bearing gift, a gift borne by Greeks.
(Nobody better say a word about pregnant bears....)
Wait...someone please explain to me what's Evil about WGA. I understand that it has a false positive and false negative rate, and I understand that even though this should be expected of all tools, in the case of WGA any false results is a Bad Thing, but why, if I run WGA and it considers my install legitimate, should I worry about it?
Please open up your own format first before going and opening up other peoples' formats. Windows Media is already easy enough to play most anywhere. Streaming (or even non-streaming) RM is a pain to convert to another format - and most of the downloadable converters require you to have RealPlayer itself already installed (so it can use the DLLs). This is as much a "solution" as Captive NTFS, and it doesn't work on platforms other than x86/Windows.
(My underlying complaint is that you don't have a half-recent version for Windows Mobile. I've tried to convert these to WMV but it doesn't work well. Releasing a WM5 player - or even a J2ME player - would shut me up for now, but your real problem is you have the obscurest, proprietariest file format ever.)
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I have a WM5 device, the T-Mobile SDA, which I really praise because it has WiFi. This is one of the new crop of devices really produced by HTC and rebranded by the cell phone companies; another one available in the US is the Cingular 2125. The wireless card means I'm paying $30/month for voice access and getting Internet from my home or school network - why pay for data when you're surrounded by so great a cloud of WiFi (with apologies to the author of Hebrews)?
It's working decently with my Mac. Bluetooth means that file transfer for the most part is manageable; an SD card means that if I need to, I can shut down the phone and transfer large amounts of data reasonably quickly. WM seems to handle most files reasonably (VCFs can import into contacts, etc.) - I was able to move my Address Book over without that many workarounds. I have a native VNC client and a Java SSH client, which work well enough for me. Of course there's no keyboard, but I didn't trust myself to carry the MDA around and not break the sliding screen.
If you happen to have WiFi on campus, consider getting one of these devices. Don't underestimate the ability to keep your items on a central server and access them via your phone.
64 bits is really 2^64 possible keys. 128 bits is 2^128 possible keys. Double-64 bits is, at best, 2*2^64 = 2^65 = 65-bit encryption. (And often is just 64.)
Use a traditional Vigenère cipher (basically a Caesar cipher with words instead) to see what happens. First with a 6-character key:
I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A
+G W B U S H G W B U S H G W B U
=O D B P W I G X Z Z G Y S Q M U
Then with two 3-character keys:
I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A
+T S A T S A T S A T S A T S A T
=B Z A O W B T T Y Y G R F M L T
+C I A C I A C I A C I A C I A C
=D H A Q E B V B Y A O R H U L V
Note that in effect your key is still 3 characters. You can decode this in one pass using TSA + CIA = VAA:
D H A Q E B V B Y A O R H U L V
-V I A V I A V I A V I A V I A V
=I H A V E B A B Y F O R M U L A
And as somebody else said, 128 1-bit encryptions is nowhere near one 128-bit encryption.
And then there's the Hurd. Followed all the theoretical precepts and guidelines. Got nowhere. Nobody's interested in working on it, and those who are aren't making any progress...but at least it's a microkernel.
It's a problem of things differing in theory and practice, and theoreticians never having practiced. Your points are right in theory, but you forgot to account for emotion (both parent-child and boyfriend-girlfriend) and morality (which ought to be slightly more than logic strictly requires). And there's no way to account for those factors in theory, because they only arise in practice.
Well that explains why you don't feel the irrational protective instinct that every parent feels. I'm nowhere close to having a child either but I do have the sense to listen to the experiences of those who have.
How about you go have a daughter, wait 16 years, and let her be by herself with a guy. Then come back and try to post about how Tommy kissing Jane isn't the end of the world.
GTA: Ringworld? Run over Prill and get your money back?
I want to see what Jack Thompson does with that.
Well, your numbers are slighly off (we'd get an order of magnitude more voltage, I think), but voltage is relatively unimportant. You can draw as much current as you like from this system. Even an appreciable number of watts won't really hold back the changing of the Earth's core, will it?
Once we get the current we need, then we can worry about stepping up the voltage as we need, or using the current to drive something non-electrical, or even building devices that use very little voltage and a lot of current. What if we use this current (low voltage) to charge a capacitor, then remove the capacitor and greatly decrease its capacitance (or connect it in parallel with a smaller capacitor)? We'd get a much higher voltage across the plates. Several things can be done with small voltage, so long as sufficient current is there.
The point is that the Earth's magnetic field, in changing, has a potential to do a lot of work, and the core is such a large system that we can do something useful, albeit not quite save the world, with the work it can capably do. (Steorn gave an example of never charging your cell phone and didn't mention anything about solving the peak oil crisis.)
As a similar example whose numbers are easier to manipulate, suppose we decided to draw 1 kW from the Earth's orbit. The Earth masses 6e24 kg and orbits at about 3e4 m/s, giving a kinetic energy of 2.6e33 J. Each year we'd only draw 3.1e10 J -- 23 orders of magnitude less. We would barely affect the orbit of the earth. And suppose we wanted to replace all the energy used by the world - according to the USGS, almost 4e17 BTU/year or 1.2e13 W. That would still give us a comfortable margin of 10 orders of magnitude. The point is that astronomical-scale systems won't significantly be affected if we tap human-scale energy out of them.
C++ is best handled when you quit thinking about "how" and look at "what". It's got encapsulation and stuff, after all: the operation [] implies nothing more than element access. I can have some crazy object mersenne such that mersenne[20] goes on the Internet and finds the 20th Mersenne prime. What exactly would you expect *mersenne to reference? The web page where it finds all this? (And don't say this should be a function, because this makes more logical sense as an array/container - a list of items - than a function - something that does something. The fact that it goes to the Internet is an implementation detail.)
And yes, there's a practical use for this. You can overload the indexing operator on an array to take a coordinate as the index. Then you can define coordinate addition (or if you're feeling technical, coordinate + direction addition). This lets you do convenient things such as map[location + NORTH]. Imagine looping over the 8 directions in C - you'd have to have int dir[8][2] and call map[x+dir[i][0]][y+dir[i][1]]. Much less elegant.
Overloading is really designed for when you know the types. I'm sure Stroustrop could reasonably have used += and -= for the string insertion and extraction, if you have a problem with the shift operators. But imagine what you get when you call stdout << "hello" in C. It takes the value of stdout and left-shifts it by the address of "hello" - what you'd expect if you're conversant in C, but it is the silliest thing ever for that command to do.
Why? Your allocations and deallocations aren't idempotent and independent? And why, exactly, are you making global objects that interact before main() starts?
You shouldn't really use casts, if you're programming in pure C++. You use inheritance and operator int() to manage that. So long as your cast is reasonable (and not, say, to or from a void*), it will handle it automatically. The four casts are syntactic salt, so you know when you're going againsts the grain. C++ is supposed to be a different paradigm than C, where you leave type handling and overloading resolution to the compiler. Now it was designed as "C with classes" so it would use the same syntax - which is kind of silly, I'd admit. But if you can wrap your head around C++ as a different language from C, I think you'll understand it better.
It's believed to be due to an upcoming polar switch (North and South switch polarities).
Hey. HEY! That's it!
Or if this isn't Steorn's method, it'd certainly do an interesting job. Not sure how much useful energy it would get us, but it would work.
How do we induce electric current? With a changing magnetic field. What's the Earth's magnetic field doing? Changing.
Technically it still obeys the laws of thermodynamics: the movement within the Earth's core is doing the work. It's the same as waving wires in the air and extracting a little current thence, but we don't have to do the work of changing the magnetic flux. And yes, it's a very small amount of energy, but it would work.
back to music how happy do you think beethoven would be to know that his epic works have been reduced to a mobile phone ringtone? and how good an understanding of his work do you get from only listening to that ringtone?
How happy do think Francisco Tarrega would be to hear that the end of the 2nd phrase of Gran Vals - and only those 13 notes - is well known today?
Why are screen magnifiers a part of an office suite anyway?
Screen magnifiers shouldn't be. Windows (XP, probably 2K also) has a built-in magnifier tool that works on any displayed graphics, whatever program it is. (I suppose it might not work with DirectX and video overlays, but that's beside the point.)
Windows also has a screen reader, which I suspect is the problem. OOo's UI needs to be designed to accomodate a screen reader, so that text in dialogs appears to the user as text in dialogs instead of a random bitmap, so that controls have a logical tab order (instead of order the programmer chose). Nothing important can be hidden in graphics. And so forth. Although screen readers will handle applications without accessibility in mind, they may not do so well.
Try using a screen reader on Solitaire for example. You'll probably get it to read the menus, and tell you when you're about to choose "Deal" or "Undo". You won't get it to read the cards. Solitaire (assuming for argument we want it to be accessible) should have hidden static-text controls on the cards, treat each card as a separate button or other standard UI control, have a keyboard shortcut for deal and then transfer focus onto the dealt card, etc.
This is the same matter as gracefully-degrading CSS. Although some programs will happily convert all your text to images, and many will do a formidable job of arranging everything in tables, it doesn't impress a disabled user one bit unless the underlying structure is that of a reasonable page (headings, paragraphs, real A HREF links, etc.) and all the fanciness is controlled by CSS. This is what Massachusetts is worried about: whether OOo gracefully degrades to a screen reader.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
Couldn't he jumper some pins on the PS/2 port to make the computer think there were a keyboard plugged in?
Or at least build a splitter with some 50c RadioShack PS/2 plugs, wires, and a single keyboard?
Why exactly is the command called "sync", then? I had the idea that fwrite or whatever buffered a write, and sync would ensure that write is done. What does fwrite really do then - buffer a buffered write, so the first sync got around to buffering the write itself?
Think they understood the VBS? Now I know that you didn't directly throw that VB at them, but still.
Explain that your computers connect to the work network and log in, and you noticed that there was a computer trying to "hack in" from another town. Your security people found that the computer was your own computer, one that had been reported stolen.
Spin it in a way they'll understand.
PS, all typos and poor logic are the sole property of Padron's Resposada.
Sue 'em all and God will know his own? Sounds more like Torquemada to me.
Cell phones do not work in high altitudes. This is a proven, scientific fact.
Where is your proof? Cell phones work fine. Just recently I was part of a group that went to the summit of an 8,000-ft mountain near Denver, and my friend got 4 bars from Cingular. (I'm on T-Mobile so I didn't get a signal, but oh well.) There's your scientific disproof.
Or perhaps you mean cell phones do not work in moving aircraft. That's a different matter, and the towers will cope with the call but they won't like it. (See the other discussions in the thread.)
"Let's roll!" (yeah, right - who actually believes that's what you say before you go to die).
What he said, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, was "Roll it." Meaning, of course, that they had a heavy food cart or something that they were using as a battering ram to get into the cockpit, because one of the terrorists was holding the door closed or blocking the way or whatever. So Mr. Beamer gave the order to roll that cart. That is a very reasonable thing to say at that moment.
Due to a game of telephone (no pun intended) between Mr. Beamer, the cell towers that as discussed elsewhere on this thread weren't designed to handle the calls, the GTE Airfone operator, Mrs. Beamer, the reporters, and the media, "Roll it" got transmuted to "Let's roll," which is far more amenable as a sound bite.
Of course, no laptops means no sequel called Python on a Plane.
the mean sea level, which is far more a product of the Earths gravity and dependant sea water pressure/density.
Actually it's a function of how much water is there on the Earth and how deep are the ocean beds. Water is essentially incompressible so density won't change. You could replace Earth with a plaster-of-Paris cast of its surface, and you'd have the same sea level.
(Except for two minor things. First, you'd need enough gravity to hold the water there, but past that point gravity essentially doesn't matter. Second, you'd need enough gravity to hold a sufficient atmosphere, otherwise the vapor pressure of water would cause some bad effects, but again, once you have enough gravity, you're fine.)
You're correct as far as stating that Wal-Mart serves the Bible belt and doesn't want the perception that they sell the Devil's games (or the Devil's videos or whatever media). However, that's due more to the general culture in these areas than any direct church influence. Around here there's simply not as much demand for violent or explicit video games. No pastor is going to directly condemn Bully; he'd have only marginally more success than those who tried to condemn Harry Potter (some tried, but I can't remember anyone seriously believing those pastors).
Most decent church-going people are not going to be interested in any of these media that Wal-Mart refuses to stock - or if they are, they don't want such a well-known place as Wal-Mart stocking these items and giving them to half the community. The Church itself has about as much influence as Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead: so long as it preaches what the congregation thinks is appropriate to preach, it has (vacuous) influence. People have left and will leave congregations en masse because of a single sermon.
3. ???
Anyone remember the Maine?
Richard Feynman
Surely you're joking. Mr. Feynman??
(Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)
Évariste Galois is the immediate, obvious choice.
Of course Albert Einstein would probably be in the library, but it's worth making sure there's a good biography that explains his struggles as a child, his annus mirabilis, how his Nobel was for the photoelectric effect, what E=mc^2 and relativity really are, how he was invited to be PM of Israel, etc.
I suppose it's entirely appropriate for 5th and 6th graders to know there was indeed a real Nicholas Flamel.
Another fascinating biography is that of Thomas Midgley, the poor soul who came up with three ideas that seemed brilliant at the time: leaded fuels, CFCs, and a system of ropes and pulleys in his bed that strangled him.
And what middle-schooler would not appreciate the toilet humor in the life of Tycho Brahe, so concerned for court etiquette that he let his bladder clog and kill him?
And if you had a baby shower inside the Trojan horse to celebrate a stereotypical nerd couple's baby, you'd have Greeks bearing bare Greeks and gift bears for the Greek born to reeking geek Greeks...borne by a Greek-bearing gift, a gift borne by Greeks.
(Nobody better say a word about pregnant bears....)
Wait...someone please explain to me what's Evil about WGA. I understand that it has a false positive and false negative rate, and I understand that even though this should be expected of all tools, in the case of WGA any false results is a Bad Thing, but why, if I run WGA and it considers my install legitimate, should I worry about it?
Please open up your own format first before going and opening up other peoples' formats. Windows Media is already easy enough to play most anywhere. Streaming (or even non-streaming) RM is a pain to convert to another format - and most of the downloadable converters require you to have RealPlayer itself already installed (so it can use the DLLs). This is as much a "solution" as Captive NTFS, and it doesn't work on platforms other than x86/Windows.
(My underlying complaint is that you don't have a half-recent version for Windows Mobile. I've tried to convert these to WMV but it doesn't work well. Releasing a WM5 player - or even a J2ME player - would shut me up for now, but your real problem is you have the obscurest, proprietariest file format ever.)